Philosophy

Introduction, coauthored with Rory Jeffs, to upcoming Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 Years of European Thought Since the Great War, presently in press with Springer.  Contains orienting justifications for the larger text; framing reflections on philosophy, war, and the crises of modernity, morality, authority, liberalism, democracy, and masculinity the Great War engendered; then a prospectus of contributions.

In State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen discuss Foucault’s interpretation of neoliberalism modelled on the themes of governmentality and biopolitics as being both influential but also problematic in relation to a variant of anti-statism. In part, this book arrives at an interesting moment in Foucauldian studies where new questions are being raised over Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. Allegations of neoliberal sympathies in Foucault’s work have provoked a wave of reaction by theorists located within the more mainstream Foucauldian studies field, with the likes of Antonio Negri even denigrating Ewald as a ‘Right-Foucauldian’ (cited at 151). Knowing Foucault’s evasion of political labels and his experimental style of lecturing which preclude deducing his actual political position from his subject matter – Dean and Villadsen pose instead, what kind of politics should we draw from his genealogical mode of analysis of governmentality, especially, vis-à-vis the state.

The paper (Foucault Studies, 25 [see link to site*]) builds upon a growing body of critical research on the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research, but brings to it a specifically Foucauldian, genealogical approach. The paper has three parts. Part 1 situates bibliometrics as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other 'metrics' (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades. Part 2 analyses bibliometrics' antecedents in prior notational practices in the Western heritage, highlighting how forms of noting have almost always had political valences, tied to projects either of control or, with Bayle and the philosophes, of subversion. Part 3 delineates the specific features of bibliometrics as a new form of notation, highlighting the latest forms of academic subjectivity bibliometrics suppose and increasingly are summoning into being.

* https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/5578/6221

This chapter examines Žižek’s theorizations of ‘ideological fantasy’ and its different manifestations or veils (Žižek 1997: 1-35). We begin (part 1) by recalling the fundamental coordinates of Freud’s, then Lacan’s, conceptions of fantasy, allowing a theoretical lineage to be established which accounts for Žižek’s coaptation and extension of what was originally a clinical term. Part 2 then turns, in this light, to Žižek’s reformulation of ‘fantasy’ in the context of a post-Marxian theory of ideology. First, we pursue Žižek’s critique of the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’, by way of his famous analyses of ideological cynicism, into his theory of ideological disidentification, and the function of ideological fantasy in structuring groups’ quasi-transgressive forms of jouissance. Second, we look at Žižek’s analyses of sublime objects of ideology, and the function of ideological fantasy in papering over social antagonism or ‘the Real’ by constructing narratives of the loss or theft of jouissance. As an avenue for future research, we show just how well and powerfully Žižek’s theory allows us to comprehend contemporary Right-wing populism as an ideological formation.

Many oppositions surround and confound any project that tries to come to grips with the relation between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: most obviously the ubiquitous post-structuralist vs. phenomenologist paradigm, but also the bifurcation between philosophers of transcendence and philosophers of immanence that it has been argued afflicts contemporary European thought. Deleuze, who advocates pure immanence and poststructuralist ‘difference’, is considered to be on one side of the paradigm, whereas the sometimes existentialist (read transcendence) and phenomenologist of consciousness (read sameness), Merleau-Ponty, is on the other. Contrary to such characterisations, however, this essay seeks to establish that something like a coexistence of planes does, in fact, obtain between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, notwithstanding some initial appearances to the contrary. We argue that Deleuze’s basic criticisms of Husserlian phenomenology in his key early texts, as well as he and Guattari’s critique of the “final avatar” of phenomenology – the “fleshism” of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964) – do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers.