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Foucault's political philosophy

Foucaultova politička filozofija

Author(s): Daniel Binswanger / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 1-2/2012

Što se motiva tiče koji me vodio, on je vrlo jednostavan… To je radoznalost – jedina vrsta radoznalosti, u svakom slučaju, koju vrijedi prakticirati s nešto upornosti: ne ona koja teži za asmiliranjem onoga što valja spoznati, već ona koja dopušta da se odljubimo od sebe samih. Što bi vrijedilo navaljivanje spoznavanja ako bi ono jedino osiguravalo stjecanje znanja a ne bi omogućivalo u izvjesnoj mjeri, i koliko je to moguće, gubljenje-lutanje onoga koji spoznaje? Ovi redovi potječu iz predgovora drugom tomu Povijesti seksualnosti pod naslovom Upotreba užitaka. Njih je promuklim glasom izgovarao Gilles Deleuze jednog lipanjskog jutra 1984. godine u dvorištu bolnice Pitié-Salpêtrière. Velikani pariške filozofije tu su se sastali kako bi odali posljednju počast preminulom Michelu Foucaultu.

Foucault’s Genealogy of Power

Fukoova genealogija moći

Author(s): Ivan Milenković / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 01+04/2006

Keywords: power; relation; knowledge; authority; violence; discipline; monitoring;

This paper tries to show that Michael Foucault is a great thinker of power who de-substantializes the power itself. Rejecting the metaphysical constructions that always presuppose only one, central, big Power, Foucault insists that power is always relative, that every refering on power is actually refering on relations of power, so it should be always analyzed as an empirical phenomenon. As a relation, power differs from violence becouse violence is a lack of relation, and from the authority as a selfreflecting power. Therefore, the knowledge appears to be the connected unseparably with power, as something always involved in power relations, same as the power relations are always some kind of relations of knowledge.

Foucault's pleading for liberalism

Foucaultov zagovor liberalizma

Author(s): Mario Kopić / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 2/2014

Foucault’s Mapping of History

Foucaultovo mapiranje povijesti

Author(s): Thomas Flynn / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 1-2/2014

Sva Foucaultova glavna djela su svojevrsne povjesnice, pa je zbog toga on svojevrsni povjesničar. Izazov je onda kako odrediti kojom se poviješću on bavi i kakva je on vrsta povjesničara. Srećom, Foucault je koristio zasebne pojmove za svoje specifične pristupe u raznim fazama svoje karijere. Rani radovi, zbog kojih je stekao reputaciju, nazvani su »arheologije«, a kasniji »genealogije«; knjige o povijesti seksualnosti koje su objavljene kad je umro nazvao je »problematizacije«.

Parrésia Vs. phronesis: Foucault and political today

Parrésia vs. phronesis: Foucault i političko danas

Author(s): Žarko Paić / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 07+09/2013

Kada se govori o zadaći filozofije u suvremeno doba često se pod time podrazumijeva nešto drugo od njezina povijesno uspostavljenoga sklopa: da nije, naime, riječ tek o smislu ili svrsi (telos) mišljenja o bitku kao takvome, već o događaju kojim mišljenje nadilazi bitak ili ga već uvijek mijenja u obzorju vremenitosti. Zadaća filozofije nije nešto izvanjsko samoj filozofiji. U jedinstvu mišljenja i djelovanja ne radi se o prvenstvu jednog nad drugim. Parmenidov znameniti izrijek da bitak jest i da bez mišljenja koje iskazuje ono što jest bitak sam ne može biti ono što jest pretpostavlja već uvijek dvoje. Prvo, filozofija misli svijet iz događaja primarne otvorenosti bitka samoga da bi uopće mogla biti imenovana filozofijom. Drugo, kazivanje o bitku nije nikad tek logičko podudaranje riječi i stvari. Ponajprije je riječ o istini doga|aja. Riječi postaju stvarima zahvaljujući događaju.

MADNESS AND MARGINALITY IN PATRICIA DUNCKER’S HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT

MADNESS AND MARGINALITY IN PATRICIA DUNCKER’S HALLUCINATING FOUCAULT

Author(s): Andrea Kriston / Language(s): English / Issue: 09/2010

The goal of this paper is to make an incursion into Paul Michel’s (fictional schizophrenic writer) brain, trying to decipher the cause of his insanity and his homosexuality. The story described oscillates between Michel the novelist and his Reader and Muse, Foucault, who swaps places with another Reader, the young scholar.

Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions

Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions

Author(s): Nancy Fraser / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/1981

L'attention de l'auteur se porte sur l'analyse du pouvoir et de la connaissance par Michel Foucault. La réalisation majeure de Foucault consiste en un exposé empirique nourri des premières étapes de l'émergence de quelques modalités particulièrement modernes du pouvoir. Ses aperçus ont une signification politique importante et résultent de sa méthode généalogique unique de la description sociale et historique de micropratiques. Mais par la même occasion, son mode d'analyse fait naître de graves problèmes, dont le principal est de trouver le moyen de procéder à une critique politiquement engagée sans faire usage d'un cadre normatif. L'auteur cherche à déterminer précisément quels sont les aperçus empiriques de Foucault, comment sa méthode généalogique mène à de sérieux problèmes et à quelles questions politiques et normatives il faut encore faire face. Die Autorin konzentriert sich auf Michel Foucaults Analyse von Macht / Wissen. Foucaults wertvolle Einsichten bestehen in einer reichen empirischen Beschreibung der frühen Stadien der Entstehung einiger spezifisch moderner Formen der Macht. Diese seine Einsichten sind von wesentlicher politischer Relevanz; sie sind das Ergebnis seiner ungewöhnlichen genealogischen Methode einer sozialen und historischen Beschreibung von Mikro-Praktiken. Sein Verfahren der Analyse jedoch führt zugleich zu schwerwiegenden Problemen. Diese sind zentriert um das Problem, wie eine politisch engagierte Kritik ohne Voraussetzung eines normativen Rahmens möglich ist. Die Autorin versucht genau zu bestimmen, worin Foucaults empirische Einsichten bestehen, inwiefern sein genealogisches Vorgehen zu ernsthaften Problemen führt und welche politischen und normativen Fragen noch zur Lösung anstehen.

Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir Wittig, and Foucault

Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir Wittig, and Foucault

Author(s): Judith Butler / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/1985

Keywords: Monique Wittig; Michel Foucault;

If gender is the corporealization of choice, and the acculturation of the corporeal, then what is left of nature, and what has become of sex? If gender is determined in the dialectic between culture and choice, then what role does “sex” serve, and ought we to conclude that the distinction between sex and gender is anachronistic? Has Beauvoir refuted the original meaning of her famous formulation, or was that declaration more nuanced than we originally guessed? To answer, we must reconstruct Beauvoir’s distinction between sex and gender, and consider her theory’s present life in the work of Monique Wittig who considers the distinction anachronistic. We will then turn to Michel Foucault’s rejection of the category of “natural sex,” compare it with Wittig’s position, and attempt a reformulation of gender as a cultural project.

Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse

Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse

Author(s): Isaac D. Balbus / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/1985

Keywords: Michel Foucault; Nancy Chodorow; Dorothy Dinnerstein; Jane Flax;

In this essay I stage a confrontation between the genealogy of Michel Foucault and the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Jane Flax and myself. I am obliged to resort to this artifice because — as far as I am aware — none of the parties to this confrontation has ever before addressed the position of the other: the feminist psychoanalytic theorists have yet to make the discourse of Foucault the object of their critique of masculine discourse as a simultaneous reaction to and denial of the power of the mother, and neither Foucault nor his followers have extended their deconstruction of the disingenuous discourse of “the True” to the discourse of the theorists of “mothering.” This confrontation is by no means arbitrary, however, because we shall see that from a Foucauldian perspective the discourse of the mother looks like a paradigm case of a “disciplinary” True Discourse, while from a feminist psychoanalytic standpoint the Foucauldian deconstruction of True Discourse betrays assumptions that can only be characterized as a classically male flight from maternal foundations. If feminism necessarily embraces these foundations, then a Foucauldian feminism is a contradiction in terms. I shall argue that this opposition between feminism and Foucault can be resolved in favor of feminism and — in part — against Foucault. This argument will entail a demonstration that there are aporias or internal inconsistencies in the Foucauldian position that can only be overcome through a reformulation of this position that would require us (a) to distinguish between libertarian and authoritarian True Discourses and (b) to assign the feminist mothering discourse to the former rather than the latter category. Thus Foucault’s discourse points — against itself — to the power of the very feminist discourse it would undermine.

Foucault Reads Freud: The Dialogue with Unreason and Enlightenment

Foucault Reads Freud: The Dialogue with Unreason and Enlightenment

Author(s): Szymon Wróbel / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2010

Keywords: dialogue; enlightenment; freedom; history; sexuality; psychoanalysis

The title of the essay refers to the famous statement in Foucaults introduction to his History of Madness where he writes that "we have to do justice to Freud". The problem, however, is that Foucault's philosophy does not seem to do justice to Freud. Foucault's use of Freud is ambiguous: sometimes he uses him for purely instrumental purposes (when reconstructing the history of madness and sexuality), but sometimes-for anthropological purposes signaling Freud's role in redefining our common humanity and particularly our relation to language, life and work. The author confronts Foucault's ambiguous reading of Freud with the equally ambiguous reading of Foucault by Derrida. Derrida discusses Foucault twice. Once in the essay Cogito and The History of Madness in which Derrida takes on Foucault's understanding of Descartes and his role in the exclusion of madness from the realm of reason. The second time-in his essay To Do Justice to Freud. Here Derrida disagrees with Foucault whether Freud managed to reestablish the body's communication with reason which Descartes destroyed.

Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault – discourses analysis

Erving Goffman i Michel Foucault – analiza dyskursów

Author(s): Andrzej Borowski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 01/2013

Keywords: symbolic interactionism; discourse analysis; total institutions; power

Functioning of the man in extreme conditions posed by some social institutions was a subject of many scientific studies so far. Among them some works are taking the special place E. Goffman and M. Foucault. Every school of the power should be so checking the total structure of action influencing action/ interaction/s other in special cases and of oppositions and dodge with which this action is connected. Using to such a school analytical categories Goffman’s neosymbolic of interactionism in the microsociological aspect and coming from Foucault’s discourse analysis in the macrosocjological aspect a novelty especially in examinations can constitute of total institutions associated with the authority of the state.

The Philosopher on the Barricade. Michel Foucault and the Intellectualization of Social Protest

Rozum na barykadzie. Michel Foucault i intelektualizacja społecznego protestu

Author(s): Karol Franczak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2016

Keywords: Michel Foucault; Intellectualization of Social Protest; Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons; Discourse; Power; Public Sphere

The main scientific objective of the paper is to investigate the problematization of protest, resistance, and explosions of social discontent in the discourse of European symbolic elites. The analysis of three dimensions of the intellectualization of protest serves to answer the following questions: how is protest shaped as an object of intellectual discussion, how it gains the attention of symbolic elites, and how intellectuals support social protest and make it a subject of public attention. The second objective is to identify the paradoxes and dilemmas of the intellectualization of protest on the example of Michel Foucault and the organization Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. Following Foucault’s case, the author argues that the protest cannot avoid symbolic appropriation by those who claim to be its greatest advocates, and elites declaring themselves to be social critics are often uncritical towards their ideological positions.

Foucault on Power and Government

Фуко за властта и управляването

Author(s): Paul Patton / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 3-4/2016

Keywords: Foucault; power; government; governmentality; relation of forces; action on the actions of others; neoliberalism

This paper examines the transformation in Foucault’s conception of power that began in 1976 and concluded with his definition of power as action on the action of others in 1982. His 1976 lectures raise series of questions about the nature of power: what is power? How is it exercised? Is it ultimately a relation of force? Only some of these questions are answered in the course of these lectures. Foucault’s answer to the question about the nature of power and the appropriate means to analyze it is not forthcoming until “The Subject and Power” in 1982. I argue that the new definition of power offered reflects the discovery of governmentality in 1978 and the lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality that followed. I conclude with some remarks about the consequences of this new conception of power for Foucault’s approach and for his analysis of neoliberal governmental power.

Foucault and the Uses of Lying

Фуко за употребите на лъжата

Author(s): Stiliyan Yotov / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 3-4/2016

Keywords: transgression & authenticity; genealogy; knowledge (connaisance) & illusion; error; lie; pouvoir-savoir; regimes of truth; stratagems of truth; truthfulness (Wahrhaftigkeit); governmentality; conduct

The interest in the genealogy and in the history of power shared by Foucault and Nietzsche raises the question about the status and the meaning of lying in Foucault’s work. This article is an effort to reconstruct his attitude to this topic, which appears in many places of the discussion but everywhere overshadowed by other problems, especially by those of the truth. It’s the turn in Foucault’s understanding of the truth what motivates me to split the text in two parts. In the first I trace out the stage of his studies devoted to the transgression by which the Self could achieve certainty in itself. But the main accent stresses the discovering of Nietzsche, made by Foucault, against the background of his own conception of knowledge management. No doubt that the following syntheses between power and knowledge leads to temptations to recognize the uses of lying as a justified tool, what Foucault finds out by himself in some praxis of psychotherapy, but also denounces as delusive and counterproductive. The second part deals with the changes in Foucault’s genealogy, occurring with the reevaluation of the governmentality as a different kind of power exercises and uses of truth. Here I reconstruct the appearance of a series of new concepts, constructed and experimentally implemented by Foucault, which helps to discover the main moments of the so called “subjectification” as a peculiar reshaping of the borders between true and untrue. The culmination of this part is devoted to the practices, in which the authenticity presupposes (increasingly) personal disclosure and fearlessness and, on this ground, the use of half-lies and half-truths seems permissible because in the end it doesn’t mix truth with lie.

Fourier, Reich, Foucault – Sexuality in the Shackles of Power?

Fourier, Reich, Foucault – seksualność w okowach władzy?

Author(s): Krzysztof Matuszewski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 36/2016

Keywords: sexuality; power; capitalism; social criticism; utopia

What is the relationship between sexuality and power? The three philosophers analyzed in the paper are among the most important contributors in this area. Fourier conceives sexuality as an aspect of sovereign drives of desire, which are oppressed by Civilization. The antidote takes the form of a full deliverance of passions, realized as Harmony projected by Fourier. Reich perceives sexuality as oppressed by the united forces of patriarchy, authoritarian religion and capitalist production. In his principal polemics with the more conservative Freud he postulates the sexual emancipation, that in Reich is more significant than in Feuerbach and Marx. Foucault contests the repression hypothesis popular in Western discourse and replaces the classical definition of power as a negative dispositive with his idea of the positive power, verbalizing the sexuality. His conception appears to be conciliatory but remains in the horizon of the critique of power. Although socialized, it does not separate itself from the repression, but pacifies and perverize it, making it more transparent, useful and efficient.

M. Foucault: About Madness as Historical Condition

Foucault: Apie Istorijos Atstumtą Beprotybę

Author(s): Stanislovas Mostauskis / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 61/2009

Keywords: Foucault; madness; pathology of mind; non-existence; differential gesture; anthropological type;

The purpose of this article is to sketch the ontology of history suggested by the scholar of the postmodern mind, Michel Foucault, and at the same time to provide one of the possible answers to the question, “What most general assumptions have determined the modern type of human?”. The argued hypothesis is as follows: the concrete anthropological type named the Western human can be named through the relation with contents, the rejection of which has established the assumptions for the origin of that type. Foucault distinguishes between a “dialectic” perception of historical development based on selfevolving “positive” powers from something what doesn’t exist positively, but has power to establish such positive condition. Such separation is based on a fundamental ontological presumption: subsistence is not just a space that belongs to history, including all existing and possible positive facts. Subsistence is also that fertile emptiness which only allows the latter ones to exist. In other words subsistence is emptiness that can’t be grasped positively; it is nothingness rewarded with ontological authority.

What Support? Foucault, Power, and the Construction of Rape

What Support? Foucault, Power, and the Construction of Rape

Author(s): Aliraza Javaid / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

Keywords: Voluntary Agencies;Surveillance;Subjectivity;Victim Blame;Stigma;

This paper is concerned with the social and cultural constructions of male rape in voluntary agencies, England. Using sociological, cultural, and post-structural theoretical frameworks, mainly the works of Foucault, I demonstrate the ways in which male rape is constructed and reconstructed in such agencies. Social and power relations, social structures, and time and place shape their discourses, cultures, and constructions pertaining to male rape. This means that constructions of male rape are neither fixed, determined, nor unchanging at any time and place, but rather negotiated and fluid. I theorize the data—which was collected through semi-structured interviews and qualitative questionnaires—including male rape counselors, therapists, and voluntary agency caseworkers. The theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that frame and elucidate the data contribute to sociological understandings of male rape.

Subject in the work of Michel Foucault – the reflexive subject and governmentality theory

Subject in the work of Michel Foucault – the reflexive subject and governmentality theory

Author(s): Milan A. Urošević / Language(s): English,Serbian / Issue: 1/2020

Keywords: Michel Foucault;subjectivity;reflexivity;the self;government;

By examining Foucault’s understanding of the subject we will try to answer whether his work is better viewed as a form of theoretical continuity or discontinuity. We begin by elaborating his basic theoretical notions. After that we analyze the relationship between the subject and government in the second period of his work. We continue by analyzing the relationship between the subject and government through the notion of the “government by the truth” which he introduces in his third period. The last chapter deals with some contradictions of Foucault’s understanding of the subject in his third period. We conclude by stating that Foucault’s work overcomes the traditional sociological divide between the micro and the macro levels of the social world.

„Society of control. Discursive practices in ‘Discipline and Punish’ by Michel Foucault”

„Society of control. Discursive practices in ‘Discipline and Punish’ by Michel Foucault”

Author(s): Paulina Kłos-Czerwińska / Language(s): English / Issue: 8/2019

Keywords: subject; discipline; punishment; control; docile bodies

According to Michel Foucault cultural patterns in discursive practices differ and reflect the discursive apriori, or episteme, of a given epoch. Episteme is a notion introduced by Foucault in order to explain changing systems of thought, it indicates “the underlying orders, or ‘conditions of possibility’ which regulate the emergence of various scientific or pre-scientific forms of knowledge during specific periods of history. These ‘epistemological fields’ give rise to ‘diverse forms of empirical science’” (Foucault 2009: 168). The work titled “Discipline and Punish” is the example of such an empirical approach to history, where all the rules, scientific or pre-scientific forms of knowledge are revealed. The book written by Foucault is a systematic and specific analysis of discursive practices that work in societies of control. Foucault analyzes many such practices starting from severe punishment of the convicted Damiens in 1757, through the hierarchic supervision and normative sanction at the turn of XVIII and XIX century, and ending with the explanations of the workings of contemporary discipline societies with its oppressive rigor in schools, hospitals and prisons.In my presentation I would like to describe these different discursive formations and practices that have been in use in the past or present societies and to present them as certain cultural patterns characteristic to various cultures and societies on different levels of development.

MICHEL FOUCAULT ON THE CARE FOR ONESELF IN THE NEOPLATONISTS

MICHEL FOUCAULT DESPRE GRIJA FAȚĂ DE SINE LA NEOPLATONICI

Author(s): Adriana Neacșu / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 35/2015

Keywords: care for oneself; self-knowledge; self-culture; truth; condition of spirituality; art to live; Plato; the Neoplatonists;

This study deals with the concept of caring for oneself and its relationship with the precept of self-knowledge in the Neoplatonists, as they were approached by Michel Foucault in The Hermeneutics of the Subject and The History of Sexuality volumes II and III. It points out the fact that according to Michel Foucault, the Neoplatonists remain broadly loyal to oneself care concept developed by Plato in his dialogue Alcibiades. In this sense, it highlights both the common elements and those that differentiate the Neoplatonists from Plato. It deals with the causes which developed significant changes in the Neoplatonists’ vision on the care for oneself. It emphasizes the importance of the concept of caring for oneself in Michel Foucault in the context of his interest for the complex relationship between the subject of knowledge and truth.