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

How The World Sees America, with Adam Tooze

The old world order is dying. What new world order if any is struggling to be born?

I can’t think of a week when it felt clearer that an era was coming to an end. Whatever people thought America was, at least for a couple of decades, it’s something else now. The killing of Alex Pretti and the fact that it was recorded on video that plainly contradicted the Trump administration’s initial narrative made that clear. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, also drove home that point when he declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was in the midst of a “rupture.”

What do people think of America now in Europe? In China? And if American hegemony is coming to an end, what comes after that?

Adam Tooze is a historian at Columbia University and a chronicler of crises. The Guardian recently called him “the crisis whisperer.” He’s written a number of books about the times when systems fall apart and new orders emerge, including “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” And on his Substack, Chartbook, he tracks the unfolding crises and power shifts, in particular the rise of China. He also had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, moderating a panel that included Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.

I wanted to talk to Tooze about what he saw at the World Economic Forum, how the world’s understanding of the U.S. is changing and how he’s making sense of this moment.

0:00 Intro
2:38 Davos recap
10:13 Trump administration’s vision of American power
16:15 China’s message at Davos
20:04 Is Trump right about America’s trajectory?
25:11 How America has perceived China’s rise
31:20 Is China in decline?
36:02 China’s progress: a mindbending experience for Tooze
42:13 The Trump administration’s contradictory approach to energy
50:06 How does China now see America?
53:36 Davos and the next world order?
59:44 Book recommendations

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9gR7CsXIwFs

Benda Hofmeyr - Foucault and governmentality: living to work in the age of control

Using empirical research, this book aims to critically analyse the dynamics, culture and forms of subjectivity of neo-liberalism. It draws upon existing historical, sociological and cultural studies to excavate the geneaology of the capitalist subject with specific emphasis on the neo-liberal govern-mental context of the last four decades. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, which he developed in his Collège de France lectures of 1978 and 1979, will be employed as an hermeneutic key to historically situate and critically analyse the regimes of subject-formation characteristic of neo-liberal capitalism. The current crisis in capitalism is surveyed, along with earlier forms of capitalism, and the transition in power from discipline to control is explored. The study concludes by tracing the changing face of Homo Economicus in relation to resistance levelled against neo-liberal capitalism and the resultant metamorphises it has undergone. Drawing upon political philosophy and political economy, Benda Hofmeyr presents a comprehensive Foucaultian analysis and historical contextualisation of the rise of neo-liberal governmentality.

Futurethoughts: critical histories of philosophy

The first section, introduced by Éric Alliez and Orazio Irrera, contains translated excerpts from Foucault’s recently published 1954–55 lecture course, La Question Anthropologique, which were used as the basis for the workshops run by Éric Alliez at the Centre in November 2023. In his serial encounters with Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Heidegger and Nietzsche in the shadow of the thought of Jean Hyppolite the young Foucault came to see the line drawn between philosophy and non-philosophy, and the investigation of the latter by the former, as the place of philosophy itself. To accompany these excerpts, we present a translation of Foucault’s obituary of Jean Hyppolite, in which Foucault summarizes the formative role played for his generation by Hyppolite’s teaching and writings.

Part two presents recent public lectures by Stella Sandford and Howard Caygill. Sandford’s on Lévi-Strauss’s ‘wild thought’ inverts the young Foucault’s approach and takes up the philosophy - anthropology relation from within anthropology itself, in structural anthropology’s relations to the philosophical side of psychoanalysis. Caygill returns emergent environmentalist imaginaries of catastrophic climate change to the immediate post-war context of the imagination of nuclear annihilation. Each philosophizes out of the supposedly ‘non philosophical’.

https://assets.kingston.ac.uk/m/2850cf28dd62e4a4/original/Futurethoughts_critical-histories-of-philosophy.pdf

Michel Foucault - Madness, Language, Literature

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism. Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.

Hannah Stark - Feminist Theory After Deleuze

"Feminist Theory After Deleuze" addresses the encounter between one of the 20th century's most important philosophers, Gilles Deleuze, and one of its most significant political and intellectual movements, feminism. Feminist theory is a broad, contradictory, and still evolving school of thought. This book introduces the key movements within feminist theory, engaging with both Anglo-American and French feminism, as well as important strains of feminist thought that have originated in Australia and other parts of Europe. Mapping both the feminist critique of Deleuze's work and the ways in which it has brought vitality to feminist theory, this book brings Deleuze into dialogue with significant thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray.