Foucault, unterrichtend

Michel Foucault’s Philosophy

My work on Michel Foucault is mostly systematically motivated: On the one hand, I am interested in the specific conception of (political) philosophy resulting from Foucault’s methodological perspective. Instead of reducing his methodology to discourse analysis, an ‘analytic of power’ or an investigation of processes of subjectivation, I see as its common core of all of Foucault’s works his methodological perspective which I attempt to reconstruct as nihilistic, nominalistic and historicistic.

On the other hand, I am interested in Foucault’s proposal for a non-relativistic ‘History of Truth’. Although he never quite managed (or cared) to fully explicate either the conceptual problems of this undertaking or what he saw as solutions to these, Foucault’s relentless pursuit of a ‘History of Truth’ defines the form of his philosophy.

Further aspects of his work which I have worked on include Foucault’s concept of critique and his analysis of neoliberalism in the governmentality lectures.

Critical Theory

Publications

Foucault and Ontology [in German]

In our contribution, Martin Saar and I discuss how Michel Foucault’s philosophical thought stands vis-à-vis ontology.

with Martin Saar

“Fragmente eines Willens zum Wissen”. Michel Foucaults Vorlesungen 1970–1984

Dieser Band nimmt die vollständige Veröffentlichung der 13 Vorlesungen zum Anlass, sie sowohl als Ganzes als auch jede einzelne Vorlesung zu betrachten. Damit bietet er tiefe Einblicke in Foucaults Vorlesungen und liefert zugleich eine umfassende Einführung in diesen Teil von Foucaults Werk.

Kritik als Emanzipation. Zur Produktion sperrigen Wissens

Discourse analysis is critical, I argue, if it produces “unwieldy knowledge”.

Biopolitics as a Critical Diagnosis

I argue that the reasons both for the way ‘biopolitics’ stirred Foucault’s readers and for his subsequent abandonment are to be found in the relation between Foucault’s model of critique and the role ‘biopolitics’ plays in it: it names the counter-truths derived from Foucault’s critical diagnosis of the dispositif of sexuality

Review of Mark G. E. Kelly (2018): For Foucault: Against Normative Political Theory

The Spell of Responsibility. Labor, Criminality, Philosophy (translation of Im Bann der Verantwortung)

What is the significance of the fact that ‘responsibility’ now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as ‘responsible’ agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of ‘responsibility’ focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life?

Review of Michel Foucault: Subjektivität und Wahrheit. Vorlesungen am Collège de France 1980–1981 and Pravu Mazumdar (ed.): Foucault und das Problem der Freiheit

Critique as a Practice of Prefigurative Emancipation

Interpretations of Foucault’s critique have not payed full attention to all three of Foucault’s methodological imperatives which he calls nihilism, nominalism and historicism. The article offers such a reading of Foucault’s critique.

Discipline and Punish Today

The articles in this special issue of Foucault Studies originate from the conference “Überwachen und Strafen heute”, held in November 2015 at the University of Bremen, Germany. An account of the conference (in German) can be found on the website Soziopolis.

with Jörg Bernardy

Introduction: 40 Years after Discipline and Punish

This introduction diagnoses two tendencies among Foucaultian scholars with regard to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

with Jörg Bernardy

Introduction: 40 Years after Discipline and Punish

Foucault lesen

A systematic and philosophical reading of Foucault.

Reading Practices - How to Read Foucault? Review of Daniel Zamora/Michael C. Behrent (Hrsg.): Foucault and Neoliberalism and Mitchell Dean/Kaspar Villadsen: State Phobia and Civil Society. The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault

Im Bann der Verantwortung

In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility’s spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labour (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy, and of the two subject positions required by ‘responsibility’ – those of the …

Kraft, Widerständigkeit, Historizität. Überlegungen zu einer Genealogie der Wahrheit

Rezension von Michel Foucault: Über den Willen zum Wissen. Vorlesung am College de France 1970/71 gefolgt von Das Wissen des Ödipus

Foucaults parrhesia – Philosophie als Politik der Wahrheit

Foucaults Praktiken

The article explains the conceptual conditions that Focuault’s notion of practices must meet and considers the methodological implications.

Governmentality and State Theory: Reinventing the Reinvented Wheel?

What constitutes the originality of governmentality as a state analytical framework? We argue that it is the specific kind of ‘unwieldy knowledge’ it produces.

with Thomas Biebricher

Neosocial Market Economy

Lumières allemandes

with Martin Saar

Review (in German) of Michael Fisch: Werke und Freuden. Michel Foucault – eine Biografie

Review (in German) of Michel Foucault: Die Regierung des Selbst und der anderen. Vorlesung am Collège de France 1982/83

Macht und Leben. Foucaults politische Philosophie im Spiegel neuer Sekundärliteratur

A review of various books on Michel Foucault

with Martin Saar

talks

Prefigurative Emancipation: The Effective Knowledge of Foucault’s Critique

The task of diagnosing the present explains how Foucault’s critique functions as a philosophical practice, and by making explicit in which ways it emancipates us, it gives us reasons why we might be interested in doing critique like that.

14 October 2019 17:00 — 19:00 Sciences Po Paris

Prefigurative Emancipation: The Effective Knowledge of Foucault's Critique

Die Macht des Seienden, das Sein der Macht und die politische Signifikanz von Wahrheit. Drei Lesarten von Michel Foucaults Position zur Ontologie des Politischen

Drei Lesarten von Michel Foucaults Position zur Ontologie des Politischen.

25 September 2019 — 27 September 2019 FU Berlin

Die Macht des Seienden, das Sein der Macht und die politische Signifikanz von Wahrheit. Drei Lesarten von Michel Foucaults Position zur Ontologie des Politischen

Conference “Philosophie, Kritik, Geschichte: Foucaults historisch-philosophische Praxis in den Vorlesungen” [in German]

Im Workshop sollen anhand von Foucaults Vorlesungen seine methodologischen Vorschläge diskutiert werden, zu einer anderen Form philosophischer und historischer Forschung zu gelangen.

30 July 2019 — 31 July 2019 Goethe University Frankfurt