(Scott Eric Kaufman (the ”Eric“ is not silent) writes: ”Matt, At this point, I think everyone could use some good old fashioned self-mockery, and if you and I have to be the ones to provide it, so be it...if you wouldn't mind posting my bit on Foucault to Long Sunday, I think that may actually be something incredibly useful. Feel free to preface it with something incredibly snarky (it's what I'd do), and then let's see how the conversation at LS differs (or doesn't) from the conversation at the Valve. A real experiment, you know.“ The following then, is his post. It is an interesting post. Please comment on it.)
Two long posts, both concerning theory, both beginning with a quotation of a previous discussion. Serendipity? The constitutional inability to resist having the last word? Doesn’t matter. Also unimportant: the experiment I concocted whereby I would post this here and ask Mark to post it on Long Sunday to see whether the two crowds would treat the material differently in some meaningful way. But I digress. (Despite not even having started yet.) Ahem: I accused Mark Kaplan of reading Foucault’s account of historical interest naively. I quoted this bit as proof:
So, for example, the sexual practices of ancient Greece – were these not, for Foucault, partly a way of thinking his way outside modern notions of ‘sexuality’ and the historically ingrained ‘regime’ supporting them.
And followed with this assessment:
I think Mark’s severely underestimating Foucault’s congenital pessimism, both about historical change and, more importantly, the idea that we can understand the discourses which saturate our lives in the moment that we live them.
He responded, quite rightly, that I glossed over Foucault’s notion of “the critical ontology of the self,” the practice he identifies with Kant’s Aufklärung, which my Oxford Duden German Dictionary tells me means something along the lines of “clearing up,” “solution,” “elucidation,” “explanation,” “a reconnaissance plane” or “the Enlightentment.” Some of these things are not like the others. I’ve wondered why the English translation of the essay—"What is Enlightenment?"—failed to capture the reference there both in Kant’s German ("Was ist Aufklärung?") and Foucault’s French ("Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?"). Might this slight tick in the English be indicative of some abstractive impulse at the heart of Anglo-American Theory? (Yes, I capitalized it, but for reasons which will eventually become apparent.) I’m not too inclined (yet) to attribute such a thing to American Theory because Kant’s work, as well as Foucault’s gloss of it, speaks directly to the problem of philosophical thought reflecting on the present moment:
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