The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
.pdf654 / David-Olivier Gougelet
See Also
Biopower
Discipline
Population
Sovereignty
Suggested Reading
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2008 [1513]. The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella. New York: Oxford
University Press.
110
MAURICE MERLEAU - PONT Y (1907–1961)
It is fair – though perhaps much too obvious – to present Foucault as an opponent of phenomenology. As a matter of fact, from The History of Madness onward, everything he writes seems to dispute every form of humanism. This criticism would have to include what at the time, thanks to Sartre’s identiication of phenomenology with existentialism and existentialism with humanism, might have appeared as a kind of necessary phenomenological humanism. There is no subject according to Foucault. There is no primeval experience to which we might return, no experience to which one could trace back the abstractions of theory. There is no plenitude of sense capable of enlightening the constitution of the objects with which we deal. What Husserl thought possible in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences, is for Foucault not possible: there is no possible way of reactivating faded evidence by leading the tradition of the sciences back to the primitive intentionality that would irst have nurtured and then deserted them. More deeply, there are no self-evident intuitions, no immediacy. There is such a thing as knowledge just because there is no intuition. There are social practices just because we are not placed within the light of any originary givenness. Seen from this angle, the phenomenological project is
grounded on the sand of ancient metaphysical illusions.
Still, it is not so easy to determine Foucault’s grounding in relation to that of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and this is even more dificult to do in relation to phenomenology. Even if Foucault says that there is no subject, no full and radiating sense, no experience as a primeval belonging to the world, what he puts in their place is something that Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology seem to have already pointed out and developed. We can see this especially if we ignore the vulgarization of phenomenology by a certain type of existentialism, and more so if we ignore the vulgarization to which existentialism itself has often been reduced. In this respect, as Foucault will say in an interview in the mid-1970s, reading Husserl’s work was crucial for his intellectual itinerary. The relationship between knowledge
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and power was not at all “a discovery of mine,” as Foucault provocatively claims in that interview. That relationship “lies in a trajectory which gets outlined between Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences” (FMFE, 126). That is the kind of phenomenology to which we must turn if we want to truly understand Foucault’s relationship to Husserl’s phenomenology, its French reception, and especially its relation to the way Merleau-Ponty takes up phenomenology.
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and the later Husserl father not only The Crisis of European Sciences, but also a text like Experience and Judgment, whose subtitle is A Genealogy of Logic. Husserl conceives his “last” phenomenology as an investigation of the constraints and the coercive mechanisms that function at the basis of knowledge. To know, for Husserl, means irst of all to write. That there is no experience without retention has always been the touchstone of Husserl’s phenomenology. Similarly, there is no knowledge without writing, without a work of inscription, and without the permanence of a trace. This is the immense expansion that the later Husserl imposes on his thought of the irreducibility of retention. As Husserl shows in The Crisis, mathematical idealities come from geometry, and geometry from the practice of land measurement. At this late stage in the development of Husserl’s thought, phenomenology wants to reanimate, behind disembodied ideas, the living body of social practices, the multilayered and phantasmatical movement of the grammata, the thick plot of “pragmatic anthropology.” (Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is what forced Foucault, early in his career, to come to terms with the transcendentalism of the Critique of Pure Reason.) In this sense, phenomenology is a genuine genealogy, as Husserl maintained, or an archaeology, as Merleau-Ponty will claim. Indeed, in his late “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty states that phenomenology is “a descent in the domain of our archaeology” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 165).
If we want to see the traces of a continuity between phenomenology and archaeology (which proves to be stronger than the often recognized discontinuities), we must look at Merleau-Ponty, who held one of the most authoritative positions in the intellectual landscape in which Foucault was trained during the 1940s and 1950s. Foucault follows Merleau-Ponty’s lecture courses – at just the moment when a whole generation of French philosophers will be struck with ideas, sparks of inspiration, splinters of thought that will proliferate immediately after MerleauPonty’s premature death in 1961: psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, all the directions French thought will take throughout the 1960s. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is an archaeology insofar as it is a phenomenology of the primordial, an inquiry into the underlying structures of human experience, a mapping of the practico-corporeal underpinnings of every human expression, experience and knowledge, history and politics. At the basis of all this there is a bodily “I can” (Ich kann), as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty maintain; that is, they maintain that there is a “power” in each and every sense of the word, a bond concerned with the ability to
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do, with an openness that unfolds into a web of possibilities that encroach on, disentangle from, and oppose each other. This claim also means a bond that has to do with a corresponding number of impossibilities that get outlined within each possibility. In other words, in order that the opening onto possibilities be an opening onto just those possibilities (and not others), there must be some sort of closure.
Naturally, Foucault does not think that there is a primordial structure or foundation; similarly, the later Merleau-Ponty, that of the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible is non-foundationalist. But Foucault unquestionably retrieves the idea that there are structures or, more precisely, local organizations, articulations of elements that affect a certain discursive ield. For Foucault, there are practical ties, material concatenations on whose shapes the contents of a certain area of knowledge depend; there are the spaces within which a given epistemic sector is able to be formulated or not; there are also postures available or unavailable to the bodies of humans within a certain age and a certain location. Archaeology is the systematic investigation of such a body of submerged statements, human practices, and apparatuses (dispositifs). This is a submerged body that blindly and dealy exerts a pressure; it produces effects of sense in accordance with rules and regularities that archaeology will bring back to light; it is a body that shapes the souls of humans, forges and disposes their habits and their bodies, trains them to a certain style of social, political, military, religious, scholastic, and bureaucratic functioning.
Blindly and dealy, we have said. If Foucault argues that there is no constitutive subject, no transcendental entity that weaves the threads of experience, no plenum that organizes and radiates the ield of experience by infusing into it that quality which we call “sense,” he does this not because he is arguing against phenomenology. He is simply developing an idea that is easy to ind at the very core of the later Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Besides being an affect, sense is an effect. It is a beam that shines through by virtue of the friction sparked between the elements of a mechanical device or at least between those of a disposition and those of an articulated joint. Sense is not something that is but something that makes itself, and it is something that makes itself within an interstitial space. It is a phenomenon of divergence (écart). It is not the elements themselves that organize our experience; it is the empty space between the elements. Sense exists as, has the way of being of, the event. But this is precisely the status of what Merleau-Ponty names “lesh,” one of the most fertile and problematic concepts among those presented in The Visible and the Invisible, his inal work. The lesh is a divergence effect (an effect of écart), more an interstice than a substance. Merleau-Ponty also describes the lesh as a mirror phenomenon, a play of differences in whose folds one can outline transient, elusive identities. One hand touches the other, according to the pivotal example in The Visible and the Invisible, an example that Husserl had already used (in the second book of Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and for a Phenomenological Philosophy). Through its own sensing, the human body then is, within itself, split in two. The body comes to
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itself through that distance which is the only “self” it possesses. The touching hand becomes the touched hand, the unity of the subject is nothing but the “spatializing” (espacement) of this divergence that reproduces itself each time it seems to cancel itself in pure coincidence. As Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible, the divergence produces “a reversibility that is always imminent and never realized in fact” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 147).
Thus, in the opening pages of The Order of Things, Foucault interprets Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas as an image of the image itself, a sort of ininite relection of the image (a mise-en-abyme). For Foucault, Velázquez had undertaken in this painting a quasi-metaphysical investigation into the laws of representation. That is why The Order of Things – this masterful study of the tiny shifts in the most profound roots of modern scientiic representation through the disciplines of economy, natural sciences, and linguistics – begins with a splendid baroque reading of this well-known painting. A painter is at work: we see him gazing out from behind the big canvas he is working on. He stares at the subject in front of himself, who is located in our direction. Among other paintings, in the background of the scene, there is a mirror. In the background, the spectator sees other paintings, in the middle of which is a mirror. We should see ourselves relected in that mirror. But what we see is the subject whose portrait the painter is painting. That subject of course is the King and Queen of Spain. The whole construction wavers around this paradox. The painter is staring at a point outside of the painting, where the Spanish royalty is situated. It is the same point in which we are placed, as spectators of the painting. We are the scene he is reproducing. But he is the scene that our gaze captures. He is the object of the Spanish royalty’s gaze, and of ours as well, insofar as we occupy the same place. The key word to which Foucault resorts at this level of his analysis is “reciprocity.” In this famous analysis, he says, “The picture in its entirety looks upon a scene for which it is, in its turn, a scene. As something looking and as something looked at, the mirror manifests a pure reciprocity” (EOT, 14, my emphasis, translation modiied; also EOT, 4).
We might say that “reciprocity” is a word – and a phenomenon – that is eminently Merleau-Pontean. There is no observing subject in the painting. Any hypothetical “subject who looks,” were he in the painting, would be an observed subject. “A subject that casts a gaze” might be in the painting only in a sidelong way, as a gaze evoked and, simultaneously, discarded, suggested and cancelled through one and the same gesture. The whole visible area on the surface appears to be surrounded by a deeper and invisible place, which is the very place in which the visibility of the visible is produced. Nevertheless, this invisible is not elsewhere with respect to the visible, it is not something other than the visible. It is not something that we could relocate in the space of the painting if we changed the direction of our gaze. The invisible is the heart of the visible and it is in the visible. But it is there as a trace, so to speak. The invisible is neither a presence nor an absence, neither an “element” among the others in the painting nor something simply outside the painting. The
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invisible does not embrace but rather pierces the visible. We look from the inner core of the painting, according to Foucault’s analysis. The visibility of the painting is produced in the luminous, and yet marginal core of the painting, that is, within the mirror. The archaeologist aims at this visible-invisible core of any “visualization,” of any epistemic arrangement (any mise-en-scène), of any painting or representation, or scientiic paradigm.
If we accept the analysis of The Visible and the Invisible (which Merleau-Ponty also developed in his inal essay, the 1961 “Eye and Mind”), then we look at the world only insofar as we look from the invisible heart of the world that looks at us. Alluding to something Paul Klee said, Merleau-Ponty observes, “As many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things ... ; what would be at issue is not seeing into the outside ... , but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist in it, to emigrate into it” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139). This blind and anonymous gaze from the outside (the outside of which Foucault also speaks in his essay “The Thought of the Outside” [collected in EEW2]) is precisely the element in which the subjective vision, “our” vision, the vision of “our” knowledge and of “our” experience, makes itself. The archaeologist (but also, as Merleau-Ponty would say, perhaps rightly, the phenomenologist) is someone who retrieves the traces of this anonymous gaze, in which not only our gaze has been forged but also and especially the power that such a gaze will have over the world and over the things it will evoke, draw, make visible and measurable, perceptible and manageable. We are a fold of that anonymous “stuff,” precisely like the things we talk about, as the things discussed by our sciences (which is naively objectivistic) and captured by our knowledge (which is supericially realistic). We are played by that network of divergences, this system of slidings and shiftings, all the noncoincidences in which what we call experience is constituted. And somehow we even think of this experience as our “own” experience.
Furthermore, as Deleuze has shown us and he was the irst (Deleuze 1988, 99–100), one must read the notorious “reappearance” of the subject in the inal Foucault through the idea of “the fold.” The reappearance of the subject is enigmatic because Foucault had implacably shown that the subject was an object outlined by something and, that man was merely a igure drawn in the sand by an unintentional hand. The Foucault of the “return” to the subject is the Foucault of the Ancients, the tireless decipherer of Greek and successively Roman wisdom, the theoretician of an aesthetics of existence with a Stoic lavor. The wise person is the one who chisels himself just like a marble block, who makes a statue of himself from himself, who molds his shape just like an artist who gives a shape to matter. It is this igure of the wise person, as is well known, that Foucault places before our eyes through the many igures of the self, of the use of pleasures, of parresia (frank-speaking). Once again, we see that a certain practice or pragmatics of the bodies is at work, but in this case it is the occasion or the event of such a igure in progress, of such a form of life in which ancient wisdom consists. The wise person’s body, the lesh carved out as a work of
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art, the words this person speaks, polished and put into play in the political arena, the soul made “public” and thoroughly political, are the stuff, the wax, the clay, the blank slate on which the traces of that practice get inscribed. The issue of the body, which is the phenomenological theme par excellence and, long before phenomenology, was a Nietzschean theme (as we see clearly in the Genealogy of Morals), eventually comes back. But, more precisely, we must say that this theme had never really disappeared. Put simply, the body seen and sifted through by the clinical gaze (The Birth of the Clinic), the body torn apart and watched over (Discipline and Punish), has now become the body rummaged through and manipulated by the tiny, unceasing, tenacious, ruthless maneuvers of the care of the self.
There is no longer a body-thing on which the trajectories of power get inscribed like incandescent darts; there is no longer the sovereign power that tortures to the point of death; there is no longer the docile body, the body turned into a bundle of ibers, a “plexus” of functions to promote, a iligree of possibilities that biopolitics will bend to its own purposes (Society Must Be Defended). There is this body that the wise person takes away from the political space, not with a view to placing it in a more primeval and authentic space, but simply to make the body the space of a different politics. There is this body, this word, this voice, which the wise person makes unavailable for certain practices and powers, so as to make it the place and the occasion of different practices and new powers. The wise person, after all, is not so much the statue produced at the end of a life of ascetical practices (askesis); he (or she) is rather the process of the making, the movement that will have produced the statue across time. From both sides, there is the wise person at work, the molding and the molded hand. The doubleness of the wise man can be elaborated further. On the one hand, there is the wise man conceived as a “work” (œuvre), as completed artifact, as crystal; that is, as a subject. On the other side, we see the wise man as “activity” and, so to speak, as “unworked” (désœuvrement), as movement and escape from the touching hand that never wholly precipitates into the touched hand, as Merleau-Ponty would say. What we are now speaking of is no longer a subject. The wise person is nothing more and nothing less than this escape from oneself, this taking of oneself away from oneself. “Se méprendre de soi” – Foucault once said – is the aim of archaeology. The aim is not truth but a certain exercise, an askesis, as it were. This asceticism is something that needs to be fostered, made to happen, let proceed.
If Foucault’s itinerary culminates in the theorization of an aesthetics of existence, we might understand this aesthetics as an aesthetics of the event. “I am a pyrotechnician,” Foucault claimed, not without some slyness, in the interview where he spoke of Husserl and Nietzsche (cited above). Yet, what did phenomenology really aim at, really “want”? It wanted to produce an “Umstellung,” an overturning in the subject, as Husserl says in the Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl 1976, 472). Phenomenology wants to bring the constituted object back to the place of its constitution, to show the unobjectiiable source of objective knowledge, and to detach the subject from the
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illusion of science's objectivism and naturalism. It wants to discover in the transcendental subject “a new will of life [ein neues Lebenswille]” (Husserl 1976, 472, Husserl’s emphasis).What did Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology want? Not to build up another, more trustworthy form of knowledge, but to place knowledge back within a certain element, within a dimension that Merleau-Ponty described as an origin that always explodes here and yet also over there, precisely at the place where we are, each time forever (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 264).What we have been describing is Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “hyperdialectics,” the bringing of oneself back to the thread of the becoming of oppositions, the placing of oneself back into the plot of divergences (écarts) in perpetual motion, divergences that perpetually bring about effects that assail us.
Although Foucault does not think there is such a constitutive source, he still thinks that there is an element lingering at the margins of the objectivations of each form of power and knowledge. That elusive element is not a source, but it is certainly an unobjective “element.” It is nothing full, and just for this reason it belongs to the order of the invisible that lies at the core of the visible. It is this unobjective, invisible aspect that archaeology wants to reactivate, a potency pulsating in power and “out of step” (contretemps) with knowledge. After claiming that he is a pyrotechnician (un artiicier), Foucault says, “I fabricate something that, at the end of the day, must be used in view of an attack, a war, a destruction. I am not in favor of destruction, but I am in favor of the fact that it is possible to go ahead, that some walls can be demolished” (FMFE, 92).
Federico Leoni
See Also
Outside
Phenomenology
Maurice Blanchot
Suggested Reading
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1976. Die Krisis der Europaeischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phaenomenologie, Husserliana, Band VI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
1968. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
2011. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes. London: Routledge.
111
FRIEDRICH NIE TZSCHE (1844–1901)
“The following study will only be the irst, and probably the easiest, in this long line of enquiry which, beneath the sun of the great Nietzschean quest, would confront the dialectics of history with the immobile struc-
tures of the tragic” (EHM, xxx). These words, which appear in the Preface to the original, 1961 publication of Foucault’s doctoral thesis Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, could, I would argue, be adapted to stand as an epigram to the entire Foucauldian oeuvre insofar as that oeuvre never loses sight of how that “great Nietzschean quest” framed the ways in which to think of the complex relations of language, truth, power, and the subject. Foucault is, moreover, well aware of this, and he appeals to Nietzsche explicitly at crucial points in his major texts and invokes him often in interviews as he tries to clarify and contextualize his projects. For example, in an interview shortly after the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault remarked that
If I wanted to be pretentious, I would use “the genealogy of morals” as the general title of what I am doing. It was Nietzsche who speciied the power relation as the general focus, shall we say, of philosophical discourse – whereas for Marx it was the productive relation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to conine himself within a political theory in order to do so. (EPK, 53)
And in his inal interview, given just a month before his death, he went even further in his identiication with Nietzsche:
I can only respond by saying that I am simply Nietzschean, and I try to see, on a number of points, and to the extent that it is possible, with the aid of Nietzsche’s text – but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless
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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1901) / 663
Nietzschean!) – what can be done in this or that domain. I’m not looking for anything else but I’m really searching for that. (EPPC, 251)
Like many of the young philosophers of his generation, Foucault was irst drawn to Nietzsche insofar as he felt constrained by the discursive practices of the philosophical discipline. Having “been trained in the great, time-honored university traditions – Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl,” when Foucault irst came upon Nietzsche’s “rather strange, witty, graceful texts,” his reaction was to say: “Well I won’t do what my contemporaries, colleagues or professors are doing; I won’t just dismiss this” (EPPC, 33). In fact, Foucault came to read Nietzsche irst in 1953, having been led to him by reading Bataille. From Foucault’s friend Maurice Pinguet, we learn that while the two were vacationing that August in Italy, Foucault took with him everywhere his bilingual French-German edition of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. While enjoying the sights, and soaking up the sun on the beach at Civitavecchia, whenever he had a few moments, “on the beach, on the terrace of a café,” Pinguet recalled that Foucault would open up the book and resume his reading (Pinguet 1986, 130).
Foucault’s interest in Nietzsche in these early years was not just personal. In 1953, Foucault was teaching at Lille, and in addition to a course on “Connaissance de l’homme et rélexion transcendentale” in which he discussed Nietzsche, he also offered “some lectures on Nietzsche” (FDE1, 19). In 1964, at the irst major conference in France to treat Nietzsche seriously as a philosopher – organized by Gilles Deleuze and held at the Abbey at Royaumont – Foucault presented an important paper titled “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (EEW2, 269–278), in which he offered an early indication of how those who later would be called the “masters of suspicion” would dominate critical theory in France for the next several decades. And later, in February 1966, he accepted with Deleuze the responsibility for organizing and editing the French edition of the German critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works – the Kritische Gesamtausgabe – edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, coauthoring with Deleuze in 1967 the “General Introduction” (FDE1, 561–563) that appeared at the beginning of the irst volume of the French Œuvres Philosophiques Complètes, Pierre Klossowski’s translation of Le Gai Savoir.
While the importance of Nietzsche’s analysis of power relations for the works of Foucault’s so-called genealogical period is widely acknowledged, it is important to recognize that Nietzsche’s inluence on and appearance in Foucault’s work began well before Discipline and Punish. In a 1983 interview, Foucault remarks that he irst read Nietzsche “from the perspective of an inquiry into the history of knowledge – the history of reason.” It was, in other words, his effort to “elaborate a history of rationality,” and not his interrogation of power, that irst led him to read Nietzsche (EEW2, 438). Reading Nietzsche made possible one of the decisive events in Foucault’s development insofar as Nietzsche showed the way beyond the phenomenological,