This Seminar will be taught by Prof. Dr. Gregg Lambert, who will be at ATTP as Guest Professor in the Winter Semester 2018. The course will be taught as an intense two week Seminar with daily meetings (mo-fr) just before the start of the Semester.
Monday September 18th to Friday September 28th 2018, 14:00-17:00 at ATTP Seminar Space.
To register, please write an Email to: sekretariat@attp.tuwien.ac.at in addition to signing up on TISS.
Gregg Lambert is Dean’s Professor of Humanities, Principal Investigator, CNY Humanities Corridor Founding Director, Humanities Center, Syracuse University, U.S.A. For CV and publications, see www.gregglambert.com, as well as his page on www.academia.edu.
This seminar will study the genealogy of the concept of dispositif (mechanism, conceptual device) in the biopolitical philosophy of Michel Foucault. Following the influence of biologist and historian Georges Canguilhem, beginning in works and lectures of 1975, Foucault employs this term specifically to avoid three other dominant terms in the history of political philosophy: organism, machine, and structure. The uniqueness of Foucault’s approach to the nature of power is that he combines both biological and technical forms in explaining its evolutionary path, which becomes more multiple and dispersed throughout modern societies, and which differentiates its concept from the idea of mechanism that belongs to modern science after Descartes. Thus, the major result of Cartesianism was “to rationalize” the idea of mechanism as a knowledge that is particular to the human species, and not as a biological capacity that is found to be present in most living organisms. In turn, this was responsible for anthropomorphizing the relation between machine and organism, introducing a fundamental dehiscence between these forms, one that continues to be played out today in determining the relations between humans, animals, and cybernetic (or digitalized) creatures.
In addition to the major works and lectures of Foucault that appear between 1975-1979, from the first volume of The History of Sexuality to the lecture course on The Birth of Biopolitics, in this seminar we will also examine the critical reception of Foucault’s description of power and its biopolitical dispositifs in other thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Roberto Esposito.
Each 3 hour seminars will consist of lecture presentation, in the first hour, followed by close examination and discussion of the assigned readings.
Gregg Lambert
(born 1961) is an American philosopher and literary theorist, who writes on Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, critical theory and film, the contemporary university, and especially on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the founding director of Syracuse University Humanities Center, where he currently holds a research appointment as Dean’s Professor of Humanities.
As Co-Founder of The Perpetual Peace Project, a partnership between the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC), the International Peace Institute (IPI), the United Nations University, Slought Foundation, Syracuse University, Utrecht University, and the Treaty of Utrecht Foundation, Lambert is engaged in bringing together theorists and practitioners in revisiting 21st century prospects for international peace, on the basis of Immanuel Kant's foundational essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (1795). He is the producer of a film by the same name, which consists of a series of short videos of several philosophers, sociologists, and diplomats speaking about peace. Lambert also serves on the Advisory Board of the Histories of Violence project.
His most recent book Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) deals with the history of political philosophy's "conceptual personae" (Deleuze): the friend, the enemy, the stranger, the migrant, and the refugee or survivor.
- 2017 Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae, ISBN 9781517901004.
- 2016 Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, ISBN 9781474413916.
- 2012 In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism, ISBN 9780816678037.
- 2008 On the (New) Baroque, ISBN 1888570970.
- 2006 Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, ISBN 9781847060099.
- 2004 The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, ISBN 9780826466488.
- 2002 The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, ISBN 9780826459558.
- 2001 Report to the Academy (re: The New Conflict of Faculties), ISBN 9781888570618.
Es wird ein Reader zur Verfügung gestellt mit folgender Literatur:
Agamben, Giorgio (2009) What is an Apparatus? Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Campbell, Timothy (2006) “Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito, diacritics 36.2: 2–22.
Canguilhem, Georges (2008), Knowledge of Life, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers. New York: Fordham.
Deleuze, Gilles (1992) “What is a dispositif?” in Armstrong, Timothy, ed. Michel Foucault Philosopher. New York: Routledge.
__________ (2006) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. New York: Semiotexte.
__________ (1995) “Postscript on Control Society,” Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 177-182.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Esposito, Roberto (2015) Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought. Fordham UP.
Foucault, Michel (1976) L’Histoire de la sexualité. Vol I: La Volonté de savoir Paris: Gallimard.
___________ (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
___________ (1980a) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. __________
(1980b) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.
___________ (1994a) Dit et écrits, vol. 4. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
___________ (1994b) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth., Vol 1. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press.
___________ (2003) “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the College of France 1975-1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Allessandro Fontana. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ___________ (2004a) Abnormal: Lectures at the College of France 1975-1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Allessandro Fontana. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
___________ (2004b) Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.
__________ (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College of France, 1977-1978, ed. Michael Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
__________ (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College of France, 1978-1979, ed. Michael Senellart, Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Lambert, Gregg (2018) “Biopower and Biopolitics” Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary Criticism and Theory.
Pasquinelli, Matteo (2015) “What an Apparatus is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault, Canguilhem, and Goldstein,” Parrehesia, no. 22, 79-89.
Cary Wolfe (2018) “Posthumanism Thinks the Political: A Genealogy for Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics.” Journal of Posthuman Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2017, 117-135.
