Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 1997 03:18:19 PST


Eric

thanks for your mail.  There have been others on this topic that I 
haven't read yet, so I hope I'm not a late echo.

You note the marked Kantian flavour of the quote Foucault uses to 
characterise philosophy.  In fact, Foucault himself adresses this 
question in an essay called "What is Enlightenment?", a response to the 
one by Kant of the same name (I think).  Here, Foucault does indeed 
bring himself alongside Kant in the project of coming to terms with the 
conditions and limits of knowledge.  It's definitely worth a read, if 
you're interested.  I know that the whole text of Foucault's article is 
on-line somewhere or other.  For me, this is one of Foucault's back-flip 
type maneuvers, because one certainly gets a more negative impression, 
particularly from his earlier work.

>It remains a form of politics as valid for
>me as the general strike. 

I couldn't agree more.  In fact, I think that this form of politics 
involves a more profound understanding of what Foucault describes as 
'the micro-physics of power', and in fact this form of politics suceeds 
where the general strike fails, because the strike participates in the 
very power structures that are inherent in it's own opression (a sort of 
ontological differend??!)

>I believe this is work each of us must do although I also recognise it 
is not
>sufficient.

Yes, absolutely.  But it seems to me that another good question here is 
whether other ways of working are as efficacious as we often think they 
are.

>Lyotard, on the other hand, while he cannot be described as 
Neo-Enlightenment,
>shows a marked tendency to return to Kant and to describe philosophy as
>critique.

Yes, this is what attracts me to Lyotard, and in particular to the 
differend as a philosophical tool, a means of getting under the skin of 
some problems that have seemed slippery to me before.

>What is the differend here between Lyotard and Foucault? What do you or 
anyone
>else out there make of it?

I think this is an excellent question (perhaps because I'm more familiar 
with Foucault, and thus can place myself on the dominant side of the 
differend in such a discussion!).  To be honest, though, I don't know 
enough yet of Lyotard to make a useful comment.  Which is of course (one 
of the reasons) why this discussion is so useful.

Jon Roffe


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