On Tue, 23 Jan 1996, malgosia askanas wrote>
> What do you mean by "constructive"? That it should give you prescriptions
> on how to improve liberal Western democracy? I am trying to ask you why,
> if this is your goal, you are looking for advice amongst people who are
> essentially _against_ liberal Western democracy and its "improvements",
> and who think that the so-called "humanism" of this system is basically
> anti-human -- if I, too, may profit from the appaling muddledness with which
> everybody is throwing these concepts around just to jerk themselves off, as
> it seems. If one insists on speaking in terms of historical political
> movements, Foucault's thought probably has the most kinship with various
> forms of anarchism. There is nothing "sad" about this. There is nothing
> "sad" in thinking that we need something radically different than what
> we have now. You may disagree, and think that what we have now can be
> hacked; but if you want to argue that it can be hacked so as to "fix"
> what the poststructs are against, then you should at least do your homework
> and understand _what_ they are against and why they argue what they argue.
>
>
>
> -malgosia
>
I'm fairly new to this list and so far I've enjoyed and been stimulated
by much of the discussion about ethics and post-structuralism.
Nevertheless, despite the certainty of the above writer, it is far from
clear that ps constitutes a unitary tradition or theoretical perspective.
Apart from the fact that a number of writers that we might now call
post-structuralist emerge out of the currents of post-1968 thinking and
from the journal Tel Quel, the theoretical tools deployed, for
example, by Foucault and Derrida are very
different.
Equally, it is far from clear that Foucault's writing is in any way
'anarchist' (which in many ways operates within a repressive hypothesis).
His later writings on
governmentality could perhaps suggest that he was working his way out
of an earlier more libertarian agenda.
------------------
> What do you mean by "constructive"? That it should give you prescriptions
> on how to improve liberal Western democracy? I am trying to ask you why,
> if this is your goal, you are looking for advice amongst people who are
> essentially _against_ liberal Western democracy and its "improvements",
> and who think that the so-called "humanism" of this system is basically
> anti-human -- if I, too, may profit from the appaling muddledness with which
> everybody is throwing these concepts around just to jerk themselves off, as
> it seems. If one insists on speaking in terms of historical political
> movements, Foucault's thought probably has the most kinship with various
> forms of anarchism. There is nothing "sad" about this. There is nothing
> "sad" in thinking that we need something radically different than what
> we have now. You may disagree, and think that what we have now can be
> hacked; but if you want to argue that it can be hacked so as to "fix"
> what the poststructs are against, then you should at least do your homework
> and understand _what_ they are against and why they argue what they argue.
>
>
>
> -malgosia
>
I'm fairly new to this list and so far I've enjoyed and been stimulated
by much of the discussion about ethics and post-structuralism.
Nevertheless, despite the certainty of the above writer, it is far from
clear that ps constitutes a unitary tradition or theoretical perspective.
Apart from the fact that a number of writers that we might now call
post-structuralist emerge out of the currents of post-1968 thinking and
from the journal Tel Quel, the theoretical tools deployed, for
example, by Foucault and Derrida are very
different.
Equally, it is far from clear that Foucault's writing is in any way
'anarchist' (which in many ways operates within a repressive hypothesis).
His later writings on
governmentality could perhaps suggest that he was working his way out
of an earlier more libertarian agenda.
------------------