The following text is an introduction to Ed Cohen’s book A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Author investigates the way in which immunology influences the perception of both the human body, and political entities, demonstrating that contemporary conceptualizations of these phenomena exist in a double bind. The historical framework Cohen applies allows for tracing the history of the metaphor of immunity in politics and medicine.

Foucault's preoccupation with the visual, specifically his positing of a sort of ‘positive unconscious of vision’, offers an entry point for examining data generated through a field study of home‐care case management practice. In Foucault's work, our attention is directed not so much to what is seen but to what can be seen and to the effects of practices of knowledge and power in constituting these particular realities. Knowledge emerges as a matter of what it is possible for knowers, for (...) nurses, to see and to say, as well as the conditions that constitute these specific possibilities for seeing and saying in a given context. Given the significance of practices of seeing in case management – seeing clients, seeing situations – examining how possibilities for understanding are constituted through ways of seeing helps us to ‘see’ the limits of currently possible practice. In the case examined in this paper, these limits constitute a gap between what a client may actually need and what it is possible, in the context of current practice, to provide. To change practice it seems important, if only as a first step, to recognize the constraints of thought in what we see. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Artikel diskutieren wir Michel Foucaults Hauptwerke zum Thema „Wahnsinn und Psychiatrie“ von den Frühschriften bis in die siebziger Jahre. Zum einen rekonstruieren wir die globale theoretische und methodologische Entwicklung seiner Positionen im Lauf der verschiedenen Werkperioden. Zum anderen arbeiten wir Foucaults philosophische Überlegungen zum Gegenstand seiner Untersuchungen heraus. Nach der einleitenden Problemstellung zeigen wir entsprechend der neueren Forschung, inwiefern Foucaults frühe Positionen von 1954 (in der Einführung zu Binswangers Traum und Existenz sowie in Geisteskrankheit und Persönlichkeit) das spätere (...) Werk durch eine phänomenologische Deskription des Gegenstands und einen historisch-kritischen Anspruch vorbereitete. Davon ausgehend thematisieren wir die zentralen inhaltlichen und methodologischen Prämissen in Foucaults Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft von 1961. Seine Thesen zur „Abwesenheit des Wahnsinns“ in der Moderne verstehen wir als einen in sich widersprüchlichen Versuch, den Gegenstand der Untersuchung von gängigen Vorannahmen zu befreien. Anschließend situieren wir Foucaults Vorlesungen Die Macht der Psychiatrie von 1973/74 im Kontext seiner machtanalytischen Werkphase und betonen seinen erneuten Standpunktwechsel in den Annahmen zur „Produktivität“ des Wahnsinns als Machteffekt. Abschließend resümieren wir unsere Kritik im Zusammenhang mit der Rezeptionsgeschichte der dargestellten Studien und fragen nach der möglichen Bedeutung dieser Werke für die philosophische und historische Reflexion des psychiatrischen Gegenstandsfeldes. (shrink)

Over the last years, the European Commission has heavily promoted various forms of digital education. In this article, we draw upon two recent European policy documents as key articulations...

The figure of Donna Haraway’s cyborg continues to loom large over contemporary feminist engagements with questions of technology. Across a range of analytical projects ranging from cosmetic surgery to employment practices it has come to be one of the defining figurations through which the social and discursive construction of bodies in a technological age are theorized. Indeed, it has become a widely accepted and largely unquestioned orthodoxy of postmodern feminist thinking. Not only has the cyborg offered a theoretical framework for (...) exploring the feminist possibilities of technologies, it has provided a focus for situating questions of technology and bodies into broader feminist theoretical considerations of the structures of knowledge, particularly those of binary oppositions and the logic of identity. While a productive and influential intervention into feminist theorizing, the cyborg is not without limitations. One of these is pointed out by Kirby (1997) as a failure to break convincingly with the logic ofidentity in the way Haraway theorizes the intersection of bodies and technologies in the fabrication of the cyborg. This article examines that criticism and then explores the possibilities which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblageoffers as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies beyond binary oppositions. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari develop a notion of “minor literature” in their short book on Kafka, and the opposition major/minor has been used with varying degrees of success by critics working in a range of disciplines including architectural theory. Teasing out the potentially subversive implications of the major/minor opposition requires reading it in relation to other binarisms developed by Deleuze and Guattari in those same years, e.g., state/nomadic science, striated/smooth space, optic/haptic, as well as Guattari’s useful concept “machinic heterogenesis.” Then, one (...) ends up with a minor architecture concerned with partially subversive practices rather than with structure per se. A building’s minor status is figured through its deployment in and production of a space that is a technological, social and political pattern as well as a line of flight. This paper reads minor architecture by examining the minor house built by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond and those currently being assembled by the Mad Housers in Atlanta, Georgia. (shrink)

Resumen: la cohesión de la cultura ha sido posible con el acaecer de la renuncia pulsional y de la póstuma instauración de la educación en la vida del hombre. Desde tiempos arcaicos se ha trazado un esquema de enseñanza y docilidad a partir de las necesidades vigentes de la época. De aquí que los objetivos de este trabajo sean examinar esta dialéctica histórica de la educación y, por otra parte, explorar los conceptos de disciplina y castigo como instrumentos configuradores de (...) la práctica educativa. Para abarcar estos objetivos, se colocan en contexto la formación del sujeto en la historia, la disciplina como elemento de control que gobierna en minucia el entorno del sujeto, y el castigo como elemento que garantiza la completa docilidad del individuo. Se discute que para alcanzar la docilidad humana deben desplegarse diferentes mecanismos de doblegamiento de la voluntad, solo que en nuestro tiempo los dispositivos de contención se han hecho tan flexibles, que han perdido la fortaleza necesaria para forjar el carácter humano con un nivel conciencia adecuada. Finalmente, se concluye que lo que realmente interesa al sistema social son cuerpos normalizados listos para las funciones del trabajo. (shrink)

This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually (...) migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government. (shrink)

Dans la Critique de la raison pratique, Kant entreprend une « archéologie » du Soi moral. Cette archéologie peut s’entendre conformément à la définition de Foucault : ne remontant vers aucune origine, comparant des faits de raison, oeuvrant sur un plan d’immanence strictement rationnel, Kant archéologue livre l’idée d’une « histoire de ce qui rend nécessaire une certaine forme de pensée ». Il s’agit de reconstruire les événementialités rationnelles qui séparent et articulent différentes conditions de possibilités d’émergence du Soi moral. (...) Et ces événementialités, portées au jour dans l’écart du présent au passé, dessinent l’horizon d’un possible politique, celui d’une articulation forte entre morale et politique, telle que le « politique moral » déjà l’annonce. Cet article est le premier jalon d’un travail en cours. (shrink)

Identity is a contemporary buzzword in education, referencing the individual and the social, the personal and the political, self and other. Following Maggie MacLure, we can think of identity in terms of teachers ‘arguing for themselves’, or giving an account of themselves. Yet in the wake of poststructuralism's radical de‐centering of the subject and its highlighting of a number of impediments to agency, we might well ask how teachers are to give an account of themselves? This paper offers reading of (...) identity that recognizes its paradoxical aspects, yet also contains scope for ethical agency. The latter is explored via a ‘diagram’ that utilizes Foucault's four axes of ethics to elaborate a framework for thinking about teacher identity as ethical self‐formation and for engaging in what I refer to here as ‘identity work’. This approach to thinking about teacher identity recognizes our discursive determination, yet also offers scope for recognizing and building ethical agency. (shrink)

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to (...) more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures. (shrink)

A new ontology that forms the groundwork for ethical practices of resistance What and how should individuals resist in political situations? While these questions recur regularly within Western political philosophy, answers to them have often relied on dogmatically held ideals, such as the distinction between truth and doxa or the privilege of thought over sense. In particular, the strain of idealist political philosophy, inaugurated by Plato and finding contemporary expression in the work of Alain Badiou, employs dualities that reduce the (...) complexities of practices of resistance to concepts of commitment. (shrink)

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow to (...) follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance. (shrink)

Un gran número de comentaristas de Foucault afirman que la biopolítica forma parte de manera fundamental del corpus de su obra. La discusión acerca de esta noción está imbricada en la política contemporánea, pero dicha interpretación se aleja de las ideas mismas de Foucault. En ese sentido, ¿en qué consisten esas modificaciones que se desprenden de la obra foucaultiana? ¿Se trata de movimientos propios de la noción o de innovaciones investigativas ulteriores? ¿Existe una lógica que sigue el concepto y si (...) es así qué lógica interna juega esta noción dentro del pensamiento del filósofo francés? La biopolítica se comprende a partir del sentido y significado de la vida en los siglos XVIII-XIX y, de esa manera, en torno a la estrategia política que circula en esos siglos. Una relación entre la política y la biopolítica o, si se prefiere, un problema discontinuo, es decir, una relación que intenta unir áreas que hasta ahora no han sido consideradas: la discontinuidad y la misma biopolítica. ¿Es posible considerar la biopolítica como un problema discontinuo y como un método en el que la discontinuidad es preeminente? Es una pregunta que pretendemos desplegar en este trabajo. (shrink)

Undoubtedly, the topic of the discontinuity has gone so far as to capture the attention of a good number of investigators who devote themselves to resect concerning the philosophy of the French thinker. To place now the look in the topic of the discontinuity promises to open a new analysis seam and perhaps allow to revalue the scope of its philosophical contributions. For such a task, we are going in the first moment to approach the history notion in the thought (...) of Foucault from here on to study the development that the above mentioned notion has with the continuity and the discontinuity. Then, we will stop to study the genealogical method to unravel if it is possible to analyze the topic of the discontinuity in view of the genealogy. Will it be possible to look at the topic of the discontinuity as a proper feature of the thought of the French philosopher? To answer this question is the task that this work tries to take to end. (shrink)

We explore briefly Foucault's ideas about the care of the self, creating ourselves and what he meant by ethics. We then examine the work of five artists–Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Helena Hietanen, Samuel Beckett, and Betty Goodwin–to help us begin to think very differently about illness and human suffering. Taking our lead from Beckett, we regard reason as being given too much responsibility for the work of a caring knowledge, and that it is through the arts that new ideas about (...) bioethics can emerge. (shrink)

Clearly in contrast to the sociosymbolic approaches that underlie the positions of Butler or Derrida, this article delves into a materialist and machinic reading of the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari. This ontology is the basis of a posthumanist conception that allows to join political philosophy, technology and biology understood as complex rhizomatic systems. From this point of view, we propose to construct an antagonistic posthumanist politics that is an alternative to the pluriversal ethics defended by Braidotti. We believe that (...) the latter maintains an excessively liberal position that prioritizes inclusion as a new form of consensus in the face of conflict. (shrink)

Este artículo es una aproximación crítica e integradora de los procesos de subjetivación política en los trabajos de Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams y Stuart Hall. Para ello, se explicará, en primer lugar, el giro epistémico realizado por Michel Foucault a finales de 1970 que le conduce a buscar la estética de la existencia tras teorizar la relación de poder y libertad. Posteriormente se analizará qué entienden por subjetivación política estos autores. El análisis de la transformación teórica que lleva (...) a cabo Michel Foucault de la relación entre poder y libertad a partir de obras como El nacimiento de la biopolítica, El uso de los placeres o La hermenéutica del sujeto permitirá precisar el análisis comparativo entre hegemonía, cuidado de sí y contrahegemonía en los autores señalados. Por último, presentaremos la especificidad de la relación entre los trabajos de Gramsci y Foucault con Williams y Hall como mediadores epistemológicos. (shrink)

RESUMO O artigo estuda, em um primeiro momento, os processos de sujeição e subjetivação nos trabalhos de Michel Foucault e sua relação com a dupla dimensão, moral e material, da governamentalidade. Se em sua dimensão moral a produção de sujeições tem como contraponto os processos éticos de subjetivação, já em sua dimensão material predomina o governo biopolítico do meio vital no qual populações são reguladas e sujeitadas em detrimento das possibilidades de subjetivação. A ênfase do governo biopolítico é especialmente observável (...) entre as populações deslocadas em busca de sobrevivência. Em um segundo momento evoca-se, para além de Foucault, uma modalidade de população problematizada como objeto de recorrente normalização nos últimos decênios, constituída pelos migrantes de sobrevivência. O estudo percorre os traços do governo biopolítico dessa população, especialmente as reconfigurações dos processos de sujeição que a regulam. Conclui-se que ela apresenta poucas possibilidades de empreender processos de subjetivação como resistência às formas de sujeição operadas pela governamentalidade biopolítica. ABSTRACT At first, the article studies the processes of subjection and subjectivation in the works of Michel Foucault and their relationship with the double dimension, moral and material, of governmentality. If in its moral dimension the production of subjections has as its counterpoint the ethical processes of subjectivation, in its material dimension what predominates, in turn, is the biopolitical government of the vital means in which populations are regulated and subjected to the detriment of the possibilities of the subjectivation. The emphasis of the biopolitical government is especially noticeable among displaced populations seeking survival. In a second moment, besides Foucault, a modality of population that has been problematized as object of recurrent normalization in the last decades, made up by survival migrants, is evoked. The study goes through the traits of the biopolitical government of that population, especially the reconfigurations of the subjection processes that regulate it. We conclude that it presents few possibilities to undertake subjectivation processes as resistance to the forms of subjection operated by the biopolitical governmentality. (shrink)

El artículo enfoca la crítica de la imagen dogmática en Deleuze desde un análisis retrospectivo del papel que desempeña la noción de «imagen del pensamiento» en su obra. Tras desgranar brevemente los distintos sentidos e interpretaciones con que el autor la utiliza y cerrar la introducción con la exposición del uso plenamente positivo que ese sintagma acabará adquiriendo en él, nos remontamos hasta el uso crítico y cronológicamente anterior –que no primero– de la expresión, donde la palabra «Imagen» señala esa (...) preconcepción tradicional, común a la filosofía y al buen sentido, de un pensamiento pretendidamente «natural», con el fin de arrojar una luz nueva sobre los principales ejes en torno a los cuales semejante Imagen se estructura. (shrink)

There are three dominant conceptual developments in Althusser’s work that suggest the significance of the subject. One is the perpetual work of ideology—its interpellation of individuals. The second is the primacy of the class struggle in relation to the state, and the consequential function of law and rights. The third is the materialism of the encounter as a process without subject. An examination of these three areas reveals the potentially and strategically important role of legal subjectivity in Althusser’s theory of (...) the political. (shrink)

The attempt by Arnason and Roberts to interpret Canetti’s work in the context of social theory is taken here as the point of departure to investigate Canetti’s view on the phenomenon of resistance. Resistance is explored in the context of Canetti’s reflection on power and transformation. Further, it is argued that through his substantive concern for crowds, an epistemological challenge emerges for social theory. Canetti gives us some precious insights on phenomena of ambiguous multiplicity, which are neither simple sums of (...) separate individuals nor an ontologized Durkheimian collective. Not only this, he resolutely ventures towards the contingency at the foundation of social order, the ‘just-thisness' of power, revealing its non-symbolic basis in gestures that impart affects. It is at this level that resistance can be best understood as a movement of liberation from the grip of power. (shrink)

In The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault suggests that it is possible to read Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire as a contribution to a genealogy of ethics. This article experiments with reading Benjamin in this way. It shows that a distinctive analysis of each of the four elements of Foucauldian ethics can be found in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the Paris arcades. Specifically, the article makes the case for reading Benjamin in terms of his valuable contribution to understandings of (...) the role played by art in modern forms of ‘parrhesia’, or courageous truth-telling. However, whereas Foucault’s notion of ‘arts of living’ focuses on challenging actual relations of power, Benjamin’s focuses on activating potential forms of power. In this way, Benjamin’s ethical framework tests the limits of Foucault’s conceptualization of the government of self and others. (shrink)

Inaugural lecture as Professor of Women's Studies in the Arts Faculty of the University of Utrecht, May 16, 1990.

I try to understand the ordeal of solitude by beginning with Marc Augé’s usage on transitional sites as a provocation, which leads us to rethink solitude as a condition of subjectivity and its various inflections, most conventionally as loneliness and, in sociology, as fragmentation, anonymity, alienation, privatization and the various opinions that link it to the deprivation of separation that longs for connection, or, more fundamentally in Simmel, as the ontological view of the tragedy of human limitation. Instead of restricting (...) us to sites, Augé’s provocation suggests that if solitude is one of a family of such usages related to the experience of being alone or apart in such a space, we might then examine ways in which it is oriented to as a condition that can vary according to extremes, say, in the way Arendt and others have contrasted the pain of loneliness with the creativity of solitude. In linking solitude to transitional sites, Augé suggests that there is something about the experience of the in-between, whether of time or space, that illuminates solitude and that makes any relationship to it a potential ordeal. I test the notion by asking how the ordeal pertains to language itself and the intermediacy of a human subject in linguistic space. (shrink)

This article revisits Arendt’s and Foucault’s converging accounts of modern (bio)politics and the entry of biological life into politics. Agamben’s influential account of these ideas is rejected as a misrepresentation both because it de-historicizes biological/organic life and because it occludes the positivity of that life and thus the discursive appeal and performative force of biopolitics. Through attention to the genealogy of Arendt’s and Foucault’s own ideas we will see that the major point of convergence in their thinking is their insistence (...) upon understanding biological thinking from the inside, in terms of its positivity. Agamben’s assessment of modern politics is closer to Arendt’s than it is to Foucault’s and this marks a fascinating point of disagreement between Arendt and Foucault. Whereas Arendt sees the normalizing force of modern society as being in total opposition to individuality, Foucault posits totalization and individuation as processes of normation, which casts a light upon the relative import they place upon politics and ethics. (shrink)

This article investigates the place that habit occupies in different ‘architectures of the person’, focusing particularly on constructions of the relations between habit and other components of personhood that are marked by time. Three such positions are examined: first, the relations between thought, will, memory, habit and instinct proposed by post-Darwinian accounts of ‘organic memory’; second, Henri Bergson’s account of the relations between habit, memory and becoming; and, third, the temporal aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus understood as a (...) set of hereditable dispositions. These different ‘architectures of the person’ are considered with regard to the role they accord habit in trans-generational mechanisms of inheritance; the historicised forms of embodied personhood that they propose; and the manner in which they account for the emergence of a capacity for freedom that can (partially) offset the weight of the inherited past. It is argued that the imputation of such a capacity to some forms of personhood, but not others, is both shaped by and provides the conditions for the operation of liberal forms of government. The manner in which the conduct of those who exhibit such a capacity for freedom is brought under the direction of varied ‘authorities of freedom’ is given particular consideration. (shrink)

This article explores what might happen to the concept of performativity within arguments that are understood as ‘topological’. It argues that we might ‘decline’ performativity, which is to say, elaborate the concerns that are expressed in the concept, but inclining it more boldly towards the complexities of a world whose elements are always in process of constitution, of reiterative enfolding. Taking a cue from Isabelle Stengers’ recent work in which she posits the notion of ecologies of practice, on the one (...) hand, and Whitehead’s concept of concern, on the other, the paper argues that emergent entities have differential requirements – not least according to the disciplines to which they appeal – and subtend different modes of implied obligation. An adherence to these requirements needs to be accompanied by persuasive presentation that obliges a community to affirm any entity. On many levels of abstraction, ecologies need to show concern for an entity to facilitate its emergence and to sustain its mode of being. In an expanded vision, then, human and non-human entities at all levels enter into multifarious relational modes of becoming, but these become of sustained consequence only through persuasion of communities, sometimes organized into disciplines. The survival of entities requires forms of differentiation, division and of value. The paper relates these arguments to forms of sociological enquiry that give glimpses of how sociology might respond. It ends with a hesitation around the radical anti-anthropomorphism of the stance developed, and argues that this does not entirely eclipse the importance of political hope. (shrink)

Little of the work in critical and hermeneutical psychology has been linked to instructional technology (IT). This article provides a discussion in order to fill the gap in this direction. The article presents a brief genealogy of American IT in relation to the influence of psychology. It also provides a critical and hermeneutical framework for psychology. It then discusses some problems of psychologism focusing on positivism, metaphysics, cultural ecology, and power. The narrow psychologism in IT produces a kind of systematic (...) blindness regarding cultural, political, and other issues. IT professionals are encouraged to engage reflectively with the power‐relations and ethical issues in which they are involved. The article points out a need for looking at psychology more comprehensively (e.g. critical and hermeneutical psychology). (shrink)

This essay argues for a convergence between, on the one side, Foucault’s characterization of the care of the self as a way of overcoming the traps of anthropological sleep, and on the other side, Deleuze’s characterization of initiating becomings as a way of fleeing the traps of organization, a line of flight, becoming becoming. This convergence is defended on the basis of a Bergsonian ontology of becoming, and in particular, Bergson’s opposition to what he calls the retrograde motion of truth. (...) One result of this convergence is that a Wittgensteinian approach to the sense of life floats to the surface. A kind of mysticism. (shrink)

This paper outlines a theoretical context for research into ‘the subject of ethics’ in terms of how students come to see themselves as self-reflective actors. I maintain that the ‘subject of ethics’, or ethical subjectivity, has been overlooked as a necessary aspect of creating politically transformative spaces in education. At the heart of egalitarian politics lies a fundamental tension between the equality of voices and the notion that one way of being or one voice may be deemed more legitimate than (...) another; which in turn puts the equality of beings into question. Building from Michel Foucault’s work regarding ethics and subjectivity, I suggest that a ‘subject of ethics’ can be viewed, in part, as a series of relations of self that form the horizon upon which a subject comes to work on themselves relative to moral codes and power relations. Ethical relations of self can be a useful concept for those interested in educational research that furthers social and ecological justice. In the conclusion of this paper I also discuss the limitations of locating ethics entirely within a constituted human subject. (shrink)

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel Foucault’s later work on (...) subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena. (shrink)

In Politics without Vision, Tracy Strong claims that in order to adequately grasp the politics of the twentieth century, and so be capable of meeting the challenges of the present, political theory must think without banisters. In this article I take up the task of thinking without banisters through the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Following the startling claim made by Adorno in a lecture course in 1963 that the term ‘humanity’ tends to ‘reify’ and ‘falsify’ important moral issues, I (...) examine three different usages of the concept of humanity in Adorno’s work, which I develop as a critique of foundations. I argue that understanding Adorno’s critique of humanity and of foundations involves understanding the role played by art in connecting the concepts of morality and politics. In connecting morality and politics in this manner, Adorno moves from a moral theory of resistance to a political theory of transformation whose insistence on the radical discontinuity between the present and the future serves as a model of a political theory without banisters. (shrink)

In this interview, Anne Fagot-Largeault discusses with Thierry Bardini her recollections of the life and work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The discussion covers Simondon’s theory of individuation and considers its influences on contemporary thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and François Laruelle. Fagot-Largeault situates Simondon’s thinking within the broader context of 20th-century biological research and the development of life sciences. Informed by her personal association and experiences working with Simondon, her reminiscences shed light on the unique character of Simondon as (...) a person and as a thinker. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje siekiama atsakyti į klausimą, kas galėtų susieti filosofiją ir vizualiuosius bei žodinius menus. Ar įmanoma ir jei taip, tai kaip įmanoma reflektuoti visus menus kaip vieno kūrybinio įvykio momentus? Siekiant atsakyti į šį klausimą, pirma, aptariamas logikos ir kūrybiškumo susikertant menui ir filosofijai susidūrimas, antra – žodžio ir vaizdo nebendramatiškumas, surastas / išrastas belgų siurrealisto René Magritte’o ir reflektuotas Michelio Foucault. Čia sugrįžtama prie klasikinio F. Niezsche’s disputo su Sokratu apie logikos ir kūrybiškumo priešpriešą ir siekiama atsakyti į (...) klausimą, kurią pusę – Sokrato ar F. Nietzsche’s – paremia šioje diskusijoje Gilles’is Deleuze’as ir Félixas Guattari. Atrodytų, kad jie suderina logiką ir kūrybiškumą, pastebėdami, kad menas nėra nei mokslinio mąstymo, nei filosofijos koreliatas ar papildas, kad trys minties formos – menas, mokslas ir filosofija – turi po nepriklausomą specifinę kryptį, Kita vertus, interpretuodamas I. Kantą, G. Deleuze’as pastebi disharmoniją tarp vaizduotės, supratimo ir proto, ir, sekdamas Antonino Artaud’o įžvalgomis, jis išskiria naują minties tipą kaip tarpinę teritoriją tarp žodžio ir vaizdo. (shrink)

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into (...) oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronisław Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. (...) Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems (constructivist studies) and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions (the phenomenological tradition) or pass on and propagate relations of power (critical theory). This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein (standard metre), Foucault (panopticism), and Agamben (paradigm), we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. (...) Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions or pass on and propagate relations of power. This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Agamben, we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies. (shrink)

This study is considered as a proposal to identify some metaphysical support of the self-care for a patient suffering from a chronic disease, as an extension of the bio-psycho-social paradigm. The methodology is dominated by a phenomenological perspective, supported by a hermeneutic conceptual analysis of the care of the self in Michel Foucault, focused on the Socratico-Platonic period and pervaded by the intention of having a translation and application to self-care. Foucault pleads for an aesthetics of the self, called subjectivity, (...) in which the subject is self-constituted through the so-called technologies of the self. The care of the self comes from the resignification of the philosophy as a way of life in which the subject is objectified. The translation and the applicability of the care of the self at the idea level to self-care are identified precisely in the acquisition of some important principles of the philosophy of care of the self from the Greek Antiquity: the role of awakener of consciousness of the one who is concerned about oneself as the first moment of the metaphor of awakening from the sleep, the ēthos as a way of being, a way of behaving and a life model. The pair self-knowledge – care of oneself justifies informing the former by the latter, in which being concerned about oneself means knowing oneself. Nevertheless, knowledge means care of the self where the self is synonymous with the soul and moreover, with the divine element in man. (shrink)

In conversation with James Ash, Pasi Väliaho discusses the relationship between video games, politics and the turn to affect for thinking about mediated experience. In doing so, both authors consider the promises and problematics of utilizing neuroscientific concepts for understanding modes of power that operate through the knots of image and sensation that make up contemporary media culture.

The empirical turn in bioethics has been widely discussed by philosophical medical ethicists and social scientists. The focus of this discussion has been almost exclusively on methodological issues in research, on the admissibility of empirical evidence in rational argument, and on the possible superiority of empirical methods for permitting democratic lay involvement in decision-making. In this paper I consider how the collection of qualitative and quantitative social research evidence plays its part in the construction of social order, and how this (...) creates certain paradoxes for the normative ideal of a public bioethics. The analysis in this paper is based on Foucauldian ideas, and on recent work in the history of the human sciences. The paper closes with some open questions for theoretical work in the sociology and philosophy of bioethics. (shrink)

Although genealogy is a popular methodological choice for philosophers, a number of social scientists in numerous fields have taken it up as way of studying historical texts. How one might use genealogy as a methodological approach, however, is not always clear. In this article, I argue for the combination of critical discourse analysis with a genealogical ethos of analysis, despite some differences in their respective approaches. The aim of the article is to contribute to debates around how qualitative textual research (...) can be opened up as a site of contact, negotiation, and unification for genealogical and critical discourse analytic approaches. (shrink)

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules (...) between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’. In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities. (shrink)

En este texto se trata de pensar el proyecto que Foucault inició con el análisis de la parrhesía. Se aborda ese problema en relación a otros dos elementos de su obra: la reflexión sobre la función de los intelectuales y sus escritos sobre la noción de crítica. Desde esa perspectiva trataré de mostrar que las investigaciones sobre la parrhesía reflejan el intento de pensar una nueva política de la verdad.