I’ve begun writing a review essay of Michel Foucault and Power Today: International Multidisciplinary Studies in the History of the Present (Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard, eds) to appear in the next issue of The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. The book collects “refined and expanded versions of select invited papers” presented to the “Michel Foucault and Social Control” conference back in May 2004 in Montreal. I was excited to review the book because I never got around to attending the conference and it deals with an area of my interest – Foucault and power.
Sadly, I’ve found myself somewhat disappointed with the volume. Perhaps it is the disjunction between “power today” and “social control”. Perhaps it is the invocation of “the history of the present”. The book repeats a number of the flaws prominent in much Foucauldian scholarship: the theoretical studies leave the empirical on the side and the empirical studies leave the theoretical on the side. That is, the theoretical and the empirical rarely meet in the ‘theoretico-empirical’; i.e., the mode in which Foucault himself presented his works.
Beyond this blindness to the theoretico-empirical, I found many of the papers fell short of the promise to discuss “Michel Foucault and power today”. This failure operated on both the empirical and theoretical levels. Regardless, I’ll post a link to the complete essay once it is available.
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thanks for this craig – despite that I am thesising on MF and power, I have never heard of this volume, so am interlibrary loaning it immediately. Is there anything in there specifically dealing with Foucault’s concepts of power and/or resistance?
Warren Montag’s essay is likely the best, which attempts to think the relation between power and law. The other two stand-out essays are by Thomas Lemke and Frank Pearce. Lemke’s essay is likely not especially relevant to your project. There’s a few brief moments of interest in the other essays; the ones that dare bring Foucault in dialogue with Marxism, but those thoughts aren’t developed all that well. There’s a companion volume, Michel Foucault et le controle sociale, if you read French. And an as of yet unpublished roundtable transcript on “Foucault and Critical Theory”, which if it isn’t published soon, I’ll have to find through other channels.
Does the companion volume have the same papers or different ones? I hate Lemke. Because I made myself read most of his book on Foucault in German. It’s 50% footnotes.
Some overlap, but different papers as well. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m happy to wait for Lemke’s book to make it into English. The table of contents makes it look like its too Germanic.
Do you think the book will make it into English? Like many books on Foucault (Han, Stoler), its major benefit is in précising unpublished material, in this case the lectures on neo-liberalism. Since those are already coming into the public domain, I can’t see there’d be much point in translating it now.
See the first item listed here under 2005.
OK, what does that mean? It’s listed as 2005, but it doesn’t seem to have been published, right? If this has been published in English, I need to get hold of it, quick. Even though I speak German conversationally to a near-fluent level, reading academic German is like being flogged with a brick.
I figured there wouldn’t be a ToC and overview of the book (part of a submission to a publisher, perhaps?) if it weren’t being translated. Translations are always delayed, especially when he major Foucauldian translators are working on something else. Send him an email.
From: Mark Kelly
To: lemke@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Date: May 22, 2006 11:15 PM
Subject: Englische Übersetzung deines Buches
Sehr geehrter Dr. Lemke,
ich schreibe dir, um dir die Frage zu stellen, ob eine englische
Übersetzung deines ‘Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft’
herausgegeben wird. Ich sah es in der Liste englischer Publikationen
auf deiner Website, aber ich kann diese englische Version gar nicht
finden. Ich würde gern wissen, ob es eigentlich existiert da ich meine
Doktorarbeit über Foucault schreibe, und es ist mir ganz klar, dass
dein Buch ganz wichtig bei den Foucault-Studien ist, aber ich würde es
wahrscheinlich ziemlich besser auf Englisch verstehen.
Cheers,
Mark Kelly
_____________________
Department of Philosophy
University of Sydney
From the horse’s mouth; in you face motherfucker!:
What a nice man!
That certainly is unfortunate. What was written and put online on his site must have been from the discussion to translate it. The lectures will be out in English “soon” enough…
Well, no offence to Thomas, who as I say was very nice, but frankly, from my week of reading his book in the original German, I would see it is basically not much of a pity at all. Wait for my book – it will be much more interesting!
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