SML Research Seminar Series - 24th October 2013, 16:00 - 17:00, Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building. Patrick O’Donovan (Cork): Foucault and transgression 1963-1984 One view of modern thought would say that to engage with limits is to dissolve them. But the opposite view proves just as tenacious: the dissolution of limits merely brings them back into play. So argues Jean-Luc Marion: it is not that we go beyond limits; it is rather that we go beyond things we think of as certainties. Across the human sciences, we encounter again and again versions of the claim that the limits which exist in the modern world are decisively those of thought. But this is a claim that may seem to border on paradox if we recall Hegel’s refutation of the assertion ‘that the limitation of thought cannot be transcended’. He simply observes that ‘to make such an assertion is to be unaware that the very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended’. Yet Hegel himself, in asserting the freedom of thought from limits, ends by identifying thinking with them. In looking at Foucault, I shall consider some of the different stances with which the breached limit can be identified and shall focus on three essays written at important points in his life-work: ‘Préface à la transgression’; ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’; and ‘What is Enlightenment?’. Each of the three essays offers a quite distinct perspective: in the first, the limit is closely identified with transgression; in the second, the limits of knowledge are portrayed as being those of the subject of knowledge; and in the third, philosophy is characterized as a limit-attitude, one which is linked again to the possibility of going beyond certain limits, but not on the basis of a model of transgression. I shall sketch three perspectives on the situation of thought relative to limits in the light of Foucault’s work. 1.The understanding of our actualité, if we follow Foucault, implies an identification of philosophy with our situation, perhaps with our limits. 2.Philosophy is identified both with a breach and with the occupation of a space where the sense of the limit is that which is given by transgression. 3.A breached limit has the scope to locate effective constraints on thought — the limit is thus both dissolved and to be dissolved. I shall conclude by offering a broadly contextual evaluation of these stances, comparing Foucault’s work with that of some other thinkers who are his contemporaries, among them Adorno, Certeau and Deleuze, and some who are ours, including Geuss, Descombes and Le Dœuff. ncl.ac.uk/sml/about/seminars/item/ODonovan
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 07:44:49 +0000
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