Writing the Self and Transforming Knowledge in International Relations: Towards a Politics of Liminality by Erzsebet Strausz

Author:Erzsebet Strausz [Strausz, Erzsebet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351402644
Google: MxdSDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 39652813
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Foucault’s imaginary dialogue illuminates a mode of inquiry particular to his generation. Deleuze describes the main aim of critique as catching ‘things where they were at work, in the middle,’ and capturing the emergence of ‘actuality’ by ‘breaking things open, breaking words open.’14 Foucault breaks ‘discourse’ open and lays bare its operations. He turns the ‘fold’ around, the internalized ‘world’ within that mirrors the social by externalizing and enlarging that register of subjectivity where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meet.15 He names the forces on the sides of both discourse and subjectivity that make up and mark out the malleable boundaries of the subject. He separates out and re-animates those pulls that may otherwise be indistinguishable as the background noise of everyday life. ‘Desire’ and ‘the institution’ don’t always have a name, they just talk, often in multiple voices and past each other, fading in, fading out, with no end. Circumstances and their life world, what is given, what is done to us and what we may do to ourselves often blend, the edges of what is what are blurred. Foucault’s staged dialogue exaggerates and fictionalizes what might taking place in the processes of subject formation. With that it enacts a moment of rupture in discourse when this dynamic can be encountered as a structure of the unthought, operative and effective on us, in us. Being exposed to this scene we might catch ourselves being subject to similar thought processes wrestling similarly conflicting pressures. Desire, frustration, struggle or maybe the hope to be otherwise might resonate with what we have experienced ourselves. Foucault’s intervention makes an instance of the unthought thinkable and sensible. It creates a new experience by turning up the ever-present background noise of institutional routine and habitual social interactions so that it can be listened to as sound in its own right, on its own terms. He wrote that ‘we have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers,’ right at the limits.16 Maybe the frontier, the limit, the threshold is that space of recognition where we can witness ‘actuality’ as it emerges, where what we do and how we are in what we do might divert from its old sense the first time. Maybe at the limits the limit is no longer that limiting either. There seems to be absolutely nothing on the other side. Maybe this really is freedom.

By now I can see that an ‘ontology of ourselves’, of ‘who we are’ in the present calls for a form of reflection that goes beyond the mere acknowledgement that we are, too, part of the phenomena that we analyze, theorize or critique. Foucault’s pragmatic, practical mode of being opens up to negotiation how it is that we are both ‘elements’ and ‘actors’ in whatever we do, academic and other.17 Through tracing Foucault’s intellectual project as a unique form of experiencing ‘science’ and a constant remaking of this experience I came to understand that this ‘how’ for my project can only derive from my own ways of inhabiting ‘disciplinary life’ while trying to make sense of the world.

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