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MIT Great Dome. AI image Introduction: Creativity and Complicity The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is often remembered for its confrontation between rationalism and historical critique. Yet some of its most philosophically suggestive moments occur not during the exchange between the two thinkers, but in the questions posed by the audience. One such intervention, concerning Chomsky’s employment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exposes a tension that unsettles the very framework through which he imagines political transformation. Chomsky repeatedly grounds the prospect of social change in those engaged in what he calls the “productive work of society.” At first glance, this formulation appears to sustain a familiar distinction between creative labour and the managerial structures that organize exploitation. A closer reading, however, suggests that the opposition cannot remain intact once the institutional location of the revolutionary intellectual ...

Introduction What if the symptom did not disclose an illness but instead brought it into existence? Such a possibility unsettles one of the most durable assumptions of modern medicine: that disease precedes its signs and awaits discovery through clinical observation. During the 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault articulated a striking inversion of this logic, suggesting that the act of classification may itself generate the very pathology it claims to identify. Far from being a passing provocation, this remark condenses a broader philosophical position concerning the historical conditions that allow objects of knowledge to emerge. The Medical Model Reversed Medical reasoning typically follows a familiar sequence: an underlying disorder produces symptoms, which physicians then interpret. Foucault disrupts this chain by proposing that social practices first mark certain behaviors as symptomatic, thereby forming the category of disease retroactively. As he observes: “T...

Neo-Caravaggist Version of The Debate. AI Image Introduction — Before Political Disagreement The 1971 exchange between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is commonly framed as a confrontation over power, authority, or human nature. Yet beneath these visible disagreements lies a more prior tension, one unfolding at the level of language itself. Before they disagree about politics, they diverge over whether the terms that make political judgment possible possess any stable authority. Throughout the conversation, certain words recur with quiet insistence: creativity , justice, legal, illegitimate, correct. Their repetition is not incidental. Each thinker is attempting, in real time, to determine who, if anyone, has the authority to stabilize their meaning. This instability does not interrupt the debate; it gives it urgency. The exchange reveals a philosophical difficulty that precedes ideological division: are political concepts entities awaiting clarification, or historical formatio...

Introduction Readers often pass quickly over the epigraph. Positioned before the main body of a work, it can appear ornamental, a gesture of erudition rather than a site of argument. Yet in certain strands of contemporary philosophical writing, the epigraph performs a far more consequential role. It ceases to function as scholarly decoration and instead operates as a theoretical threshold that unsettles the very idea of textual self-origin. What looks like a preliminary citation may already be staging the problem the essay will unfold. Samuel Weber’s “Closure and Exclusion” offers a striking example. The essay opens not with Weber’s own voice but with two others: Wittgenstein, reflecting on rule-following, and Derrida, distinguishing competing interpretations of interpretation. Before a single claim is advanced, the textual space is already shared. The essay begins, one might say, inhabited. Citation as Authority Within conventional academic prose, citation tends to support a p...