This chapter explores how poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault redefine the role of concepts in philosophy. It argues that the poststructuralists’ central claim is that the key moment of thinking does not occur with the use of concepts but with the dynamic processes by which concepts are constituted. The chapter begins by setting out the poststructuralists’ criticisms of what they see as a Platonism in traditional accounts of the concept, arguing that such accounts presuppose rather than explain the meaningfulness of our concepts. It then explores antecedents to the poststructuralists in French philosophy, before examining the poststructuralist shift from the discovery of concepts to their creation and reconfiguration. It concludes by analysing Derrida’s notion of différance, Deleuze’s problem-solution framework, and Foucault’s genealogical method to illustrate how poststructuralism challenges traditional accounts of the concept.

This chapter takes its departure from the views expressed by Newtonian humanism, post-Newtonianism, and para-humanism that shape different conceptualizations of power as an instrument of calculable control in small worlds and as a source of incalculable protean power in large ones (section 1). By way of summary, it shows how both kinds of power have operated in the domains of risk and uncertainty in finance, nuclear crisis, and global warming/AI discussed in chapters 4–6 (section 2) and in another ten cases. As the main source of the modern conception of control power Thomas Hobbes articulates a rigid, authoritarian theory of language that fits into a Newtonianism formalized about forty years after Hobbes had published Leviathan. Niels Bohr’s post-Newtonian perspective and its permissive core construct of complementarity differ profoundly from Hobbes’s insistence on the necessity of a sovereign’s total control of language. During the last half century updates of these two positions by social theorist Michel Foucault and physicist-feminist Karen Barad have clarified further the yawning gap that separates them (section 3). The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Machiavelli’s understanding of fortuna and the potentialities of protean power (section 4).

This chapter begins with Ben Golder’s reflection on the meaning and stakes of genealogical histories that have prevailed in some quarters of the historiography of the twentieth century. Golder observes that the field of inquiry has generally moved on from “vindicatory” accounts of human rights politics to ones that demystify and problematize the evolution of those politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But Golder insists that there is no one way of problematizing dominant stories, and genealogy opens up a project of locating other perspectives from around the world and other voices in the making of human rights norms and politics.

When Boulez returned to France in the mid 1970s, he assumed a number of significant roles in French cultural life, setting up IRCAM, forming the Ensemble Intercontemporain and assuming a professorship at the Collège de France. While undoubtedly a practical man, he was also interested in theorising about music and its relationship with the other arts, its place in culture and its philosophical underpinnings. The early years after his return to France brought him into the orbit of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, three of the most active intellectual figures in France of the 1970s and all four of them were to participate in the seminar Le Temps musical, which Boulez organised as an IRCAM event in 1978. This chapter considers Boulez’s contact with these three intellectuals, the seminar on musical time which brought them together and the small body of letters they exchanged in the years that followed.

Marcus’ Meditations have been the object of special attention for their literary form, structure, and style as well as for the function and destination that the author ascribed to them. Since they lack a precise plan and present some formal characteristics, the most important of which are the use of the second person, i.e. self-reference, conciseness, and repetitiveness, most scholars have concluded that the work was intended only for the emperor’s reading and use. This chapter provides, after an overview of the scholarly trends that have promoted such an exegesis of the form and function of the Meditations, a reconstruction of the relationship between formal elements and philosophical content follows and a terminological analysis of a sample of the text, concluding with a proposal to revise the widespread belief that the Meditations were conceived by the author only for his own education and spiritual improvement.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

This chapter considers the influential argument that there is a formal and substantive complicity between disciplinary surveillance and the novel, specifically the realist novel. Foucauldian readings of literature argue that the nineteenth-century realist novel functioned as a kind of disciplinary power, acting as a complement to the spatial technologies of a disciplinary society. This argument has not been readily acknowledged by the spatial turn in literary studies, but this chapter revisits the disciplinary theme in Dickens’ David Copperfield and compares that novel to Thackeray’s Pendennis. Finding very different treatments of space, surveillance, and the self leads to a reassessment of Foucauldian criticism and the idea that the novel is complicit with disciplinary spatiality. As Bildungsromans, Pendennis and David Copperfield have many similarities, but whereas Dickens plays up the themes of disciplinary introspection and an internalised form of carceral surveillance, Thackeray’s hero remains subject only to a worldly form of discipline, including the business of literature itself. Thackeray moreover suggests that prisons are a microcosm of society rather than that the techniques of the prison extend to a disciplinary spatiality. The chapter concludes that literature exhibits and exemplifies different kinds of spatiality and different versions of the carceral imaginary.

This chapter considers Shelley’s diverse and complicated reflections on death in his prose and poetry. Shelley constantly interrogates and reads death as a matter of social, poetical, and political concern. It has no single systematic structure or meaning for him, and its conceptual irreducibility evokes the degree to which Shelley studied it with rigorous openness in order to maintain a theoretical scepticism regarding the many rhetorical uses and abuses of mortality.

The falsificationist proposes a model of scientific reasoning in which deductive logic alone is used. This chapter examines a logical gap in scientific reasoning that applies even to deductive arguments used in falsifying general hypotheses. Drawing experimental predictions from general hypotheses requires additional assumptions, and the logic of falsifying arguments does not determine whether it is the hypothesis under test or these additional (auxiliary) assumptions that should be considered false. This chapter considers the treatment of this “problem of underdetermination” by Pierre Duhem, and how it can be applied to an experiment performed by Léon Foucault to test a theory about the physical nature of light. The chapter also compares Duhem’s discussion of the problem of underdetermination with W. V. O. Quine’s much-discussed underdetermination thesis. Appeals to underdetermination play important roles in many ongoing debates, making this chapter important for much of the material to come.

This chapter explores the critiques of modern liberal democracy presented by Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. Both thinkers challenge the foundational premises of liberal democracy, questioning the role of the individual citizen as a political agent. Foucault, through his concept of power, challenged the view of the modern individual as a free political agent. For Schmitt, the rivalry between friend and foe is so deep that it politicizes all other areas. In his view, antagonism between communities is the driving force of political life. The analysis extends to Bruno Latour, who challenges the dualistic cosmology inherent in modern democracy. Latour proposes a secular monistic cosmology, blurring distinctions between Nature/Culture, individuals and objects. He criticizes the reliance on external facts and on the separation between subject and object. Latour proposes the mother tongue as a basis for commonsense, but unlike the perception of liberal democracy, it does not rely on a scientific epistemology of cause and effect or objectivity. The chapter contends that the decay of democratic practices and the widening gap between democratic ideals and realities may necessitate novel imaginaries.

The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

This chapter focuses on three Virgilian entrances to the underworld – Cumae (Aen. 6.237–42), Ampsanctus (Aen. 7. 563–71) and Tainaron (G. 4.464-470). Using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia (other space) the author argues that these three spaces legitimate multiple forms of religious knowledge, which are, however, linked to the progressive imposition of Augustan authority.

For much of history, from the dawn of Greek historiography to the postmodern 1970s, genealogy has been synonymous with continuity of origins and blood identity, and therefore closely connected with the concepts of the classic and the canon. Yet, during the last half century, specially thanks to the Nietzschean and Foucauldian philosophical deployment, it has shed its narrative garb to become an agent of discontinuity, and thus the nemesis of the classic and the canon. Many scholars have analyzed the modern development of genealogies after Nietzsche’s alleged foundational statement and its Foucauldian reception. But none of them has provided a systematic history of the trajectory of this concept, from antiquity to the present. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by providing a history of the concept of genealogy and its associated ideas, delving specifically into its historiographical uses, and connecting it to the four previous concepts discussed in the book. I will, specifically, emphasize its polysemy, try to locate what has remained and what has changed in this long trajectory, and explain the (only recently) radically opposed nature (nemesis) between the concepts of genealogy and canon – and the implications that this opposition brings to historiography.

Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

Michel Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century, the species became a population and became subject to political management. Foucault’s claim defines the political stakes of this book, whose point of departure is the loss of a theological ground for the species concept. As species become targets of political power, they become mutable and historically contingent. The book argues that a result is that species come to be identified with aesthetic categories and with symptomatic or unmotivated behaviors.