Foucault News

Whitney Arnold, The Secret Subject: Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, and the Interview as Genre, Criticism, Volume 54, Number 4, Fall 2012
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crt.2012.0029

Extract
My relationship to my book on Roussel, and to Roussel’s work, is something very personal. . . . I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t have a place in the sequence of my books.
—Michel Foucault, “An Interview with Michel Foucault”

In this 1983 interview with Charles Ruas, Michel Foucault reflects on his 1963 work Raymond Roussel (translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel). While Foucault often uses his interviews to paint trajectories of his thought—even characterizing his interviews as “scaffolding” holding together and plotting a course between his works—in this particular interview he insists on the differences between Death and the Labyrinth and the rest of his oeuvre. In Death and the Labyrinth—a text that has received a marked lack of critical attention—Foucault examines Roussel’s Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books), in which Roussel describes the methods he employed for structuring certain of his works. Foucault’s efforts to clarify Death and the Labyrinth through his interview about the text parallel Roussel’s problematic efforts to explain his texts with How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Much as Roussel veils while unveiling in his explanatory text, revealing the presence of an undisclosed “secret,” Foucault clarifies Death and the Labyrinth in the interview by pointing to what he does not reveal. He presents Death and the Labyrinth as a personal text intricately connected to his private thoughts, desires, and experiences, yet he declines to elaborate on these connections.

Sardinha, Diogo (2012). “Le Kant de Foucault, une lecture téléologique de l’anthropologie”. Kant-Studien , 103 (3), pp. 361-9.
further info

Abstract:
Foucault’s main thesis in his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology is that the meaning of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View can only be entirely grasped in the light of certain notes concerning the human being, assembled in the Opus Postumum. He asserts that the discourses held on human beings in the Anthropology and the introduction to the Logic are temporary – though necessary – moments in the transition from the critical to the transcendental philosophy: the latter is the accomplishment of Kantian philosophy, to which the former was only a Propädeutik. In this paper I call this a ‘teleological reading’ of the Anthropology, one which certainly has the merit of integrating this book in the evolution of Kant’s thought, but which can also be misleading, since it rarely considers the book Anthropology in itself. Hence, Foucault carries out what is more of a study of ‘Kant’s philosophy from an anthropological point of view’ rather than a study of the Anthropology. In the end, I also indicate the way in which this method enables us to distinguish his philosophical position both from Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant and from Sartre’s humanism.

Deslandes, Ghislain (10/2012). “The care-of-self ethic with continual reference to Socrates: towards ethical self-management”. Business ethics, 21 (4), pp. 325-38.
https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12003

Abstract
‘Have you ever taken sufficient care of yourselves?’ By asking the elite Athenian youth this question, Socrates implies that the liberation of self and the capacity to govern are inseparable. Drawing on the lectures given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France in 1984 – only recently made available to the public – we show the consequences of the return to this ancient care-of-self ethic in the organizational context. After reviewing the contributions made to business ethics by these two philosophers, we propose four phases necessary to the emergence and constitution of a moral subject in organizations: self-awakening, self-evaluation, self transformation and self-presentation. We then suggest various managerial practices and behaviour inspired by this philosophical parrhesia embodied by the Greek philosopher wherein the manager should have a personal relationship with his or her own activity. Finally, we discuss implications of our study in the field of business ethics and propose an agenda for future research.