Foucault News

Cabrera, J.C.M. This is not a pipe Iconicity in Magritte’s language paintings (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

23 January 2023

Cabrera, J.C.M.
This is not a pipe Iconicity in Magritte’s language paintings
(2022) Iconicity in Language and Literature, 18, pp. 193-211.

DOI: 10.1075/ill.18.10cab

Abstract
A significant part of René Magritte’s pictorial work is devoted to the challenging relationships between images and written words. In this paper, I will look into two series of Magritte’s language paintings addressing these relationships: The Treachery of Images (also known as This is not a pipe) and The Interpretation of Dreams. In both series, painted images of written words and phrases are juxtaposed to painted images of objects in order to show that words and images should not be taken as the real objects they depict or refer to. I will show that, in addition to this obvious interpretation, there are much more interesting and challenging issues concerning the iconicity of the relationships between written words and the images depicting the objects denoted by them in Magritte’s paintings. To illustrate this point, I will elaborate on the calligram approach to the Treachery of Images proposed by Michel Foucault and Douglas Hofstadter by exploring the subliminal iconic relationships between the image of the pipe and the shape of the letters in the painted sentence (ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘this is not a pipe’). In addition, I will show that this analysis can be extended to the paintings entitled The Interpretation of Dreams. These analyses might shed a new light on these enigmatic works of art. © 2022 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Judy, R.S. Vorticist Confucianism: Ezra Pound’s translation practice in Confucius as modernist self-fashioning (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 January 2023

Judy, R.S.
Vorticist Confucianism: Ezra Pound’s translation practice in Confucius as modernist self-fashioning
(2022) Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 9 (2), pp. 134-150.

DOI: 10.1080/23306343.2022.2123189

Abstract
This article argues that Ezra Pound’s Confucius, which brings together his translations of three classics of Confucian philosophy (The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and the Analects), can be read as a form of modernist self–fashioning. The work enacts many of Pound’s early Vorticist aesthetic principles, but does so in a way that makes the translator an obtrusive character who talks back to and appropriates these ancient texts as vehicles for his aesthetic ideology. This ironic, meta–historical practice of translation can, I contend, be understood as a kind of Foucauldian “technology of the self”–i.e., a technique of self–understanding that alters and gives new meaning to life and character. Speaking through the texts he embodies Confucianism but also subsumes them to the vortex of meanings we associate with the writer Ezra Pound. Moreover, in crafting himself as an American Confucian steeped in transcultural imaginings (American, European, and Chinese), Pound’s translation practice in Confucius develops around a set of concerns that are still relevant to the contemporary world—i.e., the rise of the global subject, the return of authoritarianism and decline of American liberal democracy, and the problematic role of tradition(s) in forging a new, global aesthetic vision.

Author Keywords
Confucianism; Ezra pound; Foucault; technologies of the self; Vorticism

Nietzsche, Foucault et la généalogie (II) (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

21 January 2023

Nietzsche, Foucault et la généalogie » (II)
sous la direction d’Éric ALLIEZ, Michèle COHEN-HALIMI, Orazio IRRERA

Mardi 15h-18h | Département de philosophie | Université Paris 8 | Bâtiment A, Salle A028

Séminaire organisé dans le cadre des activités pédagogiques et de recherche du Département de Philosophie de l’Université de Paris 8, du LLCP (EA, 4008), du GRAF (Groupe de Recherche sur les Archives Foucaldiennes), et du séminaire permanent « Foucault à Paris 8 ». Activité soutenue par le Centre Michel Foucault et la revue materiali foucaultiani.

La généalogie comprise comme méthode surgit tardivement dans le corpus nietzschéen, dans La Généalogie de la morale en 1887, et ne procède pas directement de l’élaboration du concept d’inactualité, ni de celui d’histoire, tels du moins qu’ils sont déployés dans la deuxième des Considérations inactuelles (1874). L’histoire de l’élaboration des concepts nietzschéens de « méthode généalogique », d’« inactualité », d’histoire (antiquaire, monumentale et critique), sera confrontée à l’usage qu’en fait Foucault et au contexte philosophique français de cet usage ainsi qu’aux transformations de cet usage à l’intérieur même du corpus foucaldien. Devraient ainsi se voir éclairées les perspectives, nietzschéenne et foucaldienne, fort différentes sur l’historicité et se voir explicités certains enjeux de la lecture foucaldienne de Nietzsche, dont notamment celui qui gravite autour de la notion de diagnostic, celui aussi de l’inspiration nietzschéenne qui accompagne l’inscription par Foucault d’une perspective archéologique dans le discours philosophique. On s’attachera enfin au rapport de l’archéologie avec l’actualité et l’histoire, à l’intérieur de la perspective généalogique et en confrontant la « stratégie » foucaldienne avec la philosophie deleuzienne du devenir.

Programme

31 janvier 2023
Alessandro FALCONIERI – (Université Paris 8 | GRAF)
« De l’espace archéologique à l’espace généalogique. Réflexions sur l’importance de Nietzsche pour une conception foucaldienne de l’espace »

7 février 2023
Gabriel POCHAPSKI (Université d’État de Campinas, Brésil)
« Repenser l’espace, pluraliser le temps : la pensée de Nietzsche entre Foucault et l’École des Annales »

14 février 2023
Khaïang FALVISANER (Université Paris 8 | GRAF)
« Qu’est-ce qu’une expérience du langage contre-phénoménologique ? Lecture d’un inédit foucaldien des années 1950 sur Nietzsche »

7 mars 2023
Roberto NIGRO (Leuphana Universität, Allemagne)
« L’œuvre de Nietzsche dans le dispositif analytique foucaldien : quel tournant philosophique dans la pensée contemporaine ? »

14 mars 2023
Gennaro BOCCOLINO (Université de Pise/Florence, Italie)
« “Übung, Übung, Übung !”. Ascèse et idéaux ascétiques chez Nietzsche et Foucault »

21 mars 202
Camila GINÉS (Université Paris 8 | GRAF)
« Langage, vérité et puissance : la question de la rhétorique chez Nietzsche et Foucault »

Eric Schliesser, Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 January 2023

Eric Schliesser, Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism, Digressions and Impressions (blog), 19 January 2023.

[…]
Foucault redefines the nature of journalism from, say, the reporting of news, to this more ontological or existential question pertaining in tricky ways to identity, ‘what are we now?’ To be sure, Foucault does not legislate that journalism is not about reporting the news anymore, but we might say that what is thought or taken to be worthy to be reported must pertain to this kind of salience. What’s interesting about this claim is that it prefigures, but also reminds us of what we already know, that ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’ reflects the question of (our potentially fleeting) identity. The expanding lifestyle pages, perhaps, suggest that the oblique mirror that contemporary journalism provides us with to answer this question is more suggestive of our desires and fantasies than anything else.
[…]

What Long Covid Shows Us About the Limits of Medicine (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 January 2023

Abigail A. Dumes, What Long Covid Shows Us About the Limits of Medicine, The New York Times, March 17 2022

Long Covid symptoms, such as fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive difficulties, erratic heart rate, headache and dizziness, can be debilitating and wide-ranging. There is uncertainty about what ultimately causes long Covid and how to adequately respond to it.

In conventional medicine, illnesses without definitive markers of disease are often described as “medically unexplained.” As a medical anthropologist who has studied the controversy over whether treated Lyme disease can become chronic, I’ve been struck by the similarities between long Covid and other contested illnesses like chronic Lyme disease and myalgic encephalomyelitis, more familiarly known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
[…]

At the heart of conventional medicine is a foundational distinction between symptoms and signs. Symptoms like fatigue and joint pain are subjective markers of disease, while signs like fever and arthritis are considered objective markers. Unlike symptoms, signs can be observed and measured by a practitioner, often with the aid of technologies such as blood tests and radiologic imaging.

When it comes to making a diagnosis, signs trump symptoms. This enduring hierarchy can be traced to the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States and Europe, when physicians who had relied on external symptoms for diagnosis shifted to a focus on internal anatomy and pathology by using technologies like microscopes. The French philosopher Michel Foucault observed that during that time, medicine transitioned from a practice in which the physician asked, “What’s the matter with you?” to a practice in which the physician asked, “Where does it hurt?” The first question invites a patient’s description of symptoms; the second question leads to a location on the patient’s body that can be observed and measured by the physician.

[…]

Neoliberalizmin borçlu insanının dair eleştİrel bir çözümlemenin çözümlemesi: Squid Game [A critical analysis of the neoliberal debtor: Squid Game] (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 January 2023

Kurtuluş, G. & İnci, M. (2023). NEOLİBERALİZMİN BORÇLU İNSANINA DAİR ELEŞTİREL BİR ÇÖZÜMLEMENİN ÇÖZÜMLEMESİ: SQUID GAME, Marmara Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Dergisi, 44 (2) , 303-315 . Retrieved from https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/muiibd/issue/74273/1225246

Abstract
Neoliberal politikalardan hareketle, finansın artan rolü ve borçlu bireyin normalleştirilmesi üzerine tartışmalar devam etmektedir. Bununla birlikte, neoliberalizmin inşası üzerine yapılan eleştirel çalışmalar artık sadece akademik araştırmalarla sınırlı kalmamakta; günümüz iletişim araçları aracılığıyla sayıca artmaktadır. Bunun çarpıcı bir örneği, 2021 yılının Eylül ayında bir dijital platform aracılığıyla yayına giren Squid Game dizisidir. Dizide Güney Kore’nin gerçek bir borç krizi yaşadığı yansıtılmaktadır. Aynı zamanda, neoliberalizm altında yoksullaşan bireylerin çaresizliği betimlenmektedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, neoliberalizmin borçlu insanının iktidar, para ve ölüm ilişkisi çerçevesinde diyalektik bir çözümlemesini ortaya koymaktır. Bu çözümleme, Güney Kore ekonomisinde yaşanan neoliberal dönüşüm sürecini temel almakta ve Squid Game dizisindeki oyun metaforu ile ilişkilendirmektedir.

Keywords
Borç, Foucault, İktidar, Oyun, Para, Squid Game

A critical analysis of the neoliberal debtor: Squid Game

Abstract
Debates continue on the increasing role of finance and the normalization of the debtor individual based on neoliberal policies. Critical studies on the construction of neoliberalism are no longer limited to academic research; increasing through mass media. A dramatical example is the Squid Game series, which was released on a digital platform in September 2021. It is reflected in the series that South Korea is experiencing a real debt crisis. At the same time, the helplessness of individuals impoverished through neoliberalism is depicted as a cause and effect relationship. The aim of this study is to present a dialectical analysis of the debtor of neoliberalism within the framework of the relationship among power, money, and death. This analysis is based on the neoliberal transformation process in the South Korean economy and relates it to the game metaphor in the Squid Game series.

Strausz, Erzsébet, Writing with Foucault: openings to transformational knowledge practices in and beyond the classroom (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 January 2023

Strausz, Erzsébet (2022) Writing with Foucault: openings to transformational knowledge practices in and beyond the classroom, Critical Studies on Security
DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2134698

ABSTRACT
This article engages questions of authority and authorship in the discipline and the IR classroom, driven by a search for affirmative horizons within critical scholarship and academic practice. Prompted by a series of ‘failures’ attached to the social and disciplinary performance of ‘expertise’ in the context of violent conflict, I explore the practice of writing as it unfolds from Michel Foucault’s lesser cited essays and interviews as a generative, creative resource. I follow Foucault in breaking down the normalised perceptions of the ‘author function,’ revealing writing as an act that diagnoses, discovers, and potentially transforms writer, reader and the social structures that the writing addresses. Foucault’s experimental ethos brings to light the complex life worlds of sense-making through the vehicle of writing. It also invites us to embrace the transgenerational heritage that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge together with the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the text. I enter such processes of negotiation and transgression in Foucault’s work and my own writing through a series of vignettes, which aim to actualise the ‘method’ these gestures may harbour for making ‘uncommon sense’ and re-inhabiting research and pedagogical practice as continuous, self-reflexive and self-authori(zi)ng journeys.

KEYWORDS:
Foucault, author function, narrative writing, critical pedagogy, creative methods, everyday IR

Adamiak, M., Being otherwise: On the possibility of a non-dualistic approach in feminist phenomenology (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 January 2023

Adamiak, M.
Being otherwise: On the possibility of a non-dualistic approach in feminist phenomenology
(2022) Technoetic Arts, 20 (1-2), pp. 11-25.

DOI: 10.1386/tear_00078_1

Abstract
This article reflects on the current philosophical tendency to construct non-dualistic subjectivity models in response to the criticism of the traditional authoritarian human subject. Following thinkers such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, the literature has largely identified traditional metaphysics based on dualistic hierarchies as the major source of violence. Perceiving phenomenology as a method that focuses on the concepts of the lived experience and situatedness, I combine this approach with the feminist calls for dismantling the hierarchical relationship of subjectivity to the world. I draw on the concepts of Sonia Kruks, Linda Martin Alcoff, Sara Heinämaa, Judith Butler, Bonnie Mann and Johanna Oksala to inquire how dualism-overcoming phenomenology can be applied to feminist thought. I focus in particular on the approach that Oksala outlines in her book, Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations, where she proposes a transcendental view on feminist experience. Intriguingly, she understands transcendental as situated – historically, culturally and politically. Consequently, my final question concerns the possibility of combining the two usually conflicted approaches: transcendental and historical regarding the fundamental phenomenological distinction between the empirical and the transcendental.

Author Keywords
gender; lived experience; metaphysics; situatedness; subjectivity; transcendentalism

Mark Cole, Radical Organisation Development (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 January 2023

Mark Cole, Radical Organisation Development, Routledge, 2020

Book Description
Contemporary organisation development (OD) in practice draws on sophisticated theory and tools to advance organisational change, using a range of concepts and techniques including positive psychology, appreciation, and active engagement with the workforce. OD is considered to be humanistic and, as a result, progressive. Mark Cole’s original and thought-provoking treatise points at a hole at the heart of OD practice: it fails to consider the role of power in the workplace – and the result is disempowering.

Drawing from critical theory as a radical means to redefine practice, Mark Cole exposes this paradox and reveals the significant limitations and negative impacts of current OD practice. We need to replace the idea of the organisation with a focus on active human organising to enable individuals within systems to effect change from the grassroots up: this concept is Radical OD.

Essential reading for students, practitioners, and academics of OD; the wider HR community, and all with an interest in developing their understanding of organisational life, this ground-breaking manifesto offers unique and challenging insight into the corporate presence of OD – and challenges the willing reader to reimagine the focus and intent of this work.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements, Chapter 1 – Introduction, Chapter 2 – A Foucauldian preamble, Chapter 3 – A genealogy of the organisationally developed workplace, Chapter 4 – What does OD achieve? Chapter 5 – Towards a truly radical OD practice, Chapter 6 – And we land, where? Epilogue, Index

Author
Mark Cole is an OD practitioner with over 30 years’ experience working with people and change management in organisations. A published author in both books and journals, he currently works at the NHS London Leadership Academy, where he focuses on organisation and leadership development; systems thinking in the workplace, and supporting meaningful and impactful workforce engagement.

Psychiatry and the Selves We Might Become: An Interview with Sociologist Nikolas Rose (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 January 2023

Psychiatry and the Selves We Might Become: An Interview with Sociologist Nikolas Rose, Mad in America, 19 August 2020

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews the well-known sociologist of medicine, Nikolas Rose, about the role psychiatry plays in shaping how we manage ourselves and our world.

ikolas Rose is a professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. His work explores how concepts in psychiatry and neuroscience transform how we think about ourselves and govern our societies.

Initially training as a biologist, Rose found his subjects unruly: “My pigeons would not peck their keys, and my rats would not run their mazes. They preferred to starve to death.” He moved on to study psychology and sociology and has become one of the most influential figures in the social sciences as well as a formidable critic of mainstream psychiatric practice.
[…]

Rose builds on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault to reveal how concepts in psychiatry and psychology go beyond explanation to construct and construe how we experience ourselves and our world. Consistent with Foucault’s oft-quoted adage, “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous,” Rose’s work avoids simplistic explanations of why and how the mental health fields go awry and instead examines how injustices can happen without unjust people. In this way, his work often transcends critique and imagines new possibilities and ways of thinking about “mental health,” “normality,” “brains and minds,” and, ultimately, the selves we might yet become.
[…]

Dhar: Foucault’s work highlights that it was not simply that doctors had expert psychiatric knowledge, but instead, their stature created expertise. Similarly, it was not that asylums were healing, but because people were put in these places, they came to be seen as places of treatment.

Rose: Foucault points out that doctors gained control of the asylum not because they had great expert knowledge about madness, but because they were considered to be wise people in light of a series of scandals around the commercialization of asylums and their terrible conditions. Europe and North America began to regulate how people got into asylums and decided it was obviously through the doctors because they considered them wise trustworthy people.

Foucault also helped us question the whole idea of “origins.” Birth of the Clinic showed that the doctor’s “clinical gaze” emerges as a consequence of a whole series of contingent things that happened at that time, such as changes in French laws of assistance. When people were sick and needed free healthcare, they had to go into hospitals.
[…]