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„Seit zehn oder fünfzehn Jahren sind Dinge, Institutionen, Praktiken, Diskurse in einem ungeheuren und ausufernden Maße kritisierbar geworden; die Böden sind irgendwie brüchig geworden, selbst und vielleicht vor allem jene, die uns am vertrautesten und festesten erschienen und uns, unserem Körper, unseren alltäglichen Gesten am allernächsten.“ (Foucault 1977a, 217) In diesem Prozess sei etwas Unvorhergesehenes geschehen.
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Michel Foucault was probably right when he stated this in his lecture of 7 January 1976. “So I would say: for the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was somehow cracked, even and especially that which seemed most familiar and solid to us and closest to us, our body, our everyday gestures.” (Foucault 1977a, 217) Foucault said that something unexpected happened in this process. The theories that provided the locally usable instruments of critique, in other words Marxism and psychoanalysis, proved to be inhibiting to the extent that they wanted to be comprehensive, blanket theories. With the development of local critique, however, the discursive unity of those theories was destroyed, shredded, ripped apart, postponed, caricatured, theatricalized. In an interview conducted in the same year, Foucault pointed out the consequences. He said there was no more orientation, models of political action were devalued through the violence carried out in the name of theory. “The left, the whole thinking of the European left, revolutionary European thinking, which had its points of reference in the whole world and developed them in a specific way […], this thinking […] lost its historical reference points for the first time, which it had previously found in other parts of the world. […] We must start over again from the beginning and ask ourselves what we can base the critique of our society on in a situation, in which the previously implicit or explicit foundation of our critique has broken away. […] It must be possible to start from the beginning. To start again from the beginning with analysis and critique.” (Foucault 1977b, 514)
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