Live and let die: did Michel Foucault predict Europe’s refugee crisis? (2016)

Stephane Baele on the refugee situation in Europe.

Clare O'Farrell's avatarFoucault News

Stephane J Baele, Live and let die: did Michel Foucault predict Europe’s refugee crisis?, The Conversation, February 25, 2016

In March 1976, philosopher Michel Foucault described the advent of a new logic of government, specific to Western liberal societies. He called it biopolitics. States were becoming obsessed with the health and wellbeing of their populations.

And sure enough, 40 years later, Western states rarely have been more busy promoting healthy food, banning tobacco, regulating alcohol, organising breast cancer checks, or churning out information on the risk probabilities of this or that disease.

Foucault never claimed this was a bad trend – it saves lives after all. But he did warn that paying so much attention to the health and wealth of one population necessitates the exclusion of those who are not entitled to – and are perceived to endanger – this health maximisation programme.

Biopolitics is therefore the…

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Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College reviewed at NDPR

9780226188546.jpgMichel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 is reviewed at NDPR.

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9 Critical Theory books that came out in March 2016

Another useful roundup from critical-theory.com – Guattari, Agamben, and more…

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Posted in Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

No joke – Foucault’s Last Decade is officially published today

0745683924Foucault’s Last Decade is officially published today. The date is mere coincidence. If you order direct from Wiley – Polity’s distributor – then the book should be sent now. Other online retailers will be getting copies shortly. Thank you to everyone who has followed this project from its inception to completion.

Foucault: The Birth of Power, which looks at the work from 1969-75, and so acts as a kind of prequel, should be out in early 2017 – the full manuscript is currently under review.

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Academic Exam Questions – JOUR 101: Academic Journal Protocols

JOUR 101: Academic Journal Protocols

Answer all questions. Please.

Time allowed: four weeks. Six will be fine, actually, and to be honest, any time that suits you in the next three or four months will probably have to do. Just please do take the exam and send us your answers.

Part A: Referees

1. Provide an explanation, utilising a wide range of reasons, for why you have not delivered the referee report you agreed on time. Inventiveness of excuses may score extra points.

2. Critically assess why your guess that this author was, probably, a referee for your failed grant application two years ago led you to write a report of this animosity.

3. Three months ago you suggested that a paper was returned to the author with a ‘revise and resubmit’ decision. Why are you now unwilling to review the revision?

Part B: Authors

4. In 2013 your paper was conditionally accepted, subject to revisions. Please provide a justification for your decision not to actually make those revisions, nor to withdraw the paper from the journal.

5. To what extent was your decision not to resubmit your manuscript a reflection on referee E’s comments?

6. Critically discuss the difference between a) agreeing to do a book review, receiving the book, and not delivering the review; and b) theft.

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Autumn and Winter 2016-17 talks – Foucault, Shakespeare and Terrain

My attempt at keeping the diary clear of talks between January and September this year is just about holding. The last seminar I gave was on Foucault and health research and activism in January, and with the exception of three small events in April and May – a roundtable contribution on representation at the UCL IAS, an internal seminar there, and a panel discussion of Sur les toits at Warwick – the next major talk is in September.

This will be to speak at the Spindel Conference at University of Memphis. I will be giving a much-developed version of a talk that had a trial run last year: “Foucault and Shakespeare: Ceremony, Theatre, Politics”. Papers from this event will be published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy.

In October, I’ll again be speaking on Shakespeare at a conference on Early Modern Literary Geographies, held at the Huntington Library in California. The draft title is “Denmark, Norway, Poland: Regional Geopolitics in Hamlet” – part of a chapter of the Shakespearean Territories project.

In December I’ll be taking a trip to Gießen, Germany, to give a keynote lecture to the International Research Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig-Universität. There will be a workshop on my work the next day.

In February 2017, it will be back up to Durham to give a public lecture at the Institute of Advanced Study. This will be under the ‘scale’ annual theme, but I expect that both in Durham and in Gießen my main focus will be terrain and territory.

I will likely attend the AAG meeting in Boston in March 2017, perhaps combining it with a couple of other events in the USA. In April, there will be the London Review of International Law annual lecture; and on 27 April I will be at National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Again, I  expect most of these talks will relate to terrain in some way.

My attempt with these talks has been to get them to coincide with the larger writing projects. On this plan I get the chance to talk about Shakespeare a couple more times while that is my major writing focus, and don’t have to break from that work until December. Then, towards the end of the year and at the beginning of 2017, when I expect my research and writing will shift to the terrain work, I have some clear deadlines for when I need to have parts of the writing ready.

In the past few years, I’ve ended up giving 20-25 talks per year. I might keep 2016 to below 10. As ever, all the details for forthcoming  talks are here.

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Michel Foucault, Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature reviewed at NDPR

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Also at NDPR, Michel Foucault, Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, is reviewed by Mark Olssen.

I have a review of this collection, written some time ago, which is still forthcoming.

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Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects reviewed at NDPR

9781441174758Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, is reviewed by Rick Dolphijn, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (open access).

 

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Judith Butler, Tanner lectures at Yale on Interpreting Non-Violence

“Interpreting Non-Violence” will be the theme of the 2016 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which will be delivered by Judith Butler, a noted philosopher and gender theorist.

Her first talk — “Why Preserve the Life of the Other?” — will be on Wednesday, March 30, at 5 p.m. The second, “Legal Violence: An Ethical and Political Critique” takes place March 31 at 5:30 p.m. Both talks will be held in the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC) auditorium, 53 Wall St. Karuna Mantena, associate professor of political science, will introduce Butler on Wednesday and deliver a response after her second lecture. Butler will be joined by Yale scholars Paul North, professor of Germanic language and literature, and Jason Stanley, the Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, for further discussion on Friday, April 1, at 10:30 a.m. at the WHC.

Full details here. I have no details, but these lectures are usually recorded and made available online after the event. I’ll share a link if/when I see it.

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New Materialism: Politics, Aesthetics, Science video – University of Westminster 10 March 2016

University of Westminster 10 March 2016 – New Materialism: Politics, Aesthetics, Science event video

New Materialism is currently having a profound effect across disciplines. Rooted in post-marxist thinking, but spreading out on the flat ontology of networks, objects and bodies, New Materialism is an interdisciplinary discussion on the properties of matter in terms of agency, ethical responsibility and immanence. Along with post-humanism, the Anthropocene, non-representational theories and post-Deleuzian thought, New Materialism asks us to reconsider the nature of the human and the non-human, the difference between actual and virtual, the emergence of politics and law in the face of ubiquitous materiality, and above all, the new responsibilities that come with it all.

PANEL SPEAKERS

Westminster School of Media, Art & Design
Mercedes Bunz, Senior Lecturer Things are not to blame: Technical Agency in Times of High Capitalism
Christian Fuchs, Professor of Social Media
New Cultural Materialism
Mirko Nikolic, Doctoral Candidate Unhuman Love: A Post-Capitalist Politics Of Desire

Westminster Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities
Elisabetta Brighi, Lecturer Invisible Matters and the Illusions of Security
David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, From Humanising the World to “Worlding” the Human
Ben Pitcher, Senior Lecturer Isis iconoclasm and rocks and stones in material culture

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