Foucault & co. (was Re: Plato & Spengler ...

[jbor]

----------
>From: calbert at tiac.net
>

> A confirmed franco-phobe, I refuse to read Foucault in any
> language.....but my host last week saw fit to leave some west coast
> theology prof's sketches of postmoderns by the 'throne".....while
> killing time thereon I skimmed his chapter on Mike and came across
> something which tripped the Vhiessu debate. Is there anyone versed
> in F who can elaborate on his concept of "history" and
> "anthropology" - particularly regarding the issue of "illusion"
> informed by a kind of rearward projection? I think there may be an
> answer in there somewhere......

Hi cfa

I don't know if this might be close to what you're after. It's something I
stumbled across in the couple of chapters devoted to Pynchon's novels in
Philip E. Simmons' _Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture & History in Postmodern
American Fiction_ (University of Georgia: Athens, 1997, p. 156).

      In his own work on Enlightenment thought, Michel Foucault
    reorganized the connection between the desire for continuous
    history and the anxiety about personal identity, arguing that the
    construction of the unitary subject provided a site for the
    construction of continuous and unified history:

        Continuous history is the indispensable correlative
        of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee
        that everything that has eluded him may be restored to
        him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing
        without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the
        promise that one day the subject -- in the form of
        historical consciousness -- will once again be able
        to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all
        those things that are kept at a distance by difference,
        and find in them what might be called his abode.
        Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous
        and making human consciousness the original subject of
        all historical development and all action are two sides
        of the same system of thought.
                        (Foucault, _The Archaeology
                of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language_, trans.
                by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon, NY, 1972, p. 12)

    Because it belongs to the same system of thought, the idea of
    continuous history is vulnerable to the same skeptical demolition as the
    concept of personal identity. ...

Simmons goes on to talk about Fausto, but I think there are parallels with
the crumbling of ol' Pop Stencil's illusions about history, not to mention
his personal identity, after the Vheissu experience. It might be the
Foucault text you're after, at any rate.

best