Foucault and the Making of Subjects

Laura Cremonesi specialises in 20th Century French Philosophy and has published articles andbook chapters on Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot. She has published a book on Foucault’sinterpretation of the ancient world, Michel Foucault e il mondo antico. Spunti per una criticadell’attualità (ETS, 2008), and translated from French into Italian the book by Pierre Hadot, Étudesde philosophie ancienne (Les Belles Lettres, 2010): Studi di filosofia antica (ETS, 2015).Orazio Irrera is Associate Researcher at the Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne,University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is a member of the editorial board of the journalmateriali foucaultiani and the co-director of the permanent workshop “Race and Colonialism:On the Political Epistemologies of Decolonisation” at the Collège international de Philosophie. Heis the co-editor of Foucault e le genalogie del dir-vero (Cronopio, 2014) and La pensée politique deFoucault (Kimé, 2016).Daniele Lorenzini is Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Paris-EstCréteil. He is the author most recently of Éthique et politique de soi: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell et lestechniques de l’ordinaire (Vrin, 2015) and the co-editor of Michel Foucault’s lectures About theBeginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), Qu’est-ce quela critique? Suivi de La culture de soi (Vrin, 2015), and Discours et vérité (Vrin, 2016). He is also amember of the editorial board of the journal materiali foucaultiani.Martina Tazzioli is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille and ResearchAssistant at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality:Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), co-author of Tunisiaas a Revolutionized Space of Migration (Palgrave Pivot, 2016), and co-editor of Foucault and theHistory of Our Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is also a member of the editorial board ofthe journal materiali foucaultiani.

This fascinating set of essays brings together some of the best known French and Anglophone commentators on Foucault’s work today. The result is a splendid collection of engagements with Foucault’s late reconceptualization of subjectivity that ranges widely over the late lecture courses at the Collège de France, and beyond. Foucault and the Making of Subjects takes a subject we thought we knew well – Foucault and the subject – and makes it new (and urgent, again) for us. Endlessly interesting and provocative.

• Introduction. Foucault and the Making of Subjects: Rethinking Autonomy between Subjection andSubjectivation, Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli / 1. Foucault, the Iranian Uprising, and the Constitution of a Collective Subjectivity, Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli / 2. There Can’t Be Societies without Uprisings, Michel Foucault, Farès Sassine / Part 1: Productions of Subjectivity / 3. From Subjection to Subjectivation: Michel Foucault and the History of Sexuality, Arnold I. Davidson / 4. Foucault, Regimes of Truth, and the Making of the Subject, Daniele Lorenzini / 5. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Case of Sexual Avowal, Judith Butler / Part II: Autonomy, Critique, and the Norms / 6. Philosophy, Critique, and the Present: The Question of Autonomy in Michel Foucault’s Thought, Laura Cremonesi / 7. Foucault and the Refusal of Ideology , Orazio Irrera / 8. Becoming a Subject in Relation to Norms, Guillaume le Blanc / Part III: The Power ov