Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

Foucault claimed he was not presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge.
He makes statements that seem to contradict one another. “Part of the reason for this is
that he is not attempting to present a theory of anything, a complete explanation of the
structure of things. To attempt to do so, he says on one occasion, would be to concede
the very position he is rejecting, since ‘theory still relates to the dynamic of bourgeois
knowledge’” (Erickson, 2001:135). Foucault said of his own works:
I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box
which others can rummage through to find a
tool which they can use however they wish in
their own area... I would like the little volume
that I want to write on disciplinary systems to
be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate,
a conscientious objector. I don’t write for an
audience, I write for users, not readers
(Foucault, 1974:523).
Foucault did not really focus on the deep, traditional questions that other philosophers
and historians have often grappled with. Foucault was well schooled in history, but more
focused on the contemporary. McHoul and Grace said of Foucault:
We do not believe that Foucault provides a
definitive theory of anything in the sense of a
set of unambiguous answers to time-worn
questions. In this respect, there is little benefit
to be gained from asking what, for example, is
Foucault’s theory of power Nevertheless, his
work clearly involves various types of
theorisation. This is because we regard
Foucault as first and foremost a philosopher
who does philosophy as an interrogative
practice rather than as a search for essentials
(Grace, 1995:vii).
Foucault was once asked during an interview what people had especially influenced
his thinking, to which he responded: Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and
especially Nietzsche. He added:
Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that
this was someone quite different from what I
had been taught. I read him with a great
passion and broke with my life, left my job in
the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa