Posts tagged ‘Michel Foucault’
Guattari and transversality
Institutions, analysis and experimentation
by Andrew Goffey / RP 195 (Jan/Feb 2016) / Article
How, on the basis of what problems and concerns, in reference to what concepts, and in the light of what practices, can and should we understand the work of Félix Guattari? It is now fairly widely accepted that Guattari was not simply a junior partner in the two-headed exploration of capitalism and schizophrenia signed ‘Deleuze …
Submarine state
On secrets and leaks
by Daniel Nemenyi / RP 193 (Sept/Oct 2015) / Commentary
It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within… These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.
The monster and the police
Dexter to Hobbes
by Mark Neocleous / RP 185 (May/Jun 2014) / Article
On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former officer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, …
Police power, all the way to heaven
Cujus est solum and the no-fly zone
by Mark Neocleous / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article
What is a no-fly zone? Formally, it is a prohibition on flying in order to call a halt to hostilities in the region, usually enacted in aid of a group or groups which might otherwise suffer violence. When the Libyan civil war broke out in early 2011 one of the first demands made by several …
Smells like Gezi spirit
Democratic sensibilities and carnivalesque politics in Turkey
by Meyda Yeğenoğlu / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Commentary
A small protest in Istanbul, which began by aiming to protect the urban greenery, was rapidly turned into a full-blown nationwide resistance. The protests should be regarded as the most important outcry of the Turkish people since the 1980 coup, and herald a new period in the history of Turkey. But it would be …
Debt society: Greece and the future of post-democracy
Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Yannis Stavrakakis / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom
The passage from early to late modernity is generally associated with a gradual process of democratization, in both political and economic realms. Politically speaking, representative democracy has enjoyed an unprecedented global spread. In the West, especially, political and social rights seemed to have flourished until quite recently. Economically speaking, we have witnessed a ‘democratization of …
The walled city
Cannot one dream of a ‘computer hypothesis’?
by Finn Brunton / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012) / Article
This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video game’s expansion pack, extending and elaborating on the original’s materials. It is a story of the spatial history of escape routes, secret countries, …
Thought of the outside
Foucault contra Agamben
by Marie-Christine Leps / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012) / Article
It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, saying, doing, and thinking, than to what they see, …
Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011
‘Switch off all apparatuses’
by Gill Partington / RP 172 (Mar/Apr 2012) / Obituary
It is a mark of how far Kittler’s reputation had spread in the English-speaking world that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a figure who brought his own brand of poststructuralist thinking to bear on media technologies, but …
David Macey, 1949-2011
Biographer of the French intellectual Left
by Neil Belton and Peter Osborne / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / Obituary
David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer …
Also Sprach Zapata
Philosophy and resistance
by Howard Caygill / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / Article
Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw hisadversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. (Clausewitz, On War, 1832)
Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapatalives, also and for always in these lands. (Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five Hundred Years …
The Chilean winter
by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / Commentary
Since the beginning of 2011, student mobilizations in Chile have occupied the centre of public debate. On the one hand, most of the population, along with most of the political parties currently opposed to Sebastián Piñera’s government, agree on the crisis of secondary and higher education in a country that has been …
Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of discrepancies
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
by Bruno Bosteels / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the past few years in the wake of the …
Demonomics
Leibniz and the antinomy of modern power
by Kyle McGee / RP 168 (Jul/Aug 2011) / Article
The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power – the concept that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present – has revealed itself as yet another technology of …
The gender apparatus
Torture and national manhood in the US ‘war on terror’
by Bonnie Mann / RP 168 (Jul/Aug 2011) / Article
Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask …
History (Problem with)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
by Michele Riot-Sarcey / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely …
Theory (Madness of)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
by Francois Cusset / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain …
Subject (Re-/decentred)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
by Alain de Libera / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
1
Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, are currently associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated ‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational, Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over what Lyotard called ‘metanarratives’,1 are all parts of the process. Foucault’s rejection of the subject …
Risked democracy
Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeks
by Mathieu Potte-Bonneville / RP 166 (Mar/Apr 2011) / Article
The delay involved in the publication of lectures or seminars has strange effects: what comes late and in a different time to its own is research and words which were caught up – more so than the books – in the historical circumstances of their elaboration; and the text that is finally published, with the …
Neither theocracy nor secularism
Politics in Iran
by Ali Alizadeh / RP 158 (Nov/Dec 2009) / Commentary
On Saturday 13 June this year, hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Ministry of the Interior announced his landslide victory as Iran’s president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the religious head of state, prematurely and unconstitutionally embraced these results, Tehran and several other major cities became the stage for spontaneous, sporadic and widespread protests. …
Guattari and transversality
Institutions, analysis and experimentationby Andrew Goffey / RP 195 (Jan/Feb 2016) / Article
How, on the basis of what problems and concerns, in reference to what concepts, and in the light of what practices, can and should we understand the work of Félix Guattari? It is now fairly widely accepted that Guattari was not simply a junior partner in the two-headed exploration of capitalism and schizophrenia signed ‘Deleuze …
Submarine state
On secrets and leaksby Daniel Nemenyi / RP 193 (Sept/Oct 2015) / Commentary
It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within… These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.
The monster and the police
Dexter to Hobbesby Mark Neocleous / RP 185 (May/Jun 2014) / Article
On 25 February 2002, Rafael Perez, a former officer of the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit (CRASH), appeared in court accused of various crimes: covering up a bank robbery, shooting and framing an innocent citizen, stealing and selling cocaine from evidence lockers, being a member of the Los Angeles gang called the Bloods, …
Police power, all the way to heaven
Cujus est solum and the no-fly zoneby Mark Neocleous / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article
What is a no-fly zone? Formally, it is a prohibition on flying in order to call a halt to hostilities in the region, usually enacted in aid of a group or groups which might otherwise suffer violence. When the Libyan civil war broke out in early 2011 one of the first demands made by several …
Smells like Gezi spirit
Democratic sensibilities and carnivalesque politics in Turkeyby Meyda Yeğenoğlu / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Commentary
A small protest in Istanbul, which began by aiming to protect the urban greenery, was rapidly turned into a full-blown nationwide resistance. The protests should be regarded as the most important outcry of the Turkish people since the 1980 coup, and herald a new period in the history of Turkey. But it would be …
Debt society: Greece and the future of post-democracy
Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Leftby Yannis Stavrakakis / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Article, Dossier, The Greek Symptom
The passage from early to late modernity is generally associated with a gradual process of democratization, in both political and economic realms. Politically speaking, representative democracy has enjoyed an unprecedented global spread. In the West, especially, political and social rights seemed to have flourished until quite recently. Economically speaking, we have witnessed a ‘democratization of …
The walled city
Cannot one dream of a ‘computer hypothesis’?by Finn Brunton / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012) / Article
This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video game’s expansion pack, extending and elaborating on the original’s materials. It is a story of the spatial history of escape routes, secret countries, …
Thought of the outside
Foucault contra Agambenby Marie-Christine Leps / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012) / Article
It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, saying, doing, and thinking, than to what they see, …
Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011
‘Switch off all apparatuses’by Gill Partington / RP 172 (Mar/Apr 2012) / Obituary
It is a mark of how far Kittler’s reputation had spread in the English-speaking world that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a figure who brought his own brand of poststructuralist thinking to bear on media technologies, but …
David Macey, 1949-2011
Biographer of the French intellectual Leftby Neil Belton and Peter Osborne / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / Obituary
David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer …
Also Sprach Zapata
Philosophy and resistanceby Howard Caygill / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / Article
Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw hisadversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. (Clausewitz, On War, 1832)
Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapatalives, also and for always in these lands. (Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five Hundred Years …
The Chilean winter
by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) / CommentarySince the beginning of 2011, student mobilizations in Chile have occupied the centre of public debate. On the one hand, most of the population, along with most of the political parties currently opposed to Sebastián Piñera’s government, agree on the crisis of secondary and higher education in a country that has been …
Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of discrepancies
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversyby Bruno Bosteels / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the past few years in the wake of the …
Demonomics
Leibniz and the antinomy of modern powerby Kyle McGee / RP 168 (Jul/Aug 2011) / Article
The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power – the concept that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present – has revealed itself as yet another technology of …
The gender apparatus
Torture and national manhood in the US ‘war on terror’by Bonnie Mann / RP 168 (Jul/Aug 2011) / Article
Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask …
History (Problem with)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)by Michele Riot-Sarcey / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
If the philosopher’s role is to forge concepts, the historian’s function is to provide proof of their pertinence. However, this presupposes that the historian uses the concept correctly, taking into consideration the conditions that formed it. A truly transdisciplinary approach makes this possible, thanks to its rigorous method, whereas an interdisciplinary approach is merely …
Theory (Madness of)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)by Francois Cusset / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain …
Subject (Re-/decentred)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)by Alain de Libera / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
1
Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, are currently associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated ‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational, Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over what Lyotard called ‘metanarratives’,1 are all parts of the process. Foucault’s rejection of the subject …
Risked democracy
Foucault, Castoriadis and the Greeksby Mathieu Potte-Bonneville / RP 166 (Mar/Apr 2011) / Article
The delay involved in the publication of lectures or seminars has strange effects: what comes late and in a different time to its own is research and words which were caught up – more so than the books – in the historical circumstances of their elaboration; and the text that is finally published, with the …
Neither theocracy nor secularism
Politics in Iranby Ali Alizadeh / RP 158 (Nov/Dec 2009) / Commentary
On Saturday 13 June this year, hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Ministry of the Interior announced his landslide victory as Iran’s president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the religious head of state, prematurely and unconstitutionally embraced these results, Tehran and several other major cities became the stage for spontaneous, sporadic and widespread protests. …