Foucault's treatment of psychoanalysis is not particularly sympathetic. The first volume of The History of Sexuality, for example, takes aim at the "repressive hypothesis." This is a pretty direct hit on Freud. Not only to write a history of sexuality without Freud's help, but to begin the whole enterprise by turning Freud on his head. I find whole swaths of Foucault's history rather problematic, but that is for another day.
Anyway, Paul Julian Smith, one of the major Lorca critics I have to tackle in my book, uses both Freud and Foucault. His Foucauldianism lets him not deal with Lorca much as a biographical subject at all, but as an author-function. So far so good. But then psychoanalysis is not attached to any human subject at all: it becomes a free-floating hermeneutic tool. That's great, because it is lame to psychoanalyze Lorca as though he were on the couch a few feet from you. On the other hand, it makes psychoanalysis even more arbitrary than before, because it is not a theory of anyone's mind anymore. What is it? What is it doing?
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Where do people without blogs essay their ideas? Or those who use their blogs but don't talk about the ideas they are working on?
2 comments:
Where did you essay yours before?
Mostly scrawling them in notebooks.
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