TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2007//
TI  - Matricidal Madness in Foucault's Anthropology: The Pierre Rivière Seminar
JO  - Ethos
A1  - Ingham, John M.
SP  - 130
EP  - 158
VL  - 35
IS  - 2
N2  - I consider how Michel Foucault avoids trauma and tragedy while emphasizing power and discourse in his study of a 19th-century matricide in the Normandy countryside. Drawing on Jonathan Lear's discussion of knowingness, I show how Foucault misreads tragic drama as well as psychoanalysis to emphasize power, pleasure, and discourse. While seeming to acknowledge tragedy, his emphasis on will to power, violent madness, and male agonism more closely resembles Homeric epic. The attempts to displace psychoanalysis and refigure tragedy, however, are unconvincing, even self-defeating. Ironically, Foucault makes an inadvertent argument for psychoanalysis and tragedy and, thus, psychoanalytic anthropology.<p /> 
LA  - 
SN  - 0091-2131
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/eth.2007.35.2.130
ID  - ref1
ER  -