Foucault News

Wróbel, Szymon, ‘Foucault Reads Freud: The Dialogue with Unreason and Enlightenment‘, Polish Sociological Review 3 (171) 2010, pp. 271-288

Abstract
The title of the essay refers to the famous statement in Foucaults introduction to his History of Madness where he writes that “we have to do justice to Freud”. The problem, however, is that Foucault’s philosophy does not seem to do justice to Freud. Foucault’s use of Freud is ambiguous: sometimes he uses him for purely instrumental purposes (when reconstructing the history of madness and sexuality), but sometimes-for anthropological purposes signaling Freud’s role in redefining our common humanity and particularly our relation to language, life and work. The author confronts Foucault’s ambiguous reading of Freud with the equally ambiguous reading of Foucault by Derrida. Derrida discusses Foucault twice. Once in the essay Cogito and The History of Madness in which Derrida takes on Foucault’s understanding of Descartes and his role in the exclusion of madness from the realm of reason. The second time-in his essay To Do Justice to Freud. Here Derrida disagrees with Foucault whether Freud managed to reestablish the body’s communication with reason which Descartes destroyed.

Keywords: dialogue; enlightenment; freedom; history; sexuality; psychoanalysis

Blair McDonald, New Coalitions and Other Ruptures: Foucault and the Hope for Bodies and Pleasures, M/C Journal, Vol. 13, No. 6 (2010) – ‘coalition’, Vol. 13, No. 6 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.293

See here for entire article

This essay takes its point of departure from a well known excerpt found in the final pages of Michel Foucault’s text, The History of Sexuality: Volume One. It reads as follows:

“It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim-through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality- to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” (157)

Here for the first time in this text Foucault outlines a tactic for resisting the various mechanisms of sexuality. Yet, how are we to make sense of the potential sexual politics inherent to this claim? Not only does this passage mark a significant shift in the tone and style of Foucault’s writing but it is arguable that his tactic – our point of resistance should be aimed at bodies and pleasures as opposed to sex-desires – is problematic in light of his own conception of power and sexuality discussed earlier in the book. In re-reading the above passage we see that Foucault clearly acknowledges that “bodies, pleasures and knowledges” come to be in and through the exercising of power; so how is it that Foucault invokes the possibility for counterattacks on the level of bodies and pleasures yet not on the level of sex-desire? In plain language, what is Foucault trying to say here?

Johanna Oksala, ‘Sexual Experience: Foucault, Phenomenology, and Feminist Theory’, Hypatia, Volume 26, Number 1, Winter 2011 , pp. 207-223(17)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01153.x

Abstract:
This paper explicates Foucault’s conception of experience and defends it as an important theoretical resource for feminist theory. It analyzes Linda Alcoff’s devastating critique of Foucault’s account of sexuality and her reasons for advocating phenomenology as a more viable alternative. I agree with her that a philosophically sophisticated understanding of experience must remain central for feminist theory, but I demonstrate that her critique of Foucault is based on a mistaken view of his philosophical position as well as on a problematic understanding of phenomenology.