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Name/date: Major work: Keywords: Key figures: Aphorism: Political aspect: Associations: |
Michel
Foucault
(1926-1984) Discipline
and Punish (1975) Power,
sexuality, bio-politics,
bio-power, critique, actualite, eventalization
Althusser, Sartre, Bataille,
Deleuze 1968
uprising at Vincennes, founding member of GAP |
Foucault is mostly remembered for his theory of
power and his analysis of disciplinary society.
His studies cover a wide range of disciplines and
topics. They could be broadly divided into genealogical histories (of the
clinic, the human sciences, madness, the penal system, biopolitics
and sexuality) and methodological reflections (on structuralism, archaeology,
heterotopia, the writing of history). Foucault places a special emphasis on the
institutional expression of knowledge production. Critics of his work tend to
dismiss it as a form of neo-positivist conservativism, a post-modern attack on
Enlightenment Reason and an anarcho-identity politics of quietism.
Others have used his insights into the relation
between power and knowledge to develop sociological analyses of the workings of
state institutions in disciplinary societies.
The Anglo-American reception of Foucault’s work, especially
of his history of sexuality, has given strength to a form of identity politics
and fulfilled the need for a theoretical justification for postmodern
dandyism-like forms of cult of the
self.
In his latest essay called The Subject and Power, Foucault identifies three axes as being constitutive of the subject: knowledge, power and ethics. In his ouvre he claims to have followed them respectively with the main underlying concern for the ‘subject’. Are these issues addressed at the level of epistemology or ontology?
A historicised ontology of the present (which he opposes to an analytics of truth) redefines critique as the modernist attitude of self-reflexivity the content of which can only be resuscitated at the expense of the modernist ethos.
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‘Being
and Power: Heidegger and Foucault’. Article by H. L. Dreyfus |
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Resources |
Notes on
an ontology of the present |
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