I don't subscribe to H-Ideas but I received this via H-Reviews and thought
it might be of interest to members of this list.
Dr. David McInerney
Borderlands e-journal
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au
----- Original Message -----
From: "H-Net Reviews" <books@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <H-REVIEW@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 6:31 PM
Subject: Eghigian on Han, _Foucault's Critical Project_
> H-NET BOOK REVIEW
> Published by H-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (March 2004)
>
> Beatrice Han. _Foucault's Critical Project: Between the
> Transcendental and the Historical_. Translated by Edward Pile.
> Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xiii + 241 pp. Notes,
> index. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8047-3708-8; $24.95 (paper), ISBN
> 0-8047-3709-6.
>
> Reviewed for H-Ideas by Greg Eghigian, Department of History, Penn
> State University
>
> Foucault's Critical Project
>
> "Although he always desired to break away from it, and multiplied
> historicizing statements, Foucault was finally confronted again with
> the transcendental perspective, in the form of the idea of a free
> and autonomous self-constitution of the subject," concludes Beatrice
> Han in her challenging study of the work of Michel Foucault (p.
> 196). While Foucault has often been criticized for his radical
> social constructionism, his penchant for anthropomorphizing
> anonymous structures, or removing agency from human beings, Han
> reads Foucault in a novel way. She sees in his _oeuvre_ a recurring
> struggle with the universal and the ontological. The scholar who
> made it his mission to undermine essentialisms and absolutes, Han
> contends, constantly fell prey to lapses in transcendentalism,
> unable or unwilling to press his critical philosophy to its logical
> ends. In examining and explaining this tension in Foucault's
> writings and interviews, Han provides a picture of this important
> figure in twentieth-century thought that will, in many ways, be
> unfamiliar to many readers, especially in the United States.
>
> Han's book was first published in France in 1998, and Edward Pile's
> fine translation goes a long way in helping the reader through what
> is often dense, philosophical prose. What makes Han's study
> different from most other analyses of Foucault's work is that she
> wishes to recover the philosophical Foucault, a figure she believes
> has been largely lost in the eagerness of social scientists and
> theorists to appropriate his ideas. By attending to the
> philosophical sources of and echoes in Foucault's writings and
> interviews, Han shows us a different aspect of his thinking.
> Surprisingly, Han's Foucault comes out looking far more German than
> one would ever expect. While mention is made of the connections to
> Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and structuralism, the philosophers who
> appear to have had the greatest influence on Foucault were all
> German: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
> Nietzsche, in particular, figured prominently in Foucault's turn to
> the genealogical approach, which Han rightly considers "one of the
> most fertile elements in Foucault's work" (p. 144).
>
> And indeed, scholars of Foucault frequently focus on this moment
> marked by _Discipline and Punish_, when he turned away from an
> archaeological method to embrace a genealogical approach. Han, by
> contrast, is interested in continuities. What she finds is that
> Foucault from the start was moved by Kant, leading him to a
> life-long search for a non-originary historical a priori. As he
> defined it in _Birth of the Clinic_, the historical a priori was
> "that which systematizes [men's thoughts] from the outset," or as he
> put it again in _The Order of Things_, it is the "fundamental
> network which defines the implicit but unavoidable unity of
> knowledge" (p. 41). Knowledge, thus, became _the_ phenomenon to
> explain, and over time, Foucault came to believe the way to make
> sense of it rested in conducting a social (or more accurately,
> historical) epistemology of the western will to truth. The
> historical a priori came to have many names in his
> works--fundamental codes, epistemes, discourses, regimes of truth,
> games of truth--but Han leads us to recognize that, at its heart,
> Foucault's critical project was always conceived as an attempt to
> transform Kant's a priori into an empirically accessible and
> assessable phenomenon.
>
> Historicizing the a priori, Han demonstrates, quickly led Foucault
> to see the interrelationships between what is seen, what is said
> about what is seen, and what is done about what is seen. Language
> would always remain a central trope in Foucault's analyses, since
> language mediates between human beings and the structures that
> orient them. But Foucault was not satisfied with going over the
> familiar territory of Wittgenstein. Aiming to divorce truth-making
> from internal arguments, Foucault related the will to truth in
> concrete social practices, norms, values, and interests. The
> development of humanity thus needs to be seen, according to
> Foucault, as "a series of interpretations," with morality, science,
> and metaphysics all serving as historically distinctive forms of
> interpretation. As Han rightly points out, this rather
> hermeneutical understanding of history is subversive on at least two
> counts. For one thing, it does not take metaphysics at face value,
> but rather sees it as a socially constructed venture, its notions of
> truth "only defined by its therapeutic and subjecting function" (p.
> 126). For another, it is intended to be a direct challenge to
> scientific argument and its claim of universal validity.
>
> Foucault's famous claim that power and truth-making are
> interdependent, then, was no great leap. And, as Han notes, it is a
> position Foucault shared with the Frankfurt School. Still, Han
> points out, Foucault parted ways with Adorno, Horkheimer, and
> Habermas in insisting on the polyvocality of rationalities and
> strategies of power, the overwhelming creative nature of that power,
> and the absence of any escape routes in modern rationalities.
> Nonetheless, as gloomy as Foucault's understanding of modern Power
> is, it did lead him to a new (and his final) line of investigation,
> one he discussed in a far less pessimistic tone: the history of
> subjectivity. In an inspired analysis, Han details how Foucault got
> from his notion of monolithic power to the idea of a
> self-constituting individual. The key, she points out, lies in
> seeing "disciplines" as techniques for both subjecting and
> objectifying human beings. The normative and normalizing nature of
> disciplinary techniques in the modern world is what brought Foucault
> to study "problematization"--the ways in which matters become "an
> object of concern, an element for reflection, and a material for
> stylisation" (pp. 164-165)--as well as the importance of how
> individuals related themselves to the regimes of truth that tried to
> discipline them.
>
> The turn to the constitution of the self in Foucault's history of
> sexuality and later lectures is therefore not as surprising as it
> first would seem. His interests now led him to something for which
> he had often been criticized earlier for neglecting: experience.
> At the beginning of _The Use of Pleasure_, Foucault describes this
> new effort: "It was a matter of seeing how an 'experience' came to
> be constituted in modern Western socieities, an experience that
> caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a
> 'sexuality,' which opened onto very diverse forms of knowledge and
> was linked to a system of rules and constraints. What I planned,
> therefore, was a history of sexuality as an experience, where
> experience is understood as the correlation, in a culture, between
> fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of
> subjectivity" (p. 153). Subjectivity, for Foucault, was therefore
> something quite different from the notions floated by
> phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, and Marxists. To him, Han
> contends, self-constitution was a type of feedback relationship of
> individuals to themselves in the form of ways of recognizing oneself
> as a subject (though it is worth noting that phenomenology,
> psychoanalysis, and Marxism, too, made room for notions of
> reciprocity in the constitution of subjectivity). In this, Han
> points out, Foucault once again attempted to upset conventional
> philosophical distinctions, this time between act-centered morality
> on the one hand and agent-centered ethics on the other, by showing
> that even Kant's notions of moral conduct presupposed a
> self-constitution by the subject.
>
> Here again, Han draws an interesting parallel, this time with
> Sartre's notion of the self. What Foucault shared with Sartre was a
> rejection of essentialism, of the idea that the self is "something
> given to us." Both, instead, emphasized self-creation in human
> subjectivity. In Han's view, however, this emphasis was
> particularly problematic for Foucault, since he understood subjects
> as not only authors of themselves, but also as objects of relations
> of power. This comes out especially in his understanding of modern
> Man in _The Use of Pleasure_, where he expressly identifies
> disciplinary practices such as psychology, medicine, prisons, and
> educational systems as instrumental in shaping the norms and models
> of modern human thinking and behavior. Foucault, Han concludes,
> never did find a way to resolve the tension.
>
> Han does a commendable job, then, of providing a sympathetic, yet
> critical, reading of Foucault's philosophical projects. And in the
> end, this is the particular value and charm of her book: an
> analysis that never flinches from identifying shortcomings,
> vagueness, and contradictions in Foucault's arguments, yet shows a
> reasoned appreciation for the ambitions, insights, and invaluable
> contributions of his work.
>
>
> Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
> the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
> educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
> author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
> H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
> contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
it might be of interest to members of this list.
Dr. David McInerney
Borderlands e-journal
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au
----- Original Message -----
From: "H-Net Reviews" <books@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <H-REVIEW@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 6:31 PM
Subject: Eghigian on Han, _Foucault's Critical Project_
> H-NET BOOK REVIEW
> Published by H-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (March 2004)
>
> Beatrice Han. _Foucault's Critical Project: Between the
> Transcendental and the Historical_. Translated by Edward Pile.
> Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xiii + 241 pp. Notes,
> index. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8047-3708-8; $24.95 (paper), ISBN
> 0-8047-3709-6.
>
> Reviewed for H-Ideas by Greg Eghigian, Department of History, Penn
> State University
>
> Foucault's Critical Project
>
> "Although he always desired to break away from it, and multiplied
> historicizing statements, Foucault was finally confronted again with
> the transcendental perspective, in the form of the idea of a free
> and autonomous self-constitution of the subject," concludes Beatrice
> Han in her challenging study of the work of Michel Foucault (p.
> 196). While Foucault has often been criticized for his radical
> social constructionism, his penchant for anthropomorphizing
> anonymous structures, or removing agency from human beings, Han
> reads Foucault in a novel way. She sees in his _oeuvre_ a recurring
> struggle with the universal and the ontological. The scholar who
> made it his mission to undermine essentialisms and absolutes, Han
> contends, constantly fell prey to lapses in transcendentalism,
> unable or unwilling to press his critical philosophy to its logical
> ends. In examining and explaining this tension in Foucault's
> writings and interviews, Han provides a picture of this important
> figure in twentieth-century thought that will, in many ways, be
> unfamiliar to many readers, especially in the United States.
>
> Han's book was first published in France in 1998, and Edward Pile's
> fine translation goes a long way in helping the reader through what
> is often dense, philosophical prose. What makes Han's study
> different from most other analyses of Foucault's work is that she
> wishes to recover the philosophical Foucault, a figure she believes
> has been largely lost in the eagerness of social scientists and
> theorists to appropriate his ideas. By attending to the
> philosophical sources of and echoes in Foucault's writings and
> interviews, Han shows us a different aspect of his thinking.
> Surprisingly, Han's Foucault comes out looking far more German than
> one would ever expect. While mention is made of the connections to
> Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and structuralism, the philosophers who
> appear to have had the greatest influence on Foucault were all
> German: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
> Nietzsche, in particular, figured prominently in Foucault's turn to
> the genealogical approach, which Han rightly considers "one of the
> most fertile elements in Foucault's work" (p. 144).
>
> And indeed, scholars of Foucault frequently focus on this moment
> marked by _Discipline and Punish_, when he turned away from an
> archaeological method to embrace a genealogical approach. Han, by
> contrast, is interested in continuities. What she finds is that
> Foucault from the start was moved by Kant, leading him to a
> life-long search for a non-originary historical a priori. As he
> defined it in _Birth of the Clinic_, the historical a priori was
> "that which systematizes [men's thoughts] from the outset," or as he
> put it again in _The Order of Things_, it is the "fundamental
> network which defines the implicit but unavoidable unity of
> knowledge" (p. 41). Knowledge, thus, became _the_ phenomenon to
> explain, and over time, Foucault came to believe the way to make
> sense of it rested in conducting a social (or more accurately,
> historical) epistemology of the western will to truth. The
> historical a priori came to have many names in his
> works--fundamental codes, epistemes, discourses, regimes of truth,
> games of truth--but Han leads us to recognize that, at its heart,
> Foucault's critical project was always conceived as an attempt to
> transform Kant's a priori into an empirically accessible and
> assessable phenomenon.
>
> Historicizing the a priori, Han demonstrates, quickly led Foucault
> to see the interrelationships between what is seen, what is said
> about what is seen, and what is done about what is seen. Language
> would always remain a central trope in Foucault's analyses, since
> language mediates between human beings and the structures that
> orient them. But Foucault was not satisfied with going over the
> familiar territory of Wittgenstein. Aiming to divorce truth-making
> from internal arguments, Foucault related the will to truth in
> concrete social practices, norms, values, and interests. The
> development of humanity thus needs to be seen, according to
> Foucault, as "a series of interpretations," with morality, science,
> and metaphysics all serving as historically distinctive forms of
> interpretation. As Han rightly points out, this rather
> hermeneutical understanding of history is subversive on at least two
> counts. For one thing, it does not take metaphysics at face value,
> but rather sees it as a socially constructed venture, its notions of
> truth "only defined by its therapeutic and subjecting function" (p.
> 126). For another, it is intended to be a direct challenge to
> scientific argument and its claim of universal validity.
>
> Foucault's famous claim that power and truth-making are
> interdependent, then, was no great leap. And, as Han notes, it is a
> position Foucault shared with the Frankfurt School. Still, Han
> points out, Foucault parted ways with Adorno, Horkheimer, and
> Habermas in insisting on the polyvocality of rationalities and
> strategies of power, the overwhelming creative nature of that power,
> and the absence of any escape routes in modern rationalities.
> Nonetheless, as gloomy as Foucault's understanding of modern Power
> is, it did lead him to a new (and his final) line of investigation,
> one he discussed in a far less pessimistic tone: the history of
> subjectivity. In an inspired analysis, Han details how Foucault got
> from his notion of monolithic power to the idea of a
> self-constituting individual. The key, she points out, lies in
> seeing "disciplines" as techniques for both subjecting and
> objectifying human beings. The normative and normalizing nature of
> disciplinary techniques in the modern world is what brought Foucault
> to study "problematization"--the ways in which matters become "an
> object of concern, an element for reflection, and a material for
> stylisation" (pp. 164-165)--as well as the importance of how
> individuals related themselves to the regimes of truth that tried to
> discipline them.
>
> The turn to the constitution of the self in Foucault's history of
> sexuality and later lectures is therefore not as surprising as it
> first would seem. His interests now led him to something for which
> he had often been criticized earlier for neglecting: experience.
> At the beginning of _The Use of Pleasure_, Foucault describes this
> new effort: "It was a matter of seeing how an 'experience' came to
> be constituted in modern Western socieities, an experience that
> caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a
> 'sexuality,' which opened onto very diverse forms of knowledge and
> was linked to a system of rules and constraints. What I planned,
> therefore, was a history of sexuality as an experience, where
> experience is understood as the correlation, in a culture, between
> fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of
> subjectivity" (p. 153). Subjectivity, for Foucault, was therefore
> something quite different from the notions floated by
> phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, and Marxists. To him, Han
> contends, self-constitution was a type of feedback relationship of
> individuals to themselves in the form of ways of recognizing oneself
> as a subject (though it is worth noting that phenomenology,
> psychoanalysis, and Marxism, too, made room for notions of
> reciprocity in the constitution of subjectivity). In this, Han
> points out, Foucault once again attempted to upset conventional
> philosophical distinctions, this time between act-centered morality
> on the one hand and agent-centered ethics on the other, by showing
> that even Kant's notions of moral conduct presupposed a
> self-constitution by the subject.
>
> Here again, Han draws an interesting parallel, this time with
> Sartre's notion of the self. What Foucault shared with Sartre was a
> rejection of essentialism, of the idea that the self is "something
> given to us." Both, instead, emphasized self-creation in human
> subjectivity. In Han's view, however, this emphasis was
> particularly problematic for Foucault, since he understood subjects
> as not only authors of themselves, but also as objects of relations
> of power. This comes out especially in his understanding of modern
> Man in _The Use of Pleasure_, where he expressly identifies
> disciplinary practices such as psychology, medicine, prisons, and
> educational systems as instrumental in shaping the norms and models
> of modern human thinking and behavior. Foucault, Han concludes,
> never did find a way to resolve the tension.
>
> Han does a commendable job, then, of providing a sympathetic, yet
> critical, reading of Foucault's philosophical projects. And in the
> end, this is the particular value and charm of her book: an
> analysis that never flinches from identifying shortcomings,
> vagueness, and contradictions in Foucault's arguments, yet shows a
> reasoned appreciation for the ambitions, insights, and invaluable
> contributions of his work.
>
>
> Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
> the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
> educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
> author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
> H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
> contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.