Michel Foucault - Hansraj College
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul RabinowMichel Foucault:Beyond Structuralismand HermeneuticsSecond EditionWith an Afterword byand an Interview withMichel FoucaultThe University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 1 982, 1 983 by The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved. Published 1 982.Second edition 1 983Printed in the United States of America20 1 9 1 8 1 7 1 6 1 5 14 13 1 2 1 113 14 15 1 6 1 7ISBN- 1 3: 978-0-226- 1 63 12-3 ( paper)ISBN- 1 0: 0-226- 1 63 1 2- 1 ( paper)LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATADreyfus, Hubert L.Michel Foucault, beyond structuralism and hermeneutics.Includes index.1 . Foucault, Michael. I. Rabinow, Paul. II. Foucault, Michel. III. Title.B2430.F724D73 1 9831 9483-93 1 6@ The paper used i n this publication meets the minimumrequirements of the American National Standard forInformation Sciences-Permanence of Paper for PrintedLibrary Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1 992.
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ContentsPrefacexiList of AbbreviationsIntroductionxviiPart ITHE ILLUSIONOFxvA UTONOMOUS DISCOURSEPractices and Discourse in Foucault' s Early WritingsThe History of MadnessThe Archaeology of Medicine2 The Archeaology of the Human Sciences16The Rise of Representation in the Classical AgeMan and His Doubles: The Analytic of Finitude3THE EMPIRICAL AND THE TRANSCENDENTALTHE COGITO AND THE UNTHOUGHTTHE RETREAT AND RETURN OF THE ORIGINCONCLUSION TO THE DOUBLES3 Towards a Theory of Discursive Practice44A Phenomenology to End All PhenomenologiesBeyond Structuralism : From Conditions of Possibilityto Conditions of ExistenceThe Analysis of Discursive FormationsOBJECTSENUNCIATIVE MODALITIESTHE FORMATION OF CONCEPTSTHE FORMATION OF STRATEGIESHISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION: DISORDER AS ATYPE OF ORDERDISCURSIVE STRATEGIES AND THE SOCIAL BACKGROUNDVll
CONTENTS4 The Methodological Failure of ArchaeologyExplanatory PowerBeyond Seriousness and MeaningConclusion: Double Trouble79Part II THE GENEALOGY OF THE MoDERN INDIVIDUAL: THEINTERPRETIVE ANALYTICS OF POWER, TRUTH,AND THE BODY1 045 Interpretive AnalyticsGenealogyHistory of the Present and Interpretive Analytics6 From the Repressive Hypothesis to Bio-Power1 26The Repressive HypothesisBio-Power7 The Genealogy of the Modem Individual as Object1 43Three Figures of PunishmentSOVEREIGN TORTUREHUMANIST REFORMNORMALIZING DETENTIONDisciplinary TechnologyThe Objectifying Social Sciences8 The Genealogy of the Modem Individual as SubjectSex and Bio-PowerConfessional TechnologyThe Subjectifying Social Sciences9 Power and Truth1 84PowerMeticulous Rituals of PowerParadigms and PracticesPower and erword by Michel Foucault:208Why Study Power: The Question of the SubjectHow Is Power Exercised?THE SUBJECT AND POWERviii1 68
Afterword ( 1 983)On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress229History of the ProjectWhy the Ancient World Was Not a Golden Age, but What We Can Learnfrom It AnywayThe Structure of Genealogical InterpretationFrom the Classical Self to the Modern Subject2532 Foucault 's Interpretive Analytic of EthicsMethodological RefinementsINTERPRETIVE DIAGNOSISGENEALOGYARCHAEOLOGYNorms, Reasons, and Bio-PowerBeyond FoucaultIndex265ix
PrefaceThis book was born out of a disagreement among friends. PaulRabinow , attending a seminar given in 1979 by Hubert Dreyfus and JohnSearle which concerned, among other things , Michel Foucault, objectedto the characterization of Foucault as a typical . structuralist . " Thischallenge stirred a discussion that led to the proposal of a joint article. Itbecame evident as the discussion continued through the summer that the"article" would be a short book. It is now a medium-length book andshould have been longer.The book was first to be called Michel Foucault: From Structuralismto Hermeneutics. We thought that Foucault had been something like astructuralist in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledgebut had moved to an interpretive position in his later works on the prisonsand on sexuality . A group of literary specialists and philosophers onwhom we inflicted our ideas assured us with great conviction and noarguments that Foucault had never been a structuralist and hatedinterpretation.The second title of our book was Michel Foucault: BeyondStructuralism and Hermeneutics. At this stage we argued that whilestrictly speaking Foucault had not been a structuralist, he thought thatstructuralism was the most advanced position in the human sciences. He ,however, was not practicing the human sciences ; he was analyzing dis course as an autonomous realm from the outside. This time we were onthe right track. Foucault told us that the real subtitle of The Order ofThings was An Archaeology of Structuralism . Our story now was thateven though his language and approach were heavily influenced by thevogue of structuralism in France Foucault never posited a universal theoryof discourse, but rather sought to describe the historical forms taken byxi
PREFACEdiscursive practices . We tried this version out on Foucault and he agreedthat he was never a structuralist but that perhaps he was not as resistant tothe seductive advances of structuralist vocabulary as he might have been.Of course , this was more than just a question of vocabulary.Foucault does not deny that during the mid-sixties his work was deflectedfrom an interest in the social practices that formed both institutions anddiscourse to an almost exclusive emphasis on linguistic practices . At itslimit this approach led, by its own logic and against Foucault's betterjudgment, to an objective account of the rulelike way discourse organizesnot only itself but social practices and institutions, and to a neglect of theway discursive practices are themselves affected by the social practices inwhich they and the investigator are imbedded. This is what we call theillusion of autonomous discourse. Our thesis is that this the ory of discur sive practices is untenable, and that in his later work Foucault has madethe structuralist vocabulary that engendered this illusion of autonomousdiscourse the subject of critical analysis.A second thesis was that just as Foucault was never a structuralist,although he was tempted by structuralism, so he was beyond hermeneu tics although sensitive to its attractions. We were still on the track. Itturns out. that he was planning to write an "archaeology of hermeneu tics , " the other pole of the human sciences. Fragments of this project areevident in some of his writings on Nietzsche during this period. Foucaultwas never tempted by the search for deep meaning, but he clearly wasinfluenced both by Nietzsche' s interpretive reading of the history ofWestern thought as revealing nothing to give a deep interpretation of, andby the ideas that, nonetheless, madness, death, and sex underlie discourseand resist linguistic appropriation.We argue that Foucault' s work during the seventies has been asustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method. This newmethod combines a type of archaeological analysis which preserves thedistancing effect of structuralism, and an interpretive dimension whichdevelops the hermeneutic insight that the investigator is always situatedand must understand the meaning of his cultural practices from withinthem. Using this method Foucault is able to explain the logic of structur alism' s claim to be an objective science and also the apparent validity ofthe hermeneutic counter-claim that the human sciences can only legiti mately proceed by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject andhis tradition. Using his new method, which we call interpretive analytics ,Foucault i s able to show how i n our culture human beings have becomethe sort of objects and subjects structuralism and hermeneutics discoverand analyze .Clearly the issue of power is central to Foucault's diagnosis of ourcurrent situation. Yet, as we say in the text, it is not one of the areas hexii
Prefacehas most fully developed. lil discussions with him, Foucault agreed thathis concept of power remains elusive but important. He has generouslyagreed to take a step toward remedying this by offering for inclusion inthis book a previously unpublished text on power, for which we are ex tremely grateful.We would like to thank the many people, particularly those whoattended our meetings in Berkeley , who provided generous attention andsuggestions.Hubert Dreyfus would especially like to thank David Hoy, RichardRorty, Hans Sluga and, most of all, Jane Rubin for their help.Paul Rabinow would especially like to thank Gwen Wright, Lew Fried land, Martin Jay and Michael Meranze for theirs.The second edition has profited from the translating skills of RobertHarvey and the editorial suggestions of David Dobrin. Above all else, we wouldonce again like to thank Michel Foucault for endless hours of stimulatingconversation and patient and prompt revisions.xiii
List of AbbreviationsIn our study we will use the paperback editions and English transla tions of Foucault' s works, corrected when we feel it is necessary to pre serve the sense . While the translations are generally of an exceptionallyhigh quality given the difficulty of the original text, we have found severalplaces where the translations have reversed the sense the context obvi ously demands.We will use the following abbreviations for the texts and interviewswe cite .AKBCBWCECFDLDPThe Archaeology of Knowledge . Translated by A . M . SheridanSmith . New York: Harper Colophon, 1972 .The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Percep tion. Translated by A . M . Sheridan Smith. New York:Vintage/Random House , 1975 .M . Heidegger. Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row,1977." Reponse au cercle d'epistemologie. " Cahiers pour I' ana lyse, no. 9 ( 1 968)."The Confession of the Flesh. " Reprinted in Colin Gordon,ed. , Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writ ings by Michel Foucault, 1972-1977. New York: PantheonBooks, 1980.' 'The Discourse on Language' ' in the American edition of TheArchaeology of Knowledge.Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated byAlan Sheridan . New York: Vintage/Random House , 1979.XV
LIST OF ABBREVI AT I O N S"The Eye of Power. " Published as a preface (" L'Oeil dePouvoir") to Jeremy Bentham, Le Panoptique (Paris: Belfond,1977); reprinted in Gordon, ed. , Power/Knowledge .Friedrich Nietzsche . The Genealogy of Morals. Translated byF. Golffing. Garden City, New York: Doubleday/AnchorBooks, 1956.The History of Sexuality . Volume I: An Introduction . Trans lated by Robert Hurley . New York: Vintage/Random House ,1980." Interview with Lucette Finas. " In M. Morris and P. Patton,eds., Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy . Sydney: FeralPublications , 1979.L ' Impossible Prison : Recherches sur le systeme penitentiareau XIXe siecle reunies par Michelle Perrot. Paris: Editions duSeuil, 1980.Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age ofReason . Translated by R. Howard. New York: Vintage/Random House , 1973 ." Nietzsche , Freud, Marx. " In Nietzsche . Paris: Cahiers deRoyaumont, 1967."Nietzsche , Genealogy , History" ( 197 1 ) . In D. F. Bouchard,ed. , Michel Foucault: Language , Counter-Memory, Practice:Selected Essays and Interviews . New York: Cornell Uni versity Press, 1977 .The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences .New York: Vintage/Random House , 1973 .Lectures delivered at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Califor nia, October 1979." Power and Sex: An interview . " Telos 32 ( 1977)."Truth and Power. " Translation of an interview withAlessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino which appeared inMicrofisica del Potere, reprinted in Gordon, ed. , Power/Knowledge .EPGMHSILFIPMCNFMNGHOTSLTelosTPxvi
IntroductionThis is a book about how to study human beings and what one learnsfrom such study . Our thesis is that the most influential modern attempts toachieve this understanding-phenomenology , structuralism, and herme neutics-have not lived up to their self-proclaimed expectations. MichelFoucault offers, in our opinion, elements of a coherent and powerfulalternative means of understanding. His works , we feel, represent themost important contemporary effort both to develop a method for thestudy of human beings and to diagnose the current situation of our soci ety . In this book we discuss Foucault' s writings chronologically to showhow he has sought to refine his tools of analysis and to sharpen his criticalinsight into modern society and its discontents . We also attempt to placeFoucault's thought among other thinkers with whom his approach hascommon themes.Foucault has shown at length that official biographies and currentreceived opinions of top intellectuals do not carry any transparent truth.Beyond the dossiers and the refined self-consciousness of any age are theorganized historical practices which make possible , give meaning to, andsituate in a political field these monuments of official discourse .The data contained in such official documents is nonetheless rele vant and essential. Perhaps the most ironic and efficient (if not the best)way to begin a book on Michel Foucault is simply to reproduce the bio graphic dossier which is inserted at the back of the English translations ofhis works. A recent one reads as follows :Michel Foucault was born i n Poitiers, France , i n 1926. H e haslectured in many universities throughout the world and servedas Director of the Institut Fran ais in Hamburg and the lnstitutde Philosophie at the Faculte des Lettres in the University ofxvii
INTRODUCTIONClermont-Ferrand. He writes frequently for French news papers and reviews, and is holder of a chair [History and Sys tems of Thought] at France' s most prestigious institution, TheCollege de France .In addition to his classic study , Madness and Civilization, M.Foucault is the author of The Birth of the Clinic, The Order ofThings, The Archaeology of Knowledge , and,/, Pierre Riviere .His latest book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,was published by Pantheon in 1978 .This blurb was published at the back page of the English translationof The History of Sexuality . We might add that Foucault has also pub lished a book-length introductory essay on the Heideggerian psycho analyst Ludwig Binswanger, a book on the surrealist writer RaymondRoussel , and a short book on mental illness and psychology .Shifting from dossier to official reception among the high in telligentsia, in a review in The New York Review of Books (26 January1978) by Clifford Geertz, Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute forAdvanced Study in Princeton, we read:Michel Foucault erupted onto the intellectual scene at the be ginning of the Sixties with his Histoire de Ia Folie, an un conventional but still reasonably recognizable history of theWestern experience of madness. He has become , in the yearssince , a kind of impossible object: a nonhistorical historian, ananti-humanist human scientist, and a counter-structuraliststructuralist. If we add to this his terse , impacted style, whichmanages to seem imperious and doubt-ridden at the same time ,and a method which supports sweeping summary with eccen tric detail , the resemblance of his work to an Escherdrawing-stairs rising to platforms lower than themselves,doors leading outside that bring you back inside-is complete .' ' Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same' ' hewrites in the introduction to his one purely methodologicalwork, L'Archaeologie du Savoir, itself mostly a collection ofdenials of positions he does not hold but considers himselflikely to be accused of by the " mimes and tumblers" of in tellectual life. "Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police tosee that our papers are in order , ' ' he states. ' ' At least spare ustheir morality when we write . " Whoever he is, or whatever, heis what any French savant seems to need to be these days:elusive .But (and in this he differs from a good deal that has been goingon in Paris since structuralism arrived) the difficulty of hiswork arises not only from self-regard and the desire to foundan intellectual cult only the instructed can join, but from axviii
Introductionpowerful and genuine originality of thought. As he intendsnothing else than a Great lnstauration for the human sciences ,i t i s not surprising that he is more than occasionally obscure , orthat when he does manage to be clear he is not less dis concerting.The dossier presents the essential facts, the critical review situatesthem for us. We can now tum to Foucault's books .We center our story on the problems Michel Foucault has grappledwith in his works. Our book is not a biography, a psychohistory , anintellectual history , or a digest of Foucault's thought, although elementsof the last two are , of course , present. It is a reading of his work, bearingin mind a certain set of problems, i .e . , an interpretation. We have takenfrom Foucault that which is helpful in focusing on and dealing with thoseproblems. Since we are using Foucault's work to aid us , we make noclaim to comprehensiveness as to the breadth of issues which, at varioustimes, have been the object of Foucault's studies. This seems to us fairsince it is precisely how Foucault handles the master thinkers of the past.Foucault thinks that the study of human beings took a decisive tumat the end of the eighteenth century when human beings came to beinterpreted as knowing subjects , and, at the same time , objects of theirown knowledge . This Kantian interpretation defines man. " Kant in troduced the idea that man is that unique being who is totally involved innature (his body), society (historical, economic , and political relations),and language (his mother tongue) , and who at the same time finds a firmfoundation for all of these involvements in his meaning-giving, organizingactivity . We will follow Foucault' s analysis of the various forms thisproblematic (which Foucault calls in The Order of Things the analytic offinitude) took over the next two centuries.To situate Foucault, it is important to realize that the sciences ofman have in the past two decades been split between two extrememethodological reactions to phenomenology , both of which inherit butseek to transcend the Kantian subject/object division. Both these ap proaches try to eliminate the Husserlian conception of a meaning-givingtranscendental subject. The structuralist approach attempts to dispensewith both meaning and the subject by finding objective laws which governall human activity. The opposed position, which we gather under thegeneral rubric hermeneutics, gives up the phenomenologists' attempt tounderstand man as a meaning-giving subject, but attempts to preservemeaning by locating it in the social practices and literary texts which manproduces. To triangulate Foucault's movements it is important to pindown precisely all three positions: structuralism, phenomenology , andhermeneutics .Structuralists attempt to treat human activity scientifically b y findingXIX
INTRODUCTIONbasic elements (concepts, actions, classes of words) and the rules or lawsby which they are combined. There are two kinds of structuralism:atomistic structuralism, in which the elements are completely specifiedapart from their role in some larger whole (for example, Propp' s folk taleelements), 1 and holistic or diachronic structuralism, in which what countsas a possible element is defined apart from the system of elements butwhat counts as an actual element is a function of the whole system ofdifferences of which the given element is a part. Foucault, as we shall see ,explicitly distinguishes his method from atomistic structuralism, so wewill be comparing and contrasting his archaeological method with themethod of holistic structuralism to which it is more closely akin.Levi-Strauss succinctly states this method:The method we adopt . . . consists in the following operations:1 ) define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two ormore terms, real or supposed ;2) construct a table of possible permutations between these terms ;3) take this table as the general object of analysis which, at this levelonly, can yield necessary connections , the empirical phenomenonconsidered at the beginning being only one possible combinationamong others , the complete system of which must be re constructed beforehand. 2Everything hinges on the criteria of individuation of the terms orelements. For holistic structuralists such as Levi-Strauss, all possibleterms must be defined (identified) apart from any specific system; thespecific system of terms then determines which possible terms actuallycount as elements, that is, the system provides the individuation of theelements . For example, for Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked, 3raw, cooked, and rotten are identified as three possible elements ; eachactual system of elements then determines how in that system these threepossible elements will be individuated. For example, they can be groupedinto binary oppositions such as raw vs . cooked and rotten, or raw androtten vs . cooked, or each of the three elements can count on its own.Transcendental phenomenology, as defined and practiced by Ed mund Husserl, is the diametric opposite of structuralism. It accepts theview that man is totally object and totally subject, and investigates the mean ing-giving activity of the transcendental ego which gives meaning to allobjects including its own body, its own empirical personality, and the cul ture and history which it 'constitutes' ' as conditioning its empirical self. 1 . Vladimir Ja. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (The Hague: Mouton, 1958).2. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 16. (Our italics.)3. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row,1 969).XX
IntroductionHusserl' s transcendental phenomenology gave rise to an existentialcounter-movement led by Heidegger in Germany and Maurice Merleau Ponty in France. Foucault was steeped in the thought of both theseexistential phenomenologists. At the Sorbonne he heard Merleau-Pontyexpound what he later calls the phenomenology of lived experience . Inhis lectures and in his influential book, Phenomenology of Perception,Merleau-Ponty attempted to show that the lived body rather than thetranscendental ego organized experience , and that the body as an inte grated set of skills was not subject to the sort of intellectualist analysis interms of rules developed by Husserl. Foucault also studied Heidegger' sclassic rethinking of phenomenology, Being and Time, and sympatheti cally presented Heidegger' s hermeneutic ontology in his first publishedwork, a long introduction to an essay by the Heideggerian psycho therapist, Ludwig Binswanger. 4Heidegger' s phenomenology stresses the idea that human subjectsare formed by the historical cultural practices in which they develop.These practices form a background which can never be made completelyexplicit, and so cannot be understood in terms of the beliefs of ameaning-giving subject. The background practices do, however, contain ameaning. They embody a way of understanding and coping with things,people , and institutions. Heidegger calls this meaning in the practices aninterpretation, and proposes to make manifest certain general features ofthis interpretation. In Being and Time he calls his method, which amountsto giving an interpretation of the interpretation embodied in ckinterpretationoftothemeaning of sacred texts, and to Dilthey who applied Schleiermacher'sinterpretive method to history. Heidegger, by generalizing Dilthey's workand developing it into a general method for understanding human beings ,introduced the term and the approach into contemporary thought.There are , in fact, two different kinds of hermeneutic inquiry inBeing and Time, corresponding to Division I and Division II , and each ofthese has been developed by one of the two schools of contemporaryphilosophers who call their work hermeneutic .In Division I Heidegger elaborates what he calls "an interpretationof Dasein in its everydayness. "5 There he lays out the way Dasein inter prets itself in this everyday activity . This " primordial understanding" inour everyday practices and discourse , which is overlooked by the prac titioners but which they would recognize if it were pointed out to them, isthe subject of much recent hermeneutic investigation. Harold Garfinkel, a4. Ludwig Binswanger, Le Reve et L'existence, trans. Jacqueline Uerdeaux. Intro duction and Notes by Michel Foucault (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1 955).5 . Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1 962), p . 76.xxi
I NT RODUCTIONsociologist,6 and Charles Taylor, a political scientist/ explicitly identifythemselves with this type of hermeneutic method. An off-shoot of thissort of hermeneutics of the everyday is the application of the samemethod to other cultures (for example, Clifford Geertz's brand of anthro pology)8 or to other epochs in our own culture (Thomas Kuhn's applica tion of what he now explicitly calls the hermeneutic method to Aristo telian physics) . 9In Division I of Being and Time Heidegger shows that the under standing in our everyday practices is partial and thus distorted. Thislimitation is corrected in Division II, which does not take the interpreta tion of Division I at face value but sees it as a motivated masking of thetruth. As Heidegger puts it:Dasein' s kind of Being . . . demands that any ontologicalInterpretation hich sets itself the goal of exhibiting thephenomena in their primordiality , should capture the Being ofthis entity , in spite of this entity 's own tendency to cover thingsup. Existential analysis , therefore , constantly has the charac ter of doing violence whether to the claims of the everydayinterpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquilizedobviousness.10Heidegger claims to find that the deep truth hidden by the everydaypractices is the unsettling groundlessness of a way of being which is , so tospeak, interpretation all the way down. This "discovery" is an instance ofwhat Paul Ricoeur has called the hermeneutics of suspicion. One mighthave found that the underlying disguised truth was the class struggle asdisclosed by Marx or the twists and turns of the libido as uncovered byFreud. In any such case , some authority which has already seen the truthmust lead the self-deluded participant to see it too. (In Being and Timethis authority is called the voice of conscience .) In each case too theindividual must confirm the truth of this deep interpretation by acknowl edging it. And since in each case the suffering is caused by the repressivedefenses, facing the truth results in some sort of liberation, whether it bethe increased flexibility that comes, as Heidegger claims, from the re6. Cf. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology ( Englewood Cliffs, N . J . :Prentice-Hall, 1 967).7. Cf. Charles Taylor, " Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," in Paul Rabinowand William Sullivan, eds . , Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1 979).8. Cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Harper and Row,1 973).9. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1977), p. xiii .10. Heidegger, BeinR and Time, p. 359.xxii
Introductionalization that nothing is grounded and that there are no guidelines, or thepower released by the realization that one ' s class is exploited, or thematurity gained by facing the deep secrets of one ' s sexuality .Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, 1 1 gives deep herme neutics a more positive direction as a method for reappropriating a pro found understanding of Being preserved in traditional linguistic practices.According to Gadamer, reinterpreting this saving truth is our only hope inthe face of nihilism.Foucault is not interested in recovering man's unnoticed everydayself-interpretation . He would agree with Nietzsche and the hermeneuticsof suspicion that such an interpretation is surely deluded about what isreally going on . But Foucault does not believe that a hidden deep truth isthe cause of the misinterpretation embodied in our everyday self understanding. He captures all such positions as well as Gadamer' s at anappropriate level of abstraction when he defines what he calls commen tary · · as the re-apprehension through the manifest meaning of discourseof another meaning at once secondary and primary, that is , more hiddenbut also more fundamental" (OT 373). Such an account of interpretation ,he claims, . dooms us to an endless task . . . [because itl rests on thepostulate that speech is an act of translation' . . . an exegesis, which lis tens . . . to the Word of God, ever secret, ever beyond itself" (BC xvi ,xvii). Foucault dismisses this approach with the remark , . For centurieswe have waited in vain for the decision of the Word" (BC xvii) .Obviously the terminology in this area is confused and confusing. Inour discussion we will sort out the various kinds of interpretation orexegesis by using . hermeneutics" as a broad neutral term, .commen tary' ' for the recovery of meanings and truths from our everyday prac tices or from those of another age or culture , and . the hermeneutics ofsuspicion" for the search for a deep truth which has been purposefullyhidden.We shall see as we follow Foucault's changing strategies for study ing human beings that he has constantly sought to move beyond thealternatives we have just discussed-the only alternatives left to thosestill trying to understand human beings within the problematic left by thebreakdown of the humanistic framework. He has sought to avoid thestructuralist analysis which eliminates notions of meaning altogethe
Foucault is able to show how in our culture_human beings have become the sort of objects and subjects structuralism and hermeneutics discover and analyze. Clearly the issue of power is central to Foucault's diagnosis of our current situation. Yet, as we say in the text, it is not one of the areas he xii
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics is the latest and so far most ambitious attempt to present the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault to an English-speaking audience. It is also likely to be taken as the authoritative "translation" of Foucault, since it
Pornography and power in Michel Foucault’s thought Bohdana Kurylo Abstract This paper reconstructs Michel Foucault’s account of pornography by placing it into his theory of power. To explain the novelty of Foucault’s position, it counterpoises it with anti-pornography feminism and its analysis of the modern state.
ideas, with a view to make the man, the thinker, the author or the supposed unity of Foucault’s work disappear and leave space for the multiple uses that have been made of them. !!!!! 1 Pratique politiques et usages de Michel Foucault, colloque organisé sous la responsabilité de : Eric Fassin, Michel
The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality : with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault I edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN -226-08044-7 (cloth). - ISBN -226-08045-5 (pbk.) I. Reason of state. 2. Welfare state. l. Foucault, Michel. II.
MICHEL FOUCAULT : BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND HERMENEUTICS. By Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 271 p. MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE SUBVERSION OF INTELLECT. By Karlis Racevskis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
Michel Foucault, "Discourse on Language," Key Excerpts (from Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith, . the author. Not, of course, the author in the sense of the individual who delivered the speech or wrote the text in question, but the author as the unifying principle in a .
Foucault then treats Nietzsche’s writings as a political object of study. Foucault, here, specifically refers to the “discourse of Nietzsche” and demonstrates how that discourse can be used as the model for a critique of knowledge-power and of the subject. In effect, at each of these stages, Foucault takes Nietzsche’s written words to study
The Question is, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Am I My Brother’s Keeper, Bill Scheidler 4 Deuteronomy 25:5-10 – God challenges brothers to build up the house of their brothers. “If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the widow of the dead man shall not be married to a stranger outside the family; her husband’s brother shall go in to her, take her as his .
