Paul Patton

In Dialogues Deleuze argued that the history of philosophy has always been a repressive agent in philosophy, ‘A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought – but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking’ (Dialogues II, 13). His reference to the ‘image of thought’ speaks to one of the important ways in which philosophy controls thought by presenting a model or conception of what thinking is, by right, that is thinking properly so called. But if we ask how this control operates, it is difficult to ignore the institutional mechanisms that sustain and reproduce certain ways of thinking in philosophy: the history of philosophy was able to function as a school of intimidation in France in part through the system of competitive examinations and prescribed curricula. Other countries and other times have their own institutional mechanisms for the control of philosophical thought, as shown by examples from the history of anglophone philosophy. Reference to the external, institutional conditions of philosophical thought raises further questions about the consequences for philosophy of changes in the wider social and institutional environment. What happens to philosophy in societies of control, when the old rules of philosophical apprenticeship no longer apply? This chapter will explore Deleuze’s conception of control in philosophy, as well as the larger issue of the fate of philosophy in the rapidly changing institutional context of control societies.

This article traces a connection between the Daoist conception of nothingness and democratic deliberation by way of Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of decision. A widespread understanding of deliberation relies on the idea that the force of argument should be the sole determinant of individual and collective views. It follows that deliberation is genuine only if participants can change their views as a result of reasoned argument, that is to say only if there is the possibility of a decision. Analysis of the aporia(s) at the heart of decision is a recurrent feature of Derrida’s later work and, I argue, this aporetic analysis highlights the function of nothingness in the act of decision. After identifying some points of convergence between Derridean deconstruction and the Daodejing in relation to the constitutive role of nothingness in material and immaterial things, I argue that it is only because of the nothingness between reasons and a decision that there really is ‘a decision’. This nothingness as the heart of any decision is further compounded by the ‘ordeal’ that Derrida describes in relation to decisions that aspire to be just or responsible to the other. Here, it is not simply a question of the rupture with reasons or calculations but of indeterminacy in the face of the obligation to decide responsibly, that is in the light of an appropriate response to the condition or the circumstances of the other. This indeterminacy is in effect a secondary nothingness that is bound up with the attempt to do justice to the other. Finally, I argue that Derrida’s analysis of decision suggests a possible way to spell out the connection between nothingness and the ethics of difference as presented in the Zhuangzi. Awareness of the primary and secondary nothingness involved in decision reminds us that there is no ground for ‘good conscience’ with regard to any decision that has been taken and that there is always more to be done.

Against a widely supported view that Nietzsche was not a political thinker, there have been a number of edited collections and monographs devoted either to Nietzsche’s politics or, what is not quite the same thing, relationships between his thought and contemporary political philosophy. What is striking about this secondary literature is the degree of divergence among the positions taken. The books discussed in the present review provide further illustration of this diversity. This applies not only to the question whether he was or was not a political thinker, but also to the further question what kind of political thinker.

Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do--and all they will do--is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions.

Clayton Chin provides a helpful reconstruction of Rorty’s philosophy that aims to show its usefulness for political thought, while also shedding light on its relationships with Continental philosophy and on Rorty’s reading strategy employed in relation to some Continental thinkers. In relation to the first aim, Chin argues convincingly that Rorty’s primary contribution to political thought is located at the meta-theoretical level, by which he means the level at which questions may be asked about the nature and purpose of political theorizing. I agree with much of Chin’s account of the nature and value of Rorty’s meta-theoretical approach. I am less convinced by Chin’s account of Rorty’s relations with Continental philosophy and the reading strategies employed in his discussions of those with whom he engaged. There are a number of reasons for this. First, he confines his discussion to a handful of figures that he groups under the heading of ontological approaches to politics and political theory: primarily Martin Heidegger and William Connolly, but also Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Second, This is the asymmetry in the way in which Rorty is treated compared to the discussion of these interlocutors.

With the benefit of the complete publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, the reception of his work by political philosophers in the English-speaking world during the late 1970s and early 1980s appears extremely confused. This reception was based on the English translations of work published in the mid-1970s, chiefly Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume One, along with collections of interviews from the same period. The misunderstandings of those works were compounded by ignorance of developments in his approach to politics and his understanding of power worked out in lectures from 1976 to 1979. The aim of this paper is not simply to defend Foucault against critics from that period, but to show how a more complete understanding of the evolution of his political thought might enable a better understanding of the similarities and differences between his genealogical approach to power and government and the concerns of normative political philosophy.

This chapter surveys attempts to provide liberal justification for specific rights available to Indigenous citizens of democratic societies. The most important of these, by Will Kymlicka, relied on the equal right of all citizens to the good of cultural membership to argue for specific rights to protect minority cultures. After noting that Rawls’s political liberalism offers other resources to argue for specific constitutional or legal rights for colonised Indigenous citizens, the chapter turns to consider James Tully’s argument for an inter-cultural constitutionalism based on the principles of recognition, consent and continuity. Finally, the chapter refers to the work of Robert A. Williams Jr in order to suggest that the conditions of a just and fair colonial constitution are similar to the conditions of a just and stable political society in which there are incommensurable comprehensive moral views.

This article examines the linguistic aspects of post-structuralist and liberal pragmatist political theory. It analyses the differences and similarities between post-structuralist philosophy and liberal political theory. It explores the egalitarian and democratic presuppositions of post-structuralist critical strategies and the non-metaphysical and historical conception of liberalism that we find in the late Rawls. It also discusses the relevant works of Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and John Rawls.

Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations (1981). The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort (1977). It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext(e)'s new Foreign Agents Series. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, was in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix.In effect Baudrillard's essay (it quickly became a must to read both in the art world and in academe) was upholding the only reality there was in a world that keeps hiding the fact that it has none. Simulacrum is its own pure simulacrum and the simulacrum is true. In his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland. It is of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard's simulacrum itself wasn't a thing, but a "deterrence machine," just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is.

Between Deleuze and Derrida is the first book to explore and compare the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, two leading philosophers of French post-structuralism. This is done via a number of key themes, including the philosophy of difference, language, memory, time, event, and love, as well as relating these themes to their respective approaches to Philosophy, Literature, Politics and Mathematics. Contributors: Eric Alliez, Branka Arsic, Gregg Lambert, Leonard Lawlor, Alphonso Lingis, Tamsin Lorraine, Jeff Nealon, Paul Patton, Arkady Plotnitsky, John Protevi, Daniel W. Smith

Joanna Crosby and Dianna Taylor: The theme of this special section of Foucault Studies, “Foucauldian Spaces,” emerged out of the 2016 meeting of the Foucault Circle, where the four of you were participants. Each of the three individual papers contained in the special section critically deploys and/or reconceptualizes an aspect of Foucault’s work that engages and offers particular insight into the construction, experience, and utilization of space. We’d like to ask the four of you to reflect on what makes a space Foucauldian, and whether or not (and why or why not) you’d consider the space created by the convergence of and intellectual exchanges among an international group of Foucault scholars at the University of New South Wales in the summer of 2016 to be Foucauldian.