|
|
Michel Foucault
Volume I: An Introduction
Translated by: Robert Hurley Continue reading The History of Sexuality
Michel Foucault (1977)
in: Language Counter-Memory. Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.
This essay first appeared in : Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris, PUF 1971)… Continue reading Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
Arnold I. Davidson
In presenting the topic of Michel Foucault’s significance as a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucault’s own aims in shifting his attention, in his last , writings, to what he himself called “ethics.” These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucault’s last works. Volumes z and of The His-t-o r-y- of- S-e -xu-a lity are about sex in roughly the way that Discipline and Punish is about the-prison. As the modem prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucault’s last writings. Continue reading Ethics as ascetics: Foucault, the history of ethics, and ancient thought
Thomas S. Kane
Two broad assumptions underlie this book: (1) that writing is a rational activity, and (2) that it is a valuable activity. To say that writing is rational means nothing more than that it is an exercise of mind requiring the mastery of techniques anyone can learn. Obviously, there are limits: one cannot learn to write like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. You can’t become a genius by reading a book. Continue reading The New Oxford Guide to Writing
Roman par: Honoré de Balzac
Il existe à Douai dans la rue de Paris une maison dont la physionomie, les dispositions intérieures et les détails ont, plus que ceux d’aucun autre logis, gardé le caractère des vieilles construction flamandes, si naïvement appropriées aux moeurs patriarcales de ce bon pays; mais avant de la décrire, peut-être faut-il établir dans l’intérêt des écrivains la nécessité de ces préparations didactiques contre lesquelles protestent certaines personnes ignorantes et voraces qui voudraient des émotions sans en subir les principes générateurs, la fleur sans la graine, l’enfant sans la gestation. L’Art serait-il donc tenu d’être plus fort que ne l’est la Nature? Continue reading Balzac: La recherche de l’absolu
Essai d’une transmutation de toutes les valeurs
(Études et Fragments)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Traduit par Henri Albert
Note du traducteur: La présente traduction a été faite sur l’édition originale allemande, quinzième volume des OEuvres complètes de Frédéric Nietzsche, publié en novembre 1901, chez C. G. Naumann à Leipzig, par les soins du ” Nietzsche-Archiv “. On trouvera dans la préface de Mme E. Foerster-Nietzsche (…) tous les renseignements qui concernent la genèse et la composition de la Volonté de Puissance. Nous nous en sommes tenus strictement au texte établi par les éditeurs d’après les manuscrits de Nietzsche. Pour ces Etudes et Fragments, plus encore que pour les autres volumes du philosophe, nous avons eu souci d’une littéralité aussi grande que possible. Mais les idées qui y sont exprimées sont maintenant assez familières au lecteur français pour que les passages, même les plus obscurs en apparence, lui soient intelligibles. Continue reading Nietzsche:La Volonté de puissance
Claude Dubar
Temporalités, revue des sciences sociales et humaines
RESUME:
Le passage de la philosophie du temps aux approches scientifiques des temporalités a résulté de l’épuisement des apories du temps qui, d’Aristote et Saint Augustin à Kant et Husserl, ont jalonné les efforts de philosophes pour produire in abstracto une théorie unifiée du temps. Le constat par Heidegger d’une irréductible pluralité des modes de temporalisation a mis fin à cette aporétique de la temporalité et permis le déploiement d’approches plurielles des temporalités par les sciences socio-historiques. Depuis la thèse de la pluralité des régimes d’historicité par les historiens jusqu’à l’analyse des temporalités sociales par les sociologues, toutes les sciences sociales ont multiplié les distinctions internes au temps et les typologies de temporalités pertinentes. Cela n’exclut pas les réflexions citoyennes sur l’émergence d’un temps démocratique et universel réconciliant le temps paramètre englobant et le temps compagnon vécu.
Temporality, temporalities: Philosophy and the Social sciences
The passage from the philosophy of time to the scientific approach to temporality is the result of the double bind in which, from Aristotle to Saint Augustine, Kant and Husserl, has marked the efforts of philosophers trying to produce in abstracto a unified theory of time. Heidegger’s conclusion concerning the irreducible plurality of the modes of temporality put an end to that uncertainty and allowed many various approaches to temporality to blossom in the socio-historical sciences. From the historians’ theory of the plurality of historical regimes to the sociologists’ analysis of social temporalities, several pertinent distinctions internal to time and typologies of temporalities have been forthcoming. That does not preclude citizens from rethinking the emergence of a democratic and universal time that would reconcile Time as the all-encompassing parameter with Time as the lifetime companion. Continue reading Temporalité, temporalités : philosophie et sciences sociales
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, pp 278-294
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of arupture and a redoubling.
It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy-and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the epistemeplunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. Continue reading Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Texts by Strauss
Tocqueville, living two generations after Burke, accepted modern democracy on a Burkian basis, without accepting all the [?] of natural religion. That is the starting point of Tocqueville. Tocqueville was here for a very short time, making some inquiries for the French Government. The result of his observations was these remarkable two volumes I believe that no book comparable in breadth and depth has ever been produced afterwards. I believe in no other case in regard to any other country; that a man after such a short sojourn in a country could give such a comprehensive and profound analysis. Tocqueville had, of course, an excellent teacher, Montesquieu. Those familiar with Montesquieu’s turn of phrase recognize the master immediately in the work of the pupil. I think the next great book of this kind was Lord Bryce’s Modern Democracy. But that is not comparable in depth to Tocqueville’s book though it may be correct in many points where Tocqueville was wrong. But Tocqueville still has the heritage of a great eighteenth century philosophic analysis. Now Tocqueville accepts the verdict of providence. Providence has decided in favor of democracy. He makes an important distinction between the sane and moderate democracy which we find in the United States and the revolutionary extremist democracy which justly aroused the ire of Edmund Burke. In other words, America shows to Europe its own future (…) Continue reading Leo Strauss: works
Allan Bloom
Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things. Writing about the higher education in America, he does not observe the forms, manners and ceremonies of what is called (usually by itself) the community of scholars. Yet his credentials are irreproachable. He is the author of an excellent book on Shakespeare’s politics, [...]
Albert Camus
Part One
I
MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: “Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know.”
Afterwards it struck me I needn’t have said that. I had no reason to excuse myself; it was up to him to express his sympathy and so forth. Probably he will do so the day after tomorrow, when he sees me in black. For the present, it’s almost as if Mother weren’t really dead. The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak… I took the two o’clock bus. It was a blazing hot afternoon. I’d lunched, as usual, at Céleste’s restaurant. Continue reading Camus: The Stranger
 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, “Ecce Homo,” “The Antichrist” is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their finalform. Notes for it had been accumulating for years and it was to have constituted the first volume of his long-projected magnum opus, “The Will to Power.” His full plan for this work, as originally drawn up, was as follows:
Vol. I. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity.
Vol. II. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic
Movement.
Vol. III. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, the Most Fatal Form
of Ignorance.
Vol. IV. Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence. Continue reading Nietzsche: The Antichrist
|
|
