Towards a Critique of Foucault
Author: Mike Gane
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1986-01-01
Total Pages: 179
ISBN-13: 9780710207647
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Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West
Author: Deborah Cook
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2018-11-27
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 178873081X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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?
Genealogy as Critique
Author: Colin Koopman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-02-12
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 0253006236
DOWNLOAD EBOOKViewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.
Critique and Power
Author: Michael Kelly
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 1994-06-06
Total Pages: 428
ISBN-13: 9780262610933
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe book juxtaposes key texts from Foucault and Habermas; it then adds a set of reactions and commentaries by theorists who have taken up the two alternative approaches to power and critique. The result is a guide for those seeking to understand and build on an unfinished debate between two of the 20th century's most important philosophers. Which paradigm of critique—Foucault's or Habermas's—is philosophically and practically superior, especially with regard to the nature and role of power in contemporary society? In shaping this collection, Michael Kelly has sought to address this question in relation to the ethical, political, and social theory of the past two decades. Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas had only just begun to come to terms with one another's work when Foucault died in 1984; they had even discussed the possibility of a formal debate on "Enlightenment" in the neutral arena of the United States. In the decade since, Habermas and his supporters have continued to respond to Foucault in various ways, but Foucault's followers have not shown as strong an inclination to keep up his side of the dialogue. For this reason an invaluable exchange on the nature and limits of philosophy in the present age has never achieved its full potential. In this anthology Michael Kelly recasts the debate in a way that will open it up for further development. The book starts by juxtaposing key texts from the two philosophers; it then adds a set of reactions and commentaries by theorists who have taken up the two alternative approaches to power and critique. (Two of these essays were written especially for this volume.) The result is a guide for those seeking to understand and build on this important but unfinished debate. Essays by: Michel Foucault. Jürgen Habermas. Axel Honneth. Nancy Fraser. Richard Bernstein. Thomas McCarthy. James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Gilles Deleuze. Jana Sawicki. Michael Kelly.
Foucault with Marx
Author: Jacques Bidet
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-15
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 1783605391
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith this timely commitment, Jacques Bidet unites the theories of arguably the world's two greatest emancipatory political thinkers. In this far-reaching and decisive text, Bidet examines Marxian and Foucauldian criticisms of capitalist modernity. For Marx, the intersection between capital and the market is crucial, while for Foucault, the organizational aspects of capital are what really matter. According to Marx, the ruling class is identified with property; with Foucault, it is the managers who hold power and knowledge that rule. Bidet identifies these two sides of capitalist modernity as 'market' and 'organization', showing that each leads to specific forms of social conflict; against exploitation and austerity, over wages and pensions on the one hand, and against forms of 'medical' and work-based discipline, control of bodies and prisons on the other. Bidet's impetus and clarity however serve a greater purpose: uniting two souls of critical social theory, in order to overcome what has become an age-long separation between the 'old left' and the 'new social movements'.
Foucault, Marxism and Critique
Author: Barry Smart
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-11
Total Pages: 155
ISBN-13: 1135174598
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this work, originally released in 1983, Barry Smart examines the relevance of Foucault's work for developing an understanding of those issues which lie beyond the limits of Marxist theory and analysis - issues such as 'individualising' forms of power, power-knowledge relations, the rise of 'the social', and the associated socialisation of politics. He argues that there exist clear and substantial differences between Foucault's genealogical analysis and that of Marxist theory. Smart thus presents Foucault's work as a new form of critical theory, whose object is a critical analysis of rationalities, and of how relations of power are rationalised.
Foucault and Literature
Author: Simon During
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-09-16
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 100015324X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe writings of the French historian, literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault have been of immense importance to developments in literary studies since the late 1970s. He, more than anyone, stands behind the new historicism' and cultural materialism' that currently dominate international literary studies. Simon During provides a detailed introduction to the whole body of Foucault's work, with a particular emphasis on his literary theory. His study takes in Foucault's early studies of transgressive' writing from Sade and Artaud to the French new novellists' of the 1960s, and his later concern with the genealogy of the author/intellectual, writing and theorizing within specific, historical mechanisms of social control and production. Foucault and Literature offers a critique both of Foucault and of the literary studies that have been influenced by him, and goes on to develop new methods of post-Foucauldian literary/cultural analysis.
Foucault and the Critique of Institutions
Author: John Caputo
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2010-11-01
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 0271041935
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFoucault and Neoliberalism
Author: Daniel Zamora
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2016-01-06
Total Pages: 155
ISBN-13: 1509501800
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMichel 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.
Foucault
Author: Lois McNay
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-04-23
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 0745667856
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
