/lit/ - Literature

>>22872598
Well ideas are funny like that. They can bounce around all over the place.

>>22872568
Like I said, I don't know a lot. But on French politics, there's a much stronger emphasis on republicanism in its political traditions than liberalism there I think. In the U.S. for example, the political right is really very liberal in its vertical theory of freedom and its view of the state as the obstacle to freedom. Both liberal and republican traditions exist in the U.S. too, of course, but republicanism as a tradition views freedom as a *status." It's not just an act. People can also be unfree because other citizens have arbitrary power over them even if it's latent or unexpressed. French socialism -- which influenced Karl Marx -- emerged out of this tradition. You might have a "good" boss, but he still has the power to fire you, so the socialists would argue that workers can never be "free" under capitalism. You might have a "good" landlord, but he still has the power to evict you. And here you see communist states calling themselves "unions of soviet republics" or "people's republics."

As far as identity politics goes, the French again are pretty wary of it. I've read the French state really doesn't like to collect demographic data. Everyone in France is supposed to be an equal citizen, and the American habit of sorting everything in racial boxes is weird to them. French secularism is also different than the American version, like with French schools banning traditional Muslim dress.

Foucault meanwhile can sound a lot like an anarchist. One of his most influential works is "Discipline and Punish" which is a history of prisons, and how reforms to make prisons more humane have made the power exercised over people labeled as criminals much more pervasive and systematic (he called it "panoptic"), proceeding largely by surveillance and attempts to re-make not only the behavior of people embroiled in the system, but their very selves. When you think you might be watched, and believe you'll undergo further punishment for misbehavior, then you become the oppressor of yourself, like you have a government agent or prison guard in your head.