TY - JOUR

T1 - Experiences of the Self between Limit, Transgression, and the Explosion of the Dialectical System

T2 - Foucault as reader of Bataille and Blanchot

AU - Nigro, Roberto

N1 - Special issue commemorating the 20th anniversary of Foucault's death

PY - 2005/9/1

Y1 - 2005/9/1

N2 - Bataille and Blanchot figure among the authors who influenced Foucault the most. In this article we show how close Foucault was to these authors and to what extent his proximity to them permitted him to deviate from the prevailing university culture, i.e from those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism and phenomenology. The questions we pose are the following: How important were these experiences for Foucault? How did he receive them? How did he transform their theoretical stakes? In the first part of this article we argue that the encounter with Bataille's work and Blanchot's was for Foucault a kind of experience of the self. In Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself: it is a project of desubjectivation and of destruction of the notion of the foundational subject and system in philosophy. The second part focuses on the contemporary experience of the death of God. According to Foucault, such an experience discloses the limitless reign of the Limit. We show how the work of Bataille, his discovery of the categories of irreversible expenditure, death, sacrifice, excess, limit, negativity pushes the (Hegelian) system beyond its limit. In the third part we take into account the literary experience of Blanchot. According to Foucault, Blanchot's work focuses on the disappearance of the subject: the being of language emerges in the exclusion of the subject. How is it possible to have a language stripped of dialectics?.

AB - Bataille and Blanchot figure among the authors who influenced Foucault the most. In this article we show how close Foucault was to these authors and to what extent his proximity to them permitted him to deviate from the prevailing university culture, i.e from those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism and phenomenology. The questions we pose are the following: How important were these experiences for Foucault? How did he receive them? How did he transform their theoretical stakes? In the first part of this article we argue that the encounter with Bataille's work and Blanchot's was for Foucault a kind of experience of the self. In Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself: it is a project of desubjectivation and of destruction of the notion of the foundational subject and system in philosophy. The second part focuses on the contemporary experience of the death of God. According to Foucault, such an experience discloses the limitless reign of the Limit. We show how the work of Bataille, his discovery of the categories of irreversible expenditure, death, sacrifice, excess, limit, negativity pushes the (Hegelian) system beyond its limit. In the third part we take into account the literary experience of Blanchot. According to Foucault, Blanchot's work focuses on the disappearance of the subject: the being of language emerges in the exclusion of the subject. How is it possible to have a language stripped of dialectics?.

KW - Philosophy

KW - Bataille

KW - Blanchot

KW - conversion

KW - death of God

KW - dialectics

KW - experience of the self

KW - finitude

KW - Foucault

KW - Hegelianism

KW - impossible

KW - inner experience

KW - Klossowski

KW - language

KW - limit

KW - limit-experience

KW - negativity

KW - Nietzsche

KW - phenomenology

KW - sexuality

KW - sovereignty

KW - subject

KW - subjectivation/desubjectivation

KW - thought of outside

KW - transgression

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84996249603&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/06ec1f68-8d65-3c92-9ddf-9c3f10435e52/

U2 - 10.1177/0191453705055493

DO - 10.1177/0191453705055493

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 31

SP - 649

EP - 664

JO - Philosophy and Social Criticism

JF - Philosophy and Social Criticism

SN - 0191-4537

IS - 5-6

ER -