Ed Miliband Staring Into Space

http://visualcultureblog.com/2012/01/staring-into-space/ This is an amazing photo of Ed Miliband (UK leader of the Labour Party) staring into space, at a visit to a school. The blog, Visual Culture have analysed it better than I could, so I recommend reading their post here. It reminds me of Ed’s brother David, being attacked by confetti and caught on [...]

Foucault’s Brain

A huge sculpture of Michel Foucault’s head has been incorporated into the construction of a Dutch Nursing Home: ‘The building of the De Burcht residential nursing home has the form of a panopticon. From the open well on the first floor there is an all-round view of the galleries on the upper floors where the [...]

What I Hate About Paglia

This is an article by Camille Paglia about Michel Foucault and the Post-structuralists called ‘What I hate about Foucault’. I am not going to critique it yet. I just want you to read it yourselves, and tell me what you think. I never met or saw Foucault in the  flesh. (He died in 1984.) My [...]

Michel Foucault on Childhood

Q: Assuming that we aren’t doomed, chained to sex as our destiny: and from childhood as they say… MF: Exactly; look at what’s happening in the case of children. They say the life of children is their sexual life. From the bottle to puberty, that’s all they talk about. Behind the desire to learn to [...]

Do Not Ask Me

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.” -Michel Foucault I don’t know what to do about Foucault. The real one. The one who wrote ‘in order to have no face’ . The one who [...]

Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls #5 Post/Modern

  Nothing is fundamental. That is what is so interesting about the analysis of society. That is why nothing irritates me as much as these inquiries – which are by definition meptaphysical – on the foundations of power in a society or the self-institution of a society, etc. These are not fundamental phenomena. There are [...]

Pathologise This.

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. ” — Michel Foucault   ‘Gay people are not sexually interested in straights…The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try to [...]

Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls: #2 Liberty Costs

“If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.” Michel Foucault, The History Of Sexuality, Vol 1 A  beautiful day is breaking in Paris.  A sleepy-eyed girl comes [...]

Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls

Imagine if Foucault had had a son (or a daughter)… In this 1980 Interview with Michael Bess, a very lucky and I expect rather nervous graduate student from San Francisco, the great cutter of knowledge himself gave us a little insight into what kind of parent he might have been… Question: Let me give a [...]

Mantra

‘Nothing is fundamental. That is what is so interesting in the analysis of society. That is why nothing irritates me as much as these inquiries – which are by definition meptaphysical – on the foundations of power in a society or the self-institution of a society, etc. These are not fundamental phenomena. There are only [...]