The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something that functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant. (EEW3, 307)

For Foucault, the historical a priori is – unlike ideology – not primarily a set of ideas or limiting constructs, and thereby the historical a priori cannot be characterized as either true or false. In other words, Foucault’s historical a priori is not primarily a set of ruling-elite interests that, before the fact, limits or censors what can be said or thought (which is precisely the function of hegemonic ideology). Rather, the historical a priori functions a bit like the phrase that Foucault later borrows from his teacher, Georges Canguilhem. Any given period’s historical a priori is neither true nor false, but certain statements can be shown to reside “in the true” or “in the false.” In other words, in order to be heard as either “true” or “false” at a given historical juncture, a statement irst has to be judged “within the true,” able to be evaluated as bearing in some functional way on a given discourse (see “The Discourse on Language,” EAK, 224).

The historical a priori is not, as ideology would have it, akin to the blinders that an author has to wear in order to engage in normative discourse, but rather the historical a priori functions as the baseline of enabling discursive practices and thematics that all participants – whether they are speaking for or against a supposed normative discourse – have to follow in order to be relevant to a given truth procedure in the irst place. As he continues in the Archaeology, Foucault argues that the historical a priori functions as

a more extensive space than the play of inluences that have operated from one author to another, or than the domain of explicit polemics. Different oeuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation – and so many authors who do or do not know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea. (EAK, 126)

At that level, the historical a priori allows discursive participants to distinguish between what Nietzsche calls “timely” and “untimely” discourses – discourse that actors are able to use or understand and those pronouncements that are, by deinition, not assimilable into existing discursive paradigms. More than that, perhaps, the historical a priori functions as a selection mechanism that decides which statements survive and become housed in the archive and which ones pass unheard, unconsidered, forgotten as soon as they are uttered. But Foucault stresses that such forgetting

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or ignoring is not primarily a “repressive” operation, as it might be understood for the critic of ideology (i.e., only those statements in sync with the dominant modes of power are allowed to pass into the archive). Just as for Foucault “there are no machines of freedom, by deinition,” there are no inherently repressive ideological mechanisms at the level of the historical a priori.

However, understanding the historical a priori as the conditions for any discursive event to be seen as relevant within a given domain – as being “in the true” – lirts not so much with the Althusserian science of ideology critique but with the other great enemy of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: Derrida’s deconstructive focus on the linguistic “conditions of possibility” for the emergence and functioning of a discourse. On that register, barely a page of the Archaeology goes by without some kind of stinging critique of any and all discourses of hidden depth or absent origin – a theoretical a priori of any kind, even one of absence, gap, lack, or trace. As Foucault clearly writes, what he seeks in concepts like the historical a priori is “not a condition of possibility but a law of coexistence”: the historical a priori and the statement constitute “something more than a series of traces” (EAK, 107). The statements that comprise and transform the archive of the historical a priori are “not deined by their truth – that is, not gauged by the presence of a secret content” (EAK, 120). In other words, the domain of the historical a priori is characterized neither by the masked (historical) content of ideology nor by a species of hidden originary (a priori) gap or lack that haunts all language usage.

In his most pointed criticism of Derrida in the Archaeology, Foucault points out that the hazardous historical a priori of discourse “can be puriied in the problematic of trace, which, prior to all speech, is the opening of inscription, the gap of deferred time [écart du temps différeré]: it is always the historico-transcendental theme that is reinvested” (EAK, 121). And just as ideology for Foucault entails a certain privileged understanding of subjectivity, so, too, does the whole phenomenological legacy of Dasein, that “subjectivity that always lags behind manifest history, and which inds, beneath events, another, more serious, more sober, more secret, more fundamental history, closer to the origin, more irmly linked to its ultimate horizon (and consequently more in control of all its determinations)” (ibid.). In short, Foucault’s archaeological apparatus insists that the historical archive of discontinuously constructed statements, and not the quasi-transcendental conditions of discourse’s general possibility, governs the reception and impact of the statement: why certain statements are received as relevant and inluential and others – the vast majority of all statements – are not. The historical a priori does its work at the material level of discursive emergence – with positivities, things that are actually said – rather than ventriloquizing the quasi-transcendental murmur that exists in the originary ether before things are said (which remains, in Foucault’s reading, the domain of deconstruction, phenomenology, and ideology critique).

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In closing, and as a passing and inal example of the work of the historical a priori, one could conjecture that Foucault’s own reception in the English-speaking world was conigured by the historical a priori operating within linguistic-turn structuralism and poststructuralism in England, Australia, and North America. For “French theory” to have resided “within the true” in the 1970s and 1980s, it had to be based on – and somehow speak positively to – the historical a priori of the linguistic turn, and so Foucault’s archaeological work on discursive formation was received as a type of linguistically based structuralism or poststructuralism. In short, Foucault’s archaeological work was understood as akin to the work of Barthes or Derrida rather than constituting a wholesale critique of linguistic-turn thought and its obsessions with language’s inevitable lacks, gaps, and absences. Outside that “postmodern” legacy, one can perhaps more easily read these early Foucauldian formulations of the statement, the archive, and the historical a priori as archaeological predecessors to his midcareer thinking about mobile dispositifs of power, and the late works’ emphasis on “modes of veridiction” – similar notions to be sure, but ones stripped of the historical a priori’s apparent emphasis on language and discourse.

Jeffrey T. Nealon

See Also

Archaeology

History

Language

Jacques Derrida

Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading

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

Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Webb, David. 2013. Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.

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this matter. No comment” (FDE2a, 1140). How did homosexual behavior become vested in individual identity to such an extent that it marked the inner essence of the person?

Foucault points out two signiicant modiications caused by the discursive explosion of the nineteenth century. First, this quantitative phenomenon, this proliferation of discourses speaking about sex, produced “a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy” (EHS1, 38). The sexuality of the legitimate couple not only began to function as a norm but also cast light onto the “peripheral sexuality” of children, mad men and women, criminals, and “the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex” (ibid.). Even though this series of discourses about homosexuality “made possible a strong advance of social control into this area of ‘perversity’,” such a form of sexuality continued to be tolerated nonetheless, and this is how “homosexuality began to speak on its behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged” (EHS1, 101). Yet, as Foucault points out, as long as this act of ighting against being imprisoned within this notion of homosexuality was only a pure reactivity, or a “reverse discourse,” this strategy failed “to shift homosexuality from the position of an object of power/knowledge to a position of legitimate subjective agency” (Halperin 1995, 57).

For Foucault, a world of perversion emerges in the nineteenth century, “an entire sub-race race was born, different ... from the libertines of the past” (EHS1, 40), which could not be explained in repressive terms since “the severity of the codes relating to sexual offenses diminished considerably in the nineteenth century and that law itself often deferred to medicine” (EHS1, 40–41). The novelty consists in the emergence of perversion as a medical object (FDE2a, 322). We see here the creation of an entire system of knowledge that does not simply classify those “incomplete” sexual practices (i.e., homosexuality) within an organic, functional, mental pathological framework but does so in order to manage them. This new form of power, which was supposed to control and survey perversions instead of enforcing a repressive system based on prohibition, brings “an additional ruse of severity” (EHS1, 41) by incorporating those perversions and producing a new speciication of individuals (EHS1, 42–43). This is how “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage” (EHS1, 43). The homosexual was more than a type of life or anatomical/physiological shape, he was a medical object to be explained by appealing to either his past or his childhood. “Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality” (ibid.), and so he became a “case study” (FSP, 225–227). This is the moment when the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality is constituted, and as soon as it is constituted it becomes a form of sexuality different from sodomy (a legal category deined by a type of sexual relation). Homosexuality is understood as a “quality of sexual sensibility,” a “contrary sexual sensation,” a “kind of interior androgyny,” “a hermaphrodism of the soul.” Hence, “the homosexual was now a species” (EHS1, 43).

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This new modality of power coupled with a medical and psychiatric system of knowledge did more than render visible these “aberrant sexualities.” It implanted in the perverts’ bodies a permanent reality as a new raison d’être. The entire sexual domain was “placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological,” so there had to be something “in the depths of the organism” (EHS1, 44), like a dysfunction or a symptom, of the sexual instinct. Once the sexual instinct is couched in functional terms, perversions, including homosexuality, “become a natural class of diseases” (Davidson 2001, 14).

Starting in the nineteenth century, homosexuality became not merely a sexual perversion but a speciic psychiatric object, a dysfunction of the sexual instinct that requires, like all other psychic diseases (i.e., madness), therapy, intervention, and ultimately control: “The homosexual is a medical patient of psychiatry” (Davidson 2001, 22). This is the subtle way in which the medical and psychiatric system of knowledge incorporates sexual “instinctual disturbances” not merely to label them or to classify them but in order to set up a “network of pleasures and powers” that deines true ways of being oneself, a truthful sexuality, and thus it deines our most inner truth (FDE2a, 937).

Certainly, people like Gide, Oscar Wilde, Hirschfeld, and others fought against the “historico-poltical takeover” (FGS, 47) of this notion of homosexuality that was imposing more than a form of experience or pleasure but a certain identity, a certain relation to oneself. Hence, in earlier struggles, it was important to ight for certain rights for sexuality, rights for pleasure (EGS, 388). However, for Foucault, the battle for gay rights, as important as it is, should be only an “episode” and not “the inal stage” of this struggle (FDE2a, 1127). The reason is that it is very “hard to carry on the struggle using the terms of sexuality [or homosexuality] without ...

getting trapped by notions such as sexual disease, sexual pathology, normal sexuality” (EGS, 388).

Homosexuality should not be a notion for an already existing desire, but “something to be desired” (FDE2a, 982), a way of life to be invented, “a becoming gay” (FDE2a, 1555), which “makes ourselves ininitely more susceptible to pleasures” (FDE2a, 984). This is why for Foucault homosexuality has little to do with sexual liberation. Resistance is not a negation but a creative process (FDE2a, 1560), so to be gay is to deine and develop a certain way of life (FDE2a, 984). How does one deine a homosexual way of life?

Foucault does not propose a generalizable deinition for a homosexual way of life since such a discourse could be easily idealized, and imposed back as a norm on other homosexuals. In this sense, he understands his role more as a facilitator than as a leader of the gay movement (FDE2a, 1153). For him, although it is important to be creative and experiment with new relations and forms of pleasure, it is equally important to be aware of the dangers built into this notion. So, homosexuality is a strategic position (a historic opportunity [FDE2a, 985]) from which one has to

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constantly create new ways to relate to oneself and to others (an aesthetics of existence [EHS2, 10–11]).

In the reevaluation of the notion of homosexuality (“this rejuvenation ... of the instruments, objectives and axes of the struggle” [EGS, 389]), Foucault puts forward “the theme of pleasure.” In order to escape the medico-psychological presuppositions embedded in the notion of desire, Foucault proposes the word pleasure, “which in the end means nothing, which is still ... rather empty of content and unsullied by possible uses.” He contends, “there is no ‘abnormal’ pleasure; there is no ‘pathology’ of pleasure,” and thus a mode of life where the self transforms itself into a source of pleasure would avoid “the medical armature that was built into the notion of desire” (EGS, 388). As long as the apparatus of sexuality cannot normalize pleasures, it would not be able to redeine the inner essence of the subject, so the previous dictum “tell me what your desire is, and I’ll tell you what you are as a subject” (EGS, 389) would not function anymore.

And since for Foucault “pleasure has no passport, no identiication papers” (Foucault in Halperin 1995, 95), a way of life that would focus on the intensiication, modulation, and multiplication of sexual pleasures would not only function as a way of “decentering the subject and fragmenting personal identity” (Halperin 1995, 94; FDE2a, 940) but would desexualize the body (FDE2a, 1557; FDE2a, 321) and also free those pleasures from organ speciicity (degenitalization of pleasure). It is a way to invent oneself, to transform one’s body into “a place for the production of extraordinary polymorphous pleasures, detached from the valorization of sex” (EGS, 396–397). As an effect of such a strategy for creating pleasures, new forms of relationships, new forms of gay sexual practices are produced (FDE2a, 1556). And Foucault can only feel sorry for “those unhappy heterosexuals” (EGS, 400) who do not have places (e.g., baths, love-hotels [FDE2a, 779]) where they can cease to be a subject and experience all sorts of possible encounters and pleasures. But how can one deine through certain sexual practices a relational system, a homosexual style of life?

This is possible if homosexuality is understood as an ascetic mode of life, as a kind of spiritual exercise, as a practice of self-mastery in relation to oneself and to others. This “homosexual askésis” instead of being a synonym for less pleasure, calls for more intensiied, multiplied, novel forms of pleasure. And all those pleasures are not attainable unless there is mutual friendship, love, trust, idelity, and companionship among the gay individuals (FDE2a, 983). A homosexual mode of life is ultimately “an art of living,” a care for the self and for the others, where sexual choices have an effect on one’s entire life (FDE2a, 1144; FDE2a, 1114).

In some ways, Foucault’s work does not provide an ‘improved’ deinition of homosexuality “but, on the contrary, [an] attempt to empty homosexuality of its positive content, of its material and psychic determinations, in order to make it available

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to us as a site for the continuing construction and renewal of continually changing identities” (Halperin 1995, 122).

Nicolae Morar

See Also

Ethics

Life

Love

Sex

Suggested Reading

Cohen, Edward. 1988. “Foucauldian Necrologies: ‘Gay’ ‘Politics’? Politically Gay?” Textual Practice 2, no. 1:87–101.

Dean, Tim, and Christopher Lane, eds. 2001. Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eribon, Didier. 2001. “Michel Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 1:31–86.

Halperin, David. 1996. “Homosexuality,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 720–723.

1998. “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,” Representations 63 (Summer): 93–120.

2002a. “The First Homosexuality?” in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Julia Sihlova. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 229–268.

2002b. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2009. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Veyne, Paul. 1985. “Homosexuality in Ancient Rome,” in Western Sexuality: Practices and Precept

in Past and Present Times, ed. Philippe Ariès and André Béjin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 26–35.

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refers to the empirical sciences, biology, economics, and philology in particular; and the third dimension concerns philosophical thought. In formal thought, order is established via deductively linked propositions, whereas the empirical sciences relate different causal and structural elements via analogies, and philosophy endeavors to develop a thought of the Same. This trihedron is not deined by any single one of the dimensions but by the planes formed between dimensions in working from one to another; for instance, by formalizing the empirical and seeking mathematical regularities within it, or conversely by applying mathematical formulas to the empirical sciences. So, too, the dimension of the empirical sciences and that of philosophy form a common plane, which gives rise to philosophies of life, of alienated man, and symbolic forms by importing concepts of empirical origin into the dimension of philosophy. Conversely, beginning from philosophy, one inds the emergence of radical ontologies that seek to discover the being of the diverse objects of the empirical sciences. Finally, there is a plane deined between the purely formal and the philosophical dimensions, which concerns the formalization of thought. Man appears in the interpositivity of the different dimensions and planes of the trihedron and the pursuit of knowledge and thought rendered possible therein (EAK, 173). The human sciences are therefore both excluded from and included within the trihedron. They are excluded since none of the dimensions or planes that constitute the trihedron determines them completely. Distinct from the objects pursued across the surface of two dimensions, these sciences have rather their own speciic object deined by the open interior shape of the trihedron. Yet they are also included in a way because they draw on every aspect of the epistemological trihedron in seeking knowledge of man. They can, for example, attempt to formalize knowledge of human behavior via probabilities; they can draw on philology in order to better grasp man in his speciicity; and they borrow the philosopher’s inquiry into man’s initude in order to expose it completely in the empirical (EOT, 347). Thus, his being does not determine their character, but rather a complex epistemological coniguration brings about man and with this the possibility and necessity of human sciences.

This approach is epistemological rather than ontological because the human sciences are founded not on the being of man but a particular coniguration stemming from a transformation in the power of language. Whereas language in the classical age existed as the discourse within which the being of things appears, in the modern age this power is dispersed, preventing such access to being. In the face of this dispersion, the subjects and objects of knowledge can be said to turn back on themselves, revealing a hitherto unknown depth that becomes the reserve of discoverable truth. Thus natural history transforms from a study of formal differences based on a principle of continuity into the study of the life that animates living being, the study of wealth opens onto the depth of the productive forces that generate value, and discourse itself becomes the study of the history of languages. Through its fragmentation, synonymous with the opening of the epistemological trihedron,