File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1997/97-04-15.040, message 35


Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 13:52:00 -0700
From: mitchell wilson <lobster-AT-mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: Subjectivization


Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> mitchell wilson wrote:
> 
> >it seems that Foucault was saying that morality should not be
> >communal.  Rather that one should not demand of another commensurable
> >ethical standards.
> 
> Ok, I'm asking this seriously, and not in the spirit that Malgosia accused
> me of a couple of weeks ago (i.e., of someone entering a Marxism list and
> asking the participants to justify the Gulag). If morality shouldn't be
> communal, then why wouldn't it be moral for me to kill you? Or gouge out
> the eye of a passerby? Not in the legal sense, since obviously both would
> be felonies, but in the moral/ethical sense. Nietzsche might not have a
> problem with answering this, since there's one morality for slaves and
> another for masters. Presumably most of us don't accept that.
> 
> Doug

Hold on!  This is Mitch Wilson, and I was not proposing anything.  I was
merely responding to another subscriber's reading of a Foucault qoute:

"That the search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody in the
sence that everyone should submit to it, strikes me as catastrophic".
(253-4)

This subscriber (to this mailing list), whom I had responded to, had
written this:

        The main question which strikes me here, is how can such an
ethic be
applicable in modern societies without becoming elitistic? Foucault
refers
to "the question of style in antiquity - stylization of the relation to
oneself, style of conduct, stylization of the relation to others". (244)
This 'Style of Existence' resembles the kind of ethics Nietzsche
formulated
for the kind of being which should overcome modern man. To me, this is a
kind of ethics which is unaccessible for human beings already shaped by
the
techniques of morality imposed on them through a culture in which they
'always-already' exists.

And so, if morality is subjective and not in a form that everyone should
submit to, then, I asked, how could ethics become, as this person had
written, "elitistic", which I understand as elitist?  Is elitistic a
word?



   

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