The LA Review of Books has a theme section on Althusser – which includes a new translation of a lecture on Rousseau from 1972, and six essays including ones by Nina Power, Jason Barker and Richard Seymour. The whole Rousseau course from the ENS is forthcoming in translation from Verso in 2017.
The revised manuscript of Foucault: The Birth of Power has been resubmitted. The desk is clear again… Full update tomorrow.
The Arts of Logistics, 3 & 4 June 2016 Queen Mary University of London
Keynotes: Deborah Cowen & Alberto Toscano
“The Arts of Logistics” brings together scholars, activists, and artists from across the humanities and social sciences to interrogate how social movements and the arts respond to a world remade by logistics. Long an important topic for economists, management theorists, and sociologists, logistics is only recently emerging as an object of substantive study by artists and researchers in the humanities. Thus, this conference seeks to further define scholarly, political, and artistic conversations on the nexus of political economy, anti-capitalist struggle, and art.
Come and join for presentations in disciplines such as human geography, art history, architecture, literature, performance and critical theory. In additions to keynote and panel presentations, there will be a book launch and reception.
Free but registration required.
Another long day revising Foucault: The Birth of Power. Further work restructuring the introduction and some rewriting, and a bit more tweaking in the conclusion. Some of this is undoing the work done over the past couple of days and trying again. Moments when you wonder why something is where it is, move it, delete it or rework it, and then a few pages later realise exactly why it was like that. So, retrace the steps and revise again. It’s a couple of months since I submitted the manuscript, and while I can remember the content well, the detailed architectonic is – at least for me – harder to keep in mind when I’m not working on it so intensely. I’ve now printed a complete clean version of the manuscript, for a read through on paper. I only do this at a very late stage – this is only the third time in total – and I find I always see things on a page that I don’t on a screen. It’s also good to get a break from the computer, though I did manage a decent bike ride today too.
I’ll read it tomorrow and see where I am then. I’m also revising my book chapter on Farge and Foucault’s Le désordre des familles, following some comments from Nancy Luxon, the editor of Archives of Infamy (the companion volume to the forthcoming English translation).
In 2015 Les Études Philosophiques published a theme issue on Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir, which included an early draft of the book’s Introduction.
Baptiste MÉLÈS – Présentation
Michel FOUCAULT – « Introduction » à L’Archéologie du savoir. Texte établi et introduit pa Martin Rueff
Luca PALTRINIERI – L’archive comme objet : quel modèle d’histoire pour l’archéologie ?
Jean-François COURTINE – Michel Foucault et le partage nietzschéen : Vérité/Mensonge
Baptiste MÉLÈS – Les « règles de formation » comme catégories foucaldiennes
David RABOUIN – L’exception mathématique
The Introduction is to a different draft of the text than the one preserved in Bibliothèque Nationale de France box NAF28284 (1) – the introduction to that version was published in Cahier de l’Herne in 2011. This one comes from box NAF28730 (48). Martin Rueff, who edited the introduction in this theme issue, provides a detailed discussion of the extant draft materials in the recent Oeuvres.
Lots of work over the past two days on this second Foucault manuscript. In particular, the introduction is restructured, some parts rewritten and some new discussion. I say a bit more about the sources worked with, and the argument and approach up front; and then a bit more on the period to be discussed, both in range of topics, types of work and styles of output at the end. There is also a little more discussion of the manuscript of the first version of The Archaeology of Knowledge, though a detailed discussion will have to wait for a project on the 1960s Foucault. I’ve also written a few more lines into the conclusion, both summarising things and expanding on Foucault’s self-description as an ‘artificer’. Lots of minor changes, and some more explicit signposting of the argument. More work tomorrow…
Update September 2025: the Berfrois site is now closed and the archive has been removed. My piece can now be found here.
At the Berfrois website I have a short essay discussing Foucault’s Last Decade, both in terms of its content and the research process that I followed. I also say a bit about the second book – Foucault: The Birth of Power.
Foucault’s Last Decade is a study of Foucault’s work between 1974 and his death in 1984. In 1974, Foucault began writing the first volume of his History of Sexuality, developing work he had already begun to present in his Collège de France lecture courses. In that first volume, published in late 1976, Foucault promised five further volumes, and indicated some other studies he intended to write. But none of those books actually appeared, and Foucault’s work went in very different directions. At the very end of his life, two further volumes of the History of Sexuality were published, and a fourth was close to completion. In contrast to the originally planned thematic treatment, the final version was a much more historical study, returning to antiquity and early Christianity. In this book, I trace these developments, and try to explain why the transition happened…
New issue of Society and Space, including an essay by Lauren Berlant, first delivered at the AAG conference in 2015.
Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World And Other Writings is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. This is a book I’ve found very helpful in thinking about the ‘world’, and wrote about in an article in 2008 for Parrhesia. Its English translation is long overdue.
Eugen Fink is considered one of the clearest interpreters of phenomenology and was the preferred conversational partner of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Play as Symbol of the World, Fink offers an original phenomenology of play as he attempts to understand the world through the experience of play. He affirms the philosophical significance of play, why it is more than idle amusement, and reflects on the movement from “child’s play” to “cosmic play.” Well-known for its non-technical, literary style, this skillful translation by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner invites engagement with Fink’s philosophy of play and related writings on sports, festivals, and ancient cult practices.
Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Insuring Life: Value, Security and Risk, the third volume in his trilogy on these questions, is forthcoming in May in the Interventions series at Routledge. At the moment it is only a very expensive hardback – £90 for 156 pages – but a paperback is due at the end of the year.
This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification, and gendering that constitute life insurance products and practices.
Insuring Life offers a critical engagement with the epistemology of life insurance to demonstrate the unnecessary and precarious character of the conditions that make this instrument of liberal governance possible. It concludes that the transcendence of liberalism relies on the technological agency of these instruments and that its challenge begins by redefining the terms under which the potential of life, if invaluable, is to be thought as event.
The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. It will be of great use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students of political economy, critical security studies and political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics.
