p.11 [this example, which shows a chronicler leaving certain
years empty in his chronicle of events in the Annals of Saint Gall] puts one in mind of Hegel's remark that periods
of human happiness and security are blank pages in history.
p.11 Hegel was right when he opined that a genuinely historical account
had to display not only a certain form, namely, the narrative, but also a certain content, namely, a politicosocial order.
p.12 [Hegel quoted] But it is only the state which first presents subject-matter
that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such history in the very progress
of its own being.
p.12-13 Hegel insists that the proper subject of such a record is the state,
but the state is to him an abstraction. The reality that lends itself to narrative representation is the conflict
between desire and the law. Where there is no rule of law, there can be neither a subject nor the kind of event that lends
itself to narrative representation. [JLJ - I would suggest that history is not necessarily a narrative, rather that
it is whatever it takes for someone to reconstruct the event in his or her mind. Where White speaks of the conflict between
'desire and the law' as the source of narrative, we can generalize to the 'conflict between desire and the forces which
impede, such as the environment or an opponent in a contest or game' ]
p.13 once we have been alerted to the intimate relationship that Hegel
suggests exists between law, historicality, and narrativity, we cannot be struck by the frequency with which narrativity,
whether of the fictional or the factual sort, presupposes the existence of a legal system against which or on behalf
of which the typical agents of a narrative account militate.
p.105 there is no center to Foucault's discourse. It is all
surface - and intended to be so. For even more consistently than Nietzsche, Foucault resists the impulse to seek
an origin or transcendental subject that would confer any specific meaning on existence. Foucault's discourse is willfully
superficial. And this is consistent with the larger purpose of a thinker who wishes to dissolve the distinction between
surfaces and depths, to show that wherever this distinction arises it is evidence of the play of organized power
and that this distinction is itself the most effective weapon power possesses for hiding its operations... Discourse is
the term under which he gathers all of the forms and categories of cultural life, including, apparently, his own efforts to
submit this life to criticism.
p.111 What is always at work in discourse - as in everything else - is "desire
and power"
p.113 the modern history of Western man's "will to knowledge" has been less a progressive
development towards "enlightenment" than a product of an endless interaction between desire and power within
the system of exclusions which made different kinds of society possible.
p.116 the kinds of relationships the sign may have with the entity
it is intended to represent are limited to four, depending on whether the sign "alights" on (1) "some internal element"
of the entity to be represented by it, (2) some point "adjacent" to the entity, (3) some figure "similar" to the entity, or
(4) some figure manifestly "dissimilar" to it.
p.130 [Foucault] insists that the principal characteristic of power is always
to manifest itself in a discourse about something other; power can only be effective - and tolerated - when
some part of it is hidden... it can only be... analyzed in the places it both inhabits and vacates simultaneously,
and hence viewed only indirectly.
p.130 knowledge [for Foucault] is
conceived to be so saturated with power that it is no longer distinguishable from it
p.188 to what should one be responsible?
There can be no answer to this question, I should think,
that is not value-laden and normative, prescriptive and judgmental
p.189 A third way of construing the nature of the relation of language to
its world was to regard language in general as a symbol of that world, that is, a natural analogue of that of which it was
a representation. This was the Hegelian view
