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  • So, Foucault's History of Madness is one where madness comes to be the vehicle for

  • him to understand how we reinforce social codes.

  • In such a way as to limit, increasingly limit the possibilities we have.

  • For alternative ways of life, alternative pleasures for, or even one might say, for

  • the experience intensity. Intensity is pushed to the side, or

  • intensity is diminished in favor of normality.

  • That's, that's the Foucauldian light motif, I think, in much of his work.

  • Here's another quotation from the prison work excuse me, [LAUGH] from the asylum

  • work. Madness escaped from the arbitrary only

  • in order to enter a kind of endless trial for which the asylum furnished

  • simultaneously police, magistrates, and torturers.

  • Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside of it.

  • For a long time to come, Foucault writes, a madness is, becomes part of a moral

  • world. And our moral world, Foucault thinks, is

  • a world of of social conformity, reinforced social conformity.

  • And Foucault, really delighted in showing how the pursuit of anti-conformity

  • [LAUGH] often lead to more conformity. Because you concretize or make too stable

  • some alternatives, you make them into identity markers that then become their

  • own forces of conformity. So, for example Foucault in his History

  • of Sexuality wanted to show how the fluidity of sexuality gets increasingly

  • controlled over time, especially in the modern period.

  • Especially when people think they're pursuing sexual freedom, they create new

  • categories for how you should pursue sexual freedom.

  • New forms of identity to which you should conform even if that identity is is

  • liberatory, is outside of the main stream.

  • But you create a new mode of, of being that you then have to conform to.

  • This is Foucault's great subject. How we, in a way, police ourselves.

  • How we dominate ourselves by saying, oh, I am going to be a radical.

  • I'm going to be a radical. And now, I have to act like the radicals

  • act. In other words, you conform to the image

  • of radicalization. Some might you say, well, I am not a

  • diseased person because I like to have sex with people of my own gender.

  • No, no, I am not that. I am free, I am gay, or I'm a homosexual,

  • or I'm a lesbian. I am free.

  • And Foucault says, yeah, you're free. But now, notice how we start to have to

  • conform to being gay, being lesbian. What it, why do we need always to find a

  • new mode of conformity? a label for our freedom that comes then

  • to repress us. That his subject.

  • I mean, the repressive hypothesis is the core of psychoanalysis.

  • You know, the, the reason I keep walking around is because I'm repressing what I

  • really want to do. The reason my shoulder keeps going up is

  • because I'm, I'm repressing something else.

  • And so, if I repress something, something else, the repressed impulse comes out in

  • another form. And Foucault thought this was very

  • deceptive mode of thinking. And, and thought it, it deceived us about

  • the nature of pleasure and desire. it convinced us that, for example, if I

  • just lie down on the couch here and tell you about what I'm really thinking, that

  • somehow I would be liberated to, and that's kind of nice actually.

  • >> [LAUGH] >> to, I'd be liberated to, to, to tell you

  • what what I really want, why I really like Foucault.

  • What really is going on, I [UNKNOWN]. because I'm sitting up now.

  • >> [LAUGH] >> But if I were [SOUND] lying down and free

  • associating, I would be able somehow to access my true feelings and get them

  • beyond repression. Foucault then say, that's a big mistake.

  • More than that, it's a productive mistake produces the following.

  • It produces lots of talk around sexuality.

  • How repressed we are, how many vines, how many vines of freight talking about how

  • repressed we are. How many volumes of that Repertorium

  • Literature in society talk about how much they didn't talk about sex?

  • In other words, there' nothing better than talk, their repressive hypothesis

  • for talking about sex. And so, the idea that some of you feel

  • liberated by talking is what Foucault would call wrong.

  • What happens, as you might expect right now with Foucault, you keep talking about

  • things you learned to talk in the same way.

  • You learn to desire the same things. You reduce heterogeneity and you increase

  • conformity, that's the path. Whether he does it in the, the book, the

  • books on prison, these very popular books.

  • discipline and punish where he shows that we used to torture prisoners in, in very

  • public ways. And we used to be barbaric towards them.

  • And now, now we think we have to rehabilitate them.

  • We think prisoners should be given a moral treatment that brings them back

  • into the fold, if you will. But Foucault was very suspicious of this

  • effort at rehabilitation. He says, what happens instead is that we

  • take the forces that used to go into torture and policing, and we put them

  • into policing ourselves all the time. The schools themselves become the engines

  • of conformity. Schools become like prisons.

  • All our institutions start resembling prisons because all of our institutions

  • start pushing a model of identity from which they cannot escape.

  • The last reading we had from, from Foucault, and I'm going to have to just

  • call it up on my screen here so I can give you correct cor, cor, correct

  • quotations. is about enlightenment echoing Kant's

  • essay we read in the very first week. What is enlightenment?

  • Foucault writes that Kant was not seeking to understand the present on the basis of

  • a totality or of a future achievement. Kant was looking for a difference.

  • With, what a difference does today, sorry.

  • Kant was looking for a difference. What difference does today introduce with

  • respect to yesterday? What difference does today introduce with

  • respect to yesterday? Kant, Foucault says, is interested in how

  • enlightenment marks a possibility, a change, a difference.

  • And for Foucault, that creates a what he calls an attitude of modernity.

  • An attitude of modernity. And for Foucault, and this is a less

  • pessimistic side of Foucault that sees in a modernity, especially modernity that

  • he, that Foucault associates with Baudelaire.

  • modernity is a a time when you can invent possibilities rather than conform to

  • alternatives. Here is Foucault, a mar an attitude of

  • modernity. a section of the essay, What is

  • Enlightenment? For the attitude of modernity, the high

  • value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it,

  • to imagine it otherwise than it is. This, and this is really the key

  • Foucauldian phrase, to imagine, to imagine modernity otherwise than it is.

  • That, that's what Foucault is always looking for.

  • to, to think about reality that could be otherwise than it is.

  • He gets this from the surrealists and, and it becomes a key part of his

  • thinking. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise,

  • Foucault writes, in which extreme attention is extreme, sorry.

  • Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real

  • is confronted with the practice of a freedom that simultaneously respects this

  • reality and violates it. For Baudelaire, Foucault says, that you

  • paid great attention to the world around you.

  • You don't want to just close your eyes and imagine another society.

  • No, you pay attention to the world around you.

  • Extreme attention. But you pay that attention in the service

  • of imagining an alternative to the reality that's around you.

  • Violates the reality, alright? Violate the reality around you.

  • you don't want to just try to discover something else in the status quo.

  • You want to invent something else. You want to create something else.

  • This is Foucault and Baudelaire. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the

  • man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his inner truth, he is the

  • man who tries to invent himself. This is the core message of our, our week

  • for Foucault, our, our section of Foucault.

  • Modern man is he who tries to invent himself, not discover himself.

  • Not find the true essence, or the foundation, or the telos, the goal, but

  • to invent yourself. This modernity does not liberate man in

  • his being, Foucault writes. It compels man to face the task of

  • producing himself. Produce yourself, don't find yourself.

  • Because then, you have the possibilities of liberation that is new rather than

  • liberation that is conforming to another, somebody else's model of what it means to

  • be free. And this is what Foucault's critical

  • practice is all about. How do we expand the possibilities of

  • invention that changed the world around us, without succumbing to new modes of

  • conformity, new models of oppression. Foucault talks about this as practical

  • critique. The critical question today has to be

  • turned back into a positive one. The point in brief is to transform the

  • critique conducted in the form of a necessary limitation into a practical

  • critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.

  • Here, he's actually criticizing, if I can use that word here, the fact that school

  • people, the Horkheimer and Adorno's model of say, showing how limited everything

  • is. Showing how we're, we're caged in.

  • And Foucault says, what we need is a critique that opens up possibilities of

  • transgression. Just like Baudelaire did in, remember in

  • The Bad Glazier poem where he just threw something at this guy to shouting at him

  • make life beautiful. It was transgressive, it wasn't moral, it

  • didn't conform to anything else. But, it opened a space.

  • That's what Baudelaire was trying to do with his poems, and that's what Foucault

  • is trying to do with his histories. Open a space of possibility where

  • something new might happen. What is at stake, Foucault writes then,

  • is this. How can the growth of capabilities be

  • disconnected from the intensification of power relations?

  • How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensificication

  • of power relations? Can we create possibilities that are not

  • just going to be subsumed into new modes of repression?

  • That was Foucault's, that was from Foucault's work.

  • The, the, the, exploration of possibility without those explorations becoming new

  • forms of repression. And Foucault sought that out in his

  • personal life, he sought that out in his teaching.

  • He sought that out in in his books and essays and, and in, in the arts that he

  • thought about and wrote about. I had the the privilege as a young

  • historian to, to work with Foucault in, in Paris.

  • And I was working on the kinds of things that Foucault really didn't like at all,

  • frankly. I was working on Hegelian things, you

  • know? And my, and my dissertation was on

  • Hegelianism in France. And Foucault was the great enemy of

  • Hegelianism in France. And, but I, I he was very kind and

  • generous with me and, and helped me connect to people that I needed to know

  • to do my research. And I was really struck by his of course,

  • his, his charisma, his powers as a thinker, as a teacher.

  • But also, by his generosity. Because I think part of his generosity

  • was the creation of possibilities from even people who disagreed with him.

  • Creation of possibilities in a world that increasingly closed off things for us and

  • to us. He was a thinker who wanted to open up

  • things for us and to us. and he did that with gusto with with

  • generosity and with a piercing intelligence.

  • We'll come back to some people in that Foucauldian tradition next time.

  • and when we, when we go on into the postmodernism as we approach the present.

  • Thanks.

So, Foucault's History of Madness is one where madness comes to be the vehicle for

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從批判理論到後現代主義,第4部分,共4篇。 (From Critical Theory to Postmodernism, part 4 of 4)

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