Foucault News

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

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. 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 (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).
[…]

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, 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.
[…]

Giorgi Vachnadze, The Algorithmic Unconscious: Psychoanalyzing Artificial Intelligence, Non, 15 July 2023

I recently came across an article that caught my attention. Written just last year. It draws a parallel between AI and psychoanalysis. Which seemed until now two completely divergent fields. It argues that we can psychoanalyze an AI. But how would that make sense? Machine Behavior, an emerging field in “psycho-robotics”, argues that it does.
“We need to study AI systems not merely as engineering artifacts, but as a class of social actors with particular behavioral patterns and ecology (Possati, L.M. 2020).”
[…]

An artificial creativity seems to be the basis for an artificial unconscious. Which in turn serves to allow us to speak meaningfully about a society of Artificial Intellects, or Artificial Actors, Subjects, Citizens etc. This brings us to the idea of a Biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence, a term that does not exist yet, but one that I wish to establish as part of my larger research project concerning Biopolitics. To repeat, this notion does not form any part of Possati’s research, at least not explicitly.
[…]

AI Biopolitics would be a study of the conditions of possibility as well as the social impact of AI on existing power-relations in a given society. How various AI systems would be used to promote class interests, privileged groups, powerful organizations, economic exploitation, warfare, minority exclusion, political agendas etc. The integration of Machine Learning into bureaucratic institutions, government surveillance systems and the police apparatus. Their role in criminality, questions of privacy and their overall function in supporting technocratic capitalism. If AI’s would be given the legal powers of an autonomous citizen, whilst following a set of hidden commands of ideologically biased algorithms, we would be dealing with yet another assault at human freedom and dignity.
[…]

Giorgi Vachnadze, Biometric Technology And The Theory Of Human Capital, Non, 8 July 2023

Authentication and Verification: Defining the Problem
Throughout his career, one of the central concerns for Foucault’s work was to investigate, analyze and offer a genealogical account of truth-telling as a mode of subjectivation. The notion of Biopolitics implies many different ways of conceiving the modern problem of truth-politics and its historical constitution. It is important to understand that truth can no longer be spelled with a capital “T”; it has now become the object of calculation, production and fabrication. Truth has become a consumer-product, it remains relevant only in so far as it can catalyze the accumulation of capital. The modern practices of truth-extraction take one of their more hideous forms, when they begin to operate on human subjects. Biometric technologies are beginning, or perhaps have already begun to play a role of increasing importance in this process. The old Marxist problem concerned with the commodification of human labor has now reached a new level when the body itself risks becoming another item on the menu. One that employers will soon be able to select, compare, assess through risk and purchase for profit. The anthropometric, medico-legal artefacts will allow for the conversion of persons into human-material, a series of bio-mass units with market-value attached to each one. The workers’ average life-expectancy i.e. their health, has a direct impact on the longevity of the firm. It will therefore be “in the interests of” both employees and managers that the company would have access to their medical files. And this is only one out of numerous similar possible scenarios.
[…]

La philosophie de Ian Hacking, avec Matteo Vagelli, July 18 2023

Call For Papers – Happiness in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
for a topical issue of Open Philosophy
PDF -CFP Happiness in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

HAPPINESS IN CONTEMPORARY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Open Philosophy (https://www.degruyter.com/opphil) invites submissions for the topical issue “Happiness in Contemporary Continental Philosophy,” edited by Ype de Boer (Radboud University, the Netherlands).

DESCRIPTION
Contemporary continental philosophy is ambivalent when it comes to happiness. It takes up a prominent position in the work of, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, with the enigmatic notion of ‘happy life’ and in that of Alain Badiou, who provocatively states that ‘[a]ll philosophy is a metaphysics of happiness… or it’s not worth an hour of trouble’. Both inherit an old tradition of ethical thought, developed from an intuition concerning a deep relation between truth, being, the good and happiness – a tradition reinvigorated by other influential contemporary thinkers such as Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. At the same time, however, modern philosophy is marked by a certain distrust of happiness, deeming it a subject to egotistic, frivolous, or distracting for serious ethical thought. At least since Kant’s exclusion of the desire for happiness from the sphere of morality, to some the very call to reflect upon happy life is an indication of bad taste, privilege or otherworldliness. Who has time to reflect on happiness when there are so much other, more urgent topics that demand our attention, such as climate change, racism, sexism, pandemics and refugee-crises? In The Human Condition, for instance, Hannah Arendt demotes ‘the pursuit of happiness’ to the activities corresponding to the biological processes of the human life (labor), distinguishing it from the higher concerns of ‘work’ and ‘action’. In addition, a mounting body of literature argues that happiness has become a commodity and its pursuit forms an obstacle rather than an instrument to the emancipatory efforts of philosophy. The goal of this special issue is to critically assess and discuss the philosophical potential of happiness in contemporary continental thought. What is the place of happiness within contemporary continental philosophy? How do various continental thinkers approach and evaluate the subject? What is its relation to truth and to the various domains of thought, such as ontology, ethics and politics?

Authors publishing their articles in the special issue will benefit from:

· transparent, comprehensive and fast peer review,

· efficient route to fast-track publication and full advantage of De Gruyter’s e-technology.

Because Open Philosophy is published under an Open Access model, as a rule, publication costs should be covered by so called Article Publishing Charges (APC), paid by authors, their affiliated institutions, funders or sponsors.

Authors without access to publishing funds are encouraged to discuss potential discounts or waivers with Managing Editor of the journal Katarzyna Tempczyk (katarzyna.tempczyk@degruyter.com) before submitting their manuscripts.

HOW TO SUBMIT
Submissions will be collected until January 31, 2024.

To submit an article for the special issue of Open Philosophy, authors are asked to access the online submission system at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/opphil/

Please choose as article type: Happiness

Before submission the authors should carefully read over the Instruction for Authors, available at: https://www.degruyter.com/publication/journal_key/OPPHIL/downloadAsset/OPPHIL_Instruction%20for%20Authors.pdf

All contributions will undergo critical review before being accepted for publication.

Further questions about this thematic issue can be addressed to Ype de Boer atype.deboer@ru.nl. In case of technical problems with submission, please contact AssistantManagingEditor@degruyter.com

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Call for Papers 3 (1): FILOSOFÍA, POLÍTICA Y VERDAD
Coordinadores: Iván Torres Apablaza y Silvana Vignale
Latin American Journal of Humanities and Educational Divergences 
Recepción de trabajos: 30 de noviembre de 2023
https://revistas.educaidscientific.com/index.php/lajhed/announcement

PDF of Call for Papers

Latin American Journal of Humanities and Educational Divergences es una publicación semestral de acceso abierto, editado por Educa ID Scientific (Perú), que tiene como objetivo la difusión de investigaciones en el ámbito de las humanidades y la educación que problematicen tópicos críticos sobre la sociedad contemporánea en orden a contribuir a su transformación justa, simétrica y digna. La revista recibe trabajos inéditos y originales de carácter científico, especialmente artículos científicos (investigaciones cualitativas y/o cuantitativas, así como reflexiones conceptuales), reseñas de libros y eventualmente entrevistas.

Para la convocatoria del primer volumen de su tercer número la Revista organiza un dossier sobre “Filosofía, Política y Verdad” teniendo como editores invitados a los investigadores Iván Torres Apablaza (Universidad de Chile, Departamento de Filosofía, Comité de Ética de la Investigación en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades) y Silvana Vignale (Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales, Centro Científico Tecnológico, CONICET Mendoza).

La historia de la relación entre filosofía, política y verdad, es aquella de una disposición polémica. Así lo atestigua la escena inaugural de la filosofía, donde el discurso de verdad se enfrenta a la verdad de la política. La tradición de pensamiento de dicho acontecimiento origina desde entonces una ambivalencia respecto a la política: la verdad funcionará, unas veces, como apoyo a la función de gobierno;

mientras en otra, como la ética de un decir verdadero respecto al poder. En otras palabras, como discurso verdadero de la política, o como ejercicio parresiasta de enfrentar al poder con el coraje de la verdad. Pese a esto, ambas actitudes nos muestran la copertenencia entre filosofía y política, no por el contenido específico de la verdad puesta en juego, sino por su funcionamiento, sus articulaciones, por aquello que moviliza o hace circular –en cuanto todo régimen de verdad compromete a los individuos en sus decisiones y formas de obediencia–. A esta luz, la verdad será siempre una posición de fuerza, vale decir, una interpretación que exhibe efectos de poder y un poder que produce discursos de verdad. Algunas contribuciones podrían estar interesadas en mostrar el anudamiento de los discursos de verdad y de las prácticas políticas en torno a los procesos de subjetivación, en cuanto posible genealogía de los sujetos que somos en la actualidad. Es una sujeción o desujeción de una política de la verdad la que genera efectos de subjetivación que aumentan o disminuyen los grados de libertad en torno a la posibilidad de constituirse como sujetos. Dicho de otro modo, ¿qué efectos subjetivos producen los diferentes anudamientos entre política y verdad?, ¿qué correlaciones presentes en las relaciones entre saber-poder han determinado las formas de subjetivación hasta nuestro tiempo? De allí que en ese territorio que se abre entre política y verdad, sea necesario pensar en las prácticas de libertad, aunque también en las formas de obediencia, sobre las que todavía descansan hoy –desde aquella escena inaugural– nuestras servidumbres voluntarias. Esto último puede invitar al trabajo en torno a un análisis situado en una historia del presente o diagnóstico a partir de coyunturas históricas precisas en las últimas décadas, como las formas en que el liberalismo y posteriormente el neoliberalismo han expresado aquellas relaciones, y que actualmente se manifiesta en la aparición de las denominadas “nuevas derechas” y en la crisis como modelo de gobierno y síntoma de la época. En este sentido se hace necesario actualizar las formas en que filosofía, política y verdad se conjugan en un contexto de desafíos tecnológicos y científicos, así como del propio pensamiento crítico que se ha replegado defensivamente en caracterizar los dispositivos de poder que nos gobiernan, sin imaginación para ofrecer alternativas novedosas de otros mundos posibles.

Provisto de estas claves de lectura, el siguiente dossier convoca al análisis y a discusiones que permitan pensar las formas contemporáneas de relación entre filosofía, política y verdad. Sobre todo, teniendo en cuenta la crisis actual de estas formas discursivas, en un contexto de desvalorización y descrédito de la política, de indeterminación de los discursos verdaderos y del repliegue académico del discurso filosófico. En la perspectiva de este monográfico, se estima que un trabajo de pensamiento sobre estos problemas, podría arrojar nuevas perspectivas acerca del papel de la filosofía en el umbral de un cambio epocal que exige pensar las determinaciones éticas y políticas de la verdad. Los ejes de problematización que organizan esta convocatoria, son los siguientes:

• Historia política de la verdad
• Pliegues y tensiones entre ética, política y verdad
• Prácticas de gobierno y discursos de verdad
• Sujetos políticos y regímenes de verdad
• Imaginación política y verdad
• Relaciones entre verdad y política en nuestro presente

El plazo límite de envío de las contribuciones es el 30 de noviembre de 2023. Los envíos deben realizarse por medio del OJS de la revista:

https://revistas.educaidscientific.com/index.php/lajhed/about/submissions

Los artículos deben usar el formato de citación APA (séptima edición), deben ser inéditos y no deben ser enviados en simultáneo a otra revista. La extensión mínima son 12 cuartillas y la máxima 25; en ambos se debe enviar un archivo en .docx o .doc en formato carta, márgenes 2.5 e interlineado 1.5. Para el caso de las reseñas, la extensión mínima es de 5 cuartillas y la máxima de 10 con los mismos requisitos formales que los artículos. Para más detalle se puede revisar las normas para autores: https://revistas.educaidscientific.com/index.php/lajhed/author-guidelines. Cualquier consulta puede escribirse al director de la revista, Jesús Ayala-Colqui: jesus.ayalacolqui@educaidscientific.com