Lectures on the Will to Know (original) (raw)
https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137044860
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Abstract
Lectures on the Will to Know, Michel Foucault, Edited by Arnold I. Davidson Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com-licensed to Staffordshire University-PalgraveConnect-2016-02-08 * From here, ms page 18, corrections and rewritings seem to indicate that it is no longer a matter of one and the same lecture, but of different presentations. (See Appendix below, p. 195 et seq.) 10.1057/9781137044860-Lectures on the Will to Know, Michel Foucault, Edited by Arnold I. Davidson
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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.
Foucault’s Genealogy As Epistemology
Belgrade Philosophical Annual 26: 75-96, 2013
In this paper, I argue that Foucault's theorizing about knowledge, power and the subject of knowledge should be part of epistemology as philosophical discipline. Epistemology is redefined and understood as theorizing about knowledge in general and as inseparable from politics. The paper focuses on genealogy as epistemology starting from the thesis that Foucault in his genealogical works develops a conception of power that has important consequences on epistemological concepts of knowledge and the knower/subject of knowledge who is not a constituting Cartesian subject, but a constituted subject, an effect of power and knowledge constellations. Genealogy (as epistemology) is further understood as "insurrection of subjugated knowledges", of knowledges and knowers discredited and marginalized by dominant totalizing theories. Subjugated, local knowledges have the potential of creating new epistemological space, because their relation to power could be different than that of dominant knowledges. Therefore, genealogy could be seen as an epistemological method that opens new possibilities for theorizing about knowledge.
Semiotica, 2017
In his Geneva lectures in November 1891, Saussure stated a sort of “paradox of the will,” saying: “Can linguistic facts be said to be the result of acts of will? That is the question. The current science of language gives a positive answer. However, one should add immediately that … the linguistic act, if I might call it that, is characterized as being the least reflected on, the least premeditated, as well as the most impersonal of all.” This issue – shared with Michel Bréal – remains important in Saussure’s thought until the end, and it is possible to read some of the most important pages of his works in the light of this paradox – a kind of free will problem in a linguistic fashion. Such a focus on the will opens a different perspective on semiology (“For the distinguishing characteristic of the sign – but the one that is least apparent at first sight
2017
The question of forgiveness arose for Paul Ricoeur from the first moment of his phenomenology of the will. Isolating consciousness in order to describe its structure, especially that of its willing dimension (freedom), presupposes a distancing from the world, but also a distancing from evil. The precondition of this distancing is forgiveness. Forgiveness appears when consciousness is ready to reject the finitude that, of necessity, opposes itself to freedom: this 'face' of forgiveness, distinguished from the articulation of phenomenology and hermeneutics, is the admiration carried by Stoic and Orphic myths. This forgiveness releases freedom from an evil identified as contempt for finitude. Forgiveness appears next when the evil endured at the hands of another challenges one's freedom: this essay will develop what Ricoeur could only sketch regarding the idea of "Franciscan" hope. Forgiveness appears, finally, when Ricoeur explores it in connection with guilt. In...
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References (9)
- Moulinier, in "Le Pur et l'Impur," pp. 60-61, writes: "It is the drama that teaches us that Orestes and Oedipus are polluted ... Pollutions enter the written legends after Homer and Hesiod. Previously we were not told that they were."
- Sophocle, OE dipe roi , p. 142: Thebes is "drowned in a bloody surf: it perishes in the fruitful seeds of the earth, it perishes in the cattle in the fields, in the sterile abortions of women"; Sophocles, Oedipus the King , pp. 11-12: Thebes " ... can scarcely lift its brow out of the depths, out of the bloody surf. A blight is on the fruitful plants of the earth, A blight is on the cattle in the fields, a blight is on our women that no children are born to them."
- Ibid., p. 149; ibid., p. 20: " ... I forbid any to welcome him or cry him greeting or make him a sharer in sacrifice or offering to the Gods, or give him water for his hands to wash. I command all to drive him from their homes."
- See V. Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954).
- L. Moulinier, "Le Pur et l'Impur" p. 199: "There are two causes of the impurity of Oedipus, the murder and the incest, but sexual purity is not a Greek notion."
- S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams , trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Pscho-analysis, 1958) vol. IV.
- Probably an allusion to Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London: Routledge, 2002 [1927]): "By implicitly accepting that the Oedipus complex exists in all forms of society, psychoanalysts have seriously vitiated their anthropological work." [I have not been able to trace this quotation in the original English edition of the work. The editor's note cites the French translation, by S. Jank é l é vitch, La Sexualit é et sa r é pression dans les soci é t é s primitives (Paris: Payot, 1932), p. 189; G.B.]
- Discursive events: this notion, introduced into Foucauldian analysis fairly recently, appeared in "Sur l'arch é ologie des sciences. R é ponse au Cercle d'épistemologie" (1968), Dits et É crits , I, pp. 696-731; "Quarto" ed., vol. I, pp. 724-759; English translation as "On the Archeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemological Circle" in Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York and London: The New Press/Penguin Books, 1998). Previously Foucault spoke of "discourse as event."
- The description of the event: "a set of singularities, of singular points characterizing a math- ematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person," is fundamental for Deleuze. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense , trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone Press, 1990) p. 52.
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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...
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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.
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