File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2000/foucault.0009, message 53


Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 15:54:13 -0400
Subject: Reading Against Yourself (Was: Re: Lynne Cheney's views on
From: Asher Haig <ahaig-AT-warped-reality.com>


on 9/24/00 10:03 AM, JBCM2-AT-aol.com at JBCM2-AT-aol.com wrote:

> todd comer:  wake up!  or grow up!  if you're someone who shares Cheney's
> point of view, we're wasting our time talking.  I find you post curious;
> because I dismiss Cheney as yet another right-winger intent on slandering
> intellectualism -- a point of view that's no more arbitrary than your
> characterization of my position as a polemicist engaging in ad hominem
> arguments, a favorite slander employed by pseudo-intellectuals like yourself
> whenever someone disagrees with them -- I'm somehow not allowing others to
> speak.  what crap.  my opinion of Cheney is predicated upon years of seeing
> how she, and others like her, despise any progressive notion that doesn't fit
> into their canned opinions of how things should be.  this notion that Cheney
> trivial doublespeak should be equally considered along side the honest and
> exhaustive studies of Foucault is, to me, asinine, as is your feeble attempt
> to somehow invoke Foucault against me.
> 
> apart from saying that she has the right to state her point of view, you have
> nothing to say about the content of that argument.  I've not refused her this
> right, I simply don't find anything interesting in it.  I dismiss it as
> another attack by the right-wing on european intellectuals; there's nothing
> new here.  people like Cheney have attacked Freud and Marx for decades, and
> now they have pointed their vitriol at anything french.
> 
> anyone who doesn't like my position is free to add their own pinch of salt.
> if you think there's something legitimate in Cheney's argument, then you
> certainly have the right to say what it is.
> 
> jb...
> 

Although perhaps not directly related, this seems to be a prime instance of
what many have feared from "post-modern" thought -- that it's
neo-conservatism disguised under the name of the left.

How is the claim that Cheney is "yet another right-winger" any different
than the claim that Foucault is "yet another cultural relativist"? Certainly
no one requires (or I think even asks) that you agree with or even respect
Cheney's perspective, but it seems that the point is not so much whether or
not you agree, but the process by which you decide how to disagree.

Claiming that you don't engage in Ad Hominem attacks and then accusing
others of being psuedo-intellectuals is _exactly_ how people like Lynn
Cheney and Martha Nussbaum etc. are able to maintain a captive audience of
people who find themselves surrounded by modernity.

What is it that makes Foucault's studies "honest and exhaustive"? I think
that Foucault would likely be the first to admit (demand?) that we engage
not merely in a "progressive" critique of the status quo, but instead in a
"sustained critique of our historical era." It seems that this would mean
much more than merely applying Foucault -- perhaps even reading Foucault
against himself (yourself/ourselves?)?

What is an author, after all? It seems that here Foucault's point can just
as clearly be read as a need to critique our own choices of action in the
process of determining whether someone fits in your convenient subject
category of "right wing conservatives."

---

Asher Haig           ahaig-AT-warped-reality.com
Dartmouth 2004



   

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