Foucaultcu Eleştiri Nasıl Anlaşılmalı ?

This paper focuses on Foucault’s notion of critique and some objections to it. In recent times, some intellectuals have contended that there is a problem of relativity in notion of critique admitted by Foucault. For them, critique in Foucault is lack of an idea of truth, a criterion of true-false and a normative foundation on which critique is based. If any critique has not a normative foundation, it cannot save itself relativism or arbitrary subjectivism. But relativity or subjectivity actually demolishes and blinds it. And this is to accept that the critique eventually loses its meaning and function in Foucault’s understanding. In that case, there is reason for the philosophers to have doubts about the notion of Foucauldian critique itself that attempts to be skeptical about truth by interrogating the foundations of all theories. The problem of Foucauldian critique is, however, not only its relativism or subjectivism but also its irrealism, historicalism, and thereby its nihilism. This means that he has no alternative models which can be substituted for the ones criticized by him. Therefore, the real motivation under his notion of critique is nothing but wanting be different. This paper aims to give an answer to these objections by clarifying how Foucault sees the critique and its role in his own intellectual project. In the paper, I assert such objections are due to misunderstanding about the aim, role and function of critique in Foucault. Just as it could be said the claim that he was very opponent for enlightenment in all terms was due to some failure in separating his attacks on the dark side of enlightenment from his commitment to the ethos of enlightenment, so it can be said the same for the objections toward his notion of critique and its results. I apply to both his own writings on critique and secondary literature on Foucault to show this in the paper. In his “What is Enlightenment?”, Foucault has tried to show us how to become enlightened while being against some assumptions, results and dark side of enlightenment. Similarly, in his “What is critique?”, he has attempted to show us how one can be critical without applying to the norms of truth by demanding from us to rethink over the critique and making the critique itself problematical. Foucault’s chief concern regarding the critique here and in other writings is showing us that it is essentially an attitude. It is a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one does, to what one knows, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others. But, the critique as a way or attitude is simply not an instrument which leads us truth. Rather, it is a virtue; and so, it is a thing worth-while in its own right. The virtue in Foucault doesn’t mean to follow and obey the laws, rules or norms which are already determined. On the contrary, it means taking a critical attitude towards them. Foucault rejects to define the virtue with obedience or subjection. For that reason, he prefer to define the critique as an art of not being governed, an art of volitional insubordination, that of reflected intractability which essentially attempts to prevent to subjugation of the subject with the politics of the truth. When Foucault forms himself through resisting given principles forming him, the critique appears a practice of desubjection by which the subject gives himself the right to question the discourses of truth. This understanding of critique is not very far off in fact from Kant’s definition of enlightenment in which he emphasizes the role of the courage in critical attitude. In his notion of critique, Foucault precisely gives more importance to the courage to question the authority rather than to the reason. By this, he doesn’t lead the people toward an absolute anarchy; but he just advises them having alertness against being governed like that, by that, in the name of some principles, with such and such objectives. A way to do this is to consider the critique as an activity of diagnosis that tries to determine what everything are we talking about and how they become as they are rather than an activity of judgement that seeking and finding the fault within everything under the scrutiny. He thus saves himself from applying to a model of judge-critique as well as a foundational standard of truth. In fact, the prime reason for objections to Foucault’s insight of critique is to see the critique as a part of the dialectic of enlightenment working based on a set of distinctions, dual oppositions like universality-relativity and rationality-irrationality. Whereas, Foucault goes beyond those all dualisms and surmounts the problems caused by them with contextualism. He holds that the critique and its forms, its objectives and its processes must be thought in terms of a logic free of the sterilizing constraints of the enlightenment dialectic. From this, it can be asserted even that he has no obligation to give an answer to the objections mentioned. For, such a thing is to demand him to submit to the blackmail of the enlightenment which he denied. And such a demand is obviously incoherent with his critical project. For him, it is possible to conceive of a critique not relying on a universal, foundationalist form of truth. The job of an intellectual is not to tell other what truth is or what they have to do. Instead, it is to continuously call what seems obvious and clear into question, to disrupt the people’s ways and habits of thinking and making something, to get the usual and accepted suspicious and to always re-consider the known rules and norms. He tries to break the modern philosophical discourse in which we have troubled with epistemological foundations and standards of truth. Such a discourse is, for him, a barrier to ask a new question about the emergence of social practices which confines what we are and even what we may be. This question is not what truth or alternative is, but what is danger? Foucault says that the critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction resulting in that this then is what to do. Rather, it should be an instrument for those who resist and deny what is. The reason why he has not accepted the word alternative is nothing but that. The issue is not to declare that everything is bad, but everything is dangerous. He thus becomes noticed what we will fight for rather than what we will confirm while making a practice of critique. The critique as indicating the danger naturally causes a transformation in things on which it is critical although it does not offer an alternative to them. It is certainly vital for transformation. For, when one can no longer think things as one previously thought them, transformation becomes possible and even urgent as well as difficult. However, neither end of critique nor the role of intellectual is to construct utopian models. But this does not have to result in nihilism. Foucault never rejects that his understanding of critique aims to freedom and autonomy. The relationship between freedom and critique in Foucault is a reciprocal one. They always require each other. The freedom and autonomy are like standards for his understanding of critique. Therefore, the objection that Foucaldian critique has no any standard or guiding principle has no longer real sense. In conclusion, it can be said that the practice of critique in Foucault is in fact an art of existence, or an art of living. With such an art, he attempts to make his own life a creation. As a result of this, his conceptualization of critique as a practice, an ethos, an attitude, a virtue, a diagnosis and an art of not being governed so much is very different from classical notion of critique.