A short history of the teaching of philosophy in France

The webzine  Skohle brings a series of entries on the history of the teaching of philosophy in France (in French)

 

• 1 – Histoire de l’enseignement de la philosophie de 1840 à l’entre-deux-guerres
• V. Cousin – extraits – Défense de l’université et de la philosophie (1844)
• J. Vallès – extrait – L’enfant (1879)
• Alain – extraits – Propos sur l’éducation (1932)
• Marcel Proust – extrait de Jean Santeuil – le professeur de philosophie
• A. Comte – extraits – Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844)
• A. Comte – extrait – Cours de philosophie positive (1842)
• Alfred Binet – extraits de la séance de la Société française de philosophie du 28 Novembre 1907
• Emile Durkheim – extrait – L’enseignement philosophique et l’agrégation de philosophie (1895)
• Anatole de MONZIE – Instructions du 2 septembre 1925
• Jean-Louis Fabiani – extrait – Les philosophes de la république (1988)
• Jean-Louis Poirier – extraits – Etat de l’enseignement de la philosophie en 2007-2008
• 2 – Histoire de l’enseignement de la philosophie de 1975 à 2001

Has Western philosophy been built on the exclusion of certain groups of people?

I wrote an essay for a contest, but my entry did not make it to the final.  I still believe that it made a few valid claims. These was my central argument:

I would like to propose four models that could be used to clarify what is meant when one considers this relationship between the foundations of philosophy and exclusion. Considered in order of pertinence they are: ignorance, displacement, concealment (ideology), and alienation.

If we can show that as philosophy developed it failed to even register the fact that certain groups of people were being excluded, we can define this problem as one of ignorance. In the dialogue that we imagined earlier, the old house, without the new owner’s knowledge, had to be torn in order for the new one to be built. The new owners took no part in the destruction. Applied to the case at hand, their exclusion is a necessary antecedent, but does not necessarily shape the development of philosophy. Philosophy could very well have developed without the exclusion. Of course, this does not excuse philosopher’s apparent ignorance, and having ignored historical events is still a blemish on the institution. We know that modern philosophy was not particularly concerned with events such as the colonization of Africa, America, and Asia; to slavery; and many other evils. Philosophers (and scientists, poets and other intellectuals) could have known better, and therefore, should have known better. However, this distraction cannot be said to be a structural failure of philosophy, only a moral one.

To claim that philosophy and exclusion are in a relationship of displacement, we would need to argue that philosophy not only ignored certain realities, but through their inaction allowed those same realities to be displaced, preventing them from becoming a matter of public discussion. For example, many thinkers claim that Western philosophy failed to prevent the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, and therefore that the very foundations of philosophy should be reworked.

In order to claim that the relationship between philosophy and exclusion is one of concealment we must show that the cognitive structures that define philosophical thought also hide the nature of exclusion and thereby enable it. Philosophy is at fault not only by defect, by omission or by distraction, but by its very nature. For example, humanism and rationalism can be said to be projections of “possessive individualism” and of Capitalism, or alternatively, of a patriarchal social structure.

Finally, philosophy (and Western rationality in general) may stand in a relationship of alienation to certain groups, but only if what makes philosophy possible are the practices of exclusion and dispossession. This idea can be further examined in two distinct variants. The first defines the relationship between philosophy’s foundations and exclusion as a relation of exteriority, e.g., the claim that the dispossession of the working class allows for the creation of a separate class structure in which people are able to wonder about the ultimate meaning of reality. These people (intellectuals in general as well as philosophers) fulfill certain roles in the reproduction of the ruling class. We say that this is a relation of exteriority because while the existence of excluded groups makes philosophy possible (along with intellectual production in general), neither the content nor the form of philosophical production derives from the exclusion itself.

We can also argue that what philosophy’s self-proclaimed product is nothing but what has been dispossessed from the excluded masses. This is in line with the “alienation model” that Marx developed in his early writings.

 

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Leçons sur la volonté de savoir

Du Seil announced the forthcomming publication of Foucault’s first lectures in the College de France. The book, soon to be realeased, will carry the title Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. It will include the lectures given during academic year 1970-1971 and the text includes also a text called Le Savoir d’Oedipe.

The journal Esprit published in his latest issue a text titled Œdipe roi ou l’invention de la vérité judiciaire, which is extracted from Foucault’s lecture from March 17, 1971. The first page is accesible, the remainder of the text requires a subscription: http://www.esprit.presse.fr/archive/review/article.php?code=35916.

 

 

FOUCAULT, 25 YEARS ON

A new issue of Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (Volume 16 Issue 5 2010) is consacrated to the work of Foucault.

Introduction

“For Cutting: an Introduction to Foucault, 25 Years On,” pp. 583 – 585
Author: Ian Goodwin-Smith

Articles:

“Resisting Foucault: the Necessity of Appropriation,” pp. 587 – 596
Author: Ian Goodwin-Smith

“Post-structuralism’s Colonial Roots: Michel Foucault,” pp. 597 – 606
Author: Pal Ahluwalia

“The Huntsman’s Funeral: Targeting the Sensorium,” pp. 607 – 619
Author: Ryan Bishop

“The Post-Panoptic Society? Reassessing Foucault in Surveillance Studies,” pp. 621 – 633
Author: Gilbert Caluya

“The Paradoxical After-Life of Colonial Governmentality,” pp. 635 – 649
Author: Michael Dutton

“What is an Anti-Humanist Human Right?,” pp. 651 – 668
Author: Ben Golder

“Liberalism: Rationality of Government and Vision of History,” p. 669 – 673
Author: Barry Hindess

“The Author, Agency and Suicide,” pp. 675 – 687
Author: Katrina Jaworski

“A (Con)fusion of Discourses? Against the Governancing of Foucault,” pp. 689 – 703
Author: Jim Jose

On governmentality

Thomas Lemke published a paper on the journal PARRHESIA on the genesis and implications of Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’.

From the introduction:

One concept that has attracted an enormous amount of interest since Foucault’s death in 1984 is the notion of governmentality. The word is a neologism derived from the French word gouvernemental, meaning concerning government”.3 This paper will focus on the role and dimensions of the notion in Foucault’s work. I will argue that Foucault corrected and elaborated his “analytics“ or “genealogy“ of power in he second half of the 1970s. At the centre of this theoretical reorientation was the notion of government that became a “guideline” for his research in the following years. It played a decisive role in his analytics of power, since it situated the question of power in a broader context. First, governmentality mediates between power and subjectivity and makes it possible to investigate how processes of domination are linked to “technologies of the self ”, how forms of political government are articulated with practices of self-government. Secondly, the problematic of government accounts for the close relations between power and knowledge and helps to elucidate what Foucault in his earlier work called the “nexus of power-knowledge”.
Foucault introduced the notion of government as a “necessary critique of the common conceptions of ‘power’”.6 Its theoretical contours will become clearer when we compare it to the concept of power it tries to
escape and overcome: the “’juridico-discursive’” representation of power.

Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s Hypothesis: From the critique of the juridico-discursive concept of power to an analytics of government,

PARRHESIA, NUMBER 9 • 2010 • 31-43

A new Foucault blog: Foucault News

Created by Clare O’Farrell, Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, this blog This blog posts news in relation to new publications, conferences or other activities in relation to the work of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926 -1984).

To access, follow the link: http://foucaultnews.wordpress.com/

Foucault Studies, Nr. 8

A new issue of Foucault Studies is online and freely accessible.

This issue has two important discussions: a comparative discussion of of the German sociologist Norbert Elias and Foucault’s own work , and a discussion between supporters of an historical (and pragmatist) interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy and of a more phenomenological and transcendental (albeit anti-subjectivistic) philosophy.

In the review section of the Journal, we find an extensive analysis of the recently published lectures in the College de France given in 1982-1983 and 1983-1984, as well as shorter notes on recent books on Foucault.

New portal of the Foucault Center

The Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault, together with the CNRS, the IMEC and the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (IIAC) de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales created a new website dedicated to the life and work of Michel Foucault.

Accessible in several languages (Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Mandarin) , the site offers both bibliographical information and online texts. Some of the resources were already in the old site. Some are new.

To access: http://portail-michel-foucault.org/?lang=fr

Foucault in Radio France Culture

A week long series of excelent programs dedicated to the work of Michel Foucault in France Culture (in French). You can access the podcast at the site of France Culture:

• Foucault: l’ombre des Lumières 1/5 L’Histoire de la sexualité
• Foucault: l’ombre des Lumières 2/5 Les mots et les choses
• Foucault: l’ombre des Lumières 3/5 L’engagement politique
• Foucault: l’ombre des Lumières 4/5 Foucault et les Lumières
• Foucault: l’ombre des Lumières 5/5 Foucault et la folie

Foucault and Liberalism

Michael C. Behrent published an intriguing paper on the last issue of Modern Intellectual History. According to Behrent, during the late 70′s Foucault endorsed a sort of anti-humanist liberalism, which was in tune with changes in the intellectual landscape in France:

Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault’s antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault’s brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety.
Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault’s thought.

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Michael C. Behrent, Liberalism without humanism:Michel Foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979, Modern Intellectual History, Volume 6, Issue 03, November 2009, pp 539-568
http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1479244309990175