According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia. This illustration of the purchase that specific intellectuals’ discipline has on what one may call ‘universal’ political (that is, power) relations, also explains what Foucault means when he says that such intellectuals have moved closer to the proletariat and the ‘masses’, even if the specific, ‘non-universal’ problems they grapple with are often far removed from those of the masses. Thus, as critic Gary Gutting notes, the ‘archaeological’ method formulated in the Archaeology is ‘a historical method of inquiry, concerned not with structural possibilities but with actual occurences and their effects’. In addition to Philosophy, he has been teaching and writing on his other great loves, namely, nature, culture, the arts, architecture and literature. Knowledge is a practical assemblage, a ‘mechanism’ of statements and visibilities. In charting these alignments throughout history, Foucault arrives at the birth of the asylum, the constitution of the ‘insane’ subject, placed in confinement and under scientific surveillance. The debate between Foucault and Critical Theory—in particular with Habermas—is quite illuminating of the common critical-universalist orientations of the first phase of the Frankfurt School versus the diverging methodologies defended starting from the Habermasian interpretation of modernity. An Aesthetics of Existence 47 Theories of the Political: History, Power, and the Law 4. Foucault delimitates what he calls the discursive formation which has four basic elements. I have previously quoted a passage from Noam Chomsky, which acutely surveys the post-structuralist origins of our present Post-Truth condition.These words are worth recalling once again: There are lots of things I don’t understand – say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way … The panopticon, a prison where the prisoners believe themselves to be under total surveillance, functions as a metaphor explaining how and why subjects thereby modify their own behaviour. His own reference to the role that the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer played in the development of the first nuclear bomb may also serve as a telling example of what it means to be a ‘specific intellectual’. But modernity, in turn, gives way to another violent epistemic break: that of the period in which Foucault ends his book (the late 1960s), with its political and intellectual upheavals in France, and the rise of structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today—showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. This was inseparable from the kind of scientific, technological and cultural principles and practices which comprised a distinctive system of mutually cohering and corroborating concepts and propositions. 176. As this quote emphasizes, he self-proclaims that he does not use a Freudian, Marxist, or structuralist approach to his concepts and theories. The approach was inspired by the work of both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and by critical theory. S historical work now form part of the disappointments of the implications of analysis! Undergo a critical examination rhetoric about this being a career development opportunity sounds at... 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