Continental Philosophy

Read it on line

John Protevi has posted a new outline of Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population 1-4

Link

TOC

Editorial

Articles

POWER, CONFLICT, AND COMMITMENT: RETHINKING THE POLITICAL

Second Workshop in Social and Political Thought at Michigan State University

March, 28/29, Saturday: 9am-6pm, Sunday: 9:30am-12:30pm

http://www.msu.edu/~lotz/workshop2009/index.htm

Description:

During recent decades philosophers from diverse perspectives have extensively discussed the problem of the public sphere and the language, conflicts, and outcomes it can organize.  Liberal understandings of politics and public life have been challenged by feminists, critical race theorists, and radical democrats.  In view of structural change and the crisis of dominant political institutions, it has become clear that our understanding of politics needs careful reformulation.  We need to develop new conceptions of what it means to be political, how the individual and the self are politically situated in the world, and how political action and resistance (or transformations) are possible. This second workshop for social and political thought at Michigan State University will bring these perspectives together and discuss new perspectives for understanding the political sphere within our current social situation.

Speakers

Amy Allen (Dartmouth College); Feminism, Foucault, Continental Philosophy; author of The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory

Todd Hedrick (Michigan State University); Critical Theory, Habermas, Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy

Simon Critchley (New School); Poststructuralism, Continental Philosophy, author of Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, On Humor

Kristie Dotson (Michigan State University); Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Epistemology, Social and Political Philosophy, editor of  Race, Hybridity and Miscegenation

Robert Gooding-Williams (University of Chicago), Critical Race Theory, Nietzsche, Social and Political Philosophy, author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics

Roberto Nigro (Michigan State University); Foucault, Marx, Social and Political Philosophy; editor/translator of Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology

Organization and RSVP

Prof. Christian Lotz

Michigan State University

Dept. of Philosophy

503 South Kedzie Hall

East Lansing, MI 48824

517.353.9392 (Office)

517.355.4490 (Dept.)

http://www.msu.edu/~lotz

lotz@msu.edu

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce its program for the 2009 Summer School.
Location: 1888 Building, University of Melbourne.
Enrol at http://www.mscp.org.au

Week 1 January 26 – 30
11am – 1pm: Foucault and Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Ashley Woodward)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy, Part 2 (Late Medieval Era) (Ian Weeks)

Week 2 February 2 – 6
11am – 1pm: Environmental Political Theory from Spinoza to Negri (Kate Noble)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy V: Rationalism (Jon Roffe)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 3 February 9 – 13
11am – 1pm: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction (James Williams)
2pm – 4pm: Heidegger’s Being and Time (James Garrett)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 4 February 16 – 20
11am – 1pm: On Slavoj Zizek’s Political Theory, or: Would You Like A Politics With That? (Matthew Sharpe)
2pm – 4pm: Dialectics of Enlightenment (Bryan Cooke)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

For further information and enrollment please visit our website: http://www.mscp.org.au

Link

‘You cannot make a living just being a theoretician’: An Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté
With Jeroen Lauwers & Thomas Van Parys

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

Beyond Resistance: a response to Žižek’s critique of Foucault’s subject of freedom
Aurelia Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain Badiou
Hollis Phelps

Jodi Dean has been summarizing and reading Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.

Link to her posts

Edited by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception

From the publisher’s site:

French Interpretations of Heidegger undertakes a philosophical engagement with the work of the most significant and creative figures involved in the reception of Heidegger in France. The essays address those thinkers who have been influenced by Heidegger’s thought and have interpreted it in remarkable ways, including Levinas, Beaufret, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Irigaray, Zarader, Greisch, and Dastur. The volume explores the extraordinary impact that Heidegger’s thought has had on contemporary French philosophy, including such movements as existentialism, deconstruction, feminist theory, post-structuralism, and hermeneutics, and illustrates its impact on the American continental scene as well.

Click here for Table of Contents

Colin Koopman
University of California, Santa Cruz

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Forthcoming

Abstract:
I propose a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the misinterpretations proffered by influential European critics such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modern was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightforwardly opposed to modern freedom and madness. I show that Foucault held a much more complex view of these pairs, a view encapsulated in his term “reciprocal incompatibility.” By revising our interpretation of Foucault’s work on modernity in this way, we open the way to much more effective deployments of his critical apparatus.

Keywords: Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Modernity, Discipline

Link

Brian Leiter has posted his essay “The Epistemic Status of the Human Sciences: Critical Reflections on Foucault” — Link

From La vie des idees, “Foucault: Truth in Action”

Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid. “Nothing is Political, Everything Can Be Politicized: On the Concept of the Political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt.” Telos 142. Spring (2008): 135–61. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tnnemngzaww

A review of French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

There is a central question that provides a guiding thread through François Cusset’s far ranging and intellectually challenging investigation into the reception of “French Theory” in the United States: how is it that “around the beginning of the 1980s, right when the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida were being put to work on American campuses and in some alternative communities as the theoretical foundation for a new type of politics, those very names were being demonized in France as the epitome of an outdated ‘libidinal’ and leftist type of politics”? (XVIII) His study unfolds, examining the chronological periods before and after this crucial decade, casting back to roughly 1966 and then moving forward up until 2004, in an attempt to answer this question and explain the American phenomenon he terms French Theory.

Link to the review

A correspondence between Hannah Arendt and the theologian Hans-Jürgen Benedict (in German)

Foucault Live

What Schopenhauer taught Beckett

Judith Butler,‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’

Robert J.C. Young,‘Foucault on Race and Colonialism’

Scu’s new blog, Critical Animal, entries on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’

Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism

Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism: An Introduction — Yulia Tikhonova

Why I Am a Marxist — Vladislav Sofronov

The Theory of Marxism: Questions and Answers — Vladislav Sofronov; Fredric Jameson; Jack Amariglio; Yahya M. Madra

The Karl Marx School of the English Language — David Riff

You Can’t Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Chto Delat — Jacques Rancière; Artemy Magun; Dmitry Vilensky; Alexandr Skidan

Profanation of the Profane, or, Giorgio Agamben on the Moscow Biennale — Alexei Penzin

The Story of Angry Sandwich People, or, In Praise of Dialectics — David Riff; Dmitry Vilensky

Legally Soviet: A Conversation — Yevgeniy Fiks; Olga Kopenkina

Foucault, Marxism, and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections — Sam Binkley; Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Foucault and the “New Man”: Conversations on Foucault in Cuba — Sam Binkley; Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Massive Change: The Exhibit as Apology for “New Capitalism” — Lauren Langman

From Principle to Context: Marx versus Nozick and Rawls on Distributive Justice — Xiaoping Wei

Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideas on the Cooperative Principle — Anjan Chakrabarti; Anup Kumar Dhar

I have reviewed Tamara Chaplin’s Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television

Link

A review of Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge

Readers of Foucault’s texts have long been perplexed by the apparent shift his writings underwent in the late 1970s. Following the appearance of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Le volunté de savoir, translated as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction) in 1976, Foucault’s investigations inexplicably change focus: from an investigation of the prison and the mechanisms of power that produce the modern individual in Discipline and Punish, the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality focus on practices of the self in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, at the time of his death, Foucault was at work on a fourth volume examining the practices of the self in the Christian era.1 How does one account for the fact that the thinker who had written in 1966 that the one could “certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand and at the edge of the sea” was suddenly writing about the various practices of the self prevalent in the ancient world, practices that were meant to ensure individual freedom and autonomy?2 This, after all, was the thinker that had famously feuded with Jean-Paul Sartre and labeled him an outmoded thinker of systems, better suited for the nineteenth century than the twentieth, who was now writing about themes seemingly much more at home in Existentialist writings than his own anti-humanist ones.

The rest of the review

TOC

Toward a Theoretical Outline of the Subject: The Centrality of Adorno and Lacan for Feminist Political Theorizing — Claudia Leeb

Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault — Nancy Luxon

Voting the General Will: Rousseau on Decision Rules — Melissa Schwartzberg

Harriet Martineau on the Theory and Practice of Democracy in America — Lisa Pace Vetter

A special issue of Telos

Link

TOC: Volume 12 Issue Number 1 Spring 2008

Violence and Embodiment — JAMES MENSCH

Personnage, pensée, perception: Entre figure esthétique et personnage conceptuel, oscille le personnage du cinéma — CAROLINE SAN MARTIN

The Sublimity of Violence: Kant and the Aesthetic Response to the French Revolution –RADU NECULAU

Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? L’analytique sociale de Michel Foucault — SVERRE RAFFNSØE

Deleuze’s Other-Structure: Beyond the Master-Slave Dialectic, but at What Cost? — JACK REYNOLDS

Le commun et le capital: Réflexions sur le récit thérapeutique d’Antonio Negri — DALIE GIROUX

Erfahren and Erleben: Metaphysical Experience and its Overcoming in Heidegger’s Beiträge — JIM VERNON