[D-G] Fouceault, Deluze and superhumanity - What is the need with correspondanceBlyenbergh - Spinoza?

Bruno brunolistopad at hotmail.com
Mon Oct 9 15:50:35 PDT 2006


----- Original Message ----- 
From: mobileacademy05 at mobileacademy-berlin.com
To: mobileacademy05 at mobileacademy-berlin.com
Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2006 10:53 AM
Subject: Blackmarket 17th/ 18th of November and Kiosk 18th of November, 
Berlin


Mobile Academy presents:
BLACKMARKET FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE
It's a Bird! It's a Plane. It's Superman....American Close-Ups in 440 
Dialogues.

An installation with 150 experts by Hannah Hurtzig
Friday, 17th and Saturday, 18th of November, 19.30 - 23.00 hrs, HAU 1
FREE ENTRANCE! Per Expert Talk: 3 ?


The BLACKMARKET defines itself as a research on learning and un-learning and 
installs a temporary show- and production space, where narrative formats of 
knowledge transfer are tried out and presented. The installation imitates 
common places of knowledge transfer like archives or the reading room in a 
library and combines these with communication situations, which are 
well-known from markets, the stock exchange, counselling or service 
interviews. At the Blackmarket you can book an expert for half an hour and 
for only 3 EUR for a private dialogue or listen in to selected talks on the 
Blackradio.
The image we have of America is: too big. Too big are not only the countries' 
geographical dimensions, its plurality of inhabitants, their customs and 
institutions, but also the prejudice and the presumed, but often not 
verified knowledge of a country, which seems to be too close and too far 
away from us at the same time. The Blackmarket breaks up this panorama image 
into 440 knowledge fragments, giving the visitors the possibility to 
recompose it by themselves. It is less about a new image of America but more 
about an insight into a way of life that often has the tendency to represent 
itself blurred: mythical, nonverbal, egocentric.

Blackmarket experts among others: Enrico Adler (Triple Line Dance World 
Champion), Prof. Dr. Anja Bandau (Juniorprofessor at the Latin-American 
Institute of the FU Berlin), Cynthia Barcomi (Founder of the Barcomi Cafés 
in Berlin), Diana McCarty (Media Activist, Co-founder of bootlab Berlin), 
Anna Curtis (Burlesque Dancer, Photographer), Talaya Delaney (Playwright), 
Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dietze (Prof. For North American Studies HU Berlin; 
Gender Studies and Critical Occidentalism), Carolin Emcke (Journalist, 
Author), Lutz Engelke (Managing Director Triad Berlin), Peter Gente (Founder 
and Director of Merve Publishing Company Berlin), Dr. Thomas Greven 
(Scientific Assistant in the Policy Department, John-F.-Kennedy-Institute) 
Prof. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Prof. For Literature and of French & Italian 
and Comparative Literature, Stanford University), Nanna Heidenreich (Film 
Festival Organiser, Media Scientist, kanak attak Activist), Heinz Ickstadt 
(Professor and ex-Director of the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute; Pynchon 
Specialist), Christoph Keller (Artist), Chris Kondek (Video Artist and 
Director), Dr. Markus Krajewski (Author, Media Historian at the Bauhaus 
University Weimar), Dr. Ekkehart Krippendorf (Political Scientist), Helmut 
Müller-Sievers (Professor for German and Comparative Literature  at 
Northwestern University/Chicago), Petros Ovsepyan (Composer, Pianist), 
Philip Phan (Prof. for Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst.), Reynold 
Reynolds (Artist), Norris Sirone Jones (Musician), Gary Smith (Ececutive 
Director American Academy Berlin), Karsten D. Voigt (Coordinator for 
German-American Collaboration at the Foreign Office), Dr. Joseph Vogl 
(Professor for New German Literature at HU Berlin), Emmett Williams (Fluxus 
Artist).


A projekt of Mobile Academy at HAU, funded by means of the 
Hauptstadtkulturfonds. www.mobileacademy-berlin.com


KIOSK For Useful Knowledge
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in conversation with Joseph Vogl and Helmut 
Müller-Sievers

Saturday, 18th of November, 21.00 - 23.00 hrs, HAU1, free entrance

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht studied German and Romance language  and literature 
studies, sociology and philosophy. At the age of 26, he became a professor 
in Bochum. Since 1989 he has been lecturing Comparative Literature Studies 
at Stanford University and has become a fervently confessing American.
Joseph Vogl has been Professor for New German Literature at the HU Berlin 
since April 2006 and has translated a number of key works of the newer 
generation of French philosophers (Gilles Deleuze, J.-F. Lyotard, C. 
Lévi-Strauss et al.). Helmut Müller-Sievers is Professor for German and 
Comparative Literature at the Northwestern University, Chicago.

The conversation will take place in parallel to the Blackmarket and will be 
transmitted medially (video and audio). It is part of the Archive Project: 
Narratives of Places, Cities and Territories by www.tuliphouse.de (Hannah 
Hurtzig and Anselm Franke)
In cooperation with the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, funded by means 
of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes



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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "hwenk" <hwenk at web.de>
To: <deleuze-guattari at lists.driftline.org>
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: [D-G] Fouceault,Deluze and superhumanity - What is the need 
with correspondanceBlyenbergh - Spinoza?


> Hello,
>
> I had up to now no real time to answer your
> obligations concerning the article of Foucault concerning  "The egenealogy
> of the moral".
> - "Nietsche,the genelogy and the history."
> I myself had another essay of Foucault in mind which handles the discourse
> of rascism "The light of war" -
> as far as I see available only in german or perhaps in french.
>
> The issue was that he quotes Nietzsche that the will to know or
> science
> become a danger to mankind.
> Now routing also back the original quotes of Nietzsche by Foucault,
> it turns out that in the eyes of Nietzsche science had been very 
> defensive,
> searching for security.
> There comes "the will not to be betrayed."
> In order to keep life save and to transcendent the
> individual soul and the situation we are living in.
> This also lifes forth in Heodeggers:
> "The poet names the holy, the thinker thinks it."
> Therefore the  nimbus coming to science from religion.
> Now, as I mentioned, Newtonian mechanics and mathematical physics in
> general,
> medicin and chemistry, electricity and the technological development 
> worked
> so well and banned
> so much fears for things in former times unexplainable and without any
> defense.
>
> And the we can get offensive.
> Now we handle science and to know so much, that we can make experiments,
> overcoming limits which had been in former times "conditio humana".
> Foe example the bondage to society,
> the need to eat, to stay in the culture where one was boren - at least in
> mind,
> to live with real threating wars.
> Always to fight for some abstract things one is not really concerned and
> interested in.
> This all can be overcome now.
>
> That is the kind of surhumanity Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari
> and me have in mind.
>
>
>
>
> Besides that.
> What is the trouble in the discussion
> of Deleuze, Spinoza and Blyenbergh?
> I know it very well. So if you have some questions,
> I could save you a lot of very awfull thinking.
>
> Greetings Harald Wenk
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: deleuze-guattari-bounces at lists.driftline.org
> [mailto:deleuze-guattari-bounces at lists.driftline.org]On Behalf Of
> .+oot7AM martini
> Sent: Dienstag, 19. September 2006 06:37
> To: deleuze-guattari at driftline.org
> Subject: Re: [D-G] Jeepers, more Violence
>
>
>> With his development fo Newtonian Mechniics he opened the door for the
>> scientfic revolution, [...]
>> this was so perplexing and fruitful that it swept away in the long run
>> not only the old feudal structures, but also devolped so much wealth 
>> [...]
>> progress was induced by western world in brute form of colonialism.
>> The good consience was brought about by superior technolgy and the
>> liberating forces of it.[...]
>> "We subjectiate with very ancient morals compared to technological
>> development" in my eyes
>> root the real problem, indicated already by Whitehead.
>
> "folding" or "hiding" or whatever.. but what has me intertested here is
> the concealed agenda-narrative of the master's dominance of the slave
> and all the various forms which it must take... as we go through
> history.... as newton's science paves the way for 18th
> cent.capitalism, so if locke lets us have "checks & and balances" it
> is only because we necessarily accept property laws from the
> mega-machine, and thus controllers of territory maintain control of
> that balance by broadcasting control nomologically through american
> revolutionary BwO ....  if we have Rousseau's "social contract" it is
> only because we have the leviathan of the state which would violently
> destroy us otherwise and such a concept is born from the need for
> compromise with that machine, not a need to create a more complex
> machine, a need to communicate and open up to it, to save ourselves
> from its stupidity. I am glad you bring up whitehead and popper
> because it is easy to forget how closely they circle that rock. I can
> see why one might be drawn to their debates on science or empiricism,
> but don't forget about the actual the subject here. for whitehead it
> is "commerce" and for popper it is "capitalism", big dif. the
> open-society of anti-leninism is just a paradox, so why validate it
> and enter? The point should be perfectly clear, I know who I would
> like to be ruled by, it is not confusing, nobody in the world is
> asking to be ruled by the artificial intelligence of the mega-machine.
>
> Foucault is more along the direction I was hoping to go. He takes
> spinoza to task and drags neitcheeze along with him. In his essay
> "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault claims that "all knowledge
> rests upon injustice. ... [The] instinct for knowledge is malicious
> (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)."
>
> you can read more of it here:
> http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i02/02b01201.htm
> (I hate passwords!!)
>
>> And as the essay shows, the outer world wanderes into the inner world by
>> foldings and stratifications, the folds giving the subjects.
>> And the more cruel and raw the outer world comes in, the more cruel and
> hard
>> the subjects are.
>>
>>
>> And for the rule of the slaves over the salves superstition
>> and very crude interpretations of the bible played a great role.
>>
>>
>> I think what you mean is that Spinoza was against independt priests
>>
>> and favoured some kind of state religion he himself would not believe in,
>> bit in oreder to unite the state mentally.
>>
>
> and the rest of the story... " after spinoza was dead his ideas were
> territorialized by the mega-machine. the end" They are both/all forms
> of a "superstition" or metaphysics, one oedipalized may lead to more
> advantageous formations then another. Obviously "closeness of
> territory" is important, and so territory remains the number one topic
> again. but there is more to that "closeness", like you were saying a
> folding is also possible, but there's no need to make it complex, even
> w/o measured folding there is closeness, just proximity. the machine
> finds language is forced into a position of connecting that gap of
> closeness and so identity is forced to be a part of language for thhe
> machine. for the person, the machine tends to become a part of
> language, but the smart person is aware of more then just that limited
> closeness (re: locke'd +freud) so we remember that the machine is
> outside of language, was outside of language, now inside our cell.
> Deleuze would remind us that it has always been mixed, like
> prometheus. has the spirit's relationship with the megalithic-mach
> always been so stressful? but here, you link the BwO to divine
> reason... surely this can be straightened out!
>
>
>> The idea "As lead by one spirit" and uniting the weak powers of reason
>> in times where people died very often very fast and a lot
>> catastrophes were usual, leadinfg to superstion and a hardening in
> direction
>> cruelty of the souls.
>>
>> You have the daming of the riot of peasants even by Luther.
>>
>> So a little bit anxity of the beast which habits in the common peopl
> taking
>> as masses
>> was very deep rooted among intellectuals.[...]
>> Youz have to have people who thimk somethin that works for liberation.
>>[...]
>> And here it is like a wonder that science and technology found practial
> way
>> outs and help.
>>
>> This, to take th great line of "universal history", has lead to a more
>> wider and generous thinking, folds and strata,  allowing science and
>> education to grow, involving
>> development of the personality for a lot of people.
>>
>> Very formal rationlity is something like selffirmation of thinking,
>> selfreflected and tested
>> by success or explanation of failure against outer world.
>>
> I am understanding correctly that it should be acted out politically
> on the governmental stage? it does fine in science and science can
> inform. but Doesn't the mega-machine fail even more miserably then the
> oedipal king, and I'm not saying that it shouldn't? But why should I
> believe in my own degenerat-ness more then the degenerateness of the
> world around me?  It's not a choice I'd force anyone to make.
>
> Certainly "universal history" would exist even w/o those specific
> folds and strata we have today, it would be different fold, perhaps
> one without bertrand russell. The imaginary choice between the
> mega-machine and the oedipal king prevents a 3rd meta-challenge that
> must extend beyond the two types, a debate is pointless, there is no
> crisis to resolve diplomatically. Israel exists to militarily oppose
> communism in the region, its in their charter'46.) This is the
> "thinking par excel-lance" that can recognize the shellgame and
> realize a truth that rests on the finger tip.  it is initiated by the
> loss of psychological territory, like third-class depression, the
> resolution of the identity crisis amounts to the forfeit of tempo
> during the dancing game.  But this game has Lamarkean consequences for
> the loser's genealogy, who susceptible to negative variance during
> critical metholation periods, ie women's eggs. One of the great things
> about science is its ability to communicate truth to the mega-machine
> who is blind to absolute truth and can only perceive nomological truth
> like code.
>
>
>
> ======================
>
> okay
> here's the foucault article:
>
> -------
>
> Foucault the Neohumanist?
> The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6.9.1
> http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i02/02b01201.htm
>
> By RICHARD WOLIN
>
> In 1975 and 1976, Michel Foucault published two books that
> single-handedly reoriented scholarship in the humanities:
> Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Thereby,
> Foucault fundamentally altered the way we think about power.
>
> For centuries, power had been associated with the negative capacity
> to deny or forbid. In spatial terms, it stood at the apex of a
> vertical axis. This view suited our modern conception of political
> sovereignty as a top-down phenomenon. Power reputedly consisted of
> a relationship between sovereign and subjects. It bespoke the
> capacity of rulers to censure or to control the behavior of those
> they ruled. That was the traditional model of power that Foucault
> vigorously challenged in these pathbreaking studies. As he remarked
> laconically: "In political thought and analysis, we still have not
> cut off the head of the king." By remaining beholden to an
> anachronistic notion of power, the human sciences, Foucault
> claimed, remained impervious to the distinctive modalities and
> flows of power in modern society, tone-deaf to the diffuse and
> insidious operations of "biopower": modern society's well-nigh
> totalitarian capacity to institutionally regulate and subjugate
> individual behavior -- via statistics, public-health guidelines,
> and conformist sexual norms -- down to the most elementary,
> "corpuscular" level.
>
> What would happen if we reconceived power as operating on a
> horizontal axis, wondered Foucault? What if the traditional
> vertical focus on sovereignty, governance, and law were
> diversionary, leading us to mistake power's genuine tenor and
> scope? What if power's defining trait were its productive rather
> than its negative or suppressive capacities? In that case, power's
> uniqueness would lie in its ability to shape, fashion, and mold the
> parameters of the self, potentially down to the infinitesimal or
> corpuscular level. Following Descartes, we have typically been
> taught to conceive of the self as a locus of autonomy or freedom.
> But what if this autonomy were in fact illusory, concealing potent,
> underlying, and sophisticated mechanisms of domination?
>
> That is the hypothesis Foucault sets forth during his later,
> "genealogical" phase. Just as Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals,
> tried to show that the Western ideas of good and evil derive from
> an ethos of weakness -- specifically, from the "slave revolt" in
> morals against aristocratic society -- Foucault, in a similar vein,
> seeks to demonstrate the compromised origins of the modern
> "subject." In his view, the illusions of autonomy conceal a deeper
> bondage. The so-called subject is merely the efflux of what
> Foucault construes as a totalizing "carceral society." From early
> childhood, the subject is exposed or "subjected" to what Foucault
> labels the "means of correct training": an all-pervasive expanse of
> finely honed behavioral-modification techniques that suffuse the
> institutional structure of civil society -- schools, hospitals, the
> military, prisons, and so forth.
>
> In this way, Foucault boldly upends the modern narrative of
> progress. What we have customarily interpreted as evidence of
> expanding civic freedom -- that is, the triumph of rights-based
> liberalism -- when viewed in a Foucauldian optic has in fact
> produced more effective mechanisms of social control. Foucault
> audaciously stands the standard, Enlightenment view of the
> relationship between insight and emancipation on its head.
> Knowledge, which we traditionally thought would set us free, merely
> enmeshes us more efficiently in the omnivorous tentacles of
> "biopower." The popular Foucauldian coinage "power/knowledge"
> suggests that the modern ideal of value-free knowing is illusory.
> Instead, knowledge is perennially implicated in the maintenance and
> reproduction of power relations. The reign of biopower is
> buttressed and facilitated by the scientific disciplines of
> criminology, medicine, public administration, and so forth. In
> Foucault's view, moreover, the Enlightenment-inspired discourse of
> the human sciences is a prime offender. The so-called sciences of
> man function as the handmaidens of a nefarious "disciplinary
> society," furnishing it with data that serve the administrative
> needs of "governmentality": the Orwellian technique of turning
> citizens into pliable and cooperative "docile bodies." Little
> wonder that in The Order of Things -- a manifesto of French
> antihumanism -- Foucault unabashedly celebrates the "death of man"
> and implies that, in the aftermath of his disappearance, the world
> will be much better off.
>
> Contra Hegel, truth does not yield "absolute knowledge." Instead,
> as Foucault maintains in a 1977 interview, truth must be
> reconceptualized "as a system of ordered procedures for the
> production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of
> statements." As such, truth is "linked in a circular relation with
> systems of power, which produce and sustain it, and to effects of
> power, which it induces and which extends it." In his celebrated
> essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault carries this
> analysis a step further, claiming provocatively that "all knowledge
> rests upon injustice. ... [The] instinct for knowledge is malicious
> (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)."
>
> In The History of Sexuality, Foucault raised the alarm concerning
> the perils of "normalization." The notion that one should possess a
> normal sexual identity, he suggested, testifies to the workings of
> biopower. It is a mechanism of social control that reinforces
> conformist sexual practices and criminalizes "deviancy." In
> Foucault's view, the 1960's ethos of sexual liberation, as
> prophesied by Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, was merely another
> manifestation of normalization: Under the guise of sexual
> emancipation, we were instructed by "experts" to define ourselves
> in terms of having a positive and determinate sexual identity. Yet,
> as normative, all such conceptions are by definition limiting,
> exclusionary, and fundamentally repressive. The only way to
> counteract the pitfalls of "normalization," Foucault suggests
> (following the lead of Georges Bataille), is through an ethos of
> radical "transgression."
>
> Yet, at times, the maw of biopower as described by Foucault seems
> so inescapable and totalizing that one is at a loss as to how one
> might combat it. After all, how can we ensure that a given instance
> of transgression is not merely a ruse on the part of biopower to
> further ensnare us? At The History of Sexuality's conclusion, all
> we are left with is a tantalizing yet frustratingly nebulous appeal
> to a "different economy of bodies and pleasures."
>
> In North America, Foucault's innovative conception of biopower
> inspired new research models, above all in the areas of feminism,
> gender studies, and "queer theory." Auspiciously, The History of
> Sexuality appeared in English in 1978, just as the feminist and
> gay-rights movements had attained a measure of respectability and
> political prominence. That was also the moment when first-wave or
> rights-oriented feminism seemed to have run out of steam.
> Second-wave feminism, which embraced and affirmed women's
> "difference," emerged to fill the void. Although liberal political
> thought excelled at theorizing basic rights -- and thus well suited
> the needs of first-wave, egalitarian feminism -- it had little to
> say about trickier questions of female "self-realization": how
> women might fulfill themselves as women. Here, conversely,
> Foucault's bio-power paradigm, with its endemic suspicions of
> "norms" and "normalization," not to mention its manifest sympathy
> for "marginal sexualities," excelled, especially where
> considerations of "difference" were at stake.
>
> In American academe, that's the gist of the Foucault story. He has
> been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism:
> a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of
> liberalism's covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of
> the "death of man."
>
> But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only
> partially true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life,
> Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He
> underwent what one might describe as a learning process. He came to
> realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s
> rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and
> political value.
>
> That re-evaluation of humanism redounds to his credit as a thinker.
> It stems from a profound and undeniable moral insight: If one
> wishes to become an effective critic of totalitarianism, as
> Foucault certainly did, the paradigm of "man" remains an
> indispensable ally. After all, it is the totalitarians themselves
> who seek to quash or eliminate man. As antitotalitarian political
> analysts and actors, our responsibility is to spare him that fate.
>
> It would not be a misnomer to suggest that in fact the later
> Foucault became a human-rights activist, a political posture that
> stands in stark contrast with his North American canonization as
> the progenitor of "identity politics."
>
> The major difference between the two standpoints may be explained
> as follows: Whereas human rights stress our formal and inviolable
> prerogatives as people (equality before the law, freedom of speech,
> habeas corpus, and so forth), identity politics emphasize the
> particularity of group belonging. The problem is that the two
> positions often conflict: Assertions of cultural particularism
> often view an orientation toward rights as an abstract, formalistic
> hindrance. Thus identity politics risks regressing to an ideology
> of "groupthink." Or, as a percipient German friend once observed
> with reference to the American culture wars, "Identity politics:
> That's what we had in Germany between 1933 and 1945." He correctly
> insinuated that unless multiculturalist allegiances are mediated by
> a fundamental respect for the rule of law and basic constitutional
> freedoms, the door will have been opened to fratricidal conflict.
>
> In Discipline and Punish, Foucault embraced the thesis of "soft
> totalitarianism" to describe the carceral system of the modern
> West. To his credit, he would eventually criticize with equal vigor
> the post-Stalinist variant of totalitarianism predominant in
> Eastern Europe. (Among left-leaning French intellectuals, a
> veritable turning point and awakening came with the publication of
> Solzhenitsyn's magisterial Gulag Archipelago in 1974.) If, during
> the 1960s, the heroes of the French left had been developing-world
> revolutionaries such as Che, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, during
> the late 1970s dissidence was in vogue. Vclav Havel, Andrei
> Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and a cast of less-heralded oppositionists
> became the new standard-bearers for the figure of the engaged
> intellectual.
>
> With acumen and enthusiasm, Foucault boarded the antitotalitarian
> bandwagon. Since his election to the prestigious Collge de France
> in 1970, he increasingly cultivated the persona of an intellectual
> activist. During the 1970s, Foucault justly inherited Sartre's
> mantle as the prototype of the intellectuel engag. One of his
> first forays in this regard consisted of a vigorous defense of the
> so-called New Philosophers -- ex-Maoists, such as Andr Glucksmann,
> Bernard-Henri Lvy, and Guy Lardreau, who had finally seen the
> light and reinvented themselves as un-relenting critics of
> left-wing political despotism. In many respects, the New
> Philosophers were Foucault's intellectual progeny. Using conceptual
> tools he had developed such as "power/knowledge" and disciplinary
> surveillance, they merely extended his critical position to
> encompass the Soviet-dominated lands of, in Rudolf Bahro's words,
> "really existing socialism."
>
> In 1977 Foucault took to the pages of the French weekly Le Nouvel
> Observateur to publish a ringing justification of Glucksmann's
> antitotalitarian screed, The Master Thinkers, for daring to speak
> truth to power. Undoubtedly, Foucault saw through much of New
> Philosophy's rhetorical histrionics and shallow posturing. In his
> view, what was primarily at stake was a larger political point:
> delivering a coup de grce to the French left's nave infatuation
> with Marxism. Previously, French intellectuals had developed a
> network of sophisticated rationalizations to justify left-wing
> dictatorships. However, in view of the 1968 Soviet invasion of
> Prague, the unspeakable depredations of Mao's Great Proletarian
> Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's gruesome reign of terror in
> Cambodia, such justifications were wearing increasingly thin.
> Wasn't a distinctly grisly and horrific political pattern beginning
> to emerge? In this way, Foucault sought to call the bluff of his
> fellow leftists. In his review-essay "The Great Rage of Facts," he
> pointedly mocked the idea, once popular among the left, that the
> historical necessity of socialism could ever trump basic human or
> moral concerns.
>
> Far from being a one-time gambit, Foucault's spirited endorsement
> of the antitotalitarian ethos set the tone for many of his later
> intellectual and political involvements. In 1978, Bernard Kouchner,
> the human-rights activist and Doctors Without Borders founder,
> contacted Foucault to support the plight of the Vietnamese "boat
> people," who were fleeing persecution by the recently installed
> Communist government. As a result, the group "A Boat for Vietnam"
> was founded, with Foucault as one of its leading activists. Along
> with Glucksmann, Kouchner, Sartre, and Raymond Aron, the
> organization successfully lobbied President Valry Giscard
> d'Estaing to increase France's quota for Vietnamese refugees.
>
> The alliance with Kouchner and Glucksmann transformed Foucault into
> a passionate advocate of humanitarian intervention, or le droit
> d'ingrance: the moral imperative to intervene in the domestic
> affairs of a nation where human rights are being systematically
> violated. In 1981, Foucault addressed a major conference held at
> U.N. headquarters in Geneva where these themes were debated and
> discussed. In his speech, Foucault eloquently praised the
> responsibilities of"international citizenship," which, he claimed,
> "implies a commitment to rise up against any abuse of power,
> whoever its author, whoever its victims." "Amnesty International,
> Terre des Hommes, and Mdecins du Monde," he continued, "are the
> initiatives which have created this new right; the right of private
> individuals to intervene effectively in the order of international
> policies and strategies." If Foucault retained aspects of his
> earlier, antihumanist worldview, they were certainly undetectable
> in his moving Geneva speech.
>
> Later that year, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in
> Poland, brutally suppressing Solidarity, Eastern Europe's first
> independent trade union. The response by most Western European
> statesmen was a deafening silence. They judged the matter to be a
> purely "internal" Polish affair. They feared fanning the flames of
> the cold war. (Ronald Reagan's presidency had begun earlier that
> year.) So much for international solidarity. Better that the
> civilian populations of Eastern Europe passively endure the yoke of
> authoritarian rule. The recently elected French Socialist
> government had an additional, domestic political motivation to look
> the other way. It had come to power in an alliance with the French
> Communists. A rift over the "Polish question" risked fracturing the
> alliance.
>
> At the behest of Pierre Bourdieu, Foucault once again sprang into
> action. The two intellectual luminaries jointly drafted an
> impassioned statement urging the Socialists not to repeat the
> ignominious blunders of 1936 -- refusing to come to the aid of the
> embattled Spanish Republic -- and 1956 -- countenancing the Warsaw
> Pact's brutal invasion of Budapest. The statement was broadcast on
> French radio. Among its signatories were Glucksmann, Kouchner, Yves
> Montand, and Simone Signoret. Thereafter, the French government
> enacted a sudden volte-face, vigorously protesting the declaration
> of martial law. President Franois Mitterrand released a statement
> in support of the oppressed Poles. Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy
> abruptly canceled a forthcoming diplomatic visit to Warsaw. Led by
> Foucault, French intellectuals had risen to the occasion. It was
> not quite the Dreyfus affair. But it was a worthy performance
> nevertheless.
>
> During the late 1970s, Foucault became acquainted with Robert
> Badinter, an influential jurist who was an avowed admirer of the
> philosopher's work on prisons and punishment. In 1981, Badinter
> became Mitterrand's minister of justice. One of his first official
> acts was to abolish the death penalty. Other progressive
> legislative measures followed: A draconian 1970 anti-riot act was
> invalidated, police surveillance of homosexuals was forbidden, and
> the dreaded maximum-security wings of French prisons were shut
> down. Badinter and Foucault developed a deep friendship.
> Undoubtedly, many of the minister's ideas on progressive penal
> reform had been inspired by Foucault's teachings and doctrines.
>
> But did Foucault's new political self-understanding as a
> human-rights activist have any repercussions on his philosophical
> views? Emphatically so. This theme is the centerpiece of Eric
> Paras's provocative new book, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and
> Knowledge (Other Press). Paras deftly and painstakingly culls his
> evidence from Foucault's later Collge de France lectures, most of
> which remain unpublished. If his insights are correct, his study
> portends a veritable sea change in Foucault scholarship.
>
> As Paras shows, in his later years Foucault had clearly become
> disenchanted with the research program he had honed during the
> mid-1970s in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
> The treatment of "power" in these works proved too suffocating and
> monolithic. The idea of resistance to power seemed all but ruled
> out.
>
> Two developments lend crucial support for Paras's hypothesis
> concerning Foucault's momentous paradigm shift, which,
> significantly, foreshadowed a rehabilitation of "man" and
> "subjectivity." First, Foucault abandoned the methodological tack
> he had outlined in The History of Sexuality, which focused on
> sexuality as a means for "power/knowledge" to extend its sinister
> hegemony. Instead, during his later years, he turned to a more
> positive concept of subjectivity, centered on the "art of living"
> in ancient Greece and Rome. Foucault had come to believe that such
> pre-Christian, pagan approaches to the idea of self-cultivation
> represented a valuable heuristic -- a means to overcome the
> deficiencies of modern conceptions of the self. Second, the term
> "power/knowledge" itself is entirely absent from his later lectures
> and texts -- a telling indication of how radically dissatisfied
> Foucault had become with the limitations of his earlier approach.
>
> Paras's most radical and potentially controversial claim concerns
> Foucault's later re-evaluation of the idea of subjectivity. During
> the 1960s, as a card-carrying structuralist, Foucault, along with
> Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser, had celebrated
> the "death of the author" as a pendant to the fashionable
> postmodernist thesis concerning the "death of man." But as Paras
> remarks, if we know a great deal about Foucault's challenge to "the
> hegemony of 'man,' we are comparatively ignorant of the process by
> which he abandoned his hard structuralist position and later
> embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty,
> individualism, 'human rights,' and even the thinking subject."
>
> The goal of Foucault 2.0, then, is to fill this void. In fact,
> given Foucault's avowed fascination with Greco-Roman techniques of
> self-formation in studies such as The Care of the Self and The Use
> of Pleasure, it would be entirely reasonable to speak of a return
> of the subject in his later work. As Foucault remarks in a late
> interview, "I think it is characteristic of our society nowadays,
> that subjectivity has the right to assert itself, and to say ...
> 'that I cannot accept,' 'that I don't want,' or 'that I desire.'"
>
> The evidence for this return is copious. In several key later
> texts, Foucault demonstrates an avowed fascination with what he
> calls an "aesthetics of existence": an approach to the self-mastery
> predicated on considerations of "style" or "aesthetics." According
> to Foucault (here, closely following Nietzsche), the Christian idea
> of self-mastery culminated in self-renunciation or self-abnegation.
> Hence, it was disturbingly life-negating. Conversely, in the
> ancient world, care of the self focused on "the choice of a
> beautiful life." Here, the goal of self-rule or autonomy was
> primarily aesthetic -- hence, it was profoundly life-affirming. As
> Foucault enthusiastically remarks in a late interview, "The idea of
> the bios [life] as material for an aesthetic piece of art is
> something that fascinates me."
>
> In Foucault's view, the Greco-Roman idea of aesthetic
> self-cultivation meshes with the central ideas of two main
> theorists of the modern self, Baudelaire and Nietzsche.
> Baudelaire's "dandyism" -- his idea of turning one's own persona
> into a veritable work of art -- became for the later Foucault a
> positive model of individual self-realization, as did Nietzsche's
> celebrated injunction in The Gay Science "to 'give style' to one's
> character -- a great and rare art!" As Foucault explains: "What
> strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something
> which is related to objects and not to individuals, or to life. ...
> But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the
> lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
>
> Thereby, Foucault's work seems to have come full circle. Under the
> sign of aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and
> vindicates the rights of subjectivity. As Foucault avows, his new
> normative ideal is "the formation and development of a practice of
> Self, the objective of which is the constitution of oneself as the
> laborer of the beauty of one's own life."
>
> French critics have long pointed to the central paradox of the
> North American Foucault reception: that a thinker who was so
> fastidious about hazarding positive political prescriptions, and
> who viewed affirmations of identity as a trap or as a form of
> normalization, could be lionized as the progenitor of the "identity
> politics" movement of the 1980s and 1990sa movement that, as
> Christopher Lasch demonstrated, had abandoned the ends of public
> commitment in favor of a "culture of narcissism." Paras's case for
> the "neohumanist" Foucault is persuasive and well documented. One
> wonders how long it will take Foucault's North American acolytes to
> reorient themselves in light of Paras's impressive findings. That
> would mean abandoning the fashionable preoccupation with "body
> politics" -- the obsessive concern with a "different economy of
> bodies and pleasures" as a mode of transgression -- and, following
> the later Foucault, according the claims of humanism their due.
>
> Richard Wolin is a professor of history, comparative literature,
> and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University
> of New York. His books include The Seduction of Unreason: The
> Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism
> (Princeton University Press, 2004) and The Frankfurt School
> Revisited (Routledge, 2006).
>
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