I am glad that my earlier mail provoked some pre-christmas debate although I
was not altogether satisfied with the partisan approach that emerged as a
battle of scholarly camps. Beyond stating a critical remark regarding John's
paper though, what I wanted to get to was the perspectives that have been
taken with regard to a significant transition in Foucault's work. John does
point toward some important difficulties encountered in attempts to extract
a workable and sustainable oppositional political practice from Foucault's
analytics of power but avoids dealing with the transition I'm talking about
here: schematically, from the analytic of power which achieves a "highpoint"
in D & P and HS vol 1, through the modifications which followed, the
emergence of governmentality through to an ethics as aesthetics of
existence. It seems to me that this transition has been a difficult one for
those who were or are enamoured of Foucault's 1970s experiment for a
post-Marxist theoretical/practical approach to radical political
thinking/action. What sense can be made of Foucault's late emphasis on
ethics from the perspective of his analyses of power and vice versa? I do
not mean to suggest a rigid demarcation between periods here, merely a shift
in the main focus of attention for a thinker that always claimed to be
diagnosing the present. With this transition in mind and therefore without
privileging his stated objectives during the 1970s, in what sense is
Foucault's work as a whole political, what kind of politics is it, and what
kind of politics does it make possible or discourage?
Deleuze's difficult book on Foucault, with its combination of erudition and
phantasmagoria, does seem to me to be more about Deleuze's own philosophy
rather than Foucault's, even though Foucault does sometimes come to "haunt"
the portrait. In raising vitalism though, Deleuze does address the issue of
Foucault's aestheticism, which in my earlier mail I suggested was related to
an exploration of performativity or reflexivity. What I mean by these terms
does entail a space of freedom, but not such a clearly defined notion as
"free-will", with all its historical philosophical baggage. A precarious
space of freedom more suited for the experimental and experiential values of
current thought than for an exhaustive account of how it is possible.
Exhaustive accounts which rely on the relatively fixed descriptions of free
agency such as the traditional notion of free will seem inadequate. It seems
that this space of freedom remains largely unaccountable, its ultimate
source or condition of possibility unnameable. Any attempt to fully account
for it would in effect negate its very possibility if it weren't for the
fact that freedom constantly evades being rendered accountable. A part of
this experimentation/experience was the nominalist deployments in Foucault's
books, the invention of vocabulary, neologisms, transposing familiar
concepts into unfamiliar contexts, the difficult pleasures of style, etc.
This is why it seems to me that quibbling over the finer points of
Foucault's usage of concepts seems such an ambivalent exercise and misses
the point if it does not pay attention to why Foucault deploys words in the
way he does. This "dimension" of Foucault's work, only articulated late in
his life, and perhaps within the context of a knowledge of how little life
there was to live, was arguably a feature of everything he said and did
before. Not so much a confession as a parting gesture perhaps, putting a
final spin on what had already passed. But how is this political? Any takers?
cheers
sebastian
was not altogether satisfied with the partisan approach that emerged as a
battle of scholarly camps. Beyond stating a critical remark regarding John's
paper though, what I wanted to get to was the perspectives that have been
taken with regard to a significant transition in Foucault's work. John does
point toward some important difficulties encountered in attempts to extract
a workable and sustainable oppositional political practice from Foucault's
analytics of power but avoids dealing with the transition I'm talking about
here: schematically, from the analytic of power which achieves a "highpoint"
in D & P and HS vol 1, through the modifications which followed, the
emergence of governmentality through to an ethics as aesthetics of
existence. It seems to me that this transition has been a difficult one for
those who were or are enamoured of Foucault's 1970s experiment for a
post-Marxist theoretical/practical approach to radical political
thinking/action. What sense can be made of Foucault's late emphasis on
ethics from the perspective of his analyses of power and vice versa? I do
not mean to suggest a rigid demarcation between periods here, merely a shift
in the main focus of attention for a thinker that always claimed to be
diagnosing the present. With this transition in mind and therefore without
privileging his stated objectives during the 1970s, in what sense is
Foucault's work as a whole political, what kind of politics is it, and what
kind of politics does it make possible or discourage?
Deleuze's difficult book on Foucault, with its combination of erudition and
phantasmagoria, does seem to me to be more about Deleuze's own philosophy
rather than Foucault's, even though Foucault does sometimes come to "haunt"
the portrait. In raising vitalism though, Deleuze does address the issue of
Foucault's aestheticism, which in my earlier mail I suggested was related to
an exploration of performativity or reflexivity. What I mean by these terms
does entail a space of freedom, but not such a clearly defined notion as
"free-will", with all its historical philosophical baggage. A precarious
space of freedom more suited for the experimental and experiential values of
current thought than for an exhaustive account of how it is possible.
Exhaustive accounts which rely on the relatively fixed descriptions of free
agency such as the traditional notion of free will seem inadequate. It seems
that this space of freedom remains largely unaccountable, its ultimate
source or condition of possibility unnameable. Any attempt to fully account
for it would in effect negate its very possibility if it weren't for the
fact that freedom constantly evades being rendered accountable. A part of
this experimentation/experience was the nominalist deployments in Foucault's
books, the invention of vocabulary, neologisms, transposing familiar
concepts into unfamiliar contexts, the difficult pleasures of style, etc.
This is why it seems to me that quibbling over the finer points of
Foucault's usage of concepts seems such an ambivalent exercise and misses
the point if it does not pay attention to why Foucault deploys words in the
way he does. This "dimension" of Foucault's work, only articulated late in
his life, and perhaps within the context of a knowledge of how little life
there was to live, was arguably a feature of everything he said and did
before. Not so much a confession as a parting gesture perhaps, putting a
final spin on what had already passed. But how is this political? Any takers?
cheers
sebastian