> I wonder how wide the theory-haters cast their net. Derrida, no doubt.
> Butler, probably - but even that LRB article on anti-Semitism? Zizek?
> Probably him too. Foucault? Did he do anything worthwhile, or is he
> another one of those Gallic obfucators?
How can the following provide a rational basis for a theory of anything?
"The grounding assumptions of humanism presuppose that experience is prior to its expression in language. Humanists conceive of language as a tool of representation of pre-existent reality devised for communication between unique individuals. Ferdinand de Saussure redefined language as constitutive of reality . It is not a mere tool in service of a transcendental subject, but language (langue) is a set of rules that condition our perception of reality and determine the speaking subject ."
This claim (which is itself a claim by a "speaking subject" about what is claimed to be an unknowable reality) rules out knowledge of e.g. the nature of systems of discipline and punishment and of the motivation that created them?
If our perception of reality is conditioned in the way claimed, how can we know that the will to power is acted out in all that happens let alone that the acting out is instrumentally rational? The first claim - that the will to power is acted out in all that happens - implicitly supposes that its makers, Nietzsche and Foucault, know the essence of human motivation. The second, Foucault's, implicitly assumes that those acting out a will to power can themselves know reality. How could they be instrumentally rational if they couldn't know the consequences of creating a particular system of discipline and punishment?
Apart from the self-contradiction involved, I don't think you can fully understand any particular system of discipline and punishment by treating it as wholly the product of the instrumentally rational pursuit of an invariant will to power.
Ted