Re: The agent discussion once more

Hi Kaori

> I encountered 'What is Enlightenment'.  At the risk of 
> oversimplification, I believe that that article was about Foucault 
> divulging his affiliation, and he basically did identify himself as 
> a member of the western enlightened boy's club.  To borrow a 
> semiotic term, he disclosed the code system of himself, his work, 
> and in describing what that code system was, he didn't mention 
> Terayama Shuji, he didn't drop any Brazilian names.  He mentioned 
> names like Baudelaire, Kant, etc.  In my previous mail, I said that 
> I was upset that he hadn't claimed the universality of his work. 
> Well, I was equally upset that he didn't claim absolute specificity 
> for himself.  Because the implication then is that doing 
> archaeology/genealogy is to attire oneself in the 'thinking' style 
> of a western enlightened boy.

I don't read 'What is Enlightenment?' that way at all. I think it 
helps to mention the context in which this article was written. At 
the time Habermas and others were accusing Foucault of practising an 
irrationalist anti-Enlightenment form of thought which could only 
lead to superstition, political nihilism chaos, relativism and error 
etc. Foucault is arguing basically that even if he does not believe 
that Reason is the Truth and the only truth, that this does not 
invalidate the process of rational or intellectual argument or mean 
that he is a nihilist.

Another point is that the way Foucault writes sometimes makes it 
appear as though he is endorsing what he is writing about.

Equally Foucault will also just use some ideas as a platform to put 
his own point of view forward
- in this case his discussion of a limit attitude and also the 
process of paying a close philosophical and historical attention to 
the present and experimentation in thought. It would seem to me that 
this is Foucault rather than Kant speaking. The article also is 
against the kind of universalism that a lot of Enlightenment thought 
practices. It would appear to me that Foucault is precisely 
activating certain cultural and intellectual tools present in Western 
history to make his point and to argue a precise point within a 
particular intellectual debate that was taking place when he wrote 
his article.

--
Clare
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Clare  O'Farrell
email: c.ofarrell@xxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.michel-foucault.com
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