Foucault News

Foucault et la psychanalyse : Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 50 ans après?

Samedi 24 novembre 2012, Amphi Buffon, Université Paris Diderot
15 rue Hélène Brion
75013 Paris
Métro, RER C et bus : arrêt : Bibliothèque François Mitterrand.

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Seminar 10: Foucault and the critique of our present: reworking the Foucauldian tool-box.

Michael Dillon – “Foucault: Political Spirituality and the Courage of Truth”

Description: “What is this present which I belong to?”. This was the question asked by Foucault recalling Kant’s writing on the Enlightenment. This is also the interrogation that a Foucaultian gaze on the present specific context/spaces should pose again. In Foucault’s view, the practice of a history of our present is primarily conceived as a critical attitude towards the configuration of power relations given at a certain time, that is as an effective challenge of the ways in which our lives are governed. Then, the history of the present and the critique are (in turn) grounded on a genealogical posture, aiming at making all evidence unacceptable. In this way, as Foucault remarked in 1978, the critique can be conceived as “the art of the voluntary disobedience, of the reasoned indocility. Therefore, the function of the critique would be the disassujettissement in the play of what could be named a politics of truth”.

Related to the couple critique-history of our present a broad Foucaultian vocabulary has emerged: governmentality, counter-conduct, and biopolitics are only some of the Foucaultian notions closely linked to the question of our present and to the will of “not to be governed in such a way”.

The aim of this seminar will be to trace out and to “update” this range of notions, reworking them in the light of postcolonial challenges, new practices of struggle and political technologies. Thus, the aim is neither to test the viability of the Foucaultian grid in our present, nor to undertake a philological route exploring Foucault’s concepts, but rather to put these notions at work in present and heterogeneous contexts. Secondly, it’s through the twofold axis of space and knowledge that we will try to highlight the spaces for critique that a Foucaultian vantage point could open and make visible today. However, in the place of a coherent Foucaultian grid/approach to take on, we also claim the ‘right’ to a partial and instrumental use of Foucault’s tool-box: consequently, the very concept of “use” needs to be rethought not in terms of an application of methods and concepts to our diagram of analysis but instead as a way of ‘playing with’ some of Foucault’s perspectives, also pushing them up to their geographical/historical/political limits and making them resound in different spaces.

Related to that, it’s the very meaning of critique which should be reframed: what does it signify today to put into practice an effective critique of the regime of knowledge and truth which shapes our conducts? If according to Foucault the first step consists in “making visible what is visible”, now perhaps we should ask whether this is enough or if the task of the critique becomes most of all the capacity to spur us to act, shaking what is given as unquestionable evidences.

Among the notions that we will tackle: Counter-conduct, Critique, Government and Governmentality, History of the present, Regime of truth, Subjectivation.
Event Information

Location: 250, Richard Hoggart Building
Cost: FREE
Department: Politics
Time: 26 March 2013, 16:00 – 18:00

Next events:

Emanuele Leonardi – May 17th – “Biopolitics as Method: The Biopolitical&Capitalist Nature of Contemporary Environmental Crisis”

Ottavio Marzocca – May 22nd

With thanks to Yari Lanci

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Philosophy Seminars 2013
The Writing and Society Research Centre and Philosophy@UWS present:

Vanessa Lemm, A Biopolitical Reading of the Philosophical Life in Michel Foucault’s Le courage de la vérité

University of Western Sydney,
Bankstown Campus, Building 3, Room 3.G.54
20 March 2013
3.30-5pm

Abstract:

This paper investigates the relation between truth and the philosophical life in Michel Foucault’s Le courage de la vérité from the perspective of the Nietzschean question: how truth can be incorporated or embodied (einverleibt)? In contrast to the Arendtian idea that the philosophical life was a life that allowed a distance to the body, in order to avoid the problem of totalitarianism, the filling of the empty place of power or sovereignty by the “body” of the People, or what Esposito calls the closure of the political body on itself, this papers argues that in Foucault, and in particular, in his analysis of the philosophical life of the cynics, we finds an idea of the philosophical life where truth is incorporated or embodied. Here the immunitary and communitary resources of embodiment are shown to be necessary for the uniting of life (zoe) and philosophy so as to make possible a form of life (bios) that resists and overcomes the totalitarian government of life.

BIO: Prof. Vanessa Lemm (UNSW) is the author of Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham 2009, Spanish trans. with Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile, 2011; German trans. with Diaphanes, Berlin/Zuerich, 2012). She has published a great number of articles on Nietzsche and contemporary political thought. She is currently working on the notion of justice in Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as the relation between life and community in Nietzsche and Esposito.

entire 2013 program of the Philosophy seminar series at UWS 2013

Source: Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy

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Un clandestin philosophique : le freudo-marxisme français.
Luca Paltrinieri (CIRPP/CIRPHLES)

Séminaire “Archives de la philosophie française”.
8 mars 2013, 17h-19h,
salle séminaires du Pavillon Pasteur,
45 rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris.

Mouvement populaire et militant, le freudo-marxisme français ne semble pas relever de la tradition philosophique. Pourtant, il est difficile de comprendre le succès de Marcuse en 1968, ou encore les attaques de Foucault à Reich et sa polémique indirecte avec Deleuze, sans se pencher sur la singularité d’une réception toute française des idées freudo-marxistes.

En nous aidant des notions de « champ » et de « constellation », nous poserons quelques jalons d’une histoire qui commence avec les surréalistes et connaît son âge d’or pendant les années 1970. Nous verrons alors comment cette réception, qui s’est faite par les biais les plus disparates et les trajectoires les plus invraisemblables, pose la question de marges territoriales et disciplinaires de la philosophie, révélant ainsi la bataille continuelle pour définir le partage entre la « grande pensée » et son dehors.

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