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April 17 - May 14, 2023
man is both a finite figure and a strange empirico-transcendental doublet.
Ducking hate this
Studying Discourse
218/443 pages in and I’m finally getting to the part I came here to read 🤡
Foucault states that all history is a document of the past – the traces it leaves in our present through books, accounts, acts, buildings, customs.
When medical, legal and judicial discourses refer to madness, they never refer to a fixed object or experience, and they don’t treat it as the same object. Yet there may be regularities between these discourses.
Foucaults non-discursive formations (economic processes, institutions) produce discourses and become organized (or “said”) by them; in a superficially similar way, Althusser’s relates to its ideological superstructure.
“In every society, the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers.”
Genealogy describes Foucault’s attempt to reveal discourse at the moment it appears in history as a system of constraint. Genealogy compels Foucault to analyze literary, biological, medical, religious and ethical bodies of knowledge, and how such “knowledges” might, for example, relate to the discourse on heredity or sexuality. He is led to study the effects of discourses claiming to be scientific – psychiatry, sociology, medicine – on practices such as the penal system, as they first appear.
They lined the living room with books, grew cannabis amongst the petunias,
I can’t breathe
Foucault calls this dense web of power relations the microphysics of power.
Power would be a poor thing if all it did was oppress.
Minimum quantity: punishment must outweigh the advantages of committing a crime. Sufficient ideality: the idea of pain or representation of punishment should disturb potential criminals. Lateral effects: the punishment should affect others, making them scared to commit a crime! Perfect certainty: punishment will inevitably follow the crime. Common truth: evidence must be weighed according to common standards of proof. Optimal specification: crimes are codified as classifications and species that individualize the criminal by taking into account his wealth, wickedness, etc.
He later said that bath-houses with 800 blokes didn’t have an equivalent in the heterosexual community. Tough on heterosexuals, he thought.
PLSSS
chresis – the use and management of sexual activity. Diogenes (d. 320 BC), the Cynic philosopher, used to masturbate in the market-place to show the public that sexuality was a matter of basic need.
enkrateia – mastery of oneself to become a moral subject. It’s a relationship with oneself. Socrates (469–399 BC):
askesis – exercises in self-control through meditation, fasting and walking the streets in silence, raised the self to a stylization of existence. Antiphon the Sophist (c. 480–411 BC): “He is not wise who has not tried the ugly and the bad; for then the...
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Plutarch (46–120 AD) advised not to have sex in the morning.
The more powerful the vision of a total system becomes, the more powerless the reader feels.
