In Which I Sometimes Wish I Lived in Europe
What would happen if a major American newspaper ran an Op-Ed promoting a more dovish line in the war on terror in which the first and last paragraphs were a discussion of Foucault’s thoughts about “disciplines”?
Call me a fuddy-duddy American university humanities student (one day, maybe!) but I think the entire blogosphere kerfuffle about the “Foreign Policy Community” could have been illuminated if people used some basic Foucaldian terminiology and ideas. Just a thought…
And oh yeah, everything Jonah Goldberg said in Liberal Fascism, Foucault wrote more than 30 years ago. But more on that later…
Heh. I was hoping someone more enterprising than myself would take the time to go for the Goldberg/Foucault comparison. I had the same reaction when I read LF. I look forward to reading your take.
Habermas’ assessment of Foucault was that he was a “young conservative”–a reactionary anti-rationalist whose perspective was useful for critiquing the excesses of the modern state but not well suited to offering a persuasive alternative. Nancy Fraser’s awesome essay, “Foucault: Young Conservative” follows the same line of reasoning.
If one strips away all the silly “hitler was a vegetarian” nonsense from Goldberg’s book and tries to, charitably, glean an argument, it’s mostly just watered-down Foucault. Goldberg is a reactionary anti-rationalist (much more so than Foucault, I think, or at least more uncritically so), but he doesn’t seem to realize that the principled extension of his perspective is anarchism rather than modern conservativism.
tyrion
March 25, 2008 at 10:30 am