MDMD: Am I still dreaming?

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Writing is an attempt to impose conformity (that is to say order, without
> which communication is impossible) even when - as is the case with Pynchon -
> writing also expresses the impossibility of attaining any such goal. Dreams
> are always elusive; they remind us that the knowable will remain unknown.
> One of the differences between Freud and Nietzsche - I think they share a
> suspicion of mass society, to put it mildly - is Freud's belief that
> interpretation is possible. His distinction between manifest content and
> latent meaning is the means by which the role of the scientist, as
> disinterested commentator is prioritised. Nietzsche, and more recently
> Foucault, deny any such role for an empowered individual or group. The legal
> system (On the Genealogy of Morals) is whatever those who exercise power
> decide is either permissible or forbidden. 

Faucault is so very difficult for me. I admit that I have no clue what
the hell he is saying in his "What Is An Author?", however, after
reading your posts I decided to re-read  Faucault's "Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History" (in my The Faucault Reader, pp. 76-100, Edited by
Paul Rabinow, Pantheon, 1984, previously published in Language, Counter
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault,
trans by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 1977. Note: "This essay
first appeared in Hommage a Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Press University of
France, 1971, pp. 145-72) and I must say, it's a wonderful, difficult
(for example, Foucault says, "Plato, at Syracuse, did not become
Mohammed") but readable and I think I am beginning to understand you
better
after having read it.

I read Faucault, as an Agonist, like Freud and Nietzsche, but you make a
very 
good point about the differences. 

"Genealogy is gray...scratched over and recopied many times. ...the
world of speech and desire has known invasions, struggles, plundering,
disguises, ploys." 

But, 

"genealogy does not oppose itself to History, as the lofty and profound
gaze of the philosopher...it rejects the metahistorical development of
ideal signification and indefinite teleologies." 

But, 

"It opposes itself to the search for origins." 


Opposition, Struggle, conflict,  plunder, invade, disguise, ploy....all
very agonistic in Method, like Freud and Nietzsche. 



I think I will post much more from this essay as we get inot the book.