
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
Michel Foucault: Ways of Use.
Subjection and Critique
Contents
*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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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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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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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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KX presents dВЕРСИЯ journal
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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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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“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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„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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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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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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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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