If one of you Marxist scholars and psychoanalysts who see this post can help me clear a couple things up: Here, in Society Must Be Defended, January 7 1976 Lecture, Foucault is criticising the limitations of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in regards to their abilities for social and political criticism from 1960-1975, and I want to know more as to what he deems as their *positive attributes to social criticism, as well as their *negative (from what he says: in order for either framework to be successful at social critique, especially of local and particular practices and institutions, it must be broken down and particularised. The passage: The happenings of this period revealed “what might be called the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or … all-encompassing and global theories.” Not that all-encompassing and global theories haven’t, in fairly constant fashion, provided—and don’t continue to provide—tools that can be used at the local level; Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they can. But they have, I think, provided tools that can be used at the local level only when, and this is the real point, the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on. Or at least that the totalizing approach always has the effect of putting the brakes on. So that, if you like, is my first point, the first characteristic of what has been happening over the last fifteen years or so: the local character of the critique... (p5)
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 18:18:09 +0000