[no subject]

SC WROTE :

"I would find it very difficult to read self-overcoming as any sort of a
return to an originary status or condition. Self-overcoming is
simultaneously a process of destruction (the "throwing off") AND a movement
of creation"

This is a very vital point it seems to me and one that can spice up this
already very intriguing exchange
N. is certainly not a romantic naturalist seeking any return to a primal
earth or ground. A thinking through of the "eternal return of the same" and
the "will to power" would emphasize this but i would like to take it from
another perspective, what Derrida calls the question of style

Joyful Wisdom: "One thing is needful--to give style to one's character--a
great and rare art"

April 1982: In an interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow ("On the Genealogy of
Ethics" in Foucault Reader) Foucault adheres to this viewpoint. It seems his
studies of Classical technologies of the self led him to consider "making
one's life into a work of art" (n.also in jw) as a insurrectional and
creative activity against the impersonal and pulverized technologies of
power...this brings me to Jeff's comment:

"what about the turn to aesthetics in the later F, is this an outgrowth of
what came before or is it a whole different F?"

It seems to me to be an outgrowth but beyond the confines of an organic
model. In other words, foucault's various stages succeed each other in terms
of rupture, discontinuity etc...it is a wholly different foucault but at the
same time the Kehre-trope is a mis-trope because from the very first pages
of Madness and Civilization we know we are already careening down a via
aesthetica

Stylization, aestheticization, the lie, becoming-fictive...just mention
these Niet-Fou notions as positivities and most people start running. They
are the true romantic naturalists fetishizing the self as a unitary
substance. Metaphysickality once more

Needless to say this aesthetic position is not a mere dandyism.
Becoming-fictive is insurrectional. It makes one less localizable by
technologies of power. In 1977 Foucault said:

"It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in
truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for
bringing it about that a true discourse 'engenders' or 'manufactures'
something that does not as yet exist, that is 'fictions' it. One 'fictions'
history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one
'fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical
truth" (Power/Knowledge 193)

In The Genealogy of Morals N. rites:

"Art: where deception has a good conscience and the lie is sanctified"

Kinda like Shiva

Rojan Josh



Partial thread listing: