On Oct 21, 1:23am, Tristan Riley wrote:
> Subject: Re: Foucault and 'the starving millions'
> Robert S. Leventhal writes:
> >
> >To whom it may concern:
> >
> >In my view, Megill has misconstrued both Derrida and Foucault, but, more
to
> >the point, he trivializes them by bunching them together with Nietzsche,
and
> >reducing the considerable differences -- differences of politics, of
ethics,
> >and of social theory -- that define their respective projects.
>
> I know nothing of Megill's book, nor does it sound like a particularly
> interesting one if the quotation posted here is at all indicative of
> what sort of take on Foucault is contained therein. But why this
> urgency to 'rescue' F. from Nietzsche? If indeed this Megill believes
> "bunching [F.] together with Nietzsche" is somehow a one step means
> to "trivializ[ing]" him, then I would submit that this is perhaps
> about Megill's simple reading of Nietzsche (and his faith that
> his readers will be just as convinced that one cannot be too
> attached to Nietzsche as political/social theorist without getting
> infected by the poison of N.'s 'latent Nazism'). This is meant as no
> accusation, Robert, (I don't know you well enough for that yet (:)
> but it seems to me a more and more frequent phenomenon, especially among
> some US academic 'Foucauldians' and 'cultural studies' folks, to take
> one's Foucault wholly from selected fragments of History of Sexuality,
> Vol. 1 (i.e., those in which, to simplify ridiculously, F. discusses power
> as distributed throughout a web and resistance as ubiquitous) which are
> interpreted as uncomplicated paeans to 'liberatory practices' of whatever
> stripe (but nearly always involving no risky incursions upon the sanctity
> of humanism and its ethical and moral precepts--and generally perfectly
> compatible with a liberal progressivism which F. spent more than a few
> pages scathingly critiquing). Nietzsche and the undeniably dangerous
> elements of a politics of the will are accordingly carefully removed,
> as a tumor of some malign sort, and F. is thus made ready for
> a very peculiar sort of political 'radicalism' which is perhaps
> indigenous and specific to the US--in which one can count as irrefutable
> signs of one's militancy membership in various congressional lobbying
> groups and the possession of a black leather motorcycle jacket
> (which perhaps one wears to the meetings of said lobbying groups).
> For my own odd reasons, I am always curious of the motivations behind
> efforts to chop the most dangerous elements from a thinker who had so
> much to say and write about danger and violence.
>
> >a political activist all of his life. He never ceased
> >struggling for prison reform, gay, lesbian and minority rights, the rights
of
> >the mentally ill, and the victims of totalitarian regimes.
>
> I would suggest here that the idea that F. "struggled" for "rights"
> as such, presented *without* the complication of his Nietzscheanism, is
> perhaps as misleading as the reading of Megill you are here deploring.
>
> > I remember at the Foucault conference
> >at USC in 1981, somebody asked Foucault what he should do in response to
the
> >increasing institutionalization of thought, and Foucault said that as a
> >philosopher, he could only describe and analyze these regimes and the
forms
> >of power they engender historically, structurally, in terms of the
production
> >of certain types of subjects, sciences, procedures, arguments, and
> >institutionalized disciplines.
>
> I'm rather surprised he answered such a question at all. Did the
> questioner perhaps believe that there can be thought *outside* institutions
> and that therefore there could be a greater or lesser amount of
> "institutionalized thought"? F. himself certainly seemed quite less than
> convinced of such a proposition.
>
>
> Tristan
> **********************************************************************
> One cannot construct the universe without the possibility of its
> being destroyed
> Maurice Blanchot
> **********************************************************************
>
>
> -- End of excerpt from Tristan Riley <triley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Oct 21, 1:23am, Tristan Riley wrote:
> Subject: Re: Foucault and 'the starving millions'
> Robert S. Leventhal writes:
> >
> >To whom it may concern:
> >
> >In my view, Megill has misconstrued both Derrida and Foucault, but, more
to
> >the point, he trivializes them by bunching them together with Nietzsche,
and
> >reducing the considerable differences -- differences of politics, of
ethics,
> >and of social theory -- that define their respective projects.
>
> I know nothing of Megill's book, nor does it sound like a particularly
> interesting one if the quotation posted here is at all indicative of
> what sort of take on Foucault is contained therein. But why this
> urgency to 'rescue' F. from Nietzsche? If indeed this Megill believes
> "bunching [F.] together with Nietzsche" is somehow a one step means
> to "trivializ[ing]" him, then I would submit that this is perhaps
> about Megill's simple reading of Nietzsche (and his faith that
> his readers will be just as convinced that one cannot be too
> attached to Nietzsche as political/social theorist without getting
> infected by the poison of N.'s 'latent Nazism'). This is meant as no
> accusation, Robert, (I don't know you well enough for that yet (:)
> but it seems to me a more and more frequent phenomenon, especially among
> some US academic 'Foucauldians' and 'cultural studies' folks, to take
> one's Foucault wholly from selected fragments of History of Sexuality,
> Vol. 1 (i.e., those in which, to simplify ridiculously, F. discusses power
> as distributed throughout a web and resistance as ubiquitous) which are
> interpreted as uncomplicated paeans to 'liberatory practices' of whatever
> stripe (but nearly always involving no risky incursions upon the sanctity
> of humanism and its ethical and moral precepts--and generally perfectly
> compatible with a liberal progressivism which F. spent more than a few
> pages scathingly critiquing). Nietzsche and the undeniably dangerous
> elements of a politics of the will are accordingly carefully removed,
> as a tumor of some malign sort, and F. is thus made ready for
> a very peculiar sort of political 'radicalism' which is perhaps
> indigenous and specific to the US--in which one can count as irrefutable
> signs of one's militancy membership in various congressional lobbying
> groups and the possession of a black leather motorcycle jacket
> (which perhaps one wears to the meetings of said lobbying groups).
> For my own odd reasons, I am always curious of the motivations behind
> efforts to chop the most dangerous elements from a thinker who had so
> much to say and write about danger and violence.
>
> >a political activist all of his life. He never ceased
> >struggling for prison reform, gay, lesbian and minority rights, the rights
of
> >the mentally ill, and the victims of totalitarian regimes.
>
> I would suggest here that the idea that F. "struggled" for "rights"
> as such, presented *without* the complication of his Nietzscheanism, is
> perhaps as misleading as the reading of Megill you are here deploring.
>
> > I remember at the Foucault conference
> >at USC in 1981, somebody asked Foucault what he should do in response to
the
> >increasing institutionalization of thought, and Foucault said that as a
> >philosopher, he could only describe and analyze these regimes and the
forms
> >of power they engender historically, structurally, in terms of the
production
> >of certain types of subjects, sciences, procedures, arguments, and
> >institutionalized disciplines.
>
> I'm rather surprised he answered such a question at all. Did the
> questioner perhaps believe that there can be thought *outside* institutions
> and that therefore there could be a greater or lesser amount of
> "institutionalized thought"? F. himself certainly seemed quite less than
> convinced of such a proposition.
>
>
> Tristan
> **********************************************************************
> One cannot construct the universe without the possibility of its
> being destroyed
> Maurice Blanchot
> **********************************************************************
>
>
> -- End of excerpt from Tristan Riley <triley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tristan,
I appreciated your pithy intervention. As a response, I was not trying to
rescue F. from Nietzsche. I see no need to do so. I was attempting to get the
focus back to the issue of political action, and it seems to me that Megill's
critique sought to show the impotence of Foucault's idealism precisely by
linking him to what he sees as a tradition of nihilism, which he, I believe
incorrectly, reads as being politically bankrupt. Nietzsche is particularly
important, I think, for F. because he was the first "mechanized Philosopher,"
(Kittler), the first philosopher to actually utilize the typewriter as an
instrument of composition, and of course because of the method -- if one can
call it that -- of genealogical analysis, of sifting through the historical
layers of a problematics. But it does seem to me that one must carefully
distinguish Foucault's genealogy from Nietzsche, which (I think Heidegger is
correct on this one) remains within the question of value precisely at the
moment it attempts to overturn it, remains indebted to it in its overthrow.
Foucault, it seems to me, was not concerned with Umwertung aller Werte, but
with what the Umwertung does, how it is functioning itself as an instance of
power. More later.
Rob Leventhal
rsl9b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Foucault and 'the starving millions'
> Robert S. Leventhal writes:
> >
> >To whom it may concern:
> >
> >In my view, Megill has misconstrued both Derrida and Foucault, but, more
to
> >the point, he trivializes them by bunching them together with Nietzsche,
and
> >reducing the considerable differences -- differences of politics, of
ethics,
> >and of social theory -- that define their respective projects.
>
> I know nothing of Megill's book, nor does it sound like a particularly
> interesting one if the quotation posted here is at all indicative of
> what sort of take on Foucault is contained therein. But why this
> urgency to 'rescue' F. from Nietzsche? If indeed this Megill believes
> "bunching [F.] together with Nietzsche" is somehow a one step means
> to "trivializ[ing]" him, then I would submit that this is perhaps
> about Megill's simple reading of Nietzsche (and his faith that
> his readers will be just as convinced that one cannot be too
> attached to Nietzsche as political/social theorist without getting
> infected by the poison of N.'s 'latent Nazism'). This is meant as no
> accusation, Robert, (I don't know you well enough for that yet (:)
> but it seems to me a more and more frequent phenomenon, especially among
> some US academic 'Foucauldians' and 'cultural studies' folks, to take
> one's Foucault wholly from selected fragments of History of Sexuality,
> Vol. 1 (i.e., those in which, to simplify ridiculously, F. discusses power
> as distributed throughout a web and resistance as ubiquitous) which are
> interpreted as uncomplicated paeans to 'liberatory practices' of whatever
> stripe (but nearly always involving no risky incursions upon the sanctity
> of humanism and its ethical and moral precepts--and generally perfectly
> compatible with a liberal progressivism which F. spent more than a few
> pages scathingly critiquing). Nietzsche and the undeniably dangerous
> elements of a politics of the will are accordingly carefully removed,
> as a tumor of some malign sort, and F. is thus made ready for
> a very peculiar sort of political 'radicalism' which is perhaps
> indigenous and specific to the US--in which one can count as irrefutable
> signs of one's militancy membership in various congressional lobbying
> groups and the possession of a black leather motorcycle jacket
> (which perhaps one wears to the meetings of said lobbying groups).
> For my own odd reasons, I am always curious of the motivations behind
> efforts to chop the most dangerous elements from a thinker who had so
> much to say and write about danger and violence.
>
> >a political activist all of his life. He never ceased
> >struggling for prison reform, gay, lesbian and minority rights, the rights
of
> >the mentally ill, and the victims of totalitarian regimes.
>
> I would suggest here that the idea that F. "struggled" for "rights"
> as such, presented *without* the complication of his Nietzscheanism, is
> perhaps as misleading as the reading of Megill you are here deploring.
>
> > I remember at the Foucault conference
> >at USC in 1981, somebody asked Foucault what he should do in response to
the
> >increasing institutionalization of thought, and Foucault said that as a
> >philosopher, he could only describe and analyze these regimes and the
forms
> >of power they engender historically, structurally, in terms of the
production
> >of certain types of subjects, sciences, procedures, arguments, and
> >institutionalized disciplines.
>
> I'm rather surprised he answered such a question at all. Did the
> questioner perhaps believe that there can be thought *outside* institutions
> and that therefore there could be a greater or lesser amount of
> "institutionalized thought"? F. himself certainly seemed quite less than
> convinced of such a proposition.
>
>
> Tristan
> **********************************************************************
> One cannot construct the universe without the possibility of its
> being destroyed
> Maurice Blanchot
> **********************************************************************
>
>
> -- End of excerpt from Tristan Riley <triley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Oct 21, 1:23am, Tristan Riley wrote:
> Subject: Re: Foucault and 'the starving millions'
> Robert S. Leventhal writes:
> >
> >To whom it may concern:
> >
> >In my view, Megill has misconstrued both Derrida and Foucault, but, more
to
> >the point, he trivializes them by bunching them together with Nietzsche,
and
> >reducing the considerable differences -- differences of politics, of
ethics,
> >and of social theory -- that define their respective projects.
>
> I know nothing of Megill's book, nor does it sound like a particularly
> interesting one if the quotation posted here is at all indicative of
> what sort of take on Foucault is contained therein. But why this
> urgency to 'rescue' F. from Nietzsche? If indeed this Megill believes
> "bunching [F.] together with Nietzsche" is somehow a one step means
> to "trivializ[ing]" him, then I would submit that this is perhaps
> about Megill's simple reading of Nietzsche (and his faith that
> his readers will be just as convinced that one cannot be too
> attached to Nietzsche as political/social theorist without getting
> infected by the poison of N.'s 'latent Nazism'). This is meant as no
> accusation, Robert, (I don't know you well enough for that yet (:)
> but it seems to me a more and more frequent phenomenon, especially among
> some US academic 'Foucauldians' and 'cultural studies' folks, to take
> one's Foucault wholly from selected fragments of History of Sexuality,
> Vol. 1 (i.e., those in which, to simplify ridiculously, F. discusses power
> as distributed throughout a web and resistance as ubiquitous) which are
> interpreted as uncomplicated paeans to 'liberatory practices' of whatever
> stripe (but nearly always involving no risky incursions upon the sanctity
> of humanism and its ethical and moral precepts--and generally perfectly
> compatible with a liberal progressivism which F. spent more than a few
> pages scathingly critiquing). Nietzsche and the undeniably dangerous
> elements of a politics of the will are accordingly carefully removed,
> as a tumor of some malign sort, and F. is thus made ready for
> a very peculiar sort of political 'radicalism' which is perhaps
> indigenous and specific to the US--in which one can count as irrefutable
> signs of one's militancy membership in various congressional lobbying
> groups and the possession of a black leather motorcycle jacket
> (which perhaps one wears to the meetings of said lobbying groups).
> For my own odd reasons, I am always curious of the motivations behind
> efforts to chop the most dangerous elements from a thinker who had so
> much to say and write about danger and violence.
>
> >a political activist all of his life. He never ceased
> >struggling for prison reform, gay, lesbian and minority rights, the rights
of
> >the mentally ill, and the victims of totalitarian regimes.
>
> I would suggest here that the idea that F. "struggled" for "rights"
> as such, presented *without* the complication of his Nietzscheanism, is
> perhaps as misleading as the reading of Megill you are here deploring.
>
> > I remember at the Foucault conference
> >at USC in 1981, somebody asked Foucault what he should do in response to
the
> >increasing institutionalization of thought, and Foucault said that as a
> >philosopher, he could only describe and analyze these regimes and the
forms
> >of power they engender historically, structurally, in terms of the
production
> >of certain types of subjects, sciences, procedures, arguments, and
> >institutionalized disciplines.
>
> I'm rather surprised he answered such a question at all. Did the
> questioner perhaps believe that there can be thought *outside* institutions
> and that therefore there could be a greater or lesser amount of
> "institutionalized thought"? F. himself certainly seemed quite less than
> convinced of such a proposition.
>
>
> Tristan
> **********************************************************************
> One cannot construct the universe without the possibility of its
> being destroyed
> Maurice Blanchot
> **********************************************************************
>
>
> -- End of excerpt from Tristan Riley <triley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tristan,
I appreciated your pithy intervention. As a response, I was not trying to
rescue F. from Nietzsche. I see no need to do so. I was attempting to get the
focus back to the issue of political action, and it seems to me that Megill's
critique sought to show the impotence of Foucault's idealism precisely by
linking him to what he sees as a tradition of nihilism, which he, I believe
incorrectly, reads as being politically bankrupt. Nietzsche is particularly
important, I think, for F. because he was the first "mechanized Philosopher,"
(Kittler), the first philosopher to actually utilize the typewriter as an
instrument of composition, and of course because of the method -- if one can
call it that -- of genealogical analysis, of sifting through the historical
layers of a problematics. But it does seem to me that one must carefully
distinguish Foucault's genealogy from Nietzsche, which (I think Heidegger is
correct on this one) remains within the question of value precisely at the
moment it attempts to overturn it, remains indebted to it in its overthrow.
Foucault, it seems to me, was not concerned with Umwertung aller Werte, but
with what the Umwertung does, how it is functioning itself as an instance of
power. More later.
Rob Leventhal
rsl9b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx