Books by Krešimir Petković
I've researched and written a lot about Foucault through the years. I've reworked it and put toge... more I've researched and written a lot about Foucault through the years. I've reworked it and put together here, but there is also a lot's of new stuff. Some questions that might find an answer within the covers (all in Croatian though):
What is the relation between power and punishment? How did the discourse of war and why change in Foucault, and why is this important? How does a compound picture of totalitarianism offered by Arendt and Foucault help one to understand the phenomenon and why it may be still important today? What the hell is genealogy after all? Is Socrates ironist or parrhesiast? Is it possible to be both? Can knowledge save us on Nietzsche's planet? What does it mean that Agamben has an eschatology and Foucault hasn’t? Why does Bulgakov's Pilate ask Jeshua, the vagrant, about the truth? On a bit more actual and perhaps more morbid note, how does Larry Nassar's case look through Foucauldian lenses, few centuries away from controversial innocent bucolic pleasures from the Will to Know? What would Foucault say on political correctness? Why are Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson wrong on Foucault, designated by the first as Cagliostro of modern times? Where does Foucault stand between the two poles, one being Rousseau’s total political transparency and the other Sade’s dark castle of murders? What are the similarities and what are the differences between Conrad's and Foucault's ethics when “principles won’t do“? What is the relation between madness and parrhesia after all?
Truth is produced through examinations and disciplines but also through struggles and techniques of the self. Truth as an ordeal, la vérité comme l’épreuve: Foucault’s project is not a sociology of power but history of alethurgy, the production of truth. And the famous pathos of truth? Love, beyond Valentine cards, can transform the subject. It’s the greatest ordeal of all. Promotion to be held in June on the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb and announced on its web site. Hope there are not too many typos etc. in the book. We prepared it in a hurry.
Michel Foucault: moć ideja, 2017
Interdisciplinarni zbornik radova "Michel Foucault: moć ideja", nastao poslije održavanja istoime... more Interdisciplinarni zbornik radova "Michel Foucault: moć ideja", nastao poslije održavanja istoimenog znanstvenog skupa u lipnju 2014., realiziran je krajem 2016. godine kroz suuredništvo izv. prof. dr. sc. Marijana Krivaka, Luke Pejić, Davorina Ćutija i Zvonimira Glavaša. Uz navedene osobe svoje su radove za potrebe oblikovanja publikacije ustupili i izv. prof. dr. sc. Žarko Paić te doc. dr. sc. Krešimir Petković. Recenzenti zbornika su doc. dr. sc. Hajrudin Hromadžić, dr. sc. Ivan Milenković i prof. dr. sc. Lino Veljak.
A big book about punishment that took about three years from the initial contact with the acquisi... more A big book about punishment that took about three years from the initial contact with the acquisitions editor to the publication date. Bringing together things I know about violence and punishment through the lenses of various discourses, in English, was a drudging process even for a relative scribomaniac such as myself: writing a 360k words mammoth along with other things to do; trimming it down to still gigantic but a bit more readable 260k words, and reworking it after reviews and negotiations with the editors; and, finally, reading of the +600 pages copyedited proofs and producing a list of corrections and an index; oh, the final quick check of the corrected proofs and index, and lots of other things I don’t care to mention here. Hell, in a word.
A few nice persons appeared in the publishing process, but it struck me as too rigid, even when you exist the comfortable position of authorial narcissism. Just one example: an endnote referring to some concepts in the table in the last chapter ended up attached to some prior text not quite related to the matter. I asked and warned about that issue more than few times in the process (there are obviously more than few simple ways to solve this very trite problem) but it remained as it is in the final version. At the very end, I was too exhausted to push this thing through. I have instead invested what was left from my energies to correct the “ć”—a “c” with an acute accent, pronounced as “ch” in “chicken”–appearing in the first version of the covers. I somehow succeeded and, in the end, it actually conforms to the general visual rules related to the South-Slavic diacritics. In the aforementioned raw version of the covers (also sporting my academic home decapitalized), planted here instead of the pdf of the proofs, it doesn’t look too good.
In other words, the whole deal was as good as it gets for the author from the periphery whose first language is not English and who did not spend any time at all climbing up the academic ladder and—excuse me for the rude phrasing—“networking” in the Anglo-Saxon academic world (I landed up in New York by accident of a life-history after the first version of manuscript was submitted and reviewed). Or, simply, for an unknown author. As for the next book, when I rest a bit, it will be about ideology, truth and human life. I am tired from punishment and all the sadistic, cruel or cynical grotesque associated with the infliction of pain and political authority claims, and I am, as it seems, going to tackle a less ambitious theme of Ideologiekritik.
And yes, for those who care about the content of this one, the book is basically a botched theodicy (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498513449/Discourses-on-Violence-and-Punishment-Probing-the-Extremes). A lot of it is anyhow available on Google Books.
A foreword to a co-edited manual on concepts in public policy (in Croatian).
Few excerpts from a book about political power, violence and punishment in Croatia. In Croatian. ... more Few excerpts from a book about political power, violence and punishment in Croatia. In Croatian. (For those reading it: Rado bih podigao cijelu knjigu ovdje, odnosno posljednju verziju prijeloma koju posjedujem, ali ne mogu iz pristojnosti prema izdavaču koji od toga živi i računa prodati pokoji primjerak mimo sheme državnih poticaja i knjižničnog otkupa. Za ovakve subverzivne društvenoznanstvene rasprave dobivaju su naime državni poticaji, a autor, ovisno o ugovoru s izdavačem, obično dobije skroman fiksni honorar nakon čega njegov ekonomski interes u projektu prestaje. Strogo govoreći, nisam siguran ni da je ovih nekoliko kompiliranih isječaka legalno postaviti ovdje. U svakom slučaju, cijelu raspravu od 400-injak stranica može se posuditi u javnim knjižnicama u Zagrebu, a čini mi se i u ostatku Hrvatske.)
Papers by Krešimir Petković
An integral version (in Croatian) of a piece coauthored with Tena Vranek, about stalking, punishm... more An integral version (in Croatian) of a piece coauthored with Tena Vranek, about stalking, punishment and gender equality in Croatia. A bit shorter version, without Petrarca, revenge porn and some other stuff, was published in the journal Političke Perspektive in 2024 (https://hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/460419).
Politička misao, 2023
A thought experiment (in Croatian) bringing together the literature on revolutions and Robert Mus... more A thought experiment (in Croatian) bringing together the literature on revolutions and Robert Musil’s sense of possibility from The Man Without Qualities to think about the possibilities of an Anti-Brussels revolution in Croatia.
Hrvatska i komparativna javna uprava, 2022
A piece (in Croatian) about a strange brew of ideologically driven declared state ambitions to ch... more A piece (in Croatian) about a strange brew of ideologically driven declared state ambitions to change society. Starting from the two dimensions of the concept of truth—the mutual coherence of statements and the correspondence of statements with social reality—the paper analyses Croatian public policy goals based on a qualitative analysis of the state’s strategic documents. It is concluded that the suggested lack of mutual coherence and correspondence of public policies with social trends makes their goals too ambitious and potentially dystopian, especially in the perspective of negatively understood political liberty, in other words–freedom.
Politička misao, 2022
A review article (in Croatian) on public policy research in Croatia on the occasion of the annive... more A review article (in Croatian) on public policy research in Croatia on the occasion of the anniversary of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb (1962-2022). Coauthored with Zdravko Petak.
Europski glasnik, 2021
What does it mean, the king is naked? The earlier version of this essay, which discusses the poli... more What does it mean, the king is naked? The earlier version of this essay, which discusses the political implications of the concept of truth by Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou with reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave and its interpretation by Heidegger, appeared in the European Messenger (Europski glasnik, 26/2021), published by the Croatian Writers Society (HDP). It is a bit stretched but I hope still feasible experiment of a political truth game attempting to play with Arendt and Foucault against Badiou. On the one side, we see the picture of a tiny voice of truth and, ultimately, the big rage of facts against the violence of ideology; on the other, we face a fervor of the revolutionary truth i.e. ideology against the offensive world of facts which are handled with Jacobin methods. The game is, needless to say, a liberal one, that is a bit reactionary from the vantage point of the revolutionary political thought. There is some Ancient Greek and some French in the essay, but most of it is, alas, in Croatian; the only parts in English appear at the very end: most of the bibliography, and the translations of the title and the abstract.
Ekonomska misao i praksa, 2021
A piece about innovation policy in Croatia, co-written with a former doctoral student who departe... more A piece about innovation policy in Croatia, co-written with a former doctoral student who departed from public to private sector. It puts bits and pieces of discourse from across the system into Kingdonian framework of agenda setting. (In Croatian.)
Političke analize, 2021
Juggling with some metaphors from Frank Herbert’s Dune saga to explain the role of political scie... more Juggling with some metaphors from Frank Herbert’s Dune saga to explain the role of political science within the humanistic university—not just to my younger daughter or to myself, and not only in the times of various more or less natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and pandemics. Beneath the droll surface, I offer a bit traditional tripartite normative defense of political science as a struggle against tyranny, the exploration of relevant social problems together with other disciplines, and the good governance through design, implementation and evaluation of public policies. Can political scientist be a mentat, (fore)see correctly and help decision making within a sustainable and just community of the free and equal? Go check it out (if you read Croatian and are not nauseated by one too many references to Leo Strauss…).
Europski glasnik, 2019
Houellebecq: Conversion of a Cynic. Houellebecq interests me as an uncompromising critic of liber... more Houellebecq: Conversion of a Cynic. Houellebecq interests me as an uncompromising critic of liberalism. The essay, written in Croatian, tries to follow a mystical thread in Houellebecq’s seven novels from Whatever to Serotonin portraying the author’s journey as a personal eschatology. Juxtaposition of the last two novels, Submission (conversion to Islam) and Seretonin (arguably, conversion to an undogmatic Christianity), as well as comparison to earlier works, especially The Possibility of an Island, exhibits some sort of leap of faith, from the blind alleys of sexual excesses, science fiction posthumanist fantasies and cultural pessimism to an unorthodox Christology. Mercy stops the trigger but a touch of irony is added at the very end: It would seem so. / Houellebecq : conversion d’un cynique. Houellebecq m’intéresse en tant qu’un critique intransigeant du libéralisme. L’essai, écrit en croate, tente de suivre un fil mystique dans les sept romans de Houellebecq, de Extension du domaine de la lutte à Sérotonine, décrivant le voyage de l’auteur comme une eschatologie personnelle. La juxtaposition des deux derniers romans, Soumission (conversion à l'islam) et Sérotonine (on peut dire : conversion à un christianisme non-dogmatique), ainsi que la comparaison avec des œuvres antérieures, en particulier La possibilité d'une île, présente une sorte de saut de la foi, de la allées aveugles d'excès sexuels, fantaisies posthumanistes de science-fiction et pessimisme culturel à une christologie peu orthodoxe. La grâce arrête la gâchette mais une touche d’ironie est ajoutée à la fin: Il semblerait que oui.
Europski glasnik, 2019
Is populism a specific political style? Is it a political ideology? A type of regime? Its elusive... more Is populism a specific political style? Is it a political ideology? A type of regime? Its elusive shape suggests it’s an analytically obfuscating battle cry associated with the problems of identity politics and epochal legitimization crisis of liberal democracies. This essay, written in Croatian, offers a bird’s eye critical reflection on the vast populism literature by a lay political scientist in the area. In retrospect, it seems a bit too skeptical, lacking generosity at points but hopefully with enough disclaimers, careful wordings and convoluted phrases to pull it off. The final normative crescendo attempts to bring together political science and justice, posited as its core value, politically exempted from deconstruction.
Anali Hrvatskog politološkog društva, 2019
An analysis (in Croatian) of the discourses articulated in public and the politics surrounding th... more An analysis (in Croatian) of the discourses articulated in public and the politics surrounding the affirmative parliamentary voting on the Istanbul Convention in Croatia, which was then ratified. The article maps four key discourses as well as four peripheral ones in the process, and then traces the formation of a strange discourse coalition of the nominally left and right forces, which formed around the dominant discourse of violence against women. Some paradoxical precepts from Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge seem to be corroborated: rationality of tactics which precedes those of strategies as well as the idea of tactical polyvalence of discourse. Anyhow, the article is a part of much larger and more explicitly normative research which argues for penal republicanism against witch-hunts and recent trends of ideologically driven feudalization of penal policy. I hope it will one day be published as a sequel to my earlier book State and Crime.
Politicke perspektive, 2018
For those temporarily or terminally tired of discourse analysis: an attempt to deal with the old ... more For those temporarily or terminally tired of discourse analysis: an attempt to deal with the old problem of how to differentiate between truth and ideology, and to answer what does that distinction mean for politics. An essay.
A piece in Croatian that brings together Arendt’s and Foucault’s theoretical work on totalitarian... more A piece in Croatian that brings together Arendt’s and Foucault’s theoretical work on totalitarianism. It began as a diploma thesis (equivalent of MA thesis), written under my mentorship: Toni Pavlović one of my students, who now works in a public relations department of a public sector trash disposal company called Cleanliness Inc., compared the concepts of totalitarianism in Arendt and Foucault. It demanded lots of posterior work to bring it up to the “decent enough to be published” level. The text has passed through many hands. Few formal slips and glitches remain, having to do with the copy editing and the final editorial work: unfortunately, I did not have the chance to take a look at and correct the final version in the end, but I am mostly happy with the outcome. It could be an interesting reading for all Arendt and Foucault scholars as well as for those still researching totalitarianism.
An ages old material in Croatian about penal policy (non)transfer from USA to UK, specifically to... more An ages old material in Croatian about penal policy (non)transfer from USA to UK, specifically to England and Wales. It makes more sense with the separate piece on the penal policy in the US but it also works reasonably well alone. Once I did a lot of comparative work, mostly reading various journal pieces on penal policies in various political units across the world, and I felt sorry to leave all of that only to the teeth of technologically outdated but still proverbial rodent critics of the drawers. When I’ve somehow found a bit of time to deal with some old texts, I updated and polished this old piece a little; it has passed the reviews in a law journal, and voilà… (It also has an abstract in Italian I am not at all responsible for.)
Uploads
Books by Krešimir Petković
What is the relation between power and punishment? How did the discourse of war and why change in Foucault, and why is this important? How does a compound picture of totalitarianism offered by Arendt and Foucault help one to understand the phenomenon and why it may be still important today? What the hell is genealogy after all? Is Socrates ironist or parrhesiast? Is it possible to be both? Can knowledge save us on Nietzsche's planet? What does it mean that Agamben has an eschatology and Foucault hasn’t? Why does Bulgakov's Pilate ask Jeshua, the vagrant, about the truth? On a bit more actual and perhaps more morbid note, how does Larry Nassar's case look through Foucauldian lenses, few centuries away from controversial innocent bucolic pleasures from the Will to Know? What would Foucault say on political correctness? Why are Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson wrong on Foucault, designated by the first as Cagliostro of modern times? Where does Foucault stand between the two poles, one being Rousseau’s total political transparency and the other Sade’s dark castle of murders? What are the similarities and what are the differences between Conrad's and Foucault's ethics when “principles won’t do“? What is the relation between madness and parrhesia after all?
Truth is produced through examinations and disciplines but also through struggles and techniques of the self. Truth as an ordeal, la vérité comme l’épreuve: Foucault’s project is not a sociology of power but history of alethurgy, the production of truth. And the famous pathos of truth? Love, beyond Valentine cards, can transform the subject. It’s the greatest ordeal of all. Promotion to be held in June on the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb and announced on its web site. Hope there are not too many typos etc. in the book. We prepared it in a hurry.
A few nice persons appeared in the publishing process, but it struck me as too rigid, even when you exist the comfortable position of authorial narcissism. Just one example: an endnote referring to some concepts in the table in the last chapter ended up attached to some prior text not quite related to the matter. I asked and warned about that issue more than few times in the process (there are obviously more than few simple ways to solve this very trite problem) but it remained as it is in the final version. At the very end, I was too exhausted to push this thing through. I have instead invested what was left from my energies to correct the “ć”—a “c” with an acute accent, pronounced as “ch” in “chicken”–appearing in the first version of the covers. I somehow succeeded and, in the end, it actually conforms to the general visual rules related to the South-Slavic diacritics. In the aforementioned raw version of the covers (also sporting my academic home decapitalized), planted here instead of the pdf of the proofs, it doesn’t look too good.
In other words, the whole deal was as good as it gets for the author from the periphery whose first language is not English and who did not spend any time at all climbing up the academic ladder and—excuse me for the rude phrasing—“networking” in the Anglo-Saxon academic world (I landed up in New York by accident of a life-history after the first version of manuscript was submitted and reviewed). Or, simply, for an unknown author. As for the next book, when I rest a bit, it will be about ideology, truth and human life. I am tired from punishment and all the sadistic, cruel or cynical grotesque associated with the infliction of pain and political authority claims, and I am, as it seems, going to tackle a less ambitious theme of Ideologiekritik.
And yes, for those who care about the content of this one, the book is basically a botched theodicy (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498513449/Discourses-on-Violence-and-Punishment-Probing-the-Extremes). A lot of it is anyhow available on Google Books.
Papers by Krešimir Petković
What is the relation between power and punishment? How did the discourse of war and why change in Foucault, and why is this important? How does a compound picture of totalitarianism offered by Arendt and Foucault help one to understand the phenomenon and why it may be still important today? What the hell is genealogy after all? Is Socrates ironist or parrhesiast? Is it possible to be both? Can knowledge save us on Nietzsche's planet? What does it mean that Agamben has an eschatology and Foucault hasn’t? Why does Bulgakov's Pilate ask Jeshua, the vagrant, about the truth? On a bit more actual and perhaps more morbid note, how does Larry Nassar's case look through Foucauldian lenses, few centuries away from controversial innocent bucolic pleasures from the Will to Know? What would Foucault say on political correctness? Why are Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson wrong on Foucault, designated by the first as Cagliostro of modern times? Where does Foucault stand between the two poles, one being Rousseau’s total political transparency and the other Sade’s dark castle of murders? What are the similarities and what are the differences between Conrad's and Foucault's ethics when “principles won’t do“? What is the relation between madness and parrhesia after all?
Truth is produced through examinations and disciplines but also through struggles and techniques of the self. Truth as an ordeal, la vérité comme l’épreuve: Foucault’s project is not a sociology of power but history of alethurgy, the production of truth. And the famous pathos of truth? Love, beyond Valentine cards, can transform the subject. It’s the greatest ordeal of all. Promotion to be held in June on the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb and announced on its web site. Hope there are not too many typos etc. in the book. We prepared it in a hurry.
A few nice persons appeared in the publishing process, but it struck me as too rigid, even when you exist the comfortable position of authorial narcissism. Just one example: an endnote referring to some concepts in the table in the last chapter ended up attached to some prior text not quite related to the matter. I asked and warned about that issue more than few times in the process (there are obviously more than few simple ways to solve this very trite problem) but it remained as it is in the final version. At the very end, I was too exhausted to push this thing through. I have instead invested what was left from my energies to correct the “ć”—a “c” with an acute accent, pronounced as “ch” in “chicken”–appearing in the first version of the covers. I somehow succeeded and, in the end, it actually conforms to the general visual rules related to the South-Slavic diacritics. In the aforementioned raw version of the covers (also sporting my academic home decapitalized), planted here instead of the pdf of the proofs, it doesn’t look too good.
In other words, the whole deal was as good as it gets for the author from the periphery whose first language is not English and who did not spend any time at all climbing up the academic ladder and—excuse me for the rude phrasing—“networking” in the Anglo-Saxon academic world (I landed up in New York by accident of a life-history after the first version of manuscript was submitted and reviewed). Or, simply, for an unknown author. As for the next book, when I rest a bit, it will be about ideology, truth and human life. I am tired from punishment and all the sadistic, cruel or cynical grotesque associated with the infliction of pain and political authority claims, and I am, as it seems, going to tackle a less ambitious theme of Ideologiekritik.
And yes, for those who care about the content of this one, the book is basically a botched theodicy (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498513449/Discourses-on-Violence-and-Punishment-Probing-the-Extremes). A lot of it is anyhow available on Google Books.