Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault

Dear John,
I would like to receive a copy of your article via e/
mail. Thanks in advance

Bruni






Quoting "Leigh M. Johnson" <quickleigh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> 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
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>


Partial thread listing: