Douglas Clark wrote:
>This is amusing because William Oxley was classified as a
>Vitalist, along with a couple of other poets.
>
>
>
That is amusing,yes.
Deleuze's rather weird and wonderful book on Foucault characterises the
late Foucault as a vitalist, after Bichat; this is the Foucault who
wanted to liberate not sexuality but something else ("bodies and
pleasures") *from* "sexuality" per se - a radical vitalist, a vitalist
capable of willing the destruction of established modes of life for the
sake of something supposedly even livelier.
It's curious to reflect on how all of this feeds into Foucault's
interest in what one of his biographers called "the annihilation of the
self through pain". It's the belief in something beyond suffering, that
lives and resists and can only articulate itself when the creature is in
intolerable crisis, that underpins both the politics and the perversion.
I'm not a vitalist; I find the "life-force" of vitalism too close to the
will-to-power for comfort, and can't imagine a politics based on it that
would not end up contemptuously wiping out the "dead" and "rotten" parts
of a society and worshipping its own cruelty while it did it. But
perhaps Oxley could inform me otherwise, if he had the patience.
Dominic
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