Pill Pod 43 - FIGHT NIGHT: Foucault Slaps Back (Exclusive)
Added 2021-06-04 12:01:02 +0000 UTCNot to be called a n00b, Foucault slaps back at Derrida (eventually) with "My Body, This Paper, This Fire" defending his Madness and Civilization from Derrida's critique (see Pill Pod 42). Foucault claims Derrida can't read Latin properly, and more substantively, that Derrida includes subsumes madness under the dreaming philosopher, while Descartes juridically separates them so as to exclude madness from meditation.
Comments
Didn’t Descartes publish the Meditations in French first??
David Florentin
2024-02-22 23:14:37 +0000 UTCI listened to this over the last couple of days and I fucking loved it. Victor talked about being thirsty for feedback in another episode so you can have mine…. I had the most lively debate in my mind with you guys mostly on account of your understandings of Foucault, I had to keep pausing it to write little notes in my phone about why particular statements or characterisations did not reflect fidelity to Foucault’s work. It was just super enjoyable for me to have something to engage with that I find intellectually pleasurable so I am eminently fucking greatful for the content. For context I am super chronically ill - like if you imagine spending your life in a bed in a darkened room writhing in vegetable agony you will have a fairly good sense of what my life is like right now. But whilst I have a lot of fatigue and brain fog going on my brain still absolutely works, and the kicker in that sense is that pretty extreme photosensitivity and frequent instances of double vision makes it nearly impossible for me to read most of the time. I can’t emphasise enough how much gratitude I have about being able to access content like this. And I was like a sports fan yelling at the umpire toward the end when you guys just completely missed what I consider to be Foucault’s king hit of the match and the reason why even though if we are in the business of rating philosophers I will always rate Derrida higher than Foucault that I have to give the win to Foucault. I think maybe victor said something along the lines of that maybe Foucault conceded that Derrida was right and removed the pages that formed the basis of one of Derrida’s interactions with his text. And I was like cmon you guys - you have all sipped at the cup of Foucault’s heady intellectual greatness - you don’t really need to be a Foucault scholar to immediately reject that as a really poor characterisation of what might have informed king Foucault’s removal of those pages. And I am not trying to pick on victor because none of you picked it up - and I did kind of expect you to on account of some of you being very astute readers of Derrida (an aside here to tell you that I find the way pills gets angry at Matt when he talks about Derrida completely adorable). The removal of those pages and the fact that Foucault’s text doesn’t fall apart on account of that omission, the fact that it doesn’t render it a profoundly different text is Foucault’s ultimate fuck you to Derrida. And I say ‘the fact that’ whilst understanding that it is completely debatable as to whether or not it does profoundly alter the text (I imagine the pages that have been removed are not super accessible and don’t know whether they were ever even translated so I can also imagine that it is a debate that it is not even possible to have it a lot of ways). I don’t think I have a really refined sense of what it means for Derrida’s methodology or whether it actually means anything for his methodology but it definitely puts a question mark over it in a way that gives me a great respect for Foucault and the clever sneaky bastard that he was. I feel like there are multiple understandings of how Foucault’s removal of the text really intersects with Derrida and his methodology and it’s hard for me to really flesh out and refine what I think without being able to go back to the texts. But without being able to do that I would have to say that the kind of fallibility of Derrida’s critique that Foucault exposes by removing those passages from the text ultimately does not poke holes in Derrida’s methodology in my opinion but that it does expose that in some sense Derrida made a mistake (and I fucking hate saying that my affection for Derrida is intense). And that my friends is why Foucault wins the fight and provides a little object lesson about fucking around with Foucault and finding out. I feel like I am being clear here, I mean there is a sense in which I feel like I don’t need to be expansive about Derrida’s methodology because I absolutely trust some of your understandings of Derrida and his methodology but if you need me to be more expansive I definitely can be I’ve been turning this thing around in my head for a couple of days now… Anyway, I really enjoyed the shit out of this, thanks heaps for making this content.
Sarah Oates
2022-01-19 03:11:57 +0000 UTCI found the conversation around “speaking for the mad” intriguing. I wonder if you all might cover the neurodiversity movement from the perspective of critical theory. Which may be problematic… in that this movement comes out of disability discourse and seems like an attempt for “the mad,” or in their terms, the neurodivergent to speak for themselves. However, I haven’t seen much comment on the way valuing neurodiversity may rub against (or be co-opted by) capitalist ideology/capitalist desire. Anyway, I’d love to hear how the pillpod might tackle this.
James Adams
2021-07-26 17:18:49 +0000 UTCClimax
Plastic Pills
2021-07-11 20:20:12 +0000 UTCZizek vs Deleuze
anacidcommie
2021-07-11 11:54:05 +0000 UTCYou have completely made my day
Hamad
2021-06-18 16:27:49 +0000 UTCI'm taking the exit to Daoism off of the Descartes freeway. What's beyond is what's beyond.
Hamad
2021-06-18 16:26:43 +0000 UTCThis is a fun progression: Derrida calling Lacan to task in “And Say the Animal Responded” followed by Haraway’s response to Derrida in Encounters with Companion Species [And Say the Philosopher Responded?]
brightski
2021-06-04 19:20:05 +0000 UTCI think there is something to Descartes being mad. His inquiry was in part motivated by a series of nightmares that terrified him and made him question reality.
Nick Denning
2021-06-04 18:35:44 +0000 UTC
