De France Lectures Research Articles

An interview with Amos Gitai on House

When the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad invited Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai to stage his documentary trilogy House (1980, 1998, 2005) at the Théâtre national de la Colline in 2023, geopolitical animosities made way for artistic solidarities. In this article and interview, I explore how Gitai’s play critiques the violent logics of home and homelands, exploring how a commandeered house in West Jerusalem plays host to the multidirectional memory of violent Jewish and Palestinian erasure. Stones become metonyms of the Israel–Palestine conflict: as they are quarried, chiselled, split, cemented, and erected, they testify to the construction of homes that also become tools of destruction, expulsion, and mutual ontological violence (Kotef, 2020). Drawing on an interview I conducted with Gitai in July 2023, and his Collège de France lectures from 2018 to 2019, I read his archaeological journey into the remains of this Arab-Jewish house as a call to hospitality (Derrida, 1997): troubling the subject positions of host and hostage that both underpin and impede a ‘chez soi’.

Towards A Radically Relational Post-Grotowskian Performance Paradigm

Jerzy Grotowski chose to name his College de France lecture series La „lignee organique” au theatre et dans le rituel (The „Organic Lineage” in Theatre and Ritual), and the author, who attended and documented these final public talks, contends in this article that organicity constitutes a through-line connecting Grotowski’s theatrical and post-theatrical research. The author draws from these talks, as well as from her Grotowski-based training, including her work with Rena Mirecka, and her research collaborations with Indigenous artists and scholars from Turtle Island (North America), including Floyd Favel, who worked with both Grotowski and Mirecka. The author points out that in diverse traditional cultural practices whose role it is to enhance, restore, and sustain balance between human and non-human forms of life, organicity is understood as a living force endowing performative processes with energy, power, and efficacy. The post-Grotowskian performance paradigm envisioned by the author hinges upon a non-anthropocentric perspective informed by the ecological and spiritual dimensions of relationality articulated by several generations of Indigenous scholars. She contends that such a paradigm shift, which challenges artistic practices glorifying human creative agency, can provide a viable alternative to the dominance of (Eurocentric) new materialist/posthumanist theories of non-human agency.

Preface to Mieke Bal, ‘A cultural dream: Europe in the plural’, the Collège de France lectures, 2022–2023

Preface to Mieke Bal, ‘A cultural dream: Europe in the plural’, the Collège de France lectures, 2022–2023

The Cynics With and Without Foucault

Abstract: In the last three years of his life, Michel Foucault made a sudden and unexpected turn to the ancient Cynics. In lectures from 1982 to 1984, and most notably in his final Collège de France lectures from 1984 ( The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II ), he sought to recover from the Cynics a potential for critique, militant revolution, and a courageous means of speaking truth to power. Foucault's engaged scholarship is inspiring, but in many respects, it is indistinguishable from conventional scholarly approaches to ancient Cynicism. In both cases, the Cynics are thought to comprise a philosophical movement that is founded on a core of principled commitments, for instance to virtuous self-restraint, ascetic training, the pursuit of freedom from externalities of all kinds, rationalism, self-mastery, self-sufficiency, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. To reassess Foucault's analysis, I first examine the pitfalls of this picture, which rests on a largely Stoic retrojection. I then offer an alternative reading of the early Cynics, Diogenes first and foremost, that shows them in a different light. In the final part of the article, I return to Foucault to see how he fares once a different framework for understanding the Cynics is put in place. Foucault's effort to view Cynicism as a bridge to early Christian practices is only the most extreme and most questionable upshot of his final legacy.

The Postcure and the Lecture Well: A Lover's Discourse in Light of Barthes' Late Pedagogy

A reader's personal essay on and critical contribution to the retroactive understanding of A Lover's Discourse as a close formal and methodological predecessor to Roland Barthes's final three Collège de France lectures, especially the first of them, How to Live Together (1977). The essay tracks the ways that the “figures” of amorous discourse, Barthes's term for the stances and formulations that belong to and constitute the impassioned lover's subject position, anticipate the “traits” suggestive of the problem of living-together, as an individualist in a collective. It also marks the distinctions between the two projects, primarily in the latter the manifested objective of “désapprentisage,” or an unlearning, a “jamming” of the mission of the intellectual, which motivated his refusal thenceforth to repurpose any lecture as a book. Even as Barthes insisted on further differences between his two late subjects, a close “semioclasmic” analysis is brought to bear on a single “scene of language” that produced much that would be coded as figures and traits in the two studies, namely Barthes's letters written from the sanitoriums in which he spent his youth, letters issued at once lover to beloved and convalescent to outpatient in which he formulates both his estrangement in love and his flooded idiorrhythmy in communal living.

Tragedy and Juridical Forms

Foucault returned to the text of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos at various critical junctures in his thought. This article homes in on the place of that tragedy in the passage from the analytic of knowledge-power to the problematization of government by truth that took place around 1980, namely in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures. Particular attention is placed on the delineation of the political meaning of “alethurgy,” a neologism through which Foucault sought to thematize the significance of practices concerned with the manifestation of truth for the exercise of political power. By drawing on historical and anthropological studies of Greek “pre-law,” Foucault was able to explore the juridical dimensions of the liturgy of truth, especially in the transition from the Homeric centrality of the agon to the emergence of the forensic inquiry with its reliance on the extraction of (slave) testimony. The reading of tragedy here doubles as a nuanced critique of the juridical production of truth, one with important connections to Foucault’s contemporaneous political efforts to support practices of legal defense that rejected the demand that the crimi nalized subject reveal himself in an “auto-alethurgy.”

Qualifizierende Disqualifizierung und ihre Umkehrungen

Abstract In this paper, the term “qualifying disqualification” is introduced to express an intersection of several different types of power that (in a Foucauldian terminology) are differentiated as disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical formations. The paper concurs with a viewpoint that has emerged in much post-Foucauldian scholarship that these should not be understood as replacing each other in a historically emerging, linear succession. The resulting question is how to interpret instances of their convergence and intersection – for example, are they best understood as mutually consolidating (as seen in some understandings of domination)? The paper points to the friction caused by a simultaneity of heterogeneous formations of power given that they are understood to “subjectivise” differently. In turn, different understandings and conducts of “capacity” and “qualification” correspond to those differences in addition to different techniques of inclusion, exclusion, and exception. “Qualifying disqualification” is proposed as a terminology to express this friction. The fields in which its implications are explored include critical race studies (particularly the work of Saidiya Hartman), “capacity”-based rights arguments, and new interpretations of power in the work of Foucault, particularly as theorised in his Collège de France lectures.

Neoliberal governmentality, knowledge work, and thumos

Research has shown that the knowledge worker, the decisive driver of the knowledge economy, works increasingly longer hours. In fact, it would appear that instead of working to live, they live to work. There appears to be three reasons for this living-to-work development. First, the knowledge worker ‘has to’ on account of the pressure to become ever more efficient. Such pressure translates into internalized coercion in the case of the self-responsible knowledge worker. Secondly, working is constant, because the Internet and smart technologies and mobile devices have made it ‘possible’. It gives the worker the capacity and management omnipotent control. In the final instance, the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the time because s/he paradoxically ‘wants to’. It is a curious phenomenon, because this compulsive working is concomitant with a rise of a host of physical, emotional, and psychological disorders as well as the erosion of social bonds. The paradox is exacerbated by the fact that the knowledge worker does not derive any of the usual utilities or satisfactions associated with hard work. Elsewhere I have ascribed this apparent contradiction at the heart of the living-to-work phenomenon to the invisible thumotic satisfaction generated by knowledge work. In the present article, I argue that neoliberal governmentality has found a way to tether thumos directly to the profit incentive. I draw on Foucault’s 1978-1979 Collége de France lecture course in which he analysed neoliberal governmentality with specific emphasis on the work of the neoliberal theorist of human capital, Gary Becker.

Histoire de la sexualité ‘4’ (Les aveux de la chair): Aantekeninge vanuit die Nederlandse Foucault-navorsing

Histoire de la sexualité ‘4’ (Les aveux de la chair) : Notes from the Dutch Foucault-scholarship. This article presents an overview of several Dutch disseminations of Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) Histoire de la sexualité 4 ( Les aveux de la chair ), since its publication on 8 February 2018 at Gallimard (Paris) under editorship of Frédéric Gros. The exposé positions itself in terms of the most recent (December 2019) outputs of Foucault Cirkel Nederland/België (via the contributions of Steven Dorrestijn, Waldo Heugebaert and Michiel Leezenberg), as well as the recent critical studies of Machiel Karskens and Leezenberg. Several text-critical considerations regarding Les aveux de la chair are presented from these interpretations, in relation to the three standing volumes of Histoire de la sexualité ( La volonté de savoir , December 1976, L’usage des plaisirs , May 1984, and Le souci de soi , June 1984). Foucault’s exclusion of posthumous publications of his unfinished texts is amplified, since Les aveux de la chair (its sources and time of composition notwithstanding), is indeed a posthumous publication in the strict sense of the word: this aspect is, however, understated in the above receptions, albeit on justifiable grounds (in the sense that the text is regarded to be based fundamentally on Foucault’s 1981–1982 Collège de France lectures and was therefore effectively ‘published’ by June 1984). The recent Dutch reception is in conclusion described as exceptionally erudite and rigorous in its exegesis and reviews of Les aveux de la chair in the span of just two years. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This dissemination of Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité 4 ( Les aveux de la chair ) impacts various other disciplines, inter alia Studies in Antiquity, Medieval Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Patrology, Church History and Philosophy of Religion.

Commitment to Degree Zero: Barthes’ First Approaches to the Neutral

This essay links Barthes’ late development on the Neutral in his 1978 Collège de France lecture course to his early reflections on the ‘white’ or ‘neutral’ writing by looking at lesser-known materials: articles published in the sanatorial student journal Existences (1942–4), and in the newspaper Combat (1947–51), as well as how these pieces were integrated into his first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953). I show that Barthes’ first approaches to the ‘neutral’, under the spell of Sartre’s theory of committed literature, both ‘consents’ to the idea of the political responsibility of literature and rejects it, creating a third, crosswise notion of writing that prefigures the recalcitrant force of the Neutral. By exploring the complexities of these early pieces, I argue that some of the unsolved issues will reappear in the Collège de France lecture course, notably the figure of ‘aporia’, and I discuss the ethical implications of this ‘impossibility’.

Control after Cybernetics: Governmentality as Navigation by Homeostasis and Chaos

Control after Cybernetics:Governmentality as Navigation by Homeostasis and Chaos Andrew Culp (bio) Cybernetics is hardly new. A theory poised after World War II to unify the sciences, it promised to end the disciplinary divisions of American scientists. As Fred Turner has argued, however, its most enduring impact is to be found in two other places, the military-industrial complex's "freewheeling, interdisciplinary, and highly entrepreneurial style of work" and the "New Communalists" of the hippy counter-culture (2006, 4-5). These sources of success have made its legacy significant but ambiguous. The "cyber" prefix has proliferated to the point of meaninglessness. Its concept of information so diffuse as to become the commonsense understanding of media and technology. Moreover, a number of contemporary fields of study including artificial intelligence and non-Freudian psychology owe early support to researchers associated with cybernetics. Perhaps most curiously, a growing number of radicals interested in diagnosing the politics of the twentieth century also turned to cybernetics—not as a solution but as a model for the operations of liberal capitalist governmentality (Tiqqun 2010a). The significant but diffuse impact of cybernetics has long led researchers to use it as a window into deeper social trends. These inquiries are bookended by N. Katherine Hayles and Seb Franklin. In her How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles acts as a pioneer, setting the template for how the humanities should study the legacy of cybernetics—including a careful consideration of the post-World War II world that cybernetician Nortbert Wiener and his colleagues wanted to construct, as well as the unexpected troubling of the liberal notion of the subject it would jumpstart. Franklin's Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015), on the other hand, is the detailed work only possible after a field has matured, as the intellectual history of cybernetics has, confidently establishing how cybernetics played a part in establishing a whole "control episteme" linking "the principles of post-Fordist production, communicative and cognitive capitalism, and neoliberal economism through nested concepts of biology, psychology, markets, and society as self-regulating systems premised on data processing" (2015, 83). [End Page 117] Taking the significant commentary and criticism already written on cybernetics as a backdrop, I use this paper to mine a very specific archive and argue a very narrow claim. The primary materials I discuss are twofold: unpublished texts by Norbert Wiener available in his papers in the MIT archives, and Michel Foucault's recently-published Collège de France lectures. Both sets of materials are work-in-progress ideas never officially published during either's lifetime, which means that they should not be taken as definitive statements by the authors, but rather, elements of a virtual "archival unconscious." If, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would argue, the unconscious is a factory and not a theater, then the archive does not contain secrets of the soul (1983, 23-24). The archive instead contains the hidden abode of production of concepts-in-process broken down into separate "units of production" even more underdetermined than the fully-assembled concept, offering researchers the opportunity to forge even more unexpected connections between otherwise divergent works (24). In this case, elements from each archive point to a convergence between Wiener's social theories of cybernetics and Foucault's genealogy inquiry into the Classical Greek "ship of state." An additional two-part note on method. First, I approach this material not as a textualist but through a theory of the event. This method treats documents not as expressions of history, e.g. cultural products reflecting the historicity of a given moment, but as images that accompany the arrival of a new problem—a problem so "disharmonious" that it forces the reorganization of the faculties and provokes an experience of the world so novel it is as if one is seeing (hearing, feeling) it for the first time (qtd. in Zourabichvili 2012, 11). Perhaps understood as the radicalization of Gaston Bachelard's concept of the epistemological break by incorporating it into a whole philosophy of time, I draw this method from a formation of scholars who read the work of Gilles Deleuze not as constructing an ontology, but as the invention of problems that...

The Ethics of Resistance

The issues of sovereignty and territory can be discussed through ethics. Foucault's College de France lectures (1970-1984) cover such concepts as governmentality and biopolitics that influenced sovereign states, especially in regards to modernity of the eighteenth century. Foucault performs analyses of how discourses through power-knowledge form structures that define an 'Other' in terms of madness, reason and sexuality. This paper shall argue that these 'molar' questions of states are underpinned by a 'molecular' question of ethics, in which Foucault attempts to practice a new form of ethics, thereby subverting the sovereignty in the lecture hall in which he lectured in, and the scholars writing years later. Foucault argues that modernity has changed the nature of sovereignty and territory. Therefore, these questions are not only a question of ethics, but one bound up by the question of modernity and how it has transformed the eighteenth-century conception. The idea that Foucault uses is the definition of ethics, and thus he uses this as an analogy to describe how sovereignties and territories interact. In conclusion, Foucault views sovereignty and territory as philosophical spaces instead of physical or geographical ones, and that a new ethics of resistance is needed to combat neo-liberal bureaucracy.

The Banality of Cynicism: Foucault and the Limits of Authentic Parrhēsia

Foucault’s discussion of parrhēsia – frank speech – in his last two Collège de France lecture courses has led many to wonder if Foucault is pursuing parrhēsia as a contemporary strategy for resistance. This essay argues that ethical parrhēsia on either the Socratic or Cynical model would have little critical traction today because the current environment is plagued by problems analogous to those Plato thought plagued Athenian democracy. Specifically, authentication of parrhesiasts as a technique for authenticating their speech – the specific problem that the move to ethical parrhēsia in ancient Greece was designed to solve – becomes intractable in a social media environment, even with the added Cynical move to pure visibility. The problem is that contemporary society overproduces visibility as a condition for participation, which means that the context for authenticating parrhesiastic speech is one in which visibility is banalized and in which there is a surplus of speech which presents as parrhesiastic. The problem of authentication is thus a serious one, one which social media makes particularly intractable.

The Banality of Cynicism: Foucault and the Limits of Authentic Parrhēsia

Foucault’s discussion of parrhēsia – frank speech – in his last two Collège de France lecture courses has led many to wonder if Foucault is pursuing parrhēsia as a contemporary strategy for resistance. This essay argues that ethical parrhēsia on either the Socratic or Cynical model would have little critical traction today because the current environment is plagued by problems analogous to those Plato thought plagued Athenian democracy. Specifically, authentication of parrhesiasts as a technique for authenticating their speech – the specific problem that the move to ethical parrhēsia in ancient Greece was designed to solve – becomes intractable in a social media environment, even with the added Cynical move to pure visibility. The problem is that contemporary society overproduces visibility as a condition for participation, which means that the context for authenticating parrhesiastic speech is one in which visibility is banalized and in which there is a surplus of speech which presents as parrhesiastic. The problem of authentication is thus a serious one, one which social media makes particularly intractable.

The place of the Iranian Revolution in the history of truth: Foucault on neoliberalism, spirituality and enlightenment

In this article I want to argue that Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution was neither romantic fascist atavism nor does it presage any sort of transformation of his thought. Indeed, Foucault’s investigations of neoliberalism and subsequent work on spirituality, truth-telling and ethics are fully continuous with his critical genealogy of power. This is an important point, as we shall see, insofar as Foucault’s journalism on the Iranian Revolution occurs in the midst of his Collège de France lectures on biopolitics and governmentality. Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Revolution might indicate, albeit very indirectly, directions for thought that might resist neoliberalism. I will argue that Foucault was engaged in a very specific telling of the ‘history of truth’, emphasizing a partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling and transformation through struggle and ordeal, as opposed to the pacifying, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power. The ‘political spirituality’ Foucault witnessed on the streets of Tehran was a reactivation of this agonism, and– I will claim – a literal embodiment of what Foucault calls the ‘ethos of critique’.

Digital Security in the Expository Society: Spectacle, Surveillance, and Exhibition in the Neoliberal Age of Big Data

In 1827, Nicolaus Heinrich Julius, a professor at the University of Berlin, identified an important architectural mutation in nineteenth-century society that reflected a deep disruption in our technologies of knowledge and a profound transformation in relations of power across society: Antiquity, Julius observed, had discovered the architectural form of the spectacle; but modern times had operated a fundamental shift from spectacle to surveillance. Michel Foucault would elaborate this insight in his 1973 College de France lectures on The Punitive Society, where he would declare: “[T]his is precisely what happens in the modern era: the reversal of the spectacle into surveillance…. We have here a completely different structure where men who are placed next to each other on a flat surface will be surveilled from above by someone who will become a kind of universal eye.” What should we make of those archetypes today? Do they help us better understand our neoliberal digital condition of data collection, mining, and profiling by corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and the NSA? With neoliberalism and digitization — in the age of digital security — I suggest, we have gone beyond both spectacle and surveillance to a new form: one that is captured best by the idea of exposition or exhibition. Guy Debord spoke of “the society of the spectacle,” Foucault drew our attention instead to “the punitive society,” but it seems as if, today, we live in the expository society. This essay offers an architectural schema to better understand our contemporary distributions of power, one that focuses on the themed space of consumption. It then actualizes the metaphor by exploring one particular manifestation of a fully-digitized themed space, and asks how we have come to embrace and love these new forms of exhibition today.

Revisando Foucault: homo politicus e homo oeconomicus / terceiro capítulo de Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Nova Iorque: Zone Books / MIT Press, 2015)

Tradução do terceiro capítulo de Undoing the Demos, livro no qual Wendy Brown procura compreender como a emergência do homo oeconomincus subjugou outras gurações e interpelações do humano. Brown primeiro apresenta uma leitura crítica da teorização do homo oeconomicus que Foucault formulou em suas aulas sobre o neoliberalismo no Collège de France. A autora censura o lósofo francês por não ter atentado su cientemente para o homo politicus, lócus da soberania popular que consegue resistir a hegemonia do homo oeconomicus. Em seguida, re ete sobre a morfologia e posicionamento variáveis do homo oeconomicus e do homo politicus nos trabalhos de Adam Smith, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Bentham e J. S. Mill. Por último, analisa o gênero do homo oeconomicus contemporâneo e discute a disseminação do homo oeconomicus por meio da ordem de uma razão normativa e de uma racionalidade governante construída sobre essa ordem.

Tragedy, genealogy and theories of International Relations

This article interrogates the role of tragedy within the work of International Relations theorists including Michael Dillon, Mervyn Frost, Richard Ned Lebow and Hans Morgenthau. It argues that a tragic sensibility is a constituent part of much thinking about politics and the international, and asks what the reasons for this preoccupation might be. Noting that a number of diverse theoretical appeals to tragedy in International Relations invoke analytically similar understandings of tragic-political subjectivity, the article problematises these by building on Michel Foucault’s intermittent concern with the genre in his Collège de France lecture series. It proposes that a genealogical consideration of tragedy enables an alertness to its political associations and implications that asks questions of the way in which it is commonly conceived within the discipline. The article concludes by suggesting that International Relations theorists seeking to invoke tragedy must think carefully about the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political claims associated with such a move.

Confessing Preferences: What Foucault's Government of the Living Can Tell Us About Neoliberalism and Big Data

Foucault’s 1979-80 College de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, offer one way to situate the development of his later work, and in particular to understand his supposed turn away from biopolitics and governmentality to ethics and subjectivity. In this paper, I argue that (1) a unifying thread in most of Foucault’s work from the late 1970s onward is an increasing concern with the centrality of confession as a primary technology of power in the Christian West; and (2) Neoliberalism is deeply confessional, and therefore highly suspect from a Foucauldian standpoint. (3) These connections are particularly evident in a Foucauldian reading of data analytics (“big data”).

Revisiting Foucault's ‘Normative Confusions’: Surveying the Debate Since the Collège de France Lectures

AbstractAt once historical and philosophical, Michel Foucault used his genealogical method to expose the contingent conditions constituting the institutions, sciences and practices of the present. His analyses of the asylum, clinic, prison and sexuality revealed the historical, political and epistemological forces that make up certain types of subjects, sciences and sites of control. Although noting the originality of his work, a number of early critics questioned the normative framework of Foucault's method. Nancy Fraser argued that Foucault's genealogical method was ‘normatively confused’ as it implied political critique yet claimed to be value‐neutral. Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor also questioned the normative basis of Foucault's appeals to critique, arguing it was self‐refuting as Foucault left no room for the subject to escape power. Although a debate among these scholars was planned for the mid‐1980s, Foucault's death in 1984 meant this could not occur. A number of edited volumes sought to fabricate a debate, with defenders of Foucault excavating his published monographs to construct responses to his critics. While the monographs remain the central texts of Foucault's oeuvre, over the past decade his Collège de France lectures have been published and translated into English. This article offers a schematic survey of the influence of the Collège de France lectures in recasting different points in the debates over normativity, critique and resistance.