Well I only just got the digest - which certainly take a long time to
filter through!!! Blaine Rehkopf wrote on 22 August
<<<Clare says:
"It seems to me that there are two Foucaults: the French Foucault and the
English one. The distinction became especially clear at a colloquium in
Paris in 1988: the people presenting papers in (Parisienne) French were
speaking of an entirely different Foucault than the rest of the world
(the Germans, the Spanish, and so on) were speaking about.">>
Sorry what I actually meant was that the English speakers are actually the
most different - there seem to be reasonable similarities between what the
Germans, Italians, South Americans etc and French are saying - but the
English language writers are out there on their own.
<<Clare, I wonder if you could speculate on the reasons for this
dissonance. In your opinion, is the dual persona of Foucault a function
of the cultures of those who read him, or more a function of the
translations available in the various languages?>>
I think it is a combination of both. The English translations for example
are of varying quality - I quite like Richard Howard's translation of The
History of Madness but find that Sheridan tends to 'blandify' Foucault's
language and rob it of its colour for example translating 'narguer' in a
famous passage at the end of the introduction in The Archaeology as
'declare' I would have preferred 'jeer'. In Birth of the Clinic in the
first line of the first chapter Sheridan translates 'pour nos yeux deja
uses' simply as 'for us'. I would have preferred 'For our already jaded
eyes' or something like that. Maybe this sort of thing helps to explain why
some of the English language industry centred on foucault is well.... so
boring!!! :-)
<<And, if you have the time to speculate, what has been the *impact* of this
dichotomy?>>
Just very briefly, one impact is I think that a lot of the early foucault
is more or less ignored in English. Foucault is reduced to a boring
theorist of power and knowledge and institutional history. The poetic and
literary aspects of his work are more or less completely ignored which is a
great pity. Of course I am generalising here but statistically speaking etc
etc....
Clare
***********************************************************
Clare O'Farrell
email:c.ofarrell@xxxxxxxxxx
web page: http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/
***********************************************************
filter through!!! Blaine Rehkopf wrote on 22 August
<<<Clare says:
"It seems to me that there are two Foucaults: the French Foucault and the
English one. The distinction became especially clear at a colloquium in
Paris in 1988: the people presenting papers in (Parisienne) French were
speaking of an entirely different Foucault than the rest of the world
(the Germans, the Spanish, and so on) were speaking about.">>
Sorry what I actually meant was that the English speakers are actually the
most different - there seem to be reasonable similarities between what the
Germans, Italians, South Americans etc and French are saying - but the
English language writers are out there on their own.
<<Clare, I wonder if you could speculate on the reasons for this
dissonance. In your opinion, is the dual persona of Foucault a function
of the cultures of those who read him, or more a function of the
translations available in the various languages?>>
I think it is a combination of both. The English translations for example
are of varying quality - I quite like Richard Howard's translation of The
History of Madness but find that Sheridan tends to 'blandify' Foucault's
language and rob it of its colour for example translating 'narguer' in a
famous passage at the end of the introduction in The Archaeology as
'declare' I would have preferred 'jeer'. In Birth of the Clinic in the
first line of the first chapter Sheridan translates 'pour nos yeux deja
uses' simply as 'for us'. I would have preferred 'For our already jaded
eyes' or something like that. Maybe this sort of thing helps to explain why
some of the English language industry centred on foucault is well.... so
boring!!! :-)
<<And, if you have the time to speculate, what has been the *impact* of this
dichotomy?>>
Just very briefly, one impact is I think that a lot of the early foucault
is more or less ignored in English. Foucault is reduced to a boring
theorist of power and knowledge and institutional history. The poetic and
literary aspects of his work are more or less completely ignored which is a
great pity. Of course I am generalising here but statistically speaking etc
etc....
Clare
***********************************************************
Clare O'Farrell
email:c.ofarrell@xxxxxxxxxx
web page: http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/
***********************************************************