/lit/ - Literature

>>11881776
and i'm not the world's biggest foucault fan, and this is a baudrillard thread and not a foucault thread, but still. it is difficult to overstate foucault's impact on the way in which we understand the world, academia, politics today. in terms of Rectifying the Cosmic Balance, an undead Foucault summoned from beyond on behalf of peterson is kind of a beautiful thing. i would like to think that he would have championed peterson's cause just because he could do it, or because perhaps it might occur to him that the world in his absence had become every bit of a thought-control device as he had predicted it would have.

in less supernatural terms, peterson for his part is at least still alive, and perhaps it would be a net positive for him to actually read the man himself and understand where he was coming from. not so that he joins The Causes of the radical left, but to see that even within foucault's own writing is enough of an intimation that that every orthodoxy has within it the capacity to produce inquisitorial justice, which is exactly what peterson himself is up against.

peterson isn't foucault, but they are to me at least intriguingly parallel lives. in my fantasy scenario, of course, foucault is compelled not to critique peterson's argument but to champion his defense, and - because i think he would be successful - peterson comes round in the end to understanding what foucault's project in the end was aimed at. it wasn't about creating one power structure to replace another, it was about the fundamental illegitimacy and inescapability of power itself. it is *power itself* which is hegemonic, not politics. that is the key point. and once you understand this you can see why purity spirals and virtue signals are a cancerous outgrowth, a symptom, and not a sign that things are going well. power is *everywhere* and it is almost *always* illegitimate. that is why it has to be used wisely and well.

foucault would no doubt stop his own inquest long before this, and would probably chuckle at any notion that such a thing could be done. but that is peterson's own forte, and he has his own intellectual genealogy and sensibilities about this. but what a moment it would be for the stars to align in that way.