Progressive Geographies

Paul Rabinow on Foucault & the Contemporary

– the host is a bit lacking but Rabinow is probably the most important intellectual of our time…

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley), Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He is perhaps most famous for his widely influential commentary and expertise on the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He was a close interlocutor of Michel Foucault, and has edited and interpreted Foucault’s work as well as ramifying it in new directions.

Rabinow is known for his development of an “anthropology of reason”. If anthropology is understood as being composed of anthropos + logos, then anthropology can be taken up as a practice of studying how the mutually productive relations of knowledge, thought, and care are given form within…

I will be summarising and commenting on the most recently published of Michel Foucault’s lecture series at the Collège de France, on subjectivity and truth (Subjectivité et Vérité. Cours au Collège de France, 1980-1981. Eds. François Ewald, Allesandro Fontana and Frédéric Gros. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2014). As with the series I’ve just finished on the punitive society, I will proceed lecture by lecture, with two posts for lectures I find stimulate the most elucidation and commentary. That is the case for the first lecture.

Lecture of 7th January 1981
Foucault begins with a discussion of texts with passages on elephants, which refer to their supposed sexual restraint and marital devotion. At this point he does seem like a thinker invented by Borges, the French philosopher who introduces discussion of truth, subjectivity and is it turns out sexuality and desire, with elephant fables. This may not be an accident, Foucault brings Borges…