Foucault News

Jonathan Lyons, Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism, Columbia University Press, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-231-15894-7

Description
Despite the West’s growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens any prospect for East–West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox News and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford.

In Islam Through Western Eyes, Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West’s grand totalizing narrative across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse’s corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century challenges: the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations.

Through the intellectual “archaeology” of Michel Foucault, Lyons reveals the workings of this discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political lives. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers—Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women—and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.

About the Author
Jonathan Lyons spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world. His research focuses on the shifting boundaries between East and West, and his publications include The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and (with Geneive Abdo) Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-first-Century Iran. He has a doctorate in sociology and lives in Washington, D.C.

Lucian Popescu, Foucault, cunoasterea si istoria, Editura Institutul European
Publisher’s page
Pdf of abstract in English

Extract from Abstract in English
Foucault, Knowledge, and History

This synthesis on Foucault’s ideas and subjects (author, discourse, sexuality, madness, technologies, methods of writing and representing knowledge, power-knowledge etc.) presents a new way of understanding knowledge, power, history beyond academic labels stuck on Foucault’s social and professional identity. I explained why Foucault saw "relations of power" in every human relationship, and I criticized some of his generalizations concerning this concept. Power is not everywhere…

‘Problems’, in Foucault’s acception, include: how power works from the bottom to the top of societies and vice versa, from citizens to politicians and from politicians to citizens, as a circular and diffuse phenomenon; how sexuality became an important discourse and what implications it has for our contemporary mentality; how madness was defined and elaborated by socio-political powers; how and why our intellectual texts and discourses are controlled, repressed, modelled or, in extreme cases, censured and prohibited by sociopolitical institutions. The book has an introductory part, which explains why Foucault rejected the idea of the author and how he conceived his books as a series of vivid representations in which he paints his thoughts in chiaroscuro tones. Concrete examples from his works illustrate his chiaroscuro manner of thinking/writing.