Modernity and Crisis in the Thought of Michel Foucault
Modernity and Crisis in the Thought of Michel Foucault

Author: Matan Oram

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1317284526

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Few studies of Foucault have examined his thought from a sustained interdisciplinary perspective. Through the interpretative prism of the concept of the ‘Totality of Reason’, this book suggests an original analytical reading of Foucault's thought. This book addresses Foucault’s characterizations of the Enlightenment, asking whether the developmental history of the modern conception of knowledge – from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment – warrants the conclusion he draws. From the perspective of a critical evaluation of Foucault's thesis on ‘the crisis of modernity’, the book examines whether Foucault, the philosophical and social critic, truly belongs to those intellectual trends known as a ‘deconstruction’ and ‘post-modernism’ that advocate a wholesale rejection of the project of modernity, demonstrating how a classification of this kind contributes to an impoverishment of our understanding of Foucault's thought. This book will attract the attention of readers interested in Foucault, and what is broadly perceived to be the ‘crisis of modernity’. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students of sociology, political philosophy and political science, psychology, philosophy, interdisciplinary studies and cultural studies.

Foucault
Foucault

Author: Lois McNay

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0745667856

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This work provides an introduction to the work of Michel Foucault. It offers an assessment of all of Foucault's work, including his final writings on governmentality and the self. McNay argues that the later work initiates an important shift in his intellectual concerns which alters any retrospective reading of his writings as a whole. Throughout, McNay is concerned to assess the normative and political implications of Foucault's social criticism. She goes beyond the level of many commentators to look at the values from which Foucault's work springs and reveals the implicit assumptions underlying his social critique. The author also provides an account and assessment of recent literature on Foucault, including that of Habermas and Taylor. She discusses Foucault's position in the modernity/postmodernity debate, his own ambivalence to Enlightenment thought and his place in recent developments in feminist and cultural theory.

The Genesis of Modernity
The Genesis of Modernity

Author: Árpád Szakolczai

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0415253055

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This book reconstructs the ideas of three of the most important theorists of the Twentieth Century, Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Eric Voegelin. Their ideas on the distant roots and sources of modernity are discussed.

Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West
Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West

Author: Deborah Cook

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 178873081X

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The alliance of critical theory between Frankfurt and Paris Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period. To assess these resources, it examines the work of two of the twentieth century's more prominent social theorists: Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault. Although Adorno was situated squarely in the Marxist tradition that Foucault would occasionally challenge, Deborah Cook demonstrates that their critiques of our current predicament are complementary in important respects. Among other things, these critiques converge in their focus on the historical conditions-economic in Adorno and political in Foucault-that gave rise to the racist and authoritarian tendencies that continue to blight the West. Cook also shows that, when Adorno and Foucault plumb the economic and political forces that have shaped our identities, they offer remarkably similar answers to the perennial question: What is to be done?

Foucault and Neoliberalism
Foucault and Neoliberalism

Author: Daniel Zamora

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-01-06

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1509501800

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Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

State of Crisis
State of Crisis

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-07-17

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0745685293

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Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.

A Foucault for the 21st Century
A Foucault for the 21st Century

Author: Sam Binkley

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-01-23

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1443804665

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How relevant is Foucault’s social thought to the world we inhabit today? This collection comprises several essays considering the contemporary relevance of the work of Michel Foucault. While Foucault is best remembered for his historical inquiries into the origins of “disciplinary” society in a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it seems that today, under the conditions of global modernity, the relevance of his ideas are called into question. With the increasing ubiquity of markets, the break up of centralized states and the dissolution of national boundaries, together with new scientific and political discourses on biological life, the world of today seems far removed from the bounded, disciplinary societies Foucault described in his most famous books. Yet in recent years, it has become apparent that Foucault’s thoughts on modern society have not been exhausted, and, indeed, that much remains to be explored. Within this volume, novel interpretations and thematic developments of key Foucauldian concepts are presented in the works of 24 authors. Prominent among them are new forms of neoliberal economic conduct framed by distinct governmentalities; new critical concepts of biological life reflected in Foucault’s analysis of biopower, and new theoretical treatments of the effects of subjectivation. Moreover, included among these theoretical departures are empirical studies of contemporary formations of religion and spiritual practice, consumerism, race and racism, the discourse of genetics and the life sciences, surveillance and incarceration, and new social movements. Drawn from a conference held at the University of Massachusetts, Boston bearing the same title, A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governnentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium both expands our understanding of Foucault’s central theoretical legacy, and applies his ideas to a range of contemporary empirical phenomena.

Foucault and the Modern International
Foucault and the Modern International

Author: Philippe Bonditti

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1137561580

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This book addresses the possibilities of analyzing the modern international through the thought of Michel Foucault. The broad range of authors brought together in this volume question four of the most self-evident characteristics of our contemporary world-'international', 'neoliberal', 'biopolitical' and 'global'- and thus fill significant gaps in both international and Foucault studies. The chapters discuss what a Foucauldian perspective does or does not offer for understanding international phenomena while also questioning many appropriations of Foucault's work. This transdisciplinary volume will serve as a reference for both scholars and students of international relations, international political sociology, international political economy, political theory/philosophy and critical theory more generally.

Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish

Author: Michel Foucault

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-04-18

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0307819299

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A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

Crisis and Critique
Crisis and Critique

Author: Rodrigo Cordero

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-15

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1317622502

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Fragility is a condition that inhabits the foundations of social life. It remains mostly unnoticed until something breaks and dislocates the sense of completion. In such moments of rupture, the social world reveals the stuff of which it is made and how it actually works; it opens itself to question. Based on this claim, this book reconsiders the place of the notions of crisis and critique as fundamental means to grasp the fragile condition of the social and challenges the normalization and dissolution of these ‘concepts’ in contemporary social theory. It draws on fundamental insights from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as to recover the importance of the critique of concepts for the critique of society, and engages in a series of studies on the work of Habermas, Koselleck, Arendt, and Foucault as to consider anew the relationship of crisis and critique as immanent to the political and economic forms of modernity. Moving from crisis to critique and from critique to crisis, the book shows that fragility is a price to be paid for accepting the relational constitution of the social world as a human domain without secure foundations, but also for wishing to break free from all attempts at giving closure to social life as an identity without question. This book will engage students of sociology, political theory and social philosophy alike.