From: "Dickinson College -- Bologna" <fonddc_a-AT-iperbole.bologna.it>
Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 23:48:41 +0200


I talk about this explicitly in _Philospohy and Social History_ in the
article, "Foucault and Lebensphilosophie." Deleuze also makes this wrong
reading of Foucault as does Connolly. If anyone's interested I'll be happy
to send a text version of the article via e-mail.

--john


----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Purdy <dp31-AT-columbia.edu>
To: <foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 26, 1999 8:09 PM
Subject: Re: The ahistoric body & Foucault


>
>
> As far as Judith Butler's argument on Foucault's notion of the body:  I
> assume you are refering to the passage in Gender Trouble where she does a
> reading of F's comments on hermaphrodites.  It seemed to me that Butler's
> argument was quite simply unfair.  She really based it on a single
> essay by F. and did not extend her argument to F's  major works.
> In the"Psychic Life of Power"  Butler makes a very different
> argument against Foucault. I think that the earlier argument about F's
> ahistorical conceptof the body is discreetly abandoned by Butler in favor
of an argument
> that really is at the heart of her own theoretical interests: to what
> extentdo psychoanalytic models of sexual desire provide a means of
> understanding resistence to normative heterosexuality.
>
>  In "The Psychic Life of Power"Butler reads D&P against HoS, v.1. She
wants to
>  show that there is a contradiction between F's account of the subject as
> being constituted within disciplinary power and his later discussion of
> alternative sexualities developing from the very disciplinary regimes
> which seek to control them.  How is resistence possible from within a
> disciplinary regime?
> To answer this question, she goes back to Lacanian psychoanalysis
> to reconsider ALthusser's notion of interpollation, which she argues gives
> a better explanation of how resistence is formed in relationship to a
> legal force, namely as a reaction to being called before the law.
> Butler is certainly on to a problem in Foucault, one that
> other psychoanalysts such as Joan Copjec have also noted:  how can one
> explain the existence of  an interiorizedd subjectivity with its own moral
> code.  Foucault's account of disciplinary power in D&P is so
> overwhelmingly determinist that there would seem to be no way of
> explaining subjective feelings as anything but the direct effect of a
> power regime.  In other words, disciplinary power does not allow for or
> acknowledge the possibility of a  subject with autonomous feelings and a
> moral conscience.  Butler phrases this argument in terms of Foucault's
> failure to explain "resistence" to power; Joan Copjec makes a similar
> point also via a reading of Lacan, but she argues that Foucault's model
> of disciplinary power would vitiate the autonomous moral conscience.  To
> the extent that resistence and a moral conscience are real, Butler and
> Copjec are saying that Foucault has not fully accounted for subjectivity
> and they both look to their readings of  Lacanian psychoanalysis as an
> alternative that makes up for Foucault's failings.  And once they do that
> they throw into question the F's denial of the repression model, and more.
>
> The answer which F does not formulate fully, but then how could he
> answer his later critics, is in devloping a more geneaological account of
> disciplinary power as it acquires an history.  Homosexuality as an
> affirmative identity is an unintended effect of nineteenth-century
> sexology. I think that f one thinks about discplinary power in more
> historical terms then Butler's objections could be answered.  That would
> require more than further archival evidence, it would mean giving a
> diachronic account of disciplinary power, i.e. a history of its changing
> effects and its responses to those unintended developments.
>
> Daniel Purdy
> Columbia University
>