My last post for the term: Have you all noticed how Foucault manages to bring all discussions back to his methodologies in the essays we've read this term? He has a wonderful, nuanced discussion of Kant (I particularly enjoyed the idea that modernity is an ethos, not a time-period), but then he appropriates the question of what enlightenment is and answers it with something like "(the search for) enlightenment is the pursuit of situated connections and small-t truths using a genealogical/archeological method." In a sense, he places his project(s) within what he calls the modern ethos, within the critical reflection on self and context.
-Chris
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Someone missed out on their morning coffee
Maybe I'm reading my 6:30am wake up time into this, but did Foucault seem a tad cranky in this week's interview? The interviewer raised two questions that Foucault never fully answered. I'll start with the first:
Do relations of power always include relations of domination, or can they be separable, as suggested by Arendt? (378)
The basic question really seems to be, is power always bad, and is domination always exploitative? Foucault answers that Arendt is wrong, that you can't separate the two. But he seems to pick and choose how he considers this relationship. Go back a few pages the second question asked that Foucault does not, in my mind, adequately address:
How to deal with Heidegger and the Nazis? (374)
Although Heidegger is a shining example, the question really asks: if domination is bad for your general health, how do we deal with the works of people who willingly (and sometimes happily) ascribed to and support those systems of domination that Foucault is so bothered (and fascinated) by? Or, in Tweekese: How to deal with TJ and the slaves?
Foucault answer, to me, is a cop out: "The key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos." (274) But isn't that the problem with Heidegger? How, and where, do we separate the author from the academic text? How do we deal with text we don't want the author to have written? We can separate the two? Really? His "philosophical life, his ethos" doesn't resonate in his work? They are in some ways separable? Power and domination are inseparable, but those who use power, or ascribe to a system that uses power to really violently dominate people, are separable from their participation that system?
At the same time, including "but, but, he was a Nazi" prior, or post, whenever you deal with Heidegger seems to be an odd solution too.
I've lost coherency by this point, but this is an issue I intend to raise later on this morning. In some ways it's a questions of how to deal with the sources produced within relationships of power, and then how to deal with the authors and their relationship to the power system.
Do relations of power always include relations of domination, or can they be separable, as suggested by Arendt? (378)
The basic question really seems to be, is power always bad, and is domination always exploitative? Foucault answers that Arendt is wrong, that you can't separate the two. But he seems to pick and choose how he considers this relationship. Go back a few pages the second question asked that Foucault does not, in my mind, adequately address:
How to deal with Heidegger and the Nazis? (374)
Although Heidegger is a shining example, the question really asks: if domination is bad for your general health, how do we deal with the works of people who willingly (and sometimes happily) ascribed to and support those systems of domination that Foucault is so bothered (and fascinated) by? Or, in Tweekese: How to deal with TJ and the slaves?
Foucault answer, to me, is a cop out: "The key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos." (274) But isn't that the problem with Heidegger? How, and where, do we separate the author from the academic text? How do we deal with text we don't want the author to have written? We can separate the two? Really? His "philosophical life, his ethos" doesn't resonate in his work? They are in some ways separable? Power and domination are inseparable, but those who use power, or ascribe to a system that uses power to really violently dominate people, are separable from their participation that system?
At the same time, including "but, but, he was a Nazi" prior, or post, whenever you deal with Heidegger seems to be an odd solution too.
I've lost coherency by this point, but this is an issue I intend to raise later on this morning. In some ways it's a questions of how to deal with the sources produced within relationships of power, and then how to deal with the authors and their relationship to the power system.
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