Conducting critique : reconsidering Foucault’s engagement with the question of the subject

A common criticism of Michel Foucault’s works is that his writings on power relations over-emphasized the effects that technologies of power have upon the subjection of humans, rendering any attempt of resistance futile and reducing the subject to a mere passive effect of power. This criticism treats Foucault’s consideration of ethics in his later works as a break from his earlier views. In this paper, by reading Foucault’s books alongside his lectures and interviews, two ways will be proposed through which the question of the subject can be productively raised and located throughout Foucault’s works, even within his concerns with power relations. The first way is through the relation between assujettisement and critique, and the second way is through the notions of government and conduct.peer-reviewe

Critique as therapy : reflections on Foucault and Derrida

Perhaps one of the most crucial philosophical questions to ask is "what is philosophy?" But, perhaps too, the possibility of asking that question points towards the fragmented nature of the enterprise. Through the shadows of Foucault and Derrida, I will try to show how this question is important since it continually expands the definition of philosophy, blurring its territorial boundaries in such a way that enables an otherwise-thought world, preventing philosophy from being another disciplinary regime. Since antiquity, philosophy's reliance on a notion of truth provided it with analytical leverage. Hence, by placing the currency of truth itself under scrutiny, it is claimed that thinkers like Foucault and Derrida risk undermining philosophical inquiry tout court, reducing philosophy to rhetoric or fiction, with no critical function whatsoever. What's more, because of this, no normative grounding can be extrapolated from their ideas, no emancipatory aim can be sought and no ethical framework can be pursued. Both FoucauIt and Derrida were often criticized along these lines (Habermas, 1987).peer-reviewe

Chloë Taylor, Foucault, Feminism and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis. New York, and London: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 272.

Chloë Taylor’s latest monograph sets itself a wide-ranging and ambitious set of tasks, which it accomplishes in a convincing and edifying way. Foucault, Feminism and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis consists of nine chapters arranged in three parts, bookended by an instructive introduction that lays down the Foucauldian and feminist methodological principles that underpin the study, and a conclusion. The book also contains an appendix of the ‘medical legal report on the mental state of Charles-Joseph Jouy accused of indecent assaults’, including the report in the original French as well as an English translation by Taylor and James Merleau. [Excerpt]peer-reviewe

Narrating Trauma: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and the Political Ethics of Self-Narration

This thesis presents a multi-disciplinary analysis of the ethics and politics of narrating trauma in institutional contexts. Drawing on the philosophical works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this thesis studies the norms, discourses and power relations that impact survivors’ narrations of trauma in, for example, medical and legal settings. Through a use and application of Foucault’s ideas, it is argued that while self-narration is a diversified activity, discourses and power relations function to regulate, circumscribe and constrain the forms in which traumatised individuals must narrate trauma in order for their narrative to be favourably treated by institutions who encounter trauma. Building on Foucault’s views and feminist applications of his work, it is shown how possibilities of resistance – or, of narrating otherwise – are co-existent with exercises of power, despite the power imbalance that typically characterises the encounter of traumatised individuals with institutions. This thesis also focuses on Butler’s work as complementing Foucault’s views on how self-narration is entangled with discourses and power relations, and considers how her ideas on vulnerability, precariousness and relationality inform her account of self-narration. Butler’s critique of the conception of self-narration based on the sovereignty, coherence and mastery of the narrating subject is elaborated further in relation to issues in trauma theory, where it is argued that narrative coherence often functions as a hegemonic norm. This analysis of narrative coherence is pursued by a study of how survivors’ testimonies of sexual trauma in legal and political contexts is circumscribed, facilitating certain forms of self-narration while silencing others. Narrative coherence is also shown to be a dominant norm in the psychological sciences, whose theories and practices have an influential bearing on how trauma is narrated by traumatised individuals. This thesis also presents an analysis of the different levels of inequality that determine the worth and currency of trauma narratives in the asylum seeking process. Tying together the different concerns pursued throughout this work, the thesis concludes with a critical consideration of the discursiv

Reducing the maximum degree of a graph by deleting vertices: the extremal cases

Let $\lambda(G)$ denote the smallest number of vertices that can be removed from a non-empty graph $G$ so that the resulting graph has a smaller maximum degree. In a recent paper, we proved that if $n$ is the number of vertices of $G$, $k$ is the maximum degree of $G$, and $t$ is the number of vertices of degree $k$, then $\lambda (G) \leq \frac{n+(k-1)t}{2k}$. We also showed that $\lambda (G) \leq \frac{n}{k+1}$ if $G$ is a tree. In this paper, we provide a new proof of the first bound and use it to determine the graphs that attain the bound, and we also determine the trees that attain the second bound

Primary localised laryngeal amyloidosis : an atypical presentation

Primary localised laryngeal amyloidosis is a rare disease that classically presents with dysphonia. We present a case of a 38-year-old woman who presented with a history of early morning haemoptysis, progressively worsening hoarseness and intermittent dysphagia. A bulky left false vocal cord was seen on examination. A computed tomography scan of the neck and trunk revealed thickening of the left side of the larynx with associated asymmetry. Direct laryngoscopy showed a round, well-circumscribed lesion on the left false vocal cord and histological examination of the lesion confirmed the presence of amyloid. Systemic disease was ruled out and the patient was treated with endoscopic excision of the mass through carbon dioxide laser technology. The patient’s symptoms improved and the patient is being followed up yearly to exclude disease recurrence. The report highlights the presentation, diagnosis and appropriate management of localised laryngeal amyloidosis.peer-reviewe

Narrating disability, trauma and pain : the doing and undoing of the self in language

This article analyses themes from Christina Crosby’s disability memoir A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain through the philosophical works of Judith Butler. Both Crosby and Butler propose complementary ideas on corporeal vulnerability, the precariousness of life, relationality and interdependence. Crosby’s memoir provides a critique of dominant disability discourses that affect the social formation and reception of disability narratives, such as narratives that unilaterally characterize disabled subjects as strong, resilient and autonomous while bracketing the traumatic dimension of disability out of the narrative. Crosby’s book is discussed as a rich disability memoir that, while it firmly presents an account of living on, accounts for debilitating physical pain, the traumatic aspect of disability and the intense grief for lost bodily functions, abilities and life possibilities. Reflecting also on the socio-political character of disability narratives, the article considers how and why certain narratives can function critically and motivate a critical analysis of contemporary representations of disabled people. Approaching philosophically Crosby’s memoir through Butler’s work enables a wide-ranging consideration of topics found in the memoir such as the therapeutic nature of writing, narrative identity and its difficulties, the relations between disability studies and trauma theory, the political import of the personal and the ethico-political significance of interdependence.peer-reviewe

On friendship and mourning the death of a friend : reading Brodu’s debut album

“Kbar wisq” (“Too great”). That is how I described the Maltese band Brodu (literally, “broth”, but also connoting something like “mediocre” or even “disastrous”) after an intimate gig in a Valletta theatre in 2015. I know that superlatives are more often than not misguided, but there is something I see and hear in Brodu that moves me to write something meaningful about their music, and I have been meaning to do this for a long time. On their Facebook page, Brodu describes their genre as ‘Folk, Rock, Stoner, Blues, Doom… or… “Broth Rock”’, and this is not an incorrect characterisation of what Brodu sounds like at all. The band launched its debut album, Ħabullabullojb (an untranslatable and undecipherable term made up of seemingly jumbled letters), on the 14th of November, 2014. That was the first time I had ever seen Brodu live. Before then, I knew virtually nothing about them even though they had debuted in 2012, and I had heard nothing of their material except for ‘Iċ-Ċimiterju’ (‘The Cemetery’), a single they had released two weeks prior to the album launch. ‘Iċ-Ċimiterju’, briefly, is a softly-sung acoustic song, where a fragile, melancholic persona sings about the hardship that life is, its ups and downs, its confusing paths and, ultimately, its abrupt ending. The song alludes to a nearby cemetery, a place which obviously evokes imagery of finitude and mortality in which the narrator relishes at night-time, accompanied by the breeze, cypress trees, and the glare of the moon. All this is recounted as he sits next to a friend who, with two guitars, two cups of tea and a cigarette, sings with him this sorrowful duet. An evocative song about losing a significant other, I thought at first, and left it at that. A couple of days before the launch, however, I discovered through friends that the song and the album material contained autobiographical material, and that it referred to a friend of the singer who had overdosed on heroin and died. Knowing this sad fact changed the way I approached the launch and the band. I went to the album launch, listened to the music, and once the final note was played, I downed my drink and returned home. It was one of the concerts I enjoyed the most; this essay is written in the hope of demonstrating why. There are various lines of interpretation that can be followed when writing about a piece of art. I could approach Brodu’s album from different perspectives and with different aims. This is not just (or at all) a review of the album. I am not singing the band’s praises or discussing their sound. I wish to think with Brodu about a topic which is at the heart of their debut album: the topic of mourning the death of a friend. This essay will show how friendship is portrayed and understood in Ħabullabullojb, namely through the narrator’s recollections and conversations with his dead friend. In so doing, I will consider further the themes of mourning and grief, and what implications these experiences have on one’s identity. Inspired by the way in which friendship is conceived in their work, I will read Brodu alongside philosophical works on friendship and mourning (that is, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault primarily) to emphasise both how the experience of mourning transforms the self as well as how friendship, not unlike mourning, is not here understood as simply a private phenomenon but, rather, as something that can form the basis of a renewed experience of sociality and community.peer-reviewe

Foucault on drugs : the personal, the ethical and the political in Foucault in California

Foucault’s ‘LSD story’ is popular among anyone who knows a thing or two about the French philosopher. Foucault dropped a tab of acid, the story goes, with Simeon Wade, an assistant professor at Claremont Graduate School, and Michael Stoneman, a pianist and Wade’s partner, at the Zabriskie Point of Death Valley in California in May 1975. The three ‘authoritative’ biographies of Foucault (and the implications of writing a biography of Foucault are discussed below) – Didier Eribon’s 1989 Michel Foucault, David Macey’s 1993 The Lives of Michel Foucault and, especially, James Miller’s 1993 The Passion of Michel Foucault – all refer to this LSD episode.peer-reviewe