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    Category: Foucault

    • New Paper on Foucault and Parrhesia

      By Gordon Hull I'm happy to announce (shamelessly!) that my article, "The Banality of Cynicism: Foucault and Limits of Authentic Parrhesia" is now out in Foucault Studies (open access). The abstract is: Foucault’s discussion of parrhēsia – frank speech – in his last two Collège de France lecture courses has led many to wonder if…

    • Bakhtin’s Carnival, Genealogy, History

      By Gordon Hull Foucault’s use of Nietzsche to make the distinction between history and genealogy in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” is well-known.  What is less well-known, I think (perhaps I am projecting again, but I had forgotten this passage until I saw a note I’d made to it the other day), is a very clear presentation…

    • Return to “What is an Author”

      By Gordon Hull I’m teaching a Foucault seminar this term, and one of the things I’m trying to do is get better on the doxography of his essays.  That led me to a discovery about “What is an Author” that I’m going to share on the (hopefully not hubristic) assumption that other folks didn’t know…

    • Chicago Antitrust and Neoliberalism’s Blindspots

      By Gordon Hull As Foucault emphasizes in Birth of Biopolitics, one of the signal moves in American neoliberalism is the extension of economic analysis into all aspects of life.  As he puts it, the American neoliberals “try to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and…

    • Foucault’s “Analytic Philosophy of Politics”

      By Gordon Hull The current issue of Foucault Studies contains the first English translation of a lecture Foucault gave in Japan in 1978.  This “Analytic Philosophy of Politics” is essential reading if you have an interest in the transition between Foucault’s “power” and “ethics” work and/or his later understanding of power and resistance.  The Tokyo…

    • The Big Data Train Chugs On, Predictive Personality Edition

      By Gordon Hull One of the things that marketers like about big data is that they can personalize ads.  That operation is getting increasingly sophisticated.  We’ve known for a while that basic personality traits (like introversion/extraversion) can be predicted from Facebook likes.  I missed this paper when it came out, but some of the same…

    • Malthus’ Marshmallow

      By Gordon Hull We’ve all heard of a version of the experiment: you set a kid down with a marshmallow, and tell him that if he can sit there and not eat it for a while, he can have two.  Some kids can do it, and others can’t.  A famous paper suggests that whether the…

    • Are Patents Property? Depends on what you mean…

      By Gordon Hull The Supreme Court issued a landmark patent ruling yesterday in Oil States v. Greene.  The most recent major revision to the Patent statute specifies that the validity of patents – in terms of whether they meet conditions of patentability (utility, non-obviousness and novelty – the opinion does not directly specify whether questions…

    • Property as Juridical and Biopower (part 3, with a little bit about subjectification)

      By Gordon Hull In the two previous posts, I first suggested that Thomas Merrill’s logical argument for why the right to exclude was the sine qua non of any conception of property was inconclusive.  I then offered a brief reading of the Foucauldian distinction between juridical and biopower, applying it to Locke to suggest that…

    • Property as Juridical and Biopower (part 2)

      By Gordon Hull Last time, I suggested that Thomas Merrill’s logical argument for why the right to exclude was the sine qua non of any conception of property was inconclusive.  With that space cleared, I want to focus on what I think a focus on the right to exclude does emphasize.  Merrill is right that…