By Veena Das (Footnotes need to be properly linked) In Michel Serres’s moving tribute to Foucault, as he comments on Histoire de la folie, madness appears as the geometry of the incommunicable. “Very profoundly, then, the lessons of this book take up those of Nietzsche,… Continue Reading
Pierre Rosanvallon is the foremost theorist and historian of democracy in France. His most recent book, Le Bon Gouvernement (Éditions du Seuil, 2015), examines the history of democratic executive power and proposes a renewal of contemporary government. Le Bon Gouvernement concludes a four-book… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt, Daniele Lorenzini, and Jesús R. Velasco Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux. Cours au Collège de France. 1974-1975, Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, eds. (Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1999). Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, Graham Burchell trans., Arnold… Continue Reading
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the Delhi School of Economics for more than thirty years and also held a joint appointment at the… Continue Reading
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the Delhi School of Economics for more than thirty years and also held a joint appointment at the… Continue Reading
Linda Zerilli, Alondra Nelson, and Anna Lvovsky discuss Foucault’s fourth lecture series at the Collège de France, Psychiatric Power (1973-1974). Please watch the video here or here. Please also read the introductory post presenting the lectures by Bernard Harcourt, the posts by Linda Zerilli, Alondra Nelson, and Anna Lvovsky, and… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt The presentations by Linda Zerilli, Alondra Nelson, and Anna Lvovsky at Foucault 4/13 raised challenging questions concerning the political dimensions of Psychiatric Power. Linda Zerilli started us off by questioning whether the disempowered hysteric patient—predominantly middle-class women trapped in coercive family relations—could… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt [This article draws on a longer essay titled “Reading Penal Theories and Institutions”] “Women, prisoners, conscripts, asylum patients, homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle of resistance against the particular forms of power, of constraint, of control… Continue Reading
Etienne Balibar and François Ewald discuss Foucault’s second annual lectures at the Collège de France, Penal Theories and Institutions (1971-1972). Please join us and watch the recording. Please also read the introductory posts presenting the lectures by Velasco and Harcourt, the posts by Etienne Balibar and François Ewald,… Continue Reading
By Jesús R. Velasco Étienne Balibar and François Ewald have both delved into the complex relationship that Foucault entertained with Marxism, with Althusser, and with the maos. The lectures in Foucault’s Penal Theories and Institutions (PT&I) are a complex labyrinth of tens of passageways that, as… Continue Reading