Georges Canguilhem: A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings (1994)

“Georges Canguilhem is one of France’s leading philosophers and historians of science. Trained as both a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge.

A Vital Rationalist brings together some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.”

Edited by François Delaporte
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Introduction by Paul Rabinow
Critical bibliography by Camille Limoges
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 1994
This edition, 2000
ISBN 9780942299731
481 pages

Reviews: Levin (The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1994), Keller (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1996), Sutton (The British Journal for the History of Science, 1997).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (7 MB)

Simeon Wade: Chez Foucault (1978)

An introduction to the work of Michel Foucault prepared by Simeon Wade for students of the Otis Parson Institute of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Wade was a member of the faculty and made Foucault accessible to generations of its students. The handout also contains a 1976 discussion with Foucault, entitled “Dialogue on Power” (pp 4-22). “The copies are cherished beyond measure.” (updated after a correction by Erika Suderburg)

Publisher Circabook, Los Angeles
110 pages
via Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies blog (see the page for more information)

PDF (25 MB)
French translation of the interview (in Dits et écrits)

See also Foucault’s bibliography on Monoskop

Stamatia Portanova: Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts (2013)

“Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In Moving without a Body, Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software’s capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become.

Discussing the development of different audiovisual tools and the shift from analog to digital, she focuses on some choreographic realizations of this evolution, including works by Loie Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Throughout, Portanova considers these technologies and dances as ways to think—rather than just perform or perceive—movement. She distinguishes the choreographic thought from the performance: a body performs a movement, and a mind thinks or choreographs a dance. Similarly, she sees the move from analog to digital as a shift in conception rather than simply in technical realization. Analyzing choreographic technologies for their capacity to redesign the way movement is thought, Moving without a Body offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262018926, 9780262018920
200 pages

Reviews: Donnarumma (Mute, 2014), Murphy (Afterimage, 2014), Thain (Digicult).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (11 MB)