Part I – The nature and significance of the conatus Spinoza’s ‘conatus’ is a signal concept of his thought and one which appears as an axiom of modern treatments, particularly those of a political nature. Famously, the conatus doctrine provides: Each thing...
The title of Foucault’s lecture series of 1977-78 Security, Territory, Population was poorly chosen; the series should, as he acknowledges, have been called ‘Governmentality’, since the concern of these lectures is with the overarching ‘problem of government’ – that...
Paul Klee, Hauptweg und Nebenwege, 1929, oil on canvas, 83,7 x 67,5 cm, Museum Ludwig 1976. The whole thing is truly barbarism, and triumphs as such even over its own barbaric spirit. — Theodor W. Adorno Adorno’s use of the term “barbarism” has probably been most...
Key Concept One of the most thorough and interesting discussions of the relationship between federalism, constitutionalism and democracy is presented by Carl Schmitt in Constitutional Theory (Duke University Press, 2008). A federation of states, or just a federation,...
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, which was first published in 1993, remains remarkable for its introduction of the validity of ‘race’ as an analytical category in presenting the ‘Atlantic’ as a discrete geo-political unit in the modern capitalist world-system.1Paul...
In the last two lecture series Foucault gave at the Collège de France in 1982-1984, published under the titles The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, a genealogy of the obscure concept parrēsia – “truth-telling”(dire-vrai) or...
