Robinson, Bob. "Michel Foucault: Ethics." (INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) does not understand ethics as moral philosophy, the metaphysical and epistemological investigation of ethical concepts (metaethics) and the investigation of the criteria for evaluating actions (normative ethics), as Anglo-American philosophers do. Instead, he defines ethics as a relation of self to itself in terms of its moral agency. More specifically, ethics denotes the intentional work of an individual on itself in order to subject itself to a set of moral recommendations for conduct and, as a result of this self-forming activity or “subjectivation,” constitute its own moral being.

The classical works of Foucault’s ethics are his historical studies of ancient sexual ethics in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, in addition to the late interviews “On the Genealogy of Ethics” and “The Ethics for the Concern of Self as a Practice of Freedom.” The publication of his final three lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1982-3 considerably enhance how those texts are to be understood and provide original resources. The Hermeneutics of the Subject provides greater insight into the ancient ethics of caring for self and how Foucault perceives it in relation to the history of philosophy. Both The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth – his final courses, respectively – make it manifest that he considered the ancient ethical practice of parrhesia or frank-speech central to ancient ethics and, indeed, important to his own philosophical practice.

The significance of this so-called ‘ethical turn’ for Foucault’s philosophy is displayed in the controversial terms through which he ultimately expressed the purpose of his work. He lays claim to the spirit of the tradition of critical philosophy established by Immanuel Kant, and Foucault purports to exemplify this spirit by disclosing, or telling the truth about, the historical conditions of the contingent constraints that we impose on ourselves and, in doing so, opening possibilities for autonomous ethical relations. Foucault’s claim to the spirit of critical philosophy has received, and continues to receive, criticism and considerable discussion in the scholarly literature. Of central concern are the compatibility of his claim to critical philosophy as an ethical practice and his broader views about subjectivity, and whether his critical analysis of modern ethics is meant to be merely descriptive or also evaluative.

The primary focus of this article is the nature of ethics as Foucault conceives it, and it is unpacked by discussion of his published historical studies of ancient Greek and Roman ethics. The article then considers his treatment of the ancient ethical injunction of the care of the self and parrhesia, transitioning into a presentation of, and opinions about, his alleged ethical turn and the contentious role that ethics might play in his critical philosophy. . . .

http://www.iep.utm.edu/fouc-eth/

Twelfth Annual Meeting, Foucault Circle, Canisius College, March 30-April 1, 2012.

Papers on any aspect of Foucault's work, and studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking, are all welcome. We will aim  for a diversity of topics and perspectives in the program selection.

The meetings typically begin with an informal welcoming reception on  Friday evening. There will be morning and afternoon paper sessions on  Saturday, followed by dinner and a business meeting. The conference will conclude with paper sessions on Sunday morning. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined—papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes, preferably 15).

In conjunction with our meeting in Buffalo, a city in which Foucault conducted research on the prison, this year's conference will include a session dedicated to discussing documents from the GIP (le Groupe d’information sur les Prisons, a French prison reform organization that Foucault co-founded). English translations of the texts will be available.

http://foucault.siuc.edu/cfp.htm

"Radical Foucault," Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, September 9, 2011.

Keynote Speakers:

Stuart Elden, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University, one of the founding editors of Foucault Studies;
Mark Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University, author of The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (Routledge, 2009)

The publication of Michel Foucault's Lectures at the College de France, 1983-84 in English will be complete in April 2011 and his first College de France lecture course, La Volunté de Savoir, will be published for the first time in February. The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London is holding a an international conference which will re-assess Foucault's contribution to radical thought and the application of his ideas to contemporary politics. What does it mean to draw on Foucault as a resource for radical politics, and how are we to understand the politics which implicitly informs his work?

Many commentators today would seem to claim Foucault as the theorist of a politics which eschews all utopian ambition in favour of a certain governmental pragmatism, while others would claim him for a rigorous but ultimately rather simple libertarianism: can either of these positions ever be adequate to the radicalism of Foucault's analyses? Does it matter?

What is the significance of Foucault s ideas of governmentality and biopolitics in understanding his later oeuvre and its implications; do either of these terms deserve to carry the weight attributed to them by some commentators? What is the ongoing relevance of Foucault's account of disciplinarity: is, it, as Lazzarato has claimed, a historical category no longer fully applicable to contemporary forms of power?

How can Foucauldian ideas be brought bear on the analysis of austerity politics? Is there a role for Foucault's ideas in formulating effective resistance to the increasing erosion of civil liberties that operates both within countries and across state boundaries? Can the notion of bio-power account for contemporary forms of racism? How can Foucauldian epistemology enable an understanding of the biopolitics of contemporary scientific discourse?

Subjects may include, but are not limited to:

Foucauldian thought and contemporary subjectivation
Foucault and other thinkers
Governmentality and everyday life
Strategic discourses of war and terror
New technologies of the self
Foucault and new forms of resistance
Heterotopias now and in the future
Foucault and the erosion of the state
Disciplinary society and the society of control
Foucault, British politics and the 'big society'
Foucault, post-Fordism and post-democracy

http://uel.ac.uk/foucault/

Coe, Cynthia D. Review of Dianna Taylor, ed. MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS. NDPR (June 2011).

Taylor, Dianna, ed.  Michel Foucault: Key Concepts.  Chesham: Acumen, 2011.

Michel Foucault: Key Concepts is an anthology by contemporary Foucault scholars explaining and applying, as the title suggests, Foucault's most important ideas. The volume is divided into three parts -- power, freedom, and subjectivity -- with four essays addressing each topic. Taken as a whole, the essays provide succinct and insightful explanations of Foucault's contributions to our understanding of those concepts as well as demonstrations of how they can be put to use, both within Foucault's own work and in original applications. Particular attention is paid to the concepts associated with works from Foucault's "middle" and "late" periods: discipline, assujettisement, biopower, power/knowledge, parrhēsia, and the care of the self. Although the introduction begins by highlighting the unsystematic nature of Foucault's work, the essays together reveal the strong connections between the forms of analysis Foucault pursued and the concepts he developed to address those questions.

In addition to presenting a fascinating exposition of Foucault's work, the essays constitute a sustained defense of the political importance of his thought, in response to critiques from Nancy Fraser, Charles Taylor, Nancy Hartsock, and Jürgen Habermas (among others). These critiques have often culminated in the claim that Foucault's positions on power, agency, and freedom undermine the possibility of political activity in the service of any normative vision whatsoever; to the extent that Foucault attempts to avoid moral nihilism in critiquing disciplinary power or offering alternative models based in the care of the self, for instance, he is engaging in "crypto-normativity" (Habermas' term in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1992).

As Dianna Taylor claims in the introduction, Foucault challenges us to understand power, freedom, and subjectivity differently, and in relation to each other, in order to reflect critically on our own present -- a project the essays in the book admirably advance. In a Nietzschean vein, he refuses the polarity of nihilism and normative foundationalism. If we are searching for normative foundations, what Foucault is up to will look like nihilism. But the purpose of his genealogical work is to illuminate the contingency of our intellectual quests in order to open up new practices of resistance to particularly modern forms of oppression. In that sense this anthology continues recent work by English-speaking Foucault scholars, including Ladelle McWhorter, Amy Allen, and Judith Butler, to address the contradiction of the genealogical subject -- as both the product and author of a genealogy. The task is more precisely not to resolve the contradiction but to draw out the powerful and productive consequences of this ambivalence in our lives. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23869.

Pub: Michel Foucault, THE COURAGE OF THE TRUTH.

Le Courage de la vérité: la Gouvernement de soi et des autres II: Cours du Collège de France, 1984.   Edition établie sous la direction de François Ewald et Alessandro Fontana, par Frédéric Gros.   Paris: Gallimard, 2009.  The Courage of the Truth. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave, 2011.

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the Collège de France. Here, he continues the theme of the previous year’s lectures in exploring the notion of “truth-telling” in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0230112889/ref=pe_143810_19732470_snp_dp.

"The Foucault Effect 1991-2011," Birkbeck College, University of London, June 3-4, 2011.

Published seven years after Michel Foucault’s death, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality provided access to a little known and major new area of his later research, accompanied and illustrated by a rich collection of complementary studies by his co-researchers. The volume has served over the past 20 years as an influential and widely cited source, stimulating new work in many fields. In the past decade its effects has been accompanied by the acclaimed, ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures, including the full original sources of The Foucault Effect. Foucault’s work on governmentality is now recognised as one of the important developments in later twentieth-century reflection on the political, whose implications may not yet have been fully registered.

This event brings together the editors and several contributors to The Foucault Effect, along with leading international scholars who have taken up and explored its themes in several interconnected areas, engaging with the history and issues of a changing present. Among them are editors of two important new publications: Lectures on The Will to Know (Foucault’s first College de France lecture series, edited by Daniel Defert) and Mal Faire, Dire Vrai (his 1981 Louvain lectures on confession, criminology and social defence, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, to be published in French by Louvain University Press and in English by Chicago University Press). Both of these new publications are likely to modify our understanding of Foucault’s enterprise and of its relevance to our time.

The programme and contributions will be structured around five topic areas:

- Global and postcolonial dimensions
- Law, rights, justice, punishment
- Problematising the political and the left
- The history of governmentality
- Social defence in the 21st century

Provisional Programme:

Daniel Defert: The emergence of power in Michel Foucault’s 1970-71 lectures.
Colin Gordon: Governmentality and the genealogy of politics*
Graham Burchell: Reflections on governmentalities and political culture (with Italy in mind)
Paul Patton: tbc
Peter Fitzpatrick and Carolina Olarte: Foucault and the Laws of Death
Ben Golder: The Limits and Possibilities of a Foucauldian Politics of Rights*
Fabienne Brion: Governmentality, citizenship and dangerousness*
Bernard Harcourt: tbc
Giovanna Procacci: From social insecurity to human security*
Peter Miller: The calculating self
Jonathan Simon: tbc

* exact title to be confirmed

Visit: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/law/news/the-foucault-effect-1991-2011-conference-3-4-june.

McWhorter, Ladelle. Review of Timothy O'Leary, et al., eds. FOUCAULT AND PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2011).

O'Leary, Timothy, and Christopher Falzon, eds.  Foucault and Philosophy.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2010.

"Philosopher" was a label that Michel Foucault sometimes resisted, especially in the earlier decades of his career, but Timothy O'Leary and Christopher Falzon have assembled an excellent anthology of articles demonstrating Foucault's engagement with and contributions to contemporary philosophical practice throughout his life's work. The book examines and situates Foucault's work in relation to several major strands of philosophical tradition. It consists of an introduction and one paper each by the editors and an additional nine papers by well-known Foucault scholars including Gary Gutting, Jana Sawicki, Amy Allen, and Paul Patton, among others. There is no lack of interpretive disagreement in the group, which is especially notable in Gary Gutting's explicit critique of Béatrice Han-Pile's work and Barry Allen's implicit challenge to C.G. Prado. However, the disagreements and alternative perspectives are informative and thought-provoking.

Obviously it is impossible in one review to do justice to all eleven articles, and O'Leary and Falzon do an excellent job of summarizing them in their introduction. Here I will simply discuss four themes, each of which runs through several different papers. The first is Foucault's relation to his predecessors, including Hegel (Gutting), Nietzsche (Hans Sluga), and Heidegger (Timothy Rayner). The second is Foucault's relationship to and, in some cases, value for contemporary philosophical debates, including critical theory (Falzon and Amy Allen) and queer theory (Sawicki), as well as other discussions less easily categorized (Prado and O'Leary). Aligned with the second theme, the third theme that emerges very strongly in this collection is the question of truth and Foucault's epistemological positions. This comes out to some extent in Rayner's article on Heidegger, but it is foregrounded in Barry Allen's essay entitled "Foucault's Theory of Knowledge." Finally, I will conclude this review with a look at the theme of political theory and practice, with a focus on Paul Patton's essay, "Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy: Liberal and Neo-Liberal Governmentality and Public Reason." . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23091.

Cfp: "Radical Foucault," Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, September 9, 2011.

The publication of Michel Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-84 in English will be complete in April 2011 and his first Collège de France lecture course, La Volunté de Savoir will be published for the first time in February. The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London is holding a one-day conference on Friday, September 9th, 2011 which will re-assess Foucault's contribution to radical thought and the application of his ideas to contemporary politics. What does it mean to draw on Foucault as a resource for radical politics, and how are we to understand the politics which implicitly informs his work?

Many commentators today would seem to claim Foucault as the theorist of a politics which eschews all utopian ambition in favour of a certain governmental pragmatism, while others would claim him for a rigorous but ultimately rather simple libertarianism: can either of these positions ever be adequate to the radicalism of Foucault’s analyses? Does it matter?

What is the significance of Foucault’s ideas of ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopolitics’ in understanding his later oeuvre and its implications; do either of these terms deserve to carry the weight attributed to them by some commentators? What is the ongoing relevance of Foucault’s account of disciplinarity: is, it, as Lazzarato has claimed, a historical category no longer fully applicable to contemporary forms of power?

How can Foucauldian ideas be brought bear on the analysis of austerity politics? Is there a role for Foucault's ideas in formulating effective resistance to the increasing erosion of civil liberties that operates both within countries and across state boundaries? Can the notion of bio-power account for contemporary forms of racism? How can Foucauldian epistemology enable an understanding of the biopolitics of contemporary scientific discourse?

Confirmed Keynotes:

Stuart Elden, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University.
Mark Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University.

Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited, to arrive no later than Tuesday, 1st March 2011. Subjects may include, but are not limited to:

Foucauldian thought and contemporary subjectivation
Foucault and other thinkers
Governmentality and everyday life
Strategic discourses of war and terror
New technologies of the self
Foucault and new forms of resistance
Heterotopias now and in the future
Foucault and the erosion of the state
Disciplinary society and the society of control
Foucault, British politics and the 'big society'
Foucault, post-Fordism and post-democracy

Email abstracts to Jeremy Gilbert (j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk) and Debra Benita Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk).

Dawes, Simon. "Interview with David Macey on Fanon, Foucault and Race." TCS ANNUAL REVIEW (January 2011).

Simon Dawes interviews David Macey about his contribution to the Special Section on Frantz Fanon in the current issue of the TCS Annual Review, and about his 2009 article in the TCS Special Issue on Michel Foucault.

Read more to find out why (and for whom) Fanon is a source of embarrassment, the link for Foucault between race and the legitimacy of power, and why we should all be reaching for our copies of Fanon and Aimé Césaire.

Read it here: http://theoryculturesociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/interview-with-david-macey-on-fanon.html.

Cfp: "Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present," University of Bologna, March 3-4, 2011.

Neoliberalism is superficially understood as a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the development of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. Less understood, however, is how its claims to be able to develop wealth and freedom became correlated with claims to develop the prosperity and security of life itself. Life, in the form of species existence, rather than human nature, has progressively emerged as a singularly important a priori for liberal political economy. Neoliberalism breaks from earlier liberalisms and traditions of political economy in so far as it pursues the development of economic profitability and prosperity not just with practices for the development of the human species, but with the life of the biosphere.
These correlations of economy, development, freedom, and life in and among neoliberal regimes of practice and representation comprise some of the foundations of its biopolitics. As this symposium will explore, we cannot understand how liberalism functions, most especially how it has gained the global hegemony that it has, without addressing how systematically the category of life has organized the correlation of its various practices of governance, as well as how important the shift in the very understanding of life, from the human to the biospheric, has been for changes in those practices.

Today it is not simply living species and habitats that are threatened with extinction, and for which we must mobilize our care, but the words and gestures of human solidarity on which resistance to biopolitical regimes of governance depends. A sense of responsibility for the survival of the life of the biosphere is not a sufficient condition for the development of a political subject capable of speaking back to neoliberalism. What is required is a subject responsible for securing incorporeal species, chiefly that of the political, currently threatened with extinction, on account of the overwrought fascination with life that has colonized the developmental as well as every other biopoliticized imaginary of the modern age.

While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational in diagnosing this condition of the postcolonial age, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment of the political itself. In contrast this symposium will excavate the importance of Foucault’s work for our capacities to recognise how this debasement of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of “development”, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? And, crucially, how can we use Foucault to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically in a time when the most basic expressions of thought and human action are being targeted for new techniques of control and governance?

The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today this symposium will address some significant questions and problems. Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have. And certainly not that of how we might better equip them with the means to support life more fully. But that of how life itself, in its subjection to governance, can and does resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove it of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.

This symposium will be the second in a series, the first having been held in Calcutta in September 2010, “The Biopolitics of Development: Life, Welfare and Unruly Populations”. As was established there, the formulation of and response to these questions and problems remains open. The political reception of Foucault’s thought is not monolithic and the debates provoked among the participants at the Calcutta event are far from settled. Hence the demand for a second symposium, this time in Bologna.

Confirmed speakers include Michael Dillon, Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, Judith Revel, and Ranabir Samaddar. We also invite papers on this thematic from anyone else wishing to participate. Contributions analysing the topic of Foucault, political subjectivity and development from the perspective of other postcolonial locations will be particularly appreciated.

Send your abstracts to the organizing committee: Sandro Mezzadra (sandro.mezzadra@unibo.it), Julian Reid (julian.reid@ulapland.fi) and Ranabir Samaddar (ranabir@mcrg.ac.in) by December 31, 2010.

Kelly, Mark. "Michel Foucault." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY November 10, 2010.

Michel Foucault was a major figure in two successive waves of the 20th century French thought–the structuralist wave of the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave. By the premature end of his life, Foucault had some claim to be the most prominent living intellectual in France.

Foucault’s work is transdisciplinary in nature, ranging across the concerns of the disciplines of history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. At the first decade of the 21st century, Foucault is the author most frequently cited in the humanities in general. In the field of philosophy this is not so, despite philosophy being the primary discipline in which he was educated, and with which he ultimately identified. This relative neglect is because Foucault’s conception of philosophy, in which the study of truth is inseparable from the study of history, is thoroughly at odds with the prevailing conception of what philosophy is.

Foucault’s work can generally be characterized as philosophically oriented historical research; towards the end of his life, Foucault insisted that all his work was part of a single project of historically investigating the production of truth. What Foucault did across his major works was to attempt to produce an historical account of the formation of ideas, including philosophical ideas. Such an attempt was neither a simple progressive view of the history, seeing it as inexorably leading to our present understanding, nor a thoroughgoing historicism that insists on understanding ideas only by the immanent standards of the time. Rather, Foucault continually sought for a way of understanding the ideas that shape our present not only in terms of the historical function these ideas played, but also by tracing the changes in their function through history. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucault/.

"The Government of Self and Other: On Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982/3," Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, December 2, 2010.

Speakers:

Mathieu Potte Boneville (Collège International de Philosophie, Paris)
John Marks (French, Nottingham University)
Johanna Oksala (Philosophy, Dundee University)
Miguel de Beistegui (Philosophy, University of Warwick)

Further information will be provided here: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/item.php?updatenum=1424.

Pub: FOUCAULT: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON. SOCIAL IDENTITIES 16.5 (2010).

Introduction

"For Cutting: an Introduction to Foucault, 25 Years On," pp. 583 - 585
Author: Ian Goodwin-Smith

Articles:

"Resisting Foucault: the Necessity of Appropriation," pp. 587 - 596
Author: Ian Goodwin-Smith

"Post-structuralism's Colonial Roots: Michel Foucault," pp. 597 - 606
Author: Pal Ahluwalia

"The Huntsman's Funeral: Targeting the Sensorium," pp. 607 - 619
Author: Ryan Bishop

"The Post-Panoptic Society?  Reassessing Foucault in Surveillance Studies," pp. 621 - 633
Author: Gilbert Caluya

"The Paradoxical After-Life of Colonial Governmentality," pp. 635 - 649
Author: Michael Dutton

"What is an Anti-Humanist Human Right?," pp. 651 - 668
Author: Ben Golder

"Liberalism: Rationality of Government and Vision of History," p. 669 - 673
Author: Barry Hindess

"The Author, Agency and Suicide," pp. 675 - 687
Author: Katrina Jaworski

"A (Con)fusion of Discourses? Against the Governancing of Foucault," pp. 689 - 703
Author: Jim Jose

Book Reviews:

"Aftermaths: Exile, Migration and Diaspora Reconsidered," pp. 705 - 709
Author: Catherine M. Douillet

"Becoming Brazuca: Brazilian Immigration to the United States," pp. 711 - 714
Author: Benito Cao

For more information, visit http://www.informaworld.com/.

Pub: FOUCAULT STUDIES 9 (2010).

Articles:

• "At the Intersection of Sovereignty and Biopolitics: The Di-Polaric Spatializations of Money" by Tero Auvinen, 5-34
• "The Emotional Life of Governmental Power" by Elaine Campbell, 35-53
• "Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces" by Robert J. Topinka, 54-70
• "Foucault and the Ethics of Eating" by Chloë Taylor, 71-88
• "Apparatuses of Animality: Foucault Goes to a Slaughterhouse" by Stephen Thierman, 89-110

State of the Disciplines:

• "Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault: Survey of a Field of Problematization" by Robert Nichols, 111-144

Exchange:

• "Transcendental Philosophy and Critical Philosophy in Kant and Foucault: Response to Colin Koopman" by Colin McQuillan, 145-155
• "Appropriation and Permission in the History of Philosophy: Response to McQuillan" by Colin Koopman, 156-164

Review Essay:

• Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: a Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) by Chloë Taylor, Robert Nichols, 165-184

Reviews:

• Paul Veyne, Foucault: Sa pensée, sa personne (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2008) by Alan Milchman, 185-188
• Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009) by Elliot A. Jarbe, 189-193
• Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) by Mike McConnell, 194-197
• Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: a Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 2009) by Dag Petersson, 198-202
• C.G. Prado (ed.), Foucault’s Legacy (London: Continuum International, 2009) by Darryl M. De Marzio, 203-208
• Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) by Christopher Roman, 209-211
• David Gelernter, Judaism: a Way of Being (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 2009) by David A. Kaden 212-215
• John Sellars, The Art of Living: the Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy, Second Edition (London: Duckworth/Bristol Classical Paperbacks, 2009) by Antonio Donato, 216-220
• Daniel T. O’Hara, The Art of Reading as a Way of Life: On Nietzsche’s Truth (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009) by Charles Villet, 221-224
• Mari Ruti, Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (New York: Other Press, 2006) by Marcus Schulzke, 225-227

Download the essays here: http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/issue/view/398/showToc.

Premiere: THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY VOLUME ONE BY MICHEL FOUCAULT: AN OPERA. Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. October 1 and 2, 2010.

The History of Sexuality Volume One by Michel Foucault: an Opera is a work-in-progress adopting the dramatic musical form to stage the major themes and philosophical insights of one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. In this adaption of Foucault´s great work, the philosopher will encounter one student, two rivals, and a sworn enemy - perhaps all of them are ghosts. Nothing less than a grand opera is required to stage the epochal theory of self-emancipation that is Michel Foucault´s unique legacy. The performance will be set against a backdrop drawn from Foucault´s biographical details; including his activism on behalf of prisoners´ rights, and his death from AIDS.

For more information, visit: http://www.mumok.at/program/events/the-history-of-sexuality-volume-one/?L=1.

"Et Si Foucault N'Avait Pas Tort?," Five Seminars, Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon, September 2010-January 2011.

The Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) has put together a seminar focusing on Foucault’s work on psychiatry and its relevance today . The seminar will encompass five meetings running from September 2010 to January 2011 and is open to anyone interesed.

• 16 septembre de 18h à 20h.  "La méthode Foucault" par Dr Boulay et Catherine Dekeuwer
• 21 octobre de 18h à 20h.  "La folie" par Dr Giloux et Claude Olivier Doron
• 4 novembre de 18h à 20h.  "Foucault et la psychanalyse" par J. Lecaux et Elisabetta Basso
• 16 décembre de 18h à 20h.  "La normalité" par Dr Varagnat et Roland Chvetzoff
• 06 janvier de 18h à 20h.  "La sécurité" par Dr E. Venet et Arnaud Sourty

For further information, visit: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/seminar-et-si-foucault-navait-pas-tort/.

Cfp: 11th Annual Meeting, Foucault Circle, University of Alberta, March 25-27, 2011.

Papers on any aspect of Foucault's work, and studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking, are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives in the program selection.

Find the CFP here: http://foucaultblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/fc11cfp.pdf.  Ultimately, further information will be posted here: http://foucault.siuc.edu/

Heyes, Cressida R. Review of C. G. Prado, ed. FOUCAULT'S LEGACY. NDPR (August 2010).

Prado, C. G., ed.  Foucault's Legacy.  London: Continuum, 2009.

The task of C. G. Prado's edited collection is to assess Foucault's legacy on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death. As the editor admits in the introduction, this is a vast task, circumscribed in the volume through eight articles that "examine [Foucault's] contributions to contemporary thought by entering into various different conversations with one of the most innovative, enigmatic, and challenging thinkers of our time" (3). This is a fairly generic description, and the articles are wide-ranging. Most are oriented around explicating Foucault's indebtedness to, and influence upon, various other philosophers -- Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Gianni Vattimo. As a result, we can read this volume as an analysis of Foucault's location in the ongoing history of ideas, as well as (in large part) an investigation of his relation to historicity and temporality and of his genealogical method. The essays progress more or less chronologically in terms of the interlocutors, from Nietzsche to Vattimo, bracketed by less directly figure-oriented essays on temporality and Foucault's relation to secularization and fascism. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20988.

Huffer, Lynne. Review of Joseph J. Tanke, FOUCAULT'S PHILOSOPHY OF ART. NDPR (August 2010).

Tanke, Joseph J.  Foucault's Philosophy of Art: a Genealogy of Modernity.  London: Continuum, 2009.

Foucault's Philosophy of Art presents a wide-ranging overview of Foucault's various writings about Western art. The book explores "how art sheds its traditional vocation in order to become modern" (5) through a systematic analysis of Foucault's claims about the post-representational nature of modern art. Weaving together Foucault's disparate writings, interviews, and lectures on visual aesthetics -- some of them only recently published and still untranslated -- Tanke finds in Foucault not only a "philosophy of art," as announced by the book's title, but also a "lost genealogy" and a new "strand in the historical ontology of ourselves" (4). Tanke situates Foucault's art writings in the interstitial space that separates aesthetic philosophy from art history. So doing, he allows formal problems such as materiality, medium, lighting, color, depth, perspective, similitude, abstraction, and the place of the viewer to interface with familiar Foucauldian concepts such as archeological description, genealogical rupture, the event, ethical parrhesia, and the shifting relation between subjectivity and truth. Tanke presents Foucault's writings on art as a "necessary corrective to the ahistorical tendencies of philosophical aesthetics" (5). At the same time, the Foucauldian philosophical apparatus Tanke brings to bear on aesthetic criticism reshapes our understanding of art history. Reframing genealogy as a "visual practice" (6) that articulates a "dissociating view" (7), Tanke thus rewrites both the story of Foucault and the story of modern art. If we have long understood Foucault to be a thinker of epistemic and genealogical rupture, the relation between that rupture and the visual realm has not yet been as clearly articulated as it is in Foucault's Philosophy of Art.

Although Tanke claims to present Foucault's writings on art from the 17th century to the present, the book is primarily about modernity and Foucault's analyses of modern artists, including his 1971 Tunis lecture on Edouard Manet (1832-1883), his book on René Magritte (1898-1967), and lesser known writings and interviews on Paul Rebeyrolle (1926-2005), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Gérard Fromanger (b. 1939), Werner Schroeter (b. 1945), and Duane Michals (b. 1932). Tanke bookends his readings of art in modernity with an opening interpretation of Foucault's famous commentary on Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656) in The Order of Things (1966) and, in the final chapter, an analysis of Foucault's last Collège de France lectures, Le Courage de la vérité, on the Cynical life as a work of art. Throughout the book, Tanke develops the Foucauldian claim that, beginning with Manet in the mid-19th century, art establishes a break with quattrocento painting by moving away from a representational aesthetic. "When we take a genealogical look at Western art," Tanke writes, "we see that modernity is fundamentally incompatible with representation" (8).

To be sure, to say that modern art is post-representational is hardly a new insight. Indeed, the bulk of 20th-century writing on art, from R. G. Collingwood to Clement Greenberg to Rosalind Krauss to Gary Shapiro's study of visuality in Foucault and Nietzsche, can be viewed as an elaboration on the post-representation theme. One might therefore be tempted, at first glance, to dismiss Tanke's thesis as unoriginal. Such a reading, however, would miss the uniquely archeological frame Tanke brings to his analysis. As Tanke points out, and as readers of Foucault's The Order of Things (1966) already know, "representation" in Foucault has a specific, historically inflected epistemic meaning: representation names the ordering of knowledge that characterizes the Classical age, the 17th- and 18th-century episteme that follows the Renaissance age of resemblance and which gives way to modernity and the rise of man at the end of the 18th century. Understanding this archeological sense of representation is crucial to comprehending Tanke's thesis about post-representational art, and Tanke helpfully devotes the book's first chapter, "The Stirrings of Modernity," to a clear explication of The Order of Things and the significance of art in the story it tells. . . . 

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20767.

"Foucault, the Family and Politics," University of Cambridge, November 12, 2010.

Foucault writes of how the internal power-dynamics of the family interact with the social politics of society as a whole. On the one hand, social politics impact family structure and dynamics in many ways, including legal judgements, medical interventions, and social work. On the other hand, members of families call on discourses and institutions from society at large in order to manage or change the operation of the family. The conference will begin by examining the theme of the family in Foucault’s life and texts; it will then use his ideas to explore the politics of the family more generally in the contemporary world. . . .

Visit the conference website here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1325/.