Theory Reading Group, Between Deleuze and Foucault (or “among Deleuze, Foucault and Burroughs”)

Faculty Sponsor

S.E. Gontarski

Description

This reading group will follow the seminars that Gilles Deleuze delivered on Michel Foucault after the latter’s death and on the way to his publishing Foucault in 1986, English in 1988. The lectures were delivered at the Université de Paris VIII to SRO audiences and are now available on line through Purdue University (see below). The Foucault book, a severe condensation of these lectures, outlines Deleuze’s major topics in this “crucial examination of the philosophical foundations and principal themes of Foucault's work, providing a rigorous engagement with Foucault's views on knowledge, punishment, power, and the nature of subjectivity.” These lectures discuss in detail William S. Burroughs’s influence on both philosophers with his critique of our “control societies,” a term they adopt from Burroughs. Furthermore, in Deleuze’s lectures On Cinema at La Fémis (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son) in 1987 (published in Deleuze 2007, 326) he notes. “There have been, of course, various remnants of disciplinary societies for years, but we already know we are in societies of a different type that should be called, using Burroughs' term—and Foucault had a very deep admiration for Burroughs—control societies.”

Readings:

Status
Current
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