This book attempts to isolate the question of ethics in the work of Foucault and Lacan and explores its ramifications and implications for the present day.

Michel Foucault’nun çalışmalarının merkezi noktalarından birisini, Batı kültüründe insanların, özneye dönüştürülmesinin tarihini ortaya çıkarmak oluşturmaktadır. Diğerini ise, özneye dönüştürme tekniklerine karşı verilen mücadeleler, çeşitli iktidar tekniklerinin dayattığı bireysellik ve kimlikten kurtulmanın, özgürleşmenin imkânı oluşturmaktadır. İnsanları, öznelere dönüştüren süreçleri bir bütün olarak ele almak yerine, çeşitli nesneleştirme kipleri üzerinden incelemenin daha akıllıca bir yol olduğunu düşünen Foucault, çalışmalarında insanı özneye dönüştüren üç ayrı nesneleştirme kipine yoğunlaşır. Bunlar; kendilerine bilim statüsü kazandırmaya çalışan filoloji gibi araştırma kipleri, deli ile akıllı, hasta ile sağlıklı, (...) suçlular ile “iyi çocuklar” gibi “bölücü pratikler” olarak adlandırılan pratiklerde ortaya çıkan nesneleştirilme kipleri ve son olarak cinsellik gibi alanlarda bir insanın kendini özneye dönüştürme biçimindeki nesneleştirme kipleridir. İnsan, özneye dönüştürme süreçlerine girerken, iktidar ilişkilerine de dâhil olur. Çünkü bireyleri özne yapan iktidar teknikleridir. Özne sözcüğünün taşıdığı bütün anlamlar, boyun eğdiren ve tabi kılan bir iktidar biçimi telkin etmektedir. Bundan dolayı, özneye dönüşme süreçlerine karşı mücadeleler söz konusudur. Özne, iktidar ve şiddet arasındaki ilişkinin nasıl kurulduğuna dair düşünen Foucault, öznesi olarak tanıtıldığımız deneyimlerin kurulmasını gerçekleştiren bir iktidar alanı olduğunu, şiddetin de modern iktidarın kurumsal ağı içerisinde gelişen öznellik deneyimleri çerçevesinde her yere sirayet ettiğini belirtmektedir. İktidarın kurumsal düzeyde, düzenleyici ve denetleyici mekanizmalar sayesinde toplumsal ağın en uç yerlerine kadar sirayet etmesiyle birlikte şiddet, normlar, tüzükler ve prosedürler aracılığıyla belirli bir kapatma içinde gelişmektedir. Ancak, Foucault, şiddetin, iktidarın etkili bir aracı olduğunu kabul etse de, iktidarın esasını oluşturmadığını belirtmektedir. Bu çalışmada, Foucault’nun kuramsal çözümlemelerinden hareketle, özne, iktidar ve şiddet arasındaki ilişkiyi nasıl ele aldığı tartışılacak, onun düşünsel serüveni açısından önemli olan bu kavramların kendi tarih anlayışı bağlamında bir çözümlemesi yapılacaktır. Ayrıca, modern iktidar ilişkilerinin dayatmış olduğu öznellik deneyimlerine ve inceltilmiş şiddet araçlarına karşı verilecek direnişin imkânları sorgulanacaktır. -/- . (shrink)

Michel Foucault’nun çalışmalarının merkezi noktalarından birisini, Batı kültüründe insanların, özneye dönüştürülmesinin tarihini ortaya çıkarmak oluşturmaktadır. Diğerini ise, özneye dönüştürme tekniklerine karşı verilen mücadeleler, çeşitli iktidar tekniklerinin dayattığı bireysellik ve kimlikten kurtulmanın, özgürleşmenin imkânı oluşturmaktadır. İnsanları, öznelere dönüştüren süreçleri bir bütün olarak ele almak yerine, çeşitli nesneleştirme kipleri üzerinden incelemenin daha akıllıca bir yol olduğunu düşünen Foucault, çalışmalarında insanı özneye dönüştüren üç ayrı nesneleştirme kipine yoğunlaşır. Bunlar; kendilerine bilim statüsü kazandırmaya çalışan filoloji gibi araştırma kipleri, deli ile akıllı, hasta ile sağlıklı, (...) suçlular ile “iyi çocuklar” gibi “bölücü pratikler” olarak adlandırılan pratiklerde ortaya çıkan nesneleştirilme kipleri ve son olarak cinsellik gibi alanlarda bir insanın kendini özneye dönüştürme biçimindeki nesneleştirme kipleridir. İnsan, özneye dönüştürme süreçlerine girerken, iktidar ilişkilerine de dâhil olur. Çünkü bireyleri özne yapan iktidar teknikleridir. Özne sözcüğünün taşıdığı bütün anlamlar, boyun eğdiren ve tabi kılan bir iktidar biçimi telkin etmektedir. Bundan dolayı, özneye dönüşme süreçlerine karşı mücadeleler söz konusudur. Özne, iktidar ve şiddet arasındaki ilişkinin nasıl kurulduğuna dair düşünen Foucault, öznesi olarak tanıtıldığımız deneyimlerin kurulmasını gerçekleştiren bir iktidar alanı olduğunu, şiddetin de modern iktidarın kurumsal ağı içerisinde gelişen öznellik deneyimleri çerçevesinde her yere sirayet ettiğini belirtmektedir. İktidarın kurumsal düzeyde, düzenleyici ve denetleyici mekanizmalar sayesinde toplumsal ağın en uç yerlerine kadar sirayet etmesiyle birlikte şiddet, normlar, tüzükler ve prosedürler aracılığıyla belirli bir kapatma içinde gelişmektedir. Ancak, Foucault, şiddetin, iktidarın etkili bir aracı olduğunu kabul etse de, iktidarın esasını oluşturmadığını belirtmektedir. Bu çalışmada, Foucault’nun kuramsal çözümlemelerinden hareketle, özne, iktidar ve şiddet arasındaki ilişkiyi nasıl ele aldığı tartışılacak, onun düşünsel serüveni açısından önemli olan bu kavramların kendi tarih anlayışı bağlamında bir çözümlemesi yapılacaktır. Ayrıca, modern iktidar ilişkilerinin dayatmış olduğu öznellik deneyimlerine ve inceltilmiş şiddet araçlarına karşı verilecek direnişin imkânları sorgulanacaktır. (shrink)

Comment devenir sujet après la "mort du sujet"? Plongeant dans un matériau disparate, Frédéric Rambeau nous invite à suivre les trajectoires singulières des secondes vies du sujet chez Deleuze et Guattari, Foucault et Lacan. Ontologie des moi dissous, psychanalyse des passions de l'objet, problématisations radicales ou révolutionnaires du sujet politique, éthique du rapport à soi, théorie de la subjectivation sexuelle : ces secondes vies se vivent dans les signes, parfois dans des groupes : elles sont érotiques. Ce sont des (...) vies dissolues, radicales et déviantes : dissolues épistémologiquement, politiquement radicalisées, moralement déviantes. Poussées, au travers des années 1960 à 1980, par leurs puissances de surgissement et de mise en acte, elles ont découvert des formes de subjectivité inédites et risquées. (shrink)

In this 1966 interview, published here in English translation for the first time, Michel Foucault positions himself as a representative of a ‘generation’ of French thinkers who turned towards the analysis of ‘structures’ and away from the phenomenological approaches that had previously dominated French philosophy. In this, Foucault claims inspiration not only from older French scholars—namely Georges Dumézil, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss—but also from the science of genetics.

After highlighting Foucault’s ambivalent position with regards to psychoanalysis, this paper first shows that Foucault’s critical thought, insofar as it finds its condition of possibility in modern philosophy understood as a theoretical discourse on human finitude, must imperatively be complemented in the vicinity of psychoanalytical praxis-discourse: the ethical and political issue of the finished and desiring subjectivity can thus be examined anew. On the basis of the historicization of the Lacanian Law undertaken in La volonté de savoir, the paper therefore (...) concludes that a philosophical anthropology which is able to heave up to today’s decisive issues for the social critique and the politics of emancipation should build upon the Foucaldo-Lacanian critique of “modern” philosophical anthropology, but should not fear to confront it with radical criticism in return. (shrink)

El presente trabajo propone un diálogo entre la filosofía de Foucault y el psicoanálisis de Lacan, utilizando para eso el marco que ofrece el curso La Hermenéutica del sujeto del filósofo francés. A lo largo del mismo se exploran posibles puntos de contacto entre ambos discursos en torno a temas tales como una ascesis filosófica, el tratamiento de las pasiones, la función del otro y el deseo. El escrito parte de la convicción de que este diálogo puede ser mutuamente (...) enriquecedor: del lado de la filosofía permite pensar un modo efectivo de realizar un trabajo estético sobre la propia existencia; del lado del psicoanálisis permite profundizar en su dimensión espiritual antes que médica y normalizadora. Asimismo, de la conjunción de ambos discursos pueden extraerse algunas ideas para pensar una ascesis subjetiva capaz de elaborar una disidencia razonada ante las formas de dominación imperantes. (shrink)

The critique of psychoanalysis by late Foucault discretely opens up the possibility of a paradoxical dialogue with Lacan. The article aims to reconstruct the possibility of such a dialogue by recasting the issue of the subject. Conceiving the latter as an effect of his act, the article sets out from a “praxeology” which aims to establish the relationship between the subject and truth by other means than those provided by knowledge, in order to challenge the ‘rights’ of epistemology. What (...) kind of strategies are required for building such a relationship; what kind of aesthetical and ethical consequences might follow from such a departure point? To answer these questions, the virtual dialog of Foucault and Lacan, presented here, confronts “parrhesia” and “sinthome”, two concepts which help us shed some light on their common problematics. Far from indulging in vain polemics, yet without ignoring the irreducible differences, the aim of the article is to examine how Foucaldian notions can support the renewal of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis – such as the symptom – and how a Lacanian orientation can further open up Foucault’s inquiry into subjectivity. (shrink)

Penser les normes, ou l'absence de normes, penser le besoin de normes et la nécessité de s'en défaire à travers l'œuvre de Lacan et la critique de Foucault, tel est le dessein de cet ouvrage qui entend renouveler tant notre connaissance que nos interrogations sur ces questions. À l'heure de l'empowerment des minorités, la norme devient une préoccupation essentielle, et la psychanalyse, praxis radicalement hors normes, vient s'extraire du binaire du normal et du pathologique propre à la médecine et (...) transposé au social. Forte d'une double qualification, à la fois psychanalyste et universitaire, Aurélie Pfauwadel questionne le processus de normalisation sociale, l'inventivité des sujets et la régulation qu'elle permet au prisme des critiques foucaldiennes adressées à l'encontre de la psychanalyse. Voici, pour la première fois avec une telle ampleur et une telle exhaustivité, la confrontation décisive entre les pensées de Michel Foucault et du dernier Jacques Lacan. Donnant naissance à un véritable aggiornamento de la pratique lacanienne, ce livre s'érige aussi contre les préjugés environnant la psychanalyse, qui ont beau jeu de la reléguer à une pratique réactionnaire. Exceptionnel d'intelligence et d'écriture. (shrink)

French thought in the twentieth century is typically described as marked by a major fault line, a rupture or grande coupure, that emerged in the 1960s, the heyday of the ‘crisis of the subject.’ Before this time French philosophy, together with associated fields, were focused on issues of subjectivity—first in the vein of Bergsonian vitalism but then shifting, with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the late 1930s and 1940s, to forms of phenomenology and existentialism inspired first by Husserl and then, even (...) more decisively, by Heidegger.1 But starting mid-century, developments in the ‘human sciences’ of linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis began to offer a different.. (shrink)

In this article, I bring Lacan and Foucault into a conversation to show that both theorized the hysteric subject as the moment of the limit in power, where power fails to subordinate us. Moreover, both thinkers theorized the hysteric as the paradigmatic example of a political subject that not only rebels but radically transforms power structures. Next, I show that Freud's Dora case refers to a psychoanalytic discourse on hysteria, which turned into the master's discourse. Such master's discourse aimed (...) to discipline Dora into the norm of female, bourgeois, and heterosexual subjectivity. However, Dora successfully rebelled against the master's discourse. Finally, I expose that only a collective of hysterics could bring down psychiatric power down in the asylum. (shrink)

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

In the 1970s, Foucault tied his genealogy of the society of normalization to his multiple genealogies of psychoanalysis. What is often misconstrued, however, is that Lacan himself related the emergence of psychoanalysis to the growing extension of the society of normalization, as a reaction to it, shortly before the publication of The Will to Knowledge (1976). Lacan’s position proves to be diametrically opposed to Foucault’s in that he considers psychoanalysis as a practice that lies radically beyond norms, and (...) not as an agent of normalization. The crucial question treated by this article is, on the one hand, that of the pertinence of Foucault’s genealogies, and, on the other, that of pitting against this a credible history of psychoanalysis that would account for its specificity and its power of subversion. The tools of a history of psychoanalysis, furnished by Lacan, are of interest to this topic in many respects. He develops this history from within the field of psychoanalysis and in conformity with psychoanalytic epistemology, and, contrary to Foucault, he strives to maintain the necessity of thinking of psychoanalysis as a specific field in relation to other fields of knowledge and practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette—well-known as an outrageously murderous, hedonistic anti-heroine—captured the attention of some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Most of these engagements with Sade have received some critical attention. However, Foucault’s distinctive remarks on Juliette in The Order of Things have gone overlooked. I situate Foucault’s interpretation of Juliette alongside and against Adorno’s and Lacan’s: exploring his positioning of her as a liminal figure, situated in the Classical age on the cusp of (...) modernity, and his allusion to the way in which her “solitary—and endless” “prosperities” exceed our grasp. (shrink)

Se discuten las nociones de filosofía y espiritualidad, tratadas por M. Foucault en La hermenéutica del sujeto, que relacionan el sujeto con la verdad. Si la filosofía del conócete a ti mismo trata la relación cognoscitiva del sujeto con la verdad a la que tiene derecho, entonces la espiritualidad del cuidado de sí trata de la transformación experiencial que requiere la verdad para que el sujeto acceda a ella. Este es el contexto en el que M. Foucault se refiere a (...) M. Heidegger y J. Lacan como los autores que pensaron la relación entre el sujeto y la verdad. Se discute en ambos casos la distinción entre la filosofía y la espiritualidad: en Lacan, porque la experiencia psicoanalítica aparece como vivencia espiritual del cuidado de sí; en Heidegger, porque el Dasein y la verdad como desocultamiento muestran la filosofía como actividad espiritual por excelencia. (shrink)

This essay suggests that the minimal 1966 exchange between Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault in Lacan’s seminar actually stood in for a much fuller debate about modernity, psychoanalysis and art than its brevity would indicate. Using their contrasting interpretations of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas, as its fulcrum, “The Other Side of the Canvas” discovers a Lacanian critique of Foucault’s history of modernity, circa The Order of Things. The effort here is to insert the interpretation of Velázquez into the (...) context of both Lacan’s “Science and Truth” (originally the first session of the 1966 seminar) and Foucault’s recently published book. Our interpretation develops above all from Lacan’s contrast between the definition of a painting as a “window” and Foucault’s implicit understanding of it as a kind of “mirror”—a distinction in which Lacan discovers his seminal concept of “object a.” Pursuing the understanding of object a as the “surface” of the perspectival window allows us to understand why Lacan expands the discussion of Velázquez both into an understanding of twentieth-century paintings (Magritte, Balthus) and an implicit interpretation of the difference between philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to science and history. (shrink)

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, (...) and its complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire," that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements. Choosing a variety of battlegrounds, from historical phenomena - the 40,000 unsettling photographs of Moroccan drapery taken by Lacan's mentor, G. G. de ClA©rambault; the coincidence between vampire literature and the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed; the recurrent emptiness of urban spaces in film noir; the rise of democracy and questions of human rights - to theoretical concepts such as the gaze, cause, and sexual difference, Copjec imagines the blows that each contender might strike. Although Lacan emerges the victor, one has a sense that for Copjec the contest is close, that she is interested not in simply dismissing Foucault but in seizing his theory at those moments when its concerns and strategies are similar to Lacan's. She is intent on understanding how two compelling theories come to diverge, how small differences distort common assumptions. Establishing the links between psychoanalysis and critical philosophy, Copjec treats psychoanalysis not as a private language but as the mother tongue of modernity. She thus makes Lacan's famous "return to Freud" a return, as well, to the best principles of the Enlightenment. By this maneuver she forces us to question the historicist dialect that we have been taught to speak and that we all but take for granted and to regret the loss in it of psychoanalysis's more rousing accents. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza los desarrollos que Foucault realiza en torno a la analítica de la finitud en su libro Las palabras y las cosas con el fin de dilucidar las diferencias conceptuales con que Freud y Lacan abordan el sujeto del psicoanálisis. Se pretende reconocer la potencia de la crítica foucaulteana al cuadrilátero antropológico y revisar si las teorías de Freud y Lacan se encuentran o no dentro del mismo, buscando pensar la fecundidad de las direcciones contemporáneas del (...) psicoanálisis. Resultados: Foucault dejó en claro que es necesario prescindir del hombre para poder pensar de nuevo la realidad humana. Freud abrió las puertas de tal desaparición, aunque sus cimientos epistemológicos lo dejaron fijado a una antropología biologicista. Lacan retornó lingüísticamente a Freud para rescatar la potencia de su descubrimiento y formalizar un psicoanálisis cuyo sujeto no es el hombre. Orientaciones actuales del psicoanálisis parecen olvidar este último esfuerzo. (shrink)

"The body has always had the potential to unsettle us with its strange exigencies and suppurations, its demands and desires, and thus throughout the ages, it has continued to be a subject of interest and obsession. This collection of twelve peer-reviewed essays on Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault interrogates the body in all of its beauty...and with all of its blights and blemishes. Written by a diverse body of scholars-art historians, cultural theorists, English professors, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and sociologists from (...) North America and Europe-these essays bring into conversation two intellectual giants frequently seen as antagonists, and thus rarely seen together. Topics covered include: the intersections of Foucault and Lacan and how they bring to light new thoughts on the senses, the self-destructive body, ableism and disability in Guillermo del Toro's film The Shape of Water, body image and the ego, selfie-culture, and metamorphosis in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, among others."-Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Rella came of age as a philosopher in Italy during the period of the "crisis of reason" or more generally the exhaustion of classical rationality in its authority to structure experience. For Rella, unlike many others, the tensions of the crisis are productive. In The Myth of the Other, he presents a unique perspective on four seminal French thinkers: Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Bataille. Moe's masterful translation brings this remarkable Italian thinker to American readers for the first time. This (...) slim book mayvery well change the way American scholars think about the crisis of the other and the self coming our of French poststructuralism. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was a notoriously difficult and idiosyncratic thinker. But is there any value in his hermetically difficult style? By highlighting certain crucial elements of his practice, I show how Lacan enlists the notion of difficulty to press home that he did not want his readers to understand directly. Instead, as Foucault and Althusser explain so well, Lacan wished for his readers and auditors to discover themselves as subjects of desire through reading him. Indeed, in miming the (...) language of the unconscious, Lacan believed he could throw into sharp relief the notion of the unconscious itself and, paradoxically, better express himself. This temporary detour through misunderstanding indicates the programmatic value of difficulty itself. By commenting on the comedic aspect of Lacan's difficult literary dandyism, I also seek to playfully remind the reader that Lacan was a master of comedy and irony and that it is only by adopting a comparative literary approach to his work that we can appreciate how his theory of misunderstanding is at the heart of his conceptualization of madness and psychosis, allowing us to see how, for Lacan, the subject is ontologically sick. (shrink)

Lacan and Capitalist Discourse explores the political and theoretical connections between the Covid-19 Pandemic and Capitalism, unravelling the direct consequences of Lacan's thesis of so-called "Capitalist Discourse". Jorge Alemán provides an account of neoliberalism, its mechanisms to produce subjectivities and the new modes of the political far Right. The book begins with the problem of a possible exit from capitalism, continuing to consider the possibilities of mourning and the active production of a new Left. Alemán engages deeply with (...) a range of thinkers: primarily Lacan, but also Heidegger, Marx, Laclau, Foucault, Butler, Badiou, Althusser, and others, in making his case. Lacan and Capitalist Discourse will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to academics of psychoanalytic and Lacanian studies, cultural theory, philosophy and political thought. (shrink)

In its comparison of anarchist and poststructuralist thought, From Bakunin to Lacan contends that the most pressing political problem we face today is the proliferation and intensification of power. Saul Newman targets the tendency of radical political theories and movements to reaffirm power and authority, in different guises, in their very attempt to overcome it. In his examination of thinkers such as Bakunin, Lacan, Stirner, and Foucault Newman explores important epistemological, ontological, and political questions: Is the essential human (...) subject the point of departure from which power and authority can be opposed? Or, is the humanist subject itself a site of domination that must be unmasked? As it deftly charts this debate's paths of emergence in political thought, the book illustrates how the question of essential identities defines and re-defines the limits and possibilities of radical politics today. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s understanding of painting oriented him and his readers to an alternative history of art through a means or an approach well known to philosophers and literary critics, that of irony. A close reading of the first chapter of The Order of Things shows that Foucault rejected the traditional interpretations of art history generated by a focus on the intentions of the individual artist, the identification of the subjects portrayed, and the expectations of a genre, relying instead on a (...) synthesis of the approaches to painting given by Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, which converged with his ironic approach. (shrink)

En este escrito realizo en nombre propio un punto de pasaje y conjunción entre Foucault y Spino-za. Tomo en función de ello a Lacan como “mediador evanescente” y produzco un desplazamiento en el plano teórico habilitado por la urgencia de la coyuntura política, signada esta por el neolibe-ralismo y su posible dislocación, para engarzar el planteo crítico a la ética y a una necesaria refor-ma del entendimiento que active los afectos. Motiva y avala esta composición conceptual un trabajo teórico (...) y práctico sostenido que ha venido desplegándose sistemáticamente en torno al pensamien-to llamado posfundacional. (shrink)

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contra-dictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely criti-cal of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the sec-ondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I (...) pay particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Fou-cault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Fou-cault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, partic-ularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly ex-clusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights. (shrink)

In 1966 Michel Foucault pointed out that the generation of thinkers who had taken as their model Sartre or Merleau-Ponty had suddenly become part of the intellectual museum. A new generation of thinkers had appeared whose passion was not for “meaning”, “man” and “commitment”, but for the “concept and the system”.One could say that the break with the past generation began the day that Levi-Strauss with regard to societies and Lacan with regard to the unconscious showed us that “meaning” (...) was probably nothing but a sort of surface effect, a scum, and that that which affected us most profoundly, that which preceded us, that which maintains us.in space and time was the system.“Our task, Foucault went on, is to free ourselves from humanism and in that sense our work is political.” For some time Foucault and those who thought like him were classed as ‘academics”, that is as people whose thinking had little or no implications for the ongoing state of the society. Then came the May movement of 1968 and in February of 1969 a major gathering was held and the main speakers were Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. (shrink)

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis reflects on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. John Forrester probes the origins of psychoanalysis and its most beguiling concept, the transference, which is at once its institutional axis and experimental core. He explores the most seductive of all recent psychoanalytic traditions, that inspired by Jacques Lacan, whose radical questioning of psychoanalytic effects has been continued implicitly by Michel Foucault and explicitly by Jacques Derrida. Other key questions addressed (...) include the significance of speech in the talking cure, and the relationship between the 'real' of psychoanalysis and the fictionality of the 'truth' it offers. Dr Forrester also focuses on the relationship between psychoanalysis and the feminine, on analysis and gossip, on the borderline of seduction and rape, and on the women who have played such a crucial role in the history of psychoanalysis, as patients, analysts or both. (shrink)

The article focuses on how Michel Foucault made use of psychoanalysis, of which he was a great reader in the 1950s, mainly Freud. If the psychoanalysis is sometimes enrolled in a “psy-function” and is not the subject of a specific course at the Collège de France like psychiatry, it nevertheless appears as a long-standing problem, a reference that persists throughout Foucault’s work, even if it is approached in a very pointillist way. In this sense, it has a separate status within (...) this function, sometimes contradictory, sometimes quite obscure, sometimes the matrix of all disciplinary institutions, sometimes the form of depsychiatrization outside asylum. Alongside an “instrumental” use that is bound to the problem of knowledge-power, there are some quite singular uses. Foucault thus manipulates the concept of the unconscious to the point of making it completely heterogeneous to the knowledge developed by Freud and revised by Lacan. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende elaborar un concepto de las pulsiones capaz de apuntalar adecuadamente una ontología y una micropolítica del yo [self]. A través de aproximaciones a Nietzsche, Lacan, Foucault y Deleuze en particular, defiende la idea de que las pulsiones dan cuenta del sentido, más que de la verdad, del yo y del mundo con que se encuentra. La tesis de las pulsiones abre un dominio de diferencia que es impersonal y no-subjetivo, y, en cuanto tal, ha recibido críticas (...) que la acusan de eliminar tanto el sujeto cuanto el espacio de lo político. Contra esta perspectiva, el presente artículo sostiene que este dominio es la sede de una micropolítica que sirve como garante de la posibilidad de una transformación política mediante su impacto en el dominio de la subjetividad política. (shrink)

Daha önce Jean-Luc Nancy gibi isimlerle de röportajlar yayımlamış olan Le Philosophoire'ın 2000 yılında yayımlanan bu on üçüncü sayısında, Paris VII Denis Diderot Üniversitesi'nde akademisyen olan Nicolas Poirier, bu defa röportajlarına Jacques Rancière'i ekliyor. Röportajın öne çıkan özelliklerinden birisi, ve belki de en önemlisi, Rancière'in başta Michel Foucault ve Cornelius Castoriadis olmak üzere; Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Gilles Deleuze gibi Fransız filozofları, ve yine İtalyan filozof Antonio Negri'yi, iktidar, halk, özneleşme, kendilik teknikleri, polis ve politika kavramlarına yaklaşımları bakımından (çoğunlukla da (...) eleştirerek) analiz ediyor olması. Rancière, eleştirilerini, özellikle Cahil Hoca'dan (Le Maître Ignorant) beridir izini sürdüğü "entelektüel özgürleşme" meselesiyle bağlantılı olarak ele alırken okul, pedagoji, eğitim, öğretmen, bilgi aktarımı ve öğretmenin sembolik konumu gibi kavramları, çağın güncel siyasi meseleleri ışığında ele alıyor. (shrink)

"Continental philosophy" is now a well-established term in the English-speaking world: it has a point and is taken to refer to a fairly well-defined entity. It is, for example, regularly used in job descriptions. But any explanation that goes beyond something like the following, "Continental philosophy is the sort of philosophy produced by or in the wake of philosophers such as Heidegger and Adorno, Habermas and Apel, Sartre and Lévinas, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser and Derrida" is likely to be controversial. (...) The term excludes analytical and other types of exact philosophy done on the continent.1 Nor is the contrast between Analytic and Continental Philosophy supposed to encourage the assumption that Wittgenstein and Carnap are honorary Anglo-Saxons. (shrink)

Recasts Kantian philosophy along poststructuralist lines, particularly showing how Kantian ethics can be reformulated to take into account criticisms leveled by Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and others.

Since the time of Hippocrates, medical science sought to develop a practice based on "knowledge rather than opinion". However, in the light of recent alternative approaches to healing and a philosophy of science that, through thinkers like Kuhn, Rorty, and Foucault, is critical of claims to objective truth, we must reappraise the way in which medical interventions can be based on proven pathophysiological knowledge rather than opinion. Developing insights in Foucault, Lacan, and Wittgenstein, this essay argues for a recovery (...) of the Aristotelian idea of a techne, where there is a dynamic interplay between praxis and conceptualization. The result is a post-Kuhnian epistemology for medical science that recognizes the evaluative dimension of knowledge, but that also looks to a Platonic conception of the good as the ultimate constraint on human thought, thus avoiding the radically self-contained accounts of truth found in some post-modern thinkers. Keywords: normal science, power, truth, virtue CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The Derrida Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and one of the most important and influential European thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Derrida's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key (...) terms used in Derrida's writings and detailed synopses of his key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on Derrida's major philosophical influences and those he engaged with, such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan and Levinas. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Derrida's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Derrida Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Derrida, deconstruction or modern European philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Novelistic Incarnation and the Question of TruthChristine Orsini (bio)Translated by William A. JohnsenINTRODUCTIONLike many of you, I was overwhelmed by reading René Girard's first book Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, published in 1961.1 But I belong to a special class: Compared to all the young and less young readers and researchers who make up this assembly, I am what in high places, at the ARM [Association Recherches mimétiques], (...) we do not hesitate to qualify as a "historical Girardian": I read this book in 1961, thanks to Michel Deguy. And, of course, all his other books in the order of their publication. So I'm probably the oldest surviving groupie of René Girard. It's not a claim to fame, but it's in this way that I find a fellowship with you and that I'm happy to be before you. Indeed, I think that between Girardians, the differences matter less than the similarities.It is about another event, very recent, but directly linked to the previous one and also moving for me, that I am going to talk to you: the discovery of René Girard, biographie, the forthcoming book by Benoît Chantre, that I had the chance, once again, to read before everyone else. I read it passionately because [End Page 1] of all the things it teaches us about the genesis of Girard's work and above all because it gives this work an extraordinary and indisputable unity.I had assumed the unity of Girard's work but Benoît Chantre's book confirms it: What is called the mimetic theory is not a whole made up of separate and detachable parts, like a three-stage rocket, to which we like to compare it. Even if the writing of mimetic theory has undergone the turbulence of world history and the biography of its author, the whole determines its parts; the whole comprehends the boundaries of the work, the first writings and the last, in both senses of the word: to be taken altogether, understood as a whole, or discarded altogether. Moreover, its radical nature prohibits any form of readjustment or compromise. Girard has said it expressly in his interviews: There is no "Girardian system" but at the outset, a very compact intuition that fertilized all his research. This same intuition allowed Girard to profit from the work of his contemporaries and to maintain real relationships with the thought leaders of his time, such as Goldmann, Deguy, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida, without ever turning away from his own path. This intuition takes shape even before the conception of a "triangular" desire on an individual scale, a desire that will subsequently become "mimetic" on the scale of human societies.By reading the biography of Girard by Benoît Chantre, I better understood the importance of literature in the genesis of what we call mimetic theory. Marx wrote that ideas are not born like mushrooms; they always reflect a state of social reality. Girard showed, on the contrary, that social reality is not merely reflected but revealed by great literature. And with Girard, brilliant ideas are of the order of an event, intuitions inspired by readings in tune with events in his life. Reading Girard's intellectual biography therefore holds some surprises, things we did not know and things that can shed new light on those we already know.A genuine surprise is to learn that the excellent title "mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque" of his first work was imposed on him by his publisher. Girard had titled his history of the novel, which is at the same time a history of desire, "L'incarnation romanesque." At first, we will see what this mysterious title can mean; then, we will see that there are not only circumstantial reasons, linked to his teaching, to explain the confidence that Girard placed in literature, and not in philosophy and the human sciences, in his search for truth. [End Page 2]NOVELISTIC INCARNATIONIt was in Girard's personal papers, described by him as "very important papers" and carefully preserved and carried around from one move to another, that Benoît Chantre found... (shrink)