Françoise Héritier

Françoise Héritier succédera à Claude Lévi-Strauss au Collège de France. Ses travaux sur les substances corporelles, les systèmes semi-complexes et les terminologies de parenté crow-omaha, la conduiront a concevoir la valence différentielle des sexe et partant, à théoriser ce qu’elle nommera l’inceste du second type.

Editor’s Preface to L’évolution du problème de la liberté, Cour au Collège de France 1904-1905: Life and Freedom

This is an English translation of the French editor's preface to The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom, which is the first course Bergson taught as the chair in the “History of Modern Philosophy” at the Collège de France.

Neoliberal governmentality, knowledge work, and thumos

Research has shown that the knowledge worker, the decisive driver of the knowledge economy, works increasingly longer hours. In fact, it would appear that instead of working to live, they live to work. There appears to be three reasons for this living-to-work development. First, the knowledge worker ‘has to’ on account of the pressure to become ever more efficient. Such pressure translates into internalized coercion in the case of the self-responsible knowledge worker. Secondly, working is constant, because the Internet and smart technologies and mobile devices have made it ‘possible’. It gives the worker the capacity and management omnipotent control. In the final instance, the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the time because s/he paradoxically ‘wants to’. It is a curious phenomenon, because this compulsive working is concomitant with a rise of a host of physical, emotional, and psychological disorders as well as the erosion of social bonds. The paradox is exacerbated by the fact that the knowledge worker does not derive any of the usual utilities or satisfactions associated with hard work. Elsewhere I have ascribed this apparent contradiction at the heart of the living-to-work phenomenon to the invisible thumotic satisfaction generated by knowledge work. In the present article, I argue that neoliberal governmentality has found a way to tether thumos directly to the profit incentive. I draw on Foucault’s 1978-1979 Collége de France lecture course in which he analysed neoliberal governmentality with specific emphasis on the work of the neoliberal theorist of human capital, Gary Becker.

Le travail n’est pas une marchandise: Contenu et sens du travail au XXIe siècle, Alain Supiot (2019)

Review of: Le travail n’est pas une marchandise: Contenu et sens du travail au XXIe siècle, Alain Supiot (2019) Paris: Éditions du Collège de France, Collection Leçons de clôture, vol. 17, 72 pp., ISBN 978-2-72260-513-8, p/bk, €6.80 https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.7026, EPUB, free

Derecho y vida: un contrapunto entre Michel Foucault y Giorgio Agamben

Desde la perspectiva de la crítica al antijuridicismo foucaultiano expuesta por Giorgio Agamben en Homo sacer, en el presente trabajo abordamos la cuestión del derecho y su relación con la vida en la genealogía de la racionalidad política moderna, desarrollada en los cursos de Michel Foucault en el Collège de France de los años 1978-1979. Nuestro objetivo es mostrar las modalidades que adopta esta relación a través de los conceptos de integración marginalista y de utilitarismo político, de golpe de Estado permanente y de heterogeneidad de las formas jurídicas. A partir de estas nociones, nos proponemos, además, una confrontación con la lectura realizada por Agamben.