Ron Griffin wrote : "Such a non productive, seemingly adolescent, response to an honest question."
I was going to say something, but Felix Guattari said it a bajillion times better in his response to a rather ethusiast reader who insisted that Anti-Oedipus was instrumental in breaking psychoanalysis' charm :
"Pure illusion ! Psychoanalysts have remained impervious to it. It's only normal : you might as well ask a butcher to cease to sell meat - or to become a veggie ! - for theoretical reasons. And, as far as consumers as concerned, one should not think that psychoanalysis does nothing for them ! It works ! It works splendidly ! People not only ask for it - they ask for more. And they're right to pay so much for it since it works so well for them. A little bit like a drug. Plus it goes whith a small but non negligible social promotion. Anti-Oedipus was but a breath of fresh air. You know what's funny? It's the watchword a cetain psychoanalytic association emitted when the book was issued : "First, don't talk about it, il will go away on itself." And you know what? That's just what happened. No, the most tangible result of Anti-Oedipus was to severe leftism's ties to psychoanalysis." (My bloody translation.)
Frankly, Ron, I want to know : don't you really see why Arianna might find this question stupid or are you just trying to be clever? When you expect an adapted response and get an automatic one in its place, don't you have a tendency to find it stupid, however mature you may be - or are you just made out from a completely different stuff than us petty intellectuals?
I, for one, fail to see how one can ask such a question ("Where are the agents in Foucault's works?") out of "honesty"(except in the social - as opposed to moral - acception of the term). I can't, for the sake of my life, imagine how anyone go through any of Foucault's works (or at least any of Foucault's foucaldian works - i.e post 1957) and accept this question as relevant to the matter he's talking about and/or what he's trying to say about it / make out of it. I can conceive it, but i can't imagine it.
But, hey, I won't cast them the first stone : going through a philosophical work can be quite an experience; sometimes it means having what, a minute ago, seemed to be the very foundations of any experience you could make become suddenly irrelevant - or at least, appear out of place in the one you're actually making; most of the times, it means having the truth you held as self-evident become a little less so; at any rate, it demands that you be prepared to run the risk of having your beliefs (sometimes the beliefs you hold the dearest - most likely because they hold you up - so to speak) being called into question; consequently, when a book is written to put you through such a hard time (and we know Foucault conceived them as such), it's likely to fall prey to "cautious" readings - which means sometimes going through the experience with your senses selectively closed (what one might call "one-sighted readings" if he's in a spirited), some other time not opening the book at
all; that's precisely why i, for one, don't read so much - especially "philosophical works" (whatever the field they take place in : i'm not talking about works of philosophical "nature", rather about works of philosophical effect).
Having say that, I hope you see where I'm coming from. Now, here is what I'm aiming at : it seems to me that, to ask "where are in the agents in Foucault's works", one mut be blinded by his faith - his "practical" faith I hastily had i.e not necessarily the one he professes - not necessarily one he can objectivate through a "purely intellectual" process; but whether the faith is "genuine"/ "naive"/"innocent" (fides implicita) or not is irrelevant to the present matter, because : either the bias is inconscious and the pseudo-question it brings forth can't be called "honest" (NOR malicious), either the blindfolds are willfully put on and that question can't be called but dishonest.
(A question more whorthy to be called "honest" would have been : "why does the question of the agent's place seem not to be compulsory for Foucault when it is for me?" But to ask this question, you not only have to be honest : you have to be lucid first.)
But, most of all, it's the epitomy of symbolic violence (it's a way of denying one's very existence) - whether its perpetrators are as much victims of it as their targets or not. Which is why I perfectly understand why one would be so vehemently keen on dubbing this question "stupid".
End of rant.
And yes, English is my second language.
Emmanuel.
___________________________________________________________________________
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I was going to say something, but Felix Guattari said it a bajillion times better in his response to a rather ethusiast reader who insisted that Anti-Oedipus was instrumental in breaking psychoanalysis' charm :
"Pure illusion ! Psychoanalysts have remained impervious to it. It's only normal : you might as well ask a butcher to cease to sell meat - or to become a veggie ! - for theoretical reasons. And, as far as consumers as concerned, one should not think that psychoanalysis does nothing for them ! It works ! It works splendidly ! People not only ask for it - they ask for more. And they're right to pay so much for it since it works so well for them. A little bit like a drug. Plus it goes whith a small but non negligible social promotion. Anti-Oedipus was but a breath of fresh air. You know what's funny? It's the watchword a cetain psychoanalytic association emitted when the book was issued : "First, don't talk about it, il will go away on itself." And you know what? That's just what happened. No, the most tangible result of Anti-Oedipus was to severe leftism's ties to psychoanalysis." (My bloody translation.)
Frankly, Ron, I want to know : don't you really see why Arianna might find this question stupid or are you just trying to be clever? When you expect an adapted response and get an automatic one in its place, don't you have a tendency to find it stupid, however mature you may be - or are you just made out from a completely different stuff than us petty intellectuals?
I, for one, fail to see how one can ask such a question ("Where are the agents in Foucault's works?") out of "honesty"(except in the social - as opposed to moral - acception of the term). I can't, for the sake of my life, imagine how anyone go through any of Foucault's works (or at least any of Foucault's foucaldian works - i.e post 1957) and accept this question as relevant to the matter he's talking about and/or what he's trying to say about it / make out of it. I can conceive it, but i can't imagine it.
But, hey, I won't cast them the first stone : going through a philosophical work can be quite an experience; sometimes it means having what, a minute ago, seemed to be the very foundations of any experience you could make become suddenly irrelevant - or at least, appear out of place in the one you're actually making; most of the times, it means having the truth you held as self-evident become a little less so; at any rate, it demands that you be prepared to run the risk of having your beliefs (sometimes the beliefs you hold the dearest - most likely because they hold you up - so to speak) being called into question; consequently, when a book is written to put you through such a hard time (and we know Foucault conceived them as such), it's likely to fall prey to "cautious" readings - which means sometimes going through the experience with your senses selectively closed (what one might call "one-sighted readings" if he's in a spirited), some other time not opening the book at
all; that's precisely why i, for one, don't read so much - especially "philosophical works" (whatever the field they take place in : i'm not talking about works of philosophical "nature", rather about works of philosophical effect).
Having say that, I hope you see where I'm coming from. Now, here is what I'm aiming at : it seems to me that, to ask "where are in the agents in Foucault's works", one mut be blinded by his faith - his "practical" faith I hastily had i.e not necessarily the one he professes - not necessarily one he can objectivate through a "purely intellectual" process; but whether the faith is "genuine"/ "naive"/"innocent" (fides implicita) or not is irrelevant to the present matter, because : either the bias is inconscious and the pseudo-question it brings forth can't be called "honest" (NOR malicious), either the blindfolds are willfully put on and that question can't be called but dishonest.
(A question more whorthy to be called "honest" would have been : "why does the question of the agent's place seem not to be compulsory for Foucault when it is for me?" But to ask this question, you not only have to be honest : you have to be lucid first.)
But, most of all, it's the epitomy of symbolic violence (it's a way of denying one's very existence) - whether its perpetrators are as much victims of it as their targets or not. Which is why I perfectly understand why one would be so vehemently keen on dubbing this question "stupid".
End of rant.
And yes, English is my second language.
Emmanuel.
___________________________________________________________________________
Découvrez une nouvelle façon d'obtenir des réponses à toutes vos questions !
Profitez des connaissances, des opinions et des expériences des internautes sur Yahoo! Questions/Réponses
http://fr.answers.yahoo.com