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    Category: Foucault

    • Substantive Equality and Juridical vs. Statistical Biopower

      By Gordon Hull The legal doctrine of substantive equality – roughly, that one look at not just the presence of stipulated, formal equality, but that one incorporate outcomes as relevant to whether or not equality has been reached – strikes me as a biopolitical concept, whereas its more formal counterpart is more juridical.  Consider the…

    • The Return of Sovereign Shaming

      In May, a 13-year-old named Izabel Laxamana took a selfie wearing a sports bra and some leggings, and sent it to a boy at her school.  When school administrators heard about the picture, they contacted her parents.  What happened next defies easy comprehension: delivering on a threatened punishment for breaking his social media rules, Izabel’s…

    • Occupy, Parrhesia, and (Virtual) Camps

      In the current issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Kelly Happe has an interesting paper interpreting Occupy Wall Street (or at least the Zuccotti Park component) as an example of cynical parrhesia.  In a time when all expression is always already co-opted by neoliberal capital as a source of surplus value (this point has been canvassed…

    • School Desegregation, Biopower and the Cold War

      One of my summer projects is to work up my SPEP paper from last year, which used the school desegregation decisions (like Brown v. Board) as a way to think about the relations between juridical power and biopower in the courts.  The role of the courts in the transition from hegemonic juridical power to hegemonic…

    • Facebook and the Ideology of Big Data Neutrality

      It must be summer: Facebook has released a controversial study of its users.  Last year, it was the demonstration that the emotional contagion effect did not require direct contact, and could in fact spread across social networks without direct, face-to-face contact (the controversy wasn’t in the result, it was in the fact that FB did…

    • Parrhesia (Part 5): Foucault, Heidegger and The Politics of Philosophical Contexts

      I’d like to look here a little more at Foucault’s claim that Heideggerian ontology is internalist (see my discussion here), because I think it makes an important point about the political nature of context-setting.  Although questions of context are of course very difficult, one can quite plausibly propose that Being and Time begins in Plato…

    • Parrhesia (Part 4): Friends Don’t Let Friends Study the History of Being

      At the beginning of a 1974 interview (D&E II, 521), M. D’Eramo puts the following question to Foucault: “you always start your analyses at the end of the Middle Ages, without ever speaking of antiquity, but it seems to me that ancient Greece is important for constructing what you call an ‘archaeology of knowledge.’ Are…

    • Foucault And Kripke On Names And Rigid Designators

      By: Samir Chopra In 'What is An Author', Michel Foucault writes:

    • Parrhesia (Part 3): On Heidegger

      Unlike Derrida, with whom he had frequent, highly public polemics, Foucault says relatively little about Heidegger.  Much of that is incidental: in a 1983 interview, for example, while talking about the postwar influence of Sartre, he notes parenthetically that “the roots of Sartre, after all, are Husserl and Heidegger, who were hardly public dancers” (Aesthetics,…

    • Parrhesia (Part 2): Philosophy as speech and as work: Plato’s Republic

      By Gordon Hull In an earlier post, I took some initial steps toward reading Foucault’s last two lecture courses, The Government of Self and Others (GS) and The Courage of Truth (CT), in which he studies the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia.  As I noted last time, one of the things Foucault finds is a…