#foucault

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

[4. The cry: “the great Pan is dead,” announcing at the same time the birth of a new God who was also death, but also to live from the endless life of the survivors - cont'd]

d. But

for those who were lodged inside this death of Pan, without having been driven out by the word which proclaimed it,

for those who spoke in the depths of this death not yet uttered,

the philosophical language was

i. the commentary of this silent sentence

ii. the undivided comment

between the declaration and the promise

between the setting of the day of death and the forecast of a new tomorrow

iii. the sophistic speech

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt

[suspiciouslysentientlake]

controversial opinions ahead if you cant take it dont read it

so you know how according to foucault, before the 19th century there was no such thing as a "homosexual" (as a category or type of person). There were acts like you could have sex with the same gender and it would only remain something you do/did instead of something you are. 19th century psychiatry invented "homosexual" (and as a result, heterosexual) as separate species of person and put literally everyone inside categories. The thing is i think about it everytime I see the list of orientations getting longer like demisexual, lithosexual, graysexual etc like I totally get it as ways to describe your experience but what if you just felt whatever you felt without it becoming who you are or what your identity is like when you name it it doesnt remain just an experience but an identity you're constructing that you have to maintain and perform and defend all the time. Which is even more categorization, in fact another social construct instead of freedom. Again, you do you but maybe we dont need separate "identities" for every emotion we feel. And btw, guess what benefits most from this extensive categorization? Capitalism.

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

[4. The cry: “the great Pan is dead,” announcing at the same time the birth of a new God who was also death, but also to live from the endless life of the survivors - cont'd]

c. In this simple, declarative word, welded to

the absolute of an event

its now irrecoverable inevitability

i. philosophical language finds both

the sentence which initiates it

the one which closes it

ii. but, even more, the very field of its exercise is entirely circumscribed there.

—philosophical language finds there the model of its critical use

the harsh statement of the limit

the model of its dialectical possibilities, with the indefinite chain of all the reborn gods

—yet these two uses are only dissociated for us, that is to say for those who

heard the absolute cry resound,

were able to hear it precisely in two ways

[harsh limit, and indefinite rebirth]

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

[4. The cry: “the great Pan is dead,” announcing at the same time the birth of a new God who was also death, but also to live from the endless life of the survivors - cont'd]

b. the death of Pan speaks

not of the recent catastrophe of a god that we will no longer know

but this constant, uninterrupted and absolutely original event by which all knowledge was made possible

and this singularly, that Pan himself died

i. and in this curve, where the destiny of Greek thought is fulfilled to completion,

the presence of an absent god is manifested, the death of a god who does not die, his resurrection in eternity

the announcement of Pan's death is in his cry the limit word

ii. [in this historical trajectory, this negative cry, in contrast to positive anthem] makes

its end and its beginning ring in the ears of the ancient world

its very beginning, again, in a Christianity which finishes it and rejects it in death

iii. It is both

the word of division [alienation, unreconcilable distance]

the first word of dialectic [optimistic of reconciliation]

undoubtedly the basis of all philosophical discourse

(this in its original sense will only be the commentary)

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

4. The cry: “the great Pan is dead” which resounded so deeply at the end of Antiquity,

dazzling, it seemed, Hellenic happiness

announcing at the same time the birth of a new God who was also death, but to live from the endless life of the survivors

a. perhaps it was

not the last word for the Greek world;

but rather the word of the beginning

i. language which announced, in the same heartbreak,

tragedy

knowledge (The Birth of Tragedy)

ii. again, this beginning could only be stated, and as something new,

at the moment when it ended

at the moment when knowledge had reached this point of the perfect curve which led it to pure reflection

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

[3. In this sense of knowledge as mask - cont'd]

b. What [under Nietzsche's anti-dialectical schema] is prior to it [knowledge] is what the repetition of the theater repeats,

i. [but,]

—without it ever having manifested itself there

for the first time

in its original purity

—without it ever being able

either to manifest itself

or to accomplish it

ii. because knowledge offers itself the dream of total representation, as if it could find there the movement of panic

from which it turned away

or rather from which a detour allowed it to be

—but the great panic [Pan-like] fusion before knowledge is

not the totality

nor even the delirious dream of an impossible totality

these are nothing other, within knowledge itself, than the mechanism by which by projecting a circle in front of it, it attempts to erase the gap that made it possible

—"Let us be careful

not to think that the world is a living being... that the universe is a machine...

not to say that there are laws of nature... The shadows of God darken true being."

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

3. In this sense [knowledge as mask],

a. Platonism aims at the essentials of knowledge when it relates it to

memory

the essential fall of time

i. But he [Plato] diverts attention from what is fundamental when he sees in it the allusion

to a contemplation [ideas]

[to an optimism about dialectical reconciliation]

to a happiness above the sky, towards which one would strive, without feathers or wings, to ascend

ii. [Whereas for Nietzsche,] what knowledge, indispensably, designates prior to itself, is [anti-dialectical:]

—the space that it has opened [vis., meaningfulness, in terms

no longer of ascent and fall

but rather of interiority and exteriority]

—the distance that it has placed [vis.,

no longer optimistic about reconciliation

but rather demanding of research]

—the detour by which it has

turned its face

made appear, before it, the mask

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt

[the-chomsky-hash]

[“PERISHING BY ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE COULD EVEN BE PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF BEING” - cont'd]

[2. Knowledge is therefore linked to the theater - cont'd]

d. No doubt

i. it is possible for knowledge

neither to say more about itself

nor to go back further in its genealogy

than the Greek word which identifies “knowing” and “having seen” (eidenai)

ii. No primacy is thereby given to perception or experience.

iii. What is denounced there [i.e., defined by announcing a negation] is

—the relationship between knowledge and spectacle

—this distance within what we see, which means that we only see it

having already seen it,

therefore no longer seeing it,

or only seeing it made visible by this absence which offers it by already dodging it

in short its link with the mask [that posits appearance, yet negates being]

– Michel Foucault, Works on Nietzsche: first half of the 1950s, (Philosophy), from Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt