Foucault behaving badly

Foucault and Heidegger are two philosophers in a new book called Philosophers behaving badly. (Good title, named after a TV show I think.)

Here’s a review in Philosophy Now.

Heidegger you’d think would get some coverage here and indeed he has long been a source of debate in terms of how much do you take into account the life of the man vs. the philosophy. And it’s interesting that we don’t scale this as much for other disciplines (asshole geographers can still be interesting, but philosophers and anthropologists can’t be?).

Anyway…

How homeland security has infiltrated academia

Big article in The Nation on how homeland security has affected and dominated academia, not just in research, but also materially:

Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus. From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America.

Some of the seven means by which this has happened are long familiar (privatization for one has often formed the backbone of the neoliberal state) or part of larger trends (surveillance).

Conference: Foucault across the disciplines

Conference announcement:

Announcing ‘Foucault Across the Disciplines’

 

An interdisciplinary Foucault conference, to be held

on March 1-2, 2008 at the University of California,

Santa Cruz. Conference presenters include: Ian

Hacking, Paul Rabinow, Arnold Davidson (tentatively),

Hayden White, Martin Jay, Jana Sawicki, Amy Allen,

Mark Poster, David Hoy, and many others.

 

A complete list of speakers is available on our

conference webpage:

http://foucaultacrossthedisciplines.googlepages.com/foucault.html

 

This event will be free and open to the public. For

more information please visit our webpage or contact

the conference organizer, Colin Koopman (Humanities

Research Fellow, UCSC) at cwkoopman@gmail.com.

 

Please distribute this announcement to interested

colleagues and graduate students working in any discipline.

Back to Moi, Pierre Rivière…

I’ve been hearing about this film for a little while. The director of the original Moi, Pierre Rivière film based on Foucault’s publication of the legal case, has revisited the original actors and made a documentary.

Five years ago, French documentarist Nicolas Philibert received global acclaim for Etre et Avoir, his gentle study of an infant school in rural France and its charming, endlessly patient teacher. It was beautiful in its simplicity, clarity and accessibility. His new film could not be more different: a rarefied cine-essay perhaps most suitable for film festivals or graduate seminars – and yet it succeeds as a sophisticated meditation on community, transgression and the law.

More…

Foucault Event: Gouverner les vivants: à partir de Michel Foucault

Michel-Foucault.com has added an interesting looking event if you’re near Lyon next month, organised by AFIC (Association Franco-Italienne pour la recherche sur la Philosophie Française Contemporaine) and Michel Sennelart.

Sennelart edits the College de France lectures, see here.

See this and other events here.

Gouvernement de soi et des autres published

Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (Volume 1) is supposedly published today in French.

These are the lectures from 1983.

Update: Now looks like January  24 (see listing at Seuil).

Le cours que Michel Foucault prononce en 1983 au Collège de France inaugure une recherche sur la notion de parrêsia. Ce faisant, Michel Foucault poursuit son travail de relecture de la philosophie antique. A travers l’étude de cette notion (le dire-vrai, le franc-parler), Foucault réinterroge la citoyenneté grecque, en montrant comment le courage de la vérité constitue le fondement éthique oublié de la démocratie athénienne. Il décrit encore la manière dont, avec la décadence des cités, le courage de la vérité se transforme et devient une adresse personnelle à l’âme du Prince, donnant de la septième lettre de Platon une lecture neuve. De nombreux topoi de la philosophie antique se trouvent revisités: la figure platonicienne du philosophe-roi, la condamnation de l’écriture, le refus par Socrate de l’engagement.

Dans ce cours, Foucault construit une figure du philosophe, en laquelle il se reconnaît: en relisant les penseurs grecs, c’est sa propre inscription dans la modernité philosophique qu’il assure, c’est sa propre fonction qu’il problématise, c’est son mode de penser et d’être qu’il définit.

« La philosophie moderne, c’est une pratique qui fait, dans son rapport à la politique, l’épreuve de sa réalité. C’est une pratique qui trouve, dans la critique de l’illusion, du leurre, de la tromperie, de la flatterie, sa fonction de vérité. C’est enfin une pratique qui trouve dans la transformation du sujet par lui-même et du sujet par l’autre [son objet d’]exercice de sa pratique. La philosophie comme extériorité par rapport àune politique qui en constitue l’épreuve de réalité, la philosophie comme critique par rapport à un domaine d’illusion qui la met au défi de se constituer comme discours vrai, la philosophie comme ascèse, c’est-à-dire comme constitution du sujet par lui-même, c’est cela qui constitue l’être moderne de la philosophie.»

Enabling the panopticon, Microsoft edition

Yikes:

Microsoft filed a patent for a system that incorporates sensors into a computer to monitor the health and mental state of its user. The system checks heart rate, breathing, body temperature, facial expressions and blood pressure via wireless sensors, with an aim to increase productivity and worker happiness. The system also includes supervisory controls to monitor users and offer guidance if they’re stuck on a particular task.

Matt is right that this wouldn’t go over well in the West… so it will probably be targeted at computer-service oriented developing countries (India?) and states without strong unions.

Update. I guess great minds think alike!

New issue of Foucault Studies

A new issue of Foucault Studies has been published (#5).

As well as articles, the issue contains interviews, review articles and plenty of book reviews (including a nice one of own our book, thanks!).

“What in the hell” series on Foucault

A short series on Foucault’s biopolitics has been posted at a blog called “What in the hell…”

What in the hell is the relationship between labor and biopower?

What in the hell is killing? (thanatopolitics, biopolitics)

University funding up–for now

As an employee of a state-assisted university system which receives appropriations from the state, it is heartening to see that a new study shows the next financial year will post funding increases of around 7.5% nationally. This is the largest such increase in a decade (good news for parents and students as it will take the pressure off student fee increases).

Those who know the system or are employed in it can put this news in the context of woeful underfunding for much of that decade, and according to the report, is anyway unlikely to be sustained much longer (unless the next president can reverse the economic damage in the housing sector and the drain on resources from Iraq).

My own employer, Georgia State University, will fall slightly short of the national average actually, at about 7.2% increase (state by state numbers here). Our budget is only about $203m and this for a university with 28,000 students. That’s $7,250 per student.

Comparatively, the main Georgia Tech campus receives $226m (18,500 students) or $12,216 per student, and the University of Georgia about $375m (~32,000 students) or $11,718 per student.

Oh well. These are operating expenses not capital, and we are getting some nice new science buildings (mostly but not entirely funded from private donations and bonds, not the state). My building however is due for the wrecker’s ball.