Monday 29 November 2010

Godard on Foucault

I'm not so fond of Foucault, it's because he's always saying, "During this period, people thought 'A,B,C,'; but, after such and such a precise date, it was thought, rather, that '1,2,3'." Fine but can you really be so sure? That's precisely why we're trying to make movies so that future Foucaults won't be able to make such assertions with quite such assurance. Sartre can't escape this reproach, either.
Godard, 1967

3 comments:

ECW said...

Cinema as the block to all future genealogy. With Anna Karina leading the charge...

Unknown said...

I bet Foucault was quaking in his kimono about this devastatingly sharp critique from this widely read intellectual

stoneian41 said...

He was widely read.See Sam Inkinen's book Mediapolis:Aspects of texts, hypertexts and multimedia communication for a list of 32 individual philosophers Godard has explicitly addressed in his interviews and films. This quote touches on one of the main problematics in foucaults writing too, namely; ruling class history isn't just about the sedimentation of theory as Foucault would have it but productive foreces too, meaning things don't change in neat ways.Where is this quote from?I can't find it anywhere else but it would be useful to quote for my dissertation.