Heidegger in New York

Center for Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center

Only a God Can Save Us: Martin Heidegger and the Third Reich

Film Screening and Discussion
March 17th 2010, Wednesday, 6:00pm, Proshansky Auditorium

Join us for the American premiere of the documentary Only A God Can Save Us, a critical examination of Martin Heidegger’s thought and actions during the Third Reich. Fifteen years in the making, the film reveals how essential elements of Heidegger’s philosophy led him to become an enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist revolution. The film also addresses his long post-war silence about the Holocaust and his reluctance to make a public apology. Following the screening we will host a discussion with filmmaker Jeffery Van Davis and Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History, the Graduate Center.

Foucault Circle conference program 2010

Richard Lynch of the Foucault Circle has announced the program for the 10th annual conference in Baltimore (pdf), April 9-11, 2010. It should shortly be available from their website. There will also be travel and accommodation information posted.

Please check their site.

Government of self and others, English publication date

Looks like Amazon is listing an April (UK) and May (USA) release for the Government of the Self and others (82-3) lectures translation into English. (The French editions were published last year.)

Here’s the blurb:

The lectures given by Michel Foucault in 1983 at the Collège de France launch an inquiry into the notion of parrēsia and continue his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. He describes how, with the decline of the city-states, the courage of truth is transformed and becomes directed personally to the Prince’s soul, giving us a new reading of Plato’s seventh letter. The platonic figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates’ rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited in Foucault’s lectures.

In the midst of brilliant interpretations of Greek tragedy, political theory, and philosophy, Foucault allows us to rethink the role, the significance, and the transformation of practices of parrēsia from antiquity to the present. Moreover, in these lectures Foucault constructs a figure of the philosopher in which he recognized himself and with this rereading of Greek thinkers he assures his own placement in philosophical modernity, problematizes his own function, and defines his mode of thinking and being.

‘Modern philosophy is a practice which tests its reality in its relationship to politics. It is a practice which finds its function of truth in the criticism of illusion, deception, trickery, and flattery. Finally, it is a practice which finds the object of its exercise in the transformation of the subject by himself and of the subject by the other. Philosophy as exteriority with regard to a politics which constitutes its test of reality, philosophy as critique of a domain of illusion which challenges it to constitute itself as true discourse, and philosophy as ascesis, that is to say, as constitution of the subject by himself, are what constitute the modern mode of being of philosophy’.

New article “Police/Archives”

Steven Maynard writes…

I have a piece that came out a couple weeks ago in Archivaria: Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists 68 (Fall 2009). The article is titled “Police/Archives” and here’s the abstract:

“ABSTRACT The author develops the notion of “police/archives” based on his experience of trying to conduct research at the Toronto Police Museum. Drawing on Foucault, the author explores the reciprocal relationship between the police as archives and, especially, the archives as police. Another goal is to disentangle Foucault from discussions of “the Archive” as metaphor in both the archival literature and in queer theory. The author makes the case for a less metaphorical, more historical-materialist understanding of Foucault in and on archives.”

New book: Michel Foucault by Lynn Fendler

A new book on Foucault and education by Lynn Fendler:

Description

Michael Foucault is undisputedly a major thinker in education. Lynn Fendler’s volume offers the most coherent account of Foucault’s educational thought. This work is divided into: 1) Intellectual Bibliography 2) Critical exposition of Foucault’s work 3) The reception and influence of Foucault’s work 4) The relevance of the work today
Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Preface
Foreword

Part 1: Intellectual Biography

Part 2: Critical Exposition of Foucault’s Work
I. Definitions of Major Concepts
II. Summaries of Major Works

Part 3: The Reception and Influence of Foucault’s Work

Part 4: The Relevance of Foucault’s Work Today

Bibliography
Index

From Continuum, Feb 3 2010, $120.

This sounds like a useful overview, but surely Continuum are pricing this beyond the individual here. I’m all for publishers getting a return on the books they publish, but why not produce an affordable paperback edition alongside the hardback? There are far too many instances of publishers producing really expensive hardbacks that nobody reads (Springer does this a lot for instance, even demanding camera-ready copy from authors). Having a book coming out in a couple of weeks myself that I’ve spent some years writing I know I would be very upset with this kind of pricing policy.

No wonder people scan them into pdfs and upload them to websites.

Carceral notebooks

I missed this previously:

Carceral Notebooks
Volume 4, 2008

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Bernard Harcourt

Discipline, Security, and Beyond: A Brief Introduction.
Andrew Dilts and Bernard Harcourt

D’une configuration disciplinaire à l’autre? Laurent Bonelli

Des classes à la population ?
Formules de gouvernement et détention
Fabienne Brion

Masques de Foucault. Guy Casadamont

The Post-Disciplinary Prison. Gilles Chantraine

Michel Foucault Meets Gary Becker: Criminality Beyond
Discipline and Punish
.
Andrew Dilts

“Une chaîne, qui laisse toute liberté de faire le bien et qui ne permette
que très difficilement de commettre le mal.”
Claude-Olivier Doron

La police, les anormaux et leurs archives au XVIIIe siècle.
Lisa Jane Graham

Supposons que la discipline et la sécurité n’existent pas
Rereading Foucault’s Collège de France Lectures.
(with Paul Veyne)
Bernard E. Harcourt

Repenser la police et les contrôles par rapport à Foucault.
Salvatore Palidda

La connaissance “de” l’Etat. Pasquale Pasquino

“Je peins le passage.” Stephen Sawyer

Beyond Discipline and Punish: Foucault’s Challenge to Criminology
Mariana Valverde

Foucault in a Post-9/11 World: Excursions into Security,
Territory, Population
Michael Welch

Contributors

From the Introduction:

Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures contained a wealth of insights about punishment, penal techniques, the development of the police, and their relationship to neoliberalism. The lectures were extremely useful for thinking about the entire social body in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and specifically about the practices that characterize the contemporary penal sphere. And thus we set out, in these essays, to explore contemporary penal practices in conversation with the newly published lectures—but also, naturally, in conversation with Foucault’s earlier writings on épistémès and his later turn to ethics and truth telling, to veridiction and le dire vrai, to parrêsia.

Special issue of Global Society

Nick Kiersey has edited a special issue of the journal Global Society on Foucault and International Relations.

Global Society, Volume 23 Issue 4 2009

The papers assembled in this special issue are the result of a series of discussions, starting with a panel organised by David Chandler at the 33rd Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association, University of Exeter, 13-17 December 2008, and continuing with discussions across a range of panels at the 50th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New York, 15-18 February 2009. These papers represent just a sample of viewpoints and arguments extended on those occasions.

Editorial
Editorial Introduction
Nicholas J. Kiersey; Jason R. Weidner
Pages 353 – 361
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Articles
Neoliberal Political Economy and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Why Governmentality is Not Hollow
Nicholas J. Kiersey
Pages 363 – 386
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Governmentality, Capitalism, and Subjectivity
Jason R. Weidner
Pages 387 – 411
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Governmentality of What? Populations, States and International Organisations
Jonathan Joseph
Pages 413 – 427
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Foucault’s Concept of Power and the Global Discourse of Human Rights
Ivan Manokha
Pages 429 – 452
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Hobbes, War, Movement
Leonie Ansems De Vries; Jorg Spieker
Pages 453 – 474
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Taking Foucault beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe
Halvard Leira
Pages 475 – 495
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Decentring Global Power: The Merits of a Foucauldian Approach to International Relations
Doerthe Rosenow
Pages 497 – 517
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“… we are being left to burn because we do not count” : Biopolitics, Abandonment, and Resistance
Anna Selmeczi
Pages 519 – 538
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Rethinking Foucault in International Relations: Promiscuity and Unfaithfulness
Andrew W. Neal
Pages 539 – 543
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New book cover designs for Vintage re-editions

What do you think?

Very arresting, but doesn’t he get the title wrong of the last one? Or are these preliminary designs?

New books for the new year

Two new (to me) books:

Veyne, Paul
Foucault

1. Edition – May 2010

ca. 19.90 Euro
2010. 216 Pages, Softcover
ISBN-10: 0-7456-4642-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4642-8 – John Wiley & Sons
Short description
Michel Foucault and Paul Veyne: the philosopher and the historian. Two major figures in the world of ideas, resisting all attempts at categorization. Two timeless thinkers who have long walked and fought together. In this short book Paul Veyne offers a fresh portrait of his friend and relaunches the debate about his ideas and legacy. ‘Foucault is not who you think he is’, writes Veyne; he stood neither on the left nor on the right and was frequently disowned by both. He was not so much a structuralist as a sceptic, an empiricist disciple of Montaigne, who never ceased in his work to reflect on ‘truth games’, on singular, constructed truths that belonged to their own time.

A unique testimony by a scholar who knew Foucault well, this book succeeds brilliantly in grasping the core of his thought and in stripping away the confusions and misunderstandings that have so often characterized the interpretation of Foucault and his work.

From the contents
* I. In universal history, everything is singular: ‘discourse’
* II. There is no ‘a priori’ that is not historical
* III. Foucault’s scepticism
* IV. Archaeology
* V. Universalism, universals, epigenesis: the beginnings of Christianity
* VI. Notwithstanding Heidegger, man is an intelligent animal
* VII. The physical and human sciences: Foucault’s programme
* VIII. A sociological history of truths: knowledge, power, the set-up
* IX. Was Foucault a corrupter of the young? Was he the despair of the workers’ movement?
* X. Foucault and politics
* XI. Portrait of a samurai

Foucault in an Age of Terror
Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society
Palgrave Macmillan

Rethinking Foucault in an Age of Terror focuses on the relationship between literary culture, power, society and war, assessing the critical importance of Michel Foucault’s lecture series Society Must Be Defended for contemporary debates about war and terror in literary and cultural studies, as well as social and political thought.

Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended develops his historical investigations of power and knowledge to examine how society is constituted in and through relations of force, conflict and domination, articulating his account of sovereignty and biopolitics with his theory of force and war to bring a new dimension to our understanding of these fraught issues. His lectures focused in part on English society and culture, and in this respect offer an important and timely challenge to the discipline of contemporary English Studies. In response to this challenge, scholars in history, politics, as well as literary and cultural studies consider the role literary and cultural texts play in the historical and theoretical conjunction of war, society and politics Foucault outlined.


Contents

Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Life Struggles: War, Disciplinary Power and Biopolitics; J.Reid
‘Power’s ode to itself’: History, Power and Poetry in the Post-Waterloo Writing of Hazlitt, Byron and Shelley: S.Bainbridge
Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker; A.Houen
Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology; J.Marks
Biopower, Biological Racism and Eugenics; C.Hanson
Michel Foucault: Defending Society and the Idea of Race; D.Macey
War and Peace, or Governmentality as the Ruin of Democracy; L.Hartley
Necropolitics; A.Mbembe
A Geopolitical Blindspot in Foucault’s Thought: Biopolitics, Torture and Indefinite Detention in the Colonial World; S.Morton
‘Manual for a Raid’ and ‘Henslowe’s Diary’: Foucault and the Multiple Meanings of the Document; R.Fensome
Foucault, Auden and two New York Septembers; S.Bygrave
Notes
Index

Foucault circle update

From Richard Lynch at the Foucault Circle:

Hello all,
May the end of the year find you well.
Two brief notes:

1. The Foucault Circle is sponsoring a group session at the APA
Eastern Division meetings.  I hope you’re able to attend:

Session GVIII-3. Foucault Circle
Tuesday, December 29, 11:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
New York Marriott Marquis, New York, NY
Room location can be found in the program, available at the conference.

“Putting Foucault to Work: Deploying Genealogy in Contemporary Inquiry”
Chair: Colin Koopman (University of Oregon)
Speakers:
Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond) “A Genealogy of
Neoliberalism, Part I”
Todd May (Clemson University) “A Genealogy of Neoliberalism, Part II”
Commentator: Brad Stone (Loyola Marymount University)

2.  The Foucault Circle now has a group page on Facebook.
If you are on the Facebook network, please consider joining.
Type “Foucault Circle” into the facebook search box, and it should
come up.
This Facebook page does *not* replace our website or e-mail list,
which will remain our primary means of communication.  It’s merely
another tool.  But I hope it will be helpful.

Finally, the program and logistical information for our annual
meeting (April 9-11, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD) will be
sent out in January.