"Foucault can be an inspiring figure for our own projects" (Alain de Botton) - well i hope so...
I will get on their differences soon enough but do they have anything to agree on ?
" Foucault rejected
hermeneutics, the attempt to find the meaning of a text within its deep
structure, and demonstrated that writing, reading, interpreting are
historically determined modes of intellectual practice that exercise power
through the oppression or exclusion of other forms of knowledge and knowing
from below. In this respect it is clear that Foucault’s analysis fits into the
framework of a Gramscian analysis of civil society. For Gramsci, the analysis
of civil society is one aspect of the integral state (i.e., political society +
civil society) includes the analysis of the intellectuals, the role of theories
as organizing practices of collective shared convictions and beliefs. A world
view is elaborated and exists in concrete forms like newspapers and journals,
publishing houses and bookshops, schools and universities, think tanks and
business schools, films and styles of music, churches and sports."
Foucault,
Gramsci and Critical Theory – Remarks on their Relationship Alex Demirović
(Technical University, Berlin)
Links between the Frankfurt school, Gramsci and Foucault:
I think they would both agree that there is an awful lot of power around. Foucault thought it was everywhere with everyone negotiating it all the time. Gramsci and Adorno, Horkheimer etc saw it as a state, structured form of class oppression that was to be battled against.
05th May 1999 by Sebastian Gurciullo
The utopian hope for
reconciliation is therefore as much an
illusion as the
belief that there is a global capitalist order that is
somehow responsible
for the current state of things. Power is all-pervasive
and tends toward
dominative formations but because it does not form a
consistent whole,
because it is itself a conflict of relations, it is seen
as basically
anarchic, congealing in certain points but always prone to
fluctuations and
displacements, especially when challenged. The best that
can be done is
small-scale resistance actions that take up the anarchic flux
of power and channel
it for a brief moment in some "critical" or disruptive
direction, before
this deployment itself begins to congeal into a dominative
formation. Towards
the end of his life Foucault partially sublates his
analysis of power
into an aesthetics of existence, lived in his case as a
critical ethos which
aims to preserve the best impulse of the Enlightenment
- permanent critique
as a way of life
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