The death of the author revisited

A version of this piece was published in The Australian Higher Education Supplement on 4th April 2012 as ‘Credit where it’s due – but who deserves top billing?’ I posted this on my blog last year but have moved it up as I have made quite a few revisions. We do not characterise a ‘philosophical [...]

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Foucault: truth, language and philosophy

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com Describing notions of ‘the general form of the Greek conception of language’ in the context of Socrates’ discussions of truth and philosophy, Foucault notes: ‘words and phrases in their very reality have an original relationship with truth …. Language which is without embellishment, apparatus, construction or reconstruction, language in the [...]

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Foucault, scientific knowledge and climate change

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the sign speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the sign, to define what constitutes them as [...]

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Foucault and the academic author

I have moved this post to here

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Foucault, power and difference

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com I see nothing wrong in the practice of a person who, knowing more than others in a specific game of truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them and transmits knowledge and techniques to others. The problem in such practices where power – which is not in itself a [...]

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Foucault in Poland and Tunisia

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com The dual Poland-Tunisia experience balanced my political experience, and also referred me on to things which basically I hadn’t sufficiently suspected in my pure speculations: the importance of the exercise of power, the lines of contact between the body, life, discourse and political power. In the silences and everyday gestures [...]

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After Finitude (2008)

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008 After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux This book written by a young French philosopher has been taken up with great enthusiasm by a small group of English language philosophers -notably Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier members [...]

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Foucault and structuralism

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com Interviewer: Structuralism was not born recently. It was around at the beginning of the century. Yet it is only today that people have started talking about it. For the general public you are the priest of ‘structuralism’. Why? Foucault: At the very most I am the altar boy of structuralism. [...]

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Foucault on power and resistance

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com Relations of power are not in themselves forms of repression. But what happens is that, in society, in most societies, organizations are created to freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a certain number of persons get an advantage, socially, economically, politically, [...]

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