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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

edging back to place « Previous | |Next »
August 21, 2004

This also looks interesting. It is one of the few attempts to connect Heidegger and Foucault.

The emphasis is on power and its uses. Can it help us to formulate a materialism that articulates our concerns about the places we inhabit as embodied beings.

Does this lead us back to place as opposed to site or space? That is the question that should be put to Trevor. His gesture to developing an Australian materialism is pretty abstract. That culture's understanding of being is saturated with mathematical physics and so the body is represented as an object (machine) connected to other objects (bodies) through external relations.

In contrast, place is experienced by us in qualitative terms-----eg., colour, texture etc --that are known to us in and by the body that enters and occupies a place. There, is in short, a being-in-place. This gives us lived bodies that help to constitute a place as distinct from space.

The Heidegger and Foucault connection has been explored by Herbert Dreyfus here. He writes:


"At the heart of Heidegger's thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects. And, just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating in the technological understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of dealing with things as objects and resources, Foucault analyzes several regimes of power, culminating in modern bio-power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding ourselves as subjects."

Thereis something right about this because Heidegger does understand the technological mode of being in terms of power, the will to power of the modernist (individual) subject, and the way the subject is constituted (enframed) by the technological mode of being. This then provides Heidegger with an opening for a critique of modernity.

There is nothing about place, even though things and subjects have bodies that inhabit placesthat we care about and are concerned to protect?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:07 PM | | Comments (0)
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