Foucault News

Michel Foucault, Le Discours philosophique (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

1 May 2023

Michel Foucault, Le Discours philosophique, Édition établie, sous la responsabilité de François Ewald, par Orazio Irrera et Daniele Lorenzini – Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, 2023

Qu’est-ce que la philosophie et quel est son rôle aujourd’hui ? Entre juillet et octobre 1966, quelques mois après la parution des Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault, dans un manuscrit très soigneusement rédigé mais qu’il ne publiera pas, apporte sa réponse à cette question tant débattue.
À la différence de ceux qui, à l’époque, s’attachent à dévoiler l’essence de la philosophie ou à en prononcer la mort, Foucault l’appréhende, dans sa matérialité, comme un discours dont il convient de dégager l’économie eu égard aux autres discours (scientifique, fictif, ordinaire, religieux) qui circulent dans un contexte donné.

Le Discours philosophique propose ainsi une nouvelle manière de faire l’histoire de la philosophie, qui la décentre du commentaire des grands philosophes. Nietzsche y occupe toutefois une place particulière car il inaugure une conjoncture où la philosophie devient une entreprise de diagnostic du présent. Il revient en effet désormais à la philosophie de dire, à partir de l’« archive intégrale » d’une culture, ce qui en fait l’actualité.

Si L’Archéologie du savoir, consacré aux enjeux méthodologiques d’un tel projet, s’y annonce, nulle part autant que dans Le Discours philosophique Michel Foucault n’aura explicité les ambitions de son programme intellectuel.

Jager, F., Perron, A. How identity is produced and experienced in the context of mandated community-based mental health care: An application of the theories of Grosz and Foucault (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 May 2023

Jager, F., Perron, A.
How identity is produced and experienced in the context of mandated community-based mental health care: An application of the theories of Grosz and Foucault
(2023) Nursing Inquiry

DOI: 10.1111/nin.12552

Abstract
Despite changes to research and practice, that, to some degree, acknowledge that people are shaped by their contexts, the treatment of mental illness remains largely focused on interventions that take place at the level of the individual. Conceptualizing mental illness as something that resides in individuals can lead to reliance on neurobiological and psychotherapeutic solutions, and away from conversations about not only contextual causes of mental distress, but also sociopolitical solutions to mental distress. Further, it can lead to the use of mental health interventions that focus on the biology of an individual without a consideration for how those interventions themselves may have psychological, social, or political consequences that act to shape an individual’s identity, agency, and relationship to their community. This paper examines one medicolegal intervention, the community treatment order, using the philosophical work of Grosz and Foucault to consider how this intervention affects the experience and construction of identity, and the impact of this on an individual’s sense of agential membership in a community. This discussion aims to increase understanding of the individual and social implications of interventions for mental illness, and provide a conceptualization of the relationship between identity, agency, and ethics which can inform critical research and nursing practice more broadly. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Author Keywords
agency; community treatment order; critical research; Elizabeth Grosz; ethics; identity; mental health care; Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault, Philosophical Discourse (4): the incipit (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 April 2023

AGENT SWARM

1) INTRODUCTION

I am providing a translation of the incipit as reproduced at the end of a pre-publication review of Michel Foucault’s forthcoming book PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. The review was published online by Philosophy Magazine and discusses the ideas expressed therein chiefly in structuralist-demarcationist terms, given that the book focuses on enouncing the demarcations between philosophy, science, and literature.

This orienting perspective is perfectly normal, but it leaves out Foucault’s struggle with “structuralism” at that time (the manuscript was written between July and October 1966). In his interviews from that period Foucault moves rapidly from endorsing the claim that THE ORDER OF THINGS is structuralist to vehemently denying it. These hesitations exhibit a tension that is implicit not only in Foucault’s texts but in their reception, the tension between structuralism and post-structuralism.

We can see a further tension, closely tied to the first, between articulating the demarcations separating the different types…

View original post 470 more words

Nyman, S. The Birth of AI-driven Nudges (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 April 2023

Nyman, S. The Birth of AI-driven Nudges (2023) Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2023-January, pp. 5252- 5261.
https://hdl.handle.net/10125/103276

Abstract
AI methods allow for a multitude of new forms of managerial control. One is algorithmic nudging, in which organizations use AI methods to control workers through targeted recommendations. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s analytical strategies, the paper examines the intellectual heritage and ideological roots of AI-nudges. Scholars have commented on the resemblance between algorithmic nudging and Taylorist scientific management. However, as this paper shows the discourse of AI-nudges also shares significant linages with other subsequent opposing managerial paradigms. Building on the analysis of AI-nudges linages, the paper discusses how their use implies three contestable presumptions 1) that work can be codified, 2) that workers require autonomy over their work, and 3) that there is no existing conflict of interest between workers and the organization. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
Author Keywords
Algorithmic control; Algorithmic management; Critical IS research; Genealogy; Nudging
Index Keywords
Algorithmic control, Algorithmic management, Algorithmics, Critical IS research, Genealogy, Michel Foucault, New forms, Nudging, Workers’

Archive: Jeremy Crampton, Maps as social constructions: power, communication and visualization (2001)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 April 2023

Crampton, J. W. (2001). Maps as social constructions: power, communication and visualization. Progress in Human Geography, 25(2), 235–252.
https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201678580494

Two developments in cartography mark an epistemic break with the assumption that maps are unproblematic communication devices. These are 1) investigations of maps as practices of power-knowledge; and 2) ‘geographic visualization’ (GVis) which uses the map’s power to explore, analyze and visualize spatial datasets to understand patterns better. These developments are key components of a ‘maps as social constructions’ approach, emphasizing the genealogy of power in mapping practices, and enabling multiple, contingent and exploratory perspectives of data. Furthermore, this approach is an opportunity for cartography to renew its relationship with a critical human geography.

Colloque: La gouvernementalité : histoire et usages d’un concept fuyant (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 April 2023

Colloque: La gouvernementalité : histoire et usages d’un concept fuyant

Du jeudi 11 au vendredi 12 mai 2023
Sur place et en ligne
425, rue De La Gauchetière Est
Montréal (Québec)
H2L 2M7

90e Congrès de l’Acfas
Le 90e Congrès de l’Acfas, organisé en collaboration avec l’Université de Montréal, HEC Montréal et Polytechnique Montréal

Parmi les concepts qu’a légués Michel Foucault, celui de « gouvernementalité » constitue à la fois l’un des plus féconds et des plus fuyants. On ne compte plus, surtout en langue anglaise, les travaux qui s’en réclament. Quoique l’usage de ce concept paraisse avoir été plus limité dans le monde francophone, rares ont été, en tout cas, les bilans des recherches qu’il a permis de stimuler.

Ce colloque sera l’occasion de dresser un inventaire des usages qui sont faits de ce concept et des significations qui lui sont associées. Il s’agira, par le fait même, d’en évaluer la portée et les limites pour la recherche en sciences sociales. Le colloque permettra en outre de comparer et de mettre en dialogue des approches et des méthodologies qui, bien qu’elles empruntent à un même héritage, varient de manière significative. À cet égard, il importera de départager ce qui relève, d’une part, des méthodes d’analyse et du choix des objets qu’il permet d’appréhender, et, d’autre part, des postulats ontologiques qui lui sont implicites, renvoyant à des conceptions spécifiques — et critiquables — de l’action sociale.

Conférence d’ouverture

Guerre sociale, guerre culturelle, guerre civile: les avatars d’une gouvernementalité martiale sous le néolibéralisme
Colin Gordon (Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust)

Critiques et résistances

La politique comme lutte des arts de gouverner : gouvernementalité néolibérale et gouvernementalité socialiste aujourd’hui
Pierre Sauvetre (Université Paris Nanterre)

La gouvernementalité foucaldienne : de la métaphysique de la liberté à l’analytique des arts de la gouverne
Marcelo Otero (UQAM – Université du Québec à Montréal)

La technologie politique du crédit et l’économie morale de la dette
Jean Francois Bissonnette (UdeM – Université de Montréal)

Enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques

(Dé)stabiliser un concept, (re)situer des pratiques : la mise en œuvre des gouvernementalités
Claudia Marson (Celsa Sorbonne Université )

Exercice(s) de convocation d’un concept fuyant?
Sylvain Lafleur (UdeM – Université de Montréal)

Penser l’amour avec la gouvernementalité : médier les rationalités politiques, affectives et sécuritaires
Anne-Marie D’aoust (UQAM – Université du Québec à Montréal)

Colonialité, postcolonialité

Penser la gouvernementalité coloniale : une entrée par les archives
Théophile Lavault (Université de Bourgogne)

Gouvernementalité raciale et humanité : Analyse des modes de savoir et de gouvernement dans la modernité coloniale
David Moffette (Université d’Ottawa)

Gouvernance des migrations, gouvernementalité néolibérale et responsabilité du chercheur
Hervé Nicolle (Université de Nanterre)

The Weakerthans, Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961) (2003)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 April 2023

The Weakerthans, Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961). Frome the 2003 album Construction Site

Daniele Lorenzini, The Force of Truth. Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 April 2023

Daniele Lorenzini, The Force of Truth. Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault, The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming September 2023

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault’s history of truth.

Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere, The Normal and the Phenomenological (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 April 2023

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere. The Normal and the Phenomenological, Paris Institute, February 10 2023

In his introduction to Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Michel Foucault makes an observation that we nowadays seem increasingly at risk of forgetting: far from being irreconcilably opposed to one another, the two main theoretical styles of continental philosophy—i.e., phenomenology and critical theory—are both rooted in Edmund Husserl’s attempt at establishing philosophy as a rigorous science. In other words, both the “philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject,” like that of Jean-Paul Sartre or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the “philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept,” such as found in Jean Cavaillès or Gaston Bachelard, are ultimately phenomenological in aspiration, namely as “two modalities according to which phenomenology was taken up in France.”1 This ought not to be surprising, as Husserlian phenomenology (reacting to psychologism) and critical theory (reacting to early sociology and aided by Karl Marx) are both fundamentally antipositivist projects: the experience in which science takes nature to be given as simply there is inherently naïve; instead, experience gains its meaning and validity only in logical connection. The failure to secure these logical structures is what produced the notorious ‘crisis’ of the European sciences.
[read more]

Keith Barrett, Psychoanalysis & Philosophy: Existentialism to Post-Modernism (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 April 2023

Psychoanalysis & Philosophy: Existentialism to Post-Modernism, Freud Museum, London, UK

From Heidegger and Sartre to Foucault and Lacan. An online course with Keith Barrett, taking place over two afternoons.

15 June, 1:30 pm – 16 June, 5:00 pm
£36 – £45

In the period immediately following World War II, existentialism was the leading philosophical movement in European thought, and Jean-Paul Sartre, its most famous exponent, was a colossal figure on the intellectual scene. Sartre’s aim of providing an alternative way of understanding human beings to that of Freud’s psychoanalysis, was a determining factor in the writing of his early masterpiece Being and Nothingness (1943) – in which he proposed an entirely new discipline: ‘existential psychoanalysis’. By the mid 1960’s however, Sartre was no longer the leading figure in French intellectual life: his dominant position had been taken over by others, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, who took their philosophical inspiration from his great German predecessor Martin Heidegger.

On this course we will examine in detail the relation of psychoanalysis to existentialism, and see how the growing ascendency of Heidegger’s thought drove the leading exponents of French theory beyond existentialism towards post-modernism. In the Anglo-Saxon world, meanwhile, the post-Second World War period saw the beginning of a long-running and heated debate on the scientific status of psychoanalysis, and we will review them main positions and arguments in this debate.

This course will take place over 2 days: 15 and 16 June 2023, from 13.30 – 17.00 each day (time includes a tea break). All attendees will also receive access to the recording.

Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and exploring the overlap of philosophy and psychoanlaysis.