Here is a passage from Cogito and the History of Madness. It begins
with the words, "[l]et me clarify", and proceeds as usual to do
something other than precisely that.
* * *
Let me clarify: when I refer to the forced entry into the world of
that which is not there and is supposed by the world...or when I say
that this reduction to intraworldliness is the origin and very meaning
of what is called violence, making possible all straitjackets, I am
not invoking an *other world*, an alibi or an evasive transcendence.
That would be yet another possibility of violence, a possibility that
is, moreover, often the accomplice of the first one.
* * *
"Reduction to intraworldliness" rings true for me as a
characterisation of Foucault's approach; it makes him a patron saint
of debunkers and scarers-off of metaphysical phantoms, but it also
puts him in the position of a generous but slightly sinister uncle in
a kimono holding out to the reader a compact little snow-globe with a
miniature world inside it, little people and buildings, prisons and
hospitals, the motes of truth all swirling around in a discursive
flurry. If you touch the globe, it miniaturises you and sucks you in,
and that's it, you have to live there from now on.
Dominic
|