Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 125-136, September 2011.

ABSTRACT This article examines Michel Foucault’s views concerning the ethical salience of critique and compares those views to the Buddhist Madhyamaka tradition. As a critic of the Enlightenment, Foucault’s approach to ethics vacillated between deconstructing moral concepts such as “self” and “freedom,” and affirming them as the basis of an ethics conceived as “self-fashioning.” Madhyamaka thought provides a critical account of social reality that resonates with Foucault, particularly concerning the emancipatory potential of critique, but it arrives at different ethical conclusions, (...) viewing compassion rather than vertiginous freedom as the outcome of any thorough critique of the self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in (...) the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society. (shrink)

For thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, it is not possible to engage with metaphysical questions without simultaneously considering other, more political problems concerning the power relations...

In this paper, I look into personal and political entanglements in Rosa Luxemburg's letters and essays revolving around questions and problems of the revolution. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorisation of revolutions in modernity, as well as her reading of narratives within the political. What is intriguing about the Luxemburg/ Arendt encounter is the fact that although both theorists consciously refused to connect themselves with feminist ideas and movements of their times and geographies, their writings have inspired a (...) rich body of feminist theorisations of the political. What I argue is that Luxemburg's ideas and lived experiences of the revolution largely inspired Arendt's theorisation of the revolution as a political phenomenon in the pursuit of freedom, and are opening up new vistas in our understanding of gendered dynamics in historical and contemporary revolutionary events. (shrink)

There is a move to centralise scattered documents; to archive all hardcopies of published journals in one place. PESA is moving to the institutionalisation of its history. We may ask, if philosophy of education in Australasia began at Bassar College, University of New South Wales on 20 May 1970, or if it emerged from the post-war focus on teacher education, teaching on the philosophy of education. Further to the injunction that we query who may be foregrounded; who assigned to possible (...) appendices of any PESA stories? By definition the non-members, the rejected scripts, the programme notations of those who failed to present at conferences will be the omissions. And the very fact that some have been rejected, for perhaps inadequate philosophising, for moving beyond the discourse of the liberal understanding of education means that there will always be gaps, omissions, a select record. In what ways may the archive order us? How do we ensure that archival history of PESA is not the work only of Great Wo/men. We will find that after ordering and collating disorderly archives, that what is collated will be incomplete. Our question may be as was Lorimer and Philo’s, ‘should we be “allowing more disorder into the archive”’? (shrink)

This is the introduction to a special issue of HOPOS on the history of the philosophy of thought experiments.

Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within a (...) history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces. (shrink)

This article revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism, the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists’ widespread rejection of essentialism has threatened to undermine feminist politics. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem—‘strategic’ essentialism and Iris Marion Young’s idea that women are an internally diverse ‘series’—I argue that both unsatisfactorily retain essentialism as a descriptive claim about the social reality of women’s lives. I argue instead that women have (...) a ‘ genealogy’: women always acquire femininity by appropriating and reworking existing cultural interpretations of femininity, so that all women become situated within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Because all women are located within this complex history, they are identifiable as belonging to a determinate social group, despite sharing no common understanding or experience of femininity. The idea that women have a genealogy thus reconciles anti-essentialism with feminist politics. (shrink)

In his later lectures, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining ‘truth’ about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing self and world, he occasionally invites phenomenological enquiry into how this epistemic couplet bears on education. Drawing on three vignettes familiar to educators, my investigation explores modes of discovering self and world through counselling, distributed governance in the classroom (...) and the arts of writing. In each case we confront a paradox of freedom, in that agency is needed, already, to liberate the self from the world. An exegetical task is to show how Foucault worked through this philosophical problem, of relevance to many situations in education, by re-reading Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. (shrink)

In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature , Steven Pinker maintains that at present there are three competing views of human nature—a Christian theory, a "blank slate" theory (what I call a social constructivist theory), and a Darwinian theory—and that the last of these will triumph in the end. I argue that neither the outcome of such competition nor the particular content of these theories is as clear as Pinker believes. In this essay I take a critical (...) as well as a constructive look at the challenge presented by a Darwinian theory of human nature—a challenge to the social sciences and the humanities and also to theology and more specifically to a Christian understanding of human nature. (shrink)

The article is focused on Honneth’s teleology of history, presented as a historical process of gradual realization of an immanent normative ‘telos’, and not only as a form of axiological evaluation...

This article proposes that the study of non-Western philosophical traditions ought to include a critical awareness of the experience, impact, and legacy of colonialism. In this regard, Latin American philosophy offers us a key concept—the coloniality of power. It will be shown that coloniality enriches and complicates our understanding of both the history of Western and non-Western philosophies. More specifically, coloniality helps to clarify and answer the following questions: First, how was it that the discipline of philosophy came to be (...) centrally understood as Western? And second, to what degree did the modern distinction between West and non-West affect our understanding and the formation of non-Western thought? Ultimately, the methodological upshot of coloniality for the study of non-Western philosophical traditions is that it focuses our attention on the epistemic violence that was part and parcel of colonialism and therefore it frames the study of non-Western philosophical thought within the practi.. (shrink)

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of (...) the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization. (shrink)

These essays suggest a number of answers to the question: Why Nietzsche still? They show that Nietzsche still has a great deal to say to those who read him with an eye toward developing critical responses to the present and the future that will follow.

Analytical ethnography does not presume a principal analytical frame. It does not know (yet) where and when the field takes place. Rather, the ethnographer is in search for appropriate spatiotemporal frames in correspondence with the occurrences in the field. Accordingly, the author organizes a dialogue between conceptual frames and his various empirical accounts. He confronts snapshots of English Crown Court proceedings with models of event and process from micro-sociology and macro-sociology. A range of–more or less early or late, relevant or (...) irrelevant, contingent or predetermined–processual events serves as the vantage point to access event and process relations. In this line, Crown Court proceedings serve as an introductory and exemplary field for analytical ethnography, because they involve both: (strong) events and their process and (strong) processes and their events. (shrink)

In the `Preface' to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel outlines the dialectical method and contrasts it with two other approaches. On the one hand, there is `material thinking' (das materielles Denken): `a contingent consciousness that is absorbed only in material stuff', a form of thought which is rooted in existing conditions and cannot see beyond them. At the `opposite extreme' is the transcendent critical method of `argumentation' (das Räsonieren), which involves `freedom from all content and a sense of vanity towards (...) it'. The dialectical method must `give up this freedom'. It refuses `to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the Notion, either arbitrarily or with wisdom obtained from elsewhere'. Instead, it `sink[s] this freedom in the content, letting it move spontaneously of its own nature ... and then ... contemplate[s] this movement'. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...) capable of challenging human exceptionalism. In a broader sense, the unease connects to human self-constitution and the fragility of the self, fueled by the domination of substance ontologies. This article considers bears as beings “in exile,” as potential threats to human self-pronounced exceptionality, and thus, examples of experienced abject regarding human subjectivity. The article aims to analyze the way the constitution of human selfhood is tied to the alienation of wildlife and its genealogical and biopolitical context and to question if a reconceptualization of the human/nonhuman relations via process, instead of substance ontology, is needed. (shrink)

This article explores the negative framing of environmental concern in the context of food procurement and consumption, through the lens of the myth of Eden considering the ontological and genealogical aspects of the experienced exile from nature. The article first considers the theoretical context of the negative framing of food ethics. Demonstrating the consequences of the experience of food as abject, the article then goes on to discuss the exile from Eden as an explanatory myth for the perceptual inbetweenness of (...) humankind. The aim of the article is to outline the genealogical markers of the negative framing of food ethics via the discussion of the exile from Eden. In the context of a new materialist understanding of the nature–culture continuum, the article depicts the exile as a perceptual rather than ontological divide that does not reflect a factual human inbetweenness but mirrors the objectification of nature by stripping the flesh of its spirit. Such reenvisioning is thought to be a pivotal aspect for mitigating the affectual abjectivity of food and recapturing the factual entanglement of body–environment to enable affirmative environmental ethics. (shrink)

This article argues that nonviolence in the twenty-first century would increasingly be moving towards the color gray by addressing three related questions. First, given the way in which the media reported the news, how can the twentieth century be remembered especially in relation to what has taken place at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Second, how should “unusual” nonviolent protest actions – throwing shit, blood, and shoes at people – be construed from the perspective of nonviolent alternatives? Third, as (...) more parties become interested and consequently nonviolent actions become widespread, are they becoming less of an alternative and more of a normal course of action? As a result of the mainstreaming nonviolence trend, has anything been taken away from it? Confronting these questions as a way to critically examine the prospects for nonviolent actions at present, the paper concludes with a philosophical argument in favor of gray as the color of nonviolent alternatives in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article discusses the study of educational theories and ideas. Based on analyses of primarily the Danish scene, positing similarities with the other Nordic countries, we identify and investigate three main and today dominating approaches: a philosophical approach focusing on the content of the ‘great’ thinkers’ ideas, their logical-coherence and/or moral-ethical value; a historical approach centering on individuals and their educational ideas expressed as views in a realistic and contextual story; and a Foucauldian approach which analyzes educational ideas and theories (...) through their place in power-knowledge constellations. On the backcloth of analyses of the ontology and epistemology operating in these approaches we conclude that they all ignore the systematic study of the social context in which ideas and theories are conceived and we argue for a social space and social history approach as a way to fill out this epistemological vacuum. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify the relation between genealogy and history and to suggest a methodological reading of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I try to determine genealogy's specific range of objects, specific mode of explication, and specific textual form. Genealogies in general can be thought of as drastic narratives of the emergence and transformations of forms of subjectivity related to power, told with the intention to induce doubt and self-reflection in exactly those readers whose (collective) history is (...) narrated. The main interest in understanding the concept of genealogy and revisiting Nietzsche's introduction of it into philosophy lies in understanding how a certain way of writing and a certain textual practice function that successfully call into question current judgments, institutions and practices. Nietzsche's example, I argue, can provide a paradigm for a critical practice that accounts for historical processes of subject formation in terms of power and turns them against given forms of subjectivity. (shrink)

Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘gig economy’, ‘quantified self’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘data colonialism’, ‘data subjects’ and ‘digital citizens’. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sovereign, disciplinary and regulatory. This article argues that the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought these three forms of (...) power into sharp relief but made particularly visible a fourth form of power that we name ‘sensory power’, which has been emerging since the 1980s. The article draws on early studies of power by Michel Foucault, subsequent studies on biopower and biopolitics that expanded on them, and studies in the past decade that focused on data produced from apps, devices and platforms. Yet, despite its ambition, the article is inevitably an outline of a much larger project. (shrink)

This paper critically reviews phenomenological philosophy of the body in light of postmodern and postcolonial critiques of universalism. It aims to recast the notion of the lived body in plural rather than singular terms. It does so within the context of phenomenology and dance, using cultural anthropology to highlight the sense in which bodies are culturally and corporeally specific. The notion of corporeal specificity is applied to the perception of dance, paying particular attention to questions of power and hegemony. This (...) is not to reject phenomenology, but to differentiate it according to its social, historical and kinaesthetic milieux. (shrink)

The article examines the patient-doctor relationship, relying on Michel Foucault’s concept of the clinical gaze. We argue that during the last decades, a profound transformation of the social nature of medicine took place, one that Foucault’s understanding of the clinical gaze cannot adequately account for. First, the article offers an elaboration of the three-node network of clinical gaze, the clinic, and nosology to explain the positioning of the doctor and the patient within the specific social ontology generated by the rise (...) of medicine. We then discuss intensive but irresolute developments brought by technological advancements, especially the X-ray tube. Finally, we argue that in the contemporary clinic, equipped with a plethora of sophisticated devices, the position of the doctor endured the most radical transformation in comparison with Foucault’s proponent of the clinical gaze at the dawn of modern medicine. (shrink)

The article examines the patient-doctor relationship, relying on Michel Foucault’s concept of the clinical gaze. We argue that during the last decades, a profound transformation of the social nature of medicine took place, one that Foucault’s understanding of the clinical gaze cannot adequately account for. First, the article offers an elaboration of the three-node network of clinical gaze, the clinic, and nosology to explain the positioning of the doctor and the patient within the specific social ontology generated by the rise (...) of medicine. We then discuss intensive but irresolute developments brought by technological advancements, especially the X-ray tube. Finally, we argue that in the contemporary clinic, equipped with a plethora of sophisticated devices, the position of the doctor endured the most radical transformation in comparison with Foucault’s proponent of the clinical gaze at the dawn of modern medicine. (shrink)

In the last few years, justice has emerged as a matter of concern for the contemporary constitution of technoscience. Increasingly, both practicing scientists and engineers and scholars of science and technology cite justice as an organizing theme of their work. In this essay, I consider why “science and justice” might be arising now. I then ask after the opportunities, but also the dangers, of this formation. By way of example, I explore the openings and exclusions created by the recent conjugation (...) of science and justice in the field of personal genomics. Finally, I conclude with reflections on what other forms “science and justice” might take, and what might be gained or lost in fostering them. (shrink)

As genealogy has gained greater disciplinary recognition over the last two decades, it has become increasingly common to call any historically oriented philosophy, such as Theodor W. Adorno’s, “genealogy.” In this article, I show that Adorno’s philosophy performs genealogy’s defining functions of “problematization” and “possibilization.” Moreover, it does so in unique ways that constitute a significant contribution to genealogical practice. Adorno’s method, here called “tragic genealogy,” is particularly well-suited to the genealogical analysis of traditional philosophical problems and to the critical (...) reanimation of declining, but ethically significant, values. Nevertheless, I also argue that Adorno’s philosophy cannot be assimilated into genealogical practice without rejecting or revising some of its Hegelian influences, particularly its philosophy of history and its modal metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper situates and examines the project of genealogy as articulated by the philosopher, Michel Foucault, and draws out from that examination educative implications both in terms of research and school practice. Following Foucault, the genealogist's primary challenge, it would seem, is both to acknowledge and to respond to the entwinement of rationality and power. This paper also considers critiques which have clustered around Foucault's work, and, more specifically, his genealogical work, which argue that Foucault leaves us with no hope (...) for a better, more humane future and no positive agenda for change. Despite this “lack” in Foucault's work, I argue, here, that his genealogical agenda is philosophically, politically, and educatively significant. (shrink)

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor rep...

This essay proposes that subcultural practices such as gossip and fan writing are feminist epistemologies that can form radical archive inquiry and knowledge production, and creative outputs. Drawing on feminist new materialism and archive theory, I develop a set of principles for practice-based research methodologies that incorporate a researcher's intersubjective relationship with archive matter (e.g. records, documents, classification systems, social-material contexts) and consider the production of knowledge from such research as forms of tabulation. Fabulation here is seen as part of (...) a critically transgressive epistemological stance that expands feminist critiques of universalising master narratives and archive orthodoxies. My proposition, formed in part through a residency in the Woman's Art Library in London, is to name such research gestures ‘archive fanfiction’, where experimental and practice-oriented method moves with feminist politics and activism. (shrink)

This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of infinite interconnections, possibilities and developments. His rejection of Hegelianism, as well as of (...) other enlightenment philosophies, can be understood at one level as a direct response to his rejection of the mechanical atomist, and organicist epistemological world views, based upon a Newtonian conception of a closed universe operating upon the basis of a small number of invariable and universal laws, by which all could be predicted and explained. The idea of a fully determined, closed universe is replaced; and in a way parallel to complexity theories, Foucault's own approach emphasises notions such as self‐organisation and dissipative structures; time as an irreversible, existential dimension; a world of finite resources but with infinite possibilities for articulation, or re‐investment; and characterised by the principles of openness, indeterminism, unpredictability, and uncertainty. The implications of Foucault's type of approach are then explored in relation to identity, creativity, and the uniqueness of the person. The article suggests that within a complexity theory approach many of the old conundrums concerning determinism and creativity, social constructionism and uniqueness, can be overcome. (shrink)

: The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naïve return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.

(2003). U¨bermenschen, mestizas, nomads The onotology of becoming and the scene of transnational citizenship in anzaldu´a and nietzsche. Angelaki: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 41-57.

Although Friedrich Nietzsche had no less to say about value than he did about truth, his writings reflect contradictory views about their interrelation. In several passages, Nietzsche explicitly remarks that no relation exists between phenomena and value, describing value as a derivative and secondary mode of interpretation arbitrarily ‘attached’ to primary, non-evaluative interpretations. Elsewhere and more understated, however, runs an opposing line of argumentation in which Nietzsche presents interpretation as emerging through evaluation and therefore as necessarily ‘colored’ by it. While (...) Gilles Deleauze's exegesis of Nietzsche struggles to maintain a certain faithfulness to this ambiguity, most contemporary inheritors of Nietzschean thought, including Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault, have embraced the claim of ‘no relation’ between value and interpretation. This article provides support, in part through the analytic of race, for the alternative hypothesis that holds the indissociable relation of value and interpretation. (shrink)

Scholars have recently argued that one of the more urgent tasks for environmentalists is to understand how space is discursively produced. This paper is thus a genealogical, as well as a discourse analytic, account of consideration of how a landscape ‘emerges into history’ through the medium of discourse. This paper analyzes the discourse of an environmental dispute over the Oak Ridges Moraine, a glacial landscape in southern Ontario. I consider a range of different ways the debate was framed, as well (...) as which of those strategies were most likely to be taken up and widely circulated. The paper considers how certain effective strategies for arguing on behalf of environmental issues function both as challenge to, but also ratification of, certain aspects of industrial capitalism. (shrink)