Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 16:10:16 -0500 From: rmbayi-AT-po-box.mcgill.ca (mbayiha cyuma) Subject: Re: The Nature of Power. If we consider that Foucault's intellectual career was an effort to produce and establish a social history of some key Western concepts, = a social history of the problematizations that account for this or that kind of thought, = a social history of knowledge permitted/forbidden by these problematizations. If we accept that rather than dealing with the question of <WHY?>, =46oucault preferred answering to: <HOW?>. If we remember that the individual, the insane, the sexual, <<man>>, and other (Western) notions and traits did not have any *necessary* existence; that instead their temporal/arbitrary character demands a historical approach or <de'marche> in order to trace back their representational origin; and of course, that this historical project is of history as a discontinuous thing. [what is still unclear to me : could we say that this discontinuous history is devoid of any causality/finality or engine? i feel like answering : NO. But then -i'm afraid- i'd fall into ... determinism...gee whiz!] If we agree that the contingence of humans' ideas derives in reality from their being mere problematizations; that these ways of posing particular problems appear at a particular historical period in relation with very specific conditions; that therefore, their disappearance is conceivable. If we recall that sexuality, as an object of thought/knowledge has not been constituted before the advent of discourses/practices that aimed at its domestication, during the classic age and the 19th C;also that delinquence has only been thinkable as soon as emprisonment was generalized as a punitive practice; That,in a way, one can somehow explain an object with what has been its practice. Then the <de'marche> that consists on the one hand in conceiving thought as a historical fact and on the other hand in accounting for it with the practices that witnessed to its birth, definitely places Foucault within the MARXIST INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, i.e. <<it is not conscience that makes the being but rather the being --> conscience>>, i.e. <<le roi, le fou, les figures (non eternelles) sont ce que leurs configurations (non eternelles) sur l'échiquier font d'elles>> de Paul Veyne cyuma
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