Foucault News

Radical Foucault – An International Conference (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

22 August 2011

Radical Foucault – An International Conference
September 8 & 9, 2011. 9.30am – 6.30pm
University of East London

The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London is pleased to announce that registration is now open for Radical Foucault, a two day conference which will re-assess Foucault’s contribution to radical thought and the application of his ideas to contemporary politics. What does it mean to draw on Foucault as a resource for radical politics, and how are we to understand the politics which implicitly informs his work?

Keynote speakers:
Stuart Elden, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University.
Mark Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University.
David Macey, Special Professor in Translation, University of Nottingham
Anne Schwan, Lecturer in English Literature, Edinburgh Napier University
Stephen Shapiro, Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University.
Couze Venn, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory at the Theory, Culture & Society Centre, Nottingham Trent University and Managing Editor and Review Editor of Theory, Culture & Society.

Two Days: £120
One Day: £70

To register, please go to the Centre for Cultural Studies site
Please note that registration includes lunches and other refreshments during the conference, but not accommodation or evening meals. We will plan a dinner for the Thursday evening nearer the time and will contact all delegates to invite them to take part, but payment for this will be organised separately.

The conference will take place in the East Building, University of East London, Docklands Campus, London, E16 2RD.

If you need information about accommodation near the campus, then the easiest place to find it is here (the Excel conference centre is very near to the campus), but we would also recommend searching online for accommodation in more central parts of town if that is your preference (the journey from central London to the campus normally takes 40-60 minutes).

Full programme details will be published shortly.

Brisbane Foucault Reading group

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 August 2011

Brisbane Foucault Reading Group

Time: 12-2pm every Tuesday fortnight starting 9 August.
Venue: R614 (the top floor of the library) at Kelvin Grove campus, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Aims of the group
The aim of this group is to provide an informal setting to read and discuss the work of French theorist Michel Foucault. Foucault’s work is used widely across an enormous range of theoretical and applied disciplines. This group is designed for both postgraduate students and academics from any discipline who would like the opportunity to clarify Foucault’s ideas and develop applications in a group setting. There will be set texts for participants to read before each session.

Convenor
Clare O’Farrell is the author of two books on Foucault. She has also edited a book on his work, was a founding editor of the international peer reviewed online journal Foucault Studies and runs a large website on Foucault. She is founder and convenor of the AARE Poststructual Theory Special Interest Group. She runs a blog with occasional Foucault content as well as the Foucault News blog.

Dates of meetings

9, 23 August,
6, 20 September
4, 18 October
11 October – will be a session for people who would like to present work in progress

Reading for this semester
A systematic reading of Foucault’s most recent publication of lectures in English will be undertaken this semester:
Michel Foucault, (2011). The Courage of Truth. Lectures at the Collège de France 1983- 1984. Tr. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Colóquio Internacional Kant (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2011

Colóquio Internacional Kant
22 de agosto de 2011
Auditório 106 IFCS/UFRJ
Brasil

11:00 – Roberto Nigro – (Institut für Theorie, Zürcher Hochshule der Künst) – La critique de l’anthropologie philosophique comme enjeu majeur pour repenser le politique

(comunicação com tradução simultânea)

12:00 – Almoço

14:00 – Daniel Omar Perez – (PUC-PR) – Michel Foucault como kantiano

14:30 – Guilherme Castelo Branco – (UFRJ) – A analítica da finitude

15:00 – Giovana Temple – ( UFRB) – Foucault, o acontecimento e os limites da razão kantiana

15:30 – Intervalo

16:00 – Luiz Celso Pinho – (UFRRJ) – Do bom uso da liberdade em Kant e Foucault

16:30 – José Luís Câmara Leme – (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) – O poder pastoral, a revolução e a economia do entusiasmo segundo Kant e Foucault

Organizadores Guilherme Castelo Branco(UFRJ) / Daniel Omar Perez(PUC-PR)

Comissão Científica
Guilherme Castelo Branco (UFRJ) / Daniel Omar Perez(PUC-PR) / Diogo Sardinha (Collège International de Philosophie)

Realização
Laboratório de Filosofia Contemporânea da UFRJ Financiamento – CAPES-FAPERJ Apoio – PPGF-UFRJ e PPGF-PUC-PR

Endereço do IFCS : Largo de São Francisco nº 1 – 3º andar – Rio de Janeiro – RJ – Brasil

Inscrições : castelobranco ifcs.ufrj.br

John Rapko, ‘Enchantment and Malaise’: Michel Foucault on Manet (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 August 2011

John Rapko (2011) ‘Enchantment and Malaise’: Michel Foucault on Manet. Review of Michel Foucault’s Manet and the Object of Painting, Artcritical. The Online magazine of arts and ideas, Sunday 31st July 2011.

In 1967 Michel Foucault obtained a contract for a book on Manet, tentatively titled La Noir et la Surface. There’s no evidence to suggest that Foucault got far in the writing of the book, but something of its most general intended features is suggested by the contract and some remarks from Foucault’s writings in the 1960s. Analogously to the treatment of ‘regimes’ of knowledge in his previous book Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things in English), Foucault would have treated European painting as a series of discrete regimes, where a regime is characterized by certain dominant rules: of the depiction of space; of light; of meaning; and of significance. Masaccio founded the ‘classical’ regime, which held sway until Manet. In his work on Magritte, Foucault was to write that the classical regime was governed by two principles: the unbridgeable distance between linguistic and pictorial representation; and the treatment of visual resemblance between items, say, between a visual work and a thing, as a representation, wherein the resembling mark represented, or failed to represent, the resembled thing. Contemporaneously, in a much quoted passage, Foucault claimed that Manet had done for painting what Flaubert had done for literature: where Flaubert’s work depended for its meaningfulness and semantic density upon libraries, Manet’s depended upon museums. It was not Manet’s particular references to Giorgione, Velásquez, and Goya as much as the sheer coexistence of their work in a single building that created the possibility of modern meanings.

Rest of review

Gavin Kendall, Foucault, Oxford bibliographies online (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

2 August 2011

Gavin Kendall, Michel Foucault, Oxford bibliographies online, 27 July 2011
https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0021

The introduction and general overviews section of this is available for free. The rest needs to be purchased or accessed via an institution.

Contents
Introduction
General Overviews
Biographies
Selected Major Works
Lectures
Interviews and Essays
Bibliographies
Journals
Knowledge and Discourse
Madness and Mental Illness
Power and Punishment
Sexuality
Governmentality
Subjectification and Techniques of Self

Anthony Merino, Politics of Perception: Post-Foucauldian Ceramics (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 July 2011

Anthony Merino, Politics of Perception: Post-Foucauldian Ceramics [Kindle Edition] Tony Dubis-Merino (Illustrator), Pam Luke (Editor) , 2011

Description
Whether due to his insight or influence, Foucault’s mixture of cynicism, paranoia and obsession with power mirrors our current cultural zeitgeist. His thoughts resonate on both thin edges of the American political thought. On the left, consider feminist law scholar Catharine MacKinnon who stated that men incarcerated for rape thinks it is stupid because “They were put into jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and they call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. It may also be right.” On the right, there are those who believe that including homosexuality as a personal choice would lead to an epidemic of sodomy. In speaking of homosexuality, Pat Buchanan sees even mere acceptance as wrong. While these ideas are clearly on the lip of the American political bell curve, it is an arch plotted on a Foucauldian graph. The X axis is knowledge and the Y axis is power. Contemporary ceramic artists create work in this milieu, Like a desert defines a cactus, Foucault’s theory of power and society define their work.

Maurizio Meloni, Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 July 2011

Maurizio Meloni, “Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves”,Telos 155 (Summer 2011).
https://dx.doi.org/10.3817/0611155151

Abstract
Scientific naturalism, according to Jürgen Habermas, represents one of the “two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age,” the other being religious worldviews. Using Foucault’s distinction between philosophy as an “analytic of truth” and philosophy as an “ontology of the present” and “ontology of ourselves,” this essay addresses naturalism less as an epistemological issue than as a global way of rethinking humanness, that is as the theoretical “correlative” of certain local practices, which, under the influence of leading sciences such as neuroscience and molecular biology, contribute today to the naturalization of the human. In the second part of the essay, I will discuss three hermeneutic models through which leading Continental thinkers have reacted to this intertwinement of naturalism and the human condition in modernity: naturalism as a break, as a danger, and as a loss. From their reactions, the antinaturalistic legacy of much of Continental philosophy emerges clearly, and invites us to think of the present naturalistic epoch in a more radical way.

CFP: The twelfth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 July 2011

Call for papers
The twelfth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle

Canisius College
Buffalo, NY, USA
March 30-April 1, 2012

Papers on any aspect of Foucault’s work, and studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking, are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives in the program selection.

Please send a 1-2 page ABSTRACT of the paper, by e-mail.

Abstracts should be submitted to the program committee chair: Dianna Taylor (dtaylor@jcu.edu)on or before Friday, November 19, 2011. Please indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.doc” attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced in mid-December.

The meetings typically begin with an informal welcoming reception on Friday evening. There will be morning and afternoon paper sessions on Saturday, followed by dinner and a business meeting. The conference will conclude with paper sessions on Sunday morning. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion. Combined papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes, preferably 15). In conjunction with our meeting in Buffalo, a city in which Foucault conducted research on the prison, this year’s conference will include a session dedicated to discussing documents from the GIP (le Groupe d’information sur les Prisons, a French prison reform organization that Foucault co-founded). English translations of the texts will be available.

Logistical information about lodging, transportation, and other arrangements will be available after the program has been announced.

For more information about the Foucault Circle, please see the website:

Stuart Elden, Power, Nietzsche and the Greeks: Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 July 2011

Stuart Elden, Power, Nietzsche and the Greeks: Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, Originally published on the now defunct Berfrois site.

The most recently published lecture course from Michel Foucault’s time at the Collège de France is his first, entitled ‘La Volonté de Savoir’—the will to know or the will to knowledge. To avoid confusion with the first volume of his History of Sexuality, which reused the title, the editor, Daniel Defert, has chosen Leçons sur la volonté de savoir as this volume’s title. The addition of ‘lectures on…’ is appropriate, as this volume includes two pieces not originally delivered in Paris: a lecture on Nietzsche from later that year, to make up for a missing lecture from the Paris transcript, and a manuscript on Oedipus that served as the basis for lectures in the Americas over the next couple of years, developing themes from the course. Unlike the other courses published to date, this volume is based almost entirely on Foucault’s manuscript for the course, rather than transcribed from tape recordings of the actual delivery. Defert has done exemplary work in making these texts available, and supplemented them with useful notes and an essay contextualizing the course. An English translation is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan by Graham Burchell, but is unlikely to be out before 2013.

The rest of the review can be read here

For links to comments on this review see Progressive Geogrphies

Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Foucault with Habermas: Towards a complementary critical reading of modernity (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 July 2011

Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Foucault with Habermas: Towards a complementary critical reading of modernity, Revista Enfoques, Vol. IX, no. 14, 2011, pp. 139-151
https://doi.org/10.60728/a5zww823

ABSTRACT
This essay examines Foucault’s and Habermas’s critical project in order to show their complementary character. In the examination of the main aspects of their oeuvres, it is argued, contrary to what some authors state, such as Habermas, that Foucault’s position on modernity is not that of total rejection, but rather ambivalent. It is therefore possible to consider Foucault’s theory as a critical counterweight to Habermas’s. The point is made that Foucault’s theory awards flexibility to some theoretical distinctions upon which Habermas builds his own project.