Lectures on the Will to Know 3 Mar, 10 Mar, 17 Mar

NOTE: MEETING NEXT WEEK IS AT NORMAL 2:00-3:30 TIME.

The group began as per usual with questions... Our focus mostly was on Ch. 12 (17 Mar, 1971 lecture)...

1. What is it about writing that enables the shift of truth from effect to cause?  Why writing?  (p. 153)

2. Foucault speaks of 'the individual' on p. 175.  Does this ancient individual anticipate the modern disciplinary individual?  Does Foucault here in 1971 anticipate Foucault in 1975?  Or both?

3. How is death function here (p. 176)?  How does this anticipate later Foucault?

4. How does the discussion of truth in the lectures (p. 187) anticipate some of the later work on the ethics of truth?  Not only in the late ethics, but also in the Psychiatric Power lectures?  And what is the genealogy of truth here?

5. How do we connect the idea of the fictitious place of truth (on which power is founded) from pp. 193 to the earlier discussion of sophism?

6. Foucault develops a genealogical perspective, or at least a description of one, in lecture 12 at the end of the series -- see pp. 194-5.  Is the genealogical approach being described here adequate to the analyses that came before?  Is this supportable?  Were the earlier analyses genealogical, or more structural?  Were they both genealogical and structural(ist)?

7. Foucault ends the lectures with a discussion of four Nietzschean principles (p. 198).  With respect to the principle of exteriority, Foucault says that he will not analyze the text on the basis of the text itself.   Is this adequate to the lectures that preceded?

Discussion then ensued....

1) How does writing effect the shift from effect of discourse to cause of discourse?  Truth as "effect" to truth as "condition" (155).  How does it shift from outcome of struggle to an idea of law/truth/justice as something that makes struggle unnecessary (Aristotle)?  Foucault's claim is not that writing effects this shift all on its own, but is part of a whole network of supports (cf. the quip on p. 150 against Derrida).

2) Why does Foucault shift the next year from the topos of antiquity to that of modernity?  Why abandon the 1971 project on the Greeks?  (Perhaps: it's not the proper object of inquiry for the methodological emphasis on struggle he is trying to develop.)

3) Methodological shifts...

  ... From hermeneutics to genealogy: "I have never tried to analyze the text on the basis of the text itself" (p. 198).  Foucault not against interpretation but rather against interpretation-ism.  How is Foucault moving outside of the text?

This has effects for the terms of the debate between Derrida and Foucault (see Foucault's quip on p. 198 against Derrida -- "get rid of textuality").