Toward a foucaultian epistemology of resistance: Counter-memory, episte-mic friction, and guerrilla pluralism

Abstract

In this paper I argue that Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical ap-proach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting op-pression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970's. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remem-bered and forgotten, but how, by whom, and with what effects. I highlight the criti-cal possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter's genealogy of racism in Anglo-America. In the second section I put the Foucaultian approach in conversation with contemporary work in prag-matism and critical theory on the social epistemology of memory. In the third and final section, I explore some of the implications of the Foucaultian notion of resis-tance and what I term guerrilla pluralism for contemporary epistemological discus-sions of ignorance in standpoint theory and race theory. © 2011 José Medina.