Michel Foucault a Research Companion

“Since his death, more material by Foucault has been published than appeared in his lifetime. Making use of his lecture courses alongside his major works, Michel Foucault: A Research Companion provides a roadmap and travel companion through the remarkable breadth of his interests and insights. A major undertaking which is consistently valuable.” – Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick, UK. Author of Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press 2016) and The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press 2013).

“So much has been written about the work of Michel Foucault that it is an unexpected pleasure to discover something new. In this comprehensive, scholarly and committed analysis, Sverre Raffnsøe and his colleagues show how Foucault’s books, interviews and lectures constitute a continual, profound and always unfinished work of diagnosis of our present, a work that goes beyond mere critique and seeks to enhance our capacities to learn from our pasts in order to transform the futures that are unceasingly taking shape. In reading Foucault in this way, they make a compelling case that this diagnostic practice should be the stake and the test of philosophy today.” – Nikolas Rose, Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine, King’s College, UK. Author of Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (with Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Princeton University Press 2013), The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press 2007) and Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (Free Association Books 1989/1999). Editor of The Essential Foucault (with Paul Rabinow, The New Press 2003).

“In Michel Foucault: A Research Companion, Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer and Thaning offer a comprehensive and exquisitely detailed review of the works of Michel Foucault. Unlike those who point to revolutionary breaks in Foucault’s thought, the authors show continuity in Foucault’s philosophical practice of unrelentless self-criticism. We owe a debt of gratitude to Raffnsøe and his colleagues for returning us to Foucault, the philosopher, and to his modes of criticism that can guide us in our research. No one interested in the application of Foucault’s conceptualizations in the studying of our present can be without this book.” – Patricia Ticineto Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College, City University of New York, US. Author of Auto Affection (University of Minnesota Press 2000), and Feminist Thought and The End(s) of Ethnography (Blackwell 1994). Editor of The Affective Turn (Duke University Press 2007).

“The authors of Michel Foucault: A Research Companion have provided an excellent overview of Foucault’s work grounded in a rigorous familiarity with his diverse writings, lectures and interviews. What particularly recommends it is the way Foucault’s investigations are shown to be part of a consistent philosophical praxis conceived as both a diagnosis of the present and a work on oneself. In whole, or in parts, it will prove exceedingly useful to researchers and students alike.” – Mitchell Dean, Professor of Public Governance, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Author of The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics (Sage 2013) and Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Sage 1999–2010).

“This book provides a wonderfully wide-ranging and comprehensive treatment of Foucault’s work, examining material published both during his lifetime and after. The authors mount a lucid argument for the overall coherence of Foucault’s work whilst at the same time drawing attention to its continual internal transformation. Their focus on Foucault’s project of a diagnosis of the present, and its broadening of the boundaries

of what has been traditionally understood to be philosophy, is particularly enlightening as a way of understanding Foucault’s ongoing relevance and applicability in contemporary settings.” – Clare O’Farrell, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Author of Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? (Palgrave Macmillan 1989), and Michel Foucault (Sage 2005). Editor of Foucault: The Legacy (Queensland University of Technology 1997). Founder and maintainer of the Foucault News blog and the michel-foucault.com site.

“The recently completed publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France has opened up whole new facets of Foucault’s work, inspired new research avenues, and pushed Foucault scholarship to the next level. This signature volume, Michel Foucault: A Research Companion, forms a crucial contribution to these ongoing developments. Based on a thorough-going examination of Foucault’s lectures and published works, the volume offers a new perspective to help make way, in a coherent and consistent manner, through Foucault’s writings and political engagements. Well-written, in a very accessible style, this Research Companion presents Foucault as a philosopher who recurrently engages in a diagnosis of our most critical contemporary experiences. It offers a unifying trajectory across the different phases and periods of Foucault’s work. The book identifies, on the one hand, a number of recurring analytical categories in Foucault’s way of thinking and approaching problems – diagnosis, the event, the experience, veridiction, normative matrices and more – that are fundamental and need to be taken into account; the book demonstrates, on the other hand, through Foucault’s repeated interrogation of the present, an ongoing transpersonal modification of self and thought: a persistent philosophical meditation ignited by the non-philosophical, an enduring ordeal that modifies one’s manner of being, perceiving and thinking, as one enters the game of truth, an ordeal that forces one to move towards something that has not yet arrived and to ‘stand vigil for the day to come’. This Research Companion is an invaluable resource.” – Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Columbia University, US, and Directeur d’études, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, France. Author of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011). Editor of Michel Foucault’s 1973 Collège de France lectures La société punitive (Gallimard 2013) and co-editor of Foucault’s lectures Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (University of Chicago Press 2014).

Michel Foucault: A Research Companion Sverre Raffnsøe Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Marius Gudmand-Høyer Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Morten S. Thaning Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

© Sverre Raffnsøe, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Morten S. Thaning 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-349-56666-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any license permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-137-35101-2 ISBN 978-1-137-35102-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137351029

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raffnsøe, Sverre, 1959– Michel Foucault : a research companion / Sverre Raffnsøe, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, Morten Sørensen Thaning, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. pages cm 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. I. Title. B2430.F724R335 2015 194—dc23

2015025767

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Abbreviations of Foucault’s Books and Lectures Preface

viii x

Acknowledgments

xix

Introduction: A Philosophical Trajectory

1

1 Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault

38

2 Contextuality and Transversal Categories: A Less Familiar Foucault

72

3 On the Borders of Madness

98

4 A Genealogy of Structuralism and Language

147

5 Discipline, Penitentiary, and Delinquency

171

6 Warfare as a Model of Power Relations

208

7 The Governmentalization of the State

229

8 The (Neo)liberal Art of Governing

280

9 Histories of Sexualities

333

10 The Practices of the Self

369

11 Philosophy, Enlightenment, Diagnostics

426

Exit: Challenges for a Diagnosis of the Present

455

Bibliography

466

Index of Foucault’s Books and Lectures, in French and in English

477

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

479

v

Descartes meditated for six full days. One could wager that on the seventh he became a physicist again. But what could truly constitute a reflection before the day, before the morning of each day? Calling it a reflection is already going too far; perhaps, rather, an exercise in thought and in language – in pensive speech, which recedes from the earliest light, advances towards the night from which it comes, and endeavors cautiously to remain in a place without space, where eyes remain open, ears cocked, the entire mind alert, and words mobilized for a movement that they do not yet know? I will not shut my eyes, I will not stop my ears, for I know very well that midday is not here and that it is still far away. Michel Foucault: “Guetter le jour qui vient” (1963) οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης. They do not understand how what is drawing apart comes to be in agreement with itself; a frame turning back to itself like that of the bow and the lyre. Heraclitus, Fr DK 52

List of Illustrations

Boxes 1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1

A common periodization of Foucault’s authorship Foucault’s education and employment Foucault’s political activities The complex lineage of Histoire de la folie

58 70 82 101

Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 6.1

Banishment. Madness on the border of society Confinement. Madness beyond ‘ordinary’ society Moralizing. Madness is reintegrated into society The prose of the world Identity and difference The Levelers

107 109 113 160 163 214

Tables 7.1 9.1 9.2

Prototypical dispositives Ethical elements Domains of experience

245 343 343

vii

Abbreviations of Foucault’s Books and Lectures

Abbr.

French title

Abbr.

English title

[A]

Les anormaux. Cours au Collège de France 1974–1975

{Ab}

Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975

AS

L’archéologie du savoir

AK

The Archaeology of Knowledge

{SD}

“Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976

{FS}

Fearless Speech: Lectures at UC Berkeley 1983

DE I–IV Dits et écrits I–IV [DS]

“Il faut défendre la société” Cours au Collège de France 1975–1976

[GV]

Du gouvernement des vivants. Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980

{GL}

On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980

[GSA1]

Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France 1982–1983

{GSO1}

The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983

[GSA2]

Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Le courage de la vérité. Cours au Collège de France 1983–1984

{GSO2}

The Government of Self and Others II – The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984

HF

Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique

HM

History of Madness

[HS]

L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982

{HSb}

The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982

[LSP]

La société punitive. Cours au Collège de France 1972–1973

{PS}

The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973

[LVS]

Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. {LWK} Cours au Collège de France 1970–1971

viii

Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971

Abbreviations of Foucault’s Books and Lectures

Abbr.

French title

Abbr.

English title

MC

Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaine

OT

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

MP

Maladie mentale et psychologie MIP

ix

Mental Illness and Psychology

[MFDV] Mal faire, dire vrai: Fonction de l’aveu en justice-cours de Louvain 1981

{WDTT} Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice 1981

[NB]

Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979

{BP}

The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979

NC

Naissance de la clinique

BC

Birth of the Clinic

OD

L’ordre du discours

[PP]

Le pouvoir psychiatrique. Cours au Collège de France 1973–1974

RC

Résumé des cours de 1970–1982

RR

The Discourse on Language (in AK) {PsP}

Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974

Raymond Roussel

DL

Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel

SP

Surveiller et punir

DP

Discipline and Punish

SS

Le souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualité 3

CS

The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality 3

[SV]

Subjectivité et verité. Cours au Collège de France 1980–1981

[STP]

Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978

{STPo}

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978

UP

L’Usage des plaisirs. Histoire de UPl la sexualité 2

The Use of Pleasures: The History of Sexuality 2

VS

La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité 1

Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality 1

WK

For the purpose of easy distinguishing, the abbreviations are given according to this division: French original

English translation

Books

in CAPITALS

in ITALICIZED CAPITALS

Lectures

in [CAPITALS] with brackets

in {ITALICIZED CAPITALS} with curly brackets

Preface Michel Foucault (1926–1984) exerts an overwhelming and overarching influence in our contemporary social world. He has had and continues to have an enormous impact on the social sciences and the humanities, and through his reception in many instances and contexts, he also has an enormous impact on practice and theory more generally. This is allegedly the case because of the cross-disciplinary approach he has employed in his simultaneously historical and contemporary studies of very different social phenomena and experiences and the forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivities they further and maintain. Foucault’s seminal influence is supposedly also due to the serviceable character of his work and analysis. Occasionally – and famously – Foucault described his authorship as a “toolbox” for others to pick and choose from in whichever way they would like.1 The enormous impact on the humanities and the social sciences that he has had can thus be said to stem from the wide-ranging variety or assortment of analytical concepts and strategies that he has been able to muster. In this way Foucault has probably become instrumental not only because of the applicability and versatility of his “toolbox” but also because he has become very timely. His analysis and conceptual tools seem to be particularly illuminating and responsive to present-day issues – in all their diversity and particularity – while at the same time he has already become a part of how these issues have come to present themselves as a result of his popularity and influence. However, in this book we strive to demonstrate that Foucault’s analytical strategies persistently draw upon a distinct philosophical impetus as well as a series of key categories that form a consistent crux around which his authorship rotates. Foucault fascinates and attracts interest, not because his work has become so familiar and timely that it can be recognized all around us, but because he – in spite of this ubiquitous presence and immediate familiarity – nevertheless remains different and indeterminate. There remains a crucial and outstanding feature of Foucault’s way of working that represents a particular approach that sets him apart from the majority of contemporary scholarship. It is this approach in particular that we believe demands attention and 1 “Un problème qui m’intéresse depuis longtemps” [1971], DE II: 208–209. “Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir” [1974], DE II: 523–524.

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remains intriguing for theory and practice today – not least because it still remains insufficiently understood, but because it is untimely and out of sync with contemporary scholarship, and presents us with a different approach and attitude to knowledge and scholarship – or simply another way of practicing philosophy. Our CLAIM in this book is that this fact becomes evident as soon as two important issues are recognized as seminal for Foucault’s way of working, namely that the form of philosophy he takes up is that of a diagnosis of the present and that the practicing of this form of philosophy implies a certain self-modifying role for the philosopher. The aim of this book is therefore to articulate the contemporary diagnostics and the self-transformative function of Foucault’s philosophical practice as a transversal uniting feature of his œuvre that makes it cohere. This is important since if we fail to overlook this unifying thread, then either Foucault’s œuvre tends to fall apart and diverge into particular fragments, or we simply miss out on the full and momentous image of his thought. We are thus making two connecting claims with this book. First, we claim that his philosophy can be understood as the continuous attempt to show how the medium of historical investigation can be used to challenge how we relate to experiences of collective importance in our present practices and discourses. Among the experiences diagnosed in this way we will examine madness, structuralism, delinquency, the state, and sexuality. This conception breaks with philosophy as a disciplinary approach or a specific mode of scholarship in favor of a history of thought that situates itself on the margins of scientific and practical knowledge while remaining in constant dialogue with traditional philosophical thought. In our view, this non-disciplinary and original renewal of philosophy is one of the major reasons why Foucault’s work has become so relevant for other disciplines. Second, we claim that Foucault had a long-standing Auseinandersetzung or critical exchange with philosophy as a work of thought upon itself and with the very act of writing as a philosophical exercise of the self. This practice of philosophy as continuous self-modification expresses a continuous thread in his œuvre. The self-modificatory practice in the medium of thought operates on a plane that cuts across the diagnostics of the present, linking the various diagnoses together in a series of family resemblances that brings to light a specific role for Foucault as philosopher. Moreover, the recognition of this fact is essential as well for understanding the present fascination with Foucault as why he catches our attention. On this level, there is continuity rather than a constant revision of analytical tools in use that are reassigned in new studies and contexts. It is a continuity that is not to be found on the level of specific positions, propositions or opinions, or on

xii Preface

a thematic or propositional level where Foucault’s analyses can only be understood as disjecta membra of his œuvre and as relatively isolated parts that result from a sudden conversion, only to be followed and ended by an equally sudden reconversion and abandonment. The approach we have chosen in order to substantiate our claim and its importance for the understanding of Foucault is to demonstrate how he, throughout his entire career and also in most of his writings, interviews, and lectures, practices philosophy as diagnostics of the present and as a trial or ordeal of the present, both of philosophy and himself, and therefore also as a self-modificatory practice that is occupied with our relation to the limits of our contemporary experiences. EXPOSITION: The Introduction as well as Chapters 1 and 2 develop and specify this conception of philosophy from three different perspectives. In the Introduction, “A Philosophical Trajectory”, we characterize Foucault’s identity as a philosopher and demonstrate that from early on until the very end of his authorship he understands his work in terms of diagnoses of the present and exercises of thought upon itself. In Chapter 1, “Displacements and Development,” we present a characterization of the phases of Foucault’s work. The important point here is, however, that such a partition of his œuvre can only amount at best to a useful tool for initial orientation in his writings and in fact risks distorting the understanding of his work if overemphasized. Rather than speaking of revolutions in Foucault’s work of thought, we argue that one should instead acknowledge its continuous evolution and self-revision as its distinguishing traits. In Chapter 2, “Contextuality and Transversal Categories,” we focus on the contextual nature of Foucault’s thought and furthermore on a description of important categories that traverse it, notably the notions of event and experience. The perspectives developed in Chapters 1 and 2 complement the trajectory of Foucault’s thought as described in the Introduction in important ways, yet the remaining chapters do not presuppose a reading of them. In each of these chapters we present one of Foucault’s diagnoses of the present, and while these chapters are organized according to the chronology of Foucault’s work, they can also be read independently of each other as self-standing presentations of a specific diagnosis of the present. Chapter 3, “On the Borders of Madness,” treats Foucault’s investigation of madness and how it was gradually transformed into the categories of insanity and mental illness as a major experience within our culture. The chapter primarily relates to Histoire de la folie (1961) but also drawing on the Collège de France lecture series Le pouvoir psychiatrique (1973–1974). Chapter 4, “A Genealogy of Structuralism and Language,” reads Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (1966) as a philosophical diagnosis of more than just a

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contemporary shift within the humanities through the historical study of discursive practices in which life, language, and labor had been problematized according to certain epistemic regularities. The work is also a broader diagnosis of the linguistic turn and the so-called structuralist movement and as such expresses a self-reflective endeavor because both of these modes of thought exercised an important influence on Foucault’s approach at the time. In Chapter 5, “Discipline, Penitentiary and Delinquency,” we present Foucault’s investigation of discipline as a relevant model of normativity in relation to both the contemporary problematization of penal practices and the treatment of the mentally ill. By drawing on Surveiller et punir (1975) and Le pouvoir psychiatrique as well as his occasional writings from this period, we show how Foucault develops and refines his earlier studies of madness by analyzing discipline as a dispositive of power. Emphasizing the methodological features of the dispositive as an analytical concept also enables a nuanced description of discipline that does not confuse the omnipresence of disciplinary techniques with their omnipotence. Centering on the lecture series “Il faut défendre la société”, Chapter 6, “Warfare as a Model of Power Relations,” deals with a major and significant turn in Foucault’s thought, when he begins to distance himself from an analysis of power in terms of relations of fixed and asymmetrical dominance. The idea that power relations can be conceived as a battle of domination and the conviction that it can therefore be analyzed according to a model of warfare seems overly reductive to Foucault at this point. Instead he moves toward a conception of power as a relation between forces characterized by an irreducible reciprocity and reversibility. An important claim of this chapter is that this theoretical and methodological displacement in Foucault’s thought is achieved not through the development of a new theory of power, but rather by means of a genealogy of the historical antecedents and paradigms behind the idea that the exertion of power is fundamentally a mode of warfare and that civil society is ultimately a battlefield – a model that still exercises an influence in contemporary forms of political radicalism. In this way Foucault achieves an important modification in his own thought through a work of historical diagnosis. Chapter 7, “The Governmentalization of the State,” treats Foucault’s analysis of the state in terms of a “history of governmentality” that stretches back to Antiquity. Foucault’s historical investigation of governmentality as it is developed in the lecture series Sécurité, territoire, population is a diagnostic response to a contemporary experience with terrorism and the underlying ruthless considerations of security that manifest themselves in the response of nation states to this phenomenon. At the same time, Foucault’s analyses of governmentality also express a methodological self-modification that enables a multifaceted historical analysis of power operating with three different types of dispositives.

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Chapter 8, “The (Neo)liberal Art of Governing,” presents Foucault’s investigation of liberalism and neoliberalism not as political ideology or philosophy but as specific art of governing. These analyses collected in the lecture series Naissance de la biopolitique are directly connected to his history of governmentality both historically and methodologically, although this framework is also cultivated further in order to capture the distinctively liberal rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty. In Foucault’s diagnostic approach, the nativity of the present framework of government and management is depicted where the primary field of intervention for the arts of government is a civil society inhabited by a population that exhibits a certain level of self-regulating behavior and that is at the same time juxtaposed to both the super-institution of the state and the global environment of the market. Toward the end of the chapter, we also discuss how Foucault’s investigation of, and relation to, neoliberal aspects of contemporary politics led him to yet another questioning of his role as a practically engaged philosopher and thus also gave way to another instance of diagnostic self-modification. In Chapter 9, “Histories of Sexualities,” we give a survey of the development in Foucault’s major research project on the history of sexuality. This multivolume work began with La volonté de savoir (The Will to Knowledge) in 1976 but was interrupted until 1984, when the second and the third volumes appeared. In contradiction with the original plan for the research project, which had loosely planned for a focus on modernity, these two volumes explored the forms of problematization of sexual relations in Roman and Greek Antiquity. The chapter particularly centers its attention on two volumes, L’usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure) and Le souci de soi (The Care of the Self ), representing Foucault’s very last books published shortly before his untimely death in 1984. However, the diagnosis of the present relating to how sexuality has developed into a kind of seismograph, charting emancipatory potentials by seemingly going to the heart of the question of who we really are and should be, will be discussed not only in relation to the different problematizations of sexual matters in Classical Greek and Roman Antiquity. In the chapter we will also deal with one of the most important first displacements separating ancient and modern sexual morals in that we attempt to reconstruct parts of Foucault’s unpublished fourth volume in the Histoire de la sexualité series. This unfinished work, entitled Les aveaux de la chair (The Confession of the Flesh), is, among other things, concerned with practices of confession in Early Christianity and the associated relationship to oneself and to external authorities through a hermeneutics of desire, thus paving the way for the contemporary relationship between matters of desire and telling of truth about oneself. In Chapter 10, “The Practices of the Self,” we focus on Foucault’s explorations of what he terms practices of the self in Classical Greek and Roman Antiquity, which he understood as goal-directed exercises that were more or

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less voluntarily performed by the individual in order to transform his status as subject. Here, a special emphasis is placed on the lectures collected in L’Herméneutique du sujet (The Hermeneutics of the Subject) from 1982, but we also draw on other later lecture series and the three volumes of Histoire de la sexualité in order to present Foucault’s extensive studies of practices of the self. These studies express an attempt to diagnose the present insofar as they represent a challenge to contemporary attempts to develop an ethic of the self that is not based on universal moral rules or obligations. Foucault offers a test within the medium of thought for this present endeavor by studying multiple forms of self-practices in Antiquity and by providing a delineation of the political and philosophical presuppositions of this most intense historical attempt to address the problem of an ethic of the self. Focusing on the technique of confession, the chapter also depicts Foucault’s investigation of the practices of the self in Early Christianity. This technique differed fundamentally from the Roman and Greek practices of the self in its assumption that the individual ought to articulate and discursively manifest a unique truth about itself that only it can tell. The manifestation of a “personal” truth was a necessary condition in order for the individual to constitute him or herself as a proper subject, and Foucault shows how this conception also influences modern forms of knowledge such as psychoanalysis. Finally, Chapter 11, “Philosophy, Enlightenment, Diagnostics,” discusses Foucault’s late writings on Kant and the Enlightenment in their context. By focusing not on Kant’s three critiques but rather on a number of his occasional writings, Foucault describes how these texts open the question of the present as a philosophical event that encompasses the philosopher’s attempts to characterize it. In the sense that modern philosophy is still attempting to address this challenge, we participate in the question of the Enlightenment that Kant was the first to pose. Foucault also employs Kant’s reflection to emphasize that a diagnostic philosophy is not interested in the present as an already fully given or established level of reality but rather in the important tendencies, ‘logics’ or virtualities, that express themselves through the present. It is this level of the virtual that Foucault seeks to grasp through his historical investigations with the purpose of helping his contemporaries develop a more enlightened and critical “limit-attitude” that is able discern and evaluate possible trajectories that break the confines of what seems immediately present. Moreover, Foucault’s treatment of Kant also highlights the self-modificatory aspect of this philosophical attitude, especially in his reinterpretation of critique as an affirmative activity. In addition to the exposition of Foucault’s work and the various diagnoses of important contemporary experiences it represents, by using different instruments and approaches but still in accord with the same through-going philosophical categories, we finally end our book by discussing some of the

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challenges that relate to philosophy as diagnostics of the present. In this way we discuss not only a number of methodological challenges pertaining to this approach but also the question of how to relate now to Foucault’s thinking in a time when it may have become almost too contemporary. The Exit of the book will thus be a deliberation on issues that an assiduous occupation with Foucault’s work raises. Equally, it will be an invitation for further consideration of the question of how to continue working with Foucault in such a manner that his work permits further diagnostic of the present. The challenge is both to avoid the pitfall of becoming all too timely and to avoid succumbing to the all-too-easy temptation of an alleged alternative negative critique. Structurally, the last part of the book mirrors the first in focusing on Foucault’s conception of philosophy. Whereas the Introduction and first two chapters characterize this conception systematically, the final part of the book demonstrates how Foucault’s late diagnoses of the present should be read to a considerable extent as attempts to use the medium of historical investigation to articulate his own identity as a philosopher. This is most manifest in relation to Foucault’s writings on Kant and the Enlightenment, although, as we have indicated in this brief overview of the chapters of our book, it is also at stake in relation to a number of the other diagnoses, especially the one described in Chapter 9. In his wide-ranging studies of the practices of the self, Foucault maps a specific reflective relation to knowledge that he terms a “spiritual modalization of knowledge.” This term describes exercises that seek to modify knowledge of the world in such a way that it can transform the subjectivity of the individual. On a more general level, he frames his investigation of the practices of the self as an analysis of a “spiritual” conception of philosophy that demands a certain work of the self upon the self in order to access knowledge or truth, and which also presupposes the experience of truth to transform the self in its being as a subject. His exploration of the ancient roots of this tradition of philosophical spirituality as well as his analysis of the spiritual modalization of knowledge helps Foucault understand how his own work should be conceived as a contribution to philosophy and what distinguishes it in relation to other forms of knowledge. In this way the two final chapters sharpen the image of Foucault as a philosopher and refine our interpretation of his conception of philosophy. THE COMPLETE WORK: Throughout the book we have made use of not only the writings published by Foucault himself or with his knowledge but also the lecture series held at Collège de France and elsewhere that have been published after his death; in fact, a number of our presentations of Foucault’s diagnoses of the present are primarily based on these lecture series. This approach allows us to emphasize some of Foucault’s diagnoses that were not publicly accessible until recent years, such as his analyses of liberal and neoliberal governmentality, and

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have therefore not been treated in overall interpretations of his philosophy. In the case of Foucault’s late investigations, the focus on the practices of the self allows us to present many of the important aspects of his late work as it relates to this ‘axis’ of his thought, while at the same time presenting this part of his thinking from a different and broader perspective than the one accessible in the three published volumes of the Histoire de la sexualité with its specific thematic focus on problematization of sexual practices. Consequently, our interpretation of Foucault traverses various basic genres of publication in his work. Our readings of Foucault include and are based on not only his books but also his lectures, interviews, reviews, and public interventions. The various genres and their pertinent differences are indicated in the context of the concrete discussion in the various chapters. Titles published originally in languages other than English are stated with their original title first followed by the title of their English translation. We have decided to do so to avoid confusion because a number of Foucault’s publications have appeared in several translations and under different titles. As a service to the reader, the original title of Foucault’s publications is usually followed by a square bracket indicating the year of the original publication. In the Bibliography, we list all the translated texts cited by Foucault as well as all the original writings that are not included in the major, four-volume collection of text entitled Dits et Ecrits I–IV, counting no less than 364 articles, interviews, reviews, and so on but unfortunately not translated into English. In addition to Foucault’s own material, the Bibliography comprises a range of important secondary publications discussing his work as well as a number of texts we have found important for our own exposition. All the books and publications that merely serve as background for the exposition or represent Foucault’s own sources are only given in the footnotes relating to the concrete discussion. OUR SELECTION: Our exemplary presentations of Foucault’s diagnoses of the present cover all the important phases of his work, but not all his work, either published or unpublished. Within the confines of a publishable volume, we have sought to strike a balance between two considerations. First, we are convinced that Foucault’s diagnoses are best understood and appreciated when presented from a somewhat “close-up” perspective where its advantages are manifest: the interconnection of present experiences with a far-reaching historical investigation stretching across the confines of a number of disciplines. Hopefully, Foucault’s aim – namely to challenge his readers to engage in a further reflection that distances itself from their ingrained conceptions of the experience under focus – can at least to some degree be maintained in our presentation of paradigmatic diagnoses of the present. Second, we want to balance these presentations with an endeavor to thoroughly present

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the philosophical conception that guides Foucault’s diagnoses and also how it is tested and continuously modified here. An awareness of this conception of philosophy not only allows a better understanding of the content and purpose of each of Foucault’s investigations rather than only regarding them as providing another compartment in an analytical toolbox; it also allows an articulation of Foucault’s conception of philosophy that makes it possible to recognize its coherence across the different philosophical diagnoses. Finally, we are convinced that an emphasis on Foucault’s conception of philosophy in an overall interpretation of his work also provides a contribution to the present discussion of what philosophy is and should be. Parts of this book are based on our previous work on Foucault. Although revised, entlarged and updated to a considerable degree, a number of the chapters have thus appeared in earlier versions in our books Foucault, published in 2008 in Danish and Foucault: Studienhandbuch, published in German in 2010. This is the case for Chapters 1, 2, 4, 9, and 11 and the Exit, and to a lesser degree for Chapters 3, 5, and 7, which have all been complemented by substantially new sections. New chapters to be found exclusively in this book are Chapters 6, 8, and 10 as well as the Introduction. All of these chapters have no earlier versions in the previous books. However, parts of Chapter 8 are based on M. Gudmand-Høyer and T. Lopdrup Hjorth, “Liberal Biopolitics Reborn: Review Essay on Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979,” Foucault Studies, 7 (2009): 99–130. Likewise, certain parts of Chapter 5 and 7 are based on material from the previously published S. Raffnsøe, M. Gudmand-Høyer and M. S. Thaning, “Foucault’s Dispositive: The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research,” Organization, 23:2 (2016): 272–298.

Acknowledgments Our thanks are due to the following persons and institutions: Jeppe Groot, Mathias Munch, and Ditte Vilstrup Holm, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, for reliable and highly competent assistance. Thomas Robinson for committed and vigilant translation of a substantial part of the manuscript. Stuart Pethick for dedicated, prompt, accurate, and proficient language correction, as well as for imaginative and qualitative improvement of the text. Mitchell Dean, Stuart Elden, Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth, Thomas PresskornThygesen, and Kaspar Villadsen for competent scholarly critique and productive and valuable suggestions for improvement. Esme Chapman, Lynda Cooper, Brendan George, Priyanka Gibbons, and Grace Jackson at Palgrave Macmillan, and especially Vidhya Jayaprakash at Newgen for her excellent, reliable and flawless, work on the manuscript. Elise Woodard and Robert Harvey for instantly granting permission to use as epigraph an excerpt from their translation of Michel Foucault: “Guetter le jour qui vient” in Dits et écrits I (Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1994), published as Michel Foucault: “Standing Vigil for the Day to Come,” Foucault Studies, No. 19, June 2015, pp. 217–223. Claire Smith at Palgrave Macmillan and Jennie Dorny at Seuil for giving permission to use citations from Michel Foucault, Lectures at the College de France, ed. by A. Davidson. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Bernard Harcourt for selfless support in dire times and for their ability to retain a natural poise of generosity. Henrik Hermansen, Head of Secretariat, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, for enthusiastic and unstinting support of the research environment and the project. Henrik Tronier and the Velux Foundation for generous and agenda-setting funding of pertinent research. The Carlsberg Foundation for generous funding of relevant research. Our families for unflagging support and for bearing with us.

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Introduction: A Philosophical Trajectory

Foucault’s philosophical journalism. “I consider myself a journalist,” Foucault asserted in 1973, “to the extent that what interests me, that is the actuality – what is happening around us, what we are, what is going on in the world. Philosophy, up until Nietzsche, has had eternity for its reason of being. The first journalist-philosopher was Nietzsche. He introduced the today [l’aujourd’hui] into the field of philosophy. Before, philosophy only knew time and eternity. But Nietzsche had an obsession with actuality. I believe the future is something we do. The future is the way in which we react to what is happening; the way in which we transform a present movement or concern into effect. If we want to master our future, we have to ask most fundamentally the question about today. That is why philosophy, to my mind, is a kind of radical journalism.”1 Pronounced midway through the journey of his life as a writer, Foucault’s promotion of himself as a journalist-philosopher accentuates the importance of the contemporaneous as an unavoidable point of departure for himself and his thought. Foucault’s approach to thought sets out in a particular context that affects our actions and thinking. As a consequence, his thought receives impetus from crucial and thought-provoking contemporary experiences that seem to have a determining influence on what we do, know and think. Among those experiences are, for example, madness as insanity, sexuality as a site for emancipatory truth, and human capital as a binding element of our selves, which all have a determining influence on what we can know and what we can do. However, it is also necessary to extend and differentiate Foucault’s selfpromotion as a philosophical journalist by articulating how it is embedded in his conception of philosophy as diagnosis of the present. These are ongoing reflections that reach as far back as the 1960s, while the center of gravity is 1

“Le monde est un grand asile” [1973], DE II: 434; our translation. 1

2 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

to be found in some of the later texts published in the 1980s. Throughout this whole period, the conception of philosophy as a diagnosis of the present constitutes a new and general approach to philosophy that is important to take note of when entering Foucault’s work where it is constantly practiced and further developed. In this Introduction, therefore, we draw a basic outline of philosophy as a diagnosis of the present as a unifying approach in Foucault’s œuvre. While most of the chapters in this book present a selection of the most significant of these contemporary diagnoses, special attention is given here to Foucault’s articulation and discussion of himself as a philosopher who engages in a diagnostic practice of this particular kind. As an entry point to his work, thought, and development we sketch out the challenges he faces in this respect and how this practice may be situated with regard to other perhaps more familiar ways of philosophizing and ways of understanding oneself as a philosopher. Hence, before the book accounts for the different phases and the development of Foucault’s work (Chapter 1) and how they, despite constant displacement, contain a range of transversal categories that help specify his distinct historical and philosophical analysis throughout his authorship (Chapter 2), and before contextually presenting the singular diagnoses of contemporary experiences (Chapters 3–10), this Introduction serves an important preliminary purpose. It expounds on how the diagnoses of the present and the importance given to the contemporaneous represent an unavoidable point of departure for Foucault. It demonstrates how this turn toward the challenges encountered in the present commits philosophy to an engagement that reaches beyond its disciplinary boundaries and into to the nonphilosophical in order to point to concrete and important ways of thinking differently. Yet, this Introduction also shows how Foucault’s approach implies a corresponding commitment to continuous self-modification that can be discerned throughout his entire authorship and which constantly interacts with and influences the diagnostic practice of philosophy. This commitment to self-modification can be characterized more precisely by drawing on Foucault’s interpretation of the traditional idea of philosophical meditation. Moreover, Foucault’s emphasis on the intrinsic connection between diagnoses and self-modification allows him to profoundly reconfigure the Hegelian ‘philosophy of the dusk’ in favor of a philosophy of anticipatory vigilance and transgression. Our overall claim is that this ‘meditative’ aspect of Foucault’s conception of philosophical activity must be kept in mind in order not to misunderstand his ‘obsession with actuality’ as a discontinuous and unreflective form of thought. Philosophy as diagnostics of the present. Discussing Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) in an interview the year after its 1966 publication, Foucault characterizes the book as a “diagnosis of humanism” and an effort to “make a

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diagnosis of the present in which we live.” He also points out that “it is quite possible that what I am doing is somewhat related to philosophy, especially in so far as, at least since Nietzsche, the task of philosophy is not longer to utter a universal and transhistorical truth. I try to diagnose [diagnostiquer]. ... The effort to carry out an excavation under our feet characterizes contemporary thought since Nietzsche; and in that sense, I can declare myself a philosopher.” At the same time, Foucault underlines that there “exists a certain type of philosophical activities which consist generally in making a diagnosis of the present of a culture.”2 And in another interview, also in 1967, he can simply indicate that the contemporary “role of philosophy” is “to diagnose” and that “the philosopher” faces the task “to tell what is going on [dire ce qui se passe].”3 In such a diagnosis of the present Foucault seeks to clarify how an experience of the present, which is often still a tendency in the making, affects us. It predisposes us in such a manner that we are moved in certain directions and drawn toward dealing with contemporary challenges in certain ways. The purpose is to stimulate us to consider the development indicated by that very diagnosis. In another conversation from that time, he distances himself from a traditional determination of philosophy as a totalizing and exhaustive form of description. He therefore commits himself to a philosophy that takes the shape of an ongoing effort to diagnose: “Philosophy from Hegel to Sartre has essentially been a totalizing enterprise, if not of the world or of knowledge, at least of human experience. I would say that perhaps if there is now an autonomous philosophical activity, if there can be a philosophy that is not simply a sort of theoretical activity within mathematics or linguistics or ethnology or political economy, if there is a philosophy free and independent of all these domains, then one could define it as a diagnostic activity. To diagnose the present is to say what the present is, and how our present is absolutely different from all that is not it, that is to say, from our past. Perhaps this is the task for philosophy now.”4 Noting how Nietzsche had a profound influence on him since he seemed to conceive philosophy as the work of diagnosis, Foucault, in the 1966 interview “Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe?” (“What Is a Philosopher?”), emphasizes how, for Nietzsche, “the philosopher was someone who diagnosed the state of thought.” In extension of this he points out how one can envisage “two kinds of philosopher: the kind who opens up new avenues of thought, such as Heidegger, and the kind who in a sense plays the role of an archaeologist, studying the

2 “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” [1967], DE I: 606–607, 620/“Who are you, Professor Foucault?” pp. 91–92, 103. 3 “La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’” [1967], DE I: 581. 4 “Foucault repond à Sartre” [1967], DE I: 665/“Foucault responds to Sartre,” p. 53.

4 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

space in which thought unfolds, as well as the conditions of that thought, its mode of constitution.”5 In this sense Foucault does not consider philosophy as a number of dislocated, novel departures. Instead, philosophical thinking aims to form diagnoses for the state that thought finds itself in. The philosophical diagnosis of the present therefore involves a self-characterization – it self-reflectively excavates the space in which it is itself located. This space formulates conditions that determine how philosophy comes about. Foucault’s conception of a diagnosis of the present does not, however, express the archaeological rather than the Heideggerian kind of philosophy that he himself distinguishes between. Rather, diagnostic archaeology attempts to combine these two identities and thereby remain oriented toward the past as well as the future. On the one hand, an excavation of the space of thought articulates how a specific aspect of our past has developed and committed us to a certain self-conception, but also how we distance ourselves from this aspect of the past. On the other hand, such an excavation also sheds light on our present as it demonstrates how this present is under continual transformation, whereby it opens new avenues of thought and action. Philosophy ignited by the nonphilosophical. As a diagnostic activity, philosophy can neither become self-sufficient nor self-sustained, but must instead be a practice that over and over again turns toward and is affected by what does not at first seem to belong to the realm of philosophy. Philosophy must remain “present, uncertain, mobile all along its line of contact with non-philosophy, yet only existing by means of it,” as Foucault puts it in the concluding remarks of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970.6 These final paragraphs of Foucault’s lecture take the form of a programmatic eulogy for Jean Hyppolite, his recently departed teacher and previous holder of the professorial chair at the Collège de France that Foucault was then going to occupy.7 At this crucial stage of his career, Foucault places not only his future work at the Collège but also his previous work under the auspices of Hyppolite.8 5 “Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe?” [1966/1967], DE I: 553/“Philosophy and the Death of God,” p. 86. 6 OD: 78/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 236; translation modified. 7 With the succession, the title of the chair is changed from“History of philosophical thought” to “History of the systems of thought” (cf. RC: 5). 8 Besides stressing that “I wanted to place my work under his signs,” Foucault repeatedly expresses his debt to Hyppolite and states how he still serves as a model: “I wanted to conclude this presentation of my plans by evoking him,” “because I have no doubt borrowed from him the meaning and possibility of what I am doing” and “because he very often gave me illumination when I was working in the dark.” “It is towards him, towards that hiatus – where I feel at once his absence and my failings – that the questions I now ask myself are pointing.” Foucault also stresses that his “greatest debt is to Jean Hyppolite.” OD: 78/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 236; translation modified.

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That Hyppolite serves as a model for Foucault’s philosophical practice is not so much due to his published works and their results as the fact that Hyppolite, as Foucault saw it, had developed and struggled with rigorous standards for contemporary philosophizing to which Foucault tried to measure up. As a consequence, it is justified to read Foucault’s discussion of Hyppolite in this context as Foucault’s self-articulation of philosophy practiced in an exemplary way and of the standard to which he himself tries to measure up. According to Foucault’s self-articulation, philosophy practiced as he suggests becomes an ongoing and unending “repetitive interrogation” “that did not have to pursue the edifice of abstraction”; “it had always to hold itself back, break with its acquired generalities and put itself back in contact with nonphilosophy. It had to approach most closely not to that which completes it but to that which precedes it, that is not yet awakened to its disquiet. Not in order to reduce them, but in order to think them, this philosophy had to take up the singularity of history, the regional rationalities of science, depth of the memory within consciousness.” If it were still to have a reason and a justification for its existence, philosophy needed “to begin from a foundation that is at once arbitrary and absolute” and wonder if philosophy is “already there secretly present in what is not itself, starting to formulate itself half-aloud in the murmur of things.”9 Conceived as a diagnostic activity, philosophy thus becomes “an endless task [tâche sans terme],” a task that must begin over and over again, “given over to the form and the paradox of repetition” and “never ready to finish itself.”10 For Foucault, thus, philosophy becomes an ongoing, unremitting, and persistent activity. Philosophy in this sense is not to be conceived as being continuously sustained and seamlessly exercised but rather as a continued and reiterated practice that is reignited over and over again. Working as a contemporary diagnostician, Foucault thus insists on a philosophy that remains attentive toward and constantly in contact with the non-philosophy that it can only exist by, as it aims at “revealing the meaning that this non-philosophy has for us.”11 Philosophical activity: Self-modification in the medium of thought. Throughout his itinerary, Foucault continues the philosophical exercise of thought upon itself as an ongoing and unremitting activity that must begin over and over again, prompted and reignited by its encounter with the nonphilosophical present. Nevertheless, what establishes a coherent trajectory in Foucault’s thought is neither his various encounters with present phenomena nor his examination of how they seem to have come about or what they might 9 10 11

OD: 77–78/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 236; translation modified. OD: 77–78/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 236; translation modified. OD: 78/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 236; translation modified.

6 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

be. It would be more correct to say that what creates coherence in Foucault’s thought is the fact that he turns toward the present over and over again to fathom its mode of being and understand the “ontology of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves.”12 Yet, when trying to understand the ontology of the present, Foucault’s thought simultaneously remains implicated in this exercise. As a consequence, it would be even more correct to recognize how it is only on this level that there is continuous and coherent evolution. What establishes continuity in Foucault’s work on a basic level is thus philosophy as the ongoing but concrete self-modification of thought and being as it makes itself felt through the repetitive interrogation of the present. The transformative capacity of philosophical thought forms a salient feature of, and a connecting thread in, Foucault’s work. At a late turning point in his career, Foucault stresses this in a particularly emblematic way. In the introduction to the significantly delayed second volume of his Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault, in the year of his death, not only ponders on what has provided continuity as he was led to reconceive his idea of a history of sexuality; he also characterizes the kind of philosophical activity that has formed a unifying trait of his entire œuvre: “What is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?”13 Here, philosophy is not perceived as the ability just to think differently in any possible way. Rather, philosophy is perceived as the ability to think differently in the very specific ways that spring from the specific self-modifications of previous modes of thought that prove necessary as philosophy encounters and tries to make sense of the nonphilosophical. According to Foucault, philosophy “is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it.”14 Besides linking together here his encounter with the nonphilosophical and the effort to think differently, Foucault comes to characterize both his previous studies and those that should follow as “studies of ‘history’” insofar as they investigate and refer to certain historical material, domains, and problematics, but he regards it as even more important to stress the fact that they are not “the work of a ‘historian’.” This, he details, is due to the circumstance that they “are the record of a long and tentative exercise that needed to revise itself and be corrected again and again [qui a eu besoin souvent de se reprendre et 12 13 14

[GSA 1]: 22/{GSO}: 21. UP: 14–15/UPl: 8–9. UP: 15/UPl: 9.

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de se corriger]. It was a philosophical exercise: Its stake [son enjeu] was to learn [savoir] to what extent the effort [travail] to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently [lui permettre de penser autrement].”15 In this context, Foucault further asserts that “the living substance of philosophy [le corps vivant de la philosophie],” or, more precisely, the living ‘embodiment’ of philosophy, is the “the ‘essay’ [l’ ‘essai’]”; and by using the French term for ‘essay’ he stresses the fact that philosophy lives on as a still unfinished and tentative mental attempt: a personal effort but also a test of and an experiment with oneself that one makes in thought and language. Foucault also describes the philosophical essay as a “modifying ordeal or trial of oneself [l’épreuve modificatrice de soi-même].”16 Philosophical practice in this sense is an enduring ordeal one undergoes at the hands of thought, an ongoing ritual and rite de passage that modifies one’s manner of being, perceiving, and thinking in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways as one enters the game of truth. In addition to emphasizing the importance of the essay as form, Foucault can therefore also characterize his practice of philosophy as “an ‘ascesis’,” or “an exercise of oneself [un exercice de soi] in the activity of thought [dans la pensée].”17 Doing so late in his work, Foucault situates himself in continuance of a long-ranging ancient Greco-Roman tradition in which one imposed limitations on oneself and one’s immediate existence, although not to remain within these confinements but rather to permit and force oneself to modify and transgress oneself. However, Foucault also gives prominence to self-modification and self-conversion as a crucial component of his philosophical writing throughout his career. When toward the end of his life he discusses his own book on the French writer of both surrealistic and formal constraints, Raymond Roussel (1877–1933), which was published at the beginning of Foucault’s career in 1963, Foucault directs attention to the fact that self-modification and the ability to reconceptualize the present and one’s own existence has been a lifespanning driving force and a central aim for his undertaking in general: “It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor for who one is: one writes to become someone other than who one is. Finally there is an attempt at modifying one’s way of being through the act of writing.”18 15

UP: 15/UPl: 9; translation modified. UP: 15/UPl: 9; translation modified. Somewhat misleadingly, the English translation renders “L’ ‘essai’ – qu’il faut entendre comme l’épreuve modificatrice de soi-même dans le jeu de la vérité” as “the ‘essay’ – which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes.” 17 UP: 15/UPl: 9. 18 “Archéologie d’une passion” [1983/1984], DE IV: 605/“Archaeology of a passion,” in FL: 404. 16

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Philosophical meditation as a movement not-yet-known. The described self-modification in the medium of thought is only one crucial aspect of the continuity and coherence that characterizes Foucault as a philosopher practicing diagnostics of contemporary experiences. Upon closer inspection, selfmodification in the medium of thought proves to be closely linked to another crucial aspect of philosophical thought. This is the meditative aspect in which philosophy turns toward itself and examines itself and its own mode of being. In Foucault, philosophical thought turns toward itself and faces itself in order to be able to transform itself. This is a kind of philosophical meditation that Foucault continues to nurture as a life-long ambition, since this test of thought forms an essential precondition for philosophy to become a modifying selfordeal and thus for urging philosophy on as a still unfinished attempt and experiment in the medium of thought. In the philosophical tradition, meditation is a well-known recurring way to practice self-examination. An outstanding example is Descartes’ (1596–1650) Méditations métaphysiques (Metaphysical Meditations). In Descartes, thought turns toward itself to critically examine its own preconceived certainties and assumptions. Nevertheless, Foucault’s philosophical meditation differs significantly from Cartesian self-examination. For Descartes, it seemed essential to withdraw from the world into one’s own world if one were to meditate properly. At the beginning of his first Méditations métaphysiques, Descartes stressed how he “procured” himself “a quiet time in quiet solitude [un repos assuré dans une paisible solitude]” and “released” his “mind [esprit] from all cares [de tous les soins],” sat down “by the fire,” in “a winter gown,” to “cast aside all my former opinions.”19 Equally, at the beginning of his third meditation, Descartes mentions how he “will shut my eyes,” “stop my ears,” “withdraw all my senses,” “give no heed to them, as being vain and false, and by discoursing with myself, and prying more rightly into my own inner being [considérant mon intérieur], will endeavor to make myself little by little more known and familiar to myself [me rendre peu à peu plus connu et plus familier à moi-même].”20 Contrary to Cartesian meditation, however, Foucault’s meditation gives prominence to “the knower’s” chance to “get free of himself [se deprendre de soi-même]” and his “straying afield of himself [l’égarement de celui qui connaît]” as an essential motivation for philosophical passion and curiosity. 21 Despite his marked interest in meditation as an ascetic exercise of oneself in the activity of thought, Foucault thus nevertheless displays a marked reticence 19 20 21

R. Descartes: Méditations métaphysiques: 66–69; our translation. R. Descartes: Méditations métaphysiques: 96–97; our translation. UP: 14/UPl: 8; translation modified.

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to the specific meditative approach practiced in the tradition toward which the Cartesian meditations continue and contribute markedly. As a consequence, he recurrently returns to the issue of philosophical meditation as practiced in the philosophical tradition both to discern certain traits that impede philosophical meditation in the sense that Foucault tries to develop and articulate crucial aspects of his own meditative-transformative philosophical practice. In an exchange with the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) concerning the status of Descartes’ Méditations métaphysiques, Foucault labors the point that there is a material difference of crucial importance between a meditation and a demonstrative discourse. In a demonstrative discourse the subject remains “not implicated in the demonstration,” “fixed, invariable, and as if neutralized” “in relation to it.” In contrast, a meditation “produces, as so many discursive events, new utterances that carry with them a series of modifications of the enunciating subject: through what is said in meditation, the subject passes from darkness to light, from impurity to purity, from the constraint of passions to detachment from uncertainty and disordered movements to the serenity of wisdom, and so on. In a meditation, the subject is ceaselessly altered by his own movement; his discourse provokes effects within which he is caught; it exposes him to risks, makes him pass through trials or temptations, produces states in him, and confers on him a status or qualification he did not hold at the initial moment. In short, meditation implies a mobile subject modifiable through the effect of the discursive events that take place.”22 Accordingly, Descartes’ meditations have an important “ascetic” thread and must be seen as “an exercise modifying the subject.” They cannot only be read as “a group of propositions forming a system” but must also be understood as “a group of modifications forming an exercise, which each reader must carry out, and by which each reader must be affected, if he wishes in his turn to be the subject enunciating this truth on his own account.”23 Toward the end of his life, in the lectures at the Collège de France L’herméneutique du sujet (The Hermeneutics of the Subject) in 1982, Foucault returns to this idea of a philosophical meditation. In Descartes as well as in Greco-Roman and early Christian philosophy, it is to be conceived as “a sort of exercise of thought, rather an exercise ‘in thought’ [une sorte d’exercice de pensée, exercice ‘en pensee’],” but not in the sense of “a game the subject plays with his own thought [un jeu du sujet avec sa propre pensée], with the object or possible objects of his thought,” but in the sense of “a game that thought performs on the subject 22 Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” [1963], DE I: 261–262/“My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” in HM: 563. 23 “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” [1963], DE I: 258/“My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” in HM: 563

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himself [jeu effectué par la pensée sur le sujet lui-même].” A meditation is not an “exercise carried out on thought and its content but “an exercise by which, through thought, the subject puts himself in a certain situation.”24 In the opening lines of “Guetter le jour qui vient” (“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come”), an early review essay concerning French writer and philosopher Roger Laporte’s (1925–2001) first major book La Veille (On Watch), published in 1963, Foucault articulates crucial traits of philosophy as an ongoing meditative auto-transformative practice. At the same time he accentuates how a meditative practice that starts from a diagnosis of the present distinguishes itself from a more traditional philosophical meditation. Discussing the work of an author and a philosophical scholar whose work he admires, Foucault not inadvertently manages to give voice to the kind of philosophy that he tries to develop in an exemplary and condensed manner. With withering scorn, Foucault here remarks that, like God in the creation, “Descartes meditated for six full days,” only to become “a physicist again” in all likelihood on the seventh day. 25 Thus, the problem with Cartesian doubt is that philosophical meditation, as it is practiced here, does not lead to the practice of self-problematization and self-modification that is critically important to Foucault but, at the end of the day, rather to self-affirmation in the form of a confirmation of certainties to which the subject already adheres. In the final analysis, this kind of esoteric ‘unworldly’ meditation continues the inward turn that constituted Platonic philosophy and an important strand in the philosophical tradition. Based on the Platonic decision to turn one’s back on the world and its doxa, deception, and disappointment in order to take possession of privileged, esoteric, dogmatic, scholastic, and theoretical knowledge and its certitude, this withdrawn and introverted contemplation, pursuit, and worship of the essential in itself remains an indispensable component of the traditional philosophical love of wisdom in the form of a will to know and a desire for truth from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and early Modernity. In a marked contradistinction to this “evening meditation, the extension of a task that started long ago and that nightfall lightens” in which one severs the ties to the surrounding world and its fluctuations and retires and shuts oneself up in order to devote oneself to the study, recollection and worship of what finally proves to be the true constitutive invariants of an inner world, Foucault

24

[HS]: 339–341/{HSb}: 356–358. “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 261–262/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come”, p. 217. 25

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opts for a different kind of meditation in “Guetter le jour qui vient.”26 Noting that he knows very well that the clarity of midday, which nightfall meditation after all depends on and seeks to purify and consume après coup, in all serenity, at a stage when the essential is already consummated and not much happens, “is not here and that it is still far away,” Foucault refuses to shut his eyes and stop his ears. In line with his conception of philosophy as diagnosis of the present, Foucault instead insists that it is indispensable to philosophical thought to remain perceptive and in touch with the world. An ongoing openness and ability to be affected by the world is deemed essential, as Foucault adheres to and strives to develop an exercise “of thought and in the medium of thought.”27 In this he moves toward something that has not yet arrived and is still in the process of arriving and tries to keep up with and cope with something that is still dawning. He strives to articulate “what could truly constitute a reflection before the day, before the morning of each day? Calling it a reflection is already going too far, perhaps, rather, an exercise in thought and in language [exercice de la pensée et du langage] – in pensive speech [de la parole pensive] –, which recedes from the earliest light, advances towards the night from which it comes, and endeavors cautiously to remain in a place without space, where eyes remain open, ears cocked, the entire mind alert, and words mobilized for a movement that they do not yet know?”28 In this manner, Foucault insists that philosophical meditation must assume the shape of a detailed inspection in the medium of thought of the way in which one is affected as one perceives and finds oneself in a relationship with the world. Borrowing terminology developed by Derrida, one might characterize this examination of the way one is affected as an examination of auto-affectation.29 By turning toward the experience of being affected, “eyes open and ears cocked,” a rendering of the perceived impressions becomes perceptive that exceeds mere representation and re-renders them and “mobilizes them for a movement,”, as it leads on and shows the way in directions that the senses are unable to anticipate. In lieu of a return to, repetition of, and reaffirmation of an already established inner identity, a meditation on auto-affectivity articulates a movement that leads toward something that is still dawning – a dislocation that the meditation must surrender to, follow and measure up to. With auto-affection, a mode of 26 “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 262/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come,” pp. 217–218. Cf. also the considerable disparity between this kind of meditative approach and phenomenological eidetic variation, as it is indicated by Foucault in [HS]: 340/{HSb}: 357. 27 [HS]: 339/{HSb}: 356. It is worth noting that Foucault’s terminology and approach remains consistent from “Guetter le jour qui vient” to L’herméneutique du sujet. 28 “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 261–262/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come,” pp. 217–218. 29 J. Derrida: La voix et le phénoméne. Introduction au probléme du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), pp. 92–96.

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being becomes perceivable in which one continuously outdistances oneself. As a consequence, the movement of a being affected by the world must be examined and explored unremittingly in an ongoing exercise in thought and language.30 Standing vigil for the day to come. In “Guetter le jour qui vient,” Foucault makes it clear that this is of consequence for how one is to perceive the purpose, contribution and responsibility of philosophy as an ongoing meditation and a diagnosis of the present. In agreement with Hegel’s (1770–1831) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (The Philosophy of Right), philosophy as diagnosis of the present begins by recognizing that philosophy is “a son of its time [ein Sohn seiner Zeit]” and must prove what it can do, here and now. Instead of deluding itself by imagining that it can simply “leap out of [überspringen]” and ahead of “the present [seine Zeit]” to forestall the future, philosophical thought must find itself able to “dance [tanzen]” in the here and now, as Hegel forcibly puts it. If it wants to fully acknowledge and remain faithful to its point of departure, philosophy must realize that it needs to overcome its innate appetite for “issuing instructions on how the world ought to be [das Belehren wie die Welt sein soll].”31 Yet, even though Foucault seems to share Hegel’s general indication that philosophical thought is situated in and speaks within a specific historical context and his somewhat sobering urge to sound a note of caution against philosophical self-delusion, more careful inspection reveals that Foucault positions philosophical thought rather differently and that his conception of the challenges that philosophical meditation must rise to differs significantly. Hegel states that the reason why philosophy should stop both forecasting and issuing instructions is its embeddedness, since philosophy’s implication in the present means that it always “comes too late” to perform this function. “As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only at a time when actuality [die Wirklichkeit] has gone through its formative process [ihren Bildungsprozess vollendet] and attained its completed state [sich vertig gemacht hat].” Thus, “when philosophy paints its grey in grey,” it is an indication that we have passed midday and that the night is approaching: “a shape of life [Gestalt des Lebens] has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy.” Consequently, “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”32 30 J. Lear: Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 8. 31 G.W.F. Hegel: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [1820] (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Wien, Verlag Ullstein GmbH, 1972), pp. 12–14/Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21–23. 32 G.W.F. Hegel: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [1820] p. 14/Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 23.

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According to Foucault, however, philosophical meditation as diagnosis of the present begins with another kind of grey. This is not the grey that closes in after midday in the evening when the daylight is fading and the familiar shapes still linger, but the gray emerging before the morning as the day begins to break and a faint promising light begins to shimmer through the haze.33 “In this ‘not yet’ of morning,” a grey appears which is “as though diaphaneous to its own transparency.” It is a delicate and translucent gray in which a new day begins to show and trans-illuminate the dark to such an extent that the shape of things to come begins to form.34 Accordingly, it is an already juvenile grey that is promising in its anticipation of a day that breaks. While in Hegel the owl of Minerva flies at nightfall to probe and reconnoite an existing, dwindling landscape, for Foucault the owl of Minerva needs to spreads its wings at daybreak to explore an unfamiliar and uncharted landscape still emerging before our eyes. While philosophy in Hegel comes after the fact as an attempt to recognize and reconcile the logic that it saw being made, philosophical meditation for Foucault is prompted and receives its impetus before the fact as an exploration of a world that is still appearing. For Hegel, philosophy should stop both forecasting and issuing instructions since its embeddedness in the present implies that it always comes too late. Likewise, Foucault cannot help feeling that “there is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others [faire la loi aux autres], to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up against them in the language of naïve positivity.”35 Yet this is for the exact opposite reason. Philosophy is unfit to legislate and instruct because it enters and is practiced too early when everything is still in the making and unfinished. This conception of philosophy can be viewed as the reason for Foucault’s conviction that it “is entitled to explore what might 33

Equally, this grey differs from Nietzsche’s grey, at least insofar as Foucault is right to characterize genealogy as “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary” (“Nietzche, la généalogie, l’histoire” [1971], DE II: 136/“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 369). According to Nietzsche, the genealogy of morals should pay less attention to the airy and anticipatory “blue” that certain Anglo-Saxon submit to, insofar as they propose speculative general hypotheses concerning the origin of morals. Instead the genealogist ought to focus on “the gray”: on examining the actual and genuine, long and protracted historical development of human morals, which is difficult to discern. Cf. F. Nietzsche: Zur Genealogie der Moral, in F. Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe 5 (München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), p. 254) and S. Raffnsøe: Nietzsches “Genealogie der Moral” (Paderborn, Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 31–36. 34 “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 262/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come,” p. 218. 35 UP: 14–15/UPl: 8–9. Literally this passage – “lorsqu’il se fait fort d’instruire leur procès en positivité naïve” – translates to: “gives itself airs by instructing them in the language of naïve positivity.”

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be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it.”36 As a consequence, Foucault’s kind of meditation entails attentiveness to a manifestation still taking place, an alertness in which one “stands vigil” for the day to come as it is still in becoming. Articulated in the text by the same name, this demands a certain attitude, viz. that of vigilance. In this state of vigilance, however, one is not watchful in the sense of a guardian of the land who is on duty to perceive approaching danger and defend the acquired possessions. Instead, one is watchful in the sense which “evokes first of all, sleeplessness,” or the intermediate state in which one is unable to find rest and go to sleep, but must rather keep awake and vigilant while remaining thoughtful throughout the night in a conscious state where one is not fully alert and active and is led on by one’s thoughts in a dreamlike, uncontrollable manner, anxiously and hopefully anticipating what one does not know: “It is the body withdrawn but tense [replié mais tendu], the mind at attention at its four corners, on watch. It is just as much the anticipation of danger (with its indistinct struggles predawn) as the excitement and stir of a light’s promise (with sleep finally granted as day begins); even before this hope and this fear separate down the middle of their original identity, it is the acute faceless vigilance of the Watch [la vigilance aiguë et sans visage du Guet ].”37 As “a body folded back, towards itself [corps replié],” “yet extensive, outstretched and reaching out [tendue],” the meditation becomes an autoaffective vigilance which is not the vigilance of a guarded subject watching over itself, but a somnolent attentiveness to that which has not yet to come: “In fact, nobody keeps vigil on this watch: no consciousness more lucid than that of sleeping, no subjectivity so singularly worried. It is the vigil itself that keeps vigil [ce qui veille, c’est la veille] – this intangible form that outlines the next day and which, in turn, takes its own shape shape [se desine en retour] from this day which has not yet come, which will perhaps never come.” In this sense, standing vigil is an attunement that leaves the purely personal behind as it moves ahead to focus on and render that which “is ‘not yet’ in the arriving following day, and which may never arrive and become real: “What says, ‘not yet’ to the next day stands vigil: the eve is the day which precedes [la veille, c’est le jour qui precede]. Or more accurately, it is that which precedes each day, every possible day, including this day on which I speak, on which I speak because my language traces the rise of the day back to the anticipation of 36

UP: 14–15/UPl: 8–9. “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 262–263/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come,” p. 218; translation modified. 37

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it. The eve [la veille] is not the other day, the day before; it is today, even now, this simultaneous shortfall and excess that borders on and surpasses the day, and due to which the day inexorably comes and perhaps will never stop having not yet come. It is not me who is on watch in the eve’s vigilance; it is the recoil of the coming day.”38 In Foucault, philosophical meditation is not the due consideration of what has proved essential. At a time when the world is still experienced as young and the present as arriving, a meditation appears which is a non-defensive openmindedness focusing on and seeking to render what is not yet in the arriving day, articulating the excess in and shortfall of the arriving day which may never fully arrive. Accordingly, this kind of meditation is not a reflection on being or on the present, but rather a meditative premeditation. It is a thoughtfulness that is not controlled by thought, but a thoughtfulness that is prompted by the nonphilosophical and points beyond itself and established practice toward “the unthought which glistens before it, and silently sustains the possibility of thought [soutient sa possibilité]. An unthought which is not an obscure object to know but rather the opening of thought itself: that in while, immobile, it never ceases expecting itself, remaining on the lookout in the advance on its own day, which one has to call the ‘eve’ [la veille].” It is an exercise of thought in thought prompted by the contemporary that turns toward and examines how one is affected and moved by this to lend “voice to the repetition of what has not yet taken place.” Like the oscillation on site of a “time not yet inaugurated.”39 A preface to transgression. When reiteratively lending voice to what has not yet happened, but which may be arriving in what is arriving in thought, we do not leave the realm of philosophy, as Foucault takes pains to stress in “Preface to transgression,” an article on George Bataille’s (1897–1952) work published in 1963: “We do not experience the end of philosophy, but a philosophy which can regain its speech [reprendre la parole] and pick itself up again in it [se reprendre en elle] only in the marginal region which borders its limits [sur les bords de ses limites].”40 Accordingly, the philosophical enterprise can only take the form of a preface to transgression, a mere run-up to going beyond, which marks its own finitude as it points further than itself toward something it sees dimly, but may never

38 “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 262–263, 262/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come”; translation modified. 39 “Guetter le jour qui vient” [1963], DE I: 267, 265/“Standing Vigil for the Day to Come”; translation modified. 40 “Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 242/“Preface to Transgression,” p. 41; translation modified.

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arrive at.41 Foucault does not consider this the end of philosophy, but rather, “the breakdown of philosophical subjectivity” and its enclosure within itself, as it is dispersed “in a language that dispossesses it while multiplying it within the space created by its absence.” Instead of being the end of philosophy, this is “the end of the philosopher as the sovereign and primary form of philosophical language.” Whereas “the sovereignty of the philosophical subject” was continually reconstituted in Cartesian meditation, Foucault’s outwardly directed meditation in “philosophical language” opens “a soft and violent intrusion into the inwardness [dans l’intériorité], and makes it become beside itself [hors de soi],” or ‘ecstatic’.42 In Foucault’s poetic language, this allows “voiceless words to be born” and leads into a dark night in which a “dispersion of stars” shimmers through.43 When philosophy as diagnosis of the present is “to draw as close as possible ... to that which precedes it” and stirs its certainty, the present and its various occurrences which provoke us and provide food for thought, the idea is thus certainly not that this should permit philosophy to arrive at, or even come close to, “its final fulfilment.” Neither is the ambition that philosophy should remain turned backward while staying as close as possible to that “which precedes it” as it sleeps deep in the night, not yet awoken to or turned on to philosophy’s “inquietude.” The crucial task for philosophy is to install itself along this axis in continuous and repeated contact with the nonphilosophical while avoiding becoming disconcerted or going “beyond concepts.” However, in order to avoid reducing the “singularity of history, the regional rationalities of science, the depths of memory in consciousness,” philosophy must concomitantly turn toward itself in order to “to pick them up again [reprendre]” “to think them [penser]” in the medium of thought and to “reveal” “the sense, meaning and direction this non-philosophy has for us [révélant le sens que cette non-philosophie a pour nous].”44 Turning toward itself in continuous contact with the nonphilosophical, philosophy becomes an ongoing meditation that is existentially differentiating in that it forces one to think differently in specific ways. Moreover, this differentiating movement even moves forward beyond the immediately perceived as it results in an anticipation and a premeditation of what it might imply. Yet this ecstatic element and moment of presentiment does not transport philosophy beyond itself. Philosophy points the way ahead as it is mirrored within

41 “Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 235/“Preface to Transgression,” p. 32; translation modified. 42 La pensée du dehors, p. 47. 43 “Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 242–243/“Preface to Transgression,” pp. 42– 43; translation modified. 44 OD: 78/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 236; translation modified.

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philosophy. As Foucault puts it: “Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust.”45 As he tried to escape both traditional philosophical meditation and Hegelianism, Foucault thus finds himself brought back to them, “only from a different angle” and has to face them and figure out how he can pass through them in order to try to “leave” them “behind once more” as he tried to anticipate a different mode of being for philosophy.46 Premeditation. This conception and practice of philosophy remains present throughout Foucault’s œuvre. A particularly perspicuous instantiation of his approach can be found in his discussion of the present as a theme of philosophical reflection in Immanual Kant (1725–1804) toward the end of his life, which will be discussed extensively in the last chapter of the present book. In the context of a discussion of Kant’s text “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault describes how the French Revolution formed an important impetus for Kant’s philosophical thought. Yet, what provoked Kant’s thought and what he tried to think through was not so much the actual development of the French Revolution, but rather the French Revolution as an incontrovertible philosophical event. The French Revolution proves to be a decisive contemporary event that is thought-provoking since it opens up new horizons in ways that can no longer simply be obliterated as it sets a new agenda. Thus this event provokes us to rethink the contemporary in order to stay vigilant to what seems to make itself felt as it shimmers through the haze: to what may still be to come and to what might have been. This meditation remains important even if what it indicates might never be realized and even though the French Revolution as an empirical or actual phenomenon may fall decisively short of such great expectations. Likewise, Foucault’s continuing fascination throughout his career with various “counter-movements,” be they religious Christian movements from the eleventh to the seventeenth century (Chapter 7), contemporary Islamic movements (Chapter 10) or contemporary protests against incarceration or psychiatric hospitalization (Chapter 3), is largely not due to their oppositional character or their eventual claims to be radically different and their ensuing preoccupation with resistance. What fascinates Foucault in these movements of non-compliance is not so much their reactive character, but rather an element of revolt. As “revolts of conduct [révoltes des conduites]” these movements intrigue Foucault as they call for further examination in the 45

“Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 237/“Preface to Transgression,” p. 35; translation modified. 46 OD: 75/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 235.

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realm of thought to remain attentive to where they may lead.47 In the same vein, Foucault mentions that his thought was inspired by various liberating movements originating in the 1960s and 1970s insofar as these movements developed and experimented with new forms of social interaction, new kinds of relationship between sexes and new aesthetic norms. Still, Foucault’s aim was not to adhere to these communities, nor to subscribe to specific norms, but rather to examine where these experiments might lead. In Chapter 3, we will discuss Foucault’s intricate and critical relationship to the antipsychiatric reception of his work on the history of madness as an exemplary instance of this at once engaged and disengaged examination in a concrete context. In this manner, we will demonstrate how the diagnosis of the present and the selfmodification of thought immanently affect each other here. Affirmative critique. It is in accordance with this overall approach that Foucault also stresses how philosophy as diagnosis of the present should try to dispense with a more commonplace and negative judgmental form of critique as it continues to “dream about” and struggles to measure up to a different, more affirmative, kind of critique. It is “a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an œuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life [faire exister une œuvre, un livre, une phrase]; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. ... Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms.”48 As we shall further develop in Chapter 10, this kind of affirmative critique is implicit in and serves as a signpost for Foucault’s meditative attitude both to the present and his own previous thinking. As Foucault underlines in “Préface à la transgression,” it is on closer inspection “a non-positive affirmation” insofar as critical philosophy in this sense does not confirm or remain “bound by” any peculiar content in the affirmed. By contrast, philosophy is affirmative since it “affirms limited being” by affirming “the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence the first time.”49 Philosophy as diagnosis of the present is an affirmative preface to transgression as it affirms a move already on its way in the present gestures it encounters, while remaining vigilant and perceptive to where this might lead us.

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[STP]: 195–219/{STPo}: 191–226. “Le philosophe masqué” [1980], DE IV: 106/“The Masked Philosopher,” p. 325. 49 “Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 242/“Preface to Transgression,” p. 41; translation modified. 48

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Accordingly, Foucault also characterizes the “historical-critical work upon ourselves” as expressing “an experimental attitude [attitude experimentale],” since it “must on the one hand open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.”50 In sum, Foucault understands critique as connected not only to the question “what, therefore, am I, I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity,”51 but also to the “historical-practical testing of the limits that we may be able to transcend” and “thus as a work carried out by ourselves on ourselves as free beings.”52 Critique hereby becomes inherent and affirmative, insofar as it takes an outset in a rupture in that which is examined in order to confirm this movement. By actively pursuing this movement on its way and examining its further possible direction, critique affirms and transcends this movement from within. Through its confirmation of an ongoing historical movement, critique is able to seek out its boundary – not only boundaries that condition it, but also boundaries that it points toward. All the while Foucault characterizes critique as a certain kind of critical attitude, he can also determine this virtue or ethos as a “limit attitude” and “a work on our limits.” As one leaves behind the established grounds of validity, one begins to create and commit to new normative guidelines. Foucault can therefore also argue that the critical attitude should “move beyond the outside-inside alternative” by beginning to perceive the limits of that which is well known and familiar as a threshold or transition to something new.53 In an important retrospective statement, Foucault recapitulates how philosophy as a diagnosis of the present investigates the past and the present, precisely to avoid endorsing them as given entities or well-established grounds of validity. By conceiving, prolonging and re-amplifying them as ongoing movements, philosophy as diagnosis of the present works on the limits instead as it affirms and transcends them from within. Rendering the examined as a departure and a transition to something new, philosophy as diagnosis of the present seeks to stand vigil for the day to come; and as it anticipates and articulates normative guidelines which are still arriving, it may have an impact on the time to come. In a longer retrospective comment on his work, Foucault sums up the dominant traits that characterize the kind of truth he

50

“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 46. “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” [1990] : 46/“What Is Critique?” p. 56. 52 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” [1984], DE IV: 575/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 47. 53 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” [1984], DE IV: 574, 578, 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” pp. 46, 50, 46. 51

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aims for with a normative impact on the time to come: “I am not merely a historian. I am not a novelist. What I do is a kind of historical fiction. ... I’ve written a lot about madness in the early 1960 – a history of the birth of psychiatry. I know very well that what I have done from a historical point of view is singleminded, exaggerated. Perhaps I have dropped out some contradictory factors. But the book had an effect on the perception of madness. So the book and my thesis have a truth in the nowadays reality. ... What I am trying to do is provoke an interference between our reality and the knowledge of our past history. If I succeed, this will have real effects in our present history. My hope is that my books become true after they have been written – not before. ... I have written a book about prisons. I have tried to underline trends in the history of prisons. ‘Only one trend,’ people could say. ‘So that’s not exactly true.’ ... But two years ago there was turmoil in several prisons in France, prisoners revolting. In two prisons, the prisoners in their cells read my book. They shouted the text to other prisoners. I know it’s pretentious to say, but that’s a proof of a truth – a political and actual truth – which started after the book was written. ... I hope that the truth of my books is in the future.”54 Foucault’s meditation on modes of enunciating knowledge and truth. Foucault’s philosophical attitude thus does not only lead to a positive conception of critique as a forestallment and an affirmation of something that is already on its way and makes itself felt in the examined even as it leads to a clear dissociation from traditional negative judgmental forms of critique, which from the very outset imagine themselves beyond and above the examined and its guidelines.55 Equally importantly, Foucault’s philosophical practice implies a distanciation from a conception of philosophy as a desire for knowledge in itself which reduces the normative aspects of knowledge production as it aims at the establishment and the accumulation of a body of factual theoretical knowledge or true statements concerning fundamental questions. Accordingly, even though there is an ongoing re-commitment to the act of writing as a philosophical exercise in Foucault’s work, he equally asserts an unremitting skepticism toward and estrangement from philosophy as a profession, a specific academic discipline or as institutionalized knowledge, at least to the extent that philosophy in these contexts has, in our time, become a philosophical machine concerned with advancing a set of true propositions concerning the fundamental state of the world at the expense of existentially relevant philosophical meditation. 54 “Foucault étudie la raison d’État” [1979], DE III: 805; “Foucault étudie la raison d’État” [1980], DE IV: 40/“Truth Is in the Future,” p. 301. 55 Cf. S. Raffnsøe: “Philosophy and Criticism. The Critical State of Critique in the Age of Criticism.”

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This distance is obvious when Foucault, for example, refuses to bestow the title of philosopher in this sense upon himself. Confronted with the observation that critics, commentators and exegetes have encountered difficulties in assigning him a precise position in contemporary philosophical thought, Foucault retorts: “I don’t regard myself as a philosopher. What I do is neither a way of doing philosophy nor a way of discouraging others from doing philosophy.” He continues by stressing that the most important authors who enabled him to deviate from his university training as a philosopher and psychologist56 “were people like Georges Bataille, Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski, who were not philosophers in the institutional sense of the term. ... What struck me and fascinated me about these authors, and what gave them their capital importance for me, was that their problem was not the construction of a system but the construction of personal experience. At the university, by contrast, I had been trained, educated, driven to master those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism, phenomenology.”57 Foucault’s commitment to philosophy as an ongoing trans-personal meditation that may bring about decisive and dramatic normative life changing effects at a personal and collective level, coupled with his skepticism toward philosophy as body of common knowledge informing a subject that can take possession of it, come to the fore in an ongoing investigation which Foucault persistently pursues at a meta-level from at least the time he begins in 1970 to occupy the chair in “The History of Systems of Thought” at the Collège de France. In his lectures here and elsewhere, one can follow an ongoing discussion of the character and the status of philosophy, knowledge and truth, including forms of enunciation, assertion and their effects. Foucault examines crucial traits of the modern conception of knowledge and truth closely tied to science and the idea of propositional knowledge, while he also surveys significant conversions and certain telling stages in the historical developments that have forestalled and led toward the modern conception. Concomitantly, Foucault here examines other forms of knowledge, ways of truth-telling and alternative relationships to knowledge and truth-telling which have increasingly been let out of sight in modern conceptions of knowledge and truth, while he also suggests

56 Foucault’s early training in philosophy manifested itself in a licence de philosophie (bachelor’s degree in philosophy) in 1948. His thesis for the Diplôme d’études supérieures (graduate degree) in 1949 was in La constitution d’un transcendental historique dans La Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel (The Constitution of Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). Foucault equally obtained a licence de psychologie (bachelor’s degree in psychology) in 1949 and passed his diplôme de psychopathologie (degree of psychopathology) in 1952. 57 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1978], DE IV: 42–43/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” pp. 240–241.

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how they have continued to be present and exert an influence at a somewhat neglected level. Taken jointly, these investigations can also be regarded as Foucault’s examination of the larger horizon of his own knowledge production and truth-telling. In this manner, Foucault not only explores the wider surroundings into which his own knowledge production fits, he equally articulates ways to understand and to relate to his own knowledge production and truth-telling. In addition, Foucault here elaborates a framework within which his own examination of forms of knowledge and their effects in all his previous and contemporaneous books, both major and minor, can be understood. While investigating how truth has been told in the West, how its modes of enunciation have been constituted and how they have changed in the Western philosophical tradition, Foucault’s meta-examination concomitantly tries to explore how philosophical truth may be revealed and spoken in our time by others and by himself. In his first lecture series at the Collège de France Leçons sur La volonté de savoir (1970–1971), Foucault examines the constitution of the presently prevalent conception of philosophy, truth and knowledge in Aristotle and Descartes, while also drawing attention to the fact that the theme of a qualitatively different “transgressive, forbidden, formidable knowledge” is also present in Antiquity and particularly developed in Greek justice and tragedy.58 In the last lecture at the College de France in 1971 and in a lecture held in New York in March 1972 entitled “Le savoir d’Œdipe” (“Oedipal Knowledge”), he further develops crucial aspects of this perception of knowledge in a close reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus (“Oedipus the King”).59 In a series of five lectures in Rio de Janeiro during the spring of 1973 entitled “La vérité et les formes juridiques” (“Truth and Juridical Forms”), Foucault further articulates his interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus as “a history of the search for truth” and a “procedure for the search for truth which exactly obeys Greek judicial procedures,” even as he broadens the perspective and reframes his interpretation within a broader juridical and historical development.60 Likewise, the lecture series in 1971 Théories et institutions pénales (Penal Theories and Institutions) examines the broader framework of the development of procedures for the establishment and pronouncement of truth and their decisive effects since the Middle Ages.61 The lecture series La société punitive (1972–1973) and his book Surveiller et punir

58

[LVS]: 14–15/{LWK}: 13–14; translation modified. “Le savoir d’Œdipe,” in: [LVS]: 225–253/“Oedipal Knowledge,” in: {LWK}: 229–261. 60 “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974], DE II: 583–646/“Truth and Juridical Forms,” pp. 1–89. Passage cited from page 555 is left out page 17 in the English translation in Michel Foucault Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, volume 3. Power. 61 “Theories et institutions pénales” [1972], DE: II: 389–93/“Penal Theories and Institutions,” pp. 17–21. 59

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also draw attention to the irreducible significance of the establishment and manifestation of truth. In the lecture series Du gouvernement des vivants (On the Government of the Living) of 1980, Foucault examines the ambiguous relationship between truth-telling and the exercise of power. While the exercise of power cannot take place and be carried out without the manifestation of truth, the manifestation of truth is a double-edged sword. It forms a supplement to power not only as powers’ auxiliary arm, but also as something that can be turned against existing power structures.62 When in a series of lectures given in Leuwen in 1981 under the title Mal Faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice (Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling. The Function of Avowal in Justice) Foucault picks up on the unavoidability of governing oneself and others through truth-telling, he also revisits his earlier discussion of early Greek justice and tragedy in order to subsequently enter into a discussion of the significance of avowal and truth-telling in later ecclesiastic institutions and within penal justice in the modern age. Furthermore, Foucault reveals his continued interest in bringing out a different kind of truth and knowledge as an irreducible dimension at the beginning of his 1983 lectures Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres (The Government of the Self and Others). Characteristically, he here states that “in posing the question of the self and others, I would like to try to see how truthtelling [dire-vrai], the obligation and possibility of telling the truth in procedures of government can show how the individual is constituted as subject on the relationship to self and the relationship to others.”63 In turn, an analysis of the practice of speaking the truth freely or of free-spokenness (parrēsia) as an irreducible event and dimension of speech and thought form the content of both the 1983 lectures Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres 1 and the following, final series of lectures from 1984: Le courage de la vérité (The Courage of Truth), Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres 2. A philosophical operation: Knowledge as theoretical cognition. Foucault’s continuous interest in the status of truth-telling and philosophical knowledge not only leads to a distanciation from philosophy as a naturalized will to knowledge and as a search for knowledge as an end in itself; it also leads to attempts to examine the instantiation of this approach to knowledge. This theme is articulated in the opening remarks of his first series of lectures at the Collège de France entitled Leçons sur la volonté de savoir (Lectures on the Will to

62 [GV]/{GL}: 23. See Chapter 7 for an account of Foucault’s lectures which brings out his examination of the rationality of governmentality in the early Christian pastoral in which governing the prosperity or wellbeing of people is coupled with a demand to generate a truth that committed the individual to become subject to the government of others. 63 [GSA 1]: 42/{GSO 1}: 42.

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Know). According to Foucault, the will to know is not only a suitable title of his series of lectures given in 1970; it is the title that he “could also have given” “to most of the historical analyses” “carried out up until now”; and all “analyses – past or still to come – could be seen as something like so many ‘fragments for a morphology of the will to know [volonté de savoir]’.”64 In this context, Foucault develops how Aristotle in the first lines of his Metaphysics carries out an operation concerning “philosophical discourse itself” “as it has existed in our civilization.”65 It is an event of such importance that Foucault, much later in the opening lecture of his course at the Collège de France in 1982, retrospectively describes Aristotle as “the philosopher whom we have recognized as the founder of philosophy in the modern sense of the term.”66 Concordantly, Foucault examines the Aristotelian gesture to wager “whether one can ... detect [découvrir] how this historical, singular, and ever renewed activation of the system of truth and falsity [mise en jeu du système vrai ou faux] forms the central episode of a certain will to know peculiar to our civilization.”67 According to Foucault, Aristotle’s text functions as “a ‘philosophical operator’,” which “concerns the possibility and justification of the whole system, its origin and necessary birth; and beyond the system itself, it concerns and acts on the status of philosophical discourse in general.”68 Thus, Aristotle’s text concerns and founds the very possibility of the philosophical discourse in which it is set and within which it situates itself. In the opening passage of his Metaphysics, Aristotle contends that “all men by nature desire to know” and states that “an indication of this” is “the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves and above all others the sense of sight.”69 In this manner, Aristotle argues for the claim that there is a universal desire for knowledge that is found in all men and given by nature; and he asserts that a sign or a proof of this is the fact that sensations, and in particular sight, arouse or give pleasure already taken in themselves independent of any relationship to utility. This is seen as a proof that human sensation, once released from utility, already strives beyond itself toward knowledge and finds satisfaction in the cognition of basic truth. Upon closer inspection, human sensation in itself already proves to be an obscure will to accede to knowledge and wisdom; human sensation and in particular sight already contain an inherent drive toward and finds satisfaction

64 65 66 67 68 69

[LVS]: 3/{LWK}: 1. [LVS]: 7/{LWK}: 5. [HS]: 19/{HSb}: 17. [LVS]: 5/{LWK}: 4; translation modified. [LVS]: 5/{LWK}: 5–6. Aristotle: Metaphysica, I, 980a 22.

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in philosophical cognition. Since the desire to know is primordial, knowledge brings its own satisfaction or reward and is able to motivate and justify itself. In Foucault’s short rendering, “a happy knowledge and a pure contemplation is already in itself the cause of that desire to know that trembles in the simple agreeableness of the sensation.” As a supreme form of knowledge, philosophy for Aristotle has the function to demonstrate and ensure this – and founds the very possibility of its own discourse by demonstrating and ensuring this. Thus inscribing knowledge in a primordial will to know inherent in human nature, philosophy in Aristotle is able to lay the foundations for itself while it conceives knowledge as an end or a value in itself. Philosophy and knowledge arise from and are funded in a certain, singular and higher serene, form of desire, viz. curiosity, the desire to know for the sake of knowing; and as desire to know, human curiosity is in turn inscribed within and belongs specifically to knowledge and has the cognition of its object as its ultimate goal. As a consequence of and through this turn, knowledge acquires the status of an absolute value and an end in itself; the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge become one and the same; the desire to know is lodged within knowledge; and knowledge becomes a “cause of itself and the desire directed towards it.”70 In the wake of this philosophical operation, everyone becomes at “bit of a philosopher” insofar as we all, from and with the most rudimentary sensation, strive toward knowledge and cognition of truth. Concomitantly, philosophy attains a canonical status as the activity in which “conscience becomes aware of itself [conscience prenant conscience de soi]”and recognizes that “the person who wakes up to the world is already a philosopher. In this manner, philosophy becomes “the movement of truth itself.”71 In the same lecture, Foucault detects a similar philosophical operation at the beginning of the contemporary era in Descartes.72 When at the start of his Méditations métaphysiques Descartes marks out his desire and determination to arrive at the truth, he carries out a similar move by listing the reasons for doubting and excluding the possibility of being mad, which would prevent him from arriving at the truth.73 Reiterating and requalifying Aristotle’s gesture in a transposed manner, Descartes’ operation equally concerns the possibility and the justification of knowledge as a value and an aim in itself. Concomitantly, it lays the groundwork for philosophical discourse as a privileged and decisive discourse, insofar as it is committed to performing this task of conversion while also committing itself to an unconditional search for truth and to demonstrating and awakening human conscience to the fact that human sensation 70 71 72 73

[LVS]: 19/{LWK}: 18. [LVS]: 18–19/{LWK}: 17–18. [LVS]: 7/{LWK}: 6. See Chapter 3 for a more elaborate discussion of Descartes’ conversion.

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and perception is always already turned toward an unconditional search for the cognition of objective and binding truth. As Foucault elaborates in his 1982 lectures, “the Cartesian moment” also places “self-evidence [évidence]” at the origin of and the end of the philosophical approach and knowledge, that is, “self-evidence as it appears ... as it is actually given to consciousness without any possible doubt.”74 By doing so, the Cartesian line of action or procedure establishes a certain relationship of the self to the self and to knowledge as decisive not only for acquiring knowledge and certainty, but also for establishing an authentic relationship to oneself. With the Cartesian moment, the subject’s relationship to itself and to the world essentially becomes theoretical. One is able to establish an adequate relationship to oneself and relate authentically to oneself only to the extent that one knows oneself; and one is only able to relate adequately to the world to the extent that one knows oneself and possesses adequate knowledge of the world. As Descartes puts “the self-evidence of the subject’s own existence at the very source of access to being, this knowledge of oneself (no longer in the form of the test of self-evidence, but in the form of the impossibility of doubting my existence as subject),” “the ‘know yourself’,” as developed in a privileged manner in philosophical thought, becomes “a fundamental means of access to truth” according to Foucault.75 Foucault understands the Cartesian moment, following and reinforcing the Aristotelian philosophical operation, as “an event in thought” and “as a decisive moment that is still significant.”76 Not only is it significant for “our modern mode of being subjects” for which the imperative to know becomes a fundamental way of relating to oneself, but it is concomitantly, and more importantly in the present context, the event that lays the groundwork for and forms the somewhat invisible background for modern scientific thought and for modern philosophical thought as it is embodied in contemporary academic institutions. In prolongation of the Cartesian moment, philosophy becomes a primarily intellectual activity aiming for the discovery of truth in the form of propositional and systematic knowledge. According to this idea of “a philosophical practice indexed to the scientific model” in the modern sense of the word,77 “knowledge will simply open out onto the indefinite dimension of progress, the end of which is unknown and the advantage of which will only ever be realized in the course of history by the institutional accumulation of bodies of knowledge, or the psychological or social benefits to be had from discovered truth after having taken such pains to do so.”78 After the

74 75 76 77 78

[HS]: 16/{HSb}: 14. [HS]: 16/{HSb}: 14; translation modified. [HS]: 11/{HSb}: 9. [CV]: 217/{CT}: 236–237. [HS]: 20/{HSb}: 19.

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philosophical conversion to truth, any piece of information or knowledge may be regarded as factual evidence by shedding light on and being apprehended by the cognizing subject; but knowledge and the process of cognition cannot be perceived as inextricably connected with the subject’s transfiguration or qualitative change. For Foucault, “the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begins when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject.”79 Foucault considers the conversion toward and search for general knowledge as an end and a value in itself for the human subject as a characteristic strand in modern Western thought and philosophy from Descartes and Leibniz to Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy.80 Knowledge and spiritual transformation. In Antiquity, by contrast, “this theme ... of a philosophy linked to the first movement of knowledge in general” is “a theme which would have appeared very foreign to the first Greek philosophers” and is only pervasively present in Aristotle.81 Even though the Peripatetic is, toward the beginning of the modern age, designated as “the philosopher” by Thomas Aquinas and according to Foucault can be considered the “founder of philosophy in the modern sense of the term,” Aristotle should not be regarded as “the pinnacle of Antiquity, but its exception.”82 While the idea to “know thyself [gnoti seauton]” is an important feature of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman thought since at least Socrates and Plato and has been given prominence in modern Western studies, this exhortation should in Foucault’s view be understood in the context of an even more basic “fundamental principle for describing the philosophical attitude throughout Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman culture,” “which also became the principle of all rational conduct in all forms of active life that would truly conform to the 79

[HS]: 20/{HSb}: 19. “With the all too easy clarity of hindsight – of what Americans call the ‘Mondaymorning quarterback’” Foucault in a late interview indicates that there were “two possible paths that led beyond this philosophy of subject,” but which he did not take: “The first of these was the theory of objective knowledge as an analysis of systems of meaning, as semiology. This was the path of logical positivism. The second was that of a certain school of linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology – all grouped under the rubric of structuralism. These were not the directions I took. Let me announce once and for all that I am not a structuralist, and I confess, with the appropriate chagrin, that I am not an analytic philosopher. Nobody is perfect. But I have tried to explore another direction. I have tried to get out from the philosophy of the subject, through a genealogy of the modern subject as a historical and cultural reality – which means as something that can eventually change” (“Sexualité et solitude,” [1981], DE IV: 170/“Sexuality and Solitude,” pp. 176–177). 81 [LVS]: 19/{LWK}: 18. 82 [HS]: 19/{HSb}: 17. 80

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principle of moral rationality,” that is, the notion of the care of the self (epimeleia heautou).83 Knowing yourself is thus important in Antiquity and even early Christian asceticism, but primarily because examining oneself to discern the truth about oneself is a necessary prerequisite for the ability to taking appropriate care of oneself. When in Antiquity philosophy raises the “philosophical question of how to have access to the truth,” the question of knowledge can thus never be isolated from the issue of how to live a philosophical life, and must be conceived as a part of a “life exercise.”84 As a consequence, the act of knowing and accessing the truth is intimately entwined with transformation and transfiguration. Between 500 BC and 500 AD, “truth is not given to the subject by a simple act of knowledge [connaissance], which would be founded and justified simply by the fact that he is the subject and because he possesses this or that structure of subjectivity.”85 For the subject to have access to the truth, “he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play.”86 Simultaneously, the subject is transformed by the act of knowledge in which it accesses the truth by effects of the truth which rebound on the subject. “In the truth, and in the access to the truth, there is something that fulfills the subject himself, which fulfills or transfigures his very being.”87 What is barred in the modern and Aristotelian conception of knowledge is thus the value of knowledge for the spiritual transformation of the subject.88 Insofar as knowledge, as earlier suggested, is here conceived as “a desire to know that trembles in the simple agreeableness of the sensation,” another connected and essential aspect of knowledge accentuated in Antiquity is scaled down or even excluded:89 knowledge and truth experienced as decisive, daunting and largely unpredictable events that transform not only the cognizing subject, but the entire setting in unforeseeable ways; knowledge and truth as phenomena that one is far from simply desiring naturally and being able to contemplate serenely; an experience of truth and knowledge as something formidable that may force itself on you as something which fascinates and is to be feared.

83

[HS]: 10–11/{HSb}: 8–9. [HS]: 18/{HSb}: 17; [GSA2]: 216/{GSO2}: 235. 85 [HS]: 17/{HSb}: 15. 86 [HS]: 17/{HSb}: 15. 87 [HS]: 17/{HSb}: 16. 88 [HS]: 16–17/{HSb}: 15–16. See Chapter 9 for a more developed discussion of what Foucault in L’herméneutique du sujet calls a “spiritual modalization of knowledge.” 89 [LVS]: 14/{LWK}: 13. 84

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Oedipal truth and tragic knowledge. In the context of his ongoing discussion of the character of truth and knowledge during his employment as professor at the College de France, Foucault recurrently, both at the beginning and toward the end of his lectures, returns to and thoroughly analyzes Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus as an important watershed in the history of truth and knowledge, as we have already suggested here.90 At the beginning of a lecture on the tragedy in 1981, Foucault even goes as far as to excuse himself for offering “what may be the millionth reflection on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex,” by his eagerness to present “how Œdipus’s wrong-doing and truth-telling are tied together in Sophocles’s play.”91 In fact, Foucault’s persistent interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus can be read as emblematic of his meta-meditations on truth and knowledge. The interpretation not only sums up a number of crucial traits of his discussion of the character of truth and knowledge and their mode of enunciation in Antiquity, as it also gives an outstandingly clear illustration of the transformative and tragic effects of knowledge and truth-telling that remain at the forefront at this stage, but which later are to recede into the background. It also gives a rough outline of some of the transitions that pointed in the direction of another more contemplative and serene conception of truth, while it suggests how a transformative capacity remains a crucial element of truth and knowledge despite the changes. In a sense, any Greek tragedy can be described as a rite of initiation into truth as it is unveiled and exposed on stage. Accordingly, Foucault characterizes every Greek tragedy as “an alethurgy, that is to say a ritual manifestation of truth; an alethurgy in the completely general sense of the term, since tragedy, of course, makes truth audible and visible through the myths and heroes, through the actors and their masks. In Greece, the stage, the theater is a site on which the truth is manifested, as the truth is manifested, albeit in a different way, at the seat of an oracle, or on the public square where one debates, or in the space where justice is dispensed.”92 Still, one can claim that Oedipus Tyrannus is an alethurgy in a particularly fundamental sense of the word, since the search for the truth and the conditions for enunciating the truth can be said to form the principal focal point for this particular tragedy. A number of Greek tragedies demonstrate how cataclysmic change leads to cognition as it makes the protagonist or the parties involved realize something of which they were previously unaware. By contrast, in Oedipus Tyrannus, the very quest for and the unveiling of truth drives

90 Cf. [LVS]: 14–15/{LWK}, in particular “Le savoir d’Œdipe,” in: [LVS]: 225–253/“Oedipal Knowledge,” in: {LWK}: 229–261. See also “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974], DE II: 583–646/“Truth and Juridical Forms,” pp. 1–89 and [MFDV]: 46–87/{WDTT}: 57–89. 91 [MFDV]: 47/{WDTT}: 57–58. 92 [GV]: 24/{GL}: 23.

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the action. Sophocles’ play demonstrates how a quest for truth and the knowledge it imparts proves to be fatal as it elicits widely unforeseen knowledge that engenders drastic changes. For Foucault, “Oedipus the King ... has the particular characteristic of it being the mechanism of recognition the path and work of the truth itself that will lead to the reversal of the fortune of the characters.”93 Still, what stimulates the protagonist to action and sets off the plot is not a natural drive inscribed in his nature. “The tragic hero is far from naturally desiring knowledge.”94 On the contrary, it is triggered by an outbreak of plague in Thebes and a rumor indicating that something is wrong and that the plague afflicting Thebes is due to the curse of the gods in response to corruption and murder, thus jointly threatening the established rule of the tyrant. In response to these challenges, Oedipus wows to banish the person who has committed the crime, not knowing that he himself committed it.95 In this difficult situation, Oedipus seeks council on what to do from the god Apollo via the oracle at Delphi. The oracle answers with the decree to cleanse himself of an unsettled account, namely a guilt that has besmirched Thebes since its former king, Laius, was killed. This is to be achieved by either exiling or killing the murderer of the king, who can be found in the city. The answer from the god’s oracle is incomplete however, as it does not prescribe who should be killed or banished to right the wrong that haunted Thebes. The matter is thus unable to be solved by the divine judgement alone, meaning that the rest of Sophocles’ tragedy can be read as the depiction of the striving to reveal the complete truth that would allow the correction of the previous wrong and thus liberate Thebes from the debt or guilt that had burdened the city-state. The oracle’s answer is given as a concealed truth in the prescriptive form typical of the divine and the oracle, but this kind of truth proves itself to be insufficient. The missing pieces that leads to a decision and upheaval arises during the rest of the tragedy. The first piece arrives when Jocasta assures Oedipus that he is innocent by telling him that Laius was killed by several men at a crossroads, which made Oedipus recall that he and his entourage has just killed a man at such a place while on the road to Thebes.96 However, the truth that Oedipus has murdered Laius is still not conclusively proven, as one of Laius’ slaves has escaped from the clash at the crossroads; and Oedipus still hopes that he can prove that Laius was murdered by several men and thereby remove the suspicion.

93

[GV]: 25/{GL}: 24. [LVS]: 14/{LWK}: 13. 95 “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974], DE II: 556–557/“Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 19. 96 “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974], DE II: 558/“Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 20. 94

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Furthermore, this murder does not tally with Oedipus’ story, for it had been predicted that Laius “would die by his son’s hand” and that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother; and as long as Oedipus regards himself as the son of King Polybus of Corinth, it gives him hope that he has not killed Laius. The missing part that completes the picture comes via the testimony of two eyewitnesses. The first comes in the form of a messenger from Corinth to tell Oedipus that Polybus has died of natural causes and that he can return home without fear of the prophecy, for the messenger turns out to be the slave who had found Oedipus exposed on Mount Kithairon and brought him to Corinth, meaning that he can add a new element to the story that Oedipus was not, in fact, the son of Polybus. The slave from Corinth is also able to explain that he received the child from another slave who served Laius. The last piece of the puzzle is added when Oedipus seeks out this slave, who turns out to be the same slave who survived the clash at the crossroads and who, after returning home and discovering that Oedipus had become King of Thebes, had asked to be sent to Kithairon to work as a shepherd again. Here in a cabin out in the mountains, an old shepherd keeps the final and crucial part of the truth, which Oedipus had to extract from him by threatening punishment if he refuses to confess what he knows. The shepherd recounts an incident where he had passed on a child to the shepherd from Corinth – a child that he had received from Jocasta with a message to kill it. Through a series of encounters on a multitude of levels, the pieces come together and the truth is illuminated in different ways. However, it is only possible to piece the fragmented story together because of the way in which the tragedy develops the validity of the truth’s mode of enunciation, form and function. The broken pieces are gathered together into a complete picture, but this is only possible in virtue of an irreversible development in the form and technique of truth, from the oracle and the seer’s manifestation of what had to happen according to the will of the gods, to the slaves’ testimony about what actually happened from their eyewitness accounts; and it is this progression that proves to be crucial. While powerful men express their truth in the form of an oath with an explicit contractual commitment and willingness to be held accountable and, since they invoke higher powers as guarantors for the covenant, pay for if they should be proven to be incorrect, a similar kind of veridiction appears in the Oedipus drama as a transitional form in a development that moves from the gods’ veridiction (the oracle) to ordinary people’s mode of truth enunciation, namely witness testimony. At the same time as a distinction is made between the activity of seeing and the seen, the act of speaking is also severed from that which is said since to speak is to recount, and to recount is to reproduce that which has already happened.

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While the oracle’s form of enunciation involves both saying and doing at the same time, the shepherd’s recounting merely speaks of what had been done. Therefore, the activities of seeing and speaking appear in disjointed orders. In the witness testimony, the enunciation appears as an isolated activity that does not have to create reality, but rather reproduce it as accurately as possible from what has been seen. In contradistinction with this, the oracle’s statements appears as a cohesive act that simultaneously says, does and let reality come into being and upon which a series of isolated acts rests, namely that which has happened, been seen and been said, and where each and every act had the task of being as accurate as possible in reproducing the original incident and conveying what has happened. The first case involves a way of stating the truth of something by simultaneously setting or creating reality, while the final case involves a form of veridiction that claims the truth by virtue of the fact that it reproduces reality as it already is. According to Foucault “we can say that the entire Oedipus play is a way of shifting the enunciation of the truth from a prophetic and prescriptive type of discourse to a retrospective one that is no longer characterized by prophecy but, rather, by evidence. This was also a way of shifting the luminescence [l’éclat] or, rather, the light of the truth of the prophetic and divine luminescence to the more empirical and everyday gaze of the shepherds. There is a correspondence between the shepherds and the gods. They say the same thing, they see the same thing, but not with same language and with the same eyes.”97 The move toward the eyewitness form of veridiction also raises the possibility of separating the question of truth from that of power. For Foucault, Sophocles’ tragedy takes a decisive step in this direction: “When classical Greece appeared – Sophocles represents its starting date, its sunrise – what had to disappear for this society to exist was the union of power and knowledge occurred at the origin of Greek society.”98 The differentiation of truth’s form of enunciation from its former binding to a hierarchy makes it possible for the truth to obtain an independent history. Where formerly the will to truth did not allow any separation from the will to power, a quest for the simple truth arises that can follow its own particular development. What is excluded in the Aristotelian and Cartesian conversion yet markedly prevalent in Sophoclean tragedy is thus a tragic element in knowledge and truth that cannot be eradicated. Here, knowledge and truth is not something that the hero wants and worships by nature, but is something that occurs with a trajectory that imposes itself on him with unforeseeable and uncontrollable 97 “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974], DE II: 561/“Truth and Juridical Forms,” pp. 23–24. 98 “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974], DE II: 569/“Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 32.

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consequences. Truth comes forward as “transgressive, forbidden, formidable, knowledge.”99 It registers as an enigmatic and privileged event that has to be earned and cannot be possessed in its entirety. What appears may at once seem reassuring and promising, but concomitantly troubles and changes the existing order. Equally, truth is not an event here that can be contemplated and judged by an observing subject. The order is decisively changed, not only with regard to perception and judgment, but also with regard to drive, taking control of the action and taking the lead. In the context of the tragedy, truth is unveiled and states itself emphatically; something is disclosed with weight and sovereignty so that the perception, judgment and measure no longer belongs to the observing protagonist.100 Instead, the protagonist can be said to be perceived and judged by the action and what it unveils to such an extent that he enters into an alethurgy and becomes reconstituted as a consequence of the manifestation of truth. For Foucault it is evident that “Oedipus does not look at the secret, but the secret looks at him, it does not take its eyes off him and seeks to capture him by finally striking him.”101 As a consequence, truth not only discloses itself in the form of an aperture that leaves something in the dark or in the form of a daybreak that prophetically signals something which is yet to arrive more fully. Truth is also unveiled in the form of a lightning and a “knowledge that kills” since the protagonist cannot resist when it swoops down on him. In this sense, “the flash of light and death merge.”102 Sharing transformative experience in the medium of thought. As he sums it up toward the very end of his last lecture series at the Collège de France, the issue that Foucault faces and unravels in his meta-meditation on truth and knowledge is very much the problem of the self-understanding and the articulation of philosophy. In this regard, the philosophical heritage proves to be an ambiguous one. In Le courage de la Vérité (The Courage of Truth), Foucault makes it clear, on the one hand, how “from the origin of philosophy, and maybe in fact until now, still and despite everything, the West has always accepted that philosophy cannot be separated from a philosophical existence, that the practice of philosophy must always be more or less a sort of life exercise. This is what distinguishes philosophy from science.”103 On the other hand, Foucault draws our

99

[LVS]: 14/{LWK}: 13. [LVS]: 104–104/{LWK}: 108–109. 101 [LVS]: 15/{LWK}: 14. 102 [LVS]: 15/{LWK}: 14. 103 [CV]: 217/{CT}: 235. 100

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attention to the fact that precisely the problem of the true life and the problem of philosophy as a mode of life has been increasingly eliminated and invalidated from Western thought: “While loudly proclaiming that philosophy is fundamentally not just a form of discourse, but also a mode of life, Western philosophy – and such was its history and perhaps its destiny – progressively eliminated, or at least neglected and marginalized the problem of this philosophical life, which to start with, however, it posited as inseparable from philosophical practice. It has increasingly neglected and marginalized the problem of life in its essential connection with the practice of truth-telling.”104 In this connection, Foucault even pinpoints how neglecting the question of the philosophical life constitutes a parallel to the neglecting of the question of being, which Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) indicates as fateful for philosophy and Western thought at the beginning of his own philosophical trajectory in Sein und Zeit:”105 “If it is true that the question of Being has indeed been what Western philosophy has forgotten, and that this forgetting is what made metaphysics possible, it may be also that the question of the philosophical life has continued to be, I won’t say forgotten, but neglected; it has constantly appeared as surplus in relation to philosophy, to a philosophical practice indexed to the scientific model. The question of the philosophical life has constantly appeared like a shadow of philosophical practice, and increasingly pointless. This neglect of the philosophical life has meant that is now possible for the relation to truth to be validated and manifested in no other form than that of scientific knowledge.”106 Just as Heidegger in Sein und Zeit seeks to retrieve the question of being as “a thematic question of actual investigation”107 as a precondition for not only rephrasing the question of being but also for clearing a new path for thinking, Foucault strives in his lectures to draw our attention to the neglected issue of the philosophical life. By reopening the questioning of the philosophical life in this manner, he indicates that it has decisive consequences not only for the relationship to philosophical truth and knowledge, but also for the very understanding of philosophical knowledge and practice and for philosophy’s conception of itself in general. Not only in his lectures but also throughout his entire œuvre, Foucault can retrospectively be seen as attempting to practice philosophy in a way that in modern terms rises to the challenges raised by the ancient understanding of philosophy as a way to lead the philosophical life. According to this conception,

104

[CV]: 217/{CT}: 235. M. Heidegger: Sein und Zeit [1927] (Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), § 1/Being and Time (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996), § 1. 106 [CV]: 218/{CT}: 236–237. 107 M. Heidegger: Sein und Zeit [1927], § 1/Being and Time, § 1. 105

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one does not primarily seek truth or knowledge as an end or as a means in itself. One does not so much seek truth and knowledge in order to know, but rather to know how to live the truth, or to know how to live a truer life. Accordingly, the idea is not to dispense with but rather allow oneself to insist on and persist in a will to know precisely by freeing it from an all too obvious commitment to and confinement within “the form and law of knowledge” as it is perceived in the Aristotelian and Cartesian conception.108 Accordingly, when Foucault practices philosophy as diagnosis of the present, he can be considered as confronting and seeking to give an adequate present-day response to a challenge already presented by and to philosophy in early Antiquity, viz. that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and that I should examine myself and others, not primarily to know, but to experience the truth in order to be able to lead an examined and a truer life.109 In modern terms, however, the exhortation to know thyself does not imply that one turns one’s back on the world, but instead that one remains open to and affected by the world in ways that one needs to confront. Instead of philosophy as performing a unique Aristotelian inwardly oriented conversion to knowledge, philosophy in Foucault appears as an unremitting meditation committed to an ongoing unveilment of truth in the form of an ongoing transformative existential conversion. Since truth forces one ahead in unforeseen ways as it occurs within and changes the given context, knower and existing power structures, the experience of truth retains an ineradicable tragic element in Foucault’s œuvre. Instead of presenting itself as evidence for a cognizing subject, truth in Foucault’s meditation makes itself felt as an event that affects the subject in uncontrollable ways, thus forcing him or her to move ahead into the future as she or he tries to establish new and strange relationships to him- or herself. Instead of presenting experiences to a given subject, Foucault’s practice forces us to encounter the reality of experience so intensely that we are affected and remain alive when something happens and the experience of being and ourselves are altered qualitatively. For Foucault, experience is therefore not merely the cognition of an object, but also a self-transformative moment for the self and the world. In this sense, experience is not something that presents itself for me, but something that happens to me. Experience is even an event which may occur for and happen to the cognizing subject, but in which it loses primacy to such an extent that it is transformed beyond itself in rather impersonal ways. Foucault thus states that: “It would probably not be worth the trouble of making books if they failed to teach the author something he had not known before, if they did not lead to unforeseen places and if they did not disperse one

108 109

[LVS]: 25/{LWK}: 25. Plato: Apology, 38b.

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toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and pleasure of the book is to be an experience.”110 While Foucault’s engaged and temporally situated thought examines yardsticks in the making, it likewise points beyond existing yardsticks toward others that must be precluded in the analysis. Foucault’s meditation is therefore also given the character of an ongoing critical, yet affirmative, articulation of previously implicit normativity and of normativity that is still in the process of arriving. Close attention to Foucault’s approach to knowledge and philosophy is essential if one wants to appreciate the continuity in his œuvre. To the extent that one considers Foucault’s enunciations as specific statements or propositions out of context, one risks reducing them to isolated sets of claims, positions, or even opinions which do not form a coherent whole, but which rather seem to follow and supersede one another. Considered simply at a superficial propositional or thematic level, Foucault’s work thus borders on dissolution. Perceived within a widely held conception of knowledge as merely theoretical cognition, his œuvre risks falling into isolated parts or phases which succeed and supplant each other, yet without really relating to each other, as we will show in the first part of Chapter 1. Nevertheless, there is continuity in Foucault’s œuvre if it is perceived as an ongoing search for and enunciation of truth that does not primarily seek to know simply as an end or a means in itself, but rather seeks knowledge in order to be able to speak the truth and lead a truer life, as we will demonstrate in all the other parts of the book. Once understood as philosophy as diagnosis of the present, Foucault’s thought stands out clearly as an ongoing meditative practice following its own inherent necessity as it moves ahead. Perceived as a Denkweg, or as a path of thought over which we do not preside, but which must be followed and explored, Foucault’s thought appears as coherent as a Cartesian meditation. It is even most likely that what at present attracts widespread and sustained attention to Foucault’s work is precisely its consistent untimeliness in the described respects with regard to contemporary scholarship. With Foucault, another way of practicing philosophy appears that leads beyond conceptions of knowledge as mere instruments of a toolbox or an epistemological system, yet without dispensing with knowledge. Instead, this approach to philosophy radicalizes the will to know to such an extent that the search for knowledge becomes both a path of thought and an ongoing existential and socially engaged experience, which even affects the time to come.

110 “Préface à l’Histoire de la sexualité” [1984], DE IV: 584/“Preface to the History of Sexuality, Volume Two,” p. 205.

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What appears in Foucault’s work is also the future as something we do, as Foucault suggested in the passage cited at the very beginning of the introduction. For Foucault, the future as something we do is not the future conceived as something we construct intentionally or something that is just the result of our own making. It is the future as it arrives in the way one examines and responds to something already happening in the present, which appears as the result of a long and protracted history. Through the way one examines and responds to a present problem, concern or movement, one begins to transform what is on the agenda while at the same time one is prompted to undergo a modifying trial of oneself that forces one to perceive and think differently. Practicing philosophy as a diagnosis of the present in this manner, it may be able to enter a modifying self-ordeal that permits one to stray afield of oneself and begin rendering what is still on its way. Through this meditative autotransformative practice, one may be able to stand vigil and anticipate norms and modes of existence that are still arriving to such an extent that they may have decisive, yet also to a wide extent unpredictable, effects on how other people may respond and react in the future. In and through his works, Foucault attempted to have an auto-transformative effect on himself and others; and through his philosophical trajectory and his published works, he managed to have a decisive impact on future events.

1 Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault

“What I am attempting to do and what I have always attempted ever since my first real book Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique,” Foucault explains in a conversation dating from 1978, “is, through intellectual labor, to dispute and question various aspects of society by drawing attention towards their weaknesses and boundaries. My books are, nonetheless, not prophetic, nor do they encourage anyone to take up arms. It annoys me intensely for them to be seen in such a light. The challenge put forth by the books is, in the most explicit manner – and although the vocabulary is difficult – to elucidate the areas of bourgeois culture and institutions that have direct influence upon man’s everyday activities and thoughts.”1 In concerning oneself with large philosophical, literary or scientific authorships, it is common to set out with a number of unarticulated assumptions with wide-reaching implications. One such assumption is that the authorship exists as a corpus that may be studied and evaluated, preferably from a certain analytical distance. By examining the works included, one seeks to establish the decisive chronological stages of the authorship, that is, the dates at which important changes occur and new phases are established. This has also influenced the reception of Foucault’s thought. In attempting to determine the phases of the authorship, a number of smaller works have come to play a decisive role insofar as they are considered commentaries that allow the erection of boundaries between principal works. The phases of the authorship thereby seem to be firmly based upon Foucault’s reading of himself. In spite of the declaration regarding a unifying aim for the authorship as a whole cited above, it has thus been tempting to divide Foucault’s work into a number of phases that in some instances have even been claimed to be radically 1 “Conversation sans complexes avec le philosophe qui analyse les ‘structures du pouvoir’” [1978], DE III: 669.

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Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 39

different and therefore incompatible with one another.2 In taking such an approach, one is able to establish a simple overview, an order to things, which is not wrong as such but problematic when hypostasized. In the following we attempt to take a nuanced position on the unity of Foucault’s work. In the first section of this chapter, we will sketch a number of various and well-known phases in Foucault’s work. As we will argue, this division is, at least on an initial analysis, certainly possible, informative and meaningful to employ for the benefit of orientation in his writings. From a closer inspection, however, this interpretation is also superficial and to some extent misleading, as it tends to overlook a number of even more illuminating and through-going fundamentals pertaining to Foucault’s œuvre in its entirety than the ambition of critical enlightenment presented in the conversation above. In the second section, we will present some of the problematic preconceptions regarding such a partitioned approach to the authorship that have arisen in the general reception. This initial inspection, as well as the critique of the dogmas found in the reception that follows, leads into our presentation in the subsequent chapter of a number of common features and categories that characterize Foucault’s authorship in its entirety.

1

Phases of the authorship

The beginning of Foucault’s authorship proper is usually given as the first half of the 1960s. This excludes the earliest and relatively short book Maladie mentale et personnalité (Mental Illness and Personality), published in 1954 and shorter writings from the same decade – including the introduction to the French translation of the Heideggeresque Traum und Existenz (Dream and Existence), also from 1954, by psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger. Foucault later distanced himself from these works by, among other things, refusing later republication. In an interview he states that Maladie mentale et personnalité is “a work, which is completely cut off from everything later written 2 This happens in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983), when they claim that around 1969 Foucault begins to prioritize genealogical studies and practice over theory and archaeological method (see pp. 99–104). The division is also found in W. Schmidt: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst. Die Frage nach dem Grund und die Neubegründung der Ethik bei Foucault (2000), when he identifies a transition in Foucault from power and government analyses to questions of ethics and the good life around 1980 (see pp. 63, 157). It is also identifiable in J. Revel: “La pensée verticale: une étique de la problématisation” (2002), when she presents Foucault as a slightly multiple personality disordered author with four to five different identities. Revel emphasizes the incompatibility of these phases by claiming the only cohesive feature of Foucault’s disparate authorship to be the “theme of discontinuity”: that the only unchanging thing throughout the authorship is the constant rupture with itself (see pp. 64–66).

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by me.”3 Furthermore, one could argue that Foucault in this period was much indebted to phenomenology and Heidegger’s existential ontology and had not yet liberated himself from the French epistemological tradition. This tradition is known as the school of thought that focuses on the production of knowledge and history of the sciences and was established by – among others – Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) and George Canguilhem (1904–1995). In this early Heideggerian, phenomenological and epistemological phase he still sought to define a basis for science, which was ultimately modeled on the paradigm of the natural sciences. The conclusion to this ‘proto-phase’ is marked by the book Maladie mentale et psychologie (Mental Illness and Psychology), which Foucault first published in 1962. While the first section of this work is a reproduction of Maladie et personalité and therefore points back toward the 1950s, Foucault inserts a number of changes into the introduction, while the second part is rewritten on the basis of altered premises with the subtitle “The Actual Conditions of Illness” changed to “Madness and Culture.” In the revised version, the book comes to contain a fundamental critique of psychiatry, including the scientific character and objectivity of psychology. Since the book thereby problematizes the basis for the phenomena studied by psychology, it also foregrounds the authorship proper.4 However, Foucault is so dissatisfied with this patchwork of a book in the late 1960s that he – unsuccessfully – tries to stop the publication of its English translation. The origin of madness. The first phase of the authorship proper is initiated by the thesis Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (History of Madness), which Foucault defended at the Sorbonne in 1961. Here he examines the ontogenesis of the modern conception of madness as a “mental illness” as it happens in psychiatry and in mental hospitals. The book came about at a time when a demand for liberating the treatment of the mentally ill had made itself felt within psychiatry. This movement, which is often connected with Ronald D. Laing (1927–1989), David Cooper (1931–1987) and Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), received striking publicity in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest from 1962, which was made into a famous movie by Miles Forman in 1976. 3

“Interview de Michel Foucault” (1984), DE IV: 665. In extension of this rupture, Foucault stated that one should not “attempt to define psychology as a science, but perhaps as a form of culture” in an interview with A. Badiou. This was televised in 1965 with the title “Philosophie et psychologie” [1965], DE I: 438. In a foreword to a publishing of J.-J. Rousseau’s (1712–1778) Dialogues, he distanced himself from the issue of whether Rousseau was mad by writing that it was “the question of a psychologist and as a consequence not my own.” “Introduction,” in J.-J. Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Dialogues [1962], DE I: 188. 4

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 41

In Folie et déraison, the explication of the history of madness is inserted into a wider context and given far-reaching implications. The book accounts for changes in Western societies’ treatment and descriptions of madness that occurred from the end of the Renaissance until the first half of the 19th century. During the Renaissance, it had been sufficient to expel the mad from society, such that they, as people lacking a determinate position, could haunt what was well-known and at the same time account for a different world. However, in the 1600s, those who lacked reason were rounded up in large institutions. This occurred when insanity was given the status – for instance by Rene Descartes (1596–1650) – of being an absolute opposite that one must reject in order to become a rational being. However, from the beginning of the 19th century it became possible to release the mad and allow them to act within the confines of the institution because it was assumed that madness was a mental illness or the alienation of the lunatics from their own humanity. Madness had become a logic that controlled and tormented the insane. It was no longer – as had been the case with Descartes – a basic obstacle standing in the way of reason. It was as a consequence of the distance between reason and madness that it became possible to objectify it and uncover the special logic of madness that the insane were subject to. As implied by the first part of the title, Folie et déraison seeks to characterize the rationality of Western sociality by exploring the relation to its opposite, the ‘ir-rational’ – the other, which distinguishes itself from reason and in which it may be mirrored. In Histoire de la folie, Foucault traces how this relationship is slowly transformed in modern times. From a conception of reason that ostracizes its opposite since they were considered mutually exclusive, a development toward a rationality occurred that could be far more tolerant toward the antithetical concept, since it no longer constituted a radical challenge. Foucault hereby describes the emergence of an all-encompassing, modern, dialectical and human rationality. This rationality was able to lose itself in everything that seemed alien, only to relocate itself and confirm its own worth. In Histoire de la folie, Foucault focuses on developments in the experience of rationality’s opposite. In the modern medical science concerned with ‘insanity’ – i.e., psychiatry – madness is conceived as an object of knowledge that the researcher always already knows all too well because of the objectivized distance he achieves through his scientific methodology. In the works of a number of modern and early modern artists and philosophers, however – for instance the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), the philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the playwright Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) – madness comes across as a permanent and immediate contestation. Here it figures as a limit to which art is contiguous, in that it transcends and seeks to integrate this bordering madness within itself. At the same time

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the artistic works are in danger of being afflicted by madness, such that they would dissolve and perish.5 At the beginning of the original foreword, Foucault characterizes Histoire de la folie as an attempt at recapturing “in history, this degree of zero of the history of madness, when it was undifferentiated experience, the still undivided experience of the division itself.”6 Insofar as it has been a core issue for romantic literature and natural philosophy to reach behind the fragmented character of reality and determine an abstract cohesion or possible reconciliation, it is possible to perceive the book as the initiation of a ‘romantic’ phase in the authorship, lasting from 1961 to 1963.7 With the 1963 Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard medical (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception) Foucault expands his concern for medicine and healing. However, it is not merely an issue concerning the modern experience of insanity but a far wider regard that “is concerned – outside all prescriptive intent – with determining the conditions of possibility of medical experience in modern times,”8 that is, it is about the genesis of the modern conception of illness in general. Foucault calls this ‘the clinical experience’. According to Foucault, with the modern clinic coming into existence, a space was created in which it was possible to manage and discuss illness. Also, a new relationship between doctor and patient came into being. In the 18th century, established medical science had primarily taken on the character of nosology, a classification of diseases, in that the primary concern had been to study the special features that distinguished each particular illness in its natural surroundings so it could then be exhibited in its originary and unmediated universality. The aim for medicine and the doctor was – as far as was possible – to bring the diseased organism back to its natural and healthy functions. 5 In a review of J. Laplanche’s book Hölderlin et la question du père (Paris, PUF, 1961), Foucault describes how this opposition becomes apparent in Hölderlin’s authorship; see “Le ‘non’du père” [1971], DE I: 189–203. 6 “Préface” [1961], DE I: 159/HM: xxvii. 7 A number of interpreters have emphasized this point in highlighting Foucault’s attempt to return to an experience of an original un-reason behind the historical fragmentation of the concept. So as to articulate the repressed originality beneath its mere appearance and rehabilitating it, he is thought to interpret its underlying meaning. In Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985), J. Habermas insists that in Histoire de la folie “a romantic motif is exhibited, which Foucault later rejects.” Foucault apparently still assumes “something authentic behind the masks of madness” (p. 282). In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983), H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow likewise claim that “Foucault seems to have thought that there was ‘something‘ like pure madness which all these different cultural forms were groping after and covering up – a view he later abandons” (p. 4). 8 NC: xv/BC: xxii.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 43

In establishing the modern clinic, a special new frame of experience was established in which medical knowledge could be presented, tested and disseminated. In the artificial environment of the clinic, it became possible to exert continuous influence and perform a complete registration of the immediate events and variations between them. This comprehensive treatment made it possible to create a perspective on and knowledge about the particular case and its relation to the surrounding environment. The nosological approach examines how the general illness manifests itself in the individual. Over and against this, pathology (the study of disease) considers the specific illness in an individual. As it is made clear by the subtitle, An Archaeology of Medical Perception, the birth of the clinic is related to the occurrence of an in-depth and analytical mode of perception that not only examines the universal in the particular but which to a greater degree notes what is characteristic about the particular case. As Foucault had done for psychiatry and psychology in Histoire de la folie, in Naissance de la clinique he demonstrates how modern, clinical medicine came into being through a long and more disparate, complex and ambiguous historical development than that suggested by its own self-conception. According to medicine itself, the sick person and his or her needs are suddenly identified at the same time the clinic constructs an environment that is suitable for healing. Indeed, this happens in extension of medicine distancing itself from previous, obstructing prejudices. Already in the introduction, Foucault thereby underlines how it is a “formal reorganization, in depth, rather than the abandonment of theories and old systems, that made clinical experience possible.”9 As before, he indicates how modern science covers up the historical and cultural conditions of its own creation and instead writes a counter history that shows how this experience is contingent and limited. Discourse and structure. However, further on in the introduction to Naissance de la clinique, Foucault becomes critical. This is due to the difficulties involved in an impartial and “non-normative” historical examination, such as the one he is attempting. The obstacle is found in our predisposition toward understanding all speech or text as commentary. Therefore, we come to understand any expression as an utterance about something else, even though this is not completely possible. Something must remain silent – a surplus of meaning is thus left in the relevant object as a secret. We must seek to decode this by returning to the text for novel commentary and description, but only to experience the same subject matter again and again. As long as expressions are considered commentary, we conceive the spoken or written word as an incomplete translation of some previous authenticity or direct speech. Since 9

NC: x/BC: xiv.

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we can never present this speech in and of itself, but only attain an insufficient reading, Foucault holds that we are condemned to continue such exegesis of authentic revelations from history indefinitely. All the while, the interpretation keeps on suggesting an inexhaustible source of meaning, which moves toward ever-greater hermeneutic depths that in return require more reinterpretation. According to Foucault, the concept of the ‘spoken’ or ‘written’ word as a commentary, negates the possibility of “a systematic history of discourses” in general but also – and more specifically – a systematic history of a discourse for medical perception, such as the one he seeks to write in Naissance de la clinique. From this starting point, we attempt to identify the original experience or object behind what was previously said – that which motivates and is referred to. In this approach, we overlook or distort the immediate “historical appearance” of the expression and its relation to other expressions at that time. This means that one overlooks the systematic aspect of what is stated because a motivating object is sought behind the spoken word. Foucault points out that he does not favor one kind of medicine over another, just like he does not seek to define a kind of medicine, such as the one we have now, arguing for a rejection of medicine and science all together. Rather, he seeks “a structural study that sets out to disentangle the conditions of its history from the density of discourse.”10 The comments found at the beginning of Naissance de la clinique may also be read as a critical commentary to the previous studies performed in Histoire de la folie. This claim is supported by Foucault distancing himself from this book increasingly in L’archéologie du savoir (Archaeology of Knowledge) from 1969. He here states to be “against an explicit theme in Histoire de la folie” and emphasizes that “there can be no question of interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the referent. ... We are not trying to reconstitute what madness itself might be, in the form in which it first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, deaf, scarcely articulated experience and in the form in which it was later organized (translated, deformed, travestied, perhaps even repressed) by discourses. ... Such a history of the referent is no doubt possible; and I have no wish at the outset to exclude any effort to uncover and free these ‘prediscoursive’ experiences from the tyranny of the text. But what we are concerned with here is not to neutralize discourse, to make it a sign of something else ... but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity.”11 Naissance de la clinique hereby seems to represent a rupture in Foucault’s authorship, as he distances himself for 10 NC: xv/BC: xxii. Foucault includes a number of small changes and edits in the 1973 republication. Among other things, he removes the word “structural” so as to avoid being classified as a structuralist. 11 AS: 64/AK: 47.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 45

the first time from the concept of hermeneutical depth – a murky, antecedent foundation that thought must strive to interpret – which had apparently characterized his work until then. Instead we find that attention has been turned toward generally accessible statements actually made by people in order to understand the systematic structure that has made this possible. This initiates a phase of Foucault’s authorship that is characterized by reflection on discourse and language. During this period he examines discourses, that is, delimited groups of verbal expressions that constitute reasonably ordered, coherent and meaningful speech. He establishes an analysis that attempts to identify the formative rules resulting in the classification of expressions as coherent groups. This is still Foucault’s aim in the programmatic lecture: L’ordre du discours (The Discourse on Language) held at his inauguration as Professor of History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. He here stresses how “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role it is ... to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.” At the same time he takes the opportunity to announce a comprehensive research program for the following years, in which he primarily wishes to identify such “forms of exclusion, limitation and appropriation” and show “how they are formed, in answer to which needs, how they are modified and displaced, which constraints they have effectively exercised, to what extent they have been worked on.” However, this must be done in order to show how “series of discourse are formed, through, in spite of or with the aid of these systems of constraint.”12 Already in the short book Raymond Roussel (Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel ), which was published in the same year as Naissance de la Clinique, language had in itself become an object of investigation. He turns toward the esoteric and experimental author Raymond Roussel (1877–1933), who was primarily known for the scandals created by the enactment of his works and for the account of his mental illness given by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859–1947) in De l’angoisse à l’extase (From Anxiety to Ecstasy) from 1926. Shortly after Roussel’s death, the French surrealists began canonizing him as one of the foremost new authors. However, Foucault was fascinated with Roussel’s madness or rather his studies into the nooks and crannies of the human psyche. Thus, he analyzes Roussel’s retrospective accounts of the rigorous principles of construction followed by the author in writing prose, which are found in the posthumous Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books) from 1935. Foucault attempts to describe how these limitations immediately result in a dearth or lack of language that gives rise to an experience of emptiness or lack of being. This emptiness requires 12

OD: 10, 62/”The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 216, 231, 232.

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and makes room for linguistic inventiveness, a construction of new tropes in language or figurative expressions through which Roussel reinvents the world. He does not seek to “duplicate the reality of another world, but, in the spontaneous duality of language, he wants to discover an unexpected space and to cover it with things never said before.”13 The main publications in this phase of the authorship are Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences) from 1966, as well as the previously mentioned L’archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge). In the first of these, Foucault examines the various kinds of scientific discourse found in Western societies from the Renaissance to the present. This study is undertaken in order to demonstrate a number of commonalities between the various sciences but also to indicate some overall tendencies that precede the human sciences and structuralism of his time. In the other work, L’archéologie du savoir, Foucault looks back on his own previous studies in order to clarify what he had done in describing discourses and documenting a certain regularity or pattern while detailing what is understood by a discourse. Another core text from this period is “Préface à la transgression” (“A Preface to Transgression”) from 1963, which evaluates the works of author and philosopher George Bataille (1897–1962), mainly as this relates to the concept of transgression. Yet another important manuscript, La pensée du dehors (The Thought from Outside), is about the literary scholar Maurice Blanchot (1907– 2003) and was first published in Critique No. 229 in 1966 but was later reprinted by the small art publishing firm Fata Morgana. In 1973 Foucault also published a revised version of an article from 1968 with the same company. This becomes the small book Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This Is Not a Pipe) about the modernist painter René Magritte. Finally, the posthumous book Sept propos sur le septième ange (Seven Proposals on the Seventh Angel ) was published by Fata Morgana in 1986. Originally, it was a foreword to the reprinting of Jean-Paul Brissets La grammaire logique (Logical Grammar) from 1970. These shorter manuscripts are often taken to prove that Foucault was not only interested in language and discourse in the 1960s but also and especially in art and literature.14 Sociality and power. Five years after L’ordre du discours, Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) in 1975. The book examines criminal justice developments in Western

13

RR: 25/DL: 18. This is made clear not only in the mentioned works but also in the essay “Qu‘estce que un auteur?” from 1969 and in the first chapter of Les mots et les choses comprising an analysis of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which was published independently in a slightly different version in the previous year (see “‘Les suivantes’” [1968], DE I: 464–478). 14

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 47

societies from the 1700s onward. These changes resulted in the disappearance of corporal punishment as the sentence par excellence around 1800. Such punitive measures took on the form of a spectacular enactment in which the guilty party was publicly tormented to varying degrees that were carefully specified in the sentence. By making an example of the given case, it was thereby clear that existing law should be kept and that transgressions were punished. However, modern prison sentences came to displace such earlier forms of violence as the archetypical form of castigation. Thus, lawbreakers were punished through the loss of liberty and imprisonment, which secluded the criminal from society. In this sense, the aim was to demonstrate to others that transgression would be reprimanded and efforts would be made to avoid further acts of crime. In prison, it is also possible to correct the criminal’s behavior and re-socialize him, such that he may return to society. As is made clear from the subtitle. The Birth of the Prison, Discipline and Punish not only examines changes in sentencing but likewise seeks to understand the creation of an important social institution: the modern prison. For Foucault, this shift must be perceived in a much wider context. One may only understand why the correctional process becomes the punishment itself and why it attains such a central and overarching importance for societal life if one understands the introduction of such punishment as part and parcel of a far deeper and more radical transformation of the social order, the roots of which reach further back in history. The introduction and continued use of correctional punishments – a disciplinary action that strictly speaking has only exhibited a very limited reformative capability – is, according to Foucault, only comprehensible if it is conceived as a dramatic step in an extensive, continuous and ever-present regimentation and standardization of social relations. Correctional punishment was retained in spite of its deficiencies because it seems natural and unavoidable in a context built around constant mutual admonition where it is important to appear disciplined. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault therefore also studies the genesis and dissemination of discipline in Western societies since the 17th century and the societal changes this development has resulted in.15 15 The shift, which leads to Surveiller et punir from 1975, may be followed in Foucault’s overviews of lectures held at Collège de France published in the institution yearbook (and in 1989 published collectively under the title Résume des cours 1970–1982). In the lectures given at the beginning of 1970–1971 under the title “La volonté de savoir” (“The Will to Knowledge”), Foucault still studies the changes to “discursive practices,” within which Western societies have attempted to express the truth. As one can see in the title “Theories et institutions pénales” (“Penal Theories and Institutions”), the lectures from the following year not only concern punishment and criminal law but also penal institutions. In the series of lectures from 1973, “La société punitive” (“The Punitive Society”), Foucault creates an overview of various methods of punishment from ancient Greece to

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With the analyses of discipline, Foucault clarifies the insufficiency of more mainstream conceptions of power, which he considers to have been accepted in modern political philosophy since Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Indeed, this older conception had even found its way into contemporary analyses of power and culture – not only in Marxist and Gramscian schools of thought relating to ideology criticism but also in the tradition that reaches from Freud’s (1856–1939) classical to Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) modern psychoanalysis, through to the antipsychiatry of David Cooper (1931–1986). Here the application of power was understood in mainly legalistic and representative terms. Power seemed to be the ability to command others and force them to obey. The people in power were those who could formulate or if necessary enforce what to do and thereby distinguish what was permitted and forbidden. This conception of wielding power was generally negative and seemed to comprise the ability to limit the efforts of others. In this sense, power was the ability to suppress something or in so many words, displace it. However, with the kind of discipline found in societal regimentation a ‘microphysics of power’ became apparent. Unlike previous conceptions, it permeated the world of politics down to the smallest detail. Here, it was not sufficient to reject and limit through the exertion of power; disciplinary technologies rather affected their subjects, who were encouraged to act in such a manner that they changed violently in certain regards and according to strictly defined guidelines. It therefore became possible to combine the great increases in force and ability with political submission, which became an integral part of the dominated and their being. This novel conception of power has such a dynamic and productive character that it became difficult to distinguish between power and its subject, between the dominated and the dominating.16 current times. At the same time he underlines how one cannot locate the origins of the prison in criminal law, but how we must look for its creation in a general and practical disciplinary system that “penetrates all layers of society, taking forms that go from the great prisons ... to the charitable societies and that find their points of application not only among the delinquents, but among abandoned children or phans, apprentices, high school students, workers and so on” (RC: 43/“The Punitive Society,” p. 32). There is also a lecture series held by Foucault in Rio de Janeiro in 1973 with the title “La vérité et les formes juridiques” (“Truth and Judicial Forms”) in which he examines a shift in forms of truth as these relate to judicial expressions, among which is found an analysis of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (ca. 495–406 BC). At this stage of Foucault’s authorship, criminal law and other generally related themes seem to be at the foreground in his research – from truth and justice in antiquity to the contemporary prison riots in France. 16 It is not only in Surveiller et punir that Foucault examines disciplinary institutions and practices, all the while seeking to determine the productive character of such power. The lectures given at Collège de France in 1975, Les anormaux (Abnormal), are also concerned with discipline. He stresses how it creates new and alternate forms of power

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 49

The article “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l‘histoire” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”), which was published the year after the inauguration lecture at Collège de France, suggests that Foucault had already begun to work more intensively with the exertion of power and political control. This is why in the second Collège de France lecture from 1976 he can claim retrospectively that “[what] I have been trying to look at since 1970–1971 is the ‘how’ of power.” More specifically (in the first lecture from that year) he stresses that “everything I have said to you in the previous years is inscribed within the strugglerepression schema.”17

exertion, which may not be reduced to traditional configurations. Simultaneously with these efforts, he begins characterizing a conception of power, which neither perceives it as the ability to limit others nor as a kind of property, which can be owned or passed on to others. This is taken up in the lectures from 1976, which were published in 1997 under the title of “Il faut défendre la société” (Society Must Be Defended). This is rather an analysis of power that in extension of “discipline” considers the exertion of power as a mutual struggle for controlling and changing peoples’ self-realization or as a “belligerent conflict” between mutually “opposed forces” {SD}: 17. From this outset, the classical conception of power must seem like a path, along which one sought to “calm” such a development, stabilize, freeze and legitimate it, such that it would take on certain given forms. In this series of lectures, Foucault is therefore concerned with the prehistory of the alternative conception of power as a continuous struggle. An early example of this radical analysis of power is given with the bourgeois, parliamentary opposition to the king in the 1700s, during the time of the English revolution. A parallel criticism was given almost a hundred years later in France against the absolutist monarchy, which had established itself at the end of Louis XIVs reign. The rise of such a conception of power and politics constituted the background for von Clausewitz’s (1780–1831) reverse contention a century later that “War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means.” ([DS]: 16/{SD}: 17; our translation). Later, in the labor movement, Foucault also sees a conception of power as a struggle. The analysis results in the conception of power as a “warlike struggle” between mutually “opposed forced, which according to Foucault is also found with Nietzsche. 17 [DS]: 21, 17/{SD}: 24, 17. The concern with power at this time is equally clear in a number of articles and interviews. The most prominent of which are “Pouvoir et corps” (“Power and Body”) from 1975 (DE II: 154–160), “L‘extension sociale de la norme” (“The Social Extension of the Norm”) and “Intervista a Michel Foucault” (“Truth and Power”) from 1976 (DE III: 74–79 and DE III: 140–160 respectively). In the final conversation, Foucault can once more reject the method of analysis in Histoire de la folie. However, this not only happens with an outset in relationship to the object and the relationship between object and language but also because of an overall conception of power: “When I wrote Madness and Civilization, I made at least an implicit use of this notion of repression. I think indeed I was positing the existence of a sort of living, voluble and anxious madness that the mechanisms of power and psychiatry were supposed to have come to repress and reduce to silence. But it seems to me now that the notion of repression is quite inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law that says no,” (“Truth and Power,” pp. 118–119).

50 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

The most programmatic expression of Foucault’s new conception of power takes place in La volonté de savoir. This relatively easy book has become one of his best-selling works – more than 100,000 copies of the French edition alone have been printed. Attention has therefore been directed at the conclusion of La volonté de savoir, where Foucault emphasizes how the father’s, prince’s or king’s power was negatively defined until the end of the 18th century. It was considered a right or privilege for him to kill his subjects if they threatened his own survival or allow such subjects to live if there was no conceived threat. This was therefore also a form of indirect power over life, which could only be exercised under special circumstances by authorizing an execution when and if this was necessary. This form of power was symbolized by the sword. One could exert power over life by obtaining and suppressing it or threatening to do so. However, power already began to take on another form during this period whose origin may be traced further back but whose influence became decisive in the following century. It is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit or destroying them.” Foucault thus traces a much more direct display of power over life that acts directly and relentlessly to secure, uphold, stimulate and guide its expression. However, this also includes the need to remove or eliminate other parts of life that hinder its stewardship. The “ancient right to take life or let live” is thereby replaced with an ability or “power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”18 We hereby reach an “Era of biopower” within which the wielding of power is determined as a more direct control over and appropriation of life. In this age of biopower, politics becomes increasingly defined as administration and government over life. It is thus given the character of “biopolitics.” Insofar as life is no longer understood as an unthematized and immediate foundation but is gradually articulated, reflected upon and developed within the exercise of power and politics, it begins to be considered as a phenomenon with a specific trajectory and history. Foucault therefore also conjectures the rise of “biohistory.” Modern power use may, according to Foucault, only be partially analyzed from the judicial-discursive conception of power as the right to legislate, reject and limit people’s activities. This understanding of power as prohibition, which is still very much employed, is a remnant of the format within which earlier uses of power came into being and represented themselves. The most important institutions to develop in Western European societies since the Middle Ages (i.e., monarchy and the constitutional state) were formed mainly by the ability to reject and limit lower sources of power, thereby instigating 18

VS: 179, 181/WK: 136, 138.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 51

peace and security through law, which everybody was to uphold. The judicialdiscursive use of power is therefore able to account for the functions of previous institutions but not modern variants. According to La volonté de savoir, the modern variants of power should not be considered as something that one may appropriate and own but must be analyzed as a kind of power that is exerted. It is not a special structure imposed from above but rather an omnipresent relationship that affects all other relations, even at the lowest levels. Power and opposition to the exertion of power occur continuously and are immanent elements in all social relations and at all levels. For this very reason, it is not possible to understand resistance toward the use of power as confrontation and transcendence – as something beyond power – as one could be inclined to think within the earlier model. Instead, it is necessary to perceive such opposition as an activity and as a mutually antagonistic relationship in which the two parties affect and create each other. We may therefore speak of a kind of “counter power” that rejects existing use while seeking to free itself and create a liberated space. During this process, it also becomes an alternative use of power over and against other forms. Rather than considering power in legalistic terms, one must therefore understand it as a “strategic model.” Power is “the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”19 The subtitle Histoire de la sexualité I suggests that La volonté de savoir is the first part of a project to write the history of sexuality, a project Foucault had already conceived at the beginning of his authorship and announced in the original preface to Histoire de la folie and Préface à la transgression. In correspondence with his analyses of power, Foucault initially rejects what he considers to be the prevalent discourse on sexuality. This so-called repressive hypothesis is expressed as an attempt to attain sexual liberation and is aimed at Victorian Puritanism. From this perspective, sexuality has been the victim of centuries of repression and requires an urgent effort to transgress and abolish such restrictions. However, Foucault considers such aims short-sighted and superficial. Against this, he identifies a tendency over the last 300 years whereby people have been encouraged to focus upon and reveal everything about their sexual desires. In this manner, a multitude of sexual forms that deviate from the norm have been created, articulated, intensified and classified. Indeed, according to Foucault, this has happened to such a degree that our society can now be characterized as a “society of perversion” where everybody seems to belong to some deviant minority. He does not reject the claim that sexuality has been repressed or that such repression has had a defining influence on life. Rather, the point is

19

VS: 135, 123/WK: 102, 93.

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that sexuality has been at the center even within this repression and has been stimulated, articulated and propagated. The revolutionary movement to liberate sexuality is conceived by Foucault as a logical extension of the long-term and increasing encouragement toward sexuality and its diversification. Likewise, he perceives Victorian Puritanism and the manner in which repressed sexuality was enacted as something that plays a central – if not the central – role in life. As such, modern Western societies have, according to Foucault, not held back from recognizing sexuality and have rather established an extensive apparatus for presenting and maintaining a commitment to confessing the truth about sexuality. Sexuality has become a core issue, about which one must tell the truth and establish knowledge since it informs us about ourselves. In modernity, sexuality stands out as a basic feature of humanity or human subjectivity. According to Foucault, it has been given the character of an antecedent metaphysic that is vital to explore, pronounce the truth about and thereby confess to. Subjectivity and ethics. On the back cover of the first edition, La volonté de savoir is presented as a short overture that takes up themes to be developed in five additional volumes. The aim was to follow the history of sexuality in modern times. The titles of these volumes were planned in the following manner: II. The Flesh and the Body, III. The Children’s Crusade, IV. The Woman, the Mother, the Hysteric, V. The Perverse, VI. Populations and Races. According to Foucault, the work on these had almost been done and he therefore considered it likely that a volume would be completed every third month. This was not how things were to work out. On December 17, Foucault was a guest in the well-known French literary program Apostrophes. He was supposed to speak about his latest work, but to Pivot’s (the interviewer’s) surprise, Foucault refuses this. Instead, he took the opportunity to direct attention toward a Soviet show trial, where someone was sentenced to eight years hard labor. Foucault commented that “as long as you love your book, you work on it. When you stop loving your book, you stop writing.”20 Foucault therefore seemed to be in the process of distancing himself from La volonté de savoir in the very first year of its publication. It was not until 1984 – eight years after volume I – that volumes II and III of Histoire de la sexualité were published. The opening sentence: “This series of studies is being published later than I had anticipated and in a form that is altogether different” was suggestive of the issues faced.21 It was clear that the timeframe had changed drastically. Foucault had, according to his original plan, only intended to go back to the 17th century so as to set out in the 20 21

Quoted in: D. Eribon, Michel Foucault 1926–1984 (1989), p. 294; our translation. UP: 9/UPl: 3.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 53

Christian relationship to flesh and the body, thus tracing the development of modern sexuality. However, in L’usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure) and Le souci de soi (The Care of the Self ) he takes a journey back to ancient Greece and Rome. The concern of L’usage des plaisirs was the Greek approach to sexual activities in the Classical Period around the 4th century BC. Foucault examines how a number of philosophical and medical treatises problematize and reflect on a certain “use of the pleasures.” These manuscripts also contribute in formulating themes of abstinence normally ascribed to a later and far stricter Christian sexual morality, as the Greeks were able to consider sexual activities problematic with regard to what Foucault terms “four great axes of experience,” that is, the relation to the body, marriage, the pederast’s relationship to boys and finally the relation to truth and wisdom.22 In Le souci de soi, Foucault studies the same experiential areas and themes. However, having moved forward in time, he now employs a number of Greek and Latin manuscripts from the first two centuries after the birth of Christ. Far more than in the Golden Age of Greece, this later stoic period had a greater consideration for sexuality as it related to an occupation with and concern for the Self. The self-control that the Greeks sought to establish in regard to sexual urges seems at the same time harder to implement. Les aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh) was to be published as volume IV, according to the revised plan for Histoire de la sexualité (as was announced on the back cover of volumes II and III in the first edition). Foucault had intended to examine the same themes of abstinence among the Church Fathers and in early Christian doctrine from the 4th and 5th centuries AD. In this format for debate, which was centered on flesh, a hermeneutics of the self and a cleansing deciphering of lust began to play an ever more important role. In spite of the main body of work being completed before volumes II and III, this manuscript was never published, as Foucault died during the editing process that had been necessitated by the other volumes. Just as the timeframe is different, one may also observe a change in Foucault’s style during the last volume of Histoire de la sexualité. On the face of things, there is a great difference in the vein of the early works, which had an almost hermetic and monolithic character. In an interview entitled “Le retour de la morale” (“The Return of Morality”) published immediately after Foucault’s death in 1984, he retrospectively identifies a change in his mode of writing during 1975–1976, that is, immediately following the completion of La volonté de savoir. This is termed a “refusal of style evident in The Order of Things, History of Madness or Raymond Roussel.” According to himself, this change occurs because he wants to write “a history of the subject,” which could 22

UP: 39/UPl: 32.

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not be described as “an event that would be produced one day and of which it would be necessary to recount the genesis and the outcome” but must rather be understood as a slow and extended displacement.23 In comparison with L’usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi, the earlier books are almost characterized by the rejecting spirit of a genius that makes the works difficult to access. The later books, however, seem lucid and exact, being presented in an approachable style that does not pose any immediate difficulty. In regard to the rhetorical and polemical presentation of La volonté de savoir, in which almost every sentence is in the subjunctive mood and up for debate, the final books come across as far more elegant and sublime. Having being liberated from the previous bombastic combativeness, these seem almost to entice and seduce the reader. They may still be quite difficult however, but on a different level than before. Following and describing a development, the themes of these books seem to blend into each other in a dreamlike and imperceptible way that makes it a serious challenge for the reader to retain them and create an overview. The overall subject for the publications had also shifted in comparison with previous works. It was originally Foucault’s aim to understand how the modern experience of sexuality had come about. In the year of his death, this had brought him to a much wider study of subjectivity focused on his own desires. It also considered how and in what context this subjectivity had come about. Histoire de la sexualité therefore comes across as a “genealogy” of what one could call “desiring man,” from antiquity to the first centuries of Christianity. 24 In order to understand how man had become a being of desire that seeks an antecedent truth about his own sexuality, Foucault found it necessary to go further back in history than originally intended. In his earlier works, he also studies a tradition of questioning the individual’s government of the self and its ethic in relation to others. He demonstrates how the attempts at relating to the self and developing “arts of existence” in Greek antiquity had been oriented toward the effort of managing natural and sexual urges so that one did not become their victim and rather became an independent individual who was able to guide himself and others. Foucault, for instance, shows how the Stoics began demonstrating the possibility of individual freedom even when being among others. This was a development that occurred at the end of the Classical Period and persisted throughout Roman antiquity. The Stoics argued that such individual freedom and social ties were only possible to the extent that people were united in a common knowledge of the self and were thus conscious of the nature of their own desire. Finally, Foucault implies (in the unpublished 23 24

“Le retour de la morale” [1984], DE IV: 697/“The Return of Morality,” p. 465. UP: 11/UPl: 5.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 55

fragments from the fourth volume of Histoire de la sexualité ) that early Christian morality was a radicalization of the effort to formulate a truth about oneself, such that it took on the form of a duty toward one’s identity – a requirement to continuously study and interpret oneself and one’s own desires under the constant supervision of a spiritual counselor. This commitment was retained in the church and its procedures for confession and penance, which meant that self-management had been elided until it no longer concerned mastering oneself and other free individuals. Instead, it became a denunciation of the self, within which everybody continuously look to those who were given the mandate to manage this self-management. That phenomena such as subjectivity and ethics come across as especially important in these studies is underlined by Foucault in “Le retour de la morale,” which concerns the two last volumes of Histoire de la sexualité and their place in the authorship. Here he stresses that these works are concerned with “reintroducing the problem of the subject that I had more or less left aside in my first studies and of trying to follow the progress and the difficulties through its whole history.”25 In the article “Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject” from 1982, Foucault retrospectively points out that the aim of his thought over the previous twenty years had not been to “analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis.” Rather the aim had been to present a “history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” “Thus it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research.”26 In extension of this in “The Subject and Power,” Foucault continued to concern himself with the analysis of power. Here he underscores that power relations are characterized by not acting “directly and immediately on others” and by limiting or blocking their possibility of self-expression, such as when exerting violence or treating natural objects as a means in reducing them to a passive state. Instead, in this we act “upon their action”; power is exerted by “an action upon an action.”27 When we exert power over others, we affect the space in which they act and attempt to guide them in their activities. We not only take into account the actions they are currently performing but also the future actions they might take. While subjectivity and ethics become more important in Foucault’s research, the analysis of power is increasingly displaced. He can therefore claim that power actually has less the character of “a confrontation between two adversaries” than the character of “a question of ‘government’.” To govern means to 25 26

“Le retour de la morale” [1984], DE IV: 705/“The Return of Morality,” p. 472. “Le sujet et le pouvoir” [1982], DE IV: 222–223 /“The Subject and Power,” pp. 326–

327. 27

Ibid., p. 340.

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“structure the possible field of action of others.” For Foucault, the use of power therefore comes to mean “a ‘conduct of conducts’ and a management of the possibilities this presents.”28 In the 1980–1984 lectures from Collège de France, Foucault studies this “power of governing” and the special relationship to the self in Hellenistic philosophy and the early Christian congregation. He examines how the Christian relationship to the self gradually replaced antique conceptions and eventually marginalized Greco-Roman approaches to the self. In a lecture from 1982, he underlines that “it may be an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task [to constitute an ethics of the self].”29 It therefore seems as if Foucault was interested in revitalizing a certain classical relationship to the self and an ethic that has been lost in the modern world. At this stage of the authorship, Foucault seems to recognize that considerations of the free human subject had been ignored in favor of analyzing the structural connections presented in his own earlier writings, from Histoire de la folie to L’ordre du discours. On the one hand, subjective freedom could seem to have been undermined with the critique of subjectivity in Les mots et les choses and likewise in regard to the emphasis on discourse that occurs in L’archéologie du savoir. On the other hand, subjectivity seems to have been systematically presupposed for an account of the identified changes to be possible. Furthermore, in later works such as Surveiller et punir and La volonté de savoir where Foucault analyzes the use of power upon others in society in a more immediate sense, he seems to conceive human subjectivity as being that upon which power is exerted – without any closer inspection of subjectivity as such or accounting for it. It is not until the final phase that this feature truly becomes the main object of Foucault’s research, in that he studies how subjectivity develops ethical guidelines for its own existence while seeking to create a space for itself by relating to its surroundings and self-reflection.

2 From ruptures and periodizations to gradual transitions and development A heuristic periodisation. Our first overview of Foucault’s work schematically assumes a late stage in Foucault’s authorship lasting from 1976 to 1984 oriented toward ethics and subjectivity, which replaces a prior stage from 1971 to 1976 centered on social analysis and power theory. Earlier yet, we assume that he had been engaged in a discourse theoretical and semistructuralist phase, analyzing discursive or linguistic structures that were of 28 29

Ibid., p. 341. [HS]: 241/{HSb}: 252.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 57

importance for how we understand and order the surrounding world. This phase lasted from 1963 to 1971. From 1961 to 1963, a romantic phase characterized by a search for an authentic origin was apparently the earliest part of the authorship proper. Prior to this we find a stage within which Foucault was still subject to influences from phenomenology and existential ontology, which he later denounced. This previously mentioned proto-stage lasted from 1954 to 1961. At the beginning of the romantic, authenticity-seeking stage, he found that his earlier attempt to determine the foundation for objectivity in psychiatry and psychology through existential ontology and phenomenology was oriented toward a natural-scientific paradigm of objectivity. This realization apparently led him to study the assumptions behind the scientific understanding of insanity, which in return resulted in a more basic determination of madness. In the works on discourse, he was to find it a futile assignment to locate an original pre-discursive experience being suppressed by scientific cognition. In place of this, he therefore attempted to formulate the discursive rules that structure how the world manifests itself to us. In the socio-analytical period, he apparently became aware that this approach was not sufficient, insofar as it implicitly prioritized language and theory over practices and action. Language and theory hereby came to take on an autonomous or “self-legislative” existence that must be taken axiomatically, insofar as they misleadingly seemed to determine and develop an order that was forced upon their surroundings. Instead, if one wanted to understand discourse and its resultant order, Foucault now claimed that it was necessary to describe it in a wider context within which it is expressed: one must understand it as a part of more comprehensive social arrangements and general social exertions of power of which they were seen as an expression. At the later subjectivity-oriented stage, Foucault seemingly determined that the previous structural and discursive analyses of power exertion had precluded the understanding of human subjectivity in its relational structure. Subjectivity had, until then, apparently only two ‘marginal’ functions: as an implicitly present object, the activities of which were structured and controlled by technologies of power and as an entity that must be presupposed in order to explain why the structures were sometimes retained with so little change, while at other times subject to profound changes. Thus, a more detailed determination of this existence was apparently required. It was not until subjectivity and its various modes had been examined that it became possible to explain what had previously been an assumption and indicate an independent dimension that could not be reduced to structure, discourse or overall social arrangements or power. Apparently, Foucault seeks to complete this positive project in the final stage of his authorship as he explains how human subjectivity creates an

58 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

irreducible space in relating to itself and its surroundings, thus attempting to develop a new ethics in this effort.30 If one sums up this heuristic schematization of Foucault’s work, it looks as follows: Box 1.1 A common periodization of Foucault’s authorship Periods

Archeological

Genealogical

3

Year

Phases

Principal publications

1954–1961

Epistemological (Proto-)phase

Maladie mentale et personalité Maladie mentale et psychologie

1961–1963

“Romantic” phase

Histoire de la folie Naissance de la clinique

1963–1971

Language and structure

Naissance de la clinique Raymond Roussel Les mots et les choses

1971–1978

Power and society

L’archéologie du savoir Surveiller et punir La volonté de savoir

1978–1984

Ethics and subjectivity

L’usage des plaisirs Le souci de soi

Transitions and developments

This heuristic schematization is meant to provide an initial orientation in Foucault’s body of work. It is important to stress, however, that the presentation is only of limited value. The intention has been to account for an uncontroversial yet superficial perspective on the authorship that can be found in much of the secondary literature, notably in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow’s seminal book, Michel Foucault – Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. The above account becomes misleading, however, when the outlined phases, determinations and contradictions are hypostasized, thereby creating a distorted picture of Foucault as an adherent only of discontinuity. In the following, we will take into account the context within which Foucault supposedly rejects or dramatically alters his own previous positions. On such closer inspection, four specific ruptures and displacements appear as being far less dramatic with gradual transitions within the horizon of a general development of Foucault’s thought. Arguing this point, the final part of the chapter thus paves the way for 30

This strong ethical reading is for example found in F. Gros: “Course Context” (2001), cf. [HS]: 489–526/{HSb}: 507–546. A similar tendency, albeit less manifest, is found in e.g. T. O’Leary: Foucault and the Art of Ethics (2002).

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presenting an alternative and less familiar view of the consistency of Foucault’s authorship, which we will present in Chapter 2. Archaeology and genealogy as supplementary approaches. Of the mentioned stages in Foucault’s authorship, the secondary literature often conceives the transition in 1971 as the most fundamental.31 This divides the general production into two overall developments. At this point in time, he rejects the (perhaps exaggerated) emphasis on discourse, knowledge and theory and instead focuses on social practices, power exertion and forms of subjectivity. Furthermore, he apparently changes his mode of analysis fundamentally. In characterizing this change, Dreyfus and Rabinow refer to Foucault in L’ordre du discours as distinguishing between “critical” and “genealogical” analyses.32 The former refers to a mode of analysis conducted up until then, while the latter regards an approach he planned to employ in the future. According to Foucault, one seeks to clarify a number of limited systems that are related to speech when conducting critical analyses. Since these limit the possibility of what one may express, they cause us to say one thing and not another. This could be due to externally imposed limits on discourse that exclude certain elements. An example of this is the restrictions on speaking about sexuality during the Victorian Age or the sharp boundary between reason and madness that resulted in the rejection and limitations on its ability to express itself. This could also relate to internal limitations that speakers take upon themselves in order to belong to a certain community. In order for one’s speech to be relevant (in a positive or critical sense) for a certain scientific discipline, one must also know the given truisms for the field – these regard the character of the subject area and established methods that may be employed in studying it. Such internal limitations and their development have been studied by Foucault within medicine in Naissance de la clinique and for natural history, botany and philology in Les mots et les choses. Foucault also terms such critical approaches ‘archaeology’. In the archaeological analysis, he starts out from what has been expressed in order to disclose the ‘archive’, which he understands as the overall system in which expressions are classified, resulting in this and not something else being stated.33 Since Foucault, in his critical examinations, studies the creation of the mentioned 31 As mentioned earlier, this conception is evident, inter alia, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983), pp. 99–104 and W. Schmidt: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst (2000), pp. 63, 157. 32 OD: 62–72/”The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 231–234. 33 AS: 169–73/AK: 128–131. The term is already found in MC: 46/OT: 31, where it underscores that “one investigates sixteenth-century knowledge at its archaeological level,” just as it is found in the subtitle: “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.” The term is found with the same meaning already in HF: 94/HM: 80.

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limitations, as well as their purpose, change and attempts at circumventing them, he also questions the inevitability of such regimes. ‘Genealogy’ however, already occurs as a term for an alternative analytical approach in the core article “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.”34 In this article, Foucault stresses the importance of the term in Nietzsche’s attempt to characterize his own work, especially in the book Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality). Genealogy is the science that seeks the ancestry of a given phenomenon; however, it does not seek a transcendental origin from which one can derive and explain it. Rather, the approach seeks to illuminate the phenomenon through a thorough examination of its history without assuming any authentic origin. Thus, it presents an extended account of its historical genesis, within which many forbearers have collided and interacted so as to finally result in the relevant phenomenon. In a genealogical analysis, one begins with the appearance of something commonly taken for granted while indicating, at the same time, how something new and unpredicted constantly comes about in its historical account. In this manner, it is possible to underscore its contingency – the fact that it could have developed into something completely different from what it currently is. The starting point is thus a series of events that express neither a necessity nor a teleological sentiment but which are constituted by an ongoing productivity. These are novel departures that go beyond the hitherto given limitations. According to Foucault, Nietzsche the genealogist therefore seeks to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality” and “cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.” He does this by showing that “there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.”35 In L’ordre du discours, which is influenced by Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘genealogy’, Foucault defines the genealogical method as a form of analysis that unlike the critical (archaeological) approach does not content itself by demonstrating how the possibility of stating something has been limited. Rather, it examines how new series of discourses have come about or suddenly emerged on the basis of and in spite of the given limitations.36 The previously mentioned restriction on speaking about sexuality has not therefore resulted in a unified mode of speech about it but rather a number of different

34

In unison with the lecture: “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” from 1964, this 1971 article expresses the culmination of an interest in Nietzsche’s work in the second half of the 1960s. 35 “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l‘histoire” [1971], DE II: 136–140/“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 369–373. 36 OD: 62, 67, 72/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 231, 233, 234.

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and opposing discourses. In the wake of this one finds a literary, medical and psychiatric approach to sexuality. Genealogy thus emphasizes how the given restrictions not only limited but also made possible the rise of a completely new diversity. This was not an endless and arbitrary diversity but one with distinctly new and realizable outcomes. The distinction between genealogical and critical-archaeological modes of analysis cannot, however, be retained as an absolute distinction. In L’ordre du discours, the inaugural lecture given at Collège de France in December 1970 and used to justify the existence of such a shift, Foucault emphasizes that the critical and genealogical approaches must “alternate and complement each other, each supporting the other by turns.”37 One must employ both analytical approaches in order to generate a complete picture since one “description” highlights features that are toned down in the other. Genealogical analysis depicts how new fields of study, objects and possibilities came to appear. However, one should still be aware that these new possibilities and opportunities are not coincidental but the result of a limitation. The critical-archaeological analysis considers the object of study as the result of an imposed limitation with the realization that what is being studied can never be reduced to a repetition of what has happened before. Together, the two approaches exhibit how new things that come about are based on their own deficiencies and contain their own absence. The very limitations of new things are what make them possible. The two modes of analysis are so intertwined in Foucault’s authorship that it becomes difficult to locate concrete analyses that may be univocally understood as one or the other. In an interview from 1967, soon after the publication of Les mots et les choses and which according to the subtitle represented an archeology of the human sciences, Foucault states that: “no doubt my archaeology owes more to the Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism as such.”38 In the same vein, Foucault can still emphasize genealogy and archaeology as complementary modes of analysis in the introduction to L’usage des plaisirs. However, here the determination of the two concepts experiences a subtle shift once again. In the archaeological dimension, he concerns himself with modes of problematization that take into account the ways in which the world or being discloses itself as something that must be thought. In the genealogical dimension, he considers the praxis within which these modes of problematization are actualized.39 Toward the end of his trajectory, Foucault thus studies how the self increasingly emerges as a problem in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD while examining the ascetic exercises whereby individuals, in 37

OD: 71/“The Discourse on Language,” in AK: 234. “Sur les façons d‘écrire l‘histoire” [1967], DE I: 599/“The Discourse of History,” p. 31. 39 UP: 17–18/UPl: 11–12. 38

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response to the emerging set of new problems, attempt to limit and shape the self in an orderly manner. Analytics of power rather than theory of power. The distinction between an archaeological and genealogical mode of analysis is often coupled in the secondary literature to a corresponding claim about ruptures in Foucault’s conception of power. This assertion even seems to be supported by Foucault’s retrospective characterizations of his own work. For instance, in 1977 Foucault emphasizes how L’ordre du discours was written in a “transitory phase.” Prior to this, the exertion of power does not figure as an explicit theme. At most he operates with a traditional and negative conception of power as a “legal mechanism,” as an activity that “says no” and that leads to “exclusion, rejection, barriers, denial, dissimulation, etc.”40 In his lectures from 1976 he therefore notes that he had primarily operated with an implied conception of power as “repression” of some other activity.41 In his own retrospective opinion, he had therefore operated with an insufficient determination of power use. On the one hand, he had based his work on a direct extension of “a certain [juridico-discursive] representation of power” that was “deeply rooted in the history of the West.”42 On the other hand, for instance in regard to sexuality, he continued speaking of a repressive power that had been common in the humanities at this time. Already in “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l‘histoire” and in extension of Nietzsche’s argument, Foucault emphasizes that rules are not entities that limit activity. On the contrary, they recurrently allow for new reenactments of “the game of domination [le jeu de la domination].”43 In the above-mentioned conversation, he points out how around the time of the publication of L’ordre du discours he became aware of power as “negative mechanisms of rarefication” and thereby as a limitation, which was insufficient. He claims that such a conception of power seems like a starting point for new activities, thus initiating a new reality that had not existed before. However, it is even more insufficient to analyze power as repression in the wider sense of the word. This is especially the case for modern forms where power seems rather to actively produce and stimulate certain activities. In developing the studies of how prison and discipline came about, it becomes ever-clearer to Foucault that the use of power

40 “Les rapports passent à l‘interieur des corps” [1977], DE III: 228–229/“Power Affects the Body,” p. 207. 41 [DS]: 23–30/{SD}: 24–34. 42 VS: 109/WK: 82–83. 43 “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l‘histoire” [1971], DE II: 145/“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 378; translation modified.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 63

should be analyzed as “technology” and as “tactics and strategy” in order to understand its modalities.44 According to his own retrospective assessment, Foucault mainly considers the issue of power implicitly in the first part of the authorship, in the sense that he treats it as a subsection of other more defining themes. Likewise, he mainly operates with a negative conception of power as limitation and repression. In the later stages of the authorship, however, he treats power as an explicit theme. He simultaneously emphasizes the manner in which power is exerted by stimulating certain kinds of behavior. Foucault apparently became aware that the theory of power used up until then had been mistaken, meaning that it was necessary to abandon it and replace it with another more satisfactory account. Furthermore, he needed to distance himself radically from his earlier concrete analyses, as they were based on an insufficient concept of power and thus appear superficial and misleading. While it is true that in his early work Histoire de la folie Foucault uncovers a form of power that is exerted by repression and suppression of madness – a form of power which he later referred to as “violence,” and later again as “states of domination”45 – he does also demonstrate how this kind of power had been insufficient from the very beginning since it facilitates a continuous, albeit amorphous, exchange between irrationality and rationality. Toward the end of the book, Foucault furthermore points out how it became ever more difficult to understand Western culture’s relationship to madness as repression. A new approach to madness as mental illness was established during the transition from the classical mad house to the insane asylum around 1800, in which madness was no longer simply repressed. Instead, the insane were treated as a part of and reintegrated into human communality and although the mad were constantly confronted with the authority of the medical superintendent as well as his the staff in the asylum, they were equally encouraged to restrain themselves – primarily by using their freedom correctly in accordance with personal “responsibility” and “self-consciousness,” and not simply by being forced to follow a given rule.46 As the former absolute boundary between reason and madness eroded in this context, the challenge posed by the insane was reduced. Insofar as the insane were considered alienated from the self, the

44

“Les rapports passent à l‘interieur des corps,” DE III: 229/“Power Affects the Body,”

208. 45 Cf. {PP}: 15–16/{PsP}: 14; and “L‘éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” [1984], DE IV: 728/“The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” p. 299. 46 HF: 504–505/HM: 484–485.

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illness belonged to and pointed toward human reason within which it was sublated.47 Closer inspection of Foucault’s account in Histoire de la folie therefore shows how he emphasizes that a theory of power exercise as pure repression is not tenable. He suggests that such a theory of power is first and foremost expedient in analyzing a limited area within a particular historical period. The timeframe for this extends from early modernity until the end of the 18th century. Both concepts of power are thus already present in Foucault’s first principal publication and overlap with a shift in emphasis during the course of the book.48 Early on, Foucault often analyzes the exertion of power in terms of suppression, but without this approach totally excluding other attitudes. From the beginning of the 1970s, he tends toward a more belligerent conception of power involving tactics and strategy. As already mentioned, this was inspired by Nietzsche and particularly influenced by studying the history of the asylum and the prison in relation to the evolution in society of “disciplinary power.”49 The consequence of this was not that repression and suppression ceased to figure as important in Foucault’s work or thought but that they were viewed as part of a more comprehensive, strategic form of power. Later yet – in extension of his analysis of governmentality (or the rationality of governance) – Foucault mainly addresses power as the ability to lead others and oneself, without this resulting in the total disappearance of other modalities. This resulted in Foucault beginning to study the modalities of power exercise as they were mutually forming “series of complex edifices” or “systems of correlation” in connection with particular social experiences (such as the history of biopolitics or the rise of neoliberalism in the second half of the 20th century).50 In lieu of a sharp division between two monolithic theories of power that supplant each other, it is thus possible to identify, throughout Foucault’s work, a continuous shift between different conceptions of power modalities, none of which are segregated from each other or attain a sovereign status. Instead, one of them can gravitate to the center of attention in relation to the particular problematic being analyzed, but most often they all exist simultaneously and overlap across the given subject matter. Such conceptions are influenced by various inspirational theoretical sources, as well as from the 47

On this point Foucault writes: “Never again was it [the exclusion of the mad] to have the sense of an absolute limit that it had perhaps inherited from age-old terrors and that it had conformed in the obscure fears of men, by taking the place of leprosy in an almost geographical manner. Now it was a measure rather than a limit” (HF: 453/HM: 432–433; cf. also HF 483–577/HM: 462–538). 48 Cf. “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” [1964], DE I: 412–420/“Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” HM: 541–549. 49 Cf. {PP}: 48–59/{PsP}: 46–57; and SP: 137–229, 233–260/DP: 135–228, 231–256. 50 Cf. {STP}: 10/{STPo}: 8.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 65

historical material Foucault sought to analyze at the time. For this reason, power is not conceptualized through general theories that capture their universal character or nature. Instead, he constantly seeks to develop an analytics of power, which, according to La volonté de savoir, also contain “a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power and ... a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis.”51 The analytics of power is a temporary determination of how power functions in order to make it possible to study the exercise of power in a given context. This requires a continuous revision of the analytics of power that takes into account the context of that which is studied.52 At no point does Foucault perceive power as an overarching entity that exists and determines everything. This is why in La volonté de savoir he emphasizes that “one needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution and not a structure, neither is it a certain strength that we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a certain society.”53 He views power as a logic, the effect of which one can map out for a given field using a certain analysis. However, this does not imply that power is absolute or omnipotent, nor does it refute all other approaches to the field. In sum, Foucault does not analyze power as a given entity, condition or state. As a consequence, power in general, but also individual exercises of power, cannot be revealed and presented within a final, well-rounded and unified theory of power. Rather, power is perceived in effect and as having a certain effect – just as its mode of operation can be articulated in the form of a merely provisional analytics of power. Finally, power is not seen as all-determining, as Foucault emphasized in a late interview. He here pointed out that power and knowledge are irreducible dimensions: “when I read – and I know it was being attributed to me – the thesis ‘Knowledge is power’ or ‘Power is knowledge,’ I begin to laugh, since studying their relation is precisely my problem. If they were identical, I would not have to study them and I would be spared a lot of

51

VS: 109/WK: 82. That the various levels do not exclude but are present alongside each other is made clear in an interview from 1984, in which Foucault distinguishes between three levels of power: “It seems to me that we must distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties; strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call power. And, between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have governmental technologies – giving this term a very wide meaning for it is also the way in which you govern your wife, your children, as well as the way you govern an institution” (“L‘éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” [1984] DE IV: 728/“The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” p. 299). 53 VS: 123/WK: 93. 52

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fatigue as a result. The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them.”54 Theory and praxis, language and the world. The alleged shift from language and theory to praxis and action that seemingly took place concurrently in the trajectory of Foucault’s work has been represented above in accordance with the conventional reception.55 However, in Histoire de la folie Foucault was already concerned with core structures that could not be reduced to anything purely linguistic or theoretical. According to him, our distance and relationship to madness may be present in an age’s knowledge and conception and thus profoundly impact the way it is discussed and perceived; and yet the most striking and consequential expression of madness may still be found in our practical dealings with the mad. It is therefore possible to discern how a more dispassionate and objective understanding of the nature of madness became paradigmatic for the science of madness from the very early 19th century onward. Such an objective approach to and commentary on the mad must be viewed with regard to a wider practice, which included an ever-increasing and commonsense distance to the irrational. For instance, this was the case when the mad, together with a miscellaneous group of other internees, were confined in large institutions from the middle of the 17th century; and as they were subsequently gathered, but now alone and separately, in the modern therapeutic asylums projected from the end of the 18th century onward.56 If one does not take up the general perception, science and speech of that age within a broader social practice, one will only possess a partial understanding and thereby risk giving a faulty impression. Thus, at the beginning of his œuvre in Histoire de la folie, Foucault analyzes patterns or relationships that transgress the sharp boundaries between theory-praxis and language-world, while specifically making the point that focusing on language or theory in isolation would be misleading when studying the history of madness.57 Not even the books from what was seemingly Foucault’s discourse analytic phase permit any absolute distinctions between discourse and praxis. In Naissance de la clinique, Les mots et les choses and L’archéologie du savoir, he concerns himself with and seeks to uncover linguistic and theoretical relations. 54

“Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” [1983], DE IV: 454–455/“Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” p. 455. 55 Cf. e.g. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983), pp. 97–102; J.-G. Merquior: Foucault et la nihilsme de la chaire (1986), p. 101; and W. Schmid: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst (1991), pp. 47–50. 56 The development in relation to madness from the “Great Confinement” toward the birth of the modern asylum and the therapeutic regime that was inaugurated here is accounted for in Chapter 3. 57 Cf. HF: 191/HM: 173.

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However, an important motivation for this is simply to be found in the nature of the chosen subject of investigation. Foucault here studies the history of knowledge and science, through which he seeks to disclose patterns that relate to exactly this level of analysis. Yet, Foucault does not claim that this is the only level at which to disclose a pattern or that it is exhaustive to study a system discursively. Discourse and theory do not attain a transcendental status that determines how an otherwise shapeless world would appear. It is therefore insufficient to reduce the medical science that Foucault examines in Naissance de la Clinique to a purely linguistic structure. The clinic, regarded as the matrix to which medicine was generally adapted during the course of the 19th century, may come across as a new mode of description, but it equally reorganizes the way we regard, experience and act, not only as doctors and patients, but also as a population and as public authorities. In the works mentioned above, Foucault attempts to characterize the order of the discourse only insofar as he studies social activities that are oriented primarily toward discursivity. Concurrently, he claims that the order of the discourse is profoundly affected by a wider context or by wider linguistic and social correlations, which it in return also affects. With Foucault, discourse is never considered a causa sui or an autonomous order that generates and forces its logic on the world unaided. In his analysis, discourse has a limited independence; linguistic and nonlinguistic activities are not perceived as being reducible to each other. This being said, language is never merely language, just as praxis is never merely praxis. It is precisely because these dimensions are mutually irreducible that one can relate to their interaction. In a conversation from 1978, Foucault is therefore able to state that his “programme” does not rest on the purely linguistic analysis of traditional approaches. “The notion of structure does not make any sense for me. Concerning the problem of discourse, what interests me is the fact that somebody has said something at a certain point in time. ... This is what I call an event. For me, it is essential [il s’agit] to consider discourse as a series of events, to establish and describe relationships that, what we could call discursive events maintain with other events, that belong to the economic system or to the political field or to institutions. If you consider it from this point of view, discourse is merely an event like any other, even though, of course, the discursive events have a specific function with regard to other events.”58 Foucault’s motivation for studying discursive and cognitive or epistemic regularities in a certain phase of the authorship is not one of principle but rather has pragmatic and heuristic value. So long as he concerns himself with the history of knowledge and science, he seeks to disclose a pattern that applies to a similar level of analysis and abstraction. However, while being occupied 58

“Dialogue sur le pouvoir” [1975/1978] DE III: 466–467; our translation.

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with the regularities that may be expressed in discourse, Foucault also makes an effort to steer clear of reducing discursive expression to other non-discursive influencing factors (e.g., conditions in society, economic developments, institutional procedures, mentalities, etc.) located prior to or beyond the bounds of discourse.59 Just as one cannot ascribe a theory of power to Foucault, but rather an analytic of differing ways of exercising power, it is also misleading to read this work as an attempt to formulate a general discourse theory.60 Foucault does not formulate a general theory on the nature of language. He merely determines discursivity and the theoretical components that seem necessary in order to conduct such a limited discourse analysis. Instead of a definitive theory of discourse, L’archéologie du savoir formulates a provisional analysis of discourse. Here Foucault gazes back upon his authorship not only in order to create an overview of his previous discourse analytic practices but also and equally in order to pave the way for alternative modes of inquiry. The apparent shifts from theory to praxis and from discourse analysis to societal analysis are therefore seen by Foucault as shifts in emphasis with social technologies coming to the fore, while linguistic features are seen as movements both within and around these. Consequently, discourse and theory and especially the question concerning the formation of knowledge expressed in language, do not disappear from view or come to be seen as mere expressions of social technologies. In the two final volumes on the history of sexuality, discursive considerations are taken up once more, while the focus is placed upon how these reflect and affect practices of the self.61 The two levels of analysis clearly meet and interact with one another here as well, while their irreducibility is retained. The rise of subjectivity. Foucault’s intensive concern for subjectivity and ethics late in the authorship has often been received and described as another radical rupture with the structural analyses unfolded from Histoire de la folie to Les mots et les choses. Likewise, it has been suggested that man’s reintroduction in his latest books was an attempt to apologize for having done away with him at the end of Les mots et les choses. For Foucault, this was never the case. In the encyclopedia article “Foucault, Michel” which he wrote with François Ewald under the pseudonym ‘Maurice

59

Cf. “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire” [1967], DE I: 590/“The Discourse of History,” p. 31. 60 It is quite telling that H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983) presents Foucault’s efforts as a methodologically flawed attempt (pp. 79–100) at defining such a theory of discursive praxis (pp. 44–78). 61 UP: 18–19/UPl: 36–37.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 69

Florence’ in 1984, Foucault states that the issue of subjectivity is at the core of the authorship every step of the way. The aim, he claims at this juncture, is to study “what the subject must be [ce que doit être le sujet], to what condition he is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge [connaissance]. In short, it is a matter of determining its mode of ‘subjectivation’.”62 However, in this lexical self-portrait, Foucault equally emphasizes how this examination of the subject had also been a central theme throughout all his previous books. In the late phase of the authorship, he palpably examines how the subject had come to study, analyze and establish knowledge about itself: a historical inquiry that he terms “the history of subjectivity.” Yet, already in Histoire de la folie, Naissance de la Clinique and Surveiller et punir, he examined the emergence of the subject as the result of a normative division and as an object of thought: in psychiatry as mad or insane; in clinical medicine as ill or pathological; in the judicial system as an offender of the law or a criminal. Even Les mots et les choses focused on how man as a subject had been made an important object of study in modern humanities and the social sciences, as well as within biology, economy and philology. Accordingly, Foucault does not consider himself as having first erroneously rejected the existence of the human subject or that it had the character of a mirage that must be dissolved because it was misleading, only to later revive the dead to correct his own mistakes. At the beginning of the authorship he had instead sought to challenge the idea of the free and sovereign subject that had existed since the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism. This idea had become poignant in existential philosophy, which set the agenda in French debate when Foucault began to publish his work. The aim was to nuance the analysis of subjectivity by demonstrating how it had always already been shaped and predetermined, as only this could enable the subject to relate and respond more adequately to the ties that limited it. In this way, Foucault’s thought strives to open a space within which it is possible to take new forms of action. According to Foucault, the rising importance of subjectivity in the latter part of the authorship should therefore not be seen as a sudden rupture in his development. Foucault’s approaches to subjectivity are of course more explicit here; but at the same time they shed a light on the earlier works, thus resulting in the earlier implicit presence of a theme of subjectivity now becoming a more transparent theme. Therefore, after closer consideration it seems impossible to retain the claimed schisms in Foucault’s authorship as all-pervasive. If the phases and ruptures of Foucault’s work are overemphasized, then the unity of his work 62

“Foucault” [1984], DE IV: 632/“Foucault,” p. 459.

70 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

can only be articulated in terms of perpetual self-distance. He comes across as a thinker who retains a fundamentally critical distance toward everything and everybody – especially himself. In his works he starts with our culture’s obvious truths and habits, but only so as to dislocate himself from these. The image of a negative and relativist thinker who is successful in disclosing all identity-forming values as contingent constructions and who is able to change theoretical identities like a chameleon can seem compelling. Here Foucault seems the ‘vagabond philosopher’ who not only alienates and undermines his culture and readers but even undermines himself. He is considered a theoretical ‘freebooter’ who loots at will without committing himself to anything or anybody, be it existing theoretical schools of thought, his own previous standpoints or social affairs. As such, writer, literary critic and philosopher Hélène Cixous could sum up her intellectual and amicable relationship to Foucault like this: “He is a nomad, even in his own work. Should we believe that he built his own house? No, not at all. ‘This is not how it should be’, he said to me regarding his last books; ‘I have been wrong. I must reconstruct everything. Go somewhere else. Do it in another way.’”63 This image of the migrant thinker seems substantiated by Foucault’s many positions around Europe: Box 1.2 Foucault’s education and employment 1946ff

Studies at Ecole normale supérieure

1949

License (bachelor) in psychology

1951

Agrégation (final university examination), master’s degree in philosophy

1951–1952

Scholarship at Fondation Thiers in Paris

1952

Diploma for psychopathology at L‘Institut de psychologie in Paris

1952–1954

Assistant Professor of Psychology at the faculty of humanities in Lille

1955–1958

Assistant Professor of French at the university in Uppsala

1958–1959

Cultural attaché at the French institute in Warszawa

1959–1960

Cultural attaché at the French institute in Hamburg

1960–1966

Assistant Professor of Psychology in Clermont-Ferrand

1966–1968

Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Tunis

1968–1970

Professor of Philosophy at the experimental university in Vincennes

1970–1984

Professor of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France

If this picture of Foucault is not counterbalanced, then the truth about his authorship becomes an ongoing critical self-distancing that is not committed to anything except this distance and its maintenance – both toward others and inwardly. It has been claimed that Foucault is not for those who require 63 H. Cixous: “Cela n‘a pas de nom, ce qui se passait,” Le Débat, No 41, Sept.–Nov. 1986, pp. 153–158; our translation.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault 71

adherence. As proof, a reference is often given to the spectacular introduction of L’archéologie du savoir, in which Foucault finishes by stating that this particular manuscript is a way by which it is possible to avoid accountability about his opinions and thereby about who he is and he mockingly denounces the notion of such a requirement: “leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”64 It is tempting to read this and similar passages as pointing to the core of the authorship, insofar as such a core exists; it interprets this center as a commitment to not be committed to anything. The truth about Foucault thus becomes the position of not having a position.

64 AS: 28/AK: 17.Michel Foucault: A Research CompanionDisplacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault

2 Contextuality and Transversal Categories: A Less Familiar Foucault

It cannot and should not be denied that Foucault was a thinker who continuously developed his guiding ideas and constantly revised his previous thoughts. Yet, this restless identity was not absolute or purely negative but rather expressed a consistent and coherent conception about how to put philosophy into practice in contemporary terms. In spite of the numerous revisions, adjustments or alterations that characterize Foucault’s authorship as it developed over a period of around 30 years, it nevertheless comprises a thorough aspiration to practice philosophy so that it contributes appreciably to a given context of contemporary importance. Discussing consistent definitions of œuvre and conceptions of what it means to think philosophically, this chapter presents an alternative and less familiar view of the unity of Foucault’s authorship. Throughout his works, Foucault remains faithful toward a kind of philosophical activity, which will be elucidated below. His thought takes the form of a dedicated, normative reflection and this form of philosophy is contextual as it focuses analytically on events and experiences in order to unfold relationships and broader horizons. In following Foucault’s definitions of “authorship” and “thought,” we reach an understanding of his work that will no longer seem discontinuous and conflicted. Rather, the various phases may be perceived as expressing an ongoing basic concern, which is re-articulation under ever-changing conditions. In the first section of the chapter, we present Foucault’s contextual practice of philosophy, while the section is devoted to important transversal categories in his thought.

1

Foucault’s contextual practice of philosophy

Articulation and displacement. If one does not rely merely on the monumental works and the isolated comments that relate to these, a different thinker appears. This Foucault constantly develops his thought without disregarding what came before while paving the way for new questions. This 72

Contextuality and Transversal Categories 73

becomes clearer still by systematically including comments made by Foucault in articles, interviews and in particular the preliminary presentations of his agenda in the lectures given at the Collège de France (1971–1984). Here he not only enters upon problems and uncertainties, issues and perspectives as well as working hypotheses and connections; during the course of the annual lectures, Foucault also regularly embarks upon the questions of how, why and – not least – in relation to what he finds it necessary to recast and recalibrate previous approaches. Accordingly, one may observe a continuous re-articulation within which Foucault repeatedly returns to previous ideas, statements and writings in a fluid, ideational development that springs both from the already existing authorship and from the new contexts and matters of concerns he is about to engage in. Upon closer inspection, Foucault constantly adds novel elements to his previous production in order to create a new greater whole, which in return requires still new additions or supplementary work. Through this development, the existing singular elements are changed within new relationships and contexts. A case in point would be the lecture of January 25, 1978 at the Collège de France, in which Foucault once more resumes and presents a historical rupture originally analyzed in Les mots et les choses in 1966, although in a way that changes its character in the new context. The previous explication of 19th-century transitions from natural history to biology, from classical economics to political economy and from a universal grammar to historical philology, intended to demonstrate how man attained a privileged status as a living, working and speaking object with regard to the knowledge the human sciences were about to attain and establish. In 1978 however, Foucault sees the human subject in light of modern governmental technologies that direct their attention directly toward the population as the object to be explored in governing a society. In doing this, he provides the modern formation of the human and the social sciences with a partial genealogy that is altogether different from the archaeology of structuralism and the linguistic turn characterizing the book from 1966.1 The earlier analysis of how the human subject became an object of knowledge was thus reintroduced as one among several in the 1978 analysis of the population as a subject of governance for a government in search of useful knowledge concerning its citizens. However, this shift does not imply that the previous analysis is simply deficient or wrong; it is merely given additional contextualization and is thereby displaced and rearticulated.

1 {STP}: 78–81/{STPo}: 76–79. How the transition from classical economy to political economy, from natural history to biology and from a universal grammar to historical philology, was part of an archaeology of structuralism and the linguistic turn, will be covered in Chapter 4. In Chapter 7, we present the rationality of governance or what Foucault referred to as “the history of governmentality,” in relation to the issue of the population.

74 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

This process of constant addition implies a continuous shift of emphasis in the authorship. Not only is the general center of gravity displaced; even the pivotal moments of individual books and parts of the œuvre are displaced in this process. As new parts are added, the already existent aspects and implications explicitly appear precisely by virtue of being recontextualized and by entering into new and hitherto unfamiliar relations. By the same token, new features pertaining to Histoire de la folie appear as Foucault sets out on a novel analytic of the exercise of power in the second half of his career. Treating the mad mainly through internment, as was the case in the Classical Age (c. 1550– 1800), now comes across as a limited form of power; that is, as an exercise of power only through repression. The simultaneous and apparently more open understanding of madness comes forth as presupposing the subdual and ordering of madness, thereby presenting itself as an outcome of this kind of power. With the development of the novel analytic of power, however, it becomes harder to reduce the later approaches to treating the mad in Histoire de la folie to one format of power, as they seem to call for a different and more differentiated conceptualization. This also tends to be the case when the late Foucault begins to develop an analytic of subjectivity more explicitly. As soon as he begins to develop an analytic of how subjectivity emerges under different historical circumstances, it is apparent that any exertion of power – including the kinds of power Foucault had described prior to this – must therefore also be seen in light of specific formations of the subject. For instance, it becomes clear that the treatment of the mad in the Classical Age involves a particular kind of subjectification, such as the confinement of madmen in large institutions alongside the poor, beggars, criminals, libertines, venereals or epileptics so that this variegated population of internees could eventually all take share in the formation of a novel, single and overarching identity of asocial deviancy.2 The shift of emphasis, which constantly takes place throughout Foucault’s entire authorship, may therefore also be characterized as a continuous articulation and explication. When he adds new features to existing work, he develops implicit potentialities that had been overlooked. As a result, he unfolds previously latent perspectives such that they become distinct from others and therefore more articulated. This is clearest when Foucault relates to earlier work in his lectures. However, following closer scrutiny, it is obvious that he constantly returns to previous writings and statements – not in order to reject them but to reconsider, revise and reveal new aspects in them. These developments are of such a character that they change ‘everything’ in the sense that all the pieces of the earlier authorship, from the smallest to the largest, are reinterpreted as they are incorporated into new connections. Still, 2

Cf. e.g. HF: 94/HM: 80.

Contextuality and Transversal Categories 75

one cannot claim that everything prior is destroyed; it remains and makes its presence felt, but in a new manner that accommodates the new context. It is therefore problematic to claim that every once in a while Foucault takes on a fundamentally new approach. Since his authorship constantly expands, he develops the previous work as he establishes new relations to it. Foucault never finds himself in a position that he later abandons for others; rather, he moves along certain lines of development. Foucault’s practice of philosophy does not take certain positions but establishes specific relations. As such, his work has the character of ongoing and yet concrete displacement, which persistently occurs in relation to something existent. This does not imply, however, that Foucault moves beyond or transgresses what has already been presented to a new elevated or exalted position above it; the later shifts are rather codetermined. Indeed, Foucault’s thought retains an ongoing relationship to earlier ‘results’ while seeking to change what has already been presented. The contextuality of philosophy. The above description concerning the nature of Foucault’s authorship is not restricted to and limited by a common sense, linear chronology. It is not only the later writings – inserted in an already existing corpus – that add to and unfold new perspectives. One might as well claim that the earlier writings unfold new perspectives in later writings that would only have attained an implicit and convoluted existence had it not been for the antecedent writings. As such, it is not easy to appreciate and apprehend the full picture of Foucault’s philosophical endeavor by reading a single book, lecture course, article, occasional publication or interview. Very often, such textual manifestations only come across as lesser crystallization points of a far greater and much more manifold engagement with questions and problems, which are only circuitously present in the whole corpus of Foucault’s writings. For an ardent reader, Foucault’s thought comes across as a complex with an internally related coherence, rather than a corpus of delimited, autonomous parts. The authorship takes on the character of an open, relational system, in which the various connections appear and become prominent depending on into which further contexts one inserts the traces left by Foucault. The patterns formed by his considerations and their center of gravity are codetermined by the wider connection within which his thought is studied and reflected. The authorship thereby stresses how human cognition and understanding depend upon and are given precise meaning by relating to the circumstance into which they enter. Foucault disapproves of a concept of understanding that presumes to distance itself univocally from the surrounding world in order to conceptualize it as an object. Rather, he emphasizes the context dependency of thought, understanding and perception; accordingly, he draws the implications for his own thought as he considers it a limited contribution to a given environment.

76 Michel Foucault: A Research Companion

Foucault, to be sure, rejects a number of labels and categories ascribed to his thought with alacrity. As such, Foucault has refused designations such as Freudian, Marxist, structuralist, postmodernist, theoretician, historian, philosopher, intellectual and so on.3 In doing this, he merely emphasizes that an approach in an ongoing displacement cannot be reduced to and forced to take on certain rigid positions. He does not claim to function in a completely liberated space beyond all existing and possible -isms. Instead, such positions have the character of challenges that he takes up and addresses. Les mots et les choses is a good example, as it should not be read as an expression of structuralism but rather as an investigation of the historical conditions of possibility of the stucturalist mode of thought, which at the time seemed paradigmatic and asserted a self-evident authority. What makes this distinction between a confessional and a reflective attitude somewhat difficult to draw is that Foucault does not practice the latter from a detached position well-defined in terms of its presuppositions. Rather his engagement takes the form of an immersed experiment with the structuralist mode of thought in which he examines its possibilities but thereby also indirectly probes its boundaries and presuppositions. This approach is rhetorically defended in the introduction to L’archéologie du savoir, where Foucault imagines the following question from the standpoint of one of his readers who indignantly implies an imagined sovereignty and the immunity it brings: “‘Aren’t you sure of what you are saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? ... Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’” As mentioned in the last chapter, Foucault responds affably but also a little arrogantly that: “‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’”4 3 Cf. “Structuralisme et post-structuralisme” [1983], DE IV: 435/“Structuralism and PostStructuralism,” p. 437; “Espace, savoir et pouvoir” [1982], DE IV: 278/“Space, Knowledge and Power,” p. 341; and “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1980], DE IV: 42–47/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” pp. 240–246. 4 AS: 28/AK: 17.

Contextuality and Transversal Categories 77

Still, this comment should not be taken out of context either. The motivation for the reply is that the imaginary reader’s outraged rhetorical question must be seen as a misleading conclusion drawn from Foucault’s attempt to formulate the endeavor of his existing work and more specifically in L’archéologie du savoir. This endeavor concerns “an attempt to determine a singular placement [un emplacement singulier] by the exteriority of its vicinity [par l’extériorité de ses voisinages].”5 The confusing “labyrinth” prepared by Foucault only thereby to lose his own identity and risk humiliation by venturing into it is thus not one created, observed or controlled solely by him; instead, his venture opens up new underground passages, forcing his discourse to go far from itself and inviting him to lose himself only to reappear in a new form. There are an incalculable number of relations that he must navigate in order to relocate himself once again on sure footing. Foucault’s approach to thought sets out in a particular context that affects our actions and thinking and consequently has a determining influence on what we can know and what we can do. By examining and reflecting upon this context, he questions its natural character. He shakes the all too self-evident impact or influence of the context in order to access a space in which we may be able to change our ways of thinking and acting in certain regards. This is a space in which it might be possible to penser autrement, “to think differently” or “otherwise,” as Foucault at one point delineates the proper “critical work” of the present-day “philosophical activity.”6 By doing this, however, his work concomitantly affects and exerts a certain impact on what we can say and what we can do without prescribing specific ways to proceed. This is offered by Foucault as an unpretentious approach: “I think it is always a little pretentious to present in a more or less prophetic way what people have to think. I prefer to let them draw their own conclusions or infer general ideas from the interrogations I try to raise in analyzing historical and specific material. I think it’s more respectful for everyone’s freedom and that’s my manner.”7 Consequently, the transition is not an arbitrary change but the very transformation that emerges as possible for Foucault in a given situation that presents itself as binding. For this reason, it claims general validity by presenting itself as obligatory. The transfiguration is possible because he takes an outset, not in normativity as such, but always in a particular or given normative situation, so as to distance himself from it while remaining partially subjected to its influence. Foucault usually takes his starting point in all-too-present and prevailing normative truisms – such as the delineation of madness as insanity, 5

AS: 27/AK: 17; translation modified. UP: 14–15/UPl: 8–9. 7 “La technologie politique des individus” [1988], DE IV: 814/“The Political Technology of Individuals,” p. 404. 6

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incarceration in prison as the standard criminal punishment or the development of a common individuality recognizing itself as a subject of sexual desire – only to dislocate them.8 Thus, his refusal is always specific. It is the continuously (co)determined negation of the context that the dislocation relates to and detaches itself from. One must therefore understand his thought as a contribution to what is usually a contemporary context: “I start with a problem in the terms in which it is actually posed [un problème dans les termes où il se pose actuellement] and try to make a genealogy of it. A genealogy means that I conduct the analysis beginning with a current question.”9 One could therefore describe Foucault as a contextualist – if by that one takes the position that cognition is context-dependent.10 That the context of thought becomes decisive while being indeterminate – even in principle – is imperative in its implications for the status of philosophy. It suggests a mutual dependence and reference between the practice of philosophy and its context. The context is never a given in the form of a present or even fully representable entity but appears and is explicated in a certain way and in a certain light in thought. It is not until this point that it attains specificity; and the same applies to thought, which is also given specificity by entering into a relation with and affecting a certain conjunction. Philosophy in practice and practical philosophy. The mutual dependency of thought and context suggests a new role for thought and theory. In Foucault’s case, they come across as activities that arise in a specific circumstance – in fact, his writings invariably make a virtue out of engaging concretely with these instances. Indeed, theorizing and thinking are dependent upon their context, within which they attain a precise role and meaning and without which they remain activities in abstracto. They remain, however, limited contributions that assist in defining the context to which they are connected. The formation of knowledge is therefore not conceived as a contemplation (theoria) of ahistorical structures and how they relate to each other. Rather, it is conceived as a practical reflection or as a practically orientated consideration. For Foucault, thinking is an activity that takes place within a wider praxis. However, this wider praxis is not self-evident – nor is it obvious – since it is 8

Cf. UP: 13/UPl: 7. “Le souci de la vérité” [1984], DE IV: 674/“The Concern for Truth,” p. 460; translation modified. 10 This contextualism does not come across as an explicit creed in the authorship but remains implicit. Considering the way he relates in considering his own work, it is clear that he judges his own thought to be an activity that takes an outset in and contributes to a context. Only considered as a response to a context can it attain objectivity; and only as a responsible response within and to a context can it be binding in specific ways and exert an influence. This is a condition sine qua non for its binding force. 9

Contextuality and Transversal Categories 79

characterized by conflict and presents various unsolved issues. Praxis therefore implies its own problematization and necessitates basic considerations about its own character or nature, even as it raises the basic question of how to relate to it. One could say that it contains an implicit incitement to philosophize. Foucault’s work must be understood in extension of such an inevitable stimulus to perform philosophy. Rather than establishing a theory about a given field or activity, Foucault considers philosophy and apprehension a reflective praxis. Here one can take up some theoretical, historical or social circumstance in order to explicate it and relate to it – not in order to reach a definitive and final determination but as part of a non-terminating process of reformulation that can be taken up again for re-articulation. Foucault considers thought and the history of thought to be explorations of the ways in which we try and have tried to conceive, address and relate to problems presented to us. His purpose is not to give conclusive answers or finally to ‘solve’ the issues at hand; instead, he aims to provide the means for relating to them in a more qualified manner as he transforms the ways in which they immediately present themselves. Thinking and philosophy are hereby ascribed limited but decisive roles as activities that challenge the given and the obvious that we find ourselves in – the apparently straightforward problems and their straightforward answers. In doing this, something different emerges. As motivation for his later inquiries into the history of sexuality and the shift they represent in regard to the rest of the authorship, Foucault states in the introduction to L’usage des plaisirs: “the only form of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself. There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that that these games with oneself would be better left backstage; or at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known.”11

11

UP: 14–15/UPl: 8–9.

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This has consequences for how one should read Foucault’s works and the characterizations given therein. Generally speaking, these do not take on the shape of determining an essence or claims about matters of facts; they are rather preliminary evaluations of the field being studied. This is, for instance, the case for the infamous outline of man’s death at the conclusion of Les mots et les choses, which created quite a stir at its publication. Foucault here underlines that if the hitherto given perspectives on knowledge and their implicit predispositions were to disappear “then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.”12 But he does not posit the disappearance of man as a theoretical necessity. In an interview in 1978, Foucault points out that he does not consider himself a theoretician. He does not see himself as “someone who constructs a general system, either deductive or analytical and applies it to different fields in a uniform way.” Rather, he considers himself “an experimenter in the sense that I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before.”13 It is for this reason that he cannot give an exact account of his method before initiating new studies. Instead, the method comes about in relation to the given subject and the context in which it is being treated. Although numerous methodological reflections are present in interviews and articles, Foucault rejects the idea that they have a universal character: “Once my work is finished, through a kind of retrospective reflection on the experience I’ve just gone through, I can extrapolate the method the book ought to have followed – so that I can write books that I would call exploratory somewhat in alternation with books of method. Exploratory books: History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic and so on. Method books: The Archaeology of Knowledge. Then I wrote things like Discipline and Punish and the introduction to The History of Sexuality. I also put forward some thoughts on method in articles and interviews. These tend to be reflections on a finished book that may help me to define another possible project. They are something like a scaffolding that serves a link between a work that is coming to an end and another that’s about to begin. But this is not to state a general method that would be definitively valid for others or for myself. What I’ve written is never prescriptive either for me or for others – at most it’s instrumental and tentative [rêveur: dreamy, forestalling, anticipating].”14

12

MC: 398/OT: 422. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1980], DE IV: 42/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” p. 240. 14 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1980], DE IV: 42/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” p. 240. 13

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Committed, normative thought. Foucault’s contextualism does not imply relativism. His work is committed and normative, not distant and value-free. From the histories of madness, structuralism and prison to the history of sexuality, he takes sets out within subject areas where he – through his scholarly work or as a result of his own social positioning and outlook – encounters concrete issues that strike him as unacceptable (see Box 2.1). He seeks to place such issues on the agenda, not only through public announcements, but also through practical and political activities in favor of the afflicted. Alongside such immediate ‘practical’ activities, Foucault seeks to relate to the relevant pressure points in his theoretical analyses and sidestep them by showing how issues of a far more fundamental character appear. Many of the previously mentioned reorientations in Foucault become easier to comprehend when seen in light of the concrete issues that offend him and thereby force him into an intellectual offensive. Through his philosophical and historical analyses, Foucault shows that the specific conflicts are of such a general and deep-rooted nature that no swift or univocal, political or theoretical, solution is possible. They are presented as complex issues that demand extended social and theoretical work if they are to be changed. Foucault hereby stresses how specific actions and concrete activities may have more wide-reaching, concrete relevance than may seem to be the case at first sight. In light of Foucault’s thought, the problem is therefore not the absence of prescriptive guidelines but rather a proliferation of forms of normativity that constantly limit what we can do, think or even imagine. The challenge is therefore not that humans constitute a tabula rasa and that the world is completely open to our doing but that we are over-determined by truisms that have been handed down to us and which we unwittingly commit ourselves to, thereby limiting our ability to think and act (otherwise) in a number of circumstances. This is the issue that Foucault, in various ways, seeks to respond to. The aim of his analyses is not to show how humans are bound to act as puppets on a string of analyzed structures that determine every response. The purpose is to relate to the conditionality of life. It then, however, becomes necessary to articulate what we are conditioned by and in what way, without necessarily being conscious of it. It is for the very same reason that, according to Foucault, “the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.”15 With an approach such as this, it becomes possible to support the struggle against kinds of power that take the form of a “submission of subjectivity” that in turn “makes individuals subjects” – either by being “subject

15

“Le sujet et le pouvoir” [1982], DE IV: 232/“The Subject and Power,” pp. 336.

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Box 2.1

Foucault’s political activities

1968. Foucault participates in and supports student protests against the military regime in Tunis. He is accosted in the street and beaten. 1969. Foucault participates in the occupation of the newly established University of Vincennes. He protests the censuring of a documentary about the riots of 1968. He is detained when the police storm the buildings. 1971. Foucault and two others submit the lampoon Je perçois l’intolerable (“I Perceive the Intolerable”) to the press. The leaflet criticizes the intolerable conditions found in the judicial system, police, health care, schools, military and media. However, the primary contention was with conditions in the French penal system. This had become an issue as a group of Maoist inmates had begun a hunger strike to protest their plight. The manifesto marks the formation of G.I.P Groupe d’information sur le prisons, which saw the participation of judges, lawyers, journalists, doctors and psychologists. The movement was located at Foucault’s home address and sought to acquire and distribute information about prison, its role and the predicament of the inmates. The effort resulted in the prisoners being allowed to contact the media and establish connections between them and other groups, such that the inmates became aware of public involvement and support for their cause. The movement hereby set the stage for a number of extensive prison riots in France immediately following the Attica prison riot in the United States. The state submitted a lawsuit against Foucault for distributing leaflets without indication of place of print or publisher. 1972. Demonstrations, happenings and press conferences in front of prisons and the Palais de Justice; Foucault is mistreated by the police and is taken into custody. 1975. Foucault holds a press conference in Madrid with, among others, Yves Montand (1921–1991), Régis Debray (b. 1940), Costa Gavras (b. 1933) and Claude Mauriac (1941–1996). They protest the death sentences given to 11 people by the Franco regime in a special trial that had no defense. The group was expelled from Spain. 1977. Foucault, Sartre and a number of other intellectuals organize a gathering in honor of Soviet dissidents in opposition to the French president Giscard d’Estaing’s reception of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Foucault participates in a symbolic barricade of Prison de la Santé in order to prevent the administrative extradition of Rote Armee Fraktion defendant Klaus Croissant for prosecution in Germany. Foucault does not consider the happening a political manifestation but a defense of threatened universal civil liberties in a constitutional state that is combating terrorism. The demonstrators are dispersed by 40 police officers, who “with rare brutality covered us with blows, as if they had to do with a screaming mob.” Foucault suffers a broken rib in the events. 1978. September 16–24 and November 9–15, Foucault is in Iran to cover the Shiite rebellion against the Shah for Corriere della Sera. He wishes to study what he considers a rare form of power use: an Islamic revolution that is not seen through by the elite but by the masses. He sees it as having a political spirituality as its driving force and the realization of the kingdom of heaven on earth as its goal. The following year

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Foucault protests to the head of government Mehdi Bazargan over the wave of executions of opponents of the newly proclaimed Islamic republic; the militia groups who performed these executions invoked the authority of Ayatollah Khomeini. 1979. Foucault protests the Polish communist government’s repression of Solidarność and the Polish revolution under General Jaruzelski in an open letter in the French newspaper Libération, cowritten with Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Marguerite Duras (1914–1966), Patrice Chéreau (b. 1944), Bernard Kouchner (b. 1939), Claude Mauriac, Yves Montand, Claude Sautet (b. 1924) and Simone Signoret (1921–1985). On a local level, protests are directed at the newly elected French socialist government for its decision to view the affair as an internal Polish issue. This results in a storm of protest against the government. 1979. Foucault commits himself to the cause of the Vietnamese boat people who fled Vietnam by ship after the Vietnam War. He demands that French President Giscard D’Estaing increase the number of refugees permitted to enter France. To Foucault these incidents are not isolated occurrences but omens, foreboding “the great migration,” which Foucault expects to become a prominent trait of the 21st century. 1981. At a press conference in Geneva to inaugurate La Comité International contre la piraterie, an initiative for nongovernmental action in the defense of the Vietnamese boat people, attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, Foucault reads aloud a declaration invoking an “international citizenship.” It involves both the right and the obligation of all members always “to make an issue of people’s misfortune, to keep it in the eyes and ears of governments.” Inspired by the example of contemporary NGOs such as Amnesty International, Terre des hommes and Médecins du monde, Foucault invoked “this new right: that of private individuals actually to intervene in the order of international politics and strategies,” since, “after all, we are all governed and, to that extent, in solidarity” 1982. Foucault drives a convoy of medicine and writings to Poland with, among others, Simone Signoret and Bernard Kouchner. He also attempts to meet Lech Wałęsa (b. 1943) in prison.

to someone else by control and dependence” or by being “tied to” their “own identity by conscience or self-knowledge.”16 It is for this reason that Foucault refrains from claiming that man is defined by being fundamentally free to develop the character of this essential human ability. That one cannot assume freedom as a quality found in the human subject itself – as tends to be the case in much of existential philosophy – implies the ever-greater importance of philosophizing in a liberating manner. It is in the same vein that Foucault also points out that his work should not first and foremost be read as a “critique” in the usual sense of the word as the aim is not to assert and demonstrate that “everyone else is wrong [que tout le monde s’est trompé].”17 Rather, he underlines the confirmation of something 16

“Le sujet et le pouvoir” [1982], DE IV: 228, 227/“The Subject and Power,” pp. 332, 331. 17 AS: 27/AK: 17.

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different by distancing himself from what is immediately given. Since his thought is affirmative, it is prescriptive as well. For Foucault, it is impossible to move beyond normativity.18 It is in this spirit that one must understand an oft cited passage from L’archéologie du savoir, where Foucault claims that his “diagnostics does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions.” Instead, the aim of diagnosing our present philosophically brings into play “that we are difference [que nous sommes difference], that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks.”19 In saying this, Foucault rejects the project of determining our identity by determining who or what we are not. As an alternative, he formulates a diagnosis by constantly demonstrating not how we came to equate but rather how we differ from ourselves. We are difference, as a number of different ages overlap in our history and present.20 Equally, we are difference, as we are constantly on our way from one thing to the next and thus in a state of permanent transition in which we constantly cross bridges or watersheds and leave one bank as we aim for another. It is important to note, however, that this transition is a concrete crossing and an actual passage – not an entirely open and arbitrary movement. It is a transit from one thing toward something else. In the aforementioned passage, Foucault therefore continues by noting that the diagnosis shows “that difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is the dispersion that we are and make [cette dispersion que nous sommes et que nous faisons].”21 As a consequence, Foucault’s thought is not a meditation on a basic and antecedent movement in regard to which everything else seems superficial and transient. It is not, therefore, a modern version of Heraclitus’ dictum from antiquity that everything changes. Alternatively, Foucault diagnoses how we 18 In Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (2007), Prozorov correctly emphasizes that Foucault’s understanding of freedom as social practice not only distinguishes itself from the existentialist conception of freedom as a basic human capacity; it is equally incompatible with a conception of freedom as an essential feature of the social order. Foucault therefore does not seek to pose and answer the classical question of political theory: Which political order is best and takes greatest account of freedom? Rather he asks, “‘Given the present conditions of subjection, what are the possibilities of freedom available to us?’ This question presupposes that under any given social order the problem would remain, if only as a logically ever-present question of a freedom from this very order. The discourse on freedom is thus reoriented from creating a ‘freedom-friendly’ order to inquiring into the possibilities of practicing freedom in orders that are, in their own distinct ways, all encroaching on it” (see pp. 5–6). 19 AS: 172/AK: 131. 20 Cf. S. Raffnsøe: “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? L’analytique sociale de Michel Foucault” (2008), pp. 44–66. 21 AS: 173/AK: 131.

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are located in constant, concrete change while also wanting us to relate to this change in a differentiated manner that allows us to affect the direction it takes. The diagnosed transition may be contingent because events could have taken a different turn. It would be an illusionary pretension of insight, however, to insist that this very shift – sub specie aeternitatis – seems arbitrary. Since we do not live “under the aspect of eternity” but are indeed situated in a specific context, the shifts that actually happen are not arbitrary. The transitions are specific and cannot be affected as one sees fit.

2

Transversal categories in Foucault’s thought

The event of thought. In 1978, Foucault stated that he was not a good philosopher in any classical sense of the word, since he was “not interested in the eternal,” in what does not change, “in what stays the same beneath the iridescent surface of appearances.” Rather, he was interested in “the event [l’événement],” which has not, according to Foucault, played an important role in traditional philosophy, as it “has hardly been a philosophical category.”22 In contradistinction to this august tradition and in accordance with Nietzsche, it is important for Foucault to redefine “philosophy as an activity that leads to an understanding of what’s happening, right now.” Since “we are pervaded by processes, movements and forces, which we don’t know,” “it is doubtlessly the philosopher’s task to be a diagnostician of these forces, to diagnose contemporary reality.”23 Foucault reflects over crucial contemporary (practical or theoretical) events while seeking to make his own thought an event. Consequently, there is an ongoing effort in Foucault’s work to articulate events: to explicate the appearance of circumstances that did not exist before.24 However, by ‘event’ he does not refer to the sudden coming into being of something that is so tangible and well-defined that it may be retained and studied in isolation. An event is not an object, nor is it the presentation of something

22 “La scène de la philosophie” [1978], DE III: 573–574/“The Stage of Philosophy,” pp. 121–122. 23 “La scène de la philosophie” [1978], DE III: 573/“The Stage of Philosophy,” pp. 121–122. 24 This interpretation of l’événement must be understood in extension of the etymological meaning, which is usually ascribed the English word event (see Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, p. 332) and the French word l’événement (see Le petit Robert, pp. 716–717). The modern term stems from the past participle in Latin eventum. This is from the verb evenio, which means “come out, result, happen” (Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, p. 332) or what happens as the result of a certain outcome (see C. Lewis and C. Short: A Latin Dictionary, pp. 666–667). It therefore designates both the disclosure or appearance of something and when something comes to be or appears as a result of such. It designates both an outcome and an outcome of an outcome.

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so radically new that it appears in pure discontinuity from everything else. An event is the specific genesis of something in relation to a context. As a consequence, it cannot be studied in isolation from its context, nor can it constitute a primordial, ontological foundation of Foucault’s thought in a traditional sense. In his lecture at the College de France on February 8, 1978, Foucault mentions that he had previously concerned himself with insanity in Histoire de la folie and crime in Surveiller et punir. In both cases, however, he had refused to consider them “a ready-made object.” The outset for Foucault was instead the assumption “that madness ‘does not exist,’ but this does not mean it is nothing.” This approach has affinities with phenomenology. Here one takes an outset in the existence of entities about which the analysis is concerned while seeking to give an account of their mode of existence, which is different from the being of an object. According to Foucault, one thus claims: “Madness exists, which does not mean that it is a thing.”25 Despite his proximity to phenomenology, Foucault’s approach to the event still distinguishes itself clearly. He refuses to “measure institutions, practices and forms of knowledge in terms of the criteria of an already given object.” Instead, it involves “grasping the movement by which a field of truth with objects of knowledge was constituted through mobile technologies.”26 In L’archéologie du savoir, Foucault formulates this point in a similar manner: “What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things’. To ‘depresentify’ them. ... To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.”27 He conceives the event as an appearance that imposes itself upon what is already existent and changes it in specific, but not always immediately determinate, ways. Over and against defining genesis as a negation of that which is given, he attempts to view it more positively as an appearance that is discernable by positing a hitherto nonexistent agenda. As a consequence of this, Foucault treats the event as a singularity. Singularity refers to the outstanding, exceptional and peculiar and thus forms an exception to the common and ordinary. The singular is thereby in opposition to the regular and base. In extension, the singular clearly distinguishes itself from the general, which defines what is common to a number of individual things. For instance, refers to what unites all people as a species and not to any 25 26 27

[STP]: 121–122/{STPo}: 118. [STP]: 121–122/{STPo}: 118. AS: 65/AK: 47–48.

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individuality. In addition, the singular must be distinguished from universality’s usual antonym: particularity. In philosophy and science, this usually signifies the non-universal things or separate, particular entities that may be classified or subsumed under a given category. As such, the expression ‘this person’ refers to an individual living being, but it does so by emphasizing that this being belongs to the species of man. If one considers the singular qua singular or as unique, however, one does not perceive it as belonging to or possibly subsumed under a universal concept. A widespread philosophical tradition for misidentifying the singular and particular has existed since the time of Aristotle and can be found in the medieval realism controversy concerning the problem of universals.28 Likewise, the singular cannot be reduced to individuality, which in turn has traditionally been coupled with particularity but which upon closer inspection distinguishes itself from the latter – at least if by ‘individual’ one understands a being that cannot be discriminated from other beings from the same species through some eidetic determination. In this sense, one could say that the name ‘Socrates’ refers to an individual who is differentiated from other individuals (referred to in unison by the term ‘a man’). This does not imply, however, that one is able to give a universal eidetic determination of that very difference. In this sense, Socrates is an individual in relation to other individuals. As the only one of its kind, an individual is a being unlike anything else. The individual called Socrates – as it is traditionally conceptualized – is, however, not a singularity in the strict sense of the word, insofar as he remains himself through time and space. An individual may be unique in regard to its surroundings and other comparable individuals but not unparalleled with regard to itself. ‘Socrates’ does not refer to something completely unheard of and irreproducible. According to Foucault, singularity, in the strictest sense of the word, is that which – unlike even the individual – distinguishes and separates itself from a category by constituting something outstanding and unique and not merely by being separate and differentiated. To express the idea in German, one would say that it is not only einzeln and vereinzelt but einmalig. It initially appears as a simple haeccitas, which distinguishes itself by merely happening once and must therefore be simply pointed out or referred to without being comprehended.29 28 In De Interpretatione (17a 38–40), Aristotle merely distinguishes the universal (to katholou) and the non-universal particular thing (kath hekaston): “Some things are universal, others individual. By the term ’universal’ I mean that which is of such a nature as to be predicated of many subjects, by ’individual’ that which is not thus predicated. Thus ’man’ is a universal, ’Callias’ an individual.” Kath hekaston was in the Middle Ages translated as singularis. 29 In classical Greek philosophy Aristotle employs the term tode ti about ’this something.’ In medieval philosophy and Duns Scotus this becomes haeccitas, which is used to refer to or point to, a number of characteristics only satisfied by this singular of being present here and now.

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Hence, with Foucault one finds an approach to thought within which the universal and particular are not the main focus, as has been the case in traditional science and philosophy since Aristotle. Not even individuality, which has become a crucial field of investigation for art and science in recent times, constitutes the outset as such. His thought is – over and against this – an exploration of the event understood as a singularity as this distinguishes itself for good or bad. In taking up this approach, Foucault sought – among other things – to avoid reductionism. By treating things as they appeared in their singularity, he sought to avoid justifying them by reference to and deducing them from what is already given or known. Instead, he endeavored to develop the manner in which they distinguish themselves from what is already present and wellknown. In this way, he strove to elaborate how they transcend and change the given. Considered as a singularity or simple ‘thisness’, the event can clearly not be reduced to mere particularity. It happens here and now but cannot be understood as an event that only happens “here and now.” It is not a particular being that can be pinned down and identified in space and time, nor can it be conceptualized as a basic being that is elevated above time and space, as was the contention in classical philosophy and metaphysics. With ‘thisness’ one finds something that transcends this particular space and time as it is given through the creation of a new interrelatedness in time and space. For Foucault, the event is neither being nor a kind of being as such; instead it is a kind of relational being, an outstanding and unsettled matter, which appears as it establishes connections across time and space. An event distinguishes itself by being able to transcend its given conditions and boundaries. The singular event distinguishes itself from the ordinary and repeatable but likewise reflects back upon them. A singularity is therefore unique and outstanding by virtue of the fact that it does not stand alone: it appears but is not isolated. When the event comes forth ‘a world’ appears that one can approach for closer inspection. In articulating an event in its singularity, one must therefore – according to Foucault – necessarily develop its relations to something else. It is only possible to clarify the singularity of an event by explicating the connections that it partakes in while it distinguishes itself from its surroundings. For this very reason, the context comes to light in a specific manner in the event being studied. The relations that the event participates in are established in the very event being studied; and the aim is to establish connections with other parallel events that emerge as one takes this particular point of departure. For this reason, by 1963 Foucault had already denied that sexuality is an object that finally “has regained, in contemporary experience, its truth as a

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process of nature, a truth that has long been lingering in the shadows and hiding under various disguises – until now, that is, when our positive awareness allows us to decipher it so that it may at last emerge in the clear light of language.”30 Rather “the emergence of sexuality in our culture is an event of multiple values.”31 He here points out how this event, among other things, “is tied to ‘the death of God’ and to the ontological void” that this event “fixed at the limit of our thought,” as well as with the appearance of a mode of thought that does not attempt to think its boundaries but inclusive totalities. When discussing the history of sexuality toward the end of his œuvre, Foucault adds new dimensions to the appearance of sexuality as an event. He further unfolds the event as he introduces it in and establishes relations to a number of other contexts; first in regard to liberatory movements and societal regulation in recent Western history and later in connection with Greek perspectives on the good life in antiquity and then in Christian confession. Foucault sums up and highlights a number of these aspects in a conversation from 1978 while describing his own thought as “eventalization [événementialisation].” Foucault attempts to direct our attention toward events as he unfolds their irreducibility and develops their multiple relations and implications: “I am trying to work in the direction of what one might call ‘eventalization’. Even though the ‘event’ has been for some while now a category little esteemed by historians, I wonder whether, understood in a certain sense, ‘eventalization’ may not be a useful procedure of analysis. What do I mean by this term? First of all, a breach of self-evidence. It means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait or an obviousness, which imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock him up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were to be sought through the individual examination of bodies and so on. A breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest: this is the first theoretico-political function of ‘eventalization’.” Secondly, eventalization means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary. In this sense, one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes (multiplication causale). As a way of lightening the

30 31

“Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 233/“A Preface to Transgression,” p. 69. “Préface à la transgression” [1963], DE I: 248/“A Preface to Transgression,” p. 85.

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weight of causality, eventalization thus “works by constructing around the singular event analyzed as a process or ‘polygon’; or rather a ‘polyhedron’ of intelligibility where the number of faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite. One has to proceed by progressive and necessarily incomplete saturation. One also has to bear in mind that the further one breaks down the processes under analysis, the more one is enabled and indeed obliged to construct their external relations of intelligibility (in concrete terms: the more one analyzes the process of ‘carceralization’ of penal practice down to its smallest details, the more one is led to relate them to such practices as schooling, military discipline, etc.). The internal analysis of processes goes hand in hand with a multiplication of analytical ‘salients’”.32 Accordingly, an event distinguishes itself from an ‘object’ in the ordinary sense of the word insofar as it does not have any determined size; indeed, the size and scope of an event can be said to depend on the relations it enters into or opens up. Even more crucially, it is only to the extent that something opens and enters into other relations and thereby attains a certain scope that one can say that it becomes an event in the emphatic sense of the word. Otherwise, it is merely an incident or simple occurrence that disappears without making a difference or leaving a trace. An event is never simply and fully present but appears implicitly as a problem or question to be articulated further. One can only know the specific event retrospectively by unfolding its implicit ‘content’. This is possible by outlining the external relations of the event. In doing so, one moves beyond the way in which it presents itself to a furtive glance. If the event is not present in any primitive sense, then at least it can be articulated in a process that permits the implicit ‘content’ of the event to appear or unfold itself. Even though for Foucault ‘the event’ does not simply exist, it can still be shown to be real in the sense that it works and has effects in different ways and in various circumstances. As previously mentioned, when Foucault in Surveiller et punir examines the emergence of prison sentencing, he treats this as an event that makes a difference in various regards. On the face of things, it is an event in terms of criminal law. It marks that a new punitive format – corporal punishment – has taken the place of public executions and public afflictions of agony (torments), in the extreme case on the scaffold, as the sanction for crimes par excellence.33

32 “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978” [1980], DE IV: 24–25/“Questions of Method,” pp. 76–77. 33 This is illustrated by the famous contrast, established by Foucault in the opening chapter of Surveiller et punir, between the public torture and execution of Robert-Francois Damiens (1715–1757) on the scaffold in 1757 for regicide and Leon Faucher’s (1803– 1854) regulations “for the House of young prisoners in Paris” issued in 1838.

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However, upon closer inspection, one hereby begins to manifest what is just and right in a new way; punishment is no longer practiced by making an example of what is just and right and thus making it visible to all. Instead, criminal law begins to correct and rectify what is wrong and deviant. Prison sentencing can thus also be understood as a new mode of visibility in society. It is no longer sufficient to emphasize the exemplary and authoritative; it becomes imperative to cast light on the deficient and base. If one considers the emergence of prison sentencing in terms of a larger societal context, it is even possible to note how warfare, schooling and production are likewise altered in a similar manner. All these changes are mutually connected and whether, the introduction of the prison sentence can be considered an event therefore depends upon which circumstances it is considered in. The character and extent of an event depends on its context. In L’archéologie du savoir, Foucault highlights that historical studies – in extension of traditional methods in archaeology – consider the historical “documents” that have come across to us as “silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context and things left by the past.” Just as with archaeology, Foucault’s historical examinations start out in exceptional and individual remains that fasten onto the memory of a connection that is in danger of being forgotten. Just as with the science of prehistory, history grabs on to these in order to create a “series” and a “series of series that they partake in and which have situated them.”34 Later on in the same book he can therefore also emphasize that archaeology must disclose the “archive,” which means, “the general horizon to which the description of discursive formations, the analysis of positivities ... belong.”35 According to Foucault, for thought to do justice to singular events and not reduce them, it must itself become an event: it must become a monument that sets a new agenda in the contexts that it takes up and enters into. Thought must, however, also be shaped so it becomes suitable for being displaced in certain directions by entering into new connections. It must come across as an event from which one may draw hitherto unknown aspects. In extension of this Foucault can, in the foreword to the English edition of Gilles Deleuze’s (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari’s (1930–1992) L’anti-Œdipe (Anti-Oedipus), extol that it is not merely a book but rather an event. This suggests that it would be a mistake to read the book as “the theoretical reference (you know, that much-heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one we are told we ‘need so badly’ in our age of dispersion and specialization where ‘hope’ is lacking). One must not look for a ‘philosophy’ amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions 34 35

AS: 15/AK: 7. AS: 173/AK: 193.

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and surprising concepts.” Instead, the analysis “yields answers to concrete questions. Questions that are less concerned with why than with how [qui se soucient moins du pourquoi des choses que de leur comment].”36 Following this line of reasoning, Foucault can therefore distance himself from structuralism, insofar as this can be considered to form “the most systematic effort to evacuate the concept of the event, not only from ethnology but from a whole series of other sciences and in the extreme case from history.” In extension he concludes: “In that sense, I don’t see who could be more of an anti-structuralist than myself.” This being said, he underlines that “the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure. It’s not a matter of locating everything on one level, that of the event, but of realizing that there are actually a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth and capacity to produce effects. The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another.”37 Challenging the categories of representation and work. Generally speaking, Foucault highlights long-term historical developments, but his examinations rarely reach the immediate present. As a result, Foucault does not offer any univocal suggestions as to the character of the developments he examines but rather suggests various lines of advancement or scenarios that one can reflect upon and relate to. His aim is to invite his readers to participate in the process of reflection, which also becomes apparent in the lack of final summaries and conclusions as well as the intentionally rhetorical and never dull or matter-offact style. Foucault’s works therefore exhibit their open, inconclusive and incomplete character on several levels. This results in them having certain effects on the reader. The books have a lack or ‘deficiency’ inscribed within them that makes them prompt the reader. The lacunae ensure that readers are forced to contribute to the work when they read and interpret it. Furthermore, the 36 “Préface” [1977], DE III: 133–134/“Preface to Anti-Oedipus,” p. 107. In a prior review of Deleuze’s doctorate Différence et repetition, Foucault can therefore also approvingly characterize Deleuze’s thought as “philosophy that has become scene of action, persons, signs, the repetition of a unique event that never repeats itself.” “Ariane s‘est pendue” [1969], DE I: 768. In OD: 53/ODis: 33, Foucault announces that the important thing is to “restore the character of event to discourse [restituer au discours son character d’événement].” This is vital to studying discourses but – and according to Foucault – also for one’s own writing. 37 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1976], DE III: 144–145/“Truth and Power,” p. 114.

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configuration of the writings assumes involvement in a context that they co-create but cannot control. The works themselves suggest that they must not be taken as impartial descriptions of situations that simply state matters of fact and seek to attain a final determination. Rather, they must be understood as prejudiced contributions to existing conflicts and as pieces of special pleading given by a party to an existing and still-open lawsuit that cannot be given objective or absolute status over and above the case or lawsuit that they contribute to. The presented evidence becomes binding as it challenges us to extend our given line of reasoning. The purpose is not to arrive at a final verdict so that we can comply or accept its restrictions. Rather, it concerns articulating a reality in which we are entangled – often without being conscious of it and perhaps even without being able to attain a full overview of that very reality. The point is to affect the recipient – to jolt him and force him to (re)think and perhaps even act – without actually telling him how or letting him know what he in his particular context should feel, think or do. The design of Foucault’s major writings thereby bears witness to his distance from the traditional concept of the “work [œuvre]” and thereby the related category of ‘book’. He does not consider his writings complete entities that can collect, represent and create an adequate image of the world. Instead, he emphasizes how his own creations take on the character of fragments. With the external and at first unnecessary additions to the world that Foucault’s publications make up, the work, which was previously considered a closed totality, is changed into a disparate element. Employed as an instrument, this disparate element can enter into specific, intense relations with the social context and thereby possibly dislocate it and allow it to develop in various directions. Precisely which possibilities and horizons these new lines of flight open up cannot be ascertained before they are further developed as parts of yet more new connections, which they in return disrupt and change.38 In light of understanding the category of work in this manner, a connection to the introduction to L’usage des plaisirs becomes apparent. Here, Foucault points to the essay – in which one is able to present a tentative and preliminary examination of the truth about a ‘subject’ only to change it – as the general format for his thought: “There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The ‘essay’ [essai] – which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes [comme épreuve

38

“Qu‘est-ce qu‘un auteur?” [1969], DE I: 789–821/“What Is an Author?” pp. 205–222.

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modificatrice de soi-même dans le jeu de la vérité] and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication – is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, that is, an ‘ascesis’, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought [un exercice de soi dans la pensée].”39 Event and experience. The aim of Chapter 2 has been to present outstanding and pervasive features of Foucault’s thought in the light of which the previous introduction must be understood in order to avoid ossifying it into a misleading picture. These features will constitute the departure point for analyzing Foucault’s authorship in the following chapters. At first glance, the ensuing presentation will seem relatively traditional in that the chapters are organized around the so-called main works – and chronologically at that. However, the aim is now to allow the features described above to shape the presentation. Our purpose is to characterize the decisive events taken up and articulated by the respective core works. The central books of the authorship will thus be seen as contributing toward an answer to the challenges posed by contemporary events as Foucault sees them. In this sense, we are attempting to demonstrate the practical and normative engagement of Foucault’s thought. For him, thought is always a question of responding to a problem that has a tangible, politico-practical and often a personal, existential relevance.40 Furthermore, we emphasize how his occasional writings and lectures develop or anticipate the contribution made by a main work. It is hereby shown how the original event spreads like a ripple in a pond and attains a character so extensive that it demands a thorough theoretical reflection on Foucault’s part as it is not sufficient to relate to the event in merely practical or activist terms. As mentioned earlier, this does not lead Foucault to taking a certain theoretical stance in the socio-philosophical landscape in developing a theory that he can promulgate. Rather, his lectures and occasional writings turn out to express an ongoing revision of his approach to the event in question so its implications can be adequately articulated. The following presentations and interpretations of the central works therefore form an attempt to eliminate their status as isolated objects and rather see them as integrated into a continuous process of reflection that they are – and not just were – a part of. On the one hand, by reading them as responses to events, they become anchored in a practical reality whereby it is possible to take into account the commitment that is found in Foucault’s authorship. On the other hand, it becomes possible to demonstrate the scope of Foucault’s 39

UP: 15/UPl: 9. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1980], DE IV: 42–48/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” pp. 239–246. 40

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approach to articulating given events. In this latter sense, his answers can no longer be reduced to occasional writings; instead, it is necessary to retain their relevance as cultural and social analyses. The following chapters thus serve two purposes. They must have an instrumental value by presenting and explaining the central approach and basic concepts found in the most important works written by Foucault’s hand. At the same time, each analysis should present a contextualized Foucault that fits the profile given in this chapter. We will concentrate on what Foucault’s books are capable of showing, rather than debating which theoretical position they represent. By taking this approach, we are convinced that we correspond with how Foucault saw his own authorship: not as consisting of books but as events. The question of periodization will likewise be toned down and replaced with a description of ongoing shifts that occur in the œuvre. It will be interesting to show how old themes recur in new connections, thereby attaining novel importance and how Foucault’s often celebrated originality is located in his ability to dwell on the same old events and force new meaning from them. Until now, we have shifted the debate away from the usual reception of Foucault, thereby bringing into focus certain features of the authorship. Among these are the ongoing transitions and self-reflections and the implications involved. In the remainder of the book, we will substantiate the claim that this ongoing shift does not imply aimlessness. Each of the following chapters will delve into a central part of Foucault’s authorship and from this unfold relevant aspects of the remaining œuvre. In a number of instances, one of Foucault’s main works takes center stage. In these cases, we shall begin by introducing one of his main works from a certain point of entry. In other cases, emphasis will be placed on an object of study or a theme that Foucault does not treat in any one book but that has the character of a topic that leaves traces in a number of often smaller works and in his lectures. The subject-matter or field of investigation may seem to be located outside the scope of a particular work; but it is no less important because it acts as a unifying force. Likewise, in the chapters that center on a core publication, we will show how this is structured around a core issue that Foucault is in the process of examining and that leaves a mark on the surrounding sections of the authorship. So, even here it becomes apparent that the issues cannot be contained within one publication but point beyond it. For each chapter we will initially indicate how the issue examined by Foucault is closely connected with a certain personal and social experience. This is often an experience of alienation toward and ambivalence in the face of what he meets but is likewise an engaged experience that often results in Foucault taking action. Simultaneously, we show how personal experience often drives Foucault to a long term, theoretico-historical examination of a given phenomenon and its

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ontogenesis. He hereby not only casts light on the given phenomenon but also articulates the experience of alienation and ambivalence that it gives rise to while seeking to create a space in which one can relate to it and connect practical activities in a more nuanced manner. By undertaking such comprehensive reflective thought, Foucault shows how the ‘immediate’ personal experience is more than merely his limited experience. It unfolds and is shown to be a central experience that is shared insofar as it exerts a determining influence from which we can only disengage ourselves with great difficulty. It is a complex experience of such fundamental importance and with so many implications that it is difficult to connect with and distance oneself from in a definitive or univocal manner. Nonetheless, as we recognize ourselves in this experience, we are thereby forced to relate to it. Every chapter emphasizes how experience for Foucault is not knowledge about some object or even something internal to the self, such as an inner experience; instead, it turns out to be a larger event within which we are inscribed that riddles us and that we have to come to terms with. We tend to feel and claim that we make an experience, but it seems to be something that takes place instead. While experiences happen and disappear, they affect us in a lasting manner. An experience happens as we become acquainted with that which affects us fundamentally as subjects of cognition and this makes a thoughtprovoking change to our lives as it concerns us and forces us to think twice. It forces us to enter into a process of non-conclusive reflection that we do not control and that may change us in unforeseeable ways, thereby adding further food for thought. On closer inspection, it therefore turns out that the experiential point of departure for Foucault, which we describe in the given chapters, are not univocal states that indicate a definite location; they are transformative experiences that mark our presence in a certain intermediary state as we are on our way to another state that we are not yet familiar with. As the experiences remain accounts that are not fully settled, they force us to enter into an intermediate state of being that we do not have a full understanding of and are still trying to come to terms with. For this reason, it turns out that Foucault’s examinations do not result in the determination of a fully resolved final state but end up in a new productive and more articulate ambivalence. Foucault describes the relationship between personal experience and theoretical work and commitment and reflection in a retrospective comment on his efforts in 1981, with the suggestive title: “So Is It Important to Think?” It is therefore necessary to quote this at some length: “Every time I have tried to do a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of my own experience: always in connection with processes I saw unfolding around me. It was always because I thought I identified cracks [des craquelures], silent tremors [des secousses

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sourdes] and dysfunctions, in the things I saw, in the institutions I was dealing with or in my relations with others, that I set out do work [que j’entreprenais un travail] and each time was partly a fragment of autobiography. I am not a retired activist [un activiste en retraite] who would now like to go back to duty. My way of working has not changed very much; but what I expect from it is that it will continue to change me. ... There is an optimism which consists in saying: ‘In any case, it couldn’t be better.’ My optimism consists, rather, in saying: ‘So many things can be changed [tant de choses peuvent être changés], being fragile as they are, tied more to contingencies than to necessities, more to what is arbitrary than to what is rationally established, more to complex but transitory historical contingencies than to inevitable anthropological constraints.’ You know, to say that we are much more recent than we thought is not a way of placing the whole weight of our history on our shoulders. Rather, it is to make available for the work that we can do on ourselves the largest possible share of what is presented to us as inaccessible.”41

41 “Est-il donc important de penser?” (1981), DE IV: 181–182/“So Is It Important to Think?” p. 30.

3 On the Borders of Madness

Foucault’s dejection. In a retrospective interview from 1982, Foucault notes how: “Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things.”1 The first example Foucault gives to illustrate this general circumstance is Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie, which was defended as a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne in 1961.2 This text has later been published in various editions under the more widely known title of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. In 2006 the original thesis was finally translated into English as History of Madness. This edition replaced the abridged and in many ways unsatisfactory version of the book known as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason of 1967 (see Box 3.1). In the interview, Foucault referred to a period of two to three years following his acquisition of a master’s degree in 1951, when he was preparing a thesis on psychopathology alongside his work at the psychiatric hospital Sainte-Anne in Paris. Having delved into philosophy, proving that he was “mad enough to study reason,” Foucault said in hindsight, he had also been “reasonable enough to study madness” in order to examine at a more basic level wherein it consisted. At Sainte-Anne Foucault held an internship as an experimental psychologist at the laboratory for electro-encephalography. This did not entail any special duties but allowed him to enter into many activities at the hospital, in a privileged position between the staff and patients. According to his own statements, he experienced the golden age of neurosurgery and the beginning

1

“Truth, Power, Self: An Interview” [1982], p. 11. It was customary for the ’large thesis’ to be handed in and defended alongside a “small thesis.” For Foucault, this ’small thesis’ entitled Introduction à l’Anthropologie de Kant (thèse complémentaire), was a translation and analysis of Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, which was originally published in two different editions in 1798 and in 1800. 2

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of psychopharmacological treatments within the institutional confines of traditional psychiatry.3 While Foucault, on the face of things, experienced conditions at the hospital as necessary, his unusual intermediate position also lead him to feel “a kind of malaise” regarding the institutional framework in general.4 The fact that his own “psychological balance” had, according to many, been “rather fragile,” such that he himself could be regarded “en route to madness,” probably led to a sense of alienation toward the professionals in the field.5 Also, this may have strengthened his commitment to psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the period. In fact, Foucault had already visited the hospital in 1948 in order to consult a psychiatrist (Jean Delay) himself, as he, while being a student at École Normale Supérieure (ENS-Ulm) in Paris, should have been so “obsessed with the idea of suicide” that it resulted in several suicide attempts.6 Whatever the circumstances, Foucault began questioning the activities required by his employment at the psychiatric hospital. Being “lucky enough to be there neither as a patient nor as a doctor,” Foucault was confronted by “the extremely strange reality that we call confinement,” which both doctors and patients mutually seemed to “experience as absolutely self-evident.”7 In extension, Foucault left the job after three years with a sense of “great personal discomfort,” so as to take up an assistant professorship in French at Uppsala where he instead “started to write a history of these practices.”8 Indeed, as Foucault came to argue, these practices were “far from being self-evident or inevitable” but represented the outcome of “a very long history, a culmination that did not occur until the nineteenth century.”9 As such, the personal discomfort also came to pose Foucault an inexorable question: “It was not before a few years later when I started writing a book on the history of psychiatry that

3

“Truth, Power, Self: An Interview” [1982], p. 11. At Sainte-Anne Foucault was working together with psychiatrists such as Henri Laborit and Jean Delay, who were both among the very first not only to use neuroleptic medicine (chlorpromazine; Largactil in Europe, Thorazine in USA) on hospitalized psychiatric patients but also to publish to the medical community already in the early 1950s the ameliorating effects on psychotic conditions. See, e.g., J. Delay, P. Deniker, and R. Ropert: “Étude de 300 dossier de maladies psychotiques traités par chlorpromazine en service fermé depuis 1952,” Encephale, vol. 45 (1955): 528–535. 4 “Michel Foucault: An interview with Stephen Riggins” [1982], p. 123/“Une Interview de Michel Foucault par Stephen Riggins” [1982], DE IV: 528. 5 D. Eribon: Michel Foucault, p. 42. 6 D. Eribon: Michel Foucault, p. 43. 7 “Du pouvoir” [1978], L’Express, no. 1772 (July 13, 1984): p. 56/“On Power,” p. 96; translation modified. 8 “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview” [1982], p. 11. 9 “Du pouvoir” [1978], p. 56/“On Power,” p. 96.

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this malaise, this personal experience, took the form of a historical criticism or a structural analysis.”10 Mad Speech. That Foucault is able to point out a concrete challenge and personal experience of discomfort as motivation for Histoire de la folie suggests that he wanted to speak on behalf of the mad and madness. An often-heard interpretation is that Foucault, from the Renaissance until today, narrates the history of Western societies’ relation to and dealings with, a particular object: the mad. The book seemingly describes how the mad, during the Renaissance, lived in relative freedom among others and were thereafter increasingly marginalized as precarious or even dangerous objects that ought to be examined and treated. Foucault’s approach was supposedly to consider the history of repression from the perspective of the repressed. By taking this side or bringing forth the perspective of the objectified as an authentic subject, Foucault apparently seeks to annul the repression and open up communication. This interpretation is found with Anne Tardits and Jürgen Habermas, just as Jacques Derrida suggests it in his famous criticism of Histoire de la Folie.11 According to this reading, Foucault had “attempted – and this is the greatest

10 “Michel Foucault: An interview with Stephen Riggins” [1982], p. 123/“Une Interview de Michel Foucault par Stephen Riggins,” DE IV: 528–529. In an interview dating from 1975, in which the focus was more directly concerned with exploring the relationship between the formation of knowledge and the disciplinary form of power developed particularly in his College de France lecture course Pouvoir psychiatrique (Psychiatric Power) held in 1973–1974 (see last section in this chapter), but also in the concluding parts of the proceeding lecture course on La societé punitive (The Punitive Society) (cf. especially [LSP]: 201, 240–244), and finally in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) published in 1975 (see Chapter 5), Foucault gave a similar account on the personal genesis of Histoire de la folie when working at Saint-Anne: “Not being a doctor, I had no rights, but being a student and not a patient, I was free to wander. Thus, without ever having to exercise the power related to psychiatric knowledge [le pouvoir lié au savoir psychiatrique], I could nonetheless observe it all the time. I was a surface of contact between the patients, with whom I would talk, under the pretext of carrying out psychological tests, and the medical staff, who came by regularly to make decisions. This position, which was the result of chance, allowed me to see the surface of contact between the insane person and the power exercised over him, and I then attempted to render its historical formation.” “Les confessions de Michel Foucault,” interview with R.-P. Droit, Le Point (2004): 52–63, p. 55; translated by A. Beaulieu and R. Fillion in “Review Essay: Michel Foucault, History of Madness,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 74–89, pp. 76–77. 11 Cf. A. Tardits: “Partage, séparation, alienation” (1992), pp. 37–42. J. Habermas: Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985), pp. 279–283. The criticism by J. Derrida, originally brought in “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” was later published in Revue de métaphysique et morale, 1964, 3 and 4 and was included in the collection of articles L’écriture et la différence, pp. 50–69.

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Box 3.1

The complex lineage of Histoire de la folie

Histoire de la folie has its own complex history and textual lineage. The original, 673 (plus xi)-page-long edition was defended at the Sorbonne in May 1961 under the title Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Published in 2,000 copies by Plon shortly before the defense, this original edition contains an important preface, which is only here found in its full length. An appendix contains the most important historical documents analyzed in the dissertation, such as Louis XIV’s edict from 1657 in which he commands the construction of Hôspital Général in Paris. In 1964, a 308-page-long, heavily abridged version of the book was published in Collection 10/18, a branch of Plon exclusively distributing pocket-book editions. Here the original preface and only a number of chapters are included, but as strongly condensed versions. Initially, it states its aim as to retain chiefly “the passages concerning the sociological and historical aspects of the original study.” Despite Foucault disowning it, this edition was reprinted almost without changes in 1964 and 1972. Moreover, it came to form the basis of the English 1967 translation. In 1972, a more complete rendition of 583 pages was published in the Bibliothéques des Histoires series by Gallimard, which was to remain Foucault’s publisher for the rest of his life. Unlike the 10/18 edition, this new version, entitled Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, contained the full text. However, the original preface was replaced by a rather bland comment extending only two pages. In the new long edition two important appendices were added as well: first, “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” (“Madness, the Absence of Work”), an overall reflection on the book, which had previously been published as a journal article in La table ronde in 1964 and secondly, “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” (“My Body, This Paper, This Fire”), encompassing the reply Foucault made to Derrida’s criticism of the book on madness; entitled “Response à Derrida.” This text was also published in a slightly different form in the February 1972 issue of the Japanese journal Paideia. In addition, a widely read paperback version of the book was published in 1972 with Gallimard in the Tel Quel edition. This print had 585 pages and was without the two additional appendices; it was subsequently reprinted in 1976 and 1987. The English Travistock Publications edition from 1967, with the title Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, has since come out a number of times on Routledge. As mentioned, it represents a translation of the abridged French 1964 edition, including a few short additions. However, Routledge also brought a translation of the full text in 2006, edited by Jean Khalfa and translated by Jonathan Murphy. This translation also represents the most comprehensive edition of Foucault’s dissertation printed so far, including all the additional texts mentioned earlier.

merit but also the very impossibility of the book – to write a history of madness itself ... by letting it speak for itself.” Likewise, Foucault should have wanted madness to be the subject of his book in every sense of the word: its theme and its first-person narrator, its author, madness speaking about itself.”12 This critical reading suggests a problem of reference pertaining to the history of 12 J. Derrida: “Cogito et histoire de la folie” (1963), Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 68: 4, pp. 55–56; cf. also p. 61; our translation.

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madness. Following Derrida, it would not only be highly difficult to indicate who or what was actually speaking in the book but also even defining a language in which such a reference was possible. Who or what speaks when inciting an object to express itself – an object that has never been truly selfconscious, but rather repressed? How is such an object brought to articulate itself when it must speak using society’s stifling language? If one adheres to the interpretation given by Tardits, Habermas and Derrida, one must reflect on a crucial problem: Is it possible to arrive at a position beyond oppression and repression, perhaps by leaving behind or transforming the given society and its language? As Derrida sees it, Foucault attempts to circumvent this problem of reference by allowing Histoire de la folie to speak for those who have been silenced. It thus becomes a book that expresses the silence that occurs as a result of repression. Foucault lets madness speak, not directly, but indirectly through the book’s ambience or pathos. This is shown in the empathic understanding of the mad that comes across from between the lines; the repressed seem to return as a passion for a more just treatment of the mad.13 If this interpretation of Histoire de la folie is correct, it resembles the position held by the Frankfurt School. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer for instance claim that it is only possible to uphold a common narrative of an ongoing history of rationalization, progress and Enlightenment analysis in the Western societies to the extent that one overlooks and represses what made this history possible: an ongoing repression and obliteration of everything that does not fit into this story that forces it to return in the most abstruse ways.14 The authors then attempt to compensate by highlighting what has been repressed so as to emphasize the perversion of existence, which results from this loss. This promotes an exchange, which can reconcile the repressed and oppressor, thereby healing the gap. In this approach, a painful consciousness of loss motivates the re-actualization of the lost. In viewing Histoire de la folie as the history of repressing madness, it is also possible to associate it with Walter Benjamin’s famous historico-philosophical theses. History of effect is considered by Benjamin to be the history of the victor: it is at once the history of repressing the memory of that very concealment. An adequate approach to history must break with tradition, the given continuum and retain the horizon of possibility and expectation. As such, there should be “a secret agreement [Verabredung] between past generations* and the present one” because every current generation is expected to 13

“Fra en samtale med Foucault” [interview, January 1981], pp. 90–91. M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947)/Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (2001). 14

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realize the unfulfilled hopes of previous generations.15 However, the present is in danger of being crushed by the past, if this guilt is forced upon it, as Benjamin holds. It must manage the well-being of a huge and hidden past, a past that is all the more overwhelming because the hidden and the guilty are not delimited – it is the sum of what is repressed at any given time. At any given moment we are confronted with a demand for justifying everything that has been suppressed and repressed. Such a perspective is not absent in Histoire de la folie. Indeed, several passages point toward allowing the repressed object to come forth beyond moral repudiation. Already the first passages of the preface to the 1961 edition claim that we need “To recapture, in history, this degree zero of the history of madness, when it was undifferentiated experience, the still undivided experience of the division itself.” Later in the same preface Foucault points out that the work regards “a History not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in all its vivacity, before it is captured by knowledge.”16 Yet, if one pays attention to an important passage in L’archéologie du savoir, it seems clear that this was not the most important aim of Histoire de la folie. In 1969 Foucault therefore maintains that “there can be no question of interpreting discourse with a view to writing the history of the referent.” The important concern “is not trying to reconstitute what madness itself might be, in the form which first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, deaf, scarcely articulated experience.”17 In an interview from 1978 Foucault took a similar position when finding it “quite hilarious” that his book “had been equated with a work of ‘antipsychiatry’. ... I know several psychiatrists who ... regard it an apologia for the positive values of madness against psychiatric knowledge. Yet, there is absolutely no question of this in Histoire de la folie – you only have to read the book to see that.”18 In the first section of this Chapter 3, we will show how Foucault was not interested in writing the history of madness as such but rather in outlining how the function of madness in society changes over time. In view of that, Histoire

15

W. Benjamin: “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” [1940], p. 692/“On the Concept of History,” Thesis II, p. 390 16 “Preface” [1961], DE I: 159/HM: xxxii. 17 AS: 64/AK: 52. However, making this retrospective point Foucault also added a footnote to the quoted passage (i.e., to the words “scarcely articulated”), which read, “This is written against an explicit theme of Histoire de la folie, and one that recurs particularly in the preface.” AS: 64/AK: 52; translation modified. This comment demonstrates that Foucault – also according to his own judgment – was not without responsibility for the idea that madness should be the intrinsic subject of his dissertation, as suggested by Derrida. At the same time, therefore, the note may indicate why Foucault consequently chose to omit the original preface in later editions of his book about madness. 18 “Du pouvoir” [1978], p. 59/“On Power,” p. 96; translation modified.

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de la folie is a characterization of madness as a function within a historically changeable context, rather than an attempt at reconstructing marginalized madness as such.19 Hereby the book considers the border or rather the process of drawing a border, which according to Foucault embodies one of the most crucial identity-forming phenomena in Western history. The process is particularly perceptible in Foucault’s account of how a new cultural perception of madness emerged together with the rise of the great confinement in the 17th century and how the waning of this major social procedure for detaining the mad eventually gave way to the specialized institution known as the asylum, to the novel perception of madmen as the insane and to the reinterpretation of madness as the mental illness of modern times. As will become clear throughout the remaining sections of the chapter, Histoire de la folie can therefore also be read as the history of how the delineation of human reason became reliant on a particular distance to the unreason traditionally inhabiting madness and how this historical development could set up the territory for our modern experience of alienation to take its place. Toward the end, the exposition also illustrates how Foucault relates this comprehensive history to a particular tragic experience that seems to be a condition for the very thing called history. Yet, this is not the only way that the book touches on something beyond its immediate scope. In the last section of the chapter we show, on the one hand, how Foucault’s book was taken up by the movement of antipsychiatry, using it as a kind of historical justification for their radical and bellicose critique of the psychiatric institution in the 1960s and ‘70s and how Foucault, on the other hand, related to this reception, neither endorsing it nor rebuffing it but using it himself as another step or component in his diagnosis of the present.

19 See also the following statement given in an interview with Thomas Zummer under the title “Problematics” [November 1983]: “Sometimes people have read my book about madness as if I had written that madness does not exist, or that that madness was either a myth in medical or psychiatric discourse, or that is was a consequence of mental institutions. I have never said that madness does not exist, or that it is only a consequence of these institutions. That people are suffering, that people make trouble in society or in families, that is a reality. What I have tried to analyze are the ways these conditions, and the context in which this kind of suffering – delirium, persecution, etc. – are problematized as an illness, a mental illness, something which has to be cured inside such institutions and by such institutions. ... It is not a critical history which has as its aim to demonstrate that behind so-called knowledge there is only mythology, or perhaps nothing at all. My analysis is about the problematization of something which is real, but that problematization is something which is dependent on our knowledge, ideas, theories, techniques, social relations and economical processes. What I have tried to do is to analyze this kind of problematization as it conforms to the objectives which it presupposes” (p. 418).

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1

The relationship to madness

In Histoire de la folie, Foucault does not describe the history of madness as such but the history of a concern with the relationship to madness. This history extends from the end of the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance till the early 19th century. According to this long narrative, concern with the mad should, from the middle of the 15th century, gradually have replaced medieval fascination with death. In the broad cultural perception of this time, banishment of the mad began to emerge as a new problem of importance, allowing the age to relate to itself and its own limits through this issue. Banishment. Importantly, Foucault does not view this fascination with the mad as a sign of coexistence, tolerance, or open exchange between this group and the ordinary members of society. In the 14th and 15th centuries the mad were not tolerated but were instead generally exiled. They would often be expelled and left to roam, sometimes even sent away with passing ships.20 Nevertheless, such ships would travel between towns and settlements and the insane could therefore suddenly disembark and reappear as a problem when least expected. Consequently, the relationship to the mad was already at this time characterized by a certain traditional technique, which was that of banishment. The earliest historical sources speak of this as a social technique, for instance ostracizing in ancient Greece and the concept of the ‘outlaw’ in northern societies, by way of which social interaction in both cases was cleansed from the alien elements being identified as problems in one way or the other. While later incarceration resulted in the capture of these elements, banishment rather led to an actual and open-type removal. It placed the alien elements on the margins of society or almost among us, but without having any fixed position or location to call home. Conversely, the ship of fools created a metaphor of exclusion in the form of setting sail. By this procedure the mad left the well-known and secure ground so as to be taken by the uncertain element of flowing water. In the cultural perception there came about a mental image of the mad as casting off or as travelers. The mad were doomed to wander, but, at the same time, they were also a constant threat of something that could re- and disembark at any time and, by virtue of the disarray they caused, would haunt the members of society already settled. In banishing the mad, the community made clear that the mad were deviants. In doing this, society became constituted as a community too. However, the banishment only conceptualized the mad by way of a momentary ‘characterization,’ a transitory delineation that was not a final determination of 20

Cf. HF: 19/HM: 33.

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their nature. It was not an essential determination, which insisted that the mad had once and for all taken another route or taken up a different mode of being altogether. According to Foucault, banishment of the mad in the Renaissance rather suggested a mode of social existence, which experienced a crucial difference without inspiring any open dialogue that could remove the difference. Moreover, this tendency did not involve any set externality with a fixed identity. The two parties had not yet digressed into two separate identities. Banishment might have been a marginalization, but it was not yet a full segregation or a total differentiation. Banishment and embarkation did not thereby establish a stable, binary order of well-defined opposites. The mad merely left for another world, from which they could return, both in real terms and in the figure of the ship of fools. The mad were situated right on the border, wherefore Foucault speaks of “the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society.” Insofar as death had been at the center of the eschatological, medieval worldview, which was perceptible in the medieval characterizations of war, the plague and other catastrophes, mortality tended to speak persistently of the finality of man and the inherent temporality and vanity of the present world. During the Renaissance, by contrast, the mad inhabitants at the border of society became conspicuous as beings carrying a message from another world. Under these circumstances the mad person was perceived as “the Passenger par excellence, the prisoner of the passage ... his truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own.”21 As death before, it was now the mad who brought a message of the world’s emptiness, but not in the shape of an external, irrevocable conclusion. The emblem of the mad embarking on a ship of fools could acquire importance, as it permitted experience of the emptiness or nothingness of human existence from within as a modality of human existence. The mad and the ship of fools were fascinating in that they constituted a human liminal existence: a possible human mode of existence that must be avoided; all the while it presented a tempting opportunity between being and nothingness, which could disclose a higher truth about everyday human existence. As a mirror image of the human world, the ship of fools revealed that the world of humans was delimited and temporary, even though this awareness was defiant in the teeth of common sense. To the extent that people reflected their lives in the ship of fools, it became apparent that every person was on a fool’s errand. The picture of the ship suggested that common man deceived himself, as he deluded himself into thinking he was greater, cleverer, or more durable than he actually was. Eventually, this counter-image of the cultural perception indicated that common sense and human reason are based upon self-delusion, as they do 21

HF: 22/HM: 11.

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SOCIALITY

Banishment

MADNESS Figure 3.1

Banishment. Madness on the border of society

not know their true limits. At the end of the day, common sense might seem to share a basic characteristic with madness. To the extent that it lacks a sense of moderation and proves intemperate, it can mirror itself in the madness of madness. At this juncture, social existence and marginal existence became connected insofar as they mirrored each other across a boundary or a difference, such that they were able to reflect a truth about one another. This relationship suggested that madness did not belong in society, wherefore it should be banished; but it also demonstrated that madness would continuously return to haunt society and perception of human reason in new ways, so as to illustrate this truth. Foucault could therefore characterize the relationship between society and marginal existence as an ongoing, tragic battle, in which madness – by being banished precisely to the border – was constantly able to threaten and challenge the discourse of common sense by way of the ship of fools. Confinement. However, a key concern of Histoire de la folie is to reveal how the relationship with the mad as well as the perception of madness was fundamentally altered during the course of the Classical Age (c. 1550–1800), when the earlier social technique of banishment was eventually substituted by a novel procedure revolving around confinement. In 1659, the Sun King Louis XIV thus signed an edict regarding the construction of the Hôspital Général in Paris, with the immediate aim of collecting “beggars” and “vagrants” so as to avoid disorder, while at the same time providing for their subsistence and setting them to work.

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According to Foucault, this edict was important. Not only was it followed by a royal order commanding the construction of similar institutions in each French city; national differences notwithstanding, the 17th and the 18th centuries also saw efforts similar to the Hôpital Général in most of Europe.22 More specifically, Louis XIV’s edict was historically innovative insofar as it brought together or aggregated a wholly new group of people in a common administrative setting. Along with libertines, spendthrifts, epileptics, beggars, criminals, the poor and those with venereal diseases, the mad were now confined to a particular ‘place’ – and often under the same roof. Here all, in face of the differences relative to each other, could now be treated as one and the same category, that is, as elements that threatened to wreak havoc. However, to interpret the great confinement as an attempt only to eliminate the socially maladjusted would be an anachronistic interpretation. The different groups confined were not strangers to be incarcerated but people already known from the street. According to Foucault, the event did not preclude the idea of something alien; the “alien” was rather in the process of being constituted as a coherent entity through the very act of confining: “The gesture ... did not isolate strangers who had previously been invisible ... it created them [il en créait]. ... It called forth the Stranger where he had not previously been approached. In short, it may be said that this gesture created alienation.”23 Louis XIV’s edict signaled the start of a new social technique. As with banishment, confinement constituted a binary division, but ‘the Other’ was now forced to settle in a certain location for incarceration. Hereby it was possible to create a separate community of strangers that were no longer able to return to the common society as a challenge. The basis for a category of people who came across as fundamentally different from “us” was thereby created through the gesture of confinement. However, the social act of confinement not only gave rise to a new group of strangers by setting them aside from the rest society at a fixed location. The uniform procedure pertaining to the exercise of confining certain people also gave rise to a new kind of simplification, since epileptics, beggars, the poor, libertines and the syphilitic had all been treated differently before this.24 In Paris, those with venereal diseases had previously been admitted to the institution of Hôtel Dieu, while the mad were grouped together at their own special sites, or they were gathered on ships, as described earlier. The destitute and beggars were found everywhere in the town where private and religious organizations could care for them. However, when the great confinement aggregated all these different groups into one category by their mutual interning in one 22 23 24

HF: 59–67/HM: 52–62. HF: 94/HM: 80; translation modified. HF: 17–18, 98/HM: 7–8, 83–84.

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Confining

SOCIALITY The Great Confinement

Figure 3.2

Confinement. Madness beyond ‘ordinary’ society

and the same administrative setting, this gesture also gave rise to a new and basic difference in the social body. According to Foucault, this marginalization created the possibility of what would later be called the “asocial.”25 In the Renaissance, when banishment was still employed, the mad were sidelined; all the while they continued to appear as a challenge by seeming to intuit the proximity of a higher level of being. Conversely, the social gesture of confinement resulted in ‘ordinary’ society and the marginalized diverging into two distinctly opposed identities. When individuals suffering venereal diseases were included in the great confinement, it could be regarded as an expression of a social experience recognizing how sexually transmitted infections no longer had to be viewed as a necessary or existential condition. Rather, these were now considered an impurity, in the sense that the illness was the result of a questionable morality. Those who had transgressed, were isolated so as to be submitted a correction, the purpose of which was to subordinate and expel. A comprehensive moralization would reduce the marginalized to nothingness. Confinement thereby founded a sharp moral incision. The concepts of good and evil, as involved in an undetermined battle within a metaphysical totality, were replaced by a sharp and pitiless moral division, mirroring the very gesture of the great confinement. In a universe such as this, the border is given a completely different role. The Renaissance established the marginalized to roam precisely on the border of society as a challenge. In the Classical Age, the great confinement brought about a marginalization of the general un-reason of previous ages, so that this

25

HF: 94–96/HM: 79–81.

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matter could now only occur on the other side of the common sociality as its antipole. A relative and floating boundary was replaced with an absolute break. The asylum and the humanization of psychiatry. In Histoire de la folie, Foucault continues his narrative by carefully explaining not how this sharp social border disappeared in the period following the abolition of the great confinement as a general social technique but how the border gradually changed character. At the end of the 18th century, internment became untenable, since it was criticized for confounding very heterogeneous groups.26 Madness and crimes against the public order were for instance equated less and less during this century. For this reason mental asylums and prisons were gradually separated. Certainly, the great confinement had its time; it spread during the 1600s but was finally abandoned around 1800. This development was often understood as being in complete correspondence with the great movement for liberation that culminated with the French Revolution. Indeed, the narrative of freedom has been repeated many times since. Initially, all others than the mad were released from the confines of internment, since these issues became the concern of other social techniques. Other than the mad, only certain kinds of criminal remained incarcerated, the treatment of which Foucault later covered in Surveillier et punir (1975). The mad however experienced a different liberation within the confines of a specific institution. The asylum now came across as a protected location, where the mad were allowed to express their true nature, such that they could be examined and treated. According to Foucault, the internment of the mad that was first put into work by the gesture of the great confinement thus became restructured and reorganized in the shape of the asylum. This process of institutional differentiation has often been seen as stemming from a humanization of treatment, which abolished the foregoing psychical and often violent repression of the mad. However, it was also viewed as a particular recognition of the unique characters involved in this madness. This was very much the narrative given by psychiatric institutions when Foucault worked at Sainte-Anne. Such conceptions have also been retained in the stereotypical representation of the great physician and psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), who unlocked the manacles of the mad.27 Indeed, this was done at the Bicêtre Hospital (managed by Pinel during the French Revolution), which had become the primary institution for incarcerating the mad. He was convinced that 26

HF: 422, 123/HM: 401, 107. Cf. e.g. D.B. Weiner: “Le geste de Pinel: The History of a Psychiatric Myth,” in: M. Micale and R. Porter (eds.): Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 231–247. 27

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treatments did not work because the mad were refused fresh air and freedom. When they were permitted to act in a manner that was no longer contorted by repression that resulted in uncontrollable fits of rage, a new kind of objectivity became possible. Unchaining the mad allowed madness to freely express itself, not only making it possible to observe its true and undisturbed signs and symptoms but also making it possible to recognize, compare and discriminate which of these was the most characteristic in order to classify madness in its most basic forms.28 The ideas that formed the basis of this approach have also been preserved in the images of William Tuke’s (1732–1822) The Retreat, which was a property developed around 1800 near York for insane members of the Quaker sect. This early asylum was located in the countryside and supposedly resembled a large farm. When the insane lived in such peaceful settings and entered into safe, almost family-like relations, they soon lost their rage and found themselves once again.29 Such illustrations exhibit the idea of a univocal liberation from repression. This development also resulted in more precise classifications, insofar as it prevented confusion of the mad with various other groups in the great confinement. It paved the way for new opportunities for the mad to express their special character in a natural environment. The mad were thereby allowed to speak for themselves beyond the conditions of repression. Releasing the mad from the chains within the confines of the asylum was associated with a new understanding of their conditions. It was now possible to study a new subject, which in return resulted in a new kind of objectivity in dealing with and understanding the inherent character of madness. In extension of this reform movement, a new medical science came into being that sought to identify the natural laws of madness, through which it would become possible to heal the ill. In the very beginning of the 19th century, this science was given the name “Psychiaterie,” soon to be renamed as psychiatry.30 Here the mad, liberated from the abusive psychical constraints of before, were made the object of knowledge all the while they were treated as mentally ill. The asylum became the innovative institution in which the mad were now

28

Ph. Pinel: Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, ou la Manie (Paris, Richard, Caille et Ravier, 1801). This first edition of the book is an older translation by D. D. Davis under the title: Treatise on Insanity, in which are Contained the Principles of a New and More Practical Nosology of Maniacal Disorders than has yet been offered to the Public (Sheffield, W. Todd, 1806). The second edition of Pinel’s book has recently been published in a much more concise translation by G. Hickish, D. Healy, and L. C. Charland, entitled Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation, Second Edition, Entirely Reworked and Extensively Expanded (1809) (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 29 HF: 483–501/HM: 488–492. 30 Cf. J.C. Reil and J.C. Hoffbauer: Beyträge zur Beförderung einer Kurmethode auf psychischem Wege (Halle, Curt, 1808), pp. 167–170.

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admitted in accordance with this new pathological status or identity. Here they were enabled to express their madness as mental illness, in order that they could be recognized as who they really were and treated in the best possible manner. Psychiatric moralizing with a potential for human liberation. However, such a narrative of emancipation is too simple because it cannot identify the new conditions that madness had been woven into during the process that gave birth to the asylum. Since the antecedent ideas determined how madness could be expressed, they had already set the implicit conditions for beginning to conceive of madness as a mental illness. In Histoire de la folie, Foucault thus brings an internal restructuring of the confinement into focus, which ascribed this well-established social technique a new set of functions. The concern was no longer merely to manifest the difference of morality by excluding and correcting. Foucault claims that this internal restructuring had begun already in the earlier 18th century and constituted the precondition for the treatment of the mad and the new medical science to interact. This connection, he also asserts, would not have been possible for the foregoing conceptions of confinement and classical medicine. The 18th century still saw the use of age-old medical procedures toward the mad; their incoherent and uncontrollable activities were limited by strapping down and manacles. Efforts were made to remove the degeneracy by seeing through various internal and external cleansing procedures, such as bleeding and force-feeding of various bitter or sour substances, such as vinegar. The purpose of this was to create a natural equilibrium, which was also attained by the immersion of the mad into various liquids. As time passed, however, these approaches lost their status as universal treatments that delineate the ailment and force the insane back to the external world. According to Foucault, they became instead techniques that had specific areas of application in force of having an effect on the inner logic of the particular disturbance. They became differentiated approaches that depended on the individual pattern of reaction. The procedures were therefore no longer manifestations of a morality, which sought to apply a positive truth – show to the insane that he had deviated from that truth, exhibit his nothingness, and bring him back to the real world. The techniques began to function as sanctions that determined how the treated related to surroundings and acted, so as to correct them. Rather than manifesting a morality, which had the shape of an immediate correction and restitution, what began to emerge was a more diversified punishment that had a moralizing effect.31 The punishing procedures that had a direct and immediate effect on the body, but which aimed at the soul, were ultimately meant such 31

HF: 522–523/HM: 502–503.

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Confining

Moralizing

SOCIALITY

Reintegrating

Figure 3.3

Moralizing. Madness is reintegrated into society

that the treated not only felt the mistake of the mind but also internalized the punishment in a consciousness of own deviancy and insufficiency. Where the mad had previously been excluded and limited in their actions through force, they were now integrated – all the while an attempt was made at internalizing a consciousness about their own insufficient existence.32 According to Foucault, it is on the basis of such moralization that one can identify a more humane approach to the treatment of the mad and recognition of their unique character. The arrival of a psychiatric science and melioration of treatment was a far more complex phenomenon than suggested by the images of Pinel and Tuke liberating the mad. In the newly staged and apparently just framework, physical force was replaced by more subtle guiding mechanisms. Foucault recounts how Tuke’s refuge sought to introduce a new gaze that did not contain any reciprocity but rather took the form of a one-sided surveillance of the inmates. Tuke would often invite inmates to “tea parties” where the guests were asked to wear their best clothes and compete with each other in blameless behavior, under supervision. These evenings would often develop harmoniously to everybody’s satisfaction, since the participants worked especially hard to control their particular inclinations. The mad were invited to partake in an environment where everything was immediate and obvious but likewise alien to the participants. They were then asked to assume this alien behavior all the while they had to navigate the unknown under a supervisory gaze. This gaze constantly evaluated their immediate behavior in regard to accepted norms and in return judged any deviation or correspondence revealed. Tuke’s liberation and humane treatment of the mad did not release them as subjects with whom one could have a dialogue. While the inmates were no longer marked by moral condemnation, they mere made the objects of an evaluation, which took its outset in standards 32

HF: 501/HM: 481.

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beyond their immediate lives.33 In Foucault’s reading of Tuke’s accomplishments at The Retreat, it was therefore true that “the asylum no longer sanctioned the guilt of the madmen; but it did more, it organized it; it organized it for the madman as self-consciousness, and as a nonreciprocal relation with his attendant; it organized it for the man of reason as a consciousness of the other, and as a therapeutic intervention into the existence of the madman.”34 Accordingly, the background for an increasingly humane treatment of the mad, indeed letting the mad speak and attain self-understanding as mad, was on closer inspection related to a consciousness of own superiority. In place of physical force, we therefore find that an evaluating and correcting gaze from the staff was now often sufficient to calm the inmates and mark the obvious distance that made it possible to recognize madness. As the environment was adapted according to the new guidelines and the patients were submitted to more surveillance, they were likewise submitted to a new and seemingly obvious authority. The novel approach to incarceration seemed more efficient, because adapting the surroundings and introducing supervision resulted in those being watched incorporating the external and evaluating gaze. They internalized the constant attention of the others’ superiority and their own deviation from the standards given by the sane. The internalized consciousness of own insufficiency and effort to remove this deficiency resulted in the mad taking up a new selfcensuring and self-controlling behavior. According to Foucault it is important to understand these new dimensions of the asylum in seeking to develop a more comprehensive conception of the institution and its novel approach, rather than focusing on the stereotypical liberation narrative normally given. The asylum was a new institution in which the mad were differentiated from the rest, but it was only able to do this through an internal, spatial reorganization of the asylum, which permitted the creation of an artificial environment, where the mad were included in a moralizing movement. This installed a self-moderating consciousness of guilt, which could lead them back on track. The asylum was a moralizing space wherein knowledge was organized and attained about insufficient and guilty individuals. In the special psychiatric hospital – the asylum – it became clear that madness was no longer in any direct relation to a true existence. It was not even an obvious mistake that must be corrected. The insane only related to truth via

33 In Histoire de la folie, Foucault therefore precludes certain descriptions given in Surveiller et punir, regarding how the internalizing and moralizing gaze of discipline and surveillance becomes more widespread during the 19th century. This will be treated in Chapter 5. 34 HF: 505/HM: 485; translation modified.

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the discipline and morality enforced upon them by the doctor in the artificial environment of the hospital clinic. This forced them to submit and control themselves. It was this improvement that revealed the truth about the mad in general. The external gaze directed at the mad, and which they took upon themselves, contained a new narrative about madness. The mad internalized a consciousness about his or her own state as something not only alien to society but also to the self. When actions and speech manifested madness, it was no longer possible to conceive of them as belonging to the community. They then needed to be analyzed as an expression of a foreign determination, which manifests itself. Since the mad were increasingly conceived as carrying an illness that could be treated, they were likewise identified as alienated. Their deranged actions illustrated an objective and recognizable logic, which likewise made them different to themselves and others. It was exactly through the strangeness of their actions that the mad represented something beyond and indicated that their truth was another. Since madness was taking on the character of degeneration in comparison with ordinary human behavior, it automatically pointed toward and demanded a kind of progress that could be brought about by neutralizing it. Madness was therefore in the process of becoming a historical phenomenon, which constituted the opposite of – all the while indicating the necessity of – ongoing human progress.35 When a person went mad, man or humanity was alienated from itself. However, it simultaneously indicated the necessity of man returning to his humanity in a new and improved way. A complex truth. Foucault therefore finds the traditional narrative of liberation to be misleading because it is only a half-truth. This story informs us of how a dual process of autonomization and liberation of the mad makes it possible to treat them as mad and recognize them as such. Likewise, it also disregards the wider context, which makes such autonomization and liberation possible and acceptable. The precondition is, according to Foucault, that yet another and double marginalization is added: “It was as though a new exclusion was developing within the old, as though this new exile was necessary for madness to find its place, to be on a level footing with itself at last.”36 Liberating the mad within the confines of the asylum was not true liberation as an acting subject. The repeated marginalization and objectifying examinations increased the distance between the mad and society. The mad seemed as objects that had a

35 36

HF: 349–397/HM: 328–376. HF: 406–407/HM: 383.

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right to express themselves, but only in regard to an absolute, scientific subject, which saw itself as a pure and unhindered gaze beyond madness. All the while, greater liberation only became possible in force of ever more hidden moralization; this took the place of physical repression, which had previously marked the mad as insufficient. As if replacing the physical manacles, the doctor – via scientific language and the clinical gaze – made the mad internalize his own consciousness of the mad as an alienated deviant that differed from true humanity. The mad now came across as abnormal, since mental illness was inherently different from a healthy and natural state. In modern psychiatry, the mad qua mad were marginalized such that they no longer came across as a challenge and could therefore be treated accordingly. Foucault points out how the mad, in extension of this development, have since been able to “enter a technical region that is increasingly well controlled: in hospitals, pharmacology has already transformed the rooms of the restless into great tepid aquariums.”37

2

The absence of a border

A closer reading of Histoire de la folie reveals the lack of any strict and determined conception of ‘madness’, which would allow Foucault to trace the history of madness in and of itself, as suggested by Derrida.38 Nowhere does Foucault define any such a- or super-historical meanings. As Barthes suggested upon a reading of the work, Foucault seems quite conscious of madness not being “the object of knowledge, whose history must be rediscovered ... instead madness is nothing but this knowledge itself ... it is a variable and perhaps heterogeneous meaning.”39 Madness as a border. The instance allowing for a history of madness across time and space is not that madness has a given object of reference but that it is what Barthes designated a “functional reality” within a social constellation. Madness may be traced because it is a trans-historical structure that makes possible a certain effect and which can point out various social entities as actors that are suitable for taking up such a role. Blanchot is therefore correct in maintaining that Foucault’s primary aim is “the division [le partage] ... or the exclusion [l’exclusion] – and not what one excludes or divides.”40 Madness is constituted first as a trans-historical structure with a certain function in force of a particular boundary that shapes social interaction. 37 38 39 40

“La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” [1964], DE I: 420/HM: 549. J. Derrida: “Cogito et histoire de la folie” (1963), p. 66. R. Barthes: “Savoir et folie,” Critique, vol. 17 (1961), p. 916. M. Blanchot: Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (1986), 12.

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Foucault is thus well aware of the fact that the time period preceding the starting point of his narrative was not characterized by any original unity – there were merely other boundaries. At the same time, he is conscious that the mad in the Renaissance only existed as a group that could take up a central role in the consciousness of that time in force of a boundary and the marginal existence they could thus maintain. In this light, what was introduced in the Classical Age was above all another type of marginalization, which bypassed the former marginal form of existence by way of establishing a radical break between two diametrically opposed entities. Finally, it was through yet another marginalization that the mad were recognized as a group at the beginning of modernity. Emerging here as an isolated entity in unique opposition to the rest of society, marginalization had now become so absolute that the mad were no longer experienced as a challenge and a temptation. Instead this group was now so securely externalized within the confines of the asylum that they could be examined at a distance. The mad were now those whose marginal existence in the common society was of no importance for carrying out the examination of the logic expressed in their madness. Histoire de la folie therefore constantly exhibits an accentuated consciousness of boundaries and limits. Instead of following Tardits’, Habermas’s and Derrida’s readings of the book as a history of the marginalized, it therefore seems more prudent to characterize Histoire de la folie as a history of margins – more significantly a historical analysis of how the borders between society and the excluded came into being. Not before writing a history of the constitutions of margins and social borders does it become truly possible to write a history of the marginalized and excluded. Madness and reason. Since Histoire de la folie sketches the history of madness by following the development of borders and boundaries, it is not only a history of what was excluded in this process but also a history of what it was that was in the process of excluding madness. In Foucault’s account, Western societies have tended to bundle up or even congregate the greater part of what is experienced as the opposite of madness under the concept of “reason.” We have learned to experience and recognize madness as unreason and irrationality. When Foucault traces the history of madness from the Renaissance to the time of the French Revolution, he therefore also gives indirect access to an alternative history of reason. The history of madness provides the contours of the history of Western rationality by bringing attention to the outlines of rationality over and against the excluded. Circuitously, the book raises the issue of how core traits of modern society are founded on the border between reason and madness. A history that draws attention to how society is in a certain sense constituted inside or rather on the border, considers reason and madness in

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accordance with Barthes’ aforementioned notion of “functional realities,” or in the role of what Foucault later designated a “transactional reality” [réalité de transaction], correlating different entities to act within a wider context.41 Reason and madness are opposing concepts that refer to and mirror each other. The nature of madness and the mad cannot be determined without reference to the very reason from which they are excluded and against which they act. On the other hand, common sense and reason only attain their content by reflecting madness, from which they are distinguished. Through this act of dividing they are shown what they are not. A structural determination of “un-reason [dé-raison],” or the opposite of reason, allows Foucault to examine this through an extended historical development. In the same manner, a determination of madness as a certain structural content of unreason – a content where the insane function as an opposite of reason – permits emphasis on this concept across various historical ruptures. While the insane can be understood as merely non-rational, or that which differs from reason, madness denotes the unreason that is the opposite of reason and which it may mirror.42 In Histoire de la folie, Foucault demonstrates how rationality’s relation with madness was slowly transformed up through modern times. The book begins with Renaissance reason, which banished its opposite, such that reason and madness mutually challenged each other. Such reason is still found in Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) Essais. Montaigne’s moderate skepticism did not allow the possibility of condemning madness, since it was still a very real possibility that madness was present in every thought. It could still appear as a companion on the road of thought. The presence of madness could result in the categorical rejection of something as absolutely wrong or impossible, or

41

[NP]: 301/{BP}: 297. The notion of dé-raison was not only part of the title of the first version of Histoire de la folie. It was also the division between reason and unreason implied in the notion that had been important for Foucault’s earliest work on the history of madness. In a letter from 1957 regarding a first draft of the book, addressed to the Swedish specialist in the history of ideas and the history of science Stirn Lindroth, who had responded critically to the manuscript, Foucault admitted that he had not been able to define his general project, which was “not to write a history about the development of psychiatric science.” Rather the aim was to write “a history concerning the social, moral, imaginative context in which this science evolved. Because it seems to me that up until the 19th century, not to say up till the present day, no objective science about madness was possible, but only the formulation, in the terms of scientific analogy, of a certain experience (moral, social, etc.) of Unreason [Déraison]. In a way such as this – not very objective, not very scientific, not very historical – [I attempted] to approach the question. But maybe this project is absurd and doomed already in advance.” “Lettre de Michel Foucault à Stirn Lindroth, le 10 auôt 1957”; our translation. 42

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completely lacking truth, whereby it could come to view its own relative and limited perspective as absolute.43 The next step in the book is concerned with reason as it appears around the time of the great confinement in the Classical Age, at which time it swiftly excluded its opposite by rejecting the irrational out of hand. Foucault first finds a structural analogy to such rationality in René Descartes’ (1596–1650) Meditations de prima philosophia, which was first printed in 1641, that is, shortly before Louis XIV’s edict regarding the construction of the Hôpital Général.44 Here madness occurs already on the first pages, describing the journey toward certain knowledge, which was set about by Descartes’ methodological doubt. It appears along with the sensory apparatus and dreams as a possible source of error. Just as sensory phenomena and dreams, madness can instill ideas that on the face of things appear credible but that on closer inspection turn out to be faulty. In unison, these sources of ideational error and wrong conceptions force us to accept the necessity of doubting even the apparently secure and incontrovertible. While the challenge from sensory experience and dreams can be included in the meditation because they are sources of illusion, which point toward a remnant of truth, Descartes treats madness in a fundamentally different way. It is included in passing only to be rejected as a source of any cognition. The philosopher is able to identify with the victim of sensory and dream-related illusion in finding a reason to doubt these and instead locates a deeper truth that is not in doubt, since it was the precondition for the possibility of illusion. Over and against this, madness appears as something that thought cannot enter into, already at the beginning of the metaphysical meditations.45 Madness does not appear as a form of existence that can be taken 43

HF: 57–58/HM: 45–46. “The natural, original distemper of Man is presumption. Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures and, moreover, the most given to pride. This creature knows and sees that he is lodged down here, among the mire and the shit of the world, bound and nailed to the deadest, most stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest storey of the building, the farthest from the vault of heaven; his characteristics place him in the third and lowest category of animate creatures, yet, in thought, he sets himself above the circle of the Moon, bringing the very heavens under his feet” (Montaigne, Essays, trans. M.A. Screech, Book 2, Chapter XII, 505; cf. HM: 32). 44 HF: 56–59/HM: 44–47. 45 This immediate rejection comes about in the following section found early in the first meditation of R. Descartes Meditations de prima philosophia (1644): “And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense [Fr. insensez; Lat. insanus], whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass. But they are mad [Fr. fous; Lat. demens], and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant” (Trans. E. S. Haldane, 1911; MPPh [1644], p. 8).

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up in order to attain a deeper understanding of the everyday world. Rather, it surfaces a fundamental yet impossible eventuality that thought must reject from the very outset, immediately conscious of its difference, in order to attain validity. One cannot think and be mad at the same time, since the mad are those caught up in unreason. The mad are by definition “the Others.” Around the time when Pinel and Tuke release the mad, we find a movement toward a rationality that appears far more tolerant toward its opposite, since it no longer figures as a radical challenge. Foucault described the rise of a comprehensive, modern, dialectical and human type of reason, which was able to lose itself in anything that appeared alien – only to reassert itself there in an ever more self-certain and inclusive manner. Hegel’s dialectical reasoning may be seen as a classical representative of this turn. Inclusive dialectical reasoning may be seen as culminating in Hegel’s statement in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History that “the actual working of [God’s] government – the carrying out of his plan – is the history of the world” and that “in the pure light of this divine idea” of “the illusion that the world is a mad or foolish happening disappears.”46 Hegel sees it as an important aim for reason to expose itself to and contemplate the alien, but with the certainty that this will dissolve and once more point toward reason. Foucault therefore suggests that while it at first sight seems an inclusive approach to madness, it risks devolving into a monolithic evaluation from above as a result of its own irreproachable selfcertainty. Madness is therefore not permitted to express itself as a subject but is only included on the condition that it is comprehended with the objectifying gaze of reason. Delimitation and alienation: A basic condition. Foucault points out how the exclusive relation between reason and madness is established at the beginning of the modern era. His account of the border, which delimits madness and reason, does not primarily center on breaks and ruptures but has the character of a continuous development. First and foremost, Histoire de la folie is concerned with the gradual, tardy transformation of that very delimitation. It depicts how contrasts that challenge each other develop from antagonistic counterparts to strictly separated opposites, until finally their mutual distance proves so great that any relationship between them becomes invisible. It shows a slow transformation and gradual intensification of the border that – in retrospect – results in it attaining the character of a discontinuity or, basically, a rupture. Concerned with a delimitation that ultimately develops an abyss so insurmountable that those whom society reflects itself in are no longer experienced as part of humanity, Histoire de la folie is therefore also a study of an ongoing 46 G.W.F. Hegel: The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario, Batoche Books, 2001), p. 51; translation modified.

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social alienation, and Foucault’s first major work sheds light on an important question: by what means is something that presented itself as an opposite no longer experienced as an immediate challenge but as a representative of an alien, non-human logic, as imbedded in a complete differentiation between society and that which is external to society – those who are the absolutely “asocial.”47 However, it is a central point of the book that the rejected, upon closer inspection, are shown to cohere with society in force of the reciprocity. This becomes obvious when Foucault contrasts the modern opposition between reason and madness with other historically relevant delimitations.48 Both in the preface to the first edition of Histoire de la folie from 1961 and in the later commentary to the book entitled “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre,” first published in 1964, Foucault compares the modern European relationship to madness with the classical Greek relationship to hubris – a term traditionally used to signify ‘wanton violence’, arising from the pride of strength or from passion, or ‘insolence’, but also ‘an outrage’, both in a concrete and in a more abstract sense.49 By this notion the Greeks apparently related to a lack of 47 The ongoing history within Histoire de la folie could therefore be written under the impression of the 20th-century experiences of concentration camps and gulags. Foucault seeks to understand how individual societal groups could be experienced as expressing a logic so asocial as to warrant extermination without those initiating such extermination coming to question their own humanity. 48 At the outset of the historical explanation found in Histoire de la folie, Foucault describes how the lepers played a similar role in medieval society as the one given to the mad later on (HF: 13–24/HM: 3–8). The High Middle Ages saw a great number of people stricken with a disease that manifested itself as rashes, sores, abscesses, deformation of the fingers and bones and slow decay that finally resulted in death. This group of lepers was cut off from usual social contact, since they – especially from the 1200s till the middle of the 1400s – were increasingly isolated and confined to hospitals. In 1266 there were 2,000 lepers in France alone. Although these were separated and expelled from society, since they were considered “unclean” and “living dead,” the illness was also viewed as an earthly purgatory that not only expressed God’s anger but also love since the afflicted were brought closer to heavenly salvation. From the middle of the 1300s these leper colonies were disbanded. According to Foucault, this was because the isolation made possible by seclusion and contact was broken with the Middle Eastern areas of contagion following the end of the crusades around 1300. However, medieval societies were constituted by the distance created with and the reflection in the lepers, just as later societies did in regard to the mad. Foucault notes how the “structures still remained” and three hundred years later, although the leper and leprosy disappears: “The forms this exclusion took would continue, in a radically different culture and with new meaning, but remaining essentially the major form of rigorous division, at the same time social exclusion and spiritual reintegration” (HF: 16/HM: 6). What Foucault seems to imply by this historical parallel is the necessity of understanding this pattern in order to comprehend the Middle Ages and its relationship to the lepers, just as one must understand the whole structure if one wishes to understand modern society and its relationship to the mad. 49 Liddell and Scott: A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v.

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moderation when they defined the limits for acceptable behavior and common sense. Hubris appeared as the basic format of unreason that was to be avoided (if this was even possible). This was done by taking up a sound and moderate healthy mindedness (sophrosyne), which was exhibited in sensible speech (logos) as cool-headed, virtuous, and excellent behavior (arēte). This position is found in the condemnatory descriptions of Thrasymachus and Callicles in Plato’s dialogues The Republic and Gorgias from the 4th century BC. The dialogues not only show how power-ideology argues for elevating the strong above the circumstances into which he enters, but also how the strong bombastically promotes himself without further consideration. Individuals who do not know themselves and their limits not only manage their own life poorly but also risk corruption, dragging others down with them. Although the Greeks thus distanced themselves from excessive behavior, in that it constituted an ongoing threat that must be condemned, Foucault does not interpret them as being completely disjoined from it. Rather “the Greeks were not distant from hubris because they condemned it, but rather were in the distance of that excess, in the midst of the distance at which they kept it confined.”50 In this respect, the Greeks were constantly related to a challenge, an ongoing encounter, which they could not ignore once they had identified it. Plato equally marks this fascination with frivolous temptation that must constantly be removed through incantation in the mentioned dialogues. In a parallel manner, Foucault argues that it is not that the modern Western man has been located “distant from madness, but that we were in the distance of madness.” Through all of the period described by Foucault, we have been in a “deep and pathos-filled relationship” to madness that we have not been able to untie ourselves from. In this regard, we have in madness, like the Greek relationship to the lack of moderation pertaining to hubris, experienced the “most vivid of all our dangers, and perhaps our closest truth.”51 The ambivalent relationship to hubris, logos, and mania – at once both release and perdition – gave Greek thought its depth and width. Likewise and according to Foucault, the difference and relationship with madness has given modern reason and the humane person its width, depth, height, and content. However, reciprocity was far more obvious in the relationship to hubris found in antiquity. The ancient Greek dialogue with the rejected threat continued and did not result in an objective and distanced monologue about it. This became the case in modern scientific discourse about madness as mental illness. However, the Greek idea regarding a lack of moderation did demark unreason, since it constituted a constant ‘threat’ and challenge to rational discourse and sophrosyne. Unlike with modern madness, hubris was not designated as a 50 51

“La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” [1964], DE I: 577/HM: 543. “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” [1964], DE I: 576/HM: 543.

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predetermined and rejected ‘opposition’ to reason and logos, as was later the case for unreason over and against madness. Hubris marked a distinction from ordinary human existence, yet not a total alienation in the modern sense of the word, but a possible disparity that a human must constantly address. Foucault could thus recapitulate the difference by noting: “The Greek Logos had no opposite.”52 In this it is also implied that the Greek experience of injudiciousness in hubris was not because one could place unreason, madness, and a person with mental illness into the distinct and stable category of modern alienation. Without abolishing the obvious difference between reason and unreason, the Greek experience was concerned with a recurrent, antagonistic estrangement that was impossible to observe at a safe distance, as it became a matter of course with the birth of the asylum and the medical discipline of psychiatry at the turn of the 18th century.

3

A complex contemporaneity

Internalized insanity. The history of madness tells the story of how a ‘humane’ reason, centered upon man, came about. Man’s development through progress becomes a core issue in this regard. This concerns an externalizing movement, through which man and reason unfold and become relevant via oppositions that seem extremely alien to this very reason. This happens in an opposition – especially in terms of unreason (deraison) as madness ( folie) – that finally and of its own accord refers to man and his humane reason. These oppositions have an inherent tendency to transcend their own existence and point toward the reason within man, which in return contains an internalizing movement. Human reason is tested by everything alien but obviously and constantly passes the ordeal by this being annulled within human reason. Modern humane reason comes about in a movement, which is at once externalizing and internalizing – a constantly annulling and reintegrating movement.53 According to Foucault, it was not least this reciprocated movement that from the beginning of the 19th century made psychiatry possible as a science about human madness and insanity. In a distanced manner, this specialized medical discipline became able to determine the alien expression of the madness, viewing it as representing the logic of a disease, which in itself was open to rational explanation.

52

“Préface,” DE I: 160/HM: xxix. In “La folie l’absence d‘œuvre” [1964], Foucault emphasizes “homo dialecticus – that being of the outset, of the return and of time itself, the animal that loses its truth and finds it again illuminated, a stranger to himself who becomes familiar once more” (HM: 543). 53

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Madness as an absence of work. All the while madness and insanity became comprehensible as mental illnesses that were to be treated and – in the favorable cases – cured with the aid of psychiatry and its institutions, madness also emerged in a different form. This alternative form recurs in artistic, poetic, and philosophical experience as expressed by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Donatien-Alphonse François de Sade (1740–1814) to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Gérard de Nerval (1808–18–55), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and Antonin Artaud (1896–1948).54 It is the experience of madness that the poet, artist, or philosopher is able to approach and which he constantly risks losing himself in. This happened for most of those mentioned here, and to an extent that it finally became impossible for them to function within their fields; in such cases, the artist finally left the human world behind and gave in to and secluded himself in an experiential and immediate insanity. He simply went mad. What Foucault therefore finds in this context is an alternative experience of madness that is located on the border of reason and society, as it constantly tends toward losing itself in a madness that places the afflicted radically beyond human society and reason. As can be seen in the title of the first appendix to the Bibliothèque des Histoiresedition of Histoire de la folie “La folie, l’absence d‘œuvre,” such madness indicates the impossibility of creating a work of art or a similar object that transcends the passage of time and attains permanence. Madness has the character of a radical “absence of an œuvre,” of a radical non-productivity. That madness – unlike before – cannot appear as a permanence in writing and speech is, according to Foucault, epitomized in the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Classical Freudian psychoanalysis seeks to bring repressed memories up to the surface, wherefore madness is here ascribed a sinister nonlanguage. It can only come forth and be understood as dark language to the extent that it can be spoken, but in that very moment, madness disappears as an independent entity or object about which one can speak. It turns out to be nothing. “Since Freud,” Foucault summarized this aspect of the history of madness, “Western madness has become a non-language because it has become a double language (a language which only exists in this speech, a speech that says nothing but its language) – i.e. a matrix of the language which, strictly speaking, says nothing. A fold of the spoken which is an absence of work.”55

54

HF: 397, 264, 371–372/ HM: 377, 246, 351–352. “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” [1964], DE I: 580/HM: 547. Foucault furthermore points out that madness cannot be comprehended in itself and cannot be rehabilitated directly, all the while he gives a simple overview of historical developments in the following passage from an interview from the same year as Histoire de la folie: “Thus, one can say that in the Middle Ages, then in the Renaissance, madness was present on the social horizon as 55

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An ambiguous experience. The outset for Histoire de la folie is the simultaneous experience of madness taking the shape of a domesticated insanity that must be understood and – if or when possible – cured, but also an alluring marginal experience that cannot be comprehended in and of itself. This latter conception, however, could only be presented as a raging insanity beyond the usual human world. According to Foucault’s account, the history madness presented here is only possible at a time when this experience still forms a relatively obvious starting point, all the while this outset is challenged. The described experience is therefore already ambiguous. The contemporary experience of madness exists as a tension between madness-as-mental-illness and madnessas-an-absence-of-work that shakes the foundation of the former determination of madness. The contemporary experience of madness is therefore even more ambiguous, transitory, and uncompleted. It already points onwards, toward its own determinate transcendence, also furthered by historical investigations. As can be seen in the quote from the original preface, Histoire de la folie is probably an examination of madness, rather than an examination of psychiatry, because it concerns a more basic level, which makes this kind of knowledge and its related science possible to begin with. However, it is not an examination of madness in and of itself. As it becomes clear from the continuation of the passage: “Any perception that aims to apprehend the pain and words of madness ... in their wild state necessarily belongs to a world that has captured them already. The liberty of madness can only be heard from the heights of the fortress in which it is imprisoned.”56 Accordingly, the actual or genuine object of a history of madness is the very “structure,” which makes it possible to understand madness in and of itself and which results in madness attaining an uncertain character. “To write the history of madness will therefore mean making a structural study of the historical ensemble – notions, institutions, juridical and police measures, scientific concepts – which hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted.”57 The history of madness clarifies a historical connection that results in the exchange between madness and reason taking on a certain form, where madness may come into sight but where its unreason cannot be retained as having a lasting influence on this world. Madness constantly slips between our fingers and stands out as an absence of œuvre and productivity.

an aesthetic or daily fact; then in the seventeenth century – starting with confinement – madness experienced a period of silence, exclusion. ... Finally, the twentieth century gets a handle on madness, reduces it to a natural phenomenon, linked to the truth of the world.” “La folie n‘existe que dans une société” [1961], DE I: 169/”Madness Only Exists in Society,” pp. 7–8. 56 “Preface” [1961], DE I: 164/HM: xxxii. 57 “Preface” [1961], DE I: 164/HM: xxxiii.

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History and tragedy. The state, within which history and madness function as mutually excluding entities, constitutes a starting point for the book’s analysis, insofar as history and its meanings are constantly created as a transcendence of the atemporal and elusive empty space madness refers to. In this empty space and in the lack of productivity that constantly marks history in being excluded from it, the conditionality of history is located. It is for this very reason that madness must constantly reappear. History as we know it rests on a historicity: a historical mode of being, which takes the shape of an ongoing rupture from the prehistorical absence of work or non-productivity of madness. However, history thereby also comes to rest upon an initial and original loss, which it by its very existence reconstitutes, transcends and covers up. Upon closer inspection, history therefore attains the character of hubris: an ongoing intemperate transcendence of a basic non-productivity. Our particular history therefore becomes fundamentally tragic. History is constituted in departure from its prehistory. As a consequence, history is also limited and provisional. Historical acts and indeed history itself constantly faces the risk of having to change or collapse. Histoire de la folie is not about letting repressed madness speak. Instead, a central aim is to re-actualize the hidden tragedy behind history, to show how it functions in history – indeed even how it makes history possible to begin with. The effort is therefore not directed at abolishing the repression, or ascribing the repressed rights, as the repression and the repressed are basically to be seen as derived from the more fundamental tragedy. Foucault’s book seeks to remind us, as historical beings, of this inherent tragedy and the basic loss and vulnerability inserted by it. In taking up such a perspective on Foucault’s work, it no longer parallels Benjamin’s issue of justification but should rather be understood in extension of the tragic conception of history first formulated by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) in 1872, which comes to guide Foucault’s authorship. In extension, Foucault pretentiously characterizes his own giant work on madness as “the first, and probably the easiest, in this long line of enquiry which, beneath the sun of the great Nietzschean quest, would confront the dialectics of history with the immobile structures of the tragic.”58 Such

58

HM: xxx. Foucault has several times emphasized the importance of his first encounter with Nietzsche’s texts at the beginning of the 1950s, while working at Sainte-Anne. This regarded both Histoire de la folie at the outset of his authorship proper but also the authorship in its totality. In the late conversation “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview” (1982) he thus stated: “Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job at the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that” (p. 13).

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a tragic conception of history is more or less obvious throughout Foucault’s production. In such a tragic conception of history, man’s actions come across as efforts to break with the past. This implies that man’s historical existence must be viewed as actions and events that violently transform and violate the existing world, as it allows its demise, only later to be replaced with more of the same. In such a wider tragic framework, human historical existence and consciousness is a form of hubris, which also reminds us that we live on borrowed time even as, and especially because, we transcend the given intemperately. As the hero of a Greek tragedy must perish and become a scapegoat when the time for his arrogant activities runs out, the concrete historical existence is replaced by something new until that in return also ends. Over and against the ongoing optimism and belief in the creation of some permanence in modern culture, Foucault emphasizes what Nietzsche calls a “healthy pessimism,” which seeks to face the worst in society square on, namely that nothing lasts forever, so that we can come to terms with this understanding.59 Foucault’s historical analyses therefore suggest how history is characterized by developments and irreversibility, insofar as it is impossible to return to the past. At the same time, he reminds us that one cannot univocally identify any progress in history. Derrida’s reading of Foucault’s work, which sparked controversy between the two, sought to draw attention to an original loss and to the fact that this kind of tragedy formed a precondition for all levels of rationality. However, it is clear that Derrida did not understand how Foucault had already taken this into account. Likewise, the annoyed Foucault overlooked that Derrida’s point was compatible with his own, since it underlined how such tragedy also applied where Foucault had not noted it. The exchange between Derrida and Foucault can therefore be described as a meeting, which tragically failed to manifest itself because neither of them knew when to arrive.

4

The critical event called antipsychiatry

The unhappy exchange with Derrida was not the only way in which Histoire de la folie came to take part in a contemporary discussion reaching beyond the borders of the history of madness properly speaking. In a conversation in 1971, Foucault noted that his book seemed on its way to a remarkable transformation in its reception that was not only distinct from the earlier and mostly literary or philosophical readings of his historical writing but also appeared to make a novel effect on the author himself. “I once wrote a book on the history of madness. It was very badly received, except for a few people such as 59 Cf. F. Nietzsche: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, 4 (Berlin, 1933–1943), p. 213.

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Blanchot and Barthes. Until recently, in universities, when the book was talked about to the students, it was noted that it had not been written by a doctor and therefore had to be distrusted and avoided like the plague. Yet, one thing has struck me: the recent years have borne witness to a movement, in Italy, around Franco Basaglia, and in England, called antipsychiatry. These people have, of course, developed this movement from their own ideas and from their own experiences of psychiatrists, but they saw in the book that I wrote a kind of historical justification, and they in some respects reasserted it, took it into account, and to some extent recovered it, and then, before you know it, this historical book is about to have a kind of practical outcome or culmination [une sorte d’aboutissement pratique].” “So let us say,” Foucault concludes, “I might be a little jealous now and would like to do such things myself as well. Instead of writing a book on the history of justice which would then be taken up by people who would call into question justice practically, I would like to start by raising the question about the practice of justice, and then – my word! if I am still alive and if I have not been put in prison – I will write this book.” 60 The desire expressed by Foucault in 1971 was neither to write a philosophical defense of a specific theory of justice (as was done by the philosopher John Rawls in A Theory of Justice from the same year) nor to fashion an edifying book for confronting contemporary moral discussions with notions of the nature of justice from bygone eras (as was attempted by the philologist Hugh LloydJones in The Justice of Zeus, also from 1971).61 Rather, in retrospect the reference seems to be directed toward a future book that would become Surveiller et punir, wherein Foucault indeed embarked on a historical investigation into the practical notions of justice connected to the transition from corporal to rehabilitating punishment that were nascent within the very modern institution of the prison that Foucault playfully expressed his fear of. That it actually could have been an early reference to Surveiller et punir is further substantiated by the fact that Foucault, as cofounder of GIP: Groupe d’information sur les prisons, had shortly before taken up a keen interest in those forms of practical injustice that were currently making the conditions of prisoners intolerable. As indicated by the conversation from 1971, however, the road that would eventually lead to Foucault’s famous work on prison, delinquency, society as a correctional institution and the genealogy of the modern soul, and the technologies of surveillance and discipline began with a comprehensive and

60

“Un problème m’intéresse depuis longtemps” [1971], DE II: 208–209; our transla-

tion. 61

Cf. J. Rawls: A Theory of Justice (Harvard, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971). H. Lloyd-Jones: The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971).

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complex reflection on the antipsychiatric movement as a critical cultural event of the time. Hence, there is good reason to perceive Foucault’s return to problems concerning mental illness and psychopharmacology in the early 1970s as a partial attempt to come to an understanding of this event in a manner that seeks to contribute to and criticize the antipsychiatric movement and place it within a wider historical and societal setting. At the very least, this practically oriented reflexive endeavor constitutes a red thread that both explicitly and implicitly connects to a range of themes and problematics that Foucault developed in the two consecutive lecture series held at the Collège de France entitled Le pouvoir psychiatrique (Psychiatric Power) of 1973–1974 and Les anormaux (Abnormal[s] ) of 1974–1975. Hence, the event of antipsychiatry as it was taken up by Foucault did not only anticipate central elements of the inquiry into discipline as an overarching societal technology that, as an impetus for Surveiller et punir, would become a crucial factor for Foucault’s studies of the problematic of power, its forms of exertion, and its properties when conceived beyond judicial structures that function primarily through repression and negation.62 It was also an event that permitted Foucault to return to and reconsider Histoire de la folie, which was more than a decade old and was mostly concerned with developments in the problematization of madness in the 17th and 18th centuries. As Foucault himself pointed out at a conference in 1973, the lectures were concerned to a large extent with drawing up a critical history of the ways in which mental illness was handled within psychiatry in the 19th century when this discipline was about to be established in its modern sense; however, at the very same time Foucault emphasized that this history was meant to “uncover a range of the preconditions” for what was at that point termed “the birth of antipsychiatry.”63 In this final part of our chapter on Foucault’s history of madness, we will not pursue this supplementary historical enquiry to Histoire de la folie, which has its “point of departure,” as Foucault says in the first lecture in 1973, precisely in “the point where the book broke off.”64 Rather, we will focus on how Foucault’s relation to his earlier work via the new antipsychiatric discussions of the 1960s and 1970s sheds light on his philosophical diagnosis of the present. What we will account for is thus how the instrumental reception of Foucault’s former diagnosis of the present by a number of the critics belonging to the antipsychiatric movement did not only give rise to a new critical diagnosis of the state of affairs within the psychiatric institutions at the time, but also something new.

62

Cf. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1976], DE III: 148–149. “Histoire de la folie et antipsychiatrie,” conference in Montreal, May 1975 (unpublished); cf. doc 45, in: P. Artières and J.-F. Bert: Un succès philosophique. L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique de Michel Foucault (2011), pp. 214–218. 64 [PP]: 14/{PsP}: 12. 63

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This consisted in Foucault concurrently turning this new critique, which antipsychiatry somehow found to be justified through his former historical studies, into the starting point for yet another diagnosis of the present that took a principal interest in the movement’s radical critique of institutional domination and the “power relations” that seemed to be “the a priori of psychiatric practice.”65 By following through rather than completely stepping away from the critical endeavor with regard to its agenda, he would explore how the very way in which the radical critique was posed and articulated was itself a significant sign of the time, thus pointing to both the necessity of new ways of analyzing power relations and of revising his prior work as it had been used by others. In this way, the critical event called antipsychiatry becomes emblematic for the way in which the element of continuous self-modification of Foucault’s thought takes place when he is confronted with new experiences from which he cannot fully distance himself. Practicing philosophy as diagnostics of the present, Foucault never fully steps outside the context of the contemporary experience he analyses, but in the philosophical experience of revision and reconsideration of what came before, and hence of self-modification and mediated renewal, he never really stays on the inside of a project and a critical conception such as the antipsychiatric either. To account for this issue, it is therefore necessary to take a closer look at the divergence and convergence between Foucault and antipsychiatry, and then at Foucault’s critical contribution to the movement, which is indirectly communicated through a critique of his own work. The antipsychiatric movement. Foucault’s interest in antipsychiatry, either in the lectures of the early 1970s or more generally, was thus never a simple question of joining the movement, but it was not a matter of unequivocally distancing himself from it either. As an event that had presented itself as a challenge in public discourse as well as across psychiatric practice and treatment conventions, Foucault would rather position himself in a displaced relation to the critical project. The nature of this intricate relationship was, first of all, advanced by Foucault himself in a conversation from 1971 and on several other occasions when he underlined that no reciprocal acquaintances or any real relations of inspiration existed between his own earlier study on the history of madness and the collage of works that had more or less concurrently inaugurated “not one, single antipsychiatry, but rather a number of ‘antipsychiatries.’”66 Secondly, Foucault conceived himself as positioned on the outside of a “phenomenon” that since the beginning of the 1960s had consisted 65

RC: 66–67/{PsP}: 344–345. “Histoire de la folie et antipsychiatrie,” conference, Montreal, May 1975 (unpublished). Cf. also “Un problème m’intéresse depuis longtemps” [1971], DE II: 208 and “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons Michel Foucault” [1975], DE II: 771–783. 66

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in “people not knowing each other nonetheless working in the same direction,” for the reason that the leading authors who were giving voice to a diverse critical project from different places in the world all belonged to the psychiatric profession. Furthermore, from precisely this professional position, the majority of these psychiatric authors sought to draw practical consequences of their critique to result in radical alternatives to those forms of psychiatric science, treatment and institutionalization that were well-established, acknowledged and predominant at the time.67 What both instilled Foucault with a certain jealousy and at the same time fascinated him about this critical phenomenon was in this respect that several of the main figures of the movement distinguished themselves by mobilizing a specific kind of critique: a critique that not only came from within the target institution but that at the same time could be said to come from above insofar as each of authors were representatives for precisely the psychiatric profession that was in possession of the license to act in and have responsibility for the practices of the institution in question.68 What fascinated Foucault equally by the project of the antipsychiatrists and what caused this form of critique to become interesting as an object of investigation for a diagnostics of the present was the radicalism of the movement. Contrary to previous instances of critique leveled against psychiatry from the beginning of the 19th century, this was not merely a matter of calling into question certain forms of treatment or institutional procedures, and neither was it a broad appeal in favor of a more humane psychiatric practice.69 What came to the fore was conversely a movement that most radically turned against the very foundations of psychiatry as it had worked and perceived itself until then. It was a fundamental confrontation with the inherited objectives of psychiatry with regards to both cure and care, and with the predominant medical notion of illness and the biological conception of their causes that had been endorsed by the discipline, but it was also a confrontation with the established difference between mental illness and normalcy, the psychiatric authority relation between therapist and patient, and ultimately the role and function that psychiatry had assumed in a societal context overall. The radicality of this critique, coupled with the strong ambition to make a difference to practice, was also an immediately striking trait for the four main figures that Foucault most frequently highlighted in connection to antipsychiatry because of the distinctive position, authority and expertise they yielded

67

“Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons Michel Foucault” [1975], DE II, pp. 771–783; p. 776. For this idea of a “revolt from above,” cf. N. Crossley: “R. D. Laing and the British Anti-Psychiatry Movement: A Socio-Historical Analysis,” Social Science and Medicine 47: 7 (1998): 877–889. 69 Cf. J. Lagrange: “Course Context,” in {PsP}: 350–353. 68

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within the field.70 In a North American context, it was the psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz (1920–2012) in particular who had intransigently turned against his own discipline. From a classic liberal-libertarian stance, he declared mental illness to be a myth that the medical sciences were unable to substantiate yet which was nevertheless sustained solely for the purpose of the state’s continuous exertion of social control over something that in reality was nothing more than problems concerning psychosocial, moral, or judicial deviations.71 As a convenient metaphor for something manufactured and not as the predicate for a demonstrable physical state with a corresponding functional disruption, Szasz also maintained that “mental illness” did not represent anything that could justify psychiatry as a medical specialization, authority or institution, just as it was impossible to use “social function,” “moral implications,” and “political consequences” to draw any sort of fundamental boundary between contemporary psychiatric work and the inquisitorial witch hunts of old.72 In the United Kingdom, the main figures of the movement were the psychiatrists David G. Cooper (1931–1986) and Ronald D. Laing (1927–1989) because of both their joint and individual contributions to the movement. As such, it was Cooper who in 1967 coined the term that would later provide the criticalreformistic movement with its name, although without getting any closer to a definition than “the desire” for “the ideal psychiatric, or rather antipsychiatric, community.”73 In the same year, Cooper was also the one to write the 70 Besides the earlier-mentioned article by Gross, insight into the history and character of the antipsychiatric movement can be found in C. Fussinger: “‘Therapeutic Community’, Psychiatry’s Reformers and Antipsychiatrists: Reconsidering Changes in the Field of Psychiatry after World War II,” History of Psychiatry, 22: 2 (2011): 146–163; and M.T. Berlim, M.P.A. Fleck, and E. Shorter: “Notes on Antipsychiatry,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 253: 2 (2003): 61–67. Important texts on aspects of Foucault’s relation to the movement are M. Colucci: “Foucault and Psychiatric Power after Madness and Civilization,” in: A. Beaulieu and D. Gabbard (eds.): Michel Foucault and Power Today (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006): 61–70; and his “Hystériques, internés, hommes infâmes: Michel Foucault et la résistance au pouvoir.” Sud/Nord 1 (2005): 123–145. 71 T.S. Szasz: “The Myth of Mental Illness,” American Psychologist 15: 2 (1960): 113–118. 72 T.S. Szasz: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York, Harper & Row, 1970), p. xxiii. In this regard, it is important to note that Szasz strongly and to a great extent correctly, refused his membership in the antipsychiatric movement, being one of its harshest critics, especially later on in books such as T. Szasz: Anti-Psychiatry: Quackery Squared (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2009). Accordingly, when Szasz is presented here there is no intention of representing his work and intentions as such but only to indicate how his was generally received. To a lesser extent this also applies to the presentation of the antipsychiatrists accounted for in the following. 73 D. Cooper: Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (London, Tavistock, 1967): “We have had many pipe-dreams about the ideal psychiatric, or rather anti-psychiatric, community” (p. 104).

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preface for the abridged English translation of Foucault’s doctorate published as Madness and Civilisation. The preface begins with the telling sentence: “Madness has in our age become some sort of lost truth,” followed by the revolutionary vision of the emancipation of this condition from the repressive institutions of society, psychiatry and family.74 Armed with a leftist critique that emphasized the embarrassment of psychiatry with regards to what was considered to be a predominantly psychosocial pathogenesis of mental illness that allegedly came about as a result of fundamentally self-violent stressors originating in the family system that were, by way of a “fatal closed circuit,” enhanced and solidified in society at a later point, Cooper participated in the creation of Villa 21 at Shenley Hospital in London in 1962.75 This was an alternative treatment facility for schizophrenic conditions where, in principle, patients and personnel were supposed to live together as equals and where all medication was taken on a voluntary basis. It was the same ambition of providing a radical critique with a concrete practical expression of alternative kinds of psychiatric treatment that made its mark on Laing’s work. The formation of The Philadelphia Association in 1965 was indeed an extension and radicalization of the “therapeutic community” where not only the doctor but also the sick were given responsibility for the care and recovery of themselves as well as others. Situated in the old community center Kingsley Hall in London, which was located outside the hospital institution to which it had no connection, the goal of the Association was to entirely abolish the difference between doctors and patients, and between place of treatment and home, and instead create a democratic and supportive environment for the “journeys through madness” of the now only supposedly sick, with the artist Mary Barnes as the most (in)famous example.76 Laing was also the one who most vehemently asserted “madness” as a distinctive form of experience that did not necessarily involve a “breakdown” (with ”subjugation and existential death”) but could just as well be a “breakthrough” (with “potential emancipation and renewal”).77 According to Laing, madness and

74 D. Cooper: “Introduction,” in: Madness and Civilization [1967] (London, Routledge, 2005), p. vii. 75 D. Cooper: The Language of Madness (London, Allan Lane, 1978), p. 37. 76 Cf. M. Barnes and J.H. Berke: Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1971). Here Berke, Barnes’s psychiatrist at Kinsley Hall, recalls, “I, like the others, endeavoured to embody the proposition that once we entered the doors of the place, we functioned simply as equal members of a community” (p. 233). 77 R.D. Laing: The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 109–110. “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”

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psychosis was not to be conceived primarily as a mental illness for psychiatry to cure. Embodying also an ability to become a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation, madness could just as well be thought of as a creative and self-realizing journey through which the allegedly ill could rediscover his own authentic self and cure himself of the “appalling sense of alienation called normality.”78 This linking of madness with the critical view that posited the “condition” of schizophrenia not as an “illness” but as a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world and for that reason also “a social fact” and “political event” was an idea that Laing shared with the Italian Psichiatria Democratica movement.79 With the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924–1980) as its key figure, a cluster of people who would eventually became a loose coalition of psychiatrists, sociologists, youth organizations and political activists worked from the foundational notion that “when the state gives us an enormous quantity of psychiatric techniques of care,” these are “not the result of an assessment of human needs but rather the expressions of the needs of the social system.”80 It was as a reaction to this that Basaglia also experimented with developing a practical manifestation of the idea of an alternative therapeutic community, a project he embarked upon within the framework of the state asylum in Gorizia in Northeastern Italy. From 1961 onward, the departments of this asylum were gradually opened up so the patients could move freely around the hospital and the surrounding city in a new solidary with each other and with the therapists. In some instances, the patients even began to perform odd jobs to the benefit of the local community. Alongside this, all forms of isolation, coercion, sedative medication, psychosurgery, and electroshock treatments were strictly banned in favor of a general program of discharge and the endeavor to create an “out-side service” capable of restoring “the liberty that one may lack by illness alone” after the emancipation from the repression of the asylum.81 Supported by a neo-Marxist analysis that on the one hand posited a fundamental sociological communion between the mentally ill and the poor and 78 R.D. Laing: The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 95. 79 R.D. Laing: “What Is Schizophrenia?” New Left Review, I/28 (1964): 63–68; p. 64. 80 F. Basaglia: “Conversazione: a proposito della nuova legge 180” [1980], in: F. Basaglia: Scritti, Vol. II. 1968–1980: Dall’Apertura del manicomio alla nuova legge sull’Assistenza psichiatrica (Torino, Einaudi, 1982), p. 476. Cf. M. T. Berlim, M. P. A. Fleck and E. Shorter: “Notes on Antipsychiatry,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 253: 2 (2003): 61–67; p. 65. 81 F. Basaglia: “The Destruction of the Mental Hospital as a place of Institutionalisation. Thoughts Caused by Personal Experience with the Open Door System and Part Time Service.” Lecture given at the First International Conference on Social Psychiatry, London, August 1964. In: M. Maj and F.M. Ferro: Anthology of Italian Psychiatric Texts, International Anthologies of Psychiatry (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), pp. 395–403; p. 403.

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impoverished as marginalized victims of a repressive societal order and on the other hand saw mental illness as a form of escape fostered by the political ineptitude of the individual with regard to handling the oppositions of social reality, the views of Basaglia paved the way for a profound reform of the entire psychiatric system in Italy. Thus, controversial bill no. 108 of March 13, 1978, stipulated that there would neither be new psychiatric hospitals in the country nor expansions for existing ones. Furthermore, all existing hospitals were to be open and work actively toward the imminent discharge of its patients, all psychiatric treatments were to be carried out in health centers in local districts or in wards with a maximum of 15 beds and connected to general hospitals rather than located in separate psychiatric hospitals, and finally all compulsory treatment could only take place in exceptional cases in which the patient was unable to acquiesce to his treatment outside the hospital and in which adequate treatment alternatives were absent from the local district.82 As with the antipsychiatric movement at large, this legislation constituted a confrontation between medical and political conditions that not only resonated with the general revolutionary and antiauthoritarian spirit of the 1960s but also with the central idea of Basaglia’s most influential works from 1968. This idea claimed that the necessary response to the “institutions of violence” that the traditional psychiatric hospitals were built around was a series of radical measures that would lead to an emancipation and deinstitutionalization that should radically result in a “negation of the institution” altogether.83 Starting in the 1960s, it was the sum of a series of specific problematics like those explored in the works of Szasz, Cooper, Laing, and Basaglia that gradually shaped the antipsychiatric movement as a particular critical event. This event would appear to have a certain affinity with Foucault’s work insofar as its central organizing theme, according to Foucault himself in his summary of the 1973–1974 lectures, was that of the problematic nature of institutional power: “It seems to me,” he summarized almost with endorsement, “that we could situate the different forms of antipsychiatry in terms of their strategies with regard to these games of institutional power [between doctor and patient]: escaping them in the form of a contract freely entered into by the two parties (Szasz); creation of a privileged site where they must be suspended 82

Legge 13 maggio 1978, n. 180 (“Accertamenti e trattamenti sanitari volontari e obbligatori”), Gazzetta Ufficiale, 133, 16 maggio 1978. Cf. C.G. Corbascio Fox: “Mental Health ssistance in Italy: The Torino Rehabilitation Program,” in: L. Sapouna and P. Herrmann: Knowledge in Mental Health: Reclaiming the Social (Hauppauge: Nova Publishers, 2006), pp. 69–73. S. Benaim: “The Italian Experiment,” Psychiatric Bulletin 7: 1 (1983): 7–10. 83 Cf. F. Basaglia: “Le instituzioni della violenza” (“The Institutions of Violence”), in: F. Basaglia (ed.): L’istituzione negata. Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico (“The Institution Negated, or Denied: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital”) (Torino, Einaudi, 1968), pp. 111–151.

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or rooted out if they are reconstituted (Kingsley Hall); identify them one by one and gradually destroy them within a classic type of institution (Cooper at Villa 21); link them up to other power relations outside the asylum that may have brought about an individual’s segregation as a mental patient (Gorizia). Power relations were the a priori of psychiatric practice: they conditioned how relationships between individuals within it, and they governed the forms of medical intervention. The typical reversal of antipsychiatry consists in placing them, rather, at the center of the problematic field and questioning them in a fundamental way.”84 Ultimately, it was this movement – both as it appeared initially in direct conjunction with the psychiatric practices as well as how it increasingly came to include other actors during the 1970s, particularly from activist, political and social science contexts, – that the translation of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie offered “a sort of historical justification [une espèce de justification historique].”85 Convergence and divergence. Even though we discussed earlier in this chapter the fallacy of reducing Foucault’s thesis to a simple confrontation with psychiatry and its institutions, forms of practice and notions of the pathological nature of madness, the book does nonetheless contain elements that enabled it to be used as a sort of legitimizing authority in an antipsychiatric context. While Histoire de la folie relates a more comprehensive and philosophical narrative concerning fundamental problems of delimitation and a continuous exchange between rationality and irrationality, the abridged version in particular communicated several factors in which the antipsychiatrists could see their own endeavors reflected. This was the case for the historical tendency to conceive madness as a social phenomenon of exclusion and a phenomenon that allowed the mad individual to simultaneously appear as marginalized, repressed and exploited by normalcy. An additional point of identification for the antipsychiatrists was found in Foucault’s description of a certain correlation between the cultural function of madness, the specific forms of treating madness, and the contemporarily dominant economic structure. In a style that resonated with the Marxist political analyses of some of the antipsychiatrists, Foucault had for example stated, in connection to his exposition of the great internment of the 17th and 18th centuries, that “it is not immaterial that madmen were included in the proscription of idleness. From its origin, they would have their place beside the poor, deserving or not, and the idle, voluntary or not. Like them, they would be subject to the rules of forced labor.”86 Finally, those of the antipsychiatric movement who 84 85 86

RC: 66–67/{PsP}: 344–345. “Un problème m’intéresse depuis longtemps” [1971], DE II: 208–209. Madness and Civilization [1967] (London, Routledge, 2005), pp. 53–54.

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did not see the forms of experience of the allegedly insane necessarily as an illness, could mirror themselves in Foucault’s tendency toward “a certain valorizing of the experience of madness as expressed in light of instances such as Artaud, Nietzsche or van Gogh,” something that philosopher Henri Gouhier had earlier pointed out as a problematic “underlying metaphysics” of Histoire de la folie when he chaired the dissertational committee that reviewed the thesis in 1961.87 From this perspective there were, at least, certain similarities between the ambition to create a space for an experience of madness that was neither pathological nor the object of therapy and Foucault’s original “history not of psychiatry, but of madness in itself, in all its vitality, before any imprisonment of knowledge.”88 As indicated earlier, Foucault’s relation to this whole complex was not without ambiguity. Hence, discussing the matter in 1971 he did not distance himself directly from the antipsychiatric reading of his book but emphasized that he felt “closely related to the book,” not only because it was a work of his own, but because it had been able “to serve as a ‘toolbox’ for different people, working independently of each other,” and because the initially unrelated group of people representing the antipsychiatric movement “had been able to rummage through the book and find there a chapter, an analysis, or something else again, that had been useful for them subsequently.” In short, it was this kind of “practical outcome or culmination” of the book whose significance Foucault would not be dismissive of, nor sit in judgment of, nor go entirely along with.89 Moreover, Foucault’s work in the beginning of the 1970s demonstrated that there were several good reasons for why he was unable to unequivocally join the project of antipsychiatry or feel committed to writing history with the main purpose of legitimizing a certain critique of the present state of affairs. When he repeatedly accentuated that it was “exclusively in the capacity of a historian” that he was related to the critical movement (and not as a critical practitioner with a particular authority and specific competencies, engaged in his own professional context), he did so in order to emphasize the necessity of a different form of historiography than the one seen in his earlier work and deemed inspirational by critics of the existing psychiatry.90

87

“Rapport de soutenance rédigé par Henri Gouhier le 25 mai 1961,” quoted from D. Eribon: Michel Foucault 1926–1984, p. 138. 88 “Preface” [1961], DE I: 164/HM: xxxii. 89 “Un problème m’intéresse depuis longtemps” [1971], DE II: 208–209. 90 “Histoire de la folie et antipsychiatrique,” conference, Montreal, May 1975 (unpublished).

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First of all, Foucault would for this reason attempt to thrust aside all forms of nostalgic writings of history, taking a later repression of what should formerly have been the state of things as an implicit and virtually incontestable starting point. As he pointed out in a conversation from 1977, the alternative should be a certain kind of strategic historiography. Reflecting on the role that the “historical inquiry” had begun to play in contemporary intellectual work, he stated that “the great moment of theory and theory building that took place in years 1960–1968” was eventually, during the following decade, about to be replaced in favor of new “research of historical knowledge, of a quasi-empirical history.” “I think,” Foucault proceeded with reference to contemporary intellectuals and scholars, “there is still a danger to this kind of research, where the main hazard is not so much the lack of theory as a certain sort of implicit lyricism which would be one of naturalism: that is to say, ‘to which end serves history if not to try to wipe out the past [de faire table rase du passé] and uncover the different sedimentations deposited by history in order to finally re-flush the clear and melodious stream [laughs] that the sadness of the world, capitalist exploitation, the various forms of Stalinism has been able to put to silence.’ Destroy psychiatric hospitals, so that the pure voice of madness may be heard. Abolish the prisons, so that the great revolt of the delinquents may break through. ‘Down with sexual repression’, so that our beautiful spring flowering sexuality can reappear. I believe that in the current taste for historical research we find this kind of nostalgia – a nostalgia for recurrences and returns [nostalgie des retours] and the assumption that underneath history life itself is found, in need of being discovered and disclosed.” In opposition, Foucault maintained “that the mobilizing of memory and the re-actualizing of the past did not necessarily have to imply such a rediscovery of a hidden good nature. Behind history, there is no Rousseau; behind history, there is not the good savage; behind the story, there is ever more history. ... And consequently, to my mind the re-actualization of a historical memory should in order to make sense imply the recapture of the relations of forces [de ressaisir les rapports de force] that are presently established, fixed, solidified. Many of these relations of force, we tend to regard them as untouchable, failing to see that they have a history, that there are historical conditions of their emergence and their functioning. That is to say, by way of a historical analysis we could search out the weak points and the areas where they can be attacked. Hence, it is a history not with a nostalgic function but with a strategic or tactical function.”91 As we will discuss in our reading in chapter 5 of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, it was this kind of strategic writing of history that he worked hard to carry out in this famous book on the major social technology of discipline and the 91 “Entretien inédit entre Michel Foucault et quatre militants de la LCR, membres de la rubrique culturelle du journal quotidien Rouge (juillet 1977)” (unpublished), p. 4.

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birth of the prison in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, it was also in keeping with strategic historiography that Foucault brought in the antipsychiatric movement as a stepping stone in his lectures on psychiatric power at the Collège de France in 1973 and 1974. This he did by subjecting his own earlier work in Histoire de la folie to a critique that represented, at the very same time, a number of critical remarks on the very foundations of the antipsychiatric movement. Moving beyond violence, institution and the family model. Already at the very beginning of the 1973–1974 lectures at Collège de France, of which Foucault claimed Histoire de la folie was intended to serve as “a kind of ‘background’,” he brought initial attention to “a number of things completely open to critique,” especially in regard to the penultimate chapter of the book, concerned with “asylum power.”92 The first critical point Foucault made here was directed against what he now deemed to be a mere “analysis of representations” at work in his earlier work. “It seems to me,” Foucault said, “that I was trying to study the image of madness produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the fear it aroused, and the knowledge formed with reference to it, either traditionally, or according to botanical, naturalistic, and medical models, etcetera. It was this core of representations, of both traditional and non-traditional images, fantasies, and knowledge, this kind of core of representations that I situated as the point of departure, as the site of origin of the practices concerning madness that managed to establish themselves in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In short, I accorded a privileged role to what could be called the perception of madness.” As an alternative to this seemingly limited analysis of the “representational core” of madness through the discourses within which it was problematized, he would now embark upon an analysis that started “from a dispositive of power [dispositif du pouvoir]” situated “at a level that would enable discursive practice to be grasped at precisely the point where it is formed.”93 The second critical point brought about in the beginning of Le pouvoir psychiatrique lectures was more straightforwardly related to the chapter in Histoire de 92

[PP]: 14/{PsP}: 12. This “radically different analysis,” which as a promising avenue for new research ultimately posed the question “to what extent can a dispositive of power produce statements, discourses and, consequently, all the forms of representation” that may then be formed from it and “derive from it” ([PP]: 14/{PsP}: 12–13), in Chapter 5 we will discuss thoroughly the birth of disciplinary power and the strategic historiography that Foucault developed here and designated, at one point, “the writing of the history of the present” (SP: 35/DP: 31). In the context of antipsychiatry, however, it was rather the remaining of Foucault’s auto-critical remarks that represented potential and vital challenges for the movement. 93

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la folie concerned with the birth of the asylum and the specific ways of exercising power relating to this institution. In this critique, Foucault also, in one of the rare occasions in the actual lectures, directly mentions the antipsychiatric movement, whose part became more prominent in the course summary he provided after its completion: “The second criticism I have of that [next-to-]last chapter is that I appealed – but, after all, I cannot say I did so very consciously, because I was quite ignorant of antipsychiatry and especially of the psychosociology of the time – I appealed, implicitly or explicitly, to three notions that seem to me to be rusty locks with which we cannot get very far.”94 The first of these was the problem of conceiving the exercise of power and power relations through “the notion of violence,” a critique that could certainly be directed against the ways in which antipsychiatry understood the conventional psychiatric practice. At one point, for instance, Cooper had “concluded that perhaps the most striking form of violence in psychiatry is nothing less than the violence of psychiatry.”95 On the one hand, the problem, according to Foucault, with this tendency of always already regarding power as though it was violence – as if it was inevitably on its way to become brute force or assault, as if power was in effect always oppression, abuse, injustice, or, in short, violation – was its consequence for stringent analysis. The problem was thus an inability to recognize how power could also be something that was not just aggressively repressive but also quite productive, facilitative, or able to create new spaces for new kind of actions and new forms of knowledge, even for new conditions of possibility. Likewise, this view of power as an “unbalanced force,” hence close to an instance of irrationality, would make it difficult to recognize the practices influenced by “a rational, calculated, and controlled game of the exercise of power”: “a meticulous, calculated power, the tactics and strategies of which are absolutely definite.”96 It was the consequences of analytically moving beyond or even rejecting the notion of power as unavoidably inscribed in repressive violence – a notion that has had some influence on the analysis in Histoire de la folie – that Foucault gave in his elaborated experiments of strategic historiography found in the books on the birth of the prison and the history of sexuality later in the 1970s. On the other hand, in his first lecture on psychiatric power of 1973–1974 Foucault also pointed to another problem with the notion of power as violence, as “an unregulated, passionate power, an unbridled power” which he found

94 [PP]: 15/{PsP}: 13. Several times Foucault refers incorrectly to “The Birth of the Asylum” as the last chapter of Histoire de la folie, while in fact the concluding chapter is “The Anthropological Circle.” 95 D. Cooper: Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (1967), p. xii. 96 [PP]: 15/{PsP}: 14.

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analytically “dangerous.” This was the case because it might induce one to think of a “good power,” a “power not permeated by violence,” a kind of antipower, which would be the result of rebelling and finally overcoming the original violence-power.97 The obvious problem here would be – not least for the antipsychiatric movement – the difficulty in recognizing the power relations and exercise of power that were rationally invented and planned, for instance, in Villa 21, in Kingsley Hall or in the communities of Gorizia. Regarding power as violence, rising in rebellion against violence, establishing as an alternative a nonviolent environment – this sequence would, according to Foucault’s critique, invite one to introduce a normative evaluation of one’s own practice in terms of good and bad, which would tend to mask the power exercised not only in the realization of alternatives but also in one’s aspirations for something different in the name of anti-power.98 Paraphrasing from above, the implication of Foucault’s first critical remark would then be that behind our future, there is no anti-power but only more future, more power, only more history. As such, the critique of the notion of violence contained both an implicit caution for antipsychiatry to consider and Foucault’s irrevocable departure from the near romantic propensity present in parts of Histoire de la folie when it spoke, for instance, of the “undifferentiated experience” of the bygone madman of former times and of “madness itself, in all its vivacity, before it is captured by knowledge.”99 Criticizing violence as an implicit metaphysics of power and the straightforward critique of repression that it easily facilitated for itself was thus in alignment with Foucault’s idea of “a history not with a nostalgic function but with a strategic or tactical function,” that is to say, “a historical analysis” that would not embark on a total critique and the revolution it was calling for, but which much more concretely and empirically “could search out the weak points and the areas where they can be attacked.”100 97

[PP]: 10/{PsP}: 14. Some of the problematic consequences especially of the Italian deinstitutionalizations inspired by antipsychiatry are later mentioned by Foucault in the interview “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 256. 99 “Preface” [1961], DE I: 159/HM: xxxii. As rightly emphasized by M. Colucci in “Foucault and Psychiatric Power after Madness and Civilization” (2006), Foucault’s critique of antipsychiatry was evidently not a question of denying that violence and violent organization could be the order of the day in psychiatric institutions. The problem was rather that the continuation of this critical perspective would tend to reproduce the idea that if only the violence was exorcised from psychiatric practice and the psychiatric patients were set free from it and given back their civil rights – just like Pinel had unchained the mad at Bicêtre – then the question of power would be so much more difficult to ask since it in principle belonged to the apparently overcome repression of the recent past. 100 “Entretien inédit entre Michel Foucault et quatre militants de la LCR, membres de la rubrique culturelle du journal quotidien Rouge (juillet 1977)” (unpublished), p. 4. 98

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“The second notion,” Foucault continued in his 1973 lectures, “to which I referred, and, I think, not very satisfactorily, is that of the institution.”101 The critique implied here would not only relate quite directly to the antipsychiatric tendency or ambition, of which Basaglia’s work was the most manifest, of negating the “institutions of violence” and replace the outmoded psychiatric hospital with nonviolent therapy and rehabilitation in the community.102 Making the institutions of violence and, per implication, the violence of the institution the obvious point of attack, the risk would be that the positive answer to a certain question of principal importance would always be given in advance – namely whether or not the current institutional way of dealing with the challenges that people with mental illness presented in a society should be abolished in the name of nonviolence. And correspondingly, the risk would also be to identify what was reproachable and in need of obliteration by using the institution’s way of functioning as the model for critical definition. In short, blaming an institution such as the psychiatric hospital for being an institution and therefore also the negative image of what the real need was or the dream should be, one would run the risk of not being able to evaluate – without consequential prejudice – the potential value of the customary approaches of the institution (e.g., medication, everyday support by trained staff, institutional regularity) for the people with mental illness, just as one might lose sight of the potential problems pertaining to one’s own practice seeing that the new alternative was in effect not institutional. Being a retrospective self-critique, however, concerned with the earlier analysis of the history of madness, the opening lecture in 1973 was just as much the beginning of a far more general argument that Foucault would repeat and develop later on in his work: “It seemed to me,” Foucault initially said with reference to Histoire de la folie, “that we could say that from the beginning of the nineteenth century psychiatric knowledge took the forms and dimensions we know in close connection with what could be called the institutionalization of psychiatry. ... Now I no longer think that the institution is very satisfactory notion. It seems to me that it harbors a number of dangers, because as soon as we talk about institutions we are basically talking about both individuals and the group, we take the individual, the group, and the rules which govern them as given, and as a result we can throw in all the psychological or sociological discourses.”103 Similar to how the psychiatric institution could provide an already given image of what should be fought and a counter-image of what could be hoped 101

[PP]: 15/{PsP}: 14. Cf. F. Basaglia: “Le instituzioni della violenza” (“The Institutions of Violence”) (1968), pp. 111–151. 103 [PP]: 16–17/{PsP}: 14–15. 102

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for, there was also the risk that the institution would provide the final as well as the first explanation of what was going on within its borders. In this case, the task for the sociological or psychological analysis would be to elucidate how the institution was able, for instance, to govern the in-patients the way it did, to put them in a certain relationship to themselves, to each other and to the staff, but also how the institution in itself was the defining starting point for its own practice and way of managing things, without ever asking whether the institution could actually be attributed such abilities or responsibilities. While the history told in Histoire de la folie tends to regard the asylum as the defining place where the power of psychiatry was invented partly as a kind of commission demanded from a society of exclusion, the alternative approach argued for by Foucault was intended to avoid what he later referred to as “institutionalocentrism” in order to move “beyond or outside the institution ... and replace it with the overall point of the technology of power.”104 This kind of analysis should concern itself with how a difficult social exchange marked by particular challenges and difficulties constitutes, runs through, and modifies the institutions in question, thus understanding them from the standpoint of emergent processes instead of points of departure in themselves. By having “to deal with the relations of force in these tactical arrangements that permeate the institutions” the question should no longer be how the institution created problems to be overcome but rather to consider in which way they were themselves always already answers to specific societal problematics and in particular the reservoir of available and possible instruments of normative influence and power relations at a given time.105 Not addressing this network of historically specific normative dispositions, Foucault’s point seems to be, would not only render it difficult to truly comprehend the role and function of the institution but also make it likely that the reproachable aspects of the institution’s functioning would just be played out somewhere else and out of sight. The final critique, directed at the attention given to the family in antipsychiatry, was closely related to that of the institution, as it was also here a question of avoiding an inadequate “level of analysis [niveau d’analyse].”106 While Foucault criticized himself for having analyzed in Histoire de la folie the reorganization of the relationship between reason and madness and the first establishment of the asylum at the beginning of the 19th century as if the involved formative psychiatrists such as Pinel, Tuke and Esquirol had simply reproduced and reenacted a family model in the new moral institution, his 104 105 106

[STP]: 120–121/{STPo}: 116–17. [PP]: 17/{PsP}: 15. [PP]: 17/{PsP}: 15.

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reasons for this critique had a broader aim. Besides noting in 1973 that the reactivation of the doctor in the father’s image was an organizing figure that did not belong to the developments in psychiatry before the 20th century, he also questioned the relation between the exercise of psychiatry power, the state and the family altogether. “Is it not the family, neither is it the State apparatus [l’appareil d’État], and I think it would be equally false to say, as it often is, that the asylum practice, the psychiatric power, does no more than to reproduce the family for the benefit of, or on the demand of a certain kind of state control [contrôle étatique], organized by a State apparatus. The State apparatus cannot serve as the basis ... and the family cannot serve as the model ... for the relations of power that we can identify within psychiatric practices.”107 In the lectures on psychiatric power, the important issue for Foucault is that the asylum was rather organized and structured along the lines of the same overarching social technology of which the birth of the prison was also an expression and was, at the same time, a breeding ground for its development and rationalization. As such, both institutions emerged as intermediate links or as junctions of the so-called dispositive of discipline that we will account for in detail toward the end of Chapter 5 on Surveiller et punir and in the beginning of Chapter 7 concerning Foucault’s lecture on the history of governmentality. However, this critique of the analytical role ascribed to the family model also represented yet another implicit reproach concerning a tendency found in the antipsychiatric movement. When several of the antipsychiatrists saw in the family both a general site for the reproduction of societal repression and a universal hotbed of mental pathogenesis, there could, according to Foucault, be a danger of not acknowledging historically how the family itself was reorganized during the 19th century under the influence of the aforementioned disciplinary technology. This could have at least two problematic consequences: first, that a universal family would be blamed for the effects of a normative matrix it was only one of many outlets or vehicles for, thus fighting with great expectations a mere product or symptom instead of confronting with historical sensitivity the ramifications of a particular normative influence pertaining to the social body in its entirety but nonetheless in a time-specific manner. Second, the struggle against the negative consequences of the family would run a risk similar to that associated with the attempt to negate the institution, namely to believe that the breaking away from the family structure, as opposed to or in conflict with what is only apparently madness but in reality is something else, would be loaded with a revolutionary-emancipatory potential that it could neither account for by itself nor pave the way for through its destruction. The 107

[PP]: 17/{PsP}: 15.

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conception that was indirectly criticized in this respect, as well as a number of the leading ideas put forth by antipsychiatry, was still evident in a text written by Cooper some years after Foucault had given his lectures at the Collège de France. “Madness,” Cooper wrote, “is permanent revolution in the life of a person. Sometimes this revolutionary process becomes evident as a major change in the way that we live, a change in the direction of greater autonomy that may be accomplished without the intervention of other people, but sometimes it becomes socially visible as a crisis in which other people intervene. If the intervention falls into the fatal closed circuit of family and psychiatry, or friends who behave in familial ways replicating one’s own and their bits of experience of mother, father, children and amateur psychiatrist (who can be even worse than the real one), one can get stuck in a lifelong crisis that is certainly not revolutionary for anyone.”108 It was not least the combination of blaming one single instance such as the family without contextualizing it properly and the manifest emancipatory call for revolution against general repression that should be the reproachable target for Foucault’s strategic historical analysis. While Foucault did not opprobriate antipsychiatry as such but only indirectly through a self-critique, and while he continued to express admiration or even envy of the ways in which this movement had been able to bring their theoretical considerations concerning concrete forms of injustice directly into their own professional practice, there was still a reproach concerning the inadequacy of using notions such as violence, the institution and the family for a critical analysis of the network of power relations pertaining to the productive norms of discipline that Foucault found it imperative to develop. Through a self-critique concerning his earlier history of madness, inaugurated by an unexpected reception that he had no intention of controlling by exercising the authority of the author, Foucault was induced to diagnose a certain problematic tendency within a contemporary manner of doing social critique, which brought him to further articulate an alternative. However, Foucault only seriously began to re-pursue the endeavor, that he undertook with Histoire de la folie in 1961, as he recommenced it in the first part of the 1970s, a decade later. In the interim he continued his investigations into matters related to the history of madness and psychiatry, namely the conception of modern medicine and its particular clinical perception accounted for in his book Naissance de la clinique from 1963. In the 1960s he also turned his attention to how the discursive development of the human sciences and the predecessors, as these could be traced back to the Renaissance, had given way to a certain order of things wherein the notion of language was gaining 108

D. Cooper: The Language of Madness (1978), p. 37.

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a new overarching significance perhaps even to the detriment of the modern concept of man. This same archeological history of the human sciences, but directed at the diagnosis of the present was related in Les mots et les choses, published in 1966 and to certain extent continued in the more analytically oriented L’archéologie du savior from 1969, will be the topic of discussion in the following chapter.

4 A Genealogy of Structuralism and Language

Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines was published in 1966 when the controversies surrounding structuralism were heating up. It was a decisive contribution to the structuralist trend in the wider public and became a phenomenon to be taken into account, not only in the humanities and social sciences but also philosophically. Despite it being a large and inaccessible work on the scientific and philosophical history of Western societies since the Renaissance, it was also – to the yet unknown Foucault’s surprise – a huge success and had to be reprinted five times that year.1 This success happened because the book contained a number of claims that were viewed as controversial at the time. Controversy and misconceptions. The controversy, which awoke wider interest, was first and foremost related to the hypothesis about a radical change, which Foucault seems to present in the preface and toward the conclusion, only to emphasize it in the final lines. In Mots et les choses he makes the sensational claim that man is “a quite recent creature,” which has been “fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago ... but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known.”2 In conclusion, he points out the possibility of man, as he is currently known, being “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”3 In addition to apparently positing an overall incommensurability between various historical epochs, Foucault also seems to prophesize the end of the current age in yet another radical break, which in consequence would lead to the death of man. 1 2 3

D. Eribon: Michel Foucault 1926–1984 (1989), p. 183. MC: 319/OT: 336. MC: 398/OT: 422. 147

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Since reception at that time emphasized these two provocative claims, Foucault’s core aim seemed to be a general attack on humanist or anthropocentric thought. Les mots et les choses came across as a sharp critique of the idea that humanity was to be the outset, aim or commitment for any thought or speech possible. According to such a perspective on humanism, history and societal life must be viewed as contexts in which a free, human subject unfolded his inherent humanity. Until structuralism, humanism had been the obvious horizon for traditional approaches in the humanities and philosophy, whether these were existentialist and person-oriented or dialectical and Marxist schools of thought. Such humanism had been given monumental expression in Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905–1980) Critique de la raison dialectique six years earlier in 1960. Over and against this, Foucault’s work relegated humanism to a limited and perhaps already obsolete phase, which lasted from the beginning of the 1800s to the present.4 The year after, Foucault pointed out how humanism in a wider and perhaps more “moderate” sense had such a malleable character that it would be able to function as “the little whore of all the thought, culture, morality and politics of the last twenty years” and that it “was used in 1948 to justify Stalinism and the hegemony of Christian democracy.”5 With Les mots et les choses, Foucault therefore publicly appeared as a frontrunner of the structuralist challenge to the anthropocentric worldview. At the same time, it seemed that he had extended the reach of new structuralist approaches to analysis by employing them in regard to the history of ideas and knowledge, so as to prove that such an approach would illuminate an extended development, which had occurred within our own culture. In general, this history was however still understood as a series of present moments or “nows.” Sartre was a representative of this conception, since he simultaneously with Foucault – while working with difficult aspects in the second part of Critique de la raison dialectique – took out time to respond in an interview titled “Sartre répond”: “Foucault presents a geology ... a series of successive layers that form our ‘foundation’. Every layer determines the conditions for a particular form of

4

Cf. “L‘homme est-il mort?” [1966], DE I: 540. In reflecting on such anthropocentrism and the related humanism in 1967, Foucault specifies that: “The idea of man worked in the nineteenth century almost as the idea of God had worked in the previous centuries. It was believed ... that it was ... impossible for man to endure the notion that God does not exist (‘If God does not exist, anything is permitted’, was the mantra). The notion of a humanity capable of functioning without God induced horror, and hence was nourished the conviction that the idea of God had to be sustained to enable the continuous functioning of humanity. Now you propose that the idea of man, even if it is a myth, is necessary for the future functioning of humanity. I reply: Perhaps, perhaps not.” “Qui-êtes vous, professeur Foucault” [1967], DE I: 619, our translation. 5 “Qui-êtes vous, professeur Foucault” [1967], DE I: 615–616; our translation.

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thought that was victorious in a particular period of time. However, Foucault does not tell us about the most interesting, namely how every thought is formed on the basis of these conditions, or how humans move from one thought to another. In order to do this, he would need to take account of practice, that is history, and that is precisely what he refuses to do. Granted, his perspective is historical. He distinguishes between epochs, a before and an after, but he has replaced the film with a laterna magica, movement with a succession of immobilities. ... Foucault gives to people what they were in need of: an eclectic synthesis in which Robbe-Grillet, structuralism, linguistics, Lacan, Tel Quel, is put to use interchangeably to show the impossibility of historical reflection.”6 The encounter with structuralism. It was not utterly wrong to count Foucault among the structuralists, insofar as he made an effort to distance himself from prevalent humanist thought and even experienced a kinship with thinkers such as Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). It would not have been possible for Foucault to write Les mots et les choses without structuralism and the theoretical perspectives this gave rise to. Structuralism turned out to be a decisive rupture within the humanities, which resulted in Foucault identifying in it a fundamentally new form, the character and possibilities of which had not yet been fully known at the time when he wrote Les mots et les choses. By only classifying Foucault as a structuralist, an important feature of Les mots et les choses that permeates the whole of the authorship is overlooked. Not only that, there are problems with predicating Foucault as a structuralist, as he later distanced himself from it several times.7 Foucault originally had other intensions for his book than that which became of it. Indeed, as the final subtitle informs us, Les mots et les choses ended up being an archaeology of the human sciences in their more traditional format. While he still worked on this monograph, Foucault thought the subtitle was to be An Archaeology of Structuralism.8 Ultimately Foucault rejected this working title, presumably because he had not succeeded in completing the final chapters as he had intended. Since the original subtitle points toward Les mots et les choses as an archaeology of not only traditional human and social sciences but also structuralism, it indicates that he perceived them as being fundamentally on the same level. In this sense he sought not to promote one over the other but rather to elide the opposition between the two theoretical positions’ mutually opposing demands

6

“Sartre répond” (1966), pp. 87–88; our translation. Cf. e.g. “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” [1983], DE IV: 431–457 /“Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” pp. 433–458. 8 H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982), p. xi. 7

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of being valid, by not relating to these. Instead, he examined why they began competing with each other to begin with. In his archaeological examination of the traditional humanities as well as the critical structuralist sciences, Foucault takes a step back from both and considers them in comparison with each other. This is done in order to determine their character and to elaborate the circumstance into which both entered. Since the immediate and later reception of Les mots et les choses focused on the scandalous “claims,” the actual purpose of the book was overlooked. This involved ignoring Foucault’s effort to characterize an ongoing development. While the book does involve an overall historical periodization, it also includes an extended historical examination. In Les mots et les choses, Foucault clarifies the described, contemporary phenomenon and its implications by studying and accounting for its coming about in a complex prehistory. It is the book’s outset in a contemporary event that drives the work to view the history of science and ideas, and which determines a perspective for Foucault. Across the various historical epochs he uncovers an ongoing and complex development, which explains how the core contemporary event has come about and what it implies. In a 1968 interview titled “Foucault respond à Sartre,” Foucault acerbically answers the criticism posited by Sartre and others, namely that history disappears in Foucault’s “structuralism”: “Sartre is a man with too much important work to do ... to have time to read my book. ... No historian has ever reproached me for this.”9 In a later interview called “Colloqui con Foucault” from 1978, Foucault is even able to reverse the critique by noting that “Some of [the Frankfurt School philosophers] claim that I deny history. Sartre says that as well, I believe. About them it could be said, rather, that they are eaters of history as others have prepared it. They consume it preprocessed.”10 For Foucault, it was not history that disappeared in Les mots et les choses but the humanist history of philosophy, which was so popular at that time, even among philosophers who considered history to be “a kind of grand and extensive continuity where the liberty of individuals and economic and social determinations come to be intertwined.”11 In this historic-philosophical myth, history and its alien character is eliminated, such that it presents itself as a confirmation of the well-known outset. In Les mots et les choses, Foucault sought to return to the historical sources and consider them seriously, such that history could appear in its alterity. Only in this manner could it seriously challenge the present, 9 “Foucault répond à Sartre” [1968], DE I: 666/“Foucault Responds to Sartre,” FL, p. 54. 10 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1980], DE IV: 76/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” pp. 276. 11 “Foucault répond à Sartre” [1968], DE I: 666/“Foucault Responds to Sartre,” FL, p. 54.

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by limiting the obvious nature of historical facts. In order to highlight this alterity, it became necessary for Foucault to emphasize ruptures with the past. Foucault’s book is not without guilt in regard to its own mal-reception however, since it was never completed. It only gives an incomplete account of the contemporary shift that it takes its outset in and thereby only implies the issue, which united the work and gives the historical account a coherent perspective.12 There are therefore good reasons to linger on the contemporary shift, as it is presented rudimentarily in the final pages of Foucault’s book. Not till this has been done will we present the contours of the work’s main section: the historical examination. Initially, this chapter will attempt to understand the purpose set for Les mots et les choses by reading it “backwards.” We will present the contemporary shift within the humanities that Foucault took an outset in and sought to understand but which he was unable to articulate in a satisfactory manner. In doing this, it becomes clear that Foucault is also concerned with the linguistic turn and 20th-century thought in general. Les mots et les choses is an examination of how language went from being a secondary, derivative phenomenon to becoming the central feature about which everything else rotates in challenging the humanities. For this reason it is the story of how language takes the center stage, as seen from the perspective of language and the humanities. This implicit aim will be presented in relative detail in the first section about the human sciences and language, since it is necessary for understanding the historical sections of the book. The next part will regard the contemporary history as a history of man and language and give an overview of the historical development presented by Foucault in Les mots et les choses, since it demonstrates how the relationship between words and things has changed; at the same time it presents his conception of history. In the third section concerning the revival of language and modernism, we show how the everincreasing importance of language is a far more ambiguous phenomenon than usually suspected when discussing the linguistic turn. This has had consequences for how one may understand Foucault’s ‘discourse analytic works’. Foucault’s discourse analytic works, L’archéologie du savoir from 1969 and L’ordre du discours from 1971, must be understood as a part of his contemporary diagnostic effort to describe the historical conditionality of structuralism and the rise of language. This chapter leads to an interpretation of these works that is not based on an attempt to develop a universally applicable discourse theory, as often happens in the reception of Foucault. For Foucault, language and discourse never constitute a foundation for a universal discourse 12

Just as with Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) Sein und Zeit (1927), Foucault’s Les mots et les choses remained a torso, the incomplete character of which accounts for the difficult reception but also allows for a plurality of interpretations.

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theory. Rather, Foucault aims at defining a concept of discursivity, being used for a given historical analysis that therefore takes into account the particular historical outset for these analyses. From Foucault’s perspective, it is therefore incorrect to present a direct and systematic theory of discourse. This not only presents Foucault as overly abstract and incomprehensible – as is the case with an isolated reading of L’archéologie du savoir – it even results in miscomprehension. One must therefore always take the longer route through the historical analysis, which Foucault presents in Les mots et les choses, in order to properly understand L’archéologie du savoir and L’ordre du discours.

1

The sciences of man and language

Toward the end of Les mots et les choses Foucault emphasizes how the humanities traditionally focus on man in order to study and establish knowledge about this privileged object from various perspectives. Here Foucault’s analyses have a tendency to include a number of approaches usually classified as social sciences. This is because disciplines such as psychology, sociology and literary science usually concern man, but as a being that partakes in a social relationship or exists as a biological entity or as a linguistic existence, which represents itself to the world in literature. The three kinds of knowledge study man through its representations in the world, but from various approaches. Psychology is the science concerning the human mind. It attempts to account for how man represents the surrounding world – how it is received and reacted upon. However, it takes an outset in man being a certain kind of biological life: “the ‘psychological region’ has found its locus in that place where the living being, in extension of its functions, in its neuro-motor blueprints, its psychological regulations, but also in the suspense that interrupts and limits them, opens itself to the possibility of representation.”13 For this reason, psychology has always had an inherent tendency to engage in reductive explanations, to explain human consciousness from a model of man as a biological organism. One must remember, however, that this presupposes that man has distanced himself from himself and is able to represent the self, using this knowledge. Sociology is the science of society or social units. Also, sociology studies how man perceives and reacts to his surroundings. It takes its outset in the circumstance that man is a social being, or a member of a social formation: “the ‘sociological region’ would be situated where the laboring, producing and consuming individual offers himself a representation of the society in which this activity occurs.”14

13 14

MC: 367/ OT: 387–388. MC: 367/ OT: 388.

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Literary science concerns speech and especially texts, so as to determine what they narrate. Since its appearance in the 19th century this has been considered the archetypical discipline in the humanities because it regards literature and language as human modes of representation. Literature presents how man as a user of language represents his surroundings, and “the study of literature and the myths” therefore occurs “in that region where the law and forms of language hold sway, but where, nevertheless, they remain on the edge of themselves, enabling man to introduce into them the play of his representations.”15 While these various aspects of the human sciences presuppose a representation of what is human, they also assume the existence of a place in the world that can be accessed such that knowledge can be attained about it. This location is also man. In performing the human sciences in any traditional sense, one takes an outset in man having a consciousness within which it is possible to represent the self and its surroundings. In this sense, man comes to have an essential but also ambiguous function. The mentioned sciences suggest that man is both the object of knowledge as well as the subject, which acquires that knowledge. It appears as a limited empirical being, which exists insofar as it is coupled to various formats, in this case social, biological and linguistic being. These modes of existence determine it, wherefore it becomes necessary to disclose their nature. In fact, these modalities appear to be transcendental conditions for such empirical objects even to be experienced – to have any cognition of them at all. Meta-epistemic level Epistemic level Being (the conditionality for man)

The representation of (man’s) representation of: Man’s representation of: Life; sociality; language

It therefore becomes clear that the humanities have a precarious scientific status and that they never seriously take on a well-defined and stable character. This is because their inherent problem concerns the movement between various extremes, between the empirical and transcendental, objectivity and subjectivity, an ontological level and an epistemic level. The counter-sciences. The structuralist “counter-sciences,” however, do not ascribe human representations any special or privileged status in explaining the functions of life, society or language. The level of representations as well as the representational level disappear in the structures, wherefore they lose their importance for any acceptable formulation of a science about humans. Man’s central role as the site of representing the world is dissolved. Man is no longer 15

MC: 367/ OT: 388.

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experienced as the essential location for representing the world or a transcendental condition for understanding it. In the place of man, life, sociality and language become structures that are inherently able to explain his cognition and behavior. Sociology sees the rise of structural anthropology. Where traditional ethnology studies foreign peoples in their societies, the structural approach does not take its outset in human representations or the ways they represent their world and themselves. By 1966 Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) had developed exactly such an approach over a timeframe of two decades.16 The exotic societies and their regularities can only be explained by presenting them as abstract, selfregulating structures that affect social exchange. Lévi-Strauss had already, in the 1949 Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, emphasized that it was not sufficient merely to refer to the biological fact that offspring of closely related parents often have genetic illnesses and risk degeneration to explain the universal injunction against incest. In order to understand kinship structures, it was simply not enough to consider them a representation of this biological fact. The various rules of kinship and entering into marriage must – as with language – be understood as cultural systems of meaning that influence social actions and exchange; this is done by structuring meaning and action differently. Just as it is possible to exchange meaning using language, the rules of kinship constitute a system for how to exchange women between lineages, clans, and families. In return, Lévi-Strauss is able to point out that “the system of kinship is a language.”17 Just as with language, the system of kinship can be studied as a structure that determines which marriages the various members of society can enter into, whether they know these rules or not. The social hereby attains the character of an abstract and self-regulating structure. This counter-science therefore indicates that such abstract structures speak, wherefore it is not the individual person and his or her representation of the world that constitutes the outset for studying and analyzing what we say or do. Over and against traditional psychology we find structural psychoanalysis. Here, a core work is Jacques Lacan’s (1909–1981) Écrits, which came out the same year as Les mots et les choses. The main insights from this had however already been widely disseminated through lectures and seminars since 1949. As Foucault sees it, the core claim in structural psychoanalysis is that human representations can no longer be the outset, as they were with Sigmund Freud (1856–1930).18 In traditional psychoanalysis, Freud still focused on the human consciousness. Even when considering the unconscious this was done with an 16 For instance Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949)/The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969) and later Anthropologie structurale (1958)/Structural Anthropology (1963). 17 C. Lévi-Strauss: Anthropologie Structurale (Paris, Plon, 1958), p. 58; our translation. 18 MC: 385/OT: 353.

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outset in human consciousness and its representations of the world. Indeed, it even returned to this insofar as it had awareness as its central goal. This can be seen in Freud’s motto: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”19 In structural psychoanalysis the perspective and examination moves in the opposite direction. According to Foucault, one must listen to the patient being analyzed by viewing his speech as a direct expression of the unconscious and its structural meanings. In so many words, the unconscious is considered a structure, which – regardless of the patient knowing or not – decides what is being said. It is a structure that makes its presence felt and speaks through him, while the traditional humanist psychology and psychoanalysis still claimed that that the conscious self does the speaking. Over and against this, Lacan polemically notes that the true subject makes its presence felt with the unconscious: “Ça parle” (“it speaks”) comes before “Je parle” (“I speak”). That which speaks – prior to and through the person and its consciousness – is the unconscious itself, which therefore has a linguistic component and informs its surroundings about itself and its order. Already in 1953, Lacan is therefore able – in “Rapport de Rome” – to claim that in the unconscious, psychoanalysis discloses a linguistic structure.20 In the same text, he likewise points out how he has been inspired by and considers himself in correspondence with LéviStrauss.21 When psychoanalysis turns toward the unconscious, it suggests that the autonomous human subject and its consciousness is an illusion, since it partakes in a more comprehensive, inter-subjective, linguistic and symbolic structure, which decenters it and works through it.22 Within literary science, structural analysis appears as counter-science. This emerging approach, with names such as Algirdas J. Greimas (1917–1992), Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), attempts to show

19 S. Freud: Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Studienausgabe Bd. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), p. 516. 20 “It is precisely the structure of language that psychoanalytic experience uncovers in the unconscious.” J. Lacan: Écrits (Paris, Éditions de Seuil, 1966), p. 251. 21 Here Lacan also emphasizes that this concerns language as in the structural linguistic sense of the word, which appears in the unconscious, as is seen in Lévi-Strauss’ structural ethnology: “Here, linguistics can serve as a guideline to us given the role it plays ... for contemporary anthropology.” J. Lacan: Écrits (Paris, Éditions de Seuil, 1966), p. 165. 22 Foucault points out that ethnology and psychoanalysis, in their new forms: “should both be sciences of the unconscious: not because the reach down to what is below consciousness in man, but because they are directed toward that which, outside man, makes it possible to know, with a positive knowledge, that which is given to or eludes his consciousness” (MC: 390/OT: 413). Both therefore ultimately turn out to be sciences the object of which cannot be classified in regard to the hitherto important distinction between consciousness and unconscious. The “unconscious” or “pre-conscious” structures that the two new sciences concern themselves with will in the end straddle the traditional division, which was constitutive for the previous modalities of knowledge.

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how, upon closer inspection, it is language that structures what is said and appears in literature and mythology. This movement into counter-discourse is furthermore supported by contemporary tendencies within literature itself, such as Le nouveau roman. This approach set the agenda in the 1950s and ’60s. Authors such as Marguerite Duras (1914–1996), Claude Simon (1913–2005), Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) exhibited a decidedly anti-subjectivist tendency. Their novels dissolve the narrator, while this entity was a unifying feature in the traditional novel. When literature no longer seeks to represent this consciousness and give its perspective and doings, language and its order is accentuated and appears immediately. All the mentioned ruptures are inspired by and refer to a certain science as paradigmatic, namely linguistics, such as it had been formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) at the beginning of the 20th century and further developed by, among others, Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Luis Hjelmslev (1899–1965). For Foucault, the structuralist rupture is based on structural linguistics as a model science that has become the theoretical basis for all other science.

Human sciences

Sociology

Psychology

Literary science

Structural science

Structural Anthropology

Structural Psychoanalysis

Structural Literary Analysis

Proponent(s)

Lévi-Strauss

Lacan

Greimas Barthes Kristeva

Precursor/inspiration

Saussure’s structural linguistics

In linguistics, language is not merely an object being examined by science. Since structural linguistics considers language qua language and not as representing something else, language likewise appears as the basis identified in the analysis and as determining for the object it studies. In the structuralist turn, this feature is taken up for all the human sciences. In all the structural counter-sciences it therefore happens that all phenomena can be analyzed as language. The structural and linguistic turn. “The Linguistic Turn” has become a household term in 20th-century philosophy. It covers a wide range of very different philosophical schools of thought and their focus on language as the basis for reality and a generator of reality.23 A commonality for these approaches 23 The expression is first found in Richard Rorty’s (1931–2007) The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method from 1967.

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is a fundamental skepticism in regard to perceiving language as an instrument or medium, which represents reality as it is. This conception is rather replaced by the perception of language as a condition for thinking, which cannot be avoided. Cognition is fundamentally structured as language, and cognition of reality without language is rejected as impossible. Philosophy must turn toward language, since it is considered an inescapable resource, which performs a fundamental task of linguistic criticism.24 In retrospect, Foucault’s work in Les mots et les choses can be perceived as an examination of the background for, implications of, and problems surrounding the linguistic turn. Unlike with the strictly philosophical use of the term, he couples the phenomenon to an overall development in the humanities. His archaeology of structuralism must be seen as a part of a project to disclose the overall linguistic turn – in the widest sense of the word. Foucault therefore identifies unmistakable signs of language taking up the position that man has traditionally had in the human sciences. While language therefore is in the process of becoming the most important object of study, there is also a tendency to identify the structures of language in all explored phenomena. In this sense, language becomes a transcendental structure. In place of man, language has become the positive aspect that is located in everything. Hereby language ceases to be merely a medium for representation, the purpose of which is to mediate and express another more fundamental reality. Indeed, Foucault suggests that this raises pressing and as of yet unanswered questions at the end of Les mots et les choses: “we must henceforth ask ourselves what language must be in order to structure in this way what is nevertheless not in itself either word or discourse. ... By a much longer and more unexpected path, we are led back to the place that Nietzsche and Mallarmé signposted when the first asked: Who speaks?, and the second saw his glittering answer in the Word itself.”25 Language is no longer a medium, within which the human subject expresses itself, but the subject itself: the basis and foundation. This gives rise to a new circular, almost pathological reflexivity. When man – in the structuralist approach – disappears, he can no longer speak through language; instead, language comes to speak through human activities. Even 24 The tendency toward linguistic criticism is very powerful in analytical philosophy from logical positivism to philosophical semantics. Among many others one could mention Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Michael Dummett (b. 1925), Hilary Putnam (b. 1926), and Saul Aaron Kripke (b. 1940). In the continental tradition there has been greater emphasis on language as a cognitive resource. This is the case for hermeneutics with for instance M. Heidegger (1889–1976), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). Among the Frankfurt School philosophers, stretching from Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) to Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), both tendencies are found. 25 MC: 394/OT: 417.

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that which human activities and linguistic expressions concern is in itself language. The contemporary shift through which language takes up center court as subject results in the necessary question: What does it mean and imply that language becomes so important that it takes on the character of an incontrovertible ontology?

2

Contemporary history as the history of man and language

In extension of the shifts within the human sciences, which constitute a point of departure for Foucault, Les mots et les choses also becomes a history of how language changed from being derivative to being fundamental. The book examines the history of language and accounts for its role in various stages, framing a perspective from the present. Beginning with the development toward language becoming a subject, Les mots et les choses establishes a certain diachronic relation in contemporary history. In his account of the changes from the Middle Ages and up till his own times, Foucault operates with a number of overall historical ages. The first of these is the Renaissance, which lasts until around 1650, but which was in fact already waning from around 1600 on. The next is the classical phase, which lasts until around 1800, when in fact it ended in a transitory phase from around 1775 to 1825. Following this we find a third epoch, which could be termed modernity proper. This lasts until Foucault’s times, when the contours of something new appear.26 Foucault hereby establishes a conventional division of European history. The provocative thing about this is rather how he accounts for the status of this history and his characterization of the individual phases and mutual relations. In the interview “Du pouvoir” from 1978, Foucault touches on this issue, by underlining that – in spite of “the notion of discontinuity having become widespread” in connection with Les mots et les choses – this does not stop “the book from claiming the exact opposite.” Foucault goes on by stating, “It is sufficient to know only a little about the fields I deal with in the book ... to immediately see splits or great ruptures that, for example, mean that a mid-17th century book on medicine to us is an incomprehensible and risible folklore artefact; while 70 years on, in 1820, medical books are published ... that are part of a form of knowledge similar to ours. In Les mots et les choses I start from the obvious observation of a discontinuity and try to ask myself: Is this discontinuity actually a discontinuity? Or rather: What transformation has been 26 In the conversation “Sur les façons d‘écrire l‘histoire” from 1967, Foucault speaks of “a modern age, which begins around 1790–1810 and which lasts until 1950.” While the aim for the Classical is primarily to “describe it,” the challenge for modernity is to “establish a critical distance to it” (DE I: 599/“The Discourse of History,” FL, pp. 11–33).

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necessary in order to move from one form of knowledge to another? To me this is not a way of confirming the discontinuity of History at all. On the contrary, it is a way of putting discontinuity on the agenda as a problem ... to be solved.”27 The object, which Foucault subjects to a historical examination, comes to be the transformations, or the minute shifts and changes that constantly happen. It is these that bring people from one overall circumstance to another that seems radically different. Rather than a succession of incommensurabilities, Foucault seeks to describe the regularity of an ongoing transformativity. The Renaissance. According to Foucault, Renaissance knowledge conceptualized things appearing in the world as entities that reflect one another. The earth reflects the heavens;the human mind reflects God’s wisdom; and the painting imitates space. However, these things refer to and reflect each other in different ways. This comes to be a network of similarities between various elements in the world. These similarities lead to a situation where things in the world become signs of each other. One therefore finds careful analogies between an apoplectic seizure in a person and a thunderstorm, or between the skeletons of a human and a bird. However, the existence of such fundamental similarities throughout nature presents an epistemic problem: How does one know that these similarities are there? How does one see them? How does one identify the similarities? In order to identify these similarities, certain features must appear and speak for themselves. It is necessary that some things are more sign-like than others. One can, for instance, suspect that walnut extract is a treatment of headaches because a walnut has superficial resemblance to a brain, or that Wolf’s Bane is efficient in treating illnesses of the eye because its seed resembles small eyes. Such ideas were collected by the well-read, German-Swiss doctor Theophrastus B. Paracelsus (1493–1541) and given a unified theoretical conception. In his book The Nature of Things he therefore writes, “It is not God’s will that what he creates for man’s benefit and what he has given us should remain hidden. ... And even though he has hidden some things, he has allowed nothing to remain without exterior and visible signs in the form of special marks – just as a man who has buried a hoard of treasure marks the spot that he may find it again.”28 In semiology it is therefore possible to study these emphasized signs and to show what distinguishes them and how to find them. However, certain

27 28

“Du pouvoir” [1984], pp. 59–62. T. B. Paracelsus i Die 9 Bucher der Natura Rerum, quoted from MC: 41/OT: 29.

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Analogy

Analogy

Analogy

Semiology

Hermeneutics

Figure 4.1 The prose of the world. In the Renaissance, things relate and speak to each other through a series of analogies. The aim of science is to explore these relations hermeneutically. Through such interpretation, it becomes possible to establish knowledge in the shape of semiology or understanding of signs, which relate the order of things and the world.

obvious similarities are not signs of actual connections. This study of signs must therefore be supplemented with a mode of interpretation or hermeneutics, in which the signs are presented in the correct manner and their deeper meanings exhibited. This is the process through which knowledge about nature is attained. The disclosure, which is established by the interpretation, is never complete. Knowledge attains the character of a representation of original nature, the purpose of which is to create a connection between the words and things but which rather becomes a non-terminating commentary, as it can never realize the union with the original text of nature, which is its purpose. For this reason, Foucault is able to pronounce commentary the primary modality of knowledge in this age.3 In the Renaissance, things in the world are experienced as already having a linguistic character. The world appears as the immediate, material text of things, which invokes commentary that may decipher the antecedent, secret meanings. Since the things in the world appear as important entities, language cannot as of yet be an independent and delimited object. The linguistic is perceived as being ever- and diffusely present in the mysterious speech of things.29 The title of the chapter about the Renaissance is therefore “The Prose of the World,” since the world according to Foucault appears as a general semiosis that must be interpreted as a hybrid universe or an undifferentiated and murky unity, which must be explicated. Here the relationship between language and the represented is triadic. This is because the sign relation is not only composed of the sign as such, but also the signified and the similarity, which relates sign and signified and unites them in a relation. There may – in a superficial sense – be a division between the signifier and the signified, that is the words and the things, but there is – at a deeper level – a 29

MC: 49/OT: 46–49.

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necessary connection and fundamental relation in the world’s overall connections. Indeed, it is exactly the aim of this age’s science to express this connection and correspondence, which is assumed to exist. Exponents of this kind of knowledge are, in addition to Paracelsus, Niccolò Machiavelli (1459–1527), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1466–1536), and Martin Luther (1483–1546). The Classical Age. From the first half of the 1600s, an inherent problem in the Renaissance takes on an overarching importance. It became increasingly apparent that one could not merely base one’s knowledge on similarities, since this often leads to a confusion of parts and therefore misunderstandings. This is the critique that appears with Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and is given an even stronger formulation in the work of René Descartes (1596– 1650). Instead of the immediate similarity between things, certain knowledge must now take an outset in clear and distinct perception. One must clarify the representations in their identity and differences and thereby disclose the universal order, which is given through these. This applies to not only rationalism but also empiricism, which is critical of this effort and the later encyclopédistes. This approach allows a special kind of entity to differentiate from others such that they stand together, over and against the rest of the world. These become representations or ideas that unlike mere things represent the order of the world. For the Classical Age (c. 1550–1800), knowledge does not occur through interpretation; it is established through a classification, which divides the world and its immediate similarities into the identities and differences among representations. Taking an outset in this, new sciences come into being in searching for clarity in the representations that apply to a certain section of reality and ordering these in a coherent classification. In natural history one therefore discloses and represents the order of nature such as it is known in Carl von Linné’s (1707–1778) taxonomic systems. The order, which applies to the exchange of money and wealth, is reflected in mercantilism and physicalism. In general grammar, one discloses the order, which appears in language when considering it as a form of speech, which expresses ideas. Natural history, the study of wealth and universal grammar are each described by Foucault as a “particular ... discursive formation.”30 They each create a connected group of expressions, which in retrospect can be systematized. In unison, these particular discursive practices constitute an episteme, by

30

AS: 84/AK: 63

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which Foucault means a common cognitive horizon, which binds the various discursive formations together.31 In the Classical Age, one no longer takes an outset in a meaning and mode of speech, which is immediately given in the thing, but in a number of representations that represent and introduce an order into the world. In this sense, language ceases to figure as a feature of the world and instead becomes a kind of sign activity. It comes to be understood as a special medium for representation, which acts as a kind of doubling, in that it becomes possible to reproduce as well as retain reality. Language therefore attains independence as the special medium for representation, which can represent this reality adequately.32 Since the words and things are divorced from each other, there appears a whole realm of functional signs with which one must examine the order of the world – it comes to stand over and against the empirical signs and their murmuring resemblance.33 In Discours de la methode and Meditations métaphysiques, Descartes not only critiques the misleading assumptions and analogies; he also seeks to access the intuitions that are indubitable and strong enough, so that we may base our cognitions and lives upon them. The most fundamental of these intuitions is the cogito; insight into the existence of the Self through the fact that I am able to doubt, consider, and think. With Descartes, it therefore becomes the fundamental task of thought to represent and retain such basic insights in a language, which is as lucid as possible. Classicism dissolves and modernity appears. According to Foucault, in the final quarter of the 18th century it becomes increasingly apparent within existing sciences that there are elements in the objects of study that cannot be exhaustively handled in representative terms. This understanding is heightened until around 1825 when the conception of knowledge as a re-representation of independently existing forms ceases. This creates the circumstance for a number of modern sciences that take over from the classical approaches to knowledge; all the while they shift the focus of study. 31 “The analysis of discursive formations, of positivities, a knowledge in their relations with epistemological figures and with the sciences is what has been called, to distinguish it from other possible forms of the history of sciences, the analysis of the episteme (AS: 249–250/AK: 191). In “Réponse à une question” [1968] (DE I: 676) Foucault emphasizes concerning the complexity of the episteme, “[the] epistemic is not a sort of grand unifying theory, it is a space of dispersion, it is an open field of relationships and no doubt indefinitely describable. ... The Epistemic is not a general stage of reason; it is a complex relationship of successive displacements in time.” DE I: 676/”History, Discourse, Discontinuity,” p. 35, emphasis original. 32 MC: 70/OT: 62. 33 MC: 72/OT: 64.

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Identity

Representations

Difference

Analogy

Things

Analogy

Analogy

Figure 4.2 Identity and difference. At the level of representations, an order is introduced into the world. To disclose the order of the world, one must clarify the representations in their identity and differences. Language is understood as a means to represent the representational order of the world as well as possible.

Foucault shows how the researchers Antoine-Laurent Jussieu (1748–1836), Vicq d’Azyr (1748–1794) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) begin to describe how the apparent forms or characteristics among living beings relate to their internal hierarchical organization and the function of the individual part within that being. With Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) this understanding is taken much further, since he completely annuls the independence of each organ and instead perceives their form as the result of a few overall functions that define living organisms, such as breathing, digestion, circulation and movement. Ultimately, however, these functions all suggest an antecedent dynamic principle, which applies to all living beings. This transcendental and inscrutable being, which is expressed everywhere, but without ever appearing in its pure form, is life itself. With this conception of life, we find an ongoing, common logic of difference, which appears as the basis for every being and its functions. It is this very feature that ensures the exchange between beings in nature through creation and demise. This new non-representative and yet uniting dynamic – with its regularities – is studied in the new science on living beings, which is under development, namely biology. Given the theory of evolution, which is presented in On the Origin of the Species in 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) seeks to map the inherent developmental dynamic of life. At the same time there appears a change in the analysis of wealth through Adam Smith’s (1723–1790) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith takes an outset in traditional economic analyses. Here one seeks to show how goods are exchanged and through this are ascribed a value, which depends on needs (or desires) and scarcity. The analysis in the traditional approach therefore depends on how value is determined

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within a game of representations. However, Smith implies that there may be another measure of the value ascribed, which is more substantial than the mere exchange of goods and the representation of this. It occurs to Smith that the value of some good may depend on the difficulty and trouble involved in creating it: this is the process through which people’s lives are worn out. Thus Smith points to labor as the origin of the wealth that we exchange and therefore lays the ground for a labor theory of value. This happens prior to the value determined by exchange, wherefore the process cannot be understood as representative. While the labor theory of value still serves as a supplement, making it possible to understand the game of representation in greater detail, the approach is expanded by David Ricardo (1772–1823) such that labor becomes the origin of all value. The production process is claimed to be the indispensable precondition for the creation of any value to be exchanged. Value must therefore be understood as a product, whereby Ricardo – in extension of Smith – distances himself even further from the cyclical universe in traditional analysis of wealth. Here value came into being through people desiring objects that are not in their possession, while nature and the soil recurrently generate an abundance of objects that man does not need and which therefore can come to represent each other in an exchange. With a person who constantly risks his life and wears out his body in an effort to produce enough to support his own subsistence by moving beyond nature, there also appears an openended horizon for development. With Smith and Ricardo, the contour of a new science appears: “political economy.” This allows for a disclosure of the logic behind the irreversible and ongoing development of production, through which a limited and dependent being constantly recreates the economic basis for society, by at once seeking to break with and recognize own limitations. The extensive dynamic of the productive forces is described by Ricardo in his Iron Law of Wages and later in Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) analyses of the logic of capitalism. Finally, Foucault attempts to show how a parallel development occurs within general grammar. Initially, it is possible to identify a certain shift with researchers such as Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux (1691–1779) and Sir William Jones (1746–1794), who begin to focus on inflection in language, as this highlights the formal features, which are difficult to present as representative ideas. Hereby, one begins to identify elements in language that are irreducible to representation. In extension of this, linguists such as August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Franz Bopp (1791–1867) increasingly break with general grammar’s determination of language as a medium for representing representation. Rather than developing a general

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grammar, the dawning discipline of philology seeks to examine the individual languages’ particular, internal system and developmental logic and account for the internal relations between these. In philology, each language is considered unique in such a manner that this particularity determines what can be said. Thus, language once again becomes a mysterious entity that deserves further examination. In the time around 1800, the new forms of being, life, production and language appear to the classical sciences of natural history, analysis of wealth and general grammar. However, these are irreducible to the representational universe of the Classical Age and therefore suggest an underlying depth that these cannot contain. Instead, in the appearing modern sciences of biology, economics, and philology it becomes possible to examine the manifestation of these murky transcendentals, without being able to give a complete characterization of them. These limited entities appear in a progressive historical dynamic, the logic of which can be examined. The human doppelgänger and the humanities. When the new sciences study the murky regularities of life, production and language, they assign man a place in the order of things. In biology one can examine man as a particular living being that is determined by its nature. In economics it is explicated how human societies are determined by the dynamics of production. Likewise, philology shows how man is subjected to the collective will and ‘spirit’ of language. When life, production, and language break with comprehensive representation, there appears a gap in knowledge.34 As long as one in the Classical Age assumes the prior existence of representation, there is always an answer to the question of how knowledge is possible. Biology, economics, and philology break with the primacy of representation, but they are not in and of themselves able to replace the classical foundation of knowledge with another. The sciences are therefore not able to give epistemic foundations or present the conditionality of their knowledge. Modernity has an answer to all these issues, since the rupture with a classical representational universe is not complete. A residue of representationalism survives in modernity, but as a limited and dependent entity, which is contained within other themes. There is still a location where life, production, and language open up and are represented and this representation is a condition for attaining knowledge about them. This place is man! In modernity man is given an important role as the privileged location for knowledge. In so

34

MC: 324/OT: 341.

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many words, in order to gain knowledge about life, production, or language, they must be represented in man. Man was already in the Classical Age to some degree considered the site of representation, insofar as representation was able to represent itself there. This suggests that man’s function as an observer is not unified, or rather it becomes dissipated within the universe of representation and that man’s function as such a viewer of the world is never viewed as a problematical activity. Observing can never become the object of doubt insofar as the task of observing has always been solved beforehand, since representation has already happened. However, the human observer, which exists in an unproblematic dissipated state within the system of representation, cannot be visible as an isolated object. Granted, it is possible in the classical sciences to attain knowledge about man, but always from a certain external perspective. In this sense it is possible to concern oneself with man as a living, normative and linguistic being, but never with man qua man. Not till the circumstance of representation has been dissolved does man become visible as a special object. He is now distinguished by being the specific site at which the world is represented and which is able to represent the ability of representing, that is, reflect upon the act of representing. Since man becomes visible as a specific entity, he can also become the object of specific knowledge. Foucault therefore does not reject man’s existence prior to the Classical Age; he merely points out that man does not become visible to our knowledge as an isolated object, with a special area of study, before modernity. “Of course, it is possible to object that general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth were all in a sense, ways of recognizing the existence of man – but there is a distinction to be made. There is no doubt that the natural science dealt with man as with a species or genus: the controversy about the problem of races in the eighteenth century testifies to that. ... But there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such. The Classical episteme is articulated along lines that do not isolate, in any way, a specific domain proper to man.”35 Following the demise of Classicism, analysis of the human being comes to the core of epistemology, that is, accounting for the possibility of knowledge. This is because man is now understood as that which permits the presentation and creation of knowledge. According to Foucault this analysis is already given with Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Critiques from the end of the 18th century. The purpose of Kant’s analyses is exactly to account for the possibility of knowledge by turning toward and analyzing the basis of representation in man.

35

MC: 319–320/OT: 336.

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Since Kant turns the origin of knowledge upside down by looking toward the self, he finds that the order in representations stems from “categories” and “intuitions” [Anschauungen]. “Where there had formerly been a correlation between a metaphysics of representation and of the infinite and an analysis of living beings, of man’s desires, and of the words of his language, we find being constituted an analytic of finitude and human existence.”36 In this analytic, one takes a step back as compared with previous analyses and focuses on conditionality within man. The shift or transformation that occurred with Kant’s analysis of human cognitive limitations therefore implies that man must create and uphold the order in the new world of modernity. Man is able to inscribe an order onto reality because it – as a limited being – has limited categories and intuitions at hand. Man therefore upholds the order of modernity in force of its limitations. Man is, however, only able to account for this order by turning the limitations that he finds there toward the self.37 Since man in the modern world is perceived as a limited being, he cannot be ascribed the infinite assignment of caring for the order of the world, a job that had previously – even in the Classical Age – been left to God. According to Foucault, man is hereby given an ambiguous status already from the beginning of modernity. Limited man appears as a limited object of knowledge – an empirical entity, which can be examined scientifically. Simultaneously however, we also find that this limited being, in the general absence of representation, becomes the foundation of knowledge in general and is given the assignment of cognizing the order of the world. Man herby becomes the object as well as the subject of knowledge. The concern for man appearing both as an object that may be observed empirically among other objects but also as a precondition for all knowledge results in an ambiguous discourse within the human sciences. When these disciplines study man, they take an outset in man as the location for representing, uniting and shaping the world. However, and at the same time, these sciences show how this outset is lost in various positive features of the world that are only given insofar as they are collected in the limited human being itself. They never become stable or exact but remain at a sub-epistemic stage.

36

MC: 328/OT: 345. According to H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982): ”Modernity begins with the incredible and ultimately unworkable idea of a being who is sovereign precisely by virtue of being enslaved, a being whose finitude allows him to take place of God” (p. 30). 37

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In unison, the succession of sciences given by Foucault in Les mots et les choses looks as follows:

Structural counter-sciences

Structural psychoanalysis

Structural ethnology

Structural linguistics

Human sciences

Psychology

Sociology

Linguistics and literary science

Modern science

Biology

(Political) economy

Philology

Classical sciences

Natural history

Analysis of wealth

General grammar

With the described structural rupture within the human sciences, language begins to take up the role given to man in modernity. Language becomes a core empirical object, upon which much energy is expended exploring. At the same time language is given a transcendental status, as all phenomena seem to exhibit a linguistic structure. Everywhere, language is conspicuous, such that one comes to study language with an outset in language. In extension of this, Foucault is forced to ask a specific question: Why does language – which in general eludes representation – gradually take over the role previously given to man?38 There seem to be two distinct answers to this. On the one hand, there may be a new foundation for knowledge that is in the process of being established, with new epistemic modalities as a consequence of language; structuralism and many aspects of the linguistic turn point to this. This being said, Foucault also traces the contours of a situation in which the parallelism between the confusing status of language and the destabilization of man is emphasized. In this latter approach the appearance of language is but the latest development of dissolving classical knowledge, which had previously given language a place of affiliation within an infinitely representative totality, and which assigned language the status of medium for representation. Weakening this kind of knowledge initially allows man to appear, but as an entity that simultaneously has a central and peripheral status. Language thus appears indeterminate. If this is the case, then there can be no doubt that the field of knowledge given in the Classical Age is closed without the development of any novel replacement. In this sense the epoch enters its twilight and the next stage remains dormant. Because the revolutionary rhetoric of structuralism is in decline, this description seems to be the most poignant. Language begins to appear eo ipso, exactly because the foundation which it previously could express and refer to had disappeared, until that which previously should have been a transparent medium instead becomes an insurmountable world that contains man and things. However language does not 38

MC: 317/OT: 333–334.

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replace the basis that was found in Classicism, since it does not take the form of a new foundation.39 If one views the appearance of language in this way, it seems to contain an even more radical change in comparison with previous history than suggested here. This is because it would then become a rupture with the very idea of a unifying foundation. With the rise of language there appears a universe in which everything seems to have a linguistic character, just as was the case in the Renaissance; in addition there appears a tangled net of relations between the individual elements. However, unlike in the Renaissance, there can no longer be a dutiful assumption that this network of relations ultimately rests upon a deeper antecedent unity. Rather we find an incalculable number of differences.40 This presentation sheds new light on Les mots et les choses and its apparently scandalous claim that man is on the verge of disappearing – being replaced by language as a subject. Foucault’s herostratically famous metaphor about man as a face in the sand on the verge of being erased turns out to be a disingenuous and misrepresentative rhetorical device, which must be understood on the basis of the antecedent examination in general. The impression becomes more differentiated than a choice between man and language unifying the world. On the one hand, man is banished from the central position of being that which alone represents. However, the position given up by man is left vacant; a new subject does not take up representation of the world in a transparent manner. Structuralism tends toward describing language as that which stands “behind” and grounds human consciousness and its representations. Language is revealed as mankind’s ‘Other’ – that which determines it. However, Foucault’s analysis implicitly assumes another and more dynamic relation between man and language. Once again man turns out to be determined by logics or structures that may be determined as language. On the other hand, these are not merely a basis that can be referred to. They are culturally and historically produced contexts that have come about through, among other things, human conscious activity and that can be appropriated as

39

MC: 318/OT: 334. The future modality of language, as presented in the last interpretation seems to be closely related with the way in which the state of language appears in contemporary literature: literary modernism. In literary modernism, which is found from the age of romanticism and until Foucault, language is increasingly dislocated from the function of representing by focusing on the signifier rather than the signified. The signifier resists being defined as merely a medium for disseminating reality and instead develops its own logic. Hereby literary modernism begins to distance itself from the classical and rounded works in previous literary phases, in which the world is represented as a totality. Over and against this, language appears as a mysterious, fragmented multitude, in which the world is transformed. 40

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such in historical analyses. Not only that, the dynamic exchange between man and language, which Foucault’s studies examine, are themselves a product of extended transformations. In so many words, man and language enter into a tense relationship, in which they mutually refer to each other. This disallows a resolution of the given tension, since it is impossible for one or the other to fully conquer the position of subject. The horizon for this relation turns out to be the history that has created it. This comes to be the medium through which it is possible to come to an understanding of its shaping. However, history cannot itself claim the position of subjectivity, since it is not a direct determinant of man. The purpose and direction of history cannot be read but only written from a specific situation, within which certain relations – for instance the discursivity of everything – is shown to be unavoidable. The conclusion to Foucault’s Les mots et les choses is that the triumph of structuralism is a mere passing sign of a more fundamental change. Man and language increasingly enter into an inconclusive strife about which is subject. This strife cannot be mediated, only reflected upon in historical analysis.

5 Discipline, Penitentiary, and Delinquency

The intolerable. A pamphlet with the title L’intolérable was published in the early spring of 1971. Written and signed by Foucault along with two others, it presented a critique of insufferable conditions among the courts, police, health sector, school, military, and media. The immediate aim of the flyer was a critique of circumstances in the prisons, which had come into focus because a Maoist group had begun a hunger strike to protest against prison conditions. The manifesto marked the establishment of GIP: Groupe d’information sur les prisons, which had participation from judges, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and psychologists who met at Foucault’s home address and sought to generate and distribute information about the prison, its role and its conditions.1 The movement resulted in the inmates of French prisons getting access to the press and the ability to establish relations with other groups. They therefore came to understand that others were interested in their plight and supported them. This engagement indirectly paved the way for a number of extensive prison riots in France in the years after the Attica revolt. However, the prison riots and the movement also provided contemporary inspiration for Foucault’s first major publication after taking up the professorship at Collège de France. In Surveiller et punir, which came out in 1975, the prison riots formed an explicit background to the work since they not only problematized the wretched material conditions in the penal system but also had wider implications by relating to the treatment of prisoners outside prisons and indeed the role of that system in society. Furthermore, the book is also an examination of how modern modes of punishment came about as perceived from a wider social context, which becomes clear in the subtitle: Naissance de la prison – The Birth of the Prison.

1 Cf. “Le groupe d’information sur les prisons” (1971) and “Création d’un groupe d’information sur les prisons” (1971).

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From corporal punishment to rehabilitation. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault initially problematizes the inevitability of prison by indicating how the apparently necessary modality of punishment is actually a relatively new invention. The work sets out with a historical account of the extended and torturous execution in 1757 of Robert-Francois Damiens for attempted regicide. This description is followed by a reproduction of the rules for a juvenile penitentiary in La Mettray from 1840 in order to indicate how a very different kind of punishment came to the fore within a relative short period of time and with profound implications.2 It was not until around 1800 that prison was considered the legal punishment par excellance and replaced the older corporal modes. Before, punishment had been the public infliction of greater or lesser pain in an explicit ritual whereby the chastisement was given the character of a spectacle. Corporal punishment was to function as an example and had a representative character that educated the public through individual examples on what the law – as given by God and the king – was. This prompted the public to keep to the law by demonstrating the overarching power of the king in regard to the subjects, since a terrible vengeance would be inflicted upon those who transgressed the king’s commands. However, from the end of the 18th century an extensive critique appeared from different parties of this gruesome, public spectacle. It is as if the general public and legal system began to feel ashamed of the procedure for punishment. Arguments for more humane approaches to justice began to appear with a more cool-headed allocation of punishment to avoid the excesses of bodily harm and only ascribe an absolutely necessary level of pain. By extension, a new approach to punishment appeared in which the public aspect was removed by keeping the whole process behind the walls of the institution involved. Already prior to these developments, detention and imprisonment had played a certain role, but not as punishment. In his book, Foucault thus describes how detention was mainly a precaution that was implemented to ensure that a judgment could take place – it was to retain the accused for punishment or to keep a debtor till he paid his debt. The imprisonment was not a punishment as such but rather a practicality that had to be in place to ensure the punishment per se. This therefore suggests an ‘arrest’ in the original meaning of the word. The prisoners were in the ‘cachot’ or a place where the accused was ‘hidden’ (which is apparent from the root of the French word ‘cacher’). People were left here until they could be brought out for the processes involved in traditional procedures of justice, namely interrogation and punishment. The ‘cachot’ is therefore what would presently be called a detention. As soon as imprisonment ceases to be merely a practical contingency and becomes punishment as such, it also changes its character in a very

2

SP: 9–13/DP: 3–7.

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fundamental way. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault shows how the rather loosely organized inner space of facilities used for retaining prisoners becomes highly regimented. Forced labor becomes widely used and individuals are increasingly isolated so that treatment can be administered. Furthermore, a grading and adjustment of the severity and length of punishment is taken up and subjected to ongoing revision according to the inmate’s behavior. As the incarceration changes its status and becomes punishment as such, the detention area or cachot disappears and becomes a correctional facility instead. From 1760 and until 1840 (most notably around 1800), punishment underwent a transformation from being a spectacular corporal event to becoming the more discrete approach of reform and correction of the accused through prison. Discipline. For Foucault, this shift becomes more intelligible when perceived from a far wider context. In order to understand why the correctional sentence attains a central and overarching importance in society, one must understand it as a new and admittedly important stage in a deeper, more extensive, ongoing, and ever-present disciplining of social relations. The correctional punishment, or rehabilitation, is retained despite its immediate dysfunctionality, as it seems natural and unavoidable in a disciplinary context. This antecedent and wider process of disciplining – the consequences of which are ubiquitous, and which reaches its apotheosis in the prison – is for Foucault the truly interesting development; the genesis and character of discipline is the actual object of study in Surveiller et punir, In fact, discipline had been at the center of attention already from the end of his 1973 lectures on La société punitive (The Punitive Society) insofar as Foucault emphasized, “the penal system is a privileged example hereof” – to such an extent that he indicated that “the analysis of the form of power I have called punitive would have been better named as disciplinary.”3 As a result, Foucault’s history on the birth of the prison came to represent his most fully developed and publicly circulated attempt to describe what he had already referred to as “the ‘disciplinary’ power [le pouvoir ‘disciplinaire’]” in his previous lectures concerning punitive procedures in society, psychiatric practice and the problematization of abnormality in the 19th century.4 Focusing on problems of delinquency and the penitentiary, the book also fleshed out most completely a historical novelty that Foucault very often gave emphasis to in his Collège de France lectures; for instance in 1976: “Now, an important phenomenon appeared in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries

3 [LSP]: 240. The alternative name for the form of power analyzed as punitive in accordance with the course title in 1973–1974 is only given in Foucault’s manuscript and not during the actual lectures. The information is thus based on the note provided by the editors of the text. 4 Cf. [LSP], [PP]/{PsP}, [A]/[{Ab}.

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the appearance – one should say innovation – of a new mechanism of power [mécanique de pouvoir] which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment, and which was, I believe, absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty. This new mechanism of power [mécanique de pouvoir] applies primarily to bodies and what they do rather than the land and what it produces. It was a mechanism of power [mécanisme de pouvoir] that made it possible to extract from bodies time and labor, rather than commodities and wealth. It was a type of power that was exercised through constant surveillance and not in discontinuous fashion through chronologically defined systems of taxation and obligation. It was a type of power that presupposed a closely meshed grid [quadrillage serré] of material coercions rather than the physical existence of the sovereign, and it therefore defined a new economy of power based on the principle that there had to be an increase both in the subjugated forces and in the force and efficacy of that which subjugated them.”5 The encounter with and concern for the contemporary prison riots at the beginning of the 1970s thus brought Foucault to review the penal judicial system and its historical changes. Along with other contemporary movements, such as the aforementioned critique put forward by the antipsychiatrists, the riots highlighted the importance of discipline and its effects to such a degree that Foucault found it important to examine the historical genesis and character of this phenomenon – in order to understand not only the judicial system but also the contemporary nature of society. Discipline became an important issue because it was increasingly experienced as intolerable. At the time, it was possible to think that the critique of discipline was caused by a new opposition to it, but perhaps the critique stemmed from discipline taking on a new format. In this chapter, we present Foucault’s analysis of discipline as it is expressed in Surveiller et punir. We begin by giving an account of its origin, using three of Foucault’s preferred fields of inquiry in his investigation of discipline, namely the military, production and education. The second section gives an overall description of how discipline works as a formative technology with its attention to detail, spatial divisions and continual manipulation of bodily habits in order to analyze and recombine the individuality of its subjects. In this section we also focus on Foucault’s account of the relation between the rationality of discipline and the technology of surveillance. Finally, in the third section of the chapter we sketch the dissipation of discipline from important societal institutions into the social fabric as such. This final section also accounts for the normativity of discipline and the limits of this normativity.

5

[DS]: 32/{SD}: 35–36.

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The formation of discipline

When Foucault in Surveiller et punir characterizes the first complex appearance of discipline, he provides a note to remind us that he will: “choose examples from military, medical, educational and industrial institutions. Other examples might have been taken from colonization, slavery and child rearing.”6 In Foucault’s presentation these levels are, however, often treated in unison, just as he switches between general statements on the character of discipline and the more empirical studies without mentioning the immediate analytical extent of these. Finally, the analyses do not occur only in delimited books with one theme but are spread across a multitude of smaller writings, lectures and interviews that each concern their own specific subject. The following presentation of disciplinary forms through exemplars is limited to the following developments in three areas: the changes that resulted in volunteer militias becoming the standing armies of modern societies; the transition from guilds to modern industrialized production; and finally the shift from medieval apprentices and lecturing to modern schooling and its gradual didactic approach. It is within these three areas that Foucault identifies the infant appearance of a discipline that influences the participating individuals. The Army. In the early 1500s the army was still a temporary phenomenon. Regiments were gathered while seasonal and periodic campaigns were taken up when the opportunity arose. In battle, the infantry were grouped into box-like formations, with the strongest and most experienced soldiers toward the periphery, while the weakest and mostly useless troops were found at the center, such that they at least contributed with mass and volume. These tactics suggest that the soldiers were still treated as a homogenous conglomeration, the strength of which arose in the density and weight of the human group. One thing distinguished the experienced and competent soldier from others and gave the unit strength already before he was mustered into the army, namely that soldier’s attitude, bravery and spirit. According to this military paradigm, the good soldier was a natural – a state of nature the army had to take for granted. In the second half of the 18th century, however, the competent infantryman was no longer a given but rather something that was produced by the army itself. Foucault thus implies that a process of disciplining and regimentation had become detectible during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) since drilling was introduced, such that it became possible to correct and improve the individual soldier. This involved manipulating the individual soldier’s stamina and 6

SP: 143, n. 2/DP: 314, n. 1.

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physical condition, whereby it became possible for him to acquire certain skills and patterns of reaction and provide improved results while following certain desired guidelines. These new developments were utilized to their fullest effect by the military tactics of that time. This new order was presented in its purest form by the military parade; while inspecting such a spectacle a Grand Duke – according to Foucault – is said to have noted with dissatisfaction, “But they are breathing.”7 Drilling, tactics and parade allow one to observe the introduction of discipline into the purview of the army and belligerent relations. As a result, the thoroughly regimented army appeared as an entity that belonged in the ordered institution of the barrack. This was the end of the army as a homogenous mass of unqualified men, but likewise the rise of the ordered format of the army – a well-oiled machine “whose function was certainly not that of prohibiting anything” but “essentially to obtain a superior performance, a superior production and a superior productivity of the army. The army as production of deaths, that is what has been perfected or, better, has been assured by this new technique of power,” namely ‘discipline.’8 Production. In the cooperative manufacture of the 1600s, production had not yet become the object of preoccupation and interest. While the recipients of products and owners were initially interested in what was produced – its quality and properties – the mode of production as such was left to the artisan and his apprentices, who in return were dependent on their given skills and handed down knowledge. During the 18th century, intensive changes in the mode of production were undertaken by dividing the process into various phases and elementary operations. Simultaneously, the basic operations in production were rationalized by examining how they could be performed in the simplest way so that the production process could be reorganized to become as swift as possible. For Foucault, it is more important that there occurred a simultaneous and thorough manipulation of labor, which was divided and organized according to the demands set by the new production processes. As the new spatial distribution of the labor force was implemented, it sorted people into individual units that were tied to a location and a function. In order to facilitate this, it became necessary to shape labor into individual units, such that they could perform the new demanding functions as best and as quickly as possible. In short, output was improved by improving labor.9 7

“La prison vue par un philosophe français” [1975], DE II: 728; our translation. “Les mailles du pouvoir” [1981], DE IV: 191/“The Meshes of Power” pp. 159–160. 9 “L‘incorporation de l‘hôpital dans la technologie moderne” [1974], DE III: 516; our translation. 8

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However, various efforts were taken to ensure that the employees only did what the production processes required of them. The workforce was therefore subjected to temporal regimentation, which was far more rigorous than the production processes were in themselves. In this sense, the workforce was distributed according to the given opportunities of control in the production process, as well as general activities among labor. Over time, all factors included in production were therefore subjected to discipline and manipulation but also a redistribution, which made them as uniform and productive as possible. In other words, an analysis and reconstruction of productive factors occurred, which would reshape industry into a well-oiled, efficient machine. At the end of the Classical Age (c.1550–1800), the division of labor in production was therefore accompanied by a demand for increased discipline from the workforce. According to Foucault, this development resulted in the laborer, just as with the soldier becoming an individual who needed discipline in a number of specific regards. Teaching. Shortly after Jean-Baptiste Colbert bought the Gobelins Manufactory for Louis XIV in 1662, an edict was formulated containing the regulations for an associated school, where the principles of apprenticeship – according to Foucault – were to be implemented.10 No sooner had a contract been signed, the apprentices found themselves in a relationship of mutual dependency with their master, insofar as they became a part of his household. The mutual exchange consisted in the apprentice bringing support and service, while he in return received the esoteric and authoritative knowledge held by the master. Thus, while they were gradually granted the privileges of the trade, the disciples underwent six years of education until the apprenticeship was completed by a final test, which was to show en bloc that they had acquired sufficient skills. If an apprentice passed the test with a satisfactory result, he could establish himself as an independent master. A later edict from 1737 concerning the apprenticeship for tapestry weavers and courses in drawing shows that education was undergoing substantial changes. There were two hours of lessons every weekday, which began with a roll call, and the apprentices were divided into three different classes according to their ability and regular submission of individual work, which allowed the teacher to evaluate their progress and make comparisons. Here the best drawing was rewarded. This specialized training followed utterly different rules than the traditional apprenticeship. According to Foucault, this indicated a general shift in knowledge dissemination. The focus was no longer placed on authoritative and privileged knowledge that was transferred to a homogenous mass

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SP: 158/DP: 156.

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but instead on specialized dissemination that took into account the use of time and space in teaching. Since there was a division of pupils according to ability, it is possible to find precursors to the modern class-based system of teaching already in the 15th century. By introducing an ongoing registration and ranking of the individual participants within the class, this process was accelerated during the 17th century. Little by little, it became possible to form a conception of the individual pupil’s ability at various points in time and thereby adapt the teaching to his level. Student time was divided into sharply distinguished units according to their subjects, while continuous correction was implemented through various grades of reward and punishment for the work performed. The purpose of such regimentation was to force through a certain prior determined, graduated and yet coherent development in which the later stages of development built upon the former. This established a process of accumulative progress with the aim of achieving a state in which the individual developed certain selected skills to their maximum. Rather than the irregular, qualitative changes that occurred in apprenticeships, this involved the construction of an evolutionary time that resulted in steady, detailed and linear progress toward an ideal state. While education had previously concerned guiding and instructing, the new approaches allowed for the creation of ‘pedagogy’, which in a detailed and individualized sense declared whom you could be at any given time. It related the person to an idealized ‘natural’ development aimed at a goal that was not given in advance.11 A new detailed form of discipline appeared in the Renaissance and the Classical Age, which slowly but surely changed the relationship between teacher and pupil in a very fundamental way so that it became a very specific process of correction. This was based less and less on the previous ages’ ‘elevation’ (from which a generic French word for pupil, namely élève, is derived) and more on a determined acquisition of select skills through a comprehensive process of social and moral character formation or Bildung. As a result of this the modern school was viewed as an institution that, using comprehensive and minute processes of correction, was responsible for differentiating the disciplined individual, namely the pupil. Just as the soldier and worker, the pupil was viewed as an individual who had to undergo a treatment of discipline.

2

The nature of discipline

Discipline as a formative technology. As can be seen in the sections on the army, production and teaching, discipline was, from the very beginning, a

11

SP: 162/DP: 160.

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technology that submitted its human matter to a certain ‘physical’ treatment. It was concerned to a hitherto unknown degree with the changeable – that which could be altered in people and their surroundings – in order to shape it in certain desirable directions. For Foucault, the appearance of discipline constitutes a step away from the static and metaphysical approaches to social power relations found in law, to the physical and alterable treatment of the social exchange found in discipline.12 Another circumstance that distinguishes discipline from the prescriptive order of the law is the sense of detail. Where discipline is very specific, the law only touches upon the particular insofar as this enters into a particularity: “A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the Classical Age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born.”13 In all, Foucault can therefore claim that “Discipline is a political anatomy of detail.”14 The physical sense of the detail was first attained when discipline was coupled with a spatial division of its matter, for instance at the barracks, in the factory or in the school. Discipline introduced boundaries into space so that small, separate units or cells came into being.15 The divided space thereby imposed discipline onto its field of activities. The first step in using discipline occurred by creating tables of spatial distribution and then shaping the surroundings by forcing it into those tables. This was how discipline analyzed a mass of people into clearly delimited elements or units. These elements were given a position in the established network so that it became possible to determine what was there in any give place. The network of cells could in principle be refined indefinitely by subdivision and thereby adapted to the character of the multitude to be shaped by disciplinary techniques. Through the spatial distribution and localization of some mass of humans, the body became a privileged field of treatment. Discipline governs the mass of humans insofar as this mass can and should be dissolved into individual bodies.16 It became visible as the units into which the enormous mass could be divided so as to place them in the cells and spaces of discipline.17 By enforcing 12

SP: 29–34/DP: 24–30. Cf. RC: 49. SP: 143/DP: 141. 14 SP: 141/DP: 139. 15 SP: 144/DP: 142. 16 [DS]: 222–223/{SD}: 249–250. 17 In the secondary literature on Surveiller et punir, there is often great emphasis on the bodily aspect of power use. It is emphasized how Foucault ascribes the human body an exceedingly important role, both as the primary object of power use and as a location where he may find limits to that very power. The body is apparently where Foucault hopes to 13

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this division, it became possible to avoid the confusing movements and distributions of the masses and order these according to the intent of discipline. The spatial division, through which the body came into view, did not become truly productive until it was coupled with a temporal division. The spatially ordered distribution of people was then subjected to a more thorough temporal order. The activity that had been given time for practice or learning was divided into a sequence of basic units or activities that followed each other in a very specific order. Each of these was allotted a specific scope and duration within the overall activity. In this manner, the activity was analyzed and determined as a specific procedure. This analysis served as a basis for practicing and learning. Temporal discipline was thereby integrated into the treatment of the body and its appropriated pre-reflexive automatic activities or habits. When discipline hereby determined what kind of activities time should be spent on and when it, within these activities, proscribed certain specific procedures, it immediately encountered a new object. Through disciplinary treatment of particular bodies, which were identified in the multitude, these appeared as something else and could not be manipulated to an indefinite degree. They came across as entities that could be subordinated in the space of discipline, its decrees and methods, but they were also exhibited as entities that rejected what was radically incompatible. This resilience or inflexibility suggested that the manipulated bodies had their own logic, which discipline must respect. Through the manipulations of discipline, the individual organic body was disclosed and it had its own natural behavior. This new nature first appeared negatively in the shape of resistance to discipline – a limit. However, this limit could be mapped out and included in the disciplinary project as something that could give guidelines for discipline, such that it did not become too artificial, that is, restrictive. In extension of these experiences, discipline was developed so that it took on a more refined form than had previously been the case. As discipline insisted on manipulating the body, it was discovered not only that there were limits to and resistance against absolute discipline, but also that the body was able to locate an almost physical core of opposition that challenges the existing powers (such a perspective can be found in N. Frazer’s “Foucault‘s Body-Language” [1989]). However, it is worth noting that the social history of the body, which Foucault is tracing in Surveiller et Punir is the history of the total social corpus, perceived as something that can become the object of ‘physical’ manipulation. The individual bodies as they appear and as we know them have been shaped through historical practices and can therefore not figure as an ahistorical human nature or as some authentic core of opposition. It is in the manipulation by discipline that the body appears as a problem. Foucault’s political technologies of body are therefore more intangible or ‘esoteric’ than appears to be the case in the ’bodylanguage’ found in secondary literature.

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implement its own gradual malleability, which expressed its own special logic. Gradually, there appeared a discipline that adapted various levels at which the treated object or body could be found. Likewise, discipline ensured that the disciplined constantly moved in the right direction, encouraged them toward a development where the acquired properties or abilities were supported and mutually progressed in an accumulative movement. The segmented time used in this approach depicted discipline as a gradual time of acquisition. This kind of time was logical, sequential and cumulative, since the parts interacted with each other and were integrated and reinforced at ever more advanced levels. In this way, discipline organized a temporal sequence that had the character of graduated progress, which was constructed under consideration of those disciplined but which was at the same time forced upon these from the outside. This technique, through which a particular time was instigated and insisted upon, was very much the drill. When practicing a skill or some automated response, the participants were required to perform corrective tasks that corresponded to their particular level at that time and which were sufficiently repeatable and yet different to force a constant progression of ability. Introducing constant practice and drilling made it possible to retain and manipulate participants toward some desired goal, all while there was an ongoing characterization and evaluation of the individual (as compared with other participants and the planned progression) in regard to this aim. In the more refined and gradual version of discipline, a development was set up that took the shape of a progressive acquisition of skills at ever-higher levels. Such a genesis was insisted upon as a common commitment and was adapted to the individual. Disciplinary manipulation partitioned the body into isolated cells which had their own well-established procedures for executing certain tasks. Concomitantly, a corpus comprised of individual bodies were distinguished from each other by having particular developmental logics. The disciplinary treatment therefore identified a number of specific and special bodies and an effort to give them a certain shape. It showed that the bodies were in possession of an independent nature and even natural development. Disciplinary treatment had to take this into account while the natural composition that was uncovered, at the very same time, constituted a foundation on which new disciplinary measures could take place. Discipline made the individual body independent in order to subject it to its efforts, which again maximized returns within certain circumstances. It individualized the body in order to make it a site for calculated input and output. Discipline treated the body as a force that needed strengthening and unfolding, but in a manner that made sure that the optimized ability to create change gave the best and most desirable results – nothing else. In this way, it became possible to fully exploit heightened productivity. Discipline individualized the body and channeled its efforts so that the treatment not only improved output

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but also made it more malleable.18 Disciplinary treatment produced bodies that functioned in a manner in which they freely relinquished control over themselves. It was therefore a guiding principle for discipline to view the body as a machine. Discipline stimulated and formed the bodies so they could become pure and unhindered function. This sought the highest possible output while acquiring a very specific functionality.19 The effort of shaping the individual body to become a univocal and usable force was countered by another effort toward the mass of humans as a totality; not only individuals but also groups were treated by discipline. These had to live up to a demand to construct a smoothly functioning machine with the greatest possible power and effect.20 The combined individual. The essential thing about discipline was not only that it allowed divisions into increasingly detailed elements; it was subsequently able to combine these elements in advantageous and productive ways. Discipline could analyze, synthesize and coordinate the individual parts that resulted from the disciplinary process into a new arrangement. Within discipline, the individual’s identifiable and malleable body presented itself as an element to be integrated into a new space and under a new geometry, which was likewise made up of corresponding parts. By rearranging the disciplined parts symbiotically, discipline could organize more comprehensively and coherently. It became possible to construct a space that was totally organized and immersed in the logic of discipline, and it was possible to plan for an overarching temporality that was exclusively developed according to the divisions of discipline. In this way, it was possible to optimize the functional arrangements. Ultimately, the effort to coordinate arrangements of optimized forces became the motivation for the disciplinary treatment of the individual parts – that which the techniques pointed toward and which gathered them into a totality. On the one hand, discipline was a technology that was oriented toward an apparently homogenous mass of humans in order to implement a number of differentiations. Discipline was therefore a principle of individuation that divided its object of study into a series of identifiable units.21 The spatial distribution opened up by the tables of distribution led to the individual body being separated from the group and becoming a distinct individual, which was at once a product of and an object for discipline. By prescribing a certain use of time and procedures, discipline determined a taxonomy and economy of behavior, 18 19 20 21

SP: 140/DP: 138. SP: 138/DP: 136. SP: 166/DP: 164. {STP}: 3–25/{STPo}: 1–23.

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which in correlation allowed the organic individual to appear. Since discipline enforced a gradual series of exercises, it organized time as a cumulative process of skill acquirement within which the genetic individual could appear as something that had always already diverged from the pre-organized development for which it was a corrective and on the basis of which it was altered. Ultimately, the complex individuality, which contained so many characteristics, appeared as a result of the disciplinary treatment of the human body.22 It was, on the other hand, obvious that discipline primarily crystalized individuals in order to create units that could enter into arrangements in which the different elements in play could reinforce each other to the greatest effect possible. The identifiable, distinct, organic and genetic individual came about as part of an effort to create a combined individual. Discipline generated an individual that could be constructed and reconstructed with relative ease and that could enter into different productive relations with other entities. Ideally, the individual constantly contributed as much as possible within the established arrangements according to the skills he possessed, while also taking up other functions at other times. In brief, the individual participated in overarching, multi-segmental arrangements that were reconstructed by discipline down to the smallest parts. It therefore entered into a disciplinary continuum that stretched from the smallest to the largest parts of society. Surveillance and Panopticon. If you were to evaluate those who are disciplined on a continuous basis and adapt the disciplinary process accordingly, then it would be necessary to constantly follow particular developments. The problem posed by discipline is therefore how to initiate a surveillance that is naturally integrated so that disciplined behavior becomes inevitable. Foucault presents several instances of how this – in the latter half of the 18th century – became an independent architectonic movement in various suggestions of how to improve surveillance techniques. He emphasizes how a concern for maintaining an overview was clear in the construction of a number of institutions, such as the Parisian École Militaire in 1751–1769 and the royal salt mine Arcet-Senans in 1775–1779, just as the consideration for surveillance determined a number of suggestions to rebuild the Hôspital Général in Paris after it burnt down in 1772.23 However, only a few places developed surveillance techniques to the extent of the “Inspection-House,” or ‘Panopticon’(derived from the Greek pan: every and optēr: view), which Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) presented in a number of letters between 1787 and 1802 to a high ranking, yet unnamed, official. Here the English utilitarian philosopher presented a practical arrangement 22 23

SP: 169/DP: 167. Cf. RC: 50. SP: 175–176/DP: 174.

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for overcoming the surveillance problem that was transferable to a number of different disciplinary settings and – according to Bentham – “applicable to any sort of Establishment, in which Persons of any Description are to be kept under Inspection,” which is why he could call it a “Columbus’ egg.”24 In Bentham’s design, a crowd could be subjected to an ongoing and detailed surveillance by an unseen, central observer. The Panopticon therefore allows a small number of people to guard a large crowd with the least possible effort. Using the asymmetrical observational relation, a situation arises where the possibility of being under surveillance is so acute that the inmates always have to take that into account and act as if they are being watched – whether this is the case or not. The architecture therefore forces the inmates to relate to themselves in a certain way: they have to internalize the disciplinary surveillance through a particular self-relation, which involves watching and guarding themselves while exhibiting self-discipline. Bentham suggested how his design could be used in a number of situations outside of punishment and incarceration. It could be used in mad houses, where the insane were to be observed; in work houses, where the lazy were placed; in factories, where the workers were to be instructed how to work; in schools, where the coming generations were to be educated; and in hospitals, where the sick were healed. For Bentham, the Panopticon was not merely a sketch of a particular building in wood and stone; it was rather a generalizable organization of human or social relations that ensured the regimentation of how humans related to themselves. The main thing for Bentham was, therefore, not to create a tool where a central authority had always already established the norm, for it was designed to manifest surveillance as a virtuality that was so acutely present or evident that it constantly influenced and affected people’s behavior.25 Bentham’s Panopticon thus introduced a disposition into situations and persons. While discipline and surveillance relations were becoming an overarching and ever-present condition, Bentham’s Panopticon condensed a number of discipline’s characteristics in a focused and penetrating expression. It was, in

24 J. Bentham: Panopticon; or The Inspection-House: Containing The Idea of a New Principle of Construction applicable to any sort of Establishment, in which Persons of any Description are to be kept under Inspection; and in particular to Penitentiary-Houses, Prisons, Houses of Industry, Work-Houses, Poor-Houses, Lazarettos, Manufactories, Hospitals, Mad-Houses, And Schools: With a Plan of Management adapted to the Principle: In a series of Letters, written in the Year 1787, from Crecheff in White Russia to a Friend in England (Dublin/London, T. Payne, 1791). Cf. also J. Bentham: The Panopticon Writings. Ed. M. Bozovic (London, Verso, 1995), p. 29–95. 25 J. Bentham: Panopticon or, The Inspection-House, p. 40.

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so many words, a pure and constructed diagram of discipline and surveillance as a societal tool.26

3

The disciplinary society

The dispersal of discipline within the institutions of absolutism. As previously described, discipline and the related methods of surveillance initially had a very limited scope. Discipline came about within certain kinds of social relations – the army, education and production – and only affected these to begin with. From the beginning of the 17th century, discipline with surveillance seriously began shaping the army, schools and factories as special institutions that distinguished themselves from the surrounding world through their special internal order. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the number of such institutions multiplied many times and fundamentally influenced war, learning and production.27 During this development, the influence of discipline changed in character.28 Initially, it functioned as a negative technique that was able to prevent or limit what was unwanted: in the army, this concerned desertion, plundering and disobedience in dangerous situations; in production, it prevented theft, malingering and disorganization; in schools, it was a remedy against ignorance, laziness and unfortunate formations of cliques. Over time, however, there was an ever-greater emphasis on discipline playing a positive role by increasing the utility that could be attained by exploiting the relation between the individual and institutional purposes. In the army, discipline could increase the individual soldier’s skill and ability to take up roles in an increasingly efficient machine of destruction. In the factories, discipline could improve the individual worker’s agility and speed, which in turn could improve production. In school, disciplinary teaching was directed at strengthening student bodies and minds but also improving skills and disposing them to work. The disciplinary techniques were garnered from inherited techniques, with any undesirable elements rejected, suppressed and eliminated in order to focus on the elements that increased utility. Discipline thus became productive. 26 “It is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system. It is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. ... Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used” (SP: 207/DP: 205). 27 SP: 211/DP: 209. 28 SP: 211–212/DP: 209–210.

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At the same time, the number of traditional disciplinary institutions increased and changed in character, while discipline itself was also released from the closed institutions that served to incubate various versions that could penetrate other sections of society. This happened because the internal discipline in the institutions also had a disciplinary effect on their surroundings. Basic schooling not only disciplined the children, but it also needed to initiate the surveillance of the parents to ensure that they contributed to their children’s upbringing. It also occurred when various social groups became inspired to use disciplinary techniques outside the ‘original’ disciplinary institutions to shape their surroundings or manage their own constituency. Various philanthropic societies thus used a systematic division and individual surveillance of regions or areas when they sought to stop misery and unrest spreading and ensure economic, social, political and religious progress. Likewise, the members of various religious groups began using disciplinary techniques to ensure compliance and internal order. In this way, the various groups could work as sources for the dissemination of discipline. From here, discipline began to seep into and acquire the authoritarian institutions passed down to them from absolutism that had followed quite different guidelines till then. As discipline entered into the closed spaces of these already existing institutions where law, exclusion and repression dominated, it gradually altered not only their internal organization, but also their role in a wider context. The consequence of this development was that the existing approaches to incarceration became thoroughly disciplined over time. It can therefore be said that discipline not only affected the institutions in which it first appeared but also the traditional institutions of absolutism that thoroughly appropriated it. This change began in the middle of the 18th century and was completed by the middle of the 19th century. The instruments of state, such as the lettre de cachet (a letter bearing an official seal, signed by the king and used primarily to authorize someone’s imprisonment without trial) was invented in the 17th century to subordinate and subject aristocracy, free citizens and plebs alike to the binary division between illegal and permitted. While they remained symbols of a royal desire for power, they were also reused in the 18th century for local self-control, which took up the character of discipline.29 In both cases, any annoying trait was identified and subjected to a treatment that corrected the behavior of those involved. Gradually, this context of discipline had consequences for the authoritarian instruments of state. In the 1600s, incarceration was the punishment used by the courts in all cases in which the boundaries of society and community had been transgressed, without the need for actual legal punishment. Punishment 29 Cf. “La vie des hommes infâmes” [1977], DE III: 246; “L‘âge d‘or de la lettre de cachet” [1982], DE IV: 351–352.

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had the character of an authoritarian confirmation of a transgression, that is, that the perpetrator had moved outside the limits set by the community. In this regard, internment was considered a relatively uncomplicated affair. As we saw in Chapter 3, diverse groups of people were assembled in the same universal institution, such as L’Hôspital Général, to be detained for an unspecified time as a homogenous mass of people without concern for their further development. Internment was a crude demarcation of these people’s common status. As incarceration was put to use by the disciplinary technologies, the approaches to internment changed. The transformation appeared because it was difficult to enforce the prescribed treatment of the inmates. It no longer seemed sufficient merely to point out an already existing, insurmountable difference and confirm who belonged where and why there was need of an outside and an inside. Now the inmates had to be distributed and treated according to the guidelines of discipline. However, since this could not be achieved in a uniform manner, the penetration of discipline into these spheres suggested a differentiation of both the treatment handed out and the object treated: it was no longer possible to experience the excluded and interned mass of people as an undifferentiated multitude. The disciplinary tools therefore ascribed this institution a new role, which included a specification of the relation to the interned individuals. Several wholly new institutions with individual characteristics therefore grew out of this older, primordial institution. The original institution known as the ‘hospital’ thus developed into the following institutions that still exist today: the clinic (or the modern hospital), the asylum and the prison. The appearance of the asylum cannot be properly understood before it – as an institution – can be analyzed from the perspective of moralizing discipline. According to Foucault, the same can be said of modern hospitals. In retrospect, Foucault is therefore able to understand the earlier works of Histoire de la folie and Naissance de la Clinique as studies of how the asylum and the clinic were disciplined. Seen from this perspective, there appears to be a much closer connection between Histoire de la folie, Naissance de la Clinique and Surveiller et punir than is usually taken to be the case, since all three are concerned with the influence of discipline in core societal institutions. As can be seen in Chapter 3, the modern treatment of the mentally ill did not appear before the patient could be placed in circumstances where he could be submitted to a moralizing surveillance and where he must make progress by disciplining his life. However, this development is most acute in the rise of the modern prison. From 1780 to 1840 and especially around 1800, this mode of punishment underwent a transformation from spectacular corporal punishment to the more discrete correctional and reformatory punishment of the prison sentence. The birth of the modern prison can be found here. An institution appears where the

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inmates are put under surveillance and disciplined with the purpose of future improvement and eventual return to society, which itself could benefit from the improvements implemented. However, for Foucault this shift can only be understood when perceived from the wider context of discipline. It is only possible to understand why correctional punishment becomes the primary punishment and therefore a core feature of society –despite its poor record – when its introduction is viewed as part of a far deeper societal transformation instigated by ever-present discipline. According to Foucault, the process of disciplining seems to have been completed by around 1840. At that time, the prison constituted the first omnidisciplinary institution. Here the lives of the inmates could be arranged on wholly disciplinary principles all while discipline was implemented primarily in order to discipline. It had no higher purpose than itself. In prison, discipline rules completely and takes all aspects of life into account in order to transform the undisciplined into thoroughly controlled and self-disciplined individuals. Subjected to this institution we find a number of institutions, which are not strictly speaking correctional facilities but remind of the prison insofar as they are all penetrated by discipline. Correctional facilities are set up where delinquent youths can be brought up under strict discipline, whether they have been found guilty in the strictest legal sense or not. Factories and workshop schools appear where the apprentices remain incarcerated for several years and their pay is dependent on their behavior. Philanthropic and moral associations begin to use sanctions and techniques of discipline and surveillance when seeking to improve the circumstances for the poor and destitute. In this sense, a coherent and graded network of discipline appears, which Foucault terms “l’archipel carceral” or the “carceral archipelago.”30 Discipline becomes a ubiquitous feature that is felt and related to everywhere. Disciplinary norms: Deviancy and moralization. In ancient Greece, the early medieval warrior society and the courteous culture of absolutism had a tendency to present ideals: that which could be a positive example for others was exemplified. In the disciplinary surveillance society, however, there is a tendency to direct attention at the ordinary and the deficient and deviant is emphasized. There is also a comprehensive registration of the banal, transitive and individual, insofar as it is deviant. This new kind of knowledge tends to become ever more comprehensive and covers the social to the smallest details. This transition marks the disappearance of a society organized around a community that, at certain times and places, represents particular features to the world, and marks the beginning of a society where core institutions such 30

SP: 305, 308/DP: 303, 306.

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as the state are founded over and against a number of isolated, private individuals. Indeed, this transition organizes lives by making everyone – especially the deficient – the objects of ongoing registration and correction. Here, social life becomes oriented around a new kind of rules for action or normativity. During absolutism, corporal punishment emphasized the content of the law and the superior power of society, while the boundaries of society were put in place by destroying those that had transgressed the law. When the law proclaimed general prohibitions and requirements, it also directly formulated the guidelines that were a basis for societal life. Since discipline placed certain external limitations on behavior, it is also ensured that the disciplined initiated a development toward a hitherto unrealized, common goal or toward a common norm.31 Unlike with a law, a norm is a common goal that is not necessarily explicit. Everything is related to this general aim and everybody must relate to it, without ever meeting or attaining it. The norm is measures where people attempt to anticipate a hitherto unrealized community. It thus becomes possible to evaluate real actions and condone or reject to various degrees. Where the law distinguishes sharply between what is allowed and what is illegal, this distinction becomes unclear when norms are at the center of the community. The individual cannot avoid normativity or norms, since he or she is always on a path toward them without ever quite getting there. Instead of a society that has a sharp boundary between what is included and what is excluded, norms give rise to a more elastic communality, where no one is excluded but everybody is always in the process of reintegrating everybody else. However, the distance to the norm implies that everybody is always in the wrong and guilty in that regard. For this reason, everybody is always in the process of stepping into character as a deviant who must be constantly re-socialized through micro-penalties, sanctions and rewards. In extension of this, Foucault is able to characterize Surveiller et punir as an attempt at writing the “genealogy of the modern soul.”32 In the work, he attempts to cast light on the miserable modern consciousness – its constant demand for self-improvement and ongoing guilty consciousness – by writing its historical origin and genealogy. He seeks to show that the internalized consciousness of our own insufficiency and guilt come to function as a prison for the body. This has its historical genesis in a number of penal, disciplinary and surveillance procedures that are slowly developed, synthesized and internalized over time. The limits of discipline. At first glance, the prison riots and the protests in which Foucault took part during the 1970s only concerned rather local issues, 31 32

SP: 186/DP: 184. SP: 34/DP: 29.

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but his investigation into the historical roots of the technology of discipline showed that they were also revolts against a general and penetrating form of power that had a very specific physical and spiritual impact. The prison riots were directed at a disciplinary society, which came across in such a pure form that it seemed intolerable. These contemporary events therefore suggested that discipline was still applied and could be felt. However, the extensive riots against this discipline in other areas, for instance in the educational system and the ’68 student revolt, also suggested that tolerance of discipline was weakening. It therefore became possible to generate a coherent overview of discipline by distancing oneself from it. It was, however, not obvious that the movement against classical discipline implied the complete disappearance of discipline. Perhaps the critique was based on discipline changing by becoming an integrated and obvious part of one’s relationship to oneself and others in an ongoing process of evaluation. Perhaps the critique of discipline in its concrete and external modality was that it was also taking up a subtler and more refined function that was difficult to diagnose, namely self-discipline and constant self-monitoring. Foucault’s aim is not to give a complete rendition of Western history from the perspective of discipline; rather, he seeks to show how the implicit consideration for discipline was gradually and explicitly implemented in a more consistent manner by establishing disciplinary techniques that sought to alter the behavior of a certain social group. The purpose of this examination was for Foucault to examine the implication of this disciplinary refinement for social interaction. This becomes what he designates “the writing of the history of the present,” to the extent that he describes a type of dispositivity, the disposition and organization of social interaction, which may have been initiated in the past but is still, nonetheless, relevant in the present.33 It will, for this very reason, also affect the future, albeit in interaction with other types of inclusive social dispositions. It is this conception of a “history of dispositives” that is the methodological foundation for Foucault’s explicit rejection of the simplistic idea that we live in a thoroughly disciplined society where discipline is our only overarching concern: “When I speak of the diffusion of methods of discipline, this is not to maintain that ‘the French are obedient’! In the analysis of normalizing procedures, there is no ‘thesis of a massive normalization’. As if these developments weren’t precisely the measure of a perpetual failure.” As Foucault recapitulates, “When I speak of a ‘disciplinary’ society, what is implied is not a ‘disciplined society’.”34 Discipline is only ever-present as a dispositional devise, but it is not almighty. While discipline is victorious as a technology of power, it fails constantly as a complete reality because it is 33 34

SP: 35/DP: 31. “La poussière et le nuage” [1978], DE IV: 15–16; our translation.

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constantly challenged by various kinds of indiscipline. A certain failure or drift from discipline is inscribed in the device from the very beginning and this, in return, calls for more discipline.

4

The dispositive of discipline

At the beginning of the 1970s, it is now clear that Foucault once more engaged diagnostically in a contemporary experience, which through a comprehensive historical and theoretical consideration turned out to be so decisive and complex that it had wide-reaching implications. So far in this chapter we have presented his investigation of discipline in Surveiller and Punir in this light. However, an important complement to this account is an exposition of the analytical approach and methodological development that Foucault commences when he begins to describe discipline as a social technology of a certain dispositivity. In the final section of this chapter we will therefore attempt to demonstrate that in order to understand the discipline that shaped our activity and new inclinations or dispositions without actually predetermining us, it became necessary for Foucault to analyze discipline as a “dispositive [in French “un dispositif”]” – which for reasons to be explained in detail we choose to translate as ‘dispositive’ rather than the usual English translations of “apparatus” or “deployment.”35 It is in view of this analytical concept that it becomes possible to fully understand why Foucault never claims that his contemporary age was subjected to a totalitarian discipline. As we will show by surveying rather systematically and schematically what Foucault was referring to with this notion and how he intended to employ it methodologically, it was the dispositive analysis in particular that allowed him to develop a sophisticated distinction between the pervasiveness of discipline and its omnipotence. Moreover, it becomes possible to show how Foucault, by working with discipline, advanced an analytical strategy that has wide-reaching implications for how to understand social cohesion or integration and which explains the connections between the analysis of discipline and Foucault’s other diagnoses of social normativity. We have chosen to present the dispositional analysis in two steps because of the different settings in which Foucault develops the approach and uses it to grasp what concerns him here. While the advanced dispositional analysis will show itself to be instrumental for our reading of Foucault’s work on the history of governmentality in Chapter 7, in relation to which the analytical approach is conceived of as a historical account of different prototypical dispositives with varying correlations of normative social influence, the task will be more

35

Cf. also J. Bussolini: “What Is a Dispositive?” Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85–107.

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modest in the following section. Here we focus on Foucault’s introduction of the notion of the dispositive in the mid-1970s, how we are to understand its semantics, and to what ends he finds it crucial to employ. As will be made clear immediately below, Foucault embarked on this explicit commentary on the dispositive as imperative for the understanding of discipline immediately after the publication of his book on the birth of the prison and therefore already in the context of his next major project concerned with the history of sexuality. Semantics of the dispositive. In everyday French, the term le dispositif often describes an arrangement set up for a specific purpose and destined to have immediate effect. A well-known example would be un dispositif d’information at a railway station, which provides passengers with track numbers along with a timetable of departures and arrivals. Currently, the notion is often used within the domain of new forms of information, communication and media formats to describe how these may need organization, material resources, technological knowhow, formation of inputs, as well as reception of outputs, in order to function.36 Even if the equivalent of the French word in English, the dispositive, is now obsolete, this translation is still preferable because it covers and maintains almost the same semantic field as the French word.37 Etymologically, in French as well as in English, the notion derives from the Late Latin dispositivus, a substantive form of the adjective under the same name. Both the adjective and the substantive are themselves derivatives of the Latin verb dis-pōnăre (lit. “to set apart”), which is generally referring to such endeavors as “to set in order,” “to arrange or array,” “to dispose” or “to form.”38 These older connotations of the word dispositive are relevant for understanding its significance in Foucault’s body of work. Hence, the dispositive subsists, although anachronistically, as something that “is characterized by a special disposition or appointment”; it has “the quality of disposing or inclining,” often as “opposed to effective” and therefore nearly as “preparatory, conducive, contributory.”39 This becomes even clearer in the dispositive as a technical term in French.40 In a military context, dispositive refers to a number of means in correlation to a given plan (e.g., dispositif d’attaque, dispositif de defence). If a military strategy designates the process of ‘planning’, the dispositive would then designate the operation of the ‘plan’ in time and space, with the means at hand, and with

36 Cf. J.-S. Beuscart and A. Peerbaye: “Histoires de dispositifs (introduction),” Terrains & travaux, 11 (2006), pp. 3–15. 37 Oxford English Dictionary 2009, s.v. 38 C.T. Lewis and C. Short: A Latin Dictionary (1879), s. v. 39 Oxford English Dictionary 2008, s.v. 40 Le Petit Robert 2008, s.v.

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regard to the characteristics of the adversary. In a legal context, a dispositive refers to the closing, effective part of a legal text. As opposed to the preamble containing the purpose of the law and the statute itself that formulates the specific legal command, the dispositive specifies the relevance and effect of the declaration and how and why it is to be put into practice. In a technical sense, the dispositive refers to the ‘plan’ according to which the different components are in actuality organized in a given apparatus. As in the military context, the technical dispositive points to a situation that is simultaneous with the operation of the formation, but with the supplement that this formation can be mapped out in such a way that the given plan can be extracted, transposed and incorporated into other situations. The wide range of cognate meanings, all pointing to intermediate or inbetween circumstances in which some potential arrangement or acting order is to be actualized in a certain way, may well have induced Foucault to begin employing the term in the 1970s. However, Louis Althusser (1918–1990), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924–1998), or Jean-Louis Baudry (b. 1930) could also have inspired him. They all used the dispositive as a central concept prior to Foucault, respectively discussing the “conceptual dispositive” of the all-pervading ideology of the capitalistic state, the “libidinal dispositive” of human life and existence, and the “cinematic dispositive” of the screen situation.41 The introduction of the dispositive as a methodological tool. It is within this semantic setting that Foucault introduces the notion in his 1973–1974 lectures on psychiatry in the 19th century entitled Le pouvoir psychiatrique. When he playfully declares that the lectures constitute “a second volume” to the older Histoire de la Folie, he equally stresses how the notion of a “dispositive of power” should now serve as a point of departure.42 The fact that this notion implies what Foucault himself considers a “radically different analysis” in comparison with his early book testifies to its importance already in this phase of his work.43 The notion of the dispositive is thus programmatically introduced in the very first lecture as a methodological tool in order to study power. As described in Chapter 3, this is motivated as an alternative to analysis focusing on the images, fantasies and knowledge of madness: in short on a “core of representations.”44 Instead of starting from statements, discourses or other 41

L. Althusser: “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État,” La Pensée, 151 (1970): 3–38; also in L. Althusser: Positions (1964–1975) (Paris, Les Éditions sociales, 1976): 67–125. J.-F. Lyotard: Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1973). J.-L. Baudry: “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications, 23 (1975): 56–72. 42 [PP]: 14/{PsP}: 13. 43 [PP]: 14/{PsP}: 13. 44 [PP]: 14/{PsP}: 12–13.

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types of representation, Foucault wants to ask the question: “To what extent can a dispositive of power produce” representations or even achieve its effect by circumventing the level of representations? Introducing the idea of a dispositive of power in the lecture course of 1973–1974 is therefore not a matter of ignoring representations but rather a heuristic way to analyze the status of representations as derivative by capturing the process of “formation of discursive practices.”45 Dispositives of power, as they are analyzed in Foucault’s lectures on psychiatric power relations in the 19th century, work through “injunctions” on the individual body rather than through “questions” directed at the level of representations and discourse alone.46 The central aim in Le pouvoir psychiatrique is therefore not only to establish a historical context that makes it possible to consider and assess the emergence of antipsychiatry as a critical event. By focusing on the problem of madness within psychiatry, the lecture course also represents a more general attempt to write a political history of truth by employing the methodological concept of the dispositive of power: “How can [the] deployment of power, these tactics and strategies of power, give rise to assertions, negations, experiments, and theories, in short to a game of truth? Dispositive of power and game of truth, dispositive of power and discourse of truth: This is what I would like to examine a little this year.”47 The idea of dispositives of power is developed analytically in one of the later lectures of the course, in which Foucault articulates the main features of a model of psychiatric power shaping the institution of the asylum in the 19th century. Using the controversial treatment practices of the French psychiatrist and anatomist François Leuret (1797–1851) as his main example, Foucault speaks of four defining game plans, maneuvers, or dispositives.48 First, there is the technique of creating an imbalance of power between the doctor and the patient, which demonstrates that the field of forces is asymmetric and that language will not pass without constraints between the two parties. The establishment of the statutory imbalance of the asylum can be marked from time to time by violence, or it can be affirmed as a relationship of trust and esteem

45

[PP]: 14/{PsP}: 12–13; emphasis added. Cf. [PP]: 306/{PsP}: 304. This is a characterization of the so-called dispositive of neurology, but it still pertains to all the disciplinary dispositives analyzed in Le pouvoir psychiatrique. 47 [PP]: 14/{PsP}: 13. 48 [PP]: 143–170/{PsP}: 143–171. Cf. F. Leuret: Du traitement morale de la folie (Paris, J. B. Bailliere, 1840), in which he defines “the moral treatment of madness” as “the wellfounded use of all means that act directly on the intellect and on the passions of the mentally alienated” (p. 156). In his lecture, Foucault primarily refers to Leuret’s Observation XXII concerned with the rather long case history of a 45-year-old former officer by the name of M. Dupré (pp. 418–462). 46

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in a kind of pact imposed on the patient. Moreover, it can be assured both through the prestige, presence and aggressiveness of the doctor’s own person and by “the asylum system itself, its system of surveillance, internal hierarchy, and the arrangement of the buildings, the asylum walls themselves, carrying and defining the network and gradient of power.”49 In all cases, the premise of this first dispositive is that treatment must be carried out by breaking down what Foucault calls “the fundamental assertion of omnipotence in madness.”50 In this way, the treatment in the asylum presupposes a battle of wills where the will of the patient is subjugated by a different, more vigorous will endowed with greater power expressed through the dispositive.51 The second dispositive aims to inculcate an “imperative use of language” into the patient that ensures obedience and order; for example, the patient is forced to prove his reliable commandment of proper names with which one greets, shows respect and pays attention to others. Importantly, the goal is not to relearn courtesy or good manners as such; on the contrary, the objective is to ensure reliability on the part of the subject in acknowledging the hierarchy of the asylum, and more generally the hierarchies of society as such: “The language one re-teaches to the patient is not the language through which he will be able to rediscover the truth; the language he is forced to re-learn is a language in which the reality of an order, of a discipline, of a power imposed on him, must appear.”52 The third dispositive is concerned with the management of needs; for example, when treating delusions the aim is to strengthen the hold of reality on the patient by creating, renewing and maintaining certain needs. By establishing the patient in a carefully maintained state of deprivation and at the same time arranging an economy of paid work and a system of payment for extra food, or even for the opportunity to defecate, the doctors are able to impose work and money as desirable aspects of reality upon the patient. Moreover, the confinement within the asylum and isolation from the family intrinsic to this institution in the 19th century serves to intensify the patient’s need for freedom. In general, the organization of needs serves to impose external reality on the patient in two ways: “On the one hand, [reality] will be the world of non-lack in contrast to the asylum world, and so it will appear as a 49

[PP]: 148/{PsP}: 148. [PP]: 147/{PsP}: 147. 51 In the last lecture of Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Foucault analyzes another dispositive of power, namely the “dispositive of neurological capture,” and he claims that it is also applied on the will of the patient, although not in order to subjugate the will and thereby habituate the patient into a hierarchical framework of reward and punishment. The aim is rather to epistemically capture the individual at the level of the “will itself” ([PP]: 297– 333; 304/{PsP}: 299–337; 302). 52 [PP]: 150/{PsP}: 151. 50

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desirable reality. On the other hand, the external world will appear at the same time as a world into which one is initiated by learning to react to one’s own lack, to one’s own needs: When you have learned that you must work to feed yourself, to earn money even to defecate, then you will be able to reach the outside world.”53 In this way, the management of needs establishes the lack of the asylum as a ‘propaedeutic’ to reality. This dispositive of needs also introduces a form of economic moralism: the patient is meant to acknowledge that “he must pay for his madness” by systematic deprivation and since his delusion is supposedly broken when he adequately manages his needs, he can even be said to purchase his own recovery.54 Finally, the fourth dispositive aims to achieve a confessional statement of truth.55 For example, a delusional patient who maintains that Paris is actually the town of Langres which some people have disguised as Paris is repeatedly exposed to cold showers until he agrees that Paris is really Paris. The point of this maneuver is not to change his perception, that is, he might still perceive Paris as the imitation of Paris: “What is asked of him – and this is how the statement of the truth becomes effective – is that he avow it. It does not have to be perceived, it has to be said, even if it is said under the constraint of the shower. The fact alone of saying something that is the truth has a function in itself: a confession, even when constrained, is more effective in the therapy than a correct idea, or an idea with exact perception, which remains silent.”56 Here we see a clear example of Foucault’s point that the influence of the dispositive must be traced beyond the level of representations. Even if Paris is still perceptually represented to the delusional as Langres, something important is supposedly achieved by inculcating a propensity to confess the truth when confronted with authorities who assert their epistemic authority. The idea of this tactical maneuver is to attack the distorted perceptual representation indirectly by installing a habit or disposition that if sufficiently ingrained will eventually undermine the delusion. The overriding aim of the dispositive of confession in the asylum is to pin the subject to his own history. The primary goal is thus not to evince statements of truths that bear on things but rather to influence dispositions that shape the patients’ self-conception by forcing them to admit ownership of their identity. This therefore requires that the patient recognize himself in an identity constituted by certain biographical entities. Importantly, this identity “is not so much the truth that he could say about himself, at the level of his 53

[PP]: 155/{PsP}: 155–156. [PP]: 156/{PsP}: 156. 55 The editor of the text, Jacques Lagrange, as well as the English translator, Graham Burchell, wrongly label this dispositive “fifth [cinquième],” although it is only the fourth. 56 [PP]: 158/{PsP}: 159. 54

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actual experience, but a truth imposed on him in a canonical form.”57 It is a matter of establishing an entire corpus of identity from the outside, as it were, by drawing on information about the family, civil status, and medical observation. It is this administrative, medical individuality in which the patient must recognize himself.58 These dispositives are not strictly separated discursive practices but are crystallized in the asylum, which in Foucault’s analytical perspective can be conceived as a “curing dispositive.”59 He emphasizes how his analysis of psychiatric practice could not have been performed by focusing on nosography or pathological anatomy since these forms of discourse did not prescribe or explicitly reflect on the dispositives at work in the asylum. The psychiatric practice “did not produce an autonomous discourse other than the protocol of what was said and done.”60 In this sense, Foucault maintains that the dispositive of power simply designates the relevant level of inquiry if we are to understand how the mad were treated in this period. The development of the dispositive as an analytical concept. As the first lectures of Le pouvoir psychiatrique demonstrate, the dispositive is not a general analytical concept at this stage of Foucault’s work. It is rather conceived as the best methodological tool in order to study power, or more precisely the disciplinary dispositive of power, which Foucault distinguishes from the power of sovereignty.61 Since Foucault develops the analytical notion of dispositive in order to study disciplinary power, the treatment of discipline in Surveiller et Punir should be placed in the framework of Foucault’s investigation of the disciplinary dispositive, which begins in Le pouvoir psychiatrique. In some passages of this text, however, Foucault speaks of the “dispositive of sovereignty” and thus indicates that the notion of dispositive could be used in relation to other forms of power than discipline.62 Foucault here foreshadows the development of his use of this analytical tool. From a study of discipline as it paradigmatically shapes education, work-life, the practices of punishment, and the treatment of the mentally ill, the dispositive in the middle of the 1970s attains the status of a general concept operational in his analysis. It was thus during a roundtable in 1977 that Foucault, probably for the first time, was asked directly: “What is the meaning or the methodological function for you of this term, dispositive?” To this question he responded: “What I am trying to pick out with this term is, first of all, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble

57 58 59 60 61 62

[PP]: 158/{PsP}: 159. [PP]: 160/{PsP}: 161. [PP]: 163/{PsP}: 164. [PP]: 164/{PsP}: 165. [PP]: 44–59/{PsP}: 42–57. [PP]: 54, 66–67, 83/{PsP}: 52, 64–65, 81.

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consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, law, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic proportions – in short: the said as much as the unsaid.”63 However, Foucault does not seem to find this dichotomy between the discursive fields and that which is non-discursive and more material particularly important. Instead, he is preoccupied with the way in which the elements of the dispositive interrelate. In the roundtable, Foucault therefore also defines the dispositive itself as “the network [réseau] that can be established between these elements.”64 The dispositive is concurrently a grouping of heterogeneous components, tangibles, and intangibles situated within an arrangement, as well as the transversal set of connections between these components. The dispositive is of a relational nature, rather than of a substantial kind. Hence, Foucault also indicates that the dispositive stands for “precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements.”65 However, he also emphasizes its modifiability, allowing the various elements to alter their position and produce new distributions.66 In this sedimentary process, which Foucault designates “the strategic completion of the dispositive,” it appears that the different aspects of the dispositional arrangement not only take recourse to various political programs, organizational distributions, or special instruments for the exercise of power but also to analyses, reflections, calculations, or similar procedures.67 Lastly, he can therefore characterize the dispositive as “strategies of relation of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge.”68 In this sense, the dispositive points to the multifactorial network in which knowledge and the exercise of power reciprocally organize and find themselves organized by each other. Dispositive, rationality, normativity. In his historical sketches, such as the development of discipline, Foucault thus shows how certain areas were thereby posed with new challenges but also how the problematization of these gave rise as well to concrete actions in response. The essential thing for analyzing these processes of discipline, for example, is not so much whether this was

63

“Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 299/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 194. 64 ”Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 299/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 194. 65 ”Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 299/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 194. 66 Cf. P. Rabinow: Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003). 67 “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 299/“The Confession of the Flesh” (1980), p. 197. Cf. SP: 207/DP: 205. Cf. also [STP]: 112/{STPo}: 108–109. 68 Cf. “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 301/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 196.

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unconscious or intentional but how the analysis can reveal patterns in power relations that are “both intentional and non-subjective.”69 These patterns, which are made up of the exchange and mutual effects that occur between various actions and which affect the institutions involved – the army, factories, schools – ultimately constitute what Foucault in some instances calls a “program.” However, in a conversation from 1978, he points out that “these programs don’t take effect in the institutions in an integral way; they are simplified, or some are chosen and not others; and things never work out as planned. But what I wanted to show is that this difference is not one between the purity of the ideal and the disorderly impurity of the real, but that in fact there are different strategies that are mutually opposed, composed, and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects that can perfectly well be understood in terms of their rationality, even though they don’t conform to the initial programming: this is what gives the resulting dispositive its solidity and suppleness.”70 In other words, the dispositive is an apparatus that one determines post hoc by looking at the analyzed events. In retrospect, the individual social events therefore appear as entities that stem from the dispositive that they contribute to forming. Dispositivity is applied as a transverse, medial level in the interaction of social actions. At this level, the social actions must be analyzed as events that likewise affect the dispositivity. The notion of the dispositive denotes a social regularity that makes it possible to give an account for not only the events’ existence, coexistence and conflicts, but also their ongoing meaning, change, disappearance and mutual implications. Foucault’s description of how disciplinary dispositivity comes about is therefore an analysis that shows how a different rationality can apply in addition to the obvious level of individuals and their intentions. The kind of rationality that Foucault attempts to explicate expresses itself in the regularity or logic that shapes a certain kind of social interaction. The outset of his analyses likewise forms the impression that the rationality contained in such interaction can only be properly disclosed if taken up from the perspective of a generative history. Only in this manner is it possible to show how rationality gradually comes about as various responses to challenges. This approach is related to Foucault’s perception of the limited and dependent character of rationality. A certain kind of rationality appears in history through how one relates to different influences; it appears as a rationalization through 69

VS: 124/WK: 94. “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978,” DE IV: 28/“Questions of Method,” p. 253; translation modified. 70

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how one responds to the historical conditions one is located in.71 With the term “disciplinary dispositive” this ultimately points to a comprehensive presentation of the regularity that gradually came about in the mentioned relations but also inserted new ways of relating. For Foucault, discipline symbolizes a rationality that penetrates and transforms the individual fields to an increasing degree. However, the disciplinary dispositive also denotes a common way of relating to the world that became evermore important across all areas. Implementing discipline therefore helps introduce a different normativity than the law’s immediately prescriptive normativity. Foucault’s own critical analysis thus entails placing the various techniques within a more comprehensive dispositional history of technology. A dispositive leaves a trace and outlines an emerging order, but what kind of construction such sediments belong to depends entirely on the other dispositives at play in any given historical constellation. In this light, neither a technique, nor a technology or dispositive has a substantial nature. The purpose of a dispositional analysis is not to identify any such nature but to map out the effects of various dispositives within the constellations surrounding them. Consequently, an analysis of dispositives seeks to account for how objects, practices, techniques, events, and experiences that are usually taken for granted come into existence only in the interaction between the dispositives. At the same time, however, Foucault maintains that “it is in fact a connection of practices, of real practices, that has produced this and leaves its mark on reality.”72 Although the dispositives have no immediate substantial nature to be grasped, they still substantially affect reality in various ways. Hence, Foucault’s dispositional analysis does not pretend to be a way of analyzing reality as such. Instead, it is a way of demonstrating how different actions (viewed as prescriptive events) mutually eliminate each other only to collectively outline a pattern and create a new normative level. Stating the emergence of a new dispositive through a historical transformation amounts to asserting that new guidelines for actions started to make themselves known, and not necessarily that the analyzed actions are in perfect accordance with these guidelines. It is not claimed that those who act cause the dispositive to manifest itself

71

Simultaneously, with the often treated story of economic rationalization, there was – according to Foucault – also a different kind, namely rationalization of the disciplinary techniques: “In my opinion, that fact that extremely rational systems of domination have been devised is of great importance in Western history. ... An entire ensemble of finalities, techniques, methods: discipline rules in schools, in the army, in factories. It is extremely rational techniques of dominion. The power of reason is a bloody power.” “La torture, c‘est la raison” [1977], DE III: 395; our translation. 72 [NB]: 6/{BP}: 7.

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directly.73 By its organization, the dispositive attempts to indicate a level of social normativity that seems to have had a normative effect on individual programs but that in turn were never implemented as originally intended. In the perspective offered by the analysis, the social “actuality” is only shown in one specific light of normativity. However, the dispositive is still highly influential as it outlines the way in which one relates normatively to a specific situation. This normative level is regarded as an irreducible level of reality insofar as the dispositive influences the (in their own right already prescriptive) activities of social life. The effects of the dispositive are embedded in the institutions and organizations it reshapes. The dispositive is thus very real insofar as it affects the social reality by installing a most real dispositionality. It may not be an absolute or omnipotent idea; however, as an already implemented ubiquitous set of connections, it is something to which social interaction must find a response.74 Discipline beyond institutionalocentrism. All in all, the disciplinary dispositive appears as a unifying principle that in retrospect can articulate the framework that guides an important part of Foucault’s research in the 1970s. The disciplinary dispositive highlights a similarity in institutions as divergent as the army, schools, industrial production, asylum, the modern medical clinic, prison and other corrective facilities. This similarity also applies to various modern experiences and phenomena such as having a guilty conscience, the need for self-improvement, analyses of modern relations of productive power, social norms and normativity, as well as finally a similarity between seemingly distinct books such as Histoire de la folie, Naissance de la clinique, Surveiller et punir, and La volonté de savoir. In all these contexts, Foucault describes how a disciplinary process forces itself and makes its mark upon an area where the legal dispositive had previously been the decisive feature. From such a perspective, Surveiller et punir can be seen as an attempt to describe the penetration of the disciplinary dispositive within a wide range of important areas. The disciplinary dispositive thus reaches beyond Surveiller et punir, and Histoire de la folie and Naissance de la Clinique can be read as dispositive historical analyses that describe how the disciplinary dispositive accesses and takes control of the asylum and the clinic respectively. An analysis of dispositives therefore does not seek to explain the existence of the major social technologies by referring to the institutions that contain them. Foucault juxtaposes this “institutionalocentrism” with the endeavor to move “beyond or outside the institution ... and replace it with the overall 73

As long as one is expounding the dispositive, then, one is still on the stage of an “ideality,” which remains suspended in “reality.” 74 “La poussière et le nuage” [1980], DE IV: 15–16.

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point of the technology of power.”75 Thus, the analysis of dispositives seeks to unravel how a difficult social exchange influenced by particular challenges and predicaments constitutes, runs through, and changes the principal institutions and organizations. The analytic of dispositives thus understands the level of organizations and institutions from the standpoint of emergent processes. According to Foucault, a dispositional arrangement is not to be understood as an implicit or intrinsic structure of organizations but is rather a dynamic and unstable social pattern that traverses the organization and shapes it more or less explicitly. Foucault’s attempt to move beyond the institution therefore becomes a matter of tracking the formation of such a prevailing dynamic pattern functioning in the social field. On the face of it, a transparent logic seems to be present when individuals act with specific intentions. At this stage in the analysis, different problems present themselves and call for solutions to the difficulties at hand. Those who act relate to former actions and may attempt to take potential responses into account. Each action and each related intention are intersected by other actions; and because of this interaction, the result is never fully predetermined. In this interplay between actions, which eliminates the immediacy of the time- and place-oriented intentions, a new regularity appears. A new pattern emerges amidst the actions and their intentions. This pattern is the dispositive; it is the arrangement that subsequently seems to have emerged through the analyzed events. In retrospect, each of the social events seems to be derived from the dispositive they concurrently assist in creating, and the dispositive may therefore be interpreted as a transverse, mediating level in the interaction of social actions. At this stage, the social actions must be analyzed as events that occur in relation to and with an effect on the dispositive. When it comes to the study of institutions or organizations, the dispositional analysis can therefore avoid dualisms that distinguish between established and bounded entities, such as institution-individual. In this approach, it becomes possible for Foucault to analyze individuals as well as institutional entities as derivative in relation to an emerging yet unstable social logic that disposes and challenges the identity of individuals and traverses and problematizes the unity of institutions. Modes of appearance of the dispositive. Following Foucault’s analysis of discipline, it seems prudent to distinguish between three modes of appearance that pertain to the strategic functioning of the dispositive. First, there is 75 [STP]: 120–121/{STPo}: 116–17. In Le pouvoir psychiatrique the dispositive is introduced as a way to understand the institution as a phenomenon of response to an already functioning dispositional logic rather than as the focal point of analysis ([PP]: 16–17, 34, 43/{PsP}: 15–16, 32–33, 41).

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the dispositional logic emerging in the social field as an overarching process that helps to shape individuals and organizations alike. Foucault’s approach describes the field of application for a dispositive in general as non-particular. As touched upon earlier, a dispositive is an arrangement that is open to unforeseen and unpredictable events and simultaneously the constant appearance of unexpected effects upon different parts of the dispositive that modulate its ‘nature’. The strategic function plots a course toward which the processing of an arrangement tends, but it does not predetermine the effects of the dispositive. Nonetheless, the dispositive is organized and stabilized through certain regulations. How a strategic function is carried out depends on the concrete arrangement of the dispositive; this arrangement is forever being displaced because of the interaction of the dispositive with its surroundings. The interaction between the different parts of the arrangement causes what Foucault defines as a “process of functional overdetermination.”76 Various inputs mutually affect each other, thereby creating changes in the function of the dispositive. Such changes make themselves known as small tremors, which then in turn necessitate adjustments of the interaction between the various parts of the dispositive. In short, the dispositive, at this level, is analyzed as embedded in a context that it also helps to select and shape.77 Secondly, the dispositive’s engagement in its context may define its function to such an extent that its mode of appearance univocally delimits a specific field: the general strategic function may determine one specific calculus, thus processing all possible inputs. In this case, the dispositive appears as a “mechanism.”78 ‘Mechanism’ refers to an arrangement that targets and treats a specific area in accordance with certain predetermined procedures, such as the guillotine for example, which was designed to provide a ‘democratic’ execution appropriate for everybody, high or low, man or woman, fighting for or against the Republic. The notion of mechanism can thus capture a dispositive in a rigid mode of operation. In such circumstances, the dispositive does not allow any reciprocal influence from the social interactions it shapes and it does not modulate itself depending on the specific nature of the material it processes; rather, it expresses a dispositional logic in a strict and inflexible modality. The third mode of appearance is an abstraction of the functional rationality of the dispositive that Foucault typically refers to as the ‘diagram’. This mode of appearance is particularly relevant for discipline when Foucault, in Surveiller et

76

“Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 299/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 195. Deleuze describes the dispositive as “a tangle [écheveau], a multi-linear ensemble,” which is “composed of lines, each having a different nature” and each of them “broken and subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked, and subject to derivation” (G. Deleuze: “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” p. 185/“What Is a Dispositive,” p. 159). 78 [STP]: 68/{STPo}: 66. 77

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punir, provides a lucid example in which the panoptical surveillance is described as the diagram of the disciplinary dispositive: “But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: It is a diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: It is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. ... It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, schools, workshops, or prisons.”79 Foucault thus discriminates the diagram and the dispositive. The distinction between dispositive and diagram is analytically valuable because it allows the study of phenomena that crystalize the logic of the dispositive in a both complex and paradigmatic way. The diagram is present as the abstract, typical formulation of the connections in the dispositive. As a diagram, the panoptic surveillance presents a relatively simple transmittable spatial plan for the complex dispositive of discipline. A diagram may of course be expressed in other media than architectural models, such as paradigmatic texts, organizational diagrams, and scientific models. The defining characteristic of the diagram is not a particular medium but rather its typical, exemplary, or ‘classical’ nature as an expression of a particular dispositive. In the diagram, the implicit dispositional logic manifests itself explicitly and often programmatically such that it can be abstracted from its immediate context and put to conscious and determinate use in a variety of social settings. The notions of mechanism and diagram allow for a dispositional analysis to focus on exemplary and extreme shapes of a particular dispositive respectively.80 Yet, the methodological primacy ascribed to the unstable and inclusive 79

SP: 207/DP: 205. Is must be emphasized that Foucault is not consistent himself in his use of terms to distinguish between the mechanism and the diagram appearance of the disciplinary dispositive. Immediately before describing the Panopticon as the “diagram” as the general disciplinary “power mechanism” (SP: 207/DP: 205), he also refers to “the Panoptic” as a “machine” as well as “an important dispositive” (SP: 203/DP: 202; in which the translation says “an important mechanism”). However, as we argue and have attempted to show, the fact that Foucault is inconsistent in his use of terms does not imply that he, in his actual analysis, does not differentiate rather methodically between the different modes of appearance pertaining to the dispositive. For the same reason it is sound as well as useful to deploy the dispositive as the overarching, general and most clear-cut dispositional notion when seen in relation to diagram, mechanism, or machine, and even social technology. 80

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dispositional logic as it emerges in the social field avoids an erroneous identification of the dispositive with its typical or rigid mode of appearance. The dispositional analysis does not isolate diagrams, for instance by expressing the Panopticon as what discipline “really is,” but rather encourages a specific historical analysis that focuses on the relationship between the diagram and the underlying mode of problematization from which it emerges. Similarly, a mechanism is not to be understood as the expression of an intrinsic tendency of a dispositional logic, but must rather be viewed as an extreme mode of appearance conditioned by specific historical circumstances. The primary level of dispositional analysis is an ambiguous and fragile social ‘ordering process’ ultimately irreducible to an abstract conceptual articulation, which aims to define general characteristics and clearly demarcate these definitions through binary oppositions. Taking the disciplinary dispositive seriously. It is in this sense that Foucault endeavors “to take the dispositive seriously,” and it is the reason why it is important to take this central notion seriously when reading his work and not least his analysis of discipline.81 The notion is thus important in order to understand why Foucault stressed that with Surveiller et punir he had absolutely no intention “of writing the history of the different disciplinary institutions, with all they could display of individual differences.” In accordance with the logic of dispositional analysis, the purpose was “simply to mark out a series of examples of some of the essential techniques that most easily spread from one to another.” According to Foucault, “these techniques were always meticulous, often minute, but still had their importance: because they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a ‘new micro-physics’ of power; and because, since the seventeenth century, they have not ceased to reach out to ever broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body” But they also represented “small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious.” In short, they comprised “dispositives that obeyed ulterior economies, or pursued forms of coercion without grandeur it was nevertheless they that brought about the mutation of the punitive system, at the threshold of the contemporary period. Describing them will require great attention to detail: beneath every set of figures, we must seek not a meaning, but a precaution; we must situate them not only in the solidarity of a functioning, but in the coherence of a tactic.”82 This coherence of appointment and inclination, traversing and going beyond what can be actualized in a single function ascribed to certain techniques, is what makes up a dispositive of discipline, 81 82

VS: 97–98/WK: 72–73; translation modified. SP: 141/DP: 139; translation modified.

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concurrently representing the object of analysis and the way in which this object is analyzed. For the same reason, the dispositive becomes equally important for understanding why Foucault, in a reply to a critique expressed by historians in the late 1970s, would emphasize that the history told in Surveiller et punir was by no means an attempt “to study a period” but an attempt “to address a problem.” Substituting the rigidity of the mechanism with the preparatory, contributory and dispositional nature of discipline, he writes: “The automaticity of power, the mechanical character of the dispositives in which it takes shape is by no means the thesis of the book. By contrast, it is the idea that, in the eighteenth century, power of this kind could at all be possible and desirable, it is the theoretical and the practical investigations into these mechanisms, it is the incessantly manifested will, then, to organize such dispositives, that constitutes the object of the book. To consider the way in which we have sought to rationalize the power, the way in which we have conceived, across the eighteenth century, a new ‘economy’ of relations of power; to show the important role that was played by the theme of the machine, of gaze, of surveillance, of transparence, etc.: that is not the same as saying that power is a machine or that such an idea was born mechanically. It is the study of the development of the technological theme that I find important: important within the great reevaluation of power mechanisms that took place in the eighteenth century, within the general history of techniques of power and, even more globally, the relations between rationality and power; important, also, in relation to the birth of the institutional structures specific to modern societies; and important, finally, for understanding the formation or development of certain forms of knowledge, such as the human sciences.”83 As it shows, the study of discipline through the history of the new kind of punishment called the prison was profoundly shaped by the logic of dispositional analysis and the way in which this allows us to understand the normativity we experience within our social surroundings. It is norms understood as dispositions put into reality as described earlier that makes it clear why Foucault could maintain that “the diffusion of methods of discipline” by no means implies that “‘the French are obedient’,” and why he could consider it mistaken to infer that “one was affirming the omnipotence of power, if one was talking about the general presence of power relations.”84 When omnipresence is not the same as omnipotence it is precisely because the particular normative influence of discipline expresses itself as a dispositive: as something that has “the quality of disposing or inclining” but is not itself “effectively” determining the nature of social relations even though it enters the social field with 83 84

“La poussière et le nuage” [1980], DE IV: 18; our translation. “La poussière et le nuage” [1980], DE IV: 16; our translation.

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a “a special disposition or appointment” that necessitates not compliance but response.85 Foucault’s diagnosis of the contemporary experience of discipline was the diagnosis of a dispositive. However, as we have already accentuated, the development of Foucault’s use of the dispositive as an important analytical category does not end with Surveiller et punir. In Chapter 7, we will show how Foucault, in the beginning of his lectures in 1978 and thus at the commencement of his enquiry into the history of governmentality, expanded his use of the dispositive while also adding considerably to its complexity. If his work on discipline was dealing with the workings and the nature of the dispositive in its most explicit and singular sense, the later analysis was rather concerned with the interplay between several different senses and how the general normative influence exercised upon the social field was never unilateral but rather shaped by possible encounters, alliances and constellations.

85

Oxford English Dictionary, 2008, s.v.

6 Warfare as a Model of Power Relations

In light of Foucault’s work in the 1970s, it is crucial to recognize how the description of power as a social technology involves a distinction between various kinds of power and a mode of inquiry capable of differential analysis. In his lectures from the first half of the 1970s, Foucault primarily examines discipline as such a technology of power. In the résumé of “Il faut défendre la société”, the Collège de France lecture course held at the beginning of 1976, he brings together an important outcome of these analyses of disciplinary power: “In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects.”1 Hence, as in many other instances, Foucault criticizes a theory of power that focuses on the scope and legitimacy of power. More specifically, he criticizes the analytical insufficiency of a theory of power that concerns itself with determining whether the competence to distinguish between forbidden and permitted in a given context is legitimate or not, as well as evaluating the capacity to implement prohibitions through commands or force. According to such a fundamentally juridical conception, power is assumed to constitute a substantial unity that can be possessed by a ruler. It is over and against this

1

[DS]: 239/{SD}: 265. 208

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that Foucault eventually develops a relational analysis of power that focuses on how it is practiced and what the practice of power means for the development of various kinds of subjectivity.2 While this emphasis given to the shaping of the subject in connection to a long range of different social techniques and technologies becomes highly prominent in the remainder of his work, the focus of Foucault’s investigations in the first half of the 1970s is predominantly the formation of subjects through relations of disciplinary power. At this juncture, he concentrates on how these power relations shape the individual body through a multiplicity of carefully regulated practices, which can be more or less discursively articulated and self-reflective. However, to understand how Foucault himself regarded “Il faut défendre la société” as a space for retrospective reflection on the kind of analytical endeavor undertaken in this time period, it is important to take note of a more or less implicit distinction that pertains to his descriptions of the exercise of disciplinary power. In terms of analysis, Foucault tends to operate with degrees of reciprocity pertaining to these power relations. The differentiation results in a continuum between, at one end, power relations in which the reciprocity appears as durable and irreducible and, at the other end, power relations characterized by an often extreme degree of asymmetry and therefore exercising one-sided dominance over others. According to Foucault’s inquiry, this latter category of one-sided relations of dominance is particular apparent in the exercise of disciplinary power as it presents itself in institutions such as prisons, the army, and psychiatric institutions in the 19th century. For instance in Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Foucault writes about the disciplinary order, which he claims founds the therapeutic process in the asylum, that “this kind of immanent order, which covers the entire space of the asylum, is in reality thoroughly permeated and sustained by a dissymmetry that attaches it imperiously to a single authority that is both internal to the asylum and the point from which the disciplinary distribution and dispersion of time, bodies, actions, and behavior is determined. This authority within the asylum is, at the same time, endowed with unlimited power, which nothing must or can resist. This inaccessible authority without symmetry or reciprocity, which thus functions as the source of power, as the factor of the order’s essential dissymmetry, and which determines that this order always derives from a nonreciprocal relationship of power, is obviously medical authority, which, as you will see, functions as power well before it 2 It is thus with reference to this kind of relational analysis of power that Foucault, in a programmatic passage from the essay “The Subject and Power” (1982), can define the overall purpose of his body of work as an attempt to characterize “the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (p. 326).

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functions as knowledge.”3 In the description of the asylum as “a field polarized in terms of an essential dissymmetry of power” the one-sided relation of dominance becomes the condition for the function of the institution.4 Even if the medical authority in the asylum, personified in the doctor, does not come to possess power as in the juridical model, he acts as a local source, from which the power relations stem. At the same time, however, such medical authority is – in the strictest sense – distinct from disciplinary power; exactly as a fixed point that ensures the continuation and asymmetry of the disciplinary techniques, authority remains distinct from these. In his description of the techniques of discipline as they play out within, for instance, the asylum, Foucault also discovers an aspect of irreducible reciprocity in the power relations, thus making them impossible to describe as purely one-sided relations of dominance. Instead, it is necessary to emphasize a greater or lesser degree of reciprocity and reversibility that can potentially affect the stability of the relations and the structures of authority within a given field. Even if Foucault does not emphasize the reversibility and reciprocity of power relations in many of the texts from this period, these characteristics are nevertheless still assumed in the definitions of power given in “Il faut défendre la société”, according to which power is an implementation and deployment of a relationship of force.5 By the same token, Foucault emphasizes the reversibility of power relations in his résumé of the lecture when he continues to claim that we should study such relations “as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another.”6 A history of power as war and Foucault’s auto-critique. Strongly accentuating the reciprocal relation between power and its opposition, this definition is not only essential in order to understand Foucault’s inquiry into the exercise of power in a broader sense; what is equally important is this kind of reciprocity with regard to the “pseudo-military vocabulary,” with notions such as “opposed powers,” “tactics,” “strategies,” and “struggles,” that Foucault was fully aware of making use of when working for an alternative to the juridical conception of sovereignty in the first half of the 1970s.7 While Foucault in his Collège de France lectures of 1973–1974 was still not certain whether it would “really make an advance” for his analytical endeavor to employ such

3 4 5 6 7

[PP]: 5/{PP}: 3. [PP]: 6/{PP}: 4. [DS]: 16/{SD}: 15. [DS]: 239/{SD}: 266; our emphasis. [PP]: 18/{PP}: 16.

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paramilitary concepts but was nonetheless willing to “try to see what we can do with it,” this analytical experiment had acquired an altogether different status when he embarked on “Il faut défendre la société” at the beginning of 1976. Instead of attempting to scrutinize various dispositions of power by using a militaristic terminology in the context of psychiatric expertise and the asylum or delinquency and prison-like institutions, Foucault’s major aim during this new lecture course was to ask retrospectively and self-reflectively what it actually implied to study the excessive power and power relations in an analysis that revolves around the concept of ‘war’. Foucault expressed this aim in a series of general questions, which also demonstrate why it is that war can serve as the most radical and general framework for power, understood not as relations of fixed and asymmetrical dominance but as relations of perpetual and irreducible reciprocity between adversaries. “Must war,” he asks, “be regarded as a primal and basic state of affairs, and must all phenomena of social domination, differentiation, and hierarchization be regarded as its derivatives?” “Do processes of antagonism, confrontations, and struggles among individuals, groups, or classes derive in the last instance from general processes of war?” “Can a set of notions derived from strategy and tactics constitute a valid and adequate instrument for the analysis of power relations?”8 However, as so often is the case with Foucault, he does not give a clear and straightforward answer concerning the scope and validity of the war-model and how this relates to the analysis of power relations but rather asks about the historical origin of this model. Consequently, in “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault’s inquiry into the questions concerning war and power as well as the retrospective reflection on the status of his own previous work, ends up as an investigation of the historical ancestors and paradigms for the idea that the exertion of power is fundamentally a mode of warfare and that civil society is, in reality, a battlefield. It is by asking these general historical questions that Foucault further develops his analysis of the exercise of power while also critically questioning the status and the scope of this kind of belligerent analytics. Even if the lecture course that Foucault gave in 1976 is concerned with several of the issues prominent in the preceding courses on Le pouvoir psychiatrique and Les anormaux, and even if “Il faut défendre la société” contains an inclusive historical inquiry of its own that equally contextualizes and supplements and amplifies these antecedent matters of concern, the connecting thread of the lecture courses still practically comes across as a methodological deliberation by way of which Foucault sought to come to terms with his work on power relations so far and to possibly move beyond this analysis or to connect it with something new. Accordingly, aware that the Collège de France lectures of 1976 8

[DS]: 239/{SD}: 266.

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bring together the problematization of the societal danger associated with psychosocial abnormality with a comprehensive genealogy of state racism and a civil society characterized by a bellicose struggle with itself, we have primarily in this chapter chosen to follow Foucault in his indirect attempt to assess and evaluate his own foregoing analysis as he writes a genealogy of the exertion of power as a mode of generalized warfare. To present Foucault’s critical self-reflection as he develops it in conjunction with his articulation of the history in which the predecessors of a critical discourse emerge, we begin by giving Foucault’s outline of early counter-discourses. They emerged from the middle of the 17th century during the time of the Glorious Revolution in England and in the 18th century in France in opposition to and as a counter-history to the traditional discourse of the rule of law and royal power. According to this counter-history, the rule of law and the juridical discourse was established as an instrument for the monarchy as a means to legitimize and conceal people’s subjugation to its yoke. Thus, the adherents regarded their discourse as an attempt to reopen a war that existing law had in fact already pursued, while trying to conceal it. In the radical critique, war had become a generalized fundamental state that could not be transcended as it traversed the social institution and their apparent peace, thereby reducing them to elements in a general conflict that split the social sphere into two opposed forces. Accordingly, the revolt was no longer to be conceived as a solitary event that broke with the law but, on the contrary, as an ongoing rebellion that formed the only fitting response to the established system. With the new critical discourse, a new kind of historical analysis appeared that broke with the previous Roman and Medieval representation of power and formed an unremitting opponent to modern social contractual theory. The discourse revealed a hidden continuous historical warfare that formed the backdrop for modern racism by asserting an ongoing war or struggle of races. Subsequently, the chapter discusses how this historical analysis inspires Foucault to distinguish more systematically between two basic systems for analyzing power in the Western hemisphere. The first juridical schema understands power as a primal right that is surrendered according to a basic contract and constitutes sovereignty. According to this conception, power becomes oppression if it oversteps the terms of this basic contract. The second critical conception analyzes power not in terms of the contract-oppression schema but as a struggle. Finally, the chapter shows how Foucault in the 1970s fundamentally revises his earlier social analytics influenced by the critical discourse and the model of belligerent power relations as it was developed in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Concomitantly, however, Foucault also becomes aware that the new approach is problematic. Not only is it dependent upon and

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framed in opposition to the prevailing discourse that it criticizes; it is also marked by a hidden reductionism, producing the result that all social acts and events tend to be regarded as weapons or instruments in an ongoing war. As a consequence, Foucault accentuates the independence of right and truth with regard to power and strives to articulate the relationship between these three irreducible fields. To be able to analyze power relations in their antagonistic relationship to – but equally in their close and intricate interconnectedness with – right and truth, Foucault further develops a more elaborate historical analytics of dispositives during the second part of the 1970s.

1

War as a counter-discourse of power

In “Il faut défendre la société” Foucault presents what may at first seem a paradoxical fact: When the modern, Western territorial states were constructed around the rule of law and its peace, the previous rivalries of the feudal state, which were conflicts that were not sharply delimited, were overcome by establishing a monopoly on violence and by excluding internal conflicts to the periphery of society. Yet, the violence which was abolished returned in the shape of a more limited and temporary state of emergency, but it also took on a purer and more absolute character in the shape of wars between armies. Alongside the movement toward a more generalized state of peace, however, there occurred what could be generically designated a “counter-discourse,” which sought to deny and defy this development, as it told a “counter-history.”9 The counterdiscourse claimed that the war, which appeared to be a state of temporary emergency, was ultimately the basic social relation, which demonstrated a profound truth about all other relations. Ultimately, it was necessary to interpret the more peaceful social relations and institutions – including the installed peace itself – not only as the outcome of but as a part of an ongoing battle. 9 Concerning the term “counter-history” as a characterization of “the new form of history that appeared precisely at the very end of the Middle Ages, or, really, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” cf. [DS]: 60–66/{SD}: 69–76. Throughout “Il faut défendre la société” Foucault also refers to “discourse of struggle,” “revolutionary discourse,” “discourse of perpetual war,” and “historical discourse.” While he at times uses these terms with sharp contextual distinctions between them, and at other times almost synonymously, all of them are marked by their opposition to something – as “counter-discourses.” However, these discourses and histories are not counter-discourses and counterhistories in the sense that they belong, rightfully and completely, to the oppressed ([DS]: 66/{SD}: 76). Rather these very mobile and versatile discourses, which can be adopted and used by various social groups, are counter-discourses in the sense that they take the form of oppositional discourses and position the speaker as speaking on behalf of – and speaking the language of – the oppressed, subdued, and enslaved. When examining these counter-discourses, Foucault therefore also examines precursors for the contemporary discourse on sexuality he critically engages with at the beginning of La volonté de savoir.

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English and French counter-discourses to the rule of law. From the middle of the 17th century, during the time of the Glorious Revolution, such a critique was put forward by the English middle class opposition to the monarchy. The radical discourse had an influence on the parliamentary opposition to the monarchy and among the puritans but was prominently articulated among the Levelers, who were led by William Walwyn (c. 1600–1681), John Lilburne (1614–1657), Richard Overton (1631–1664), and Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676).10 This group sought to challenge the obvious character of existing law by revealing a hidden historical fact. The revelation was that law had not merely been an original and unbroken transfer or tradition; the existing law, to which one was subject, had come about through the Norman invasion of Anglo-Saxon England 600 years earlier. In the radical critique, law and the existing state of rights was viewed as a result of a people’s subjugation to the Norman yoke. Law was thus no longer proof of continuity but rather a rupture. It appeared as an attempt to cover up the rupture and the historical event through which it had been installed. In this way, the law obstructed the view of antecedent history.

“We have if we look with the eyes of frailty, enemies like the sons of Anak, but if with the eyes of faith and confidence in a righteous God and a just cause, we see more with us then against us.”

Among the most important texts authored by the Levelers, also known as the Diggers, was: (1) An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right, which first was presented to the Army Council in October 1647, followed by two later text versions: (2) An Agreement of the People of England, and the places therewith incorporated, for a secure and present peace, upon grounds of common right, freedom and safety, presented to the English Parliament in January 1649, and (3) An Agreement Of The Free People of England. Tendered as a Peace-Offering to this distressed Nation, by Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburne, Master William Walwyn, Master Thomas Prince, and Master Richard Overton, Prisoners in the Tower of London, May the 1, 1649. The quotation (p. 169) is from the very end of the last text version, after the group of Levelers had been incarcerated in the Tower of London, often used as a secure place for safekeeping offenders against the Crown.

Figure 6.1

The Levelers

The writings mentioned are found in Andrew Sharp: The English Levellers. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998).

10

[DS]: 85–100/{SD}: 97–114.

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According to Foucault, this radical discourse therefore sought to bring attention to the law as not being pure representation and enlightenment, as had previously been suggested, but rather as a kind of illumination that left something else hidden in the darkness, and which the radical discourse could provide a platform for this to be able to speak. The radical discourse pointed out that since the existing law had an ambiguous reality and expressed one group’s victory and another’s defeat, law should also be regarded as an exercise of violence toward the newly subjected. For this reason, the radicals encouraged the subjects under the law to express a general opposition to the existing corpus of law. In the radical discourse, revolution thus became the reopening of a conflict that had been active throughout history but that had been suppressed by the rule of law. Accordingly, an event such as the Revolution of 1688 could be conceived as an opportunity to end the permanent historical conflict once and for all in a final and decisive battle. A similar critique was employed by the aristocracy around one hundred years later against French absolutism, which had been decisively established toward the end of Louis XIV’s reign.11 The analysis is given in its most lucid form in Boulainvillers’ (1658–1722) Histoire de l’ancien Gouvernement de la France (History of the Ancient Government of France), which was not published before 1727, and his Essai sur la Noblesse de France, contenans une Dissertation sur son Origine et Abaissement (Essay Concerning the French Nobility, Containing a Dissertation about Its Rise and Fall ), published in 1732.12 Since Boulainvillers sought to document that the French nobility was legitimate in its leadership by claiming a theory of descent from the older Frank (i.e., German) nobility, he operated – as in English radicalism – with a discourse of conquest and subjection, which was, however, now viewed from the perspective of the conquerors. The original Germanic nobility had not been authorized to govern because it could not act on behalf of a continuous legal tradition that could be traced back to antiquity; rather, it attained its right by being able to invade and thus install itself in Gaul, which had been impoverished by its previous nobility and defended by mercenaries and was thus in a state of dissolution. The new nobility sought to set up a happier and more stable social order where the original population tilled the land and the new Frank overlords defended the territory. In this happy feudal state, the Frankish king would only have a marginal position as primus inter pares. According to this position, he would lead the

11

[DS]: 101ff/{SD}: 115ff. H.d. Boulainvillers: Histoire de l’ancien Gouvernement de la France, avec XIV Lettres Historiques sur les Parlemens ou Etats-Generaux, Tome I–III (La Haye/Amsterdam, Aux dépends de la Compagnie, 1727); Essais sur la Noblesse de France, contenans une Dissertation sur son Origine et Abaissement, avec des Notes Historiques, Critiques & Politique (Amsterdam, n.p., 1732). 12

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army in case of war and act as a magistrate in times of peace. However, the royal house rose above this situation by betraying the nobility from which it originally stemmed and thus entered into an unnatural alliance with the original Gallic population, which had begun to form various oppositions to the aristocracy in the shape of clergy and the middle class. In this way, it became possible to isolate the nobility and take from it the original power and knowledge that it possessed. Indeed, it was only by returning knowledge about the authentic rights of the nobility and the hidden treachery contained here that would make it possible to once more take up the role previously held by the nobility. War as the primal state of affairs. Both the English and French counterdiscourses expressed a decisive critique of the discourses of rebellion and disobedience, which had been quite widespread during the Middle Ages and which could still be handled within the conceptual framework of the juridical conception of power. According to Foucault, the decisive point here was to give an account of how a rebellion could become permissible at a moment when the situation had become intolerable because the nobility had transgressed legitimate authority. In the new kinds of counter-discourse, however, the right to rebel was formulated as an absolute responsibility that one was constantly required to undertake. Unlike the previously described critique of institutions, this involved a break with the law and sovereignty theory. An analysis of sociality was developed which presupposed that the conditions for revolt were always fulfilled. What Foucault finds in this radical rupture is a connection to the new discourse, which also contains a different analysis of law and its role in society. Existing law was viewed as an entity that had been installed as a result of a prior invasion and deceit. It was perceived as an instrument for the monarchy in order to legitimize and establish its spoils of war. For this reason, it was necessary to view the establishment of the institution of law as the outcome of one group’s victory and another group’s subjugation: The law was an expression of acts of violence and repression. According to this determination, the law not only played this role in a distant historical situation, as the opposition that was traced back to the past was still experienced as pertinent. In contradiction with what had seemed to be the case and which the theory of legitimacy claimed, the existing law had not been able to transcend the state of affairs in which it was installed to begin with. The law was an entity determined by serving a purpose in an ongoing war between the two groups. It was a weapon, an instrument of war, which had been put to use in an existing campaign and to serve strategic schemes. The counter-discourse of invasion thus viewed itself as an attempt to reopen the war, which existing law in fact already pursued while seeking to conceal

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this fact, which in turn meant that the revolt was no longer conceived as a solitary event that broke with the law but rather as the only fitting response to the established system in general. In order to liberate oneself from the juridical conception as such, one could always with good reason reopen the war in a new and unexpected location as one implemented a general rebellion against a law that sought to hide the fact that it was itself a part of a belligerent campaign. Accordingly, the revolt became a general mode of existence that one could adopt. Whereas the older discourse on revolt focused on determining the circumstances under which the subject was allowed to defend itself against the abuse of power, the radical discourse explained why one was always allowed, even required, to rebel. The ultimate consequence was that a continuous reengagement in a civil war against law and order came to be seen as the only adequate response to the apparent pacification of the social characteristic of the institution of law. What Foucault attempted to indicate with this radical critique of the law was how war began to appear as a general matrix for social analysis. In the new discourse, war became the mother of everything else – although not in the sense of a mystical original format that preceded the social and legitimized it. Rather, the logic of war expressed itself in a number of actual battles and wars that had been fought throughout history. War as it was expressed in these historical conflicts formed a logic that allowed the institutions of society to be established. Indeed, it remained the secret drive behind all apparent changes: Behind the social order and its apparent peace, a hidden war was taking place. In this radical critique, the aim of war was no longer to establish a new peace as it had become a state that could not be transcended and that traversed the social institutions and their apparent peace, thereby reducing them to elements in a conflict that split the social sphere into two opposing forces. From this perspective, it was no longer possible to view politics as an activity that sought to unite citizens in a substantial community that could generate a state of peace. Instead, politics had to be understood as a strategic modality, whereby one sought to situate oneself advantageously in the ongoing battle. Politics became the continuation of war by other means. It was the appearance of such a conception of politics that made it possible for Clausewitz to reverse the sentence and claim that “War is merely the continuation of policy [Politik] with other means.”13 Indeed, according to Foucault, the very possibility of this

13 C. v. Clausewitz: Vom Kriege. Erster Theil. Hinterlassene Werke des Generals Carl von Clausewitz über Krieg und Kriegführung, Erster Band (Berlin, Ferdinand Dümmler, 1832): “Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit andern Mitteln” (I, I, 24; p. 28). English edition: On War. Indexed Ddition; ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 87.

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observation already assumed politics as a place where people were waging war with one another.14 The birth of modern history and the State as subject. With the new critical discourse there appeared a new kind of historical analysis in which it became possible to break with the traditional Roman and Medieval narrative, which connected history with the traditional Indo-European system of representation and viewed the narration of history as a ritual for producing power.15 The traditional historical narrative took on the character of a ceremony, which sought to pacify society by decorating and justifying the institutions of power and justifying a social body that had been divided into three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the peasantry. By utilizing this historical format, it became possible for sovereignty to establish itself as a transferred, radiant, unitary, and legitimate modality. However, Foucault shows how the new discourse rejected the established presentation of an enlightened triadic distribution and balance, emphasizing instead a dark binary battle as it opposed two antagonistic forces and established a hidden and overlooked slavery. This new discourse was critical of the identification between the people and the monarchy, since it sought to retain a principle of heterogeneity. Unlike the traditional paradigmatic and genealogical-historical reification of historical events into a present unity, the new discourse employed a view of history as characterized by radical discontinuities, which could not be overcome. In this context, Foucault underlines how rejecting the ideal of antiquity, on closer examination, was paving the way for a writing of history in the modern sense of the word – a historic-political discourse. Hence, with the gradual distancing from the ancient practice of recounting history, the outline of a history evolved that had the character of ongoing change without purpose, although this often resulted in a counter-effort to shut down the possibility of such a lack of purpose in historical transformations. With the rise of this form of history, a conception of time appeared that could not see itself as a direct extension of antiquity. The counter-discourse claimed that antiquity was finally over. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was not yet apparent that we were no longer a part of antiquity, meaning that the idea of Rome and Roman Law could remain a universal model and norm for the governments of that time. The new kind of history took its outset in an invasion, which constituted a rupture with traditional law and its continuity. The new writing of history assumed a particular subject in history, which was in explicit opposition to that which was assumed to be universal. Initially, this particular subject was the limited populace, which 14 15

[DS]: 41–44/{SD}: 48–52. [DS]: 114–120/{SD}: 131–139.

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possessed various characteristics through which they distinguished themselves from other demographic groups; this was the race of a people. Rather than taking up the representative historiography of the Roman tradition, the new radical discourse sought its ideal in prophetic, biblical history and its narrative of Jerusalem’s subjection to Babylon and Jewish diaspora. In a further perspective, however, the new discourse resulted in the nation as the particular principle and subject of history. To begin with, Foucault shows that the nation denoted a wider, particular group of people who viewed themselves as belonging together because of a common ancestry and common association with a delimited territory. The historic-political discourse was one of the great, but often forgotten, opponents of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and social contract theory, as associated with the political thinking of John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). It was very much this perspective that Hobbes sought to eliminate, as he imagined a state of nature or war and was thus able to conceptualize the social body – in which the sovereign formed an artificial soul, animating the body – as a radical, irreversible rupture with nature and the initial state of war. However, Hobbes viewed the state of nature as being constantly on the verge of returning; it remained a threat within society, since the historic-political discourse maintained that war was perpetual, whereas Hobbes viewed it as something that must be rejected.16 According to Foucault, the radical model of analysis remained an important opponent to social contract theory after Hobbes and could be found in the latter half of the 1700s in a polemical discourse in favor of the repressed third estate. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1787) and Abbé Siéyès (1748–1836) both emphasized this estate as the productive class, unlike the other two useless estates.17 In the wake of the French Revolution and the following century, this mode of analysis further developed into a class and class warfare discourse, which passed through the various versions of Socialism and Communism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It also shaped that and the subsequent

16 Cf. e.g. T. Hobbes: Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Common-wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (London, Andrew Crooke, 1651), book 1, chapter XIII: “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity, and Misery”: “It is ... manifest that, during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre, and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man” (p. 62). 17 E.J. Sieyès: Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (n. p., 1789). English edition: What Is the Third Estate? (London, Phaidon Press, 1964); A.-R.-J. Turgot: Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (n. p., 1788). The text was previously published anonymously as “Réflexions sur la formation & la distribution des richesses, par Mr. X.” in the influential periodical Ephémérides du citoyen ou Bibliothèque raisonnée des sciences morales et politiques, XI (1769): 12–56. English edition: Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (London, E. Spragg, 1793).

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century’s jingoistic nationalism and came to its fullest expression in the racism of that age, for instance in Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s (1816–1882) Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay Concerning the Inequality of Human Races) published in 1853–1855 and partially translated into English already the following year.18 Indeed, with the emergence of social Darwinism, it became an important factor in European history.19 State racism, society, and defense. From the beginning of the 1700s, an ever more comprehensive generalization of the polemical discourse thus emerged as it was deployed as a tactical medium in a number of core controversies. The polemical discourse presented a battle between the classes, which was defined by work; it formulated a battle between nations, which was defined by association with language; and it claimed a battle between races, which concerned the survival of species.20 According to Foucault, discourses of modern racism emerged in the first half of the 19th century at the very moment when the earlier discourse of an ongoing war was in the process of being transformed into a counter-history of the revolutionary type, mainly maintaining a class struggle.21 With modern racism, however, the earlier radical discourse is revivified, but with a new decisive twist. The theme of the historical war with its battles, victories, and defeats was eventually replaced by the post-evolutionist theme of the struggle for life and existence. Here the struggle is no longer described as a combat but is rather recoded as a struggle in the biological sense: as a process involving differentiation, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest species. In this recoding, the binary analysis of societal processes is replaced with a society that is biologically monist. According to Foucault’s account, the society emerging here is, on the one hand, essentially conceived as a dynamic unit consisting of a number of heterogeneous elements, which are themselves transitory and can be replaced since they are not essential to society. On the other hand, society conceived as this basic unity is precarious and may be threatened

18 J.A.d. Gobineau: Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris, Firmin Didot Fréres, 1853–1855). First partial English version: The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, with particular reference to their respective influence in the civil and political history of mankind. With an analytical Introduction by H. Hotz; to which is added an Appendix contacting a summary of the latest scientific facts bearing upon the question of unity or plurality of species by J.C. Nott (Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1856). Second English version: The Inequality of Human Races (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915). 19 Cf. e.g. M. Hawkins: Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 61–81. 20 [DS]: 193–212/{SD}: 215–238. 21 [DS]: 70/{SD}: 80.

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by elements that are foreign to it, whether they are endogenously produced by it or they exogenously infiltrate it or invade it from the outside. Synchronously, the evaluation of the state is inverted. According to the earlier counter-history, the State was necessarily unjust because it served the interests of one group against the other and concealed this fact. Within the new perspective, the state is essentially needed as “the protector of the integrity, the superiority, and the purity of the race.”22 As a consequence, Foucault accentuates how the radical critical discourse that was essentially “used in struggles waged by decentered camps” during the 17th century “will be recentered and will become the discourse of power itself.”23 At this point, the critical discourse “abandons the initial basic formulation, which was: ‘We have to defend ourselves against our enemies because the State apparatuses, the law, and the power structures not only do not defend us against our enemies; they are the instruments our enemies are using to pursue and subjugate us.’” As Foucault infers in his lectures, it is no longer: “We have to defend ourselves against society.” In its place a new assertion emerges: “We have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite ourselves, bringing into existence.”24 At this point, the struggle between one social group and another is replaced by a state racism, or “a racism that society will direct against itself.” In its defense of the social body, this state racism would eventually aspire to an ongoing purification and normalization of the social body. With state racism, a certain tendency that figures as one of the basic social phenomena of the 19th century therefore comes to the fore. It was an urge for “power to take life into account” and “to seize power over man as a biological being” that led to an increasing “statefication of the biological [étatisation du biologique].”25 Dialectics and the movement of contradiction. In the 19th century, the historical transitions that could motivate the emergence of state racism also took on other forms. Throughout this period, there was an effort to inscribe the new historic-political discourse in the discourse of sovereignty in order for Rome and the empire to reconquer the polemical discourse so as to enforce the peace. This happened, for instance, in the modern state-based appropriation of racism as it was expressed in colonialism. However, the effort reached its pinnacle in Nazism’s eschatological ideology. Here the original theme of the radical 22

[DS]: 70–71/{SD}: 80. [DS]: 53/{SD}: 61. 24 [DS]: 53/{SD}: 61–62. 25 [DS]: 213/{SD}: 239–240; translation modified. An informative exposition of some of the more contemporary aspects of Foucault’s encounter with the discourses of state racism is found in S. Elden: “The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault’s ‘Il faut défendre la société’ and the Politics of Calculation” boundary 2:29 (2002). 23

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discourse, the historical battle against the always unjust state, was neutralized in an idea about a different state, which could serve as the instrument of racial purity and which could result in the battle to end all battles and the unjust duality of history and establish a lasting just state. Over the last 200 years, the polemical model has also played an important role insofar as it stimulated and influenced dialectical thought in its modern form from German Idealism until today. In the effort to sketch a general logic of contradiction, dialectic thought always had a tendency to recognize “the movement of contradiction and war,” but according to Foucault only to reincorporate the polemical discourse into and validate it within “the old form of philosophico-juridical discourse.”26 For dialectics, the present age must certainly always be viewed as the moment when the opposition between master and slave was being abolished and a universal truth was in the process of being revealed. In this manner, dialectic thought sought to employ the historical polemical perspective to present a history of philosophy and, in that contemporary battle, articulate the moment in which the universal was finally expressed. The core question for an analysis of the present hereby became exactly what in the contemporary age was a carrier of universality and therefore transcended the merely ephemeral. As suggested, the tendency to construct a philosophy of history and pose such questions was already present in the radical discourse from the beginning. It is therefore possible to speak of an inherent tendency toward dialectics, which became ever more obvious as the discourse was generalized.

2

Power as repression

Opposing forces and temporary stability. On a more general level, the radical critique turned explicitly against the law and the theory of sovereignty, which conceived of power as a pre-established entity. The juridical conception perceived power as a capacity the individual possessed as an isolated individual: a right which he or she could give up to others through a juridical act that took on the character of a contract. In this contract, one transferred a permission to exert power by limiting the scope of actions but also by drawing a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate action. If the state transgressed its authority, then this would be viewed as a misuse of the granted right to act, or even as a misuse of power and a subjugation of others. It was not until this moment that the state actually used power against others in a strict sense, since consent and agreement in all other cases was implied. In the theory of sovereignty and the traditional view of power, one remained within the juridical scheme. 26

[DS]: 50/{SD}: 58.

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The radical, critical discourse, however, sought to point out that it was impossible to begin with an idea of power as an already present object and right when analyzing its exercise. If the analysis was to have any hope of accounting for how power came about, it needed to take a more dynamic stance by showing how the use of power stemmed from and took shape within a ubiquitous war between various groups. As Foucault demonstrates historically throughout the lecture course, power relations were to be sought in the belligerent encounter between various opposed forces that sought to overcome each other. The battle between the involved groups resulted in the establishment of the superior and the subordinate, which the winning parties attempted to maintain. The possession of power over others should be viewed as an ability to stabilize the temporary relation of domination that one had attained in the shifting balances of war. When one begins to view the use of power as a tactical move in an ongoing war, the traditional distinction between legitimate and illegitimate is challenged. The core idea of the juridical theory was the conception of a limitation that could be recognized as the limited person’s own legitimate self-limitation, and therefore not as an actual limitation at all since he or she already agreed with that which was imposed by the limitation. Seen from the perspective of war, the distinction between this idea and the idea of an imposed illegitimate limitation, which had the character of abuse on the other, was not relevant at all. When one views the exertion of power as a part of a belligerent exchange, the exercise of force must always appear as an external limitation of actions. For this reason, the exercise of power is per definition illegitimate. In the polemical discourse, power must appear as an entity that is universally employed as a means for repression and not just in special circumstances. It is the choice between submitting to or resisting such repression that becomes the decisive element in the relation to power – not the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy. Struggle and submission: Universal repression. In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault contrasts the traditional understanding of power and the analysis of power provided by the radical counter-discourse: “We can, then, contrast two great systems for analyzing power. The first, which is the old theory you find in the philosophers of the 17th century, is articulated around power as a primal right that is surrendered and that constitutes sovereignty, with the contract as the matrix of political power. And when the power that has been so constituted oversteps the limit, or oversteps the limits of the contract, there is a danger that it will become oppression. Power-contract, with oppression as the limit, or rather the transgression of the limit. And then we have the other system, which tries to analyze power not in terms of the contract-oppression schema but in terms of the war-repression schema. At this point, oppression was not

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repression in relation to the contract, namely an abuse, but, on the contrary, repression was simply the effect and the continuation of a relationship of domination. Repression is no more than the implementation, within a pseudopeace that is being undermined by a continuous war, of a perpetual relationship of force. So, two schemata for the analysis of power: the contract-oppression schema, which is, if you like, the juridical schema, and the war-repression or domination-repression schema, in which the pertinent opposition is not, as in the previous schema, that between the legitimate and the illegitimate but that between struggle and submission.”27 Although the new critical discourse, which conceived of war as the underlying ontology of the social sphere, indicated a different theory of power that would seem to replace the juridical conception, it remained fundamentally bound to this approach. An analysis of social conditions that conceived of war as the fundamental ontology only became possible through a historical process that marginalized the violent conflicts from the social body – or at least cultivated them in terms of organized warfare. But the violent conflicts located beyond the spheres of society returned in the ontology of war, which rectified warfare as the fundamental truth about social relations.28 As such, the radical and critical discourse aims to analyze power as repression because such an exertion of power formed the condition for the polemical analysis and because it was the only overall kind of use of power known. The polemical analysis, with its perspective on the use of power as always being a kind of repression, was heir to the juridical concept that stated that it could not be truly repressive to the extent that it was legitimate. This was why it was considered acceptable to the subjects of the sovereign. In the radical discourse, the definition of power use was generalized as universal repression, which had hitherto been the exception.

3

Foucault’s repression

Nietzsche’s play of domination. Substantiated through his attentive historical inquiry in “Il faut défendre la société”, the insight that the use of power could eventually amount to universal repression was among the decisive factors that led Foucault to reflect on his own previous conceptions of power. After Foucault developed a kind of discursive analysis that was still strongly influenced by the order of law and prohibition in L’archéologie du savoir and L’ordre du discours, he wrote the article “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” in 1971, in which he affirmed Nietzsche’s radical critique of social analysis. Here Foucault took up a social ontology that dissected the social as a dynamic battle for dominance – a battle that likewise seemed to contain a natural inclination toward stabilization 27 28

[DS]: 17/{SD}: 16–17. [DS]: 42/{SD}: 49.

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and ossification, such that it came to follow regular patterns.29 Such an ossification of the social dynamic, which involved it following certain rules, could not be viewed as a rupture but rather as a stabilization that continued social strife and its inherent violence on a new level.30 Following Nietzsche, Foucault perceived this stabilization, which established new rules, as the creation of a new basis for power struggle. He viewed the idea of an independent drive for peace and rejection of war as a misinterpretation of the installed rules. However, this was also a tempting misinterpretation because it involved merely taking the prohibition it contained for granted: “the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence. The desire for peace, the serenity of compromise, and the tacit acceptance of the law, far from representing a major moral conversion or a utilitarian calculation that gave rise to the law, are but its result and, in point of fact, its perversion. ... Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.”31 On the one hand, the rules constitute a limitation that exerts a new form of violence as a response to the original violence, but on the other hand, it also acts as a means for exerting violence to attain own goals. The article on Nietzsche thus appears to express a shift of emphasis away from an analysis mainly concerned with examining a form of power that was practiced in terms of law and which was itself influenced by the juridical model. What is purported instead is a method of analysis that not only seriously questions how this kind of power presents itself but concurrently suggests an alternative approach that subsequently had a decisive impact on Foucault’s own analysis and how he came to understand his work as well. When in 1976 Foucault looked back on his own research from the first half of the decade, he could perceive it as situated in the radical, critical tradition. One of the main purposes of his lectures at Collège de France from that year thus seems to have been to trace the historical preconditions for his own method of analysis so far: “It is obvious that everything I have said to you in the previous years is inscribed within the struggle-repression schema.”32

29 Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” [1971], DE II: 144–145/“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 85. 30 Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” [1971], DE II: 145/“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 85. 31 “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” [1971], DE II: 145/“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 85. 32 [DS]: 17/{SD}: 17.

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The reductionism of the model of war. Since Foucault had, until then, been mainly concerned with the various kinds of limiting power uses that claimed to be legitimate so as to demonstrate how they ultimately became repressive, it is possible to claim that the perspective presented in the first half of the 1970s had in fact had an impact on his general approach. However, it was not until the beginning of the 1970s that Foucault explored the positive basis of his critical attitude, such that it avoided becoming a purely negative rejection. Furthermore, it was not until the middle of the decade that he was able to single out the historical origins of such an alternative basis for analysis. However, while Foucault was successful in formulating such an alternative with greater clarity, he also became increasingly aware of how dependent the ‘alternative’ outset was of that which it criticized and how problematic the new approach was. To the extent that Foucault brought the new perspective to use in analyzing power relations as battle and repression, he also gradually came to question that view. Foucault thus began to distance himself from the radical and polemical analysis, since the battle and repression problem was “insufficiently elaborated” but primarily “because I think that the twin notions of ‘repression’ and ‘war’ have to be considerably modified and ultimately, perhaps, abandoned.”33 The problem was to be found in the hidden reductionism that was located in the radical critique, when it claims that it was only possible to understand politics and social relations as war continued with other means and that truth was merely an instrument or weapon in such a war. At the beginning of the 1970s, Foucault had mainly sought to map the logic of power exercise as distinguished from the self-representation of the juridical conception. However, with his lectures from 1976, he sought to emphasize that this was not the same as claiming a general ontology by retaining power as an all-encompassing entity. Rather, his approach expressed the view that power relations must be analyzed as a field of limited scope that could impact, rupture, infiltrate, or penetrate other fields. These other fields must retain their autonomy, however, but also their interaction with the analysis of power. The triangle: Power, right, truth. Foucault’s analysis of how power is exerted involved starting with looking at a set of events from a distinct perspective. This particular approach allowed a coordination of social events in order to determine how and to what extent they indicated a structuring of the participating individuals’ potential for acting, that is, whether they had been influenced. In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault points out that it was only possible to develop such a particular analytic of power if one related it to the other fields of analysis while retaining a sense of the particularity involved: “What 33

[DS]: 17/{SD}: 17.

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I have been trying to look at since 1970–71 is the ‘how’ of power. Studying the ‘how of power’, or in other words trying to understand its mechanisms by establishing two markers, or limits; on the one hand, the rules of right that formally delineate power, and on the other hand, at the opposite extreme, the other limit might be the truth-effects that power produces, that this power conducts and which, in their turn, reproduce that power. So we have the triangle: power, right, truth.”34 The analytic of power must give an account of how exerting power first became possible when it related to two other irreducible fields. On the one hand, exertion of power must take the juridical sphere into account, as it modulates and is affected by a judicial field where judgments are made over the uses of power so as to determine whether the exchange, which its actions realized between the parties involved, was just. In a case where such a judicial judgment was already structured through the law’s formalization of jurisdiction, the exertion of power had to anticipate and relate to a given body of law that delimited what was right. On the other hand, the exertion of power had to acknowledge, be affected by, and modulate a field that allowed an evaluation of whether the judicial distribution and the exercise of power is in accordance with what can be maintained as true. Even if one seeks to uncover irreducible fields when analyzing right, law and jurisdiction, truth, and power, this does not mean that one should approach these fields as separate areas as if their effects can be studied in isolation. In the passage quoted above, Foucault formulates the relation between the various fields as exclusive and as forming exclusive spheres that limit each other; however, these fields can relate to each other. The irreducible spheres infiltrate each other such that they create and transform the reality which the other spheres relate to, thereby affecting how each of them works. The fact that they can effect and must relate to each other’s internal realities requires, in the perspective of an analytic of power, the possibility of characterizing how an effort and a capacity to affect the actions and conduct of others and bring about certain outcomes throughout history has influenced the possibility for expressing the truth and claiming rights. Foucault formulates this perspective in “Il faut défendre la société” while also – in a manner characteristic for this period – tending to describe power as a fundamental prime mover that conceives of truth as epiphenomenon: “My problem is roughly this: What are the rules of right that power implements to produce discourses of truth? Or: What type of power is it that is capable of producing discourses of power that have, in a society like ours, such powerful effects?”35

34 35

[DS]: 24/{SD}: 24. [DS]: 22/{SD}: 24.

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However, the point is exactly that the triadic division of fields is there to avoid power being reduced to a prime mover in Foucault’s work, which affects an activity the traces of which are cognized at other levels. When Foucault’s analysis often chooses the power perspective rather than truth or rights, this cannot be explained as ontological priority, although his formulations may suggest this. It is in fact merely an analytical priority, insofar as he takes the analysis of power relations as his starting point. It is necessary to retain the various fields in their irreducibility while at the same time insisting that it is only possible to consider them fully in the interaction with other fields. This is why Foucault does not formulate a general theory of power, truth, and right. In order for this to be possible, it is necessary to require that power, truth, and right have the character of special objects of study, or at least delimited areas that could be studied to generate a comprehensive description or systematization. Following Foucault, a theory on power, truth and right per se would assume that it is possible to isolate and comprehend the general nature of irreducible fields. However, in the very moment one seeks to capture the particularities of a given field, it becomes elusive, meaning that this task must be taken up from the perspective of other fields. The interdependence results in the individual fields never attaining the status of delimited areas. The polarity between irreducibility and interdependence (which makes the opposed entities a possibility, since only nonidentical things may be mutually dependent) means that the comprehensive theory of any individual field would be a theory that could comprise all fields. While it is therefore impossible to formulate a complete theory for any of the individual fields, it is possible to analyze how each of the irreducible fields have been organized and reorganized in their interaction with each other and then articulate which conditions this sets for the other fields and how anything appears within the individual fields. Even though an exhaustive theory is not possible, it is still possible to set up a historical analytics and an analytic approach.36 The most advanced attempt to follow up on this opportunity was probably Foucault’s historical analysis of dispositives as it was further developed in the investigations of governmentality.

36 When beginning his studies of the history that would lead to the formation of “Le dispositif de sexualité” Foucault wrote: “The aim of the inquiries that will follow is to move less toward a ‘theory’ of power than toward an ‘analytics’ of power: that is, toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis” (VS: 109/WK: 82).

7 The Governmentalization of the State

Foucault’s collision with the regime of security. Late in the evening on November 16, 1977, a police van carrying Klaus Croissant left La prison de la Santé in Paris. Foucault was to be found in front of the prison along with 25 other people to form a symbolic barricade.1 The demonstrators had decided that the happening was to be peaceful, but – according to Foucault – the group was dispersed by the police, and the roughly 40 officers beat the demonstrators “with a rare display of brutality as if dealing with a screaming mob.”2 Foucault’s personal payoff from the events of that evening was a broken rib. Croissant had been the defending attorney at several trials of members of Rote Armee Fraktion in West Germany, but he was accused of complicity with his clients and was debarred his profession. He had escaped to France on July 11, 1977, where he had applied for political asylum. After several members of the Baader-Meinhof Group had been found dead in their cells on October 18th that year, Croissant was arrested by the French authorities on October 24th and later extradited at the request of the German government. Foucault’s engagement in the affair was expressed in his participation in the demonstration but also in a number of public appeals. Moreover, the affair gave rise to a number of theoretical reflections about what had occurred.3 1

D. Eribon: Michel Foucault, 1926–1984 (1989), pp. 259–260. “Désormais, la sécurité est au-dessus des lois” [1977], DE III: 366. 3 At the beginning of December, Foucault formulated an appeal to the leaders of the left to intervene in the case, especially concerning two women who were accused of hiding Croissant in Paris, cf. “Lettre à quelques leaders de la gauche” [1977], DE III: 388– 390/“Letter to Certain Leaders of the Left,” pp. 426–428. After Secretary of Justice Alain Peyrefitte – in provocation by Foucault’s open letter – accounted for his actions in an open letter response, Foucault responded that Peyrefitte had approved the extradition before this had been approved by the courts, cf. “Alain Peyrefitte s‘explique ... et Michel Foucault lui répond” [1978], DE III: 505–506. Foucault attempted to articulate the general and practical implications of the controversy in: “Désormais, la sécurité est au-dessus des lois” [1977], DE III: 366–368; “Va-t-on extrader Klaus Croissant?” [1977], DE III: 361–365; “Michel Foucault: la sécurité et l‘État” [1977], DE III: 383–388. 2

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As Foucault saw it, his efforts to challenge the extradition of the RAF’s preferred lawyer was not conceived as a defense of the organization or its use of terror to pursue its goals.4 Rather, he intervened on behalf of a historically generated right, namely the right of the accused to have a loyal defense. According to Foucault, this right was under attack in West Germany’s systematic persecution of the Baader-Meinhof attorney.5 In regard to the extradition of Croissant, France had violated a similar right by preventing Croissant’s defense. The authorities had hindered a fair trial by agitating sentiments and speaking about international solidarity as a defense against international terrorism, while suspicion of collusion with the terrorists was systematically directed at anyone who was interested in the case or sought to draw attention to it. There was even a decision to exclude any right of appeal in the case. In addition to the very real personal consequences for Klaus Croissant, it was the massive intervention by the authorities that made the affair relevant in a wider social diagnostic context for Foucault – not least because the intervention reverberated around the media and the public. The sequence of events revealed considerations that were viewed as so pressing that the law and its spirit had to be bent and reinterpreted so that it became possible for the courts to take these extralegal concerns into account. The occurrence was, according to Foucault, an extreme expression of a new overarching form of rationality that was beginning to manifest itself as a dominating social technology in the contemporary world and could be recognized as a certain logic of welfare. As usual, however, Foucault’s philosophical response to the contemporary context in which he was normatively involved eventually took the form of a comprehensive historical and theoretical reflection. In his lectures from 1978, Sécurité, territoire, population, we thus see Foucault moving from an analysis of security to a broader investigation of what he now designates “the history of governmentality.”6 This analysis does not leave the theme of security and welfare behind but develops an analysis that frames the considerate, but at time also ruthless, care for general welfare as a matter of how leadership and management have been rationalized and optimized. Foucault examines how 4 In his published diary Claude Mauriac quotes Foucault as emphasizing: “I did not approve of terrorism and the bloodshed, I did not approve of Baader and his gang.” Le temps immobile, tome IX [Mauriac et fils] (1986), p. 388; our translation. 5 Discussing the case in the essay “Va-t-on extrader Klaus Croissant?” (1977), Foucault also maintains that: “among the rights belonging to the governed ... there is one that is essential: the right to juridical defense. ... It is the right of the governed to have lawyers who are not – as it is the case in the countries of Eastern Europe – defending you all the while they show you that they would condemn you and be your judge if their happiness and your unhappiness were at stake. It is a right to have a lawyer who speaks for you, and with you, who makes it possible for you to be heard and protect your life, your identity, and the force of your refusal.” DE III: 365; our translation. 6 [STP]: 111/{STPo}: 108.

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governmentality as a management-rationality has developed and gradually taken on an overarching character. A central aim for Foucault in focusing on this subject matter is to illuminate a register that may unify the topical discussions of security, government or management, and welfare. Sections 1–3 of this chapter is therefore devoted to presenting this unifying register developed by Foucault in Sécurité, territoire, population, but also in other writings from this period. However, in order to understand Foucault’s late work it is important to recognize that the problem of governmentality, first articulated in 1978, remains an overarching concern in all the later lecture series Foucault was to give at Collège de France. It is thus no coincidence that the last two lecture series Foucault held still carried the common title: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres – the government of self and others. For this reason it is fruitful to present the multifarious context(s) in which governmentality became a matter of concern for Foucault. Before we present Foucault’s investigation into the history of the art of government and state reason in 1978, we will therefore not only provide a description of Foucault’s encounter with and reflection on the contemporary logic of welfare but also sketch out the main elements of governmentality as they can be excavated bit by bit in Foucault’s lectures from the late 1970s and early 1980s. This preliminary overview will help situate the particular perspective on the problem of governmentality that Foucault develops in Sécurité, territoire, population. But to complicate matters even further, it was also in relation to formulation of the problem of governmentality that Foucault in some respects revisited and refined the dispositional analysis as an important component in describing the logic of discipline as an overarching social technology in opposition to sovereignty. It is therefore crucial in our overview of the development of governmentality to expound the important relationship between dispositional analysis and the notion of governmentality in 1978, but also how the newly formulated dispositive of security that Foucault introduced here gave way to an analysis of dispositives that insisted on configurations and correlations before confrontation and opposition and a history of sociality that equally prioritized ambiguous constellations of social logics in preference to epochal characterizations. It is in order to sort out and provide a more general outlook of this complex field of inquiry and experience this chapter forms two complementary expositions. In sections 1–3 we present the three different contexts mentioned in relation to which Foucault conceptualized governmentality as a historical experience, an analytical notion and a research agenda of contemporary relevance. Thus a short overview of what Foucault regarded as a special governmental logic involved in the ruthless care of the contemporary welfare state is followed by a presentation of the notion of governmentality as it was first

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conceptualized in the 1978 lectures and of how it was nurtured by an analysis of the interaction between the dissimilar dispositives of law, discipline and security. After this, we briefly go through the later development of the governmentality notion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was used also to describe the attempts to conduct the conduct of people across the whole social sphere and later the contact points between techniques of the self and technologies of domination. Informed by the account of these closely interrelated elements inscribed in the conception of the governmentality notion, sections 3–6 then embark on the actual discussion of Foucault’s history of the governmentalization of the state in 1978. This history takes its beginning in Foucault’s study of the ancient roots of governmental rationality and its distinct nature and difference to the Greek and Roman conception of government as rule and leadership. The roots of governmental rationality are, according to Foucault, found in the early Christian tradition and the exercise of pastoral power developed in this context. Subsequently, we focus on the reinterpretation of governmental rationality that occurs when it is conceived as a technique for secular salvation. This shift eventually leads to the emergence of a raison d’état in the 17th century. The next step concerns the subsequent dissemination of a governmental rationality that allows for the creation of modern police sciences and a disciplinary biopolitics during the 17th and 18th centuries. In this way, the present chapter also paves the way for the following chapter. Here the starting point will be a concern with the question of whether there should be a limit to what a government may do, or whether the state was governing not too little but too much; this critique became a key component in the economic-political tradition known as liberalism.

1

The logic of welfare

Terror, security, and care. It was the accused Klaus Croissant’s claimed or real connection with the phenomenon of terrorism that resulted in the authorities’ and public’s violent agitation, and which generated a need for immediate action to remove the irritant. Terrorism was a modality of political activity that sought to shake the establishment through sudden acts of violence when least expected. In this manner, terrorism not only challenged the fundamental assumptions of every individual’s life but also the relations between individuals and the institutions that took care of them and managed their lives in a way that lived up to their security needs. The individual acts of terrorism never grew to a scale where they constituted a real threat to existing society. As an expression of a threat that was difficult to remove and that had to be countered at any cost, terrorism could generate anxiety and anger among those that govern and those that are governed:

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“What is fundamentally shocking in terrorism, what brings about the very real and not feigned fury of the one who is governing, is that terrorism attacks precisely on the level where he had affirmed the possibility of guarantying people that nothing would happen to them.”7 Terrorism was given a central position in public life and generated what could be called an allergic reaction since it symbolically touched on the implicit agreement that permeated institutions and social interaction in the welfare state. This agreement had the character of an implicit and vague ‘contract’ on security or welfare that was expressed in a number of highly diverse formulations. In this ‘agreement,’ the government offered – insofar as it was possible – the management of the lives of the governed and an attempt to fulfill their needs for security by guaranteeing against any accidents, damages or risks that could possibly arise collectively or individually. Since some fell ill, there was a health sector that could treat them, and health insurance ensured financial reimbursement. Since some became unemployed, there were unemployment benefits that could grant basic social security. When it came to crime, a police force and penal system was developed to catch and reform criminals and thus prevent further transgressions. If there was flooding or other natural disasters, efforts were made to compensate those affected and minimize the social consequences as much as possible. People were also encouraged to form companies where the individual was insured against unpredictable events. The governing system had created a number of devices that made it possible to intervene with all available resources should any extraordinary event affect daily affairs thereby alleviating adverse consequences for those affected. Required leadership. Insofar as the governed accepted these offers, the constant and encompassing intervention by the governing system should be viewed as an enforced guardianship that had been required and demanded. Their government appeared to be produced and authenticated by an ever-present demand for security. Leaders and those who were led could unite in agreement to direct attention toward possible dangers and factors of insecurity in order to eliminate them. It was thereby possible to integrate and rally around a kind of leadership that – while making an effort to universally manage all aspects of collective life – also took account of individual behavior so as to disclose and eliminate the dangers that constantly appear there. This exclusive attention to security and risk was not given by nature. It was not until the mutual agreement on creating security – universally as well as individually – that the need for safety took center court as a core, unifying, and social phenomenon. Furthermore, this narrative allowed for the construction of an ever-increasing vigilance toward anything that could be perceived as a 7

“Michel Foucault: la sécurité et l‘État” [1977], DE III: 385–386; our translation.

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danger. This agreement on security involved constantly conjuring up dangers in order to banish them. The heightened attention toward and irritability concerning risk is exhibited in contemporary risk society, which has its origin in the security and welfare state. In such a society, the effort to generate security and the anxiety created by various dangers mutually reinforce each other. In certain cases, the fear of fear and the efforts to ensure security intensifies in an endless feedback loop that spirals out of control.8 Crisis is thus the normal state of affairs in the security and welfare state. The phenomenon of terrorism was particularly efficient in releasing such a feedback spiral because it was a mode of acting that sought to spread societal insecurity. It thereby symbolically exhibited the impossibility of completely fulfilling the security agreement that guaranteed the governed that nothing bad would happen to them. However, it likewise demonstrated that the impossibility was not only due to natural processes that came from without but from processes that occur endogenously within the social. The ruthless care of the welfare state. The impossibility of realizing the security agreement revealed by the phenomenon of terrorism did not result in moderation but rather in an excessive intensification of the effort to create security. Klaus Croissant’s extradition to Western Germany coincided with a state of emergency concerning the traditional rule of law and universal civil rights. It is Foucault’s opinion that this ‘coup d’état’ did not constitute a rupture with the rationality of the welfare state but was rather a consequence of it. The West German state of emergency thus exemplified an inherent tendency in the welfare state, but in a radicalized or purified format.9 As soon as the capacity of the welfare state to guarantee security was threatened at a basic level, it turned out to contain an inexorable logic that could not be reduced to well-meaning and empathetic care of the governed. In such cases, a strong will to ignore all other concerns than security becomes manifest as the welfare state exhibits a certain kind of ruthlessness toward anything in its way. This also contains a ruthlessness toward the law. The events surrounding the extradition of Klaus Croissant demonstrated that traditional rule of law was viewed as unable to take the exceptional circumstances into consideration. Indeed, there was an explicit will to disregard the law and its universality in

8 “Lettre à quelques leaders de la gauche” [1977], DE III: 390/“Letter to Certain Leaders of the Left,” p. 428. 9 Foucault notes that “fear, and that fear of fear, is one of the conditions for security states to function.” “Lettre à quelques leaders de la gauche” [1977], DE III: 390/“Letter to Certain Leaders of the Left,” p. 428; translation modified.

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cases in which it opposed a sufficient management of security: “In order to be politically creditable and profitable the whole campaign for public security has to be supported by spectacular measures that demonstrate that government can act swiftly and forcefully beyond legality. From now on, security is above the law. Power has willed to show that the juridical arsenal is incapable of protecting citizens.”10 Emphasis on potential threats toward collective and individual welfare is a feature welfare states share with 20th-century totalitarianism. In modern totalitarianism, a total and radical mobilization of society occurred in order to address the issue of individual, group, and national survival and well-being. Leadership in such countries took on the shape of an ongoing coup d’état. However, it also demonstrated how the management of such radicalized states of emergency ironically brought total terror. This terror did not manifest as a demonic, chaotic evil but was rather administered by the functionaries of security as a necessary consequence of a political rationality that sought for the best possible outcome in situations that were repeatedly described as crises and states of emergency, thus necessitating extreme precautions. To point out such similarities between welfare states and totalitarianism is, of course, not the same as reducing them to each other. In fact, Foucault warns against the inability to distinguish between them: “I am indeed worried by a certain use that is made of the Gulag-Internment parallel. A certain use which consists in saying, ‘Everyone has their own Gulag, the Gulag is here at our door, in our cities, our hospitals, our prisons, it’s here in our heads’. ... With immense indignation, with a great philanthropic sigh, we embrace the whole world’s political persecutions.”11 What Foucault points out with regard to the tendency of security to move beyond and above the law when taking care of the welfare of people is rather how totalitarianism, with its lack of division between individual, group, society, and state, exhibited this move in its most unconditional, radical, and pure form. The idea of developing a genealogy of the rationality of

10 “Désormais la sécurité est au-dessus des lois” [1977], DE III: 367; italics added; our translation. 11 “Pouvoirs et strategies” [1977], DE III: 418/“Powers and Strategies,” p. 134. Cf. also the response given in “Michel Foucault: la sécurité et l‘État” [1977], DE III: 387: “We need to have faith in peoples’ political consciousness. When you say to them: ‘You are living in a fascist state, and you don’t know it’, then they know that you are lying to them. When you say to them: ‘Never have our fundamental rights and freedoms [les libertés] been more limited and threatened than now’, then people know it is not true. ... By contrast, if you speak with them about their actual experiences, about the concerned and anxious relationship they have with the mechanisms of security – what will follow, for instance, from an entirely medicalized society? what are the power effects that will follow from the mechanisms of security watching over you each and every day? –, then they know very well that this is not fascism but something entirely new.”

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security in the shape of a history of governmentality is precisely to avoid such a reductive analysis.

2

The early linage of governmentality and dispositional analysis

From social medicine to biopolitics of the human race. This development of Foucault’s notion of governmentality has it first provenience in the broader field of medicine. In Foucault’s lectures on the history of social medicine from 1974 at the Institute of Social Medicine in Rio de Janeiro, he begins by noting that a governmental management that sees itself as serving the individual and the collective while also acting as a guarantor for health had become increasingly widespread after World War II.12 Building on this, he examines the appearance and dissemination of state and social medicine, which targeted the general population as the object for treatment. In extension, he describes the huge implications for human biohistory that followed from the massive medical intervention that had taken place since the 18th century. In these lectures, Foucault attempts to explain the appearance of the well-structured hospital – the clinic – by referring to social medicine as well as discipline in the broad and profound sense described in Chapter 5. He likewise accounts for how medicine hereby ceases to be clinical, or located solely within the clinic, and tends to become an all-inclusive way of regulating social interaction instead. Foucault hereby declares himself a proponent of “the hypothesis that the hospital is born from techniques of disciplinary power and from the medicine of interventions on the environment [milieu].”13 In this way, he begins to sketch the contours of a new kind of administration and social interaction that cannot be reduced to discipline. At this point, he does not seem to have a clear conception of the particularity of this new rationality; rather, his view remains that it is very much an extension of discipline. These suggestions are unfolded in greater detail in the concluding chapter of La Volonté de savoir, on the “Right of Death and Power over Life,” where Foucault seeks to describe contemporary biopower and the generation of

12

The first lecture is given in French translation as “Crise de la médecine ou crise de l’antimédecine?” [1976] (DE III: 40–58); the second as “La naissance de la médecine sociale” [1977] (DE III: 207–228), and the third as “L‘incorporation de l‘hôpital dans la technologie moderne” [1978] (DE III: 508–521). As mentioned in Chapter 5, Foucault had, coincidentally though, touched upon the appearance of social medicine in chapters II and III of NC/BC. 13 “L‘incorporation de l‘hôpital dans la technologie moderne” [1978], DE III: 518/“The Incorporation of the Hospital into Modern Technology,” p. 149. That there is a similar relationship between the asylum and generalized psychiatry is underlined by Foucault in a review of Castel’s L’ordre psychiatrique (1977) under the title “L‘asile illimité” [1977], DE III: 271–275.

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“anatomo- and bio-politics.”14 Toward the end of the first volume of the work on sexuality, and to some extent reaching beyond the otherwise introducing and programmatic nature of the book, Foucault seeks to capture the special features of the new biopower by contrasting it with and distinguishing it from the law. This aim is also present in Foucault’s closely related final lecture at Collège de France in 1976, where he distinguishes between discipline and what he now refers to explicitly as “bio-politics.” Here he points out, in accordance with his preceding studies, that from the end of the 17th century to the end of the 19th, disciplinary techniques take up a position of ever-greater importance.15 However, he also suggests how “we see something new emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century: a new technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. ... It does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.” But while discipline “tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies,” the new technology of power addresses “a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass.”16 In this regard, Foucault is able to distinguish “anatomo-politics” quite clearly from the “‘biopolitics’ of the human race.”17 Here biopolitics – unlike the prescribing and controlling logics of discipline – has a merely regulative function.18 It is in connection with studying biopolitics in social medicine that Foucault initially stumbles upon the existence of a political rationality that cannot be reduced to discipline. Throughout 1977, Foucault was engaged in a number of articles and conversations that covered the kind of management that had become possible after the managed actively gave up their self-governance and handed over responsibility for their lives to other external actors. Here, Christian confession became a paradigmatic version of such management, because in confession you begin to narrate and establish a truth about yourself under the view of certain privileged listeners.19 The aim of this is to receive guidance and thus, in so many

14

VS: 183/WK: 141. [DS]: 215/{SD}: 242. 16 [DS]: 216/{SD}: 242. 17 [DS]: 216/{SD}: 243. 18 [DS]: 220–223/{SD}: 247–251. 19 Cf. for instance “La vie des hommes infâmes” [1977] DE III: 237–253/“Lives of Infamous Men,” pp. 157–175; “Préface à My Secret Life” [1977] DE III: 131–132; “Le supplice de la vérité” [1977], DE III: 331–332; “Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l‘intérieur des corps” [1977], DE III: 228–237/“Power Affects the Body,” pp. 207–213; “Non au sexe roi” [1977], DE III: 256–269/“The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” pp. 214–225; “Pouvoir et savoir” [1978], DE III: 399–414. 15

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words, hand over crucial elements in the management of your life to these others. Foucault’s disclosure of government, which actively includes the effort to manage the self among the managed and where those under supervision are motivated to give up their autonomy, points beyond the disciplinary dispositive in its traditional format. That same year, Foucault took up the practical actions and theoretical reflections over certain tendencies in the welfare state in earnest. As described earlier, this concerned the consequences regarding the modified and more pragmatic approach to the rule of law in particular. His encounter with the welfare state can also be found in a number of texts that encourage not only the taking up of a position and taking action but also the articulation of a more theoretical logic of the welfare state.20 Security and governmentality. It was not until after his sabbatical the previous year that Foucault resumed his lectures at the Collége de France in 1978 under the headline “Sécurité, territoire, population,” where he sought to coordinate all the experiences and individual analyses into a new overarching theme. However, Foucault seems to waver a bit here, even at this advanced stage, when it comes to determining the new, unifying perspective. At the beginning of the first lecture (January 25, 1978), he sets out to demark the specificity of what he designates “the dispositive of security [dispositive de la sécurité ]” as his main aim, something that remains a concern in the immediately succeeding lectures. However, toward the end of the following fourth lecture (February 1, 1978), he explains that the correct headline for the lectures of that year should not be the one given above and mentioned in the summary presented in Résumé des cours but rather “the history of governmentality,” while simultaneously incorporating the history of the security dispositive as an essential technique employed by governmentality. In order to grasp the scope of Foucault’s subsequent work within this framework, it is therefore important to pay attention to the details of all the three parts of Foucault’s working definition and hence to quote at length: “Basically, if I had wanted to give the lectures I am giving this year a more exact title, I certainly would not have chosen ‘security, territory, population’.

20 Foucault simultaneously describes how social medicine has entered and influenced the courts in the shape of forensic psychiatry. Indeed, this occurred already in the previous century: “L‘évolution de la notion d‘individu dangereux‘ dans la psychiatrie légale du XIXe siècle” [1978], DE III: 443–464/“About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’,” pp. 176–200; “Attention: Danger” [1978] DE III: 507–508; “Le poster de l‘ennemi public” [1979], DE III: 253–256; “L‘angoisse de juger” [1977], DE III: 282–297/“The Anxiety of Judging,” pp. 241–254.

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What I would really like to undertake is something that I would call a history of ‘governmentality’. By this word ‘governmentality’ I mean three things: 1) By ‘governmentality’ I understand the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and dispositives of security [dispositifs de la sécurité] as its essential technical instrument. 2) By ‘governmentality’ I understand the tendency, the line of force, that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led towards the preeminence over all other types of power – sovereignty, discipline, and so on – of the type of power that we can call ‘government’ and which has led to the development of a series of specific governmental apparatuses [appareils] on the one hand, [and, on the other] to the development of a series of knowledges [saviors]. 3) By ‘governmentality’ I think we should understand the process, or rather the result of the process, by which the state of justice of the Middle Ages became the administrative state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was gradually ‘governmentalized’.”21 In immediate extension of this elaborate definition, Foucault claims that we are currently in an age in which governmentality has become the overarching mode for rationality and that we live in an “age of governmentality.”22 He suggests that over time, the welfare and security state became an entity whose genesis is necessary to illuminate by placing these two state forms within a more comprehensive examination of governmentality. However, in order to comprehend the relevance of this rudimentary diagnosis of the present it is important to clarify why Foucault would emphasize the notion of “security” as a principal matter of analytical concern and for which reason he would speak of the “pre-eminence” of one particular type of power in preference to sovereignty and discipline. This demands a look into the development of dispositional analysis, which Foucault certainly did not restrict to his analysis of discipline but continued to evolve in the second part of the 1970s. Dispositional prototypes: Law, discipline, security. As discussed toward the end of Chapter 5 in relation to discipline, the general notion of the dispositive in Foucault’s analysis is characterized by inclusiveness, relationality, and modifiability. Precisely because of this, it is best understood when employed in 21 22

[STP]: 111–112/{STPo}: 108–109; emphasis added. [STP]: 112/{STPo}: 109.

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actual dispositional analysis, as Foucault paradigmatically undertakes particularly in the beginning of his 1978 Collège de France lectures Sécurité, territoire, population. In order to answer his initial question: “What are we to understand by ‘security’?” he here begins by pointing out how history can be analyzed as a history of major technologies or dispositives and how an analysis of this type would also imply a history of the formation of dispositives and their interrelations.23 This history of major societal technologies differs from what Foucault calls “a history of techniques in the proper sense of the word,” that is, a history that merely focuses on the rise and fall of various means employed to deal with certain surroundings.24 The dispositional analysis of the history of technology is not content to merely describe, for instance, when solitary confinement was introduced in prisons. Instead it focuses on the “far more global but also more blurred history of correlations which occasion that, in a given society and for a given sector, a technology will be installed.”25 Foucault’s history of major technological arrangements is a study in conditions for the clustering of social techniques and the inevitable and equally momentous interplay between these techniques, but also how such techniques tends to cluster up in ways that endow them with inclinations or dispositions of a similar kind. While stressing the necessity of analyzing history as a social technological history of dispositives, Foucault introduces what he calls three basic and particularly important “modalities” of dispositives, which he designates “law,” “discipline,” and “the dispositives of security.” All three prototypes can be regarded as major formations of social technologies and characterized by a particular mode of distribution as they deal with the surrounding world and organize human and social interaction within this framework. It is especially in light of this common demeanor that Foucault can characterize the specificity of what he describes as the social logic of security, which does not only distinguish itself from the dispositives of law and discipline but also plays an import part in the introduction of the notion of governmentality. Legislation and its outcome, the law, can thus be construed as a special kind of dispositional arrangement insofar as they are an attempt to establish a differentiation between the forbidden and the permitted. This legal dispositive exists as a codifying and prohibitive social technology that lays down a binary order, eventually supported by sanctions, to be respected by every legal subject. The law distinguishes sharply between the permitted and the forbidden in order to specify the unwanted acts. However, where discipline is concerned, it is a preventive and productive dispositive that works to avert the unwanted from 23 24 25

[STP]: 6/{STPo}: 4. [STP]: 10/{STPo}: 8. [STP]: 10/{STPo}: 8.

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occurring and, as such, often fabricating something new as well – something wanted. The disciplinary modality intervenes in the daily existence of its objects, individual bodies, molding them so that they can be expected to function in a desirable fashion in the future. Just as the law deals with its surrounding world, so does discipline, although now in a prescriptive fashion that aims to eliminate the unwanted and prevent it from occurring at all. Conversely, the dispositives of security do not deter; instead, they work conductively by aiming to facilitate the self-regulation of a population. The implementation of security precautions is not designed to distinguish between the wanted and the unwanted, nor is it capable of removing or ameliorating the unwanted. Instead, the measures of security establish a readiness to take “into account that which can happen,”26 often with reference to its societal utility or inutility.27 Thus, this modality of dispositive processes the unexpected in order to avoid potential destructive consequences, or gain from prosperous outcomes. Foucault emphasizes how the three major dispositives all express distinct dispositional logics and are, at one and the same time, able to share common material. He illustrates this important point with a ‘childish’ example; a simple case of penal law: “you must not steal.”28 Within the juridical dispositive, theft is treated by “laying down a law and fixing a punishment for the person who breaks it, which is the system of the legal code with a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited, and a coupling, comprising the code, between a type of prohibited action and a type of punishment.”29 The punishment may, of course, vary significantly from a simple fine to banishment, severe corporal punishment, or even the death penalty. The disciplinary dispositive differs from this form because it processes theft through a “series of supervisions, checks, inspections, and varied controls that, even before the thief has stolen, make it possible to identify whether or not he is going to steal.”30 Furthermore, theft is treated post factum by the dispositive of discipline, not only by employing a series of penitentiary techniques such as obligatory work, moralization, and correction but also by using a number of investigative, medical, and psychological techniques which fall “within the domain of surveillance, diagnosis and the possible transformation of individuals.”31 Within the dispositive of security, however, the phenomenon of theft is interpreted in a manner quite different from the former two. It is inserted into a series of probable events and in calculation of costs – “and instead of a binary division between the

26 27 28 29 30 31

[STP]: 23/{STPo}: 21. [NB]: 53/{BP}: 51. [STP]: 6–8/{STPo}: 4–6. [STP]: 7/{STPo}: 5. [STP]: 6/{STPo}: 4. [STP]: 6/{STPo}: 4.

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permitted and the prohibited, one establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand, and on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded.”32 More specifically, the treatment of theft within the dispositive of security revolves around questions such as: “How can we predict statistically the number of thefts at a given moment, in a given society, in a given town, in the town or in the country, in a given social stratum? ... What is the comparative cost of the theft and its repression and what is more worthwhile: To tolerate a bit more theft or to tolerate a bit more repression? Can [the culprit] really be reeducated? Independently of the act he has committed, is he a permanent danger such that he will do it again whether or not he has been reeducated?”33 In sum, statistical prognoses about tendencies of the population, and correspondingly the ‘economic’ weighing of costs and risks in realizing different courses of action, constitute the dominant framework for dealing with theft within the dispositive of security. Among these three dispositional modalities, the disciplinary prototype is quite clearly the most familiar as it represents the major theme in Foucault’s historical account of the birth of the prison. As we saw in Chapter 5, it is not the prison itself that is Foucault’s primary concern; rather, it is the transversal tendency that makes it relevant to ask: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”34 The focus of investigation is the complex network that connects and permeates these different institutions as it imbues them with a particular disciplinary dispositionality that is alterable, transferable, and modifiable, but nonetheless recognizable. Alternatively, the legal or juridical prototype, simply referred to as sovereignty, is mainly dealt with by Foucault in a negative manner, and not least in his critique of the conventional understanding of power as being principally sovereign, commanding, prohibitive, and legal in nature.35 However, this dispositional modality is also apparent in the various instances where Foucault demonstrates how basic juridical conceptualizations are remolded by the rise of new social dispositions, such as the birth of corrective incarceration in contradistinction to the psychical punishment of sovereignty, the rise of the reason of state, or the birth of the neoliberal version of governmentality in the 20th century.36

32

[STP]: 8/{STPo}: 6. [STP]: 8/{STPo}: 6. 34 SP: 229/DP: 228. 35 Cf. VS/WK; [DS]/{SD}. 36 The psychical punishment of sovereignty is principally treated in Surveiller et punir; the rise of the reason of state in [STP]/{STPo}; and the birth of 20th-century neoliberal governmentality in [NB]/{BP}. 33

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Likewise, the last prototype of security is more complicated to discern than discipline as these arrangements seem to correspond to a dispositional ‘halfway house’ in Foucault’s work. As mentioned earlier, they are to some extent related to the “regulatory controls” or the “biopolitics of the population,” which Foucault described as a new social order beginning to interact with the “disciplines” or the “anatomo-politics of the human body ” in the 19th century.37 More importantly here, they also connect directly to the notion of governmentality set up in the 1978 lectures.38 In this context, the dispositives of security were integrated into a larger conceptualization that is close to Foucault’s overall designation of the dispositive quoted in Chapter 5 and may be more apt in representing the dispositional prototype. Hence, when defining both the dispositive in general and governmentality for the first time Foucault referred to a highly heterogeneous “ensemble” encompassing “the said as much as the unsaid”: institutions, practices, architectural forms, discourses, tactics, analyses and reflections, administrative measures, procedures, regulations, decisions, calculations, scientific statements, philosophical and moral proportions – all of which allows for a certain type of normative matrix that “that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led towards the pre-eminence over all other types of power – sovereignty, discipline, and so on – of the type of power that we can call ‘government’, having the population as its ‘target’, political economy as its ‘major form of knowledge’, and dispositives of security as its key ‘technical instrument’.”39 The proximity or overlap between governmentality and security, which in instances such as that discussed earlier can be delimited to represent only the technical or practical implement of the former, Foucault illustrates when he summarizes “that sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework. The specific space of security refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given space. The space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold is, I think, roughly what one can call the milieu,” understood generally as “the medium of an action and the element in which it circulates.”40 It is this characteristic of security that Foucault eventually builds

37

VS: 183/WK: 139; emphasis in original. [STP]: 113/{STPo}: 110. 39 [STP]: 112/{STPo}: 108–109; “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977] DE III: 299/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 194. 40 [STP]: 22/{STPo}: 20. 38

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into the notion of governmentality, where the societal milieu comes into view as something akin to a natural habitat in which the population dwells. In continuation with his investigations of this dispositional modality and its interchange with the legal and disciplinary prototypes in the lectures in 1978 and 1979, Foucault reassigns it as “the general dispositive of governmentality.”41 Thus, he maintains a number of the implications pertaining to the dispositives of security; not least the relation to the population and to the difficult interchange between security and freedom.42 This development could also be regarded as a sequence of different phases within the history of the same, very comprehensive dispositive. Foucault would then study it from the appearance of raison d’état in the 18th century, which will be treated in the second part of this chapter, to its later liberal and neoliberal formations in the two following centuries. As we will further discuss in Chapter 8, Foucault redefined in his 1979 lectures the notion of governmentality as “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men,” thus broadening it to such an extent that it could also study problems of government outside the dispositional frameworks of security and governmentality as formulated earlier. Taking into account that Foucault never systematically explains exactly how the notions of biopolitics, security, and governmentality relate to each other, it also becomes clear that any schematic representation of his dispositional analysis entails both interpretation and reconstruction. Hence, Table 7.1 is meant to be a heuristic illustration of how the different elements of the three dispositional prototypes could be mapped out according to a conceptual juxtaposition. It should not be taken as an account of all the relevant analytical components, as it not only reduces biopolitics, security, and governmentality into one single societal technology but also pulls together notions that are not employed by Foucault himself in order to fill out categorical lacunas in the table. Instead, the table aims to illustrate some of the major constituents of the matter of concern for dispositional analysis by focusing on the normative order, the exercise of power, the spatiality, the subject position, as well as some of the material Foucault investigates with one particular dispositive in the forefront. From epochal characterizations to ambiguous constellations. To present the objects of dispositional analysis in a schematic outline such as this obviously runs the risk of endorsing a certain misunderstanding of the dispositives 41 42

[NB]: 71/{BP}: 70. [NB]: 67/{BP}: 65.

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Table 7.1

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Prototypical dispositives

LAW

DISCIPLINE

Biopolitics SECURITY Governmentality

Normative order What?

Prohibitive Forbidden/Permitted Codifying

Prescriptive Unwanted/Wanted “Normating [Normation]”

Conductive Utile/Inutile Normalizing

Exercise of power How?

Repressive Limitation

Productive Formation

Facilitative Allowing (laissez-faire)

Spatiality Where?

Territory State of Law

Localized, Analyzed Spaces Institutionalized Society

Natural Environment Civil Society

Subject position Who?

Legal Subjects Codifying Acts

Individual Bodies Controlling Behavior

Population Conducting conduct

Selected material

Law, Jurisprudence, Classical Political Philosophy, Internment, Representation, Public Punishment, Sovereignty, Confinement of Madness

Asylum, Administrative Institutions, Bad Consciousness, Crime Rates, Criminology, Educative Imprisonment, Examination, Forensic Psychiatry, Military Parade, Psychology, Pedagogy, Prisons, Surveillance, Schools, Workshops

Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Political Economy, Statistics, Pastoral Power, Raison d’état,

that Foucault strongly warns against. Hence, the above typology of dispositives can tempt the conception of a history of recent times as a succession of dispositive modalities.43 According to this succession, the dispositives of law would have brought about a legal system with ancient lineage that breaks free of its customary legal connections by the end of the Middle Ages and subsequently lasts into the 18th century. Sometime during the 18th century, this legal system would then be replaced by a modern system based on disciplinary dispositives that prevails well into the 20th century. At present, a more contemporary system based on security precautions seems to be in the process of replacing discipline. In a historical analysis of this kind one attempts to characterize the life of any given period as a unified system based on a certain

43

[STP]: 8–13/{STPo}: 6–11.

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dispositive typology, while at the same time assuming the existence of rather clear-cut historical ruptures.44 Nonetheless, one should be careful not to perceive the history of dispositives as a process in which one system simply replaces another. According to Foucault, there is no “series in which the elements follow each other in such a

44 In this regard, it is important to note that our exposition of the dispositive is both indebted to and critical of Gilles Deleuze’s earlier treatment of the notion. Based on the important observation that “Foucault’s philosophy often presents itself as an analysis of concrete dispositives,” Deleuze was possibly the first to emphasize the crucial importance of this concept for understanding Foucault’s work (G. Deleuze: “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” [1989], p. 185/“What Is a Dispositif?” p. 159). At the same time, however, it is also Deleuze’s achievement to have associated Foucault’s “philosophy of dispositives” with his own famous proposition concerning the coming into being of the so-called Control Societies, which have had a considerable impact in contemporary social theory and critique (G. Deleuze: “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” (1989), p. 188/“What Is a Dispositif?” p. 162; G. Deleuze: “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” (1990)/“Postscript on Control Societies”). In this context Deleuze contested that while it “is sometimes thought that Foucault painted the picture of modern societies in terms of disciplinary dispositives in opposition to the older dispositives of sovereignty,” this should not be the case as “the disciplines Foucault described are the history of what we gradually cease to be, whereas our actuality is taking shape in dispositions of open and continuous control” (G. Deleuze: “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” (1989), p. 188/“What Is a Dispositif?” p. 165). Consequently, it appears as if he develops Foucault’s notion of the dispositive further by suggesting a succession of various societies, namely “societies of sovereignty,” “disciplinary societies,” and “societies of control,” each of them dominated or permeated by a particular dispositive (G. Deleuze: “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” (1990), pp. 240–241/“Postscript on Control Societies,” pp. 177–178). The problem here is not only that Deleuze manages to advocate that Foucault recognized “a society of control” as our imminent future, despite the fact that very little in Foucault’s published work testifies to any overt interest in contemporary control (G. Deleuze: “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” (1990), p. 241/“Postscript on Control Societies,” p. 178); in fact, in most discussions concerning control, Foucault explicitly associates this notion with the operations of discipline (cf. e.g. {STPo}: 4, 16, 32, 39, 95, 351, 353; for a competent critique of Deleuze’s focus on control in Foucault’s analysis, see T. Lopdrup-Hjorth: “Let’s go Outside”: The Value of Co-Creation [Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School, 2013], pp. 200–216). Of greater importance is the fact that Deleuze also comes close to suggesting a simple succession of dispositional epochs marked by a sharply cut periodization and a sustained generalization of societal formations, both of which are foreign to Foucault’s work. In fact, the intention with Foucault’s idea of a history of dispositives is exactly to undermine an epochal approach to history and equally any totalizing depictions of society as a whole. – When we suggest that the dispositive is relevant as an independent socio-analytical concept we do not, therefore, disagree with Deleuze as to the importance and the centrality of this notion for Foucault’s work. But what we strongly emphasize is that this importance is precisely dependent on an understanding of the history of dispositives that, in opposition to Deleuze’s assessment, substitutes the said periodizations and generalizations for a truly multifarious social order that is by some means traversed by different time periods at the very same time.

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way that the appearance of the new causes the earlier ones to disappear. There is no era of the law, of the disciplinary, nor an era of security.”45 The dispositional analysis as Foucault articulates it in his lectures is thus keen to avoid any use of epochal characterizations, let alone describe historical development as successive epochs replacing each other in a “kind of historical schema.”46 In fact, the investigations of the 1978 lectures, in which he develops the notion of dispositive in concrete terms, function as a way of distancing himself from an epochal interpretation of discipline in terms of a “generalized disciplinary society.”47 Crucially, this also rules out other epochal ‘candidates’ in terms of security, population, risk, control, post-discipline, and so on; in other words, dispositional analysis questions the very idea of epochal characterizations. The task of the analyst cannot be to suggest that we have entered or are on the brink of a new era characterized by a novel form of social rationality. Such prophetic or eschatological brinkmanship is disavowed in an analysis that privileges the “shift of emphasis” rather than the ‘substitution’.48 Of course, for the distinction between substitution and shift of emphasis to have any content it must be realized on an analytical level. Therefore, a brief overview of the interpretive strategies that Foucault uses in order to carry out his non-epochal analysis of dispositional constellations, that is, dispositives arranged within a given context in a ‘system of correlation’, can be found below.49 Firstly, Foucault stresses how, in a previous historical situation, a dominant dispositive makes use of other dispositives, which later achieves a more central status in organizing social interaction: “It is absolutely clear that in the juridico-legal system ... the disciplinary aspect [was] far from absent since, after all, when a so called exemplary punishment was imposed on an action, ... it was in fact precisely with the aim of having a ‘corrective effect’. ... We could [say] the same with regard to the disciplinary system which includes a whole series of dimensions that absolutely belong to the domain of security. Basically, when one undertakes to correct a prisoner ... one tries to correct the person according to the risk of relapse, that is to say according to what will very soon be called his ‘dangerousness’ – that is to say, again, a mechanism of security.”50 In retrospect, other considerations besides that of the law were already present and imperative in order for the law to function (the practice of the law already had an implicit disciplinary and securing effect). Meanwhile, such implicit matters 45

[STP]: 10/{STPo}: 8. [STP]: 8/{STPo}: 6. 47 [DS]: 225/{SD}: 253; [PP]: 68/{PsP}: 66; SP: 217/DP: 216; cf. M. Sennelart: “Course Context” (2007), {STPo}: 378. 48 [STP]: 373/{STPo}: 363. 49 [STP]: 10/{STPo}: 10. 50 [STP]: 9/{STPo}: 7. 46

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may turn out to be a primary matter for other dispositives. The secondary disciplinary effect of the law has a better chance of succeeding if special disciplinary dispositives are established with the specific purpose of correcting. Secondly, Foucault emphasizes how a dispositive that expresses an overriding or prevailing logic in a contemporary context depends on the continuous reinterpretation of other dispositional logics. For example, the function of the apparatus of security “involves a real inflation of the juridico-legal code.”51 Likewise, the development of the systems of security implies that the disciplinary techniques are activated and propagated: In order to guarantee security one has to employ “a whole series of techniques for the surveillance of individuals, the diagnosis of what they are, the classification of their mental structure, of their specific pathology, and so on. In short one has to appeal to a whole disciplinary series that proliferates under mechanisms of security and is necessary to make them work.”52 Thirdly, the dispositional analysis allows for the coexistence of several parallel, competing, or even internally struggling dispositives within a specific institution or, quite generally, in any given situation. For example, the correlation of dispositives may be arranged so as to form parallel arrangements that exert distinct normative influences in different parts of an institution. At a given level, the logic of security systems may constitute the principal organizing force, whereas in other layers of the same institution, disciplinary techniques may prevail in the shaping of social interaction. Moreover, a number of dispositives may share and to a significant degree compete over the same material. As we have seen, Foucault emphasizes this important methodological point with his example of a piece of simple penal law that states, “you must not steal.” Thus, focusing on one single dispositive in the history of dispositives is the story of how rudimentary considerations are articulated in a fundamentally endless movement. Our modes of existence are differentiated into relatively selfdependent types of social interplay that increasingly separate from each other, but without ceasing to interact with other dispositives in respect to empirical phenomena or experiences. Foucault points to this endless differentiation in a reply to Habermas in 1983, who had credited Foucault with having captured the historical moment when reason took a turn that led to an instrumental rationality. According to Foucault, however, this praise was somewhat problematic since it implicitly presupposed that he merely operated with a singular splitting of reason. Foucault thus replies: “It is true that I would not speak about one bifurcation of reason but, in fact, rather about an endless, multiple bifurcation.”53 51

[STP]: 9/{STPo}: 7. [STP]: 9–10/{STPo}: 8. 53 “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” [1983], DE IV: 440/“Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” p. 442. 52

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Fourthly, the dispositional analysis also allows for cases in which two dispositives exert an internally contradictory normative influence. The phenomenon of terrorism is a case in point. In dealing with this phenomenon, the dispositive of security attains not only a diagrammatic but also and at times even a mechanistic character, thus enforcing drastic safety measures for the welfare of the population.54 The paradigmatic challenge of terrorism often provokes a rigid response from the technologies of security, not least in circumstances where these technologies are coupled with liberal governmentality. When appearing in its rigid or extreme form, such a dispositive of security will tend to collide with the liberal shape of the juridico-legal dispositive, which is centered on the protection of rights. In relation to terrorism, irreconcilable conflicts could thus be analyzed as the collision between the logic of two distinct dispositives; for example, between considerations of the security of populations and flexible self-organizing ‘flows’ on the one side – the liberal version of the so-called pact of security55 – and on the other, the protection of the inalienable rights of individuals. This is yet another way of resisting a univocal description of the interactions in the social field in terms of an ‘x-society’. Fifthly, the framework of dispositives is employed by Foucault to move between micro and macro levels of analysis. A dispositional logic can express itself in any material or medium: Discursively in philosophical or scientific texts, in the policy papers of the political system, in diverse practices of institutions and organizations such as hospitals, schools and work-places, in architectural products and in city or regional planning, in life forms, groups, and projects of civil society, in the formats of the diverse media of the public sphere(s), and in the works and techniques of fine art. This potential pervasiveness of the dispositive enables the analyst to describe tendencies at an overarching or ‘societal’ level. Yet, at the same time a dispositional logic does not exist in itself as a definable substrate that is set apart from a social practice. Rather, its specific dispositionality can only be discerned as it manifests itself within some material or medium, and therefore (historical) study of specific expressions is necessary to characterize its logic. As we have emphasized, the expression of a dispositional logic is (except in a mechanistic mode of appearance) altered as a result of the specific context with which it interacts; as such, a dispositive is always already altered, destabilized or modified. In Chapter 2 we emphasized that Foucault is a thinker of events who focuses on individual social happenings by seeking to clarify how such events create ruptures within established social space and constitute the realization of something new. However, even this view becomes one-sided if we do not emphasize that Foucault is considering what the novel, singular event initiates 54 55

M. Senellart: “Course Context” (2007), {STPo}: pp. 369–391. M. Senellart: “Course Context” (2007), {STPo}: pp. 372–373.

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by questioning what it gives rise to. It is as an expression of this line of inquiry that we should understand the concept of the dispositive as a methodological tool for historic-philosophical research. The notion of the dispositive enables Foucault to study those social patterns toward which events point. On the one hand, social interaction is viewed neither as a fluent and shapeless process nor as a series of singular or unique events. On the other hand, Foucault does not analyze the social transaction either, as he takes his point of departure in the organization of a social order that frames those very transactions. He does not begin with the layers of an already stratified society but attempts to describe social interaction in its coming about, as the first contours of a new development begin to show.56 It is this level, where a rudimentary sedimentation of social interaction occurs, that he attempts to capture by the term dispositive.

3

Later developments in the notion of governmentality

The examination at the Collège de France in 1978 of how a political governmentality arose that gave political leadership an increasing right to interfere in the behavior of groups made up of individuals, enabled Foucault to account for reasons of state as they came about at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. As emphasized earlier, this concern with problems of governmentality and government more broadly also continued to leave a significant mark on Foucault’s work after it was introduced in 1978, essentially in the context of dispositional analysis and with a special emphasis on the dispositives of security. In order to indicate how this lecture course began a wide series of studies of governmental problematics in different contexts, we will end this exposition of the elements of governmentality in light of dispositional analysis by mentioning a few instances of the later developments of the governmentality category as they were set forth in Foucault’s research from 1979 until his death in 1984. The purpose of this final remark is only to give an impression of the framework and agenda that Foucault’s introduction of the notion of governmentality eventually led to, while also indicating how these later developments relate to a group of problems and subject matters that Foucault’s encounter with security and possible collaborators of terrorism was, to some extent, already entangled in. In doing this, we will present some of Foucault’s alternative uses of the notion of governmentality that cannot be reduced to the definition given in 1978 while remaining closely associated and thus indicative of a cohesive analytical project concerning government. 56 The dispositive of discipline for example involves both “deployments, maneuvers and manipulations,” which in their exercise express a strategic function, as well as a more or less stable ‘system’ of “techniques and devices.” In short, the notion seeks to capture the process of social ordering as well as the products or results of these processes.

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Biopolitical government and liberalism. The first and most significant instance where Foucault came to modify the notion of governmentality but without breaking away from its earlier connotations was embedded in his inquiry into modern liberalism of the 19th and 20th centuries, within which he found an ongoing reflection on rationalizing government of particular importance.57 As we will discuss in detail in the following chapter concerned with the 1979 lectures on the birth of biopolitics, this was a reflection that set out in the already existing raison d’état, in order to criticize and correct it.58 Accordingly, liberalism took a point of departure in existing approaches to governmental rationality and its efforts toward optimization: attaining the greatest effect with the least effort. Over and against this, liberalism held that such governmental rationality could not be its own aim or its own guide: it could not give an answer as to why governmental rationality was required, just as maximization of ever more comprehensive governmental rationality could not be a guiding principle or even explain how best to govern. By distancing itself from the existing raison d’état, the liberal critique sought to give a different answer concerning the raison d’être for governmental rationality, other than mere maximization. It pointed out that governmental rationality had to relate to the logic guiding the actions of the governed, and that government had to take the rationality of the governed into account by limiting itself. There were aspects of life that one should refrain from governing, not only because it was unwise to attempt to do so but also because it was impossible. In traditional approaches to governmental rationality, there had been an ongoing question about whether governmental rationality was implemented with sufficient stringency and detail to maximize the strength of the state. In liberalism, the question became whether governmental rationality was able to limit itself, such that it could govern in the best possible way.59 It is thus

57 [NB]: 324/{BP}: 318. Cf. Chapter 8 for further discussion of the liberal art of governing in [STP]/{STPo} and [NB]/{BP}. 58 At the beginning of the lecture course of 1979, Foucault points out “a new art of government that began to be formulated, reflected upon, and outlined around the middle of the eighteenth century” and perceives this “as to limit the exercise of government internally” ([NB]: 29/{BP}: 27). Also at the beginning, he further claims that liberalism basically opposes and modifies raison d’état, but without questioning its basis ([NB]: 23–24/ {BP}: 21–22). In immediate extension of this, he notes that one is first able to grasp the theme of biopolitics when understanding the phenomenon of liberalism. 59 Taking an outset in raison d’état, the governing elite had to ask itself: “Am I governing with sufficient intensity, depth, and attention to detail so as to bring the state to the point fixed by what it should be, to bring it to its maximum strength?” With the liberal determination of the guidelines for governmental rationality, the question became: “Am I governing at the border between the too much and too little, between the maximum and minimum fixed for me by the nature of things” ([NB]: 21/{BP}: 19).

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the appearance of the problem of self-limitation within governmental rationality that Foucault studies in the 1979 lectures.60 The definition Foucault gave of governmentality in the context of modern liberalism was quite formal in comparison with the definition of 1978. It referred directly neither to security, political economy or the state, nor to the various prototypical dispositives and their systems of correlation. Rather, it simply pointed out “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men,” conceived of as the very activity of conduct itself and as “a proposed analytical grid” that could be applied to a range of different domains of inquiry.61 How and in relation to what Foucault employed this notion, essentially of conduct of conduct – which does not disregard the governmentality of raison d’état but rather amplifies and expands it with reference to the self-limitations imposed on direct state intervention – will be accounted for in Chapter 8 in connection with various forms of liberalism, especially so-called German ordo-liberalism and American anarcho-liberalism, which Foucault analyzed in his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France. In this context, it is worth mentioning how it was also the analysis of this kind of governmentality and its implications that lead Foucault in his 1979 lectures to take up biopower once more, thereby transforming the account he gave in 1974 for the kind of biopolitics related to what in the 17th century was termed “Medizinische Polizei,” “hygiène publique,” and “social medicine.” This politics of the living distinguished itself by viewing the population as its object and as a consequence treating this object as “a set of co-existing living beings [ensemble d’etres vivants] with particular biological and pathological features, which thereby falls under specific forms of knowledge and technique [savoirs et techniques specifiques].”62 In Naissance de la biopolitique, Foucault understands the birth of biopolitics and this notion in extension of governmentality 60

From 1978 and over the next two years, the majority of Foucault’s shorter writings and interviews touch upon and consider the new governmental rationality. Among the shorter texts authored by Foucault in 1978–1980, the following are particularly relevant for the issue: “La société disciplinaire en crise” [1978], DE III: 532–534; “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1980], DE IV: 41–95/“Interview with Michel Foucault,” pp. 239–297; a transcript of two lectures given by Foucault on October 10 and 16, 1979, at Stanford University were published under the titles: “‘Omnes et singulatim’: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 134–161/“‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” 180–201; “Foucault étudie la raison d’État” [1979], DE III: 801–805 and in “Foucault étudie la raison d’État” [1980] DE IV: 37–41/“Truth Is in the Future,” pp. 298–301, of which the first is the most extensive; “La politique de la santé au XVIIIe siècle” [1978], DE IV: 7–18/“The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 90–105. 61 [NB]: 192/{BP}: 186. 62 [STP]: 377/{STPo}: 367; cf. RC: 106. See Chapter 8 for further discussion of Foucault’s use of the term ‘bio-politics’.

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and therefore as a technique that rationalized leadership problems when these concerned phenomena relating to a group of living beings that constituted a population. Such phenomena pertained to the population’s health, hygiene, birth and mortality rates, as well as the quality of the gene pool.63 However, as we will discuss in detail in the next chapter, which is directly concerned with the 1979 lectures, these earlier aspects of biopolitics tend to be overshadowed or played down by Foucault’s studies of liberalism and the politics of life this tradition fosters. Government of the living. The lectures Foucault gave the following year at Collège de France under the title Du gouvernement des vivants (On the Government of the Living) were presented as a continuation of the existing studies into the workings of governmental rationality. Seeing that the broad working definition given to the notion of government in 1980 was “the techniques and procedures intended for directing or guiding the conduct of people,” these lectures clearly set out from the previous year’s studies. However, both the timeframe of the inquiry and its field of reference had undergone notable change.64 The lecture course was concerned with confession and the supervision of consciousness, primarily as these had been developed in early Christianity and especially in regard to monastic life around the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. It is therefore possible to view the lectures of that year as a detailed unfolding of previous studies into the rationality of governmentality in the early Christian pastoral. Here Foucault thus supplements the perspective concerned with governmental rationality by focusing on how truth-telling (alèthurgie) in the early Christian pastoral had appeared as an indispensable and overarching aspect to governing others by conducting their conduct as expressed through various techniques of the self.65 By installing an ongoing surveillance of the movements of the soul and a continuous requirement for total confession, it became possible to govern people in a particular way. Through ongoing examination of oneself a truth was revealed that people were forced to relate to. Such techniques of the self-permitted the exhibition of a truth that would not only problematize the ability to govern oneself but also implied that this capacity was transferred to others who were able to decipher the truth revealed.66 Consequently, in the lectures from 1980 Foucault retains the governmental perspective, but only insofar as he expands it by “taking a very particular 63

[NB]: 323/{BP}: 317; cf. RC: 109. [GV]: 318/{GL}: 322; translation modified; cf. RC: 123. 65 In the first lecture of 1980 Foucault emphasizes that the purpose of this year’s course was to “elaborate on the concept of governing people through truth [la notion de gouvernement des hommes par la vérité]” [GV]: 12/{GL}: 11. At the same time he draws attention to having taken up this theme in the previous year: cf. [NB]: 20–22/{BP}: 18–19. 66 [GV]: 319–320/{GL}: 323–324; cf. RC: 128–129. 64

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and precise example that does not fall within the domain of politics.”67 As an alternative to analyzing the conduct of conduct such that it corresponded to the governmentalization of “the exercise of political sovereignty,” Foucault began to examine how governing the prosperity or wellbeing of people became coupled with a demand to generate a truth that committed the individual to become subject to the government of others.68 The guiding question for Foucault’s lectures that year was therefore: “how, in our civilization, have the relations between the government of people, the manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity, and the salvation for each individual and for everybody been established?”69 This level of analysis broke with the governmentality of raison d’état or liberalism but presented, at the same time, a broadening of the perspective for studying conduct of conduct that could easily be integrated into the former without losing its analytical independence. The lectures from 1980–1981, Subjectivité et vérité, and L’herméneutique de soi from 1981–1982 (Subjectivity and Truth and Hermeneutic of the Self ), elaborated further on two themes that Foucault began to identify as both interconnected and important for his research, namely “a history of subjectivity” and “an analysis of the forms of ‘governmentality’.”70 As he noted in the overview of the lectures for 1981, Foucault in this way sought – again – to “take up the question of governmentality from a different angle.” This new angle was: “the government of oneself in its articulation with relations with others (such as one finds in pedagogy, behavior counselling [conseils de conduit], spiritual direction, the prescription of models for living, etc.).”71 Governmentality and techniques of the self and of others. When introducing this new approach, Foucault provided yet another working defining of governmentality, which once more accentuated alternative aspects of the notion without refusing or disapproving of the earlier ways of using it. In the context of the history of the experience of sexuality in antiquity – which 67

[GV]: 18/{GL}: 17. [NB]: 3/{BP}: 2. 69 [GV]: 79/{GL}: 76–77. 70 RC: 134/“Subjectivity and Truth” (1997), p. 88. 71 RC: 136/“Subjectivity and Truth” (1997), p. 89. Among the shorter texts from the 1980s, the following contain important contributions to defining the new governmental rationality: “Espace, savoir et pouvoir” [1982], DE IV: 270–285; the “Foucault” entrance in Huismans (ed.) “Dictionnaire des philosophes,” pp. 942–944, which was written under the pseudonym “Maurice Florence”; “The Subject and Power”; “Michel Foucault, une interview: sexe, pouvoir et la politique de l‘identité” [1984] DE IV: 735–752; Foucault’s lectures at a University of Vermont seminar in the fall of 1982, which were published as “Technologies of the Self” (pp. 6–49) and “The Political Technology of Individuals” (pp. 145–162); “Le souci de la vérité” [1984], DE IV: 646–649; and “L‘éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” [1984], DE IV: 708–729. 68

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Foucault began to study in detail in the lecture course of 1981 mentioned earlier – he therefore presented a distinction between various types of “‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason.” Of special interest among these were “the technologies of domination” and “the technologies of the self” – that is, on the one hand, “the techniques which permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to impose certain wills on them, and to submit them to certain ends or objectives,”72 “an objectivizing of the subject,”73 and, on the other hand, “the techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on.”74 It was in light of this distinction and the juxtapositions it made analytically possible that Foucault gave his new definition, which not only described a genuinely relational notion but also comprised a certain element of retrospective selfcritique. “This contact,” he pointed out in a lecture held at the University of Vermont in October 1982, “between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call governmentality,” and continued,: “Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual lamination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself.”75 However, this auto-critical point Foucault had already elaborated on in another lecture given previously at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire) in November 1980, where he also went into more detail about the relational and analytical notion of governmentality he was working with at the time. On the one hand, Foucault would thus suggest “that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization, he has to take into account not only techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. Let’s say: he has to take into account the interaction between those two types of techniques – techniques of domination and techniques of the self. He has to take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination.” And most importantly, Foucault then could particularize: “The contact point, where the individuals are driven [and known] by others is tied to the way they 72 “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980], p. 203. 73 “Technologies of the Self” [1982/1988], p. 18. 74 “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980], p. 203. 75 “Technologies of the Self” [1982/1988], p. 19.

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conduct themselves [and know themselves], is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word [as they spoke of it in the 16th century, of governing children, of governing family, or of governing souls], governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.” On the other hand, when Foucault was with hindsight criticizing himself in this context, it was because he might have “insisted ... too much on the techniques of domination” when he was earlier studying such institutions as the asylums or the prisons. This characterization of the earlier work did not do justice to the complexity of the ways in which power was exercised in relation to the history of madness’s transformation into insanity or the history of delinquency as an emblematic focal point for surveillance and the disciplinary dispositive, as we have respectively discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. Yet, Foucault’s critical or distancing account still articulated a shift of emphasis that would undoubtedly be the case for his work in the 1980s, while at the same time it accentuated the conception of governmentality as a “contact point.” “What we call discipline,” Foucault thus continued, “is something really important in these kinds of institutions, but it is only one aspect of the art off governing people in our society. We must not understand the exercise of power as pure violence or strict coercion. Power consists in complex relations: these relations involve a set of rational techniques, and the efficiency of those techniques is due to subtle integration of coercion technologies and self-technologies.” Proposing that we should “get rid of the more or less Freudian schema – you know it – the schema of interiorization of the law by the self,”76 in order not to presuppose but to actually analyze how, when, where, and by what means techniques of the self and technologies of power would interrelate and produce certain effects on the “virtual modes of existence for possible subjects,” Foucault finally précised that “having studied the field of government by taking as my point of departure techniques of domination, I would like in the years to come to study government – especially in the field of sexuality – starting from the techniques of the self.”77 The later books concerned with the history of sexuality are therefore connected to the examination of governmental rationality. At the same time,

76 “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980], p. 204. 77 “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980], p. 204. The phase “virtual modes of existence for possible subjects” is found in [GSA 1]: 7/{GSO 1}: 5.

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however, they have come to draw attention away from that which actually constituted a guiding theme for Foucault’s research at that time. Taking into account the aforementioned American lectures as well as courses given at the Collège de France from 1978 and onward, it becomes apparent that Foucault considered the problem of governmental rationality alongside publishing the later volumes concerning the history of sexuality. Being aware of this, it becomes possible to view Foucault’s journey back to antiquity and the concern for techniques of the self as a contribution to the genesis of the modern governmental rationality. To put it simply and chronically inverse, he attempted to write a complex history about how society had originally been inhabited by individuals who sought self-control in a context characterized by the rivalry that was an apparent aspect of the sexual morals and ethics of classical antiquity. However, this would develop into a society where citizens increasingly gave up control of the self and their surroundings to an external form of governmental rationality that ought to and was assumed to be able to care for everyone. As the individual gave up autonomy, a form of governmental rationality developed that increasingly intervened and took care of individual and collective life. The constitution of the self and governing others are thus mutually related. It is possible to treat the two within the framework of studying the development of governmental rationality in general. It is the beginning of this history of governmentality – which would have its own history as a versatile notion that occupied Foucault in the main part of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978. Before it was the name for the analytical and relational contact point between practical and ethical techniques of the self and political technologies of government, and before it was the name for a certain way of exercising power by way of conducting the conduct of people, which could be recognized in different forms traversing the whole social field from the level of the state to the level of the individual, governmentality was a name given to a historical configuration in which the population as an self-regulating object of government in its own right was essential. It was the historical experience that it was neither possible nor feasible nor favorable to seek control over the population that lead “towards the development of a series of specific governmental apparatuses [appareils]” – in short, the dispositives of security – and “to the development of a series of knowledges [saviors]” – in short, political economy – and eventually toward the governmentalization of the state.78

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[STP]: 111–112/{STPo}: 108–109; italics added.

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The prehistory of governmental rationality

The remaining sections of this chapter treats the history of governmentality as Foucault studies it in his 1978 lectures, that is, from its early, rudimentary antecedent in the paroral tradition of early Christianity, already distinguishing itself from the preceding conceptions of steering known in antiquity, to its apparent manifestation in the notion of the reason of the state as it was formulated in the 16th and 17th centuries. Here we will first focus on how this important governmental concept was constructed and conceived within the philosophical and political thinking of that time. Secondly, we will expand on how this state reason came to link up with a new national technology of conduct known as the police and a corresponding international politics concerned with the power balance between European nations. Last of all, we will briefly relate this historical exposition to the point of departure that was found in Foucault’s encounter with the welfare state of potentially ruthless security. Steering and governmentality. The governmentality that Foucault seeks to investigate is clearly distinguished from the classical and medieval concepts of domination, rule, and steering, as expressed in Plato’s (428–347 BC) and Thomas Aquinas’ (1225–1274) politico-philosophical writings, for example.79 In those ages, the prince’s control of his realm was viewed in analogy with the helmsman’s steering of and control over his ship. Rule was conceived in teleological terms as guidance toward the right end of the journey that one had set out on, and it thus presupposed a certain privileged knowledge of the location of the final destination or harbor that one was supposed to approach. A moral and functional steering set out with a high and unifying purpose where actions and events were directed in order to commit people to that end. In governmental rationality, it is possible to attain and realize certain goals, but there is no longer a transcendent aim as such. Here, the motivation for initiating governmental rationality and the resultant guidelines stem from elsewhere, namely either in the logic of the subjects who are governed, which government in turn seeks to promote, or simply in the optimization of governmental rationality itself. There is a further difference between steering and governmental rationality. Antique and medieval steering were conceived as being outside or at best on the margins of society, insofar as the exercise of government needed a different 79 Foucault primarily describes how this pastoral governmental rationality distinguishes itself from the Greco-Roman approach to government in Cours 08.02.1978–22.02.1978 ([STP]: 119–190/{STPo}: 115–190). However, he also examines the character of the new leadership in the minutes to the lecture series “Omnes et singulatim” at Stanford in 1979 (published as “‘Omnes et singulatim’: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 134–161/“‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” 180–201).

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status or was found on a higher level than its subjects. Rule became possible and an obligation for certain people because the ruler was superior and possessed knowledge that elevated him above other parts of the social body politic. Thus, steering was essentially top-down or from above. Governmental rationality, however, focuses on certain behaviors within the social body that it seeks to change. Thus, in terms of status, governmental rationality operates on the same level as the governed. It is primarily able to govern because of its knowledge of the governed, its logic and its inherent possibilities. Classical and medieval rule was widely prescriptive, since it set out with a purpose above and beyond its subjects, who it sought to represent. Since modern governmental rationality appears as an agenda from ‘within’ the social body, it directs the governed in a manner that allows it to appear in extension of or as a deviance from this guidance. Traditional modes of rule took the social body and its structure for granted. In this sense, it was only necessary to develop overall guidelines and intervene in the ‘exceptions’ that resulted in deviations from this structure. Conversely, modern governmental rationality has to manage the populace on a more basic level. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the constitution of the world and society could be taken for granted, meaning that it was – far more than modern governmental rationality – an ontological approach. Traditional government conceived as steering saw itself as representing a higher, divine reality, which it merely sanctioned and retained. Modern governmental rationality, on the other hand, is not based on being but activity and effect. Here, it is necessary and incontrovertible that it must be co-constitutive of the social reality that it seeks to govern. Such governmental rationality is creative in the truest meaning of the word. As implied earlier, the conception of steering and dominance was applied for a long time, stretching from Plato to Aquinas. It did not, however, disappear all at once. A number of its core features can be found in later thinkers such as Jean Bodin (1668–1738) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Here, the theories of state and sovereignty assumed that the prince or king was able to dominate his subjects by force of his superior position. It was for this very reason that he could formulate general commands. In the modern conception of governmental rationality, the elevated position of the ruler is no longer obvious and cannot be legitimized as given by nature. Rather, rule seems so counter-intuitive, precarious, and fragile that it has to be retained and authorized through performance or the way in which it distinguishes itself from society. Furthermore, the position cannot be retained in reference to the transcendent but rather through an imminent reference to that over which it decides. For Bodin and Hobbes, the sovereign must be able to legitimize itself through the society it can create. The ruler therefore appears to be a human creation.

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In these regards, this tradition preempts aspects from the modern conception of governmental rationality. In general, however, this approach to state and sovereignty must be viewed as mainly stemming from the classical ideas of steering. The basic question is still how to found the best rule and ensure its stability, not the more comprehensive issue of developing an ongoing and meticulous (re)establishment of governmental rationality through which the social field can be shaped. To find the precursors to the modern idea of governmental rationality we have to look to a tradition that began well before Bodin and Hobbes and which characterized the prince as a shepherd for society, as found in ancient oriental cultures such as the ones described in The Old Testament. It is in such a pastoral tradition – where pastor is Latin for Shepherd – that we find the roots of modern governmentality. Origins of the pastoral tradition. Foucault found an early Western mode of governmental rationality that was directed at a group of people in a process of change in the Christian pastor or shepherd’s government of his herd. This was a kind of governmental rationality that involved managing the individual – even at the level of intimate details. This created a constant dependence for the individual and Christian society as a whole. This approach hereby differed from the more common approaches to ruling in antiquity. According to Foucault, the metaphor of the shepherd and its uses in describing the overall nature of ruling and government was suspiciously absent in the great political texts of Greece and Rome. It is not found in Isocrates (436–338 BC), Demosthenes (384–322 BC) or Aristotle (384–322 BC). One exception is found in the Homeric epics, where the term was used as a ritual address when the lower ranks approached the monarch, and in works that were influenced by Pythagoras, such as fragments by Archytas (428–347 BC). The metaphor of the shepherd was therefore relatively rare and was only found in texts that were influenced by oriental cultures. In the classical texts from Hellenic culture, the metaphor of the shepherd is used very sporadically indeed, and then only for it to be refuted as being inappropriate.80 The idea of pastoral leadership seems to have been common in ancient oriental cultures. The Egyptian Pharaohs received a shepherd’s staff, and the Babylonian kings were addressed as “the shepherds of mankind.” Divinities were described as sheepherders that guided man to the pastures where they belonged and ensured their subsistence.81 There was continuity between the

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A paradigmatic example of this is Plato’s late dialogues The Statesman or Politikos. “‘Omnes et singulatim’: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 137/“Omnes et singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” p. 182. 81

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exalted gods and the divinity of the king, which were one in terms of the pastoral image.82 The theme of the shepherd is found in older Hebrew societies. Here, Yahweh was often revealed as an indispensable shepherd for his people, but the imagery was given a twist. God was given as the only and unique shepherd who guided his people personally through the assistance of his prophets.83 The pastoral structure was redefined as a relation that in its original and positive format defined the relationship between God and people. This was a purely religious relation, where the king was excluded. Hebrew society therefore did not have any pastoral institutions as such. In regard to the control exhibited by traditional rule, pastoral governmental rationality exhibited a number of important differences. The pastor was the leader, who through his statements gathered a dispersed multitude into a herd. This herd did not exist and could not retain its existence without his immediate presence and direct intervention. If the shepherd disappeared or if he ceased his efforts, the herd would disband. The pastor was the constant founder and re-creator of social coherence. The ruler, however, set out in an already existing community and sought to solve its conflicts so that it could go on without his constant intervention. Where the Greek monarch or statesman intervened once and sought to create a framework for social interaction – as with Solon’s (638–558 BC) laws for Athens – the pastor’s intervention suggested a continuous reconstitution of the community. The shepherd did not assume the community’s prior existence and did not therefore appropriate it. While ruling was conceived as a use of power over a tract of land, the pastor implemented his leadership over a group of people that was not defined according to territory.84 The shepherd governed a group of people that was in constant motion and under constant change. It is precisely because the pastoral power was not defined territorially that he could promise a land of milk and honey. The overall goal for pastoral governmental rationality was the ongoing question of caring for the flock and ensuring the individual could attain salvation despite the dangers in life. As can be seen in the tragedy of Oedipus, the monarch was also entrusted with saving the city-state. According to the metaphor of the 82

[STP]: 128–134/{STPo}: 125–130. A clear expression of this is found in the Book of Psalms 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.” 84 [STP]: 119–134/{STPo}: 115–130. Cf. “Omnes et singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 137/“Omnes et singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” p. 183. 83

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captain, the task presented to the politikos or statesman was to safeguard the community when it was confronted with danger. The shepherd, however, had to not only ensure favorable circumstances in general but also intervene on behalf of the community and the individual. The pastoral approach was universal as well as individual in its approach. The role and commitments entrusted to a leader began to change when governmental rationality was viewed as a pastoral relation. Unlike the Greek man of state, the shepherd had to dedicate his life to the flock, the collective and individual salvation of which was ascribed a higher purpose. His position was determined by the burden and effort involved, not the honor that it gave rise to. Unlike the leadership of a Greek state and the rule of a polis, the pastor’s charity toward his flock had the character of self-sacrifice. Pastoral governmental rationality therefore manifested as devotion to those governed. In all these areas, pastoral leadership anticipated essential aspects of what would later become modern approaches to governmental rationality, which will be treated in the next chapter. This involved not only a concern for the community or the flock but an ongoing and detailed management of individual lives. Because of its constant availability to assist in individual as well as collective subsistence, life, and development, it became possible to establish a social and human connection that had not been available otherwise. It became possible to unfold a kind of governmental rationality, which becomes vital for the governed. The early Christian pastoral. From the 3rd century on, the oriental theme of the shepherd received wider usage in Christianity, despite it being located in a society with a very different kind of government. While the metaphor of the shepherd had been taken up in the oriental tradition in order to illustrate the divine government of man, it was now employed to interpret the human governmental rationality by people in this world. It became indicative of how people should be governed in their self-government or self-management.85 The practice of governmental rationality constituted an important precondition for the Christian religion to establish the institution of the church, which could intervene at any time and shape the lives of its members. It has since been a fundamental feature of any number of religious societies and institutions. However, in the Christian approach, the idea of the leader as a shepherd was developed in various ways. The shepherd’s responsibilities were given in much greater detail. The pastor was responsible for not only the individual but also the smallest actions, thoughts and ideas that stemmed from that 85

It is especially evident in Benedict of Nursias writings. Besides founding the Spoleto monastery in 529 AD, he also formulated the Regula Benedicti, which became an outset for the Western monastic tradition.

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individual – including their moral character. The detail of the pastor’s responsibilities obliged him to know everything about every lamb in the flock. He needed clarity about people’s actions and motivations, whether there was sin in thought and emotions, and whether he achieved sufficient progress in leading people to salvation. This involved initiating an ongoing examination of the governed and inducing him to establish detailed knowledge about himself. On the one hand, in Christian confession, the enunciation and presentation of truth, in which “individuals are called upon to manifest what they are themselves in their heart of hearts [sont appelés à manifester ce qu’ils sont eux-mêmes, au fond d’eux-mêmes]” remains indispensable for the exercise of power and the constitution of the self, as it proved essential and fatal for the realization of power and the manifestation of selfhood as early as in Sophocles’ Oedipus, first performed 429 BC. Making hitherto hidden secrets and misdemeanors public, the manifestation of a collective binding truth is supposed to, somewhat paradoxically, function as a “purifying mechanism” that in itself ensures “pardon” and the reestablishment of the just order. According to Foucault, “it is necessary that individuals tell the truth about themselves for power to actually be reestablished according to laws that are those of the sun, the sun that organizes the world, and the sun that lights up the depths of conscience.”86 On the other hand, in Christian confession, the aim of self-examination was not for the governed to attain insight that could lead to self-mastery but rather that he or she could pass on the knowledge to the pastor, who could then be a guide for the most intimate details. While self-examination and care of the self had been considered means to self-control and mastery of the surroundings in antiquity, they entered into an ongoing commitment to confess that established a dependency on others. Such confession became decisive for exerting power. An examination of the church and its confessional tradition is therefore able to not only illuminate how citizens in Western societies have been subject to uses of power and collection of information but also show why governmental rationality has become dependent on certain kinds of truth-telling. At the same time as the pastor had been granted greater responsibility and a duty to know everything, the principle of immediate and complete dependence on the pastor by the guided was introduced. The relation to the pastor functioning as a shepherd of his flock installed a mode of governmental rationality in which the individual was constantly encouraged to hand over management

86 [GV]: 86–87/{GL}: 88–89. Foucault elaborates continuity between antiquity and early Christian confession in his discussion of part of chapter 15 of De somnis, written by Philon of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–50 CE) (GV: 81–87/{GL}: 83–89). Attempting to blend and harmonize Greek and Jewish philosophy by reinterpreting Canonical text, he played a pivotal role in this regard for the early Christian Church Fathers.

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of the self to the pastor. The ability to obey therefore gradually became a virtue in Christian texts and an aim in itself. Whereas in antiquity submission had been a temporary device used to attain independence, it now became a permanent condition.87 With the techniques of governmental rationality taken up, the Christian pastoral system organized a permanent relationship to the self among those that governed. It ensured that those who were governed related to the self in such a way that they constantly refused themselves and rejected a life shared with others. They were guided toward initiating a daily rejection of this world, which became an integral and basic feature of Christian identity. However, this not only applied to those guided but also the pastor. The Christian pastoral relation required that the pastor was willing and able to sacrifice himself for even the smallest thing that fell within his purview. It became a mark of the suitability to govern that the pastor was reluctant to take up the office, precisely because he was not anxious to govern and command but preferred to serve.88 This system therefore initiated a whole network of exchanges that involved mutual sacrifices for each other. A general, mutual, servile relation appeared where no one was the lord of others. Everybody appeared to be servants of God and each other. Pastoral governmental rationality therefore instituted a circulation of servility or a generalized ‘servocracy’.89 This generalized servility excluded the individualization that had traditionally taken the shape of selfmastery or self-confirmation found in egoism. Instead, a process of individualization appeared that had the character of subjectification.90 Its leaders and the governed became individuals through subjectification, that is, by being identified in detailed governmental structures that inserted that person into permanent relations of submission and him or her to a truth that was extracted from the self. With the Christian pastor, techniques appear that allow the government of others in the government of their selves. This occurred by the governed subject renouncing control of himself by transferring the control and conduct of his own conduct to the society of which he was a part – in particular to its governing body. Western man could therefore consider himself a lamb among other lambs that required and needed governmental rationality and constant care at both collective and individual levels. This made it possible to view governmental rationality and politics in general as a kind of protective shepherding, which in turn gave rise to the agitation and aggressiveness of

87 Regula Benedicti emphasized oboedentia or obedience toward the abbot as a basic requirement. 88 GV: 111–158/{GL}: 114–141. 89 GV: 165–210/{GL}: 167–192. 90 [STP]: 186–188. {STPo}: 183–185.

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servility that has become a unique feature of Western European societies and their governmental rationality. This involves a propensity toward aggression or even violence in the exercise of government toward both internal as well as external threats – all in the name of mutual care.91

5

The immanence of raison d’état

The appearance of raison d’état. The Christian pastoral system continued to exist throughout the 12 catholic centuries following the creation of the church. During this time, the pastoral structure of governmental rationality was revitalized several times through a number of reform-movements, including the monastic way of life.92 With the appearance of beggar-monks, pastoral governmentality from the 13th century was increasingly transplanted to the surrounding population. This development was strengthened in the 16th century with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Pastoral leadership would – from this time on – increasingly intervene in everyday life, where it also became the subject of increasing criticism. The ongoing thematization and problematization of pastoral approaches to society gradually led to the development of a specific mode of leadership based on ideas of sovereignty and dominance. The traditional conception of sovereignty and dominance was characterized by there being no distinction between exerting sovereignty and rule; so long as every member of society sought the individual and common good within the framework of an overarching cosmo-theological continuum, there was no fixed boundary between sovereignty and rule. The monarch or prince could therefore not be distinguished from the religious leader or pastor. The head of the family, the monarch, and God ruled in similar ways within that continuum. The dissemination of governmentality was therefore limited to the Christian, pastoral tradition. However, the cosmo-theological continuum came under significant pressure during the 1500s and 1600s, when a de-pastoralization of government and world took place. New kinds of knowledge, such as Kepler’s (1571–1630) astronomy, Galilei’s (1564–1642) and Newton’s (1642–1727) natural philosophy, as well as Jonston’s (1603–1675) natural history suggested that God only affected the world through universal, eternal, and simple laws that man could know. The world was no longer viewed as influenced by divine miracles

91 “Omnes et singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 139/“Omnes et singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” p. 184. 92 “Omnes et singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 144– 147/“Omnes et singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” pp. 188–190.

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that revealed God’s existence as a pastor that intervened in individual cases. God governed the totality of the universe and ruled over it in general.93 In extension, the pastoral government of people no longer seemed so extensive or definitive. The government people exerted over each other had to be something other and more than the total and general dominance that God exerted upon nature. The art of government could no longer rely on some paradigm but rather had to have its own particular logic that could be sought out and explored. Human governmentality had to seek out its principles within human society – in the object it sought to govern. This resulted in a ratio etatus or a limited mode of reasoning, which could be applied insofar as one was concerned with issues of state. When it appeared, it marked a difference from principia natura or the general and universal principles of nature. This secularization of governmentality became manifest from the middle of the 1600s with the appearance of a genre of literature that explored the rationality of secular governance.94 In literature concerning raison d’état, the aim was no longer to advise the king about rule but to preserve and extend the state. In extension, it became possible to emphasize limitations to the power held by the head of state by noting that the king dominated and ruled but did not govern.95 93 In his sixth meditation, Descartes therefore emphasized that God no longer governed the world through concrete interference in the specifics of the universe. Rather God was a sovereign of nature in force of the universal regularities he had installed in his creation and which had become autonomous to such a degree that God could no longer alter the primary expressions of his will. Cf. R. Descartes: Meditations metaphysiques: Objections et reponses suivies de quatre lettres (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1979), pp. 184–187. 94 In fact the genre originated already in the 16th century with De la Perrière’s (1499– 1565) Le miroir politique from 1555 and Botero’s (1540–1617) Della ragion di Stato from 1589, but it had its golden age in the 17th century with Bonaventura’s (1555–1602) Delle ragion di stato from 1623, Naudé’s (1600–1653) Considerations politiques sur le coup d’État from 1639, and Chemnitz’s (1605–1678) De Ratione Status from 1674. It continued from there into the subsequent century. 95 Already in an early lecture in 1978, Foucault quotes the sentence as an outstandingly clear statement of the differentiation between governmentality and rule: “while I have been speaking about population a word has constantly recurred – you will say that this was deliberate, but it may not be entirely so – and this is the word ‘government’. The more I have spoken about population, the more I have stopped saying ‘sovereign’. Or was led to designate or aim at something that again I think is relatively new, not in the word, and not at a certain level of reality, but as a new technique. Or rather, the modern political problem, the privilege that government begins to exercise in relation to rules, to the extent that, to limit the king’s power, it will be possible one day to say ‘the king reigns, but he does not govern’, this inversion of government and the reign or rule and the fact that government is basically much more than sovereignty, much more than reigning and ruling, much more than the imperium, is, I think, absolutely linked to the population. I think that the series, mechanisms of security-population-government and the opening up of the field that we call politics, should be analyzed” (cf. [STP]: 78/{STPo}: 76).

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That the king was the highest authority in society was not sufficient in itself, and rather became based on ruling by decree. It was necessary for him to observe and intervene in his surroundings and adapt his particular use of power to the specific logic that was found there. Only in that manner could the king’s rule avoid being based on exceptions of sovereign intervention and instead be continually present and procure the continuous development of the state. It would appear that reasons of state always rejected notions of justice and reasonableness in order to promote the interest of the state. However, in the literature, the term ‘state’ was viewed as positive and poignant. ‘State’ was understood as government of a reliable people. The state was able to establish security and order. In reasons of state, one sought to understand what had to be done in order to establish, maintain, and extend such a dominion.96 According to this tradition, there was a special and positive commitment to govern. The truth of governmental rationality could be explored and known, such that stability and development could be combined. This kind of literature was therefore the first to present the art of governing as a separate and independent activity. It sought out the approaches involved when a number of people were to be governed, while viewing these as having motivations distinct from the state. The logic of the reason of state. For the reason of state, the state was no longer a given entity but in a process of permanent reconstitution. An artificial reality appeared when some people governed others so that governmental rationality could be retained and extended. This particular human reality was not only an ideal to be attained but was likewise a corrective reality that the reason of state had to take into account and adapt to.97 Accordingly, the working of the

Foucault quotes a famous phrase in a February 4, 1830, article in The National, published by the French historian and politician Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), who was later to become prime minister and second president of France. The Latin phrase “rex regnat et non gubernat” was voiced more than 200 years earlier by the Polish-Lithuanian nobleman and Great Crown Chancellor Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605) in the Polish parliament at the beginning of the 17th century. In both cases the maxim seems to advocate the need to limit monarchy to stay within the confines of constitutional sovereignty. For Foucault, however, the antinomy between two forms of power stated in the aphorism presupposes that a regime of government different from rule, sovereignty, and imperium has been developed and become increasingly important. 96 According to Botero’s Delle ragio di stato: “State is a stable rule over people and Reason of State is the knowledge of the means by which such a dominion may be founded, preserved and extended” (G. Botero: The Reason of State [1589] [New Haven, Yale University Press, 1956], p. 3). 97 According to Foucault, the state must be created through intervention and thus becomes a regulative principle for governmental reason, cf. [STP]: 294–314/{STPo}: 163–185.

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raison d’état was, therefore, not to be regarded as a pure expression of despotic arbitrariness – quite the contrary. The reason of state did not simply subscribe to an ontology of dominance and transcendence to which everything must be reduced but instead began to develop the art of governing humans as a singular approach to the world that needed to commit itself to its own specific rationale. A specific and immediately accessible truth had replaced a transcendent and universal truth in the beyond, which previous modes of rule had hitherto aimed for and endeavored to realize. With the appearance of raison d’état, we find a state that is created through governmentality. At the end of the Middle Ages, “state” no longer referred to a “state of peace” but rather – in Thomas Hobbes’ terms – to a sovereign actor in the social sphere that ensured peace and stability by installing a hierarchy. It therefore became possible for subjects of the state to collaborate on constructing, preserving, and reconstituting a new state within the state, as organized around the new approaches to governmentality. This change was decisive for the conglomerate of different political institutions to become possible. In Louis XIV’s (1638–1715) government, the articulation of sovereign grandeur was therefore allowed. This development is found most emphatically in the famous dictum attributed to the Sun King: “L’État, c’est moi.” The new reality that appeared set a new limitation on the population, namely the merciless necessity of a logic that must be followed if there was to be government. Ultimately this logic only respected society to the extent that it was advantageous for the sovereign. In a coup d’état, where the existing order is suspended, we find a situation in which the raison d’état could be viewed in its purest format. In a coup, which follows its own artificial and political justice, the state appears in such a manner that it can dispose of the existing institutions and order. The coup d’état therefore replaces one state with another. This merciless necessity makes it possible to distinguish violence from brutality through the raison d’état. The contemptible and exaggerated use of power found in brutality is arbitrary and therefore also irrational. There is no contradiction between violence and rationality, however. Rather, violence can be found in direct extension of rationality insofar as it is a necessity related to some specific situation. In violence, the necessity of raison d’état can appear in its purest form. This development also suggested another transformation in regard to the Christian pastoral system. In the ascetic culture of Christianity, a mutual sacrifice had taken place in order to attain salvation in heaven for the group as well as every lamb in the flock. According to the necessity of raison d’état, it was possible to sacrifice or exclude the individuals to attain balance and development in society. Governmental rationality was therefore secularized. The pastoral governance of the community was changed into a secular care of life in this world. The coup was therefore not an exception but an event that would reaffirm the logic it was a part of. The perspective of governmental rationality could

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not be avoided and could not be transcended. The fact that this was seen as a necessity allowed for the appearance of a tragic complication in a history that had no origin because it had always already begun and could never be overcome.98 For the first time, a truly historical mode of being appeared – historicity as such. Both the Christian pastoral approach and traditional modalities of rule had pointed toward the end of history. The Roman Empire had been the paragon of political leadership. This made it possible for the rulers and the governed to tolerate any given misery because they were ensured a coming peace and salvation.99 With the peace that appeared with the state there occurred a demand for constantly improving security in this life. Since peace remained precarious and stability fragile, the demand could in principle never be completely met. Such a mode of existence was tragic in a different way than the Ancient tragedies, as it was not concerned with the tragic predicament of the human condition within a larger cosmos as such. The tragedy appeared because human beings were now inscribed in their own history where they sought to remove the sources of insecurity and create an acceptable existence but were forced to do this by competing with each other through risky strategies and mutual attacks. Insecurity was therefore certain to reappear only to be tackled at an ever-higher level, such that any stability or continuity of existence became a pipe dream. The tragedy was that there could be no respite from such a secular history, since it was endless.100

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With raison d’état and the reconceptualization of peace as a stability that appeared in force of a dynamic balance between various forces, a form of political thinking and practice that conceived of itself as fundamentally dynamic also became possible.

98

[STP]: 295–236/{STPo}: 285–328. “The idea which had been predominant throughout the Middle Ages was that all the kingdoms on the earth would be one day unified in one last empire just before the Christ’s return to earth. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, this familiar idea is nothing more than a dream, which was also one of the main features of political thought, or of historical-political thought, during the Middle Ages. This project of reconstituting the Roman Empire vanishes forever. Politics has now to deal with an irreducible multiplicity of states struggling and competing in a limited history” (“The Political Technology of Individuals” [1982/1988], p. 152). 100 The paradigm representative of the form of tragedy in Antiquity is Sophocles (ca. 495–406 BC). The modern form of tragedy connected to the raison d’état includes Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Macbeth and King Lear and Racine’s (1639–1699) Britannicus. 99

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Police and the European balance of power. This change became apparent in a reorganization of the European system of states in early modernity. There was no longer an idea of Europe as a hierarchy that could be gathered in one ultimate form, namely the empire. Instead, Europe was perceived as an aristocracy of states between which there was a sort of parity, meaning that a certain balance had to be struck to avoid disparities of power between the states. Over time, there arose a diplomatic-military complex in order to regulate the relative strength between states, such that a multilateral balance could be maintained. A new European order, built upon the evolutionary peace of diplomacy, was given paradigmatic expression in the wake of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) through the Peace of Westphalia. Simultaneously, raison d’état had implications for the development of a new governmental technology that was directed at the internal organization of states and which went by the name of “police.”101 This was not yet understood as a delimited institution and authority within the state that sought to ensure the safety and security of the public. It rather concerned technologies for governing individual behavior so that the social order would remain stable without further intervention.102 However, ‘police’ gradually came to mean a collection of techniques that allowed the state to extend its powers while retaining internal order. It became necessary for the individual state to organize the internal order of the country if it was to survive in competition with other states. The European balance of states was therefore dependent on each country having an efficient police force in order to prevent revolutions and popular uprisings that could unhinge this carefully constructed system of diplomacy. When the Congress of Vienna reached a peace treaty in 1815 and thereby attempted to reestablish the European balance of power, the states involved were therefore given the task of ensuring the size and efficiency of their police forces. Foucault even emphasizes that the situation gave rise to an almost excessive problematization of the police.103

101

[STP]: 375/{STPo}: 365; cf. RC: 102. “The Political Technology of Individuals” [1982/1988], p. 154. “The notion of police, even in France today, is frequently misunderstood. When one speaks to a Frenchman about police, he can only think of people in uniform or in the secret service. In the 17th and 18th centuries, ‘police’ signified a program of government rationality. This can be characterized as a project to create a system of regulation of the general conduct of individuals whereby everything would be controlled to the point of self-sustenance, without the need of intervention” (“Espace, savoir, pouvoir” [1976], DE IV: 272/“Space, Knowledge, and Power,” p. 337). 102

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France had developed an extensive police force already in the previous century. Later, Germany made this issue the object of academic and practical studies when the first professorships of police and cameral sciences were established in 1727. Over time, many members of the Prussian, Russian, and later Austrian administrative systems were given university education within this wide field of study. Indeed, the approach and various related ideas had been introduced to Napoleonic France. The middle of the century saw the first initiatives toward an independent program for an organized police state. Notably, this program was developed by Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717–1771) in instructive dissertations such as Grundsätze der Polizey-Wissenschaft (Principles of Police Science) from 1757 and Staatswirtschaft oder systematische Abhandlung aller ökonomischen und Cameralwissenschaften (State Economy or Systematic Treatise on All Economic and Cameralist Sciences), published in 1755. Here von Justi sought to answer the basic question of raison d’état: How should one govern in the face of many contingent and unpredictable events? The answer was to collect as much knowledge about the object to be governed as possible, namely the state. Giving this answer, von Justi distinguished clearly between police and politics. Politics primarily concerned the negative issues of state.104 It fought with internal and external enemies, using the army against one and the law against the other. The function of the police was, however, primarily a positive one, since its aim was to ensure the general capabilities of the state through optimization of the internal “constitution.”105 For von Justi, the police did not have the delimited feature of a law enforcement authority that we recognize today. The term rather referred to an ongoing project of creating a system for regulating individual behavior and conduct, such that a self-sustaining order could be established. If the police ensured the internal order and improved the state’s abilities, it had to ensure not only the survival of citizens but also the improvement of their competencies and abilities. Only with such measures could citizen satisfaction, order and progress be secured. With von Justi, police technology therefore initiated a permanent intervention into people’s lives, the purpose of which was not only to avoid the detrimental features of life but also actively to

103

[STP]: 319–336/{STPo}: 311–328. J. G. von Justi: Grundsätze der Policey-Wissenschaft (1757) (Sauer u. Auvermann, 1969), p. 8. 105 J. G. von Justi: Grundsätze der Policey-Wissenschaft (1757) (Sauer u. Auvermann, 1969), p. 9. 104

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improve the quality of life. The task was therefore not mainly to repress but to ensure the secular development of welfare. The population. Since the police sciences reflected upon the importance of citizen welfare in state security and progress, the population became the primary issue for political leadership. Foucault stresses that the population as category was both absent and present within the rationality of raison d’état. He claims that it was not until the appearance of the police and its technologies that there was a consideration of the population’s particular nature and character. Prior to this, the population had been viewed as a resource alongside other resources in developing the sovereign’s political strength.106 It appeared as a condition for exercising government, whose quality and nature was taken more or less for granted. With the appearance of mercantilism and Colbertism in the 1600s, this began to change.107 The population was now viewed as a resource to be developed by the government. Citizens became the decisive factor upon which all other variables depended.108 A plentiful and productive population was the precondition for the countries’ subsistence and for low prices in agricultural products, since it was here labor was found. Indeed, this also applied to manufacture. A large and industrious population resulted in low prices for the final products and allowed for exports rather than imports. In return, this made it possible for the state to avoid spending money and rather save it, whereby it became possible to cement the state’s position in the competition with others. The tendencies found there were intensified in the police sciences and related technologies since it conceptualized ‘population’ as the true and privileged object of police interference. It became, in so many words, the primary object of attention for political governmentality. The population became the context upon which societal governance depended and with which it entered into an ongoing exchange. It was not merely a means but the purpose of governmental rationality taking pains to further develop this important resource. The population

106

[STP]: 57–81/{STPo}: 55–79. Mercantilism concerns a number of ideas about balancing trade, which influenced European policies in the 17th and most of the 18th century. Thomas Mun’s (1571–1641) England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664) was an important contribution to this tradition. Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) implemented policies based on mercantilist ideas. Colbertism concerns the administrative staff that controlled the monarch’s riches. It managed taxes and other income so as to attain knowledge about the nature of their origin. Foucault therefore views mercantilism and Colbertism as novel approaches to solving the problem of governmentality, rather than economical doctrines that anticipated the science of economics per se. 108 [STP]: 69–77/{STPo}: 67–75. 107

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became a decisive and unifying factor in a developmental dynamic that the government was dependent on and included in. In the police sciences, these tendencies reached their highest peak for that age when the population was conceptualized as the true and privileged object of police interference, whereby it also became the overall issue for political governance. The subjects of a country, understood and treated as a population, were the primary task for the state and government. This resulted in a specific issue of population: Since the king’s subjects appeared in unison as a population, it was no longer possible to view them solely as a group of legal subjects – instead they were perceived and treated as a mass of living beings.109 From the appearance of raison d’état in the second half of the 16th century through to early mercantilism and Colbertism and up until von Justi’s police science, a continuous transformation of governmental rationality and its related technologies appeared. Whereas the reason of state had endeavored to establish a state incorporating its own subjects as an aim in itself, a conception of state arose that entered into an intimate and ongoing exchange with a conglomerate of living beings that was affected by the security and support offered by governmental interventions while also showing their own specific patterns of behavior. In mercantilism and Colbertism, the identification of a population that began to gain independence from governmental intervention did not result in the population being left to its own devices. Rather, it resulted in ever greater intervention into peoples’ lives on behalf of the government. In fact, this coincided with early mercantilism’s changes to political governance, which intensified the use of governmental technologies. In this light, mercantilism and Colbertism must still be regarded as intermediary technologies of government in relation to the problem of governing the population. In a number of important ways they still treated the subjects of the state as legal subjects that had entered into a contract with the public, or as submissive wills. There was likewise an emphasis on subjecting the populace to a disciplinary apparatus in order to ensure the production of goods that were useful to the governing class. Mercantilism and Colbertism therefore conceived governmentality fundamentally as a matter of law and discipline. Below the representative standard of the law, however, which set out the permanent guidelines for the state, there was a recurrent coup d’état in order to deal with the events at hand. The sovereign government instigated this in

109 Foucault points out that the population conceived as a group of living beings in a given territory became the primary issue of governance during the 1700s – a process which began in Germany (“Omnes et singulatim” [1979], DE IV: 160/“Omnes et singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” p. 200).

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order to ensure discipline under the auspices of the law. Thus, governance was still conceived as regimentation of the social. When population became the crux of the matter, however, there was an effort to develop a kind of leadership that could not be reduced to regimentation of the body politics through law and discipline. When a population of living beings was to be governed, they could not primarily be managed as merely belonging to some substantial universality, in this case humankind, which would be viewed as equipped with natural legal rights and a basic inalterable human nature, as would seem rational to presuppose within the relative order that natural history laid bare. Rather, one began to govern an assembly of individuals that belonged together in force of their being members of the same species: Homo sapiens, wherefore they were saturated with the dynamic of life.110 A random group of people does not constitute a population. A population must be sizeable enough to have birth and mortality rates and a state of health that it must be able to develop or degenerate. When the subjects of a state were perceived as a collection of living beings, it became possible to identify constants in their behavior that did not stem from their constitutive generality. These constants became apparent because of individual behavior that was not recognized by the individuals themselves. Mortality caused by fever and suicide could be the same from year to year, despite changes made for individual members of the population. However, it became possible to ascertain that infant mortality was higher than mortality for adults and that urban areas had a higher mortality rate than rural areas. In other words, the population could be viewed as a collection of living beings that exhibited seemingly random behavior but that was in fact imbued with regularity. This was possible because the population was saturated with life processes, that is, the population began to exhibit a natural character.111 However, this naturalness was not permanent and unalterable. The natural, biological processes that moved through a population depended on the environment. Changes in the environment altered the basis for how biological entities function. The natural regularities identified by the state and government therefore gave rise to careful intervention, which sought to control these changes in a desired way.112 There were many kinds of intervention, but they all had to take the logic of the living, human population into account.

110 Life appeared as a dynamic perspective within governance around the same time as the transition occurred from natural history to biology. 111 [STP]: 72/{STPo}: 70. Cf. VS: 35–36/WK: 25–26. 112 According to Foucault, with the physiocrats “the political problem of the population begins to emerge, splitting off from the technology of ‘politic’ and in correlation with the birth of economic reflection” [STP]: 375–376/{STPo}: 366; cf. RC: 104.

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The population was therefore not merely a collection of legal subjects or random people living in one area. A population exhibited fertility, mortality, and health rates, but also pathology. Despite individual differences, populations exhibited regularity. Statistical data about the population was initially collected in Germany during the 1700s. This was used to determine the political and economic strength of a country. Furthermore, similar efforts were taken up in England and France in order to develop the idea of statistical laws and regularities. This resulted in the idea of normal or averages at the beginning of the 18th century. As a part of the effort to improve control, France, England, and Austria began to use data-collection aimed at improving the state of the population in specified areas, but also in order to collect taxes, recruit soldiers, and assess the strength of the state. There was a growing interest for the health of the population, but initially without any subsequent intervention.113 Medical police. From the middle of the 1700s, an actual program appeared in Germany for the government to intervene in and improve the general health of the population. A health policy in the proper sense of the word developed that interfered in the general population to avoid and reduce the effects of epidemics and lower child mortality for the benefit of the state. This program was developed under the heading ‘medical police’, which seemed to appear for the first time in the title to Wolfgang Thomas Raus’ book Gedanken von dem Nutzen und der Nothwendigkeit einer medicinischen Policey-ordnung in einem Staat (Thoughts on the Utility and Necessity of a Medical Police Program for the State) from 1764.114 The continued interest for public health and the issues of medical police could also be seen in Johan Wilhelm Baumer’s Fundamenta politiae medicae (Principles of Medical Police) from 1777, just as it came to expression in Johan Peter Brinkmann’s Patriotische Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Medicinalanstalten from 1778. In this latter work, the author distinguished between natural and inevitable diseases on the one hand and the ones created by man, which could be addressed. He argued the case for governmental intervention in order to prevent misery, illness, and death and thereby improve security. The program was given its definitive expression in Johann Peter Frank’s six-volume work: System einer vollständigen medizinischen Polizei, which came out between 1779 and 1817 with additional volumes. This sought to systematize existing knowledge in the field of health in order to show how governance could use this to improve the health of the general population. 113 “La politique de la santé au XVIIIe siècle” [1978], DE IV: 17/“The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” p. 166. 114 Cf. G. Rosen: From Medical Police to Social Medicine (New York, Science History Publications, 1974), p. 137.

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The appearance of such ideas about a ‘medical police’ points toward the reconceptualization of medicine in the 1700s, which until then had been primarily an issue between the individual and the doctor, which was an aspect that remained in the clinic of the Classical Age. Now a social medicine appeared that had the general population as its object and which was working beyond the clinic in order to ensure public hygiene.115 This new care for the population was developed as an issue beyond the perspective of sovereignty and disciplinary governance in the English public health movement, which saw its results implemented during the 19th century. Medical police was therefore able to attain an important role in the time from the appearance of the governmental rationality at the end of the 17th century, when managing the powers of the state came to be a prime concern.116 Foucault and the (welfare) state. By examining the origin and dissemination of the modern raison d’état, Foucault seeks to understand contemporary governmentality and the ruthless care for the population it exhibited in such instances as the Croissaint affair in the 1970s. According to Foucault, it is necessary to perceive the creation of such a raison d’état as occurring through interaction with various kinds of governmental rationalities. This concerns the gradual creation or transformation of a number of core societal institutions that Foucault had described in earlier works and that he employs in his description of governmentality: internment and later the treatment of the mad in asylums; the treatment of the ill in modern hospitals; discipline in prisons, schools and the army. According to Foucault’s historical inquiries, an investigation of the interaction between governmentality and raison d’état sheds light on the birth of the modern welfare state and its rationality.117 A conglomerate of highly diverse political institutions gradually crystalizes in order to become a coherent, cogent actor in the social field. Over time, the state came to be viewed as a special entity in society that unfolded its own boundless logic by penetrating and influencing ever more aspects of social life. The state became 115 “Crise de la médecine ou crise de l‘antimédecine?” [1976] DE III: 50/“The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine?” p. 13). 116 Foucault claims that the “development in the second half of the eighteenth century of what was called medizinische Polizei, public hygiene, and social medicine, should be re-inserted in the general framework of a ‘biopolitics’.” According to Foucault, biopolitics “aims to treat the ‘population’ as a set of co-existing living beings with particular biological and pathological features, and which as such falls under specific forms of knowledge and technique.” According to Foucault biopolitics “must itself be understood on the basis of a theme developed since the seventeenth century: the management of state forces (la géstion des forces étatiques)” ([STP]: 377/{STPo}: 367; cf. RC: 106. Cf. “La naissance de la médecine sociale” [1977], DE III: 210. As we shall see toward the end of the next chapter, however, biopolitics is a quite ambiguous phenomenon. 117 [STP]: 261–284/{STPo}: 255–278.

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an ever-growing Leviathan to be feared, the secrets of which would have to be disclosed in order to identify the insatiable appetite of the beast. However, Foucault’s inquiry also suggests a shift in the perspective of analysis in comparison with viewing the state as an already existing entity. He claims that it is not sufficient to analyze the state as a given, independent, natural thing that occurs spontaneously according to some ‘genetic’ requirement. Foucault begins the lectures of 1979 by stressing that he wants to gather up the threads of his investigation in the previous year where he “tried to show” “that the state is far from being a kind of natural-historical given that develops through its own dynamism like a ‘cold monster’ whose seed having been sown at a given moment has gradually eaten away at history. The state is not a cold monster; it is the correlative of a particular way of governing.”118 Foucault seeks to go behind the state as a given substance by showing how the modern understanding of this word has come about as a connection between a number of social elements that were already in existence and that constantly enter into new relations with each other. This in turn shatters old balances and creates new ones. He therefore holds that the state must be analyzed as the result of a constantly threatened but also overarching arrangement of already existing interactions that permeate it. With his examination of how governmentality came about, Foucault seeks to identify a logic that has applied to a number of social events and that still determines the modern state. Foucault underlines this general point during his 1978 lectures: “After all, maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think. Maybe. What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not the ‘statification’ [étatisation] of the society, so much as what I would call the ‘governmentalization’ of the state.”119 However, in studying the genesis of governmentality rather than the state, Foucault is equally able to establish a new connection between his previous studies. By reexamining his previous history of the various internments of madness or the rise of discipline as a mode of punishment within this new context, he comes to understand a phenomenon that relates these various studies in a new way, namely the ongoing governmentalization of social interaction.120 Using this approach, Foucault shifts the level of analysis, just as he had done with a number of other phenomena that seem to appear as substantial entities: madness, asylum, the hospital clinic, language, and penal institutions. Foucault’s basic agenda was to bracket these phenomena and not to treat them as obvious institutions that must exist, independently acting subjects, 118 119 120

[NB]: 7/{BP}: 6. [STP]: 112/{STPo}: 109. [STP]: 91–113/{STPo}: 87–110.

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or completely established objects to be examined, but rather to perceive them from a more comprehensive perspective. The basic endeavor was thus to distance us from their necessity and naturalness by showing how they were constituted and are constantly retained through various, historically changeable, social technologies. In the course of his 1978 lectures, Foucault underscores this general approach in the context of a longer reflection on his previous and ongoing investigations: “When in previous years we talked about the disciplines, about the army, hospitals, schools, and prisons, basically we wanted to carry out a triple displacement, shifting, if you like, to the outside [passer, si vous voulez, à l’extérieur], and in three ways. First, moving outside the institution, moving off-center in relation to the problematic of the institution or what could be called the ‘institutional-centric’ approach [l’ ‘institutionallocentrisme’]. ... The second shift, the second transfer to the outside, concerns the function. ... So, the second principle is to substitute the external point of view of strategies and tactics for the internal point of view of the function. ... Finally, the third de-centering, the third shift to the outside, concerns the object. Taking the point of view of the disciplines involved refusing to give oneself a ready-made object, be it mental illness, delinquency, or sexuality. It involved not seeking to measure institutions, practices, and knowledges in terms of the criteria and norms of an already given object. Instead, it involved grasping the movement by which a field of truth with objects of knowledge was constituted through these mobile technologies. We can certainly say that madness ‘does not exist’, but this does not mean it is nothing. All in all, it was a matter of doing the opposite of what phenomenology had taught us to say and think, the phenomenology that said, roughly: Madness exists, which does not mean that it is a thing. ... In short, the point of view adopted in all these studies involved the attempt to free relations of power from the institution, in order to analyze them from the point of view of technologies; to distinguish them also from the function, so as to take them up within a strategic analysis; and to detach them from the privilege of the object, so as to resituate them within the perspective of the constitution of fields, domains and objects of knowledge. If this triple movement of a shift to the outside was tried out with regard to the disciplines, I would now like to explore this possibility with regard to the state. Can we cross over to the outside of the state as we could, without great difficulty, with regard to these different institutions?”121 Just as modes of discipline and surveillance appeared in the asylum, clinic, prison, insanity, illness, and delinquency, so Foucault shows how the modern state allows for a governmentality to appear which was defining for its being. Evidently, Foucault considers this investigation a logical extension of his prior authorship: “Just as in the examination of the relationships between reason 121

[STP]: 119–120/{STPo}: 117–118.

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and madness in modern West we tried to question the general procedures of confinement and segregation, thus going behind the asylum, the hospital, therapies, and classifications [just as to examine the status of illness and the privileges of medical knowledge in the modern world it was necessary to go behind the hospital and medical institutions in order to attempt to connect up with the general procedures for taking up life and illness in the West, with ‘biopolitics’], and just as for the prison we tried to get behind penitentiary institutions in the strict sense so as to seek the general economy of power, can we carry out the same reversal for the state?” However, this leads to further questions: “Is it possible to place the modern state in a general economy of power that assured its mutations, development, and functioning? Can we talk of something like a ‘governmentality’ that would be to the state what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was for the medical institutions?”122 Although Foucault’s investigation of the state does not presuppose that it exists as a definite, coherent identity, it is of course not reduced to nothingness, as he stresses – quite the contrary. As soon as one speaks of or acts in regard to the governmental state, a correlation is established that has vast implications for the social context. A governmental rationality that traverses the modern welfare state has become so widely distributed that it has grown under our skin and become an integral part of our present. This results in it affecting our predispositions to think and act. As will become clear in the next chapter, however, this governmental rationality is far from a single-valued and unambiguous arrangement. In fact, it points in divergent and antagonistic directions.

122 [STP]: 123–124/{STPo}: 120. The passage given in brackets was not part of Foucault’s oral presentation at the Collège de France on February 8, 1978, but was only present in the manuscript and reconstructed by the editors of the lecture course (cf. [STP]: 123–124/ {STPo}: 120).

8 The (Neo)liberal Art of Governing

Even from the vantage point of posterity, there is something uncannily familiar about Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the spring of 1979. Foucault’s account seeks to provide what he would later call “an ontology of the present.”1 Furthermore, he also attempted to disclose the “domain [champ]” within which several of the “currently possible experiences” of his time came about as something he and his contemporaries needed to engage in or relate to.2 In the twelve-lesson lecture course entitled Naissance de la biopolitique but covering a broad range of topics – such as the art of government, population, liberalism and neoliberalism, the state, civil society, political economy, sovereignty, enterprise, liberty and security – it now seems that Foucault was already describing the nativity of an imminent future in remarkable detail. 3 While Foucault had previously explored more specific areas of modern experience, such as madness, the clinical gaze, the rise of language as subject, delinquency, sexuality, and so on, the experiential domain at the center of attention in 1979 is of a much more extensive and dispersed nature. In fact, Naissance de la biopolitique addresses nothing less than what has become a matter of course, that is, the experience of the social order that we have currently come to take for granted. Foucault characteristically describes the history of the domains in which this experience has taken place and become self-evident. Certainly, this is not a phenomenological experience of society without calendar or geography, nor is it a theoretical reconstruction of political philosophy; rather, the focus here is on the critical experience of society after

1

“Qu’est-ce que le lumières” [1994], DE IV: 687–688. “Qu’est-ce que le lumières” [1994], DE IV: 688. 3 An informative overview of the editorial conditions of the lecture course is found in M. Gane: “Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism” (2008): 353–363. Cf. also “Course Context,” [STP]: 369–401/{STPo}: 379–411. 2

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it has become a privileged site for “the government of men insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty.”4 Foucault’s lectures address a situation where the primary field of intervention for the arts of government materializes as a civil society inhabited by a population that is somewhat spontaneously self-regulating and at the same time somehow juxtaposed to both the super-institution of the state and the global environment of the market. It is in this context that Foucault in 1979 studies the “rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty” as it has been worked out by different variants of liberalism.5 Even if the subject of liberalism appears to occupy most of the space in Naissance de la biopolitique, the societal experience in question is not reducible to the ‘lack’ of society typically associated with neoliberalism.6 Foucault rather interprets liberalism within the framework of his study of governmental rationalities. The bulk of the following chapter gives a relatively detailed outline of Foucault’s research in the 1979 lectures. Toward the end of the chapter, we move on to provide a discussion of the context in which the research originated. First, we present the relation between Naissance de la biopolitique and Foucault’s earlier study of the logic of welfare and security in the 1978 lecture course Sécurité, territoire, population. Focusing on his reflections on the relation between freedom and liberalism, this section also emphasizes the diagnostic character of Foucault’s investigation, which undermines attempts to identify him as either a critic or a proponent of liberalism. In line with Foucault’s idea of writing a history of the present, the contemporary reader is confronted with liberalism not as an ideal to be worshipped or an ideology to be unveiled and refuted but as a governmental rationality that has grown under our skin and become a momentous and integral aspect of our present as it affects not only our political and organizational life but also everyday working and private lives, whether at the center or on the margins of the social order. Subsequently, we follow Foucault’s account of the birth of present day liberalism, which evolved with a critique of the practice of existing raison d’état and mercantilism as it was initially voiced within classical liberalism and political economy toward the end of the 18th century. Where the reason of state and mercantilism primarily aimed at maximizing the state’s power and wealth by optimizing state intervention and regulation, the liberal critique developed the idea of “frugal government.” It pointed out that good

4

[NB]: 2/{BP}: 3. [NB]: 2/{BP}: 4. 6 Cf. e.g. M. Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families” (“Interview,” Women’s Own [1987], October: 8–10). Cf. also S. Raffnsøe et al.: “Neoliberal Governmentality,” Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 1–4. 5

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government was a prudent or sparing exercise of government that took care to confine governmental intervention not for legal or moral reasons but for more pragmatic reasons. Only by respecting the productivity inherent in auto-regulation of the market, and thus by way of auto-limitation, could government take proper care of its own objectives and thus become good and productive. With the notions of frugal government, which limited itself in order to optimize itself, interaction and auto-regulation of the market began to function as the truth-criterion for the exercise of government. According to 19th-century radicalism and utilitarianism, the acid test for the use of governmental intervention was its (estimated) utility for the development of the natural order of the market. The third section deals with Foucault’s investigation of a later formative stage of modern liberalism. This was German ordoliberalism, which was mainly developed by the liberals of the Freiburg school of economics in conjunction with the academic journal ORDO-Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft between 1930 and 1950. According to Foucault, German neoliberalism brings with it a reversal of the relationship between the state and the market. Where the issue for earlier liberalism was to make room for a market within an already existing and legitimate state, the problem for the German neoliberals was how to make room for the state, given that the natural order of the market already existed. The solution was to adopt the free market as a regulating principle of the state and art of government. According to the ordoliberals, government should not prioritize the redistribution of wealth but should establish the conditional rules under which not only and primarily will the market function but also competition will flourish and entrepreneurial individuals will take center stage. The fourth section focuses on an even later stage of the development of neoliberalism as investigated in the 1979 lectures. Scrutinizing the thought of some of the towering figures such as economy professors Herbert Alexander Simons, Theodore William Schultz, and Gary Becker, Foucault seeks to articulate the crucial traits of the neoclassical Chicago School of economic thought as it developed from the mid-1930s onward. In his reading of the American neoliberals, Foucault accentuates their reconfiguration of the homo economicus that was already on the agenda in the works of classical economics. As with the German neoliberals, economic man is recast as a creature of competition but also as “human capital” here rather than a partner in a process of exchange, and is thus always augmentable in comparison and in competition with others. With this economic grid of intelligibility, it becomes possible to examine and appreciate a long range of human behavior hitherto deemed facets beyond the reach of economic explanation as an expression of economic rationality. While German neoliberalism focuses on enabling humans to become entrepreneurs, American neoliberalism takes the entrepreneurial mode of existence for

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granted and claims that governmental interference must focus on providing new sources from which the capital for competition can be accumulated. The fifth section touches on Foucault’s short discussion of French neoliberal thought, which guided contemporary economic policy in his homeland at the time of his 1979 lectures. Here a seminal idea, already traceable in German and American neoliberalism, comes to the fore. The economy is essentially a game that should permeate the whole of society. Accordingly, governmental activity should not only ensure that the economy progresses to the advantage of the greatest possible number of players but also that participants do not lose so much that they are barred from participating in the game. In line with this fundamental rule of non-exclusion from the economic game, a neoliberal social security policy is outlined. It takes the form, for example, of negative income tax. By allocating cash benefits to citizens who earn below an income threshold that ensures a minimal level of vital needs, this tax system secures a minimum level of social security and allows them to participate in the economic game. This never fully applied idea proposes the program of a society in which the population regulates itself in accordance with economic principles and in which the economy’s fluctuating processes of differentiation become all-pervading. The sixth and seventh sections reflect upon and situate Foucault’s examination in the 1979 lectures within a wider setting. These sections explain how the guiding thread in the discussion of Foucault’s 1979 Collège de France lectures has come to be the development of a liberal art of government, despite the fact that Foucault had chosen The Birth of Biopolitics as a title. Indeed, his use of the term “biopolitics” has given rise to a widely-read and interesting literature on this subject. Subsequently, these sections situate Foucault’s scarce use of the term in the lectures within his own wider, but rather sporadic, discussion of biopolitics. The eighth and final section sheds light on some of the motivating forces in Foucault’s own research at the time to illuminate what he strove to grasp in his investigations of the liberal art of governing. Likewise, it permits a reflection on Foucault’s approach to theory while enabling a discussion of the question of how to read Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism.

1

Framework for Foucault’s approach to liberalism

The self-limitation of governmentality. The previous chapter presented Foucault’s investigation of the prehistory of governmental rationality in early Christianity but also the golden age of government rationality, where it spread and became an independent rationality in its own right with the formation of a reason of state. Foucault stresses how the current developments of the welfare state can be best understood by examining these complex origins. His lecture course Sécurité, territoire, population therefore examines Christian pastoral

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governance and contemporary governmentality with its amoral raison d’état and governance based on knowledge gathered from the science of police. From Christian caring to modern governmentality – as expressed in the science of police – the formation of a pervasive and penetrating governmental rationality, which micromanages the lives of every individual, is also taken up. This was the tendency that Foucault saw expressed in its purest form by modern totalitarianism. According to Foucault, however, a reverse inclination is equally predominant in the welfare state: According to this propensity, it is also necessary to modify security efforts by refraining from controlling that which is impractical to control. Governing and managing to maximize security is, in other words, countered by self-limitation, which is introduced in order to optimize governmental rationality even beyond what is possible to arrive at by optimizing control. This is possible if one creates a space for the managed to unfold without too much interference, such that management is able to respect and adapt to the inherent logic or rationale of those who are led. In Naissance de la biopolitique, Foucault seeks a closer understanding of how management is modified by this turn. He studies how liberal management rationality has come to respect the existence of a social exchange that should only be managed to a limited degree, if it is to be managed optimally. Among other things, he is concerned with the appearance of the modern liberal conception of an independent economy. Accordingly, he examines not only the polarity between governmentality and economy but also that between management mentality and the self-limitation inscribed within it. His approach permits him to point out the setting for contemporary conflicts and exchange between liberalism and state activism as they are expressed in a multitude of ways. Crucial for Foucault’s studies of governmentality is thus the idea of an intrinsic tendency toward self-limitation within this social technology. In his investigation of security and welfare, he emphasizes a certain tendency of modern governmental rationality to exercise ruthless and all-encompassing care for the security of the population, but a liberal aspect is also presupposed in this same tradition of governmental rationality. Foucault first develops this important point at the beginning of his investigation of governmental rationality and its mechanisms of security carried out in Sécurité, territoire, population, a year before his direct engagement with liberalism in Naissance de la biopolitique. In the third lecture, he analyzes the dispositives of security as they were developed in the 18th century as a ‘government of the event’ and uses the example of grain scarcity, which was a major theoretical political problem at the time.7 More specifically, Foucault sees the restrictions on the circulation of grain as 7

[STP]: 32–50/{STPo}: 30–49.

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an early example of an important self-limiting tendency in the modern form of governmentality. A number of political and economic thinkers in the mid-18th century who more or less closely associated with the physiocrats rallied around what Foucault terms as a liberal solution against the dominant detailed system of juridical and political regulation, which was shaped by the existing cameralist view that exports and the hoarding of grain should be prohibited or at least severely limited in order to avoid scarcity.8 The protagonists of a new political economy argued that people should be allowed to store their grain and hold onto it as and when they wish and to whatever extent they want. Likewise, people should be able to ship their grain abroad when prices were favorable. In short, the circulation of grain should be free and unlimited. An important presupposition of the physiocratic argument is that food scarcity should no longer be viewed as an evil, or for that matter as a fortunate development, but rather from an amoral perspective as a natural phenomenon. Rather than the obsessive fear of the evil of scarcity, the focus is placed on the reality of grain production, including its tendencies to price increases and scarcity, which in turn is analyzed from a more general perspective. Precisely this step backward allowed for a new political economic approach that refrained from the immediate attempt to prevent scarcity altogether in favor of “curbing scarcity by a sort of laisser-faire, a certain ‘freedom of movement’ [laisser-passer],” for example by allowing things to run their course through lifting the prohibitions on exports and hoarding of grain.9 This implies, Foucault explains, “allowing prices to rise where their tendency is to rise. We allow the phenomenon of dearness-scarcity to be produced and develop on such and such a market, on a whole series of markets, and this phenomenon, this reality which we have allowed to develop, will itself entail its own selfcurbing and self-regulation.”10 Foucault readily acknowledges that this logic is an early version of one of the core ideas of economic liberalism. He also emphasizes how the governmental perspective employed in his analysis allows us to see further aspects of this “game of liberalism” as it is prefigured in the arguments of the physiocrats.11 Although freedom is a crucial aspect of this game, it is not the overarching theoretical or practical goal of the political economic thinkers of the 18th century. Rather, they view their approach as expressing a 8 [STP]: 39/{STPo}: 37. The foundations of the physiocratic school were provided by François Quesnay (1694–1774). In his analysis of the problem of the circulation of grain, Foucault furthermore focuses on a text by the French writer Louis-Paul Abeille (1719– 1807), who was influenced by the physiocrats, as a particularly clear and schematic example of the logic that he is interested in exposing. Cf. [STP]: 53 n. 17/{STPo}: 52 n. 17. 9 Concerning the origin of the formula laisser-faire, laisser passer cf. [STP]: 53 n. 15/ {STPo}: 51 n. 15; [NB]: 27 n. 13/{BP}: 24 n. 13. 10 [STP]: 43/{STPo}: 41–42. 11 [STP]: 49/{STPo}: 48.

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commitment to reality or ‘nature’. They try to work from within reality as they endeavor to make the components of reality work in the right way in relation to each other.12 According to this approach, governmental rationality must therefore situate itself within the interplay of reality with itself. Foucault further clarifies this distinguishing feature of contemporary governmental rationality through a comparison with the dispositives of law and discipline. Unlike the ‘realistic’ approach, which resides in the domain of nature, the dispositive of law, according to Foucault, works within the imaginary in the sense that it must rely on imagination in order to formulate all the acts that must not be committed in order to comply with the law. Similarly, discipline is a social technology that works through the articulation of detailed norms that govern what men should do. The level of artificiality and constraint implied by disciplinary technique varies according to a correlative diagnosis of the natural inclinations that must be shaped or overcome. In this way, discipline seeks to govern through a sphere of norms that is, so to speak, complementary to and beyond reality. Governmentality, however, conceives of itself as a technology that seeks to shape reality from within its own structure and logic, as it was paradigmatically exemplified in the approach to scarcity of food and the circulation of grain. Foucault also hints at how the governmental perspective can allow an understanding of liberalism and its ideal of freedoms not as political ideology or set of values but rather as an element of modern governmentality: “I said somewhere that we could not understand the establishment of liberal ideologies and a liberal politics in the eighteenth century without keeping in mind that the same eighteenth century, which made such a strong demand for freedoms, had all the same ballasted these freedoms with a disciplinary technique that, taking children, soldiers, and workers where they were, considerably restricted freedom and provided, as it were, guarantees for the exercise of this freedom. Well, I think I was wrong. I was not completely wrong, of course, but, in short, it was not exactly this. I think something completely different is at stake. This is that this freedom, both ideology and technique of government, should in fact be understood within the mutations and transformations of technologies of power. More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of dispositives of security.”13 In this passage, Foucault corrects the interpretation put forward in Surveiller et Punir, where liberalism is analyzed in the context of discipline and surveillance, insofar as the real corporal disciplines and a minute web of panoptic techniques are here conceived as the foundation of the formal, juridical

12 13

[STP]: 48/{STPo}: 47. [STP]: 50/{STPo}: 48.

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liberties advocated by liberal ideologies and politics.14 Foucault now implies that this perspective on liberalism is misguided. Instead, he suggests a different framework for understanding liberalism and the phenomenon of freedom as it is conceived by economic and political thinkers of the 18th century, namely as a correlative to the dispositive of security, since freedom is presupposed in order for these technologies to be deployed efficiently. This freedom is not to be thought of as particular privileges attached to a person in virtue of his social status. It is rather a freedom to circulate in the broad sense of the term. According to Foucault, this form of freedom becomes absolutely fundamental within the governmental rationality of security, which takes its point of departure in what the subjects “want to do, what they have an interest in doing, and of what they think about doing.” 15 Foucault’s analysis of the correlation between the dispositives of security and economic freedom suggests how modern governmentality presupposes the freedom of those who are governed. Later in his studies of the government of self-government in Greek, Roman and Christian antiquity carried out in the lecture courses from 1980 to 1984, he discovers that governmental rationality can presuppose the freedom to conduct oneself in a number of different ways. Specific for the “problem of freedom” as it appears within modern governmentality are a number of further characteristics of which only three of the most important shall be mentioned here. First, governmentality in its modern form is a rationality of the state and it is within this framework that the problem of freedom appears. Second, freedom poses itself as a challenge from within the logic of governmentality itself rather than as a mere external constraint on its attempt to govern. In order to exercise governmentality most efficiently, it is challenged from the 18th century onward to take the freedom of the governed into account and confront itself with the question: Can better results be attained by governing less rather than more? Third, when modern governmentality is confronted with the challenge to limit itself and let its subjects unfold more freely, it is paradigmatically an economic conception of free conduct that it presupposes. Even when the challenge to let free conduct unfold is rejected, for example for reasons of preventing unacceptable levels of inequality in society, the freedom that governmental rationality restricts is primarily modeled on the free conduct of oneself as an economic agent. The correlation between dispositives of security and economic freedom is reciprocal, according to Foucault’s analysis: Not only does modern governmentality presuppose a specific form of free conduct; the game of liberalism can conversely be analyzed as an element within this technology of power. In the texts of influential physiocrats, Foucault found the idea that rather 14 15

SP: 223–225/DP: 221–225. [STP]: 50/{STPo}: 49.

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than avoiding the scarcity of food, it could be curbed and even nullified by allowing it to unfold within a framework of less regulated restrictions on hoarding and exporting grain. According to the argument of these authors, scarcity will then disappear as a scourge and as a phenomenon afflicting the population in general, but “on condition that for a whole series of people, in a whole series of markets, there was some scarcity, some dearness, some difficulty in buying wheat, and consequently some hunger, and it may well be that some people die of hunger after all.”16 Precisely by allowing a multiplicity of individuals to die, one will be able to prevent scarcity from occurring at the level of the population. Whereas the scourge of scarcity is meant to disappear, scarcity that results in the death of individuals cannot and must not disappear. According to Foucault, an “absolutely fundamental caesura” in modern governmentality is revealed here. “Within the economic technology and management, there is this break between the pertinent level of the population and the level that is not pertinent, or that is simply instrumental. The final objective is the population. The population is pertinent as the objective and individuals, the series of individuals, are no longer pertinent as the objective, but simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population.”17 By refraining from the prevention and eradication of immoral or asocial habits and phenomena, as was characteristic of the rationality of discipline, governmentality can allow such processes to unfold by regarding them as natural and inevitable and thereby relying on the habits and phenomena expressed in these processes – not because they are apprehended as valuable in themselves but because they are viewed as instrumental means in order to achieve aims situated at the level of the population.18 The fundamental telos of a self-limiting governmentality is thus placed at the level of the population, which aligns with the fact that in the following year Foucault analyzes liberalism in Naissance de la biopolitique as an art of government that intensifies and internally refines the tradition of raison d’état from the inside rather than breaking with its fundamental assumptions.19 In the reflective practice of raison d’état, governing rationally means to enable “a given state to arrive at its maximum of being in a considered, reasoned and calculated way.”20 This means that any self-limitation on the part of governmentality is drawn in order to attain the immanent goal of maximizing its own strength. Governmental rationality will in other words respect such limits to the extent

16 17 18 19 20

[STP]: 44/{STPo}: 42. [STP]: 44/{STPo}: 42. [STP]: 47/{STPo}: 45. [NB]: 29; cf. 15–16/{BP}: 28; cf. 14. [NB]: 6/{BP}: 4.

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“that it can calculate them on its own account in terms of its objectives and [the] best means of achieving them.” 21 The diagnostic approach to liberalism. Our discussion of Foucault’s analysis of the welfare state in the previous chapter pointed out that Foucault’s approach was diagnostic. His approach to liberalism is of an equally diagnostic nature. Foucault’s view of the welfare state is, as we have seen, ambiguous, as he claims that it is based on a logic that stems from a consideration of security and care, but which can develop into totalitarianism as well as an ongoing ability for self-moderation. The welfare state is therefore obviously the result of a complex development that contains various opposed tendencies handed down to us as a precarious inheritance. The same diagnostic approach is unfolded when he begins to trace liberalism as an art of government. This is especially clear from Foucault’s remarks on the relation between liberalism and the phenomenon of freedom. Toward the end of this third lecture of his 1978 course, Foucault suggests that he intends to return to the problem of freedom and the correlative dependence between governmentality and liberalism.22 Sécurité, territoire, population does not contain further reflections on this theme, but the next year, in Naissance de la biopolitique, he develops his reflections somewhat further. Here Foucault argues that he finds it futile to state that a liberal mode of governing is more tolerant and flexible than previous modes of governing because it is founded on and utilizes freedom in a particular way. Such an idea should be avoided, since it presupposes that freedom is a quantitatively measurable entity but also because it implies that freedom is universally given and either progressively realized or gradually diminished over time. Foucault instead proposes that freedom “is never anything other – but this is already a great deal – than an actual relation between governors and governed, a relation in which the measure of the ‘too little’ existing freedom is given by the ‘even more’ freedom demanded.” When Foucault employs the term “liberal,” he is therefore not referring to an art of government that is content to respect or guarantee particular forms of freedom. Instead he is referring to a governmental practice that is a producer of freedom, as “it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms actually exist: freedom of the market, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression.”23 This entails that liberalism is an art of government that constantly has to manufacture and produce freedom, just as it must make sure that there is a sufficient amount of freedom in order to benefit from the natural capacities inherent in the self-regulation of the population and the market. 21 22 23

[NB]: 13/{BP}: 11. [STP]: 50/{STPo}: 48. [NB]: 65/{BP}: 63.

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The actual freedoms called for and entailed by this modern form of governmentality are not first and foremost established according to juridical principles. Rather, the economic freedom in question is “completely bound up” with disciplinary techniques as they are developed and disseminated throughout society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Foucault revisits the famous example from Surveiller and Punir, Bentham’s Panopticon, discussed in Chapter 5, and now emphasizes that it was conceived as a general program applicable across a broad range of institutions, “like schools, factories, and prisons which would enable one to supervise the conduct of individuals while increasing the profitability and productivity of their activity.”24 More generally, according to Foucault’s new analysis, the disciplinary technique of supervision becomes reinterpreted as an integral part of the liberal art of governing because government must supervise so that it can “intervene when it sees that something is not happening according to the general mechanics of behavior, exchange and economic life.”25 Therefore, Foucault claims that the Panopticon is a general program for government rather than a mere regional device aimed at penal institutions. These remarks develop Foucault’s reinterpretation of the relation between discipline and liberalism from the year before. Even if he was wrong to connect disciplinary techniques to the juridical liberties advocated by liberal ideologies and politics, he maintains that a connection exists between discipline and liberalism insofar as the latter is conceived as a specific art of government. Methodologically, this reinterpretation is in line with Foucault’s history of dispositives as is presented in 1978. In his distinction between different dispositives, Foucault emphasizes that (elements of) one dispositive may be reinterpreted and thereby attain a different function within a new dispositive. He gives several examples of this, among them the proliferation of disciplinary techniques of surveillance in order to establish mechanisms of security.26 Liberalism is, as we have seen, conceived as a governmental rationality, and from the beginning of his analysis Foucault emphasizes that it is therefore shaped by the mechanisms of security. Such mechanisms to some extent reinterpret other dispositives, such as the techniques of surveillance from the dispositive of discipline. But the mechanisms of security also introduce new techniques in order to ensure that the well-being of the population is not endangered by an overflow and excess of freedom. Because of its intrinsic considerations of security, liberalism’s production, consumption and utilization of freedom is thus inseparable from the establishment of a variety of limitations, interventions and controls that show up in limiting the freedom of the market through anti-monopoly legislation, for example, or special taxes on 24 25 26

[NB]: 68/{BP}: 67. [NB]: 69/{BP}: 67. [STP]: 9–10/{STPo}: 7–8.

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import: “In short, strategies of security, which are, in a way, both liberalism’s other face and its very condition, must correspond to all these imperatives concerning the need to ensure that the mechanism of interests does not give rise to individual or collective dangers. The game of freedom and security is at the very heart of this new governmental reason. The problems of what I shall call the economy of power peculiar to liberalism are internally sustained, as it were, by this interplay of freedom and security.”27 The emergence of this type of governmental activity also contributes to Foucault’s more formal reconceptualization in 1979 of governmentality, which becomes “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men,”28 where the latter notion, la conduite in French, has a twofold meaning for Foucault: (a) the activity of conducting (conduire) and of conduction (la conduction) and (b) the way in which one conducts oneself (se conduire), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire) and is conducted (est conduit) – that is to say, the way in which one finds oneself to behave (se comporter) as an effect of a conduct (une conduite) that represents an action of conducting or of conduction.29 Whereas the law prohibits certain acts and legitimizes certain rights, and discipline prescribes an obligatory behavior under supervision, the economy of power associated with this new formal governmentality – both as the “political” conduct of others and as the “ethical” conduct of oneself – actively produces and seeks to regulate a freedom that is to some extent always already presupposed.30 The intrinsic relationship between freedom and security is so fundamental for liberalism that Foucault even claims that there is a “problematic relationship between the production of freedom and that which in the production of freedom risks limiting and destroying it.”31 Not only is the production of freedom in need of security measures as an external constraint in order not to deteriorate or be led astray; liberalism limits freedom in the very (re)production of freedom: “Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera.”32 The internal logic of security within the liberal production of freedom expresses itself as the continuous attempt to calculate the extent to which the free pursuit of individual interests, insofar as they are different or even possibly opposed to each other, can be allowed without constituting a danger for the interest of all. This constant balancing act with regard to the notion of danger is a central reference point; and Foucault thus speaks of an “entire education and culture of danger” within liberalism that also influences 27 28 29 30 31 32

[NB]: 67/{BP}: 65. [NB]: 192/{BP}: 186. [STP]: 196–197/{STPo}: 193. “Un système fini face à une demande infinite” [1983] DE IV: 374. [NB]: 65/{BP}: 64. [NB]: 65/{BP}: 64.

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individual self-conduct. Liberalism implies that individuals are stimulated and conditioned “to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger.”33 Naissance de la biopolitique undoubtedly expresses a deep fascination on the part of Foucault with liberalism as a profoundly influential and ambiguous technology of government. But it does not document his attempt to identify with some sort of liberal tradition either, or to simply refute it. In line with Foucault’s idea of writing a history of the present, the contemporary reader is confronted with liberalism not as a repressive ideology or an ideal but as a governmental rationality that has grown under our skin and become a momentously integral aspect of our present and everyday working and private lives, whether on the margins or at the center of the social order.

2

Classical Liberalism

The frugality of government. “Starting from the end of the eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth century, and obviously more than ever today, the fundamental problem is not the constitution of states, but without a doubt the question of the frugality of government.”34 In Foucault’s reading, the birth of liberalism is inseparable from the notion of “frugal government,” by which the question of “the too much and too little” develops into the central criterion around which the art of government will revolve.35 Because the practice of raison d’état had the maximizing of the state’s strength as its primary objective and was therefore relatively autonomous in its workings, Foucault links it to mercantilism, regarded not only as proto-economic doctrine but also as a particular organization of commercial production and circulation that insisted that the state should enrich itself through monetary accumulation, strengthen itself by increasing the population and uphold itself in a state of permanent competition with foreign states.36 While this last principle was the permanent objective of an external military-diplomatic technology of the state, Foucault finds the other two to be organized by an internal technology of the police, which was also described in the 1978 lectures.37 Seeing that this police technology, which represented a set of administrative techniques and statistical forms of knowledge concerned with maximizing the volume, productivity and health of the inhabitants within the state territory in order to maximize state power as well was principally exercised by means “of permanent, continually

33 34 35 36 37

[NB]: 68/{BP}: 66. [NB]: 30–31/{BP}: 29. [NB]: 30/{BP}: 28. [NB]: 7/{BP}: 5; [STP]: 285–310/{STPo}: 293–318. Cf. Chapter 7.

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renewed, and increasingly detailed regulation,” Foucault also links the birth of liberalism with the “breaking up” of this “over-regulatory police,” being unable to deal with the “spontaneous regulation of the course of things.”38 An incessant and indefinite government of this self-sufficient type, the liberal critique objected, would never be able to give any comprehensive account as to why it was governing in the first place, or how it was to govern in the best possible way. In contradistinction to the principle of maximizing government, the liberal critique pointed to the principle that government should recognize and take account of the self-regulation of the governed, which also implied that not just any type of government would be an appropriate government. The regulation of government should take hold of this self-regulation of the governed by imposing on itself what Foucault describes as a work of “auto-limitation.”39 Accordingly, classical liberalism established itself as an art of government that was to intervene in the affairs of its subjects according to a quantitative scale, but always prioritizing the minimum necessary degree of intervention as the optimum, as long as this was possible and appropriate with regard to the selfregulation of the population. This is why Foucault suggests that this liberal art of governing of the late 18th century is describable as the emergence of a new “frugal government” within the governmentality of raison d’état. It was the entry into the art of government of the problematics pertaining to the question of the prudent or sparing exercise of government that took care to confine governmental intervention to the amount and extent necessary.40 A good government is a government that considers, reflects upon and fine-tunes its operations according to its overall goals and the nature of what it governs. As such, good government also confirms the answer that a group of merchants, in Marquis d’Argenson’s (1694–1757) famous account, should have given to a mercantilist minister asking them what he could do for commerce: Laissez-nous faire.41 The issue of the frugality of government is addressed in both French and British political thought around 1800, where a number of prominent writers rejected the idea that natural social developments must necessarily be managed or governed. These writers did not, therefore, seek to create a design for the best society but rather concentrated on existing governmentality in order to address and exert an influence on it. This was a radical and provocative development for the time insofar as it was not only a critique pointing to the faults of the practice of government but also a statement that pointed out that governments 38

[STP]: 348; 362; 352/{STPo}: 340; 354; 344. [STP]: 12/{STPo}: 10. 40 [STP]: 30/{STPo}: 28. 41 M. D’Argenson: “Lettre à l’auteur du Journal économique au sujet de la Dissertation sur le commerce de M. le Marquis Belloni,” Journal économique (April 1751): 107–117; quoted in [NB]: 28, n. 16–17/{BP}: 25 n. 16–17. 39

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ignored the important guidelines for government and simply governed too much or in an excessive manner. This kind of reasoning, which can be found in thinkers such as François Quesnay (1694–1774), Adam Smith (1723–1799), and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), was radical but was also presented as containing a number of practical ideas for concrete reforms, before they became unified into a coherent theory. In his Tableau économique from 1758, which developed the core ideas of Physiocratic economic theory, Quesnay emphasized that the best kind of police did not interfere in everything. The best way for ensuring the good of the nation and society was to have a solid constitution, rather than interfering in trade. The aim was to leave society to its own devices and to the effects of mutual competition. As Quesnay succinctly stated in his famous maxim XXV of his Maximes générales du gouvernement économique d’un royaume agricole (General Maxims for the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom): “Let there be complete liberty in commerce; for the surest, most exact, and most profitable policy for interior and exterior commerce of the state and nation consists in the greatest possible freedom in competition.”42 Quesnay suggested that the regime should be despotic but not intervene, and he gave China as an example to follow. In his treatment of liberalism, however, Foucault not only focuses on the practices and discourses stemming from Quesnay’s and Bentham’s writings but of course also on the significance of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations from 1776 for a history of liberal governmentality. This work is often viewed as a founding contribution to economics, which is an important branch of modern social science. In extension of earlier works, such as Louis Turquet de Mayerne (1550–1618) La Monarchie aristodémocratique, ou Le gouvernement Composé (1611) and Antoine de Montchrestien’s (1575–1621) Traicté de l’Économie Politique (1615), Smith thus made the point that the political science of the statesman falls short of its target insofar as it focuses exclusively on issues of subordination, limitation, and control.43 Indeed, the science of the statesman and the reason of state must go beyond an exclusive focus on limitations and consider political economy, or the organization of the state’s internal life in productive ways, as an essential branch of the science of the statesman. According to Smith, the purpose of “political economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” is to address two distinct yet

42 F. Quesnay: Maximes générales du gouvernement économique d’un royaume agricole in Œuvres Économiques complètes et autres Textes. Vol. I (Paris, L’institut national d’études démographiques, 2005), p. 571; our translation. 43 “‘Omnes et singulatim’: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1981], DE IV: 153– 161/“‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” pp. 317–325.

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closely related objectives: “first to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or the commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.” In contradistinction to previous authors, however, Smith makes it clear that that the branch concerned with the national economy should not attempt to guide every household toward a common good if it is to serve the two interrelated purposes to “enrich both the people and the sovereign” in an efficient manner.44 Smith emphasizes that the governance of the state’s household is exercised in the best way if it does not inhibit the activities of the individual. Since everybody seeks to tend to their own interests to the best of their abilities, under perfect competition they would collectively civilize each other by establishing a relatively harmonious public order characterized by a reciprocity that created growth and surplus.45 In this manner, Smith’s argument is directed at the government and expresses a sneaking suspicion that the government, in its attempt to govern in the best way and in a search of profit maximization, is constantly led or tempted to overstep its boundaries. Since the government’s job is to further the common welfare, it must also respect the logic of society when managing it. Government must therefore limit itself and allow the governed object to act autonomously. In this argument, the free market is given a privileged status. The paradigmatic expression of this is found in the argument that the best result is attained when the antisocial community of the economy is allowed to function. The truth of the market and the use of government. Foucault identifies two interrelated problematics of primary importance for the formation of the new art of government, which appeared as Europe began to gain the position of a particular and privileged region of unlimited economic development in relation to a world market. The first of these is the installation of the market as a place and instrument for the formation of truth.46 From the Middle Ages to the 18th century, the market was essentially “a site of justice.” Accordingly, the market was tightly organized in order to prevent fraud and theft. Exchange was characterized by an extreme and thorough regulation pertaining to what products were to be sold, their origin and manufacture, and not least their price. This price had to reflect “the just price, that is to say, a price that was to have a certain relationship with work performed, with the needs of the merchants, and, of course, with the consumers’ needs and possibilities.” Adding to this, 44 45 46

A. Smith: The Wealth of Nations (London, Everyman’s Library, 1910), p. 375. A. Smith: The Wealth of Nations (London, Everyman’s Library, 1910), p. 10. [NB]: 31/{BP}: 29.

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the market was a site of justice in the sense that it was tightly organized in order to prevent fraud and theft. Overall, the market could thus be seen as “a site of jurisdiction” in the sense that it functioned as “a place where what had to appear in exchange and be formulated in the price was justice.”47 Meanwhile, a fundamental transformation of significant importance occurred in the 18th century that enabled the formulation of a liberal art of government. By way of 18th-century political economy, the market was reconfigured as a place with a certain naturalness that one had to be knowledgeable about. From being an ordre artificiel, established and regulated through mercantilist policies, the market had become an ordre naturel. From being a site of jurisdiction, the market had become a site for the formation of a “normal,” “good,” “natural,” or “true price,” that is, a price that “fluctuates around the value of the product” and is determined by the interplay between the costs of production and the concrete demand.48 Thus, to the extent that prices are formed through “the natural mechanisms of the market they constitute a standard of truth which enables us to discern which governmental practices are correct and which are erroneous.”49 In this sense, the market had become a site for the formation of truth, a “regime of veridiction” as to the governmental practice,50 not because political economy as such tells the truth to government but because political economy points to the site where government will have to look “to find the principle of truth of its own governmental practice.”51 Foucault associates the second problematic of importance for the formation of the new art of government with 19th-century English radicalism and utilitarianism. Here a new critique of the proper limitation of government is established based on an estimation of the utility versus the non-utility of governmental actions and interventions.52 Being less directed at the question of whether government has the legal right or not to interfere as it does, this critique considers government instead in terms of its concrete objectives and

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whether the exercise of government is in accordance with these objectives or if it is governing too much or too little. This critical question about the appropriate and desirable way to limit governmental practice is therefore also a question regarding the kind of auto-limitation government should impose on itself given that it must regulate in agreement with the self-regulation of the governed and with their natural environment and actual conditions. With reference to the general utility of governmental practice, the critique is to confront cases in which regulation would be unreasonable, counterproductive, or simply futile, and for that reason it seeks to define the limits of governmental competence on the basis of what it will be useful or useless for government to do or not to do. It is from this position that the radical limitation-critique can persistently raise the question to every single governmental action: Is this useful and for what? Within what limits is it useful? When does it stop being useful? And when does it become harmful? These questions come very close to what Jeremy Bentham sought to distinguish as the agenda and the non-agenda, as he designated that the rule of conduct for economic actions and similar initiatives of government should form the criterion for whether or not governmental interference could be expected to increase general happiness according to the utilitarian principle of maximizing happiness and minimizing pain.53 Nevertheless, Foucault is cautious not to reduce English radicalism to a mere precursor or projection of utilitarian ideology or theory into the field of political practice.54 Instead, it is utilitarianism that could be regarded as more than a philosophy or science, since it is first and foremost to be considered a technological attempt to define the competences of the art of government, with a more or less direct reference to what Foucault regards as “the fundamental question of liberalism”: “What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things?”55 These two central elements – the market as a site of veridiction operating through the principle of exchange, and the limitation calculus through which the utility of government is measured – Foucault understands as tied together by the category of interest. The new art of government is not organized around a self-referring state that seeks to maximize its power, men, and wealth but rather must deal with the complexities of interests as they manifest themselves in the 53

Jeremy Bentham: Method and Leading Features of an Institute of Political Economy (including finance) considered not only as a Science but also as an Art (1800–1804); quoted in [NB]: 26–27, n9/{BP}: 24, n9. In addition to the distinction between the agenda and the non-agenda, Bentham here also discerns a third category of sponte acta, designating the economic activities spontaneously developed by the members of the community without governmental intervention. 54 [NB]: 41/{BP}: 40. 55 [NB]: 48/{BP}: 46.

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complex and delicate “interplay between individual and collective interests, between social utility and economic profit, between the equilibrium of the market and the regime of public authorities, between basic rights and the independence of the governed.”56 From directly interfering with and regulating things, men and wealth with the aim of maximizing the strength of the state, as in the logic of the reason of state and as also proposed by physiocratism, government should now only deal with these insofar as they are of interest to somebody. Hence, as Foucault states, government “is only interested in interest.”57 At the same time, however, government “must not obstruct the interplay of individual interest,” not only because of respect for freedom of circulation and self-regulation of the population but also because it is impossible for government to have full knowledge of the logic of this multiplicity of interests it seeks to encourage.58 This is why Foucault accentuates the “invisibility” rather than the “hand” in the famous analogy of Adam Smith. In addition to the existence of something like a providence bringing together the multiple threads of individual interests, the analogy also refers to the fact that the connection between individual pursuit of interests and profit and the growth of collective wealth and welfare is essentially imperceptible.59 With the constitution of political economy at the turn of the 18th century, a problematic of government appears that is still recognizable today. No one is so powerful that they can stop the march of time, and history has taken a number of twists and turns since then. According to Foucault, the model of political economy, which is being defused in our time and structures our actual political debates, is the model of a possible neoliberal governmentality as it was further developed and carved out in 20th-century German debates.60

3

German neoliberalism: The ordo-liberals

Foucault’s 1979 course gives considerable attention to German neoliberalism, primarily in the form of the ordo-liberals of the Freiburg School. Central figures in the School are the economist Walter Eucken (1891–1950) and the jurists Franz Böhm (1895–1977) and Hans Grossmann-Doerth (1894–1944); however, Foucault also analyzes the work of Alfred Müller-Armack (1901– 1978), Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966), and Alexander Rüstow (1885–1963), who were not part of the Freiburg School but still played important roles in shaping neoliberal thinking and policies in Germany in the 20th century. Foucault

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focuses on these thinkers not just because of their historical precedence in regard to American neoliberalism, which was inspired by the Germans, but also because the “governmental style” that marks the specific form of German neoliberalism is something that we are “immersed in”: “the contemporary neoliberalism which actually involves us [ce neoliberalisme don’t nous sommes les contemporains et dans lequel nous sommes de fait impliqués].”61 Foucault begins his analysis of German neoliberalism by considering the widespread contemporary “state-phobia” that united otherwise discordant groups all across the political spectrum. He does this in order to show how the phobia of the state is actually caught up in a much more fundamental and important “crisis of governmentality,” manifesting itself in a number of reevaluations of the liberal art of government: “Everyone is in agreement in criticizing the state and identifying its destructive and harmful effects. But within this general critique ... through and in the shadow of this critique, will liberalism in fact be able to bring about its real objective, that is to say, a general formalization of the powers of the state and the organization of society on the basis of the market economy?”62 Alongside or below the “state-bashing” efforts and the incautious, imprecise, and misleading accusations of the state becoming fascist, Foucault thus identifies a more fundamental and relevant problem, which turns on the reevaluations and proposals of renewing the art of government in Germany immediately before and after the Second World War. In the same way that Surveiller et punir illustrates how the humanization of the practice of punishment was caught up in a more general disciplinarization of the social corpus and La volonté de savoir shows how the repression-hypothesis was bound up in a more wide-ranging transformation marked by a proliferation of discourses on sex, Foucault here links the widespread contemporary critique of the state with a more fundamental transformation emerging as a crisis and reformulation of governmentality. In doing so, he marks out some important shifts that distinguish German neoliberalism from the preceding classical form, especially when it comes to the principle of laissez-faire and the extension of the associated neoliberal governmentality. First of all, Foucault emphasizes that German neoliberalism brings with it a reversed relationship between the state and the market. If the problem for classical liberalism and political economy according to Foucault’s account was how to make room for a market given an already existing and legitimate state, the problem for the German neoliberals was the opposite: “Given a state that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on the basis of this non-state space

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of economic freedom?” The space for this renewal is cleared by the way in which history “had said no to the German State,”63 and from the neoliberals’ reevaluation of historical events in light of their experience with Nazism. All the supposed ills of capitalism (one-dimensionality, standardization, uniform mass society, etc.) are according to neoliberals actually not the result of the market and its allegedly inherent failures. Rather, they are the result of a set of interventionist “anti-liberal policies,” which the neoliberals locate as invariant components employed and utilized in a broad set of government programs, ranging from the Beveridge Plan and the New Deal to the policies of the Soviet Union and Nazism.64 Since all the dangers and problems hitherto associated with capitalism and the market’s mode of functioning have their origin in a set of more or less radical interventionist anti-liberal policies, the solution, according to Foucault’s rendering of the German neoliberals, was to “adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions.”65 In other words, a state supervised by the market, rather than the other way around. Yet, this neoliberal proposal of adopting the market as the organizing and regulating principle does not imply a subscription to the naturalness inherent in the classical liberal conception of the market; in fact, the German neoliberals find it both erroneous and counterproductive to believe in the virtues of laissez-faire and a naturally free market. Instead, the market is conceptualized as a “political-cultural product, based on a constitutional order that requires careful “cultivation” for its maintenance and proper functioning.66 However, although Adam Smith’s invisible hand is in need of a helping hand to function, this helping hand need not interfere directly in the market or with its outcomes. Rather, it should only work on the conditions allowing it to function, which first and foremost means setting up the necessary preconditions for the flourishing of competition. In this prioritization of competition over exchange as the distinctive essence of the market, the neoliberals diverge from classical liberalism, but in doing so they accentuate what a range of 19th-century economists – such as Leon Walras (1834–1910) and Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) – had already attributed so much importance to. Furthermore, since government should not prioritize redistributing wealth but instead should seek to establish the conditional rules under which competition will flourish, this also entails a radical reversal of social policy as traditionally understood. It is no longer a question of compensating for the unfortunate effects of a market economy. Instead, what is to be established is

63

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a government that is not against but for the market.67 This social policy is a far-reaching and widely encompassing form of governmentality that is geared toward governing society by reference to and in accordance with the market. While this might sound like the reappearance and intensification of the commodification process already denounced by Karl Marx,68 Foucault emphasizes the singularity of German neoliberalism by stressing its difference from a society of commodities, “in which exchange value will be at the same time the general measure and criterion of elements.”69 It is, therefore, not the man of exchange or man as consumer who provides the idealized figure of the German neoliberals but rather the competitive and productive creature of enterprise: “The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm or, if it comes to it, the State, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other, enterprises which are in some way ready to hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in their scale for the individual’s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful and perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on one alone. Finally, the individual’s life itself – with his relations to his private property, for example, with his family, household, insurance, and retirement – must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.70 In programing this new art of government, the multiplication and dissemination of the enterprise from within the societal body plays a crucial role. This is not merely to be understood as a particular institution, for it involves the mobilization of a special social êthos that marks out a whole competitive and enterprising way of being and behaving in terms of personal plans and projects with objectives, tactics and agendas.71 Thus, it is a matter of nothing less than making the enterprise into “the formative power of society.”72 It is a matter of intervening deeply in the very fabric, tissue or vital parts of society by way of a policy of life – that is, what the economist and originator of the term Neo-liberalismus, Alexander Rüstow, refers to as Vitalpolitik: “a politics of life, which is not essentially oriented to increased earnings and reduced hours of work, like traditional social policy, but which takes cognizance of the worker’s whole vital situation, his real, concrete situation, from morning to night and from night to morning,” including material belongings and moral hygiene,

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sense of property and social integration.73 What is at stake here is a governmentality that should address “all the factors on which the happiness, well-being and contentment of man truly depend,” and which should take into account what Rüstow and Röpke conceptualize as the worker’s “fourfold embeddedness” in his community, nature, property and tradition.74 This is the comprehensive biopolitical and neoliberal governmentality that is formulated in Germany, and it is this German model, not the “Bismarckian state becoming the Hitler state,” “which is being diffused, debated, and forms part of our actuality.”75

4

American neoliberalism

“Liberalism in America,” Foucault states at some point, “is a whole way of being. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed.76 Whereas the ordo-liberals endorsed the idea that society should be governed for the market, the American neoliberals aimed to redefine all of society as an economic domain or form.77 Noticing this as a general background of the American adoption of neoliberalism, Foucault’s examination focuses on the governmental and biopolitical implications of the proposed expansion of economic analysis and programing to areas of the social field not formerly associated with economic principles or rationality. This analysis is primarily based on work by economists like Henry Calvert Simons (1899–1946), Theodore W. Schultz (1902–1998) and Gary Becker (1930–2014), whereas Foucault pays less attention to other famous figures of the Chicago School such as Milton Friedman (1912–2006) and George Stigler (1911–91).78 73

Alexander Rüstow is quoted from [NB]: 164/{BP}: 157, n62. Cf. J. Hegner: Alexander Rüstow: Ordnungspolitische Konzeption und Einsfluß auf das wirtschaftpolitische Leitbild der Nachkriegszeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart, Lucius, 1999), 52–68. 75 [NB]: 198/{BP}: 192. 76 [NB]: 224/{BP}: 218. 77 [NB]: 245–246/{BP}: 239–224. 78 E.g., J.v. Overtveldt: The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business (Chicago, Agate, 2007). Informative studies on Foucault’s reading of American neoliberalism include J. Donzelot: “Michel Foucault and Liberal Intelligence,” Economy and Society 37:1 (2008): 115–134; F. Guala: “Critical Notice: Naissance de la biopolitique,” Economics and Philosophy 22 (2006): 429– 439; T. Lemke: “‘The Birth of BioPolitics:’ Michel Foucault’s Lecture at Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30:2 (2001): 190–207; M. Peters, “Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective,” Journal of Educational Enquiry 2:2 (2001): 58–71; J. Read: “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 25–36; and M. Simons: “Learning as Investment: Notes on Governmentality and Biopolitics,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 38:4 (2006): 523–540. 74

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In his reading of the American neoliberals, Foucault accentuates their reconfiguration of the homo economicus that was already on the agenda in the works of classical economics. But while economic man in this context was interpreted as a creature of exchange in accordance with his needs and wants, which implied that he represented one of two partners in a process of exchange, the economic man in the anarcho-liberal context is, as with the German neoliberals, recast as a creature of competition whose inclination toward competing may not always be actualized but is nonetheless always potentially ready to be encouraged and spurred. Accordingly, the freedom that is in need of security here becomes the freedom of liberated competiveness, and the associated competitive homo economicus comes into view not just as “an entrepreneur of himself,”79 as was the case in German neoliberalism, but also as the living being who is in need of being set free to freely compete. The human creature of competition cannot, therefore, be a man of exchange because instead of being one among many partners in a process of exchange he becomes a subject of personal enterprise who not only earns his own wages, administers his own consumption and produces his own satisfaction but also embodies his own assets and productivity.80 Here even consumption becomes another entrepreneurial activity used for the production of personal satisfaction, which also implies that the opposition between an active production and a passive consumption ceases to have any meaning. In short, man has become an amount of “human capital,” which may always be still further augmentable with reference to his acquired and hereditary resources. “The distinctive mark of human capital,” Theodore W. Schultz writes in 1961, “is that it is a part of man. It is human because it is embodied in man, and it is capital because it is a source of future satisfactions, or of future earnings, or of both.”81 It is the biopolitical implications of this kind of economization of everyday life that draw Foucault’s attention. Through this reconfiguration of the economic man, the interventional field of anarcho-liberal governmentality becomes a radicalization of the Vitalpolitik of the German neoliberals, as it includes not only every aspect of enterprising human conduct across all possible social fields but also the very genetic makeup predisposing this conduct of enterprise.82 But besides venturing to stimulate and ameliorate the human population all the way down to their hereditary equipment and preparing for potential situations in which this equipment could pose a “danger,”83 it is primarily on the side of the acquired and acquirable factors that this neoliberal governmentality endeavors to have 79

[NB]: 232/{BP}: 226. [NB]: 231/{BP}: 225. 81 T.W. Schultz: Investment in Human Capital: The Role of Education and Research (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971), 148; quoted in [NB]: 243 n33/{BP}: 236 n33. 82 [NB]: 248/{BP}: 243. 83 [NB]: 234–235/{BP}: 228–229. 80

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an indirect effect on the economy. This is especially pertinent in regard to the making of a “competence-machine” that produces a continuous surplus of human capital and that Foucault points to as enabling this neoliberal governmentality to identify the problems for which it also proposes its solutions. In the case of educational investment, for example, professional and school education is evidently important for the development of human capital. But this radical governmentality also argues on an experimental basis that the very development of the competence acquiring human being is also relevant and includes factors such as the time spent by the parents on the formation of their child, the emotional atmosphere in the family and the quality of the child’s social relationships. Foucault thus locates the competence-machine within a comprehensive neoliberal “environmental analysis” of human capital, entailing the possibility of analyzing “the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection, as investment which can form human capital. Time spent, care given, as well as parents’ education – because we know quite precisely that for an equal time spent with their children, more educated patents will form a higher human capital than parents with less education – in short the set of cultural stimuli received by the child: all this will contribute to the formation of those elements that can produce human capital.”84 Every subject matter on the basis of which the population is potentially inclined to reach an end – in childhood, in youth, at work, on vacation, in marriage, in civil life, as parents, in friendships, in retirement, in health care – comprises a field of economic analysis because it is also the ground from which human capital can be extracted and put into production. Accordingly, Foucault mentions how the American neoliberals also point to the potential human capitalization of assets pertaining to social phenomena, such as social mobility, migration, and the innovations conceptualized by Joseph A. Schumpeter.85 Even public hygiene, health care, criminality and the function of penal justice emerge as economic forms in this analysis of the Chicago School.86 It is in continuation of this that Foucault draws attention to the neoliberal construction of a “grid of economic intelligibility” with which it becomes possible to appraise a whole range of human behavior as economic even though it is not usually considered as such.87 With this grid it is not only possible to analyze all facets of the relationship between mother and child in terms of investments, which are measurable in terms of time and convertible into human capital; it also becomes possible to invert a vast multiplicity of human conduct that was previously taken to be the object of disciplines such as 84 85 86 87

[NB]: 235–236/{BP}: 229. [NB]: 236–238/{BP}: 230–231. [NB]: 254–266/{BP}: 248–261. [NB]: 253/{BP}: 246.

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demography, psychology and sociology, so that they, on a certain level, become visible for the economic rationality at the same time as they begin to express an economic rationality themselves. In this context, however, it is not only every rational aspect of human conduct and life that is amenable to economic analysis in accordance with the classical formulation that economics “is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.”88 According to Gary Becker, this already very extensive definition does not go far enough because economic analysis can perfectly well be applied to individual non-rational behavior as well, with the only criterion being that the conduct in question reacts to reality in a non-random way. Given that the irrational conduct responds to the modifiable stimuli of the environment in a systematic way and “accepts reality,” in Becker’s words89 despite its irrationality, it is thereby apposite for economic analysis and economics becomes the science of the systematic nature of responses to reality in the form of environmental variables.90 Meanwhile, in conjunction with this grid of economic intelligibility, Foucault also draws attention to the neoliberal construction of a “critical assessment instrument” directed at the exercise of public power in terms of the market.91 Where this first construction was “analytical” in its scope because it was able to make social processes visible and intelligible in a generalized economic form, this second construction is rather “programmatic” in capacity because it makes it possible “to test governmental action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure.”92 Together, the two constructions form an effective analytic-programmatic technology with which a great part of the social field can be reconstructed so they take part in an economic reality, and with which a permanent economic-political criticism of almost all political and public authorities can be secured and empirically substantiated in terms of the market. All governmental initiatives can be met with this critical assessment according to principles of supply and demand, cost and benefit, efficiency, and the potential losses due to public interventions in the field of the market. In contrast to the ordo-liberal rejection of a natural sphere constituting the beneficial functioning of the principle of laissez-faire, Foucault argues that the American anarcho-liberals rather turn this principle upside down by means of their analytic-programmatic technology. “Here the laissez-faire is turned into 88 L. C. Robbins: “Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science” (1931); quoted in [NB]: 228 {BP}: 222. 89 G. Becker: “Irrational Action and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 70:4 (1962): 153–168; quoted in [NB]: 290–291 n. 6–7/{BP}: 287, n6–7. 90 [NB]: 273/{BP}: 269. 91 [NB]: 253/{BP}: 246. 92 [NB]: 253/{BP}: 246.

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a ne-pas-laisser-faire directed at the government, in the name of a law of the market that will permit each of its activities to be measured and assessed.”93 This conversion of the laissez-faire principle leads to a situation in which the market no longer functions as the veridictional regime for the self-limitation of government as in classical liberalism, as the market converts into something that is now hostile to the government. What emerges is “a sort of permanent economic tribunal,” the truth-telling of which is no longer responsive and oracular but determined and antagonistic when it comes to guiding government. Additionally, Foucault claims that this economic tribunal is not merely a private or cooperative matter but has rather been institutionalized in a number of American organizations or think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Consumer Safety Product Commission, and the Food and Health Administration, from whence the permanent economic tribunal can be brought into action in an almost positivistic critique of the “nonsense” and “contradictions” of governmental procedures and actions.94 In concert with this radical economization of government action, the American neoliberals therefore also express a now familiar aspiration to extend the market across all social and political domains, thus breaking down the traditional divisions between the economic, the social and the political in what constitutes not a governmentalization but a marketization of both state and civil society. The governmentality of both German and American neoliberalism revolves around the economic enterprization of virtually every individual agent of the population, but it does so in different directions. German neoliberalism inscribes the human enterprise in a “vertical movement” by reversing the relationship between state and market in order to establish conditions under which competition will flourish, being convinced that regulation of prices by the market itself is so delicate that it must be supported and managed. For its part, American neoliberalism inscribes the human enterprise in a “horizontal movement” by expanding the economic to principally all social forms in order to transform a long range of non-economic entities and activities into means of competition, confident that the grid of analysis and the decision-making criteria it offers ought to be more generally applicable.95 While the German conception of Vitalpolitik therefore stands for factual reconfiguration of traditional social politics focusing on enabling the individuals to become entrepreneurs of themselves (e.g., assistance to the unemployed, health care coverage, and housing policies), the American conception of human capital rather takes for granted the entrepreneurial mode of existence and provides it instead with still 93 94 95

[NB]: 253/{BP}: 247; translation modified. [NB]: 252–253/{BP}: 246–247 (252–253). [NB]: 329/{BP}: 323.

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new sources from which the capital of competition can be accumulated (e.g., family life, education, and genetic equipment). Thus two governmental technologies of facilitation emerge, endowed with a more societal and a more individual proclivity respectively, but both breaking away from the naturalness of classical liberalism. Here German neoliberalism projected a sort of “economic cultivation” for the safeguarding and affluent performance of the market by indirect governmental planning and intervention, whereas American neoliberalism planned for a kind of “economic realism” according to which a transversal level of economic reality could incorporate almost all social forms in terms of economics but which at the same time allowed them their differences on all other levels.96

5

Liberal governmentality and the economic game

Meanwhile, it is on the topic of French neoliberalism, which is presented before the anarcho-liberals in Naissance de la biopolitique but succeeds their work chronologically, that Foucault most directly addresses the encounter between liberal governmentality and the question of social security. With reference primarily to economist Raymond Octave Joseph Barre (1924–2007), European commissioner at Brussels from 1967 to 1972, and prime minister under Giscard d’Estaing (1976–1981); Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (b. 1926), French minister of finance and economy under President Georges Pompidou from 1969 to 1974 and president from 1974 to 1981; and the two economists Christian Stoffäes (b. 1947) and Lionel Guy Stoléru (b. 1937), Foucault calls attention to a number of features pertaining to the challenge of creating a social policy within a neoliberal framework.97 D’Estaing held that government should “completely separate that which corresponds to the need of economic expansion from that which corresponds to the concern for solidarity and social justice” because the social system can disrupt the economic system with negative consequences (e.g., rise of wages, increase of unemployment or uneven redistributions), even if social security is deduced solely from earned wages.98 By introducing “an economic tax” versus “a social tax,” d’Estaing projects a separation of the economy as a system with its own rules and the social as a system with its own particular objectives, which should at once correspond to and be entirely impermeable to each other. This “decoupling,” Foucault argues, is part of the application of a seminal idea, being equally traceable in German, American,

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[NB]: 266–269/{BP}: 256–259. [NB]: 199–201/{BP}: 196–197. 98 V. Giscard d’Estaing: “Preface,” in Économie et Société humaine: Rencontres internationals du ministre de l’Économie et des Finances (Paris: Denöel, 1972); quoted in [NB]: 218–219. n39–45/{BP}: 211, n39–45. See also [NB]: 205–209/{BP}: 198–202. 97

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and French neoliberalism, according to which “the economy essentially is a game [un jeu].”99 This means that the economy should progress as a game between partners and the whole society should be permeated by it, and that the role of the state in this regard is restricted to defining the rules of the game and making sure that they are applied. And since the rules of this game have to ensure that the economy develops and progresses as actively and keenly as possible and to the advantage of the greatest possible number of players, the primary and categorical rule of the game should also ensure that the players do not lose so much that they become unable to continue playing. It is through this “rule of non-exclusion” in the economic game that Foucault sees the policy of neoliberal social security coming into view,100 which he sketches out on the basis of “negative tax” as Stoléru and Stoffaës outlined it in the 1970s.101 In opposition to positive income tax, wherein government claims a portion of income and the sum paid increases as income rises, this negative tax system entitles taxpayers to receive payments (or negative taxes) if, but only if, their earnings are below a given threshold and, conversely, this payment reduces as income rises. Through this system, government provides social security in the form of supplementary cash benefits relative to how much the citizen is economically below the threshold, which is usually fixed at “a ‘vital minimum’ ... of elementary needs.”102 According to Foucault, this neoliberal tax policy has a number of consequences. First, it guarantees the non-exclusion of the economic game because it ensures that citizens who are temporarily made redundant do not end up below what is considered a proper level of consumption. Second, it nevertheless keeps this assured level of minimum consumption so low as to motivate, incentivize or frustrate the unemployed to always prefer working and participating in the economic system before receiving benefits, thus counteracting the well-known problems with the negative work incentives and benefits dependency of traditional welfare programs as well. Third, the neoliberal drift in this system is not only that it fully decouples the “economic tax” and the “social tax” but also that it does not provide the social security associated with a standard policy of full

99

[NB]: 207/{BP}: 201; translation modified. Cf., e.g., M. Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 225–227. 100 [NB]: 207/{BP}: 202. 101 Cf., C. Stoffaës: Vaincre “Rapport du groupe d’étude de l’impôt negative” (Paris, 1973– 1974), and L. Stoléru: Vaincre la pauvreté dans les pays riches (Paris, Flammarion, 1977). It was Milton Friedman who made the negative income tax famous by proposing that all welfare programs should be restructured with this system as the model, so that government support for those with low incomes would be withdrawn only at a low marginal rate and would not distort the market; cf. M. Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), chapter 12: “The Alleviation of Poverty.” 102 Stoléru quoted and translated in [NB]: 220, n51/{BP}: 213, n51.

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employment; people are not forced to work if they have no interest in doing so. It only guarantees the possibility of minimum existence at a given level, essentially leaving the incentives to be a matter for the jobless themselves.103 Although Foucault is perfectly aware that the negative tax system has never been applied in full effect or in pure form, it is nevertheless here that he maps out his last outline of neoliberal governmentality, chronologically speaking.104 Because the negative tax provides something like a minimal level of social security, though at the lowest possible level and principally substituting all welfare such as food stamps, public housing and minimum wage laws with cash benefits defined with regard to the threshold, it allows the economic system and the mechanism of competition to function in the rest of society. Above the threshold, the “enterprise society” of vibrant competition and investment in the capital of oneself is thus given free rein to run its course without any interruption from social security or inopportune citizens below this threshold point: “Full employment and voluntarist growth are renounced in favor of the integration in a market economy. But this entails a fund of a floating population, of a liminal, infra- or supra-liminal population, in which the assurance mechanism will enable each to live, after a fashion, and to live in such a way that he can always be available for possible work, if market conditions require it.”105 This type of governmentality, directed at a population that is dynamically divided according to the threshold of enterprise, looks as if it rigidly resigns itself and the human beings it comprises to the economic order that was formerly the expression of the self-regulatory household of the same population. According to Foucault, however, it is also a very loose-fitting and alterable economic order: “[It] is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by ... normative mechanisms. ... On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.”106

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[NB]: 212–213/{BP}: 207. [NB]: 209, 212/{BP}: 204, 207. A review of the factual experimentations with negative tax is found in R.A. Moffitt: “The Negative Income Tax and the Evolution of U.S. Welfare Policy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17:3 (2003): 119–140. 105 [NB]: 212/{BP}: 207. 106 [NB]: 265/{BP}: 259. 104

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This theme-program, which he also designates “an environmentalism open to unknowns and transversal phenomena,”107 forms Foucault’s last articulation of a neoliberal governmentality and its consequences, as it concurrently regulates the population both rigidly and loosely in accordance with economic principles.

6

Foucault’s notion of biopolitics

Given the name of the 1979 lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality, Naissance de la biopolitique, it may seem surprising that neither biopolitics nor biopower have been discussed so far. It may seem even odd or counterintuitive, if one considers the consequential repercussions of the notion in subsequent scholarship. The spread of biopolitics. The concept of biopolitics has received enormous attention in modern research over a great range of societal and economic problematics, both in conjunction with the governmentality perspective and more independently. Since the late 1990s, the term has received particular attention and gained recognition within literature related to Italian critical thought. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben asserts that “the politicization of bare life as such ... constitutes the decisive event of modernity” and analyzes how “the fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity” “finds its ... articulation.” 108 In Empire, Hardt and Negri state that the “conceptions of control and biopower both describe central aspects of Empire” and claim that “when power becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised by power’s machine.”109 Since the turn of the century, biopolitics has remained the subject of intense investigation and discussion. For British social theorist Nikolas Rose, a “biopolitical age,” in which “politics now addresses the vital processes of human existence” forms an overarching and recurrent framework for the investigation of the ethical and political implications of modern life sciences, as his book title The Politics of Life Itself suggests.110 Discussions of life and biopolitics are equally recurrent in political theorist Mitchell Dean’s investigations of modern forms of government and economies of power as evidenced by the title of his book, The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics. 111 The term 107

[NB]: 266/{BP}: 261. G. Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), pp. 4, 137. 109 M. Hardt and A. Negri: Empire (2000), pp. 25, 24. 110 N. Rose: The Politics of Life Itself (2007), p. 53. Cf. also N. Rose: “Politics of the life itself”, Theory, Culture & Society, 18:6 (2001): 1–30. 111 M. Dean: Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (1999). “Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality,” Journal for Cultural Research 6:1–2 (2002): 119–138. “The Signature of Power,” Journal of Political Power 1 (2012): 101–117. Signature of Power: Governmentality, Sovereignty and Biopolitics (2013). 108

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has proved equally important for political theorist Michael Dillon’s studies of international political theory, security and war.112 In his trilogy Communitas, Immunitas and Bios, Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito has not only developed a critique of how the concept of biopolitics has come to be deployed in Italian theory and elsewhere but also paved the way for a more positive conception of biopolitics.113 Thus, after Foucault the concept has been expanded even further to include not only a well-known biopolitical distinction between “bare life [to zōon]” and “political existence [ho bios]” in relation to sovereignty but also a biopolitical mode of production in the world of postmodern capitalism, although the most prevalent use of the concept is perhaps to be found in the sizeable literature that has biopolitics and its relationship to new inventions of biotechnology and bioeconomy as its critical target.114 To a large extent, the instigators of these fairly recent studies on biopolitics and the biopolitical condition refer back to Foucault. Often they situate their contribution with regard to Foucault’s opening, despite the fact that some deplore the rather ambiguous and somewhat sketchy character of the term in Foucault’s work. According to Hardt and Negri, “Foucault’s work allows us to recognize the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power.”115 The introduction to what has become the voluminous work on Homo Sacer starts off by discussing Foucault and situates Agamben’s own investigation as an “inquiry” that “concerns precisely” a “hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” toward which Foucault’s investigations point.116 In continuation of Agamben, Mitchell Dean in The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics focuses on the “secret problem Foucault immediately faces. What is the relationship of this new power over life to disciplinary power.”117 Recently, German political scientist Thomas Lemke presented Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, in which he awards Foucault’s treatment of biopolitics a crucial position – not

112 M. Dillon: Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: The Political Economy of Security After Focault (2009). M. Dillon and A.W. Neal: Foucault on Politics, Security and War (2008). M. Dillon and J. Reid: The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (2009). 113 R. Esposito: Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008). Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (2010). Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2011). 114 Supplementary informative studies of the history of biopolitics include, besides Esposito’s earlier mentioned Bios, A. Somit and S.A. Peterson: “Biopolitics After Three Decades – A Balance Sheet,” British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998): 559–571; P. Rabinow and N. Rose, “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195–217. 115 M. Hardt and A. Negri: Empire (2000), p. 23. 116 G. Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), p. 6. 117 M. Dean: Signature of Power (2013), p. 35.

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as the instigator but as an agenda-setting turning point for the discussion of the term.118 In the present context of an introduction, however, we must attach greater importance to Foucault’s own use of the term in the time preceding and leading up to the 1979 lectures than to the later reception of his work by other scholars, as interesting and productive as these investigations may be. Thus, although many have found inspiration in Foucault’s work, a thorough overview of the impact of the notions of biopolitics and biopower on present theoretical debates and empirical research and a fuller historical account of the various waves in the reception of Foucault’s terms fall beyond the scope of this book. Not only do none of the later delineations of biopolitics match Foucault’s, as later scholars are often keen to stress, but what could be conceived as a ‘reception’ of Foucault’s 1979 lectures long precedes the publication in French and English in 2004 and 2008 respectively and seems delayed in regard to his oral lectures. As a consequence, it is more likely to be influenced by Foucault’s earlier work concerning biopolitics in La volonté de savoir (1976), which shall be treated later in this chapter. Even in his lectures, Foucault stresses that biopolitics is only haphazardly treated there. In his course summary published in 1978, Foucault concludes that the course Naissance de la biopolitique “ended up being devoted entirely to what should have been only its introduction. The theme was to have been “biopolitics, by which I meant the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birth rate, life expectancy, race. ... We know the increasing importance of these problems since the nineteenth century, and the political and economic issues they have raised up to the present.”119 On closer scrutiny, however, it seemed to him “that these problems were inseparable from the framework of a political rationality within which they appeared and took on their intensity. This means “liberalism,” since it was in relation to liberalism that they assumed the form of a challenge.”120 Accordingly, it seemed to Foucault that the problematics of biopolitics, already introduced in the lectures of the previous year, should be examined within the larger framework of the development of a modern art of government in general and a liberal governmentality in particular in order to become operational. Foucault only draws the logical conclusion from his realization in the opening paragraph of Naissance de la biopolitique: “In fact, this year I would like to continue

118 119 120

T. Lemke: Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (2011), pp. 33–52. [NB]: 323/{BP}: 317. [NB]: 323/{BP}: 317.

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with what I began to talk about last year, that is to say, to retrace the history of what could be called the art of government.”121 Accordingly, Naissance de la biopolitique could be regarded not only as an analysis of the history of liberalism but also as Foucault’s perhaps most comprehensive preparation for an analysis of modern biopolitics; with the important addendum and corrigendum, however, that an examination of biopolitics needs to be resituated within the larger framework of what he in 1978 designated “the history of governmentality”122 and in 1979 “the general dispositive of governmentality”123 if it were to be adequate, and with the important qualification that Foucault himself never subsequently managed to bridge the abyss that separated modern biopolitics from the larger landscape it needed to be resituated within, if it were to be properly understood. In this light, the title Naissance de la biopolitique may also be interpreted to suggest that the account of biopolitics given in the lectures never comes close to investigating the coming of age of biopolitics in its full-fledged form – only a first preliminary outline of its early emergence or coming into being is drawn. In the 1979 lectures, Foucault made preparations for a later investigation of the genesis and character of biopolitics that he never managed to carry out. In sum, there are good reasons for not structuring a presentation of Foucault’s lectures from 1979 around the notion of biopolitics (or biopower). Foucault’s outline of biopolitics. To begin with, it is worth emphasizing that the notion of biopolitics was not invented by Foucault but has a history that not only succeeds his writings, as has been suggested, but also proceeds and conditions his examination considerably. The prehistory stretches from a eugenic kind of biopolitics, which was primarily advocated by German and Swedish scholars of a National Socialist orientation in the early 20th century, to a biologically oriented biopolitics, which was originally delineated as a subfield of political science focusing on biological factors involved in political behavior by a group of American and French researchers in the 1960s.124 When Foucault first introduced the term in 1974 in the context of social medicine, he only loosely indicated that biopolitics was linked to a political regulation of the biological aspects of human beings insofar as they were members of given cities, nations or other groupings of people.125 In the closing section of La volonté de savoir from 1976, Foucault claims that from the 17th century,

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[NB]: 3/{BP}: 1. [STP]: 33/{STPo}: 11. 123 [NB]: 71/{BP}: 70. 124 Cf. T. Lemke: Biopolitics (2011), pp. 9–32. 125 “La naissance de la médicine sociale” [1977], DE III: 210/“The Birth of Social Medicine,” p. 137. 122

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the “power over life” was deployed around two major poles.126 According to Foucault, the first of these poles seemed to be centered on the body: “the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls.” This anatomo-politics of the human body reformulates what he has described in earlier lecture series and in Surveiller et punir as the technology of discipline. But Foucault also speaks of a second technology of power, “focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.”127 The supervision, interventions, and regulatory controls of these processes are termed a biopolitics of the population. Foucault situates the development of biopolitics in the post-revolutionary period in France, when the population becomes something to be controlled with instruments such as demography, the evaluation of the relationship between resources and inhabitants, and the construction of tables analyzing wealth and its circulation.128 A relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death due to the management of conditions of existence and probabilities of life with the goal of optimizing individual and collective welfare. Biopolitics is distinguished from the technology of law because it neither conceives of its subjects in legal terms nor interprets the existence of the state as a juridical question of sovereignty. With biopolitics “power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the largescale phenomena of population.”129 Foucault also maintains that biopolitics is a characteristically modern form of power because it wagers the life of the species on its political strategies; in this way biopolitics marks the passing of the “threshold of modernity.” In the programmatic rhetoric characteristic of La volonté de savoir, Foucault sums up this point: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”130 With the appearance of biopower, however, it was possible to leave this ancient tradition behind. In the former Aristotelian view, man was a living being who, in addition to being a biological entity, also had a political dimension in a polis. This biological nature was viewed as a precondition for the political animal; however, this biological status eventually came to play an

126 127 128 129 130

VS: 182–183/WK: 139. VS: 182–183/WK: 139. VS: 184/WK: 140. VS: 180/WK: 137. VS: 188/WK: 143.

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active role in the political. It became a dynamic mode of being that actively contributed to the domain of politics, which man had to manage and form. Politics became a de-spiritualized activity in which the physical existence of man was at stake. This development reflects a decisive transformation in the general economy of power from the sovereign’s right to take life and let live to the biopolitical capacity to foster life or allow it to die. ‘Fostering’ implies a reconception of life as belonging within the domain of value and utility, and in order to do this it is necessary to qualify, measure, and appraise. The object of biopolitics is therefore not “to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects” but to effect distributions around the norm. The emphasis on normalization does not mean that the law becomes superfluous or that the institutions of justice vanish. As elements of biopolitics, judicial institutions are rather increasingly “incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.”131 In La volonté de savoir, Foucault draws a distinction between biopolitics and biopower. Whereas the biopolitics of the population is distinguished from the disciplinary anatomo-politics of the human body, biopower designates a constellation of both biopolitics and discipline, that is, a type of “power over life” directed both at the “performances of the body” and the vital processes of the population. This biopower traverses a broad range of institutions, from the family, army, and schools to police, medicine, and the administration of collective bodies.132 In the last lecture of “Il faut défendre la société”, also from 1976, we find a similar distinction between biopolitics and biopower.133 Again, biopolitics is distinguished from discipline in terms of its characteristics as a technology of power that deals with the population as both a scientific and a political problem,134 whereas biopower designates the constellation between these technologies and thus covers the spectrum “between the organic and the biological, between body and population.”135 The description of biopolitics in “Il faut défendre la société” is consistent with the presentation given in Volontè de savoir and it has a similar programmatic character, which on an immediate level is 131

VS: 189–190/WK: 144. VS: 182–183, 185/WK: 139, 141. 133 [DS]: 213–235/{SD}: 239–263. 134 [DS]: 218–219/{SD}: 245. 135 [DS]: 225/{SD}: 253. “Il faut défendre la société” is based on a series of lectures and not a manuscript intended for publication, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that Foucault is not completely consistent in his use of the two terms. In one place biopower is thus used in the sense of a technology distinct from discipline, that is, as synonymous with biopolitics. [DS]: 220/{SD}: 247. 132

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reflected in the fact that both texts on biopolitics are placed at the end of an investigation. In both cases, Foucault adds a further and final level to his analysis, but without undertaking the task of fleshing out the details. Compared with the description given in La volonté de savoir, however, the last lecture of the 1976 course gives a clearer and more systematic presentation of both relevant fields of interventions (or domains) of biopolitics, as well as the level of intervention that characterizes this technology. As for the domains of biopolitics, Foucault first distinguishes a kind of social medicine developed at the end of the 18th century in order to increase public hygiene. This type of practice was institutionalized in order to coordinate medical care and medicalize the population.136 The forms of knowledge employed by such a centralizing form of power include demographic measurements of phenomena in statistical terms such as longevity, birth, and mortality rate. Armed with such knowledge, the social medicine in question begins to develop a natalist policy that intervenes in all phenomena relating to the birth rate, while also addressing the “problem of morbidity” conceived as the “form, nature, extension, duration, and intensity of illnesses prevalent in a population.”137 A second field of intervention for biopolitics – especially as the age of industrialization is entered – relates to the ability to work insofar as a range of phenomena may incapacitate individuals and put them out of circuit for a shorter or longer period of time. In order to address these threats to the capacity for work, a number or rational economic mechanisms are established including “insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures, and so on.”138 The third domain mentioned by Foucault relates to the problem of how the milieu – both natural and artificial – influences the dynamics of a population, and in this connection Foucault uses the “the urban problem,” that is, the pressures that the organization of the town gives rise to, as an example.139 In terms of the biopolitical level of intervention, Foucault emphasizes first that biopolitics deals with human beings insofar as they are part of a collective and whose effects are therefore studied on a mass level. Even though such effects may be unpredictable when considered in isolation, they nonetheless display constants that can be established when studied over a period of time and thereby turned into “serial phenomena.” Second, it as this level of generality that biopolitics seeks to intervene into these general phenomena that it seeks to optimize: “The mortality rate has to be modified or lowered; life

136 137 138 139

[DS]: 217–218/{SD}: 244. [DS]: 217/{SD}: 243. [DS]: 218/{SD}: 244. [DS]: 219, 223–224/{SD}: 245; 250–251.

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expectancy has to be increased; the birth rate has to be stimulated.”140 Unlike the technology of discipline, which intervenes directly at the level of the body itself, biopolitics uses overall mechanisms in order to achieve general states of equilibration and regularity. Finally, Foucault briefly describes the relation between biopolitics and the state. He stresses that the overall regulatory rationality of biopolitics is, to a greater extent than discipline, anchored in the state apparatus and sub-state institutions as for example medical institutions, welfare funds, and insurance companies.141 Concerning the notion of biopower, Foucault also adds a couple of interesting aspects to the programmatic and rhetorically high-pitched sketch presented in La volonté de savoir. He characterizes the phenomenon of the norm as the crucial mediating link in biopower between the regulatory technology of biopolitics and the technology of discipline: “There is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element that circulates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize.”142 In this sense the idea of a society of normalization designates an intersection between discipline and biopolitics, which together constitute a biopower that seeks control over both body and life.143 In continuation of the investigation of the history of state racism undertaken in “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault also emphasizes the functions of racism for biopower. He notes that racism serves to introduce a break within the biological continuum of the human species addressed by biopower between certain races that are described as good and others that are described as inferior in comparison. Such “biological-type caesuras” separate out specific groups within the otherwise normative undifferentiated domain of biopower.144 There is also a further function of racism for biopower that must be seen in light of the logic of warfare investigated in the earlier lectures of “Il faut défendre la société”. In the discourse of radical critique examined by Foucault, war remains the secret drive behind all apparent changes insofar as the social order and its apparent 140

[DS]: 219/{SD}: 246. [DS]: 223/{SD}: 250. There is one further mention of biopolitics from this period. This is in the lecture Les mailles du pouvoir, held in 1976. Although much less detailed, the conception briefly discussed here is identical to the one put forward in “Il faut défendre la société” and La volonté de savoir. Cf. “Les mailles de pouvoir” [1981] DE IV: 193–194/“The Meshes of Power,” p. 160–162. 142 [DS]: 225/{SD}: 252–253. 143 [DS]: 225/{SD}: 253. 144 [DS]: 227/{SD}: 255. 141

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peace is interpreted as a deceiving illusion behind which a hidden war is taking place. In the perspective of such a radical critique, the aim of war is no longer to establish a new peace, but rather war has become a state that cannot be transcended and that repeatedly splits the social sphere into two opposed forces. From this perspective, politics cannot be regarded as an activity that seeks to unite citizens into a substantial community that can perhaps even establish a state of peace but is rather a strategic endeavor that expresses an attempt to situate oneself advantageously in the ongoing battle – it is simply the continuation of war with other means. Now, in the last lecture of the course, Foucault suggests how such a form of rationality may reappear within the framework of biopower. As a power over life that employs both disciplinary techniques directed at individual bodies and biopolitical technologies addressing the population, biopower seeks to “optimize a state of life” and protect “the security of the whole from internal dangers.”145 The fact that biopower aims to optimize and protect the whole of a population makes it collide with the logic of warfare, which is structured around political exclusion, expulsion, and even the killing and extermination of adversaries in order to achieve victory. In the perspective of biopower, such a binary logic of opposition and violence is both uneconomic and excessively dangerous and therefore unacceptable. Thus, Foucault highlights the role that racism plays in circumventing these objections to the rationality of warfare and instead turning the regulatory mechanisms of biopower into an instrument for applying its bellicose logic to the social field. The crucial point is that racism reinterprets the political adversaries to be overcome as external or internal threats to the population, and in this way it allows the binary logic of warfare to unfold on new terms. Foucault thus concludes, “Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous functions of the State.”146 In the same context he indicates that with “murder” and “killing” he is also referring to the “indirect” murders of “expulsion, rejection, and so on,” which are defining aspects of the discourse of warfare he has investigated in previous lectures.147 The two chapters from Volontè de Savoir and “Il faut défendre la société”, both from 1976, are the only places in Foucault’s œuvre where he employs the notions of biopolitics and biopower analytically, and even in these contexts he remains, as we have seen, quite programmatic. This may seem surprising, not only given the title of the 1979 lectures, Naissance de la biopolitique but also because Sécurité, territoire, population from 1978 opens by stating that the lectures will be devoted to the study of what he has previously,“somewhat

145 146 147

[DS]: 219, 222/{SD}: 246, 249. [DS]: 228/{SD}: 256. [DS]: 228/{SD}: 256.

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heedlessly or thoughtlessly (un petit peu en l’air),” ”called” “biopower.”148 The fact is, however, that there is no further mention of biopower in the rest of Sécurité, territoire, population. Instead, Foucault goes on to present the history of dispositives as his methodological framework and then pursues the history of governmentality and its security mechanisms.149 As for Naissance de la biopolitique, the title of these lectures seems to be an embarrassment for Foucault insofar as he repeatedly apologizes that he is not delivering on its promise: although he intended to talk about biopolitics, he never succeeded in doing so.150 What concerns the idea of biopower as a modern constellation of the disciplinary and biopolitical technology is not mentioned in the later lectures at Collège de France, or in any of Foucault’s later publications for that matter. This does not mean that it is explicitly or implicitly rejected, but perhaps it indicates that its proper function is to be understood in relation to an analysis of the modern conception of both sexuality and racism. With regard to the notion of biopolitics, it is not disregarded but rather replaced to some extent in Foucault’s lectures on governmentality from 1978 and 1979. Once properly historically investigated, the technology of power addressing the population is renamed governmentality by Foucault instead of biopolitics.151 And not only is biopolitics replaced as the overall name for the technology of population; crucial aspects of what was conceived as biopolitics in 1976 is now analyzed as a modern form of governmentality employing mechanisms of security. For example, the work of Quesnay and the economic school of the physiocrats are now interpreted within the perspective of governmentality rather than as an aspect of biopolitics.152 From the three passages in the 1978 and 1979 lectures where biopolitics is briefly mentioned it is apparent, however, that Foucault found room for a more specific notion of biopolitics within the new framework of governmentality. In the fifth lecture of Sécurité, territoire, population, where Foucault explicates the presuppositions of his study of governmentality, he suggests that governmentality is to the state what “techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions.”153 In line with this conception he adds that biopolitics consists of “the general procedures for taking charge of life and illness in the West.”154 From the context it is clear that like the other technologies of power studied by Foucault, this new, specific version of

148 149 150 151 152 153 154

[STP]: 4/{STPo}: 1; translation corrected. See Chapter 7. [NB]: 23, 191, 323/{BP}: 21, 185, 317. [STP]: 111–112/{STPo}: 108–109. [STP]: 31–50/{STPo}: 30–49; [NB]: 62–63/{BP}: 61; cf. VS: 184/WK: 140. [STP]: 124/{STPo}: 120. [STP]: 124n/{STPo}: 120n.

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biopolitics cannot be confined to institutions, yet it can be said to find paradigmatic expression in specific modern institutions; namely, those structured by medical knowledge and techniques. Later he lists “Medizinische Polizei, public hygiene and social medicine” as institutions that should be studied within the framework of biopolitics in this more specific sense. Earlier in the lectures, he investigated the science of police in the 18th century as an art of government that aims to increase the power of the state and exert its strength to the full, while at the same time procuring the happiness of its citizens, that is, securing their survival and improving their living conditions. 155 He indicates that this tradition of police contains a biopolitics which treats the population in terms of “a set of coexisting living beings with particular biological and pathological features.”156 From the one relevant passage in Naissance de la biopolitique, it is clear that Foucault is also working with the same, specific notion of biopolitics. Biopolitics is thus defined as “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed by governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birth rate, life expectancy, race.”157 Characteristically, Foucault here alludes to the debate in England in the middle of the 19th century concerning public health legislation as an example of a biopolitical phenomenon.158 In the 1978 and 1979 lecture series, biopolitics and governmentality both have the population as their object, but, crucially, this does not imply that they are technologies of power on the same level. Rather, Foucault emphasizes in both lecture series that biopolitics is to be conceived as part of governmentality, which is therefore the overarching technology.159 Perhaps it may be concluded that in Foucault’s revised conception biopolitics is to governmentality what techniques of surveillance are to discipline, that is, an integral and irreducible rationality that is most fruitfully analyzed as a component in an overarching dispositive or technology. The limited notion of biopolitics in a sense returns us to Foucault’s initial formulation of biopolitics in 1974, where the notion was also developed in relation to phenomena such as social medicine, public hygiene, and public health. However, whereas the lectures held in Rio de Janeiro in 1974 conceived of biopolitics as a disciplinary form 155 [STP]: 319–336/{STPo}: 311–328. “‘Omnes et singulatim’: vers une critique de la raison politique” [1979], DE IV: 134–161/“‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” 180–201. Cf. Chapter 7. 156 STP: 377/{STPo}: 367. A passage from the lecture “The Political Technology of Individuals” held in 1982 confirms this interpretation. Here Foucault characterizes the politics of police as a biopolitics (“La technologie politique des individus” [1988], DE IV: 826/”The Political Technology of Individuals,” p. 160). 157 [NB]: 323/{BP}: 317. 158 [NB]: 323/{BP}: 317. 159 STP: 377/{STPo}: 367; [NB]: 25, 24, 323/{BP}: 22, 22 n., 317.

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of power, the framework has in 1978 and 1979 shifted: now it is governmental reason, including liberal governmentality, that we must understand before we are “able to grasp what biopolitics is.”160 The revised conception is extremely tentatively developed and Foucault never investigates it analytically in the lectures from these years or in his later work. The last sentence of Naissance de la biopolitique implies that such a historical analysis of biopolitics ought to be undertaken on the back of his investigation of governmentality over the two previous years,161 but for Foucault it remains an unexplored horizon. Whereas governmentality remains a continuous theme of research in the rest of his authorship – although no longer investigated in a modern context – he never develops a full analysis of biopolitics and biopower.162 This does not imply, however, that an investigation of these phenomena did not remain a worthwhile task for him, let alone that he would later reject the idea and purpose of such an investigation. In an interview conducted a year before his death in 1984, Foucault was asked whether it wouldn’t be logical for him to write a genealogy of biopower. He answered: “I have no time for that now, but it could be done. In fact, I have to do it.”163

7 Existential transformation: Examining Foucault’s turn to liberal thought in context The anticipating and foreboding character of Foucault’s analyses in 1979 expounded in this chapter may seem somewhat surprising, given that Foucault’s lectures were in many ways very timely. Lecturing in the 20th century, Foucault addressed a contemporary public as it was represented by the crowd turning up to attend his lectures at the Collège de France. The public of his time was of course affected by a wealth of experiences and vexed by a number of contemporary problems and topical questions that are in many ways no longer necessarily ours. In the accustomed manner, Foucault’s investigations were, as usual, prompted by and responded and related to a number of pressing contemporary political issues and ongoing social transitions. He even ventured into making specific recommendations for contemporary politics, jurisprudence, and social behavior.

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[NB]: 25/{BP}: 22. [NB]: 328/{BP}: 323. 162 There are no references to biopower and only rare mentions of biopolitics after 1979. Foucault did give a talk on The Birth of Biopolitics at Princeton in November 1980, but this has not been published (cf. D. Defert: “Chronology” [2013], p. 74). 163 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1983). 161

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Ongoing activist activity. At the time, Foucault still committed himself over and over again to political activism in defense of historically established civil rights as they were encroached upon by governments, be they from the right or the left wing of the political spectrum, in the name of a higher political necessity164. As described in the previous chapter, Foucault took part in a symbolic barricade outside La Prison de la Santé in Paris in November 1977 in order to prevent the administrative expulsion without legal proceedings of Rote Armee Fraktion’s defense attorney, Klaus Croissant, from France to the Federal Republic of Germany. The aim was to defend the right of the accused to have a fair trial and a loyal defense and to demonstrate that the rule of law should not be revoked to defend the state of Western democracy against politically motivated terrorism.165 In March 1979, Foucault placed his apartment at the disposal of an IsraeliPalestinian symposium. Later the same year, Foucault committed himself to the cause of the Vietnamese boat people trying to flee Vietnam by ship after the end of the Vietnam War. Participating in a public meeting, Foucault demanded that French President Giscard D’Estaing increase the number of refugees permitted to claim refuge in France. For Foucault, these incidents were not to be regarded as isolated occurrences, but as omens foreboding “the great migration” that Foucault expected to become a prominent trait of the 21st century.166 Even later, at a press conference in Geneva in 1981 to inaugurate La Comité International contre la piraterie, which was an initiative for nongovernmental action in defense of the Vietnamese boat people attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, Foucault wrote and read aloud a declaration invoking an “international citizenship.” It involved both the right and the obligation of all members always “to make an issue of people’s misfortune, to keep it in the eyes and ears of governments.” Inspired by the example of contemporary NGOs such as Amnesty International, Terre des hommes, and Médecins du monde, Foucault invoked “this new right: that of private individuals actually to intervene in the order of international politics and strategies,” since, “after all, we are all governed and, to that extent, in solidarity.”167 On the one hand, the experience of marked changes in the relationship between the juridical and the social thus continued to spur Foucault’s activism in the remaining years of his life. He continued to commit himself to a vigorous

164

See Chapter 2, in particular box 2.1. “Foucault’s political activities.. Cf. the first paragraphs of the previous chapter. 166 “Le problème des réfugiés est un présage de la grande migration du XXIe siècle” [1979], DE III: 824. 167 “Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme” [later published in Liberation 1984], DE IV: 707. 165

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defense of civil rights as they were brought under pressure to bow to social concerns of the greatest importance. Crucial among these concerns was the consideration for public security, as described in our previous chapter. Equally crucial was the pragmatic necessity to further the progress of civil society and social welfare. On the other hand, this experience seems to have provided an incentive to initiate joint studies at the adjoined seminar of 1979 at The Collège de France, since they were devoted to the examination of a previous parallel “crisis of juridical thought towards the end of the 19th century,” which brought about a change in the status of law.168 Keeping up with challenging contemporary collaborators and interlocutors. In his interventions and in the lectures, Foucault was thus concomitantly inspired by and entered into discussion with a number of contemporary theoretical and analytical interlocutors. Some of these interlocutors were at the time fairly close collaborators, taking part in the exchange around Foucault seminars; others were already or were to become public figures. Among those were Pierre Rosanvallon (b. 1948), later to occupy the professorial chair of modern and recent political history at the Collège de France. In his book L’âge de l’autogestion, Rosenvallon criticizes traditional conceptions of sovereignty, law, political representation in the form of representative democracy, and socialism for being insufficient modes of democratic governance, as they downplay the importance and inevitability of self-governance. Accordingly, he anticipates that “autogestion” is destined to replace crucial 18th- and 19th-century political terms such as ‘republic’ and ‘socialism’ and become the central political term of the future.169 Also crucial among the participants in the seminar was the sociologist Jacques Donzelot (b. 1943), who had added new issues to the agenda when he published La police des familles in 1977, and he would concomitantly and subsequently carry out research that would lead to a number of articles and the book L’invention du social, published in 1984. In his publications, Donzelot demonstrated how since the 18th century the state had unceasingly overstepped its political foundation based on the equal sovereignty of all and the divide between the public and the private as a guarantor of the progress of civil society. To manage the populations and economize the bodies, it became essential to intervene actively in the private sphere of the family. In the course of this development, a social sector of its own came into existence in the 19th

168 “Naissance de la biopolitique’, Annuaire du Collège de France” [1979], DE III: 824. The talks included investigations of not only civil, public, administrative, and penal law but also of health law and security measures. 169 P. Rosanvallon: L’age de l’autogestion ou La politique au poste de commandement (1976).

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century, even as the social began to appear as an independent field in its own right and with a logic of its own. Invited by Foucault’s partner, the sociologist Daniel Defert, Donzelot, and a number of other members of the seminar in 1977–1979 became involved in writing several government reports on accidents in the workplace, commissioned by the Labor Ministry of France.170 Among these were Foucault’s research assistant from 1976 to 1983, François Ewald (b. 1946). In the course of this research, Defert wrote a genealogy of life insurance, Donzelot coauthored a report on unemployment insurance, and Ewald stumbled upon what he later termed a “major philosophical event.”171 It was a law issued by the French Third Republic in 1898 to compensate workers for accidents in the workplace by insuring them according to the risk taken. This law on responsibility for work accidents introduced a hitherto unseen sense of shared human responsibility for risks that have become prevalent in industrial society at the expense of a more traditional juridical and moral notion of responsibility as personal fault, or the individual obligation to carry the cost of what is experienced as the result of a moment’s negligence or just bad luck. As a consequence, at first glance this obscure piece of legislation is to be regarded as a “world-changing event” of far-reaching importance, according to Ewald. Not only does it compete with and surpass the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 in importance, but it coincidently leaves them behind and goes beyond them as it sanctions a “profound mutation in man’s relationship to himself,” which previously implied that man in industrial society assumes responsibility for the social and insures himself. It marks the foundation of political modernity because it questions and transgresses the political space that revealed itself particularly clearly in these historic revolutionary events, which included a political order and discourse characterized by binary political-juridical opposition, violent struggle, oppression, and revolution, and by the idea that a final confrontation could lead to a just representative order or a new contract beyond the previous struggles. Against this, something irreducible is presented with the social measures and laws establishing a shared responsibility concerning accidents, work and unemployment, disease, and age, which have been implemented since the end of the 19th century but have a prehistory dating back to practices and techniques for shipping, fire and life insurance originating since the late Middle Ages.172

170 M.C. Behrent: “Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the ‘Antirevolutionary’ Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State” (2010): 585–624. 171 F. Ewald: L’Etat providence (1986), p. 9. 172 F. Ewald: L’État providence (1986), pp. 10, 181–193.

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The potentially world-changing character of these new kinds of measures was made clear by Donzelot again in a 1978 article, which at first glance presents itself as a book review of primarily Pour une nouvelle culture politique, written by Patrick Virelet and Pierre Rosanvallon, but which at closer inspection is an appraisal of the bearings of research conducted in conjunction with Foucault’s seminar. Even when such measures remain connected to political struggles, it is important to note that they contain something “irreducible to the simple logic of struggle, of victory and defeat” and introduce something “specific into the social relations. This new element is a technology, a form of social arrangement [agencement social] inherited from business practices [pratiques marchandes] and transposed onto the level of an entire society’s security problems [transposée sur le plan des problemes de sécurité de toute une société]: the insurance technology [la technologie assurantielle]. It is a very general technology in itself that may be used and is used in various manners in other political configurations but that will provoke, by successive indirect and unexpected repercussions, the emergence of a particular form of social coherence. ”173 In all these ways and in many others, aspects of the social seemed to become unmistakably present that were irreducible to the state, its sovereignty and government, not only in the sense that they decisively exceeded it but also in the sense that they laid bare the limitations of state and sovereignty and actively imposed restrictions on its range as they manifested an irreducible logic of their own of consequence for the ‘inner’ workings of the state, including its legitimacy and justification. Something appeared that was neither to be located inside the state and its sovereignty nor clearly outside its workings as an irreducible state of nature. Dissatisfaction with contemporary political culture and analysis. Closely associated with this detection of new kinds of social technologies and the discovery of the emergence of the social as an irreducible field was a deeply shared sense of unease or embarrassment with regard to existing political culture and analysis among the participants in the research seminar. Existing political culture tended to view political interaction essentially as a confrontation between two opposing forces trying to vanquish or prevail over each other to make up for previous injustices and thus install the right order. In accordance with this conception of politics, received political analysis tended to focus on the state, as it positioned the play of social forces around this entity and basically conceived and ‘politicized’ them as an attempt to conquer this central

173

J. Donzelot: “Misère de la culture politique” (1978), p. 580.

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agency to replace it with something else. According to Donzelot and others, an important offspring for this common Manichean conception of politics was to be found in the social and political battles of the 19th century and formed “the strategic configuration of our modernity.”174 The notion continued to prevail in contemporary leading theories such as classical political economy and Marxism. Within this conception of politics, revolutionary activity tended to be perceived as the political act par excellence, as it aims at overturning the existing social order and taking possession of the state to install an alternative and more just state of affairs. The sense of dissatisfaction with the existing “political theatre” and the discovery of social elements and techniques that were irreducible to this raised a fundamental problem, succinctly stated by a central participant in the seminars, Pasquale Pasquino, in 1978: “If the theatre of our political reason is empty, I believe this is not just because the piece which has been, and is still being, played in it is laughable. I think it is much more because a ground has crumbled away beneath our feet, the ground upon which there emerged and developed the discourse and practice of what for a century at least has been known in Europe, and for us, as the ‘left’ – including the ‘far’ left. On what ground are we standing now?”175 While the described analytical grid had worked productively in its time and had a profound impact on Western history, the general impression in the research environment at the Collège de France was that it had had its day. It now had mainly limiting effects and impoverished not only political analysis and action but also the ability to grasp empirically what was going on, as well as the ability to anticipate what could come. In an interview conducted in 1977, Foucault explicitly states that “we must recognize that we live in an impoverished world, as concerns political imagination” and explicitly levels criticism against Marxism for forming an integral part of this conjecture and “having contributed to and still contributing to this impoverishment of political imagination.”176 Accordingly, a pressing issue for researchers in the environment around Foucault was to decenter themselves from and out-distance present political and theoretical culture with its emphasis on state, sovereignty, and representation, as well as its focus on political antagonism and struggle, its predilection for seizing power and resistance, its enduring fascination in collective will, and the revolution as a manifestation of collective will that would overthrow

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J. Donzelot: “Misère de la culture politique” (1978), pp. 578–579. P. Pasquino: “Theatrum politicum: The Genealogy of Capital: Police and the State of Prosperity” (1991), p. 117. 176 “Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: Comment se débarasser du marxisme” [1977], DE III: 599–600. 175

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the existing order.177 Still, the question remained: How exactly should this reinvigoration of political imagination proceed? A shift in accent. Foucault had already begun addressing these questions in the lectures of the previous years. With Sécurité, territoire et population, he had examined to what extent it was possible to “catch up with [rejoindre] the general problems of the state,” yet with another approach that started from “the local and microscopic analysis of forms characterized by the pastorat.”178 In this manner, Foucault had been able to demonstrate that “the problem” of “a dynamics of forces [d’une dynamique des forces] and the rational techniques that permitted to intervene hereinto” was more important than the “problem of a sovereign’s legitimacy over a territory.”179 With this, however, Foucault had been able to produce a decisive shift, yet still limited. He had mainly managed to focus on and follow “the development and the implementation [la mise en place] of the reason of state,” as he put in retrospect at the beginning of the lectures of 1979;180 in accordance with this shift, a “more exact title” of Sécurité, territoire et population would have been “A history of governmentality, population and government.”181 Nevertheless, the change remained limited in the sense that “it was a matter of shift of accent,” “not of a substitution.”182 Foucault left out “the thousand and one different modalities and possible ways that exist for guiding men, directing their conduct, constraining their actions and reactions,” inter alia “the government of children, of families of a household, of souls, of communities,” to center his investigation on the art of government only “in so far as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty.”183 The change in the scope of the investigation was thus limited. Since the purpose was still primarily to account for the development of the reason of state, Polizeiwissenschaft, and the implementation of an unbounded and all-encompassing rationality of 177

To attempt to distance himself from ruling Western conceptions, Foucault decided to go to Iran twice in 1978 to cover the ongoing Iranian uprising against the Shah for the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera. In this manner, he tried to gain firsthand experience with an “ideational” report not only on rebellion against Western ideologies, processes of modernization, and liberalization but also on a revolt that would not necessarily be destined to take on the form of Western revolution. In these respects, Foucault considered the appearance of Islam as a political force and as a problem an essential challenge that needed to be examined more closely. See Chapter 11 for a more developed discussion of Foucault’s journey to Iran. 178 [STP]: 365–366/{STPo}: 358. 179 “Sécurité, territoire et population” [1978], DE III: 720–721/”Security, Territory, and Population,” pp. 68–69. 180 [NB]: 5/{BP}: 3. 181 [STP]: 111/{STPo}: 108. 182 “Sécurité, territoire et population” [1978], DE III: 719/”Security, Territory, and Population,” p. 67. 183 [STP]: 3/{STPo}: 1–2.

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governmentality that aimed at augmenting the power of the state, the change with regard to the angle of approach remained equally limited.184 At the beginning of the 1979 lectures, the pertinent question remained of how to transgress traditional political oppositions and give added weight to and account for the development of social techniques and forms of organizing that have developed and transgress existing political culture and its world of ideas. New agenda-setting social procedures had developed outside the existing political universe to such an extent that the ground had crumbled underneath the traditional political theater and a different approach was called for. Piecemeal progress. As he proceeds through Naissance de la biopolitique and tries to overcome the limitations in the approach hitherto practiced, Foucault seems, to some extent, at a loss as to what to do, and he appears to proceed in a very piecemeal fashion. He appears to take preliminary runs only to break off as he stumbles across various preexisting bits and pieces; then, as he picks these up and examines them more closely, he wonders whether the isolated occurrences may be pieced together in various ways that might permit him to think of an idea of their location within a larger setting. Before this task is completed, however, he abandons this activity, only to set off and try out another direction. Evidently, the puzzle Foucault managed to piece together in the 1979 lectures appears particularly fractured. Nevertheless, it was in the course of this piecemeal process that Foucault embarked on an investigation that opened new vistas, revealing a complex, compound, complicated, and at this time still relatively unexplored landscape. While consisting of a number of preliminary runs, the lectures of 1979 nonetheless mark a decisive turning point in Foucault’s œuvre that opens new vistas and permits him to leap off in new directions. The puzzle that Foucault managed to piece together resembles a patchwork, but it draws an outline of a relatively diffuse landscape that has stayed with us and become a ubiquitous part of our contemporaneity. At the same time it suggests lines for further exploration that deviate from the all-too-well-trodden paths. In all these respects, Foucault’s investigation remains of relevance.

184

In a lengthy conversation with Japanese activist and philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto (1924–2012), Foucault admits that the conversation has made him aware that his work has serious “limitations” and “parts that are still missing,” in particular his 1978 course on “the formation of the state” and “on the bases for establishing the state in a period from the 16th to the 17th centuries in the West, or to be more precise, the process in the course of which the so-called reason of state is formed” (“Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarasser du marxisme” [1977], DE III: 617). Still, the main question that remains to be examined here is “the gigantic and irrepressible thirst that forces us to turn towards the state,” not against it.

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A new turn toward theory and liberal thought. Foucault’s turn and alternative approach points to and is intimately linked with a new conception of theory that moves beyond the received idea of theory, or theory as it was usually situated within contemporary political and academic culture. According to Foucault, theory is not to be perceived as an art that simply presents or represents, renders or re-renders reality. Neither is it to be explained as a result of certain interests, an ideology expressing and covering up a play of forces, or as the prediction of a time to come that transcends present antagonisms. Problematizing traditional oppositions between theory and practice, Foucault instead approaches the theoretical texts examined in the lectures as texts establishing and manifesting a knowledge that introduces and produces a certain social ordering that transcends the simple logic of confrontation. Accordingly, he begins to approach and analyze theory and knowledge as social technologies that entail and permit a certain virtual programing of the social. This leads him to strive to articulate the singular forms of generalizable social cohesion that can be detected in the forms of theory and knowledge under examination, which are outlined here as implicitly present and generally binding.185 The approach to theory practiced in the lectures of 1979 is of consequence for the question of how to understand Foucault’s relationship to the field investigated here, in particular his much discussed relationship to and analysis of liberalism. In extension of his re-situation of theory and in accordance with his diagnostic approach, Foucault does not devote himself passionately to presently often recurring discussions concerning the pros and cons of liberalism and liberal economic theory. At stake here is not the issue of determining whether liberalism is right or wrong, either in the sense of depicting historical and contemporary reality adequately or in the sense of being the most just or most efficient ordering of society. Nor does Foucault address the issue whether and to what extent he himself subscribes or adheres to liberalism or neoliberalism as a political position, ideology or scientific theory. Instead, Foucault approaches liberalism in a very provisional manner as a social event in order to tentatively explore and unfold what might be the purport and the implications of this event in the long run, even though it may still be in the making and thus may not even have fully arrived.186 As he 185 When developing the history and analytics of dispositives, Foucault initiates this approach to social phenomena. Foucault’s focus on theoretical texts as social events with important performative implications is also in continuance of his much earlier insistence on the performative character of discursive events and of knowledge. Cf. AS: 38–39/AK: 26–27. 186 As a political movement, liberalism was still in the making at Foucault’s time of lecturing and writing. Only in the wake of Foucault’s examination did liberalism begin to achieve political supremacy in the Western world and become a seemingly self-evident doctrine, dominating economic policy and theory. The election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States from 1981 to 1989 can be adduced as indicating this shift.

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investigates a body of knowledge in the making, claiming to speak the truth about society in the face of governmental power, Foucault tries to follow the intriguing twists and turns of its coming into being. In this manner, he tries to articulate how the liberal art of governing has come into being as an agendasetting veridictional regime that has become binding and in this way has also become a piece of social machinery that has decisively changed the social game. Foucault’s examination centers on the establishment of a new form of veridiction to explore how it has been brought into effect as a social technology: a piece of social engineering that has permitted a reprograming of the social while transcending antagonisms hitherto taken for granted. Furthermore, he tries to follow the lines of flight of this piece of virtual programing as it established to outline where it may lead us if it is generalized and developed further. At stake in Foucault’s lectures is thus the exploration of liberalism at work as a potentially world-changing event of far-reaching importance, an event that is still in the making. Foucault had come to perceive liberalism as a body of knowledge that had attained a scientific and binding status and thus managed to change the “political experience” of his time in ineluctable ways. In these respects, it resembled an important and at this time still very present predecessor, namely Marxism. Even though Marxism “had emerged in the midst of rational thought, as a science,” as a way of speaking the truth, it is evident to Foucault that Marxism and science should not be reduced to “a sum of propositions taken for the truth.” Marxism “needed to be worked through in order to determine how it “functions in modern society” and articulates the manner in which an “undeniable” “historic event” of this kind opens a new space while also having normative and coercive effects; as did liberalism.187 A transformative philosophical experience. In line with the transition performed in Foucault’s own lectures in the spring of 1979, the seminar of the following year was devoted to “certain aspects of the liberal thought in the 19th century” and included presentations given by Rosanvallon and Ewald.188 Yet, as a specific thematic for Foucault’s presentations, liberalism and liberal economics vanished at the same point, never to reappear. Understood at a thematic level, Foucault’s examinations of liberalism may thus be understood as disjecta membra of Foucault’s œuvre, a relatively isolated part that resulted from a sudden conversion, only to be followed through and ended by an equally sudden reconversion and abandonment. Resituated within Foucault’s

187

“Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarasser du marxisme” [1978], DE III: 618, 600. 188 “Du gouvernement des vivants” [1981], DE IV: 129.

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overall train of thought, however, the transfiguration performed in the lectures of 1979 is of significantly more long-ranging importance. The lectures of 1979 indicated a transition in Foucault’s analysis of power that reengaged with and transcended his own previous analysis of power relations. In the lectures of 1976 entitled “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault examined how one had come to understand civil order fundamentally as an “order of battle [un ordre de la bataille],” and “that it was war that functioned within power relations” to such an extent that “an ongoing combat worked through peace.”189 Accordingly, his main problem with regard to truth was then: “What are the rules of right that power implements to produce discourses of truth? Or: What type of power is it that is capable of producing discourses of power that have, in a society like ours, such powerful effects?”190 In the lectures of 1979 and onward, by contrast, Foucault dissociates himself from the potential reductionism inherent in the model of war. He emphasizes the irreducibility and the self-dependence of knowledge and truth but also stresses the antagonism between power, knowledge, and truth while giving prominence to the experience of there being something incontrollable in the enunciation of truth, even though the exercise of power remains crucially dependent on the enunciation of truth and knowledge. Foucault further accentuates the ambiguous antagonism between truthtelling and established power in the “political and institutional ethnology of truth-telling [le dire-vrai] or truthful speech [la parole vraie],” including studies of ancient parrēsia, which forms a central concern for a number of lectures in the 1980s at the Collège de France, Berkley, and Leuven.191 Yet, already at the beginning of the lectures of 1980, Du gouvernement des vivants, Foucault began to sketch out a turn in this direction in extension of his lectures during the previous year. According to Foucault, “it would be very difficult to find an example of a power that would exercise itself without being accompanied ... with a manifestation of truth.”192 In this context, Foucault accentuated the fact that “this truth, the manifestation of which accompanies the exercise of power, goes far beyond knowledge useful for government.”193 Accordingly, “the exercise of power [which is called ‘hegemony’ in Greek] ... the fact of being in a position of leading others, of conducting them, and of 189

RC: 87. [DS]: 22/{SD}: 24. 191 [MFDV]: 17/{WDTT}: 28. Cf. also the lectures at the Collège de France Subjectivité et vérité (1980–1981), L’hérmeneutique du sujet (1981–1982), Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (1982–1983), Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Le courage de la vérité (1983–1984), and the lectures at University of California Berkley Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia (1983). See Chapter 11. 192 [GV]: 6/{GL}: 4. 193 [GV]: 7/{GL}: 5. 190

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conducting, as it were, their conduct ... [could not exist] without something like an alethurgy,” without a disclosure of truth.194 As stated in the first lecture of the 1979 series, Foucault here never completely abandoned the perspective of sovereignty. Instead, he focused on how limitations of sovereignty appeared from within the perspective of sovereignty in the form of the recognition of necessary restraints on the exercise of sovereignty, a necessity acknowledged in the reflection on the practice of sovereign government. At the thematic level and with regard to the subject examined, Foucault thus never completely left the perspective of sovereignty behind. However, it was the form of conversion initiated in the lectures of 1979 that formed the basis for his later recognition and examination of instances of sovereignty, which were no longer specifically limited to the political sphere, the state, and governmentality but originated elsewhere and were dispersed throughout the social body. Foucault took his leave from sovereignty as it was understood within traditional political thought and the theory of sovereignty only to discover and articulate how sovereignty in various respects is incorporated into self-governance.195 The conception of a highest authority in social life that is free and can freely rule and define society above the rest of us becomes an essential disseminated element of self-governance and the truth that originated as a result of the interaction of self-governing entities. At the level of philosophical self-examination and self-transcendence the conversion may seem more radical. As an author examining himself and trying to create an experience in thought, Foucault increasingly seems to give up the perspective of sovereignty and control to see where his ongoing examination may lead him. In the lectures, Foucault’s ongoing reconversion is probably most strikingly felt in the misleading character of the titles Foucault chose – and elected to keep – for his lectures. Sécurité, territoire et population ended up being a scrutiny of governmentality, even as Naissance de la biopolitique ended up being an examination of the birth and purport of liberal thought. This selfoblivion manifests a commitment to an ongoing self-conversion in the realm of thought. As is evident from the previous description of Foucault’s commitment to practical activities, these experiences and transitions did not motivate him to abandon his activist attitude. In accordance with the importance Foucault placed in extra-statist social activity, Foucault continued to commit himself to advancing the claims of nongovernmental actions and to speaking truth in the face of established governmental power.

194 195

[GV]: 8/{GL}: 7. “Subjectivité et vérite” [1981], DE IV: 213.

9 Histories of Sexualities

Foucault and (homo)sexuality. At the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault gave a number of interviews in which he was asked about conditions for homosexuals.1 These conversations were partly motivated by Foucault. Despite being an academic celebrity at the time, he was not hiding his own homosexuality and was considered a kind of expert in the field in extension of his 1976 Histoire de sexualité. In this context, Foucault emphasized that modern man seems to be in need of creating new experiences as to sexuality and gender – in relation to which he pointed out how the homosexual environment could serve as a template for experiential practices of this kind, especially through its desire to experiment with new modalities of life and community. Foucault sums this argument up in a conversation from 1982, in which he points out that the gay environment, instead of a “science of ... or a scientific conscience about ... what sexuality really is,” is in need of a gay form of life: A gay-future can take the shape of “the creation of new forms of life, of relations, of friendships, of art and culture in society, of new forms of ethics and politics to be established across our sexual choices.”2 Foucault’s so-called journey back to antiquity in the latter part of the authorship has, in the light of such comments, been interpreted as an attempt

1

These interviews are primarily: “Le triomphe social du plaisir sexuel: une conversation avec Michel Foucault” [1982], DE IV: 308–314/“The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” pp. 157–162. “Choix sexuel, acte sexuel” [1982], DE IV: 320–335/“Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” pp. 141–156. “Michel Foucault, une interview: sexe, pouvoir et la politique de l‘identité” (1984), DE IV: 735–746/”Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” 163–173. 2 “Michel Foucault, une interview: sexe, pouvoir et la politique de l‘identité” [1984], DE IV: 735–736/“Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” pp. 163–164.

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to reawaken the classical ethic or art of living as pertaining to modern man’s effort to (re)create himself and his identity.3 Such a reinvigoration of antiquity was supposedly to counteract the modern tendency to define and determine identities according to sexual orientation, due to the apparent fact that homosexual experiences in the Classical Period did not interfere with a general conception of what a person is. In antiquity, sexual ethics did not appear to take an outset in an established identity or sexual orientation but in a certain use of pleasure that without distinguishing could be directed toward man or woman, slave or youth. Foucault has contributed to this impression of his later work. In a conversation from 1982, he admits, “If you mean by ethics a code that would tell us how to act, then of course The History of Sexuality is not an ethics. But if by ethics you mean the relationship you have to yourself when you act, then I would say that it intends to be an ethics, or at least to show what could be an ethics of sexual behavior. It would be one that would not be dominated by the problem of the deep truth of the reality of our sex life. The relationship that I think we need to have with ourselves when we have sex is an ethics of pleasure, of intensification of pleasure.”4 In an interview from 1984 concerning his later studies on classical philosophy Foucault furthermore claims that, “the problem of an ethics as a form to be given to one’s conduct and to one’s life has again been raised.”5 Again in 1982, Foucault also hints that this effort concerning a new kind of ethics can find support in two conceptions from antiquity that interest him: “The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me. The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation to the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure. All that is very interesting.”6 Finally, in 1984, Foucault notes that: “From Antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience 3 Cf. W. Schmid: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst (1991), pp. 10, 35. W. Schmid: Die Geburt der Philosophie im Garten der Lüste (1987), pp. 13–36. T. O‘Leary: Foucault and the Art of Ethics (2002), pp. 2–3. J. Davila: “Éthique de la parole et jeu de la vérité” (2003), pp. 196–200. P. Veyne: “Le dernier Foucault et sa morale,” Critique, 471–472 (1986), p. 939. P. Hadot: “Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault” (1987), p. 230. This perspective can also be found in the following works, albeit to a lesser degree: H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983), pp. 254–257. J. C. Monod: Foucault: La police des conduites (1997), p. 113. 4 “An Interview by Stephen Riggins” [1982], p. 131/“Une interview de Michel Foucault par Stephen Riggins,” DE IV: 536. 5 “Le souci de la vérité,” DE IV: 674/“The Concern for Truth,” p. 461. Cf. [HS]: 242/ {HSb}: 252–253. 6 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 235.

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to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence.”7 With modern thinkers of aesthetics such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) as inspiration, and with classical thought as the key material, Foucault could therefore seek to sketch a special form of existence in which the self was able to treat its life, behavior and being, that is, its ēthos and self, in an artistic manner.8 In short, many have viewed Foucault’s late works as representing the rise of an individualized and aesthetic ethical thought consisting in the development of a personal attitude as well as a series of practices and goals whereby we would be able to guide our own moral formation of ourselves. In tandem, the reception has developed a picture of Foucault in which ethics and an actively self-forming subject came to the forefront of his foregoing analyses concerned with a passive subject shaped by technologies of power and discursive practices, which had been in focus earlier in his authorship.9 Upon closer inspection, this impression is a simplification. Not enough emphasis has been put on exchanges such as the following from 1984: “– A style of existence – that’s admirable. These Greeks, did you find them admirable? ” Foucault’s answer is clear: “– No. – Neither exemplary nor admirable? – No. – What did you think of them? – Not very much. They were stymied right away against what seems to me to be the point of contradiction in ancient morality: 7 “Une esthétique de l’existence” [1984] DE IV: 732/“An Aesthetics of Existence,” p. 451. 8 Cf. T. O’Leary: Foucault and the Art of Ethics, pp. 2–3. J. Davila: “Éthique de la parole et jeu de la vérité,” pp. 196–200. P. Veyne: “Le dernier Foucault et sa morale,” p. 939. P. Hadot: “Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault,” p. 230. From this aesthetics of existence it was supposedly possible to cash in on the promise made by Baudelaire’s dandy, who according to Foucault “makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art” (“Qu‘est-ce que les lumières?” [1], DE IV: 571/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 50), or by Nietzsche, when he laments the deficiencies in the artist’s poēsis, as it usually loses its power exactly “where art ends and life begins” and prophesizes that ”we,” by contrast, “want to be the poets of our own lives” (F. Nietzsche: Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, IV. 299, KSA 3, p. 538; our translation). In this interpretation, Foucault’s aim was – as with Nietzsche before him – to consider the writers from antiquity as especially insightful in this regard, as their ethical thought often drew on metaphor and thought patterns where existence was shaped, created, and styled in an especially pleasing or beautiful way and only with a limited concern for the external institutional system and its norms. Cf. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 231. 9 Cf. W. Schmid: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst, p. 64. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 254. F. Évrard: Michel Foucault et l’histoire du sujet en Occident, pp. 98–99. G. Deleuze: Pourparlers, pp. 134, 148–149. G. Deleuze: Foucault, pp. 101–104. H.H. Kögler: Michel Foucault, pp. 137, 145.

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between, on the one hand, this obstinate search for a certain style of existence and, on the other, the effort to make it common to everyone ... All of Antiquity seems to me to have been a ‘profound error’ [une profonde erreur].”10 This critical rebuttal of classical moral thought can be supplemented by a comment from 1983: “The Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other, an obsession with penetration, and a kind of threat of being dispossessed of your own energy, and so on. All that is quite disgusting!”11 Hence, it seems unlikely that Foucault sought a revitalization of a kind of thought that he considered ‘profoundly erroneous’ and “rather disgusting.” His aim is much wider. Desire, government, confession. During the 1980s Foucault often gives his overall aim as being an attempt to unravel a genealogy of the subject.12 He hereby points to a recurring theme in his authorship, namely that the subject is not a given and static form and hence must be studied historically.13 This genealogy of the subject as a historical reality appears in a number of areas, which Foucault was unable to collect under one theme. Nonetheless, it is possible to speak of three main themes in this historical analysis. The first concerns a genealogy of sexual ethics and a history of desiring man.14 Foucault hereby examines how “Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire” and “how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive domain.”15 Foucault in other words studies how the antique problematization of sexual behavior in early Christianity was reinterpreted into a problematization of sexual desire, all while he presents how the antique problematization appeared in itself and was thereby distinguished from Christian and modern modalities of problematization. 10 “Le retour de la morale,” DE IV: 698/“The Return of Morality,” p. 466. The translation is slightly modified and supplemented with a passage from the original French interview (“Neither exemplary ... ”). 11 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 233. 12 Cf. “Subjectivity and Truth,” p. 4; “The Subject and Power,” p. 208. “Foucault,” DE IV: 632. 13 Cf. e.g. “Une esthétique de l‘existence” [1984], DE IV: 733/“An Aesthetics of Existence,” p. 452, where Foucault emphasizes: “In the first place, I do indeed believe that there is no sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject to be found everywhere. I am very sceptical of this view of the subject and very hostile to it. I believe, on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity” (translation modified). 14 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 240. 15 UP: 11–12/UPl: 5–6.

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The second general theme that concerns Foucault in his genealogy of the subject is a parallel history of a subjectivity that both governs itself and is governed by others. He here delves into how the relationship between ethics and politics has been problematized in different ways through antiquity. Accordingly, Foucault attempts in his analysis to take into account “the contact point, where the individuals are driven [and known] by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves [and know themselves].”16 If one therefore considers it an ethical activity to guide or attempt to set right one’s own freedom (government of self) and a political activity to guide or attempt to set right the freedom of others (government of others), it becomes clear that Foucault’s studies of antiquity includes an inquiry into how the ethical government of the self has become incorporated into and confronted with government of others.17 For instance, he studies how classical modalities of government were transformed through the Christian pastoral power.18 In the transition from the golden age of Hellenism to early Christianity, not only was desire established as a problem, but also the modalities of management were transformed.19 The third theme in Foucault’s comprehensive genealogy of the subject takes the shape of a historical genesis of the confessing subject, most notably in the Collège de France lectures, Du government des vivants (The Government of the Living), held in 1980. Here he examines how the subject has become committed to various ways of telling truth about itself.20 In 1983, Foucault hereby determines that his interest “has always been the question of truth, of telling the truth ... – what it is to tell the truth – and the relation between telling the truth

16 “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980], Political Theory 21:2 (1993): 198–227; p. 203. The reason for the square brackets is that the cited publication of the two lectures given at Dartmouth on November 17 and 24, 1980, and entitled “Subjectivity and Truth” and “Christianity and Confession,” respectively, have included in endnotes a number of additions from Foucault’s previous presentation of the lectures given at Berkeley on October 20–21 of the same year, which are known as the Howison Lectures. 17 Cf. “L‘éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la vérité,” DE IV: 711–12. RC: 136. 18 Cf. RC: 136. 19 Cf. “The Subject and Power,” p. 214. 20 Cf. [GV]/{GL} and [SV]. The historical examination of truth activities conceived as the procedures that connect a certain subject with a certain kind of truth and truth-telling represents yet another track in Foucault’s late thought. The inquiry commenced in 1980 is thus continued in the 1982 lectures L’herméneutique du sujet (The Hermenutics of the Subject) ([HS]/{HSb}), with a focus on the care of the self, and further in the lectures of 1983 and 1984, entitled Le governement de soi et autres and Le courage de la vérité: Le governement de soi et autres II (The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II) ([GSA1]/{GSO1}, [GSA2]/{GSO2}). See also {FS}. We treat part of this history in the following chapter.

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and forms of reflexivity, of self upon self.”21 As we will demonstrate, Foucault identifies a shift from antiquity to early Christianity. The famous dictum “Know thyself [gnōthi seauton]” was in the golden age of antiquity subordinate to the lesser known “care of the self [epimeleia heautou]” for the benefit of actual living. This changed in early Christianity, when knowledge of the self eventually became integrated into confession, as the individual admitted the most intimate details about sinful thoughts and actions to a spiritual guide. Incomplete works. In 1983 and 1984, Foucault worked intensively on at least four different book projects, of which only one was published as volumes II and III of Histoire de la sexualité, which came out in June of 1984, only weeks before his death. The three remaining projects were never fully realized.22 Besides the two mentioned volumes, Foucault primarily worked on a book that went by the title of Les aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh), which was to be volume IV of the Histoire de la sexualité and which was to concern the problematization of sexual desire in early Christianity. Foucault had actually been writing this before the final and published versions of volumes II and III, but the development and the refined insights of these two had required a revision of Les aveux de la chair. Foucault gave up on this, however, as he became aware that the AIDS he had acquired would not allow him to live long enough. This did not prevent him from adding a note to volumes II and III, where he anticipated the content of volume IV: “Les aveux de la chair treats the experience of the flesh [experience de la chair] in the first centuries of the Christian era and the role played in this context by a hermeneutics and a purifying decipherment of desire.”23 The first section in this chapter will be concerned with volumes II and III, while the second will deal with the fragments of volume IV such as they can be traced and reconstructed from Foucault’s fragments of posthumous work.24 Most notably, these fragments include an extract or perhaps a 21 “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” DE IV: 445/“Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” p. 446. Foucault expands upon this subject in a conversation from 1981: “Actually, we find in the confession a fundamental notion of our manner of being connected to what I call ‘obligations’ to truth. ... The problem consists in knowing whether this relation between truth and what we are takes on its own form in Western Christianity.” “Interview de Michel Foucault,” DE IV p. 658. Cf. also [HS]: 243/{HSb}: 253. 22 A valuable overview of the different phases of Histoire de la sexualité and other works in progress in the late 1970s and early 1980s can be found in S. Elden: “The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault’s History of Sexuality,” Journal for Cultural Research 9:1 (2005): 23–41. 23 “Michel Foucault · Histoire de la sexualité,” addendum 1984. 24 Informative comments on the administration of Foucault’s written heritage as well as the quite unfinished state of the manuscript envisioned to develop into Les aveux de la chair can be found in “‘Je crois au temps ... ’: Daniel Defert légataire des manuscrits de Michel Foucault,” Revue Recto/Verso 1 (2007): 1–7.

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whole chapter of the book published in a journal in 1982. The rest are for the main part to be found in a few interviews and individual lectures given in the early 1980s and, particularly, in the annual lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1980 and 1981, entitled Du government de vivant (The Government of the Living) and Subjectivité et verité (Subjectivity and Truth). The second project that Foucault did not complete in the period 1981 to 1984 was an examination of antique techniques of the self, which were supposed to result in a study parallel to Histoire de la sexualité, since it also took its outset in classical thought. The content of this book was to be “different papers about the self – for instance, a commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades in which you find the first elaboration of the notion of epimeleia heautou, ‘care of the self’, about the role of reading and writing in constituting the self, maybe the problem of the medical experience of the self, and so on.”25 The title of the work was envisioned as Le souci de soi, which was thus identical to the title ultimately used for the published volume III of Histoire de la sexualité. This is probably the case because this book came to contain a chapter entitled “La culture de soi” (“The Cultivation of the Self”), which can be considered a resume of his work concerning antique care of the self. The main source of this unpublished or transformed work is, however, the 1982 lectures from Collége de France, L’hermémeneutique du sujet, in which Foucault treats the dialogue Alcibiades as well as the Hellenistic generalization of self-care much more extensively than in volume III. These lectures also treat the role of reading and writing in constituting the self, which was given a more lasting expression in the article “L‘écriture de soi” (“Self Writing”) published in 1983. The next chapter concerns this incomplete work. The third unpublished project was to have the title of Le gouvernement des soi et des autres (The Government of Self and Others). The primary subject of this work was to be the ethical and political problems that were coupled with forms of government in antiquity. This study was at the same time conceptualized as a prolegomena to characterizing modern management – a theme that occupied Foucault in the latter half of the 1970s and that he considered returning to. The opposition between modern and classical thought on the practice of government is furthered by the mode of governing that appeared in early Christianity, typically termed pastoral power by Foucault.26 Similar topics were

25

“On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 231. However, it is not only in the principal treatment of early Christian modes of governing contained in Du government des vivants ([GV]/{GL}) that Foucault discussed the specificity and significance of pastoral power. It also represented an important part of the 1978 lectures on the history of governmentality ([STP]: 119–242/{STPo}: 115–237; see Chapter 7), just as it has been the topic of the of the highly cited article “The Subject and Power” (1982). 26

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central to Foucault’s lectures under the same title at Collège de France in 1983 and 1984. The issue concerning management of the self and others is taken up sporadically in this and the next chapter, about care of the self. As will become clear, the four book projects are related in several ways, just as the same subjects – desiring man, government, confession – appear in each of them in different respects. In addition to sharing subjects, the four themes also share the same tri-part historical periodization, both in the history of sexual desire and confession but also in the history of a temporal division beginning with Hellenism in the 4th century BC, and then Imperial Rome in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Foucault opposes these two epochs with early Christendom as it appeared in the 4th and 5th centuries AD.

1

The right uses of pleasure

Volumes II and III of Histoire de la sexualité take an outset in the question of continuity and rupture. According to Foucault, it has been a widespread understanding that on the one side of an almost insurmountable historical chasm we find a strict medieval Christian morality exigently binding our sexual relations and activity, while on the other side, located in the immediately preceding period in time, we should find a far freer relationship to sexual pleasure and a distinctive tolerance toward all that which Christianity gradually forbade through an ever-stricter mobilization of abstinence. According to this understanding, the sexual lusts enjoyed relatively good and free conditions in antiquity, following which they were subjected to a chastising restraint by Christianity.27 Continuity and discontinuity. It is this commonly endorsed historical discontinuity that Foucault initially problematizes in the later volumes of his history of sexuality by pointing out the difficulties in establishing the “cartography of division [cartographie du partage]” between antiquity and Christianity – thematically as well as periodically.28 The danger associated with the sexual act, its restriction to bounds of marriage, the condemnation of homosexuality, abstinence as a condition for the true way of living: none of these issues were unknown in the Classical Period. For sexual morality, they rather constituted what Foucault referred to as “four major domains of experience: the relation to the body, the relation to the wife, the relation to boys and the relation to truth.”29 27 Cf. UP: 20–31, 273–278/UPl: 14–24, 249–254; SS: 269–274/CS: 235–240. See also P. Brown: The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 22. 28 “Le combat de la chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 308. Cf. [SV]: 20–21. 29 “Michel Foucault · Histoire de la sexualité,” addendum 1984. Cf. also UP: 20–31/UPl: 24–34.

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The first of these domains of experience – that which in Christianity became the inherent evil of intercourse – was in Greek and Roman texts often presented as a danger intrinsically associated with sexual intercourse. However, in antiquity it was not the sexual act in itself that was center of attention but more particularly the dangers of excess, of death and destruction through irrational or imprudent waste of precious virility in using of pleasure.30 The second experiential domain – which in the Middle Ages became understood in terms of monogamy – can likewise be identified in antiquity; Aristotle, for instance, considered it dishonorable to seek sexual pleasure outside of wedlock.31 Also the third domain of experience regarding the relationship between men – which the Greeks chiefly reflected upon as pederasty involving a grown man and a youth, while in the Christian context it became a part of the general conception of sodomy including non-procreative sexual activity of any kind as well as bestiality – was problematized intensely in the classical texts. Just as homosexuals in modern and Christian times have been presented as morally ambiguous and criminal types, for instance Plato and Aristophanes characterized the younger men who had relations with older men as sluggish and dull individuals who did not know better.32 Finally, the fourth experiential domain – the implementation of the true way of life through sexual abstinence, which is usually ascribed to the Christian regime – was already evident in antiquity as well. Accordingly, Socrates could prove his great potential for wisdom through his exceptional ability for self-control when he relentlessly rejected the many beautiful young men who gathered around him, thus reversing the typical direction associated with pederast courtship.33 Taking these domains of experience concerning the uses of pleasure into account, Foucault hereby points out a surprising monotony when it comes to the moral requirements concerning sexual urges. “I think you can say,” he states in conversation from 1982, “that the codes in themselves did not change a great deal. ... I think that the great changes which occurred between Greek society, Greek ethics, Greek morality and how the Christians viewed themselves are not in the code, but are in what I call the “ethics”, which is the relation to oneself.”34 In the 1981 lectures, Subjectivité et vérité, he already specifies this by saying that there was probably no “fundamental modification” between the ancient philosophers and the early Christian thinkers’ discussion of the “moral doctrine” concerning the rules and codes applicable to sexual activities. And equivalent to this doctrinal continuity of sexual morals, Foucault also points to

30 31 32 33 34

Cf. P. Brown: The Body and Society (1988), p. 19. Aristoteles: Politica 1335b. Plato: Phaidros 239 c–d. Aristophanes: Thesmophoriazusae 130ff. Plato: Symposium 217a–219e. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 240.

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the well-known historical fact that there was no immediate “rupture” between the ancient and the Christian world on the level of common social phenomena, institutional frameworks or even the typical “model of conduct” that had been under development for a long period of time.35 The displacement – more extended, less localizable – that Foucault seeks to unearth is therefore not directly related to the apparition of “a new code of sexual behavior.” The focus of his investigation is rather the differences between “two major assemblages of techniques of life, of technologies of subjectivity,” which express the ethical problematization of the very “experiences” that gradually set the ancient and Christian worlds apart.36 Analytical models for the history of sexual ethics and domains of experience. Foucault presents his investigation of this alternative displacement on the level of ethics in two ways. On the one hand, he presents an analytical model that aims to show which elements a given ethic concerning sexual moderation comprises (see Table 9.1). These elements include: the material one relates to when restricting one’s sexual acts (ethical substance), the manner in which one obliges oneself to a given rule of moderation (mode of ethical subjection), the work performed on oneself in order to be able to subject oneself to this rule (ethical asceticism), and finally the purpose that the individual pursues by imposing specific moral rules upon himself (ethical teleology).37 On the other hand, Foucault also examines how sexual ethics change as the four mentioned domains of experiences – the sexual act (body and health), marriage (the relationship to the woman), the relationship between two of the same gender (young men, homosexuality), as well as truth and abstinence – became problematized in new ways (see Table 9.2.).38 While Foucault hereby

35 [SV]: 257. Regarding the continuity, Foucault refers here to D.S. Bailey: Homosexuality and the Western Tradition (London, Longman, Greens, 1955) and J. Boswell: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009). 36 [SV]: 259. 37 As indicated by G. Deleuze in his book Foucault (pp. 11–12), it is informative to note how the four elements that Foucault presents in his historical study of sexual ethics show some formal resemblance to the four Aristotelian causes. By analogy, the ethical substance would then correlate with the material cause, the formal cause with the mode of subjection, the efficient cause with ethical labor to produce change and the ethical teleology with the final cause. 38 Cf. the description Foucault gives of his Histoire de la sexualité project in the French version from 1984 of the conversation with H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An overview of work in progress” (1982), which was slightly modified before its publication by Foucault himself: “[Question:] How have you divided up your work? [Answer:] A volume on the problematization of sexual activity in classical Greek thought concerned with dietetics, economics and erotics, L’Usage des plaisirs; then a re-elaboration

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Ethical elements

Period/ Element

Greek Classical

Roman Imperial

Early Christian

Modern

Ethical substance Ontology

Aphrodisia Act-enjoymentdesire

Venera Act-enjoyment(desire)

Flesh (Desire)-act(enjoyment)

(Sexuality) (Desire-actenjoyment?)

Mode of ethical subjection Deontology

Shaping life so it may stand forth as a work of art

Stylizing with regard to cosmological order and rational rules

Submitting to divine law and institutions

(Actions judged according to general norms)

Ethical labor Asceticism

Moderate actions, avoid excess

Self-cultivation

Analyzing the self in order to eliminate desire

(Analyzing the self in order to understand our desire)

Ethical goal Teleology

Self-mastery

Moderate control of the self

Chastity and purity

(Liberation through true expression of desire)

Table 9.2 Domains of experience Experiential Aphrodisia domain/ ‘Period’ Classical Period

Venera

Flesh

Sexuality

Imperial Rome Early Christendom Modern

Sexual act

Dietic; selfmastery

Concern for control of the body

Afterimage of the Fall (Augustine)

(Bodily function)

Marriage

Economy; public (self-) management

Pact of marriage

State of legitimate marriage

(Norm)

Same-gender Erotic; courting; Ridiculing the Sodomy love of boys relationship political sovereignty Truth and abstinence

Philosophy; Socratic love; truth and self-control

Rejection of youths as an erotic theme; virginity

Chastity and purity (Cassian)

(Homosexuality)

(Emancipation)

of the same themes in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, Le Souci de Soi; then the problematization of sexual activity in Christianity from the fourth to the fifth centuries, Les Aveux de la chair” (“À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: Un aperçu du travail en cours” [1984], DE IV: 611).

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retains the moral codes as relatively uniform and stable in time, he at the same time emphasizes that they are problematized in quite different ways in classical antiquity, Imperial Rome, and early Christianity. Hence, Foucault operates with and incorporates both continuity and discontinuity in his historical analysis: continuity insofar as it is concerned with ethical problematization of sexual morals within equivalent experiential domains, and discontinuity insofar as these ethical problematizations of sexual issues were clearly different in approach and scope, implying not only distinct ways of dealing with morals problems of the body, marriage, same-sex relations, abstinence and access to truth but also a distinction between more comprehensive horizons of experience. It is in this respect that Foucault can also use the ethical substance described earlier in order to distinguish more broadly between the “the experience of aphrodisia, the experience of the flesh and the modern experience of sexuality,” which are conceived “not as three domains of separated objects, but rather as three modes of experience, that is to say, three modalities of the relation of the self to the self within the relation we can have to a certain domain having to do with sex.”39 Using this alternative and more comprehensive characterization of the ethical substances or matters of concerns, it thus becomes possible to periodize Foucault’s history of sexuality accordingly. (It is to better describe the development between the Greek and Roman problematizations belonging to the same experiential horizon that we in Table 9.2 supplement with the distinction between the ‘periods’ of aphrodisia and venera). Tables 9.1 and 9.2 are meant to assist the reading of the following sections, which outline Foucault’s two general ways of analyzing developments in the problematization of sexual matters – in relation to elements of ethics and to the domains of experience. Elements of ethics. In antiquity, as Foucault sees it unfolded through writers such as Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle and Hippocratic medicine, the first of the four elements in the ethical domain – the ethical substance – was ta aphrodisia, translatable as those things that have something to do with Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and pleasure, and comprise a number of sexual acts required by and connected to nature through intense pleasure. At the same time, the force naturally inherent to these acts was such that it could threaten the individual’s heath through excess and inner revolt or turmoil.40 However, the principle for regulating this precarious activity was not defined in terms of a universal legislation that could determine and distinguish between permitted and forbidden acts of pleasure. According to Foucault, the mode of subjection – the 39 40

[SV]: 78. UP: 105–106/UPl: 93.

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second ethical element – took the shape of knowhow: an art form or technique that prescribed the uses of pleasure according to certain variables (need, time, status), which could not be decreed generally. The labor the individual had to perform upon the self – the third ascetic element of ethics – therefore took the shape of a battle where the individual had to establish a complete control over the self, such that it reflected domestic as well as political power exercised by that self. According to this logic, there can be no power over the self without power over the urges, no power over the city-state without power over your household, yourself and your desires. This was how the argument would run in the classical problematization of ethical labor. In extension of this the fourth ethical element – the mode of being that was implemented as a goal through this ethical labor – could be characterized by the exercise of an active freedom, which could not be distinguished from a visible relationship to the truth. As Foucault summarized this issue in an interview dating from 1984: “The Greeks problematized their freedom, and the freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem. But ethical in the sense in which the Greeks understood it: ēthos was a way of being and of behavior. It was a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others. A person’s ēthos was evident in his clothing, appearance, gait, in the calm with which he responded to every event, and so on. For the Greeks, this was the concrete form of freedom; this was the way they problematized their freedom. A man possessed of a splendid ēthos, who could be admired and put forward as an example, was someone who practiced freedom in a certain way. ... But extensive work by the self on the self is required for this practice of freedom to take shape in an ēthos that is good, beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable, and exemplary.”41 In Imperial Rome, during the 1st and 2nd centuries, the ethical substance was still given as a matter of natural force, wherefore ta aphrodisia could be directly given as venera (Venus being the Latin name for Aphrodite); this force should be fought by the individual who should be the master of it. According to Foucault, however, there was in this struggle, characterized as it was by violence, excess and constant rebellion, an ever-greater focus on individual weakness and powerlessness; a new fragility came into view, as did an effort to avoid the inexorable natural force. The mode of submission still had the character of techniques of living (techne tou biou) built around aesthetic and ethical criteria, but life art was increasingly generalized by a reference to universal principles as especially the Stoics saw them applied in nature or universal human reason. There was some modification of the ethical labor performed on the self, since knowledge of the self became ever more important for the exercises on abstinence and self-mastery: “the task of testing oneself, examining oneself, 41 “L‘éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” [1984], DE IV: 714/“The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p. 286.

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controlling in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth – the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing – central to the formation of the ethical subject.”42 Finally there was the fourth ethical element, the aim, which was still defined as the individual’s sovereignty over the self. However, this sovereignty was only applicable within an experiential horizon where the relationship to self took the shape of not only self-mastery but also a certain kind of moderate valuation of the self as a place emptied of desire and turned away from the problems of life. Experiential domains. According to Foucault the four domains of experience were already present in classical Greek antiquity, and they all expressed an encouragement to sexual abstinence. Unlike the later Christian and modern conceptions, which both had a tendency to regard sexual experience from a universal perspective, it was an essential characteristic of Greek problematization that each of the four domains of experience appeared in a particular way, such that the individual – in regard to the body, women, the youth, and the search for truth – could find different or even heterogeneous requirements and rules for sexual behavior.43 As is the case with the ethical elements, these four different experiential domains contain a number of essential displacements accounted for by Foucault in L’usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi, respectively. In the Greek perspective on the relationship between abstinence and bodily issues, the sexual act and the associated pleasure, was never – according to Foucault – perceived as an evil in itself.44 However, a number of medical texts do exhibit an interest in the connection between sexual activities and general health. Foucault here shows how the relation between sexual activities and the state of the body and health were problematized in what he terms a dietetic approach. According to Foucault, the medical as well as sexual dietetic is considered a technique, whereby the individual could respond to vicissitudes of life in a useful and rational way. These responses were not universal but situational. Accordingly, the skilled doctor should be able to converse and explain in such a way that his guidance not merely became rules followed passively but pieces of advice that could be actively included by the self in the mode of living and relationship to self.45 In this view, the art of medicine was not merely a collection of precautionary measures that aimed at identifying and curing illnesses;

42 43 44 45

SS: 85/CS: 68. UP: 275/UPl: 251. UP: 111, 133, 141/UPl: 97, 117, 125. UP: 121/UPl: 107. Cf. also Platon: Timaeus 89d.

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it was also a way of shaping the self as an ethical subject taking care about body and soul in the right way.46 The relationship between bodily awareness and abstinence therefore revealed a kind of private self-mastery. If the uses of pleasure constituted a problem for the individual’s relationship to his body, it was because these were viewed as able to shake that very self-mastery, just as they could be the origin of passions that could potentially overwhelm him. This did not mean however, that sex should be avoided, merely that one should make an effort rather to have less sex than an excess of it. Likewise it was considered problematic to use the pleasures arbitrarily. In terms of nature, sex was meant for procreation, wherefore it was important to choose the best circumstances for bringing about the best possible pregnancies and in extension the best possible offspring. When this called for limiting sexual activities, it was not because this was viewed as sinful and merely legitimate within the purview of marriage and parental care but because the best possible children had to be born for the future advantage of the city-state. Dietetic abstinence therefore entered into a game of life and death, as sexual excess could threaten the only kind of immortality man could hope for, namely the continued existence of the lineage. According to Foucault, this circumstance changed during the time of Imperial Rome, through its problematization of bodily experience. It had become much more difficult to attain the private self-mastery that had been the Greek aim. In the works of medical authors such as Galen (ca. 129–200 AD), Rufus of Ephesus (late 1st century AD), and Soranus (ca. 98–138 AD), Foucault notes a beginning tendency to pathologize the sexual act.47 In this connection, where sex was not considered as of itself evil but rather a kind of ailment, the possibility of restraining oneself through personal and dietetic self-mastery disappears. Instead, one was confronted with an inner force so great that one could not defeat it but should merely seek to moderate it so that it could be endured. In the Classical Period, the relationship between abstinence and marriage was conceptualized as a semi-public, economic mastery of others. Classical writers such as Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle might inscribe marriage into the wider context of the city-state and its related laws and norms for ensuring survival and prosperity. The basic element for ensuring the continuation and enrichment of the city-state was the household and accordingly it was in relation to this institution that the function of the institution of marriage had to be understood. Marriage was subordinated to the well-being of the city-state, which implied an emphasis on correct behavior exhibited by the male in sexual relations, when he was at the head of a family, all while being an honorable citizen who was able to exert moral and political power over wife, children and slaves. The 46 47

UP: 123/UPl: 108. SS: 166–167/CS: 142–143.

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household was a privileged location, where the free citizen could show selfmastery. As mentioned, the classical texts also considered it problematic to seek sexual pleasures outside wedlock. This may seem strange in a time when the woman was forbidden by law to be unfaithful, while the husband was free to have sexual relations with mistresses, slaves, boys and prostitutes.48 However, Foucault attempts to show that the argument for limiting sexual relations to the marriage was not built on equal arrangements for men and women. The woman was legally required to remain monogamous; she would lose all rights if she were unfaithful and it was considered a virtue (in the classical sense) to exhibit virtue (in the modern sense) because she had to respect the rules set up for her by others. It was forbidden for the man to be with another married woman, just as he was expected to divorce if she had been unfaithful. However, in the first case it was not the woman’s status that was the source of the problem but that her lover had violated the rights of another man. In the second case, it was the husband’s rights that had been violated, wherefore the law required him to divorce so that illegitimate offspring did not receive citizen status.49 These cases were both categorized as a crime because of the potential effects on the relationship between citizens and not so much because a personal relationship between man and woman was violated. In this way, marriage functioned as part of a normative public life, wherefore Foucault can emphasize how the Greeks – in spite of a lack of law – still considered it only right and fair that the free citizen kept his sexual activities within the confines of marriage. Unlike the woman, who was virtuous by passively accepting the rules determined by others, the man was especially so by actively restraining himself. Problematizing marriage altered character during Imperial Rome. Taking an outset in Musonius Rufus (b. 20 AD), Plutarch (45–120 AD), Hierocles (2nd century AD), Seneca (4 BC–65 AD), and Epicitus (55–135 AD), Foucault seeks to show how sexual abstinence was no longer primarily thematized according to the husband’s role as head of the household. Insofar as desire outside of marriage was denounced as morally contemptible this happened in reference to a unique personal relationship between the two people in question, a relation that was no longer the consequence of an economic necessity. Rather the personal relation was the basis for the marriage. In this regard the focus was on reigning in the desires not so much according to hierarchic domination

48

UP: 159–163/UPl: 143–146. The law was taken seriously. If the husband did not send the wife away, he would lose citizen status himself. Cf. M.H. Hansen: The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology (Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 99–100, 387. 49

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of man over women but according to reciprocal conjugal relations, whereby a mutual allegiance based on common principles became more important compared to the asymmetrical relation that characterized the Classical Period. This more relational and personal understanding of marriage was characterized by the mentioned authors as a duality, since mankind was viewed as living naturally in pairs. The justification of marriage from this view was therefore based on not only procreation but on the consideration that the individual is first able to unfold his or her potential through having a life partner. The duality corresponded to a universality, since marriage was not only a convenient arrangement in practical terms; it was a universal duty, which could not be separated from attaining dignity as a man and which even philosophers must take up in order to represent mankind in general by being exemplary for others. Refraining from extra-conjugal affairs was therefore not a public show of self-mastery but a restriction taken up to show respect for married life. Being unfaithful not only jeopardized your reputation for self-mastery but was a crime against the ‘humanistic’ friendship involved in marriage.50 Also the third experiential domain, the problematizing of abstinence in relation to young boys, involved relationships of mastery or domination although cast in political not dietetic and economic terms. Rather than one’s mastery over oneself, or the mastery over one’s household and its inhabitants, this mastery in the political domain could only be established on the condition that the other part was equally and irreducibly free to perform selfmastery too. In this encounter, principally between two men, dominance was therefore no obvious matter. The Greek problematization of the relationship between two men took its outset in the relationship between the lover (ho erastês) and the beloved youth (hê pais).51 This pederast relationship had to enter into a refined regulation to attain acceptance.52 The pederast relationship produced a network of activities that were very different from the ones that characterized marriage and regular heterosexual relationships. This complex regulation of the erotic demonstrates that it was not unproblematic for one man to enter into a relationship with other men. It was not shameful or connected with guilt for a youth to be coveted or for a lover to feel desire.53 The same occurred when this lust, desire and enjoyment was not moderated. This worry was related to what Foucault, in his published analysis in Le souci de soi of Oneirocritica or The Interpretation of Dreams, written in Greek by Artemidorus in the 2nd century 50 51 52 53

SS: 91–100, 201–205/CS: 150–164, 173–177. UP: 214/UPl: 193. Cf. K.J. Dover: Greek Homosexuality, pp. 54–57, 81–100. Cf. Xenophon: Hiero 1.31–1.33.

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AD, calls “consubstantiality” between sexual and other relations in the antique problematization. 54 In the 1981 lectures at the Collège France, however, Foucault supplements this description by referring to a certain “isomorphism” in the perception of sexual and social roles relating more generally to the ethics of aphrodisia and venera. There was here a “projection of the sexual onto the social” but without implying “that the sexual was therefore some kind of symbol of the social”: “Between the sexual and the social,” Foucault emphasizes, “there is no symbolic code or encryption [code symbolique]. If the sexual revisits the social, it is because they lie in continuity of each other. The sexual acts one could dream about were fundamentally of the same nature, the same substance, and – to go even further – the same form as the social relations, the social acts, the social events or occurrences [événements sociaux] as to which they could relate.”55 In this respect, sexual partners were and remained true or complete social persona also in their sexual relations. This implied that “the judgement that one could pass on the sexual activities” were regarded “inseparable from the social marking of the individuals involved.” But this also implied that the ethical question that raised itself here was concerned with whether or not the sexual acts were in fact inseparable from the given social marking. The ethical question of the right use of pleasure became a matter of maneuvering correctly in accordance with the sexual-social continuity. Accordingly, Foucault infers, “if there was in fact this continuity and the isomorphism between sexual relation and the social relation, then the act could be considered quite good. In contrast, it would be considered quite bad, it would be morally disqualified if it returns, reverses, upsets, or more simply, if it departs from, diverges or differs from the social relations it takes part in. Consequently, the true division in the field of aphrodisia is evidently not that of homo- and heterosexual: instead, it had to do with the problem of socio-sexual iso- and heteromorphy.”56 It was in accordance with this perception that the pederast relation between man and youth was problematized with reference to categories similar to social hierarchy and rivalry: high and low, dominant and submissive, penetrating and penetrated, active and passive.57 From city-state law prohibiting the confluence of politics and prostitution Foucault is therefore able to see how sexual abstinence was not based on a rejection of sexual identity but the impossible

54 SS: 42/CS: 28. Foucault treats Artemidorus’ Interpretation of Dreams at length in SS: 16–50/CS: 4–36. 55 [SV]: 80–81. 56 [SV]: 81–82 57 UP: 237/UPl: 215.

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confluence of sexual submission and political dominance.58 If the youth sold his reputation by giving himself too willingly, he risked destroying his chance of entering city-state politics and thereby becoming an actual citizen. When the pederast relationship was considered problematic, it was therefore not because it was inherently wrong to be ‘homosexual’, but because it risked undermining the youth’s right and ability to attain self-mastery and thereby also his right to lead. It had to do with socio-sexual iso- and heteromorphy. In Le souci de soi, Foucault shows how this political dimension to same-sex relationships was far less prominent in Stoic thought and was gradually replaced by a greater focus on marriage between man and woman. Taking an outset in dialogues by Plutarch and Pseudo-Lucian from the 2nd century he shows how there was a growing difficulty in recognizing and justifying the pederast relationship. Pseudo-Lucian’s text ends with an ironic and exact reminder of all the doubtful activities that homoeroticism seeks to cover up in the name of friendship, virtue and pedagogy. The dialogue’s homosexual protagonist may through classical philosophy refer to a spiritual relation between youth and lover, where their mutual gaze is considered the true relation, but after the gaze comes the kiss, and then the hand, which caresses first the bare chest, then the supple belly and does not stop till it reaches its goal.59 In Plutarch’s more detailed treatment of the issue, the central problem becomes how “mutuality of consent” can be possible between man and youth, insofar as there is always a principal asymmetry between them.60 There is no surprise about the stoic conclusion to the dialogue, where it is claimed that the mutual relation can only exist between man and woman, since only these can love each other actively. Indeed, this is seen as attaining its most perfect expression in marriage, where the reciprocity serves as an ongoing confirmation of the pact that is entered into in that institution.61 This conceptual figure is also found in Pseudo-Lucian, where it is coupled to desire and lust because it is claimed that only the heterosexual relation involves giving and receiving sexual pleasure, while the male lover of a boy only takes pleasure but gives nothing in return.62 As the Roman institution of marriage came to colonize the erotic, such that the man’s respectful and mutual relation to the woman eventually replaced the practice of courting young boys, Foucault claims that there was a shift 58 “Entretien avec M. Foucault,” DE IV: 287. In UP: 239–242/CS: 217–220; this circumstance is presented with an outset in Aeschines’ In Timarchus, which concerns a court case against a young man who is charged with entering politics after having prostituted himself in his youth – this is considered impossible and inappropriate. Cf. K. J. Dover: Greek Homosexuality, which takes an outset in exactly this court speech. 59 Pseudo-Lucian, Amoribus 53. Cf. SS: 243–261/CS: 211–227. 60 [SV]:304 (RC: 141–142)/“Subjectivity and Truth,” p. 92. 61 Plutarch, Amatorius 751c, 769a. Cf. SS: 238–239/CS: 206–207. [VS]: 179–201. 62 Pseudo-Lucian, Amoribus 27. Cf. SS: 253/CS: 202.

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away from the intimate connection between a philosophical search for truth and sexual abstinence. Foucault sees the contours of a philosophical reflection, especially in The Symposium and Phaedros, that challenges the traditional conception of courting and thereby the related doctrines about correct behavior and regard for the honor of the youth. Foucault identifies in the first of the encomia on Eros in The Symposium Plato’s sarcastic presentation of the traditional conceptions of the erotic, centered on the age of boys, submission and moral decay.63 In the second part of The Symposium, Plato challenges this platform of problematization with the erotic centered on the ascetic subject and a mutual access to truth. While the traditional perspective on the erotic precludes a concept of love and moves on to consider deontological issues of regulating the courting process, Socrates asks the ontological question of what love is as such and what must be done to attain it. The Socratic conception of the erotic does therefore focus not on the boy’s honor but on the love of truth itself. The traditional asymmetrical subject/object relationship thereby collapses and is replaced by the two parts meeting in a common subjectivity and striving for truth. Socrates comes to play an important role in Plato’s reinterpretation of the traditional erotic institution through his role as a conversation partner and teacher, which results in a reversal of the direction for desire. It is the young, beautiful men who pine after the older and ugly Socrates, because of his status as Philo-sophus: “a friend or lover of wisdom.” Foucault sees this conversion of desire in Alcibiades who toward the end of The Symposium appears in a drunken state (i.e., without selfmastery) and narrates a situation that would be quite alien to the traditional conception of the erotic, namely Socrates’ repeated demonstration of self-mastery by refusing Alcibiades, who was renowned for his beauty. In Plato’s work, Foucault not only identifies the indication of “a transition from an erotics structured in terms of ‘courtship’ practice and the freedom of the other to an erotics centered on an ascesis of the subject and a common access to truth.” Plato’s reinterpretation of contemporary courting practices equally shows “one of the points from which the inquiry into the desiring man would take form” since “the tradition of thought deriving from Plato was to play an important role when, much later, the problematization of sexual behavior would be reworked in terms of concupiscent soul and the deciphering of pleasure.”64 Plato points forward by lancing the conception of spiritual and Platonic love, which in early Christianity could not occur till one had purged out one’s desires and lust. However, at the same time Plato remains connected to the classical conception of erotics because he situates his idea of love in relation to young men and boys. Foucault holds that the later tradition would 63 64

Plato: Symposium 178a–197e. UP: 267, 268/UPl: 244, 244–245.

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not permit pederasty to be the outset of a self-imposed abstinence and search for truth. Instead, from the age of Imperial Rome and on it is the issue of female virtue that becomes the outset for understanding this relation. Plato thereby remains loyal to his age when he lets Socrates exhibit manly virtue by rejecting the beautiful Alcibiades. Of course Socrates covets the beautiful youth and is therefore neither virginal nor chaste, and he chooses not to eradicate his desire but be abstinent through his incredible self-mastery. According to Foucault, this masculine virtue eventually shifts toward a feminine, almost effeminate virtue much more concerned with the problems of virginity in the Imperial Age. As a counterpart to the Greek erotics, Foucault discusses this new problematization of virginity with reference to a number of ancient novels in which the protagonists, often a young man and woman in a symmetrical and reciprocal relationship, struggle the vicissitudes of life (kidnapping, shipwreck, misfortune, etc.) in order only to be reunited in the end with their purity of heart and soul intact.65 However, the shift toward more womanly virtue first became really apparent in early Christianity in the shape of the battle for chastity.66

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Presenting this historical development would have been the aim for the parts of Les aveux de la chair that were meant to treat the domains of experience associated with sexual ethics (see Table 9.2), most likely with an outset in the early Christian church and the church fathers. Foucault possibly wanted to touch on how the four experiential spheres were discussed by Christian thinkers from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, notably Tertullian (160–220) and Clement of Alexandria (d. ca. 215), and even more so by thinkers from the 4th and 5th centuries such as John Chrysostom (347–407) and St. Gregory of Nyssa (335–339). The last of these, according to Foucault, expresses a reinterpretation of the antique conceptions of care of the self, such that it comes to represent “the impulse that leads one to renounce marriage, detach oneself from the flesh, and, thanks to the virginity of heart and body, rediscover the immortality from which one has fallen.”67 These possible analyses do not register in the posthumous publications; they can only be found in the unpublished manuscript of volume IV of Histoire de

65 In this discussion Foucault refers to the novels known as Leucippe and Cleitophon by Achilles Tatius, Aithiopika (Theagenes and Charikleia) by Heliodorus, and Kallirhoe by Chariton, all originating in the 1st and the 2nd centuries AD. 66 UP: 277–278/UPl: 253–254. SS: 264/CS: 230–231. 67 RC: 146/{HSb}: 492.

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la sexualité.68 It is possible to emphasize, however, that these developments can already be traced in the work of Paul the Apostle (10–67), who considered it best for the congregation to live a life of total abstinence: I wish that all men were as I am,69 he says and thereby gives his view on the content of the fourth experiential sphere, namely that the true life should be lived through a rejection of sexual desire. As congregations were probably not all that willing to live such a life, Paul permits them sexual activities if they had married first: for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.70 Here he also points to his version of the second experiential sphere: that sexual desire (if it cannot be avoided) is only legitimate in marriage. Paul will not grant any further concessions to his congregation. As a version of the first experiential domain, sexual desire is considered an evil in general, wherefore one should have sex as if one did not want to: let those who have wives live as though they had none ... those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it.71 In regard to the third domain of experience, it is finally well known that Paul condemns homosexuality as shameful and “against nature [kata phusin].” He therefore writes about the godless heathens that: their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.72 Paul considered these general rules of living to apply to all Christians, which is most likely why they were taken up by the earlier mentioned thinkers and made their way into the general reception.73 In Paul’s own texts we do not

68 In this respect P. Brown: The Body and Society (1988) can be of good use, as it gives an introduction to the problematization of the sexual in the early Christian centuries that relates directly to Foucault’s work, albeit using a more sociological approach. 69 Corinthians: 7:7. 70 Corinthians: 7:9. 71 Corinthians: 7:29–7:31. 72 Romans: 1:26–1:27. 73 In his 1980 lectures at Collège de France, Foucault claims that whereas “speculative, theoretical, theological thought” as well “themes of morality” stemming from ancient philosophy influenced Christian thought from very early on, “the practice of direction, on the other hand, the practice of examination of conscience, everything we might call techniques of the philosophical life, penetrated Christianity only rather late on” ([GV]: 247–248/{GL}: 253). Foucault’s prime example in this regard is found in Cassian’s reflections on life within the monastic institutions, where techniques of ancient philosophical life were reinterpreted because they were inscribed within relations of obedience. In this chapter, we will treat Cassian in relation to the problematization of desire and sexual issues, while in the next chapter in relation to confession and matters of speaking truth.

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find the incorporation of such universal moral rules into specific practices or techniques of direction such as confession. If one collects the comments that are dispersed in volumes II and III, but also in other lesser texts and conversations, as well as the Collège de France lecture courses from 1980 and 1981, it is apparent that Foucault is emphasizing how all individuals – male and female, old and young – were increasingly and in many ways submitted to a set of universal rules in early Christianity. Instead of variable conditions, such as the given season, local geographical conditions, wind and weather, Christianity began to establish a different kind of temporal regulation of sexual activity. Unlike in antiquity, there was a conscious attempt to take an outset in for instance revelation or the bible, to determine when sex was permitted and forbidden. There was a greater emphasis on the church year, female menstruation cycles, pregnancy, time since last birth and so forth.74 Unlike in antiquity, there was an establishment of stricter norms intended to found the rules – a development that was hastened by the consolidation of the church as an institution. Furthermore, Christianity was able to connect the first and second domains of experience, since it was generally argued and promoted that the sexual act could only occur for one purpose, if it was not to be sinful, namely procreation. Also, this applied for everybody, men and women, at all times and under all conditions.75 Foucault sums up some of these conditions in a conversation from 1984: “Early Christianity brought several important modifications to ancient asceticism: it intensified the form of the law, but it also reoriented the practices of the self in the direction of a hermeneutic of self and a deciphering of self as subject of desire. The articulations of law and desire appear to be rather characteristic of Christianity.”76 The legal generalization corresponded to a generalization of desire and lust such that every single person was in possession of such feelings that affected us in a certain way.77 Desire became a law that applies within us, and unlike in antiquity this must be confronted with an external world that

74

Cf. [SV]: 101, 230–233. UP: 131/UPl: 116. UP: 140/UPl: 123–124; SS: 214–215/CS: 183–184. 76 “Le souci de la vérité” [1984], DE IV: 672/“The Concern for Truth,” pp. 458–459. 77 This was very different from classical Greece, where desire, according to Foucault, did not appear as a universal identity. Cf. “Interview de Michel Foucault” [1981/1984], DE IV: 662: “There were people who practiced aphrodisia properly according to customs and others who did not, but the idea of identifying someone by way of their sexuality had not occurred to them.” In this conversation, Foucault sees the first identification procedure in the “sexuality dispositive,” established from the very moment when “an ensemble of practices, institutions and forms of knowledge had made sexuality a coherent domain and an absolutely fundamental dimension for the individual.” Already early Christianity begins a tradition that makes it possible to seek answers about one’s identity. 75

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is subjected to religious norms.78 In respect to the sexual morals established in antiquity, Foucault shows how flesh turned into a universal, ethical problem in early Christianity: “that there was a whole re-elaboration of this moral and the emergence of the experience of the flesh.”79 Unlike in classical Greece, this question and experience of flesh was problematic for men and women alike. Before, mastery of the self had been an issue that concerned the man and had taken different shapes according to how this related to his own body, his wife, or the boys.80 All the while a diversified masculine paradigm of self-mastery begins to withdraw there appears a new mode of problematization that takes as a starting point a more general notion of an individual that can be of either gender and, in principle, of any social rank. In one of the few occasions where he directly speaks about Les aveux de la chair, Foucault sums up the shifts that occurred within the ethical problematization of sexual morals. Although this characterization is quite rough and schematic in comparison to the wide web of gentle displacements and slight modifications between the late ancient and the early Christian world that Foucault generally stresses in his lectures, this characterization is nonetheless informative: “In [the book about Christianity] I try to show that all [the Greco-Roman] ethics has changed. Because the telos has changed: the telos is now immortality, purity and so on. The asceticism has changed, because now self-examination takes the form of self-deciphering. The mode d’assujettissment is now divine law. And I think that even the ethical substance has changed, because it is not aphrodisia, but desire, concupiscence, flesh and so on.”81 Augustine and theoretical libidinalization. In respect to sexual morals early Christianity gave way to a kind of doctrinal and ‘theoretical’ unification of themes and problems, which, according Foucault, had among others been instigated by Augustine (354–430).82 This theoretical framework concerning the elements and domains of experience in sexual ethics can be seen in Augustine’s

78 “Le souci de la vérité,” DE IV: 672/“The Concern for Truth,” pp. 458–459; Foucault also mentions this in SS: 193/CS: 165. One source could have been Clement of Alexandria, who in Paedagogus II.10.83.3 laments the hideous and immoral hyena, which is known for its frequent sexual activities in a multitude of positions and even while the female is pregnant. Christian couples should not perform such immoral acts. Cf. P. Brown: The Body and Society (1988), pp. 132–133. 79 [SV]: 179. 80 “Le souci de la vérité” [1981/1984], DE IV: 673/“The Concern for Truth,” pp. 459– 460. 81 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1982), p. 268. Cf. [SV]: 20–21, 118–179. 82 UP: 278/UPl: 253.

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problematization of sexuality in what Foucault terms a ‘libidinalization’ of the sexual where desire is coupled with the idea of the Fall. When Augustine in his Confessiones thinks back on the intense joy that was related to friendships from his youth and from the more physical but loyal love to his beloved through many years, he cannot avoid expressing regret about the desire that sticks to the happiness found in these memories, thereby making them problematical and uneasy in his discourse to and about himself.83 According to Foucault, the hereby implied idea of lust and desire as something that tends to be problematic in and of itself, that casts an irreducible and irreversible shadow on experience and memory, suggests a shift in regard to the classical uses of pleasure: “For the Greeks, when a philosopher was in love with a boy, but did not touch him, his behavior was valued. The problem was: Does he touch the boy or not? That’s the ethical substance: the act linked with pleasure and desire. For Augustine, it’s very clear that when he remembers his relationship to his young friend when he was eighteen years old, what bothers him is what exactly was the kind of desire he had for him.”84 While Confessiones presents the sexual as a natural part of social relations, desire constantly emerges as a problem for human will.85 Augustine focuses on desire as an internal activity in the human being, without this necessarily relating to anything in the real world and which man may not be able to control. In Augustine, the Greek ethics of the right use of pleasures seems to be interchanged with an ethics concerned with the dispositions of desire. This latter approach no longer only asks whether one is moved by one’s desire or lust to perform some action or not, and it does not primarily base its ethical judgement on whether one is able to practically master a desire, which may be problematic in real terms but is innocent in and of itself. Rather, it asks which mental disposition the desire stems from, and from the desire itself, it begins to problematize the intention for an action that has not and perhaps never will be performed. Although Augustine is concerned with what guides people in their deepest choices and founds their lives – Self or God – he does not consider our carnal nature as evil per se. What is decisive, however, is whether man is moved by good or by ill will. According to Augustine, sin is comprised of a perverted or perhaps inverted will ( perversa voluntas). In sin, one is closest to oneself and as a consequence also loses that very self, wherefore it also goes under the name of arrogance (superbia).86 In such an interpretation it is impossible for the human will to repress desire and thereby attain self-mastery.

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Augustine: Confessiones IV. 8–10. Cf. UP: 49/UPl: 40. “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” p. 268. Cf. Augustine: Confessiones IV.4.7. 85 Cf. P. Brown (1988): The Body and Society, p. 328. 86 Cf. Augustine: De libero arbitrio II.14 (perversa voluntas); De civitate Dei XIV.3 (superbia). 84

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In the De civitate Dei, Augustine develops a thought experiment about sexual relations in Paradise that further explains this problem of the will. Unlike his contemporaries, Augustine considered the possibility of intercourse in the afterlife. The Fall was not that these degrading and bodily relations had become a necessity but that there had occurred irreparable damage that made it impossible to retain a sovereign will. If Adam had wanted to procreate in the Garden of Eden he could, according to Augustine, have done it with the same control and mastery as he had with all his other limbs. In paradise, man did not know of the spasmodic and degrading sexual excitement because here self-mastery was a natural and real state, until the Fall had made its influence felt. After this, involuntary bodily excitement became a rebellion against man’s originally free and human will, since it became a sign of man’s rebellion against God.87 What Adam did to deserve punishment was, according to Augustine, elude the will of God and thereby attain his own independent will. He hereby disregarded that his own will was utterly dependent on God’s. As a punishment for this rebellion, Adam lost his Elysian self-mastery. As Foucault recapitulated in a lecture from 1981: “He wanted to acquire an autonomous will and lost the ontological support for that will.”88 According to Augustine’s De civitate, Adam used the fig leaf to hide the shameful parts of his body, which are referred to as pudenta and which he lost control of through his insubordination.89 In this Foucault recognizes a new general problem of sexual ethics: “Sex in erection is the image of man revolted against God. The arrogance of sex is the punishment and consequence of the arrogance of man. His uncontrolled sex is exactly the same as what he himself has been toward God – a rebel.”90 Since rebellious man was thereby guilty of a crime that required unending punishment, it likewise became an unending tendency toward uncontrollable sexual drives: an instinct that could be subdued but would forever remain active.91 In this context, the previously prized Greek virility could no longer represent the same sign of male virtue. Virility could only be problematic as long as it was not under ascetic self-control. It was exactly controlled self-mastery that had become an ontological impossibility for Christians. According to Foucault, it becomes possible to identify a new relationship between sexuality and subjectivity. There was still a primarily male sexuality, where femininity was a derivative and dependent variable, but instead 87

Augustine: De civitate Dei XIV.24. “Sexualité et solitude” [1981], DE IV: 175/”Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 181. 89 Augustine: De civitate Dei XIV.17. 90 “Sexualité et solitude” [1981], DE IV: 175/”Sexuality and Solitude,” pp. 181–182. 91 Cf. P. Brown: Augustine of Hippo (1967), p. 389. In Contra Julian IV.2, Augustine mentions that the ascetic who had truly over-won any desire in a wake state still risked dreaming about it, whereby he could never be absolutely certain of his own self-mastery. 88

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of the Greek emphasis on willing penetration and activity, a problematization arises of the relationship between passivity and unwilling erection. As a consequence, the problematization does not focus so much on the relationship with other people as on the self-relation, paradigmatically expressed in the relation between one’s will and involuntary bodily expressions.92 Instead of a GreekRoman ‘penetrative’ self-relation, characterized by an aggressive invocation of active self-mastery, Foucault holds that Augustine gave rise to an ‘erectile’ and passive self-relation. Augustine named the basic principle of the movement and drives in the sexual organs libido, which originally meant ‘lust’, ‘desire’ or ‘longing’, but was given the additional meanings of ‘illicit inclination’ and ‘sexual desire’.93 In extension of coupling libido and bodily pleasure, the main doubts that relate to sexual desire concerning its force, origin and effects also become a central issue within the human will. As libido, desire is no longer an external hindrance for the will to overcome but an internal part of that very will. Desire in the shape of libido is no longer a manifestation of the unimportant and base inclinations that the will can conquer; rather it becomes a consequence of will, given that it was already man’s will that had become guilty by transgressing the limitations originally set by God. With his story about the Fall, Augustine initiated a process in which the center of Christian thought was to be found within the person or individual. This was because he finds a discordiosum malum, an ‘evil discord’ in fallen man, which makes it impossible for him to achieve self-transparency.94 This foul note in human will was a sign that the original sin had become a part of human nature and the involuntary movements of desire was one of the primary areas where this could be detected with absolute certainty.95 Here, the spiritual battle against desire and the self is not as with Plato a question of turning one’s gaze upward – toward a higher sphere – to recall the reality we already knew but forgot, so as to let this ideal reality act as norm giving for our passion. In extension of Augustine’s analysis, our spiritual battle should consist in turning our gaze downward – or toward the inner – so as to decipher which among all the movements in the soul stem from the libido. This labor is on uncertain grounds because will and libido cannot be fully separated. And what is more, according to Foucault, “this task is not only an issue of

92

Cf. “Sexualité et solitude” [1981], DE IV: 176/”Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 182. Cf. C. Lewis and C. Short: A Latin Dictionary, s.v. 94 Cf. Augustine: Contra Julian IV.8. P. Brown: The Body and Society (1988), pp. 399–408. The idea that “transparency to oneself” is impossible is, according to Foucault, a defining and crucial element of Christian thought and practice. [GV]: 304/{GL}: 310. 95 Augustine: Sermo 151.5. Cf. P. Brown: Augustine of Hippo (1967), p. 388. 93

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mastership but also a question of the diagnosis of truth and illusion. It requires a permanent hermeneutics of oneself.” 96 Foucault in other words views this sexual ethic as a commitment to a certain kind of truth-telling, since it concerns not only the acquisition of a number of moral rules for sexual behavior but likewise an ongoing examination and cross-examination of the self’s libidinal situation. At this juncture, techniques of the soul become sophisticated spiritual labor. Because desire exhibits its ongoing presence in the shape of an erection – which may be excited by willing thoughts and actions but can likewise occur without the work of the will because Augustine considers it defective – Foucault points out that problematization of the sexual no longer permits the establishment of classical selfmastery. In this matter, Augustine gives up on the sovereignty of the self and seeks new ways of assistance with God. Cassian and the hermeneutics of desire. In addition to Augustine’s theoretical libidinalization, Foucault also emphasizes a different ‘practical’ unification or synthesis in early Christianity. It is expressed in the reuse of various techniques for cleansing and battling desire and lust, wherein an aesthetical use of pleasure is no longer at the core of the ethical problematization but rather desire and its cleansing hermeneutic.97 The practical framework for the elements and experiential domains of sexual ethics can especially be found in Cassian’s (ca. 360–433) reflections on techniques of the self within monastic life.98 According to Foucault, Augustine not only developed a systematic discussion of the status of desire and lust but also pointed toward a series of spiritual techniques. It is the practical implementation of techniques such as these that can be found within monastic literature from the 4th and 5th centuries. Foucault notes their purpose in short and concise terms: “The techniques were mainly concerned with the stream of thoughts flowing into consciousness, disturbing by their multiplicity the necessary unity of contemplation and secretly conveying images or suggestions from Satan. The monk’s task was not the philosopher’s task: to acquire mastership over oneself by the definitive victory of the will. It was perpetually to control one’s thoughts, examining them to see if they were pure, whether something dangerous was not hiding in or behind them, if they were not conveying something other than what 96

“Sexualité et solitude” [1981], DE IV: 176/”Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 182. UP: 278/UPl: 254. 98 This is a reading of “Le combat de chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 295–308/”The Battle for Chastity,” 185–197, the only published chapter from Les aveux de la chair. In Du gouvernement des vivants, Foucault treats the writings of Cassian extensively but here not focusing on the relation to sexuality but on practices of truth-telling more exclusively. Cf. [GV]: 257–307/{GL}: 261–313. 97

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primarily appeared, if they were not a form of illusion and seduction. Such data have always to be considered with suspicion; they need to be scrutinized and tested.”99 In Foucault’s account, Cassian’s instructions to the monastery life not only crystalize the normative conceptions about obedience and distinguishing selftrial. His battle for chastity is taken up through a cleansing deciphering of desire and lust, which is characteristic of early Christianity’s problematization of the sexual, firstly, because it shows how the fourth domain of experience – the connection between self-imposed abstinence and truth – becomes a battle for purity and chastity; secondly, because it discloses how the ethical substance appears as a distinctive configuration of flesh or carnality, desire and impure thoughts. As a theoretical reflection on monasticism, Cassian pursues the question of how one can “develop a life of perfection, or rather a life of working at perfection, in a system of salvation in which Christ’s sacrifice has already been accomplished, once and for all and for everyone who recognizes it. What does it mean to still want perfection in a system of salvation?”100 Cassian thus distinguishes himself from Augustine by insisting on the possibility of overcoming desire, at least in principle, using hard labor initiated by free human will. More so than Augustine, he ascribes free will a status where it is not directly opposed to the grace of God but rather supplements it. Still, the two thinkers have commonalities. Both adhere to a shift from the Greek penetrative model to Christianity’s erectile model, which uses surveillance of obscene and involuntary movements in body and soul. They both understand sexuality as a desire lodged within man that must be scrutinized in order to know who we truly are. On the face of things the battle against the vices takes up more space in Cassian’s work than the battle for the virtues. On the topic of sexual matters, he divides immoral behavior or fornication into three kinds: firstly, as regards the union of the two genders (carnalis commixitio); secondly, in the area of auto-eroticism that takes place without women’s presence and which is called ‘onanism’ after Onan or uncleanliness (immunditia); and thirdly, as is instigated only in the soul and consciousness, which Cassian too designates libido (libido) to encompass intense lust and desire, which can come about in the secret nooks and crannies of the soul, can arise without bodily feeling. For the list to be complete, however, there should be added a fourth kind, namely desire (concupiscentia), which, according to Cassian, was given paradigmatically in the famous sentence from The Sermon on the Mount: But I tell you that

99 100

“Sexualité et solitude” [1981], DE IV: 177/“Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 183. [GV]: 254/{GL}: 259.

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anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.101 It is exactly this quadruple division of immorality or fornication that illustrates how it is not only the ordinary sexual intercourse that becomes an area of intense problematization; the domain of sexual immorality concerns thought (libido and concupiscentia) as much as actions (commixitio and immunditia), and it may occur individually (libido and immunditia) as well as in human relations (commixitio and concupiscentia). Cassian furthermore underlines that all aspects of immorality are equally sinful, as they can all lead to sins that block our way to the Kingdom of God, wherefore we must be equally conscientious with them all.102 Foucault points out how Cassian’s subdivision of immorality is in contrast with everyday ideas about immorality from that time, which underlines the innovative character of Cassian’s conception of the sexual.103 At the time, it seems to have been a custom to consider illegal and contemptible immorality in three main forms: infidelity to your wife; immorality or lewd behavior in general, without any relation to matrimony; and finally corruption of young boys or sexual relations with children.104 If this list is compared with Cassian’s division, it becomes clear that his focus is not on sexual sin based on sexual actions, but that the ethical substance – the material he seeks to treat in his battle for chastity – belongs to a world different from the one where people meet or help themselves to sexual enjoyment. In the battle for chastity, the monk can prove how he wishes to raise himself above this mortal world and approach the divine. This is because not only is chastity a defense against the world, but also it expresses a love of God: the purer the monk’s soul the clearer he can perceive the deity.105 Foucault points out five degrees of chastity given by Cassian in a step-wise progression toward the perfect state.106 In fact, the monk should in the fifth phase think of procreation as being on the same level with making bricks. These five levels are however followed by a sixth where immorality is no longer an object of the monk’s will as such but is given as something outside his immediate control. At this stage, the monk is not even seduced in his sleep by female phantoms that tempt him. Indeed, this stage is considered especially important because of its ambiguous nature. Cassian claims that although such a misapprehension is eo ipso not a sinful act, it is still an indication that sin is hidden at the core of

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Matthew: 5.28. Cassian: Collationes Patrum V.11. 103 “Le combat de la chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 299/“The Battle for Chastity,” p. 188. 104 Cf. Didache XII Apostolorum II.2; III.3. 105 Cf. Cassian: Collationes Patrum XII. 10; XII.13. 106 Cassian: Collationes Patrum XII.7. Cf. “Le combat de la chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 301– 302/“The Battle for Chastity,” p. 190. 102

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the subject because in sleep we are not completely beyond the reach of sin but are subjected to temptations according to how we act and think when we are awake. We have involuntary dreams of sexy temptresses, which according to Cassian is a sign that we have forgotten to clean up our thoughts in a manner that is fitting for a monk. We may not have free will in sleep, but that does not make us innocent. Nightly dreams and ejaculations suggest that we are not sufficiently the masters of our wills during the daytime. In the context of monasteries where the sexual, according to Foucault, was problematized as being without a real partner, without a real sexual act, and even without a conscious intention, the ethical substance no longer took the traditional shape of aphrodisia but was instead to be located in the body and the soul’s smallest movements, images, memories, thoughts and dreams. Still, the sexual could give signs that would permit us to interpret where and who we are. The battle for chastity occurs by doing the work of managing involuntary movements that even if not put into action are still actualized in thought as signs of the underlying desire. Since this ethical substance is immaterial and unreal but still exists, it must become an object of interpretation. Cassian points out how the battle for chastity and against immorality should happen through a thorough investigation of consciousness that distinguishes and interprets all thoughts that appear.107 For the monk, this applies to the degrading wet dreams as well as the tempting illusions that appear in sleep, and the problem becomes determining whether ejaculation is based in one thing or the other: was there some pleasure and desire in sleep or just when I woke up? Did I enjoy it? Do I regret it? For this reason, the monk must constantly question himself, although he may just have determined the opposite. He can, in other words, not be sure of himself but is placed on an unstable foundation and must therefore – that is the solution in this monastic tradition – present the problem to the elders. The monk is simply not himself able to determine whether he is impure or not: he needs help from higher authorities to perform the interpretation that can inform him where he stands. For this reason, a relatively innocent and unavoidable wet dream raises the specter of possible desires, which in return must become the object of a distinguishing analysis of consciousness, where the individual must not restrain from making immediate decisions about the self but obediently leave this to others to take part in.108

107

Cf. Cassian: De Institutis coenobiorum VI.4. The investigation of purity is thus placed within the framework of obedience that should penetrate life within the monasteries. Foucault articulates the general characteristics of obedience within monasticism in Du gouvernment du vivants (cf. [GV]: 261–269/ {GL}: 266–275). 108

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In this sense, possible desire becomes an opportunity for analysis. Here the desire is not a problem as such, but it supplies the substance that can determine if one is sufficiently free of sin to participate in the Holy Communion, a most important part of life. Sexual desire is not treated as a basic instinctual drive, which all other drives derive from, as in some versions of Freudianism. Rather, signs of sexual desire are expressive of other vices that may be found in the human soul in the shape of deceitful demons that must be fought, however hard that may be. The sexual is therefore especially important but as an epiphenomenon, as wet dreams and other temptations reveal more serious vices, such as anger, greed, or vanity, which in return can lead to what is even more sinful.109 Unlike with Augustine, for whom the sexual, in the shape of tempting thoughts and wet dreams, was a universal indication of the fall of man in each individual, the same sexual impulses could, according to Cassian, inform the individual about his or her efforts in striving for chastity and therefore about whom you are as an individual.110 Foucault is therefore able to claim that the monastic contribution to the history of sexuality is made up by coupling a powerful aversion to the flesh with sexual libido, understood as a manifestation of the personal.111 The desire that appears in an analysis of the self is on the one hand a ‘residual product’, which the subject is no longer a part of – it is not a true object of will but something one hopes will disappear. As such, the perfect chastity becomes a gift from above, while one in life must employ the free will to retain a constant inner supervision, in order to prepare the best possible basis for the chastity, which is only given in grace by God.112 This initiates an ongoing project of sorting and examining the objects of consciousness. Indeed, it was this distinguishing self-examination that played such an important role in the self-technologies of monastic life. In his 1980 lectures, Foucault states that the monk in this respect could not perform such a work of discrimination referring to a measure in the objects of his consciousness, nor could he find the measure in himself, because he was “inhabited by a foreign principle that is at the same time a source of illusion.”113 The monk will therefore have to rely on obedience to others in his work of self-examination, as this is paradigmatically expressed within the technique of confession, which will be an important object of analysis in the following chapter.

109 Cassian: Collationes Patrum I.22. Cf. P. Brown: The Body and Society (1988), pp. 421–422. 110 Augustine: Confessiones X.30.42. De Genesi ad litteram XII.15.31. 111 “Interview de Michel Foucault” [1981/1984], DE IV: 661. 112 Cassian: De Institutis coenobiorum VI.22. 113 Cf. [GV]: 292/{GL}: 297.

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According to Foucault, the hermeneutic battle for chastity should not be viewed as a simple internalization of a number of forbidden sexual transgressions where the previous injunctions against real activities are supplemented and completed by injunctions against sexual intentions. Rather, Foucault underlines how the self-techniques of monastic asceticism allow a new domain to appear, namely “that of thought, operating eratically and spontaneously, with its images, memories and perceptions, with movements [mouvements] and impressions transmitted from the body to the mind [âme] and the mind to the body. This has nothing to do with a code of permitted or forbidden actions but is a whole technique for analyzing and diagnosing thought, its origins, its qualities, its dangers, its potential for temptation, and all the dark forces that can lurk behind the mask it may assume.”114 This is therefore a hermeneutic of desire: to watch over personal thoughts pertaining to desire in order to understand one’s mode of being. This surveillance involves a process of subjectivation, which is inseparable from a commitment to speak a certain truth about oneself. This ethical labor happens in a state of constant suspicion to oneself: one must always suspect oneself of being on the way to an undesirable location and must therefore seek help from others to avoid this. Such a process of subjectivation involves a non-terminating process of self-objectivation: “Moreover, this subjectivation, in its quest for the truth about oneself, functions through complex relations with others, and in many ways. One must rid oneself of the power of the Other, the Enemy, who hides behind seeming likenesses of oneself, and eternal warfare must be waged against this Other, which one cannot win without the help of the Almighty, who is mightier than he. Finally, confession to others, submission to their advice, and permanent obedience to one’s superiors are essential in this battle.”115 Along with the rise of this mode of subjectivity – a subject that had become suspicious about itself and its desire, a subject that had an interpretative relation to the self through confession, a subject that insisted on obedience to some other – the conception of virtue, according to Foucault, changed status.116

114 “Le combat de la chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 307/“The Battle for Chastity,” p. 195. Foucault mentions that this new domain of thought is also found with Gregorius of Nyssa and Basil of Ancyra. To this one can also add Evagrius, cf. E.A. Clark, “Foucault, the Fathers and Sex” (1988), pp. 45–46. 115 “Le combat de la chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 307/“The Battle for Chastity,” 195. 116 Cf. Foucault’s description of the three fundamentally linked and interdependent principles of the dispositive of Christian direction: “The principle of obedience without an end, the principle of incessant examination, and the principle of exhaustive confession. A triangle: listening to the other, looking at oneself, speaking to the other about oneself” ([GV]: 284/{GL}: 289).

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First of all, Foucault identifies a shift in early Christianity in Cassian’s battle for chastity. In the 2nd century, Tertullian had identified virtue in virginity as an externalized attitude realized in a spiritual marriage with Christ. This was an activity that could be compared to martyrdom, since it showed the seriousness and personal cost of wanting to live a life of another world. Abstinence was therefore a change in both action and being.117 This conception of virginity changed with Cassian, by becoming an inner spiritual battle, wherefore Foucault notes that it becomes “a withdrawal that also reveals hidden depths within.”118 Secondly, this battle for virgin chastity continues in some respects a theme from the late-Hellenic, romantic novels that presented virtue as a defense of chastity. As mentioned earlier, these books told the story of two young lovers who were meant for each other but who first had to prove their faith and endurance by going through a number of challenges that tested their virtue and let them prove their resolution. Victory in this battle for premarital virginity was “essential to the relationship with themselves and essential to the relationship with others.”119 Virginity is also important to Cassian, but since it is reinterpreted as chastity the tests do not come from the outside but from the self itself. You can prove your chastity by posing yourself tests, which likewise shows love, not of another person who is likewise chaste but of God, whose closeness increases proportionally to your chastity. With Cassian, virginity becomes chastity, not only in action but also in thought. One could claim that Foucault examines a shift from the Platonic conception of purity, paradigmatically expressed in Socrates refusing the handsome Alcibiades in spite of his excellent qualities.120 The older philosopher hereby exhibits a noble self-mastery through his will’s total victory over himself. Over and against this we find Cassian and other ascetic thinkers, who insist that true purity is made up of a constant and fierce battle against all the thoughts and images that titillate and tempt in your consciousness. For Socrates the aim of the spiritual battle for purity is to not do what he covets – to be abstinent. For the Christian ascetic the aim is not even to covet; it is to be chaste. It is in extension of this that Foucault’s comment about Cassian in a lecture from 1981 becomes truly informative: “Real purity is not acquired when one can lie down with a young and beautiful boy without even touching him, as Socrates did with Alcibiades. A monk was really chaste when no impure 117 118 119 120

Cf. P. Brown: The Body and Society (1988), p. 77. “Le combat de la chasteté” [1982], DE IV: 306/“The Battle for Chastity,” 194. SS: 265/CS: 230. UP: 256–269/UPl: 33–46. Plato: Symposium 215b–223d.

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image occurred in his mind, even during the night, even during dreams. The criterion of purity does not consist in keeping control of oneself even in the presence of the most desirable people; it consists in discovering the truth in myself, and defeating the illusions in myself, in cutting out the images and thoughts my mind continuously produces. Hence the axis of spiritual struggle against impurity. The main question of sexual ethics has moved from relations to people, and the penetration problem to the relation to oneself and the erection problem: ... to the set of internal movements that develop from the first and nearly imperceptible thought to the final but still solitary pollution. However different and eventually contradictory they were, a common effect was elicited: sexuality, subjectivity, and truth were strongly linked together.”121 However, this also points toward the chastity of virginity as a method for the subject to identify truths about himself or herself: “Hence the ethical subject was to be characterized not so much by the perfect rule of the self by the self in the exercise of a virile type of activity, as by self-renunciation and a purity whose model was to be sought in virginity. This being the base, one can understand the significance that was attached, in Christian morality, to two opposite yet complementary practices: a codification of sexual acts that would become more and more specific, and the development of a hermeneutics of desire together with procedures of self-decipherment.”122 Foucault therefore views the rise of a subjectivity, which in comparison with previous ages not only wishes to be abstinent but also to be chaste: a subject that no longer presents itself as manly to itself and virile to others but rather is passive and effeminate as it views itself across from a number of temptations and external problems that must be navigated. Foucault also sees the rise of submissiveness in this subjectivity, which was alien to the ancient world. This is because alongside the passive chastity, Foucault also sees the appearance of a subjectivity that begins to consider obedience rather than command as a virtue. Foucault finds this principle of obedience to be instantiated also in Christian truth-telling, as he programmatically asserts at the very end of Du gouvernement des vivants: “The Christian has the truth deep within himself and he is yoked to this deep secret, indefinitely bent over it and indefinitely constrained to show to the other the treasure that his work, thought, attention, conscience, and discourse ceaselessly draw out from it. And by this he shows that putting his own truth into discourse is not just an essential obligation; it is one of the basic forms of our obedience.”123 In the following chapter we will return to 121 122 123

“Sexualité et solitude” [1981], DE IV: 177–178/“Sexuality and Solitude,” 183. UP: 106/UPl: 92. [GV]: 307/{GL}: 312–313.

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Christianity not in relation to the theme of sexuality and desire but within the broader framework of Foucault’s investigation of practices of the self. It is within this analytical framework that the technique of confession already touched upon in this chapter should be placed in order to see its significance beyond the theme of sexuality.

10 The Practices of the Self

Subject formation in practices of the self. In the programmatic introduction to L’Usage des plaisirs, Foucault describes his histories of sexuality succinctly as a study of “the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves” as subjects of sexuality.1 He immediately goes on, however, to situate his investigation of sexuality within a more general approach to subjectivity that focuses on “the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject.”2 The study of “the history of desiring man” is thus situated as a specific “domain of reference” within a more overall approach to the problem of “forming oneself as subject.” Sexual behavior exemplifies the theoretical framework within which Foucault attempts to analyze ‘the subject’. The underlying object of Foucault’s study is the “pragmatics,” “techniques,” or “practices of the self.” In an interview he playfully emphasizes this point: “I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that than sex. ... Sex is boring.” 3 The theme of ‘the subject,’ or more precisely the emergence of the subject in practices of the self, is the focus of the following chapter. The purpose will be to shed light on how the dimension of subjectivity is analyzed in the late work of Foucault by distinguishing a level of analysis that is irreducible to the singular historical experience of sexuality also studied by him in these years. The main focus will be the lecture series from 1982, L’herméneutique du sujet, but relevant material from volumes II and III of Histoire de la sexualité will also be employed. L’herméneutique du sujet was presented as an exceptional landmark in Foucault’s thought when it was published, and even if the extraordinarily wide 1 2 3

UP: 10/UPl: 4. UP: 12/UPl: 6. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” [1983], p. 253. 369

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range of interrelated analyses carried out here are never fully developed or integrated in an overall systematical framework or narrative, Foucault’s investigations open up several profound and far-reaching avenues for philosophical questioning and historical research.4 First of all, his analytical focus on the practices of the self enables him to analyze a level of subject formation that is of relevance for an ethics whose content cannot be captured through universal obligations, general moral codes, or any other kinds of rules that could be understood independently of their context of application. In the lectures, Foucault carries out the project of a history of self-constitution reaching from classical antiquity to early Christianity. The epicenter is found in the Hellenistic and Roman cultures in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, when the obligation to care for the self through the exercise of diverse practices of subjectivity became a general cultural phenomenon. Within the history of thought, this “culture of the self” represents, according to Foucault, an event of continued significance for our modern mode of being subjects.5 Ethics of the self, political government and reflective knowledge. Later in the lecture series Foucault specifies the relevance of this decisive moment in the history of thought in terms of a problem concerning the relation between ethics and politics as it is conceived in his own present: “At any rate,” Foucault says “what I would like to point out is that, after all, when today we see the meaning, or rather the almost total absence of meaning, given to some nonetheless very familiar expressions which continue to permeate our discourse – like getting back to oneself, freeing oneself, being oneself, being authentic, etcetera – when we see the absence of meaning and thought in all of these expressions we employ today, then I do not think we have anything to be proud of in our current efforts to reconstitute an ethic of the self. And in this series of undertakings to reconstitute an ethic of the self, in this series of more or less blocked and ossified efforts, and in the movement we now make to refer ourselves constantly to this ethic of the self without ever giving it any content, I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.”6

4 The enthusiasm of the editors is thus tangible in this respect: cf. the “Course Context” by the editor Frédéric Gros ([HS]:487–526/{HSb}: 507–550) and the “Introduction” to the English translation by Arnold Davidson ({HSb}: xix–xxx). 5 [HS]: 11/{HSb}: 9. 6 [HS]: 241/{HSb}: 251–252.

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The presupposition of Foucault’s investigations of the practices of the self is thus that there is a legitimate issue at stake in the more or less desperate attempts in the late 20th century to rearticulate an ethics of the self. By mapping ancient techniques of subject-constitution, he aims to challenge his contemporaries to qualify the incessant yet shallow discourse on how an ethic of the self can be reconstituted precisely because he acknowledges the relevance and importance of this task. Here Foucault’s lectures from 1982 offer valuable inspiration for the present because he provides a description of a wealth of different practices and techniques of self in his readings of Hellenistic and Roman texts, as well as a valuable reflection on the political and philosophical presuppositions of this most intense attempt in the history of the West to address the problem of an ethic of the self. He thereby diagnostically sharpens the awareness of the possibilities as well as the challenges in our present endeavor to reinvigorate this tradition. Foucault’s focus on the practices of the self also allows him to articulate an irreducible level of government of the self that is intrinsically connected to the art of governing others that he described in his earlier investigations, and in this way to expand and refine his analysis of government and power. He thus explicitly emphasizes that if we accept his conception of power relations as mobile, transformable and reversible, then we cannot avoid “passing through” theoretically as well as practically “the element of a subject that is defined by a relationship of self to self.”7 This means that when he speaks of “resistance to political power,” Foucault does not engage in a call for oppositional reactions but rather presupposes already active transgressive forces expressed by dynamic relationships of self to self. In light of the previous chapter on the liberal art of governing, a further point may be emphasized. In relation to a form of power that increasingly takes the shape of a “conduct of conduct,” of the government of self-government as it is in the case of modern (Western) societies, it becomes more and more important to develop refined analytical tools to capture the reflective practices of the self. In this sense the contemporary discourse and practice of subject formation is an undeniable challenge, and Foucault’s analyses can help us to relate in a more enlightened manner to this phenomenon, even if we are ultimately skeptical concerning the prospects of an ethic of the self. The investigations of practices of the self are also relevant for our contemporary conception of the relation between knowledge and the subject. The fact that man is the object of knowledge in modern sciences such as chemistry, physics, biology, psychiatry and economy has led to the philosophical problem of objectification (objectivation), which, for example, plays a central role in the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. In this type of enquiry we ask whether there 7

[HS]: 241/{HSb}: 252.

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can be “knowledge of the subject which is of the same type as knowledge of any other component of the world, or is another type of knowledge required which is irreducible to the first.”8 In other words, this type of discourse asks how far and in what sense the objectification of the subject in a field of knowledge (connaissances) is epistemologically possible while seeking to articulate the consequences for the subject when he is objectified in this manner. However, if the objectified subject is irreducibly characterized by a relationship of self to self, then we may also ask another kind of question: How does and how could the subject relate reflectively to such knowledge? It is this question that Foucault wants to draw his contemporaries’ attention to and reconsider when he focuses on the philosophical problem of the “constitution of the knowledge of the world as spiritual experience of the subject,” which he finds at the heart of some of the texts of Greek and Roman antiquity.9 Here the question of objectification prompted by the enormous explanatory force and practical accomplishments of the modern sciences does not arise at all. Instead, these texts view the relation between knowledge and subjectivity from the other side, as it were, than modernity because they inquire into the value of knowledge for the spiritual transformation of the subject. They emphasize the need to “to inflect knowledge [savoir] of the world in such a way that it takes on a certain form and a certain spiritual value for the subject.”10 In this sense the ancient authors express what Foucault calls a “spiritual modalization of knowledge” that is of contemporary significance. Finally, on a more general level Foucault also distinguishes between a tradition of “modern philosophy” and a tradition of spirituality, or perhaps more precisely spiritually informed philosophy, which dominated all schools of thought in antiquity, although it also has modern proponents.11 According to this latter tradition, the subject’s access to certain types of truth depends on a continuous exercise of practices that may include “purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc. which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for the access to truth.”12 Spiritually informed philosophy not only demands a certain work of the self upon the self in order to access knowledge or truth; it also claims that there will be a “rebound effect” of the truth upon the subject that will affect and transform him in his being as a subject. “Modern philosophy” is a label that does not cover all philosophers 8

[HS]: 303/{HSb}: 317. [HS]: 304/{HSb}: 319. 10 [HS]: 304/{HSb}: 318. 11 Aristotle constitutes an exception for Foucault in the sense that he is the philosopher in antiquity for whom the question of spirituality was least important. [HS]: 19/ {HSb}: 17. 12 [HS]: 16/{HSb}: 15. 9

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of the modern period but serves for Foucault to distinguish a tradition that denies the presuppositions of spirituality. Instead it propounds the idea that knowledge alone gives access to the truth without an accompanying or prior work of the self upon the self, and it also disallows the idea of transfiguring rebound effects of the experience of truth upon the subject. Since Foucault views his own philosophical activity as a distinct expression of the tradition of philosophical “spirituality” in this sense, the investigation of the conception of practices of the self in the ancient schools of philosophy also helps Foucault to understand how his own work is a contribution to philosophy. Subjectivity, truth and care for the self. In L’Usage des plaisirs and L’Souci de soi, “practices of the self” designate a presupposition and an instrument in order to investigate transformations in subject constitution in relation to sexuality. These practices are not singled out as an object of analysis as such and are therefore pervasively present in some parts of these books but absent in others. In L’herméneutique du sujet, the situation is different insofar as Foucault develops a specific historical category in order to capture the subject conceived as an expression of practices of the self. In fact, this course contains material for a planned book that was to be devoted entirely to the practices of the self, which Foucault never wrote. The lectures from 1982 examine the notion of “care for the self [Gr: epimeleia heautou; La: cura sui]” and follow its history from its philosophical inception with Plato (428–347 BC). He begins by stating that he wants to “step back” from the privileged example of the regimen of sexual behavior, which had been the focus of the lecture course the previous year and rather “extract from it the more general terms of the problem of ‘the subject and truth’.”13 While “the problem ‘subjectivity and truth’” was certainly an important topic in the 1981 lectures at Collège de France carrying the same name, Subjectivité et vérité, it was to a great extent explored in relation to the complex question concerning “a certain preexistence of a supposedly ‘Christian sexual morality’ existing within the thought and the morality we call pagan.”14 Going through a range of the same material and issues that would be treated in L’Usage des plaisirs and L’Souci de soi in 1984 – such as sexual abstinence, the activity and the passivity of sexual pleasure, the economy and the ethics of marriage – the question of subjectivity and truth Foucault in the preceding lectures recurrently saw in light of the overall guiding historical question: “the whole moral reflection, as theoretical, as general as it may be, the whole question concerning morality, as contemporary as it may be, is it not, it seems to me, unable to avoid a historical question to which they are associated and whose shadow they carry with them: what was it that happened 13 14

[HS]: 4/{HSb}: 2. [SV]: 12, 45.

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in the first centuries of our era, revolving around what we call pagan ethics and Christian morality.”15 It is thus in opposition to this topical approach that Foucault in 1982 seeks to draw out the more general problem question concerning subject and truth through practices of the self. He goes on to claim that this can be achieved by focusing on the body of work relating to the notion of “the care for the self” because this will reveal it as “an extremely important phenomenon not just in the history of representations, concepts or theories, but in the history of subjectivity itself or, if you like, in the history of the practices of subjectivity.”16 The study of the “practices of subjectivity” through the phenomenon of care for the self is described in L’herméneutique du sujet as a historical analysis spanning from the first forms of this attitude in the Greeks to the first forms of Christian asceticism, that is, from the 5th century BC to the 5th century AD. This history can be roughly divided into three phases: first, classical antiquity, when there is special emphasis on the Socratic form of care for the self; second, what Foucault calls “the long summer of Hellenistic and Roman thought,” when the exhortation to care for the self reached the status of “general cultural phenomenon.”;17 and third, early Christianity, or more precisely certain early forms of Christian asceticism, for which the care for the self is inscribed into a so-called hermeneutics of the self. In the present chapter, Foucault’s historical schema as well as the notion of care for the self will be employed in order to organize his analyses of the subject in terms of practices of the self as they are developed in the relevant books, lectures and occasional writings. The three key sections of the chapter will present Foucault’s study of practices of the self in relation to each of the three historical periods. The main emphasis will be on the “golden age of the care of the self,” that is, the first two centuries AD and the Hellenistic and Roman schools of thought that Foucault investigates most thoroughly in this historical context. As an introduction, however, we want to briefly present, in a preceding section, the methodological framework of the investigations of practices of the self as well as the relation between practices of the self, morality and ethics.

1

Philosophical methodology: The correlation of experience

In Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, the Collège de France lectures of 1983, Foucault presents a brief, retrospective characterization of his philosophical methodology.18 At the very beginning of the lectures, Foucault articulates 15 16 17 18

[SV]: 21. [HS]: 13/{HSb}: 11. [HS]: 11/{HSb}: 9. Cf. [GSA 1]: 4–7, 41–42/{GSO 1}: 2–5, 41–42. Cf. [GSA 2]: 10/{GSO 2}: 8–9.

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how his work as a whole up until this point in 1983 can be understood as a “history of thought” that links “forms of a possible knowledge [savoir], normative frameworks of behavior and conduct [comportement] for individuals, and potential modes of existence for possible subjects.”19 He thus describes his history of thought in terms of a correlation between three axes or dimensions. The first axis deals with the formation of forms of knowledge, which is studied by focusing not on the development or progress of bodies of knowledge as such but on specific discursive practices in which knowledge is expressed and particularly the forms of veridiction that regulate these practices. The second axis focuses on power understood not in terms of domination but rather as the exercise of technologies of governmentality, that is, procedures by which one sets out to conduct the conduct of others. Finally, the third axis fixes upon the potential modes of existence for possible subjects, that is, the forms or practices of the self by which the individual becomes a subject. The three axes are complexly related and irreducible to one another; they cannot be reduced to or be absorbed by each other and their relations are in fact constitutive of each other. At the center of the correlation lies the “source or hotbed of experience [de foyer d’experience].”20 Intersections as objects of analysis. Foucault claims, perhaps surprisingly, that the correlation of experience with these three axes was already present in Histoire de la folie where the focal point was of course the experience of madness, grasped in the correlation between the “forms of knowledge,” the “set of norms,” and the subjective “modes of being.” He goes on to offer a view of his work after Histoire de la folie as an articulation of the three axes in turn: Les Mots et les Choses develops the axis of knowledge, Surveiller et punir contributes to the articulation of the axis of normativity, and the as yet unpublished volumes II and III of the Histoire de la sexualité expound the axis of subject constitution. Simultaneously, these works represent studies of specific focal points of experience, namely the human sciences, delinquency and sexuality respectively.21 Foucault suggests that his retrospective reconstruction of his work is also a programmatic point of view for how to (re)interpret it. He speaks of his “general project, which is to try to analyze what may be called the focal points or matrices of experience like madness, criminality, and sexuality, and to analyze them according to the correlation of the three axes which constitute

19

[GSA 1]: 5/{GSO 1}: 3. Cf. [GSA 2]: 10/{GSO 2}: 9. 21 The introduction to L’usage des plaisirs affirms that Foucault views the constellation of experience as the methodological backbone also for his genealogy of desiring man. UP: 10–11/UPl: 4–6. 20

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these experiences: the formation of forms of knowledge, the normativity of behavior, and the constitution of the subject’s mode of being.”22 In this way, Foucault invites us to revisit his previous investigations in light of the correlation of experience where in each case one axis is most prominent even if an axis is never completely absorbed by the others. In L’Usage des plaisirs, Foucault asks whether his detour after the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité actually changed his way of thinking. The “irony” that Foucault perceives at this point is that the investigation that led him to antiquity did not so much change him as give him a “better perspective” on the way he had worked all along on his history of thought. Of course this “new vantage point” also transforms or “rejuvenates things”: if he were to make what was only implicit in the earlier analyses explicit, then their status would also change significantly.23 The correlation of experience is also a framework for understanding the status of the analyses of parrēsia, the practice of speaking freely or free-spokenness ( franc-parler). The analyses of parrēsia form the content of both Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la vérité, the final series of lectures from 1984. Thus, at the point in his philosophical development where Foucault recognizes the correlation of experience as the methodological model that has structured his work in its entirety, he defines the overall purpose of his last two series of lectures as the attempt to clarify the correlation itself and to learn how we can establish it by studying how it has been instituted.24 In relation to this, the practice of parrēsia is relevant because it is the practice of speaking truth to power, through which the subject constitutes himself or herself. It is in other words “situated at the meeting point of the obligation to speak the truth, procedures and techniques of governmentality, and the constitution of the relationship to self.”25 The extensive study of parrēsia is therefore for Foucault a way to elucidate the correlation of experience because it is a concrete historical practice that institutes this correlation. In performing a (partial) genealogy of parrēsia with particular focus on the texts of Euripides, Plato, and those documenting the doctrines and practice of the Cynic school of philosophy he excavates the philosophical and methodological foundations of his own work. He does so with philosophical consistency through proceeding in a genealogical manner where he can remain true to the historical anti-foundationalism that he is steadfastly committed to in his work. The correlation between the dimensions of experience does not only form an adequate starting point for understanding the status and purpose of Foucault’s

22

[GSA 1]: 41/{GSO 1}: 41. UP: 17/UPl: 11. 24 [GSA 1]: 42/{GSO 1}: 42. 25 At the beginning of Le courage de la vérité Foucault also emphasizes this overall methodological purpose of his study of parrēsia. Cf. [GSA 2]: 10/{GSO 2}: 8–9. 23

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last two lecture series, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la vérité; it also serves as an illuminating framework for recognizing a number of important methodological points concerning his investigations of the practices of the self. First of all, the model emphasizes that the practices of the self are at the center of his philosophical interest whereas sexuality plays the role of a focal point of experience. This underlines the importance of L’herméneutique du sujet because it is this work in which Foucault methodologically singles out the practices of the self as the specific object of analysis. Here an analogy can be drawn to Foucault’s investigations of power in “Il faut défendre la société”, Sécurité, territoire, population and La naissance de la biopolitique: Whereas these series of lectures articulate the second axis of normativity in a wealth of detail and with crucial internal distinctions between types of normativity, most notably by expanding the analysis of discipline with the dispositive of security and the forms of governmentality, L’herméneutique du sujet has a similar status in relation to the axis of subject-constitution. Second, Foucault emphasizes that the level of analysis now characterized by terms such as “practices of the self” was already implicitly present in his investigation of the experience of madness in our culture in Histoire de la folie. This axis does not designate a complete novum within Foucault’s work even if it was not sufficiently emphasized before now.26 Third, the deliberate methodological focus on the practices of the self also underlines that Foucault is not interested in a more general interpretation of the schools of thought that he treats in L’herméneutique du sujet, and his analyses should be judged accordingly. Fourth and finally, the correlation of experience accentuates that even if the axis of subject-constitution is in focus in L’herméneutique du sujet, the idea is to keep the interplay with the two other axes of veridiction and normativity in view. In the following presentation of Foucault’s work on the practices of the self, we have therefore attempted to keep the interaction between the three axes in mind. Morality, self-constitution, and the criteria of ethics. Rather than the relative stability of moral rules and values as well as the contingencies of actual behavior, Foucault is interested in studying a level of practical reflection upon the way one ought to conduct oneself as an ethical subject that acts in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code. It is especially in the beginning of the second volume of his Histoire de la sexualité from 1984 that he explicates this level of analysis: “Given a code of actions and with regard to a specific type of actions (which can be defined by their degree of conformity with or divergence from the code), there are different ways to ‘conduct oneself’ morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as 26 This is perhaps first recognized clearly by Deleuze in his Foucault (1988); cf. e.g. pp. 113–115.

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an agent, but as an ethical subject of this action. Take, for example, a code of sexual prescriptions enjoining the two marital partners to practice a strict and symmetrical conjugal fidelity, always with a view to procreation; there will be many ways, even within such a rigid frame, to practice that austerity, many ways to ‘be faithful’.”27 In short, morality cannot be reduced to a set of acts that conform to a rule or law but essentially involves a more or less reflective self-formation as an ethical subject. This is the reason for the fundamental role ascribed to the practices of the self in Foucault’s historical investigation of ethics. Once we acknowledge the irreducible and crucial function of a level of ethical self-formation that cannot be captured by moral codes, these practices appear as a ‘medium’ of ethical self-formation in relation not only to the government of pleasures but in regard to all kinds of morally relevant subject matters.28 In L’Usage des plaisirs and L’Souci de soi, it is this level of analysis that allows Foucault to describe the complex field of historicity in the way the individual is trained to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct, “from classical Greek thought up to the formulation of the Christian doctrine and pastoral ministry regarding the flesh.”29 Foucault’s emphasis on the irreducibility of practices of the self to what can be captured in universal moral rules allows him to suggest different possible historical constellations between moral code and practices of the self: There are first moralities for which “the main emphasis is placed on the code, its systematicity, its richness, its capacity to adjust to every possible case and to embrace every area of behavior.”30 In this conception of morality there is a very strong codification of moral experience, and the ethical subject refers his conduct to a set of codified laws to which he must submit at the risk of committing offenses that would make him liable to punishment. Secondly, there are moralities such as those found in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity that are less oriented toward the codified definitions of proper morality and instead privilege the practices of the self and the attempt to intensify, develop, and teach them.31 Third, there are moralities such as those found in early Christianity where a strong emphasis on ethical self-constitution through practices of the self thrived alongside code-oriented moralities.32 It is important to note that Foucault’s genealogical approach to the analyses of ethical self-constitution do not belong within the framework of a ‘normative

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UP: 33/UPl: 26. UP: 35–36/UPl: 28–29. UP: 39/UPl: 32. UP: 36/UPl: 29. UP: 38/UPl: 31. UP: 37/UPl: 30.

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ethics’ concerned with the question of the criteria of right and wrong, as this problem poses itself from the perspective of the subject. An indication of his methodological abstraction from the perspective of the subject that considers how he should act is that the Aristotelian virtues of character (aretai ) as well as his conception of practical wisdom ( phronēsis) are absent in Foucault’s account.33 In Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, phronēsis represents the understanding that guides the virtuous person and that makes his actions more than expressions of a habitual propensity to act in accordance with what virtue requires of him. In order to act in an ethically responsible manner, a virtuous person cannot blindly follow his habitually constituted virtues of character, such as courage but must rather be able to reflectively apply these virtues according to the requirements of a specific situation. This process of interpreting the situation and what it requires cannot be performed from a context-independent position and put into universal rules. According to the model of phronēsis, the criteria for right and wrong are only accessible from within the interpretative position itself.34 This restriction allows that an understanding of the criteria or norm as to why a response is right could still to some extent be manifested discursively even if this articulation will also be tied to the interpretation of the situation. From an Aristotelian perspective, the decisive question of ethics cannot, therefore, be confined to the theme of practices or techniques of the self, although his approach does not exclude that such aspects may constitute an important dimension of ethical self-formation.35 The central issue here is that a technique of the self considered in abstraction from virtues of character and practical wisdom is profoundly ambiguous in relation to the crucial ethical distinction between right and wrong. This should not only be understood in the obvious sense that, like all arts or techniques, the technique of the self is open to deliberate misuse. A self-technique might be used properly and consciously to constitute and assert a certain disposition of the self, yet both virtues of character and the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom are needed in order to deserve the label ‘ethical’ in the normative sense that is at the center of Aristotle’s attention but from which Foucault abstracts. If it is not embedded

33

Aristotle’s model plays a crucial role in a number of recent philosophical reinterpretations of ancient ethics. John McDowell and Hans-Georg Gadamer are two prominent examples, representing the Analytical and the Continental traditions of philosophy respectively. Cf. J. McDowell: “Virtue and Reason,” in: Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 50–73. H.-G. Gadamer: Truth and Method (London, Continuum, 2004), pp. 310–321. 34 A decisive passage in this regard is Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea VI, 8, 1142a 24–30. 35 Wolfgang Detel has investigated how Aristotle’s practical philosophy can enrich and critically modify Foucault’s analyses of sexuality and practices of the self in classical Greek antiquity. Cf. W. Detel: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 58–92.

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in a properly habituated character or guided by practical wisdom, then the successful use of the technique of the self could even make the subject blind to the legitimate demands of the concrete situation and thus further an unethical response. Because of his methodological bracketing of the question of how to distinguish between right and wrong, such problems of application and adequate character formation do not gain the same status for Foucault as they do in the Aristotelian approach, even if both conceptions represent a view of ethics as irreducible to rules that could be articulated and understood independently of the context in which they are applied.

2

The classical care of the self

A first indication of the object of analysis aimed at in Foucault’s analyses is found in the following passage from L’Usage des plaisirs: “The domain I will be analyzing is made up of texts written for the purpose of offering rules, opinions, and advice on how to behave as one should: ‘practical’ texts, which are themselves objects of a ‘practice’ in that they are designed to be read, learned, reflected upon, and tested out, and that they were intended to constitute the eventual framework of everyday conduct. These texts thus served as functional devices that would enable individuals to question their own conduct, to watch over, and give shape to it, and to shape themselves as ethical subjects; in short, their function was ‘etho-poetic’, to transpose a word found in Plutarch.”36 In L’herméneutique du sujet, Foucault also analyzes a number of more theoretical philosophical treatises, but even so his focus on the ethopoetic function of these texts remains the same. The historical point of departure for Foucault’s treatment of the practices of the self is classical Greek antiquity (5th to 4th century BC), and more specifically the Socratic tradition of care for the self, primarily as it is depicted in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates’ philosophical self-conception remains the paradigm for a number of important figures in the later tradition of philosophers who reflect on the care of the self: “In a series of late texts, in the Stoics, in the Cynics, and especially in Epictetus, you will see that Socrates is always, essentially and fundamentally, the person who stops young men in the street and tells them: ‘You must care for the self’.”37 With reference to Plato’s Apology, where Socrates defends himself in front of his fellow Athenian citizens, Foucault emphasizes how Socrates’ philosophical mission is conceived in terms of a continuous

36 UP: 18–19/UPl: 12–13. Foucault’s remarks are taken from the beginning of his investigation of sexuality in the classical antiquity in L’Usage des plaisirs, yet it is remarkable how the theme of sexuality as such is absent, or rather replaced with the broader theme of ethical subjectivity and etho-poeisis, i.e. the ‘creation’ or constitution of character. 37 [HS]: 10/{HSb}: 8.

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attempt to care for himself, and at the same time care for his fellow Athenians and encourage them to care for themselves.38 However, even though Socrates’ version becomes the paradigm of care for the self in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, his fixation on ‘dialogue’ as the practice that enables the combination of care for the self, care for others, and the protreptic encouragement of others to care for themselves in one and the same activity is a particularly Platonic point of emphasis not found in the later tradition. The Socratic care of the self. In the Apology, Socrates conceives of his encouragement to care for the self as instigating an awakening from a dogmatic slumber, and he claims that if practiced properly it becomes a principle of restlessness and movement.39 He also points out that in caring for the self and encouraging others to do likewise he has neglected a number of alternative activities that in the eyes of the many are thought to be profitable and advantageous. In this emphasis on the ‘costs’ of caring for the self, Foucault detects an early appearance of the problem of the precarious authority of the philosopher or the master (maître) in relation to the practice of self-care.40 With what authority can the master encourage others to give up conventional measures of recognition in favor of caring for themselves? In the case of Socrates, this problem is of course sharpened in light of his fate, and Plato sharpens it further by his depiction of Socrates’ attitude toward the threat of death and his ambiguous relation to religious authority. Although Socrates conceives of his philosophical mission as an activity entrusted to him by the god, his service to god is defined in terms of challenging its authority, and as for the threat of execution, he denies that putting him to death will put an end to his philosophical project. By defying all traditional authorities while remaining at their mercy, his example inevitably raises what Foucault calls the problem “of the position occupied by the master in this matter of ‘caring for oneself’.”41 Foucault takes care to mention that the principle of “taking care of the self” is not an instruction invented by Socrates in order to encourage his fellow citizens to engage in philosophy but rather an older maxim that in some cases does not even refer to an exclusive or primarily intellectual activity. In this sense, Socratic philosophy transposes a “more widespread ideal into its own requirements.”42 A fundamental characteristic of the care for the self, both before and after Socrates, is that it is linked to a political, economic, or social privilege.43 This is to be understood both in the sense that it presupposes a 38 39 40 41 42 43

[HS]: 7–10/{HSb}: 5–8. [HS]: 9/{HSb}: 8. [HS]: 9/{HSb}: 7. [HS]: 9/{HSb}: 7. [HS]: 475/{HSb}: 493. [HS]: 33/{HSb}: 31.

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certain amount of social independence and spare time, but also in the sense that successful care for the self is a requirement for the individual to become a proper political subject. In order to conduct others it is necessary to spend time to learn to conduct oneself. In a Socratic context, the latter point is made clear in Alcibiades I, the one text from classical Greek antiquity to which Foucault devotes most extensive analysis.44 “In the dialogues of Plato’s youth – those called the Socratic dialogues – there is,” Foucault says, “a very familiar context of a political and social milieu compromising the small world of young aristocrats whose status makes them leading figures in the city-state and who are destined to exercise a certain power over their city-state, over their fellow citizens. They are young men who from an early age are consumed by the ambition to prevail over others, their rivals within as well as outside the city-state – in short, to enter active, authoritarian and triumphant politics. However, the problem is whether the authority initially conferred on them by birth, membership of the aristocratic world, and great wealth – as was the case with Alcibiades – also gives them the ability to govern properly. It is a world, then, in which relations between the status of the ‘preeminent’ and the ability to govern are problematized: the need to care of oneself insofar as one has to govern others.”45 In Socrates’ conversation with Alcibiades, he encourages the young, beautiful noble to first take care of the self, or he will never – according to Socrates – be able to live up to his political ambitions.46 In order to make Alcibiades receptive to this idea he begins by reminding him of his inferiority: the rivals he is facing if he wants to transform his statutory privileges into the government of others, in particular the nobles from Sparta and Persia, outmatch him both in terms of wealth and education. Lacking these resources, he must compensate by developing a certain know-how (savoir); in short, a technē.47 The Socratic care of the self is an inquiry into the nature of this form of knowledge that will allow Alcibiades to fulfill his political potential despite

44

[HS]: 32–80, 475–476/{HSb}: 31–83, 494–495. [HS]: 43–44/{HSb}: 43–44. It is not settled whether Alcibiades I is an early dialogue or indeed whether it is written by Plato at all. The latest commentary in English by Nicholas Denyer argues that it is authentic but a late dialogue. Cf. N. Denyer (ed.): Plato: Alcibiades. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001). Foucault discusses both the dating and the authenticity of the dialogue but states that what is decisive for him is that in Alcibiades I he finds “in outline an entire account of Plato’s philosophy, from Socratic questioning to what appear to be elements quite close to the final Plato or even to Neo-Platonism” [HS]: 72/{HSb}: 74. 46 The historical Alcibiades (ca. 450–404 BC) played an important and very controversial role in the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta in which he changed sides several times. 47 [HS]: 37/{HSb}: 35. 45

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his defects in terms of wealth and education. At an early point of the conversation, Alcibiades acknowledges his ignorance in respect to a political technē and Socrates encouragingly remarks that if one is made aware of this at a young age, then such ignorance can still be remedied.48 In the Apology, Socrates describes how he has roamed the streets and stopped everyone, young, old, citizen and non-citizen, to tell them to take care of themselves.49 The injunction to care for the self pertains to the whole of life and to everyone, whereas in Alcibiades I it appears as relevant for the young aristocrats who are destined to exercise power.50 In Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, the care of the self becomes a permanent obligation throughout life and for ‘everyone’.51 However, even if these philosophers demand, express, and proclaim the generalization of the care of the self, we should be careful as to how to understand this idea. First of all, because the care for the self demands free time (otium or scholê), it therefore remains an activity for the elite who can afford this luxury.52 Secondly, even if it is not restricted to specific social strata, it is still dependent on inclusion within definite organizations or social networks of friendship and can therefore not be understood as an opportunity that can be grasped by the individual qua individual human being but rather something that can be exclusively practiced within the group.53 Thirdly, even if the principle of caring for the self is available without any prior condition of status and without any specific professional or social aim, only a few are able to ‘hear’, that is, only a few can manifest the continuous devotion and ability that is necessary in order to realize it successfully. “It is the final aim of life for every man, but a rare form of existence for a few, and only a few.”54 Plato depicts the care of the self as inevitably revolving around the relationship to a master. Using the figure of Socrates, he reinterprets the pederast relationship between the lover (ho erastês) and the beloved youth (hê pais), which in the 5th and 4th centuries BC was subject to intense and subtle regulation and reflection.55 Alcibiades’ other suitors and lovers care for his body or at best they care for him as a conventional pedagogical subject who can be taught certain skills, aptitudes, and abilities that will help him prevail in the political arena. In Plato’s depiction, however, Socrates cares for Alcibiades’ himself, that is, for his soul as a subject of action. Socrates is the master “who

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Plato: Alcibiades I, 129e. Plato: Apology, 30a. [HS]: 80/{HSb}: 82. [HS]: 39/{HSb}: 37. [HS]: 109/{HSb}: 112. [HS]: 114/{HSb}: 117. [HS]: 123/{HSb}: 127. UP: 214/UPl: 193–194.

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cares about the subject’s care for himself, and who finds in his love for his disciple the possibility of caring for the disciple’s care for himself. By loving the boy disinterestedly, he is then the source and model for the care the boy must have for himself as subject.”56 The ignorance of which Alcibiades is guilty and which bars him from becoming an influential politician is of a special kind. On the one hand, it cannot be remedied by the traditional forms of knowledge offered in his culture, for example the art (technē) of political rhetoric offered by the sophists. Alcibiades needs an art of the self. On the other hand, the dialogue does not continue from Alcibiades’ admittance of ignorance to an exposition that lays out the specific practices that a Socratic care of the self involves. Rather, Socrates begins to inquire into the nature of the ‘self’ that such a practice presupposes: “What is this identical element present as it were on both sides of the care: subject of the care and object of the care?”57 The aim is to attain knowledge of the point toward which the reflective activity points back and inquire into the presupposition of the care of the self. For Plato, the self is the soul. In Alcibiades, however, it is emphasized that in relation to care of the self, we must conceive of the soul not as a timeless substance, but as a “subject of” a specific number of things. It is the subject of action and of relationships with other people, but also of behavior and attitudes and of course of a relationship to oneself.58 Although it is the subject of action that is at stake in the care of the self, this designates a purely instrumental relationship of the soul to the rest of world or to the body. Rather, according to Foucault, Plato seeks to specify the irreducibility or “singularity” of the subject with regard to the surrounding objects, to people to whom he relates, to his own body and not least to himself.59 The purpose of the classical care of the self. Not only in the texts of Plato but also in the works of other influential authors from 5th- and 4th-century Athenian society, the care for the self necessarily involves the element of askēsis, training or exercise. In his treatment of Alcibiades, Xenophon claims that his scandalous acts and repeated treachery during the Peloponnesian war should be understood in this light. Alcibiades’ behavior did not reflect the bad influence of Socrates or any of his other teachers but rather the fact that after his conquest of many beautiful men and women and after his success in the general opinion of the populace, he thought he could neglect the task of training himself.60

56 57 58 59 60

[HS]: 58/{HSb}: 59. [HS]: 52/{HSb}: 53. [HS]: 56/{HSb}: 57. [HS]: 55/{HSb}: 56. UP: 84/UPl: 72.

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At stake in the exercise is the establishment of a certain ‘attitude’ toward oneself, which Foucault finds expressed in the term enkrateia.61 It expresses moderation or mastery in respect to the pleasures and appetites, but importantly it also involves an element of struggle or test of strength. When exercising enkrateia, the subject acts like the ruler who in the face of opposition insists on enforcing the laws he takes to be good. He thereby avoids incontinence (akrasia), which is not the deliberate choice of bad principles but rather a weakness of character caused either by a lack of intellectual grasp of the consequences of reasonable principles or by an absence of the strength necessary in order to put these principles into action.62 In order for the subject to express enkrateia, he must be successfully tested. He must prove his ability to adopt a combative attitude toward the pleasure and toward himself. A demanding struggle is necessary not because the pleasures are understood as intrinsically evil but because their possible ascendency and dominion would be both inevitable and catastrophic if they were allowed free reign. Similarly, even if the desiring part of the subject is considered decisively inferior, it is not viewed as a completely ontologically separate and alien power. Unlike the “spiritual combat” as it is conceived in paradigmatic texts of early Christianity, the struggle is a crossing of swords with oneself.63 Accordingly, achieving the state of enkrateia through askēsis is not so much conceived as the abolishment of all pleasures but rather as the stable rule of the self over the self. The intensity of the desires and pleasures is not supposed to disappear; rather, the moderate subject is expected to be able to control them well enough so as not to allow for excess or violence.64 Training or exercise is essential in order for the care for the self to be able to establish the foundation for political action, but in texts from classical Greek antiquity relatively little attention is paid to the details of the forms that the particular practices or techniques could take. The askēsis is not “organized and conceived as a corpus of separate practices that would constitute a kind of specific art of the soul, with its techniques, procedures and prescriptions. It was not distinct from the practice of virtue itself; it was the rehearsal that anticipated that practice.”65 The content as well as the form of the care of the

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UP: 45, 74/UPl: 37; 63. UP: 76–77/UPl: 65. On this point Foucault refers to Aristotle, who distinguishes akrasia from immoderation, akolasia, which is the deliberate choice of bad principles. Aristotle also makes a distinction between enkreteia and sōphrosunē, which he views as a higher form of moderation because it does not involve the experience of pleasure that is not in accord with reason. Enkrateia, by contrast, constitutively involves the struggle to maintain control. Cf. Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea III, 11–12, 1118b–1119b; VII, 7, 1150a–1152a. 63 UP: 80/UPl: 68. 64 UP: 81/UPl: 69. 65 UP: 86/UPl: 74. 62

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self simply correspond to the practice of virtue in actual situations among one’s fellow citizens. The presupposition during the Classical Period that establishing oneself as a proper citizen, becoming virtuous, and taking proper care of oneself is achieved through one and the same educational process prevented the care of the self from gaining substantial independence. Governing others was thus not distinguished from governing oneself either in terms of method or content. The most fundamental reason for the lack of autonomy characteristic of the care of the self in classical Greek antiquity, however, is teleological. In Alcibiades I, this structure is complex because the city-state mediates “the relationship of self to self so that the self could be the object as well as the end.”66 However, even if the self is conceived as the end, this is only possible because it is mediated by the city-state. The idea of the city-state as the telos should not be understood in the sense that the individuals simply bent their care for the self to meet collective demands. Rather, on an individual level the telos of the care of the self, according to Plato and other paradigmatic texts of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, is a specific kind of civic freedom. The presupposition for the development of a free political community is not confined to the independence of the city-state as a collective entity. Rather, in order to secure the well-being and good order of the city, it is a requirement for each of the citizens to develop and preserve a certain form of relationship with himself in which he ensured his own freedom and supremacy in regard to himself. As for Aristotle, he connects the individual efforts to attain virtue directly to the rule of the people in Athens: “A state is good in virtue of the goodness of the citizens who share in the government. In our state all the citizens have a share in the government. We have therefore to consider how a man can become a good man. True, it is possible for all to be good collectively without each being good individually. But the better thing is that each individual citizen should be good. The goodness of all is necessarily involved in the goodness of each.”67 In Plato’s Republic and Laws, democracy as a form of rule and a way of life is radically questioned. Yet the fundamental presupposition that the freedom of individuals, understood as the mastery they are capable of exercising over themselves, is indispensable to the entire state is never challenged. In Plato’s utopian societies, freedom is secured by the rule of the best men or the best laws, traditions, and conventions. It is, according to Plato, far better to be ruled by other good men or good laws than to entertain the illusion of an independent ‘atomistic’ freedom that in reality is enslavement to desires. Accordingly, the opposite of freedom is conceived as enslavement of the self by oneself.68 Such 66 67 68

[HS]: 81/{HSb}: 83. Aristotle: Politica, VII, 13, 1132a. Cf. UP: 92/UPl: 79. UP: 92/UPl: 79.

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a concept of freedom implies the idea of a leader who is expected to be in full command of himself and able to restrain his own appetite even when his power over others provides him with ample opportunity to indulge it as he pleases. The figure of the tyrant mirrors this image of the leader: he is incapable of curbing his passions and therefore also prone to abuse his power, transgress written and unwritten norms and do violence to his subjects. In both examples it becomes clear that the decisive problem in the classical conception of freedom is how one is able to bring a power to bear on oneself in the power that one exercises over others.69

3

The golden age of the care for the self

In Hellenistic and Roman culture during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the care of the self becomes an object of intense reflection in the schools of thought now known as the Cynics, the Epicureans and the Stoics. It is especially the main figures from the latter group, that is, Seneca (4 BC –65 AD), Epictetus (50–138), and Marcus Aurelius (121–180) whom Foucault focuses on. In the texts from this age, the care of the self becomes a more widespread social phenomenon and a general principle that is assumed to be coextensive with the whole of life. Thereby, the care of the self transmutes into an “autonomous, self-finalized practice with a plurality of forms.”70 The generalization of the care of the self. Foucault focuses on Plato’s Alcibiades I as a point of reference in order to draw some schematic contrasts between classical Greek antiquity and the Hellenistic period. This enables him to make a distinction between a care for the self that is confined to a special period of life and a generalized demand to care for the self, or more precisely a practice that spread from the late adolescence into adulthood and lasted for the rest of one’s life. Whereas the Socratic-Platonic discourse focused on the vulnerable and critical point of transition into adult life with its political responsibilities, a range of later authors, already beginning with Epicurus (341–270 BC), emphasize how the care for the self is an obligation that should last for the whole of one’s life.71 In the first two centuries AD, this tendency is accelerated and the care for the self tends to become identical with an art of living (technē tou biou).72

69

UP: 93/UPl: 80. [HS]: 83/{HSb}: 86. 71 [HS]: 83/{HSb}: 86. It matters that Foucault focuses on Alcibiades I. If he had used other dialogues, e.g. the Apology, as his point of reference, the contrast would not have been obvious. Here Socrates emphatically asserts that his injunction to care for the self is directed at everyone, “young or old” (cf. Plato: Apology, 30a). 72 [HS]: 197/{HSb}: 206. 70

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In the Hellenistic age, the critical function of the care of the self also becomes more pronounced. For Stoic philosophers, it still requires training and preparation but increasingly also “unlearning,” which “takes on the appearance of a stripping away of previous education, established habits, and the environment.”73 The target is both the habits of childhood, the values of the family milieu, and the masters of “primary education.” Among the latter, the teachers of rhetoric are criticized for installing the ideal of pleasing others rather than encouraging their clients to take care of themselves. The criterion for the critical reformation that the process of unlearning is meant to facilitate is “nature.” However, it is “a nature that was never given and has never appeared as such in the human individual, whatever his age.”74 The idea of using techniques to correct, restore, and reestablish a condition that has only existed as an ideal takes the care of the self close to a medical type of practice. Drawing on an already existing correlation between the care of the self and medical thought and practice from the Classical Period, this link is strengthened and developed, for example by the Stoics, into a “grid of analysis” that is valid for the medicine of the body and as well as for the therapeutics of the soul. The assumption underlying this approach is that a similar theoretical analysis can be applied to both physical troubles and moral disorders in order to attend to, treat, and, if possible, cure them.75 In some instance, the analysis of the self as a ‘patient’ in medical terms is even a requirement in order to engage in the more philosophical dimensions of the care of self. Epictetus thus scolded his students for expecting to have their opinions and judgments corrected in a purely cognitive process of learning, advising them to first attend to their physical symptoms before pretending to be ready for theoretical education.76 The focus of attention in the correlation between medical and therapeutic discourse, however, is not the body as such but rather “the point where the ills of the body and those of the soul can communicate with one another and exchange their distresses.”77 The idea is that neither the body nor the soul can be treated or cared for in isolation from the other. Within this framework a recurring theoretical and practical problem is how to interpret the

73

[HS]: 92/{HSb}: 95. The notion of “unlearning” plays a role in the philosophical school of the Cynics and resurfaces in the Stoics. Emphasizing the critical function of the care of the self does not, however, draw a contrast to the Socratic-Platonic discourse as such. In fact, according to the Apology (and a number of other dialogues) the whole point of Socratic-Platonic care of the self is to strip away “previous education, established habits, and the influence of the environment” in favor of self-constitution through the practice of philosophy. 74 [HS]: 92/{HSb}: 95. 75 SS: 70–71/CS: 54–55. 76 SS: 71/CS: 55. 77 SS: 72/CS: 56.

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process of interaction between body and soul. How and to what extent can the ills of the soul be perceived as bodily symptoms? And to what degree do bad judgments or unvirtuous acts express underlying physical illness? The central element common to both therapeutic and medical discourse is the notion of pathos, which is understood by both Epicureans and Stoics as both passion and illness. “It applies,” Foucault says, “to passion as well as to physical illness, to the distress of the body and to the involuntary movement of the soul; and in both cases alike, it refers to a state of passivity, which for the body takes the form of a disorder that upsets the balance of its humors or its qualities and which for the soul takes the form of a movement capable of carrying it away in spite of itself.”78 The increased medical involvement in the care of the self obviously thus expresses a growing concern with the fragility of the self, and indeed the self is induced to acknowledge his feeble state. He is not only to accept his state of moral imperfection and ignorance but also to recognize that he is fragile and at the very least threatened by ills and therefore in need of treatment and care, which in many cases requires the assistance of a master with the necessary competence. In Hellenistic and Roman thought, the master’s assistance is still vital for the care of the self, but this relation becomes increasingly independent of the love relationship or even the interpretation in terms of erotic metaphors.79 The figure of the master instead appears within an institutional framework, notably as the teacher within a philosophical school or as a private counsellor in a client relationship. An example of the first “Hellenic” type is found within the Epicurean school, which emphasizes the need for a somewhat closed communal life in order to take proper care of the self.80 In this somewhat closed environment, a master was present who could guide or force the individual along, and even if the relationship was not conceived as erotic, it still required an intensified friendship where the virtue of ethical frankness – parrēsia – played a central role. The school of Epictetus represents a different variant of this type in which the school is understood not so much as a place of continuous and closed communal life but simply as a place of fairly frequent and demanding meetings.81 The second “Roman” institution of mastership is a semi-contractual reliance that involves a dissymmetrical exchange of services between two parties whose social status is unequal.82 The master here takes the shape of a private “counsellor of existence,” who is often taken in and housed by a political leader

78 79 80 81 82

SS: 70/CS: 54. Cf. [HS]: 94/{HSb}: 97. [HS]: 477/{HSb}: 496. [HS]: 131/{HSb}: 136. [HS]: 133/{HSb}: 138. [HS]: 137/{HSb}: 142.

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of an aristocratic family for whom he acts as an advisor. In this relation, he guides the choices and reflections of his patron who at one and the same time is supposed to be both his employer and his friend. He acts as a “sort of cultural agent for a circle into which he introduces both theoretical knowledge and practical schemas of life, as well as political choices.”83 This type of master is more genuinely integrated into the daily mode of being, into political life and its practices of advice and opinion. The importance of the master becomes more pronounced when he acts in this capacity, but precisely due to this he also risks becoming mixed up in binding concrete problems to such a degree that he risks his irreducible and singular function as an interpreter external to everyday and political life. Since reflective distance is essential to his professional identity, it must continually be reasserted within his role as counsellor of existence. In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, however, the contemplative detachment of the philosopher is no longer employed in order to propose general models, as the focus is increasingly placed on specific pieces of advice, counsels of prudence and detailed recommendations.84 Self-finalization and the crisis of subjectivation. “One of the most important phenomena in the history of the practice of the self, and perhaps in the history of ancient culture,” Foucault states in one of the lectures, “is quite probably that of seeing the self – and so the techniques of the self and the practice of oneself that Plato designated as care of the self – gradually emerge as self-sufficient without the care of others being the ultimate aim and indicator by reference to which care of the self is valued.”85 The gradual independence of the practices of the self, which Foucault refers to in this passage, has, in his opinion, been broadly carried on into the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. In Plato’s Alcibiades it is a self-evident presupposition that the purpose of the care of the self is to take part in the government of others in the city-state. The social status of Alcibiades and aristocrats like him means that one day they will have to run the city-state, and this gives the care of the self an objective and ultimate purpose of a collective nature. Even if the object of the care was the self, the end was the city-state. Of course, insofar as the rule of the city-state was democratic and the subject was a potential citizen, the care of the self also had himself as an end – precisely inasmuch as he is a part of the city-state. In this sense the self could be the telos only because it was mediated by the city-state. In what Foucault calls “the bloom of the imperial golden age,” this crucial mediation eroded and a “selffinalization” of the relationship to the self took place.86 83 84 85 86

[HS]: 138/{HSb}: 143. [HS]: 139/{HSb}: 144. [HS]: 170/{HSb}: 176. [HS]: 81/{HSb}: 83.

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The general principle that underlies the care of the self in this period is formulated by Epictetus as the idea of “conversion to self [epistrophē eis heauton],” a notion that has Platonic roots.87 This notion acquires a new meaning as its dualistic and epistemic dimensions are downplayed in favor of an emphasis on a change in the mode of self-relationship. In the proper activities that the self engages in, it should be kept in mind that the chief objective it should set for itself should be to develop and reaffirm a proper relation of oneself to oneself.88 In the Platonic tradition, the epistrophē designated a turn toward the proper element of the soul and is thus defined by a relation to an irreducible exteriority, whereas the turn advocated by Epictetus, Plutarch, and Seneca is an emancipatory turn “on the spot.”89 Its sole end is to enable the self to dwell in oneself and remain there, that is, to establish a proper form of relationship to oneself. Plutarch opposes this conversion to oneself to idle curiosity and busyness ( polypragmosynē), which could take the form of both a dispersed interest in the (mis)fortunes of others, as well as the hunt for secrets that are completely irrelevant to human existence.90 Seneca, for his part, uses the metaphor of a fortified citadel in order to describe the ultimate purpose of the attempt to escape dependencies and enslavements through practices of the self.91 As this imagery indicates, the proper form of self-relation is characterized by mastery, control and also according to the juridical model of possession: According to Seneca, the self ought to attempt to establish an authority over himself that nothing limits or threatens. He also uses the word joy ( gaudium) in order to emphasize the affective experience of ‘pleasure’ that takes place when self-possession is carefree and unthreatened. Joy in this sense is a state of pure immanence in the self, insofar as it arises out of the self, and once present it cannot be threatened by any external event. This is contrasted to voluptas, the kind of pleasure whose origin is to be placed in external objects that we cannot be sure of. “In place of this kind of violent, uncertain, and conditional pleasure, access to self is providing a form of pleasure that comes, in serenity and without fail, of the experience of oneself.”92 According to this model, the ultimate purpose of the care of the self is to establish a relation of complete control accompanied by an enjoyment that has escaped desire and is beyond disturbance.93 Foucault grants that the Hellenistic and Roman culture of the self that he seeks to capture in his analysis can, in a certain and precise sense, be understood as individualistic. This is not because the practices of the self represent 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

SS: 81/CS: 64; cf. [HS]: 201/{HSb}: 209–210. SS: 81/CS: 64–65. Cf. Seneca: Epistula, VIII, 7 (225, n. 23). Cf. [HS]: 210–213/{HSb}: 218–222. SS: 82/CS: 65. SS: 83–84/CS: 66. SS: 85/CS: 68.

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an ‘individualistic attitude’ that ascribes an absolute value to the individual as individual and focuses on the individual’s degree of independence in relation to groups, institutions or collectives; nor is it because the domain of family, domestic relations and private life is granted a particular importance or supreme value. Rather, ‘individualism’ is here conceived as the moral obligation to intensify the relation to oneself by taking oneself as an object of knowledge and field of action which must be corrected, transformed and purified.94 Such a demand to care for the self could in principle exist in a society that would not view the individual as an end in itself and where the domain of private life had been eroded or was not allowed to attain independence.95 Similarly, we should be careful how we understand the ‘disappearance’ of the political as telos for the care for the self. Even if the question “What shall we do in order to live properly?” is increasingly identified with the question: “What shall we do so that the self becomes and remains what it ought to be?” this identification can also be understood as an absorption of the former question into the latter.96 In other words, the break with the political on the level of telos expressed with the notion of self-finalization entails a new relation to the exercise of politics rather than the annulation of this relation. As Foucault says: “Civic and political activity may have, to some degree, changed its form; it nonetheless remained an important part of life for the upper classes. Broadly speaking, the ancient societies remained societies of promiscuity, where existence was led ‘in public’. They were also societies in which everyone was situated within strong systems of local relationships, family ties, economic dependencies, and relations of patronage and friendship. Further, it should be noted that the doctrines that were most attached to austerity of conduct – and the Stoics can be placed at the head of the list – were also those which insisted the most on the need to fulfil one’s obligations to mankind, to one’s fellow citizens, and to one’s family, and which were the quickest to denounce an attitude of laxity and self-satisfaction in practices of social withdrawal.”97 Following this line of argument, the intensification of the work upon oneself can be viewed as a requirement for the proper relation to “the political game,”98 a game that the self was always already forced to relate to even if participation in it was not an end in itself. In order to capture this ambiguity more clearly, Foucault interprets the fact that even if the city-state remained a standard form of organization, it lost its centrality as a telos for the formation of the self. In the 1st century BC and the

94 95 96 97 98

SS: 56/CS: 42. SS: 57/CS: 43. [HS]: 171/{HSb}: 178. SS: 56/CS: 41–42. SS: 101–117/CS: 82–95.

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1st and 2nd centuries AD, the practices of the self should instead be viewed in relation to the Empire, a complex organizational space that was far greater, more discontinuous, and less closed than the city-state. Importantly, the administrative space of the Empire was not strictly hierarchically organized. Roman Imperialism did not so much seek to suppress or curb the local powers but rather to use them as intermediaries and relays, for example for the levy of regular tributes.99 In order to stimulate and regulate the cities within the larger framework of the Empire, the administrative class needed to expand significantly. The growing influence of a “managerial aristocracy,” which included army officers, financial procurators, and senatorial governors of provinces, was therefore characteristic for this period. The managerial aristocracy necessary to administer the Empire was placed between “a higher power whose orders must be conveyed or carried out, and individuals or groups whose obedience must be obtained.”100 These types of administrators were to keep in mind that they were not exercising a supreme authority (imperium) but rather a sort of delegated power ( procuratio).101 In contrast with the democratic polis in classical Greek antiquity, the members of the Roman administrative class held revocable offices that often depended quite directly on the favor of a single superior. It is the nature of these administrative duties, as well as the precarious conditions for their exercise of their authority, that must be understood in order to understand the rising interest in the practices of the self that characterize this period. This development expresses the intensified attempt to conceive the relationship that the self ought to have with his status, functions, activities, and obligations.102 The self must learn to govern himself in a way that takes adequately into account that when he exercises power, he typically occupies a point of transition within a field of complex relations. The primary concern in this care of the self is to “define the principle of a relation to self that will make it possible to set the forms and conditions in which political action, participation in the offices of power, the exercise of a function, will be possible or not possible, acceptable or necessary.”103 This “problematization of political activity” includes a continuous reflection on the justification of the subject’s personal and lasting commitment to the life and practice of politics.104 In order to exercise the art of government, it is necessary to relate to it as a “profession,” albeit one that requires a difficult 99

SS: 104/CS: 83. SS: 104/CS: 84. Foucault takes the notion “managerial aristocracy” from R. Syme: Roman Papers, p. 1576. 101 SS: 108/CS: 88. 102 SS: 104/CS: 84. 103 SS: 107/CS: 86. 104 SS: 107/CS: 87. 100

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balancing act in order to be performed appropriately. The professionalization of the exercise of power indeed demands that the self is not completely identified with this profession as a social role or as a means to manifest social status. Social and political identification are from the point of view of the relation to self “extrinsic, artificial and unfounded signs.”105 The precariousness inherent in the exercise of power because of the structural dependence on others who were of a superior status or simply uncontrollable not only demanded that one was cautious not to give offence and thereby destroy the unstable position one held; it also placed a demand on the self to continuously evaluate whether the right time had come to withdraw from political activities and duties so that one was able to remain at one’s own disposal. The choice between withdrawal and political engagement was only a simple alternative on a superficial level. What is interesting to Foucault is rather the complexity of this problematization. This concerned which activities “were obligatory or optional, natural or conventional, permanent or provisional, unconditional or recommended only under certain circumstances.”106 At stake were also the rules and conditions under which one could legitimately take part in these activities. Precisely the “relativization” of the exercise of power, however, was therefore not necessarily a matter of negating the political tasks assigned but rather a presupposition for the proper and committed exercise of one’s function. The form of political engagement and the level of distance toward it were at issue, but not the relation itself. The self ought to work to “set his soul straight” and establish an ethos that allowed him to exercise political power. In this way the “retreat within himself” and the proper commitment to the political role are still interdependent aspects. What has changed in relation to the classical care of the self is that the texts of the Imperial Age emphasize a structural incongruity rather than a potential harmony between the care of the self and the political function. The presupposition for the most adequate form of commitment to the exercise of one’s political function was now that the self must fundamentally break with the dominant standards of acknowledgement of the exercise of politics. The new political circumstances demanded a conversion to the self that opened an irreducible gap to the life of politics that the conversion also sought to bridge or even close. The problematization of the relation between care for the self and the government of others was so intense in this period that Foucault speaks of a “crisis of subjectivation.”107 This crisis was centered around the following problem: How could the individual form himself as an ethical subject in a way that allowed him to legitimately submit himself to external rules upon which he had no or little influence as he was required to 105 106 107

SS: 115/CS: 93. SS: 115/CS: 94. SS: 117/CS: 95.

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do in political life? Whether and how far the culture of the self can be seen as an adequate response to this structural problem, or whether it remains a compensatory phenomenon that expresses the crisis of subjectivation more than a response to it, is one of the most important if implicit questions in Foucault’s treatment of the texts from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The spiritual modalization of the knowledge of nature. In the fourth book of his Natural Questions, Seneca speaks of a concrete measure that can be taken in order to respond to the problem described earlier. Addressing Luciulius, governor in the province of Sicily, he writes: “To judge from your letters, wise Lucilius, you like both Sicily and the free time your office of governor leaves you. You will continue to like them if you are willing to stay within the limits of your office, if you think of yourself as the Prince’s minister and not the Prince himself.”108 Seneca applauds Lucilius for conducting himself wisely because he makes use of studious free time – otium – in order to properly fulfill his job as a procurator. The free time of studious reflection allows him to perform the task he has been assigned as a function; he is able to exercise his powers as a job and thereby remains satisfied with himself. Foucault sums up Seneca’s expectations as to the use of otium in the following way: “As an art of himself, which has the aim of ensuring that the individual establish an appropriate and sufficient relationship to himself, studious otium ensures that the individual does not invest his own self, his own subjectivity, in presumptuous delirium of a power that exceeds its real functions. He puts all the sovereignty he exercises in himself, within himself, or, more precisely, in relationship of himself to himself. And on that basis, on the basis of this lucid and total sovereignty that he exercises over himself, he will be able to define and delimit the performance of his office to only those functions it has been assigned. This, then, is the good Roman functionary.”109 It is characteristic of Foucault’s approach in L’herméneutique du sujet to treat otium not as an ideal or a specific state of existence, but rather as an art, practice, or “technique” of the self that if used properly can transform and correct the self. It is the proliferation of these techniques in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD that makes this period so interesting for Foucault because it supplies ample empirical material for him to develop a “schema” if not a history of these techniques.110 As Foucault emphasizes, techniques of the self were used long before the age of classical Greek antiquity where he begins to study them, and he mentions a couple of these ancient forms that were also used in other civilizations, 108 109 110

Seneca: Natural Questions part IV, “Preface,” 1; cf. [HS]: 375, n.9/{HSb}: 392, n.9. [HS]: 361/{HSb}: 377. [HS]: 302/{HSb}: 316.

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such as rites of purification, techniques of withdrawal or for concentrating the soul.111 The important thing is that even if such goal-directed behavior combines self-care and self-knowledge to varying degrees, it always expresses more than a merely cognitive endeavor to achieve knowledge. While it is true that Plato and the tradition of Platonism tends to subsume care of the self in its entirety within knowledge and self-knowledge conceived as the highest forms of care,112 unlike dominant traditions within the “modern age of the history of truth,” when knowledge alone gives access to truth, the gnōthi seauton (know yourself) and epimeleia heautou (care of the self) are still essentially entangled in the Platonic tradition.113 In fact, this interaction also remains intact during early Christianity, meaning that Foucault can describe his approach toward the end of L’herméneutique du sujet as an attempt to resituate the gnōthi seauton alongside the epimeleia heautou so as to develop an analytic of different forms of reflexivity insofar as they contribute to the constitution of the subject.114 In other words, even if a practice or technique of the self is not merely a tool to gain knowledge of the self but rather entails real work of the self upon the self, it also includes an essential aspect of reflexivity – that is, the work performed is also an exercise of self-reflexive thought. Foucault articulates these two aspects of the techniques of the self in more detail by examining them from the angle of mathēsis – knowledge – and askēsis, “exercise” respectively. Concerning mathēsis, he seeks to show that in some forms of Hellenistic and Roman thought, knowledge of the world must be inflected so that it assumes a certain form and expresses a certain spiritual value for the subject.115 It is a matter of a “spiritual modalization” being constitutively involved in the relationship of the subject to the knowledge of the world. The constitutive link between the knowledge of things and the care for the self is examined at some length in relation to a number of different philosophical schools, notably Demetrius the Cynic and Epicurus, as well as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca as representatives of Stoicism.116 The theme concerning the spiritual value of knowledge has Socratic roots insofar as Socrates remarks that he has preferred to stay within the confines of Athens because the country and the trees cannot teach him anything, whereas the men in the towns are able to teach him much.117 According to Foucault’s reading of Demetrius, however, it is not the object of knowledge in itself that determines its value, such as the Socratic remark might seem to 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

[HS]: 46–47/{HSb}: 47. [HS]: 49/{HSb}: 49. [HS]: 18, 67/{HSb}: 17; 68. [HS]: 444/{HSb}: 462. [HS]: 304/{HSb}: 318. [HS]: 220–300/{HSb}: 229–314. Plato: Phaedrus, 230d; [HS]:221/{HSb}: 230.

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suggest. It is therefore not possible to divide the objects we study into useful and pointless ones on an immediate level, for example by rejecting knowledge of things and instead preferring knowledge about human nature. The problem is not whether we should strive for knowledge about nature or about ourselves. Rather, the spiritual value of our epistemic endeavors is decided by the mode in which we know the object and the way in which this knowledge of the object can change our being as subject. We need not turn away from the things of the world to realms of the soul in order to achieve knowledge of value to us. If a given – in principle any given object – has the potential to achieve normative or prescriptive relevance, and if it can transform the individual’s mode of existence, then it has the form that useful knowledge must have.118 It is thus “ethopoetic” knowledge, the kind of knowledge that shapes our disposition or character (ēthos). Foucault finds an analogous spiritual modalization in Epicurus’ conception of physiologia: knowledge of nature. When undertaken in the modality where it affects the individual’s constitution as a subject, Physiologia is not a distinct branch of knowledge. A specific example of this can be found in Epicurus’ texts on physics, which treat subjects such as comets, the composition of the world, and atoms and their movements. Here he claims that the purpose of the inquiry into celestial phenomena is “peace of mind and firm confidence.”119 More generally, Foucault claims that the purpose of physiologia is to prepare the self for whatever circumstances may arise by freeing us from fears, myths, and misapprehensions. If continuously exercised, physiologia not only is able to grant the kind of pleasure or satisfaction that can be found in the confidence of the sufficiency of one’s resources. It also makes “men who are haughty” – sobaroi – a term that Foucault interprets as a kind of “intrepidity” that enables the individual to stand firm “not only against the many beliefs that others wish to impose on him, but also against life’s dangers and the authority of those who want to lay down the law.”120 Finally, physiologia is a means to develop the capacity to make the distinction that is crucial to both Epicureans and the Stoics between what depends on us and what does not, and accordingly to exercise a limitless mastery over the former.121 Epicurus contrasts physiologia with paideia, the purely ornamental type of knowledge typical of the cultivated man. Paideia is the expression of a “culture of boasters [fanfarons], developed merely by concoctors of words whose aim is to be admired by the masses.”122

118 [HS]: 221–228/{HSb}: 231–238. Demetrius’ text is cited by Seneca in book VII of De Beneficiis. 119 Epicurus Letter to Pythocles 85–87. Cf. [HS]: 232–233/{HSb}: 243. 120 [HS]: 230/{HSb}: 240. 121 [HS]: 231/{HSb}: 241. 122 [HS]: 230/{HSb}: 239.

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Since it lacks the attempt to achieve self-dependency (autarkeia), it represents the complete opposite of physiologia. In his interpretation of selected texts of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius that deal with the reciprocal link between knowledge of things and care of the self, Foucault tries to show “how all the objectives of traditional Stoic morality are in fact not only compatible with but can only really be attained, can only be met and accomplished at the cost of the knowledge of nature that is, at the same time, knowledge of the totality of the world.”123 In relation to Seneca, he focuses on his late investigation into the philosophy of nature, Natural Questions. Here Seneca undertakes an immense exploration of the world including reflections on the sky, the wind and the earth, celestial bodies such as meteors and planets, and the geography of rivers and seas, and viewed in its totality his exploration expresses a movement of ascending, descending and re-ascending.124 According to Seneca, the exploration of the world must be conducted in old age because at this point we are able to free ourselves from our servitude to the self. This idea of liberation from the self through natural philosophy is not in contradiction with Seneca’s principle that the self is an object to be honored, pursued and kept in sight. Rather, it expresses his conviction that precisely in order to take care of our self, which strictly speaking is our only ‘property’, we must break with a certain unfortunate structure in our self-relation, which Foucault describes as the “system of obligation-reward.”125 This structure works on two levels: first, in relation to the obligations of our traditional active life, like managing our affairs, working the soil and pleading at the forum. We tend to take the alleged necessity and seeming purposiveness of these obligations for granted, and in this sense we are enslaved by our commitment to them. Second, we must free ourselves from the tendency to “make a profit for ourselves” when evaluating our activities, whether in the form of material goods, reputation, or pleasures of the body. Natural philosophy can free us from this structure and thereby express the most emphatic care of the self precisely because of its theoretical nature. Practical philosophy deals with the question, “what is to be done?” and thereby allows us to cast the kind of “light on earth” that allows us to discern between different courses of action in daily life. Natural philosophy, however, is contemplative in the sense that it “involves dragging us from the shadows down here and leading us to the point from where the light comes to us.”126 Despite the obvious use of Platonic 123

[HS]: 255/{HSb}: 266. Foucault specifically focuses on the passages of the texts where Seneca articulates his motivations for engaging in an exploration of the world. Cf. Seneca: Natural Questions, preface book I and III. 125 [HS]: 262/{HSb}: 273. 126 [HS]: 263/{HSb}: 275. 124

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imagery, Seneca’s description of this movement to the origin of light does not involve the turning away from this world in order to contemplate a different reality or ‘another world’, but rather takes place within the immanence of the world. It enables us to reach the highest regions of the world without losing sight of the world or our place it in it. It allows us to take a more proper measure of our existence because our obligations and our purposes such as wealth, honor and pleasure take on their real dimensions from this new vantage point we have achieved. “What are armies for us, Seneca asks, when seen from above, when we see them after having covered the world’s great cycle? All armies are no more than ants. Like ants, in fact, they move around a great deal, but over a very small space. ‘You sail on a point’, he says, and no more than a point. You think you have crossed immense spaces: you remained on a point. You wage war on a point, and you share out empires on a point, but only a point.”127 This “punctualization” of ourselves where our existence is recognized in its proper dimensions both in time and space is perhaps the most emphatic expression of Seneca’s attempt to connect knowledge of the world to care of the self. The liberation Seneca is describing seeks to obtain a tension between the self that investigates the rational causes that structure the world, and the self as a mere point within this rational totality. This tension is perhaps expressed rather than resolved in Seneca’s conception of freedom as the acceptance of necessity. In what Foucault characterizes as the Senecan “view from above” as distinguished from the Platonic flight to a different reality, we reach the region from which God views the world and are thereby able to contemplate how divine providence has situated us within a sequence of specific and rational causes that must be accepted as necessary if we want to achieve the only possible freedom in relation to this order. In Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Foucault finds a symmetrically opposed conception of the spiritualization of the knowledge of the world.128 Rather than a view from above that seeks to understand the world as rational whole and the point-like existence of self within this whole, Marcus Aurelius looks at the smallest details of things and the fine texture of the objects in order to demonstrate his freedom in relation to them. Foucault finds this “infinitesimal view” expressed in a number of passages and developed according to three principles in a number of techniques or spiritual exercises.129 The first principle concerns 127

[HS]: 266/{HSb}: 277. Cf. Seneca, Natural Questions: preface book I. [HS]: 277–300/{HSb}: 289–311. 129 The term “spiritual exercise” is coined by Pierre Hadot in his Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique (1981), whose influence on his interpretation of Marcus Aurelius Foucault explicitly acknowledges. Cf. [HS]: 280/{HSb}: 292. Hadot emphasizes that the Meditations are composed as notes (hypomnēmata) written on a daily basis for the author’s personal use in spiritual exercises. Foucault uses the term spiritual exercises synonymously with his own terms practices or techniques of the self. Hadot’s interpretation of Marcus Aurelius is 128

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the question of what is good for the subject as a rational being, the second concerns our freedom to form an opinion and the third is constituted by the fact that only one level of reality is really relevant for the subject, namely the present moment, “prior to which nothing exists any longer and after which everything is still uncertain.”130 The spiritual exercises that aim to inculcate these principles often involve the analysis or decomposition of an object experienced in the flux of representations, occasioned by the encounters we have in life or spontaneously appearing in the mind. One example involves the analysis of a piece of melodic, enchanting song or dance, where the aim is to establish a discontinuous attention that isolates each note or each movement from the others and thus exercise our ability to withstand the charm of the melody or the beauty of the dance. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, we “go straight for the parts themselves, and by analysis [diairesis] come to scorn them [kataphronein].”131 When the song or dance appears only in terms of what is given in the present instant, this ‘naked’ reality will prove to the self that discontinuous notes or movements possess no power in themselves because they lack all charm, seduction, or flattery. In this way, the exercise of temporal discontinuity serves to reassure the subject of his freedom in relation to a potentially seductive threat that is disarmed by being broken down to its proper elements and thereby revealed in its insignificant reality. A different analytical exercise with a similar function involves breaking objects down into their material elements, for example a cooked dish that we like and that provides us pleasure. Again the aim is to dissect this thing into parts to expose their commonness or cheapness, thus affirming that the only firm ground for the self is not to be found in the objects that we seem immediately dependent on but in the rational principle that guides our exercises. The analytical dissolution of continuities should even be applied to the immediate sense of our own individuality. Through the exercise of breathing, we can understand that our pneuma, our life or spirit, is in reality no more than a breath, a material entity, and since it is replaced with every respiration, we may even conclude that inasmuch as we have a pneuma, we are never the same. Applied to our own ‘life’, the analysis can make us realize that as “body, even as pneuma, we are always something discontinuous in comparison with our being. Our identity is not here.”132 The only ‘thing’ that withstands the analytical decomposition and is capable of providing us with a foundation is virtue as it is expressed and affirmed in the exercises themselves and thus, in

translated into English in a version specifically rewritten for the publication of P. Hadot: Philosophy as Way of Life (Oxford, Blackwell’s, 1995), pp. 179–191. 130 Marcus Aurelius: Meditations III 6, 9–10; [HS]: 280/{HSb}: 292. 131 Marcus Aurelius: Meditations XI 2; [HS]: 289/{HSb}: 302. 132 [HS]: 291/{HSb}: 304.

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the end, our unity inasmuch as we are rational subjects. However, according to the Stoic conception, the reason that our rationality partakes in is the reason that governs the world in its entirety, and in this sense it is not a capacity that belongs to the individual and individuates him as such. Foucault therefore states that the exercises described by Marcus Aurelius tend toward the “dissolution of individuality” in two ways: “Consequently, if we look at ourselves below us, or rather if we look down on ourselves from above,133 we are nothing but a series of disparate, distinct elements; material elements and discontinuous moments. But if we try to grasp ourselves as reasonable and rational principle we will then realize that we are no more than part of the reason presiding over the entire world.”134 Whereas Marcus Aurelius’ exercises seem to press not only toward assertion of freedom in relation to the objects that are analyzed and scorned but also, ultimately, toward a dissolution of individuality, Seneca’s aim is rather to found and establish a proper conception of the self’s identity.135 In his concluding remarks on the relation between the knowledge of the nature of things and the care of the self, Foucault formulates four characteristics of the spiritual modalization of knowledge. Firstly, it entails that the subject must change his position in order to know; a self-reflective movement is required whether it leads us into the heart of things, as in Marcus Aurelius, or to the summit of the world, as in Seneca. Secondly, this shift of position enables the subject to know the reality and the value of things more properly and thereby to discern their importance and power over the human subject. Thirdly, the subject must perform a kind of viewing of himself as he truly is, as perhaps most clearly exemplified in Seneca’s “punctualization” of the self. Fourthly and finally, the ultimate purpose of this epistemic movement is the attainment of freedom for the subject; a mode of being that is one “of every perfection of which he is capable.”136 The subjectivation of true discourse. Whereas Foucault’s notion of mathēsis designates the aspect of knowledge in the techniques of self – i.e., knowledge in its spiritualized mode – his notion of askēsis is an attempt to capture these same techniques or practices inasmuch as they are types of actions or activities 133 Foucault here alludes to his earlier comments on Marcus Aurelius’ use of the term kataphronein in the description of how to conduct the exercises of decomposition. “Kataphronein is very precisely: to consider from above, to look down on” ([HS]: 289/{HSb}: 302). 134 [HS]: 294/{HSb}: 307. 135 Foucault emphasizes that the view he finds in Marcus Aurelius is an “inflection,” whereas Seneca represents the more mainstream view in antiquity that the objective of the self-techniques is a “perfect, and complete relationship of oneself to oneself.”([HS]: 305/{HSb}: 320). 136 [HS]: 295/{HSb}: 308.

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that are not reducible to an epistemic endeavor.137 Askēsis refers to the types of actions necessary for binding the subject to the truth and the activation of true discourses, not only in thought or memory but also in the actions themselves.138 Foucault stresses that the goal with askēsis, as it was conceived by the Greek and Roman thinkers he focuses on, is not primarily renunciation but rather to obtain something we do no not have, which he defines as “the more or less coordinated set of exercises that are available, recommended and even obligatory, and anyway utilizable by individuals in a moral, philosophical and religious system in order to achieve a definite spiritual objective.”139 In order to reach this objective, a crucial instrument of askēsis is so-called paraskeuē (or instructio as it is translated into Latin).140 Foucault interprets paraskeuē as a systematically guided process of preparing and equipping the self for future events. Paraskeue is not a specific subset of self-techniques but rather names an aspect of self-techniques, namely their character as psychological equipment for handling future events.141 More specifically, the goal is to acquire “soul-armour” that will protect the self. Establishing such armor is achieved by internalizing elementary “moves” that prepare one for certain types of events that are likely to be encountered but whose specific characteristics cannot be foreseen. The content of this armor is made up of discourses (logoi ) that the subject has heard, read, remembered, repeated, written and rewritten, and as befits their nature as logoi, they are propositions that have been justified by reason. Furthermore, it is important for Foucault that when such logoi constitute “a good paraskeuē they are not confined to being kinds of orders given to the subject. They are persuasive in the sense that they bring about not only conviction but also the actions themselves. They are inductive schemas of action that, in their inductive value and effectiveness, are such that when present in the head, thoughts, heart, and even body of someone who possesses them that person will then act as if spontaneously.”142 In this sense, we may say that the logoi that make up an armor of the soul are “ready to hand 137 [HS]: 300/{HSb}: 315. In some passages Foucault writes as if knowledge is not a practice so that askēsis would simply be coextensive with the practices of the self. In our interpretation, however, knowledge and askēsis are two ‘equiprimordial’, aspects of the practices of the self. 138 [HS]: 303/{HSb}: 317. 139 [HS]: 398/{HSb}: 416–417. 140 [HS]: 306/{HSb}: 320. Foucault refers to Seneca’s On Benefits (De Beneficiis) as a source for this concept but also to Epicurus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Demetrius (cf. [HS]: 306–313/{HSb}: 320–327). 141 It is thus apparent from Foucault’s description of the spiritualized form of knowledge termed physiologia that it also helps to establish paraskeuē ([HS]: 230/{HSb}: 240). Similarly the premeditation of future evils that Foucault treats as a test is also a paraskeuē, a form of preparation achieved through internalization ([HS]: 454/{HSb}: 473). 142 [HS]: 309/{HSb}: 323.

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[prokheiron, ad manum].” When establishing a paraskeuē, one is practicing a calculated succession of procedures that allows for a “transformation of logos into ethos.”143 Importantly, the acquired “soul-armor” is of a general nature, as it protects the self against events in the future that cannot be foreseen, even if their general nature can be known and internalized.144 The paraskeuē should therefore be sufficiently general and effective “to be adapted to every circumstance and – on condition of their being sufficiently simple and well-learned – for one to be able to make immediate use of them when the need arises.”145 In this way, paraskeuē can be understood as the set of necessary and sufficient practices that will enable us to overcome anything that we may encounter in life. Foucault uses the analogy to the training of an athlete and speaks of the person with a proper paraskeuē as an “athlete of the event.”146 Another self-technique related to paraskeuē is the examination of conscience, which is a technique that may be performed both retrospectively and prospectively.147 Looking back, the agent reviews the events of the day and recalls problems encountered and faults committed. The purpose with such acts is to purify and strengthen his commitment to himself as a responsible agent. When employed prospectively, the examination of conscience is a matter of reflecting upon “the actions you will perform in the day, your commitments, the appointments you have made, the tasks you will have to face: remembering the general aim you set yourself by these actions and the general aims you should always have in mind throughout life, and so the precautions to be taken so as to act according to these precise objectives and general aims in the situations that arise.”148 In regard to the retrospective examination of conscience, Foucault emphasizes that it is not aimed at bringing about “remorse,” as in certain Christian techniques of confession. The self is not examined in order to release secrets that reveal its culpability but rather to articulate and internalize certain schemas of action. Consequently, Foucault shows that the faults on which Seneca’s account of the examination of conscience concentrates are understood more as “technical” errors. Much like the way a craftsman may critically consider the ways in which he exercises his craft, the examination of conscience should be understood as a matter of memorizing the mistakes in guiding ourselves. Therefore, authors like Seneca employ technical verbs in their description of the examination of conscience, with neutral, almost

143 144 145 146 147 148

[HS]: 312/{HSb}: 327. [HS]: 307/{HSb}: 321. [HS]: 307/{HSb}: 321. [HS]: 308/{HSb}: 322. [HS]: 460–464/{HSb}: 480–484; cf. SS: 77–79/CS: 60–62. [HS]: 481/{HSb}: 461.

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“administrative” connotations. The examination of conscience is akin to “going back over the measures of a finished piece of work, as an inspector checks the measures again, sees if the thing has been made properly.”149 A presupposition for establishing a good defensive equipment against future events is that the subject has achieved an adequate relation to the true discourses that he aims to internalize as an “armour of the soul,” that is, that he has made these discourses his own.150 This “subjectivation of true discourse” constitutes an important part of askēsis, and Foucault specifically examines three aspects of it, namely listening, reading and writing, and, finally, speech.151 As for listening, it includes not only exercises in silence and the correct physical posture but also techniques for directing one’s attention toward the subject matter ( pragma) of the given discourse rather than the beauty of the form, grammar or vocabulary. It is essentially a matter of regarding the truth that one hears as a proposition or an assertion that must be transformed into a precept for action and engraved in the soul.152 In his treatment of the practices of reading and writing, Foucault stresses the conception of Seneca, according to whom one ought only to read a few books and to keep in mind that the purpose is to provide opportunities for meditation. Seneca also emphasizes the need to maintain a proper balance between reading and writing and advises his reader to confine themselves no more to writing than to reading. “The first will depress and exhaust the spiritual energy. The second will overexcite and dilute it. We should have recourse to each of them in turn and temper one by means of the other in such a way that the written composition embodies [mette en corps] what we have gathered from reading.”153 Writing has a purpose for oneself since it helps one to ‘absorb’ the subject matter of our thought and become established in the soul. But written commentaries or notes – the so-called hypomnemata – can also be of use to others and may even form the basis for a spiritual correspondence where the one who is more advanced in virtue is informed of the other’s condition and thus serves him as a personal guide. Parrēsia and the care of the self. Parrēsia – or libertas in the Latin translation – is according to Foucault best understood as the virtuous practice of “speaking freely” or “free-spokenness [franc-parler].” In Herméneutique du sujet, the analysis of parrēsia is introduced as part of the account of askēsis, more specifically as the third aspect of the subjectivation of true discourse that is meant

149 150 151 152 153

[HS]: 463/{HSb}: 483. [HS]: 317/{HSb}: 333. [HS]: 317–397/{HSb}: 334–416. [HS]: 332–333/{HSb}: 349–350. [HS]: 341–342/{HSb}: 359; cf. Seneca: Epistula, LXXXIV, p. 2.

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to articulate the precepts on how to speak the truth.154 In order to capture the obligation to tell the truth implied in parrēsia, however, Foucault includes the role of the other, or more precisely the master, who as we have seen is constitutive of the care of the self. The reason for this is that in the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman arts of the self, “the discourse of the person being guided has no autonomy; it has no function of its own.”155 Therefore, the analysis of parrēsia must focus on the discourse of the master. The student must learn and internalize the truth that the master is committed to tell. An extreme example of this is found by Foucault in a description of the emphasis of a pedagogical silence with regard to the master’s speech in the Pythagorean school of philosophy.156 Here the student is not only barred from entering the game of questioning and answering but also disallowed from taking notes. The positive point of these prohibitions is to exercise the capacity for unaided memorization. After an extensive period of silence of no less than two years where the student has learned to keep quiet and listen so the words of master can be inscribed in his soul, he has earned the right to speak and ask questions. Even if the Pythagorean example is extreme, it is not unique, and Foucault claims that the whole tradition of dialogue from Socrates to the Stoics and Cynics affords no real autonomy to the discourse of the person being guided.157 This thesis rests on two arguments that are not clearly distinguished in Herméneutique du sujet. First, that the relation between a student and a master expressed in the practices of dialogue and discussion is one of structural inequality. The student must keep quiet and listen to the truth, although perhaps his capacity to tell the truth must also be tested in a more or less structured conversation with the master. The master, however, retains the authority to decide whether and to what extent the student is telling the truth, and therefore what stage he has attained in the subjectivation of true discourse.158 The criterion for the master’s epistemic authority may be drawn from different sources, including the (formal) features of the discourse itself, further theoretical presuppositions not accessible to the student at his current stage, the life experience of the master, specific disciplinary knowledge, esoteric insights and religious revelations. In any case, the structural inequality of the dialogical relation entails that one of the parties, namely the master, possesses or

154

In his analysis of parrēsia in Herméneutique du sujet, Foucault primarily comments on texts by Seneca and Galen and the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus ([HS]: 345–397/ {HSb}: 362–416). 155 [HS]: 348/{HSb}: 366. 156 The description is found in Aulus Gellius, an author from the 2nd century AD. Cf. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 1,I,IX, 1–6; [HS]: 395–397/{HSb}: 413–415. 157 [HS]: 347–348/{HSb}: 365. 158 [HS]: 348/{HSb}: 366.

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at least is fundamentally closer to the truth.159 In the text on parrēsia by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, Foucault finds an interesting inflection of this model. In the Epicurean groups described by Philodemus, the undisputable authority of the master to tell the truth is supplemented by a horizontal relation between the students themselves where parrēsia is exercised as a practice of open-hearted mutual evaluation. According to Philodemus, this exercise of free speech serves to assure and increase the reciprocal benevolence among the students.160 Although the structure of dialogical inequality dominates the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman texts, according to Foucault it is not unique to them and can also be found in Christian and modern forms of truth-telling in relation to practices of the self. There is a second decisive feature of truth-telling, however, that is paradigmatically established by Christian technologies of subjectivity in monastic institutions around the 5th and 6th centuries, and which is therefore foreign to Greek and Roman antiquity. Here there is a requirement for the subject to express a personal truth, or more precisely “a truth that only it can tell, that it alone holds, and that is not the only element but one of the fundamental elements of the operation by which its mode of being will be changed. Christian confession will consist in this.”161 In such practices the discourse of the guided subject gains a certain irreducible autonomy because it must reveal a truth about itself that nobody else can reveal. The Greco-Roman relation between truth-telling and care of the self does not include this crucial aspect of a personal truth and this is a second, further reason that it is only someone with the status of the master who can exercise parrēsia to benefit the care of the self. Foucault finds “speaking freely [franc-parler]” to be the most precise translation of parrēsia because this discourse is conceived as an alternative to two other forms that threaten to enslave the subject. The first, moral adversary, is flattery, which presents an important challenge for a number of Hellenistic and Roman authors, including Plutarch and Seneca.162 In the dissymmetrical

159 According to Plato, Socrates’ ‘mastery’ consists in the consciousness of his ignorance. If the Socratic docta ignoranda is taken seriously it implicates a more refined conception of the autonomy of the person being guided in dialogue than Foucault assumes. According to the Socratic model, the master expresses his mastery in seeking to be corrected by the ‘student’ whose discourse, by contrast, is autonomous insofar as it can appeal to an apprehension of the subject matter that must be acknowledged as (more) adequate. In L’Herméneutique du sujet, Foucault does not comment on the relation between ignorance and authority in the Socratic conception of mastery but assumes that the Socratic tradition operates straightforwardly with a master who is in the know. 160 [HS]: 372–374/{HSb}: 389–391. 161 [HS]: 391/{HSb}: 408–409. 162 [HS]: 357/{HSb}: 374.

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power relationships characteristic of Imperial Age political flattery, there was a way for the inferior to influence his superior via the only instrument available to him, namely speech. He seeks to use his command of logos to make the superior blind and turn him into a tool for his own purposes. In this way, the flatterer takes advantage of and exacerbates the lack of self-sufficiency in the person he flatters, thereby rendering him into a position of unacknowledged dependency. The person who speaks freely does the opposite because he seeks to make his interlocutor aware of the state he is in, and he speaks to him in such a way as to allow him to form an independent relationship with himself. The ultimate aim of this form of discourse is therefore to put the other person in a position where he does not need it.163 The person who practices parrēsia therefore expresses the virtue of “generosity” insofar as he has no direct personal interest in its exercise. As opposed to flattery, rhetoric, the second technical adversary of parrēsia, cannot and should not be overcome completely. Rather, the elements and procedures belonging to rhetoric can be useful as tactical measures to convey something, as long as the speaker does not strive toward total adherence to its rules of art and especially does not accept its overall purpose, which is to act on others to the greater advantage of the person speaking.164 Furthermore, as the art of persuasion, rhetoric can be exercised well by using lies in order to achieve its aim, whereas parrēsia is incompatible with lying. In fact, parrēsia is best not considered an art at all but rather a “practice of true discourse defined by rules of prudence, skill, and the conditions that require one to say the truth at this moment, in this form, under these conditions, and to this individual inasmuch, and only inasmuch as he is capable of receiving it, and receiving it best, at this moment in time.”165 In Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, we find the conviction that such aims cannot be pursued through the eloquence exercised in collective guidance and popular moralizing within public institutions where the stirring of affects are bound to dominate. According to Seneca, libertas is therefore best exercised in a relation between individuals where the simple and well-ordered truthful rhetoric can unfold and where there is room for freedom of style and flexibility that is attentive to the individual and his present condition.166 Finally, the crucial guarantee that the master can be trusted to exercise parrēsia is that “the presence of the person speaking must be really perceptible in what he actually says.”167 While the Graeco-Roman practice of parrēsia

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[HS]: 357–363/{HSb}: 375–379. [HS]: 369, 385–386/{HSb}: 385–386, 402–403. [HS]: 367/{HSb}: 384. [HS]: 385/{HSb}: 401–402. [HS]: 388/{HSb}: 405.

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implies no obligation to tell a unique personal truth that has the form “this is what I am,” it does presuppose a commitment on the part of the speaker to a correspondence between his enunciation and his conduct in general. In this sense the self-consciousness of the master who exercises parrēsia in the Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman contexts is expressed in the statement, “this truth I tell you, you see it in me.”168 Testing the self and life as a test. According to Foucault, a number of the techniques he investigates can be characterized as tests where the self is allowed to practice adequate responses to various situations, whether these are artificially organized or actually experienced. Whereas the examination of conscience evaluates the past in order to correct and prepare for future behavior, and the internalization of true discourses trains for an unexpected future by internalizing true discourses, the test is designed to exercise control within the context of temptation. A technique that has this character undertakes the reflexive attempt to treat the present as a test, that is, as something that has the potential of both providing the subject with self-insight and helping him to transform himself. A simple example of a test that works through generating abstinence originally stems from a Pythagorean context. One is supposed to start the morning with tiring physical exercises and then be served extraordinarily rich and attractive dishes. The idea is then to resist the tasty food. Instead, “You place yourself before them, gaze on them, and meditate. Then you call the slaves and content yourself with their extremely frugal food.”169 In order for something to be a test, it must express an attempt to investigate what one is capable of and in this way measure how far one has advanced.170 This can be done in simple ways, as in the case of the exercise of abstinence described, or in relation to threatening affects such as anger by committing oneself to not getting angry for a predefined period of time. If this is successful, then this period can be gradually extended from one day to two days and then to four days in order to finally make a pact with oneself not to get angry for a month. Another test of self-location is the attempt to forego “even your honest and legitimate advantage for a time.”171 This technique is meant to challenge our tendency to pursue self-gain excessively, which is the root of injustice, by compensating through the deliberate exercise of a kind of “super-justice.” The test is an essentially self-reflective type of technique because it should help one to adopt “a certain enlightened and conscious attitude towards what 168 169 170 171

[HS]: 391/{HSb}: 409. [HS]: 49/{HSb}: 48. [HS]: 412/{HSb}: 430. [HS]: 413/{HSb}: 432.

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one is doing and towards oneself doing it.”172 The test does not only involve the successful application of a certain rule of action on oneself – e.g., maintain abstinence in the presence of delicious food – but crucially also the development of an internal reflective disposition. Rather than merely challenging oneself to abstain from a certain illegitimate behavior, the test also involves a thinking exercise to neutralize the thoughts, imaginations, and especially affects related to this behavior. This work of thought upon itself can imply the development of a proper reflective attitude toward certain social duties or obligations that are in themselves legitimate but that can threaten to affectively overwhelm us and thereby threaten our independence. Drawing on a text by Epictetus, Foucault gives the following example: “When your child, your little boy or girl is on your knees, and you quite naturally express your affection for him or her, at the very moment you are kissing your child in a legitimate impulse and expression of natural affection, say to yourself constantly, repeat in a whisper, for yourself, or say anyway in your soul: ‘tomorrow you will die’.”173 On the one hand, the inclination to display legitimate attachment should be acknowledged while our affective independence at the same time should be affirmed through a reflective reminder of the fragility of the bond to the child. The everyday situation is employed by Epictetus as an occasion for testing our capacity to maintain this ambiguous disposition. Another test that aims to manifest and support our independence and control the nature of our attachments is described by Epictetus and involves examining, monitoring and screening our representations.174 The objective of this practice is to act like a tester of coinage in relation to our representations and divide them into those we can approve of as ‘sound’ and those we most reject as inauthentic. This analogy expresses the demand for a vigilant introspection and the need to become suspicious of oneself and the flux of representations that flows through one’s mind. Unlike the later Christian reinterpretation of this technique, Epictetus does not conceive the purpose of this suspicion to be an uncovering of the hidden origin of the representations. Rather, the aim is to ‘administrate’ our thoughts so as to better affirm our independence and therefore the discriminatory work rests on the fundamental Stoic division between that which does depend on us and that which does not. If the representations refer to circumstances that do not depend on us, they should be rejected as inappropriate “objects of ‘desire’ or ‘aversion’, of ‘attraction’ or ‘repulsion’.”175 And conversely the test of representations is meant to affirm those parts of our self-relation that depend on our own will. 172 173 174 175

[HS]: 412/{HSb}: 431. [HS]: 414/{HSb}: 433; Epictetus: Discourses III: xxiv, 88. Cf. Epictetus: Discourses I, III. SS: 81/CS: 64.

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Foucault finally investigates a test that relates to our attitude to the future, namely the Stoic premeditation of future evils ( praemeditatio malorum).176 This practice responds to our tendency to establish an unfortunate relation to the future. A challenge to our propensity to become preoccupied by the future is not only needed because our attention constantly risks becoming enslaved to a dimension that we cannot control by imagining possible future scenarios; testing is also required because our preoccupation with the things to come consumes the present as the appropriate dimension for actualizing our political duties and pleasant leisure. Furthermore, our imagining of the future counteracts the crucial exercises of memory that enable us to grasp the past, which is the aspect of reality that is already established and over which we are able to exercise proper sovereignty. Given these threats, the Stoic establishes a test that helps us internalize a proper relation to the future by systematically preparing us for misfortunes.177 This is the goal that the premeditation of future evils ( praemeditatio malorum) seeks to achieve. More specifically, it aims to train in thought the assumption that all possible evils that we can imagine will actually happen. Not only this, but we should also presuppose that they most certainly will occur and we should think of them as happening immediately in the present moment. Even if on the surface this exercise seems to express an intensified preoccupation with the future, it is actually meant to represent the opposite. In the premeditation of future evils, the subject seeks to disarm the power of the future by making all possibilities present in his test of thought: “We do not start from the present in order to simulate the future: We give ourselves the entire future in order to simulate it as present. It is therefore a nullification of the future.”178 The uncertainty of the future appeals to the imagination of the subject, and in order to counter this tendency the Stoic seeks to reduce the reality of the future, in particular future evils, by conceiving these as already present in a sort of immediate time that has been gathered up into a point. This simulation enables us to strip down the threatening reality of the possible misfortune and reveal it as something unimportant and short-lived, and in this way the premeditation of future evils is a sophisticated development of the Stoic principle that either a pain is so violent that it is impossible to bear and you will be killed by it, in which case 176

[HS]:444–460/{HSb}: 463–480. The Epicureans opposed the Stoic meditations on future evils, firstly because distress will inevitable occur when misfortune strikes no matter how we have prepared, and secondly because thinking about misfortune in itself constitutes an evil, and thirdly for the simple reason that we do not know whether the misfortunes we prepare for will actually happen. Instead they advocated detachment from painful thoughts and the recalling of past pleasures in order to ward of future misfortunes ([HS]: 449–450, 456 n. 25 and 26/ {HSb}: 468, 475 n. 25 and n. 26). 178 [HS]:452/{HSb}: 471. 177

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it is short, or the pain is in fact bearable.179 If successfully exercised, the truth that the premeditation equips us with about possible misfortunes will act as a defense to ward off the representations that arise when adversities actually occur so that they do not overwhelm the soul affectively and thereby disturb its independence. The meditation on death (meletē thanatou), which Foucault briefly discusses, has the same general structure as the premeditation on future evils, but it brings it to its highest point.180 It adds a layer of self-awareness in the form of the establishment of a gaze focused on oneself from the point of view of death. According to Seneca, the core of this exercise consists in living a day as if one’s whole life passes in this one day, and the arrival of evening will also be the arrival of the evening of life. The point of establishing this analogy is again not to become preoccupied with a possible future but rather to enable a double evaluation of our present state and activities. First, by capturing the present in the ‘snapshot’ of one day, the death meditation will enable us to relate to the value of activities that we have performed during this day. It will provide an occasion for reflection upon whether we would continue these activities given the immediate presence of death. Secondly, by testing ourselves as if we were at the threshold of death, we will also be able to look back and evaluate the whole of our life until now. Life as it has been lived so far is in this way gazed on as a totality and thereby revealed as it is. Toward the end of L’herméneutique du sujet, Foucault also analyzes testing as a general attitude toward reality and life as this conception implicitly structures Roman Stoic thought.181 The care of the self encompasses the whole of life and is simply equivalent to educating oneself through all of life’s misfortunes. In relation to Seneca’s On Providence, Foucault emphasizes the idea of God as a relentless pedagogue who, acting like a firm father rather than an indulgent mother, shows his love by being strict and by loving relentlessly (amat fortiter). Whereas he abandons the wicked men to their sensual pleasures with the result that their formation is neglected, he hardens, prepares and makes the good men more courageous by testing them continuously. God has inserted man within a providential scheme and his world has been organized so as to have a formative value in virtue of the challenges it presents him with.182 In addition, Epictetus reinterprets the Stoic doctrine concerning the nature of apparent evils. According to classical Stoicism, the knowledge of the rational structure of the world has a spiritual value for man insofar as it allows him to acknowledge that what appears to be an evil, such as an illness, an earthquake, 179 180 181 182

[HS]: 453–454/{HSb}: 472–473. [HS]: 457–460/{HSb}: 477–480. [HS]: 419–434, 452–454/{HSb}: 437–452, 485–487. [HS]: 420–421/{HSb}: 438–439.

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or the death of a loved one, “however accidental it may seem, is really part of the order of the world and its necessary sequence.”183 Insofar as we are rational beings and therefore able to take the standpoint of a rationality that is in the end divine, we will, according to this doctrine, be able to let the “thought of the whole” nullify the personal experience of suffering, but taken in itself, the personal experience testifies to the fact I am harmed by the misfortune that strikes me. Epictetus, however, expresses the conviction that when conceived as a test the personal experience of harm in itself and precisely in virtue of harming us gains a positive value. What appears as evil is not only ontologically nullified but now gains a positive value. The reason for this reevaluation of evil is that the experience of harm caused by the apparent evil demonstrates to the subject that he has not achieved a state of perfect control. In this way the apparent evil has gained a directly positive value for the care of the self in Epictetus’ conception.184 The idea of life as a test is characterized by Foucault as a religious conception in a brief comparison with both classical Greek antiquity and Christianity.185 In the tragedies of classical Greek antiquity, man’s relation to the divine takes the shape of a wrestling match and a great joust between the power of men and the power of the gods, where man is bound to lose but in this defeat is reconciled with the gods who now protect him.186 The religious interpretation of the care of the self in the texts of the Stoics has a completely different character. Here it is out of what Foucault calls “a rather pernickety paternalism” that good men are continuously exposed to tests organized by the gods in order to properly educate them.187 At the same time, this religious conception of testing is also fundamentally different from Christianity insofar as the Stoic authors do not draw precise consequences of its paternalistic model. According to the view that shapes Seneca’s thought, the test is an obligation for everyone and involves a continuous process of preparation or training that is coextensive with life itself. This naturally implies the question of what the self is trained or prepared for, whether it is the identification with universal reason as such, the fulfilment of life culminating in death as the revealing point or perhaps immortality conceived personally, or simply an assimilation with universal reason. Similarly, the Stoic model also naturally raises fundamental questions concerning its discrimination between good and bad men. “Should we assume that there are

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[HS]: 424/{HSb}: 442. [HS]: 425/{HSb}: 443. 185 [HS]: 425–426/{HSb}: 443–447. 186 Foucault makes this comparison with reference to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, written at the beginning of the 5th century BC. 187 [HS]: 426/{HSb}: 445. 184

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good and bad men from the start? And that God directs the good to the misfortunes and the bad to sensual pleasures? Or should we accept that there seems to be a reversal: God submitting men to tests, seeing those who withstand them, who do well at them, and so multiplying the tests around them, whereas the others, those who have demonstrated their incapacity in the first tests, he abandons to pleasures of the flesh?”188 In relation to both of these problems, neither Seneca nor Epictetus attempts any precise, in-depth reflection, and this is what will change radically with Christianity. In Christian spirituality, all are expected to regard life as a test, but alongside this a rigorous and extensive theological reflection concerning the problem of preparation and the problem of discrimination will develop. Regarding the former, the categories of salvation and immortality are obviously central, and in relation to the latter, the notion of predestination as well as the question of human freedom in the face of divine omnipotence will become crucial points of focus.

4

The practice of confession and the hermeneutics of the self

Foucault’s examination of Christian confession in monastic institutions around the 5th and 6th centuries can be viewed as a continuation of the history of selfcare, although with some significant modifications since the intense concern with the self that occurs in early Christendom has a paradoxical character that fundamentally distinguishes it from the Greek and Roman approaches. The Christian forms of confession, as paradigmatically described in the works of John Cassian (c. 360–435), certainly develop the idea of commitments to truth and the self as being the primary concern in self-care. Likewise, askēsis is also a decisive element in Stoic techniques of the self and was already present in Socratic philosophy’s approach to self-care. However, these elements were radically reinterpreted in the Christian context. While in Stoic techniques askēsis served to strengthen the self in the best way possible (analogous to the establishment of an inner fortress) and serve as an aim for existence and to steel oneself for the events and trials of life, the object of Christian askēsis was to renounce the world and relinquish the self. Furthermore, while Stoic askēsis sought to connect the individual with a number of true and external rules one could use in life, the Christian askēsis emphasized that the self was dutybound to search for and find the truth about oneself while submitting this true individuality to God’s law. While the instruments in the first case consisted of rational rules with the purpose of making the individual a master of himself, the rules in the second case concerned making the individual submissive. Care of the self in early Christendom is therefore paradoxical, since it concerns a

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[HS]: 427/{HSb}: 445–446.

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radical renunciation of the self. For the believer, the self is constituted in a radical rupture with the self. You can only become yourself with God as an intermediary, or as Paul expresses it: the believer is dead but lives in Christ.189 According to Foucault, several early and influential Church Fathers and techniques confirm that an ongoing government of self was necessary to uphold this new state. Foucault also claims that the reinterpretation of the Stoic self-techniques was undertaken according to the principles of obedience and contemplation, which had been less important in Roman spirituality but which within the Christian monastic framework became vital elements.190 Unlike heathen philosophy where the relation between teacher and pupil was limited and instrumental because the pupils’ temporary obedience was based on the teacher guiding them to a happy and autonomous mode of life, the requirement for obedience in monastic institutions applied to all aspects of life and lasted until death. Although the principle of obedience had not yet been given the institutional shape it was later to have at the time of early Christianity, it still played an important role as a regulative principle of life in the early monastic brotherhoods alongside the ideals of poverty and sexual abstinence. Obedience was viewed as an important virtue and a marker of identity that made it possible for the Christian monk to recognize himself as such. An old monastic rule from Eastern Christianity noted that anything a monk did without permission was comparable to theft.191 The principle of obedience constituted a permanent tenet that applied to anybody who lived within the confines of the monastic institution and was to be understood and implemented as a permanent sacrifice of personal will. The principle of contemplation distinguishes the methods used in monastic life from the self-techniques used in Roman schools of thought. Where heathen or pagan philosophy in a certain sense emphasizes moderation and self-mastery as the highest good, the Christian monastic brotherhood emphasized the contemplation of God. Here the monk submits to the commitment of constantly directing his thoughts toward God while pledging his heart, soul, and thoughts to remain pure enough to perceive God and receive his light. Contemplation of the divine can only happen when the monk practices this beholding of God by freeing his consciousness from foreign elements such as thoughts, impure images and embarrassing lust. Only then can he attain the closeness to God that is the purpose of contemplation.

189

Cf. Romans, 6:6; Galatians, 2:19. Cf. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980]. 191 Cassian: De institutis coenobiorum IV.10–12; IV.23–32. 190

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Penance and self-examination. An important ritual in early Christian care of the self is penance, wherein the sinner presents himself as repentant. This was especially the case with newly converted Christian congregations, who confessed in front of God in a collective ritual. However, it also allowed perpetrators of serious sin to enter the Christian flock once again. This did not so much involve a ritual with a bishop conferring a particular status on someone as it indicated a serious desire to repent sins. This status could last over a period of years during which the repentant person had to follow special rules, but it still had real consequences for this person’s overall life. The commitment to repent came about through the sinner explaining to the bishop that and why he wanted this status. This was therefore not a stringent, analytical, linguistic enactment of the specific sins and their context but rather a dramatic recognition of the sinner’s status as repentant. This spectacle is depicted by one of the Fathers of the Church, Hieronymus (347–420), who describes how the Roman noblewoman Fabiola submits to a confessional penance because she has committed the serious crime of remarrying before her first husband had died.192 In the days following Easter, Fabiola could be found among the repentant who publicly admitted their mistakes. The bishop, the priest, and the people wept with her as she humiliated herself. Her hair loose, her face pale, her hands dirty, she bowed her neck while chastising her naked chest and face with which she had seduced her second husband. She revealed her cuts to everybody and the eyes of all in Rome were filled with tears as they saw the scars of her now liberated body.193 In the case of Fabiola, we truly see the confessions of the flesh since she not only confesses by telling everybody her faults but also presents to everybody the flesh that is guilty of the sin. However, penance is still connected to a punishment that is performed by the self upon the self: “To prove suffering, to show shame, to make visible humility and exhibit modesty – these are the main features of punishment. Penitence in early Christianity is a way of life acted out at all times by accepting the obligation to disclose oneself. It must be visibly represented and accompanied by others who recognize the ritual.”194 Penance concerns presenting yourself as a sinner in order to overcome those very sins. Foucault mentions the analogy of martyrdom where the believer would rather die than compromise or give up faith. For the sinner to be reintegrated into the Christian congregation, he must freely submit to a ritual martyrdom: “Penance is the effect of change, of rupture with self, past and world. It’s a way to show that you are able to renounce life and self, to show that you can face and accept death. Penitence of sin doesn’t have as its targets the 192 193 194

Cf. [GV]: 201–208/{GL}: 206–213. Hieronymus: Epistula LXXVII (ad Oceanum), 4. Coll. 692. ”Technologies of the Self” (1982/1988), p. 42.

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establishment of an identity but serves instead to mark the refusal of the self, the breaking away from self: Ego non sum, ego. ... It represents a break with one’s past identity. These ostentatious gestures have the function of showing the truth of the state of being of the sinner. Self-revelation is at the same time self-destruction.”195 Foucault furthermore shows how the examination of conscience, as it is known from Stoicism, is given a new meaning in the Christian context. Belonging to the early monastic institutions, this self-technique distinguishes itself from penance by aiming for a verbalization of the inner movements of the soul rather than a somatic presentation of guilt and sin. For instance, John Chrysostom (347–407) gives a description of how consciousness is examined, which can be seen as a Christian equivalent of what is found in Seneca’s De Ira.196 In a sermon, Chrysostom notes that after understanding that only God can be the final judge over life, there is much to be said for being a judge over one’s conscience in self-examination. This exercise should happen every single day, preferably in solitude after dinner and just before going to sleep. Here it is possible to imagine all the torments of hell that one risks by not examining and judging one’s conscience properly and thereby eradicating the devil’s temptations in one’s mind. If one is tempted to seek an excuse in this process by pointing to the temptations that one has been tested with, then one ought to react by reminding oneself of the ability to withstand such temptations. Therefore, the guilt and responsibility falls back in the end on one’s personal consciousness – a fact that will be revealed either before or during the confrontation with God’s final judgment.197 As with Chrysostom, a part of Seneca’s imagery is legal in character. He appears to split the self into prosecutor, prosecuted, and judging personalities; however, the language used similarly retrieves its metaphors from an administrative context. Rather than playing the role of a judge in relation to oneself, Seneca is first and foremost a manager or administrator who, following the completion of a job, meticulously studies whether everything was done properly and that everything is as it should be. As a consequence, it is difficult to compare mistakes with sins in the Christian sense of the word, such as with Chrysostom. He may have made mistakes, but these are merely unsatisfactory actions that point to an adjustment in the relationship between aims and means. What can be criticized is a practical fault in how things are pursued, as the person was unable to match the principles of behavior recognized by him as being true and proper with what he actually did. When Seneca identifies a fault, this does not reveal a transgression of a code of laws but rather expresses 195 196 197

”Technologies of the Self” (1982/1988), p. 43. Cf. [GV]: 232–233, 252–255/{GL}: 37–38, 57–61. Chrysostom: Homila XLII.3. Coll. 454–455.

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a situation where his attempts to adapt to certain rules of life were insufficient at this point. A confrontation with such rules of life serves to improve actions in the future, not to condemn the past.198 For this reason, Seneca does not consider his mistakes sins so he does not search for bad, sinful, or evil intentions behind them, nor does he recall them to locate guilt and consequently punish himself. While the subject in Christian self-examination must recall God’s law so as to identify sin, the subject in Stoic self-examination – as a self-administrator – must recall actions in order to reactivate fundamental philosophical rules for the good life and thereby adapt future actions according to those rules. Seneca’s point to himself is: make sure you do not do it again and I will bear with you. His purpose is not to acknowledge his guilt, and the self-examination consequently does not aim at cleansing the soul of errors to make him pure in heart and spirit. The purpose of Seneca’s self-techniques is not to disclose some hidden truth within the subject but rather to recall a principle that ought to be expressed in his behavior but that has on this examined occasion been overlooked. However, for Chrysostom, rather than recalling a rational rule so as to do the right thing in the future, he emphasizes confessing sins in order to attain forgiveness for them. For Chrysostom, error comes to play a more independent role and the task becomes to purify the self, not with future actions in mind but the next world. For this reason, Chrysostom strongly recommends the Christian to continuously confess sins, not in a public setting or in relation to other men who could advise him on his self-governing but before God and often witnessed by a spiritual guide. Since the monk must continuously direct his thoughts toward God, it is not so much his task to manage the correct course of actions as it is to test the purity of his thoughts. The monk’s task is not to analyze the passions that could cause problems for the steadfastness and correctness of actions but rather to be concerned with thoughts that could pollute the purity of his contemplation and its directedness toward God. Since the primary material for Christian self-examination, according to Foucault, is an area that belonged prior to the field of possible action and before possible will or even desire, it becomes a far more fleeting matter than the object of Stoic philosophy. The monk had to examine all his thoughts to uncover hidden self-deceit in the nooks and crannies of the mind that could have originated with Satan. It became, in other words, necessary to initiate a hermeneutics of suspicion toward the self. This is to be accomplished through absolute confession of one’s thoughts to a spiritual guide while exhibiting comprehensive obedience toward this authority. Following one’s own will entails the risk of being lead disastrously astray.

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Although there was room for a strictly private approach to confession where one simultaneously and directly confesses before God and asks for forgiveness, there was also a different approach to confession under development within the monastic institution.199 Since the young monks had to be guided in every situation such that their wills did not lead them to temptation, there arose a confessional praxis where the spiritual guide not only appeared as a judge and forgiver but also as someone who would offer spiritual direction. With his ability to distinguish between good and evil – attained though many years of ascetic living during which he was taught to suppress immediate urges through the help of those who came before him – he brought up the other monk in a relationship of obedience and dependence.200 This spiritual guidance implied confessing not only what one had done wrong but also one’s thoughts – even intimate or irrelevant thoughts. Everything had to be put into speech. For Epictetus, self-examination was not presented as submissiveness, and truth was not something a spiritual guide helped the initiates attain. Rather, he saw it as a sovereign exercise for the individual to submit the representations of thought to some kind of verification. Since he recognizes that consciousness is constantly penetrated by various ideas, the problem for Epictetus is to distinguish representations that can be controlled from those that cannot. This teaches us not to be controlled by what is outside our ability to manage.201 The test of self, which happens in monastic life, serves rather to avoid Satan’s constant deceptions because the monk in submissive collaboration with the spiritual guide must constantly determine the origin of thoughts so as not to be taken down the wrong path. The purpose of establishing this attitude is to drive out any demonic illusions by obediently submitting to someone else rather than ensuring willful self-mastery. According to Foucault, this represents a substantial shift from the Stoic to the Christian techniques of self, which only superficially resemble each other. Confession. As we have seen, Foucault examines the gradual formation of Christian confession from Tertullian to Cassian, for whom repentance and confession are gradually coupled with total verbalization of the thoughts found in the subject. This kind of linguistic expression of innermost thoughts came to characterize the Christian tradition of confession. Confession therefore became a form of truth-telling in which the speaker is the instigator of disclosure. It was a verbal practice in which the subject as a

199 This private mode of confession is discussed in Cassian: Collationes Patrum XX., Cf. også O. Chadwick: John Cassian (1968), pp. 55–60. 200 Cassian: De Institutis coenobiorum I.2; I.11; II.3; IV.10; IV.23–24; VII.8; XII.27; Collationes Patrum II.14–15; XVI.23; XVIII.3. 201 Epictetus: Dissertiones I.20.

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privileged teller of truth affirms an essential aspect of his being and thereby binds himself to that truth. This practice was not only intended to modify the relation that the subject has with himself but also to establish a relation of dependency between the confessing subject and his spiritual advisor in the monastic institutions. In this way, the ascription to himself of an identity as a result of his avowal also subjects him as a submissive object of the government of others. In this regard, Foucault claims that the Christian pastoral system began to represent “another regime of truth [regime de vérité].”202 Moreover, the truth of confession is an innovation in comparison with the inherited dogmatic regime of truth. Here, truth-telling has taken the shape of a creed – an allegiance to certain untouchable and reasonable contents of faith or dogma. In confession however, the issue is rather an infinite exploration of the individual and the secrets he contains.203 Foucault therefore emphasizes how Christianity, from the very beginning, was constantly riddled with an extraordinary tension between two regimes of truth: the regimes of faith and confession. The synthesis between the two came to be expressed in the ambiguous meaning given to the word “confessor.” On the one hand, it referred to the one who admitted his secrets and his sin, while on the other it also denoted the person who confessed to a certain faith and dogma. In confession, the subject is influenced from outside the self to produce a true discourse about this very self. True speech, within which the subject turns toward the self as toward an object, comes about by addressing an Other, namely God, but also the dispenser of penance, namely the Bishop and the spiritual advisor. Here the subject only seeks its own truth insofar as it subjects to the demands of an Other. When the subject develops this true discourse about the self, it occurs within an ethic of refusing the self and a framework of a kind of power in which the subject commits and sacrifices himself to an Other. In Christian self-doubt, the care for the self becomes an unceasing attempt to get free of the body and the treacherous thoughts found in consciousness, not because the self or the body is an illusion, as in Buddhist thought, but because the self is too real. The more one uncovers the truth about oneself, the more one must refuse oneself. In return, the more one refuses the self, the greater the need for casting the light of truth on the inner reality of the self in order to find out if more is hidden within. This exchange between speaking the truth about oneself and denying reality establishes a connection between pastoral management and Christian technologies of self in the early modalities of confession. The pastor’s task is thus to guide the hermeneutic of the self through a managerial art of the soul. 202 203

[GV]: 82/{GL}: 84. [GV]: 85–86/{GL}: 87–89.

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The modern history of confession. In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that Foucault already examined the modern history of confession in the 1970s. In La volonté de Savoir, Foucault examines the will to know the intimate truth concerning desire in Western countries, since various institutions appreciate and encourage the individual to produce a confession about the self whereby the confession “was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization” through the exercise of technologies of power.204 The story in volume I, which is framed by the period from the Council of Trent in 1545 until the end of the 19th century, is therefore the narrative of how a demand to inform about everything sexual had become the aim and means for a special kind of power use. With the historical perspective stretching from the 16th-century Christian pastoral demand to pass “everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech” to the “veritable discursive explosion” that according to Foucault characterizes modern times, he explores the “great subjugation [assujettissement]” through which sexuality is conceived according to the discursive regime of scientia sexualis.205 In this historical perspective, La volonté de savoir examines how confession took up a special position among the great rituals of truth production, since it went from denoting a situation in which a person could guarantee another person’s worth or status to gradually indicating a situation in which the individual could become and be made responsible for the self as well as its thoughts and actions from the truthful speech this person could produce.206 In a conversation from 1977, Foucault describes confession in this sense as the procedures that are employed in order to stimulate the individual to articulate a true discourse about sexuality that can affect the subject.207 A genealogy of confession in the broader sense of a discursive acknowledgement or “speech act,” especially in relation to wrong-doing, is given in a series of lectures from 1981, Mal faire, dire vrai. Here Foucault characterizes confession or avowal (aveu) as “a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relationship of dependence with regard to another, and modifies at the same time his relationship to himself.”208 Confession concerning the domain of sexuality appears as merely one way out of many that a broader mode of veridiction has been implemented. For this reason, Foucault finds it interesting to study how such a mode of veridiction has come about in historical terms, and he gives an initial

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VS: 78–79/WK: 58. VS: 30, 25, 30, 69–98/WK: 21, 17, 21, 53–73. 206 VS: 78/WK: 58. 207 ”Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977], DE III: 317–318//“The Confession of the Flesh,” pp. 215–216. 208 [MFDV]: 7/{WDTT}: 17. 205

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impression of this development as early as the 1975 College de France lectures, where he provides a sketch of “the history of confession” as a precursor to studying the role of confession in modern sexuality.209 In his historical outline, Foucault draws attention to how a certain form of penance began to be instituted from the 6th century onward. The believer – when transgressing a serious sin – was required to seek out a priest to whom he could convey the forbidden act. After this the priest responded by demanding satisfaction for the sin. The priest had a “catalogue” that gave a precise indication of which punishment fitted the sinful act; so, just as a prosecutor in the legal system could refer to a determined compensation for some injustice, the penance was characterized as an equalizing satisfaction or tariff. In this context, where penance involved the performance of some compensation set by the church rather than the public rituals that were typical of early Christianity, confession changed character. Although confession could only be used in connection with penance, the verbal expressions of the confessor came to have an ever greater role, since it became increasingly important to say exactly what had happened and under what circumstances. According to Foucault’s historical sketch, it is not until the second half of the Middle Ages – the period from the 12th century until the Renaissance – that the Church in earnest made confession one of the most important mechanisms in its exertion of power. Initially, this happened by the Church making confession a routine event, since it became obligatory for all believers, men and women, as well as nobles and commoners, to admit their sins at least once a year. People of the cloth were expected to confess once a month and in some cases once a week. In regard to this demand, which was promulgated in Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta from 1215, you admitted not only those actions you had identified as serious sins but all sins: large and small. On top of the demand for regularity, there was also a requirement for complete confession. The task for the clergy became a difficult interpretive assignment to determine whether the sin in question was deadly or forgivable. The tariff system was hereby gradually eroded and replaced by a punishment of penance that paid more attention to, and rested upon, the sinfully involved people, the concrete circumstance of sin, and the priest’s ability to ask the right questions in order to attain the desired answers. According to Foucault, Decretum Gratiani’s codification of church decrees compiled ca. 1159 held that “Penalties are arbitrary.”210 The sin was no longer enough to determine the subsequent punishment. The procedure of confession demanded an interpretation to examine the sinner’s consciousness carefully. In this regard, confession began

209 210

[A]: 158/{Ab}: 70–71. [A]: 163/{Ab}: 176.

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to play the most important role in regard to penance because the interpretation increasingly determined the character of penance, rather than the sin itself. Foucault narrates this story as a background for the change in confessional procedure that occurred from the beginning of the 16th century and was ultimately given its monumental expression by the Council of Trent in 1545.211 It is not until Foucault identifies this kind of confession in the 1970s that he is able to see how a knowledge-producing mechanism was gradually instituted by stimulating the subject to regularly narrate the truth about himself and his inner life. Concerning this praxis, Foucault notes in 1977 that “up to the middle of the sixteenth century the Church only supervised sexuality in a fairly distant manner. The requirement of annual confession, with its avowal of the different kinds of sins committed, ensured that in fact one wouldn’t have to relate very many sexual adventures to one’s cure. With the Council of Trent, around the middle of the sixteenth century, there emerge, “alongside the ancient techniques of the confessional, a new series of procedures developed within the ecclesiastical institution for the purpose of training and purifying ecclesiastical personnel. Detailed techniques were elaborated for use in seminaries and monasteries, techniques of discursive rendition of daily life, of self-examination, confession, direction of conscience and regulation of the relationship between director and directed. It was this technology which it was sought to inject into society as a whole.”212 In La volonté de savoir, Foucault furthermore describes how the device of confession is gradually reinterpreted and given greater use in novel areas. In the 1800s and 1900s, confession began to play a role in the relationship between teachers and pupils, criminals and police, doctors and the sick, and parents and children while taking on different concrete forms. The subject ought to confess in interrogation, at the hospital, or in an autobiographical narrative. A number of discourses about individual existence became ever more common, just as they were, in general, granted greater weight and importance. Confession also became important within science and – according to Foucault – influenced medicine, pedagogy, criminology, and other similar subjects and activities. However, the clearest example of the ongoing generalization of confession can be found in the insatiable will to scientific knowledge about the sexual, which took hold of the new psychiatric science. Here it was no longer the sinner who was confronted with the pastor but the patient with his or her sexual problems confessed to a doctor. He might not speak much about sex per se or about what had happened and how, but he might rather access the thoughts that covered and reinterpreted sexual acts, the associations coupled with sex and the 211

Cf. Saint Concile de Trente, especially 14.5 “De la confession.” “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977], DE III: 303/“The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 200. 212

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images or desire that they contained. Psychiatry stimulates a discourse about confidentiality and individual feelings of desire that may appear to be irrelevant and peripheral but that could be ascribed a hitherto unknown importance when presented through various kinds of confession, verification, free association, hypnosis, memory recall and so forth. Foucault here speaks of “two modes of production of truth,” namely “procedures of confession” and “scientific discursivity,” which intersect such that the latter reinterprets and employs the former for the purpose of knowledge acquisition.213 Within psychiatry it becomes common for a number of ailments and illnesses to have their origin in sex – almost everything could be explained in reference to sexual problems. Even the smallest events that pertain to desire and sex were assumed to have detrimental consequences throughout life.214 Confession became necessary to attain knowledge about what produces this causality, whereby it became important for medical aetiology or the study of causes. Secondly, confession became necessary for the doctor to decode the latent and hidden signs, the minute expressions and verbal slips that must be brought together to locate the truth about the patient’s constitution. This generates a master-servant relationship, since it is the listener who ultimately decides what the patient is actually saying. Although speech comes from below – from the patient – truth is first revealed with help from above – from the therapist – after being processed in his hermeneutical apparatus, even if the effect of truth was not aimed at the listener but the speaker. Nonetheless, it was the interpretation that formed the basis for the medical diagnosis. Thirdly, this introduced a relationship between the normal and the pathological where the patient’s sexual deviance was to be guided back to the norm through various procedures. Here, confession becomes important because following a correct interpretation establishes a truth about the patient’s state that can initiate the correct normalizing therapy, meaning that confession came to play a role for medical prognostics and therapeutics. However, Foucault emphasizes that the generalization of confession had a far wider reach than merely psychiatry and science as he attempts to characterize a kind of solidarity that is fundamentally based on the effects of confession. This tendency can be found in modern literature and philosophy. In philosophy there was a search for the basic connection to truth in the subject per se and not the divine or some forgotten metaphysical knowledge that could be recalled. The subject’s own sense data form philosophy’s actual object, as can be seen in phenomenology and existentialism, where the focus is placed 213

VS: 87/WK: 64–65. In [A]: 266/{Ab}: 266, Foucault mentions the doctor Heinrich Kaan who in his Psychopathia sexualis from 1844 describes how excessive masturbation can lead to partial paralysis, total paralysis, and even brain tumors. 214

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on immediate experience and the relationship between consciousness and the world. In literature there has been a shift from the wonderful, epic story about the hero’s brave battle with various challenges and tests to the modern mode of writing, which primarily seeks to develop a subjective truth about personal feelings and sensations. With the modern novel, which is a relatively new genre, ordinary and everyday features enter the literary scene, which had previously been devoted to the special and grand, as was the case for heroic poems and hagiography. According to Foucault, the tradition of psychoanalysis is also shaped by confessional technologies.215 This is a method for understanding mental disturbances by disclosing their unconscious causes and then removing them as best as possible by making these causes apparent to the patient. Conversation resolves neuroses – for instance hysteria – that are often caused by sexual problems. This is therefore a continuation of the psychiatric efforts of the 1800s to let the sexual speak so that the truth about it can have a positive effect on the patient’s behavior, while gender comes to define this behavior to an ever greater degree such that the sexual is given the status of that which can tell us who we really are, why we feel as we do and why we do as we do. We seek a faux metaphysics about ourselves through the truth about our desire and sexuality.216 Confession here becomes liberating in regard to what was hidden and repressed, since the revelation is given an emancipatory and positive account. According to Foucault, this view added to the modern myth of an inherently repressed sexuality that could be liberated through enunciation. In return, this was a positive step, as it supposedly allows us to be who we really are. The truth that has been implemented through confession becomes liberating by disclosing a power that used to be repressive. Foucault emphasizes, however, that if we purely rely on this image of confession as opposing power – power that we imagine represses who we truly are and that speaks the language of subjugation by saying “no” – then we forget the other side of the story, namely that confession itself has come about through a number of power-mechanisms, as presented in this chapter.217 Historically speaking, confession also constitutes a use of power because it requires us to turn against ourselves in an attempt to establish a truth about that self, which at the same time is handed over to others. Foucault does not only want to warn us about the exertion of power that accompanies confession as a shadow; he also points out our excessive desire for analysis that can help us establish our true identity.218 From the implications

215 “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [1977], DE III: 314/“The Confession of the Flesh,” pp. 210–211. 216 “L‘Occident et la vérité du séxe” [1976], DE III: 105–106. 217 VS: 80/WK: 60. 218 VS: 96/WK: 71–72.

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of confession – stretching over the older Christian formats and the newer scientific ones – Foucault claims we have inherited a special kind of subjectivity that is primarily expressed in psychoanalysis but that also influences culture in general. As an addition to the disciplinary dispositive, Foucault adds in La volonté de savour yet another aspect of the genealogy of the modern soul, namely the modern need for introspection and analysis of the self: our desire to seek a truth about the self in the movements and events of the soul or consciousness, our desire to examine the secrets of the psyche and expose them, our desire to earnestly turn toward the self and bring forth what we do not immediately understand, precisely in order to understand and liberate it.

11 Philosophy, Enlightenment, Diagnostics

1

The enlightenment of Foucault

Some ten years after Foucault’s characterization of philosophy as a diagnostic activity associated with “a kind of radical journalism,”1 he returns to this theme in a number of short articles and conversations found at the end of his authorship. At this point, he emphasizes that the origins of his conception of philosophy reaches further back than to Nietzsche. In particular, he focuses on a number of occasional writings published by Kant. At the close of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault develops his ideas about philosophy as a diagnosis of the present by relating to Kant and the Enlightenment tradition rather than Nietzsche as a precursor to his own thought. However, the aim for Foucault is still to articulate how one can understand philosophy as historically situated. More precisely, he focuses on the three following questions: What are the precursors to a conception of philosophy as a diagnosis of the present? How has such a conception of philosophy been developed? Finally, what does such a conception of philosophy imply? This endeavor regards writing the history of how philosophy comes to understand itself as a historically situated activity, the purpose of which is to diagnose its own epoch. Foucault seeks to write the generative history of contemporary diagnostics, or a genealogy, so as to explicate the conception of philosophy as diagnosis of the present. Foucault’s positive reception of Enlightenment philosophy is an important signal also in regard to the reception of his work that describes Foucault as critical of that very age and movement.2 Foucault refused the charge that he 1

“Le monde est un grand asile” [1973], DE II: 434; our translation. See our introduction. In Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1985), Habermas thus criticizes Foucault for deserting conceptions of the autonomous subject and commitments to reason as a critical faculty of judgment that has been attained through the Enlightenment by turning toward quasi-metaphysical, ever-present conceptions of power and discourse (pp. 279–343). 2

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sought the origin of modern totalitarianism in the Enlightenment when it was put to him in 1978.3 Instead, he emphasized a far more positive influence, stating that “Europe, for almost two centuries, has been able to maintain an extremely rich and complex rapport with the event of the Enlightenment, which Kant and Mendelssohn were inquiring about already in 1784. This rapport has never ceased to undergo change, but it has never grown dim or disappeared either.” In the same vain, Foucault could therefore also characterize the Enlightenment “as our ‘heritage’” and as our most “most ‘present past’ [actuel passé].”4,5 Setting out in the Enlightenment tradition and characterizing philosophy as diagnosis of the present is fully realized in some of Foucault’s later texts, such as “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” and “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2).”6 These will form the basis for the following treatment of Foucault.7

3 Cf. M. Agulhon: “Postface” [1980], pp. 313–316. Foucault responds to this criticism in his own “Postface” [1980], DE IV: 35–37. 4 “Postface” [1980], DE IV: 37. 5 “Postface” [1980], DE IV: 37. 6 “Published in English as “What Is Enlightenment?” and “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” respectively. 7 Foucault begins referring to Kant and the tradition he initiates a few years prior to this. These writings are also included to the extent that it is expedient. The new field of study is taken up for the first time in an introduction written by Foucault for the American edition of Canguilhem’s main work: Le normal et le pathologique, in 1978. Here Foucault reads Canguilhem and French epistemology – both of which have been decisive outsets for Foucault’s authorship from the very beginning – in extension of a tradition that does not just place “rational thought” against “the question concerning its nature and its foundation.” Instead, and in extension of this tradition, Foucault inquiries into “the history and the geography” of rational thought, “its immediate past and its actuality,” and “its moment and its place.” “Introduction par Michel Foucault” [1978], DE III: 431; our translation. In this regard, Foucault refers to how such a tradition takes its outset in Kant and his attempt to answer the question: “What is Enlightenment?” In 1979 this question is raised in passing as being central to Foucault in a review of Jean Daniel’s (b. 1920) L’ère des ruptures, which concerns the issue: “Who are we in the present, what is this ever so fragile moment from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry this identity away with itself?” “Pour une morale de l’inconfort” [1979], DE III: 783/“For an Ethics of Discomfort,” p. 443; English translation modified. In “The Power and the Subject,” first published in 1982, Foucault situates his analysis of power in the wake of a tradition initiated by Kant and one that is continued in Hegel and Nietzsche (pp. 215– 216; DE IV: 231). See also “Space, Knowledge and Power” (pp. 357–358; DE IV: 279), “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” 229–252; DE III: 382–412 and {GSA 1}: 3–39/{GSO 1}: 1–40. In 1984, Foucault refers to the mentioned genealogy in a series of texts. In addition to the previously given writings, we can emphasize the already listed encyclopedic article “Foucault, Michel” in Dictionnaire des philosophes (DE IV: 631–636; 459–463).

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The present as the theme of philosophical reflection. When Foucault considers Kant’s canonical text from the Enlightenment “Was ist Aufklärung?” he is not immediately interested in the answers that Kant gives. Nor is he interested in the consequences that may be drawn from those answers, for instance in regard to certain political orders such as enlightened absolutism or republicanism. Foucault is primarily fascinated by the way in which Kant raises and treats the question of Enlightenment. Kant’s approach differs from that found in his most famous and general works, namely the three critiques. In the critiques, Kant seeks universal and therefore ahistorical guidelines and limits to reason and judgement.8 Likewise, the approach also distinguishes itself from some of Kant’s other works on history, such as Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (1784). While these treat history, they do so in a teleological perspective in attempting to determine which common goal all of human history is moving toward. There are however similarities between Kant’s treatment of the Enlightenment issue and the approach taken up in several ‘smaller’ manuscripts, such as “Der Streit der Fakultäten” (1798) and “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie” (1796). These are all ‘occasional writings’ that came about under special circumstances, namely as responses to questions posed by his contemporary age, which were experienced as urgent and unanswered. In these writings, Kant does not attempt to articulate conditions of possibility that transcend the movements and events of history. His subject matter is not antecedent conditions for history but in a particular present that expresses a specific, but encompassing, historical tendency. These writings therefore pose “the question of the present, of the contemporary moment.”9 The question taken up by Kant in “What Is Enlightenment?” does not therefore regard a rejected foundation or origin to which we should return or a finality toward which we are moving. Kant poses questions about events that are going on now – in the present – and in this way he initiates a reflection on actuality. In pondering the Enlightenment, Kant asks what kind of phenomenon is in question in the present. What does it involve and what can I – in posing the question – say about Enlightenment and the present? These questions concerning the present are posed as open questions. We do not know the answers to them, as history has not fully resolved the events that are underway, but the questions are raised so as to include the one who poses the very question. According to Foucault, Kant raises “the question of the 8 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1791). 9 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 679/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” p. 88.

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present as a philosophical event incorporating within it the philosopher who speaks of it.”10 The tradition of reflection. Foucault claims that Kant initiates a ‘tradition’ that stretches over J.G. Fichte (1762–1814), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), F. Nietzsche (1844–1900), M. Weber (1864–1920), E. Husserl (1859–1938), M. Heidegger (1889–1976), and the early Frankfurt School represented by, among others, T.W. Adorno (1903–1969) and M. Horkheimer (1895–1973). Foucault therefore considers his own thought in extension of the philosophical activities and intentions found there.11 In this tradition, philosophy is defined as diagnosis of the present, and, according to Foucault, this tradition constitutes an important movement in the philosophy of modernity. It is a movement or ‘tradition’ because it is not united by any common doctrine but rather by the continuous return to a question that must constantly be answered anew without definitive resolution. Kant’s text therefore seems to mark “the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either.” Modern Philosophy thereby becomes the philosophy that seeks to answer the question “raised so imprudently two centuries ago.”12 In extension of this, Foucault claims, “philosophy as the problematization of a present-ness, the interrogation by philosophy of this present-ness of which it is a part and relative to which it is obliged to locate itself: this may well be the characteristic trait of philosophy as a discourse of and upon modernity.”13 It is exactly because this is a communion over an open question and not a community of doctrine that Foucault can articulate a commonality with the majority of those thinkers who employ the discourse of modernity while remaining skeptical about some of its dogma. Foucault’s fraternity with modernity is expressed in a constant re-posing of its founding question. Here, modernity does not become a project that one must redeem by completing it, as Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) claims in “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt.”14 Instead, the modern becomes a non-terminating project, 10 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2),” DE IV: 680/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” p. 89. 11 “The Political Technology of Individuals” [1988], p. 145; DE IV: 813. 12 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?(1)” [1984], DE IV: 562/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 32. 13 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 680/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” p. 89. 14 J. Habermas: Kleine politische Schriften I–IV (1981), pp. 444–464. Taking an outset in the necessity of declaring oneself in favor of the project of modernity, he considered Foucault a proponent of “implacable antimodernism,” p. 465; our translation. Habermas later pursued the theme in four lectures held in 1983 on Foucault’s ‘home turf’ Collège

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a tradition that can only be continued by constantly returning to it so as to reopen the question that constantly threatens to close upon itself. The present as an event. Kant’s reflection on his contemporary world is first initiated as a questioning of the present as an event and secondly as an inquiry into the ontology of the present. A third question implied by Kant’s text is how we can relate adequately to the present and its ontology. In this way, Kant makes it possible to ask about the ethical modality of the present – its ethos. In “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” Foucault points out that already in Discours de la methode (1637), Descartes related to a historical circumstance within cognition.15 Earlier in “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” Foucault finds attempts at determining and relating to contemporary developments as far back as the Platonic (427–347 BC) dialogue Politikos.16 As such, it is a recurring feature in philosophical traditions. However, in classical philosophy the present was always subject to an examination and evaluation before accepting or rejecting it. One related to the present in what Foucault called a “longitudinal relationship.” The present is always perceived in regard to something that came before or after on the timeline. ‘Now’ is thus related to the past and the future as if the observer were located outside time. As such it becomes possible to relate the present with the past and ask if the past was better than the present or if the present is a time of decay when seen in comparison with this past. According to Foucault, the question of the present is, after Kant, posed such that the one asking has an “archerlike” or “‘sagital’ relation to one’s own presentness.”17 Rather than pretending to evaluate the present from an Archimedean point, we seek to relate our own existence to this present and target it with our reflection.18 de France, following an invitation from Paul Veyne (b. 1930). Foucault was less than enthused. After having greeted Habermas, he left at the beginning of the first lecture, as he did not “want to waste his time.” Later he asked his friend Paul Veyne “why on earth” he had invited Habermas (D. Eribon: Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (1994), p. 290). Habermas’s lectures and the resultant criticism of Foucault were later published in the book Der Diskurs der Moderne. In the article “Mit dem Pfeil ins Herz der Gegenwart”/“Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present” [1984], Habermas relates to Foucault’s “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” (see note below). 15 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 679–680/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” pp. 88–89. 16 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières (1)” [1984], DE IV: 563/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 33. 17 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 679–680/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” 90. 18 According to J. Habermas’s reading in “Mit dem Pfeil ins Herz der Gegenwart”/“Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” a short essay written on the occasion of Foucault’s death in 1984, “Foucault discovers in Kant the first philosopher to take aim like an archer at the heart of a present that is concentrated in the significance of the contemporary moment, and thereby to inaugurate the discourse of modernity” (p. 108/p. 151).

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Kant defines Enlightenment as something almost completely negative: Enlightenment is an emergence (Ausgang) from man’s self-imposed tutelage. Kant thereby distances himself from an attempt to employ omens in determining the future that is unfolding. His aim is not to find out which age he belongs to; rather, he seeks to resolve what has happened insofar as a phenomenon like the Enlightenment rises to such prominence in his present. As Foucault points out, he asks what difference the present or ‘today’ makes in history in relation to the past: “It is in the reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.”19 Since philosophy, for Kant, begins to concern itself with the present in an archer-like relation, the present appears to philosophical reflection as a singularly irreducible and incomplete event that breaks with previous events. It thus becomes imperative for philosophy to target and flesh out this decisive moment, of which it is a part. The ontology of the present: Reality and virtuality. It is not sufficient merely to perceive the present as an actual event in the sense of establishing a break with an earlier state of affairs because this does not adequately comprehend the ontology of the present that Kant opened up. It is not the concrete and specific event in itself that is Kant’s primary focus of interest, as philosophical reflection on the present must be supplemented and made more concrete. As Foucault mentions, this becomes clear in a passage from another small manuscript by Kant, namely Der Streit der Fakultäten (1794).20 Here Kant seeks signs or proofs that make it possible to speak about progress for mankind. He identifies such indications in the French Revolution, which took place between the publication of Was ist Aufklärung? and Der Streit der Fakultäten. This is therefore seen as a decisive event that results in a distinction between today and yesterday to such a degree that it becomes possible to speak of progress. It may seem strange to see the French Revolution used as proof of mankind’s inherent tendency toward progress, if one takes into account real circumstances such as the reign of terror that followed the onset of the revolution. However, on closer inspection of the text, it becomes clear that Kant’s decisive point does not concern the concrete historical event. The French Revolution, as an event, is not made up of actions or atrocities through which the social strata were turned upside down and impressive buildings of state disappeared 19

“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières (1)” [1984], DE IV: 568/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 38. 20 “Der Streit der Fakultäten,” in: I. Kant: Schriften zue Anthropologie, Geschichtphilosophiem Politik un Pädagogik 1 (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 351–368/“The Conflict of the Faculties,” in: H. Reiss (ed.): Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 175–193.

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so that others could take their place. The real event in this regard is the way in which the French Revolution was received in Europe. It generated enthusiasm and elation from the immediate personal gain that remained as the revolution unfolded. This enthusiasm suggests to Kant that there exists an inherent and deeply felt desire for progress within man – that we seek to distinguish today and yesterday such that things get better and the world moves forward: “I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race.”21 It is thus possible to claim that Kant is not primarily interested in the concrete French Revolution as an empirical phenomenon but only insofar as he can interpret it as expressing something decisive. It reveals – or permits the appearance of – an inherent demand for independence in mankind and a desire for the world to move forward. With the French Revolution, something new occurs that attains incontrovertible importance for us. As an event in Foucault’s philosophical sense, it opens a horizon for thought and action that takes the form of a perpetual challenge that cannot be ignored. The revolution as such may not last, but as a consequence it installs an incontrovertible disposition that humanity cannot discard or forget – no matter how events or history otherwise unfold. Whether or not the revolution succeeds, a new inclination toward independence or emergence from the previous tutelage enters into history. To that extent, one can claim that the Enlightenment and the Revolution are intrinsically related events. The revolution is the event that continues and completes the disposition that emerged in the event of the Enlightenment, such that it is no longer possible to ignore this disposition. 22 In an important sense, the guiding interest in Foucault’s reading of Kant is not actuality or even what actually happened, it is rather a transversal level that emerges and gains importance by creating new dispositions that shape the actuality of various events.23 According to Foucault, the revolution – as an actual event – risks being abandoned when history moves on, “but seen from

21

“Der Streit der Fakultäten,” in: I. Kant: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtphilosophiem Politik un Pädagogik 1 (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 358/“The Conflict of the Faculties,” in: H. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 182–183. 22 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 685/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” 94–95. 23 It is this transversal level of emergence that Foucault’s analysis of dispositives attempts to articulate.

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the viewpoint where its specific content becomes unimportant, its existence attests to a permanent virtuality which cannot be ignored.”24 ‘Virtuality’ and the ‘virtual’ should not be understood as designating a dimension or level of existence that imitates reality without actually being real. Rather, virtuality should be understood etymologically from the Medieval Latin virtualis, which designates ‘something which has an inner power or potential’. Virtuality means the effective force contained and expressed in material or actual events. In understanding an occurrence as an event in Foucault’s sense, we focus on the forces and effects that are implicitly at work in the occurrence. We can relate to this virtual level of forces and effects on both an analytical and a theoretical level, as well as a practical or even existential one. As part of a diagnosis of the present, the center of our attention is the momentum of force through which the actual occurrences point beyond themselves and can be recognized as belonging to a more encompassing pattern or tendency. According to Foucault, the virtual level must be distinguished both from the level of directly available facts and objects as well as from the level of (mere) potentiality. What is characteristic of a virtual force is that it can never be fully realized or completely exhausted in what can become immediately present, although it still shapes this level in the form of a persisting dispositionality. The construction of panoptic asylums in the 19th century expresses the intrinsic virtuality of Bentham’s panoptic diagram. Yet, on the one hand, the virtuality of the panoptic diagram is not fully realized or actualized as in the example of the acorn developing into an oak employed in Aristotle’s reflections on potentiality and actuality;25 and on the other hand, the expression of such virtuality is more than a ‘mere’ realization of an already implicit potential because the expression represents an irreducible ontological supplement or ‘surplus value’ in regards to the virtual level. Despite their immediate appearance, events therefore cannot be reduced to the particular time and place of their occurrence. On the contrary, the immediate phenomena are analyzed in a diagnosis of the present as singular events that distinguish themselves by creating connections across time and space. They are never given as such but must be thought of as entities that continually transcend themselves.26 When 24

“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 686/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” 96. 25 Cf. Aristotle: Physica, II and Metaphysica, IX. 26 The consequences of this for Foucault’s individual analyses are described in the previous chapters. A clear example is found in his relationship to structuralism. Foucault analyzes it not primarily to take up a position for or against its legitimacy but to diagnose the virtual force of this new movement in the contemporary context. The same approach is expressed in Foucault’s analyses – primarily in the ’60s – of contemporary literature and literary theory. These trends turn out not to be an ideal for him to follow. Rather, his approach is that of a diagnosis of the present, insofar as he perceives these as phenomena that are central to the contemporary world, the virtuality of which he must unfold.

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one focuses on virtuality, the object of study appears as a permanent selftranscendence – as something that is always already in the process of moving beyond itself from within. This is the case when Foucault comments on contemporary events or is concerned with apparently extraneous historical events. In extension, he points out that he is neither a historian nor a fictional author, but rather that he practices a kind of ‘historical fiction’.27 Since he focuses on articulating specific tendencies in past events, his works – from the perspective of a modern tradition of historical science – can come across as exaggerated and as partial descriptions. However, Foucault has another aim altogether, namely to stage an interaction between history and contemporary reality. His goal is not to determine historical truths but to unfold the truth that historical events have from the perspective of our contemporary, diagnostic gaze. Thus, he considers his books to be events that do not attain truth until after they are written and in force of their reception. It is necessary to perceive Foucault’s historical investigations in this perspective. They are not attempts at reconstructing the past with the greatest possible objectivity and completeness; nor do they pretend to give a universal overview of history. Surveiller et punir is, for instance, not a complete history of the development of punishment and discipline but an interpretation that discloses the one-sidedness of the narrative of progress characteristic of the humanities and humanistic discourse in general. It is therefore a history that precludes and recognizes the validity of a number of other outlooks. Foucault’s works are not shortcuts to an overarching insight into an epoch’s ideational and historical-philosophical foundations. If this were the case, then it would be fair to criticize him for not treating Stoic cosmology in this interpretation of Stoicism in Histoire de la sexualite.28 The stoics interest Foucault to the extent that they contribute to clarifying the genealogy of subjectivity and thereby pose a critical diagnosis of the transforming conception of subjectivity insofar as this pertains to Foucault’s own era. The purpose is everywhere one of contemporary diagnostics.29 By posing the question of the Enlightenment, Kant exercises an archer-like relation to his own time wherein he seeks to target it. When employed as an image of Foucault’s exercise of a diagnosis of the present, the metaphor of 27

“Foucault étudie la raison d’État” [1980], DE IV: 40. For instance P. Hadot – who was a great inspiration in Foucault’s work on antique thought – criticized him on this point in La philosophie comme manière de vivre (2002), pp. 216–217. 29 Despite his aim to conduct a diagnosis of the present through historical studies, Foucault seeks to attain a transparent and responsible use of the sources. By employing many quotes and references he makes clear to the reader that his contiguity to the original works makes a cross reading possible, so as to formulate one’s own interpretation. 28

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an archer shooting an arrow must be developed insofar as there is no fixed point that one can take into one’s sights. It is instead a moving target that the diagnostician can capture by following it and thereby precluding its inherent moment. The present one seeks to capture is, in virtue of its virtuality, itself in movement. It is therefore necessary to pick the analysis up as an arrow that has landed only to be sent on its way once again. It is therefore not sufficient for the diagnosis to focus on its own present as a given phenomenon. It must take up the present in an attempt to anticipate its ruptures and how it points beyond itself toward what one would term a ‘pre-future’. A new ontology of actuality appears with the Enlightenment and expresses a continuous challenge to which Foucault sees his own work as a response. The Enlightenment is vitally important to Foucault, as this singular event introduces a paradigmatic temporality of thought and history. This therefore results in the history of thought appearing as a series of ongoing departures from the past that allow new considerations to arise. For Foucault, Kant’s question about the Enlightenment raises “the question of the historicity of the thought of the universal.”30 The question becomes: How does a universal commitment appear in the series of historical departures within the movement of thought – from what was previously a given – toward a limited autonomy or Mündigkeit? It is possible, in retrospect, to consider Foucault’s authorship as a history of thought that seeks to answer this question.

2

The attitude of modernity and the ethos of philosophy

The attitude of modernity. Since he determines the lasting legacy from the Enlightenment as endless problematization, Foucault is able – without further ado – to distance himself critically from the “piety” of “those who wish us to preserve alive and intact the heritage of Aufklärung [Enlightenment].” Such worship of the Enlightenment is for Foucault “doubtless the most touching of treasons.”31 It is exactly in extension of the well-meaning effort to conserve the Enlightenment that this form of worship betrays the fundamental problem that manifests itself in the Enlightenment, namely the historicity of a mode of thought that seeks to think universality. The religious worship of an event that seeks to commit us to this one event and that stigmatizes apostates ultimately fails the Enlightenment understood as an ongoing event.

30 “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 687/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” 95. 31 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (2)” [1983/1984], DE IV: 686–687/“Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution” 95.

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Kant’s text on the Enlightenment raises an important question about the attitude one can have toward the ontology of actuality. By “attitude” Foucault means: “a mode of relating to contemporary reality [un mode de relation à l’égard de l’actualité]; a voluntary choice made by certain people [un choix volontaire qui est fait par certains]; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling [une manière de penser et sentir]; a way, too, of acting and behaving in which one establishes a relationship to something else [une manière aussi d’agir et de se conduire qui, tout à la fois, marque une appartenance et se présente comme une tâche].”32 At the same time, he specifies that this is similar to what the ancient Greeks called an ethos, or a particular way of living. The Enlightenment thereby raises the question of which particular way of living becomes possible and adequate when one must relate personally to contemporary times as an event that is coming into being and that one is inscribed into. Conceiving the Enlightenment within the framework of the ontology of actuality raises difficult question: How can a mode of living or ethics be attained that responds adequately to the fundamental challenges put forward by its epoch? In his effort to specify the contours of such a contemporary ethic, Foucault is inspired by a number of earlier attempts to shape what he calls “the attitude of modernity.” For Foucault, modernity does not refer to a specific historical epoch with certain defining features located between an earlier, primitive, premodern phase and a subsequent mysterious post-modernity. With the terms “modern” and “modernity,” Foucault aims instead at a certain attitude that comes about and exists alongside the Enlightenment insofar as it takes up the challenge given by the ontology of actuality. For Foucault, such a modern attitude therefore opposes a number of anti-modern attitudes that ignore the challenges posed by the ontology of actuality. One is anti-modern, for instance, in seeking to determine and return to a more substantial ground behind the transience and evanescence of modern life. Foucault finds an attitude toward modernity in the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), who presents it in unavoidable and emblematic terms. In “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Baudelaire describes the modern as “the ephemeral [le transitoire], the fugitive [le fugitive], the contingent.”33 For Baudelaire, being modern is not equivalent to recognizing or confirming this movement or the experience that all that is solid melts into air but instead implies taking up an attitude that rebels against mere changeability. In distinguishing itself from a

32 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 568/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 39. 33 “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” in: C. Baudelaire: Curiosités esthétiques L’Art romantique (Paris, Bordas, 1990), p. 467/C. Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays (London, Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.

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mere subservience to the dominant tendencies of the present age, the attitude of modernity is the effort to reconquer something eternal that is not located behind or beyond this moment but in the transient. According to Foucault, “it is the will to ‘heroize’ the present.”34 The heroic attitude toward the present avoids antiquating it and putting it on display. This is what happens if the present is retained as sacred and eternalized. This is likewise the case if – like the flaneur – one collects transient moments and a number of interesting but unrelated curiosities. Instead the present is glorified to the extent that one is able to force something more from the fleeting and something more than momentary. Usually this inevitability or necessity in the present may not become clear except in retrospect as one begins to relate to what is immediately given and its challenges. In agreement with Baudelaire, Foucault finds another example of such an attitude in Constantin Guys (1805–1892), who Baudelaire emphasizes as the painter of modern life. Unlike the anti-modern painters of that time, who find the 19th century and its garments ugly and therefore depict all scenarios with medieval, Renaissance, or oriental attire, Guys time and again paints the civilized people of that time and their brief encounters. However, he does this in such a manner that something more is forced from them, and the situations and customs of that time are thus resurrected by attaining new depth and by pointing beyond the very moment of depiction. The modern painter is able to present how the tailcoat is “the necessary attire of our epoch [l’habit necessaire de notre époque],” not only because the frock and dress coat “have their political beauty, which is “the expression of judicial equality [l’expression de l’égalité juridique],”but also because they “have their poetic beauty, which is the expression of the public soul [l’expression de l’âme publique].” An “endless defilation of undertakers [croquet-morts],” “political, enamored or bourgeois” reminds us that we all “bear mourning.” As such the painter of modern life testifies how his times – even in moments of apparent triviality – may be marked by a wondrous grace. He does this by implicitly suggesting how the age has a compulsive relationship to and mourning over death – it being ever-present and the ultimate ‘democratic’ equalizer insofar as it is projected and marks every organized or chance meeting. In such a representation, current culture comes across as a gathering of pallbearers in which “We are each of us celebrating some funeral.”35

34 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 569/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 40. 35 “Salon de 1846: De l‘héroisme de la vie moderne,” in: C. Baudelaire: Curiosités esthétiques L’Art romantique et autres œuvres critiques, pp. 195, 195–196/C. Baudelaire: “The Salon of 1846: On the Heroism of Modern Life” in: F. Frascina and C. Larrison (eds.): Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York, Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 17–19; “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” in: C. Baudelaire: Curiosités esthétiques, p. 467.

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For Foucault, the modern painter begins to work precisely where the rest of the world falls asleep and begins to “transfigure” or recreate the world. In this sense, the person who takes up the modern attitude and attempts to paint modern life attains an ambiguity toward that very modern life, of which he is a part. The aim is to respect reality and avoid reducing it. However, this is only possible by breaking with reality as it presents itself and showing how it points beyond its immediate existence. For Foucault, the transfiguration or changing of the world does not come about by annulling reality but through “a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom. ... For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.”36 In Foucault’s view, the modern attitude found with Baudelaire is not just a relation established with the present but also an attitude toward oneself. The attitude of modernity thus also involves relating to the self in a certain way. Just as it is not merely a question of accepting the present but reviving it, the modern self-relationship is not merely an issue of accepting that self in the fleeting moment or reestablishing it in a more basic sense. Rather, it involves relating to oneself as an ongoing process in order to make this self “the object of a complex, difficult and painstaking elaboration of oneself [l’objet d’une elaboration complexe et dure]” (translation modified). One must make oneself the subject of an ascetic effort: a self-cultivation that limits immediate development but makes new opportunities for development possible. For Baudelaire, modern man does not seclude himself to discover antecedent and hidden truths about himself. Modern man is the man who encounters himself in his irreducible relationships to others so as to reinvent himself. When the attitude of modernity is formulated as a relationship toward the self, it is likewise afflicted by the tension between reality and freedom, and acceptance and transformation, which in turn affects the relationship to the present and sociality in general. For Foucault, Baudelairian modernity “is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.” The attitude of modernity regards man’s “inevitable,” but also precarious and difficult, “revolt against himself.”37 36 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 570/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 41. 37 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 570/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 41.

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The historicity of revolt. It is, however, not only with Baudelaire that man’s troublesome revolt against himself is given an exemplary expression. While reading Kant and Baudelaire, Foucault also sought to attain firsthand experience of such a contemporary revolt when he twice traveled to Iran in 1978 to cover the uprising against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) in a number of newspaper articles.38 The Italian newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault for regular contributions, so he suggested gathering a number of intellectual reporters to depart for hot spots around the world where a special kind of events – namely ideas – were coming into being or disappearing into obscurity, so as to make “ideational reports.” In Foucault’s view, the often-repeated end of the great ideologies was vastly overrated. Indeed, in comparison with what he had observed, it was a misleading abstraction to say so: “Some say that the great ideologies are dying; others that they submerge us with their monotony. Conversely, the contemporary world is swarming with ideas, which arise, toss and turn, disappear and reappear, and shake people and things. This happens not only in intellectual circles and in European or Western universities, but on a global scale and, among others, in minorities or people that history until now has almost never accustomed to talk or to being listened to [que l’histoire jusqu’à aujourd’hui n’a presque jamais habitué à parler ou à se faire écouter].”39 Foucault’s attempt to create such a team of “ideational-reporters” was to support the formation of a kind of intellectual that would be specifically engaged in contemporary times. His journey to Iran had been thought of as the first in a series of such ideational reports.40 The purpose of ideational reports was not to engage in a moral debate for or against what is being examined – in Foucault’s case the Iranian Revolution – but to examine the forces at work within the phenomenon and what is brought to the Western context by that idea.

38

These are: “L‘armée, quand la terre tremble,” DE III: 662–669; “Téhéran: la foi contre le shah,” DE III: 683–688; “À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?” DE III: 688–698; “Une révolte à mains nues,” DE III: 701–704; “Défi à l‘opposition,” DE III: 704–706; “Les reportages‘ d‘idées,” DE III: 706–707; “Réponse de Michel Foucault à une lectrice iranienne,” DE III: 708; “Le chef mythique de la révolte de l‘Iran,” DE III: 713–716; “L‘ésprit d‘un monde sans ésprit,” DE III: 743–755; 250–260; “Lettre ouverte à Mehdi Bazargan,” DE III: 780– 783; “Inutile de se soulever?”: DE III: 790–794. 39 “Les reportages‘ d‘idées,” DE III: 706–707. 40 It was in extension of this effort that the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut (b. 1949) later went to the United States to cover developments there, just as André Glücksmann (b. 1937) wrote a piece on the Vietnamese boat people. Other planned reports never came about. Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was supposed to write about Vietnam and Arpad Ajtony (1944–2013) about Hungary, while Jorge Semprun (b. 1923) was to cover the Spanish process of democratization, and Ronald Laing (1927–89) was to write about mass-suicides (in particular the 913 dead, including 270 children from the People’s Temple sect in the jungle of Guyana in 1978).

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In Iran, Foucault was attracted to an ethos that he thought was present in the first phase of the revolution. Here the people of Iran rebelled against not only the Shah’s secret police but also the Western processes of modernization and liberalization that the Shah represented. Indeed, Foucault emphasized how the man on the street, as well as the high-ranking clergy, were attempting to create room for an otherwise nonexistent “political spirituality.”41 It is not the immediate religious implications of this term in the Iranian context that Foucault finds interesting here. In a discussion held on the 10th anniversary of another revolt – the May 1968 protests in France – Foucault suggests that the central aspect of such a political spirituality is “the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false.42 From Foucault’s perspective, such a political spirituality is, in both the French and Iranian contexts, coupled to the will and ability to establish a different management of the self. A political spirituality comes about as a result of people in the political field being able to create a mode of managing the self and others and a different way of enunciating the truth from what was known hitherto. As a consequence, the political space also changes. In enunciating the truth and managing the self and others, it becomes possible to refract the existing political field in ways that permit the rise of spirituality. Political spirituality comes about in shaping and refracting the political space such that a transformation of the self and by extension the political arena becomes possible. Examining the inevitable but precarious revolt against oneself in which man creates space for political spirituality becomes a recurring figure in the latter half of Foucault’s authorship.43 It is one of the motivations for Foucault’s concern with contemporary liberal political traditions in the lectures that span 1978 and 1979.44 It likewise determines his alternative reading of this tradition, insofar as he perceives it as a critical break with existing traditions in government – a critical break that seeks to create room for and emphasize the

41 It had occurred to Foucault already at this stage that “The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and the coming years. In order to approach it with a minimum of intelligence, the first condition is not to begin by bringing in hatred” (Réponse de Michel Foucault à une lectrice iranienne,” DE III: 708). He also stressed that one must not ascribe to him any conception of an Islamic spirituality and government replacing the previous dictatorship. Instead, Foucault attempted to examine what he considered an interesting moment in this “political spirituality.” 42 “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978” [1980], DE IV: 30/“The Impossible Prison,” pp. 275–286. 43 We owe Alain Beaulieu our gratitude for directing attention toward this circumstance in a graduate school lecture at Copenhagen Business School entitled Foucault and Practice, March 2007. 44 Cf. [STP]/{STPo} and [NB]/{BP}.

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necessity of self-management. Alongside this, efforts to examine the precursors to such a revolt seem an important motivation for Foucault when studying the management of the self and its spiritual exercises in antiquity. This was done in subsequent lectures in 1983 that concerned the critical practice of truth-telling. Just as it is found in the ethos of antiquity, an essential aspect of the modern attitude is the experience that one can attain freedom through acting in a certain way. This relates to and addresses external conditions not through some inner search or exploration but in a concrete confrontation with and refraction of the encountered.45 Foucault’s interest in examining the earlier-mentioned ongoing revolt and its current shifts heightens his awareness of and motivation for examining contemporary phenomena that challenge liberalism and its dynamics. There is all the more reason for him to do so, insofar as liberalism – since Foucault’s time of writing – has become entrenched as a contemporary dogma with totalitarian tendencies. Whether it takes the shape of a self-evident, economic reality or a “Californian cult of the self,”46 in its time liberalism may have formed a reinvigorating correction to the existing governmental rationality while indicating the necessity of creating a space for exercising independence. According to Foucault, however, it is currently in need of a new resuscitation and re-Enlightenment because it is tending toward becoming a new dogma that closes the space for thought and thereby fatuous. In the article “Inutile de se soulever?” or “Is it Useless to Revolt?” which is Foucault’s closing remark on the Iranian Revolution, he complains about the

45 “L‘éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” [1984], DE IV: 714/“The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” p. 436f. In this regard it is worthwhile recapitulating an important point, namely that concern with the ethos of antiquity serves as inspiration to think the attitude of modernity in an unusual way. The purpose is not to develop an ideal that we must copy. Rather it is a looser form of inspiration from what Foucault considers the concrete shaping of freedom, the nature of which is more apparent in antique ethical practice than in most mainstream modern philosophy, where morality is determined as a set of rules or principles. Such a principle could be the utilitarian one, which requires every action to maximize happiness for most people. Where this approach to morality seeks to guide the use of freedom and thereby the possible actions from such principles, what is inspirational in antique thought is the heightened emphasis on creating a relationship to one’s freedom so as to act. Foucault’s examination of antique ethics inspires his own search for modernity’s attitude, in that he both in Baudelaire and in antique ethics finds the formulation of an ethos, which takes the shape of a special approach or attitude. What is important here is that Foucault does not see the – historically speaking – later appearance of such an attitude as a form of eternal recurrence. The ethos of antiquity should merely assist in articulating the character of the modern. 46 “Postface” [1980], DE IV: 36; “Une système fini face à une demande infinite” [1983], DE IV: 374–375/“The Risks of Security,” pp. 365–381; “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” p. 245.

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regime of terror that it led to. He hereby distances himself clearly from the totalitarian approach taken up by Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–1989). Previously, Khomeini had fascinated Foucault by being a relatively unknown “focal point of a collective will.”47 Furthermore, to investigate where it might have led, Foucault’s loyalty toward the initial phases of the revolution and examining its implicit momentum remained constant. He retains a tension between the end of the revolution and the virtuality contained in the course of its events. Thus, Foucault’s relationship to the Iranian Revolution is not unlike Kant’s relationship to the French Revolution. What immediately fascinated Foucault was the revolt, whereby he means, “The movement through which a lone man, a group, a minority, or an entire people say, will no longer obey, and are willing to risk their lives in the face of a power that they believe to be unjust, seems to me to be irreducible.”48 The moment of the uprising or revolt is fascinating by being a part of history while remaining an irreducible, inexplicable, and fundamental moment that elides explication. It is irreducible insofar as even the most totalitarian power could not exterminate it. It arose time and again, even in the Nazi ghettos and concentration camps. Nor is it possible to explain why people would prefer “the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.”49 Finally, it is fundamental insofar as it constitutes the condition for having a history at all. If there were no moments of indignation or revolt and existing power had universal dominion, history would come to a grinding halt. The moment of revolt constitutes the precondition for history moving on, just like it ensures the continuation and development of sociality. According to Foucault, the moment of revolt has been shaped throughout most of Western history, as the uprising and insubmission were conceptualized in religious terms. Thus, they were above all acted out and exercised in religious movements and often in exaltation. This becomes apparent not only in the traditional church and its parishes but perhaps even more so in religious counter-movements opposing the church.50 Conceptions of redemption 47 “Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 790–794;/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” pp. 263– 267; “Le chef mythique de la révolte de l‘Iran” [1978], DE III: 716/“The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt,” p. 222. No matter this changed evaluation of Khomeini’s role, Foucault does not seem to change his basic position: “It is certainly not shameful to change one’s opinions, but there is no reason to say that one’s opinion has changed when one is against hands being chopped off today, after having been against the tortures of the SAVAK yesterday” (“Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 793/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” 266). 48 “Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 790–791/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” p. 263. 49 “Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 791/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” p. 263. 50 In his lectures from 1978, Foucault examines a number of concrete examples of such “revolts of conduct [révoltes des conduites].” These are rebellious ways of behaving and relating, through which – from the 11th to the 17th century – people have sought to

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in the next world have been well suited for capturing the idea of a “historical externality” within history so as to enact it in a highly charged expression. However, over the last 200 years of Western history, revolt has been enacted and conceptualized in a secular revolution. By setting new and better standards for life on earth, it has been possible to give the revolt an end goal and legitimacy and to prescribe rules for its activities. This means that the revolt has been rationalized and conceptualized in a certain and limited format. For Foucault, it therefore becomes important to distinguish revolution and revolt. The latter may be smaller, less spectacular, and tangible, but it is likewise more basic in that it creates the precondition for and an incentive toward revolution. In this derived format, the revolt emerges to be given clear and recognizable contours. For Foucault, the contemporary revolution in Iran is therefore also interesting and challenging precisely insofar as the participants’ perception of the self and their movement is anachronistic in comparison with what at present would occur in Western societies. Here the revolt has been internalized in history by explaining and giving it meaning in the shape of the revolution. The Oriental revolt breaks with the Western conception of revolution and its association with development and progress so as to couple with and indeed renew commitments to older religious formats. The revolt that fascinates Foucault therefore also challenges the values that are central to the current liberal dynamic. The Iranian revolt thereby also shakes a mundane political community that has a tendency to focus on its own worldly values. In so doing, it tends to close itself off from outside influence and view its own state as natural and obvious. Thus it reduces the possibility of individual reasoning and thereby the attainment of political spirituality, as Foucault uses the word. Foucault holds that it is a fallacy to claim that religious despotism, governance by Mullahs, was inherent to the Iranian uprising and its enthusiasm from the very beginning.51 Considering the historical events from the perspective of the end result, this conception attributes a teleological necessity to history and reduces the beginning to the end. Ironically, this observation thereby manages to confirm the regime’s religious identity and self-conception as it seeks to legitimize and necessitate itself by referring to the original rebellion and its inherent teleology. create a more personal space in regard to the Christian pastorate while remaining within the religio-spiritual universe ([STP]: 195–219/{STPo}: 191–226). Here we find the ascetic mastering of the self, establishment of alternative religious communities, Christian mysticism, the return to an independent reading of the Holy Scriptures among the believers and the eschatological preaching of preparing oneself for the next world already in this. Such rebellious attitudes take an outset in the given, all while they establish an inner rupture: We are Christians, but in a different way. 51 “Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 793/“Is It Useless to Revolt?”, p. 265.

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As Foucault sees it, there are a number of circumstances that result in the Iranian rebellion taking this direction after only a few years. This explains why this happened, even though this outcome should not be considered a necessity from the very outset. Among these reasons we find the Iranian clergy’s strong institutional position and its grasp on the population, powerful xenophobia in the region, the repression of women, the dream in the movement to make Islam a great and vibrant civilization, the region’s global economic and strategic position in terms of oil reserves, rivalry between local powers, and global imperialism.52 Foucault considers both interpretations and opinions as motivated by a fear of the event that is manifested with the Iranian rebellion and which had not found its expression for a long time. They appear as efforts to limit what had happened by covering it up and integrating it. If the idea of the revolt is covered up and integrated into the revolution, then it is possible – as has been the case since the French Revolution – to reject the revolt as such. One can thus justify the revolt to the extent that it attains a higher revolutionary goal and reject it to the extent that it does not. Or one can reject the revolt by rejecting the idea of revolution as such, since it – like Saturn – eats its own children so as not to be consumed. This implies a derivative rejection of the revolt as a viable possibility. Such elimination makes it all the more important for Foucault to distinguish between the revolt and what it led to in order to retain the irreducible in the event: the enthusiasm that equally threatens any despotism. This is because any absolutist regime is challenged by such a ‘general’ enthusiasm that distances the individual from his or her own immediate survival and thus the limitations that this places upon their perspective. Only hereby is it possible to avoid the revolution eating its own children: by stopping the revolution from gobbling up the revolt that fathered it and avoiding any challenge by the revolt that questions the revolution and its higher purpose. For Foucault the issue is one neither of rejecting the revolt nor of legitimizing the uprising. In his perspective no one has the right to pronounce the revolutionary dictum: “Revolt for me, the final liberation of each man hinges on it.” Still, just as untenable is the general defeatist conservative claim “It is useless to revolt, since it will always be the same.” Instead, Foucault wishes to direct people’s attention toward the simple fact that when people are aggravated, they rise and protest vehemently. It is here that “subjectivity” “introduces itself into history and imbues it with new life and spirit [lui donne son soufflé].”53 In this respect, not only great men are important; also, and maybe first and foremost, each and every man may play a decisive role. This shows 52 53

“Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 792/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” p. 264. “Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 793/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” p. 266.

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when the inmate rebels against prison discipline, when the mad revolt against incarceration, degradation, and dependence and when people rise up against a repressive regime. “This does not make the first one innocent, does not cure the second, and does not guarantee to the third the results that were promised. No one, by the way, is required to stand in solidarity with them. No one is required to think that these confused voices sing better than others and speak the truth in its ultimate depth. It is enough that they exist and that they have against them all that strives to silence them, to make it meaningful to listen to them and to search for what they want to say. A question of morality? Perhaps. A question of reality, certainly. All the disillusionments of history will not change this. It is precisely because there are such voices that human time [le temps des homes] does not take the form of evolution, but exactly that of ‘history’.”54 The continuous re-enchantment that aggravation and revolt introduce into history means that history does not take on the character of a continuous developmental process where the succeeding events build on the preceding; rather, history takes the form of an ongoing change characterized by ruptures and upturns that result in previous states imploding so as to be recreated in new ways. In extension of this, the relationship between the established and the rebellious is not to be described as a relationship between independent actors who represent opposed and fundamentally different forces. The revolt is not given the status of a ‘counter-power’ to be located beyond and transcending power relations. Rather, it is understood as an internal rupture in history and established power. Since such a rupture prevents established power and history from becoming absolute and closing in on themselves, it challenges and sets both into movement. In this sense, established power is challenged to exert more power to conserve and continue itself.55 Critique. Toward the end of “Inutile de se soulever,” Foucault characterizes what he terms as his own “theoretical morality [morale théorique]” by pointing out how a specific intellectual stands in a distinctive and privileged relationship with the revolt that repeatedly affects the course of history. Insofar as the strategist – whether he is a politician, revolutionary or proponent of the Shah or Ayatollah – distinguishes himself by claiming that an individual’s death or scream is a necessity in attaining a totality or overarching principles, Foucault considers himself decidedly “anti-strategic.” In thinking critically, he seeks to break with the idea of a higher purpose by being “respectful when a singularity arises and intransigent as soon as the state violates universals. It is a simple 54

“Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 793–794/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” p. 266. In the article “The Subject and Power,” Foucault therefore points out how the exertion of power requires “intransigence of freedom” (pp. 221–222). 55

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choice, but hard work. One needs to watch, a bit underneath history, for what breaks and agitates it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. After all, this is my work. I am neither the first nor the only one to do it, but I chose it.”56 As it focuses on the historical moment of revolt in which it can no longer be taken for granted and becomes something different, critical thought becomes possible and enables us to examine where the revolt might lead us. Within the realm of thought, such a critical, intellectual approach thereby constitutes a parallel to the revolt whereby it manifests itself not only in the people’s, group’s or individual’s revolt but also in Baudelaire’s acute formulation of the modern attitude. Critical thought is guided by a theoretical morality or ethos. This corresponds to the practical attitude that comes about in such uprisings. In one of his discussions of Kant and the Enlightenment, Foucault characterizes the “permanent critique of our historical era” and its all too obvious and natural commitments as that which distinguishes his philosophical ethos.57 Since such critical thought seeks the level where history begins to move and allows us to think differently, it is located in extension of the Enlightenment requirement of Sapere Aude or daring to think, resulting in the possibility of liberation. In order to take up the challenge and the attitude given to us by the Enlightenment, a rejection of what Foucault calls the “‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment” is required.58 This is the conception that the Enlightenment has passed on an essential core of rationality to subsequent generations that we must profess and continue to work for, lest it is lost. For Foucault, such a requirement to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment repeats one of the most harmful inclinations in modern thought.59 This is an arrogance that has influenced the philosophical analysis of contemporary times in particular. It posits the present point in time as the determining moment in history. In this here and now, it is decided whether history is able to realize its potential and complete itself or whether it fails so miserably that it may result in perdition. Such conceitedness on behalf of one’s own time is often found in Nietzsche and before him Hegel. Later, Habermas may also be seen to exhibit such arrogance when he requires that everybody express loyalty toward Enlightenment rationality. For Foucault, critical thought in extension of the Enlightenment occurs with the modest realization that one does not live in a unique and decisive turning

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“Inutile de se soulever?” [1979], DE III: 794/“Is It Useless to Revolt?” p. 267. “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 571/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 42. 58 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 571/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 42. 59 “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” [1983], DE IV: 448/“How Much Does It Cost to Tell the Truth?” p. 359. 57

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point. Yet, even without the revolutionary and quasi-religious euphoria – even if we do not allow ourselves “the dramatic and theatrical easy option to affirm that this moment where we are situated is the moment of greatest damnation, in the middle of the night, or the moment where the sun triumphs at the height of day” (translation substantially modified) – this particular time may still be experienced as incredibly intriguing and important. It “is a day like every other, or rather, it is a day which is never quite like any other.” As a consequence, “the time we live in is very interesting; it demands to be analyzed, and demands to be broken down” (translation substantially modified).60 With Kant, the task for philosophy emerges to diagnose what today is and what “this ‘us today’ is [ce que c’est que ‘nous aujourd’hui’]” (translation substantially modified), without taking refuge in a simplifying and theatrical over-dramatization. Such a “diagnosis of contemporary times [diagnostic sur ce qu’est aujourd’hui]” cannot content itself with simply describing and determining who we are or prophetically predicting the point we will reach in the near future. Instead, this diagnosis must seek to “reach forward and manage to grasp in which ways that which is and the manner in which it is could possibly no longer be what it is [parvenir à saisir par où ce qui est et comment ce qui est pourrait ne plus être ce qui est; translation substantially modified].” The way to do this is to seek out, follow, and prolong “contemporary lines of frailty and friability [en suivant les lignes de fragilité d’aujourd’hui]”: the moment when indignation and revolt arise and create a “sort of virtual fracture [espece de fracture virtuelle], that opens a space of freedom, understood as a space of concrete freedom, that is possible transformation” (translation substantially modified).61 In a more positive sense – also in extension of Kant’s Enlightenment – Foucault is able to characterize the ethos of critical philosophy as a “limit-attitude [une attitude limite].”62 While Kant in Kritik der reinen Vernunft generalized the conception of criticism by describing his own Enlightenment as “the age of criticism to which everything must be subjected,” he also emphasizes how critique had a close relationship to setting limits.63 According to Foucault, here “the Kantian question was that of knowing [savoir] what limits knowledge [connaissance] has to renounce transgressing.”64 In force of being able to 60 “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” [1983], DE IV: 448/“How Much Does It Cost to Tell the Truth?” p. 359. 61 “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” [1984], DE IV: 448–449/“How Much Does It Cost to Tell the Truth?” p. 359. 62 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 45. 63 I. Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1968), p. 13./I. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason (New York, Dover Publications, 2003), p. ix. 64 For further development of the notion and critique and a more nuanced discussion of the various notions of critique in Kant, cf. S. Raffnsøe: “What is Critique? The Critical State of Critique in the Age of Criticism.”

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establish and reflect on the necessary limitations that various activities must not transcend if they are to be well-founded, we exhibit ourselves as subjects with the ability to perform critical judgments. In this sense, we should limit theoretical reasoning to remain within the boundaries of cognition and abstain from speculating about the nature of the world as such. We should therefore also – according to Kant – not permit practical reason to speak of reality. In the normative requirements of practical reason, we express value judgments about reality that are valid despite not being comprehended as determinate for this reality. For Kant, critique is therefore also closely connected with the ability to delimit various spheres of validity. Critique is thus the ability to demark and distinguish.65 According to Foucault, however, probing the boundaries of sense that Kant opened must now be taken up and continued in a critical thought that opens new vistas. Today critical thought must move “beyond the outside-inside alternative” that still defines Kant’s first Critiques – not to simply reject previously given limits but to “be at the frontiers [être aux frontières].”66 Accordingly, critical thought regards an ongoing thematization of the boundaries, not to determine necessary limits that we must refrain from transcending but to indicate the borders we are contiguous with. Instead of confirming and legitimizing the necessary limitations, critical enlightenment comes to prove given limits, but for the purpose of transcending these. In searching for these limits, Foucault performs a “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.”67 Still, this is not a strictly historical examination of what actually happened but rather a historico-philosophical study of the conditions that currently apply to us in order to take these up for consideration and relate to them. As Foucault stresses: “In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design [dans sa finalité] and archeological in its method. Archaeological – and not transcendental – in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge [connaissance] or all possible moral action but will seek to treat the 65 Although the immediate sources of “Kritik” and “critique” are German and French respectively, the deeper etymological origin is the Greek kritikê technê, which is defined as “the art of judgment” and has roots in the adjective kritikos, which is itself a derivative of the verb krinein, which means “to distinguish, to determine, to judge”; etymologically speaking, to criticize therefore means to “distinguish or set boundaries.” Cf. S. Raffnsøe: “What Is Critique? The Critical State of Critique in the Age of Criticism”. 66 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 45. 67 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 46.

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instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and know [connaître]; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”68 The modern philosophico-critical ethos thereby forms a parallel to the attitude of modernity that Foucault locates in Baudelaire. The attitude of modernity revolts against the changeability that constitutes the immediate present. Also, it seeks to dislodge something more substantial from the fleeting moment by incorporating it only to make it the subject of a new and thoroughgoing treatment that transfigures the immediately given. Likewise, in the modern critico-philosophical attitude, one takes up the historical not as given but as something that is dynamically forced upon us and determines us, and thereby challenges us. This determining movement is retained in the historico-philosophico-critical ethos, but only on the understanding that special attention is granted to the moments of revolt within which it refracts and shifts, such that its internal force is reinvigorated. In the modern, critico-philosophical attitude, one takes the ontology of actuality, where everything has a fleeting appearance, and makes it a condition for the genealogical examination of the historical developments that have led us this far. Thus, an element of historical development is accentuated while remaining irreducible to and transcending both historical determination and historical transience. This is done in an active manner, as the genealogical examination focuses on the virtual level – the inner force which appears – such that the given is transcended and the possibility of something new comes about. Foucault may therefore “characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves as free beings.”69 In such a “philosophical life,” “the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”70 As with the attitude 68 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 46. 69 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 575/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 47. 70 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 577/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 50. In the preface to the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault makes a similar point concerning the philosophical analysis itself: “What is at stake [son enjeu]” for Foucault in the “philosophical exercise” is “to get to know [savoir] to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so

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of modernity, critical experimentation within the given limits is affected by the tension between reality and freedom, and acceptance and transformation. It remains affected as it shines a light on what appears in the interstices between these poles.71 Foucault also characterizes the “historical-critical work upon ourselves” as “experimental,” insofar as it “must on the one hand open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.”72 In this regard, Foucault in 1984 emphasizes how he allowed himself to be inspired “by the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible for the last twenty years in a certain number of areas, which concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness.73 Here one leaves behind the established grounds of validity as one begins to consider one’s own thought and being as an object of practical-ethical self-formation. Consequently, one begins to create and commit to new normative guidelines. Critique is hereby perceived as inherent and affirmative because it sets out in previous ruptures in order to confirm departures. In force of actively pursuing the movement underway and examining its possible further directions, critique transcends this movement from within. Through its confirmation of an ongoing historical departure, critique is able to actively seek out its boundaries – boundaries that not only condition it but also limit its directions. As part of a longer series of interviews with leading European intellectuals, Foucault agreed to give an interview in the French newspaper Le Monde in

enable it to think differently [dans quelle mesure le travail de penser sa proper histoire peut affranchir la pensée de ce qu’elle pense silencieusement et lui permettre de penser autrement]” UP: 15/UPl: 9; translation slightly modified. 71 In the article “Qu‘est-ce que la critique?” Foucault is able to emphasize how such a critique has come about on the margins of philosophy. On the one hand, it has happened in spite of traditional philosophy, in an attempt to distance it from established philosophical dogmatism. On the other, it has related to the core of philosophy insofar as the critique has sought to move in the direction of a future philosophy and has considered itself the condition for it. The critical approach has only become a general virtue in modern times as a rebellion against the expanding rationality of management, which has come about in extension of the Christian [parish]. Thus Foucault can suggest the following definition of the critical attitude: as an activity that seeks to create a space for the individual’s management of the self, critique is “the art of being less governed.” “Qu‘estce que la critique?” pp. 36–38; our translation. 72 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 46. 73 “Qu‘est-ce que les Lumières? (1)” [1984], DE IV: 574/“What Is Enlightenment?” p. 46.

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1980, but on the explicit condition that the talk was published anonymously. He wanted to circumvent the kind of ubiquitous critique that perceives and judges what is said and done by the name and face of the enunciator. Also, he was nostalgic “for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard,” and “the surface of contact was quite unrippled” “with the potential reader.” During this carefully revised interview, Foucault mentions that it seems that the French painter Courbet “had a friend who used to wake up in the night yelling: “I want to judge, I want to judge. It is amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time.” Concomitantly, Foucault makes the observation that a certain kind of negative judgment is often directed at the intellectual whose ideas are “criticised,” “denounced,” or “condemned.” Contrary to this widespread form of negative critique, Foucault stresses that he “can’t help but dream about” a different, more affirmative kind of critique: “a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an œuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life [faire exister une œuvre, un livre, une phrase]; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.”74 Thus, while underlining the nonjudgmental and affirmative character of the critique he adhered to, Foucault concomitantly stressed its imaginative and liminal element. Even though such an outline of critique accentuates the moment in which subjectivity appears in history, it also transcends the idea of the classical judging cognition of the subject that comprehends itself and its limits, as is found with Kant.75 74

“Le philosophe masque” [1980], DE IV: 106/“The Masked Philosopher,” p. 325. In a late retrospective piece from 1980, Foucault underlines how experiences, not only personal but also with authors like Bataille, Nietzsche, and Blanchot, have been essential for him. For these authors it was not crucial to build a philosophical system. Instead they were primarily concerned with examining personal experience as a problem. What was crucial in their ongoing work with personal experience was not re-founding the subject but rather initiating a “de-subjectivization.” The effort in working with personal experience had been to bring the subject to the verge of itself, such that it could transcend itself in an impersonal and singular marginal experience (“Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” DE IV: 42–43/“What Our Present Is,” pp. 407–415). As we have pointed out earlier, the experience with liminality does not result in entering the ‘outside,’ Instead it needs to be repeated in the form of an ongoing de-subjectivization. In this sense, critique remains a “preface to transgression,” and subjectivity asserts itself in the form of a recurring spirituality. 75

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Foucault couples the critical, modern attitude with an ongoing search for moments of revolt. While these moments may seem insignificant, they actually create history. Still, Foucault does not claim that one should only concern oneself with them and seek to make a house under constant reconstruction habitable: the changeability of history conceived as a place of rest or acknowledged as a value in and of itself. Rather, he constantly seeks to renew the critical attitude indicated in the concrete analyses that constitute his works. This leads to the critique becoming historical in the sense that it cannot become a goal of its own endeavor or be formulated independently of its context. As a diagnosis of the present, the critique always sets out in a temporally given issue and seeks to reflect on this so as to relate to it in a more nuanced manner, and furthermore act upon it. This takes place in the certain knowledge that the solutions given by the critical attitude more or less indirectly suggest new issues that themselves become new problems. As such, critique must renegotiate itself over and over again. In a late conversation from 1983, Foucault emphasizes the “ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.” He therefore underlines his complete agreement with the analysis given in Robert Castel’s (1933–2013): La gestion des risques. De l’anti-psychiatrie à l’apres-psychoanalyse (1982). The book presents many of the problems that the anti-psychiatric movements gave rise to.76 Indeed, these victories had been supported by Foucault’s Histoire de la folie and had often been seen as related to this work. In any case, Foucault is able to state that he agrees “completely with what Castel says, but that does not mean, as some people suppose, that the mental hospitals were better than antipsychiatry; that does not mean that we were not right to criticize those mental hospitals. I think that it was good to do that, because they were the danger. And now it’s quite clear that the danger has changed.” For instance, he here refers to Italy where several of the large institutions were closed in favor of smaller, social-psychiatric units that treat schizophrenics within a local environment that includes habitation and drop-in-centers. In this manner, the mentally ill have attained a life that is reminiscent of ordinary people, and which formed a contributing motivation in the anti-psychiatric critique of power. However, the afflicted have also lost the safety of the asylum where they were constantly within reach of doctors and nursing staff. The focus has likewise shifted from attempting to cure people in the hospital to integrating them as part of society. In doing this, they often remain a radically marginalized group who experience the slightest societal demands – such as working at drop-in-centers – as insurmountable. We therefore experience “new problems.”77 76

Foucault’s complex relationship to the antipsychiatric movement is discussed in the last section of Chapter 3. 77 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” p. 256.

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The solutions that result from the critique of previous problems become new problems as history progresses. Insofar as new problems arise from what were previously solutions, it becomes clear that the criticizing activity never comes to an end. Critique is a historical and non-terminating activity. The modern critical project never attains a goal or comes to an end as it must constantly be reinitiated and return to us as a challenge. Instead of attaining completion, the modern project returns to itself in an ongoing oscillation between issues, contemporary diagnostic critique, solutions, and new issues that grow from that very process. Foucault relates to contemporary social practices and the issues that come about in analyzing them in a contemporary diagnostic manner so as to create the basis for relating to and reflecting on the problems. Such a reflective attitude can lead to improved intervention or activity, which then gives rise to new challenges. In connection with Foucault calling for an ongoing critique that relates to not only given problems but also the problems that arise from the critical solutions given, he does not thereby mean that “everything is bad.” Rather, he suggests that “everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.” Although he may identify with Heidegger and the late Frankfurt School – insofar as they also assume an ongoing reopening of issues that pertain to modernity and Enlightenment – he cannot share in their dystopian, total-diagnosis of the modern occident as lost in Seinsvergessenheit or the forgetting of being, which is spun within an inexorable “dialectic of enlightenment.” Such analyses present all of history and its end-goal in modernity from the same bleak perspective, which makes it seem like forfeiture, loss, or decay. Things are not bad or rotten but dangerous and precarious, such as the treatment of the mentally in the 1950s, wherefore Foucault holds that “we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.”78 Foucault’s fascination with the moment of revolt in history results in him avoiding a position like that of the late Heidegger, who seeks solace in an ongoing philosophical meditation over an all too absent moment in or behind known history. As a countermove to the concept of an overarching history, which in his perspective only covers up being so that it increasingly appears as immediately given to us, Heidegger constantly returns to and thematizes this lost moment in a decaying history. He speculates about the absence of being in history and seeks to keep the back door open, so that a more basic determination of being can show itself in and through history. However, this criticism requires him to wait for such a basic being to show itself. Foucault’s approach distinguishes itself from such an external and distant, but also powerless, critique that seeks to thematize a basic and yet ‘transcendental’ moment in

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history. This was the moment that Heidegger had attempted to keep alive in the absence of a more substantial transcendence. His critique not only becomes inherent and affirmative, but also active and transcending. It is inherent and affirmative in the sense that it takes an outset in a moment of history, in order to affirm this motion. Since it actively seeks this motion and examines its possible direction, the critique transcends the contemporary movement from within. Critique becomes an affirmation of an already ongoing, concrete and historical movement that is able to search out the limits that determine it and which it determines. In force of it affirming virtuality and bringing us to the limits of ourselves, critique is therefore able to liberate the present, sociality, and the self. In his penultimate series of lectures from the Collége de France, Foucault summarizes the trends he has sought out in his work as follows: “[I have sought to establish] an analysis for what could be called seedbeds or focal points of experience [foyers d’experience] in which forms of a possible knowledge [savoir], normative frameworks of behavior for individuals, and potential modes of existence for possible subjects are linked together [s’articulent les un sur les autres].”79 Explicating the complex conception of experience and its core features has been imperative throughout the present book. At the same time, the present chapter has sought to indicate and retain how there is an inherent connection between elements normally considered distinct or isolated. The pronunciations of truth and knowledge, the matrices of normativity and behavior as well as the modes of existence for possible subjects are intrinsically connected and mutually explicative. These are, if not the “principles” or “themes” of Foucault’s work in its entirety, then at least, as he says, “some of the landmarks [repères] that I set up for myself.” They mark out “the route [parcours]” he tried to follow in his philosophical diagnostics of the present.80

79 80

[GSA 1]: 4–5/{GSO1}: 3. [GSA 1]: 4, 7/{GSO1}: 2, 5.

Exit: Challenges for a Diagnosis of the Present

The conditions for diagnosis. In his critical analysis, Foucault takes an outset in the experience of a specific, current movement. His diagnosis of the present begins by observing the present as a special disruption that takes place as an event in which we participate so as to examine what that present involves for us.1 Here, the present takes on a relational existence that we are involved in and whose consequences we must unfold or explicate. For a diagnosis of the present, the present appears as a yet to be settled score that needs further examination in order to elucidate what is at stake for us and where it might lead us. The crucial task for a diagnosis of the present is not to deny or univocally recognize the demand to commit to the experienced phenomena and the indispensable obligations they seem to present. This would be the parti pris that much of traditional, normative and philosophical theory seeks to arrive at. By contrast, the diagnostic of the present does not aim for a clear yes or no to the validity of contemporary phenomena. Rather, the perspective shifts from the usual evaluation of what should be valid for us to an examination of what asserts itself here. The issue is thus not just what has brought about or engendered the studied phenomena, for such an approach should also consider why they are still relevant, seem to bind us and put us under an obligation. As a consequence, the diagnostic investigation involves an examination of what still applies in and through the given phenomena and what they point toward in the future.2

1 We have shown how experience of the present as a transition forms a continuous outset for Foucault’s larger works; for instance, the transition from human to language in the humanities or from madness to insanity. 2 Cf. S. Raffnsøe: Nietzsches ‘Genealogie der Moral’ (Paderborn, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 14–17, 141–146, 147–158.

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As we pointed out in Chapters 1 and 2, the shift from validity to application does not imply that Foucault suspends any commitment or normativity or adopts a neutral and objective relation to these. Rather, a diagnosis of the present constitutes an engaged, situated, and normative approach to thought. It takes an outset in the present as a context that always already has a normative effect and seeks to articulate the correct standards for actions in the making. As diagnostics examines the measures that are suggesting themselves, it concomitantly transposes the examined normativity in certain respects, and in this manner it begins to point toward other standards. The diagnosis points beyond the immediate context and establishes a new context that exerts a determining effect. The present is not immediately and self-evidently at hand but is precluded and rendered in the analysis. In this sense the diagnosis of the present speaks from a normativity that is still underway: it projects a normativity and commits to it in its own special refractive rendering.3 With Foucault, a diagnosis of the present becomes a specific normative movement. It is a refractive transposition that becomes possible in a concrete circumstance and points beyond itself toward something that is still arriving. Diagnostics therefore takes on the character of an ongoing subscription to normativity that is always underway and can never be fully present or represented. Accordingly, the analysis takes the form of a continuous articulation of a normativity that was previously implicit or inarticulate. The difficulty of diagnosis. In taking such an approach, it would be misleading to suggest that we are located at a distance from the contemporary context and its normativity from the beginning, such that the core problem becomes one of articulating the normative position from which one speaks.4 It is likewise naive to think that one is able to continuously distance oneself when analyzing 3 In a diagnosis of the present, the time-honoured distinction between facticity and validity is problematized. Indeed, this distinction may have been obvious for the mainstream philosophical and theoretical schools of thought since the beginning of modern times and has resulted in requirements not to commit the naturalistic fallacy and derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. The distinction between what is the case and what I must do was given its classical expression in Kant’s philosophy. Kant’s first critique was concerned with cognition and its requirements and his second with that of morality and its foundation. He claimed that these were two different spheres of being or areas of validity. Yet, for an analysis of that which comes to the fore and exerts an influence, the factually given comes across as normatively determined and the normative as given. 4 This formulation of this difficulty as a basic problem in cognition is often found in traditional epistemology and philosophy of science. Similar formulations are found in a number of discussions on analytical strategies within the social sciences. Here, the outset therefore becomes a cognizing subject that is located at a distance to the world. For such a traditional, theoretical subject, the fundamental aim is to attain valid and binding

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concrete circumstances, such that one moves totally beyond its normativity. The challenge for a diagnosis of the present is rather that we are lodged in a context that remains normatively determinate and that we can only relate to by rendering and thus indirectly adhering to a new kind of normativity. This prevents the diagnostician from giving a definite outset and goal to which he can refer to when legitimizing his analysis. The contemporary diagnostic analysis is thus a meditation that is currently en route. The analysis takes the form of an ongoing intermediary being, the outset of which may very well be situated, but without a definite start or end point. This introduces a continuous indeterminacy as concerns the outset and conclusion. The diagnostician begins with the movement that is in progress and applies to a certain context. However, he does not fully know this context or its implications, meaning that he does not, formally speaking, fully know the presumptions of his own work. This problem is exacerbated by the analysis not taking the immediate context for granted but rather bordering it and seeking to participate in transcending it. Furthermore, the diagnostician’s transcendence of the immediate context is limited insofar as his own text is a limited entity and therefore confined to a certain time and place. The completion of the text may not be utterly coincidental in the arbitrary sense, but neither is it given by nature or necessary. The conclusion to an analysis could always be different, meaning that it is contingent and therefore always revisable.5 As mentioned in Chapter 2, the contemporary diagnostic text points beyond itself in its conclusion toward a further context as well as an ongoing reception – it is therefore difficult to say where it ends. access to the surrounding world. This outset brings about a fundamental problem, viz. that while the correlation between these two spheres can be established in infinite ways, it is impossible to indicate why one is more right or determinate than others. Because the relation that connects the subject and the world and presents cognitive warrant is underdetermined, relativism becomes a recurrent issue that must be rejected or conquered. This traditional presentation of the issues in epistemology is in direct extension of classical Anglo-Saxon philosophy from J. Locke (1632–1704) to D. Hume (1711–1776) and is repeated in a number of discussions on social constructivism, which often classify Foucault as a member of this movement. However, as we have suggested in Chapter 2, this approach to formulating the issue of epistemology is quite alien to Foucault, as he views his own work as a practical consideration that is already situated in and related to a normative context. 5 An obvious example is found on the last pages of Surveiller et punir, where Foucault – to use his own words – not only “ends” “the book,” as the English edition renders but “interrupts [interromps] a book” by citing an anonymous newspaper article. The article constitutes the outset for a sort of conclusion that, however, does not create an overview or is systematic. Characteristically, the final footnote in the work reads: “At this point I interrupt a book that must serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society” (SP: 315/DP: 308). Foucault hereby stresses that his ‘work’ has a temporary character with many ‘exits’.

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That diagnosis has attained the character of an ongoing intermediary existence that contains a double indeterminacy, which even endows the analysis with a lack of boundaries. It is especially difficult to indicate where it begins and ends. Since it is constantly located on its margins and in the process of transcending itself, it becomes very difficult to characterize the outlines of that very analysis. Even the attempt to determine such contours becomes a preamble to further steps, or a preface to further transgression. The diagnostic boundaries do not have the character of a given external framework; instead they form internal limits of the critique that it temporarily sets for itself and that must therefore be taken up once again and redefined. As already mentioned, this can be perceived as the strength of a given diagnosis. However, it likewise results in a situation that cannot take outsets and limits for granted. If these are experienced as problematic and an explicit need for outsets and limits is felt, then it becomes an internal issue to determine and justify these. The outset, conclusion, contours, and justification of an analysis begin to appear as internal issues within and for the diagnosis of the present that it must relate to. This raises a number of difficult challenges to answer adequately. First and foremost, the problem of creating or constituting the concrete analysis becomes an internal difficulty for a diagnosis of the present. Each of Foucault’s core works brings up the question of why he lets the analysis take an outset in this particular contemporary diagnostic issue. The immediate answer is that it seemed a pressing issue for him. However, such an answer brings up the question of what exactly made the issue pressing and whether a deeper examination will substantiate this feeling of inevitability. However, it also raises the issue of the analysis’ selection or favoritism toward a certain kind of data. Given that the analysis has a certain outset, what legitimizes the selection of certain events at the expense of others? How would it affect the analysis if other events were emphasized instead? These questions are closely related to issues of sufficiency and representativity – is the scope of the analysis wide enough? How far does it reach? What does it cover? To what extent does it represent the treated events? Are there events that fall outside the scope of the given analysis? Finally, how can one even talk of an analysis being sufficient or representative at all?6 In extension, the question arises as to why Foucault’s contemporary diagnoses permit him to set the specific agenda that he does in regard to his outset and approach. Insofar as these are not unequivocally given, it is possible to 6 It is often said about such issues of representation that theory or research is representative to the degree that it represents or corresponds with what is studied. However, this answer becomes problematic if – as with Foucault – it is recognized that the cognized is no longer presented as a complete, already existing object.

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include contexts that permit the appearance of a different “inherent” virtuality that leads in different directions. How can Foucault claim that the virtuality he emphasizes is the correct one? What characterizes the path he takes in comparison with other competing directions? By what force can it rise above other competing possibilities or show itself to be better? Finally, one finds the question of who is included in or comprised by a given analysis and how. How do I – as a recipient of the analysis – decide whether the given research affects me or take into account to what extent it constitutes a commitment for me? In return this raises the question of how to test the analysis. When corroborating, correcting, further developing, or improving the analysis, what are the criteria one can resort to or refer to? What can I refer to in determining whether I should accept the analysis and in deciding whether the analysis imposes an obligation on me? From final majority to finite coming of age. If one takes an outset in Foucault’s diagnosis of the present, a number of traditional issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science are thus reintroduced and reemerge, albeit slightly skewed. Since they can no longer be answered using traditional approaches, it also becomes difficult to see how they can be answered at all. The obvious retort to the given questions is that there can be no guarantees in Foucault’s reflective universe. The immediate outset for the individual books and his favoring of certain sources and agendas can only be justified in a more complete sense in the subsequent analysis unfolded over the work as a whole. One can, in the same manner, first determine the scope of the analysis by relating it to the complete construct. In Foucault’s reconstructive universe, the constitution of the analysis, its favoring of certain sources, its representativity and sufficiency, its virtuality and implications, are first discernible and justifiable in retrospect. Only by creating an overview and relating each part to the established universe is it possible to face and answer the given questions. Here it becomes highly problematic that the contemporary diagnostic study is essentially non-terminating, meaning that its results and normativity are condemned – to a large degree – to remain implicit. Referring to an overview provided post factum does not suffice, since completion of the diagnostic feat is temporary. For this reason the overview becomes obsolete, such that the analytical feat must be taken up once more. The problems mentioned about analytical validity are postponed only to recur again on a new level – ad infinitum. As a counterpart to the infinite regress argument employed in epistemology, which is concerned with the foundations of knowledge, Foucault’s work gives rise to an uncanny infinite recursion. Since the rules are not given and the infinite recursion allows for a potentially infinite variety of construction, this in turn raises the problem of recursivity, of what to recur to. The question of what permits and justifies a given analysis – in general and in regard to

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other competing explanations – arises once again on newly established analytical levels. The preliminary and incomplete character of the analysis not only results in the contours and validity of the presentation becoming quite indeterminate. The open character also affects the implications for action given in the analysis. Certainly, Foucault strongly indicates that he does not want his books to be viewed as indicatory for taking action in any traditional sense by developing a codex, set of laws, or recommendations that others must follow. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, he clearly wishes for his works to have a normative effect not only on how we perceive reality but also on how we relate to each other. Yet, the kind of normative effect sought by Foucault is not specified, for instance, how I as a recipient of the analysis should relate to it and conduct myself, and how I should take up normative action in extension of that. Insofar as it is possible to relate to the analysis in different ways, it also becomes uncertain why I should do this in one way rather than another. Furthermore, it is not clear how to conceptualize the normative character of the analysis to begin with; for what reason and by virtue of what is it even able to have a determining influence? Foucault does not cover such questions on a more fundamental level, nor does he give any definite answers. It is possible to respond that the answers to these questions depend on the further context into which the work is inserted and must therefore be left to this context for further explication. As demonstrated earlier, this retort only results in the questions appearing as internal to the analysis when any particular person relates to it. The analysis becomes dependent on the precision that the recipient and the further context are able to supply. It is therefore necessary to inquire into whether the social analysis even can be said to have sufficiently precise ‘content’ and scope in itself at all. Accordingly, one begins to demand an account of what could then endow it with these characteristics. Is it even possible to speak of things as central or peripheral in a social-diagnostic analysis, and how would it be possible to determine this? Can one speak of understanding or misunderstanding a social diagnostic analysis, and from which criteria? In extension of all these unsettled issues, it becomes necessary to approach the question of the overall value and effect of a Foucauldian diagnosis of the present at all. Given that we are convinced that such a diagnosis will lead on, without actually being able to specify this contention, is it then possible to perform such a diagnosis from the conviction that it will lead to something better? Are certain kinds of contemporary diagnoses better than others, and is it even possible to determine if this is the case? As his diagnostic shifts from validity to what is present and in force, Foucault is able to bracket the requirements of validity brought by the phenomena and instead diagnose what asserts itself and compels attention. Yet, all the presented

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recurrent issues make it apparent that it is impossible to totally spirit away any issue of validity. It returns in a new form as painful uncertainty where one must relate to Foucault’s analysis and its normative effects. This happens as soon as the consideration of commitment and thereby validity for oneself and society begins. How and in what regard can Foucault’s analysis be a guide for action in any other sense than the well-known, prescriptive, judicial sense that he is seeking to distance himself from? While it was Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche who were the first to seriously point out the contemporary diagnostic assignment for philosophy, it was the latter who traced the possibility for taking up this assignment with a genealogical analysis while also emphasizing an important additional issue. In an aphorism, Nietzsche underlines that a historical analysis of how what is currently valued and accepted as a norm and commitment is not necessarily the last word but a key preparation for a more qualified and critical discussion of its validity: “The question of the descent [Herkunft] of our appreciations [Wertschätzungen] ... does not coincide with their criticism [Kritik], as is so commonly believed: even though the insight in a pudenda origo [shameful provenience] carries with it a diminution of the value of the phenomenon which has come into being in this way and makes preparations for a critical mood and attitude towards it.”7 Examining current values and their genealogy and heritage does not exempt one from subsequent evaluation of the treated values, nor from taking a stance on the merit of these values. It does not exempt us from performing a critical distinction. As we have attempted to show, such a ‘subsequent’ issue cannot be easily classified as an external one in regard to the genealogical study. It is a problem that has already been entered into and which breaks out and disrupts the contemporary diagnostic disclosure of how existing norms function and apply. The point is therefore not that the given issues within the diagnosis of the present are philosophical. On the one hand, they cannot be finally solved by reference to external objective criteria, but on the other hand they cannot be ignored. Although bracketing the question of validity is a precondition for contemporary diagnostic, it cannot ignore the fundamental requirement of giving an account of itself and of accounting for basic methodological issues, just as it must also relate to justifying the specific, engaged activities that arise from the work. The price of avoiding such accountability is not only that the consistency of the diagnosis and the engagement is lost. It also risks becoming scientifically disingenuous while the engagement becomes in danger of being indistinguishable from irrational decisionism. In terms of the philosophy of science,

7 F. Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe 12, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–1887 (München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), p. 160.

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the given engagement may be perceived as a vague, subjective choice. As has been documented in the pages above, this was hardly Foucault’s intention. It is obviously important that this concept of accountability is not seen as a requirement for final and conclusive justification. In the text “Was ist Aufklärung?” Kant determined Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” In extension of this, it is also possible to view Foucault’s diagnosis of the present as a contemporary approach to reigniting Enlightenment. Through his articulation of how man’s self-incurred normativity comes about in such a manner that it silently and subcutaneously enters our being, he created a space where we may apply reason and judgment independently so as to distance ourselves from seemingly all-too-obvious commitments. It is, however, necessary to specify that such a departure and exit never comes to an end with Foucault – it must be repeated continually. By employing Kant’s terminology, it could be said that Foucault always endeavors to develop an “age of enlightenment.” As with Kant, this does not mean that we actually attain an “enlightened age.”8 According to Foucault, we will never reach a situation where we are finally able to attain full maturity as individuals. Instead, we remain children of the times, who by putting in an effort may become teenagers, insofar as we are ever on our way toward reaching independence. As Foucault sees it, we can never reach a final state where we become autonomous, a guiding ideal state that Kant perhaps may seem to indicate and forestall in his philosophical approach to morality. However, while we are in the process of becoming enlightened individuals, Foucault does not provide any suggestions as to how to become something more or qualitatively different, in relation to either the present or the existing corpus that he has handed us. Perhaps Foucault would view the hope for something more or qualitatively different as an illusion. According to Foucault, we may only and at best expect momentary recursions to a political spirituality that leads to and rests upon the conception of a courageous leadership of oneself. Isolated from the challenges it needs to face and must relate to, any proclaimed maturity risks regressing to a detached dogmatism. Foucault – contemporary, all too contemporary? Determining such insubstantiality is important for Foucault, not only regarding what he characterizes as the ontology of actuality but also where the philosophico-critical activity should lead us. However, this increases the significance of considering a final issue, namely: How does Foucault’s determination of the ontology of actuality and philosophico-critical activity relate to what is commonly given as the

8

I. Kant: “Was ist Aufklärung?” p. 59.

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highest values of the contemporary world? Is Foucault’s thought on the same level as these? Perhaps even to such a degree that it becomes problematic? In terms of contemporary diagnostics, it is possible to pose the question of whether Foucault’s diagnoses (the virtuality they contain and the normativity that they indicate as their preconditions) are forced to accept a hollow victory. Is the extended Foucault reception witnessed in recent years and which has made Foucault a most quoted author a result of the fact that we, at least to some degree, have already become familiar with and recognize ourselves in his insights? Is the famed reception a result of Foucault’s diagnoses becoming fundamentally mainstream, and have his works not attained a deeper resonance and wider acceptance in force of them becoming immediately recognizable? At present it is possible to observe a number of openly defined and given norms and guidelines for action in a number of spheres that are being weakened and replaced by norms and rules that are far more difficult to identify and less substantial.9 There is a current focus on individual and particular events and individuals for whom self-affirmation through self-transcendence is a core project. In this sense we find a photographic negative of the individual ethos in the culture of coaching and management, just as the unpredictable ‘event’ and critical revolt has become a tool for economic development within contemporary event culture. We live in an age in which virtuality comes across as the central existential modus. Thus, the moment and the momentum at which we point beyond ourselves is no longer experienced as something that enters into the actual and disrupts it but is rather something that we increasingly organize ourselves around and which also organizes us. Virtuality has attained the status of an organizing principle for the individual, organization and society. In short, Foucault’s thinking may have become so popular and entered the mainstream because it has “become a son of its time.” It has become ready “to dance” “in the here and now” to the extent that it is able to comprehend the shapes of life that have already grown old and which it can no longer rejuvenate.10 When contemporary criticism is no longer considered subversive but rather a welcome contribution to an ongoing optimization, it poses new challenges to the diagnostician. In other words: can the critical intellectual’s accentuation of implicit virtuality clear new paths and lead off the beaten tracks in a landscape in which virtuality is always already explicated and formulated as an assignment? Can the philosophico-critical thematization of the moment of revolt in history facilitate a transcendence of actuality in an age where the revolt has been incorporated as a resource? It is not possible to answer such 9

See S. Raffnsøe: Sameksistens uden common sense 1, pp. 11–20. G.W.F. Hegel: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: pp. 12–14/”Elements of the Philosophy of Right,” pp. 21–23. 10

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questions univocally or even simply. Rather than rejecting the concepts and strategies given to us by Foucault as tarnished in themselves, the aim must be to discuss their contemporaneity and insist on asserting and further developing their ‘incontemporaneity’ to whatever extent is possible. Coming to terms with one’s own age is not necessarily a problem, nor is winning the day or becoming accepted, but it does contain the danger of one’s approach becoming ubiquitous to the extent that it no longer presents a challenge. In any case, Foucault seems to have an ambition of attaining something more and different. As Nietzsche insisted on philosophy as a kind of radical journalism and as diagnosis of the present, which Foucault would later characterize as one of the few remaining independent formats for philosophy, the German philosopher not only confronted posterity with the previously mentioned assignment of suggesting how examining the vulgar origins of culture can pave the way for and permit proper criticism. From Nietzsche we also inherit the ambition and effort of performing a diagnosis of the present that is out of synch with and beyond its own age. In the diagnosis of the present unfolded by Nietzsche in the second untimely meditation entitled Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, he points out how his mode of perception is, for a change, “untimely, because” he seeks to understand “something of which our time is rightly proud – its cultivation of history as being injurious to it, a defect and deficiency in it.”11 The addition of “rightly proud” is important to note: For Nietzsche the aim does not concern taking up an imaginary, illusionary position outside the present from which one can criticize and reject its ideals. Rather, historical Bildung is not only interesting for Nietzsche insofar as it is present and plays a major role but precisely insofar as it is an overarching contemporary phenomenon with a number of attractions or positive traits. Thus it cannot simply be rejected, as it demands further investigations. The daunting challenge lies in retaining an ambiguous gaze at the phenomenon of historical Bildung by shedding light on the reverse and often less popular side of the present phenomenon. By emphasizing the drawbacks and flip side of agenda-setting contemporary phenomena that the present to some extent rightly prides itself in, the diagnosis is able to keep a distance to and from the present. In a study where the diagnostician thus indicates the precariousness of the present and stands aloof from it, the diagnosis aims for incontemporaneity with the present time. In the current situation, where Foucault’s critical ‘gaze’ seems to have become the obvious perspective of our times, the challenge is to retain the 11 F. Nietzsche: “Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Zweites Stück: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in: F. Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe I (München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999): p. 246/F. Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 60.

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incontemporaneity of his thought, rather than identifying with it as a position that may be replicated and disseminated. Throughout the book we have emphasized how Foucault’s works are replies to their time. They are polemical reactions that are anchored in personal experiences and which retain their poignancy by relating to their times. Replicating the concepts is not a guarantee for conducting a diagnosis of the present in Foucault’s spirit. As such the concepts are merely markers of interesting and complex experiences. The experiences must be reclaimed and rearticulated by new readers, taking into account the assumptions of a new time, if a diagnosis of the present is to regain its incontemporaneity.

Bibliography Books and published lectures by Foucault Abnormal. Lectures at Collège de France. 1974–1975. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris, Gallimard, 1969. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York, Panthenon Books, 1972. Les anormaux. Cours au Collège de France. 1974–1975. Paris, Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1999. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1978–1979. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. The Birth of the Clinic. London, Routledge, 2003. The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality 3. London, Penguin Books, 1990. The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1983–1984. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1977. Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France. 1983–84. Paris, Hautes études Seuil/Gallimard, 2009. “Il faut défendre la société.” Cours au Collège de France. 1975–1976. Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 1997. Death and the Labyrinth. The World of Raymond Roussel. New York, Continuum, 2004. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London, Penguin Books, 1991. Dits et écrits I – IV. Paris, Gallimard, 1994. Fearless Speech. New York, Zone Books, Semiotext(e) 2001. Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris, Plon, 1961. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France. 1972–1973. Paris, Gallimard/ Le Seuil, 2008. Du gouvernement des vivants. Cours au Collège de France. 1979–1980. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2012. On the Government of the Living. Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. The Government of the Self and Others, Lectures at the Collège de France. 1982–1983. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B. Collection “Les vies parallèles”. Paris, Gallimard, 1978. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1981–1982. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France. 1981–1982 Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2001. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris, Gallimard, 1972. History of Madness. London, Routledge, 2009. Maladie mentale et personnalité. Paris, PUF, 1954. Maladie mentale et psychologie. Paris, PUF, 1962. Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice. Cours de Louvain 1981. Louvain, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2013. Mental Illness and Psychology. Oakland, University of California Press, 1987.

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Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère ... Un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle présenté par Michel Foucault. Paris, Gallimard/Julliard, 1973. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris, Gallimard, 1966. Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978–1979, Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2004. Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard médical. Paris, PUF, 1963. L’ordre du discours. Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1971. The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York, Vintage Books, 1994. La pensée du dehors. Paris, Fata Morgana, 1986. Le pouvoir psychiatrique. Cours au Collège de France. 1973–1974. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2003. Psychiatric Power. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1973–1974, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Raymond Roussel. Paris, Gallimard, 1963. Résumé des cours 1970–1982. Paris, Julliard, 1989. Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977–1978. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2004. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1977–1978. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1975–76. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. La société punitive. Cours au Collège de France. 1972–1973. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2013. Le souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualité 3. Paris, Gallimard, 1984 Subjectivité et verité. Cours au Collège de France. 1980–1981. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2014. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris, Gallimard, 1975. L’usage des plaisirs. Histoire de la sexualité 2. Paris, Gallimard, 1984. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality 2. London, Penguin Books, 2006. La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité 1. Paris, Gallimard, 1976. Leçons sur La volonté de savoir. Cours au Collège de France. 1970–1971. Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2011. The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality 1. London, Penguin Books, 1998. Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France. 1970–1971. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Wrong-Doing, Truth Telling. The Function of Avowal in Justice. Chicago, University of Chigaco Press, 2014.

Articles and interviews by Foucault “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews 1961–1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 450–454. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” [1980], Political theory, 21:2 (1993): 198–227. “An Interview with Stephen Riggins,” in: P. Rabinow (ed.): Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Penguin, London 1997/2000; pp. 121–133.

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“The Anxiety of Judging,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 241–254. “The Army – When the Earth Quakes,” in: J. Afary and K.B. Anderson: Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; pp. 189–194. “The Battle for Chastity,” in P. Rabinow (ed.): Michel Foucault. Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, volume one, New York, The New Press, pp. 185–197. “The Birth of a World,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 65–66. “The Birth of Social Medicine,” in: J.D. Faubion (ed.): Power. London, Penguin Books, 2000; pp. 134–156. “Candidacy Presentation, Collège de France, 1969,” in: P. Rabinow (ed.): Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. London, Penguin, 1997/2000; pp. 5–11. “The Challenge to the Opposition,” in: J. Afary and K.B. Anderson: Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; pp. 213–215. “The Concern for Truth” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 455–464. “Les confessions de Michel Foucault,” Le Point (July 1, 2004): 52–63. “The Confession of the Flesh,” in: C. Gordon (ed.): Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 –1977. New York, Pantheon, 1980; pp. 194–228. “The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine?” Foucault Studies 1 (2004): 5–19. “Création d’un groupe d’information sur les prisons,” Ésprit, no 401 (1971): 531–532. “The Discourse of History,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 19–32. “Du pouvoir,” L’Express, 1722 (July 6–12, 1984): 56–68. “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961– 1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 214–225. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” in: P. Rabinow (ed.): Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. London, Penguin Books, 2000; pp. 281–301. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961– 1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 432–449. “Foucault Responds to Sartre,” in: S. Lotringer (ed.): Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). New York, Semiotext(e), 1996; pp. 51–56. “Foucault,” in: J.D. Faubion (ed.): Aesthetics. London, Penguin Books, 2000; pp. 459–465. “Foucault’s Response to Atoussa H.,” in: J. Afary and K.B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; p. 210. “Fra en samtale med Foucault” [interview with Danish philosopher Søren Gosvig Olesen, January 8, 1981], in: M. Foucault: Talens forfatning [Danish translation of L’ordre du discours]. Copenhagen, Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2001; pp. 83–92. “Le groupe d’information sur les prisons,” J’Accuse, 2 (1971): 14–15 “Histoire de la folie et antipsychiatrie,” conference in Montreal, May 1975; unpublished; cf. doc. 45, in: P. Artières and J.-F. Bert: Un succés philosophique. L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique de Michel Foucault, Presses universitaire de Caen – IMEC éditeur, Caen, 2011; pp. 214–218.

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Index of Foucault’s Books and Lectures, in French and in English Note: Figures in bold indicate longer passages that would function as privileged entry points insofar as the work in question is discussed at length and situated within a larger context.

Lectures Abnormal, Collège de France 1974–1975 {Ab} – see Les anormaux Les anormaux, Collège de France 1974– 1975 [A]: 48 n16, 129, 211 The Birth of Biopolitics, Collège de France 1978–1979 {BP} – see Naissance de la biopolitique Du gouvernement des vivants, Collège de France 1979–1980 [GV]: 23, 253, 328–32, 331, 360, 367 Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (1), Collège de France 1982–1983 [GSA1]: 23, 231, 331 n191, 374–77, 374, 376–377 Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (2): Le courage de la vérité, Collège de France 1983–1984 [GSA2]: 23, 33, 331 n191, 337 n20, 374–77, 376 n25, 376–377 Lectures on the Will to Know, Collège de France 1972–1973 {LWK} – see Leçons sur la volonté du savoir On The Government of the Living, Collège de France 1979–1980 {GL} – see Du gouvernement des vivants The Government of Self and Others I, Collège de France 1982–1983 {GSO1} – see Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (1) The Government of Self and Others II – The Courage of Truth, Collège de France 1982–1983 {GSO2} – see Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (2) L’herméneutique du sujet, Collège de France 1981–1982 [HS]: xv, 9, 11 n27, 28 n88, 331 n191, 337 n20, 369, 373–374, 377, 380–413, 380, 395–396, 411 The Hermeneutics of the Subject {HSb} – see L’herméneutique du sujet

“Il faut défendre la société”, Collège de France 1975–1976 [DS]: xiii, 48–49 n16, 62, 174, 179, 208–229, 208–27, 313 n9, 237, 242, 247, 315–18, 315 n135, 331, 337 Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, Collège de France 1970–1971 [LVS]: 23–35, 29 n90, 35 Lectures on the Will to Know, Collège de France 1970–1971 {LWK} – see Leçons sur la volonté de savoir Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice, Université catholique de Louvain 1981 [MFDV]: 23, 29, 29 n90, 331, 420 Naissance de la biopolitique, Collège de France 1978–1979 [NB]: 200, 241–42, 244, 251–54, 277, 280–313, 281, 285, 288–310, 312–13, 319–21, 327, 440 Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Collège de France 1973–1974 [PP]: 129, 139–44, 138 n93, 173, 193–97, 194 n46, 194 n48, 195 n51, 202 n 75, 210, 247 Psychiatric Power, Collège de France 1973– 1974 {PsP} – see Le pouvoir psychiatrique The Punitive Society, Collège de France 1972–73 {LSP} – see La société punitive Sécurité, territoire, population, Collège de France 1977–1978 [STP]: 18, 86, 143, 198, 198 n67, 202–03, 202 n75, 230, 239–43, 245, 247–48, 251–52, 257–58, 258 n79, 266 n95, 261, 264, 266–67, 267 n97, 269–72, 274, 274 n112, 276–79, 276 n116, 279 n112, 280–93, 280, 280 n3, 284–293, 285 n8, 285 n9, 296, 313, 319–20, 327, 339–40, 339 n26, 442–43 n50

477

478

Index of Foucault’s Books and Lectures

Security, Territory, Population, Collège de France 1977–1978 {STPo} – see Sécurité, territoire, population La société punitive, Collège de France 1972–1973 [LSP]: 22, 47, 100 n10 “Society Must Be Defended”, Collège de France 1975–1976 {SD} – see “Il faut défendre la société” Subjectivité et verité, Collège de France 1980–1981 [SV]: 340, 342, 344, 350–51, 355–56, 373–74 Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, Université catholique de Louvain 1981 {WDTT} – see Mal faire, dire vrai

Books L’archéologie du savoir (1969; AS): 44, 46, 56, 58–59, 66, 68, 71, 76–77, 84, 86, 91, 103, 103 n17, 146, 151, 162 n31, 224 The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK) – see L’archéologie du savoir Birth of the Clinic (BC) – see Naissance de la clinique The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality 3 (CS) – see Le souci de soi Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (DP) – see Surveiller et punir The Discourse on Language (in The Archaeology of Knowledge; AK) – see L’ordre du discours Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961; HM): xii, 38, 40–44, 42 n7, 49 n17, 51, 56, 58, 59 n33, 63–64, 64 n47, 66, 69, 74, 86, 98–146, 187, 193, 201, 375, 377, 452 History of Madness – see Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaine (1966; MC): xii, 2, 46, 46 n14, 56, 58–59, 59n33, 61, 66, 68–69, 76, 80, 146, 147–170, 155 n22, 375

Maladie mentale et psychologie (1962; MP): 40, 58 Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard medical (1963; NC): 42–45, 44 n10, 58–59, 61, 66–67, 145, 187, 201 L’ordre du discours (1971; OD): 4 n6, 4 n8, 5, 16–17, 45–46, 56, 59–62, 92 n37, 151–152, 224 The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (OT) – see Les mot et les choses Le souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualité 3 (1984; SS): xiv, 53–54, 58, 338–68, 339–340, 343, 346–47, 349–351, 353, 355–56, 366, 388–389, 391–94, 403, 409 Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975; SP): xiii, 22, 46–48, 56, 58, 64, 69, 86, 90–100, 100 n10, 114 n33, 128–129, 138, 139 n92, 144, 175–91, 171–75, 177–80, 182–190, 197–198, 201, 204–07, 242, 242 n36, 247, 286–87, 299, 314, 375 L’usage des plaisirs. Histoire de la sexualité 2 (1984; UP): xiv, 6–7, 7 n16, 8, 13, 52–54, 58, 61, 68, 77–79, 93–94, 336, 338–68, 340, 342–344, 346–353, 351 n58, 355–57, 360, 365–67, 369, 373, 375–76, 375 n21, 378, 380, 380 n36, 383, 385 n62, 448–50, 449–50 n70 The Use of Pleasures: The History of Sexuality 2 (UPl) – see L’usage des plaisirs La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité 1 (1976; VS): xiv, 22–23, 47 n15, 50–54, 56, 58, 62, 65, 199, 201, 205, 228 n36, 213, 236–37, 274 n111, 299, 312–17, 317 n141, 319, 333–38, 343, 420, 422–24 Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality 1 (WK) – see La volonté de savoir

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts Abeille, Louis–Paul (1719–1807), 285 n8 abnormal, 116, 173, 212 abstinence, 53, 340–354, 366, 408–409 activist, activism, 94, 97, 134, 136, 284, 322–323, 332, 453 Adorno, Theodor W. (1903–1969), 102, 157 n24, 429 aesthetics of existence, 18, 334–335, 345, 360, 390 Agamben, Giorgio (b.1942), 310–311 Alcibiades, 339, 352–353, 366, 382–387 alethurgy, 29, 33, 253, 296 n50, 332 Althusser, Louis (1918–1990), 193 analysis of finitude, 167 analysis, 24, 27 n80, 59–71, 89–92, 104 n19, 138–146, 230–232, 277–278, 454, 457–461 of power, 48–51, 55, 173, 208–211, 228 n36 – see also dispositional analysis anthropocentrism, 148 antipsychiatry, 48, 103, 127–146, 174, 194, 452 Antiquity, 27–29, 54, 122–123, 218, 257–260, 334–353, 380–413 aphrodisiac, 343–345 archaeology, 3–4, 39 n2, 59–62, 73, 91, 149–150, 448 Aristotle (384–322 BC), Aristotelianism, 22, 24–28, 32, 35, 87–88, 260, 314, 341, 342 n37, 344, 447, 472 n11, 379–380, 385 n62, 386, 390, 433 army, 175–196, 185, 199–201, 209, 271, 276, 278, 315, 393 art of living, 334, 387 Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948), 53, 124, 137 ascetics, 7, 94, 342–345, 352–358, 366, 372–374, 418, 438, 443 n50 asylum, 63–64, 104, 110–117, 134–136, 139–144, 187, 194–197, 201, 209–211, 256, 276–279, 433, 452 attitude of modernity, 435–441, 449–453

Augustine (354–430), 343, 356–361, 364 author, authorship, 38–39, 58–59, 68–75, 94–95 auto–affection, 11 auto–critique – see critique autonomy, 145, 238, 257, 386, 405–406, 435 avowal – see confession axis of experience – see experience, domains of, axes of Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962), 40 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 161 banishment, 105–109, 241 bare life, 310–311 Barnes, Mary (1923–2001), 133 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980), 116–118, 128, 155–156 Basaglia, Franco (1924–1980), 40, 128, 134–135, 142 Bataille, George (1897–1952), 15, 21, 46 Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867), 335, 436–439, 441 n45, 446, 449 Baudry, Jean–Louis (b. 1930), 136 Becker, Gary (1930–2014), 282, 302, 305 Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), 102–103, 126 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), 183–184, 290, 294, 297, 433 Bicêtre, 110, 141 n99 Bildung, 178, 446 Binswanger, Ludwig (1881–1966), 39 biology, 69, 73, 152–153, 163, 165, 302–303, 310–321 biopolitics, 232, 236–245, 251–253, 276 n116, 279, 302–303, 310–321 biopower, 50, 236–237, 252, 310–321 bios, 311, 334 Blanchot, Maurice (1907–2003), 21, 116, 128, 451n75 Bodin, Jean (1530–1596), 259–260

479

480 Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

body, 53, 340–344, 358, 363, 365, 383–384, 388–389, 398, 419 disciplinary, 112, 164, 179–183, 189, 194, 205, 243, 314, 317 societal, 109, 144, 218–219, 221, 259, 310, 332 Bopp, Franz (1791–1867), 164 Botero, Giovanni (1544–1617), 266 n96 Boulainvilliers, Henri de (1658–1722), 215 boundaries, 19, 59, 63, 88–89, 107, 110, 117, 179, 189, 265, 448, 458 Canguilhem, George (1904–1995), 40, 427 n7 care of the self, 28, 338–340, 353, 373–374, 380–413, 415 Cassian, John (c.360–435), 343, 354 n73, 360–368, 413, 418 Castel, Robert (1933–2013), 452, 236 n13 chastity, 343, 353, 361–367 Chicago School, 282, 302, 304 Christianity Early, 9, 28, 53–56, 253, 260–265, 283, 287, 334–346, 353–368, 370, 373–374, 378, 385, 396, 412–420 Modern, 17, 148, 232, 346, 420– 422 city–state, 30, 261, 345, 386, 390, 392–393 civil society, 211–212, 245, 249, 280–281, 306, 323 Classical Age (c.1550–1800), 74, 107, 117, 119, 161–168, 177–179, 276 Classical Period (c.500–330 BC), 53, 334, 340, 349, 386 Clausewitz, Carl von (1780–1831), 49 n16, 217 Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215), 353, 356 n78 clinic, 42–43, 67, 80, 145, 186–187, 201, 236, 276–278 Coeurdoux, Gaston–Laurent (1691–1779), 164 cogito, 162 Colbert, Jean–Baptiste (1619–1683), 177, 272 Colbertism, 272–273 colonialism, 221 commentary, 43–44, 160 Communism, 219

competition, 282–283, 294–295, 300, 303–309 between States, 270, 272, 292 conduct (of conduct), 56, 227, 232, 287, 241, 244–245, 252–257, 264, 270–271, 290–292, 297, 303–305, 327, 331–332, 334, 337, 342, 371, 375, 377–378, 380, 382, 392, 395, 442 n50 confession, Christian, 53–55, 237, 263, 337–340, 403, 413–422 confession, in psychiatry, 196–197, 420–426 confinement, 74, 99, 104, 107–110, 112, 119, 195, 240, 279 conscience, examination of, 354 n73, 367, 403–404, 408, 416 contextualism, 75–78 Cooper, David G. (1931–1986), 40, 48, 132–136, 140, 145 correction, 47, 109, 112, 128, 178, 187–189, 241 correlation of experience – see experience, correlation of counter–discourse, 212–218, 223 –history, 212–213, 220–221 –movements, 17, 442 –power, 445 –sciences, 153–156 criminal justice, 46–47 criminality, 46–48, 69, 74, 78, 86, 89–91, 110, 233, 304, 375, 422, 46 critique, 83, 130–131, 140–145, 174, 299, 317–318, 445–454 affirmative, 18–20, 450–454 auto–critique, 142, 210–213 Croissant, Klaus (1932–2002), 229–234, 322 culture of the self, 370, 371, 395 cura sui – see care of the self Cuvier, Georges (1769–1832), 163 Cynics, 376, 380, 387–388, 396, 405 D’Azyr, Viqc (1746–1794), 163 Da Vinci, Leonardo (1442–1519), 161 danger, 14, 212, 233–234, 242, 247, 261–262, 291–292, 303, 318, 340–341, 397, 452–453 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), 163 Dean, Mitchell (b. 1955), 310–311

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

degeneration, 115, 154 Delay, Jean (1907–1987), 99 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995), 91–92, 293 n77, 246 n44 342 n37, 377 n26 demography, 305, 314 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 9, 11, 100, 116–117, 127 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 8–10, 22, 25–27, 41, 119, 161–162, 266 n95, 430 desire to know, 24–28 Early Christian, 338, 354–368 Greco–Roman, 348–353 sexual, 51, 54–55 78, 333, 338–340, 343 deviance, 359, 423 diagnosis of the present, 1–5, 18–19, 84–85, 130–131, 151, 191, 230, 281, 289–292, 371, 426–435, 447, 452–454, 455–465 diagram, 185, 203–205, 433 Diderot, Denis (1713–1784), 124 Diggers, the, 214 Dillon, Michael, 311 disciplinary dispositive – see dispositive of discipline discipline, 47–49, 62, 90, 128–129, 138–see also dispositive of discipline discourse analysis 45, 57, 68 discourse, 44–46, 56–57, 59–61, 66–68, 84–86, 103, 139, 157, 193–194, 197, 212, 243, 331, 367, 371–372, 404–409, 422–423, 449 philosophical, 9, 13, 24–25, 34, 404–409, 422–423, 429 theory of, 68, 152 dispositional analysis, 190–207, 236–250, 329 n185 dispositive, 191–197, 201–207 of discipline, 144, 191, 201–207, 291, 425 of governmentality, 313 of law, 201, 232, 239–241, 245–249, 286, 291, 314–315 of power, 139, 193–197 of security, 377 of sexuality, 355 n77 of sovereignty – see dispositive of law of treatment, 194–197 doctor–patient relation, 42, 67, 99–100, 115, 116, 133, 135, 144, 194–195, 210, 276, 346, 422–423, 452

481

dominance, 259, 265–266, 348–351 domination, 48, 62–63, 65 n53, 130, 200 n71, 209–211, 223–225, 232, 255, 256, 248, 259, 265–265, 268, 375 Donzelot, Jacques (b.1943), 323–326 Duras, Marguerite (1914–1996), 156 economic analysis, 242, 282, 302–310 economy, 69, 73, 136, 150, 163–165, 168, 195–196, 232, 239, 271–274, 284–288, 292–310, 347 education, 174–178, 190, 291, 304, 307, 382–383, 388 emancipation, 122, 133–135 empiricism, 161 engagement, 75–78 Enlightenment, 17, 19 n, 69, 102, 335 n8, 426–436, 441, 446–450, 453, 462 enterprise, 280, 301–303, 306, 309 enthusiasm, 431–432 Epicurus, 387, 396–397 epimeleia heatou – see care of the self episteme, 161–162, 166 epochs, 147–150, 158, 168, 232, 244–250 Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), 161 essay, 7, 93 ethical substance, 342–345, 356–357, 361–363 ethics of the self, 370–371 ethics, 370–371, 374, 377–380, 436 – see also ēthos ethics, of sexuality 55–57, 257, 333–368 ēthos, 19, 301 345, 396–397, 445–465 Eucken, Walter (1891–1950), 304 event of thought, 85–92 event, 72, 94–97, 127–130, 150, 190, 199–203, 200, 214–215, 226, 243, 249–250, 284, 324, 330, 391, 402–404, 427–434, 448–449, 455, 458, 463 eventalization, 89–90 Ewald, François (b.1946), 68, 325, 330 exchange, 161, 164, 282, 290, 295–297, 301–304 existence, 7, 26, 86, 106–107, 114, 123, 127, 162, 167, 256, 306, 310–314, 335–336, 397–399, 430–431, 453–368 experience of madness, insanity, 42, 103–104, 117, 124–125

482

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

experience contemporary, 1–4, 64, 89, 130, 137, 141, 191, 20, 207, 231, 238, 281, 330–332, 436, 455 correlation of, 374–380 domains of, axes of [re: Foucault’s philosophical methodology], 374–377, 454 domains of, axes of [re: the history of sexuality, ethics], 53, 340–343, 346–347, 361 Foucault’s personal, 96–100, 130, 451 n75, 465 of modern medicine, of the clinical, 42–43, 339 of sexuality, 54, 254, 333–334, 344, 369 of the Flesh, 338, 344, 353–357 philosophical category of, 33–36, 72, 94–96, 200, 248, 280 family, 133, 143–145, 195, 301, 304, 323, 388 Flesh, 53, 338, 343 Forman, Milos (b.1932), 40 Frankfurt School, 102, 150, 429, 453 freedom, 54, 56, 63, 83–84, 110–111, 195, 235 n11, 244, 281, 285–291, 304, 337, 345, 386–387, 399–401, 413, 438, 441, 447, 450 French Revolution, 17, 110, 324, 431–432, 442 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 48, 124, 154–155, 256, 364 gay, 333–334 genealogy, 13 n33, 58–62, 73, 78, 189, 212, 218, 235, 255, 336–337, 378–379, 425–426, 448–449, 461 GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons), 82, 128, 171 Giscard d’Estaing, Valery (b.1926), 82–83, 307, 322 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de (1816–1882), 220 God, 265–266, 358–366, 399, 411–419 Gogh, Vincent van (1853–1890), 124, 137 Gouhier, Henri (1898–1994), 137

government of self and others, 231, 337–339, 394 others, 254, 264, 282, 390, 419 self, 54, 287, 337, 371, 414 governmentality, 230–232, 236–245, 250–260, 265–279 classic, 269–276 liberal, 249, 283–290, 377 Gregory of Nyssa (335–394), 353, 365 n114 Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1917–1992), 155–156 Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863), 164 Guattari, Felix (1930–1992), 91 Guys, Constantin (1805–1892), 437 Habermas, Jürgen (b.1929), 42 n7, 100–102, 117, 157 n24, 248, 426 n2, 429–430, 446 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770– 1831), 2–3, 12–13, 17, 21, 48, 120, 427 n7, 429, 446, 461, 463 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), 3–4, 34, 40, 151 n12, 157 n41, 371, 429, 453–454 Hellenistic, 27, 56, 260, 337, 371–374, 381, 387–389, 405–408 hermeneutics, 151 n24, 160 of desire, 53, 336–338, 360–368 of the self, 53, 360, 374, 413–425 Hieronymus (347–420), 415 historicity, 126, 269, 378, 435, 439 historiography – see historical analysis history, 5–6, 16, 20, 43, 60, 91–92, 97, 99–104, 120, 126–127, 158–165, 170, 190, 210–222, 257, 269, 426–432, 442–446, 453–454 of governmentality, 192, 207, 230–232, 238–240, 294, 327 of subjectivity, 53–55, 69, 254, 337, 374 modern, of confession, 420–425 of desiring man, 336, 369 of dispositives, 190, 200, 294, 246–248, 290, 319 – see also dispositional analysis, dispositive of ideas, 148–151 of knowledge, 67, 116 of philosophy, 150, 147, 222, 426–431 of power, 210–213

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

history – continued of science, 67, 118 n42, 147–151, 162 n31 of truth, 29, 194, 396 thought, 79, 370, 375–376, 429, 435 the present, 84, 139 n 91, 190, 281, 292 historical analysis, 6–7, 20, 44, 60, 105, 117, 145, 152, 205–207, 228, 240, 245, 281, 321, 329 n185, 336, 340–344, 374, 449, 461 strategic, 137–140 Hjelmslev, Luis (1899–1965), 156 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), 48, 219, 259–260, 268 Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843), 41, 124 homo economicus, 282, 303 Homosexuality, 333, 340, 342–343, 354 Hôpital Général, 108, 119 Horkheimer, Max (1885–1973), 429, 102 hospital, 40, 98 99, 110, 114–116, 133–135, 142, 183–184, 187, 204, 236, 279, 452 hubris, 121–123, 126–127 human capital, 282, 303–306 human race, 237–238 human sciences, 46, 61, 73, 149, 151–158, 167–168, 206, 375 humanism, 2, 148, 179 humanities, 62, 69, 147–158, 165–170, 434 Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), 27, 371, 429 Hyppolite, Jean (1907–1968), 4–5 Idealism, German, 222 identity, 11, 14, 55, 70–74, 77, 83–84, 106, 161, 196–197, 334, 401–402, 416, 424 ideology, 286, 292, 329 Imperial Rome, 340–353, 390–413 individual, 23, 43, 54–55, 81, 87, 175–189, 202–204, 237–238, 255, 262–265, 291–292, 301–302, 305–309, 336–339, 344–350, 380–389, 418–420, 444 individuation, 182 insanity, 41, 42, 57, 77, 123–125, 256 – see also madness institutionalocentrism, 143, 201–202

483

insurance, 233, 301, 316–317, 324–325 intellectual, 339, 445–446 interest, 297–298 Iran, 327 n177, 439–444 Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982), 156 Janet, Pierre (1859–1947), 45 John Chrysostom (347–407), 353, 416–417 Jones, Sir William (1746–1794), 164 journalism, 1, 426, 464 juridical dispositive – see dispositive of law Jussieu, Antione–Laurent (1748–1836), 163 Justi, Johan Heinrich Gottlob von (1717–1771), 271–273 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 17, 98 n2, 166–167, 426–436, 442, 446–448, 461–462 Kesey, Ken (1935–2001), 40 Klossowski, Pierre (1905–2001), 21 know thyself, yourself (gnoti seauton), 26–27, 338, 396 knowledge, 10, 20–36, 40–41, 59, 69, 73, 78–80, 86, 103, 114, 116, 125, 137, 139–142, 152–153, 159–170, 177–179, 198, 239, 252, 259, 265, 271–276, 292, 329–331, 375–376, 380–384, 422–423, 447–448, 454, 459 tragic, 29–33 archeology of, 44–46 and power, 65–66, 216 and governmentality, 271–279, 298, 316, 329–330 and truth, 331 technical (technē), 384 of the self, 338, 345, 371–373, 384, 392, 396, 401 of nature, 395–401 theoretical, 10, 20, 390 know, will to, 10, 23–25, 35–36, 420 desire for, 10, 20, 24–28 Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941), 155–156 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981), 48, 149, 154–156 Laing, Ronald D. (1927–1989), 40, 132–135, 439 n40

484 Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

laissez–faire, 299–300, 305–306 Lamarck, Jean–Baptiste (1744–1829), 163 language, 45–46, 57–58, 66–68, 93, 124, 151–170, 195 Laporte, Roger (1925–2011), 10 law, 172, 179, 186, 189, 193, 208, 212–218, 222–227, 234–238, 263, 265, 273–275, 315, 322–324, 347, 386 law, Early Christian, 355–356, 378, 416–417 leadership, 230–235, 260–261 legal dispositive – see dispositive of law Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), 27 Lemke, Thomas (b.1963), 311–313 Leuret, Francois (1797–1851), 194 Levelers, the, 214 Lévi–Strauss, Claude (1908–2009), 154–156 liberalism, 232, 245, 251–254, 280–292, 312–313, 329–330 classical, 292–298 neoliberalism, 64, 245, 251, 329 American, anarcho–liberalism, 252, 302–307 French, 307–309 German, ordo–liberalism, 252, 298–302 liberation, 51, 110–116, 336 n13, 398–399, 446 libido, 359–364 life, 12, 18, 33–36, 188, 261–262, 274, 310–312, 345–346, 363–364 biographical, one’s own, 383, 387, 398, 408–418, 432–433 biological, 152–154, 163–166 government of, power over, 49–50, 221, 232–238, 251–258, 268–269, 301–307, 314–320 political, communal, 389–395 private, 392 modern, 436–438 philosophical, 449 social, 188–189, 201 as a test, 408–412 Lilburne, John (1614–1657), 214 limit attitude, 447 limit, 15–19, 41, 45 linguistic turn, the, 73 n1, 151, 156–158

linguistics, 3, 149 linguistics, structural, 152–158 Linné, Carl von (1707–1778), 161 literature, 45–46, 153–156, 169 n40, 423–424 Lloyd–Jones, Hugh (1922–2009), 128 Locke, John (1632–1704), 219, 457 n4 logos, 122–123, 403, 407 Louis XIV (1638–1715), 49 n16, 101, 107–108, 119, 177, 197, 215, 268, 272 n107 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 161 Lyotard, Jean–Francois (1924–1998), 193 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1459–1527), 161 machine, 182, 204, 310 mad, the, 41, 63–64, 66, 74, 100–121, 136, 197, 445 madness, 20, 40–44, 57, 63–64, 86, 98–145, 194–196, 256, 277–280, 375–377 Marcus Aurelius (121–180), 387, 396–402 marginalization, 106 market, 281–282, 285– 309 truth of the, 295–298 marriage, 53, 154, 340–354 Marx, Karl, 164, 301 – see also Marxism Marxism, 48, 76, 134, 136, 148, 326, 330 medical police, 275–276 medical science, 41–42, 67, 111–112, 132 medicine, 42–44, 67–69, 145, 158, 344, 346, 388, 422 social, 236–238, 276, 313, 320 meditation, philosophical, 8–36, 84, 119, 162, 266 n93, 410, 453, 457, 464 – see also premeditation mental illness 39, 41, 45, 63, 104, 112, 122–125, 131–135 – see also insane Mercantilism, 161, 272–273, 281, 292 metaphysics, metaphysical, 34, 58, 88, 109, 119, 137, 141, 167, 423–424, 448 method, methodology, 39 n2, 49 n17, 59–60, 80, 190–197, 204, 211, 225, 248, 250, 290, 319, 374–380, 488, 461 Middle Ages, Medieval, 10, 22, 50, 105, 121, n48, 124 n55, 158, 213 n9, 216, 218, 245, 259, 268–268, 295, 324 milieu, 236, 243–244, 316, 382

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

military, 174–176, 192, 270, 292 Modernism, 151, 169 n40 Modernity, modern, 310, 314, 429–430, 435–440, 449–450 Monarchy, 50, 212–218, 260–261, 265 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592), 118–119 moral code, 344, 370, 378 morality, 60, 71, 109, 112, 148. 335, 441 n45 Christian, 53, 334, 340–343, 353–359, 367, 373–74 Greco–Roman, 374, 377–380 nation, the, 219 nationalism, 220 naturalism, 138 nature, 106, 110, 136, 138, 159–165 nature, knowledge of nature, 395–401 Nazism, 221, 223 Negri, Antonio (b.1933), 310–311 neoliberalism – see liberalism Nerval, Gérard de (1808–1855), 124 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 1–4, 13 n33, 21, 41, 49, 60–64, 85, 124, 126–127, 137, 157, 212, 224–225, 335, 426, 429, 446, 461, 464 nonphilosophical, the, 4–6, 15–16 normalization, 190, 221, 245, 315, 317, 423 normal, 275, 296, 423 norm(s), 37, 51, 113–114, 145, 180, 188–191, 201, 206, 286, 317, 343, 359, 423 normativity, normative guidelines, 19–20, 36, 43, 77, 81–85, 94, 143–145, 174, 198–201, 206–207, 243–249, 309, 333, 361, 375–379, 448, 450, 454, 456–463 nouveau roman, Le, 156 obedience, 185, 190, 334, 361, 364–367, 393, 414–418 objectification, 371–372 Oedipus, 22, 29–33, 261, 263 ontology, 40, 57, 158, 224, 268, 343 ontology, of the present, of actuality, 6, 280, 430–436, 449 ordoliberalism – see liberalism

485

otium, 383, 395 Overton, Richard (1640–1664), 214 panopticon, 183–185 paraskeuē (instructio), 402–403 Paracelsus, Theophrastus (1493–1541), 159, 161 parrēsia, 23, 331, 376, 389, 404–408 pastoral power, 232, 261, 337, 339 – see also pastorate pastorate, Christian, 23 n62, 232, 262–265, 268–269, 283–284, 337–339 patient, 114, 134, 135, 155, 187, 195–197, 388, 422–424 – see also doctor– patient relation Paul, St. (10–64/67), 354, 414 pedagogy, 178, 245, 254, 351, 422 pederasty, pederast relationship, 53, 341, 349–353, 383 penal justice, 23, 304 penance, 55, 415–422 periodization, 56–58, 85, 150, 256 n44, 340 phenomenology, 11 n26, 21, 27, 40, 57, 86, 278, 280, 423 philology, 59, 69, 73, 165, 168 Philon of Alexandria (25 BC–50 AD), 263 n86 philosopher, 1–10, 21–24, 27, 70–76, 85, 119, 341, 357, 366, 381–383, 405–406 philosophy, 8–36, 84, 119, 150, 162, 222, 266 n93, 404–409, 410, 422–423, 426–435, 453, 457, 464 Physiocrats, Physicalism, 161, 285 – 287, 294–298, 319 Pinel, Philippe (1745–1826), 110–113, 141, 143 Plato (428–347 BC), Platonism, 19, 27, 35, 122, 258–260, 339, 341, 344, 347, 352–353, 359, 380–387, 390–391, 430 pleasure, 53, 334–360, 373, 378, 385, 391, 397–400, 411, 413 Plutarch (45–120), 358, 351, 380, 391, 406 police, 233, 270, 293 – 294, 320, 440 medical, 275–276 science, 232, 270–273

486

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

political economy, 239, 243, 252, 257, 292–310 political imagination, 326–327 population, 272–275 potentiality (actuality) power, 23, 32, 48–57, 62–65, 68, 74, 81, 100 n 10, 129–130, 139–145, 190–191, 208–210, 236–237, 245, 256, 266–267, 270–271, 276, 310–318, 331–332, 345, 371, 377, 387, 394–395, 419–420, 424, 442 as repression, 222–226 as war, 210–222 asylum, 140 – 143 disciplinary, 48–50, 173–176, 190, 197–198, 201–207 pastoral psychiatric, 139 right, and truth, 226–228 and governmentality, 239–243 practical reflection, 78, 377 practices of the self, 68, 369–378, 390–393 premeditation, 17–18, 410–411 – see also meditation present, the, 6–7, 17–18, 37, 103, 190, 426–438, 446, 454, 455–456, 464 prison, 20, 46–48, 62, 64, 78, 82–83, 110, 128, 138, 171–174, 187–190, 204, 206, 235, 240, 278–279, 445 problematization, 61, 79, 104 n19, 129, 173, 336, 342–345, 356, 393–394, 429 psychiatry, 20, 40–43, 57, 69, 103–104, 111–113, 123–125, 127–145, 145, 193–194, 279, 371, 423 psychoanalysis, 48, 99, 124, 154–156 psychology, 40, 43, 57, 99, 152–156, 305, 424–425 punishment, 31, 47, 78, 90–91, 113, 128, 171–174, 184–189, 197, 206, 241–242, 299, 358, 378, 415 Quesnay, François (1694–1774), 285 n8, 294, 319 race(s), 166, 212–221, 312, 314–320 racism, 212, 220–221, 317–319 raison d’état, reason of state, 232, 234, 251–263, 265–276, 284, 292–293

rationality, 41, 64, 118–120, 136, 174, 198–201, 203, 206, 320, 446 economic 282–283, 302–305 governmental, 232, 248, 251–253, 258–265, 268, 318, 441 and reason, 401–402, 412 Rawls, John (1921–2002), 128 representation, 62, 92–94, 139, 152–169, 193–196, 225, 374, 418 repression, 49–52, 62–64, 100–111, 129, 134, 141, 145, 216 – see also power as repression repression hypothesis, 299 revolt(s), 17, 20, 138, 171, 191, 212, 216–217, 327 n117, 438, 440–445, 446–447, 449, 452–63 critical, 463 revolt(s) of conduct (révoltes des conduites), 17, 442 n50 historicity of, 439 student revolt, of May 1968, 190, 440 and revolution, 443–45 revolution(s), 141, 215, 270, 324, 326 English, 48–49 n16 Emancipatory, 145 French, 17, 110, 117, 219, 324, 431–432, 442 Glorious, 212, 214–15 Islamic/Iranian, 82, 439, 441–42 Polish, 83 Sexual 52 revolutionary activity, 326 discourse, 213 n9 emancipation, 133, 144 spirit, 135 Ricardo, David (1772–1823), 164 Robbe–Grillet, Alain (1922–2008), 148, 156 Roman Period, 7, 9, 27, 54, 56, 212, 218, 219, 232, 258 m79, 269, 289, 341, 343–344, 351, 356, 359, 371–415 Roman Law, 218 romantic phase, 42, 42 n7, 57, 58, 141 Romanticism, 69, 169 n40 Röpke, Wilhelm (1899–1966), 298, 302 Rose, Nikolas (b.1947), 310–11 Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader–Meinhof Group), 229–230, 230 n4

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques (1712–1778), 40 n4, 138, 219 Rule of Law, 212–215, 225, 234, 238, 322 Rüstow, Alexander (1885–1963), 398, 301–02 Sade, Donatien–Alphonse Francois de (1740–1814) Sarraute, Nathalie (1900–1999), 156 Sartre, Jean–Paul (1905–1980), 3, 82, 148–149, 150 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913), 156 Schizophrenia, 134 Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1767–1845), 164 Schultz, Theodor W. (1902–1998), 282, 302–03 scientia sexualis, 420 security, 249, 377 – see also dispositive of security self awareness, 411 constitution, 370, 376, 377–78 cultivation, 343 evidence, 23 examination, 8, 10, 27–28, 35, 55, 236, 332, 365, 359–360, 364, 401, 408, 413–418, 422 finalization formation, 450 governance, 23, 237–238, 253–254, 254–257, 291, 323, 332 knowledge, 83, 152, 283–289, 338, 396 limitation, auto–limitation, 282, 295, 306 mastery, (enkrateia), 54, 263–264, 339, 342–343, 345–349, 352–353, 356–359, 366–368, 418, 443 management, 55, 64, 262, 337, 340, 343, 440–41 moderation, 289 regulation, 293, 297–298, 309 transcendance, 434, 463 modification, self–transformation, self–conversion, xi, xiv–xvi, 2, 5–7, 10, 18, 28, 35, 37, 76–77, 130, 332, 438 practices of, xv, 68, 369–425 semiology, 27 n80, 159–60

487

Seneca (4BC–65AD), 348, 387, 391, 395–408, 401 n135, 411–413, 416–17 sexuality, 54, 254, 333–334, 344, 369 Shepherd, Christian pastoral, 260–64 Siéyès, Abbé (1848–1836), 219 Simon, Claude (1913–2005), 156 Simons, Henry Calvert (1899–1946), 302 Simons, Herbert (1916–2001), 282 singularity, 5, 16, 60, 86–89, 384, 445 skepticism, 118 towards philosophy as a profession, 20–21 Smith, Adam (1723–1790), 163, 294, 298, 300 Social Darwinism, 220 social medicine, 236–238, 238 n20, 252, 276, 276 n116, 313, 316, 320 socialism, 219, 323 society/–ies, 41, 45, 58, 153, 220–21 and the asocial, 121 civil, xiii, xiv, 211–212, 245, 249, 280–281, 306, 323 of control, 246 n44 defending, 220–21 disciplined, 190 disciplinary, 185–188, 190, 247 expulsion from, 41, 45, 47 institutionalized, 245 margins of, border of, 105–107, 117, 120, 121 n48, 258 medicalized, 235 n11 mobilization of, 235 of normalization, 317 our, 5, 256, 331 of perversion, 51 and power, 65 punitive, 47–48 n15, 48, 100 n10, 173 and reason, 124 reintegration into, 113 risk, 234 shepherd for, 260 ‘statification (étatisation)’ of, 277 virile, 336 Western, 243 sociology, 152, 156, 168, 305 Socrates (469–399BC), 27, 341, 352–353, 366, 380–384, 387 n71, 396, 405, 406 n159

488 Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

Sophocles (496–406BC), 22, 29–33, 47–48 n15, 263, 269 n99, 412 n186 sophrosyne, 122 sovereignty, xiv, 16, 33, 84, n19, 174, 208–212, 216, 218, 221–223, 231, 239, 242–245, 246 n44, 260, 265, 267 n95, 276, 280, 311, 323, 332, 334, 343 as capitalizing a territory, 243 dispositive of, 197 and imperium, 266 government as the exercise of, 281, 310, 327 governmentalization of, 245 of the self, individual, 346, 360, 390, 410 and self–governance, 332 and state, 314, 325, 326 theory/–ies of, 259, 332 spiritual battle, combat, labor, 359–360, 366–367, 385 conception of philosophy, xvi direction, guidance, 254, 338, 417–19 exercise(s) 399 n129, 441 experience, 372 inflection of knowledge (mathēsis), 396, 401 love 352 modalization of knowledge, xvi, 28 n88, 372, 395–401, 402 n141, 411 objective, 402reintegration, 121 technique(s), 360 transformation, 28 spirituality, 327–373, 451 Christian 413 Islamic, 440 philosophical, 372–73 political, 82, 440, 440 n41, 443, 462 Roman, 414 state administrative, 239 apparatus, 149 constitutional 82 of emergency, 213, 234–35 governmental, governmentalization of 229–279, 232, 257, 268, 279 of justice, of law, 239, 245 police state, 271 territorial, 213 theory/–ies of, 259

welfare, 231–236, 238, 276–279, 283–284, 289 statification of the biological, 221 State–phobia, 299 state racism, 212, 220–221, 221 n25, 317 statesman, 260–262, 260 n80 statistical data, 275 steering, 258–60 Stoffäes, Christian, 307–08 Stoic(s), 53–54, 345, 351, 380, 387–388, 388 n73, 392, 397, 405, 410 n177 Stoicism, stoic philosophy, 383, 388, 396, 398, 401, 409–318, 434 Stoléru, Lionel G. (b.1937), 307–308, 308 n 101 strategy, 63–63, 134, 191–92 structural anthropology, 154, 155 n21, 168 structural psychoanalysis, 154–156, 168 structuralism, xi, 27 n80, 46, 61, 73, 73 n1, 76, 92, 147–170, 433 n26 structure(s) structure(s), of power subject(s), xv–xvi, 9–10, 16, 21, 26–27, 27 n80, 48, 50, 73–74, 111–115, 120, 148, 155, 157–158, 169–170, 208, 215, 303, 336, 448 active, 367 of confession, 365, 377, 418 constitution of, 376–377, 396 of desire, 25, 78, 336, 355, 364, 385 ethical, 367, 177–178, 380, 394 formation (of), 209, 209 n2, 369–70 genealogy of the, 255, 336–337, 434 and/of governance, 73, 254, 254 n71, 258, 264, 287, 293, 337, 339–40 history of, 53 and/of knowledge, 25–27, 28, 35, 73, 83, 96, 100, 115–116, 153, 167, 196, 255, 371–372, 375, subject(s), modifying the, 9–10, 16, 27–28, 35, 93, 256, 256 n77 legal, under the law, 215, 240, 245, 273–75. 341 modes of (possible) existence (for), 375 passive, 367 philosophy of, 27 n80 position, 245possible, 454 of power, 208, 217, 224, 244, 263, 387, 401

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

subject(s) – continued and practices of the self 369–70 and self–formation, forming oneself as a, 335, 369–371, 384 of self–governance, 337 and spirituality, spiritual experience, 372, 396, 451 n75 of subjugation, 208 and truth, 26–28, 33, 93, 337, 337 n20, 267, 272–274, 401–408, 419–425 subject–constitution, 371, 377 subjected, 41, 82–83, 165, 172–174, 177–188, 191, 195, 214–215, 252, 340, 356, 447 subjection 84 n19, 215, 219, 336 n13 ethical, 342–345, 342 n37 subjectification, 74, 264, 401–04 subjectivation, 69, 365, 390–395, 401–05 crisis of, 390–95 subjectivity, x, xvi, 14, 16, 28, 52–59, 68–71, 74, 153, 156, 209, 254, 342, 365, 444, 451, 451 n75 and ethics, ethical subjectivity, 52–59, 352, 367, 380 n36 history of, 254, 374 practice(s) of, 374 and sexuality, 358–359, 367, 369 submission of, 81–82 surveillance, 113–114, 114 n33, 128–129, 174, 183–189, 195, 203–204, 206, 241, 245, 248, 253, 256, 278, 286, 290, 320, 361, 365 suspicion of oneself, 360–361, 365, 409, 417 Szasz, Thomas S. (1920–2012), 132, 132 n72, 135 Tactics, 63–64, 140, 175–176, 194, 210–211, 239, 243, 278, 301 Tardits, Anne, 100, 100 n10, 100 n11, 102, 117 tax, negative, 308–309, 309 n104 technique(s), 104 n19, 105, 116, 134, 194, 200, 240, 205, 252–253, 279, 329 of discipline, of surveillance, 210, 236, 248, 250 n56, 286, 290, 318–320 of direction, confession, of the soul, 355, 360, 364, 368, 403, 422 of government, 286, 376 of life, 342, 387

489

of philosophical life, 354 n73 of the self, xv, 232, 237, 253, 254–257, 254 n7, 264, 339, 345–347, 355, 360, 364–365, 369, 371, 379–380, 382–385, 390, 395 social, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 116, 209 spiritual, 360 of subject constitution, 371 technology/ies, 258, 278, 287, 316 of biopolitics, 317–19 of discipline, surveillance, 48, 128, 129, 174, 176–190, 200 n71, 241, 279, 314, 317 of direction, 424 of government, 65 n52, 73, 238–239, 249, 255, 264–266, 270–276, 286, 292, 302, 306–307, 320, 375 of insurance, 233, 301, 316–317, 324, 325 of Law, 314 of the police, 292 of population, 319 of security, 249 of the subjectivity, 342, 406 of the social, of power, 57, 62–63, 68, 129, 138, 143–144, 176, 190–191, 201–204, 205 n80, 206, 208–209, 230–231, 232, 237, 240, 244, 255–257, 278, 284, 286–287, 314–315, 232, 237, 240, 244, 255–257, 278, 284, 286–287, 314–315, 319–320, 325, 329–330, 420 of the state, 392 terror, 64 n47, 230, 232, 235, 413, 442 terrorism, xiii, 82, 230, 230 n4, 232–243, 249–250, 322 Tertullian (160–220), 353, 366, 418 test, testing the self theoretician, 78, 80 theory contract, 219 juridical, 223 of discourse, 57, 68, 68 n60, 151–152 of power, 56, 62–66, 68, 208, 223–224, 228, 228 n36 and practice, 66–68, 78–80, 91–92, 92–94, 128, 138, 162 n31, 329–330, 493 n26, 455–456, 458 n6 of sovereignty, 216, 222, 332

490

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

think differently, penser autrement, 6–7, 16, 37, 77, 79, 446, 449–50 n70 Third Estate, the, 219 Thirty Years War, 175, 270 thought affirmative, 84–85, 449–54 and cognition, 23–27, 28, 369 critical, 446–54 event of/and the event, 85–89, 94–97, 432–433, 448 exercise of, in, 6–7, 11–12, 15, 79, 409 and experience, 1, 94–97, 121–122, 332, 423–435, 450, 452 Foucault’s, xii–xiii, xvi, 1–2, 6, 36, 38, 55, 58, 64, 69, 72, 75–80, 78 n10, 85–89, 130, 426–453, 455–465 history of, 45, 70 history of systems of, 375–377, 429, 435 and knowledge, xi, 29, 369 medium of, xv, 11, 33 and meditation, 8–10, 28–36 normative, 81–85, 459, 456 philosophical, xi, 3–37, 78, 85–88, 426–435, 449 n70 and transformation, self–modification, 5–8, 27–28, 29–37, 94, 321–323, 332, 450 and the unthought, 4–5, 12, 15, 16–18, 118–122, 432–435 Western, 34 work of, xi, xiii, 409 totalitarianism, 235, 284, 289, 427 tragic experience, 29–33, 35, 104, 107, 126–127, 209 tragedy, 22–23, 29–33, 47–48 n15, 126–127, 261, 269, 269 n99 transcendental, 2 n56, 60, 67, 153–154, 157, 163, 165, 168, 448, 453 transgression, 2, 15–18, 46–47, 51, 89, 187, 223, 365, 416, 451 n75, 458 transversal categories, xi–xii, 85–97, 198, 242, 307, 310, 432, 432 n23 and care for the self, 373–74 confession of, statement of, 196–207, 237, 263–264, 338, 419. 421–23 desire for, 10 enounciating, pronouncing, manifesting 20, 22–23, 331

experience pf 28, 29–33 game of 7, 7 n16, 93 governing through, 253 n65, 282 independence of, 213 is in the future, 20 of the market, 295–98 and meditation, 9 movement of, transfiguration of, 25, 28, 29–33, 93 power, right, 226–228, 331 speak the, 405 truth–telling, 21–23, 29–34, 253, 236, 306, 331, 337–338, 337 n20, 360, 360 n98, 367, 406, 418–419, 441 alèthurgie, 235, 296 n50 Tuke, William (1732–1822), 111, 113–114, 120, 143 Turgot, Anne–Robert–Jacques (1727– 1781), 219, 219 n17 unreason, 42 n7, 104, 109, 117–118, 118 n42, 120, 122–25 – see also madness, irrationality utility, 24, 185, 275, 282, 296–298, 315 utilitarian, utilitarianism, 183, 225, 282, 296–297, 441, 449 venera, 343–345, 350 venereal diseases, 108–09 venerials, 74 veridiction, ii, 31–32, 296–297, 296 n50, 306, 330, 375, 377, 420 – see also truth–telling and truth violence, 47, 55, 63, 121, 135, 139–142, 141 n99, 145, 194, 208–225, 232, 256, 265, 268, 318, 343, 385, 387 virtuality, 184, 431–435, 433 n26, 442, 454, 459, 463 virtue, 19, 78, 264, 300, 343, 348, 351–353, 358, 361, 365–367, 379, 385–389, 400–404, 407, 411–414, 450 n71 Vitalpolitik, 301, 303, 306. Walwyn, William, 214 war, xiii, 49 n16, 91, 106, 185, 188, 210, 311 n112, 317, 331, 482 n46, 384, 399 warfare, xii, 91, 208–228, 318, 365

Index of Names, Subjects and Concepts

welfare (state), 229–239, 249, 258, 272, 276–279, 281, 283–284, 289, 295, 298, 308, 308–309, 308 n101, 314, 317, 323 will to know, 10, 24–25, 35–36 will to knowledge, 23, 36, 47 n15 Winstanley, Gerrard (1609–76), 214 work (labor), 38, 49, 136, 152, 164, 174, 176.77, 272, 361 ethical labor, 343, 345, 359–360, 365, 418, 438

491

work, Foucault’s œuvre, xi–xii, 2, 6, 17, 34–36, 66, 72, 74, 89, 93–95, 318, 328, 330, 451 work, absence of an oeuvre, 64 n48, 101, 116, 121–125 writing act of, xi, 7, 20, 44–46, 52, 76, 92 n37, 99–100, 339, 404 mode of, 53, 73, 92–94, 103, 128, 137–139, 139 n93, 189–190, 218, 424