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Whose line is it anyway?: Enlightenment, revolution and Ipseic ethics in the works of Thomas Pynchon

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 10:20 authored by Martin Eve
This piece effects a critical revision of the interactions between late Foucault and the works of Thomas Pynchon through the theme of Enlightenment, a relationship far more nuanced than granted by current appraisals. Examining resistance, revolution, and the critical attitude alongside a focus on the Foucauldian sphere of ethics, this work posits Pynchon's negative and positive utopianism as a regulative idea. Reading both Pynchon's fiction and his essays, particularly ‘Nearer My Couch to Thee’, alongside Foucault's two pieces on Kant's ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’, it emerges that the divide between Pynchon and Foucault hinges more upon what we can know about ourselves and not necessarily, as has always been supposed, on who, or how, we can dominate. Pynchon's stance on revolution and resistance runs broadly in line with late Foucault's remarks on incrementalism; any change that can come about will, and should, be incremental while remaining pessimistic towards Meliorism. The narrowing of the sphere of ethics to ipseity that Foucault introduces to effectively counter the problems of agency that this entails, however, are not shared by Pynchon. For Pynchon, work upon the self is intrinsically contaminated and cannot be clearly delineated from the wider, impinging systems. With apologies to the author himself, it seems fair to say that when reading Pynchon in the Foucauldian Enlightenment tradition: we do know what's going on (to some, perhaps ingrained and inescapably limited, extent), and we let it go on, only ever imagining, in sorrow, how it could (never) be otherwise.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Textual Practice

ISSN

0950-236X

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

5

Volume

26

Page range

921-939

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2013-05-08

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