Like Antoine Goulem, I'd be interested in a discussion relating Marx to
Foucault (or vice versa). I think Gayatri Spivak's work has been
turning in this direction. For example, her essay "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" would be good to look at.
Concerning "ethics" and poststructuralism, or how humanism seems to be rearing
its ugly head again in the discourse of "anti-humanists" trained in
poststructuralist theory: it seems to me what is happening here are
attempts at re-defining the term, "humanist." The problems with the brand
of humanism that Foucault and other post-structuralists were critiquing lay in
its tendency to universalize and in that sense essentialize "human" experience
to fit a certain norm (i.e. white, male, economically and intellectually
privileged). Any new brand of humanism that might surface in the 1990s
would (hopefully) be informed by this legacy of anti-humanism. What this
new species of humanism would look like, I'm not sure. But I think the
conjectures are interesting.
Jane Park
------------------
Foucault (or vice versa). I think Gayatri Spivak's work has been
turning in this direction. For example, her essay "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" would be good to look at.
Concerning "ethics" and poststructuralism, or how humanism seems to be rearing
its ugly head again in the discourse of "anti-humanists" trained in
poststructuralist theory: it seems to me what is happening here are
attempts at re-defining the term, "humanist." The problems with the brand
of humanism that Foucault and other post-structuralists were critiquing lay in
its tendency to universalize and in that sense essentialize "human" experience
to fit a certain norm (i.e. white, male, economically and intellectually
privileged). Any new brand of humanism that might surface in the 1990s
would (hopefully) be informed by this legacy of anti-humanism. What this
new species of humanism would look like, I'm not sure. But I think the
conjectures are interesting.
Jane Park
------------------