In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Empire Writes Back, With A VengeanceDenis DuttonOne of the more uplifting aspects of the turn toward theory in recent years has been the growth of postcolonial cultural studies. Postcolonial studies are in actuality constituted by counterdiscoursive, decolonizing practices which acknowledge the recognition of minority discourses, deconstructing hegemonic texts and imperialist metanarratives, opposing unduly overprivileging Western canonical paradigms of “literature,” and—well, you know what I mean. As Benita Parry (...) so lucidly explains, “The labor of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony.” And what an awesome labor it is. The noted postcolonial theorist Georg M. Gugelberger sums things up by saying (I’m not inventing this) “postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism.”But what of the struggling masses of oppressed peoples whose interests and cultural sensitivities are so caringly looked after by practitioners of postcolonial studies? How do they feel about the fact that the only thing standing between them and “total capitalism” is resistance being mounted in a comparative literature department in Idaho, or someplace? This is a question seldom asked, let alone answered. Fortunately, new light has been thrown on the matter with the arrival of a booklet at this journal. Indian History from Above and Below, by Rukun Advani, is published by Ram Advani, probably a member of the family, in Lucknow. It is dedicated to “all Bengali intellectuals and those whose dollar salaries rise in proportion with obscurity and jargon.” Advani notes in his preface that although Bengali intellectuals talk torrents in their native tongue, when they [End Page 198] disseminate their thoughts abroad, they translate into a “clogged, colonial, unfluid flow,” with footnotes such as: “Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3–333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, how many times a day do you have one in summer; idem., do you really?; differentiated peasantry; undifferentiated peasantry; for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the post-colonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajit da and Amiya da in Gayatri di, ed., Gendered, Gendered, O Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Oxford University Press, forty years later).”The first of the booklet’s two essays, “Indian History from Below: a Swiftian Consideration,” discusses a neglected but “important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking and defecation.” Just to name these three functions posits “a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most decisively Derridesque reflections, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production.’” Beginning with the Foucauldian notion of “the peasant’s overdetermined relative autonomy from the olfactory,” Advani describes “the Barthesian notion of the impossibility of critical transcendence by the historian into either the symbiotic acculturation of the pastness, and indeed the presentness, of the present-subject, or indeed the even greater epistemological and hermeneutic problems posed by attempting a recreation of the ontological presuppositions of the peasant.” Much of this is elaborated in the classic essay by Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack, “The Post-Colonial Lavatory and Its Radical Implications for Nomenclaturing Among Gendered and Subalternized Third World Expatriate-Marxist-Feminists in the First and Second Worlds: A Derivative Discourse Decoded.”The debt that Rukun Advani owes to Professor Spewhack is clear from the sheer number of his references to books and articles by her. These include, on the subject of toileting, Master Disgusted, Native Disgusting: a Perspective on Peasants from 250,000 Dollars per Annum, “On the Symbolic Hegemony of Subsection Numbers in a Gendered and Subalternized Post-Colonial Context: A Derivative Discourse Decoded” (in The Phenomenology of Praxis and the Praxis of Phenomenology in a Postmodern Residential Colony), “The Violence of Steam and the Episteme of Violence: Foucault’s Views on Hot Air Balloons” (in Obscurata), and even parts of her autobiography: The Larger than Life of Lavatri Lavatory [End Page 199] Spewhack (chapter titled “My Collected Phonecalls and Faxes”). While some... (shrink)

Michel Foucault turned to Classical and Hellenistic philosophy late in his career, a change of focus that surprised and was misunderstood by many at the time. Often, it is supposed that his aim was to find the “freedom” that he had allegedly denied in his earlier works on power relations; he is thought to have proposed an autonomous self which would oppose and resist dominating political institutions. I instead contend that Foucault’s work on the Ancients is better understood (...) as a challenge to or interrogation of current understandings of freedom. Rather than locating a subject whose freedom would consist in a lack of determination (whether from power or any other source), “freedom” in Foucault’s work on the Ancients is the result of a deterministic production. Rather than describing a freedom which is already naturally ours, Foucault shows how Classical and Hellenistic subjects used techniques to constitute themselves as free. Hence his later works’ emphasis on askesis, or “practices of the self”— that is, the work one performs on oneself in order to transform what one is. Practices of askesis, and those of Epictetus in particular, show that knowledge alone is not sufficient for morally improving oneself. Practices of askesis also indicate that treating one’s volition (or “will”) as a quasi-object to be adjusted through practical techniques does not alienate freedom, but rather is freedom’s foundation. Indeed, Foucault shows that through the exercises of askesis, a subject can be produced and constituted as free for the first time. Examples of askesis in Epictetus are given to show how a Stoic could force himself to have a morally correct volition: taking ideas which he knew but could not follow, and transforming them into principles of actual conduct which he could not help but follow. The sense of “freedom” and “subject” developed in Foucault’s reading of the Stoics thus remains wholly foreign to free will as an original possession of a purely autonomous self. In fact, it challenges free will on a number of issues, including the relation of choice to knowledge, how to effectively reform and reshape desire and judgment, and the benefits of treating oneself as a quasi-object. It is through askesis that Foucault most clearly raises these challenges, and in so doing, makes us question our reliance on the free will as an explanation for human ethical behavior. He replaces it with askesis, a set of effective techniques which can actually transform us into the ethical selves we want to become. (shrink)

Epistemology was a central concern of Michel Foucault. By denying the conflation of knowledge with power, and consistently maintaining a dyadic relationship (“power/knowledge”) rather than a relationship in which power eclipses knowledge, Foucault maintains that knowledge requires its own analysis irreducible to the strategic maneuvers of power. “Epistemology,” by this caricature, has to approach the question of knowledge as a transcendent entity, akin to Plato's Ideal Forms. Foucault's work on knowledge is primarily critical rather than normatively reconstructive. (...) The most important and influential of his ideas was Foucault's claim that power and knowledge are co‐constituting: “that power and knowledge directly imply one another ”. The chapter also explores some of Foucault's case studies, which reveal general claims about the nature of truth and knowledge. (shrink)

Foucault’s later writings continue his analyses of subject-formation but now with a view to foregrounding an active subject capable of self-transformation via ascetical and other self-imposed disciplinary practices. In my essay, I engage Foucault’s studies of ancient Greco-Roman and Christian technologies of the self with a two-fold purpose in view. First, I bring to the fore additional continuities either downplayed or overlooked by Foucault’s analysis between Greco-Roman transformative practices including self-writing, correspondence, and the hupomnemata and Christian ascetical (...) and epistolary practices. Second, I add exegetical support to recent arguments denying Foucault’s advocacy for the death of the subject per se. In fact, my analyses show that Foucault’s ethico-aesthetic turn and its corresponding concern with self-transformation and self-(re)constitution via ascetical practices assumes a subject with rational and volitional capacities. Without these capacities, the art of living Foucault describes is not possible. (shrink)

« Si la connaissance se donne comme connaissance de la vérité, c’est qu’elle produit la vérité par le jeu d’une falsification première et toujours reconduite qui pose la distinction du vrai et du faux. » Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, Gallimard-Seuil, Paris, 2011 (1re éd. : 1971)."If knowledge is given as knowledge of the truth, it is because it produces the truth by the game of a first, primary falsification renewed again and again which raises the distinction of true (...) and false" [my translation]. Michel Foucault, Lessons on the will to know, Gallimard-Seuil, Paris, 2011 (1st ed.: 1971)I wonder how can Foucault, who refers to Nietzsche as source of inspiration, speak of falsification and deny at the same time objectivity of truth – besides the obvious pun. The challenge of Nietzsche is to contest the objectivity of truth as human desiderata, in such a context Foucault's notion of falsification (of what? falsification of an objective reality?) does either make no sense at all or encodes some other meaning beyond being false – a possible reading would be to take it that Foucault means "distortion", or better “will to deceive “.Perhaps, Foucault's observation amounts to the simple remark that some of the so-called scientific justifications of institutionalized qualifications and anathemas that have important political and socio-economic consequences such as those involving notions as health, disease, or gender do not have the scientific backing they are purported to have (now scientific backing, I guess, must be understood in a rather standard or naïve sense of distinguishing between sciences and pseudo-sciences). This might in some sense be a sensible reflection, and it must be conceded that Foucault had the merit of undertaking extensive and thorough examinations of archives, protocols and reports buried in institutions of various kinds which animated his legendary charming style of writing. Of course, this is quite far away from constituting a revolutionary assault on the notions of (scientific) truth, knowledge and meaning, but, one can say, I think, that his work motivated and still motivates some new approaches to the study of institutional archives. If the reading proposed in the preceding paragraph seems a too meagre result and we are prepared to read Foucault's remarks as involving more thorny epistemological matters, there are of course other ways to delve into them: On one hand I allow me to suggest studying the sceptics of the ancient Greek tradition, or the study of analogical dialectical reasoning within the Arabic Jurisprudence theories of the Middle-Ages (or more generally their theory of Argumentation that has been largely ignored also by the analytic approaches to Argumentation theory and Epistemic Logic), or if one dares to go so far the millenary Jain epistemological lessons on the Art of the Point of View provide plenty to learn from (this constitutes another gap in the recent studies on reasoning and knowledge). On the other one cannot escape the feeling that claims as those of Foucault, though they might be seen as involving interesting questions, many of them have been brought forward without awareness (or perhaps even because of lack of awareness) of the discussions that took place in depth and length in philosophy of logic and knowledge – moreover, as a quick look on nowadays publications bring to the fore, such kind of discussions are nowadays experiencing a creative impulse at a breath-taking pace (particularly so in the context of social sciences). True, analytic philosophers and some philosophers of logic stemming from analytic philosophy quite often ignore history of philosophy or even the history of the science they are purported to study, or more generally philosophical approaches foreign to their own framework – with the result that quite often they produced a rather superficial analysis of the links between knowledge and truth – however, this only points out, that it is time that we start learning each from the other Am I falsifying Foucault? Who knows …. (shrink)

Em seus últimos cursos no Collège de France, Foucault dedica uma atenção especial ao conceito de parrhesía. Trata-se de uma experiência viva na cultura greco-romana, que ele analisa em meios às técnicas de produção dos modos de subjetivação. No ensaio de si, como forma de cuidado de si, os antigos submetiam a vida à prova por meio do exercício corajoso da verdade. A parrhesía é, pois, o dizer-verdadeiro que faz da vida um campo de experimentação. No contexto dessas análises, (...) Foucault não cessa de se referir às suas obras anteriores e de situá-las a partir dos problemas que se ocupa na presente ocasião. É assim que inscreve seus outros trabalhos na temática da subjetividade e da verdade. Acompanhando esta releitura, arrisco aqui uma aproximação, bastante pontual, entre a noção de parrhesía e o livro O Sobrinho de Rameau, de Denis Diderot, a partir da abordagem deste texto feita por Foucault em História da loucura. (shrink)

Em seus últimos cursos no Collège de France, Foucault dedica uma atenção especial ao conceito de parrhesía. Trata-se de uma experiência viva na cultura greco-romana, que ele analisa em meios às técnicas de produção dos modos de subjetivação. No ensaio de si, como forma de cuidado de si, os antigos submetiam a vida à prova por meio do exercício corajoso da verdade. A parrhesía é, pois, o dizer-verdadeiro que faz da vida um campo de experimentação. No contexto dessas análises, (...) Foucault não cessa de se referir às suas obras anteriores e de situá-las a partir dos problemas que se ocupa na presente ocasião. É assim que inscreve seus outros trabalhos na temática da subjetividade e da verdade. Acompanhando esta releitura, arrisco aqui uma aproximação, bastante pontual, entre a noção de parrhesía e o livro O Sobrinho de Rameau, de Denis Diderot, a partir da abordagem deste texto feita por Foucault em História da loucura. (shrink)

In the field of critical philosophy, the view of Michel Foucault has been subject to very extensive discussion. It has been an ongoing puzzlement how he could reject any talk about ahistorical universals and at the same time claim philosophy – at least in its genealogic form – to be of critical importance. How could he claim any analysis to have only local significance, and at the same time take the view that some analyses can show other views to (...) be problematic? According to what standards?A common strategy against Foucault has been to state that he is not as neutral as he claims to be – that underneath his analysis of, say, prison (Discipline and Punish – 1975) or sexuality (The History of Sexuality 1-3 – 1976/1984) there is a hidden universal normativity that shapes his critique of these fields. Another approach to the seemingly paradox claim by Foucault has been to deny the critical aspect of his work. This has been Jürgen Habermas’ strategy – most thoroughly carried out in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). In the following I will try to articulate a notion of critique that will demonstrate that it nevertheless does make sense to attribute a critical approach to the Foucaultian writings. Foucault’s critical approach has certain difficulties, but I will argue that it at the same time has certain qualities that can broaden the more traditional account of critique that can be extracted from for example Habermas’ writings. This I will do by (II) demonstrating in what sense it is possible for Foucault to maintain a concept of critique, without having to commit himself on universals. I will show that in Foucault’s writings, critique is understood as reality resisting a conceptual grip – critique is a pointing out of a resistance against or response to the understanding activity. Critique is understood as something that is put upon us. After this I will (III) show that Habermas’ opposition to the position of Foucault springs from a focus on critique as an activity between acting agents. This view is seen in his emphasis on communicative actions and validity claims and in his hesitance towards “natural” reality in discursive matters. But as I will show, this hesitance is rather an effect of than a cause to his basic notion of critique: his latest change in view on reality, has not brought a similar change in the concept of critique. Finally, I will (IV) show how both Foucault and Habermas are important in illuminating the notion of critique – that they complement, rather than exclude, each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Foucault for Psychoanalysis”Monique David-Ménard’s Kind of BluePenelope DeutscherFoucault for psychoanalysis? This is a paradoxical question. Foucault also produced a critique of psychoanalysis, aiming to show that sexuality was not an a-temporal reality, nor a truth eventually discovered by Freud. It was a discursive formation, one among others.—Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, 172.To the philosophers..A practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of philosophy, Monique David-Ménard extends a (...) singular proposition to philosophers. She is not the first philosopher to engage the assumptions of psychoanalysis, but hers is a particularly idiosyncratic suggestion for how to think with the analyst’s clinical work, intimate and alien. She has proposed we do so in the company of Gilles Deleuze,1 and most recently, in Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011) has extended her invitation to think with the clinic through an ingenious reading of Michel Foucault.As Eloge opens, David-Ménard’s reading of Foucault is far from the scene. Early in the work, we are asked to think with a practice, seemingly in a different register. An analyst finds herself accused of being an obstacle, of opposing the analysand’s wishes in life. In this context, we are asked to think about the blue of a painting in the room where the analysand waits (David-Ménard 2011, 34). [End Page 111]Given the criticisms of psychoanalysis elaborated in the work of Foucault and Deleuze, one might have expected these philosophers to be considered in Eloge in that stead.2 Or, one could imagine Foucault playing a role because of his genealogical analysis of the formation of the Oedipus complex.3Two years after the publication of Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault had, in Abnormal, characterized the desiring space of the family as stimulated in a capillary network of individualizing normalization (Foucault 2003, 257), linked by medicalized and expert concern of which parents became the auxiliaries. They are charged, and charge themselves, with the goals of family health, of preservative and defensive good parenting, and with the conduct of the child’s conduct. Foucault describes the pre-twentieth century emergence of lay and expert preoccupation with the dangers of childhood masturbation. This produces an environment whose intensive scrutiny involves a close “folding of... parents’ bodies over... children’s bodies” (ibid., 265) in a saturated, hermetic environment stimulating oedipalized desire. This means one can offer a genealogical account of the conditions of formation of the latter. These include a responsibilization of parents, who control for the presence of abnormal sex, advised by new experts (lay, medical, pseudo-scientific) in collective crusades for health and life. Thus there is differentiation through minor gradations of abnormality. Even the specificity of the architectural spaces in which scrutiny is directed plays a role in the hollowing out of the child’s putatively interior psychic-sexual life, the intense object of “palpating” interest (Foucault 1978, 45) in new apparatuses of knowledge-power (Foucault 2003, 327).Because he presents this as the context in which the “nuclear and substantial family was gradually constituted” (Foucault 2003, 264), along with its oedipal configurations of desire, Foucault emphasizes the contingency of both. Psychoanalysis would be, from his perspective, willfully indifferent to these or other possibilities for genealogical analysis of the apparatus of power, knowledge, and the body, of the repeating configurations of desire that are its special domain of expertise,4 and the emergent forms of authority associated with the analyst, described in History of Madness (Foucault 2009) and in Psychiatric Power (Foucault 2006).Perhaps we’d expect to see David-Ménard, the psychoanalyst, addressing these accounts, but they are neither repudiated in Eloge, nor extensively discussed. Far from rejecting a genealogical analysis of psychoanalysis, she promotes its promise. But this is so in a particular sense.Necessity and repetitionA particular patient might fear being “mad like her mother.” She might fear being denied, trapped, or annihilated (David-Ménard 2011, 33). She might [End Page 112] consider herself somehow denied a lover. She might seem to be denying herself a lover. There’s a degree of necessity in all these variants. Perhaps these... (shrink)

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers From 1971 until 1984 at the College de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended , Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within (...) society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. (shrink)

The article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault’s own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms (...) of racism. This article challenges Foucault’s reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault’s genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the ‘counter-historical’ discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault’s genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project. (shrink)

Though Foucault was intrigued by the possibilities of radical social transformation, he resolutely resisted the idea that such transformation could escape the effects of power and expressed caution when it came to the question of revolution. In this article we argue that in one particularly influential line of development of Foucault’s work his exemplary caution has been exaggerated in a way that weakens the political aspirations of post-Foucaldian scholarship. The site of this reduction is a complex debate over (...) the role of normativity in Foucaldian research, where it has been claimed that Foucault’s genealogical approach is unable to answer the question ‘ Why fight?’ The terms of this debate are limited by a dominant though selective interpretation of Foucault’s analytics of power, where power is understood primarily in terms of government, rather than struggle. In response we suggest that if we reconfigure power-as-government to power-as-war, this adjusts the central concern. ‘ Why fight?’ becomes replaced by the more immediate question, ‘ How fight?’ Without denying the obvious benefits of cautious scholarly work, we argue that a reconfiguration of Foucault’s analytics of power might help Foucaldian research to transcend the self-imposed ethic of political quietism that currently dominates the field. (shrink)

of autonomous agency. Yet neither denies the importance of human freedom. In Heidegger's early work the subject is reinterpreted as Dasein -- a non autonomous, culturally bound (or thrown) way of being, that can yet change the field of possibilities in which it acts. In middle Heidegger, thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world, while in later Heidegger, anyone is free to step back from the current world, to enter one of a plurality of worlds, and, thereby, (...) facilitate a change in the practices of one's society. Likewise, for early Foucault, the subject is reduced to a function of discourse; for middle Foucault, writing can open up new worlds, and in later Foucault, freedom is understood as the power to question what is currently taken for granted, plus the capacity to change oneself and, perhaps, one's milieu. In short, while both Heidegger and Foucault reject the Enlightenment idea of an autonomous subject, they have a robust notion of freedom and action. And it will turn out for both thinkers that each person can modify his or her cultural practices by openness to embeddedness in them. All this needs a great deal of explanation. We need to determine, on the one hand, just what each rejects and why, and, on the other, what series of understandings of the self and its possibilities for action each introduces. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Husserl’s and Foucault’s approaches to the historical a priori and defend Husserl’s richer notion. Foucault borrows the expression ‘historical a priori’ from Husserl and there are continuities, but also significant and ultimately irreconcilable differences, between their conceptions. Both are looking for ‘conditions of possibility,’ forms of ‘institution’ or instauration, and patterns of transformation, for scientific knowledge. Husserl identifies the ‘a priori of history’ with the ‘historical a priori’ and believes that the ‘invariant essential (...) structures of the historical world’ can be identified. Foucault, on the other hand, is less interested in the Kantian inquiry into the limits or legitimization of knowledge than in the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault rejects the idea of universal and necessary a priori structures and denies that the structure of the conceptual framework governing an era can be fully determined. Both Foucault and Husserl contrast ‘inner’ history with external history, but, I argue, Foucault misconstrues Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a form of ‘absolute subjectivity’ against which his ‘archaeological’ method reacts. In fact, Foucault’s own conception of the historical a priori is ambiguous and fails to have explanatory value precisely because it misunderstands the need for the a priori to be both universal and necessary, and offers no account of the ‘a priori of historicity’ which, for Husserl, is essential to human cultural life. (shrink)

This essay aims to critically assess the later Foucault's ethical turn by using Levinas's ethical metaphysics as critical yardstick. Foucault's notion of ethical subjectivity constitutes a site of resistance against externally imposed subjugating subject identities. Apart from a practice of freedom, Foucault also insists that it engenders the subject with a generous responsiveness towards others. Despite Foucault's other-aspirations, it seems probable that care of the self would fall short ethically when compared to Levinas's insistence upon an (...) unconditional openness towards the Other. Upon closer investigation, however, we find that Levinas's ethical metaphysics is founded upon phenomenological analyses of our immanent 'economic' existence here and now in the world. Although he maintains that metaphysics or 'transcendence, the welcoming of the other by the same' (Levinas, 1979:43/13) is primary, the immanent process of the subject's 'auto-personification' ( ibid ., p.147/120) serves as a necessary condition for the possibility of becoming ethical, of welcoming the Other. Moreover, contrary to Foucault's self-caring subject, who actively partakes in its own ethical self-formation, Levinas's existent has no educable ethical sensibility. It is powerless against the gravitational pull of its egoism, condemned to a hopeless amorality unless the Other intervenes and saves it from itself. I shall therefore argue that Foucault's account of ethical self-becoming invests the subject with a meta -physical potential, which it is denied by Levinas's ethical metaphysics. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 113-125. (shrink)

Enciclopédia não está entre os termos mais conhecidos de Michel Foucault. Todavia, ao olhar com atenção para algumas ocorrências desse termo ao longo de sua carreira, com uma especial ênfase aos anos de 1960 e 1970, algo se revela ao leitor atento. O intuito desse texto é discernir esse termo no vocabulário foucaultiano, mostrando sua dupla face. Se por um lado, Foucault se refere tecnicamente à Enciclopédia editada por Denis Diderot e Jean D’Alembert; por outro, ele recorre ao (...) termo sugerindo outra prática que não simplesmente elabora um memorial de nossos saberes, mas ultrapassa essa fronteira na direção do que ele chamará de heterotópico. No primeiro momento, o caráter crítico da abordagem levará a considerações sobre os limites do projeto enciclopédico, e as consequências práticas das políticas de memória e esquecimento que ele implica. Num segundo momento, a partir de fontes importantes como Nietzsche, Freud e Marx, compreenderemos as possibilidades de uma nova dobra na história das técnicas de interpretar, em busca de uma ressignificação foucaultiana das enciclopédias. (shrink)

The object of this article is to show some convergences between the thought of Hannah Arendt and of Michel Foucault. My thesis is that both authors aims a thought of the openess and not determined, a political alternative that goes beyong the party politics and aims to recover the public space. Politics as activity of creation and experimentation. The political theory of Hannah Arendt represents a tentative to think the event, to affront the contingency and to deny the traditional (...) images and metaphors offered to imagine the political. It is a will to act, to transgress and overcome the limits.O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar algumas convergências entre o pensamento de Hannah Arendt e o de Foucault. Minha tese a respeito é, que no fundo, ambos os autores visam a um pensamento do aberto e do não determinado, uma alternativa política que vai além de uma política partidista e que aponta para recuperar o espaço público. Política como atividade de criação e de experimentação. A teoria política de Hannah Arendt representa uma tentativa de pensar o acontecimento, de afrontar a contingência, de recusar as imagens e metáforas tradicionais oferecidas para imaginar o político, como uma vontade de agir, de transgredir e superar os limites. (shrink)

In this book, Honi Haber offers a much-needed analysis of postmodern politics. While continuing to work towards the voicing of the "other," she argues that we must go beyond the insights of postmodernism to arrive at a viable political theory. Postmodernism's political agenda allows the marginalized other to have a voice and to constitute a politics of difference based upon heterogeneity. But Haber argues that postmodern politics denies us the possibility of selves and community--essential elements to any viable political theory. (...) Haber calls into question the postmodern dichotomy of totality or difference. She argues that the self--which need not be coherent or unchanging--is always already a social entity. The "subject" must be understood as a subject-in-community, but any subject is constructed by many different communities. The subject whose death has been dictated by postmodern deconstruction is the very subject whose life is necessary for a politics of difference. Haber develops this theory through a detailed examination of postmodern politics as formulated in the work of Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault. Beyond Postmodern Politics suggests that we must use the concept of subjects-in-community in order to move beyond postmodern politics and arrive at a genuine politics of difference. (shrink)

Por Laura Fraga de Almeida Sampaio, tradutora do livro A aula inaugural, que Foucault pronunciou ao assumir a cátedra vacante no Collège de France pela morte de Hyppolite, pode ser considerada um texto de ligação entre suas obras, datadas dos anos 60, como História da loucura, As palavras e as coisas, A arqueologia do saber, centradas predominantemente na análise das condições de possibilidade das ciências humanas, e as que se seguiram a maio de 68, como Vigiar e punir, voltados (...) ao exame da microfisica do poder. Foucault desvenda a relação entre as práticas discursivas e os poderes que as permeiam. Ao perceber os diversos procedimentos que cerceiam e controlam os discursos da sociedade, o autor comprova que "o discurso não é simplesmente aquilo que traduz as lutas ou os sistemas de dominação, mas aquilo pelo que se luta, o poder de queremos nos apoderar". Na segunda parte do texto, Foucault anuncia a direção em que prosseguirá suas investigações no decorrer dos cursos no Collège de France, apontando para o que denomina o "conjunto crítico" e o "conjunto genealógico" e lança o projeto de estudo das interdições que atingem o discurso da sexualidade. A este trabalho dedicará muitos anos, após a publicação do primeiro volume da História da sexualidade, em 1976: A vontade de saber (uso dos prazeres, vol.2, O cuidado de si, vol, 3, ambos de 1984). (shrink)

Michael Foucault's writing has shaped the teaching of half a dozen disciplines, ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But none of his books offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader precisely serves that purpose. It contains selections from each area of Foucault's thought, a wealth of previously unpublished writings, and an interview with Foucault during which he discusses his philosophy with unprecedented candor.

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis proposes that the death of the author is neither a desirable, nor properly attainable goal of criticism, and that the concept of the author remained profoundly active even--and especially--as its disappearance was being articulated. ;As the phrase implies, the death of the author is seen to repeat the Nietzschean deicide. In Barthes, the idea of the author is explicitly connected to that of God, for Foucault (...) and Derrida, to that of the transcendental subject of knowledge. Nowhere, however, is any demonstration forwarded as to why we must conceive author, transcendental subject, and divinity as specifications of the same subject, and therefore implicated in a common closure. Always and everywhere, the death of the author proceeds on the basis of an idealized conception of authorship. ;In practical terms, such are the pressures exerted upon critical discourse by the death of the author that the author is implied from the outset. Barthes will insist that the authorial subject is constituted in and through language, whilst also recommending that we should regard certain authors as "founders of languages". With Foucault, the requisite transindividuality of archaeology is subverted by the absolutely privileged, metahistorical status it bestows upon Nietzsche. Derrida's history of logocentrism denies the author precisely because of the exorbitant recourse it must make to Rousseau as the single systematized instance of an age of logocentric metaphysics. ;The placement of the author reflects the experience of these critics in writing their texts. In Barthes, the return of the author is inseparable from his own autobiographical project; with Foucault, it relates to the rejection of the transcendental detachment of the archaelogist in favour of the engaged subjectivity of the genealogist; in Derrida, authorial reinscription coincides with his attempt to move beyond critical reading toward autobiographical literature. With hindsight, it appears that it is the becoming-author of the critic that is actually at issue. ;However, this revisionary phase has been largely neglected, and Barthes, Foucault and Derrida are continually invoked to underwrite critical resistance to the author. From the Russian Formalists onward, literary theory has shown itself incapable of accommodating authorial subjectivity. As such, the question of the author increasingly presents itself as the question of theory, of its adequacy as a descriptive science of literature and discourse in general. (shrink)

The centerpiece of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is the analysis of what Foucault terms the “repressive hypothesis,” the nearly universal assumption on the part of twentieth-century Westerners that we are the heirs to a Victorian legacy of sexual repression. The supreme irony of this belief, according to Foucault, is that the whole time that we have been announcing and denouncing our repressed, Victorian sexuality, discourses about sexuality have actually proliferated. Paradoxically, as Victorian (...) as we allegedly are, we cannot stop talking about sex. Much of the analysis of the first volume of the History of Sexuality consists in an unmasking and debunking of the repressive hypothesis. This unmasking does not take the simple form of a counter-claim that we are not, in fact, repressed; rather, Foucault contends that understanding sexuality solely or even primarily in terms of repression is inaccurate and misleading. As he said in an interview published in 1983, “it is not a question of denying the existence of repression. It’s one of showing that repression is always a part of a much more complex political strategy regarding sexuality. Things are not merely repressed.”1 Foucault makes this extremely clear in the introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, when he writes. (shrink)

Over the past fifteen years there has been a considerable amount of debate concerning what theoretical population dynamic models tell us about the nature of natural selection and drift. On the causal interpretation, these models describe the causes of population change. On the statistical interpretation, the models of population dynamics models specify statistical parameters that explain, predict, and quantify changes in population structure, without identifying the causes of those changes. Selection and drift are part of a statistical description of population (...) change; they are not discrete, apportionable causes. Our objective here is to provide a definitive statement of the statistical position, so as to allay some confusions in the current literature. We outline four commitments that are central to statisticalism. They are: 1. Natural Selection is a higher order effect; 2. Trait fitness is primitive; 3. Modern Synthesis (MS)-models are substrate neutral; 4. MS-selection and drift are model-relative. (shrink)

Abstract: In this study, I propose to examine Marty’s reconstruction of the general framework in which Brentano develops his theory of consciousness. My starting point is the formulation, at the very beginning of the second chapter of the second book of Brentano’s Psychology, of two theses on mental phenomena, which constitute the basis of Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects. In the second part, I examine the objection of infinite regress raised against Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects (...) and Marty’s interpretation of Brentano’s theory of the unity of consciousness. The third part bears on the important distinction between implicit and explicit consciousness, which Brentano introduces in his lectures on descriptive psychology. Here, I analyse Marty’s principle of individuation in light of the modifications which Brentano made to his theory of consciousness after the publication of his Psychology in 1874. The last section is an examination of Marty’s conception of consciousness as self-consciousness with respect to his principle of individuation. (shrink)

This volume is a wonderful introduction to Foucault and a testimony to the deep humanity of the man himself.

In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...) it. My defense of the Statistical Interpretation relies on a distinctive feature of causation. Causes conform to the Sure Thing Principle. Trait fitness distributions, I argue, do not. *Received July 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy/Institute for the History, Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the College de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced both in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended and in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault sets out to study the emergence of this new technology of power over population."--BOOK JACKET.

Language and the birth of "literature." A preface to transgression. Language to infinity. The father's "no." Fantasia of the library.--Counter-memory: the philosophy of difference. What is an author? Nietzsche, genealogy, history. Theatrum philosophicum.--Practice: knowledge and power. History of systems of thought. Intellectuals and power. Revolutionary action: "until now.".

'A fabulous journey through thirty years of political and intellectual ferment... will reorient our reading of Foucault's major works' Didier Eribon The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offers the definitive collection of his articles, interviews and seminars from across thirty years of his extraordinary career. This first volume, Ethics, contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, as well as key writings and candid interviews on ethical matters: from the role of the intellectual (...) and philosopher in society to friendship, sexuality and the care of the self and others. Edited by Paul Rabinow Translated by Robert Hurley and Others. (shrink)

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of (...) the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds. (shrink)

"Next to Sartre's Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years." -- Library Journal.

In this remarkable book Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of recent times, calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance.

Between the first and the second volume of The History of Sexuality there is a gap of eight years in which Foucault did not publish anything except interviews. Analyzing some of those interviews, the article reconstructs the reasons that lead Foucault to abandon the thematization of power’s constraints imposed on the subject and start to elaborate an ethics in which the subject can be rid of him or herself thorough a care of pleasure. Arguing how this change does (...) not represent for Foucault a denying of his previous work but its evolution, the article shows that, despite Foucault’s attempt to establish a discourse other than psychoanalysis, his ethics of sexuality unwittingly returns to the “force” that psychoanalysis recognizes as animating sexuality. (shrink)

According to a prominent view of evolutionary theory, natural selection and the processes of development compete for explanatory relevance. Natural selection theory explains the evolution of biological form insofar as it is adaptive. Development is relevant to the explanation of form only insofar as it constrains the adaptation-promoting effects of selection. I argue that this view of evolutionary theory is erroneous. I outline an alternative, according to which natural selection explains adaptive evolution by appeal to the statistical structure of populations, (...) and development explains the causes of adaptive evolution at the level of individuals. Only together can a statistical theory of selection and a mechanical theory of development explain why populations of organisms comprise individuals that are adapted to their conditions of existence. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy, Culture contains a rich selection of interviews and other writings by the late Michel Foucault. Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, (...) and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.[…]Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.[…]In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies.Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization , The Birth of the Clinic , Discipline and Punish , and History of Sexuality , the first volume of a projected five-volume study. (shrink)

Psychological individualism is motivated by two taxonomic principles: (i) that psychological states are individuated by their causal powers, and (ii) that causal powers supervene upon intrinsic physiological state. I distinguish two interpretations of individualism--the 'orthodox' and the 'alternative'--each of which is consistent with these motivating principles. I argue that the alternative interpretation is legitimately individualistic on the grounds that it accurately reflects the actual taxonomic practices of bona fide individualistic sciences. The classification of homeobox genes in developmental genetics provides an (...) illustration. When applied to the taxonomy of psychological kinds, alternative individualism has some surprising consequences. In particular, externalist taxonomies of thought are consistent with the alternative interpretation, and hence consistent with individualism. I conclude, on this basis, that the individualism/externalism dispute which has long preoccupied philosophy of psychology is an empty one. (shrink)