File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1995/f_Apr.95, message 50


Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 14:08:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: ANTOINE GOULEM <goua-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: Re: Foucault and Revolution


The question about Foucault and Revolution is another one which leads me 
to see a conneciton between Kant and Foucault.  With respect to Foucault, 
consider for instance the exchange that is published in Power/Knowledge: 
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77_, ed. C. Gordon. In his 
debate with Maoists on the topic of popular justice, he is asking them to 
consider the ways inwhich the power dynamic embodied by the holding of a 
trial is not altered simply by the fact that it's our team in charge. The 
topography and theatre, as it were of a trial are not only reflections of 
the power dynamic in our society, they are part of it, they produce it, 
and reproduce it. The staging of trials is the result of material 
conditions, which include symbolic interaction. Foucault was not 
challenging the claim thatthe owners of the factories were oppressing the 
workers in ways which required a response; nor was he, it seems to me, 
pointing out the problem with their desire to hold the trial as an 
existential version of the  turn the other cheek view of political 
action. What I think does follow from Foucault's views is that the 
appropriate form of response to oppression emerges out of the specific 
condiitons of oppression. It may be that I'm making him out to be Rosa 
Luxembourg. 
Antoine Goulem,   goua-AT-alcor.concordia.ca

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