From: SFELMA-AT-aol.com Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 22:15:53 -0400 Subject: Re : Rape - Foucault avec Lacan ? I would like to express my agreement with Rebecca Brown's argument. I joined this group rather late so perhaps I've missed something - but I'm extremely surprised by the fact that during all these sex "talks" no one has mentioned (let alone read) any of Foucault's text from the ethical period - specifically, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. As everyone knows, in these two texts, Foucault rewrote, revised a good bit of his theory of Power as expressed in Discipline and HoS vol. 1. For the later Foucault, the central concern was no longer exposing, analyzing, subverting the regime of the normative (by the late 70s, every freshman taking European Intellectual History 101 knew that "that" was our intellectual duty, our ethical imperative !!), but rather - to put in plainly - to live a good, happy, "productive", artistic life, even (or especially) under such circumstances. The ethics outlined by Foucault was not transcendental but rather inscribed, lodged within the various games of life and love that we engaged in daily. From this standpoint, the struggle involved in sex, within love relations, with friendship should not be seen, criticized in terms of violence or power (foucauldian kind or not), but rather in terms of Agon and negotitation - within oneself, with the other, with the community. And I think the same goes for Gender Construction as well. Like Rebecca Brown I think the concept of a "true, orginary self" being corrupted by (bad) power is very problematic. However, I also have trouble with some of "attitudes" of some of the more Deleuzified Foucaldians who tend to have the view that "since gender is a construction and not a given, since it is 'discursive' - let us proceed henceforth without worrying too much about it ... and whenever people raise the question of Gender, that will be our answer !!" To that "joyoys" view of life, I would like to counter with a more pessemistic one - that of Freud and Lacan. Gender is at once a construction and a form of renunciation, a form of foreclosure even. Sexual difference, as J. Rose said, is "always constructed at a price and it involves subjection to a law which exceeds any natural or biological division. The concept of the Phallus stands for that subjection, and for the way in which woman/gender are very precisely implicated in its process". I know the Foucauldians and the Lacanians were never the best of friends and as Derrida has shown in "To do Justice to Freud", Foucault's relationship with Freud and Lacan was extremely difficult and probelmatic. But as theorists like Bulter has shown, thinking about Foucault through Lacan and vice versa can often be more productive and interesting then rehearsing the same old lines (about Prof. Foucault and Dr. Lacan) over and over again ... J. Lin "One day the young Anna Freud SFELMA-AT-aol.com ask her father to explain the concept of phallus to her. Freud, being a man of science, unbuttoned his pants and show her. 'Oh," Anna exclaimed, thus enlightened, "it's like a penis, only smaller !" - a joke from the incomparable Jane Gallop
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