Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Once upon a time sexual relations were necessary for the birth of a child. Back then the gender and state of health of a baby were known only after it emerged from the womb. The movements of a criminal suspect, a wayward spouse, or an errant teenager could be detected only by physically following them. It was even the case that, with the exception of fathers who died during the nine months between impregnation and birth, only living persons could have children.

The Technological Society

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

Les Mots et Les Choses

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts -- automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism -- as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of \"end of history\" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize \"everyday life,\" laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) employed the terms ‘technology’ and the ‘technique’ over the course of his intellectual career. His use of these words in his mature writings, it is argued, reflects a profound ambivalence: Foucault sought to denounce the pernicious effects of what he called modern ‘technologies of power,’ but also deliberately evoked the more positive values associated with ‘technology’ to develop a philosophical standpoint shorn of the ‘humanist’ values he associated with existentialism and phenomenology. The article situates Foucault’s condemnation of power technologies within the broader skepticism towards ‘technological society’ that pervaded French intellectual circles following World War II. In the first phase of his career (1954-1960), Foucault built on these attitudes to articulate a conventional critique of technology’s alienating effects. Between 1961 and 1972, the theme of ‘technology’ f...

Foucault and Technology

This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault's own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, rather than “discipline,” was modernity's paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault's philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault's antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault's brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault's thought.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1479244309990175

Liberalism without humanism: michel foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979*

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called 'new philosophers'? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

Foucault and neoliberalism

In January 2006, Jerome Monod, a close advisor to then President Jacques Chirac, bestowed France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, on Francois Ewald, a prominent French intellectual. Monod’s praise only barely concealed how unlikely it was, given their respective careers, that such an occasion would bring them together. A successful businessman, Monod had established himself as a counselor to France’s political elite. Ewald’s career had followed, to put it mildly, a somewhat different trajectory. After studying philosophy, he threw himself into the revolutionary politics that crystallized around the student and worker strikes of May 1968. Through his activism, he met the philosopher Michel Foucault, whose studies of madness and deviance appealed to the contrarian sensibilities of the sixties generation. By the seventies, Foucault, teaching at the College de France, the summit of French academic life, had appointed Ewald as his assistant and was supervising his doctoral dissertation. Following the philosopher’s death, Ewald became the de facto executor of his intellectual estate, coediting a major Foucault anthology, overseeing the publication of his lectures, and founding a center dedicated to his memory. Needless to say, it was not these accomplishments but later and less revolutionary endeavors that earned Ewald his medal. By the early 1990s, Foucault’s student had become the house intellectual of the French insurance industry and an ideological standard-bearer of the Medef, France’s primary employers’ organization. Those attending Ewald’s award ceremony were thus treated to a singular piece of oratory, in which a captain of industry, praising a former Marxist, wondered aloud: “What happened inside of you

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653042

Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State*

"It is not the case," Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, "that men first stopped believing in God and in the authority of the Church, and then subsequently started behaving differently. It seems clear that men first of all lost any overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together, and so ceased to be able to make sense of any claims to moral authority."1 Religious faith and moral order thrive, MacIntyre tells us, on robust social bonds. This insight rests upon an implicit premise: to believe in religion-"in God and in the authority of the Church"-is to believe in society-that is, an "overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together." Though MacIntyre states this claim with particular succinctness, he is far from alone in making it. His fellow communitarians, who value religion for fostering social cohesion, frequently endorse normative versions of this argument, while sociologists of religion have employed it to explain, for instance, the impact of social differentiation on religious belief. Yet this assimilation of religion with its social function belongs to a much longer intellectual tradition-one in which the history of modern France has played a leading part. During the revolutionary decade that closed the eighteenth century, theocrats such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald excoriated the Jacobins' brazen anticlericalism, ridiculing the blindness with which they felled the pillar of faith upon which the social edifice rests. That conservatives daunted by revolution's satanic specter would insist that society-that is to say, their society, the estate-based order of the ancien regime-could not survive an assault on religion-in other words, their religion, Roman Catholicism-is understandable. The eagerness with which certain republicans and socialists, their most obdurate ideological opponents, emphasized the intimate bond between religion and the social order is, however, more puzzling.2 Yet in the 183Os, one finds, for example, Pierre Leroux, a philosopher of impeccable republican pedigree, lamenting, in terms that echo Maclntyre's, that "religious atheism has brought about social atheism."3 Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the Catholic republican Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, the philosopher and moralist JeanMarie Guyau, and Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, made similar pronouncements. While generally sympathetic towards republican institutions, these thinkers nonetheless occupied a distinct ideological space on the French left, defined by the conviction that republicanism required a far denser conception of society than that which could be elicited from the social contract or individual rights alone. Leroux and Buchez, for example, unrelentingly proselytized for the idea of "association," while Guyau and Durkheim concurred in placing solidarity at the heart of their understanding of the social order. The belief that republicanism was in need of a sociological correction thus defines the identity of these thinkers as much as their efforts to persuade mainstream republicans to give religion a second look.4 Viewed together, their arguments reveal an alternative religious tradition within French republicanism, distinct from the anticlericalism embraced by many of their contemporaries, one deeply concerned with religion's modern fate-provided, however, that religion was grasped as a primordially social phenomenon.Why were these social republicans so eager to conflate "society" and "association" with "religion" ? These concepts, I argue, provided a vocabulary for conceptualizing the nature of social cohesion in a post-revolutionary world. In the social imaginary of the old regime, religion had been harnessed to the concepts of order and corps, a connection that underpinned its vision of society as an organism formed by unequal yet complementary estates. This organicism invoked the traditional Christian belief that Christ, in addition to a physical body, possessed a mystical body, a corpus mysticum constituted by the Catholic Church. …

Michael C. Behrent

Papers

Foucault and Technology

Liberalism without humanism: michel foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979*

Foucault and neoliberalism

Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State*

The mystical body of society: religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought.