Re: no subject, no humanism

In your message of 13:26 Apr 11 1997, you write:

> There was no exegetical comment on Foucault involved, merely one on how to go> about using the difference humanism/antihumanism. Foucault may well have
> written on 'le sujet', so what?


Well, the *so what* is that this is a Foucault list, after all. But
perhaps it is my own mistake to have assumed that you were talking about
Foucault on this list.


> I can agree, Foucault didn't say that no
> human animals were minding their business in this world, but that's not my
> point. Hence, your question can be turned into mine, what is a subject?


Okay, that's all I was asking.


> A subject is a carrier, a problem being that when a subject is 'suspected' to> carry a system, what is it then that carries the subject? In a sociological
> context the subject is the actor is the human being, individually or
> collectively doing society. What is it then, that is acting the actor? Some
> fundament from the Beyond? Not telling you much about the details (e.g. the
> problem of 'part/whole' turning up when people are 'part' of the social
> 'whole') I can tell you that one may well 'suspect' society doing society all
> by its own, no subject-carrier being involved, human beings just like all the
> rest of the planetary stuff merely being one of those material garantees for
> the social order, not existing within it but in its environment - with the
> peculiarity of course that society itself is a garantee to let psychic
> propensities maintain their ruts, which is not the case with fysical or
> organical ones. In a sociological context then, an antihumanistic observation
> strategy is a strategy that does not suppose human beings within society.
> That would be like describing society as a mixture of membranes, physical
> forces, some chemistry and a lot of consciousness. More on that may looked
> for in Erving Goffman (if one focusses on the productive side of his
> ambiguities concerning self, personality etc...) and most definitely in
> Niklas Luhmann. One may look for how F's discourse/discursive formations, not
> being grounded on a consciousness, do or do not interlace with all of that
> stuff, and make use of such a constructed field of a variety of
> antihumanistic proposals in either direction. I don't care wright now how
> anyone would do that, I just suggesting sth, that the 'no subject, no
> humanism' grid may be a nice program to distinguish humanism/antihumanism for
> us. This may or may not be helpful to write things on behalf of Foucault, but
> it may be useful for further dwelling upon it in a variety coming contexts.
>
> What is it then, that is not a simple as that? It is, quite simply, that it
> is not any ones fate to close oneself in into the conceptual boundaries of
> Foucaults theory as Foucault himself has left them behind. The frame or
> relevance here was clearly a sociological one, on how to render society
> tell-a-story-aboutable. If it is not as simple for philosophy as it is for
> sociology, that I can only observe that the philosophical frame of relevance
> is a lot more problematic.
>
> Joeri Vancoillie.
>
>

Frankly, I don't understand any of what you've written here. Again, I
will assume that it is my shortcoming and not yours. But I'm sticking
with my suggestion that this issue is not as simple as your "no subject,
no humanism" one-liner suggests.

Peace,
Blaine Rehkopf

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