Foucaultblog on hiatus?

Foucaultblog was founded in 2007 as a kind of indirect adjunct to my and Stuart Elden’s co-edited book on Foucault and geography. I’ve been the sole owner and contributor to it during that time, passing on Foucault news (I set up a Google Alert: whenever anybody mentioned ”Foucault” on the web I would check out what they said and link to it if it was interesting). This is quite time consuming as you can imagine.

I’ve been thinking for some time that Foucaultblog is perhaps nearing the end of its run, but at the same time I know there’s a wide readership of the blog centering around interest in Foucault. I’ve rather badly kept it going these last few months but have increasingly found myself restricted by the (self-imposed) need to keep it on topic, when I might wish to write on other issues (eg Wikileaks).

Now I think the time has come to at least admit publicly that I have less interest and time in maintaining this blog. This has meant fewer posts and as every blogger knows, fewer posts means fewer readers. There are two options which occur: put the blog on hiatus, or ask you the readership to take it over. My guess would be that people would prefer to run their own blogs rather than one associated by someone else, so I’ve decided to put the blog on hiatus.

What this means is that while I may occasionally post here if something very interesting happens, my blogging activity will be elsewhere.

To that end: in September 2009 I registered for another blog name, opengeography, inspired by the open geography movement and its associated practices such as participatory GIS and openstreetmap. I started posting regularly there about a week ago. It’s weird but I knew no-one was reading it and this felt very liberating. I planned to post there for a while and then gradually stop here. I also planned to design it a bit more before publicising it.

However, I’m starting to see a few readers and links there now, so I might as well confess to it.

So, farewell then, foucaultblog!

Those readers interested in open, public and participatory geographies, critical historical genealogies of space and territory, and critical cartography, and oh well, the things I’m interested in, are welcome to check out opengeography! It’s experimental and unplanned and the topics will no doubt vary widely, but it the idea is to create an interesting, riskier space.

Thanks to all who have commented and linked here over the last few years!

Call for papers: Foucault and International Law

See below, cfp, Foucault and International Law.

­−Call For Papers−

Special Issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law (2011)

Foucault and International Law

Abstracts due by 12 May 2010; Complete articles by 17 September 2010

The Leiden Journal of International Law is now soliciting articles for a special issue exploring the relevance of Foucault’s oeuvre to international law and legal theory. Apart from its merits for philosophy, political theory and sociology, the importance of Michel Foucault as a legal thinker (both as a thinker of law in his own right and as a thinker whose work can be illuminating for legal studies) is increasingly being felt. With the continuing translation and publication of Foucault’s lecture courses at the Collège de France and the ongoing importance of his already published work, Foucault’s work continues to provide fertile suggestions for rethinking many of our established notions of law, right(s), sovereignty and legal subjectivity. Yet to date there have been, with some notable exceptions, few sustained treatments of Foucault’s relevance to international law and international legal theory. This is the subject of Issue 2 of volume 24 (2011) of the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL).

What is the relevance of Foucaultian methodologies (archaeology, genealogy, problematisation) to international law and international legal theory? What does a Foucaultian analytic of international law entail? How can we use it to analyse international legal subjectivity? How does that relate to, inter alia, sovereign statehood and/or human rights law? How can the Foucaultian toolbox contribute to our understanding of the devolution of international public law, its fragmentation and specialisation (e.g. as an instance of governmentality)? What about international law ‘from below’ (the relevance of Foucaultian models of power/resistance, anti-globalisation perspectives and critiques of neoliberalism and the global rule of law, for example). These questions are just a number of suggestions, intended as provocations for thought, within the general theme of ‘Foucault and International law’ we invite contributors to interrogate and critically engage with.

Contributors will be asked to prepare an article of approximately 10,000 words (including footnotes) for publication in the LJIL, consistent with its instructions for authors. Those interested in contributing are requested to respond to this Call for Papers by email to managing editor Christine Tremblay (ljil@law.leidenuniv.nl) by 12 May 2010, attaching a 300-word abstract of the article you propose to contribute.

The selected authors are requested to submit the full articles by 17 September 2010. All contributions will be subject to double-blind peer review in accordance with the usual procedures of the LJIL. Please contact the LJIL (guest) editors with any further questions: Tanja Aalberts (taalberts@fsw.leidenuniv.nl) and/or Ben Golder (b.golder@unsw.edu.au).

The Leiden Journal of International Law is published with Cambridge University Press, and provides a forum for two vital areas, namely international legal theory and international dispute settlement. For further information, please visit the journal’s website: http://www.journals.cambridge.org/LJL

New paper: The Birth of Political Subjects

Charles E. Scott has a new paper of interest in Research in Phenomenology (embargoed at GSU for 1 year so have not seen the actual paper here).

The Birth of Political Subjects: Individuals, Foucault, and Boundary Experiences

Abstract

In a context of experiences in which events become apparent that encroach upon mainstream and reasonable good sense, this paper gives an account of the emergence of political subjects into public domains that make possible new knowledge and personal and institutional transformations. A statement by Simone de Beauvoir and engagement with Michel Foucault’s interpretation of “limit experiences” help to orient the paper. The essay ends with a discussion of certain types of power and the birth of political subjects.

There are also a couple of pieces on Heidegger in the same issue.

International conference, Pisa, 15-17 April

Daniele Lorenzini writes in with information on a major international conference on Foucault, to be held in Pisa, 15-17 April 2010.

“Historical Limits and their Critical Overcoming.”

Jeudi 15 Avril,
“Saletta” des Éditions ETS, Piazza Carrara 16
9.30-17.00: Journée internationale d’études doctorales,
consacrée à la présentation des recherches en cours
sur la pensée de Michel Foucault.

Vendredi 16 avril,
Aula Barone, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Via Paoli 15
9.00 Ouverture: Simonetta Bassi
(Directrice du Département de Philosophie, Università di Pisa)
9.30 Introduction au Colloque: Arnold I. Davidson
(The University of Chicago, Università di Pisa)
9.45 Patrick Singy (Columbia University)
A Tergo: Taking History from Behind
10.30 Andrea Cavalletti (Università IUAV, Venezia)
Souci de soi et résistance
11.30 Piergiorio Donatelli (Università La Sapienza, Roma)
Ethical thought and conceptual reflection. Foucault meets morality
12.15 Discussion (réponse Paolo Savoia)
14.30 Frédéric Gros (Université Paris XII-Val de Marne)
“Il faut être pauvre pour dire la vérité“ (Foucault et les cyniques)
15.15 Laura Cremonesi (Università di Pisa)
La lecture foucaldienne du christianisme:
enjeux philosophiques et politiques
16.00 Discussion (réponse Orazio Irrera)
17.00 Présentation des nouvelles ressources des études foucaldiennes: le portail “Michel Foucault”
(www.portail-michel-foucault.org) et le projet
“Materiali foucaultiani” (site web et revue).

samedi 17 avril,
Aula Barone, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Via Paoli 15
9.00 Ouverture: Alfonso Iacono
(Doyen de la Faculté des Lettres et Philosophie, Università di Pisa)
9.30 Judith Revel (Université Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Historiciser, problématiser: de l’archéologie à l’actualité
10.15 Florence Caeymaex (Université de Liège)
La biopolitique et les nouveaux “pouvoirs sur la vie”
11.15 Carlos Manrique (Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotà)
Attitude, Critique, Rupture: The reconfiguration of the “public” sphere in Foucault’s Le gouvernement de soi et des autres
12.00 Discussion (réponse Silvia Chiletti)
14.30 Philippe Artières (IAC, CNRS/EHESS, Paris)
et Jean-François Bert (IAC, CNRS/EHESS, Paris)
Sur la table du philosophe
15.15 Daniel Defert (Université Paris VIII-Saint Denis)
Présentation du premier Cours de Michel Foucault
au Collège de France de 1971: “La volonté de savoir”
16.00 Discussion (réponse Luca Paltrinieri)
17.00 Table ronde:
Mauro Carbone (Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3),
Arnold I. Davidson, (The University of Chicago, Università di Pisa)
Miguel De Beistegui (The University of Warwick)
Frédéric Worms (Université Lille III – ENS, Paris).

Here are the brochure and the program (pdf).

New book: Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law

Andrew Sharpe’s book Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law is now available as an e-book and a regular text. This book examines the notion of monster through a number of legal cases.

In contrast to other figures generated within social theory for thinking about outsiders, such as Rene Girard’s ‘scapegoat’ and Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘stranger’, Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law suggests that the figure of ‘the monster’ offers greater analytical precision and explanatory power in relation to understanding the processes whereby outsiders are constituted.

The book draws on Michel Foucault’s theoretical and historical treatment of the category of the monster, in which the monster is regarded as the effect of a double breach: of law and nature. For Foucault, the monster does not simply refer to a particular kind of morphological or psychological irregularity; for the body or psyche in question must also pose a threat to the categorical structure of law. In chronological terms, Foucault moves from a preoccupation with the bestial human in the Middle Ages to a concern over Siamese or conjoined twins in the Renaissance period, and ultimately to a focus on the hermaphrodite in the Classical Age. But, although Foucault’s theoretical framework for understanding the monster is affirmed here, this book’s study of an English legal history of the category ‘monster’ challenges some of Foucault’s historical claims.

In addition to considering this legal history, the book also addresses the contemporary relevance of Foucault’s theoretical framework. Structured around Foucault’s archetypes and the category crises they represent – admixed embryos, conjoined twins and transsexuals – the book analyses their challenge to current distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and the idea of the ‘proper’ legal subject as a single embodied mind. These contemporary figures, like the monsters of old, are shown to threaten the rigidity and binary structure of a law that still struggles to accommodate them.

Foucault Archives Website reorganises, audio of 1984 lecture available

Just checked into the Foucault Archives website and found they have redesigned it. Worth checking this occasionally as they slowly put new material up. They’re now calling it “portail Michel Foucault” (link goes to French version where there is more material).

New: Here’s the audio from the 1984 lectures for instance; effectively his last words in public.

I’m not sure the new design is effective; to me it looks unfinished…

Foucault Studies Issue 8 Available

Foucault Studies is pleased to announce the publication of issue 8

Including a special section on Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias

Review essay on Michel Foucault’s Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres & Le Courage de la vérité. Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II

Discussion on Foucault’s Kantian Lineage and his 1982 lecture The Hermeneutics of the Subject

Twelve new book reviews

Foucault Studies is an electronic, open access, peer reviewed, international journal that provides a forum for scholarship engaging the intellectual legacy of Michel Foucault, interpreted in the broadest possible terms.  We welcome submissions ranging from theoretical explications of Foucault’s work and texts to interdisciplinary engagements across various fields, to empirical studies of contemporary phenomena using Foucaultian.

All articles are freely available as open access on our website:
www.foucault-studies.com

Please visit our website www.foucault-studies.com to sign up for E-alerts to receive news of CFP’s and new issues.

Number 8, February 2010

Table of Contents:

Editorial
Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu, Sam Binkley, Jens Erik Kristensen, Sven Opitz, Chloë Taylor; with Morris Rabinowitz & Ditte Vilstrup Holm
____________________________________________________

Special Section on Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias

Introduction to the Special Section
Sam Binkley, Stefanie Ernst

Space, Time and the Constitution of Subjectivity: Comparing Elias and Foucault
Paddy Dolan

Emotional Intelligence: Elias, Foucault, and the Reflexive Emotional Self
Jason Hughes

The Planned and the Unplanned: A Roundtable Discussion on the Legacies of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias
Sam Binkley, Paddy Dolan, Stefanie Ernst, Cas Wouters
___________________________________________________________________

Articles

Stations of the Self: Aesthetic and Ascetics in Foucault’s Conversion
Christopher Yates

Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages
Colin Koopman
____________________________________________________________________

Exchange

Response to Colin Koopman’s “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages”
Kevin Thompson

Historical Conditions or Transcendental Conditions: Response to Kevin Thompson’s Response
Colin Koopman
__________________________________________________________________

Review Essay

Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collége de France 1982-1983 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2008), ISBN: 978-2020658690 & Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité. Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France 1984 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009), ISBN : 978-2020658706
Alain Beaulieu
__________________________________________________________________________

Reviews

Ben Golder & Peter Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law (New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2009), ISBN: 978-0415424547
Max Rosenkrantz

Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (New York: Continuum, 2009), ISBN: 978-0826495952
Marc Trabsky

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), ISBN: 978-08020955890
Kate Drabinski

Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008) ISBN: 978-0739119969
Robbie Duchinsky

Johanna Oksala, How To Read Foucault (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008), ISBN: 978-0393328196
Trent H. Hamann

Derek Hook, Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power (Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), ISBN: 978-0230008199
Bradley Kaye

Kathrin Thiele, The Thought of Becoming: Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008), ISBN: 978-3037340363
John McSweeney

Chloë Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault. A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (New York: Routledge, 2009), ISBN: 978-0415963718
Sal Renshaw

Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo (eds.), A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), ISBN: 978-1443804448
P. Taylor Trussell

Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ISBN: 978-0521682992
Lena Wånggren

Judith Revel, Michel Foucault: Expériences de la pensée (Paris: Bordas, 2005), ISBN: 2047299446
Alan Milchman

Judith Revel, Dictionnaire Foucault (Paris: Ellipses, 2008), ISBN: 978-2729830939
James Muldoon
Version: 8.5.436 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2755 – Release Date: 03/18/10 19:33:00

New book: Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth

Ian Marsh writes in with news of his new book:

In ‘Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth’, Ian Marsh examines the historical and cultural forces that have influenced contemporary thought, practices and policy in relation to this serious public health problem. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the book tells the story of how suicide has come to be seen as first and foremost a matter of psychiatric concern, and sets out to challenge the assumptions and certainties embedded in our beliefs, attitudes and practices concerning suicide and the suicidal.

The book provides a clear overview of the work and ideas of Michel Foucault; offers an accessible approach to analyzing contemporary problems through the use of Foucault’s methods, allowing the reader to apply these methods to their own areas of interest; and analyzes suicide in a provocative and stimulating way to challenge reader’s own previously held perceptions.
Available from Cambridge University Press (http://www.cambridge.org/9780521130011).

Paperback £19.99 / $34.99
Hardback £55.00 / $95.00

Call for Papers–Special issue of Foucault Studies on the relations between the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben

Recently seen on H-NET:

Call for Papers–Special issue of Foucault Studies on the relations between the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben Editor, Jeffrey Bussolini

The work and thought of Giorgio Agamben has gained immense popularity in the last decade (not unlike the intense interest in Foucault’s work in and since the 1980s). His ongoing and intensifying use of concepts from Foucault has brought increasing interest to the relations between these two thinkers. This issue of Foucault Studies focuses on the points of contact, borrowing, interpretation, and difference between them. While biopolitics is an important point of connection, their interrelations also encompass method, intellectual history, theory of secularization, governmentality, sovereignty, and veridiction, among other salient aspects. This issue aims to collect and present a set of essays concerning many different facets of the influence and resonance between these two thinkers. As this influence seems particularly evident after Agamben’s 1995 Homo Sacer, several papers will likely address the connections in that and the following works such as State of exception and Remnants of Auschwitz. Though not necessary for all submissions, we hope for several that concern the intensive focus on Foucault in Agamben’s recent books (and pamphlet) Il Regno e la Gloria: per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e dello governo, Che cos’e un dispositivo?, Signatura rerum: sul metodo , and Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento. In addition, papers concerning the relations between Agamben’s early works and those of Foucault, and papers concerning any aspect of connection between their thoughts, are welcome.

Please send complete papers to the issue editor Jeffrey Bussolini by MAY 12th 2010 at bussolini@gmail.com in .odt or .doc format. Please put ‘Agamben Issue’ in the subject line.

Foucault and Animals CFP

Matt Chrulew writes in with a CFP on Foucault and Animals.

Call For Abstracts: Foucault and Animals
Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Wadiwel (Eds)

“The animal in man no longer has any value as the sign of a Beyond; it has become his madness, without a relation to anything but itself; his madness in the state of nature.” “it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in everything the least representation, and the smallest murmur’…” “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”
Michel Foucault, History of Madness; Discipline and Punish; and The Will to Knowledge.

Michel Foucault had much to say on many things, and the legacy of his thinking can be found across a diverse range of fields of inquiry, including philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, politics, architecture, health sciences, ethics and sexuality. Yet Foucault says very little about animals. And perhaps, as a consequence, while Foucault would seem to be everywhere in social and political theory, the impact of his work is yet to be fully appreciated within the emerging field of animal studies. As has been shown in recent critical engagements with Foucault that have drawn connections with animal life, including those of Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway, and Roberto Esposito, Foucault’s work is extremely profitable for understanding our conflicted relationships with animals. More than another of the endless applications of his work, we believe this conjunction to be essential: both for the advancement of a new field struggling with questions of power, knowledge, and ethics; and for the study of a philosopher whose antihumanism failed to interrogate the category of species.

We are seeking abstracts from scholars engaged with Foucault and animal studies for a proposed edited book collection. The collection will be unashamedly critical in approach, seeking to include articles that challenge systems of power which simultaneously organise conduct, violence, care and domination of nonhuman animals, from wildlife parks to factory farms. However, we also recognise there is an urgent need for indepth, inter-disciplinary theorisation that is able to map and challenge the lines of distinction between human and animal. We therefore encourage submissions from scholars working in a range of disciplines,
interested in how Foucault might be used to consider human and animal relations in a broad sense. We welcome not only philosophical discussion but analysis of science, policy, and activist praxis. We encourage not simply the transfer of Foucauldian concepts but their effective adaptation to multispecies contexts.
Suggested topic areas include:
• Biopolitics;
• Ethics and the care of the self;
• Power and the political;
• Discourse and knowledge;
• Governmentality and conduct;
• Sovereignty and security;
• History of biology and science;
• Discipline, training and communication;
• Panopticism, surveillance, gaze, spectacle;
• Sexuality;
• Animal subjectivities;
• Heterotopias of interspecies contact;
• The animality of humanity;
• Humanism, language and the border of species.
For abstract submissions (of 500 words), or to discuss proposed contributions, please email either Matthew Chrulew at mchrulew@gmail.com or Dinesh Wadiwel at dwadiwel@gmail.com
Abstract deadline: 28th February 2010.
Projected completed book chapter deadline: late 2010.