A partir de 1982 Foucault attribue une place centrale à l'expérience qui noue transformation de soi et accès à la vérité. Dans cette perspective la vérité devient une expérience dans laquelle nous devons transformer notre existence pour accéder au vrai. C'est toute la problématique de la spiritualité et de sa relation à la philosophie qui est ainsi ouverte, redéfinissant la philosophie comme une expérience de transformation de soi à l'épreuve de la vérité. Notre objectif sera ici de montrer comment à travers le concept de parrêsia Foucault propose une nouvelle manière de problématiser la relation entre discours vrai et transformation de soi. Ce travail sur soi implique une remise en question constante, mais surtout elle implique une vigilance permanente à l'égard du monde, des autres et de soi-même. Il ne s'agit plus seulement là de s'inventer soi-même en réponse à l'assujettissement, mais d'avoir le courage de devenir autre, dans un monde autre. Cette relation entre vie et vérité implique de se mettre constamment en jeu, risquant toujours une déprise de soi nécessaire à l'émergence d'une vie autre : il s'agira donc pour nous de tracer les déclinaisons éthiques prises par ce courage de la vérité. La parrêsia comme une autre forme de penser le nouage entre subjectivité et vérité, une forme de subjectivation dans laquelle le sujet ne s'attache pas à la vérité de forme identitaire, mais par laquelle le sujet se met perpétuellement en jeu. Nous examinerons pour cela cinq formes, ou plutôt cinq moments de problématisation historique de la parrêsia analysés par Foucault dans ses deux derniers cours au Collège de France : la parrêsia dans les pratiques de soi antiques, la parrêsia et ses origines démocratiques, le moment de transition d'une parrêsia politique à une parrêsia éthique, la parrêsia socratique et finalement la parrêsia cynique. Ce parcours nous permet en même temps de montrer la relation établie par Foucault entre le concept de critique et celui de parrêsia. Nous verrons également comment par ce nouage s'ouvre en même temps la question du rôle de l'intellectuel ainsi que celle de la tâche de la philosophie, question sous-jacente et présente tout au long de ces derniers cours.

This thesis argues for a new understanding of criticism in Foucauldian genealogy based on the role played by the values of Michel Foucault’s audience in motivating suspicion. Secondary literature on Foucault has been concerned with understanding how Foucault’s works can be critical of cultural practices in the contemporary West when his accounts take the form of descriptive history. Commentaries offered heretofore have been insufficient for explaining the basis of Foucault’s criticism of cultural practices because they have failed to articulate the relation of the genealogist to her present normative context—the social and political values and goals that, in part, define the position of the genealogist within her culture. This thesis shows why previous accounts are insufficient for explaining Foucauldian genealogical critique, and it argues for a simple alternative warranted by Foucault’s writing.

This paper analyzes Allt, Martina Lowden's novel from 2006, from a media discursive perspective. The theoretical framework consists of Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, Friedrich Kittler's research on hermeneutic reading, and N. Katherine Hayles's studies of pattern–randomness controlled meaning production. Various examples on how communication technology influences the narrator’s act of writing illustrate the medial discourse surrounding the body of Allt. Initially the underlying archive that constitutes the narrators raw material for writing (lists, lexical representations and institutional bibliographies) will be identified. The archival background is, further on, essential for the understanding of how a hermeneutic act of reading (to compare with the product of the late 1800-century educational reform, described by Kittler in his essay "Authorship and Love") takes place throughout the novel. Confronted through a hermeneutic interaction, the literature surrounding the act of writing in Allt, becomes meaningful when put back into a distribution system; when red about and written again – in short, when mutated to fit on to new text consumers. This constant and instant meaning production is, as a final step in this paper, compared with the pattern-randomness network described in Hayles's book How We Became Posthuman.

<p>This dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies, the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices. It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.</p> / Dissertation

Techn. Univ., Masterarbeit--Chemnitz, 2006. / Literaturverz. S. [258] - 288.

In the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer gives us an excellent illustration of a point French theorist Michel Foucault would make centuries later: That power is something that moves and shifts between people and within institutions, that it is not fixed nor permanent, that it is used as needed toward specific ends, and that it is enacted through the medium of discourse. In Melibee, Melibees wife Prudence achieves a place of authority and influence in her marriage via her use of discourse, and specifically by using a more male way of speaking. Chaucer is often considered feminist-friendly due to characters such as the Wife of Bath, but critics have also given us many reasons why the Wife fails as a truly empowered woman. Within Chaucers oeuvre, Prudence is often overlooked as an example of Chaucers proto-feminism because she is a wife who, despite her barrage of knowledge, at times is somewhat meek and subservient to her husband.

In what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze labelled Control Societies, mechanisms reminiscent of censorship – that is, restriction of information that administrators of power wish to regulate the spreading of – are present in the concept of copyright. This kind of censorship has the advantage of not being scrutinized by public eyes in the way that the work of institutionalized censorship agencies such as the Swedish Statens Biografbyrå was. It is not unlikely that expanded possibilities for punishing anyone who spreads copyrighted material will result in larger and larger areas that may not be accessed, as the avoiding of conflict and repressive actions will emphasize the behaviour to take detours around information that is deemed taboo and therefore suspicious and dangerous. The ACTA trade agreement is one proposed tool for such extended possibilities for punishment. This essay does not however claim that copyright and censorship are the same – but rather that the institutional execution of power that was previously a matter of state censorship has a lot of similarities with current and prognosticated application of copyright laws by corporations. While claiming to protect the individual, the disciplinary power executed actually aims to protect the one executing it; the purpose of the power structure is to replicate itself.

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This thesis is an attempt to articulate a ‘Relational’ ontology, and in turn relate this type of cultural worldview to Foucault’s philosophy and methodology. The major thesis being offered here is that Foucault can be read as a ‘Relational’ ontologist. The hope is that when he is understood from this standpoint, the unique methodology he operates with, one which allows us to view our social worlds as cultural, historical, and political products, will be seen as a coherent, authoritative, and legitimate challenge to the normalized way we envision our existence.

This thesis explores how photography has been used in the governing of subjectivities and draws on the following three forms of governmentality identified by Michel Foucault: biopower, discipline and ethics. In photography's early history discourses on character and insanity privileged visual observation and the camera was used as a more precise extension of the clinician's eye. With the emergence of Freud's "talking cure" the use of still-photography in treatment and diagnosis was generally neglected until the 1970s when the medium was re-configured as an ideal technique for accessing the unconscious. Currently Phototherapy clients, with the aid of a therapist, use personal photos in order to identify and modify problematic aspects of self. I draw on Michel Foucault's second and third period work in order to investigate these shifting relationships of photography to subjectivity.