学术活动发布与订制系统

Michel Foucault’s idea of knowledge power is based on a contrast of ancients and moderns. We see this in for example his history of sexuality. For the ancients (i.e. Greeks) we have notions of the mean of reason, balance and pattern in nature and human nature. Modernity is instead defined against the ancients and instead in terms of the Christian confessional, and Augustine closing the last of the schools of philosophy. Now nature is contingency, chaos and sexual excess and perversion. For the moderns only God is in control, and we have Foucault’s paradigm of power/knowledge based on the Christian confessional. Here first God, then the human subject and finally discourse itself is all there is that controls the chaos, the contingency of outer nature and human inner nature (sexuality). But what about China where there is no confessional? Where God as controlling subject (上帝) loses out to the spatio-temporality of天。 How does power/knowledge work here? Where is discourse? What kind of modern do you get with when modernity is constituted, not against the ancient but instead grafted onto to a (Daoist/Confucianist) antiquity? What kind of nation? What sort of political? In Foucault’s bio-politics of contemporary neo-liberalism the location of power is instantiated in the discourse of neo-classical economics. This is based on a model of Newtonian physics in which now it is the laws of economics that control the chaos and contingency of (social) nature. But does this work in China? Here Foucault sets up in contrast to (neo-liberalism’s) neo-classical economics, something like classical political economy. Is such a classical political economy closer to the Chinese reality in in which time is irreversible; in which the ethical (and unethical) can be, not opposed to,but instead an extension of economic activity, in which not capital intensity but (often very highly qualified) labour-intensity is driving force? For Foucault, classical political economy works as a critique of neo-liberalism. What, in the wake of the global crisis, would such a critical political economy look like in China today? What would Michel Foucault look like in China?