Reviews of the Birth of Biopolitics

Here is a nice review of the Birth of Biopolitics by Francesco Guala in 2006 in Economics and Philosophy (h/t Test Society).

doi:10.1017/S0266267106001052 or here if your library doesn’t take that journal.

Guala:

His goal is to lay bare the “savoir” of liberalism. The concept of savoir is perhaps Foucault’s most enduring legacy to epistemology and the philosophy of science. The customary way to present it to an Anglo-American audience is by way of a contrast with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigm (e.g. Hacking 1979). Like a Kuhnian paradigm, a savoir is a changing historical entity that is mostly invisible to those who live and work within its boundaries. As with Kuhn’s revolutions, there’s a high degree of incommensurability across the “ruptures” (the term is Bachelard’s) that separate different savoirs. Unlike a paradigm, however, a savoir isn’t organized around exemplary achievements. Its role is less in determining what ought to be done within a certain discipline, than what can be done. A savoir defines primarily the conditions of possibility of science, by making certain kinds of entities amenable to a certain type of discourse. More precisely, with the birth of a savoir, an entity or domain becomes a legitimate object for a discourse that can be evaluated in terms of truth and falsity.

What other reviews are available?

Review: Foucault Beyond Foucault

Review by Todd May of Nealon’s recent book Foucault Beyond Foucault:

There is a witless, though common, interpretation of Michel Foucault circulating these days.  It is an interpretation that seeks to declaw Foucault’s political radicalism and bring him into the liberal fold.  On this interpretation, Foucault abandoned the analysis of power constructed during his genealogical period (false) because it had a totalizing character that left no room for resistance (false) in favor of a sort of individual self-construction that he found in the ancient Greeks (false).  If Jeffrey Nealon had done no more than recall to us the vapidity of this interpretation, he would have performed a service.  However, he has done much more than this.  In his slim volume on Foucault, he has offered a fascinating interpretation of Foucault’s work, one that brings to light previous neglected elements of his thought.  Although the stated motivation for Nealon’s discussion is to counter the current interpretation of Foucault’s ethical works, the result is one of the most interesting interpretations of Foucault to emerge in many years.

See more at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Two reviews of The Greeks and Greek Love

Two reviews of a new book by James Davidson, who argues for a reappraisal of Greek homosexuality:

Homophilia, same-sex love, is for Davidson “serious, permanent and real”. So it is central to his mission to refute both the claim that “homosexuality” is a modern notion, and the associated thesis that in ancient Greece it was nothing to do with orientation, but was just a matter of the power of the penetrator and the subjugation of the penetratee – “sodomania”. He argues with fervour, often verging on contempt, that the whole caboodle comes from an unholy alliance in the late 1970s between an English classical scholar and a French sage. Kenneth Dover was (and is) dedicated to discovering the truth and to calling a spade a spade; Michel Foucault was as dedicated to showing how what masquerades as “truth” is merely a construct, a means for exerting and perpetuating power. They could both agree, however, that Greek pederasty was all about the machismo of being the penetrator and inflicting humiliation on the subjected receptacle, the pathic anus.

This is the description from the Guardian, the more reasonable of the reviews. Putting aside for the moment that weasel-word that truth is “merely” constructed (as noted here before) I think Foucault’s argument was more complex if you also look at his later “Greek” writing (and not just the power material).

Compare this then if you will with the bilious comments from that great newspaper, the Telegraph:

I loved his demolition of the presumptuousness of Kenneth Dover (a prurient closet case) and Michel Foucault (a self-loathing sado-masochist)

I suppose in their world, anyone who trangresses outside the bounds of what they think is “normal” love just has to be self-loathing!

Anyway an interesting looking book:

It is an epic rhapsody in praise of what James Davidson calls (with a characteristic coinage) “homobesottedness”. While bringing out the huge variety of homophilic phenomena in the Greek world, his persistent leitmotifs are the social bridging, the elevated aspirations and the lasting devotion that were the blessings of homobesottedness. His mission is to rehabilitate Greek same-sex love, to rescue it from all the slurs, the associations with unnaturalness, sickness, promiscuity, dirty furtiveness. He sets out to dispel the smut, the orgasm-centred gropings and pokings, above all to obliterate the modern obsession with what he calls “sodomania”: besotted does not mean besodding.

Choice reviews our book

Choice, the influential journal of the American Library Association, has a review of our book in its December 2007 issue:

Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, ed. by Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden. Ashgate, 2007. 377p bibl index; ISBN 9780754646549, $114.95; ISBN 9780754646556 pbk, $39.95. Reviewed in 2007dec CHOICE.

The work of French philosopher Foucault is here excavated, translated, interpreted, assessed, and applied. During his life, Foucault indulged critical thinking concerning, especially, social institutions, power, and knowledge. This is apparently the first book to negotiate Foucault’s questions placed before the French geography journal Hérodote in the 1970s. The work’s first section relates essentially to Foucault’s writings on space, accompanied by selected Francophone responses (1977) and Anglophone responses (2006). The remainder of the book consists of essays developing context for Foucault’s work, translations of several of his essays, and further extension of his work in the shape of nondisciplinary but critical and discursive inquiry. This is a thoughtful and imaginative undertaking, replete with utile index. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. — G. J. Martin, emeritus, Southern Connecticut State University

Two reviews of Paras

Two reviews of Paras, Foucault 2.0 address the question of whether Foucault reintroduced the notion of the subject in his later writings. Additionally, on this week when the president of Iran visits Columbia U, they comment on Foucault’s journalism in the late 1970s with the Iranian revolution.

These topics speak to the different Foucaults that are out there. There’s the one that is seen by say cultural studies people and cultural anthropologists. Then not too far away, there’s the Foucault of sexuality. There’s the Foucault seen by those interested in political theory and governmentality. And there’s the Foucault that is seen by Serious philosophers studying the ramifications of archeology and genealogy. As I’ve learned doing this blog, there’s also the Foucault of modern theology students (ethics and culture of the self). (Then of course there are all the Foucaults, with egghead glistening, who play the role of villain in the nightmares of David Frum and co.)

Why a review is not just a review

The fact that the TLS review of Foucault’s History of Madness is still being picked up by various people and used to reject Foucault tout court shows why a review is not just a review but a political intervention.

Now the neo-con magazine National Review Online has taken up the issue:

Clare O’Farrell on Foucault

There are a lot of introductions to the work of Michel Foucault but none better than Clare O’Farrell’s Michel Foucault published in 2005 (Sage).

I’m not quite sure how she does it, but she covers all periods of Foucault’s work in rich detail, provides an extensive and remarkably useful annotated listing of key concepts (worth the price of the book alone), a list of websites, a chronology, and a long bibliography–all in 184 pages.

Fallout from negative review continues

People around web continue to pick up the negative TLS review cited in a previous post. The issue is how Foucault’s work should be read, granting that History of Madness contains historical inaccuracies.

No-one has as yet replied to Scull’s position about historical inaccuracies in History of Madness (eg whether they also extend to other historical works by Foucault or just this one early book, which MF later had his own doubts about).

More interesting than most, this one cites a paper titled “Would it matter if everything Foucault said was wrong?”

“I knew there was something I didn’t like about Foucault” now, having read the review “I see that rumors of your value have been greatly exaggerated.”

While here, a more nuanced reaction:

I am not a great fan of Foucault, but I wonder whether philosophy is a science and whether the possibility that Michel Foucault’s assertions are unproven makes them irrelevant. In other words, if Andrew Scull happens to be right about the scholarly work upon which Foucault based his readings does it make Foucault’s philosophy irrelevant? I believe that Foucault has remained relevant all of these years because he puts his finger on something that may not have been scientifically provable, but that was essential for it led to important and existential questions.

Reviews of History of Madness

Two reviews of the new English translation of the History of Madness. One by Colin Gordon in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review, and one by Peter Barham in the LRB.