CALL FOR PAPERS: FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE

Special issue of  PHILOSOPHY TODAY. An International Journal of Contemporary Philosophy

Special issue editors
Vilde Lid Aavitsland (University of Louisville)
Leonhard Riep (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Experience is a key concept in Foucault’s work, yet its centrality has long been overlooked. In many of his published works, such as The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and in interviews, Foucault positioned his own work in direct opposition to phenomenology and its concept of lived experience. It therefore came as a surprise to many of his readers when Foucault introduced experience as a central methodological concept in The Use of Pleasure. Here, Foucault defined experience as the correlation, within a given culture, between forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity. However, he himself claimed that this idea of treating experience in its historicity was not novel but emerged from his earliest work. Indeed, Foucault’s oeuvre is, from the beginning, littered with explicit and veiled references to the concept of experience. It is of great importance in his archaeological phase, for example in History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, or the literary essays on Bataille and Blanchot from the 1960s. And it also informed his earliest thinking, as the recent publication of the early Sorbonne manuscript on Hegel from 1949 and the Lille manuscripts on Binswanger, Husserl, and anthropology from the 1950s prove. Accordingly, in this special issue we want to shed new light on Foucault’s concept of experience and the debates surrounding it.

Potential topics for articles include (but are not limited to):

· The early manuscripts: Does the recent publication of his mémoire from 1949 or the Lille manuscripts from the 1950s change our perception of Foucault’s concept of experience? What is the influence of Husserl’s (or Hegel’s) phenomenology? What is the relation to Foucault’s later notions of experience? Is Foucault’s mature concept of experience “post-phenomenological,” or does he retain parts of the phenomenological concept? 

· Limit-Experience: Is the concept of limit-experience still useful to think exclusion from society? How do transgression and exclusion interact? Why is Foucault abandoning this concept in his major genealogical works, such as Discipline and Punish or The Will to Knowledge? What is the relationship between limit-experience and “historical forms of experience”?  

· Gender/race: What is the relation between gender, race, and experience? Can Foucault account for differently gendered and/or racialized experiences? Is it necessary, as some commentators have argued, to make Foucault’s concept of experience compatible with phenomenology for it to be useful for feminist theory or philosophy of race?  

· Relationship to other philosophical movements: What is the relationship between Foucault’s concept of experience and other philosophical concepts of experience, for example, in phenomenology, pragmatism, or the Frankfurt School? 

· Relationship to other central concepts in Foucault’s work: What is the relationship between experience and critique, or experience and problematization? Is there an experiential dimension in genealogy?

Submission deadline: December 20, 2024  

Submit article, prepared for anonymous peer review, and a cover letter with identifying information about the author, to Leonhard Riep (leonhard.riep@gmail.com). Articles should be written in English and be maximum 9000 words in length, including critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, authors must format their articles to the Philosophy Today formatting guidelines available here: https://www.pdcnet.org/philtoday/Submission-Guidelines

Manuscripts must be original, unpublished work and not under consideration by any other publication. Article manuscripts should include a brief abstract (150 words) and up to ten key words. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain necessary permission for use of copyrighted material contained within the article.