New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

An appreciative Remark on Derrida

Thus in order to be an original, he is obliged to contribute to the ruin of a language, which a century sooner he would have helped to improve. Though such writers may be criticised, their superior abilities must still command success. The ease there is in copying their defects, soon persuades men of indifferent capacities, that they shall acquire the same degree of reputation. Then begins the reign of subtil and strained conceits, of affected antitheses, of specious paradoxes, of frivolous turns, of far-fetched expressions, of new-fangled words, and in short of the jargon of persons whose understandings have been debauched by bad metaphysics. The public applauds: frivolous and ridiculous writings, the beings of the day, are surprisingly multiplied." --Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 

In Condillac the "frivolous" is that "which seems worthless" (Commerce and Government. {Condillac is one of the great eighteenth century economists.})

Let's grant his enemies that Derrida's writings and social consequences instantiate such a reign of "subtil and strained conceits, of affected antitheses, of specious paradoxes, of frivolous turns, of far-fetched expressions, of new-fangled words, and in short of the jargon." According to Condillac, "bad metaphysics" is a science that enters into the "nature and causes" of things. (2) We can make the analogy work if we allow that Derrida's followers are the product  of a scientific age (or Husserlian phenomenology). Yet, the passage from Condillac would also exonerate Derrida in a certain sense; he would be the product of a historical circumstance--he would be born too late to contribute to the improvement of his language.

The Genealogy of Genealogy (II): Diderot and the Pursuit of Truths

Recall that in Letters to Serena (1705), Toland’s genealogical method is a debunking enterprise; it is applied only to concepts whose truth cannot be secured by natural methods of inquiry. (Toland graciously or prudentially allows that revelation may secure truth.) In Toland-style ‘genealogy’ a concept is treated "like some others in philosophy, had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author who was the inventor thereof, and which was favoured or opposed as peoples' persuasion, interest or inclination led them." I have been unable to find an instance where Toland applies this genealogical method to concepts whose truth, if any, can be secured by natural methods. This move was left to Diderot (also to Adam Smith, but he delayed publication of his History of Astronomy by half a century).

At the start of Diderot’s (1754) Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, Diderot offers a ‘natural history’ of each of the individual sciences; he treats “geometry,” by which Diderot means – judging from the names he associates with it (e.g., “Bernoulli, Euler, Maupertuis, Clairaut, Fontaine, and D’Alembert”) – mathematical physics or, especially, rational mechanics, as the exemplary science. In section 5, Diderot divides the life-cycle of a science into three stages: (i) a "birth;” (ii) a period of high prestige; and (iii) a decaying period when there are diminishing returns of enquiry within it. Finally, there is (iv) the completed edifice—confusingly, already discussed in the previous section (4; all my references below are to sections).

Foucault's nostalgia?

One of the students in my Foucault class yesterday called Jouy (from the notorious pages 31-32 of the English version of History of Sexuality, Vol 1) "the first child molestor." I agreed with that, insofar as, roughly speaking, Foucault claims that something like an ancestor of our category of "child molestor" was formed at that time, as the sexuality of children and "abnormals" like Jouy becomes the focus of intensified power / knowledge practices. But prior to that, Foucault would have us believe, no one really cared about the sort of thing that went on in the incident Foucault presents in HS1. 

Two points are relevant here.

The Genealogy of Genealogy

We tend to associate the practice of genealogy, especially in its unmasking variety, with Nietzsche (or the emulators of Foucault). But teaching Toland's (1704) Letters to Serena reminded me that genealogy has a genealogy that precedes Nietzsche. One of Toland's genealogies focuses on the idea of the immortality of the soul, (the subject of the second letter). In paragraph 1, of Letter 2, the "immortality of the soul" is treated as a "truth" known to classical sources independent from and preceding Biblical revelation (p. 20; in fact, he insists that the doctrine is unknown to the Hebrew Bible (Letter II, p. 56)). In the very next paragraph (2) on the very next page, Toland speaks in his own voice and offers a concise statement of his methodology:

To persons less knowing and unprejudiced than Serena, it would [be] found strange perhaps to hear me speak of the soul's immortality, as of an opinion, which, like some others in philosophy, had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author who was the inventor thereof, and which was favoured or opposed as peoples' persuasion, interest or inclination led them. Letters II.2 (p. 21 [I have modernized spelling to some degree--ES].)

Serena is the official addressee of the Letters; she is a high status, educated interlocutor. The preface to the Letters has, in fact, a resounding defense of intellectual, gender equality. Toland suggests that it is either "inveterate custom" or the "design in the men" that causes female exlusion from the "world of learning." In general, Toland thinks nurture is responsible for much of our (very flawed) "second nature" in women and men. So, while Toland accepts a universal human nature, it is according to him extremely plastic. Echoing Plato and Malebranche, he suggests that belief and character formation starts in the womb and is developed (or degenerated by) our major social institutions (family, church, universities, etc.)--he treats our acculturation as inevitable, but as practiced as a form of social disease (cf. "infection.")

Zero tolerance, broken windows, and Plato's Laws

Last week I presented a paper* on "Plato, Political Affect, and Lullabies"** at a wonderful conference at CUNY. One key point is Plato's claim that habits of transgression formed from repeated petty misdeeds can ripple up to bad effect in a polity (788b-c). In the plus ça change category, I read this AP story on "zero tolerance" school policies in the morning paper. Some key grafs: 

Zero tolerance traces its philosophical roots to the "broken windows" theory of policing, which argues that if petty crime is held in check, more serious crime and disorder are prevented.[***]

A dreadful day for the Humanities

Rens Bod calls my attention to the disaster occuring in Timbuktu (Mali). While the barbarism of the Islamist insurgents is surely to blame most, Western neglect and -- as Bod reminds us -- European "prejudices" help explain why these manuscripts had not been digitized yet.

Weekly Philo of Economics: the "gentle hand" of James Steuart, neo-Liberalism and Smithian theodicy

I have the same opinion of Sir James Stewarts Book that you have. Without once mentioning it, I flatter myself, that every false principle in it, will meet with a clear and distinct confutation in mine.--Adam Smith to William Pulteney Esqr, Member of Parliament, Kirkcaldy, 3 Sept. 1772

When an expert speaks to a member of parliament we should always be a bit mistrustful. However, in the Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith does not mention Steuart's nearly forgotten (1767) An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy. (As Salim Rashid has explored, Smith is not generous in his citations.) So, we do not learn what Steaurt's true principles are by Smith's lights. James Steuart (1713-1780) had an exciting life, but after the publications of the Wealth of Nations Steuart's political economy became completely overshadowed by Smith's, despite their shared debts to Hume. This is a shame. For, while Steuart, who -- as the late Andrew Skinner has noted -- has a fantastic treatment of price-formation (a topic that is handled very schematically in Smith's Inquiry),  is not the most elegant writer, Steuart's Inquiry is prophetic of the world we live in: in Steuart's economic universe there are free markets alongside active government interventions. (What's missing in Steuart's treatment are the large bureaucratic agencies that simulate markets--Oskar Lange and data-mining came much later.)

In particular, according to to Steuart: "The duty of the statesman is to support the double competition every where and to permit only the gentle alternate vibrations of the two scales." (229; quoting from the Dublin edition of 1770). This is the only duty of the statesman mentioned by Steuart. Steuart's is, in fact, the vision of neo-liberalism, especially the ordo-Liberals (Röpke, Eucken, and to some degree Hayek), which -- as Foucault has nicely described -- also make it the state's primary goal to create and maintain the possibilities of free markets. (This is not to claim that Steaurt and the ord0-Liberals have the same ideas about the means of doing so.)

Adam Smith in The Birth of Biopolitics, reconsidered.

[This is a guest-post by Barry Stocker; check out his blog.--ES]

Recent comments by Eric and John on Foucault’s reading of Adam Smith have made me think about one aspect of Smith’s argument about domestic industry in Wealth of Nations IV.ii; and about the phenomenological aspect of Foucault’s thought.

Smith begins by arguing that ‘domestick industry’ benefits from the ‘invisible hand’, so that the individual with capital directs it to the use of domestic industry rather than foreign industry, for reasons of self interest rather than public good. It is only that this individual does not only think of the ‘revenue of society’, not that he is completely unaware of it. Foucault’s reading is typically schematic in seeing this passage as being about the complete invisibility of the public good. That schematism is part of Foucault’s creativity, but we should always be particularly careful about distinguishing between the sources Foucault uses and the way he uses them in service of developing a schema. Getting back to Smith, he moves onto the argument that free trade is better for a society than protectionism, that is that the revenue of a society benefits more from trade with other countries than the situation in which the stare creates impediments to that trade. This is a shift away from the initial point, and consciously or not, Smith is using a rhetorical strategy to move the hypothetical reader, who prefers state direction of the economy, to first accept free trade within a national economy, and then international free trade.

Returning to the invisibility of the hand, this is fascinating for Foucault, I suggest, because of an underlying familiarity with phenomenology, which clearly takes a lot from Merleau-Ponty as well as Heidegger though Foucault never chooses to to refer to Merleau-Ponty in his publications or lectures. A peculiar situation made even more peculiar when we remember that Merleau-Ponty was one of Foucault’s undergraduate teachers. However, the text by Merleau-Ponty that is key here is The Visible and the Invisible, sadly left unfinished on Merleau-Ponty’s death.

Foucault on liberalism and multiplicity

In Tuesday's installment in his Philo Economics series, Eric discusses Foucault's analysis in Birth of Biopolitics of Adam Smith. (Jeff has a post from February 2012 on BB as well; [update, 17 Jan 12:30 pm: Eric has one on "regimes of truth" in Spinoza here.]) Common to both is the notion of non-totalizable multiplicity so that economics is "atheist." I thought I should put in my two cents, with an extract from this piece on "Foucault's Deleuzean Methodology of the late 1970s." (See also this earlier post on Foucault's notion of "statification" as integration of a multiplicity.)

Weekly Philo of Economics: Foucault and the Invisible Hand

After last week's post on Smith's treatment of Jupiter's Invisible Hand, I intended to post on Smith's great (and unfairly neglected) rival, James Steuart, but other obligations prevented me from composing that piece this week. So, this week I turn to Michel Foucault's treatment of Smith in The Birth of Biopolitics. While commenting on Smith's use of "invisible hand" in the Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN), Foucault insists that Smith is committed to the claim that

Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic agents are absolutely necessary. The collective good must not be an objective... Invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect nature of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account. Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good. (Foucault 2008: 279-80)

Foucault conflates here two features in Smith; Smith’s insistence in the Wealth of Nations that that “never… much good” is “done by those who affected to trade for the publick good” (WN 4.2.9, 455-56) does not require that individuals do not know that if by legally pursuing profits for their own enterprise (in competitive environment) they can indirectly promote the public interest. If that were right, then by Foucault’s logic, Smith should have never published. However, the reason why the merchant/employer does not know that he is contributing to national wealth by profit seeking activity is that s/he is laboring with a faulty ideology supplied by Mercantilists. Smith never claims that the profit-seeker can never know that his (her) activities may contribute to national wealth. In fact, it follows from Smith’s account that once one is familiar with a correct (that is, Smith’s) political economy, one can also intend to promote national wealth just in virtue of pursing one's economic interests. This is not to deny that according to Smith “generally” there need not be such intent, just that sometimes there could be.

A Foucaultian analysis of framing gun violence as a public health issue

Doug Henwood, author of the wonderful book Wall Street, editor of the Left Business Observer, and blogger at LBO-News, recently broadcast a phone interview with Mark Ames,  author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, on the history of rampage killings, up to and including the Newtown massacre. Toward the end of the interview Henwood claims that right wing anti-gun control fits explicitly into their coherent political philosophy of competitive / possessive individualism, but that neoliberal Democrats can't admit their neoliberalism (that is, their own competitive individualism) and so flounder about looking for a rationale for their gun control efforts.

The mention of neoliberalism reminded me that a week or two ago I briefly discussed Bernard Harcourt's seminar in which François Ewald, alongside Gary Becker himself, discussed Foucault's reading of Becker's human capital theory. Ewald is a specialist in social risk management and has written extensively on the history of insurance in France.

Bringing the two together I'm going to try to work out a Foucaultian reading of the strategy in which Democrats pose gun-control legislation under the rubric of handling public health or public safety risks.

Spinoza, Hume, Hazony and Regimes of Truth

Some of the Hebrews seems to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.--Spinoza (E2P7S) [in Curley's translation]

In my previous three posts (here, here, here) on Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, I did not engage with Hazony's efforts at articulating the epistemology (chapter 6) and metaphysics (7) of the Hebrew Scripture. Chapter 6 is a fascinating meditation on Jeremiah. Here I focus on the latter. According to Hazony in "the Hebrew Bible...truth is not in the first instance a quality of that which is said, but of "objects and persons." "Objects" here are taken very widely to include "objects of the understanding more generally, including actions and circumstances." (195-196). In particular, that "which is true is something that is reliable, steadfast, faithful; while that which is false is something that cannot be counted upon, or which appears reliable but is not." (199) So to simplify: something is true iff it is a steadfast object. So, in addition to true being a property of objects (etc.) it is also a normative property. As Hazony writes, "that which is true is that which proves, through time and circumstance, to be what it ought." (202)

Hazony contrasts what one can label -- to introduce and deploy a Foucault-ish terminology -- "the Biblical regime of truth" with the traditional one he claims we have inherited from Aristotle. (Foucault nor Heidegger are mentioned by Hazony.) In the traditional regime truth is a "quality of speech" (thought, etc.); true speech is about a reality separate from speech and agrees with or corresponds to that reality. (195) Let's grant Hazony the conceptual possibility that there are different "regimes of truth." So, here I ignore the kind of criticism familiar from, say, Bernard Williams' "general point:" that "nothing that was not opposed to the false could be rightly represented as the "the true." (Truth and Truthfulness, 272; emphasis in original; Williams' passage was discussed recently in an illuminating lecture on Foucault's debts to Marcel Detienne by my Ghent colleague, Maarten Van Dyck.) Williams is not just making a narrow (and plausible) point about translation; the general point denies the possibility of different regimes of truth. Given that here I am merely describing the history of various regimes of truth I need not worry if alternative regimes to ours represent anything.

Who will write the Foucauldian story of the Institution of Philosophy?

"There is clearly a connection between power, knowledge, and its control. Perhaps no one has understood and investigated this more thoroughly than Foucault. A Foucauldian study, not of prisons or sexuality, but of the institution of philosophy, would make compelling reading."--Graham Priest in a footnote, responding to Kristie Dotson; Dotson responds to Priest, in turn. [Recall our discussion here at Newapps: here, Helen, Mohan, Me.]

Wrong but true

In History of Sexuality 1, Foucault grants the title of "science" to the biology of reproduction (54E / 73F and 154E / 204F ["les sciences biologiques de la reproduction"]) as opposed to the savoir de la sexualité humaine (204F / 154E). But this doesn't contradict Foucault's claim that "sex" is produced by the modern sexuality dispositif, for "sex" is an "artificial unity" grouping together "anatomical elements [and] biological functions" (the connaissance of which had passed the threshold of scientificity [cf Gutting 1989, 252-256]) with all sorts of other things, such as "conducts, sensations, pleasures."

Now the key move of the sexuality dispositif in constituting "sex" as a natural constant is to then give that unity a causal power (154E / 204F). And while we can note that the sexuality savoir did get some "quasi-scientificity" from its "proximity" with the bona fide science of reproduction, we also have to note that the undoubted scientific contents of the biology of reproduction could be recruited to "serve as the principle of normality for human sexuality" (154-155E / 204F).

Using the notion of "threshold of scientificity" Gutting 1989 lays out (252-256), it seems that Foucault would not object to a (Bachelardian / Canguilhemian) history of science that would say "now we know that Aristotle is wrong about reproduction, and that it was really sperm and egg and not the objects postulated by his theory that were at work." But saying this is not an archaeological analysis, so that Foucault could still say that Aristotle produced true statements relative to his episteme. In other words, to be a little paradoxical about it, he is wrong but was true. Wrong by the standards of contemporary science, but true by the standards of archaeology. (Presumably, had Foucault ever done an archeology of biological savoir in Aristotle's time.) [NB: slight rewording of this graf -- inserting the tenses in "is wrong but was true" -- done on Sun 1 April 2:30 pm CDT.]

Foucault or Deleuze

I’ve recently been revisiting Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics lectures, a misnomer if ever there was one since much of the discussion is on neo-liberalism and Foucault never actually gets to biopolitics. Regardless, while going through this book again an important connection and/or difference between the projects of Foucault and Deleuze became clear to me, a difference with clear connections to Hume and Adam Smith. A couple of passages should give a sense of these connections.

De Libera on philosophical archeology

Here is a great interview (in French) with Alain de Libera on his conception of ‘archeology’ as a philosophical enterprise. De Libera is working on a monumental ‘archeology of the subject’ (volumes I and II have already appeared, but there is more on its way), and in this interview he discusses some of the main methodological aspects of the enterprise. He contrasts his approach with Foucault’s notion of archeology (see the classic L’Archéologie du Savoir), and also with the Nietzschean notion of genealogy.

CC#10: The Relevance of Seneca?

It is no secret that Deleuze's project is in many ways at odds with Kant's. Whereas Kant's transcendental project sought to set forth the conditions of possible experience, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism (and yes, it is a transcendental project) sought to understand the conditions of real experience. In his efforts to develop this project, Deleuze turned heavily to the early modern philosophers, most notably Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume. There has been an upsurge of excellent work in early modern philosophy, as is well represented on this blog by Eric Schliesser, Dennis Des Chene, and Charles Wolfe. I would argue that one reason for the increased interest in early modern thought converges with Deleuze's project: namely, it's part of an effort to develop realist alternatives to various forms of Kantian transcendental idealism and anti-realism.

As part of this general trend in philosophy it might be time to reconsider the stoics, and in particular Seneca.

Foucault contra a "circular ontology of the state"

I'm teaching a Foucault seminar this term (hence the recent flurry of posts on the prison-industrial complex). In prepping the course I re-read this passage I wrote a few years ago (from this article) which claims a close connection between Foucualt's methodology and Deleuze's notion of "multiplicty." 

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault tells us to avoid a "circular ontology of the state" (STP 362F / 354E); we have to keep from hypostasizing the state as a substance, and avoid what Foucault will call "state phobia." In an important passage in Birth of Biopolitics Foucault concentrates on the "statification" [étatisation] of governmental practices. But this does not mean analyzing the "essence" of the state and then trying to deduce current practices of state governmentality as accidents accruing to the substance defined by that essence. For Foucault, flatly stated, "the state does not have an essence"; it is not "an autonomous source of power" (NB 79F / 77E). Rather it is only the "effect, the profile, the mobile shape [découpe mobile] of a perpetual statification [étatisation] or perpetual statifications [étatisations] in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift" multiple practices such as finance, investment, decision-making, control, and relations of local / central authorities (NB 79F / 77E). The state has no essence; it is not a substance with changing properties, but what Deleuze would call an Idea, a multiplicity, a system of differential elements and relations involved in "incessant transactions."[i]

[i] With "incessant transactions" we have a strong echo of the Deleuzean notion of a multiplicity as a structure of continuous variation. Relatively low-key in Difference and Repetition (e.g., 326F / 253E), continuous variation is a major concept throughout A Thousand Plateaus. 

Schools vs prisons

An excellent post at the University of Minnesota Press blog, entitled "Schools vs. Prisons: How zero-tolerance and other punitive disciplinary policies are hurting students."

As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. For today's post, UMP has interviewed Kathleen Nolan, author of Police in the Hallways, who explores the impact of punitive disciplinary policies on students and on their educational experiences.

One response in particular caught my eye. 

Q. What inspired the study you undertook when you started working on this book?

Before going back to school for my Ph.D., I was a high school teacher in the South Bronx. It was around the late 1990s, at the dawn of the move toward high-stakes testing and zero-tolerance school discipline. I, along with most of my colleagues, was very frustrated. Our school was terribly under-resourced. We needed so much—updated books, basic literacy support, working computers, even windows that opened properly and desks that weren’t 30 years old. It was a disgrace. And I thought, you can’t be serious! These are the reforms you’re giving us—culturally irrelevant, test-driven curriculum and police officers? Why aren’t we trying to provide the real social and educational supports that students need? Circumstances in the school certainly inspired the direction of my research, but there was something else outside the school—the view I had from the broken windows of my classroom on the third floor. Just beyond the vacant lot on the other side of the road there was a large, new, shiny white building. It was impressive and imposing in the midst of urban decay. 

It was a youth prison. 

I left teaching and entered grad school with the image of that prison ingrained in my mind. I wanted to learn more about how we got to a point where we, as a society, were more willing to invest in policing and jailing poor youth than we were to invest in their education.

Foucault famously ends a chapter in Discipline and Punish with "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" But here the schools don't resemble prisons, because the prisons are involved in some other social machine than that of a "carceral society" in the sense intended in DP.

The point is that we can't simply apply Foucault's analysis in DP to the US prison-industrial complex; we can't take his concepts as ready-made and look for instances of them ("aha, there it is: that's a Panopticon!"); we can only do our own analysis, perhaps using Foucault's methods in our toolkit. 

To put it in a quick-and-dirty fashion: warehousing one segment of the population of a de-industrialized system (plus providing jobs for another segment) is not the same as disciplining the population of an industrializing system, even if the de-politicization function might be analogous. 

Force-feeding of prisoners in California hunger strike protest

The article is here, and the following highlights are essential to understanding the story. Readers familiar with Foucault's work will recognize the toxic combination produced by prison discipline and "biopower" in which the management of life steps to the fore as a target of power-knowledge dispositifs.

[Force-feeding] has been prohibited since 1975 by the Declaration of Tokyo of the World Medical Association provided the prisoner is "capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment....

[The hunger strike by prisoners at California's Pelican Bay institution is in protest of practices whereby] prisoners in Security Housing Units ("the SHUs") spend 23 hours a day confined in isolation in 6-by-10-foot concrete, windowless, soundproof, cells with artificial lighting and one hour in a concrete exercise yard, ruled by judges to be a form of torture...

[Prisoners have signed DNR orders, which is] a legal order written so that people respect wishes to not undergo CPR or advanced cardiac life support if their heart were to stop or they were to stop breathing. This request is usually made by the patient or health care power of attorney and allows medical teams taking care of them to respect their wishes. 

California Department of Corrections secretary, Matthew Cate, has reported  that he will intervene "to save those inmates’ lives."...

[Responding to the use force-feeding to break a hunger strike at Guantanamo] In March 2006, 250 doctors from seven Western countries published their open letter in the medical journal, The Lancet, warning that participation of any doctor in force-feeding is contrary to World Medical Association rules.

See here for "ten ways to support the Pelican Bay prisoner hunger strike."

Stuart Elden review of Foucault lecture course from 1970-71

Stuart Elden, the subject of a New APPS interview a few months ago, and a blogger too, reviews what promises to be a very interesting book. Here's are some excerpts: 

The course ranges widely in its content and theoretical engagements. Foucault’s inaugural lecture, published as ‘The Order of Discourse’, was delivered on the 2nd December 1970, and this course began the following week. Foucault discusses, among many other things, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the Sophists, Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod, justice and injustice, agrarian crises, the role of the army, money, law and economy in ancient Greece, Oedipus and Nietzsche. The reading of Oedipus, which is explicitly opposed to Freud’s sexual reading, is concerned with the history and politics of truth and knowledge. As Defert perceptively notes, the reading of Oedipus sits in relation to the rest of the course rather as the discussion of Velasquez’s Las Meninas does to The Order of Things: it illustrates the key themes being discussed through a reading of a work of art.

...

It is clear from this course that Foucault’s analysis of power develops out of his work on knowledge; is theoretically enriched by his engagement with Nietzsche; and is born out of his reading of the Greeks. While the first two claims were evident to all careful readers of his work; it is in the last of these that the course’s biggest surprises are to be found. As the back cover of the French edition suggests, “we can no longer read him as before”.

On Phaedrus, Pythagoras, Pirsig, and (Newtonian) philosophy...

Below I reprint an old blog post. It is a homage to Fixler because he introduced me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was an undergraduate. I was reminded of Fixler by this cute discussion (thank you Jason Stanley, by way of facebook). I went to The University of Chicago, and never lost my fondness for Pirsig. So, if it is true that "real philosophers do not consider this [Pirsig's book] real  philosophy" I am not a real philosopher, alas. [Yeah, resist the temptation to affirm!]

More methodology of history of philosophy: against the cult of contingency

During the last two weeks in preparation for a debate with James Harris at BSHP, I posted about my efforts to think my way toward a philosophical history of philosophy (see on Schlick and Coining Concepts here, and on philosophic prophecy here). During the debate, the Chair, Knud Haakonssen, objected to my criticisms of the cult of contingency among historians by claiming that it was product of skepticism. I responded that it presupposed excessive skepticism in order to rule out alternative approaches to history *in advance* (Marxist, Nationalists, Prophetic, Functional, philosophic, etc). That is, this kind of skepticism should be earned.

I have blogged about the cult of contingency before. I quote myself:

English language Foucault videos on Discipline and Punish

I'll be teaching Foucault in the Fall, and so was happy to have these videos pointed out to me by a Facebook friend (Jakko Leskinen). Especially interesting is the reference at the end of video 2 to insurance and savings as more efficient means of control than discipline. Plus the Italian subtitles are very cool. 

Cordelia Fine on self-fulfilling prophecies in "neurosexism"

At the end of Chapter 16 of her Delusions of Gender (New York: Norton, 2010), the concluding chapter of the section on "neurosexism," Cordelia Fine discusses the way speculative claims about biological explanations of gendered behavioral differences always end up being refuted (and sometimes even retracted!) -- though of course with the bold claim making headlines, while the refutations that follow a few months later are buried on p. 14, below the fold. She then writes on p. 186:

But before this {the refutation] happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here, they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our mind, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.

Foucault Studies, vol 10: Foucault and Agamben

Foucault Studies is pleased to announce the publication of issue 10

 A Special Issue on Foucault and Agamben
Guest Edited by Jeffrey Bussolini

Including five original articles and an interpretive review essay of recent publications by Agamben bearing on the work of Foucault.

The issue also includes a report from the Foucault Archives at Berkeley, a review essay of the recent translation of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983: The Government of Self and Others and seven new book reviews.

Link to the issue (all papers are open access).