Parrhesia: Issue 3, 2007

The latest edition of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy is available online.

This issue includes essays by Alain Badiou with Tzuchien Tho, Clare Blackburne and Marguerite La Caze, just to name a few contributors, as well as reviews.

Michel Foucault’s last works tell us that parrhesia is the act of fearlessly speaking the truth.To engage in parrhesia is never, however, a ‘neutral’ act. Parrhesia simultaneously incorporates aesthetic and ethical dimensions. The parrhesiast is someone whose fidelity to the truth becomes the pivot of a process of self-transformation.

The journal endeavours to feature work by leading figures in contemporary thought, along with scholarly articles, which are double blind peer-reviewed.

Parrhesia is affiliated with the Departments of English and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and with the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

Crennan on Scepticism and Judicial Method

Late last month, Justice Susan Crennan of the High Court of Australia, gave this speech on scepticism and the judicial method. It contains an interesting (if possibly light-weight) discussion of the problem confronting theories of judicial method, in particular as they rely on the existence of objective truth, by the work of Foucault.

Baudrillard est mort II - The Art of Disappearing

‘The Art of Disappearing’, via Eurozine, contains excerpts from a discussion between Jean Baudrillard and an interviewer. Baudrillard, while discussing death and disappearance makes some interesting comments on Foucault’s death ...

Foucault: the Shirt

I will be making a short run of Foucault shirts as pictured.



This is a two colour image printed on a dark brown shirt, which will hopefully be raglan sleeved. The image is about 30cm in height.

If you would like a Foucault shirt, then let me know before next Monday. Tell me what size you are after and whether you want men's/lady's.

Also, I have been considering adding text either underneath the image or on the back. If you have any suggestions for a quote or the like, please let me know.

Review Notice – Foucault’s ‘History of Madness’

NDPR has published a review of the recent translation of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (Histoire de la Folie, previously translated in an abridged form as Madness and Civilization).

Foucault, footy and philosophy

Marc Abrahams
Tuesday May 2, 2006
The Guardian

Of all the football leagues for all the players in the world, the Australian Football League is the first to sponsor research that overtly applies the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Australian football is not soccer, nor is it American football. It is, fans and players like to point out, based on a different philosophy from anything else that answers to the name "football". Australian behaviourists Peter Kelly and Christopher Hickey elucidate one aspect of the game's philosophy in a study they call: Foucault Goes to the Footy: Professionalism, Performance, Prudentialism and Playstations in the Life of AFL Footballers.
Read the whole article here

Windschuttle - 'Foucault as Historian'

"In 1966, Michel Foucault attracted a great deal of academic attention by coining the phrase 'the death of man'. His obvious allusion to Nietzsche's well-known proclamation of the end of religion in the phrase 'the death of God' drew a considerable notoriety to himself and to the then burgeoning school of 'anti-humanism'. By 'the death of man', Foucault wrote in his book The Order of Things, he meant the end of the humanist concepts of man as a creature ruled by reason and of history as a phenomenon governed by the decisions of powerful individuals. Instead, history was a process without a subject. Not only did men not make their own history but the concept of 'man' itself, he argued, was passé.

Foucault shared this thesis with other anti-humanist thinkers of the time, including the Annales school of French historians, all of whom regarded history as being driven by forces far more powerful than those of any individual. Anti-humanism's main proposition was that the autonomy of the individual subject was an illusion. The humanist tradition had been wrong to assign the central roles of human affairs to the conscious mind and free will. Instead, some strands of anti-humanism claimed that human behaviour and thought were dominated by the unconscious, and hence humanists should abandon their assumption that purposive behaviour was consciously directed. Others, like the Annales school, held that the impersonal forces of geography and demography governed the destiny of mankind." - The Sydney Line (site of the Australian History/Culture Wars ...).

Continetial Philosophy has posted a critique of Windschuttle's interpretation.

Negri - 'A Contribution On Foucault'

"Foucault's work is a strange machine, it actually makes it impossible to think of history as other than present history. Probably, a great deal of what Foucault wrote (as Deleuze rightly underlined) should be rewritten today. What is astonishing - and concerning -, is that he never ceases to seek, he makes approximations, he deconstructs, he formulates hypotheses, he imagines, he makes analogies and tells fables, he launches concepts, withdraws them or modifies them… His is a thought of a formidable inventiveness. But this is not its essence: I believe that his method is fundamental, because it enables him to study and describe at the same time the movement from the past to the present and that from the present to the future. It is a method of transition where the present represents the center. Foucault is there, between the two, neither in the past where he does archaeology, nor in the future whose image he sometimes sketches - ““comme à la limite de la mer un visage sur le sable”” -. It is starting from the present that it is possible to distinguish other times. Foucault has often been reproached for the scientific legitimacy of his periodizations: we I can understand the historians, but at the same time, I would want to say that this is not a real problem: Foucault is where the questioning lies, which always originates in his own time.

Historical analysis, with Foucault, thus becomes an action, knowledge of the past becomes a genealogy, the future perspective becomes a dispositif. For those who come from the militant Marxism of the 1960s (but not from the dogmatic and caricatural traditions of the Second and Third International), Foucault's point of view is obviously perceived as absolutely legitimate: it corresponds to the perception of the event, of the struggles and of the joy of taking risks outside of all necessity and pre-established teleology. In Foucault's thought, Marxism is completely dismantled at the level of analysis of power relations and historical teleology, of the refusal of historicism or of a certain positivism; but at the same time, Marxism is also reinvented and remodelled on the perspective of the movements and struggles, i.e. actually on the reality of the subjects of these movements and struggles: because to know is to produce subjectivity." - From generation-online.

Foucault's 'Commentary of Kant's Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view'

"Would the archaeology of the text, if it were possible, allow us to see the birth of ‘homo criticus’, whose structure would essentially differ from the man who preceded him? The Critique, with its own propaedeutic character in philosophy, will play a constitutive role in the birth and becoming of concrete forms of human existence ... Since the 16th century juridical thought has primarily been concerned with the definition of the relation of the individual to the general form of the State, or of the individual to things within the abstract form of property. In the second half of the 18th century, the relationship of belonging amongst individuals themselves in the concrete and particular form of the couple, the family group, the household and the home come under question: how can civil society, which the bourgeoisie presupposes as its own foundation and justification, particularise itself in these restricted unities, which do not follow the feudal model, yet need not dissolve themselves at the moment of its permanent disappearance?" - Translated by Arianna Bove.

[This comes care of generation-online, which, in turn, comes care of Philosophy.com.]

On Foucault And Lego Theorists

"The Lego Michel Foucault comes with a Parisian library for younger children, or with the Lego San Francisco S/M Dungeon for older boys and girls" - Available at Theory.org. Also available are Judith Butler and Antony Giddens.

Foucault And The Ayatollah

An article, from the Boston Globe, on Michel Foucault and his time in Iran covering the Revolution.