Foucault News

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

Clare O'Farrell

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.

Anne Schwan, Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 July 2011

Anne Schwan, Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, London: Pluto Press, 2011, ISBN: 9780745329819

Description
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro’s excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.

Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault’s key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault’s thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish takes a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.

About The Authors
Anne Schwan is Lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University.
Stephen Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Endorsements
“This is a useful and illuminating companion to Foucault’s book, and will clarify much that remains puzzling about this proteiform thinker, dispelling misunderstandings and sending the reader on new and more fruitful paths.”

(Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University)

“[A] highly readable guide to one of Foucault’s best-known but often misinterpreted works. … This book will be of great assistance to students and others looking for a clear introduction to Discipline and Punish and for pointers on its theoretical contexts.

(Clare O’Farrell, author of Michel Foucault (2005) and founding editor of Foucault Studies)

Olli Pyyhtinen, Sakari Tamminen, We have never been only human: Foucault and Latour on the question of the anthropos, (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 July 2011

Olli Pyyhtinen, Sakari Tamminen, We have never been only human: Foucault and Latour on the question of the anthropos, Anthropological Theory, Vol. 11, No. 2. (1 June 2011), pp. 135-152.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499611407398

Abstract
Today, the impact of the work of both Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour is increasingly evident in anthropology, most notably in the subfields of medical anthropology and the anthropology of science and technology. However, so far the oeuvres of these two thinkers have not been compared in a systematic fashion in the secondary literature. The present consideration intends a sustained comparison of their work to the end of problematizing the notion of the human or the anthropos. We suggest that both Foucault and Latour provide us with vital means to question human exceptionalism. Instead of calling upon the essence of human subjectivity by drawing on the notion of intentionality, for instance, they break open the interiority and autonomous hidden essence of the human. While Foucault does this mainly with his notion of the death of Man, Latour’s work calls human essence into question by asserting the respective birth of non-humanity. We argue that it is especially the two thinkers’ mutual concern with relationality that makes their work central to recent discussions of ‘posthumanism’ by proposing a form of ‘ahumanism’. However, at the same time Foucault and Latour tend to neglect the ‘outside’ of relations, although both see it as providing the resources for every assemblage.

Ben Golder, Review: Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law. By Andrew Sharpe (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

12 July 2011

Ben Golder, Review of Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law, Abingdon: Routledge , 2010 by Andrew Sharpe, The Modern Law Review, Volume 74, Issue 4, July 2011, pp 639–642.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663912463631c

Review
Andrew Sharpe has written a very erudite and impeccably serious book about monsters. However, Sharpe’s thought-provoking book is not so much about the mythological imagination as it is about the legal imagination and the ways in which ‘at least some human beings are positioned as outsiders’ by the law (3). Foucault’s Monsters thus takes up the important question of the production, circulation and management of human difference in and through legal discourse. For Sharpe, the category of ‘the monster’ has historically been one of the crucial techniques whereby law has sought to define the acceptable limits of human being – it helped furnish an answer to those presuppositional ontological questions of ‘who is legible as a human?’ and ‘who shall count as a human?’ As Sharpe’s fascinating historical researches on the English common law show, and as one would expect in a book theoretically indebted to Foucault, this process according to which certain humans are constituted as legal monsters (a process, precisely, of monsterisation, of making into a monster) proceeded according to different logics at different points in time. For example, each historical epoch depicted here deploys its own ‘privileged’ figure – for the Middle Ages, it is the bestial human; for the Renaissance, it is the spectre of conjoined twins; and for the Classical Age, it is the figure of the hermaphrodite which exercises the legal imagination. I say ‘history’ and ‘historically’, but of course as Sharpe makes clear early on (and indeed as does the latter half of the book itself, which addresses the contemporary issues of transsexuality, conjoined twins and admixed embryos), a legal history of the monster is not simply a return to the recondite pronouncements of Bracton and Britton, Swinburne and Blackstone (as interesting and bizarre as this turns out to be). Rather, the intent – in true Foucaultian style – is to unsettle the grounds of the present legal construction and regulation of human difference.

See here for rest of review

Michael L. Cepek, Foucault in the forest: Questioning environmentality in Amazonia (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 July 2011

Michael L. Cepek, Foucault in the forest: Questioning environmentality in Amazonia, American Ethnologist, Volume 38, Issue 3, August 2011, pp 501–515.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x

ABSTRACT
In this article, I analyze the encounter between the Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonian Ecuador’s Cofán people to question the concept of “environmentality”: the idea that environmentalist programs and movements operate as forms of governmentality in Michel Foucault’s sense. I argue that, although the Field Museum’s community conservation projects constitute a regulatory rationale and technique, they do not transform Cofán subjectivity according to plan. By exploring Cofán people’s critical consciousness of environmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubt on the governmentality paradigm’s utility for analyzing the complexities of cultural difference, intercultural encounter, and directed change.

Keywords: governmentality;environmentality;indigenous conservation;environmental management;Amazonia

Peter Lucas, Foucault and Subjection (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 July 2011

Lucas, P. (2011). Foucault and Subjection. In: Ethics and Self-Knowledge. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1560-8_10

Abstract
A sceptical essentialist ethic of self-interpretation, founded on an obligation to avoid the mendacity involved in inducing deficient self-conceptions in others, looks to have significant normative force. But how might it apply outside of the personal relationships investigated by Sartre, in a broader social context, in which self-conscious sadism (and masochism) seems to be uncommon? This chapter addresses this question with reference to the work of Michel Foucault. Although Foucault rejected key elements of phenomenology, his account of the power effects of disciplinary technologies has clear parallels with Sartre’s account of sadism in concrete relations with others. At the same time, he emphasises that disciplinary power does not require an agent, and may be diffused throughout social institutions. Foucault did not regard himself as an ethicist, in any conventional sense; but in highlighting the price we pay for scientific self-knowledge, his findings have clear implications for those whose professional roles involve the acquisition and deployment of such knowledge.

Elly Tams/Quiet Riot Girl, Scribbling on Foucault’s Walls – ebook novel (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 July 2011

Elly Tams/Quiet Riot Girl, Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls. The Girl Who Wasn’t There Novel for download from author’s site.

Published: June 29, 2011
Category: Fiction » Literature » Erotica

Short Description
Imagine if the great, French, homosexual philosopher, Michel Foucault, had in fact had a daughter… This is the story of the girl who wasn’t there…

Le nouveau contrôle social (colloque) Foucault 1979

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

5 July 2011

The film which runs for (1 hour and 22 minutes) of this conference which includes Foucault can be found on the University of Paris 8 Archives site. It is an interesting social document reflecting the somewhat anarchic atmosphere of the University at Vincennes in 1979.

Colloque
« Le nouvel ordre intérieur »

Partie 3 : « Le nouveau contrôle social »
avec les interventions de
Hubert Dalle, Louis Casamayor,
Louis Joinet et Michel Foucault

Documents n&b / Colloque organisé par le
département Anglo-américain
Filmé du 22 au 24 mars 1979 par le
Service des Moyens Audiovisuels / Durée 1h 22mn

Numérisation, restauration et montage : Patrice Besnard
Labo VAO / 2009

En mars 1979 le département Anglo-américain, et plus précisément Pierre Dommergues, organise un colloque baptisé « Le nouvel ordre intérieur » particulièrement d’actualité à l’époque, mais peut-être encore aujourd’hui ! Le grand Amphi est plein à craquer pour écouter les interventions de personnalités très connues (Chomsky, Macciocchi, Foucault, Châtelet), ou moins connues. Les questions du public entraînent des débats houleux avec, bien sûr, leur lot de provocateurs. Ces documents montrent bien également le « bouillonnement » intellectuel et politique important qui existait à Vincennes.

Ronald E. Butchart, What’s Foucault Got to Do with It? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjected (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 June 2011

Ronald E. Butchart, What’s Foucault Got to Do with It? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjected, History of Education Quarterly, Issue 2, Volume 51, May 2011, pages 239–246.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5959.2011.00333.x

Extract
The three essays before us constitute an indictment of the field of the history of education for its neglect of theory. Read linearly, from the Introduction through Coloma, the indictment becomes increasingly strident, moving from a gentle call for greater consideration of the potential contributions of theory for historical writing to a condemnation of the field for its parochial “indifference, imperviousness, and perhaps even resistance” to theory. As one practitioner within the field who shares with these authors a keen relish for theory and philosophy of history, I regret that the challenge to the field to attend more carefully to the possibilities of theory has been presented in exactly this form. My regret flows from the indictment’s incoherent form, from its misleading evidentiary base, from its curious move from a broad embrace of multiple theoretical stances to a narrow, crabbed insistence on only one deeply problematic theory as acceptable evidence of the field’s theoretical sophistication, and from the stunning effort in the last essay to appropriate and deploy language as power in order to marginalize and exclude from historical inquiry all but the narrowest range of discourse traditions. I will take up each of those issues in turn.