Monday, July 01, 2024

Foucault's Non-Progressivism ("The endlessly repeated play of dominations")

 


Green Lake, Wisconsin


James K. A. Smith writes of Foucault's non-progressivism as essential to Foucault's theory.

"As Nietzsche earlier claimed in his Genealogy of Morals, good and evil are just names that we give to the power interests of the strong versus those of the weak. Thus “in a sense,” Foucault concludes, “only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non-place,’ the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” The story of humanity is not the Enlightenment fiction of perpetual progress or the constant progression of the race, as Kant (and Richard Rorty) suggest, but rather simply the shift from one combat to another, from one form of domination to another."

(Smith, James, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? p. 87)