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Displaying: 1-20 of 31 documents


1. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Valérie Daoust Introduction
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2. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Lawrence Olivier, Francis Lapointe À la recherche du politique dans le travail de Michel Foucault
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La plupart des recherches entreprises sur la philosophie de Michel Foucault ont visé jusqu’à maintenant à définir et assigner son travail à une étiquette politique définie. Foucault est pour les uns anarchiste, pour les autres nihiliste ou encore simple militant de gauche. Ce qui est étonnant avec cet effort, c’est que malgré la multiplicité des lectures, elles peuvent toutes se justifier et trouver quelques appuis dans son oeuvre. Par contre, en entreprenant la recherchedu politique de cette façon, c’est-à-dire en posant à Foucault la question programmatique du « ce qu’il faut faire », nous tombons dans un piège que lui-même a toujours souhaité éviter, celui d’« unidimensionnaliser » sa pensée. Mais alors, comment lire son oeuvre sans nous-mêmes appliquer cette morale d’État civil demandant à chaque philosophe ses papiers politiques ? En quoi, si nous refusons cette question, la pensée de Foucault peut-elle demeurer une pensée politique ? Notre thèse est la suivante : en examinant la manière avec laquelle Foucault ré􀏔léchit le politique dans son cours au Collège de France Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, nous p ouvons m ontrer c omment, vers la fin de sa vie, il a changé l’angle de la question. En effet, dans ce cours, l’activité politique n’est plus envisagée à partir de la question du « ce qu’il faut faire », mais à partir de l’expérience du pouvoir elle-même, c’est-àdire comment sommes-nous en mesure d’exercer le pouvoir sur les autres. La tâche du philosophe n’est donc plus celle du « donneur de leçon » pense Foucault dans ce cours, mais celle de faire de sa vie un exemple où parole et acte, discours et vérité sont intimement reliés.
3. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Daniel Desroches La vérité du sujet. Subjectivation et véridiction chez Foucault
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Il y a une énigme chez Foucault : la mise en plan de l’histoire de la sexualité en faveur d’un retour au sujet s’explique plutôt mal. Qui plus est, le projet d’élaborer une subjectivité sans sujet n’était pas sans poser quelques problèmes. Dans cet article, nous mettons en contexte ces difficultés afin de montrer qu’une autre forme de subjectivité était malgré tout possible. Pour ce faire, nous solutionnons une part de l’énigme en justifiant le recours à des formations historiques de longue durée dès 1978 (I). Nous décrivons ensuite la subjectivation qui, dans le cadre d’une esthétique de l’existence, répond aux critères d’une subjectivité sans sujet (II). Et pour illustrer comment Foucault dépasse le sujet moderne, nous introduisons la parrêsia qui, dans le cours de 1982, rattache le sujet et la vérité de manière à offrir une résistance au pouvoir (III). En conclusion, nous tentons de cerner l’originalité méthodologique de Foucault sur cette question en précisant le sens d’une approche poststructuraliste de la signification.
4. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Valérie Daoust Michel Foucault, la philosophie féministe et le sujet femme. Confessions identitaires et énoncés critique parrèsiastiques
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Cet article considère les concepts de la confession et de la parrêsia dans l’oeuvre de Michel Foucault et les applique à l’analyse de la construction du sujet femme. Il montre comment dans une perspective confessionnelle, la femme entretiendrait un rapport à ellemême et aux autres qui tend à un auto-assujettissement selon des catégories normatives essentialistes. À ce dire-vrai confessionnel, j’oppose le dire-vrai parrèsiastique, en m’interrogeant sur la possibilité d’attribuer un rôle émancipateur à l’identité « femme ». La parrêsia devient alors le modèle d’un discours critique, qui se rapproche de la critique sociale caractérisant le féminisme. Je retrouve ainsi dans l’histoire du féminisme des témoignages de ce que Foucault redécouvre chez le Grecs comme parrêsia politique, éthique et cynique.
5. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Jeffrey Renaud Rethinking the Repressive Hypothesis: Foucault’s Critique of Marcuse
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In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Michel Foucault ostensibly sets out to reject the “repressive hypothesis” as an inadequate characterization of the relationship between sex, power and knowledge. Given the obliqueness of his polemical attack against this hypothesis and its representatives, however, some commentators have attempted to elucidate and assess his position by situating Herbert Marcuse’s critique of sexual repression within the ambit of Foucault’s argument. The following essay contributes to this investigation by highlighting Foucault’s implicit and explicit remarks against Marcuse in the first volume of The History of Sexuality and the series of interviews surrounding the publication of this text. I will concentrate on his claim that, by reducing power to a purely “negative,” repressive force exercised against the majority of individuals, Marcuse misses the “positive” or “productive” operations of power that constitute the sexual subject. To address this charge, I depart from the usual procedure of explicating Marcuse’s analysis of sexual repression in Eros and Civilization and turn, instead, to his later work on “repressive desublimation” in One-Dimensional Man, where his emphasis on the productive dimension of repressive power comes into full view. By challenging Foucault’s dismissal of the “repressive hypothesis” on the basis of a more faithful reading of Marcuse, I hope to open up a space for further inquiry into the connections between these two seemingly irreconcilable positions.
6. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Julie Perreault L’éthique foucaldienne de la volonté. Dialogue entre Foucault et Kant
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Cet article revoit la notion de la volonté chez Foucault en la resituant entre ses réflexions sur la modernité et ses travaux plus tardifs sur l’éthique et la subjectivité dans le monde gréco-romain. Le problème de la critique sert de prétexte pour reconsidérer l’étroitesse des rapports entre les philosophies kantienne et foucaldienne. L’article présente d’abord le concept de la volonté dans la morale ancienne et chez Kant, pour y confronter ensuite le problème de la critique, tel que Foucault en rend compte dans un texte de 1978 (« Qu’est-ce que la critique ? »), et effectuer enfin un dernier retour vers l’éthique. Ce mouvement de va-et-vient entre l’éthique et la critique suit un second cercle de compréhension qui éclaire l’un par l’autre les discours de Kant et de Foucault, en mêmetemps que les problématiques historiques qu’ils partagent. La volonté y est présentée chaque fois comme une activité du sujet qui a à se constituer lui-même en tant qu’être libre. Or, ce dernier a aussi à se positionner dans la modernité en rapport à une a utorité qui fonctionne de plus en plus comme un « gouvernement des âmes ». Le rapport à Foucault saisit d’une part l’historicité de la question kantienne de l’autonomie. Le rapport inverse reconnaît d’autre part un aspect peut-être indépassable de toute subjectivité éthique : l’espace transcendantal que la raison pratique articule chez Kant entre les notions de volonté, d’autonomie et de liberté.
7. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Marc Djaballah Le réel de la philosophie. Foucault et la critique ontologique
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Cet article aborde le concept du réel de la philosophie dans la lecture foucaldienne de Platon par le biais du problème de la méthode. Dans un premier temps, on y trouve une exposition du sens de la critique chez Foucault, faisant intervenir le rapport circulaire entre la méthode et le matériel sur lequel il s’exerce. Cette discussion dégage de ses ouvrages une variété ontologique de la critique, à la fois analogue et irréductiblement distincte de la critique épistémologiqueissue de la philosophie transcendantale dans la tradition de la première Critique de Kant. Dans un deuxième temps, la lecture de Platon élaborée par Foucault dans Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres est examinée autour du thème de la réalité propre à la pratique philosophique. Celui-ci relève une conception platonicienne de la philosophie comme ascèse, selon laquelle le philosophe doit renoncer à s’adresser à la vérité en tant que logos, afin dechercher à se transformer en se mettant à l’épreuve de la réalité de sa pratique. Cette tâche requiert l’acquisition d’un trio de capacités qui ensemble constituent la structure de la pratique philosophique : le pouvoir d’être écouté (le cercle de la réceptivité de l’autre), le pouvoir d’être soi-même (le cercle de la spontanéité), et le pouvoir de ne pas être lu (le cercle de la connaissance). Ce texte débouche ainsi sur un modèle de la philosophie d’inspiration platoniciennequi complète et enrichit la méthode de la critique ontologique que Foucault élabore à partir de Kant et de Nietzsche.
regular articles/articles réguliers
8. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Jim Vernon Liberation Theology: Hegel on Why Philosophy Takes Sides in Religion Conflict
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Hegel famously identifies Protestant conscience and its corresponding state as reflecting the unity of ethical and religious principles, thereby bringing into actuality the truth of human spirit. However, he also reminds us that it is vital to free states that the Church remain divided, rather than unifying into one sect. Thus, he affirms a secular state above religious conflict, but explicitly takes sides in one such conflict, out of the interest philosophy has in the development of the Protestant nation-state. In this paper, I resolve this tension by articulating Hegel’s account of philosophy’s interest in historical movements in general, and of the historical relationship between religion and the state in particular. Focusing on his account of the contemporary struggle between Catholicism and Lutheranism,I then develop an account of philosophy’s interest in religious conflict. I close with some schematic remarks on the ‘Hegelianism’ of some recent Catholic movements.
9. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Fred Evans The Clamour of Voices: Neda, Barack, and Social Philosophy
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Taking up the significance of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death in an Iranian street protest and novelist Zadie Smith’s analysis of President Obama, I offer an account of society as a “multivoiced body.” This body consists of “voices” that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. Viewing society in this manner implies the simultaneous valorization of solidarity, diversity, and the creation of new voices as well as the kind of “hearing others” that makes these three political virtues possible. It also encourages resistance to the always present countertendency of raising a particular voice to the level of the “one true God,” “pure race,” “Capital,” or any other “oracle” that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices.
10. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Bettina Bergo The Future of Paradosis: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity
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This essay discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity (2008). Nancy’s engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. This raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the “divine” in a demythified world, as well as the question of the exhaustion of Christianity and its self-deconstruction. I address Nancy’s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and “look,” of a faith that is not tied to a god or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond certain ‘orthodox’ oppositions between atheism and Christianity. I use Gérard Granel’s deformalization of phenomenology and the Gospel of James’s “Epistle of straw” to adumbrate a minimalist faith in the world, and I alsoinvestigate Jean Pouillon’s study of the senses of “croire” and Émile Benveniste’s archeology of credere in light of Nancy’s approach to faith. I close with reflections on Nietzsche’s psychology of “the redeemer.”
11. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Joachim Feldes Alfred von Sybel—A Life Between the Lines
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Though seen in several photographs, Alfred von Sybel remained for many years a rather unknown member of the early phenomenological movement. Detailed documentation of his life and work only became available following research on the “Circle of Bergzabern,” a group comprised of former members from the “Philosophical Society Göttingen”: von Sybel, Conrad, Conrad-Martius, Hering, Koyré, Lipps and Stein, were listed as the seven participants. In the Phänomenologenlied, written in 1907, von Sybel outlined the groups’ approach: “to the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), in a programmatic way, and it became an integral part of their meetings. Following his extensive correspondence, this article reveals von Sybel’s desperate search for fellowship and orientation, which resulted in a very puzzling life. Thus, this first ever-published comprehensive biography of von Sybel mirrors the mysteries surroundingthe song: different versions exist and due to a lack of details it remains a puzzle which version is the original one.
12. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Clarence W. Joldersma An Ethical Sinngebung Respectful of the Non-Human: A Levinasian Environmental Ethics
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In the following paper, I connect Levinas’s notions of il y a and hypostasis to nature as alterity via Sallis’s interpretation of nature in its return. I interpret Levinas’s idea of the elemental as an unpossessable milieu, an excess with indirect traces, indicating alterity, something strange. I then turn to Levinas’s idea of the ruin of representation to argue for a contextual reversal in which meaning arises from the non-human other. This reversal uncovers the possibility of understanding non-human things as existents, sites where nature in its return reveals the need for respect of the other—an ethical Sinngebung.
13. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Noah Moss Brender Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking: Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic Systems Theory
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From his earliest work forward, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop a new ontology of nature that would avoid the antinomies of realism and idealism by showing that nature has its own endogenous sense which is prior to re􀏔lection. The key to this new ontology was the concept of form, which he appropriated from Gestalt psychology. However, Merleau-Ponty struggled to give a positive characterization of the phenomenon of form which would clarify its ontological status. Evan Thompson has recently taken up Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach to cognitive science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic systems theory and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However, Thompson does not quite succeed in resolving the ambiguities in Merleau-Ponty’s account of form. This article builds on an indication from Thompson in order to propose a new account of form as asymmetry, and of the genesis of form in nature as symmetry-breaking. These concepts help us to escape the antinomies of Modern thought by showing how nature is the autoproduction of a sense which can only be known by an embodied perceiver.
review essay/essai critique
14. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Matthew R. McLennan Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure. Trans. A. Hudek and M. Lydon
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15. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
List of Book Reviews/Liste des comptes rendus
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16. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Iain MacDonald Between Normativity and Freedom
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17. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Christoph Menke Hegel’s Theory of Liberation: Law, Freedom, History, Society
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The freedom of spirit, Hegel claims, consists in “the emancipation of spirit from all those forms of being that do not conform to its concepts.” That is, freedom must be understood as “liberation [Befreiung].” The paper explores this claim by starting with Hegel’s critique of the (Kantian) understanding of freedom as autonomy. In this critique Hegel shows that norms or “laws” have to be thought of as “being”—not as “posited.” This is convincing, but it leaves open the question of the relation between law and freedom (i.e., the very question that the concept of autonomy was meant to solve). In its second part the paper claims that Hegel’s solution to this problem consists in the analysis of freedom as the “historical” process of “social” transformation. While social norms ordinarily or habitually exist in the form of a second nature—according to Hegel, this is the form they necessarily take on in their social reality—, the act of liberation radically changes their mode of being: liberation is the momentary and transitory act of the ontological transformation of social norms from nature into freedom.
18. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Christoph Menke Hegel’s Theory of Second Nature: The “Lapse” of Spirit
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While in neo-Aristotelian conceptions of virtue and Bildung the concept of “second nature” describes the successful completion of human education, Hegel uses this term in order to analyze the irresolvably ambiguous, even conflictive nature of spirit. Spirit can only realize itself, in creating (1) a second nature as an order of freedom, by losing itself, in creating (2) a second nature—an order of externality, ruled by the unconscious automatisms of habit. In the second meaning of the term, “second nature” refers to spirit’s inversion of itself: the free enactment of spirit produces an objective, uncontrollable order; "second nature" is here a critical term. On the other hand, the very same inversion of free positing into objective existence is the moment of the success of ("absolute") spirit. The paper exposes this undecidable ambiguity of second nature and claims that its acceptance and development are the conditions of an adequate understanding of the constitution and forms of second nature.
19. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Thomas Khurana Paradoxes of Autonomy: On the Dialectics of Freedom and Normativity
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This paper revisits the concept of autonomy and tries to elucidate the fundamental insight that freedom and law cannot be understood through their opposition, but rather have to be conceived of as conditions of one another. The paper investigates the paradigmatic Kantian formulation of this insight and discusses the diagnosis that the Kantian idea might give rise to a paradox in which autonomy reverts to arbitrariness or heteronomy. The paper argues that the fatal version of the paradox can be defused if we avoid the legalistic model of autonomy and rather turn to the model of participation in a practice. This leads to a dialectical understanding of the idea of autonomy that preserves the insight that freedom and law are mutually conditioning and simultaneously reveals that they remain in irresolvable tension with one another.
20. Symposium: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Dirk Setton Absolute Spontaneity of Choice: The Other Side of Kant’s Theory of Freedom
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Kant’s concept of autonomy promises to solve the problem of the actuality of freedom. The latter has actuality as a practical capacity insofar as the will is objectively determined through the form of law. In later writings, however, Kant situates the actuality of freedom in the “absolute spontaneity” of choice, and connects the reality of autonomy itself to the condition of a “radical” act of free choice. The reason for this resides in the fact that his first solution is marked by a certain defect: it does not contain a sufficient concept of the actuality of a practical capacity. This essay elaborates a revised account of Kant’s concept of freedom in light of this insight. The argument is that we need to distinguish force and faculty in order to understand the actuality of a capacity. Only on this basis can we introduce the idea of imagination as a pre-reflexive force of practical reason and the idea of reflective judgment as a power of practical judgment in order to realize how free choice is capable of generating a maxim that has the form of a law spontaneously and of its own accord. In this way, we see that the actuality of freedom necessarily includes the spontaneity of choice, and that human freedom manifests a certain paradoxicality: the university of the will is bound to a subjective ground of determination, to a pre-reflexive act of "radical" choice.