Strange Predecessors: Some Stray Thoughts on Foucault

Michel Foucault's list of influences and predecessors is fairly well established, in part because he has named his predecessors repeatedly, presenting an account of his origin that is more history than genealogy. His "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" essay is canon. His final remarks on Heidegger, while surprising to many, are no less well known. The only question mark is perhaps his relation to Marx, which vacillates between the citations "without quotation marks" and utter repudiation, like his famous remarks about fish in water. To me that continues to be the more interesting connection, and I should mention that I am currently reading Stéphane Legrand's Les Normes Chez Foucault, a book that I really should have read awhile ago, definitely before his book on Ayn Rand, and should have more to say about that soon.

Revised and Resubmitted: My Remarks from a Recent Conference on Transindividuality

 There is an odd temporality to academic work. If you are lucky, if someone finds anything you say interesting, or relevant, people will ask you to talk more about it. The problem with this is that the "it" they want to hear more about is often a book or an article that you wrote a long time ago, possibly years, and since then you (hopefully) have moved onto something else. Some years ago I published a book on transindividuality, a book that was the product of years of reflection, reading, and procrastination. The book marked my interest in (and hopefully contribution to) the interest in the concept of transindividuality. This year, years after it came out, I was asked to talk about the concept at an amazing conference (see the flyer above). As the conference neared I found myself wondering what I was going to talk about, I wrote and quickly deleted multiple drafts, considered multiple angles to the problem, but also found myself wondering if I had already said all that I had on the topic.