I’ll be speaking at the University of Sussex on 7 December 2018 on ‘Foucault before The History of Madness – Lectures, Translations, Nietzsche’. The talk draws on the research i’ve been doing for The Early Foucault. The ‘translations’ are ones made by Foucault and colleagues, not of Foucault.
Before this event I’ll be discussing Foucault: The Birth of Power with a smaller group who have been reading that book.
Thanks to Anna Gumucio Ramberg and Bal Sokhi-Bulley for this invitation.
The long-awaited volume V of Georges Canguilhem, Oeuvres complètes, Critique No 195-196 – the tribute issue to Georges Bataille from 1963; Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III; Farzaneh Haghighi, Is the Tehran Bazaar Dead? Foucault, Politics, and Architecture (sent by the publisher) and Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey.
Shannon Brincat is running a tribute page to Robert W. Cox at Progress in Political Economy. Tributes from Anna Agathangelou, Andreas Bieler, Shannon Brincat, Richard Devetak, Richard Falk, and many others. More tributes are welcomed.
The Brooklyn Rail is proud to host a panel discussion and film screening in honor of Paul Virilio’s (1932-2018) life and the influence his work has had on a generation of thinkers. The evening will begin with a rare screening of the short film “Itineraries of Catastrophe” – a conversation between Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer. The panel, moderated by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and will include McKenzie Wark, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, and David Levi Strauss, with introductions by Nichols Goodeve.
Thanks to dmf for the link.
New issue of Foucault Studies – including a new translation of a Foucault interview from 1979, and a review of Les aveux de la chair, among many other pieces.
The 25th issue of Foucault Studies, Foucault and Philosophical Practice, has now been published. (September 2018)
The journal is open source.
The issue amounts to no less than 23 contributions and a sum total of more than 400 pages. In addition to the special issue on “Foucault and Philosophical Practice”, comprising four articles with a shared introduction, the issue contains a section with eight original articles, a review section, and a section containing a significant interview with Foucault from 1979 published in English as well as in French plus contextualizations by both the translators and the the original interviewer.
Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary, Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament – OUP, March 2019
Breaking new ground in scholarship on gender and politics, Performing Representation is the first comprehensive analysis of women in the Indian parliament. It explores the possibilities and limits of parliamentary democracy and the participation of women in its institutional performances.
Offering a new, multi-method analysis of the gendered nature of India’s parliament through an examination of electoral data, media reports and life stories of women Members of Parliament it sheds light on the performance, aesthetics, and norms of parliamentary life. It explores how the gendered axis of power underpins the performance of parliament and its Members as well as the political economy in which they are embedded. The book makes a strong case for taking parliamentary politics seriously in these times of populism, without either a utopian framing of women MPs as challengers of masculinised institutional politics or seeing them simply as docile actors in a gendered institution.
Performing Representation raises critical questions about the politics of difference, claim-making, representation and intersectionality. It addresses these questions as part of global feminist debates on the importance of the women’s representation in political institutions.
Historical Materialism 15th Annual Conference – 8-11 November 2018, SOAS, London
Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] – Heyday 2019. This is the famous/infamous memoir of Simeon Wade, with a foreword by Heather Dundas.
In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically…of ‘an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people.’” This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade—ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. Led by Wade and Wade’s partner Michael Stoneman, Foucault experimented with psychedelic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth.
Foucault and Wade in 1975 – click to see full picture from Boom California.
Foucault in California is Wade’s firsthand account of that long weekend. Felicitous and often humorous prose vaults readers headlong into the erudite and subversive circles of the Claremont intelligentsia: parties in Wade’s bungalow, intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest (whose denizens call Foucault “Country Joe”); and, of course, the fabled synesthetic acid trip in Death Valley, set to the strains of Bach and Stockhausen. Part search for higher consciousness, part bacchanal, this book chronicles a young man’s burgeoning friendship with one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
It’s a great subtitle, certainly, but the cover is perhaps a little disappointing, especially when there are such great photos of Foucault on this ‘trip’. Simeon Wade died in October 2017, but shortly before his death he took part in a fascinating interview with Heather Dundas. It’s available in Boom California – which also has some of the photos.
Another picture of Foucault with Wade and Stoneman was used for a feature in Time magazine in 1981, and can be seen here. The ‘Chez Foucault’ fanzine by Wade – an interesting document and the only English source of an interview is available here.
CFP: From Sense to Machinic Becoming – the 12th Annual Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference
Royal Holloway, University of London 8-10 July 2019
The year of the 12th Annual Deleuze & Guattari conference marks the 50th anniversary of three crucial events in the development of their work that would have lasting impact: Deleuze’s publication of his second major work The Logic of Sense; Guattari’s composition of his ‘Machine and Structure’, which critically reviewed both that work and Deleuze’s earlier Difference and Repetition; and the pair’s first face-to-face meeting. The conference theme aims to capture this important point of transition that sees the close of Deleuze’s earlier solo career and the beginning of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration, which brings with it their break with structuralism and psychoanalysis as well as explorations of whole new areas of aesthetics, ethics, politics, archaeology, science, evolutionary theory, and more.
Full details here
Shakespearean Territories was due to be published this week, but there is a slight delay – apparently due to the printer and to paper shortages in the US (this really is a thing).
It should available very soon, hopefully in the next week or two, and I’ll post here when available.
