The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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transhistorical subject. Nietzsche showed, in other words, that “There is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason.” At the same time, Nietzsche also demonstrated to Foucault that “we can never demand that the history of reason unfold as a irst and founding act of the rationalist subject” (EEW2, 438).
It is Nietzsche’s disclosure of the history of the subject, the history of reason, and the interrelations of these two histories that dominate Foucault’s early, archaeological works, works that Foucault himself acknowledged owe “more to Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly so called” (EEW2, 294). To understand what these works owe to Nietzsche, we need only look at the way Foucault deploys Nietzsche irst in his thèse complémentaire, “Introduction à l’Anthropologie de Kant,” and again when he returns to many of the same themes in The Order of Things. In his thèse, which accompanied his translation of Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault provides an account of the place of Kant’s Anthropology in relation to the three Critiques as well as the Opus Postumum. The key to this relation is located in Kant’s Logic, where the three questions that guide the Critical Philosophy – “What can I know?” “What should I do?” “What may I hope for?” – now appear along with a fourth: “Was ist der Mensch?” (“What is man?”). This fourth question, Foucault tells us, “gathers [the irst three] together in a single frame of reference” (EIKA, 74), which is to say that the answer to the questions of metaphysics, morality, and religion are, for Kant, ultimately to be found in anthropology.
Foucault further discusses the place of “man” in the Opus Postumum as the synthesis of God and world (see EIKA, 105ff). And it is this further point that allows Foucault to come to his conclusion. First, Foucault comments that, “These three terms, God, the world, and man, in their fundamental relationship to one another, get these notions of source, domain, and limit going again – the organizational persistence and force of which we have already seen at work in Kant’s thought” (EIKA, 105). And it is “in the recurrence of these three notions, their fundamental rootedness, that the movement according to which the conceptual destiny, that is, the problematic, of contemporary philosophy can be seen to take shape” (EIKA, 106). This is to say that for Foucault the entire problematic of post-Kantian philosophy has been located in the interrogation of human initude, which Foucault understands in terms of Kant positioning man (limit) as the synthesis of God (source) and world (domain). Such an understanding explains Nietzsche’s surprising appearance in an “Introduction” to Kant’s Anthropology insofar as Nietzsche also positions a being – but a being other than “man” – as the synthesis of source (values) and domain (Earth). Foucault thus closes his “Introduction à l’Anthropologie de Kant” with the following sentence: “The trajectory of the question Was ist der Mensch? in the ield of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it: der Übermensch” (EIKA, 124).
Readers of The Order of Things are familiar with the role Nietzsche plays in that text,and this is anticipated in other provocative ways in Foucault’s thèse complémentaire.
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To cite just one example, although Foucault notes that in Kant’s Anthropology “language is not yet presented as a system to be interrogated” (EIKA, 100), in The Order of Things he highlights Nietzsche’s role in illing this lacuna insofar as Nietzsche was the irst to connect “the philosophical task with a radical relection upon language” (EOT, 305). It was Nietzsche, in other words, who, long before Heidegger, suggested that one could learn about the genealogy of morality by examining the etymology and evolution of moral terminology (e.g., in the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals). And it was Nietzsche who recognized that a culture’s metaphysics could be traced back to the rules of its grammar, and who recognized that, for example, Descartes’ proof of the cogito rested on the linguistic rule that a verb – thinking – requires a subject – a thinker – and that this very same linguistic prejudice leads to the metaphysical error of adding a doer to the deed (see, e.g., Nietzsche 1966, 17; Nietzsche 1967b, I:13). Insofar as all the structuralists based their theories on the view of language as a system of differences, we can therefore understand why Foucault could regard the question of language as the single most important question confronting the contemporary episteme, which erupted with the question of language as “an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered” (EOT, 305). And insofar as Nietzsche viewed our metaphysical assumptions to be a function of our linguistic rules (grammar as “the metaphysics of the people” [Nietzsche 1974, 354]), and he understood both our metaphysics and our language in terms of the difference between forces, one can understand why Foucault traces the roots of the contemporary episteme, which no longer views man as the privileged center of representational thinking and discourse, back to Nietzsche as its precursor.
Turning from Foucault’s early work to his genealogical period, we again see the Nietzschean inspiration at the heart of Foucault’s thinking about truth, power, and the subject. For Foucault, Nietzsche was the irst to address a certain kind of question to “truth,” a question that no longer restricted truth to the domain of epistemic inquiry or took the value of “truth” as a given. By posing ethical and political questions to “truth,” Nietzsche saw “truth” as an ensemble of discursive rules “linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it” (EEW3, 132). When Nietzsche claimed, in On the Genealogy of Morals, that philosophy must for the irst time confront the question of the value of truth (Nietzsche 1967b, III:24), he recognized that “Truth” was not something given in the order of things, and in so doing Foucault credits him with being the irst to recognize “truth” as something produced within a complex sociopolitical institutional regime. “The problem,” Foucault writes, “is not changing people’s consciousness – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. … The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness, or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche” (EEW3, 133).
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Throughout his career, Foucault drew inspiration both from Nietzsche’s insights linking power, truth, and knowledge and from his rhetoric of will to power, which drew attention away from substances, subjects, and things and focused that attention instead on the relations of forces between these substantives. Following Nietzsche, for Foucault, “power means relations”: “Power in the substantive sense, ‘le’ pouvoir, doesn’t exist. […] The idea that there is either located at – or emanating from – a given point something which is a ‘power’ seems to me to be based on a misguided analysis, one which at all events fails to account for a considerable number of phenomena” (EPK, 198). Where Nietzsche saw a continuum of will to power and sought to incite a becoming-stronger of will to power to rival the progressive becoming-weaker he associated with a degenerating modernity, Foucault saw power relations operating along a continuum of repression and production, and he drew attention to the multiple ways that power operates through the social order while never losing sight of the becoming-productive of power that accompanies the increasingly repressive power of that normalizing, disciplinary, prison society we call “modern.” Contrary to the “repressive hypothesis” that functions as one of the privileged myths of modernity, Foucault shows that resistance is internal to power as a permanent possibility. Foucault argues that power relations are not preeminently repressive, nor do they manifest themselves only in laws that say “no.” They are also productive, traversing and producing things, inducing pleasures, constructing knowledge, forming discourses, and creating truths (cf. EEW3, 119–120). This fundamental ambivalence between repression and production mirrors Nietzsche’s recognition that will to power stands always facing the choice of going under or overcoming.
The inal dimension of Foucault’s Nietzscheanism we will examine is his thinking on the subject, which as we saw was what irst led him to read Nietzsche. Foucault’s early desire, as exempliied in his critique of “man,” to challenge the epistemic and discursive privileging of the subject was directed very explicitly toward the “subject-function” of “man” as the foundation of the modern, a “subject-func- tion” that he sees alive and well in phenomenology and existentialism. But this was not to be Foucault’s inal position on this matter, as is made clear when Foucault returns explicitly to relect on the subject in his late works, for while Foucault has no sympathy for the phenomenological-existential and, in particular, the Sartrean subject (see, e.g., EEW1, 290), he does retrieve a more ambivalent subject whose constitution takes place within the constraints of institutional forces that exceed both its grasp and its recognition.
This is the subject whose genealogy Nietzsche traced in On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1967b, I:13). In an analysis that Foucault discusses in his important early essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (EEW2, 369–391), Nietzsche focuses not on the valorization of origins (Ursprung) but on a critical analysis of the conditions of the subject’s emergence (Entstehung) and descent (Herkunft). Pursuing this genealogy, Nietzsche locates the subject not as a metaphysical given but as a historical
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construct whose conditions of emergence are far from innocent. The “subject” is not only a superluous postulation of a “‘being’ behind doing,” a “doer” ictionally added to the deed. In addition, the belief in this postulate is exploited by slave morality both to convince the strong that they are free to be weak – and therefore are accountable for their failure to be weak – and to convince the weak that they are, in reality, strong and should therefore take pride in having freely chosen – by refraining from action – to be weak. For Nietzsche, “the subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) … makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit” (Nietzsche 1967b, I:13). For this reason, Nietzsche directs his genealogical gaze to the life-negating uses made of the principle of subjectivity in the service of a “hangman’s metaphysics” that invented the concept of the responsible subject in order to hold it accountable and judge it guilty (Nietzsche 1968, VI:7).
In Discipline and Punish, his most Nietzschean text, Foucault for all practical purposes reproduces Nietzsche’s analysis when he argues that the history of the microphysics of punitive power would be an element in the genealogy of the modern “soul” (EDP, 29). Foucault addresses this soul most explicitly in the discussion of the construction of the delinquent as a responsible subject, arguing in Nietzschean fashion that there is a subtle transformation in the exercise of power when punishment is no longer directed at the delinquent’s actions (his “doing”) but at his very person, his “being” as (a) delinquent. And Foucault returns to this argument at a crucial moment in the irst volume of The History of Sexuality, when he notes the point at which the homosexual is no longer simply the performer of certain “forbidden acts” but instead has emerged as a subject with a “singular nature,” a new “species” (EHS1, 43).
By the end of his career, as his attention turned, in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, speciically to sexuality, his thinking moved from the constitution of the subject as an object of knowledge and discipline to the ethical practices of subjectiication (assujetissement) and “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport à soi, which [he calls] ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as an ethical subject of his own actions” (EEW1, 263, translation altered). In thinking about the construction of the ethical subject, Foucault himself came to see that the question of the subject, or more accurately the question of subjectiication – the transformation of human beings into subjects of knowledge, subjects of power, and subjects to themselves – had been “the general theme of [his] research” (EEW3, 327). Even here, however, as his thinking turned to the Greeks and his overt references to Nietzsche diminished, Foucault continued to see his own trajectory framed by the Nietzschean project of creatively constructing oneself through giving style to one’s life (cf. EEW1, 261–262).
Alan D. Schrift
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See Also
Genealogy
Power
Gilles Deleuze
Immanuel Kant
Suggested Reading
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1995. “The Signiicance of Michel Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche: Power, the Subject, and Political Theory,” in Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter R.
Sedgwick. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 13–30.
Mahon, Michael. 1992. Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject. Albany:
The SUNY Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Random House.
1967. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. 1968. Twilight of the Idols, trans. Reginald J. Hollingdale. Middlesex: Penguin Books. 1974. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Random House.
Pinguet, Maurice. 1986. “Les Années d’apprentissage,” Le Debat 41 (September–November):
122–131.
Schrift, Alan D. 1995. Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. New York:
Routledge.
Sluga, Hans. 2005. “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
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PLATO (428–347 BCE)
Foucault worked on Plato’s texts during the inal years of his productive life (1981–1984) across three large problematic dimensions: the erotic, the ethical, and the political. The problem of the Platonic erotic was posed on the basis of an interrogation of the relation between boys in ancient culture. In a general way, Foucault shows how sexuality in the Greeks is not considered, as in the Christian epoch, through the ilter of a code of interdictions and the requirement of a suspicious decipherment of one’s own desire. Instead, sexuality is considered on the basis of the problem of a relation of the self to the self in terms of commandment and government. The aphodisias (the things of love) appear, for example, to the
Greeks as dangerous, not because they would be a igure of Evil but because their proper energy (the impulse of love, the search for satisfaction of carnal pleasure) risks, each time, to make us lose the rigorous control over ourselves. Just as a master of the home must learn to manage his expenses correctly in order to guarantee his family’s prosperity, the sexual subject must manage his pleasures correctly and develop in himself the qualities of moderation. If not, he will only suffer events, he will be carried away by his desires, and he will ind himself in a condemnable position of passivity. Within this very general framework that valorizes the principle of activity, homosexual love affairs do not constitute an absolute speciicity, because the problem posed is not that of the object of sexual desire (a man or a woman) but that of the internal dynamic of sexuality (a force that is at times dificult to control). For Foucault (in The Use of Pleasure), Plato’s Symposium (Diotima’s speech) and his Phaedrus (the inal myth) represent, within this Greek problematic of pleasures and amorous relations with boys, a certain shift in direction. In effect, Plato no longer poses to the aphrodisist the question of their use (what strategy should be adopted in order to subdue their energy?) but that of their essential nature (what is the truth of love?). Plato represents the passage from the deontology to the ontology of amorous desire. Now, through a moment of reduction and of spiritualization, amorous
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desire is analyzed as an impulse toward the truth that starts out by directing itself toward the wrong object; the tension that pushes us to look for pleasure with beautiful people is recodiied as a restless search for eternal Ideas. For Foucault, Plato is the one who poses the problem of the truth of love and understands the genuine love as the love of the truth. To truly love a young man is to struggle with him against the deceptive illusion of carnal pleasures and to reorient the set of desires toward what unites them in an authentic way: the pure truth of the logos. This transformation is central because it poses, within sexual ethics, new principles: the necessity of a dificult struggle and of a permanent puriication; the formulation of a rigorous austerity that can go as far as renouncing every relation to the lesh. Platonic erotics proposes ethical demands that will be rediscovered in Christianity.
Foucault’s reading of Plato is also very important in the elaboration of a central concept, which is “the care of the self.” As the 1982 course at the Collège de France (“The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” ECF-HOS) shows, Foucault constructs, on the basis of Plato’s Alcibiades, the theme of “the care of the self,” which for him characterizes ancient ethics – outside of the speciic problem of sexual pleasure. In a general way, Foucault is going to oppose an ancient care of the self, whose irst formulation is found in Plato, to a modern introspection. This opposition allows him to think that there is something like a history of subjectivity. The ancient subject must take care of himself; that is, the ancient must regularly turn back to himself and examine himself carefully. But this turning back is not introspective. What is not at issue, within the framework of the care of the self, is a psychological self-decipherment, through which the subject would discover his secret nature or his hidden identity. For example, in the Alcibiades, Socrates simply asks Alcibiades (who has launted his intention to enter politics and concern himself with the affairs of the polis) the following question: before you concern yourself with the affairs of others, have you thought of concerning yourself with yourself? However, this is not to say that you would do better to concern yourself with yourself instead of concerning yourself with the polis.
This question means that you will take better care of others insofar as you take care of yourself correctly. The care of the self does not appear as a narcissistic invitation to be self-centered and be concerned solely with one’s own person. It is an invitation to work on oneself, a regulation of one’s behavior so that one will be able to act on and with others in a just, coherent, and effective way. For example, how would one be able to claim to dominate the anger of the people or to be able to denounce public corruption, if one has not already done a work on oneself to quiet one’s own its of rage or one’s own lust? The order that must reign in the polis must also reign in the individual. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates appears precisely as the master of the care of the self. Foucault’s second reference point is the great dialogue of the Apology.
Here, Socrates is described as the one whose mission is precisely to care in such a way that each takes care of himself. In his inal course at the Collège de France
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(“The Courage of Truth,” ECF-COT), Foucault returns to the Platonic form of the care of the self, but by dividing it. This division of the care of the self allows him to establish a fundamental alternative to Western philosophy on the basis of Plato. Plato laid out two ways: that of wisdom and that of metaphysics (ECF-COT, 127). The way of wisdom (presented, according to Foucault, in the Laches) demands of the subject that he pose the problem of the form that he must give to his existence, the rules of conduct that he must adopt, the problem of the coherence of his discourse and his actions, of the techniques by which he will be able to obtain ethical results. This irst Platonic way is also what Foucault calls an “aesthetics of existence.” Taking care of oneself amounts to imposing qualities of order and harmony on one’s existence. The second way is that of metaphysics, which Foucault lays out on the basis of the inal sentences of the Alcibiades. The subject is called not to transform his way of life but to concentrate himself on the nature of his soul, to come to know the soul in its ontological principle, to recognize in the soul the mirror of a divine essence, to use one's soul as a support in order to go behind the curtain of sensible appearances and to merge with with the world of eternal essences. To care for oneself is to rediscover the divine portion of one’s soul. This alternative within Platonism is, for Foucault, fundamental, for it outlines two distinct kinds of questioning: How to live? Or what is the soul in its truth? This originary division of philosophy is reconigured at the end of the 1984 course when Foucault takes into account ancient Cynicism. Cynicism is a philosophy of ethical provocation. The Cynic breaks the set of social codes, transgresses all the social conventions, by leading a scandalous existence. But this different existence constitutes at the same time a call to the transformation of the world by means of the denunciation of its hypocrisies and injustices. In contrast, Platonism, for Foucault, invites a puriication of the soul by means of the logos. This askesis constitutes at the same time a preparation for a higher life in another world, that of the intelligible essences (ECF-COT, 319). Plato then appears as the thinker of the identity between the soul and the logos, which founds a philosophy of transcendent truth. Diogenes, in contrast, commits philosophy to the path of the immanent transformation of self and of the world.
In 1983, Foucault proposed a series of lectures on parresia, a Greek term that means frankness and that Foucault translates by “truth-telling” or even by “the courage of truth.” Parresia designates a speaking that is direct and frank, the kind of speech that clearly states its convictions and takes the risk of making people unhappy. The one who speaks frankly puts himself in danger by stating unbearable truths to those who are listening. Foucault considers that parresia is a forgotten foundation of Greek democracy. In fact, thanks to parresia, democracy can remain authentic and does not decline into demagogy. For example, the way in which Socrates addresses himself to his judges during his trial derives from the idea of parresia. He does not try to seduce them; rather, he provokes them. Plato himself, over the duration of his
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life, would have undergone this parresia, at the moment of his confrontation with the tyrant of Syracuse. Foucault studies this story of Plato and Dionysus both in the narrative that Plutarch provides and in Plato's own version in the “Seventh Letter.” Two remarks are in order in relation to Foucault’s reading of this narrative. First, Foucault observes that Platonic parresia functions in a framework different from democracy. Plato proves his courage not before a people who are unreliable and who can be inluenced; Plato is courageous before an omnipotent tyrant. But, second, what is most important lies in the fact that Plato, by deciding to go to Syracuse, determines philosophy to be a test of oneself and of others rather than as a system of eternal truths made available to future readers. Foucault’s interpretation of the “Seventh Letter” is entirely remarkable and original. He inds in this text the statement of a conception of philosophy that is removed from the fascination with a logos that is abstract and separated from contingencies. Plato went to Syracuse, as he himself explains, because he considered that philosophy must test its own reality. Philosophy must not simply be logos (discourse); it must also be ergon (work). In
1983, Foucault strove to establish that Plato, in the “Seventh Letter,” deined philosophy as practice, at once as a self-practice and as a political practice (ECF-GSO, 209–219). Philosophy is not a simple system of knowledge that must keep watch over its internal logical validity. Philosophy is a practice: a practice of truth that must test its own reality by accepting its task of standing up to the political world. It is a self-practice that presupposes a whole ascetical work and an internal discipline. Nevertheless, the philosopher is not the one who must constitute political programs that the rulers must carry out. Foucault’s analysis of the “Seventh Letter” provides a new presentation of the philosopher-king. This igure does not mean that the philosopher must govern because his knowledge is more extensive and his science is superior. Philosophy does not have to bring to political humans the knowledge that they lack. Philosophy has to bring the demand of an ethical structuration made of patience, courage, and irmness.
Foucault’s readings of Plato therefore have been variable and at times contradictory. One can map out four great interpretative strategies. Plato is irst presented as the one who simply brings forward a general apparatus of classical Greek thought (this is the example of his erotics in relation to the classical position of sexual relations with boys). But Plato can also be thought of as the one who introduced a forgotten foundation of the ethics of the ancients (this is the example of the care of the self as the Socratic interrogation par excellence). Third, Plato can be thought of as the initiator of a way or of several ways that would outline crucial divisions throughout the whole of Western philosophy (this is the example of the alternative between an aesthetic of existence and a metaphysics of the soul). Finally, in Foucault, through a inal, substantial strategy, on the basis of a very precise reading, we see a different Plato appear (this is the example of the “Seventh Letter,” which presents philosophy as a practice of the self rather than as a doctrine of knowledge). This complex array
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of interpretative strategies could be found as well in Foucault’s treatment of other great igures of philosophy; for example, Descartes or Kant.
Frédéric Gros
See Also
Care
Parresia
Philosophy
Truth
The Ancients (Stoics and Cynics)
Suggested Reading
Davidson, Arnold. 1994. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–140.
Gros, Frédéric, and Carlos Lévy, eds. 2003. Foucault et la philosophie antique. Paris: Kimé.