Séminaire organisé dans le cadre des activités pédagogiques et de recherche du Département de Philosophie de l’Université de Paris 8, du LLCP (EA, 4008), du GRAF (Groupe de Recherche sur les Archives Foucaldiennes), du Collège international de Philosophie, et du séminaire permanent « Foucault à Paris 8 ». Activité soutenue par le Centre Michel Foucault et la revue materiali foucaultiani.
La généalogie comprise comme méthode surgit tardivement dans le corpus nietzschéen, dans La Généalogie de la morale en 1887, et ne procède pas directement de l’élaboration du concept d’inactualité, ni de celui d’histoire, tels du moins qu’ils sont déployés dans la deuxième Considération inactuelle (1874). L’histoire de l’élaboration des…
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism through which these transformations can be explored. Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic operations shape the government of self and other. They explore the emergence of algorithmic reason through rationalities, materializations, and interventions, and trace how algorithmic rationalities of decomposition, recomposition, and partitioning are materialized in the construction of dangerous others, the power of platforms, and the production of economic value. The book provides a global trandisciplinary perspective on algorithmic operations, drawing on qualitative and digital methods to investigate controversies ranging from mass surveillance and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the UK to predictive policing in the US, and from the use of facial recognition in China and drone targeting in Pakistan to the regulation of hate speech in Germany
The original (1985) edition of this work attempted to cover the main lines of development of phonological theory from the end of the 19th century through the early 1980s. Much work of importance, both theoretical and historiographic, has appeared in subsequent years, and the present edition tries to bring the story up to the end of the 20th century, as the title promised. This has involved an overall editing of the text, in the process correcting some errors of fact and interpretation, as well as the addition of new material and many new references.
Review: Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality 4)
Michel Foucault, edited by Frederic Gros and translated by Robert Hurley
Vintage, $17 (paper)
When Foucault died from complications of AIDS, he left the series entitled History of Sexuality at least one volume shy of completion. For decades since, ardent readers of Foucault have fantasized that they would receive an “answer” from the sky once they could read the unpublished book, Confessions of the Flesh. Sometimes, I joined them. Now it has been published, in both French and English, and they—we—have in our hands as much as Foucault wrote of what might have been. Is this stitched-together volume an “answer” from the sky? Was shouting Foucault’s name a question?
The book has traveled a winding road to publication. In 1976, on the back…
Edward (E.P.) Thompson and Dorothy Thompson resources page on the Verso site
Edward and Dorothy Thompson were historians and activists. They met in 1945, and worked together on the international youth brigade which helped to build the railway in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Soon afterwards they married and settled in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where they both taught in extramural adult education. They made a dynamic and idealistic team, determined to use their considerable energy to create a better world. A succession of houses in Yorkshire and the English midlands were constantly filled with interesting people and lively discussion. Alongside their work as historians, writers and teachers, Edward and Dorothy worked tirelessly for the peace movement, being early supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and founder members of the later European Nuclear Disarmament, which encouraged dialogue across the iron curtain. Both of them published seminal works in their fields, and each was the other’s first editor and critic.
Includes bibliographies and other resources, including some audio and video
Update June 2025: a revised and expanded version of this post is here.
Between 1967 and 1968 Louis Althusser and some of his students delivered a course at the ENS pitched as philosophy for scientists or non-philosophers.
Some parts of the course have been published, including Alain Badiou’s Le concept du modèle in 1969 and Michel Fichant and Michel Pécheux, Sur L’histoire des sciences shortly afterwards. Badiou’s text was reissued by Fayard in 2007 and translated as The Concept of Modelby re:press that same year.
These early volumes indicate others to follow, including an Introduction by Althusser, Expérience et Expérimentation by Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar, and a Conclusion provisoire.
The series as listed in the Badiou and Fichant/Pécheux volumes
Between Badiou’s book and the Fichant/Pécheux one the structure of the series changed, with François Regnault withdrawing his contribution, and the third and fifth volumes being merged. Of the second plan, only Althusser’s Introduction was published, as Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (1967), but only in 1974; translated in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. The French text is, I think, out of print, but available on Gallica.
Pierre Macherey is very good on the history of the course and the series, in a piece translated in Parrhesia in 2009. He indicates that a fifth lecture which Althusser planned for the concluding volume was published posthumously in Althusser’s Écrits philosophiques et politiques, under the title ‘Du coté de la philosophie’.
In that piece, Macherey mentions that the original roneotypes of the course materials were available at the ENS archives, donated by Balibar. But at some point they have also been made available online to read or download at archive.org
Louis Althusser. Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques organisés à l’Ecole normale supérieure
Papier. Documents ronéotypés. 175 f. 325 x 240 mm.
Cours organisés par Louis Althusser : 5 cours de Louis Althusser, 3 cours de Pierre Macherey, 3 cours d’ Etienne Balibar, et 1 cours de François Regnault.
The first page is below.
I found this out because I’m interested in some earlier Althusser seminars, particularly the 1962-63 one where he spoke about Foucault (Balibar’s notes from that are at IMEC). The 1964-65 seminar led to the famous Reading Capital volume. Some of the Althusser texts mentioned above, and the Badiou one, are reasonably well known. The Fichant and Pëcheux volume is interesting for some of the debates about epistemology and science which Foucault and Canguilhem were involved with. But the availability of the archive material was news to me, which is what prompted this post.
I’ll be speaking about my ongoing Foucault work, and particularly the book on the 1960s, in an online seminar for the University of Cambridge on 31 January 2022 at 5-6.30pm. The public registration link for the seminar is here.
Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel, la thèse principale de Jean Hyppolite, publiée pour la première fois en 1946, constitue une véritable opération de transfert culturel qui a permis à des générations d’étudiants et de chercheurs d’approcher l’œuvre de Hegel.
A welcome reedition of Hyppolite’s classic text, long out of print.
Daniele Lorenzini, The Normativity of Biopolitics Working draft of a talk delivered at the Dutch-Belgian Foucault Circle on 24 February 2021.
As was predictable, the coronavirus pandemic has contributed to the emergence of a new series of analyses centered on Michel Foucault’s notions of biopower or biopolitics. In this talk, I won’t draw any distinctions between the two notions (because Foucault himself doesn’t), and just use them interchangeably to indicate the specific form and mechanisms of power that aim to protect, manage, and enhance the biological life of the population. However, the re-appropriation of the notions of biopower and biopolitics by politicians, journalists, and public intellectuals today also gave rise to many—more or less problematic—misunderstandings and misreadings of Foucault. If anything, I hope that my talk will shed some light on what these uses of Foucault’s notions of biopower and biopolitics misunderstand and overlook. At the same time, however, I…
This seminar provides an opportunity to review contemporary critical studies inspired by the philosophy and theory of Louis Althusser
This seminar comprises three papers:
1. Alya Ansari, In Excess of The Text: The Logics of Capital and Literary Form
Literary attempts to represent production and surplus-value inevitably grapple with the fundamental difficulty of typifying the mechanisms of an exploitative economic system that always presents an image distinct from its actual operation, appearing in a partial and concealed way. These literary representations of production and surplus-value are autographic—that is, their representation is mimetic, and inevitably so given the considerable rift between capital’s representation and its reality—but rarely allographic, rarely moving the reader to animate the revolutionary idea. This essay elaborates Althusser’s conception of “symptomatic reading” in order to demystify the literary archform that forecloses adequate knowledge of capital’s governing logics within the literary mode of production. Animating symptomatic reading using Deleuze’s notion of expression, I respond to Pierre Macherey’s call for a properly literary philosophy by centering the formal distinction between autographic and allographic literary forms as integral to the intellectual production of adequate knowledge about capital. As such, this paper interrogates how and why philosophy and its attendant revelations offer such a special kind of resistance to being presented in popular literary form.
2. T. L. McGlone, Décalage as Subterranean Concept in Reading Capital
In Reading Capital, Louis Althusser and his students generated a series of concepts which now possess some renown in Marxist circles: overdetermination, structural causality, symptomatic reading. The term décalage (variably translated as “discrepancy” and “dislocation,” though it can be rendered as “gap” or “lag”) has received only a fraction of the attention of other major terms of Reading Capital. In this presentation, I argue that décalage functions as a ‘subterranean concept’ in Reading Capital, a notion integral to the text’s argument even though its full meaning is never explicitly outlined. Focusing on the contributions of Macherey and Balibar, I highlight how décalage is crucial for explaining Reading Capital’s implicit methodology—a methodology essential to the text’s attempts to present a non-teleological account of conceptual development. More crucially for the present political moment, in Balibar’s essay especially the notion of décalage undergirds a flexible but conceptually rigorous theory of social change responsive to contemporary changes in the state, mass movement organizing, and global regimes of capitalist accumulation. Décalage provides Marxist thinkers and militants with a basis for analyzing apparent ‘exceptions’ to the rules of capitalist economic and state development, maintaining a crucial balance between conceptual rigor and intellectual fluidity.
3. Dr. Samuel J.R. Mercer, ‘The Ideology of Work’ between the Writings of Louis Althusser
In his text On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Louis Althusser references an appendix to the text, which remains either lost or unfinished: an appendix titled ‘The Ideology of Work.’ Inspired by the potential contents of this appendix, this paper discusses how Althusser has – and might have – considered the relationship between ideology and work within his writings and what the consequences of this consideration may be for the Marxist sociology of work today. The paper suggests the co-existence of two discussions of the ‘ideology of work’ between Althusser’s writings, constructed at similar times: one grounded in an analysis of ideology as the product of state apparatus (found in On the Reproduction of Capitalism); another grounded in ideology as an epistemological obstacle (found in The Humanist Controversy). The paper argues that the sociology of work has implicitly reproduced a harmful separation of these two analyses in its own thinking about the relationship between work and ideology, productive of economistic and humanist deviations of which it cannot make sense. The paper concludes with a call to revisit the tensions present in Althusser’s understandings of ‘the ideology of work’, with a view to reconstructing a method useful for the Marxist sociology of work.
The speakers are:
Alya Ansari is a PhD candidate in the program in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, with a graduate minor in Moving Image, Media, and Sound Studies. Her dissertation asks after the self-effacing operation of the capitalist mode of production as understood through the comparative narrative semiotics of 19th and 21st century labor/social/historical novels. Her research mobilizes Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “expression” in order to chart the deconstructive logic already at work in the capitalist mode of production, drawing from the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza to develop an immanent understanding of the value-form in the lineage of Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, John Milios, and Panagiotis Sotiris.
T. L. McGlone is a PhD student in the Philosophy graduate program at Villanova University. His work focuses on political concepts of historical change from a Marxist perspective, drawing primarily on recent thinkers such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Paulin Hountondji, as well as philosophers of modernity including Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and G. W. F. Hegel. He is an editor at Negation Magazine.
Samuel Mercer is a lecturer in social policy at Liverpool Hope University, researching at the intersection between Marxist epistemology and sociology. His current research tracks the effects of theoretical humanism within the sociology of work and employment. His most recent publications include ‘The Ideology of Work and the Pandemic in Britain’ (Rethinking Marxism, http://rethinkingmarxism.org/Dossier2020/) and ‘Humanism and the Sociology of Post-Work’ (Economy & Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2021.1938881).
The session is chaired and introduced by Dhruv Jain
