In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading of Michel Foucault as an anti-correlationist thinker. Specifically, I position him as aligned with what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls speculative materialism (an offshoot of speculative realism). Given the resurgent and exciting prioritization of speculative ontology over concrete politics among these thinkers, coupled with the need for a revolutionary anti-capitalist political movement, my approach aims to take speculative materialists’ claims regarding access to the in-itself seriously while also devoting attention to their (underdeveloped) political dimension. It is in this latter realm Foucault proves particularly helpful to think alongside. Though Foucault has often and convincingly been portrayed as an anti-universalist, postmodern, and epistemologically-oriented figure, I present him as concerned with the subject’s access to the Outside (the great outdoors, things-in-themselves) as well as the politics of such access. I do so through a study of a wide selection of his works (books, essays, interviews, articles), a comparison between his philosophical position and that of Meillassoux’s, and an expansion upon Foucault’s analysis of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things, positing the artwork as a speculative object. I suggest, in short, that Foucault’s concepts of thought, force, and the subject have surprisingly striking similarities to Meillassoux’s absolute contingency and his political subject (the ‘vectoral militant’). We can, then, begin to see a revolutionary politics arising out of what I understand as Foucault’s speculative stance—hopefully providing an opportunity to both (re)consider Foucault and highlight the politics incipient in contemporary explorations into the Outside.
{"title":"Foucault’s Outside: Contingency, May-Being, and Revolt","authors":"L. Martin","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi31.6466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi31.6466","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading of Michel Foucault as an anti-correlationist thinker. Specifically, I position him as aligned with what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls speculative materialism (an offshoot of speculative realism). Given the resurgent and exciting prioritization of speculative ontology over concrete politics among these thinkers, coupled with the need for a revolutionary anti-capitalist political movement, my approach aims to take speculative materialists’ claims regarding access to the in-itself seriously while also devoting attention to their (underdeveloped) political dimension. It is in this latter realm Foucault proves particularly helpful to think alongside. Though Foucault has often and convincingly been portrayed as an anti-universalist, postmodern, and epistemologically-oriented figure, I present him as concerned with the subject’s access to the Outside (the great outdoors, things-in-themselves) as well as the politics of such access. I do so through a study of a wide selection of his works (books, essays, interviews, articles), a comparison between his philosophical position and that of Meillassoux’s, and an expansion upon Foucault’s analysis of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things, positing the artwork as a speculative object. I suggest, in short, that Foucault’s concepts of thought, force, and the subject have surprisingly striking similarities to Meillassoux’s absolute contingency and his political subject (the ‘vectoral militant’). We can, then, begin to see a revolutionary politics arising out of what I understand as Foucault’s speculative stance—hopefully providing an opportunity to both (re)consider Foucault and highlight the politics incipient in contemporary explorations into the Outside.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47119353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In an interview, two years after publishing the introductory volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (La Volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault boldly claimed that the future of philosophy depended on looking beyond its European home. “It is the end of the era of occidental philosophy,” Foucault declared to his priestly interlocutors on his 1978 visit to a Zen temple in Japan. “Thus, if there is to be a philosophy of the future, it must be born outside of Europe or it must be born as a consequence of encounters and impacts (percussions) between Europe and non-Europe.”1 Although he had already celebrated Asian ars erotica in contrast to the West’s scientia sexualis, Foucault did not explore the practices and discourses of those erotic arts in his subsequent work on the history of sexuality. Instead he confined himself to Europe, going back to the Greeks and developing his inquiry into Roman and ultimately Christian theorizing concerning sex. Overcoming that severe limitation was a key motivation for my writing Ars Erotica. There were two good reasons for Foucault’s concentration on European sexuality. First, he was primarily concerned with understanding contemporary Western culture’s problematic attitudes toward sex. He sought to explain the stubborn discomforts “We ‘Other Victorians’” still have with sex by showing the error of the conventional Freudian repression thesis and replacing it with a theory of discursive power networks focused on the truth of sex (among them psychoanalysis). These networks have their potent historical
米歇尔·福柯(Michel Foucault)在他的《性行为史》(history de la volont de savoir)导论出版两年后的一次采访中大胆地宣称，哲学的未来取决于超越欧洲本土的视野。“这是西方哲学时代的终结，”福柯在1978年访问日本的禅宗寺庙时对他的僧侣们宣称。“因此，如果有一种未来的哲学，它必须在欧洲之外诞生，或者它必须在欧洲和非欧洲之间的相遇和影响(冲击)中诞生。”尽管他已经赞美了亚洲的情色艺术，而不是西方的性科学，但福柯在他后来关于性史的著作中并没有探索这些情色艺术的实践和话语。相反，他把自己局限在欧洲，回到希腊，并发展他对罗马和基督教关于性的理论的研究。克服这种严重的限制是我写作《情色艺术》的主要动机。福柯关注欧洲的性取向有两个很好的理由。首先，他主要关注的是理解当代西方文化对性的有问题的态度。他试图解释“我们其他维多利亚人”仍然对性有顽固的不适，他指出了传统的弗洛伊德压抑理论的错误，并用一种专注于性的真理的话语权力网络理论(其中包括精神分析)来取代它。这些网络有其强大的历史
{"title":"Sex, Emancipation, and Aesthetics: Ars Erotica and the Cage of Eurocentric Modernity","authors":"R. Shusterman","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi31.6456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi31.6456","url":null,"abstract":"In an interview, two years after publishing the introductory volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (La Volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault boldly claimed that the future of philosophy depended on looking beyond its European home. “It is the end of the era of occidental philosophy,” Foucault declared to his priestly interlocutors on his 1978 visit to a Zen temple in Japan. “Thus, if there is to be a philosophy of the future, it must be born outside of Europe or it must be born as a consequence of encounters and impacts (percussions) between Europe and non-Europe.”1 Although he had already celebrated Asian ars erotica in contrast to the West’s scientia sexualis, Foucault did not explore the practices and discourses of those erotic arts in his subsequent work on the history of sexuality. Instead he confined himself to Europe, going back to the Greeks and developing his inquiry into Roman and ultimately Christian theorizing concerning sex. Overcoming that severe limitation was a key motivation for my writing Ars Erotica. There were two good reasons for Foucault’s concentration on European sexuality. First, he was primarily concerned with understanding contemporary Western culture’s problematic attitudes toward sex. He sought to explain the stubborn discomforts “We ‘Other Victorians’” still have with sex by showing the error of the conventional Freudian repression thesis and replacing it with a theory of discursive power networks focused on the truth of sex (among them psychoanalysis). These networks have their potent historical","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43594871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Problem of Concealment: Reformism, Information Struggles, and the Position of Intellectuals","authors":"Delio Vásquez","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi31.6460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi31.6460","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43801544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution. London: Verso, 2021. Pp. 256.","authors":"Jasper Friedrich","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi31.6473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi31.6473","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49370763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beauty between Repression and Coercion: A Few Thoughts on Richard Shusterman’s Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love","authors":"Leszek Koczanowicz","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi31.6455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi31.6455","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42356963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"David Macey, The Lives of Foucault. A Biography. London: Verso, [1993] 2019. Pp. 613.","authors":"M. Gane","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi31.6475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi31.6475","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48712850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Foucault’s participation in the 1954 carnival of the mad at an asylum in Switzerland marked the beginning of his critical reflections on the origins of psychology. The event revealed a paradox at the heart of psychology to Foucault, for here was an asylum known for its progressive method and groundbreaking scientific research that was somehow still exhibiting traces of a medieval conception of madness. Using the cultural expression of this carnival as a starting place, this paper goes beyond carnival costumes to uncover the historical structures underneath the discipline of modern psychology. Drawing on Foucault’s earliest works in psychology, his 1954 Mental Illness and Personality, his 1954 “Dream, Existence and Imagination,” his 1957 “Scientific Research and Psychology” and briefly his 1961 History of Madness, I will describe the discrepancy between the theory of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the methods of modern science, and the practice of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the classical age. I will argue that this division helps make sense of unexplained psychological phenomena, as seen in general practices related to artistic expression, and individual experiences, as seen in the presence of guilt and the resistance to medical diagnosis in patients.
{"title":"The Carnival of the Mad: Foucault’s Window into the Origin of Psychology","authors":"Hannah Lyn Venable","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6268","url":null,"abstract":"Foucault’s participation in the 1954 carnival of the mad at an asylum in Switzerland marked the beginning of his critical reflections on the origins of psychology. The event revealed a paradox at the heart of psychology to Foucault, for here was an asylum known for its progressive method and groundbreaking scientific research that was somehow still exhibiting traces of a medieval conception of madness. Using the cultural expression of this carnival as a starting place, this paper goes beyond carnival costumes to uncover the historical structures underneath the discipline of modern psychology. Drawing on Foucault’s earliest works in psychology, his 1954 Mental Illness and Personality, his 1954 “Dream, Existence and Imagination,” his 1957 “Scientific Research and Psychology” and briefly his 1961 History of Madness, I will describe the discrepancy between the theory of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the methods of modern science, and the practice of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the classical age. I will argue that this division helps make sense of unexplained psychological phenomena, as seen in general practices related to artistic expression, and individual experiences, as seen in the presence of guilt and the resistance to medical diagnosis in patients.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47872580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：