From: SFELMA-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 04:01:47 -0400
Subject: True Self ?


My question to Jeff concerning all these talks about the "True Self" is 
just exactly what is a true self ?  How do you define it ?  It's all fine 
to talk about the lack of the normative term in Foucault and how that is 
problematic - but it is quite another to go from there to the 
confirmation of such a thing as true self. A simple question is if "true" 
self exists,  what does it look it ?  Does it have a content ?  If so,  
please specify for me what it is.  Is there one true self or numerous 
(that is,  can my true self differ from your true self -
if so,  then what does "true" mean here and if not,  how does one judge 
which self is truer) ?  I'm also a little confused about the repeated 
references to Marcuse and the Frankfurt School - While Marcuse was one 
member of the Frankfurt school he was surely not the only one and - 
leaving aside the question of whether Marcuse did or did not hold such a 
strict Feurebachian view,  this "true self" business surely would find 
less much support in the work of Adorno and Benjamin.  

As for Foucault's concept of becoming other :  

>>"For me what must be produced is not the man identical with himself, such
as 
>>nature has designated him, or according to his essence...It is a question,
>>rather, of the destruction of what we are, and of the creation of something
>>totally other--a total innovation" ("Remarks on Marx," pp121-122). 

and the comment on being the same is boring,  etc.  I don't think F is 
talking necessarily 
about becoming another person - but rather the words "Other" and "Same" 
must be read here in a Levinasian way.  To use the 
non-foucauldian-and-by-now-very-dated-terminologies,  Foucault is really 
speaking here of the ontological Other (or the Big Other if you will) and 
not the ontic one.  And besides,  even if we were speaking of the ontic 
level,  F has a point ... how boring it is to always be the same,  to be 
happy about the way we are with our "true" self - why not try,  in the 
various games that we play in life,  to be a little different,  to little 
inventive,  to take some risk once in awhile.  Someone once asked 
Foucault about the  changes in his intellectual project and he answered : 
"Why am I not allow to change ?  Do you think that I work like a dog all 
my life so that I can say the same things that I did ten years ago ?" and 
on another occasion he said,  "if I knew what the conclusion of my book 
would be before I start writing,  I would never have the courage to 
finish."  

More than anything else theoretical ("postmodernism",  power 
configuration,  etc.  etc.),  this need to constantly be different from 
what one was before (or what one was saying,  writing before- most 
clearly expressed in the mock dialogue in Arch. of Knowledge) points to a 
kind of intellectual ethos that was Foucault's

J.Lin


Jason Lin
SFELMA-AT-aol.com