Stuart Elden Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 20

Stuart has an update to his next book. These are always fascinating to read. Not many authors I know of post so frequently about work in progress. Here’s an excerpt:

One thing that the University of Melbourne has, which is useful for this work, is all ten volumes of Claude Mauriac’s memoirs, Le temps immobile. Mauriac was a close friend of Foucault’s for many years, and his memoirs are a non-linear, loosely thematic set of excerpts from his journal. David Macey and Didier Eribon make quite a bit of use of them in their biographies of Foucault, and so there were a few citations I wanted to check. But Clare O’Farrell encouraged me to “well and truly scour” them, which I have been doing. Entries are dated, and there is a decent index, so I was able to skim over parts outside the period I’m concerned with – he kept journals for nearly sixty years. Even so, each volume is around 500-600 pages, so this is a lot of work, but they include some very interesting anecdotal information and some useful insights. I also worked through the recently-reissued book by Thierry Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, which is a set of interviews, initially anonymous but which we now know to be with Foucault, and is very revealing. I then re-read the Miller, Macey and Eribon bibliographies and was struck how Macey especially was able to fill in detail about the courses on the basis of what was then pretty scant evidence.

Obviously a lot of very thorough work going into this. Making it hard for reviewers of the eventual book!

Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 20.

Elden: Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 13

Stuart’s latest update on his book Foucault’s Last Decade.

Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 13.

Foucault news now at Refracted Input

Hooray! The news component of Foucaultblog has found a new home at Clare O’Farrell’s blog Refracted Input. Foucault News blog.

Clare is well known in the Foucault community and the author of several books on Foucault, as well as maintaining Michel-Foucault.com since 1997.

I’m very grateful for Clare’s offer to continue posting news about Foucault and Foucault-related events. Foucault Blog is dead, long live Foucault news!

New Italian website

I’ve had a nice note from Daniele Lorenzini about a new Italian Foucault website at Materiali Foucaultiani. The site is available in French, Italian and English. They also want to start a new journal. Here is part of their manifesto:

More precisely, we wish to build up a framework to investigate and to highlight the essential link between the Foucaultian “boîte à outils” and the search of a sense to give to our actualité. To this purpose we shall firstly outline a cartography of the receptions and applications of the concepts elaborated by Foucault, to show that his “boîte à outils” is still fundamental if we want to put into question our present and take a clear stand in front of the issues emerging from our actualité. Then, we have to explore the ensemble of appropriations and interpretations which has made Foucault’s theory a “travelling theory”, i.e. a perspective of analysis and, at the same time, a critical posture capable of crossing disciplinary limits, sifting archives different from those opened by Foucault himself, and offering tools and materials to reflect soundly on events belonging to our multi-spatial and multi-temporal global present. In short, the aim of our project is to broaden the spectrum of problematizations proposed by Foucault, using the instruments provided by his work. For instance, it is an undeniable fact that in the postcolonial or gender studies the Foucault legacy has generated several theoretical and political evolutions that it is now impossible to put aside – even when the Foucaultian method has been forced or adopted only partially.

It looks interesting and I wish them well.

Two new books from Blackwell

First is Foucault and Philosophy which is already out, edited by Chris Falzon and Timothy O’Leary (2010).

Second is a Blackwell “Companion” to Foucault, which Falzon will edit with O’Leary and Jana Sawicki.

The Companion books tend to be hefty and significant books (I’m familiar with the ones for Heidegger and Political Geography) and it’s good to see one being devoted to Foucault.

Why Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Foucault

I wasn’t familiar with this blogger previously, but Jill Dolan at the Feminist Spectator does a brilliant take-down of Andrew Sullivan’s misperceptions and misstatements about Foucault and gay and lesbian ways of being.

A small taste:

Sullivan associates “liberationist” gay and lesbian discourse, the taxonomy’s second track, with Michel Foucault, whose ideas he proceeded to misread. In Sullivan’s interpretation of Foucault, gender and sexuality are “all in our heads.” Well, not exactly. Foucault and the school of “social constructionist” theories of gender and sexuality he in some ways originated, believe that sexuality is constructed by history and language. While men, for example, might have had sex with one another throughout history, they’re only called “homosexual” when culture decides to name these acts as such, bringing into being a stigmatized identity where there wasn’t one before.

New book: Michel Foucault by Lynn Fendler

A new book on Foucault and education by Lynn Fendler:

Description

Michael Foucault is undisputedly a major thinker in education. Lynn Fendler’s volume offers the most coherent account of Foucault’s educational thought. This work is divided into: 1) Intellectual Bibliography 2) Critical exposition of Foucault’s work 3) The reception and influence of Foucault’s work 4) The relevance of the work today
Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Preface
Foreword

Part 1: Intellectual Biography

Part 2: Critical Exposition of Foucault’s Work
I. Definitions of Major Concepts
II. Summaries of Major Works

Part 3: The Reception and Influence of Foucault’s Work

Part 4: The Relevance of Foucault’s Work Today

Bibliography
Index

From Continuum, Feb 3 2010, $120.

This sounds like a useful overview, but surely Continuum are pricing this beyond the individual here. I’m all for publishers getting a return on the books they publish, but why not produce an affordable paperback edition alongside the hardback? There are far too many instances of publishers producing really expensive hardbacks that nobody reads (Springer does this a lot for instance, even demanding camera-ready copy from authors). Having a book coming out in a couple of weeks myself that I’ve spent some years writing I know I would be very upset with this kind of pricing policy.

No wonder people scan them into pdfs and upload them to websites.

Carceral notebooks

I missed this previously:

Carceral Notebooks
Volume 4, 2008

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Bernard Harcourt

Discipline, Security, and Beyond: A Brief Introduction.
Andrew Dilts and Bernard Harcourt

D’une configuration disciplinaire à l’autre? Laurent Bonelli

Des classes à la population ?
Formules de gouvernement et détention Fabienne Brion

Masques de Foucault. Guy Casadamont

The Post-Disciplinary Prison. Gilles Chantraine

Michel Foucault Meets Gary Becker: Criminality Beyond
Discipline and Punish. Andrew Dilts

“Une chaîne, qui laisse toute liberté de faire le bien et qui ne permette
que très difficilement de commettre le mal.” Claude-Olivier Doron

La police, les anormaux et leurs archives au XVIIIe siècle.
Lisa Jane Graham

Supposons que la discipline et la sécurité n’existent pas—
Rereading Foucault’s Collège de France Lectures. (with Paul Veyne)
Bernard E. Harcourt

Repenser la police et les contrôles par rapport à Foucault.
Salvatore Palidda

La connaissance “de” l’Etat. Pasquale Pasquino

“Je peins le passage.” Stephen Sawyer

Beyond Discipline and Punish: Foucault’s Challenge to Criminology
Mariana Valverde

Foucault in a Post-9/11 World: Excursions into Security,
Territory, Population Michael Welch

Contributors

From the Introduction:

Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures contained a wealth of insights about punishment, penal techniques, the development of the police, and their relationship to neoliberalism. The lectures were extremely useful for thinking about the entire social body in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and specifically about the practices that characterize the contemporary penal sphere. And thus we set out, in these essays, to explore contemporary penal practices in conversation with the newly published lectures—but also, naturally, in conversation with Foucault’s earlier writings on épistémès and his later turn to ethics and truth telling, to veridiction and le dire vrai, to parrêsia.

Special issue of Global Society

Nick Kiersey has edited a special issue of the journal Global Society on Foucault and International Relations.

Global Society, Volume 23 Issue 4 2009

The papers assembled in this special issue are the result of a series of discussions, starting with a panel organised by David Chandler at the 33rd Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association, University of Exeter, 13-17 December 2008, and continuing with discussions across a range of panels at the 50th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New York, 15-18 February 2009. These papers represent just a sample of viewpoints and arguments extended on those occasions.

Editorial
	Editorial Introduction Nicholas J. Kiersey; Jason R. Weidner Pages 353 – 361 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
Articles
	Neoliberal Political Economy and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Why Governmentality is Not Hollow Nicholas J. Kiersey Pages 363 – 386 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	Governmentality, Capitalism, and Subjectivity Jason R. Weidner Pages 387 – 411 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	Governmentality of What? Populations, States and International Organisations Jonathan Joseph Pages 413 – 427 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	Foucault’s Concept of Power and the Global Discourse of Human Rights Ivan Manokha Pages 429 – 452 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	Hobbes, War, Movement Leonie Ansems De Vries; Jorg Spieker Pages 453 – 474 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	Taking Foucault beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe Halvard Leira Pages 475 – 495 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	Decentring Global Power: The Merits of a Foucauldian Approach to International Relations Doerthe Rosenow Pages 497 – 517 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now
	“… we are being left to burn because we do not count” : Biopolitics, Abandonment, and Resistance Anna Selmeczi Pages 519 – 538 Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions Related Articles	buy now

Rethinking Foucault in International Relations: Promiscuity and Unfaithfulness
Andrew W. Neal
Pages 539 – 543
Abstract | Full Text PDF | Full Text HTML | Request Permissions
Related Articles

Foucault Special Issue: Theory, Culture & Society

Theory, Culture & Society have a special issue on Foucault coming out.

Thinking After Michel Foucault: Introduction to TCS Special Issue on Foucault.
Couze Venn and Tiziana Terranova.
[A version of this Introduction appears in Theory, Culture & Society, vol 26 no 6, 2009. Papers referred to in the Introduction can be found in the Special Issue.]

Keywords:  biopolitics, neoliberalism, power, subjectivity, life, race, methodology.

Abstract:

This Introduction to the Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Michel Foucault draws out the possibilities for new critiques of the present and points to new directions for the future, both for research in the social sciences and for imagining alternative ways of being. It highlights the innovative contributions which all the papers make, particularly in the excavation of neoliberalism to expose the mechanisms whereby it achieves its ends, and in indicating the costs for human well-being that are implicated in its recruitment of the domain of the social to serve its ends. The Special Issue demonstrates that, in spite of the short-comings in Foucault’s work which are picked out in the papers, his explorations of power, subjectivity, and what it means to be and to think continue to be relevant as a starting point for a range of reflections about our own times.

Here’s the lineup:

Articles

Couze Venn and Tiziana Terronova – Introduction: Thinking after Michel Foucault.

Michel Foucault – Alternatives to the Prison: Dissemination or Decline of Social Control?

Paul Rabinow – Foucault’s Untimely Struggle: Toward a Form of Spirituality.

Judith Revel – Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions.

Lois McNay – Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.

Stephen J. Collier – Topologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government beyond ‘Governmentality’.

Maurizio Lazzarato – Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social.

Eugene Thacker – The Shadows of Atheology: Epidemics, Power and Life after Foucault.

Brian Massumi – National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers.

David Macey – Rethinking Biopolitics, Race and Power in the Wake of Foucault.

Couze Venn – Neoliberal Political Economy, Biopolitics and Colonialism: A Transcolonial Genealogy of Inequality.

Tiziana Terranova – Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics.