Winter 2014 Conference

WIll to Know book jacketOrigins of Truth: Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know

February 21-22, 2014
Stony Brook Manhattan
387 Park Avenue South (Enter at 101-113 East 27th Street)
New York, NY 10016

Co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University 
In celebration of the publication of Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), we invite participants to a conference in New York City.
As the first of Foucault’s annual courses, Lectures on the Will to Know set an agenda for his intellectual journey of the 1970s and 1980s. Its publication in English translation opens up new directions for research into power, knowledge and the “formation of discourses.”
This conference gathers a group of established and emerging scholars to analyze Lectures on the Will to Know – its sources, themes and intellectual, historical or political contexts.  What are the multiple ways that “truth” and “origins” are developed in Foucault’s work?  How do philosophy and history intersect in this text?  What is “will” in a Foucaultian context and how can we think of “the will to know” without reinstalling sovereign subjectivity?  How do Foucault’s encounters here with Aristotle, the Sophists, Nietzsche, Deleuze – indeed, with the possibility of an origin of Western knowledge — complicate our understanding of his genealogical approach?
Keynote Address & Reception — Friday, February 21, 6:30pm
Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University:
“Michel Foucault’s Will to Know”
Guest Lecture — Saturday, February 22, 3:00pm
Eduardo Mendieta, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University:
“Morphologies of Truth: The Price of Subjectivity”
Paper Presentations:
Friday, February 21
Bernard Gendron, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:
“Foucault in 1971: Turbulence, Discontinuity, Uncertainty”
Verena Erlenbusch, University of Memphis:
“Foucault’s History of Sovereignty”
Neil Brophy, Villanova University:
“Foucault on Will, Knowledge and Truth in Aristotle and Nietzsche: Elements of a Critical Positivism”
Johan Boberg, Uppsala University:
“Writing the History of Truth: Foucault & Heidegger”
Maxime Lallement, Manchester Metropolitan University:
“Justice, Judgment, Positivity and Discourse in Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know“
Daniel Schultz, Yale Divinity School, and University of Chicago:
“The Will to Know: The Ethics of Genealogy”
Kerem Eksen, Istanbul Technical University:
“The ‘Event’ Called Philosophy: From the Lectures on the Will to Know to Hermeneutics of the Subject”
Saturday, February 22
Corey McCall, Elmira College:
“Foucault’s Faust and Saint Anthony”
Dean Casale, Kean University:
“A Third Way of Knowing:  A Critique of Foucault’s ‘Oedipal Knowledge'”
Wai Kit Choi, California State University, Los Angeles:
“Theorizing Money and Modernity: Implications from Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know“
Peter Macapia, Pratt Institute:
“Distributions: Ceramics, Money, and Events”
Abubakr Khan, State University of New York–Binghamton:
“To Will the Event: Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze”
Panel Respondents:
Suzanne Verderber, Pratt Institute
Darini Nicholas, Pratt Institute
Concluding Roundtable
Ann Burlein, Associate Professor (Religion & Sexuality, Religion & Medicine), Hofstra University
Peter Carravetta, Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, Stony Brook University
Tuija Pulkkinen, Professor, Gender Studies, University of Helsinki                              
Special Thanks to
Eduardo Mendieta, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Alissa Betz, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Scott Sullivan, Director, Stony Brook Manhattan Campus
Kevin Jobe, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Yama Akbar, Stony Brook Manhattan Campus
Mike Jolley, Treasurer, The Foucault Society
Jeffrey Bussolini, College of Staten Island, CUNY
Conference Director: Shifra Diamond, Director of Programs, The Foucault Society
Conference Volunteer: Lorievie Abapo
Updated: February 22, 2014
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