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354 / Miguel de Beistegui

private, why the private at all, domesticity, marriage, and why marriage between two people?” The Cynic works and struggles toward a constant dépouillement (a stripping, denuding, shedding) and a décapage (a cleaning or cleansing) of existence, his own as well as that of others, to take it to the limit, to strip it to its absolute minimum, to leave no aspect of it unquestioned. We have the image of the dog again, chewing on his bone, cleaning it, exposing it; the dog that guards, attacks, exposes, threatens, cleans, and scours, but in all innocence and sovereignty, out of love for others.

Foucault’s relation to philosophy – to the discipline of philosophy, its history and the way in which throughout that history it has tended to construct itself as a particular science, the science of truth itself, and therefore as the science of all sciences – was, and remained, ambiguous and ambivalent. If he turns toward history, it is to question the ontological and transcendental claims that philosophy tends to make. But, in turning to history, he does not turn away from philosophy. Rather, he raises philosophical questions that history itself cannot raise, and he is thus able to bring to the surface the unconscious or a priori of the human and social sciences, the system of truth and power they presuppose, and the modes of subjectivity they generate. That he does with a view to asking who we are today, and with the further view of asking whether, and how, we might resist them, how we might create new technologies of the self, new ways of governing oneself as well as others. Let us leave the inal word to Foucault himself, who once said: “If someone wanted to be a philosopher but didn’t ask himself the question, ‘what is knowledge?’, or ‘what is truth?’, in what sense could one say he was a philosopher? And as much as I may say that I’m not a philosopher, if it’s truth that I’m concerned with, then I am still a philosopher” (FDE2a, 30–31).

Miguel de Beistegui

Suggested Reading

Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans.

Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

PLAGUE

In the second lecture of his 1975 course on “Abnormal” at the Collège de

France, Foucault drew a distinction between sovereign and disciplinary mechanisms of power by examining the two apparatuses that were put in place to deal

with, on the one hand, leprosy and, on the other, the plague.

In the case of leprosy, the “model of control” used during the Middle Ages was that of exclusion, which entailed the “rigorous division” of certain individuals from the others, the constitution of two masses foreign to one another, and the subsequent juridical and political “disqualiication” of one of those masses with respect to the other (ECF-AB, 43–44). Foucault contrasts the model of exclusion with that of the quarantine, a model used more and more often during the eighteenth century to combat the plague.

First and foremost, the quarantine, as a model for the control of individuals, is a mechanism of inclusion: it concerns itself with the “spatial partitioning and control” of plague-infested towns. Certainly, there existed an element of exclusion in the model of the quarantine, but whereas those suffering from leprosy were cast away into a “vague territory” and left to fend for themselves, the quarantined territory immediately became the object of a “ine and detailed analysis, of a meticulous spatial partitioning” (ECF-AB, 44–45). As Foucault had explained during a talk given in Brazil in 1974, the quarantine model, which involved the partitioning of a space into districts and the constant surveillance of that space by sentries and appointed inspectors who recorded everything they saw and in turn answered to a higher medical authority, relied on a medical power that sought

to position individuals in relation to one another, to isolate them, to individuate them, to monitor them one by one, to control their state of health, to verify whether they were still alive or whether they were dead and in this way to maintain society in a space that was compartmentalized, constantly under surveillance,

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Plague / 357

and controlled by a register, as complete as possible, of all of the events that had occurred. (EEW3, 146, translation modiied)

Throughout these analyses, Foucault associates the model of exclusion with a sovereign, negative mechanism of rejection. On the other hand, the eighteenth-century practice of quarantine, as a model of “political control,” corresponds to a different historical process, which Foucault describes as “the invention of positive technologies of power” (ECF-AB, 48). In other words, the model of the quarantine is a properly disciplinary model of control: it effects the spatial repartitioning of a territory and controls the circulation of bodies within that territory through the establishment of a clear medical hierarchy and the creation of a inely regulated network of surveillance and recordkeeping. Thus, as a technique of power, the quarantine functions not through sovereign exclusion but through the mechanisms, proper to discipline, of the “close and analytical inclusion of elements” and the distribution of individual bodies as “differential individualities,” mechanisms that “secure the formation, investment, accumulation, and growth of knowledge” (ibid.).

Thus, the signiicance of the quarantine, as Foucault would later explain in Discipline and Punish, lies in the fact that its myriad mechanisms constitute “a compact model of the disciplinary apparatus” (EDP, 197, translation modiied). And it is precisely these mechanisms that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon would later reinscribe in architectural form. Accordingly, if the quarantine represents a model for the disciplinary apparatus put in place in exceptional situations and circumstances, such as an epidemic of plague, then the Panopticon is the “diagram of a mechanism of power brought to its ideal form,” its “architectural igure,” through which the mechanisms of discipline encountered in the quarantine can be generalized in such a way as to deine “power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (EDP, 205).

David-Olivier Gougelet

Suggested Reading

Crampton, Jeremy, and Stuart Elden, eds. 2007. Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Dillon, Michael, and Andrew Neal, eds. 2008. Foucault on Politics, Security, and War. London: Palgrave.

PLEASURE

Pleasure seems to be used in at least three different ways in Foucault’s work: as an alternative to a discourse of sexuality based on desire; as a feature of the Greek understanding of aphrodisiac; and as a practice of the self, or

askesis.

Foucault contrasts pleasure with desire in a number of his writings and interviews, but it is in volume one of The History of Sexuality that he irst introduces pleasure as an alternative to desire because he argues that desire is trapped within the logic of juridico-discursive power. Even when power is viewed as productive and constitutive of desire, desire only becomes important within a discourse of sexuality that judges one based on one’s desires and seeks to extort the truth from individuals about their desires through confession. Whereas desire is bound up with processes of individualization, normalization, and control, pleasure is not.

In two often-quoted passages from the irst volume of The History of Sexuality,

Foucault points to the possibility of thinking about sex and sexuality differently, by moving away from sex-desire toward bodies and pleasures:

It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (EHS1, 157)

Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we become dedicated to the

359

360 / Margaret A. McLaren

endless tasks of reinforcing its secret, of exacting the truest confessions from a shadow. (EHS1, 159)

Some scholars wonder whether Foucault is invoking a prediscursive, natural notion of bodies and pleasures here. Foucault clearly posits pleasure as a point of resistance to the discourse of sexuality. In his subsequent work on the history of sexuality in ancient Greece and early Rome, he explores pleasure in more depth; in these historical periods, it is connected to the techniques of living, rather than repression and negation (EEW1, 89). Insofar as it stands outside the normalizing scientiic and religious discourses that since the seventeenth century have constituted the discourse of sexuality, pleasure provides an alternative way of thinking about bodily practices that is not reducible to sex or desire.

Pleasure, however, is not simply an alternative to sex-desire but is also an element of it. It is not the having of pleasures but the classifying of them that is problematic; confession played a role in the “great archive of the pleasures of sex” along with the discourses of science and medicine (EHS1, 63). Power and pleasure reinforce one another, forming a “perpetual spiral” (EHS1, 45). According to Foucault, “Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap and reinforce one another” (EHS1, 48). Within the discourse of sexuality, pleasure is produced, at least in part, through the classiication of perversions. In this way, scientia sexualis intensiies pleasures produced within the discourse of sexuality through power and knowledge. According to Foucault, sexuality is a historical construct, “a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensiication of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power” (EHS1, 105–106). In volume one of The History of Sexuality, Foucault shows how pleasure, power, and desire work together to produce sex, which is assumed to be the object of the discourse of sexuality but is instead its product. Pleasure here (pleasures of sex), as linked to power and produced through classiication, is part of the apparatus of sexuality based on sex-desire, whereas pleasure as askesis opens up new possibilities outside the discourse of sexuality. For instance, when Foucault discusses sadomasochism as an innovative practice, he claims that pleasure is “desexualized” because sadomasochism broadens the notion of pleasure to bodily pleasure rather than simply sexual pleasure (EEW1, 165).

Pleasure plays a primary role in volume two of The History of Sexuality, subtitled The Use of Pleasure. Given Foucault’s rallying cry near the end of the irst volume, this is not surprising. Aphrodisia (acts of love), a central concept for ancient Greeks, includes acts, pleasures, and desires. These three elements were linked together in a dynamic relationship, and for the Greeks the object of moral concern was not any single element of this ensemble but the relationship among them. In The Use

PLEASURE / 361

of Pleasure Foucault raises the question: “How could one, how must one ‘make use’ (chresthai) of this dynamics of pleasures, desires and acts” (EHS2, 52)?

In a discussion he had with Rabinow and Dreyfus in April 1983, Foucault lays out the different relationship of the three elements of sexual behavior: (1) acts; (2) pleasure; and (3) desire. He claims that these three elements have different emphases at different times in different places. For the Greeks, the act was prioritized, and then pleasure and desire played minor roles. For the Chinese, pleasure was prioritized and then desire, with acts following. For Christians, desire becomes the focus, then the act, with pleasure trailing behind. And for we “moderns,” desire has become all important and then the acts, whereas pleasure has nearly disappeared. The following table provides an illustration.

Greeks	acte – plaisir – [désir]
Chinese	plaisir – désir – [acte]
Christian	[désir] – acte – [plaisir]
Modern	désir – acte – ([plaisir?])

The triangular relationship among acts, pleasures, and desires shifts over time, but it is within this triangle that Foucault thinks we can trace the genealogy of the subject.

For the ancient Greeks, the pleasures of the body included the pleasures of food and drink as well as sex. The pleasures were seen as natural, and the main issue was not what was permitted and what was prohibited but how to avoid excess. Sex is not privileged, and its pleasures are viewed as natural along with other bodily pleasures. In fact, Foucault notes that the Greeks were much more concerned with food than with sex. Pleasure is not viewed as bad or evil as it is in the Christian tradition (EHS2, 16). In fact, the important question for the ancient Greeks is not what pleasures one has (i.e., the objects of one’s pleasure and desire) but how one has one’s pleasures. The measure of pleasure is quantity; excessive pleasure is self-indulgent. But the moderation of pleasures comes from the person experiencing the pleasures, not from the surveillance or judgment of others. Mastery of the pleasures is synonymous with mastery of the self. Unlike in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Christianity, medicine, and science categorized one in terms of one’s desires, in ancient Greece the emphasis was on how one used one’s pleasure, not what gave one pleasure. Thus, as Foucault says, “moral discrimination was more dynamic than morphological” (EHS2, 50). In other words, it did not matter if one’s object of affection was a man or a woman. What mattered was how one conducted oneself, whether or not one acted, and if one’s actions were in moderation. In his genealogy of the “desiring subject,” the move from pleasures experienced through acts (in ancient Greece) to pleasure bound up with desires and identity is the shift from doing to

362 / Margaret A. McLaren

being. This shift from acts to desires corresponds with the creation of categories of sexual identity: “This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new speciication of individuals.... The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (EHS1, 42–43). Foucault was suspicious of ixed categories of identity, especially sexual identity, because these categories serve to regulate behavior and classify individuals according to their sexual desires. The discourse of sexuality marks desires as important and uses them to categorize individuals. Because it is based on sex-desire rather than pleasure, the ethic of sexuality is tied to the logic of repression and prohibition.

In The Use of Pleasure, one can see that the “mode of subjection” implied by the moral problematization of sexual conduct is markedly different for the ancient Greeks than it was after the early seventeenth century. The use of pleasures involved moderation and good judgment in the way that the individual managed his or her sexual activity. As Foucault put it, “It was not a question of what was permitted or forbidden among the desires that one felt or the acts that one committed, but of prudence, relection, and calculation in the way one distributed and controlled his acts” (EHS2, 54).

In Care of the Self, Foucault continues his genealogy of the desiring subject, tracing the shift from an ethics of pleasure to an ethics of sexuality. During the irst two centuries CE, Foucault notes an increasing mistrust of the pleasures and the limiting of sexual pleasure to marriage. Nonetheless, the focus on the pleasures at this time did not result in moral codes or prescriptions but in an intensiication of the relationship to oneself (EHS3, 39, 41). In antiquity, pleasure was emphasized over desire, and the moderation of one’s pleasures was seen as part and parcel of a beautiful life. Thus, choosing to act on one’s desires was an aesthetic choice rather than a moral choice.

The use of pleasure in relation to sex comprises one aspect of an overall concern for the self, which includes diet, household relations, and erotic relations between men and boys. Out of this concern or care for the self, Foucault develops his ideas of askesis and a stylization of freedom: “The moral relection of the Greeks on sexual behavior did not seek to justify interdictions, but to stylize a freedom – that freedom which the ‘free’ man exercised in his activity” (EHS2, 97).

In a number of interviews in the early 1980s, Foucault discussed the possibility of pleasure as askesis, as a practice of the self. He noted that contemporary pleasures are intense and innovative. Foucault discussed sadomasochism, drugs, and neardeath experiences as having the potential for new forms of pleasure. Pleasure can be found as well in friendships and homosexual relationships. In responding to a question about what young homosexuals need to work on, Foucault said “not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves ininitely more susceptible to pleasure” (EEW1, 137). Foucault characterizes pleasure as intense, deep, and overwhelming (EEW1, 129). He advocates an ethics of sexual behavior based on pleasure and its

PLEASURE / 363

intensiication (EEW1, 131). Pleasure also plays a role in forging new models of relationships, particularly friendships between homosexual men. Foucault describes friendship as “the sum of all those things through which [people] can reciprocally give each other pleasure” (EEW1, 135). As relationships move into uncharted territory, possibilities for innovation and creativity open up for a multiplicity of new forms of life not based on discovering the truth about one’s desires.

Pleasure provides an alternative to desire and to the discourse of sexuality that shapes us into desiring subjects. Although Foucault is not interested in returning to the ancient Greek notion of ethical practices (nor does he think it is possible), he posits that it provides us with a model where desire and pleasure had a strong connection and, signiicantly, ethical questions were not linked to scientiic knowledge. The choices one made about ethical conduct were aesthetic choices and related to choosing a beautiful life, not to normalization. This escape from normalization and scientiic categorization is also implied in Foucault’s discussions of contemporary askesis of pleasure as these practices of pleasure go beyond our current experiences and may open up new possibilities for relating to others and to ourselves.

Margaret A. McLaren