Eli B Lichtenstein | Lewis & Clark College (original) (raw)
Papers by Eli B Lichtenstein
European Journal of Philosophy, 2022
Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative... more Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative conclusions can be established. Although such methods provide diverging ways of pursuing genealogical inquiry, they typically con- verge in eschewing historiographic methodology, in favor of a uniquely philosophical approach. In contrast, one genealogist who drew on historiographic methodology is Michel Foucault. This article presents the motivations and advantages of Foucault's genealogical use of such a methodology. It advances two mains claims. First, that Foucault's early 1970s work employs a distinct genealogical method, which borrows from contemporary historiographic models of explanation to expand the range of objects that are proper to genealogical accounts of historical change. I demonstrate how Foucault modifies two central commitments of Nietzsche by broadening the dimensions of genealogical inquiry and explanation. Second, that historical method has normative relevance for genealogy, insofar as different historiographic choices can lead to different normative conclusions. I motivate this second claim by explaining how Foucault's multidimensional genealogical method expands both (a) the range of objects that are subject to evaluative assessment, and (b) the set of possible prescriptive recommendations that follow from such assessment.
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2022
This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno's social theory by motivating the central ro... more This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno's social theory by motivating the central role of abstract domination within it. Whereas critics such as Axel Honneth have charged Adorno with adhering to a reductive model of personal domination, I argue that the latter rather understands domination as a structural and de-individualized feature of capitalist society. If Adorno's social theory is to be explanatory, however, it must account for the source of the abstractions that dominate modern individuals and, in particular, that of value. While such an account remains undeveloped in Adorno, Marx provides resources for its development, in positing the constitution of value neither in production nor exchange alone, but in the social totality. This article argues that Marx's account is compatible with Adorno's, and that it may be used to render Adorno's theory of domination more credible on explanatory grounds.
Critical Horizons, 2021
The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early ... more The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault's understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a "matrix" of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault's contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.
Constellations, 2021
While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide ... more While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide a critique of legal violence, commentators typically interpret it as providing a further critique of state violence. However, this interpretation often receives no further argument, and it remains unclear whether Benjamin’s essay may prove analytically relevant for a critique of state violence today. This paper argues that the “Critique” proves thusly relevant, but only on condition that it is developed in two directions. The first direction is conceptual, and consists in an explanation of the necessary relationship between states and violence. This explanation is found by appealing to a concept not cited in Benjamin’s text, but which, I argue, remains its implicit basis: sovereignty. According to this conceptual development, state violence is the necessary result of the state's attempt to maintain its sovereign law at the expense of emancipatory struggles to generate non-sovereign law. The second direction is genealogical, and consists in destabilizing the modern belief that justice is best served through the judicial channels of a sovereign state. Here I employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical research to demonstrate the historical contingency of state justice and, by extension, the possibility of a justice beyond the state.
Foucault Studies, 2020
Foucault's governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state thr... more Foucault's governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state through the lens of governmental reason. However, these lectures largely omit consideration of the relationship between discipline and the state, prioritizing instead raison d'État and liberalism as dominant state technologies. To remedy this omission, I turn to Foucault's early studies of discipline and argue that they provide materials for the reconstruction of a genealogy of the "disciplinary state." In reconstructing this genealogy, I demonstrate that the disciplinary state marks the "dark side" of the liberal state, a dark side which is, moreover, largely obscured in the governmentality lectures. I further construe the difference between this early genealogy of the state and the later governmental studies in methodological terms. At stake in this difference is the historiographic status of capitalism and social conflict. Foucault's governmentality lectures employ what I term an "idealist disavowal," thereby treating capitalism and social conflict as irrelevant to the history of the state. The early disciplinary studies, on the other hand, enact a "materialist avowal," by which these objects are avowed as central to the explanation of how and why the state develops. Finally, I argue that Foucault's governmental genealogy of the liberal state is explanatorily and analytically incomplete, while the genealogy of the disciplinary state contributes to its completion on both fronts.
Book Reviews by Eli B Lichtenstein
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2020
Eli B. Lichtenstein German and French traditions of critical theory are often seen as two opposin... more Eli B. Lichtenstein German and French traditions of critical theory are often seen as two opposing camps. The opposition is variously cashed out as that between divergent philosophical inheritances, forms of argumentation, social analyses, or normative commitments. While rapprochements are sometimes attempted-in reference, for example, to a common critique of power-the disagreements have remained more prominent than the agreements. In her study of Adorno and Foucault, Deborah Cook does not follow this common approach. Cook sets herself a twofold task: to demonstrate, firstly, that the social analyses of Adorno and Foucault are "complementary in important respects" (ix); and, secondly, that these analyses provide valuable resources for critique and resistance today. I shall consider each of these in turn, before articulating two systematic questions left unanswered by the book. Cook foregrounds the social theory of Adorno and Foucault, using this approach to reassess the place of Marx in each philosopher's thought. Accordingly, although she acknowledges that Adorno was not an orthodox Marxist and that he strove to make the critique of political economy adequate to late capitalism, Cook nevertheless places him "squarely within a Marxist paradigm" (31). Adorno's Marxism, according to Cook, is perhaps seen most clearly in his claim that exchange relations provide the dominant logic of social life: all social phenomena and spheres of experience must ultimately assume the form of the abstract exchangeability of commodities (40-2). This Marxism is also highlighted when Cook distinguishes Adorno's views from those of Friedrich Pollock, and convincingly argues, against the typical analysis, that Adorno does not fully accept the latter's state capitalism thesis (33). Contra Pollock, Adorno believed that the political does not subsume the economic; domination maintains an irreducibly economic form (34). Foucault, on the other hand, as the book makes clear, holds that domination involves a modality of power that is not irreducibly economic (37, 49). Yet, Cook challenges the common view that Foucault's social analysis is incompatible with a Marxist framework (38). Most generally, she argues that Foucault's characterization of power relations as ubiquitous does not license the inference
Teaching Documents by Eli B Lichtenstein
Course Description Critical theory is a philosophical tradition that theorizes oppression and dom... more Course Description Critical theory is a philosophical tradition that theorizes oppression and domination in order to contribute to efforts to transform the world. Philosophers in this tradition thus seek to reveal the nature of unequal power relations and to ultimately challenge the structures on which they rest. This class provides an introduction to key methods and themes in critical theory. We'll consider methodological questions such as the nature of critique and the relationship between theory and practice. We'll consider thematic questions such as: the epoch-defining effects of modern penal systems; the ways that colonialism causes lasting material and psychological harm; and the relationships between capitalism, ecological destruction, and racial and gender oppression. Finally, we'll examine attendant political questions such as the possibility of resistance and the meaning of emancipation. Throughout the semester we'll read important texts in twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory, with particular focus on major works by Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Nancy Fraser.
Course Description What is race and how is it related to racism? How are racial identities consti... more Course Description What is race and how is it related to racism? How are racial identities constituted, transformed, and challenged? This course examines the idea of race from six related philosophical perspectives. First we'll examine the epistemology of race, to determine if and how one's standpoint affects our knowledge of race, along with the different sorts of ways one might be said to know something about race. Second, we'll consider the metaphysics of race, asking if race is a biological phenomenon, or else if (and how) it is socially constructed. Third, we'll consider genealogies of race and racism, to examine the complex and plural processes by which different racial identities emerged in modernity, and to question the relevance of history to an understanding of racism today. Fourth, we'll read phenomenological accounts of race, which describe how race is an embodied phenomenon, which can impact our perception of social reality, below the level of conscious awareness. Fifth, we'll consider how race has been excluded from much Western political philosophy, and weigh the broader causes and consequences of this exclusion. Sixth, we'll read works that propose models for antiracist action, which theorize complex intersections of race, class, and gender, and which chart paths towards collective emancipation. Throughout the course we will approach these themes by surveying the work of both historical and contemporary philosophers and theorists of race.
European Journal of Philosophy, 2022
Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative... more Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative conclusions can be established. Although such methods provide diverging ways of pursuing genealogical inquiry, they typically con- verge in eschewing historiographic methodology, in favor of a uniquely philosophical approach. In contrast, one genealogist who drew on historiographic methodology is Michel Foucault. This article presents the motivations and advantages of Foucault's genealogical use of such a methodology. It advances two mains claims. First, that Foucault's early 1970s work employs a distinct genealogical method, which borrows from contemporary historiographic models of explanation to expand the range of objects that are proper to genealogical accounts of historical change. I demonstrate how Foucault modifies two central commitments of Nietzsche by broadening the dimensions of genealogical inquiry and explanation. Second, that historical method has normative relevance for genealogy, insofar as different historiographic choices can lead to different normative conclusions. I motivate this second claim by explaining how Foucault's multidimensional genealogical method expands both (a) the range of objects that are subject to evaluative assessment, and (b) the set of possible prescriptive recommendations that follow from such assessment.
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2022
This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno's social theory by motivating the central ro... more This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno's social theory by motivating the central role of abstract domination within it. Whereas critics such as Axel Honneth have charged Adorno with adhering to a reductive model of personal domination, I argue that the latter rather understands domination as a structural and de-individualized feature of capitalist society. If Adorno's social theory is to be explanatory, however, it must account for the source of the abstractions that dominate modern individuals and, in particular, that of value. While such an account remains undeveloped in Adorno, Marx provides resources for its development, in positing the constitution of value neither in production nor exchange alone, but in the social totality. This article argues that Marx's account is compatible with Adorno's, and that it may be used to render Adorno's theory of domination more credible on explanatory grounds.
Critical Horizons, 2021
The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early ... more The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault's understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a "matrix" of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault's contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.
Constellations, 2021
While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide ... more While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide a critique of legal violence, commentators typically interpret it as providing a further critique of state violence. However, this interpretation often receives no further argument, and it remains unclear whether Benjamin’s essay may prove analytically relevant for a critique of state violence today. This paper argues that the “Critique” proves thusly relevant, but only on condition that it is developed in two directions. The first direction is conceptual, and consists in an explanation of the necessary relationship between states and violence. This explanation is found by appealing to a concept not cited in Benjamin’s text, but which, I argue, remains its implicit basis: sovereignty. According to this conceptual development, state violence is the necessary result of the state's attempt to maintain its sovereign law at the expense of emancipatory struggles to generate non-sovereign law. The second direction is genealogical, and consists in destabilizing the modern belief that justice is best served through the judicial channels of a sovereign state. Here I employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical research to demonstrate the historical contingency of state justice and, by extension, the possibility of a justice beyond the state.
Foucault Studies, 2020
Foucault's governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state thr... more Foucault's governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state through the lens of governmental reason. However, these lectures largely omit consideration of the relationship between discipline and the state, prioritizing instead raison d'État and liberalism as dominant state technologies. To remedy this omission, I turn to Foucault's early studies of discipline and argue that they provide materials for the reconstruction of a genealogy of the "disciplinary state." In reconstructing this genealogy, I demonstrate that the disciplinary state marks the "dark side" of the liberal state, a dark side which is, moreover, largely obscured in the governmentality lectures. I further construe the difference between this early genealogy of the state and the later governmental studies in methodological terms. At stake in this difference is the historiographic status of capitalism and social conflict. Foucault's governmentality lectures employ what I term an "idealist disavowal," thereby treating capitalism and social conflict as irrelevant to the history of the state. The early disciplinary studies, on the other hand, enact a "materialist avowal," by which these objects are avowed as central to the explanation of how and why the state develops. Finally, I argue that Foucault's governmental genealogy of the liberal state is explanatorily and analytically incomplete, while the genealogy of the disciplinary state contributes to its completion on both fronts.
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2020
Eli B. Lichtenstein German and French traditions of critical theory are often seen as two opposin... more Eli B. Lichtenstein German and French traditions of critical theory are often seen as two opposing camps. The opposition is variously cashed out as that between divergent philosophical inheritances, forms of argumentation, social analyses, or normative commitments. While rapprochements are sometimes attempted-in reference, for example, to a common critique of power-the disagreements have remained more prominent than the agreements. In her study of Adorno and Foucault, Deborah Cook does not follow this common approach. Cook sets herself a twofold task: to demonstrate, firstly, that the social analyses of Adorno and Foucault are "complementary in important respects" (ix); and, secondly, that these analyses provide valuable resources for critique and resistance today. I shall consider each of these in turn, before articulating two systematic questions left unanswered by the book. Cook foregrounds the social theory of Adorno and Foucault, using this approach to reassess the place of Marx in each philosopher's thought. Accordingly, although she acknowledges that Adorno was not an orthodox Marxist and that he strove to make the critique of political economy adequate to late capitalism, Cook nevertheless places him "squarely within a Marxist paradigm" (31). Adorno's Marxism, according to Cook, is perhaps seen most clearly in his claim that exchange relations provide the dominant logic of social life: all social phenomena and spheres of experience must ultimately assume the form of the abstract exchangeability of commodities (40-2). This Marxism is also highlighted when Cook distinguishes Adorno's views from those of Friedrich Pollock, and convincingly argues, against the typical analysis, that Adorno does not fully accept the latter's state capitalism thesis (33). Contra Pollock, Adorno believed that the political does not subsume the economic; domination maintains an irreducibly economic form (34). Foucault, on the other hand, as the book makes clear, holds that domination involves a modality of power that is not irreducibly economic (37, 49). Yet, Cook challenges the common view that Foucault's social analysis is incompatible with a Marxist framework (38). Most generally, she argues that Foucault's characterization of power relations as ubiquitous does not license the inference
Course Description Critical theory is a philosophical tradition that theorizes oppression and dom... more Course Description Critical theory is a philosophical tradition that theorizes oppression and domination in order to contribute to efforts to transform the world. Philosophers in this tradition thus seek to reveal the nature of unequal power relations and to ultimately challenge the structures on which they rest. This class provides an introduction to key methods and themes in critical theory. We'll consider methodological questions such as the nature of critique and the relationship between theory and practice. We'll consider thematic questions such as: the epoch-defining effects of modern penal systems; the ways that colonialism causes lasting material and psychological harm; and the relationships between capitalism, ecological destruction, and racial and gender oppression. Finally, we'll examine attendant political questions such as the possibility of resistance and the meaning of emancipation. Throughout the semester we'll read important texts in twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory, with particular focus on major works by Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Nancy Fraser.
Course Description What is race and how is it related to racism? How are racial identities consti... more Course Description What is race and how is it related to racism? How are racial identities constituted, transformed, and challenged? This course examines the idea of race from six related philosophical perspectives. First we'll examine the epistemology of race, to determine if and how one's standpoint affects our knowledge of race, along with the different sorts of ways one might be said to know something about race. Second, we'll consider the metaphysics of race, asking if race is a biological phenomenon, or else if (and how) it is socially constructed. Third, we'll consider genealogies of race and racism, to examine the complex and plural processes by which different racial identities emerged in modernity, and to question the relevance of history to an understanding of racism today. Fourth, we'll read phenomenological accounts of race, which describe how race is an embodied phenomenon, which can impact our perception of social reality, below the level of conscious awareness. Fifth, we'll consider how race has been excluded from much Western political philosophy, and weigh the broader causes and consequences of this exclusion. Sixth, we'll read works that propose models for antiracist action, which theorize complex intersections of race, class, and gender, and which chart paths towards collective emancipation. Throughout the course we will approach these themes by surveying the work of both historical and contemporary philosophers and theorists of race.