[lit-ideas] Re: Madness, Foucault, Nietzsche & Emerson

  • From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, cblists@xxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 14:35:53 -0330

Quoting cblists@xxxxxxxx:

> 
> On 6-Dec-11, at 11:27 PM, Judith Evans wrote:
> 
> > Madness and Civilization is not a postmodernist work, Eric.
> 
> Thanks for this, Judy - it awoke me from my 'dogmatic slumber'  
> regarding Foucault.
> 
> Wikipedia is (unsurprisingly) somewhat incoherent about Foucault and  
> postmodernism.  In the entry under 'Postmodernism' one finds Foucault  
> listed as one of the 'major players' (my terminology, not Wikipedia's).
> 
> Yet under the entry for Michael Foucault himself one reads:
> 
> "Foucault ... rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels  
> later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a  
> critical history of modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant."
> 
> Now this sentence is itself ambiguous: is Foucault's thought ('a  
> critical history of modernity') rooted in Immanuel Kant, or is it  
> 'modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant' which is the focus of Foucault's  
> critical history?

Gadamer has it right in his considered hermeneutics: an author's intentions,
denials, sexual orientation (if any), religious affiliation (if any) or
subsequent commentaries on her own published work possess no privileged
authority in the game of interpretation of her texts' meaning and truth. "... a
critical history of modernity rooted in ... Kant"?? Like Hello?? What can
"rooted" possibly mean here? Is not an "empirical apriori" a
self-contradiction? Enlightenment appreciated.

I don't get the distinction Chris is making. Chris, what are you trying to say?

Judy, why are Foucault's writings not accurately identified as postmodern?
Surely he is one of the Holy Trinity of postmodern patron saints along with
Lyotard and Rorty. Gospodsi, Gospodsi, pomolimsya.

Walter O
MUN





> 
> Chris Bruce,
> post-post-modernist, in
> Kiel, Germany
> --
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