Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

From the Portail Michel Foucault

L’ART DE GOUVERNER
du Friday 22/10/10 au Saturday 23/10/10
Journées d’études organisées à
l’Université de Créteil,
Site du mail des Mèches,
Bâtiment d’Economie les 22 et 23 Octobre 2010

Vendredi 22 Octobre : Accueil et petit-déjeuner à 9h30 – Salle 015

Problèmes de philosophie politique, sous la présidence de Pierre Manent, de 10h à 13h.

Diego Vernazza : « L’art de gouverner suivant l’esprit des lois : principes d’une politique négative.»

Emilia Murgia : « La spécificité de la théorie du gouvernement dans le Contrat Social : le corps du Prince entre légitimité et fonctionnement. »

Edouard Jourdain : « De l’autogouvernement comme art et comme science. Perspectives à partir des œuvres de Proudhon et Castoriadis. »

Nicolas Poirier : « Quel projet politique contre la domination bureaucratique ? Castoriadis et Lefort à Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1958). »

De 13h à 14h30 : Buffet avec les participants et les auditeurs – CROUS du CMC

Gouverner en situation, sous la présidence de Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, de 14h30 à 18h.

Adrien Louis : « Note sur la modernité des tyrannies modernes. »

Félix Blanc : « Que signifie « gouverner en temps de guerre » dans les régimes représentatifs ?»

Luca Paltrinieri : « Gouvernement des choses et subversion des conduites : l’art de gouverner au XVIIIème siècle. »

Eloïse Girault : « De la pensée magique en politique. Construction de l’action publique et crise des temporalités. »

Jérôme Boissonade : « Du dispositif délibératif à la pragmatique coopérative. »

Samedi 23 Octobre : Accueil et petit-déjeuner à 9h30 – Salle 306

Rhétorique politique et discours ordinaire, sous la présidence d’Alice Krieg-Planque, de 10h à 13h

Ariane Revel : « Diderot, Rousseau : l’art du philosophe et l’art du politique. »

Daniele Lorenzini : « That government is best which governs not at all – Thoreau et les enjeux éthiques de la désobéissance civile. »

Magali Brailly : « Du souci de l’Autre au souci du monde. Ethique levinassienne et politique arendtienne, une convergence possible ? »

Aude Dontenwille-Gerbaud : « Interactions orateurs / publics populaires : acte de fondation de la troisième République. »

De 13 à 14h30 : Buffet avec les participants –

Questions internationales, sous la présidence de Maria Bonnafous-Boucher, de 14h30 à 17h

Cécile Goncalves : « Qui gouverne la mondialisation ? »

Martina Tazzioli : « Migrants, moving and mobile people : le gouvernement des exceptions par le pouvoir différentiel de normalisation.”

Orazio Irrera : « Les interruptions du gouvernement colonial en Inde : le terrorisme et la non violence comme matrices de subjectivation éthico-politique. »

American Comparitive Literature Association 2011
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver,
March 31st – April 3rd, 2011

“World Literature / Comparative Literature”
Seminar: Foucault and/on Literature
Seminar Organizer: Philip Goldstein, U of Delaware-Wilmington,
Philip Goldstein, U of Delaware-Wilmington

Summary
The question of how the work of Michel Foucault bears on the study of literature has been controversial. Some say that in his early work on madness Foucault indicates that, as a kind of counter discourse, literature resists the institutional technologies constituting the subject. Others say that in his later work on sexuality, Foucault shows that literature as well as other discourses fosters the aesthetic self-creation of the individual. Still others say that, as Foucault’s account of the author function suggests, literature is its own discourse with its own history and technologies.

Seminar Proposal Deadline: October 1, 2010
Deadline for Paper Proposals: November 1, 2010
For more information, contact conference@acla.org

Michelle Brady, ‘What ethnography contributes to studies of governmentality’. Paper presented at the 11th Advances in Qualitative Methods Conference, October 2010, October 7-8 2010.

Published as Brady, M. (2011) Researching governmentalities through ethnography: the case of Australian welfare reforms and programs for single parents Critical Policy Studies. Vol 5. No. 3. October. pp.265-283

Abstract
In this paper I argue that the spaces of freedom and constraint that capacity programs for Australian single parents open up and close down are distinctly different when viewed from a top down perspective of governmental rationalities as compared to a bottom up perspective of what Foucault referred to as the ‘witches’ brew’ of actual practices. Around 90 percent of lone parents with dependent children in Australia are lone mothers, and around 80 percent of these lone mothers receive single rate Parenting Payment. Changes to this payment (and its precursor, Sole Parent Pension) over the last 25 years have recognized this gendered composition by focusing on issues of mothering and the intensive activities of care that continue to be carried out most commonly by mothers. While the 2005 Welfare to Work package appeared to sharply break with this practice by not focusing on gender and the unique features of mothers’ life courses, I find that these considerations have remained a key part of the ‘witches’ brew’ of actual practices. Given this finding, a key argument is that studies of governmentalities which combine sociologies of actual practices together with studies of official governmental rationalities can make important critical contributions.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Insuring Security: Biopolitics, security and risk, London: Routledge, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-415-58343-5

Description
Insurance is the world’s largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is know about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance.

This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from the continuous interaction of an ‘entrepreneurial form of power’, and traditional forms of sovereign security. Through rich empirical cases and a unique theorization, the book breaks apart the traditional division between security studies, political economy and political theory. The author explores this theory in relation to specific issues such as the use of life insurance in the molecular age, the use of insurance to securitize against environmental catastrophic risk, specialist products such as kidnap and ransom insurance, as well as the use of insurance to counter maritime piracy in the twenty-first century.

Providing an important and original contribution to the study of the biopolitics of security, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of security studies, international relations and international political economy.

Further details

Employment opportunity

Research Associate
Keele University
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Research Institute of Law, Politics and Justice

(Fixed Term for 12 months)

Starting Salary: Grade 7: £29,853 p.a.

A one-year post-doctoral research position is available within a project entitled Capitalising security through life insurance in the UK; directed by Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project seeks to analyse the role of life insurance as a security provider in the UK. The project is problem-driven and involves engaging with an interdisciplinary focus (Politics/International Relations/Security Studies; Social Studies of Finance; Social/Cultural/Political Theory). It seeks to advance knowledge on the ways in which liberal security is actively produced in relation to profit-making and the promotion and protection of lifestyles through the management of risk. The project is embedded within the Emerging Securities research group at Keele University which hosts the Biopolitics of Security Research Network.

Applicants will play an important intellectual role in managing and developing the project. Preference will be given to applicants able to demonstrate experience in biopolitical research. Competency in conducting interdisciplinary literature reviews and analyses, semi-structured interviews with high-profile officials, and internet-based as well as physical archival research is required. General knowledge of debates concerning security and risk is expected.

This post will commence on 10th January 2011.

Further details on Keele University site.

For enquiries
please write to Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero by emailing:
l.lobo-guerrero@intr.keele.ac.uk

Job packs available: or email vacancies@keele.ac.uk, Human Resources, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG or Fax: 01782 733471.

Please quote post reference: RE10/22UK

Closing date for applications: 20 October 2010

See this news item
The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) celebrated its relaunch at Kingston University by announcing its new partnership with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8.

The CRMEP is one of the very few philosophy centres which is focused on European philosophy in English language universities. Most of the staff were previously employed at Middlesex University which controversially closed the Centre down in April 2010.

Also of note here is that Foucault was a founding professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII Vincennes for a year in 1969-70.

For further details in Japanese see here

University of Tokyo Centre for Philosophy Lecture:
MAEDA Koichi “Michel Foucault and Film”
Date: 17:00-18:30, October 15 (Fri), 2010
Place: Seminar Room, 2F, Building 101, Komaba Campus, University of Tokyo
Language: Japanese
Admission Free
No Registration Required

The Government of Self and Other: On Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982/3
Date: 2 December 2010 , 10:00 to 17:00
Location: Bolivar Hall, Kingston University, 54 Grafton Way, London W1

Speakers

Mathieu Potte Boneville (Collège International de Philosophie, Paris)
John Marks (French, Nottingham University)
Johanna Oksala (Philosophy, Dundee University)
Miguel de Beistegui (Philosophy, University of Warwick)

Call for Papers: The Green Apparatus? Political Technologies of the Sustainable City

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 12-16th April 2011, Seattle, USA.

Session organized by Stephanie Wakefield (CUNY Graduate Center) and Bruce Braun (University of Minnesota)

“Nature is the new civic ideal.”
—Alexandros Washburn, Director of Urban Design for the NYC Department of City Planning, from Metropolis magazine

Summary
We are commonly presented today with two diverging yet fundamentally intertwined futures: one of hightech, intelligently designed buildings complete with hanging gardens and smiling families, and another of ubiquitous environmental disaster composed of miasmic wildfires, violent floods, and phantasmic oil spills. It is in this context that diverse projects are being taken up by architects, theorists, designers, planners, and citizens alike, which can in short be called Green Urbanism. Such projects are not confined to the realm of the technical; rather, their scope is at once diverse and wide, taking the lived environment, the habits and gestures of bodies, the circulation of energies and matters, and the population itself, as matters of concern.

This session is designed to explore the conjunction of biopolitics and the diverse apparatuses of Green Urbanism. Following Michel Foucault, we deploy the term apparatus (dispositif) to denote a heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, and philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions that constitute a response to a specific urgency. We are further informed by two competing readings of Foucault’s term: Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration and grounding of Foucault’s schematic, particularly its ontological engagement and definition as “a machine that produces subjectifications” and Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative and pragmatic reading of dispositif as a “tangle of lines” that “are subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked and subject to drifting.”

We seek to bring together those engaged in investigating the material processes of Green Urbanism: the actual technologies by which habits, gestures, behaviors, desires, and practices of daily life are molded and shaped, activated and mobilized, combined and cultivated, or improvised and expanded. Is Green Urbanism the intensification of biopolitical control? A site for new political imaginations and new political orders? Or something else entirely?

Topics may include but are not limited to:
Materialist theories of subjectification
Political technologies of Green Urbanism
Apparatus/dispositif – Agamben v. Deleuze
Bodies, spaces, and habits
Political imaginations and the low-carbon city
Design for behavior change
Green citizenry
Oikonomia
Biopolitics/biopolitical production

Please send questions, ideas, or abstracts to stephaniewakefield@gmail.com by October 15th 2010

Wong, James, The Care of the Self: Possibilities for Associative Politics (2010). APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper.

Update August 2025. Link no longer available

Abstract
Foucault’s late work, in particular his research on practices of the ‘care of the self’ has been seen by some authors as a possible resource for democratic theory (Connolly, Simons). Ella Myers in her recent article argues that Foucault’s idea of the ‘care of the self’ can only be a limited resource for “rendering power relations more equitable, open, and responsive” to democratic practices (Myers 127). She argues that practices of the care of the self do not correct the depoliticizing effects of disciplinary power and biopower. The emphasis on individuals to establish a reflexive relation to one’s self would appear to point away from the kind of collaborative practices required for democratic engagement. She underscores the limitation of Foucault’s account by highlighting his remark that in care of the self the “relationship with oneself is ontologically prior” (Foucault 30). In this paper I offer an alternative reading of Foucault’s puzzling remark about ontological priority that would counter individualist worries. I then argue, by using Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of ‘care’, that the social and reciprocal dimension in Foucault’s account of practices of the care of the self is more substantive than Myers permits. I conclude with some observations about the possibility for collaborative political engagements with others.