+
From: Kevin Turner <k_turner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 12:41:03 +0000
I take the first point as given: that was the whole point of my play on
the word asylum - reason as generally being understood as a knowledge
free from power (i.e. without seizure), but in Foucault's analysis of
madness "reason becomes the asylum (actual institutional practice of
seizure) of the mind.
As for the second point, it seems to me that that might be
over-complexifying things.
The way I see it, and this may actually be an over-simplification of
things, and I could certainly be critisised for this, but it seems to me
that Foucault simply took what was necessary and given in Kant and
historicised it: i.e. turned it into a contingent and constitutive. That
is, that what Kant took to be the necessary transcendental a priori of
understanding, experience, etc., Foucault took to be thoroughly
historicised forms of understanding, shot through with relations of
power, and constitutive of possible fields of experience, of
experiencing historically singular forms of subjectivity: mad, ill,
order, crime, sexuality, and so on.
Regards - Kevin.
xavier delcourt wrote:
Thanks forFirstly
Secondly, nevertheless, there seems to be à light flaw in your
translation of asylum: "a" is not the latin ablative (like in "a
priori") but the greek privative (meaning "not" or "without"):
although the modern sense of asylum, as an institution, does not
obviously point to it, asylum is a place (generaly sacred) where there
is not right of seizure, luckily.
As for the "historical a priori"(independant of or not given in
experience, but appliable to any object of possible experience,
universal and necessary), which, indeed, is central in the foucaldian
definition of experience it poses some analytical questions too, as
to how Foucault builds and applies a (several) rule(s) of
transformation to the kantian a priori: does it relate to the
(transcendantal) subject as such(constitutive of conditions and a
little more), to the categories (concepts, conditions of objects, or
representations), or to the forms of intuition -internal: time, or
external: space-(conditions of apparition or presentations). Or/and
does it relate to the synthetic a priori judgement (rule of
construction of an object in experience or practice, ie synthesis
between a concept, or a conceptuel determination, and an ensemble of
"spatio-temporal"-i am not sure of the english equivalent-
determinations, which allows a synthesis between -at least-two
heterogeneous concepts)?
And these, of course, are just a beginning, staying within the first
of the critics.