RE: Genealogy&Interpretation

Morten

Some odd thoughts in response to your mail about your paper

I'm not at all sure that Foucault 'breaks' with archaeology after AK. Rather
i think that the project of The Order of Things and AK are sidesteps away
from the project of Histoire de la folie. Discipline and Punish and the
History of Sexuality are very similar to HF. When F returns to this
earlier - Nietzschean, genealogical - project he is simply more
theoretically worked out than he was originally. Read the original 1961
preface to Histoire de la folie, and then look at the interviews around the
time of the second volume of History of Sexuality (Genealogy of Ethics
especially), or the various prefaces to HS II. It's all part of the same
project - a genealogy, or a historical ontology. OT and AK are part of that
project, but with more of an emphasis on knowledge, _savoir_. HF and Birth
of the Clinic are, as the later F says, clearly about power.

There's a book edited by Richard Schacht called Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History that has some good articles on genealogy.

I've just written an article - a summary of some of my PhD/forthcoming
book - on the relation between Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault -
called 'genealogy as historical ontology'. It's forthcoming hopefully later
this year in a book on the Foucault Heidegger relation (that also includes
pieces by Spanos, Dreyfus & Beatrice Han). I can maybe post some chunks of
this to you if you'd like - but i've outlined the key points on the list
before.

I'm not sure about the stuff on hermeneutics - my initial take is that
Nietzsche and Heidegger are doing hermeneutics (especially H), and that
Foucault would have much in common with them. But not with Gadamer, who
seemed the most visible hermeneut of Foucault's time. Just a thought.
Dreyfus & Rabinow's book on Foucault treats hermeneutics in some detail as i
recall, though the treatment of the relation with Heidegger is very sketchy,
and, i think, extremely misleading. See though Dreyfus, 'Beyond
Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Later Heidegger and Recent Foucault' in
Shapiro & Sica (eds) Hermeneutics: Questions and Proposals (U of
Massachusetts Press, 1984).

As we've got onto Dreyfus (& Rabinow) and periodisation of F's thought...

They characterise 4 stages: Heideggerian,
archaeological/quasi-structuralist, genealogical, ethical. As you can
probably gather from above comments, i'm not at all sure about this.

Hope this is helpful

Stuart

Dr Stuart Elden
Lecturer in Politics
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL, UK


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