Over this past week I spent eleven hours on a portion of Foucault's
_Madness and Civilization_, and I have preliminarily concluded that
even though some tidbits are valuable, which are only so somehow in
their own right, his genealogical method is worthless as philosophy
and becomes a dead history up to which he does not write or examine
both contingently as those tidbits are only fruitful buds along the
way which would be pruned if he were more rigorous, and necessarily
as there is an unacknowledged hermeneutics at work committed by him
consciously or not or somehow necessitated (inauthentically) by the
method itself with a power all its own. Concepts are reduced to the
descent of the usage of words defined by their conjoined descent of
practices or arbitrary collections of actions. Essences are at work
in the genealogist's continuities in descent. The hermeneutics used
is in surrender to self-interpretation, as a period's documents are
granted the right to definitively mean what exactly their practices
are. Even if this method is accepted by the genealogist, descent is
of not only of concepts, words, practices, institutions, discourses
but also of the elements being traces through them in descent. Also
how is one to course through them as this must necessarily be crude
as many elements are foreign to the genealogist's understanding, as
meanings self-determined by the institutions under scrutiny so made
by necessarily non-genealogical methods, that is, their history, or
histories, must be included within descent. But the more pronounced
problem is the meaning of the reduced element, the embodied actions
as universally(?) understood. It seems that they are interpreted in
the end through the world of the genealogist, and perhaps this just
may be the point of the performance of genealogy in the first place
(if such a place there is). If this is so then parody is indeed the
way to go, and it is humor in the performance, but something on the
order of a dead, dry humor. And what of the valuable tidbits, those
unpruned buds? Are these lurking irony mocking the dead humor? They
are the explicit repudiation of the genealogical method of descent,
a clarified explication from the perspective of the genealogist and
therefore signifies the salvation(!) from radical relativism as the
essentially parodistic hermeneutics of self-interpretation, whether
those discourses under scrutiny are histories within descent, being
true genealogically, or descent within the genealogist's histories.
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_Madness and Civilization_, and I have preliminarily concluded that
even though some tidbits are valuable, which are only so somehow in
their own right, his genealogical method is worthless as philosophy
and becomes a dead history up to which he does not write or examine
both contingently as those tidbits are only fruitful buds along the
way which would be pruned if he were more rigorous, and necessarily
as there is an unacknowledged hermeneutics at work committed by him
consciously or not or somehow necessitated (inauthentically) by the
method itself with a power all its own. Concepts are reduced to the
descent of the usage of words defined by their conjoined descent of
practices or arbitrary collections of actions. Essences are at work
in the genealogist's continuities in descent. The hermeneutics used
is in surrender to self-interpretation, as a period's documents are
granted the right to definitively mean what exactly their practices
are. Even if this method is accepted by the genealogist, descent is
of not only of concepts, words, practices, institutions, discourses
but also of the elements being traces through them in descent. Also
how is one to course through them as this must necessarily be crude
as many elements are foreign to the genealogist's understanding, as
meanings self-determined by the institutions under scrutiny so made
by necessarily non-genealogical methods, that is, their history, or
histories, must be included within descent. But the more pronounced
problem is the meaning of the reduced element, the embodied actions
as universally(?) understood. It seems that they are interpreted in
the end through the world of the genealogist, and perhaps this just
may be the point of the performance of genealogy in the first place
(if such a place there is). If this is so then parody is indeed the
way to go, and it is humor in the performance, but something on the
order of a dead, dry humor. And what of the valuable tidbits, those
unpruned buds? Are these lurking irony mocking the dead humor? They
are the explicit repudiation of the genealogical method of descent,
a clarified explication from the perspective of the genealogist and
therefore signifies the salvation(!) from radical relativism as the
essentially parodistic hermeneutics of self-interpretation, whether
those discourses under scrutiny are histories within descent, being
true genealogically, or descent within the genealogist's histories.
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com