Michel Foucault: The Politics of Truth (1997/2007)

“In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatschrifte asked its audience to reply to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Immanuel Kant, following Moses Mendelssohn, took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his ‘age of reason.’ Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault released a response to Kant’s initial essay, positioning the philosopher as the initiator of the discourse, and critique, of modernity—a credit traditionally accredited to Nietzsche. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between these two philosophers, Foucault and Kant, as the framework around which these different lectures and unpublished essays are assembled. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three volume History of Sexuality. Foucault’s examination of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” is the most “American” moment of Foucault’s thinking. It is in America that he realized the necessity of tying down his own reflection to that of the Frankfurt School. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, The Politics of Truth contains transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by John Rajchman
Translated by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2007
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350393, 9781584350392
195 pages

Publisher

PDF (13 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)

Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech (2001–) [EN, TR]

“Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault’s project as a philosopher.

Still unpublished in France, Fearless Speech concludes the genealogy of truth that Foucault pursued throughout his life, starting with his investigations in Madness and Civilization, into the question of power and its technology. The expression “fearless speech” is a rough translation of the Greek parrhesia, which designates those who take a risk to tell the truth; the citizen who has the moral qualities required to speak the truth, even if it differs from what the majority of people believe and faces danger for speaking it.

‘Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth through frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.'”

Edited by Joseph Pearson
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2001
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350113, 9781584350118
183 pages

Publisher

Fearless Speech (English, 2001, no OCR; updated on 2012-12-30)
Doğruyu Söylemek (Turkish, trans. Kerem Eksen, 2005/2012, added on 2014-5-19, via)

Brian Massumi: A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992)

A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze’s entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of “state-happy” Marxism and “school-building” strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.

Publisher MIT Press, 1992
ISBN 0262132826, 9780262132824
229 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)