Event overview
Emanuele Leonardi (University of Western Ontario) - "Biopolitics as Method: The Biopolitical & Capitalist Nature of Contemporary Environmental Crisis"
The paper aims at delineating a general methodological framework – defined biopolitics as method – through which a situated object of study (in this case the current environmental crisis) can be politically investigated. Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics, in fact, allows for the elaboration of a simultaneously political and epistemological grid of intelligibility which is potentially able to fruitfully articulate the productive frictions between the formal status of theory and its historical consistency. In particular, the newly articulated concept of population whose peculiar naturalness opens up a new field of power intervention – the environment – which will be defined as the permanent negotiation between natural and historical determinations.
Foucault's “biopolitical hypothesis” is discussed in depth and subsequently problematized in its methodological implications. As a red thread, the research question which is deployed is the following: how can a biopolitical framework help us in defining the specific features of the ecological crisis? To properly answer, the paper proposes a methodological understanding of the notion of biopolitics based on some revisions to it proposed by Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Through a critical discussion of some of their philosophical formulations, a (post)Marxist-Foucauldian methodology is proposed. It is grounded on three fundamental assumptions: a) the simultaneously ontological and historical character of the concept of freedom in the late Foucault; b) the politico-epistemological explanatory power provided by the notion of antagonistic tendency as elaborated by the Italian workerist tradition, and lately popularised by Hardt and Negri; c) the philosophical articulation of the relation between ontology and politics such as the one proposed by Agamben, in which the two elements are thought as distinct but inseparable: they are not the same thing, but outside of their relation they lose their meaning as theoretical categories.
Next events:
Ottavio Marzocca - May 20 - "Freedom and Truth Between Parrêsia and Liberalism"
Matthieu Renault - May 22 - "A Decolonizing Alethurgy. On Confession in the Colonies: Fanon after Foucault"
Workshop description:
Description: “What is this present which I belong to?”. This was the question asked by Foucault recalling Kant's writing on the Enlightenment. This is also the interrogation that a Foucaultian gaze on the present specific context/spaces should pose again. In Foucault's view, the practice of a history of our present is primarily conceived as a critical attitude towards the configuration of power relations given at a certain time, that is as an effective challenge of the ways in which our lives are governed. Then, the history of the present and the critique are (in turn) grounded on a genealogical posture, aiming at making all evidence unacceptable. In this way, as Foucault remarked in 1978, the critique can be conceived as “the art of the voluntary disobedience, of the reasoned indocility. Therefore, the function of the critique would be the disassujettissement in the play of what could be named a politics of truth”.
Related to the couple critique-history of our present a broad Foucaultian vocabulary has emerged: governmentality, counter-conduct, and biopolitics are only some of the Foucaultian notions closely linked to the question of our present and to the will of “not to be governed in such a way”.
The aim of this seminar will be to trace out and to “update” this range of notions, reworking them in the light of postcolonial challenges, new practices of struggle and political technologies. Thus, the aim is neither to test the viability of the Foucaultian grid in our present, nor to undertake a philological route exploring Foucault's concepts, but rather to put these notions at work in present and heterogeneous contexts. Secondly, it's through the twofold axis of space and knowledge that we will try to highlight the spaces for critique that a Foucaultian vantage point could open and make visible today. However, in the place of a coherent Foucaultian grid/approach to take on, we also claim the ‘right’ to a partial and instrumental use of Foucault's tool-box: consequently, the very concept of “use” needs to be rethought not in terms of an application of methods and concepts to our diagram of analysis but instead as a way of ‘playing with’ some of Foucault's perspectives, also pushing them up to their geographical/historical/political limits and making them resound in different spaces.
Related to that, it's the very meaning of critique which should be reframed: what does it signify today to put into practice an effective critique of the regime of knowledge and truth which shapes our conducts? If according to Foucault the first step consists in “making visible what is visible”, now perhaps we should ask whether this is enough or if the task of the critique becomes most of all the capacity to spur us to act, shaking what is given as unquestionable evidences.
Among the notions that we will tackle: Counter-conduct, Critique, Government and Governmentality, History of the present, Regime of truth, Subjectivation.
Event Information
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 May 2013 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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