Re: Materialism/Idealism...

The following quote is from chapter 9 of The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity. I'd like to read your comments on Habermas's critique, and how
it relates to the previous discussion on Foucault as Materialist.

"On the one hand, Foucault has to retain for his concept of power - which
ironically conceals itself in discourse as the will to truth and at the
same time makes itself felt therein - the transcendental meaning of a
condition of the possibility of truth. On the other hand, he not only
brings to bear against Idealism of the Kantian concept a temporalizing of
the a priori - so that new discourse formations, which push out the old,
can emerge like *events* - but also strips this transcendental power of
the connotations that Heidegger prudently leaves to an auratic history of
Being. Foucault not only historicizes; his approach is at the same time
nominalist, materialist, and empiricist. He thinks of the transcendental
practices of power as something particular that strives against all
universals, and further as the lowly corporeal-sensual that undermines
everything intelligible, and finally as the contingent that could also
have been otherwise because it is not governed by any regulative order."

-- David W

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