Foucault's Legacy (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Foucault’s Legacy

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Foucault’s Legacy, edited by C. G. Prado Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

Foucault’s Legacy

Edited by C. G. Prado

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © C. G. Prado and Contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: 1-8470-6595-3 (Hardback) ISBN-13: 978-1-8470-6595-7 (Hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foucault’s legacy/edited by C. G. Prado. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-8470-6595-7 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. I. Prado, C. G. II. Title. B2430.F724F74 2009 194–dc22

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Contents

Contributors

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Editor’s introduction C. G. Prado

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1. The temporality of power David Couzens Hoy

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2. A philosophical shock: Foucault reading Nietzsche, reading Heidegger Babette E. Babich

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3. Foucault, Hegel, and the death of man Tom Rockmore

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4. After knowledge and liberty: Foucault and the new pragmatism Barry Allen

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5. Two uses of genealogy: Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams Colin Koopman

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6. Weakening ontology through actuality: Foucault and Vattimo Santiago Zabala

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7. Foucault, Secularization theory, and the theological origins of totalitarianism Michael Lackey

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8. Secular self-sacrifice: on Michel Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France James Bernauer

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Select bibliography Index

161 167

Contributors

Barry Allen, McMaster University; author of Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (Cornell 2008), Knowledge and Civilization (Westview 2004), Truth in Philosophy (Harvard 1993), and numerous articles on Foucault, Nietzsche, and pragmatism. Babette E. Babich, Fordham University; executive editor of New Nietzsche Studies; author of Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger (SUNY 2006), Habermas, Nietzsche, and Critical Theory (Humanity 2004), and other books. James Bernauer, Boston College; author of Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Humanities Press 1990); co-editor of special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism (September 2005) commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Michel Foucault’s death, co-editor of Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience (Ashgate 2004). David Couzens Hoy, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz; author of The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (MIT 2009), Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (MIT 2004), Critical Theory (with Thomas McCarthy, Blackwell 1994), The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (University of California 1982); editor of Foucault: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 1986). Colin Koopman, Humanities Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz; author of Pragmatism as Transitionalism (forthcoming), ‘Revising Foucault’ (Philosophy and Social Criticism, forthcoming), ‘Foucault’s Methodological Expansion: Adding Genealogy to Archaeology’ (Journal of the Philosophy of History, forthcoming), and other articles. Michael Lackey, University of Minnesota; author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Sociocultural Dynamics of Faith (Univ. Press of Florida 2007), Modernist God States: A Literary Study of the Theological Origins of Totalitarianism (forthcoming), and many articles. C. G. Prado (editor), Queen’s University (emeritus); author of Choosing to Die: Elective Death and Multiculturalism (Cambridge 2008), Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge 2006), and other books; editor of A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Humanity 2003) and other collections.

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Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University; McAnulty College Distinguished Professor; author of Kant and Idealism (Yale 2007), Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy (Yale 2005), On Foundationalism (Rowman and Littlefield 2004), other books and many articles. Santiago Zabala, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University Institute of Philosophy; author of The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (Columbia 2008) and The Remains of Being (forthcoming); editor of Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Gianni Vattimo (McGill-Queen’s 2007) and Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo’s The Future of Religion (Columbia University Press 2005).

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Editor’s introduction C. G. Prado

How does one assess a philosopher’s legacy? In the case of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of the latter twentieth century, one can begin by considering the reputation that he acquired during his lifetime and the impact of his works on notable scholars in all the disciplines of the human sciences. But assessment of his philosophical legacy inevitably focuses on his influence on thinkers in his own canonical tradition. Contrary to this, it is also necessary to consider the broader impact of his central ideas on philosophers outside his methodological and canondefined intellectual milieu. In the case of Foucault, this latter is not an easy task. There has been notable lack of engagement with Foucault on the part of philosophers in the analytic tradition.1 Despite this disinterest, though, Foucault’s central ideas have had an impact. If evidence of Foucault’s far-reaching influence is required, one need look no further than statements by his biographers and commentators on his writings. ‘At the time of his death,’ as James Miller writes, ‘Michel Foucault was perhaps the single most famous intellectual in the world.’2 Alan Ryan is still more positive, saying that Foucault ‘was the most famous intellectual figure in the world’ when he died.3 David Macey makes the more modest claim that at his death Foucault ‘was without doubt France’s most prominent philosopher,’ but he adds that Foucault’s international reputation ‘almost eclipsed his reputation in France.’4 Miller makes a further comment that is most relevant to the articles that follow in this collection; he tells us that scholars across the academic spectrum continue to grapple with the implications of Foucault’s research and dwell on the abstract questions he raised.5 Jonathan Arac is more assertive, contending that ‘Foucault’s work . . . changed the basis for the work of all scholars.’6 One may be forgiven for suspecting such claims to be exaggerated; it is commonplace for followers of theorists to express over-enthusiasm for the work of their favorites and to overstate its originality or importance. But in the case of this rather enigmatic figure, the claims seem not to be

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exaggerated. High estimation of Foucault is evident in disciplines from political science through cultural geography, sociology, and literary criticism to film studies. There also is an extensive feminist literature on Foucault, much of it favorable to his views or building on his insights and contentions. Nor is this interest in Foucault limited to professional academics; students in various disciplines often are even more enthusiastic about Foucault than their professors, considering him a champion in the struggle against what they regard as stultifying disciplinary traditions. But as noted, many, if not most analytic philosophers see Foucault as a tradition-destroying postmodern and a threatening relativist. Foucault was aware of this hostility, but seemed to relish it, claiming he was ‘very proud’ that some thought him dangerous for being ‘an irrationalist, a nihilist.’7 What Foucault likely found more difficult to deal with was dismissal or indifference, and that is what he got from the world of analytic philosophy. As Didier Eribon remarks, Foucault was ‘completely ignored by most American philosophers.’8 Foucault failed to engage even Richard Rorty, a philosopher who escaped—some would say transcended—his early analytic background to become North America’s answer to European postmodernism in general and to Foucault in particular. What is undeniable is that Foucault raised serious and demanding questions about ‘the reach of power and the limits of knowledge, the origins of moral responsibility and the foundations of modern government, the character of historical inquiry and the nature of personal identity.’9 A complication with assessing this influence, though, is that, like Nietzsche, Foucault is all things to all people. Eribon remarks that ‘there are several Foucaults—a thousand Foucaults.’ Eribon also quotes Georges Dumézil, ‘who knew [Foucault] better than almost anyone else,’ as saying that Foucault ‘wore masks, and he was always changing them.’10 The key to this multiplicity is Foucault’s own heartfelt assertion that the intellectual’s mandate is ‘[t]o change something in the minds of people.’11 He could not imagine what intellectual activity can consist of ‘if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently.’12 Speaking of his own work, Foucault maintained that when he wrote, he did it ‘above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before.’13 But this objective, which Foucault achieved with impressive success, insured that attempting to assess his legacy is a difficult task. What is certain, however, is that driven as he was to seek novelty of thought, Foucault, again like Nietzsche, was a profoundly oppositional thinker. He was a critic and a genealogist whose analyses aimed at alterity. Foucault was a lover not only of masks but also of irony; he was a master

Introduction

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of suspicion, and the very fact that a discipline, a methodology, a history, or an issue was established made him question it at the most fundamental level. And if Foucault himself was not often given to resolving the problems his analyses and suspicions unearthed, he invariably succeeded in establishing new parameters within which others might think those problems through. Thinking along with Foucault decidedly is not for everyone. It is not for those who would theorize in an historical vacuum, who brandish the banner of ‘clarity’ and strive to reduce to zero the ambiguity of all that lies before them. Still less is thinking along with Foucault for those who seek facile solutions to problems centuries in the making and legitimized by discourses that though they appear unproblematic and self-evident are inevitably themselves part of the problem. Thinking along with Foucault requires that we renounce the ahistorical naivety and self-certainty on which our thinking can all too easily run aground, and that we undertake a deeper kind of inquiry into the conditions that fundamentally constitute knowledge and truth. It requires that we exercise a degree of historical consciousness and often enough a fair amount of suspicion. Twenty-five years after his death, Foucault’s texts have been amply discussed and critiqued, but the huge literature that his work has inspired has not brought interpretation and assessment to completion. This should come as no surprise because Foucault’s work does more than pose scholarly challenges and invitations. Some of his most important ideas—especially that of power-relations—have been integrated into our own thinking, and we approach many questions with those ideas at the back of our minds. Additionally, true to Foucault’s enigmatic nature and diversity of approach to issues and questions, reflecting on his legacy is complicated by how there is no single work or theme that adequately represents the complex, variegated, and evolutionary totality of Foucault’s thought and its several shifts in direction. His work resists holistic interpretation.14 Despite his own avowals about the unity of his overall project, his books ‘hardly ever refer back to his previous works,’ either specifically or even by implication.15 Assessing Foucault’s legacy, then, is more a matter of initiating and developing various conversations. This is what the articles that follow do; they examine his contributions to contemporary thought by entering into various different conversations with one of the most innovative, enigmatic, and challenging thinkers of our time. Turning to what follows, David Couzens Hoy opens the conversation with consideration of Foucault’s contemporary importance and some intriguing thoughts on temporality. Babette Babich takes a broad perspective on

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differing construals of Foucault’s work, depending on whether he is read as having been more importantly influenced by Nietzsche or by Heidegger. Tom Rockmore narrows the focus somewhat in considering one of Foucault’s most central ideas; he looks at alternative interpretations of Foucault’s thesis about ‘the death of Man’ in light of Hegelian and anti-Hegelian readings of it, with a view to showing the ambiguous consequences for philosophical thinking. Barry Allen focuses a little more tightly, considering Foucault’s relation to the new pragmatism by tackling the intriguing lack of engagement between Foucault and pragmatism’s leading contemporary exponent, Richard Rorty. Allen also treats the deeper issue of how Rorty and Foucault shared a surprisingly traditional discursive conception of knowledge. Narrowing the perspective still more, the next two articles explore connections between Foucault and particular philosophers. Colin Koopman focuses on the Anglo-American milieu and particularly on Bernard Williams, a philosopher who, though in the analytic tradition, reached across the canonical divide to consider Nietzsche’s thought in his own work. Koopman discusses the difference between Foucault’s use of genealogy as problematization and Williams’ vindicatory genealogy which, like Nietzsche’s subversive genealogy, may be normatively confused. Santiago Zabala focuses on the Continental European milieu, particularly on Gianni Vattimo, an increasingly influential and widely-read contemporary. Zabala discusses the relationship between Foucault’s and Vattimo’s respective conceptions of philosophy and what their similarities and dissimilarities mean for understanding philosophy and its goals. Again taking a broader perspective, one going beyond philosophy’s academic boundaries to social issues, Michael Lackey considers the significance and applicability of Foucault’s ideas for understanding a major contemporary political danger. He examines the relevance of Foucault’s poststructuralist secularism to the role of theological beliefs and practices in the continuance and growth of totalitarianism. James Bernauer, who knew Foucault and studied with him, continues the emphasis on the social. He closes the volume with some intriguing reflections on the conceptual impact of Foucault’s thinking on our own thought about religion and facelessness as an aspect of subjectivity. To close this brief Introduction, it merits mention that the scholarship displayed in the articles that follow is most impressive. At the end of the volume I provide a select Bibliography, but it is one limited for brevity’s sake to citations in English and those works having the most direct connections to the various articles. Readers should avail themselves of the rich resources provided in the many citations listed in the articles’ Endnotes.

Introduction

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Lastly, I thank you, the reader, for your time and for your interest in this collection. I am certain that both your interest and time will be amply repaid because you will find much that is challenging in the articles that follow. Kingston, Ontario, 2008

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

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9 10 11 12

13

14

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Analytic philosophers whose post-Kantian canon prioritizes the work of Frege, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein tend to not consider Foucault a philosopher, seeing him as a postmodern who essentially broke with his Continental postKantian canon emphasizing the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. They think he has ‘nothing to say’ about ‘philosophical theories of truth and knowledge.’ Nola, Robert (1994) ‘Post-Modernism, A French Cultural Chernobyl: Foucault on Power/Knowledge.’ Inquiry, 37(1): 3–43, 3. Richard Rorty notes ‘a distinguished analytic philosopher [D. M. Armstrong] urged that “intellectual hygiene” requires one not to read . . . Foucault.’ Rorty (1982), The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 224. Miller, James (1993), The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster, 13. Ryan, Alan (1993), ‘Foucault’s Life and Hard Times.’ The New York Review of Books, 40(7): 12–17, 12. Macey, David (1993), The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson, xi. Miller 1993, 13. Arac, Jonathan, ed. (1991), After Foucault. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, vii. Martin, L. H., Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton, eds. (1988), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 13. Eribon, Didier (1991), Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 313. Miller 1993, 13. Eribon 1991, xi. Martin et al. 1988, 10. Foucault, Michel (1986), The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage, 9. Foucault, Michel (1991), Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Trans. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), 27. Gutting, Gary, ed. (1994), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 3–4. Gutting 1994, 3.

Chapter 1

The temporality of power David Couzens Hoy

Twenty-five years after his death Foucault is larger than life. The end of his life in 1984 was only the beginning of an exponential increase in the influence of his thought. He always played down his importance as a particular individual. From his own point of view, his personal life and thus its end were not the most significant aspects of his intellectual existence. If he was modest about his personal life, indeed even secretive, he never extended that modesty and secretiveness to his thought and his writings. Nor should we in our attempts to assess Foucault’s legacy. Today it is impossible for a specialist in any figure of Continental philosophy to be taken seriously without also knowing Foucault’s work in depth. One can prefer any of the major French, German, Italian, Slovenian, Croatian, or Polish philosophers, but one must also be able to contrast that person’s thought to Foucault’s. In the last twenty-five years Foucault has thus changed from being one among many to the point where he is now more than ever the universal constant for contemporary European philosophy. And not merely for philosophers. While the current A to Z of philosophers from Agamben to Zizek have their adherents in philosophical scholarship, no other philosopher has achieved Foucault’s level of impact on fields other than philosophy. Some highly regarded philosophers raise the question whether Foucault should even be considered a philosopher. I view this attitude as a provincial envy of the degree to which Foucault has been appropriated in literature, history, cultural studies, gender studies, species studies, and the like. I would even speculate that the recent proliferation of the variety of topics that can now lay claim to being an academic program is due to Foucault. Thanks to his ability to traverse boundaries and to break down traditional barriers, ‘X studies,’ where X is an unlimited variable, may one day replace the traditional departments of the humanities. That day may well signal the end of ‘Philosophy,’ at least as an academic department in the humanities division. While analytic philosophy may

The Temporality of Power

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have to be moved over to the natural or social sciences divisions of the academy, Continental philosophy may disappear into the various programs of humanities studies. (There is no need for young philosophers to worry about employment, though, for each program of study—and their number shall be legion—will need its own resident ‘theorists.’) Indeed, perhaps it is already the case that everyone teaching humanities is a Continental philosopher. Do you, the readers of this anthology, currently have peers who know nothing about Foucault? (Or at least, who would admit to knowing nothing?) Of course, we could all afford to know more about Foucault, even those of us who are considered Foucault specialists. That is why there is a growing rather than a shrinking need for volumes such as this one, where eminent thinkers and researchers raise and discuss their issues about the validity of Foucault’s ideas. Let me mention two major rubrics that feature in current Foucault scholarship, namely, materiality and ideality. Then I will turn to the theme that I wish to highlight, namely, temporality.

Materiality Consider materiality first. Although Foucault did not seem overly concerned with his own life and even his impending death, he was deeply involved with his bio-political studies of the concepts of life and death. While the phenomena of life and death are eternal and universal, the concepts of life and death have a history. He charts the ever-increasing penetration into our existence by the bio-political organization of life and death through both disciplinary power and biopower. Whereas the genealogy of disciplinary power uncovers the materiality of embodiment, the genealogy of biopower reveals the materiality of population. The contradiction of materiality is that our attempts to control the physical conditions of existence turn back on us with a vengeance and end by controlling us. The increasing erosion of our freedom by our very efforts to maximize our freedom is thus the quasi-dialectical motor of the history of statist biopower. One example that he provides of the dialectical contradiction built into biopower is atomic energy. Although initially developed for the improvement of life, atomic energy rapidly leads to the atomic bomb, which improves our ability to foster not better life, but instead, greater death. In depicting the contradictory effects of human bio-political efforts to improve life, Foucault’s genealogical account of life resembles Hegel’s analysis of life in the famous dialectical life and death struggle. Action in the name of life

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can turn on us and Foucault posits that it can even result in the potential suicide of the human species. As an example, Foucault suggests that there could even be a potential worry about experiments with viruses. The effort to discover the secrets of life could possibly result in the production of a virus so virulent that it would wipe out all life on the planet. Another example that he provides is modern racism. Not the ordinary ‘ethnic’ suspicion of others who look and act differently from oneself, modern racism becomes ‘statist’ when it adopts a biologizing discourse that invokes terms such as purity, degeneracy, or inferiority. This example shows that the concept of life involves a contradictory materiality that has severe consequences for our existence, both private and public. Two other examples of biopower are not provided by Foucault’s writings. One is his own death, presumably through what we now call AIDS. As life and death are increasingly organized as a means of controlling populations and peoples, the meaning of ‘life’ changes in ways that Foucault was only beginning to work out when he came to his own end. The name of his particular death was barely coming into use at that time, so it is not clear that he or his friends fully understood the epidemic that was apparently the specific cause of his demise.1 Perhaps that does not matter, for medical science has many names for fatal diseases it does not understand. One suspects that major scientific paradigm changes or epistemic shifts will be required before these fatal illnesses will be understood. Another example of the dialectic of life and death as it plays itself out at the level of materiality is the apocryphal worry (at least we hope that the worry is merely fanciful) that the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva may cause a disaster of planetary proportions. That is, through science’s efforts to extend human knowledge and to unlock the secrets of nature, the collisions of protons might in fact produce an infinitesimal black hole. Even though such a black hole would be very small, the speculation is that the tiny implosion would have the power to consume the entire planet.2

Ideality In addition to materiality, another topic that Foucault reinvigorates in his late work is ideality. By the term ‘ideality’ I mean the emphasis that philosophy has traditionally placed on the inner life, the mental, the representational, in short, on consciousness. The standard paradigm case of ideality is first-person subjectivity. The initial fame of Foucault’s early work

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when he was developing the method he calls ‘archaeology’ comes from his apparent break with these Cartesian, Kantian, and Sartrean preoccupations with ideality, that is, with self-consciousness, conscience de soi—a term he says even as late as 1979 that he prefers to avoid.3 This move away from the priority of the cogito, the transcendental unity of apperception, or the freely constituting consciousness is only one side of Foucault’s thought, however. More influential outside academic philosophy are his genealogical studies of how the subject is constituted by both disciplinary power and biopower. These studies lead to his attempt to ‘think differently’ and to break with particular, constituted identities through what he calls desubjectification or désassujettissement. The point is that our relations to our concrete, practical selves change when we realize that we have become who we are as a result of relations of domination. The task then becomes to desubjectify or even to desubjugate ourselves by critically resisting our bio-political self-stylings. Foucault’s intellectual trajectory thus shows subjectivity reappearing as a poststructural topic of concern after it had supposedly disappeared along with the structuralist rejection of the Cartesian fixation on the cogito. When the question of the subject reemerges in Foucault’s later work on the genealogy of ethics in the 1980s, however, it is conceived in an entirely new way. Now more than ever, the self that we are is one that we will need to examine critically from as many different angles as possible—hence the proliferating need for interdisciplinary ‘studies.’ All these points of view taken together constitute that meta-discipline of the humanities, the ‘history of consciousness.’

The temporality of power Now I shall concentrate on the central topic of this essay, the temporality of power. I think that the assumption of many scholars is that Foucault is primarily a spatial thinker. Especially in Discipline and Punish Foucault is preoccupied with architecture, from Piranesi’s famous prints of dark, infi nite prisons with no outside to Bentham’s Panopticon, wherein visibility is itself the trap. Nevertheless, note that the key to punishment in the penitentiary is not so much the architecture as the daily schedule The striking contrast that begins the book is between a public execution in 1757 and the timetable for a given day in a penitentiary 80 years later.4 Thus, right from the start Foucault recognizes that the carceral is fundamentally a matter of ‘doing time.’

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My hypothesis is that despite Foucault’s tendency to think about power in spatial pictures, his thought is in fact concerned with temporality throughout. Furthermore, I speculate that the thoroughly temporal character of his thought is difficult to see at first because it can be found in so many aspects of his work. I propose as a thesis that for Foucault temporality is the mode in which the processes of materiality run up against and are resisted by the processes of desubjectification. I shall unpack this definition through examples of Foucault’s statements about the temporality of power. Although as an archaeological historian he concerns himself with making philosophical points by studying the past, as a genealogist or ‘critical historian’ he writes the ‘history of the present.’5 The use of the methods of archaeology and genealogy are not confined to different periods of his life. Many of his writings combine both of these methods. Thinking about these methods helps to explain what otherwise might be taken as conflicting attitudes toward the temporal dimensions. Take the dimension of the present first. Foucault’s characterization of genealogy as ‘history of the present’ derives from an apparent paradox. How can there be a history of the present when the present has not yet turned into the past and thus could not yet be a topic for a historian? Furthermore, what should the genealogist’s attitude be toward the present? Foucault might appear to be contradicting himself when he describes his relation to the present in the following remark that I quote at length from an interview that appeared in 1983, shortly before his death in 1984: Here, I think, we are touching on one of those forms—perhaps we should call them ‘habits’—one of the most harmful habits in contemporary thought, in modern thought even; at any rate, in post-Hegelian thought: the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn, and so on. The solemnity with which everyone who engages in philosophical discourse reflects on his own time strikes me as a flaw. I can say so all the more firmly, since it is something I have done myself; and since, in someone like Nietzsche, we find this incessantly—or at least, insistently enough. I think we should have the modesty to say to ourselves that, on the one hand, the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again. We must also have the modesty to say, on the other hand, that— even without this solemnity—the time we live in is very interesting; it needs to be analyzed and broken down, and that we would do well to ask ourselves, ‘What is today?’6

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The apparent tension here is between an apocalyptic present that stands out as a moment of important crisis and a more humble present that is no different from any other present. How can the ‘historian of the present’ have both of these attitudes toward the present at the same time? Foucault’s relation to the present is twofold, depending on which methodological viewpoint he is occupying. First, as a methodological archaeologist he cautions against attributing too much importance to any given present. The present changes, and any given set of interests will never dominate the philosophical field forever. Foucault therefore warns against thinking of the present as the crucial point of rupture, or the high point, or the moment of either completion or returning dawn. Our time, the above quotation insists, is not ‘the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again.’7 If we ask the question, why Foucault now, we should remember Foucault’s own advice, which is that the present is not very important in the grand scheme of things. As a methodological genealogist, however, the second thing he says is that the present is in fact where we are now. This point is not the truism that one can live only in the present. One can, after all, be in the present but not be at all attentive to it. One can be so focused on the past or the future that one fails to attend to the transformative possibilities that can be found only in the present. Foucault’s call is to live more fully in the present, which is where the action is. From an archaeological perspective, then, the present is no different from any other present. But from the genealogical perspective, each present is significantly different from every other present. Each present has its distinctive possibilities. Therefore, each present is the only one in which we can act. Foucault’s method of genealogy is the key to action that is specific and transformative. The task of genealogy is to trace out the ‘lines of fragility in the present.’8 That is to say, genealogy should try to grasp ‘why and how that which is might no longer be that which is.’9 The point of genealogical philosophy is to open up ‘a space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation.’10 Transformation is, of course, a temporal notion. How does he argue for it? Let me point to an example of his temporalization of power before trying to answer this question. In his 1973–1974 lectures on Psychiatric Power he distinguishes the temporality of the power of sovereignty from that of the disciplinary power that emerges in the late eighteenth century. Whereas the power of sovereignty involves the traditional model of power as possessed by the sovereign and imposed from the top downward on the subjects, disciplinary power is more diffuse and permeates society

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in a capillary fashion. The sovereignty model of power looks backward to the principle that founds its authority. This principle can be divine right or blood or birth, and it is repeated discontinuously in rituals, ceremonies, and narratives that re-establish the tradition from time to time. Disciplinary power, in contrast, ‘looks toward the future, towards the moment when it will keep going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be required, when discipline, consequently, will have become habit.’11 Whereas sovereignty depends on the idea of precedence, and is thus essentially connected to the past, discipline looks ahead and is thus more oriented to the present and the future than to the past. Disciplinary power involves a temporal gradient aiming at the telos where discipline will function permanently without the application of unnecessary force. A more total hold, it seizes the body and not the product: ‘it is a seizure of time in its totality, and not of the time of service.’12 Discipline, says Foucault, contrasts to sovereignty power insofar as it is a total occupation of the individual’s ‘time, life, and body.’13 In the lectures from 1975 to 1976 and especially in those from 1977 to 1978 he does not modify so much as he complicates this account of the temporalization of power. This complication is necessary insofar as in the lecture from March 17, 1976 he adds biopower as the third major formulation of power. When he spells out this notion of power in the lecture of January 11, 1978, biopower is first discussed in terms of the mechanisms of security. He starts off, as we might expect, by distinguishing the three forms of power spatially: ‘sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population.’14 He then notes that the temporal dimension of security is also futural. Security does not involve a static perception, but a perception that ‘will open onto a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured or measurable.’15 In other words, security is only ever a matter of probability, of an ‘indefinite series of mobile elements.’16 In contrast to discipline, which draws on the work of the past to form present habits that will determine what people do in the future, biopower generally and security in particular plans for an uncertain future that it would control by regulation that anticipates probabilistically rather than by deterministic mechanisms that operate on individual bodies. On either account, his vision is clear: individuals in modern society are caught in the pincers of these different models of power. The experience of the temporality of modern society is the effect of these pincers. Modern temporality is produced through the conflict that results when the closure

The Temporality of Power

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that the materiality of the past would impose on the present is opened up by the processes of desubjectification.17 A possible objection at this point is that the metaphor of pincers works better when there are only two concepts of power at stake, sovereign and disciplinary. I grant that the French word tenaille suggests a two-jawed instrument of torture. The most effective reply is to point out that there can be a pincers effect generated by three prongs rather than two. (Think less in terms of an instrument of torture than of something more innocuous such as a drill chuck). In fact, three prongs gives a better grip and can apply more force than two. Furthermore, there is a better correlation to the three dimensions of time (past, present, and future) when there are three modalities of power (sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower). In sum, Foucault offers a compelling analysis of the temporality of modern society—past, present, and future—with this three-dimensional analysis of power.

The temporality of universals Are the three dimensions of power ‘universals’? If so, does that imply that they are a priori, that is, eternal and necessary (as Kantians would have it)? Or do universals also have temporality? There is no reason to believe, contrary to critics such as Jürgen Habermas, that Foucault cannot invoke universal principles. Although Foucault may be suspicious of particular claims to universality, he need not deny the applicability of all universal structures or values. Thus, Foucault could reject Habermas’ criticism of him for being a crypto-normativist who smuggles in universal standards to which he is not entitled. Foucault himself believes that although experiences are always singular, ‘Singular forms of experience may perfectly well harbor universal structures.’18 He then underscores the point by insisting that the idea that thought ‘should have this historicity does not mean it is deprived of all universal form, but instead that the putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical.’19 On Foucault’s view, then, universals have temporality. Genealogy is the method for showing that a universal begins at some point in historical time. Insofar as anything that has a beginning also can have an endpoint, the inference is that any universal can have an end as well. Or at least the genealogy challenges us to imagine a state of affairs that lacked the universal in question.

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Foucault thus does not reject all universals, but instead he has a nuanced attitude toward them. For instance, in ‘Useless to Revolt?’ Foucault opposes universalist ‘strategists’ who, when faced with a particular injustice, will argue that the injustice can be seen to be inconsequential when viewed from the perspective of the greater necessity of the whole. In contrast to these strategic universalists, Foucault says, ‘my theoretical ethic is opposite to theirs. It is “antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as.’20 In other words, Foucault has a clear sense of when injustice is committed, and he will resist such acts of injustice in the name of the universal. I therefore see Foucault as a critical pluralist. A pluralist believes that universals are the results of interpretations. Someone who is also a critical pluralist insists that not simply any interpretation will do. Some interpretations are better than others and it is not the case that ‘anything goes.’ Sometimes a universal can cover up injustice, as in the dialectic of enlightenment, where the discovery of reason also led to the invention of disciplinary power. Other times, however, the critical pluralist can see that power unjustly violates the universal. So the critical pluralist can invoke the universal to counter injustice equally as effectively as the universalist. In sum, Foucault’s thought must be that the universal is not the sole provenance of the universalist. Foucault does in fact sometimes espouse a ‘methodological nominalism.’ In dialogue with the French historian, Paul Veyne, Foucault presents the genealogist as someone who supposes that ‘universals do not exist.’21 By universals here he does not mean moral principles so much as explanatory concepts such as state, society, sovereigns, subjects, or madness. These are the rubrics standardly thought to be essential features not only of the present, but of any time and place. In contrast to this insistence on universals, Foucault’s ‘critical history of thought’ maintains a systematic skepticism toward ‘all anthropological universals.’22 The critical historian views these anthropological universals as historical constructs, as objects that emerge historically when the subject tries to make itself into its own object. This methodology does not trivialize universals. They can have real effects and they are often insidious. In contrast to phenomenology, which says that universals exist even if they are not a ‘thing,’ genealogy maintains as a methodological hypothesis that universals do not exist but with the caveat that they are not thereby ‘nothing.’23 From a fictitious relation, Foucault maintains, a real subjection can be born.24 Genealogy is the study of the emergence of universals and their transformation into attitudes of domination and subjection.

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The temporality of existence In Foucault’s last years Paul Veyne reports that he often reflected on suicide and finitude while working on the Stoics. His study of the practice in Antiquity of meditation on death brings out the differences between Greek understandings of temporality on the one hand and the Christian sense of time on the other. Foucault’s reflections on the Greek sense of temporality are strongly influenced (without acknowledgment) by Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, and Martin Heidegger. Foucault remarks in his lecture of March 24, 1982—which is an especially rich discussion of the temporality of existence—that the Greeks mistrusted the future and that they also were suspicious of thinking about the future. In a passage that clearly reflects Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history—as portrayed in a painting by Paul Klee entitled Angelus Novus, which Benjamin owned—Foucault writes, ‘for the Greeks what we have before our eyes is not our future but our past, that is to say that we advance into the future with our back turned.’25 The practice of meditating on death might seem to controvert Foucault’s claim that the Greeks did not like to think about the future. Foucault maintains, however, that Antiquity views the future as a nothingness that does not exist. Either predetermined or senseless, the future is sealed off by the meditation on death, which is, in a remark echoing Heidegger, a ‘nullifying making present of the future.’26 The death meditation is more of a way of inuring oneself to the future, of not letting oneself be worried about the future, and it is thus a way of not thinking about the future in the very act of seeming to think about it. How could the Greeks think about history, however, if they did not think about the future? One might believe that without the future, there would be no historical sense of the past. In fact, says Foucault, this is the case. Bergson is presumably correct that temporal themes such as progress and history require being able to look at both memory and the future at the same time. Insofar as the Greeks placed a positive value on memory and such a negative value on the future, they did not develop the ‘historical consciousness’ that Foucault dates much later.27 Hand in hand with the development of historical consciousness goes the emergence of a deeper sense of self. Christian ascesis differs from Greek ascesis in that the former wants to discover the self so that the self can then be renounced or repudiated. The flip side of Christian ascesis is the ‘California’ cult of the self. ‘Let it all hang out!’ tells us to let our deep, inner self come to the surface and show itself for what it truly is. At least that was the message a few years ago. More recently, we have learned to prefer that

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not everything needs to be flaunted, and that some deep dark secrets are better kept hidden. Foucault himself treats the cult of the self with disdain and derision. However much he liked California, he distrusted the rhetoric of self-discovery and preferred instead the trope of self-creation. The point is not to liberate our true self, because no such thing exists, but instead, we should style our self in a new way. This process of self-stylization has to occur genealogically, however, and it must involve overcoming the duality of materiality and ideality. In point of fact, I believe that this overcoming is best achieved through genealogical temporalization itself, as I will now suggest by way of conclusion.

Foucault, now more than ever While the genealogical method is not the only current approach to critical theory, it should nevertheless be recognized as a major contribution to the recent history of thought. In my estimation genealogy is Foucault’s most important legacy. Whatever stories are told from now on, their emplotment ought to be genealogical, however else they are also constructed. Contrary to Deleuze, for instance, genealogy is not necessarily opposed to dialectical emplotments. The reason why genealogy can be dialectical is that it can serve either of two functions: it can be either vindicatory or unmasking.28 That is, genealogy may unmask aspects of ourselves that we have acquired through domination, and therefore may want to reject. Or genealogy may vindicate aspects of ourselves that we have overlooked because they are so close to us and so crucial to our identities. Either way—and here is the crucial difference from Hegelian dialectics—genealogy does not construct universal history, that is, a single story about where humanity has been and where we are all going. Genealogy is thus not universal history, even if it is the history of universals. The plural is important here. Perhaps I should even say ‘the histories of universals,’ with both words in the plural. The methodology of critical history does not posit that there is a single time in which all events stand. Foucault thus insists—presumably contra Bergson, who in a famous disagreement with Einstein asserted the oneness of time29 —on the multiplicity of temporalities: History, then, is not a single time span [durée]: it is a multiplicity of time spans that entangle and envelop one another. So the old notion of time should be replaced by the notion of multiple time spans . . . In reality

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there are multiple time spans, and each one of these spans is the bearer of a certain type of events. The types of events must be multiplied just as the types of time spans are multiplied. That is the mutation that is occurring at present in the disciplines of history.30 Multiple universals and multiple temporalities thus become the methodological assumptions of the genealogical approach. This conclusion offers a hypothesis about Foucault’s understanding of temporalization. We can now see why he wants both to minimize the present’s apocalyptic sense of its own importance and to maximize the significance of the present as the arena in which we have to act. We act insofar as we question our given identities. This process of desubjectification takes place in the present through a critical reworking of the materiality of the past in view of possible future transformations. The temporality of genealogy thus construes materiality as the past, ideality as the present, and transformation as the future. A critical history of the present studies the past to prepare for transformations of the present into different futures. In sum, engagement with Foucault’s legacy should always involve remembering that the time for transformative action is now or never, or better, now more than ever.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

See Paul Veyne’s reflections on Foucault’s demise in his essay, ‘The Final Foucault and his Ethics,’ in Arnold I. Davidson, ed. (1997), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 232. Reported in The New York Times, Tuesday, April 15, 2008, D2. Foucault, Michel (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 Michel Senellart, ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2. Foucault, Michel (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 7. Ibid., 31. Foucault, Michel (1994), ‘Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,’ The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984, Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, eds. New York: The New Press, 93. Ibid. Ibid., 94. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, Michel (2006), Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1973– 1974, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 47. Ibid., 46, my emphasis. Ibid.

18 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28

29

30

Foucault’s Legacy Foucault, Michel (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 11. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 57. Foucault, Michel (1984), ‘Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume Two,’ Paul Rabinow, ed. (1994), The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 335. Ibid. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘Useless to Revolt?’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984, James D. Faubion, ed., trans Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press, 453 (emphasis added). The term ‘supra-historical’ I adapt from Nietzsche, ‘The Use and Abuse of History for Life.’ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 3. Foucault, Michel (1998), ‘Foucault by Maurice Florence,’ Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, James D. Faubion, ed. New York: The New Press, 1998, 461. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 118. ‘A subjection is born mechanically from a relation.’ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202. Foucault, Michel (2006), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 463. Ibid., 471. Ibid., 464. Bernard Williams distinguishes vindicatory from unmasking genealogy in Truth and Truthfulness (2002). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 36. See Hoy, David Couzens (2008), The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of ‘Temporality’. Cambridge: The MIT Press, which goes into more detail about the issues raised in the present essay. Foucault, Michel (1972), ‘Return to History,’ James D. Faubion, ed. (1998), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: The New Press, 430.

Chapter 2

A philosophical shock: Foucault reading Nietzsche, reading Heidegger Babette E. Babich

Michel Foucault analyzes the formation of the ‘subject’ or ‘self’ in a postNietzschean, post-Heideggerian, quasi-Marxist, or today, we had better correct that to say, just because few scholars have any desire to be named Marxist: simply, vaguely leftist context,1 exceeding what has been called the poststructuralist as much as the postmodern moment by means of different epistemic discourses of imitation, representation, but also rhetorical or ‘stylistic’ discourses and including practical or therapeutic analysis.2 Additionally, to recall the important question of practice and the increasingly popular language of philosophical therapy, more than Nietzsche’s vision of either convalescence (and nihilism) or healing or indeed of the philosopher as lawgiver or a physician of culture, Foucault is illuminated by Pierre Hadot’s analysis of the Stoic ‘art’ of philosophy as ‘a way of life.’3 To many readers, Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche has seemed the most obvious of all and to the degree that Foucault’s epistemology foregrounds the genealogical transferences of power or its productive technologies, including the calculative stratagems and technologies of the body, manifest in the history of the natural and social or human sciences, as in art and literature, Foucault’s analysis has often been read as a straightforward elaboration/continuation of Nietzsche’s own ‘genealogy’ (as if this itself were somehow a transparent affair as I have long argued that it is not)4 and this is often coordinate with a variety of efforts to distinguish the two, where all such distinctions are always effective associations. 5 Nietzsche’s arch-polemical and highly elliptical genealogy goes beyond Foucault’s rather more traditional understanding of genealogy if only because and in great measure, Nietzsche often invents his genealogies which is not to say that he makes them up but only that he ‘paints’ his genealogies, like his hopes, on the metaphorically conceptual wall (Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) §296) in bold colors and broad strokes for the sake of what he called his future and for Nietzsche that future always means the

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reader. In this fashion, Nietzsche would compose his The Gay Science as a complex readerly appeal to philologists and scholars cum scientists of all stripes, recasting his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music in terms of the chronologically, culturally different example of the gai sabre that was the song tradition of the Provencal knight-poets or troubadours.6 Highlighting Nietzsche’s re-envisioning of his first elaboration of the relation between music and word, one has also to note how very tendentious this had, inevitably, to be for Nietzsche and if only because and very like Foucault in this regard, Nietzsche also and always sought to do more than just one thing in any of his writings.7 In this multifarious fashion, Nietzsche concludes the first book of The Gay Science with a provocation against the all-too common ‘clamor about distress’ and the habit of those who seemingly seek suffering (Nietzsche’s readers imagine that he is here thinking of Schopenhauer or else of Wagner but the reference is perfectly political, where Nietzsche denounces the slogan ‘Neediness is needed! [Not ist nötig],’ a political convention that has yet to go out of style). Against the ‘clamor’ of the ‘politicians,’ against the youthful enthusiasms of those who, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘do not know what to do with themselves,’ Nietzsche proposes yet another and still indeed very Foucauldian tactic, one little adverted to by his advocates who often miss his extraordinarily melancholy but still and perfectly solar or divine joy: ‘—Pardon me, my friends,’ Nietzsche writes in a style captivating for Derrida and others on the seductive and forgotten art of friendship, ‘I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.’ (The Gay Science (GS) §56). This painted, dappled happiness would be a ‘happiness humanity has not known thus far’ (GS §337). Like the sun at evening, when ‘even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars,’ this would be ‘the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter’ (Ibid., cf. GS §383).

Foucault and Nietzsche; Foucault and Heidegger Although there is no lack of efforts to read Foucault and Nietzsche together or indeed to align Foucault and Heidegger, Foucault scholarship overall tends to be split on these same terms. In the following, I argue that the opposition is misleading for the complicated reason that Foucault’s Heidegger can only be understood on Nietzschean terms while and at the same time, Foucault’s Nietzsche only takes place by way of Heidegger albeit (and this point simply cannot be overemphasized) a very Francophone reading of Heidegger.8

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For these and other reasons, reading Foucault qua Nietzschean (apart from Foucault’s Heidegger) is as misleading as reading Foucault qua Heideggerian (apart from Foucault’s Nietzsche). The difficulty here, both singularizing and pernicious, is that reading both Nietzsche and Heidegger apart from one another is so common as to be automatic. Explicitly Heideggerian readings of Foucault are thus inclined to content themselves with more rather than less stumbling caricatures of Nietzsche and the same can be said for Nietzschean readings of Foucault which tend to be less clumsy than patently, vehemently anti-Heideggerian. Critics on both sides argue that Foucault overlooks the philosophical specificity of either Nietzsche or Heidegger and that he does so for the sake of his own very particular social analyses of praxes and institutions. On the level of rhetoric, Foucault appropriates what he can take to be Nietzschean tactics for his own purposes—Michel de Certeau is superb on this,9 —but it can also be argued that such rhetorical aims work in a wholly other sense in Nietzsche’s similarly ambitious strategy as a writer, effecting a tactical chiasm between Foucault and Nietzsche as between Foucault and Heidegger.

Marx, Freud, Nietzsche: in Ricoeur’s shadow Foucault is at times read together with Nietzsche,10 at times regarded as a ‘Nietzschean’ of sorts and at times as if Foucault’s work simply elaborated upon or developed the Nietzschean project that is supposed to carry the name of a ‘genealogy’11 alternately opposed, somewhat artificially given the pleonastic character of the term for Foucault, to an archaeology. There is, as part of this, a vague reflection on matters of philosophical style and rhetoric, taking Foucault to be a master tactician in this regard and noting that Nietzsche too might be regarded in the same way. Indeed with respect to rhetoric and style, supposedly sanctioned readings of Foucault have been more or less winnowed from the rest, or so one pretends. But reading Foucault, like reading Deleuze, like reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, is itself a thoroughly politicized business where some and only some readings are engaged (or to be explicit rather than allusive: only some readings of what seem to be a limitless and seemingly interdisciplinary array are cited/criticized/discussed)12 and others are not. In addition to such selective scholarly receptivity we may add the bean-counting politics of scholarly name-dropping, and today one finds less and less the older argument that Foucault’s genealogy continues an archaeological project13 that somehow begins if not with Freud than surely with Nietzsche. Gary Shapiro offers an

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important correction of this habitual reading of Foucault, taken indeed on Foucault’s own terms14 just where Foucault contends that his project is a critical one that may be traced back to Kant. Writing as ‘Maurice Florence,’ Foucault contends that to ‘the extent that Foucault fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the critical tradition of Kant, and his project could be called a Critical History of Thought.’15 In just such a Kantian modality, Foucault is able to specify that ‘a critical history of thought would be an analysis of those conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge [savoir].’16 It is in this critical spirit17 that Foucault responds to Ricoeur’s lectures on Freud,18 setting Nietzsche alongside Marx and Freud. For his own part, Ricoeur reflects on ‘Interpretation as Exercise of Suspicion,’ invoking the three musketeers of hermeneutics Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, the ‘three masters of suspicion,’19 I note that it is significant, revelatory even, that Ricoeur appropriates Nietzsche’s already conventional invocation not merely of the word but the phrasing of a ‘school of suspicion,’ where Nietzsche, in a late-written preface to Human, All too Human reminds his readers that his ‘writings have been called a school of suspicion [eine Schule des Verdachts] . . .’ [HH §i]. Ricoeur’s naming convention became standard even beyond Foucault, hence one may read Jean-Luc Marion’s Idol and Distance as offering another set of contenders for a new era, very nearly post-political, in the guise of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Denys.20 Nor is it irrelevant that in, and amidst, such variations, Nietzsche remains constant. Jefferey Minson has argued that associations such as these and others do not license us to reduce Foucault to Nietzsche (bracketing for the space of this essay just what such a reduction might mean).21 Nevertheless a range of critically epistemic tactics often associated with Nietzsche recur in Foucault. If Nietzsche goes further than Foucault it is because he does not merely claim, in a provocative instantiation of what most commentators call his perspectivism, that ‘there is no truth’ but continues further to compound his own reflections, further reflecting on the perspectival significance of such perspectives on perspectives and as such.22 Indeed, Nietzsche’s philosophy, early and late, is a sustained reflection upon the significance of or else on the consequences of this very lack of truth and our fondness for or belief in the truth (this corresponds to what he calls, and in a serried array: our asceticism and our piety). For Douglas Smith, the interpretive dynamic or contest between Ricoeur and Foucault (and I would add here: Deleuze) inevitably excludes Heidegger,

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which did not mean (as Smith observes with some understatement) that Heidegger had no role to play. Smith’s point is set contra Vincent Descombes’ interpretive troika for the explication of ‘French Philosophy.’ Thus the triad ‘Marx, Freud and Nietzsche,’ drawn from Ricoeur, functionally adumbrates not the relevance of Heidegger for Foucault but his irrelevance. Heidegger is as absent from Foucault as from Ricoeur, a claim repeated in tension with Foucault’s last interview ‘My whole philosophical development has been determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I acknowledge it was Nietzsche who got the upper hand.’23 But Foucault’s French readers are inherently strangers neither to Nietzsche nor to Heidegger and one can argue that, ceteris paribus, the following reflections might also be extended to a reading of such (I am here speaking of Deleuze but it is important to emphasize that one might just as well refer to others such as de Certeau and Baudrillard, etc.).24 Heidegger himself is yet another story and not only for Foucault scholars. Hence and although one has now the benefit of several readings of Foucault and Heidegger, 25 one continues even here and even for such recent perspectives, to be faced with a neatly exclusive disjunction between either Heidegger and Foucault or Nietzsche and Foucault but rarely both together. As already noted, most French readers can be counted as exceptions, like Dominique Janicaud in addition to scholars like C. G. Prado and others. For it is key that with Foucault one has to do with a continental thinker who has enjoyed a long and fruitful reception among analytic scholars (not only Hubert Dreyfus and Gary Gutting but also Ian Hacking, etc.) in addition indeed to interdisciplinary readings that extend throughout the social sciences.26

Foucault and Heidegger If one has had one’s Heidegger only by way of analytic readings such as Dreyfus’ (very) influential approach, the very same and still very analytic lens often reveals rather more Heidegger in Foucault than Foucault himself liked to confess.27 As a corollary, it may be added that a good part of the reason for deciding that a lion’s share of the influence between Nietzsche and Heidegger should be given to Nietzsche derives from the habit of assuming that what a thinker says in his last publications represents what he ‘really,’ somehow, thinks. So we take Foucault’s off-hand reflections as an ultimate confession: ‘. . . I am simply a Nietzschean, and

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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 Nietzschean!)—what can be done in this or that domain.’28 And yet what does Foucault tells us here? Perhaps it worth noting that by speaking of ‘anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nonetheless Nietzschean!)’ Foucault adumbrates an identifi ably Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche.29 One can and one has been urged to sidestep the rigors of both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his critique of the scientific limits of science. Most readers have enough to do follow Foucault. Indeed, Foucault himself has enough to do as when he reflects on the locus of power in writing and the diminution of the writer in modern times. Hence and on the specifically political issue of technoscience and biopower, Foucault could suggest that the modern scientific intellectual ‘emerged’ in the wake of the Second World War, ‘as a point of transition between the universal and the specific intellectual.’30 For Foucault, speaking of Oppenheimer in this particular context, it was owing to a very ‘direct and localised relation to scientific knowledge and institutions that the atomic scientist could make his intervention; but, since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal.’31 In the context of such ‘technico-scientific structures’ (and with respect to nuclear scientists, but also pharmacists and computer experts, etc.), Foucault is able to point out that ‘[t]ruth is’ in effect ‘a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth,’ i.e., ‘the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true.’32 As Foucault explains, and one can read Nietzsche (and indeed Heidegger on the same questions), such truth functional discourse technologies include ‘the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.’33 Thus Foucault refers no less to Nietzsche than to Kant’s conception of belief or opinion as holding for true [für Wahrhalten, tenir-pour-vrai]. But to connect such a critical perspective on truth as well as technoscience and thence indeed to include, as Foucault includes, politics/ society one needs to add Heidegger to Foucault’s Nietzschean and critical Kantianism (if only because Adorno would constitute an alternative or competing voice).

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Foucault-Heidegger-Nietzsche: the politics of influence I have been emphasizing the interpretive consequences to be drawn from the simplistic yet still dominant habit of reading either Heidegger or Nietzsche but rarely both together (the problem is compounded when one omits, as one tends to do in both cases, Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s Kant or else and indeed Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s Descartes). One assumes that Heidegger and Nietzsche are somehow antithetical thinkers, despite the famous/infamous detail that Heidegger devotes more of his writing (and reading) to Nietzsche than to any other thinker with the possible exception of Aristotle, whom Heidegger however also read as propadeutic to a reading of Nietzsche (not the worst idea in the world, provided indeed one reads one’s Aristotle as Nietzsche did, and that is critically not categorically). Thus, we noted that Hans Sluga felt no need to integrate Foucault’s recollection that he ‘had to read Nietzsche in the fi fties . . . Nietzsche alone did not appeal to me’ with his own claim that what was decisive for Foucault was Heidegger and not Nietzsche.34 It is likewise instructive that Dreyfus dismisses Foucault’s Nietzschean allusions although he too quotes the same final interview to emphasize his own focus on Heidegger.35 The problem, of course, turns upon Heidegger’s political liabilities (to speak gingerly here) and if Foucault is best set as far to the anarchic left as can be imagined (for an enthusiast of all things American, as he was), Foucault still and very blithely asserts contra the intellectually respectable dynamite that was/is Nietzsche and the very easy associative work that it is to read his genealogy as of a piece with Nietzsche that the decisive coordination was the two taken together, that is, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The combination functioned for Foucault, as it still ought to function for anyone, as an exactly ‘philosophical shock.’36 Indeed, the ongoing shock is and remains this same conjunction. If Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger highlights a connection that may have been old news for (classically formed!) continental readers (it is the very point of departure, for David Allison’s pathbreaking book collection, The New Nietzsche),37 Heidegger’s specific role in France has recently been highlighted in Janicaud’s two volume Heidegger en France and (for Anglophone readers), Ethan Kleinberg’s Generation Existential.38 Indeed I argue that such political and sociological issues can often be the only thing at stake in deciding who one cites and who one does not cite but also whether or not one finds a thinker to have been influential.39 We tend as Nietzsche says not merely to find just and only what we are looking for but we also tend to be incapable of seeing anything else.

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Reading We will be hard pressed to answer the question of debt or influence with respect to the question of Heidegger and Foucault just because, and like other French authors, Foucault himself does not read his Nietzsche or indeed his Heidegger as Anglophone scholars tend to read Nietzsche and Heidegger. That is: what Foucault does not do is ‘read’ (or cite) certain texts and then explain these same cited texts to readers who have already read (and indeed often cited and explained) the same texts themselves. The problem is compounded (and hence we have the problem to begin with) because and as we have noted the ‘influence’ of his interviewers, when asked about such influences Foucault amiably acknowledges the same. So far so good, but how are we to understand the very idea of an intellectual ‘debt’? We might go further and actually read Foucault. If so we may find ourselves in difficult straits, for Nietzsche tells us that reading does not come to us automatically: we need first to learn to read, and then we need to read in fact or actually, something we do only reluctantly and then only with authors who matter, or where the investment can pay us back (for the sake of, or as Nietzsche said, in order to write a book or essay of one’s own: in just such cases, so Nietzsche points out, one is, as Heidegger would say, still not reading). To trace Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger we ourselves need to read but that means to read as Nietzsche reminded us that one might read, rather than merely set off on a hunt for relevant names.40 To this degree, any effort to limn Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault has more to do with random detail than Foucault’s specific engagement with Nietzsche or with the inevitably metonymic Nietzscheanism of French philosophy—a Nietzscheanism culminating, with a Freudian tic troped by a pretended denial in Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut’s collection, Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas nietzschéens /Why We Are Not Nietzscheans.41 The authors in this collection hardly oppose Nietzsche as much as they reflect upon the loss of a certain way of philosophizing in Nietzsche’s name. Thus Robert Legros muses: ‘How could a philosopher not be a Nietzschean, when all of Nietzsche’s philosophy sets out to radicalize the two quests that are at the very birth of philosophy: to criticize the obvious tenets that carpet the world and, through, creation, to evoke wonder at the irreducible enigma the world conceals? How,’ he repeats for emphasis, ‘to pretend to be a philosopher without feeling oneself to be Nietzschean?’42 A similar sentiment echoes in Alain Raynaud’s insightful reflection on Nietzsche’s critical enlightenment

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perspective on the enlightenment itself, as a post-Kantian project that was begun but ought not end with Nietzsche. Raynaud thus argues that if ‘Nietzsche can make of the Aufklärung an instrument for his critique of Reason, then we in turn can make of his “irrationalism” the means to continue the liberation that began with the Enlightenment.’ 43 Looking to the very same Kantian adumbration of the question of enlightenment as his own self-description, his own very formalistic ecce homo, emphasizes it, Michel Foucault’s philosophy continues the same critical tradition.

Science and The Birth of the Clinic We have come to hear the relevance of Canguilhem and Cavailles in Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic but of course the same text can be read between both Heidegger and Nietzsche as indeed with reference to other names, especially, and this is significant, in the philosophy of science. How do scientists see? How does science progress? There are convergent parallels with Norwood Russell Hanson’s extremely suggestive Patterns of Discovery but there are also parallels in Heidegger’s Being and Time and (specifically for Foucault’s analysis) in Heidegger’s ‘Science and World-Picture’ [Zeit des Weltbildes] a lecture from 1938, the same year in which the first translation of Heidegger’s work into French appeared (and including selections from Being and Time) in the collection Qu’est ce que la Métaphysique? 44 To Heidegger one must also add Merleau-Ponty especially with regard to the specific notion of phenomenology to which Foucault himself makes reference. De Certeau, again, is useful here as he reminds us that what Foucault ‘discerns at this level’45 is ‘the move [le geste] which has organized a discursive space.’ De Certeau points out that what is ‘decisive’ in such practices is less a matter of such discourses as might exclude ‘people from normal social intercourse’ than the very Cartesian, ‘miniscule and ubiquitously reproduced move of “gridding” (quadriller) a visible space in such a way as to make its occupants available for observation and “information.” ’46 If this is the panoptic example of Discipline and Punish, this is also the effective invention of modern medicine (all diagnosis, test, and demonstration— and less and less a matter of healing: that issue remains the patient’s problem not the clinician’s, henceforth medicine is no longer a matter of the relationship between ‘sickness and what alleviated it’ [The Birth of the Clinic (BC 55)] but a matter of teaching, of show and tell, the patient remade as an ‘object of positive knowledge’ [BC 197; cf. xviii]) as Foucault details this in The Birth of the Clinic.

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Speaking here of the change of clinical discourse and the changing perceptions of the ‘greyness of things,’ Foucault writes of the relation between ‘ “things” and “words” where . . . seeing and saying still are one. We must reexamine the original distribution of the visible and invisible insofar as it is linked with the division between what is stated and remains as unsaid.’47 Here Foucault alludes to Heidegger’s emphasis on physis as well as his unmistakable notion of truth as aletheia, where Foucault notes the Heraclitean ‘obscurity, the density of things closed upon themselves’ and the illuminating power of ‘the gaze that passes over them, around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The residence of truth in the dark centre of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze . . .’48 In his preface to The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault reads not only Heidegger but Nietzsche, as he himself attests to this influence, beginning with the title The Birth of the Clinic but also in Foucault’s fourth section, entitled: ‘The Old Age of the Clinic’ echoing the theme of the decline and the death of tragedy that was the subject of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Foucault’s readings between both Nietzsche and Heidegger are thus much closer to Heidegger’s own readings of Nietzsche than American scholarship tends to recognize, hence Foucault’s coordination of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Heidegger.49 This ‘French’ Heidegger raises the question of the subject as Foucault poses it as a radically critical challenge (and not an appeal to a transcendental humanism) and when Foucault moves between anticipated or likely alternatives as so many misunderstandings he is reading rival theorists as much as Nietzsche and indeed and especially Heidegger. Thus with respect to ‘living individuality’ and beyond the highly charged (because philosophically decisive) ‘old Aristotelian law, which prohibited the application of scientific discourse to the individual’ (BC 170) in his prefatory reflections on the status of ‘scientifically structured discourse about an individual’ (BC xiv), Foucault recalls that ‘accession to the individual’ recalls ‘the most concentrated formulation of an old medical humanism’ (ibid.) before going on to invoke the ‘mindless phenomenologies of understanding’ (and here Foucault deploys a very Nietzschean characterization) referring to the ‘sand of their conceptual desert’ and thence to the Heideggerian notion of the ‘non-thought’ (ibid.). Each move alludes neither to Heidegger nor to Nietzsche but to a Heidegger who reads Nietzsche. Sharing a Heideggerian lineage, Foucault’s genealogy does not simply move to a kind of archaeology (any more than Bruno Latour’s strong sociology of science simply becomes a polite engineer’s history of lionized science).

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In a voice including the language of Heidegger on science as much as Canguilhelm, Foucault writes that ‘[m]edicine made its appearance as a clinical science in conditions which define, together with its historical possibility, the domain of its experience and the structure of its rationality’ (BC xv). The critique thus invoked calls not only for Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s critique but for Nietzsche’s reading of the same critique: It may well be that we belong to an age of criticism whose lack of primary philosophy reminds us at every moment of its reign and its fatality: an intelligence that keeps us irremediably at a distance from an original language. For Kant, the possibility and necessity of critique were linked through certain scientific contents, to the fact that there is such a thing as knowledge. In our time – and Nietzsche the philologist testifies to it – they are linked to the fact that language exists and that, in the innumerable words spoken by men – whether they are reasonable or senseless, demonstrative or poetic – a meaning has taken shape that hangs over us, leading us forward in our blindness, but awaiting in the darkness for us to attain awareness before emerging into the light of day and speaking. We are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses and to the task of hearing what has already been said. (BC xv–xvi) Nietzsche asks us to pay attention to the names and this we pretend to do, more often than not. Like Heidegger, Foucault is one of Nietzsche’s rare readers to suggest that we attend to Nietzsche’s questions. If Heidegger calls emphatic attention to what Nietzsche means by science [Wissenschaft] drawing a parallel to love and to passion [Leidenschaft], Foucault emphasizes not only origin and genesis [Ursprung, Herkunft, Entstehung, Genealogie] but also the good [agathon].50 Foucault thus alludes to the first section of On the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche raises the question ‘what was the real etymological significance of the designations for ‘good’ coined in the various languages?’ (GM I: 4), contending as Nietzsche mused that ‘they all led back to the same conceptual transformation’ (ibid.). Indeed, Nietzsche concludes the first section of his ‘polemic’ (the polemical scholarly attack is, as we recall, the rigorously ‘suspicious’ subtitle of Nietzsche’s Genealogie: Eine Streitschrift) with a reprisal of this same question: ‘What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?’ (GM I: 17) The challenge as Nietzsche poses it is one Foucault embraces, where Nietzsche contends that ‘every table of values, every “thou shalt” known to

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history or ethnology, requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation, rather than a psychological one; and every one of them needs a critique on the part of medical science.’ (Ibid.). Foucault seems post-Kantian as he notes almost in Heidegger’s voice that ‘in stating what has been said, one has to re-state what has never been said’ (BC xvi). Here Foucault points to what is elicited via questioning and its power to call forth ‘a remainder that is the very essence of that thought, driven outside its secret.’’ (Ibid.). Both the later Heidegger and the Heidegger of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ echo Foucault’s declaration that ‘this unspoken element slumbers within speech,’ especially, singularly to be articulated in questioning. Speech is thus for Foucault ‘an act of “translation”,’ which means that ‘it has the dangerous privilege images have of showing while concealing’ (xvii). One is not merely using the language of semiology and reading in what de Certeau called the squared or ‘gridded’ field of the clinic but an aural, haptic, ocular discursive adaptability that continually changes with the technologies of its adumbration, requiring ‘a sort of sensorial triangulation in which various atlases, hitherto excluded from medical techniques, must collaborate: the ear and touch are added to sight’ (163). In this triangulation one has not to do with three senses to which one might someday add one or two but with the enhancement and transformation of ocularity as such and that is to say of vision. ‘The structure that commands clinical anatomy, and all medicine that derives from it, is that of invisible visibility.’ (165). A Zarathustran echo in the idea (and the ideal) of ‘immaculate perception’ is also at work in Nietzsche’s late-written preface to The Gay Science in a remark Nietzsche sets into the mouth of a girl-child. From such a moralizing, moralistic perspective, Nietzsche reflects on the purely epistemological idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing god, the very idea of a transcendental, timeless, ultimate truth: ‘Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that’s indecent.” (GS §iv) Emphasizing that ‘at the end of the eighteenth century . . . education was given a positive value as enlightenment’ (BC 64), the language Foucault uses of the ‘birth of truth’ (ibid.) recalls Nietzsche’s emphasis on the ‘lateborn’ status of truth among human beings and indeed the discourse of corrective regulation. This for Nietzsche is the scientific conviction of our age: namely ‘the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it.’’ (The Birth of Tragedy (BT) §15)). Foucault goes on, as Nietzsche goes on, to add nudity, the physician’s

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‘invisible visibility,’ the same nudity Nietzsche seems to invoke when he speaks in the section of The Birth of Tragedy that seems relevant here: ‘[t]here would be no science if it concerned itself only with one naked goddess’ (BT §15). The point for Nietzsche as for Foucault is the point of perversion and the distractive, sustaining focus on revelation, the intellectual bachelor’s investigative ‘laying bare,’ yet this ‘perverse’ emphasis does not follow for the reasons one might imagine. Hence Nietzsche contrasts the gaze of the scientist (or Foucault’s clinician) with the artist: ‘[w]henever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.’ (Ibid.). Foucault speaks of ‘a language that did not owe its truth to speech but to the gaze alone’ (BC 69) and Heidegger speaks of calculation, a terminology echoing in Foucault in what is also indeed the Marxist sensibility of his discourse (cf. BC 83–85). Drawing, as Nietzsche does, upon the inherently “ocular” (88) interest of science, Foucault also traces the genesis of the pathological “fact” apart from the vagaries of individual illness, the invention of positive diagnosis, the birth of the clinic: In the period of Laplace, either under his influence or within a similar movement of thought, medicine discovered that uncertainty may be treated, analytically, as the sum of a certain number of isolatable degrees of certainty that were capable of rigorous calculation. Thus this confused, negative concept . . . was to be capable of transforming itself into a positive concept and offered to the penetration of a technique proper to calculation. (97) Speaking in terms of ‘events of the open domain’ (98), the clinic is read in Heideggerian terms that echo with Merleau-Ponty and Canguilhelm. And it is Canguilhelm who can be heard (along with Bataille) when Foucault compares ‘chest diseases’ with venereal diseases, as ‘diseases of love: they are the Passion, a life to which death gives a face that cannot be exchanged.’ (172). If this reference to death inevitably recalls Being and Time and the death that is ultimately and always mine (and not just a trivial inevitability or a tragical fate not to be outgone), death is also the inherently singularizing end or limit of all mortal being in the world (and not only, pace Heidegger, pace Levinas and Derrida, our own only-too-human mortality).

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Reading Heidegger on death, Foucault’s reading of death in The Birth of the Clinic recalls Nietzsche: ‘Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.’ (Ibid.). Foucault invokes Nietzsche and Heidegger as much as Schreber and Lacan when he affirms that the ‘first scientific discourse about the individual had to pass through this stage of death. Western man could constitute himself in his own eyes as an object of science, he grasped within himself, a discursive existence, only in the opening created by his own elimination: from the experience of Unreason was born psychology . . . from the integration of death into medical thought is born a medicine that is given as a science of the individual. And, generally speaking, the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death: from Hölderlin’s Empedocles to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and so on to Freudian man.’ (197).51 If Foucault goes on to discuss Empedocles in a Hölderlinian mode, the emphasis is a Heideggerian one inasmuch as it is a focus on death: ‘after Empedocles, the world is placed under the sign of finitude, in that irreconcilable, intermediate state in which reigns the law, the harsh law of limit.’ (198). Keeping to the tenor of Nietzsche’s own reflections on genealogy, Foucault remarks that is perhaps understandable that ‘the figures of knowledge and those of language should obey the same profound law, and that the irruption of finitude should dominate in the same way, this relation of man to death, which, in the first case, authorizes a scientific discourse in a rational form, and, in the second, opens up the source of a language that unfolds endlessly in the void left by the absence of the gods?’ (Ibid.).

Theory of knowledge, theory of science and the agonistics of a discipline The language of mathesis, taxinomia (or taxonomy), and genesis as Foucault uses such terms in The Order of Things reveals his debt to Heidegger but emphasizes the Kant he sought to underscore (almost like Adorno who insisted on the need to privilege, alternately to be sure, both Kant and Hegel). In this Kantian spirit, Foucault emphasizes the overall project of science in terms of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. Thus the sciences ‘always carry within themselves the project, however remote it may be, of an exhaustive ordering of the world.’ (The Order of Things (OT) 74). Taxinomia, the idea of taxonomy has in the interim, following Foucault but not less after Agamben as well as Borges and Eco, become

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quite common as Foucault had defined it and as Agamben following Taubes had also defined it in distinctly Heideggerian terms: not only as a matter of regional ontologies but ontic articulation and indeed not only in terms of the very Heideggerian conception of mathesis 52 but a peculiarly Heideggerian reflexive use as Foucault emphasizes that ‘Taxinomia is not in opposition to mathesis: it resides within it and is distinguished from it; for it too is a science of order—a qualitative mathesis.’ (OT 74). As the ‘knowledge of beings,’ taxinomia ‘treats of identities and differences’ as a ‘semiology confronted by history . . . it defines . . . the general law of beings, and at the same time the conditions under which it is possible to know them’ (ibid.). Mathesis itself is to be understood, by contrast, ‘in the strict sense,’ as ‘a science of equalities, and therefore of attributions and judgments: it is the science of truth.’ (Ibid.). The contemporary critical change from the Classical period takes place in the alteration of mathesis reframed to constitute ‘an apophantics and an ontology’ leaving the human sciences or better said the humanities on the side of ‘history and semiology’ on the hermeneutic schema Foucault traces here, along with Ricoeur rather than with Gadamer ‘from Schleiermacher to Nietzsche and Freud.’ (Ibid.). Although and like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Foucault was concerned with reading the history of science for the sake of a philosophical understanding of science, his readers have been chary of this association. Indeed, apart from some early first attempts, only Ian Hacking has taken Foucault as relevant for the philosophy of science and then only, and this has been decisive for subsequent readings, in historical and social terms but that is also to say as carefully distinguished from the philosophy of science proper.53 Foucault can also be read in correspondence with Heidegger’s own reflections on physics qua physics or biology as biology when he observes that historians of science want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fi fty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. (OT 127–128) For Foucault, the very idea of natural philosophy as is under siege: the idea of natural history is transformed taxonomically, finally to become biology

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(cf. OT 160–162). Biology, now defined as the ‘science of life,’ turns out to be other than a philosophy of life and is hence and historically nothing ‘vital.’ Thus ‘Natural history is situated both before and after language; it decomposes the language of everyday life, but in order to recompose it and discover what has made it possible through the blind resemblances of the imagination; it criticizes language, but in order to reveal its foundation.’ (OT 116). What is lacking is ‘radical questioning’ (ibid.) as Heidegger defines it but what is at stake is the genesis of the very ‘life sciences’ themselves out of the spirit (or echoing Nietzsche: out of the death) of natural history per se. Life thus ‘becomes one object of knowledge among others, and is answerable, in this respect, to all criticism’ if it also ‘resists this critical jurisdiction, which it takes over on its own account and brings to bear, in its own name, on all possible knowledge.’ (OT 162). This echoes Heidegger’s claim that the essence of technology is nothing technological54 as indeed Heidegger’s still more intriguing claim that the essence of the polis ‘is nothing political.’55 Foucault’s reflection on the implications of Nietzsche’s teaching of the Overman, his ‘Promise-Threat,’ as Foucault describes ‘the notion that man would soon be no more—but would be replaced by the superman’ (OT 322), is combined with a rigorous reflection on the consequences of the Eternal Return (legions of Nietzsche commentators have yet to do the same), explaining that ‘this meant that man had long since disappeared and would continue to disappear, and that our modern thought about man, our concern for him, our humanism, were all sleeping serenely over the threatening rumble of his non-existence.’ (Ibid.). Foucault’s reflections are thoroughly epistemological in Nietzsche’s radical sense but also with respect to Heidegger’s brief on humanism. This takes Foucault farther than Heidegger, with a more extreme doubt than Descartes’ own and just as Nietzsche called for a more radical doubt than Descartes. 56 ‘Ought we not to remind ourselves—we who believe ourselves bound to a finitude which belongs only to us, and which opens up the truth of the world to us by means of our cognition—ought we not to remind ourselves that we are bound to the back of a tiger?’ (Ibid.). The tiger’s back to which we are bound is, of course, the dream tiger of Nietzsche’s reflection upon the limits of truth and knowledge/reasoning/ power in his never published post-Kantian reflections on language, as on grammar, social conventionality and logic, ‘On Truth and Lie in an ExtraMoral Sense.’57 Writing ‘beyond’ good and evil, Nietzsche proposes to consider the parallel right and wrong of rationality and logic itself. And so Nietzsche borrows from standard texts to do so.58

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Reading between Heidegger and Nietzsche, Foucault accords with Kant. The consequence is a tragically (in Nietzsche’s sense) rigorous (in Heidegger’s sense) musing upon the limits of cognition, such as we find in ‘The “Cogito” and the Unthought’ in The Order of Things. Speaking in the same Kantian terms of the human being as ‘the locus of an empiricotranscendental doublet’ (OT 322), Foucault contends that ‘man is also the locus of a misunderstanding’ (OT 323), finding its fundamental necessity ‘in the existence—mute, yet ready to speak, and secretly impregnated with a potential discourse—of that not-known from which man is perpetually summoned towards self-knowledge.’ (Ibid.). This modality frames Foucault’s revision of Kant, moving from the question ‘How can experience of nature give rise to necessary judgments?’ (ibid.) to the very Nietzschean and Heideggerian (cum Lacanian) question ‘How can man think what he does not think, inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority?’ (Ibid.). There is thus for Foucault a fourfold shift, the question is no longer that ‘of truth, but of being; not of nature, but of man; not of the possibility of understanding, but of the possibility of a primary misunderstanding;’ (ibid.) and finally and with respect to science the shift has been ‘from the possibility of a science of nature to the possibility for man to conceive of himself.’ (325) Thus Foucault has all along been speaking of Heidegger if indeed by way of Nietzsche and Hölderlin (cf. OT 333–335). And Foucault has been speaking of Nietzsche all along, most of all when he invokes mathematics in his concluding chapter on ‘The Human Sciences’ pointing out that ‘the recourse to mathematics, in one form or another, has always been the simplest way of providing positive knowledge about man with a scientific style, form, and justification,’ (OT 351), a point coordinate with Nietzsche’s contention that ‘mathematics is merely the means for the general and ultimate knowledge of man.’ (GS §246). If Heidegger’s counter to Heisenberg is right—Heisenberg had thought, as Heidegger reflects on the observation that ‘man everywhere encounters only himself’59 —Foucault’s vanishing subject is already Nietzsche’s, already Heidegger’s. In this sense, Nietzsche’s plaintive cry ‘Two thousand years and not a single new god!’ might suggest how we should hear the supposed death of the subject. Nietzsche is the prophet of an end inaugurated not so much by ‘the absence or the death of God . . . as the end of man’ (OT 385) and Foucault in a Heideggerian voice traces the ‘wake of that death and in profound coordination with it—what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer: it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and

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the return of masks.’ (Ibid.). Echoing Heidegger’s anti-humanist reflections and hence far from a world transfigured in our own image, laughing in Nietzsche’s voice at our own and ongoing self-presumption—this is Foucault’s ‘Promise-Threat’ of the Overman—‘one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the end of the sea.’

Notes 1

2

3

4

Beyond Michel Foucault’s own ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’ in: Martial Guerolt, ed., Nietzsche. Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 183–192, see Etienne Balibar’s insightful discussion, ‘Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism’ in Timothy J. Armstrong, ed. and trans., Michel Foucault: Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1992) 38–58. One has to add Marx along with Heidegger and Nietzsche, but as those scholars who once read Marx now abjure him (and his works) and newer scholars have never read him, to note that one has to add Marx is the equivalent of a sigh. One tends not to read Nietzsche and Marx together, and those who do so tend not to get the Nietzsche bits straight (as Gillian Rose and Howard Caygill have noted). Efforts, not exceptions, include James Miller’s ‘Some Implications of Nietzsche’s Thought for Marxism,’ Telos 37 (1978) or Anthony Giddens, ‘From Marx to Nietzsche: Neo-Conservatism, Foucault, and Problems in Contemporary Political Theory,’ Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (1982): 215–230. More broadly, for an overview of some of the difficulties that bedevil any reading between Nietzsche and Marx, see Clifford Geertz’s reflections on academic-cum-cultural power-exchanges in his ‘Anti-Anti-Relativism,’ American Anthropology 86 (1984): 263–178. The effort to find a voice for Marx in Habermas (and indeed Habermas’ criticism of Foucault) yields considerable challenges on more than one level. See Dominique Janicaud on this, ‘Rationality, Force, and Power: Foucault and Habermas’ Criticisms’ in Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault, 283–300. See Pierre Hadot’s influential Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) as well as Wilhelm Schmid’s Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst: Die Frage nach dem Grund und die Neubegrundung der Ethik bei Foucault (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000) in addition to, still more recently, Edward McGushin’s Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Hadot himself remains best on this but see McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis and Paul Veyne, ‘Foucault and Going Beyond (or the Fulfillment of ) Nihilism’ in Armstrong ed., Michel Foucault Philosopher, 340–345. Note that C. G. Prado adverts to the important influence of both Nietzsche and Heidegger in Starting With Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). McGushin emphasises Foucault’s reading of Descartes, as Beatrice Han highlights Foucault’s reading of Kant in Foucault’s Critical Project (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). This point goes beyond the differences between Ursprung and Herkunft as Foucault himself has emphasized in his discussion of ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’

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6

7

8

9

10

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and as his readers in turn have analysed his emphases. On reading Nietzsche’s ‘genealo gies’ (of morals, religion, science, etc.) see Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Ref lecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), Chapter 5, as well as Babich, ‘The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic’ in Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 171–190. See for example, Michael Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) as well as Jeffrey Minson’s Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985) among many others. Although Jacqueline Stevens, ‘On the Morals of Genealogy’ Political Theory 31/4 (2003): 558–588 manages to overlook John Pizer’s, ‘The Use and Abuse of “Ursprung”: On Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche.’ Nietzsche-Studien 19 (1990): 462–478, her essay is a useful counter to the current, largely analytic rage for reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals in preference to his other works. The most insightful reader of/between Nietzsche and Foucault remains Gary Shapiro. See for a creative instantiation, his Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See for an introductory discussion, Babich, ‘Gay Science: Science and Wissenschaft, Leidenschaft and Music’ in: Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed., Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2006), 97–114. As Henry Corbin says in his June 1978 interview with Philippe Nemo: ‘A philosopher’s campaign must be led simultaneously on many fronts, so to speak, especially if the philosophy in question is not limited to the narrow rationalist definition that certain thinkers of our days have inherited from the philosophers of the “enlightenment.” Far from it! The philosopher’s investigations should encompass a wide enough field that the visionary philosophies of a Jacob Boehme, of an Ibn ‘Arabi, of a Swedenborg etc. can be set there together, in short that scriptural and visionary (imaginal) works may be accommodated as so many sources offered up to philosophical contemplation. Otherwise,’ Corbin goes on to emphasize, ‘philosophia no longer has anything to do with Sophia.’ http://www.amiscorbin.com/textes/anglais/interviewnemo.htm. Accessed May 18, 2008. The relevance of such an array is evident in Arnold Davidson’s nevertheless selective and consequently limited collection, Foucault and his Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998) including Hadot and Derrida, among others. See too Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault Philosopher. See Michel de Certeau, ‘Foucault and Bourdieu’ in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 45–60. For an illustration, see Keith Ansell-Pearson, ‘The Significance of Michel Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche: Power, the Subject, and Political Theory’ in: Peter Sedgwick, ed., Nietzsche: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 13–30. See above notes, especially Pizer but see also C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder: Westview, 1995) and Todd May’s work in addition to Stuart Elden’s several studies (also to be considered in conjunction with Heidegger).

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Foucault’s Legacy For an example of such restrictive engagement, see Timothy Rayner’s Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience (New York: Continuum, 2007). The discussant in question is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Dreyfus with a rather spare nod towards Rabinow. That other scholars apart from Dreyfus find Heideggerian elements in Foucault’s writing is patent but Rayner, foregrounding what amounts to a calculatedly elective affinity, seems only to address scholars who follow Dreyfus’ Foucault/Heidegger. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972) George Steiner, ‘The Mandarin of the Hour – Michel Foucault,’ New York Times Book Review, Feb. 28, 1971, 2, cf. Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 266–267. Maurice Florence [Michel Foucault], ‘Foucault,’ 1. In Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 2003), 1–5; here 1. Ibid. NB: this is a French rather than an Anglo-American Kant, and rather than the several German varieties of Kant. Paul Ricoeur, De l’interpretation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 40–44. Cf. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’ in: Martial Guerolt, ed., Nietzsche. Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 183–192. See Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–33. Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy, 33. See Jean-Luc Marion, Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). See Minson, Genealogies of Morals but see too the alternative readings by Alan Megill and May. See Nietzsche’s own discussion of this in On the Genealogy of Morals and see for a discussion of this very specific distinction with reference to the conceptual relevance of relativism, Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science, 46–56. Douglas Smith, Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France 1872–1972 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 221. Smith is careful to advert to the importance of Heidegger in France precisely for the sake of understanding Nietzsche’s influence in the same context that the ‘reception of Nietzsche in the late 1960s and early 1970s thus implies an engagement with Heidegger . . .’ Smith, Transvaluations, 225. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Jean Baudrillard’s famous, insightful, and very short: Forget Foucault (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977). Originally published as: Oublier Foucault (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1977), trans. Humanities in Society, 3 (Winter, 1980), 87–111. But see especially Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien: I Arts de faire [Paris: 10/18, 1980] and on de Certeau’s Foucault, Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick, ‘The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault’s Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse’ Diacritics 29/3 (Fall 1999): 63–80 in addition, of course, to Elden’s work on Foucault.

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30 31 32 33 34

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See for a recent collection, Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) in addition to Rayner, Foucault’s Heideger. See Ian Hacking, ‘Michel Foucault’s Immature Sciences’ Nous 13 (1979): 39–51 but it is Gary Gutting who authored Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On these sensibilities, analytic and not, C. G. Prado can ruefully recall that as a student he opted not to hear Foucault speak, a recollection which confirms quite apart from its personal significance for Prado, that Foucault had been invited, as had MacIntyre and Rorty, to give a lecture in the first place. See Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Derrida is the almost (not really) martyr of the difference it makes not to have such an open reception while Jean Baudrillard has the best credentials for such a regrettable distinction. Saying this does not mean that it is easy to incorporate Foucault in the increasingly quantified constellation or image of the social sciences. For a how-to, see Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Using Foucault’s Methods (London: Sage Publications, 1999) and note that while Kendall and Wickham mention Nietzsche (if only in passing), they steer well clear of Heidegger. Thus Hans Sluga argues that Paul Rabinow and Dreyfus overstate Foucault’s Heideggerian influences in Sluga ‘Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,’ in: Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 110–139. Foucault, ‘Politics, Philosophy, Culture,’ 251. As Foucault goes on to say: ‘I’m not looking for anything else but I’m really searching for that . . .’ (Ibid.). The incompleteness of the sentence attests, of course, to its oral character, undergirding the ambiguity that permits contrary interpretations. See my discussion of this theme throughout Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Heidegger, Nietzsche (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 127–128. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 131. Ibid. Sluga, ‘Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,’ 250. See note 27 above. Dreyfus, ‘On the Ordering of Things: Being and Power in Heidegger and Foucault,’ in Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault Philosopher, 80–95. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 250. David Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche (New York: Dell, 1977). See further, David Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France (Paris: Albin, 2001), in two volumes and Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). For yet another reading, see Alan Schrift, Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (New York: Wiley, 2004). Schrift emphasizes the growing influence of analytic philosophy in France, accurate indeed inasmuch as professional philosophy seeks to follow an explicitly Anglo-American lead but although the ambition is

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45 46 47

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Foucault’s Legacy clear it cannot be consummated simply owing the French background in the history of philosophy that is anathema to analytic philosophy. Such a historical background characterizes those Schrift identifies as the ‘leading’ French scholars, such as Jules Vuillemin, Gaston Granger, Jacques Bouveresse, etc., and so exceeds a comparable formation for their Anglo-American counterparts that the distinction wavers. What does not waver, bien entendu, is the enthusiasm for things analytic in Paris as in Oxford. I discuss this and other issues in Babich, ‘On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy’ in C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst : Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003), 63–103. In today’s electronic era, the very idea of the hunt itself has lost a bit of luster: given search engines, all we need do is click and we on our way to an automatic table of answers. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, eds., Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, Robert de Loaiza, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Robert Legros, ‘The Nietzschean Metaphysics of Life,’ in Ferry and Renaut, eds., Why we are Not Nietzscheans, 110–140, here 111. Raynaud, ‘Nietzsche as Educator,’ in Ferry and Renaut, eds., Why we are Not Nietzscheans, 141–157, here 145. This text was first translated in 1938 by Henry Corbin as Qu’est ce que la Métaphysique? Suivi d’extraits sur L’Être et le Temps et D’une Conference sur Hölderlin (Paris: Gallimard, 1951 [1938]). De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 46. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 46–47. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, xi. Originally published as Naissance de la Clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). In a book of the same era, William J. Richardson would draw attention to the same Heideggerian difference between the said/unsaid. See William J. Richardson, Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963 [Fordham University Press, 2003]). BC xiii. Xavier Tilliette, discussing Hölderlin and Heidegger invokes the same Corbin we noted above on the matter of multifarious proficiency in connection with the difficulty of reading Heidegger and Hölderlin for, on the one hand, students of literary criticism and, on the other hand, romantic idealism from Schiller to Hegel, Schelling, and Jacobi. See Tilliette, ‘Hölderlins Empedokles im Lichte Heideggers,’ in Peter Trawny, ed., ‘Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch wohnet / Der Mensch auf dieser Erde’. Heidegger und Hölderlin (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 149–162. This philological analysis is a focal point of Foucault’s ‘Nietzsche, Marx, Freud.’ Empedocles leaps into the volcano and the Freudian man, we know, is concerned with death as with sex and Nietzsche has plans for Zarathustra or a substitute to die. See for a discussion and further references Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche, 157–162. For a reading of Hölderlin’s Hyperion and death, see the conclusion of Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, Preface, x–xii.

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See on Heidegger’s mathesis, Babich, ‘Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science: Calculation, Thought, and Gelassenheit,’ in Babich, ed., From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire (Dordrecht: Kluwer. 1995), 589–599 as well as Stuart Elden on calculation in Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and for a critique of this reading of mathesis, Dmitri Ginev, Context of Constitution: Beyond the Edge of Epistemological Justification (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). In addition to Gutting and Hacking, cited above, see Linda Alcoff’s essay on Foucault ‘Foucault’s Philosophy of Science: Structures of Truth, Structures of Power,’ 211–223, Gary Gutting, ed., Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophies of Science (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 211–223 as well as Joseph Rouse and Yvonne Sherrat. Barry Allen, Knowledge and Civilization (Boulder: Westview, 2004) is an exception. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 4. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’ (Summer semester 1942), ed. Walter Biemel, (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993 [1984]), §14b, 80 [98]. Nietzsche, KSA 11, 640–641. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (in fi fteen volumes) (Berlin : Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 1,877. For further references and a discussion of such ‘borrowings,’ see the first two chapters of Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 27. Heidegger cites Werner Heisenberg. ‘Das Naturbild,’ .

Chapter 3

Foucault, Hegel, and the death of man Tom Rockmore

This is a chapter about the relation between Hegel’s role in French philosophy since roughly the first third of the last century, over some seven decades, and Foucault’s familiar, but puzzling thesis of the death of man. Descombes’ suggestion that Hegel is the master thinker, within whose enormously broad position the French philosophical discussion unfolds, and against which it reacts,1 is illustrated by Foucault’s thesis, which belongs to the general effort, typical among leading French thinkers of his generation, to break out of Hegel’s French connection. One set of questions concerns the interpretation of his thesis. What is the meaning of Foucault’s famous thesis of the death of man? Death is unfortunately an everyday occurrence. Everyone who does not die in another way in the meantime will eventually die a ‘natural’ death occurring at the end of life. But many, far too many also die in violent ways often linked to the particular historical moment in which they lived. The last century was one of the bloodiest in human history, filled with genocides of all kinds.2 And early in this century it is hard to be optimistic that it will be better. But ‘man,’ at least ‘man’ as ordinarily understood, has clearly not ‘died’ if the reference is merely to physical death. Hence, on the surface, Foucault’s thesis is puzzling, difficult to grasp, not clearly intelligible, perhaps not even interesting, and less than obviously correct. But it becomes easily legible and very interesting, even if one might still dispute its central claim, if read against the complex Hegelian background of twentieth-century French philosophy. A second set of questions concerns the relation of Foucault’s thesis to Hegel. Is he finally successful in breaking out of the Hegelian framework? Or out of the French Hegelian framework? Or is the result, as Descombes claims for French philosophy in general, that in effect to play the game of the master is to lose to the master of the game? If Descombes’ claim holds for Foucault, one must conclude that despite his efforts he fi nally does not

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go farther than Hegel. In that case, his view of the subject, which at first glance appears not to be Hegelian, even to be anti-Hegelian, would turn out to be Hegelian. These two questions are related. The meaning to be attributed to Foucault’s thesis of the death of man requires an understanding of the philosophical context in which it arose, hence a grasp of the specific nature of French Hegelianism that, since Kojève, dominated and perhaps still dominates French philosophy. I will be arguing that Foucault’s thesis, which appears to be a reaction against Hegel, which belongs to the antiHegelian effort to break out of Hegel’s enormous and continuing impact on French philosophy, can be understood as in fact broadly compatible, but not identical, with at least one way of reading Hegel’s position. In an important sense Foucault’s thesis is not anti-Hegelian but Hegelian, one of the ways of grasping one of the deepest of his insights, the nature of the subject, hence contained within his overall position.

Hegel’s French connection The Hegelian background of twentieth-century French philosophy is not well understood. Reasons include the lack of interest of Hegel scholars in the unusual French reading of Hegel,3 which is fully matched by the lack of interest, indeed disinterest of those interested in French philosophy in Hegel, who, at least at first glance, smacks of German idealism in a way that has nothing at all to do with French philosophy. Most, perhaps all of the important French philosophers since the 1930s are marked by their encounter with Hegel. Yet this encounter, which is not often discussed, is mainly ignored, even for such authors as Levinas or Merleau-Ponty, whose positions depend on their reading of Hegel, hence for whom it is crucial.4 The case for Hegel’s importance for philosophy in general and with regard to French philosophy is made in related but different ways by Merleau-Ponty and Descombes. Who is an existentialist and when existentialism begins depends on the point of view. 5 In a comment on the work of Jean Hyppolite, an important French Hegel scholar, Merleau-Ponty called attention to Hegel, whom he understood as the first existentialist, in a famous passage, which must be cited at length, since it provides helpful insight for this discussion6: All the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and

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psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason, which remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason, broader than the understanding, which can respect the variety and singularity of individual consciousnesses, civilizations, ways of thinking, and historical contingency but which nevertheless does not give up the attempt to master them in order to guide them to their own truth. But, as it turns out, Hegel’s successors have placed more emphasis on what they reject of his heritage than on what they owe to him. If we do not despair of a truth above and beyond divergent points of view, if we remain dedicated to a new classicism, an organic civilization, while maintaining the sharpest sense of subjectivity, then no task in the cultural order is more urgent than re-establishing the connection between on the one hand, the thankless doctrines which try to forget their Hegelian origin and, on that other, that origin itself. That is where their common language can be found and a decision confrontation can take place. Not that Hegel himself offers the truth we are seeking (there are several Hegels, and even the most objective historian will be led to ask which of them went furthest), but all our antitheses can be found in that single life and work. There would be no paradox involved in saying that interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the philosophical, political, and religious problems of our century. This passage is important for our purposes for four reasons. First, it suggests that since Hegel all the important ideas emerge in reactions of different kinds to him. If Kant is certainly the single most important thinker of modern times, Hegel is the most important Kantian, whose version of the critical philosophy carries forward many of Kant’s insights in forging a link to history that cannot later be reversed. Hegel’s importance is acknowledged by Heidegger, a leading twentieth-century anti-Hegelian, who points to the need to dialogue with and overcome Hegel if Western philosophy is to remain viable.7 Second, Merleau-Ponty points out the importance of reestablishing connections to Hegel, which have been covered up in different ways. Certainly one of the most obvious connections is, as he also suggests, the connection to phenomenology, which later phenomenologists and historians of phenomenology consistently work to suppress. A cardinal example is the view that Husserl invented phenomenology. This myth, which is by now well entrenched, and which is routinely repeated by Husserlians, is based on ignorance about or willful disregard of the prior philosophical tradition.8 Third, there is the suggestion that, since our historical moment

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is circumscribed by Hegel or the reaction to him, there is no way to go beyond Hegel in our time. In other words, efforts to surpass Hegel remain within the folds of the vast Hegelian position. Finally, as Merleau-Ponty points out, there are obviously different ways to interpret Hegel, different ways to understand his ideas, different ways to comprehend the dimensions of his enormous and continuing influence, different ways to assess his accomplishment. Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that Hegel is the central philosopher of our time suggests that he is also the central ‘French’ philosopher, the dominant philosophical presence in the French debate. This suggestion is developed by Descombes who, writing in Merleau-Ponty’s wake, rereads French philosophy through Hegel. In his remark, Merleau-Ponty has in mind Hyppolite, an important but traditional French Hegel scholar, but Descombes is thinking of his more charismatic ‘French’ counterpart Alexandre Kojève. French Hegel studies began in the nineteenth century. French interest in Hegel began during his lifetime—he died in 1831—in Victor Cousin’s discussion of the Phenomenology of Spirit in his courses at the Collège de France in 1828.9 Cousin met Hegel in Heidelberg in 1817 and 1818, became interested in his work, and remained in correspondence with him.10 In Cousin’s wake, French Hegel studies continued in a desultory manner. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Lucien Herr contributed a short, neutral presentation of Hegel’s life and thought.11 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hegel’s thought was discussed by a number of French writers. Such discussions include several chapters in a work by Victor Basch on classical German views of political philosophy12 and a monograph by Paul Roques, the first such work in French devoted to Hegel’s thought.13 Slightly later, in lectures at the Sorbonne that were eventually published in book form, Victor Delbos, the Kant scholar, mentioned Hegel in the context of a discussion of ‘Kantian factors in German philosophy from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.’14 In a lengthy work on scientific explanation, Emile Meyerson wrote an entire volume on Hegel’s philosophy of nature [Naturphilosophie].15 The neo-Kantian, Léon Brunschvicg, contributed a violently critical chapter on Hegel in his account of consciousness in Western philosophy.16 In an influential work, Jean Wahl drew attention to the relation of Kierkegaard and Hegel.17 After Wahl’s book, French Hegel studies quickly began to take off. Since Wahl, there have been a number of important students of Hegel in France, including Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Pierre-Jean Labarrière, Gwendoline Jarczyk, Bernard Bourgeois, and now Jean-François Kervegan. Labarrière and Jarczyk, who are both in Christian orders, have done

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much to call attention to Hegel from an orthodox Christian perspective. Bourgeois is a classical Hegel scholar, whose many translations and commentaries are justly regarded as important. Kervegan, who took his place at the Sorbonne, called attention to himself in his effort to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt, the German Nazi legal theorist,18 who remains a controversial figure in France.19 The two dominant figures in French Hegel studies in the twentieth century are certainly Kojève and Hyppolite. Besides the fact that they were interested in Hegel and died in the same year, 1968, the year of the student revolution in France, they are different, opposed in nearly every important way, including their views of Hegel. Kojève, whose original name was Alexandr Kojevnikov, emigrated from Russia, after a lengthy period in Germany, where he acquired a doctorate under Jaspers, to France. His nearly native grasp of German was a huge asset in explaining Hegel’s Phenomenology to French scholars who did not know German well enough to read Hegel in that language at a time when there was no French translation of the book. His famous lectures on Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (1933–1939) were attended by a group (e.g. Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Breton, Jacques Lacan and Raymond Aron) most of whose members later became well known in French culture. Others influenced by Kojève’s reading of Hegel, but who are not known to have attended his lectures, include Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. On the contrary, Hyppolite was a product of the French elite system of schools, later a professor at the Sorbonne, the Ecole normale supérieure, and the Collège de France. He famously taught himself German at the same time as he produced the first translation into French of Hegel’s Phenomenology (1939). Their Hegel interpretations also differ markedly. Speaking generally, with Lukàcs,20 who was only translated into French later, Kojève represents the Marxist, or so-called young Hegelian reading of Hegel, whereas Hyppolite illustrates first-rate, but otherwise typical academic interpretation. Kojève has had an immense and continuing impact on later philosophy in France, but French Hegel studies as they continue today are mainly due to Hyppolite’s influence. Kojève, who was not an academic and had no academic ambitions, was not constrained by fidelity to the text. His Hegel, which produced a sensation in French philosophy, is anachronistically influenced by Marx and Heidegger. Kojève sharply discounts the familiar right-wing, theological approach to Hegel in working out a strongly left-wing, anthropological view. In effect, he rereads the Phenomenology through the lens of Hegel’s

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famous analysis of the master-slave relation. His impact was only heightened by his mastery of the text, his grasp of German, and the paradoxical nature of his claims. As his lectures were coming to an end and the world was sliding toward the onset of the Second World War, Kojève was claiming that history had already come to an end. In comparison, Hyppolite, who was less exciting, was the very model of the well-informed, sober scholarly commentator. Kojève, the outsider who galvanized French thought, was sui generis. He had no equal in French philosophy and no successor. Yet his flamboyant approach left strong traces in the later French debate. It is then no accident if four decades after his lectures ended Descombes understands philosophy since that time in terms of the Hegelian analysis of recognition, as a basic opposition between sameness and otherness (le même et l’autre). There is a measure of truth in his suggestion that French thought continues to react less to Hegel, who has always been less influential than such other phenomenologists as Husserl and Heidegger, but rather to Kojève’s Hegel. Descombes’ reading of French philosophy since Kojève through his Hegelian glasses is further reinforced by Ethan Kleinberg.21 To the best of my knowledge, Kleinberg is the first to assert in detail that Kojève is the central influence in the French Heidegger debate. Kleinberg reads Kojève as a reader of Heidegger who is also reading Hegel.22 He appeals to the reaction to Kojève to understand the French Heidegger, which he describes as arising in reaction to Heidegger as read by Kojève.23 Kleinberg contends that Kojève’s view that Heidegger has roughly the same philosophical anthropology as Hegel leads to the characteristic French anthropological reading of Being and Time, which Sartre expounded in ‘Existentialism is a Humanism,’ but that Heidegger was later at pains to refute. The fantastic influence of Kojève’s Hegel was made possible by the fascination with this avowedly brilliant, Russian-born Hegel commentator as well as by the specific structure of French philosophy. For whatever reason, French philosophy has long favored foreign models, in the twentieth century, as Ricoeur remarks, such masters of suspicion as Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx,24 but also Heidegger. In France, the discussion often progresses through commentary, frequently in excruciating detail, on selected central figures, or master thinkers, some of whom are French and others of whom are foreign, and whose theories form the horizon of the debate at any given moment. Early in the last century, Henri Bergson was the dominant figure. After Sartre published Being and Nothingness (1943), he nearly instantly became world famous and the main intellectual force in both

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French philosophy and literature. He later gave way to Heidegger who reigned as the central ‘French’ master thinker until the cause célèbre of his Nazism came to the attention of the wider public in the later 1980s.25 The reaction to Kojève’s Hegel took different forms, such as a rejection of perceived Hegelian principles, insights and arguments as well as the acceptance of other, alternative conceptual models or master thinkers within the French context. What is often called French postmodernism is a concerted protest by different thinkers working in Kojève’s wake to liberate themselves from the influence of his reading Hegel, which is still such a large, but silent presence in French philosophy. Though there is no agreement about postmodernism, such supposedly postmodern thinkers as Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida all belong in different ways to the anti-Hegelian camp. In France, where Hegel is often understood as presenting a closed system, this is often a point of attack. Lyotard’s refusal of general explanation (méta-récits) counts as a refusal of system.26 This line is further pursued by Deleuze and Guattari who organize their work in a discontinuous manner into plateaus, which are connected together through subterranean passages they call ‘rhizomes.’27 The implicit and explicit criticisms of Hegel formulated by Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari and others pale by comparison with Derrida’s critique, which he waged over many years. Though extremely critical, Derrida paradoxically indicates the deep impact of Hegel on his own ideas. He goes so far as to claim that it is impossible to finish reading Hegel and that in a sense that is all that he is doing.28 Hegel is widely present in Derrida’s writings, including through the slippery notion of deconstruction, which can be depicted as a skeptical extension of Hegel’s critique of the capacity of language to pick out individual objects in the opening arguments of the Phenomenology to the general problem of knowledge in general.29 Derrida has written widely on the positions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. His writings on Hegel and Husserl mainly apply Heideggerian insights, often very critically, to their positions. Being and Time presents incompatible views of transcendental phenomenological truth [veritas transcendentalis]30 and a hermeneutical conception based on the circle of the understanding.31 Kojève, who was influenced by Heidegger, develops a similar point. According to Kojève, ‘Hegel was able to bring the history of philosophy (and, hence, history in general) to an end and to initiate the era of wisdom (whose light already shines on us, but also burns us, more than it warms us, which sometimes seems to us to be revolting) in identifying the Concept and Time.’32 Derrida, who descends from both Heidegger and Kojève, makes this point against Hegel in his critique of the supposedly Hegelian

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theory of ‘absolute knowledge as closure or as the end of history.’33 Yet Hegel never claims to bring philosophy to an end in his system. In fact he explicitly disclaims this possibility in his insistence that philosophy, which comes after the fact, is condemned to meditate on previous forms of thought.34 Derrida further attacks the related idea of total system in his concerted effort to toll the bell as it were for the Hegelian system, hence the French name ‘glas.’35

Foucault’s thesis in the French context I come now to Foucault. His striking thesis of the death of man arises in the context of the anti-Hegelian revolt in Kojève’s wake. This thesis can be understood as directed against a certain view of Hegel, as directed against a number of contemporary French thinkers such as Sartre under the influence of such French philosophical models as Heidegger and Nietzsche, and, since French philosophy has always been broadly humanist, centered on competing conceptions of subjectivity, even as directed against French philosophy itself. In the process of coming to intellectual maturity, Foucault rebelled against usual sexual stereotypes and other social conventions as well as the intellectual trends of his time. It is perhaps not as well known as it ought to be that Foucault grew up intellectually in a conceptual environment dominated by Hegel, whose thought he studied and against which he, like others of his generation, reacted. Like Althusser, Foucault also wrote on Hegel for the DES, what is at present called, in imitation of the North American model, a masters degree in philosophy. Like many others of his generation, Foucault rebelled against Hegel as well as Sartre. Foucault who was earlier a member of the French Communist Party, later turned against communism and Marxism as Sartre moved in that direction, eventually writing his Critique of Dialectical Reason [Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960]. Though important in the French context,36 in France Foucault never reached the level of either Sartre, whom he criticized, or Heidegger, whom he embraced.37 Yet Foucault spoke for other contemporaries when in an interview he satirized Sartre as a man whose thought belonged to an earlier period: ‘The Critique of Dialectical Reason is the magnificent and pathetic effort of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century. In this sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian and, I would even say, the last Marxist.’38 For the young Foucault, Sartre’s journal, Les Temps Modernes, represented a form of intellectual terrorism.39

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A recurrent theme in the discussion at this time was the subject. Sartre’s existentialism turns on the improbable view of subjectivity he works out in Being and Nothingness. The attack on this concept arose from different directions nearly simultaneously. Merleau-Ponty, his slightly younger colleague, who understood the subject not as transcendent to but as in the world, and phenomenology as existential phenomenology, was closer to Hegel than the still very Cartesian Sartre.40 In the pages of Les Temps modernes, Sartre’s journal, Sartre’s colleague attacked the Sartrean conception of the subject as nondialectical and starkly dualist in ‘The Battle over Existentialism’ (1945).41 Sartre was also quickly attacked from another direction by Heidegger, who, when the attack succeeded rapidly, nearly seamlessly replaced his French counterpart as the central intellectual reference. Sartre’s view of the subject was again attacked slightly later by the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage.42 The reactions to this latter attack diverged. According to Didier Eribon, this attack signaled the end of Sartre’s intellectual hegemony on French intellectual life.43 Pierre Bourdieu, at the time the leading sociologist, understood this work as indicating a new, different route to follow.44 Heidegger’s attack was directed against the humanism Sartre featured, for instance in ‘Existentialism is a humanism.’45 In the Letter on Metaphysics (1948), written while he was under severe pressure after the war, Heidegger, who lived in the French occupation zone, sought to protect himself by cultivating friends in the French cultural world. His Letter was simultaneously directed against a selection of his own earlier views, including his effort to recover metaphysics as well as his conception of the subject as Dasein, against Sartre’s view of subjectivity, and against any view of the subject from the angle of vision of traditional humanism. Heidegger’s supposed humanism, which helped him gain access to a dominant position in the French intellectual establishment, was paradoxically combined with an emphasis on the deconstruction or better the later banishment of the subject. In the meantime, Heidegger’s thought had evolved from an earlier period in which a conception of the subject appears to be central in his thought to a later period in which it seems to disappear.46 The central role of Dasein in Being and Time, which was translated only later into French, now gave way in The Letter on Humanism to a theory that retreated back behind the modern concept of the subject. Heidegger here professes a new, supposedly deeper humanism, in effect a form of humanism without a subject, which became extremely influential. Heidegger, in rejecting Sartre’s effort to ally existentialism with ontological phenomenology when, after the war, his alliance with Marxism and the French Communist Party was called into question,

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simultaneously rejects Dasein, traditional humanism that in his opinion is inevitably based on metaphysics, and any traditional form of subjectivity. Heidegger now claims that the true humanism is to be found in thinking (Denken) lying beyond philosophy. In place of humanism, Heidegger suggests a turn to what he calls humanitas in the service of being, but without humanism in the old, metaphysical sense. Heidegger’s attack on humanism, which immediately parachuted him to the forefront in French intellectual circles, was very influential. Others rushed to criticize Sartre as well as to work out his post-Cartesian view of the subject. His earlier conception of Dasein as a subject always already in the world, hence as not transcendent to it, is certainly not Cartesian. His new view of thought beyond a subject was even less Cartesian, even antiCartesian in reversing the traditional French approach to philosophy on the basis of the subject. The Cartesian element in French philosophy is often regarded, especially in France, as identical with philosophy itself. This point is strikingly made by Bergson: ‘All modern philosophy derives from Descartes . . . All modern idealism comes from there, in particular German idealism . . . All the tendencies of modern philosophy coexist in Descartes . . .’47 This idea is independently reaffirmed by Derrida in a dispute with Foucault concerning a remark in Histoire de la folie about Descartes. In an important passage in the first of the Meditations, Descartes raises against his theory the possibility that he is quite simply mad.48 Foucault’s comments on this passage49 led Derrida to remark that not only did Foucault misread the cogito in this work but this misreading proves that the act of philosophy can no longer be anything other than Cartesian.50 In now giving up the subject and returning back behind Descartes, Montaigne and even conceivably Augustine, Heidegger seemed to be making good on his claim to be a modern pre-Socratic. In the last paragraph of his critique of Sartre’s concept of the subject in the ‘Battle over Existentialism,’ Merleau-Ponty suggests integrating existentialism into Marxism. This project was later carried out by Sartre from his deeply Cartesian perspective, initially in Search For A Method (1957) in which he offered existentialism to ‘prop up’ Marxism so to speak, later in the gigantic, unrevised, nearly formless Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). In his later Marxist period, Sartre sought in effect to reinforce his view of the subject in responding to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism. Others, whether under Heidegger’s influence or independently, sought to weaken or eliminate subjectivity as a factor in their theories. The turn from a ‘Cartesian’ view of the subject to a disembodied, epistemological placeholder view of

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subjectivity51 resulted in a series of variations on the ‘decentered’ conception of subjectivity featured in the later Heidegger. In French philosophy, Heidegger’s thesis was anticipated by Kojève. The latter was influenced by Heidegger during his period in Germany before coming to France. Kojève, who simply assumes without argument that philosophy has come to an end in Hegel’s theory, advances a related thesis concerning the end of human being. According to Kojève, here influenced by Marx, the end of history is also the end of human being, the end of the free, historical human individual following from the end of wars, revolutions and philosophy.52 This thesis echoes through recent French philosophy, notably in the views of Foucault and Derrida.53 Under the influence of Kojève and Heidegger, a similar thesis was quickly worked out by others. Although any number of French structuralist figures, including Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Piaget, Goldmann, 54 and so on could be mentioned, this point can be illustrated through the theories of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser and Foucault. Piaget, who is typical of structuralists in that regard, is concerned to avoid a conception of the subject that has anything to do with lived experience.55 Barthes substitutes a concept of the author writing for the concept of the person. 56 The structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss advances a conception of history independent of human being, in which history is the beginning point but not the end point of a quest for intelligibility.57 In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes the possibility of knowledge depend on an unconscious and unknowable activity through which a conceptual subject ‘constructs’ the knowable object of experience. 58 Lévi-Strauss takes a similar line in maintaining that all culture can be understood as the result of the unconscious imposition of form by the human mind that is basically the same in all times and places.59 This view has been understood as the claim, for instance, that although there are myths there are no authors.60 Althusser’s so-called theoretical antihumanism is the basis of his structuralist Marxism61 that refuses any form of anthropology. His antihumanism is intelligible against the background of the Marxist debate roughly since Lukács’ brilliant History and Class Consciousness. The emphasis on alienation in Lukács’ book that was later confirmed by the publication of several unknown, early Marxian texts led to the idea of Marxist humanism.62 The formulation of a humanist, anthropological, resolutely philosophical reading of Marx’s position threatened the Marxist view of Marx, originally formulated by Engels, as transcending philosophy in a science of history and society.63 Althusser’s intervention in the debate was meant to defend the orthodox Marxist view of Marxism as a science by admitting

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the existence of Marx’s early philosophical writings–once they were published it was hard to deny this fact–while denying their importance.64 His antihumanist reading of Marx, more precisely his claim that Marx breaks with the very idea of a universal essence of man in favor of a specific analysis of levels of human practice,65 is intended to show that in his mature work Marx moves beyond anything resembling a conception of the subject in order to carry out a scientific study of practice. Althusser’s intent, which cannot be understood apart from the political struggle to maintain Marxist orthodoxy, is to abolish the subject as Marx understood it in order to ‘save’ the Marxist view of Marx.66 Foucault’s thesis of the death of man arises in the context of a general French turn against subjectivity, hence against the Cartesian heritage, under the influence of Heidegger, Nietzsche and others. Although he indicates that Nietzsche is more important to him than Heidegger– parenthetically a Nietzsche read through Heideggerian lenses–he sees the latter as the essential philosopher.67 Foucault’s radical attack on a certain conception of human being is misconceived as an attack on human being as such, or as antihumanism, since it is limited to an analysis of the concept or the representation of human being.68 Foucault’s aim in his early work is in part to show how and when human being became an object of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.69 And his later work precisely centers on tracing various forms of human practice.70 Among the structuralists, Lévi-Strauss and Althusser put subjectivity into parentheses in order to constitute structuralist anthropology and Marxism as social sciences. If, as has been claimed, ‘structuralism’ is nothing other than a superficial effort to formulate a general methodology for the human sciences,71 then Foucault is not a structuralist. He objects to the very idea of social science as in principle mistaken. Social sciences are not only false sciences; they are not even sciences at all since they rely on a conception of human being that cannot be known, that cannot be the object of a science.72 Influenced by Kojève,73 Heidegger and others, Foucault maintains that the conception of human being is ‘finished’ [‘fini’].74 This conception came into being in the eighteenth century between two types of language, when human being gave itself a representation in the interstices of language temporarily in fragments.75 Our task today is to think the disappearance of human being since it is now in the process of disappearing. As Foucault later put it, the result is an anonymous system without a subject that marks a return to the seventeenth century. But man has not been put in the place of God since there is only ‘an anonymous thought, knowledge without a subject, theory without identity . . .’76

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Foucault’s thesis can be understood as amplifying Heidegger’s later turn away from the subject. In ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (1938) Heidegger claims that every age is grounded by metaphysics, which in turn depends on a world picture.77 It is decisive for the modern age that the world is transformed into a picture and man into a subjectum.78 In the modern period man has changed in becoming subject,79 where subjectum is a translation of hypokeimenon. Heidegger, who asks rhetorically whether every age has its own world picture, suggests that the concept of the subject or even the subject comes into being and passes away. According to Heidegger, it is only in the modern age that the world has a picture,80 the emergence of the world as picture is the fundamental event of the modern age,81 and the interpretation of man as subjectum is the metaphysical presupposition for all future anthropology.82 Descartes can only be overcome by overcoming modern metaphysics and Descartes’ Meditations provides the pattern for an ‘ontology’ of the subject defined as conscientia.83 In his own way, Foucault argues a similar point. He does not so much dispense with as offer a novel analysis of the subject. In a typically lengthy discussion of Foucault’s remark in passing on Descartes’ thought,84 Derrida objects, thereby adumbrating his own later view of textuality [textualité], that on Foucault’s reading of Descartes there could be something outside of, or prior to, the realm of philosophical discourse.85 Foucault’s response, criticizing Derrida for reducing ‘discursive practices to textual traces,’86 points to the need to go beyond the texts, or abstract philosophical discussion, through historical analysis. For Foucault, who is also influenced by Nietzsche, this leads to analysis of the mechanisms of power within which the ideas of truth and of subjectivity are meaningful. Since truth is relative to the domain of power,87 and since there is nothing outside of power structures, the problem is not to change people’s consciousness but rather to change the regime that produces the truth within the particular relations of power.88 For Foucault, the mechanisms of power are prior, not only to the analysis of truth, but also to subjectivity.89 He sees the alternatives as the idealist view of the subject as constitutive, for instance in the Kantian or Marxian senses, and the phenomenological view of subjectivity, even in historicized form, in which the subject evolves over time. His insistence that one needs to dispense with the constituent subject would lead to the death of subjectivity only if there were no other alternative. In an important passage linking his genealogical analysis to subjectivity, he insists on the need ‘to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework.’90 The result is to make subjectivity genuinely

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historical by inverting the relation between subjectivity and objectivity or history. Foucault continues: ‘And this is what I would call genealogy; this is a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.’91

Foucault on the constitution of the subject Foucault’s thesis of the death of man presupposes an underlying contextualist theory of human being. For Foucault as well as many others, human being is always already in a pre-existing social and historical context, into which it is born, in which it is socialized, hence by which it is shaped or constituted, and which, except in exceptional circumstances, it does not itself either shape or constitute. In Kant’s wake, Fichte, who rethinks the conception of the subject, transforms the highly abstract transcendental unity of apperception that Kant advances in the critical philosophy into finite human being. Like Fichte, Foucault stresses the way that human beings are constrained by their surroundings. This general point is developed in various ways by a collection of later thinkers. Hegel, for instance, works out a seminal conception of objectification to describe the relation of subject to object, individual to group, human being to society. According to Hegel, who is thinking within the horizon of Adam Smith’s understanding of modern capitalism, the externalized activity of finite human beings, for instance workers in modern industrial society, assumes concrete form as the property of another.92 This concept, which describes the way in which human beings literally ‘concretize’ themselves in what they do, is the basis of Marx’s theory of alienation, which describes the effects of objectification on human beings in various complex ways, which are basic to modern capitalism. Objectification, which, under the heading of ‘reification,’ Lukács famously conflates with alienation,93 further underlies Marx’s ‘constructivist’ view, which comes directly out of German idealism, that in and through their activity human beings produce objects, or commodities, which are sold in the market place, themselves, their social relations, and more generally the entire social world. In comparison, with prominent exceptions, such as his self-transformative, Nietzschean view of creating oneself as a work of art,94 Foucault downplays the active side of human being in emphasizing the way that for

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the most part human beings are not active, but passive, hence shaped by their social surroundings. Very much like the post-Kantian idealists, and Heidegger, but in a different way, Foucault reacts to Kant. Foucault was fascinated by Kant’s famous article on the Enlightenment, in which he defined intellectual maturity as independence.95 Though he responds to Hume’s attack on causality, Kant shuns the latter’s view that reason is the slave of the passions, hence less than free. Like Descartes, Kant presupposes that the human subject is completely unlimited, hence wholly free, though he cannot deduce or otherwise justify freedom. Foucault, who claims to shun questions of theory and methodology, reports he was not interested in analyzing the phenomena of power or, as he says, in elaborating the foundations of such an analysis.96 Instead of following an economic approach to relations of production, or a linguistic and/or semiotic approach to relations of signification, he chooses a purely descriptive approach toward phenomena of power. In this specific sense, his writings are generally phenomenological, or descriptive, not dynamic, or directed toward explanation. He is interested in describing ways in which human beings, who for the most part are not free to constitute themselves, are rather constituted by their surroundings. Most people are hemmed in, obstructed in their actions, forced into certain predetermined molds by their surroundings in myriad ways he sought to document. In looking back at his work, Foucault later claimed his overriding aim was to write a history of different ways that human beings are made into or constituted as subjects. Foucault sees his central theme as writing ‘a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.’97 In effect, he is claiming that human beings are not producers but rather products, in short the result of their relation to their social surroundings. But what then is left of the subject, or at least of the traditional conception of subjectivity? Foucault, who addresses, this question repeatedly, claims in a late interview in distinguishing his view from others that the subject simply vanishes so to speak. Here is the passage98: I wanted to see how these problems of constitution could be resolved within a historical framework, instead of referring them back to a constituent object (madness, criminality, or whatever). But this historical contextualization needed to be something more than the simple relativization of the phenomenological subject. I don’t believe the problem can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject

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itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. This passage demands careful attention. Foucault cannot literally be claiming that human being simply disappears, since the biological being routinely referred to in this way continues through time and history. At most, a certain conception, which Foucault designates as the phenomenological subject, which both endures and constitutes, is no longer acceptable. His view seems to be that there is nothing like a permanent essence of human being, a way that human beings are. Hence, he disagrees with someone like Noam Chomsky, who thinks that, unless there is a fi xed human essence, in his case the deep structure common to all natural languages that is innate, or native—hence the term ‘nativism’—in all human beings, we simply cannot explain how infants learn to speak. Foucault, who denies there is a single privileged manner of designating human being, takes issue with the repeated effort over several thousand years in the West in theology and philosophy, and within philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger to understand the human subject as made in the image of God, as endowed with the capacity for speech, as a social being, and, more recently, as homo economicus, Dasein, and so on. According to Foucault, who takes a strongly historical approach, there is no central core of human being that persists outside time since literally everything is historical. This historicist approach leads to two distinctive claims concerning the constitution of human being and knowledge of all kinds, including knowledge of human being. One of the consequences of the widespread attack on subjectivity is the proliferation of theories in which the subject plays no central role. Heidegger, for instance, explains historical events, such as the Second World War, not in terms of human actions, passions and decisions, but rather in relation to being that has supposedly withdrawn. He dramatically calls for renewed attention to the problem of being in a time of peril.99 This leads to the view that events are not due to a person or group of persons, but rather to such factors as what Heidegger calls the gigantic.100 He apparently has in mind a formation that obtains at a given historical moment, such as modern technology, which allegedly controls and constricts human being. Foucault, who is perhaps influenced by

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Heidegger, less dramatically advances the idea that whatever human beings are at any given moment is not due to the actions of other human beings but rather to the social manifestations of power by which the subject is constituted. He retrospectively groups his many writings into three forms of ‘subjectivisation’ (subjectivization), or ways in which the human subject is constituted.101 These include studies of the genealogy of forms of inquiry or sciences, then so-called dividing practices through which temporally dominant theories or institutional structures group people into categories, and finally methods, routines, practices, and disciplines one selects to alter one’s own subjectivity. The forms of inquiry include such sciences as linguistics, economics and biology. The dividing practices comprise studies of sickness, health, criminality and sexual practice. Finally the ways one alters one’s own subjectivity are studied with respect to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Foucault’s historicism102 further results in a distinctive approach to knowledge. According to Foucault, who, in perhaps thinking of Kant, seems to forget earlier attention to a conceptual grasp of human being, the very concept is initially formulated during the Enlightenment period. His thesis seems to be that there is no single truth about human being, since different views emerge within different historical formations, in different historical moments. His archeological survey of the human sciences consists in describing the different historical spaces that obtain in a specific time and place.103 Different times give rise to different representations, but there is no privileged representation and certainly no possibility of ascertaining the truth in any usual sense. In this respect, Foucault is close to MerleauPonty’s own concern, under Hegel’s influence, to relate claims to know to the historical moment, to which they are indexed and in which they are true.104 Like Merleau-Ponty, like Hegel, he refuses any claim that goes beyond relating the views about cognitive objects, such as human being, to the historical moment. He further goes out of his way to refuse the Husserlian solution that consists in attributing priority to the observing subject in order to go to the things themselves. If the historical moment and, as a consequence, the discursive practice that obtains changes, then the view, for instance the view of human being, also changes. Foucault does not shy away from, but rather clearly embraces this inference. Once again he seems close to the later Heidegger’s rejection of his earlier view of subjectivity, including the French anthropological reading of his thought. Heidegger, who proscribes the concept of the subject as the result of a metaphysical investment we need to transcend, rejects the idea of human being he associates with Christianity as well as

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the possibility of representing what he calls the event (Ereignis).105 With this idea in mind, he fatefully compares human being to ‘[a] fleeting cloud shadow over a concealed land . . .’106 Foucault states a related view, based on what he calls epistemes, that, when it concerns human being, is couched in astonishingly similar language. In talking about the history of science, Thomas Kuhn famously uses the ambiguous term ‘paradigm’ to refer to paradigm changes that obtain after a scientific revolution.107 Foucault uses ‘episteme,’ which is also ambiguous, and which he later abandoned. The difference in the way he employs the term has been noted in the discussion. In The Order of Things (1966) this term refers to historical worldviews, or conceptual schemes, which Heidegger rejects in ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ and in The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) it designates the discursive regularities in various cognitive disciplines in particular historical moments.108 The difference is between the view of the cognitive object one might favor and what in fact obtains. The conception of human being, as opposed to human individuals, is merely another discursive regularity linked to the rise of the human sciences, or psychology, sociology as well as literature and mythology, within which ‘man’ is represented in the so-called modern episteme. From the historical vantage point that considers dominant epistemological conceptions with respect to forces that bring them into being, maintain them for a period, before discarding one episteme for another, Foucault calls attention to the recent vintage of the concern with human being in the human sciences. One way to put the point might be to note that the conception of human being is coeval with the rise of the human sciences. Yet if one were at some point to abandon the link between an anthropological conception of the subject, which Heidegger ties to Descartes, then, as Foucault famously remarks, ‘one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’109

Conclusion: Foucault, Hegel and the death of man I began by asking two questions about the meaning of Foucault’s thesis of the death of man and its relation to Hegel. The answer to the first question is that the conception of human being is an episteme Foucault relates to the rise of the human sciences. His interest lies less in knowing the cognitive object than in delimiting possible knowledge of the cognitive subject. If, as he suggests, for human sciences based in philosophical anthropology one were to substitute a more positivistic approach grounded in the structures

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that at any given time constitute subjects, then if not biological individuals at least the epistemological conception of man would disappear. The answer to the second question is more complicated, and depends on how one interprets Hegel and the French Hegel. Foucault’s thesis lends itself to divergent readings from Heideggerian (and Nietzschean), a large variety of anti-Hegelian, or even diverse Hegelian angles of vision. The Heideggerian reading points to the wide influence in the French debate of Heidegger’s later retreat behind the subject, hence the turn away from Dasein toward the anti-Cartesian self-manifestation of being described after the so-called turning of his thought, for instance in the Letter on Humanism. Foucault ostensibly pursues this turning away from man in his thesis about the death of man. A second reading is generically antiHegelian. It seems plausible that, like many others in his generation, such as Derrida, Foucault may well have intended the thrust of his position as a reaction against French Hegelianism, which emerged under the influence of Kojève’s famous lectures on the Phenomenology, and which was virtually everywhere when he began to write. There is a third, more specifically Hegelian way of reading Foucault’s thesis. Despite Foucault’s intention, a Hegelian interpretation of his thesis, which stresses the historical nature of the subject, brings Foucault’s position close to Hegel’s even if, as seems likely, one of his intentions was to rebel against it. In the French context, which has always been concerned with humanism in a broad sense centering on the conception of the subject, in virtue of Kojève, Hegel is often read from a humanist perspective as philosophical anthropology, and Heidegger is also read from a humanist perspective as philosophical anthropology. In a sense to say Foucault is closer to Heidegger, an anti-Hegelian, hence is himself an anti-Hegelian who breaks out of the all-encompassing French Hegelian mold, is to miss the point. For since the French Heidegger is read through Hegel, Foucault’s Heideggerian anti-Hegelianism, if it is that, is really only a form of French Hegelianism. The three readings of Foucault’s thesis are, given Hegel’s influence in the French debate, only three different forms of the same underlying view, or three different kinds of French Hegelianism. French Heideggerianism, French anti-Hegelianism and French Hegelianism all emerge out of the stunning influence of Kojève’s reading of Hegel on the later debate. The similarity lies in the broadly humanist, subject-centered, historicist analyses featured by Foucault and many others in France and elsewhere, for instance in Cassirer and Dewey, who were also influenced by Hegel, writing in Hegel’s wake.

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Discussion of humanism often tends to equate the genus with one of its species.110 For present purposes, three forms of ‘humanism’ can be distinguished: the revival of classical letters; the stress on human being; and a claim for the social relevance of philosophy. Foucault, like Hegel, perpetuates and develops a philosophical insistence on the centrality of human being. This emphasis, which arises early in Christian philosophy, for instance in Augustine’s pioneer conception of a subject to account for human responsibility incumbent upon original sin,111 is later developed in different ways by Montaigne, Descartes, Kant and many others. British empiricist philosophy has always favored an anthropological approach to philosophy that, in the post-Kantian reaction to critical philosophy, spread through the debate. Although broadly humanist, centrally concerned with subjectivity, Foucault and Hegel approach it from different angles. The former’s concern with the constitution of the subject is narrower and more focused than the latter’s broader interest in the relation of human being to modern industrial capitalism in all its dimensions.112 Foucault seems to be uninterested in the way his approach to subjectivity relates to other views of subjectivity unfolding after Kojève’s intervention in the French discussion, hence unaware of and uninterested in the intrinsic historicity of his own enterprise. He thinks that in writing the history of different ways in which the subject is constituted one can turn away from any conception of the human subject, which will later disappear. Hegel, who is aware that all philosophical theories, including his own, belong to the history of philosophy, believes our cognitive views, including our views of the subject, change as the historical moment changes, but that all knowledge necessarily presupposes a conception of the subject of knowledge. Yet these differences finally pale before the deep agreement about the need to grasp the modern world through an understanding of human subjectivity in the historical context. Hegel formulates the initial and still most influential version of this approach, which many others, including Foucault later develop. I conclude that, and despite his intentions, and though a charter member of the French revolt against Hegel, in the final analysis, Foucault’s thesis of the death of man is another form of French Hegelianism.

Notes 1

See Vincent Descombes (1981), Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Foucault’s Legacy See, for this thesis, Christian Delacampagne (1998), De l’indifférence. Essai sur la banalisation du mal, Paris: Odile Jacob. Delacampagne is influenced by Arendt’s view of the banality of evil. See Hannah Arendt (1980), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin. There are few French studies of French Hegelianism. See, for an exception which reflects a strongly Christian perspective, Gwendoline Jarczyk and PierreJean Labarrière (1986), De Kojève à Hegel: 150 ans de pensée hégélienne, Paris: Albin Michel. I am unaware of any study of the relation of Levinas and Hegel. Merleau-Ponty thought it was not possible to escape from Hegel. For a study of Merleau-Ponty that considers his relation to Hegel, see S. Priest, Merleau-Ponty (1998), London: Routledge. See, e. g., Walter Kaufmann (1956), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, edited, with an introduction, prefaces, and new translations, New York: Meridian Books. ‘Hegel’s Existentialism,’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, translated, and with a preface by Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (1964). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 63–64. See Martin Heidegger (1982), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translation, introduction, and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 178. See, for a relatively recent instance, Dermot Moran (1905), Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. London: Polity Press. See Victor Cousin (1991), Cours de philosophie, Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie (1825, 1841). Paris: Fayard. For an account of Cousin’s rationalist reading of Hegel without the conception of dialectic, see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, 136–137. For a discussion of the relation of Cousin to Hegel, see Jacques d’Hondt (1988), Hegel in His Time, trans. John Burbidge with Nelson Roland and Judith Levasseur. Peterborough: Broadview, 132–161. See Lucien Herr, ‘Hegel,’ in La Grande Encyclopédie Larousse, Paris: Larousse, 1890–1893), rpt. in Lucien Herr (1932), Choix d’écrits, II: Philosophie, Histoire, Philologie, Paris: Editions Rieder, 107–140. For Queneau, Herr’s discussion was the only decent one available at the time. See Raymond Queneau, ‘Premières confrontations avec Hegel,’ (1963), Critique, nos. 195–196, 694. See Victor Basch ([1904] 1927), Les Doctrines politiques des philosophies classiques de l’Allemagne, Paris: F. Alcan. See Paul Roques (1912), Hegel, sa vie et ses oeuvres, Paris: F. Alcan. See Victor Delbos (1919), ‘Les Facteurs kantiens de la philosohie allemande de la fin du XVIIIè siècle et du commencement du XIXè siècle, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, nos. 26 (1919), 569–593, 27 (1920), 1–25, 28 (1921), 27–47, 29 (1922), 157–176, 32 (1925), 271–281, and 35 (1928), 529–551. The discussions in numbers 28 and 32 deal most closely with Hegel’s thought. See Emile Meyerson (1921), De l’explication dans les sciences, Paris: Payot. For a summary of Meyerson’s reading of Hegel, see Alexandre Koyré (1973), Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique, Paris: Gallimard, 215–220.

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Léon Brunschvicg (1927), Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale, Paris: Alcan, 2 vols. See vol. 2, 382–401. See Jean Wahl (1929), Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, Paris: Rieder. See Jean-François Kervegan (2005), Hegel, Carl Schmitt: Le politique entre spéculation et positivité, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. See, for a recent study, Yves Charles Zarka (2005), Un Détail nazi dans la pensée de Carl Schmitt, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. See Georg Lukács (1967), Histoire et conscience de classe, trans. Kostas Axelos and Jacqueline Bois, Paris: Editions de Minuit. See Ethan Kleinberg (2005), Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961, chapter 2. According to Kleinberg, three readings emerge from a deep tension in Heidegger around the relation of the individual to the collective background (11). The initial set of French readers concentrated on specific aspects of human being, which is the focus of the second part of Being and Time, in slighting the problem of being, that is the focus of its first part. The second reading, which was organized around Jean Beaufret, inclined toward the collective. Kleinberg implies that both readings are ‘correct’ since Heidegger is simultaneously following both Kierkegaard and Dilthey (12). This leads to tensions in Being and Time and in the understanding of the book (17). Levinas is crucial to this reading of the French grasp of Heidegger. Levinas is an early, perhaps the earliest ‘French’ figure to become deeply interested in Heidegger as well as the co-inventor (with Blanchot) of the third phase in which French readers rebel against the ethical inadequacy of Heidegger’s position in Being and Time in substituting ethics for ontology. See Paul Ricoeur (1970), Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 32. Heidegger’s influence in France was seriously undermined by Farías and then by the enormous reaction to his work. See Victor Farías (1987), Heidegger et le national-socialisme, Paris: Editions Verdier. See Jean-François Lyotard (1979), La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. See Jacques Derrida (1972), Positions, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 103. See, for discussion, Tom Rockmore (2004), ‘Derrida and Heidegger in France,’ in Working Through Postmodernity: Essays in Honor of Gary B. Madison, Symposium, vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 2004, Paul Fairfield, ed., 339–362. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 62. See Heidegger, Being and Time, § 32: ‘Understanding and interpretation,’ 188–194. Alexandre Kojève (1955), ‘Le Concept et le temps,’ Deucalion 5, 18.

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Foucault’s Legacy See Jacques Derrida (1967), La Voix et le phénomène, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 115. See, e.g., G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in HegelWerke, XX, 460, 476. See Jacques Derrida (1981), Glas, Paris: Denoël, 2 vols. After Foucault’s untimely death, Paul Veyne, a respected intellectual and a close friend, wrote: ‘L’oeuvre de Foucault me semble être l’événement de pensée le plus important de notre siècle.’ Cited in Didier Eribon (1991), Michel Foucault, Paris: Flammarion, 352. In my view, Miller’s tendency to see Foucault as assuming Sartre’s mantle and as dominating French thought overstates the case. See James Miller (1992), The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon and Schuster. ‘L’homme est-il mort?’ Arts et loisirs, 15 juin 1966, cited in Eribon, Michel Foucault, 189. See Eribon, Michel Foucault, 297. See ‘Cartesian Freedom,’ in Jean-Paul Sartre (1955), Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson. New York: Collier Books. See ‘The Battle over Existentialism,’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and NonSense, 71–82. See Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. See Eribon, Michel Foucault, 188. See Pierre Bourdieu (1980), Le Sens pratique, Paris: Minuit, 8, cited in Eribon, 188. See Jean-Paul Sartre (2007), Existentialism is a humanism, trans. Carol Macomber, Introduction by Annie Cohen-Solal, Notes and Preface by Arlette Elkaïm- Sartre. New Haven: Yale University Press. See, for this interpretation, Dieter Thomä (1999), Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Henri Bergson (1915), La Philosophie. Paris: Larousse, 1915, 5–7, cited in Franz Böhm (1938), Anti-Cartesianismus, Deutsche Philosophie im Widerstand. Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 25n5. See The Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (1970). London: Cambridge University Press, I, 145. See Michel Foucault (1972), Histoire de la folie. Paris: Gallimard, 56–59. See ‘Cogito and Histoire de la folie,’ in Jacques Derrida (1967), L’Ecriture et la difference, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 95. In his discussion, Piaget distinguishes between the conception of the human individual that is not relevant and the idea of the ‘epistemic subject’ or ‘cognitive nucleus.’ See Piaget (1968), Le Structuralisme, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 120. See Kojève(1947), Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard. 434–437. See Jacques Derrida (1972), Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 144. Any list of structuralists is arbitrary, since there is no agreement about the nature of ‘structuralism.’ Goldmann can be counted as a structuralist since he calls his method ‘genetic structuralism.’ See Piaget, Le Structuralisme, 58.

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See Roland Barthes (1977), ‘Death of the Author,’ in Image, Music, Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 145 Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as the I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject,’ not a ‘person,’ and this subject, empty outside the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together,’ suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.

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See Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964), La Pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon, 347–348. In a famous passage, Kant described this activity as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul.’ Immanuel Kant (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, B 181, 183. See Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon, 28. See Paul de Man (1983), Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 11. On the relation of structuralism and Marxism, see Lucien Sebag (1964), Marxisme et structuralisme, Paris: Payot. For a French humanist reading of Marx, see Jean-Yves Calvez ([1956] 1970), La Pensée de Karl Marx. Paris: Editions du Seuil. This view is formulated in many places in his corpus, for instance in Friedrich Engels (1941), Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, C. P. Dutt, ed. New York: International Publishers. For critique of Althusser’s antihumanist structuralism, see ‘Le Marx d’Althusser,’ in Leszek Kolakowski (1978), L’Esprit révolutionnaire. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 158–185. Louis Althusser (1970), For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Vintage, 228–229. See, for a critical discussion of his views, ‘Le Marx d’Althusser,’ in Leszek Kolakowski (1978), L’Esprit révolutionnaire. Bruxelles: Ousia, 158–185. Michel Foucault (1984), Les Nouvelles littéraires, 28 juin–5 juillet 1984, cited in Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (1988), La Pensée 68. Paris: Gallimard, 129. Deleuze, Foucault’s close associate, correctly emphasizes this point. See Gilles Deleuze (1966), ‘L’homme, une existence douteuse,’ in Le Nouvel Observateur, le premier juin 1966, 33. In an interview published shortly after this article, Foucault points out that in Les Mots et les choses, he desired only to point out how the concept of ‘human being’ was constituted at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. See ‘L’Homme est-il mort?, Un entretien avec Michel Foucault,’ Arts et loisirs, no. 38, 15–21 juin 1966, 15. For this reading, see Georges Canguilhem (1967), ‘Mort de l’homme ou l’épuisement du cogito,’ Critique, no. 242, juillet 1967, 599–618. For a study of Foucault’s concept of the subject, see Chapter 7: ‘Foucault and the Intellectual Subject,’ in Allen Stoekl (1992), Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 174–198. Stoekl argues that Foucault is doubly dependent on both Heidegger and Nietzsche, and that Foucault’s Nietzschean affirmation of the death of man depends on the indissociable link between Nietzsche and Hegel.

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Foucault’s Legacy See de Man, Blindness and Insight, 5. See Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 378. The ‘romantic’ view of the end of human being disseminated independently by both Kojève and Heidegger echoed widely throughout French thought of the period. For instance, Sartre noted in his journal that Simone de Beauvoir thought that the human species came into being and would pass away at a future time. See Jean-Paul Sartre(1983), Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Novembre 1939–Mars 1940. Paris. Gallimard, 35. See Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 394. See Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 397. Entretien, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 5, 15 mai 1966, cited in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Paris: Flammarion, 1991, 189. ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in Martin Heidegger (1977), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 129. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 133. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 128. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 129–130. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 134. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 140. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 152. See Michel Foucault (1972), Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 56–59. See ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ in Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la difference, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 51–97. Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 602. See Michel Foucault (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon, 131. See Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 133. See, for an analysis of Foucault’s view of power, Philippe Chevalier (2004), Michel Foucault. Le pouvoir et la bataille. Nantes, Editiions Pleins Feux. Foucault, Knowledge/Power, 117. Foucault, Knowledge/Power, 117. See § 67 in G. W. F. Hegel (1991), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Allen W. Wood, ed., trans. H. B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 97–98. See ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,’ in Georg Lukács (1971), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 83–222. See, e. g., ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’ in Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (1984). New York: Pantheon, 340–372. See ‘What is Enlightenment?,’ in Foucault Reader, 32–50. See Afterword: ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1983), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 208. See ‘Le Sujet et le pouvoir,’ in Michel Foucault (1994), Dits et Ecrits, Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, IV, 222–243, and Afterword: ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structualism and Hermeneutics, 208–226.

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Foucault Reader, 58–59. See Martin Heidegger (1959), An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 50. See ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 135. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structualism and Hermeneutics, 208. See, for discussion, Chapter 7: ‘Anti-totalising Skepticism or Totalising Prophecy,’ in John E. Grumley (1989), History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault. London: Routledge, 183–205. See Michel Foucault (1973), The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, xi. See ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 12–42. See ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 153. ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 153. See Thomas Kuhn (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See, on this point, Ladelle McWhorter, ‘Episteme,’ in The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, edited by John Protevi (2005), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 176–177. Foucault, The Order of Things, 387. Gay, who usefully considers humanism as the revival of classical letters, devotes insufficient attention to its other dimensions. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, I, Chapter 5: ‘The Era of Pagan Christianity,’ 257–322. See Augustine (1983), On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett. See, e. g., the account of the ‘System of Needs’ in Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 189–208, 227–239.

Chapter 4

After knowledge and liberty: Foucault and the new pragmatism Barry Allen

Foucault’s name is relatively rare in the lists of heroes and allies Richard Rorty frequently constructs. There must be hundreds of references to Derrida and Davidson for every one to Foucault. That’s surprising. There is little if any disagreement between Rorty and Foucault on many philosophical questions. For instance, they agree that Nietzsche and developments in postmodern European philosophy, especially Heidegger, make epistemology untenable. They both consider the idea of truth as adequacy or correspondence no less untenable, and for the same reasons. Both advance nominalistic ideas of knowledge and truth. Both are historicist, ironical about the contingency of things. Foucault is surely as ‘imaginative’ a philosopher as any other Rorty might name. What’s more, he’s a good liberal, or so Rorty believes. Why then the reticence to work with Foucault as Rorty does his other authorities? One reason has less to do with Foucault than with his (mostly American) following. Some of Rorty’s most strongly-worded criticism is turned against what he calls a ‘Foucauldian Left’ of avant garde humanists in the field of Cultural Studies. As for Foucault, I think Rorty didn’t know what he was supposed to do with the conclusions of the major works, especially Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. If Derrida redescribes, say, the relation between Plato and Heidegger, Rorty is happy and says, ‘That’s interesting! I never thought of looking at it that way.’ But when Foucault redescribes the relation between, say, medicine and welfare in terms of biopower and governmentality, Rorty seems unsure what he is supposed to do with it. It’s not just an imaginative construction, not just a private poem. It broaches ‘public’ matters, like the loyalty we may feel to political institutions and their representatives. Foucault places a strain on Rorty’s distinction between public and private.1 He seems to have chosen for his private poetry the assumptions

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of the public institutions that Rorty most regards. He redescribes in imaginative new ways institutions that Rorty does not want to have redescribed, because his loyalty toward them is not as it were extensional, not independent of how they are described. If you say ‘modern institutions of social welfare,’ Rorty might say, ‘It’s the right thing to do.’ But if the same history and rationality is redescribed in terms of biopower and a political anatomy of the body, I think Rorty is unsure what that should imply for the solidarity he feels with liberal institutions. His major criticism of Foucault is precisely that he doesn’t explain anything on this point. He doesn’t tell ‘us’ what to do with the new language for describing institutions to which ‘we’ feel loyal. Foucault may not feel that loyalty, or perhaps chooses to keep it private. What may be mere discretion Rorty reads as evasion, ambivalence, and unwarranted skepticism. The merits of this argument remain to be seen. Before I get to that, I want to develop some of the substantial agreement between Foucault and Rorty in their view of knowledge and truth. Their ideas are similar, as is the motivation for developing them, their discontent with epistemology.

Knowledge after Nietzsche The textbook questions of epistemology include the definition of knowledge; the nature of evidence; the criterion of truth; and the question of certainty—do we have it? Must knowledge be certain?2 That’s questions enough, but we need one more. What is the point of these questions, or the value of theories that answer them? What good can be expected from inquiry in this direction? Two answers are traditional. The first, shared by Plato, Locke, and Kant, is that a theory of knowledge is a kind of logic or methodology of knowledge, and can be expected to make our knowing more disciplined, rigorous, and efficient.3 This rationale is now largely discredited. A second rationale for epistemology is to provide philosophers with an occasion to stand up for values thought to be under attack by reckless skeptics of reason and truth. Despite different motivations, procedures in epistemology remain similar. The idea is to establish a meta-order in the field of knowledge, identifying the forms of verifiable knowledge, and elucidating the criteria of evidence and truth. The goal, according to Rorty, is a vision of ‘the immutable structures within which knowledge, life, and culture must be contained—structures set by the privileged representations which [epistemology] studies.’ He diagnoses the desire for a theory of knowledge

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as ‘a desire for constraint—a desire to find “foundations” to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations which cannot be gainsaid . . . the desire for confrontation and constraint.’4 From Plato in Classical times to the innovations of Stoic logic and their translation into Latin by Cicero to the theories of the medieval Schoolmen, it became traditional in Western philosophy to think of the best, most important knowledge (episteme, scientia) as knowing the truth. It also became traditional to understand truth as the identity of what is and what is said, ontos and logos—the onto-logical theory of truth, which degenerated into the so-called correspondence theory.5 It may seem innocuous to say that knowledge has to be true. How could knowledge be false? But it is an assumption, and one with an important implication, namely, that knowing has at its core, as its unit, or primary exemplification something that can be true. That defines the proposition. In a blow, knowledge that fails to fit the format of a logical proposition (and this includes everything material, mechanical, artifactual) disappears from view.6 Philosophical discourse on knowledge in the West is stuck in the assumption that knowledge (or the best, philosophically most important knowledge) has to be true. In a wonderful way even radical postmodern nominalists like Foucault and Rorty confirm this presumption, following the path Plato started in philosophy of excluding techne and its works from philosophical ideas about knowledge. Rorty wrote a whole book to explain to epistemologists what’s wrong with epistemology. Foucault never did that, perhaps because he thought Nietzsche already had. The topics of knowledge and truth figure prominently in Nietzsche’s work from early to late. In the Third Essay of the Genealogy of Morals he argues that the intellectual passion for truth is an unconscious religious passion, a way for atheists still to believe in God. To turn away from religion because it is untrue is not the triumph of rationality over superstition. It is a new superstition, or rather, one whose superstitious quality is newly apparent, especially to those who may still feel attached to the idea that truth is divine. Modern ideals of truth, science, and enlightenment have a dark side, an unconscious aspect in which they participate in the very irrationality they profess to overcome. Nietzsche understood that the question he is raising is a new one, for which Western philosophy is not prepared: ‘And here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?’7 The

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demystifying critics and lovers of truth must now contemplate their own irrational delusion, as they dutifully demystify demystification and discover that truth is a sort of lie. The death of God is just the beginning. Truth is next. Then Science. Nietzsche expects a violent Selbstaufhebung of Western reason, pushing modern culture over the edge of the nihilism that has haunted it since antiquity. The problem of knowledge in postmodern thought begins here. The simplest, most helpful meaning for the expression ‘postmodern’ refers to trends first in German and French thought and now international, of philosophers who take Nietzsche seriously, especially in what he says concerning knowledge, science, and truth. Nietzsche initiated the now prevalent skepticism among philosophers about the ‘correspondence’ theory. The unpublished essay of 1873, ‘On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense’ has practically all the arguments against correspondence that Nietzsche returns to throughout the later work, and they are a good part of all the arguments anybody has invented for questioning the correspondence theory. Beginning a bit later, the American Pragmatists, especially William James, independently came to similar conclusions. These days, even Analytic philosophers have mostly abandoned the correspondence theory. Yet it was always Nietzsche’s conviction that without this ontological idea of truth the value of knowledge becomes newly problematic. Analytic philosophers have so far refused to draw this conclusion. Continental postmoderns, however, all draw it, and pursue different strategies for dealing with it. Let me briefly touch on a few others before taking up Foucault. Heidegger’s strategy is to reject the problem as inadequately formulated. It is not really a problem about knowledge. It is a problem about being especially about the relation between being and our being. Knowledge of truth is not the primary meaning or value of knowledge. What comes first, and makes knowledge of truth possible, is how-to competence with tools. Scientific knowledge of truth is a modification of technical competence, introducing special tools and specially contrived applications, as in a laboratory. That was the argument of Being and Time (1927). In later works Heidegger emphasizes the genealogy of modern science and technology.8 He moves in a direction opposite to that of Nietzsche. From the critique of truth Nietzsche steps forward to new problems of knowledge and science. Heidegger turns the other way, stepping back to the origin of discredited (‘metaphysical’) ideas of knowledge and truth, trying to reconnect with their roots at the beginning of Western thought, as if there were unsounded depths in them from which we might still profit.

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Jürgen Habermas thinks Nietzsche over-dramatizes the nihilism a critique of correspondence must induce. The sciences will happily ignore philosophy and keep doing what they do best, calm in their mystified false consciousness about truth. A little false consciousness is desirable in the sciences. ‘The glory of the sciences is their unswerving application of their methods without reflecting . . . From knowing not what they do methodologically, they are that much surer of their discipline, that is, of methodical progress within an unproblematic framework. False consciousness has a protective function.’9 Habermas does nonetheless want a philosophical theory of knowledge and truth in the light of Nietzsche’s critique. He follows postmodern European philosophy in rejecting a metaphysical theory. As he sees it, the critique of correspondence is one of the few good ideas Nietzsche had.10 But a critique of the past, dismissing the old Greek metaphysical approach to truth, cannot be all that philosophy has to say. Habermas thinks we are owed a better explanation of truth’s point or value. He looks for it in the ethics of discourse. Truth is not a relation to a corresponding thing in itself. It is a social relation, a norm. The justification for statements is always justification in someone’s eyes, relative to context. Habermas says it’s different for truth. Having the truth is not the same as having a good argument or interesting evidence. The difference between justification and truth is not a difference of ontology or epistemology. It is a normative difference, a difference in the responsibilities of a speech act, and a difference in how we relate to each other in the public space of reasons. When I advance a claim as the truth, I undertake the distinctive obligation of ensuring that my statement holds up under any challenge, from any interlocutor, in any context. I commit myself to the universal validity of my statement. As Habermas puts it, ‘A proposition is true if it withstands all attempts to refute it under the demanding conditions of rational discourse.’11 Nietzsche pointed out how modern science has pushed knowledge and happiness further and further apart, contrary to the promise of Socrates and Plato. It has taken a century for Europe to catch up to Nietzsche, but Jean-François Lyotard thinks it is now an accomplished state, the postmodern condition, which he memorably defined as incredulity toward metanarratives. This is no more than another way to say ‘God is dead.’ A metanarrative is a philosophical whopper that legitimizes a culture’s values. The incredulity is not just that we’re wised up and no longer credulous. You cannot tell a credible metanarrative in a time like ours. The unity isn’t there, the contingency unmissable, the polytheism rank. Knowledge is no longer a

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training for minds, a form of Bildung, a care of the self, or a patriotic duty. It is a product, produced for sale, consumed to produce more. Its value has nothing to do with wisdom, enlightenment, or emancipation. What you get from knowledge, the good of it, is access to ‘a complex conceptual and material machinery,’ helpful in the game of advantages, to make a good move.12 Who knowledge helps and who it frustrates cannot be told in advance. We cannot trust knowledge to favor the Good, nor can we believe that truth will make us free. I’m not sure Lyotard’s ‘Report on Knowledge’ adds much to Foucault, or for that matter to Max Weber (writing on ‘science as a vocation’). Foucault once suggested that the ‘general theme’ of all his work is ‘the discourse of true and false.’ He explains that he means ‘the correlative formation of domains and objects, and of the verifiable, falsifiable discourses that bear on them.’ He says: ‘It’s not just their formation that interests me but the effects in the real to which they are linked . . . My problem is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth . . . I would like, in short, to resituate the production of true and false at the heart of historical analysis and political critique.’13 As a historian of knowledge Foucault is not interested in how or when this or that truth was discovered. His concern is with the underlying rules, the deep structure, the discursive apparatus ‘according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true.’ These rules define the depth grammar of historical knowledges, the styles of reasoning ‘which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned, the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth, [and] the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.’14 The truth in question here is not the onto-logical adequation of intellect and being. A statement’s truth-value is merely its currency, a matter of arbitrary syntax. Its cause is in the language-game, the discursive formation, not the being of a being. To ask whether a statement is ‘really true’ is like asking whether a U. S. dollar is really money (‘I understand that it circulates, but should it? Is it really money?’). Both questions assume that there is more to these values than currency, which Foucault rejects. Like prices or money, truth-values are purely relational, conventional, ultimately arbitrary artifacts of discursive economy. A statement has no inherent, discoursetranscendent, purely logical true-or-false, regardless of what, if anything, people make of it. The price of a commodity is what it sells for. The historical and practical (if not onto-logical) truth-value of a statement is what it passes for. The important thing is not being true but passing, currency.15

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Power cannot make it true that black is white. But it can and does govern (that is, modify, conduct) the circulation of statements, or what is taken seriously, what passes for true. It is this currency, this circulation in an economy of serious speech acts, that is decisive for both history and experience. It does not matter to the experience of the convict whether the criminology in which his warden has an advanced degree is a respectable science or a positivist farrago. What is received as known and enjoys the credibility of truth may align itself with administrative convenience and disciplinary authority and become largely indifferent to performance. Effective truth-value is credibility, a statement’s capacity to penetrate people’s practical reasoning, conducting or governing those who receive it as an important truth. Philosophers have always considered knowledge of truth to be most worth their attention. Foucault is no exception. It is the logic of epistemology that makes a historian of knowledge a historian of truth. The most important knowledge is claimed, discursively articulated, passing (in discourse) for true. Without sharing the normative concerns of epistemology Foucault nevertheless confirms its assumptions about knowledge; for instance, that knowledge comes in a statement or speech act; that the unit of knowledge is linguistic, logical, a logos; and that the most important knowledge is discursively articulated and if not onto-logically true, at least passing for true in discourse. All there is to ‘knowledge’ on Foucault’s account is serious truthcandidacy, prestigious discourse. Anything that passes, anything that is taken seriously as a candidate for truth, counts as knowledge. He has no use for a normative concept of knowledge, meaning one that distinguishes knowledge from what is claimed, believed, or said to be known (what passes for knowledge). Foucault may think the sole use for such a distinction is to carry on epistemology, which Nietzsche showed to be a deeply compromised project, pursued in earnest only by those equally compromised in self-knowledge. Foucault also seems to consider normative ideas of knowledge and truth obstacles to due appreciation of truth’s politics, which is the politics of what passes. Yet there is a price to pay for indifference to normative knowledge. There is only one way to counter the power of disciplinary expertise. It is no good citing Foucault to the experts and problematizing their governmentality. What you have to do is show that they are wrong, that they do not know, that there are unconsidered alternatives, that others know better. For that purpose it is counterproductive to say that there is, after all, no significant difference between knowing and not knowing, or even between true and false; or to say they are arbitrary differences in the deployment of

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discursive power. Unless you take knowledge seriously enough to think there’s a difference between the mere claim to it and the quality itself, why should you care that knowledge and truth may be mobilized for effects of disciplinary power?

Pragmatism old and new To the first generation of American Pragmatists, doubt about PlatonicChristian assumptions concerning ‘the Truth’ provoked not a crisis of nihilism but a feeling of relief, inspiring a critique of rationalism in European philosophy parallel with Nietzsche’s. And inspired it was, hopeful. Their hope was not the rationalistic optimism Nietzsche criticized in Socrates, as if the triumph of the Good might be a foregone conclusion. Pragmatism is a vision of the world as an evolving, unfinished place; ‘a wide open universe,’ John Dewey said, ‘without bounds in space or time, without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the lid off.’ William James said the same thing, as did Nietzsche, and Foucault applauded when Deleuze said it again.16 In such a world, the Pragmatists argued, action can make a real difference, and that should make us hopeful. Our fate isn’t sealed. The future is open, the universe more like a frontier to explore than a fi nished system. Pragmatic philosophers like William James and John Dewey work in terms as non-metaphysical as Nietzsche or Foucault, yet they take pains to reconstruct the normative understanding of knowledge and truth, providing an alternative to Nietzsche’s nihilism and Foucault’s scholarly antinomianism. These Pragmatists can agree with everything Nietzsche implied in his statement ‘God is dead’ while not following him in his nihilism. They can agree with Foucault that knowledge and truth are instruments of social power, without his grim refusal to acknowledge that some ‘knowledge’ is more properly knowledge and some ‘truths’ not really true. Yet by Nietzsche’s standard, Pragmatism must seem tame and much too democratic. Heidegger was contemptuous of American philosophy and dismissed Pragmatism as a naive metaphysics of technology. No one in Europe challenged these assessments. If they are wrong it had to be shown, and it was Richard Rorty who showed it.17 Rorty rewrote American Pragmatism in terms that emphasize its similarity to postmodern European thought. Instead of presenting Pragmatism as an alternative to postmodernism (as Hilary Putnam does), Rorty creates a postmodern Pragmatism.18 His argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of

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Nature is that European philosophers then studiously neglected in Analytic training, including Heidegger and Derrida, were coming to the same conclusions about language, meaning, and truth as preeminent Analytic practitioners like W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson. What is more, these were the conclusions reached earlier among the Pragmatists, especially Dewey. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a book written for epistemologists about epistemology, offered to a dubious subdiscipline as therapy for the neurotic gnosisosis whose symptom is taking epistemology seriously. Though a critic of epistemology, Rorty nevertheless shares some of its assumptions about knowledge (the same is true, as we have seen, of Foucault). There is for instance a logocentric, propositional bias in his work. Only a proposition, statement, or claim solicits the agreement that defines knowledge. To be acclaimed, the proposition must be well-justified, defensible with good reasons, and that too is a bias of epistemology, which tends to make the most important knowledge dialectical, dialogical, discursive, justified by reasons. Knowledge for Rorty is a statement that wins the right compliments, carries the right prestige, a discourse no one can refute, not because it is so wonderfully true, but because the evidence is well put together, the conclusions carefully considered, and so on. Rorty looks for the norms of knowledge in those of conversation. ‘If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood.’19 You ‘know’ whatever others let you get away with claiming. The implication is that there’s no more to knowledge than the economy of such claims. I think we have to wonder about that. Conversation is urbane and civilized, but I doubt that it is the right place to look for the norms of knowledge. Doing so mystifies the relationship of knowledge and technical effectiveness (this is also a worry for Foucault’s account). What does consensus in a language game have to do with inventing a faster computer, a harder steel, or a new shape for an aircraft? If the norms of conversation have little or nothing to do with technology or technical achievement, how can they be the norms of knowledge as we know it?20

Sunk in the order of discourse Knowledge for Foucault is what passes for true in a historical economy of discourse. Statements count as knowledge not by adequacy to being but by

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currency, by passing for true. The economy of knowledge is one of statements and truth-values, without a foundation deeper than discourse. This may look like a radical nominalism, as indeed it is, but the radical stance is also a seductive guise for some old assumptions about knowledge. Like Rorty, he finds no important difference between truth and justification, that is, what passes for true. Like Rorty, the most important knowledge is a statement with a discursively articulated truth-value. Rorty acknowledges the normative difference Foucault abandons between knowledge and what passes, offering an account in terms of the ethnocentric consensus. There is no concrete meaning for the abstract term ‘knowledge’ apart from valued instances and admirable examples—admirable to us, Rorty’s ethnocentric we. To count as knowledge, claims must pass through a critical public-reasoning process, securing the consensus of the right authorities. Rorty seems to drop the old condition that knowledge be true. Knowledge, for him, is belief-plus-ethnocentric consensus. Yet only a statement or claim could solicit such agreement; and to win it, it must be thoroughly uncontroversial, and might as well be called true—certainly it is believed-true, especially by the authorities. If only as an automatic compliment to conspicuously justified statements truth remains an a priori condition on knowledge. The best or most important knowledge is discursive, knowing how to talk.21 Once again, the technical is silently written out of philosophy. A linguistic or discursive bias runs deep in Rorty’s thinking. It seems important to reduce as much as possible to something about language. Thus he says such things as, ‘ “Thinking” [is] simply the use of sentences’; ‘Language provides our only cognitive access to objects’; and ‘All our knowledge is under descriptions,’ hence propositional, discursive, linguistic.22 Foucault does this differently, but he still does it. He admits there is more to knowledge than discourse, and what he calls ‘disciplinary knowledge’ is more than talk. He discusses the use of architecture in creating ‘disciplinary space,’ and how inventions like timetables, alarm clocks, and the artificial nipple were enrolled in producing the docility of disciplinary subjectivity. Some of the techniques and technologies he discusses belong to discourse. Confession, for instance, is ‘a ritual of discourse.’ The techniques of ‘examination’—‘small techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting files, of arranging facts in columns and tables’—are ‘procedures of writing that made it possible to integrate individual data into cumulative systems,’ making them ‘scriptuary and documentary’ and therefore discursive.23 Other, less obviously discursive artifacts, like alarm clocks and artificial nipples, seem to find their point in the new statements they make

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possible; for instance, making it possible to say something scientific about an individual (delinquent, schizophrenic, dangerous offender), to write it in a file; and possible to say something scientific about ‘collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given “population.” ’24 Foucault seems to acknowledge the nondiscursive only to subordinate it to discourse. It is the discursive accomplishment of a statement that dignifies nondiscursive artifacts as knowledge, making the practices that mobilize them knowledge-practices, their associated institutions knowledge-institutions. The only nondiscursive that matters to knowledge is prediscursive, on its way to language, and ‘the prediscursive is still discursive . . . One remains within the dimensions of discourse.’25 Rorty says it is the ‘crucial premise’ of his argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ‘that we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.’ He says we should ‘see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature.’26 There’s no thing in itself to make truths true; ergo, truth and knowledge are social constructions. First we tried to explain truth in terms of Nature. Then we lost faith in transcendence and explained truth immanently in terms of social factors, like language, community, consensus, and intersubjectivity. Foucault falls into this pattern too. His ‘archeology of knowledge’ is a late, sophisticated version of the positivist-sociological ‘social determination of knowledge’ thesis (Marx, Durkheim, Mannheim). The ‘objects’ of knowledge, the ‘things’ true statements are true to, have no reality apart from the agreement of those who talk about them. As Foucault explains: What, in short, we wish to do, is to dispense with ‘things’ . . . to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse, [and] to define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitutes the conditions of their historical appearance.27 Look at knowledge as Foucault does, or take up Rorty’s pragmatic point of view—either way, knowledge is sunk in the order of discourse. Both thinkers find a new and imaginative way to reaffirm that knowledge is discursively articulated and subject to the condition of truth. What is objectionably ‘positivist’ in both thinkers is their unappealable decision to admit discourse or the discursive but act as if nothing else counts as

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knowledge. This enormous privilege for discourse puts both thinkers in the shadow of Platonism. Even if we agree that truth is not an adequacy or correspondence, it does not follow that knowledge and truth are but the loquacious shadows of social representation. This dichotomous treatment of Nature and Society combined with serene indifferent to anything ‘technical’ mark the ideas of knowledge in Rorty and Foucault as offspring of the Western logos.

Rorty reads Foucault In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty makes a criticism of Foucault that he repeats and develops in later discussions. He always begins with something to admire. ‘A large part of Foucault’s work—the most valuable part, in my view—consists in showing how the patterns of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies have imposed on their members kinds of constraint of which older, premodern societies had not dreamed.’28 Striking the same note ten years later, he lauds Foucault for having shown how ‘today’s chains are often forged with the hammers that struck off yesterday’s.’ He emphasizes Foucault’s understanding of ‘how we tricked ourselves in the past . . . exhibiting the unexpected and painful consequences of our ancestors’ attempts to do the right thing,’ adding that Foucault ‘was more inclined to admit than Marx’ that the ‘sequence of hammers into chains is unlikely to end with the invention of hammers that cannot be forged into chains— hammers that are purely rational, with no ideological alloy.’29 But there always comes a but. Praise is always qualified, the criticism always the same. Something important has been left out. For Rorty, ancestors like Jeremy Bentham and James and Mill were trying to do the right thing, that is, something we might have done too. So we must not despise them, must rather respect them, knowing that we too can only try to do the right thing. Foucault describes new threats and dilemmas for liberty, but says nothing of possible alternatives. How would he prevent pain and suffering, if not with hospitals or state-administered welfare? Foucault ‘certainly said a lot of useful things about contemporary institutions,’ but he refrains from ‘tell[ing] us the right thing to do in the future.’30 This omission is chalked up to detachment taken too far. What Rorty calls ‘the extraordinary dryness of Foucault’s work’ is ‘produced by a lack of identification with any social context, any communication . . . There is no “we” to be found in Foucault’s writings.’31 In other words, as Foucault himself paraphrases Rorty’s criticism, he does not situate his argumentation

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relative to any specific group or community ‘whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated.’ To which he replies, ‘But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result—and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it.’32 On the one hand, Rorty seems to think Foucault’s work is too detached to be useful for deciding what ‘we’ should do. On the other hand, he is not detached enough. His account is morally one-sided. He sees threats, dangers, emerging forms of discipline and control, without pausing to admire how, for all the insidious counterproductivity, these innovations (some of them anyway) did a lot for the suffering of many people. Doesn’t that compensate anything? Referring to the decreased suffering attributable to such things as state welfare, health, and social security, Rorty says, ‘my disagreement with Foucault amounts to the claim that this decrease does, in fact, compensate for those constraints.’33 Skepticism about the value of disciplinary surveillance is an attitude held only by people unconsciously enjoying its security. The surveillance of populations through records of births, deaths, infant mortality, disease, and so on can prevent a lot of suffering. In an example of globalized Western discipline, surveillance technologies—records of child deaths by location, reason, and so on, computerized and networked—allowed Tanzanian health care workers to reduce child mortality by twenty-five percent in two years. That’s a lot fewer dying children. Helen Epstein, a specialists on AIDS in Africa, observes, ‘Reporting births, deaths, and cases of disease, tracking drugs and supplies, managing salaries and contracts, maintaining ledgers and creating systems of inspection may not sound like the stuff of great medical heroics, but they are.’34 Rorty seems to argue that Foucault doesn’t strike the right balance. Private self-creating poetry gets the upper hand, and makes him evasive about his obligations to other people—not his ‘private’ obligations, but those of solidarity and citizenship. Rorty says Foucault and Plato share an assumption that ‘unless there is some interesting connection between what matters most to an individual and her purported moral obligations to our fellow human beings, she has no such obligations.’35 Foucault almost seems to confirm this improbable reading when he says that we should ‘get rid of

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[the] idea of an analytical or necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures.’36 I take him to say that the ‘ethical’ (Rorty would say ‘private’) work on the self has no ‘interesting’ (that is, ‘analytical or necessary’) connection with economics or politics, including obligations of solidarity. That does not mean, as Rorty tries to make it, that one has no such obligations. It means those obligations do not derive ideologically or morally from how one chooses to care for oneself. Ethics, in Foucault’s dramatically non-Kantian usage, doesn’t have much to do with where you stand in relation to social, economic, or political structures. It is ‘private.’ But nothing you do in private nullifies public obligations. You can’t imagine yourself out of debt. Foucault has been criticized for emphasizing discourse over subjectivity and agency.37 The criticism is suggestively answered by his late work on subjectivity, where he overcomes his erstwhile inclination to efface freedom and subjectivity from his work. He tries in this late work to strike a balance between what power and knowledge contribute to subjectivity, and what is due to the relation we take as subjects to ourselves. What he calls ethics refers to the particular relation to self (rapport à soi) that structures the way individuals make themselves moral subjects. He explicitly understands his last work as compensating for something elided in his earlier work: In Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and also in Discipline and Punish a lot of things which were implicit could not be rendered explicit due to the manner in which I posed the problems. I tried to locate three major types of problems: the problem of truth, the problem of power, and the problem of individual conduct. What bothered me about the previous books is that I considered the first two experiences without taking the third one into account.38 Rorty seems especially to dislike Foucault’s followers on the left. He excoriates what he calls the ‘Foucauldian academic Left in contemporary America,’ dismissing them as a ‘school of resentment’ peddling ‘rationalizations of hopelessness.’ He says, ‘Foucauldian theoretical sophistication is even more useless to leftist politics than was Engels’ dialectical materialism. Engels at least had an eschatology. Foucauldians do not even have that.’ Well, so what? Why is this lack, if that is what it is, objectionable? Apparently because it makes them ‘exactly the sort of Left the oligarchy dreams of: a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future.’39

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Looked at pragmatically, in terms of effect, Foucault’s work (and much of the work that cites him as an authority) seems to undermine solidarity with the ancestors who invented disciplinary biopower and modern governmentality, and the fellow citizens who administer them, without having any better idea what to do instead. Rorty’s liberal ancestors were trying to do the right thing, and they were not without success, despite some unexpected consequences. We can do no better. What is more, we are not left defenseless against the counterproductivity of our ancestor’s well-meaning innovations by the very institutions they bequeathed us. ‘Contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for its own improvement—an improvement which can mitigate the dangers Foucault sees.’40 Complacent is a favorite word of Rorty’s critics on the Left. I think these readers must not appreciate how profoundly skeptical he is of Theory. Views they criticize as ‘complacent’—meaning arrived at casually, uncritically, irresponsibly—are better seen as the skeptical outcome of a fruitless foray into the wilderness of contemporary theory. ‘I just can’t think of anything I learned from post-Mill writings that added much.’41 Rorty’s version of liberalism is a pragmatic default position. Instead of a bold new alternative, it is a well-aged, by now unimaginative idea that has the pragmatic virtue of having not been made irrelevant by the history of the last century. We pragmatists are not arguing that modern Europe has any superior insight into eternal, ahistorical realities. We do not claim any superior rationality. We claim only an experimental success: we have come up with a way of bringing people into some degree of comity, and of increasing human happiness, which looks more promising than any other way which has been proposed so far.42 What modern Europe supposedly discovered is how to make the things that usually divide people (religion, ethnicity, sexuality) seem unimportant; and to conceive of moral progress as ‘a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things.’43 The practical success is so resounding that Rorty indulges in a not very pragmatic hyperbole. In a passage criticizing Foucault, he says, Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word.44

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Max Weber may be right that whatever anybody does in politics will always have unexpected, even evil consequences. He calls it ‘a fundamental fact of all history’ that ‘the ultimate product of all political activity frequently, indeed, as a matter of course, fails utterly to do justice to its original purpose and may even be a travesty of it.’45 Perhaps Rorty believes that merely pointing out more examples is not an interesting criticism. He seems to think that criticism is uninteresting unless there is a new idea, not just for theory but for practice, something ‘we’ can try instead. I wonder about that. People’s ideas about alternatives are limited by their information, whereas their discontent may express information that can and should be more widely appreciated. People can know what they don’t like without having a clear idea of what to do about it, because they may not know what options are available. Criticism may even be part of the process of generating new alternatives. If no alternatives are presently known, then we need to know that, to have it made explicit and let the problem stimulate whom it may. It would be wrong to silence critics until they have their own answers. Why is it their job? Why isn’t their work to make the problems known, so that everyone can work on them? Alas, for Rorty it is always the problems that are the problem.

The good liberal Throughout Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty explains liberals as ‘the people who think cruelty is the worst thing we do.’46 Yet when he spells it out, the rationale for government is not the prevention of cruelty. Instead, Rorty restates the classical liberal idea that government is not an end in itself; it is done for the sake of private liberty. ‘The point of a liberal society is not to invent or create anything, but simply to make it as easy as possible for people to achieve their wildly different private ends without hurting each other.’ Locke said as much. Then Rorty adds Mill’s coda, which is that the rationale for private liberty is self-invention, creativity, imagination. ‘Governments and social institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible. One who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced.’47 Foucault too is drawn to this liberalism, which may explain why Rorty can describe Foucault’s politics as ‘the standard liberal’s attempt to alleviate unnecessary suffering.’ He was ‘a good liberal,’ something Rorty explains as ‘willing to leave [people] alone to be as self-inventive or as

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banal as they liked.’ In his work for causes, speaking on issues, signing petitions, and so on, he was (‘much of the time’) on the side of the angels, ‘trying to serve human liberty . . . trying to achieve the same political consequences which a good humanitarian bourgeois liberal would wish to achieve.’ But in writing the historical and philosophical works for which he is famous, he was trying ‘to be a faceless, rootless, homeless stranger to humanity and to history.’48 Which is somehow a bad thing, a limitation, the sign of something still cathected and repressed, holding Foucault back from pragmatism. In ‘The Birth of Biopolitics,’ Foucault hints at a not disinterested interest in what he sees as the key liberal innovation in political reasoning. The ‘liberal’ point of view emerges in modern politics with the early-modern rise in the resources available to governments. For a long time, since antiquity, it was all governments could do to maintain their territory against external threat. There was seldom much to spare for innovative ventures in policy or regulation. In the sixteenth century that began to change. New instruments of disciplinary control were coming into use. Some were inherited from the Inquisitions, including the apparatus of records, registers, dossiers, and indexes. These, together with a probabilistic style of reasoning about evidence, another Inquisitorial inheritance, enabled early-modern governments to maintain convenient and constantly updated information about subjects and other resources. These governments also experimented with other instruments of control, including improved maps and more accurate means of measuring time; better roads and communications; new sources of finance and techniques of accounting; settled and guarded frontiers; and readily mobilized military forces supplied with uniform equipment and powerful weapons.49 Some advocated extending the new instruments of government as far as possible (that’s the argument of the Polizeiwissenschaft Foucault studied). Liberals came into being as the opposite mentality, the suspicion (or certainty) that government tends to excess and must be checked. He defi nes this liberalism briefly as ‘a critique of the irrationality peculiar to “excessive government.” ’50 Liberals after this model, historically the fi rst though not the only sort of liberal, stand on a principle. It was Locke’s principle, and we have seen that it is still Rorty’s. In Foucault’s words, Government (meaning not the institution ‘government,’ of course, but the activity that consists in governing human behavior in the framework of, and by means of, state-institutions) cannot be its own end. It does not

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have its reason for being in itself, and its maximization, even under the best possible conditions, should not be its regulative principle.51 Foucault’s remarks about this first liberalism seem to imply that its principle is no less cogent today. For instance, he says, ‘Rather than a relatively coherent doctrine, rather than a politics pursuing a certain number of more or less clearly defined goals, I would be tempted to see in liberalism a form of critical reflection on governmental practice.’ Then or now. He continues in this vein. ‘That criticism can come from within or without, it can rely on this or that economic theory, or refer to this or that juridical system without any necessary and one-to-one connection.’ In other words, the liberal principle belongs to a style of political reasoning that can be detached from economic and juridical ideologies. He goes on to credit liberalism with all but inventing modern political life, which ‘exists when governmental practice is limited in its possible excess by the fact that it is the object of public debate as to its “good or bad,” its “too much or too little.” ’52 This remains political life today, and the liberal critique of the irrationality peculiar to government must inherit this relevance for the political reason under which Western governments continue to operate. There remains Mill’s coda to the classic liberal principle, which is to explain the point of the liberty liberalism defends. For Mill and then Rorty it is self-creativity. Foucault seems implicitly to take that on too, in what he elsewhere says of the aesthetics of existence and work on the self. Events since Foucault’s death have confirmed the steep rise in resources, occasions, agents, instruments, ingenuity, and effectiveness devoted to the government of action and choice. Instead of calling this disciplinary surveillance we call it security. Foucault said that from his perspective it was the ‘problems of governmentality and the techniques of government’ that are ‘the only political issue, the only real space for political struggle and contestation.’ ‘The target nowadays,’ he says, referring to ‘philosophy as a critical analysis of our world,’ is no longer the Socratic one of knowing ourselves, but the biopolitical one of refusing to be what knowledge knows that we are. Foucault continues: The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. 53

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Rorty insisted on the irrelevance of Heidegger’s politics to the philosophical interest of his work. At the same time, no change in how we understand Heidegger has any relevance to liberal politics. Foucault, by contrast, is, Rorty believes, politically very close, ‘a good liberal.’ Yet his work seems to undermine loyalties that Rorty won’t abandon, and it worries him that the loyalty of others may not survive habituation to Foucault’s way of describing them. Perhaps Foucault sees the loyalties differently. What is liberalism, even for Rorty, without the ‘private’ sphere, where people make good the liberty liberal government assures them of, by developing their subjectivity? What then when precisely this liberty is subverted in the name of taking better care of us? Foucault understood that personal identity is never not a social construction and never merely one. Power does not operate on a pliant and indifferent body. The body is alive and has resources. They may not be much, but what individuals make of them is what they make of themselves. Today, the illiberal idea that security is more important than liberty is becoming newly legitimate. Liberals believe that political government is secondary to the ethical ends of the governed. Foucault seems all but to say that there is today a ‘we’ which includes him, who feel that this principle is principle enough for reasoned and passionate politics. This is discreetly said, especially in comparison with Rorty, but it may be enough to indicate how far we are from Rorty’s depiction of Foucault as ‘a faceless, rootless, homeless stranger to humanity and to history.’54

Notes 1

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See Rorty, Richard (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. On these epistemological themes, see Chisholm, Roderick (1977), Theory of Knowledge (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1–4. ‘There may well be an art whose aim would be . . . not to put the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be.’ Plato, Republic 518c–d. Rorty, Richard (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 163. On this history, see my (1993), Truth in Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. I develop this criticism of discursive bias in the theory of knowledge in my (2004), Knowledge and Civilization. Boulder: Westview. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, Third Essay, §27.

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See for instance ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in Heidegger, Martin (2002), Off The Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This point of view was already sketched out in Being and Time §69b. Habermas, Jürgen (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 315. See Habermas, Jürgen (1999), ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge,’ Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, Babette Babich, ed. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Habermas, Jürgen (2005), ‘Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,’ Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, J. Medina and D. Wood, eds. New York: Blackwell, 120. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 36, 52. Foucault, Michel (1991), ‘Questions of Method,’ The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Gordon Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 79. Ibid., 85, and Michel Foucault (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, C. Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon, 131. On ‘passing for true’ see my Truth in Philosophy, Chapter 8 (on Foucault). Dewey, John (1993), Political Writings, Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro, eds. Indianapolis: Hackett, 74. See also James, William (1978), Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 20, 123–124; and Nietzsche (1967), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, §1065. On Deleuze, see Foucault, Michel (1977), ‘Theatrum Philosophicum,’ Language, CounterMemory, Practice, D. F. Bouchard, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. On the German reception of American Pragmatism, see Joas, Hans (1993), Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I develop this argument in ‘Postmodern Pragmatism’ (2008), Philosophical Topics 36 (2). Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 389–390. Rorty addresses some of these doubts in his ‘Response to Barry Allen,’ in Robert Brandom (2000), Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. I respond in a chapter on Rorty in Knowledge and Civilization. On ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ as ‘automatic and empty compliments,’ see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 10, 371–372; and Richard Rorty (1991), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 24. Rorty, Richard (1999), Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 55, 48; and Richard Rorty (1998), Truth and Progress Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 298. Foucault, Michel (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 190–191. Ibid. Foucault, Michel (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 76. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 170, 171.

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Foucault’s Legacy Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge 47–48, my emphasis. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63. There was a less successful effort earlier to dismiss Foucault; see Rorty, Richard (1986), ‘Foucault and Epistemology,’ Foucault: A Critical Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 320, 242. Ibid., 310, 242. Rorty, Richard, (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others Philosophical Papers Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 173–174. Foucault, Michel (1994), ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,’ Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 385. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63. Epstein, Helen (2007), ‘Death by the Numbers,’ New York Review of Books 54:11 (June 28 2007), 43. Rorty, Heidegger and Others, 197. Foucault, Michel (1983), ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 236. Especially by critics in Disability Studies; for instance Whyte, S. R. (1995), ‘Disability Between Discourse and Experience,’ Ingstad, B. and Whyte, S. R. (1995), eds., Disability and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. I discuss their criticism in (2005), ‘Foucault’s Nominalism,’ Foucault and the Government of Disability, Tremain, Shelley (2005). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Foucault, Michel (1988), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, Kritzman, L. D., ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 243. See also ‘Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume II,’ in Paul Rabinow, ed., Foucault Reader. Rorty, Richard (1998), Achieving Our Country. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 38, 37, 139. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63. Rorty, Richard (1998), Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation With Richard Rorty, Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, eds. Charlottesville: Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 64. I develop this reply to the ‘complacency’ charge in ‘A More Laudable Truthfulness,’ Common Knowledge 14 (2008): 193–200. Rorty, Social Hope, 86. Ibid. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63. Weber, Max (2004), ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ The Vocation Lectures, David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, eds., trans. Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis: Hackett, 78. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv. Rorty always attributes this to Judith Shklar. Rorty, Heidegger and Others, 196; Achieving Our Country, 30. Rorty, Heidegger and Others, 194, 195. On Foucault’s activism, see Halperin, David M. (1995), Saint Foucault. New York: Oxford University Press, 22–24. See Oakeshott, Michael (1993), Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, Shirley Robin Letwin, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. On the Inquisitions and probabilistic reasoning, see Tully, James (1988), ‘Governing Conduct,’ Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Edmund Leites, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 27–29. I discuss this history at more length in ‘Foucault and

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Modern Political Philosophy,’ in The Later Foucault: Philosophy and Politics, Jeremy Moss, ed. (1998). London: Sage. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘The Birth of Biopolitics,’ Ethics, Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1. New York: New Press, 77. Ibid., 74, my emphasis. Ibid., 77. Foucault, Michel, ‘Governmentality,’ Foucault Effect, 21; and ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 216. Rorty, Heidegger and Others , 195. For further discussion of the relationship between Foucault and American pragmatism, see Colapietro, Vincent M. (1998), ‘American Evasions of Foucault,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 36: 329–351; Kumar, Chandra (2005), ‘Foucault and Rorty on Truth and Ideology: A Pragmatist View from the Left,’ Contemporary Pragmatism 2, 35–93; Marshall, James D. (1994), ‘On What We May Hope: Rorty on Dewey and Foucault,’ Studies in Philosophy and Education 13, 307–323; Maslan, Mark (1988), ‘Foucault and Pragmatism,’ Raritan 7 (Winter, 1988): 94–114; May, Todd (2004), ‘Michel Foucault: Nietzschean Pragmatist,’ International Studies in Philosophy 36: 63–75; O’Leary, Timothy (2005), ‘Foucault, Dewey, and the Experience of Literature,’ New Literary History 36 (2005): 543–557; Reynolds, Joan (2004), ‘Pragmatic Humanism in Foucault’s Later Work,’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 37: 951–977; Weaver, William G. (1997), ‘Dewey or Foucault? Organization and Administration as Edification and as Violence,’ Organization 4: 31–48. I am grateful to Colin Koopman for these bibliographical references, and to David Rondel for helpful comments.

Chapter 5

Two uses of genealogy: Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams Colin Koopman

The notion common to all the work that I have done . . . is that of problematization. —Michel Foucault, 1984, ‘The Concern for Truth’

Michel Foucault’s final description of his genealogical and archaeological inquiries in terms of the concept of ‘problematization’ is, most commentators have found, difficult to comprehend. Was problematization really always at the core of Foucault’s analytical ensemble? Or was this merely another one of Foucault’s famous backward glances in which he sought to impose a consistency on what was in reality the fragmented history of his various research projects? By taking Foucault at his word, we can open up an investigation of what it might mean to take up genealogy (leaving archaeology to the side on the present occasion) as a form of the history of problematizations. Doing so enables us both to appreciate the precision of Foucault’s use of genealogy and to understand how Foucault’s precise uses of this analytic-diagnostic tool have perhaps been wrongly conflated with other prominent uses of genealogy. Taking Foucault at his word when he speaks of the importance of problematization for the full range of his thought enables a much-needed comparative discrimination of (at least) two different uses of genealogy. On the one hand we can discern Foucault’s use of genealogy as a project in critical problematization. On the other hand we can discern the more normatively-ambitious uses of genealogy featured in the work of other prominent thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche and most recently Bernard Williams. There are considerable differences separating Foucault’s use of genealogy as a history of problematizations from Nietzsche’s and Williams’ more normatively ambitious uses of genealogy. Nietzsche and Williams used genealogy as a normatively determinative mode of inquiry which can supposedly settle the question of the value of

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the practices which we might use genealogy to inquire into. Of course, these two thinkers each used genealogy in very different senses insofar as Nietzsche’s genealogy was an attempt to undermine and subvert certain modern moral practices whereas Williams’ was an attempt to vindicate and strengthen certain modern moral notions concerning the value of practices of truthfulness. Although the minimal conclusion that Foucault’s genealogy differs from Nietzsche’s and Williams’ genealogy may not be all that surprising, what is nonetheless revealing is an exploration of the specific terms on which these varying conceptions of genealogy can be differentiated. Such an exploration particularly helps us recognize the complex relationship between genealogy and critique. It is my claim that Foucault’s project differs from more normatively ambitious uses of genealogy and that much light is shed on the way in which Foucault used genealogy as a critical apparatus by explicating this difference. Foucault used genealogy to develop a form of critique that did not rely on the traditional normative ambitions which have motivated so much of modern philosophy. Foucault, perhaps a Kantian after all as he himself insisted on more than one occasion, used genealogy to engage in philosophical critique without offering normative judgments.1 This does not mean that we cannot find political and ethical commitments in Foucault nor that Foucault contradicts himself in holding such commitments. The point is rather that Foucauldian genealogy by itself does not form the basis of normative commitments straightforwardly understood. To the extent that Foucault’s genealogies either credit or discredit certain views about what we ought to do, these views were not developed by Foucault in the straightforwardly normative fashion that Williams’ vindications and Nietzsche’s subversions seem to lend themselves to. And to the extent that Foucault’s genealogies are compatible with straightforward normative commitments, it is not the case that genealogy as problematization by itself generates such normative conclusions as they are traditionally understood. And yet there are neither any principled reasons why those who take up genealogy on Foucault’s model of problematization could not at the same time hold normative commitments nor any principled reasons why genealogical problematization could not be used in support of certain political and ethical commitments. The point, rather, is that the kind of critical resources which Foucault’s genealogy is keyed to are not the kind of traditional normative resources which fuel the projects of Williams, Nietzsche, and so much of modern ‘critical’ thought. In this essay, I defend and explore this contrast between these two different senses of genealogy—genealogy as critical problematization and

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genealogy as normative evaluation, taking Foucault as representative of the first and Williams as representative of the second, leaving Nietzsche largely to the side on the present occasion. In developing my argument in this way I do not mean to suggest that Nietzsche’s use of genealogy is identical to Williams’ such that the two are easy substitutes for one another. I focus on Williams rather than Nietzsche for two reasons. First, Williams’ claim to the banner of genealogy deserves to be taken more seriously than it has by contemporary scholars already familiar with the work of Foucault and Nietzsche. Second, I find that Williams’ use of genealogy exhibits a version of normatively ambitious genealogy that is at least as sophisticated as Nietzsche’s usage of genealogy as a form of subversion, although this is a claim which I shall not defend presently. My strategy here will consist of contrasting Foucault’s genealogy as critical problematization from Williams’ genealogy as normative vindication in the context of a challenging criticism which is often issued against genealogies: namely, the charge of the genetic fallacy. I shall show that normatively ambitious uses of genealogy too readily commit the genetic fallacy. I shall also show that an interpretation of genealogy in terms of Foucault’s own category of critical problematization enables a form of genealogy that does not commit the genetic fallacy. I shall lastly discuss why Foucault’s problematizing genealogy is not deprived of effective critical resources by virtue of Foucault’s refusal to engage in normatively ambitious projects of vindication and subversion.

Genealogy and the genetic fallacy One way of understanding the difference between the normative use of genealogy and the problematizing use of genealogy is to focus on a wellknown criticism of genealogy: the charge that genealogy commits the genetic fallacy in conflating the past historical development of a practice with the present justification of that practice.2 Genetic reasoning is, in my opinion, somewhat less fallacious than is commonly presupposed by philosophers who are not inclined to take history very seriously. The impossibly strong claim that practices of logic and justification are rightly conducted without the slightest concern for inquiry into the history and evolution of such practices makes sense only by rigorously denying the counterclaim that justification itself is a temporal process that takes place both within and through time. But despite any misgivings one may have regarding the genetic fallacy itself, it is not difficult to discern some of the ways in which

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the charge of the genetic fallacy has at least some purchase on the ambitious normative uses to which Nietzsche and Williams (and others) have put their genealogical inquiries. It is not at all clear that the historical development of our practices can be as strictly determinative of the current justifiability of these practices as Nietzsche and Williams sometimes seem to claim. The important question raised by the charge of the genetic fallacy concerns strong claims that genealogy normatively bears on justification to such a degree that genealogy by itself can determine justifiability. Weaker claims for the mere relevance of genealogical histories to questions of normative assessment are more widely accepted. Returning to Foucault and Williams, my strategy will be to show that Williams was like Nietzsche in that he tended to deploy genealogy with high normative ambitions and in so doing often risked committing the genetic fallacy. Foucault, on the other hand, had more modest uses in mind in writing his genealogies and so avoided committing the genetic fallacy, though at the same time managed to write books which are still broadly relevant to the important normative practices (e.g., punishment, sexuality, madness) under consideration in those books. Nietzsche attempted to show that the genealogy of the moral system of the will to truth can be used to subvert that morality and many of its central concepts, truth among them.3 Williams attempted the similar project of showing how the genealogy of certain of our practices connected to the concept of truth can result in a ‘vindication’ of truth and its values against currently fashionable criticisms.4 Whether or not one agrees with the very idea that genetic reasoning is fallacious, the charge that genealogy commits the genetic fallacy at the very least can serve to focus our attention on the possibility that Nietzsche and Williams sought to use genealogy for purposes that risk positing an unsettling view of the relation between historical development and normative justification.

Genealogy as normative vindication: Williams In order to grasp the specific force of genealogy in Williams’ work, it is important to first understand the general project of which this genealogy is a part. Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness is best read as a book that is trying to change the questions we ask of truth. Williams boldly gives up the project of trying to say what truth is, or at least he urges that there is precious little we can say of such matters, and instead opts for a very different inquiry into the value of truth. ‘I shall be concerned throughout with what

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may summarily be called “the value of truth.” ’5 That is Williams’ primary concern and we ought not lose sight of it. One way of understanding Williams’ project is in terms of the concerns of twentieth-century analytic epistemology. The going consensus these days holds that analytic theories of truth running from Tarski to Davidson teach us that there is very little to say about truth indeed. When asked the philosopher’s question, ‘what is truth?’ we should simply point to Tarski’s T-Sentences: ‘P’ is true if and only if P. The idea of the various forms of minimalism and deflationism which take their cues from Tarski is that we should move talk of truth over from the theory of knowledge to the theory of meaning and replace epistemology with semantics. Williams’ achievement was to assume these lessons of twentieth-century philosophy of truth and yet still insist that we can do robust philosophical work on truth. Williams allows something like minimalism and deflationism to reign when we face the conceptual question of ‘what is truth?’ but insists that we need something a great deal more robust if faced with the moral question of ‘why value truth?’ Many proponents of minimalist theories of truth have taken the lesson of their theories to be that truth by itself is of precious little value since the real aim of belief is not truth so much as it is justification amongst our peers.6 But, insists Williams, ‘Nothing ties minimalism to an instrumentalist view of the value of truth.’7 Williams notes that his question about the value of truth is really Nietzsche’s question: ‘The problems that concern this book were discovered, effectively, by Nietzsche.’8 It is rarely remarked that Williams had in fact long been taken by Nietzsche’s question—while he did not deal with this question in detail until his 2002 book he registered his interest in the problem as early as 1981 in a little-read review essay where he stated that Nietzsche helps us bring into focus the particular ‘demands’ of ‘truth and truthfulness’ and then went on to boast that ‘Nietzsche was the greatest moral philosopher of the past century.’9 According to Maudemarie Clark, moreover, Williams personally conveyed to her that he had been planning a book on Nietzsche as early as the 1970s.10 All of this provides a warrant for reading Williams’ work on truth as motivated by Nietzsche’s questions about truth. The questions posed by Nietzsche bring to life a whole new domain of problems that enables a different kind of philosophically informative work on truth. In his deft combination of Nietzsche’s provocative questions with the rigorous skepticism of twentieth-century analytic epistemology, Williams fashioned an impressive combination of epistemological minimalism plus moral seriousness about truth.

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It is through this combination of epistemological minimalism and moral robustness that Williams invokes his central distinction between truth and truthfulness. Truth, for Williams, remains a minimal semantic concept about which we can say precious little. This concept has no history: truth is what truth is, not what truth does. Williams admits that there are histories of theories of truth. But the concept itself? No history there. Once you get the concept right you will see that truth (that is, the correct theory of minimalist truth) is the sort of thing that ‘is not culturally various, but always and everywhere the same.’11 Truthfulness, by contrast, is something whose history is rich and varied. There are all kinds of different odd ways of being truthful, of telling the truth, and of speaking truthfully. Different forms of truthfulness have a history, but truth itself does not. Truth remains a metaphysically and epistemologically minimal notion about which we can say very little while truthfulness reveals the moral richness of truth. The purpose of distinguishing truth from truthfulness in this way is to bring into view a series of questions concerning the moral status of truth which have been occluded by more classical quests for a definition of truth. To inquire into the moral value of truth Williams undertakes a series of genealogies of truthfulness. These genealogies, says Williams, will be a ‘vindicatory’ history in that they will enable us to see ‘why truthfulness has an intrinsic value; why it can be seen as such with a good conscience; why a good conscience is a good thing with which to see it.’12 In Williams’ hands, then, genealogy takes the form of an inquiry into various forms of truthfulness. Specifically, he offers rich and illustrative chapters on the history of telling the truth about the past, about oneself, and about one’s society.13 At the end of these genealogies, as instructive and engaging as they are, Williams still must squarely face a question that will motivate some critics to charge that he has committed the genetic fallacy. Their suspicions might run like this: ‘And so what if truthfulness has the history you tell us it does; that does not show that these practices of truthfulness actually emerge vindicated from your tale.’ I am not sure how Williams saw himself around such suspicions. Richard Rorty expresses puzzlement about such matters when he notes that, ‘I had trouble seeing the continuity between the first half and the second half of Williams’ book; the connections between the more philosophical part and the more historical part are not perspicuous.’14 Clearly Williams took truth to be more than just truthfulness, and for him a moral philosophy of timeless truth is not exactly identical to a genealogical history of truthfulness. Yet just as clearly Williams took his genealogy of truthfulness to somehow vindicate the value of truth. Is this sloppy slippage or ingenious integration?

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A great deal in Williams’ account seems to turn on the particular kind of vindication for truth that he seems to have in mind. When Williams sets out to vindicate the value of truth, he sets out specifically to vindicate truth as ‘intrinsically’ valuable. Williams wants to vindicate truth by showing it to be something worthy of ‘respect’ and this means showing it to be intrinsically valuable.15 This point helps us grasp one rather important implication of Williams’ insistence that the concept of truth itself has no history. If truth has no history, then it is at least minimally plausible for Williams to claim that truth is intrinsically valuable. But if truth has a history, then it would seem flatly incoherent to claim that truth itself is intrinsically valuable. Historically variable moralities of truthfulness might have a value, but such value could only be instrumental. What these values might help us appreciate, however, is the greater intrinsic value of something that does not vary with history, namely the concept of truth itself. I detect a sensible presumption in Williams’ approach to the effect that if something is intrinsically valuable then it cannot be subject to the contingencies of historical evolution. Williams thus reserves truth as something capable of possessing intrinsic value by insisting that the concept of truth has no history. This presumption might be seen as a response to a concern that has always pursued genealogists going back to the very first genealogist: no, not Nietzche, but Darwin, or perhaps even earlier, maybe Hume. Consider Darwin’s genealogy, which raises the following problem. If homo sapiens is the contingent product of a long process of unplanned evolution, then we are not pristine in the timeless image of the holy. If so, Darwin’s critics worried, then humanity is stripped of its intrinsic dignity, goodness, and value. Whatever value we do have, we did not have to have it, but things just so happened to work out that way. With this, the nineteenth-century culture wars were underway. Similar battles were brewing back in Hume’s day too. Contemporary debates about Truth can be seen as an analogue of these old debates about Man, Reason, and Nature. Some contemporary thinkers, Rorty among them, find a Darwinian version of the message about truth an uplifting one because it suggests that our values are our achievements, and so we can do what we need to in order to improve upon them.16 Other contemporary thinkers, Williams perhaps among them, find parts of the message problematic because they believe that in order to be really valuable, valuable all by itself, truth must stand outside of history as an impermeable reality whose value speaks for itself. These contemporary debates clearly recapitulate some of the most crucial intellectual clashes that emerged in Darwin’s wake in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Take the debate between William James and Charles Peirce over

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truth. James, like Rorty, thought of the value of truth as constructed by and amongst we humans, but no less worthy for it. The achievement that we call truth is a grand achievement, and it is our achievement. Peirce, like Williams, thought that in order to be really valuable truth must stand on its own outside of the contingencies of human evolution. Peirce wrote to James in 1902: ‘No doubt truth has to have defenders to uphold it. But truth creates its defenders and gives them strength.’17 The more Jamesian Rorty thought that if we take care of freedom then we will be free enough to take care of truth. The more Peircean Williams thought that taking care of freedom means taking care of truth first. Despite the usual concerns one might have about Williams’ readiness to invoke such properties as ‘intrinsically valuable’ and ‘timelessly ahistorical’ one can still admire the coherence of his account and the sense in which everything neatly hangs together. Williams was right to insist that truth can be intrinsically valuable only if it is ahistorical. One of his achievements was to suggest that we can combine these ideas with a minimalist conception of truth and a genealogical explanation of truthfulness. We might object to the whole package, but we should not deny Williams’ achievement in having shown us just how well all these things can be packaged together. Rorty was among those who objected to the whole package. It remains a measure of the long distances which separated the two thinkers that Rorty could never have made sense of Williams’ two crucial ideas that truth has intrinsic value and that it has no history.18 But Williams and Rorty would have agreed that historical investigations of various forms of truthfulness are where all the most important work in a moral philosophy of truth will get done. Williams’ version of this idea is that such historical investigations help us approach truth itself and whatever intrinsic value we can glimpse of it. This is because genealogical inquiries can help us understand the specific historical content which fills out an otherwise empty ahistorical concept of truth. Williams writes, ‘[I]n many cases the content of our concepts is a contingent historical phenomenon . . . The forms of these dispositions and of the motivations they embody are culturally and historically various.’19 Williams’ view is thus that we can use philosophical reflection to discern ‘the necessary, structural features’ of truth, but that ‘philosophy needs to make room for history’ when we turn toward ‘specific cultural determinations’ of truthfulness.20 These are the two halves of Williams’ enterprise between which Rorty can find no clear connection. The admittedly vague answer which Williams seems to offer to the challenge posed by Rorty seems to be that philosophical reflection provides us with a minimal

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outline of an ahistorical concept of truth such that genealogical reflection can then go on to provide us with the historical details that fill in this thin concept with rather much thicker content: ‘General reflection can show that something has to support the disposition . . . But what particular range of values in a given cultural situation will perform this role is a matter of real history.’21 It is in this sense that Williams’ project on the whole is meant to offer a vindication (a real vindication and not just an ethnocentric paean) of truth as intrinsically valuable. While we could perhaps do without this or that particular form of truthfulness, the genealogy is supposed to show us that the collective effect of all these forms of truthfulness is to impress upon us that surely we could not do without any kind of truthfulness at all. Even if we could get by without telling the truth about the past or telling the truth about ourselves, we would still need some forms of truthfulness in our lives in order to get by at all. It is in this sense that an ahistorical concept of truth is intrinsically valuable, always and everywhere, even though the contingent determinations informing this necessary value shift according to the historical exigencies of different practices of truthfulness which impress us around here and just now. It is time to confess that I am among those who do not buy Williams’ story about intrinsic value and a concept of truth that is beyond history. I regard Williams’ work as an ingenious, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to get a great deal of normative mileage out of a method or analytic of inquiry that is better reserved for elucidation, explication, and intensification. Like Williams, Nietzsche thought that he could use genealogy to seal some fairly controversial conclusions about modern morality. Williams vindicated— Nietzsche subverted. But no matter what one wants to prove about the situations in which one finds oneself, one should not use genealogy to try to prove anything about the present, other than that the present need not be the way that it is. Williams’ genealogies of the moralities of truthfulness are rich, impressive, and learned. But his supposed vindication of truth is puzzling. Williams himself would have realized the obvious danger involved in using genealogy to vindicate anything. Aware of his proximity to the genetic fallacy, I see Williams as having backed into a nongenealogical account of truth as an ahistorical concept. This certainly helps along his vindicatory story about truth, albeit not on genealogical grounds and definitely not on uncontroversial grounds. Leaving the controversies over truth to the side, my point is that what does the vindicating in Williams’ account may not be the genealogy after all, but rather the philosophical reflections on

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truth. All the real normative mileage is being run not by the genealogical components in Williams’ work but by the philosophical components which stipulate a formal theory of truth and then through armchair reflection attempt to show how this formal concept is intrinsically valuable. A central part of Williams’ genealogy is the first more philosophical half of the book in which he offers armchair musings on why a very minimal concept of truth may be taken to be intrinsically valuable to any form of human social life.22 Williams calls this an ‘imaginary genealogy’ and it is meant to provide the essential outline of a story about the value of truth which a real ‘historical genealogy’ then comes along to fill out in the second more historical part of the book. But it is not clear why this armchair reflection is a genealogy at all in that it seems more in keeping with the traditional philosophical technique of a thought experiment. As for the real historical genealogies, these show us at best why truth might have been taken to be valuable at some point in our history. But they could not be used to show that truth is intrinsically valuable nor could they be used to show that truth has no history. I agree with Ian Hacking who urges that, ‘It is better to play down the “intrinsic.” ’23 Those aspects of Williams’ vindicatory story in which he plays up the ‘intrinsic’ and the ‘ahistorical’ are, almost by definition it seems, not genealogical. That may be to the advantage or disadvantage of genealogy. But it would surely be a disadvantage to pretend that the vindicatory thought experiments are genealogical when, truthfully, they are not. Insofar as Williams explicitly oriented his conception of genealogy toward normatively rather ambitious purposes, he failed to fully explicate the senses in which his genealogies might be useful for quite different purposes of social-scientific and humanistic explication and problematization. And surely it is the case that his genealogies are indeed useful for these purposes. The best chapters of Williams’ book offer edifying intellectual histories of different practices of truth-telling. Here are important episodes in the history of truthfulness, a history which Williams has shown us ought to be taken very seriously indeed. But if we are interested in theoretically exploring the ways in which such genealogical histories can be used to explicate our contemporary practices of truthfulness and intensify the problematizations constitutive of those practices, we would do well to turn away from Williams and his theoretical remarks about intrinsic value and ahistorical truth so that we may turn toward some other genealogist whose work offers an explicit engagement with such theoretical explorations. Perhaps now is the time to take up Foucault again.

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Genealogy as critical problematization: Foucault Foucault was well aware of the problems facing any normatively ambitious use of genealogy such as that featured in the work of Williams or Nietzsche. This was made especially evident when he came in his later years to describe his own historical research through the lens of the concept of problematization. The point of problematization for Foucault was not, as per Nietzsche, to use history to subvert some of our most central modern practices. The point was rather to use history to show the way in which certain practices have structured some of the core problematics which a given period of thought, most notably our own modernity, must face. In Nietzsche’s hands, genealogy was used as a global critique of the modern moral system, the effect of which was to simply clear the board of our existing moral conceptions. In Foucault’s hands, genealogy was used as part of a local critique of some of our moral practices, the effect of which was to problematize these practices in a way that showed their need for future revision. Nietzsche cleared the board while Foucault pointed out problems on the board of which we were not formerly aware but which he thought could only be addressed from within the limits of the board. In comparing Foucault and Williams, the same sorts of observations apply insofar as Williams used genealogy to vindicate the current setup of the board which equally prevents us from rigorously questioning the problems implicit in the setup in the first place. Despite his having been severely and widely misread in these regards, 24 genealogy as practiced in Foucault’s more cautious sense is indeed evident in many of his works. In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of The Self, Foucault uses problematization neither to undermine nor to vindicate ancient ethical practices, but to show the way in which certain features of these practices were understood as the primary problems which these practices were made to address.25 A similar reading of problematization is also the best way to make sense of Foucault’s earlier genealogies of punishment and sexuality in Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know (volume 1 of The History of Sexuality).26 Here Foucault’s strategy is not that of undermining modern notions of power and freedom (as these are exemplified in punitive and sexual practices). Rather, Foucault uses genealogy to clarify the way in which these practices have themselves problematized certain assumptions about power and freedom which have tended to persist. Modern punishment and sexuality do not demonstrate that repressive theories of power and emancipatory theories of freedom are wrong or bad, they show rather that for we moderns power and freedom have precisely become the

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problematic field on which we are most earnestly focused. Power as discipline and freedom as liberation are not delegitimated by Foucault, but are rather shown to be the most critical problematic on which we moderns find ourselves obsessively working. Foucault’s use of genealogy as a means of clarifying and intensifying this problematic or problematization is however not incompatible with attempts to destabilize practices of discipline and liberation. The point rather is that genealogical problematization by itself neither legitimates nor deligitimates. Genealogical problematization instead helps us recognize that constitutive practices such as these form fields in need of further work. Although it would be useful to revisit Foucault’s major genealogical treatises with this revised conception of the critical role of genealogy in mind, it is outside of the scope of this paper to exhaustively engage these complex texts.27 A quicker way of putting my interpretation to the test is to compare it to Foucault’s own observations about genealogy as a practice of problematization. For the sake of orientation, I will begin with a summary overview of Foucault’s concept of problematization and then move on to unpacking this summary on the basis of his varied writings about problematization. Problematization as Foucault practiced it can be seen as a form of inquiry with two aspects. A first aspect is a genealogical inquiry into the emergence and descent of certain problems and their corollary conceptions of what might count as a solution. A second aspect concerns the way in which such inquiry functions to clarify and intensify the hybrid network of problems and solutions inquired into. Inquiry in the form of problematization is preceded by the problems which are the objects of its study, but by studying their emergence the problematizing form of inquiry is able to open these problems up to more rigorous forms of critical scrutiny. By inquiring into the emergence of hybrid networks of problems and solutions, genealogy enables us to recognize our problems as contingent products rather than as necessary givens. By clarifying and intensifying these hybrid networks, genealogy also enables us to adopt a more reflective relation to the problems in which we already find ourselves, whether consciously or not, enmeshed. In sum, problematization functions to both open up problems in their emergence and to make them available for critical scrutiny. This dual-aspect description of genealogical problematization can be discerned in many of Foucault’s own writings and conversations about problematization. But the first thing to note is Foucault’s own claims for the importance of problematization for all of his work. In a manner somewhat

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typical of his intellectual tendencies, Foucault came to describe all of his work under the rubric of problematization: The notion common to all the work that I have done since History of Madness is that of problematization, though it must be said that I never isolated this notion sufficiently . . . In History of Madness the question was how and why, at a given moment, madness was problematised through a certain institutional practice and a certain apparatus of knowledge. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish I was trying to analyze the changes in the problematization of the relations between crime and punishment through penal practices and penitentiary institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.28 Regardless of the accuracy of this self-description, what it does defi nitively establish is the great importance of the notion of problematization in Foucault’s thinking about all of his work in his final years. In an interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, Foucault was asked if his histories of ancient thought were intended to revive a golden age of ethics which might be a plausible substitute for our current moral practices. Foucault’s emphatic response apparently demanded an exclamatory emphasis when transcribed into a written text: ‘No!’ Foucault then used this question as an opportunity to specify the way in which he saw his historical research functioning: ‘I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problématiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.’29 Foucault was always more interested in posing challenging questions than in definitively solving problems. Showing a practice to be good or bad is ultimately a way of solving problems rather than provoking them. This explains why Foucault vigilantly avoided the ‘blackmail’ of being ‘ “for” or “against” ’ modern regimes of truth.30 Foucault was clear about this in many of his reflections on his use of genealogy. Sometimes he merely mentioned this point casually in the context of other discussions: ‘[W]hat I have been trying to do this evening is not to solve a problem but to suggest a way to approach a problem.’31 At other times, most often in interviews, he was careful to establish this point in a more rigorous fashion. In the lengthy interview with Trombadori: My role is to raise questions in an effective, genuine way, and to raise them with the greatest possible rigor, with the maximum complexity and

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difficulty so that a solution doesn’t spring from the head of some reformist intellectual or suddenly appear in the head of a party’s political bureau. The problems I try to pose—those tangled things that crime, madness, and sex are, and that concern every life—cannot easily be resolved.32 In another interview with Rabinow: My attitude isn’t a result of the form of critique that claims to be a methodical examination in order to reject all possible solutions except for the one valid one. It is more on the order of ‘problematization’— which is to say, the development of a domain of acts, practices, and thoughts that seem to me to pose problems for politics.33 Lastly, consider this line from the essay on methodology published as the ‘Introduction’ to the second volume of The History of Sexuality project: ‘The proper task of a history of thought is: to define the conditions in which human beings “problematize” what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live.’34 These many methodological reflections on problematization suggest that the point of Foucault’s genealogies was to neither subvert nor vindicate existing practices, beliefs, and conceptions. Rather, it was to critically show the way in which certain practices, beliefs, and conceptions have become problematic in the history of thought due to the contingent intersection of a complex set of enabling or disabling conditions. To say that practices are problematic is not to insist that they are wrong. It is to insist that they constitute a field on which we find that we must continue to work. Foucault is saying, for example, that we must concern ourselves with the problematic relations between modern power and modern freedom, for example between the powers which we at times unthinkingly use to regulate sexual practices and the freedoms which we attribute to certain supposedly liberating sexual practices. Genealogy taken in this sense is an initiating, rather than a concluding, phase of thought. Genealogy brings into critical focus the problems which further critical work must attempt to develop solutions for. Genealogy seeks out the limits that condition our possibilities for being, acting, and thinking in the present. In this sense Foucault is, as Ian Hacking has noted, ‘a remarkably able Kantian.’35 A Kantian more invested in the analytic and diagnostic explication of the conditions of the possibility of the present than he was in the traditional philosophical practice of issuing specific judgments in metaphysics

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and morality, Foucault’s thought tracks a quite different orbit than that described by Williams’ genealogy and Nietzsche’s too, for that matter. While the normative ambitions characteristic of Williams’ and Nietzsche’s deployments of genealogy risk committing the genetic fallacy, we should not move too quickly in generalizing this point to Foucault. Foucault’s more modest deployment of genealogy is not subject to any traditional form of the charge of the genetic fallacy insofar as it refuses to enlist genealogy in a project of normative justification. This point is important not in the least because Foucault has been amply, severely, and repeatedly criticized precisely along these lines by a number of prominent commentators. Perhaps one of the most cogent arguments to the effect that Foucault commits the genetic fallacy was offered by Nancy Fraser. Fraser’s criticism of Foucault is based on an interpretation of Foucault’s use of genealogy according to which the genealogist deploys carefully-developed empirical insights which in combination with some minimal set of other relevant considerations are supposed to establish the normative conclusion that certain of our practices are bad or unjust. Foucault is supposed to commit the genetic fallacy insofar as he uses empirical insights to establish normative conclusions. But, says Fraser, Foucault’s work yields normative confusions rather than normative conclusions. 36 This criticism misses the point that Foucault did not use genealogy in order to normatively evaluate the present practices whose histories he was writing. He rather used genealogy in order to clarify and intensify the dangers of the present whose histories he studied. The best way of defending Foucault against Fraser’s criticism is to provisionally concede her admittedly controversial premise that genetic reasoning is fallacious in order to then go on and refute her other premise which asserts that Foucault’s genealogies exemplify genetic reasoning of precisely this objectionable kind.37 Foucault, in other words, did not use genealogy in order to definitively establish normative conclusions about the practices he was investigating. Yet it is precisely this attempt to establish normative conclusions on the basis of descriptive claims about the historical evolution of practices that critics such as Fraser find objectionable in genetic reasoning. Many devotees of Foucauldian genealogy are likely to find my defense here to cede too much ground to Fraser. Fraser’s claim, after all, was that Foucault is full of ‘empirical insights’ but also rife with ‘normative confusions’ or what Habermas would later call ‘crypto-normativism.’38 Is this not the sort of view I am retreating to? Not quite. I am not conceding Fraser’s claim that Foucault’s work is objectionable due to its being normatively

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confused. Foucault’s work, as I see it, was just not straightforwardly normative in the sense that Fraser’s argument requires, and that is why Foucault does not commit the genetic fallacy. Two observations are relevant at this point. First, my defense of Foucault against Fraser does not require us to regard his work as incompatible with normative evaluation. Second, my defense also does not require us to regard Foucault’s work as critically ineffective even if it is not as normatively ambitious as Williams’ and Nietzsche’s work. While genealogy is not itself normative, it can nonetheless be critically engaged in and broadly relevant to forms of inquiry involved in the normative evaluation of practices. Genealogy remains relevant to evaluation just insofar as the clarification of the historical development of particular problems is not entirely irrelevant to present inquiries aiming to resolve these very problems we now find ourselves in the midst of. Indeed there is all the reason to think that the genealogical project of developing a historical critique of the present (in Kant’s sense of critique) provides many of the tools we would need to even set about the project of normatively engaging ourselves in the present. The contrast to Williams helps us recognize that Foucault’s genealogy properly understood as problematization is not an exercise in legitimation and delegitimation. It also helps us recognize the sense in which Foucault’s critics too often attack his genealogies on a level where they never operated. Foucauldian genealogy is an exercise in clarifying and intensifying the problematizations which condition the ways in which we constitute ourselves in the present. Genealogy as problematization does not seek to establish normative conclusions to the effect that certain practices are either good or bad, either just or unjust, either valid or corrupt. Genealogy as problematization only aims to provide us with materials which we will need if we are to engage in the difficult practice of reconstructing ourselves. These materials for self-transformation, according to Foucault, are what a genealogy seeks to recover in locating the precise practices and procedures which have contributed to our current forms of constituting ourselves. The ultimate goal of genealogy as such is an explication and conceptualization of a complex set of practices that have contingently coalesced. This can be described as an analytical and diagnostic project. The genealogist analyzes and diagnoses practices in a way that reveals the problematizations enabling them. It is these problematizations that crucially condition our possibilities for acting, thinking, and being in the present. It is on the basis of these problematizations—the constraints and limits which they establish—that we continually fashion and refashion ourselves. By rereading genealogy (and perhaps also archaeology though I have not

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dealt with this here)39 in light of this conception of problematization, as Foucault himself suggested we should, we can come to an understanding of how genealogy can gain critical purchase without being put forward as a straightforward normative project of legitimation or delegitimation. We are today, once again, in want of such a practice of critique.40

Notes 1

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5 6

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For self-descriptions as a Kantian see Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Paul Rabinow, ed. (1997), Essential Works, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. New York: The New Press, and ‘Foucault, Michel, 1926—,’ Gary Gutting (1984), ed. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University. For a classic, possibly the first statement of the genetic fallacy, see Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel (1934), An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method . New York: Harcourt. For more recent probing see Margaret Crouch (1993), ‘A “Limited” Defense of the Genetic Fallacy,’ Metaphilosophy 24, no. 3, Jul, 1993, and Kevin Klement (2002), ‘When Is Genetic Reasoning Not Fallacious?’ Argumentation 16, no. 4, Dec., 2002. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1994), On the Genealogy of Morals, Carol Diethe, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University. On the genetic fallacy in Nietzsche see Alexander Nehamas (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University, 107ff., and David Hoy (1986), ‘Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method,’ Yovel, ed., Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 20–38. For one of the best criticisms of Nietzsche along these general lines see Alasdair MacIntyre (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University. For a defense of Nietzsche see Paul Loeb (1995), ‘Is There a Genetic Fallacy in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals?’ International Studies in Philosophy 27, no. 3. Williams, Bernard (2002), Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University. Ibid., 6. See Richard Rorty (1998), ‘Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright,’ Richard Rorty (1998), Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Truth, 66; see also Barry Allen (2003), ‘Another New Nietzsche,’ History and Theory 42, Oct., 2003, 373. Ibid., 12. Williams, Bernard (1981), ‘Nietzsche’s Centaur,’ London Review of Books, June 17, 1981, 17. Maudemarie, Clark (2001), ‘On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’ Debt to Nietzsche,’ Richard Schacht (2001), ed., Nietzsche’s Postmoralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 120, note 3. Williams, Truth, 61. Ibid., 36, 263.

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See chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Williams, Truth. The genealogy of liberal social critique (Chapter 9) is the least developed, but for a fuller account see Bernard Williams (2005), In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton: Princeton University. Williams’ book is actually more complex. In chapter 3 he offers an entirely different genealogy of the origins of truthfulness itself. Unlike the later historical genealogies, Williams offers this early account as an explicitly ‘fictional’ genealogy. It is not clear that armchairthought experiments are really genealogies at all. I leave imaginary genealogies to the side, but Edward Craig considers at length the complex relationship between historical genealogies and fictional state of nature stories in Williams. See Edward Craig (2007), ‘Genealogies and the State of Nature,’ Alan Thomas (2007), ed., Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Rorty, Richard (2002), ‘To the Sunlit Uplands,’ London Review of Books, Oct. 31, 2002. Available online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n21/print/rort01_.html; see also Allen, ‘Another Nietzsche’, 375. Williams, Truth, 38, 58, 92, 11. See Richard Rorty, ‘Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin’ in Rorty, Richard (1998), Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Peirce to James, June 12, 1902, as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry (1996), The Thought and Character of William James. Nashville: Vanderbilt University, 286. On Williams and Rorty see Hilary Putnam (2004), Ethics without Ontology. Harvard: Harvard University. Williams, Bernard (2006), ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,’ Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton: Princeton University, 192. Williams, Truth, 93 Ibid. Ibid., Chapter 3. Hacking, Ian (2004), ‘Critical Notice of Truth and Truthfulness,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34, no. 1, Mar., 2004, 147. See also Allen, ‘Another Nietzsche’ agreeing with Hacking and contrast Craig, ‘Genealogies’ arguing that the specific advantage of Williams’ genealogy is that it enables us to explicate the elusive connection between instrumental and intrinsic value. See Jürgen Habermas (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Frederick Lawrence, trans. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel (1990), The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Vintage, and Michel Foucault (1988), The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3, Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. New York: Vintage, and Michel Foucault (1990), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Vintage. I describe Discipline and Punish and History of Madness in these terms in Colin Koopman, ‘Revising Foucault’, forthcoming in Philosophy & Social Criticism. Foucault, Michel (1990), ‘The Concern for Truth,’ Lawrence Kritzman (1990), ed., Politics, Philosophy, Culture. New York: Routledge, 257. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress,’ interview by Rabinow and Dreyfus, in Paul Rabinow (1997), ed., Essential Works, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. New York: The New Press, 256.

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Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, 312–313. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘ “Omnes et Singulatim”: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,’ James Faubion (2000), ed., Essential Works, Volume 3: Power. New York: The New Press, 311. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’ by D. Trombadori, in James Faubion (2000) ed., Essential Works, Volume 3: Power, 288. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematizations’, interview by Rabinow, in Paul Rabinow (1997), ed., Essential Works, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. New York: The New Press, 114. Foucault, Care of the Self, 10 Hacking, Ian (1984), ‘Self-Improvement’ in David Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader. New York: Blackwell, 238. For recent revisionist work on the importance of Kant for Foucault, see Amy Allen (2008), The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia. Allen’s book corrects the defects of the reading of Foucault as a Kantian offered in early literature, most notably in Béatrice Han (2002), Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, Edward Pile, trans. Stanford: Stanford University. See Nancy Fraser (1989), ‘Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions’ and ‘Michel Foucault: A Young Conservative?’ in Nancy Fraser (1989), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Amy Allen offers a different approach by accepting Fraser’s premise that Foucault used genealogy to develop genetic evaluations and refusing Fraser’s premise that genetic reason is fallacious; see Allen’s forthcoming paper, ‘Foucault, Autonomy, and the Genetic Fallacy. Fraser, ‘Foucault on Modern Power’ and Habermas, Philosophical Discourse. I describe the compatibility of archaeology and genealogy in Foucault’s general analytic-diagnostic orientation of problematization in Colin Koopman (2008), ‘Adding Genealogy to Archaeology,’ Journal of the Philosophy of History 2, no. 3. For their comments on earlier versions of this paper I thank Ryan Acton, Barry Allen, and Christoph Durt. For helpful discussions of Williams and Foucault I would like to thank Amy Allen, Ian Hacking, Hans Sluga, and especially David Hoy. For important questions in response to a presentation of this material at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle, I thank Dianna Taylor. Lastly, I acknowledge a Postdoctoral Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided me with the resources to research and write this paper.

Chapter 6

Weakening ontology through actuality: Foucault and Vattimo Santiago Zabala

But what therefore is philosophy today—I mean philosophical activity—if it is not the critical work of thought on itself? And if it does not consist in undertaking to know how and to what extent it would be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what one already knows? —Michel Foucault, L’Usage des plaisirs, 1984

When authors become classic figures it is not simply because of their originality but rather because of the influence, consequences, and effects of their work. Contrary to what most think, these influences are not particularly evident in the direct disciples of an author but rather in those readers who do not necessarily pursue the intuitions of the classic authors faithfully. One can see Martin Heidegger’s influence over Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty much more clearly than his sway over his own students, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Ernst Tugendhat. While Heidegger’s disciples pursued their master’s works one way or another, the other philosophers only responded to some particular conception or idea in Heidegger’s work and therefore employed them in a much more circumscribed way. A collection of essays on the influences, consequences, or effects of a classic author is not only an occasion to evaluate once again his significance but most of all to specify how his thought affected others. Foucault’s influence on the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo is much more significant than one might expect. It can be found in Vattimo’s recent and forthcoming works more so than his older ones, but most important, indispensable for understanding his fundamental philosophical task: weakening ontology through actuality. While Vattimo’s books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, postmodernity, and religion are not straightforwardly

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concerned with Foucault’s writings, since 1988 the Italian philosopher has been outlining and planning an ontology that refers specifically to Foucault’s ‘ontology of actuality.’ In his own ontology, Vattimo foresees the essence and outcome of his philosophical program, which consists in weakening the strong structures of reality through interpretation, that is, philosophical hermeneutics. The goal of this paper is to outline Vattimo’s ontology, which, as I’ve said, has only been announced, sketched, and planned by Vattimo because it is not an ontology that he endorsed at the beginning of his philosophical journey; but rather it is one embraced at the end, as an outcome of hermeneutics. While this could not have happened otherwise (because an ontology that precedes philosophy automatically presupposes truth instead of committing itself to the search for truth), Foucault indirectly indicated the ontology for the ‘event of Being’ that Vattimo was searching for.1 In order to outline Foucault’s influence on Vattimo, I will divide this paper in two parts: ‘Ontology of Actuality’ and ‘Being as Event.’ The first part will analyze Foucault’s article where he planned the ‘ontology of actuality’; the second will show how Vattimo fused together this ontology and his philosophy of ‘weak thought.’ My hope is that both parts will show how Vattimo has brought forward what I propose to call ‘Foucault’s attempt’ at an ontology. That Foucault recognized that all his ‘philosophical edification has been determined by the reading of Heidegger’ and also that Heidegger is the author he wrote least about ‘but read the most,’2 induces me to think that Vattimo has brought forward what perhaps was Foucault’s ontological or Heideggerian silent project. It is curious to note that in his recent autobiography, Vattimo recalls meeting Foucault for the first time in July 1964 at a colloquium on Nietzsche in Royaumont, where he was invited by Gilles Deleuze.3 At this colloquium, Vattimo not only attended Foucault’s lecture but also took part in the discussion afterward with other participants who included Boehm, Taubes, Wahl, Baroni, Ramnoux, Demonbynes, and Kellel. Foucault’s lecture— which was first published in the Cahiers de Royaumont of 1967 and is now available (with the transcription of the discussion) in Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975, under the title ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’—analyzed the system of interpretation founded in the nineteenth century.4 It is no surprise that Foucault chose those same philosophers whom Paul Ricoeur would later consider the ‘masters of suspicion,’5 that is, the ones that unmasked, demystified, and exposed our most established beliefs. Although Foucault did not conceive hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline as Vattimo did, this is one of the few places in which he analyzes it.6

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The French master began his lecture by explaining how ‘each cultural form in the Western civilization . . . has had its system of interpretation,’7 that is, its particular interpretation of Being that characterized its relation to reality. ‘In opposition to the time of signs, which is a time of definite terms, and in opposition to the time of dialectic, which is linear in spite of everything, there is a time of interpretation [explains Foucault], which is circular,’8 that is, incomplete. What he finds most significant after Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is the primacy of interpretation with respect to signs. While ‘resemblance,’ in the sixteenth century, provided the ‘place’ of interpretation, that is, ‘the minimal unity that interpretation had to maintain,’9 in the twentieth century it is a ‘perpetual play of mirrors.’10 In this play of mirrors everything becomes ‘interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs.’11 Having said this, if in the sixteenth century something could be said and deciphered only when things resembled each other, after Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud it is only possible when things reflect back on each other; in other words, when they involve us in an interpretation that always reflects back on itself: ‘there is never . . . an interpretandum that is not already interpretans.’12 Although Vattimo agreed with most of Foucault’s thesis, he was surprised that Foucault presented Marx as an antifoundational theorist together with Nietzsche and Freud. Marx did not consider interpretation a consequence of antifoundationalism, but the interpretative nature of reality is an integral part of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s demystifications. For this reason, Vattimo posed the following question in the discussion: If I understood correctly, Marx should be classified with those thinkers who, like Nietzsche, discovered the infinity of interpretation. I fully agree with you as far as Nietzsche is concerned, but isn’t there in Marx a necessary point of arrival? What does infrastructure mean if not something which must be considered as a base? Foucault responded: As far as Marx is concerned, I hardly developed my idea; I’m even afraid of not being able to show it. But take The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon for example: Marx never presents his interpretation as the final interpretation. He knows well, and says so, that we could interpret at a more profound level or more general level, and that there is no short-gap explanation in the ground.13

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Although Vattimo was probably correct to point out that interpretation for Marx did not possess that incomplete, infinite, and circular nature that it had for Nietzsche and Freud, Foucault (just as Ricoeur would a few years later) only wanted to champion these three masters’ demystifications of our most foundational beliefs. If radical demystification is nothing more than the recognition of the primacy of interpretation over signs, facts, and objects, then the infinite nature of interpretation must be the vital part of any philosophy. It is no surprise that hermeneutics received full philosophical significance with Heidegger, only after Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s demystification of power, nature, and consciousness had been abundantly absorbed into Western culture.

Ontology of actuality Before venturing into the philosophical meaning of Foucault’s ‘ontologie de l’actualité,’ it should be pointed out that this expression was first used by Foucault on January 5, 1983, in a course at the Collège de France. Although an extract of the course was published under the title ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’ in Le Magazine Littéraire,14 Foucault the following year published a longer version of the same text in English, dropping the term ‘ontology of actuality’ in favor of ‘historical ontology of ourselves.’ In the first edition, ‘ontology of actuality’ was opposed to an ‘analytics of truth,’ and in the second edition, ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ was opposed to the ‘critical ontology of ourselves.’ If we compare both editions we can easily observe that Foucault meant the same thing by both formulations and probably found ‘historical’ and ‘critical’ more appropriate because they could both be used as opposing modifiers to the ‘ontology.’ Foucault never used the term ‘ontology of actuality’ again, but he did refer to ‘historical ontology’ a few months later in an interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus in Berkeley15 and to ‘formal ontology of ourselves’ in ‘The Political Technology of Individuals.’16 If Foucault did not develop this concept in his other writings it is not only because he sadly died the following year but because he did not conceive of ontology as the philosophical history of Being.17 In sum, he preferred ‘historical ontology’ to ‘ontology of actuality’ because he felt closer to historicism than to ontology or, for that matter, to philosophy. This might also be why he immediately dropped the word ‘actuality’ in favor of ‘historical’ in the second edition. But what is the difference between these two so-called ontologies? Foucault used this pair of terms to distinguish the possibility of choosing between ‘a critical philosophy which presents itself as an analytical

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philosophy of truth in general and a critical thought which will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of actuality.’18 In other words, an ontology of actuality (or a historical ontology of ourselves), according to Foucault, would not turn to projects that claim to be global as an analysis of truth (or a critical ontology of ourselves) would, but on the contrary only to historical investigations into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, and saying. Foucault goes on to specify that ontology of actuality is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archeological—and not transcendental—in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.19 In sum, if this new historical ontology is archeological, it is so because it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge but instead will only try to treat the instances of discourses that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. Ontology of actuality does not try to ‘make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.’20 But how did Foucault individuate what he distinguishes between? Foucault formulated this distinction between an ‘analysis of truth’ and an ‘ontology of actuality’ through a careful analysis of Kant’s article ‘Was heist Aufklärung?’ [‘What Is Enlightenment?’], published in November 1784 and his three Critiques, published in 1781, 1788, and 1790, respectively. Kant described the Enlightenment as the moment when humanity put its own reason to use, that is, without subjecting itself to any external authorities (such as God or Nature) in order to determine by itself what can be known, done, and hoped for. For this reason, Foucault considers Kant’s three Critiques as the Enlightenment’s guide, that is, the ‘handbook of reason that has grown up in the Enlightenment.’21 But by being the handbook of reason, the same Enlightenment also becomes the age

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of these Critiques, that is, the age that made possible Kant’s masterpieces. This is where Kant’s article ‘Was heist Aufklärung?’ comes in. It marks the entrance into the history of philosophy of a question that modern thought was not capable of answering: ‘What is the Enlightenment? What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’22 It is in this small text that this question was first formulated and, according to Foucault, revolutionized philosophy. For Kant this question, like the Critiques, does not demand an understanding of the present on the basis of a totality or on the basis of a future achievement but only on the basis of a difference within actuality. While many believe this small text represents only a significant fusion between critical and historical reflection, for Foucault it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. In is in the reflection on ‘today’ as a difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.23 In order to fully comprehend the meaning of Kant’s question we must compare it with the Cartesian question: Who am I? ‘I’ for Descartes is conceived as the unique, universal, and unhistorical subject. But if this ‘I’ is also everyone, anywhere, and at any moment, it loses its relation with the present, that is, with actuality. And this is precisely what Kant avoids because his question allows an analysis of both us and our actual present. By questioning the ‘historical,’ ‘contemporary,’ or better, ‘actual’ events that surround him, Kant avoids the universal philosophical trap, which consists in metaphysical questions such as ‘what is truth, nature, or God?’ While these questions belong to the field of the ‘ontology of truth,’ which does not acknowledge their actuality, Kant, by asking ‘what are we, as Aufklärer, as part of the Enlightenment?’24 belongs to the ontology of actuality. In sum, Foucault sees in Kant’s text a fundamental distinction between a ‘formal ontology of truth’ and an ‘ontology of actuality,’ the latter which, as I said, he went on to call a ‘historical ontology of ourselves.’ This historicalontology question, ‘What are we today?’ has characterized philosophy ever since because, as Foucault says, ‘Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Husserl, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School have tried to answer this question.’25 One way or another, we can say that none of these philosophers searched for formal structures with universal values but rather engaged in a historical investigation into the events that led them to recognize

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themselves as subjects of what they were doing, thinking, and saying in their actuality. After all, a philosophy that does not include the philosopher in its own sphere does not faithfully reflect ‘reality.’ It is no surprise, then, that ‘ontology of actuality’ questions were raised by philosophers because, as Foucault notes, ‘philosophy is in fact the most general cultural form in which we might be able to reflect on the reality of the west.’26 In other words, philosophy in itself must reflect on its own contemporary debates, such as analytical versus Continental philosophy. Another way to formulate this antithesis might be that adopted, and freely applied by the late Foucault, who set against philosophy as ‘analysis of truth’ a philosophy understood as ‘ontology of actuality,’ explicitly preferring the second. Although Foucault did not elaborate the meaning of the term ‘ontology,’ such dichotomy, also beyond its own explicit intentions, delineates new possible distinctions and articulations in the antithesis.27

Being as event As I said at the beginning of this paper, Foucault’s influence over Vattimo is circumscribed by his ‘ontology of actuality,’ which allowed the Italian philosopher not only to overcome metaphysics but most of all to locate the ‘Being as event’ that he inherited from Heidegger. As we will see, Vattimo has brought forward Foucault’s attempt at an ontology that was promised but not pursued. In fact, if the first edition (which was a transcription of a course) of Foucault’s essay on Kant had not been published, Vattimo might not have focused on this ontology of actuality because in the second edition, as I said, ‘actuality’ was replaced by ‘historical,’ which could be interpreted just as another version of historicism. Instead, it is actuality that captured Vattimo’s attention because, as we will see, it is the cornerstone of his weakening of ontology. Although the distinction between ‘ontology of actuality’ and ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ is not terribly signifi cant, as both editions demonstrate, Vattimo preferred the first formulation because it is easier to oppose to its counter, ‘analytics of truth,’ that is, to metaphysics. But before analyzing how Vattimo managed to place the history of Being into Foucault’s ontology of actuality, it is first necessary to understand the meaning of ‘weak thought’ and how he inherited the event of Being from Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics. Vattimo formulated the term ‘weak thought’ in order to abandon philosophy’s traditional claim to global descriptions of the world because after

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those masters’ demystifications we mentioned above, thought is much more aware of its own restrictions, limits, and boundaries. While the Italian term ‘debole,’ ‘weak,’ has a very negative connotation just as in English, it should not be interpreted as a failure, but rather as a possibility of emancipation, that is of freeing thought from objectivity, truth, and reality which have conditioned it until now. But doesn’t philosophy become strong again once it incorporates weak thought? Doesn’t it fall again into that metaphysics it tried to avoid? According to Vattimo it doesn’t because for weak thought the history of metaphysics is not the history of an error from which we must set ourselves free given that we have now ‘found’ the ‘correct’ description of reality. On the contrary, since we still haven’t found the correct description of reality, we must only adjust to this ‘condition’ of thought. In sum, the weakness of ‘weak thought’ should not only be interpreted in contrast to ‘strong thought’ nor as the result of a discovery (that there is no objective description of truth), but of an awareness of a condition. In this condition Being is not set apart, but just interpreted as something weaker, such as an ‘event’ following Heidegger’s indication after his destruction of metaphysics in Being and Time.28 When Heidegger declared in Being and Time that ontic knowledge presupposes a knowledge or foreunderstanding of Being as such, he also showed that we can no longer conceive the notion of an entity as a self-evident present object. All the objects in front of us are already the result of a series of descriptions, positions, and placements that constitute them; in other words, objectivity is a result of our interpretation and not the cause. While past philosophers interpreted this forestructure of objectivity as a transcendental or dialectical totality, Heidegger individuated in it what metaphysics has always ascribed to Being: stability in presence. But the act of modeling beings on Being, of appropriating to themselves the notion of Being, also indicates the (forgotten) difference between Being and beings; Being is not what endures, what is and cannot not be—as Parmenides would have it—but only what becomes because it ‘becomes’ from the ontological difference. According to Vattimo, Heidegger’s ontological difference, that is, the difference between Being and beings, indicates most of all ‘that Being is not. Entities are what can be said to be. Being, on the other hand, befalls, or occurs.’29 Although it is just ‘on the forgetfulness of this difference that metaphysical thought was able to evolve into a strong thought,’30 the destruction of metaphysics employed first by Heidegger and then by Derrida has not only produced ‘weak thought’ but also dissolved Being into its own ‘becoming’ of interpretations. This means that Being can be distinguished from beings only when it is understood as an event instead

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of as a present objectivity. But if Being is not in the presence of things, how can we acknowledge or compare it? Vattimo explained that although Being is not identifiable with beings, with the particular entities given to us in our experience, it is ‘comparable to the light by which entities become visible.’31 This light can also be understood as the linguistic horizon that surrounds us because beings become visible to us only within a historically determined horizon since it is impossible to attribute to this field the immutable objectivity of the ‘objects’ that appear within it. In sum, the ‘difference’ of the ontological difference indicates that we can only truly distinguish Being from beings when we conceive ‘it as historical-cultural happenings, as the instituting and transforming of those horizons in which entities time and again become accessible to man.’32 But what makes possible our experience of the world in this condition without objective presences? What is the a priori in this postmetaphysical world? The a priori that makes possible our experience of the world is Ge-schick, destiny-forwarding, or Ueber-lieferung, transmission. Being never really is but sends itself, is on the way, it transmits itself . . . Being now ends up stripped of the strong traits attributed to it by metaphysics. Being that can occur does not have the same traits as metaphysical Being with the simple addition of ‘eventuality.’33 The term ‘Ereignis’ (event), used by Heidegger to indicate (not define) Being in Contributions to Philosophy,34 was meant to mark, according to Vattimo, the new ontological approach that excludes all essentialist views of Being. Vattimo’s starting point is not only the end of metaphysics but also the end of deconstruction: ‘what is ahead of philosophy as its goal, after deconstructionism, is a labor of stitching things back together, of reassembly.’35 In this condition, Being becomes an event because philosophy no longer corresponds to the Platonic agenda of understanding Being through the Eternal but rather seeks to do so through its own history; that is, it redirects itself toward history. But this is only possible if Being and event are fused together. Such a Being would derive not from Being ‘as it is’ but from Being viewed as the product of a history of formulations, interpretations, and deconstructions that ‘are “givens” of destiny understood as a process of transmission. They are points of reference we keep encountering each time we engage in thinking here and now.’36 But if Being for Vattimo consists in a transmission, in the forwarding and destiny (‘Ueberlieferung’ and ‘Ge-schick’) of a series of echoes, linguistic resonances, and

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messages coming from the past and from others in the form of events, what is the philosophical position that corresponds to this process of the weakening of Being? If philosophy becomes a labor of stitching things back together, of reassembling the events that constitute Being after deconstruction, then the static subject-object model of descriptions will not be applicable anymore and will have to be replaced by an active practice of interpretations. Interpretation, unlike description, is an infinite process in which every response changes and modifies the nature of the call to the extent that it affects the very Being that is being interpreted; in other words, while description corresponds to stable presences, interpretation can correspond to different events of Being since each interpretation itself is different. Hermeneutics becomes in this way the most appropriate philosophical position for grasping Being’s vocation of giving itself as the truth of human language, and therefore it presents itself as the most appropriate method for the ‘thinking that corresponds to Being as event.’37 Having said this, one might think that language is something bigger than or prior to Being, while on the contrary, it is an event of Being itself. For Vattimo, this ‘eventuality’ indicates that everything we see as a structure, essence, or theorem (such as the idea of truth as the conformity of the proposition to the thing) is an event, a historical aperture or disclosure of Being that must be interpreted. Being presupposes this disclosure, which is not an object of philosophical research but rather that into which Being is always-already thrown. Another argument in favor of Vattimo’s weak thought lies in philosophy’s inability to solve the fundamental question of ontology: Why is there Being, and why is there something rather than nothing? If this question has not yet been answered, it must be because ‘Being lacks a reason’: there is no reason sufficient to explain why Being is. This implies the weakness of Being since ‘if Being had a strong reason to be,’ explains Vattimo, ‘then metaphysics would have significance, would have strength. But as things are, Being . . . is historical and casual, happened and happening.’38 For these reasons Vattimo believes that philosophy is weak thought, an ontology of weakness where philosophical efforts ought to focus on interpretation as a process of weakening the objective weight of the presence of Being. Vattimo has taken literally Heidegger’s indication that the new epoch of Being, after the destruction of metaphysics, would not depend on our decisions but rather on recognizing how we belong to this same destruction, that is, to ‘a philosophy of “decline,” a philosophy which sees what is constitutive of Being not as the fact of its prevailing, but of the fact

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of its disappearing.’39 After all, if Being has been able to endure so long, it is not ‘because of its force . . . but because of its weakness.’40 Although Vattimo individuated the ‘weak’ condition of thought, the ‘eventual’ status of Being, and the ‘hermeneutic’ nature of philosophy after Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, he still needed to locate Being in an ontology, an ontology that not only recognized its historical transmission but, most of all, that could articulate the historical events that constituted it in our present. Since the publication of ‘Ontology of Actuality’ in 1988 and then in many of his other writings, such as Beyond Interpretation and Nihilism and Emancipation,41 Vattimo has explained why Foucault’s ‘ontology of actuality’ represents the most persuasive way to collect the event of Being. The ontology for which we are searching with Heidegger’s help is a theory that speaks of actuality (the objective genitive) and also belongs to it, in the subjective sense of the genitive. Because there is no other way to grasp Being as something stable apart from its event (that is, the specific historical aperture in which it arises by allowing Being to appear), a theory of present existence is a theory that has no other source of information or legitimation apart from the present condition itself.42 Any source of legitimation other than its ‘present condition,’ such as objectivism or transcendentalism would automatically throw Being into metaphysics again, that is, in an ‘analytics of truth’ where Being would represent what endures and cannot not be. Ontology of actuality is the most persuasive ‘answer to Heidegger’s call to recollect Being’ says Vattimo, that is, ‘to grasp what is meant by “Being”—the word itself and virtually nothing else—in our experience now.’43 But as I said, if Being after Heidegger’s destruction can no longer be the metaphysical knowledge of Being qua beings, as in Aristotle, but only the event of those appeals that come down to us through its history, then the new philosophical task after metaphysics is to ‘weaken ontology through actuality.’ But Vattimo’s ontology of actuality is not only an appropriate way to pursue Heidegger’s post-metaphysical indications, but also to battle against those metaphysical positions that still today reign over contemporary philosophy. In other words, ‘weak thought’ can help to contrast those analytical and phenomenological philosophers (such as Barry Smith and Jean-Luc Marion) who tend to use ontology as a descriptive science of the existent. This is why among the most committed philosophers in favor of ‘weak thought’ was Richard Rorty who was among the first to overcome

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those realist and anti-realist disputes such as atheist versus theist or more recently analytical versus Continental philosophy.44 These disputes are just residues of a metaphysical culture that even Foucault wanted to surpass; after all the fact that ‘ontology of actually’ for him was not supposed to turn to projects that claimed to be global as ‘analysis of truth’ did, but on the contrary, to historical investigations into the events that constitute our actuality, demonstrated he was also looking for a culture in which the realms of faith and scientific knowledge were compatible. But in order for such a philosophical culture to persists it is necessary to set apart ‘truth’ as a value, as the only matrix capable to increase or decrease knowledge, in favor of truth as a consequence of interpretation. But as a consequence of interpretation truth can only be contingent, fragile, and most of all weak. This is perhaps why Rorty entitled a collection of his interviews Take Care of Freedom and Truth will take Care of Itself 45 and Vattimo his autobiography Not Being God.46 Although I believe Foucault would have approved of Vattimo’s appropriation of his terminology to locate the eventuality of Being that he inherited from Heidegger, this concern is not significant, and time should not be wasted in such historical investigations because, as I said at the beginning of this paper, only the effects Foucault’s work had on others is important. And as we saw, Foucault’s influence over Vattimo is essential to the point that the Italian philosopher recently declared, in a biographical interview for his seventieth birthday, that ‘the idea of ontology of actuality could also be interpreted as a retrospective vision of my philosophical path.’47

Notes 1

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Gianni Vattimo announced a book to be titled Ontology of Actuality in his 1994 work Beyond Interpretation, but he has recently changed the title to Of Reality. Although I have seen the manuscript of this work, I will only use his published work for my theme in order to facilitate anyone working today. Foucault, Michel (2001), ‘Le retour de la morale,’ Dits et écrits II, 1976 –1988. Paris: Gallimard, 1522. This is one of the few interviews not translated in the threevolume English translation of Dits et écrits edited by Paul Rabinow for The New Press. Foucault’s recognition of Heidegger’s influence is also indicated in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1982), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vattimo, Gianni, and P. Paterlini (2006), Non Essere Dio. Una autobiografia a Quattro mani. Reggio Emilia: Aliberti, 122; also forthcoming in English, Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel (1994), ‘Discussion,’ Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975. Paris: Gallimard, 603–607. Note the transcription of the discussion with Foucault is not included

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in the English translation of Michel Foucault (1997), ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ Aesthetic, Method, and Epistemology, James D. Faubion, ed. New York: The New Press, 269–278. Ricoeur, Paul (1970), Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault’s recently published 1981–1982 lectures at the Collège de France, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, are neither concerned with hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline nor with the ‘subject’ as ‘self-knowledge,’ but rather with how the ‘self’ and the ‘care of the self’ were conceived during the period of antiquity. Some commentators, such as Mark G. E. Kelly, consider the title ‘misleading’ and thought The Care of the Self ‘would have been a more apt title’ (Mark G. E. Kelly (2005), ‘Review: Michel. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject,’ Foucault Studies 3: 107–12. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ 270. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ 278. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ 270. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ 272. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ 275. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ 275. Foucault, ‘Discussion,’ 603–604. This course was partially published first in Le Magazine Littéraire 207 (May 1984): 35–39, and recently as Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’ Dits et écrits II, 1976 –1988, 1498–1507. This edition of the essay was not translated into the three-volume English translation of Dits et écrits (which includes both editions) edited by Paul Rabinow for The New Press. Only the second edition, from 1984, was translated first in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (1984) ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 32–50, and then in Michel Foucault (1997), ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed., trans. R. Hurley and others. New York: The New Press, 304–319. One of the first philosophers to comment on Foucault’s ‘ontologie de l’actualité ’ (sometimes translated as ‘ontology of the present,’ ‘ontology of ourselves,’ or ‘ontology of current events’) was Vincent Descombes (1993) in The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events, trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz. New York: Oxford University Press, which is an investigation of how philosophy should deal with world events. Foucault, Michel, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,’ in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, 253–280. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘The Political Technology of Individuals,’ Power, James D. Faubion (2000), ed., trans. R. Hurley and others. New York: The New Press, 403–417. Vincent Descombes confirms this in his outstanding analysis of Foucault’s ontology of actuality: An ontology of the present must tell us about the present as present, about time as time, about the unaccomplished as unaccomplished, about the past as past. Yet conceptual discussions of this order are notoriously absent from Foucault’s writings. In keeping with the positivist program, he can only conceive of studying a concept in the historical mode. Which amounts to saying

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’ 1506–1507. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ 315. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ 315. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ 308. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ 305. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ 309. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘The Subject and Power,’ Power, James D. Faubion (2000), ed., trans. R. Hurley and others. New York: The New Press, 335. Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals,’ 403. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘Philosophy and Psychology,’ Aesthetic, Method, and Epistemology, James D. Faubion (1997), ed. New York: The New Press, 250. Vattimo, Gianni, foreword to F. D’Agostini (1997), Analitici e continentali. Guida alla filosofia degli ultimi trent’anni. Milan: Cortina, xv. A detailed history of Vattimo’s weak thought can be found in my ‘Introduction’ to Weakening Philosophy, Santiago Zabala (2007) ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 3–34. Vattimo, Gianni (1984), ‘Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,’ trans. T. Harrison, in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 10 (1984): 151. Vattimo, Gianni, Art’s Claim to Truth, Santiago Zabala (in press), trans. L. D’Isanto. New York: Columbia University Press. Vattimo, Gianni (1982), ‘Difference and Interference: On the Reduction of Hermeneutics to Anthropology,’ trans. T. Harrison, Res 4: 87. Vattimo, ‘Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,’ 156. Vattimo, ‘Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,’ 157. It is interesting to notice that Foucault himself used the terms ‘event’ and ‘eventalization’ in order to make ‘visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediately anthropological trait, or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all.’ Michel Foucault (2000), ‘Questions of Method,’ in Faubion (2000), 226. Heidegger, Martin (1989), Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vattimo, foreword to F. D’Agostini, Analitici e continentali, xv. Vattimo, ‘Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought,’ 151. Vattimo, Gianni (1993), The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy After Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. C. P. Blamires and T. Harrison. Cambridge: Polity Press, 149. Vattimo, Gianni (2002), ‘Weak Thought and the Reduction of Violence: A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo by Santiago Zabala,’ trans. Y. Mascetti, Common Knowledge 3: 463. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 5. Vattimo, Gianni (1988), The End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 86. Vattimo, Gianni(2007), ‘Ontology of Actuality’ Contemporary Italian Philosophy, S. Benso and B. Schroeder, eds. New York: State University of New York Press,

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89–107; Beyond Interpretation, trans. D. Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997; Santiago Zabala (2004), ed., Nihilism and Emancipation, trans. W. McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 6. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 8. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 86. A very clear example of this division among contemporary philosophy can be found in C. G. Prado (2003), ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytical and Continental Philosophy. Amherst: Humanity Books. Rorty, Richard (2006), Take care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, E. Mendieta, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vattimo, Gianni, (2008), Addio alla verità, Rome: Meltemi Publishers. Vattimo, Gianni (2006), ‘Philosophy as Ontology of Actuality: BiographicalTheoretical Interview,’ L. Savarino and F. Vercellone, eds., Iride 49: 492. A detailed analysis and development of Vattimo’s event of Being can be found in Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Philosophy After its Deconstruction (Forthcoming 2009), New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 7

Foucault, Secularization theory, and the theological origins of totalitarianism1 Michael Lackey

Michel Foucault’s provocative remarks in the Preface to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Gauttari’s Anti-Oedipus about the omnipresence of fascism have inspired scholars to reflect more on the anti-fascist impulse at the core of Foucault’s writings than on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s text. For instance, in ‘Beyond Theology and Sexuality,’ Jeremy Carrette cites some memorable passages from the ‘Preface’ to clarify his ‘queer theory’ approach to Foucault, which functions to unveil ‘the fascist regimes of Christian theology and sexuality in the bondage of a fixed self.’2 In ‘The Fascist Longings in our Minds,’ Rey Chow combines Foucault’s ideas from the ‘Preface’ with a Freudian theory of projection to justify her claim that ‘Fascism has become for us the empty term, the lack, onto which we project all the unpleasant realities from which we want to distance ourselves.’3 James Bernauer makes extensive use of the ‘Preface’ in his essay, ‘Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,’ to demonstrate ‘that Foucault’s style of analysis should make him the “patron saint” for the study of Nazism.’4 That scholars have used the anti-fascist remarks in the ‘Preface’ to understand the core concepts at the heart of Foucault’s work should surprise no one, for as Foucault makes abundantly clear in a 1984 interview, one of his life-long objectives was to construct a nonauthoritarian discursive model, one that would establish a civil relation between interlocutors, whether those interlocutors were citizens, academicians, politicians, or countries.5 While many contemporary scholars agree that there is a strong antifascist impulse running throughout Foucault’s writings, there has been some confusion about Foucault’s take on the role of religion in the formation of a fascist technology of the self. In this essay, I argue that, for Foucault, it is impossible to understand ‘the fascism in us all’6 that made Hitler and the Nazis so effective without taking into account the crucial

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role Christianity played in the formation of the Western political subject and the modern nation-state. There are two stages to my argument. In the first, I briefly examine secularization theory. Recent studies have been posing a substantive challenge to the traditional secularization hypothesis, which holds that science and reason have been slowly but surely supplanting religion and faith. As I will demonstrate, Foucault recognized many years ago that the traditional Enlightenment story about secularization was an incoherent fiction that significantly distorted our understanding of intellectual and political history. In the second part of this essay, I analyze Hitler’s religious conception of the political. Examining Hitler’s speeches and writings, I contend, will shed considerable light on the distinctive theological technology of the self that made fascism flourish. The consequences of using Foucault’s work to understand the origins of totalitarianism and fascism are staggering. First, Foucault’s work will force us to reconsider those canonical studies, such as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which hold that secularization was a precondition for the emergence of the nation-state, totalitarianism, and fascism. Foucault refused to give credence to the secularization hypothesis, an intellectual move that has baffled some prominent scholars. For instance, Vincent P. Pecora praises Foucault for teaching us ‘how to rethink the Enlightenment’s idea of progress,’ but he faults him for failing to understand ‘the story of secularization that accompanied it.’7 But if my interpretation of Foucault is convincing, he would argue, contra Pecora, that secularization has never even begun to take hold much less to occur in the West, and consequently, Foucault would argue, contra Fromm, Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, and Anderson, that it is impossible to understand the origins of totalitarianism and fascism without taking into account a distinctly religious conception of the political subject. I have dug out the theologian instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth.8 Scholars have consistently claimed that secularization has been underway in the West from the Enlightenment to the present. What exactly secularization is, however, continues to perplex. Here are three separate models: (1) given the way science and reason supplanted religion and faith,9 (2) given the way the Protestant Reformation shifted epistemic authority

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from the unified Church to the individual conscience,10 or (3) given the way translations of the Bible into vernacular languages led to the proliferation of irreconcilable religious schisms,11 the credibility of the church and its truths has been significantly undermined, thus leading to the rise of a nonreligious mentality in the West. Such are the standard versions of the secularization hypothesis that have dominated. But a casual glance at the writings of some prominent writers tells a much different tale. For instance, in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman from The Gay Science boldly proclaimed God’s death, and a close reading of Nietzsche’s writings from 1882 through 1885 indicates that he would have probably accepted the central premise at the heart of traditional secularization theory, that with the passage of time, science would eventually supplant religion. But in 1886, there was a palpable shift in the Uebermensch philologist’s writings. First, they became more intensely political, thus leading him to do an extensive analysis of ‘the secret black art of [the] truly grand politics of revenge’12 and to prophesy the coming of the twentieth century’s political horror show: ‘The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale politics.’13 The second shift relates to Nietzsche’s critique of God and religion. While Nietzsche continued to argue in the years 1886 through January of 1889 that God is both an incoherent and dangerous idea, he started to realize that the God-concept is not disappearing from the culture as he had formerly thought: ‘I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar . . .’14 Gone is the cocksure atheist of 1882, who boldly claimed that the God-idea is on the wane. Indeed, for Nietzsche, not only is the God-concept not disappearing, but it is also assuming a more prominent role in the political sphere, which is why he warns his reader in The Anti-Christ ‘not [to] underestimate the fatality that has crept out of Christianity even into politics.’15 We see a similar pattern in Mark Twain’s writings. In the year 1899, we could say that Twain would have agreed with Arendt, who claims in The Origins of Totalitarianism that twentieth-century anti-Semitism is based on ‘a secular nineteenth-century ideology’ that is distinct from traditional ‘religious Jew-hatred.’16 For instance, in ‘Concerning the Jews,’ an essay published in the September 1899 issue of Harper’s Monthly, Twain tries to explain the origins of Western anti-Semitism. Throughout this essay, Twain says that he is ‘convinced that the persecution of the Jew is not due in any large degree to religious prejudice.’17 Twain does not totally exonerate religion, for he does claim that, if religion plays a role in justifying the culture’s anti-Semitism, it is only a minor one. In fact, Twain offers a tentative

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quantification of religion’s role: ‘Religious prejudices may account for one part of it, but not for the other nine’ (2000: 242). What really accounts for rampant anti-Semitism is the Jewish superiority in making money: ‘I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian’s inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business—in either straight business or the questionable sort’ (2000: 242–243). Therefore, Twain concludes that ‘Jewish persecution is not a religious passion, it is a business passion’ (2000: 249). Now let us consider a passage Twain penned on June 22, 1906. Discussing the many pogroms against Jews in Russia during the years 1903 through 1906, Twain says: For two years now Christianity has been repeating in Russia the sort of industries in the way of massacre and mutilation with which it has been successfully persuading Christendom in every century for nineteen hundred years that it is the only right and true religion—the one and only religion of peace and love. For two years now the ultra-Christian Government of Russia has been officially ordering and conducting massacres of its Jewish subjects.18 Striking in this passage is not just Twain’s reversal regarding the causes of ‘Jewish persecution,’ but his contention that the early twentieth-century pogroms are part of a long line of massacres Christendom has been committing ‘in every century for nineteen hundred years.’ Between the years 1899 and 1906, Twain revised his view about the role religion was playing within the culture. Indeed, in his 1901 essay, ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness,’ Twain claims that a Christian conception of the political has been central for the justification of the invasive and intrusive politics of Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. Utilizing a benevolent discourse about the Blessings of Civilization, which holds that imperialist powers dominate lesser nations for their own good, Western leaders have been able to vindicate their invasive politics and to mobilize the masses to support their agenda. But this whole political agenda, Twain argues, has been premised on a Christian conception of the political: We know this. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and 90 per cent of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fi fty [sic] state legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust.19

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For Twain, it is impossible to understand or appreciate the West’s imperialist political agenda without taking into account the Christian orientation of Western legislators, that body of leaders that both frames the nation’s agenda and legitimizes the global project. Let me supply one last example to illustrate my point. As a college student at Cambridge, E. M. Forster rejected Christianity sometime in 1898 or 1899, an experience that he considered one of the most momentous of his life.20 Not surprisingly, religion is treated as a charming but increasingly obsolete fiction in his early works. For instance, in the 1908 novel, A Room with a View, the narrator says that ‘the thing one never talked about—religion—was fading like all the other things.’21 Given this situation, religion is of marginal importance in the novels from 1907 until 1910, a fluffy subject for fluffy characters (such as Mr. Beebe in A Room with a View) or a twisted subject for twisted characters (such as Mr. Pembroke and his sister, Agnes, in the 1907 novel, The Longest Journey). But by 1913 and 1914, when Forster was penning his overtly homosexual novel, Maurice, religion became an extremely ominous presence, a socio-cultural power that enforces strict gender and sex roles (as with Mr. Ducie’s sand diagrams depicting the God-mandated heterosexual Ideal) and identifies and defines ‘sexual irregularities’ in order to monitor and control human sexuality (as with Mr. Borenius, who claims that ‘when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God’22). In 1918, so dominant was the religious mentality within a political context that Forster wrote in a letter to his friend, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, that England is a ‘God State.’23 By 1924, with the publication of A Passage to India, Forster suggests that it is impossible to understand the colonizing politics of the British Empire without taking into account its religious justification, which is best expressed in Isaiah 9:7: ‘For unto us a child is borne, unto us a Sonne is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder.’ As chosen people, who take their cue from God, the British are divinely ordained to rule and govern (the government shall be upon Christ’s shoulder, and since the British are the Imperial ministers of Christ, the government falls upon their shoulders), which explains why the British have been authorized to control India. Mrs. Moore, who turns against ‘poor little talkative Christianity’ in A Passage to India, does so, because she finally realizes how it has justified Britain’s invasive and intrusive politics, a point she makes when she specifically alludes to the Isaiah passage.24 Given the overwhelming power of religion to structure social forms and to determine the political agenda, it should come as no surprise that Forster claims in 1939 that ‘this is an age of faith.’25

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A German philologist, an American satirist, and an English novelist all undergo a similar experience. Initially, they all accept the traditional view that the West is becoming secular, but they all ultimately reject that view. Since they all draw the same conclusion but at different historical moments, it would make more sense to say that something changed, not so much in the culture, as in the way that they conceptualized historical and political events. Put differently, they adopted a different model of secularization, which led them to shift their view about the religious orientation of the culture at large. This is most obvious when we think about Twain’s example. In 1906, Twain does not say that a religious resurgence occurred within the culture, thus justifying the claim that religion has been the cause of the 1903 through 1906 pogroms against Jews in Russia; rather, he revises his earlier view by claiming that Christendom has been consistently justifying the persecution of Jews for the last nineteen hundred years. In other words, Twain makes use of a new secularization model in 1906 that enabled him to see the religious causes of persecution that he did not see when he penned his 1899 essay, ‘Concerning the Jews.’ Other than Nietzsche, no one, I contend, provided us with a more astute model for identifying the subterranean theological impulses operating within language, psyches, culture, and the polis than Foucault, and, therefore, no one has been better positioned to shed more light on the theological origins of totalitarianism and fascism than Foucault. For Foucault, who claims that ‘the death of God profoundly influenced our language’26 and led to the death of the subject, 27 secularization is a process of coming to secular consciousness, one of identifying and exorcising theological assumptions that continue to inform systems of thinking even when one has rejected the God-concept. Within this tradition of secularization theorists, it is not enough simply to ignore religion or to deny God’s existence. One must perpetually examine the degree to which one’s system of thought is based on a theological model of knowledge. It is such a view of theological assumptions that is central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of the Enlightenment. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists may have believed that they had supplanted God and religion, but since they held firm to a belief in human nature, they were unwitting believers.28 Therefore, to actually be secular, according to Sartre, one must reject the existence of human nature: ‘there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.’29 What distinguishes writers such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Foucault from traditional secularization theorists is their method of analysis. Secularization theorists in the Enlightenment rationalist tradition hold

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that, to determine whether a person or a community is secular or religious, we need only to determine whether individuals or communities are making conscious declarations of belief. These writers base their theories, for the most part, on empirical indicators such as church attendance, prayer in schools, and polls about belief. By contrast, secularization theorists in a Nietzschean, Sartrean, or Foucauldian tradition hold that it is possible for a person to reject God and religion but to remain faithful, at the level of the psychological subconscious or the political unconscious, to a theological view of the world. These writers focus mainly on unexamined ideological assumptions, unconscious conceptual frameworks, and orientations toward knowledge. That Foucault belongs to this latter tradition is clear in the ‘Preface’ to The Order of Things, where he claims that his method of analysis ‘does not belong to the history of ideas or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed’ (1994: xxi–xxii). Instead of examining what people say or believe, Foucault examines the systems of knowledge and power that have given birth to their particular systems of thinking. Nietzsche deploys this same method of analysis, which is why he concludes that science, despite its secular pretensions, ‘rests on a faith,’ ‘that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.’30 It is not what science thinks or says about itself, but the conditions of knowledge under which it came into being that determine whether it is theological or secular. Given this approach, Foucault, like Nietzsche and Sartre, rejects the simplistic view that the Enlightenment marks a decisive shift from the sacred to the secular or even the beginning of a shift from the sacred to the secular. As Bernauer insightfully claims, ‘early modernity,’ for Foucault, ‘was not a tale of growing religious disbelief but, rather, saw the emergence of an energy which drove both the global missionary activities of European Christianity as well as a vast religious colonization of interior life’ (2004: 78). Indeed, Foucault specifically claims that Christianity continues to institute in his day (‘still very numerous’) an authoritarian technology of the self: Christianity is not only a salvation religion, it is a confessional religion; it imposes very strict obligations of truth, dogma, and canon, more so than do the pagan religions. Truth obligations to believe this and that were and are still very numerous. The duty to accept a set of obligations, to

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hold certain books as permanent truth, to accept authoritative decisions in matters of truth, not only to believe certain things but to show that one believes, and to accept institutional authority are all characteristic of Christianity.31 Foucault objects to Christianity’s ‘strict obligations of truth, dogma, and canon’ not simply because this Christian view significantly divests humans of individual autonomy, but because it sets into motion an insidious power relation within self and with others. Indeed, Foucault argues that religion’s destructive potential manifests itself in and through then-contemporary polemics, which is based on the idea of annihilating one’s adversary: As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary neglected, ignored, or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable.32 By indoctrinating citizens with the idea that there exists a God-created Truth, an ‘intangible point of dogma,’ religion has been able to institute within individuals a fascist technology of the self, ‘a state of domination’ in which ‘an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means.’33 The theological or religious technology of the self, therefore, is not dependent upon an overt or conscious declaration of belief, but rather, upon an instituted model of self-knowledge,34 one that presupposes the existence of a God-created ‘permanent truth’ and an ‘intangible point of dogma.’ Within the Christian model, according to Foucault, knowledge is hierarchical, and therefore, the Christian subject conceives of itself in relation to an imagined metaphysical reality: ‘In Christianity, asceticism always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and of reality because most of the time the self is a part of that reality that must be renounced in order to gain access to another level of reality.’35 What the self produces is secular, ephemeral, and therefore untrustworthy, so if Christian subjects want to be right with God, they must renounce the products of the secular self and submit to the metaphysical, immutable, and therefore absolute reality of God. This relation of Christian subjects to themselves cannot be imposed from the outside; it must be something that they desire, something that

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animates their relation to themselves and others. Having internalized, at the level of desire, the view that there exists a God-created, metaphysical reality, Christian subjects must renounce thoughts and impulses that are incompatible with their faith-constructed Truths. Moreover, Christian subjects, instead of engaging with others in the production of a mutually agreed upon and culturally negotiated system of ‘truth,’ must demonize, denounce, or dismiss those individuals whose ‘truths’ are at odds with the permanent Truth that God has authored. It is, I contend, this hierarchical model of knowledge that created the conditions for fascism to flourish. But to give my reader a clear sense of this hierarchical model, let me turn to Hitler’s writings, for he articulates most clearly the nature of the fascist technology of the Western self. The German quest for God is not to be separated from Christ. We have lost our true cohesion with God. We are neither warm nor cold. Half Christian, half heathen. Yes, even the best are groping in the dark, not knowing what to do.36 Using Foucault’s model of the Christian technology of self to understand fascism, specifically the fascism in us all, will enable us to challenge two standard assumptions about Hitler’s theologically inflected conception of the political. The first assumption is that Hitler could not have been a Christian because he persecuted Christians. The second assumption is that Hitler, instead of actually believing in and/or accepting Christianity, exploited it for political reasons. Therefore, Hitler was only a nominal Christian and not truly a Christian in practice. It is my contention that, if we use Foucault’s approach to the formation of the political subject to understand Hitler’s distinctly Christian conception of the polis, these two assumptions would be exposed as false and misleading. That Hitler regularly proclaimed himself a Christian and that he considered the Nazi Party to be based on Christian principles are simply matters of historical fact. In his first wireless speech to the German people after he came to power in 1933, Hitler announced that his political party regards ‘Christianity as the foundation of our national morality.’37 Just two weeks later, he boldly declared in another speech his theological allegiance to Christianity: ‘it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany’ (1941: 148; February 15, 1933). In a 1934 speech, Hitler specified the nature of the Nazi Party’s Christian orientation by claiming that ‘[t]he National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity,’38 and by positive Christianity, he meant ‘caring for the

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sick, clothing the poor, feeding the hungry and quenching the thirst of the parched’ (1941: 597; February 24, 1939). Indeed, in January of 1939, Hitler boasted that under his leadership, Germany has almost quadrupled State contributions to the Churches, and that the National Socialist State differs considerably from France, the United States, and England because it refuses to accept the ‘separation between Church and State.’39 Even as late as 1945, Hitler insisted that ‘God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work.’40 Given its commitment to positive Christianity, Hitler claimed that the Nazi Party ‘stands on the ground of a real Christianity,’ because it is based on ‘Christian principles’ (1942: 386, 387; February 24, 1939). Absolutely crucial to Hitler’s Christian conception of the political is his distinction between ‘real Christianity’ and a perverted version of the faith, an idea he develops in Mein Kampf. His conception of the legitimate polis is based on a distinction between relative ‘knowledge,’ which is not really Knowledge because it is fluctuating and therefore unreliable, and dogmatic Knowledge, which is objectively True and therefore always valid. Indeed, Hitler casts a skeptical eye on a movement’s or a political system’s ‘outward formulation,’ which is subject to interpretation and error. In other words, political ‘truth’ is relative and therefore not Knowledge. Beyond critique, however, is what Hitler refers to as an ‘inner sense,’ which ‘is immutable.’41 As a Catholic, Hitler believes that the Catholic Church provides us with an ideal model for accessing this immutable Truth, for the Church refuses to lose sight of the ‘inner sense’:42 Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. [. . .] It has recognized quite correctly that its power of resistance does not lie in its lesser or greater adaptation to the scientific findings of the moment, which in reality are always fluctuating, but rather in rigidly holding to dogmas once established, for it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith. (1971: 459) To create the conditions for a moral culture and to establish an enduring political system, Hitler insists that the community must give primacy to religion, for ‘faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude’ (1971: 267). Indeed, without religious dogma, the twin terrors of anarchy and nihilism loom large: ‘The attack against dogmas as such, therefore, strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state, and, as the latter would end in a total anarchy of the state, the former would end in a worthless religious nihilism’ (1971: 267). In short, if the culture would

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have a true politics, it must acknowledge the primacy and inviolability of religion, because only religion can give us what is reliable, enduring, and legitimate. On this point, Hitler is as emphatic as he is direct: ‘Anyone who thinks he can arrive at a religious reformation by the detour of a political organization only shows that he has no glimmer of knowledge of the development of religious ideas or dogmas and their ecclesiastical consequences’ (1971: 114). For Hitler, religion must be the basis and foundation of a political system, and never the other way around. Therefore, Hitler concludes that ‘[f]or the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable’ (1971: 116). Understanding the primacy of religion in the formation of the political explains how Hitler, as a Christian, could justify persecuting ‘Christians.’ To clarify my point, let me take issue with James Carroll’s impressive work on Hitler and the Nazis. In his massive study, Carroll draws a clear line of connection between early Christian theology and the Nazi pogroms against Jews, but he stops short of concluding that Hitler and/or the Nazis were Christian. Rather, Carroll rehearses the standard argument, which seemingly justifies the claims that Hitler, in the final analysis, could not be considered a Christian and that he was even hostile to Christianity. As Carroll says: ‘Hitler suggests that, once finished with the Jews, he would have targeted for elimination, one way or another, those whose loyalty to Jesus competed with loyalty to the Third Reich’ (2001: 16). Unfortunately, Carroll does not cite the source for this claim about Hitler, but it is likely that he has Hitler’s famous 1939 speech in mind. In this speech, Hitler claims that National Socialism can never be considered incompatible with Christianity, because National Socialism is based on the one and only true Christian faith. Hitler unambiguously makes this point when he justifies taking action against false servants of the faith: But, the National Socialist State will ruthlessly make clear to those clergy who instead of being God’s ministers regard it as their mission to speak insultingly of our present Reich, its organizations, or its leaders, that no one will tolerate a destruction of this State, and that a clergy who place themselves beyond the pale of the law will be called to account before the law like any other German citizen. (1942: 51; January 30, 1939) For Hitler, ‘the Government of the Reich [. . .] regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation’ (1941: 157; March 23, 1933), so if certain members of the clergy defy the State, they would be implicitly setting themselves against God. Therefore,

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in the name of God, Hitler feels not only justified but also obligated in taking action against godless opponents of the State: ‘We shall protect the German clergy in their capacity as God’s ministers, but we shall destroy clergy who are the enemies of the German Reich’ (1942: 53; January 30, 1939). The major premise that Hitler takes as a given could be stated thus: in serving the National Socialist State, members of the clergy are implicitly ‘God’s ministers.’ Conversely, in defying the National Socialist State, members of the clergy are implicitly opponents of God. This Christian conception of the political is based on the idea that religion precedes politics, that Christianity is the basis of National Socialism rather than National Socialism being the foundation for Christianity. Therefore, we could say, contra Carroll, that Hitler intended to persecute, not Christians, but only those ‘Christians’ who have failed to understand real Christianity, which Hitler considered to be the religious foundation of the National Socialist polis. More important than Hitler’s conflation of politics and religion is the technology of self that made this particular view of the religiously inflected polis so effective. Put differently, it is not necessarily what Hitler said but rather the fascist technology of self that he and the Nazis subscribed to and instituted that made his political agenda Christian. At this point, let me examine the technology of self on which Hitler’s view of the Christian polis depends. In a 1922 speech, Hitler articulates the only conditions under which a nation could flourish. Hitler claims that ‘my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter’: In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the [biblical] passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. (1942: 26; April 12, 1922) At issue here is a legitimate and enduring political system on which civilization could flourish. Hitler goes on to claim that he considers it his ‘duty to see to it that human society does not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago—a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish

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people.’ For Hitler, when a government allows nonreligious people to rule and govern, a ‘catastrophic collapse’ of civilization is destined to occur. Of ultimate importance is a religious sensibility, the only true foundation of personal identity and the body politic. Therefore, to ensure that German civilization does not suffer the same fate as ancient Rome, Hitler believes that he has not just a right but an obligation to rid the culture of nonChristians, and specifically Jews. What leads Hitler to this conclusion is his conviction that the Jews are rooted in the ephemeral realities of the material world rather than the everlasting truths of the spiritual world, and to illustrate this point, Hitler alludes to the Gospel passages in which Christ banishes the money changers from the temple: His [the Jew’s] life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. (1971: 307) Jews base their lives on their ‘business existence’ rather than ‘religion,’ which is why their lives are ‘only of this world’ and why their ‘spirit is inwardly alien [. . .] to true Christianity.’ This passage is useful because it enables us to understand what Hitler means by religion. Religion is based on other-worldly concerns, such as an immutable or spiritual truth, while business is based on ‘this world’ concerns, such as money and power. And since Jews root themselves in their ‘business existence,’ and since their lives are ‘only of this world,’ their very natures are opposed to Godly virtues as well as religion. Starkly put, the opposition Hitler establishes is between the religious, that which is eternal, immutable, and noncontingent, and the nonreligious, that which is ephemeral, mutable, and contingent. Therefore, Hitler opposes Jews because they most thoroughly incarnate nonreligious principles, and as such, their very existence opposes and threatens the foundations of true civilization, which can only be legitimate or secure when it is based on ‘true Christianity.’ It would be a mistake, at this point, to assume that all Germans or that all Christians embody the virtues of ‘true Christianity’ and therefore true politics, for as Hitler argues, there are many ‘Germans’ and ‘Christians’ who have perverted the faith and therefore vitiated the political. Hitler makes

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this argument when he alludes to Christ taking ‘the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity.’ He concludes by condemning then-contemporary Christians for debasing the faith through their support of and appeal to Jewish parties: ‘Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties—and against their own nation’ (1971: 307). Those ‘Christians’ who support ‘atheistic Jewish parties’ have allied themselves with anti-Christian beings, and as a consequence, they have corrupted more than just religious faith; they have vitiated the political order itself. It is for this reason that the political powers of the Weimar Republic failed to invigorate the German nation. Note Hitler’s logic as he denounces the post-Great War political agenda: [W]here, I would ask, was Christianity for them in these fourteen years when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government. (1941: 148–149; February 15, 1933) By aligning themselves with atheistic parties, Weimar Republic German leaders, who are only ‘theoretically Christian,’ have corrupted the faith, which is why the political order ultimately failed. Hitler, by contrast, argues that he and the Nazi Party will institute a different kind of politics, one based on the true faith: ‘I do not merely talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity’ (1941: 148; February 15, 1933). For Hitler, theoretical Christians have forfeited their right to call themselves true Christians or true Germans, which is why they are false servants, and having debased Christianity and thereby themselves, they have implicitly set themselves ‘against their own nation.’ To illustrate the dangers of allowing non-Christian people to play a role in the construction of the polis, Hitler offers the Jews as evidence. It is important to keep in mind that Hitler does not consider Jews religious. As he claims, ‘their [the Jews’] whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community’ (1971: 232). When it comes to the formation of the polis, the Jews’ lack of religion has staggering consequences. Were they to play a role in the construction of the body politic, the political order would most certainly crumble. Such is the reason why

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Jews have never been able to construct a culture of their own: Since the Jew—for reasons which will at once become apparent—was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others. His intellect at all times developed through the cultural world surrounding him. The reverse process never took place. (1971: 301) As an intellectually inferior race that cannot be the originators or discoverers of religious Knowledge, the Jews can comprehend and assimilate the ideas of others, but they have never been able to discover or produce a Knowledge of their own. Consequently, they have never been able to produce an enduring and legitimate culture, which can only come into being were it based on true Knowledge. This is the case, because dogmatic Knowledge, which is religious by nature, is the necessary foundation for constructing a legitimate and enduring culture and polis, and since the Jews, according to Hitler, are not and cannot be religious, they have never constructed an enduring and legitimate culture (‘The reverse process never took place’).43 In short, Jews are necessarily a diasporic people because they do not possess the requisite religious sensibility to build a God-based (and therefore legitimate and enduring) body politic. Understanding the primacy of religion in Hitler’s conception of the legitimate political order poses a substantive challenge to those scholars who claim that Hitler merely exploited religion for political reasons. For instance, a scholar such as Bernauer, I argue, mischaracterizes Hitler’s totalitarian agenda by focusing on ‘fascism’s discourse of political religiosity’ (2004: 81). Suggesting that fascism’s religiosity is primarily political (‘political religiosity’) fails to take into account the vital and primary role religion played in the formation of the political. If the objective is, as Foucault claims, to understand the conditions of knowledge that gave birth to the fascist relation within individuals and with others, then to analyze and interpret Hitler’s political agenda in terms of a ‘political religiosity’ would be a misrepresentation of the order of knowledge in which the fascist sensibility and mentality came into being. For Hitler, the very phrase ‘political religiosity’ would disqualify religiosity as religious and would render the political illegitimate. In other words, if we want to understand the fascist relation as Hitler conceives it, then we must start by understanding his conception of a religious-based or faith-based politics rather than a ‘political religiosity.’ For Foucault, Christianity has cultivated this idea that religious Knowledge precedes and supersedes political ‘knowledge’ and has thus set the stage

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for fascism. The basis for this fascist technology of self first came into being ‘starting in the sixteenth century,’ which is, as Foucault argues, not ‘the beginning of de-Christianization, but rather, as a number of historians have shown, [. . .] a phase of in-depth Christianization.’44 Indeed, Foucault specifically claims that ‘modern states begin to take shape while Christian structures tighten their grip on individual existence’ (2003: 177). What made Foucault reject the traditional secularization hypothesis and thus conclude that Christianity had become a more instead of a less dominant force of political control in the West was his conviction that Christianity evolved sophisticated methods for structuring and thereby taking possession of a person’s inner life. To illustrate Christianity’s newly developed approach to controlling everyday citizens, Foucault focuses on the shift from the fi fteenth and sixteenth century obsession with witchcraft to the seventeenth and eighteenth century obsession with possession. This shift reflects a radical internalization of Christianity, for while witchcraft was defined in terms of a person’s conscious, rational choice to reject God and to accept the devil, which means that the perpetrator could be legally punished, possession is an internal affair that is beyond a person’s control, which means that the victim could not be held legally accountable: ‘In possession, however, rather than a pact sealed by an action, there is an invasion; the devil’s insidious and invincible penetration of the body’ (2003: 208). From this point on, Christianity evolves a subtle and insidious ‘technique for the government of souls’ (2003: 177), which entails ‘a slow penetration of the body’ (2003: 209), resulting not in a body transported into the realm of the transcendent, but rather ‘a body penetrated in depth’ (2003: 211). Given the logic of Foucault’s work, it is Christianity’s insidious technique of penetrating bodies that makes way for the ‘fascism in us all’ of the twentieth century, ‘the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (1983: xiii). We are now ready to clarify precisely how Hitler’s religious conception of the political entails the ‘fascism in us all.’ Prior to the Protestant Reformation, truth obligations were imposed on Christian subjects by the culture’s religious institutions of power, but during the Reformation and Enlightenment, there was a palpable shift of epistemic authority from the unified Church to the individual conscience. It was at this point that everyday Christian subjects were starting to be interpolated (‘in-depth Christianization’), at the level of desire, with a model of knowledge that subordinates political ‘reality’ to religious Reality. By the nineteenth century, in-depth Christianization had been linked with the nation-state, thus giving birth to, not the secular

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imagined nation-state, as Benedict Anderson would have us believe in his book Imagined Communities, but the sacred imagined nation-state. What distinguishes the sacred imagined nation-state from the sacral monarchy is the locus of authority. The African American writer, Richard Wright, published in 1953 a novel (The Outsider) that brilliantly pictures the way in-depth Christianization functions within the mind of everyday citizens within the twentieth-century body politic. Like many prominent twentieth-century intellectuals, the main character, Cross Damon, subscribes to the view that ‘Modern consciousness is Godlessness.’ Ironically, modern Godlessness has not led to the death of religion, but to its mass proliferation. As Cross says to the Marxist intellectual, Mr. Blimin: since religion is dead, religion is everywhere . . . Religion was once an affair of the church; it is now in the streets in each man’s heart. Once there were priests; now every man’s a priest. Religion’s a compulsion, and a compulsion seems to spring from something total in us, catching up in its mighty grip all the other forces of life—sex, intellect, will, physical strength, and carrying them forward.45 Wright would certainly acknowledge that Western intellectuals have become secularized, but he would qualify this claim by arguing that everyday citizens have become even more compulsively and fanatically religious, which has led to a more religious body politic. But what is distinctive about the role of religion in the twentieth century is that citizens do not have to be told what to do or how to believe; through an in-depth Christianization that has been linked with the nation-state, citizens naturally and willingly subordinate their secular selves to the religious dictates of the nation-state, even when doing so ultimately destroys them. The development of in-depth Christianization in relation to the nationstate was two-fold. First, there was a positing of a Divine Ideal, whether that would be a transcendent Law or a Godly mandate. This Ideal was, in the best of all possible worlds, the basis and foundation for the political. Indeed, it was used to determine which nation-states were legitimate, so a writer such as Rudyard Kipling could justify the colonization of inferior nations because they were composed of ‘lesser breeds without the Law.’ Second, citizens of the nation-state would be right with God and the State only insofar as they had subordinated their ephemeral, secular, and personal desires to the Eternal Law of the Divine. This is what Foucault means when he claims that Christianity presupposes ‘a certain renunciation of the self’ so that a person can ‘gain access to another

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level of reality.’ When citizens of Hitler’s Germany renounce their own desires and submit to the Nazi Party, they may know that they are losing themselves, but they also believe that they are gaining the Divine, which is the basis and foundation for Hitler’s Christian nation. Once this order of knowledge has been established, there is no need to coerce individuals into behaving as subjects of the Nazis’ Christian nation; rather, the citizens, having undergone the experience of ‘in-depth Christianization,’ would intuitively know how to identify anti-Christian adversaries, who reject God and His Truths out of willful ignorance or a moral failing. Therefore, Hitler’s Christian subjects would not have to be commanded to demonize, denounce, or dehumanize non-Christian or anti-Christian subjects; his subjects would engage in such marginalizing practices as a matter of logical course, and doing so would be a marker of their faith in first God and then Nation. According to Foucault, both the Christian Truths and the religious technology of self that Hitler and the Nazis deploy are arbitrarily constructed systems that enable fascism to come into being as well as to flourish. Hitler’s Christian mandates are not neutral and objective representations of a neutral and objective God. They are human-constructed concepts calculated to secure and consolidate the ruling Party’s power, so when everyday citizens submit to the dictates of fascists, they do so because they ‘love power.’ The citizens, like Hitler, may not be aware that power is the governing principle of their behavior, but for Foucault, their ignorance is precisely what makes the oppressive political systems so effective, dangerous, and destructive. While Foucault considers the specific religious Truths that lay the foundation for the fascist nation-state to be dangerous and destructive, what concerns him most is the Christian technology of self that has enabled the fascist political regime to come into existence and to flourish. By positing an hierarchical model of knowledge and by subordinating the ephemeral to the Eternal, Christianity has set into motion a political system that makes citizens ‘desire the very thing that dominates and exploits’ them. Put more concretely, since citizens’ secular desires are configured as untrustworthy, irrelevant, and, at times, unpatriotic, they must renounce them in the name of a higher divine Reality, which the sacred imagined nation incarnates. As soon as citizens internalize this model, the religious nation-state can then do with its citizens what it will, and the citizens will consider their sufferings, losses, and even death an Ultimate Gain, because they have, in giving their lives for their nation, ultimately given their lives to God and His Eternal Truths.

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Conclusion Let me be absolutely clear about my objectives in this essay. I am not trying to say that Hitler was a Christian. What Hitler personally and privately believed, I cannot say. But it is indisputable that he consistently referred to himself and the Nazi Party as Christian, and if we use Foucault’s method of examining the conditions that gave birth to a particular form of knowledge/power that inhabited the minds and bodies of everyday citizens of Nazi Germany, we would have to conclude that a distinctly Christian technology of self was central. Indeed, Foucault specifically claims in his ‘Society Must be Defended’ Lectures that the ‘old religious-type anti-Semitism’ played a crucial role in the formation of ‘the nineteenth century’ nation-state.46 This nineteenth-century religious anti-Semitism set the stage for Hitler’s political project in Nazi Germany, for as Carroll notes in his massive study of Christian anti-Semitism, polls indicate that 95 percent of German citizens considered themselves church-affiliated Christians in 1940 (2001: 28). Therefore, Hitler’s speeches and writings are important documents not so much for understanding Hitler’s inner life or his Christian faith, but for comprehending the technology of self that enabled fascism to flourish in the hearts and minds of many everyday citizens of Nazi Germany. Moreover, if we use Foucault’s model of in-depth Christianization, we would have to conclude not that Hitler exploited religion, and specifically Christianity, to achieve his political objectives. Rather, we would have to conclude that Christianity produced the technology of self that made Hitler, the Nazis, and fascism a living nightmare from which we are still trying to awake.

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I would like to thank the University of Minnesota for the financial support that made some of the research for this project possible. I would also like to thank James Bernauer for helping me to clarify some of my ideas. Carrette, Jeremy (2004), ‘Beyond Theology and Sexuality: Foucault, the Self and the Que(e)rying of Monotheistic Truth,’ Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. Aldershot: Ashgate, 227. Chow, Rey (2005), ‘The Fascist Longings in Our Minds,’ Linked Histories: Postcolonial Studies in a Global World, Wendy Faith and Pamela McCallum, eds. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 24. Bernauer, James (2004), ‘Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,’ Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. Aldershot: Ashgate, 81.

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See ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: The New Press, 111–119. Foucault, Michel (1983), ‘Preface,’ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xiii. Pecora, Vincent (2006), Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 28. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1980), The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 130. See James Thrower (2000), Western Atheism: A Short History. Amherst: Prometheus Books; David Berman (1990), A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell. London and New York: Routledge; Michael J. Buckley, S. J. (1987), At The Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press; and Thedore Ziolkowski (2007), Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. See Erich Fromm (1941), Escape from Freedom. New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rhinehart, Richard Wright (1995), White Man, Listen! San Francisco: HarperPerennial, and Steve Bruce (2002), God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. See Benedict Anderson (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 35. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1966), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 131. In her excellent book, Nietzsche, God, and the Jews, (1994) Albany: SUNY Press, Weaver Santaniello argues that Nietzsche shifted his focus to politics in 1887 (128), but I focus on 1886, which is when Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil. For other studies of Nietzsche’s politics, see Tracy B. Strong’s Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1975) Berkeley: University of California Press and Daniel W. Conway’s Nietzsche and the Political (1997) London and New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989), Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 48. For an extensive analysis of this sentence, see my essay, ‘Killing God, Liberating the “Subject”: Nietzsche and post-God Freedom,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 60(4) October 1999, 737–754. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989), The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 168. Arendt, Hannah (1976), The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, xi. Twain, Mark (2000), ‘Concerning the Jews,’ The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, Charles Neider, ed. New York: De Capo Press, 243. Twain, Mark (1963), ‘Reflections on Religion,’ Hudson Review 3: 338. Twain, Mark (2000), ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness,’ in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, 295. See N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 49–80.

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Forster, E. M. (2000), A Room with a View. New York: Penguin Books, 183. Forster, E. M. (1993), Maurice. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 13–15, 237. Forster refers to the ‘God State’ in a letter dated April 13, 1918. The letter is unpublished and housed at the King’s College Library at Cambridge. I would like to thank The Society of Authors as agent for the Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge for giving me permission to publish this material. For a superb analysis of Forster’s critique of religion and the God-concept, see Donald Watt’s essay, ‘E.M. Forster’s Quarrel with the God-State.’ Philological Quarterly, Fall 1981, 60(4): 523–537. Forster, E. M. (1984), A Passage to India. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 166, 228. Forster, E. M. (1977), ‘What I Believe,’ Two Cheers for Democracy. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 67. Foucault, Michel (1977), ‘The Father’s “No,” ’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 86. See Michel Foucault (1994), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 344–387. For an excellent analysis of Enlightenment rationalists’ reliance upon a theological conception of knowledge and their inability to ‘de-divinize’ language and the world, see Richard Rorty (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–69. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1999), ‘The Humanism of Existentialism,’ Jean-Paul Sartre: Essays in Existentialism. Secaucus: Carol Publishing Group, 36. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990), Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 281, 283. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘Technologies of the Self,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: The New Press, 242. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rainbow, ed. New York: The New Press, 112. Foucault, Michel, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,’ in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 283. Foucault specifically claims that he is interested not so much in what the human is (this is an incoherent idea according to Foucault) but in ‘the instituted models of self-knowledge and their history.’ In other words, Foucault’s project is predicated on this question: ‘how was the subject established, at different moments and in different institutional contexts, as a possible, desirable, or even indispensable object of knowledge?’ Foucault, ‘Subjectivity and Truth,’ in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 87. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ 238. Goebbels, Joseph (1987), Michael: A Novel, trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Amok Press, 120. Hitler, Adolf (1941), My New Order, Raoul de Roussy de Sales, ed. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 144; February 1, 1933.

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Hitler, Adolf (1942), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922–August 1939, trans. and ed., Norman H. Baynes. London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 385; August 17, 1934. Hitler, Adolf (1939), Speech Delivered by Adolf Hitler Before the German Reichstag on January 30, 1939. Washington, D.C.: Gift of German Consulate General, 1939, 51. Hitler, Adolf (1945), ‘Text of Hitler’s Twelfth Annual Speech to Reich,’ New York Times, January 31, 1945, 4. Hitler, Adolf (1971), Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 459. As James Carroll observes, Hitler never left the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church never excommunicated him (2001, 28). For a more extensive analysis of Hitler’s Christian justification of violence against the Jews, see Michael Lackey, ‘Poetry as Overt Critique of Theology: A Reading of Paul Celan’s “Es war Erde in ihnen,” ’ Monatshefte: für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, 94(4) Winter 2002, 427–440. Foucault, Michel (2003), Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France: 1974–1975. New York: Picador, 177. Wright, Richard (1993), The Outsider. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 274. Foucault, Michel (2003), Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 88–89.

Chapter 8

Secular self-sacrifice: on Michel Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France James Bernauer

The richest development in Michel Foucault’s career as a teacher at the Collège de France is on display in the difference between his first lecture there on December 2, 1970 and his last course in the winter of 1984. In his inaugural lecture, he spoke of his desire for anonymity: ‘I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me.’ His last lectures are on ‘parrhesia,’ on speaking openly, on disclosing one’s personal relationship to truth, and these lectures are delivered in the context of his own interest in a care of the self. Most of us are probably more familiar with his earlier search of anonymity for it found such striking expressions: ‘I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.’ In 1964 he compared the writer to the martyr: ‘Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self.’1 Is the distance between this self-obliteration and his later care of the self to be accounted for in the transformation of an isolated writer that was effected by his years of public teaching? Or had Foucault come to discoveries that solicited an intense new relationship to himself and urged a personal communication? Had he come to realize what Alexander Nehamas claimed for him years later, namely: ‘His private project was of public significance.’?2 How might that public significance be expressed? That question I prefer to respond to at the end of this essay. While the courses were presented at the Collège de France, many of the same lectures were delivered in other countries including Canada and the United States. In addition to attending his 1979 and 1980 courses in Paris, I personally also heard Foucault lecture in New Hampshire and took an

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intense month-long course and seminar with him in the summer of 1982 at the University of Toronto. Of course, he also taught in Vermont and Berkeley. While the lectures were fundamentally the same, his auditors undoubtedly took away different emphases and felt drawn to different insights. My own approach to his courses carries an American accent, one that is indebted to my growing up during the Cold War when we, especially those of us who called New York City our home, lived from day to day with regular air raid drills that warned of possible nuclear annihilation. A consequence of that biographical fact is that, in reading his published lectures and in recalling some of the yet to be published ones, I have regularly found myself drawn more strongly to the original project of his history of sexuality series rather than what his work developed into with The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. In the introductory volume of that series, Foucault wrote of a bio-politics that had created a landscape dominated by history’s bloodiest wars. And these wars did not represent an abandonment of modern humanism in favor of some primitive right to kill. For him they were but the other side of a power that is ‘situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.’ This bio-political project of administering and optimizing life closes its circle with the production of the Bomb: ‘The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of a power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence.’3 Certainly these themes of war, racism, populations, and life versus death struggles run through Foucault’s courses and the reader often detects fragments of one or other of the six volumes that had already been announced for the never completed history of sexuality series. And here I shall draw on the courses most relevant to that earlier project: Psychiatric Power (1974), Abnormal (1975), ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (1976), Security, Territory, Population (1978), ‘The Birth of Biopolitics (1979), and On the Government of the Living (1980). In returning to that original project of the history of sexuality, I must avoid doing an injustice to Foucault by failing to acknowledge his own restlessness to move onto something new, to avoid being colonized and becoming a less effective critic. There are superficial signs of that impatience in his lectures. For example, he announces a ‘guerilla method’ to escape the ‘circus’ that his large audiences at the Collège had created: he moved the time of his classes from late afternoon to early morning in order to cut the numbers of those attending. Without any effect, from what I have heard. But more significantly, we must also recognize that he harbored doubts about what he had been doing. He decided to change the style of

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his teaching and the chronology of its concerns by doing readings of specific texts from the Greek and Hellenistic periods. He could be harsh on himself. In 1976 he wondered whether his work had become merely a ‘freemasonry of useless erudition.’ This is how he put it: Lines of research that were very closely interrelated but that never added up to a coherent body of work, that had no continuity. Fragments of research, none of which was completed, and none of which was followed through; bits and pieces of research, and at the same time it was getting very repetitive, always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same concepts.4 We must also admit that not a few of his auditors had their own doubts about where he was going and they were disappointed with elements of his teaching, for example, his rather dull treatments of American neoliberalism and German ‘Polizeiwissenschaft’ in his 1979 still untranslated course ‘The Birth of Biopolitics.’ At the same time, no set of lectures was totally deprived of those gems of provocative tales or analyses that so characterized his writing. My personal favorite moment in Foucault’s lectures came with his sparkling 1980 meditation on the power-knowledge forces in Oedipus the King during his yet unpublished course ‘On the Government of the Living.’ That course also provided the most humorous moment for me, when Foucault introduced the writings of the fourth century monk John Cassian and the lecture hall soon fi lled with bewilderment and the murmur of a common question, ‘Cassian, qui est?’ It was particularly amusing to me because, as a Jesuit seminarian, I had to suffer reading Cassian’s conferences and I found it astonishing that the avant-garde Foucault was echoing the interest of my pious novice master. Among the many lectures are also those jewels of discovery in which Foucault so clearly took particular satisfaction. To cite but one example, and this from his 1974 course ‘Psychiatric Power.’ He says that in a sense this nineteenth century interview with a female patient is the ‘most marvelous description of asylum existence to be found’ and shows her renunciation of the self that the doctor’s biographical questions are trying to create for her. A brief excerpt: (Doctor) I do not know your name; would you like to tell me? (Patient) The person of myself does not have a name . . . (Doctor) I would however really like to know what to call you, or rather what your name was formerly . . .

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(Patient) The person of myself has lost her name, she gave it on entering Salpêtrière. (Doctor) How old are you? (Patient) The person of myself has no age . . . (Doctor) What do you think of the ladies with you here in this ward? (Patient) The person of myself thinks they have lost their reason.5 It is not difficult to appreciate why he was so pleased with this ‘person of myself.’ His earliest work had repudiated the ‘homo psychologicus’ crafted by modern psychiatry. Later he was to erase the human identity of the being who lives, speaks and labors and, in doing so, move beyond humanism. Even later, he was to walk away from the self-satisfactions of the modern, enlightened person. To my mind, some of the courses indicate yet another dimension to the modern figure from which Foucault sought distance and this identity was its so-called secular face. This is the modern living being, articulate in self-knowledge, independent in historical development, and confidently post-spiritual, post-religious. In fact, following some of Foucault’s insights, we may surmise that this secular figure is itself a theological artifact despite its effort to hide the religious and spiritual forces that have brought it into being. Of course, ‘secular’ and its relationship to the religious is again a hot topic in contemporary discussion and in recent months we have seen the publication of Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age among other works. The sources of that renewed discussion are multiple but two certainly stand out (and both were influential on Foucault): first, the religious-political movements in the developing world, especially in South America and in many Islamic societies; secondly, the difficulty intellectuals have had in comprehending such modern crimes as the Holocaust which, in particular, seems to transcend customary historical categories. For example, as with many others I was looking forward to the appearance of the fi nal volume of Saul Friedländer’s magisterial history of the Holocaust which was published last year. His conclusion did not surprise but his abandonment of the typical academic qualifications and hesitations to his principal claim did startle me. His decades long investigation of Nazi Germany’s destruction of the Jews concludes with this: ‘There remains but one plausible interpretation: Modern society does remain open to—possibly in need of—the ongoing presence of religious or pseudoreligious incentives within a system otherwise dominated by thoroughly different dynamics.’6 Foucault’s own interpretation of the Nazi era is along the same lines. In the 1976 course he asserted that Nazi

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racism functions in the religious ‘prophetic discourse from which the theme of race struggle once emerged. Nazism was thus able to reuse a whole popular, almost medieval, mythology that allowed State racism to function within an ideologico-mythical landscape’.7 Some would claim that Foucault’s interest in spirituality and religion was a consequence of his journalistic involvement in the Iranian Revolution of 1978 but that would be to ignore numerous earlier signs of such interest in his writings.8 Certainly, Foucault’s openness to the religious dynamics of the Islamic world was not only due to his scholarship but also to his personal experiences. Let us recall that Foucault spent a year (1958–1959) in Poland where he would have seen the Catholic Church’s strong opposition to the Communist government. Of course, Pope John Paul II, who became Pope a month before Foucault’s first trip to Iran, brought that resistance to an extraordinary efficacy as was shown in the massive outpouring of popular support for him during his trip to Poland in the Spring of 1979. That visit was the catalyst for the Solidarity movement, of which Foucault became a strong public advocate, and which arguably was one of the events that announced the coming collapse of Communism. However, possibly even more important for understanding Foucault’s sense of the religious dynamic were his visits to Brazil in the early and mid nineteen-seventies while the military dictatorship was in control. He would have been very alert to the theologies of liberation that had come to prominence in South America at that time even if suspicious of any Marxist dimensions to them. He would have witnessed the Catholic Church’s militant advocacy of human rights and the type of power it was capable of exercising. To give one example: in 1975 a prominent Jewish journalist, Vladimir Herzog, was killed while in police custody, another event in a series that had intimidated the Jewish community there. The Archbishop of São Paulo decided to organize an inter-denominational memorial service for the murdered journalist and this is Foucault’s impression of the event: (The service) drew thousands and thousands of people into the church, on to the square and so on, and the cardinal in red robes presided over the ceremony, and he came forward at the end of the ceremony, in front of the faithful, and he greeted them shouting: ‘Shalom, shalom.’ And there was all around the square armed police and there were plain clothes policemen in the church. The police pulled back; there was nothing the police could do against that. I have to say, that had a grandeur of strength, there was a gigantic historical weight there.9

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It was the spiritual-political power of that historical weight that prepared him for Iran and generated some of his hope for its revolution.10 Apart from those important experiences, his project was a ‘history of the present,’ and this necessarily engaged him in a religious-spiritual analysis because the forms of knowledge, power and subjectivity which he saw as animating our culture were often constructed, he claimed, in decisive ways in argument or alliance with religious practices and concerns. This conviction mandated Foucault’s scrutiny of religious writers and customs. In a 1975 lecture he mentioned the insight which would greatly shape his studies of the next decade: What ‘took place starting in the sixteenth century, that is to say, in a period that is not characterized by the beginning of de-Christianization, but rather, as a number of historians have shown, by a phase of in-depth Christianization.’11 Foucault had rejected what he later called the ‘blackmail of the Enlightenment,’ that either-or acceptance of it as some new rationality, liberated from the superstitions of a religious past.12 As a result, his history of the present came to ignore the customary epochal divisions and concluded that, between different historical eras, the ‘topography of the parting of the waters is hard to pin down.’13 In the case of the early modern period, he refused the topography of a religious era yielding to a secular age. On the one hand, this rejection could involve the claim that the so-called religious culture of the Middle Ages was more legend than reality and this might carry great import for modern human self-understanding because it would raise this question: Do we ‘define ourselves as essentially secular because we define our forebears as essentially religious?’14 One might argue that, in fact, it was the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism which made the modern European era a specifically religious age. This is the position of Jean Delumeau, whose book on the topic Foucault cites in the published version of his 1975 lectures at the Collège de France.15 Foucault’s view contains an even more interesting thesis, namely, early modernity was not a tale of growing religious disbelief but, rather, saw the emergence of an energy which drove both the global missionary activities of European Christianity as well as a vast religious colonization of interior life. This colonization is what Michel Foucault refers to in 1975 as an ‘in-depth Christianization’ or a ‘new Christianization’; the effect of this missionary effort was the ‘vast interiorization’ of a Christian experience which possessed a double center: the practice of confession and the struggle of the flesh with the spirit and the body.16 He studied these practices in a variety of contexts but my concern is with how they operated in the political domain because it was there that Foucault saw the demonic force of certain seemingly benign

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religious practices. He claims that the Christian pastorate introduced a ‘strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity’ that seem to have nothing to do with the Greek notion of the city. Foucault says: ‘Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine these two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game—in what we call the modern states.’17 His 1975 course at the Collège investigated how the general domain of abnormality was opened up for a psychiatric understanding. Foucault attributed responsibility for this development to the articulation of sexuality as a dimension within all abnormality and, most importantly, on the necessity of each individual to avow a sexual identity. His desire to analyze the conditions accounting for the appearance of this obligatory avowal of sexuality prompted him to study the Christian practice of confession. His initial examination concentrated on its practice after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), and the expansion of confession to ever-larger numbers of relationships in the period after the Reformation.18 A special concern took shape that oriented Foucault’s approach to the study of Christianity. He focused on the problematic of governance that appeared in the sixteenth century and that showed itself in the dissemination of discourses on personal conduct, on the art of directing souls, and on the manner of educating children. This intensified Foucault’s exploration of the crisis of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which provoked in that period an anxiety over the matter of governance by putting in question ‘how one wishes to be spiritually directed here on earth for one’s salvation.’19 The exploration of the knowledge-power relations engaged in governance directed him to a treatment of the Christian pastorate, and thus to a confrontation with the ethical formation critical to its way of obtaining knowledge and exercising power. The first major statement of the results of his research in premodern Christian experience came with his course ‘On the Governance of the Living,’ which he presented in 1980. He analyzed a Christian practice that embraced forms of power, knowledge, and relation to self very different from pre-Christian practices. It is the continuing vitality of variations on each of these that justifies Foucault’s claim of a ‘christianisation-in-depth’ throughout the modern period. Most significant were practices of confession and penance. Jean Delumeau has claimed: ‘The history of modern western reason passes by way of the confession.’20 For Foucault, however, it was an instrument in the development of a new form of individualizing power, that of the pastorate, which had its roots in the Hebraic image of God and his deputed King as shepherds. This power is productive, not repressive. Exercising authority over a

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flock of dispersed individuals rather than a land, the shepherd has the duty to guide his charges to salvation by continuously watching over them and by a permanent concern with their well-being as individuals. Christianity intensifies this concern by having pastors assume a responsibility for all the good and evil done by those to whom they are accountable and whose actions reflect upon their quality as shepherds.21 Paramount in the exercise of this pastoral power was the virtue of obedience in the subject, a virtue which all too often developed into an end in itself. Such obedience is put forward as the antidote to the human condition after Adam’s Fall. With the Fall, the original subordination which human nature accorded to soul and will was lost, and the human being became a figure of revolt not only against God but also against him or herself. This situation was graphically illustrated in the lawlessness of sexual yearnings. Seditious sexuality signals the need for a struggle with one’s self, and permanent obedience is essential to this struggle. The obedience that is intrinsic to the exercise and responsibilities of pastoral power involves specific forms of knowledge and subjectivity. In order to fulfill the responsibility of directing souls to their salvation, the pastor must understand the truth, not just the general truths of faith but the specific truths of each person’s soul. For Foucault, Christianity is unique in the major truth obligations that it imposes upon its followers. In addition to accepting moral and dogmatic truths, they must also become excavators of their own personal truth: ‘Everyone in Christianity has the duty to explore who he is, what is happening within himself, the faults he may have committed, the temptations to which he is exposed.’22 Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this obligation to discover and manifest one’s truth took place in those liturgical ceremonies in which the early Christians would avow their state as sinners, and then take on the status of public penitents.23 Less dramatic but more enduring was the search for truth served by those practices of examination of conscience and confession that Christianity first developed in monastic life. The Christian campaign for self-knowledge was not developed directly in the interest of controlling sexual conduct, but rather for the sake of a deepened awareness of one’s interior life. The endless task of self-scrutiny is accompanied by regular confessions to another, for verbalization of thoughts is another level of sorting out the good thoughts from those that are evil, namely, those that seek to hide from the light of public expression. Through its examination of conscience and confession, Christianity fashions a technology of the self that enabled people to transform themselves. The principal product of this technology was a unique form of subjectivity.24

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The purpose of the Christian hermeneutic of the self is to foster renunciation of the self who has been objectified. The continual mortification entailed by a permanent hermeneutic and renunciation of the self makes of that symbolic death an everyday event. All truth about the self is tied to the sacrifice of that same self, and the Christian experience of subjectivity declares itself most clearly in the sounds of a rupture with oneself, of an admission that ‘I am not who I am.’25 This capacity for self-renunciation was built from the ascetic power with regard to oneself that was generated by a practice of obedience, and from the skepticism with respect to one’s knowledge of oneself that was created by hermeneutical self-analysis. Foucault later came to warn of the dangers of that obedience and its ubiquity did orient Foucault to a frequent focus on the ‘pathology’ of Christian practices.26 And well he should have for this ensemble of unconditional obedience, uninterrupted, and exhaustive confession migrated into the cultures of the two great totalitarian systems of the past century.There are numerous examples of Foucault’s tracing of those elements operating within Christianisation in depth. For example, in his 1975 course, Abnormal, he speaks of several human monsters that became significant in modern culture such as hermaphrodites and people who had one head and two bodies or one body and two heads. This is what he has to say of them: It is the image of the kingdom and also of Christianity divided into two religious communities. There are some very interesting discussions in which there is a close connection between the religious and medical problematics. In particular, there is the case of two Siamese twin sisters who were baptized, or rather who were brought to the baptismal font. One was baptized and then the second died before she could be baptized. A big discussion takes place, and the Catholic priest who performed the baptism says: There is no difficulty. If the other is dead, it is because she would have become Protestant.27 In that same set of lectures, Foucault betrays the difficulty of writing the text he imagined as the next in the sexuality series after the introductory volume (Body and Flesh). He could not disentangle the ‘political anatomy of the body,’ with its investment in the useful body of aptitudes, from the ‘moral physiology of the flesh,’ which exhibited Christianity’s investment at the ‘level of desire and decency.’28 Our modern cultures are lethal in part as a consequence of the intermingling of the religious and the political and the camouflage of that

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reality by the definition of ourselves as secular beings. We have been measured, to steal a phrase from Adorno and Horkheimer, in the ‘gaze of a coffin maker.’29 Foucault observed in 1977: ‘The nonanalysis of fascism is one of the most important political facts of the last thirty years.’30 Why should he have felt that to be the case? It may be the theme which actually ties together the two foci of his courses: the interest in the social-political on the one hand, and the art of the individual on the other. Far more significantly though, doesn’t its nonanalysis hide from us the political religions into which we have been baptized and through which we may sacrifice our lives? Foucault made a major contribution to understanding the dynamics of fascism in suggesting how they cultivated a religious sensibility. Frequently it was described as a type of ‘religion of nature.’ There was a worship of life itself that claimed to overcome the old dualism of body and spirit. This sanctification of biological life was united to an adoration of national life.31 This is, of course, closely related to Foucault’s treatment of bio-politics as well as Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the eclipse of the political space by society. 32 Even with this religion of nature, Fascism, in both its German and Italian forms, helped persuade its audiences through a utilization of categories from traditional Christian discourses. Political life was sacralized as sacral language was politicized.33 Foucault’s keen sensitivity to fascism is certainly overdetermined. In addition to growing up when he did, I have wondered whether he appreciated the place of the French Action Francaise movement in the development of fascism. In his 1978 course, ‘Security, Territory, Population,’ Foucault indicted our culture: Of all civilizations, the Christian West has undoubtedly been, at the same time, the most creative, the most conquering, the most arrogant, and doubtless the most bloody. At any rate, it has been one of the civilizations that has deployed the greatest violence. But, at the same time, and this is the paradox I would like to stress, over millennia Western man has learned to see himself as a sheep in a flock, something that assuredly no Greek would have been prepared to accept. The religious power Christianity bequeathed to modern institutions carried with it the ‘moral and religious paradox of the shepherd, or what could be called the paradox of the shepherd: the sacrifice of one for all, and the sacrifice of all for one, which will be at the absolute heart of the Christian

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problematic of the pastorate.’34 From out of this tangled set of practices would come sexuality as the seismograph of human identity and masturbation the critical focus of self-relation.35 National Socialism’s pseudo-religious culture was a more dangerous eruption from that organization of life. As Foucault wrote, with it we ‘have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State and an absolutely suicidal State.’36 Clearly, it was not a secular state. By this point, it may seem as though Foucault’s courses have sketched an iron cage for life but that impression would be a disservice to his work. Running through several of the courses is the theme of resistance to which the earlier mention of the psychiatric patient’s ‘person of myself’ testified. There are many more examples. In the course Abnormal, Foucault claims that the body of evil spirits becomes a ‘fortress body’ or a ‘citadel body,’ a resisting ‘convulsive flesh.’ It is the body that opposes silence or the scream to the rule of complete discourse, the body that counters the rule of obedient direction with intense shocks of involuntary revolt or little betrayals of secret connivance. The convulsive flesh is at once the ultimate effect and the point of reversal of Christianization organized in the sixteenth century. The convulsive flesh is the resistance effect of Christianization at the level of individual bodies.37 In the 1978 course, Foucault emphasizes how alternative religious themes and practices are deployed as counter-conducts in internal opposition to pastoral power. In Foucault’s reading, certain types of asceticism as well as religious communities challenge the regular operation of the pastorate. And then there is mysticism which Foucault saw as one of the very sources for the development of a critical attitude. In contrast to pastoral power’s confessional practice, mysticism has a ‘completely different game of visibility. The soul is not offered to the other for examination, through a system of confessions. In mysticism the soul sees itself. It sees itself in God and it sees God in itself.’38 At the beginning of this essay, I asked how Foucault’s private project might be considered of public significance. In responding, let me draw a contrast. We have probably all read the opening lines of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus but bear with me as I repeat them here: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering

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the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games.39 I wish to put forward an hypothesis, namely, that Foucault left us with a contrasting interrogation and it could be phrased this way: There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is whether we should sacrifice our lives. Judging how a culture of totalized meaning and normalization has defined the worth of our living and dying and how we might critically resist that definition is the fundamental question of philosophy. Has our so-called secular age fabricated us as ghostly, given us an ‘excarnation,’ to use Charles Taylor’s term? Foucault had a particularly keen insight into how our lives were endangered, not by existential meaninglessness, but rather by totalized meaningfulness, whether that be articulated in the forms of religious dogmatism, totalitarian theories or a vaunted secular enlightenment. On the one hand, this danger is the robbing of the contingencies from our lives and how we are led to understand them; on the other hand, this danger is the summons directed to us to political and personal suicide, whether that invitation be spoken in the accents of nuclear strategy, religious martyrdom or humanistic selfsacrifice. Wasn’t his distinctive desire to ‘get free of oneself’ (The Use of Pleasure, 8), the need to escape from an existence defined in terms of a programmed struggle between life and death, an existence that can be persuaded to find ultimate significance in mutual nuclear annihilation, religious martyrdom, heroic self-destruction.?40 Was it that realization which led Foucault to formulate an ‘aesthetics of existence’ that ratified the beauty we could create from out of our lives? Was it that insight which left him eager for a renewed culture of ‘caring for the self’? Didn’t he come to his appreciation of the spiritual knowledge in Hellenistic culture as a direct consequence of working through the religious thematic that has been our concern here? And finally: perhaps the major reason why his personal project has become politically significant is that he came to see that the source of his desire for anonymity, which had so attracted him in his inaugural lecture at the Collège, was not his personal resolve but rather the same cultural matrix that had imposed facelessness—if not worse—on those millions of human beings who had been reduced in our age to anonymous masses.

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Notes 1

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Foucault, Michel (1976), The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper, 17; Michel Foucault (1977), ‘What is an Author?’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald Bouchard, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 117. Nehamas, Alexander (1998), The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 180. Foucault, Michel (1978), The History of Sexuality Vol. I. New York: Pantheon, 137. Foucault, Michel (2003), ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 . New York: Picador, 3, 2, 4. Foucault, Michel (2006), Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 160. Friedländer, Saul (2007), Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination. New York: HarperCollins, 657. Foucault, Michel (2003), ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collége de France 1975–1976, 82. Although he never elaborated the analogy, negative theology was one of the few styles with which he compared his thought. See my discussion of this point in my (1990) Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought. Amherst: Humanity Books, 178–179. Foucault, Michel (1999), ‘On Religion,’ Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture, Jeremy Carrette, ed. New York: Routledge, 107. This account of his personal experience is taken from an earlier essay by me: (2006) ‘An Uncritical Foucault? Foucault and the Iranian Revolution’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, 6: 784–785. Foucault, Michel (2003), Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975. New York: Picador, 177. Foucault, Michel (1984), ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: Pantheon, 40–43. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘The Battle for Chastity,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 I: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: New Press, 196. I take this formulation of the question from a recent Boston lecture by Pierre Manent, ‘The Charms and Limits of Secularization,’ Fortin Lecture, October 19, 2007. Foucault, Michel (2003), Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, 196, note 18. The English translation of Delumeau’s work was published as (1977) Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation. London: Burns and Oates. Foucault, Michel (2003), Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, 177, 193, 188–189. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘ “Omnes et Singulatim,” Toward a Critique of Political Reason,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, 3: Power, 311. Foucault, Michel (1978), The History of Sexuality Vol. I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 61. Foucault, Michel (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 89.

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Delumeau, Jean (1990), L’aveu et le pardon: Les difficultés de la confession XIII–XVIII siècle. Paris: Fayard, 9. Foucault, ‘ “Omnes et Singulatim”: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, 3: Power, 307–312. Lectures from the March 19 and 26, 1980 course at the Collège de France. Foucault, ‘Sexuality and Solitude,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 178. Foucault, Michel, Lectures of March 5 and 12, 1980 at the Collège de France; Lecture of June 15, 1982 from Foucault’s Course at the University of Toronto ‘The Discourse of Self-Disclosure.’ Foucault, ‘Sexuality and Solitude,’ The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, 178. See ‘Omnes et Singulatim,’ p. 311; the Toronto course, ‘The Discourse of SelfDisclosure,’ June 15, 1982; Michel Foucault (1985), The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon, 63, 70. Hölzl, Michael (2003), ‘Kritik und Gegenentwurf der Theologie. Michel Foucault in der Tradition kritischer Theorie,’ Gottes und des Menchen Tod? Die Theologie vor der Herausforderung Michel Foucaults. Mainx: Matthias-GrünewaldVerlag, 146. Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, 66. Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, 193. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 235. Cited in Mark Neocleous (1997), Fascism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 87. Foucault, Michel (1980), ‘Powers and Strategies,’ an interview with the editorial collective of Les révoltes logiques. Cited in Power/Knowledge, Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon, 139. Pois, Robert (1986), National Socialism and the Religion of Nature. London: Croom Helm, 91. See Eyal Chowers (2004), The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 184–185, 196. See Emilio Gentile (1996), The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Kenneth Burke (1964), ‘The Rhetoric of Hitler’s “Battle,” ’ Terms for Order. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 95–119; Uriel Tal (1981), ‘On Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust,’ Y. Bauer (1981), ed. The Holocaust as Historical Experience. New York: Holmes and Meier, 43–74; Friedrich Heer (1998), Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiosität. Vienna: Amalthea; and Philippe Burrin (1997), ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,’ History and Memory 9, 1–2: 321–349. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, 130, 129. See Abnormal, 231–262. Thomas Laqueur (2004) concludes his study of masturbation with his astonishment at the importance it has played in culture: ‘It remains strange and disturbing that in our century the young Wittgenstein on the eastern front of the Great War was in moral agony because, amidst the death and carnage, he masturbated,’ Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone Books, 420.

160 36

37 38

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Foucault, Michel (2003), ‘Society Must Be Defended’ Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador, 260. Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, 212, 213. Security, Territory, Population, 212. This religious counter-conduct foreshadows later opposition to the State, 355–358. Camus, Albert (1955), The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage Books, 3. It may be a particularly American genius to unify all of these forms of ultimate significance. That astute observer of the American experience, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote this in the nineteenth century: ‘The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States. The longer I stayed in the country, the more conscious I became of the important political consequences resulting from this moral situation.’ Depending upon where a contemporary visitor might arrive, he or she could receive the very same impression as did de Tocqueville and be made anxious by it. What makes our present situation particularly dangerous is that this religious atmosphere combines with two other forces. A legacy of the United States’ history of the frontier, especially its American-Indian war, is that violence is not only an instrument of destruction but also a vehicle for rebirth. In addition, the era of nuclear weapons adds an alarming new element to this myth, the confession of an apocalyptic creed in which good does definitively triumph over evil. There are indications that this fundamentalist vision has entered into American military planning as well as its popular culture. Here is one example of the second. ‘Pantex’ is the name of a Department of Energy plant which is located outside of Amarillo, Texas. It is the site where all of America’s nuclear weapons are assembled or disassembled. Some years ago a writer explored the sentiments of those who lived and worked in that area and she found that in the preaching at the local churches there was a particularly strong emphasis on religious apocalyptic and on the Biblical notion of the Rapture. This is the conviction that, at the final divine destruction of evil, religious believers will be rescued from becoming victims of that ruination. A. G. Mojtabai (1986), Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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—(2002), ‘Weak Thought and the Reduction of Violence: A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo by Santiago Zabala,’ trans. Y. Mascetti. Common Knowledge, 8(3): 452–463. —(2007), ‘Ontology of Actuality,’ Contemporary Italian Philosophy, S. Benso and B. Schroeder, eds. New York: State University of New York Press. Veyne, Paul, (1997), ‘The Final Foucault and his Ethics,’ Foucault and His Interlocutors, Arnold I. Davidson, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Bernard (2002), Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wright, Richard (1993), The Outsider. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers. —(1995), White Man, Listen! San Francisco: HarperPerennial. Zabala, Santiago (2007), ed., Weakening Philosophy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ziolkowski, Thedore (2007), Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Index

“Abnormal” (Foucault) 154, 156, 159n. 35 Adorno, Theodor 24, 32, 155 “Age of the World Picture, The” (Heidegger) 54, 59 AIDS 8 alienation 55 Allen, Barry 4 Allison, David 25 Althusser, Louis Pierre 49, 52–3 analytic philosophers 5n. 1 Anderson, Benedict 140 Angelus Novus (Klee) 15 anthropological universals 14 Anti-Christ, The (Nietzsche) 126 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze/Gauttari) 124 anti-Semitism 126 antifoundationalism 111 Arac, Jonathan 1 archaeology 113 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) 59 Arendt, Hannah 126, 155 atomic energy 7 Augustine, St. 61 Babich, Babette 3–4 Barthes, Roland 52, 65n. 56 Basch, Victor 45 “Battle over Existentialism” (Merleau-Ponty) 50, 51 Being 71, 111, 115–20 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 47, 50 Being and Time (Heidegger) 27, 31, 47, 48, 50, 71, 116 Benjamin, Walter 15 Bentham, Jeremy 79

Bergson, Henri 15, 16, 47, 51 Bernauer, James 4, 124, 130 “Beyond Theology and Sexuality” (Carrette) 124 Bible, the 126 biology 33–4 biopower 7–8, 12–13 Birth of Biopolitics, The (Foucault) 148 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault) 27–8, 32 Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (Nietzsche) 20, 31 black holes 8 Body and Flesh (Foucault) 154 Bourdieu, Pierre 50 Brunschvicg, Léon 45 Camus, Albert 156 Canguilhem, Georges 27, 31 Care of The Self, The (Foucault) 100, 147 Carrette, Jeremy 124 Carroll, James 134, 142 Cassian, John 148 Cavailles, Jean 27 Chomsky, Noam 57 Chow, Rey 124 Christianity 15, 124–5, 127–42, 151–6, see also God Clark, Maudemarie 94 Collège de France 146, 152, 157 “Concerning the Jews” (Twain) 126–7, 129 conscientia 54 constructivism 55 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty) 79, 83 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger) 117

168

Index

Corbin, Henry 37n. 7 Council of Trent 152 Cousin, Victor 45 “critical history of thought” (Foucault) 14 critical pluralism 14 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Foucault) 49, 51 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 29, 52 crypto-normativism 104 Darwin, Charles 96 Dasein 50–1, 57, 60 Davidson, Donald 76 de Certeau, Michel 21, 30 death 15, 32 death of God 71–2, 75, 126, 129, see also God death of Man 4, 42–3, 49, 53, 55, 59 deconstruction 117–18 Delbos, Victor 45 Deleuze, Gilles 23, 48, 75, 110, 124 Delumeau, Jean 151–2 Derrida, Jacques 48–9, 51–2, 54, 60, 76, 109, 116 Descartes, René 9, 34, 51, 53–4, 56, 59–60, 114 Descombes, Vincent 23, 42–3, 45, 47, 121–2n. 17 destiny-forwarding 117 desubjectification 9 Dewey, John 75–6 disciplinary power 11–13 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 9, 27, 68, 100, 102 Divine Ideal 140–1 Dreyfus, Hubert 25 Dumézil, Georges 2 Empedocles 32, 40n. 51 Engels, Friedrich 81 Enlightenment, the 113–14, 125, 129–30, 151 epistemes 59 epistemology 68–9, 74, 76, 94–5 Epstein, Helen 80 Eribon, Didier 2, 50

ethics 81 event 117, 122n. 33 “excarnation” 157 “Existentialism is a humanism” (Sartre) 50 fascism 4, 124–5, 129, 132, 139, 141–2, 155–6 “Fascist Longings in our Minds, The” (Chow) 124 Ferry, Luc 26 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 55 Forster, E. M. 128 Fraser, Nancy 104–5 Freud, Sigmund 22–3, 47, 111–12 Friedländer, Saul 149 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 20, 30, 126 genealogy 4, 10–11, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 21, 55, 90–3, 96–9, 100–6 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 70 Generation Existential (Kleinberg) 25 genetic fallacy 92–3 God 30, 57, 70, 126, 128–32, 135, 140–1, 152–3, 156, see also Christianity Greeks 15 “gridding” 27 Guattari, Pierre-Félix 48, 124 Habermas, Jürgen 13, 72, 104 Hacking, Ian 33, 39n. 26, 99, 103 Hadot, Pierre 19, 36n. 3 Hanson, Norwood Russell 27 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 7, 32, 42–50, 52, 55, 58–61 Heidegger en France ( Janicaud) 25 Heidegger, Martin 15, 20–4, 25–36, 44, 46–52, 53–4, 56–9, 63n. 23, 68, 71, 75–6, 86, 109, 115–19 hermeneutics 32, 110, 112, 118, 154 Herr, Lucien 45 Herzog, Vladimir 150 Histoire de la folie (Foucault) 51 historical consciousness 15 historical genealogy see genealogy “historical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault) 112

Index history 16–17, 56–8, 115–16 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 52 History of Madness (Foucault) 102 History of Sexuality, The 68, 100, 103, 147 Hitler, Adolf 124–5, 132–8, 140–2 Hölderlin, Johann 32, 35, 40n. 49 Holocaust, the 149 Hoy, David Couzens 3 “Human Sciences, The” 35 humanism 51, 60–1 humanitas 51 Hume, David 56, 96 Husserl, Edmund 44, 47, 48, 58 Hyppolite, Jean 43, 45–7 ideality 8–9 Idol and Distance (Marion) 22 imaginary genealogy see genealogy Imagined Communities (Anderson) 140 Islam 150 James, William 71, 75, 96–7 Janicaud, Dominique 25, 39–40n. 38 Jarczyk, Gwendoline 45–6 Jews 134–8 John Paul II, Pope 150 Kant, Immanuel 22, 24, 29–32, 35, 44–5, 52, 54, 56, 58, 69, 103–5, 113–15 Kervegan, Jean-François 45–6 Kierkegaard, Søren 45 Kipling, Rudyard 140 Klee, Paul 15 Kleinberg, Ethan 25, 39–40n. 38, 47, 63n. 23 knowledge 32–5, 69, 71–9, 120, 130, 138 Kojève, Alexandre 43, 45–9, 52–3, 60 Koopman, Colin 4 Kuhn, Thomas 59 La Pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss) 50 Labarrière, Pierre-Jean 45–6 Lackey, Michael 4 Large Hadron Collider 8 Latour, Bruno 28

169

Legros, Robert 26 Les Temps Modernes (Sartre) 49 Letter on Humanism, The (Heidegger) 50, 60 Letter on Metaphysics (Heidegger) 50 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 50, 52–3 Levinas, Emmanuel 43 liberals 83–6 Longest Journey, The (Forster) 128 Lukács, György 46, 52, 55 Lyotard, Jean-François 48, 72–3 Macey, David 1 Marion, Jean-Luc 22, 119 Marx, Karl 22–3, 36n. 1, 46, 47, 51–5, 79, 111–12 materiality 7–8 mathematics 35 mathesis 33 Maurice (Forster) 128 Meditations (Descartes) 54 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 27, 31, 43–5, 50–1, 58 metanarratives 72 metaphysics 50, 115–20 methodological nominalism 14 Meyerson, Emile 45 “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion” (Bernauer) 124 Mill, J. S. 82–5 Mill, James 79 Miller, James 1 Minson, Jefferey 22 Myth of Sisyphus (Camus) 156–7 natural history 34 Nehamas, Alexander 146 New Nietzsche, The (Allison) 25 “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (Foucault) 110 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 2, 4, 10, 19–24, 25–35, 47, 49, 53–4, 60, 68, 70–2, 74–5, 90–4, 96–7, 100, 104–5, 111–12, 126, 129–30 “non-thought” 28 Not Being God (Vattimo) 120

170

Index

Oedipus the King (Sophocles) 148 “On the Government of the Living” (Foucault) 148, 152 “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” (Nietzsche) 71 “Ontology of Actuality” (Vattimo) 119 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 24 Order of Things, The (Foucault) 32, 35, 59, 130 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt) 126 Outsider, The (Wright) 140

Renaut, Alain 26 “Report on Knowledge” (Lyotard) 73 rhizomes 48 Ricoeur, Paul 22–3, 33, 47, 109–10, 112 Rockmore, Tom 4 Roman Catholic Church 133, 150 Room with a View, A (Forster) 128 Roques, Paul 45 Rorty, Richard 2, 4, 68–70, 75–86, 95–7, 109, 119–20 Ryan, Alan 1

Parmenides 116 Passage to India, A (Forster) 128 Patterns of Discovery (Hanson) 27 Pecora, Vincent P. 125 Peirce, Charles 96–7 perspectivism 22, 24 phenomenology 44, 50 Phenomenology (Hegel) 46–8 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 45 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty) 75–6, 78 “philosophy of decline” 118–19 Plato 68–71, 79–80, 130 political religiosity 138 “Political Technology of Individuals” (Foucault) 112 postmodernism 48, 71–2 poststructuralist secularism 4 power 54, 56 pragmatism 75–6, 82, 84 problematization 90–2, 100–6 “Promise-Threat” 36 Protestant Reformation 125–6 Psychiatric Power (Foucault) 11, 148

Sartre, Jean-Paul 47–51, 129–30 Schmitt, Carl 46 science 27–35, 58, 71–2, 130 “Science and World-Picture” (Heidegger) 27 Search For A Method (Sartre) 51 secularization 125–30 Security, Territory, Population (Foucault) 155 Shapiro, Gary 21–2 signs 111–12 Sluga, Hans 25, 39n. 27 Smith, Adam 55 Smith, Barry 119 Smith, Douglas 22–3, 38n. 23 “Society Must be Defended” (Foucault) 142 Socrates 72, 75 sovereignty 11–13 structuralism 53 subjectivity 53–5, 58 subjectum 54 surveillance 80

Qu’est ce que la Métaphysique? (Heidegger) 27 Quine, W. V. 76 racism 8, 149–50 Raynaud, Alain 26–7 Rayner, Timothy 38n. 12 reading 26–7 religion 125–30, 134–42, 151–2, 157

T-Sentences (Tarski) 94 Take Care of Freedom and Truth will take Care of Itself (Rorty) 120 Tarski, Alfred 94 taxinomia 32–3 Taylor, Charles 157 temporality of existence 15–16 temporality of power 9–17 theory of alienation (Marx) 55 Tilliette, Xavier 40n. 49

Index “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (Twain) 127 Tocqueville, Alexis de 160n. 40 totalitarianism see fascism transcendental phenomenology 48 transmission 117 truth 24, 28, 33, 70–5, 78–9, 93–9, 114, 118, 120, 130–2, 141 Truth and Truthfulness (Williams) 93–4 Twain, Mark 126–9 universality 13–14, 17 Use of Pleasure, The (Foucault) 100, 147 “Useless to Revolt?” (Foucault) 14

Wahl, Jean 45 “weak thought” 115–20 Weber, Max 73, 83 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant) 113–14 Why We Are Not Nietzscheans (Ferry/ Renaut) 26 Will to Know, The (Foucault) 100 Williams, Bernard 4, 90–9, 100, 104–5, 107n. 13 Wright, Richard 140 X studies 6 Zabala, Santiago 4

Vattimo, Gianni 4, 109–12, 115–20, 120n. 1 Veyne, Paul 14, 15

171