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Who Speaks? Foucault and the Problem of Beginning

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“ I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path - a slender gap - the point of its possible disappearance”. Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language 1. The Desire Not to Begin At the beginning of The Order of Discourse , Foucault imagines a different way of entering speech. He would have preferred not to be the one who begins: “I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speakin...
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Questioning the Familiar: The Shortest Words Have the Longest Histories

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Derrida & Foucault in Roy's Style. AI image I. The Words We Think We Understand Self. Subject. Freedom. Truth. Human. Reason. Normal. These are words we use constantly, and precisely for that reason they can seem transparent. We hear self and think we know what it refers to; we hear freedom and assume that its meaning is already clear. The familiarity of the vocabulary makes the concepts behind it easy to overlook. But familiarity is not the same as transparency. A useful interruption is therefore: What makes this word mean what it seems to mean? The mistake is to treat the term as the starting point of the analysis. Instead of beginning with What is the self? , we can ask a different question: How did this particular idea of the self become intelligible to us? The shift may seem small, but it changes what we are looking for. Rather than taking the concept as a fixed point and building an argument from it, we investigate the conditions that make a particular ...
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If There Is No Subject, Who Has Human Rights?

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I. What Do We Mean by “Subject”? Questioning the subject became one of the central concerns of twentieth-century philosophy. But there seems to be an obvious problem with this move when we turn to human rights. Modern ideas of freedom, responsibility, and human rights seem to require someone who possesses them. Rights belong to people; people act, choose, suffer, speak, and take responsibility for what they do. Behind these actions, we tend to imagine a stable individual: the human being as the subject of experience, activity, responsibility, and freedom. So what happens if philosophy begins to question the subject itself? The question can sound almost absurd. If there is no stable subject, who is left to have rights? If there is no fixed human essence, on what basis can we speak of universal human rights at all? This is essentially the problem put to Jacques Derrida in an interview devoted to the “deconstruction of the subject.” The interviewer asks whether the subject whose...
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Look Where the Concept Points: Foucault and the Epistemological Indicator

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  “In the history of knowledge, the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of an epistemological indicator to designate certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history”. — M. Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault debate: On human nature 1. The Finger and the Moon There is an old image of someone pointing at the moon while the person being addressed keeps looking at the finger. The mistake is simple: confusing the indication with what it indicates. Something similar can happen in philosophy. We encounter a familiar term and begin treating it as though it were already a clearly defined object of thought. We ask what freedom is, what justice is, what human nature is. But perhaps the term itself is telling us where to look rather than giving us something to look at. This is one way of approaching an intriguing remark Foucault makes in his 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky. Discussing the notions of life and hum...
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