{"id":5639,"date":"2010-05-17T14:57:50","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T18:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5639"},"modified":"2010-05-17T15:07:32","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T19:07:32","slug":"5639","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/05\/17\/5639\/","title":{"rendered":"foucault critique of Hegel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire<\/em>. 1987.\u00a0 182-183<\/p>\n

Indeed, for Foucault, domination is not a single stage in an historical narrative whose ultimate destination is decidedly beyond domination. …<\/p>\n

For Foucault, domination is not, as it is for Hegel, an impossible or self-contradictory enterprise. On the contrary, the prohibitive or regulative law must find ways to implement itself, and the various strategies of that law\u2019s self-implementation become the occasions for new historical configurations of force.\u00a0 Regulative or prohibitive laws, what Foucault will come to call \u201cjuridical\u201d laws, are curiously generative. They create the phenomena they are meant to control: they delimit some range of phenomena as subordinate and thereby give potential identity and mobility to what they intend to subdue.\u00a0 They create inadvertent consequences, unintended results, a proliferation of repercussions precisely because there is no prior dialectical prefiguration of what form historical experience must take<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Without the assumption of prior ontological harmony, conflict can be seen to produce effects that exceed the bounds of dialectical unity and result in a multiplication of consequences.<\/em><\/p>\n

From this perspective, conflict does not result in the restoration of metaphysical order, but becomes the condition for a complication and proliferation of historical experience, a creation of new historical forms.<\/p>\n

This \u201cnon-place\u201d of emergence, this conflictual moment to which produces historical innovation, must by understood as a nondialectical version of difference, <\/span>not unlike the \u201cdifference\u201d which, for Derrida, permanently ruptures the relation between sign and signified.\u00a0 For both Derrida and Foucault, the Hegelian theme of relational opposition is radically challenged through a formulation of difference as a primary and irrefutable linguistic\/historical constant<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The inversion of Hegel\u2019s prioritization of identity over difference is achieved through the postulation of certain kinds of \u201cdifference\u201d as historically invariant and insuperable. In effect, the difference whereof Foucault and Derrida speak are differences that cannot be aufgehoben<\/em> into more inclusive identities.<\/p>\n

Any effort to posit an identity, whether the identity of the linguistic signified or the identity of some historical epoch, is necessarily undermined by the difference that conditions any such positing.\u00a0 Indeed, where identity is posited, difference is not aufgehoben<\/em>, but concealed.\u00a0 In fact, it appears safe to conclude that for both Derrida and Foucault, Aufhebung is nothing other than a strategy of concealment, not the incorporation of difference into identity<\/span>, but the denial of difference for the sake of positing a fictive identity. We shall see that for Lacan the role of difference functions similarly. For both Derrida and Foucault, difference displaces the metaphysical impulse from its totalizing goal<\/span>.\u00a0 The Derridean moment of linguistic misfire where the conceit of referentiality debunks itself, undermines the Hegelian effort to establish sign and signified as internally related features of a unified reality.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the Foucaultian moment of conflict seems capable of producing only ever greater complexity in its wake, proliferating opposition beyond its binary configurations into multiple and diffuse forms<\/span>, thus undermining the possibility of an Hegelian synthesis of binary opposites.<\/p>\n

It is clear that both Derrida and Foucault theorize from within the tradition of a dialectic deprived of the power of synthesis.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it becomes necessary to distinguish between kinds<\/em> of difference, some of which are dialectical and always reinstate identity subsequent to any appearance of ontological difference and others of which are nondialectical and resist assimilation into any kind of synthetic unity. To find the latter sort of difference is to change the very meaning of the \u201clabor of the negative,\u201d for this \u201clabor\u201d consist of building relations where there seemed to be none, in the \u201cmagic power that converts the negative into being.\u201d\u00a0 Nondialectical difference would convert the negative only and always into further negativity or reveal difference itself, not as the negative, but as a qualitative permutation of Being;<\/span> in effect, nondialectical difference, despite its various forms, is the labor of the negative which has lost its \u201cmagic,\u201d a labor that does not construct a higher-order being but either deconstructs the illusions of a restorative ontological immanence and posits nondialectical difference as irreducible, or rejects the primacy of difference of any kind and offers a theory of primary metaphysical plenitude which eludes Hegelian categories<\/span> and entails a defense of affirmation on nondialectical grounds.\u00a0 (184)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. 1987.\u00a0 182-183 Indeed, for Foucault, domination is not a single stage in an historical narrative whose ultimate destination is decidedly beyond domination. … For Foucault, domination is not, as it is for Hegel, an impossible or self-contradictory enterprise. On the contrary, the prohibitive or regulative law must find ways to … Continue reading “foucault critique of Hegel”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,100],"tags":[132],"class_list":["post-5639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-hegel","tag-subjectsdesire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5639"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5643,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5639\/revisions\/5643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}