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From: Andrew Culp <polarbear@xxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:15:26 -0500
David Halperin's "Saint Foucault" is perhaps the most sustained
engagement with Foucault, his personal thoughts on social movements, and
it's initial reception within queer-focused political action like Queer
Nation and ACT-UP.
There are a lot of short references in Foucault's interviews to social
movements and political emphasis - the most popular is a
Deleuze/Foucault conversation entitled "Intellectuals & Power". A
common reference is to Foucault passing mention of "hyper-pessimistic
activism." While he was deeply involved in political action throughout
his whole life (from the asylum, to the prison, and current events), he
tended to stick to early-Modern France in his academic work.
Biographies like Eribon's (and Halperin's) or even the semi-biographical
account of Focault's time in Iran might give a fuller account of how to
connect his circumscribed academic work to his greater personal
involvement with political action.
As far as secondary literature goes, I like Michael Hardt's read.
Included in both Labor of Dionysus and Empire are Foucault's critiques
of social movements - as such. One essay that is an elaboration on a
section of Labor of Dionysus is Hardt's "Withering of Civil Society"
found in a mid-90s (1994?) Social Text. The argument is that 'civil
society' as per Hegel is the education-qua-disciplining of labor as a
pre-condition -- said otherwise, the self-inscription of governmental
intelligibility that transform movements-as-themselves into
movements-for-themselves at the cost of autonomy. There's loads of
other "governmentality" literature out there about social movements
which make the same sort of argument (Nick Rose's Powers of Freedom
comes to mind) - but Hardt's is maybe the clearest succinct
philosophical elaboration. And, of course, the post-colonial literature
is particularly good on these points, too.
On the Agamben front, has he a reading of "movement" that opens itself
onto another popular political philosophy/theory terrain of Schmitt &
Arendt:
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Movement.html
If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Andrew Culp
Ohio State University
Department of Comparative Studies