Foucault News

Florence Hulak, « Michel Foucault, la philosophie et les sciences humaines : jusqu’où l’histoire peut-elle être foucaldienne ? », Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines [En ligne], #13 | 2013, mis en ligne le 21 octobre 2013,
https://doi.org/10.4000/traces.5718

Résumé

L’œuvre de Michel Foucault a pu être lue comme inaugurant une pratique révolutionnaire de l’histoire. Toutefois, les historiens qui se sont inspirés de ses travaux n’ont pas poussé jusqu’au bout la transformation de l’écriture de l’histoire qu’impliquait ce modèle. S’il revient à l’historiographie d’examiner les difficultés conjoncturelles qu’a pu connaître la réception de Foucault, cet article se propose d’analyser les obstacles proprement épistémologiques à la pleine introduction de sa pensée en histoire. Il montre que, pour devenir véritablement foucaldienne, l’histoire devrait renoncer à son appartenance aux sciences humaines, c’est-à-dire à la fois à son statut de science, à l’étude du social et à la référence au réel. Le diagnostic que porte Foucault sur les sciences humaines ne saurait en effet épargner l’histoire, même s’il n’a jamais insisté sur ce point, préférant défaire l’ancrage de l’histoire dans les sciences humaines pour mieux l’associer à l’archéologie puis à la généalogie. Mais cette nouvelle alliance prive alors l’histoire de son propre régime de vérité, en la faisant dépendre de celui d’un discours philosophique.

In English

According to some readings, Michel Foucault has invented a revolutionary way to write history. However, even the historians who have drawn from his work have not accomplished the full transformation of their practice that was required by the foucaldian paradigm. While historiography explores the circumstantial reasons for this limited scope, this article focuses on the epistemological obstacles to a full integration of Foucault’s thought in historical works. It shows that a fully foucaldian history could not belong to the human sciences any more, which means it should give up at once its scientific status, the study of the social, and the reference to reality. The diagnosis that Foucault makes on the human sciences does not indeed spare history, even if he never laid emphasis on this point. He prefers to remove history out of the human sciences, so as to connect it better with archeology and then genealogy. Yet this new alliance deprives history of its own regime of truth, and makes it dependent on a philosophical one.

Elisabeth Chaves, The Art of Not Being Quite So Governed: An Examination of the Work of the “Critical” Journal (2013) New Political Science, 35 (3), pp. 507-521.
https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2013.813702

Abstract
Michel Foucault in his lecture “What is Critique?” argues that criticism offered a response to the state’s developing art of governing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Instead of accepting the state’s way of governing, critics presented alternative visions of not being quite so governed or of not being governed thusly. Similarly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, factions within academic disciplines also rejected their disciplines’ mode of governing and created alternatives. In response to the desire to make political science more relevant and visible, the Caucus for a New Political Science formed as an alternative to the American Political Science Association. A similar trend occurred in other disciplines. Over the next few decades a number of academic journals were founded that included the word “critical” in their titles or explicitly stated a “critical” aim or approach. However, even dissenting academic groups, like the Caucus for a New Political Science, began to be reabsorbed within their disciplinary homes. With time, many of these groups succumbed to a degree of professionalization that perhaps inhibited their larger aspirations. As Foucault argues, the critical attitude does not reject governing altogether; it is not a call for anarchy. Rather, it demands an alternative to the current governance. The question becomes how to maintain the critical attitude while also building alternative institutions. Does institution building attenuate critique? And what then is critique? This article reflects on these questions by providing a brief study of “critical” disciplinary reorganizations, with greater attention to the Caucus for a New Political Science and its journal, New Political Science.