Abstract
In the final chapter, the emphasis is put on the relation between the critical discourse and the genealogical reading of history under a materialist and historical perspective, in order to raise questions regarding the current syntax of power relations and knowledge in the historical conjuncture of neoliberal homo œconomicus.
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Notes
- 1.
Nietzsche’s repeated use of this metaphor stands for “concepts, which capture and organize sensations; or habits that constrain us without being noticed; systems of ideas or practices (both religious and philosophical) and which in the end offer no real support” (Burngham 2015: 307). See, also Constancio and Branco (2012).
- 2.
A series of postwar conferences (1946–1953), held in New York, sponsored by the Macy Foundation, and aimed at breaking down disciplinary barriers in the sciences, resulting in the launching of the newborn science of Cybernetics (Kline 2015).
- 3.
It is worth mentioning that Wiener himself visited Paris in 1950 to give a lecture at the Collège de France, as a detailed and penetrating review of Wiener’s Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine had appeared in Le Monde on 28 December 1948, introducing his thought to France.
- 4.
If Marx revealed capitalism as a historically determined process of social homogenisation of labour at the level of relations of production, Nietzsche revealed modernity as a historically determined process of social homogenisation of thought at the level of rationality and practices, whereas Freud revealed bourgeois ethics as a historically determined process of social homogenisation of sexuality at the level of a biopolitical norm.
- 5.
This structural difference concerning subjectivity cannot be represented, according to Marx, by mathematics, not even by differential calculus, since they deal “only with quantities and thus with quantitative change which cannot be qualitative, contradictory change”, as they non-dialectically exclude temporality, namely history (Carchedi 2011: 289).
- 6.
As Evans summarises: “Lacan coins the term extimité by applying the prefix ex (from exterieur, ‘exterior’) to the French word intimité (‘intimacy’). The resulting neologism […] neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematises the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained. For example, the real is just as much inside as outside, and the unconscious is not a purely interior psychic system but an intersubjective structure. […] Furthermore, the centre of the subject is outside; the subject is ex-centric. The structure of extimacy is perfectly expressed in the topology of the Torus and of the Möbius strip” (1996: 59).
- 7.
For a more detailed discussion of the relation between the Foucauldian genealogy and its theoretical (Nietzschean) and political context (activism after May 1968), see Lagios 2016.
- 8.
“But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty” (Nietzsche 2007: I, §2).
- 9.
Etymology shows that memorandum is every agreement that should be remembered or stick to memory (OED “Memorandum”).
- 10.
PIGS: the unflattering and derogatory—if not racist—acronym of the weak and indebted European economies (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) was invented in the mid-1990s, long before the debt crisis of 2008 (Dainotto 2007: 2).
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Lagios, T., Lekka, V., Panoutsopoulos, G. (2018). Genealogy and the Question of the Present: A Conclusion?. In: Borders, Bodies and Narratives of Crisis in Europe. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75586-1_10
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