That doesn't seem like a terrible result. There's even a good case to be made that James and Nietzsche are at least proto-pomo, which fits with this characterization.

You should read that book. It's not very rigorous, it's just him telling it like it is for pages and pages straight. A certain kind of mind will find it extremely cathartic – it's less a monograph and more an uninterrupted rant.

Yes, but I would say the issue is also with the notions of 'genealogy' and 'archeology' in relation to subjects.

As far as I understand Henry though, he would reject that there's anything for such immanence to be transcendent to in the first place. 'Worldly relations' aren't 'excluded' from his notion of immanence, they just don't exist tout court. There is no 'outer' for an 'inner' to be contrasted against. It's just affect all the way down (and up). Anyway, from phenomenology to post-structuralism I simply see an evolving line, and one of the miserable ramifications of speaking about 'post-modernism' that that it utterly obscures the richness of the connections and the breaks that take place along that line.

As for defining postmodernism in terms of it's take on the 'subject', that seems to me to be a particularly reductive take on this. Although it chimes nicely with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze hardly talk about the category of the subject at all, and with Deleuze in particular, the subject is simply one among every other product of individuation which applies no less too river, rocks, climates and societies. The idea that 'post-modernism' is overbearingly concerned with questions of subjectivity is one of those pervasive myths that deserves a rather quick and unceremonious death.

That excerpt from Barbarism interested me, because I have not previously seen that insight into how scientism negates life articulated. I think that is what is behind the insistence that humans are animals or computers - it relieves us of the mystery of ourselves, which for most of us is a burden.

I agree, but don't think the various avenues you tend to offer (or really that Henry does, ultimately) are an interesting antidote for these woes. To my mind the world is a lost cause and has little of value, and while there may be some divine spark that could in some conceivable sense be nourished, in practice that is not going to happen, and studying for what reasons humanity is miserable just has merit as an intellectual curiosity, and not under the delusion that it will at some point be less miserable. (And I think philosophy, including continental philosophy, is generally not only itself miserable, but a positive collaborator in and agitator of that misery). But you really should read Barbarism, because nobody tells the truth quite like Henry.

Perhaps, but there is something for the self to be transcendent of and that is really the point of Henry's polemic against any scientific understanding of the "individual". The point for Henry (and interestingly in a similar way for Berdyaev whom I've also been enjoying reading of late) is precisely that the individual is not the self.

Perhaps the reason that Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida do not talk about the self in this sense is that for them it simply does not exist. So, I'm not (and haven't been) saying that postmodernism is "overbearingly concerned with questions of subjectivity" at all. So, I probably used the wrong term and should have referred instead to individuals being culturally constructed; which of course they are.

Perhaps the reason that Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida do not talk about the self in this sense is that for them it simply does not exist. — John

This is manifestly untrue. There's not much else to say about that.

Perhaps, but there is something for the self to be transcendent of and that is really the point of Henry's polemic against any scientific understanding of the "individual". The point for Henry (and interestingly in a similar way for Berdyaev whom I've also been enjoying reading of late) is precisely that the individual is not the self. — John

Eh, the disjunction between the subject and the self (or the 'ego') has a long and rich history, and is pretty pervasive with respect to all the philosophers we're discussing here. I suspect Henry would reel against speaking about any of his philosophy in terms of transcendence, but I'm not very invested in that debate either way.

I don't know who this is aimed at, but I have read quite a lot of "pomo" literature and even more proto-pomo (Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger). I have been trying to get at something that aint easy to get at (due at least to some not insignificant degree to the nature of much of 'pomo' literature). I actually enjoy reading some Deleuze or Derrida when I'm in the mood to be a connoisseur of ideas for ideas' sake (kind of like you you might drink wine for wine's sake and not to get drunk). Not so with Fouco, tho. ;)

@TheWillowOfDarkness.

It's more than that. When I say "infinite" or "meaning," I am only pointing to something which my language never is. All language does this. My thoughts and speech about my eye are not my eye. Talk about my computer is not my computer. Speech about the infinite is not the infinite.

Yes, I know this and I understand your perspective. I agreed with you in my first reply to you.
Here I was picking up on the idea that there can be meaning in the infinite, I find this problematic, I would always defer to the use of eternal rather than infinite.

The infinite cannot be known in the personal. It cannot be an interpretation. Either requires that the infinite be subject to change, for it be a object depending on the actions, understanding or existence of the finite human.

Yes I agree, but I don't see it as this simple, see below.

Transcendent accounts consider the infinite something to be obtained, through study, through living, through following a tradition: belief in the spiritual (to use Wayfarer's term), then the infinite will be present, the world will be saved from the absence of the infinite. Ironically, the argument for the transcendent is that we become the infinite, that we cease living in the finite realm and enter the eternal.

Here we need to tease out the esoteric from the exoteric understanding and use of transcendence as it has been handed down to us from the traditions. The notion of attaining the infinite(being delivered into eternity) and following a study and practice and then reach Nirvana and leave behind the finite. This is the exoteric understanding that is disseminated widely through our culture and the religious traditions.
By contrast, the esoteric understanding of transcendence (as it has been handed down to us by the traditions) is a discipline undertaken under strict direction from a master in which the initiated disciple relinquishes the exoteric in every form, stills the mind and metaphorically breaks into the eternal soul within themselves(which is veiled at this point in our evolution). This can be viewed as the opposite of breaking out of something, one breaks into that inner sanctum which is veiled to us in this world, rather like the pulling away the scales which protect a developing bud to allow the flower to bloom.

This process and the language used by the initiated would always have been concealed from the uninitiated.

We might describe immanence as the understanding that the infinite is inaccessible to us. No matter what we do, we will not live the infinite. Whatever our lives, we will still be finite creatures of change, no matter how much we understand the world or the infinite which it expresses. While there is infinite expressed everywhere and anywhere, the most we will ever do is point to it, no matter how much we understand (or do not understand) it.

Yes, this is strictly true of infinity, but do you realise that infinity is a human invention? We should be using the word eternity, or some other word which refers to an endlessness, but also allows for the unknown, which allows for realities and events which seem illogical, or impossible to us from our limited perspective.

It is in the respect that immanence and transcendence are similar, both refer to eternity expressed in reality. The difference is that transcendence understands eternity to be an object obtained or accessed though specific action, while immanence understands it to be necessary and unavoidable. Even you, more a pluralist in these matters, would say that it's particular action, a particular life, a particular mystic tradition which brings the eternal, which accesses it.

This comes to the heart of the matter. For me eternity is also unavoidable, but currently (due to our evolutionary incarnate predicament) unavailable, or veiled to us in our day to day existence. It is due to the veil that eternity is transcendent, but the mystic realises that the veil is the hard casing of a bud, to speak metaphorically and that our body has within it, in a latent form, the apparatus to release our true nature in some way into our incarnate selves.

I say that no-one needs to do anything to express the eternal. Everyone necessarily does so, no matter who they are. The whole world does. God (the eternal) is necessary and not something that is obtained or acts. Even the despairing or suffering express it. There is no means to obtain it (God, tradition, etc.,etc.) because it not the sort thing that is obtained. It's outside the world of change, greed and desire. No-one ever accesses it, no matter how much they understand or feel it.

Yes, I agree, the eternal is everywhere, is all, we are eternity devices, but we just don't see it.

The implication though is that we can't expect to understand it through our invention of logical thought alone. Our understanding would naturally develop through a natural process of unfolding/opening/revealing/unveiling. Because logic can't, at least at this time encompass the eternal.

So as far as I can see we are in agreement.

OK, I'm equating the subject with the self and distinguishing it from the individual. This is not exactly Henry's terminology perhaps. Perhaps he would equate the subject with the individual, and I would have no argument with that; as long as the distinction between the empirically or culturally constructed and determined individual and the radically immanent self is maintained.

I think the "disjunction" you are referring to is something else altogether.

I know how you feel, but really we owe it to our descendents who are not here to respond, to at least try to preserve the ecosystem, ourselves and make some progress towards securing our long term survival. It's not much to ask, is it?

I agree though - I just meant that Foucault, far more than Deleuze or Derrida, was a theorist of subjectivization, it's modes of operation, etc, etc. In fact it was in grappling with the work of late Foucault that I actually turned to - of all people - Zizek, or psychoanalysis more generally, which seemed to offer a way out of what seemed to me to be the impasses in Foucault's thoughts on freedom. Without getting into it too much, while late Foucault began to look into the techniques of the self as a means for subjective refashioning and so on, I've never been convinced he adequately theorized the mechanisms for those techniques he wants to say that man is capable of (in Lacanian terminology, Foucault has no conception of the Real)*. But that's a more narrow, theoretical issue.

--

*Giorgio Agamben gives voice to what I mean when he writes, in the famous opening lines of his Homo Sacer: "In his final years Foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on he other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and conscious­ness and, at he same time, to an external power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Foucault's work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back to a common center.

...Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault's work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power. If Foucault contests the tradi­tional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively based on juridical models ("What legitimates power?") or on institu­tional models ("What is the State?"), and if he calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty" in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in which the political "double bind" finds its raison d'etre?

...Although the existence of such a line of thinking seems to be logically implicit in Foucault's work, it remains a blind spot to the eye of the researcher, or rather something like a vanishing point that the different perspectival lines of Foucault's inquiry... converge toward without reaching."

A case can be made that if there is something universal about human nature, then we don't have the radical freedom, ethical responsibility etc that you seem to want to preserve. If there is an essence and that essence is given by something outside the subject (by something transcendent, say), where is the freedom? — Πετροκότσυφας

Incidentally, this line of reasoning is more or less exactly what drew me towards these kinds of thinkers; the notion of human freedom as guaranteed by some liberal conception of universality always struck me as cartoonish and ridiculous, and it always seemed to me that it'd only be by working through the processes of subjectivization that one could ever, in any coherent manner, speak about freedom.

Because he rejects that the subject is necessarily constructed by such forces. Sure, he says that this is what has happened in various times and what happens in our time and tries to show how specific subjectivities were produced, but he does not accept that this is necessarily how it ought to be. — Πετροκότσυφας

I would still say that Foucault thinks that pre-reflective subjects are constructed by various technologies of power and discourse. Those technologies are ever-changing, so there is nothing universal about the form of the construction of subjects, but surely the point must remain that subjects in all times and places have, for Foucault been constructed by the technologies of power operating within their societies.

I agree with you that Foucault does not think this is how it ought to be, or how it must be; that he thinks the subject, once she comes to critically understand the power relations that have shaped her, can and should then begin the process of manipulation to fashion herself as a living work of art.

But, where I disagree is that I do not see this kind of self-creation as the kind of radical freedom that must be presumed to ground genuine moral responsibility. I would say that freedom only comes to us in the terms in which we think ourselves. If we think ourselves as immanently and exhaustively constituted as individual parts of cultural, social, historical and discursive processes, whether unreflectively and disempoweredly other-constituted or reflectively and empoweredly self-constructed, there can be no radical freedom for us, because we cannot think of ourselves as such. If we think ourselves as radically free and live our lives in the light of that though, who is to say we are not 'really' radically free?

I think it is revealing that Foucault thinks "that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity-and not of authenticity".
Sartre's, which derives from Heidegger's (really Kierkegaard's) notion of authenticity is predicated on the turn away from the inauthentic generalized deliverances of 'das Mann', towards the personailzed, particularized, lived experience of Dasein, towards the intuitive, phronetic capacity (although Heidegger would not have put it this way) to respond directly to experience in a way utterly free from any of the dictates of 'what one does'.

There is an irony in this because to concern oneself with self-creation, which can only ever be a process of manipulating generalized cultural materials, seems to be seen by Foucault as the "only practical consequence" on account of his very incapacity to free himself from the generalized presuppositions inherent in his genealogies and archeologies of the the subject. So, his position can never be truly revolutionary, but must remain a mediocre reactionary strategy. And it is interesting that many critics have noted this reactionary spirit which lies at the heart of postmodernism as it does at the heart of any philosophy that insists on a discursive account of the self and of freedom.

It is not a matter of freedom being guaranteed by anything. Freedom cannot be guaranteed. That is the erroneous conceptual trap you seem to keep falling into; the demand that freedom must be guaranteed by some discursive analysis or other. As I see it, this demand is monstrously self-limiting. Freedom must be felt, it must be lived, it must be intuited, and it must first be presumed as an act of faith. This is the essence of Kierkegaard's "leap". This is the true essence of authenticity, to turn away from all intersubjective demands for justification of one's acts.

The one universal thing about selves is the fact that they are all truly free. This does not mean that the individual, as a cultural subject is free, it means that the self, insofar as it is spirit, is not restricted to its cultural subjectivity. But if the individual does not believe this ( i'e' has no faith) , then of course the individual cannot be free; irrespective of how brilliantly and ingeniously it manipulates what it understands to be its cultural constitution and 'constructs itself as a work of art'.

You mistake me. When I speak about 'guarantees', I mean precisely statements like this:

The one universal thing about selves is the fact that they are all truly free. — John

I mean, if you really believe this, then all you bluster about freedom needing to be lived, intuited, etc is meaningless. If we're so 'radically free', then what need any practise of freedom? This whole trope about spirit and freedom is on par with animism for me, it treats freedom as this abstract truth which zero bearing on life as actually lived. When I speak about guarantees, I'm speaking out against any such notion, especially any mythical notion of freedom as spirituality ingrained or whatever mystical thesis that makes of freedom some reified Idea in the sky or soul or whatever.

Foucault in fact has a wonderful quote about this, especially on the notion of 'guarantees': "Freedom is practice; . . . the freedom of men is never assured by the laws and the institutions that are intended to guarantee them. That is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because ‘freedom’ is what must be exercised . . . I think it can never be inherent in the structure of things to (itself) guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom”.

The question that occurs to me is, if we live in a free society, as all the contributors here presumably do, then we are all free agents. So what kind of 'freedom' is at issue? If its economic, political and social freedom, then we have that already. It's meaningless to talk about degrees of freedom in that context - we are all possessed of the same social freedoms. So are we talking about freedom from internal constraints, like anxiety? Or what? What is the criterion? Freedom to please oneself or follow one's own in inclinations? That would seem very much like success. So is that what is meant?

But the problem with what you say is that even if the true spiritual nature of persons is freedom, this cannot entail that there is any rational guarantee of that. And a person's realization of freedom can be obscured by any beliefs that deny it.

So freedom cannot ever be an "abstract truth" but rather something that must first be believed (on the basis of our intuitions and lived experience) before it can be fully lived.

I agree with Foucault that the structure of things cannot guarantee freedom; freedom has nothing to do with structures or processes. As I have said already I don't believe there can be any guarantee in any abstract sense, that is any deductive certainty, that we are free. But we can become certain that we are free when we cease the futile activity of asking for such guarantees.

You are still demanding such guarantees though-- believe, else your freedom will be obscured, else you will not be free. The one thing you won't accept is people are free without a guarantee.

People don't have to believe in freedom to be free. The person who denies they make a choice still chooses. They are still free no matter what they might think.

Here there is an irony to your position: it's you who doesn't think freedom is universal. You think belief is the gatekeeper. Fail to believe and someone will not be free.

People may be lacking in a realisation of freedom, but that doesn't mean they aren't free. It just means they think and say they aren't free, which may or may to cause them anxiety.

I can't speak for others, but I am not talking about any 'freedom' that can be granted by the state, or any freedom from emotions (in the sense that they might be eliminated or whatever).

The kind of freedom i mean is the ability to have determined to have done otherwise than one has done. When you say "I wish I hadn't done that" you imagine that you could have done something else. Of course purely logically speaking we could always have done otherwise, but freedom would be an illusion if we could not actually have done otherwise.

The scientific image of the world makes it seem impossible that there really are alternative courses of action which are available to be entirely determined by the person. Science cannot provide any coherent understanding of how we could be any freer than any other exhaustively physical process.

I think it is undeniable that people may be either freed or enslaved by their beliefs.

People are inherently free but may certainly enslave themselves.

Not with respect to the sort of freedom you're talking about. It's not a question of culture, discourse of power.

Now if you meant people may be harmed or anxious by a particular understanding of the world, by the ideas they deny themselves in their image of the world and truth, that is certainly true. In that case though, the issue is not a lack of freedom, but the particular understanding or belief which is hurting them. The problem isn't any lack of "universal freedom" or the absence "grounding myth (in the sense of one being true)." It's all about who they are, their particular beliefs and how they impact on them.

Someone might well need to think they are free to understand that they are, and feel that their life is worthwhile, but in that there is no challenge to their freedom. It's just a description of the lived culture they will find fulfilling (and the belief system they do not find fulfilling).

It's a much simpler thing I'm talking about; which is that if people do not believe they are free they will not experience freedom nor will they act freely, but instead their acts will be determined by their slavery to the ideas that deny their freedom.

That's a contradiction. If that were true, freedom would be dependent on believing in it, meaning it would not be "universal" and only a particular way, a discourse, a thought, an action, of people behaving.

In any case, no one's actions are predetermined by their outlook on freedom. Every action takes the action itself. All acts are lived. Even the person who denies they have freedom might find themselves acting otherwise to what they thought would happen. Everyone is free. All make choices, even those who think they don't have any choice. Freedom is so without the guarantee of belief in freedom.

So freedom cannot ever be an "abstract truth" but rather something that must first be believed (on the basis of our intuitions and lived experience) before it can be fully lived. — John

But what in the world has belief got to do with freedom? A belief in unicorns speaks nothing as to their reality, and I don't see what a 'belief' in freedom has to do with the practice and exercise of freedom either. In any case, without specifying how belief functions to guarantee freedom - and yes, as Willow points out, you're leveraging belief as a guarantee for freedom, no matter your protestations to the contrary - all you're doing is displacing the problem. To be free, one must believe: OK but what is belief other than some kind of immaterial, 'mental' conviction, no different to one's 'belief' in UFOs and The Secret? In fact, how does your position differ from the self-help woo that is The Secret at all?

But what in the world has belief got to do with freedom?

I can't speak for John, but as I see it what he is referring to is something along the lines of this. To have a conscious conception of the freedom one is engaged in. I have experienced this, rather like in a lucid dream in which you realise you are fully conscious in the dream and then experience a literal freedom in your actions. Even more so, if you can somehow control the dream, something I was never able to do. A freedom that is fully actualised in living action. This smacks of revelation to me, but one which embeds a realisation of freedom within oneself.

Yeah, I don't much care for dreamed up freedom. A slave in chains remains so regardless of whatever state of 'consciousness' they remain in. Lucid dreaming and 'inner experience' are just so much mystical salad dressing that have nothing to do with the concrete exercise of freedom. It's crystal healing disguised as medicine.

A case can be made that if there is something universal about human nature, then we don't have the radical freedom, ethical responsibility etc that you seem to want to preserve. If there is an essence and that essence is given by something outside the subject (by something transcendent, say), where is the freedom?
— Πετροκότσυφας

This presumes that this universal human nature is a rigid framework of some sort. It need not be, only the phenomenological stage or ground upon which that human dwells need be universal("all the world's a stage").
As I have pointed out it is incorrect to consider the transcendent somehow external to the subject. It is only ever accessed, received through the intangible being of the self. One ought to realise that temporal and spatial extension are a projection, from the transcendent realm, so each being is symultaniously in (dwelling) the transcendent realm and in the spatio temporal world. It is the world of extension that is external.

You do realise presumably that this question cannot be answered from our limited knowledge and understanding of the world we find ourselves in? Whatever freedoms one might rationally identify, may only have that appearance. Without access to the underlying basis of this world we are the blind leading the blind, surely?