The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Foucault attempts to describe – a prior time where reason and madness participated in an undivided experience, where the two communicated with one another. But, communication is only possible where there is meaning, sense, or reason, and madness or unreason is precisely the absence of these qualities. Thus Foucault is wrong both in his reading of Descartes and in his historicist account of the relation between history and madness. There could never be in history any time when madness and reason are either undifferentiated or absolutely differentiated.

Derrida’s challenge served as an opportunity for Foucault to revisit the Meditations and expand on his reading of them. In his response to Derrida, Foucault writes that we “must keep in mind the title itself of ‘Meditations’” (EHM, 562). Keeping this in mind means paying attention to the nature of the “discursive events” from which the text is composed. In a “pure demonstration,” in a text composed exclusively or primarily of arguments, statements are linked by formal rules and ought to be understood and evaluated according to their logical validity. Consequently, “the subject of the discourse is in no sense implied in the demonstration” (ibid.). In other words, in a text devoted to logical demonstration, each statement takes place, or happens, as the result of the application of the formal rules of logic, and the aim of the demonstration is to arrive at the proper conclusion, which follows necessarily from the sequence. The essence of an argument is in the relation of each statement to the others. The existence and status of the subject who writes or reads is absolutely not essential to the meaning or structure of the text. In a logical analysis, we are not interested in the relation of the statements to the subject who thinks them or the effects they might bring about in or on that subject. But a meditation, on the other hand, “produces, as so many discursive events, new enunciations that bring in their wake a series of modiications in the enunciating subject” (EHM, 563). This is the ascetic or meditative dimension of the text. Insofar as the meditation aims at bringing about modiications in the subject, it is a practice of the self – a practice that aims at the transformation of the subject.

In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault returns to this very point. In this text, he deines meditation “not as the game the subject plays with his thought but as the game thought plays on the subject” (ECF-HOS, 358). In the case of the First Meditation, Foucault writes that “Descartes is not thinking about everything in the world that could be doubtful.... Descartes puts himself in the position of the subject who doubts everything.... This, then, is not at all an exercise carried out on thought and its content. It is an exercise by which, through thought, the subject puts himself in a certain situation” (ibid.).

The Meditations, according to Foucault’s reading, include both demonstrative reason and meditative, ascetic thinking. In his reply to Derrida, Foucault traces the two kinds of discursive practices as Descartes employs them in the development of doubt in the First Meditation. Foucault follows and paraphrases the sequence of demonstrative statements up to the point where the doubt requires ascetic thinking.

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Descartes states a principle of practical reason: do not trust someone who has deceived you. He notes that the senses have deceived him on numerous occasions. Therefore, the senses should not be trusted. This is merely sound reasoning. The concluding statement follows logically from the previously established statements. But, though Descartes now has arrived at the valid logical conclusion of his argument, he inds himself unable actually to doubt his senses. Even though the senses have deceived him, he cannot make himself question the certainty that he is here in this room, in these clothes, even though it is nothing other than his supposedly unreliable senses that convince him of these facts. In other words, the immediate actuality of the subject, the givenness of the existing subject who is trying to doubt here and now, resists logical doubt. It is at this point, according to Foucault, that the discursive procedure of the text shifts from the demonstrative order to the ascetic. When Descartes raises the specter of madness and then summarily dismisses it, he does so in the context of an ascetic practice. He is looking for a device that will modify his subjective state, and madness is not effective because Descartes knows that he is not mad. How does he know this? According to Foucault, this is the sign that Descartes is already caught up in a form of knowledge that excludes madness. This is why Descartes dismisses madness and instead reaches for the device of the dream. Dreaming is a condition experienced by rational subjects in which they are deceived about their immediate surroundings. According to Foucault, the sequence of statements in which Descartes considers the possibility that he might be dreaming does not have a demonstrative function – it is not organized according to principles of inference. Rather, this discursive sequence is ascetic in function. Its purpose is to take effect in the subject who thinks it. The key to this sequence is not the logical relation of one statement to another but rather the modiication of the subject who is meditating. This modiication is possible when one meditates on the nature of dreaming, because in this meditation one is reminded that in an actual dream one is often sure of being awake. Consequently, Descartes no longer knows if he is asleep or awake – consequently his relation to his own immediate actuality, his very presence in the room, has been modiied. This modiication opens up the possibility of continuing doubt just at the point where demonstrative reasoning had reached its limit.

Why is it that this function of the Meditations tends to be overlooked? Why do we tend to focus on the statements solely in terms of their demonstrative order? To answer these questions, we must turn to Foucault’s genealogies of governmentality and care of the self. In this research, Foucault traced the formation, transformation, and circulation of relations of power, knowledge, and practices of the self at the heart of Western civilization. Although our civilization has developed many different technologies of control, one central trend is the focus on self-government, or “care of the self.” In order to better understand these technologies, Foucault developed a genealogy that traced them to their roots in Western philosophy, which, he discovered, was originally a practice of care of the self. Care of the self was both an attitude (concern,

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vigilance) and a labor that one carried out with the aim of self-realization in a true, beautiful, noble existence, self-mastery, or a status of peace within oneself (see ECFHOS). Foucault’s studies show that ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophy was primarily devoted to care of the self. In other words, it was not irst and foremost a disinterested, theoretical pursuit that aimed at producing objectively true propositions. Rather, philosophy was a kind of training for life that involved a labor self-formation and self-transformation: the truth sought by philosophers was a true life. This truth was the result of self-transformation and was the reward for that transformation. Furthermore, this practice of care required forming relationships of government, spiritual direction, between individuals. The philosopher acted as a spiritual director to the student so that the student could arrive at the point where he could take care of himself, govern himself, and live properly.

This practice of self-transformation and spiritual direction was taken up by early Christian thinkers, monastics, and ascetics and later became the provenance of what Foucault named “pastoral power.” The Church developed its distinctive mechanism of spiritual direction – pastoral power – by taking over the framework of care of the self from ancient philosophy (see ECF-STP lectures of February 8, 15, and 22). Pastoral power entailed establishing permanent and intense relationships between individuals, in which some – pastors – govern others not by dominating them or repressing them but rather by taking care of the salvation of their souls. The pastor guides, or governs, the conduct of the individual through a variety of practices of spiritual direction, confession, and penance that come to invest the whole life, including the inner life, of the governed.

As pastoral power intensiied and gained ground in Western civilization, it became the object of resistance and generated numerous revolts and reform movements. Foucault argues that “the general problem of ‘government’ suddenly breaks out in the sixteenth century” (ECF-STP, 88). Foucault sets Descartes’ text within this ield of contestation. Descartes’ thought is motivated by the desire to govern his own thoughts, to outline and follow a method for arriving at truth. He develops his rules for conducting – in other words for governing – the mind in the pursuit of truth (Rules for the Direction of the Mind). Furthermore, the truth Descartes seeks is not a speculative truth. As he writes in Part 6 of the Discourse on Method, his aim is to ind and employ a method for arriving at useful knowledge, knowledge that could more generally help improve the government of life. Descartes’ text therefore presents us with what Foucault calls technologies of government – arts of conducting oneself and others based on a method of discerning practical, governmental, truth: “If Descartes’ philosophy is taken as the foundation of philosophy, we should also see it as the outcome of this great transformation that brought about the reappearance of the question: ‘How to conduct oneself?’” (ECF-STP, 230). Descartes’ thought is an effort to develop and practice a science of self-government.

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Suggested Reading

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 31–63.

McGushin, Edward. 2005. “Foucault’s Cartesian Meditations,” International Philosophical Quarterly 45:41–59.

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(EEW2, 437). By denying allegiance to the three dominant trends of thought in France in the 1950s and 1960s, Foucault positions his work outside the main currents of mid–twentieth-century French thought.

The same is true of Freud: psychoanalysis is clearly indebted to the study of hysteria in the late nineteenth century. However, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, his notion of a part-psychic, part-physical “drive [Trieb],” and the advancements in technique accomplished in analysis make the new science of psychoanalysis distinctly modern (cf. EEW2, 251ff). Foucault signals as much by including Freud with Nietzsche and Marx in his 1967 article for the Cahiers de Royaumont: Nietzsche. Together, this group of thinkers deines the discursive character of modern life: “[T]he nineteenth century – and particularly Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – have put us back into the presence of a new possibility of interpretation; they have founded once again the possibility of a hermeneutic” (EEW2, 271–272).

Here as previously, Freud is not considered in isolation. Whether it is Freud in company with French Marxism à la Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser, or Freud together with Nietzsche and Marx, Foucault’s tendency is to think of Freud in community with others. What this suggests is that to engage Freud is to face questions of inheritance, intellectual genealogy, and traditions of thought: Freud, the great thinker of the family in modern times, cannot be critically interrogated without raising issues of iliation and association.

Just as issues of association and lineage shape Foucault’s and Freud’s respective projects from the outside through the inluence of the past and present, those same issues and their “present historical” temporality are prominent within their respective thoughts. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), for example, Freud posits three stages of infantile sexual development; he does so, however, only on the evidence of the “fragmentary manifestation[s] of [infantile] sexuality” that appear in a person’s mature psychology (Freud 1949, 179). Similarly, the psychological factors that contribute to Dora’s ingering of her reticule during therapy, and the connection in her mind between this small purse and past events in her sexual development, are signiicant only insofar as they are manifest in the present (Freud 1949, 76ff).

Foucault, too, is a historian of the present. As he explains in his 1984 piece on Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” a critical genealogy is a “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying” (EEW1, 315). To think, interpret, and criticize is always a present undertaking, but it is inlected by the past. So, the community named in “Foucault and Freud” is at once historical, conditioned by all that has shaped and determined their respective projects and deined their common ground and their points of difference while being also a contemporary gathering of persons and ideas.

What this means is that we are party to the society of Foucault and Freud: we who think in the present continue to work in their company. The “and” between

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them, which involves both thinkers, implicates us as well. The “and” that bonds Freud to Foucault poses to us questions of association, of iliation; it raises issues of the responsibilities and ethics of living and thinking with others, especially when the others with whom we think can no longer answer for themselves; and it draws out the historical conditions of our own thinking, our lives, and our intellectual efforts to communalize.

The history of the twentieth century as the history of the present is another name for the community named by “Freud and Foucault.” If Foucault opens his review of Gilles Deleuze with the idea that “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (EEW2, 343), we might take his hesitation to indicate something other than uncertainty about the future. Foucault’s “perhaps” suggests that “this century” has already been designated. One day this may change and we will see ourselves as Deleuzians; in the meantime, we are all already members of the intellectual community named in “Foucault and Freud.”

These relections on community, intellectual iliation, and our present FreudianFoucauldian circumstances are borrowed, in part, from the lecture Jacques Derrida gave in 1991 to commemorate Foucault. As Derrida asks, “Would Foucault’s project have been possible without psychoanalysis, with which it is contemporary and of which it speaks little? ...Does the project owe psychoanalysis anything? What? ... In a word, what is the situation of psychoanalysis at the moment of, and with respect to, Foucault’s book?” (Derrida 1998, 76).

The questions Derrida pose here are speciic, as is itting in interrogating the work of Foucault; the book project in question in this regard is Foucault’s History of Madness. Yet, by generalizing Derrida’s point, and doing so in order to implicate ourselves, we raise a number of related questions: Would our project be possible, that of thinking ourselves under our present conditions, were it not for Foucault and Freud? What debt do we owe these thinkers? Further, what is the situation of the community named by “Foucault and Freud” at this moment? What does membership in such a society require and entail?

As we have already noted, these issues of community and social belonging (and their obverse, issues of abnormality and dysfunctional nonbelonging) are familiar to the work of both thinkers. Freud maintained the importance of social and ilial relations in analysis in determining individual psychology; he also conceived of the group of practicing psychoanalysts as an extended family, or as members of a common tribe. Early in his career, Freud invited other therapists and doctors into his home each week as part of the “Wednesday Psychological Society”; throughout his career, Freud continued to exercise strict paternal control over the clan, and would expel members, as he did to Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, for their divergence from psychoanalytic doctrine.

There is no corresponding archaeological or genealogical society that Foucault oversaw in his lifetime. Indeed, and despite the community of intellectuals that

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Eleanor Kaufmann imagines between Foucault and others based on their writing laudatory essays to one another (see Kaufmann 2001), to the extent that Foucault considered issues of membership and belonging, it was to distance himself from given intellectual traditions. In a 1980 interview with Le Monde – conducted under conditions of anonymity and published as “The Masked Philosopher” – Foucault rejects the need for a contemporary “society of scholars”: “People sometimes complain that there is no dominant philosophy in France. So much the better for that!” What is better than belonging to a community of thinkers, Foucault continues, is a willingness to “think otherwise [and] to do something else” (EEW1, 327).

Of course, a desire for anonymity and a preoccupation with nonmembership is a kind of ixation on the opposite; and Foucault was constantly concerned in his work with group dynamics, from the mentally ill gathered within institutional walls to prisoners living together under the threat of disciplinary power. Biographically, Foucault identiied with the protest groups in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution in 1978; and the history of sexuality project can be read as a theoretical exercising of personal issues of gay identity and the social signiicance of being a homosexual.

Foucault, then, like Freud, is a preeminently social thinker. The question, which can only be addressed through a study of their particular textual encounters on the topics of community, society, and afiliation, is what the nature of their shared social thought is and how this past community inluences our own present ways of thinking about ourselves in society.

In the context of Foucault’s early psychological writings – “Introduction” to the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1952), Mental Illness and Personality/Psychology (1954/1962), and History of Madness (1961) – the “and” of “Foucault and Freud” names “madness [folie]” or “unreason [déraison].” By listening to unreason, which in the nineteenth century lost its means of addressing reason because of the turn in psychology toward scientiic positivism, Freud implicitly critiques the same psychological tradition as Foucault. In turn, Foucault, in company with Binswanger, who was himself part of Freud’s inner circle, charges modern psychiatry with objectifying unreason as madness and thereby silencing it. In place of the categorical and etiological diminishment of unreason, under the title of madness or mental illness, Binswanger treated the mentally ill patient existentially by considering his or her self-constitution as a biography and life’s narrative.

In History of Madness, Foucault places Freud at the end of a historical lineage that begins in the classical period with Pinel and Tuke. Yet, in coming after the history of early modern psychology, Freud also comes before it in returning to madness and allowing unreason to speak. In this way, Freud encompasses the whole history of modern psychology – a historical feat that his own psychoanalytic approach to time and history makes explicable; here is Foucault commenting on this aspect of Freud’s thought in his 1968 “response” to the Paris Epistemology Circle: “The desire to make historical analysis the discourse of continuity, and

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make human consciousness the originating subject of all knowledge and all practice, are the two faces of one and the same system of thought.” Foucault continues this line of thought by citing the corrective effect that “psychoanalytical, linguistic and then ethnological research” has had on this premodern notion of continuous, conscious history (EEW2, 301). An implication of Foucault’s response is that he, too, is modern, which is to say psychoanalytic, in his archaeological study of the history of madness.

Beyond the idea that Foucault keeps company with Freud and psychoanalysis in practicing history in a similarly discontinuous fashion, the issue of community and societal belonging appears explicitly in the pages of History of Madness as “the Great Coninement” of criminals, the poor, the morally debauched, and the mentally ill during the classical period of European history (EHM, 158ff). Freud is implicated in this history in participating in the modern equivalent of classical internment: by identifying the pathologies from which the mad suffer and classifying cases according to observable symptomologies, Freud collectivizes the mentally ill just as decisively as did the wardens of the eighteenth-century asylum. As Foucault puts this last point in his “summary” for his 1973–1974 lecture course at the Collège de France: “[Psychoanalysis is] a reconstitution of medical power as truth-producer, in a space arranged so that the production would always remain perfectly adapted to that power” (EEW1, 47).

Is there a sense in which Foucault does the same? The society of the mad named by “Nietzsche and Artaud” – and, on a few occasions, Freud is included in this society – recurs throughout History of Madness (EHM, 351–352, 510–511). The problematic of “unreason” is made to identify a select society: Nietzsche and Artaud (and Freud). Each in his own way participates in unreason, and this bonds each of them to the others in the history of modern thought. Foucault’s suggestion is that all we must do is join this Nietzschean-Artaudian-Freudian society in order to reverse the scientistic turn that reason generally and psychology speciically took in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Issues of communalization and society are central as well to Foucault’s remarks on Freud in The Order of Things (1966). Toward the end of the volume, Foucault considers psychoanalysis together with ethnology as premiere instances of the human sciences: “[P]sychoanalysis and ethnology are not so much two human sciences among others, but ... they span the entire domain of those sciences” (EOT, 379). An “ethnological psychoanalysis” similar to what Freud envisions in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) would apply the Freudian insight into the unconscious to the inexplicit determinants of a society. It would in turn make the unconscious a social structure whose signiicance was guaranteed by the various practices of a given culture: “By this means, ethnology and psychoanalysis would succeed, not in superimposing themselves on one another ... but in intersecting like two lines differently oriented” (EOT, 380).