Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 10:22:21 -0500 (EST) From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: foucault on polemics Doug wrote: > Interesting. Is there no Foucaultian polemic? This is an interesting question. I assume that you're not asking whether Foucault himself engaged in polemics, etc., but whether there are forms of polemic that are in some sense specifically "foucauldian". Now to really think about this we would probably need to agree on what we mean by "polemic". To the extent that the purpose of polemic is to _refute_, I believe that it is pretty much at cross-purposes with Foucault's approach to thinking, which is very concenred with constant readiness for transformation, with "stopping to think what one is thinking" -- in other words, the production of the new. To the extent that polemic does strive to produce something new by bringing about a dialectical event of some kind, I would say that a Foucauldian attitude towards it would probably be opportunistic and depend on the situation. However, there is in Foucault a definite striving to get away from dialectics, which is, I believe, seen as a form of thinking that can no longer serve as a productive and useful foundation for leftist thought. -m
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