Foucault News

Elden, S. (2024). Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France. History of European Ideas, 1–14.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024.2391378

ABSTRACT
This article discusses an important moment in the career of Alexandre Koyré, and the history of philosophy in France. It looks at the 1951 election of a successor to Étienne Gilson at the Collège de France, for which Koyré was one of the possible candidates, alongside Henri Gouhier and Martial Gueroult. Koyré came close, but Gueroult was elected to the chair. In time, Gueroult was succeeded first by Jean Hyppolite and then, in 1970, by Michel Foucault. Using archival documents to discuss the process in detail, this article shows the weakness of Koyré’s proposers, and the strength of Gouhier’s application. Finally, drawing on Koyré’s outline of his proposed teaching programme, it discusses how success might have shaped his future career, using this as an indication of his position within and beyond a French tradition in the philosophy and history of the sciences.

KEYWORDS: Collège de France Henri Gouhier Martial Gueroult Alexandre Koyré history of the sciences

Elden, Stuart. “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity.” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 3 (2024): 571-600. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2024.a933859.

Abstract:
The biographical links between Michel Foucault and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil have received more attention than their intellectual connections. This article contributes by surveying Foucault’s engagements, from a 1957 radio lecture to his late lectures at the Collège de France. Particular focus is on lectures on structuralism and history in 1970, some references between 1970 and 1981, and the use of Dumézil’s work in each of Foucault’s two final courses at the Collège de France. In each, Foucault takes up Dumézil’s analyses of mythology in developing his own projects concerning history and antiquity.

Sreenanti Banerjee. Politics of Secularisation, Religious Conversion, and “Saving” the (Hindu) Daughter under Hindutva: Re-reading the Hadiya Court Case. ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. 2024. Vol. 8(2):193-216.

DOI: 10.13169/reorient.8.2.0193

Abstract
This article charts the different modalities of political transgression that marked an act of religious conversion and inter-faith marriage performed by a Muslim female subject in contemporary India, and the subsequent misreading of this transgression; a misreading made possible by liberal political thought’s delineations of the conceptual category of “interest”. Existing legal, political, academic, and popular discourses have read the prominent 2016 event of the conversion of a Hindu woman named Akhila into Islam, as either the “false consciousness” of a “vulnerable” individual whose self-interests were unintelligible to herself, or, as an unambiguous case of a “mature” woman in a “modernising” Kerala “choosing” to opt for an inter-faith marriage and to convert; a liberal idiom of choice that thereby needs to be safeguarded via Constitutional provisions. The article, even while acknowledging the political need to adhere to the latter reading/constitution of the female (Islamic) subject’s sovereign desire to convert, shows some of the limitations of both these ideologically antithetical positions. It argues that the desire of Hadiya (Akhila’s new name after converting to Islam) to convert remains unreadable by both the right-wing Indian judiciary, backed up by Hindutva forces, as well as the “left-liberal” feminist intelligentsia that sought to support her autonomy. In fact, both these ideologically opposed stances often legitimised each other. By examining the legal debates that took place in the Indian courts, the article shows how construing Hadiya’s act of conversion solely through the legal-juridical prisms of “religious freedom” and “choice”, pegged to the concept of self-interest, is vigorously insufficient.

Keywords: Religious conversion, Hadiya, Islam, disinterested reason, will, Subject of Interest, interventionist secularism, Subject of Prayer

Lautaro Colautti, Una multiplicación, un brote del cuerpo. Cine, cuerpo y política en el pensamiento de Foucault, Journal de Ética & Cine, Volumen 14 | Nro 2 | Julio 2024

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3770-6874

Lautaro Colautti, Multiplication, An Outbreak of The Body. The Relationship Between Cinema and Politics in Foucault’s thought

Resumen
En el presente artículo se pretende realizar una lectura de los artículos y entrevistas que Michel Foucault brindó sobre el cine a partir de la década de los ’70. Básicamente, en sus comentarios sobre filmes de Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, René Allio, Liliana Cavani, Werner Schroeter o Louis Malle, entre otros directores, el teórico expresa un modo de entender el cine a partir de la posibilidad de éste de mostrar los cuerpos de una manera novedosa y disruptiva. Buscaremos mostrar cómo esta concepción del cine se relaciona con el modo de entender la política a partir de las nociones de resistencia y de políticas de la libertad.

Palabras Clave: Foucault | cine | cuerpo | memoria | resistencia

Abstract
In this article, we aim to provide an analysis of the articles and interviews that Michel Foucault gave about cinema starting from the 1970s. Essentially, in his comments on films by directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, René Allio, Liliana Cavani, Werner Schroeter, or Louis Malle, among others, the theorist expresses a way of understanding cinema based on its ability to depict bodies in a novel and disruptive manner. We will seek to demonstrate how this conception of cinema is related to the understanding of politics through the notions of resistance and politics of freedom.

Keywords: Foucault | cinema | body | memory | resistance

Colautti, L. (2024). Apropiaciones argentinas de la arqueología foucaultiana. Cuadernos De Filosofía Latinoamericana, 45(131), 116-141.

https://doi.org/10.15332/25005375.9805

Lautaro Colautti, Argentinian Theoretical Uses of Foucault’s Archaeology: The Era of “The Forms” and the Postmodern Episteme

Resumen (es)
Durante la década del ’60, Foucault realiza sus investigaciones histórico-filosóficas bajo el nombre metodológico de arqueología. Este término para referir al estudio de las condiciones históricas de posibilidad que permitieron la aparición de diversos saberes e instituciones. En su libro Las palabras y las cosas, una arqueología de las ciencias humanas (1966), Foucault centra su trabajo de descripción de las distintas épocas del pensamiento en torno a los conceptos de episteme y a priori histórico, ambos abandonados al menos en la década siguiente, cuando Foucault pasa a describir su labor intelectual como genealogía.

En el campo intelectual argentino, la recepción y circulación de la obra de Foucault varió mucho desde los años cincuenta hasta nuestros días. En los últimos años, las categorías arqueológicas fueron utilizadas para pensar tanto la historia intelectual como el diagnóstico de la sociedad contemporánea. En el presente trabajo nos encargaremos de presentar dos actualizaciones de la episteme foucaultiana para pensar las tensiones entre saber y política: la era de las Formas de Elías Palti y la episteme posmoderna de Pablo Manolo Rodríguez mostrando cómo ambas expresiones reformulan el aparato conceptual empleado por Foucault para pensar una arqueología de lo político en el caso del primero y la aparición de la cibernética en el caso del segundo autor. Para dicha tarea, nos concentraremos los elementos que retienen ambos autores argentinos, así como también en aquellos puntos en los que ambos toman distancia del pensador de Poitiers.

Palabras clave (es): Foucault, arqueología, episteme, cibernética, política

Abstract
During the 1960s, Foucault conducted his historical-philosophical research under the methodological name of archaeology, using this term to refer to the study of the historical conditions of possibility that allowed for the emergence of various knowledges and institutions. In his book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, published in 1966, Foucault focused his descriptive work on the different epochs of thought around the concepts of episteme and historical a priori, both of which were abandoned at least in the Foucauldian vocabulary of the following decade when Foucault began to describe his intellectual work as genealogy.

In the intellectual field in Argentina, the reception and circulation of Foucault’s work varied greatly from the 1950s to the present day. In recent years, archaeological categories have been used to think about both intellectual history and the diagnosis of contemporary society. In this paper, we will present two updates of Foucault’s episteme to think about the tensions between knowledge and politics: the era of “The Forms” by Elías Palti and the postmodern episteme by Pablo Manolo Rodríguez, showing how both expressions reformulate the conceptual apparatus used by Foucault to think about an archaeology of the political in the case of the former, and the historical emergence of cybernetics by analyzing the epistemic changes made in the last fifty years in the case of the latter author. For this task, we will show what is retained from the Foucauldian gesture but also to what extent Argentine authors distance themselves from the thinker from Poitiers.

Keywords: Foucault, archaeology, episteme, cybernetics, politics