The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

544 / John Protevi

for power, which is in turn the grid of intelligibility of the social ield. These successive grids of intelligibility reveal a dynamic social ontology, an interactive realism, in which war is a strategy for action in the social ield, a way of integrating the multiplicity of force relations that constitute that ield and thereby constituting the protagonists of political history as engaged in a “war by other means.” The looping effect or self-fulilling prophecy here should be clear: it’s almost a cliché to say that naming yourself and others as warriors tends to create the reality in which others treat you as such and you respond in kind since they have just proved your point!

At the end of volume one of The History of Sexuality, we ind Foucault’s irst published theses on state racism and biopower. After the publication of the lecture courses, we can now see this analysis as having been developed in the last lecture of Society Must Be Defended (ECF-SMD, 239–263). The outlines of Foucault’s treatment of sovereign power as the right to decide life and death in this volume are well known. The sovereign power to decide life and death has a formal derivation from absolute Roman patria potestas, but survives in diminished form in classical legal theory, so that only when a threat to the sovereign is present can the right be exercised. The sovereign has only an indirect hold on the life of the subject in regard to external enemies; here the sovereign can indirectly expose the subject to death by compelling him to defend the sovereign in war. But in response to an internal threat, the sovereign can exercise a direct power and put the subject to death (EHS1, 135). So the sovereign has a “dissymmetrical” right with regard to the life of subjects, being able to reach life only via death, by killing or refraining from killing. The symbol of such sovereign power is the sword, and the major form of power is by means of deduction (prélèvement) (EHS1, 136). The power over life is transformed in the modern West, however. There are many forms of power, not just deduction, for the aim is no longer simple enrichment of the sovereign but an intensiication of forces. Thus life becomes the positive object of administration, and death is just the reverse side of life. Two symptoms reveal this transformation: irst, the increased bloodiness of war, for modern states must defend everyone, not just the sovereign; and second, the death penalty became the scandal of a power that administers life (EHS1, 136–138).

Perhaps dismayed at the results of his genealogy of the war schema, Foucault moves in the fourth lecture of “Security, Territory, Population” to “governmentality” as the model for social relations, as its grid of intelligibility. Rather than social relations being seen as war, we are asked to see social relations as the “conduct of conduct,” as the leading of men’s lives in quotidian detail. There is still the Deleuzean concept of integration of a multiplicity of differential elements and relations as embedded in the interplay of power and resistance in practices, but the grid of intelligibility is no longer war but governmentality. Along with the change in the grid of intelligibility comes a change in the nature of the relations. It is no longer “force” relations but relations of “actions” that are to be integrated. Foucault’s formula is

WAR / 545

now that “to govern ... is to structure the possible ield of action of others” (EAIF, 221). Now we must avoid reading Foucault as if a concern with subjectivity comes to replace a concern with power. Rather, subjectivity is the mode in which power operates in governmentality; the conducting of the conduct of our lives is done by inducing us to subjectify ourselves in various ways, as sexual subjects, or indeed as self-entrepreneurs.

John Protevi

See Also

Life

Multiplicity

Power

Race (and Racism)

State

Violence

Henri de Boulainvilliers

Carl von Clausewitz

Suggested Reading

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

University Press.

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

Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Nealon, Jeffrey. 2007. Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensiications since 1984. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.

II

PROPER NAMES

550 / Warren Montag

their work from beginning to end. In their respective realms, whether the history of madness or the history of Marxism, their common rejection of a certain notion of the subject as origin allowed or compelled them to see discontinuities, breaks, and ruptures where others had seen linear progress, and to argue, much to the shock of their readers, that there was no single object of Marxist theory or of the discourse on madness but rather a series of absolutely disparate objects. The fact that their shared “theoretical anti-humanism,” the idea that something called man was not the transcendental essence of history but rather a theoretical (and political) construct internal to history, provoked their critics – sometimes the same critics (as in the case of Sartre), sometimes different – to similar expressions of outrage is surely signiicant. As Althusser liked to say, the meaning of a philosophy lies in its effects, especially the attacks it provokes.

Another fairly obvious point of convergence between the two men was the refusal to consider theories independently of the material and institutional forms in which they were incarnate. Thus, for Foucault the history of the concept of madness could not be understood separately from the forms of coercion and coninement to which those deemed mad were subject. Even the history of medicine, or more speciically the histories of pathology and epidemiology, could not be disentangled from the institutional forms of segregation, constraint, and observation that formed its material conditions of possibility. Similarly, for Althusser, ideology, the system of ideas that justiied and contributed to the reproduction of class exploitation, did not exist in the form of a false consciousness that might be dispelled by true ideas but was consubstantial with the material apparatuses and practices that governed a given society at a given historical moment. For both men, the very notion of the individual as subject as the origin of thought, speech, and action, was a historical phenomenon produced by very speciic apparatuses, a form of subjection that imprisoned the individual and compelled him to speak and to act. Again, their critics accused them of remarkably similar errors: a denial of human freedom, the freedom to think and criticize freely, a political pessimism masquerading as a left-wing functionalism, and a vision of a domination so total that every act of resistance could only secure its reproduction.

Finally, both Althusser and Foucault understood themselves as working within the speciicity of a historical moment that was not governed by “Zeitgeist” or worldview but was the site of conlict and multiplicity in which they had to take a position. Althusser called this the theoretical conjuncture, Foucault simply “the present.” Althusser extended the Leninist concept of a political conjuncture marked by a relationship or rather series of relationships of disparate forces within which any political action took place to the philosophical realm, which he understood as a ield of conlicting forces in which he was caught and in which he had no choice but to intervene. Foucault, from a very different starting point and set of references, arrived at

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a similar position. In his commentary on Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (EEW1, 303–320), he notes that Kant accounts for the conditions of possibility of philosophical speculation in two radically different ways. The irst concerns the transcendental conditions of thought that confer on its content a universality. This is of course the standard image of Kant as the author of the three Critiques. Foucault, however, points to another Kant, the philosopher of the present and the contemporary, who feels compelled to produce “a particular analysis of the speciic moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing” (EEW1, 309). This is perhaps the most decisive connection between Althusser and Foucault, which, more than the others, makes intelligible the points of both convergence and divergence that constitute the precise character of their relationship.

It was in fact these common notions, the conditions of possibility of their proximity, that brought the two men into conlict at certain precise points. The irst of these conlicts occurred around the appearance of the History of Madness in 1961. Althusser’s reaction to the book, as reported in his correspondence, was one of enormous excitement and enthusiasm (“as crepusculary as Nietzsche, but as clear as an equation”) (Althusser 1998, 215). He saw the History of Madness as a history full of discontinuities and reversals, of a concept that despite its status in the psychiatry of the mid-twentieth century was determined as much by political, legal, and philosophical concerns as by anything understood as scientiic, a history as it was, not as it was supposed to be. It is all the more striking then that the only written trace of his reading, lecture notes from a course on structuralism in 1962–1963, contained a critique above all of Foucault’s own theorization of his work in the original preface (removed from subsequent editions). Foucault’s project of an archaeology of a silence, the gradual silencing of madness by means of its transformation into “mental illness,” seemed to Althusser to suggest an inversion of the notion of reason as origin and grounds of the history not simply of thought but of civilization itself: it is madness that becomes the transcendental origin, that which civilization must exclude and repress in order to be itself, as if reason were the negation of the madness and nonsense that preceded it. Whether or not Foucault learned of this critique, the work that followed The Birth of the Clinic focused on modes of discourse, quite independently of the subject understood as its origin or the real object that discourse was supposed to represent.

At the same time, Althusser and his colleagues in 1966 initiated a discussion (of which Althusser’s contribution was published posthumously as “Three Notes on a Theory of Discourse” [Althusser 2003, 33–84]) investigating the ways in which an object of knowledge did not precede discourse but was only constituted in it, as well as what Althusser had begun to call the “interpellation” of the subject of discourse, the way in which the role of the subject and origin of discourse was attributed retroactively to individuals as one of its effects. As in the case of Foucault in The

552 / Warren Montag

Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Althusser realized that even that gesture by which discourse was granted a materiality, its irreducibility to an expression or representation, led to a kind of dualism of discursive and nondiscursive practices. It was only too clear that the individual’s constitution as a subject free and therefore legally responsible (and punishable) for his actions could not be understood as a discursive effect alone but involved the social “apparatuses” (“appareils,” a word common to both Althusser and Foucault) in which discourses were inextricably embedded. This discovery coincided with the general radicalization around May 1968, the challenges to which impelled both men to write two of their most inluential texts, Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) and Foucault’s

Discipline and Punish (1975).

It was in the latter work that Foucault criticized Althusser most openly (although not by name), referring to the “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” essay published ive years earlier. Althusser had preserved the language of Marxism, including above all the notion of ideology, which had come to mean the system of ideas that inclined individuals to accept and submit to the established order but had done so to transform its meaning. For Althusser, ideology could not be understood as having the form of ideas, of consciousness or even of discourse. Instead, as he announced in his essay, “ideology has a material existence”: ideology exists only in apparatuses in which the body, above all, is at stake. But his exposition, as evidenced by the countless interpretations that followed the publication of the essay, unfolded in an uneven and contradictory manner. In particular, the notion that ideology interpellated individuals as subjects could be understood as the production of a ictitious subjectivity or a drama of recognition. In the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish, Foucault, who had earlier denounced the very notion of ideology as “idealist” (as concerned with minds rather than bodies and with consciousness rather than material forces [EPK, 58]), reformulated Althusser’s theory by rejecting the very notion of ideology, especially insofar as it was used to explain the constitution of subjects. Ironically referring to the religious concept of the soul, instead of the preferred terminology of personality, consciousness, or subjectivity, as if to confront the latter terms with their theological origins, Foucault argues that we can only begin to understand “the genealogy of the modern ‘soul’” if we reject any notion that it is an illusory “ideological effect” (EDP, 29). In keeping with his project of a microphysics of power, Foucault focuses much more closely than Althusser on the way in which this “soul” is not only real and material, rather than a false representation, but is “produced permanently around, on, within the body” (EDP, 29) by a disciplinary power. Not only has discipline, the set of strategies and tactics whose objective is to secure the utility and docility of the body, replaced ideology in his analysis, but the material production of the soul around the body has replaced the notion of the interpellation of the subject.