Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 11:16:45 -0500 From: albright-AT-world.std.com (R.H. Albright) Subject: Dangerous Ian Robert Douglas quotes: Gilles Deleuze in 1986 with: > "Is there something 'dangerous' in Foucault's thought > that also explains the passion it continues to arouse?" > - "Dangerous, yes, because there's a violence in Foucault. > An intense violence, mastered, controlled, and turned > into courage." ~~~~~~~~~~ To which I also add this post-mortem "danger" from William James: "The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche,-- and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle,-- though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth." ---from "Circumscription of the Topic", _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ Frank Lentricchia still raises valid concerns about the dangers (and limitations) of both Foucault's and James's thought in his now 10 year old book, _Ariel and the Police, Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens_. If James goes too Ariel-like at times, the suffocating world created by Foucault lends itself to these dangers: Cynicism Determinism Despair Whether one needs to turn to Merleau-Ponty, Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Benjamin Barber, as Henry Samuel Levinson suggests in his 1996 introduction ot _A Pluralistic Universe_ as later incarnations of what James believed, or read James and Emerson again, themselves, as a counter-balance to Foucault (Lentricchia is fair enough in criticizing what he perceives as some of James's shortcomings; meanwhile, for some reason Stanley Cavell still occasionally finds Emerson worth considering)-- is up to each individual to decide, even as you may *think* that your choice is one of free will. ---Randall Albright http://world.std.com/~albright/alien.html
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