File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1997/97-04-15.040, message 25


Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 18:00:53 -0300 (EST)
From: cefestellita-AT-ax.apc.org (Carlos Eduardo Freire Estellita Lins)
Subject: Re: Chance


Jamie:

I decided to answer you, although many people have already done it because I feel that it is important to exchange different points of view.

First I'd like to remind you that Foucault uses the french word "hazard" that is somewhat close to the English "chance," but it could be misunderstood. You've got also "chance" in french, and it is an important concept along Bataille's book on Nietzsche (Foucault is very well acquainted with this work). Sometimes we run through some translation problems. I wonder if the choice performed,  electing "chance" to translate "hazard" can figure the whole semantic scope of the original word.
It is not really a theory of chance, meaning something achieved, that is being mentioned or quoted by Foucault. I see the tracks of the whole discussion concerning the relationship between Eternal Recurrence and Will to Power, elicited from Heiddeger and Deleuze.

There is also the Mallarmé problem of writing and language conceived as a disjunctive couple, which Foucault refers to in "The Order of Things." Foucault is talking about a theoretical continuity that joined Mallarmé's idea of book and Nietzsche's Eternal recurrence.

Deleuze was the first (1962) to pose the problem of recurrence in thigh proximity to Stephane Mallarmé's "un coup de dés". Both stated that a blow of dice will never abolish chance. The thought of eternal recurrence demands reconciliation between chance and necessity. Chance is not a mere attempt within the game but the ethical necessity to play, to conceive life as such eternally recurrent game. The dice statement in his poetry would be a way to understand the meaning of repetition and cycle in Nietzsche's philosophy.

I wonder if Foucault is not referring to the difficult problem of recurrence in terms of an ethical dimension that doesn't need a cycle of many times eternally repeated, opposed to a cosmological conception that implies on numerical recurrence and keeps polarity between necessity and chance. There is a claim to go further beyond the polarity chance-necessity, conceiving "hazard" as the "kair=F3s," the happy marriage of "necessity hands" and "dice-box of chance." This problem has been discussed on Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Heidegger's Nietzsche 1. We can also trace it from Karl Lowith's Nietzsches Ewig Wiederkehr des Gleiches.

The attempt to master chance through the will to power does not mean that chance would be tamed or banished. Instead, it would be re-placed and re-played (Wiederspielen) again and again at higher risk.
To resume I would like to say that Foucault's assertion is, as usual, placed within a contemporary debate concerning nietzschean idea of the eternal recurrence. His subtle conceptual move should be understood as a contribution that doesn't focus chance or fate or hazard as opposed to necessity. On the other hand, we must be aware that Foucault is not longing to ground a real theory of chance or something alike. In a certain way, genealogy and history furnished him the hint to study, in a nietzschean manner, this problem of chance and necessity. Such theme was already sketched in phenomenology and french history of science, two major milestones for Michel Foucault's oeuvre.


Estellita-Lins, MD. Philosophy PhD.
Psychoanalysis Department - Researcher
IFF Hospital - Fiocruz - RJ - Brasil



>I've just finished reading 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', and came across
>a curious sentence that I was hoping that perhaps someone could explicate.
>It's on p.89 of the Foucault Reader, and is related to the concept of
>chance. Having just quoted Nietzsche as saying that there is only 'the iron
>hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance,' Foucault goes on to say:
>
>'Chance is not simply the drawing of lots, but raising the stakes in every
>attempt to master chance through the will to power, and giving rise to the
>risk of an even greater chance.'
>
>Now, I must admit that my knowledge of Nietzsche is a bit sketchy, and this
>may in fact be very simple - but would someone please explain to me what
>this theory of chance that Foucault is using is?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Jamie
>
>walvisch-AT-silas.cc.monash.edu.au
>
>




   

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