Re: Foucault and the Gay Science

Hey this a good topic endeed David Macy book talks a littel about how
Foucault and Delueze read the Gay Science in phase he was writing the gay
science. "aesthetic self-recreation" does not ring a bell, I mean The Gay
Science is an attack on "science" Nietzsche in a typical Nihilist fashion
states:

Origin of knowledge (169)

"such erroneous articles of faith which were continually inherited, until
they became almost apart of the basic endowment of the species."

a. that there are endurable things.

b. that there are equal things

c. that there are things, substances, bodies

d. that a thing is what it appears to be

e. that our will is free

f. that what is good for me is good in itself

g. truth itself, - it seems to be that one is unable to live with it,
(truth)

but you can find more of this kind of reality as error thinking in the gay
science. is "life opposed to death" "cause and effect"

"we operate with thing that do not exist : lines planes bodies, atoms,
divisible time"

Okay so there you have it. but what Foucalt does with this approach is
quit amazing in a number of ways. Foucault says that Nihilism is not
really what most of us experience at a day to day level, knowledge power
relations force us to think positively, in the illusion so to say of
reality.
We are trapped and invested with positive knowledge or as Neitzsche would
say "good knowledge". But at the level of "history" knowledge falls once
again into nihilism because it knowledge itself is not consistent or
progressive but rather characterized by breaks cutoff which are not
reconcilable, logical or understandable.

but I am sorry you wanted to talk about "aesthetic self-recreation" not
nihilism in the sciences, but they might have a connection somehow. In
that for Neitsche the superman or god killer become god must "recreate"
himself as god given the "fragility of being" which have come to
a "happening" in the act of error as error- Nihilism the death of god. but
what is aesthetic about this I don't know. May if he is dionysian like the
story of midas in the birth of tragedy. and What that has to do with
Foucault I don't know either. Maybe you could say what you mean, I am
ready to talk about the Gay Science and Faucault all you want it is one of
my favorite subjects.

with best regard

jeremiah luna

ass editor
throw yourself down. a journal of radical theory and action
http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/student/jeremiah.luna/throwyourselfdown/index.thml







On Mon, 28 Aug 2000 dp@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 08:23:25 -0500
> From: dp@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Reply-To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Foucault and the Gay Science
>
>
>
> Anonymous wrote:
>
> > Good morning, My greatest apologies of this topic has already been
> > discussed. I am relatively new to Foucault's philosophy, and newer
> > still to this listserv. I'd like to know--to what extent is
> > Foucault's aesthetic self-recreation similar to Nietzsche's pursuit of
> > the gay science? Thanks so much, and my apologies once again.
>
> What do you think? What do you take to be Foucault's aesthetic
> self-recreation (self as a work of art?) and N's notion of the Gay
> Science?
>
> Matisse
>


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