The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Suggested Reading

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia

University Press, chap. 3.

Derrida, Jacques. 2011. Voice and Phenomenon, trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, Edmund. 1965. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer. New

York: Harper Torchbooks.

1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

1977. Cartesian Meditation, trans. Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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

University Press.

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order to arrive at a genuinely critical stance with respect to the social and scientiic order of his time.

A quick glance at the titles of his works could suggest that he found his way out of this philosophical predicament by abandoning philosophy altogether and turning to history instead. From the very start until the very end, from History of Madness, his irst book, to History of Sexuality, his last book, history seems to be the focus of his thought. Instead of focusing on the traditional problems or areas of philosophy, or on the thought of previous philosophers, his work consisted of historical investigations, limited, for the most part, to the classical and modern ages, concerning a wide range of topics, such as madness, crime, or desire and pleasure, the birth of institutions such as clinical medicine or the modern prison, the emergence of disciplines such as psychiatry, the scientia sexualis, political economy, biology, or linguistics.

(Two signiicant and historically antithetical exceptions to this general rule can be found in Foucault’s work from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Birth of Biopolitics from 1978–1979 [ECF-BBIO] is devoted to a series of analyses of the birth of neoliberalism in the twentieth century and discusses at length the Chicago School of Economics, whose views and theories have shaped our lives and inluenced policies in the last thirty years. At the other end of the historical spectrum, we need to note Foucault’s sustained engagement with, and readings of, philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity concerned with the care of the self and the aesthetics of existence [ECF-COT, ECF-GSO, and ECF-HOS].) Telling, in that respect, are the conditions surrounding the publication of Foucault’s main PhD thesis. Initially called Madness and Unreason (Folie et déraison), its publication was rejected by the philosopher Brice

Parain, then a series editor at Gallimard, but accepted by the historian Philippe Ariès for his series “Civilisations and Mentalities” with Plon and published in May 1961 under the exact title of Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. The subtitle emphasized the historical dimension and credentials of the book. And although we must not forget that Foucault devoted his “secondary thesis,” normally devoted to a igure of the philosophical canon, to translating and presenting Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, we need also to recall that he eventually published the translation, but without its long introduction.

For further evidence of Foucault’s ambiguous, if not distant, relation to philosophy, one could point to the fact that his irst positions as an assistant professor and then as a full professor at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, while in a department of philosophy, were in fact in psychology, and the only Chairs in Philosophy he ever held in a career that spanned twenty-four years were between 1966 and 1969, irst at the University of Tunis and then, in 1969, at the newly created University of Vincennes. His Chair at the Collège de France, which he occupied between 1970 and the year of his death (1984), bore the intriguing title of “History of the Systems of Thought” and replaced that of Jean Hyppolite, his teacher, in the “History of Philosophical Thought.” Finally, Foucault himself was perfectly content to admit

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that he only worked with the help of a handful of philosophers, thus suggesting that the vast majority were, for his own purposes, of little or no use at all.

But the truth is that if Foucault breaks with a certain way of doing philosophy, of constructing problems, and with a certain conception regarding the task and goal of philosophy, it is to invent a new way of philosophizing. My aim here is to show that Foucault’s work is rigorously philosophical, and that the problem with which he is concerned – namely, the manner in which what he calls savoirs (kinds of knowledge) are intimately related to certain apparatuses (dispositifs) of power, which in turn generate speciic modes of subjectivity – is underpinned by the question of truth, or, more speciically, by the system of exclusion and normativity that truth presupposes, and the historical conditions under which such a system is constituted.

There is no doubt, as I have already suggested, that Foucault was impressed by the way in which structuralism transformed the social sciences, and that his work from the 1960s, most notably The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, bear the mark of that method and approach. However, even before turning to structuralism as a way out of the dominant philosophical and intellectual climate of the 1940s and 1950s, and its commitment to various forms of humanism, Foucault was drawn to a different kind of philosophy, oriented toward the analysis of scientiic concepts and procedures. From the time of his doctoral thesis (1961) and at least until the lecture courses at the Collège de France from the late 1970s, his work unfolded not under the banner of “a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject” (EEW2, 465), as he described it famously, and with which much of French philosophy came to be identiied after World War II, but under the more discrete, seemingly modest, and more narrow auspices of a philosophy concerned with the conditions of emergence of the sciences and the formation of scientiic concepts, and exempliied by igures such as Koyré, Canguilhem, and Bachelard. Foucault saw the latter two in particular as enacting a powerful self-critique of reason itself and its concepts, and emphasizing the ruptures, discontinuities, and contingencies behind the apparent “progress” of science. It is their approach and aspects of their method that he eventually applied to the “human sciences.” He sought to identify the points that make possible the shift from one discursive “regime” or “formation” to the next and to show how, in the end, there is more in common between, say, natural history, general grammar, and the analysis of wealth in the classical age than between natural history and modern biology, general grammar and philology, or the analysis of wealth and economics. Such an emphasis on the historical conditions underlying epistemic shifts distinguished Foucault’s approach from that of the historian of ideas or the philosopher of science. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, for example, Foucault makes it very clear that he is concerned not with the sciences themselves, or their logical propositions, but with what he calls “discourses” and “statements” (énoncés) (EAK, 126–131). Whereas the irst approach aims to reveal the actual, positive content of the sciences, and thus their “truth” dimension and their “meaning,” the

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second approach (“archaeology”) analyzes those sciences from the point of view of their “historical a priori” or “archive”; that is, from the point of view of what makes them “possible and necessary” (EOT, 168).

At the same time, and notwithstanding the obvious Kantian tone of Foucault’s approach, the shift from a critical investigation in the Kantian sense (that is, in the sense of the conditions of knowledge and experience as rooted in the faculties of the transcendental subject) to history as the very terrain for the constitution of such conditions is distinctly non-Kantian, and, one could even argue, deprives transcendental philosophy itself of its own grounds and justiication. Archaeology, then, is a seemingly transcendental category or method, concerned with the conditions of possibility of knowledge, or, better said, with the real conditions of emergence of knowledge (EAK, 127), except that the conditions in question are not those of knowledge in general but of historically and geographically speciic “epistemes” that do not refer back to, or presuppose, the faculties of the human subject as their point of origin. If anything, archaeology reveals the extent to which there is no ahistorical subject, and thus no being that we can designate as human from the start: subjects aren’t constituted a priori but constructed as effects of the savoir in question and the practices, discourses, and institutions it makes possible. Foucault also describes his work as the search for the “unconscious” of knowledge; that is, for the autonomous domain, with its rules and structures, that lies beneath or behind what knowledge knows of itself, and the actual knowledge-content (connaissance) it pursues (see FDE1, 681–683).

But, one might ask, what is this entire effort, this new method, set of concepts, and series of detailed analyses ultimately with a view to? This is the point, perhaps, at which we begin to put our inger on the distinctly philosophical aspect of Foucault’s work, for he does not see archaeology – and, one could argue, even genealogy – as an end in itself. He sees history, and speciically archaeology, as primarily oriented toward, and as a way of engaging critically with, our own present: with the concepts we use, the rationality we operate under, the objects we construct, and the type of subjects we have become. He sees archaeology, and even genealogy, as a tool, rather than an end in itself. To an interviewer who asked him the extent to which his work could be seen as philosophical, Foucault replied the following: “It’s quite possible that what I’m doing is somewhat related to philosophy, especially given the fact that, since Nietzsche, the aim of philosophy is no longer to utter a universal and transhistorical truth, but to diagnose” (FDE1, 606). In another interview from the same year (1967), he said the following: “The role of philosophy is to diagnose. The philosopher has ceased to try and say what is eternally. The far more arduous and leeting task he is now faced with is to say what is happening” (FDE1, 581). Here we have an image of philosophy that in the interview from which the passage is extracted Foucault traces back to Nietzsche. Elsewhere, however, and perhaps surprisingly, he traces it back to Kant – not the Kant of the critical project, who seeks to identify the conditions and limits of human experience and knowledge, but the Kant of the

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historical essays, and of “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in particular. In his lecture course at the Collège de France from 1982–1983, Foucault says that Kant’s text has always represented for him something like an “emblem” or a “fetish” (ECF-GSO, 7). In his essay, Kant raises the question of who we are and what it means to philosophize today. He raises the question of philosophy against the backdrop of an event, the Enlightenment, which he deines as “the courage to make use of one’s own understanding” and the “public use of one’s reason.” Courage is the subject matter of Foucault’s inal course at the Collège de France (FCF-CV), to which I shall return. Philosophy, then, insofar as it is bound up with such a project, is identiied with an “attitude” and an “ethos,” best described as the diagnosis and “permanent critique of our historical era” (EEW1, 312). The task of philosophy is thus relatively modest: it does not claim to speak in the name of universal truths and eternal essences, the absolute, or even human nature; it aims simply to understand the present. Such a seemingly modest activity, however, requires a certain “courage” and involves a different conception of truth, to which we shall return. At the same time, the activity of diagnosis, and thus of philosophy, is no longer restricted to those who claim to be philosophers, who address the classical problems of philosophy, or who engage with its history. The critical and diagnostic activity of thought, with which Foucault identiies genuine philosophy, can be found in a number of discourses and disciplines (history, linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, religion, etc.), united by a common suspicion regarding the universal notions of truth, freedom, or subjectivity, and so on.

But how can philosophy reconcile the demand to respond to what is happening, and its task as a diagnostician, with the “archive” and the archaeological point of view? How can the analysis and description of the historical a priori, of the emergence of discourses of truth and knowledge between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, help us understand who we are today? What is the relation between today and yesterday, present and past, and to what extent can archaeology and philosophy (as diagnosis) work together? Or is there a dimension of philosophy – the dimension concerned with the present – that falls outside the realm of archaeology, and this in such a way that Foucault will eventually need not so much to abandon the archaeological point of view as supplement it with a different kind of approach? As the next section of this essay will make clear, the sense of critique that is required in order to carry out the task of diagnosing our historical era is not that of Kant but that of Nietzsche. It is critique as genealogy.

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault makes it clear that the archive and archaeological point of view presuppose a certain distance with respect to their object, and that they can interrogate only the past. It is, Foucault claims, impossible for us to describe our own archive (EAK, 130), for the simple reason that it is from within its rules that we speak and think. In its actual state, the archive is thus uncircumventable. In order to grasp our own archive, we would need the sort of

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distance that, by deinition, we do not have. And yet, the archive does not bear on the remotest of pasts, a past that would be so distant that it would no longer concern us. Rather, its role is to interrogate the threshold of our own present, to reach the point where we understand what we are no longer, without quite understanding what we are. This is the extent to which archaeology itself is a diagnostic tool. The historical perspective is necessary to not take our own situation and present for granted, to question it, and see where it has introduced discontinuities, paradigmatic shifts, and ruptures. It is necessary to see the extent to which we tend to draw general if not universal conclusions, on the basis of our own present experience – an experience that, far from proceeding from a universal truth, human nature, or the essence of things, was shaped as a result of historical contingencies. Those contingencies are the real (and not merely possible) conditions of experience. They are the (historical) a priori.

But is it enough, Foucault began to wonder in the 1970s, to analyze and describe the discourses of the human sciences and extract their historical a priori? Are the diagnostic and critical aims of Foucault’s project suficiently well served by the purely epistemological level on which archaeology operates? Should we not also ask about the deep motivations underlying the type of epistemes analyzed hitherto, or, to use a

Nietzschean expression, about the “will” that corresponds to the very statements of truth those epistemes imply? It is precisely after the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), which marks the culminating point of Foucault’s archaeological period, and before the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975), devoted to the birth of disciplinary power and exemplifying his genealogical approach, that, in a short period that includes his irst lecture course at the Collège de France, Foucault writes and lectures extensively on Nietzsche, and on the problem of genealogy in particular. (At Vincennes, in February 1969, Foucault taught a course on “Nietzsche and Genealogy.” In 1971, as a tribute to Jean Hyppolite, he published “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” [FGNH; collected in FDE2, 136–156; in English, in EEW2, 369–392]. In April 1971, he gave a lecture at McGill University on “How to Think the History of Truth with Nietzsche without Presupposing Truth” [included in FCFLSV, 195–213]. Finally, La volonté de savoir [FCF-LSV] sets up a radical opposition between the Aristotelian and the Nietzschean “morphologies of knowing [savoir].”) Behind the break with the history of philosophy, and even with the history of philosophical thought, which his Chair at the Collège de France seems to announce, it is precisely to that history that Foucault devotes his irst lecture course, and it is that very legacy that allows his own thought to gain the critical power it was lacking.

At the very beginning of his irst lecture course at the Collège de France (1970–1971), precisely entitled “Lectures on the Will to Know,” Foucault wondered whether “it is possible to establish a theory of the will to know that could be used as a foundation for the historical analyses” (FCF-LSV, 3). How are we to understand “foundation” in this context? Far from wanting to ground his own historical

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investigations on more scientiic and secure foundations, Foucault opens up a line of questioning that will reveal a multiple, shifting, and ultimately disturbing origin, bound up with interpretation and even “iction” (FDE2a, 236). Behind what Aristotle, and the entire tradition that followed, saw as the supposedly natural desire of human beings to know (le désir de connaître), their inborn curiosity, and their inclination to distinguish the truth from the false, built into the very notion of philosophy, there is something quite different: a will to know (volonté de savoir) and to truth. Inspired by Nietzsche, Foucault understands this will or desire not as oriented toward, or essentially concerned with, knowledge and truth – that is, not as this essentially epistemic and disinterested drive, emanating from a cognitive subject – but as oriented toward, or intimately bound up with, the will to subjugate and dominate. Truth, in other words, is not just, and not even primarily, a matter of knowledge (connaissance). It is also, and primarily, a matter of power: whereas knowledge refers to “the system that allows one to give a prior unity, a reciprocal belonging and a co-naturality between desire and knowledge,” knowing (savoir) is “what needs to be wrested from the interiority of knowledge so as to ind in it the object of a will [vouloir], the goal of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the workings of a struggle [l’enjeu d’une lutte]” (FCF-LSV, 18). The will to truth, and the “veridiction” it generates, are indissociable from a “will to power,” a will to dominate and subjugate – indissociable, that is, from what Foucault recognizes as systems or dispositifs of power, and institutions such as the asylum, the Panopticon, the school, the market, or the family, which shape, mold, and correct minds and bodies alike. Unlike Nietzsche, though, Foucault does not attribute this will to a form or type of life or an instinct. Through a translation of Nietzsche’s Macht as pouvoir (power, as in political power) rather than puissance (potentiality, as in sexual potency), Foucault ultimately displaces the terrain of Nietzsche’s analysis and avoids his own naturalism. But he does retain the idea that to every discourse of “truth” concerning the human, such as psychiatry or criminology, belongs a speciic distribution and organization of power, a process of subjection (assujettissement) as well as subjectiication: “The birth of the human sciences goes hand in hand with the installation of new mechanisms of power” (EPPC, 106).

This is how, to use the example of the discourses on sexuality that begin to proliferate in the nineteenth century, Foucault claims that he wants “to deal not only with those discourses, but also with the will that sustains them” (EHS1, 16). In other words, he’s not concerned to know whether certain discourses manage to formulate the truth about human sexuality, or on the contrary only generate lies that conceal the truth. Nor is he interested in denouncing the many errors, illusions, naivetes, or moralisms concerning “sex.” Rather, he wishes to identify the “will to know” that operates as their support and instrument (EHS1, 20). Speciically, the question is one of knowing how, at a speciic time and over a certain period, human sexuality – or, to be more precise, the object that came to be known as “sex” – began to fall under the authority of a discourse and a will oriented no longer toward sensations and pleasure,

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the law and the forbidden, but toward truth; that is, toward the system of opposition and exclusion between truth and falsity, usefulness and danger, or the normal and the pathological. The problem, in other words, is one of knowing how “sex” emerged as an object precisely through its constitution within a scientiic discourse, the scientia sexualis, and as a result of the need to control, discipline, or “normalize” the sexual body through a number of techniques or “technologies,” including that of “telling the truth” about one’s actions and desires.

In “The Subject and Power” (1982), Foucault claims that “the main objective today is not to discover, but to refuse what we are” (EEW3, 336, my emphasis). And with that goal in mind, philosophy is more necessary than ever, over and beyond its ability to diagnose: “We need to promote new forms of subjectivity by refusing the type of subjectivity that has been imposed on us for several centuries” (ibid.). Genealogy, Foucault says in Society Must Be Defended, is not just a method; it is also a “tactic,” which aims to “set free” or “desubjugate” (ECF-SMD, 10). Such a liberation would signal not the end of power relations (slavery alone, or total domination, for Foucault signals the absence of power) but “a new economy of power relations” (EEW3, 329). The problem, in other words, is no longer just one of diagnosis and even critique. It has also become a problem of creation and invention.

Although Foucault never explicitly says, or never had the time to say, what such technologies could consist of for us today, he did engage in a series of readings of such technologies in the ancient world, and of that of the “care of the self” (epimeleia heauto, cura sui) in particular, which the Cartesian tradition abandoned in favor of the sole technique of self-knowledge, also inherited from the Greeks. Far from excluding the notion of truth, those later texts all try to bring back into the domain of philosophy questions and practices traditionally associated with spirituality, for if by “philosophy” one means this form of thought that asks about the true and the false, about how to distinguish the true from the false, and how the subject might have access to the true, then we will need to recognize as “spirituality” the set of practices, experiences, and exercises (such as puriication, renunciation, and conversion, but also a range of erotic practices) recognized as necessary in order to arrive at the truth and through which the subject is constituted as a subject of truth. Foucault claims that those two types of questioning and experiences were never separated in the various schools of philosophy of antiquity, with one notable exception, that of Aristotle, who was subsequently described as the philosopher. If the “Cartesian moment” is in that respect exemplary, it is not the founding moment. By turning the question of the access to truth into a question of knowledge, philosophy, especially in its modern phase, cuts itself off from the tradition of the care of the self, which Foucault is concerned with reawakening in his later work.

Let me return to the example of “sexuality.” Foucault contrasts such a science of sexuality with the ars erotica of ancient Rome, China, Japan, India, and Arabic

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societies. It is not as if one could not associate the category of truth with such an art. In fact, all those techniques or technologies of the body and its pleasures involve a certain discourse of truth, but it is one that is extracted from the pleasure itself, understood as a practice and recorded as an experience. And pleasure is not considered from the point of view of the law, of what is permitted and what is forbidden, or that of utility, but from the point of view of its intensity, its speciic quality, its duration, and other angles. This distinction is crucial because it means that there is room for a discourse of truth that is not that of science – whether sexual, political, economical, or whatever. It is precisely to this other truth and this other will that Foucault will turn in the 1980s – in relation to the use of pleasures (see EHS2, Chapter 5) but also in relation to ethics and politics, as his inal lecture course, “The Courage of Truth,” makes amply clear. The question then becomes the following: In relation to ourselves as well as others, can we will something other than domination? Can we approach the problem of government – of ourselves and others – in ways that are not disciplinary and subjugating? Can we invent modalities of power outside the technologies of discipline of the nineteenth century and the more recent, biopolitical technologies of the self? This is what is at stake in Foucault’s inal phase of thought and in his writings and lectures from the 1980s, which focus on the ways in which, in antiquity, an entire discourse and a large body of literature was devoted to the care of the self, the way to govern oneself and relate to others not as members of a “society,” “individuals,” or a “population” but as subjects who construct themselves through a series of practical, spiritual, and aesthetic practices aimed at articulating a new assemblage of “truth” and “subjectivity.”

In that respect, Foucault is interested in emphasizing the fundamental contrast between the technology of confession, based on the need, if not the command, to speak the truth about oneself as a condition of one’s salvation, and the Greek, essentially Stoic and Cynic, practice of parresia, understood as openness and frankness of speech, as the courage to speak the truth even in the most delicate and dangerous circumstances – a form of discourse, and an attitude, that was contrasted with lattery, rhetoric, and sophistry and involved the subject as a whole. The philosophical life of the Cynic is not one of knowledge and contemplation. It is a life of combat, a “militant” life, Foucault says, fully aware of this anachronistic characterization. The Cynic is aggressive. Like a dog (kuon), from which his own name is derived, he bites, barks, and shocks. He attacks his enemies – not the actual people but their vices, illusions, vanity, desires, and passions, as well as their fears and weaknesses, and of course his own, not only with words, sometimes especially not with words, but with blows, with sticks. That is the extent to which he is useful, politically useful. The struggle is also against conventions, laws, and habits, against an entire social and political order. The Cynic is an agent provocateur, a guerrillero: “Why not practice incest?” he asks;

“Why not cannibalism?”; “Why clothes?”; “Why the distinction between public and