This post was originally intended as a bare-bones response to Bruno Latour’s challenge to list hopes for change emerging out of the coronavirus crisis, but ended up being prefaced by a preamble on my difficulties with writing and a reflection on my current context. For quite some time, I have suffered (and I use the …
Foucault has this to say about “self-expression”: I don’t believe in the virtue of using language for “self-expression”. The language that interests me is the one that can actually destroy all the circular, enclosed, narcissistic forms of the subject and of oneself. And what I mean by ‘the end of man’ is, deep down, the …
Originally posted on Foucault News:
After the terrible news of the fire and because the banner of Foucault News is an image of Le Stryge, one of the chimera on top of Notre Dame, I am reposting the message and photo below from the Alliance Française de Brisbane. The fate of the chimera is as yet…
No apologies for cross-posting this notice of the new book from Foucault News! Foucault at the Movies Michel Foucault, Patrice Maniglier, Dork Zabunyan. Translated and edited by Clare O’Farrell, Columbia University Press, 2018 Michel Foucault’s work on film, although not extensive, compellingly illustrates the power of bringing his unique vision to bear on the subject …
It is often argued that Foucault adopts a relativist view of history. This couldn’t be further from the truth (no pun intended). It is much more complex than that. Most often it means in coded form ‘Foucault’s view and interpretation of history and events is at odds with my own view’. If we have different …
Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm. Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, Trans. Tam McTurk, Cambridge: Polity, 2017 Another book I will be reading through on this blog. This short and entertaining anti self-help book is an absolute gem. I will admit I am a bit of a self-help junkie, but prefer works that offer practical (and not too …
More reflections prompted by: Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home, Lake Worth, Nicolas Hays, 2006 [1995]. To add to my miscellany of definitions of home, Cooper Marcus (pp. 105-6) refers to a 1979 work by David Seamon with a strong Heideggerian theme, A geography of the lifeworld. …
More reflections prompted by: Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home, Lake Worth, Nicolas Hays, 2006 [1995]. Cooper Marcus argues following Jung that: “In the course of our lives, other people enter, and sometimes leave the field of our psychic awareness. […] What is less obvious is that …
These remarks are prompted by a recent short interview in The Guardian with Sam Taylor, a novelist and translator of 30 books from French into English. He comments ‘Ultimately, it’s a question of taste. My personal ideal for a translation is one that makes the reader forget they are reading a translation at all, but …
“A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize …
Refracted Input 