Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:39:49 +0200
From: Ayo Wahlberg <ayo-AT-ruc.dk>
Subject: Re: "Lightning of possible storms"


"I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge
but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light
fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the
breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence;
it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them
sometimes - all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences
sends me to sleep; I'd like criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination.
It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of
possible storms."
- M. Foucault, 6-7 April 1980, Le Monde
p. 323, "The Masked Philosopher" in Foucalt (1994) Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, The New Press: New York