First, she writes about how the early, super-structuralist and Foucault share much in common. But...
"But then Foucault and the early MacKinnon begin to diverge. Foucault sought to develop genealogies of knowledge -- to find out how a human will to know had produced shapely and powerful knowledg*es*. His Volume One traced modern sexuality back to the Christian confessional to argue that sex has been "constituted as a problem of truth." Foucault sought out the conditions of this knowledge. He thought that power/knowledge posited the products as Truth: so that knowing the Truth would subject one to it; while seeking to *know knowledge* enabled on to seek to avoid or disrupt this equation. Hence Foucault's persistent appetite for undoing his own knowledge. The second volume of the _History of Sexuality_, for example, begins with the announcement that his research program (taking the genealogy back to the classical and late antiquity) had utterly dislocated his ideas, had required a complete reframing of the problem, and had delayed publication of the new work for years. And he gave no apology:
"As to those of you to whom to work hard , to begin again and again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next -- as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet." And finally since knowledge produces subjects (that is to say, ia power that has the effect of asujetissement), he relished the way in which such disruptions produced a new Michel Foucault: "When I write, I do it above all to change myeslf and not to think the same thing as before.
Foucault was thus deeply irratonalist. By comparison, the later MacKinnon and certainly Roving West are strong rational positivists. I've already parsted MacKinnon's transition form the 'Signs" articles, ..., to her 1989 book _Toward a Feminist Theory of the State_, to show a shift from affirming both the necessity and the impossibility of knowing "women's point of view," to a claim to speak unproblematically from it. Surely not accidentally MacKinnon the Certain Knower reached her apotheosis in a 2000 paper, "Points against Postmodernism," where she resists precisely the irrationalism I've attributed to Foucault .. by claiming, for herself and for feminism, positive knowledge of reality as it is experience by women.
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