>>Foucault's nihilism? foucault himself claimed (in a couple of interviews
>>mainly) that his histories were in a sense nothing but "fictions" and that
>>what he was really interested in when writing them was of experiencing some
>>form of personal transformation! this confirms the kind of account tony
>>gives in his first post on F's nihilism, that F sought to present as
>>reasoned, scholarly, work the kind of alternative account(s) that must be
>>outmanouvered in order for the conventional normal one to hold onto its
>>claim to validity. Foucault's painstakingly reconstructed genealogies are
>>therefore not the truth at last coming out, but the more disturbing
>>unworking of every possibility of truth at last, which is a transformative
>>experience which Foucault would like to share with his readers.
>
>No, no, no, no, no. He is not interested in the "disturbing unworking of
>every possibility of truth at last." That's nihilism! Foucault was not a
>deconstrucitonist! Truth is *incredibly* important to Foucault. But not
>because it has an essence so much as it has such profound affects. And
>something that has profound affects must be taken very seriously.
>
Serious indeed, nihilism is a very serious matter. And the operations of
truth as a manifestation of power, with its multifaceted penetration into
life, is also an important matter. But then in what sense are the serious
reconstructions of this penetration true, and for who? Do the analyses of
the demands of truth as manifestations of disciplines, bio-power, or
whatever, produce some other sort of truth? Would this truth not be
something like a predicament in which every unveiling of disciplinary truth
comes to share the same fate (eventually) as the disciplinary truth
unveiled? What alternative is there, realistically, that Foucault offers to
the disciplinary society he describes in his (fictional) histories. None.
All he can offer is an attempt to locate possible sources of resistance, but
without hope of changing anything, fissures in the operations of power that
create possibilities for survival through increasingly vacuous, confused,
and impoverished strategies of rebellion.
True, Nietzsche, like his heir, was not a self-congratulating nihilist as
such. He did talk at times of taking up "active nihilism" (as opposed to the
passive nihilism whose representatives today can be found in all those
comfortable suburban families, sitting at home if front of the TV or smugly
enjoying "quality time" together) as a stage that intellectual life must
move through in order to survive in a nihilistic world of commodified
comforts and superficial ridicule. But it seems to me that while Nietzsche
did not embrace nihilism simply with gay abandon, as a happy end in itself,
he had no real solution for it either, other than some sort of dogged
persistence which led him to propose a number of (unworkable) solutions (eg.
Dionysus vs the Crucified). Nihilism is not something which can be easily
overcome, as more often than not, any attempted (overly hasty) overcoming of
it is itself a further manifestation of the disease. There is no foreseeable
end to this predicament, which is not to say that it will never end or that
one should give up on searching for an end to it. Nihilism is not simply an
affliction that strikes individuals. It is much more pervasive than that,
you only need to look around the world today to see it thriving happily in
many of our otherwise inoccuous activities, institutions, habits. Strangely,
life can be sustained by nihilism, but it is often a dessicated life - a
life haunted by deformations of the spirit, of degraded humanity, which can
even be enjoyed in South Park (hidee-ho). We are mutating, but into what?
Anyone interested in John Ransom's article, "Forget Vitalism: Foucault and
Lebensphilosophie", can find it in *Philosophy and Social Criticism*, v. 23,
n. 1, Jan. 1997.
ciao
Sebastian Gurciullo