Michel Foucault anyone?

What really makes me laugh with all these post structuralists is that they try to destabilise all discourse as meaningless but in doing so imply either that they themselves are meaningless,or that they have the 'key' to the truth. In other words they have shifted the power discourse from the dominant accepted meanings to themselves!
Most great philosphers are excellent at critique and deconstruction but almost always create a system just as opressive or marginally less so as an alternative. The truest thing any philosopher ever said was Kierkeegard: 'Subjectivity is truth'. But then he went and mucked up all his good work by saying true subjectivity was in fact his version of christian theology.

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Originally Posted by Theunderground

What really makes me laugh with all these post structuralists is that they try to destabilise all discourse as meaningless but in doing so imply either that they themselves are meaningless,or that they have the 'key' to the truth. In other words they have shifted the power discourse from the dominant accepted meanings to themselves!
Most great philosphers are excellent at critique and deconstruction but almost always create a system just as opressive or marginally less so as an alternative. The truest thing any philosopher ever said was Kierkeegard: 'Subjectivity is truth'. But then he went and mucked up all his good work by saying true subjectivity was in fact his version of christian theology.

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I'm not sure many of them claim they have the "truth" though. For many in the Foucault frame, the point is only to destabilize authority, or understanding where authority comes from, rather than presenting any truth of your own. It's one of the reasons they are often accused of tending towards nihilism, because their chosen methodology can't effectively argue for any given truth.

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Originally Posted by Theunderground

What really makes me laugh with all these post structuralists is that they try to destabilise all discourse as meaningless but in doing so imply either that they themselves are meaningless,or that they have the 'key' to the truth. In other words they have shifted the power discourse from the dominant accepted meanings to themselves!

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Deconstruction is not destruction. It is re-arrangement of a discourse to make visible the cracks and lacunae in it. It does not prove anything, it does not refute anything. It just shows what is there and relies on critical judgement of individuals to repair the cracks (reformation) or dismantle the dominant discourse and build a new one (revolution). There are no nutshells. Everything is open to discussion as there is no God-given meaning (logos). From faith to language, from language to discourse, everything is open to questioning. Simply put, deconstruction is critical thinking and continuous (re)evaluation of situations. All philosophies of the past ossified in due course of time and became oppressive. Deconstruction has a self-regulating mechanism at its heart to safeguard against this eventuality.

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

Deconstruction is not destruction. It is re-arrangement of a discourse to make visible the cracks and lacunae in it. It does not prove anything, it does not refute anything. It just shows what is there and relies on critical judgement of individuals to repair the cracks (reformation) or dismantle the dominant discourse and build a new one (revolution). There are no nutshells. Everything is open to discussion as there is no God-given meaning (logos). From faith to language, from language to discourse, everything is open to questioning. Simply put, deconstruction is critical thinking and continuous (re)evaluation of situations. All philosophies of the past ossified in due course of time and became oppressive. Deconstruction has a self-regulating mechanism at its heart to safeguard against this eventuality.

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My quibble is that I assume we are doing that automatically when we read anyway, without the neologisms. I mean, this is a thought pattern, but any historian, or critic is going to do the same thing regardless of what political or cultural standpoint they intend to work in, or believe they are working in.

In essence Derrida is giving a name for close reading, or for investigative research - critical thinking - as you say.

Let's not forget that the ever-astute Foucault lavished praise on the Ayatollah Khomeni and described the Iranian Revolution as the first sign that militant Islam was poised to become a cure for Western oppression in the Third World.

And even today, Iran remains a beacon of rational governance, human rights, and gender equality.

Yep.

JBI hit the nail on the head. These guys are telling us to read carefully and be critical? I thought that was the whole point of science and philosophy anyway. Also,they dont offer any foundations and mostly dont think human nature has any 'fixed essense'. To me this is just an excuse to say i want to reserve the right to justify anything i want. Nietzsche said all this more honestly,constructively and with far more panache a century ago.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

Foucault is better as some short of evil anthagonist who will use any weapons to destroy a stabilished system, but often he is just confuse of what to do afterwards. But he was quite intelligent, quite a thorn.

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The timeless quandary of the left-wing intellectual: wants to demolish everything and rebuild on the rubles and ashes, but then doesn't know what to build in its stead.

Never had much patience for his warped thinking and twisted vocabulary and sentences, always a sign to me of a muddled mind. A thinker who knows what he wants to say, knows how to express himself in clear prose. I don't get into this problem with thinkers like Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, and Mary Midgley, to just name a few.

Also, I recently discovered he was a fan of Ayatollah Khomeini and considered him the saviour of Iran :frown2: Hardly surprising, but as someone who aligns himself in the left most of the time, it's of course sad to see another left-wing thinker displaying total political stupidity.

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Originally Posted by Heteronym

Also, I recently discovered he was a fan of Ayatollah Khomeini and considered him the saviour of Iran :frown2: Hardly surprising, but as someone who aligns himself in the left most of the time, it's of course sad to see another left-wing thinker displaying total political stupidity.

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Well its hard to say who was worse for Iran, the Shah or the Ayatollah. After all, when Foucault was writing in support of Khomeini the alternative was not any better. Also, he was writing about the Ayatollah primarily during the revolution. A lot of people were fascinated by the ability of the Ayatollah to lead an essentially non-violent revolution, and despite the theocratic principles it involved a move towards more democratization despite also moving towards perhaps a de-liberalization in the social sphere. Most of the moves towards de-democratization occurred after Foucault's writings on Iran, so perhaps Foucault was too optimistic about the aims of the Islamist movement in Iran but there is nothing really outlandish about the positions he took.

Also, it's hard to describe his support of Khomeini as an endorsement of their politics, but it was more his fascination with the ability of the Islamist discourses to displace Capitalism or Marxism that drove him to write about the revolution.

It becomes difficult for me to find attenuating circumstances for Foucault - not that I'm looking too hard for them - when it seems left thinkers and artists have the uncanny gift to always support dictators: Sarte and Stalin; García Márquez and Castro; Chomsky and Pol Pot; Foucault and Khomeini. It's like you can accurately predict where terror will spring if you simply study which leader the left is supporting this week...

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Also, it's hard to describe his support of Khomeini as an endorsement of their politics, but it was more his fascination with the ability of the Islamist discourses to displace Capitalism or Marxism that drove him to write about the revolution.

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Oh yes, of course, it's what I wrote above: wanting to destroy what's known without knowing with that to replace it with, or replacing it with something even worse. Foucault belonged to a small cadre of Western thinkers who had an incredible hatred for the West, although he disguised it in meaningless babble, and another moral relativist, going so far as accusing Islamic feminists of being too westernized when they pointed out the sexual descrimination in Khomeini's Iran. Pity he didn't live to see that his Islamic spiritual renewal quickly turned into a totalitarian ideology. He had many opportunities to denounce what Iran became after 1979, but he never did, and that speaks volumes about where his loyalty was.

Yes, simple because the western capitalism is easily as ppressive and hipocrite. After all, we just saw those muslins (ignorants) teaching the american democracy they can take down dictadors with less violence, without millions and with a ideology beyond profit... just again. (Iran is considerable better than Saudi Arabia, which is a bit of western model for nice arabic-muslins countries).

Discussion of current politics is not allowed.