Foucault-Studies-Number-1 (2004).pdf

foucault studies © Stuart Elden, Clare O’Farrell, Alan Rosenberg, 2004

ISSN: pending Foucault Studies, No 1, pp. 1-4, December 2004

EDITORIAL Introducing Foucault Studies Stuart Elden, Clare O’Farrell, Alan Rosenberg Interest in the work of the French thinker Michel Foucault continues to develop within the English‐speaking world and elsewhere at an exponential rate. There exists an ever‐expanding corpus of writing which deals either directly with his work or uses his ideas as the basis for other research. Indeed, some of his concepts, notably his work on power, are now so well recognised as to often appear without attribution. Aside from being widely used at the research level, Foucaultʹs work is also commonly referred to in university courses across the humanities and the social sciences as well as in applied professional disciplines such as education, architecture and social work. There are several research and discussion networks in existence which focus on his work, including the Centre Michel Foucault in Paris, the History of the Present groups in Canada and the UK, the Foucault Circle in the USA and a new Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios Michel Foucault in Mexico. In the virtual sphere, the popularity of the various Foucault websites on the internet attests to the influence of his work: the Michel Foucault: Resources site for example, averages up to 500 hits a day from all over the world. There are also two major email discussion lists which deal with his work and a number of other minor lists.

In 2004, the year that marks the twentieth anniversary of Foucaultʹs death, his work has become more popular than ever with numerous conferences around the globe in Europe, South America and the United States, Australia and elsewhere. 2004 has also marked the publication of four previously unpublished works by Foucault in French: a set of interviews originally conducted in 1975 by Roger‐Pol Droit, two new volumes of lectures and the dramatised radio broadcast of a very lengthy interview conducted by Claude Bonnefoy in 1969. A book on Manet containing a lecture by Foucault which had only appeared previously in incomplete form in an obscure journal has also been published. 2004 has also marked a remarkable revival of interest in Foucaultʹs work in France after years of relative neglect. This has not been restricted merely to publication of new work by Foucault, but also extends to the publication of new books about his work, special issues in journals and

1

http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au/

foucault studies, No 1, pp. 1-4

wide circulation magazines and newspapers, several conferences, and a special series of Foucault related events at the annual Autumn festival in Paris.

With so much activity ‐ and ever increasing activity ‐ around Foucaultʹs work, a journal which deals specifically and directly with his work and its impact was more than overdue. Although there are a select number of journals which publish various kinds of research influenced by Foucaultʹs work (as well as other French thinkers), Foucault has not been accorded the honour of a journal which provides a forum for the discussion of his work, including criticisms, developments and applications, the publication of new translations and reviews and reports of books, conferences and other activities. This sets him apart from other thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, and even, now, Baudrillard, and we believe this journal is timely.

The journal intends to provide a forum for discussion of Foucault which goes beyond received orthodoxies, simplifications and uncritical appropriations. In particular, the journal aims to publish work which utilises not only the more familiar material by Foucault but also the wide range of material made available by the 1994 publication in French of a four volume collection of over 360 of Foucaultʹs shorter writings and the more recent (and ongoing) publication of his lectures. Much of this material is still in the process of being translated into English, and it revolutionises ways of thinking about his work.

The initial submissions to the journal, a few of which appear in this first issue, testify to our belief that there was a real lacuna in the available outlets for work on Foucault. We recognised Foucaultʹs work was being used productively across the globe and across a whole range of disciplines, and therefore sought submission of material that not only deals with his work directly but also that which critiques, updates and augments his claims across very diverse geographical, disciplinary and historical domains. In this and subsequent issues we aim to cover the full breadth of these interests, including power, politics, law, history, social and cultural theory, sexuality, race, religion, gender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, geography, architecture, education, health studies, management studies, media studies. Where possible, the journal will look to publish translations of shorter pieces from Foucaultʹs oeuvre, and will regularly carry book reviews and conference and seminar reports.

It is important to emphasise that even if the editors have their own specialised interests, they will be seeking to make the journal as inclusive a forum as possible (in the spirit of Foucaultʹs own work) and will be seeking contributions from across a wide range of specialisations, interests and viewpoints. We have attempted to reflect something of this breadth of interest in Foucault’s work in our editorial board.

2

Elden, O’Farrell, Rosenberg: Introducing Foucault Studies

There have been concerns that a journal focused specifically on

Foucaultʹs work runs the risk of imprisoning this famously iconoclastic thinker within the strictures of a scholarly orthodoxy with rigid rules of inclusion and exclusion. In the social sciences and other applied fields, one frequently encounters researchers struggling to understand Foucault and to apply his thought while fighting an uphill battle against entrenched prejudice concerning his and other similar ideas in their own very pragmatically oriented fields. These researchers sometimes find it difficult to publish their work, which is too divergent to fit easily within the well‐defined boundaries of their own disciplinary and institutional locations. One of the aims of this journal is to provide an alternative outlet for such work. The name ʹFoucaultʹ on the cover of this journal is thus an open invitation for scholars to depart from conventional disciplinary strictures while still performing their own rigorous research. Foucaultʹs name serves here as an invitation, not the name on the door of a closed club.

In this first issue, we are very pleased to include a new translation of one of Foucault’s lectures, alongside three important and challenging essays. Simon Enoch examines the construction of the Jewish subject in Nazi medical discourse and Neil Levy and Jeremy Moss, quite by coincidence working at the same institution, reflect respectively on some of the ethical and political implications of Foucaultʹs work. They are accompanied by a review essay by Brad Elliott Stone on two of Foucault’s lecture courses, and a range of reviews of other books. The last contribution here is a brief report by Richard Lynch of the work he has done on a bibliography of English translations of Foucault’s work. The report explains the way in which the bibliography can be used, and provides links to the material which is freely available on the Foucault Resources website. Richard intends to keep this material up‐to‐date, and this journal will include brief updates where appropriate. Together we believe this first issue is a significant contribution to the ongoing reception of Foucault’s work in the English‐speaking world, and although contributions to the journal continue in good numbers, we also hope it will inspire future submissions.

This launch issue will be followed by twice yearly publication. There is the potential for special issues on particular topics, and suggestions for themes would be welcomed by the editors.

Two further points about the journal are worth noting. First, that the journal is available online, and is free to anyone who wishes to use it. This seems appropriate given the global reach of interest in Foucault and the wide internet usage by Foucault scholars and researchers in general. It also means that the journal is free from external constraints. Second, that the journal aspires to the same standards as print journals, and sees the internet as a valuable medium for the dissemination of high‐quality rigorous work. All

3


articles published in Foucault Studies have gone through peer‐review and standard editorial procedures.

Having no outside support means that the editors are necessarily indebted to a number of people. We are especially grateful to the editorial board for their advice and enthusiasm for this venture; to the numerous referees who have reviewed the work submitted to the journal and offered helpful and generous criticism; and to Morris Rabinowitz and Doris B. Katz for their invaluable technical assistance. All of these people enabled this first issue of the journal to come into existence. We hope you enjoy the material presented here.

4

foucault studies English Translation © Foucault Studies, 2004


TRANSLATION The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine? Michel Foucault Translated by Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr. (Professor Emeritus, University of Hawai’i), William J. King (University of Hawai’i) and Clare O’Farrell (Queensland University of Technology)1 NOTE: This was the first of three lectures given by Michel Foucault on social medicine in October 1974 at the Institute of Social Medicine, Biomedical Center, of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was originally published in Portuguese translation as “Crisis de un modelo en la medicina?”, Revista centroamericana de Ciencas de la Salud, No 3, January-April 1976, pp. 197-209; and in Spanish as “La crisis de la medicina o la crisis de la antimedicina”, Educacion Medica y Salud, Vol 10 No 2, 1976, pp. 152-70. The version in Dits et écrits, (Paris: Gallimard), vol III, pp. 40-58, is a retranslation of the Portuguese back into French. We have translated this article from Spanish and thank PAHO Publications for their permission to publish it. We have also compared it to the French translation by Dominique Reynié. I would like to open this lecture by drawing attention to a question which is beginning to be widely discussed: should we speak of a crisis of medicine or a crisis of antimedicine? In this context I shall refer to Ivan Illich’s book Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health,2 which, given the major impact it has had and will continue to have in the coming months, focuses world public opinion on the problem of the current functioning of the institutions of medical knowledge and power. But to analyze this phenomenon, I shall begin from at an earlier period, the years between 1940 and 1945, or more exactly the year 1942, when the famous Beveridge Plan was elaborated. This plan served as a model for the organization of health after the Second World War in England and in many other countries. The date of this Plan has a symbolic value. In 1942 – at the height of the World War in which 40,000,000 people lost their lives – it was not the right to life that was adopted as a principle, but a different and more 1 [Ed.] Clare O’Farrell made very extensive changes working from the French version

while preserving some of the variations that exist in the Spanish version. Editorial changes were also made by Stuart Elden and Morris Rabinowitz.

2 [Ed.] Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health, London, Calder and Boyars, 1975.

5


substantial and complex right: the right to health. At a time when the War was causing large-scale destruction, society assumed the explicit task of ensuring its members not only life, but also a healthy life. Apart from its symbolic value, this date is very important for several reasons: 1. The Beveridge Plan signals that the State was taking charge of health. It might be argued that this was not new, since from the eighteenth century onwards it has been one of the functions of the State, not a fundamental one but still one of vital importance, to guarantee the physical health of its citizens. Nonetheless, until middle of the twentieth century, for the State guaranteeing health meant essentially the preservation of national physical strength, the work force and its capacity of production, and military force. Until then, the goals of State medicine had been, principally, if not racial, then at least nationalist. With the Beveridge plan, health was transformed into an object of State concern, not for the benefit of the State, but for the benefit of individuals. Man’s right to maintain his body in good health became an object of State action. As a consequence, the terms of the problem were reversed: the concept of the healthy individual in the service of the State was replaced by that of the State in the service of the healthy individual. 2. It is not only a question of a reversal of rights, but also of what might be called a morality of the body. In the nineteenth century an abundant literature on health, on the obligation of individuals to secure their health and that of their family, etc. made its appearance in every country in the world. The concept of cleanliness, of hygiene, occupied a central place in all these moral exhortations concerning health. Numerous publications insisted on cleanliness as an indispensable prerequisite for good health. Health would allow people to work so that children could survive and ensure social labour and production in their turn. Cleanliness ensured good health for the individual and those surrounding him. In the second half of the twentieth century another concept arose. It was no longer a question of an obligation to practise cleanliness and hygiene in order to enjoy good health, but of the right to be sick as one wishes and as is necessary. The right to stop work began to take shape and became more important than the former obligation to practise cleanliness that had characterized the moral relation of individuals with their bodies. 3. With the Beveridge Plan health entered the field of macroeconomics. The costs involved in health, from the loss of work days, to the necessity of covering those risks stopped being phenomena that could be resolved through the use of pension funds or with mostly private insurance. From then on, health – or the absence of health – the totality of conditions which allowed the health of individuals to be insured, became an expense, which due to its size became one of the major items of the State budget, regardless of what system of financing was used. Health began to enter the calculations of the macro-economy. Through the avenue of health, illnesses and the need to ensure the necessities of health led to a certain economic redistribution. From the beginning of the present century one of the functions of budgetary policy

6

Foucault: The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine

in the many countries has been ensuring a certain equalization of income, if not of property, through the tax system. This redistribution did not, however, depend on taxes, but on the system of regulation and economic coverage of health and illnesses. In ensuring for all the same opportunities for receiving treatment, there was an attempt to correct inequalities in income. Health, illness, and the body began to have their social locations and, at the same time, were converted into a means of individual socialization. 4. Health became the object of an intense political struggle. At the end of the Second World War and with the triumphant election of the Labour party in England in 1945, there was no political party or political campaign, in any developed country, that did not address the problem of health and the way in which the State would ensure and finance this type of expenditure. The British elections of 1945, as well as those relating to the pension plans in France in 1947, which saw the victory of the representatives of the Confédération générale du travail [General Confederation of Workers], mark the importance of the political struggle over health. Taking the Beveridge Plan as a point of symbolic reference, one can observe over the ten years from 1940-1950 the formulation of a new series of rights, a new morality, a new economics, a new politics of the body. Historians have accustomed us to drawing a careful and meticulous relation between what people say and what they think, the historical development of their representations and theories and the history of the human spirit. Nevertheless, it is curious to note that they have always ignored that fundamental chapter that is the history of the human body. In my opinion, the years 1940-1950 should be chosen as dates of reference marking the birth of this new system of rights, this new morality, this new politics and this new economy of the body in the modern Western world. Since then, the body of the individual has become one of the chief objectives of State intervention, one of the major objects of which the State must take charge. In a humorous vein, we might make an historical comparison. When the Roman Empire was crystallized in Constantine’s era, the State, for the first time in the history of the Mediterranean world, took on the task of caring for souls. The Christian State not only had to fulfil the traditional functions of the Empire, but also had to allow souls to attain salvation, even if it had to force them to. Thus, the soul became one of the objects of State intervention. All the great theocracies, from Constantine to the mixed theocracies of eighteenth century Europe, were political regimes in which the salvation of the soul was one of the principal objectives. One could say that the present situation has actually been developing since the eighteenth century not a theocracy, but a ‘somatocracy’. We live in a regime that sees the care of the body, corporal health, the relation between illness and health, etc. as appropriate areas of State intervention. It is precisely the birth of this somatocracy, in crisis since its origins, that I am proposing to analyze. At the moment medicine assumed its modern functions, by means of a characteristic process of nationalization, medical technology was experiencing

7


one of its rare but extremely significant advances. The discovery of antibiotics and with them the possibility of effectively fighting for the first time against infectious diseases, was in fact contemporary with the birth of the major systems of social security. It was a dazzling technological advance, at the very moment a great political, economic, social, and legal mutation of medicine was taking place. The crisis became apparent from this moment on, with the simultaneous manifestation of two phenomena: on the one hand, technological progress signalling an essential advance in the fight against disease; on the other hand, the new economic and political functioning of medicine. These two phenomena did not lead to the improvement of health that had been hoped for, but rather to a curious stagnation in the benefits that could have arisen from medicine and public health. This is one of the earlier aspects of the crisis I am trying to analyze. I will be referring to some of its effects to show that that the recent development of medicine, including its nationalization and socialization – of which the Beveridge Plan gives a general vision – is of earlier origin. Actually, one must not think that medicine up until now has remained an individual or contractual type of activity that takes place between patient and doctor, and which has only recently taken social tasks on board. On the contrary, I shall try to demonstrate that medicine has been a social activity since the eighteenth century. In a certain sense, ‘social medicine’ does not exist because all medicine is already social. Medicine has always been a social practice. What does not exist is non-social medicine, clinical individualizing medicine, medicine of the singular relation. All this is a myth that defended and justified a certain form of social practice of medicine: private professional practice. Thus, if in reality medicine is social, at least since its great rise in the eighteenth century, the present crisis is not really new, and its historical roots must be sought in the social practice of medicine. As a consequence, I shall not be posing the problem in the terms used by Illich and his disciples: medicine or antimedicine, should we save medicine or not? The problem is not whether to have individual or social medicine, but whether to question the model of the development of medicine beginning in the eighteenth century, that is, from when what we might describe as the ‘take off’ of medicine occurred. This ‘take off’ of health in the developed world was accompanied by a technical and epistemological removal of important obstacles in medicine and in a series of social practices. And it is precisely these specific forms of ‘take off’ that have produced the current crisis. The problem can be posed in the following terms: (1) what was that model of development? (2) to what extent can it be corrected? (3) to what extent can it be used today in societies or populations that have not experienced the European and American model of economic and political development? To sum up, what is this model of development? Can it be corrected and applied in other places? I would now like to expose some hidden aspects of this current crisis.

8


Scientificity and Efficacy of Medicine In the first place, I would like to refer to the separation or distortion that exists between the scientificity of medicine and the positive nature of its effects, or between the scientificity and the efficacy of medicine. It was not necessary to wait for Illich or the disciples of anti-medicine to know that one of the capabilities of medicine is killing. Medicine kills, it has always killed, and it has always been aware of this. What is important, is that until recent times the negative effects of medicine remained inscribed within the register of medical ignorance. Medicine killed through the doctor’s ignorance or because medicine itself was ignorant. It was not a true science, but rather a rhapsody of ill-founded, poorly established and unverified sets of knowledge. The harmfulness of medicine was judged in proportion to its non-scientificity. But what emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the fact that medicine could be dangerous, not through its ignorance and falseness, but through its knowledge, precisely because it was a science. Illich and those who are inspired by him uncovered a series of data around this theme, but I am not sure how well elaborated they are. One must set aside different spectacular results designed for the consumption of journalists. I shall not dwell therefore on the considerable decrease in mortality during a doctors strike in Israel; nor shall I mention well-recorded facts whose statistical elaboration does not allow the definition or discovery of what is being dealt with. This is the case in relation to the investigation by the National Institutes of Health (USA) according to which in 1970, 1,500,000 persons were hospitalized due to the consumption of medications. These statistics are upsetting but do not afford convincing proof, as they do not indicate the manner in which these medications were administered, or who consumed them, etc. Neither shall I analyze the famous investigation of Robert Talley, who demonstrated that in 1967, 3,000 North Americans died in hospitals from the side effects of medications. All that taken as a whole does not have great significance nor is it based on a valid analysis.3 There are other factors that need to be known. For example, one needs to know the how these medications were administered, if the problems were a result of an error by the doctor, the hospital staff or the patient himself, etc. Nor shall I dwell on the statistics concerning surgical operations, particularly in relation to certain studies of hysterectomies in California that indicate that out of 5,500 cases, 14% of the operations failed, 25% of the patients died young, and that in only 40% of the cases was the operation necessary. All these facts, made notorious by Illich, relate to the ability or ignorance of the doctors, without casting doubt on medicine itself in its scientificity. On the other hand what appears to me to be much more interesting and which poses the real problem is what one might call positive 3 [Ed.] Letters in relation to this study can be found in Robert B. Talley, Marc F.

Laventurier, and C. Joseph Stetler, ‘Letters: Drug Induced Illness.’ Journal of the American Medical Association 229, no. 8 (1974) pp. 1043-44.

9


iatrogenicity, rather than iatrogenicity4: the harmful effects of medication due not to errors of diagnosis or the accidental ingestion of those substances, but to the action of medical practice itself, in so far as it has a rational basis. At present, the instruments that doctors and medicine in general have at their disposal cause certain effects, precisely because of their efficacy. Some of these effects are purely harmful and others are unable to be controlled, which leads the human species into a perilous area of history, into a field of probabilities and risks, the magnitude of which cannot be precisely measured. It is known, for example, that anti-infectious treatment, the highly successful struggle carried out against infectious agents, led to a general decrease of the threshold of the organism’s sensitivity to hostile agents. This means that to the extent that the organism can defend itself better, it protects itself, naturally, but on the other hand, it is more fragile and more exposed if one restricts contact with the stimuli which provoke defences. More generally, one can say that through the very effect of medications – positive and therapeutic effects – there occurs a disturbance, even destruction, of the ecosystem, not only at the individual level, but also at the level of the human species itself. Bacterial and viral protection, which represent both a risk and a protection for the organism, with which it has functioned until then, undergoes a change as a result of the therapeutic intervention, thus becoming exposed to attacks against which the organism had previously been protected. Nobody knows where the genetic manipulation of the genetic potential of living cells in bacteria or in viruses will lead. It has become technically possible to develop agents that attack the human body against which there are no means of defence. One could forge an absolute biological weapon against man and the human species without the means of defence against this absolute weapon being developed at the same time. This has led American laboratories to call for the prohibition of some genetic manipulations that are at present technically possible.

We thus enter a new dimension of what we might call medical risk. Medical risk, that is the inextricable link between the positive and negative effects of medicine, is not new: it dates from the moment when the positive effects of medicine were accompanied by various negative and harmful consequences. With regards to this there are numerous examples that signpost the history of modern medicine dating from the eighteenth century. In that century, for the first time, medicine acquired sufficient power to allow certain patients to become healthy enough to leave a hospital. Until the middle of the eighteenth century people generally did not survive a stay in a hospital. People entered this institution to die. The medical technique of the eighteenth century did not allow the hospitalized individual to leave the institution alive. The hospital was a cloister where one went to breathe one’s last; it was a true ‘mortuary’.

4 [Ed.] Caused by a doctor, from iatros, physician.

10


Another example of a significant medical advance accompanied by a great increase in mortality was the discovery of anaesthetics and the technique of general anaesthesia in the years from 1844 to 1847. As soon as a person could be put to sleep surgical operations could be performed, and the surgeons of the time devoted themselves to this work with great enthusiasm. But at the time they did not have access to sterilized instruments. Sterile surgical technique was not introduced into medical practice until 1870. After the Franco-Prussian war and the relative success of German doctors, it became a current practice in many countries. As soon as individuals could be anaesthetized, the pain barrier – the natural protection of the organism – disappeared and one could proceed with any operation whatsoever. In the absence of sterile surgical technique, there was no doubt that every operation was not only risky, but led to almost certain death. For example, during the war of 1870, a famous French surgeon, Guérin, performed amputations on several wounded men, but only succeeded in saving one; the others died. This is a typical example of the way medicine has always functioned, on the basis of its own failures and the risks it has taken. There has been no major medical advance that has not paid the price in various negative consequences. This characteristic phenomenon of the history of modern medicine has acquired a new dimension today in so far as that, until the most recent decades, medical risk concerned only the individual under care. At most, one could adversely affect the individual’s direct descendants, that is, the power of a possible negative action limited itself to a family or its descendants. Nowadays, with the techniques at the disposal of medicine, the possibility for modifying the genetic cell structure not only affects the individual or his descendants but the entire human race. Every aspect of life now becomes the subject of medical intervention. We do no know yet whether man is capable of fabricating a living being which will make it possible to modify the entire history of life and the future of life. A new dimension of medical possibilities arises that I shall call bio-history. The doctor and the biologist are no longer working at the level of the individual and his descendants, but are beginning to work at the level of life itself and its fundamental events. This is a very important element in bio-history.

It has been known since Darwin that life evolved, that the evolution of living species is determined, to a certain degree, by accidents which might be of a historical nature. Darwin knew, for example, that enclosure in England, a purely economic and legal practice, had modified the English fauna and flora. The general laws of life, therefore, were then linked to that historical occurrence. In our days something new is in the process of being discovered; the history of man and life are profoundly intertwined. The history of man does not simply continue life, nor is simply content to reproduce it, but to a certain extent renews it, and can exercise a certain number of fundamental effects on its processes. This is one of the great risks of contemporary medicine and one of the reasons for the uneasiness communicated from

11


doctors to patients, from technicians to the general population, with regards to the effects of medical action. A series of phenomena, like the radical and bucolic rejection of medicine in favour of a non-technical reconciliation with nature, themes of millenarianism and the fear of an apocalyptic end of the species, represent the vague echo in public awareness of this technical uneasiness that biologists and doctors are beginning to feel with regards to the effects of their own practice and their own knowledge. Not knowing stops being dangerous when the danger feared is knowledge itself. Knowledge is dangerous, not only because of its immediate consequences for individuals or groups of individuals, but also at the level of history itself. This is one of the fundamental characteristics of the present crisis. Undefined Medicalization The second characteristic is what I am going to call the phenomenon of undefined ‘medicalization’. It is often argued that in the twentieth century medicine began to function outside its traditional field as defined by the wishes of the patient, his pain, his symptoms, his malaise. This area defined medical treatment and circumscribed its field of activity, which was determined by a domain of objects called illnesses and which gave medical status to the patient’s demands. It was thus that the domain specific to medicine was defined. There is no doubt that if this is its specific domain, contemporary medicine has gone considerably beyond it for several reasons. In the first place, medicine responds to another theme which is not defined by the wishes of the patient, wishes which now exist only in limited cases. More frequently, medicine is imposed on the individual, ill or not, as an act of authority. One can cite several examples in this instance. Today, nobody is employed without a report from a doctor who has the authority to examine the individual. There is a systematic and compulsory policy of ‘screening’, of tracking down disease in the population, a process which does not answer any patient demand. In some countries, a person accused of having committed a crime, that is, an infringement considered as sufficiently serious to be judged by the courts, must submit to compulsory examination by a psychiatric expert. In France, it is compulsory for every individual coming under the purview of the legal system, even if it is a correctional court. These are examples of a type of a familiar medical intervention that does not derive from the patient’s wishes. In the second place, the objects that make up the area of medical treatment are not just restricted to diseases. I offer two examples. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, sexuality, sexual behaviour, sexual deviations or anomalies have been linked to medical treatment, without a doctor’s saying, unless he is naive, that a sexual anomaly is a disease. The systematic treatment by medical therapists of homosexuals in Eastern European countries is characteristic of the ‘medicalization’ of something that

12


is not a disease, either from the point of view of the person under treatment or the doctor. More generally, it might be argued that health has been transformed into an object of medical treatment. Everything that ensures the health of the individual; whether it be the purification of water, housing conditions or urban life styles, is today a field for medical intervention that is no longer linked exclusively to diseases. Actually, the authoritarian intervention of medicine in an ever widening field of individual or collective existence is an absolutely characteristic fact. Today medicine is endowed with an authoritarian power with normalizing functions that go beyond the existence of diseases and the wishes of the patient. If the jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are considered to have invented a social system that had to be governed by a system of codified laws, it might be argued that in the twentieth century doctors are in the process of inventing a society, not of law, but of the norm. What governs society are not legal codes but the perpetual distinction between normal and abnormal, a perpetual enterprise of restoring the system of normality. This is one of the characteristics of contemporary medicine, although it may easily be demonstrated that it is a question of an old phenomenon, linked to the medical ‘take off’. Since the eighteenth century, medicine has continually involved itself in what is not its business, that is, in matters other than patients and diseases. It was precisely in this manner that epistemological obstacles were able to be removed at the end of the eighteenth century. Until sometime between 1720 to 1750, the activities of doctors focused on the demands of patients and their diseases. Thus has it been since the Middle Ages, with arguably non-existent scientific and therapeutic results. Eighteenth century medicine freed itself from the scientific and therapeutic stagnation in which it had been mired beginning in the medieval period. From this moment on, medicine began to consider fields other than ill people and became interested in aspects other than diseases, changing from being essentially clinical to being social. The four major processes which characterize medicine in the eighteenth century, are as follows: 1. Appearance of a medical authority, which is not restricted to the authority of knowledge, or of the erudite person who knows how to refer to the right authors. Medical authority is a social authority that can make decisions concerning a town, a district, an institution, or a regulation. It is the manifestation of what the Germans called Staatsmedizin, medicine of the State. 2. Appearance of a medical field of intervention distinct from diseases: air, water, construction, terrains, sewerage, etc. In the eighteenth century all this became the object of medicine. 3. Introduction of an site of collective medicalization: namely, the hospital. Before the eighteenth century, the hospital was not an institution of medicalization, but of aid to the poor awaiting death. 4. Introduction of mechanisms of medical administration: recording of data, collection and comparison of statistics, etc.

13


With a base in the hospital and in all these social controls, medicine was able to gain momentum, and clinical medicine acquired totally new dimensions. To the extent that medicine became a social practice instead of an individual one, opportunities were opened up for anatomical pathology, for hospital medicine and the advances symbolized by the names of Bichat, Laënnec, Bayle, et al. As a consequence, medicine dedicated itself to areas other than diseases, areas not governed by the wishes of the sick person. This is an old phenomenon that forms one of the fundamental characteristics of modern medicine. But what more particularly characterizes the present phase in this general tendency is that in recent decades, medicine in acting beyond its traditional boundaries of ill people and diseases is taking over other areas. If in the eighteenth century, medicine had in fact gone beyond its classic limits there were still things that remained outside medicine and did not seem to be ‘medicalizable’. There were fields outside medicine and one could conceive of the existence of a bodily practice, a hygiene, a sexual morality etc., that was not controlled or codified by medicine. The French Revolution, for example, conceived of a series of projects concerning a morality of the body, a hygiene of the body, that were not in any way under the control of doctors. A kind of happy political order was imagined, in which the management of the human body, hygiene, diet and the control of sexuality corresponded to a collective and spontaneous consciousness. This ideal of a non-medical regulation of the body and of human conduct can be found throughout the nineteenth century in the work of Raspail for example.5

What is diabolical about the present situation is that whenever we want to refer to a realm outside medicine we find that it has already been medicalized. And when one wishes to object to medicine’s deficiencies, its drawbacks and its harmful effects, this is done in the name of a more complete, more refined and widespread medical knowledge. I should like to mention an example in this regard: Illich and his followers point out that therapeutic medicine, which responds to a symptomatology and blocks the apparent symptoms of diseases, is bad medicine. They propose in its stead a demedicalized art of health made up of hygiene, diet, lifestyle, work and housing conditions etc. But what is hygiene at present except a series of rules set in place and codified by biological and medical knowledge, when it is not medical authority itself that has elaborated it? Anti-medicine can only oppose medicine with facts or projects that have been already set up by a certain type of medicine. I am going to cite another example taken from the field of psychiatry. It might be argued that the first form of antipsychiatry was psychoanalysis. At the end of the nineteenth psychoanalysis was aimed at the demedicalization of various phenomena that the major psychiatric symptomatology of that same century had classified as illnesses. This antipsychiatry is a psychoanalysis, not only of hysteria and neurosis, which Freud tried to take 5 [Ed.] François Vincent Raspail, Histoire naturelle de la santé et de la maladie, suivie du

formulaire pour une nouvelle méthode de traitement hygiénique et curatif, Paris: A. Levavasseur, 2 Volumes, 1843.

14


away from psychiatrists, but also of the daily conduct which now forms the object of psychoanalytic activity. Even if psychoanalysis is now opposed by antipsychiatry and antipsychoanalysis, it is still a matter of a type of activity and discourse based on a medical perspective and knowledge. One cannot get away from medicalization, and every effort towards this end ends up referring to medical knowledge. Finally, I would like to take an example from the field of criminality and criminal psychiatry. The question posed by the penal codes of the nineteenth century consisted in determining whether an individual was mentally ill or delinquent. According to the French Code of 1810, one could not be both delinquent and insane. If you were mad, you were not delinquent, and the act committed was a symptom, not a crime, and as a result you could not be sentenced. Today an individual considered as delinquent has to submit to examination as though he were mad before being sentenced. In a certain way, at the end of the day, he is always condemned as insane. In France at least, a psychiatric expert is not summoned to give an opinion as to whether the individual was responsible for the crime. The examination is limited to finding out whether the individual is dangerous or not. What does this concept of dangerous mean? One of two things: either the psychiatrist responds that the person under treatment is not dangerous, that is, that he is not ill and is not manifesting any pathology, and that since he is not dangerous there is no reason to sentence him. (His non-pathologization allows sentence not to be passed). Or else the doctor says that the subject is dangerous because he had a frustrated childhood, because his superego is weak, because he has no notion of reality, that he has a paranoid constitution, etc. In this case the individual has been ‘pathologized’ and may be imprisoned, but he will be imprisoned because he has been identified as ill. So then, the old dichotomy in the Civil Code, which defined the subject as being either delinquent or mad, is eliminated. As a result there remain two possibilities, being slightly sick and really delinquent, or being somewhat delinquent but really sick. The delinquent is unable to escape his pathology. Recently in France, an ex-inmate wrote a book to make people understand that he stole not because his mother weaned him too soon or because his superego was weak or that he suffered from paranoia, but because he was born to steal and be a thief.6

Pathology has become a general form of social regulation. There is no longer anything outside medicine. Fichte spoke of the ‘closed commercial State’ to describe the situation of Prussia in 1810.7 One might argue in relation

6 [Ed.] Foucault is probably referring to Serge Livrozet, De la prison à la révolte. Paris:

Mercure de France, 1973. Foucault’s preface to this book also appears in Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, vol II, pp. 394-416.

7 [Ed.] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Der geschlossne Handelsstaat, Tübingen: Coota, 1800. There is no complete translation into English, but for selections, see Hans Reiss (ed.), The Political Thought of the German Romantics, 1793-1815, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955, pp. 86-102.

15


to modern society that we live in the ‘open medical States’ in which medicalization is without limits. Certain popular resistances to medicalization are due precisely to this perpetual and constant predomination. The Political Economy of Medicine Finally I should like to speak of another characteristic of modern medicine, namely, what might be called the political economy of medicine. Here again, it is not a question of a recent phenomenon, since beginning in the eighteenth century medicine and health have been presented as an economic problem. Medicine developed at the end of the eighteenth century in response to economic conditions. One must not forget that the first major epidemic studied in France in the eighteenth century and which led to a national data gathering was not really an epidemic but an epizootic. It was the catastrophic loss of life of herds of cattle in the south of France that contributed to the origin of the Royal Society of Medicine. The Academy of Medicine in France was born from an epizootic, not from an epidemic, which demonstrates that economic problems were what motivated the beginning of the organization of this medicine. It might also be argued that the great neurology of Duchenne de Boulogne, Charcot, et al., was born in the wake of the railroad accidents and work accidents that occurred around 1860, at the same time that the problems of insurance, work incapacity and the civil responsibility of employers and transporters, etc. were being posed. The economic question is certainly present in the history of medicine. But what turns out to be peculiar to the present situation is that medicine is linked to major economic problems in a different way from the traditional links. Previously, medicine was expected to provide society with strong individuals who were capable of working, of ensuring the constancy, improvement and reproduction of the work force. Medicine was called on as an instrument for the maintenance and reproduction of the work force essential to the functioning of modern society. At present, medicine connects with the economy by another route. Not simply in so far as it is capable of reproducing the work force, but also in that it can directly produce wealth in that health is a need for some and a luxury for others. Health becomes a consumer object, which can be produced by pharmaceutical laboratories, doctors, etc., and consumed by both potential and actual patients. As such, it has acquired economic and market value. Thus the human body has been brought twice over into the market: first by people selling their capacity to work, and second, through the intermediary of health. Consequently, the human body once again enters an economic market as soon as it is susceptible to diseases and health, to well being or to malaise, to joy or to pain, and to the extent that it is the object of sensations, desires, etc. As soon as the human body enters the market, through health consumption, various phenomena appear which lead to dysfunctions in the contemporary system of health and medicine.

16


Contrary to what one might expect, the introduction of the human body and of health into the system of consumption and the market did not correlatively and proportionally raise the standard of health. The introduction of health into an economic system that could be calculated and measured showed that the standard of health did not have the same social effects as the standard of living. The standard of living is defined by the consumer index. If the growth of consumption leads to an increase in the standard of living, in contrast, the growth of medical consumption does not proportionally improve the level of health. Health economists have made various studies demonstrating this. For example, Charles Levinson, in a 1964 study of the production of health, showed that an increase of 1% in the consumption of medical services led to a decrease in the level of mortality by 0.1%. This deviation might be considered as normal but only occurs as a purely fictitious model. When medical consumption is placed in a real setting, it can be observed that environmental variables, in particular food consumption, education and family income, are factors that have more influence than medical consumption on the rate of mortality. Thus, an increased income may exercise a negative effect on mortality that is twice as effective as the consumption of medication. That is, if incomes increase only in the same proportion as the consumption of medical services, the benefits of the increase in medical consumption will be cancelled out by the small increase in income. Likewise, education is two and one-half times more important for the standard of living than medical consumption. It follows that, in order to live longer, a higher level of education is preferable to the consumption of medicine. If medical consumption is placed in the context of other variables that have an effect on the rate of mortality, it will be observed that this factor is the weakest of all. Statistics in 1970 indicate that, despite a constant increase in medical consumption, the rate of mortality, which is one of the most important indicators of health, did not decrease, and remains greater for men than for women. Consequently, the level of medical consumption and the level of health have no direct relation, which reveals the economic paradox of an increase in consumption that is not accompanied by any positive effect on health, morbidity and mortality. Another paradox of the introduction of health into the political economy is that the social changes that were expected to occur via the systems of social security did not occur as expected. In reality, the inequality of consumption of medical services remains just as significant as before. The rich continue to make use of medical services more than the poor. This is the case today in France. The result is that the weakest consumers, who are also the poorest, fund the over consumption of the rich. In addition, scientific research and the great proportion of the most valuable and expensive hospital equipment are financed by social security payments, whereas the private sectors are the most profitable because they use relatively less complicated technical equipment. What in France is called the hospital hotel business, that

17


is, a brief hospitalization for minor procedures, such as a minor operation, is supported in this way by the collective and social financing of diseases.

Thus, we can see that the equalization of medical consumption that was expected from social security was watered down in favour of a system that tends more and more to reinforce the major inequalities in relation to illness and death that characterized nineteenth century society. Today, the right to equal health for all is caught in a mechanism which transforms it into an inequality. Doctors are confronted with the following problem: who profits from the social financing of medicine, the profits derived from health? Apparently doctors, but this is not in fact the case. The remuneration that doctors receive, however elevated it might be in certain countries, represents only a minor proportion of the economic benefits derived from illness and health. Those who make the biggest profits from health are the major pharmaceutical companies. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is supported by the collective financing of health and illness through social security payments from funds paid by people required to insure their health. If health consumers - that is, those who are covered by social security - are not yet fully aware of this situation, doctors are perfectly well aware of it. These professionals are more and more aware that they are being turned into almost mechanized intermediaries between the pharmaceutical industry and client demand, that is, into simple distributors of medicine and medication. We are living a situation in which certain phenomena have led to a crisis. These phenomena have not fundamentally changed since the eighteenth century, a period that marked the appearance of a political economy of health with processes of generalized medicalization and mechanisms of bio-history. The current so-called crisis in medicine is only a series of exacerbated supplementary phenomena that modify some aspects of the tendency, but did not create it.

The present situation must not be considered in terms of medicine or antimedicine, or whether or not medicine should be paid for, or whether we should return to a type of natural hygiene or paramedical bucolicism. These alternatives do not make sense. On the other hand what does make sense - and it is in this context that certain historical studies may turn out to be useful - is to try to understand the health and medical ‘take off’ in Western societies since the eighteenth century. It is important to know which model was used and how it can be changed. Finally, societies that were not exposed to this model of medical development must be examined. These societies, because of their colonial or semi-colonial status, had only a remote or secondary relation to those medical structures and are now asking for medicalization. They have a right to do so because infectious diseases affect millions of people, and it would not be valid to use an argument, in the name of an antimedical bucolicism, that if these countries do not suffer from these infections they will later experience degenerative illnesses as in Europe. It must be determined whether the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European model of medical development should be reproduced as is, or modified and to what extent it

18


can be effectively applied to these societies without the negative consequences we already know. Therefore, I believe that an examination of the history of medicine has a certain utility. It is a matter of acquiring a better knowledge, not so much of the present crisis in medicine, which is a false concept, but of the model for the historical development of medicine since the eighteenth century with a view to seeing how it is possible to change it. This is the same problem that prompted modern economists to engage in the study of the European economic ‘take off’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a view to seeing how this model of development could be adapted to non-industrialized societies. One needs to adopt the same modesty and pride as the economists in order to argue that medicine should not be rejected or adopted as such; that medicine forms part of an historical system. It is not a pure science, but is part of an economic system and of a system of power. It is necessary to determine what the links are between medicine, economics, power and society in order to see to what extent the model might be rectified or applied.

19

foucault studies © Neil Levy, 2004


ARTICLE Foucault as Virtue Ethicist Neil Levy, University of Melbourne ABSTRACT: In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo‐American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule‐based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest that seeing Foucault and virtue ethicists as engaged in a convergent project sheds light on a number of obscurities in Foucault’s thought, and provides us with a historical narrative in which to situate his claims about the development of Western moral thought. It is impossible for anyone who attempts to keep abreast of recent developments in both Anglo‐American and Continental philosophy not to be struck by a certain convergence between important strands of their ethical thought. On the one hand, we have the later work of Michel Foucault, and his ‘return to the Greeks’.1 On the other, we have a host of philosophers in the Anglo‐American tradition, often calling themselves ‘virtue ethicists’, who have sought in Aristotelianism a new way of conceptualizing the problems of ethics.2 As I shall show, the apparent similarities between the two bodies of work is more than a surface appearance, but reflects a real convergence in the thought of the two traditions. The work of each side can thus be read so as to illuminate that of the other.3

1 The major texts of Foucault’s last period are the second and third volumes of The

History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), hereafter cited in the text as UP; and The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley, (London: Penguin Books, 1986).

2 On virtue ethics, see the articles collected in Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds) Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1997).

3 I take myself here to be engaged in the project of shedding light on a little appreciated point of convergence between Foucault and an important strand of Anglo‐American ethical thought, a convergence that suggests that greater dialogue between the Continental and Analytic traditions, at least on these questions, would prove fruitful. I should not like my argument to be understood to play down the very real differences in the stakes, styles and methods of the two major kinds of Western

20

Levy: Foucault as Virtue Ethicist

Foucault and the Virtues Virtue ethicists are united by one core thesis: that modern moral theories have placed far too much stress on, variously, rules, duties and consequences, and accordingly have overlooked the true primary locus of ethics: the character of the agent. They argue that the debate that dominated moral philosophy in the analytic tradition for much of the twentieth century, between deontologists and consequentialists, has ended in impasse precisely because both ignore the centrality of character. Moral philosophical debate can no longer afford to ignore a third ethical tradition, that which centres around the virtues. Virtue ethicists call upon us to cultivate desirable character traits. Rather than seeking rules or principles following which would lead to good consequences or fulfil our duties, we should seek to behave justly, compassionately, charitably – to display the virtues in our actions. The proponents of this view claim for it a number of substantial advantages over its deontological and consequentialist rivals. It is widely held to be truer to the phenomenology of ordinary moral life, in which we are moved by concern for others, not principles, duties or consequences. It avoids the counterintuitive implication, apparently common to its rivals, that we act wrongly in caring more for our intimates than for strangers. It is, supposedly, less bloodless and abstract – an ethics for all of us, not just for philosophers, yet also, it is claimed, the ethics that gives the best account of the actions of moral exemplars down the ages. Socrates and Confucius, Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King each displayed the virtues, rather than guiding their behavior by rules or thoughts of consequences. Foucault, working in an intellectual environment in which utilitarianism has rarely seemed to be a live option, is not much concerned with opposing it. However, important elements of the project he developed in his last works are strikingly similar to virtue ethical thought. Foucault distinguishes two primary elements of the ethical domain: in certain moralities the main emphasis is placed on the code, on its

systematicity, its richness, its capacity to adjust to every possible case and to embrace every area of behavior [...] On the other hand, it is easy to conceive of moralities in which the strong and dynamic element is to be sought in the forms of subjectivation and the practices of the self. In this case, the system of codes may be rather rudimentary. Their exact observance may be relatively unimportant, at least compared with what is required of the individual in the relationship which he has with himself (UP: 29, 30).

philosophy. On the degree to which Analytic and Continental philosophy differ from each other, and the prospects for reconciliation between them, see my ‘Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences’, Metaphilosophy, April 2003.

21


Thus, while virtue ethicists typically oppose their thought to both consequentialism and deontology, Foucault sees his project as being to correct the over‐emphasis in moral thought upon codification. Against this tendency, he reasserts the importance of the relation of the self to itself in ethics. He would have us return to the practice of the Greeks, for whom

in order to behave properly, in order to practice freedom, it was necessary to care for self, both in order to know one’s self [...] and to improve oneself.4

Though all moralities contain both codes and relations to self, the two are mutually exclusive in the sense that an increase in one automatically causes a decrease in the other. Thus, Foucault tells us, that where the codes are numerous and detailed, ‘practices of the self [...] almost fade away’.5 But finding an adequate place for liberty in ethics requires that the practices of the self remain vital. An over‐emphasis on codification decreases the margin of liberty, just as over‐codification in politics ‘sterilizes both intellectual life and political debate’.6 We have seen that virtue ethicists, unlike Foucault, are concerned with the rejection of consequentialism, as well as codification. But their favored replacement as the locus of ethical thought is the same as Foucault’s, the character of the agent. For John McDowell, for example, the question ‘How should one live?’ is ‘necessarily approached via the notion of the virtuous person. A conception of right conduct is grasped, as it were, from the inside out’.7 Moreover, the virtue ethicists, though not concerned exclusively with opposing codification, nevertheless give its rejection special emphasis. For them, as much as for Foucault, the new emphasis on character is the concomitant of increased suspicion with regard to the place of rules in ethics.8 For McDowell, the belief that such codes play the major role in ethics is simply a particular form of a more general prejudice: that ‘acting in the light

4 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of Care of the Self as Practice of Freedom’, J.D. Gauthier

(trans), in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, The Final Foucault (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 5. . Hereafter cited in the text as ECS.

5. Michel Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’, A. Sheridan (trans), in Lawrence Kritzman (ed), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977‐1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 260.

6 Michel Foucault, ‘Pour en finir avec les mensonges’, in Le Nouvel Observateur (June 21‐7, 1985), p. 61. My translation.

7 John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’ in Crisp and Slote, p. 141. 8 Indeed, it has been argued that one of the primary appeals of virtue ethics is that ‘it

promises a nonskeptical response to the failure of codification’. (Gary Watson, ‘On the Primacy of Character’ in Owen Flanagan and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty Identity, Character and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990)., p. 454).

22


of a specific conception of rationality must be explicable in terms of being guided by a formulable universal principle’ (148). When we cease to be blinded by this prejudice, it will be apparent that

If one attempted to reduce one’s conception of what virtue requires to a set of rules, then, however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike one as wrong (148).

Like the later Foucault, virtue ethicists seek to replace what they see as a misplaced stress on codes with an ethics centred around the self. Moreover, they find this ethics of the self in the same source: the ethical thought of the ancients. To be sure, the ancient sources drawn upon by virtue ethicists in the Anglo‐American tradition, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other, are somewhat different. Most virtue ethicists draw mainly from Aristotle, in particular the Nichomachean Ethics, whereas Foucault is more concerned with later, Hellenistic and Roman, developments of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions.9 However, this difference should not be over‐emphasized. From the point of view of the mainstream of modern ethical thought, with its emphasis upon codification, the differences between these schools are relatively insignificant. They represent differing views on the best way to elaborate an ethics based upon the relationship of the self to itself, on an internecine debate between proponents of a radical alternative to mainstream philosophical thought. Moreover, the differences between Aristotelian and later approaches to ethics are somewhat softened in the respective developments of the two traditions by contemporary thinkers. On the one hand, Anglo‐American thinkers are by no means ignorant of later developments in ancient ethical thought.10 For his part, Foucault abandons key elements of Hellenistic ethics in his reinterpretation of it, especially their claim, contra Aristotle, that living the good life depends only on the resource of the self, rather than also requiring a conducive social, political and economic environment.11 For all their differences, Foucault and Anglo‐American virtue ethicists can therefore be seen as engaging in convergent enterprises: a mobilization of ancient, character‐based, ethics against modern, codification‐based, thought. Moreover, perhaps as much due to their

9 I thank an anonymous referee for encouraging me to think about this difference in the

sources of each. 10 For influential work in the Anglo‐American tradition which emphasizes later Ancient

thought, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

11 I argue for this in interpretation of the later Foucault in my Being Up‐To‐Fate: Foucault, Sartre and Postmodernity (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).

23


differences as their striking similarities, these are mutually illuminating enterprises. It is apparent that their strikingly similar diagnoses of the malaise of modern ethics, and of the means by which it will be cured, commit both to a historical thesis. If modern ethics has gone wrong by over‐emphasizing the role of rules, and the solution is to be found in classical thought, then the history which led from late Antiquity to modernity must be a history of the fading away of practices of the self, and their replacement by codes. In fact, both sides do indeed tell such a historical story. For Foucault, for example,

[The] elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art was at the centre [...] of moral experience, of the will to morality in Antiquity, whereas in Christianity [...] morality took on increasingly the form of a code of rules.12

Foucault appears to suggest that the transition from an ethics centred on practices of the self to a more strictly codified morality was the reverse side of a transformation in the primary target of ethics. Whereas classical ethics had as its primary target the concern for self, later morality emphasized ‘the care one must show others’ (ECS: 5). As a result, the care of the self was ‘denounced as being a kind of self‐love, a kind of egoism’ (4). Rather than caring for herself, the Christian was exhorted to sacrifice herself for others (5). The virtue ethicist tells a similar story about the transition from an ethics of virtue to a more codified morality. In her seminal ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, for example, Elizabeth Anscombe tells how we arrived at the strange sense we give to the word ‘ought’ and to the concepts of moral duty and moral obligation. We feel them to have some kind of absolute force; they ‘imply some absolute verdict’.13 The most obvious model here is the Kantian categorical imperative, which is supposedly binding upon all rational agents regardless of their wants, desires or social status, but the same kind of force has widely been taken to be definitive of moral judgments. However, such an absolutely binding force was absent from the judgments of Classical ethics. How, then, it did come about that our terms for moral obligation acquired this strange sense?

The answer, Anscombe tells us, is historical: ‘between Aristotle and us came Christianity, with its law conception of ethics’ (30). Christianity held that moral obligations were laid down by the word of God, fixed forever in His commandments. Moral duties were thus strictly codified. As a result of the long domination of Christianity over our thought, ‘the concepts of being bound, permitted, or excused became deeply embedded in our language and thought’ (30). 12. Michel Foucault, ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’ Alan Sheridan (trans), in Kritzman, p. 49. 13 G.E.M. Anscombe ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ in Crisp and Slote, p. 30. Hereafter

cited in the text as MMP.

24


Thus Anscombe’s diagnosis of the crisis in modern moral thought: The language in which we think our morality has its source in a conception of ethics as divine law. Hence, the absolutely binding force which, we feel, somehow attaches to moral judgments. At the same time, however, we live in a profoundly post‐theistic world. We still have the terms that stem from this conception, they still retain their essentially theistic connotations, but we no longer believe in the cosmology that once imbued them with significance. As a result, our moral terms no longer have any ‘reasonable sense’ (33). They are anachronisms, simply survivals from a past way of thought. What are we to do, faced with this situation? Give up on our peculiar moral terms, Anscombe counsels:

the concepts of obligation and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say —and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conceptions of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it (MMP: 26).

These ethical terms are, literally, nonsensical without the framework which once made them meaningful. And, in any case, we know we can do ethics without them. We have the example of Aristotle, who did not even possess a term for ‘illicit’ (31)—that is, contrary to the (moral) law. Thus, Anscombe counsels us to reject deontological and consequentialist ethics, in favor of a thought which concentrates instead on the character of the agent—a virtue ethics. Such an ethics would no longer judge acts as contrary to or in conformity with the law, but would instead assess them as exhibiting, or failing to exhibit, some particular virtue: ‘It would be a great improvement if, instead of “morally wrong”, one always named a genus such as “untruthful”, “unchaste”, “unjust”’ (MMP: 34). If I am right, Anscombe’s narrative, and her proposed solution, can illuminate Foucault’s last works. Her thesis provides a powerful justification for Foucault’s search for an aesthetics of existence. Foucault, too, recognizes that codified ethics is in decline:

The idea of a morality as obedience 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.14

But Foucault does not provide us with an explanation for this decline (or even a clear definition of what this decline consists in).15 Anscombe’s narrative, with

14. ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, p. 49. 15 As an anonymous referee pointed out to me, Foucault does provide hints that suggest

that he, like Anscombe, sees the decline in religious belief– the so‐called Death of God

25


its parallel account of the replacement of ancient conceptions of ethos by the codified morality of Christianity, and its similar call for a new emphasis on the agent, rather than the rules, is, at very least, fully compatible with Foucault’s later work. We can therefore look to it to provide us with the missing piece of the puzzle: the explanation for the decline of codified morality. As we have seen, Anscombe provides that explanation via a further historical thesis, to do with the decline in belief, which leaves the laws without the context that made them both meaningful and motivating. The Primacy of the Self If I am right thus far, it may be that virtue ethics can help shed light on some other puzzling aspects of Foucault’s work. In particular, perhaps it can shed light on the place he gave to the notion of the care of the self, and the reasons he may have had for thinking that such care is an indispensable part of ethics. The Greeks, Foucault tells us, assumed that “the one who cared for himself correctly found himself, by that very fact, in a measure to behave correctly in relation to others and for others” (ECS: 7). This seems very strange to us. Surely ethics has as its subject matter, its very substance, the relation the self has to others, not to the self? How ought we to understand the claim that, in ethics, the self and not the other is primary? It is easy to misunderstand Foucault’s claims here. We might think, first, that he is claiming that while ethics is necessarily concerned primarily with the care for the other, this care is best secured by way of a detour through the self. If this were the case, then the relation to the other would remain primary, and the emphasis on the self would be relegated to a mere means. But Foucault explicitly denies that the relation to the other is primary in any sense: “One must not have the care for others precede the care for self. The care for self takes moral precedence in the measure that the relation to self takes ontological precedence” (ECS: 7). We cannot, therefore, interpret away Foucault’s emphasis on the primacy of the care for the self in ethics. He does not mean it metaphorically, or strategically; he means, quite literally, that in ethics the relation to self in primary. Second, we might interpret Foucault as denying the importance of ethics. Perhaps he is giving Anscombe’s narrative a Nietzschean twist: with the death of God and the subsequent undermining of the concept of ethical obligation, we should simply give up on the project of morality. We—we strong ones—should shake off its shackles, and realize our full potential, taking care of ourselves. But this interpretation, too, is in conflict with

–as central to the decline in codified morality. However, Foucault provides no more than hints; perhaps he intended to develop an account in later volumes of the History of Sexuality.

26


Foucault’s explicit pronouncements. The care for the self does not exclude caring for others, but is its condition:

Care for self is ethical in itself, but it implies complex relations with others, in the measure where this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others [...] Ethos implies also a relation with others to the extent that care for self renders one competent to occupy a place in the city, in the community or in interindividual relationships which are proper (ECS: 7).

How are these seemingly contradictory statements to be harmonized? How can the care for self be— ontologically and ethically—primary, yet still serve as the ground of an ethics which is nevertheless concerned for others? Once again, I think the solution is to be found in virtue ethics. What is the foundation of ethics, according to the virtue theorists? To what can we refer, when we need to decide which character traits are virtues, which vices? What, in the absence of divine law, can play this role? Many (though by no means all) virtue theorists are Wittgensteinian on this question: what underlies our ethics, and rescues our lists of virtues and vices from individual caprice, is our shared forms of life. More specifically, as part of our socalization into a particular form of life, certain kinds of character are held up to us as exemplary. Through explicit teaching, through the narratives we are told, and through the practices of praising and blaming, we are led to adopt a certain character, one which will incorporate as many as possible of the traits our culture considers to be virtues. In this training, what we do is often more important than what we say—if our parents and teachers tell us that meekness is a virtue, for example, but neither practice it themselves, nor praise it in others, it is likely to be their example, and not their pronouncements, which take hold. It is this conception of the kinds of character worth cultivating which guide us when we act. We can, as John McDowell points out, depict moral deliberation in the form of an Aristotelian practical syllogism, in which the role of major premise is played by ‘the virtuous person’s conception of the sort of life a human being should lead’.16 It is not, therefore, the dictates of reason, or the intuition of a transcendent realm of timeless moral facts, or the word of God that justifies our morality; it is our inculcated interest in being a certain kind of person. As Sabina Lovibond puts it:

moral categories [...] can be seen as registering distinctions which are of unconditional practical interest to us in virtue of our concern to live a life deserving of praise and not of contempt. Nothing, short of indifference to that aim, can make moral considerations irrelevant; and we naturally think of them, further, as overriding other kinds of considerations, since there seems

16 McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, p. 156

27


to be some incoherence involved in setting aside the constraints imposed on one’s conduct by the design one seeks to impress upon one’s whole life.17

We might think that this vision of morality is frightening, in as much as it seems to make adherence to its strictures optional, the contingent outcome of a practice of teaching or, merely, as Philippa Foot puts it, ‘a system of hypothetical imperatives’.18 Indeed, this vision of ethics makes its force contingent upon our having been brought up in a certain way. Objectivity becomes merely a matter of adopting the correct—that is to say, socially endorsed—standpoint. But, as Lovibond argues, that just is what objectivity means, not merely in ethics, but everywhere. To judge objectively means to judge from a standpoint which approximates that of the ideal observer, and we adopt this particular standpoint

not because experience has shown that the particular standpoint is the one which offers the best view of reality; rather, it is because reality is defined as that which one apprehends when one looks at the world from the standpoint in question (59).

On this account, ethics is no less objective than is perception: both get their significance from our shared forms of life. Our forms of life, specifically our practices of praising and blaming, lead us to internalize certain character traits as exemplary. Thus, virtue ethics claims that moral judgments owe their force ultimately to the assessments we make, that certain actions, omissions and dispositions express certain traits of character, traits that are virtuous or vicious. It is this fact that accounts for the primacy of the interest one ought to take in the shape of one’s life. Our concern to live a certain kind of life, a concern which, given that we are fundamentally social beings, we cannot not have, provides the ground for our morality. Ethics, defined as the relation of the self to itself, precedes morality, understood as the relation to the other. Reading Foucault through the lens of virtue ethics, it becomes apparent that he understood this primacy in the same manner. It is the primacy of character that explains the simultaneous moral and ontological precedence of the relation to the self over the relation to the other. Though we are concerned, in moral philosophy, largely with how we should treat each other, this concern has as its precondition the relation we have to ourselves. At the same time, however, we ought not to repeat the error made by Christianity, of confusing this relation to the self with an egoism, onto which a concern for

17 Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p.

52. 18 Philippa Foot, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, in Michael Smith

(ed) Meta‐Ethics (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1995).

28


others may, or may not, be grafted. The care for the self is simultaneously a caring for others, for there is an intimate relation between the achievement of the desired relation to the self and other‐directed actions. We do not possess the virtues of courage, or kindness, for example, unless we are disposed to act courageously or kindly in appropriate circumstances. Moreover, the surest way to cultivate these virtues is by acting appropriately: virtues involve a kind of knowledge, and this knowledge is acquired only through practice. As Lovibond argues, moral concepts can only be acquired, and refined, by way of participation in appropriate practices:

The use of moral concepts by individual speakers (as they progressively acquire competence in that area of language) is grounded in an increasingly diversified capacity for participation in social practices, i.e. practices mediated by language or other symbolic systems (32‐3).

Thus the concern for the self does not stand opposed to a concern for others, but is its essential condition. Only through an appropriate concern for myself do I become an ethical subject. Indeed, and in stark contrast to the selflessness of the Christian tradition, Foucault holds that the abuse of power over others is not the result of an excess of concern with the self. It stems, precisely, from its lack:

the risk of dominating others and exercising over them a tyrannical power only comes from the fact that one did not care for one’s self and that one has become a slave to his desires (ECS: 8).

The primacy of the relationship to the self in ethics is neither the regrettable outcome of the egoism of human psychology, nor the expression of a fundamental amoralism. Rather, it provides the grounds for concern for others. Without the relation to self, we would not be concerned about others at all. We would not, in fact, be concerned about anything. The Continuity of Foucault’s Concerns It seems, therefore, that Anglo‐American virtue ethicists are engaged in an enterprise that runs parallel to, and can illuminate, Foucault’s later recovery of practices of the self. However, there is one obvious objection to my claim that Foucault can profitably be read as a virtue ethicist. Someone might argue as follows: Foucault cannot have been engaged in the project of elaborating a virtue ethics, because such an ethics runs counter to the deepest currents in his thought, from first to last. A virtue ethics is concerned with the interiority of the subject, with what she is, rather than with what she does; virtue

29


theorists emphasize ‘Being over Doing, the Inner over the Outer’.19 But Foucault always rejected such an emphasis, and devoted much of his work to demonstrating its pernicious consequences. Discipline and Punish, for example, is largely concerned with an analysis of the ‘colonization’ of the judicial system by an essentializing psychology, which would attempt to fix our identities.20 The History of Sexuality is concerned with the same process of essentialization, this time through the mechanism of a supposedly natural sexuality.21 It is implausible that Foucault would have gone back on this life‐long commitment. Moreover, this was a commitment that Foucault himself reaffirmed in discussion of his last works, stating that ‘a moral experience essentially centered on the subject no longer seems satisfactory to me today’.22 Whatever Foucault may have been doing in these last works, our imagined objector concludes, it cannot have been elaborating a virtue ethics. This objection is not without some force. It is indeed true that many virtue ethicists speak of the virtues as capacities that allow us to realize our distinctively human natures, and that such talk about human nature was—rightly—anathema to Foucault. It is his continuing rejection of such a nature that Foucault expresses in his rejection of the subject. But I do not believe that this objection establishes that Foucault was not engaged in the project of elaborating a virtue ethics. What Foucault’s work demonstrates is that such an ethics can proceed without a notion of the subject, if by ‘subject’ we understand a being whose essence is fixed in advance. It is here that Foucault’s talk about self‐stylization, about the aesthetics of existence, comes into its own. Cultivating the virtues is not a process of uncovering a pre‐existing nature, it is a matter of creating oneself in a certain way. The virtuous self is not something to be discovered, or a potentiality implicit in all human beings that ought to be realized; it is created, in much the same way as we might create a sculpture or a painting. Foucault’s virtue ethics thus focuses, not on the subject, but on the character of the individual. While a subject is something given in advance, character is the set of dispositions and motivations to act into which we are acculturated and which we may then choose to cultivate or reject. According to this picture, if the self has depths, it is only because it has created them. Here too, though, Foucault is not a lone voice, but working in an area that has also been cultivated by at least some virtue ethicists. Basing virtues, not on nature but upon acquired dispositions is the direction in which the more

19 Robert B. Louden ‘On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics’, in Crisp and Slote, p. 213 20 ‘[B]behind the pretext of explaining an action, are ways of defining an individual’.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 18.

21 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

22 Foucault, ‘The Return of Morality’, in Kritzman, p. 253.

30


Wittgensteinian of these theorists have also looked. Foucault’s work thus participates in the development of that current of virtue ethics which Gary Watson calls ‘tradition‐based theory’.23 On such a theory, ‘the concept of tradition somehow does the work that the concept of human nature does in the Aristotelian view’.24 Foucault’s careful demonstrations of the pernicious uses to which concepts of a human essence have been put do not disqualify him from being considered as a virtue ethicist. But they do give us powerful reasons to prefer some versions of virtue ethics over others. Foucault’s last works thus show us how we might continue to do ethics after we have followed him in rejecting a substantive conception of the subject. It stands as an example to other virtue theorists, just as his earlier work stands as a warning to them against acceptance of the notion of human nature. Perhaps it also stands as another kind of warning as well. If I am right, if Foucault’s last work can indeed usefully be read as participating in the project of elaborating a new virtue ethics for late modernity, then this work could undoubtedly have been rescued from a number of obscurities and hesitations had Foucault engaged with the parallel projects of the Anglo‐American virtue ethicists. At the same time, those virtue ethicists who seek to elaborate a tradition‐based theory, and reject the notion of human nature, would find in Foucault both a powerful justification for their position and an example as to how they might proceed. Perhaps, then, the fact that we can now see what value each could have been to the other should stand as a warning to those of us in both philosophical traditions, that in ignoring the work of the other we risk inhibiting the development of our own.25

23 I have defended the view that the aesthetics of existence should be understood as a

self‐stylization on the basis of traditions in my Being Up‐To‐Date. For Foucault, ‘the practices of self’ are ‘not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (ECS: 11).

24 Watson, p. 468, n. 24. On this view, Watson adds, human nature merely ‘places boundary conditions on culture, but by itself yields no definite content for the moral life [....] Human nature must be made determinate by socialization’.

25 I would like to thank two anonymous referees for Foucault Studies for a number of helpful comments on this article.

31

foucault studies © Jeremy Moss, 2004


ARTICLE Foucault and Left Conservatism Jeremy Moss, University of Melbourne ABSTRACT: The consequences of Foucault’s work for political theory have been subject to much reinterpretation. This article examines the reception of Foucault’s work by the political left, and argues that the use made of his work is overly negative and lacks a positive political dimension. Through a discussion of the work of Judith Butler and other interpreters of Foucault I argue that the problem facing the poststructuralist left is formulated in a confusing and unhelpful manner, what I will call the ‘dilemma of the left libertarian’. Once we get around this formulation of the problem a more progressive political response becomes possible. I end by discussing the political possibilities of Foucault’s work in terms of an account of autonomy derived from Foucault’s later work on the Enlightenment. KEY WORDS: Foucault, Butler, Autonomy, Politics, Ethics, Critique, Left, Conservative, Rorty, Habermas I: Introduction The conjunction between Foucault and political theory is now well established. However, even though political theory and Foucault have been intimately linked in recent years the results have often been rather disappointing. Foucault scholarship has promised much yet delivered little that is useful for a left obviously struggling to define its goals. Many of those, on the left at least, influenced by Foucault have failed to reconcile egalitarian goals such as equality, material redistribution and human rights with the claims of poststructuralist political ontology concerning power, subjectivity or truth. From recent accounts of the significance of Foucault’s work one gets the impression that the goal of a progressive politics is to reiterate the claim that because there is no philosophical basis from which to articulate a politics, we should confine ourselves to negative and local claims. Where Foucault’s work is concerned, my complaint is that this attitude is neither in keeping with his texts themselves or with what is possible within the framework of his thought. What so many of his interpreters have done is to ignore the politically positive dimension of his work (which is elaborated in his discussion of what he calls the ‘enlightenment ethos’), in favour of the

32

Moss: Foucault and Left Conservatism

negative dimension. All too often interpreters of Foucault see the relevance of his work to be contained in the critical rather than constructive side of his enterprise, and for egalitarians this is less than satisfactory. I want to argue that surely this is not the sole point of a progressive politics. What has been lost here is the idea that the aims of a left or progressive politics should not be just to refuse certain definitions of the self or power, although this is important, but to argue for and articulate positive alternatives that will both alleviate oppression and enable people. One of the major causes of this impasse is the absence of a positive position that has more than local applicability. Whereas the ‘Old’ left was renowned for its insistence on such principles, it is now increasingly unlikely to find much that goes beyond a very restricted localism. This impasse is nicely encapsulated in a recent debate concerning ‘Left Conservatism’, which re‐opened the question of how we might have a progressive political position while still upholding many of the insights that poststructualist thinkers such as Foucault have developed. What struck me as important about this debate was that it addressed the issue of what sort of politics is possible when working with frameworks informed by poststructuralist thought.1 The ostensible context for the debate was the term ‘Left Conservatism’, which denotes a position that attacks at least two things about the poststructuralist left: the alleged obscurantism that infects so much of its dialogue, a kind of intellectual fog emanating from Paris ⎯ as the Left Conservatives might say; and the epistemological and political anti‐foundationalism of theorists such as Butler. In turn, Butler and others argued that leftists such as Richard Rorty or Nancy Fraser were conservative because they ostensibly put forward a foundation for their political views. Neither of the above claims about poststructuralism are particularly new and I do not want to be taken as giving them credence. Why this debate strikes me as important, however, is that it highlights the issue of the conjunction of poststructuralist thought and political theory and the issue of whether this marriage is sometimes a marriage in name only. In order to get the issues in this debate in perspective I will briefly describe some of Judith Butler’s substantial normative claims, made in this debate and elsewhere, because I think Butler’s work encapsulates some of the problems that are central to poststructuralist political theory, especially as it relates to Foucault. She also specifically identifies herself as engaging in a dialogue with elements of the left. My goal in what follows will be to show why Butler and others falsely diagnose the problems facing the Left and 1 The debate took the form of a one day workshop in 1998 involving Judith Butler,

Wendy Brown, Paul Bové and a number of other figures who are variously associated with either the academic left or poststructuralism. The debate was published in the electronic journal Theory and Event 2:2. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/toc/archive.html#2.2

33


poststructuralist theory. The concern that I have with Butler’s work in particular is that she formulates the problem facing the poststructuralist left in a confusing and unhelpful manner, what I will call the ‘dilemma of the left libertarian’, a position that is really just a weak version of liberalism, which is a less than satisfactory return on her radical rhetoric. Once we get around this formulation of the problem a more progressive political response becomes possible, and I will pursue this problem through a discussion of some recent interpreters of Foucault and through Foucault’s work itself. My reason for choosing Foucault is that his work has obviously had an enormous impact on the intersection of poststructuralist thought and politics, yet has often been used to form very traditional political conclusions. In contrast, when describing the ethos he admires Foucault is quite explicit in his portrayal of the ethos as containing a positive and enabling component, which is, in my view, compatible with his other philosophical commitments. As an antidote to the limitations of the approach of Butler and others, my key claim will be that Foucault’s work offers us a version of autonomy that is consistent with some of his other insights concerning power and subjectivity, that it can also function as a political principle that is not always confined to local applications and that has a positive component, thereby offering a better response to the problems facing contemporary left thought. Before preceding let me make it clear what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that one should not reflect on what we might call ‘political ontology’, the basic terms of political theory; power, contract, obligation and so on, as so many Foucaultians do to great effect. Such tasks are clearly at the heart of what political theorists should be doing. Rather, what I want to argue is that such reflections should not have to end in the unnecessarily limited and negative conclusions typical of Butler’s approach. I am also unashamedly pursuing a project that seeks to conjoin Foucault with a left or progressive stance. Some might see this as an exercise doomed to failure; that we should not think of Foucault in terms of left or right. But again, I think this is unwarranted. With respect to Butler, I should note that I am not trying to be comprehensive in respect to her work. I am really only interested in those parts of her work that deal directly with the political questions I have outlined and that are raised by the Left Conservative debate. Butler and the Political: Difference vs Unity? In the Left Conservative debate itself and elsewhere Butler criticises other elements of the left for being reductionist and advancing a false unity between different subjects. The unity is unappealing for Butler because it rests on a dangerous reduction of subjects’ interests to class interests, thereby ignoring other, non‐class based, differences. Her claim is that we need to rigorously adhere to the tenets of poststructuralist social and political

34


ontology, which tell us that our foundational terms cannot be grounded ‘in any kind of permanent way’. Without proper respect for these kinds of theses the left is doomed, on Butler’s view, to repeat the mistakes of the past.2 Butler thinks of anti‐foundationalism as being opposed to a type of universalism that, in the language she prefers, subjects the differences in and between people and groups to a form of ‘violence’.3 Such homogenising acts, she claims, do not respect the ineradicable differences that exist between subjects. The resistance to this sort of unity, as she puts it, ‘carries with it the cipher of democratic promise on the left’. Nonetheless, interestingly, despite such suspicions, Butler admits that the language of universal human rights is impossible to ignore in the political arena.4 Butler expresses a distrust of any position which claims that there are political truths that apply universally even at a very general level because these universals cannot be given a proper foundation; they are conceptually impossible and practically dangerous as her recent work with Laclau and Zizek attempts to show.5 In fact, Butler seems to see this problem as a dilemma of the following sort: either one is for a type of ahistorical justification of norms or principles that ignores human differences (which she is not) or one accepts that there are no such justifications and, consequently, no universal political norms. I will call this the dilemma of the ‘left libertarian’. It is a dilemma because the choice of the first alternative leads one into conflict with some of the crucial metaphysical claims concerning difference and historical causation, whereas the second choice runs foul of egalitarianism. Either way one is stranded. Describing this position as libertarian is appropriate because of Butlerʹs staunch refusal, in the literature here under consideration, to articulate anything other than a respect for ‘negative’ norms that operate to protect individual freedoms. But let me be more precise. What her position seems to rule out are general criteria for judging and orienting action because this would introduce a false unity to subjects’ experiences and a positive content to her politics.

2 Judith Butler, ‘Left Conservatism II’, Theory & Event, 2:2, (1998): sct 4,

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v002/2.2butler.html3 Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, New Left Review, (1998): p. 44. 4 Ibid. 5 In her article “Restaging the universal; hegemony and the limits of formalism”, in

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), Butler uses a discussion of Hegel to make the point that the universal, at a conceptual level, will always exclude the concrete or particular but that what is excluded leaves a trace in the universal. She goes on to argue that this process is important for political theory as regimes that have set themselves up as representing the universal are invariably engaged in exclusionary practices.

35

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v002/2.2butler.html


As it stands, this dilemma rules out a progressive political position with any substance for Butler.6 However, understanding the problem in this way misrepresents the situation in which progressive politics finds itself. The issue should not be seen as a choice between those, on the one hand, who think difference precludes unity or any sort of universalism, and those, on the other, who think there is an ahistorical unity, which does not respect different subjectivities. Rather, the issue should be seen as one between an acceptable use of universalism — one that knows its limits, which I will call ‘transversalism’ — and one that does not. Butler and many others have misread the problem because they have set up a false dichotomy between universalism and difference that has bedevilled the debates between the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ left for years. The result is a reluctance to put forward positive or non‐local principles, which erects a significant barrier to progressive political theory. In what follows, I will use Foucault’s own work to show that the political options for poststructuralism are not confined to negative political claims. I will articulate how this new way of seeing the problem allows us a way out of the left libertarian dilemma. I want now to consider where echoes of this dilemma can be found in the reception of Foucault’s work. II: Foucault; his Critics and Supporters Foucaultʹs work has elicited similar objections to those made by the left conservatives about poststructuralist influenced political theory. Foucault’s initial reception in political circles was dominated by his perceived inability to account for the basis of normative judgement and action. Foucault’s later research opens up possible routes for a defence against these charges.7 Nonetheless, the charge that there is no foundation for critical assessments 6 It is ironic that one of the mistakes made by Butler is to assume that her conclusions

about a lack of universality in normative thought applies in the same way to all the different categories of this thought. It is as though she thinks that it is the same class of things that are universalised in politics, ethics and metaphysics. Part of the reason for Butler and others construing the situation in this way is because of an improper analogy between disagreement in metaphysics (‘violence’, as she calls it) and disagreements in politics or, more particularly, in theories of justice. Disagreement over fundamental issues in metaphysics may be the result of differences that perhaps just cannot be resolved. But not all disagreement in political theory is like that. We may disagree over what it is for any one of us to lead a fulfilling life but agree on the respect for anotherʹs views or the need not to harm others. These two assumptions are fundamental to any plausible politics (certainly any left politics) and constitute part of the basis for politics such that there can be disagreements without it meaning that differences are ignored. So Butler is wrong to make the analogy she does between metaphysics and politics.

7 I discuss this issue at greater length in my ‘Introduction’, The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, (London: Sage Publications, 1998).

36


persists, especially among supporters of Foucault themselves. This is partly because there seems to be a marked conservatism in how Foucault is used. There is certainly a reluctance on the part of many of Foucault’s interpreters to take anything but a very weak position on the possibilities of Foucault’s work for politics and ethics, which, as I mentioned, ignores the positive side of the Enlightenment ethos. Those who think that Foucault’s later discussion of ethics and government offers us fresh insights into how we can conduct ethical inquiries often locate the benefits of the approach in the contrast between ethics and morality. What Foucault admired about the Greek model of ethics, understood as the selfʹs relationship to the self, was that there was a certain amount of freedom to transform oneself in relation to a moral code. In effect, Foucault was attracted by the autonomy allowed by the Greek model of the relation between morality, seen as a code, and ethics. Some take this to be a rejection of a sterile appeal to overly formalised rules in favour of a more open form of inquiry into the good. Others, like Rorty, see this type of Foucaultian position as an acknowledgment of the type of anti‐foundationalism wherein appeals to truth claims or notions like interest or rationality are just engaging renditions of one’s own subjective position.8Notwithstanding these doubts, Foucault’s lack of emphasis on overarching moral codes has been developed and discussed by a number of sympathetic interpreters. However, they seem to use his work in a way that is reminiscent of Butler’s approach. For example, in a recent article on Foucault, James Bernauer and Michael Mahon argue that Foucault’s later work does allow for an identifiable ethical stance that cannot simply be equated with aesthetic self‐absorption. They rightly point out that phrases such as ‘we have to create ourselves as a work of art’, have led to a great deal of misinterpretation of Foucault’s later work.9 The authors argue that what phrases such as the one above direct us to is the effort of struggling for a kind of freedom, which is closely attuned to whatever historical contingencies we find ourselves surrounded by. This, at least, is a positive view that accords a measure of complexity to Foucault’s later position. Nonetheless, the authors still shy away from any of the serious ethical or political consequences of even this

8 It is interesting to note that Rorty, from initially being a quite savage critic of

Foucault, came around to thinking of Foucault as a fellow traveller down the pragmatist liberal path when it came to normative questions. For Rorty, the upshot of Foucault’s position is that there is no deep philosophical reason for our obligations to other human beings. This is an interpretation of Foucault that sees him, along with Dewey, as having given up the ‘hope of universalism’, Richard Rorty, ʹMoral Identity and Private Autonomy: the Case of Foucaultʹ, in Essays on Heidegger and Others, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): pp.197‐8.

9 Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: an Overview of Work in Progress’, ed. Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): p.351.

37


rather minimal suggestion for what constitutes a Foucaultian political position. They point out, for instance, that Foucault’s ethics are not to be equated with universal prescriptions for what is a right or wrong action. But they also mention that the Foucaultian model consists of maximising individuals’ freedom to distance themselves from various objectionable normalisations and to have at least a measure of control over the type of people they are. Presumably, the authors see these two conditions as desirable for people to have and being good irrespective of what sorts of goals individuals might choose; that is, the content of people’s choices is not constrained by assuming that these sorts of freedoms are important. Thus, the ability that both the authors assume in what they say is something like autonomy, although of a very minimal kind. This sort of position is typical of other of Foucault’s sympathetic interpreters.10 John Rajchman’s widely cited work on Foucault’s ethics exhibits the same tendency to understand the importance of Foucault’s work to lie in a kind of vague preference for negative freedom. Like Bernauer and Mahon, Rajchman observes the distinction between moral codes and ethics, as Foucault understands it, as the crucial issue for ‘modern practical

10 There are, of course, other positive interpretations of Foucault’s work that I cannot do

justice to here. I only claim to be discussing a prominent trend. Todd May’s account of poststructuralist politics, Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructualist Anarchism, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), which draws on Foucault, also only attributes minimal positive content to Foucault’s work. He claims that there are two principles that follow from the poststructuralism of Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard, they are: ‘that practices of representing others to themselves — either in who they are or in what they want—ought, as much as possible, to be avoided.’ (the anti‐representationalist principle), (Ibid., p.130); and, ‘that alternative practices, all things being equal, ought to be allowed to flourish and even to be promoted’ (Ibid., p. 133). While he at least concedes that there is the possibility of generality here once we apply ceteris parabis clauses, there is still not much of a positive content. Similarly, Chris Falzon’s book Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation, (New York: Routledge, 1994), is unnecessarily negative. Falzon sees the alternative to totalising metaphysics not as fragmentation but as the conceptualisation of our situation in terms of dialogue, especially social dialogue — the open ended interplay between ourselves and others. He makes the important and often overlooked point that a Foucaultian politics is not opposed to unity between groups or forms of united struggle. The difference between united politics on the Foucaultian model is that while it might put aside differences it nonetheless does not forget them or set itself up as outside difference or otherness. However, there is not much in this interpretation that has a substantive positive content. It also seems as though Falzon’s model of dialogue in the political realm escapes some of the criticisms that other dialogical or procedural models have to face. In particular, the charge that in order to ensure that dialogue or discourse take place that substantive goods have to be assumed. For a discussion of some recent developments in this field see James Bohman, & William Rehg ed., Deliberative Democracy, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997).

38


philosophy’.11 He notes that Foucault’s genealogy attempts to free subjects from certain forms of truth, whether they are sexual or social. This is the negative part of the Enlightenment ethos that Foucault elsewhere says he admires.12 The positive part, at least on Rajchman’s reading, entails the kind of work on the self that Foucault finds first outlined by the ancient Greeks. The impasse that Rajchman sees Foucault’s ethics as assisting us to overcome is the failure of any sort of universal moral code to tell us anything about how we should behave (our subjectivities are too diverse for such a code) in face of the need people experience to overcome oppressive subjectivities or at least experience some control over who they are. He writes

Foucault may not have provided us with what Habermas thinks of as philosophical yardsticks. But he may be said to have invented another use for philosophy. It is not universalistic: it does not appeal to people irrespective of who they are. And yet it is not for any one group. Foucault’s philosophy was a philosophy neither of solidarity nor of objectivity.13 (My italics).

For Rajchman, Foucault’s contribution to normative thought consists of the necessary tasks of uncovering the contingent nature of our identities and working on the self. Anything that resembles universalism is to be avoided.14

For those less sympathetic to Foucault his work offers even less of a political position. Some critics view his aesthetics of existence as little more than a frivolous indulgence and a relativistic one at that. Lois McNay, for example, sees Foucault’s later work as a movement away from his earlier overly passive account of the subject. However, while she recognises that the project of an aesthetics of existence is more than a pure decisionism, McNay is far from comfortable with Foucault’s position. She understands the problems for Foucault’s account as stemming from unexamined notions of self‐mastery and a heroization of the self. What is more, she argues that the models that Foucault uses to develop his idea of an aesthetics of existence are ones that are implicitly gendered.15 Foucault’s final mistake is to fail to appreciate the social location of the self that is supposed to engage in aesthetic self‐mastery. In conceiving ethics as a work on the self by the self, Foucault has taken a step back form his previous work and adopted a position that is reminiscent of

11 John Rajchman, ‘Ethics after Foucault’, Social Text, Vol. 13/14, (1986): p. 166. 12 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, ed. Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader,

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 13 Rajchman, Ethics: p.179. 14 One notable contribution to this debate is provided in a recent collection on Foucault

and Habermas in Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, Foucault Contra Habermas, (London, Sage Publications, 1999). While this collection is on the whole positive about the politics that might develop out of Foucault’s work, there are still many hesitations about the dimensions of such a project.

15 Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994): p. 149.

39


Sartre’s disembodied ego making its radical choices. For McNay, Foucault’s manoeuvre amounts to little more than a fetishization of aesthetic practice. Echoing Fraser, she concludes that, in the end, Foucault is left with a preference for an aesthetics of existence without being able to justify why this should be a goal or how we might distinguish good practices from bad. Notwithstanding these misgivings, what might a positive characterisation of Foucault’s work really amount to? We might agree that the negative goals of genealogy are of considerable importance; it is no small task to offer a critique of the major norms and practices pervading one’s society. Even so, the normative perspective that these interpreters of Foucault offer moves little beyond the negative dimension of his thought. Take the supposedly positive element suggested by Rajchman. It consists primarily in working on the self in a way that seemingly pays little attention to the claims that others or society might make on a person.16 However, its chief failure is to see no position that might exist in between the disdain for universalism on the one hand and the (individually focused) ability to work on the self that is said to be the essence of Foucault’s ethics on the other hand. Interpreted along these lines, Rajchman’s position is similar to Butler’s and reminiscent of the Left Conservative debate. He sees the political and ethical alternatives as divided between difference and unity with little scope for either giving positive content to an egalitarian program or going beyond a very localised sort of normative claim. The confusion of this position lies in not seeing the potential in Foucault’s work of a more robust understanding of ethical and political norms. It combines the reasonable assumption that the goals of people’s lives should be left up to them to decide with the politically anaemic idea that the only positive ethical things that come out of Foucault’s work are work on the self and a preference for negative freedom of some sort. While we might agree that, as a general rule, non‐interference is a good thing, this does not imply that there are no moral or political principles with any bite. What the protagonists in the Left Conservative debate such as Butler and the Foucault interpreters cited above share is the move from the claim concerning anti‐foundationalism to the idea that primarily limited and negative goals are the ones best suited to a progressive politics. They are able to proceed this way because they assume that there are insufficient features of human nature and experience from which we might derive a basis for interpersonal comparison and unity. The structure of the problem here is similar to the one that I identified in Butler’s work. Both interpretations of anti‐foundationalism share

16 In his book, Truth and Eros, Rajchman offers a slightly revised version of his thesis

that attempts to integrate a form of concern for community into his interpretation of Foucault. However, he ultimately ends up with the same position John Rajchman, Truth and Eros, (London: Routledge, 1991, part 2).

40


the assumption that there can be no universal normative basis for either a political position or a way of criticising power relations and articulating general normative principles. However, I think Foucault’s work can provide an alternative once it is freed from some of the misleading dichotomies that frame the reception of his work in political theory. As I mentioned, his later work on autonomy holds the most promise and is able to offer both a way of criticising power relations and a basis of enablement that could fulfil the need to incorporate positive elements into progressive theory. In what follows I offer an interpretation of autonomy as an example of the sort of positive normative foundation that is consistent with Foucault’s other insights. Not only is the interpretation of autonomy that I put forward compatible with Foucault’s work, but it also might be used to form the basis of a specifically progressive politics. It is to these issues that I now turn. III: Autonomy The first thing to note about Foucaultʹs later work and, indeed, about his political writing in general, is that there is no attempt to perform a conceptual analysis of autonomy. In fact, Foucault only mentions autonomy in a few scattered places. No doubt the heritage of the word autonomy in philosophy has much to do with its absence as a term in Foucaultʹs vocabulary. The Kantian overtones and implications of autonomy, especially the implications for a theory of the subject, might explain why Foucault would have avoided the term. Yet, there are reasons to suppose that Foucaultʹs criticisms of the constraints imposed on subjects derive their force from an implicit account of autonomy, as I will attempt to show. Foucaultʹs attraction to the idea of autonomy is outlined in some of his articles from his later work on Kant.17 In the context of reflecting on the direction of modern thought and its indebtedness to both Kant and the Enlightenment tradition, Foucault describes a philosophical attitude (on which he draws) that relies heavily on an idea of autonomy. Foucault finds in Kantʹs understanding of the ‘maturity’ humans need to show in their use of reason the basis for a modern question centred around what he calls a ‘critical attitude’. What Kant understood as the Enlightenment was both a collective

17 Foucault wrote of Kant in a number of his later works notably in ‘The Art of Telling

the Truth’, ed. L. Kritzman, Michel Foucault: Politics Philosophy and Culture, (London: Routledge, 1988). However, I will take the essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ as the best source of his views on Kant. James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenburg offer a thorough account of Foucault’s various encounters with Kant’s discussion of the Enlightenment in their James Schmidt & Thomas Wartenburg, ed. M. Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas debate, (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press) where they trace three different responses by Foucault to this issue.

41


and personal enterprise in which ‘man’ would escape from the immature use of reason. For Kant, immaturity consisted of following the authority of others when, in fact, our own reason was sufficient. As we saw, Foucault appreciated the sense of autonomy that comes when the link between ethics, in his sense of the word, and morality was weakened. So, while Foucault rejects the type of universalist morality that Kant proposes in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic s of Morals, he nonetheless endorses the central role of autonomy precisely because he is suspicious of universal moral codes of the type Kant advocated.18 This is because Foucaultʹs attitude towards autonomy shares with Kant a healthy scepticism concerning the claims of authority over reason or critique. Yet, the threats to autonomy that Foucault identifies come not from authority in Kantʹs sense, but from the threats posed by the modern operation of power. Foucault’s characterisation of this ethos implicitly contains an appeal to autonomy. What this attitude entails, and what it shares in common with ancient ethics, is the necessity for a critical (autonomous) attitude towards the self that is both aware of the historical character of the selfʹs traits and displays a willingness to rework them.19 As I have characterised it here, to be autonomous is to display certain mental abilities. This reading is in keeping with what Paul Patton has called a ‘meta‐capacity’, the ability to use and develop a personʹs other capacities in the light of critical reflection.20 As such, it is a second order capacity allowing subjects to reflect on and evaluate their first order beliefs or desires. As the name suggests, the meta‐capacity to which Patton refers is that capacity which evaluates the other capacities, general purposes or choices that an agent has. Autonomy, in this sense, is something that is present or not present by virtue of forms of power and the subjectʹs own psychical constitution and resembles self‐direction rather than the self‐realisation of our deepest purposes, as it is for Charles Taylor.21 Autonomy, for Foucault, is the ability to reflect on and direct oneʹs choices and purposes in both an immediate and a long‐term sense. This account is in keeping with his other philosophical commitments in that he sees autonomy as a product of a subjectʹs capacities. Such a meta‐capacity is 18 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trs. H. J. Patton, (New York:

Harper Torchbooks, 1964): p. 98. 19 The sense of autonomy outlined above is best described as personal autonomy. To

inquire into personal autonomy is to determine what is, or is not necessary for someone to achieve self‐direction in his or her life. Although there are similarities between political, moral and personal autonomy, the scope of the different senses is distinct. Nonetheless, personal autonomy functions in a political way in that it is a condition of political agency because of its role in maintaining political society.

20 Paul Patton, ‘Foucaultʹs Subject of Power’, in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. J. Moss, (London: Sage, 1998).

21 Charles Taylor, ʹWhat is Human Agency?ʹ, in Human Agency and Language, Philosophical Papers Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

42


vulnerable to the operation of the type of social forces that Foucault describes under the heading of governmental power. The important thing about Foucault’s discussion of governmental power is that it extends the understanding we have of the sort of social phenomena that threaten autonomy; it is not just naked force or internal neuroses, but a lack of authorship that extends right down to the bedrock of agency that can constrain autonomy. To be more precise, governing conduct in this way is a type of influence that involves altering agentsʹ understanding of the various ways in which they may act. As such, it places limits on what a person can or cannot do by altering their perceptions of what it is possible to do. As Barry Allen has put it: ‘The point of discipline is not to force people to do what you want, but to make them into the kind of people you want; not to make people do what you want them to do, but to make them want to do it, and to do it as you want them to, with the desired tools, efficiency, and order’.22 If Foucaultʹs discussion of the operation of governmental power is correct, then what I will refer to below as the ‘conditions’ for autonomy will alter considerably. The government of individual choices means that the threats to autonomy are not only different from standard conceptions of constraint, but arguably more severe. It is more severe because the disappearance of the agentʹs control over their own identity and choices is lost due to a loss of control of the capacities that make up autonomy. As Foucault makes clear in The History of Sexuality, one of the features of this kind of loss of autonomy is that, by its very nature, it will appear hidden to the agent.23 As such, it poses a threat of a different order than that of an external barrier, which is more readily recognisable.24We might characterise the presence of mental abilities as a necessary condition for autonomy. It is a necessary and not sufficient condition because, as we noted, there are various other constraints that prevent a person from using his or her mental abilities. In order for autonomy to be exercised a set of

22 Barry Allen, ʹFoucault and Modern Political Philosophyʹ, in The Later Foucault: Politics

and Philosophy, ed. J. Moss, (London: Sage, 1998): p. 174. 23 Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. trs. R. Hurley (London: Allen Lane,

1979) pp. 86‐91. 24 It should be apparent from the discussion above that the conception of autonomy that

can be found in and developed from Foucault’s work does not ignore the effects of the operation of power. Foucault’s work analysed how power was able to ‘co‐opt’ subjects. Discipline and Punish was Foucault’s most systematic attempt to describe how power operated at this level. But he was also at pains to point out that the operation of power did not mean that subjects lost the power to act and to shape events. While there is not room to elaborate this claim here, Foucault’s later work emphasised two things: first, that subjects do have agency and, second, that being able to reflect on this agency was morally and politically important. Foucault was definitely not a determinist about agency. I have elaborated these views in my ‘Introduction’ to The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy.

43


conditions has to be met. Without going into too much detail, the conditions of autonomy will include at least two other elements.25 The first is an adequacy of options. The thought here is that a person is not autonomous unless they have a broad range of choices to make. A person whose only choices are between, for instance, starvation or enslavement is someone who is choice poor and therefore not autonomous. This sense of choice includes both short‐term and long‐term choices. One must be able to make everyday choices concerning how one orders daily life and long term choices such as the choice of a certain ‘direction’ or plan for one’s overall goals, which will also, therefore, include a variety of options that are non‐trivial. Having options to choose between does not entail that any one set of options in particular must be the objects of choice. Foucault, of course, emphasised the heterogeneity of the goals and purposes that people valued and the importance of the need for individuals to create their own new options. But agreeing that there is a plurality of meaningful conceptions of what individuals might value is consistent with the claim that individuals should be able to choose between non‐trivial alternatives. A society in which individuals are able to choose between and create options not need to pre‐determine what these options are. The last condition is independence. The difference between independence and adequacy of options is that while people may have many options from which to choose, if they are coerced into accepting or choosing one, then this represents a constraint on autonomy. Physical constraints provide the clearest example of threats to independence. Where a person is held captive or threatened with harm unless they make a particular choice, their independence is removed. The interesting twist that a Foucaultian account can bring to this condition is that there is both an internal and external sense of constraint that applies to independence. External constraints are things such as overt violence or threats of violence. Freedom from these types of constraints is what we usually associate with negative freedom. But internal constraints such as the type that was mentioned above — where government operates to control a subject’s choices — is Foucault’s chief contribution to the understanding of constraint.26 To achieve independence,

25 I should emphasise that the conception of autonomy that I am defending here is not

equivalent to an endorsement of liberalism or any other political theory. While it is true that many types of liberal theory do value autonomy, so too do other varieties of political theory including libertarianism and some forms of socialism. I should also note that arguing for an absence of coercion and the presence of options is similarly consistent with various types of political theory.

26 I here leave aside the question of what form of political organisation is required to fulfil these conditions. The conditions of autonomy specified above do not imply that

44


therefore, a subject must be free from obvious forms of external constraint and be free from the type of government of individuals that Foucault took such great pains to identify.27 It is important to be clear about the value of autonomy as a normative principle with more than local application. Recall that a common objection to Foucault was that his account of power prevented him from providing criteria on which to base a normative position. Common as this objection is, it relies on a very unsophisticated account of power, which it will be helpful to pursue to see the source of the misunderstanding. When Foucault makes use of such terms as ‘domination’ and ‘subjection’ he is describing instances of power‐over. Power‐over is not in itself objectionable. If we define power‐over as affecting the possibilities for action that are available to a subject, then instances of power‐over need not involve domination. A person might affect the possibilities of action of another in positive ways by, for instance, giving advice, whereas domination occurs when a person negatively affects subjectsʹ possibilities for action. Similarly, the description of the social field in terms of the ubiquitous presence of power includes the idea of the productive nature of power and the power agents have to alter events — power‐to. Power‐to is thus the ability that agents have to change or influence their surroundings. These two distinct but related terms are part of the same conception of power. They are not at odds with each other. Admittedly, there is confusion in Foucaultʹs work over this question. This is partly a result of a lack of foregrounding of power‐to in the middle work, a lack rectified in the later work.28 A more carefully considered account of power also provides the clue to where one might begin to look for the justification of the normative values that a position such as Foucault’s might countenance. That agents have the power‐to do or become certain things is one of the factors that explain why

subjects must simply look to existing institutional structures to ensure these conditions.

27 This tripartite definition of the conditions of autonomy is discussed by Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): ch. 13. My account closely follows his. A similar framework was developed by Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1973). I am not suggesting here that achieving independence in the sense I have specified is to escape power. Achieving independence is escaping from a particular form of power, power‐over as domination, and not escaping power completely as Habermas would have us do. Agents who act independently of constrain are still exercising power, but they are not subject to objectionable types of power‐over.

28 This leaves Nancy Fraserʹs often cited critique in a weak position. For, while there is definitely a rhetorical confusion in Foucault, it is not at the deep level that Fraser maintains, not, that is, at the conceptual level. I discuss the issue of foregrounding power–to in the later work in my ʹʹIntroductionʹ to The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy. For an account of the point concerning domination and subjection see Paul Patton ʹTaylor and Foucault on power and freedomʹ, Political Studies xxxvii (2), 1989.

45


and how a strategy of power operates. But the power‐to do something has more than a mere causal dimension, it also has its normative side as well. The normative dimension comes from an aspect of power‐to that is seen as vital to what a moral and political agent should be able to do. The question of what this normative dimension to power might be is best approached from a ‘thin’ understanding of subjectivity, which defines subjects as having various capacities or forces that could be developed in various ways.29 Leaving aside the question of which capacities a subject would develop and the choices that these would entail, the capacity to distinguish between different choices and capacities is important; in short, there will be a need for the capacity to distinguish between the worth of different choices. If we also assume that it is better, on the whole, to make choices that are independent, not only of the influence of others but from the further negative dimensions of power‐over, then what we have here is a protean reliance on a capacity for autonomy.30 There is, therefore, a means of distinguishing between objectionable instances of power and acceptable ones. But note that understanding the role of autonomy in this way only minimally prescribes the content of subjectsʹ beliefs or identity. It is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for political agency and one which subjects benefit from regardless of their other beliefs. But this move raises an interesting question: by introducing autonomy to satisfy those worried about normative claims, has a new conception of interests been introduced? Foucault was not, on the whole, a partisan of theories of objective interests because of the overly ahistorical character he associated with them and because of fears of the perhaps unwarranted paternalism involved. This is also surely the type of problem that makes anti‐foundationalists nervous. For interests, in this sense, have a decidedly universal feel to them, which might invoke features of interpersonal 29 Paul Patton develops the idea of a thin conception of subjectivity at some length. He

writes: “The human material is invariably active, it is a ‘substance’ composed of forces or endowed with certain capacities. As such it must be understood in terms of power, where this term is understood in its primary sense of capacity to do or be certain things. This conception of the human material may therefore be supposed to amount to a ʹthinʹ conception of the subject of thought and action: whatever else it may be, the human being is a subject endowed with certain capacities. It is a subject of power, but this power is only realised in and through the different bodily capacities and forms of subjectivity which define the biological and social varieties of human being”. Patton, “Foucault’s Subject…”, pp. 65‐6.

30 Other defenders of Foucault against Fraser have focused on Foucaultʹs rhetorical strategy to explain how he might be an egalitarian. James Johnson proposes that we see Foucault as proposing a rhetorical strategy of exaggeration which establishes a perspective from which one can assess forms of power. Although this does not seem to answer the question of how one might then develop a new political arrangement except by consensus James Johnson, ‘Communication, Criticism and the Postmodern Consensus: an Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault’, Political Theory, Vol. 25 No. 4.

46


comparison that do not respect human difference. However, such a dismissal is too hasty. Autonomy is a kind of interest, but it is compatible with Foucaultʹs nominalism. What, then, would be Foucaultʹs objection to real interests of the kind, for instance, that Steven Lukes writes of?31 For Lukes, an action involves power when a personʹs real interests are significantly affected. This distinction between real and apparent interests is crucial for his contrast with one and two‐dimensional models of power because it provides for an account of ‘misguided’ action. The problem for Lukesʹ position is the status of real interests. Lukes argues that we can use empirical studies to show what interests are.32 This might be done by contrasting how people act under normal (often oppressive) conditions and abnormal ones (in times of social upheaval for instance). Crudely put, Lukesʹ claim is that by observing the behaviour of agents in abnormal times we can see what they really want to do, what it is in their interests to do. We might observe, as does Lukes, that when faced with situations in which agents are threatened with some social situation which causes harm—through pollution, for instance—that their interests (in remaining healthy in this case) will be shown when they choose not to accept the situation.33 Such a neat verification of interests is not something that has usually been attributed to Foucault or, indeed, to those who support any sort of anti‐foundationalism. But such a position does not rule out all accounts of interests. If, for instance, we assume that the development of capacities in various ways in accordance with a life plan or conception of the good is something that agents will seek to do, then, all things being equal, whatever helps this development will be worthwhile. This is not to say that all development should be considered desirable. A subject might develop in ways that everyone, including herself, might find objectionable. She might, for instance, develop habits or traits that are destructive of her own well‐being, as well as the well‐being of others. This might occur for any number of reasons: external pressures, lack of judgement, ignorance, illusion or just sheer laziness. Some of these causes might be beyond the agentʹs control, some may not. From a practical point of view, however, we might say that being able to distinguish, rank and attempt to actualise the goals that one hopes to achieve and the consequences of pursuing them will aid an agent in pursuing her conception of the good. To then be able to act on whichever goal one has chosen is also an obvious advantage. Thus the possession of a certain

31 Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, (London: The Macmillan Press, 1976). 32 Lukes, Power, pp.46‐50. 33 Ibid., pp.42‐5.

47


amount of autonomy is clearly a help and not a hindrance on such a practical or instrumental level.34 The conception of human beings as being better off if they are able to understand and choose between meaningful alternatives is at the centre of what Foucault thinks is important. What needs to be remembered when recalling the objections to his political thought is that autonomy was both consistent with his version of anti‐humanism in that it was made possible by embedded subjects, and that his commitment to autonomy was at the centre of his normative thought. The two separate realms—a philosophically inspired reflection on subjectivity and the engaged critique from a thoroughly normative standpoint—come together in the later work on autonomy to provide a link between Foucault’s nominalism and political justification.35

34 The discussion of autonomy above has implicitly contained an assumption about

autonomy being compatible with a similar autonomy for all. There is not the space here to defend this claim. But given such an assumption, there are all sorts of side constraints that might apply to a personʹs autonomy. But, generally speaking, we might say that there is a presumption that limiting the autonomy of others is, prima facie, undesirable. However, limiting autonomy for another value of equal or greater importance does not seem intuitively implausible. While I do not want to raise the issue of the respective ordering of different values here, one can see how as political values one might plausibly limit the other. The freedoms involved in being autonomous may well come from achieving an equality of condition which itself imposes restrictions on other freedoms.

35 I leave aside the question of why autonomy is not more sought after. Is the evidence of people consciously limiting their autonomy a counter argument to autonomy being in peopleʹs interests? There may be all sorts of reasons why people might choose to put themselves in positions where autonomy is lessened. No one who supports a theory of power as government could suppose that not choosing to act autonomously was always a straightforward decision. Voting for a government that practices fiscal restraint, which may include the cutting of essential services otherwise valued, because one has accepted a false argument about economic crisis, would be such a case. Accepting a lower position in the workplace, which might harm oneʹs life prospects because one believed it was all one was good for, might be another case. Such instances alert us to the ways in which people might be deceived about their choices such that they act in ways which limit something that they would otherwise consider important.

A further reason is that people might choose some other value over autonomy. Take the case where I accept a work contract that will restrict me to a particular set of tasks whose requirements are very narrow and unfulfilling. Such a decision might be justified in my eyes because I value the cause of the people that I am working for, or, because I believe that by taking such a job that I am increasing my childrenʹs chance of an education.

48


IV: The Significance of Autonomy and the Left Conservative Debate To return to our starting point, which was the impasse created by the left libertarian dilemma symbolised by Butler, the chief problem was that it lacked a positive dimension and more than local applicability. I want to address both of these points in turn. Autonomy can play a variety of roles in political theory. The role that I assign to it here is that of a normative yardstick against which we might evaluate the performance of governments or other institutions. Although one can envisage more substantive roles for autonomy, showing that it can be used as a normative benchmark indicates the positive dimension to Foucault’s work, which has far reaching consequences. First, to understand the conditions of autonomy in this way is to appreciate that more than just freedom from some constraint is required in order to achieve autonomy. There are positive requirements that must be satisfied. Politically, these requirements are more significant than it may at first appear. Ensuring that subjects have the appropriate mental abilities is no small task, as it might involve developing extensive public education programs. Notwithstanding the ways in which the value of autonomy might be constrained by other political values, the consequences of adopting autonomy as a way of evaluating forms of power surely demands a politics that consists in more than just ensuring that certain types of power‐over others are minimised. What it suggests is a form of politics that actually enables rather than merely clears the critical ground by performing an endless series of genealogies that conclude with the reminder that no one can tell us who we are. For this conception to be satisfied there has to be both a lack of external constraint for these conditions to be met and it requires that subjects have the capability to act in an autonomous way. Issues concerning poverty and powerlessness thus become intimately linked with satisfying autonomy. If individuals are without basic resources, such as adequate health care, then this might prevent them being autonomous according to the account above. Similarly, not having the opportunity to participate in political processes may also severely constrain autonomy. It would also mean that the range of constraints that Foucault identifies, such as different types of government of subjects, would also have to be addressed. Additionally, this sort of analysis of autonomy and power allows what I will call ‘transversal’ truth claims. Transversal here means a truth claim that applies across particular strategies of power. This might take a number of forms. Autonomy, seen as a normative criterion for assessing different practices and configurations of power, might be one such transversal claim. There could be other capabilities that do this as well, such as literacy. Importantly, a norm of autonomy might be valued by heterogeneous groups

49


and individuals for quite different reasons. Groups with divergent worldviews might value autonomy for similar practical reasons. They may notice that autonomy is valuable for a range of conceptions of the good. But note that by claiming that autonomy is transversal one does not have to support a detailed and thick conception of human nature. This conception of autonomy does not have to depend for its support on a realist type claim that there are timeless ahistorical truths concerning human nature that are at the basis of autonomy. The basis of this claim is not a form of metaphysical realism, but the experience of differently situated cultures and people. This claim needs greater unpacking than I can give it here, but methodologically it is enough for now to note that transversal claims about autonomy do not have to be connected with conceptions of ‘essential’ human nature. Also note that essentialism, where it is used as a term that describes timeless ahistorical features of people, is only contingently connected to universalism; one might be an essentialist of difference. Take, for instance, the biological race theories of the 19th century, which claimed that different races had different biologically‐based features. Here we have an essentialist claim, but one that is an essentialism of difference. Politically, what this means is that within a Foucaultian framework one is not confined to objecting to a purely local instance of power. While all empirical political work will begin on this level, the knowledge gained or claims made might transverse local power strategies. Hence there is the possibility of objecting to forms of power on a transversal basis that are not confined within, for instance, national boundaries, as Foucault himself expressly allows.36 So, the claim that genealogy reduces the effectiveness of political theory by severing the ties of the local from the general is not borne out once we accept the transversal nature of certain types of normative truth claims. Nor should we think of these positive and transversal claims as forms of the good; they are better conceived of as conditions of agency. No doubt it could be said, with some justice, that the preceding account of autonomy, positive political theory and transversalism is a long way from what Foucault actually said about the role and nature of politics. While Foucault’s work is full of allusions to normative ideas he does not develop these scattered comments in any systematic way. Perhaps this is what prevents some of his interpreters from coming up with anything more than a preference for negative freedom over non‐freedom — but I doubt it. As I mentioned at the beginning, the transversalism and positive dimension to Foucault’s work can, in fact, be taken as an expression of the positive side of the enlightenment ethos that he says he admires; a positive side that has been

36 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, ed. H. L. Dreyfus, & P. Rabinow, Michel

Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982): p. 221.

50


ignored in favour of the negative dimension, despite the impressive consensus on the dangers of universalism. In the discussion of the enlightenment he is quite explicit in claiming that what he thinks is possible is the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy — not just the identification and removal of certain forms of constraints, although this is certainly important. There are positive and enabling activities and processes to be performed. This is part of the enlightenment ethos, but it is also surely part of what a progressive program would aim to incorporate. Indeed, in the frequently quoted passage (below) Foucault rejects the universalism that I have been characterising as ahistorical and unaware of its limits, and asks that the enlightenment ethos take the form of a possible transgression. Foucault writes:

But if the Kantian question was knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to be that the critical question today has to [be?]turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.37

I would argue that transgression here should be seen not just as a denial of a form of governmental power, but as a transgression that can be seen as both positive and transversal in the senses I have been describing. Seeing things in this way allows us to steer a course between the false opposition of an ahistorical universalism and a restricted localism. Finally, the failure by Foucault interpreters and some of the participants in the Left Conservative debate to observe these kinds of distinctions, and thus to opt for typically negative conclusions about what the left should do, raises the question of how they should be categorised. The lack of positive, enabling and transversal elements in what Butler and some Foucault interpreters end up with is really a very poor return on what is often a body of thought with radical roots. Given the challenges that face the left today surely outlining an alternative to prevailing politics is the most appropriate way of getting in touch with the useful part of a progressive tradition that has rightly seen its task as alleviating oppression and empowering people, whereas there is now a minimalism to Foucault‐influenced left thought. In this sense, some of the participants in the Left Conservative debate should be careful whom they label conservative. 37 Foucault, ‘Enlightenment…’, p.45.

51


Acknowledgments Thanks are due to Catherine Mills for her comments on an earlier version of this paper and Chris Cordner for helpful discussions of many of these issues. I would also like to thank Todd May for his criticisms of this essay. Versions of this paper were presented at the Society for European Philosophy Conference, University of Cork, Ireland, September 11‐14, 2002; and at a one day seminar ʹThe Later Foucault: Biopolitics and Ethics, Philosophy Departmentʹ, Australian National University, August 9th, 2002.

52

foucault studies © Simon Enoch, 2004


ARTICLE The Contagion of Difference Identity, Bio-politics and National Socialism Simon Enoch, Ryerson University ABSTRACT: Michel Foucault’s concept of bio‐politics entails the management and regulation of life processes within the population as a whole. This administration of the biological was perhaps most manifest in the German state under National Socialism. Indeed, Foucault remarks that there was no other state of the period in which “the biological was so tightly, so insistently regulated.” However, while the Nazi regime evinced this bio‐political concern with the management of life, it also released an unprecedented murderous potential. It is this paradox, that the care of life can become the administration of death, or what Foucault deemed the transition from bio‐politics to thanato‐politics, that I wish to investigate through an examination of the construction of the Jewish subject through in Nazi medical discourse. This paper will examine how medico‐political discourse facilitated the construction of medically authorized norms that constructed the Jew as both a biological and social threat to the body politic, and how this discursively produced “Other” informed the transition from bio‐politics to thanato‐politics within the confines of the German medical establishment.

“National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz It was Michel Foucault who popularized the notion of modern politics as bio‐politics, concerned with the vital processes of human existence: health and vitality of the population, sexuality and reproduction, disease and illness, birth and death. This focus on the population as an object of knowledge resulted in a proliferation of scientific discourse concerned with the administration of life. As Nikolas Rose states, “bio‐politics was inextricably bound up with the rise of the life sciences, the human sciences, clinical medicine. It has given birth to techniques, technologies, experts and apparatuses for the care and administration of the life of each and all.”1

1 Nikolas Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society (Vol. 18, No. 6,

2001), 1. Bio‐politics should be viewed as one pole of what Foucault deemed bio‐power, the other being anatomo‐politics, or the disciplinary techniques focused on the

53


Perhaps the most exemplary site of applied bio‐politics was the German state under National Socialism. Indeed, Foucault argues that there was no other state of the period in which “the biological was so tightly, so insistently regulated.”2 However, immanent within the desire to control the biological make‐up of a population is the latent potential to eliminate that which is perceived to threaten the vital health of the population.3 Indeed, this dormant desire to purify the body politic was arguably most manifest in the experience of the Jewish population under National Socialism. Thus, the question arises, if bio‐politics’ basic function is to “improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for its failings,” how is it that power such as this can kill?4

It is this paradox of bio‐politics; that the care of life can become the administration of death, or what Foucault calls the transition from bio‐politics to thanato‐politics, that I wish to investigate through the discourse of the German medical establishment under National Socialism.5 The role of German medicine in the discursive production of unsuitable participants in the body politic is particularly disturbing in view of the supposed superior ethical standards typified by modern western medicine. Yet, as Robert Proctor illustrates, German medical science not only lent justification to the extermination of the undesirable, but also participated in their murder.6 Therefore, I wish to investigate how medico‐political discourse facilitated the construction of the Jew as both a biological and social threat to the body politic, and how this discursively produced “Other” informed the transition from bio‐politics to thanato‐politics within the confines of the German medical establishment. However, a few methodological precautions are in order before proceeding. For Foucault, discourse is not just a text, but a practice that operates on a number of levels and describes a domain of language use, a system of representation.7 Historical discourses make identity explicit. It is the intervention of institutions and discourses that legitimate and frame identity.8 Identity can be made, undone, and made again. It does not exist in an essential sense, but is constituted in any number of discourses – in

individual body. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 139.

2 Michel Foucault. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975‐1976 (New York: Picador, 2003a), 259.

3 Rose, 2001, 2. 4 Foucault, 2003a, 254. 5 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1998), 122. 6 See Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1988), 177‐222. 7 Juliet Steyn, The Jew: Assumptions of Identity.(London: Cassell, 1999), 7. 8 Ibid., 7.

54

Enoch: The Contagion of Difference

legislation, social policy, literary and visual culture, medical and scientific theory, etc. In undertaking a Foucauldian analysis of the discursive production of the subject, we must be careful not to assert one discourse as the primary generator of identity. The danger with the appropriation of such an analysis, in this context, is that one will presuppose that the Jews assumed the subject positions created by Nazi medico‐political discourse, and that counter‐discourses positing alternative identities were either rendered inert or deemed not to exist. There is no firm evidence to suggest that this was the case.9 Furthermore, the complexities of negotiating one’s own subjectivity do not lend themselves to validating this conclusion. Any universal assertions of how the Jews perceived themselves in the wake of Nazi health and racial hygiene policies would be tenuous at best. Instead, this paper will focus on the construction of a Jewish identity objectified through the eyes of Nazi medical discourse, and how this construction ultimately informed the formulation of a medical subjectivity that realized the potential for a thanato‐politics immanent within bio‐politics.

In initiating this investigation, I will examine the intersection between German medical science and National Socialism that facilitated the politicization of medical discourse. In addition, I will consider how the German medical and political apparatus attempted to entrench biological explanations for social ills through medico‐political discourses of disease, criminality and sexual deviancy in the construction of the Jewish subject. By situating these discourses within Foucault’s notion of bio‐politics as the production of a normalizing society, I hope to illuminate how the German medical establishment could realize the seemingly contradictory potential to be both stewards of life and administrators of death, or what Robert Jay Lifton has deemed the “killing‐healing” paradox.10

Giorgio Agamben argues that the integration of medicine and politics is an essential characteristic of modern bio‐politics.11 Indeed, under National Socialism the relationship between politics and medicine was much more pervasive than a small coterie of Nazi doctors dictating health policy. The German state was able to mobilize a significant portion of the medical and scientific community in its application of health, population and racial

9 However, it would be equally unwise to conclude that the modes of objectification

deployed by Nazi medico‐political discourse had no affect on the Jewish population. Obviously, the construction of a diseased and degenerate identity foisted upon the conceptual Jew was a matter of life and death. For a discussion on how modes of objectification transform human beings into subjects see “The Subject and Power.” In James D. Faubion,(ed.) , Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954‐1984 (New York: The New Press, 2000).

10 See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 430‐432.

11 Agamben, 1998, 143.

55


hygiene policies. 12 Furthermore, doctors were instrumental in extending the scope of medical surveillance on behalf of the dictatorship through their role as examiners and counselors within the expanded Nazi health system.13 While it is beyond the purview of this paper to explore all the reasons that explain the intimate collaboration between German medicine and National Socialism, the most compelling is the climate of prestige and power that the Nazi state offered to the medical community in exchange for collusion in its policies. As Proctor observes, the Nazis “biologized” social concerns over gender, crime, poverty and other substantial social issues exacerbated by the economic and social crisis of the Weimar period. This willingness to seek biological explanations for a host of social problems greatly increased the potential for medical science to participate in the planning and formulation of state policy. Indeed, as Proctor states;

Nazi racial programs were seen as public health programs, involving participation of doctors in state policy on an unprecedented scale. National Socialism promised to place medicine on a new and higher level in society; it may even be true that under the Nazis the medical profession achieved a higher status than at any other time in history.14

Furthermore, the authoritarian position towards health policy emblematic of National Socialism was profoundly suited to the aspirations of social engineers within the medical profession. Racial hygienists viewed the destruction of democratic institutions as “clearing the way for eugenic legislation to solve the problems of the anti‐social, degenerate, and chronically sick.”15 Eminent physician Gerhard Wagner, head of the German Medical Society, foresaw a great future for medicine under the Nazis. “National Socialism would initiate a movement from individual medicine to medicine administered to the volk,” or to the population as an organic whole.16 Similarly, an influential manual by Rudolf Ramm of the University of Berlin proposed that each doctor was to be no longer merely a caretaker of the sick, but a “physician of the volk,” urging doctors to become “biological soldiers.”17 Thus National Socialism offered German medicine the potential to remake 12 Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine

and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), 5. 13 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2001), 30 14 Proctor, 1988, 287. Robert Jay Lifton notes that physicians had one of the highest

ratios of Nazi Party membership of any profession: 45%. See Lifton, 1986, 34. 15 Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and

Nazism, 1870‐1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 498. See also Lifton, 1986, 23.

16 James M. Glass, Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler’s Germany (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 39.

17 Lifton, 1986, 30.

56


society along biological principles, an offer that was difficult to ignore after the economic and social upheavals of the Weimar Republic.

However, this alliance did not leave the medical profession untouched. The Nazis need of medical justification for their racial policies would shape the content of racial theorizing to more closely correspond with Nazi beliefs.18 Furthermore, Nazi conceptions of race would be propagated throughout the medical community, through the establishment of research institutions and university department chairs, and even become an integral part of the curriculum at medical schools throughout Germany.19 Finally, the implementation of Nazi health policy further infused German medicine with Nazi inspired racial discourse, as doctors and scientists became more enmeshed in a web of surveillance and regulation imposed by the state.20 Thus, the medical community became increasingly implicated in the bio‐political apparatus of the Nazi state. In order to more fully comprehend the implications of this, it is necessary to explicate Foucault’s notion of bio‐politics as the production of a normalizing society and the contributions German medical discourse made to its realization through the construction of the Jew as a biologized “Other.”

For Foucault, the bio‐political state is of necessity a normalizing state. Indeed, Foucault notes that “a normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.”21 Foucault is addressing the ascendance of bio‐political knowledges, such as medicine, science, demography, sexology, etc, as complicit in the construction of regulatory norms through which irregularities, anomaly, and deviation can be identified within the population. Attendant to this are the inevitable apparatuses of power that capture the “abnormal” within their purview. The norm consequently “lays claim to power…it is an element on the basis of which a certain exercise of power is founded and legitimized.”22 Race, for Foucault, 18 Nazi conceptions of “race,” including a “superior Aryan race” in contrast to inferior,

degenerate races were not always in keeping with the contemporary theories of the period. As Wiendling notes, “a process of renegotiation and reformulation” of racial hygiene was undertaken to move racial science towards the Nazi view. See Weindling, 1989, 493‐494.

19 Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989),174.

20 The element of coercion in the medical community’s acceptance of Nazi racial discourse cannot be overlooked here. However, it would be equally unwise to assume that Nazi racial views were strictly forced upon the medical community. Proctor argues that Nazi racial policy emerged from within the scientific community as much as it was imposed. See Proctor, 1988, 297. Furthermore, Nazi racial discourse was not met without resistance. For a discussion of The Association of Socialist Physicians opposition to Nazi policy see Proctor, 1988, 251‐281.

21 Foucault, 1990, 144. 22 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College De France, 1974‐1975. (New York:

Picador, 2003b), 50.

57


operates as a bio‐political norm that produces subjects through its construction and transgression, in a manner not unlike sex in The History of Sexuality.23 Similar to sexuality, race is viewed as a discourse of normalizing and centralizing power:

It will become the discourse of a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage. At this point, we have all those biological‐racist discourses of degeneracy, but also all those institutions within the social body which make the discourse of race struggle function as a principle of exclusion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society.24

Thus, this discourse of race becomes integral to the bio‐political state in its mission to normalize society.25 Indeed, Foucault notes that racism is inscribed as a “fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states.”26 Foucault further argues that this discourse operates to establish a “break into the domain of life that is under power’s control,” fragmenting the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which “certain races are classified as superior.”27

Certainly, German medical discourse established this type of bifurcation of race that Foucault speaks of. German medicine facilitated the acceptance of the Aryan racial type as the norm against which all other races were to be judged. However, the definition of what constituted the “Aryan 23 While I place more emphasis on race rather than sexuality for the purposes of this

paper, it should be noted that Foucault identified the potential for state racism within bourgeois sexual norms of health and degeneracy. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 26‐32.

24 Foucault, 2003a, 61. 25 While Foucault makes no explicit mention of how constructions of race facilitate

nation‐building, there are indeed parallels between race as a normalizing category and the need for a “fictive ethnicity” to consolidate the members of “the nation.” For example, see Enakshi Dua “Beyond Diversity: Exploring the Ways in which the Discourse of Race has Shaped the Institution of the Nuclear Family” in Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson. Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti‐racist Feminist Thought (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1999), 237‐259.

26 Foucault, 2003a, 254. Ann Laura Stoler argues that bio‐politics represents a shift in the function of power for Foucault. Bio‐politics augurs the regulation of the social body toward the normalization of a collective identity and away from the individualizing tendencies of disciplinary power. See Stoler, 1995, 33, 39n. However, Foucault insists that one does not replace the other, rather bio‐politics does not exclude disciplinary power, “but 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.” See Foucault, 2003a, 242.

27 Ibid, 254‐255.

58


type” was notoriously fluid and arbitrary. Beyond a list of positive human attributes such as “productive, intelligent, initiative, logical, strong willed, bearers of civilization, etc,” the Aryan racial type was more clearly defined by what it was not.28 Omar Bartov notes that the 1935 Nuremberg race laws could define “Aryan” only negatively, as having no Jewish ancestry.29 The fact that the Nazi racial norm was ill defined should not come as a surprise. As Ross Chambers notes, other hegemonic norms such as “heterosexual,” or “white,” are similarly unmarked. This bestows the privileges of normalcy and unexaminedness to the “unmarked,” while reserving for the “marked” the “characteristics of derivedness, deviation, secondariness and examinability, which function as indices of disempowerment.”30 Thus, what is of concern to this inquiry is how German medicine negatively defined the Jewish subject as deviating from the Aryan norm through discourses of disease, impurity, criminality, and sexual deviance. The notion of racial health and susceptibility to disease and illness became one of the chief priorities of biomedical science under the Nazis.31 Whereas the Aryan was constructed as healthy and relatively free of disease, the Jew was assigned a litany of ailments ascribed to their degenerate racial status.32 Jews were theorized to be more predisposed to diabetes, flat feet, staggers, hemophilia, deafness, nervous disorders, muscular tumors, manic depression, dementia, feeblemindedness, hysteria and suicide than non‐Jews.33 Indeed the connection within medical discourse between Jews and disease inevitably collapsed into Jews as disease. Increasingly, Jews were characterized as the embodiment of disease itself. Thus, Gerhard Wagner, speaking at the 1935 Nazi Party Congress would declare that Jews “were a diseased race,” while Judaism was “disease incarnate.”34 We therefore begin to witness the proliferation of a discourse of parasitology used to assert the essential identity of the Jew.35 One German physician phrased this in the following terms:

28 Kater, 1989, 115. 29 Omar Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews and the

Holocaust.” The American Historical Review (Vol. 103, No. 3, June 1998), 791. 30 Ross Chambers, “The Unexamined.” in Mike Hill, (ed.) Whiteness: A Critical Reader

(New York: New York University Press, 1997), 189. 31 Proctor, 1988, 196. 32 See Kater, 1989, 114‐115. One theory explained the proclivity of disease in Jews to

their impure racial constitution, which was said to be an amalgam of “Negro and Oriental blood” that manifested in an increased susceptibility towards disease. See Proctor, 1988, 197.

33 Proctor, 1988, 197. 34 Kater, 1989, 195‐196. 35 Phillipe Burin, “Nazi Antisemitism: Animalization and Demonization.” in Robert S.

Wistrich (ed.) Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 226.

59


There is a resemblance between Jews and tubercle bacilli: nearly everyone harbors tubercle bacilli, and nearly every people of the earth harbors the Jews; furthermore an infection can only be cured with difficulty.36

Similarly Dr. Dietrich Amende expressed his concern about “the biological danger the Jew is posing within our people,” warning against infection by Jewish “parasites.”37

This notion of “Jewish infection” was further expounded through medical discourse on the purity of blood. As Sander Gilman notes, because of the difficulty of identifying the Jew based on physical traits alone, difference had to be even more “carefully constructed in order to identify the Other.”38 Uli Linke argues that the “axiom for this construction of ideas of difference derived from a typology of blood…[b]lood became a marker of pathological alterity, a signifier which linked race and difference.”39 Indeed, German medicine looked to blood as the ultimate arbiter in the determination of race. Blood group surveys of different racial types were conducted on a massive scale, while the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry searched to link infectious disease to the blood proteins of specific races.40 Physician Alfred Bottcher even recommended the application of race science toward the practical goal of “making the blood of the Jew visible in a test‐tube.”41 Similarly, Dr. Eugen Stahle noted that racial identification through blood would prevent Jewish attempts to escape detection through deception, baptism, name change, citizenship, or even nasal surgery. “One cannot change one’s blood,” Stahle concluded.42 Attendant to this research were calls from the medical community to prohibit the “mixing of blood” between races. Wagner argued that if Germans continued to allow the mixing of Jewish and non‐Jewish blood, it would result in the “spread of diseased genes of the already bastardized Jewish race” into “relatively pure European stocks.”43 Indeed, Kater notes a “plethora of polemics” against the “influence of foreign blood” during this period.44 This discourse of blood and purity would be most manifest in the institution of the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and

36 Proctor, 1988, 195. 37 Kater, 1989, 178. 38 Sander L. Gilman, “Plague in Germany, 1939/1989: Cultural Images of Race, Space,

and Disease.” In Andrew Parker, et al. (ed.) Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 178.

39 Uli Linke, German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York: Routledge, 1999), 119.

40 Weindling, 1989, 464‐467, 563. 41 Kater, 1989, 115. 42 Glass, 1997, 40. 43 Proctor, 1988, 196. 44 Kater, 1989, 181.

60


Honour,” which outlawed sexual relations and marriage between Jews and non‐Jews under penalty of death.45 The laws, designed to prevent “racial pollution,” would be monitored and enforced by the medical community who would issue certificates that testified the couple was genetically “fit to marry.”46

As the identity of the Jew became increasingly biologized and situated in a discourse of medical concern, the physician was elevated to the status of “racial warden,” charged with protecting the German body politic from the threat of Jewish contagion.47 The publication of State and Health, a treatise on the regime’s health policies authored by some of Germany’s foremost medical specialists, appealed to the medical community for “forces that want to exclude factors of biological degeneration and to maintain the people’s hereditary health. It thus aims to eliminate influences that harm the biological growth of the nation.”48 Certainly, this discourse of defense against an internal threat is emblematic of the modern bio‐political state’s deployment of racism. Foucault encapsulates the content of this discourse: “We have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the sub‐race, the counter‐race that we are, despite ourselves, bringing into existence.”49 Foucault further elaborates;

We see the appearance of…a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic elements of social normalization.50

German medical discourse of Jewish disease and contagion was instrumental in the enactment of Nazi health policy designed to “purify” the German public through the segregation and isolation of the Jewish population. The segregation of public spaces and the confinement of Jews in state‐sanctioned ghettoes were couched in the medical terminology of “hygienic necessity.”51 The confinement of Jews to squalid living quarters with meager access to the basic means of life translated into rampant outbreaks of infectious disease, thereby justifying the Nazi medical authorities’ advocacy for continued medical quarantine of the Jewish population.52 The German medical authorities furthered the isolation of the Jew through their advocacy of the

45 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany 1933‐1945

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 84. 46 Proctor, 1988, 138. 47 Ibid., 179. 48 Agamben, 1998, 147. 49 Foucault, 2003a, 61‐62. 50 Ibid., 62. 51 Proctor, 1988, 199. 52 Ibid., 200.

61


public emblem of the yellow six‐pointed star to mark the Jew. Germany’s foremost medical journal justified these measures as necessary “to create an externally visible separation between the Jewish and Aryan population.”53 As Linke notes, this identifier of subaltern racial status, served as a key symbol of identity, “synthesizing and collapsing, in an undifferentiated way, the racial suppositions of the German fascists.”54 Thus, medical discourses of purity and infection trapped the Jew in an apparatus of institutional power that served to physically exile and distance him thereby reinforcing the identity of the Jew as a pestilence that required removal from the otherwise healthy body of the nation. However, notions of disease and contagion did not exhaust the German medical‐science attempt to medicalize the Jew as “Other.” The biologized Jew was increasingly incorporated into the discourses of criminality and sexuality in an effort to implicate the Jew as the cause of a host of social ills. Through these discourses, the Jew would be further defined as the most insidious enemy to both the biological and the social health of the German body politic. Just as medical discourse theorized the Jew as racially disposed to certain kinds of disease, criminal biology argued the Jew was also racially disposed to certain forms of crime. Interest in criminal biology accelerated with the rise of the Nazis, with legal and medical journals regularly reporting that crime and other anti‐social behaviors were genetically determined racial characteristics.55 Once again the Aryan norm would be the measure against which all other races were to be judged. Geneticist Fritz Lenz argued that the Aryan possessed the distinctive racial quality of “foresight,” a quality that, according to Lenz, “led the German (unlike the Jew) to respect the life and property of others.”56 Against this norm, the Jew was constructed as biologically prone to commit a litany of crimes. As Proctor notes, Nazi medical authorities followed the conclusions of the criminal biologists to attribute bankruptcy, distribution of pornography, prostitution, drug smuggling, purse snatching, and general theft to the racial heredity of the Jew.57 The discourse of criminal biology raised numerable concerns over the higher reproductive birth rate of criminal versus non‐criminal elements of the population.58 In lieu of these concerns, the Nazi state established examination centers deployed throughout Germany to explore the genetics and racial specificity of crime. In addition, larger criminal biology research institutions were established in nine major cities. By 1939, examination of the genetics and 53 Ibid., 205. 54 Linke, 1999, 179. 55 Proctor, 1988, 203. 56 Ibid., 204. 57 Ibid., 204. 58 Ibid., 202.

62


genealogy of criminal suspects became a routine part of criminal investigations.59 Furthermore, criminal biology would inform the implementation of sterilization and castration laws designed to halt the diffusion of hereditary criminality within the population.60

Through this discourse of medicalized criminality, the Jew was captured within the purview of an additional apparatus of state power, the criminal justice system, and thereby further problematized as a threat to the social health of the population, as well as being a biological threat. The discourse of criminality as inherently genetic also served to emphasize the “incurability” or “inalterable” criminal nature of the Jew. Such discourse allowed medicine to claim what Foucault calls “a role of generalized social defense,” for the biological protection of the species against individuals who as carriers of a condition, “a stigmata, or any defect whatsoever, may more or less transmit to their heirs the unpredictable consequences of the evil, or rather of the non‐normal, that they carry within them.”61 This idea of social defense against the proliferation of criminality is most explicit in Dr. Johann von Leers’ The Criminal Nature of the Jews. In this text, von Leers melded the discourse of Jewish disease and criminality to justify the murder of Jews on purely biological/genetic grounds:

If the hereditary criminal nature of Jewry can be demonstrated, then not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals, but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offence against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs without observing the proper precautions.62

In the above passage we witness the confluence of a number of the discourses so far outlined; disease, criminality, and the defense of society from the internal threat. It is ultimately through this convergence of medical discourse and bio‐politics that I believe the transition from bio‐politics to thanato‐politics will be rendered intelligible. However, before proceeding with this line of analysis, it is necessary to outline how medical science constructed the sexuality of the Jew as deviant and contaminate. At first glance, Nazi medical discourse that asserted the essential sexuality of the Jew seems inconsistent and contradictory. On the one hand the Jew is portrayed as lecherous, lustful, possessed of an uncontrollable

59 Ibid., 203. 60 Ibid., 203. 61 Foucault, 2003b, 316‐317. Foucault deploys the idea of social defence in relation to

psychiatry and the incurable, however I believe it is equally valid in the case of an incurable, medicalized criminality.

62 Gisela Kaplan, “Irreducible “Human Nature”: Nazi Views on Jews and Women.” in Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, (ed.) Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alternatives to Genetic Explanations. (New York: The Feminist Press, CUNY, 1994), 194.

63


sexual drive directed at gentile women.63 On the other, the Jew is represented as possessing decidedly feminine sexual characteristics and a proclivity to homosexuality.64 This seeming contradiction between an aggressive masculine sexuality and femininity is resolved through the medicalization of Jewish sexuality as resulting from a “weakened nervous system.” Medical science attributed the excessive sexuality of the Jew to a racial predisposition to nervousness and neurasthenia. This lack of nerve resulted in an inability to control their passions, “unable to distinguish from love and lust, beauty and sensuality.”65 Thus, to the Jew was attributed the irrational, hysterical, overly emotional essence that science had ascribed to the female, counterposed to the masculine norms of reason, discipline and restraint. This allowed the Jew to be represented as both feminine and sexually aggressive, without appearing contradictory. As Mosse argues:

[T]he stereotyped depiction of sexual “degenerates” was transferred almost intact to the “inferior races,” who inspired the same fears. These races, too, were said to display a lack of morality and a general absence of self‐discipline. Blacks, and then the Jews, were endowed with excessive sexuality, with so‐called female sensuousness that transformed love into lust. They lacked all manliness. Jews as a group were said to exhibit female traits, just as homosexuals were generally considered effeminate.66

This degenerate sexuality of the Jew was also linked to the Jew’s inherent criminality. The excessive sexuality and moral depravity of the Jew was offered as the cause of the Jew’s supposed penchant for sexual crimes such as prostitution and abduction.67 Furthermore, Jewish sexuality was to be incorporated within the wider discourse of contagion through medical science’s insistence on the infectious and poisoned nature of Jewish sexuality. Sexual relations with a Jew were believed to “poison the blood,” resulting in a form of “genetic impregnation” where the tainted Aryan woman would continue to transmit Jewish hereditary characteristics to her children for the rest of her life, regardless of the race of the father.68 As has been shown, the result of this discourse and the advocacy of the medical community produced the laws prohibiting racial miscegenation. Through medical discourse race and sexuality were inextricably linked, as degenerate racial traits transmitted

63 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in

Modern Europe. (New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1985), 140. 64 Proctor, 1988, 195‐196. Note that the representation of “the Jew” is almost always

male. As Kaplan notes, “ the exclusive portrayal of Jewish men as targets for ridicule might even be unique to the Nazi regime.” Kaplan, 1994, 206.

65 Mosse, 1985, 144. 66 Ibid., 36. 67 Burrin, 1999, 227. 68 Ibid., 226.

64


through sexual practice were represented as inheritable legacies that threatened the purity of the race.

Thus, the discourses of disease, contagion, criminality and sexuality produced an identification of the Jew as both biological and social threat to the body politic. Furthermore, this ostensibly “incurable” threat harbored the potential to infect and contaminate the entire German population, eradicating the purity of the Aryan race. While this medicalized identity might explain the discrimination, segregation and oppression of the Jewish population, it still does not render intelligible the ultimate extermination of the Jews and the medical establishment’s complicity in this act. In order to better explicate this process, it is now necessary to investigate how the discursive production of the Jewish “Other” might have affected the subjectivity of German medical practitioners, thereby allowing them to occupy the seemingly contradictory subject positions of stewards of life and administrators of death. In other words, how did the medicalized Jew release the potential for thanato‐politics immanent within bio‐politics? However, I offer these conclusions tentatively; by no means do they exhaust the possible reasons as to why an individual medical doctor might participate in such acts of murder. Indeed, as Lifton notes, such events may always elude our full understanding.69

The construction of the medicalized Jew through the discourses of disease, contagion, criminality and sexuality involved a fundamental discursive transformation in German medical science. I believe two discursive shifts are of ultimate importance; what Foucault deemed discursive transformation through derivation and redistribution.

Discursive transformation through redistribution characterizes changes peculiar to the episteme, or the aggregation of values and perceptions that forge the professional precepts of a specific discipline.70 In the case of Nazi medicine, we witness the importation of the social as a legitimate object of knowledge into medico‐biological discourse. This resulted in an expansion of the number of possible objects that could be considered within the purview of medical discourse. As has been shown, medical discourse offered biological explanations for a host of social ills, including crime and sexual deviancy. While this epistemic change was not peculiar to German medicine (other nations embraced socio‐biological explanations), the degree to which medical science was allowed to act upon these socio‐biological explanations most certainly was unique. The authoritarian health policies of National Socialism allowed for the actual implementation of the most perverse fantasies of the medico‐social engineers. The power/knowledge dynamic was thereby much more salient in this type of environment where medical knowledge was

69 Lifton, 1986, 13. 70 Michel Foucault, “Politics and the Study of Discourse.” Ideology and Consciousness.

(No. 3., 1978), 13.

65


immediately seized upon and applied through the expansive Nazi state apparatus.

Attendant to this epistemic shift is a discursive transformation through derivation. Derivation occurs when a discipline brings to bear “operations which have normally [been] applied to one of its objects and then applies [these operations] to another, thereby altering the character of analysis of the second object.”71 As the social became a legitimate object of knowledge for medical science, operations that normally applied to the objects of medical science were applied to objects within the social, thereby altering the character of analysis of the second (social) object. We witness this discursive transformation in the representation of the Jew through parasitology.72 German medical discourse begins to treat the Jew as a disease rather than as a human. Thus, the operations and logic associated with disease or bacteria, particularly quarantine, isolation, and ultimately, eradication, are transferred onto the medicalized Jew. Indeed German medicine employed an almost clinical discourse in its extermination of the undesirable. Dr. Viktor Brack, an early practitioner of carbon monoxide poisoning (“disinfections” as they were commonly known), argued that only physicians should carry out killings, referring to the motto “The needle belongs in the hand of the doctor.”73

When we frame these discursive transformations within the broader themes of bio‐politics as care of the body politic and defense against the internal threat, we can begin to explain how German medicine could occupy the contradictory positions of both stewards of life and administrators of death. The construction of the medicalized Jew as diseased and contagious; a threat to both the biological and social health of the nation, coupled with the bio‐political imperative of social defense unleashed the potential for German medicine to view the extermination of the Jews as a rational response in order to preserve the health of the nation.74 The biological racism foisted upon the medicalized Jew established a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life.75 Auschwitz physician Fritz Klein succinctly demonstrated the internal logic of this bio‐medical discourse when he stated

71 Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject.

(New York: New York University Press, 1993), 45. 72 Phillipe Burrin notes that Nazi medicine equated the Jew with organisms like

parasites and bacilli, which are among the least anthropomorphous in the animal kingdom, thereby contributing to the “bestialization” of the Jews as a racial group. See Burrin, 1999, 227.

73 Proctor, 1988, 190. 74 There is no crude determinism here that states that the mere existence of these

discursive variables will inevitably result in the need to exterminate the “Other.” Rather, this confluence of factors constitute what Foucault considered a “field of possibilities,” not all of which are actually realized. See Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change. (Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press, 1998), 43

75 Stoler, 1995, 84.

66


that it was “out of respect for human life” that he would “remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”76 Such an “irrational rationality” is only rendered intelligible when situated within the praxis of bio‐politics. As Wagner stated, “National Socialism would initiate a movement from individual medicine to medicine administered to the volk,” or in other words, the medical management and regulation of the living body of the people. The advent of the bio‐political state, with its attendant racial norms, facilitated the construction of internal racial enemies through their transgression. Medical discourse produced the Jew as the insidious internal enemy, capable of contaminating the biological and social health of the volk. In order to preserve the health of the population as an organic whole, Nazi medicine would have to assume the role of social defense and excise the cancer of the Jew in order to “save the patient” as it were. Indeed, Foucault comments that the biological racism of the normalizing state allows for the establishment of this type of logic:

The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I, as species rather than individual, can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be, I will be able to proliferate. The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety: the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life healthier: healthier and purer.77

The extermination of the Jew thereby renders the body politic healthier, it allows the collective body to expel the abject, to borrow a Kristevean phrase. Under the logic of bio‐politics, extermination of the diseased part improves the health of the whole. When situated within the realm of bio‐politics, German medicine can thereby occupy the paradoxical role of caring for the life of the nation through the eradication of the diseased and infected Jew. Thus, the threshold between bio‐politics and thanato‐politics is reached when the internal enemy threatens the “continuum of life” that bio‐politics exerts over the living body of the people.78 Thanato‐politics becomes the necessary response to the preservation of the care of life of the whole when threatened with internal destruction. As Foucault states, “killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results in…the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race.”79

76 Kater, 1989, 179. 77 Foucault, 2003a, 255. 78 Eduardo Mendieta, “To Make Live and to Let Die.” (Paper presented at The Foucault

Circle. Chicago, April 25th, 2002), 7. 79 Foucault, 2003a, 256.

67


Finally, what is perhaps the most disconcerting and destabilizing aspect of Foucault’s conception of thanato‐politics is his insistence that this murderous potential always remains latent within the management and regulation of life processes that constitute modern bio‐politics. Thus, to dismiss the actions of Nazi doctors as an “aberration” or as a “lethal outbreak of anachronistic barbarism,” is to view these events as a singular anomaly in the otherwise progressive trajectory of modernity, rather than a potential inherent within modernity itself.80 However, Foucault’s analysis cautions against such an interpretation. The surfacing of a thanato‐politics from a regime of bio‐politics should not be construed as uniquely peculiar to Nazism, rather it should be viewed as a potential latent in any bio‐political regime, regardless of its outward political appearance.81 Thanato‐politics is the counterpart “of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”82 While Nazism perhaps represents the most grotesque manifestation of the thanato‐politics latent within the regulatory and disciplinary techniques of modern bio‐power, Foucault reminds us that;

They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and devices of our political rationality.83

Similarly, Nazi medicine should not be viewed as a perversion of mainstream scientific canons, but as extending the underlying rationality of modern science itself. As Mario Biagioli observes, much of the scholarship on Nazi medicine tends to present Nazi scientific practices as a major anomaly in the history of science or as a deviation from proper medical practice.84 However, Biagioli argues that such a view constitutes a “dangerous naivety” that prevents us from viewing “normal” medical science as implicated in the Final Solution.85 Indeed, as Lerner has shown,

80 Detlev J.K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the “Final Solution” from the Spirit of Science.”

In Thomas Childers & Jane Caplan (eds) Reevaluating the Third Reich. (New York :Holmes & Meier, 1993), 236.

81 Foucault argues that Nazism alone “took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of bio‐power to this paroxysmal point” (the final solution for the other races and the absolute suicide of the German race). This play “is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States.” See Foucault 2003a, 260.

82 Foucault, 1990, 137. 83 Foucault, 2003a, 276. 84 Mario Biagioli, “Science, Modernity and “The Final Solution.” In Saul Friedlander

(ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 185.

85 Ibid., 204.

68


The biologizing of prejudice, discrimination, and ultimately the call for genocide was invented and promoted by “normal scientists,” and indeed by leaders within their professions. Not only can these scientists, in hindsight, be regarded as among the top professionals in their fields at the time of their work: they also saw themselves with some justification as having the same status as such people as Pasteur, Koch, and Lister.86

Similarly, Lifton’s interviews with the assistants of Dr. Josef Mengele illustrates the degree to which practices that we now consider irrational were once regarded as scientifically legitimate. As Lifton explains, Mengele’s assistant considered the scientific method employed at the camps,

[M]ore or less standard for the time, the norm for anthropological work. She recognized it as the same approach she had been trained in at her Polish university under a distinguished anthropologist with German, pre‐Nazi academic connections.87

Furthermore, as Milchman and Rosenberg demonstrate, the “myth of modern medicine” with its utopian designs towards the engineering of the healthy society through the eradication of disease and death pervades the Nazi bio‐medical vision.88 Rather than constituting a radical break with the modern tenets of medical science, Nazi medicine extended the same methods and rationality of mainstream medicine, albeit to a terrifying degree. To label such practices as “bad science,” fraudulent, or methodologically incompetent in hindsight is to disregard Foucault’s emphasis on the historically contingent nature of all forms of knowledge, medical science included. Indeed, that such practices were viewed as rational and legitimate at the time, employed by eminent scientific professionals, calls into question the very legitimacy and rationality of scientific practices conducted in our own present.

Thus, Foucault exposes what Milchman and Rosenberg deem “the dark side of modernity,” revealing the potential for genocidal practices not as a result of deviations from the values of reason and rationality that constitute modernity, but inherent within modernity itself. Foucault thereby alerts us to the dangers within the purported rational and progressive practices and techniques that characterize modernity.89 While the surfacing of this

86 Lerner cited in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “Foucault, Auschwitz, and the

Destruction of the Body.” in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds.), Postmodernism and the Holocaust. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 224.

87 Lifton, 1986, 357. 88 See Milchman & Rosenberg, 1998, 224‐225 for a more detailed discussion. 89 It should be noted that Foucault is not advocating the wholesale rejection of modern

rationality, but rather its uncritical acceptance. To quote Foucault, “If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning risks sending us into irrationality.”

69


murderous potential ensconced within modernity is neither inevitable or inescapable, Foucault’s insistence that we recognize and interrogate this potential forces us to realize that “modernity is not a one‐way trip to freedom,” and that we must maintain a vigilant pessimism in regards to the truth claims of modernity in order to forestall potential future holocausts.90

In conclusion, National Socialism allowed for the intersection of medicine and politics to a degree hitherto unseen. Medicine would become a technique of knowledge/power, serving both as a “scientific seizure on biological and organic processes” and a “political technique of intervention.”91 Medical discourse served to create biologized subjects through the establishment of racial norms and their application as part of a state wide regulatory apparatus. The Jew was racially constructed through the deviation from these norms, represented as both a biological and social threat to the body politic through discourses of disease, contagion, criminality and sexual deviancy/contamination. These discourses emptied the Jew of any substantial human content, equating the essential essence of the Jew with infectious parasites and bacteria. The discursive production of Jews as disease facilitated the surfacing of a thanato‐politics by allowing German medicine to treat the “Jewish problem” as one would treat a virus or an illness; through segregation, isolation, and eventually eradication. As the bio‐political protectors of the health of the volk, German medicine could thereby rationalize the extermination of the Jews, and their complicity in that extermination, as a necessary medical practice to ensure the continuing health of the social body. To quote Kater, “the removal of the Jews from the locus of disease in the widest sense, whether they be the cause, the carrier, or the essence of this disease, was the task of the “Aryan” as healer and, more precisely, the job of the Nazi physician; “Killing in the name of healing.”92

Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow (ed). The Foucault Reader. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 249.

90 Detlev J.K. Peukert. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 249.

91 Stoler, 1995, 83. 92 Kater, 1989, 181.

70

foucault studies © Richard A. Lynch, 2004

ISSN: pending Foucault Studies, No 1, pp. 71-76, November 2004

NOTICE Two Bibliographical Resources for Foucault’s Work in English Richard A. Lynch, Wabash College Michel Foucault is one of the most important figures in a generation for whom short, occasional pieces—including a wide variety of interviews as well as articles for both academic and popular journals—constitute an essential part of the thinker’s oeuvre. Dits et Écrits, a monumental but not exhaustive collection of Foucault’s shorter works, gathers 364 pieces that supplement the dozen or so monographs that Foucault published and the handful of studies and collections that he directed or edited.1 Such shorter works are critical for an adequate understanding of the evolution and force of Foucault’s work. But a number of difficulties arise when one tries to work with these materials. First, many of these articles appear in multiple publications—often with different titles, sometimes in variant translations, and occasionally altered or edited—and it is not immediately obvious how one can determine which is which. And since the major bibliographies are all incomplete (each including at least a few publications that the others omit), there is no single source that can help to resolve these difficulties. I have created two bibliographical resources, available on the Michel Foucault: Resources website, to address these issues and facilitate access to these shorter texts. The first of these is a bibliography, Michel Foucault’s Shorter Works in English; the second is a cross‐reference of six bibliographies particularly useful for English‐language students of Foucault’s works. The bibliography aims to provide a single source for information about all of Foucault’s shorter works that are available in English. Therefore, the scope of this bibliography is strictly limited, but within those limits quite ambitious. It is limited in that the bibliography includes only shorter works, and only works available in English. Monographs, collections and studies (such as Moi, Pierre Rivière…), and the complete Collège de France courses are excluded, as is most personal correspondence (with a few exceptions for

1 Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, Paris: Gallimard, Four Volumes, 1994.

71


http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au/lynch.html


letters that were later published). Included within the bibliography are all the texts included in Dits et Écrits, such as articles, interviews, lectures (including individual lectures or extracts from Collège de France courses), and chapters from monographs or studies (such as Foucault’s ‘Presentation’ in Moi, Pierre Rivière…). Of course, texts are included only if they are available in English, whether original or in translation. Within these limits, this bibliography aspires to completeness in two senses. First, it aims to include all of Foucault’s shorter works that are available in English; second, it aims to include all English versions and publications of each piece. This is necessarily an unfinished project, as new translations continue to appear and older translations are recollected and anthologized in a variety of sources. This bibliography was born from two frustrations. First, I was thwarted by a number of duplicate translations of some of these shorter pieces, often with different titles and frequently with multiple translators. Without carefully comparing the texts or tracing them to their original publications, one couldn’t easily tell that they were in fact multiple versions of the same text. One good example is ‘Structuralism and post‐structuralism’ (number 330 in Dits et Écrits), an interview first published in 1983 in Telos. It was later republished as ‘Critical theory/intellectual history’ in the collected work Politics, Philosophy, Culture, and then as ‘How much does it cost for reason to tell the truth?’ (in a translation from a German version) in Foucault: Live. This interview has been published in English in seven different sources, at least twice under each of the three titles. The need for a single database that would make this comparison easy seemed clear. The second frustration stemmed from a lack of bibliographical consistency. There are a number of good bibliographies of Foucault, but all are incomplete and each uses a different system of organization. Michael Clark published an annotated bibliography in 1983, but it only claimed to be complete through 1981 (in fact, it is not).2 In the early 1990s, both David Macey and James Bernauer independently compiled bibliographies of Foucault’s works.3 These are both impressive accomplishments, but there are a number of discrepancies between their lists, and neither tries to exhaustively inventory all available translations. The 1994 publication of Dits et Écrits offered yet another sequence and a few items overlooked in earlier lists, as did the catalog of the Centre Michel Foucault (which was established at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir and later transferred to the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine). And of course, new ‘inédits’ and new translations 2 Michael Clark, Michel Foucault, an Annotated Bibliography: Tool kit for a New Age (New

York: Garland Publishing, 1983). 3 James Bernauer, ‘The works of Michel Foucault 1954‐1984’, in Michel Foucault’s Force

of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 231‐254; David Macey, ‘Bibliography: the works of Michel Foucault’, in The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) pp. 543‐565.

72

Lynch: Two Bibliographical Resources

continue to appear long after Foucault’s death. This bibliography takes Dits et Écrits as the authoritative numeration, but also aims to include works not included therein; the bibliographical cross‐reference will facilitate comparison between the various numerations. The cross‐reference (and those other bibliographies) will be discussed in more detail below. The main part of the bibliography follows Dits et Écrits in its organization: Foucault’s shorter works are sequenced in chronological order of publication (rather than in order of composition, which is sometimes speculative). Since the order of publication of different texts in a given year is not necessarily clear, the editors of Dits et Écrits decided to list those pieces that appeared in books (such as prefaces) first, followed by journal articles (with least precise dates before most precise) second, placing the annual Collège de France résumé last. A number of Foucault’s shorter works are available in English, but are not listed in Dits et Écrits. These are included in two appendices. The first appendix follows the organization of the ‘Complément bibliographique’, prepared by Jacques Lagrange, in the final volume of Dits et Écrits. Lagrange’s bibliography includes a number of Foucault’s texts that were not included in Dits et Écrits. Several of these are available in English, and they are numbered ‘CB’ (for ‘Complément bibliographique’) and listed in sequence. The initial sixteen entries are listed in the order in which they appear in Lagrange’s bibliography; subsequent entries are listed in the order that they were added to this bibliography (to avoid renumbering of previously listed items). In each case, Lagrange’s citation and bibliographical details are followed by the English version (or versions). The second appendix includes English texts that are neither in Dits et Écrits nor in Lagrange’s bibliographical supplement. These are numbered ‘OT’ (for ‘other texts’). No attempt has been made to list these in chronological order; all entries are listed in the order that they were added to this bibliography. In sum, as of July 2004, just short of half of the texts included in Dits et Écrits (180 of 364) are available in English and listed in this bibliography, as well as 27 texts not included in Dits et Écrits, for a total of more than 200 different texts. Most have been published in multiple venues; 439 citations are included in this bibliography – in other words, each text has appeared an average of 2.1 times. Given the ever‐growing number of texts available in English, a print edition of this bibliography would soon become outdated. Therefore, most recent versions will continue to be available at the Michel Foucault: Resources website. The bibliography is typically updated 1‐2 times per year, sometimes more frequently, depending upon the number and extent of changes and additions. I have attempted to verify all citations through inspection of the source and comparison with the French or with other English versions; there

73



are a few for which I have been unable to do this. With a work of this scope and detail some errors have inevitably escaped even careful proofreading. Users are cordially invited to help keep this bibliography up‐to‐date, by sending information about corrections and new publications to the author or to the webmaster. A second resource—a cross‐reference of six bibliographies—is also available with this bibliography. A cross‐reference seems particularly useful because, just as many of Foucault’s texts have appeared in different venues under different titles, each of the bibliographies arranges these texts in a unique sequence. The six bibliographies included in the cross‐reference are Dits et Écrits (including some of the additions in Lagrange’s ‘Complément bibliographique’), bibliographies published by Michael Clark, James Bernauer, and David Macey, the catalog of Centre Michel Foucault holdings at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, and my bibliography of shorter works in English. Its scope is therefore broader than the bibliography, since it includes monographs and other items, as well as items not available in English. The cross‐reference is available in two formats: excel and pdf. The excel file includes six parts, each sorted according to one of the bibliographies. Each part can also be downloaded as a pdf file. The following are a few notes about each of the six bibliographies, including details about its contents as well as the extent to which it is indexed in the cross‐reference. Dits et Écrits provides an authoritative list of Foucault’s work, and should serve as the standard for citations. Its publication in 1994 marked the first major posthumous event (print publication of the complete Collège de France courses is the second) to facilitate the rethinking of Foucault’s work. These four volumes collect works initially published in many languages— French, English, Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, and Japanese—and in many often obscure or inaccessible journals. Nevertheless, it is not entirely complete. The editors chose to exclude texts readily available in monographs by Foucault (such as the 1972 preface to Histoire de la folie and the two essays in Moi, Pierre Rivière…), posthumous articles or interviews that Foucault had not reviewed, and petitions signed by Foucault (even if he had been the principal author). Many of these excluded texts are listed in the other bibliographies. Not all of the items listed in Lagrange’s ‘Complément bibliographique’ are included in the cross‐reference. Michael Clark’s 1983 Michel Foucault, an Annotated Bibliography: Tool Kit for a New Age includes publications by Foucault through 1981. It was published as part of the Garland Bibliographies of Modern Critics and Critical Schools series. The annotations are usually quite useful; it also includes a large number of secondary sources. Foucault’s works are organized into five sections (A through E) and listed in chronological order of publication within those sections. Section A includes books and collections of essays; the

74

Lynch: Two Bibliographical Resources

collections are in a number of languages (notably Italian, German, and English) and include many of the essays in Dits et Écrits. Section B includes prefaces, translations, and edited books—essentially, translations and texts appearing as parts of monographs. Sections C, D and E consist of shorter works: essays and review‐articles (C), reviews (D), and interviews and miscellaneous materials (E). Among the miscellaneous materials are audio and video recordings not listed in Dits et Écrits. Even though it does not include publications after 1981, this annotated bibliography continues to be a valuable resource; a second, updated edition would be of great value. All of the primary sources included in Clark’s bibliography are listed in the cross‐reference. Two significant English‐language bibliographies were prepared after Foucault’s death but before the appearance of Dits et Écrits, one by James Bernauer, the other by David Macey. James Bernauer’s ‘The works of Michel Foucault 1954‐1984’ (prepared with the assistance of Thomas Keenan) is included in his book, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics of Thought, published in 1990. This bibliography is divided into three sections. The main section (with 325 entries) includes texts written and published by Foucault in chronological order of composition (not publication). Monographs, articles, and interviews are included here. Two shorter sections include miscellaneous materials (section B, including personal letters that had been published, radio interviews, and a few notes of his lectures published by others) and studies directed by Foucault (section C). All of the citations in Bernauer’s bibliography are included in the cross‐reference. David Macey’s 1993 ‘Bibliography: the works of Michel Foucault,’ like Bernauer’s, is listed in chronological order of composition rather than publication. It appeared with his biography, The lives of Michel Foucault. Among its 397 entries are a number of unpublished materials, all of which are available at the Centre Michel Foucault. All of the citations in Macey’s bibliography are included in the cross‐reference. The final item included in the cross‐reference is not exactly a bibliography but a catalog—the April 1993 catalog of holdings at the Centre Michel Foucault in the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir. This catalog was prepared by Marie‐Josèphe Dhavernas.4 (The catalog is itself incomplete; it only includes materials held as of January 1991. Many additional items have been added to the collection since then, and the holdings were transferred in 1997‐98 to the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC), which has in turn added holdings. Some of the IMEC materials are numbered according to a different system, and the Saulchoir numeration may itself be eventually superceded. 4 Marie‐Josèphe Dhavernas, ‘Catalogue du fonds Michel Foucault depose à la

Bibliothèque du Saulchoir’, 2ème éd. Paris: Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault, 1993.

75


Nevertheless, it was in use at the IMEC and is useful for identifying the holdings available.) Texts in the catalog are grouped into three sections: A, B, and D. Section A (‘Les livres’) includes monographs and books. Section B (‘Les articles’) includes originals and translations of articles, some appearing in journals, others in monographs. Section D (‘Les documents photocopiés’) includes reproductions of articles and other miscellaneous materials, such as Foucault’s thèse complémentaire on Kant’s anthropology and a number of transcripts of lectures. (The collection also contains audiocassette recordings of most of Foucault’s Collège de France courses, but these are not listed in the catalog, nor in the cross‐reference.) All three sections include secondary sources as well as work by Foucault; they also include a number of duplications (items may be in both section A and D, for example) and multiple translations or editions of texts and monographs. Many of the duplications are noted in the cross‐reference, but many items in the catalog are not included. Secondary sources and translations, in particular, have been excluded. I hope that each of these resources—the bibliography of works in English and the bibliographical cross‐reference—will be of value for scholars and students of Foucault’s work. They may also be used in conjunction with each other. For example, one can use the cross‐reference to take a citation in Clark’s bibliography and find out where it is included in Dits et Écrits, and then use the bibliography to find out whether and where it is available in English.

76

foucault studies © Brad Elliott Stone, 2004


REVIEW ESSAY Defending Society From the Abnormal The Archaeology of Bio-Power Brad Elliott Stone, Loyola Marymount University I: Introduction The publication of the Collège de France lecture courses marks a new phase of Foucault scholarship. So far there have been four lecture courses published by Gallimard: “Il faut défendre la société” (1997), Les anormaux (1999), L’herméneutique du sujet (2001), and Le pouvoir psychiatrique (2003). Of these, two lecture courses, “Society Must Be Defended”1 and Abnormal,2 have already been translated into English, with The Hermeneutics of the Subject ready for publication by the end of this year. These lecture courses are valuable for Foucault scholarship not only because they supplement the arguments given by Foucault in his published monographs during the same period (Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1), but also because there are topics that, although perhaps mentioned briefly or implicitly in the monographs, come to the foreground in the lectures in a way that goes beyond the published texts. There are probably some Foucauldians who object to the publication of the lectures. Those who take Foucault’s final wishes seriously consider the lectures “unpublished” by Foucault, and they should therefore be “unpublished” today, lest one turn Foucault into an author of an oeuvre. The editors write in the preface of all of the lecture course books that the lectures should not be considered “unpublished” because Foucault delivered them in the form of public lectures and, furthermore, the books are not publications of

1 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975‐

1976, trans. David Macey, English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003). Future references to this text will be made as SMD followed by the English translation page number.

2 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974‐1975, trans. Graham Burchell, English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003). Future references to this text will be made as AB followed by the English translation page number.

77


Foucault’s lecture notes (although the notes were sometimes consulted); rather, they are transcriptions from audio tapes recorded by students of Foucault.3 However, contrary to the editors’ intentions, serious Foucauldians would remind them that Foucault does mention the transcription of public addresses as part of the oeuvre process:

[D]oes the name of an author designate in the same way a text that he has published under his name, a text that he has presented under a pseudonym, another found after his death in the form of an unfinished draft, and another that is merely a collection of jottings, a notebook? … [I]s it enough to add to the texts published by the author those that he intended for publication but which remained unfinished by the fact of his death? … And what status should be given to letters, notes, reported conversations, transcriptions of what he said made by those present at the time, in short, to that vast mass of verbal traces left by an individual at his death, and which speak in an endless confusion so many different languages (langages)?4

There are many ways to turn works into an oeuvre of a given author. If “Foucault” is the name of an author‐function, we are warned against making an oeuvre that corresponds to that function. The Foucauldian oeuvre at the time of Foucault’s death would look like this: the published manuscripts of Foucault; the interviews he gave that were published in magazines and journals; and essays written by Foucault as prefaces, articles, and interventions. With Foucault’s death, some would argue that if scholars were to turn Foucault into an oeuvre, these would be the materials that would be the canon (and nothing more). This is what makes Dits et Écrits acceptable; all of its entries were previously published by Foucault within his lifetime or cleared for publication before his death. However, there are other things that are of interest to professional academics: transcriptions of what Foucault said (viz., the lecture courses), pseudonymous writings (e.g., “Michel Foucault” by Maurice Florence), and texts in draft form that would have been published if Foucault had been able to finish them (e.g., the final three volumes of The History of Sexuality). These items serve as wonderful resources for Foucault scholarship, and would greatly enhance the understanding of Foucault’s works. Some would argue that these texts should be off limits as primary source material; others demand their use for the furtherance of scholarship. Given that I am writing about the lecture courses, it is obvious that I am in support of their publication and their use in Foucault scholarship. After all, Foucault scholarship requires that we form an oeuvre that serves as the object of our investigation. A “hyper‐Foucauldianism” that forbids the

3 Cf. SMD xii, xiv; also cf. AB xiv‐xv. 4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New

York: Pantheon, 1972), 23‐24; emphasis mine.

78

Stone: Defending Society From the Abnormal

formation of an oeuvre would result in the end of Foucault scholarship. If Foucault scholarship is to continue, we either have to keep talking in circles about the same texts over and over again (a repetitive commentary), or we must find new connections, new ideas, and new texts. That is a cold brute fact of academe. To ward off any allegations of hypocrisy, we Foucauldians can still hold that the oeuvre is an unstable attempt to form a discursive unity, although oeuvres are inevitably formed nonetheless. One way to remember our distrust of oeuvres is to always remind ourselves that there are multiple “Foucaults” to be studied without feeling the need to form a united Foucauldian system. The goal of this essay is to present the main themes of both “Society Must Be Defended” and Abnormal, which are not only the two translations we have so far in English, but also the two lecture courses that mark a turning point in Foucault’s understanding of subjectivity—from a strictly disciplinary model to a model made up of normalization, governmentality, and the care of the self. The hope is that the reader will be introduced to the merits of these texts, and begin to incorporate the ideas therein into future Foucault scholarship. The main apparatus in the lectures is the archaeology of sovereignty and the subsequent epistemic shift to bio‐power. Many readers of Foucault believe that archaeology is brought to an end with the 1969 publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge or the 1972 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” This is simply not true. Foucault never gives up the archaeological project. All of his “genealogical” texts (lecture courses included) describe discontinuities in enunciative modalities, concepts, domains, statements, and objects.5 Along with his discussion of the different dispositifs of power, one still finds an archaeology, albeit implicit in the published monographs, of the knowledge that emerges along with that power arrangement. Furthermore, those power arrangements are discontinuous, so that the shift from one dispositif to another is often complimented by a shift from one epistémè to another. Where the lecture courses are helpful, I believe, is in the fact that the lecture courses offer the archaeological analysis that is implicit (or sometimes completely missing) from the published works. Foucault mentions archaeology in both lecture courses. In Abnormal, at the end of the first lecture, although Foucault says aloud that the goal is “to study … the emergence of the power of normalization,” the manuscript says, “to do an archaeology of … the emergence of the power of normalization.”6 In “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault says that archaeology is “the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities,” whereas genealogy is “the tact

5 Cf. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pt. II‐III. 6 AB 26, including the footnote; emphasis mine.

79


which, once it [archaeology] has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them.”7 Here, it seems that genealogy is always a secondary process to be done after archaeology. In other words, there is no genealogy without prior archaeology. No power arrangement is analyzable until there is also an analysis of the knowledges and discourses produced and perpetuated by that power. Therefore, in this essay, I seek to examine these two lecture courses archaeologically. Abnormal is an archaeological account of how the concept of monstrosity is discontinuous from the Classical to the Modern age, and how a new discourse, medico‐juridical discourse, comes into existence in order to explain the new concept of monstrosity. This discourse is itself discontinuous with the juridical and medical discourse of the Classical period, which leads Foucault to criticize its power over life and death. Since this discourse has the power over life and death, it becomes bio‐political, aligning itself with theories of race and sexuality; in short, it becomes one more discourse of normalization. My discussion of Abnormal makes up the second section of this essay. Section three turns to “Society Must Be Defended,” which Foucault states is the last lecture course on discipline and normalization. In these lectures Foucault lays out the archaeological elements that account for the Modern dispositif of power, bio‐power. To do this, Foucault shows the discontinuity in the concept of history. A new historical discourse, historico‐political discourse, will emerge as a partial, war‐based account of “nations” (a new discursive object in its own right). This new discourse directly challenges the previous “philosophico‐juridical” form of historical discourse, which is best represented by Hobbes’s Leviathan and Machiavelli’s The Prince. For both Hobbes and Machiavelli, war is the antithesis of politics; however, as Foucault will show in “Society Must Be Defended,” politics is nothing more than war continued in a different way, or said differently, arranged under a different dispositif. Also, the old historical discourse offers us histories of the sovereign; the new history will work against the notion of sovereignty. As a result, the dispositif changes from the power of the sovereign to a war model. This war model allows for the emergence of bio‐power, as the war that becomes politics is not the war between one group and another (the Classical notion of races), but between the dominant subgroup within a country against the “inferior” subgroup (the Modern notion of races). Therefore, “society must be defended” from its own inferiorities, the exaggerated result of which is the State racism of the twentieth century. In the final section of the essay, I ask the reverse question. Foucault shows us how knowledge and power work together so as to make the

7 SMD 10‐11.

80


statement: Il faut défendre la société contre les anormaux. We must, along with Foucault (for what is the point of archaeology without critique?), ask the reverse: Faut‐il défendre la société contre les anormaux? Answering this question negatively opens up a new possibility of subjectivity, truth, and power. II: Abnormal According to Foucault, the goal of Abnormal is to analyze “the emergence of the power of normalization, the way in which it has been formed, the way in which it has established itself without ever resting on a single institution but by establishing interactions between different institutions, and the way in which it has extended sovereignty in our society.”8 What emerges in Abnormal is a particular discourse, medico‐juridical discourse, also called “expert psychiatric opinion.” It is a strange mixture of medical and juridical discourse,9 although it follows neither judicial nor medical discursive practices. This new discourse gives birth to a new discursive object: the abnormal. The abnormal represents a monstrosity behind all criminality, a monstrosity of the lack and/or rejection of bio‐political and/or disciplinary normative practices.

This new object is discontinuous with the monsters of the previous epistémès. In the Medieval period, monstrosity was thought of mostly in terms of “the bestial man,” the person who is half human and half animal, the by‐product of the crossing of two kingdoms. The Renaissance age puzzled over Siamese twins, and the Classical epistémè, steeped in its organized tableaux, was unable to place the hermaphrodite.10 All of these variations or types of monsters shared the property of being strange “mixtures.” Foucault explains this idea of the monster in the following way:

the monster is essentially a mixture … of two realms, the animal and the human: the man with the head of an ox, the man with a bird’s feet—monsters. It is the blending, the mixture of two species: the pig with a sheep’s head is a monster. It is the mixture of two individuals: the person who has two heads and one body or two bodies and one head is a monster. It is the mixture of two sexes: the person who is both male and female is a monster. It is a mixture of life and death: the fetus born with a morphology that means it will not be able to live but that nonetheless survives for some minutes or days is a monster. Finally, it is a mixture of forms: the person who has neither arms nor legs, like a snake, is a monster.11

8 AB 26. 9 As we know from The Order of Things, Foucault is very suspicious about the mixed

nature of things in the Modern epistémè. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), Ch. 9.

10 Cf. AB 66. 11 AB 63.

81


Why were monsters a problem? The problem with monsters was that they defied the categories of understanding, be they civil, scientific, or religious. This is why Foucault calls the monster in his course summary of the 1974‐1975 year an antiphysis, one that is against nature.12 Monstrosity, Foucault tells us, “is the kind of natural irregularity that calls law into question and disables it.”13 To use a well‐established Foucauldian term, monsters are living transgressions: “the monster is the transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of the table, and of the law as table … there is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law.”14 The Classical monster was a criminal because the monstrosity was illegal—it broke the law, and therefore was often executed under the old punitive methods of sovereign power. In the Modern period, which begins at the end of the eighteenth century, the understanding of monsters enters a new stage. In the new arrangement of knowledge, “[m]onstrosity … is no longer the undue mixture of what should be separated by nature. It is simply an irregularity, a slight deviation, but one that makes possible something that really will be a monstrosity, that is to say, the monstrosity of character.”15 Monsters are no longer criminals because they violate natural law; criminals are monsters because they violate the norms of society. In the later part of the eighteenth century, Foucault tells us, “we see something emerge … the theme of the monstrous nature of criminality, of a monstrosity that takes effect in the domain of conduct, of criminality, and not in the domain of nature itself … the moral monster.”16 The case study that Foucault chooses in order to examine the moral monster and its role in the emergence of medico‐juridical discourse is the Henriette Cornier case. In this case, Cornier murders the infant daughter of a neighbor for what appears to be no reason at all. Since Cornier is not mad in the Classical sense, she cannot be acquitted. Since she has no direct motive for the crime, the interest which led her to perform the crime cannot be punished by Classical punition theory.17 This, Foucault argues, leads to the medico‐juridical (psychiatric) evaluation of actions, which differs from the merely medical (is Cornier insane?) or merely juridical (what was Cornier’s motive so we can punish that motive?) evaluation:

12 Cf. AB 328. 13 AB 64. 14 AB 63. 15 AB 73. 16 AB 74‐75. 17 Cf. AB 111‐112. The idea that the interest must be punished (and not the crime

directly) is further explained in Discipline and Punish. Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 94.

82


What do we see when we consider how Henriette Cornier’s life has unfolded? We see a certain way of being, a certain habitual way of behaving and a mode of life that exhibits little that is good. She separated from her husband. She gave herself up to debauchery. She has had two illegitimate children. She abandoned her children to the public assistance, and so on … Her debauchery, her illegitimate children, and the abandonment of her family are all already the preliminaries, the analogy of what will happen when she well and truly kills a child who lived alongside her … Since the subject so resembles her act, then the act really is hers and we have the right to punish the subject when we come to judge the act.18

Her “motiveless crime” actually turns out to be in tandem with the person she is, a moral monster. Her other abnormalities (debauchery, child abandonment, illegitimate children, etc.) are the explanation for why Cornier killed the little girl. Cornier has not merely committed a crime; she is a criminal monster, and this is just one more event in the chain of her abnormal agency. Since she is now guilty of something, being an abnormal individual, she can be punished by law. With this maneuver, psychiatry becomes differentiated from psychologico‐medical discourse, which focused on questions of madness. It is also differentiated from the Classical juridical model, which assigned punishment based on the material motive of a crime. Medico‐juridical discourse, Foucault writes, deals with “an irregularity in relation to a norm and that must be at the same time a pathological dysfunction in relation to the normal … Between the description of social norms and rules and the medical analysis of abnormalities, psychiatry becomes essentially the science and technique of abnormal individuals and abnormal conduct.”19 Therefore “[a]ny kind of disorder, indiscipline, agitation, disobedience, recalcitrance, lack of affection, and so forth can now by psychiatrized.”20 As a result, psychiatry takes center stage in the judicial process. There are three functions of medico‐juridical discourse within the legal system. First, psychiatric opinion given by the psychiatrist creates a doubling effect. The offense is connected to other abnormalities of the accused so that the defendant herself (what Foucault calls “a psychologico‐ethical double”) is on trial, not the offense.21 Second, psychiatric opinion creates the “delinquent,” the person who already resembles the crime committed. This is useful for crimes that would have previously been labeled as “motiveless.”22 Finally, the psychiatrist takes over the position of the judge, creating the

18 AB 124. 19 AB 163. 20 AB 161. 21 Cf. AB 15‐18. 22 Cf. AB 18‐21.

83


“doctor‐judge” double, which brings an end to pure juridical discourse. Since abnormality is now a medical issue, the goal will no longer be punishing but treating and curing.23 Under the auspices of medicine, psychiatry gains a prominent position in the bio‐political dispositif of the Modern epistémè as a branch of public hygiene, protecting society against the psychological ills of the abnormal individuals.24 As we will see in the next section of this essay, eventually it will be said that “society must be defended” from this illness, and psychiatry will serve as the defender of normalcy. The last five lectures of Abnormal focus on the issue of sexuality. The reason why sexuality plays such an important role in the archaeology of psychiatry is that childhood becomes the breeding ground for abnormality.25 In the nineteenth century, the largest concern about children was masturbation. As a result, the onanist becomes the paradigm of moral monstrosity by the end of the nineteenth century. The pathology associated with masturbation was a medical one, for it was believed that all illnesses found their roots in masturbation.26 Therefore, the masturbating child begins the path of abnormality, which might lead not only to medical problems in her adult life, but also to criminal activities. However, in a unique twist, it is the parents who have the responsibility to insure that their children refrain from masturbating. This sets up the Freudian incestuous family structure (especially in bourgeois families) which serves as the laboratory of psychiatry well into the twentieth century.27 With the “puerilization” of abnormality, psychiatry becomes able to evaluate adults as abnormals if they seem to have “arrested development;” that is, if adults act like children instead of adults. Foucault discusses the Charles Jouy case as an example of such an evaluation. Charles Jouy is a migrant worker who has a series of sexual encounters with a little girl. The girl is sent to a house of correction for her participation in Jouy’s sexual games. However, there is a question as to how to deal with Jouy . Should he be psychiatrized? The answer is yes, but for a reason different from the psychiatrization of Henriette Cornier. Jouy is psychiatrized “by establishing that he remains extremely close to and almost fused with his own childhood and the child with whom he had relationships.”28 In short, Jouy is playing 23 Cf. AB 21‐23. All three of these functions correspond to the discussion Foucault has at

the beginning of Discipline and Punish. Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 19‐23. 24 Cf. AB 118‐119. 25 Cf. AB 242, 299‐305. I am using the term “archaeology of psychiatry” from The History

of Sexuality, Vol. 1, when Foucault states that an archaeology of psychiatry would amount to a discussion of sexuality. Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 130.

26 Cf. AB 236‐242. 27 Cf. AB 263‐274. 28 AB 303.

84


“doctor” with the little girl; he has the psychological development of a little boy; he is a case of arrested development. The difference between Cornier and Jouy is described by Foucault in terms of the childish traces in one’s actions: “The alienists essentially said to Henriette Cornier: You were not then what you later became, and for this reason we cannot convict you. The psychiatrists say to Charles Jouy: If we cannot convict you, it is because when you were a child you were already what you are now.”29 Prior to medico‐juridical discourse, alienists would not try to trace Cornier’s actions back to infantile instincts. In the Jouy case, it is merely a coincidence that Jouy’s offense was with a child and could be traced to a childish game; the real difference is that Jouy is an adult whose criminal actions are explained by an abnormality, a lack of development. I will return to Abnormal, especially the first lecture, in the final section of the essay. It suffices for the moment to have traced the history of psychiatric discourse and the discursive objects that are created in its wake. Insofar as this history and these objects are discontinuous, Foucault has offered an archaeology of the abnormal individual and the discourse that will make possible a dispositif of power that plays with life and death. III: “Society Must Be Defended” “Society Must Be Defended” is probably best thought of as a genealogical text dealing with the emergence of modern bio‐power through the notion of race. In this essay, race is viewed as a discursive concept, and therefore placed within what I believe is the larger archaeological goal of the lectures: the archaeology of historico‐political discourse. This discourse is discontinuous with the philosophico‐juridical discourse of Machiavelli and Hobbes and the Classical notion of history, whose purpose was to legitimize sovereignty through an “impartial” retelling of past events. Historico‐political discourse, however, holds that impartiality is impossible, that truths (especially historical truths) are based on which side of the battle one is on. Historico‐political discourse is discontinuous with philosophico‐juridical discourse in three main ways. First, there is a shift in enunciative modality; that is, the speaker of the discourse changes. Foucault writes that “the subject who speaks in this discourse [historico‐political discourse] … cannot, and is in fact not trying to, occupy the position … of a universal, totalizing, or neutral subject. In the general struggle he is talking about, the person who is speaking … is inevitably on one side or the other.”30 This differs from the philosopher, who claims to speak from perfect reflective

29 AB 302‐303. 30 SMD 52.

85


equilibrium, from a disinterested view from nowhere. The new discourse changes that; it approaches truth in an interested way. Second, historico‐political discourse “inverts the values, the equilibrium, and the traditional polarities of intelligibility, and which posits, demands, an explanation from below … in terms of what is most confused, most obscure, most disorderly and most subject to chance.”31 Since it is an interested discourse, the new discourse does not seek the pretty or simplest picture of history. Instead, it puts aside the abstractly universal rational schemata and offers an ugly, dirty, complicated story. Foucault explains this new history this way: “So what is the principle that explains history? … a series of brute facts … a series of accidents … a bundle of psychological and moral elements … a fundamental and permanent irrationality … which proclaims the truth.”32 This differs from the philosopher, who stands on the side of reason and is therefore unwilling (or perhaps unable) to deal with the hard facts of an unending war. Third, this new discourse “develops completely within the historical dimension … It is interested in rediscovering the blood that has dried in the codes … the battle cries that can be heard beneath the formulas of right … the dissymmetry of forces that lies beneath the equilibrium of justice.”33 Unlike the philosopher, who in her own way seeks a kind of “peace” in the exploration of history, the speaker of historico‐political discourse shows that war has always been beneath the surface of order and peace. Historico‐political discourse is a war discourse, which makes it perfect for the analysis of power in terms of war. The author referenced repeatedly by Foucault is Boulainvilliers, who formulated a war‐based theory of power and history in the early eighteenth century. Prior to the formation of this new discourse, history was a tool of sovereign power. It performed two functions—one genealogical, the other memorial. The genealogical function of history was to show that sovereignty was legitimate. It did so by praising antiquity and its heroes, showing that the present sovereign is the legitimate heir to that glorious antiquity, and therefore allows the fame of the past to be incorporated into the present sovereign. The memorialization function was connected to the genealogical function insofar as the detailed annals and records of every action and decision made by the sovereign demonstrated the sovereign’s importance. This way, the sovereign would survive into posterity.34 In short, “[h]istory

31 SMD 54. 32 SMD 54‐55. 33 SMD 55‐56. It is interesting to note that this new history is quite similar to Foucault’s

description of “effective history” in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Cf. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), §§6‐7.

34 Cf. SMD 66‐67.

86


was a ritual that reinforced sovereignty.”35 It was the history of power as told by power; it was the way that the sovereign justified its claim to power. As Foucault writes

we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power … The point of recounting history, the history of kings, the mighty sovereigns and their victories … was to use the continuity of the law to establish a juridical link between those men and power … Like rituals, coronations, funerals, ceremonies, and legendary stories, history is an operator of power, an intensifier of power.36

Sovereignty is the subject and the object of the old historical discourse: it is a history of sovereignty written by the power of the sovereign in order to justify the sovereignty. Historico‐political discourse challenges this use of history. It is against the sovereign; it is “a discourse that cuts off the king’s head, or which at least does without a sovereign and denounces him.”37 The discourse is taken up by the oppressed and the non‐sovereign (in France, the aristocracy), and serves as a counterhistory of sovereignty. Instead of using history to show the greatness of the sovereign, it would “break up the unity of the sovereign law that imposes obligations; it also breaks up the continuity of glory … It will be the discourse of those who have no glory … who now find themselves, perhaps for a time … in darkness and silence.”38 The result of this counterhistorical discourse is the creation of a new subject of history, “race,” also called “society,” a discursive object that makes up the main topic of “Society Must Be Defended.” A society is defined by Foucault as a “body of individuals governed by a statute, a society made up of a certain number of individuals, and which has its own manners, customs, and even its own law . . . a ‘nation.’”39 The concept of a nation will later be described in terms of a race, but before moving to race, Foucault describes the importance of the concept of a nation. In the age of sovereign power and history, words like “nation” and “race” referred back to the sovereign. A nation was the group of people and the lands under the power of the sovereign. Hence the sovereign state’s definition of “nation” was “a great multitude of men … inhabiting a defined country … circumscribed by frontiers … who have settled inside those

35 SMD 69. 36 SMD 66. 37 SMD 59. 38 SMD 70. 39 SMD 134.

87


frontiers [and] must obey the same laws and the same government.”40 In other words, “[t]he nation in its entirety resides in the person of the king,”41 or, to use the phrase attributed to Louis XIV, L’Etat, c’est moi. The French race, then, simply meant “those under the crown of the king of France.” “Nation” takes on a different meaning in the age of historico‐political discourse. There arose the possibility of there being multiple “nations” within a sovereign geopolitical nation. For example, in early nineteenth‐century France, the nobles considered themselves a nation, and the Third Estate was a different nation. This is the origin of the concept of nation that “does not stop at the frontiers but which, on the contrary, is a sort of mass of individuals who move from one frontier to another, through States, beneath States, and at an infra‐State level.”42 There can be, for example, one nation in two countries, or two nations in one country, etc. This changes the understanding of war radically. War was previously understood in terms of one nation’s (under its sovereign) being at war with another nation (under a different sovereign). Only sovereigns went to war. Now, however, there can be wars between two different nations within the same geopolitical area or under the same sovereign. History becomes the story of race struggle. Race war began, Foucault claims, in terms of one nation being against another, as explained above. However, in the Modern period, race war takes on a dimension that is more familiar to us in contemporary society. Race ceases to be a concept tied to sovereignty and geopolitical boundaries; it becomes the concept of groups within a political entity. This leads to a different kind of race war than previously conceived:

The discourse of race struggle ( will be recentered and will become the discourse of power itself. It will become the discourse of a centered, centralized, and centralizing power. It will become the discourse of a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage.43

Contemporary race war is the result of one race (one group, perhaps within the same country as other races) claiming superiority over all other races, allowing that dominant race to define what counts as normal. Of course, this means that the abnormal, which was discussed in the previous section of this essay, becomes that which goes contrary to the dominant race’s norms. The purity and perpetuity of the race becomes the goal, and with the advent of modern biology, racism as we currently understand it is born. The dominant 40 SMD 142. 41 SMD 218. 42 SMD 142. 43 SMD 61.

88


race seeks to become the only race in a country. As Foucault describes, there is “not an armed clash, but an effort, a rivalry, a striving toward the universality of the State.”44 One result is that the expression “society must be defended” changes meaning between the sovereign period and the Modern epistémè: “It is no longer: ‘We have to defend ourselves against society,’ but ‘We have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace, the counterrace.’”45 And this is how racism ties into bio‐political power. Foucault writes in the final lecture that race is one of the ways of determining who is forced to live, and who will be allowed to die.46 In order to force the dominant race to live, one must get rid of the opposing race that is infecting the dominant race. Racism serves as a biological war, one whose goal is the dying of the other races: “The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I ( can live, the stronger I can be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.”47 With this biologism connected to other technologies of normalization, the war of power continues to rage, in spite of the appearance of peace (i.e., no war against an opposing country) and order. Since I want to limit myself to discursive elements in this summary, I will refrain from saying much about the actual workings of power in these systems. However, it is important to note that there is a major shift in dispositifs described in “Society Must Be Defended” between the sovereign notion of power as repression and the historico‐political understanding of power in terms of war. By examining the role of war in power and knowledge, we can begin to think of power in terms other than repression and take up “Nietzsche’s hypothesis,” that “the basis of the power‐relationship lies in a warlike clash between forces.”48 These forces can also take up discursive elements, allowing war to equally serve as an archaeological model as well. IV: Conclusions I conclude with what I take to be Foucault’s concerns about medico‐juridical and historico‐political discourse. Foucault worries in Abnormal that psychiatry is itself a kind of monster. If monstrosity is defined in terms of strangeness, unnaturalness, and mixture, then psychiatry is itself a monstrosity. It is not quite science, not quite juridical, yet juridico‐scientific. Furthermore, Foucault argues, psychiatry is “the reactivation of an essentially parental‐puerile, 44 SMD 225. 45 SMD 61‐62. 46 Cf. SMD 254. 47 SMD 255. 48 SMD 16.

89


parental‐childish discourse ( It is a childish discourse ( a discourse of fear whose function is to detect danger and to counter it.”49 Psychiatry is childish, although one of its areas is the puerility of adults. Yet, here is a discourse that is itself puerile; it is all about dangerous and scary people, “monsters.” The study of abnormals is based more on fear than science. To show this childishness, Foucault begins the lecture course with passages from two psychiatric reports, neither of which are really scientific, for their descriptions are funny and clearly biased.50 These reports, although funny, are frightening because “discourses of truth that provoke laughter and have the institutional power to kill are, after all, discourses that deserve some attention.”51 Given that the power to punish is contained in such infantile discourses based on fear, we have reason to be concerned about psychiatric discourse’s role in the judicial process in an age of bio‐politics. Similarly, the racist discourse that emerged as a result of historico‐political discourse, as described by Foucault in “Society Must Be Defended,” has placed the power to kill into problematic hands. Historico‐political discourse was developed as a way to escape the model of sovereignty. The result, however, is the invention of bio‐power, which is actually more intense than sovereign power. Genocide, colonization, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, and institutional racism are some of the catastrophes that receive justification through the discourse of race struggle. As with psychiatry, race discourse infused with the power to kill leaves room for concern. Of course, Foucault is not suggesting that we return to sovereignty; instead, we must find a new way of understanding power, a new way of talking about it, a new way of using it. As Foucault writes, “if we are to struggle against disciplines, or rather against disciplinary power, in our search for a nondisciplinary power, we should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we should be looking for a new right that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty.”52 As stated at the beginning of this essay, these two lecture courses mark a turning point in Foucault’s analysis of subjectivity, and lead us on the path to a new imperative for the next épistème. The new imperative is free from both sovereignty and normalizing society. The imperative will no longer be “society must be defended from the abnormal.” Rather, it will be one that is perhaps the oldest of all, although meant in a different way: “take care of yourself.” To those ends, Foucault’s analyses of psychiatry and race discourse open an opportunity for thought and, perhaps, hope. Archaeology always

49 AB 35. 50 Cf. AB 2‐6. 51 AB 6. 52 SMD 39‐40.

90


suggests a kind of reversal. If the imperative explored in these lectures is il faut défendre la société contre les anormaux, the reversal is the following question: Faut‐il défendre la société? As usual, Foucault does not give us the answer to the questions raised by his archaeologies. All he gives us is an axiom: for any discursive formation, if one can show how it came into history, one can see where it will finally someday unravel.

91

foucault studies © Mark Kelly, 2004


REVIEW

Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). ISBN 0-8047-3709

Michel Foucault is not now normally associated with Immanuel Kant. But there are some indications that he should be. Writing an entry about himself, pseudonymously, for a French dictionary of philosophy, he described himself as essentially Kantian.1 One is tempted to pass this off as a playfully esoteric self‐description.

However, Béatrice Han takes up this relatively obscure perspective on Foucault’s thought2—and runs a long way with it. Han has a powerful additional piece of evidence for her treatment of Foucault in relation to transcendental idealism: it is Foucault’s own doctoral dissertation, a translation of and a commentary on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The commentary was itself book‐length, but the only copy remains buried in the Parisian archives that hold Foucault’s Nachlass. Han brings this material to us for the first time. In doing so, she performs a significant service to Foucauldians, much as Ann Laura Stoler did with her précis of Society Must Be Defended in Race and the Education of Desire.3 Now that that lecture course has itself appeared,4 in unforeseeable violation of Foucault’s testament that there be no posthumous publications of his work,5 however, Stoler’s work has lost much of its importance. We cannot know whether the same fate might befall Han’s book, but as things stand it is invaluable.

1 Michel Foucault, “Foucault” in his Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Ed. James D.

Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press, 1998. pp. 459‐463; the pseudonym under which Foucault writes is ‘Maurice Florence’.

2 Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Tans. Edward Pile. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 3.

3 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

4 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Trans. David Macey. London: Penguin, 2003.

5 According to Pierre Nora, quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 323.

92

Kelly: Review of Foucault’s Critical Project

Like so many books on Foucault, Han’s Foucault’s Critical Project comprises a chronological survey of his thought, with a unique angle. The angle in this case is to examine Foucault’s trajectory through the concept of the ‘historical a priori’, a concept used by Foucault himself (although one first used by Husserl, if with quite a different meaning), but one hardly prominent in his work, even where he does employ it.6 The historical a priori is, of course, Foucault’s update of Kantianism, charting not the conditions for the possibility of experience, but rather the historical conditions for the possibility of knowledge.

This approach is extremely apposite, in that it chases the elixir of Foucault scholarship, a solid philosophical basis underlying Foucault’s work and the shifting sands of his varying methodology. What Han uncovers, however, is not stable bedrock, but rather the continual redefinition of the historical a priori: it might always be there underlying Foucault’s thinking, but its own specific meaning shifts over time—it is this change then that Han traces.

The first piece of Foucault’s work Han comes to chronologically is the aforementioned commentary on Kant’s Anthropology. The chapter on the commentary sets the scene for Han’s book, because it is there, and there alone, that Foucault is explicitly concerned with the transcendental (as one must be when writing on Kant). After this comes a chapter on what Han identifies as the three works of Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ period. Then comes the second part of the book, which is on Foucault’s genealogical works. The third and final part of the book consists of the treatment Foucault’s late thought and the return of subjectivity therein.

In this Han follows the normal pattern for books on Foucault. Her treatment is indeed conventional, following the well‐established tripartite periodization of Foucault’s oeuvre. The only thing that is remarkable about it is Han’s inclusion of Foucault’s commentary on Kant in the part of the book dealing with archaeology. It is also interesting that another work by Foucault is not included in this section, or anywhere in the book, namely Madness and Civilization. This is generally considered the first major book by Foucault (his only previous publication being a book for students, Mental Illness and Psychology, which he had himself later severely reedited and finally withdrawn from publication). Madness and Civilization was, moreover, the primary thesis for Foucault’s doctorate in 1960, alongside which the Anthropology translation and commentary constituted a mere supplementary thesis.7 In displacing the History of Madness in favour of the commentary, Han

6 See ibid., p. 4. 7 Strictly speaking, Madness and Civilization is not quite the same as the doctoral thesis.

Of course, this is because it is the English translation, but also because that translation is a heavily abridged version of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.

93


creates a new trajectory for Foucault, one which begins with a work in which the conjunction of the transcendental and the historical is the key theme. What would ordinarily be an obscure feature of Foucault’s thought is transformed into an obvious line of approach by placing Foucault’s encounter with Kant first, and quite unobtrusively so given its simple chronological priority among the books dealt with by Han.

It is in the commentary, it seems, that Foucault first hits upon the concept of the historical a priori (which is why Madness and Civilization does not concern Han—it was written before this discovery). The historical a priori then recurs in one guise or another throughout the rest of his output, and it is this trace that Han is intent on following, watching how Foucault’s thinking on the questions first broached in the commentary develops. ʺThe overall importance of Foucault’s interpretation of Kant is strategic rather than theoretical, and is played out within the Foucauldian corpus.ʺ8 As such, Han sees it as constituting the “prehistory” of archaeology.9 Foucault interprets Kant, in the commentary as in his later meditations on Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?,10 as the thinker standing at the threshold of modernity: in the Anthropology, Kant is inaugurating the question, “Was ist der Mensch?”,11 which Foucault so famously criticised when he portended the death of man.

Foucault’s historical a priori remains obscure across the archaeological period, in that Foucault posits it as something which must exist, but cannot be any more specific: it is the condition of the possibility of knowledge—a highly Kantian formulation. There must be such a guiding condition to account for the epistemic unities he identifies, the fact that at one time people are clearly constrained to talk only in particular way, and at other times a different regime of truth obtains. The reason for this obscurity becomes quite clear: Foucault has found himself resorting to metaphysics, positing a limit which is not internal to language yet has no other domain for its existence. Han paints a picture of him in the archaeological period stripping away his presuppositions: in Birth of the Clinic he implicitly depends on (Merleau‐Ponty’s) phenomenology for his a priori; by The Order of Things, it is experience and hence subjectivity; by The Archaeology of Knowledge he has excised the subject, leaving him with pure abstraction.12 This historical a priori was neither the Kantian a priori, a necessary precondition for experience, nor something simply logical, but something more in the line of a Platonic form, not merely ideal but in fact more real than the real things it governs, the condition of the possibility of their reality. 8 Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 33. 9 Ibid., p. 35. 10 See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in his Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.

Ed. James D. Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1997. pp. 303‐319. 11 See Han. Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 32. 12 See ibid., p. 50.

94


The solution to this problem is Foucault’s discovery of power. Reading Foucault from the point of view of the historical a priori allows for a novel spin on the turn Foucault takes at the beginning of the 1970s, from archaeology to genealogy (to use his own terminology). The concept of power allows him to shift the regulatory functions of language into a domain which, though it is of his own invention, is nevertheless anchored in reality in a way that his previous a priori was not. In Han’s account, at this point Foucault makes the leap of understanding the historical a priori in explicitly political terms, through his development of the concept of ‘power‐knowledge’, where power and knowledge are seen as inseparably intertwined.13 For Han, this is a response to the failure to find a plausible historical a priori at the level of discourse itself—examining knowledge endogenously will never reveal what makes something count as true at a particular historical conjuncture. In this, Han shows her debt to her doctoral supervisor, Hubert Dreyfus, under whose tutelage this book was originally written.14

In dealing with the fate of the a priori in the genealogical period, Han continues to chase the most elusive element of Foucault’s thought, the question of his position on truth. This gives rise to a quite original contribution to the ongoing debate of this topic, as well as providing an interesting and knowledgeable survey of the issues involved in it. Han concludes that, ultimately, Foucault was in this period confused about his profound nominalism and his wish nonetheless to take strong positions.15 This is not an original criticism by any means—except insofar as Han couches this as a confusion between the empirical and the transcendental, a novel way of declaring Foucault philosophically unsatisfactory.16

When Foucault changes tack again in his late work, in his (in)famous ‘return to the subject’, Han is less than impressed. For her, this entire turn is in fact marked with the same basic problems that marked his earliest work: the maintenance of phenomenological concepts, without the appropriate underpinnings, particularly his reliance on a notion of ‘experience’; a “regress to a prephenomenological perspective”. She particularly accuses Foucault of being ultimately rather Sartrean, in spite of his overt hostility to Sartre’s philosophy. Ultimately, she accuses him of being merely “prephenomenological” because, unlike Merleau‐Ponty and Heidegger, he does not go far enough into his presuppositions to purge himself of his “pseudo‐transcendental understanding of the subject.”17 This is some of the

13 Ibid. pp. 132‐2. 14 See Han’s comments in her “Reply to Gary Gutting”, p. 5 However, she is also critical

of some of Dreyfus’s views on Foucault—see, for example, Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 192.

15 Ibid., p. 144. 16 Ibid., p. 145. 17 Ibid., p. 187.

95


harshest criticism of Foucault’s late work that I have ever encountered, and, if correct, is devastating. Han manages to be peculiarly effective here because she analyses things from the point of view of the historical a priori, which in the final work really disappears to almost nothing, and without anything new emerging to replace it.

There has been a backlash against Han on this front, however. Garry Gutting has complained against Han that she simply presumes that a philosophical basis is required for genealogy to work.18 Gutting accepts that there are dubious philosophical foundations to Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ thought of the 1960s, but that is not the case of the later work, which is governed by a “strict nominalism”, in which Foucault simply refuses to address the issue of what might be beyond language. Gutting argues that Han implicitly concedes that genealogy works well as an historical device, and thus thinks her complaints about it at an ontological level are misplaced.

Gutting’s review has been answered by Han herself at some length.19 She rightly defends Foucault as being a philosopher, not merely someone with some interesting readings of history. To my mind, the approach Gutting takes to Foucault is a very easy one, and one which is unsatisfying philosophically. There is an unchallenging reading of Foucault, made by both enthusiasts and detractors, for example by Richard Rorty on one side and Charles Taylor on the other, which sees Foucault as an intellectual bricoleur who sometimes throws up some interesting concepts, but whose writings are without depth.

It is in relation to such views that Han’s book actually provides a very valuable service, situating Foucault as a philosopher within the philosophical tradition, and not merely within the current of ‘poststructuralism’ or of recent ‘continental’ philosophy, but rather really in the Western tradition, as engaged with the Kantian heritage which is the common background of contemporary Western philosophy per se.

Nevertheless, though Han argues that Foucault does have significant philosophical underpinnings, she argues that there is an incoherence to these. It would be that incoherence that gives rise to allegations that Foucault is a non‐philosopher. It seems to me that this is, in fact, indicative of a prior disagreement with Foucault’s orientation that is indicative of a greater philosophical conservatism on the part of Han. At the outset of the book, Han postulates that

18 Gutting, Gary. “Review of Béatrice Han’s Foucault’s Critical Project.” Notre Dame

Philosophical Reviews, May 2003. http://ndpr.icaap.org/content/archives/2003/5/gutting‐han.html

19 Han, Béatrice. “Reply to Gary Gutting’s review of Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical.” http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~beatrice/Gutting _answer_ 2003‐05.pdf

96


If Foucault’s project is coherent, then it should be possible to organize it around a central theme to which the others could be subordinated. The present book’s hypothesis will be that this central theme is situated at the convergence of an initial question with an object that appears later, a convergence that occurs only retrospectively to Foucault himself, by means of a reflection on his own course and strategies.20

Firstly, there seems to be an obvious dubiousness to Han’s initial premise: a coherent project does not have to be one which has a central theme; rather, it could be highly nebulous, but nevertheless coherent. Of course, Han could still argue correctly that there is such a central theme to Foucault’s work. However, the terms in which Foucault ultimately couches his project, which Han mentions before making these claims, while being claims for the ultimate coherence of all his effort, and while in fact implicitly admitting that he only realises what they are retrospectively, there is to my mind no suggestion of a central theme. Rather, what is central, in keeping with Foucault’s late philosophical orientation, is a problematic, or cluster of problematics. What he had done, in short, and by his own account, was to problematise truth and subjectivity. It would be incorrect to say that this problematisation was a central theme, since it was not thematised as such. It would also be incorrect to say that the things problematised (sexuality, mental illness, power) were central themes of Foucault’s work as a whole, since they were in fact only the central themes of particular studies. Insofar as Han does not find the central theme that she looks for, she takes it not as a sign that there is something wrong with her thesis, but rather that there is something wrong with Foucault.

Han has produced a book of solid scholarship. She clearly knows Foucault very well, including parts of his oeuvre unknown, really, to anybody else. The direction in which she takes Foucault is, I think, one which needed to be taken, to study Foucault’s relation to standard philosophy, in the light of the seemingly nihilistic iconoclasm of his critiques. In taking this line, Han has unearthed much that is buried deep in Foucault’s texts, an entire level of his thought that is generally passed over, perhaps precisely because it is so infuriatingly (apparently) incoherent. In doing this, she has done something valuable for her readers. And while I do have substantial disagreements with some of her conclusions, the scholarship is of such a standard and originality that this book is required reading for those interested in really engaging with Foucault.

Mark Kelly, University of Sydney

20 Han. Foucault’s Critical Project, p. 2.

97

foucault studies © Douglas I. Thompson, 2004


REVIEW

Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey (eds.) Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self (London: Sage Publications, 1997). ISBN: 0803975473 I The breadth of Michel Foucault’s influence is often astounding. Foucauldians can be easily found in such disparate fields as geography, architecture, queer studies, and, more recently, management studies. Indeed, in relation to this last academic discipline, business schools are seeing a “growing interest in the contribution of the work of Michel Foucault to our understanding of organizations, accounting and the control of work.”1

In reflection of this trend, Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey bring together a series of previously published essays from various authors in their book Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self. The essays in this collection “attempt to apply Foucauldian categories and procedures to throw fresh light on the history of the factory, management and the modern corporation.”2 The book is divided into three sections: essays in the first section establish the general applicability of Foucault’s thought to management and organization studies, the second section focuses on accounting and the rise of the modern corporation; the third section provides analyses of recent changes in the post-Taylorist rationalization of work, particularly in relation to the techniques of self-management that characterize contemporary methods of human resource management (HRM).

If there is a single, discernible Foucauldian theme running through all of the essays in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory, it is the development of techniques of observation, measure, and performance 1 Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey, “Managing Foucault,” Introduction to Foucault,

Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self (hereafter referred to in the footnotes as FMOT), p. 1.

2 ibid., p. 3. Contributors to FMOT include: Pippa Carter, Stewart Clegg, Stanley Deetz, Patricia Findlay, Trevor Hopper, Keith Hoskin, Norman Jackson, Norman Macintosh, Alan McKinlay, Tim Newton, Mike Savage, Ken Starkey, Philip Taylor, and Barbara Townley.

98

Thompson: Review of Foucault, Management and Organization Theory

appraisal within modern private-sector organizations. In this regard, the editors situate Foucault’s work in close proximity to Weber’s metaphor of the “iron cage” of modern rationality “which simultaneously materially enriches Western civilization and spiritually impoverishes the captive individual.”3 As the book’s subtitle suggests, the Panopticon features prominently in the first two sections, while Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self” forms the theoretical basis of the analyses in the last section. Though many critics would claim a clear break between Foucault’s work of the mid- to late-1970s on modern technologies of power and his turn in the 1980s to modes of the production of subjectivity, there is a firm line of continuity in these works that is evident in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: in both phases, Foucault critically emphasizes the internalization of imperatives of power by the modern subject. This is the theme that runs “from Panopticon to technologies of self” and which undergirds the arguments of the essays collected in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory.

II

The essays in the first section situate Foucault’s contribution to management and organization studies much as one would expect, given the above-mentioned theoretical emphasis. Here, Foucault is a firmly “postmodern” thinker whose work reveals that contemporary organizational life is not necessarily “part of some modernist march to a better tomorrow.”4 Indeed, organizational life often has an ominous tone in this section, as one contributor expresses in his assertion that “as individuals, we are incarcerated within an organizational world.”5

As stated above, some of these essays place Foucault within the tradition of the critique of organizational rationalization that began with Weber. In this context, Foucault’s contribution is to underline “the development of disciplines of knowledge shaped almost wholly by the ‘disciplinary gaze’ of surveillance,” which foster the categorization of “individuals or bodies … through diverse and localized tactics of ratiocination” within modern organizations.6

The most successful essays in this collection, however, are those that eschew the general, preferring instead to “use” Foucauldian theoretical constructs to analyze particular historical formations. These essays tend to come in the second and third sections of the book. Among them is a persuasive piece on Britain’s Great Western Railway from 1833 to 1914 that 3 ibid., p. 4. 4 Gibson Burrell, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: The

Contribution of Michel Foucault,” in FMOT, p. 26. 5 ibid., p. 25. 6 Stewart Clegg, “Foucault, Power and Organizations,” in FMOT, p. 38.

99


details the discovery of career incentives as a more efficient technique for shoring up company discipline than traditional threats of negative sanction.7 This essay is remarkable for its balanced, critical appropriation of Foucault’s work, which includes questioning the Foucauldian notion of “discipline.” In addition, there are a number of essays which chronicle the rising use of internal management accounting – as opposed to accounting for external communication and audit – to create the visible and measurable responsibility centers that structure contemporary corporations. In this vein, the editors contribute a piece on the use of detailed accounting practices to create the “corporate Panopticon” that brought Alfred Sloan’s Ford Motor Corp. success in the postwar years.8 And there is a similar analysis of the disciplinary techniques instituted during the rise of ITT under “super accountant” CEO Harold Geneen.9 In the spirit of Foucault’s emphasis on the often indispensable phenomena found at history’s margins – “the details and accidents that accompany every beginning”10 – another essay of this middle section proposes to place the usually quiet field of accounting at the center of our understanding of “the economic.”11

Essays in the third section provide case studies to illustrate recent techniques through which contemporary enterprises effect the internalization of management imperatives in their employees. One of these essays chronicles the shift within one firm of a subgroup of workers from regular employment to contracted consultant status. The author of this essay finds that by increasing the visibility and individual accountability of these employees-turned-consultants within the company, management was able to effect a shift in their orientation towards their work, after which “[m]ost worked harder for the same pay.”12 Through interviews, the author of this study finds significant evidence of an internalization of company imperatives that neutralized the tension between managers and workers. In such a case, “[t]he enemy is no longer the managers’ expectations. The company is integrated into the self.”13 Another essay in the third section details a process through which a company hand-picked its job applicants for their docility and then set up a system of

7 Mike Savage, “Discipline, Surveillance and the ‘Career’: Employment on the Great

Western Railway 1833-1914,” in FMOT. 8 Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey, “The ‘Velvety Grip’: Managing Managers in the

Modern Corporation,” in FMOT, p. 113. 9 Trevor Hopper and Norman Macintosh, “Management Accounting Numbers:

Freedom or Prison – Geneen versus Foucault,” in FMOT, p. 126. 10 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory,

Practice, ed. D. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 144. 11 Keith Hoskin, “Examining Accounts and Accounting for Management: Inverting

Understandings of ‘the Economic’,” in FMOT. 12 Stanley Deetz, “Discursive Formations, Strategized Subordination and Self-

surveillance,” in FMOT, p. 160-1. 13 ibid., p. 166.

100


“teamworking” and intense “peer review” that delegated management surveillance to all employees.14 The authors of this essay come to a very different conclusion than in the preceding essay: in this case, the intensity of the expectation of self-surveillance is found to have stimulated multiple sites of resistance in the employee group.

III The Foucault scholarship in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory is generally competent, the essays are clearly written, and the book does much of what it sets out to do. There are some significant shortcomings in what it sets out to do, however. First, every one of the book’s contributors is affiliated with an Anglophone university, either in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States. This is surprising when we consider one contributor’s admission that “[i]t should not be assumed that Foucault’s writings are fully coherent to the Anglo-American eye.”15 Such homogeneity inevitably leads to a narrowness of view. For example, while Japanese management techniques are mentioned in two of the book’s essays, in both cases they arise only to mark the effect that their importation into the United States had on American companies.16 Furthermore, there is no mention of the globalization of labor markets or management techniques, and no acknowledgement that, far from being universal, Anglo-American management culture is very particular.

This cultural one-sidedness might partially account for the book’s narrow critical focus. In resting overwhelmingly in Foucault’s critique of modern power relations – a critique that Foucault sometimes (unfortunately, in my view) raises to the level of a social ontology17 – the essays in the book ignore the emphasis on subjective autonomy in Foucault’s later (re)turn to Kant and tend to avoid a deep engagement with the limitations of Foucault’s view of modern power relations. The editors’ concluding essay is an exception to this, but it appears as an afterthought in comparison to the dominant focus of the previous essays which avoid a larger theoretical domain.18 As an example of the limitations of this approach, take Foucault’s view of normativity, a central concept in his thought that has been criticized

14 Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor, “Through the Looking Glass: Foucault and the

Politics of Production,” in FMOT. 15 Burrell, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis,” p. 15. 16 McKinlay and Starkey, “The ‘Velvety Grip’”; McKinlay and Taylor, “Through the

Looking Glass.” 17 See Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt

School,” Political Theory 18(3): 437-69, Aug. 1990. 18 Ken Starkey and Alan McKinlay, “Afterward: Deconstructing Organization –

Discipline and Desire,” in FMOT.

101


as “one-sided” and “unsociological.”19 In contrast with Foucault’s Nietzschean association of normativity with coercion, for many social theorists the internalization of norms is a necessary stage in socialization and solidarity formation. Although the better essays in the collection question the validity of some Foucauldian categories and raise the possibility of resistance to disciplinary power,20 the book’s contributors tend to leave the prospects – and occasional empirical actuality – of normatively-based worker solidarity to the side.

The most significant shortcoming of Foucault, Management and Organization Theory, however, is a more general problem. The book and its individual essays tend to be unclear about their intended scope. While it is clearly a “critical” series of essays that takes normative aim at modern management practices, larger contextual questions of political or economic orientation are unfortunately given little emphasis. As nearly all of the essays in the book take late-capitalist, private-sector organizations as their objects, obvious questions silently loom above the page. Do these writers wish to launch a quasi-Marxian critique of the unequal forms of social organization and resource distribution engendered by and within contemporary private-sector organizations? Or do they instead wish their critique to remain safely within the boundaries of the company, thus confronting hierarchical discipline within organizations while ignoring larger political questions of unequal social power?

A few of the essays in the collection take some steps in the direction of these questions, but they are exceptional in this regard. For example, one essay associates contemporary HRM practices with “the emergence of a new language of work” that “denies the very possibility of class conflict” within the company.21 And another essay takes the argument for enlarging the domain of critique one step further in its authors’ suggestion that the discipline of the organized workplace has a larger function than simply production. In this view, labor is a technique of dressage, which “escape[s] the imperatives of production” and instead “functions to suppress deviance,” thus taking part in the larger system of “governmentality” that permeates modern (presumably Anglo-American) societies.22 This essay hints at the 19 See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1987), chs. 9, 10; and Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), chs. 1, 2, 3.

20 See, for example: Savage, “Discipline, Surveillance and the ‘Career’”; and Hopper and Macintosh, “Management Accounting Numbers.”

21 McKinlay and Taylor, “Through the Looking Glass,” p. 173. 22 Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter, “Labour as Dressage,” in FMOT, pp. 59, 49.

Governmentality is a Foucauldian neologism that refers both to the micrological performance of power on the individual subject and to the mentality of internalized discipline that this performance produces.

102


larger picture, suggesting that the wider societal function of labor be “examined in terms of its consequences and its progeniture in order to understand how it arises, how it functions and whether it needs to be resisted.”23

More typically in the collection, however, the essays come close to larger political and economic questions only to pull away cautiously. One author even seems to take positions on both sides, equating the employment relationship in itself with “economic domination and subordination” one moment, while seeming content simply to try to improve modes of communication within late-capitalist enterprises the next moment.24 Given that for-profit enterprises are the major focus of the book, it is surprising that the essays in Foucault, Management and Organization Theory tend to avoid the owner-worker cleavage – acknowledged as central to Western modernity by writers from Marx to Lipset and Rokkan – in terms larger than the internal workings of individual organizations.

Some may argue that this is asking too much, that the contributors are not political scientists or economists and thus should not be expected to raise such questions in their essays. Perhaps. But surely Foucauldians should recognize the dangers of the compartmentalization of knowledge into tidy “disciplines.” As an illustration of the need for critical management theorists to look beyond the inner workings of the corporation, consider Robert Anthony of the Harvard Business School, perhaps the predominant postwar American proponent of (non-critical) “management control theory.” Anthony served as Robert McNamara’s Assistant Secretary of Defense (Controller) from 1965 to 1968 (McNamara, by the way, makes an appearance in one of the book’s essays as president of Ford Motor Corp.).25 Just as the American “revolving door” that shuttles members of the upper managerial class between the private sector and the state transcends the bounds of the corporate organization, thus highlighting the porous separation between public and private, so should the focus of critical management studies. The specter of Anthony’s presence in Robert McNamara’s hyper-rationalized Pentagon during the critical years of the expansion of the war in Vietnam should illustrate the potential real-world effect of rationalized business

23 ibid., p. 64. 24 Clegg, “Foucault, Power and Organizations,” pp. 39, 45-6. 25 Robert Anthony and Vijay Govindarajan, Management Control Systems, 8th ed.

(Chicago: Irwin, 1995), p. ix. David Otley credits Anthony with quasi-foundational status in “Management control in contemporary organizations: towards a wider framework,” Management Accounting Research 5, 1994: pp. 289-99. Anthony’s most influential work is perhaps Planning and Control Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Boston: Division of Research, Harvard Business School, 1965). McNamara appears in McKinlay and Starkey, "The ‘Velvety Grip’,” p. 116.

103


models when they inevitably wander into to the blood-and-guts sphere of political action.

While the contributors of Foucault, Management and Organization Theory often argue persuasively for a Foucauldian look at management practices, they just as often fail to appreciate the wider significance of their work. Given that Foucault clearly emphasized the wider societal significance of the local technologies of social organization that emerged in early modernity, I look forward to a Foucauldian study of contemporary corporate practices that resolutely considers our global political and economic situation.

Douglas I. Thompson, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

104

foucault studies © John McSweeney, 2004


REVIEW

J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2003). ISBN 0-268-0269-9

With this thought‐provoking and impressive study, J. Joyce Schuld makes an innovative contribution to the growing body of literature exploring the significance of the thought of Michel Foucault for Christian theology and the broader study of religion. Her discernment of parallels on a performative level, between Foucault’s notion of power and St. Augustine’s notion of love, supports what at first sight seems a rather unlikely prospect: a sustained and fruitful conversation between the intellectual projects of Foucault and Augustine. Attention to this performative level enables Schuld to pursue this unexpected conversation through a series of related issues in “theologically oriented cultural analysis”, from social evil to the ambiguity of privileged discourses, while allowing Foucault’s and Augustine’s respective social and (inter)personal emphases to extend, in a kind of cross‐contamination, “the geographic reach” of each other’s analyses.1 What emerges is a brilliantly articulated common concern with the complexities and ambiguities of the social and political spheres, and a common commitment to attending to the dangers and vulnerabilities associated with them. In so doing, Schuld succeeds in her goals of retrieving neglected dimensions of Augustine’s thought and of demonstrating that Foucault has a value for theology, while elaborating a distinctive theological vision. And yet, her approach is not entirely unproblematic.

Particularly innovative in her cross‐reading, from a methodological point of view, is its concern to explore the resonances and exploit the differences between these two thinkers to the benefit of both of their projects, without reducing the distinctiveness of their insights and approaches. However, Schuld provocatively claims that no “metanarrative pressures” are exerted at the performative level of power and love by Foucault’s and Augustine’s larger projects: for all of the differences between them, their analyses are ultimately not incompatible.2 This correlates with Schuld’s 1 J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love (Notre Dame,

Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2003), 3, 79. 2 Ibid., 78.

105


interpretation, inspired by aspects of the broader American reception of his thought, of Foucault’s “specific researches” as “intentionally partial social descriptions” that are “empirical” in nature and “utterly uninterested in all‐encompassing interpretations”, “bracketing” rather then disqualifying broader questions. This enables her to present Foucault as attending to “forgotten voices” in a manner “suited to detecting and responding to the shifting risks of a post‐modern world”, while being able to locate his thought as “colourful fragments” within a more “intricate and extensive mosaic”.3 Consequently, Foucault’s carefully circumscribed social insights can be given greater “thickness” in their juxtaposition with Augustine’s rather more personal and relational theological framework and can be inserted within it, even as the framework itself is extended by contact with Foucault’s more political analysis.

While sophisticated and sympathetic (Schuld admirably wishes to defend Foucault against those who dismiss his thought as juvenile and dangerous), this reading simply seems to sacrifice too much of Foucault to Augustine’s intellectual perspective. It cannot allow room for the possibility that Foucault’s “bracketed” analyses and “unsettling rhetoric” might be strategic moments of a philosophical ethos that ultimately contests the “ontological and evaluative center” of Augustine’s thought4 – or for the further possibility that Foucault’s post‐Christian concerns might even contest the theological presuppositions of Augustine’s thought. In spite of her attention to differences between them, Schuld’s interpretation of Foucault considerably limits the extent of those differences and threatens to subtly harmonize Foucault’s thought with Augustine’s theologically‐motivated worldview. The difficulty here lies not so much in pursuing the interplay between Augustine and Foucault on the side of Christian cultural analysis, as in the tendency to obscure awareness that this is one half of the possible

3 Ibid., 8, 17‐19. 4 Ibid., 42. See Schuld’s quotation (p79) from Foucault’s “The Subject and Power”

supporting her view of his bracketed analyses: “If for the time being…I grant a certain privileged position to the question of ‘how’ it is not because I would wish to eliminate the question of ‘what’ and ‘why’. Rather it is that I wish to present these in a different way.” However, it seems that this text indicates the opposite of what Schuld draws from it. For as Foucault goes on to explain, the question of ‘how’, while of itself a “flat empirical little question”, does want to “introduce a suspicion” concerning power’s existence as the kind of object about which one can ask ‘what’ and ‘why’. Thus, his concern is not to bracket, but to contest and alter, these questions of meaning and causality. See M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power” in J.D. Faubian, ed., Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume 3 (New York: The New Press, 2000), 326‐348, at 336‐337.

106

McSweeney: Review of Foucault and Augustine

conversation – that Foucault remains at a distance from Augustine and theology.5

These tensions carry through the opening chapter’s fascinating exploration of the parallels between Augustinian ‘love’ and Foucauldian ‘power’. There Schuld skilfully highlights how love, as well as power, is relational, dispersed, and productive; how love’s emphasis upon the personal and power’s attention to the social might complement one another to suggest a rich and varied network of relations that simultaneously constitute our personal and social space; how together power and love might better enable one to articulate the ambiguities, dangers and sites of subversive hope within that space.6 Schuld can propose that where Foucault extends Augustine’s analysis deeper into the social and political spheres, the latter’s notion of love introduces a richer grammar of human relationality, possessing a “generative” capacity in relation to human possibility that the political heritage of the term ‘power’ necessarily denies it.7 In addition, Schuld can suggest that Augustine’s relational paradigm offers a more secure and satisfactory articulation of human freedom. Where Foucault must struggle to articulate a space of freedom beyond the ubiquity of power, Augustine can treat both of freedom and subjection within the single framework offered by love (in terms of ordered and disordered relations); where Foucault must define freedom in terms of autonomy (from power), Augustine can locate it within the sphere of interpersonal relationships.8

The quality of Schuld’s writing – and this pertains throughout the book – is such as to evoke subtle and varied tones of likeness and contrast between Foucault’s and Augustine’s respective portrayals of power and love across a range of texts and concerns, while imaginatively opening up a shared space in which to conceive and extend the range and meaning of both. Nevertheless, omitted from this account is how Foucauldian power functions precisely against the assumption that a benign coincidence between power and freedom is possible, and thus how ‘power’ renders the space of relationality and (inter)subjectivity problematic as a space of freedom. While Schuld can recognise that Foucault would see dangers in Augustine’s formulation of a freedom based on rightly ordered relations of dependency, her assumptions about the nature of Foucault’s project do not allow her to see the contestation

5 Schuld’s text tends to exhibit a degree of ambiguity, in this regard. At one moment,

she stresses the irreducible differences between Foucault and Augustine and the limits of any conversation between them; at another, she seems to suggest that they simply differ in their styles of describing the same social reality, the one attending to the fine grain of specific aspects of that reality, the other continually relating these details within a larger pattern. See for example, Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 8, 79.

6 See ibid., 14ff. 7 See ibid., 8, 31. 8 See ibid., 18‐30.

107


of that formulation implicit in his thought and, hence, the implied refusal of Augustine’s position as a straightforward alternative to his own.9 It, therefore, does not clearly emerge in Schuld’s discussion that Foucault’s difficulties in reconciling power and freedom are ethical before they are conceptual. This is not to suggest that Schuld is incorrect to argue that Augustine’s relational paradigm may have much to offer Foucault in this area (and vice versa), but that Foucault’s contestation of Augustine’s intersubjective emphasis (and Augustine’s implicit contestation of Foucault’s emphasis upon power) would seem to be a be a necessary part of the conversation between power and love, if the complexity of the encounter and the distinctiveness of each thinker’s project is to be preserved.10

One further related difficulty needs to be mentioned. Schuld’s desire to portray Augustine’s and Foucault’s analyses as complementary sometimes has the unfortunate tendency of leading to a simplified presentation of aspects of the content of Foucault’s thought. For instance, she suggests that Foucault never resolves the tensions between his conceptions of power and freedom, but “simply wanders back and forth…between these two depictions of human possibilities”.11 However one ultimately judges Foucault’s later reflections on themes such as ‘governmentality’, ‘subjectivation’, and ‘care of the self’, this description scarcely does them justice. Similarly, Schuld’s emphasis upon the lack of a relational dimension to Foucault’s notion of freedom tends to ignore, for instance, the emergence of the theme of friendship in his later thought.12

Nevertheless, within the parameters that follow upon her interpretation of Foucault, Schuld does offer an impressively sustained and

9 See ibid., 43. See also, M. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of

Work in Progress” in P. Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954‐1984, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2000), 253‐280, at 256. Foucault stresses that he is not pursuing alternative solutions but the genealogy of problems. His statement that “you can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people” would seem to bear on his conversation with Augustine.

10 Schuld wants to utilize Augustine’s premodern thought as a way of appreciating Foucault’s insights by creating a distance from the modernity he criticizes. However, Foucault’s later genealogies of the subject suggest that Augustine’s assumptions cannot be so readily or unproblematically differentiated from those of modernity and cannot so easily be made to escape Foucault’s critique.

11 Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 29. 12 For example, see Marli Huijer, “The Aesthetics of Existence in the Work of Michel

Foucault”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 25.2 (1999), 61‐85. Huijer argues that “the relation to the intimate other, shaped as friendship, is crucial to [Foucault’s] ethical‐aesthetic approach.” (61). Perhaps, this also suggests a limit to the usefulness of reading Foucault primarily through the lens of the notion of ‘power’, as it tends to obscure the significant developments to be found in Foucault’s later thought, as well as the critique of aspects of the earlier deployment of ‘power’.

108

McSweeney: Review of Foucault and Augustine

multi‐dimensional cross‐reading of Foucault and Augustine. The conversation yields a multiplicity of insights for a Christian cultural analysis confident of its own “ontological and evaluative center”, and, perhaps most impressively, articulates a coherent perspective rooted in Augustine’s and Foucault’s genuinely shared concerns with the dangers and ambiguities, vulnerabilities and possibilities, of the personal and social spheres. Across a range of texts and questions, Schuld shows how their respective responses to the dangerous and failed rhetorics of empire and modernity lead to an attention to the ambiguities and dangers that underlie the “lust for certitude”13 and the privileging of certain discourses. She also shows how Foucault and Augustine highlight both the “performative vulnerabilities” that complicate our ability to eliminate the negative side of our social achievements and how certain people are rendered vulnerable in this context.

The fascinating comparison drawn between Augustine’s theory of original sin and Foucault’s analysis of power in the second chapter illustrate these achievements well. Schuld highlights how each thinker delineates a social space in which evil is anonymous and yet permeates its most infinitesimal ‘capillaries’ and processes.14 More importantly she shows how both Foucault and Augustine articulate a sense of human agency and responsibility within this social space responsive to the human vulnerability and moral ‘vertigo’ experienced within it. This enables her to present a striking and insightful contrast between the ‘vulnerable’ subjectivity Foucault and Augustine propose, on the one hand, and the ‘autonomous’ moral agent she discerns, for example, in the work of Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, on the other.15 As such (and here her argument is perhaps most insightful and persuasive), Schuld succeeds in articulating a genuine and distinctive Foucauldian‐Augustinian ethical ‘voice’.

Discerning the roots of this common understanding of human “performative vulnerabilities” in their “shared conviction that the materiality of the flesh and the particularity of subjective identities are both at the same time radically configurable and configuring”16 forms the basis for an extended discussion in Chapter 3, centred on notions of desire and habit, of the possibilities and limits of configuring our social world. In turn, this leads in Chapter 4 to an exploration of the human price of claims to certitude. An innovative feature of this discussion is the suggestion that Foucault and Augustine share a view that ‘concupiscence’ linked to sexual desire has only a relative significance in explaining ‘performative vulnerabilities’ and their social outcome: a more complex picture is required.17 The strength of Schuld’s 13 Schuld, Foucault and Augustine, 111. 14 See ibid., 47‐51. 15 See ibid., 59ff. 16 Ibid., 79. 17 See ibid., 85‐102.

109


analysis lies in her ability to convey the complexity performed in this regard in the writings of Foucault and Augustine and so to evoke the multi‐dimensional approach called for in analyzing the contemporary context.

The final chapter, on the ambiguity of social achievements, reflects Schuld’s accentuation of neglected social and political aspects of Augustine’s theology. Against the backdrop of Foucault’s texts, Augustine’s view that the political is an unnatural and ambiguous realm can be seen to reflect not simply the contemplative’s distrust of the world, but a genuine political gesture attuned to the ambiguity of all social achievements.18 Equally, Schuld can suggest a similar significance to Augustine’s questioning not only of desire not ordered by reason, but of reason itself, disordered as it is by desire.19 At the same time, Foucault’s sensitivity to the dangers of power demonstrates limitations in Augustine’s political thought, such as his readiness to tolerate, for the preservation of order, measures that he admitted were repellent.20

At the beginning of her study, Schuld cites Foucault’s invitation to approach his thought as a tool‐box containing various resources to be used in “creative analysis and appropriation”.21 And in many respects this book is an admirable and sophisticated response to that invitation, opening up a rich and unexpected conversation. However, at crucial points in the argument Schuld makes her strategic reading of Foucault coincide too neatly with Foucault’s own concerns. Where this occurs Foucault’s work suffers the kind of distortions that often troubled him, and the credibility of Schuld’s argument suffers. Thus, while her study reveals much in Foucault’s and Augustine’s ethical approaches that appears critical to our contemporary context and develops a fine theologically oriented cultural analysis, important in its own right, it also misses opportunities for a more profound Auseinandersetzung between Foucault and Augustine and, consequently, a more thorough contestation of theology’s own entanglement in the ambiguities and dangers, vulnerabilities and possibilities of our present. Nevertheless, this study is highly recommended for its creative and insightful elaboration of a new and unexpected space of dialogue and for its challenge to the preconceptions and categorizations that can all too readily circumscribe ethical and religious thinking.

John McSweeney, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick

18 See ibid., 161ff. 19 See ibid., 177‐8. 20 See ibid., 186. 21 Ibid., 6.

110

foucault studies © Muhammad Ayaz Naseem, 2004

ISSN: pending Foucault Studies, No 1, pp. 111-113, November 2004

REVIEW

Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, Selected and Edited by Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999). The complicated question of religion as it pertains to Foucault’s work is often raised by scholars and students of Foucault. It asks both about Foucault’s personal and scholarly relationship to religion. Though there are numerous references to religion in his published work, what is not present is an overt and systematic treatment of religion in relation to his philosophy. This has prompted many of his followers, as well as detractors, to assume and/or to argue that religion has no place in Foucault’s post‐structuralist thought in particular, and in post‐structuralist thought in general. These scholars often read Foucault’s notion of the Death of God (following Nietzsche), his emphasis on the contingency of the subject, and his opposition to meta‐narratives as a sign of his rejection of religion as an analytical notion (following Marx).

Jeremy Carrette’s Religion and Culture attempts to address these issues and to clarify Foucault’s position as to the place of religion in his philosophical thought. As James Bernauer writes in the prologue, Carrette provokes students of Foucault to “challenge one another to risk the exploration of new terrain rather than just report their knowledge of the already mapped” (p. xi).

This volume is the first attempt to bring together various pieces that Foucault wrote from time to time that that explicitly deal with issues of religion and theology. What is heartening is that the volume brings out not only Foucault’s engagement with Christian theology, but also his attempt (albeit later in his academic life) to understand other religious traditions, especially how they work to bring about social change (e.g., the Islamic revolution in Iran: Chapter 10, pp. 131‐134) and transform the self (e.g. the Zen way of life: Chapter 8, pp. 110‐114). It should, however, be kept in mind that these are not Foucault’s only explications of religion. As Carrette notes in his lengthy introduction (Prologue to a confession of the flesh, pp. 1‐47), “there is in Foucault’s work an important theological and a religious sub‐text which remains unexamined and neglected” (pp. 2‐3). Religion and Culture aims to correct this by bringing together “Foucault’s engagement with religious themes outside the main corpus of his writings” (p.3).

111


Religion and Culture imaginatively divides Foucault’s writings into three parts. These divisions not only map the trajectory of Foucault’s interventions in and interrogations of religion in the context of discursive reality, they also juxtapose ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ in Foucauldian thought in order to “open up the trajectory of Foucault’s religious thought—to provide an account of Foucault on religion and culture” (p.34).

The volume opens with a prologue by Jeremy Carrette that provides a sharp background which allows us to engage with Foucault’s thoughts on religion and culture. Carrette not only brings out the religious sub‐text in Foucault’s work, but also highlights just how Foucault’s work provides a multidimensional critique of religion by bringing sexuality and the body into his exploration of religion and theology. Carrette also highlights Foucault’s attempt to explore a political spirituality of the self. Foucault, in this respect, not only shows how religion and theology engage with the sexual body, but also foregrounds the political technologies embedded in religious practices and questions such notions as mystical archaeology. Thus, in Foucault’s work, religion is “always a subsidiary sub‐category, a cultural deposit” that influences and informs his historical and philosophical interests. For him religion is part of the ‘cultural conditions of knowledge’ (p. 33). As Carrette writes, “Foucault’s work directly questions the separation between religion and culture by including it within his ‘analysis of the cultural facts’ and later collapsing the division between religion and politics in an ethics of the self… Foucault’s work can therefore be seen to move within a discursive space of ‘religion and culture’—where one mutually informs the other” (p. 33).

What also comes out of this collection of Foucault’s writings (like his other writings) is the issue of gender insensitivity and blindness. Foucauldian thought has often been seen as a continual contestation with feminist thought. Aware of this, Carrette attempts to put this continual contestation in perspective by raising the question of “how to read Foucault’s work on religion in a gendered context?” How are ideas that Foucault formulates about religion inscribed with a gendered perspective? How far has Foucault been complicitous with the religious institutions that have silenced and abused women and distorted men? How do we read Foucault’s texts on religion with an awareness of the politics of gender?” (p.7). According to Carrette, “while Foucault repressively omits to explore the position of women, his methodological stance creates the conceptual space to critique Foucault’s own exclusion (p. 9).

What is most interesting about the essays in this volume is to see Foucault’s own struggles and inner contestations as a scholar. These struggles are especially evident in the pieces on Klosowski, modern French fiction, and his own experience of non‐Western religious traditions such as Zen and Islam. Here we see Foucault in dialogue with his own ideas about spirituality, religion, and the self. These contestations with the self are especially evident

112

Naseem: Review of Religion and Culture

in the pieces on Zen and Islam, where Foucault is confronted with traditions that have different epistemological bases from which changes in the social and the self can be brought about. These personal contestations tie in well with two of the most engaging and revealing pieces in the volume, ‘Who are you, Professor Foucault’ (Chapter 6, pp. 87‐105) and ‘On religion’ (Chapter 7, pp. 106‐109). The former is a 1967 interview of Foucault by P. Caruso, while the later is based on the transcription of conversations between Foucault and Thierry Voeltzel, a young hitchhiker. In these two pieces Foucault lays down the basis of his views on spirituality and religion from an extremely personal angle and provides insights into his contestations with his own demons. This is well supplemented by a touching and marvelous memoir by James Bernauer.

In all, this collection is a welcome addition to the corpus of Foucault’s writings available to the Anglophone world. It is valuable in that it brings together for the first time many previously inaccessible pieces by Foucault that will be of interest and use not only to students of theology, but also to students and scholars who have interest in social change, the self, and the society at large.

Muhammad Ayaz Naseem, Mcgill University

113

foucault studies © Stuart Elden, 2004


REVIEW

James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette (eds.) Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). ISBN: 0754633535 Michel Foucault and Theology is an important book in the continuing study of this aspect of Foucault’s work. Its editors have themselves made major contributions to this debate: Bernauer’s Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight and articles; Carrette’s collection of Foucault’s writings on Religion and Culture and his monograph Foucault and Religion. Michel Foucault and Theology, which brings together a number of papers from a wide range of perspectives. Although many of the papers have been previously published, this is a valuable collection and one that should be of interest to readers beyond those interested specifically in theology. Papers discuss such major Foucaultian themes as sex, madness, political action and his relation to Habermas.

As is well known, Foucault was concerned with the relationship between Christianity and sexuality for the last decade of his life. As recently published lecture courses are making clear, this began at least as early as 1974, through a concern with Jesuit colonies in Latin America, and the relation between confession and sin around sexual practices, particularly masturbation. Continuing work through the later 1970s took into account the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Christian pastoral, and the early Church Fathers. This work culminated in the projected fourth volume of the History of Sexuality series, Les aveux de la chair. If publication of this book seems unlikely – in addition to Foucault’s prohibition against posthumous publications, Daniel Defert recently described the extant manuscript as being in a Proust-like state – forthcoming lecture courses are likely to illuminate many of these concerns.

In this collection there is not a concerted attempt to rebuild Foucault’s trajectory of thought (despite, for example, Bernauer’s illuminating reading of the 1984 course on parrhesia and the cynics), but a series of reflections on his work from a theological perspective, some illuminating readings of particular problems with his thought, and combinations of these two approaches. The first chapter is a powerful reading of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians; the second is a detailed analysis of Foucault’s relation to the Fathers and sex. There is a very useful discussion of Foucault’s widely misunderstood work on

114

Elden: Review of Michel Foucault and Theology

Iran by Michiel Leezenberg, which is likely to become the standard reading of this part of his work, and established scholars such as John Caputo and Thomas Flynn provide previously published but still interesting chapters. Despite its dull title – “From Singular to Plural Domains of Theological Knowledge: Notes Toward a Foucaultian New Question” – Thomas Beaudoin’s chapter is a real highlight. Here he reflects on the way that Foucault’s work can illuminate questions in music, particularly the improvisations of jazz. This is interesting because Foucault rarely spoke about music – unlike art or literature – and yet clearly had an interest in it, notably the work of his early lover Jean Barraqué and Boulez.

Foucault’s relation to the Catholic tradition he was brought up in is noted in a few places – and is obvious in his own writings, such as when he numbers the commandments in the Catholic rather than Protestant way. The final chapter is a fascinating (and deeply disturbing) examination of Catholic attitudes to sex, particularly providing a detailed reading of educational pamphlets. The examination of Foucault’s contentious claims regarding the birth or invention of homosexuality receives a detailed reading. That said, it is notable that Mark D. Jordan critiques many misunderstandings of these passages of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, but not specifically of the suggestion in the English translation that “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”. The French is substantially more ambiguous, with the sodomite described as “un relaps”, a throwback, a relapse.

Elsewhere there is a willingness to use Foucault, and those he cites, such as Jean Dulumeau, to problematise widely-held assumptions, such as the idea that the Middle Ages was a religious era and the modern age a more secular one. Far from it, it is due to those who wrote the history of the medieval period that our view is more myth than reality, as it was the conflict between Catholics and Protestants that marked the early modern period at home, and which their missionary colonisation spread abroad. J. Joyce Schuld and Henrique Pinto provide chapter length summaries of their own monographs on the subjects of Foucault and Augustine, and Foucault, Catholic thought and interfaith dialogue respectively. In this sense, this book is a state of the art report on the current status of research in this area. It can be recommended to a range of different audiences and will be particularly useful for those interested in Foucault’s thought generally, but who also want a sense of how he is being received in this area, and for those interested in the recent theological turn to contemporary thought (notably Derrida and Heidegger) for perspectives and ideas.

Stuart Elden, University of Durham

115

foucault studies © Stephen D’Arcy, 2004


REVIEW

Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (eds.) The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (New York: New Press, 2003). ISBN 1-56584-801-2 It is customary to periodize Foucault’s work in terms of three phases, the archaeological writings of the 1960s, the genealogical writings of the 1970s, and the ethical writings of the 1980s. Though this is simplistic, it does help to highlight some discernible discontinuities in his intellectual trajectory. A less chronological classification of Foucault’s works, , also pointing to a fundamental differentiation, is suggested by a perusal of The Essential Foucault (New Press), a new anthology of short pieces by Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. In it we find a series of unmistakably philosophical interviews and occasional lectures or essays, but no excerpts from any of Foucaultʹs largely historical monographs, such as The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. The omission reminds us that Foucault the philosopher, preoccupied by questions of method and aiming to elucidate basic concepts, can be distinguished from Foucault the historian, intent on tracing the genealogy of human kinds and present‐day social practices. The Essential Foucault is a single‐volume abridgement of the three‐volume Essential Works of Foucault, 1954‐1984 (New Press), itself a partial translation of the multi‐volume Dits et Écrits (Gallimard). It would be wrong to expect from this book a kind of abbreviated summation of Foucault’s career. Another anthology, The Foucault Reader (Pantheon), comes closer to that, since it includes substantial excerpts from Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality I. The Essential Foucault contains nothing like that, although certainly some of the same thematic ground is covered, notably in some interesting lectures on the rise of bio‐power and in a few interviews that reiterate and elucidate his claims about the importance of political technologies in the emergence of the human sciences. True, there are also shorter genealogical studies included, like the excellent and still timely “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual,’” and the influential lecture on “Governmentality.” Nevertheless, the picture that emerges from the pages of The Essential Foucault – taken on its own – is that of a historico‐philosophical research program, underdetermined (so to speak) by actual research. Thus, his “strategical conception” of power is given

116

D’Arcy: Review of The Essential Foucault

a lucid articulation, notably in both “The Subject and Power” and “Truth and Power,” but the detailed analysis of technologies of governance and “rituals of power,” familiar to readers of a book like Discipline and Punish, is largely absent. The conclusion seems inescapable that the works included in The Essential Foucault may be essential to a serious study of Foucault, above all by philosophers, but they are clearly not the essential works, even in the minimal sense of being a representative sample of Foucault’s major contributions.

Nevertheless, an anthology of many of Foucault’s central philosophical texts is surely something to be welcomed and embraced. It is true that one sometimes hears doubts expressed about whether Foucault was a philosopher at all, but in making their case the doubters make no reference to some of the important essays included here, like “What is Enlightenment?”, “What is Critique?”, “Truth and Power,” or “The Subject and Power.” These are plainly philosophical works, exploring essentially conceptual issues such as modernity, rationality, power, truth, and subjectivity.

The Essential Foucault invites us, then, to examine Michel Foucault the philosopher. But what sort of philosopher does he appear to be, based on the contents of The Essential Foucault?

Above all, he is a critical philosopher. The selections by Rabinow and Rose seem almost calculated to drive this point home, and this impression is only reinforced by the orientation of their “Introduction.” Critical philosophers, notably the line of German philosophers leading from Kant to Marx, tried to show that objectivity – the objectivity of knowledge, of human culture and history, of the commodity form – was, in one way or another, an achievement of human subjectivity (in the widest sense), that is, a product of human activity. Critique meant disalienation, or the reappropriation of the products of one’s own activity as knower, agent, or worker. Foucault’s project is similar at least to the extent that he too wants to dissolve the illusion that our experiences – of sexuality, say, or madness, or danger – confront us with an external necessity that permanently circumscribes our freedom to act or refrain from acting. But Foucault’s critique is, as he himself says, “a nominalist critique… arrived at by way of a historical analysis” (p. 258). The philosophical point, as opposed to the historical points about changes in the manner in which power was exercised in a certain period, and so on, is always of the same general type: where we are prone to find necessities, a more careful study reveals contingencies; where we have been taught to look for our deepest nature or essence, a second look finds only a historical artifact, arbitrarily assembled; where we tend to see the universality of an “anthropological constant,” a better‐informed assessment would show us nothing but the “exorbitant singularity” of a recent cultural invention. Indeed, Foucault identifies – as his “first rule of method” – the principle that one should, “insofar as possible, circumvent the anthropological universals…in order to examine them as historical constructs” (p. 3). This applies, of course,

117


to madness, sexuality, delinquency, and so on. Ultimately this is an ontological commitment, or rather, a commitment to what he calls “historical ontology” (p. 55) or a “critical ontology of ourselves” (p. 56). To the question, ‘what are we?’ the answer must always be sought by way of a critical interrogation: “In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” (p. 53).

The book begins with a substantial, 25‐page “Introduction” by Rabinow and Rose, which offers a tour through Foucault’s key concepts (at least the concepts prominent in the last fifteen years of his career: problematization, bio‐power, dispositif, etc.). After pointing out the provisional nature of even Foucault’s final self‐characterizations, the editors proceed to reread his whole body of work largely through such late texts as “What is Enlightenment?” Personally, I find that approach compelling, and it seems to have become the norm among Foucault’s commentators. But it does mean that archaeology, in the form that project had in Foucault’s early work (including important books like The Order of Things and Madness and Civilization), takes a back seat to historical ontology and the ethics of self‐formation. No doubt this could be justified by the relatively greater influence of Foucault’s “post‐archaeological” writings (I use this expression in spite of the fact that Foucault’s later self‐characterizations often retained the word “archaeology,” while detaching it from the theme of discourse analysis and generally giving it a broader sense; cf. p. 53). In any case, the “Introduction” succeeds well at what seems to be one of its main aims: to offer a clear articulation of the importance of Foucault’s work for contemporary critical analysis, without in any way encouraging the ossification of his concepts into a methodological orthodoxy or a banner under which “Foucauldian” partisans might assemble. On the contrary, the point is effectively made that precisely the dynamism of power and knowledge that Foucault so decisively disclosed renders any such position untenable: “After all,” the editors remind us, “Foucault wrote before the collapse of the Soviet empire, before the ‘New World Order,’ before the internet, before the genome project, before global warming, before genetically modified organisms, before pre‐implantation diagnosis of embryos, before ‘pharmacogenomics’” (p. xiii).

To the extent that this book sets aside the historical and political emphases of (its main “competitor”) The Foucault Reader, in favor of a new emphasis on Foucault’s contribution to philosophy, The Essential Foucault does offer something importantly new to English‐speaking readers: a single‐volume survey of Foucault’s efforts, over a period of thirty years, to develop a new, “historical nominalist” mode of critical philosophy.

Stephen D’Arcy, Huron University College

118

foucault studies © Brad Mapes-Martins, 2004


REVIEW

Roger Alan Deacon, Fabricating Foucault: Rationalising the Management of Individuals (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003). ISBN 0-84762-661-7 While recent Foucauldian scholarship has addressed the implications of governmentality as a way of theorizing modern political rationality, few have sought to incorporate a broader inquiry about the possibility for a continued Enlightenment project. To do so suggests, in part, a return to the debate between Habermas and Foucault, as well as an incorporation of Foucault’s later writings on Kant. Roger Deacon has sought to interrogate the continued relevance of the “Enlightenment project” in light of recent scholarship and in combination with a wide‐ranging analysis of the work of Foucault. Deacon covers a lot of ground, from Madness & Civilization to the later lectures on parrhesia, while simultaneously challenging criticisms of Foucault as a relativist, fatalist, and pessimist. Attempting to handle such an array of materials and give it a tight focus is an ambitious project. Deacon’s effort is guided by the following question: “[I]n the light of Foucault’s work, and related contemporary debates around the salvageability or otherwise of the Enlightenment project, what kind of future exists for social theory and practice?”1 In order to answer this question Deacon “fabricates” a Foucault‐author. Deacon does so by developing what he calls a “holistic” approach to Foucault, that is, an interpretively constructed unity of Foucault’s oeuvre that explores “alternative conceptions of theory, politics and the subject, intimated but not always developed in Foucault’s work.”2 Deacon claims to be constructing his Foucault as a way of achieving “a consistent Foucault, a useful Foucault, an applied Foucault,” but insisting on consistency in order to “follow” Foucault is left unjustified.3 Questioning the viability of the Enlightenment project in light of Foucault begins with a description of the Enlightenment’s place in determining our present. For Deacon, as for Foucault, that which has come to characterize our present is the problematic nature of the grounds of

1. Roger Alan Deacon, Fabricating Foucault: Rationalising the Management of Individuals

(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003), 10. 2. Ibid, 13. 3. Ibid.

119


knowledge initiated by Kant in his critiques. The present is caught within an understanding of the possibilities and limits of knowledge that relies on positioning “man” as both the object of knowledge and the subject that knows. Following Foucault’s analysis of Kant in The Order of Things, Deacon goes on to outline the history of truth as that in which Western rationality is ensnared. “If we are indeed ‘trapped’ in a history which is ours and which has made us what we are, how is it that we can be aware of, let alone come to understand, this fact?”4

In answering, Deacon turns to the notion of a permanent critique of the present developed in Foucault’s later reflection on Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” The notion of a permanent critique of the present emerges from what Foucault describes as: “philosophy problematiz[ing] its own discursive actuality: an actuality that

it questions as an event, as an event whose meaning, value, and philosophical singularity it has to express and in which it has to find both its own reason for being and the foundation for what it says.”5Deacon understands the critique of reason to be imperative to

understanding our present as it has been affected by the Enlightenment. The critique of reason, thus, is continuously activated as a paradox that is unable to “accurately represent the object of critique” and, yet, must attempt to in order to maintain the “illusion of its capacity to know its other” in which Enlightenment reason persists.6 Furthering his discussion of critique, Deacon turns to Foucault’s

genealogical analysis. The capacity of genealogy to “reconfigure the past” lends itself to Deacon’s project through a problematizing of the Enlightenment.7 Deacon, in accordance with his “fabrication” of Foucault, says little on the relationship of archaeology to genealogy, but instead defers to Arnold Davidson’s analysis.8 Fabrication, as Deacon explains, is capable of bringing about specific political effects. Through his problematization of the Enlightenment Deacon points the way to a strategic counter‐memory of reason. Genealogy requires that we “exteriorise the present,” thus making unfamiliar that which has an “apparent order, necessity and identity.”9 In doing so, a counter‐memory is developed that contains within it the possibility for alternative futures. Deacon quickly points out that such alternatives are not present in the work of Foucault, but follow from its

4. Ibid, 35‐36. 5. Michel Foucault, “What is Revolution?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvêre Lotringer

and Lisa Hochroth (n.p.: Semiotext(e), 1997), 86. 6. Deacon, Fabricating Foucault, 49. 7. Ibid, 68. 8. See Arnold I. Davidson, “Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” in Foucault: A Critical

Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 221‐233. 9. Deacon, Fabricating Foucault, 96.

120

Mapes-Martins: Review of Fabricating Foucault

implications. It is through the localized work of intellectuals separating out and de‐familiarizing the taken‐for‐granted knowledges that constitute a given discourse that counter‐memories can come to have truth‐effects. The local character of genealogy, Deacon argues, is not to be

understood as lacking coherence. Turning again to Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” Deacon points to the interrelatedness of particular experiences and the “general history” by which each has come to take its present form to demonstrate the coherence of a problematization of Enlightenment reason. Such coherence is further demonstrated through the systematic examination of the three domains of genealogy– knowledge, power, and the subject– in combination with the practical systems by which they operate. It is important that Deacon establish the coherence of genealogical questioning of Enlightenment reason in order to arrive at Foucault’s revision of the structure‐agency dichotomy, thus paving the way for an analysis of power and the assumption of freedom that accompanies relations of power. At this point Deacon turns to the history of political rationality as the

emergence of disciplinary power alongside and within power as sovereignty. Distinct from a Marxist understanding of power as emanating from the state and operating as repression or domination, Foucault’s rendering of Christian pastoral power is simultaneously individualizing and totalizing. It is this simultaneity that characterizes modern Western political rationality. Deacon dwells for some time on the emergence of discipline as outlined in Discipline and Punish before discussing the combination of techniques– discipline and bio‐politics– that enable modern political rationality to operate. Deacon seeks to clarify the more general historical features of power relations before turning to a more detailed analysis of the positive capacity of power: “Thus not only are power relations not reducible to the disciplines, or the latter to the apparatuses of the state, but it would also be wrong to see the disciplines as replacing or transcending sovereignty […].”10 Disciplinary relations of power, Deacon reminds us, are local, contingent and unstable; they are the tactical deployment of a particular discourse. Tracing the reconceptualization of power undertaken by Foucault,

Deacon finds in the shift from a theory of power to an analytics of power the opportunity for a “rewriting of [the]historical and theoretical trajectory” of relations of power, an alteration of the discourse of power.11 Through analysis of the interconnections between local relations of power and the global strategies that they support, transformative negotiations of relations of power are made visible. Avoiding the assumption that power relations per se are detrimental, Deacon seeks to maintain the notion of flexible, numerous,

10. Ibid, 158. 11. Ibid, 164.

121


sometimes conflicting, resistances. It is the combination of this understanding of resistances with the positive capacity of power relations to produce subjects that, in turn, leads Deacon to accept Foucault’s conception of an ethics of self‐experimentation. Despite Deacon’s claim that Fabricating Foucault “explores the

implications of the work of Michel Foucault for the Enlightenment project,” it is not until the reader arrives at the conclusion that any such implications are explored.12 The book lays out, in vast scope, the groundwork for such an inquiry, but arrives at eleven conclusions that read as a restatement of various arguments made by Foucault himself. Deacon states early on that: “While I have attempted to reduce to a minimum those moments where, as

a result of my intention to use him in order to abuse him, my voice and the voice of Foucault seem imperceptibly to merge, such lapses in critical distance are both partly unavoidable and to some extent desirable since in this book Foucault is pitted against himself.”13Although the merging of the two voices is justifiable, doing so lends the

book an exegetical air that, while helpful for the new student of Foucault, can be read as uncritical. The holistic conception of Foucault that Deacon develops, “assuming

the unity of his oeuvre in order to demonstrate its consistency over time,” avoids the aporias that were often most fruitful for Foucault.14 While Deacon challenges the conclusions drawn by Habermas about Foucault’s relativism, he ignores the more helpful questions Habermas raised around the causal relationship of truth and power and the shifting that appears to take place in the development of genealogy out of archaeology. This is not to say that those criticisms of Foucault that Deacon does address are not handled well, but that other criticisms may be better suited to the task of reflecting on the Enlightenment project in light of Foucault.

Brad Mapes‐Martins, University of Massachusetts

12. Ibid, 6. 13. Ibid, 14. 14. Ibid, 13.

122

foucault studies © Alain Beaulieu, 2004


REVIEW

Frédéric Gros (ed.), Foucault et le courage de la vérité (Paris, PUF, 2002). ISBN: 2130523315 The “courage of truth” translates the Greek term parrhêsia, which becomes one of the later Foucault’s preferred topics. Like Heidegger, who in his later writings sharpens the experience of “true thought” around the translation of a few pre-Socratic terms (e.g., chréon, alèthéia, moîra, logos), Foucault devotes his final courses at the College of France (1981-1984) to interpreting a network of Greek concepts (e.g., epimeleia heautou, meletê, êthos), which converge for that occasion in an experiment with the parrhesiastic way of life. Despite its title, however, the work consisting of six chapters written by as many contributors aims not so much at substantiating this convergence through historical investigation as showing the omnipresence of the theme of the courage of truth in Foucault’s intellectual cursus. These contributions re-evaluate the usual tripartition of Foucault’s work (archaeology, genealogy, subjectivation), turning the practico-theoretical “fundamental complex” (p. 8) that constitutes the courage of truth into the central axis around which Foucault’s thought and political engagement revolve. From this perspective, parrhêsia, defined as “une prise de parole publique ordonnée à l’exigence de vérité, qui, d’une part, exprime la conviction personnelle de celui qui la soutient et, d’autre part, entraîne pour lui un risque, le danger d’une réaction violente du destinataire” (p. 158), corresponds to what Foucault practised and thought throughout his entire lifetime and work. The truth-telling or fearless-speech (franc-parler, dire-vrai), which combines the transformation of oneself with a risk-taking, provocative way of speaking, is somewhat characteristic of a degree of cynicism that is in keeping with Foucault’s dicta, reading between the lines: “the real sick people are the psychiatrists” (Madness and Civilization) or “the creation of illegalities is the true criminality” (Discipline and Punish). As institutions develop, their techniques of domination become increasingly tolerable. And the courage of truth becomes the most effective means of resisting them.

The work is divided into three sections. The first is entitled “The specific intellectual”. Through references to Foucault’s engagements (GIP, Iran, Croissant, etc.), the first text (P. Artières) illustrates the new relationship of the intellectual to his actuality. It is no longer a question of identifying universal values, but rather of making a diagnosis on a “located present”. The

123


second chapter (F.P. Adorno) goes further by investigating the relationship between theory and practice. It stresses Foucault’s attempt to differentiate the social critique from the political dimension while associating the first with an ethical practice. This is what Socrates already practised. His “stylization of existence” deserves to be used as an antidote to the edict, “Know thyself” (gnothi seauton), which is overrated in our tradition. The second section is entitled “Metaphysical engagement”. The first text in that section (J. Revel) challenges the divisions of Foucault’s work from an original and inspiring perspective. The only break in Foucault’s philosophical cursus would have originally occurred in 1953 with the reading of Nietzsche, who reveals to Foucault the importance of discontinuity. But how to introduce a degree of unity to the study of the “cases” that interest Foucault (Artaud, Bataille, Sade, Roussel, etc.)? The theoretical answer to that question would have been given to Foucault by Deleuze, and the practical answer, by his involvement in the GIP. On the theoretical level, it is no longer a question of unifying the differences, but rather of “problématiser” by questioning events and singularities that Foucault later associates with different historical a priori. At the practical level, the GIP provides Foucault with the argument according to which resistance is not aimed at forming a new unitary community, but at generating a maximum of differences. Thus at the theoretical and practical levels, the question of the “cases’” unity is marginalized. The following chapter (M. Fimiani) points to a Hegelian motive in Foucault’s study of the relationship between self-government and government of others, self-control and transformation of self, etc. The third section is entitled “Greek Light”. In the first chapter of this section, the author (J.-F. Pradeau) reconsiders the interesting debate that pits Foucault against P. Hadot concerning the status that is to be granted to the “spiritual exercises”. It is known that ascetic practices open the way to Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence”, which are vigorously denounced by the guardians of Hellenism as a new form of dandyism incompatible with ancient universal reason. The authentic ancient “culture of the self” is not directed toward a free and voluntary aesthetic constitution; it implies the idea of a cosmic and external order on the basis of which it is regulated. To Foucault’s defence, the author points out that Foucault’s interest in the “culture of the self” is aimed not at achieving a historical return, but at undertaking a genealogy of the modes of subjectivation in order to break with the repressive and legal conception of power. The final chapter (F. Gros) first exposes the three analyses of the concept of parrhêsia, where Foucault successively opposes the courage of truth to confession (aveu), rhetoric and wisdom. The author later explains how Socrates becomes for Foucault a “frère parrhèsiaste” who constitutes his existence through the creation of a simple lifestyle and the use of a provocative “technique of veridiction”. Foucault stresses the fact that the scandalous truth-telling of Socrates was devalued in favour of a Platonic

124

Beaulieu: Review of Foucault et le courage de la vérité

idealization of the “noble soul” and self-knowledge. That constitutes for Foucault a misappropriation of the true nature of Socrates.

The work coordinated by F. Gros has the merit of showing the decisive character, for Foucault, of the connections between being and doing, work and engagement, the invention of the techniques of veridiction and the creation of a lifestyle, etc., which help give this philosophy an immediately pragmatic value. The book convinces the reader of the importance of the courage of truth for Foucault. From the latter’s definition of the “author” (which, while not mentioned in the book, is adequate for its own purposes) as the one who loses his/her identity in favour of a self-transformation through the process of writing (1960s), his interest in the perspective of “the life of infamous men” from which history must be rewritten, and his conception of the specific intellectual (1970s) up to his final meditations in which the topic of parrhêsia becomes explicit (1980s), Foucault never ceases to practise the courage of truth and to seek the forgotten conditions of its exercise.

Alain Beaulieu, McGill University

125

foucault studies © Alain Beaulieu, 2004


REVIEW

Frédéric Gros & Carlos Lévy (eds.), Foucault et la philosophie antique (Paris, Kimé, 2003). ISBN: 2841743128

The panorama of contemporary philosophy is divided over the status to be granted to Greco-Roman thought. Some authors prefer to discredit ancient philosophy, such as Heidegger (Being and Time) and Derrida, for whom the Platonic philosophy of truth and the Aristotelian philosophy of time are to be de(con)structed, and the Critical theory in its Habermasian version, which barely goes beyond the "Unfinished project of Modernity". There are also the nostalgics of "beautiful harmony" such as Gadamer, who from a conservative perspective rehabilitates the Platonic dialogical ideal, as well as the historians of ancient philosophy. And there are finally those who risk an innovative and productive reading of the ancient thought. The latter include the young Heidegger, who sees Aristotle as a precursor of the hermeneutics of facticity, the mature Heidegger who commemorates the pre-Socratics’ poetry, Deleuze, who proposes a creative reading of Lucretius and Stoicism, and Foucault whose later writings (1980-1984) develop the original thesis of a regrettable forgetfulness of the ancient care of the self (epimeleia heautou). The older Foucault’s interest in ancient philosophy is consistent with his intellectual cursus in that he remains faithful to the break with utopias by considering the necessary play between power and knowledge, and ultimately conceives of the interweaving of the liberation process and the "techniques of self" (or the power exerted by oneself over oneself). This leads Foucault to undertake a genealogy of the modes of subjectivation and, more specifically, to write a history of the ways of caring for oneself. The late Foucault widens the historical extent of his research, which was hitherto limited to the period from the Renaissance (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) to Modernity ( nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries), and extends it back to Antiquity.

Foucault et la philosophie antique is the title of the proceedings from an international conference organized in Paris in 2001 around a course given by Foucault in 1981-1982 at the Collège de France, entitled Herméneutique du sujet (Gallimard/Seuil, 2001). F. Gros, who coedited Foucault et la philosophie antique, also helped edit this course, and wrote the luminous and generous “Situation du cours” (Herméneutique du sujet, p. 487-526). Volumes II and III of the History of Sexuality (1984) had already developed the main concepts developed by

126

Beaulieu: Review of Foucault et la philosophie antique

Foucault based on his reading of ancient philosophies (care of the self, government of oneself and others, the aesthetics of existence, etc.). It is in the courses, however, that one finds the most detailed elaboration of Foucault's periodization (Platonic, Imperial, Christian and Cartesian moments), compared to which the information contained in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality seems almost fragmentary. Moreover, the last courses devote many analyses to topics that receive little development in the books (cynicism, "direction of conscience", etc.). Hence the great importance of their publication.

In the first two sections of Foucault et la philosophie antique, the authors analyze the relationship of Foucault to the three major Hellenistic systems – Stoicism, Skepticism and Epicureanism. The first chapter (T. Benatouïl) presents a meticulous comparative study of Deleuze’s and Foucault's conceptions of Stoicism. Let us note, however, that, contrary to what the author asserts (p. 33), Deleuze's interest in Stoicism does not disappear after Logique du sens (Minuit, 1969), as is demonstrated twenty years later in Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque (Minuit, 1988, p. 71-72), where Stoic doctrine is associated with the production of the first logic of the event. The following chapter (L. Jaffro) is concerned with some "distortions" in Foucault's interpretation of Epictetus, for whom rhetoric is not as sharply opposed to parrhêsia (truth-telling) as Foucault maintains. The author also stresses, using a highly instructive approach, the rigidity of Foucault's periodization, which prevents him from considering the anti-Cartesianism of stoic obedience that was developed in England around the eighteenth century (in particular by A. Smith and Shaftesbury). The third chapter (V. Laurand) deepens the analyses devoted by Foucault to Musonius Rufus' doctrine of marriage. In the following chapter, the author (C. Lévy) discusses Foucault's exclusion of Skepticism in his exploration of ancient thought. Foucault would have voluntarily left out the thesis of Skepticism to avoid confronting this nihilistic side of care of the self, which would have weakened the historical process of the subject's construction that he wanted to highlight. The fifth chapter (A. Gigandet) attempts to rebuild the unity of Foucault's sporadic references to the Epicurean doctrine. The third and last section of the work is concerned with the "spiritual exercices" (pratiques de l'âme). One author initially studies the decisive passage for Foucault's analysis, which extends from the ancient "direction of conscience" based on care of the self to the Christian "direction of conscience" directed at renunciation of self (M. Senellart); one then explains the paradox of Platonism, which maintains a tension between the epimeleai heautou - care of the self - and the gnôthi seauton - self-knowledge (A. Castel-Bouchouchi); and one finally underlines the fact that the Nietzschean edict, "Make your life a work of art", which was revived by Foucault, can be achieved only in favour of a particular ethics of speech anchored in parrhêsia, or truth-telling (J. Davila).

127


Foucault does not propose any return to a Hellenic-Roman experimentation with care of the self. And it is this lack of desire to restore the past, conjugated with a reclamation of ancient philosophy for our actuality that puts the later Foucault in a delicate and stimulating position. Volumes II and III of the History of Sexuality, as well as the last lectures at the Collège de France, have the rare ability of presenting the vivacity of Hellenistic philosophy to non-specialists, while also contributing to the debate among initiates. This shows the richness of Foucault's ultimate explorations, which are admirably presented, problematized and constructively criticized by the authors of Foucault et la philosophie antique. (Some short biographical/bibliographical notes on the authors would have been helpful.)

Alain Beaulieu, McGill University

128

Foucault-Studies-Number-1 (2004).pdf

Documents

Transcript of Foucault-Studies-Number-1 (2004).pdf