John ,
I am interested in your article, "Foucault and Lebensphilosophie", if you
could email me a copy.
Thanks,
Leigh
-----Original Message-----
From: Dickinson College -- Bologna <fonddc_a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Saturday, June 26, 1999 5:04 PM
Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault
>I talk about this explicitly in _Philospohy and Social History_ in the
>article, "Foucault and Lebensphilosophie." Deleuze also makes this wrong
>reading of Foucault as does Connolly. If anyone's interested I'll be happy
>to send a text version of the article via e-mail.
>
>--john
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Daniel Purdy <dp31@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: <foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Saturday, June 26, 1999 8:09 PM
>Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault
>
>
>>
>>
>> As far as Judith Butler's argument on Foucault's notion of the body: I
>> assume you are refering to the passage in Gender Trouble where she does a
>> reading of F's comments on hermaphrodites. It seemed to me that Butler's
>> argument was quite simply unfair. She really based it on a single
>> essay by F. and did not extend her argument to F's major works.
>> In the"Psychic Life of Power" Butler makes a very different
>> argument against Foucault. I think that the earlier argument about F's
>> ahistorical conceptof the body is discreetly abandoned by Butler in favor
>of an argument
>> that really is at the heart of her own theoretical interests: to what
>> extentdo psychoanalytic models of sexual desire provide a means of
>> understanding resistence to normative heterosexuality.
>>
>> In "The Psychic Life of Power"Butler reads D&P against HoS, v.1. She
>wants to
>> show that there is a contradiction between F's account of the subject as
>> being constituted within disciplinary power and his later discussion of
>> alternative sexualities developing from the very disciplinary regimes
>> which seek to control them. How is resistence possible from within a
>> disciplinary regime?
>> To answer this question, she goes back to Lacanian psychoanalysis
>> to reconsider ALthusser's notion of interpollation, which she argues
gives
>> a better explanation of how resistence is formed in relationship to a
>> legal force, namely as a reaction to being called before the law.
>> Butler is certainly on to a problem in Foucault, one that
>> other psychoanalysts such as Joan Copjec have also noted: how can one
>> explain the existence of an interiorizedd subjectivity with its own
moral
>> code. Foucault's account of disciplinary power in D&P is so
>> overwhelmingly determinist that there would seem to be no way of
>> explaining subjective feelings as anything but the direct effect of a
>> power regime. In other words, disciplinary power does not allow for or
>> acknowledge the possibility of a subject with autonomous feelings and a
>> moral conscience. Butler phrases this argument in terms of Foucault's
>> failure to explain "resistence" to power; Joan Copjec makes a similar
>> point also via a reading of Lacan, but she argues that Foucault's model
>> of disciplinary power would vitiate the autonomous moral conscience. To
>> the extent that resistence and a moral conscience are real, Butler and
>> Copjec are saying that Foucault has not fully accounted for subjectivity
>> and they both look to their readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis as an
>> alternative that makes up for Foucault's failings. And once they do that
>> they throw into question the F's denial of the repression model, and
more.
>>
>> The answer which F does not formulate fully, but then how could he
>> answer his later critics, is in devloping a more geneaological account of
>> disciplinary power as it acquires an history. Homosexuality as an
>> affirmative identity is an unintended effect of nineteenth-century
>> sexology. I think that f one thinks about discplinary power in more
>> historical terms then Butler's objections could be answered. That would
>> require more than further archival evidence, it would mean giving a
>> diachronic account of disciplinary power, i.e. a history of its changing
>> effects and its responses to those unintended developments.
>>
>> Daniel Purdy
>> Columbia University
>>
>
>
I am interested in your article, "Foucault and Lebensphilosophie", if you
could email me a copy.
Thanks,
Leigh
-----Original Message-----
From: Dickinson College -- Bologna <fonddc_a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Saturday, June 26, 1999 5:04 PM
Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault
>I talk about this explicitly in _Philospohy and Social History_ in the
>article, "Foucault and Lebensphilosophie." Deleuze also makes this wrong
>reading of Foucault as does Connolly. If anyone's interested I'll be happy
>to send a text version of the article via e-mail.
>
>--john
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Daniel Purdy <dp31@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: <foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Saturday, June 26, 1999 8:09 PM
>Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault
>
>
>>
>>
>> As far as Judith Butler's argument on Foucault's notion of the body: I
>> assume you are refering to the passage in Gender Trouble where she does a
>> reading of F's comments on hermaphrodites. It seemed to me that Butler's
>> argument was quite simply unfair. She really based it on a single
>> essay by F. and did not extend her argument to F's major works.
>> In the"Psychic Life of Power" Butler makes a very different
>> argument against Foucault. I think that the earlier argument about F's
>> ahistorical conceptof the body is discreetly abandoned by Butler in favor
>of an argument
>> that really is at the heart of her own theoretical interests: to what
>> extentdo psychoanalytic models of sexual desire provide a means of
>> understanding resistence to normative heterosexuality.
>>
>> In "The Psychic Life of Power"Butler reads D&P against HoS, v.1. She
>wants to
>> show that there is a contradiction between F's account of the subject as
>> being constituted within disciplinary power and his later discussion of
>> alternative sexualities developing from the very disciplinary regimes
>> which seek to control them. How is resistence possible from within a
>> disciplinary regime?
>> To answer this question, she goes back to Lacanian psychoanalysis
>> to reconsider ALthusser's notion of interpollation, which she argues
gives
>> a better explanation of how resistence is formed in relationship to a
>> legal force, namely as a reaction to being called before the law.
>> Butler is certainly on to a problem in Foucault, one that
>> other psychoanalysts such as Joan Copjec have also noted: how can one
>> explain the existence of an interiorizedd subjectivity with its own
moral
>> code. Foucault's account of disciplinary power in D&P is so
>> overwhelmingly determinist that there would seem to be no way of
>> explaining subjective feelings as anything but the direct effect of a
>> power regime. In other words, disciplinary power does not allow for or
>> acknowledge the possibility of a subject with autonomous feelings and a
>> moral conscience. Butler phrases this argument in terms of Foucault's
>> failure to explain "resistence" to power; Joan Copjec makes a similar
>> point also via a reading of Lacan, but she argues that Foucault's model
>> of disciplinary power would vitiate the autonomous moral conscience. To
>> the extent that resistence and a moral conscience are real, Butler and
>> Copjec are saying that Foucault has not fully accounted for subjectivity
>> and they both look to their readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis as an
>> alternative that makes up for Foucault's failings. And once they do that
>> they throw into question the F's denial of the repression model, and
more.
>>
>> The answer which F does not formulate fully, but then how could he
>> answer his later critics, is in devloping a more geneaological account of
>> disciplinary power as it acquires an history. Homosexuality as an
>> affirmative identity is an unintended effect of nineteenth-century
>> sexology. I think that f one thinks about discplinary power in more
>> historical terms then Butler's objections could be answered. That would
>> require more than further archival evidence, it would mean giving a
>> diachronic account of disciplinary power, i.e. a history of its changing
>> effects and its responses to those unintended developments.
>>
>> Daniel Purdy
>> Columbia University
>>
>
>