This essay challenges some of the recent scholarship which claims that Michel Foucault was more sympathetic to neoliberalism than is typically acknowledged. Accordingly, it considers the possible motivations for Foucault’s 1978-1979 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics; the relationship between liberalism and the various forms of power identified by Foucault; and, finally, claims that Foucault’s account of the ‘care of the self’ was itself informed by the neoliberal theory of human capital. It finds that Foucault regarded neoliberalism as coercive social (...) arrangement on par with the other forms of power/knowledge targeted by his work. And it concludes with some reflections on how Foucault’s account of the ‘aesthetics of existence’ might facilitate resistance to neoliberalism. (shrink)

Drawing from ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources, this textbook offers a comprehensive and systematic historical overview of aesthetic theory.

This essay attempts to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between Michel Foucault and the French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert. It contends that this relationship has been mi...

This essay offers a new interpretation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s landmark work of critical social theory Empire. It develops an account of the politics of exile by situating this political strategy in terms of Hardt and Negri’s claim that it is no longer feasible to confront capitalist power head-on. It attends closely to Hardt and Negri’s account of Empire’s pyramidal structure, and the problems that this structure creates for the multitude’s passage from virtuality to actuality. It criticizes the (...) authors’ assertion that, under Empire, the institutions associated with modernity have become indistinguishable from one another in ‘society of control.’ This essay concludes by theorizing the historicity and power of the university, in an attempt to specify what the democratic self-organization of the multitude, together with its exodus from Empire, might look like. Accordingly, it contends that the production of knowledge and higher education depend upon an idea of absolute value which outstrips the commodity-form, and in so doing, provides an intimation of the multitude passing to the exterior of Empire. (shrink)

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the relationship between art and politics, the history of aesthetics, and the political valences of art, literature and aesthetics.

The writings of François Jullien are an indispensable starting point for those hoping to eschew the provincialism hampering many forms of art theory today. In the first instance, his writings help identify the limitations of aesthetic theory fashioned according to the European model. These "limitations" refer to both the practical limits that prevent such theory from taking account of the different forms of artistic production in our world more generally, as well as to the constitutive limits that define European thought (...) in its specificity. Jullien allows us to approach our own thought as we might another culture, namely as a group of historically contexualized ideas deprived of their sense of self-evidence. In... (shrink)

This special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism is dedicated to James Bernauer, S.J. on the occasion of his retirement from full-time teaching. It contains original essays from Bernauer’s stu...

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.