Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 07:52:08 -0800 (PST)
Subject: re: wittgenstein




On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, jon roffe wrote:
> 
> The issues you raise re Wittgenstein and power are interesting. I've 
> been working on an imaginary relationship between the work of 
> Wittgenstein and Foucault, so I'd be interested in any elaboration you 
> had to offer.  However, I think your recourse to Marx is problemmatic, 
> in terms of the analysis of power that he offers - here's where I see 
> Foucault coming in - and that a Marxist orthodox understanding of power 
> helps even less than your assessment of Wittgenstein's silence of the 
> issue of power - a silence that I too find puzzling.

Dear Jon,

I would be intrigued to here more about your putting Wittgenstein and
Foucault together.
Also, in regards to language and power, have you thought of Nietzsche?  It
seems to me that in hermeneutics there is a decision that must take place
in which the interpretive process is ended, for the sake of
communication--where the vast array of possible meanings is limited,
and that that decision is a function of power.
I think passages from Zarathustra are useful in that--especially on
perspectivism, and the essay "Truth and Lie in the Extra Moral Sense" as
well as passages from Will to Power and Genealogy of Morals.  Deleuze's
book on Nietzsche is also really quite good for seeing Nietzsche's linking
of language and power.

Matt Wettlaufer