Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy

What makes Michel Foucault work continue to be of central importance in current debates in sociology, political science, and philosophy? Why do we still read him as a guide to contemporary social and cultural life? The Later Foucault argues that the key to understanding Foucault is his political thought. It is this that began to be expressed clearly in his last writings and that pulled together his earlier interests in power, agency, and subjectivity. The book brings together a distinguished array of Foucault scholars and commentators on politics to bring out the significance of Foucault last writings. It examines such key issues as the question of Foucault and human rights; his relationship to ethical thought, power, and freedom; his relationship to feminism; and comparisons of his work with Levinas and Rawls. The result is a probing text that casts Foucault work in a new light. The Foucault who emerges in these pages is a subtle and radical thinker. He never believed that commentary on social and cultural life was sufficient. Instead, his work presents provocative challenges to the orthodox, habitual forms of practice and beliefs. Foucault remains an indispensable figure because his ideas continue to be "good to think with."

Loren Graham - Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia

The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko became one of the most notorious figures in twentieth-century science after his genetic theories were discredited decades ago. Yet some scientists, even in the West, now claim that discoveries in the field of epigenetics prove that he was right after all. Seeking to get to the bottom of Lysenko’s rehabilitation in certain Russian scientific circles, Loren Graham reopens the case, granting his theories an impartial hearing to determine whether new developments in molecular biology validate his claims.

In the 1930s Lysenko advanced a “theory of nutrients” to explain plant development, basing his insights on experiments which, he claimed, showed one could manipulate environmental conditions such as temperature to convert a winter wheat variety into a spring variety. He considered the inheritance of acquired characteristics which he called the “internalization of environmental conditions” the primary mechanism of heredity. Although his methods were slipshod and his results were never duplicated, his ideas fell on fertile ground during a time of widespread famine in the Soviet Union. Recently, a hypothesis called epigenetic transgenerational inheritance has suggested that acquired characteristics may indeed occasionally be passed on to offspring. Some biologists dispute the evidence for this hypothesis. Loren Graham examines these arguments, both in Russia and the West, and shows how, in Russia, political currents are particularly significant in affecting the debates.

Towards a critique of Foucault

The work of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential of modern French social theorists and philosophers, has had a dramatic and far-reaching effect on many disciplines. The essays in this reissued collection, originally published in 1986, present Foucault's work as an important contribution to the theoretical analysis of history, language and power. They also represent a critical response to this contribution, encouraging readers not only to read Foucault for themselves, but to think about some new problems in a new way.

Edward F. McGushin - Foucault's Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life

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.