The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Finally, the issues of community and afiliation that run through all of the textual exchanges between Foucault and Freud become fully articulated in Foucault’s late history of sexuality project. Freud and psychoanalysis are near constant points of reference for Foucault in the irst volume of The History of Sexuality (1976). At the beginning of the book, in considering the “repressive hypothesis” that deines modern sexuality, Foucault turns to Freud: “Perhaps some progress was made by Freud” in overturning the idea of our own sexual repression. Yet, owing to his clinical “circumspection” and “medical prudence,” Freud did not go far enough (EHS1, 5), hence the need for Foucault to continue Freud’s work.

Subsequently, Foucault presents psychoanalysis as a “scientia sexualis” characterized by the “clinical codiication” of discourse on sex and sexuality and the hermeneutic role played by the listener to such discourse (EHS1, 65ff). Finally, Foucault ends the book as he began it: with Freud. In envisioning a people to come who will wonder in retrospect at our modern preoccupation with the truth of sex – and notice the complex historical temporality of this vision – Foucault imagines future generations who will laugh at the charge of “pansexualism” once brought against Freud. From this future vantage point, the error of this judgment against Freud will lie with those who dismissed it in order to overcome a perceived modern prudishness, for they will be the ones who proved blind to Freud’s genius: “[Freud placed sexuality] at one of the critical points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the strategies of knowledge and power” and thereby impelled the proliferation of sex in modern discourse (EHS1, 158–159).

But it is in the middle section of the book that issues of community and iliation appear most explicitly. Here, under the heading of “The Deployment of Sexuality,” Foucault identiies two interrelated forms of societal power: a “deployment of alliance” and a “deployment of sexuality” (EHS1, 106–107). Foucault discusses the past ways in which these “deployments” have intersected and interacted; it is a history that culminates with psychoanalysis, according to which the disparate bonds of alliance are reorganized around the basic family unit and sexual, disciplinary power is exercised over these extended social connections through the prohibition against incest (EHS1, 112–113).

In that Foucault’s discussion recalls Freud’s discussion of (much) the same in Totem and Taboo – with alliances being igured there in totemic clan afiliations and sexuality being deployed through the taboo against incest (cf. Freud 1955, 8ff) – we might read this section of The History of Sexuality as working out in some detail the promised ethnological psychoanalysis that Foucault imagines at the end of The Order of Things.

If this last suggestion presents a viable reading of the middle sections of Foucault’s irst volume of The History of Sexuality, then it outlines a Freudian framework through which we might read the second and third volumes of the same history. While Foucault focuses in these last works on what might seem like personal

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or private issues, on such things as techniques of care of the self and practices of self-writing, these are all set against the wider backdrop of a sexual ethics. Further, Foucault draws his examples for such an ethics from the ancients, speciically from different schools or groups of ancient philosophers – the Stoics are of particular importance in the third volume of the project, subtitled The Care of the Self (1984).

What this suggests is that the “and” between himself and Freud continues to inluence Foucault to the end of his intellectual career. In trying to reverse the order of a Freudian sexualization of social alliances, and thereby model a productive social norm based on the practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Foucault continues to work with basically Freudian themes of social alliance and sexuality.

Adrian Switzer

See Also

Psychoanalysis

Sex

Georges Canguilhem

Suggested Reading

Davidson, Arnold I. 2001. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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.

2001. “Cogito and the History of Madness,” trans. Alan Bass, in Writing and Difference. New York: Routledge, pp. 36–76.

Freud, Sigmund. 1949. A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Other Works (1901–1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7. London: The Hogarth Press.

Ginsburg, Nancy, and Roy Ginsburg. 1999. Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kaufmann, Eleanor. 2001. The Delirium of Praise: Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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French philosophy of science in which Foucault was trained and the Frankfurt school is, Foucault notes, “a strange case of non-penetration between two very similar types of thinking which is explained, perhaps, by that very similarity. Nothing hides the fact of a problem in common better than two similar ways of approaching it” (ibid.). Although he does not specify which works of the Frankfurt school he has in mind here, he suggests that the thread that connects his work to the Frankfurt school is the attempt to offer a “rational critique of rationality,” which Foucault explains is “a question of isolating the form of rationality presented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order to show that it is only one possible form among others” (EPPC, 27). To be sure, the attempt to offer a rational critique of rationality draws Foucault’s work into proximity with one of the most important works of the irst generation of the Frankfurt school, Horkheimer and Adorno’s dark masterpiece, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002; for discussion, see McCarthy 1991 and Hoy 1986). However, in light of Habermas’s own trenchant critique of that text (Habermas 1987b, 106–130), this proximity does not necessarily bring Foucault any closer to Habermas himself.

To complicate matters even further, although Foucault professed some familiarity with and even interest in Habermas’s work, and expressed some hesitation about Habermas’s notion of the ideal speech situation (on both points, see EEW1, 298), he never offered a sustained discussion or critique of Habermas’s work. Habermas, for his part, did develop a sustained critique of Foucault, devoting two lectures in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity to Foucault’s work (Habermas 1987b, 238–293).

However, this critique is based on an incomplete reading of Foucault’s work, since Habermas appears to have composed it prior to the publication of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality (EHS2 and EHS3) and without having read Foucault’s important late essays on Kant, critique, and the Enlightenment project. Near the time of Foucault’s death, a formal exchange of ideas between Foucault and Habermas was in the planning stages, but even that was apparently the source of misunderstanding (for Foucault’s version of events, see EPPC, 34; for Habermas’s, see Habermas 1994). In any event, it was slated for November 1984 (Habermas 1994, 150), so it never took place.

As a result of these misunderstandings and missed opportunities, the FoucaultHabermas debate remains largely a second-order affair – the product of the secondary literature on these two thinkers – and a contentious one at that. In the remainder of this entry, I will irst enumerate Habermas’s major criticisms of Foucault, indicating how commentators have responded to these charges on Foucault’s behalf. I shall then turn the tables and sketch out some Foucault-inspired criticisms of Habermas.

In his lectures on Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas

1987b, 238–293), Habermas presents three major criticisms, the second of which is further subdivided into three parts. First, he criticizes Foucault’s ambiguous use of the concept of power, which is employed simultaneously as an empirical and a

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transcendental concept, resulting in paradoxical critical positivism – paradoxical because positivism at least aspires to be value-free, and hence it cannot, in Habermas’s view, also be critical. Second, Habermas charges Foucauldian genealogy with reductionism of three types: it reduces meaning, truth and validity, and normativity to power relations. The irst form of reductionism mires genealogy in presentism; the second, in relativism; the third, in cryptonormativism. Third, because genealogy “deals with an object domain from which the theory of power has erased all traces of communicative actions entangled in lifeworld contexts” (Habermas 1987b, 286), Foucault’s analysis of power is unsociological in two senses. First, the assumption that power relations are coextensive with the social body and cannot be eliminated leaves Foucault unable to explain how social order is possible, since the possibility of social order depends on some non–power-laden (in the sense of nonstrategic; hence, Habermas would also say communicative) forms of interaction. Second, Foucault cannot adequately explain the relationship between individual and society, since he presents individuals as copies mechanically punched out by disciplinary power relations rather than as autonomous individuals.

In the background of each of these criticisms is Habermas’s more general charge that Foucault, like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Horkheimer and Adorno before him, is an antior counter-Enlightenment thinker. Foucault’s late essays on Kant and the Enlightenment project, not discussed in Habermas’s lectures in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, no doubt complicate this picture considerably. However, in a subsequent essay (Habermas 1994), in which Habermas does address Foucault’s later work on Kant, Habermas declines to reconsider his interpretation of Foucault’s earlier work in light of these later texts. On the contrary, he interprets Foucault’s embrace of a certain – admittedly somewhat idiosyncratic – understanding of the Kantian Enlightenment project as standing in stark contradiction to his earlier work. Moreover, he suggests that it is the productive yet ultimately unsustainable contradiction in Foucault’s work between his critical analysis of power and his unmasking of the will to truth that leads him “in this last of his texts, back into a sphere of inluence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity” (Habermas 1994, 154).

Contra Habermas, however, Foucault’s defenders have argued that one can read even Foucault’s work from his early and middle periods as aiming to transform the Kantian Enlightenment project from within by exploring the historically and socially speciic, and hence contingent, conditions of possibility for subjectivity and agency in late Western modernity (see Allen 2008). This is in fact how Foucault presents his own philosophical oeuvre in essays such as “What Is Enlightenment?” (EEW1, 303–319). Such a reading considerably complicates Habermas’s interpretation of Foucault as an antimodern young conservative who sets out to abstractly negate the Enlightenment project only to ind himself unwittingly drawn back into its orbit. Recent scholarship also calls into question Habermas’s claim that Foucault’s

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genealogies present the subject as a mechanically punched out copy. Indeed, challenging this reading is particularly important in light of Foucault’s late work on practices of the self, which presupposes a capacity for deliberate self-transformation that would seem impossible if Habermas’s reading of Foucault’s middle-period work is correct. The fuller picture of Foucault’s account of subjection that emerges from thinking through the transition from his middle-period genealogies to his late work on practices of the self is that of a self who engages in practices of self-formation and self-discipline, though these practices take place within rather than outside power relations (see McWhorter 1999). Commentators have also rethought the normative stance of Foucault’s critique by uncovering, for example, an implicit norm of freedom at work in Foucault’s texts (see Oksala 2005). Such a reading challenges Habermas’s assertion that Foucault reduces normativity to power relations.

Whereas the bulk of the literature that makes up the Foucault-Habermas debate consists either of extensions or further articulations of Habermas’s central charges (see Honneth 1991; McCarthy 1991) or of attempts to defend Foucault against Habermas’s criticisms, a small portion of it turns the tables around and offers Foucauldian criticisms of Habermas’s work. For example, James Tully (Tully 1999) argues that Habermas’s principal objections to Foucault – the charges of presentism, relativism, and cryptonormativism – can be successfully turned around against Habermas. With respect to the irst objection, Tully argues that Habermas’s reconstructive defense of the decentered, postconventional, autonomous subject and the social institutions and forms of life that make such subjects possible (see Habermas 1990) is insuficiently critical of its own present. As Tully puts it, “the arguments for the universality of the decentred subject are structured in a way that insulates it from criticism.” Hence, “at the center of Habermas’ form of relection is a form of the subject which is taken for granted at the outset and protected from, rather than opened to criticism by the forms of analyses characteristic of his philosophy (Tully 1999, 111–112). Turning Habermas’s charge of relativism around, Tully casts doubt on Habermas’s strong claims to universalism and the context transcendence of validity claims. Tackling the charge of cryptonormativism, Tully maintains that the price Habermas pays for his normative grounding of critical theory is utopianism. In so doing, Tully echoes – and also complicates – one of Foucault’s own passing critical remarks about Habermas (EEW1, 298). Habermas’s assumption that communicative action and discourse can be even in principle (if not, as Habermas fully admits, in practice) isolated from relations of power is utopian, as Tully argues, in two senses: irst, “in the strict sense that there is ‘no place’ where humans communicate and dispute norms without putting into play relations of power”; and, second, even if one interprets, as one should, Habermas’s notion of communication free from domination as a regulative idea, “to approach communicative games [in this way] is to abstract oneself from what is really going on and the possibilities of concrete freedom within them, the only kind of freedom available to humans” (Tully 1999, 131).

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Tully’s fourth and inal point turns on the very idea of a rational critique of rationality. Whereas Foucault claims that this idea is both the central impetus of his work and the thread that connects him to the Frankfurt school (EPPC, 27), Habermas famously maintains that such a project is self-undermining, since it ends in performative contradiction (see Habermas 1990, 76–109). As Tully sees it, all that Foucault needs to do here to avoid the dreaded performative contradiction is simply “to refuse to enter into the form in which Habermas structures the debate” (Tully 1999, 121), by refusing to identify the rationality that he is critiquing with reason per se. As Foucault himself puts this point, in response to a question about Habermas’s defense of the modern, Enlightenment conception of reason (reformulated as communicative reason): “that is not my problem, insofar as I am not prepared to identify reason entirely with the totality of rational forms which have come to dominate....

For me, no given form of rationality is actually reason” (EPPC, 35). The point of Foucault’s rational critique of rationality, then, is not to indict reason per se but rather, as discussed earlier, to isolate “the form of rationality presented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order to show that it is only one possible form among others” (EPPC, 27). The point, in other words, is to reveal the contingency of those forms of rationality that we take to be universal and necessary and hence open up the possibility of moving beyond them.

Another Foucault-inspired line of criticism of Habermas’s work focuses on his conception of power. The criticism focuses on Habermas’s tendency in his two-vol- ume magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984; Habermas

1987a) to use the term “power” to refer only to the functionally integrated administrative political system (i.e., the state). The result of this terminological choice is that Habermas tends to refrain from analyzing the core functions of the lifeworld – the reproduction of society, culture, and personality – in terms of power relations. As a result, Axel Honneth criticizes Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld on the grounds that it generates two inversely related and equally problematic ictions: the iction of a norm-free economic and administrative political system and that of a power-free lifeworld (Honneth, 1991, 298ff). Similarly, Nancy Fraser maintains that it is “a grave mistake to restrict the use of the term ‘power’ to bureaucratic contexts,” for this renders Habermas’s theory of communicative action incapable of fully illuminating gender dominance and subordination, which is secured largely through the lifeworld domain of the traditional nuclear family (Fraser 1989, 121). The upshot of this criticism is that Habermas’s conception of the lifeworld presents an object domain from which all traces of power have been erased.

Although Habermas insists in response that the lifeworld “by no means offers an innocent image of ‘power-free spheres of communication’” (Habermas 1991, 254), critics doubt whether his attempts to theorize the role that power plays in the lifeworld are satisfactory (see Allen 2008; Allen 2010). For instance, Habermas’s colonization of the lifeworld thesis, explored in detail in the second volume of The Theory

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of Communicative Action (Habermas 1987a), highlights the ways in which increasingly complex systems of power and theoretical forms of power intrude on lifeworld contexts, producing pathological effects. However, this response does not meet the force of the objection, which concerns precisely Habermas’s lack of an account of power relations that are internal to the lifeworld itself. Habermas’s second way of theorizing power in the lifeworld, his notion of systematically distorted communication, is initially more promising. In instances of systematically distorted communication, power relations, in the form of a strategic orientation toward success (as opposed to a communicative orientation toward mutual understanding), penetrate the structures of communicative action themselves (Habermas 2001). The analysis of systematically distorted communication hence comes much closer to addressing Honneth’s and Fraser’s worry. However, this comes at a high cost for Habermas. Because systematically distorted communications are both prima facie communicative and latently strategic, they are neither fully strategic nor fully communicative. In order to maintain the normative basis for his theory, Habermas needs to be able to distinguish between interactions that are genuinely communicative and those that are merely apparently so; and yet, the only way he can make this distinction is by appealing to the notion of communicative action, which may, for all we know, be subject to systematic distortions. Although this circle is not necessarily a vicious one, it does raise the vexing question of how conident we can ever hope to be in making the distinction between communicative and strategic actions. In the background here is the Foucauldian worry that it is not possible to disentangle power from validity once and for all.

A inal Foucauldian criticism of Habermas concerns his account of autonomy, a concept central to Habermas’s normative project. The worry here is that Habermas’s robust account of autonomy is plausible only insofar as we are overly sanguine about the depth and complexity of the relationship between normalizing, disciplinary, and biopolitical power relations and the modern autonomous subject. If, as Foucault has shown, the subject is constituted by power relations, then this means, as Judith Butler points out, that “power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic” (Butler 1995, 39). This suggests that if we accept Foucault’s (and Butler’s) analysis of subjection, we must confront the possibility that what looks like autonomy may in fact be something else entirely.

Foucault makes a similar point when he admits that, if we accept his archaeological and genealogical recasting of Kant’s notion of critique, “we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and deinitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits” (EEW1, 316). Accepting this means accepting something more demanding than the mere fallibilism that Habermas recommends (see Habermas 2003). It means accepting that “the theoretical and practical experience we have of our limits, and of the possibility

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of moving beyond them, is always limited and determined; thus, we are always in the position of beginning again” (EEW1, 316–317). This is tantamount to acknowledging the ultimate contingency of our historically determined epistemological and normative starting points. In light of Habermas’s staunch defense of the project of modernity – however lawed and incomplete the project of modernity may be, it nonetheless represents for Habermas the result of a historical learning process – this may be the most serious and fundamental disagreement between the two thinkers.

Amy Allen

See Also

Critique

Power

Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading

Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

2009. “Discourse, Power, and Subjectiication: The Foucault/Habermas Debate Reconsidered,” The Philosophical Forum 40, no. 1 (Spring): 1–28.

2010. “The Entanglement of Power and Validity: Foucault and Critical Theory,” in Foucault and Philosophy, ed. Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ashenden, Samantha, and David Owen, eds. 1999. Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory. London: Sage.

Biebricher, Thomas. 2005. Selbstkritik der Moderne: Foucault und Habermas im Vergleich.

Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Butler, Judith. 1995. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Linda Nicholson.

New York: Routledge, pp. 629–647.

Fraser, Nancy. 1989. “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1987a. The Theory of Communicative Action, volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.

1987b. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry

Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

1991. “A Reply,” in Communicative Action: Essays on Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

2001. “Relections on Communicative Pathology,” in On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, trans. Barbara Fultner. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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2003. “Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn,” in Truth and Justiication, ed. Barbara

Fultner. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Honneth, Axel. 1991. The Critique of Power: Rel ective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans.

Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hoy, David Couzens. 1986. “Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy. Oxford: Blackwell,

pp. 123–148.

Hoy, David Couzens, and Thomas McCarthy. 1994. Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kelly, Michael, ed. 1994. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press.

McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” in Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 43–75.

McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saar, Martin. 2007. Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und

Foucault. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.

Tully, James. 1999. “To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’s Theory,” in Foucault contra Habermas, ed. Samantha Ashenden and David

Owen. London: Sage Publications, pp. 90–142.