【题目】福柯在中国

（Michel Foucault in China）

【演讲人】Scott Lash 教授      伦敦大学戈德斯密斯学院

【主持人】汪晖 教授

【时间】2012年3月15日（周四）晚七点半

【地点】文北楼309室

【语种】英语

【主办单位】清华大学人文与社会科学高等研究所

【内容简介】

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?

 

Scott Lash 是英国伦敦大学社会学教授，1980获伦敦经济学院社会学博士，近三十年来，已出版专著近20种，著述涉及社会批判理论和文化研究。现任伦敦大学戈德斯密斯学院文化研究中心主任。