A Foucault for the 21st Century

A Foucault for the 21st Century
Author: Sam Binkley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2009-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 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.

After Foucault

After Foucault
Author: Lisa Downing
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2018-06-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108653278

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The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, to contextualize, and to contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault's work, or a series of interventions aimed specifically at experts, After Foucault explores his critical afterlives, situates his work in current debates, and explains his intellectual legacy. As well as offering up-to-date assessments of Foucault's ongoing use in fields such as literary studies, sexuality studies, and history, chapters explore his relevance for urgent and emerging disciplines and debates, including ecology, animal studies, and the analysis of neoliberalism. Written in an accessible style, by leading experts, After Foucault demonstrates a commitment to taking seriously the work of a key twentieth-century thinker for contemporary academic disciplines, political phenomena, and cultural life.

The Self as Enterprise

The Self as Enterprise
Author: Peter Kelly
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317016424

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Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.

Foucault on the Arts and Letters

Foucault on the Arts and Letters
Author: Catherine M. Soussloff
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1783485752

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A collection of new essays addressing Foucault’s thought and its impact on thinking about the visual arts, literature and aesthetic discourse in the 21st century.

Care or Control of the Self? Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and the Subject in the 21st Century

Care or Control of the Self? Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and the Subject in the 21st Century
Author: Andrea D. Bührmann
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 152755337X

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The beginning of the 21st century is characterized by fundamental societal changes: in addition to changing demographics and the globalization of economic flows, the transformation of an industrial-Fordistic society to a non-industrial service society is significant. For more than twenty years, these large-scale trends and their inherent chances and risks have been the topic of vivid discussions in all the social sciences. Keywords are ‘risk-society’, ‘post-industrial society’, ‘knowledge-society’ and ‘information-society’. The implications of these developments are also reflected in the challenge to the traditional, hegemonic and rational understanding of subjectivity. Against the background of these great social changes, several factors indicate that the forms of self-regulation or self-governance are also being transformed. A one-sided consideration of the homo economicus and its varieties would underestimate, for example, certain non-rational forms of self-perception and self-reflection, as well as non-rational practices of self-management and subjectivation. The aim of this anthology is to discuss the question, to what extent the relationship to oneself (its regulation with respect to its governance) and the relationship towards others in (post-)modern societies are being transformed. The perspective of Norbert Elias’ process sociology as well as Michel Foucault’s post-structural theory seem especially promising, as they appear to have been the first researchers consistently and convincingly analysing the ‘nature’ of the individual by reflecting upon its long-term historical process of transformation. Both have different visions but similar concerns: they deal with structures of control that exist within society and within the individual.

Foucault and Modern Society

Foucault and Modern Society
Author: Jason L. Powell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2020-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781536176414

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This books explore the relevance and application of the conceptual and theoretical works of Michel Foucault to an understanding of modern society. The book begins by providing a biographical excursion of Foucault's life and works that gives the reader hints of how this thinking of social theory was shaped. The book moves its attention to how conceptual tools he developed are relevant to modern social theory and the interpretation of people, professions and populations in western culture in particular. The book explores the impact of his work on power and the example of social work and how it reshaped such a helping profession. In doing so, Foucault raised both a challenge and impact for social theorists to take up on subjectivity in how individuals make their own histories. Despite this, the book concludes with a re-appraisal of Foucault's work on surveillance and aging prisoners that highlights the sheer analytical diversity of his social philosophy.

The Passion of Michel Foucault

The Passion of Michel Foucault
Author: James Miller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674001572

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Based on extensive new research and a bold interpretation of the man and his texts, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

The Early Foucault

The Early Foucault
Author: Stuart Elden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781509525966

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"The first intellectual history of Foucault's early career"--

The Japan Lectures

The Japan Lectures
Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1003813593

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This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in postwar Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication, and exchange. At the heart of the lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy no longer simply Western, yet to come. The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which has long since moved away from earlier "Area Studies"; at the same time, it participates in the new scholarship about Foucault’s own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault’s work for philosophy in the 21st century.