Kristeva, Foucault, and History: The Sensuous and Production of the Subject

• In Event: Sensuous Curriculum: Of Politics and the Senses in Education

Abstract

“To touch,” writes Erin Manning, “is to excribe touch, as a verb, as a terminology, to deflect and question its insertion in a vocabulary that would seek to stabilize politics, and/as the body once more” (Manning, 2007, p. 15). Touch both defines and “deflects” epistemological durability of specific practices of power and conceptualizations of equity and justice. To excribe implies a rather disjointed position of the researcher who examines the ways in which history and historical texts fashion a self. The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Julia Kristeva (1991) and Michel Foucault (1977) use history to promote and foster the sensual aspects of subject production. The ways of knowing through genealogical analysis (Foucault) and historical reconstruction (Julia Kristeva) offer researchers opportunities to investigate the material aspects of methodological approaches through historical texts. For Foucault, history operates in medias res, lacks an origin, and moves through accidents based on chance events. For Kristeva (1991), history is employed to “draw tentative lines” (p. 170), to offer perspectives of unities in order to make thematic and inductive claims about that nature of the psyche of the human being. What is critical about both philosophers is their insistence on the possibilities for history of escape our selves (Bernauer, 1990; Foucault, 1977; Hayes, 2007) or to become a “foreigner” to ourselves in order to embody specific notions of freedom. This paper will focus exclusively on both author’s sense of history and how it informs their sense-making on subject production.
References
Bernauer, J. (1990). Michel Foucault’s force of flight: Toward an ethics of thought. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books.
Foucault. M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, New York: Vintage Books.
Hayes, C.J. (2007). Self-transformations: Foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. New York, New York: Columbia University Press.
Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Authors

• David L. Carlson, Arizona State University

• Joseph D Sweet, AZ