Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France (Spring 2011)

STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France

Spring Semester 2011

*Mar. 15, Security, Territory, Population, 191-361, Hyunkyoung Cho

[Fig 1] Etienne Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, projecting by magic lantern, in Paris, 1798.

[Fig 2] James Gillray, A Phantasmagoria 5, January 1803, image: 279 x 245 mm, With permission of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford (Tate Britain Exhibition “Gothic Nightmares, Feb-May 2006) http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gothicnightmares/rooms/room5_works.htm

Phantasmagoria Show: The Bordering of “A Counter-Conduct”

• The five forms (border elements) of counter-conduct;

the ascetic, the communal, the mystic, the scriptural, the eschatological.

1. The meaning of a conduct/conduction

The sense of “a conduct” (une conduite) embraces the activity by which some conduct others; the way in which individuals conduct themselves within this form of “conduct.” The conduction involves the process for the practice of conducting; “the process of producing conduct for the practice of truth.” (193)

2. To identify some of the points of resistance, some of the forms of attack and counter-attack that appeared within the field of the pastorate:

-the correlation between conduct and counter-conduct

-the intoxication of religious behavior

-the nullification of the world of the law

-the disorder against the pastorate

-the dissidence.

3. The five forms of counter-conduct

1) asceticism: as a challenge of the exercise of the self on the self:

2) community: there may be the principle of absolute equality between all members of the community; all individuality is only illusion, and all appetites are legitimate. (211)

3) mysticism: the privileged status of an experience that by definition escapes pastoral power; Ignorance is a knowing, and knowledge has the very form of ignorance. (212)

4) Scripture; the return to the texts; Reading is a spiritual acts that puts the faithful in the presence of God’s word and which consequently finds its law and guarantee in this inner illumination. Reading the text given by God to man, the reader sees the very words of Gods and his understanding of it, even when confused, is nothing other that What God wanted to reveal of Himself to man. (213)

5) eschatological beliefs; after all, the other way of disqualifying the pastor’s role is to claim that the times are fulfilled or in the process of being fulfilled, and that God will return or is returning to gather his flock. He will be the true shepherd. (214)

4. The bordering

-The counter-conduct forms border-elements re-utilized, re-implanted, and taken up again in one or another direction.

-The border-element is a mode of re-implantation of the counter-conduct to utilize it and re-insert it in its own system through the bordering.

-The bordering (as struggle/dissidence) is not conducted in the form of absolute exteriority, but rather in the form of the permanent use of tactical elements that are pertinent in the anti-pastoral struggle. (215)

-It is to find the inner depth and background of the governmentality; it is not a question of undertaking anything like an endogenous history of power that develops on the basis of itself in a sort of paranoiac and narcissistic madness. Rather, the point of view of power is a way of identifying intelligible relations between elements that are external to each other. (214)