Garance

Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of a "government of things", the book also goes beyond new materialist scholarship which tends to displace political questions by ethical and aesthetic concerns. It puts forward a relational and performative account of materialities that more closely attends to the interplay of epistemological, ontological, and... See more

What is distinctive about Western culture is that we have given so much importance to the problem of the subject in our social, political, economic, legal, philosophical, and scientific traditions . Foucault's most general aim is to "discover the point at which these practices became coherent reflective techniques w ith def inite goals, the point... See more

Contrary to many interpretations, Foucault believed in possibilities for action and resistance. He was an active social and political commentator who saw a role for the ‘organic intellectual’. His ideas about action were, like Hayward’s, concerned with our capacities to recognise and question socialised norms and constraints. To challenge power is... See more

In the history of knowledge the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of . . . designat[ing] certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history . "

One of the hallmarks of Western political philosophy, in Foucault's interpretation, has been its devotion to such abstractions, first principles, and utopias-i . e., theory . In the West we have consistently approached the problem of political order by building models of the just social order or searching for general principles by which to evaluate... See more

For Chomsky, we must struggle against the injustices of our current society in the name of a higher goal-justice. Surely, Chomsky argues, unless we have a guiding principle, we will have no way of judging the actions of others . It is perfectly possible that we may find ourselves in a situation in which a revolution turns out to be worse than the... See more