Download or read book Saint Foucault written by David M. Halperin and published by Oxford Paperbacks. This book was released on 1995 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there is scarcely more than a mention of homosexuality in his scholarly writings, Michel Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, has become a source of inspiration to a generation of gay activists. This book provides a defence of Foucault's work.
Download or read book Saint Foucault written by David M. Halperin and published by . This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller?David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory."Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS.
Download or read book Confessions of the Flesh written by Michel Foucault and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brought to light at last--the fourth volume in the famous History of Sexuality series by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, his final work, which he had completed, but not yet published, upon his death in 1984 Michel Foucault's philosophy has made an indelible impact on Western thought, and his History of Sexuality series--which traces cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it--is one of his most influential works. At the time of his death in 1984, he had completed--but not yet edited or published--the fourth volume, which posits that the origins of totalitarian self-surveillance began with the Christian practice of confession. This is a text both sweeping and deeply personal, as Foucault--born into a French Catholic family--undoubtedly wrestled with these issues himself. Since he had stipulated "Pas de publication posthume," this text has long been secreted away. However, the sale of the Foucault archives in 2013--which made this text available to scholars--prompted his nephew to seek wider publication. This attitude was shared by Foucault's longtime partner, Daniel Defert, who said, "What is this privilege given to Ph.D students? I have adopted this principle: It is either everybody or nobody.""--
Download or read book Sexuality written by Michel Foucault and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality—the first volume of which was published in 1976—exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault’s interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault’s thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault’s lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of “perversions”—morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault’s theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate “natural” sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault’s transformative thinking on sexuality.
Download or read book The Passion of Michel Foucault written by James Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive new research and a bold interpretation of the man and his texts, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.
Download or read book Foucault s Pendulum written by Umberto Eco and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth
Download or read book Foucault and Augustine written by J. Joyce Schuld and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Augustine as a conversation partner, this text explores the value of Michel Foucault's controversial writings for theologians, ethicists, philosophers and cultural theorists. It demonstrates the possibilities and difficulties of applying Foucault's social criticisms within Christian contexts.
Download or read book Foucault s Futures written by Penelope Deutscher and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.
Download or read book Foucault and the Art of Ethics written by Timothy O'Leary and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive assessment of Michel Foucault's later work responds to the contemporary crisis in ethics, focusing on the way Foucault attempts to bring together the two seemingly-incompatible spheres of ethics and aesthetics through his reassessment of the Greek tradition.
Download or read book Foucault and Theology written by Jonathan Tran and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Identification Papers written by Diana Fuss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of identification, especially in the discourse of feminist theory, has come sharply and dramatically into focus with the recent interest in such topics as queer performativity, cross-dressing, and racial passing. Identification Papers is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics. Identification Papers situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identification in Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one. Identification Papers closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political. Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- Identification Papers will be a necessary starting point in any future theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.
Download or read book A Face Drawn in Sand written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leadership, innovation, diversity, inclusiveness, sharing, accountability—such is the resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive incitements undergird such benefits? Although there are innumerable discussions of Michel Foucault in the English-speaking academy, seldom is his work used systematically to unravel the dead ends and potentialities of humanistic inquiry as embedded in these simple but dynamic questions. Rey Chow takes up this challenge by articulating the plight of the humanities in the age of global finance and neoliberal mores through a resharpened focus on Foucault’s concept “outside.” This general discussion is followed by a series of micro-arguments about several loosely linked topics: the biopolitics of literary study, visibilities and invisibilities, race and racism, sound/voice/listening, and confession and self-entrepreneurship. Against what she polemicizes as the moralistic-entrepreneurial norming of knowledge production, Chow foregrounds a nonutilitarian approach, stressing anew the intellectual and pedagogical objectives fundamental to humanistic inquiry: How to process, analyze, and evaluate different types of texts across languages and disciplines; how to form and sustain viable arguments; how to rethink familiar problems through less known as well as very well-known sources, figures, and methods. Above all, she asks in an abidingly humanistic spirit, how not to know all the answers before the questions have been posed.
Download or read book Reading Foucault for Social Work written by Adrienne S. Chambon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book-length introduction to the work of Michel Foucault in social work. Each chapter of the text emphasizes different notions from Foucault's writings. Contributions include conceptual, philosophical, and methodological considerations, and discussions from various fields and levels of practice.
Download or read book Foucault s Askesis written by Edward F. McGushin and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis. Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askēsis.
Download or read book Foucault and the Politics of Rights written by Ben Golder and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on Michel Foucault's late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault simply revise his former positions and endorse a liberal politics of rights? Ben Golder proposes an answer to this puzzle, which is that Foucault approaches rights in a spirit of creative and critical appropriation. He uses rights strategically for a range of political purposes that cannot be reduced to a simple endorsement of political liberalism. Golder develops this interpretation of Foucault's work while analyzing its shortcomings and relating it to the approaches taken by a series of current thinkers also engaged in considering the place of rights in contemporary politics, including Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Jacques Rancière.
Download or read book Foucault in California a True Story Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death written by Simeon Wade and published by Heyday Books. This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking "nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade-ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. Led by Wade and Wade's partner Michael Stoneman, Foucault experimented with psychotropic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth. Foucault in California is Wade's firsthand account of that long weekend. Felicitous and often humorous prose vaults readers headlong into the erudite and subversive circles of the Claremont intelligentsia: parties in Wade's bungalow, intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest (whose denizens call Foucault "Country Joe"); and, of course, the fabled synesthetic acid trip in Death Valley, set to the strains of Bach and Stockhausen. Part search for higher consciousness, part bacchanal, this book chronicles a young man's burgeoning friendship with one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.
Download or read book Foucault at the Movies written by Patrice Maniglier and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault’s work on film, although not extensive, compellingly illustrates the power of bringing his unique vision to bear on the subject and offers valuable insights into other aspects of his thought. Foucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault’s commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work. Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan situate Foucault’s writings on film in the context of the rest of his work as well as within a broad historical and philosophical framework. They detail how Foucault’s work directly or indirectly inspired both film critics and directors in surprising ways and discuss his ideas in relation to significant movements within film theory and practice. The book includes film reviews and discussions by Foucault as well as his interviews with the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and other journals. Also included are his dialogues with the noted French feminist writer Hélène Cixous and film directors Werner Schroeter and René Féret. Throughout, Foucault and those he is in conversation with reflect on the relationship of film to history, the body, power and politics, knowledge, sexuality, aesthetics, and institutions of internment. Foucault at the Movies makes all of Foucault’s writings on film available to an English-speaking audience in one volume and offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.
