Lacan and the mirror stage explained

Makes sense now?

Our complicity in surveillance

Welcome to my world is right: we take part in the production of our surveillance. His evidence?

Facebook.

Subject formation

Two different posts on subject formation. Both claim certain things about Foucault and subject formation, from very different perspectives. One is “missional” and wishes to use postmodernity to reclaim the missionizing role of the church, and the other analyses the death of the subject from a Heideggerian perspective.

The UK surveillance society

(Updated)

How many cameras would you need for complete surveillance of a large country?

Britain’s answer is one for every 14 people…plus “spy drones“:

The latest gizmo to be employed in what civil liberty campaigners are calling Britain’s “surveillance society” is a small, remote-controlled helicopter that can hover above inner city streets and monitor suspected criminals.

Moi, Pierre Rivière movie sequel

A sequel has been made to the movie Moi, Pierre Rivière… based on Foucault’s book of the same name about a true case of parricide.

(Updated)

A sex worker’s story

A sex worker tells her story:

Heterotopia

Gary Sauer-Thompson has a post on heterotopia which makes a valuable point:

[Foucault] says that the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

More here.

Extreme Prejudice: notes on Andrew’s Scull’s TLS review of Foucault’s History of Madness

Colin Gordon has provided the text of a letter he wrote to the TLS in response to Scull, which they have declined to publish. I’m pleased to be able to present it here for the first time. –Jeremy

Switched at birth?

The Birth of Biopolitics by Michel Foucault:

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore:

Foucault is…

…a demi-god

…a hallucination

…a truth-denier

…a “Franco-phoney“

…regrettably a dominant figure in law schools (along with Marx)

…a pseudo-scientific sophist transmitted by relics

…besotting the French chattering classes

and finally:

…is responsible for the Virginia-Tech killings

Adding:

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

“Polemics, Politics and Problematizations”

Update: The Nation weighs in on Phyllis Schlafley’s claim (above) that the Virginia Tech shootings were caused by reading Foucault and other “fringe” writers.