Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance
20050604,16:51
http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/feminism.htm
Foucault’s challenge to our society’s will to knowledge and his assessment of the mechanisms of power/knowledge are consonant with his ethics, one of the most frequently overlooked contributions to contemporary social criticism. In his later interviews and analyses in particular, he proposes that ethics should be grounded in resistance to whatever form totalitarian power might take, whether it stem from religion, science, or political oppression. In Western societies, he adds, religion and law have lost their viability for grounding ethical practices. An ethics based on the “so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is”, moreover, is also a dead end. One direction he does point to for contemporary society is some version of an aesthetics of daily life. But because his intellectual stance is more to reject the role of the prophet or the legislator of morality, Foucault refuses to draw up a blueprint for contemporary ethics and, indeed, assaults the notion of a single ethic. As he puts it, “The search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody in the sense that everyone should submit to it strikes me as catastrophic.” In place of a unitary morality, he upholds the “philosophical ethos” found in “the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness.”
（據此說法，要追求的，不是一套貫通的常規，不是道德法則。女人唔應該咁女人，男人唔應該點點點，這些說法莫不在制定某些個體應如何遵從「誰」定下的法規。這是很「現代」的前進式思維吧，要求「一種」劃一的道德性。傅柯提出的，是近乎日常修行式的ethics，於彼時彼處境作出特定的反思反抗或協商。）
（只怕這個原則到頭來成為另一種常規法則？）
The value of Foucault is not that he puts forward a set of ethical mandates but that he refuses to do so, offering instead a method that exposes the totalizing proclivities of conventional ethical visions. John Rajchman has argued that Foucault’s work is an unfamiliar “modern” ethic, “which, instead of attempting to determine what we should do on the basis of what we essentially are, attempts by analyzing who we have been constituted to be, to ask what we might become. Its principle is freedom, but a freedom which does not follow from any postulation of our nature genealogical investigation; it requires, in Foucault’s words, “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty”.
（其實有多少人真正願意讓自己自由？我疑惑。生活無指引無人對你說不准呢樣不准果樣，即是每一刻你都要自己警醒地看住自己。好自為知。）
（又有多少人能放下所謂「批判」的幌子？一棍瓣人展示權力的例子比比皆是－－「女人唔該似番個女人快D去減肥」或「女人應該解放自己解放社群」－－其實都同樣是基於本質化的假設去叫女人成為甚麼。法規內容似南轅北轍，規範性卻是同出一轍。不禁啞然，失笑。）
