Lectures on the Will to Know (original) (raw)
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The subject of truth : on Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know
2014
This essay argues that in order fully to appreciate the reorientation of Foucault‟s lecture courses from the 1980s around the concepts of “truth” and “subjectivity,” it is necessary to read closely his very first lecture course at the College de France, Lectures on the Will to Know (1970-1971), in which, for the first time, Foucault focuses on the event of truth itself, rather than on a discourse of truth within the social or human sciences. The lectures delineate the Aristotelian “morphology of knowledge” and “system of truth” that have dominated western thought, and, with Nietzsche, question its underlying assumptions. Specifically, they bring out a deeper, more complex phenomenon, identified as the “will to know,” which reveals the inextricable bond between truth, knowledge and power. Foucault‟s genealogy of truth reveals the historical and contingent conditions of emergence of a morphology of thought which presents itself as natural, necessary, and disinterested. In doing so, ho...
9. Ch4 - The Understated importance of the Will
Gramsci's Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Theory of Democracy, 1992
Please note: this is Chapter 4 in Gramsci's Democratic Theory. I could only upload one section at a time - this is section 9 of 13 in total. FROM THE BOOK: The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci serve as the foundation for Sue Golding's in-depth study of Gramsci's contribution to radical dem- ocratic theory. Her analysis encompasses English, Italian, and French debates on the subject, as well as political and philosophical discus- sions on the limitations of liberal and socialist democratic theory. Golding explains how Gramsci arrives at the conclusion that a funda- mentally pluralistic 'post-liberal' democracy - that is to say, one that is 'open/ fluid, and based on an immanent and heterogeneous will of the people - is not only possible and preferable, but actually obtainable. The consequences of his analysis are dramatic: on the one hand, Gramsci is able to provide a conception of the structure which is no longer static or reducible to a formal economic moment; it is, instead, profoundly political, since it becomes both the repository and expression of change as well as the terrain upon which a better society can emerge. On the other hand, he is able to incorporate as fundamental to a post-liberal democratic theory a number of concepts often overlooked in the theoretical discussions of socialist democracy. Gramsci demonstrates that if one is to take seriously historical materialism and the kind of democratic society to which it points, one will necessarily be faced with a clear choice. One can either accept a flawed but strategically powerful methodology based on the dialectics of a philosophy of praxis or, more to the point, take as a given the profundity of the political and the radical diversity this implies, and search for a new logic. In the concluding chapter, Golding takes a look at the possible resolutions offered by way of a discursive (or what has come to be known as postmodern) philosophy outlined in part by the surrealists and further developed in the work of Laclau, Mouffe, Foucault, and Derrida.
In the twentieth century, the concept of the will has been portrayed in bad light. Martin Heidegger, for instance, criticizes the will as a movement of reducing otherness to sameness, difference to identity. Since his diagnosis of the will, the releasement from a wilful manner of thinking and the exploration of the possibility of non-willing has become a prevalent issue in contemporary philosophy. This article questions whether we have to reject the will in such a radical way. Is there not a third position possible beyond willing and non-willing, a concept of willing which exceeds the reduction of otherness to sameness, difference to identity? Heidegger himself attempted to develop a proper concept of the will in the onset of the thirties. We start therefore our inquiry with Heidegger’s phenomenology of the will in the thirties. We will discern three main characteristics of Heidegger’s concept of the will. Although Heidegger later on was very critical of the concept of the will, we are not inclined to reject the concept of the will as he did eventually. By following the intimations of Heidegger's phenomenology of willing, we are able to identify some limitations of his later rejection of the will and offer our own thoughts on how to build on Heidegger's phenomenology of willing.
2015
Although its origins stem from theological debates, the general will would ultimately become one of the most celebrated and denigrated concepts emerging from early modern political thought. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would make it the central element of his political theory, and it would take on a life of its own during the French Revolution before being subjected to generations of embrace or opprobrium. James Farr and David Lay Williams have collected for the first time a set of essays that track the evolving history of the general will from its origins to recent times. These essays include attention to the general will’s theological, political, formal, and substantive dimensions with a careful eye to the concept’s virtues and limitations as understood by its expositors and critics, among them Pascal, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and John Rawls.
On The Genealogy of the Ereignis of Knowledge: Foucault, Deleuze & Heidegger
In this essay, I attempt an interpretation of what Michel Foucault means by the term ’event’ in the period from The Archaeology of Knowledge until his death in 1984. The sense in which I propose to examine the role of ‘events’ in Foucault is a combination of the senses used by Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of ’event’ as Er-eignis in On Time and Being, Identity and Difference and “The Way to Language.” I show the ramifications of this understanding in terms of Foucault’s genealogy and the mechanics of force and power relationships. In doing so, I explicate an interpretation of Foucaultian genealogy and demonstrate how the notion of ‘event’ discussed herein may aid in reconciling genealogy with archaeology. Finally, I discuss the difference between relations of force and relations of power in terms of the ‘event’ and genealogy in order to show how genealogy can be a means of resistance to power and to demonstrate the operative mechanisms of power relation reversal. I demonstrate this by way of Friedrich Nietzche’s text “On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense.” This paper explores the construction of language and of power, knowledge and discourse as events in Foucault. Ultimately force relations are irreducible to power relations and vice versa. The persistence of force relations beneath the relations of power is precisely that which allows reversal and instability, and genealogy operates on the level of designating these points of confrontation or Emergences “Entstehung” in order to either create and appropriate a new form of knowledge, or to appropriate subjugated knowledges in order to bring them to light and make use of them in the reversal of the power relationship. In the course of this, a better understanding of the relation between knowledge and power is attempted in terms of the ‘event.’ This is an excerpt from a senior thesis project. Other sections examine in greater depth the relation between Foucault and Nietzsche as well as the relation between this interpretation of ‘event’ and Foucault’s archaeological concepts of the episteme and historical a priori. I show that these concepts are still operative after The Archaeology of Knowledge. The final chapter will discuss the mechanisms of interaction between power and positivity and the relation between strategy and power with the aim of explicating the mechanisms operative in an epistemic rupture. I will examine the particular case of the break that, according to Foucault, occurred between 1775 and 1825. This chapter has been slightly abridged for clarity of focus and for length.