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Description
In his hugely influential book Discipline and Punish, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison as a means of representing the transition from the early modern monarchy to the late modern capitalist state. In the former, power is visibly exerted, for instance by the destruction of the body of the criminal, while in the latter power becomes invisible and focuses on the mind of the subject, in order to identify, marginalize, and ‘treat’ those who are regarded as incapable of participating in, or unwilling to submit to, the disciplines of production. The Panopticon links the worlds of Bentham and Foucault scholars yet they are often at cross-purposes; with Bentham scholars lamenting the ways in which Foucault is perceived to have misunderstood panopticon, and Foucauldians apparently unaware of the complexities of Bentham’s thought. This book combines an appreciation of Bentham’s broader project with an engagement of Foucault’s insights on economic government to go beyond the received reading of panopticism as a dark disciplinary technology of power.

Scholars here offer new ways of understanding the Panopticon projects through a wide variety of topics including Bentham’s plural Panopticons and their elaboration of schemes of ‘panoptic Utopia’, the ‘inverted Panopticon’, ‘panoptic governance’, ‘political panopticism’ and ‘legal panopticism’. French studies on the Panopticon are groundbreaking and this book brings this research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It is essential reading, not only for those studying Bentham and Foucault, but also those with an interest in intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those studying contemporary surveillance and society.

Contents:
Foreword, Clare O’Farrell;
Introduction, Anne Brunon-Ernst;
Part I Historiography Reconsidered: from Discipline to Governmentality: Deconstructing Panopticism into the plural Panopticons, Anne Brunon-Ernst;
From Discipline and Punish to The Birth of Biopolitics, Christian Laval.
Part II Status of the Panopticon in Prison, Penal and Constitutional Reform: From ‘utopia’ to ‘programme’: building a Panopticon in Geneva, Emmanuelle de Champs;
Penal theory without the Panopticon, Jean-Pierre Cléro;
From the penitentiary to the political Panoptic paradigm, Guillaume Tusseau.
Part III Is There a Panoptic Society? Social Control in Bentham and Foucault: Transparency and politics: the reversed Panopticon as a response to abuse of power, Marie-Laure Leroy;
Social control and the legal Panoptic paradigm, Malik Bozzo-Rey;
Epilogue: the Panopticon as a contemporary icon?, Anne Brunon-Ernst and Guillaume Tusseau;
Bibliography; Index.

About the Editor:
Anne Brunon-Ernst is Senior Lecturer in Legal English at the University of Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas) and a member of the Centre Bentham, Paris.

Aperçu du texte

Le modèle contagionniste d’explication de certaines maladies physiologiques, mais aussi des mouvements collectifs et de la criminalité, a vu ses fondements théoriques consolidés au xixe siècle avec l’identification médicale de germes pathogènes d’une part, la répression du monde ouvrier, l’émergence de la science criminologique, et la psychologie des foules, d’autre part. Ce modèle a porté ses fruits bien au-delà de la seconde moitié du xixe siècle, mais les multiples usages du terme « contagion » extérieurs au champ lexical de la médecine – que l’on pense au paradigme épidémiologique de la philosophie cognitive ou à la virologie qui innerve les sciences de l’information et de la communication – sont aujourd’hui considérés comme métaphoriques (Cheyronnaud et al. éd., 1998). L’idée même de transmission du mal par contact n’est pourtant pas issue de la science médicale. Si le modèle contagionniste a sans doute pris force au xixe siècle et a trouvé dans les dispositifs biopolitiques du…

Publisher’s page

Description
Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to the early church Fathers. He did so not for anything like a return to God but rather because he found in those sources alternatives for re-imaging the self. And though Foucault never seriously entertained Christianity beyond theorizing its aesthetic style one might argue that Christian practices like confession or Eucharist share family resemblances to Foucaultian sensibilities. This book will explain how to do theology in light of Foucault, or more precisely, to read Foucault as if God mattered. Therefore, it will seek to articulate practices like confession, prayer, and so on as techniques for the self, situate “the church as politics” within present constellations of power, disclose theological knowledges as modes of critical intervention, or what Foucault called archaeology, and conceptualize Christian existence in time through mnemonic practices of genealogy.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements / Introduction / Part I: Power and Totality / 1. Power / 2. Capitalism, Totality, and Resistance / Part II: Self-Writing / 3. Biography and Biopolitics / 4. Writing the Self / 5. Self-Care: The Case of Animals / Postscript
Author(s)

Jonathan Tran,
Jonathan Tran is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. His book Theology and the Vietnam War: History, Memory, and Redemption is forthcoming in the Blackwell series “Challenges in Contemporary Theology”

Abstract
This paper argues that we may now speak of a ‘new Foucault’ with more to say to contemporary human geography than might at first be suspected. A number of recent publications – notably the collected and translated Collège de France lecture series – paint a picture of Foucault that arguably departs from presumptions of him as the chronicler-theorist of discursively constituted, totalising power. The paper has two objectives: first, to offer a synoptic introduction to the lecture series, spotlighting the geographical resonances; and secondly, to thread an interpretative line through these materials demonstrating Foucault’s concern for the vital problematics of lively bodies and unpredictable populations, always threatening to over-spill different forms of power (sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical, governmental, pastoral, psychiatric). An attempt is made to address Nigel Thrift’s non-representationalist critique of Foucault, and to propose that the gulf between Thrift and Foucault is not as great as the former may imply – a finding of value when identifying future possibilities for critical-geographical inquiry.

Keywords:
Michel Foucault; Collège de France lectures; power; bodies; populations; non-representational theory

Via Stuart Elden’s blog Progressive Geographies

Pdf of interview

Présentation
Présentation Cet entretien a eu lieu dans les premiers jours du mois de juillet 1977. Animateurs de la rubrique culturelle du journal quotidien Rouge, nous avions le désir de rendre compte d’un livre de Michel Foucault paru en 1976, La Volonté de savoir, premier volume de son Histoire de la sexualité, et plus encore de pouvoir questionner son auteur sur son rapport au marxisme et au gauchisme. Michel Foucault avait paru un temps très lié à la fraction maoïste de l’extrême gauche et n’avait en tout cas jamais eu de contacts directs avec les trotskystes de la Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, lesquels avaient plutôt tendance à le renvoyer hors du champ légitime de la pensée révolutionnaire. Or il était pour nous, surtout depuis Surveiller et punir, un « éveilleur » qui avait toute sa place dans un quotidien comme Rouge, conviction qui n’était pas partagée par les responsables du journal. La Volonté de savoir représentait en outre une mise en question particulièrement de la doxa freudo-marxiste qui avait cours dans la Ligue, tout en posant de redoutables défis à la psychanalyse lacanienne qui nous passionnait alors. Nous étant présentés à Michel Foucault comme des militants de la Ligue et journalistes à Rouge, rien d’étonnant à ce qu’il nous ait considéré comme des représentants de la « ligne » dominante, en accord avec les positions défendues par Jean-Marie Brohm dans la revue qu’il animait à cette époque, Quel corps?, alors que nous étions, pour des raisons d’ailleurs différentes, des « marginaux » à l’intérieur de cette organisation. Notre activité dans la rubrique culturelle était d’ailleurs pour nous un moyen (qui s’est avéré bien illusoire) de transformer le rapport de la Ligue avec la recherche intellectuelle et esthétique du moment. C’est à l’occasion de la réunion mémorable au théâtre Récamier, le 21 juin 1977 que j’ai rencontré Michel Foucault. Comme on sait, cette réunion, organisée à l’occasion de la visite de Brejnev en France, fut l’occasion d’entendre Léonid Plioutch et d’autres dissidents. On en a fait l’une des grandes manifestations de la « nouvelle philosophie », alors même que s’y étaient retrouvés des intellectuels et des militants de presque toute la gauche anti-stalinienne.

C’est d’ailleurs en tant que militant de la Ligue que je m’y trouvais. Profitant d’un intermède, j’ai dit à Michel Foucault notre souhait d’un entretien pour le journal, ce qu’il accepta sur le champ, m’invitant à lui téléphoner rapidement afin que nous puissions mettre sur pied cette rencontre. Ce que je fis quelques jours plus tard. C’est ainsi que nous eûmes la chance de passer un long après-midi d’été à échanger de la façon la plus libre sur tous les sujets qui nous intéressaient. Il se trouve que cet entretien ne reçut pas de la part de la rédaction du quotidien un accueil enthousiaste, on en comprendra les raisons en le lisant, et qu’il est resté en grande partie inédit jusqu’à ce jour. J’ai transmis une copie de l’enregistrement à François Ewald à la fin des années 1980, si je me souviens bien. Certains chercheurs ont pu l’écouter et l’étudier dans les archives Foucault déposées à l’IMEC à Caen et régies par le Centre Michel Foucault, ou en entendre des extraits sur France culture. Plus curieusement, le collectif théâtral Foucault 71 en distribue depuis des années une version fidèle, mais très abrégée, aux spectateurs de ses représentations. La transcription de l’entretien qui suit est presque complète, il en manque toutefois la conclusion.

Christian Laval, juin 2011

Via Variazioni foucaultiane

This is the seventh page from a forthcoming short graphic novel written by Lauren Kinney and drawn by by Matt MacFarland.

I will be posting additional panels on Foucault News as they are produced.

The authors will be looking for a publisher when the work is complete, so if you have any ideas on this front please don’t hesitate to contact them. Contact details for the authors can be found on Matt MacFarland’s website.

Link to page 1
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link to page 6

Abstract
The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo-Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the mid-1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein’s earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time.

Pdf of full paper

Extracts
theorists employing actor-network theory (ANT) have frequently come under attack by critical scholars for failing to adequately address or critique asymmetrical power relations, and thus acquiescing or even supporting the status quo. Critics of Michel Calloni, for example, contend that his investigations of economic assemblages, ‘[turn] out…to be an overture to a prospective alliance to be struck with neoclassical economists.’ Responding to similar criticisms, Bruno Latour asserts that many critical analyses of unequal power relations justify themselves and explain the relations they scrutinize by saying in effect, ‘Power relations are unequal because powerful actors exert their power over weaker actors.’ [...]

By contrast, Michel Foucault’s work is celebrated for its ability to stir and mobilize the ethical and emotional energies of those who engage with it, enabling researchers (among others) to critique social arrangements, and thus to attempt to modify them. We find this particularly interesting in light of Latour’s desire to rescue Foucault from what he calls his transatlantic destiny. Latour reminds us that: ‘No one was more precise in their analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations [than Foucault].’ Latour goes on to say, however, that ‘as soon as Foucault was translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had ”revealed” power relations behind every innocuous activity and that ‘even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.’

Publisher’s page

Description
Despite the West’s growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens any prospect for East–West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox News and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford.

In Islam Through Western Eyes, Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West’s grand totalizing narrative across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse’s corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century challenges: the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations.

Through the intellectual “archaeology” of Michel Foucault, Lyons reveals the workings of this discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political lives. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers—Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women—and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.

About the Author
Jonathan Lyons spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world. His research focuses on the shifting boundaries between East and West, and his publications include The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and (with Geneive Abdo) Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-first-Century Iran. He has a doctorate in sociology and lives in Washington, D.C.

Abstract
This article considers three different historical events from the point of view of their connections to aspects of the history of liberal political reason: the actions of the British in New South Wales in the early nineteenth century in their claim to sovereignty over Indigenous lands; the establishment of Aboriginal missions and subsequent removal of Aboriginal children in the early twentieth century; and the Northern Territory Emergency Response and suspension of the Australian Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act (1975) early in the twenty-first century. The aim is to point to gaps between present claims about liberalism and ‘actual existing liberalism’, review the basis for examining accounts of governance deploying ‘authoritarian liberalism’ and ‘racewar’ as central concepts, and call into question the Northern Territory campaign as an ‘exceptional’ event.