More responses

And then reading through the other stuff you wrote... I should note, first, that I say less in response than I maybe should. It's not that I don't find what you say interesting--completely the contrary--but that I don't feel I have much to contribute. I could say, "Wow, I should read Proust," but then I'd find myself saying that a lot. But I do really enjoy getting this overview of your reading.

You mention someone objecting to Berkeley by saying you can't really live his philosophy, and you say you're not thinking of Johnson. I wonder if you're thinking of Hume, who wasn't talking about Berkeley so much as his own sceptical conundrum. I can't remember the exact quote, but basically he says this can all seem deeply perplexing in the study, but as soon as you put the book down and step outside, you can't possibly go about the business of living while taking this scepticism seriously.

Your mention of Proust letting his characters shine through in their individuality, not letting the narrator control them too much, reminds me more than anything of Chekhov. It's the thing I think I most love about Chekhov: he's so generous to his characters. In Ibsen, the characters are caught up in this tragic momentum where they can do nothing to alter their course. In Chekhov, it feels like the plot meanders because the characters have so much freedom to be themselves, as if the author doesn't want to exert the control he'd have to in order to tighten the momentum of the tale. And yet, for all that--because of that, because the wills of the characters are put front and centre and aren't held back--his plays have tremendous tension.

I wonder about this thing about theory cheapening literature. I'm maybe not quite sure what it means, that is, what counts as theory in literature. Would Anna Karenina be better off without its opening sentence, or does that not count as a theoretical explanation of the themes of the novel? I suppose also Proust was writing before much postmodern experimentation had come along. Can Milan Kundera really be called out for theorizing about his own novels while he writes them? I suppose you could object to it, but in Kundera it's a very deliberate narrative strategy rather than simple clumsiness or preachiness.

That's so cool that your published work has earned you fan mail! What was the paper on, and what were the responses like?

As for Foucault and Nietzsche, you bring me back to the course I took on Foucault back in Toronto. I remember a friend of mine saying what he found weird about Foucault is the way that, in Nietzsche, the stuff about genealogy, will, power, and the like all has a kind of spiritual import--it's as if Nietzsche wants to sublime his soul--and in Foucault it all becomes political. Which is the reverse of what you might expect: if you simply described the two thinkers and were asked who you thought influenced whom, you might think that the more down-to-earth politically minded thinker came first, and he was succeeded by this guy who took those practical ideas and ran with them to create a project for the self-overcoming of mankind.

All that said, I seem to remember being told that the Nietzschean influence on Foucault's early work was rather slender (though I've only read bits of Les Mots et les Choses, so what do I know?). I think the suggestion was that, with his essay on Nietzsche, and following it up with Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, Foucault entered a "genealogical" phase, and that his earlier work had been more characterized by "archaeology" and his conception of ruptures. Les Mots et les Choses, for instance, characterizes massive changes in the structure of thought, but doesn't seem to characterize them in terms of will or power enacting this shift.

You wonder why Eric A. Havelock gets almost as much mention as Proust in our tags. I think it's because I've been a little more consistent and diligent in my tagging than you have. But fear not, this post will get a tag for Proust and none for Havelock, so Proust will quickly be leaving Havelock in his dust! I'm also pleased to see Wittgenstein climbing up there. I didn't mention him at all for the first few months, which felt odd. Not that it was deliberate or anything.

Gosh, and now it's past my bedtime. It's Friday, but I'm not going to post either of these today because I'd really like to write to you about Wittgenstein and deconstruction, and I don't want to have sent out a couple posts before I do that. (If I do, I worry that the next time I find a moment to sit down with this blog, I'll be responding to your response to my stuff on thought and language and will run out of time again.) I don't know why I felt the need to flag this. Call it a peculiar sense of honesty--I'd feel oddly deceptive if I led you to believe that I'd just written this as soon as I posted it.

(It's now Monday evening and I can truthfully tell you that I'm writing this last sentence just before I click "Publish Post.")

Foucault, Genealogy, History

A couple of months ago I read a pretty convincing book on 'Foucault's Nietzschean genealogies'. It's no longer fresh in my mind and it was recalled to the library so I don't have it on hand to consult, but last night I read the most important essay Foucault wrote on Nietzsche - "Nietzsche, genealogy, history'. Foucault is almost remarkable in his generation for NOT having written a book on Nietzsche. At the same time, he's perhaps the most consistently Nietzschean. As the book I just mentioned (by Michael Mahon) argues, the main project that took up most of Foucault's career was a genealogy of morals. His essay on Nietzsche presents an extremely familiar and straightforward Nietzsche. He focuses mainly on the untimely meditation on the uses and misuses of history and the genealogy of morals, and he doesn't take many liberties with his interpretation. At times it feels like he's just paraphrasing Nietzsche. At the same time, when he's outlining what the aim of genealogist is, appropriate methodology. etc., you could forget he was talking about or through Nietzsche and imagine he was just explaining his own books, from the history of madness to the history of sexuality. The essay does place a lot of unnecessary emphasis on a dubious distinction to make its most basic (and obvious) point - it tries to distinguish the words 'Ursprung' and 'Herkunft' (or 'Entstehung')... the problem being not that he's wrong about what the words mean in German, where they come from and what distinction could be made, but rather that, as Foucault himself makes plain, Nietzsche actually uses Ursprung with both the negative meaning Foucault wants it tied to and the 'good' concept that Foucault is associating with 'Herkunft'... not that it matters all that much, since the concepts he is dealing with are indisputably present in Nietzsche.. 'Ursprung' is used by Foucault to designate a set point of origin that determines something once and for all, a mythical beginning before the fall or pretty much any a-historical/ trans-historical essence, where as 'Herkunft' is used to designate origin as a slow process of coming into being and transformation that shows all the accidents of history that explain how something got to be what it is at this moment, without any pretense of knowing what it will be or any particular interest in what it once was, except insofar as that contributes to its current state of being (or rather becoming). Of course, Nietzsche's anti-platonism is kind of old hat, and among historians in general, there is a general awareness of the dangers of creating a teleological narrative, of trying to eradicate chance and make everything leading up to the present seem inevitable (As a side note, something in both Bataille and Klossowski, that I haven't really explored enough is the conflating of chance and necessity of embracing chaos as a necessity - everything leading up to this moment being necessary not because a carefully laid out plan is being followed through but because allowing all the possibilities of chance to unfurl is necessary, because if all the things leading up to now hadn't been possible there would have been no chance, chance being life and becoming... not that this is exactly what's said by anyone anywhere, but it is pointing in the right general direction - necessary and inevitable are not the same, and there is a strong connection between the necessary and the arbitrary, the two are not mutually exclusive and this is part of the meaning of the eternal return - which has nothing much to do with Foucault). Anyway, Foucault and Nietzsche are unite in denying an essence of man, in looking into the construction of the self and in believing that beliefs, values and basic assumptions of all kinds are historically determined, that institutions, ideas, words and so forth do not necessarily keep their original meanings, that they are invested with new meanings by those who turn them to their own purposes, and both believe that this history is mainly driven by struggles for sovereignty and domination. Both believe that explaining values held by society today means revealing shifting constellations of force. Neither believes that there is some truer absolute system of values that has to be rediscovered or finally obtained that is being obscured by this interplay of forces and investment of institutions and ideas by interests. Neither wants to have anything to do with transhistorical constants like 'human nature'. In his book on Nietzsche and Foucault, Mahon at some point notes that Nietzsche is never closer to Foucault than in the passage in Genealogy of Morals where he talks about the different meanings societies have given to punishment, which he ties to an analysis of the word 'Schuld' - punishment initially being repayment for a debt, the joy that the creditor got seeing the debtor suffer being recompense for the property loss or pain inflicted, with a very belated idea of a person being punished because he was responsible for his actions (guilt being linked to responsibility), and punishment as a deterrent. I've never found the passage particularly convincing, but the basic idea of the same punishments being used by different societies with different intentions and different justifications inevitably makes you think of Foucault's book 'Discipline and punish' (which is a bad translation - it should be 'punish and surveil'), though Foucault is interested in shifting penal practices and what that says about intentions, and, of course, he actually does a lot of research and doesn't speculate as wildly... as you can see with the 'Schuld' and 'Herkunft' distinction, he isn't reading too much into a word and its origins (the idea that 'repayment' is a straightforward joy in the suffering of another), he's using those words as a logical way of maintaining a very clear conceptual distinction... of course, now that I think about the violence he does to 17th century theatre and renaissance paintings to make statements about how society deals with madness, I retract what I just said - Foucault goes at least as wild as Nietzsche on occasion, making baseless claims, and however much use he makes of the archive, he is guilty of considerable distortion and simplification. But still...