New Thomas Lemke material on biopolitics

Via Foucauldian Reflections comes news of some new work by Thomas Lemke, who is at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt/Main. Lemke works on some of the issues surrounding genetics and reproduction from a biopolitical perspective.

His new paper is a discussion of the 78-79 lectures: “An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory” (Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory No. 15, 2007).

Excerpt below.

Foucault Archives go online

The Foucault Archives have now gone online:

http://www.michel-foucault-archives.org/

(via foucault-l)

The site is edited by:

Philippe Artières,
Jean-François Bert,
Daniel Defert,
Frédéric Gros,
Pierre Lascoumes,
Pascal Michon,
Mathieu Potte-Bonneville,
Judith Revel,
José Ruiz-Funes.

More comments on Iran

It’s quite interesting how Ignatieff dismisses Foucault’s support for the Iranian revolution with just labelling him as radical and praises Jahanbegloo’s attempts to bring the liberal, pragmatic thinkers such as Rorty and Heller.
<snip>
A recurring theme these days is that the lines between the right and the left, when it comes to Iran, has become so blurry that they has almost become meaningless.
The left has started to challenge the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy in a similar fashion to the right. This is what living in the American paradigm does to one’s intellect, I suspect.

(From here.)

YouTube phenomenon video

Interesting reflections on the latest YouTube phenomenon video of the Philippine prisoners practicing their “Thriller” performance (now viewed over 2.7 million times!).

Two minutes into the video, I got over my amazement and realized that in fact it all made sense, as far as Foucault goes. Thinking back over his theories of disciplinary society, it fit almost too well. Indeed, perhaps I was astonished at first, more because, as Freud says, what is uncanny is what is most familiar and therefore strangely hard to recognize.

And so the more I thought about the dance and about the appearance of the video on YouTube, the more I saw that it conformed quite exactly to Foucault’s theories about the social function of the prison.

History of the Situationist International

Not Bored! (which hosts the famous Surveillance Camera Players, previously mentioned in this blog) has written an interesting history of the Situationist International and Guy Debord.

Exactly 50 years ago today — on 28 July 1957 — the Situationist International (SI) was founded in Cosio d’Arroscia, a small village in Italy. Is it not senseless to celebrate such an event? The SI disbanded in April 1972, and so is no longer with us. Several of its most important members (Asger Jorn, Constant, and Guy Debord) are dead. When the organization was in existence, it existed both in and against its era;[1] it was never intended to last beyond it.[2] To the extent that the SI’s era has passed, so has the SI itself. There is no going back.

“Did Foucault invent fisting?”

“Did Foucault invent fisting?”

This was a question I was once asked by an anthropology student in our department. I quote it today because it’s symptomatic of the often legendary or rumor-laden mythology that sometimes surrounds Foucault’s private life, particularly when it comes to sex and homosexuality.

By way of commenting on the story that the University of Michigan is thinking of changing its gay support group name to be more inclusive (as predictably decried by Andrew Sullivan here) this guy offers us the following potted history of the politics of homosexuality, concluding:

Then, Saint Michel Foucault happened on the scene with his death from AIDS in 1984. Foucault’s original claim to fame was Archeology of Knowledge, published in 1971. He lectured at U.C. Berkeley as a visiting professor during the Radical Sixties, crossing into San Francisco’s Miracle Mile of S&M extremism. He and his lover back in Paris seemed quite “ordinary,” but according to Edmund White, Foucault “turned into a S&M slave” for other S&M leather men to gang fist him while trashing Folsom Street’s more derelict bathhouses and backrooms. According to White, Foucault did not contract AIDS by being fisted or wasted (he sure could have, Edmund).

While “intellectually” a historian by profession, Foucault ventured into some provocative areas with his corpus, indicting penology, psychology, and criminalization of aberrant behavior. While few read his most promising work of 1971, many became enmeshed with his relational ontology of binary differences, male/female, straight/queer, sadist/masochist, gay/lesbian, etc. And since many gays and lesbians major in English language and literature, this Postmodern bullshit from France is the elite nonsense de jour. Ironically, Foucault is not a Postmodernist, but a structuralist, from which springs his Relational Ontology in a schizo-affective, S/M binary sort of way.

I only quote this rubbish extensively in order to make the point that some people seem all too happy to pass comment on work that they have a stunning unfamiliarity with. Also to point out that this is another example of something I’ve noted before, that Foucault is simultaneously not read (eg., “no one reads him any more”), and yet exerts a massive influence on the gullible.

No one is forced to read Foucault (or to like his work) but it seems to me that if you’re going to offer forceful opinions (“bullshit,” and whatever a schizo-affective “relational ontology” is supposed to be) you might want to know more about him than whatever Edmund White said of him in a couple of sentences.

Biopolitics and racism (new book)

I believe a new book is coming out from SUNY Press based on the Biopolitics and Racism issue of Radical Philosophy Review (Vol 7:1) which was reviewed in Foucault Studies #3 (pdf) and edited by E. Mendieta and J. Paris.

New Lynch bibliography

Richard Lynch has updated his bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works.

This is the single most useful and accurate listing of all the shorter works (it is even more complete than Dits et Ecrits) and is absolutely essential for Foucault scholarship.

Resistance studies

The University of Göteborg has a resistance studies network.

We currently have a working group in Gothenburg which meets regularly and a steering group of five people based at School of Global Studies. An international advisory board is on the way being formed. We are looking for more active participants in the network and hope that new working groups might form in other parts of the world, supporting each other in the research of resistance.

Michael Watts shot in Africa

I’ve just heard that the British geographer Michael Watts was attacked and shot in Nigeria. He appears to be OK and even sent an email:-

“I am OK. But only just. I was visiting Ibiba [Don Pedro] when a bunch of thugs arrived – about 10-12 on bikes very heavily armed. I think it was criminal not political but the nature of PH right now is that it is impossible to know because of the post election crisis and the political gang warfare. But in the total chaos there was a lot of shooting; one shot in the leg. They came calling for ‘the white man’ and asked me for money after hitting me on the head with a Beretta. Then another group came, high on drugs, and tried to shoot my leg as I was getting up but missed and hit my left hand. I am OK but shaken, and my usual confidence is shaken. The city is in lock down and is unraveling I’m afraid and it will get worse. Poor Ibiba, Isaac and their staff are traumatised and suffered loss and damages. But I suppose it could have been very much worse. Thanks for your concern. MW”

Here is Michael Watts’ homepage if you are interested in his work (sometimes drawing on Foucault, although that doesn’t seem quite relevant right now). I wish him and his friends a quick recovery.