Future Foucault:
on the Anniversary of Bodies and Pleasures
February 26, 2010
Pembroke Hall 305
Brown University
It has been twenty-five years since the death of one of the last century's most crucial philosophers, as well as twenty-five years since the publication of the final two volumes of Histoire de la Sexualité. Since then, an extraordinary body of interdisciplinary scholarship has emerged around the work of Foucault, with much attention recently being focussed on his writings on ethics, governmentality, biopolitics, and war.
The timeliness of these topics points not only to Foucault's foresight, but the ways in which we are still struggling to come to terms with reading Foucault and understanding what he has to say about the kinds of temporalities we establish, inhabit, and anticipate through his work. In other words, how does Foucault help us to recognize the past in close proximity to a future? How is the present always invaded the sense of the "to come?" How are concepts like "sexuality," "sex," "bodies and pleasures" formulated by diverse temporal structures that recur, haunt, anticipate, and render aporetic our modes of knowledge? In what way is time a central preoccupation of Foucauldian thought, which tries to theorize a kind of "critical futurity?"
Speakers:
Tim Dean, SUNY/Buffalo
Anne F. Garréta, Duke University
Janet Halley, Harvard Law School
"Governmentality/Law"
Mark Hansen, Duke University
William Haver, SUNY/Binghamton
"Reading Foucault's Genet Lectures"
Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University
"Ethical Substance and Endurance in Late Liberalism"
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Philosophy, Anthropology, French Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media, the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women and the Cogut Center for the Humanities.
Michel Foucault
1926-1984