The ‘linguistic turn’ and Michel Foucault

Core Readings:

Susan A. Crane, 'Language, Literary Studies, and Historical Thought', in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maze ed., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (2002), pp. 319-336.

Michel Foucault, 'We other Victorians', The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction, Introduction.Michel, Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, (1983)pp. 208–226. (https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.power/)

Michel Foucault, 'Why is it so important to think?' (1981), in Michel Foucault: Power, ed. by James D. Faubion (1994). (another online version: https://monoskop.org/images/1/15/Foucault_Michel_1981_1982_Is_It_Really_Important_to_Think_An_Interview.pdf)

Please watch online the famous debate 'Human Nature: Justice versus Power' between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault from November 1971 at Eindhoven University of Technology. Moderated by the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders, the debate explored whether a universal human nature exists and how societal power shapes human freedom. A full text transcript is available on Chomsky's Official Archive.Link opens in a new window

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE

Further Readings:

Brown, Callum G., Postmodernism for Historians (2013)

Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (2004)

Canning, Kathleen, Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience

Signs 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 368-404.

Downing, Lisa, A Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (2008).

Gutting, Gary, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005)

Taylor, Chloe, Routledge Guidebook to Foucault's The History of Sexuality (2016)

Seminar/essay questions:

1. What does Foucault mean by knowledge/power? Is the concept still useful in today's world?

2. What unites the different approaches in the 'linguistic turn'?

3. Is human nature universal?

4. Is history writing simply story writing?

Gobbets:

1. 'The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. (Chomsky-Foucault debate, 1971)

2. 'Stories have to be invented' they are not found.' (Hayden White, Metahistory, 1973).

3 'Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1968)

4. 'We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.' (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1973)