A more Marxist Foucault? Reading Foucault's La société punitive

This article analyses Foucault’s 1972–3 lecture course, La société punitive. While the course can certainly be seen as an initial draft of themes for the 1975 book Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish), there are some important differences. The reading here focuses on different modes of punishment; the civil war and the social enemy; the comparison of England and France; and political economy. It closes with some analysis of the emerging clarity in Foucault’s work around power and genealogy. This is a course where Foucault makes use of Marxist language and categories, engages with historical materialism, and offers a complementary and at times corrective focus

Foucault and Shakespeare : ceremony, theatre, politics

Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another, such as in Richard II or Richard III, arguing that “a part of Shakespeare's historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État.” For Foucault, the first are illustrations of the conflict between the individual and the mechanisms of discipline. The second are, however, less interesting than moments when the sovereign is replaced, not with another sovereign, but with a different, more anonymous, form of power. Yet, in his 1976 Collège de France course, Society Must Be Defended, where he treats the theme at most length, he intriguingly suggests that Shakespearean historical tragedy is “at least in terms of one of its axes, a sort of ceremony, or a rememorialization of the problems of public right.” Foucault was long fascinated by the theatre, and especially its relation to political ceremony. Drawing especially on his 1972 lectures in Paris and a related presentation in Minnesota, this paper asks how we might understand the relation between ceremony, theatre, and politics in Foucault and Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare's plays, both histories and tragedies, thus demonstrate the importance of ritual and ceremony, a political theatre. Examining the disrupted ceremony of King Lear, the repeated ceremony of King John, the denial of ritual in Coriolanus, and the parody of the ceremonial in Henry IV, Part One opens up a range of historical, theoretical, and political questions

Mapping the present: Space and history in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the theoretical issues surrounding the notions of space and place, by examining how they can be put to work in a historical study. This work is achieved through a reading of Foucault, who not only sketched a history of space, but also undertook a number of spatial histories. To understand this, and these histories, this thesis begins by reading Foucault's professed influence on history, Nietzsche, and goes on to highlight the key role that Heidegger plays in this understanding. Just as Heidegger is central to Foucault's work on history, it is suggested that the importance of space also stems from Heidegger, especially from his work in the 1930s which critically engages with Nietzsche and the Romantic poet Hölderlin. The importance of space, or more fundamentally place, becomes central to Heidegger's later work on modern technology, his rethinking of politics and the πόλις, and art. Reading Foucault's work on history draws out the nature of his spatial language. Not only is his work replete with spatial metaphors, but he also made analyses of actual spaces. This is most evident in Foucault's two large scale historical projects – the history of madness from the Renaissance to the beginnings of psychology in Histoire de la folie, and the study of modern discipline in the army, hospitals, schools and prisons found in The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish but also in numerous shorter pieces and lectures. His two major works are re-read as spatial histories, and the standard interpretations to an extent re-placed, in the light of the argument developed in the previous chapters. Foucault's historical approach is often described as a history of the present: given the emphasis on space, it is here rethought as mapping the present

Why should people interested in territory read Shakespeare?

This paper argues that territory is more than a simple concept, and that William Shakespeare is a valuable guide to understanding its complexities. Shakespeare’s plays explore many aspects of geography, politics and territory. They include ideas about the division of kingdoms in King Lear, the struggle over its control in Macbeth and many of the English history plays, to the vulnerability of small territories with powerful neighbours in Hamlet. However, the plays also help us to understand the legal and economic issues around territory, of the importance of technical innovations around surveying and cartography, and the importance of landscapes and bodies. Shakespeare is especially interesting because debates in political theory at this time concerned a recognizably modern understanding, and European states were consolidating their own rule, marking boundaries and seizing colonial possessions. Shakespeare dramatizes many of these themes, from The Tempest to plays set in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Othello. Territory is a word, concept and practice, and their interrelation is explored with Shakespeare as a guide. This builds on the author’s previous work on territory, but also develops the understanding further, especially around the colonial, corporeal and geophysical. Historical work on our contemporary concepts can also be revealing of our present

Foucault as translator of Binswanger and von Weizsäcker

Foucault’s Introduction to a translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay ‘Dream and Existence’ was published in late 1954. The translation was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux, with Foucault acknowledged for the notes. Yet Verdeaux herself indicates the intensely collaborative nature of their working process and the translation. In 1958, Victor von Weizsäcker’s Der Gestaltkreis was published in French as Le Cycle de la structure, translated by Foucault and Daniel Rocher. Foucault went on to translate and introduce Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology as his secondary doctoral thesis. His engagement with Kant and Binswanger’s ideas has been discussed in the literature, but his role as translator has generally been neglected. His engagement with von Weizsäcker is almost never mentioned. This article critically discusses Foucault’s role in the Binswanger and von Weizsäcker translations, comparing the German originals with the French texts, and showing how this is a useful additional element to the story of the early Foucault

Spaces of the Past, Histories of the Present: An Interview with Stuart Elden and Derek Gregory

The ontologies of space and territory, our experience of them and the techniques we use to govern them, the very conception of the socio-spatial formations that we inhabit, are all historically specific: they depend on a genealogy of practices, knowledges, discourses, regulations, performances and representations articulated in a way that is extremely complex yet nevertheless legible over time. In this interview we look at the logic and the patterns that intertwine space and time — both as objects and tools of inquiry — though a cross-disciplinary dialogue. The discussion with Stuart Elden and Derek Gregory covers the place of history in socio-spatial theory and in their own work, old and new ways of thinking about the intersection between history and territory, space and time, the implications of geography and history for thinking about contemporary politics, and the challenges now faced by critical thought and academic work in the current neo-liberal attack on public universities and the welfare stat

The limits of territory and terrain

This response outlines the intention of thinking critically about terrain as a way to think about the political materiality of territory. It responds to the interlocutors particularly around the themes of place, geology, depth, Eurocentrism, and the relation between human and physical geography