Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores how certain epistemic constraints have affected Foucault's genealogy as a critical tool for politics. Specifically, his analysis contributes to our era's focus on the subject and its fear of mass conformity. These underlying ideas obscured Foucault's more important and clear sighted contributions to political theory.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There has been significant recent scholarly interest in reading the Collège de Sociologie of the French inter-war years (and especially its leading figure, Georges Bataille) as an important intellectual point of connection between the Durkheimian school of the pre-WWI period and the post-‘68 generation of poststructuralists (see e.g., Gane 1991a and b; Richman 2002). This work, though useful and often ground-breaking, largely concentrates itself in a history of ideas tradition that is centered on texts. I propose that a full understanding of the intellectual genealogy necessitates an interpretive framework more attentive to the sociology of knowledge; that is, a framework sensitive to the actual institutional and other social sites in which the melding of Durkheimian and other (especially Nietzschean) ideas could take place in such a way as to clearly inform subsequent generations of thinkers with a kind of intellectual Zeitgeist that has both textual and lived, experiential, social elements. The journal Critique (which was founded by Bataille in 1946 and later edited by Jean Piel, brother-in-law to both Bataille and Jacques Lacan) serves as one such institutional (if in many ways ‘outsider’) site. Here, and in a few other sites I examine, the conditions were present for the creation of interaction rituals and the production of a kind of collective memory that linked thinkers of Bataille’s generation influenced by Durkheimian thought via Marcel Mauss to thinkers of the post-’68 generation (e.g., Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) who would absorb these Durkheimian/Maussian elements often without explicitly realizing it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: According to Foucault, power in modern society is diffuse and pervasive, and works through the agency of free subjects. Its imperatives are internalized by individuals who become tied to a particular identity and govern their own behavior accordingly (i.e., discipline is supplemented by self-discipline). This process can be understood better through the prism of some recent insights from neuroscience. From this point of view, the whole process of norm internalization can be seen as a form of “neuropolitics” through which social and power relations become ingrained not just in human bodies and minds, but also in human brains.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: For a long time the works of Habermas and Foucault have
been considered to be almost dichotomous, harbouring irreconcilable
differences. The one working in the Hegelmarxist tradition of the
Frankfurt School’s Critical Theorists, whereas the other, being a
Poststructuralist endowed with the typical scepticism with regard to
modernity, above all cites the notorious Nietzsche as his main
influence. The objective of the paper is to challenge this neat
dichotomy by placing both, Habermas and Foucault in the tradition of
Critical Theory as it is exemplified in the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
being the seminal work of Frankfurt School thinkers Horkheimer and
Adorno. It will be argued that both, Habermas and Foucault share
certain premises with the critical approach of Horkheimer/Adorno.
However, more importantly, the critical enterprises of Habermas and
Foucault exhibit certain new features that can be interpreted as an
attempt – though not a conscious one in Foucault’s case – to overcome
the shortcomings of the critical project of Horkheimer/Adorno. While
Habermas tries to avoid the flaws of their allegedly self-defeating
critique by introducing the concept of communicative rationality that
is to serve as the foundation of critique, Foucault chooses another way
out of the dilemma of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the view
presented in this paper, he resorts to a Nietzschean Genealogical
approach that rests on a hybrid mixture of fact and fiction making
heavy use of rhetorical devices. Most importantly, this approach avoids
the problem of a self-defeating critique by radically reducing the
knowledge and truth claims it raises, depicting itself as being just
one interpretation among others. Thus, it will be argued, Habermas and
Foucault modify the critique of Horkheimer/Adorno in differing aspects,
the effect of both being ways to circumvent the problem of performative
contradiction. Habermas sticks to the tradition of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment insofar as he continues to raise strong truth claims
while abandoning the all-encompassing, totalising critique of the
latter, explicitly exempting certain phenomena from the critique to use
them as a foundation for his critical task. Foucault, conversely,
sticks to the notion of an all-encompassing critique while reducing the
respective knowledge claims, thereby escaping from performative
contradiction. Therefore, it will be argued, both Habermas and Foucault
can be described as heirs to the early Frankfurt School. Their critical
enterprises share some of the latter’s premises while at the same time
modifying certain elements to provide differing ways out of the dilemma
of the self-defeating critique of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Over the last century some
philosophers and political thinkers have begun to question the
subject-centered conceptions of human beings and political existence
that has characterized modern approaches to these issues. Emphasizing
difference and ‘otherness,’ some of the challenges to subjective
thinking appear to be hostile to any positive conception of political
community. While thinkers who advocate challenges to subject-centered
philosophy disagree with one another on many issues, they are often
similarly criticized by many as irresponsible to important aspects of
political life. Included within this criticism it is frequently argued
that ‘post-subjective’ political thinking does not adequately describe positive
identity within a community, nor that it acceptably justifies
individual or group accountability within this community. This does not
mean that ‘postmodern’ thinkers have thought themselves as abandoning
politics. This paper examines some political thinking ‘beyond
subjectivity,’ specifically focusing on Michel Foucault’s thinking
about political identity, and on accountability in a ‘radical
democracy’ in the writings of Chantal Mouffe. This examination should
reveal some of the requirements and expectations of ‘identity’ and
‘accountability’ in political life – specifically concerned with how
‘decentering’ the subject responds to, or redefines, these
expectations. The paper is primarily concerned to provide an evaluation
of these two ‘post-subjective’ accounts of political life – where these
accounts might explicitly or implicitly suggest a new source for
identity and accountability, and when we might find them politically
unacceptable where they seemingly lack such consideration.