The last few decades have seen a steady growth of interest in doing philosophy with children and young people in educational settings. Philosophy with children is increasingly offered as a solution to the problems associated with what is seen by many as a disoriented, cynical, indifferent and individualistic society. It represents for its practitioners a powerful vehicle that teaches children and young people how to think about particular problems in society through the use of interpretive schemes and procedures especially designed (...) for this. It typically conceives of truth-telling as the work of dialogical reasoning, which is understood in turn as leading to increasing awareness of mental and methodological processes. This article starts from another point of view. What is at stake, I shall argue, is not so much the question of how to think for oneself in an appropriate way. Rather, in line with Michel Foucault, I want to identify philosophy as a practice oriented by the care of the self and of transformation of the self by the self. From this angle, philosophy with children will not be understood as something that orients us towards valid knowledge claims, but as an act of becoming present in the present. This way of conceiving of philosophy with children will be explored in the context of a concrete philosophical experiment with children that I planned and carried out in Cambodia. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss nurses' ongoing difficulty in engaging with politics and address the persistent belief that political positioning is antithetical to quality nursing care. I suggest that nurses are not faced with choosing either caring for their patients or engaging with politics. I base my discussion on the assumption that such dichotomy is meaningless and that engaging with issues of relationships firmly grounds nursing in the realm of politics. I argue that the ethical merit of nursing care relies (...) instead on positioning nurses squarely at the centre of care activities, experiences, and functions. Such positioning makes possible what Foucault called ‘practices of self‐formation’, that is, micro‐level processes that balance out the ubiquitous economic, cultural, legal, and scientific technologies that steadily constitute subjects in this era of modernity. Nurses, then, become not a group that needs to be controlled and governed, but individuals who must care for their self before they may care for anyone else. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Au sein de l’œuvre de Levinas, se trouve un exposé sur la subjectivité fondé sur son compte de temporalité. A cet égard, Levinas est comme de nombreux phénoménologues. Cependant, pour mieux le comprendre de cette façon, nous devons d’abord reconcevoir ce que Levinas veut dire par “l’éthique”, pour voir la continuité essentiel de ses comptes de subjectivité et temporalité. En comprenant les continuités, entre et à l’intérieur de son sujet moral et sa temporalité futurelle, nous sommes capables de (...) redéfinir l’ envergure et le moyen de la phénoménologie, afin de suffisamment juger l’influence de Levinas dans cette discipline. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Regarding an already consolidated tradition in discourse studies in Latin America, with featured importance in graduate programs in the field of Linguistics and a busy calendar of annual events in the field, it is possible to say that there is considerable amount of imported knowledge being applied and very little creativity in local theoretical or methodological production. Discourse studies are generally divided into two main schools of thought: French discourse analysis and English discourse analysis. The denomination that represents these (...) lines of discourse sheds light on the colonized nature of the field. This colonization of discourse knowledge, in more immediate terms, indicates considerable effort applied to theories viewed as universally valid and scarcely modified for the situated context, but it also shows the implications of being a discourse analyst in a subordinate space within the academic field – a place where we, Latin American discourse researchers, occupy compared to our colleagues in the global North – and about contemplating theoretical alternatives. The decolonizing effort of this field should thus be directed to three converging paths: decolonizing knowledge, in the sense of criticizing theories and methods while understanding that there is no universal knowledge; decolonizing the power of the creative act of overcoming this universalizing knowledge, which means accepting the force of local methodological and theoretical production, especially by constantly questioning disciplinary separation and its impositions; and decolonizing the being, making strategic use of this paradoxical space, which contains the possibilities of knowledge communion, also including common knowledge. All this should have an impact on graduate-level education in discursive studies, in a virtuous cycle between consciousness, criticism and creativity. (shrink)

To understand how we have become what we are requires, following Foucault, not a theory but an `analytics' which examines how technologies of power and knowledge have, since antiquity, intertwined and developed in concrete and historical frameworks. Distilling from Foucault's oeuvre as a whole a rough periodization of western political rationalities, this article shows how the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution and knowledge-production. Platonic, Stoic and Christian pursuits of self-mastery (...) and self-knowledge, often via the intervention of an external master, were initially confined to an elite, but thereafter were amplified and generalized to encompass entire populations in conjunction with the rise of the modern state. Via techniques of confession and ascetic conduct, faith and empiricism, and selfreflection and everyday reality, western political rationalities, in the form of combined totalization and individualization technologies whereby some (struggle to) discipline others even as all (are exhorted to) discipline themselves, have come to dominate the globe. (shrink)

This article attempts to chart a course beyond the 'impasse of the political' in Derridean deconstruction that avoids both the ontologization of ethics in Levinas and the recourse to morality in Habermasian discourse ethics. Instead, it presents an account of the decision in a terrain of undecidability through the concept of affinity. This mode of ethico-political activity, when combined with Foucault's analytics of power and Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, provides the outlines of a project of radical social transformation that could (...) achieve greater nuance with regard to 'actually existing' democracy and justice than has so far been achieved within deconstructive political theory. At the level of social structure, such a project is commensurate with a move away from subject positions associated with the system of liberal-capitalist nation-states, in favour of identifications produced by a locus of 'coming' communities. Key Words: affinity • Critchley • deconstruction • Deleuze and Guattari • Derrida • ethics • Foucault • Laclau and Mouffe • politics. (shrink)

This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they agree that emancipation is an ongoing critical task, I emphasize two aspects of (...) Foucault's version: his attention to practices of liberty that entail bodily as well as subjective reconstruction and his inclusion, among topics for critique, of modernity's ontology of the human subject. In the case of women's emancipation, I argue that both aspects of emancipation must proceed simultaneously because of the distinctive nature of their oppression. For second-wave feminism, I note a continued, although reoriented, equation between women and slaves. But now I identify a further framework whereby emancipation emerges as a threefold although systemic undertaking in which legal, subjectivist, and economic dimensions are at stake. I argue in conclusion that each entails unfinished emancipatory projects that represent timely ways to revive emancipation in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late work, including the return to an analysis of the state and the introduction of biopolitics as a central theme. According to one dominant interpretation, these shifts did not entail a fundamental methodological break; the approach Foucault developed in his work on knowledge/power was simply applied to new objects. The present article argues that this reading — (...) which is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to Discipline and Punish in secondary literature — obscures an important modification in Foucault’s method and diagnostic style that occurred between the introduction of biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be Defended) and the lectures of 1978 ( Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 ( Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and totalizing claims about the characteristic forms of power in modernity. The later lectures, by contrast, suggest what I propose to call a ‘topological’ analysis that examines the ‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements — techniques, material forms, institutional structures and technologies of power — are configured, as well as the redeployments through which these patterns are transformed. I also indicate how attention to the topological dimension of Foucault’s analysis might change our understanding of key themes in his late work: biopolitics, the analysis of thinking, and the concept of governmentality. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is quite rightly considered a fully fledged response to May ’68 and as one with the radical politics of the 1970s, their 1980 follow-up, A Thousand Plateaus, has tended to provoke a more perplexed reaction. In this article, I will argue that we can nonetheless extract a definite line of argumentation serving a precise political end if we relate the text back to Foucault's mid-1970s output on power/knowledge. In particular, I will emphasise Deleuze and Guattari's (...) appropriation of the Foucaultian notion of dispositif via their concept of the assemblage, the former being understood as a concrete articulation of lines of power, knowledge and subjectivation, as well as the Foucaultian ‘diagram’, the latter being a more abstract or indeterminate stage of the dispositif whose relative indeterminacy, for Deleuze and Guattari, offers a means of escape. I will show that, making room for the assemblage's opening back onto the relative indeterminacy of its generative stages, the assemblage incorporates into itself a more immanent alternative to the dispositif that is focused on collective desire rather than power, within which resistance becomes a primary and generative dimension rather than a counter-attack. In the first section, I will outline Foucault's approach to power, knowledge and subjectivation, emphasising Deleuze's reading of Foucault though without trying to overdetermine my reading in this way. Next, I will turn to the Foucaultian diagram. In the third section, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how the notion of assemblage developed in this text responds to and builds upon Foucault's approach to power/knowledge and subjectivation in order to reconceive resistance. (shrink)

While Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is concerned with psycho-sexual development, it concomitantly presents a novel historical-political imagination. This article compares the post-Oedipal self with the selves envisioned by Nietzsche and Marx, suggesting that while these 19th-century theorists constructed selves that are able to transcend the normalizing and subjugating circumstances of modernity, Freud’s theory defines a healthy self as irredeemably embedded in the prevailing culture and life-orders. In making his case, Freud spurns the quests of Nietzsche and Marx for (...) wholeness of the individual and for self-authorship, and presents the self as structurally agonistic, riven and thoroughly molded by society. (shrink)

The paper contrasts understandings of knowledge grounded in Enlightenment norms with the departures from those norms taken by some strands of feminism and hermeneutics, as well as the contributions made by the writing of Michel Foucault. A reading of Foucault's writings on knowledge, power and the discursive constitution of self and world is offered as a potentially useful frame within which to raise questions about nursing, nurses and knowledge.

This article is a slightly modified version of the first part of Chapter 4 of Revoluciones sin sujeto. Slavoj Žižek’s y la crítica del historicismo posmoderno (Madrid: Akal, 2015) translated by Douglas Kristopher Smith and Nicolas Lema Habash. This text seeks to overcome the scission between Slavoy Žižek and Michel Foucault by challenging the notion that Foucault lacks an ontology of power, beyond contingent historical processes. By exposing the underlying Nietzschean relational ontology of struggle—as distinct from a fundamental, positive grounding—in (...) Foucault’s work, the piece shows how this aspect has been largely misunderstood—including by Žižek himself. Furthermore, it demonstrates how this agonistic ontology of human experience can serve to shed light on Žižek’s notion of the incompleteness of the subject by bringing it into the realm of politics. (shrink)

‘Time’ has been central to Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his subsequent account of its solid and liquid variants. The experience of time in these accounts announces the coming of new opportunities, but it also signals a corrosion of our moral sensitivity. In this article, I assess Bauman’s contribution to the sociology of time and the centrality of our temporal character for his philosophical anthropology. There is a unique chance to be moral in liquid modernity, by unshackling the outdated (...) and habitual ethics of the past. The danger, however, lays in an increasingly ‘hurried life’, where a ‘nowist’ culture demands endless answers to the most banal of choices, often before these choices have even arrived. I argue that for Bauman the historical power of culture is to raise the ‘ought’ above the ‘is’. This results from our character as temporally-aware creatures. In our liquid modern times, the haste of life and its individualizing forces shift the character of that temporal awareness, endowing us with a false set of needs crafted by the market. The project of humanity itself has become, in Bauman’s diagnosis, subservient to maintaining the goals of the market. (shrink)

Sites of embodied disruption challenge academics to engage with power at its seams. In this article I consider an ethics of embodiment, situating it within questions raised by Judith Butler in her articles, “Doing Justice to Someone” and “Giving an Account of Oneself”. In “Giving an Account,” Butler claims that gaps in knowledge and representation are germane to ethical practice, that brave inadequacies and creative approximations are the best we can do for others and ourselves. In “Doing Justice,” Butler enacts (...) this stance, recounting the story of David Reimer, a child who in 1965 was offered up to science after his penis was severed in a botched circumcision. She seizes upon, through narrative fragments, a body whose sexual indeterminacy became the site and occasion for particularly brutal regimes of interpretation. Butler situates this patchwork narrative within the academic industry that reappropriates David's story for its own purposes. Taking Butler's ideas to heart, I carefully trace the nuances of her argument and highlight the silences and foreclosures of her account. I propose “seamfulness” as a possible ethical-aesthetic strategy for embodying Butler's ethical concerns. I close by briefly introducing some implications for arts-informed representations in academic work. (shrink)

Tangled ruptures: discursive changes in Danish psychiatric nursing 1965–75Psychiatric nursing and psychiatric nurses have been referred to in various ways over the course of history. These articulations reflect and constitute the ways in which nursing is comprehended during specific periods. A rupture in these descriptions and conceptions of Danish psychiatric nursing over the period 1965–75 is identified using a discourse analytical framework, inspired primarily by Foucault. This rupture influenced all aspects of psychiatric nursing: the perception of the psychiatric patient, the (...) expertise and knowledge of the nurse and the care given by the nurse. The study raises questions about the cultural and social changes that occurred prior to the discursive rupture. (shrink)

This paper comments on ‘Critique and Negativity: Towards the Pluralisation of Critique in Educational Practice, Theory and Research’ by Dietrich Benner and Andrea English. Negativity is a disquieting ghost for teachers, educational researchers, administrators and other professionals of this field, including those involved in the design of policy. First, I make some remarks in response to the essay by Benner and English in order to draw attention to the importance of dealing with negativity. Second, I introduce a further problematisation of (...) negativity: I deal with the practical issues that emerge from the conceptual reactivation of negativity and the possible consequences that result from this in the context of teaching graduate seminars. I am especially concerned with the ways in which negativity is inscribed in the process of knowledge production (that is, research), and in the possible consequences of subscribing to one or the other concept of negativity (teleological negativity, parasitic negativity, and relational negativity as the sine qua non condition for any ontology). Lastly, I raise some points for discussion with regard to certain possible consequences of the use of one or another notion of negativity in teaching and research. (shrink)

This paper comments on ‘Critique and Negativity: Towards the Pluralisation of Critique in Educational Practice, Theory and Research’ by Dietrich Benner and Andrea English. Negativity is a disquieting ghost for teachers, educational researchers, administrators and other professionals of this field, including those involved in the design of policy. First, I make some remarks in response to the essay by Benner and English in order to draw attention to the importance of dealing with negativity. Second, I introduce a further problematisation of (...) negativity: I deal with the practical issues that emerge from the conceptual reactivation of negativity and the possible consequences that result from this in the context of teaching graduate seminars. I am especially concerned with the ways in which negativity is inscribed in the process of knowledge production (that is, research), and in the possible consequences of subscribing to one or the other concept of negativity (teleological negativity, parasitic negativity, and relational negativity as the sine qua non condition for any ontology). Lastly, I raise some points for discussion with regard to certain possible consequences of the use of one or another notion of negativity in teaching and research. (shrink)

The article presents an interpretation of certain aspects of John Dewey’s psychological works. The interpretation aims to show that Dewey’s framework speaks directly to certain problems that the discipline of psychology faces today. In particular the reflexive problem, the fact that psychology as an array of discursive practices has served to constitute forms of human subjectivity in Western cultures. Psychology has served to produce or transform its subject-matter. It is shown first that Dewey was aware of the reflexive problem, and (...) found that it needed to be addressed. Next, three concepts of Dewey’s psychology are drawn in: subjectivity, habit and morality. Dewey is interpreted as articulating what we today would call a practice-orientated approach to psychology, in which moral and practical reasoning is seen as a dimension of all knowledge and action. Subjectivity is understood as a function emerging with complex interaction. Finally, a Deweyan approach to how psychology and other social sciences can cope with, and make positive use of, the reflexive problem, is outlined. By acknowledging their existence in the world they study, i.e. by becoming moral sciences that realize their moral and political implications, the social sciences can become problem-solving instruments that serve to help create a democratic public, a community as an actual social idea. It is pointed out that Dewey had an attractive view both of psychology – the subject-matter and of Psychology – the discipline and its practices – and ventured on the rare attempt at explicating how they are connected in what he called Great Societies, what we today would call post- or late-modernity, and how Psychology can help to constitute Great Communities in which human beings might flourish. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

This article focuses primarily on our research group’s year of preparation before the opening of a new K-7 publicly funded ecological ‘school’ for students aged 5–12. The article begins with a discussion of the reasons for seeking ways to change the values of a culture which fails to confront the consequences of its destructive practices, and for looking for a new approach to ecological education which sees the more-than-human world as an integral part of the learning situation. Five principles are (...) introduced and explained—principles that have grown out of the evolving experience of the research group, and then four ‘slogans’, which have served to guide the ongoing work of development, are described and illustrated. As part of the purpose of this project to change social and cultural values, the change of values within the research group during its ongoing work is also explored. (shrink)

This paper articulates a genealogical approach to critical discourse analysis derived from Michel Foucault and Kenneth Burke. The possibilities of this approach are displayed through a case study of the discourses produced by the 1994 anti-gay, ‘no special rights’ initiative in Idaho. Proponents of the initiative represented themselves as conservative Idaho citizens fighting a culture war to preserve traditional family values against a powerful, sexually perverse subject with a militant gay agenda. The analysis traces the emergence and dynamic interplay of (...) antagonists' rhetorical moves and counter-moves in this closely fought battle. It shows how categories like ‘conservative’ can be reinterpreted and put into play in a new strategy. (shrink)

This article explores how theoretical arguments in relation to the concepts of embodiment and identity can allow one to analyse and explore the cultural and psychological significance of a contemporary set of practices of the `hallucinatory self', exemplified by members of the Hearing Voices Network. The article considers work in `critical psychology', which has largely been ignored by media and cultural theory. Through specific analysis of the ways in which a group of voice-hearers are enacting their identities outside of the (...) frameworks of the `psy' disciplines, the limits of current theories of identity will be exemplified. The article suggests that cultural and social theory must move beyond `consumption' as one of the key sites of subjectification, and begin to explore the significance of sites organized through divisions made between the normal and the abnormal. This will involve developing theories of subject formation which can adequately theorize the relations between truth, power and desire, and can pay attention to those situated practices which produce the various possibilities of experience in relation to contemporary forms of selfhood. (shrink)

How should those who value reasonable pluralism navigate ethical and epistemological challenges related to speech and inquiry in higher education? We propose the ethical pursuit of public knowledge as a guiding vision for public colleges and universities with the understanding that other institutions will serve different purposes. The ethical criterion of mutuality calls for engagement across difference and reciprocal recognition of others’ basic equality and liberty. To maintain epistemic legitimacy, knowledge-production processes in these institutions should elevate ideas warranted by public (...) reasons that have withstood rigorous critical scrutiny above those that have not. Some forms of speech—including the expression of extremist views on both the Right and the Left—will prove unreasonable and incompatible with the guiding vision and should therefore be marginalized within these institutions. (shrink)

The scholarly works of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault have been subject to ongoing scrutiny for a number of decades. However, less attention has been given to their activities as public intellectuals and the relation between these and their philosophical and theoretical projects. Drawing on their own conceptualization of the role of the intellectual, the article aims to illuminate these issues by examining Habermas’ advocacy of a ‘Core Europe’ and his defense of NATO bombardments in Kosovo in 1999 as well (...) as Foucault’s involvement with the Groupe d’Information des Prisons (GIP) and a wide variety of his interviews, op-ed articles, etc. In showing that the intellectuals’ views differ in important ways from those of the scholars but nevertheless inhabit a crucial position in the overall edifice of their oeuvres, the article concludes that the practices of theorists deserve more attention for a comprehensive and more nuanced account of their thought. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Richard Rorty's version of pragmatism focuses too much on community, and gives insufficient attention to the workings of power and the necessary relation between theory and practice. I then turn briefly to the work of Michel Foucault for a better understanding of power relations. Finally, I argue for the value of learning from a group of writers who connect theory and practice in a way that attends to both community and power relations.

This paper argues that historicism can provide substantive philosophical grounds for critical theory and various modes of critique. Unlike the developmental historicism that dominated the nineteenth century, we start from a radical historicism tied to nominalism, contingency, and contestability. This radical historicism is compatible with a commitment to truth claims, including the truth of historicism and the truth of particular genealogies and other accounts of the world. Genealogy can be viewed as radical historicism in its critical guise, denaturalizing the ideas (...) it targets. In addition, however, radical historicism provides possible grounds for both historical ontology and a revised version of ideology critique. Ideology is conceived here in relation to failures in consciousness itself rather than the alleged conflicts of a material base. (shrink)

The idea of finding Foucault first looks at the many influences on Foucault, including his Nietzschean acclamations. It examines Foucault’s critical history of thought, his work on the orders of discourse with his emphasis on being a pluralist: the problem he says that he has set himself is that of the individualization of discourses. Finally, it addresses his work on the culture of the self which became a philosophical and historical question for Foucault later in his life as he investigated (...) the historical form of relations between subjectivity and truth in Western philosophy since Antiquity and how philosophy as an activity taught about the care of the self. The conclusion suggests some ways that students might approach his work as they proceed in finding Foucault and their own selves. (shrink)

Dada continues to attract a small following among scholars, but has perhaps not yet been recognized as providing invaluable insight into the underlying functions and potentials of culture generally. This article explores the nature and theoretical import of Dada, and two radically different visions of culture as they might try to accommodate and explain Dada. Models of culture taken from Bourdieu and Nietzsche are brought to bear, first on Dada, and then on each other, with the aim of developing a (...) theoretically informed understanding of Dada, and also demonstrating the practical, political and philosophical difficulties involved in choosing between a conflict model of culture and an `existential' model. Ultimately, both models are found to be helpful but insufficient at providing an adequate account of Dada, and it is suggested that present models of cultural analysis can benefit by revisiting both Dada and Nietzsche, trying to incorporate their insights and critically evaluate their visions of culture. (shrink)

In this article,we address how the professionalization process is reflected in the way Danish nursing textbooks present ‘nursing’ to new members of the profession during the 20th century. The discussion is based on a discourse analysis of seven Danish textbooks on basic nursing published between 1904 and 1996. The analysis was inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, in particular the concepts of rupture and rules of formation. First, we explain how the dominating role of the human body in nursing (...) textbooks disappears in the mid‐20th century. This transformation can of course be attributed to changes in tasks and responsibilities for nurses or to the implementation of increasing amounts of knowledge and theories from other disciplines than medicine into the nurses’ knowledge base. However, inspired by Foucault, we consider these historical changes to be the conditions of possibilities and not causes. The second part of the analysis shows that along with ‘the disappearance of the body’, a second discursive change appears: the role of doctors and medicine changes fundamentally from about mid‐20th century. Finally, we argue that this discursive reorganization enabling new patterns of thought to emerge was driven by a professional interest in describing nursing as an independent profession. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the notion of ‘rupture’ from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose studies of discourse and governmentality have become prominent within nursing research during the last 25 years. We argue that a rupture perspective can be helpful for identifying and maintaining a critical potential within nursing research. The paper begins by introducing rupture as an inheritance from the French epistemological tradition. It then describes how rupture appears in Foucault's works, as both an overall philosophical approach and (...) as an analytic tool in his historical studies. Two examples of analytical applications of rupture are elaborated. In the first example, rupture has inspired us to make an effort to seek alternatives to mainstream conceptions of the phenomenon under study. In the second example, inspired by Foucault's work on discontinuity, we construct a framework for historical epochs in nursing history. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of the notion of rupture as a response to the methodological concerns regarding the use of Foucault‐inspired discourse analysis within nursing research. We agree with the critique of Cheek that the critical potential of discourse analysis is at risk of being undermined by research that tends to convert the approach into a fixed method. (shrink)

Discourse analysis has been introduced into nursing research as an approach which has the potential to offer new perspectives and to pose new questions to taken‐for‐granted assumptions. However, critique has arisen that when applied to nursing studies, the epistemological foundation of the discourse analysis is often overlooked. It is furthermore claimed that the methodological inspiration does not lead to any new insights and that these studies can hardly be differentiated from more traditional studies. This study supports this critique, arguing that (...) the challenges of implementing discourse analysis in nursing research reflect a dominant pattern of thought in the discourse of the nursing profession that have held sway throughout the last century. We argue that this pattern of thought stems from the Western philosophy of consciousness and the conception of the sovereign subject. By applying a discourse analytical perspective to the discourse of the nursing profession itself, this study elucidates the challenges of applying discourse analysis in nursing research. (shrink)

The social production of an enterprise clinic: nurses, clinical pathway guidelines and contemporary healthcare practicesIn this paper I critically engage with the forming of contemporary nursing practice with/in an ‘enterprise clinic’ in order to discuss the practical potential of developing a mode of reflective practice that is a critical ontology of self. Critical engagement in the paper is secured through a ‘troubling’ of the relationship between the contemporary practices of both the self and governance, without the reduction of one to (...) the other. The paper draws on my doctoral study in which I combined the techniques of ethnography and discourse analysis in order to critically examine registered nurses’ employment of clinical pathway guidelines through an analysis of the political technologies through which that engagement was constituted. This critical purchase was applied because of the influence of the contemporary ‘problematisation’ of healthcare provision in western society on the formation and deployment of the professional identities of nurses. (shrink)

The phrase ‘To perish from absolute knowledge’ from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil runs like a red thread throughout Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, spanning a period of 20 years in which Foucault continuously turned to Nietzsche as his main philosophical and methodological role model. Beginning with his first lectures on Nietzsche in the early 1950s, Foucault repeatedly alluded to this phrase as the key to Nietzsche’s philosophical critique which anticipated the philosophical shift to ontology in the 20th century. Drawing on (...) a host of unpublished essays from Foucault’s archive, it will be shown that this phrase holds the key to Foucault’s Nietzsche interpretation and explains his reliance on historicity as the transcendental basis for his critical project. The article will rely on Foucault’s dynamic analysis of this phrase to narrate the development of his historical methodology between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, and will argue for the continuity and coherence of Foucault’s critical project. (shrink)

This article pays close attention to Michel Foucault's theory that political regimes are enlightened through courageous free speech. A Foucaultian enlightenment occurs not when philosophical reason completely replaces superstition and enthusiasm in the public sphere, but instead when the parrhesiast partially organizes competing claims to know and to speak the truth. While much of the recent scholarly literature on Foucault’s later lectures emphasizes the political importance of the parrhesiast, less attention has been paid to the overlap and/or incompatibility between parrhesia (...) and the other modes of truth-telling. Below, I explain Foucault’s analysis of the basic modes of philosophical truth-telling: prophesy, philosophy, teaching, and parrhesia. I provide examples of speakers working within these modes in the ancient and modern world. I explain the overlap and tension between these modes, and I analyze Foucault’s partial organization of them through the image of the parrhesiast. I briefly compare Foucault’s position to the agonistic democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and distinguish Foucault’s view from consensus-based views of public reason. Finally, I provide practical and theoretical examples of parrhesiastic activity in the contemporary world. (shrink)

In his later lectures, Foucault analyzes confession as a key exercise of the Christian pastoral power. The pastoral power’s creation of a lifelong obligation to speak the truth of oneself is a ‘prelude’ to modern practices of government, and a key facet of modernity. There has been some confusion regarding the scope of Foucault’s study. Is it medieval Christian confessional practices or Christian obedience itself that is his theme? In this article, I revisit all of the later lectures touching on (...) confession and avowal in order to clarify Foucault’s ambivalence about Christian proto-governmentality. Foucault exposes two regimes of truth, belief and confession, and offer a practice-based, confession-centred history of the pre-modern self. Connecting his lectures to his method of anarchaeology clarifies how the force of truth (the ‘you have to’) is, for Foucault, a fundamental if ambivalent historical-cultural problem of government. (shrink)