Foucault and the Making of Subjects (New Politics of Autonomy) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786601044 ISBN 13: 9781786601049

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Michel Foucault's account of the subject has a double meaning: it relates to both being a "subject of" and being "subject to" political forces. This book interrogates the philosophical and political consequences of such a dual definition of the subject, by exploring the processes of subjectivation and objectivation through which subjects are produced. Drawing together well-known scholars of Foucaultian thought and critical theory, alongside a newly translated interview with Foucault himself, the book will engage in a serious reconsideration of the notion of "autonomy" beyond the liberal tradition, connecting it to processes of subjectivation. In the face of the ongoing proliferation of analyses using the notion of subjectivation, this book will retrace Foucault's reflections on it and interrogate the current theoretical and political implications of a series of approaches that mobilize the Foucaultian understanding of the subject in relation to truth and power.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Laura Cremonesi specialises in 20th Century French Philosophy and has published articles and book chapters on Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot. She has published a book on Foucault's interpretation of the ancient world, Michel Foucault e il mondo antico. Spunti per una critica dell'attualità (ETS, 2008), and translated from French into Italian the book by Pierre Hadot, Études de philosophie ancienne (Les Belles Lettres, 2010): Studi di filosofia antica (ETS, 2015).

Orazio Irrera is Associate Researcher at the Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal materiali foucaultiani and the co-director of the permanent workshop "Race and Colonialism: On the Political Epistemologies of Decolonisation" at the Collège international de Philosophie. He is the co-editor of Foucault e le genalogie del dir-vero (Cronopio, 2014) and La pensée politique de Foucault (Kimé, 2016).

Daniele Lorenzini is Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Paris-Est Créteil. He is the author most recently of Éthique et politique de soi: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell et les techniques de l'ordinaire (Vrin, 2015) and the co-editor of Michel Foucault's lectures About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), Qu'est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi (Vrin, 2015), and Discours et vérité (Vrin, 2016). He is also a member of the editorial board of the journal materiali foucaultiani.

Martina Tazzioli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. She holds a PhD in Politics from Goldsmiths University of London, UK. She is co-editor of 'Spaces in Migration' (2012) and 'Foucault and the History of our Present' (2014).

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Foucault and the Making of Subjects

By Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Matter Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-104-9

Contents

Introduction: Foucault and the Making of Subjects: Rethinking Autonomy between Subjection and Subjectivation Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli, 1, 
1 Foucault, the Iranian Uprising and the Constitution of a Collective Subjectivity Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli, 11, 
2 There Can't Be Societies without Uprisings Michel Foucault and Farès Sassine, 25, 
Part I: Productions of Subjectivity, 53, 
3 From Subjection to Subjectivation: Michel Foucault and the History of Sexuality Arnold I. Davidson, 55, 
4 Foucault, Regimes of Truth and the Making of the Subject Daniele Lorenzini, 63, 
5 Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Case of Sexual Avowal Judith Butler, 77, 
Part II: Autonomy, Critique and the Norms, 95, 
6 Philosophy, Critique and the Present: The Question of Autonomy in Michel Foucault's Thought Laura Cremonesi, 97, 
7 Foucault and the Refusal of Ideology Orazio Irrera, 111, 
8 Becoming a Subject in Relation to Norms Guillaume le Blanc, 129, 
Part III: The Power over and of Governed Subjects, 137, 
9 The Government of Desire Miguel de Beistegui, 139, 
10 Between Politics and Ethics: The Question of Subjectivation Judith Revel, 163, 
11 Foucault and the Irreducible to the Population: The Mob, the Plebs and Troubling Subjectivities in Excess Martina Tazzioli, 175, 
Index, 191, 
About the Contributors, 193, 

CHAPTER 1

Foucault, the Iranian Uprising and the Constitution of a Collective Subjectivity

Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli

As is well known, Foucault went to Iran twice in 1978 (on 16–24 September and 9–15 November) as a special correspondent of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, writing a series of short articles that were immediately translated and published in Italian in the form of a reportage (Foucault 2001b, 662). Only a few texts on the Iranian uprising actually appeared in French in those months, and from the summer of 1979 till his death, five years later, Foucault chose not to refer publicly to Iran anymore. His stances on this subject gave rise to numerous misunderstandings and to some violent critiques, especially in France. Foucault indirectly responded to them through his article 'Inutile de se soulever?', published in Le Mondein May 1979 (Foucault 2005d), but eventually decided to keep silent, maybe because he did not want to get involved in political controversies with people who — as he said — were 'fabricating things about my own texts and then attributing that to me' (infra, 30). However, in August 1979, Foucault conceded a long and incredibly rich interview to a young Lebanese philosopher, Farès Sassine, giving him permission to translate it in Arabic for the weekly An Nahar al'arabî wa addûwalî. This interview was unavailable in its complete and original French version until the journal Rodéo finally published a full transcription of it in 2013; we are glad to offer here its first English translation.

PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNALISM

Why did Foucault get interested in the Iranian uprising and decide to go there and write a series of newspaper articles in the first place? The answer to this question is complex and multifaceted. There were of course 'material' conditions that made it possible: the Italian publisher Rizzoli had proposed him a regular collaboration with Corriere della Sera in the form of 'points of view'. Foucault accepted and started a project aiming at constituting a 'team' of intellectuals-reporters whose task was to 'witness the birth of ideas and the explosion of their force' everywhere in the world, 'in the struggles one fights for ideas, against them or in favour of them' (Foucault 2001d, 707). Foucault's reportage on the Iranian uprising was the first which was realised; only two other reportages followed — Alain Finkielkraut's reportage on the United States under the Carter administration and André Glucksmann's reportage on the boat people (Foucault 2001b, 706). No doubt there was also a more or less fortuitous or accidental reason: as Foucault explains it at the beginning of his interview with Sassine, when the news about a mass uprising taking place in Iran began to be reported, he was under the impression of his recent reading of Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope (Bloch 1986). So, he decided to go there and see what was happening as a way to 'test' Bloch's theses about the relationship between political revolution and religious eschatology (infra, 25–26). However, those material conditions and contingent reason should not prevent us from trying to grasp the more general framework within which Foucault's decision to go to Iran and write a reportage on the uprising taking place there can be inscribed.

In the beginning of the 1970s, Foucault had already presented his work and the work of philosophy in general — or better of philosophy as he wanted to practise it — as a 'radical journalism': 'I consider myself a journalist', he wrote in 1973, 'to the extent that what interests me is the actualité, what is happening around us, what we are, what is going on in the world'. According to Foucault, Nietzsche had been the first 'philosopher-journalist', that is to say, the first who introduced the fundamental question about today (aujourd'hui) into the field of philosophy (Foucault 2001a, 1302). In January 1978, a few months before his reportage on the Iranian uprising, Foucault again evoked the idea of philosophy as a form of journalism, liking it this time to Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant's texts on the Aufklärung, published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784: these texts, according to him, inaugurate a 'philosophical journalism' whose task is to analyse the 'present moment' (Foucault 1991, 9–10). He referred again to the same idea in May 1978, in his conference 'What Is Critique?' (Foucault 2007b, 48), as well as in April 1979, in a short article published in Le Nouvel Observateur (Foucault 2001e, 443). It is thus possible to suggest that Foucault's willingness to go to Iran and see what was happening there was a way, for him, to put into practice — in the most concrete sense of the word — the task of a philosophical journalism which tries to think of the present, the 'today', highlighting both the difference it introduces in relation to the past and the way in which it contributes to redefine our perception of ourselves as part of this actualité. After all, Foucault never ceased to present the work of philosophy in these terms: Foucault, the Iranian Uprising and the Constitution of a Collective Subjectivity 13 indeed, the concept of 'historical ontology of ourselves' that he elaborates in a series of lectures and articles at the end of his life is precisely for him a way of dealing with a series of questions — 'What is our actualité ? What are we as part of this actualité? What is the target of our activity of philosophising insofar as we are part of our actualité?' (Foucault 2015b, 84)2 — which for sure...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786601044
• ISBN 13: 9781786601049
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Herausgeber: Cremonesi Laura, Irrera Orazio, Lorenzini Daniele, Tazzioli Martina
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland