October 19, 2018

Questions: 

Pg 30 Foucault’s method: is it archaeological or genealogical? (Three moments, Greek, Christian, modern). 

Pg 28 What really constitutes the difference between formal-emp analysis and ethnological analysis?

General question regarding why Foucault’s readings of the Greeks always seem to look differently: is it a close reading? Different method of surveying? 

Pg 34: translation of dike —why can’t Mnls deliver a sentence? 

Pg 31: “kind of” or “equivalent to” juridical avowal? What’s the taxonomy of avowals?

Related:

Pg 32/28  : why is this structure of avowal only human? What about talking to the horses? 

Pg 28: ho power is functioning between veridiction and jurisdiction?

Pg 49: explanation of juridical changes—close to Econ analysis, but without reductive analysis—what are the relations? 

Pg 41: avowal not admission of fault, but youth leading astray

Pg 43: what is relation between truth and memory? 

Pg 43- reputations of truth and a Oakway

Pg 39- alethurgy 

Discussion: 

Starting with first question (archaeology and genealogy). 

- if he sets up these three moments distinctly, but not their connections, or the relations between these moments, that’s very archaeological. 

- plucking things across a vast historical expanse, is archaeological

- it’s in contrast to a genealogical movement, where one starts with two moments, and then tries to understand the continuity and difference between them, how we get from one to the other. 

But then in the content of the chapter, he seems to treat this genealogical suggestion that there’s a shift this moment. It’s a shift contained within a time slice. 

But he is really interested in power here. But it is clear that it’s genealogical in the sense that he is interested in the way that truthtelling is a technique of power. 

Why go back to the ancients? Maybe its practical, insofar as we need to go back to the Greeks because it’s only that far back that we get a sense of this relation between truth and justice being otherwise.

The introduction of a judge changes the type of judgement (pg 47). 

This emergence of an autonomous judicial system institutes new kinds of relations of power. 

Going back to the Greeks is one way of denaturalizing western philosophy. 

But is there some resonance with Heidegger—especially regarding truth as a disclosing—vs. how he ends, when he seems to say that truth is something fundamentally different. So is he agreeing or disagreeing with Heidegger? 

Moving from agonistic structure to something like rational judgement, being accepted by those who are being judged, etc. 

The shift: there used to be these relations of force mitigating these proceedings, but then a new sense of the judicial emerged that needed to present themselves as not permitted by force, so they need to present new relations of truth. 

- this is very Nietzschian, or also Hume arguing against Locke. 

Is the move—agonistic struggle to the rational account of justice— tied to the move to ground rationality in the world, rather than just seeing it as a human movement? (Or, what’s the relation between this shift to make the proceedings seem absent of power and based on truth, related to Foucault’s claim in subjectivity in truth that rationality was situated in the world in order to justify human use of it). 

What you’re looking for in Foucault are paradigmatic expressions of wider sets of practices (or this is what Foucault is often attending to). 

And these are just literature, not descriptions of practices. Which is also very different than most of his work. 

Horses—they talk to the horses, threatens them, and the oath he is supposed to take is directed at the horses. Maybe they were stand-ins for the gods? 

But at any rate, it’s strange he says truth-telling is all about humans. But that seems like it maybe undermines his position, insofar as he wants to say that truth-telling is not a pure transference of meaning/truth from one speaking subject to another. And it’s also strange because he then the very first story he tells includes horses as knowers, as hearers, and as subjects in the oath ritual. Plus, he talks about the race being itself a kind of truth-telling, one way of establishing the truth. Which is precisely not speech.