Re: dialectics, etc.

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ricardo Duchesne wrote:

>These are just two sides of the same coin: if is is an "inner essence
>we could never name", liberating it means producing a whole new
>subject.

For Foucault et Cie., there is no inner essence, so how could it be
"liberated"?  That's the point of the passage. Elsewhere, Foucault said
that he rejected the notion of a "process of liberation" in favor of
"practices of freedom," since "liberation" depends on the notion of
something repressed yearning to breathe free. And, as he also argued, what
we think of as "repression" (in both the political and Freudian senses)
doesn't block the expression of the (nonexistent) inner essence: it
produces subjects and desires. So these aren't two sides of the same coin;
these are two inconvertible currencies.

Doug