Dear Glen,
you might also want to take a look at Matrin Kusch "Foucault's Strata and Fields" Dordrecht, 1991 which has a very interesting and informative discussion on Foucault's relation to the new histories in France (i.e. Annales, Koyre, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser) and discusses Foucault's notion of the "event" throughout.
Regards,
Kevin.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ari@xxxxxxxx
> Sent: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:11:24 +0100
> To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] foucault and the philosophy of the event
>
> Dear Glen,
>
> I think the Annales School is the background of Foucault's notion of
> eventalization. Good generic sources on the movement are François
> Dosse’s New History in France. The Triumph of the Annales, Urbana and
> Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994, Peter Burke’s The French
> Historical Revolution: the Annales School. 1929-89, Cambridge: Polity
> Press, 1990, Stuart Clark ‘The Annales Historians’ in Q. Skinner The
> Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge: CUP, 1985, p.
> 177-198
>
> Here are my thoughts on this, another PhD blur:
>
> Foucault recognised the importance of the Annales School and saw the
> fertility of the encounter between structuralism and history as well as
> the importance of not seeing them as mutually exclusive: the former for
> its power of diagnosis and rigorous methodology in describing order and
> regularities synchronically, the latter for its positing of the question
> of periodization and time philosophically. In writing histories on the
> basis of stretches of time and using no other criteria but a periodizing
> one, Foucault praises the history of series, or eventalization as a
> method, for being able to bring about the multifaceted character and
> heterogeneity of elements at work in conjectural moments of emergence,
> rather than looking into the events themselves in order to disclose,
> from a hermeneutics of their internal principles, their causes and
> destiny.
>
> '[Eventalization] means making visible a singularity at places where
> there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate
> anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on
> all. To show that things weren’t ‘necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a
> matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it
> wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was
> to lock them up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were
> to be sought through individual examination of bodies; and so on. A
> breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our
> knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest: this is the first
> theoretico-political function of eventalization.' M. Foucault,
> ‘Impossible Prison’ [1980] in Foucault Live, 1996, p. 277
>
> For taking up this method and applying it to the illusions of unities of
> discourse Foucault has been amply criticised, but we believe his writing
> of history was fundamentally linked to a concern for diagnosing the
> present. The method of the Annales School and the study of events as
> embedded as well as ramifying into the moment of their emergence is an
> example of how a theoretical stance, when practiced and actualised in
> research and writing, can itself become an event. The critique of
> political, individual and chronological idols found in Foucault and the
> historians of the Annales School addresses the problem of explanations
> that rely on the categories of historical consciousness embedded in a
> historical moment: the latter is not sufficient to reconstruct and
> approximate to how it was nor can it be used to order the past in a line
> of progressive continuity. This is the attack on the History of
> Philosophy that had found its greatest expression in the guise of the
> Idealism of Hegel and Croce. We have seen how the autonomy granted to
> the category of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge problematised
> this in the framework of epistemology, and we shall later see how the
> notion of self-déprise addresses it from a different angle. There is a
> discrepancy between the thought and the thinkable that Foucault and the
> Annales historians investigate and they do so in an interdisciplinary
> way. Behind their insistence on framing and drawing grilles of
> intelligibility for the past and the investigation into this discrepancy
> lies the possibility of determining a difference in the present.
>
> As Foucault asserts in the first of the lectures on ‘Il faut défendre la
> societé’, against both scientism and empiricism, exercising critique
> through the writing of histories entailed bringing together a certain
> technical erudition of buried historical knowledge with the
> ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ of a local character.
>
> Arianna Bove
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foucault-L mailing list
____________________________________________________________
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you might also want to take a look at Matrin Kusch "Foucault's Strata and Fields" Dordrecht, 1991 which has a very interesting and informative discussion on Foucault's relation to the new histories in France (i.e. Annales, Koyre, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser) and discusses Foucault's notion of the "event" throughout.
Regards,
Kevin.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ari@xxxxxxxx
> Sent: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:11:24 +0100
> To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] foucault and the philosophy of the event
>
> Dear Glen,
>
> I think the Annales School is the background of Foucault's notion of
> eventalization. Good generic sources on the movement are François
> Dosse’s New History in France. The Triumph of the Annales, Urbana and
> Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994, Peter Burke’s The French
> Historical Revolution: the Annales School. 1929-89, Cambridge: Polity
> Press, 1990, Stuart Clark ‘The Annales Historians’ in Q. Skinner The
> Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge: CUP, 1985, p.
> 177-198
>
> Here are my thoughts on this, another PhD blur:
>
> Foucault recognised the importance of the Annales School and saw the
> fertility of the encounter between structuralism and history as well as
> the importance of not seeing them as mutually exclusive: the former for
> its power of diagnosis and rigorous methodology in describing order and
> regularities synchronically, the latter for its positing of the question
> of periodization and time philosophically. In writing histories on the
> basis of stretches of time and using no other criteria but a periodizing
> one, Foucault praises the history of series, or eventalization as a
> method, for being able to bring about the multifaceted character and
> heterogeneity of elements at work in conjectural moments of emergence,
> rather than looking into the events themselves in order to disclose,
> from a hermeneutics of their internal principles, their causes and
> destiny.
>
> '[Eventalization] means making visible a singularity at places where
> there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate
> anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on
> all. To show that things weren’t ‘necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a
> matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it
> wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was
> to lock them up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were
> to be sought through individual examination of bodies; and so on. A
> breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our
> knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest: this is the first
> theoretico-political function of eventalization.' M. Foucault,
> ‘Impossible Prison’ [1980] in Foucault Live, 1996, p. 277
>
> For taking up this method and applying it to the illusions of unities of
> discourse Foucault has been amply criticised, but we believe his writing
> of history was fundamentally linked to a concern for diagnosing the
> present. The method of the Annales School and the study of events as
> embedded as well as ramifying into the moment of their emergence is an
> example of how a theoretical stance, when practiced and actualised in
> research and writing, can itself become an event. The critique of
> political, individual and chronological idols found in Foucault and the
> historians of the Annales School addresses the problem of explanations
> that rely on the categories of historical consciousness embedded in a
> historical moment: the latter is not sufficient to reconstruct and
> approximate to how it was nor can it be used to order the past in a line
> of progressive continuity. This is the attack on the History of
> Philosophy that had found its greatest expression in the guise of the
> Idealism of Hegel and Croce. We have seen how the autonomy granted to
> the category of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge problematised
> this in the framework of epistemology, and we shall later see how the
> notion of self-déprise addresses it from a different angle. There is a
> discrepancy between the thought and the thinkable that Foucault and the
> Annales historians investigate and they do so in an interdisciplinary
> way. Behind their insistence on framing and drawing grilles of
> intelligibility for the past and the investigation into this discrepancy
> lies the possibility of determining a difference in the present.
>
> As Foucault asserts in the first of the lectures on ‘Il faut défendre la
> societé’, against both scientism and empiricism, exercising critique
> through the writing of histories entailed bringing together a certain
> technical erudition of buried historical knowledge with the
> ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ of a local character.
>
> Arianna Bove
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foucault-L mailing list
____________________________________________________________
Free Email Notifier - Receive notifications & previews of incoming emails!
Visit http://www.inbox.com/notifier and check it out!