week+10+pedlt3


 * Post-Colonial Critic**

So I am fundamentally concerned with that heterogeneity, but I chose a universal discourse in that moment because I felt that rather than define myself as repudiating universality—because universalisation, finalisation, is an irreducible moment in any discourse—rather than define myself as specific rather than universal, I should see what in the universalizing discourse could be useful and then go on to see where that discourse meets its limits and its challenge within that field. I think we have to choose again strategically, not universal discourse but essentialist discourse. I think that since as a deconstructivist—see, I just took a label upon myself—I cannot in fact clean my hands and say, “I’m specific.” In fact I must say that I am an essentialist from time to time. There is, for example, the strategic choice of a genitalist essentialism in anti-sexist work today. How it relates to all of this other work I am talking about, I don’t know, but my search is not a search for coherence… […] One thing that comes out is that you jettison your own purity as a theorist. When you do this you can no longer say my theory is going to stand against anyone else’s because in this sense the practice really norms the theory, because you are an essentialist from time to time. (11-12)

MJP: So political practice is like housework?

GCS: And who doesn’t know this? Except political theorist who are opining from the academy with theological solutions once and for all. I mean, political practice is more complex than housework, but, to take the example of the metaphorical arena, it involves the same persistent effort. Because you are inserted in an inherited vocabulary, putting in heterosexist, feminist metaphors is important, but not enough. We must be conscious of this whilst we are engaging in other things; it can’t become our central goal just to keep watching our language. (41)

I continue to think that the real usefulness of these two //is// in the lesson of their refusal to be taken in by victories measured out in rational abstractions, in the dying fall of their urge persistently to critique those dogmas for the few (in the name of the many) that //we// cannot not want to inhabit. By reading Foucault in Derrida, I have tried to repeat the practical lesson of history, the perennial critique: //qui gagne perd//; who wins (also) loses. “A cautious skepticism with regard to the utopian politics and a neostoic almost Camusian[?] ‘pessimistic activism’ in the face of ultimate meaninglessness,” writes Thomas Flynn, of the same lesson.” By reading Foucault in Derrida in the wake of a reconsideration of Heidegger, I have tried to distinguish this trajectory from the existentialist position. […] This is the voice of caution, raised at the moment of negotiated independence, a critique of what one cannot not want. (46)
 * Outside the Teaching Machine**

…from a point of view where philosophy is seen as a private enterprise, where a complete break between philosophy and “citizenship” (necessarily of the postimperialist or neocolonialist “liberal” state) is taken as normal—from such a point of view, Foucault seems to be pushing for the poet’s desire for autonomy as a general ethical //goal//.

The point of my strategic and heuristic use of continuism is to emphasize that, if the ethical subject is //not// taken to be without historical, cultural, linguistic limits, then a study of its constitution(s) is the place to begin ethical investigations. As Andre Glucksmann writes: any ontico-ethical thinking must take into account or “make appear the dissymmetries, the disequilibriums, the aporias, the impossibilities, which are precisely the objects of all commitment. (39-40)

Foucault is no longer tripping up the programs of emancipation (mostly juridico-legal and political), but tracking the “practice of freedom.” It is indeed clear how far he is from a Derrida who has put the //praxis// of freedom to the test by the //techne// of each act of writing. Foucault, in his final serene mood, can write: “Liberty is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate... form taken by liberty.” The relationship between condition of (im)possibility and practice in Derrida would lead, in my understanding and formulation, to the more gymnastic “persistent critique of what one cannot not want.” (42)