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Foucault's Oriental Subtext

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Uta Liebmann Schaub
Uta Liebmann Schaub*
Affiliation:
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio
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Abstract

Foucault's work has been investigated from within the Western intellectual tradition. My study approaches it from outside that tradition, from the perspective of Oriental thought. Oriental concepts were appropriated by the Western counterculture of the sixties and were espoused by associates of Tel quel when Foucault began to develop his radically subversive critique of Western discourse formation. Eastern models appear to have shaped his own discourse to such an extent that they function as a concealed subtext in his work. He criticizes the West for its anthropocentrism and logocentrism, its antagonistic dialectics, and its confidence in an unlimited advance of systematic knowledge. Foucault's enterprise is grounded in Oriental, chiefly Buddhist, systems that emphasize a progressive decentering of the individual through praxis rather than theory, a logic of coexisting opposites, a paradoxical language, and a knowledge unattainable through logocentric rationality.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 3 , May 1989 , pp. 306 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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