On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, John S. Ransom wrote:
> You don't think he's a hermeneuticist? In what sense not?
>
> I've kind of thought of Foucault as a left-wing hermeneuticist. That is, he
> sees us "situated" in a context and then talks about intertwined strategies
> of domination and resistance. And that's a sort of "internal" reading, isn't
> it?
Uh oh, my bluff has been called. *grin*
Well, he's not a hermeneuticist in the very simple sense that his
primary concern is not with understanding, or with theorizing about the
possibility of understanding, the texts he deals with, but to mobilize
them for present purposes. There is no real attempt at a fusion of
horizons, I don't think. He somewhere refers to his reading of texts as a
kind of positivism, doesn't he?--which seems to imply taking them as one
finds them in the terms of one's own horizon. I'm not sufficiently
familiar with hermeneutical thought (hardly familiar at all, realy) to say
anything more than that. Could you explain what "internal reading" is,
and elaborate some more about why you think Foucault does this?
Anyway, that's why I don't think the concerns expressed several weeks ago
about people in different social circumstances being unable to understand
each other are really Foucauldian concerns.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced
at least once."
--------------------------------(Nietzsche)--------------------------------