Tuomo Tiisala’s Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons – Chapter 4

Is there a difference between critique (methodological reflexiveness, form of explicitation – project of semantic self-consciousness) and the object of critique (savoir as thing submitted for critique).

How can one be against power without providing a justification with respect to its legitimate/illegitimate uses of power? (p. 80)

Does his account of power bring us back to a repressive and/or unitary model of power? (p. 81)

Is Tiisala’s account of critique a depoliticization of critique? (p. 86)

Are there analytic-objective truths and, if so, how are they related to savoir? (p. 93)

How is truth different for Brandom vis-à-vis Tiisala’s Foucault? (p. 93)

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There is a question of how to understand the function of being against power if there is not possibility of questioning the legitimacy in some way of power (which Tiisala seems committed to).

Tiisala has the idea that power operates by masking itself but that the diagnostic act is an unmasking of power that tends to destabilize its stability that relies on its regular unmasked operation.

His argument is dependent on the idea of freedom that is non-political. A freedom that is structurally necessary. It is functionally “against” power, not normatively.

There seems to be an implication that power always constrains freedom, which seems plausible for sovereign power and potentially for discipline but… for governmentality or biopolitics? Or any other modality of power we want to study? 

A constraint on existential freedom, in that sense, is not bad (only on ethical/political freedom).

Important passage: “What makes this passage particularly interesting is the functional definition of power as anything that makes the scope of human freedom seem narrower than it really is.” (p. 81). This highlights the notion of freedom as something that is there and then constrained by power. Power is in that sense anything that makes freedom “seem” or “appear” narrower. There seems to be an “unbounded freedom” presupposed – but, if so, how can it be narrow or not? How could it be measured?