Sverre Raffnsøe

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• professor, dr. phil.
• Professor (Full) at Copenhagen Business School

A dichotomy between sickness and health Often, "sick" and "healthy" are conceived as contrary predicates that clash with, are incompatible with and exclude one another in the sense that they refer to the extreme, opposite poles of a linear progression. 61 While this conception does not necessarily entail that they are contradictory in the sense tha...

The ongoing establishment of new specialized disciplines and subject areas from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century leads to a relatively clear and widely accepted division between faculties and types of knowledge. Since the Second World War, however, these divisions have been decisively questioned. While the university institut...

The historical examination sets out by describing the major reorganization of Western knowledge institutions and disciplines that laid the foundation of the modern university roughly 200 years ago. With the establishment of the Humboldtian university, the human sciences, for the first time in history, assume their modern shape and become recognizab...

The establishment of the Humboldtian university model and the decisive role allotted to the humanities within it permitted an ongoing formation of new specialized disciplines and subject areas which continually challenged the initial organization. During the nineteenth century, a number of new disciplines and faculties, such as the natural sciences...

Making use of the analysis of the historical backdrop established in the three preceding chapters, Chap. 6 examines the contemporary organization of knowledge. Here all the historical layers previously described are still present and continue to exert a significant influence. At the same time, a new remarkable turn makes itself felt. Drawing on dis...

Following the survey of the book and the main historical stages of the history of the human sciences in the modern university outlined in the preface and the introduction, the chapter articulates the main analytical, methodological, epistemological or ontological tenets that this alternative history builds upon. In keeping with the driving ambition...

This part reflects upon crucial implications of the investigation. What appears is an enduring productive crisis that has spurred not only an ongoing recovery and repossession of the human sciences but also self-affirmation and fertile self-transgression. The genealogy of the human sciences permits a more complex and favourable diagnosis, symptomat...

It has become commonplace to highlight that the humanities are undergoing a severe, acute and decisive crisis. The claim is that the crisis is the outcome of a longstanding process of decay and decline. Consequently, the humanities are facing a period of intense difficulty and danger threatening their very existence. This perception is voiced by va...

De talrige og mangeartede bidrag i dette festskrift til Jens Erik Kristensen tegner både et billede af en usædvanlig afholdt og alsidig idehistoriker, forsker og underviser og bærer samtidig vidnesbyrd om genkommende temaer, analytiske mønstre og kritisk-teoretiske tilgange, som har fulgt Jens Erik Kristensen siden studietiden i 1970erne og de førs...

In the age of the Anthropocene, Man’s project and its inherited cosmogonies have multiplied and intensified environmental damage, human suffering and the challenges that leaders need to care about. The question is how may leaders learn to respond to and lead the way as material conditions of living beings in the Anthropocene change rapidly? One fin...

While the analysis of liberalism fills much of The Birth of Biopolitics, the focus of Foucault’s discussion is on the dynamic, equivocal and enigmatic contemporary condition at the intersection of welfare governance, biopolitics and neo-liberalism of the late seventies. This article examines The Birth of Biopolitics as a prolongation of Security, T...

We are very pleased to guest edit and publish this special edition of Foucault Studies entitled Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1980. Security, Territory, Population; The Birth of Biopolitics; On the Government of the Living. As pronounced in the editorial, this special edition contains three articles, each devoted to discu...

I denne rundbordssamtale, diskuterer vi forskellige former for kritik, historisk og aktuelt. Vi diskuterer, hvordan kritik er blevet noget uomgængeligt og allestedsnærværende, og hvilken problemer- og udfordringer det stiller til en kritisk praksis i dag. Vi skitserer to arketypiske kritikformer, som vi benævner som negativ og affirmativ kritik. De...

Det er ikke nok at styre. Der må også le-des Sverre Raffnsøe Professor, dr. phil., Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy , Copenhagen Business School sra.mpp@cbs.dk Der er vaesentlig forskel på at styre og på at lede. Det er i evnen til at lede medarbejdere til selv at tage ansvar og initiativ, ledere kan vise deres vaerd og løse proble...

This study provides a general overview of the crucial and critical stages in the history, organization and production of knowledge in Western societies since the establishment of the modern university around 1800. A recurring subject of examination, forming a guiding and unifying theme, is the momentous influence of the human sciences as well as th...

The cultivation and propagation of aesthetic expreience after its declaration of independence

Man hævder ofte at alle faste værdier forsvinder og at ethvert socialt bånd er i færd med at opløses. Dette skyldes imidlertid at samfundet hænger sammen på en måde som ikke svarer til vores traditionelle forestillinger. Det sociale bånd der knytter os sammen er vævet af en række forskelligartede tråde hvoraf ingen fremstår som substantielle og gru...

Man hævder ofte at alle faste værdier forsvinder og at ethvert socialt bånd er i færd med at opløses. Dette skyldes imidlertid at samfundet hænger sammen på en måde som ikke svarer til vores traditionelle forestillinger. Det sociale bånd der knytter os sammen er vævet af en række forskelligartede tråde hvoraf ingen fremstår som substantielle og gru...

Man hævder ofte at alle faste værdier forsvinder og at ethvert socialt bånd er i færd med at opløses. Dette skyldes imidlertid at samfundet hænger sammen på en måde som ikke svarer til vores traditionelle forestillinger. Det sociale bånd der knytter os sammen er vævet af en række forskelligartede tråde hvoraf ingen fremstår som substantielle og gru...

Wohin man auch blickt, finden sich kreative Praktiken, Räume, Organisationen und Subjekte: der Kreativitätskomplex. Im Arbeitsalltag, im Stadtraum, in Medien und Werbung, auf den sozialen Plattformen, in Schulen und Universitäten - der Imperativ für alle lautet, neu und besonders, auffallend und einzigartig zu sein. Doch wie ist es dazu gekommen? M...

Wohin man auch blickt, finden sich kreative Praktiken, Räume, Organisationen und Subjekte: der Kreativitätskomplex. Im Arbeitsalltag, im Stadtraum, in Medien und Werbung, auf den sozialen Plattformen, in Schulen und Universitäten - der Imperativ für alle lautet, neu und besonders, auffallend und einzigartig zu sein. Doch wie ist es dazu gekommen? M...

Wherever we turn, we find creative practices and creative spaces, creative organizations and creative subjects. At work or in public places, in media representations and in advertisements, on social platforms, in schools and universities: There is a demand to be new and special, conspicuous and singular. How did this creativity complex and its impe...

Wherever we turn, we find creative practices and creative spaces, creative organizations and creative subjects. At work or in public places, in media representations and in advertisements, on social platforms, in schools and universities: There is a demand to be new and special, conspicuous and singular. How did this creativity complex and its impe...

Art. Aesthetics. Exile. Ovid. Delacroix

Responding to Guattari’s call for a ‘mutation of mentality’, the article explores unconventional horse-assisted leadership learning as promising ways of embodied learning to be affected and response-able. By drawing on and continuing the work of Guattari and posthuman feminist scholars, we aim to show that studying the affective pedagogics of openi...

With Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair, a long awaited and major publication in Foucault’s œuvre has finally become available. In order to fully understand Les aveux de la chair and its contribution to Foucault’s work, Foucault Studies and future use of Foucault’s work, it is necessary to understand its publication history as well a...

This essay argues that what makes Michel Foucault’s oeuvre not only stand apart but also cohere is an assiduous philosophical practice taking the form of an ongoing yet concrete self-modification in the medium of thought. Part I gives an account of three essential aspects of Foucault’s conception of philosophical activity. Beginning with his famous...

This essay argues that what makes Michel Foucault's oeuvre not only stand apart but also cohere is an assiduous philosophical practice taking the form of an ongoing yet concrete self-modification in the medium of thought. Part I gives an account of three essential aspects of Foucault's conception of philosophical activity. Beginning with his famous...

Since the establishment of Organization Studies in 1980, Michel Foucault’s oeuvre has had a remarkable and continuing influence on its field. This article traces the different ways in which organizational scholars have engaged with Foucault’s writings over the past thirty years or so. We identify four overlapping waves of influence. Drawing on Fouc...

Since the Enlightenment, critique has played an overarching role in how Western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant’s critical philosophy...

Anmeldelse af Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: The New Human in Literature. Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900. Bloomsbury, London & New York.

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late...

Hvis vi udfordrede fore-stillingerne om ledelse og fremfor at hive arkive-rede figurer i ensartede blå suits frem, ville vi få øje for, at det ikke alene er nødvendigt, men også hensigtsmaessigt at ud-vide ledelsesfigurenog vores forestillinger om, hvad der kan vaere god ledelse.

The Anthropocene is heralded as a new epoch distinguishing itself from all foregoing eons in the history of the Earth. It is characterized by the overarching importance of the human species in a number of respects, but also by the recognition of human dependence and precariousness. A critical human turn affecting the human condition is still in the...

This chapter clarifies how the turn towards humanity as a decisive factor can be understood as a result of increasing human empowerment, which has meant that the human being can seem to have assumed a position at the core of its own universe. Such an anthropocentric conception is, however, inadequate if we are to understand the wider implications o...

The book’s sixth chapter points to how the human turn, as a significant factor, sets a new agenda for the scientific area that has traditionally had as one of its primary tasks the investigation and establishment of knowledge about the human field. With the change of humankind’s role and the human character comes a new position of, and a new role f...

Copernicus points out the necessity of introducing a shift in the centring of the Universe, a turn of momentous consequences. Consecutively, Kant suggests a similarly decisive Counter-Copernican Wende. Despite their relegation from the centre of the Cosmos, humans may seem to take centre stage in the realm of knowledge, but also in practical and ex...

The human turn in the Anthropocene landscape involves a certain hubris compared with a more traditional Western cosmological existential understanding of the world, and thereby it also comes to involve an exodus and estrangement from the limited and simultaneously central position that humankind holds in this understanding. Now, moving into the for...

Under the present circumstances, the received form and the historical heritage of the human sciences poses a special challenge. It was only 200 years ago, with the re-constitution of the university around 1800, that the human sciences first entered the scene in the shape recognizable today as “humanities” in the modern sense which investigate and c...

Chapter eight points to how, within the faculty of the humanities, efforts are already under way to address the challenges presented by the human turn. Te human sciences are already in the process of redefining themselves in relation to their historical heritage. Post-disciplinary disciplines are being established, and fundamental borders are being...

This initial chapter describes how the Anthropocene gives rise to a still unfamiliar landscape that is distinct and overarching. It is characterized by the fact that the human being holds a new position and a new role. Humankind has acquired a central role as the single most decisive factor on Earth, not only for humans themselves but also in a wid...

This investigation begins by looking at how the turn towards the human as a decisive factor in the Anthropocene world also entails a new turn of the human. Even as the human factor manifests itself as decisive, it becomes clear how humans are situated beings. Not only are they affected by the world, they are also characterized by a certain way of b...

The call for knowledge and know-how about humans with the human turn leads to a general turn towards the human factor in science, research and education. A brief look at the life sciences, health sciences and “big data” exemplifies how a number of sciences are turning towards the human and setting new agendas for the modes of living that currently...

The intolerable. A pamphlet with the title L’intolérable was published in the early spring of 1971. Written and signed by Foucault along with two others, it presented a critique of insufferable conditions among the courts, police, health sector, school, military, and media. The immediate aim of the flyer was a critique of circumstances in the priso...

Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines was published in 1966 when the controversies surrounding structuralism were heating up. It was a decisive contribution to the structuralist trend in the wider public and became a phenomenon to be taken into account, not only in the humanities and social sciences but also philosophically....

Even from the vantage point of posterity, there is something uncannily familiar about Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the spring of 1979. Foucault’s account seeks to provide what he would later call “an ontology of the present.”1 Furthermore, he also attempted to disclose the “domain [champ]” within which several of the “currently p...

Some ten years after Foucault’s characterization of philosophy as a diagnostic activity associated with “a kind of radical journalism,”1 he returns to this theme in a number of short articles and conversations found at the end of his authorship. At this point, he emphasizes that the origins of his conception of philosophy reaches further back than...

In light of Foucault’s work in the 1970s, it is crucial to recognize how the description of power as a social technology involves a distinction between various kinds of power and a mode of inquiry capable of differential analysis. In his lectures from the first half of the 1970s, Foucault primarily examines discipline as such a technology of power....

“What I am attempting to do and what I have always attempted ever since my first real book Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique,” Foucault explains in a conversation dating from 1978, “is, through intellectual labor, to dispute and question various aspects of society by drawing attention towards their weaknesses and boundaries. My books are, none...

It cannot and should not be denied that Foucault was a thinker who continuously developed his guiding ideas and constantly revised his previous thoughts. Yet, this restless identity was not absolute or purely negative but rather expressed a consistent and coherent conception about how to put philosophy into practice in contemporary terms. In spite...

Foucault’s collision with the regime of security. Late in the evening on November 16, 1977, a police van carrying Klaus Croissant left La prison de la Santé in Paris. Foucault was to be found in front of the prison along with 25 other people to form a symbolic barricade.1 The demonstrators had decided that the happening was to be peaceful, but — ac...

Foucault’s philosophical journalism. “I consider myself a journalist,” Foucault asserted in 1973, “to the extent that what interests me, that is the actuality — what is happening around us, what we are, what is going on in the world. Philosophy, up until Nietzsche, has had eternity for its reason of being. The first journalist-philosopher was Nietz...

Foucault’s dejection. In a retrospective interview from 1982, Foucault notes how: “Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things.”1 The first example Foucault gives to illustrate this general circumstance is Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie, which was defended as a...

Subject formation in practices of the self. In the programmatic introduction to L’Usage des plaisirs, Foucault describes his histories of sexuality succinctly as a study of “the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves” as subjects of sexuality.1 He immediately goes on, however, to situate his investigation of s...

The conditions for diagnosis. In his critical analysis, Foucault takes an outset in the experience of a specific, current movement. His diagnosis of the present begins by observing the present as a special disruption that takes place as an event in which we participate so as to examine what that present involves for us.1 Here, the present takes on...

Foucault and (homo)sexuality. At the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault gave a number of interviews in which he was asked about conditions for homosexuals.1 These conversations were partly motivated by Foucault. Despite being an academic celebrity at the time, he was not hiding his own homosexuality and was considered a kind of expert in the field in...

Michel Foucault continues to be hugely influential. His diagnoses challenge us to rethink crucial phenomena such as madness, discipline, the human sciences, the state, neoliberalism, sexuality and subject formation. Based on his work in its entirety, and with special emphasis on his many recently published lecture series, this book provides an upda...

Medarbejderne leder sig selv på flere og flere arbejdspladser. Når den enkelte skal skabe fornyelse og selv tage vare på sig selv og sine opgaver, er selvledelse vejen frem. Det giver medarbejderen stor frihed, men frihedens velsignelser er samtidig en forbandelse og en belastning.

Since the Enlightenment critique has played an overarching role in how western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant’s critical philosophy,...

While Foucault’s work has had a crucial impact on organizational research, the analytical potential of the dispositive has not been sufficiently developed. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the notion of the dispositive as a key conception in Foucault’s thought, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France, and to develop dispo...

Sverre Raffnsøe, Matias Møl Dalsgaard, and Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Søren Kierkegard (1813-1855) in Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, and Robin Holt (eds) The Oxford Hanbook of Process Philosophy & Organization Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 111-128.

In the context of an ongoing change, management is required to take the form of a leadership that must be reignited over and over again. The article examines a new art of leadership that may be viewed as an attempt to keep up with these challenges and stay ahead of time. It emerges from a pilgrimage leadership learning laboratory on the road to San...

This article advances the 'dispositive' (le dispositif) as a key conception in Fou-cault's work. As developed in his annual lectures in 1978 and 1979, the dispositive represents a crucial constituent of societal analysis on par with the familiar analytics of power/knowledge and the governmentality perspective-indeed it forms a lesser known intermed...

Taking an approach that avoids comprehending power and trust as entities to be studied apart, the article insists on elucidating trust and power as they are enacted in their intimate and delicate relationship to each other and to other human and social phenomena of similar importance, such as knowledge and experience, gift-giving, hope, freedom and...