The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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the nineteenth century ... converge[s] on Freud” (EHM, 510), it does so along two related pathways.

From one direction, Foucault traces the historical path to Freud from the “York Retreat” introduced by William Tuke. Tuke’s “Retreat” anticipates Freud in the “‘big family’ atmosphere formed by the community of the insane and their keepers at the Retreat” (EHM, 489). This link between the treatment of madness and the family is both classical (ibid.) and modern: “[F]rom this point onwards ... the discourses of unreason became inextricably linked to the half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family” (EHM, 490). From this perspective, psychoanalysis appears as an updating of the family dialectic, which in the interim between Tuke and Freud had become “historical[ly] sediment[ed]” (ibid.).

From the other direction, Foucault traces the line from Phillipe Pinel to Freud. By exorcising religion from the asylum, Pinel was able to legislate a secular morality: treatment is a matter of normalizing the madman in conformity with proper society (EHM, 493). Since the cloistered space of the asylum is not a second Eden in which the madman reclaims his natural (religious) goodness, as in Tuke’s bucolic retreat, Pinel had to balance the isolation of the asylum with its inclusion in bourgeois society (EHM, 495).

Foucault presents three “principal means” by which Pinel realizes this dificult task: the imposition of silence, a purely relexive form of recognition, and the introduction of a process of “perpetual judgment” (EHM, 495–503). Although Freud is anticipated in each of these structures – by reopening a dialogue between reason and madness, practicing a scientiic observation of the self-constituting mad subject, and reversing the judgmental condemnation of the mentally ill (EHM, 510) – it is only by way of Pinel’s “fourth structure” that we arrive fully at Freudian modernity: “the medical persona [le personnage médical]” (EHM, 503).

Although by all appearances the very image of the modern empirical scientist, the medical persona introduced by Pinel is in fact an amalgam of the moral authorities present in early modern society: “Father and Judge, Family and Law” (EHM, 506). Once “every moment of this story” of the medical persona is transposed into a “psychoanalytic narrative,” the story of psychoanalysis reveals the Freudian analyst as no more than the modern version of classical moral authority: Dr. Freud as father, judge, and enforcer of the moral law (EHM, 507).

Here the possible ambivalence of Foucault’s attitude toward psychoanalysis is harder to discern. Foucault is critical of the concealed moralizing of modern psychiatry, but he identiies Freud with the medical persona, which likens him to the modern subject in company with Nietzsche, Artaud, and Nerval. In what sense, then, does Freud fail where Nietzsche and Artaud succeed; namely, in articulating the expressive excess contained in the position of the modern subject?

A possible answer to this question lies with Jacques Lacan, the other modern “persona” of the psychoanalytic tradition. If Freud acknowledges, reluctantly, his

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subjective presence in the analytic setting – and his own importance in coalescing around himself the burgeoning science of psychoanalysis – Lacan draws these matters to the very center of his psychoanalytic practice.

During his 1981–1982 lecture course at the Collège de France on the hermeneutics of the subject, Foucault considers this “subjective” difference between Freud and Lacan. Although psychoanalysis in general is a “form of knowledge” that “questions, interrogat[es], and require[s] ... the very old and fundamental questions of the epimeleia heautou [care of the self]” (ECF-HOS, 29), the problem with the Freudian version of that “form of kowledge” is that it has forgotten “the question of the relations between truth and the subject” (ECF-HOS, 30).

Foucault then praises Lacanian psychoanalysis on the same grounds as he criticizes Freud. By asking the question of “the price the subject must pay for saying the truth,” Lacan surpasses Freud in “reintroduc[ing] into psychoanalysis the oldest tradition ... of the epimeleia heautou” (ECF-HOS, 30). Nevertheless, Lacan’s positive efforts remain futile because of his psychoanalytic approach, which “pose[s] the question of the relations of the subject to truth ... in terms of knowledge [conaissance]” (ibid.).

As with Binswanger, Foucault’s engagement with Lacan is characterized by an ambivalence between two different forms of psychoanalysis: Lacan is favored over Freud but criticized for his commitment to a psychoanalytic framework that pairs subjectivity with knowledge. Still, this critical assessment of Freud relative to Lacan casts Foucault’s attitude toward psychoanalysis in the History of Madness in a new light.

At no particular point in his work does Freud speak from the extra-signiicant position of the modern subject. Still, in “identif[ying] the irruptive signiier,” Freud does more than simply “[rediscover] the lost identity of meaning” (EHM, 546). Freud might succeed in toto where he fails in specie: as founded on the “irruptive signiier,” the Standard Edition as a whole might be the mad “absence of an œuvre” produced by the modern subject (ibid.).

A “personalized” reading of Freud’s oeuvre is possible, though, only if the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not endemic to the science. To conirm or dismiss this possibility, one would need to consult The Order of Things (1966).

Foucault here numbers psychoanalysis as one among the “human sciences.” But psychoanalysis is also unique in “advanc[ing] toward the unconscious” directly (EOT, 374). In going straight to what the other sciences approach indirectly, “psychoanalysis moves toward the moment ... at which the contents of consciousness articulate themselves ... upon man’s initude” (ibid.).

Foucault also shows how the distinctiveness of psychoanalysis explains its insuficiency as a “general theory of man” (EOT, 376). The mad subject pronounces in each of their acts the death that igures human initude; the initude, that is, “upon the basis of which we are, and think, and know” (EOT, 375). In attending to the mad

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subject, psychoanalysis thus reveals in “the forms of madness” the very basis of the human sciences (EOT, 376).

Despite its unceasing advance toward the unconscious as the source of what makes the modern subject knowable, psychoanalysis is insuficient to its own task. Psychoanalysis fails in this regard because it does not operate “within the limits of a praxis in which it is not only the knowledge we have of man that is involved, but man himself” (ibid.).

In order to realize its promise as the human science, psychoanalysis would have to be combined with ethnology as the other “counter-science” of modern man (EOT, 381). An ethnological psychoanalysis would maintain (ethnologically) the unity of a sign system through its various expressive transformations; it would also identify (psychoanalytically) the “lacuna” from which such transformations arise (EOT, 380). Psychoanalysis would supply “th[e] great caesuras, furrows, and dividing-lines ... [that make man] a possible area of knowledge” (EOT, 378); ethnology would keep man as the object of study from disappearing into those lacunae. In short, the last chapter of The Order of Things lays out the realization of Freud’s project of an “anthropological psychoanalysis” in Totem and Taboo by supplying a workable psychoanalytic praxis

(EOT, 379).

Interestingly, Foucault realizes this Freudian project in a distinctly Lacanian fashion. In combining ethnology and psychoanalysis, Foucault envisions the “discovery that the unconscious ... is in itself, a certain formal structure” (EOT, 380).

Since the character of such a structural unconscious is linguistic, Foucault here echoes Lacan’s claim that the unconscious is structured as a language.

If The Order of Things is an archaeology of the human sciences in general,

Foucault describes the “history of the deployment of sexuality” in the irst volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) as “an archaeology of psychoanalysis” in particular

(EHS1, 130). Foucault here turns his attention to the historical a priori of power and knowledge that constitute modern humans as sexed subjects. Given sex and knowledge as the theoretical coordinates of this late work, the directness of its engagement with psychoanalysis is unsurprising.

In reference to the “repressive hypothesis,” according to which nothing need be said about sex because there is nothing that calls for comment or consideration, Foucault sets Freud apart, slightly, from such modern “Victorianism” (EHS1, 5). If the repressive hypothesis is correct in that we moderns pass over sex in silence, then psychoanalysis is an exception: Freud spoke of sex and enabled sex to speak itself. Since Foucault here inaugurates a multivolume work on sex, and in so doing aims to say what has been left unsaid in our collective sexual histories, he would seem to stand beside Freud as an exception to the general rule of repression.

However, Foucault’s aim is to give the lie to the repressive hypothesis. The point is not to show that we are sexually liberated but rather to ask how we came to see ourselves as repressed in the irst place. With respect to the repressive hypothesis,

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Suggested Reading

Binswanger, Ludwig. 1957. Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a Friendship, trans. Norbert

Guterman. New York: Grune and Stratton.

Derrida, Jacques. 1998. ‘“To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, in Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 70–118.

Moore, Carmella C., and Holly F. Matthews. 2001. The Psychology of Cultural Experience.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shepherdson, Charles. 2000. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

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social racism” (ECF-SMD, 61), but he stepped back from this too. What he did do was show that in the French context the early eighteenth-century historical discourse of races associated most notably with Henri de Boulainvilliers was transformed into “the theory of races in the historico-biological sense” (ECF-SMD, 60) in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and then linked with evolutionism (ECF-SMD, 256) (see Bernasconi 2010). He organized this account around a distinction between “racism in its modern, ‘biologizing,’ statist form” (EHS1, 149), which he sometimes presented as being organized around the idea of racial purity (ECF-AB, 133; ECFSMD, 81) and “racism in the traditional sense of the term” (ECF-SMD, 87), or as he called it in the inal lecture of the course Abnormal “ethnic racism” (ECF-AB,

316). However, the fact that with few exceptions (e.g., ECF-SMD, 103 and 257) he virtually ignored race-based slavery and the speciic place of race in colonialism and imperialism has led to the charge that his account is provincial in the sense that it belongs to a historiography “locked in Europe” (Stoler 1995, 60). Nevertheless, this has not stopped a prominent African thinker, Achille Mbembe, from using Foucault’s notion of biopower to illuminate colonial occupation (Mbembe 2008).

Foucault was not writing a history of racism in the conventional sense but a “genealogy,” which he deined early in the 1976 lecture course as a “coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories, which allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics” (ECF-SMD, 8). It is in these terms that Foucault’s work must inally be judged. He chose to begin his account with Boulainvilliers because of the latter’s impact on the development of a speciic brand of French racism that lourished at the end of the nineteenth century and that continued to have echoes in the France of his day (ECFSMD, 262–263). Foucault believed that racism was indispensable to the functioning of the modern state: “death of the inferior race ... will make life ... healthier and purer” (ECF-SMD, 255). And at the time it was a genuine question for Foucault as to whether biopower could function without racism (ECF-SMD, 263).

At one point in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault provocatively reserved the term “racism” for a period that began at the end of the nineteenth century (ECFSMD, 65). Although he conceded later in the same lecture course that there had indeed been prior racisms, the discrepancy is explained by the fact that Foucault’s focus throughout was on state racism (ECF-SMD, 254). Nor was this decision to locate racism so late entirely without precedent. Hannah Arendt drew a distinction between race thinking and racism that had the same effect of dating the advent of racism to the second half of the nineteenth century, although, unlike Foucault, she showed a strong interest in the racism of imperialism (Arendt 1973, 158–184). As with Foucault, Arendt – relying on French scholarship – highlighted Boulainvilliers, but for Arendt the crucial igure was Count Arthur de Gobineau, whereas for Foucault it was Benedict Augustin Morel, the author of Traité des Dégénerescences Physiques, Intellectuelles et Morales de l’Espéce Humaine (1857). Foucault argued that

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Morel transformed the notion of degeneration in such a way as to prepare for what came to be known as the eugenics movement (ECF-AB, 134). Morel’s focus was on the way that the sins of the parents are visited on their children: although the children of alcoholics may not themselves be alcoholics, through inheritance they nevertheless come to suffer deformities or other problems. It was because Morel invited societies to address the potential dangers that Foucault was able to give him such a central place in the history of biopolitics (Morel 1857, 356, 661).

Foucault is said to have understood biologizing racism very broadly insofar as he employed it to cover all forms of degeneration, including alcoholism. The main basis for this claim is the assertion in Abnormal where Foucault described a new racism that “is not so much the prejudice of one group against another as the detection of all those within a group who may be carriers of a danger to it. It is a racism that permits the screening of every individual within a given society” (ECF-AB, 317). In that context, he wrote of a racism “against the abnormal, against individuals who, as carriers of a condition, a stigmata, or any defect whatsoever” that is hereditary (ECF-AB, 316). It is quite possible that Foucault meant simply to show the broadening of what were conceived of as hereditary traits, but some commentators have extended Foucault’s concept of racism to include, for example, not only mental deiciency and mental illness but also so-called sexual deviance (McWhorter 2009, 31–35, 291–293). To be sure, at one point in Society Must Be Defended, albeit without explicit reference to Morel, he refers to “all those biological-racist discourses of degeneracy (dégenérescence), but also all those institutions within the social body which make the discourse of race struggle function as a principle of exclusion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society” (ECF-SMD, 61). It is not altogether clear why Foucault was so insistent on calling this a racism, except perhaps to anticipate the way the two technologies, the technology of eugenics and that of psychology, came together in National Socialism (ECF-AB, 317).

Although Foucault’s account of the history of the various concepts of race and of the history of racism lacks detail, its importance for the development of his own work, as well as for subsequent scholarship in critical philosophy of race, cannot be doubted. It was at the heart of his claim that, at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, a long-prepared-for shift took place when sovereign power, organized around the sovereign’s power to take life or let live, was complemented – and to a certain extent displaced – by what he called “biopower,” a term he had used already in the irst volume of The History of Sexuality to refer to “what brought life into the realm of politics as an object of explicit calculation” where what was at stake was the life not of the individual but of large units of population such as races, nations, or even the species as a whole (EHS1, 143–145). Biopower was manifested in a new right that was attributed to the state, the right to intervene to make live or let die (ECF-SMD, 241–248). Among the ways in which this new right of the state to “let die” manifested itself was through genocide and the discourse of eugenics and

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Suggested Reading

Elden, Stuart. 2004. “The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault’s ‘Il faut défendre la souété’ and the Politics of Calculation,” Boundary 2, 29, no. 1:125–151.

Holt, Thomas C. 2001. “Pouvoir, savoir et race. A propos du cours de Michel Foucault ‘Il faut defendre la societe,’” in Lectures de Michel Foucault, volume 1: A propos de “Il faut defendre la societe,” ed. Jean-Claude Zancarini. Paris: ENS Editions, pp. 81–96.

Mader, Mary Beth. 2011. “Modern Living and Vital Race: Foucault and the Science of Life,”

Foucault Studies 12:97–112.

Magiros, Angelika. 1995. Foucaults Beitrag zur Rassismustheorie. Hamburg: Argument.