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When the Symptom Creates the Disease: Foucault and the Politics of Intelligibility

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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...
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Justice After Metaphor: The Dispute Beneath the Dispute in the Chomsky–Foucault Debate

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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...
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Where Does a Text Begin? — Epigraphs and the Question of Origin in Contemporary Philosophy

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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...
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Human Nature, History, and Structure: Foucault’s Challenge to Chomsky Through Saussure

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Introduction The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault stages a fundamental confrontation about human nature, political critique, and the grounds of emancipation. Chomsky defends the need for a concept of human essence to orient moral judgment and guide social transformation. Foucault, by contrast, warns that such a move risks projecting historically specific norms under the guise of universality. This disagreement is not merely ideological; it reflects a deeper methodological divide concerning whether “the human” precedes social and historical formations or is produced within them. When read alongside Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics—and his rejection of a panchronic perspective—Foucault’s challenge appears less ad hoc than structurally grounded in a broader theoretical logic. Saussure’s theory of language helps clarify why Foucault is suspicious of transhistorical claims about human nature and why Chomsky’s searc...
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Concept or Condition? Human Nature and the Politics of Foundations in the Chomsky–Foucault Debate

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Freedom Without Foundations. Expressionism (AI Image) Introduction Political disagreements often appear to revolve around competing visions of justice, authority, or social organization. Yet some disputes unfold at a deeper level, before programs or principles enter the scene. The 1971 conversation between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault offers such a case. What emerges over the course of their exchange is not merely a conflict between libertarian socialism and genealogical critique, but a more fundamental divergence concerning the status of the concepts through which political thought becomes possible. At stake is a prior question: must political reflection begin with an account of what human beings are, or should it instead examine the historical conditions that make such accounts intelligible? The debate reveals less a disagreement about society than a tension regarding whether politics requires foundations at all. The Search for Ground Chomsky’s interventions display a pe...
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“What Is a Woman?”—From Inherited Sign to Legal Operator

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Introduction: When Inherited Meaning Is No Longer Enough The question “What is a woman?” rarely causes difficulty in ordinary language. Speakers acquire the term early, use it fluently, and navigate its meaning without conscious reflection. In everyday contexts, it functions smoothly, without hesitation or demand for explicit definition. Yet in academic, legal, or political settings, the same question often produces silence, deferral, or visible unease. This contrast does not indicate ignorance or breakdown in understanding. Rather, it signals a shift in the semiotic conditions under which the question operates. The problem lies not in the word itself, but in the system that requires it to perform a different function. Language as an Inherited System Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language provides a critical starting point. For Saussure, language is not a tool invented or modified at will by individual speakers, but a social institution transmitted across generations. ...
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Clarity as a Revolutionary Gesture: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Exhaustion of Poststructuralism

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Mucha’s Lyrical Ballads . AI-generated image Introduction For much of the twentieth century, suspicion toward language was not only legitimate but necessary. Structuralism, and later poststructuralism, made it unmistakably clear that meaning is not immediate, that it does not rest on a transcendental foundation, and that every act of expression is entangled with history, power, and difference. Yet when a critique outlives its historical urgency, it risks hardening into style, and eventually into habit. At that point, what began as a dismantling of illusion can congeal into rhetoric. This article advances a simple but, in the current intellectual climate, somewhat uncomfortable thesis: after decades of sustained critique of meaning, clarity has become a genuinely contemporary, and indeed provocative, modern gesture. Far from being naïve or regressive, clarity understood as responsible legibility can be fruitfully compared to the reaction articulated by Wordsworth and Coleridge aga...
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