Foucault's Askesis

Foucault's Askesis
Author :
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Total Pages : 380
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780810122833
ISBN-13 : 0810122839
Rating : 4/5 (33 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Foucault's Askesis by : Edward F. McGushin

Download or read book Foucault's Askesis written by Edward F. McGushin and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis. Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askēsis.

Bodies and Pleasures

Bodies and Pleasures
Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Total Pages : 288
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0253213258
ISBN-13 : 9780253213259
Rating : 4/5 (58 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Bodies and Pleasures by : Ladelle McWhorter

Download or read book Bodies and Pleasures written by Ladelle McWhorter and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sexual identities are dangerous, Michel Foucault tells us. Categories of desire harden into stereotypes by which the forces of normalization hold us and judge us. In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life. At the same time, her analysis advances discussion of key issues in Foucault scholarship: the genealogical critique, the status of the subject and humanism, essentialism versus social construction, and the relationships between identity, community, and political action. Weaving her own experience of coming to grips with her lesbian sexual identity into her readings of Foucault's most recent writings on sexuality and power, McWhorter argues compellingly that Foucault's texts should be read less for the arguments they advance and more for their transformative effect. By exploring bodies and pleasures—gardening, line dancing, or doing philosophy, for example—McWhorter shows that it isn't necessary to conform with socially recognized sexual identities. Bodies and Pleasures takes the reader beyond unexplored norms and imposed identities as it points the way toward a personal politics, ethics, and style that challenges our sexual selves.

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 1318
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781139867061
ISBN-13 : 1139867067
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon by : Leonard Lawlor

Download or read book The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon written by Leonard Lawlor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-21 with total page 1318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.

Foucault's Strange Eros

Foucault's Strange Eros
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 134
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780231552011
ISBN-13 : 0231552017
Rating : 4/5 (11 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Foucault's Strange Eros by : Lynne Huffer

Download or read book Foucault's Strange Eros written by Lynne Huffer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the strange eros that haunts Foucault’s writing? In this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject. Focusing on the ethical implications of this mode of thought, Huffer shows how Foucault’s poetic archival method offers a way to counter the disciplining of speech. At the heart of this method is a conception of the archive as Sapphic: the past’s remains are, like Sappho’s verses, hole-ridden, scattered, and dissolved by time. Listening for eros across fragmented texts, Huffer stages a series of encounters within an archive of literary and theoretical readings: the eroticization of violence in works by Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucault’s antiprison activism, and Monique Wittig’s Sapphic materialism. Through these encounters, Foucault’s Strange Eros conceives of ethics as experiments in living that work poetically to make the present strange. Crafting fragments that dissolve into Sapphic brackets, Huffer performs the ethics she describes in her own practice of experimental writing. Foucault’s Strange Eros hints at the self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the strange.

Foucault's Legacy

Foucault's Legacy
Author :
Publisher : A&C Black
Total Pages : 283
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781441131508
ISBN-13 : 1441131507
Rating : 4/5 (08 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Foucault's Legacy by : C.G. Prado

Download or read book Foucault's Legacy written by C.G. Prado and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foucault's Legacy brings together the work of eight Foucault specialists in an important collection of essays marking the 25th anniversary of Foucault's death. Focusing on the importance of Foucault's most central ideas for present-day philosophy, the book shows how his influence goes beyond his own canonical tradition and linguistic milieu. The essays in this book explore key areas of Foucault's thought by comparing aspects of his work with the thought of a number of major philosophers, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rorty, Hegel, Searle, Vattimo and Williams. Crucially the book also considers the applicability of his central ideas to broader issues such as totalitarianism, religion, and self-sacrifice. Presenting a fresh and exciting vision of Foucault as a philosopher of enduring influence, the book shows how important Foucault remains to philosophy today.

Fearless Speech

Fearless Speech
Author :
Publisher : Semiotext(e)
Total Pages : 196
Release :
ISBN-10 : STANFORD:36105064226181
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (81 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Fearless Speech by : Michel Foucault

Download or read book Fearless Speech written by Michel Foucault and published by Semiotext(e). This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lectures given as part of Foucault's seminar on Discourse and truth, at the University of California at Berkeley, 1983. The seminar was devoted to the study of the Greek notion of 'parrhesia' or 'frankness in speaking the truth'

Foucault and the Kamasutra

Foucault and the Kamasutra
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 297
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226348445
ISBN-13 : 022634844X
Rating : 4/5 (45 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Foucault and the Kamasutra by : Sanjay K. Gautam

Download or read book Foucault and the Kamasutra written by Sanjay K. Gautam and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gautam has here laid out the first serious reading of Michel Foucault in relation to key Sanskrit texts, and--what may be a surprise to many--he has written the first book-length work in English on the nature and origin of the Kamasutra. Gautam also takes up the Natyasastra (the Kamasutra's twin), locating in the first the themes of sexual-erotic pleasure, and locating in the second the classical Indian view of theater, music, dance, and aesthetic pleasure. The book shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in ancient Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics. Foucault provides a framework for opening up the intellectual horizon of Indian thought; it is his distinction between ars erotics (erotic arts) and scientia sexualis (science of sexuality) that fuels Gautam's exploration of the courtesan as symbol of both erotic and aesthetic pleasure, particularly in her role as a wife to her patron, which entails the morphing of erotics into a form of theater. The scope broadens ambitiously, to an inquiry on the nature of knowledge formation, erotics, theater, and gender relations in premodern Indian society and culture--as they converged on the historical figures of the courtesan and her male counterpart, the dandy. Gautam's twining of aims and subjects--Foucault's western philosophy of pleasure and India's classic text on eros (anchored in art and aesthetics)--transforms both the modern and the ancient texts with new understandings, and as new forms of investigating erotics and subjectivity itself.