File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1999/foucault.9906, message 68


Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 16:43:50 -0500
From: Eugene Thacker <maldoror-AT-eden.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault


also, it seems that Butler makes related claims even earlier on in
Bodies That Matter, when she points out that, while on the one hand,
"bodies are never purely discursive," on the other positing a
prediscursive body elides the historical and political contingencies in
what gets defined as a body in a given context (institutional or otherwise).

this aporietic state has always bothered me, since, while it does spell
out some of the complexities in the body-language relationship, it
appears that one is stuck in having to account in some way for the
object of the action of constructionism and contingency. Butler's
arguments for approaching the body as "constraint" are suggestive, as is
her general perspective of critical embodiment from within and not
external to normative power relations - but the nagging question of
_what_ is constrained, and what acts or is embodied critically remains,
and, at least for me, it doesn't really do to simply state that the
body-itself can't be dissociated from its construction...

if i remember correctly, several Foucault critics have attempted to
point out F's comment that power always implies resistance, and then
pointed to the late work on technologies of the self - but these seem to
be two qualitatively different modes (?)...

for this reason i wish that Foucault would've done more work in the
biological and medical sciences, since it seems that much of the
philosophical debates over the substance of the body begins from what
are essentially biological assumptions about what is recognized as an
anthropomorphic, corporeal, anatomical - and now genetic - body...

eugene thacker


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