Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Cours au College de France, 1970-1. Suivi de Le savoir d’Oedipe, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2011.
Stuart Elden has offered some preliminary observations on this new French publication on his blog
He has also published some comments by Colin Gordon on this volume as well on his blog
THE FOUCAULT EFFECT 1991-2011
I am reposting this notice about this important conference with some new links.
The audio recordings of this conference were available at the excellent Backdoor Broadcasting Company which ceased operations in 2021.
Stuart Elden has provided an overview of the conference on his blog Progressive Geographies and has written up his discussant notes on his blog.
A Conference at Birkbeck, University of London:
Date: Friday 3 – Saturday 4 June 2011
Venue: Clore Lecture Theatre, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck
Participants: Fabienne Brion, Graham Burchell, Daniel Defert, Peter Fitzpatrick, Ben Golder, Colin Gordon, Patrick Hanafin, Bernard Harcourt, Peter Miller, Carolina Olarte, Giovanna Procacci, Paul Patton, Jonathan Simon.
Published seven years after Michel Foucault’s death, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality provided access to a little known and major new area of his later research, accompanied and illustrated by a rich collection of complementary studies by his co-researchers. The volume has served over the past 20 years as an influential and widely cited source, stimulating new work in many fields. In the past decade its effects has been accompanied by the acclaimed, ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures, including the full original sources of The Foucault Effect. Foucault’s work on governmentality is now recognised as one of the important developments in later twentieth-century reflection on the political, whose implications may not yet have been fully registered.
This event brought together the editors and several contributors to The Foucault Effect, along with leading international scholars who have taken up and explored its themes in several interconnected areas, engaging with the history and issues of a changing present. Among them are editors of two important new publications: Lectures on The Will to Know (Foucault’s first College de France lecture series, edited by Daniel Defert) and Mal Faire, Dire Vrai (his 1981 Louvain lectures on confession, criminology and social defence, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, to be published in French by Louvain University Press and in English by Chicago University Press). Both of these new publications are likely to modify our understanding of Foucault’s enterprise and of its relevance to our time.
The programme and contributions was structured around five topic areas:
Global and postcolonial dimensions
Law, rights, justice, punishment
Problematising the political and the left
The history of governmentality
Social defence in the 21st century
7 PROPOS DU SEPTIÈME ANGE D’après Michel Foucault
Création collective de Bruno Boulzaguet
Jeu : Bruno Boulzaguet
Percussions : Jean Christophe Feldhandler
Lumières : Olivier Oudiou.
Penseur excentrique, écrivain prophétique et linguiste « juché au point extrême du délire » (Selon Michel Foucault), Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1919) était animé d’une confiance absolue dans les raisonnements les plus tortueusement logiques qui mènent immanquablement aux confins de la divagation hilarante, comme le démontre ce spectacle, une drolatique leçon de grammaire pour un acteur et un musicien. (durée 40mn)
Deuxième partie : (De 20mn à 30mn) Chaque soir un concert ‘carte blanche’ Proposé par la Cie Théodoros Group.
Théâtre de L’Atalante
10, place Charles-Dullin 75018 PARIS
du lundi 20 au jeudi 30 juin 2011 à 20 h 30, le samedi à 19 heures, relâche le dimanche
Tarif préférentiel de 10 euros du lundi 20 au vendredi 24 Juin 2011
Réservation au 01 46 06 11 90
Roberto Nigro Maître de conférences invité à l’EHESS donnera cinq conférences sur les Démonstrations de pouvoir
Le jeudi 9 juin 2011 15h00-17h00 105, bd. Raspail, Salle 11 “Violence, domination, résistance : trois concepts clés dans l’œuvre de Michel Foucault”
Le mardi 14 juin 2011 18h30-20h30 Salle 1, Centre Parisien d’Études Critiques, 37 bis rue du Sentier 75002 “Pouvoir et représentation du pouvoir. L’exemple du coup d’état en tant que théorie de l’action politique dans la pensée du XVIIe siècle”
Le jeudi 16 juin 2011 18h30-20h30 Salle 1, Centre Parisien d’Études Critiques, 37 bis rue du Sentier, 75002 “L’exception et la règle dans les arts de gouverner modernes”
Le jeudi 23 juin 2011 18h30-20h30 Salle 1, Centre Parisien d’Études Critiques, 37 bis rue du Sentier, 75002 “La crainte des masses. Révoltes, insurrections et coups de main. Vers une généalogie des technologies de gouvernement du peuple”.
30 juin 2011 18h30-20h30 Salle 1, Centre Parisien d’Études Critiques, 37 bis rue du Sentier, 75002 “Coups d’État et révolutions”
The Centre for Studies in Otherness invites papers for the e-journal issue Otherness: Essays and Studies 2.2.
Otherness: Essays and Studies, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary e-journal, publishes research articles from and across different academic disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study. We publish two issues a year, alternating between special topic issues and general issues. This is a call for our general issue, forthcoming in Winter 2011.
‘The foreigner is neither a race nor a nation … we are our own foreigners, we are divided.’
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves
Otherness is complex and multivalent term. Otherness is defined by difference, both via outside markers and internal characteristics. Otherness is also a means by which we define ourselves. Thus the concept is inevitably bound with conceptions of selfhood, making it fundamental for discussions of subjectivity, social, cultural and national identity, and larger discussions of ontology. In light of more recent theory and criticism, the assumed line between the self and the other, the defining boundary of identity construction, is blurred, and as such the entire concept of otherness has become intricate and problematic. It is this concept, otherness, in all of its complexities and nuances that we seek to explore and discuss through Otherness: Essays and Studies.
Past projects from the centre, and past issues of the journal, have brought together articles from the fields of cultural theory, continental philosophy, sociology, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, Gothic studies, postmodernism and poststructuralist theory in their consideration of otherness. This journal invites submissions dealing with aspects of critical, socio-political, cultural, and literary exploration, within the scope of studies in otherness and alterity.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Otherness in Cultural Representation
Hybridity, Creolization, and the Global other
Memory, History, Trauma, and Otherness
Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other
Sexuality, Gender, the Body and the Other
M/other / Sm/other: Engendering Otherness
Ambivalence and Otherness: Mimicry & Menace
Absolute Otherness vs. Self-Same Other
Monstrosity, Spectrality and Terror of the Other
Uncanny or Abject Others; or The Familiar Other
The Sublime or the Unimaginable Other
Malignant Otherness: Madness/Sadness
Healing Otherness: Sanity & Suffering
Pathography: Voicing the Otherness of Pain
Articles should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words. All submissions should be sent via email with Word document attachment formatted to Chicago Manual of Style standards, to editors, Maria Beville and Matthias Stephan at otherness.research@gmail.com
The deadline for submissions is Friday the 2nd of September 2011.
Epistemologies of the Political, the Global and the International
A workshop to reflect collectively on the ways we know the ‘factual’ world we research.
For further info see this site
Organised by the Emerging Securities Research Unit, Keele University and co-sponsored by the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group
Keynote speaker: Prof Michael Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Monday 7 November 2011
Keele University, Claus Moser Building, 9:30 – 5:00
Rationale
Orders of the real are authoritative ways of imagining the world. They imply specific sets of beliefs, attitudes, practices, and discourses that taken together constitute regimes of truth around which decisions on what is to be taken as valid are made. Orders of the real presuppose understandings of how the world is known, the relations that constitute the regimes upon which knowledge is produced, and the representations and assumptions about the problem of political existence. Although within a positivist tradition of science they have been approached from the realm of ‘the empirical’ and observed through methods that seek to reduce them to objective and measurable facts, they are far more problematic than that. As continental thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, and many others have demonstrated, they enshrine complex relations of power, that include, and transcend, what has been known through and after Foucault’s work as power/knowledge.
Orders of the real constitute epistemological problems. They can be observed as sites from which to question deep assumptions that determine the outcomes of research. They can also be explored to make explicit the conditions of possibility and operability of systems of thought upon which modern technologies of governance depend. They can also be used to interrogate problems that in principle appear buried in time, such as various relationships between the modern and the secular as well as the modern and the uncertain, within technologies and practices of government and rule.
The Emerging Securities Unit was created in 2009 to support research on novel forms of revealing the possibility of being political. Through this workshop we intend to offer a space for critical reflection on the epistemological implications of researching the political, the global, and the international as sites of representation of orders of the real.
Format
The workshop is organised in the form of interventions to a general debate. We are calling for participants who wish to reflect publicly on the epistemological implications of their past, current, and future research projects. We invite abstracts on these interventions of no more than 300 words drawing on, but not exclusively, the following questions:
· How can relationships between ontologies and epistemologies be made productive in revealing the possibilities of being political?
· What does researching the epistemologies of the political, the global, and the international offer in terms of understanding the realm of the empirical?
· What might a sceptical epistemology look like if traditional approaches to power/knowledge are to be resisted?
· Can epistemologies be secured in an attempt to secure orders of governance?
Please send abstracts to Corey Walker Mortimer (c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk) by the 29th of July 2011
Accepted participants will be asked to write a 1000-word brief on their intervention to be included on a report of the workshop which will be hosted at the Emerging Securities Research Group website.
Costs of participation: There are no fees for this workshop. However, participants will have to fund their own travel/accommodation/subsistence.
Organisers: Luis Lobo-Guerrero (l.lobo-guerrero@intr.keele.ac.uk), supported by Peter Adey (p.adey@esci.keele.ac.u), and Barry Ryan (b.j.ryan@intr.keele.ac.uk), on behalf of the Emerging Securities Unit.
Event coordinator: Corey Walker Mortimer (c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk)
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory Special Issue on ‘Freedom and Power’ Call for Papers
Ever since Livy proclaimed that ‘freedom is to be in one’s own power’, if not from a long time before, the relationship between freedom and power has been an enduring concern of political theorists. It has withstood even Berlin’s sharp distinctions between seemingly irreconcilable kinds of freedom and the subsequent diversion via debates about ‘negative, ‘positive’ and ‘republican’ freedom. With greater historical purview it is possible to see that the fault line between various competing conceptions of freedom is clearest with regard to how social and political theorists conceive of the relationship between freedom and power. While some thinkers have opposed freedom and power, arguing that liberty can only be truly attained free from power and domination (republicans) or in the absence of external impediments imposed by other human beings (liberals), others have identified a close and intriguing link between them, especially in the sphere of politics. A motley crew of radicals, Marxists and conservatives occupy the latter camp, including Livy, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault. Moreover, those in the former camp tend to think of freedom in formal and abstract terms, while proponents of the latter eschew this now normal tendency in political philosophy and instead think of freedom in fully substantive, concrete and even materialist terms. (Hobbes is an unusual and unique figure as his account of freedom inspires members of both parties in this debate.)
Several important questions arise concerning freedom and power:-
• What is freedom?
• What is the relationship between freedom and power?
• How, if at all, are freedom and domination related?
• Is there a categorical or insurmountable conflict between freedom and discipline?
• Does freedom depend upon being free from interference or being able to achieve certain desired or desirable goals or ends?
• Are these two conditions – freedom from interference and the ability or power to achieve certain ends – related in some sense?
• Can we measure freedom, and, if so, how?
• What forms or degrees of freedom are possible in modern representative democracies?
• How does representation affect freedom?
• Is our freedom dependent on the power of our representatives?
• How does the degradation of the planetary environment affect our views on freedom?
• Given the dire need for self-control and self-discipline, especially regarding levels of consumption in the developed North, is the concept of freedom even still relevant?
• Does the concept of freedom need to be reconfigured to accommodate constraint, austerity and self-control? If so, how?
• What do the experiences of relatively recently liberated states teach us about freedom?
• What is the relationship between freedom and power in the ‘Global South’?
• How, if at all, does poverty affect freedom?
The editors of Theoria ask contributors to think about these questions in and of themselves and in the light of the various arguments from any of the proponents of the various conceptions of freedom. These can be written about in term of furthering our understanding of the nature of personal and political freedom within modern representative democracies or in order to develop novel arguments that propose conceptions of freedom for different possible future political organizations and forms of power. While abstract theoretical insights and arguments are welcome, we urge contributors to try and think about freedom and power within and between particular political contexts, especially within the ‘Global South’, where often freedom is a nascent and precarious achievement, and sometimes only for the lucky few, and between the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’, either in relational or comparative terms. Given the changing power relations that exist within and between existing states, there is also much room for utopian thought regarding new forms of freedom in as yet un-experienced contexts of political power and moral conflict.
Submissions must be sent in MSWord format to the
Managing Editor, Ms Sherran Clarence (sherranclarence@gmail.com) on or before the 31st of August 2011.
International Conference on Autobiography “Technologies of the Self: New Departures in Self-Inscription”
University College Cork,
2-3 September 2011
Confirmed Key-Note Speaker: Professor Patricia Clough (CUNY)
There are contesting versions of autobiography. We’ve travelled far since Georges Gusdorf traced the origins of autobiography back to the origins of language itself, saying “the very first man who set out to speak and write his name inaugurated a new mode of human presence in the world. Beginning with the very first one, any inscription is an inscription of the self.” Philippe Lejeune was more circumspect in placing Rousseau in the vanguard of self-representational writing, and reading the Confessions as marking the emergence of specifically modern concept of selfhood in the Enlightenment period. But in the same year as the publication of Lejeune’s Le Pacte Autobiographique (1975), Roland Barthes published Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which signaled the end of the classical Enlightenment subject of autobiography, and the beginning of a radical autobiographical practice. Michel Foucault’s work on self-surveillance within structures of coercion opened up further vistas.
The last ten years have introduced a further element to this debate: in an era in which self-expression has undergone an exponential growth fuelled by technological innovation, most importantly, perhaps, the creation of an internet that hosts an ever-increasing number of blogs, tweets, personal webpages and other forms of audiovisual self-expression such as YouTube, it seems timely to think again about the phenomenon of writing, filming, recording and, indeed, publishing or publicizing the self: what innovations in self inscription have recent decades witnessed, what continuities and discontinuities can be traced, what changes in attitudes to the self and to self-revelation or exposure have been witnessed, how have developments in the channels of broadcasting altered how, what and why we engage in various, if always elusive acts of self-expression, are there now new practitioners of self-inscription because of these changes, and, finally, with so many outlets and such a market for narratives of self, how is such material consumed?
Foucault Inspires Trio
From Hartford Courant August 2025. Direct link no longer available
A venerable venue with a varied musical menu, Real Art Ways serves the highly original, sizzling, simpatico music by the trio Parrhesia on June 11 at 8 p.m. at the contemporary arts center, 56 Arbor St., Hartford, USA
Inspired by the French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas Michel Foucault, especially his reflections on the necessity for truth-telling, freedom and frankness in discourse, the empathetic trio members are Stephen Haynes, trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn; Joe Morris, electric guitar, and Warren Smith, drums, percussion, marimba and voice.
Released in 2010, Parrhesia’s self-titled album has been praised for the instrumental textures that emerge from the musical discourse among the three intensely interacting musicians. In their frank manner of speaking among themselves musically, the three freedom-loving musicians weave unique textures with their individualistic approach to their instruments, improvising true discourse without false discord.
MANCHESTER Workshops in Political Theory 2011
31 August – 2 September 2011
Call for Papers – Ontology and Politics Workshop
Convenors: Paul Rekret (Queen Mary), Simon Choat (Kingston), Clayton Chin (Queen Mary)
Description
Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy. While the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes. Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics grounded in the concepts of difference and otherness.
However, such a stance finds itself increasingly challenged today. On the one hand, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a politics grounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity, while on the other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of Continental thinkers in recent decades.
This panel aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking both the political and the philosophical.
We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:
-Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study of politics?
-Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political? How should this relation be conceived?
-Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?
-Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light of recent critiques?
-Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from recent speculative materialist ontologies?
If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper to p.rekret@qmul.ac.uk or S.Choat@kingston.ac.uk by 15 June 2011.
Foucault News 