Philosophy Commons^™

Taylor, Genealogy, History, Peter Hawes

Honors Theses

n this paper I compare two different genealogies of the idea of the ‘self’: Charles Taylor’s and Michel Foucault’s. I begin by arguing that Taylor’s focus on combating what he calls “subtraction stories” places him in the genealogical tradition with Foucault. I then engage with Foucault's genealogy of the self, which illuminates how the notion of the ‘self’ was constructed as a means of control, which leads him to say we should do away with trying to understand it outside of relations of power. This call for the rejection of the self, I suggest, presents a problem for us, who …

Pleasure In Atrocity, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

As Foucault says, genealogical work can be tedious and gray, but it is also pleasurable, even when the archives one delves into are filled with hatred, violence, and injustice. This article explores that pleasure, both in dangers and its possibilities, and in the process offers a partial genealogy of corporate personhood in U.S. legal history.

Painting (And Photography), Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Two of Foucault's signature essays on painting are especially well known: the analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas, and an essay on Rene Magritte that includes a striking account of how abstraction displaced representation in Western art. In addition, many of Foucault's texts are studded with acute descriptions of major painters from Breughel to Warhol; he gave lecture courses on quattrocento painting and Manet and published essays on several contemporary artists (Rebeyrolle, Fromanger, Michals). Since one of Foucault's major themes was the relation between visibility and discursivity, it is not surprising to find that painting is a favored site for …

Post-Liberation Feminism And Practices Of Freedom, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most feminist theorists over the last forty years have held that a basic tenet of feminism is that women as a group are oppressed. The concept of oppression has never had a very broad meaning in liberal discourse, however, and with the rise of neo-liberalism since 1980 it has even less currency in public debate. This article argues that, while we may still believe women are oppressed, for pragmatic purposes Michel Foucault’s concept of practices of freedom is a more effective way to characterize feminist theory and politics.

Queer Economies, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in …

Decapitating Power, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In “Society Must Be Defended” Foucault examines 17th century race war discourse not so much in order to understand 20th century racism or concepts of race but primarily because it constitutes an historical example of an attempt to think power without a head or king. This essay examines his account of race war discourse and the sources he used to construct it. It then takes issue with his claim that early race war discourse can be separated from 18th and 19th century racisms. Finally, it returns to the question of power and argues that the effect of the 1976 lecture …

Governmentality, Biopower, And The Debate Over Genetic Enhancement, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Although Foucault adamantly refused to make moral pronouncements or dictate moral principles or political programs to his readers, his work offers a number of tools and concepts that can help us develop our own ethical views and practices. One of these tools is genealogical analysis, and one of these concepts is “biopower.” Specifically, this essay seeks to demonstrate that Foucault’s concept of biopower and his genealogical method are valuable as we consider moral questions raised by genetic enhancement technologies. First, it examines contemporary debate over the development, marketing, and application of such technologies, suggesting that what passes for ethical deliberation …

The Technology Of Biopower: A Response To Todd May's "Foucault Now?", Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Because the occasion for his essay was the inaugural conference of the newly formed Foucault Society in New York City in the spring of 2005, Todd May takes as his point of departure the question of whether Foucault’s work is valuable to the sort of people who have come together to form that society: philosophers, artists, political activists, and in general to concerned citizens today, twenty years after Michel Foucault’s death. As might be expected given the Society’s raison d’être, May answers this question in the affirmative. But exactly how is Foucault’s work still relevant? It is his answer …

Michel Foucault : Power/Knowledge And Epistemological Prescriptions, Martin A. Hewett

Honors Theses

In an interview in 1977, seven years before his death, Michel Foucault made the following profound and controversial statement:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Within this sentence lies perhaps his most contested assertion: that knowledge is not some property of statements or beliefs that exist separately from relations of power within societies and discourses, but is constituted by and constitutive of them. Foucault's genealogies of sexuality and punishment are the most notable means by which he develops this claim, and their own potent explanatory powers leave us …

"This Is Not A Christ": Nietzsche, Foucault, And The Genealogy Of Vision, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There is nothing surprising about linking the names of Nietzsche and Foucault, something that Foucault himself frequently did. We know that the practices of archaeology and genealogy owe much to On the Genealogy of Morals; and in The Order of Things Foucault celebrates Nietzsche for being able to look beyond the epoch of "man and his doubles,'' thinking of the Obermensch as designating that which is beyond man, and for serving, along with Mallarme, as one of the prophets of the hegemony of language in the emerging episteme of the postmodern world. Here I want to focus on other affinities, …

The Patrilineal Discourse Of Enlightenment: Reading Foucault Reading Kant, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The English translation of Foucault's unpublished French manuscript addressing Kant's statement on enlightenment appeared in 1984, 200 years after the publication of Kant's essay. Foucault meant to entitle his essay as Kant did, but instead he gave it the interested and partially correspondent title What is Enlightenment? This is only a partial correspondence, because the full title of Kant's essay is Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? Foucault's title suppresses the fact that Kant's essay is not framed as a question, but as a definitive answer. This is present in the perfectiveness of the initial substantive; it is not an …