Summary....

Okay - so there's psychoanalysis, there's Foucault, and there's Nussbaum. Now with the help of my teacher I have been able to limit these things! I sort of know what I want to do with Nussbaum - or at least it is easier - but I am not sure that I know Foucault so well, but it won't be so hard, and the texts are all there - the only thing is to work on Kristeva. And to see how I could phrase what my project is to be. Maxime mentioned Nussbaums mix of Aristotelian with "Stoics" - I haven't thought of it that way, but insofar as there is a disciplinary aspect and insofar as there is a call to some kind of discipline under a "care of the self" in Foucault, there are definitely associations there.... care of the self is for being political - if it is not care of the self in the restricted aesthetic/appearances and even purely physical appearances - I thought to integrate Foucault from the point of view of th epossibility of critiquing those who hid, shunned, put aside and disciplined and saying, "Look, this itself is a discipline which is outside of yours, and for that reason is important and good and makes philosophers who do reach as much as they can of the best of human functioning, and being able to do that, they are able to be for others!" which is the political, but the political is already everywhere - the political is in the resistance of the individuals/communities to -not necessarily repressive functions of the structure but nonetheless being aware, being critical, saying these things are what you are doing - be conscious (and in that sense - there's the Kant that Maxime mentioned was Foucault's real Enlightenment stakes) and from there, in building up your capacity to do that (whether in the cranky mid-dialectic philosopher of Hume, whether in the person who is asserting the subjective or the objective wherever either of these has taken prominence politically or at least rhetorically in a way that does influence, if not governing realities, the ways in which selves and relationships are constructed). To say that sorrow is a way of doing that wherever you are - and the brilliance of sorrow is that it does not have to begin as an intellectual activity, but is signaled and is the call for intellectual activity - not so much detective work but as throwing in one's lot to the human cry for what is lacking, stifling, in the realities and structures in which we function - families, politics, etc. And to this end, beginning with psychoanalysis would be interesting because it reveals in more intelligibility than it can bear perhaps the sort of ordeals that one is a subject of (I don't believe half of these myths but find even the more outrageous ones to have a very interesting tool to circumvent all problematic political assumptions by creating stories at a very different level, by taking whatever is most - not "repressed' perhaps but in the context in which it arose - it was a deconstructive revolution, and what am I using it now for? A deconstructive or a reconstructive project? Or for something merely descriptive? I like its descriptiveness....