Critical Theory: Foucault over Marx?

[ris]

Hello all, this is my first post to this interesting site. :)

I'm currently studying the tradition of critical theory at uni, amongst many other things, and am interested in hearing some opinions outside of my occasionally unenthusiastic class. I'm particularly interested in what Foucault has had to add to this tradition...So i wonder if anyone has any thoughts or ideas on Foucault's divergent position...? I've been reading his essay 'What is Enlightenment?' and so i conclude that, basically, Foucault wants us to move away from the notion that history is the building of knowledge in a linear irreversible way; the project of human enlightenment is a total process, whereby humankind is in constant debate with its present. Modernity (and he uses Baudelaire to help explain his position) is subject to the process of self-actualizing individuals who can, in the public sphere/ in a more general and communal way, engage in critical debate about the present to determine how, when and why change should occur for the future...

Not sure if this is the sort of thing that would get discussed around here, this being my first post, but i thought i'd throw it out there anyway.

~

[Uberzensch]

I would love to have conversations like this, so your post definitely fits. (Not that I'm the authority here, but as Nietzsche says, "One is always wrong, but with two truth begins.— One cannot prove the case, but two are irrefutable." So, if we both agree, then it is so!)

I think you'd be interested in reading Foucault's essay, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History". In it, he deals with some of the issues of history that you mentioned in your post. The notion of history as a linear process leading to something more "true" is refuted.

[Quark]

Hi, ris. I hope you're getting more exciting conversation here than with your anemic classmates.

I'm somewhat thrown by the title of your post, though. What part of it refers to Marx? When you say "Foucault over Marx" it sounds like you're pitting these two against each other (or that Foucault and Marx make a fraction, but that seems unlikely). Are you attributing "the notion that history is the building of knowledge in a linear irreversible way" to Marx?

[Jozanny]

You might use my thread as an overview:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36051

Perhaps the moderators will merge the two of them, though that isn't my call.

[ris]

I think you'd be interested in reading Foucault's essay, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History". In it, he deals with some of the issues of history that you mentioned in your post. The notion of history as a linear process leading to something more "true" is refuted.

Thanks for that suggestion! I will look into it.


Hi, ris. I hope you're getting more exciting conversation here than with your anemic classmates.

I'm somewhat thrown by the title of your post, though. What part of it refers to Marx? When you say "Foucault over Marx" it sounds like you're pitting these two against each other (or that Foucault and Marx make a fraction, but that seems unlikely). Are you attributing "the notion that history is the building of knowledge in a linear irreversible way" to Marx?

Gah oops no no, that's definitely not what i'm attributing to Marx. Just a case of my thinking ten things and typing out only one... I was going to pose my discussion differently, in terms of a comparison of Foucault and Marx, then i sort of changed ideas as i wrote...and didn't edit the title.

At any rate, my title is actually more to do with what i'm currently working on for an essay, in which i have to compare the "immanence" of Foucault and Marx's versions of critical theory...

(and i can tell already this is going to be a place for interesting discussion. thanks!)

[Jedothek]

What is the function of angle brackets in Nicolaus' translation of Grundrisse?

[rudolp73]

I appreciate Foucault's distrust of contemporary enthusiasms; turning sexuality into "health", glorifying technology at all costs, and that contemporary foreign interventions are largely aggressions disguised as pity. But to turn distrust in these things itself into a scholarly method is only something that could happen to the most privileged of a capitalist society very late into its machinations, and plays right into its processes of dispossessing those we're not immediately aware of. Especially when Foucault uses it to create a method of knowledge.