Progressive Geographies

Foucault’s Confessions,
May 4-June 3 2021
Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 a.m.,
free and open to the public.
For more information and to register, visit foucaultsconfessions.org.

(See also this news item on the Rice University site)

Over five weeks in the month of May and the beginning of June, an international group of scholars will engage the work of Michel Foucault at the intersection of ethics, power, and Christianity in the context of the 2018 Éditions Gallimard publication of Les Aveux de la chair and its 2021 translation as Confessions of the Flesh. Foucault’s work and biography are not without controversy and we invite both critical and charitable engagement from speakers and audience members.

This series of virtual talks will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:00 Houston/12:00 NYC/18:00 Paris & Johannesburg. Each session will last one hour, featuring a speaker’s paper for 30-45 minutes, and…

Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor – University of Minnesota Press, translated by Robert Nichols, March 2021

The politics of dispossession are everywhere. Troubling developments in intellectual property, genomics, and biotechnology are undermining established concepts of property, while land appropriation and ecological crises reconfigure basic institutions of ownership. In The Dispossessed, Daniel Bensaïd examines Karl Marx’s early writings to establish a new framework for addressing the rights of the poor, the idea of the commons, and private property as a social institution.

In his series of articles from 1842–43 about Rhineland parliamentary debates over the privatization of public lands and criminalization of poverty under the rubric of the “theft of wood,” Marx identified broader anxieties about customary law, property rights, and capitalist efforts to privatize the commons. Bensaïd studies these writings to interrogate how dispossession continues to function today…

Foucault Studies, Number 29, 9 April 2021
Special Issue: Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh

Editorial
Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Bregham Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Varena Erlenbusch, Alex Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, Robin Holt, Leonard Richard Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, Edward McGushin, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Giovanni Mascaretti, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Annika Skoglund, Dianna Taylor, Martina Tazzioli

Special Issue: Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh

Confessions of the Flesh – Guest Editors’ Introduction
Agustín Colombo, Edward McGushin
1-5

Foucault’s Concept of Confession
Philippe Büttgen
6-21

Foucault’s Queer Virgins: An Unfinished History in Fragments
Lynne Huffer
22-37

Fascinating Flesh: Revealing the Catholic Foucault
James Bernauer
38-47

Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh
How the Fourth and Final Volume of The History of Sexuality Completes Foucault’s Critique of Modern Western Societies

Portrait of Paul M. Rabinow by Saâd A. Tazi, during his Blaise Pascal professorship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris.

Christopher Ying, UC Berkeley professor emeritus Paul Rabinow dies at age 76, The Daily Californian, April 11, 2021

Paul Rabinow, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology and world-renowned anthropologist, died April 6 at the age of 76 in his Berkeley home.

Rabinow spent about 41 years at UC Berkeley between 1978 to 2019, serving as the director of anthropology for the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and as the former director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.
[…]

Rabinow is most well-known for his commentary on the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault, with whom he worked while Foucault was in Berkeley in the early 1980s.