In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Linus Recht about his article “After Desire: Foucault’s Ethical Critique of Psychological Man and the Foucauldian Ethos of the Internet Age,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discussed Foucault’s critique of the psychological self and his search for a form of selfhood that would allow for continual reinvention and the discovery of new pleasures; how a reading of Platonic psychology demonstrates the weakness of Foucault’s critique of the psychological self as a historical construct; how contemporary social media has translated Foucault’s ethics of the self into reality; and how the ubiquity of mobile phones and similar devices in our everyday life, particularly the way that they subject us to a constant stream of distracting stimuli, suggests that Foucault’s notion of what the self could be might actually be a recipe for misery. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.
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In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Kyle Baasch about his article “Critical Theory in the Flesh: Adorno and Foucault in San Francisco,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discussed how Foucault’s aversion to Marxism relates to his notion of the individual as endlessly transfiguring itself through acts of creative self-invention; how Adorno interprets the freedom of the subject within the context of consumer culture and exchange society; the influence of Adorno’s experience as a heartbroken lover on his conception of happiness, particularly in Minima Moralia; how Adorno’s notion of happiness relates to the conception of harmony that Foucault criticizes; and the extent to which the two thinkers can be put into conversation. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store. The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Biden’s decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice. Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearings—but instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January 6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators’ priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesn’t care. Christophe Guilluy is a geographer and observer of French society. Christopher Caldwell comments on his work here. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on November 21, 2021 and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here. Q: Several months before the presidential election, how do you see the political situation in France? Christophe Guilluy: Fundamentally nothing much has changed since 2017. I did an interview about the duel between Macron and Le Pen, which I described as a chemically pure cleavage: the popular classes against the professional upper classes, the metropolis against the periphery. None of that has changed at all. The core of Macron’s electoral support is still made up of the bourgeoisies of the right and the left, the boomers, the retirees, people fully integrated into society. And for a good reason: he is the only candidate who defends the economic and cultural model of the past twenty years. Therefore, the electorate willing to follow him is the one that is integrated into this model, that benefits from it or is protected by it, such as the retirees for example. Starting from that, he can count on a hypersolid foundation of those 25%. This has not changed since his election. On the other hand, there are the disaffected, those no longer integrated economically, those we used to call the middle class. Fabrice Balanche is a geographer at the University of Lyon who focuses on the Middle East. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on August 19, 2021, and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here. Q: What are the geographic specificities of Afghanistan? Fabrice Balanche: Afghanistan is a country of mountains and deep valleys, with passes connecting one region to another. It is a compartmentalized country. This obviously poses problems to all powers that want to penetrate it. It is a territory very difficult to control. This physical fragmentation has human and social corollaries. The country includes different ethnicities living in the valleys: Pashtoons, Uzbeks, Tajiks. These ethnicities are further divided into clans and tribes that compete with each other. Even the central authority in Kabul, during the time of the monarchy, never succeeded in achieving direct control of the population. This physical reality and the ethnic diversity are essential elements for any understanding of the country. They are furthermore linked to each other: the tribes maintain their specific identities thanks to the physical geography of the territory. One can be the master of one’s valley. Let us be precise that the field of geography has two topics: the physical question and the human and cultural specificity of a country. Western leaders did not want to see or understand these points, and this is what has led to the fiasco. |
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