Back at the beginning of blogging, we used to talk about topics such as poststructuralist philosophy and Derrida and meaning and such stuff as that. This afternoon I caught a link the great Lucy Bellwood made to inmagasroom’s Tumblr, which itself linked to the original interview with Catherine Malabou, in which Malabou quotes Foucault to the effect of ‘Do you think I’ve worked so much, for so many years, to always say the same thing, and not be transformed?’
I cite this because Malabou refers to a sentiment Foucault also expressed another time, in his aphorism ‘…Travailler, c’est entreprendre de penser autre chose que ce qu’on pensait avant’ (‘To work is to undertake to think something different from what one thought before’) in ‘Le souci de la vérité (entretien avec F. Ewald)’, Magazine littéraire 207 (1984), pp. 18-23. I’ve quoted this latter form several times, but evidently it was on MF’s mind recurrently in the early 80s.
I probably would just have noticed and thought it was cool except that a couple of days ago somebody (and now I’ve culpably lost my original link, mea culpa, was it Tim Howles?) linked to the article ‘Sexuality and Solitude’ (LRB Vol. 3 No. 9, 21 May 1981) in which Richard Sennett and Foucault write casual introductions of their shared interest in disparate aspects of the problem of when and how ‘sexuality’ became so prominent as aspect of Western self-definition. And all the more I’m glad to have been redirected to Foucault, inasmuch as the tale of his advocacy of, perhaps guilt of, pederasty has been vigorously called into question (if not utterly refuted).