The United Nations confirmed that privacy remains a human right in the digital age, but our daily digital experiences and seemingly ever-increasing amounts of data suggest that privacy is a mundane, distributed and technologically mediated concept. This article explores privacy by mapping out different legal and conceptual approaches to privacy protection in the context of datafication. It provides an essential starting point to explore the entwinement of technological, ethical and regulatory dynamics. It clarifies why each of the presented approaches emphasises (...) particular aspects and analyses the tensions that arise. The resulting overview provides insight into the main strengths and limitations of the different approaches arising from specific traditions. This analytic overview therefore serves as a key resource to analyse the usefulness of the approaches in the context of the increasing datafication of both private and public spheres.Specifically, we contrast the approach focusing on data subjects whose data are being ‘protected’ with others, including Fair Information Practice Principles, the German right to ‘informational self-determination’, and the South American ‘habeas data’ doctrine. We also present and contrast emerging approaches to privacy and discuss their intersection with datafication. In conclusion, we put forth that rather than aiming for one single solution that works worldwide and across all situations, it is essential to identify synergies and stumbling blocks between the various regulatory settings and newly emerging approaches. (shrink)

Representations of the active brain have served to establish a particular domain of competence for brain mappers and to distinguish brain mapping’s particular contributions to mind/brain research. At the heart of the claims about the emerging contributions of functional brain mapping is a paradox: functional imagers seem to reject representations while also using them at multiple points in their work. This article therefore considers a love-hate relationship between scientists and their object: the case of the iconoclastic imager. This paradoxical stance (...) is the result of the formation of an interdisciplinary approach that brings together a number of scientific traditions and their particular standards of what constitutes scientific evidence. By examining the various ways in which images are deployed and rejected, the origins of these conflicting tendencies can be traced to the technological, methodological, and institutional elements in the work of functional imagers. This approach provides insight into the current demarcation of imaging and reflects on features of visual knowledge. (shrink)

The shift in Foucault’s work from genealogy to ethics finds consensus among Foucault scholars. However, the motivations behind this transition remain either misunderstood or understudied in large part. Foucault’s recently published or soon-to-be translated 1977/—9 lectures (published as Security, Territory, Population and as The Birth of Biopolitics) offer new elements for understanding this dense and uncharted period along Foucault’s itinerary. In this article, the author argues that Foucault’s interpretation of the liberal tradition, which is at the core of the 1977—9 (...) lectures, must be examined in combination with Foucault’s other major interests in the late 1970s, namely the Iranian Revolution and Kant. The discovery of spirituality (Iran), the valorization of an autonomous subject (Kant) and the call for a tolerant environment towards minority practices (liberalism) pave the way for the later Foucault’s ethics, which are grounded in spiritual exercises and means of liberating the subject. (shrink)

This article addresses the need to problematize “cases” in science and technology studies work, as a middle-range theory issue. The focus is not on any one case study per se, but on why case studies exist and endure in STS. Case studies are part of a specific problematization in the field. We therefore explore relations between motivation for the use of cases, their constitution, and ways they can be invoked to make particular kinds of arguments in STS. We set out (...) to examine the case as an object that links together research practices, intellectual debates, and programmatic concerns in our own work. Based on our experiences and on this reflection on the links between cases and questions in STS, we propose a number of casemaking strategies that shift and enrich the deployment of ethnographic cases as an epistemic tool in STS. (shrink)

Brain in a vat scenarios in analytic philosophy feature both brains and technological apparatus. The relation between specimens and technology is an interesting aspect of these scenarios, and in order to explore this relation, I contrast here two kinds of scientific collecting practices: the collection of post-mortem brains versus the compilation of digital brain atlases. This contrast highlights a novel configuration of the relation between brains and new information technologies. This new configuration is traced back to the late 1980s, which (...) saw the rise of a new kind of collection of brains, with a markedly different scope and nature: the neuroscience database. Brains are now easily captured in vivo, so that while post-mortem brains were precious and few, scanners provide an embarrassment of riches in the form of terabytes of data. The rise of the virtual brain as a new digital object for research is reliant on the development of new imaging technologies, but also on the growth of computerised tools, informatics, and electronic networks in this field. These developments contribute to an informational turn in scientific research. This article considers what is involved in the shift in type of object, from the scarce, wet, biological brain to a plentiful, digital, virtual one. It discusses the significance of this new object in terms of collections, institutions, and research practices. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to current discussions about methods in anthropological (especially ethnographic) research on the cultures of the internet. It does so by considering how technology has been presented in turn as an epistemological boon and bane in methodological discourse around virtual or online ethnography, and cyberanthropology. It maps these discussions with regards to intellectual traditions and ambitions of ethnographic research and social science, and considers how these views of technology relate to modernist discourse about the value of (...) technology for producing a particular kind of objective knowledge. For this article, I have examined a number of monographs and methodological texts in which the internet, as both a new setting and a new technology for doing ethnography, is shown to raise new issues for ethnographic work and for theorising anthropological approaches. In this material, questions of presence, field relations (including trust and confidentiality), and new possibilities for observation are especially prominently discussed. Anxieties about whether the internet can be a field at all are also expressed. In my analysis, I place these issues and dilemmas facing the researcher in the context of the intellectual tradition of ethnography as applied to technology. The main themes found to subtend these discussions of ethnography's 'way of knowing' are the notion of 'field', technology, intersubjectivity and capture. The paper ends with a reflection on the kind of knowledge about the internet that ethnography can be expected to produce, given these methodological prescriptions. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze exprime un besoin de philosophie apte à révolutionner les manières convenues de pratiquer la philosophie. Il souhaite mettre un terme au cycle des interprétations pour mieux expérimenter les forces impersonnelles, associe l'histoire de la philosophie à l'" agent de pouvoir " dans la pensée, et formule ce curieux désir de sortir de ta philosophie par ta philosophie. Ses monographies d'auteurs ont pourtant acquis le statut de " classiques " de la philosophie. Deleuze prend également part, à sa manière, (...) aux grands débats de son temps en situant son travail dans le courant de la métaphysique occidentale. D'où la nécessité d'interroger l'héritage philosophique de Deleuze, dix années après la disparition de fauteur. Les contributions réunies ici ouvrent de nouvelles pistes en étudiant les rapports complexes de Deleuze à notre tradition et en récusant aussi toute tentative de réduction de la pensée deleuzienne à un simple moment historique. Contributions de Manola Antonioti, Alain Beaulieu, Constantin Boundas, Olivier Fahle, Stéfan Leclercq et Arnaud Viltani. (shrink)

Intense interspecies engagements are central to the work of ecologists, as they seek to understand our rapidly changing world. To explore researcher-bird engagements in ecological fieldwork, we use a lens of care. Taking as a starting point the widely shared photos of bird-in-the-hand that portray situations where individual birds become sources of data about populations, we show the significance of complex care work in ethically and epistemically loaded moments. Crucial knowledge about survival, biodiversity loss and animal welfare emerges at the (...) intersection of multispecies care for individuals, for populations and for knowledge infrastructures. We put forth the concept of intermittent care to explain the changing concerns for individual birds here-and-now or for populations of the future. Attention to care therefore helps unravel how ecological knowing depends on entanglements between humans, nature, and technologies that take shape through a constant negotiation of different strands and matters of multispecies care. (shrink)

The Politics of Gilles Deleuze and the Random Materialism of the Late Althusser A cursory reading of the writings of the late Althusser in which the philosopher attempts to devise a « random materialism » might lead us to regard them as the matrix from which a number of post-structuralist conceptions of politics, including that of Gilles Deleuze, have sprung. Our intention in the present article is to demonstrate the partial nature of such a filiation. To do so, the article (...) focuses on the relationship between the late Althusser and the Deleuzean conception of politics. It will thus examine the refusal, common to both philosophers, to elaborate a totalising theory of the political and their concomitant invocation of a principle of contingency. Such an affinity should not however disguise the differences between Althusser and Deleuze with regard to the manner in which the actualisation of such a programme is to be envisaged. (shrink)

Derrida’s intellectual itinerary shows a progressive reconciliation with Lévinas’ ethical thinking. “Violence and Metaphysics”, one of Derrida’s earlier essays, was highly critical of Lévinas’ “phallotheology”, whereas his later works were more receptive to the Levinasian analysis on hospitality, “cities of refuge” (villes-refuges) and justice. This essay will discuss the mutual terminological exchanges between Derrida and Lévinas as well as some divergences between the two thinkersregarding the deconstruction project. Finally, we will see how Derrida distinguishes himself from Lévinas’ ethics by bringing (...) an end to the search for the conditions of possibility of experience in favour of a more radical experience of the impossible and the inconditional. (shrink)

table ronde du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, 27-29 mars 1979. Huygens et la France (Paris, Vrin, 1981, p. 99-114) CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS VU PAR LEIBNIZ par Albert HEINEKAMP (*) (Leibniz-Archiv, Hannover) Les ...

This collection examines an aspect of Gilles Deleuze’s thought that has largely been neglected; whether or not Deleuze was a metaphysician. Answering this question may reveal the problematic nature of so-called postmodernism and the critique it leveled at the first philosophy, and it may help readers to better understand philosophy’s fate.

Qu'en est-il des relations intellectuelles de Deleuze à ses contemporains ?

Depuis le milieu des annees 1960, les etudes spinozistes ont pris un nouvel essor sous l'impulsion du courant marxiste qui a vu dans le programme de liberation des collectivites pense par Spinoza le projet politique le plus apte ä assurer une reponse ä la crise de legitimite du marxisme. Dans la foulee de certaines intuitions de Althusser, et ä la lumiere de la conceptualite spinoziste, plusieurs penseurs (notamment Deleuze, Negri, Macherey, Matheron et Virno) ont ainsi propose un nouveau modele d'organisation (...) de la vie en commun. Ces acteurs de la renaissance spinoziste redigent, en quelque sorte, le chapitre conclusif de la derniere ceuvre de Spinoza (i.e. le Tratte politique reste inacheve) en definissant les nouvelles conditions de la democratic ä l'heure de la deterritorialisation generalisee marquee par l'abolition des frontieres nationales (economie mondiale, reseaux informatiques, etc.). Ce contexte offre l'occasion de repenser la politique en radicalisant les propos de Spinoza et en faisant jouer les notions de "puissance" et de "multitude" non seulement contre les concepts de "pouvoir" et de "peuple" qui en sont venus ä dominer le champ de la reflexion en philosophic politique, mais egalement contre les philosophies de l'histoire fondees sur la dialectique et la teleologie. Apres avoir decrit brievement quelques-uns des principaux enjeux de la politique spinoziste et avoir presente les nouveaux ennemis du spinozisme (neo-liberalisme et marxisme ideologique), nous ferons une genealogie de la refondation neo-spinozienne de Marx (Althusser, Deleuze, Negri) avant de repondre ä la question "Que faire?". II s'agira alors de determiner le role de l'Etat et de situer cette pensee politique par rapport ä l'utopie revolutionnaire. Ce parcours contribuera ä mieux definir les fondements et les implications de la democratic non-representative qui est au cceur des revendications de la renaissance spinoziste. (shrink)

Depuis le milieu des annees 1960, les etudes spinozistes ont pris un nouvel essor sous l'impulsion du courant marxiste qui a vu dans le programme de liberation des collectivites pense par Spinoza le projet politique le plus apte ä assurer une reponse ä la crise de legitimite du marxisme. Dans la foulee de certaines intuitions de Althusser, et ä la lumiere de la conceptualite spinoziste, plusieurs penseurs (notamment Deleuze, Negri, Macherey, Matheron et Virno) ont ainsi propose un nouveau modele d'organisation (...) de la vie en commun. Ces acteurs de la renaissance spinoziste redigent, en quelque sorte, le chapitre conclusif de la derniere ceuvre de Spinoza (i.e. le Tratte politique reste inacheve) en definissant les nouvelles conditions de la democratic ä l'heure de la deterritorialisation generalisee marquee par l'abolition des frontieres nationales (economie mondiale, reseaux informatiques, etc.). Ce contexte offre l'occasion de repenser la politique en radicalisant les propos de Spinoza et en faisant jouer les notions de "puissance" et de "multitude" non seulement contre les concepts de "pouvoir" et de "peuple" qui en sont venus ä dominer le champ de la reflexion en philosophic politique, mais egalement contre les philosophies de l'histoire fondees sur la dialectique et la teleologie. Apres avoir decrit brievement quelques-uns des principaux enjeux de la politique spinoziste et avoir presente les nouveaux ennemis du spinozisme (neo-liberalisme et marxisme ideologique), nous ferons une genealogie de la refondation neo-spinozienne de Marx (Althusser, Deleuze, Negri) avant de repondre ä la question "Que faire?". II s'agira alors de determiner le role de l'Etat et de situer cette pensee politique par rapport ä l'utopie revolutionnaire. Ce parcours contribuera ä mieux definir les fondements et les implications de la democratic non-representative qui est au cceur des revendications de la renaissance spinoziste. (shrink)

This article makes a dual contribution to scholarship in science and technology studies on simulation-building. It both documents a specific simulation-building project, and demonstrates a concrete contribution of STS insights to interdisciplinary work. The article analyses the struggles that arise in the course of determining what counts as theory, as model and even as a simulation. Such debates are especially decisive when working across disciplinary boundaries, and their resolution is an important part of the work involved in building simulations. In (...) particular, we show how ontological arguments about the value of simulations tend to determine the direction of simulation-building. This dynamic makes it difficult to maintain an interest in the heterogeneity of simulations and a view of simulations as unfolding scientific objects. As an outcome of our analysis of the process and reflections about interdisciplinary work around simulations, we propose a chart, as a tool to facilitate discussions about simulations. This chart can be a means to create common ground among actors in a simulation-building project, and a support for discussions that address other features of simulations besides their ontological status. Rather than foregrounding the chart’s classificatory potential, we stress its role in discussing and reflecting on simulation-building as interdisciplinary endeavor. This chart is a concrete instance of the kinds of contributions that STS can make to better, more reflexive practice of simulation-building. (shrink)

Résumé L’incarnation phénoménologique a-t‑elle, dès Husserl, une origine christique? Ce qu’on a appelé le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie amorcé dans les années 1960 en France obéirait bien plutôt, en ce cas, à l’inspiration du mouvement phénoménologique dès ses débuts. On explore ici cette question, en mettant la chair phénoménologique à l’épreuve de l’athéisme de Deleuze et du thème du « corps sans organes » issu du rapport conflictuel d’Antonin Artaud avec la mystique chrétienne, et en remontant à la crise (...) ouverte par Arius ainsi qu’au Concile de Nicée.Does phenomenological incarnation have, already in Husserl, a Christian origin? What has been called the theological turn of phenomenology in the nineteen-sixties in France would in that case be much more in line with the initial inspiration of phenomenology. Exploring this question, we try here to put phenomenological flesh to the test of Deleuze’s atheism and of the theme of a “body without organs” resulting from the conflict between Antonin Artaud and Christian mysticism, and to consider anew both the crisis generated by Arius and the teachings of the Council of Nicaea. (shrink)

This article aims at understanding the North-American reception of Foucault’s Folie et déraison. After showing how American conceptions of social control facilitated the integration of Foucauldian thinking in North-American academia, I examine the ways by which the advocates of anti-psychiatry and the historians of psychiatry read Folie et déraison, which became emblematic for French Theory. I then present various Anglo-American critiques of Folie et déraison and defend the persistence of a “Foucauldian spirit” against the sci-entifization of psychiatry. All this allows (...) for an assessment of the legacy of Folie et déraison in the North American debates. (shrink)

Derrida’s intellectual itinerary shows a progressive reconciliation with Lévinas’ ethical thinking. “Violence and Metaphysics”, one of Derrida’s earlier essays, was highly critical of Lévinas’ “phallotheology”, whereas his later works were more receptive to the Levinasian analysis on hospitality, “cities of refuge” (villes-refuges) and justice. This essay will discuss the mutual terminological exchanges between Derrida and Lévinas as well as some divergences between the two thinkersregarding the deconstruction project. Finally, we will see how Derrida distinguishes himself from Lévinas’ ethics by bringing (...) an end to the search for the conditions of possibility of experience in favour of a more radical experience of the impossible and the inconditional. (shrink)