R: R: Was Foucault a nihilist?

Sebastian Gurciullo writes:
>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?

Yes, but that means sharing fate at a very high level of abstraction. So
abstract, in fact, that the similarity means almost nothing. Here we have
two regimes of truth that share -- speaking abstractly -- the same fate:
Discourse and power/knowledge nexus #1 runs from about the 12th century to
the 17th. Nexus #2 runs from then to now. Both have now ended. Other than
the fact that they both ended, they were very different from one another. It
would be like saying a game or season of football shares the same fate as a
season of baseball. It's true, but not much of significance is being
referred to.

>What alternative is there, realistically, that Foucault offers to
>the disciplinary society he describes in his (fictional) histories. None.

I think he's trying to defang the disappointment we feel when we think to
ourselves: 'there is no alternative.' Why does there have to be some big
alternative? What kind of creatures are we that we have this incredible
will-to-an alternative? Isn't the "alternatve" just a place-holder for God?

>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.

But only impoverished because they lack this alternative thing? But maybe we
just talked ourselves into that and it's an unreflective prejudice. Maybe we
don't need it to make sense of things and to decide to do things.

--John Ransom


>
>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
>
>


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