The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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foreign army approaching the town, and saves Dulcinea, a damsel in distress. With ironic lourish, the reader is amused to learn that the giant is actually a windmill, the army is a herd of sheep, and Dulcinea is a washwoman conducting her daily chores. Foucault shows that Don Quixote himself in fact “resembles” (“acts like” or “is analogous to”) an anachronistic medieval knight, the windmill resembles a giant, the herd of sheep an oncoming army, and Ducinea a damsel in distress. Each of these instances in this literary text are indications of a Renaissance mentality and mode of thinking that resonates with scientiic studies offered by Galileo (when what he sees in his telescope resembles the planets in the sky), by Machiavelli (when he advises that an effective prince will need to resemble both the lion and the fox), and by Cervantes’s contemporary Shakespeare (when, in Romeo and Juliet, one inds a description of the main characters as “star-crossed lovers” – resembling stars that are out of their orbit).

The important role of the literary text becomes evident when in the second book of Don Quixote the “hero” of the story hears from townspeople of a “great knight errant” who has been performing wonderful feats of gallantry. Don Quixote recognizes that he himself is “represented” (presented again) in these stories. Hence there is a shift from an age of “resemblance” to that of “representation.” Similarly, between the age dominated by “representation” and its replacement, the “anthropological age of man,” the Marquis de Sade’s writings mark the shift that is taking place. Between the “representation of desire” and the function of the “empirico-transcendental doublet” (the combination of objectivity and subjectivity) that constitutes “man” in the Kantian era, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (whose virtuous main character is treated as the neoclassical representation of the scene of the libertine’s excessive practices) is juxtaposed with the alternate and subsequent role of a modern “object” subjugated by the sadistic desiring “subject.” De Sade’s various late eighteenth-century novels, such as Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom, demonstrate even more intensely that no longer is desire “represented” on the scene (as clear and distinct ideas are represented to Descartes, as grammar is represented by Arnaud and the seventeenth-century Port Royal logician-grammarians, and as Madame de Lafayette’s illicit lovers – the Princesse de Clèves and the Duc de Nemours – seek to represent to themselves the moral course of action given the intensity of their love affair).

The postmodern turn in the human sciences that was taking place around the time of The Order of Things in 1966 was also signaled (according to Foucault) by the writings of Nietzsche and the nineteenth-century French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé that were produced decades in advance. Long before the postmodern episteme began to take shape in the latter half of the twentieth century, Nietzsche and Mallarmé – through the literary quality of their texts – were offering a new way of thinking. Their work came to mark the thinking of the human sciences in terms of structure, sign system, iguration, discourse, interface, difference as operative between subject/object, transcendental/empirical, and knower/known in lieu of

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being constituted by them. Although Nietzsche was more of a philosopher than a literary igure, in many contexts his aphoristic style (see Beyond Good and Evil) and his narratological philosophizing (as in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in the 1880s) mark a radical shift in thinking from the comprehensive and all-encompassing critical and philosophical enterprises of Kant and Hegel. Similarly, Mallarmé’s emphasis on “correspondences” and symbolic formations (rather than references to realities in the empirical world) provides a “threshold” to the postmodern thinking that would take more than half a century to realize.

Each of these “threshold texts” – literary expressions of a new way of thinking – marks a difference between the dominant episteme and that appearing on the scene at the margins of the contemporary. Literature, then, takes on something like a prophetic role, one that provides a hinge with attitudes, ways of articulating the relation between words and things of a subsequent era – before its time. Hence literature is not just the description of how things are at any one epoch but the foreshadowing of perspectives to come. Jean-Paul Sartre, in What Is Literature? (1947–1948), had proposed that writing (“écrire”) has as its dominant task that of the “free” writer (subject) addressing the “free” reader (also a subject) demonstrating the reader’s “freedom” through the novel or theatrical piece. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another of Foucault’s predecessors, in his uninished Prose of the World (composed in 1951–1952), proposed that literature should be an instance of “expression” more than an act of “communication” and “engagement” of the writer (as Sartre had proposed). As in Sartre, literature would be a manifestation of an active subjective consciousness – “embodied” in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, “engaged” in Sartre. The bridge to Foucault comes as Merleau-Ponty offers his notion of the “speaking subject” and the “spoken subject.” Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, expressive, gesturing subject opens a space for prose and the importance of the writer. But, for Foucault, the subject–object relation as a description of the human is still inscribed within the prior “modern” episteme, that of the “anthropological,” “empirico-transcendental doublet” known as “man,” or what Sartre (drawing on Henri Corbin’s translation of Heidegger’s Dasein) called “human reality.” Hence Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero and his essays on the New French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, all from the early 1950s (during Foucault’s later twenties) already signaled a different way of thinking about literature. For Barthes, literature is best described as “writing,” and writing is situated at the intersection of “style” and a moment in time. Writing is at “zero degree” because it does not invoke either the activity or subjectivity of the writer nor is it constituted as an object of investigation as the product of a writer’s subjectivity. Writing can be characterized as “bourgeois” writing, “revolutionary” writing, and so on. Writing at that time had already taken on the character of what Foucault a decade later would call a “discursive practice.”

For Foucault, literature has an entirely different function from what Sartre and Merleau-Ponty offered; it is thereby more like that of the cultural critic and

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semiologist Roland Barthes. For Foucault, literature means “literary texts,” and “literary texts” participate in a discursive practice of a particular era. Or, to be more precise, literary texts mark the edge of a discursive practice that is in the process of becoming marginalized in favor of a new episteme. With respect to the episteme of the human sciences, what we have called the “postmodern” episteme, Foucault identiies in particular the structuralist formulations in the areas of ethnology (Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis), and political theory (Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism). In many ways, Barthes was the most eloquent theoretician of this new structuralist and even poststructuralist attention to the hinge or “text” between a conscious subjectivity and an empiricist objectivity. And Barthes’s cultural criticism, much of which was focused on literary practices (from Greek theatre, to Racine’s seventeenth-century plays, to Robbe-Grillet’s “new” novels) demonstrated the unique and special status of the kind of sign systems that constitute Foucault’s notion of the “epistemé.” Literature, then, is “epistemic,” an effect of the human sciences, a site of “jouissance,” a place of pleasure in the text that is neither in the subject nor in the object but rather in the semiological spaces between them.

Three years before publishing The Order of Things (1966), Foucault wrote a monograph on the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) entitled Death and the Labyrinth (1963). Like many of the igures identiied in The Order of Things, Foucault was fascinated with this writer, poet, and novelist because of his marginal status in the grand literary canon. Just as Barthes “discovered” Robbe-Grillet, Foucault discovered Roussel. And like Robbe-Grillet’s novels, such as Le Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959), the neutral space of writing – something like what Barthes called the “middle voice” (from the Greek grammatical form) – elaborated through repetitions and, in the case of Roussel, reiterated parentheses – became the focus of literary and theoretical elaboration.

Already in 1961, when Foucault produced his mammoth History of Madness in the Age of Reason, in order to demonstrate how mad people were treated in Europe in the Middle Ages, he cited the 1494 literary text by Sebastian Brandt entitled The Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff ). The Narrenschiff narrates how mad people would be put on a ship that circulates throughout the rivers of Europe. The ship would occasionally stop in a city or town situated along the river. The passengers would attempt to enter the town, but in short order they would be sent off to the next city or town since they would be treated as undesirables with respect to any of these locations. Here, for Foucault, the content of the literary text is offered as a demonstration of the way people wrote about or thought about things and the world at that time.

Three years after publishing The Order of Things, Foucault produced another major work: The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Much of Foucault’s extended study of the methodology behind The Order of Things and his rethinking of the “history of ideas” was in fact an attempt to respond to the criticisms lodged against what

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historians regarded as a signiicant broadside to their whole enterprise. After all, why would a historian want to emphasize “discontinuity” rather than “continuity” in history, or focus on marginal igures (such as Cuvier, Bopp, and the Brothers Grimm), or to think about the interstices between historical “periods” rather than attend to the major outlines and conditions of the epoch itself? And even literary historians at the time would be worried about designating noncanonical writers as worthy of celebration. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault gave less attention to literature and more to the relations between ideas, norms, and practices at a given time. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault addressed the structures of his own “theoretical practice” (as Althusser would have called them) rather than narrating the development of thought, language, and social and political theory (as he had done in The

Order of Things).

However, in 1968 (the year before the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge), Foucault wrote a piece entitled “What Is an Author?” Both of these texts came in the wake of the events of May and June 1968, which resulted in Foucault being given carte blanche to create the most exciting new philosophy department in France at the newly established University of Paris-VIII – Vincennes, which was later moved to Saint-Denis in the north of Paris. This new department (UER, as they were called) included Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and later Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. But once Foucault was elected to the newly created Chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France in 1970, he had to leave the University of Paris-VIII to those he had hired to develop its fame and reputation. In the 1968 Éditions du Seuil Tel Quel volume entitled Théorie d’ensemble (which includes groundbreaking essays on the contemporary status of literary study by Roland Barthes concerning the “death of the author,” Jacques Derrida with his famous “Différance” essay, Julia Kristeva on the theory of the text and semiology, and others), Foucault contributed his famous “What Is an Author?” essay. Foucault’s account of the “author-function” rather than the positional, ego-centered “author” marked a whole new way of thinking about literary practice. Along with Barthes (whom Foucault eventually was able to support for the Chair of Semiology to join him at the Collège de France), Foucault participated in this group theory of literature in order to show that it was time to displace the authorial hegemony in favor of the structures of literary practice. The assignment of an author to a text was in order to create a rational entity associated with a particular text, not to celebrate a speciic individual’s creative powers. Literature, then, for Foucault is linked to texts, discourses, and archives rather than to authorial presences or sources of creativity.

The publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge was followed on December 2, 1970 by Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, entitled “L’Ordre du discours” (“The Discourse on Language”). This presentation set the stage for the next thirteen years of lectures held at this celebrated institution on topics concerning systems of repression and disciplining (e.g., prisons), political theory, government

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and self-government (care for the self), sexuality and confession, the courage to say the truth, and others. The role of literature became subjugated to the concern with discourse, language, and the statement or enunciation (énoncé). Can “iction” say the truth? Can language be a site of truth or falsity? Can literary texts as well as political treatises and philosophical narratives provide a locus for saying the truth? When invited to lecture as visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley in fall 1983 (later published as Fearless Speech [EFS]), Foucault decided to focus on “Discourse and Truth,” in particular as a study of the ancient Greek notion of “parresia,” a term meaning variously “free speech,” “frankness,” “saying everything,” or “full disclosure.” For these lectures, he gave full attention to the tragedies of Euripides (ifth century BCE), though the term continued to be used well into the patristic period of the ifth century CE. Foucault continued to follow this mode of thinking from Socrates to the Roman Cynics and Stoics during his inal year of lectures (1983–1984) at the Collège de France, entitled “The Courage to Truth.”

Parresia entails that the speaking subject – the subject of the enunciation – also serve as the subject of the “enunciandum” (what is at issue, namely the speaker). This rhetorical device means that the speaker seeks to persuade by demonstrating the “courage to say the truth.” And parresia played a key role in the conception of the Athenian democracy as offering a government in which one could speak openly and frankly. Importantly, in Euripides’ tragedies, especially the Ion and the Orestes, Foucault focuses on the question of who has the “right” and “courage” to speak the truth. Furthermore, he devotes special attention to four other Euripides plays: The Phoenician Women, (411–409 BCE), Hippolytus, (428 BCE), The Bacchae, (407–406 BCE), and Electra (415 BCE). For instance, in The Phoenician Women, Euripides explores the conlict between the two sons of Oedipus (Eteocles and Polynices) when Eteocles refused to follow the agreement to let his brother rule Thebes after the irst year, hence preventing the “democratic” “free speech” of his brother and the people of Thebes. The sovereign not giving up power is linked to “madness” as well as the prevention of “free speech” (parresia). In The Bacchae, a herdsman brings a message that could have consequences for the messenger himself. So he asks Pentheus the king if he can “speak freely” (parresia) and without punishment if the king does not like the content. Pentheus grants the herdsman his request, placing the sovereign in a situation in which he gives power to the slave to say what he needs to say without adverse consequences. Similarly, in Electra, the daughter, Electra, and her mother, Clytemnestra, confront one another. Electra asks her mother not to punish her for speaking freely, but in the process her mother asks Electra to use her parresia to prove that Clytemnestra was wrong in killing Electra’s father, Agamemnon. The result of this call for speaking frankly had adverse results for Clytemnestra, as she was then killed by Electra’s brother Orestes after demonstrating that she had indeed killed her husband without suficient justiication. What is important here is that Foucault continued, right up to the end of his career, to draw on literary texts in

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order to demonstrate how discursive practices are crucial to the articulation of ways of thinking and knowing at a particular time.

Reading his later texts and lectures, many of which included instances drawn from literary writings, Foucault was able to activate his understanding of political, social, and intellectual accounts of truth, madness, courage, power, governmentality, biopolitics, sexuality, and the many other themes that preoccupied him over the years leading to his untimely death in late spring 1984. Literature would no longer be the product of a creative, originating author but rather one of many instances of articulating ways of thinking and producing knowledge in different periods and places. Literature would neither be privileged nor denigrated over the course of Foucault’s career. He gave literature new vitality and signiicance both in signaling new ways of thinking and as demonstrative of the multiple discursive practices of an era.

Hugh J. Silverman

See Also

Author

Language

Parresia

Friedrich Nietzsche

Raymond Roussel

Jean-Paul Sartre

William Shakespeare

Suggested Reading

Barthes, Roland. 1967. Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1988. What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro. Steven Ungar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Silverman, Hugh J. 1997. “Sartre/Barthes: Writing Differences,” in Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism, 2nd ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 236–253.

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concerning relationships with boys took the form of a relection on love” (EHS2, 201). This relationship as articulated in writings by Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Pliny, and others acknowledges that the role of men differs from that of boys. Men are the active partner (the lover rather than the beloved), men have a different status – they are older than the beloved boy and have more wealth, more knowledge, and more experience (EHS2, 194–195; EHS3, 197). This inequality between lovers was problematic, in part because the relationship changes when the boy becomes a man. In its purest form, love for boys should transition from love of their beauty to friendship (philia) based on love of their virtue. The erotic or love relationship between men and boys appears in the relationship between a master and his student. Both seek the truth, and for Plato love (eros) is a relation to truth (EHS 2,

239). Signiicantly, the love between men and boys should focus on the beauty of the soul of the boy and not include sexual relations. This sublimation of eros to a “pure” relationship based on virtue and friendship is, according to Foucault, one source of the shift from an ethics of pleasure to an ethics of desire (EHS2, 244–245).

For the Greeks, discussions focused on proper and improper ways to love, centering on the relationships between men and boys. In the Roman and Stoic texts, the question shifted from how to love to whom to love, but divergent arguments were put forth about whether it was “natural” for men to love boys or women.

Foucault claims, “The debate between the love of women and the love of boys ...

is the confrontation of two forms of life, of two ways of stylizing one’s pleasure, and of the two philosophical discourses that accompany these choices” (EHS3, 218). Love accompanies discussions of pleasure (aphrodisia) in early Greek and Roman texts, and in part it is the relationship between the two that reveals the character of love. In texts such as Lucian’s Affairs of the Heart, a paradox is revealed in men’s love for boys. If the purest form of love – linked to philosophy, virtue, and the pursuit of truth – excludes the pleasures (aphrodisia), then it is incomplete. But if it includes the pleasures, then it is base rather than virtuous.

This paradox is not present in relationships between men and women, as Roman texts assert that marriage must include both Eros (love) and Aphrodite (pleasure). Plutarch argues that conjugal love between a man and a woman is the most perfect form of love; this leads to a new erotics. This new erotics privileges the marital relationship as the site of reciprocity, virginity, and complete union. If we think of the second and third volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as a genealogy of love (as well as a genealogy of desire), we can see the shift from a conception of love that centers on relationships between men and boys to the conception of love that privileges the marriage relationship and the family. However, the restriction of love to marriage in ancient Roman texts does not presage a Christian ethics of prohibition, because the ethical substance is different. For the ancient Greeks, “the ethical substance was acts linked to pleasure and desires in their unity,” whereas for Christianity it is sexuality (EEW1, 263).

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In later essays and interviews, Foucault turns from a historical exploration of love to a discussion of love in contemporary homosexual relations. In “Friendship as a Way of Life,” he argues that people are disturbed not by sex between men but by love. Love goes against law, rule, and habit because of its “multiple intensities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and changing forms” (EEW1, 137). Foucault views love between men as opening up new possibilities for relating and for friendship. In this sense, love can be transformative (like pleasure) in a way that desire is not.

Margaret A. McLaren

See Also

Desire

Friendship

Homosexuality

Philosophy

Pleasure

Plato

Truth

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” in Magazine litteraire no. 325 (October 1994): 57–65.

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