The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Canguilhem proposes that the life sciences, especially in their connection to medical discourse, are the best places to study the history of veridical discourses, since they prohibit the sort of formalization found in mathematics and physics. The sciences of life exhibit an uncertain but undeniable connection between veridical discourses and human life insofar as they bear the mark of the distinction between health and illness within themselves thanks to concrete, nonscientiic human experience (Canguilhem 1991, 222). These discourses have therefore found themselves constantly confronted with the speciicity of living things, thereby giving vitalism a special role in their history, since it appears as a perpetual counterbalance to attempts to reduce living beings to physical and chemical constants. So even though vitalism may be regarded as false by a reductionist science, it constitutes part of the normativity of the life sciences, since contemporary biological concepts, like that of relex motion, are historically dependent on them (Canguilhem 1955). Thus, rather than attending to theories, Canguilhem focuses on concepts, since these cut out particular phenomena for scientiic study while respecting the peculiarity of the living beings that are studied. Essential to the normativity of the life sciences, the concept becomes the object of their historian. As Foucault puts it, Canguilhem studies the concept of life as both a property of life and as an attempt to explain life (EEW2, 475). This makes the endeavor to know a way of living, not a way of denying life, and the history of science a philosophical discipline, since it reveals the vitality of this rationality.

According to Foucault, Canguilhem’s most important work is The Normal and the Pathological, irst published in 1943 and then again in 1966 with important additions. In these two parts of the book, the reader inds “how the problem of the speciic nature of life has recently been inlected in a direction where one meets with some of the problems that were thought to belong strictly to the most developed forms of evolution” (EEW2, 476). Foucault alludes here to the problem of error, which is central to Canguilhem’s thought but not explicitly addressed in his major publications in the history of science before 1966. Recalling that between 1943 and 1966 work on the mechanisms of heredity had enabled an understanding of the living in terms of genetic error, Foucault can be read as suggesting that the error Canguilhem originally studied in the concept of life was later discovered by the life sciences and medicine in life itself, giving a signiicant scientiic conirmation of Canguilhem’s historical and philosophical work.

To better grasp Foucault’s claim, consider the problem of error in Canguilhem’s earlier work. Error is clearly a problem for those who would know, since the scientist wants to avoid making an error in judgment by taking the false for the true, or the true for the false, even though it is a condition of possibility for scientiic work (Canguilhem 2011, 644–646). Although error in its usual sense pertains to the human pursuit of knowledge, it has its origins in the experience of failure provoked by the costly trials and errors of living (Canguilhem 1991, 130). Acting without knowledge,

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without even consciousness at irst, the living attempt to attain their ends however possible, with any techniques at their disposal. Consciousness arises only in the face of failure, when a risk taken leads to suffering or illness, making subjectivity dissatisfaction with one’s condition (Canguilhem 1991, 222; Canguilhem 2002, 364). The project of seeking knowledge is therefore undertaken in the face of error or failure; that is, in the face of conscious impotence. Medicine and the life sciences are key ields of study, since medicine in all its cultural forms is an attempt to relieve suffering that produces a will to know through its own failures to heal (Canguilhem 1991, 229). As early as 1938, Canguilhem argues that the birth of science from the failures of technique, which happen because of its error in assuming an agreement between needs and things, shows that this error is creative as such in man (Canguilhem 2001, 504). The pursuit of knowledge, though, is an erroneous one, since it is not oriented by the aim of solving any particular problem but solely by the will to know; that is, to grasp the true and avoid the false. Respecting the mutual exclusivity of these values, the search for knowledge seeks to expel all errors from itself, even though it is only error that renders the will to know possible. The continual pursuit of knowledge may be the purest risk possible, since it is guided by no value other than that of truth. But a problem known, and thus resolved to a certain extent, becomes the basis for a new technique, a new way in which the living can attempt to dominate its environment. Such risking, such trial and error, in the attempt to prosper is normativity itself, whereas obedience to established values and norms is normality (Canguilhem 1991, 228). Moreover, the being that can risk itself, experience failure, and recover is healthy, whereas the being that is unable to risk itself and incapable of tolerating changes to its milieu is ill, and as this holds for the living, it also holds for the pursuit of knowledge as a way of living. This notion of error as a permanent contingency for the living “allows [Canguilhem] to bring out the relationship between life and knowledge and to follow, like a red thread, the presence of value and norm” (EEW2, 477). It is not that Canguilhem deduces knowledge from life but rather that knowledge is one of many ways of living, each with its own way of becoming. The problem of error therefore also teaches that where there is knowledge there are orienting values and enabling norms; that is, power.

The risk scientiic rationalities pose in addressing human problems – whether these be physical, psychological, social, or political – can be seen, for Canguilhem, in their judging according to standards of truth and falsity alone. In this manner, positivism seeks to reduce the distinction between normal and pathological states to merely quantitative variations of basic physiological functions. But to do this is to deny the basis of the distinction between health and illness in living, and this haunts the entire history of positivist attempts to undo the distinction (Canguilhem 1991). It also denies the value of error, the value of erring for living beings, and demands that humans conform to the rigid contours of the true. Although medicine and medical theorists have suffered from this problem, Canguilhem also worries about the

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Suggested Reading

Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological, with an introduction by Michel Foucault, trans. C. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books originally published in 1943 and 1966.

1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, ed. F. Delaporte, trans. A. Goldhammer. New York: Zone Books.

2001. Œuvres complètes, tome I: Écrits philosophiques et politiques (1926–1939). Paris: Vrin. 2002. Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie. Paris: Vrin. 2005. “The Object of the History of Science,” in Continental Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary

Gutting. London: Blackwell.

2008. Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press.

2011. Oeuvres complètes, Volume 1, Braunstein and Schwartz, eds., Vrin: Paris. Comte, Auguste. 1853. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau.

London: J. Chapman.

Eribon, Didier. 1991. Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gutting, Gary. 2005. Continental Philosophy of Science. London: Blackwell.

Leblanc, Guillaume. 2010. Canguilhem et la vie humaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lecourt, Dominque. 2008. Georges Canguilhem. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Macey, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage.

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Over and above these honoriic acknowledgments, the effects of Deleuze’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s concept of will to power in terms of force relations are apparent in Foucault’s writing about the nature of power during the 1970s. Deleuze’s concept of a transcendental ield of force relations, encompassing all of the means by which bodies of different kinds may act on each other, forms the basis of Foucault’s analysis of power in volume one of The History of Sexuality. Foucault suggests that power must be understood “in the irst instance as a multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate,” and as the processes by which these force relations are transformed and support or contradict one another, and as the strategies in which they take effect (EHS1, 92–93). As such, power’s condition of possibility “is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power” (EHS1, 93). It follows from this understanding of power as the effect of relations between different forces that the power of a body resides not “in a certain strength we are endowed with” but in the luctuating ield of relations to other bodies. The power even of a single body is dispersed in such a manner that “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (ibid.).

In 1969, Foucault published a short review of Difference and Repetition, followed by a much longer article in 1970 on this book and its companion The Logic of Sense (FDE1, 767–771; EEW2, 343–368). This article begins with the much-quoted remark that “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (EEW2, 343). Less frequently noted is the irst part of this sentence, in which Foucault places Deleuze’s work in “enigmatic resonance” with that of Klossowski. Indeed, Foucault’s reading of Deleuze’s books is framed by themes shared with Klossowski’s work, such as the overturning of Platonism and the revaluation of simulacra. In Deleuze’s case, he argued, this overturning took the form of a perversion of Platonism, the gesture of which is “to displace oneself insidiously within it, to descend a notch, to descend to its smallest gestures – discreet but moral – which serve to exclude the simulacrum” (EEW2, 345). Foucault presents The Logic of Sense as “the boldest and most insolent of metaphysical treatises,” where metaphysics is understood as a discourse dealing with extra-being and “the materiality of incorporeal things – phantasms, idols, and simulacra” (EEW2, 347).

At the same time, following Deleuze’s reworking of the Stoic concept of events as incorporeal effects produced by bodies and states of affairs and expressed in propositions, this metaphysics of phantasms is also a metaphysics of events, the essential elements of which Deleuze had formulated in his major thesis for the Doctorat d’État, Difference and Repetition (1968). Foucault recounts Deleuze’s diagnosis of the subjection (assujettissement) of difference to forms of identity in the history of philosophy and endorses the project of “liberating” difference through the invention of an “acategorical” thought. He points to the overriding concern of both these books with the nature of thought. Deleuze’s search for a new image and a new practice of

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thought requires abandoning the constraints of the common sense and good will that have dominated the philosophical tradition. It requires abandoning the subordination of both difference and repetition to igures of the same in favor of a thought without contradiction, without dialectics and without negation, one that embraces divergence and multiplicity: “the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not limited or conined by the constraints of the same” (EEW2, 358). It requires an acategorical thought and a conception of being as univocal that revolves around the different rather than the same. Being here is understood as the recurrence of difference in the sense that Deleuze gives to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Whereas for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra this remained an intolerable thought, Foucault inds the thought of eternal recurrence as difference enacted in Deleuze’s texts. As a consequence of the lightning storm that bears the name of Deleuze, “new thought is possible; thought is again possible” (EEW2, 367).

Neither Deleuze nor Foucault were directly involved in the upheavals of May 1968, although both were deeply affected by them. In 1969, Foucault was responsible for Deleuze’s appointment to the philosophy department at the newly established University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. They collaborated on a number of political activities throughout the early 1970s, including the Prisoner’s Information Group established by Foucault, Daniel Defert, and others at the beginning of 1971 with the aim of bringing to the public at large the voices of those with direct experience of prisons (FDE2, 174–182; Defert and Donzelot 1976). Both took part in a number of other campaigns, such as the antiracism movement inspired by the shooting of a young Algerian in the Paris neighborhood known as the Goutte d’Or (Dosse 2010, 309–313). Deleuze participated in Foucault’s seminar at the Collège de France in 1971–1972 devoted to the case of Pierre Rivière. Both men contributed to several issues of the journal Recherches, published by Guattari’s Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionelles (CERFI), including the infamous issue on homosexuality entitled Trois milliards de pervers (Guattari 1973).

The high point of their common political and theoretical engagement was undoubtedly the “Intellectuals and Power” interview, conducted in March 1972 and published later that year in the issue of L’Arc devoted to Deleuze (ELCP, 205–217). They reject the idea that there is a single “totalizing” relation between theory and practice in favor of the idea of a plurality of more fragmentary relations. In their view, theory is neither the expression nor the translation of a practice, whereas practice is neither the application of theory nor the inspiration of theory to come. Rather, theory is itself a local and regional practice that operates as a series of relays from one practice to another, whereas practices are relays from one theoretical point to the next. Deleuze advances the much-quoted formula that epitomizes the pragmatism of their approach: theory should be considered a toolbox, or a pair of spectacles that may or may not provide a useful view of the world. If a theory does not help in a given situation, the theorist-practitioner should make another (ELCP,

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208). In turn, Foucault suggests that it was one of the lessons of the upsurge of direct political action at the end of the 1960s in France that the masses have no need of enlightened consciousnesses in order to have knowledge of their situation. The problem is rather that their own forms of knowledge are blocked or invalidated. The role of the intellectual therefore does not consist of bringing knowledge to or from the people but of working within and against the order of discourse within which the forms of knowledge appear or fail to appear. More generally, it consists of struggling against the forms of power of which he or she is both the object and the instrument.

Foucault connected the problem of inding adequate forms of struggle to the prevailing ignorance of the nature of power. He considered existing theories of the state and state apparatuses, along with the theory of class power associated with Marxism, to be inadequate for understanding the nature of power and the forms of its exercise. He credited Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy as well as his work with Guattari with advancing the manner in which this problem is posed (Anti-Oedipus was published in March 1972). He implicitly referred to his earlier comments about working within the order of discourse and knowledge in suggesting that identifying and speaking publicly about the centers of power within society is already a irst step in turning power back on itself: “If the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they coniscate at least temporarily the power to speak on prison conditions – at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups” (ELCP, 214).

Many of the points made in this landmark interview continued to reverberate through the publications of Deleuze and Foucault in the years that followed. Much of Foucault’s work during the 1970s sought to develop new conceptual tools for understanding power and its relation to knowledge or theory. The irst lecture of his 1976 course at the Collège de France takes up the question implicitly posed by his 1972 remarks about the relative lack of understanding of the nature of power and sets out a series of heuristic principles designed to reorient the study of power away from the juridical, political, and ideological apparatuses of the state and toward the material operations of domination and subjectiication throughout society, along with the formations of knowledge that accompany them. At the outset of this lecture, Foucault returns to the inhibiting effects of global theories in relation to “subjugated knowledges,” deining his genealogical approach as one that targets “a combination of erudite knowledge and what people know” – the technical knowledge of the practitioners of particular forms of power and the disqualiied knowledge of those subject to them – and suggesting that this would not have been possible were it not for “the removal of the tyranny of overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards” (ECF-SMD, 8).

His 1982 text “The Subject and Power” offers much the same analysis of the totalization of micropowers by a dominant or ruling power that he gave a decade

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earlier (EEW3, 326–348). But Foucault’s understanding of power had by this time taken a new turn following his discovery of governmentality and his renewed focus on the freedom of those over whom power is exercised. He no longer conceived of power in terms of the interplay of bodies and forces but in terms of “action upon the actions of others” (EEW3, 341). His analyses of the means by which power is exercised included techniques for the government of whole populations by institutions exercising sovereign power. His 1978–1979 lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality included a polemic against forms of “state-phobia” that relied upon an essentialist conception of state power exempliied by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the state as an apparatus of capture (Patton 2010).

Deleuze and Foucault’s 1972 interview already showed signs of their divergent theoretical trajectories. At one point, for example, Deleuze endorses and attributes to Foucault the idea that theory is “by nature opposed to power,” even though Foucault has just suggested that theory always takes place within an order of discourse and knowledge that is governed by forms of power (ELCP, 208). Deleuze appears to understand “theory” to mean something like the conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts that he later described as “in itself” calling for “a new earth and a people that do not yet exist” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 108). However, this conception of theory continues to rely on the repressive conception of power that Foucault soon came to challenge. Deleuze refers here to the radical fragility of the system of power and its “global force of repression” (ELCP, 209, translation modiied). They drifted apart following the publication in 1976 of volume one of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and his criticism of the represssive conception of power. A letter that Deleuze wrote to him in 1977, subsequently published as “Desire and Pleasure,” set out a series of questions that relected differences between Foucault’s account of the formation of the Western apparatus of sexuality and Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of assemblages of desire and power (Davidson 1997, 183–192; Deleuze 2007, 122–134). Some of these points bearing on the relation of desire to power and the primacy of movements of deterritorialization or lines of light in any given assemblage were restated several years later in a footnote in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 530–531). More generally, Deleuze’s questions point to more profound differences in their relations to psychoanalysis and the kind of critique each was prepared to undertake (Grace 2009).

In response to questions from James Miller some years later, Deleuze insisted that there was no single cause of their estrangement but a number of contributing factors: “The only important thing is that for a long time I had followed [Foucault] politically; and at a certain moment, I no longer totally shared his evaluation of many issues” (Miller 1993, 298). The issues on which their evaluations around this time diverged sharply included Israel-Palestine, the so-called new philosophers, and