[Fifty-something intellectuals will recall Frenchie theatre of the absurdist Samuel Beckett's _Waiting for Godot_]
_Waiting for Foucault : And Other Aphorisms_
by Marshall Sahlins
Waiting for Foucault ( aphorism on page 37)
" A man of a thousand masks" one of his biographers said of Michel Foucault, so how seriously can we take the guise he assumed to say that power arises in struggle , in war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. "Who fights whom ?" he asked. "We all fight each other." Critics and exegetes hardly notice Foucault's connections to Hobbes except to mention the apparently radical disclaimer that his own notion of power is "the exact opposite of Hobbes' project in _Leviathan_" We have to give up our fascination with sovereignty, "cut off the king's head, " free out attention from the repressive institutions of state. Power comes from below. It is invested in the structures and cleavages of everyday life, omnipresent in quotidian regimes of knowledge and truth. If in the Hobbesian contrast subjects constitute the power, the Commonwealth that keeps them all in awe, in the Foucaldian schema power constitutes the subjects. All the same, the structuralism
the later Foucault abandoned for a sense of the poly-amorphous perverse, this structuralism taught that opposites are things alike in all significant respects but one. So when Foucault speaks of a war of each against all, and in the next breath even hints of a Christian divided self - "And there is always within each of us something that fights something else " — we are tempted to believe that he and Hobbes have more in common than the fact that, with the exception of Hobbes, both were bald.
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