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.     

Foucault and Radical Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy is a flourishing variant of democratic theory. John Dryzek and Iris Young are two of its more radical exponents, and here I bring some Foucaultian complications to their work. The radicalness I highlight in both thinkers owes to their different but comparable commitments to equality between different voices in deliberation. Foucault's histories are all histories of expert knowledges and the objects they usher into the world. In this sense, expert knowledges present problems for deliberative democracy, not only because they carry greater status than other knowledges but also because they have ontological effects. As I illustrate with the example of economics, although the programs of Dryzek and Young can cope quite well with the first, the second is a more serious problem, although possibly a positive one.     

Free Christian Speech: Plundering Foucault

Abstract

This article explores the meaning of free speech through an analysis of Michael Foucault's lectures on parrhesia in order to show how questions of freedom are bound up with questions of truth. The activity of speaking freely is a function of truth-telling rather than merely subject to regulative principles that underwrite claims of sovereignty. The Christian proclamation of the gospel extends Foucault's insights into a theological register and supplies a foil for considering some of the shortcomings of his constructive proposal. By surveying parrhesia in the New Testament, together with some attendant political implications, this article attempts to explain the political transformation enacted by those who bear witness to the gospel without sovereign benefits. The freedom of such speech, it is asserted, is irrespective of these benefits.