Yoshie, this is an excellent point. Thank
you for that. I had forgotten all about Marx and how he is absolutely essential
for understanding Foucault's concerns here. Obviously Foucault's point goes
much more beyond Marx but as your rightly put it, he's working in the shadow of
Marx. Ali
=
The tradition of historical materialism, with which Foucault was
ambivalently engaged, postulates that the subjective transformation of
the sort that Foucault put under the rubric of "spirituality" in The
Hermeneutics of the Subject comes only through a collective
revolutionary practice and vice versa, a revolutionary process in
which people, through practical activity, transform both themselves
and their circumstances, and that it is in this process we should seek
"truth." As Marx put it, "The philosophers have only interpreted the
world, in various ways; the point is to change it." The eleventh
thesis on Feuerbach is often misunderstood as a call to action,
rejecting philosophy, but it is best to interpret it as a criticism of
the common epistemological premise of the philosophers whom Marx
criticizes, the premise being that there exists a subject, disengaged
from the world as well as other subjects, who can know. Foucault,
like Marx, criticizes that premise.
Yoshie
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