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The French Center for Research
on Contemporary China, Taipei Office,
in collaboration with the
Institute of Political Science (IPSAS), Academia Sinica,
have the pleasure to invite you to attend the following
lecture:
"Taiwan as the Westphalian Society’s
Foucaldian Heterotopia"
「台灣：西發利亞國際社會之傅柯異托邦」
(in English)
by Dr. Françoise Mengin,
Senior Research Fellow,
French Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI)
(Sciences Po-CNRS)
on Thursday November 22,
2007, 2:30 PM
Venue: Conference Room A,
Institute of
Political Science
(Social Sciences Building
North, 5th Floor), Academia Sinica, Taipei
The lecture is open to all.
Please find the abstract below.
Contact:
cefc@gate.sinica.edu.tw - Tel : (02)
2789 0873 -
www.cefc.com.hk/taipei
Abstract:
Because of the entanglement of a claimed sovereignty limited
to the territory the régime is in control of, and the fact that the official –
though not internationally recognized – borders are still those of the 1947
constitution, Taiwan, as a geopolitical entity, is all the more difficult to
conceptualize as the exceptional does not lie where one would expect to find it.
For this very reason, one may resort to Michel Foucault’s concept of
heterotopia as those other spaces “which are something like counter-sites, a
kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real
sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted.”
Following Foucault’s reasoning should lead one to consider
Taiwan as a “mirror” to scrutinize contemporary international practices, logics,
and processes. Non-recognition does not mean autarchy, and, indeed, Taiwan is
fully integrated into the international society. First, the substitutes for
diplomatic and consular relations which have been devised between Taiwan and
states recognizing the PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan indicate that the rule of
the game is still the Westphalian fiction, although through a logic of pretence.
Second, the relocation tide of Taiwan’s industry on the mainland - a case in
point of globalization processes - produces inverted logics.
Short Biography:
Senior Research Fellow, French Centre for
International Studies and Research (CERI) (Sciences Po-CNRS), Paris.
Main fields of research : Cross-Strait
relations, Taiwanese politics, and PRC’s foreign policy, within a twofold
approach: historical sociology and international relations theory.
Publications related to the topic of the seminar:
- “A
Tocquevillian Process:
Taiwan’s Democratization and
its Paradoxical Foundations”, in Robert Ash and J. Megan Greene (eds),
Taiwan in the 21st
Century: Aspects and limitations of a Development Model,
London and New York, Routledge, 2007, pp. 232-248.
- “A
Pretence of Privatisation: Taiwan’s External Relations”, in Béatrice Hibou
(ed.), Privatising the State, London, Hurst, 2004, pp. 147-167.
- “Taiwanese
Politics and the Chinese Market: Business"s Part in the Formation of a State, or
the Border as a Stake of Negotiations”, in Françoise Mengin and Jean-Louis Rocca
(eds), Politics in China: Moving Frontiers, New York, Palgrave, 2002, pp.
232-257.
-
Trajectoires chinoises, Taiwan, Hong Kong et Pékin, Paris, Karthala, 1998.
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