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PHENOMENOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY IN FOUCAULT’S “INTRODUCTION TO BINSWANGER’S DREAM AND EXISTENCE“: A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE ORDER OF THINGS?

Dezember 15, 2016, 5:00 p.m., BÉATRICE HAN-PILE, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the relation between phenomenology and anthropology by placing Foucault's first published piece, “Introduction to Binswanger's Dream and Existence“ in dialectical tension with The Order of Things. I argue that the early work, which so far hasn't received much critical attention, is of particular interest because, whereas OT is notoriously critical of anthropological confusions in general, and of “Man” as an empirico-transcendental double in particular, IB views “existential anthropology” as a unique opportunity to establish a new and fruitful relation between transcendental forms and empirical contents. This is because IB focuses on a specific object, “Menschsein” (the “being of man”), which is neither the transcendental subject nor an empirical being (a member of the class Homo sapiens). Thus for the young Foucault, existential anthropology occupies a fertile methodological middle ground between transcendental approaches (exemplified in IB by Heideggerian phenomenology) and empirical forms of analysis (exemplified by Freudian psychoanalysis). I first interpret anthropology in the light of phenomenology and defend the view that Menschsein is neither a transcendental structure nor a concrete particular, but the instantiation of the first in the second. I argue that for anthropology to yield the full theoretical benefits Foucault claims for it, the particular cases of Menschsein examined in existential analysis have to be regarded as exemplary. I then read phenomenology back in the light of anthropology and examine how, for Foucault, the analysis of Menschsein in dreams benefits fundamental ontology by affording us a clearer view of some of the main existentiale than the focus on everyday waking experience in Being and Time. Finally, I turn to the limits and difficulties of this early position and my reading of it, and to their consequences for Foucault's later view.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10825

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FOUCAULT’S ICONIC AFTERLIFE: THE POSTHUMOUS REACH OF WORDS AND THINGS

Dezember 15, 2016, 5:00 p.m., NANCY PARTNER, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

The lasting influence of Michel Foucault's work is both instantly recognizable in that his very name can be invoked as a noun or adjective (“Foucauldian”), as a critical stance or attitude without further elaboration, and yet his signature concepts have been flattened, stretched, exaggerated, and thinned as they have been applied by his most enthusiastic followers. Although Foucault has entered the canon of philosophers, he also became iconic, most notably with the typographic icon, power/knowledge, a (possibly unwanted) achievement of recognition and compression virtually unknown to other philosophers. In this essay, I consider the Foucault of the philosophical canon, and I trace some of the main routes of the iconic Foucault into acceptance or nonacceptance by the academic disciplines, notably history and anthropology, and numerous other unexpected venues where variants of Foucault's ideas have found surprising homes. I also contemplate the meaning of the status of “iconicity” as it has been analyzed by sociologists, and the possibility that iconic misreadings of Foucault's concepts have been extraordinarily “good to think with” by his critics.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10827

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Issue Information – TOC

Dezember 15, 2016, 5:00 p.m., History and Theory, Allgemein.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.00007

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NATURE AND THE IRRUPTIVE VIOLENCE OF HISTORY

Dezember 15, 2016, 5:00 p.m., JULIAN BOURG, Allgemein.

ABSTRACT

Historical thinking has long defined itself in part through opposition to the natural, in spite of periodic critical efforts to bridge the gap. Deeper in Western traditions of historical reflection are traces of modes of thought through which the distance between human history and nature writ large tends to collapse. Two thinkers not often placed in dialogue—Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin—both unearthed aspects of this subterranean current. Foucault's The Order of Things maps different moments of Benjamin's trajectory: Renaissance resemblance and the metaphysics of language, classical taxonomy and the baroque “mourning-play,” and modern history and commodity culture in the nineteenth century. Violence appears periodically as the irruptive and disruptive force that conditions the natural-historical and thus an anthropocentric history that derives from it: from post-Edenic Babel to geological cataclysm and corporeal transience to the Marquis de Sade, Karl Marx, capitalism, and total war. Without in any way succumbing to naturalism, that inverse of subject-centered instrumental reasoning, both Foucault and Benjamin considered the import of the natural-historical for the eventual articulation of contemporary historical thinking and in doing so contributed to the regeneration of natural history as a mode of thought.

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10831

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