Government of Self and Others released

I’m just about to go and pick up my copy of Foucault’s 82-3 lectures, The Government of self and others, which has been published in English translation.

While it might seem that there is little in here that we don’t already know (or have read in the original French version published in January 2008) frankly speaking you know very well that there’s always something of interest, or some longer development of an argument only incompletely discussed elsewhere!

This is volume 1 and if the schedule is the same as the French, then we can expect the second volume on this subject (and Foucault’s last lectures) in about a year.

Government of self and others, English publication date

Looks like Amazon is listing an April (UK) and May (USA) release for the Government of the Self and others (82-3) lectures translation into English. (The French editions were published last year.)

Here’s the blurb:

The lectures given by Michel Foucault in 1983 at the Collège de France launch an inquiry into the notion of parrēsia and continue his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. He describes how, with the decline of the city-states, the courage of truth is transformed and becomes directed personally to the Prince’s soul, giving us a new reading of Plato’s seventh letter. The platonic figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates’ rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited in Foucault’s lectures.

In the midst of brilliant interpretations of Greek tragedy, political theory, and philosophy, Foucault allows us to rethink the role, the significance, and the transformation of practices of parrēsia from antiquity to the present. Moreover, in these lectures Foucault constructs a figure of the philosopher in which he recognized himself and with this rereading of Greek thinkers he assures his own placement in philosophical modernity, problematizes his own function, and defines his mode of thinking and being.

‘Modern philosophy is a practice which tests its reality in its relationship to politics. It is a practice which finds its function of truth in the criticism of illusion, deception, trickery, and flattery. Finally, it is a practice which finds the object of its exercise in the transformation of the subject by himself and of the subject by the other. Philosophy as exteriority with regard to a politics which constitutes its test of reality, philosophy as critique of a domain of illusion which challenges it to constitute itself as true discourse, and philosophy as ascesis, that is to say, as constitution of the subject by himself, are what constitute the modern mode of being of philosophy’.

Reading group on Birth of Biopolitics

A reading group has been convened at QUT, Australia to study the Birth of Biopolitics lectures:

In light of considerable interest in the term “neo-liberalism”, its historical origins, and its uses and misuses – including its use by Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd – we have decided to get together an informal working group to discuss how the term was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s lectures at the College de France in 1978-79 have only now been translated and published. In these lectures he traces a history of liberalism as an “art of government”, and its relationship to political economy and to government policy.

The convener is Terry Flew, who will offer summaries of the lectures. He has already posted his first one. Worth following I would think.

Quote of the moment

I lecture at a rather special place, the Collège de France, whose function is precisely not to teach. What I find very pleasing about the situation is that I don’t feel like I’m teaching, that is, I don’t feel that I am in a relationship of power with my students. A teacher is someone who says: “There are a certain number of things you don’t know, but you should know.” He starts off by making the students feel guilty. And then he places them under an obligation, saying: “I’m the one who knows these things that you should know and I’m going to teach them to you. And once I’ve taught them to you, you’re going to have to know them. And I’m going to verify whether you really do know them.” So there’s verification, a whole series of relationships of power. But at the Collège de France, students take only the courses they want to take. And anybody can sit in on classes, anybody from retired army officers to fourteen-year-old lycéens. They come if they are interested, otherwise they stay home. So who is tested, who is under power? At the Collège de France, it’s the teacher. (1975)

Madness and marginalization

Interesting discussion of hospitals, the marginalized and the mad in Political Affairs Magazine.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his short essay “Madness and Society,” [DE 83, from 1970] begins by assuming what needs to be proved: that the attitude towards “madmen” (his term) has not fundamentally changed from earlier, medieval society. In order to claim this, he makes a few assumptions: that society is divided into certain hived off components, namely, 1) labor, or economic production; 2) sexuality and family, or reproduction; 3) language/speech, and 4) “ludic” activities such as games and festivities. These categories are fairly arbitrary, since we can see that reproduction could easily be included in production, since the reproduction of the laborer is obviously necessary to production, and of course it assumes that games have no reproductive aspect to them, which is surely at least arguable. Nevertheless, these assumptions provide the groundwork for Foucault’s hypothesis that there are “marginalized” individual members of society who have special properties.

What Foucault calls the “second cycle of social production” (without telling us here what the “first cycle” might actually be) includes these individuals; his example refers to “primitive” tribes and their celibates, homosexuals and transvestites. The justifying reference for this assertion is, however, not to members of the medieval society which preceded the modern social conditions, but the “primitive.” The “primitive” I suggest cannot be used convincingly to justify such claims about the medieval. Foucault is nevertheless able to assume that these individuals are marginalized because of his previous separation of categories, in which economic production is artificially segregated from the other realms, the reference to the “primitive” is only tacked on to this.

The result is that there is no possibility of recuperation in Foucault’s account. The possibility that the (apparently) marginalized might actually be also at times culturally necessary, even central, to the reproduction of society, even if in a “shamefaced” or de-negated way is from the outset disallowed.

The essay is quite interesting, but suffers from not taking into account Foucault’s more complete writings on the topic. For example, Abnormal gives a number of examples of marginalized characters who exist happily–think of the Jouey case–before modern psychiatrizing gets ahold of them.

New audio lectures online

Paul Rabinow has just announced that a number of Foucault lectures are now available online. I’m pretty sure these are newly available in this audio format.

In English:

Howison lectures October 1980, parts 1-4

Parrhesia 1983 parts 1-6

Rabinow seminar and recordings, including a phone call to Foucault (in French) May 1983 (link is apparently incorrect for this one. Update: by jiggery pokery, I’ve figured out the phone call file is here.)

In French:

Il faut défendre la société, 1976

Sécurité, territoire, population, 1978

Naissance de la biopolitique, 1979

Gouvernement de soi et des autres, 1983 (and 1984, see Update below).

While these are not new texts (apart maybe from the discussion in Rabinow’s office, which sounds like Hubert Dreyfus was there as well) they may still be useful for those who want to hear the actual lectures as delivered. (It certainly makes you appreciate the task of the editors who had to transcribe and edit the lectures!).

Update II: If you look carefully you can also find the recordings of the 1984 lectures which were published earlier this year in French. They are not listed on the site explicitly. Here is the first one.

Notes on Foucault’s last lectures

Andy at Ad Absurdam has been posting his notes on Le Courage de la Vérité, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II (Government of the self and others), the last (1984) lectures that Foucault gave.

The first one is here and from there you can access the others. He has included a number of translations, since this has only come out in French for now.

Government of self and others published

Volume 2 of Government of self and others has been published (in French). Volume 1 was published around this time last year (also in French).

Volume 2 represents the last lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France, in 1984. They are called “Le courage de la vérité.”

Here’s an early review in Libération.

Theory of the state: “an indigestible meal”

In reading through The Birth of Biopolitics I reached the lecture where Foucault addresses the objection that he does without a theory of the state, and famously observes:

Well, I would reply, yes, I do, I want to, I must do without a theory of the state, as one can and must forgo an indigestible meal (Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 76-78), lecture of 31 January 1979.

Thomas Lemke recently wrote a piece using this phrase (which was I believe first pointed out by Colin Gordon in his introduction in 1991 to the Foucault Effect). Lemke observes:

In his lectures of 1978 and 1979 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault responded to some Marxist critics who had complained that the “genealogy of power” lacked an elaborated theory of the state. Foucault remarked that he had refrained from pursuing a theory of the state “in the sense that one abstains from an indigestible meal”… However, a few sentences later Foucault states: “The problem of state formation is at the centre of the questions that I want to pose.”

Here is the passage as translated by Graham Burchell in the new English edition (2008):

[continuing from “meal”]. What does doing without a theory of the state mean? If you say that in my analyses I cancel the presence and the effect of state mechanisms, then I would reply: Wrong, you are mistaken or want to deceive yourself, for to tell the truth I do exactly the opposite of this. Whether in the case of madness, of the constitution of that category, that quasi-natural object, mental illness, or of the organization of a clinical medicine, or of the integration of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies within the penal system, what was involved in each case was always the identification of the gradual, piecemeal, but contiuous takeover by the state of a number of practices, ways of doing things, and, if you like, governmentalities. The problem of bringing under state control, of ‘statification’ (étatisation) is at the heart of the questions I have tried to address.

However, if, on the other hand, “doing without a theory of the state” means not starting off with an analysis of the nature, structure, and functions of the state in and for itself, if it means not starting from the state considered as a sort of political universal and then, through successive extension, deducing the status of the mad, the sick, children, delinquents, and so on, in our kind of society then I reply: Yes, of course, I am determined to refrain from that kind of analysis. There is no question of deducing this set of practices from a supposed essence of the state in and for itself. We must refrain form this kind of analysis first of all because, quite simply, history is not a deductive science, and secondly, for another no more important and serious reason: the state does not have an essence. The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power. The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual statification (étatisation) or statifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities. That is why i propose to analyze, or rather take up and text this anxiety about the state, this state-phobia, which seems to me a typical feature of common themes today, not by trying to wrest from the state the secret of what it is, like Marx tried to extract the secret of the commodity, but by moving outside and questioning the problem of the state, undertaking an investigation of the problem of the state, on the basis of practices of governmentality.

Birth of Biopolitics, 2008, pp. 77-8.

NB Bob Jessop wrote about some of this in Political Geography last year in a paper called “From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power.” He ended up arguing that Foucault’s analysis was not incompatible with state theory given that it was “from below”:

generalizing from Marsden’s re-reading of Marx and Foucault on capitalism (1999), it seems that, while Marx seeks to explain the why of capital accumulation and state power, Foucault’s analyses of disciplinarity and governmentality try to explain the how of economic exploitation and political domination (on the importance of ‘how’ questions for Foucault, see his 1982). There is far more, of course, to Foucault’s work in this period but this re-reading shows that there is more scope than many believe for dialogue between critical Marxist and Foucauldian analyses.

Full-text: Birth of Biopolitics Chapter 1

Palgrave Macmillan have made available the first chapter (in pdf) of the Birth of Biopolitics. The book itself is due to be published on April 4, 2008 so this is a nice sneak preview.

The pdf also includes the Table of Contents and the Index of Concepts and Notions.

Foucault says his course will be about liberalism as political economy:

I thought I could do a course on biopolitics this year. I will try to show how the central core of all the problems that I am presently trying to identify is what is called population. Consequently, this is the basis on which something like biopolitics could be formed. But it seems to me that the analysis of biopolitics can only get under way when we have understood the general regime of this governmental reason I have talked about, this general regime that we can call the question of truth,
of economic truth in the first place, within governmental reason.

Consequently, it seems to me that it is only when we understand what
is at stake in this regime of liberalism opposed to raison d’État—or
rather, fundamentally modifying [it] without, perhaps, questioning its
bases—only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is.

So, forgive me, for some weeks—I cannot say in advance how many—I
will talk about liberalism. In this way, it may become a bit clearer what is at stake in this—for, after all, what interest is there in talking about liberalism, the physiocrats, d’Argenson, Adam Smith, Bentham, and the
English utilitarians, if not because the problem of liberalism arises for us in our immediate and concrete actuality? What does it mean when we speak of liberalism when we apply a liberal politics to ourselves, today, and what relationship may there be between this and those questions of right that we call freedoms or liberties? What is going on in all this, in today’s debate in which Helmut Schmidt’s18 economic principles bizarrely echo the voice of dissidents in the East, in this problem of liberty, of liberalism? Fine, it is a problem of our times. So, if you like, after having situated the historical point of origin of all this by bringing out what, according to me, is the new governmental reason from the eighteenth century, I will jump ahead and talk about contemporary German liberalism since, however paradoxical it may seem, liberty in the second half of the twentieth century, well let’s say more accurately, liberalism, is a word that comes to us from Germany.