"New French Thought" coming from Princeton University Press. I have read Blandine
Kriegel's The State and the Rule of Law and browsed a compilation which bears the name
of the series.
I am interested to hear what Foucault scholars think about these new works.
They seem to me to represent an initiative on the part of French scholars to return to
enlightenment liberalism and examine it for its merits. Kriegel's piece, for example,
argues that the sweeping abuses of power of the twentieth-century West have their roots
in German romanticism, not in Enlightenment rationalism (which has been accused of being
the source of the . This, combined with her thorough use of enlightenment thinkers,
suggests a suspension of postmodernism, a break with the contemporary French tradition,
to create the space necessary to explore again the phenomena of the Enlightenment.
Note also what Kriegel, touted on the in-flap as having collaborated with
Foucault, asserts in the chaper on sovereign power:
This is not the era of "bio-politics," or of therapeutic technologies,
demographic regulation, and pedagogical and penal discipline, the
nineteenth-century development chronicled by Foucault. But a symbolic
politics of life has emerged. Feudalism was war; now the sovereign state
promises peace. (24)
A powerful statement, that.
Any comments?
****************************************************************************************
Nicholas A. Dronen
http://w3.servint.com/cognigen/f/fci.cgi?dr2864423
ndronen@xxxxxxxx
****************************************************************************************
Kriegel's The State and the Rule of Law and browsed a compilation which bears the name
of the series.
I am interested to hear what Foucault scholars think about these new works.
They seem to me to represent an initiative on the part of French scholars to return to
enlightenment liberalism and examine it for its merits. Kriegel's piece, for example,
argues that the sweeping abuses of power of the twentieth-century West have their roots
in German romanticism, not in Enlightenment rationalism (which has been accused of being
the source of the . This, combined with her thorough use of enlightenment thinkers,
suggests a suspension of postmodernism, a break with the contemporary French tradition,
to create the space necessary to explore again the phenomena of the Enlightenment.
Note also what Kriegel, touted on the in-flap as having collaborated with
Foucault, asserts in the chaper on sovereign power:
This is not the era of "bio-politics," or of therapeutic technologies,
demographic regulation, and pedagogical and penal discipline, the
nineteenth-century development chronicled by Foucault. But a symbolic
politics of life has emerged. Feudalism was war; now the sovereign state
promises peace. (24)
A powerful statement, that.
Any comments?
****************************************************************************************
Nicholas A. Dronen
http://w3.servint.com/cognigen/f/fci.cgi?dr2864423
ndronen@xxxxxxxx
****************************************************************************************