About

In a sense, the title of this website—Snafu—“situation normal, all fucked up,” says it all. During 2017-2018, we were caught in a series of perfectly normative events that unfolded around scholarly work and privileged players in a congeries of interconnected elite academic settings.

One set of these events concerns the fate of a manuscript, Inquiry After Modernism, jointly written by Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS, Paris) and Paul Rabinow (UC Berkeley).

The other set of events concerns Rabinow and his ever-more opaque relations with his colleagues at Berkeley.

We have decided to accept an exit from the authorized domains of official scholarly media and from the sphere of influence of their guardians, but not silence.

Rabinow has decided to respond to the secretive Star Chamber-like proceedings in the Anthropology Department at Berkeley, not by taking legal action for defamation or other grounds but, rather, by attempting to conceptualize how power works in such situations.

Hence this website.

For more information on Professor Rabinow’s lecture “Contemporary Counter-Conduct” given at Stanford University on February 11, 2019 click here.