Women, Algeria, Torture, Foucault: Advancing the Anticolonial Sociology of Marnia Lazreg
September 25-26, 2025
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Marnia Lazreg was a pathbreaking sociologist who made important contributions to a wide variety of fields, including the study of women, torture, colonialism, Islam, Foucault, international development, and her native Algeria. Much of this work was informed by an abiding belief in the emancipatory potential of a universalistic conception of the human—an approach that bucked prevailing academic trends and inspired a highly original oeuvre rich in critical perspectives. We convene in honor of this unique liberatory voice, who was taken from us in 2024.
The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines and locales to build upon ideas that Marnia expounded in five of her books.
Cooperation: A Political, Economic and Social Theory with Bernard E. Harcourt
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 @ 6:00 PM EDT
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Join us at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, for a conversation with Bernard E. Harcourt on his book Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia University Press, 2023), presented in conjunction with the exhibition Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.
In his book, Harcourt writes, “Cooperation is pervasive in contemporary economy and society, often hidden in plain sight and unacknowledged. It operates in the shadows of advanced capitalist economies. Its omnipresence demonstrates the possibility and potential of an economic regime based on coöperism.” From consumer co-ops to worker cooperatives, mutual aid networks to nonprofits, Harcourt points to collective models that embody democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and sustainability beyond electoral politics.
Cooperation resonates with the history of the Workshop, with Blackburn’s private art studio and development into an artist-run cooperative from 1953 - 1971, before its incorporation as a nonprofit. Today, as a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, it remains the oldest community printshop in the United States.
Binswanger and Existential Analysis: Michel Foucault
Wednesday, October 1, 2025 7:00 PM
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Join us Wednesday, October 1st at 7pm for a discussion of the new book, Binswanger and Existential Analysis: Michel Foucault, with the editor Bernard E. Harcourt.
In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would “situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man.” This book presents Foucault’s unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.
Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault’s historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.
This event is presented by the Columbia Maison Française. It is co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, the European Institute, and the Alliance Program.
Daniel Louis Wyche with Bernard Harcourt
Tuesday, October 7, 2025 7:00 PM
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Join us Tuesday, October 7th at 7pm for an event celebrating Daniel Louis Wyche's new book, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other. He will be in conversation with Bernard Harcourt.
What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world? This book explores the ways several twentieth-century thinkers can help us relate the “care of the self” to the “care of the other,” tracing their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, just as collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.
Daniel Louis Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of “self-purification” integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between the care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical. Ambitious and nuanced, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other offers a framework for unifying individual moral action and collective political life.