Oedipal Knowledge

            Questions:

1.      Why does every philosopher read Antigone/Oedipus and nothing else? Sophocles was not the only playwright in Ancient Greece.

2.      Why Oedipus? What does Oedipus do for Foucault? What does it get him in terms of the arguments he’s been making in the other lectures? Is he giving an “interpretation”? And if not, what is he doing?

3.      Would this be considered a genealogical account? Tracing a moment at which power/knowledge was attempted to be separated from one another – talking about transition (not just archeological snapshot). But it’s also lacking some features of genealogy: looking at this very foundational text, which he gets away from later. Is this a genealogy or if not what is it?

4.      Pg 249 the tyrant and the seer vs. Pg 189 tyrant, the sage, popular power : Why does popular power drop out, does it drop out? 3 great procedures: do these map onto the tyrant, the sage, popular power?

5.      Power/knowledge

6.      What’s the role of excess and transgression here (256-7)?

Discussion:

            Why not engage anyone other than Sophocles who can refute the picture Sophocles gives? Foucault analyzes few scattered remnants of texts from Ancient Greece and from that deduces, this is how it was in Ancient Greece. It seems completely fallacious.

            Oedipus has been read wrong. He is a figure that embodies two competing claims to knowledge, a figure of excess and transgression. Here is this thing that has been read in one way, and here is another way to read it. So is this an interpretation?

            This could be read in an English class. But it could also be used as a tool for genealogy. It is the only literary text he deals with. Except Homer: historical position on Homer – how truth claims were made in Greek society (pushes literary elements aside). Whereas this lecture engages the literary aspects of the play very deeply.

            This is a great reading of Oedipus but we are desensitized to it because we are so focused on power/knowledge.

            What is he getting out of it, other than convenience? If you’re a Continental philosopher, you have to write on Bartleby, even though it’s not even central to Melville’s corpus.

            He doesn’t look at Homer, but all these obscure texts. He draws on all the stuff that you have to go to archives to get it. Maybe it’s an interpretation here, or maybe something that’s not an interpretation. But maybe then he realized you can’t do that with texts like Oedipus.

            But how do you approach a work of art? It’s a piece of fiction, an artwork. Can we draw anything conclusive from it? And if you can’t, it seems like it’s never not an interpretation. This text as a product of its moment – he doesn’t analyze that. Is it symptomatic of these things in Greek society? But he doesn’t do that – something happens in society and here is its representation in literature. Oedipus as representing societal change?

            Agamben: Foucault’s method is paradigmatic. He finds a paradigm for this broader social assembly. For example: Bentham’s sketches of the panopticon. Maybe Oedipus was paradigmatic.

            What, then, is the tragedy paradigmatic of?

            Gnome – Oedipus’ self-asserting knowledge: master of his own destiny (dikezein?)

            Akouein – Knowledge that listens to and obeys some outside force (which Oedipus refuses to do).

             The tyrant and the seer – 2 kinds of knowledge meet in his body and his expulsion, his banishment is structurally necessary for Greek society.

            Pg 255: “Wanting to see for himself, he has seen himself…” blocks his ears and blinded. He is the object of his own transgression and punishment is carried out on his self, his own body. But he is a figure of transgressive knowledge.

            What is this transgression? Apart from sleeping with his mother. Pushing the divine law out of the city, replacing it with juridical law, taking the place of the Gods. He wants disinterested knowledge but as the sovereign he cannot be seeking knowledge on this new model and not exercising power at the same time. His action of trying to know himself comes into conflict with his power.

            Knowledge by witness – knowledge by facts: ends up corresponding to the oracular – the knowledge of the Gods.

            This particular kind of knowledge is dangerous. The danger of knowledge. Knowledge becomes dangerous when you attempt to control it. Everything about Oedipus is too much. Banishment – social form of blindness. Blinding himself – double blindness: can’t see so can’t be seen. It’s not about trying to get into Oedipus’ head (not psychological) but looking at all these external elements. Incest taboo is also pushed to the side.

            Along with Oedipus disinterested knowledge is banished. What is enforced is the order of the Gods. Where does the purely disinterested knowledge come back in? Creon represents the law. Antigone is speaking to the Gods and trying to mobilize that power against Creon. But Antigone gets killed, though Creon does not win (Gods have the last say), his wife and son commit suicide. The law of the Gods gets reinstantiated. Antigone prevails in enforcing the law of the Gods.

            Sphinx – warner for trying to know who you are. Oedipus ignores the warning. He’s definitely transgressing. He’s trying to have the knowledge of Gods without actually listening to them. As a tyrant there is also an excess of power. He’s excessive and trangressive because he represents knowledge as his own power and not knowledge of order of things/disinterested knowledge. Power to order the world. Knowledge of the order of the world given by the Gods, the seer – disinterested knowledge. Oedipus is mimicking Gods here in pretending that his knowledge is disinterested.

            Oedipus is too good at it – he does know, he figures it out. He’s so committed to figuring it out. It’s not ignorance and guilt, it’s not unconsciousness and desire. He’s not operating with a lack, he’s operating with a too muchness. Excess and transgression: fully Deleuzian. The three syntheses of time – third synthesis: the hero is destroyed because he’s overcome by this task as he overcomes it (a paradox).

            Is it too much because it’s so self-interested and so not disinterested? Figuring out he’s the object of the search and subject of it too. That’s what we’re not supposed to be in the later figuration of disinterested knowledge: knowledge is knowledge of something out there in the world, but here he’s propelling toward himself.

            Socrates: both the subject and object of his own search for knowledge, applying the dictum, “Know thyself.” Like Oedipus he gets expelled from the city. Yet Foucault wants Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle to be on the side of disinterested knowledge. Disinterestedness: subject standing back from power or knowledge of the disempowered (slave morality). No passion, disconnected from power.

            Oedipus has power to put things in order – he exercises power in knowing (not just because he owns the town, because power is not a capacity for Foucault). He’s so good at it that he undermines himself. He went too far. In the context of the play, he’s always already operating under the Olympian order in some way, but at the end his power is completely taken away from it, he’s stripped of it. It doesn’t matter he follows his own original rule (blind himself and exile himself), because Creon asks him to wait for the Gods’ decree.

            The disinterested knowledge here anticipates Plato and Aristotle. March 17 1971 Lecture (pg 197). Is Aristotelian knowledge sufficiently close to seer knowledge?

            Power/knowledge is thrown out as a pair, excluded. “We can learn by inquiring” – the play says: oh you better not know that way. Because that way is bound up with power. Disinterested knowledge (Aristotle) since it keeps its distance with power is okay, permissible. 2 possible readings: 1) Move from power/knowledge to disinterested knowledge is a move of power. (more metaphysical reading, more Nietzschean) Pg 155: “The semantic field cuts itself off as institution, as social break: philosophy, science, the discourse of truth [are]: independent of power, founders of power, critics of power. But it was in fact organized on the basis of power.” 2) Let’s grant that there is something like disinterested knowledge and do a genealogy of how that comes about. That knowledge bears the history of struggle with other forms of knowledge that explicitly affirm power. What are the conditions of possibility that knowledge is totally disarticulated from power? Not exercise of power, but exercise of knowledge bound up with power.

            It’s not like after Oedipus knowledge was no longer related to power. There is still power at work. There is no basis, no ground, but knowledge is always produced in its interplay with power. Which doesn’t make them any less true. There is power operating there but that does not make it untrue. Power is not oppressive.

            Chronologically: Written around the same time as Socrates and Plato are running around. 30 years before Socrates was executed. For Nietzsche, Sophocles represents pre-disinterested knowledge.

            Homer’s contest – Nietzsche: old Homeric form of truth & it was lost through Socrates.