Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 08:16:59 -0800 (PST) From: MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER <mattw-AT-sfsu.edu> Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault Dear Jon Foucault actually said that power was not only normative and oppressive but that it could also be constructive in the sense of creating new discourse. As far as I know he never said that power was essentially constructive (that would be to give a much more optimistic turn than he merited--it would be reading more Nietzsche into his political writings than is there). I think this conflict between power that is constructive and power that normalizes is a conflict Foucault never resolved. It is in some sense the conflict between Nietzsche and Marx, between an emphasis on the body and its embeddedness in a world of practises and language, and the body as a social and economic being historically informed. Nietzsche never had a viable or desirable political philosophy--it didn't interest him--while in Marx the individual vanishes into the totalitarianism of State. I can't see how an appeal, however, to the Enlightenment--via Lyotard or anyone else--would be a solution to this problem of the metanarrative. It could be argued that the Enlightenment was in part responsible for this problem, in its privileging of reason over other forms of discourse, its emphasis on Man as a rational animal that constructs a social contract when he begins to live in agreement with others. I would have thought that Nietzsche's critique of this would have been sufficient. I imagine that Lyotard maintains his suspicion of the Enlightenment, as have most of the other French post-structuralists. Matt Wettlaufer
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