Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 11:14:04 +0000 From: Ian Robert Douglas <I.R.Douglas-AT-bristol.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Baudrillard Vs. Foucault On Tue, 05 Nov 1996 Barberi Alessandro wrote: >I never understood exactly why Baudrillard wanted to forget Foucault, >because his argumentations in "L'echange symbolique et la mort" >(symbolic change and death?) from 1976 refer very often to "Les mots et >le choses" (The order of things) .. That's certainly right. David Macey's _Lives of Michel Foucault_ also questions Baudrillard's motivations. It certainly seems more complex than it would at first seem. Baudrillard is clearly not interested in assigning Foucault to oblivion, he simply turns the whole issue on its head asking how one intellectual could possibly describe 'power' so perfectly. He is clearly suspicious that Foucault himself is would up within a practice of power/knowledge to which even he is unaware. In this I think that Baudrillard misunderstands the distinction Foucault made betweeen power and force. Many of the points that he goes on to make (and makes elsewhere, in particular in _The Shadow of the Silent Majorities_), are no so radically far from what Foucault might himself agree with. In any case, Macey quite rightly returns to _Cool Memories_ for further clues as to what Baudrillard was up to, which again - as Alessandro points out - includes the obvious debt that Baudrillard owes to Foucault. Baudrillard describes: Paradoxically, Foucault lived his life as though he were ill-loved and persecuted. He was certainly persecuted by the thousands of disciples and industrious sycophants he certainly secretly despised (or at least one hopes he did), who took away from him in caricatural form all sense of what he was doing. To forget him was to do him a service, to adulate him was to do him a disservice. (p.198) One is indeed reminded of Foucault's own comments on Nietzsche in the interview 'Prison Talk' ("The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche's is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest.") Why then was Foucault reportedly so 'hurt' by Baudrillard's piece? Possibly because Baudrillard seemed to miss (as many have) the nature of Foucault's contribution to the imagination of power. Anyone else got a clue? ian.r.d. "I shut my eyes in order to see." - Paul Gaugin _______________________________________________________________________ Ian Robert Douglas, Department of Politics, "Modern demolition is truly wonderful. As University of Bristol, a spectacle it is the opposite of a rocket Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK. launch. The twenty-storey block remains perfectly vertical as it slides toward the I.R.Douglas-AT-bris.ac.uk centre of the earth." (Jean Baudrillard) Tel: (0117) 928 7898 Fax: (0117) 973 2133 http://mail.bris.ac.uk/%7Eportls/JPP _______________________________________________________________________
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005