Foucault News

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

Clare O'Farrell

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

Clare O'Farrell

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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.

The Panopticon Effect (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 April 2023

The Panopticon Effect, 99% invisible, 03.28.23 Podcast and transcript

In the Netherlands, about an hour and a half south of Amsterdam, there’s a city called Breda. Like many Dutch towns, it has cozy narrow streets, canals and plenty of bicycles. But there’s one historic building – right in the middle of town that really stands out from the rest.
[…]
Inside the building, there’s a wide-open circular hall the size of half a football field with the sprawling dome overhead. Along the curved brick walls, there are hundreds of heavy orange doors spread out evenly across the four floors. And behind most of these doors are small rooms that were once prison cells. When this place was first built in 1886, it was a penitentiary. But not a typical one. This was a panopticon.
[…]
Over time, the panopticon has turned into something way bigger than just a blueprint for penitentiaries. It’s become the metaphor for the surveillance state. Philosopher Michel Foucault had probably the most popular take on the panopticon concept. He used it to warn society that what actually keeps all of us in check isn’t necessarily that someone is watching you. It’s just the feeling that someone might be watching you. But very few actual prisons were built around this idea.

Bstieler, Michaela and Gianluca Crepaldi. “Working-Through Wellness: Critical Perspectives on the Contemporary Wellness Dispositif.” (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 April 2023

Bstieler, Michaela and Gianluca Crepaldi. “Working-Through Wellness: Critical Perspectives on the Contemporary Wellness Dispositif.” Genealogy+Critique 9, no. 1 (2023): 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.9543

Abstract
In this paper, we examine the institutionalised demands and imperatives that govern the contemporary working subject. Our starting point is the thesis advanced by both Alain Ehrenberg and Eva Illouz that since the 1960s institutions are no longer characterised by a strict culture of prohibition and discipline. Instead, institutions seem to be increasingly animated by the norms and practices of a “culture of self-care”, enriched by therapeutisation (Ehrenberg) and emotionalisation (Illouz). However, this does not mean that the disciplinary regimes that Foucault focuses on are simply disappearing. They persist, albeit in a different form, and we demonstrate this by looking at three central aspects of contemporary wellness: (a) specific spatial arrangements, (b) the performance of bodily practices and techniques and (c) ritualised interactions. We argue that in wellness facilities disciplinary regimes become effective through interpellations that are inscribed in rigid temporal-spatial orders and demand the body’s docility. Insofar as this process relies on those norms that Ehrenberg and Illouz reserve for post-Fordist labour, the wellness space can ultimately be understood as a labour space. For what is at stake is the productivity of the subject.

Keywords: well-being, subjectivity, neoliberalism, labour, normativity, capitalism, temporality, Alain Ehrenberg, Eva Illouz, Michel Foucault

Ivan Segré, Destitution: Lacan, Foucault et la cabale (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 April 2023

Ivan Segré, Destitution: Lacan, Foucault et la cabale, Lundi matin, no. 376, 31 mars 2023

Sur la base de certains énoncés de Lacan et de Foucault, qu’il s’efforce d’élucider, Ivan Segré propose une sorte de généalogie de la notion de « critique ». Partant des observations de Foucault relatives à la critique biblique au XVIe siècle, il aboutit, via Lacan, à une réflexion sur la contingence du pouvoir. Le chemin est escarpé, mais le détour vaut le coup d’œil.

Dans l’histoire des sciences humaines, l’interprétation des rêves a d’une certaine manière succédé à celle de la Bible. Or l’herméneutique biblique avait une histoire, depuis les philologues grecs et latins de l’antiquité jusqu’à ce tournant historique que Pierre Gibert a appelé « l’invention critique de la Bible [1] » et qu’il situe entre le XVe et le XVIIIe siècle. C’est à cette « invention » que Michel Foucault se réfère lorsqu’il pose la question « Qu’est-ce que la critique ? » ; et qu’il répond :

« Et si la gouvernementalisation, c’est bien ce mouvement par lequel il s’agissait dans la réalité même d’une pratique sociale d’assujettir les individus par des mécanismes de pouvoir qui se réclament d’une vérité, eh bien, je dirais que la critique, c’est le mouvement par lequel le sujet se donne le droit d’interroger la vérité sur ses effets de pouvoir et le pouvoir sur ses discours de vérité ; la critique, ce sera l’art de l’inservitude volontaire, celui de l’indocilité réfléchie. La critique aurait essentiellement pour fonction le désassujettissement dans le jeu de ce qu’on pourrait appeler, d’un mot, la politique de la vérité. »[2]

[1] L’Invention critique de la Bible. XVe-XVIIIe siècle…
[2] Qu’est-ce que la critique, Vrin, 2015..

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Archive: Hodges et al, Medical education… meet Michel Foucault (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 April 2023

Hodges BD, Martimianakis MA, McNaughton N, Whitehead C. Medical education… meet Michel Foucault. Medical Education. 2014 Jun;48(6):563-71.
doi: 10.1111/medu.12411. PMID: 24807433.
Abstract

Context: There have been repeated calls for the greater use of conceptual frameworks and of theory in medical education. Although it is familiar to few medical educators, Michel Foucault’s work is a helpful theoretical and methodological source.

Methods: This article explores what it means to use a ‘Foucauldian approach’, presents a sample of Foucault’s historical-genealogical studies that are relevant to medical education, and introduces the work of four researchers currently undertaking Foucauldian-inspired medical education research.

Results: Although they are not without controversy, Foucauldian approaches are employed by an increasing number of scholars and are helpful in shedding light on what it is possible to think, say and be in medical education.

Conclusions: Our hope in sharing this Foucauldian work and perspective is that we might stimulate a dialogue that is forward-looking and optimistic about the possibilities for change in medical education.

Faubion, James. “Michel Foucault”. Encyclopedia Britannica (updated 2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 April 2023

Faubion, James. “Michel Foucault”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Foucault.

Education and career
The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was born to a solidly bourgeois family. He resisted what he regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and his native country, and his career was marked by frequent sojourns abroad. A distinguished but sometimes erratic student, Foucault gained entry at the age of 20 to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1946. There he studied psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned communism, and established a reputation as a sedulous, brilliant, and eccentric student.

After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five years (1955–60) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany). Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in 1961. Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (“Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the Classical Age”), it won critical praise but a limited audience. (An abridged version was translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.) His other early monographs, written while he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France (1960–66), had much the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les choses (“Words and Things”; Eng. trans. The Order of Things) in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. He chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance—at the University of Tunis in Tunisia (1966–68)—and was still in Tunis when student riots erupted in Paris in the spring of 1968. In 1969 he published L’Archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970, after a brief tenure as director of the philosophy department at the University of Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France, France’s most prestigious postsecondary institution. The appointment gave Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive research.
[…]

David McGrogan, A Foucauldian Defense of Liberalism (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 April 2023

David McGrogan, A Foucauldian Defense of Liberalism, Law & Liberty, March 27 2023

We should not settle for the nominal freedom of a relentlessly micromanaged society.

There is a strong case to be made that Michel Foucault was the most important and influential thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. He was not a nice man. And many of his conclusions were odious. But he discerned the path on which modernity was walking better than almost anybody else.

The most useful of Foucault’s contributions were not published in book form but were delivered as lectures, posthumously compiled and translated. Those gathered in the collection Security, Territory, Population are far and away the most significant. In them, Foucault provides a complete conceptualisation of the evolution of modern governance, showing how it is characterised, above all, by “governmentality” or what has elsewhere been called the “conducting of conduct.”

[…]

David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria University. He blogs at News From Uncibal.

Daniele Lorenzini, Philosophy Colloquium: Genealogy as a Practice of Truth: Nietzsche, Foucault, Fanon (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 April 2023

Daniele Lorenzini, Philosophy Colloquium: Genealogy as a Practice of Truth: Nietzsche, Foucault, Fanon

Presented by the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research.
Thursday, April 20, 2023, 6:00PM to 8:00PM (EDT)
6 E 16th St Wolff Conference Room/D1103
The New School
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011

This paper has two main, interconnected goals. On the one hand, the argument is that, even though the major forms taken by genealogy throughout the history of philosophy seem to make it impervious to truth, there is an important sense in which genealogy, specifically as conceived of and practiced by Nietzsche and Foucault, is a practice of truth. How to make sense of this claim? The first two sections of the paper address this question and show that the (Nietzschean and Foucauldian) genealogist aims to produce “new truths” that function as disruptive ethico-political forces destabilizing current modes of thinking and being, and creating the concrete possibility for the emergence of new possibilities for thought and action. The third and final section of the paper, on the other hand, builds on these insights to argue that Fanon’s psychiatric writings, too, can be construed as genealogical practices of truth. By doing so, the presenter will not only muster further evidence for the conclusions in section II, but also provide an alternate framework to make sense of Fanon’s contribution to critical theory broadly construed—one that doesn’t reduce him neither to the tradition of historical materialism nor to critical phenomenology or phenomenological psychiatry alone.