“Paul Rabinow, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology and world-renowned anthropologist, died April 6 at the age of 76 in his Berkeley home.
Rabinow spent about 41 years at UC Berkeley between 1978 to 2019, serving as the director of anthropology for the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and as the former director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.”
Rabinow was of course a vital conduit for Foucault’s work into English; my introduction to Foucault in grad school was by way of the Foucault Reader he edited.
His work was also important to me as I worked to understand biopolitics beyond Foucault’s own texts, extending the inquiry into topics like the human genome project and medical risk, and offering cautions against appropriations of the concept by Negri and Agamben.
He writes at the end of his Anthropos Today that “my diagnosis is that worldviews concerned with progress and decadence as essential elements of a totalizing figure should be allowed to retire into the past, to take their place as historical memories. By relinquishing them we will enable reason to better confront contemporary problems” (133-4), and concludes:
“Jean Starobinski advocates a criticism that seeks neither “the totality (as with the gaze from above), nor [. . .] intimacy (as does a self-identificatory intuition).” The critical practice is one that finds the means to navigate these relations of distance and closeness. There is no “quasi-divinity” present here, only a disciplined human curiosity. Let us agree with Starobinski that method re-quires motion. A movement that goes on “inlassablement,” tirelessly, steadfastly, persistently. I advocate pursuing in our thought and writing something like the motion, through different scales and different subject positions, that Starobinski proposes in the quote and exemplifies in his criticism. Such movement is easy to initiate and hard to master. Yet I firmly believe that in the actual conjuncture of things, it is a paramount challenge for philosophy and the human sciences to experiment with forms that will be, if not fully adequate to, at least cognizant of, the need for such movement through scale and subjectivity. Such motion might help us to leave notions like progress behind and even to help us to take better care of things, ourselves, and others” (136)
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