Ian Robert Douglas quotes: Gilles Deleuze in 1986 with:
> "Is there something 'dangerous' in Foucault's thought
> that also explains the passion it continues to arouse?"
> - "Dangerous, yes, because there's a violence in Foucault.
> An intense violence, mastered, controlled, and turned
> into courage."
~~~~~~~~~~
To which I also add this post-mortem "danger" from William James:
"The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche,-- and in a less degree
one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle,-- though often an
ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with
the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind
one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the
purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth."
---from "Circumscription of the Topic",
_The Varieties of Religious Experience_
Frank Lentricchia still raises valid concerns about the dangers (and
limitations) of both Foucault's and James's thought in his now 10 year old
book, _Ariel and the Police, Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace
Stevens_. If James goes too Ariel-like at times, the suffocating world
created by Foucault lends itself to these dangers:
Cynicism
Determinism
Despair
Whether one needs to turn to Merleau-Ponty, Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls,
and Benjamin Barber, as Henry Samuel Levinson suggests in his 1996
introduction ot _A Pluralistic Universe_ as later incarnations of what
James believed, or read James and Emerson again, themselves, as a
counter-balance to Foucault (Lentricchia is fair enough in criticizing what
he perceives as some of James's shortcomings; meanwhile, for some reason
Stanley Cavell still occasionally finds Emerson worth considering)-- is up
to each individual to decide, even as you may *think* that your choice is
one of free will.
---Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/alien.html