Michel Foucault

Despite his repudiation of antisemitism, Renan influenced the development of antisemitic ideologies in both France and Germany. His typology of ‘Semite’ and ‘Aryan’ was adopted especially in Germany and and combined with biological concepts of race to become the foundation of the concepts of ‘Semitism’ and ‘Antisemitism’. Renan, however, always insisted on a linguistic/cultural definition of race and regarded the biological conception, while it might have had some primitive reality, as outmoded and immoral in European civilization. After 1870 the growth of German racial antisemitism led Renan to elaborate repeatedly on race as a civilisational phenomenon that in modern Europe should have lost its biological origins. His argument that modern Jews were integral members of the French ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’ was profoundly influential on the emergence of the theory of the modern ‘nation’ as the liberal state. Gobineau's theory of race also lent itself to exploitation by racial antisemites, though it was not overtly antisemitic. Unlike Renan, however, Gobineau in his later years inclined to a vague personal antisemitism. The main difference was one of temperament as well as devotion on Renan's part to a liberal idea of the nation, as opposed to Gobineau's aversion to liberalism and modern civilization.     

Foucault toujours

Miller, J., The Passion of Michel Foucault (Simon & Schuster, 1993), 493pp., ISBN 0 671 69550 9

Mahon, M‐, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy— Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992), 255pp., ISBN 0 7914 1150 8

Salmagundi — A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences (hiver 1993, no. 97), £3.00     

American Indian ethnohistory: Recent contributions by three historians

Finger, John R. Eastern Band of Cherokees 1819–1900. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. xiv + 253 pp. including maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Miller, Christopher L. Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985. x + 174 pp. including maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.00 cloth.

Morrison, Kenneth M. The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki‐Euramerican Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. x + 256 pp. including maps, notes, and index. $24.95 cloth.     

Foucault and Technology

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’ fell into abeyance in his work, though he often suggested a connection between the rise of technology and the advent of the ‘human sciences.’ Between 1973 and 1979, ‘technology’ became a keyword in Foucault’s lexicon, notably when he coined the phrase ‘technologies of power’. He continued to use the term in the final stage of his career (1980-1984), when his emphasis shifted from power to ‘technologies of the self.’ The essay concludes by addressing Paul Forman’s thesis on the primacy of science in modernity and of technology in modernity, suggesting that in many respects Foucault is more of a modernist than a postmodernist.