The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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striking. They inscribed their humiliations, their hatred for the regime, and their resolve to overthrow it at the bounds of heaven and earth, in an envisioned history that was religious just as much as it was political. (EEW3, 450)

One of the things that fascinates Foucault about the events that happened in Iran is that they resonate with the insurrections of conduct that one sees in the Western context. Without reducing it to a revolution in the Western vein, he approaches it with these events in mind. The Iranian Revolution fascinates Foucault precisely because it recalls these Western insurrections of conduct as it simultaneously distinguishes itself from them. Foucault concludes the essay by relecting on his own role as an observer of the conlict. He characterizes his “theoretical ethic” as

“anti-strategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a dificult job, for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. After all, that is my work; I am not the irst or the only one to do it. But it is what I chose. (EEW3, 453)

Based on these remarks, conduct and counterconduct are essential for comprehending not only Foucault’s thought but his conception of the task of thinking today.

Corey McCall

See Also

Christianity

Critique

Governmentality

Power

Revolution

Suggested Reading

Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds. 1996. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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authority over a lock of dispersed individuals rather than a land, the shepherd has the duty to guide his charges to salvation by continuously watching over them and by a permanent concern with their well-being as individuals. Christianity intensiies this concern by having pastors assume a responsibility for all the good and evil done by those to whom they are accountable and whose actions relect on their quality as shepherds (EEW3, 308–309). Paramount in the exercise of this pastoral power is a virtue of obedience in the subject, a virtue that, unfortunately, all too often became an end in itself. The obedience that is intrinsic to the exercise and responsibilities of pastoral power involves speciic forms of knowledge and subjectivity.

Now we turn to knowledge. In order to fulill the responsibility of directing souls to their salvation, the pastor must understand the truth, not just the general truths of faith but the speciic truths of each person’s soul. For Foucault, Christianity is unique in the major truth obligations that are imposed on its followers. In addition to accepting moral and dogmatic truths, they must also become excavators of their own personal truth. In Foucault’s words: “Everyone in Christianity has the duty to explore who he is, what is happening within himself, the faults he may have committed, the temptations to which he is exposed” (EEW1, 178). Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this obligation to discover and manifest one’s truth took place in those liturgical ceremonies in which the early Christians would avow their state as sinners and then take on the status of public penitents. Less dramatic but more enduring was the search for truth served by those practices of examination of conscience and confession that Christianity irst developed in monastic life. The Christian campaign for self-knowledge was not developed directly in the interest of controlling sexual conduct but rather for the sake of a deepened awareness of one’s interior life. “Cassian is interested in the movements of the body and the mind, images, feelings, memories, faces in dreams, the spontaneous movements of thoughts, the consenting (or refusing) will, waking and sleeping” (EEW1, 191). This endless task of self-scrutiny is accompanied by regular confessions to another, for verbalization of thoughts is another level of sorting out the good thoughts from those that are evil: namely, those that seek to hide from the light of public expression. Through its examination of conscience and confession, Christianity fashioned a technology of the self that enabled people to transform themselves. The principal product of this technology was a unique form of subjectivity (EEW1, 178).

Finally, we take up subjectivity. Christian practices produced an interiorization or subjectivization of the human being as the outcome of two processes. The irst is the constitution of the self as a hermeneutical reality – namely, the recognition that there is a truth in the subject, that the soul is the place where this truth resides, and that true discourses can be articulated concerning it (EEW1, 95–106). The Christian self is an obscure text demanding permanent interpretation through ever more sophisticated practices of attentiveness, decipherment, and verbalization. The second process is both paradoxical and yet essential for appreciating the unique

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mode of Christian subjectivity. The deciphering of one’s soul is but one dimension of the subjectivity that relates the self to the self. Although it involves an “indeterminate objectivization of the self by the self-indeterminate in the sense that one must be extending as far as possible the range of one’s thoughts, however insigniicant and innocent they may appear to be,” the point of such objectivization is not to assemble a progressive knowledge of oneself for the sake of achieving the self-mastery that classical pagan thought advanced as an ideal (EEW1, 195).

The purpose of the Christian hermeneutic of the self is to foster renunciation of the self who has been objectiied. The individual’s relation to the self imitates both the baptismal turning from the old self to a newfound otherness and the ceremony of public penance that was depicted as a form of martyrdom proclaiming the symbolic death of the old self. The continual mortiication entailed by a permanent hermeneutic and renunciation of the self makes that symbolic death an everyday event. All truth about the self is tied to the sacriice of that same self, and the Christian experience of subjectivity declares itself most clearly in the sounds of a rupture with oneself, of an admission that “I am not who I am.” This capacity for self-renunciation was built from the ascetic power with regard to oneself that was generated by a practice of obedience, and from the skepticism with respect to one’s knowledge of oneself that was created by hermeneutical self-analysis. Unlike William James, who saw the satisfactions confession afforded and was puzzled that so many turned from them, Foucault grasped its dangers, and it is this awareness of danger that is distinctive of his analysis of religion. He claimed that there was a “millennial yoke of confession” and that “Western man has become a confessing animal” (EHS1, 61, 59).

Foucault’s examination of confession has given rise to a variety of stimulating studies (for example, C. Taylor 2009). Among the most interesting are the studies that bring Foucault’s examination of confessional practice to bear on some of the new documentation emerging from the archives of the former Soviet Union. Central to that use is the distinction that Foucault stresses between two forms of Christian confession and that I have mentioned in passing. The irst was exomologesis, which was a public confession of oneself as a sinner. This was a status, a “way of life,” symbolic and theatrical; it was Christianity’s ontological confession, “not telling the truth of sin but showing the true sinful being of the sinner. It was not a way for the sinner to explain his sins but a way to present himself as a sinner” (ETS, 42). The second form is exagoreusis, the verbal confession in which the individual explores his interior geography of thoughts and desires in the presence of a director to whom obedience is owed. This is Christianity’s epistemological confession, its hermeneutics of the self. Despite their differences, these two forms of confession possess an important trait in common. In Foucault’s words: “You cannot disclose without renouncing.... Throughout Christianity there is a correlation between disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and the renunciation of self.” It is the loss of that self-renunciation that characterizes the migration of confessional techniques into

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a modern hermeneutics of the self and its production of a positive identity (ETS, 42–43, 47–48).

But let us become more historically speciic. There was a Soviet hermeneutics of the self in which confession and public penance were deining technologies. But Communist self-interrogation and self-fashioning were mutations of Eastern Christianity’s practices, which were quite distinct from those of the West. For example, it has been shown that the Central Control Commissions of the Communist Party, which were so important for preserving its order and orthodoxy, imitated the functions of the ecclesiastical courts in the Russian Orthodox Church. These commissions did not wish to punish but rather come to know the defendant and have the individual reveal his or her wrongdoing so that admonition and encouragement of a change of conduct would take place. If the wrongdoing continued, the court or commission would have the person excommunicated from the Church or expelled from the Party (Kharkhordin 1999, 35–74). As a result of the show trials of the 1930s, the confessions of some of the non-Stalinist Bolsheviks may be among the most vivid of the memories that we still carry of Communism. Communism’s project of creating new men, of becoming the best one could be, demanded membership in the Party. As part of the application to enter, it was usual to submit an autobiographical statement, and these had common features inasmuch as they were often guided by oficial questionnaires. The prospective member renounced the superstitions of a religious consciousness and denounced clerical exploitation of the poor. The most important element of these autobiographies was the conversion experience, the applicant’s account of how the old bourgeois self was put aside and how one’s Communist soul came to be fashioned and embraced. Among the terms for describing this conversion were “transformation,” “transition,” “remolding,” “spiritual break,” and “reversal in worldview” (Halin 2003, 280–281, 56, 49–50, 91, 51).

After 1936, however, the Soviet hermeneutics of the self had a new political context, with the result that there was a signiicant change in the form of self-pre- sentation. It was in that year that Stalin promulgated a constitution that declared that the “foundation for classless society has already been laid” and that a new stage in the Soviet State’s development had begun. Because one now lived in a socialist state, the point of autobiographical statements was to show that one had always been a communist, a revolutionary from birth. Conversion stories fall away from personal accounts. “Whereas in the past autobiographers had drawn on a range of model selves, now there were two basic types: the good soul and the wicked soul” (Halin 2003, 33, 262). Stalin’s ideology determined which was which. This might be regarded as the ontological phase, to use Foucault’s term, in the Communist hermeneutics of the self, and it certainly resembles Christianity’s penitential form as distinct from the epistemological form of confession. Indeed, in Eastern Christianity, the experience of religious confession was very much subordinated to the penitential expression where the emphasis is on deeds and not an accounting of one’s interior

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life. The prominence of the penitential emerges from Russian monasticism’s strong commitment to constant mutual surveillance of the monks by the monks. Fraternal love is demonstrated by the monk’s careful observance of his brothers, and Saint Basil the Great even compared refusals to denounce sinning brothers as equivalent to “fratricides.” Eastern Orthodoxy’s practice of horizontal surveillance among peers contrasts with the “hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors that characterized the West.” It was this horizontal technology of the self that Soviet culture embraced and that gave birth to the special role of Kollektivs in that culture. The selfknowing that is privileged as a result of this disciplinary matrix is not the confession of one’s desires and movements of soul but rather the clarity of grasping how one is regarded in the eyes of others. The Soviet individual did not take shape through analysis of private desire but rather by “submitting to consideration by the relevant group that reviewed his or her morality.” That individual’s visibility is an inversion of the Panopticon’s goal, for now the individual is seen by all and these may see in every direction.“United together around the victim, single persons disappear; they become part of a physically invisible yet terrifying kollektiv.... There’s nowhere to look for help, there’s nowhere to run” (Kharkhordin 1999, 114). And once the Christian conviction that the sinner can always sincerely seek forgiveness is eliminated from this penitential form, then there is created the practices that deined Stalin’s regime, a “technology of no mercy” (Kharkhordin 1999, 121, 355, 356, 75–122).

James Bernauer

See Also

Abnormal

Christianity

Discipline

Ethics

Knowledge

Power

Subjectiication

Truth

Suggested Reading

Taylor, Chloë. 2009. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal.’ London: Routledge.

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a general limit, but also it does not aim to negate merely a particular limit; that is, nothing general such as a unity and nothing particular such as a difference. Indeed, if contestation still inds itself to be a thought of something (of some sort of object), then it must take that something and make it more extreme so that it breaks free from the “of” of transitivity: “To contest is to go as far as the empty core where being attains its limit and where the limit deines being” (EEW2, 75). For Foucault, being is not a being (it is not any of the things that are), which allows being to be conceived as the void (of beings): “being attains its limit.” But also, insofar as being is not any of the things that are, it is always deined as that which is over the limit of any being whatsoever: “where the limit deines being.”

Although these formulas recall Heidegger, Foucault does not mention him by name. Instead, he stresses that contestation is not the kind of negation that one inds in the Hegelian dialectic. Negation in the Hegelian dialectic brings what one has negated into the “restless interiority of spirit” (EEW2, 152). Contestation, however, goes in the opposite direction. When he negates his own discourse, Blanchot makes it “lose the grasp” not only on what it just said but also on “its very power to enunciate” (ibid.). When language loses it grasp, the grasp made possible by past meaning, when it loses even its power to enunciate, then language no longer internalizes; it has truly passed to the outside. Going in the opposite direction of internalization, contestation therefore is no longer the internalizing memory we ind in Hegel; it becomes forgetfulness (ibid.). As forgetfulness, contestation realizes that language must be left behind since it has always referred to interiority or to the exteriority of interiority (or the exteriority relative to and dependent on interiority). Leaving this language of interiority behind, contestation makes language “hollow itself out”; that is, it frees language of the already-said of language so that it is able to say something other than what it has said before. In this way, contested language is, as Foucault says, “a pure origin since it has itself and the void for its principle” (ibid.). But, it is also, as Foucault notes, “a re-beginning since it is past language which, but by hollowing itself out, has liberated this void” (ibid.). Contested language (which is again not the language of negative theology and not the discourse of Hegelian dialectic) is a beginning and a rebeginning. Later, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault calls this beginning and rebeginning the archive. Here, in his essay on Blanchot, he speaks of “not speech, but barely a murmur, barely a tremor, less than silence.” By this he means less than the silence of a truth ultimately illuminating itself, but also we have “the fullness of the void, something we cannot silence, occupying all of space, the uninterrupted, the incessant, a tremor and already a murmur, not a murmur but speech” (ibid.). Thus we see ultimately that what contestation aims at is this murmur. Foucault gives us a hint as to how we might understand it. He refers (strangely going beyond Hegel) to Kant’s early 1763 essay on negative magnitudes (Kant 2003, 203–241). In this essay, Kant tries to show that negative magnitudes in mathematics refer to afirmative quantities. Thus the negation of contestation does

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not really result at a void in the sense of “zero = 0.” Through the process of hollowing out and negating the language of internalizing memory, contestation constantly tries to reach down to the ininitely small traits of language (and to the small traits of the visible, such as mirrors). These small traits are not unities of language, like meanings or references or even enunciating subjects, but the events of discourse called statements (EAK, 28).

Leonard Lawlor

See Also

Archive

Outside

Resistance

Georges Bataille

Maurice Blanchot

Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading

Blanchot, Maurice. 1992.The Ininite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1995.The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 2003. “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763),” in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, trans. and ed. David Walford, in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 203–241.