Intertexts

I n t r o d u c t i o n Martin Donougho and Paul Allen Miller U n i v e r s i t y o f S o u t h C a r o l i n a The papers in this volume were first given as oral presentations at the Sec¬ ond Annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Confer¬ ence, “History, Technology, and Identity after Foucault.” This conference in March 2000 was organized as afollow-up to the “Cultural History After Foucault” conferences organized by John Neubauer and George Rousseau at the University of Amsterdam and Aberdeen University in 1997 and 1998 re¬ spectively. Selected papers from those conferences were published in Arcadia. 33.1 (1998) and Configurations 7.2 (1999). In each successive conference, the participants and organizers have tried to ask with greater acuity what is the specific nature of Foucault’s contribution to our understanding of cultural history, what are the strengths and weaknesses of his approach. The focus on the problematics of technology and identity in this final conference clearly aims at the heart of what is most distinctly Foucauldian in contemporary his¬ torical practice. The papers in the volume fall into two clear halves. The first four examine the problematic from the perspective of literary and rhetorical texts. These papers also look at history from the long view, from antiquity to the present. The second half of the volume examines the political conse¬ quencesofaFoucauldianconceptoftechnologiesofgovernanceoftheself and others. Its focus is naturally more on the history of the present. Our first paper, by David Konstan, “The Prehistory of Sexuality; Foucault’s Route to Classical Antiquity,” interrogates Foucault’s move to an¬ tiquity in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality. In the process, Konstan focuses on two primary questions: whether sexuality and the fixed identities that Foucault says go with it can be said to have ahistory; and whether Foucault’s model of normalizing discourses really applied to the medical and scientific texts he examined from antiquity. In relation to the first question, Konstan follows in the wake of Joel Black’s suggestion that what Foucault is actually doing in volumes 2and 3is examining the prehistory of sexuality, since sexuality as defined in volume 1is adiscursive construction of the eighteenth century.As such, the production of identity and subjectivity, to the extent that ascience or art of erotics is involved, will involve fundamen¬ tally different technologies of self-construction than those found in Enlight¬ enment Europe. This recognition in turn leads to adeeper and more penetrat¬ ing understanding of Foucault’s exclusion of literary texts from his ancient erotic archive. For if any ancient texts had the regulatory and normalizing function Foucault attributes to science in the early modern period, they are preciselythetextsofpoetryandtherhetoricalschools.Konstanconcludesby noting some surprising but persuasive links between Foucault’s interest in an¬ tiquity’s technologies of the self and the American transcendentalists’ focus o n s e l f - c u l t i v a t i o n . 3 4 I N T E R T E X T S Zahi Zalloua’s “Alterity and the ‘Care of the Self’” uses Foucault’s con- I cept of self care and technologies of the self to interrogate Montaigne’s at¬ tempt to understand the relation of self and other in his relation to La Boetie. \ In the process, he shows how Montaigne is able to use both Cicero’s defini¬ tion of afriend as asecond self and Aristotle’s definition (ultimately indebted to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium) of afriend as the completion self While those concepts are in acertain sense complementary, they are not identical. Zalloua shows how Montaigne uses the differences between them to meditate on the contradictions of finding one’s identity in and through arela¬ tionship with the other. The self, as both Montaigne and the later Foucault re- j alized, is always an essay, always an attempt to think differently and hence i found an identity fold in the discursive construction of the self. Ethics, or “the care of the self,” is thus inconceivable except as an embrace of the other, who...