The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
.pdf554 / Warren Montag
Suggested Reading
Althusser, Louis. 1969. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. 1998. Lettres à Franca (1961–1973). Paris: Stock/IMEC.
2003. The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–1967), trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso.
Cavaillès, Jean. 1970. “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” trans. Theodore J. Kisiel, in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph J. Kockelman and Theodore J. Kisiel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 353–412.
Montag, Warren. 2002. Louis Althusser. London: Palgrave.
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THE ANCIENTS
(STOICS AND CYNICS)
Avery large part of Foucault’s investigations concern, in Western modernity (the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries), the organization of kinds of knowledge and the mechanisms of power. However, Foucault has over the course of his life studied, at three different times, ancient history and ancient phi-
losophy. The irst time was in 1971, in his irst course at the Collège de France (La volonté de savoir, FCF-LSV). This course interrogated the appearance, in the
West, of a discourse (philosophy) that claimed to be universal, true, just, disinterested, neutral, objective, and pure. Foucault shows how this discourse presupposes the great sociopolitical revolutions of ancient Greece. These ancient Greek revolutions include the determination of a justice as the establishment of human measure and human order, and no longer as the manifestation of the wild force of the gods; the invention of a currency that is able to circulate throughout the polis and
to symbolize the social bond; the institution of a law (nomos) that is anonymous and impartial; and the characterization of crime as “pollution” (miasma). All of these
characteristics (objectivity, universality, neutrality, and purity) are found again as criteria for philosophical discourse both in classical Greece and later in the West. In 1971, Foucault showed that the invention of this true discourse was based at the same time on a certain number of exclusions: rejection of tragic speech that insists on the unbearable dimension of the true; the elimination of revolutionary speech when it denounces the hypocrisy of the consensus and the scandal of injustices; and separation among those who claim to have the right to speak, between the pure and the impure. This irst large study of Greek thought is presented therefore as the realization of Nietzsche’s program of the description of the will of Western truth (at once the practical root of philosophical discourse and the denunciation of the obscurities produced by this discourse). Next, at the end of the 1970s, Foucault studied, on the basis of Plato’s political texts in particular, the way in which governmentality in
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the Greek polis involves nothing like a pastoral style. The modern state introduces, with the idea of raison d’État, the care of the individual as a principle of govern-
ment. But, in the 1980s, Foucault devoted, exclusively this time, his investigations to
ancient culture and thought: the collection of courses at the Collège de France (from 1981 to 1984) and his published books (the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, respectively subtitled The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, EHS2
and EHS3). One can reorganize this collection of investigations around three major notions: Greco-Latin antiquity: epimeleia heautau or cura sui (the care of the self), parresia or libertas (frank speaking), and aphrodia or voluptas (the pleasures of love).
The concept of care of the self is studied by Foucault essentially in the version that the great Hellenistic and Roman philosophers have given to it (even if Foucault recognizes the importance, in Plato, of this concept through which he characterizes the character of Socrates as a master of the care of the self). In a very general way, what is at issue for Foucault is to rethink the problem of the relation between subjectivity and truth. In the modern West, there are two general ways in which this relation has been structured. The irst is philosophical (the Cartesian moment). One has to interrogate the nature of the subject as the foundation of knowledge and of the recognition of truth, the very condition of science. The second is religious (the Christian moment, reactivated later by psychology). Here one has to pose the question of a true knowledge of the subject itself. And to gain this true knowledge, one has to propose methods of introspection, analysis, and self-decipherment (hermeneutics), through which a subject would be able to become conscious of his authentic identity and his secret nature, and by means of the verbalization addressed to another (a confessor, a psychoanalyst), he would become aware of his hidden desires. When Foucault undertakes the study of the ancients on the basis of the concept of the care of the self, he attempts speciically to show that these two great ways of posing the problem of the relation between subjectivity and truth (transcendental interrogation or confessional techniques) do not hold for antiquity. On the one hand in fact, Foucault shows that the care of the self poses the question of the relation between the self and truth not at the level of transcendental conditions but of ascetic ones. The subject is capable of truth on the condition of performing on himself a certain kind of work, a certain number of transformations and puriications that are indispensable if he wants to gain access to the truth. The possibility for a subject to know the truth does not depend on a rational demonstration but on a spiritual transformation. On the other hand, the care of the self structures a relation between the self and truth that is irreducible to the Christian modality of interior decipherment. The care of the self is constituted by a sect of techniques that Foucault calls “techniques of subjectiication,” in the sense that the subject is called by these techniques to construct himself, to fashion for himself an internal consistency, to obligate himself to certain regularities of behavior. One really has to understand primarily that the care of the self for the ancients constituted in no way an invitation to narcissism (the idea
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that one would turn oneself into an object of adoration), or an elicitation to egoism (the idea that one would be concerned with prioritizing one’s own affairs over those of others). The care of the self is a long, dificult enterprise of self-construction that demands the advice of a master of virtue and an arduous discipline. The primary objective of these exercises lies in obtaining a certain kind of concentration, an intensiication of self-presence, and thereby it avoids the dispersion and the scattering of the subject. We know about some of these exercises: an examination each morning through which one prepares for the events of the day by anticipating the things that might be rather unpleasant so that one does not lose one’s temper when they happen; an examination each evening in which I go over my day once more in order to take stock of the progress accomplished toward my ideal of mastery and wisdom; then the analysis of representations by which I differentiate within what happens to me between what does not depend on me (the content of events) and what depends on me (the meaning that I am going to give to them); a meditation on death through which I obligate myself to consider lucidly my future disappearance so that I will not let myself be carried away by ephemeral passions and leeting desires; the patient study of nature, which teaches me to understand that a causal chain runs through all phenomena and that everything that happens must therefore have its reason; and inally the exercises of endurance (fasting, depriving oneself) through which I manufacture for myself a patience that will help me bear the unpredictable things of existence. Through these exercises, each of us must learn to turn back toward oneself. But this turning back cannot be assimilated to introspection. The problem is not to know oneself better or to throw oneself into the investigation of one’s hidden intimacy or one’s secret nature. Through these exercises, one learns rather to interiorize schemas of appropriate action (to react courageously to catastrophes, etc.) and to provide for oneself rules of behavior (not to lose one’s temper, etc.). But this interiorization of principles holds only because it allows me to make visible, in the exteriority of my social relations and of my attitudes, qualities of order and harmony (this is an aesthetics of existence). The care of the self does not lead one to detach himself from the world and from others. It leads one to act, with others and in the world, in a rational way. It is especially in the Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius) that Foucault inds the evocation of these techniques of the self, but the care of the self can also be Epicurean. The care of the self then takes on a more communitarian form. Friendship gives to each a conidence and a consistency that helps him lee from false pleasures. Nevertheless, one has to notice that the skeptics are never mentioned by Foucault. Skepticism in fact presents, within Hellenistic and Roman wisdom, a peculiar aspect that is particularly dificult to integrate within the general framework of the care of the self: the theme of an empty subject and an
effort of desubjectiication.
The second important concept is that of parresia. Parresia designates a kind of speech that is courageous and open to risk. For example, Socrates refuses to latter
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or sweet-talk his judges. Out loud, he proclaims his convictions, even though he puts himself in danger of death by expressing them. In the same way, when Plato confronts Dionysus of Syracuse, he does not hesitate to criticize the tyrant and instead praises justice, thereby provoking Dionysus’s anger. Foucault shows the interest in parresia especially within the democratic framework. Democracy can remain authentic and not decline into demagoguery, only because there are courageous men who do not hesitate to stand up to the passions of the people in order to try to make
their ideal of the public good triumph. In a democracy corrupted and manipulated by rhetoricians, parresia becomes negative. It becomes the license given to everyone to say whatever comes to mind. There is, however, a second face to parresia, its
ethical face. Foucault studies it on the basis of a description of Cynic philosophy. In the Cynics, parresia is connected to a way of life. The Cynics make use of rough
language and are deliberately provocative. They go from city to city and harangue the crowds by violently denouncing the vile compromises, the atrocious hypocrisies, the ridiculous customs that one inds everywhere in human societies. But this freedom of speech is total in the Cynic because he makes for himself no concessions. He lives like a dog, sleeps outside, and possesses nothing but a stick, a bag, and an old coat. For Foucault, the Cynic allows us to ask philosophy the question of the “true life.” The true life, however, is not a harmonious, ideal, resplendent life. It is a life constructed like a permanent test: how is one to free oneself from social hypocrisies, depend really on no one, and imitate nature? In philosophy, the Cynic represents the
way of dissonance and scandal.
The last concept constructed by Foucault is aphrodisia. In a very general way, Foucault investigated in the ancients a problematization of sexuality that is irreducible to modern readings. Western modernity constructs sexuality on the basis of three major notions: moral interdiction, the man/woman difference, and concupiscence. For Foucault, sexuality in the ancients is structured on the basis of different landmarks. The irst is the obsession with mastery. Sexual pleasures are not considered to be bad in themselves. Instead, they are seen as involving a certain kind of risk because of their internal energy. They risk carrying us away, leading us astray. Therefore we have to deine strict rules of use so that we do not let ourselves be overrun by them. Then there is the exultation of activity. The true line of division does not pass between man and woman but between an active position and a passive position in the sexual relation. Finally, sexuality does not give rise, in the ancients, to techniques of self-decipherment. Instead, sexuality leads to regulation. One would then ind here again the general framework already mentioned in relation to the care of the self. Sexuality does not allow us to know ourselves better. It refers instead to a tumultuous sequence of existence that we have to give a regular, harmonious form.
Overall, Foucault’s summoning up of the ancients has an essentially disturbing function. Traditionally, ancient philosophy has been for us a reference point for what is obvious in philosophy. In ancient philosophy, we investigate the foundation,
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the conirmation by origin, of the eternity of our certainties. In contrast, Foucault investigates, in the culture and thought of the ancients, an element of destabilization, a factor of historicization: the historicity of truth and of the subject, the historicity of philosophy and of sexuality. The ancients for Foucault disturb our modern certain-
ties. And they are able to do this, to disturb us in this way, not because their truths would be truer but because they are other.
Frédéric Gros
See Also
Christianity
Ethics
Friendship
Hermeneutics
Parresia
Psychoanalysis
Plato
Sex
Suggested Reading
Gros, Frédéric, and Carlos Lévy, eds. 2003. Foucault et la philosophie antique. Paris: Kimé. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed.
Arnold Davidson. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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GEORGES BATAILLE (1897–1962)
Like many French theorists of his generation, Foucault’s thinking was deeply inluenced by the work of Georges Bataille. Historically, Foucault’s assistance in the posthumous publication of Bataille’s Œuvres completes (1973) as well as his frequent contributions and editorial consultation to Critique, a journal
founded by Bataille, clearly indicate the esteem with which he held Bataille and his work. (See “A Preface to Transgression,” ELCP, note 1.) Philosophically, however, the inluence of Bataille’s work is almost always unmarked in Foucault’s texts and thus more dificult to trace.
Foucault only wrote one essay explicitly on the work of Georges Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression” (ELCP). Written in 1963, this essay begins to work out some of the insights about the self-enclosed character of prohibition and transgression that then comes to full-blown articulation in Foucault’s 1976 reorientation of the “Repressive Hypothesis” in volume one of The History of Sexuality (EHS1). It is the restricted and thus illusory character of liberation that transgression promises that Foucault traces in Bataille’s work in this early essay – an insight that becomes central to his reconiguration of not only sexuality but also power in the later volume one of The History of Sexuality. Because of the singular essay’s focus on transgression as well as a long-standing reading of Bataille as a literary bad boy of eroticism and the sacred, most scholarship on the connections between Foucault and Bataille tends to emphasize their shared focus on sexuality and this limited, if vexing, character of transgression as a complex register of modern Western subjectivity. This emphasis is certainly warranted, given Bataille’s early writings (1930s) – both ictional and theoretical – on the politically, epistemologically, and psychologically disruptive force of eroticism and sexuality, especially in early twentieth-century European resistances to fascism. (See especially his ictional works Blue of Noon and Story of the Eye as well as the collected writings in Visions of Excess and Erotism: Death and Sensuality.) But if we are to grasp how Foucault’s infamous call in volume one of The History of Sexuality
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to reconceive Western subjectivity through “bodies and pleasures” (EHS1, 157) may be situated in Bataille’s work, we need a broader understanding of Bataille’s epistemological intervention in the various projects of modernity. From that perspective, we can begin to see how Foucault’s ongoing effort, across his early and later work to grasp and thereby transform our historical present through the excavation of subjugated knowledges can be traced back to the radical shift in perspective that Bataille articulated in the language of general economy.
As the Second World War ended and the cold war emerged, Bataille entered what Michel Surya describes as a period of intense production and seriousness, in which the Dada and surrealist scandals from the 1930s became “a distant and disparate echo” (Surya 2002, 372) and the question of political economy in its broadest sense took hold of his writing. The result is The Accursed Share, volumes I–III, as well as Theory of Religion, wherein Bataille enacts his self-avowed “Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking – of ethics” (Bataille 1991, 25), which he calls “general economy.” Radically reorienting us from the epistemological and political projects of modernity, where clarity and precision are the hallmarks of insight, argumentation, and principles of evaluation, “general economy” is best approached obtusely, through characterization rather than deinition. Bataille frames it in the early pages of volume one of The Accursed Share as the study of “the movement of energy on the earth” (Bataille 1991, 10), especially the persistent exclusion of excess energy, which Bataille called “nonproductive expenditure” as early as 1933 (“The Notion of Expenditure,” 1985, 117), from all modern epistemologies, politics, ethics, and religions. To grasp such a large, amorphous and yet pervasive omission leads Bataille to a methodology of “general economy,” wherein “a human sacriice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel were no less interesting than the sale of wheat” (Bataille 1991, 9). Not simply a methodology that sets the intellectual free from the rigor of disciplinary training, Bataille’s analyses are grounded in the ongoing effort to grasp nonproductive expenditure – that is, to grasp excess – without recourse to the restricted economy of transgression/prohibition. For his various analyses in The Accursed Share (these three volumes include topics such as the sacriicial practices of the Aztecs, military formations of early Islam and Lamaism, a fascinating advocacy of The Marshall Plan, extended readings of Lévi-Strauss and Nietzsche, prolonged meditations on eroticism and sovereignty beyond the logic of transgression, and the political and ethical questions of communism and capitalism, among others) as well as later works on religion and eroticism, this involves a thorough critique of the insidious logic of utilitarianism and all its various guises – a critique that arguably also animates a great deal of Foucault’s thinking, especially in his genealogies.
Foucault’s wide array of objects of study has constantly been a source of bewilderment and admiration. From his early work in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge to demarcate the boundaries of disciplines and, to use his later language of biopolitics, decipher the productive and normalizing effects of those boundaries
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through omission, Foucault is consistently attuned to the silences of those phenomena that remain unfocused, unexamined – undisciplined. He is constantly concerned with how “Mendel spoke the truth, but was not dans le vrai” (EAK, 224). While this attunement can be traced to many sources, perhaps most of all to Husserl, the kind of move we ind in Bataille’s general economy helps us to understand some of Foucault’s most continuous obsessions: the spatialization of reason, the attention to shifting scales of investigation (micro, macro, local, distant), the critical capacity of subjugated knowledges and the tricky methodology of excavating them, and the demarcation of the abnormal (delinquents, criminals, madness, sexual deviants, and so on) in the ever-narrowing conines of modern “normal” life. These are also Bataille’s obsessions, albeit taken up in different terms and emphases. To follow these trajectories is to give a completely different orientation to moments in Foucault’s texts such as the early one in volume one of The History of Sexuality when he tells us that he is not aiming to disprove the Repressive Hypothesis but rather to put “it back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century” (EHS1, 11, my emphasis). Such moments begin to proliferate in Foucault’s texts once one is sensitive to them, leading us to see how some of Bataille’s most challenging and groundbreaking work animates Foucault’s very thinking, in ways so profound that they are dificult – but crucial – to decipher.
Shannon Winnubst
See Also
Sovereignty
Transgression
Maurice Blanchot
Suggested Reading
Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share, volume 1. New York: Zone Books.
Hollywood, Amy. 2002. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchel, Andrew J., and Jason Kemp Winfree, eds. 2009. The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication. Albany: The SUNY Press.
Surya, Michel. 2002. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso. Winnubst, Shannon. 2006a. Queering Freedom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
ed. 2006b. Reading Bataille Now. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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XAVIER BICHAT (1771–1802)
In THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC, Foucault presented the anatomist and physiologist
Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) as the deining igure of modern medicine: since the nineteenth century, medicine has been living in “the age of Bichat” (EBC, 122). In order to understand how Bichat’s work transformed medicine, it is irst necessary to get a sense of how Birth of the Clinic transformed the history of medicine. This book, which Foucault once complained had been greeted by “total silence” when it was published (FDE3, 88), offers a new interpretation of the emergence of modern medicine in the early nineteenth century. For two centuries, doctors and historians have for the most part stuck to a positivist interpretation: modern medicine emerged when physicians began to observe more and theorize less. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, moral and religious taboos supposedly prevented physicians from dissecting corpses, and it is only when these cultural obstacles were lifted that
a new, truly scientiic kind of medical knowledge became possible.
Foucault argued that “this reconstruction is historically false” (EBC, 125). Mentioning the examples of well-known eighteenth-century physicians and surgeons like Morgagni, Hunter, Tissot, and Desault, he pointed to the fact that dissecting corpses was relatively common before Bichat. The historiographical implications of this minor historical rectiication are important: Foucault agreed with other historians that the early nineteenth century marked a rupture in the history of medicine, but this rupture was now in need of a new, nonpositivist explanation.
What Bichat accomplished was therefore not to improve medical knowledge gradually by dissecting more corpses than physicians before him (although he certainly dissected many). More fundamentally, what he and other physicians after him accomplished was “a recasting at the level of knowledge [savoir] itself.... It is not the same game, somewhat improved, but another game” (EBC, 137). This game, in which death has become the source of disease as well as a technical instrument of knowledge, is centered on the new notion of “pathological life” (EBC, 153).
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