Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 13:12:40 +1100 (EST) From: Sebastian Gurciullo <sebtempo-AT-silas-2.cc.monash.edu.au> Subject: Re: R: Was Foucault a nihilist? >>Foucault's nihilism? foucault himself claimed (in a couple of interviews >>mainly) that his histories were in a sense nothing but "fictions" and that >>what he was really interested in when writing them was of experiencing some >>form of personal transformation! this confirms the kind of account tony >>gives in his first post on F's nihilism, that F sought to present as >>reasoned, scholarly, work the kind of alternative account(s) that must be >>outmanouvered in order for the conventional normal one to hold onto its >>claim to validity. Foucault's painstakingly reconstructed genealogies are >>therefore not the truth at last coming out, but the more disturbing >>unworking of every possibility of truth at last, which is a transformative >>experience which Foucault would like to share with his readers. > >No, no, no, no, no. He is not interested in the "disturbing unworking of >every possibility of truth at last." That's nihilism! Foucault was not a >deconstrucitonist! Truth is *incredibly* important to Foucault. But not >because it has an essence so much as it has such profound affects. And >something that has profound affects must be taken very seriously. > Serious indeed, nihilism is a very serious matter. And the operations of truth as a manifestation of power, with its multifaceted penetration into life, is also an important matter. But then in what sense are the serious reconstructions of this penetration true, and for who? Do the analyses of the demands of truth as manifestations of disciplines, bio-power, or whatever, produce some other sort of truth? Would this truth not be something like a predicament in which every unveiling of disciplinary truth comes to share the same fate (eventually) as the disciplinary truth unveiled? What alternative is there, realistically, that Foucault offers to the disciplinary society he describes in his (fictional) histories. None. All he can offer is an attempt to locate possible sources of resistance, but without hope of changing anything, fissures in the operations of power that create possibilities for survival through increasingly vacuous, confused, and impoverished strategies of rebellion. True, Nietzsche, like his heir, was not a self-congratulating nihilist as such. He did talk at times of taking up "active nihilism" (as opposed to the passive nihilism whose representatives today can be found in all those comfortable suburban families, sitting at home if front of the TV or smugly enjoying "quality time" together) as a stage that intellectual life must move through in order to survive in a nihilistic world of commodified comforts and superficial ridicule. But it seems to me that while Nietzsche did not embrace nihilism simply with gay abandon, as a happy end in itself, he had no real solution for it either, other than some sort of dogged persistence which led him to propose a number of (unworkable) solutions (eg. Dionysus vs the Crucified). Nihilism is not something which can be easily overcome, as more often than not, any attempted (overly hasty) overcoming of it is itself a further manifestation of the disease. There is no foreseeable end to this predicament, which is not to say that it will never end or that one should give up on searching for an end to it. Nihilism is not simply an affliction that strikes individuals. It is much more pervasive than that, you only need to look around the world today to see it thriving happily in many of our otherwise inoccuous activities, institutions, habits. Strangely, life can be sustained by nihilism, but it is often a dessicated life - a life haunted by deformations of the spirit, of degraded humanity, which can even be enjoyed in South Park (hidee-ho). We are mutating, but into what? Anyone interested in John Ransom's article, "Forget Vitalism: Foucault and Lebensphilosophie", can find it in *Philosophy and Social Criticism*, v. 23, n. 1, Jan. 1997. ciao Sebastian Gurciullo
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