Foucault-L mail-list

Another 'meta' comment that F makes about theory, besides the one on 'theory
as a toolkit,' appears in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," where F talks
about 'genealogy as a curative science,' and I've always thought that latter
phrase caught something.

I also wonder what anyone who cares to comment would think of F's claim, in
"What is critique?", that critique is itself a virtue that can and should be
pursued even when one lacks a decent blueprint for a just society.

"What is critique" is also where F talks about the critical attitude as one
which says 'no' to this or that particular exercise of power, or to its
exercise in pursuit of such-and-such an end. As he puts it, "if
governmentalization is really this movement concerned with subjugating
individuals in the very reality of a social practice by mechanisms of power
that appeal to a truth, I will say that critique is the movement through
which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its
power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth. Critique
will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The
essential function of critique would be that of de-subjectification in the
game of what one could call, in a word, the politics of truth."

-- John