Foucault was interested in Zen Buddhism?
wow
I wonder what he would have to say about my ancestral faith, Hinduism, minus
the usual caste system bullshit.
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi <
critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Chetan Vemuri <aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > so how would one characterize Foucault's overall attitudes to organized
> > religion?
> > Would they be Nietzschean/Dawkinsian? Or supportive in a social sense?
>
> In much of his best known work, Foucault developed Max Weber's
> insights in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What
> interested him is how "the soul" has become "the prison of the body,"*
> making the body obedient to factory discipline,** through such modern
> secular institutions as criminal justice, psychiatry, and medicine.
>
> At the same time, Foucault did not think that Marxism put up profound
> resistance to the relations of power that create such discipline,
> because of its philosophical shortcomings (such as productivism and
> progressivism, though these have been questioned by a significant
> minority of Marxist philosophers) as well as experiences of state
> socialism. Rather, he went in search of a political
> spirituality/social movement that potentially could do what Marxism
> couldn't (hence his interest in Islam and the Iranian revolution),
> while exploring approaches to life that differed from and could help
> us question our modern one (hence his interest in Zen, ancient Greek
> ethics, and so on).
>
> In other words, it may be said that Foucault fought religion
> (capitalist modernity shaped through the Reformation) by religion
> (whose etymology means to to "tie again," suggestive of binding
> ourselves to one another in friendship as a way of life).
>
> * Through this inversion, Foucault was doing the same thing to
> Christianity's understanding of itself as what Marx had done to
> Hegelian philosophy's: turning it right side up.
>
> ** Tomás Sánchez-Criado observed in another thread that "many Latin
> American colleagues [have been] complaining of the scarce utility most
> of the writings by Foucault." That is probably because the kind of
> existence/experience whose genealogy Foucault critically examined is
> that of highly developed capitalist society under a highly developed
> bureaucratic state, where a majority of working people are urbanized,
> proletarianized, and socially atomized. For a long time, these
> material conditions for discipline and governmentality did not exist
> outside the "West" (even today a majority of the population in many
> nations in the global South are farmers and agricultural workers).
> Even in Third-World nations where the development of capitalism has
> given rise to a largely urbanized and proletarianized population, a
> majority of them are often stuck in the informal sector, unsubjected
> to factory discipline and very much neglected by the state (see Mike
> Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004: "If
> God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen
> again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world").
>
> Yoshie
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foucault-L mailing list
>
--
Chetan Vemuri
West Des Moines, IA
aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx
(515)-418-2771
"You say you want a Revolution! Well you know, we all want to change the
world"
wow
I wonder what he would have to say about my ancestral faith, Hinduism, minus
the usual caste system bullshit.
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi <
critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Chetan Vemuri <aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > so how would one characterize Foucault's overall attitudes to organized
> > religion?
> > Would they be Nietzschean/Dawkinsian? Or supportive in a social sense?
>
> In much of his best known work, Foucault developed Max Weber's
> insights in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What
> interested him is how "the soul" has become "the prison of the body,"*
> making the body obedient to factory discipline,** through such modern
> secular institutions as criminal justice, psychiatry, and medicine.
>
> At the same time, Foucault did not think that Marxism put up profound
> resistance to the relations of power that create such discipline,
> because of its philosophical shortcomings (such as productivism and
> progressivism, though these have been questioned by a significant
> minority of Marxist philosophers) as well as experiences of state
> socialism. Rather, he went in search of a political
> spirituality/social movement that potentially could do what Marxism
> couldn't (hence his interest in Islam and the Iranian revolution),
> while exploring approaches to life that differed from and could help
> us question our modern one (hence his interest in Zen, ancient Greek
> ethics, and so on).
>
> In other words, it may be said that Foucault fought religion
> (capitalist modernity shaped through the Reformation) by religion
> (whose etymology means to to "tie again," suggestive of binding
> ourselves to one another in friendship as a way of life).
>
> * Through this inversion, Foucault was doing the same thing to
> Christianity's understanding of itself as what Marx had done to
> Hegelian philosophy's: turning it right side up.
>
> ** Tomás Sánchez-Criado observed in another thread that "many Latin
> American colleagues [have been] complaining of the scarce utility most
> of the writings by Foucault." That is probably because the kind of
> existence/experience whose genealogy Foucault critically examined is
> that of highly developed capitalist society under a highly developed
> bureaucratic state, where a majority of working people are urbanized,
> proletarianized, and socially atomized. For a long time, these
> material conditions for discipline and governmentality did not exist
> outside the "West" (even today a majority of the population in many
> nations in the global South are farmers and agricultural workers).
> Even in Third-World nations where the development of capitalism has
> given rise to a largely urbanized and proletarianized population, a
> majority of them are often stuck in the informal sector, unsubjected
> to factory discipline and very much neglected by the state (see Mike
> Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004: "If
> God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen
> again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world").
>
> Yoshie
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foucault-L mailing list
>
--
Chetan Vemuri
West Des Moines, IA
aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx
(515)-418-2771
"You say you want a Revolution! Well you know, we all want to change the
world"