Today in class, one of the students (they are all very bright!) mentioned reading Michel Foucault's essay on Don Quixote, originally from his work, The Order of Things.
I felt very annoyed by the essay, said the student.
What kind of author uses the word "transcendence" three times in one paragraph!!
The class laughed --and our dear professor said --also laughing--
I knew that essay would annoy you guys, as scientists!
He reminded us that the Continental essay tradition does not follow the Anglo-American style of beginning with the main points before proceeding to lay out the argument. The French essai never begins with the conclusion, but rather meanders, aiming to illuminate a topic from various angles. Think of Montaigne. Think of Badiou. Like the French tradition, the traditional Japanese essay form is also known to meander. In fact, the word zuihistu 随筆 means "following the brush." And like the French essai, zuihitsu often feel like personal musings -- but at the same time, tees less rigid forms of writing can be extremely enlightening and thought-provoking.
That said, I am also not a fan of the writing of Michel Foucault. Is anyone a fan of his writing style?
In my last year at Berkeley, my beloved guru, Hubert Dreyfus taught a class with Paul Rabinow on their book about Foucault, called Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. I loathed the book but was taking any class taught by Dreyfus. Basically, I lived, breathed and dreamt Heidegger those last years and probably would never have ended up in Japan for two decades had it not been for Hubert Dreyfus.
And, like all his classes, Dreyfus began this class on Foucault discussing Heidegger's concept of the clearing (lichtung).
If humans have no essential nature as the Existentialists tell us (ie, "existence precedes essence"), then it is humans themselves who assign meaning to being. That is to say, that humans assign meaning and interpret not only the world around them, but their understanding of being itself, so that being is in fact intrinsically embedded within all the shared social and cultural practices by which we have been socialized and through which we understand the world around us. It is this understanding of being that Heidegger refers to as "the clearing" (lichtung). So fundamental, it is often unconscious to us as well-- like the air we breath. We simply don't notice how these shared practices inform how we understand things, that anything outside the paradigm will show up as incomprehensible (just like trying to get a flat-worlder to think about the earth being round-- it just "doesn't compute").
Foucault used Heidegger's concept of the clearing to explore what he called the episteme. This was always Foucault's primary interest: to try and grasp the a priori network or grid of meaning that we map onto the world.
Professor Wey-Gómez called this the "rules of the world."
I love that expression and had never heard it before.
Cervantes gives us a fiction. But he also always gives us the rules, says the professor.
And, it is in the recognition that reality is a cultural construct and that all narratives have rules by which we can--in this recognition-- that we are able of taking a stand. [the existential stand].
++
Note: Foucault thought that there were two works of art that heralded the modern world: Diego Velázquez and Miguel de Cervantes. Specifically it was Velázquez’s famous painting of Philip IV’s daughter the Infanta Margarita and her entourage, Las Meninas--and Cervantes' Don Quixote.
About Las Meninas, he writes
We are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross. And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject.
Someone should write a beautifully written book in a meandering and personal style about these two works of art since they are somehow linked.
Re-reading (listening on audible) Laura Cumming's book, The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece.
How Art and literature can save us.
Comments