Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 16:49:51 -0500 From: Ian Robert Douglas <Ian_Robert_Douglas-AT-Brown.edu> Subject: Re: Foucault and the elusive body. >How shall I understand the relationship betwenn those two saying. Are >they contradictory or not.. I don't think they are contradictory; in tracing the body 'totally imprinted by history' Foucault is not saying at the same time that that same body cannot resist that imprinting, or that that imprinting does not give birth to certain specific means of resistence, appropriate to its own intervention. All he seems to be suggesting in the second citation is that for him, genealogy should take the body, and not 'class', or perhaps even 'society', as its point of departure. The first citation is simply an articulation of his theory of power, and its distinction from domination; that power exists only where a certain space of freedom exists, and that any intervention by power produces new possibilities, new openings for resistence and counter-strategy. This does not say that such counter-forces are inevitably articulated. They are immanent, and follow the intervention by power. Genealogy is well suited to facilitating them, however, as it focuses on the body, which is - for Foucault and others - the point of application for power.
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