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Category Archives: Foucault

CFP: Foucault and Animals

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Call For Abstracts: Foucault and Animals
Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Wadiwel (Eds)
“The animal in man no longer has any value as the sign of a Beyond; it has become his madness, without a relation to anything but itself; his madness in the state of nature.”
“it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in [...]

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A Myth About Foucault

Sunday, November 15, 2009

My apologies for writing such a boring post after such a long period of absence. In the past few years, I was unfortunately too eager to get involved boundary skirmishes, but this has, for the most part, disappeared. I hate to say that I find myself pondering yet another boundary skirmish, yet again over the [...]

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Another Recommendation

Sunday, August 3, 2008

My friend and mentor, Lorna Weir, has been quite busy as of late. Another one of her papers, “The Concept of Truth Regime” [pdf], appears in the current Canadian Journal of Sociology 33(2).
“Truth regime” is a much used but little theorized concept, with the Foucauldian literature presupposing that truth in modernity is uniformly scientific/quasi-scientific and [...]

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Foucault – “Birth of Biopolitics”

Friday, June 20, 2008

For those you who haven’t either already ordered the UK edition or who haven’t pre-ordered the American edition, Amazon informed me that Birth of Biopolitics shipped today.

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Review: Foucault Beyond Foucault

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Todd May reviews Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault (thanks Jeremy):
Nealon argues here that the explanation for the changes in power’s operation is its increasing efficiency through intensification.  Sovereign power was brutal but clumsy.  Social power was better, but was brought to greater efficiency by discipline, which, Nealon claims, acts not so much upon the [...]

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An Alternative to EndNote

Thursday, May 31, 2007

In addition to moving away from Word and to Mellel (which after about five days of use, I’m quite happy with, even if there is a bit of a learning curve), I’m also moving away from EndNote to Bookends. I purchased a copy of EndNote a long time ago and found it to be [...]

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Another Round: Gordon vs. Scull on Foucault

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Colin Gordon has been kind enough to let Jeremy Crampton at FoucaultBlog post a copy of a letter that the Times Literary Supplement declined to publish. While the Gordon/Scull battle over Foucault has been a hot topic in the blogosphere, this letter has not, to my knowledge, been commented on yet.
Scull questions whether many readers [...]

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Still More on The History of Madness

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

As is always the case when matters such as this arise, the criticism of particular works or, indeed, of entire corpuses of works gets tied up with issues of academic politics. This is clearly the case when the “anti-Theory” (whatever that is, of course) dogmatists at The Valve go on the offensive. For them, questions [...]

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More History of Madness

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Rather than going away as an issue, the Scull versus the Foucauldians debate seems to be spreading. It seems odd to me that people are willing to get worked up over this issue. Afterall, standard periodizations of Foucault’s work place The History of Madness outside his developed periods; viz., the archaeological, the genealogical, and the [...]

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Reviewing The History of Madness

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Andrew Scull’s “fair and balanced” review of the new translation of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness has been making the rounds. Those who find fair and balanced reviews to be little more than displays of pettiness and resentiment may want to look at Colin Gordon’s review, which, it seems, has been read by next to [...]

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