"Problematise" is Foucauldian amongst other things. I don't know what
register it slots into in the French- not managerial/Americanese in the
first instance. A problem in Foucault is an artifact, something with a
genealogy which can be traced. How do sex, drugs, food (onanism, opium,
oysters) etc. get to be problems? How do moral and epistemological and
administrative imperatives come to be brought to bear on them? The questions
are sexy, and even by asking them you sound like you're answering them,
which more or less sums up Foucauldian chic.
My one-time English tutor Stephen Gill also used to tell his undergraduate
students to "problematise, not deproblematise" - don't try to straighten
works of literature out, go for the kinks and niggle at them. I don't think
he was speaking Foucauldian, though. Generally he treated English with
respect - more I think than I did, or do. My undergraduate essays were
written in halting, and later fluent, Derridean. There was a particularly
bad patch shortly after I finished reading Lyotard's Libidinous Economy
(sounds like a textbook H. Potter should be forcibly kept away from).
Everything was an orifice for a while.
Dominic
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