Foucault News

Foucault’s Last Decade – fifth update

Clare O'Farrell

2 December 2013

Update on Stuart Elden’s work on his book on Foucault with lots of links to his other work on Foucault

Foucault 24 Nov

Having put together rough drafts of chapters 1 and 2 (see previous update), I was now able to move to the real focus of the book. But there is no simple break, and even as I go onto these chapters there was some material from previous courses that was best discussed here. This was especially the case with the material on hysterics and children in Psychiatric Power. While the primary aim of the book is a chronological exposition, it’s not slavishly so.

The idea was that the next chapter (number 3 on the new plan), under the working title of ‘Pervert, Hysteric, Child’, incorporates material from Psychiatric Power and Abnormal into a coherent whole. The next step was, of course, the 1974-75 course Abnormal (incidentally I don’t know why it has this title instead of the more literal The Abnormals). Again, I wrote a piece on this when it…

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Michel Foucault’s 1968: Tunis, Sidi Bou Said, Paris (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 December 2013

Although I missed putting this up in time, I am posting it as it looks interesting in case anyone wishes to follow this up with the author.

Lecture by Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski (UT Austin) : Michel Foucault’s 1968: Tunis, Sidi Bou Said, Paris

Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 4:30pm
Goldwin Smith Hall, GS 258, English Lounge 232 East Ave, Central Campus

Focusing on the two drafts of L’Archéologie du savoir, this talk will explore the political and personal events that influenced Michel Foucault’s transition from Structuralist guru to activist critic of modernity.

PDF with further info

L’Emancipation de Kant à Deleuze (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 December 2013

Diogo Sardinha, L’Emancipation de Kant à Deleuze, Hermann éditeurs des sciences et des arts, Collection / Série : Hermann Philosophie, 2013

248 pages ; 21,00 x 14,00 cm
ISBN 978-2-7056-8757-1

Sommaire
Plus que jamais, sans doute, nous avons besoin de stratégies critiques pour l’émancipation. Or, lisant la philosophie des deux derniers siècles, on découvre les attitudes les plus contrastées dans ce domaine. Kant, qui définit les Lumières comme « la sortie de l’homme de la minorité dont il est lui-même responsable », incite son lecteur à devenir adulte. Par contre, Deleuze (seul ou avec Guattari) met en avant un devenir-mineur et insiste sur un devenir-enfant qui soit un devenir-force.

En même temps, cette opposition immédiate de Kant et Deleuze esquive tout ce qui a mené de l’un à l’autre. Lorsqu’on reprend le fil qui les lie, des figures inattendues surgissent : Sartre, Bataille et Foucault deviennent alors les personnages d’une histoire tissée autour de Baudelaire, par rapport auquel les trois philosophes écrivains prennent des positions radicalement divergentes. Si on veut donc comprendre ce qui semble être le renversement du devenir-majeur kantien par le devenir-mineur deleuzien, c’est ce parcours qu’il devient nécessaire de reconstituer. À la fin, on aura reconstruit quelques stratégies émancipatrices, utiles pour nous aujourd’hui.

Summary in English

In the history of emancipation over the past two centuries, two philosophers are situated at extreme opposites from one another: Kant and Deleuze. The former launched an appeal to become adult, while the latter argued the case for a becoming-child. Do they represent, besides theoretical extremes, the temporal extremities of a period marked at its end by the reversal of its inaugural principle?

Kant defines the Enlightenment as ‘the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority’, and his motto of Enlightenment thus rings like an incentive to become major: ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!’. It is on this very point that Deleuze, alone or with Guattari, is of interest. Do they not insist on a becoming-child, even though the child is the minor par excellence? Do they not alert their readers to the possibility of a becoming-minor, which is a becoming-force?

Such an immediate confrontation between Kant and Deleuze omits that which led from one to the other. If we want to retrace the thread that links them, unexpected figures come to the fore: Baudelaire, Sartre, Bataille and Foucault. Through them, and in a movement that started with Baudelaire, the heritage of dandyism unfolds. In order to understand the significance of Deleuze’s reversal of Kant’s principle, we must retrace this journey.

Lecturer, European Philosophy, Macquarie University Australia

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 November 2013

Lecturer, European Philosophy

Job no: 493692
Work type: Fixed term full time
Vacancy type: External Vacancy
Categories: Academic – Teaching and Research

The Department of Philosophy is a pluralist department with recognized research excellence in many areas of Philosophy, including ethics, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and mind and cognition.

We are seeking a talented and enthusiastic Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy on a four year fixed-term appointment. The appointee will be expected to contribute to the teaching of the curriculum in European philosophy, which includes courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy, the philosophy of religion, as well as units in aesthetics and the philosophy of film. The appointee will also be expected to contribute to the delivery of one or more first year philosophy units. There is also the possibility of teaching research-related seminars in our Masters of Research program.

Selection Criteria

To be considered for this position, applicants must respond to the selection criteria below and attach their application as a separate document in the application process.

§ a PhD in Philosophy by the time of appointment

§ an established research track record of high quality peer reviewed publications, including a list of publications

§ a sample of work

§ potential to apply for research grants from national and international research bodies

§ demonstrated success in undergraduate teaching

§ the potential to undertake Postgraduate supervision in Philosophy

§ capacity to work in a pluralist department and collaborate with other teachers and researchers

Salary Package: from $88,741 – $104,996 p.a. (Level B), plus 17% employer’s superannuation and annual leave loading

Start Date: Negotiable, no later than 15 July 2014

Appointment Type: full-time, for 4 years

Enquiries: Associate Professor JP Deranty on jp.deranty@mq.edu.au or +61 2 9850 6773

Applications Close: 31 December 2013

Macquarie University is an EO Employer committed to diversity and social inclusion. Applications are encouraged from people with a disability; women (particularly for senior and non-traditional roles); Indigenous Australians, people who identify as GLBTI; and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Applications need to be submitted through the Macquarie University online recruitment system. Where circumstances such as disability or remote location prohibit your access to our online system please contact the enquiries person listed in this advertisement for assistance.

Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: Current Issues and Future Challenges. Keynote (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 November 2013

Dr. Thomas Lemke: “Biopolitics: Current Issues and Future Challenges”
Keynotes from the Biopolitics, Society, and Performance conference. October 2012, Trinity College Dublin.

Also of interest, another keynote lecture from the same conference

Rosi Bradotti: “What is ‘Human’ about the Humanities today?”

With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this link

Alain Brossat, Orazio Irrera et Martina Tazzioli, Foucault à l’épreuve des études postcoloniales. Séminaire (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 November 2013

PDF flyer

La prochaine séance du séminaire Actualités Foucault aura lieu le vendredi 13 décembre 2013, de 14h à 17h, à l’Université Paris-Est Créteil, bâtiment i, 2e étage, salle 233 (métro ligne 8, Créteil Université).

Le thème de la séance sera « Foucault à l’épreuve des études postcoloniales », avec la participation de Alain Brossat, Orazio Irrera et Martina Tazzioli.

Elisabeth Chaves, The Art of Not Being Quite So Governed: An Examination of the Work of the “Critical” Journal (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 November 2013

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.

Anna Anderson, Critiquing student participation projects (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 November 2013

Anna Anderson, The critical purchase of genealogy: Critiquing student participation projects (2013) Discourse. Article in Press.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.828417

Abstract
Until recently the dominant critique of ‘student participation’ projects was one based on the theoretical assumptions of critical theory in the form of critical pedagogy. Over the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a critical education discourse that theorises and critically analyses such projects using Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’. In this paper, I argue that while these governmentality studies challenge some of the key theoretical and taken for granted assumptions upon which such initiatives rest, they neglect to challenge the central assumption that such initiatives represent a historical break with traditional schooling practices. The importance of accounting for and critically analysing these projects within a historical framework will be argued through a discussion of Foucault’s notion of genealogy as a particular conception and method of critique. It will also be demonstrated using an example, which shows an unacknowledged nineteenth century history of the current discourse and practice of student participation.

Author Keywords
genealogy; governmentality; student participation; student voice

Pierre Lauret, « Foucault est un personnage extraordinaire » entretien avec le collectif théâtral F71 (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 November 2013

Pierre Lauret, « Foucault est un personnage extraordinaire » entretien avec le collectif théâtral F71, Cahiers philosophiques, 2012/3 (n° 130), 112-126

Further info and text

Fondé en 2004, le collectif F71 est composé de cinq comédiennes (Sabrina Baldassarra, Stéphanie Farison, Emmanuelle Lafon, Sara Louis, Lucie Nicolas), qui co-assument la responsabilité de la mise en scène et de la direction artistique, et d’une directrice de production, Thérèse Coriou. Depuis sa création, ce collectif a monté et présenté trois spectacles autour de Michel Foucault :

Foucault 71, qui porte sur l’engagement de Michel Foucault et d’autres intellectuels (Gilles Deleuze, Claude Mauriac…) en 1971 ;
La Prison, qui prend pour objet l’institution carcérale et les pouvoirs disciplinaires et de contrôle à l’œuvre dans le champ social ;
Qui suis-je maintenant ?, méditation théâtrale rêveuse et poétique sur l’identité et le regard, inspiré par le texte de Foucault « La vie des hommes infâmes » (Dits et Écrits, 1977, n° 198).

Dans l’entretien qui suit, on trouvera le détail de la constitution et de l’histoire de ce collectif théâtral et des enjeux qui nouent sa manière de travailler, mais aussi d’exister dans le champ théâtral, et plus largement dans la société, à la réflexion et à la pratique publique de Foucault.

suite

CFP: Michel Foucault: Ethnography and Critique (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

22 November 2013

Call for Papers

Michel Foucault: Ethnography and Critique
Convenors: Orazio Irrera & Martina Tazzioli

Bergamo, June 5-7, 2014
Deadline: February 17, 2014

Conference Website and contact details

[Editor: Link Updated 16 April 2026 to page archived on Wayback Machine]

Since the Sixties, Michel Foucault had described his work in ethnographic terms, stressing that for him it was a question of situating outside of the culture we belong to, in order to critically show the way in which this latter was built. Foucault’s perspective, far from representing only an historical analysis of the nexus between powers and knowledges, as a genealogy was firmly anchored to the analysis of the present; and it was also grounded on the ethical and political necessity to understand the present as the threshold that splits up what we have become from what we are no longer, in order to open some possibilities to think ourselves differently from what we are.

On the one hand, ethnography appears for sure among the human and the social sciences that on the one hand are susceptible of the critique addressed by Foucault, but on the other in the last decades it seemed to be able to take the critical solicitations produced by the French philosopher. For this reason, it seems useful to question the way in which today –a present which is certainly different from the present of Foucault – ethnographic practices still succeed in making operatives some of the conceptual tools offered by Foucault tool-box. However, the uses of these tools are not limited to a mere application: rather, the application itself becomes a moment of test, of experimentation and of theoretical and methodological innovation, extending further the Foucaultian trajectory beyond the lines of research undertaken by him.

Therefore, we will welcome contributes able to show how ethnographic practices have adopted and re-elaborated analytical strategies and categories which come out from Foucault’s texts, both in relation both to the construction of a specific fieldwork, both regarding to the changing and productive relationships that who does an ethnographic work established with it. Concerning this last point, we refer to the way in which Foucault could be used also “reflexively”, to grasp the transformations that specific ethnographic practices generate on those who conduct ethnographic researches, modifying epistemologically and/or ethically the relationship that one has with oneself and with the others.

We are particularly interested to contributions both in English and in Italian on the following themes:

Ethnographic practices in relation to the nexus space-knowledge (Urban studies, migrations)
Ethnographic practices in relation to governmentality, biopolitics and neoliberalism
Ethnographic practices and normalization/medicalization of societies (racism, gender issues, education)
Ethnographic practice and production of subalternity
Ethnographic practices and discursive analysis
Ethnographic practices and forms of reflexivity (transformation of the point of view of the ethnographer in relation to the construction/observation of the ethnographic field)