Paul Rabinow interview by Edyta Niemyjska and Michael J. Kelly on February 18th, 2013 @ Figure/Ground Communication

Dr. Rabinow was interviewed by Edyta Niemyjska and Michael J. Kelly on February 18th, 2013 

Read the full Interview here

Dr. Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the world’s leading scholars on the philosophy of Michel Foucault. He is Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. Dr. Rabinow is the editor and author of numerous books, some of which include Design Human Practices: An Experiment in Synthetic Biology (with Gaymon Bennett), The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles (with Talia Dan Cohen), Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, The Essential Foucault (with Nikolas Rose), French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, Essays in the Anthropology of Reason, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (with W. Sullivan), The Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (with Hubert Dreyfus), and Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (with W. Sullivan).

What where the motivating factors for your choosing to go into academia?

I grew up in New York City, and I was a curious young man, interested in various things of the world.  The atmosphere in the 1950s was political because of McCarthyism and I grew up in a kind of Socialist-oriented community. So, I had a kind of childhood that was already fairly alert to larger problems in the world.  Like a lot of bright young kids I was good at math and I went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a public high school with a competitive exam. It was a high school where we were very committed to science and math. So, I had a public high school education but of a terrific sort.  It was all boys which, given how immature we all were, made life easier.  I had a kind of exposure to and enjoyment of very intense thinking in particular in mathematics but there were also literature courses and what have you.  I was also in an intellectual milieu in which, in that part of NYC (i.e. Queens), there was a summer camp in which, believe it or not, we even had a philosophy counselor that would bore us with Ludwig Wittgenstein at a young age.

The idea that I was moving into sophisticated, intense, political and intellectual activity from a fairly young age in New York was unusual at least up to a certain point.  It may have been unusual in many other places in America but less so there.  Also for whatever reasons, I have never been very clear about this, I was a fan of Paris from a very young age.  Certainly by high school and actually even before I was reading French literature and philosophy, and obviously that interest has stayed with me.

I had a choice between going to Columbia University or the University of Chicago.  I met some friends of my parents that had gone to Chicago and I liked them a lot.  They were very intense, bohemian and very active politically and intellectually, and it struck me that if that was what was coming out of Chicago then that was exciting. So I went to Chicago, although my parents wanted me to stay in NY. Chicago was an incredibly advanced intellectual place that suited me extremely well, and it is where I earned my B.A. and Ph.D.

The University of Chicago is one of the main universities in the U.S. that had a very structured curriculum. They assumed that they knew better than the students what the students should learn, at least for several years, that you were capable of learning anything, and that learning shouldn’t be overly specialized.  We also had a very broad and rigorous exposure to many things in the world and I liked that a lot.  For instance, there was a required non-Western civilization course (this is in the early ‘60s) and so I took the Indian civilization course, which was taught by multiple people: anthropologists, historians, sanskritists, lawyers, and others.  Hence the idea that first of all the world is global and that multiple disciplines had to contribute to an understanding of any important phenomena was there all the way through for me. My main philosophical training was with a man called Richard McKeon. He was the dean of Humanities and a famous Aristotle scholar with a particular approach to the history of philosophy. It was very intimidating and rigorous but I found it to be extremely challenging and exciting, both as a pedagogic style and understanding what the history of philosophy was going to be. On both levels it was something I carried forward with me to the rest of my life.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend my life in the library arguing about philosophic ideas with other philosophers! So I majored in anthropology for which at that point and for many years to come the University of Chicago was arguably the most exciting place to be. Anthropology at Chicago had a strong social theory component to it (this is again in the 1960s). I worked closely with a number of people. Bernard Cohn, who worked on India, where I was originally thinking of going, was a wonderful teacher, a very wonderful man. And then Clifford Geertz, my advisor, who was a brilliant fellow but a kind of an awkward human being. In any case, that’s how I got to Morocco.

The idea that there was this inherent complementarity between the history of philosophy, the basic questions of philosophy, and actually going out into the world and engaging experientially in situations seemed to me not in conflict.  Certainly, it is not how the philosophic disciplines have developed, that’s not what they do, which seems to be an impoverishment.

So, that’s one version of the basic formation.  I should add that I took my doctoral exams as an undergraduate in Chicago, for a variety of reasons, so they were obliged to let me into the graduate program which they had not done previously for Chicago undergraduates.  We made a deal that they would take me into the graduate program if I went to Paris for a year. Which was one of those offers you can’t refuse.  This was 1965-66.  I went to Paris and I sat in the seminars of Claude-Levi Strauss, Louis Dumont, and also the lectures of Jean Hyppolite at the Collège de France.  Jean Hyppolite was one of the Foucault’s mentors, I found out later.  The French connections in all of this are continued all the way though my work. 

Who would you consider to be your mentors in graduate school, and were there some lessons you learned from them that you would like to share?

The thing that was powerfully impressive about the University of Chicago was the complementary influence of tradition and new pedagogy from Robert Hutchins; what really mattered was the approach to learning and the curriculum as much as any of the individual professors.  The single biggest influence on me as an undergraduate was Richard McKeon.  He was a very stern, tough teacher but it wasn’t just him.  It was the whole structure of the college.  There was a very strong sense that there were objective questions in the world and that he taught us very rigorously how to read texts in a structured and incisive manner.  As opposed to other educational experiences in America today the game was not how clever your interpretation could be but being in awe and then attempting some degree of mastery, whether it was Aristotle or Spinoza, before you had any opinion about it.

That was the very discipline that suited me, on the one hand.  On the other hand, there was the experiential side of research that I found in anthropology.  My main influence Bernard Cohn, Barney as we called him, was a pretty warm fellow.  He taught history of anthropology.  That was very influential.  I would not say per se that I had a direct mentor, that is, except for the institutions.  Stuyvesant High School and the University of Chicago were ultimately my mentors more than individual people.  I have the same kind of relationship with Foucault.  That is to say, I learned a great deal from him.  I was fascinated, intrigued and challenged, but that wasn’t per se a kind of individual relationship of that sort. Rather, he was someone that combined deep philosophical questions with a very impressive empirical research, and that seemed to be missing from most if not all of the philosophy.  It gave a critical edge to all of the anthropology in which I was interested.

Behind all of this there is John Dewey who was given a lot of lip service in Chicago and his thinking was very influential in much of what was going on.  It was only recently that I really returned to Dewey and I have been seeing a lot of connections but I think that, at some level, American pragmatism is very strong in my work.  Especially in that there is no real separation between conceptual work and experience. (...)

PAUL RABINOW GAYMON BENNETT - CONTEMPORARY EQUIPMENT: A DIAGNOSTIC

PAUL RABINOW GAYMON BENNETT

CONTEMPORARY EQUIPMENT: A DIAGNOSTIC INTRODUCTION  1 FROM A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT TO AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CONTEMPORARY 2 PROBLEMATIZATION  3  EQUIPMENT 6  FORM 1: ANTIQUE EQUIPMENT  8  ùFORM 2: MODERN EQUIPMENT  10  FORM 3: CONTEMPORARY EQUIPMENT  12  PRACTICING DIAGNOSTICS  14  A DIAGNOSTIC OF EQUIPMENTAL PLATFORMS  17  FROM REGIMES TO MODES  17 EQUIPMENTAL PLATFORMS  19  TABLES, CATEGORIES, AND CONNECTIONS 20  EQUIPMENTAL PLATFORMS 24  APPENDIX OF CONCEPTS  60

INTRODUCTION
In early May 2007, Rabinow called for “secession,” in Blumenberg’s sense of refusing predominant practices, concepts, and problems, where they prove unhelpful for work on the problematization at hand. Scientifically and ethically, relations among and between the life sciences, human sciences, and ethics need sustained re-thinking and re-working. Such labor cannot be conducted, it seemed to us, unless the adequacy of reigning habits, dispositions, and deliverables are vigorously contested. It was at that point of secession that a period of extremely intense conceptual work began, culminating several months later in the production of a diagnostic grid for re-thinking relations among the life sciences, human sciences, and ethics (http://bios-technika.net/diagnostics-grid. html). This diagnostic grid has remained in the background, functioning as a powerful conceptual tool for the practice of orientation,production, and verification.

What follows in the first section of this appendix should be read as a kind of “users-guide” to our human practices diagnostic. The diagnostic (see the second part of the appendix) is composed of four tables consisting of categories and conceptual distinctions. It is designed to aid inquiry, and, where appropriate and possible, the design and composition of equipment. The tables, categories, and distinctions are not representational. In fashioning them we did not suffer the conceit often attributed to the functionalist projects of the early 20th century; we do not presume that our categories are comprehensive, and thereby adequate, if abstract, distillations of the real essence of things across comparative domains. 

DIAGNOSIS
Diagnosis has two functions.The first is analytic. It functions to lay out tables of categories.That is to say, a diagnosis serves a critical function; it facilitates the work of decomposition of complex wholes in order to test the logic on the basis of which composition has taken place. In diagnosis, the work of decomposition cannot be an end-in- itself. Rather, analysis must be followed by recom- position.This synthetic work is the second function of a diagnosis.
Cluster 1: Diagnosing Equipment: Diagnosis,Affect, Truth Claim, Ethical Mode, Equipment
Cluster 2: Critical position for Human Practices: Diagnosis, Contemporary, History of the Present, Problematization, Remediation
Cluster 3: Diagnosis of Political Spirituality: Diagnosis, Salva- tion,Veridiction, Jurisdiction, Political Spirituality

ASSEMBLING THE CONTEMPORARY

Paul Rabinow

The Accompaniment

Assembling the Contemporary

University of Chicago Press 2011

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, Paul Rabinow contends that to make sense of the contemporary anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of his formative mentors: Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. Reflecting on their lives as teachers and thinkers, as well as human beings, he poses questions about their critical limitations, unfulfilled hopes, and the lessons he learned from and with them.This spirit of collaboration animates The Accompaniment, as Rabinow assesses the last ten years of his career, largely spent engaging in a series of intensive experiments in collaborative research and often focused on cutting-edge work in synthetic biology. He candidly details the successes and failures of shifting his teaching practice away from individual projects, placing greater emphasis on participation over observation in research, and designing and using websites as a venue for collaboration. Analyzing these endeavors alongside his efforts to apply an anthropological lens to the natural sciences, Rabinow lays the foundation for an ethically grounded anthropology ready and able to face the challenges of our contemporary world.

“One of our most vividly original thinkers, Paul Rabinow has produced a richly informed meditation on collaboration.  It is, in its own terms, an ‘untimely’ book in the best sense, immersed in history, focused on the present, and dedicated to the ‘demands of the day.’  With reflections on art, music, philosophy, biology, as well as on his teachers, mentors, and collaborators, The Accompaniment is the culminating book of an extraordinary career, and secures Rabinow’s place as our leading anthropologist of knowledge.”—Geoffrey Harpham, director, National Humanities Center

“Sophisticated, historically and philosophically grounded, and engaging, Rabinow’s vision of what anthropology might be provides food for thought and deserves careful consideration and debate.”—Richard Price, College of William and Mary

Biopower Today - Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose @ Biosocieties, No. 1, 2006

Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose 

Biosocieties (2006), 1 : pp 195-217

Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science

In this article we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider Foucault's development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close to ours, from the philosophical take-up of the terms by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. We argue that, while exceptional forms of biopower, especially in conditions of absolutist dictatorship, and when combined with certain technical resources, can lead to a murderous ‘thanatopolitics’—a politics of death—biopower in contemporary states takes a different form. It characteristically entails a relation between ‘letting die’ (laissez mourir) and making live (faire vivre)—that is to say strategies for the governing of life. Using examples from our own current research, we consider recent developments in biopower around three themes: race, population and reproduction, and genomic medicine.

Paul Rabinow - Pensare cose umane - Meltemi, It, 2008

“L’equipaggiamento è il mezzo di trasformazione del logos in ethos” diceva Michel Foucault: da tale affermazione prendono avvio le riflessioni di Paul Rabinow contenute in queste pagine, che non hanno come oggetto alcun determinato territorio del sapere, né si propongono di risolvere alcuna specifica questione. Piuttosto, esse mirano ad assemblare “una scatola degli attrezzi concettuali” che possa guidare il pensiero dell’uomo contemporaneo, e a promuovere una modalità sperimentale di indagine valida anche per le scienze umane.
Come pensare alle cose umane è un problema che assilla gli uomini fin dall’inizio della filosofia occidentale: ogni soluzione che intende porsi come definitiva è destinata al fallimento. Nessun consenso è stato raggiunto sui metodi, né sui principi di verifica o sulle forme di narrazione. Le “comunità interpretative” non comunicano realmente tra di loro.
L’originalità del contributo antropologico di Rabinow in tal senso sta nel seguire alcuni particolari percorsi di indagine, come il rapporto tra il ruolo delle arti e quello delle scienze nelle metamorfosi della modernità; le innovazioni tecnologiche viste nei termini di “nuove narrative e nuove metafore”; la centralità data ai concetti di distanza e prossimità, totalità e interconnessione, dunque a dimensioni spazio- temporali determinanti nell’attuale svolta socioantropologica dei linguaggi digitali e della società delle reti, dove si gioca il destino dell’individualismo moderno.
In particolare, colpiscono le intuizioni relative alla funzione che ha l’arte nel fornire modelli di interpretazione della realtà sociale: nella tessitura teorico-sperimentale delle analisi di Rabinow un notevole peso viene affidato a figure come Duchamp e Klee, entrate a comporre non poca parte dei molteplici strumenti raccolti nella sua “scatola degli attrezzi concettuali” e messe avventurosamente alla prova di un progetto a dir poco arduo.
Pensare cose umane è infatti un saggio appassionato quanto complesso – condotto dialogando costantemente con alcuni grandi classici del pensiero moderno, in particolare con la tradizione delle scienze sociali inaugurata da Max Weber – ed è lo stesso autore ad ammetterlo sin dall’inizio: “Il lettore sia avvisato che questo libro richiederà una certa pazienza”. D’altra parte, come potrebbe essere diversamente se la posta in gioco è quella – tornando al Foucault più sondato e teorizzato da Rabinow – di trasformare il logos in ethos e di invitare la ricerca scientifica ad abbandonare le ideologie del progresso e a servire piuttosto ad “avere migliore cura delle cose, di noi stessi e degli altri”?


Paul Rabinow insegna Antropologia presso l’Università di Berkeley (California), dove ha avuto modo di collaborare con Michel Foucault. Tra le sue opere più significative ricordiamo: Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (con Hubert L. Dreyfus, 1983; trad. it. La ricerca di Michel Foucault, 1989); Making PCR. A Story of Biotechnology (1996; trad. it. Fare scienza oggi. PCR: un caso esemplare di industria biotecnologica, 1999); Essays on the Anthropology of Reason(1997); French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (1999); The Essential Foucault (con Nikolas Rose, 2003); Marking Time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007).


Traduzione it. Edoardo Zavarella


Read more on Meltemi website


Paul Rabinow


Pensare cose umane

Introduzione

Ethos, logos e pathos

Paraskeuï [equipaggiamento], (...) costituisce l’elemento di trasformazione del logos in ethos.

Michel Foucault, L’ermeneutica del soggetto

Questo libro si propone come una meditazione sull’affermazione di Michel Foucault secondo cui “l’equipaggiamento è il mezzo di trasformazione del logos in ethos”. Molto lavoro è richiesto, tuttavia, per afferrare il senso di tale affermazione. La difficoltà in parte consiste nel fatto che i termini “equipaggiamento” e “meditazione” sono usati in un peculiare senso tecnico. Inoltre, il perché qualcuno voglia trasformare “logos” in “ethos” richiede a sua volta una spiegazione. Perciò, il lettore sia avvisato che leggere questo libro richiederà una certa pazienza. In più, e inaspettatamente, il libro si rivolge al lettore come a un amico. Inizialmente anche questo ap- pellativo è opaco. Comunque, utilizzando come vademecum la meravigliosa affermazione di Jean Paul secondo cui “la filosofia è l’abilità di farsi degli amici per mezzo di un testo scritto”, abbiamo almeno una certa idea tanto del territorio che sarà visitato nei seguenti capitoli, quanto della maniera in cui quel territorio sarà at- traversato (Sloterdijk 1999, p. 243). Un proposito centrale del libro è di assemblare una scatola degli attrezzi concettuali il cui scopo è il progresso dell’indagine. Le modalità di ricerca che prevalgono correntemente nelle scienze umane sono, mi sembra, carenti in alcuni punti cruciali. Queste carenze sono specialmente marcate nelle re- lazioni conflittuali tra il continuo accumularsi di un corpo di informazioni, il modo in cui a quelle informazioni viene data forma narrativa e concettuale, e come questo sapere plasmi una condotta di vita. Non c’è dubbio che tutto ciò richieda ulteriore elaborazione, e questo libro è un tentativo di rispondere a tale richiesta.

(...)

Read the book first 15 pages on pdf

H.L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow - Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago University Press, Usa 1983)

This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole. To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method"interpretative analytics"capable fo explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition. 
"There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault's 'On the Genealogy of Ethics,' a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality." 
David Hoy,London Review of Books


Contents
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: The Illusion of Autonomous Discourse
1. Practices and Discourse in Foucault's Early Writings
The History of Madness
The Archaeology of Medicine
2. The Archaeology of the Human Sciences
The Rise of Representation in the Classical Age
Man and His Doubles: The Analytic of Finitude
The Empirical and the Transcendental
The Cogito and the Unthought
The Retreat and Return of the Origin
Conclusion to the Doubles
3. Towards a Theory of Discursive Practice
A Phenomenology to End All Phenomenologies
Beyond Structuralism: From Conditions of Possibility to Conditions of Existence
The Analysis of Discursive Formations
Objects
Enunciative Modalities
The Formation of Concepts
The Formation of Strategies
Historical Transformation: Disorder as a Type of Order
Discursive Strategies and the Social Background
4. The Methodological Failure of Archaeology
Explanatory Power
Beyond Seriousness and Meaning
Conclusion: Double Trouble
Part II: The Genealogy of the Modern Individual: The Interpretive Analytics of Power, Truth, and the Body
5. Interpretive Analytics
Genealogy
History of the Present and Interpretive Analytics
6. From the Repressive Hypothesis to Bio-Power
The Repressive Hypothesis
Bio-Power
7. The Genealogy of the Modern Individual as Object
Three Figures of Punishment
Sovereign Torture
Humanist Reform
Normalizing Detention
Disciplinary Technology
The Objectifying Social Sciences
8. The Genealogy of the Modern Individual as Subject
Sex and Bio-Power
Confessional Technology
The Subjectifying Social Sciences
9. Power and Truth
Power
Meticulous Rituals of Power
Paradigms and Practices
Power and Truth
Conclusion
Questions
Truth
Resistance
Power
Afterword by Michael Foucault:
The Subject and Power
Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject
How Is Power Exercised?
Afterword (1983)
1. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress
History of the Project
Why the Ancient World Was Not a Golden Age, but What We Can Learn from It Anyway
The Structure of Genealogical Interpretation
From the Classical Self to the Modern Subject
2. Foucault's Interpretive Analytic of Ethics
Methodological Refinements
Interpretive Diagnosis
Genealogy
Archeology
Norms, Reasons, and Bio-Power
Beyond Foucault


Informazioni bibliografiche

Titolo	Michel Foucault, beyond structuralism and hermeneutics
Autori	Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault
Curatore	Michel Foucault
Collaboratori	Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault
Edizione	2, illustrata, ristampa
Editore	University of Chicago Press, 1983 (ristampa) First ed. 1982
ISBN	0226163121, 9780226163123
Lunghezza	271 pagine