In this study of space and power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s, Rabinow uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how social environment was perceived and described. Ranging from epidemiology to the layout of colonial cities, he shows how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, health and welfare administration, and social legislation.

In Marking Time, Paul Rabinow presents his most recent reflections on the anthropology of the contemporary. Drawing richly on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and, most interestingly, German painter Gerhard Richter, Rabinow offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars examining cutting-edge practices in the life sciences, security, new media and art practices, and other emergent phenomena. Taking up topics that include bioethics, anger and competition among molecular biologists, the lessons of the Drosophila (...) genome, the nature of ethnographic observation in radically new settings, and the moral landscape shared by scientists and anthropologists, Rabinow shows how anthropology remains relevant to contemporary debates. By turning abstract philosophical problems into real-world explorations and offering original insights, Marking Time is a landmark contribution to the continuing re-invention of anthropology and the human sciences. (shrink)

In his series of essays on Kant written during the 1980s, Michel Foucault attempted to discern the difference today made with respect to yesterday. As his essays as well as his lectures during the early 1980s demonstrate, he was drawn — and devoted the bulk of his scholarly efforts to a renewed form of genealogical work on themes, venues, practices and modes of governing the subject and others — to experiments in new forms of friendship, sociability and transformations of the (...) self and others that he saw taking shape, or imagined were taking shape around him. This work, which has come to be known unfortunately as the ‘late Foucault’, arose out of deep dissatisfaction with his own life conditions, the broader political climate of the time, and a profound and unexpected rethinking not only of the specific projects he had intended to carry out but of what it meant to think. This article explores some of the elements at play during these deeply formative several years, which as they unfolded were in no way intended to constitute a ‘late Foucault’, quite the opposite, even if fate would have it otherwise. The article begins with a ‘prelude’ that introduces the problem of what mode is appropriate for giving form to thinking. It proceeds to argue that Foucault engaged in a struggle to redefine the object of thinking; that in order to do so he was led to pursue a venue in which such thinking could be practised; and finally to an increasingly articulate and acute quest for a form that would constitute a difference between what Foucault diagnosed as an impoverished modern problem space and a future in which things might be different and better.If we define spirituality as being the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject, then we can say that the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begin when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject. (shrink)

This book is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole. To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method - "interpretative analytics" - capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent (...) validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition. (shrink)

This article explicates a valuable but undernoticed point of contact between John Dewey and Michel Foucault. Both agreed that thinking arose in the context of problems such that the work of thought for both proceeds by way of working through and working over problems. Both affirmed that thinking arose in problematic situations; that it was about clarifying those situations, and that ultimately it was directed towards achieving a degree of resolution of what was problematic in the situation. Both agreed that (...) thinking—or inquiry—was not fundamentally about the representations of a situation; either those produced by a contemporary thinker or as an exercise directed at historical materials. Both agreed that a history of ideas as autonomous entities, distorted not only the process of thinking as a practice, but also the reasons for which it had been engaged in, often with a certain seriousness and urgency, the first place: that is to say, such approaches covered over the stakes. Both agreed that the stakes involved something experiential and entailed a form of logic (or in Foucault’s later vocabulary a mode of ‘veridiction’), in which the thinker could not help but be involved. (shrink)

The problem reduced to its lowest terms is whether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course the logical standards and forms to which further inquiry shall submit.Gilles Deleuze, in his book What Is Philosophy? asks: "What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?" (Deleuze and Guattari 28). I imagine few in this audience would disagree with (...) that claim. The changing, historically situated, interplay of concepts and problems is a register that those inspired by the work of John Dewey can readily acknowledge as pertinent even if what Dewey meant by each of the terms and what Deleuze meant .. (shrink)

_Designs on the Contemporary_ pursues the challenge of how to design and put into practice strategies for inquiring into the intersections of philosophy and anthropology. Drawing on the conceptual repertoires of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and John Dewey, among others, Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis reflect on and experiment with how to give form to anthropological inquiry and its aftermath, with special attention to the ethical formation and ramifications of this mode of engagement. The authors continue their prior (...) explorations of the contemporary in past works: How to conceptualize, test, and give form to breakdowns of truth and conduct, as well as how to open up possibilities for the remediation of such breakdowns. They offer a surprising and contrasting pair of case studies of two figures who engaged with contemporary breakdowns: Salman Rushdie and Gerhard Richter. Approaching Richter’s artistic struggles with form and technique in the long wake of modernism and Rushdie’s struggles to find a narrative form—as well as a form for living—to respond to the Iranian fatwa issued against him, they show how both men formulated different new approaches to anthropology for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Today, somewhat counter-intuitively, we no longer have an obvious venue for thinking-in-the world about our actuality. Despite, or because of, the endless conferences, seminars, mobility, publication outlets, new media and the like in which it is easier and easier to be connected, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the diagnostic that it is harder and harder to relate. This Foreword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ considers the contemporary problem of the inversion of connectedness and relatedness in the (...) light of Marilyn Strathern’s oeuvre. Proceeding from a discussion of the three kinds of friendship distinguished by Aristotle, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of conceptual persona is invoked as a way of thinking through conceptual friendship and the forms of relationality that an engagement with Strathern’s work requires and sustains. (shrink)

Michel Foucault, during the early 1980s, devoted the bulk of his scholarly efforts to a renewed form of genealogical work on themes, venues, practices, and modes of governing the self and others. This work came to be known unfortunately as the “late Foucault”. This essay explores some of the historical elements at play during this deeply (re)formative years. The essay is organized around a prelude that introduces the problem of what mode is appropriate for giving form to thinking. It argues (...) that Foucault engaged in a struggle to redefine the object of thinking. In doing so, he was not only led to pursue a venue in which such thinking could be practiced, but also to an increasingly articulate and acute quest for a form that would constitute a difference between what Foucault diagnosed as an impoverished modern problem space and a future in which things might be different and better. (shrink)

Studies the social science of moral inquiry as an attempt to develop a psychology and sociology that would explain the complex in terms of the simple as the new physics was doing in the natural realm.

Michel Foucault is generally considered one of the most brilliant and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his writing has remained unpublished and/or unavailable in English. It is only recently that the French publisher Gallimard issued Dis et Ecrits, the first complete collection of everything Foucault published outside of his monographs. Ethics, the first of three volumes in the collection, provides a lucid and accessible overview of Foucault's work. Included in the first section of this volume are (...) his groundbreaking analyses of penal institutions, psychiatry, "biopolitics," and the modern subject. A second section contains interviews, along with Foucault's key writings on ethics. Winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award. (shrink)

In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanisms of domination, demonstrating how conflict within (...) the self lies at the heart of Foucault's life and work. (shrink)

Reviews : Clare O'Farrell, Foucault—Historian or Philosopher? ; James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought ; Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment ; Jonathon Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.

First, it is clearly a great honor to our society that Paul Rabinow has agreed to present the Coss Dialogue Lecture for 2012. His work in the field of what he has termed "the anthropology of the contemporary" has reached out to otherwise diverse traditions in anthropology and philosophy in order to incorporate their best elements into a novel approach to the logos of anthropos. His case-based studies have focused on the relations between the physical sciences and the (...) human sciences, and especially between the efforts of scientists working in the fields of synthetic biology and the efforts of those working in the fields of the human sciences who take it as their task to evaluate the ethical and other diagnostic .. (shrink)

In some previous work, I tried to give a concept-based account of the nature of our entitlement to certain very basic inferences (see the papers in Part III of Boghossian 2008b). In this previous work, I took it for granted, along with many other philosophers, that we understood well enough what it is for a person to infer. In this paper, I turn to thinking about the nature of inference itself. This topic is of great interest in its own right (...) and surprisingly understudied by philosophers. A correct understanding of inference promises to shed light on a number of important topics. In particular, it threatens to undermine the sort of concept-based story about entitlement to which I had previously been attracted. (shrink)

Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...) integrated within physical science generally. My purpose in this paper is to explore these projections, especially as they bear on (1) the principal elements of common-sense psychology: the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and (2) the conception of rationality in which these elements figure. (shrink)