Critique & Humanism | 44 | No. 1 | 2015 |

Theme of the Issue:

Michel Foucault: Ways of Use. Subjection and Critique

Editorial: Lea Vajsova and Momchil Hristov, 44, no. 1, 2015, 232 p., ISSN:0861-1718

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Michel Foucault: Ways of Use.
Subjection and Critique

Contents

KX 44 1 tom 19_Contents_ENG

*This issue is only available in Bulgarian.

Working to Death: Competition and Security

The paper offers a discussion of two cases of working to death, the famous 19th century case of Mary Anne Walkley, and the recent death of a global bank intern, Moritz Erhard. The point of the paper is that competition is an assemblage rather than a natural phenomenon, and that the invention of human capital transformed the competition between workers into a competition between entrepreneurs dominated by security strategies and not by disciplinary technologies as in the times of Mary Anne Walkley.

Keywords: Foucault, Marx, discipline, security, competition

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Author: Todor Hristov

Todor Hristov is Associate Professor of Literary Theory at Sofi a University. He holds PhD degrees in Sociology and Literary Theory. His most recent book offers a discussion of the 1876 April Uprising as an experiment at inventing a regime of sovereignty without a sovereign symptomatic of the advantages and defi ciencies of the regime of sovereignty that triumphed in that age of imperial administration. Todor Hristov’s principal research interests are in governmentality studies, critical theory and cultural studies.

Psychology as Corporate Technology of Governmentality

This paper develops the argument that Foucauldian genealogy is marked by a strong anti-representationalism that is most constantly visible in what Foucault, borrowing from Nietzsche, calls a “tragic structure”: the mode of constitution of a self through an act of exclusion which by the same token is rendered unavailable, thus rendering the self-constitution also unavailable. Then the practical effects of the care of the self as an anti-representational critical strategy are traced demonstrating how care of the self interweaves with risk calculations, insurance marketing and therapeutic techniques knitting a psychological technology of governmentality.

Keywords: genealogy, representation, tragic structure, care of the self, risk

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Author: Milena Iakimova

Milena Iakimova is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, member of the Editorial Board of Critique and Humanism journal. She is author of the monograph Sofi a of the Plebeians (The 20-ies of the 20th Century) (2010; in Bulg.). Fields of interest: urban studies, social theory and pragmatism, qualitative research methods.

The Subject of Order and the Order of the Subject: The „Care of the Self” as Care of Purity and Dirt

The first part of this paper addresses the status freedom has in Michel Foucault’s philosophical work. For this purpose, I build upon the theoretical work of Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The effort is to understand the relation between the extreme, ecstatic ways of liberation and the particular situation of the subject that “gets free”. The second part of the paper is an attempt to reflect on these theoretical questions through an analysis of specific empirical practices – New Age practices in particular. In order to understand the basic logic of New Age practices, I try to synthesize Foucault’s “care of the self” alongside the problems of purity and dirt as symbolic categories in Mary Douglas’s theoretical work. This is the main aim of the article – to try to think about the “care of the self” as care for order, care to maintain the symbolic order which takes place at the level of the individual.

Keywords: freedom; subject; care of the self; power; governmentality; deterritorialization; New Age; purity; OCD; anxiety

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Author: Simeon Kyurkchiev

Simeon Kyurkchiev is a PhD student in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His primary interests are in critical sociology and sociology of knowledge. He works on New Age practices and rationality, and alternative healthcare.

To Disclose Yourself: Power and Constitution of the Sexual Subject in Foucault’s Works

According to Didier Eribon, Foucault should also be interpreted within the movement for sexual freedom, and especially the LGBT movement developed itself, after the Stonewall. However if we reconstruct Foucault’s work on sexuality in this perspective, we shall see that there is a certain critique to the slogan “coming out of the closet” mobilized by the LGBT social movement as containing, presumably, an emancipatory potential. In fact, “to disclose yourself” became an important power technique through which the sexual subject was constituted within psychiatry and psychoanalytical therapy – a process that became possible partly because of a specific discursive regime established during the 19th century. Power technique producing sustainable identity as a core of power domination.

Keywords: discursive regime, subject, sexuality, power relations, power technique.

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Author: Lea Vajsova

Lea Vajsova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Sofia University, member of the Editorial Board of Critique and Humanism journal. Her academic interests are mainly in the fields of social movements and critical social theory. She is a co-editor (with Daniel Smilov) of #The Protest: Analyses and Positions in the Bulgarian Press, Summer 2013 (2014; in Bugl.). Her recent publications are: “Ethnomethodological Notes on the Position of the Researcher Participating in the Protest” (Following the Steps of the Other: A Collection in Honor of Maya Grekova, 2014; in. Bulg.); “Occupy “Orlov Most”! The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (Critique and Humanism, 41/ 2014; in Bulg.)

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Critique and Politics of the Present

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What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue

Translation: Neda Genova
Editors: Ognyan Kasabov and Momchil Hristov

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Author: Judith Butler

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkley. She is the author of Notes toward a performative theory of assembly (2015); Senses of the subject (2015); Dispossession: the performative in the political (co-written in 2013); Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism (2012); Is Critique Secular? (co-written in 2009); Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009); Who Sings the National-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004); Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); Excitable Speech (1997); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”(1993); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Refl ections in Twentieth-Century France (1987) etc. Her research interests are in feminist theory, sexual studies, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, psychoanalysis.

Rethinking Foucault’s Intellectual Heritage through the Possibility of a Historical Sociology of Discursive Practices

This study attempts to read ‘displacingly’ Foucault for whom such concepts as freedom, activity and subjectness are important with regard to the constant focus on the critique of modernity and the ‘critical ontology of ourselves’. Hence, the stakes of this study and the challenges it faces are the following: 1) to critically rethink Foucauldian intellectual heritage emphasizing the ontological and epistemological thematizations of the conceptions of discourse, subject, practices of the self and of the possibility of changing ‘ourselves’; 2) by taking advantage of the methodological heuristic value of the Foucauldian problematizations, to try to present a reversed perspective towards the subject constitution and its activity (being-active), and therefore 3) to present a research stance working on the borders of the specific methodologies of Foucault and simultaneously retaining them, as a chance to develop a sociology of discursive practices which is nonclassical in its conception and historical in its methodology.

Keywords: discourse, subject, practice of the self, historical sociology of discursive practices

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Author: Stoyka Penkova

Stoyka Penkova is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Sciеnce, Faculty of Philosophy and History, Plovdiv University. Her main areas of research interests include Sociology of Inequalities, Inheriting and Discursive Practices, Performativity and Ideology of the Discursive Practice. Monographs: Inheriting and Discursive Practices (2013; in Bulg.); Inequality, Discourse, Inheriting (2013; in Bulg.). Most recent papers: “The Discourse of the Motherland as a Representation of Socialist Ideology: Discursive Forms and Derivation in a Child’s Personal Diary (1948/1953).” (Sociological Problems 1-2/2015; in Bulg.); “Migration, Family Life and Cultural Inheritance on the Two Sides of the Bulgarian-Turkish Border (The New Diversity of Family Life in Europe. Mobile Ethnic Groups and Flexible Boundaries, 2015, coauthored with Meglena Zlatkova).

“Interference Culture”: Geopolitics of Marginal Phenomena

A former professor at the University of Amsterdam and currently a professor at the University of Bucharest, Sorin Alexandrescu is not only a specialist in semiotics, literary criticism, narratology, and poetics, but also a reputed historian of Romanian modernity. His studies of cultural history, such as Romanian Paradox (1998), Looking backward: Modernity (1999) or Identity in Rupture (2000), analyze the founding discourse theory, Foucauldian archeology or textual deconstruction. In this article, I analyze Sorin Alexandrescu’s discourse of method, which can be found in the prefaces of his books on Romanian intellectual history. Dealing with some methodological issues forged by Nietzsche, Foucault, and Ricoeur, Alexandrescu proposes perspectivism as a general strategy of cultural studies. He refutes the sanctification of culture by modern historiography since that sanctification makes impossible a critical reflection on oneself. Such a critical approach does accept breaks, discontinuities, ruptures and Otherness; it allows to look at oneself through the eyes of the other. This does not mean defining Romanian culture as marginal but as interference culture since the distinction between center and periphery is perspectival. Alexandrescu admits that his method for analyzing the discursive strategies of modern cultural historiography is not only a form of resistance, but also (could be) a form of power-knowledge. His metahistorical reflection is a kind of self-analysis, a hermeneutics of the subject in which one can learn how to resist Foucault.

Keywords: Sorin Alexandrescu, Romanian intellectual history, cultural discourse theory, Otherness, interference culture.

 

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Author: Corneliu Bilba

Corneliu Bilba is lecturer at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Department of Political Science and International Relations. He has studied Philosophy at the Universities of Iasi (Romania) and Lille 3 (France). He is a former boursier of Gouvernement Français, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. His doctoral dissertation deals with the critique of representation in Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. His main fi elds of research are political philosophy, international ethics and applied hermeneutics. Corneliu Bilba is the author of Hermeneutics and Discontinuity: Studies of Discursive Archaeology (2011). He is the co-editor of the international journal Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy.

„I Have a Drone!” War of Drones

This article discusses the new perspectives of warfare in the context of automatic weapons. Gaining distance from hostilities decreases the significance of the human body and increases the mathematical and technical approach to the other’s death. The enemy becomes a vague point in the visualization, which could be dealt with through algorithms and representations. The paper touches upon some questions concerning the future uses of drones.

Keywords: war, drones, human body, distance, algorithms, future

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Author: Stoyan Stavru

Stoyan Stavru holds PhD in Law (2009) and PhD in Philosophy (2015), both from Sofia University „St. Kliment Ohridski“. His main research interests are in the field of bioethics and biolaw, especially in relation to the various regulatory and descriptive regimes of the human body. His books (in Bulg.) in this field include: The Human Body as a Subject of Rights in Rem“ (2008), A Proprietary Action of Death: Dead Body before and after the Funeral (2008), Visions in Pandora’s Box. Biolaw. Book One. Legal Mythology of the Human Body. Fluctuations of Legal Personality (2014) and Visions in Pandora’s Box. Biolaw. Book Two. Mutations in Human Reproduction. Carnival Death – Legal Aspects (2014).

Truth-Telling as an “Ultimate Account” (Mapping a New Research Field)

Here I examine the performatives of truth-telling as entirely practical – everyday – gestures similar to “accountable actions” in Harvey Sacks’s conversation analysis. According to Sacks, in an everyday conversation, to give an “account” of yourself and of the situation is a standard “device” for overcoming an existing distance between interlocutors or a crisis in communication (as in giving “accounts” in family rows). Three main practical functions can be identified in such everyday accounts: (1) avoiding a crisis in the coordination of action by (2) objectifying the situation (3) for the purpose of further coordination of action. The hypothesis here is that truth-telling performs the same three functions, but takes them to a higher level: truth-telling may turn out to be a specific type of an extremely tense account – telling the truth is like giving an account in exceptional circumstances, an account which, itself, is exceptional because it claims to be “ultimate”. Finally, the performatives of telling the truth are gestures of providing ultimately generalized examples, instances, samples, models to be followed. The novelty of this approach is not merely in the comparison to “accounts”, but also in its implications for, above all, cultural studies and political philosophy: If we succeed in demonstrating that truth-telling is such an extreme practical gesture, then we will be able to achieve simultaneously several secondary objectives: (1) to explain the “exceptionality” coefficient in a number of cultural-historical as well as contemporary forms of institutionalization of truth (an oath to the gods or to the Constitution, confession, interrogation, testimony, even inquiry as inquisition in the sense of Michel Foucault); (2) to explain also why truth-telling in everyday life, where we rely on routine coordination of actions, is practically such a rare – exceptional – gesture. But also (3) if telling the truth is a functional device for overcoming distance through objectification, then it is not surprising that despite the substantive variety of the cultural forms of institutionalization, the role of “accountability” – but also the role of “truth” – has been progressively growing since antiquity as a main institutional stake in the ever more mass societies. At the same time, (4) insofar as telling the truth is an entirely and solely situational practical gesture of giving an “account”, the “place of truth” as an institutional stake of democratic policies must be kept as an “empty place” open to contestation, justification, and new proposals.

Keywords: truth-telling, account, performative, conversation analysis, ordinary language philosophy.

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Author: Dimitar Vatsov

Dimitar Vatsov, PhD in Philosophy (Sofia University), is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia. He is Editor-in-Chief of Critique & Humanism journal. He is the author of the following books (in Bulg.): Essays on Power and Truth (2009); Freedom and Recognition: The Interactive Sources of Identity (2006); Ontology of Affirmation: Nietzsche as a Task (2003). He has also published numerous papers in English, Italian, Russian, French, Polish and Spanish. His research interests are in the fields of political philosophy, especially critical theory, and post-analytic philosophy of language.

Varieties of Pragmatist Truth

In this paper, I focus on the first formulations of the pragmatist conception of truth advanced by Charles S. Peirce, Ferdinand Schiller, William James and John Dewey. I attempt to delineate and compare the particular place of these four conceptions in the common framework of pragmatism, and to estimate their potential to replace the traditional understanding of truth as a ‘correspondence’ with an alternative concept based on the pragmatist understanding of truth. As the results show, the pragmatist philosophers do not really replace ‘correspondence’ with another concept, and while they often disapprove of it, they tacitly depend on its meaning for their conceptions of truth, which leads to an inconsistent position regarding the concept of correspondence. I also pay attention to the consequences of the pragmatist conceptions about truth for scientific knowledge.

Keywords: Charles S. Peirce, Ferdinand Schiller, William James and John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, pragmatist conception of truth, correspondence, consensus theory, instrumentalism, warranted assertibility, humanism, scientific knowledge, experiment.

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Author: Hristo Gyoshev

Hristo Gyoshev has a PhD in Philosophy and presently works as Assistant Professor at the Philosophy and Sociology Department of the New Bulgarian University. He teaches courses in the fields of history of philosophy, and contemporary theoretical and practical philosophy. His research interests are in the fields of analytic philosophy, social philosophy, and contemporary moral and political philosophy. He is the author of the book Identity and Normativity. A Study on Derek Parfi t’s Philosophical Reductionism (2013; in Bulg.).

The Concept of “Meaning” in Davidson’s Work

The concept of ‘meaning’ is extremely important in the philosophy of language in the 20th and 21st centuries. The purpose of this paper is to describe the theoretical basis and uses of this concept in the post-analytic tradition and more specifically in the texts of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty. Selected works of both philosophers and several short articles on the issue are analyzed in the process. Davidson’s attitude towards the role of ‘meaning’ has gone through some metamorphosis over the years, so I opt to present the theoretical framework of his earlier stage, which is closely linked to ideas of Tarski and Quine, and his relatively late stage where the idea of triangulation arises. At the end of this article, I describe Rorty’s attitude towards the problem of the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’. The inclusion of Rorty permits us to highlight the position of Davidson on the topic and clearly shows the problems of theoretical thinking in the field of philosophy of language.

Keywords: philosophy of language; truth; meaning; realism; triangulation; principle of charity; A.Tarski; W.V.O.Quine; D.Davidson; R.Rorty.

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Author: Tomislav Evtimov

Tomislav Evtimov is a PhD student at the New Bulgaria University. Most recent publications: “The Media Image of MRF” (Language and Publicity 3/2015; in Bulg.); “The State, the Protest and the Counter-Protest” (available at: www.hssfoundation.org).