Foucault's Truth In Transition
Foucault is well-known as the genius behind a new philosophy of history, famous for radical opinions on the history of sexuality and repression. He speaks of the way that historians were surprised to find that they could write the history of the world as a history of economics, and yet surprised again to find that history could be described as a story of behaviors and bodies and emotions. He then proceeds to say that "Soon they'll understand that the history of the West can't be disassociated from the way in which 'truth' is produced and inscribes its effects." One can already see the beginning of this new understanding made manifest in Foucault's own work, and in much so-called "postmodern" thought which questions the underpinnings of reality.
Truth has always been bound up not merely in the official dogmas about reality, whether scientific or religious, but also in the ways in which...
Faucault, like many other postmodernists, points out that it is not merely what is explicit in culture that defines truth, but also the way in which the explicit defines truth in the negative. For example, the Christian truth put very strong strictures on sexuality, and obsessed about controlling it. This very obsession about denying sexuality created a focus on sexuality which, ironically, defined and strengthened the status of sexuality. By putting controls on sex, sex came to be in control; in the same way, creating "truths" about sex made sex into a repository of truth. "Sex has always been the center where our 'truth' of the human subject has been tied up along with the development of our species," says Foucault. Truth thus was defined both by dogma and by the dominant power, but it was in many ways resident within the spaces that power walled off.…
