Foucault News

Naja Vucina, Claus Drejer, Peter Triantafillou, ‘Histories and freedom of the present: Foucault and Skinner’, History of the Human Sciences August 18, 2011
https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695111415176

Abstract
This article compares the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Quentin Skinner’s historical analyses seek to unsettle the limits on present forms of freedom. We do so by comparing their ways of analysing discourse, rationality and agency. The two authors differ significantly in the ways they deal with these three phenomena. The most significant difference lies in their ways of addressing agency and its relationship to power. Notwithstanding these differences, the historical analyses of both authors seek to problematize the ways in which past thoughts and practices limit contemporary forms of freedom. While Foucault seems to go furthest in this endeavour, a comparison may enrich both lines of historical analyses.

Alexandre Macmillan, Michel Foucault’s Techniques of the Self and the Christian Politics of Obedience, Theory, Culture & Society July 2011 vol. 28 no. 4 3-25
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411405348

Abstract
Foucault repeatedly argued that his work on techniques of the self were not a denial of his previous work on 18th- and 19th-century Europe, but a different way to make our present intelligible. Although Foucault explicitly associated modern techniques of the self with the Christian model, he never considered Christian techniques of the self in a comprehensive manner. The recent publication of his last two lectures at the Collège de France in 1983 and 1984 seems to fill this gap. Christian techniques of the self are characterized by an ascetic of obedience, and are considered as antithetical to ethical, parrhesiastic techniques of the self. Foucault’s detailed analysis of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Ion in these lectures also provides valuable insights into the rationality that presides over the modern techniques of the self, and the logic that animates the Christian politics of obedience.

Thomas Lemke, Critique and Experience in Foucault, Theory, Culture & Society, July 2011 vol. 28 no. 4 26-48
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411404907

Abstract
It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to ‘experience’ to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality. However, the interest in experience also decisively shaped Foucault’s analysis of the ‘critical attitude’ that he explicitly started to address at about the same time. The article argues that Foucault’s notion of critique is informed by a specific reading and understanding of ‘experience’. Experience is conceived of as dominant structure and transformative force, as existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond historical limits. Foucault defines experience as a dynamic interplay between games of truth, forms of power and relations to the self. Accordingly, the Foucauldian account of critique is characterized by three aspects: the activity of problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination, and the audacity to expose one’s own status as a subject. While the first section of the article briefly reconstructs the trajectory of ‘experience’ in Foucault’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s, the main part discusses the dimensions and implications of this ‘experimental’ critique.