Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 21:56:51 -0400 (EDT) From: John Ransom <ransom-AT-dickinson.edu> Subject: Genealogy Erik Lindberg writes, in part: At any rate, Derrida mixes in some genealogy in his deconstruction, and Foucault's project it geared, in the end, toward reversing hierarchies, examining the margins, looking at the way the outside defines the inside, and so on. While Derrida uses the notion of repression incessantly, he also undermines it. It is, he thinks, an term that he would like to do without, but can't. Similarly, Foucault would like to do without the idea of repression, but it is there in his writing (unlike Derrida, he doesn't thematize its return in his own writing). Neither wants to see power as "bad," but wavers. Both would like, as Derrida says, to assert that "everything is strategic and adventurous," including their own texts. But both find that to write one needs a target, and it turns out that in "post-modernity" the most plausible target is still some "repressed" force. Except with great difficulty (and even then?) force is implicated with "power." [end quotation from Lindberg] Erik and all others, I really do see what you're getting at, and I take your point, but I would like to think of this point of yours in the following way: It's not so much that Foucault (I cannot yet speak authoritatively about Derrida, but then, neither can he) finds that he needs a target, and that that target turns out to be some "repressed" force. I think of the intellectual process this way: In fact, being the kind of people we are, trapped by the myth that--to simplify grossly--the existence of power, the exercise of force, the installment of constraints, the effort to silence; in a word, all these forms of "repression" can also be immediately read as "injustice," "illegitimate," and so on. Being those kind of people, when *we* read that some kind of power is involved in the creation of a historical artifact (a class, a dynasty, a particular power/knowledge regime) the *effect* of that knowledge is that we are psychically distanced from that cultural artifact. That's just a fact about us: the revelation of the role of power in the constitution of things shakes us up and gets us to question, "problematize" them, if you will. And that effect--the effect of being distanced from cultural forms we previously viewed as natural or simply unquestionable-- is exactly the effect that genealogy is after. But the irony is that the very psychic feature that triggered the questioning attitude genealogy is after is the belief genealogists are most concerned to reject; namely, the belief that the existence of power or force, its exercise in this or that illegitimate way, leads of necessity to the existence of something we should denounce: injustice. In _Beyond Good and Evil_, Section 259 Nietzsche says something along these lines: Life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation, and, at its mildest, exploitation. If something lives, then it expresses itself through will to power. Exploitation does not mean that some society is corrupt, because this belongs to the essence of what lives. I bring in Nietzsche not because we are now all supposed to bow to him, but just to illustrate the point mentioned above about genealogists not being critics of *power.* And so do you see what I am saying? It's not that Foucault had to fall back on the old story about how awful power is, but that we his readers simply assumed that was the kind of critique Foucault was after! That's what social critics do! In truth, genealogy has bigger fish to fry than the idea that power is "behind" things. ------------------
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