Subject: [HAB:] Foucault-Sartre [Ali]
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 11:07:35 +0000


Trusting the Hab. list is unperturbed by this brief excursion into Foucault 
and Sartre thanks Ali for the revealing F. quote. Very helpful. I have been 
toying with a critique of Foucault linked to what I now begin to see is my 
under-understanding of Foucault's relationship to Sartre.

Sartre - according to Marcuse - invested a degree of emancipatory potential 
in the opportunity for creative role playing.... the choice of taking on a 
role (the waiter etc.) as an act of self creation. I had thought Foucault 
appropriated this into his own strategies for resistance. My intended 
*critical* point was that rather we are *forced* to adopt inauthentic role 
plays in order merely to survive as functionaries within both social and 
economic systems. This, IMO, diminishes the validity of the act of self 
creation as the locus for individual resistance.

[Foucault]
>I would like to say exactly the contrary: we should not have to refer the 
>creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, 
>but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative 
>activity" (Essential works, vol. i. p. 262).

I'll have to read and re-read a few times to grasp the importance of the 
distinction Foucault is making :-).

Habermas - for obvious reasons - unfortunately shuns the creative aspect of 
engaging in communicative action thereby excluding the explosive and 
liberating force of creatively taking part in communication free of 
distortion, seeking to reach an understanding.

Embedding communicative reason as the cornerstone of the modern Occidental 
lifeworld and depicting it as an always/already mechanism of social 
integration strips communicative reason of its avenging force methinks.

mattP

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