The Ister DVD released

The 2004 documentary The Ister is released on DVD this week.

Daniel Birmbaum:

The film traces the Danube’s full course, from the Black Sea all the way to its source in southern Germany. Part rhapsodic journey replete with moments of great beauty, part tedious educational program rife with digressions on politics and history, it is not the great work of art that would prove Syberberg wrong. But it is certainly an original undertaking: a cinematic collage that turns on Hölderlin’s epic “river hymn,” The Ister (from “Istros,” the ancient Greek term for the Danube), and, more pointedly, on Martin Heidegger’s famous reading of it.

And later:

Perhaps this accounts for the fact that it is not until we reach the Black Forest—real Heidegger country—and Syberberg appears, dressed in white like a latter-day Kurtz, that things get truly exciting. The creator of the magnum opus Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) dilates on the “new Germany,” which he calls a “weak and friendly” place. Something has been lost, he suggests: The glory of Germany, the most spiritual of nations, is gone; gone is Hölderlin, gone is Heidegger. If you live in this weak, friendly nation, as I do, you’re especially susceptible to artists like Syberberg—artists who open the door to a world we thought no longer existed, a world of myths and heroic poetry. Syberberg’s art has always tapped into these archaic energies, although on the surface it critiques the irrationalism such energies produce when unleashed. His dangerously attractive soliloquy seems a necessary finale, reminding us that The Ister’s true subject is not the physical river but the metaphysical geography that has been evoked by poets and thinkers to devastating and barbaric effect. Although Syberberg is fully aware of this, he can’t help playing with fire. He is a mild and sophisticated man, someone I would love to get to know. Behind him, the forest whispers: “The horror, the horror.”

Foucault’s translator on his death

Alan Sheridan in 1984:

In the late Sixties he spent two years as Director of the French Institute in Warsaw, where he acquired a profound loathing for Eastern European socialism and an equally profound admiration for the Poles. I remember, one Sunday morning, watching the installation of Pope John Paul II with Foucault and a friend – all three of us ex-Catholics – on Michel’s miniscule black-and-white television set. I was struck at the time by the fascination with which he watched the proceedings. Quite apart from delight in the ‘camp’ of the occasion, it was obvious that he was feeling something of the pride and joy felt by the Poles themselves: their masters may be puppets of Moscow, but a Pole was now running the Catholic Church. He was always in the forefront of any action to assist the Eastern European dissidents. Solidarity was obviously very close to his heart….

Foucault was much criticised retrospectively for his early support of the Ayatollah Khomeini. What fascinated him was how a certain kind of spirituality could galvanise millions of people to take to the streets and bring down one of the most highly-armed regimes in the world. He withdrew his support as soon as the nature of the ‘Islamic revolution’ became apparent, but I believe that he did suffer from a naive belief in the sanity of the ‘popular will’, failing to see that where it is unmediated by established procedures and institutions it can all too easily be manipulated into tyranny.

New video interview: Foucault and Signoret on Poland, 1981

An interview conducted on French TV of the visit by Simone Signoret and Foucault to Poland, following the declaration of martial law.

Here’s what the site says (thanks to Google Translate!):

Christine Ockrent interviewing the actress Simone Signoret and philosopher Michel Foucault on the situation in Poland where the Solidarity trade union has been banned by the government. Simone Signoret, who wears a badge of the Polish trade union “Solidarity”, explains why she went to Poland, including Medecins du Monde. She says she has not had the courage to wear this badge there. She believes that the country is in dissent, it spoke of the economic situation and the fact that Poles are monitored continuously, “we do not talk because there are microphones everywhere. She saw Polish actors “boycott” their work, namely their participation in television programs that gives them a fixed income. Décission This is not an instruction given by a union, but it is taken individually. Michel Foucault examines the notion of standardization in Poland, spoke of the totalitarian regime in socialist countries. It urges the French to visit this country. It poses the problem of the necessary commitment of Europe, explains that the Poles feel about the French.

Foucault on Nietzsche: proto-postmodernist?

Apparently there’s some kind of flustering going on whether (a) Foucault used an unpublished text by Nietzsche and (b) that he (and Derrida) called Nietzsche a “proto-postmodernist.” See Craig’s summary here entitled “a myth about Foucault.”

Craig covers the first issue. (b) is also very unlikely. Foucault was once asked whether he was a postmodernist and he demurred as he doesn’t like labels and anyway he was still trying to figure out modernity!

Rorty on Foucault in 1981

Reviewing three new books by Foucault in 1981, Richard Rorty wrote:

Russell and Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Sartre are dead, and it looks as if there are no great philosophers left alive. At the end of his book, Alan Sheridan hesitantly stakes a claim for Foucault: ‘It is difficult to conceive of any thinker having, in the last quarter of our century, the influence that Nietzsche exercised over its first quarter. Yet Foucault’s achievement so far makes him a more likely candidate than any other.’ This judgment is probably right. Foucault offers the two things which people want from a philosopher: a view about what values to place on current knowledge-claims, and hints about how to change the world. More specifically, he combines a sceptical judgment about the nature of science with concrete suggestions about how power might be taken from those who presently possess it. His view of knowledge derives from Nietzsche. His view of power derives from Marx. But he uses each of these men to criticise the other.

You can tell this is Rorty from the language (eg., “social hope,” mentions of Dewey) and how he uses his subjects to very neatly stack up against each other in clear-cut positions.

The three books (Power/Knowledge, Sheridan’s biography, Herculine Barbin) are given a fairly sensible review by Rorty. He later remarks:

Power/Knowledge (and an earlier collection of translations of his essays and interviews, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) can be read as cancelling and replacing Foucault’s earlier attempt to state the method and goal of his historical writing: The Archaeology of Knowledge, his stuffiest, most obscure and worst book. Especially in the interviews. Power/Knowledge is remarkably un-gurulike, very honest, and about as clear as an attempt to say something genuinely new can be.

Rorty had a different opinion about the third book however:

The third of the books under review, however, was a mistake. Herculine Barbin comprises the memoirs of a hermaphrodite who committed suicide, a nasty little fictionalisation of her life (‘A Scandal at the Convent’) by a psychiatrist named Panizza, and a very lightweight ten-page introduction by Foucault. Foucault is currently in the middle of writing a long work on sexuality, and these memoirs are one of the things he came across in his research. But they were not worth reprinting, much less translating. They do not help to answer, nor even help to ask, the question with which Foucault begins his introduction: ‘Do we truly need a true sex?’ About the memoirs, Foucault says: ‘one has the impression … that everything takes place in a world of the feelings – enthusiasm, pleasure, sorrow, warmth, sweetness, bitterness – where the identity of the partners and above all the enigmatic character around whom everything centred, had no importance … what she evokes in her past is the happy limbo of a non-identity …’ But this is not borne out by the text. The memoirs convey very little. They read so much like soft porn that it is almost impossible to remember that they really are a desolate attempt at self-description.

This leads to Rorty’s severest criticisms of Foucault, namely that he goes too far, is too radical.

Foucault does not speculate about possible future utopias, either in connection with sexuality or with anything else. His suggestions about reform remain hints. But one wishes he would speculate. His obviously sincere attempt to make philosophical thinking be of some use, do some good, help people, is not going to get anywhere until he condescends to do a bit of dreaming about the future, rather than stopping dead after genealogising the present.

…

Like Sartre, Foucault seems to hate the bourgeoisie more than he loves anyone else.This leads him into the same sort of tolerance for Maoist bloodthirstiness as Sartre had for Stalinist terror. In the first interview in Power/Knowledge, Foucault out-radicals some Maoists by objecting to ‘People’s Courts’ as perpetuating the ‘judicial and penal apparatus’ which the revolution must get rid of. It all sounds much too much like a Nazi ideologue suggesting that the administrative apparatus for carrying out the Nuremberg Laws betrays the spirit of the National Socialist revolution, and hinting that it would be better if Jews were beaten to death on the spot by their neighbours. It is hard to see how someone who claims no longer to believe in a good, pure, true self which has been repressed by society can seriously suggest that ‘the masses will discover a way of dealing with the problem of their enemies … methods of retribution which will range from punishment to re-education, without involving the form of the court which – in any case in our society, I don’t know about China – is to be avoided.’

Certainly in this quote we have that old appeal to the proletariat that Orwell lampoons so effectively in Nineteen-Eighty-Four. The interview from which this quotation derives was published in 1972 and occurred between Foucault and “some Maoist militants” to discuss a people’s court to judge the police.

Now, Foucault does go on to admit that if the people’s court deleted the “bench and the robe” and just employed a a regulatory role (what he would prefer to call “an instance of political elucidation”) then he would agree with it. But this would precisely not be a court.

A court has the function of splitting up people, a dividing practice, especially between the proles and the non-proletariat, and this is what Foucault wants to examine in this interview. For me I don’t think this is a question of out-radicalising Maoists, but of his familiar concern with power and institutions.

AAG 2010 sessions on territory and cartography

I’ve mounted a website and blog for our sessions on Territory and Cartography at next year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) conference. We have three sessions total and some of the papers have a definite Foucaultian approach, although this was not a prerequisite of the cfp.

Anyway, please jump over to the blog and leave comments and suggestions. I’m hoping to get the session participants to upload their actual abstracts and to transition the blog into a group blog for more general discussion going forward.

New book: Stuart Elden Terror and Territory

Stuart has a new book out: Terror and Territory, The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. From the publisher:

A timely analysis of the contemporary state of territory

Today’s global politics demands a new look at the concept of territory. From so-called deterritorialized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda to U.S.-led overthrows of existing regimes in the Middle East, the relationship between territory and sovereignty is under siege. Unfolding an updated understanding of the concept of territory, Stuart Elden shows how the contemporary “war on terror” is part of a widespread challenge to the connection between the state and its territory.

Although the importance of territory has been disputed under globalization, territorial relations have not come to an abrupt end. Rather, Elden argues, the territory/sovereignty relation is being reconfigured. Traditional geopolitical analysis is transformed into a critical device for interrogating hegemonic geopolitics after the Cold War, and is employed in the service of reconsidering discourses of danger that include “failed states,” disconnection, and terrorist networks.

Looking anew at the “war on terror”; the development and application of U.S. policy; the construction and demonization of rogue states; events in Lebanon, Somalia, and Pakistan; and the wars continuing in Afghanistan and Iraq, Terror and Territory demonstrates how a critical geographical analysis, informed by political theory and history, can offer an urgently needed perspective on world events.

Stuart Elden is professor of political geography at Durham University, UK.

304 pages | 11 maps | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Terror-State-Territory
1. Geographies of Fear, Threat, and Division
2. Territorial Strategies of Islamism
3. Rubble Reduced to Dust: Targeting Weak States
4. Iraq: Destruction and Reconstitution
5. Territorial Integrity and Contingent Sovereignty
Coda: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty

Notes
Index

Stuart tells me that this work includes some discussion of Foucault and is also grounded in the work he has done previously on Foucault. I might also add that Stuart is putting together quite a body of work on territory. In addition to the current book (and article) there is a long term project on the entire history of territory, as well as recent pieces on Lefebvre and Foucault.

CFP: “Deleuze: Ethics and Politics”

Rockwell Clancy sends the following message:

* * *

Call for Papers

 

4^th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference

At

Purdue University

 

“Deleuze: Ethics and Politics”

 

April 9-10, 2010

Purdue University, West Lafayette

 

Deadline for Paper Submission:

January 15, 2010

 

The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without a doubt, Deleuze was one of the most singular and prolific philosophers of the 20^th century. It is no surprise then, that the impact of Deleuze’s thought continues to reverberate throughout a host of diverse disciplines including Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory, Law, Visual Arts, Film Studies, and Education. With recognition of Deleuze’s influence in these various fields, and in the spirit of Serres’ assessment, this  conference seeks to motivate an exploration of Deleuze’s inventive thinking in the particular areas of politics and ethics.

 

Thus, this conference will serve as a platform, bringing together graduate students and faculty interested in engaging, developing, or critically examining the political and ethical dimensions of Deleuze’s work. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: immanent vs. transcendent criteria in ethics, political theory, law and jurisprudence; the role of the State in relation to capitalism; the possibility of social forms of organization radically exterior to the State forms; the positive or productive function of desire as a creative force directly invested in the social field; the problem of micro-fascism with respect to individual and collective processes of subjectivation; the forms of resistance enabled by minor literature and other processes of becoming-minor; the conception of cartography as a critical and transformative social analytic of power relations. This two-day conference will consist of four panels, each with three to four accepted graduate students presenting, three keynote addresses, and a wine and cheese reception.

 

Keynote Speakers

We will host three preeminent Deleuze scholars as keynote speakers: Daniel Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, from Purdue University, and Eugene Holland, from Ohio State University. Dr. Smith is known for national and international projects including translations of Deleuze and Klossowski and several works on Deleuze leading up to the forthcoming publication of his book on Deleuze’s philosophical system. Dr. Holland specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. He has published widely including a 1999 volume on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and a forthcoming book on Nomad Citizenship. Dr. Plotnitsky has contributed numerous publications on Deleuze and on the topics of science, literature, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book entitled Space-Time-Matter-Thought: Non-Euclideanism from Riemann and Deleuze, and Beyond.

 

Conference Eligibility and Submission Process

We welcome submissions from graduate students of any discipline working on the political or ethical facets of Deleuze’s philosophy. Submissions will be accepted via email at phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2010. Authors should attach both the paper and an abstract (500 word limit) as a Word document. The author’s name and affiliation should be omitted from the body of the paper. In addition, the author should include the text of the abstract in the body of the message. Be sure to include the following information in the email: full name, departmental affiliation, degree program, and the title of your paper. Accepted authors will receive notification no later than February 15, 2010.

 

Contact Information

For updates, please visit http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/phil-lit/conference/. All additional questions can be directed to Erin Kealey or Rocky Clancy via email at: phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu.

 

 

Sexuality and solitude: Foucault and Sennett

You’ve read the piece known as Sexuality and Solitude by Foucault (DE 295) which begins:

In a work consecrated to the moral treatment of madness and published in 1840, a French psychiatrist, Louren*, tells of the manner in which he treated one of his patients – treated and of course, as you may imagine, cured. One morning he placed Mr A., his patient, in a shower-room. He makes him recount in detail his delirium. ‘But all that,’ said the doctor, ‘is nothing but madness. Promise me not to believe in it any more.’ The patient hesitates, then promises. ‘That is not enough,’ replies the doctor. ‘You have already made me similar promises and you haven’t kept them,’ And he turns on the cold shower above the patient’s head. ‘Yes, yes! I am mad!’ the patient cries. The shower is turned off; the interrogation is resumed. ‘Yes. I recognise that I am mad,’ the patient repeats. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘I recognise it because you are forcing me to do so.’ Another shower. ‘Well, well,’ says Mr A., ‘I admit it. I am mad, and all that was nothing but madness.’

*See footnote a in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, edited by P. Rabinow.

This text has appeared in various forms (the one in J. Carrette’s Religion and culture is the best since it is a variorum) but as far as I know the complementary piece by novelist and author Richard Sennett, originally published alongside Foucault in the London Review of Books in May 1981, has not appeared.

With the reorganisation of the LRB website recently in honor of their 30th anniversary, this text is now very easy to read (sub. req’d).

An extract:

A few years ago, Michel Foucault and I discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves. Sex is as basic as eating or sleeping, to be sure, but it is treated in modern society as something more. It is the medium through which people seek to define their personalities, their tastes. Above all, sexuality is the means by which people seek to be conscious of themselves. It is that relationship between self-consciousness, or subjectivity, and sexuality that we want to explore. Few people today would subscribe to Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,’ but a translation of this dictum to the field of sex does command assent: know how you love, and you will know who you are.

Michel Foucault and I are working, as I say, on two very different historical periods in which this theme of self-consciousness via sexuality appears. He focuses on how Christianity in its early phases, from the third to the sixth century, assigned a new value to sexuality, and redefined sexuality itself. I focus on the late 18th and 19th centuries, and within that period on how medical doctors, educators and judges took a new interest in sexuality.

There is also a letter, a few issues later in 1981 from a certain William Milne, identified as a professor at Newcastle Upon Tyne who says:

Michel Foucault sternly claims that he is not a structuralist. If this is the case, can he please explain to a layman what he means exactly by ‘technologies of the self’? And why no citations from women themselves? And why no analysis of sado-masochism? Nietzsche’s aphorism, ‘Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip,’ tells us more about recent history surely than the theories of Tissot and Boerhaave, or, come to that, the obsessively self-centred memoirs of Casanova, ever can.

Sennett then offers a final series of remarks centering around Tissot’s Onania (1758):

Tissot set in motion three attitudes about auto-eroticism that profoundly influenced medical and educational opinion later in the 18th and throughout the 19th century: sexuality in solitude is, first, profoundly arousing; auto-eroticism is, secondly, the condition in which a person is most aware of him or herself. To be both sexually aroused and self-aware, alone, is, thirdly, dangerous: the body is on the road to madness and the soul on the road to perdition. What is important about Tissot’s legacy, and about the phenomenon of auto-eroticism generally in the 19th century, is that through the prism of auto-eroticism authorities attempted to understand eroticism itself. Armed with these three assumptions, researchers set out to try and understand sexuality. Rather than considering people making love together as constituting a domain of knowledge about which the doctor would learn, the notion was to separate the individual and to study him by himself, because it was in isolation that the person felt his sexuality most strongly. It was an application to the study of sex of other forms of 19th-century individualism, this assumption that a person was to be considered as an isolated individual.

Update on the Heidegger situation

Updated below.

As we noted here on foucaultblog last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a slash and run piece by a guy called Carlin Romano on Heidegger. Romano’s stated goal was to ridicule and mock Heidegger:

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

Romano has already been called out by Slate, but now even the New Republic piles on:

this column is an intellectual disgrace, and one that the Chronicle should be ashamed for having published. I say this as someone who’s very far from being one of the “acolytes” who “bizarrely venerate” Heidegger and his ideas.

The writer here is Damon Linker, who continues:

Yet even if distinguishing between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics were as impossible as Romano (and Faye) would have us believe, that still would not justify excluding Heidegger’s thought from serious reflection, study, and a place in the university. On the contrary, it would serve as an additional reason to wrestle with the challenge it poses.

I think I would agree with this.

However, now Slate is back with more comments from someone else who finds the Romano essay “delightfully acerbic”:

Romano’s Chronicle piece generated an often-furious comments thread, a spectacle of postmodernists in temper tantrum mode.

I can understand the splenetic attacks on Romano for not taking Heidegger seriously, although the angry Heideggerian academics never explained exactly why we should.

In general, I’m in favor of separating the man (or woman) from the work, but it was Heidegger himself, his defenders don’t seem to recognize, who claimed Nazism for his own. He didn’t make the separation between man and philosophy that they conveniently claim to excuse his personal racism.

This is by a guy called Ron Rosenbaum, who goes on to attack Hannah Arendt:

Which brings us back to Arendt again. As the extent of Heidegger’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazism becomes more apparent, and as it becomes ever clearer that the allegiance was not merely opportunistic and careerist but derived from a philosophical affinity with his Fuhrer’s effusions, it becomes impossible not to reexamine certain questions. Such as: How much did Arendt know about the depth of Heidegger’s allegiance? Did Heidegger lie to her? Did she believe him the way she believed Eichmann? Did she assume his complicity with the genocidaires was something careerist and banal? Or worse, did she know? And did she disingenuously (or self-deceptively) construct her false banal Eichmann from her false banal Heidegger?

Rosenbaum or Slate however have turned off comments so we’ll not be able to address these questions. Perhaps they got scared by the Chronicle responses.

Update. New York Times weighs in.