Stanford University Press Blog

The Oppenheimer Enigma

Illuminating legend and doubt

JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY

1945— J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves and others at the Trinity test site. By United States Army Signal Corps - Image taken from Project Gutenberg and cropped and saved to a more appropriate file format. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

Robert Oppenheimer's tortured personality has given rise to several misunderstandings that have led to him becoming a legendary figure, as evidenced by Christopher Nolan's recent film. I try to demystify three of them, based on the analyses of my recent book, The War That Must Not Occur », Stanford University Press, 2023.

  

1. The work on the U.S. bomb justified by the hypothetical future Nazi bomb

It is undeniable that, as early as 1939 at least, the need to outpace Hitler played an important role in the decision to set up the Manhattan Project. After all, it was a German, Otto Hahn, who, in January 1939, succeeded for the first time in achieving the fission of the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons.

However, by the end of 1942, there was no Nazi bomb on the horizon anymore. Led by Werner Heisenberg, the German project had been on the wrong track from the start, and it was better suited to building a uranium pile capable of releasing energy than a bomb intended to explode and destroy nations. This failure can be explained in part by the fact that many of Central Europe's most prominent scientists, being Jews, had fled to America, and some of the greatest had joined the Manhattan Project! Heisenberg’s late admission that he didn’t really want to make a bomb remains a moot point.

The Charms of the Polemical

Negativity and the cultural legacy of the 1960s

BRUCE ROBBINS

Photograph of Matthew Arnold by Elliott & Fry , circa 1883 - National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain,  via Wikimedia Commons

When the publication date of  my new book Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction » was announced, a number of people got in touch with me on social media and told me that what caught their interest was the word “polemical” in the subtitle. I hope they will not be disappointed by the modest degree of belligerence they will find in it. The book is also meant as an introduction to cultural theory.

(People also said they loved the cover. Thank you, David Drummond! Your brilliant design is better than the book underneath it.)

I start from the premise that fighting is already ongoing. As the US goes into the season of midterm elections, no one needs to be told that the Culture Wars of the last century are still very much alive. What is more surprising is that attacks on teachers for teaching seemingly uncontroversial matters, like the atrocity of slavery, have found an echo among literary critics themselves, some of whom accuse their colleagues of being too negative about our cultural heritage (“our” could have irritated quotation marks around it), and too negative in general.

How negative is too negative? There is a lot to fight over.

The negativity is often blamed on the heritage of the 60s movements that championed  race, gender, and sexuality rights. Those movements largely demanded greater representation in the name of an expanded democracy; logically enough, they were not always respectful of a past in which they and theirs had gone unrepresented, or worse. But there is much more to say on the subject. Methodologically speaking, I would argue, the broadest and most influential legacy of the 60s was not “theory” but the imperative to put texts into their historical context, and from the perspective of those who assume that the great texts of the past are timeless, contextualization will look like negativity—like tearing those texts down, judging the past by the moral standards of the present, showing it disrespect.  This is not entirely false. On the other hand, a great deal of entirely “positive” or “appreciative” criticism has been enabled and encouraged by “identity politics”—it is perhaps not seen as appreciative only because of the particular social content that is being appreciated.

American Philosophical Association Eastern Conference 2022

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the APA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors and highlights from the last year of Philosophy at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

APA Eastern Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Philosophy titles with discount code S22XAPAE-FM, through our virtual exhibit ». Please enjoy a sampling of some of our recent titles below.

 

Badiou by Badiou »

ALAIN BADIOU, TRANSLATED BY BRUNO BOSTEELS

In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics.

A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this new student-friendly work is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier.

American Philosophical Association Eastern Conference 2021

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the APA  exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors and highlights from the last year of Philosophy at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

2021 Philosophy and Critical Theory Catalog

From the Blog Archive

APA Eastern Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Philosophy titles with discount code S21XAPA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

Little Heart-Shaped Pills

The fiction of love potions and the reality of neurotechnology.

BRIAN D. EARP and JULIAN SAVULESCU

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

We're pleased to present this excerpt from Chapter 4 of Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships» by Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu.

If you’ve been alive sometime in the last thousand years, you will be familiar with the idea of a love potion—a magical liquid that when quaffed or applied makes a person fall passionately in love. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a love potion is introduced as a weapon in the marital war between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. To humiliate Titania, Oberon drizzles juice distilled from a “love-in-idleness” flower on to her eyelids as she sleeps, causing her to “madly dote” upon the first creature she sees—the donkey-headed Bottom. The flower’s magical juice also causes a tumult for the play’s mortal lovers; administered by the mischievous Puck, it makes Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with the formerly spurned Helena, much to the dismay of Hermia, who was in the process of eloping with Lysander.

After many chases through the enchanted wood, all is set to rights, as this is after all a comedy. In Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, a love potion is substituted for a death potion to avoid the demise of the romantic leads—but not until Act 3, as this is Wagner.

In both stories love potions force characters to assume emotions that are not their own. In many popular depictions, the effects of a love potion are often undesirable, even if the person deliberately seeks it out. Consider the 1960s chart-topper “Love Potion No. 9” by the legendary songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In this song, the narrator, a self-described “flop with chicks,” visits Madame Ruth, who doses him with a black, turpentine-smelling potion brewed up in her kitchen sink. He’s suddenly disoriented and starts impulsively smooching everything and everyone he sees. This includes, as you might remember, a police officer who subsequently smashes his precious “little bottle.” Presumably, none of this improved the narrator’s luck with “chicks.”

What Remains of Francisco Franco

When the personal becomes necropolitical.

HANS RUIN

Photograph of Valle de los Caídos. "62016-Valley-of-the-Fallen" by xiquinhosilva. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY 2.0

 

We're pleased to present this adapted excerpt from Chapter 4 of Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness» by Hans Ruin.

In recent years the political fabric of Spain has been torn apart by a struggle over the location of a heap of human bones: the remains of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The current left-wing government had promised that it would move Franco’s remains from the spectacular tomb-church dug hundred meters into a cliff in the mountains north of Madrid in the Valle de los Caídos,  the “Valley of the Fallen.” Franco himself arranged this monument as an attempt to unite the nation after a brutal civil war. The bodies of over 30,000 soldiers and civilians from across the political spectrum, including workers on the site, were interred in the same tomb, at the center of which he chose to rest himself. Until very recently he laid there alongside his main ideologues, under an enormous cross coming out of the mountain. But his remains were moved under guard in October of last year. In an attempt to restore him post-mortem to civilian status, his coffin was taken to the family crypt in a cemetery near Madrid. The Franco family was fiercely opposed to this move, as were large parts of Spanish society. However, to the majority in a country where many families still carry painful memories from the war, the persistence of this fascist monument was simply intolerable, a “moral insult,” in the words of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The commemorated dead need not be political or military heroes in order to have a necropolitical significance.

Spain is a country where such necropolitical struggles continue to dominate public life. The question of how to care for the dead, where to place the dead and how to commemorate them in death, is an issue that simply will not go away. If earlier generations of sociologists believed that this kind of culture of death and mourning belonged to an earlier stage of human political life and civilization, we are continuously reminded of how it persists. The dead will not leave the public space. In my book Being with the Dead» I deploy a broad range of philosophical tools from phenomenology, deconstruction, and cultural memory studies to describe and understand the inner workings of what I there describe as a fundamental trait of human social existence: we live not only with the living but also with the dead.

On the surface this is perhaps obvious, when we look at all the ways that we continue to engage with the dead, to remember them, to worship but also to struggle with them and their legacies. What they have left behind, in the form of books, artworks, cultural artifacts, and constitutions, continue to guide how we live and understand reality and ourselves. The dead are always with us, from the most intimate family archives to the monuments for our nations’ founders and cultural heroes. Being with the dead is ultimately what makes it possible for us to occupy historical time. If it was not for our relation to the dead, history would lose much of its meaning: The past is really a domain of those who have been.

Between Political Economy and Political Theology – Part 2

Martijn Konings and Adam Kotsko Discuss Neoliberalism

by MARTIJN KONINGS and ADAM KOTSKO

CC0 via Pixabay

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present the second part of a conversation between Martijn Konings, author of Capital and Time, and Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism's Demons.

Adam Kotsko:

You mention that “neoliberalism has a unique capacity to roll challenges to its mode of operation into its mode of operation,” which is certainly true. And I think that my theory of neoliberalism, as an extreme vision of the “trap of freedom” that we see in both Christian culture and previous models of capitalism, accounts for why that is possible—there is always a fresh pool of people to blame. Who would have thought, for instance, that pursuing the American Dream of home ownership would turn out to imperil the world economy? But once that happened, the Tea Party movement arose to let us know that those subprime borrowers were to blame for everything and deserved no government assistance of any kind. In that respect, Trump is in perfect harmony with the neoliberal ethos, as his followers come up with all kinds of improbable “you should have thought of that” scenarios to scapegoat people. And these choices are always moralized—I remember one legislator, during the attempted repeal of Obamacare, asking aloud why we should support those “bad people” who were so inattentive to their health.

These moralizing dynamics seem to be absent from your analysis, and I suspect that might be why other dynamics, such as racism, misogyny, and nationalism do not really figure in it. Your book is brilliant on questions of risk and state entanglement in markets, but it all seems very bloodless—as though a figure like Hayek embraces market neoliberalism simply out of a recognition that the world is open-ended and unknowable. But we know that all the great neoliberal figures were in fact deeply socially conservative and that part of the reason they found such ready allies in right-wing parties was that the market was supposed to be an efficient method for reproducing and even entrenching social and political hierarchy—and, in my terms, for finding ways to blame subaltern populations for their own position, which supposedly results from their own “free choice.”

More generally, I get from your work a sense that there was something necessary about the emergence of neoliberalism, as though it simply fits with the way the world is (according to Luhmann, for instance). I don’t see it that way at all—I see it as a very skillful political campaign that took advantage of a crisis within the Keynesian model but did not supply the only possible, or even the most plausible, solution to the unexpected problems that were emerging.

Martijn Konings:

You’re definitely right to say that the sociology of class, race, gender, etc. don’t play a major role in my book. In part that’s a choice to focus on the way capital and neoliberalism work at a more abstract level and to examine them through the register of economic and financial policymaking. But my specific focus is bound up with a specific concern, namely, to understand the driving force behind neoliberalism’s relentless need (and ability) to blame external factors for the damage that it wreaks. To my mind, the issue is not just that there is always a new pool of people to blame; it is what sustains this logic of blaming.

Between Political Economy and Political Theology – Part 1

Martijn Konings and Adam Kotsko Discuss Neoliberalism

MARTIJN KONINGS and ADAM KOTSKO

June 1, 2017 – President Trump delivers a speech to a crowd in the Rose Garden of the White House. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present the first part of a conversation between Martijn Konings, author of Capital and Time, and Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism's Demons.

Adam Kotsko:

I have just finished your very interesting book, and I think we have much to discuss. When you suggested this conversation, you mentioned disagreements—and I am sure we will find plenty of those—but my first impression is that there is a certain homology between our projects. Fundamentally, we are both responding to simplistic and ineffective critiques of neoliberalism by trying to discern how neoliberalism makes sense on its own terms.

Martijn Konings:

To kick this off, let me just start with two questions:

I’d first like to ask you to explain a bit more why you feel the Trump presidency is so obviously an expression of neoliberalism’s decline. You rely on Davies’s understanding and periodization of neoliberalism, which I feel over-identifies the essence of neoliberalism with the kind of rationalization of economic governance through things like “new public management” under Third Way regimes and sees the Trump regime as too “irrational” to qualify as neoliberal. To my mind, such a perspective remains too rooted in a concern with rational-discursive legitimation and does not fully register the affective aspect of political mobilization in a deeper way.

I get a lot out of your emphasis on the persistent force of political theology. But to my mind, it leaves a certain ambiguity. Does that persistence mean that political theology should be taken as an explanatory template? Or is the point that we should step up our efforts to criticize the theological from a more committed secular perspective?

Adam Kotsko:

Neoliberalism is not necessarily in decline in practice. Trump's deviation from neoliberal "best practices" have been fairly marginal, and they tend to occur in the areas that Republicans are most willing to push back on. And globally speaking, few of the so-called "populist" leaders seem to have much interest in breaking with the market-based economy or moving toward more state-led models. This fits with what I say about Trump as a parody or heretic within the neoliberal framework rather than a break—and sometimes heresies can become respectable alternate versions! Look what happened with the heresy of Lutheranism within Christianity, for example. I can see what you mean when you say I identify the 90s version of neoliberalism as normative in a typological sense—but it is far from the only version of neoliberalism that has been concerned with discursive legitimation. If anything, the combative neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher were even more concerned with legitimating themselves, simply because they were proposing radical changes. What's so puzzling in our moment, I think, is that the remaining "classic" neoliberals (moderate Democrats, Blairites, etc.) no longer have any real popular purchase, and the right-wing reaction legitimates itself—misleadingly, as usual—by distancing itself from the neoliberal policies it mostly continues to pursue. Neoliberalism as a principle of legitimation is on the decline, then, and I don't know how long it can go on like that. 

Bedeviled by Neoliberalism

Adam Kotsko, author of The Prince of This World, on why we are less free than we think we are.

By ADAM KOTSKO

Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for President, July 28, 2016. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Ever since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, neoliberalism has been an object of increasing debate and critique. Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has reshaped public policy and arguably every area of life on the model of market competition, which it presents as the most authentic expression of human freedom. But the term itself has largely been the province of academic analysts, and it was arguably only in the wake of the contentious Democratic presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders that it entered the mainstream political lexicon. Still, the debate over neoliberalism has in many ways been a missed encounter. On the one hand, left-wing critics of neoliberalism have used the term, with varying degrees of precision, to characterize everything that is wrong and unjust in the political-economic system. On the other hand, mainstream liberals, far from defending neoliberalism, insist that it simply does not exist. We are faced with a bizarre situation wherein the ruling ideology of our age is either viewed as destructive or completely disavowed.

            This strange phenomenon points to the core question that drove my research in Neoliberalism’s Demons: if everyone either hates neoliberalism or denies that it exists, then why do people go along with it? I presuppose that the neoliberal order has been dominant for at least a generation (roughly since Thatcher and Reagan) and that it has had the destructive effects that its critics attribute to it—of which the Global Financial Crisis is only the most spectacular example—and ask how such a system could be regarded as legitimate and binding upon populations that have for the most part grown more materially insecure and politically disempowered under its sway.

A Critique of the Critique of Finance

Critics of neoliberal capitalism rarely recognize the productive power of speculation.

by MARTIJN KONINGS

CC0 via Pixabay.

If there is one theme that unites the various critiques of contemporary finance, it is the emphasis on its speculative character. Financial growth is said to be driven not by the logic of efficient markets, but rather by irrational sentiment, “animal spirits” that do not respect fundamental values.

Capital and Time » advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the interaction of speculative investments.

Emphasizing the role of volatility in contemporary capitalism (evident at the time of writing, as the stock market is experiencing a downturn) is important as an antidote to notions of market efficiency and equilibrium. But it is a mistake to think that it provides a sufficient basis for effective critique. Predictions regarding the limits or collapse of neoliberal finance have simply not enjoyed a good track record. Over and over, the contemporary financial system has proven capable of sustaining higher levels of speculative activity than anticipated. This has certainly been true of the past decade. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason is my attempt to make sense of this—that is, to understand what might be wrong or missing in the existing heterodox critique of speculation, and to advance a more accurate understanding of the role of uncertainty, risk, and speculation in contemporary capitalism.

At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value. Although “essentialist” (or “foundationalist”) modes of explanation have been under fire across the social sciences for several decades now, when it comes to the critique of finance they have had considerable staying-power: without a notion of real value, it often seems, we lose any objective standard against which to assess the speculative gyrations of capitalist markets.

At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value.

“What Are you Wearing?”

On aural sex and the mysterious disappearance of audio porn.

by DOMINIC PETTMAN

Public domain via pxhere.

You are feeling frisky.

You are home alone.

What do you do?

If your blood is pulsing with testosterone, the chances are that you will reach for the laptop and browse around. You will likely click until you find pixels arranged in such a way that an attractive face and body is convincingly simulated on the screen. This digital body is no doubt in a state of nakedness (or near undress) beckoning you with a come-hither expression. It may also be in the midst of being ravished by another two-dimensional body, playing the role of your proxy. Your eyes drink this image in, as you project yourself into the scene. If your system is more infused with estrogen, however, you are more likely to rely on imagination and memory; projecting erotic visions on the insides of your eyelids (even as there is an increasing chance you might succumb to the Internet’s infamous capacity to provide “porn on tap”).

We all have different libidinal triggers: olive skin, long eyelashes, bangs, freckles, cleavage, ribbons, stiletto heels, stockings, tattoos, abs, beards, and so on, ad infinitum. But the point is that most of these are visual. Given the modern privileging of sight (“seeing is believing”), we tend to neglect, or even forget altogether, that the ear can be one of our most sensitive erogenous zones. Indeed, psychoanalysts tell us that the ear is often the primary source of the libido, given that we are likely to hear things as children that excite and stimulate us. Even if we have no idea what these sounds are, they comprise the sonic gateways through which we enter the erotic realm of egoistic fantasy. As grown-ups, we may find particular voices to be “sexy.” And we certainly tend to find the noises produced by lovers to be a crucial element of arousal, during the torrid bedroom tango. But intriguingly, such sounds have slipped further and further away from our collective consciousness in the twenty-first century, as the Internet has absorbed and replaced previous media forms. Why is this?

Given the erotic power and potential of sound, why are there so few places online that cater to the ear?

Making Sense of Love

Much more than a feeling, love explains how we understand our world and each other.

by PAUL A. KOTTMAN

The Fall of Man, 1616. Painted by Hendrick Goltzius.

Over the past generation or so, with astonishing rapidity, widespread social opposition to same-sex marriage has evaporated in many parts of the world. Reliable and effective birth control has become increasingly available to individuals around the globe. Millions of women, in the past century, have gained the ability to safely and legally terminate a pregnancy at will. New reproductive technologies, along with new kinship formations, make the propagation of life and the raising of children seem less and less the result of sexual reproduction.

At the same time, in many places, we are living through one of the most profound social transformations in human history: the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. The tidal waves of political and philosophical feminism, and the critiques to which entrenched institutions of sexual domination are subjected, are being felt throughout society. Behind this lies the expanded social authority of lovemaking and “love-based” commitments, in our laws governing everything from marriage and domestic economic life, to the adoption of children, to our schools and medical practices. Virtually no social, civic or political institution is being left untouched by these vast changes.

The sheer pace of social change often outstrips our explanations for it.

In the face of ongoing violence, naked prejudice, social crisis, regressive politics and institutionalized oppression around the world—much of which arises in response to the developments just mentioned—we may hesitate to trumpet this list of achievements too loudly. Nevertheless, the immense social transformations just mentioned are real and vast.

Gender’s Postural Paradigm

On the sexual politics behind the upright man and his counterpoint: the inclining woman.

by ADRIANA CAVARERO

The Virgin and the Child with Saint Anne. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-19). Public domain.

Sexual and emotional inclination toward a person—for brevity’s sake, we’ll call it eros—stirs serious apprehension, above all among philosophers. They perceive it as a threat to the subject’s equilibrium—a deep quiver, a slippery slope. What they fear most of all are inclinations that are too impetuous and difficult to master. In the turbulent realm of eros, these include the inclination that turns to lust and other pleasures of the flesh—prominent among which is the alleged propensity of specifically female nature to lasciviousness.

In traditional ethics, this argument is often developed with particular passion, but it also appears in authors who would seem to be more open-minded. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the influential philosopher Pierre Proudhon, known for his innovative and revolutionary ideas, wrote some passages on this theme that are worthy of mention. In La pornacratie, ou les femmes dans les temps modernes he writes,

To speak of sexual relations, it is a law of nature in all animals that the female, incited by the instinct to have children, searches for a male in all manner of ways. Woman cannot escape this law. She is naturally more inclined to lasciviousness than man, first because her self is more fragile, such that liberty and intelligence struggle in her with less force against her animalistic inclinations, and secondly because love is the great, if not only, occupation of her life.

Despite his misogyny, or perhaps precisely because his prejudice does not spare even maternity, Proudhon’s words are ultimately thought-provoking. Following a widely accepted theory, Proudhon argues that love, with its pathologies and excesses, is essentially rooted in natural and animal phenomena related to sexual inclination, understood not as an orientation for a particular sex but as the instinct to have sex. He also suggests that, in women as in females of other species, this instinct is subordinated to the instinct for procreation. From this perspective, erotic and maternal inclinations spring from a core that is as imperious and indomitable as nature itself.

Speaking of the Devil

From his rebellious debut to modern day, the devil has always been a political figure.

by ADAM KOTSKO

A depiction of Satan being cast out of heaven, based on John Milton's Paradise Lost, engraved by Paul Gustave Doré, 1866. Public domain.

In the most recent presidential debate, Trump was unusually literal in demonizing his opponent, at one point calling Clinton “the devil.” While such rhetoric is foreign to presidential debates, it is commonplace in many conservative Christian communities, where liberal political leaders are often suspected of being the Antichrist. And while their readings of biblical prophecy are questionable at best, my research on the devil has convinced me that they are not completely on the wrong track: The devil has always been right at home in the political world.

The devil has always been right at home in the political world.

The title of my book, The Prince of This World, refers to an epithet that Jesus twice uses to describe the devil in the Gospel of John. It jumped out at me as a possible title because my project was to demonstrate that the devil was not solely a theological symbol, but also a political one. Though he is undoubtedly a rebellious prince, insubordinate to his rightful ruler, God, nonetheless he remains a prince.

It would be easy to dismiss this as mere imagery, but to do so would be to misunderstand the devil’s place within the worldview represented by the New Testament writings. The devil is of course not simply identical with human rulers, but he does engage in a rule that is not merely metaphorical or symbolic. In the world of the Gospels, he asserts control over individual human beings. As with most rulers, this control is mostly mediated through subordinates (demons), but on important occasions it can be more hands-on. For instance, in two of the Gospels (Luke and John) he personally possesses Judas Iscariot and incites him to betray Jesus.

5 Books in Honor of Foucault

Tomorrow is Foucault’s 90th birthday—mark the occasion by brushing up on his legacy.

 

Nearly three decades after his death Michel Foucault remains one of the most discussed thinkers in academia. Across the humanities and social sciences his work continues to be among the most cited, a distinction proportionate to the number of scholarly hats Foucault wore in life—including that of the philosopher, the historian, the social theorist, the philologist, and the literary critic. At the dawn of the millennium Le Monde declared his book, The Order of Things to be among its 100 Books of the Century—and more recently still, Buzzfeed listed Discipline and Punish as one of 15 College Books That Will Actually Change Your Life. His corpus, chiefly concerned with the inner workings of modern conceptions of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, continues to open minds and spur debate.

In honor of his 90^th birthday we’ve curated a list of books which, running a gamut of disciplines, tussle with Foucault’s legacy. The titles below critically investigate Foucault’s notions of religion, politics, and social life, engaging some of his signature concepts and his key influences and interlocutors along the way.

 

1

State Phobia and Civil Society »
The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault

by MITCHELL DEAN and KASPAR VILLADSEN

RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
Political theorists and academic heretics

Drawing on a series of Foucault’s lectures, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen explore a crucial question of contemporary political theory: how should we deal with state power? Common to Foucault’s various followers is an aversion to conventional forms of political organization—sympathies purportedly aligned with Foucault’s own antistatism. Yet, in pointing to the ambiguities of Foucault’s writings on the subject, State Phobia and Civil Society argues against the prevailing academic fashion that pits itself against the state. In so doing they aim to close the gap between the reductively radical “Saint Foucault” of grad school lore and the actual, political Foucault, restoring to him the nuance and complexity that his thought warrants.

ALSO SEE: Mitchell Dean’s piece, Rebel, Rebel?, comparing the legacies of Michel Foucault and David Bowie.

“I can only describe State Phobia in terms usually reserved for bestsellers: un-put-downable, a cause of sleepless nights.”

—Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana