File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1996/96-07-25.211, message 72


From: "E.M. Durflinger" <bc05319-AT-binghamton.edu>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 08:06:43 +0000
Subject: Re: X-files makes Diane wonder


Although I don't have time to comment on this whole exchange, I do 
feel that I should point out that pace Butler, Foucault, Deleuze, 
the nonessential nonmateriality of the body is by no means equal to 
it being 'just a fantasy.'  Stating 'there is no "reality" that is 
not the fantasy of a certain system' is not a statement that can be 
usefully applied to, at least, Deleuze and Foucault, who consistently 
have worked to destabilize the ideology/reality, fantasy/reality, 
mind/body type dualisms with the analysis of the multiple 
materialities of power.
 
To be more specific, your final example of the ideological cold (a 
rhetorical rhinovirus, indeed) implicitly still presumes a 
fantasy/reality distinction--you attempt to place the Butlerian 
position into a Frankfurt-style system/realtiy dichotomy, framing it 
in a colonial discourse where the substrate 'body' is 
overlaid/infected/whatever by the ideological 'cold.'  Again, this is 
the wrong brush to be tarring Butler/Foucault/Deleuze with, as this 
is not their argument, *especially* when you take the sort of 
subjectivist voluntaristic position that the cold can be seen to be a 
fantasy of *mine* and not a shared social reality.
 
And I'd like to if possible bring the rhetorical level down a few 
notches.  There's a truism on the Internet that trotting out the 
Holocaust/Hitler/Nazis during a discussion is an instant discourse-stopper, a 
'trump' that tends to render discussion moot.  Rather than continuing 
to be a discussion over concepts, discussion tends to get sidetracked 
into arguing over the value of the Holocaust/Hitler/Nazi example and 
whether or not it really applies, etc.

///Connor
_________________________________________________________
E.M. Connor Durflinger              Philosopher for Hire
         "Have Forestructures, Will Travel"
            Reverend, Universal Life Church
bc05319-AT-binghamton.edu              PIC Program at B.U.
_________________________________________________________
inspiration STATION:
http://philosophy.adm.binghamton.edu/durflinger/inspiration/


   

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