The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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conviction that “hope is part of man. Human action is transcendent” (Sartre and Lévy 1996, 53).
Late in life, Foucault seemed to approximate Sartre’s mantra when he explained:
I’m very careful to get a grip on the actual mechanisms of the exercises of power; I do this because those who are enmeshed, involved, in these power relations, in their actions, in their resistance, their rebellion, escape them, transform them, in a word, cease being submissive. And if I don’t say what needs to be done, it isn’t because I believe there is nothing to be done. On the contrary, I think there are a thousand things that can be done, invented, contrived by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are involved, have decided to resist them or escape them. From that viewpoint, all my research rests on a postulate of absolute optimism. (EEW3, 294)
We have just seen that the Critique does respect the formalization of analytic reason. Sartre even describes his projected study of Gustave Flaubert’s life and times as the response to the question whether “today we have the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology” (Sartre 1968, xxxiv). Yet Sartre accords a threefold primacy to free organic praxis – epistemic, ontological, and moral. Indeed, he calls comprehension (hermeneutical understanding) “the translucidity of praxis to itself” (Sartre 2004, 74), though allowing in his Flaubert study almost offhand that ideology could cloud the clear vision of consciousness (Sartre 1981–1993, volume 1, 141). Again, he seems held fast in the anthropological quadrilateral by its two methodological corners. But, to continue my analogy, each of these conining corners is adapted by Sartre in such a way that they enable him to break free of the neat limitations that Foucault would impose on him. We have just seen how Sartre’s adoption of the dialectic is not a commitment to identity over difference, except in the admittedly “futile passion” to be self-identical. The “othering” character of consciousness (articulated in intentionality) constitutes and sustains the gap in which creativity (the imaginary), the ethical, and the political can function freely, though always “in situation.”
In Search for a Method, Sartre “repeats with Marxism: there are only men and real relations between men” (Sartre 1968, 74). The ontology of these all-important relations is not addressed explicitly except to call them “real” as presumably opposed to merely “nominal.” But one factor enabling Sartre to escape this quadrilateral is his robust ontological realism – precisely what led him to move away from Husserl of the Ideas. That rage for nonlinguistic reality liberated him from the conines of Foucault’s alleged dalliance with linguistic idealism in The Order of Things even as it turned Foucault toward nonlinguistic power relations in his genealogical pursuits. In other words, Foucault, too, seemed aware of that threat toward the end of the book,
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when he raised the question of “what language must be in order to structure in this way what is nevertheless not in itself either word or discourse, and in order to articulate itself on the pure forms of knowledge” (EOT, 382), for insofar as the sides of the quadrilateral map over the four modalities of the linguistic sign that yield archaeologically the episteme of the classical age, even if they are inverted in Nietzschean fashion with “Man” displacing “Name” in the modern model, Sartrean existentialism resists surrender to the empire of the sign or the emerging realm of structuralist “signiication.” Sartre once quipped, “le signiiant [signiier] c’est moi.” But even this is an exaggeration because the ontological locus of language for Sartre is the practico-inert, and the individual is both signiier and signiied (signiiant et signiié).
Ontologically, language does not “speak” the speaker even if it is a basic ingredient of the human situation, as Sartre pointed out in Being and Nothingness. For him, too much is at stake in ignoring this constitutive relation, namely the existentialist values of freedom and moral responsibility, to name the two most important. These have remained deining features of existentialist thought. And it is not pushing the envelope too far to note that in several respects the “inal Foucault” seemed to gesture in this direction with his talk of experience, as we shall see.
Humanism. Broadly speaking, one can say that humanism, anthropology, and dialectical thought for Foucault are intertwined. While analytical reason, in Foucault’s mind, is incompatible with humanism, “dialectic appeals to humanism secondarily” for several reasons: because it is a philosophy of history, because it is a philosophy of human practice, and because it is a philosophy of alienation and reconciliation. For these reasons and because fundamentally it is always a philosophy of return to the self (soi-même), dialectic in a sense promises the human being that he will become an authentic and true man. It promises man to man and to this extent is inseparable from a humanist ethic (morale). In this sense, the parties most responsible for contemporary humanism are evidently Hegel and Marx (FDE1, 541). And one could add, “Sartre is the last Hegelian and even the last Marxist” (FDE1, 542). The link between humanism and dialectic is perplexing because, among other things, Sartre would have encased “bourgeois” humanism precisely in the bad faith of the bourgeoisie and its analytical rationality: it is conidence in its “right” to govern. In effect, what Sartre despised is the racism, the anti-Semitism and the nascent fascism of the French middle class, as captured in his novel Nausea and short story “The Childhood of a Leader.” His is a humanism of labor, a “socialist” humanism minus the Socialist Party.
But the humanist ethic? That is another story. A naturalist ethic? Yes. And an ethic of persons and not abstract principles, to be sure, as well as an ethic that is creative and willing to respect and foster the freedom of others. Foucault, who distinguished ethics (action of the self on itself) from morals (a set of principles and codes) (Flynn 2005, 347n7) in The Uses of Pleasure, does seem to approximate the
Sartrean (actually Nietzschean) notion of moral creativity, but at the risk of slipping
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into aestheticism. Again, he runs this risk with Sartre, who, noting the resemblance between moral choice and aesthetic creativity in Existentialism Is a Humanism, warned his critics not to confuse this with aestheticism, though he predicted they would.
Authenticity. In notes from conversations that Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow held with Foucault at Berkeley in 1983, we catch glimpses of an ethic for our time that he is in the process of sketching. Following an earlier remark, they ask him: “But if one is to create oneself without recourse to knowledge or universal rules, how does your view differ from Sartrean existentialism?” In reply, Foucault insists that Sartre misses the mark by linking the practice of creativity to the moral notion of authenticity, which Foucault (mis)interprets as faithfulness to a “true self”: “The theme of authenticity whether explicitly or not, refers to a mode of being of a subject deined by its adequation to itself (lui-même).” On the contrary, Foucault believes that the relation to the self ought to be described in terms of multiple possible modalities, only one of which is authenticity. This requires the practice of certain “techniques of the self” and not merely a shift in discourse (FDE4, 617ff, revised in French edition). One could question whether authenticity is merely one value among equals or, as Sartre seems to imply, enjoys at least a primacy among equals, if not a certain power to trump other considerations, all things being equal. Given the admitted impossibility of reaching a level playing ield in a persistent capitalist and racist society – in Sartre’s account – perhaps a certain amount of “amoral realism” seemed called for during his four years of fellow traveling with the French Communist Party (1952–1956). But it was their call for justice in addition to a penchant for “direct action” that attracted Sartre to the Maoists in the later 1960s – a politico-ethical stance he seemed to share with Foucault in those years (Sartre, Gavi, and Victor 1974, 79).
A parallel moral matter arises when we consider Foucault’s last lectures on The Courage of Truth ( parresia) at the Collège de France and at Berkeley the previous term. Briely stated, his survey of parresia as a political virtue the irst semester (you told the prince the truth even if it cost you your head) and a moral virtue the second (you admitted the truth about yourself even if it cost you your self-image) – raised a mixture of political and ethical issues that transformed and displaced parresia from the institutional horizon to the horizon of individual practice of ethos formation (see FCF-CV, 62). But in fact this “parresiastic” account in the broad sense of considering all three poles of truth-telling – the scientiic, the political, and the ethical – in their irreducible yet essential interrelationship, Foucault insists, “has characterized philosophical discourse from the Greeks to our day” (ibid.). I leave it to the reader to consider how Foucauldian “parresia” might map over Sartrean “authenticity” if the cognitive and political dimensions of the latter were elaborated as Sartre proposes (Flynn 2005, 280–282).
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Experience. Foucault distinguished two paths taken by French philosophers in the wake of Husserl’s famous Cartesian Meditations lecture delivered in Paris in 1929.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty pursued the “philosophy of experience, of meaning and of the subject,” whereas the philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept was followed by Cavaillès, Canguilhem, and presumably himself (EEW2, 466). Still, it is signiicant that the concept of experience igures importantly throughout his works. Foucault called the History of Madness his “experience book” and spoke openly about experience in an interview with Duccio Trombadori late in his career. The last two volumes of his History of Sexuality analyze the “experience of sexuality” in the ancient world. Above all, when charting his lifelong inquiries along the three axes or “poles” of his thought (truth, power, and subjectiication) with his characteristic appeal to spatial metaphors, he describes the space they enclose and their “matrix” as experience. One should not marvel, then, that Pierre Macherey would call “experience” a concept that lies at the center of Foucault’s thought (Macherey 1986, 753–754).
Has Foucault changed his mind? Or was his use of “experience” so polyvalent that it could travel comfortably along the path of the concept? Briely, I would suggest that what troubles him about the use employed by Sartre and initially by MerleauPonty as well was their linkage of experience with consciousness as if the expression “unconscious experience” was an oxymoron – and so it seemed to be for Sartre. But with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “operational intentionality” and the Lacanian understanding of the unconscious structured like a language, the link between consciousness, intentionality, and experience seemed weakened, if not broken entirely. Thus Foucault could raise the question: “Can’t there be experiences in the course of which the subject is no longer posited, in its constitutive relations, as what makes it identical with itself? Might there not be experiences in which the subject might be able to dissociate from itself, sever the relation with itself, lose its identity? Isn’t that the essence of Nietzsche’s experience of eternal recurrence?” (EEW3, 248).
What is the upshot of the foregoing comparison and contrast? To adopt Foucauldian spatial metaphors, one can say that his thought is prismatic (three poles of truth, power, and subjectiication rising indeinitely from their experiential matrix), whereas Sartre’s thought is pyramidal (all sides converging in a responsible agent whose inner life is free; that is, “othering”). If we choose the model of searchlights or Venn diagrams, one can recognize a certain overlap and intensiication of positions from differing perspectives. Each model is suggestive by its very limitations. The challenge, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty once more, is to award each a voice in the conversation without letting it devolve into a dialogue of the deaf.
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See Also
Experience
Parresia
Phenomenology
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Suggested Reading
Flynn, Thomas R. 1997. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2005. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Macherey, Pierre. 1986. “Aux Sources de ‘Histoire de la folie,’” Critique 442 (August–
September): 753–774.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia
Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical
Library.
1966. “Jean-Paul Sartre répond,” L’arc 30:87–96.
1968. Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Vintage Books. 1981–1993. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, trans. Carol Cosman, 5 vols.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan
Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Philippe Gavi, and Pierre Victor (a.k.a. Benny Lévy). 1974. On a raison de se révolter. Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Benny Lévy. 1996. Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian Ven Den
Hoven. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)
Foucault’s references to Shakespeare are infrequent but revealing.
Apart from a passing allusion to the sonnets, he refers exclusively to the tragedies and histories. In each case, he calls attention to aspects of Shakespeare’s representations of death: irst the relationship between death and dreaming, then the relationship between death and madness, and inally the relationship between death
and sovereignty.
(1) Death and dreaming. In “Dream, Imagination, and Existence,” Foucault argues that dreaming interrupts sleep by representing the dreaming subject’s own death. This idea prompts him to recall the voice that cries “Macbeth doth murder sleep!” Building on the existential analyses of Heidegger and Binswanger, Foucault contrasts authentic death (the “proper” end of an existing being) with inauthentic death (the “accidental” death that threatens existence from outside). From this distinction, it would be a short step to Freud’s opposition between the aims of the death drive and Eros; authentic death would be the aim of the death drive, whereas inauthentic death would be the unintended death that happens to cut lourishing life short. Foucault, however, resists this Freudian interpretation. If to be mortal is to move with sovereign freedom toward a death that is both authentic and adventitious, the two seemingly opposing tendencies must ultimately coincide. Foucault inds this view admirably expressed in the coincidence of the two interpretations of Calpurnia’s dream in Julius Caesar. Caesar reports, “She dreamt tonight she saw my statue, / Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts, / Did run pure blood.” Calpurnia is right to take her dream to be the ominous sign that it is of the danger that might befall Caesar if he goes to the Capitol. At the same time, Decius Brutus, despite his insincerity, is no less justiied in interpreting the dream as an expression of Caesar’s sovereign destiny to be Rome’s great benefactor. The two interpretations
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coincide, for Caesar will fulill his destiny precisely by unexpectedly falling at the hands of the conspirators. For Foucault, death, in general, resolves an apparent antinomy “between freedom and the world.” He concludes that “in every case death is the absolute meaning of the dream.” Reiterating the opposition between sleep and death, he returns once more to Macbeth: “Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, / And look on death itself!” (EDE, 54–55).
(2)Death and madness. In his other major text from the 1950s, Foucault characterizes both Shakespeare and Cervantes as writers who “attest to the great prestige of madness” during the Renaissance (EMIP, 67). In History of Madness, he goes one step further, suggesting that Shakespeare and Cervantes depict a “tragic experience of madness born in the ifteenth century more than they relect the critical or moral experience of unreason that is nonetheless a product of their era” (EHM, 37). Shakespeare, then, is located on the cusp of a historical divide. From the earlier, tragic point of view, madness is essentially linked to death: to succumb to madness is to cross a threshold from which no traveler returns alive. In support of this idea, Foucault mentions the examples of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and King Lear. In later seventeenth-century drama, madness no longer represents a point of no return but becomes instead a stage on a journey, a temporary condition from which it is possible to be redeemed. We may wonder if Lear’s madness, cured by sleep, is closer to this later model than Foucault suggests, but the suicides of Ophelia and Lady Macbeth underscore his point. Ophelia’s drowning relects an association of madness and water that runs across the two periods, a continuity that Foucault highlights in the context of wondering why the motif of the ship of fools suddenly came to the fore in ifteenth-century painting and literature (EHM, 12). He does not locate this motif in Shakespeare, but he does suggest that the wanderings of Lear and the Fool attest to the same sort of liberty that was granted to the mad during the Renaissance (EHM, 77). In “Madness and Society” (1970), he mentions Lear’s Fool as an exemplary representative of the early modern igure of the “licensed” fool who knows more than everyone else (EEW2, 340).
(3)Death and sovereignty. The madness of Lear is referred to again in Foucault’s
1973–1974 lectures on psychiatric power, but the emphasis has now shifted to questions concerning political sovereignty. After Lear abdicates and inds himself subject to the tyranny of his ungrateful daughters, his ensuing madness symbolically expresses his transformation from sovereign to subject. Richard III (whose foreboding dream anticipates his own death) is subject to a similar threat. Such crises of sovereignty attest to the fragility of the medieval legal iction of the “King’s Two Bodies.” Ernst Kantorowicz, whom Foucault cites in Discipline and Punish, argues that this fragility is most perspicuous in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Foucault observes that by the end of the eighteenth century, the relationship between sovereignty, madness, and death had come to be represented in an entirely new way.
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Pinel’s description of Willis’s cure of George III’s madness depicts “a completely different type of power ... an anonymous, nameless and faceless power that is distributed between different persons” (ECF-PP, 21). In his lectures on “the abnormal” the following year, Foucault identiied “the infamy of sovereignty” or “the discredited sovereign” as “Shakespeare’s problem” (ECF-AB, 13). The next year, in Society Must Be Defended, Shakespeare’s “‘historical’ tragedies” are said to relect “the problems of public right,” speciically “the problem of the usurper and dethronement, of the murder of kings and the birth of the new being who is constituted by the coronation of a king” (ECF-SMD, 174–175). Shakespeare’s “sad stories of the death of kings” are typical of tragedy in general. In modernity, the rise of the novel is correlated with a shift from the juridical problem of right to the statistical problem of the norm. This idea recalls Foucault’s earlier discussions of the loss of tragic experience and the differences between Lear’s and George III’s loss of sanity and sovereignty. In his 1977–1978 lectures, Foucault briely mentions the theme of the coup d’état in Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine.
Besides these three major thanatological topoi, Foucault refers in passing to Roussel’s “imitation of Shakespeare” (EDL, 98) and to French classical indifference to Shakespeare (in connection with Nietzsche’s conception of “great epochs”) (EEW2, 384). More suggestive is his allusion in “What Is an Author?” to the notorious authorship controversy: “If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house we visit today, this is a modiication that, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author’s name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a signiicant change and affect the manner in which the author’s name functions” (EEW2, 210).
Despite the relative brevity of his remarks about Shakespeare, Foucault has had a major impact on Shakespeare studies, notably through his inluence on New Historicist criticism. Richard Wilson recounts some of the Foucauldian themes (such as panopticism and disciplinary power) that critics have found in Shakespeare’s plays.
Andrew Cutrofello
See Also
Death
Madness
Sovereignty
Raymond Roussel
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Suggested Reading
Howard, Jean E. 2004. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” in Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945–2000, ed. Russ McDonald. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 458–480.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1997. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Thought.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, Richard. 2007. Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows. New York: Routledge, esp. chap. 2: “Prince of Darkness: Foucault’s Renaissance,” pp. 75–122.
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CARL VON CLAUSE WITZ (1780–1831)
Carl von Clausewitz was a German general and military theorist.
Foucault’s engagement with Clausewitz is primarily around the latter’s most famous saying, that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” The idea here is that war is an extension, a certain form, of the political process that goes
on between nations.
Foucault’s best-known mention of this dictum is probably that in volume one of his History of Sexuality (EHS1, 93), but he examines it in more detail and names Clausewitz as its originator in the lecture series Society Must Be Defended (ECFSMD, 15). Foucault’s move here is to invert Clausewitz’s dictum, to say that it is not so much that war is a continuation of politics as that politics is a continuation of war. Foucault thus puts himself explicitly at odds with Clausewitz, inasmuch as he seems to be saying the opposite thing to Clausewitz. For Foucault, war shows us the nature of power relations in a way that is concealed in “peaceful” politics but still continues to operate beneath the surface. War and politics are for him different ways of “encoding” power relations. Foucault contrasts this understanding of power with a “juridical” model of power that sees power as essentially a matter of rules and hierarchy. For Foucault, rules and hierarchy are manoeuvres within a social war. From this perspective, he sees himself as following a tradition of European political thought with antecedents including Friedrich Nietzsche, and much of left-wing thought, with its emphasis on class struggle underlying our apparently peaceful institutions. By contrast, Clausewitz would seem to belong to the mainstream of thinking about war and politics, which sees the former as an adjunct to a stable, established politics. Indeed, Foucault thinks his “inversion” of Clausewitz is in fact older than Clausewitz’s position, which itself inverted an older position, and which did not in fact originate with Clausewitz (ECF-SMD, 48).
However, it is not clear how much inverting the statement in either direction actually changes its meaning. Whether war is held to be another form of politics or
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