Let me explain my reluctance in replying to the passage you quoted. I
wanted to take my time mulling it over. I am suspicious of Foucault's
language of transgression, his valorization of its subversive and radical
potential, even while in other moments I am fatally attracted to it. The
passage to me seems to rely on this view, constituting as it does an
alternative to the "millenary language of dialectics", an alternative which
in my opinion suffers from its own "millenary" excesses. There may indeed
be a major experience of sexuality which exceeds the prisons of dialectical
thought, with its logic of accumulation, which points to a general
experience of expenditure, unreason, poetic madness that cannot be
recuperated by the dialectic. This possibility is of interest and points
the way toward a renegotiation of the status of dialectical thought, of our
relation to it. I cannot identify with the rhetorical fervour displayed in
this passage or others like it which can be found particularly in Foucault's
earlier work. It now seems strangely out of place, even if one can imagine
a time in Paris in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when this kind of hyperbolic
rhetoric was appropriate, in its attempt to break through certain prisons of
thinking. Not that I would suggest that prisons of thinking have somehow
disappeared since that time.
What does the passage suggest to me? It seems to suggest a view of our
century as reaching an end, an end of accumulation (hence also dialectical
thought). From which can only come expenditure, exhaustion, the spending of
this accumulation as its end. As I understand it, this is the millenary
language of transgression. But perhaps I have misread the juxtaposition
intended by Foucault here?
That which particularly interests me is the reference to anthropological
images and models of explanation. Hunger and need as eminently
anthropological metaphors. Resisting conventional sociological
configurations which posit a sociologized (anthropomorphic) force of need
and hunger, we have instead a negative, mute, unending experience which
unravels a fixed point of reduction. Meaning as the labor of rescuing need
and hunger from a force of alienation, from which we, in turn, are now to
be rescued from, opens out into a space of no return without fixed points of
reduction, or perhaps with an endless proliferation of such fixed points of
reduction. This is the experience which need and hunger open onto.
~Sebastian
wanted to take my time mulling it over. I am suspicious of Foucault's
language of transgression, his valorization of its subversive and radical
potential, even while in other moments I am fatally attracted to it. The
passage to me seems to rely on this view, constituting as it does an
alternative to the "millenary language of dialectics", an alternative which
in my opinion suffers from its own "millenary" excesses. There may indeed
be a major experience of sexuality which exceeds the prisons of dialectical
thought, with its logic of accumulation, which points to a general
experience of expenditure, unreason, poetic madness that cannot be
recuperated by the dialectic. This possibility is of interest and points
the way toward a renegotiation of the status of dialectical thought, of our
relation to it. I cannot identify with the rhetorical fervour displayed in
this passage or others like it which can be found particularly in Foucault's
earlier work. It now seems strangely out of place, even if one can imagine
a time in Paris in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when this kind of hyperbolic
rhetoric was appropriate, in its attempt to break through certain prisons of
thinking. Not that I would suggest that prisons of thinking have somehow
disappeared since that time.
What does the passage suggest to me? It seems to suggest a view of our
century as reaching an end, an end of accumulation (hence also dialectical
thought). From which can only come expenditure, exhaustion, the spending of
this accumulation as its end. As I understand it, this is the millenary
language of transgression. But perhaps I have misread the juxtaposition
intended by Foucault here?
That which particularly interests me is the reference to anthropological
images and models of explanation. Hunger and need as eminently
anthropological metaphors. Resisting conventional sociological
configurations which posit a sociologized (anthropomorphic) force of need
and hunger, we have instead a negative, mute, unending experience which
unravels a fixed point of reduction. Meaning as the labor of rescuing need
and hunger from a force of alienation, from which we, in turn, are now to
be rescued from, opens out into a space of no return without fixed points of
reduction, or perhaps with an endless proliferation of such fixed points of
reduction. This is the experience which need and hunger open onto.
~Sebastian