>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > So, Foucault's theory has a pessimistic cast especially in his
>Weberian strain,
> > for he practically argues that modernity represents no progress whatsoever
> > over the pre-modern state of affairs & that there is no way out of
> > the iron cage that he describes, only an ever-present dialectic of
> > power & resistance to it.
>
>So how, as a politically engaged philosopher, was
>Foucault "active" in a laudable way?
To judge the quality of Foucault's activism, I need to know more than I know about Foucault's life & French politics (I mainly know of his political activism through some of his own interviews -- I need other French leftists' opinions about it), but I'd say that his politics was not very coherent, as you can see below in Jim Farmelant's summary:
At 3:46 PM -0400 6/8/01, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>Well, Foucault at different times had different things to say about
>his relationship with Marxism. Early in his career he was a
>Communist, but after breaking with the Party back in the '50s, he
>declared that he was no longer a Marxist but a Nietzschean. In the
>early '60s he appears to have been identified politically with the
>Gaullists who at one point even appointed him to a commission on the
>reform of French higher education. However, starting around the
>mid-60s he shifted politically to the far left, allying himself at
>least for a while with the Maoists. In 1979, he was a vociferous
>supporter of the Iranian Revolution. In his last years, Foucault
>began to take an interest in liberal thought, and he wrote on such
>people as Hayek.
In any case, my criticism concerns Foucault the theorist, not Foucault the political activist; you can very well be a good political activist even if your theoretical premises are off the mark, and vice versa.
At 6:18 PM -0700 6/12/01, Alec Ramsdell wrote:
>If his pessimism
>presents a snag to notions of recontesting, how did
>he, or how could one justify his political activism,
>such as it was? He couldn't have been that
>pessimistic if he was that engaged.
Foucault's pessimism mainly expressed itself in rejection of Marxist theory & socialist revolution, not in rejection of all reforms. His idea of the "specific intellectual" (as opposed to the model of the "universal intellectual" represented by Sartre & the like) goes well with his preference for micro-politics.
Yoshie
P.S. I like Foucault the stylist. Foucault the historian of sexuality has much to offer through his emphasis upon discontinuities (= an unprecedented episteme that emerged because of the rise of capitalism & changes within the new episteme), though he expressly rejects the only theory -- Marxism -- that can actually explain the discontinuities he identifies.