Sebastian Gurciullo wrote:
> I have recently read a chapter that Allan Stoekl devotes to Foucault in his
> book "Agonies of the intellectual". He argues quite forcefully that a
> language/philosophy of transgression, in so far as it claims to replace or
> topple dialectical thinking is engaged in a kind of dialectical manouver
> itself. [...]
> Any claim to have somehow found a limit experience in something like
> sexuality, madness, death, that transcends the usual confines of philosophical
> thinking is claiming to find an other, a hidden double of "man" which can be
> recuperated even while one is ostensibly out to destroy the anthropological
> conception of "man" itself. Sexuality as limit experience, where speaking
> breaks off, is itself recuperable in the dialectical movement if it somehow
> captures something which normal (logocentric/rational etc) philosophising
> experience cannot.
It seems to me that this argument suffers from a somewhat shoddy approach
to notions like "find" and "capture". What one "finds" in a limit experience
is "found" in a very different sense than when one "finds", say, a scientific
truth. I think that if one posits a movement away from dialectical
thinking and towards a language, or philosophy, of transgression, then one
is ipso facto positing a shift in meaning, within philosophy, of words such
as "finding" and "capturing".
-m
> I have recently read a chapter that Allan Stoekl devotes to Foucault in his
> book "Agonies of the intellectual". He argues quite forcefully that a
> language/philosophy of transgression, in so far as it claims to replace or
> topple dialectical thinking is engaged in a kind of dialectical manouver
> itself. [...]
> Any claim to have somehow found a limit experience in something like
> sexuality, madness, death, that transcends the usual confines of philosophical
> thinking is claiming to find an other, a hidden double of "man" which can be
> recuperated even while one is ostensibly out to destroy the anthropological
> conception of "man" itself. Sexuality as limit experience, where speaking
> breaks off, is itself recuperable in the dialectical movement if it somehow
> captures something which normal (logocentric/rational etc) philosophising
> experience cannot.
It seems to me that this argument suffers from a somewhat shoddy approach
to notions like "find" and "capture". What one "finds" in a limit experience
is "found" in a very different sense than when one "finds", say, a scientific
truth. I think that if one posits a movement away from dialectical
thinking and towards a language, or philosophy, of transgression, then one
is ipso facto positing a shift in meaning, within philosophy, of words such
as "finding" and "capturing".
-m