The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Relatedly, a consideration of Entstehung focuses one’s attention on the milieu and the means of emergence of events. Events emerge through relations between forces and, more speciically, through relations of conlict, domination, and subjection. Confrontation between forces of varying strength occasions the emergence of the triumphant forces themselves as events. Emergence in this context should be understood not as the long-awaited arrival of something expected, as the product of logical or planned development, but as the fortuitous appearance of something that could only have arisen given the conluence of particular forces. Hence, for Foucault, doing history via genealogy – that is, via an analysis of events – destabilizes foundations, breaks up unities, and reveals fragmentation and heterogeneity in their place.

Genealogy thus disrupts the presumptions of both unity and objectivity by locating within history that which has been regarded as constant and stable; for example, by recasting presumed givens such as “human nature” as both the product of events and as themselves discursive events. It places the historian within history; it interrogates the place from which the historian speaks, the construction of the objects that shape the historian’s pursuit of knowledge, and the emergence of the concepts that structure the historian’s speech. Genealogy thus brings to the fore events that would previously have lain undiscovered and shifts our focus from major, perceptible, and momentous occurrences to the minor, subterranean “profusion of entangled events” beneath them (ELCP, 155).

Whereas traditional history posits an inevitable continuity among historical events, “effective” history treats events as singular eruptions; an event is “the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it” (ELCP, 154). The presumption of a logical progression of events is rejected, supplanted by the accidental collision of forces that give rise to events of an unanticipated order. Thus, in line with the Nietzschean inheritance that shapes Foucault’s understanding of the event, a focus on events is paired with a disruption of the conventional understanding of causal relations. The event indicates a shift from thinking of causality as a linear relation between cause and effect, as eficient causality, to thinking of causality in terms of a set of more complex relations. The idea that events are the effects of chance encounters between forces, however, does not entail that events arise randomly or that the contingency of their emergence is haphazard. Instead, Foucault maintains, for example, that the events that constitute a discursive formation are the product of “the regularity of a practice” (EAK, 74).

Foucault’s understanding of the event is also signiicantly inspired by Deleuze’s theory of the event in The Logic of Sense. In his review of that text in “Theatrum

Philosophicum,” Foucault summarizes three dimensions of the event: “at the limit of dense bodies, an event is incorporeal (a metaphysical surface); on the surface

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Suggested Reading

Colwell, Chauncey. 1997. “Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy,” Theory and Event

1, no. 2. Accessed November 11, 2010. DOI: 10.1353/tae.1997.0004.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University

Press.

Flynn, Thomas. 1994. “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 29–48.

McWhorter, Ladelle. 1994. “The Event of Truth: Foucault’s Response to Structuralism,” Philosophy Today 38, no. 2:159–166.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. “The Four Great Errors,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J.

Hollingdale. New York: Penguin.

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the term of art for the process of cognition generally employed by Kant and German Idealism.

Foucault examines the role of the constitutive sense of experience in his famous treatment of the invention of man in The Order of Things (1966). There he demonstrates that man comes to exist only when he is identiied as the source of the representational form of knowledge that had governed what was knowable in the classical age. In this sense, the subject whose power produces representation becomes itself an object of knowledge. Modern empirical sciences (biology, economics, and philology) emerge precisely at this historical juncture as ways of studying the initude of man’s various representational capacities (perceiving, valuing, and describing). Man is shown to be a resolutely inite object. But he is also, at the same time, the subject that is held to constitute the empirical world and to do so precisely by virtue of his initude. Modern philosophy – and Foucault here clearly targets the constitutive phenomenology of Husserl, the existential phenomenology of the early MerleauPonty and Sartre, and Heidegger’s distinctive hermeneutical phenomenology – is thus deined by its attempt to work out an “analytic of initude” that shows how man, precisely in and through his limitations, is both the transcendental origin of all objects of knowledge and the empirical object itself being studied, both, as Foucault put it, the founding and the founded. Lived experience is but one of the principal names for man as this “empirico-transcendental doublet,” Foucault contends, for le vécu is the “space in which all empirical contents are given to experience; it is also the originary form that makes them in general possible and that designates their irst roots” (EOT, 321). As such, lived experience is nothing other than the dogmatic slumber, the “anthropological sleep,” into which modern thought, according to Foucault, has fallen. This sleep, as we begin to awaken from it, from the encumbrance of man himself, Foucault says, opens a new space in which it might become possible to think other than simply in accordance with humanism. In this sense, Foucault’s mode of thought is indeed deeply at odds with any appeal to experience in this constitutive sense.

The concept of l’expérience, however, plays an important and distinctly different set of roles throughout Foucault’s work. We can distinguish four principal senses. Three are concepts with which he was explicitly concerned, what can be termed thematic concepts. Another is a meaning on which he relied but does not analyze directly, which is thus best called an operative concept.

The irst of the thematic concepts of experience is methodological and is marked by Foucault’s employment of the phrase “form of experience” and its variants. In this sense, experience denotes the object of archaeological-genealogical investigation. Foucault speaks, for example, of studying the “structure of the experience of madness,” the “pure experience of order and its modes of being,” and the “experience of sexuality.” Each of these he takes to be a historically unique “form of experience” composed of a “correlation between ields of knowledge, types of normativity, and

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forms of subjectivity in a particular culture” (EHS2, 4). Each form is thus a coniguration forged by the reciprocal, though irreducible, interrelations between speciic types of knowledge, power, and processes of subjectivization. This coniguration, what Foucault elsewhere calls a historical a priori or game of truth, is a historical multiplicity that serves, in turn, as the grid of intelligibility, practice, and selfrelation that sets down the rules for what can count as an experience of the speciic sort under examination. The task of the archaeological-genealogical method is thus to unearth this shifting fundamental conditioning stratum and to set out the chance lines of historical concatenation of types of knowledge and practices of power and subjectivization by which it emerged.

The second thematic concept of experience in Foucault’s work is his famous appeal to “limit-experience.” Whereas lived experience is concerned with accounting for the mundane, the banal, and the commonplace, limit-experience occurs at points in life that are as close as possible to being unlivable. Foucault initially found the resources to think of this distinctive sort of experience in his studies of a lineage of what he called thinkers of the outside: the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stephane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot (EEW2, 150–151). Each, according to Foucault, located moments in the course of ordinary life at which the boundaries that deine its very normality become exposed, paradoxically, in and through their collapse. Following this line, Foucault initially conceived of limit-experience as an encounter with the untamed space of the prediscursive that he believed lay anterior to the grids of intelligibility that deined the conines of reason, knowledge, and the normal. Later, drawing from the work of Georges Canguilhem, he came to think of a limit not as what opens on some domain outside lived experience but as a deviation from the norms that structure the environments that we inhabit, a chance error or mutation that occurs within the immanent low of life and that, as such, creates the possibility of something new emerging precisely within that low itself (see EEW2, 476–477; cf. FDE3, 441–442).

Now, whether the response to such an encounter is to act out the transgression (Bataille) or to withdraw into the condition of destitution (Blanchot), as Foucault’s early writings proclaim, or it is to embrace the creative role of deviance for life itself (Canguilhem), as he was later to advocate, limit-experience is always a process of desubjectivization, an experiment or ordeal in which the constituting self is wrenched from out of its supposed position of preeminence, exposed in its frailty, and confronted with the task of fashioning itself anew, a practice of freedom, an aesthetics of the self.

The third and inal thematic sense of experience is the testimony of the marginal. Experience here denotes the wide spectrum of embodied knowledge that comes from being in a condition of subjugation or exclusion. Foucault never sought to develop a full theoretical account of such experience, but he did, on several signiicant occasions,

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appeal to it. One such example was when early on he considered the possibility of writing a history of madness itself; that is, an account of madness as it had been lived by the mad. Yet, even then, he acknowledged that such experience is necessarily intertwined with the cognitive schemes and normative practices that produce it: “The liberty of madness can only be heard from the heights of the fortress in which it is imprisoned” (EHM, xxxii). Accordingly, his subsequent presentations of such testimony – in the two case studies that he assembled from the nineteenth century, of the murderer Pierre Rivère (I, Pierre Rivère, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother ... [1973]) and the hermaphrodite Alexina Barbin (Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite

[1978]), as well as the introduction he wrote for an anthology of internment reports that he edited, “Lives of Infamous Men” (1977) – were all constructed so that they show the complex way in which these experiences were caught up in and constituted by speciic historical techniques of representation and forms of intervention, what he would come to call processes of subjectivization. In each, he sought to give voice to subjugated experiences as they moved within and through the very practices of normality that excluded them as deviant or abnormal.

The inal sense of experience in Foucault is more subtle and dificult to detect, but not for that any less signiicant. Foucault himself never theorized this sense, but he relied on it, and it enabled him to carry out his work. It thus stood behind the research itself, shadowing it, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar.

This sense refers to the concrete experiences born out of social and political struggle, and it has two sides. The irst has to do with the motivation underlying Foucault’s work. Foucault was directly involved in or witnessed at close hand efforts to reform psychiatric facilities and hospitals, the uprisings against the conditions of prison life, social movements in support of immigrant rights and against racism, and political revolts and revolutions, and he supported, albeit critically, the burgeoning movement for gay liberation. He sometimes explicitly invoked such experiences as being part of what compelled him to investigate speciic institutions and practices (see FSP, 39–40/EDP, 30–31). In this sense, these experiences stood, for him, as a wellspring that motivated his research and served to suggest for him speciic lines of analysis on which he subsequently drew in his investigations.

The second side has to do with the eficacy or effects of this research. As each of Foucault’s works is rooted in a contemporary sociopolitical situation, it has a stake in the conigurations of knowledge, power, and subjectivization that are at work in this context. Each study thus necessarily operates within the truth of the concrete experience out of which it arises, and, as such, Foucault acknowledged, his analyses must meet the standards of conventional academic research. This means that they must strive to make and defend veriiable historical claims through the responsible use of source materials. But these works exceed the purview of the classical academic historian in that they also call their readers to an experience of who

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and what they are or, better, who and what they have become, an experience of modernity itself that would ultimately begin, Foucault held, a transformation in the reader’s relationship to the subjects that they themselves have become and the age that has shaped them as such. In this sense, the effect of archaeological-genealogical research is not simply to offer an account of the past but to do so in such a way that it provokes us to think of new ways of relating to ourselves, to one another, and to the traditions and worlds that we share. Foucault did not speak of the intended effects of his research very often, but he did note in an interview that what for him was ultimately at stake in his work was not just the historical cogency of his analyses, as important as that was, but the creation (Foucault calls it a “iction”) of an experience of transformation, of transposition, of conversion even, wherein the current form of our subjectivity is brought to its dissolution and an opening to something new emerges. As such, he said, each of his works is to be read as, in this precise sense, an “experience book” (EEW3, 246). Experience, in this deeply practical and exploratory sense, can thus properly be said to pervade the whole of Foucault’s thought and to shadow it there as a continual call for transformation, a constant challenge to refuse what one has become.

Kevin Thompson

See Also

The Double

Man

Phenomenology

Subjectiication

Georges Canguilhem

Suggested Reading

Bruns, Gerald L. 2011. On Ceasing to Be Human. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, chap. 3.

Djaballah, Marc. 2008. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. London: Routledge.

Flynn, Thomas. 2005. Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, chap. 9.

Gutting, Gary. 2002. “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience,” Boundary 2, 29, no. 2:69–85. Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, chap. 5.

Jay, Martin. 2006. Songs of Experience: Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of

California Press, chap. 9.

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Lawlor, Leonard. 2006. The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. New York:

Fordham University Press, chaps. 4–5.

Macherey, Pierre. 1986. “Aux Sources de ‘L’Histoire de la folie’: Une rectiication et ses limites,” Critique 42:753–774.

Oksala, Johanna. 2011. “Sexual Experience: Foucault, Phenomenology, and Feminist Theory,” Hypatia 26, no. 1:207–223.

O’Leary, Timothy. 2008. “Foucault, Experience, Literature,” Foucault Studies 5:5–25. Rayner, Timothy. 2009. Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book. London: Continuum.