New book: Israel’s Occupation

New book announced:

Israel’s Occupation Neve Gordon. Univ. of California, $21.95 (344p) ISBN 978-0-520-25530-2

Applying the work of Michel Foucault to the contemporary Middle East, this highly theoretical book examines the “means of control used to manage” the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Gordon, a professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University, begins by exploring the diffuse mechanisms of power—in the political, civilian, geographical and economic arenas—used to normalize the occupation in its first years, making the ostensibly temporary occupation permanent. Later chapters take a more specific historical approach, examining a series of events that radically transformed these power structures: the first intifada, the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, which, the author argues, required a reorganization of Israeli power in the Occupied Territories, leading to the disregard of the Palestinians inhabiting those territories. Gordon focuses on the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and writes for a decidedly scholarly audience; as a result, the book’s usefulness beyond academics will likely be limited. (Nov.)

Via Publisher’s Weekly

Book: Foucault on Politics, Security and War

Updated below

Finally! This has been a long time coming but is finally out:

Foucault on Politics, Security and War edited by Michael Dillon and Andrew Neal.

Synopsis from publisher (Blackwell):

This book reappraises the work of Michel Foucault on questions of politics, security and war in light of his recently published College de France lectures. It addresses topical issues such as: the War on Terror, risk, biosecurity and biopolitics, AIDS, racial and ethnic conflict, and the critique of law for a wide audience of scholars in political theory, IR and political science among others. Its focus on more recently translated work by Foucault commends the project as one of trans-disciplinary appeal and importance. As Foucault’s legacy is once more becoming central to debates in heterodox (international) political theory, the volume looks set to become a key reference for future engagements in this vein.”Foucault on Politics, Society and War” interrogates Foucault’s controversial genealogy of modern biopolitics. These essays situate Foucault’s arguments, clarify the correlation of sovereign and bio-power and examine the relation of bios, nomos and race in relation to modern war.

Table of Contents:

Introduction; M.Dillon & A.W.Neal; PART I: SITUATING FOUCAULT; Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur; S.Elden; PART II: POLITICS, SOVEREIGNTY, VIOLENCE; Goodbye War on Terror? Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War and Exceptionalism; A.W.Neal; Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault; J.Reid; Security: A Field Left Fallow; D.Bigo; Revisiting Franco’s Death: Life and Death and Bio-Political Governmentality; P.Palladino; PART III: BIOS, NOMOS, RACE; Law Versus History: Foucault’s Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty; M.Valverde; The Politics of Death: Race War, Bio-Power and AIDS in the Post-Apartheid; D.Fassin; Security, Race, and War; M.Dillon.

My co-editor, Stuart Elden, is here with a piece on Foucault as “collaborateur.” Having read this a few years ago, it would be nice if this was more generally available. I’m also interested in reading the contributions by Valverde and Fassin.

Pricing: fifty quid seems a bit much–guess I’ll have to use the library for this one.

(In the meantime here is a fascinating new historical piece from Stuart on reassessing Kant’s Geography. I continue to be amazed at the breadth of Stuart’s scholarship…)

Update: Michael Dillon, one of the co-editors, has a blog entry with more details.

CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises

CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises. AAG Las Vegas, March 22-7, 2009

Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)

There has been a noticeable shift in public policy across a range of sectors
from policy focussed on individual (or corporate) responsibility to a focus
on the ‘environment’ (imagined in various guises) as the cause of, and
potential solution to a range of social ills (e.g. obesity, drinking, crime,
terrorism, climate change, etc). Often focussed on (though not restricted
to) the ‘urban’, such policy uses a range of terms (space, environment,
context, etc.) to refer to the combination of spatial relations (social,
cultural, physical, political, economic etc.) deemed responsible for
impending crises. Similar to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘Milieu’,
such ‘environments’ are seen as spaces of intervention and hence as spaces
of security as environments and populations are seen as mutually
constitutive (population understood as a multiplicity bound to the material
relations within which they live).

Thus, according to Foucault, using the example of the construction or
planning of towns as a form of social control, security can be
differentiated from discipline through its particular relationship with both
space and time: “Security will rely on a number of material givens. It
will, of course, work on site with the flows of water, islands, air and so
forth. Thus it works on a given…[which] will not be reconstructed to arrive
at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. … The town will not
be conceived or planned according to a static perception, but will open onto
a future that is not exactly controllable. … The specific space of security
refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and
the uncertain, which have to be inserted into a given space” (2007 p.19-20).

Across the social sciences a range of work has also noted a fundamental
shift in the orientation to the future within recent policy (to pre-emption
and anticipatory governance) and accordingly the adoption of a broad range
of techniques (futures methodologies, multi-level modelling, scenario
planning, etc.) to capture and control future spaces. Such policies and
subsequent interventions (e.g. healthy / green towns) involve a range of
assumptions about the relationships between bodies, spaces, technologies,
natures, etc. which require further investigation. This call is therefore
for papers which explore the spatial and temporal relationships of policies
which claim the ability to secure the future.

Reference: Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmilan

Papers may address (but are not limited to) the following issues in relation
to such policy:

The temporalities (habit, predictions, everydaylife) and spatialities of
security;
The relationship between bodies and spaces;
Methodologies for capturing future spaces;
The role of different populations in securing the future (age, gender,
ethnicity, etc);
The construction of urban natures/cultures;
Sites of impending crisis / intervention (city centres, towns, suburbs, etc);
The role of the environment / urban as an ameliorative device;
The construction of impending crises as a result of ‘urban’ spaces /
environments;
The role of technologies;
Temporal and spatial aspects of mobilities;
Situating policy within place and time – attempts to apply models of success
from other places;
The conflation of different ‘crises’;
etc.

Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)

Full text: Telos article by Deuber-Mankowsky

Article is:

“Nothing is Political, Everything Can Be Politicized: On the Concept of the Political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt” by Deuber-Mankowsky, Telos, 142, Spring 2008.

Article begins:

In a 1979 memo about governmentality, Michel Foucault establishes that the analysis of governmentality as a “singular universality” implies that everything is political. Foucault explains his conclusion by “de-constructing” the phrase “everything is political.” This leads to the set of questions that he introduces when he talks about the terms biopolitics and biopower, whose meaning provides a new perspective regarding the history and development that shaped modern forms of government. I will characterize these problems in detail before I return back to the aforementioned passage.

Via Continental Philosophy

Using Deleuze as a guide to reading Foucault

This blog outlines the experiences of two people who presented a seminar on reading Foucault. It could be very useful if you are thinking of doing something similar. They present their methods, and some key quotes and ideas, especially from Deleuze.

Of course I appreciate the quote, well known in some circles, where Deleuze calls Foucault a cartographer!

Foucault Derangement Syndrome (FDS)

Foucault’s Minions picks up an instance of Foucault Derangement Syndrome (FDS):

The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault [who] taught a whole generation to distrust authority, even when it appeared to be attempting to protect the weak from attack, or protecting the vulnerable from themselves.

This belief that all authority is dangerous has become one of the central doctrines of our times – with deeply problematic consequences.

Thus A.N. Wilson in a piece called “Rebels without a Clue.”

(For the uninitiated, FDS is a sly reference to Bush Derangement Syndrome, a phrase often bandied by neocon bloggers about people who get irritated by Bush. So at last Bushies have done something useful in giving us a term for all those pearl-clutchers who see Foucault behind every idea they don’t understand. You kids get off my lawn!)

Michael Behrent on liberalism

Behrent’s paper analyzing Foucault’s account of liberalism, which was given at the UMASS conference earlier this year, receives some comments at this blog:

I have just finished reading a very interesting, and unpublished, article by Michael Behrent on Foucault and economic liberalism entitled, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979”. The article and its references will be very useful for me in thinking about Sorel’s context of reception in post-1968 France; in particular, the question of the meaning(s) of liberalism. Behrent does a wonderful job of situating Foucault and, it seems to me, of explaining what economic liberalism ‘did’ and meant for him. The highest praise: it made me want to run out and buy (perhaps I will tomorrow), the 1978 and 1979 Collège de France lectures on which the argument is based.

As much as I liked the piece, though, I find myself disagreeing with it on a fundamental level. I get the impression that Behrent more or less agrees with what he convincingly argues Foucault thought about economic liberalism. One reason I want to read these lectures is to see if Foucault does indeed seem to be endorsing the idea that the absence of explicit disciplinary practices in an ideal neoliberal regime necessarily means the absence of implicit, or hidden, disciplinary practices.

By the way, where is Behrent now? I cannot find his faculty affiliation at Denison University–has he moved on?

New Intro to Foucault

This is new I believe. Has anyone seen it yet?

The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault

Lisa Downing 

ISBN: 9780521864435 Format: Hardback Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Book review: French Theory

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a new book review of François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Review by Ethan Kleinberg.

According to the standard story, French theory is much beloved over here by certain strands of society, cultural theorists, cultural anthrologists and the like, but “erased” in France where they are not studied (supposedly). Of course certain strands of science (this is an example) also hate what they know of “pomo” and the names of Foucault and Derrida.

h/t CP

“Big Sister” surveillance fears in France

It was a Frenchman, Michel Foucault, who most famously argued that the etymological link between “states” and “statistics” is no accident—that gathering and organizing information about a population is, in itself, a means of exercising power over it. Some of his countrymen have taken the message to heart: The chorus of critics that has emerged to oppose a massive new “Big Sister” database has just been joined by a prominent member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s own cabinet.

The new database, known as EDVIGE, has sparked a firestorm of opposition from French unions, non-profits, and civil liberties groups since the national privacy watchdog,CNIL, forced the government to make its existence public in July.  EDVIGE, which has been dubbed “Big Sister” because the acronym is also a woman’s first name, stands for “Exploitation documentaire et valorisation de l’information générale” or “Documentary exploitation and evaluation of general information.”

Meant to be used by French intelligence agencies and administrative police, the database would collect personal information about groups or individuals over the age of 13 deemed “likely to breach public order.” 

From ars Technica (and an execrable pun in their headline).