Notes for 10-5-11

10-5-11 Foucault Reading Group with Vincent Colapietro

Housekeeping: History of Sexuality reading—p [optional 17-49], 81-102, 150-159

Questions:

Colapietro’s piece

—please explain the distinction b/w social and socialized and why it is useful in talking about Dewey and Foucault. Are they necessary for one another, or is the relation found within the work of either philosopher independently? P 33

--Mf’s agonism and polemics p 36

Foucault “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”

286—“a slave has no ethics”? (in MF’s sense)

--why does MF not address patriarchy?

287—ontological priority of self-relation

300—freedom and control of conduct—dodging question

--power in MF a methodology or theory of human nature?

Discussion:

Hermeneutical suspicion is more prominent in MF than Dewey. Foucault is more critical of the normalized subject in which the internalized norms—in a way we’ve ‘been had’ (normalization of sexual desire, etc). Dewey is relatively innocent of ‘being had.’

MF is a more thickly descriptive account with a critical edge. It is not lacking in Dewey, it just not as pronounced. He was a white protestant heterosexual male. He was there for the founding of the NAACP, but he’s not at odds with his society in the ways Foucault was. There is a very different subject position. They are close, but the way it is enacted is somewhat different.

Do you have to be uncomfortable in society in order to have a critical eye? Yes. Dewey was ill at ease and at odds, but not to the extent and in the forms Foucault was.

P 26 of Colapietro—I wonder the extent to which there’s room in profession philosophy for a sort of confluence of transfomation and theory (?). Is a biography like Foucault’s possible in academia today? Need to remember that MF was working in a psychiatric hospital. Also, we are secluded. We are committed—to a cause, to a way of life. Being committed to the madness of professional philosophy and being committed to transformative and emancipatory cause? The unlived life is not worth examining. Dewey is interesting on the other side—what are we going to do with these immigrants? His phil of ed is not abstract. We can’t exploit their labor, we must do something transformative. What are the sites of our everyday lives? Perhaps our interest in MF is only academic.

To turn it back on MF—p 286—maybe this explains the dissatisfaction of the work of the 80s. Maybe the things on the Greeks is somewhat informative as contrast to the Christian tradition, though it doesn’t seem grounded in the ways History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish are. But perhaps this is the way of reconstituting an ethos. MF is a profoundly Nietzschean thinker—MF is recovering these practices for a purpose. He’s trying to open space for a critical conversation without providing a precise code or method. Method is subordinate to the cultivation of sensibility.

Re-asking the question: why go to the Greeks when he’s talking about ethics? Is this truly not the project. This is for a very distinctly French audience. How are these practices still with us? Perhaps they’ve just be transformed throughout history and are still with us in the asceticism of science, for example. Perhaps MF is excavating on two levels. The general level (284)and the particularized Greek techniques of the Hellenistic period. Maybe the larger project can still be with us. These are deeply ingrained habits, and the process of uprooting them is arduous.

“Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (p 284)—unpack this. Why is freedom ontological? Ethos as a mode of being and behavior and not simply a practice. Is this circular? Brings in the distinction between freedom and liberation.

Decolonization seems to be the paradigm case of liberation. What are we to do with this in relation to what he says about liberation and freedom and the example of sexuality on p 283.

Let’s read MF against MF regarding slaves and ethics. Perhaps slave is more of a conception which lacks a taking up of freedom. Absolutely domination is not the negation of power, so the subject has some modicum of freedom.

The end of Colapietro’s article reminds some of Arendt. She’s been a part of VC’s work for 30 years, though not explicitly written. Docility of body and docility of mind.

P 282-83—liberation from domination v freedom in relations of power. Domination may not be the problem, but there still is a problem. Perhaps on 284, MF is using nondomination and freedom as synonyms.

Freedom in its broadest sense, which may include and require liberation, is the ontological condition for ethics. It is once liberation has been achieved, the work of ethics begins. Cautionary note: freedom may be exercised prior to liberation (e.g. poetry, etc prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall).

Why not put the emphasis on reflective practices as reversing into practices of domination? Might be a historical answer that we have to give about how practices yield, but why haven’t we been talking about this when we were talking analytically?

There may be a strain of humanism implicit in MF, that human nature is rebellious. This may be a historical claim and not an ontological one.