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akemi_666's review against another edition
3.0
Perhaps I understand Foucault differently, but I don't agree that Foucault leaves no room for radical change in his conceptualisation of power, for power constitutes subjectivity, much like how gravity constitutes directionality--through limitation. Without gravity, an endless drift; without power, an unbounded nothing. Only the limit grants mobility--thus, agency.
While I haven't read enough Butler to respond to Ruti's claim that Butler's Levinasian ethics allow for no radical break from power, I don't think you can break from power (in the conventional sense). Rather, you travel between discourses, and in that transversal, you invite the accident, the mistake, the misperformance, an unexpected line of flight that brings one discourse into contact with another. You never break from power through escape, but rather, through an intensification of power, a multiplication of misalignment, that grants you and others the ability to recognise the alien nature of your reified relations. Power only breaks through its disjuncture.
I generally liked this book (Butler is mired in ressentiment, Zizek is a raving sexist--neither alone are enough for us to pave a way forward that isn't either a politics of Abrahamic meekness or white male jouissance), but I think this gulf between Lacanians and Foucaultians is far smaller than it's made out to be. Just because power is inescapable, doesn't mean you can't transfigure it.
While I haven't read enough Butler to respond to Ruti's claim that Butler's Levinasian ethics allow for no radical break from power, I don't think you can break from power (in the conventional sense). Rather, you travel between discourses, and in that transversal, you invite the accident, the mistake, the misperformance, an unexpected line of flight that brings one discourse into contact with another. You never break from power through escape, but rather, through an intensification of power, a multiplication of misalignment, that grants you and others the ability to recognise the alien nature of your reified relations. Power only breaks through its disjuncture.
I generally liked this book (Butler is mired in ressentiment, Zizek is a raving sexist--neither alone are enough for us to pave a way forward that isn't either a politics of Abrahamic meekness or white male jouissance), but I think this gulf between Lacanians and Foucaultians is far smaller than it's made out to be. Just because power is inescapable, doesn't mean you can't transfigure it.
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