Foucault News

Nicolas Gane, Neoliberalism and the Defence of the Corporation (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

31 July 2023

Nicolas Gane, (2023). Neoliberalism and the Defence of the Corporation. Theory, Culture & Society, 40(3), 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221113727

Abstract
This article addresses a little-known event in the history of neoliberalism: a conference at Stanford University held in 1982 to reconsider Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property 50 years after its initial publication. This event is important as it is where key members of the neoliberal thought collective sought to define and defend the powers and freedoms of the corporation. First, this article outlines the political commitments of Berle and Means by considering the core arguments of The Modern Corporation and Private Property; second, it addresses key papers from the event published subsequently in the Journal of Law and Economics; and third, it analyses the neoliberal defence of the corporation that emerged from these papers, and reflects on the limitations of the work of Berle and Means for developing a response to their neoliberal critics.

Robert S. Leib, Of other histories: philosophical archaeology, historiology, and paradigmatology (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 July 2023

Robert S. Leib, Of other histories: philosophical archaeology, historiology, and paradigmatology, Parrhesia 37 · 2023 · 91-120

Open access

This article contributes to the discussion of philosophical archaeology in Foucault’s early works by reexamining its influences and recent developments using two concepts that appear in The Order of Things —a history of the Same and a history of the Other. Foucault viewed his work in The Order of Things as a departure from his earlier archival research into madness because madness is the object for a history of the Other, while order is the object for a history of the Same. A history of the Other, he says, is: “that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize the interior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness).” Eventually, Foucault would pursue this in his “Lives of Infamous Men” essay and Parallel Lives project. A history of the Same, by contrast, is “that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities.” It is the history of a culture that does the Othering, deployed as a means of preserving that culture against the encroachment of “foreign” influences. I will use this distinction throughout the paper to figure various archaeological projects in relation to one another. I will reexamine philosophical archaeology through these two categories and the permutations that result when they are brought to bear on one another.
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Lorenzini, D., & Tiisala, T. The architectonic of Foucault’s critique (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 July 2023

Lorenzini, D., & Tiisala, T. (2023). The architectonic of Foucault’s critique. European Journal of Philosophy, 1– 16. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12877

Open access

Abstract
This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s critical project. It is well known that Foucault’s genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the subject’s freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault’s critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above-mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth-telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth-telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth-telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique’s methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re-evaluating Foucault’s critical project as a whole. By showing that truth-telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault’s critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture.

Call for Papers: The twenty-second annual meeting of the Foucault Circle (2023-24)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 July 2023

CALL FOR PAPERS
The twenty-second annual meeting of the Foucault Circle

Emerson College
Boston, MA, USA
May 17-19, 2024

PDF of Call for Papers

We seek submissions for papers on any aspect of Foucault’s work, as well as studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking.

Paper submissions require an abstract of no more than 750 words. All submissions should be formatted as a “.doc” or “.docx” attachment, prepared for anonymous review, and sent via email to the attention of program committee chair Patrick Gamez (pgamez@nd.edu) on or before December 18, 2023. Indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading. Program decisions will be announced during the week of January 22, 2024.

We expect that the conference will begin Friday afternoon and will conclude around lunch time on Sunday morning. Presenters will have approximately 40 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined; papers should be a maximum of 3500 words (20-25 minutes reading time).

Logistical information about lodging, transportation, and other arrangements will be available after the program has been announced.

For more information about the Foucault Circle, please see our website:
http://www.foucaultcircle.org
or contact our Coordinator, Edward McGushin: emcgushin@stonehill.edu

Miguel Vatter. Liberal Governmentality and the Political Theology of Constitutionalism (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 July 2023

Vatter, M. (2019). Liberal Governmentality and the Political Theology of Constitutionalism. In B. Leijssenaar & N. Walker (Eds.), Sovereignty in Action (pp. 115-143). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108692502.006

Summary
‘The king reigns but does not govern’. This formula, which according to Carl Schmitt was coined by Adolphe Thiers, a French liberal historian and politician, enemy of Bonapartism yet suppressor of the Paris Commune, has become today the most important formula in the study of liberalism. Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben both understand this formula as capturing something essential about liberalism as a form of governmentality that guides the conduct of individuals either in the absence, or beyond the reach, of the sovereign power and its legislation through normative and normalizing orders that escape democratic control. Although not discussed as such, this formula also underlies recent attempts by jurists and historians of political ideas such as Martin Loughlin and Richard Tuck to bolster the sovereignty of the state against new forms of governing without the state that emerge in neoliberalism. This chapter proposes a new reading of this formula by situating it on the terrain of constitutionalism, rather than on that of sovereignty. In so doing, it seeks to bring together in a meaningful exchange these two different critical approaches to neoliberalism, and the emerging debates they harbour. One debate is between those who advocate a Foucauldian and biopolitical and those who adopt an Agambenian and politico-theological analysis of neoliberal governmentality. The other is the one between advocates of a republican, constitutional approach to democracy and those who argue for the revival of popular sovereignty on the basis of new ‘democratic’ interpretations of Bodin and Hobbes.

Keywords
Sovereignty, Constitutionalism, Political Theology, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, Ernst Kantorowicz

Lemm, Vanessa, and Miguel Vatter, Michel Foucault’s perspective on biopolitics (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 July 2023

Lemm, Vanessa, and Miguel Vatter. “Chapter 4: Michel Foucault’s perspective on biopolitics”. In Handbook of Biology and Politics, (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) accessed Jul 26, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781783476275.00012

Abstract
Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics, a term that he began using in the mid-1970s, is closely related to his new theories of power, which have since revolutionized our understanding of this concept. This chapter explains Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, which is now widely adopted in all social sciences and humanities when discussing the relation between politics and biology, from the perspective of his account of power. The chapter explains that biopolitics, for Foucault, describes a new way to govern citizens by considering individuals part of ‘populations’ whose biological lives (from birth to death) need to be managed in order to maximize their strength, well-being, and now ‘resilience’. The chapter also details how, for Foucault, such biological government entails the real peril that certain ‘sub-populations’ may be considered dispensable in order to ‘strengthen’ other sub-populations, a phenomenon which has led in the past centuries to state-based racism, colonialism, and eventually totalitarian forms of absolute domination. The chapter concludes by discussing a more ‘affirmative’ understanding of biopolitics, where biological life is understood as something that resists political domination.

Jeffrey Whyte, The Birth of Psychological War Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 July 2023

Jeffrey Whyte, The Birth of Psychological War. Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War. Oxford University Press, 2023

Open access

Description
The Birth of Psychological War explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary ‘post-truth era’. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States’ counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to make war more humane and less violent.On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to ‘win hearts and minds’. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.

This book makes use of both governmentality as a framework for thinking about psychological war in terms of the circulation of information, and also confession as a way of thinking about how US psychological warfare has constantly attempted to ‘make speak’ and tie individuals to the kinds of truths they are led to formulate about themselves.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1:’A New Geography of Defence’
2:Truth, Territory, Terror
3:Covert Crusade
4:Psywar in Vietnam

Dr Jeffrey Whyte is a Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of British Columbia, and an MA in Communications from Simon Fraser University. His work explores the political history of psychological warfare in the United States.

Gordon Hull, Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 July 2023

Gordon Hull, Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (Part 1), New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 13 July 2023

Last time, I offered a quick synopsis of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s excellent new book Code. Here, I’d like to track one specific Foucault reference in it. Geoghegan takes Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind as a central text in the ambivalence French theorists came to feel about American communication theories, and he notes that the book “occasioned a broader reassessment of the human sciences marked by a new ascent of ‘coding’ as a key concept poised to dislocate and perhaps dissolve, existing scientific hierarchies” (152). He adds:

“Learning to code – that is, to cast cultural objects in terms of codes, relays, patterns, and systems – did more than reframe existing knowledge in cybernetic jargon. It also reflected a growing cynicism toward existing cultural and scientific nodes. From the 1960s onward, the semiotic task of deciphering obscure ‘codes’ in culture, politics, and science overtook the structuralist project. This crypto-structuralism shifted emphasis from the neutral connotations of ‘communication’ to antagonistic notions of code …. If these terms furthered the technocratic project of US foundations, they also set in motion a radical critique of scientific neutrality. Beneath the neutral science, something ‘savage’ lurked.” (152-3).

Geoghegan cites Lacan, Barthes and the Tel Quel group (on which see Danielle Marx-Scouras’s excellent study). He also quietly footnotes Foucault’s “Message ou bruit [message or noise]” “for a critical discussion of these same terms by Foucault” (215n81).
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Sam Binkley, Against White Interiority. A Racial Critique of Therapeutic Reason (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 July 2023

Sam Binkley, Against White Interiority. A Racial Critique of Therapeutic Reason, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

About this book
This book presents a bold critique of the new racial sensibility that has attained global prominence following the police murder of George Floyd. Through a set of managerial and therapeutic discourses, this new sensibility describes the inner racial life of white subjects, inducing them to adopt a therapeutic attitude toward deeply interiorized white emotions and conflicts. In so doing, the new racial sensibility promises to remake whiteness in the image of the self-aware racial ally. However, such an appeal, it is argued, serves the subtle function of the preservation of white racial dispositions, and the reproduction of the very racism it sets out to transform. Adopting a critical lens derived from Michel Foucault’s analysis of sexuality, together with an engagement with sociological, psychoanalytic and phenomenological reflections on shame as a racial affect, a critique of white interiority considers alternative frames through which white anti-racist subjection might be imagined.

Table of Contents
White Secrets: An Uncomfortable Introduction
The New Racial Sensibility
White Shame and Racial Abandonment
Guilt’s Capture
Beyond the Confessing Animal

Giorgi Vachnadze, Mathematics as a Social Practice (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 July 2023

Giorgi Vachnadze, Mathematics as a Social Practice, Non, 16 July 2023.

[…]
Mathematics is performed.

But the performance is oftentimes an effect, or an unintended consequence of how much power has been delegated to its authority as an institution. The dictatorship of numbers has become a regime of truth and a type of governmentality by way of standardized testing and the contemporary undisputed faith in science that has indeed reached religious dimensions today. Let alone a corrective for common sense, mathematics seems to be a colonizer of common sense. Let us see then, whether Franz Fanon can offer us a way to decolonize mathematics. The first thing that needs to be recognized is that mathematics in its pure form (as opposed to the way it is applied for commercial or even scientific purposes) does not aim to secure wealth. We could at least say this much, that the privileged object of mathematical research is not profit, but Truth with a capital “T”. At the end of the day, most scientists, when hard-pressed with epistemic questions, will eventually rely on mathematics and common sense to account for a grounding or a firm starting point for any scientific method. Mathematicians therefore seem to be the de facto supporters of a very particular type of colonialism. One that is much more difficult to identify, expose, criticize and reform. A monopoly on truth.
[…]