James Bernauer

The ethics of Michel Foucault

A recent ethics textbook aimed at university-level students, in listing the presuppositions of any ethical system, begins, “Singular moral judgments are never merely singular.” By their very nature moral judgments are implicitly universalizable, and only “a peculiar kind of irrationality” that “has come to infect contemporary thinking” could allow one to dispute this self-evident truth. Aristotle was mystified by those who claimed that a characteristic function could be found for an eye, a hand, a foot, a carpenter, or a tanner, but that none could be found for human beings in general. An ethical principle, according to Kant, must be universally applicable if it is to be considered as having any validity whatsoever. Foucault, however, disconcerts. By claiming that there are no universally applicable principles, no normative standards, “no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life,” Foucault, according to Charles Taylor, relinquishes any critical power that his historical analyses might have. Without such a “normative yardstick,” according to Jiirgen Habermas, Foucaults historical analyses cannot be genuinely critical. Indeed, Foucaults skepticism with regard to the notions of universal human nature or universal rationality is clear. He associates universal human nature with the Enlightenment doctrine of humanism, which provides a vision of the human essence with which men and women are expected to conform, thus offering a universal criterion of moral judgment.

michel foucault's ecstatic thinking

Although Michel Foucault’s life was cut short by a premature death, his work was not deprived of a good measure of completion. His published writings span a period of thirty years and, while they manifest an extraordinary range of interests, there is a remarkable coherence to the achievement of a philosopher who was so willfully anti-systematic. The key to that coherence, however, is to be found neither in the particular topics he investigated nor in the different methods he pursued. Running through these, amid the scattered researches on one hand and the refining of method on the other, was a fundamental interrogation of his experience of thinking itself, a continuing concern with the route it should follow if research was to be more than academic exercise and method more potent than arrangement of material. The single experience which

on reading and mis-reading hannah arendt

In the years since her friends gathered to say good-bye at her funeral m December 1975, Hannah Arendt’s thought has met both an increasingly enthusiastic welcome and an ever thorough criticism from the growing audience of her readers and commentators. Perhaps the most interesting phase of this current reception is now hidden from public view because it is taking place m the small classroom gatherings of colleges where she is being read with the fresh eyes of a new generation, who can appreciate her apart from the controversies that so determined reactions to her writings while she lived. Although several recent dissertations devoted to her work indicate these new readings, most of the books and articles which have taken her as their theme reflect the perspectives of her contemporaries or her own students. Their efforts already make up a formidable literature. At the time of

foucault at the collège de france i: a course summary:

Philosophy and Social Criticism is pleased to publish translations of two of Professor Michel Foucault’s summaries for courses which he presented in 1978 and 1979 at Paris’s Collège de France. The second of these will appear in a future issue. After having taught for almost a decade at various institutions both in France and abroad, Foucault was chosen as the successor to his former teacher, Jean Hyppolite, and honored with the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Coll6ge. He delivered his inaugural lecture there on December 2, 1970 and, since that occasion, he has presented ten courses (no course was given in the academic year 1976-1977) and has presided at an equal number of seminars.’ Although these courses cannot be reduced to a simple coherence, they are related and may be described as concerned with investigating the relationships between operations of power and the will to knowledge which Foucault had discussed in his first lecture. Within this broad framework, the courses are divisible into two major cycles.

Confessions of the soul Foucault and theological culture

The article studies Foucault’s treatment of religious culture and some theological responses to his approach. Foucault examined some modern practices as exhibiting a ‘Christianization-in-depth’, as, for example, in the extension of confession as a continuing practice in recent and current political culture. Confessions of faith characterize both fascism and communism and the confessional form of the latter showed extensive debt to the legacy of eastern Christian practices. The Soviet hermeneutics of the self contrasted with the western form because the self-knowledge of the former is not a western confession of desires and movements of the soul but, rather, coming to a clarity in grasping how one is regarded in the eyes of others. The continuing vitality of religious forms in contemporary experience shows itself in American apocalyptic creeds. Foucault’s critical analysis aids a self-understanding in three areas of religious activism: self-denial; the envisioning of sexuality; the aspirations toward community and friendship.

The works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984

Introductory Note. The greatest care has been taken to guarantee the completeness and accuracy of this bibliography. Section A lists all of his publications in their chronological order of composition (which in many cases is not their order of publication) when we have been able to establish such exactness. All English translations have also been identified. Section B lists miscellaneous materials. Section C takes note of the contents of studies which were conducted under his direction. The occasional symbols which we use refer either to Michel Foucault (MF) or to the principal words of his French titles (e.g., AS for L’ Archéologie du savoir).

Hallucinating Heidegger: Reflections from Hannah Arendt’s thought

First, a word of thanks and another of apology. I want to thank the organizers of this workshop [‘Heidegger and Politics’, Boston College Workshop on Contemporary Philosophy, 8–9 October 2010] both for their invitation to me but even more for their choice of topic. The collaboration of the philosophical community with Nazism mandates a scrutiny of that legacy – and this perhaps especially for a department such as our own here at Boston College which has taken such pride in its European philosophical identity. Unexamined, that legacy may become toxic. Also, a word of apology: I should have given the organizers a subtitle for my paper, probably ‘reflections from Hannah Arendt’s thought’ [and in this printed version it is included]. My title comes from the experience of the illusions and delusions that are so often on parade in discussions of German philosophy during the Nazi years. And perhaps they themselves at times mirror the fantasies that nourished German intellectual culture from 1933 to 1945. Probably, however, even my title has a relationship with Hannah Arendt’s work. As we know, factual truth was not a major concern of those years and perhaps that is the reason Arendt later stressed its importance. To quote her:

The Tragic Couple

The Tragic Couple is the first book length examination of the historical encounters between Jesuits and Jews from the modern period through the twentieth century where a special focus is placed on events leading to the Holocaust.