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Upon rereading the preceding pages, I am struck by the fact that, notwithstanding my effort to "take Foucault into phenomenology' and thus in a sense to dissolve what I learned from him in a new element, there remains an insight that is decidedly Foucaultian which resists this current and, in reversing it, seems to draw phenomenology into Foucault. It can be summarized in one word: dissociation. By "dissociation' I mean something quite simple which nonetheless might explain a great deal of the fascination that Foucault's early work exercised on my generation: it is the dissociation between understanding in the sense of comprehension and understanding in the sense of sympathy. What Foucault calls "discourse" gives rise to such a dissociation: between different epochs of our culture, but also, between different cultures or within one single culture between, for example, social classes or generations or even - and I will come back to this - between individuals. Discourse works as a kind offilter through which certain things or statements literally can be seen or heard, but not others. Before the truth of a proposition can be decided, for instance, it must first be heard (it must be able to appear, Heidegger would say) and taken seriously. As I have suggested in my introduction, what is at stake here is a different sort of relativism than the one which people usually try to discredit by invoking the "self-refuting argument' which has been used from Plato to Habermas ("performative contradiction") to supposedly settle the matter.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4467-4_14

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