Foucault News

Dana Schowalter, Shannon Stevens, Daniel L. Horvath, The Misogynistic Backlash Against Women-Strong Films (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

2 April 2023

Dana Schowalter, Shannon Stevens, Daniel L. Horvath, The Misogynistic Backlash Against Women-Strong Films, Routledge, 2022

Description
This book is an exploration of the political struggle for visibility engendered by the growing number of women-centered popular films and a critical analysis of the intensifying misogynistic backlash that have accompanied such advances in the depiction of women on screen.

The book draws from a variety of theoretical and methodological tools to provide critical cultural analysis and alternative readings of women-strong films and their important role in society. The authors engage with popular culture and the popular press, media studies, and rhetorical criticism examining new modes of communication while providing historical context to help make sense of these oppositional readings. The book includes case studies on Mad Max: Fury Road, Wonder Woman, Atomic Blonde, Star Wars, and Ghostbusters to analyze critical responses, men’s-rights activist boycotting campaigns, online harassment, and the political economy that precede and accompany the creation and presentation of these films.

This is an accessible and timely analysis of the rise of feminist-friendly and women-led films and the inevitable counterculture of misogyny. It is suitable for students and researchers in Media and Communication Studies, Gender and Media, and Cultural Studies.

Dana Schowalter is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Western Oregon University. Her research interests include feminist media studies, feminist political economy, and global philanthropy. Her work has been published in Neoliberalism in the Media, Women and Language, and Communication Review.

Shannon Stevens, Associate Professor of Journalism in the Department of English at California State University, Stanislaus, advises the student newspaper. A former journalist, she is a feminist rhetorician who researches media, popular culture, and policy. “The Rhetorical Significance of Gojira: Equipment for Living Through Trauma” appeared in The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema: Critical Essays (2015).

Daniel L. Horvath is a Part-Time Faculty in Communication Studies at California State University, Stanislaus. His research focuses on the way representation warps around critical categories of gender, race, class, etc. He published research on Michael Moore documentaries in Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary (2015) and on the rhetorical conditions of whistleblowing as a public act of parrhesia in Whistleblowing, Communication and Consequences (2021).

Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, Foucault and Phenomenology, a Tense and Complex Relationship: From Anti-Phenomenology to Post-Phenomenology (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

1 April 2023

Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, Aurélie, ‘Foucault and Phenomenology, a Tense and Complex Relationship: From Anti-Phenomenology to Post-Phenomenology’, in François-Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies, Oxford Handbooks (2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 26 Jan. 2023),
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192865755.013.13

Abstract
In line with observers that have recently reconsidered the relationship between Foucault and phenomenology, this chapter argues that Foucault’s philosophy inevitably falls within the scope of phenomenology, by rediscovering and extending its potentialities (Legrand, 2008). To do justice to the real nature of the relationship between Foucault and phenomenology, this chapter aims to highlight the possible affiliation and peculiar significance that phenomenology has taken in Foucault’s approach, and to show how Foucault extended the potentialities and richness of phenomenology towards a new approach of phenomenology, known as ‘post-phenomenology’. To that end, we consider Foucault’s three main theses (Burrell, 1988) through the prism of phenomenology: we first consider the relationship between the young Foucault and the phenomenology developed by Husserl, in terms of historicity and archaeology; we then analyse Foucault’s relationship with phenomenology through the prism of the historicization of the transcendental, expressed in Foucault’s genealogy of the subject, revealing unexpected resemblances between Foucault’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views; last, we explore Foucault’s reconsideration of the subject, through his developments of the hermeneutics and ethics of the self, revealing an active mode of experimentation largely influenced by Heidegger’s approach, and further inscribing his work in the wake of Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty.

Keywords: Foucault, phenomenology, post-phenomenology, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty
Subject Organizational Theory and BehaviourBusiness and Management

Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” and “The Culture of the Self” (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

31 March 2023

Now available for pre-order on the University of Chicago Press website.
Michel Foucault, What Is Critique? & The Culture of the Self
Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Arnold I. Davidson
Translated by Clare O’Farrell, University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2024,
ISBN-13: 9780226383446, Publication date: 01/15/2024, 208pp, Hardcover (First Edition): $35.00

Newly published lectures by Foucault on critique, Enlightenment, and the care of the self.

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 text, “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the “art of not being governed in this particular way,” one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the “politics of truth.”

This volume presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a “new ethics” that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science.

Un inédit de Michel Foucault publié en mai (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

30 March 2023

Un inédit de Michel Foucault publié en mai
AFP, 10 mars 2023

Un inédit de Michel Foucault, “Le Discours philosophique”, réflexion sur les rapports entre philosophie et actualité, sera publié le 12 mai, ont annoncé jeudi les éditions du Seuil.

Cet essai permettra de lire un manuscrit quasi achevé que le philosophe entama en 1966 et ne publia jamais, pour une raison non précisée.

L’édition de ce livre est assurée par deux universitaires, Orazio Irrera de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis et Daniele Lorenzini de l’Université de Pennsylvanie, aux Etats-Unis.

Le premier y a consacré un semestre de cours à Paris 8 fin 2022. Le second avait publié la table des matières sur Twitter en février.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984), auteur prolixe, avait écrit dans son testament qu’il refusait de faire l’objet de publications posthumes.

Toutefois, son dernier compagnon et légataire, Daniel Defert, décédé mardi, et l’ancien assistant de Foucault, François Ewald, ont souhaité que des écrits éclairant sa pensée voient tout de même le jour. Ils ont été nombreux ces 30 dernières années, y compris les quatre volumes de ses “Dits et Écrits”.

Foucault, considéré comme l’un des grands penseurs de la “French Theory”, un mouvement de renouveau de la philosophie à partir des années 1960, reste connu pour ses travaux sur la psychiatrie et la médecine, la sexualité, le pouvoir politique et la répression.

“Le Discours philosophique”, selon la présentation de l’éditeur, propose une “analyse archéologique” de la philosophie, avec “ses mutations historiques, d’une métaphysique de la représentation (Descartes) à une anthropologie (Kant), jusqu’au retour d’un langage venant occuper le vide laissé par l’effacement de l’homme (Nietzsche)”.

André Duarte, Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and Necropolitics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 March 2023

André Duarte, Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy. Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and Necropolitics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Routledge, 2023

Book Description
In this incisive book, André Duarte examines the health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the contemporary crisis of democracy.

Reflecting on President Jair Bolsonaro’s misgovernment of Brazil, as evidenced by his political actions, speeches and omissions from March 2020 to September 2021, and using concepts like biopolitics, neoliberalism and necropolitics, Duarte proposes three interrelated hypotheses to demonstrate Bolsonaro’s sharp distrust of democracy. First, that Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, actions and omissions during the first year and a half of the pandemic revealed a dangerous mixture of biopolitical, neoliberal and necropolitical governmentality strategies. Second, that the pandemic in Brazil intensified the damaging side-effects against democracy brought by neoliberalism and biopolitics, once the necropolitical vector assumed precedence. And third, that Bolsonaro’s political agenda is either to revoke the Brazilian democracy by violent means or to implement a façade democracy by slowly distorting it from within, blurring the differences between democracy and authoritarianism.

Conceptualizing democracy as power of the demos and not exclusively as a political regime organized around a definite set of political institutions, Duarte argues that Bolsonaro’s misgovernment of Brazil is related to his antidemocratic viewpoints. Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy is an important book for researchers, students, and anyone concerned about the dangers that surround the democratic experience in the contemporary world.

Table of Contents
Introduction

1. The image of hell: understanding Brazil’s pandemic hell under Bolsonaro

2. Biopolitics, neoliberalism, necropolitics and the crisis of democracy

3. Brazil’s pathway to hell

4. Bolsonaro’s power apparatus

5. Rethinking democracy

Author
André Duarte is a full professor in the Philosophy Department at the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. His research interests include contemporary philosophy and political theory, specializing in the works of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, among others.

Reviews
“This brilliantly written, provocative book offers an original analysis and a poignant critique of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. It is a timely, much-needed contribution to current debates in political theory on the notions of biopolitics and necropolitics, and their relationship to democracy, neoliberalism, and the government of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Daniele Lorenzini, University of Warwick

“This urgent project brands President Jair Bolsonaro’s pandemic politics as ‘façade democracy’: an authoritarian leader stirring up populist resentment toward vaccines and masks in the name of democratic responsiveness. Duarte painstakingly charts the erosion of Brazilian democracy from within and proposes techniques for democratic renewal.”
Lisa Disch, Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“This insightful book is an original and important contribution to philosophical and political discussions of the contemporary world. The Brazilian example of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, crossed with the global event of the COVID-19 pandemic, is particularly relevant to address not only the situation in Brazil today, but also the authoritarian drifts that undermine the ‘democratic experience’.”
Philippe Sabot, Full Professor of Contemporary Philosophy, University of Lille, and President of the Michel Foucault Center.

Special Issue: Foucault Before the Collège de France (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 March 2023

Special Issue: Foucault Before the Collège de France, Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 40 Issue 1-2, January-March 2023

Foucault Before the Collège de France
Stuart Elden
Orazio Irrera
Daniele Lorenzini

Did Foucault Find a ‘Way Out’ of Hegel?
Pierre Macherey

Foucault and the History of Anthropology: Man, before the ‘Death of Man’
Arianna Sforzini

Michel Foucault in the 1950s: Beyond Psychology towards Radical Ontology
Philippe Sabot

Foucault’s Critique of the Human Sciences in the 1950s: Between Psychology and Philosophy
Elisabetta Basso

Foucault as Translator of Binswanger and von Weizsäcker
Stuart Elden

Foucault in Hamburg: Notes on a One-Year Stay, 1959–60
Rainer Nicolaysen

Philosophical Discourse and Ascetic Practice: On Foucault’s Readings of Descartes’ Meditations
Daniele Lorenzini

Foucault on Raymond Roussel: The Extralinguistic Outside of Literature
Azucena G. Blanco

Painting for Fools
Catherine M. Soussloff

Nietzsche, Ontology, and Foucault’s Critical Project: To Perish from Absolute Knowledge
Aner Barzilay

Five Modalities of Michel Foucault’s Use of Nietzsche’s Writings (1959–73): Critical, Epistemological, Linguistic, Alethurgic and Political
Bernard E. Harcourt

Literature and Madness: Madness in the Baroque Theatre and the Theatre of Artaud
Michel Foucault

Linguistics and Social Sciences
Michel Foucault

Foucault’s 1960s Lectures on Sexuality
Alison Downham Moore
Stuart Elden

Michel Foucault, Madness, Language, Literature (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 March 2023

Michel Foucault, Madness, Language, Literature
Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Judith Revel
Translated by Robert Bononno
The University of Chicago Press, 2023

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.

Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.

Refsum, C. Event: Or, How Foucault Used Baudelaire to Enlighten Kant (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 March 2023

Refsum, C.
Event: Or, How Foucault Used Baudelaire to Enlighten Kant
In Bruce Barnhart, Marit Grøtta (eds) Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, (2022) pp. 15-30.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003328599-3

Abstract
This chapter explores the notion of the event through a discussion of Michel Foucault’s critical view of the enlightenment as an event and Charles Baudelaire’s literary engagement with events. In Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s classic essay “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment’” (1784), “What Is Enlightenment” (1984), Foucault argues forseeing enlightenment as a manifestation of a philosophical ethos: “heroizing the present.” This chapter explains how Foucault draws on Charles Baudelaire to explore what such a “heroizing” implies; it argues that Foucault’s view is not fully comprehensible unless we consult other Baudelaire texts besides the one specifically cited in “What Is Enlightenment.” In reading Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Bad Glazier” (1862) it shows that the idea of “heroizing the present” can only be understood as a highly risky experiment where the fragile boundaries between reason and madness, infancy and maturity, good and evilare exposed. Contrary to Steven Pinker, this chapter argues that Foucault is not against enlightenment, but rather in favor of seeing enlightenment as a series of historically situated events. The chapter concludes by examining the ways in which the discourse on “enlightenment” and the “heroized present” is both actualized and challenged in today’s world of predictive technologies and other attempts to suppress the event and the open present.

Colapietro, V. Quotidian Tasks: Habits, Routines, and Rituals (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 March 2023

Colapietro, V.
Quotidian Tasks: Habits, Routines, and Rituals
(2022) Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 36 (4), pp. 491-516.

DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.36.4.0491

Abstract
The author frames his exploration in terms of Michel Foucault’s distinction between the practice of emancipation in the strict sense and practices of freedom. He proposes to treat rituals of attention as examples of practices of freedom. Before doing so, however, he considers the socioeconomic contexts in which such rituals must be situated. Then, he sketches what such rituals involve. In a sense, this article is a reflection on a claim put forth by one of the characters in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Insights from William James and John Dewey in addition to those from Foucault are deployed to illuminate what is involved in claiming ownership of one’s freed self. Copyright © 2022 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Author Keywords
attention; John Dewey; liberation; Michel Foucault; William James

Simons, M. “Changing” one’s mind: Historical epistemology as normative psychology (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 March 2023

Simons, M.
“Changing” one’s mind: Historical epistemology as normative psychology
(2023) Metaphilosophy

DOI: 10.1111/meta.12616

Abstract
This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault’s “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a normative psychology: a set of prescriptions for which mental constitution a scholarly self has to have. In the Conclusion, it returns to existing analyses of “open-mindedness” as a virtue and explores in what way these cases challenge these analyses, as well as to what extent Foucault’s “techniques of the self” can be applied to other cases in the history of French philosophy. © 2023 The Author. Metaphilosophy published by Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Author Keywords
Gaston Bachelard; historical epistemology; Léon Brunschvicg; Michel Foucault; open-mindedness; virtue epistemology