Spring Course Announcement: Foucault Seminar

Graduate Seminar Announcement:

COMS 930: Michel Foucault and Biopolitics

Spring 2013 – Wednesdays 9:00am – 12:00pm – Bailey, Room 401

Professor: Dave Tell

Nearly thirty years after his passing, Michel Foucault remains one of the most-cited intellectuals across the humanities and social sciences. In the past five years a once-overlooked Foucauldian concept has proved particularly fecund: biopolitics. Through the efforts of Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Nikolas Rose, and others, biopolitics now sits at the forefront of the Foucauldian imagination. 

This seminar has two primary goals.

1. Introduce students to the work of Michel Foucault. The course is offered as an introduction; no previous engagement with Foucault is required. After beginning with the 1969 Archeology of Knowledge, we will focus on the famous works of the mid-1970s: Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. We will supplement these works with various interviews and essays in which Foucault grapples with the ideas at play in the major works.
2. Introduce biopolitics. Foucault introduced the term in 1976 (in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality) and, in various ways, grappled with it for his remaining eight years. Because the years 1976-1984 constitute a conspicuous gap in Foucault’s major works, we will be forced to trace the development of biopolitics through his lectures and secondary works. From Foucault, we will read Security, Territory, Population (the 1978 lectures) and The Birth of Biopolitics (the 1979 lectures). We will also consider the uptake of biopolitics by Bulter, Agamben, and, perhaps, Rose and Latour. If time allows, we will turn to the final two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.  

A Preliminary and Tentative List of Texts:

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

---. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable

Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language

---. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

---. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction

---. Security Territory Population: Lectures at the Collège de France

---. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France

---. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France

---. Power/Knowledge: Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

Latour, Bruno, The Politics of Nature

The seminar will require a paper of publishable length as well as other, smaller writing assignments. Questions? Please ask me: davetell@ku.edu