'A fabulous journey through thirty years of political and intellectual ferment... will reorient our reading of Foucault's major works' Didier Eribon The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offers the definitive collection of his articles, interviews and seminars from across thirty years of his extraordinary career. This first volume, Ethics, contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, as well as key writings and candid interviews on ethical matters: from the role of the intellectual and philosopher (...) in society to friendship, sexuality and the care of the self and others. Edited by Paul Rabinow Translated by Robert Hurley and Others. (shrink)

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, (...) and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.[…]Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.[…]In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies.Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization , The Birth of the Clinic , Discipline and Punish , and History of Sexuality , the first volume of a projected five-volume study. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy, Culture contains a rich selection of interviews and other writings by the late Michel Foucault. Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important way forward in service of a more successful dialogue is through greater integration of applied sciences (experimental and clinical) (...) with conceptual and theoretical approaches, informed by philosophical methods. By way of illustration, we explore six central themes: (i) the role of mutations in cancer; (ii) the clonal evolution of cancer cells; (iii) the relationship between cancer and multicellularity; (iv) the tumour microenvironment; (v) the immune system; and (vi) stem cells. In each case, we examine open questions in the scientific literature through a philosophical methodology and show the benefit of such a synergy for the scientific and medical understanding of cancer. (shrink)

L’éthique gouvernementale s’est développée comme réflexion critique au cœur des institutions gouvernementales. L’auteur entend situer l’éthique gouvernementale dans ses rapports avec l’éthique sociale et l’éthique fondamentale après avoir défini ces notions. Au cœur de cette articulation, l’éthique gouvernementale se veut la gardienne de l’animal politique pour le respect du plus grand bonheur de tous et de chacun.

There is one question that any potential reader who suspects that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) might be important for past, contemporary, and future philosophy inevitably raises: how should I read Whitehead? How can I make sense of this incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Accordingly, this monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set (...) of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead's entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that all commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of MysticismJean-Michel Heimonet (bio)Translated by Emoretta Yang (bio)1It is always relatively surprising to see how the great minds of an era manifest a kind of blindness when it comes to judging their peers, whether one is thinking of Balzac as the reader of Stendhal or Gide as the reader of Proust. This is undoubtedly because any truly forceful mind is also a mind (...) so obsessed and fascinated by its own way of apprehending the world that it can admit no other system of reference, no other range of values than its own. From this point of view, “A New Mysticism,” the article that Sartre devoted in some bad faith to Bataille’s Inner Experience when the book was published in 1943, should be accorded a prime place in the annals of great literary misunderstandings. There is no doubt that the brilliant philosopher of Being and Nothingness commits a strange blunder—strange, at least, for an intellectual of his stature—with respect to the conceptual sacrifice by which Bataille seeks to reveal and, at the same time, cast out modern man’s nostalgia for the sacred. But is “blunder” the right word? Because everything in the book proceeds not as though Sartre had not understood, or badly understood, but rather as though he had pretended not to understand the true stakes that in turn are revealed and consumed by this impossible book. The harshness of his critiques, the vehemence of tone—poorly tempered by a forced irony—instead prove that Inner Experience had hit home, at a level unusual for intellectual polemics. Struck to the core, Sartre reacted. This explains why “A New Mysticism” is a “boomerang” text, or a revealing one, in the photographic sense, being more valuable for what it tells us about its author than for what it teaches about the object being criticized. It is a text in which the reader has to read what is not said, “between the lines,” seeking the cause for the text’s often flagrantly unjust and indeed petty and truistic assertions, in its defense system, or, to borrow a term from the field of psychoanalysis which Sartre so abhorred, in the author’s “denials.” To put it clearly, is not the presence of the sacred, this unknowable and virulent sacred, which seeps out of every part of Bataille’s book, through the cracks and tears in its “form” and the paradoxical gaps in its “content,” also the presence that ceaselessly haunts, with its shadow and disturbing light, the thinking of the last great philosopher-monster?In his didactic concern to be convincing, Sartre divided his article into three parts, the first two dealing respectively with “form” and “content,” the third functioning as a verdict. Viewed fifty years later, such a division applied to a text as anti-academic as Inner Experience might seem comical. It points, however, to the seriousness being accorded in Sartre’s text to knowledge as organized within the academy and to the institutional function of the academy. From one end of the text to the other, Sartre acts as censor and judge, pitilessly pointing out, with the derisive scorn of the specialist, the philosophical naiveté of “Mr. Bataille,” particularly his rapid and unprofessional reading of Jaspers and Heidegger, which Bataille knew only in translation [see “NM” 194]. Sartre’s superior mandarin attitude explains why his first task had been to divide literary and philosophical history into two “frames of mind.” Although original, Bataille’s style and writing already had their place in a “tradition,” which is that line from Pascal to the surrealists, by way of Nietzsche, made up of writers anxious to express (themselves), writing down their [End Page 59] thoughts as they come, helter-skelter, in the exalted illumination of the moment, even before being located and fixed within the design of an argument. In modern writers, this tradition had become even more intensified. Disregarding the classical writerly values of restraint and modesty, the writer seeks to express not only his mind but also his body and its living reality, to establish with the reader a sort of “carnal promiscuity.” Thus we get Breton, who... (shrink)

Partant du problème du biopouvoir introduit à la fin du cours de 1976, Il faut défendre la société, Michel Foucault déplace soudain l'horizon du cours : il s'agit non plus de l'histoire des dispositifs de sécurité, qui passe provisoirement au second plan, mais de la généalogie de l'État moderne, à travers les procédures mises en œuvre, en Occident, pour assurer le « gouvernement des hommes ».

Derrida's work testifies to the problematic state of contemporary thought. Questioning Derrida offers new explorations into Derrida's contribution to philosophy. Presenting contributions from prominent philosophers worldwide, this book explores many aspects of Derrida's philosophical perspective. With contributors commenting on a particular topic or defending alternative viewpoints, this book examines the work of Plato, Hegel, Aristotle, Heidegger and also the philosophy of science. Focusing on 'problematology' - a conception of philosophy as questioning - the contributors explore this new way of 'doing' (...) philosophy. Including a concluding chapter from Derrida himself, this book presents Derrida in question and Derrida and his answers and opens new debate for readers across the fields of philosophy and literature, particularly those exploring the work of Derrida, issues in continental philosophy, and the theory of questioning. (shrink)

L'éthique n'a pas que des sources philosophiques ou religieuses-spirituelles. Elle peut aussi se nourrir des questionnements inscrits dans des oeuvres littéraires. La littérature est peut-être même le lieu privilégié où se donnent à voir et à comprendre doutes existentiels, dilemmes moraux, intuitions philosophiques. Si l'éthique consiste bien dans l'approfondissement de notre connaissance de la dimension morale de la conscience de soi, de la conscience du monde et de la conscience d'exister, elle trouvera dans l'oeuvre de l'écrivain un matériau riche et (...) complexe qui ouvrira la voie à son propre déploiement. C'est ce que propose cet ouvrage en puisant à l'oeuvre de cinq romanciers de la modernité classique allemande du début du vingtième siècle, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil et Stefan Zweig. (shrink)

Written with the suppression of the Tunisian students by their own government in view, Michel Foucault’s March 1968 ‘Linguistics and Social Sciences’ opens up a new horizon of historical inquiry and epitomises Foucault’s abiding interest in formulating new methods for studying the interaction of language and power. Translated into English for the first time by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Chantal Wright, this remarkable lecture constitutes Foucault’s most explicit and sustained statement of his project to revolutionise history by transposing the (...) analysis of logical relations into the history of knowledge. (shrink)

The concept of well-defined and mutually exclusive objective facts has no counterpart in the formalism of standard quantum mechanics. Bypassing decoherence theories, we then inquire into the conditions of use of this concept of objective fact, and find that it is grounded on the possibility of making reference to spatio-temporal continuants and permanent properties. Since these conditions are not fulfilled within the quantum paradigm, one must look for appropriate substitutes. Two such substitutes are discussed. The first one is phenomenal fact (...) , whose relevance to quantum physics is evaluated in the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology. The second substitute is intersubjective agreement, which can be disconnected from objectivity stricto sensu, as quantum mechanics seems to require. A study of intersubjectivity in terms of the pragmatics of language is undertaken. This study is applied to both Everett’s symbolism of memory brackets and Bohr’s transcendental remark that description of scientific experiments cannot dispense with ordinary language. (shrink)

Présentation de la spécificité de l'épistémologie en France, entre philosophie de la connaissance et philosophie des sciences, à travers un panorama de son histoire depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, de ses grands courants et de ses grandes figures : A. Comte, A. Cournot, C. Bernard, G. Bachelard, H. Poincaré, etc.