The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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DEATH
Death is not one of Foucault’s core explanatory concepts along the lines of being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) in Heidegger or the death drive (Todestrieb) in Freud. It certainly does not occupy the same position in Foucault’s oeuvre as discursive formations, episteme, power, power-knowledge, and technologies of the self – to name a few – which play very speciic explanatory roles within his theoretical framework. That being said, Foucault never ceased to relect on the question of death in indirect and oblique ways throughout his intellectual life. In fact, he even introduced The Birth of the Clinic as a book “about space, about language, and about death” (EBC, ix). In Foucault’s relections, death turns out to be neither a natural phenomenon, whose essence can be ascertained through empirical observation, nor an entity of the metaphysical or transcendental order. One inds that there is something essentially elusive about death, and Foucault tries to capture its elusive essence from three perspectives: (1) from the standpoint of an archaeology of discourse-knowledge; (2) from the standpoint of a genealogy of power-knowledge;
and (3) from the standpoint of the relationship between subjectivity and truth. Foucault’s relections on death from the standpoint of an archaeology of dis-
course-knowledge ind their most intense and far-reaching manifestation in The Birth of the Clinic when he discusses death in the context of a radical transformation of medical discourse at the end of the eighteenth century beginning with the work of Xavier Bichat. It is in Bichat’s anatomical treatises that Foucault inds a complete reconiguration of some of the most basic relationships between life, death, and disease. These discursive objects have gained a new essence.
Foucault shows how death from the Renaissance right up to the end of the eighteenth century was conceived as the negation of life. Neither life nor disease can be investigated after death because with death we have the absolute end of life and disease. Since death is something external to life, which imposes itself on life from the outside and brings an end to it, death is in need of an agent. Disease is one of its
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primary agents. Although the living organism and disease are in opposition to each other and have no intrinsic relationship with each other, as they belong to different orders of being, they are both a part of nature and follow its laws. Were it not for disease and other agents of death, life would go on and on. One dies because one is in a situation surrounded by disease wherein one simply cannot live forever. It means that initude, which in the case of living beings is their mortality, is only conceived negatively as the absence of ininity – the fact that one cannot prolong one’s life forever and cannot possess eternal life. Furthermore, death abolishes all traces of individuality. It levels all the differences among individuals that one observes in life, reducing everyone equally to dust. These relationships between life, death, and disease are “discursive” to the extent that they constitute the background that enables the medical practitioner to experience, record, and analyze the various symptoms in the patient and abstract the speciic characteristics of the patient as extraneous to the nature of the disease. Against this background, the medical practitioner arrives at the “pure nosological essence” of the disease and prescribes the patient a suitable remedy.
From the end of the eighteenth century, death is no longer an interruption of life. Instead of being the external limit that constrains life, it now becomes a part of life to the extent that life is now conceived essentially as a process of dying. To live means to die slowly. This novel idea of life inds its broadest formulation, from Bichat onward, in the concept of tissue degeneration. By the very fact that they function and are exposed to the outside world, tissues are prone to wear and tear, which is now conceived as a form of degeneration. Since life is a constant process of dying, death is no longer a single event but a series of degenerative events dispersed throughout the life of the organism. It is only by virtue of this everyday degeneration that the organism can contract disease, which in turn accelerates this process of degeneration. No longer a nosological being alien to life that can inhabit the living body, disease is now nothing but the dying body functioning in a drastically abnormal way. One now distinguishes between the pathological processes of a diseased body and the process of mortiication that occurs throughout the organism’s existence.
These new discursive relations between life, death, and disease give autopsy its central position. The pathologist can now trace the spread of the disease in the entrails of the corpse by distinguishing those lesions and alterations in the tissue that were the manifestations of the disease from other alterations that were only the manifestations of the more general process of death. Thus it is only after death and during the autopsy that the ultimate essence of the disease can be brought to light. Whereas before the knowledge of life and disease stopped with death, it is now only death that can shed light on the secrets of life and disease. Furthermore, since the interactions between the general process of mortiication and the process of accelerated degeneration brought about by disease vary from person to person and are ultimately unique, death is no longer the uniform leveler of lives lived differently. It is
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rather what individuates every person from the broad monotony of daily life. Every opened-up corpse gives itself to a unique description heralding a transformation in scientiic language. Death frees it from the exclusive Aristotelian concern for the universal. Scientiic language can now focus on the particular, which has suddenly become paramount. Inluenced by the ideas of Maurice Blanchot, Foucault will continue his relections on the relationship between language and death in Death and the Labyrinth and “Language to Ininity.” Moreover, death and initude are no longer understood negatively as the cessation of life. In the concept of tissue degeneration and the morbid organism, they have gained a positive meaning, which Foucault will again discuss in The Order of Things.
In volume one of The History of Sexuality, Foucault tackles the question of death from the standpoint of the force relations that shape individuals in society. Up until the seventeenth century, the force relations between the sovereign and his subject are characterized by the former’s right to acquisition, the ultimate expression of which was the acquisition of the life of the subject through death. This right to acquisition of life is of course not an absolute right. It can be exercised indirectly in war when the sovereign exposes his subject to the threat of death in order to save his position. It can be expressed directly through the death penalty, which the sovereign may issue on a dissenting subject, threatening her life. Life in this regime of force relations is an irreducible, inaccessible brute fact that is extremely fragile surrounded as it is by the random ruthlessness of death. Monarchic power manifests itself in the form of this randomness of death, turning the political life of the individual into one of two modes of death: to die for the sovereign in war or to be executed by the order of the sovereign. The human being is “a living animal with the additional capacity of political existence” (EHS1, 143): death.
From the seventeenth century onward, we witness a radical transformation in the relations of force. Life ceases to be simply an inaccessible brute fact. Medical and social practices bring life more and more within the ambit of knowledge. Power does not manifest itself just as a demand for death. It is now a demand for a certain kind of life. This demand takes the form of an anatomo-politics of the human body: the techniques of discipline employed on the individual human body to increase its eficiency and integrate it into the socioeconomic system through institutions such as the school, the military, the prison system, and the factory. It also takes the form of a biopolitics of the population: the regulation of the biological processes of “propagation, births, mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity” (EHS1, 139). The power of death has given way to the management of life, a management that intrudes into the daily lives of individual citizens in a manner simply unimaginable in the monarchies of yore. Since force relations are characterized by a control over life and a harnessing of its powers, death now eludes the grasp of this new disciplinary power. Death is no longer the common currency in which the public transactions between the monarch and his subject are conducted. Death has retreated into
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the private sphere and is the only thing that truly belongs to the individual. This genealogical transformation of force relations into a political management of life correlates with the transformation of discourse into anatomical pathology, in which death becomes the inner secret of the individual to be revealed only after a dissection of her corpse. It is certainly not the case that war and killing simply vanish in this new regime of force relations. War and killing go on, sometimes on a scale far larger than anything in the past, but they are now justiied in terms of life itself as a means to ward off the biological threat to the life of the population.
Whereas the archaeology of discourse-knowledge and the genealogy of powerknowledge treated death from the third-person perspective as the death of an organism and death of a political subject, from this third standpoint of the relationship between subjectivity and truth, we focus on how the subject relates to its own death. Foucault understands subjectivity as originating in a relexive experience. This is an experience that involves knowing and acting – an epistemic-praxiological experience – wherein the actor-knower and the object acted once known are one and the same. Subjectivity is an experience of the subject working on itself in order to come to grips with the truth about itself. In Western culture, however, this experience has never remained the same. It has undergone drastic transformations over the course of history. Every particular relexive experience conigures only a speciic mode of subjectivity. There is no single essence of subjectivity for Foucault but only different modes of subjectivity whereby the subject is made and unmade. Hence speculative categories such as soul, body, and original experience cannot constitute the starting point of an inquiry into subjectivity.
The relexive experience in which a speciic mode of subjectivity comes into being is conditioned in part by how the subject relates to its own death. Death here has the speciic quality of being one’s own death. Foucault gives us a concrete illustration of how subjectivity is constituted in the subject’s relation to its own death by discussing the Stoic exercise of death meditation (melete thanatou), which has its roots in ancient Greek thought. In this meditation, the subject assumes the stance of someone for whom death is imminent. Death provides the subject with a vantage point from which to view its past and present. On the one hand, by thinking of the present moment as if it were the last, the subject is able to comprehend the truth of the action or thought that it entertains at that moment by being forced to ask: Is this the kind of thought or action I would like to pursue if it were my last or is there something better that I ought to be doing, one truly beitting my last moment? On the other hand, one is forced to recall everything one has done in life: If I were to die this moment, have I lived my life in a way that I ought to have done? The vantage point of death brings to the fore the truth of one’s present and past. The past and the present are stripped of all the delusion and denials one normally harbors when one is secure in the knowledge that death is nowhere near. To think of one’s death is not to think of the future but is only a means to ascertain the true value of one’s
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present and past life. The mode of subjectivity we are presented here is not the contemporary historical consciousness “when it became possible to think that looking at memory is at the same time looking at the future” (ECF-HOS, 464). That would be a different kind of relexive experience in which one’s own death would be experienced in a very different way.
Eschewing the comforts of mere empirical descriptions of death and transcendental relections on being-towards-death, Foucault devises his own methods to tackle the question of death from three seemingly mutually exclusive perspectives. In the process, death becomes a complex, irreducibly fragmented and dynamic object that presents us a different face as an object of discourse, an object of force relations, and an object of the relexive experience of subjectivity. Whether we can bring these three faces of death together into a comprehensive whole by showing how the dynamism of discourse, the luidity of power, and the self-transformations of the subject interact with one another is a question worth pondering indeed.
Arun Iyer
See Also
Biopower
Finitude
Life
Medicine
Xavier Bichat
Maurice Blanchot
Sigmund Freud
Martin Heidegger
Suggested Reading
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised with a Foreword by
Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: The SUNY Press.
Lawlor, Leonard. 2003. Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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DESIRE
Desire plays a central role in modern subjectivity according to Foucault. In volume one of History of Sexuality, Foucault analyzes the way in which desire came to play a dominant role in the discourse of sexuality and cor-
respondingly in our self-understanding. But Foucault questions how and why we have come to understand ourselves in this way. In his earlier work, desire seems synonymous with interest and plays a minor role if any (EAK, 69, 115). But at the end of volume one of The History of Sexuality, Foucault explicitly links desire with sex
(sex-desire), clearly calling for a new paradigm, an ethics of pleasure rather than sex (EHS1, 157). By Foucault’s own description, his three-volume series The History of Sexuality is a genealogy of desire (“Culture of the Self,” cassette, Foucault Archives; EHS2, 12). In volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality, he pursues the question: “Why do we recognize ourselves as objects of desire and not agents/subjects of pleasure” (“Culture of the Self”)? The concept of desire is important for understanding Foucault’s notions of subjectivity, power, discourse, confession, and sexuality.
In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault discusses the deviation from his original plan to have a multivolume series on the history of sexuality that focused on what he calls the four great strategic unities that emerged out of the discourse of sexuality during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. Rather than pursuing these four igures, he explains that a genealogy of the hermeneutics of desire was in order instead: “In any case it seemed to me that one could not very well analyze the formation and development of the experience of sexuality from the eighteenth century onward, without doing a historical and critical study dealing with desire and the desiring subject. In other words, without undertaking a ‘genealogy’” (EHS2, 5). According to Foucault, a genealogy of desire would help to reveal the historical constitution of subjectivity, in the form of the desiring subject. Moreover,
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desire itself is a “theoretical theme” encompassing both sexuality and the Christian experience of the “lesh” (ibid.).
Foucault’s genealogy of desire led him to a study of ancient Greece (EHS2) and early Rome (EHS3). In ancient Greece, there was no discourse of sexuality but instead “acts of love” (aphrodisia) that linked acts-pleasures-desires. The priority given to each of them changes depending on the historical period; for the Greeks the emphasis was on acts, for the Chinese the emphasis was on pleasure, and for Christians desire became the focus (EEW1, 268–269). Ancient Greek ethics emphasized not the role of desire but the use of pleasure. Ethical subjects moderated their actions but did not ferret out desire (EHS2, 54). In other words, it was not a matter of what was permitted or forbidden but of moderation or excess in terms of pleasure. From the seventeenth century onward, desire played a major role in subjectivity. Foucault attributes this shift primarily to two things: Christianity and the corresponding focus on knowing and controlling one’s own desires; and psychoanalytic discourse, which sees desire as the “truth” about the self.
Foucault rejects both the Lacanian notion of desire as lack and the Freudian notion of desire as repressed. In his essay “Desire and Pleasure,” Deleuze recounts Foucault saying, “I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use it differently, I cannot keep myself from thinking or living that desire = lack, or that desire is repressed. [W]hereas myself, what I call pleasure is perhaps what you call desire; but in any case I need another word than desire” (Deleuze 1997, 189).
For Foucault, desire as repression and desire as constituted through the law both rely on the same juridico-discursive conception of power as negative. We cannot liberate our desire without invoking this conception of power that manifests as limit and repression. Foucault develops his analytics of power as a response to the inadequacy of this juridico-discursive model of power (EHS1, 82–83). His analytics of power demonstrates power’s productive potential; it does not simply limit but produces new objects, such as desiring subjects, through practices and discourse such as confession. Desire plays a central role in volume one of The History of Sexuality; desire becomes the signiicant act of transgression that needs to be confessed. Good Christians had to follow the imperative: “Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse” (EHS1, 21). Discourse becomes the vehicle for speaking the truth about oneself, and the truth about oneself is viewed as one’s desires. Confession plays the role of tying one to one’s desire because it forces the articulation of the unsaid into the said. And through its scrutiny of desires and the compulsion to make them public, the Church imbued them with signiicance and heightened their importance. Confession serves to individualize and normalize: “The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power” (EHS1, 59). Christianity, through its emphasis on discerning and confessing desires, makes desire the central truth about the subject. Subjectivity in the contemporary West cannot
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be understood outside normalizing power relationships. Power operates through a variety of discourses – religious, scientiic, medical, and psychological – to produce the desiring subject. The deployment of sexuality with its multifarious forms of normalization and control operates through desire. This explains Foucault’s warning that we cannot attack sexuality through sex-desire but must look to bodies and pleasures for a new understanding of subjectivity based perhaps on an ethics of pleasure (EHS1, 157, 159).
Margaret A. McLaren
See Also
Body
Christianity
Confession
Pleasure
Sex
Gilles Deleuze
Suggested Reading
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. “Desire and Pleasure,” in Foucault and His Interlocuters, ed. Arnold
Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 183–192. Originally published as “Desir et Plaisir,” Magazine litteraire no. 325 (October 1994): 57–65.
Rajchman, John. 1991. Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics. London:
Routledge.
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DIFFERENCE
Unlike many of his contemporaries such as Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, or Lyotard, Foucault is not usually considered a philosopher of difference in the sense that the concept of difference plays a central role in his thought.
Commentators dispute whether his work can be subsumed under a single description, and in the course of his career he put forward a variety of descriptions of his overall project: the history of the different ways in which human beings have been made subjects, power, experience, and the conditions of possibility of certain kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of thinkers. He sometimes described his work as an attempt to carry out an internal ethnography of modern European culture and rationality, one that focused on its limits or systems of exclusion, rejection, and refusal. He deined his problem as that of exposing the implicit systems that imprison us: “I would like to understand the system of limits and exclusion that we practice without knowing; I would like to expose the cultural unconscious” (FDE2, 189). In this regard, some of his work investigated the forms of identity or sameness of modern European culture, while some of it investigated the limits or divisions that deined this culture, notably the divisions between reason and madness, normal and pathological. In this sense, for example, he described The History of Madness as the history of a division or a rupture found in every society. By contrast, The Order of Things is a history of the way in which European society organizes the resemblances as well as the differences between things into rational schemas: “The History of Madness is the history of difference while The Order of Things is the history of resemblance, the same and identity” (FDE1, 498).
Although he always denied that he was a structuralist or that he made use of the techniques of structural analysis, in an interview in 1967 he went as far as aligning himself with a nontechnical, generalized, and philosophical structuralism that would interrogate the present moment in history and culture and discern what was happening (FDE1, 581). The Nietzschean conception of philosophy as a certain
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kind of diagnosis of the present provided one of the most enduring ways in which Foucault described his work (FDE1, 553, 606). He often suggested that the point of his retrospective analyses was to undertake a critique of “our time” (FDE2, 183). On several occasions toward the end of his life, Foucault sought to spell out his own critical relationship to the present by comparing it with Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault argues that this apparently minor work signals the appearance of a new type of question for philosophy, one directed at the nature of the present in which the philosopher lives and writes: “What is happening today? What is happening now? What is this ‘now’ in which we all live and which is the site, the point [from which] I am writing” (ECF-GSO, 11)? In his own “What Is Enlightenment?” essay, Foucault describes Kant’s approach to the present historical moment as essentially negative, unlike the teleological approach in his other writings on history: “He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday” (EEW1, 305)?
These comments show that Foucault’s own understanding of his work bore traces of the philosophy of difference that lourished in France during the 1960s. Not surprisingly, his work toward the end of that decade shows the strongest signs of his alignment with those engaged in the philosophical revaluation of difference. Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Voice and Phenomenon and Writing and Difference were published in 1967, and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition appeared in 1968 and The Logic of Sense in 1969. Foucault published a brief review of Difference and Repetition in 1969 in which he summarized this book as announcing the end of the philosophy of representation and the beginning of the philosophy of difference: “At last it is possible to think the differences of today, to think today as the difference of differences” (FDE1, 770). Foucault wrote a longer article on these two books by Deleuze, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” which appeared in 1970.
During this period at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Foucault sought to clarify the kinds of differences analyzed in his major studies in the history of systems of thought and knowledge. These undertook the analysis of conditions of possibility of objects of knowledge in the human sciences, where, unlike in Kant, these were considered to be historical conditions underpinning certain kinds of empirical knowledge and practice. Foucault sometimes described this historical a priori as the “cultural unconscious” of a particular society at a particular time. His concern to identify changes in relation to the forms of understanding and treatment of madness (The History of Madness), medical science (Birth of the Clinic), and the empirical sciences of language, wealth, and life (The Order of Things) gave rise to a perception of his work as focusing on discontinuity rather than continuity in the history of the sciences. He responded directly to this perception in response to questions from the journal Esprit, published in May 1968, and in response to questions from the Epistemological Circle at the École Normale Supérieure, published