On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 1:37 PM, Kevin Turner <kevin.turner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> as regards the relation to modernity, this seems somewhat
> more tenuous, since in the text cited, Foucault is writing
> about classical Greek experience of Aphrodisia: i.e.
> how free Greek males constituted certain aspects of
> themselves as object of reflection, intervention, and
> transformation: i.e. how they constituted themselves as
> both knowing subject and known object.
The sentence in question comes in the introduction where Foucault is
describing his plan of action, his approach to history, rather than in
the rest of the book where he discusses what free men of ancient
Greece did and thought. If my memory serves me, after the
introduction the term "experience" seldom, if ever, appears in The Use
of Pleasure, which is one of the reasons why I think for Foucault
"being as experience" is a product of historical transformation,
rather than a transhistorical phenomenon, though Foucault does
sometimes use the term experience to refer to pre-modern worlds (again
if remember correctly).
The term experience is as much of a problem for Foucault as the term
production is for Marx and Marxists. On one hand, throughout history,
we can say that human beings experienced, just as they produced; on
the other hand, terms like experience and production can obscure the
specificity of modernity by virtue of their transhistorical utility, a
problem for philosophers of discontinuity like Foucault and Marx, who
wish to unearth, for instance, how exactly "sexuality" (for Foucault)
and "economy" (for Marx) became disembedded from a variety of moral
regulations of mutual though hierarchical obligation and dependency
that had existed before modernity. To my knowledge, though, Foucault
never explicitly define what experience is.
Yoshie
> as regards the relation to modernity, this seems somewhat
> more tenuous, since in the text cited, Foucault is writing
> about classical Greek experience of Aphrodisia: i.e.
> how free Greek males constituted certain aspects of
> themselves as object of reflection, intervention, and
> transformation: i.e. how they constituted themselves as
> both knowing subject and known object.
The sentence in question comes in the introduction where Foucault is
describing his plan of action, his approach to history, rather than in
the rest of the book where he discusses what free men of ancient
Greece did and thought. If my memory serves me, after the
introduction the term "experience" seldom, if ever, appears in The Use
of Pleasure, which is one of the reasons why I think for Foucault
"being as experience" is a product of historical transformation,
rather than a transhistorical phenomenon, though Foucault does
sometimes use the term experience to refer to pre-modern worlds (again
if remember correctly).
The term experience is as much of a problem for Foucault as the term
production is for Marx and Marxists. On one hand, throughout history,
we can say that human beings experienced, just as they produced; on
the other hand, terms like experience and production can obscure the
specificity of modernity by virtue of their transhistorical utility, a
problem for philosophers of discontinuity like Foucault and Marx, who
wish to unearth, for instance, how exactly "sexuality" (for Foucault)
and "economy" (for Marx) became disembedded from a variety of moral
regulations of mutual though hierarchical obligation and dependency
that had existed before modernity. To my knowledge, though, Foucault
never explicitly define what experience is.
Yoshie