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6 - The Cosmoecological Workshop: Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer
- Edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, University of Nottingham, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, University of Warwick, Maddalena Tacchetti, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Ecological Reparation
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 28 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2023, pp 104-116
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Summary
Introduction: a metaphysical catastrophe
And suddenly the world began to quake. The ground trembled. Soils liquified under the smooth covers of asphalt. Modern infrastructures were bent, dented, upended. Buildings moved to the rhythm of their crumbling dance. Those inside ran out, when they could. Others succumbed to the collapse. The rumbling noise filled the air. Amidst the turmoil, hundreds of metres of coastline fell off a cosmic cliff, dropping vertically by over half a metre. The Earth itself trembled, shaken, literally knocked off its axis. Days have been shorter ever since. The Pacific Ocean shrivelled a little. And Japan, whose northeastern region of Tohoku was closest to the epicentre, was moved 13 feet closer to North America. With a magnitude of 9,1 Mw, it was the biggest earthquake to have struck the archipelago, and only the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. And yet it only took six minutes. Six. The planetary blink of an eye, making it present that most things happen in the break, through the cracks, with the tides of time, through the resonance of events: ‘point of view on a point of view, displacements of perspective, differentiation of difference’ (Deleuze, 2004: 200). For indeed, the earthquake that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 turned out to be but a prelude, a foreshock of its own, a call to another kind of intensity whose response washed it all away. This was what seismologists call an underwater megathrust earthquake – a name that could belong just as well to geology as to poetry – and the 39-metre tsunami that it summoned flooded the entire area, ravaging it all in a 200-square mile range. The dark wave truly devoured everything: almost 20,000 people died, countless other critters saw their lives brought to a sudden end, and over 45,000 buildings were destroyed. Among those who survived, 4.4 million households were left without electricity, over 340,000 people were displaced, and suffered from food, water, shelter, medicine, and fuel shortages for a long period of time afterwards, even when considerable material efforts were deployed to restore infrastructures in the wake.
The tsunami precipitated ripples of its own.
2 - Foucault's Subjectivities
- from PART I - GOING AFTER FOUCAULT
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- By Monica Greco, University of London, Martin Savransky, University of London
- Edited by Lisa Downing, University of Birmingham
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- Book:
- After Foucault
- Published online:
- 30 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 07 June 2018, pp 31-45
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Summary
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
Michel Foucault, ‘Truth, power, self’Introduction: Inheriting Foucault, Again
How to inherit Foucault? To take up the challenge of thinking the concept of subjectivity after Foucault is, first of all, to recognize that while his work remains widely debated, reinterpreted, and often critiqued, it has constituted a veritable event in the history of modern thought, in the sense of marking the difference between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. His analyses wrested the concept of subjectivity from the dominant problematics in which it had been hitherto situated, transformed its trajectory, and reinvented the problems to which it may constitute a response. Stated in the broadest terms, Foucault proposed a genealogy of subjectivity in explicit contrast to the project of developing a philosophy of the subject as ‘the foundation for all knowledge and the principle of all signification’. This move reversed the relation that had traditionally been posited between subjectivity and the possibility of knowledge. Thereafter, subjectivity became intelligible as the product, rather than the origin, of historically specific concepts and theories embedded in the working of normative institutions. Beyond this, as we will go on to argue, Foucault's engagement with the problem of subjectivity effected an even more profound displacement, by historicizing the privilege of knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) as a modality of relation to the truth in the constitution of human beings as subjects. It is in light of these profound displacements that engaging with the concept of subjectivity in modern thought today – whether to endorse, interpret, criticize, or transform it – is to become, directly or indirectly, faithfully or unfaithfully, Foucault's heirs. Our aim in this chapter is to explore what inheriting Foucault may involve, what it may demand of those who think and write about subjectivity after him.
And yet, have we not inherited Foucault already? Have we not already learned the lessons that stemmed from his historical and philosophical inquiries into subjectivity?