Foucault on Freedom

F O U C A U LT O N F R E E D O M Freedom and the subject were guiding themes for Michel Foucault throughout his philosop...

Author: Johanna Oksala

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F O U C A U LT O N F R E E D O M Freedom and the subject were guiding themes for Michel Foucault throughout his philosophical career. In this clear and comprehensive analysis of his thought, Johanna Oksala identifies the different interpretations of freedom in his philosophy and examines three major divisions of it: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical. She shows convincingly that in order to appreciate Foucault’s project fully we must understand his complex relationship to phenomenology, and she discusses Foucault’s treatment of the body in relation to recent feminist work on this topic. Her sophisticated but lucid book illuminates the possibilities which Foucault’s philosophy opens up for us in thinking about freedom. j o h a n n a o k s a l a is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She has published articles on Foucault, phenomenology and feminist philosophy.

MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY General Editor Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago Advisory Board Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt University, Berlin Mark Sacks, University of Essex

Some recent titles Daniel W. Conway: Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game John P. McCormick: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism Frederick A. Olafson: Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics Gunter ¨ Zöller: Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy Warren Breckman: Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory William Blattner: Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism Charles Griswold: Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment Gary Gutting: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity Allen Wood: Kant’s Ethical Thought Karl Ameriks: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy Alfredo Ferrarin: Hegel and Aristotle Cristina Lafont: Heidegger, Language and World-Disclosure Daniel Dahlstrom: Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Michelle Grier: Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion Henry Allison: Kant’s Theory of Taste Allen Speight: Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency J. M. Bernstein: Adorno Will Dudley: Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy Taylor Carman: Heidegger’s Analytic Douglas Moggach: The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer Ru¨ diger Bubner: The Innovations of Idealism Jon Stewart: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered Nicholas Wolterstorff: Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology Michael Quante: Hegel’s Concept of Action Wolfgang Detel: Foucault and Classical Antiquity

F O U C A U LT O N F R E E D O M

JOHANNA OKSALA University of Helsinki

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521847797 C Johanna Oksala 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2005 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn-13 978-0-521-84779-7 hardback isbn-10 0-521-84779-6 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

page vii

Acknowledgements

viii

List of abbreviations Introduction

1 pa rt i l a n g ua g e

1

Philosophical laughter An archaeology of order The three epistemes The birth and death of man The being of language

17 19 23 30 34

2

The Foucaultian failure of phenomenology The history of science The analytic of finitude

40 41 53

3

The anonymity of language A view from nowhere The subject of change The freedom of language

70 71 78 81

pa rt i i b o dy 4

A genealogy of the subject The constitution of the subject The problem of circularity

93 95 104

5

Anarchic bodies The body of power The discursive body

110 111 117 v

vi

6

contents

The resistance of the body The anarchic body

121 124

Female freedom The anonymous subjectivity of the body The historical constitution of the body Female freedom?

135 138 145 150

pa rt i i i e t h i c s 7

The silence of ethics History of ethics Ethics as practice The ethical subject Ethics as aesthetics Philosophy lived

157 157 160 161 165 169

8

The freedom of philosophy The freedom of critical reflection Freedom as ethos The different meanings of freedom

175 176 182 188

9

The other Ethical subject and the other Subjectivity as passivity The other as precondition of ethics

193 195 199 204

Conclusion: freedom as an operational concept

208

References

211

Index

220

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am fortunate to have had some of the leading philosophers in my field to read parts or versions of this work at different stages of its development: Rosi Braidotti, Simon Critchley, Thomas Flynn, Gary Gutting, Sara Heinämaa, Jana Sawicki and Dan Zahavi. I am deeply grateful to them for their perceptive comments, good advice and constructive criticism. I want to thank the many networks of colleagues and good friends who have inspired, supported and discussed my work. I also want to thank my students, whose critical questions and fresh insights have contributed to my views on Foucault. A different version of chapter 5 originally appeared as the article ‘Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience’ in Hypatia, A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 4. I am grateful for the permission to reprint it here. Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their love, support and remarkable patience.

vii

A B B R E V I AT I O N S F O R W O R K S B Y F O U C A U LT

Books in English AK DL DP HS OT UP

The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Trans. Charles Ruas. New York: Doubleday, 1986. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977/1991. The History of Sexuality, vol. i, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 1970/1994. The History of Sexuality, vol. ii, The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Articles, essays and interviews in English

ATT

B/P

CF

‘The Art of Telling the Truth’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 86–95. ‘Body/Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 55–62. ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 1972–1977, ed. Colin

viii

l i s t o f a b b r e v i at i o n s

CT

CT/IH

EPF

GE

HES

IHB

INP

MS

NGH

OWH

ix

Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 194–228. ‘The Concern for Truth’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 255–67. ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 17–46. ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practise of Freedom’, in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988, 1–20. ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 340–72. ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1997, 93–106. ‘Introduction’, in Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Richard McDougall. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, vii–xvii. ‘Introduction’, in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 7–24. ‘Minimalist Self’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 3–16. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 76–100. ‘On the Ways of Writing History’, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1998, 279– 95.

x

PE

PS

PT

PR

QG

RM

SC

SP

SPPI

SPS


‘Politics and Ethics: An Interview’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 373–80. ‘Postscript, An Interview with Michel Foucault by Charles Ruas’, in Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas. New York: Doubleday, 1986, 169– 86. ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1998, 69–87. ‘Politics and Reason’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 57–85. ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 63–77. ‘The Return of Morality’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 242–54. ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality’, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988, 286– 303. ‘Subject and Power’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1982, 208–26. ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1997, 163–73. ‘Structuralism and Post-Structuralism’, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1998, 433–58.


ST

STW

TES

TJF

TL

TP

WA

WC

WE

xi

‘Subjectivity and Truth’, in The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997, 171–98. ‘A Swimmer Between Two Words’, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1998, 171– 4. ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1997, 223–51. ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Foubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1997, 1–89. ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 78–108. ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 109–33. ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 101– 20. ‘What is Critique?’, in The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997, 23–82. ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 32–50. Books in French

AS MC RR

L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969/2001. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966/1996. Raymond Roussel. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

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Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975/2001. Histoire de la sexualité, vol. ii, L’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1984/1994. Histoire de la sexualité, vol. i, La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Articles, essays and interviews in French

CJ

EPL

IMF

JMF

PA

PC

PEI

QA

QL1

QL2

‘Cours du 14 janvier 1976’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. iii, 1976–1979, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1976/1994, 175–89. ‘L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. iv, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1984/1994, 708–29. ‘Introduction par Michel Foucault’, in Dits et ećrits 1954– 1988, vol. iii, 1976–1979, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1978/1994, 429–42. ‘Le jeu de Michel Foucault’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. iii, 1976–1979, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1978/1994, 298–9. ‘La philosophie analytic de la politique’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. iii, 1976–1979, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1978/1994, 534–51. ‘Pouvoir et corps’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. ii, 1970– 1975, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1975/1994, 754–60. ‘Politique et e´ thique: une interview’, in Dits et ećrits 1954– 1988, vol. iv, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1984/1994, 584–90. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. i, 1954–1969, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1969/1994, 789–821. ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. iv, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1984/1994, 562–78. ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. iv, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1984/1994, 679–88.


SEPS

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‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’, in Dits et ećrits 1954– 1988, vol. iv, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1983/1994, 431–57. ‘Sur les fa¸cons d’écrire l’histoire’, in Dits et ećrits 1954–1988, vol. i, 1954–1969, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1967/1994, 585–600. ‘La vie: l’expérience et la science’, in Dits et ećrits 1954– 1988, vol. iv, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Fran¸cois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1984/1994, 763–76.

INTRODUCTION

Freedom is a concept that it is repeatedly used today in discourses ranging from political philosophy and rhetoric to self-help guides, yet it seems that it has never been less clear what it means. This is not only due to conceptual confusion or lack of philosophical precision. The effects of the rapid process of economic and cultural globalization have made many of our traditional ways of thinking and living redundant, and have raised critical questions about our ‘freedom’ to command our lives. On the other hand, neo-liberalism and the extreme individualism characterizing our culture have made ‘freedom’ itself a contestable value. One strand in this present ‘crisis’ of freedom is the critique of an autonomous subject which characterizes post-structuralist thinking. Michel Foucault’s thought – and post-structuralist thinking as a whole – is often read as a rejection of the subject. This ‘rejection’ is interpreted in varying terms. The subject cannot ground knowledge, meanings or morality. It is not the agent of social or epistemic changes, but rather the effect of them. There is no subject in itself prior to the normalizing cultural coding that turns the human being into a subject. All possible ways to comprehend oneself and to act in a coherent fashion are conditioned by a historically varying cultural matrix. The charges against Foucault’s thought in contemporary debates often focus on the question of the freedom of the subject and the notions that are understood as intrinsically tied to or dependent on it: autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, political agency. According to many of Foucault’s critics, the denial of an autonomous subject leads to the denial of any meaningful concept of freedom, which again leads to the impossibility of emancipatory politics. When there is no authentic subjectivity to liberate, and power, as the principle of constitution, 1

2

fo u c au lt o n f r e e d o m

has no outside, the idea of freedom becomes meaningless. Since we are always the products of codes and disciplines, the overthrow of constraints will not free us to become natural human beings. Hence, all that we can do is produce new codes and disciplines.1 I will argue that, rather than dismissing post-structuralist thinking as politically dangerous and trying to hold on to the autonomous, humanist subject for political or simply conservative reasons, it is more fruitful to take seriously the major impact post-structuralist thought has had on our ways of thinking about the subject, and also to try to rethink freedom. The post-structuralist understanding of the subject clearly makes problematic many of our traditional and accepted ways of conceiving of freedom. It cannot be understood as an inherent capacity or characteristic of the subject. We cannot say that we are born free. Neither can freedom be linked to emancipation: it does not lie in finding our true or authentic nature and liberating it from the constraints of power or society. For Foucault, freedom is not the freedom of protected rights that must be safeguarded. Neither does there seem to be much point in arguing that it is the ability to choose between different courses of action and to govern oneself autonomously, if our choices themselves are culturally constituted. Freedom cannot be conceived of negatively either: it cannot be linked to the ability to think or act despite external constraints, when the external constraints are understood as the condition of possibility of subjectivity. I will show that Foucault’s thought, however, opens up alternative ways of thinking about freedom. It provides us with important tools for trying to answer the question, perhaps more burning than ever: what is freedom? While it is thus strongly argued by many commentators that there is no freedom in Foucault’s thought, at the same time, and seemingly paradoxically, others argue that the main motive and theme in his work is precisely freedom. Gary Gutting (1989, 1), for example, writes that Foucault’s thought is a search for ‘truths that will make us free’. John Rajchman (1985, 50) claims that Foucault is ‘the philosopher of freedom in a post-revolutionary time’. Given the obvious differences in commentators’ understandings of philosophy, and of Foucault’s thought in particular, it seems plausible to look for the source of the contrasting interpretations in the different ways of understanding freedom in his philosophy. My work will explicate the different meanings of freedom that can be found in Foucault’s works, and inquire into the possibilities he opens up for us in thinking about freedom today. 1 See e.g. Walzer 1986, 61.

introduction

3

Before focusing on the topic of freedom, I will explicate the understanding of the subject to which the question of freedom in Foucault’s thought is essentially tied. When it is argued that there is no freedom in it, the argument rests on the claim that there is no autonomous subject. When, on the other hand, it is argued that freedom is what Foucault’s thought is fundamentally about, it is often claimed that this is due to the fact that his work reveals constraining forms of subjectivity as historically contingent. Foucault himself claimed that the general theme of his research was the subject (e.g. SP, 208). Even though many commentators argue that his own interpretations of his work were continuously changing, not compatible, and were therefore not to be trusted,2 I take this claim to be significant. I will argue that Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies not only contain implicit assumptions and presuppositions about the subject while their actual objects of study, focus and domain are elsewhere – for example, systems of thought, power, social history – but that they also contain explicit efforts to rethink the subject. Foucault characterized his work as a genealogy of the modern subject: a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. He further distinguished three modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects. These modes correspond with three relatively distinct periods in his thought (SP, 208.) The first is the modes of inquiry that give themselves the status of science. Human beings are turned into subjects in processes of scientific study and classification, for example, into speaking subjects in linguistics, subjects who labour in economics, subjects of life in biology. Foucault’s archaeology deals with this first mode in analyzing systems of knowledge. In The Order of Things he showed how the discourses of life, labour and language historically developed and structured themselves as sciences, and how human sciences further constituted man as their object of study. The second phase of Foucault’s work, his genealogies, studied what he himself called ‘dividing practices’ (SP, 208). These are practices of manipulation and examination that classify, locate and shape bodies in the social field. His books Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality are inquiries into this second mode of objectification. He shows how modern disciplinary technologies constitute the subject as their object of control: human beings are examined, measured and categorized. This process defines them as modern 2 See e.g. Hoy 1986, 2.

4


individuals. The disciplinary mechanisms do not shape subjectivity only by external coercion; they also function through being ‘interiorized’. In The History of Sexuality, for example, Foucault shows how our belief in a true sexual nature is a disciplinary mode of knowledge that makes us objects of control as well as subjects of sexuality. Our self-understanding, sexuality and even embodiment are constituted by the normative ideas of what is healthy, true and beautiful. The third phase of Foucault’s work, represented by volumes ii and iii of The History of Sexuality, studies the way the human being turns himself or herself into a subject. It is an analysis of the subject’s relationship to itself in the domain of sexuality. He asks how human beings recognize and constitute themselves as subjects of sexuality. The subject’s self-understanding and relationship to the self are important dimensions in the constitution of forms of subjectivity. The subject is studied now not only as an effect of power/knowledge networks, but also as capable of moral self-reflexivity – critical reflection on its own constitutive conditions – and therefore also of resistance to normative practices and ideas. Subjects constitute themselves through different modes of self-understanding and self-formation. Foucault’s ‘ethical turn’ does not essentially change his understanding of the subject, however, it is only the perspective that shifts. He still denies the autonomy of the subject: the subject is always constituted in the power/knowledge networks of a culture, which provide its conditions of possibility. The modes of self-knowledge and techniques of the self that subjects utilize in shaping themselves as subjects of sexuality, for example, are not created or freely chosen. Rather, they are culturally and historically intelligible conceptions and patterns of behaviour that subjects draw from the surrounding society. Self-understanding is internally tied to historically varying social and discursive practices – techniques of governmentality. The governing of oneself is tied to the governing of others. My study of Foucault’s understanding of the subject is traversed by two axes: feminist philosophy and phenomenology. Phenomenology acts as Foucault’s interlocutor and as a point of comparison. Feminist philosophy traverses the work in the sense that it motivates the questions I pose to Foucault. Even though my starting point is Foucault’s thought, the aim is also at reappropriation, bringing it closer to my own questions and concerns stemming initially from feminist philosophy. Rethinking subjectivity is essential in feminist philosophy, as several feminist writers have argued. Rather than arguing that women too are subjects

introduction

5

when the subject is understood as the independent, autonomous and rational subject of the Enlightenment, a lot of contemporary feminist theoreticians consider it important to question traditional notions of subjectivity. Theorists from diverse philosophical frameworks – such as Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti – have argued that we should not seek to simply redefine the subject in neutral terms, but we should rather define a whole new sense of subjectivity: both problematize the subject and embrace a new subjectivity for women. While the Enlightenment characteristics of the subject – autonomy, independence and rationality – have been firmly associated with masculinity, Braidotti’s nomadic subjects, Haraway’s cyborgs and Irigaray’s images drawn from female morphology represent new figurations aiming to subvert traditional imaginings of female subjectivity.3 Feminist theory does, on the one hand, share with Foucault and poststructuralist thought the aim of rethinking the subject of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, the idea of feminist emancipation is both historically and theoretically connected to the Enlightenment ideal of freedom: the autonomy of subjects. This tension between the modernist legacy of feminist theory and its radical challenging of some of the most fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment characterizes much of the contemporary feminist debate. This debate has often been cast in terms of feminism versus postmodernism. Since there is no consensus over the meaning of either one of these terms, the debate has taken many different forms, ranging over diverse issues and positions.4 My aim is not to take part in it, but rather to study critically some of the underlying ideas constitutive of the tension between emancipatory politics and post-structuralist understanding of the subject. The feminist task of rethinking female subjectivity is often understood as one of finding an in-between position: we must manage to argue for the culturally constituted status of female subjectivity without losing agency, singularity or the Enlightenment values of freedom and 3 See e.g. Irigaray 1977/1985; 1984/1993, Haraway 1991, Braidotti 1994. 4 The debate involves large epistemological questions about how postmodern feminist critiques of objectivity can avoid falling into relativism; debates about whether the concept of gender functions as a false generalization transcending boundaries of culture, class and race, or as a unifying and empowering notion; aesthetic issues contesting the borders between high and mass culture; analyses of the material changes involved in postmodernism, for example, in the structure of the family, and in work and class distinctions. See e.g. Butler 1990, Haraway 1991, Hekman 1990, Nicholson 1990, Braidotti 1991 and 1994.

6


equality motivating the feminist movement. Susan Hekman (1990, 81), among others, has argued that Foucault’s understanding of the subject is a fruitful approach for feminist theory for the very reason that it manages to question the dichotomy between a constituting subject that is autonomous and active versus a constituted subject totally determined by external circumstances. Hekman claims that Foucault’s conception of the subject avoids the eclecticism of many feminist approaches by describing a subject that is capable of resistance and political action without any reference to elements of a disembodied and autonomous Cartesian subjectivity.5 I agree with Hekman that Foucault’s understanding of the subject may well provide a fruitful point of departure in feminist efforts to rethink subjectivity, but my stance is more critical. I will argue that Foucault managed to retain the subject’s capacity for resistance, self-reflection and criticism, but only by leaving open important questions. My work will explicate these questions and discuss the problems involved in answering them. I will also argue that when Foucault’s thinking about the subject is applied to feminist theory, the question of female emancipation has to be rethought. Another axis in my study of Foucault, in addition to feminist philosophy, is phenomenology. Foucault is normally presented as being in opposition to phenomenology, both to its fundaments in Husserl’s thought and to existentialist reinterpretations.6 The common claim is that he rejected Husserl’s transcendentalism and focused on concrete historical facts. He did not align himself with Husserl and his philosophy of transcendental (inter)subjectivity, but rather followed Nietzsche and the ‘postmodern’ thinkers celebrating the death of the subject, meta-narratives and reason. My study questions this common understanding of Foucault’s relationship to phenomenology. I will argue that the simple opposition is based on a narrow reading of phenomenology, and on a simplification of Foucault’s thought, and that there are interesting connections between Foucault and phenomenology which are not adequately understood. I will show that, although Foucault clearly rejected existentialist readings of phenomenology, he did not deny all links to it. The aim of his critique of phenomenology was rather to reveal its problems (as he saw them), and to deal with them through a different approach. 5 On Descartes’ conception of the body and feminist critiques of Cartesian mind–body dualism, see e.g. Reuter 2000, Judovitz 2001. 6 The few exceptions are e.g. Mohanty 1997, Flynn 1997, Han 1998/2002, Visker 1999.

introduction

7

I will argue that Foucault’s thought links up with the phenomenological tradition in at least two senses: (1) it is a critical inquiry into the conditions of possibility of knowledge and the historicity of reason; and (2) as a philosophical study of the subject, it is an effort to rethink critically the phenomenological subject. It may seem difficult to defend a view linking Foucault’s thought to phenomenology, given the fact that he explicitly distanced himself from it in various texts and interviews. The Order of Things, for example, contains explicit criticism, which I discuss in chapter 2. In his introduction to the English translation, he furthermore presents his whole method specifically as an alternative and antidote to phenomenology.7 His criticism of phenomenology in OT is, however, partly self-criticism. Foucault’s first published works – a monograph Maladie mental et personalité (1954) and an introduction to the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1954) – were both strongly influenced by existential phenomenology. He argues in the first edition of Maladie mentale et personalité that to understand mental illness we have to take into account the lived experience of the patient, we need ‘a phenomenology of mental illness’. The second edition, published in 1962, was radically rewritten. Keith Hoeller (1993) notes that it reflects the views of mental illness that Foucault put forth in Madness and Civilization in 1961: we need a historical study of madness. Hoeller dates the marked turn in Foucault’s thought from the lived experience to a broader historical and political analysis of its preconditions in these intervening years. Foucault himself describes his turn away from phenomenology: I belong to the generation who as students had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism . . . at the time I was working on my book about the history of madness [Folie et déraison]. I was divided between existential psychology and phenomenology, and my research was an attempt to discover the extent that these could be defined in historical terms . . . That’s when I discovered that the subject would have to be defined in other terms than Marxism or phenomenology. (PS, 174)8

7 See OT, xiv. 8 The French original is not available. Wherever possible, I will give the French or German original of the long English citations in a footnote.

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Hence, while it is uncontestable that Foucault was a critic of phenomenology and not a phenomenologist, phenomenology nevertheless forms an important background from which he sought to differentiate and distance his own thought. He started from phenomenology, but he also significantly returned to it in his late texts by reformulating his relationship to it: it no longer appears in terms of an opposition, but is rather presented as a continuum. In a text on the Enlightenment written in late 1970s, he turns to Husserl’s late writings, reading him not essentially as presenting a philosophy of the subject, but as inquiring into the legitimacy of reason. Foucault associates the Enlightenment firmly with critique, a critical attitude that questions not only obstacles to the use of reason, but also reason itself and its limits. According to Foucault, this critical attitude took the form of questioning reason in its connection with power, ‘the relationships between the structures of rationality which articulate true discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it’ (WC, 45). Foucault saw the critique of reason as responsible for excesses of power taking different forms in the history of philosophy from the Hegelian left to the Frankfurt School. Husserl is also used as an example here, who, according to Foucault, referred to the crisis of European humanity as something that involved the changing relationship between knowledge and technique. Foucault considered Husserl’s thought as importantly questioning rationalization and hence studying reason as a historical phenomenon. In an introduction to the English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault argues that, in his late works, Husserl was not asking traditional epistemological questions about the universal nature of knowledge or its timeless conditions of possibility, but he was rather posing a critical question about our epistemic history as well as about our present reality.9 He thereby situates Husserl in the tradition of thought that questioned western rationality about its claims of universality and autonomy, and hence penetrated the historico-critical dimension of philosophy. Foucault writes: 9 Foucault distinguishes two different modalities according to which French thinkers appropriated Husserl’s thought after his Paris lectures in 1929. One was the existentialist reading of Sartre, which took Husserl in the direction of a philosophy of the subject, and the other was Cavaillès’ reading, which, according to Foucault, brought it back to its founding principles in formalism and the theory of science (INP, 8–9). Foucault situates his own thought in the tradition of Cavaillès, which developed as the history of thought and the philosophy of science.

introduction

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And if phenomenology, after quite a long period when it was kept at the border, finally penetrated in its turn, it was undoubtedly the day when Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis, posed the question of the relations between the ‘western’ project of a universal development of reason, the positivity of the sciences and the radicality of philosophy. (INP, 11)10

According to Foucault, the critique of rationality led Husserl to develop a new mode of questioning (VES, 767). Husserl did not just study the universal structures of knowledge, he also proposed an inquiry into the historical meaning of knowledge, that is, into the meaning that the ideas of science and philosophy have for us now, at this very moment. Foucault thus considered his thought to be in line with phenomenology to the extent that the answers to the question ‘What is philosophy?’ would be similar: philosophy is understood essentially as a critical practice responding to our present. It is, however, not only critical towards other forms of knowledge or practices of living, but it is also significantly selfcritical. It must turn to question its own conditions of possibility, the legitimacy of reason and its own historicity. I will argue that understanding Foucault’s background in phenomenology and relating his work to it is important for understanding his philosophical position. I will show how many of Foucault’s central philosophical issues and methodological directions are motivated by the problems arising out of the phenomenological enterprise. By constructing a dialogue in this book between Foucault and three major phenomenological thinkers – Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas – I aim to bring to light some common forms of questioning and points of fruitful exchange as well as of fundamental contrast. By focusing on Foucault’s relationship to phenomenology, however, I do not want to claim that it is the only or even the most important influence on his thought. His work had many different themes and influences: Nietzsche’s philosophy, structuralism, French historiography and philosophy of science, for example. Any study of Foucault’s thought representing one choice of many possible perspectives is therefore a distortion of his multifaceted and original thought. 10 ‘Et si la phénoménologie, après une bien longue période ou` elle fut tenue en lisière, a fini par pénétrer a` son tour, c’est sans doute du jour ou` Husserl, dans les Méditations cartésiennes et dans la Krisis, a posé la question des rapports entre le projet occidental d’un déploiement universel de la raison, la positivité des sciences et la radicalité de la philosophie.’ (IMF, 432)

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m

This book is divided into three parts: Language (chapters 1, 2, and 3), Body (chapters 4, 5, and 6) and Ethics (chapters, 7, 8, and 9). These three parts explicate the three constitutive modes of subjectivity in Foucault’s thought, and they also correspond loosely with the three chronological periods in it: archaeology, genealogy and his late writings on ethics. The structure of the book is primarily thematic, however. I do not offer a chronological reading of the development of Foucault’s thought, or a philosophical reconstruction of ‘Foucault’s theory of the subject’. Instead, I ask what freedom means at different points in his work and study its preconditions as well as its problems. My argument is that language, the body and ethics are the domains in which the different senses of freedom can be found. My focus on certain Foucault texts, and the omission of others, are based on this thematic priority. The first part of the book, Language, inquires into the idea of freedom present in Foucault’s archaeology. The focus of my reading is on The Order of Things, which studies the question of language most explicitly. I explicate Foucault’s philosophical position by contrasting it to Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly to his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. This is illuminative in terms of understanding the philosophical implications of Foucault’s treatment of the history of science in OT. I also make a stronger claim about the importance of reading OT in relation to phenomenology. I will show how many of the central philosophical issues, as well as the methodological directions, that are present in OT are motivated by the problems arising out of the phenomenological enterprise. In OT Foucault advocates the idea of language as something that always outruns the subject, who can never completely master it. Language is not simply an instrument of expression, it also generates an excess of meanings. Foucault gives language a regulative role in the mode of scientific discourse, but it also demarcates a domain of freedom in the mode of literature, particularly as avant-garde writing. There is an ontological order of things implicit in the theories of scientific discourse. Language as avant-garde writing is, however, capable of forming alternative, unscientific and irrational ontological realms: different experiences of order on the basis of which different perceptual and practical grids become possible, and hence lead to new ways of seeing and experiencing. While Foucault’s archaeology is generally viewed as emphasizing the necessary structures of thought and opposing humanist aspirations of looking for the freedom of man, there is an antihumanist understanding of freedom as an opening of new possibilities

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of thought implicitly safeguarded in archaeology. Foucault tried to show not only how the limits of knowledge, representation and experience are constituted, but also what distorts them. It is not that freedom characterizes the subject, it characterizes language in the mode of literature, which is capable of undermining the stability of our ways of seeing, understanding and acting. The second part of the book, Body, explicates the genealogical approach and engages with feminist appropriations of Foucault. Foucault’s understanding of the historical construction of the body through mechanisms of power has influenced feminist theory profoundly, but the feminist appropriations are based on varying readings of what exactly Foucault meant. He did not present a theory of the body anywhere, not even a unified account of it, and thus his view has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles, which aim at bringing the body into the focus of history. I will discuss Foucault’s understanding of the sexual body in volume i of The History of Sexuality, and ask what he meant by the idea of bodies and pleasures as a form of resistance to power. I argue that we must take this idea seriously and not simply dismiss it as a naive fall back to the prediscursive body. I will show that if we are to understand Foucault’s idea of bodily resistance, we must leave behind the conception of the body as a mere material or bio-scientific object. The question of resistance only opens up if we take the experiential body – the body as experiencing in everyday practices – as the starting point. I will argue for a certain kind of irreducibility of embodied experience which does not mean that experience is treated as ahistorical or prediscursive, but that it can never be wholly reduced to discursive meanings. Elisabeth Grosz writes (1995, 222) that a distinction must be drawn between discourse and experience, even given the understanding that language or systems of representation are the prior condition for the intelligibility of experience. I argue that this distinction is crucial for understanding the resistance of the body. The experiential body is the permanent contestation of discursive definitions, values and normative practices. Even if linguistic intelligibility structures and constitutes the limits of experience, these limits are never firmly set and are constantly transgressed. The existence of the abject and the mute is furthermore necessary for constituting the intelligible and the normal. Foucault’s genealogy, like his archaeology, thus also displays a dimension of freedom in the sense of a constitutive outside to the discursive order: embodied experiences capable of distorting, multiplying and overflowing definition, classification and articulation.

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The idea of understanding the Foucaultian body as the experiential body raises the question of its relationship to the lived body as described by the phenomenologists. Foucault’s dialogue with phenomenology, which features in part ii of this book, thus takes place with MerleauPonty. Chapter 6 presents a Foucaultian reworking of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body, and I argue that this could provide feminist theory with new ways of understanding ‘female freedom’. Emancipation requires a body that is conceived in ways that are open to reinterpretations and multiple meanings, rather than one that is pure of cultural inscription. Part iii, Ethics, discusses the understanding of freedom that is to be found in Foucault’s late work. His thinking on ethics elaborates his understanding of freedom by introducing a deliberate dimension to it: ethics as care for the self is the deliberate part of freedom. Freedom is not only a non-subjective opening of possibilities, but it can also be deliberately cultivated and practised by its subjects. Subjects exercise freedom in critically reflecting on themselves and their behaviour, beliefs and the social field of which they are a part. They materialize and further stylize the possibilities that are opened around themselves. Care for the self as a practice of freedom means challenging, contesting and changing the constitutive conditions of subjectivity as well as its actual forms. It means exploring possibilities for new forms of subjectivity, new fields of experiences, pleasures and relationships, and modes of living and thinking. The quest for freedom in Foucault’s ethics becomes a question of developing forms of subjectivity that are capable of functioning as resistance to normalizing power. Foucault’s late essays on the Enlightenment also postulate the idea of freedom as a historical ethos originating from the Enlightenment: the championing of political freedom in the modern sense cannot be found in any pre-Enlightenment tradition of thought. Foucault does not simply embrace traditional Enlightenment ideas, however, he also submits them to critical reappropriation. What, for him, characterized the philosophical ethos originating in the Enlightenment is that it is a permanent critique of our own philosophical era. By linking his thought to the Enlightenment, he made the normative move of adopting the values associated with it – critical reasoning and personal and political autonomy – as the implicit ground on which his critiques of domination, abusive forms of power and rationality rest. The Enlightenment provided him with the historical – not transcendental – values on which to base his implicit critiques. Its ethos represents a commitment to a specific historical tradition within which we think about human life and

introduction

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politics, and freedom as the autonomous use of reason is a precondition of critical reflection on our present. The last chapter of this book, focuses on the question of the other in Foucault’s ethics. I explicate two interconnected problems that I claim are riddling his understanding of the ethical subject: the autonomy of the subject and the role of the other in its constitution. I will show, through a reading of Emmanuel Levinas, how these problems are interconnected. With the help of Levinas, I argue that we must acknowledge the fundamental importance of the other person for the constitution of ethical subjectivity. To discuss the centrality of freedom in Foucault’s thought is to situate him in a long lineage of thinkers who have held freedom as a central theme in philosophical reflection. It has been argued that an emphasis on freedom characterizes French philosophy in particular and also lies in France’s revolutionary heritage.11 The discussion of freedom in the context of political philosophy forms only one fraction of its pervasive importance in the French philosophical tradition, however. Descartes understood freedom most of all as an epistemological question: freedom is the condition of possibility of knowledge because it enables us to refrain from believing things that are not completely certain and hence to avoid error. Sartre saw freedom primarily as an ontological question: in Being and Nothingness freedom is a structure of the being of man and thus forms a part of a comprehensive ontology. By tracing the meanings of freedom in the different phases of Foucault’s thought I will argue that it is best understood as an epistemological and ontological question also in his thought, rather than as a strictly political question. Freedom lies in the ontological contingency of the present, in the unpredictability of our ways of thinking, acting and relating to other people. Thinking can only take place within a historically defined framework of rules and practices, but this framework is never a necessity. Philosophy as an ontology of the present is the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of crossing them (WE, 50). Its aim is to free us from ourselves: shatter our preconceptions concerning the present by showing the historical contingency of our thought and practice. 11 See e.g. Cohen 1997, Gutting 2001, 382.

I LANGUAGE

1 PHILOSOPHICAL LAUGHTER

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ (Nietzsche 1887/1974,181)

The instant bestseller that made Foucault famous, The Order of Things (OT), arose out of laughter. Foucault opens the book by writing that the book arouse out of a passage in Borges, from a laughter that shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought and continued long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse the age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quoted ‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia’ which presented a wholly other system of thought and therefore broke up ‘all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things’ (OT, xv). The shattering impossibility to think in certain ways

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motivated Foucault’s philosophical inquiry in OT and led him to ask: what is it possible to think? Foucault’s archaeological question about the limits of thought resembles the transcendental question of phenomenology concerning the conditions of possibility of knowledge: what are the conditions of possibility of our experiences, the constitution of objects and modes of knowledge? I will argue that, although the mode of questioning is similar, the methodological route followed by Foucault diverts sharply from phenomenology. Hence, the methodological question that must follow the transcendental one – how can we study the conditions of possibility of our thought since, by definition, we cannot set ourselves outside of it – is given a very different answer by Foucault. I will also show how, in Foucault’s thought, the question of the limits of thought, by implication, must be followed by the question of what falls outside the discursive limits of being. I will argue that, by explicitly questioning the conditions of possibility of knowledge, Foucault also implicitly inquires into an otherness that escapes the existing order imposed upon being by scientific discourse. Even after being brought within the order of the same, this otherness is still capable of forcing a shattering laughter upon us. Foucault points to his phenomenological background himself in several contexts. In an essay entitled ‘Subjectivity and Truth’ (ST), he explicitly describes the development of his thought – the genealogy of the modern subject – as a reaction to phenomenology.1 He claims that as the intellectual climate in France became more critical of phenomenology in the 1960s, two hitherto hidden theoretical paradoxes implicit in phenomenology could no longer be avoided. The first one was that phenomenology had failed to found a philosophy of scientific knowledge, and the second that it had failed to take into account the formative mechanisms of signification and the structure of systems of meaning. Different approaches developed in France as efforts to deal with these paradoxes: logical positivism, semiology, Marxism, psychoanalysis and structuralism (ST, 174–5). The close relationship between Foucault’s archaeology and phenomenology has also been noted by some of Foucault’s commentators.2 Beatrice Han argues in her book Foucault’s Critical Project that a profound reading of Foucault’s relationship with phenomenology 1 See also e.g. SPS, 442. 2 See e.g. Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, Gutting 1989, Lebrun 1989/1992.

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shows the continuity of the two projects as well as their roots in a common Kantian origin. According to Han, for Foucault, phenomenology is both an interlocutor and a favoured target, because it also attempts to overcome the obstacle of pure transcendentalism. Despite appearances, archaeology is profoundly connected to phenomenology in that it attempts to find a solution to the same problem and adopts a method that is similar in aspects such as its descriptive rather than explicative outlook (Han 1998/2002, 5). This first chapter presents a concise explication of the main philosophical arguments in OT. The explication prepares the way for the reading put forward in the second chapter, which contrasts OT to Husserl’s thought, particularly to his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Following the presentation of the negative or critical side of archaeology as an effort to overcome the problems inherent in phenomenology, the third chapter evaluates the positive contribution of Foucault’s archaeology to philosophical questioning. It focuses on the topic that is the overriding theme of the present book: the question of freedom in Foucault’s thought. I will argue that OT contains an idea of otherness – a realm outside the discursive order of things – which represents freedom for Foucault. This possibility of an otherness outside of what can be scientifically ordered and brought within the realm of knowledge does not lie in some pure and prelinguistic sphere of originary experience, however, but in language itself.

An archaeology of order Foucault argues in OT that there is a level of order, ‘a positive unconscious of knowledge’, that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is formative of scientific discourse. This level gives us the organizing principles of knowledge, the unconscious structures that order scientific discourses. Even though individual scientists never formulated these principles, nor were they even aware of them at the time, this level nevertheless defines the objects proper to their study. It constitutes the condition of possibility for forming concepts and building theories (OT, xi). Hence, beyond the level of scientific discoveries, discussions, theories and philosophical views exists an archaeological level formative of them. This level consists of the ontological order of things assumed to exist, and also of the principles that organize the relationships between things and words in terms of what exists and how it

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can be known and represented. It is the historical a priori of scientific discourse. This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true. (OT, 158)3

Foucault’s objective in OT is to study this historical a priori, the formative level of scientific discourse. His method is a historical inquiry into the ordering codes of our culture since the sixteenth century: how the space of knowledge has been arranged, how discursive practices have been structured. By studying how scientific discourses have been ordered, he seeks to reveal or unveil the ontological order of things assumed to exist prior to them. This order behind ordering fundamentally but ‘unconsciously’ forms and structures scientific discourse. Foucault describes his analysis: Quite obviously such an 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, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. (OT, xxii)4

The question that guides Foucault’s archaeology is thus a transcendental question in the sense that it concerns the condition of possibility of knowledge: what determines different forms of scientific knowledge and makes possible certain discussions and problems? The condition 3 ‘Cet a priori, c’est ce qui, a` une e´ poque donnée, découpe dans l’expérience un champ de savoir possible, définit le mode d’être des objets qui y apparaissent, arme le regard quotidien de pouvoirs théoriques, et définit les conditions dans lesquelles on peut tenir sur les choses un discours reconnu pour vrai.’ (MC, 171) 4 ‘Une telle analyse, on le voit, ne relève pas de l’histoire des idées ou des sciences: c’est plutôt une e´ tude qui s’efforce de retrouver a` partir de quoi connaissances et théories ont e´ té possibles; selon quel espace d’ordre s’est constitué le savoir; sur fond de quel a priori historique et dans l’élément de quelle positivité des idées ont pu apparaˆıtre, des sciences se constituer, des expériences se réfléchir dans des philosophies, des rationalités se former, pour, peut-être, se dénouer et s’évanouir bientôt.’ (MC, 13)


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of possibility must, however, in connection with Foucault’s archaeology, be understood in a specific way. It is not universal a priori, but conditions that are importantly historical: they are formed in history and also change in it. Neither can they be found through an analysis of the subject’s faculties or experiences. They condition, significantly, also the subject’s experiences. By revealing the conditions of possibility of the thought of a particular period, Foucault seeks to reveal the nonsubjective conditions that make subjective experiences of order and knowledge possible.5 His aim is thus to write a history of the transcendental: a historical description of the varying conditions of possibility of knowledge in different periods. Foucault introduces the concept of episteme (épistémè) in OT. There has been much discussion and confusion about what exactly he means by this, and he himself has offered different definitions.6 One common but mistaken reading is to understand it to simply refer to the existing field of different forms of knowledge in a specific period. Claire O’Farrell, for example, describes episteme as the differing configurations of knowledge at different periods.7 Understood in this way, the main function of the concept would be to enable Foucault to locate the points of discontinuity in the western history of thought.8 Foucault’s archaeological inquiry in OT distinguishes three epistemes, and analyzes the epistemic systems underlying three historical epochs: the Renaissance, the classical age and modernity. The notion of the episteme is not only a tool for writing the history of thought and describing ruptures in it. I argue that it is, most of all, a tool for understanding the historical conditions of possibility of knowledge 5 Beatrice Han (1998/2002) shows that Foucault’s inquiry into the historical a priori of knowledge is a search for a principle of determination, which is non-subjective. It has ‘the function of introducing into the field of knowledge a principle of nonsubjective determination, which defines for a given period and geographical area the historical form taken by the constitution of various forms of knowledge’ (45). 6 The notion of episteme presented in OT was widely criticized for being a totality as well as a static notion that excludes change. In the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), Foucault answers this criticism and modifies his stance. He denies that there is one episteme for the science of a particular period: the relations that he describes are valid only in order to define a particular configuration (AK, 159). He also writes that episteme is not an immobile figure but rather ‘an infinitely mobile group of scansions, shifts, and coincidences which establish and dismantle themselves’ (AK, 250). 7 O’Farrell (1989, 54–5) argues that when the notion of episteme is introduced for the first time in OT, Foucault uses it in two different ways: firstly to denote the entirety of western knowledge, and secondly to describe different configurations of knowledge at different periods. 8 See e.g. Machado 1989/1992, 14.

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in a particular period. Hence, episteme refers to the historical a priori of an epoch. Rather than referring to the different configurations of knowledge, it refers to their historical conditions of possibility. Foucault writes, for example: ‘In any given culture and at any given moment, there is only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’ (OT, 168). He also describes his aim in OT in terms of transcendental analysis. What I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and therefore manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility. (OT, xxii)9

The first break or discontinuity that Foucault’s archaeological inquiry reveals positions the dawning of the classical age roughly halfway through the seventeenth century. The second epistemic break took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century and, according to Foucault, marked the beginning of the modern age (OT, xxii). By documenting breaks or discontinuities between the epistemes, Foucault argues against the continuous development of European science and rationality. The history of western science cannot be understood as a steady progression from unscientific forms of knowledge to ever more accurate and rational methods and theories. Foucault’s aim in OT is to show that, on the contrary, the whole order of existing things on the basis of which we think today is radically different from that of the classical thinkers, just as their mode of being of words and objects was completely different from that of the Renaissance thinkers. The epistemic changes fundamentally affect what kinds of things can be the objects of knowledge. The fundamental changes in the mode of being of what could be known resulted in a change in modes of knowledge to the point that some of the theories of the previous episteme were no longer even recognized as belonging to the field of scientific knowledge. Neither were scientific discoveries simply improvements of 9 ‘ce qu’on voudrait mettre au jour, c’est le champ e´ pistémologique, l’épistémè ou` les connaissances, envisagées hors de tout critère se référant a` leur valeur rationnelle ou a` leur formes objectives, enfoncent leur positivité et manifestent ainsi une histoire qui n’est pas celle de leur perfection croissante, mais plutôt celle de leurs conditions de possibilité’ (MC, 13).


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previous theories. Foucault writes about the birth of natural history at the beginning of the classical age, for example, that it ‘did not become possible because men looked harder and more closely’, but because the mode of being of the natural order had changed (OT, 131–2). To better understand how modes of knowledge in Foucault’s thought are determined by non-subjective, discursively formed historical a prioris, I will next give a short description of how his concept of episteme functions in OT. This vaguely defined and abstract notion is fleshed out by detailed historical studies of the birth of the different sciences. This emphasis on history exemplifies Foucault’s method of discarding abstract conceptual definitions and instead elaborating the vague, often frustratingly ambiguous, philosophical ideas through concrete historical description. Unfortunately, this method also, at times, makes it difficult to reconstruct Foucault’s philosophical position coherently.

The three epistemes The Renaissance episteme. Foucault starts his explication of the three epistemes with a relatively short description of Renaissance episteme. The chapter has a telling title, ‘The Prose of the World’. Foucault’s aim is to show that what characterized the episteme of the Renaissance was the implicit assumption that words and things formed a unified texture and were linked through resemblance. Adjacent things were similar or they emulated and reflected each other from afar. Some similitudes were not visible, but were rather subtle resemblances of relations: the relation of the stars to the sky could be found between man’s skin moles and the body of which they were the secret marks. Things that resembled each other were further drawn together. Through sympathy similar things assimilated and transformed, through antipathy they maintained their isolation (OT, 19–24). The shortness of a certain line on a man’s hand, for example, reflected, through analogy, the image of a short life. The analogy between body and destiny, again, indicated sympathy that created communication between them. Knowledge meant uncovering the resemblances that linked things to one another in an infinite chain of similitudes. To know meant to interpret: to find a way from the visible marks to what they resembled. For these chains of similitudes to become knowledge they had to be linked to words, but the way words were linked to things was, again, through resemblance. Signs could signify only insofar as they resembled what they indicated. They signified by forming another order of

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resemblances: they were signatures of resemblances that made it possible to recognize them. According to Foucault, ‘The sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude’ (OT, 29). To search for a meaning meant bringing to light a resemblance. To search for a law governing signs was to discover things that were alike. Language was thus one of the things in the world to be interpreted. There was a common order for words and things, ‘the relation of languages to the world is one of analogy rather than signification’ (OT, 37). Because words were signs woven into the overall network of similitudes that had to be interpreted, observation, accepted authority and magical divination were on the same level of knowledge. According to Foucault, for Renaissance knowledge ‘there is no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition’ (OT, 33). He argues that, although it is easy for us to interpret that rational beliefs and esoteric knowledge were in conflict during the Renaissance, and that esotericism lost the battle as western science and rationality developed, if we study the archaeological level of knowledge – the level that makes different forms of knowledge possible – this does not hold. The Renaissance episteme not only made possible the coexistence of what, for us, are rational arguments, erudition and magic, it also made it impossible to distinguish them as different forms of knowledge, since they all relied on the same principles of organization. The prose of the world was formed as one infinite text binding together words and things through resemblance. The classical episteme. With the advent of the classical age there occurred a change. At the beginning of the seventeenth century similitude ceased to be the organizing principle of words and things. It was, rather, understood as the occasion for error, something that tempted man to draw conclusions from the deceiving senses (OT, 51). The hierarchy of analogies was substituted by the analysis of identity and difference. Rationalism was to replace old superstitious beliefs. It was firmly believed in the classical age that being had a universal order that could be analyzed by a universal method and that could be represented by signs that mirrored perfectly this order of being. Knowledge was organized in a table, it could be displayed as a perfect system. The method was to find the simple nature of beings and proceed from them to more complex ones


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by comparison and ordering. If the analysis was carried out correctly, it would yield perfect certainty. To know no longer meant to draw things together by finding a shared nature in them, it meant to discriminate (OT, 54–5, 75). The relationship of words to things thus changed fundamentally. The common order dissolved into two separate orders that were nevertheless inseparably linked in a transparent relation of representation. There was an external order of objects and an ideal order of signs. Signs, including language, were representations that directly represented their objects. The order of language was therefore the order of the world and could mirror it perfectly. Knowledge became representation. Foucault writes polemically that ‘language in the classical era does not exist’ (OT, 79). Language as an object of knowledge was not possible. It only had a function, it represented, but it was not an object of knowledge in itself. It was the transparent medium of representation, conveying the immutable and perfect order of the visible world: [L]anguage is no longer one of the figurations of the world, or a signature stamped upon things since the beginning of time. The manifestation and sign of truth are to be found in evident and distinct perception. It is the task of words to translate that truth if they can; but they no longer have the right to be considered the mark of it. Language has withdrawn from the midst of things themselves and has entered a period of transparency and neutrality. (OT, 56)10

Foucault’s point in his long discussion of the three classical forms of knowledge – general grammar, natural history and analyses of wealth – is to show how the same order underlies them, how they were all authorized by the same organizing principles. The form of these modes of knowledge is that of an ordered table of representations in which different beings could be named and could find their place in a language. General grammar was not the classical predecessor of modern linguistics because its object of study was not language as we understand it. It was a mode of knowledge limited and structured by the classical 10 ‘le langage n’est plus une des figures du monde, ni la signature imposée aux choses depuis le fond des temps. La vérité trouve sa manifestation et son signe dans la perception e´ vidente et distincte. Il appartient aux mots de la traduire s’ils le peuvent; ils n’ont plus droit a` en eˆ tre la marque. Le langage se retire du milieu des eˆ tres pour entrer dans son aˆ ge de transparence et de neutralité.’ (MC, 70)

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episteme. In the ontological order of things language did not exist as a historical, variable object to be known. Similarly, just as there was no language to be known, neither could life be an object of knowledge. In terms of natural history, life did not create a fundamental distinction in the order of things, it was not an obvious threshold dividing certain forms of knowledge from others. It was only one category in the classification of beings (OT, 161). According to Foucault, the idea of biology was not possible in the classical episteme: ‘Natural history is nothing more than the nomination of the visible’ (OT, 132). The task of natural history was to represent the visible order of nature by ascribing a name to living beings, and in that name to name the character that situated them within the taxonomic system of identities and differences. The goal was to lay out a unified grid that covered the entire vegetable and animal kingdom (OT, 141): ‘The naturalist is the man concerned with the structure of the visible world and its denominations according to characters. Not with life’ (OT, 161). The analysis of wealth obeys the same configuration as natural history and general grammar. In the Renaissance episteme, just as words had the same reality as what they said, and living beings were marked by visible signs, the signs that indicated and measured wealth carried the marks of wealth in themselves. Money, gold and silver coins were themselves precious and desirable. In the classical episteme, however, money no longer had intrinsic value, but instead became the pure representation of wealth. The sign that coins bore was merely the exact and transparent mark of the measure they constituted (OT, 170). Money had the power to represent all possible wealth, it was the instrument through which wealth, as well as the objects of need and desire, could be turned into a universal system of identities and differences. Foucault’s general claim is thus that the classical knowledge ascribed to each thing represented a name and laid out a linguistic grid across the whole of representation. The form of knowledge that named the being of all representation in general was philosophy: the theory of knowledge and the analysis of ideas (OT, 120). The modern episteme. There occurred another a major change at the end of the eighteenth century. Foucault claims that the visible order of things was torn apart: a space opened up behind it that required explanation. Knowledge no longer meant perceiving and representing the visible order in language. It now meant disclosing the invisible basis of living beings in life, of different discourses in the being of language, of the systems of wealth in labour. Language, life and labour become


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questions in their own right. Knowledge meant reconstituting the hidden unities that underlay the dispersion of visible differences. The consequence was the collapse of the classical episteme (OT, 268–9). While the classical thinkers saw knowledge in the form of an ordered table, in the modern age, according to Foucault, it was understood in terms of series and development (OT, 262). The realm of knowledge was no longer one of identities and differences forming one ordered table, but an area made up of organic structures, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function (OT, 218). Objects of knowledge had become susceptible to external influences and subject to time. The historicity of empirical beings had become definitive of knowledge in the modern age. Things were defined not by their place in a timeless system of classification, but by their place in history. This meant that there had to be a whole new conception of order. The form of knowledge, as well as the mode of being of its objects, were fundamentally altered: the modern manner of empiricism had begun (OT, 250). Thus, European culture is inventing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality and history. (OT, 251–2)11

The fundamental change from one episteme to another is again recognizable in the specific changes in the areas of knowledge that Foucault examines. Language evolved with its own density, and therefore also philology. Words no longer simply represented things, but for a word to be able to convey meaning it had to belong to a grammatical totality which, in relation to the word, was primary, fundamental and determining (OT, 281). In biology, living beings were ordered and conceived of on the basis of functional homogeneity, not visible identities and differences. Life was a non-perceptible, purely functional aspect, it had ‘left the tabulated space of order and become wild again’ (OT, 277). In economics, wealth was no longer considered to be distributed over a table as a system of equivalencies, but was organized and accumulated in a temporal sequence. 11 ‘Ainsi, la culture européenne s’invente une profondeur ou` il sera question non plus des identités, des caractères distinctifs, des tables permanentes avec tous leurs chemins et parcours possibles, mais des grandes forces cacheés développées a` partir de leur noyau primitif et inaccessible, mais de l’origine, de la causalité et de l’histoire.’ (MC, 263)

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Foucault’s point, from the perspective of the history of science, is thus to show how modern forms of knowledge originated from a fundamental break in the history of thought and were not simply more advanced developments of previous modes of knowledge. This enables him to show how certain controversies and oppositions, which are traditionally regarded as fundamental by historians, are in fact part of the same epistemic order. Although the birth of biology, economics and philology were part of the same archaeological upheaval, and although the epistemic forms of these disciplines are similar, what distinguishes the epistemic structure from the classical one is that there is no longer a homogenous or uniform basis of knowledge. It is now possible for different empirical sciences to have different knowledge bases. While man as both a subject and an object of knowledge provides the basis for human sciences, natural sciences are grounded in the unproblematized being of their object. According to Foucault, the dispersal of the basis of knowledge in the modern age was tied to the failure of representation. Representation had become problematic, it had became opaque. It could no longer define the common order of things and knowledge. The parallel orders of words and things were diverted and torn apart: there were, on the one hand, ‘things, with their own organic structures, their hidden veins, the space that articulates them, the time that produces them’, and on the other, representation, ‘a purely temporal succession, in which those things address themselves (always partially) to a subjectivity’ (OT, 239– 40). The representing relation had become problematic. Epistemology had taken the central place in philosophy that was previously held by ontology. The questions that haunted philosophy in the modern age were questions about the legitimacy and possibility of representation: what linked things to words and propositions and provided the basis of true knowledge? According to Foucault, Kant was the first to question representation on the basis of its rightful limits, and therefore Kant’s thought marks the threshold of the modern episteme (OT, 242). Kant’s transcendental question about the condition of possibility of knowledge marked the end of the classical episteme and the age of representation. Questioning the rightful limits of representation meant looking beyond the space of representation for its condition of possibility. In Descartes’ thought, ordered knowledge was possible because clear and distinct ideas were in perfect correspondence with things, and this correspondence was created by God. God was the ultimate ground of knowledge, not man.


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Man was simply another being in God’s well-ordered table. His place as the organizer of the representations was never problematised in the classical episteme. According to Foucault, man as an ordering subject thus did not appear in western thought until Kant. In Kant’s thought, man has taken the place of God as the organizer of the world, but he has done this by virtue of being tied to finitude, by being limited. It is the limits of his knowledge that make knowledge of the world possible. Foucault describes the philosophy following Kant up to the present as different efforts to deal with the dissolution of the homogenous field of orderable representations. He distinguishes between two correlative new forms of thought. On the one hand, there is the reformulation of transcendental philosophy in the form of phenomenology: the questioning of the conditions of possibility of representation from the point of view of the experiencing subject. On the other hand, there are the forms of thought in which knowledge is grounded in the mode of being of the object. Foucault writes that in the latter modes of thought, ‘the conditions of possibility of experience are being sought in the conditions of possibility of the object and its existence whereas in transcendental reflection the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience are identified with the conditions of possibility of experience itself’ (OT, 244). Foucault refers here, on the one hand, to positivism: ‘There are philosophies that set themselves no other task than the observation of precisely that which is given to positive knowledge’ (OT, 244). The other possible counterpart to transcendental philosophy of the subject are the various ‘metaphysics of the object’. For these forms of thought there are ‘transcendentals’ – ‘Will’ for Schopenhauer, ‘Life’ for Nietzsche – which form the conditions of possibility of the always partial knowledge of the subject. These ‘metaphysics of the object’, according to Foucault, posit an objective foundation behind experience, with its own rationality that the subject is never able to bring to light completely. The modern episteme thus has become severely fractured. There is no one unified archaeological basis of knowledge.12 12 Foucault argues that there are, in fact, two forms of fracture. Firstly, there is the split between forms of knowledge finding their basis in transcendental subjectivity and those finding a basis in the mode of being of the object. Secondly, because of the emergence of empirical fields of which mere internal analysis of representation can no longer provide an account, there is also a split between the field of a priori sciences, pure, formal sciences, and the domain of a posteri sciences, empirical sciences. These two forms of fracture give rise to the modern problem concerning the relations between the formal field and the transcendental field, the domain of empiricity and the transcendental foundation of knowledge (OT, 248).

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Foucault’s caricatured picture of modern philosophy as following Kant’s thought in different variations is clearly simplistic and problematic. Nevertheless, even if Foucault’s characterization of modern philosophy is not accurate as far as other thinkers are concerned, it is revealing in terms of his own philosophical position. Foucault clearly sees the question of the problematic status of representation – particularly in the form of language – as the main question of modern philosophy, and hence as the question that his thought for its part must address. Although Foucault rejects the solution offered by phenomenology, he moves uneasily between the other two philosophical alternatives that he sketches for us, namely positivism and ‘metaphysics of the object’. Foucault’s attack against phenomenology in OT gains its full force in chapter 9, ‘Man and his Doubles’, but it begins already to take shape in the paragraphs in which he lays out in bold strokes the predicament of all post-Kantian philosophy. The epistemological conjuncture in which phenomenology is born, in a sense, already seals its fate. Foucault’s critical attack advances on multiple fronts. He seeks to situate phenomenology historically, and thus to show how the self-understanding implied in its fundamental project is only one necessary moment in modern thought. The questions it considers as fundamental to philosophy are those that were made possible and necessary by the modern episteme. This episteme not only has given birth to the phenomenological enterprise as a whole, but has also made possible the modes of experience of the phenomenologist, which serve as the starting point of his inquiries. Phenomenology becomes Foucault’s key example of a problematic form of thought made possible by the modern episteme and the birth of the empirical sciences of man. I will return to Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology in detail in the next chapter. To pave the way for this, I will now explicate Foucault’s controversial and often misunderstood concept of ‘man’. For Foucault, man marks a form of thought that the modern episteme has given birth to, and the death of man is the mark of the beginning of the next one.

The birth and death of man For Foucault, man refers to a human being, but a human being only insofar as he is understood in a certain way, in a way that was not possible in the classical age, for example. Man is a being who is the source of


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knowledge of the world, and at the same a being in the world that can be known. Foucault calls man an empirico-transcendental doublet. Man, finite, yet a basis of all knowledge, is an invention of modern thought. In his double aspect, man is at the same time a fact among other facts to be studied empirically, and he is the transcendental ground of all knowledge. He is formed by a complex network of background practices that he can never fully understand, and yet he is the possibility of their elucidation. He is a product of a history whose beginning he cannot reach and at the same time he is the writer of that history. Foucault claims that the new conceptual space in which the human sciences were formed in the modern age took shape in the figure of man: In classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizes himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the ‘representation in the form of the table’ – he is never to be found in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist – anymore than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language. He is quite a recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with his own hands less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he could finally be known. (OT, 308)13

Foucault thus claims that our understanding of the human being as an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet called man’ is by no means necessary or unproblematic. Although taken for granted by us to the extent that it is difficult for us to conceive of any other ways of thinking about the relationships between the subject, knowledge and history, Foucault diagnoses man as the problem of the modern episteme. According 13 ‘Dans la pensée classique, celui pour qui la représentation existe, et qui se représente lui-même en elle, s’y reconnaissant pour image ou reflet, celui qui noue tous les fils entrecroisés de la “représentation en tableau”, – celui-là ne s’y trouve jamais présent lui-même. Avant la fin du XVIIIe siècle, l’homme n’existait pas. Non plus que la puissance de la vie, la fécondité du travail, ou l’épaisseur historique du langage. C’est une toute récente créature que la démiurgie du savoir a fabriquée de ses mains, il y a moins de deux cents ans: mais il a si vite vieilli, qu’on a imaginé facilement qu’il avait attendu dans l’ombre pendant des millénaires le moment d’illumination ou` il serait enfin connu.’ (MC, 319)

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to Foucault, modern thought has been a series of attempts to overcome the paradox inherent in the figure of man. It has been searching for a discourse whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both; a discourse that would make it possible to analyze man as a subject, that is, as a locus of knowledge which has been empirically acquired but referred back as closely as possible to what makes it possible, and as a pure form immediately present to those contents. (OT, 320–1)14

According to Foucault, the first attempt by post-Kantian thinkers to overcome the paradox of man was through reductionism: if they reduced man to his empirical side they could not account for the possibility of knowledge, and if they emphasized the transcendental side, they could not claim scientific objectivity or account for the contingency of man’s empirical nature. Foucault associates this stage with the positivism of Comte and the thought of Hegel and Marx. Foucault places phenomenology within the next stage in which the problem was stabilized, that is, in the coexistence of empiricism and transcendentalism in an ambiguous balance. His discussion of the three doubles of man – empirical/transcendental, the cogito/the unthought, the retreat/the return of origin – is an explicit criticism of phenomenology. He engages with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger respectively. I will focus in the following chapter on Foucault’s criticism of Husserl, although Foucault’s argument follows the same structure in connection with all of the three doubles: a mode of thought that centres on man – a human being in the order of positivity and in the order of a foundation, as both the source of meaning as well as the outcome of the natural world, human culture and history – necessarily remains ambiguous and circular. It superimposes the transcendental and the empirical dimensions of man.15 Phenomenology can only show how ‘what is given 14 ‘un discours dont la tension maintiendrait séparés l’empirique et le transcendantal, en permettant pourtant de viser l’un et l’autre en même temps; un discours qui permettrait d’analyser l’homme comme sujet, c’est-à-dire comme lieu de connaissances empiriques mais ramenées au plus près de ce qui les rend possibles, et comme forme pure immédiatement présente a` ces contenus’ (MC, 331). 15 Beatrice Han (1998/2002) argues that Foucault’s critique of phenomenology and of all post-Kantian theory, which is denounced as being imprisoned by the ‘analytic of finitude’ in OT, applies to Kant himself. According to Han, Foucault’s presentation of Kant’s position in OT is ambivalent. On the one hand, Foucault credits Kant with being the


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in experience and what renders experience possible correspond to one another in an endless oscillation’ (OT, 336). Foucault’s bold aim is thus to show how, after a series of convoluted attempts to deal with the paradoxical predicament of the modern episteme, modern thought has arrived at a dead end. ‘And so we find philosophy falling asleep once more . . . this time not the sleep of Dogmatism but that of Anthropology’ (OT, 341). Foucault’s judgement of philosophy in general – but particularly of phenomenology – is cutting: phenomenology is ‘a sleep – so deep that thought experiences it paradoxically as vigilance, so wholly does it confuse the circularity of a dogmatism folded over upon itself in order to find a basis for itself with the agility of a radical philosophical thought’ (OT, 341). Hence, the grand aim of Foucault in OT is to show, first, how all previous philosophy has erred and then to give it new direction and impetus. Just as Nietzsche heralded the death of God as promising philosophical thought a new beginning, Foucault clearly and consciously imitates him in heralding the death of man as an event important enough to inaugurate a new episteme: ‘The void left by man’s disappearance’ is ‘the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think’ (OT, 342). initiator of the discursive space in which Modernity deploys itself by critically questioning the conditions of possibility of representation, and consequently of all possible knowledge. On the other hand, for Foucault, Kant was the insurmountable limit of Modern thought because his thought initiated the monopolization of the field of possible knowledge by ‘man’ and his doubles. The critical question of the conditions of possibility of true knowledge was, for Kant, intrinsically connected to the introduction of the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental. Han reads Foucault’s unpublished complementary doctoral thesis, which was a commentary to his translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and argues that in this text Foucault’s aim was to show how the strict separation between the transcendental and the empirical put forward by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason undergoes an inflection in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View symbolized by the recentring of Kant’s triple interrogation on to the question ‘What is man?’ This displacement is problematic for Foucault, as it makes the contents of empirical experience work as their own condition of possibility; moreover it seeks within human finitude the elements of a transcendental determination henceforth made impossible in principle by the anthropological confusion between the empirical and the a priori (Han 1998/2002, 3). Han writes: ‘Commentary permits us to establish that it is not the “Kantian critique” in its totality that marks “the threshold of our Modernity”, but that the line of division passes within Kant’s work itself, separating the original formulations of the transcendental theme from its later versions’ (35). This means that Foucault’s work is not only a critical reaction to phenomenology, but also and more profoundly to Kant. According to Han, it is the identification of the Kantian aporia that provided Foucault with a guide from which he was able to build a contrario an original method and conceptual apparatus, and that allowed him to reopen the critical question of the conditions of possibility of knowledge while attempting to throw off the last anthropological constraints (Han 1998/2002, 4–5).

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The being of language The new possibilities for thinking opened up by the death of man are connected with a new understanding of language. Foucault argues that in Western culture the being of man and the being of language have never, at any time, been able to coexist together as a basis of knowledge, and that their incompatibility has been one of the fundamental features of our thought. This forms the root of ‘the most important philosophical choice of our period’ (OT, 339). Foucault suggests that it is in the analysis of language as something more fundamental than man that the new possibilities for thought lie. The birth of man was possible because of the collapse of the classical discourse, but now we are again on the brink of a new episteme. Man’s being is weighed down by ‘the reappearance of language in the enigma of its unity and its being as by a threat’ (OT, 338). Although the modern episteme detached language from representation, which meant that it could appear as a philosophical problem in its own right, Foucault suggests that philosophical reflection held itself aloof for a long time because of the dispersion of language, because of its multiple modes of being (OT, 304).16 According to Foucault, language did not appear in the field of thought directly and in its own right until the end of the nineteenth century with Nietzsche. Now, however, Foucault claims that it is the most important question confronting us. ‘The whole curiosity of our thought now resides in the question: what is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude?’ (OT, 306). This question heralds a new episteme (OT, 307). Foucault suggests a solution to the paradoxes of the modern episteme in an inquiry based on the functioning of language. 16 While language was posited and reflected upon only in the form of an analysis of representation in the classical age, in the modern age it appeared as a question in its own right. Language itself had become an object of science, instead of having the sole right to represent the natural order of things. According to Foucault, this ‘demotion of language’ was compensated for in three ways. Firstly, because language was not only an object of science but also the necessary medium for any scientific knowledge, there arose the aim of neutralizing scientific language so that it could mirror the world as exactly as possible. Foucault calls this the positivist dream of a purified, logical language (OT, 296–7). Secondly, because language had lost its transparency and resumed instead the enigmatic density it possessed at the time of the Renaissance, this resulted in the revival of the techniques of exegesis (OT, 298). And thirdly, there was the birth of literature in the modern sense. According to Foucault, modernist writing is not about creating beauty or pleasing our senses. What it lays before us is the enigmatic being of language, the bare existence of words with their indefinite meanings (OT, 300).


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Foucault’s position is thus nominalist rather than phenomenological in the sense that the historical a priori ordering scientific practices is discursively constituted.17 By studying how discourses have been ordered at different historical times, he seeks to reveal or unveil the ontological order of things assumed to exist independently of them. Scientific discourses always presuppose certain historically varying things as existing in the world, and this implicit, presupposed ontology grounds the explicit order of things. However, not only do scientific discourses rely on certain implicit ontological assumptions, they also explicitly create them, at least in the realm of human sciences. This reading of the ontological order not as the transcendental ground of scientific discourses but as their implicit effect – presupposed but by that same movement also created by them – is explicit in certain passages in OT, such as: If one wishes to undertake an archaeological analysis of knowledge itself . . . One must reconstitute the general system of thought, whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or a problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge. (OT, 75)18

Hence, one can say that Foucault considers the whole network of knowledge, in its positivity, also to constitute its own ‘unconscious’, the historical a priori that makes certain problems and ways of questioning possible. Thus, he does not claim that there exists two separate ontological levels, the network of scientific discourses, on the one hand, and the conditions that form it, on the other. There is only the network of discourses, which can, however, be retrospectively analyzed on different levels. Archaeological analysis reveals the structures of this network that have remained unconscious to its practitioners while conditioning their thought and experience. The nominalist idea that discourse systematically forms the objects of which it speaks, as well as the ontological order on the basis of which they become possible, is made more explicit in the book that followed 17 For more on Foucault’s nominalism, see e.g. Flynn 1994, Rouse 1994. 18 ‘Si on veut entreprendre une analyse archéologique du savoir lui-même . . . Il faut reconstituer le système général de pensée dont le réseau, en sa positivité, rend possible un jeu d’opinions simultanées et apparemment contradictoires. C’est ce réseau qui définit les conditions de possibilité d’un débat ou d’un problème, c’est lui qui est porteur de l’historicité du savoir.’ (MC, 89)

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OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge.19 Foucault sets out to present a method for studying discourse; a rule-governed practice of making scientific statements (AK, 138).20 Discursive practices constitute their objects of study through rule-governed transformations, they do not simply seek to articulate the already existing and ordered things themselves. Discourse is not reducible to language and speech, but must rather be understood as a formative practice that constitutes its objects and also circumscribes its subjects in creating all feasible positions from which it is possible to make scientific statements. Foucault now writes about the task of archaeology: A task that consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe. (AK, 49)21 19 Beatrice Han (1998, 87–93) argues that Foucault’s nominalist position is not consistent in OT, and that there is a major shift between OT and AK. The historical a priori is defined in OT as an implicit relationship between words and things, or between being and language: the conditions of possibility of forms of knowledge consist of different relationships between the being of signs and being in general. Foucault considered it his task to chart the different forms of this relationship between words and things through history, from the Renaissance to modernity. According to Han, his form of analysis already makes it clear that he must still have presupposed an ontology of ‘words’ and ‘things’ in OT – an ontology of two separate and autonomous modes of existence – to be able to analyze the changing forms of their relationship. Hence, although he retrospectively claimed that his book dealt with neither words nor things, but rather with ‘objects’, which are discursively constituted, his position becomes consistently nominalist only after OT. 20 Foucault acknowledged in AK that he used the notion of discourse in at least three different ways: (1) as a general domain of all statements, (2) as an individualizable group of statements, (3) as a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements (AK, 80). I will restrict myself to the last meaning, which, I argue, is central to understanding Foucault’s philosophical position. For more on Foucault’s concept of discourse see e.g. Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, Frank 1989/1992. 21 ‘Tâche qui consiste a` ne pas – a` ne plus – traiter les discours comme des ensembles de signes (d’éléments signifiants renvoyant a` des contenus ou a` des représentations) mais comme des practiques qui forment systématiquement les objets dont ils parlent. Certes, les discours sont faits de signes; mais ce qu’ils font, c’est plus que d’utiliser ces signes pour désigner des choses. C’est ce plus, qui les rend irréductibles a` la langue et a` la parole. C’est ce “plus” qu’il faut faire apparaˆıtre et qu’il faut décrire.’ (AS, 66–7)


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In AK, Foucault also reformulates his mode of questioning in order to emphasize the idea that his aim is not to reveal a set of transcendental rules or conditions that are ontologically separate from the empirical practices. Rather, the analysis of discourse aims to isolate ‘the conditions of existence’ of statements as opposed to the conditions of possibility (AK, 28). These conditions of existence determine what actually exists and thus, in principle, imply a finite group of statements. Foucault thus argues that his analysis of scientific discourses moves on a solely descriptive plane. He does not concern himself with possible statements or with the conditions of possibility for making statements, but rather focuses on actual statements. Foucault refers to disciplinary unities such as natural history by using a broader term discursive formation. He claims that the unity of a discursive formation is not defined by a unity of any of its elements, for example, its objects or themes, but rather by the rules that govern the formation of its statements and objects. His major premise in AK is thus that discursive formations are identifiable as rule-governed systems. The aim of an archaeology of scientific discourse is to identify these rules of formation in their historical existence. Such rules are the historical a priori in AK: they are regulative and formative but historical. They provide ‘an a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience, but an a priori of a history that is given, since it is of things actually said’ (AK, 127). The rules governing discursive formations are not abstract laws or formal principles, but refer to the ways in which the statements are actually related. ‘The regularity of statements is defined by the discursive formation itself. The fact of its belonging to a discursive formation and the laws that govern it are one and the same thing’ (AK, 116). It is possible to abstract the rules from the practices only retrospectively, as a result of an archaeological analysis. Hence, the rules are not transcendental in the sense that they form the condition of all possible statements. For Foucault, there is nothing more than the particular and limited amount of statements and the relations that exist between them. The rules of discursive formation are simply the description of these existing relations (AK, 116–17). They determine what, in a particular historical situation, in a particular field, did count as scientific objects, what sort of things were said about them, who said them, and what concepts were used in the saying (AK, 71). While, in OT, Foucault presented archaeology as a modification of

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transcendental philosophy in the sense that his aim was to isolate the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge for an epoch, in AK he restricts his analysis more strictly to particular discursive fields and their conditions of existence. I will show in the following chapter how the central role Foucault gives to language, as well as the methodological paths that he explores in studying it, can be read as reactions to the problems arising out of phenomenology. I take the main motivation in Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology in OT to be to reveal the problems involved in grounding knowledge on the being of man and to press upon us the need to find a new direction for philosophical inquiry in the study of language. By comparing Foucault’s archaeology to Husserl’s phenomenology, especially to the formulations Husserl gives his project in his late work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, I hope to bring to light both the common forms of questioning as well as the profound methodological differences. The philosophical laughter that inaugurates OT reappears later on in the book as laughter directed at phenomenology as a prime example of a thought centred on man. Philosophical laughter is what Foucault thinks is needed in order to shatter ‘the familiar landmarks’, the domineering forms of thought, and to inaugurate a new mode of thinking. However, he must have been aware of the vulnerability of his own philosophical position, since his philosophical laughter could only ever be silent laughter. He ends his criticism of phenomenology in chapter 9 by writing: Anthropology constitutes perhaps the fundamental arrangement that has governed and controlled the path of philosophical thought from Kant until our own day. This arrangement is essential, since it forms part of our history; but it is disintegrating before our eyes, since we are beginning to recognize and to denounce in it, in a critical mode, both a forgetfulness of the opening that made it possible and a stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of thought. To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is


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man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one. (OT, 342–3)22 22 ‘L’Anthropologie constitue peut-être la disposition fondamentale qui a commandé et conduit la pensée philosophique depuis Kant jusqu’à nous. Cette disposition, elle est essentielle puisqu’elle fait partie de notre histoire; mais elle est en train de se dissocier sous nos yeux puisque nous commen¸cons a` y reconnaˆıtre, a` y dénoncer sur un mode critique, a` la fois l’oubli de l’ouverture qui l’a rendue possible, et l’obstacle têtu qui s’oppose obstinément a` une pensée prochaine. A tous ceux qui veulent encore parler de l’homme, de son règne ou de sa libération, a` tous ceux qui posent encore des questions sur ce qu’est l’homme en son essence, a` tous ceux qui veulent partir de lui pour avoir accès a` la vérité, a` tous ceux en revanche qui reconduisent toute connaissance aux vérité de l’homme lui-même, a` tous ceux qui ne veulent pas formaliser sans anthropologiser, qui ne veulent pas mythologiser sans démystifier, qui ne veulent pas penser sans penser aussitôt que c’est l’homme qui pense, a` toutes ces formes de réflexion gauches et gauchies, on ne peut qu’opposer un rire philosophique – c’est-à-dire, pour une certaine part, silencieux.’ (MC, 353–4)

2 T H E F O U C A U LT I A N FA I L U R E OF PHENOMENOLOGY

Gérard Lebrun (1989/1992) suggests in an article on Foucault’s archaeology that it is worth rereading The Order of Things, at least once, as an anti-Krisis. To present such a reading will be my aim in this chapter. Lebrun points out that The Order of Things and Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences bear many rhetorical, thematic and structural affinities. Both Foucault and Husserl engage in a constructive rereading of the history of philosophy, both prepare their main arguments about modern and contemporary thought with careful analyses of seventeenthcentury thought, and both set as their task the elucidation of the fundamental conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge. Some of Foucault’s key concepts in OT, such as ‘historical a priori’ originate from Husserl (Lebrun 1989/1992, 32).1 Yet despite the similarity of their tasks, themes and vocabulary, the two thinkers end up with fundamentally different understandings of the historicity of reason, the conditions of possibility of knowledge, and the development of the sciences. OT sets out to ultimately reveal the failure of phenomenology and to chart a way out the impasse. Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology in OT can be divided roughly into two different types. I will present his discussion here according to this twofold schema, although the issues in question necessarily overlap. Firstly, there is implicit criticism of the phenomenological understanding of the philosophy of science as presented in Husserl’s Crisis. By laying out a very different understanding of the development of science in 1 Husserl explicates the notion of historical a priori in his essay ‘The Origin of Geometry’. Although Foucault’s historical a priori originates from there, it gets a very different meaning in Foucault’s thought. I will return to the difference between Husserl’s and Foucault’s notions at the end of this chapter.

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t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y

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OT, Foucault implicitly challenges Husserl’s method and central ideas about the history of thought. In his introduction to the English translation, he presents the method of the book specifically as an alternative and antidote to phenomenology. If there is one approach that I reject, however, it is that (one might call it broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity – which in short, leads, to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to the theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. (OT, xiv)

Secondly, there is explicit criticism of phenomenology in the text of OT, in chapter 9, which focuses on the paradox of man. Because the chapter is notoriously cryptic, to be able to follow Foucault’s arguments one cannot simply lay them out for evaluation: they must first be rebuilt from fairly sparse and ambiguous references. I will therefore explicate what I take to be the main points in Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology in relation to Husserl’s thought.

The history of science Foucault’s engagement with Husserl in OT takes issue mainly with Husserl’s late work, particularly The Crisis of European Sciences. By the time of he had written The Crisis, Husserl had been forced to acknowledge that the ‘Cartesian way’ into phenomenology was misleading. One reason for this was that there were fundamental structures of the world which the Cartesian way overlooked, or presupposed unproblematically, in its explication of the ego. In The Crisis, therefore, Husserl develops the important concept of the life-world. This refers to a horizon of meaning that is always ‘already there’ for the experiencing subject before any efforts are made to articulate or understand it. The life-world constitutes the universal field of all actual and possible experiences. The life-world, for us who wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world. (Husserl 1954/1970a, 142)2

Husserl argues that the life-world forms the basis of all human praxis, including all scientific praxis. All theories of science – not just empirical sciences but also the a priori sciences, such as mathematics and logic – derive their meaning and grounds for validity from the life-world. They presuppose the existence of a directly experienceable world, and set themselves the task of making this ‘prescientific and subjective knowledge’ into perfect and objective knowledge. In the process, however, they lose sight of this ground on which their theoretical formulations rest and can only rest. The ‘objective-true world’ that results from the theoretical activity of the sciences and of the scientists is a construction of something that, in principle, is not perceivable or experienceable in its own being. Husserl writes: The contrast between the subjectivity of the life-world and the ‘objective’, the ‘true’ world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical substruction, the substruction of something that is in principle not perceivable, in principle not experienceable in its own proper being, whereas the subjective, in the life-world, is distinguished in all respects precisely by its being actually experienceable. (Husserl 1954/1970a, 127)3

The life-world is, by its being, experienceable and is therefore the realm of original self-evidences. It consists of what is intuitable in principle (Husserl 1954/1970a, 127). It is thus both the reference point of meaning for the theories of objective science as well the concrete unity that

2 ‘Die Lebenswelt ist . . . fu¨ r uns, die in ihr wach Lebenden, immer schon da, im voraus fu¨ r uns seiend, “Boden” fu¨ r alle, ob theoretische oder außertheoretische Praxis. Die Welt ist uns, den wachen, den immerzu irgendwie praktisch interessierten Subjekten, nicht gelegentlich einmal, sondern immer und notwendig als Universalfeld aller wirklichen und möglichen Praxis, als Horizont vorgegeben. Leben ist ständig In-Weltgewißheit-leben.’ (Husserl 1954/1962, 145) 3 ‘Der Kontrast zwischen dem Subjektiven der Lebenswelt und der ‘objektiven’, der ‘wahren’ Welt liegt nun darin, daß die letztere eine theoretisch-logische Substruktion ist, die eines prinzipiell nicht Wahrnehmbaren, prinzipiell in seinem eigenen Selbstsein nicht Erfarhrbaren, während das lebensweltlich Subjektive in allem und jedem eben durch seine wirkliche Erfahrbarkeit ausgezeichnet ist’ (Husserl 1954/1976, 130).


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encompasses them. Objective science is one kind of human praxis and is therefore itself also part of the life-world. The task that Husserl sets for his ‘new science’ in The Crisis is to break ‘the scholastic dominance of objective-scientific ways of thinking’ and to inquire into the life-world as the only possible ground for the sciences and their claims to objective validity (Husserl 1954/1970a, 129). The life-world must become a subject of investigation in its own right. This cannot mean a simple description of our surroundings, however. Husserl clearly sees the problems involved in a project aimed at elucidating something that is both the basis of objective validity or the ‘scientifically true’ world, as well as what encompasses it and all theoretical pursuits, including its own. He asks: ‘How are we to do justice systematically – that is, with appropriate scientific discipline – to the all encompassing, so paradoxically demanding, manner of being of the life-world?’ (131). Husserl claims to achieve this goal by performing a series of inquiries, starting from the pregiven life-world and moving back to its constitution in transcendental subjectivity, and ultimately in transcendental intersubjectivity. The first step is the epoche of objective science resulting in the disclosure of the life-world. This means that all our objectivescientific opinions and cognitions are put out of play and ‘one can place oneself completely upon the ground of this straightforwardly intuited world’ (123). After suspending all our scientific beliefs about the world, we come to realize that the life-world is not merely subjective and relative, but that it has a general structure. Prescientifically, the world is already a spatio-temporal unity containing bodies with causal relations between them. The structures of the life-world, however, are now intuited directly and are not theoretical abstractions. To elucidate these invariant structures of the life-world would be the task of life-world ontology. However, the phenomenologist must not be content with staying at this level, which still remains the level of the natural attitude, but should proceed to ask how the life-world is pregiven to us: what is its manner of being and what makes it a universal basis for any sort of knowledge (146). We notice thereby that the first step which seemed to help at the beginning, that epoche through which we freed ourselves from all the objective sciences as grounds of validity, by no means suffices. In carrying out this epoche, we obviously continue to stand on the ground of the world; it

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m is now reduced to the life-world which is valid for us prescientifically; it is just that we may use no sort of knowledge arising from the sciences as premises, and we may take the sciences into consideration only as historical facts, taking no position of our own on their truth. (Husserl 1954/1970a, 147)4

It then becomes necessary to accomplish a second epoche the ‘transcendental epoche’, which reveals the transcendental correlation between the world and world consciousness.5 This is accomplished by the ‘withholding of natural, naive validities and in general of validities already in effect’ (135). By placing himself above his practical and natural interests, and even his own natural being, the philosopher arrives at an attitude that is ‘above the pregivenness of the validity of the world’ (150) and is therefore capable of discovering its mode of giveness in the constituting consciousness. After all natural interests have been put out of play, the world appears ‘purely as a correlate of the subjectivity which gives it ontic meaning, through whose validities the world is at all’ (152). The life-world is studied as multiplicities of manners of appearing, which refer back to the ego-pole as constitutive of their unity. The general structure of all experience, as well as the manner of being of the world, are comprehended under three headings: the ego-pole, the subjective as appearance tied together synthetically, and the object-poles (171). Foucault’s critique of phenomenology in OT questions the possibility of accomplishing either one of the steps or epoches that Husserl presents in The Crisis. While Foucault explicitly attacks the second in his discussion of the double of man, ‘the cogito and the unthought’,

4 ‘Wir bemerken dabei, daß jener nächste Schritt, der anfangs zu helfen schien, jene Epoché, in der wir uns aller objektiven Wissenschaften als Geltungsbodens entheben mußten, keineswegs schon genugt. ¨ Im Vollzug dieser Epoché stehen wir offenbar noch weiter auf dem Boden der Welt; sie ist nun reduziert auf die vorwissenschaftlich uns geltende Lebenswelt, nur daß wir keinerlei Wissen, das aus den Wissenschaften herstammt, als Prämisse verwenden und die Wissenschaften nur in der Weise historischer Tatsachen, ohne eigene Stellungnahme zu ihrer Wahrheit, in Rechnung ziehen durfen.’ ¨ (Husserl 1954/1962, 150) 5 Recent studies in phenomenology argue that reduction is not strictly speaking something that is accomplished. It is not a planned procedure or an expected result, but rather, unanticipated experience. Juha Himanka (1999) emphasizes that reduction allows us to move from the habitual to the unforeseen and the unexpected: after reduction we are able to look as if for the first time. On this kind of interpretation of reduction, see e.g. Waldenfels 1993, Himanka 1999 and 2001, Heinämaa 2002. See also already Fink 1933, Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994.


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I will show here that the method and overall understanding of the history of science present in OT also makes it impossible to accomplish the first epoche. Husserl’s aim in The Crisis, in concise terms, is to show how the lifeworld is the starting point for all scientific abstractions and theories. All scientific truths, even the detailed calculations of observed phenomena given by complicated measuring devices, must derive their ground of validity from the life-world, which alone is directly experienceable. Foucault, on the other hand, understands scientific development as irreversibly removed from direct intuition and experience. In order to explicate the difference between Foucault’s and Husserl’s understanding of the philosophy of science, I will argue here that many of the central ideas that Foucault inherits from Gaston Bachelard’s and George Canguilhem’s thought are illuminative.6 A third important influence would be Jean Cavaillès, whose posthumously published essays contain an explicit critique of Husserlian phenomenology and a call to abandon the subject and to develop in its place a philosophy of the concept.7 6 Gary Gutting (1989) explicates the relationship between Foucault’s archaeology and Canguilhem’s and Bachelard’s philosophies of science in his book Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Gutting argues that Foucault’s method in OT is primarily an application and an extension of Canguilhem’s history of concepts, as well as a refinement of Bachelard’s understanding of the historicity of scientific conceptions. Gutting (1989, 54, 218–20) also points out, however, that Foucault’s archaeology is not only a continuation of Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s work. His archaeology is an original method for the study of history of science, with its own distinctive topics and concerns. Even in areas where Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s influence is particularly strong, Foucault extends, adapts and transforms their ideas and methods. As a historian of biology, Canguilhem focused on concepts that were in fact deployed by the biologists whose work he was analyzing. Foucault, however, deals not only with first-order biological concepts, but also with concepts that define the conditions of possibility for formulating such concepts. According to Gutting, Foucault’s extension of the history of concepts thus undermines the privileged role of disciplines in the history of thought and introduces a level of conceptual history that is more fundamental than that of the first-order concepts of scientific disciplines. While Foucault’s work follows Bachelard in emphasizing the epistemological factors working below the level of first-order concepts as well as the consciousness of the scientists, unlike Bachelard, Foucault does not see this level as entirely negative. For Bachelard, such factors are residues of outdated modes of thought that obstruct the path of scientific development. For Foucault, this deep epistemological level has positive significance: it embodies the conditions that make possible the formation of new concepts. Since my principal topic is Foucault’s relationship to phenomenology and not to French philosophy of science, my presentation of Foucault’s relationship to Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s thought relies considerably on Gutting’s work. 7 See Cavaillès 1947/1994, 473–560.

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Bachelard’s philosophy of science as a critique of phenomenology. Bachelard’s work reiterates the central idea in Husserl’s thought, that scientific entities and theories are essentially historical, and that the development of science is best understood by reflecting on its concrete historical employment. However, while The Crisis strongly argues that sciences have a derivative status in relation to philosophy understood as rigorous science, Bachelard claims that the achievements of science in fact create and must create philosophical understanding (Bachelard 1934/1949, 3–5; Gutting 1989, 13–14).8 In his book Le nouvel esprit scientifique (1934/1949), Bachelard sought to show how modern physics radically altered our metaphysical understanding of the nature of reality: of matter, movement, space and time. He further argued that it implied a non-Cartesian epistemology, which condemns the doctrine that knowledge must proceed from simple natures that can be known directly to more complex ones. Modern physics reveals that there are no simple ideas or essences which could be understood in themselves, and which would serve as a basis for further deductions. All simple ideas or essences are in fact always derivative and can initially only be understood as parts of complex systems of thought and experience (Bachelard 1934/1949, 142–8). Modern science thus forces us to rethink our ideas about direct intuition by questioning its primacy as well as its reliability. The intuitive clarity of scientific claims is achieved in a discursive manner, by progressive clarification resulting from varying examples, and by putting theoretical notions to work (Bachelard 1934/1949, 145).9 Bachelard’s notion of the epistemic break characterizes the way in which scientific knowledge splits off from, and even contradicts, common-sense experiences and beliefs. It places objects of experience into new categories that reveal properties and relations not available to ordinary sense perception. Bachelard rejects any view that makes the 8 Gary Gutting (1989, 23) argues that it is important to note that Bachelard’s subordination of philosophy to science is not an instance of positivistic scientism. Bachelard did not consider philosophy itself to be a part of science. Philosophy is a reflection of the sciences, and its methods and results do not share the empirical character of scientific disciplines. See also Canguilhem 1994a, 33, 43. 9 In his book La philosophie de non (1940/1949) Bachelard also argued against the idea of a unitary epistemological base underlying modern science. Reason, rather, must obey science: it must not privilege immediate experience, but rather balance it with scientific experience, which is more richly structured (144). Paul Rabinow (1994, 13) elaborates on this by writing that Bachelard’s aim was not to attack science, but rather to show it in action in its specificity and plurality.


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contents of ordinary, subjective experience more real than scientific objects (Gutting 1989, 14–19). According to him, ‘Objective research pursued in a laboratory commits us to progressive objectification that gives reality at the same time to both a new experience and a new form of thought’ (Bachelard 1934/1949, 172). Foucault’s aim of searching for the conditions of possibility for scientific modes of knowledge in the structuring of the discourses themselves follows Bachelard’s views in this respect. Foucault’s fundamental idea of the episteme – the development of the sciences in accordance with a historical a priori that unites, regulates and structures them – is in direct opposition to Husserl’s argument that the lived experience is the indispensable starting point and condition of possibility of scientific discourse. By studying scientific discourses themselves, Foucault claims to be able to reveal the ordering codes that condition, regulate and structure even the ordinary, non-scientific experiences of an age. Even though his explicit criticism in OT is mainly targeted at the effectiveness of Husserl’s second, transcendental epoche, Foucault’s method and the philosophical implications of the book refute Husserl’s first epoche, the reduction to the life-world. According to Husserl, the first epoche reveals to us a universal a priori belonging purely to the life-world. From this it is possible to proceed to life-world ontology, which explicates the universal structures of the life-world, as well as to transcendental inquiry into the constituting function of subjectivity. What we need first is ‘a separation in principle of the latter (universal life-world a priori) from the objective a priori, which is always immediately substituted for it. It is this separation that is effected by the first epoche of all objective sciences’ (Husserl 1954/1970a, 140). Husserl thus holds that science always involves some kind of a rupture with prescientific experience, while at the same time it can only find its basis in the life-world. The view of scientific discourse that Foucault advocates in OT, on the other hand, questions the possibility of separating what belongs purely to the life-world and what is a second-order idealization of scientific discourse. Science constructs ordinary experiences and blurs the line separating them from its own theoretically informed experiences. Scientific idealizations become part of the ordinary life-world. Foucault’s notion of the episteme covers, in Husserl’s terms, both the life-world and the objective world of science. A change in episteme means a change in the perceptual, practical and theoretical grids: the mode of being of words, as well as of objects, changes. Husserl

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acknowledges the historical dimension of the sciences and considers the relation between the prescientific life-world and the scientific world as dynamic.10 Nevertheless, even if their relation changes historically, reduction to the life-world presupposes that this distinction is in place, that we know what belongs to the scientific world and what belongs to the life-world. For Foucault, on the other hand, even everyday perceptions are structured according to the changing historical a prioris of scientific discourse, and hence the distinction becomes impossible in principle. He would thus agree with Husserl that there is a more fundamental level underneath the level of particular scientific theories, but he would claim that this level is not that of life-world experiences. The fundamental, archaeological level structures not only the order of discourses but also the subjective experiences of this order. Foucault also searches for the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge as well as of life-world experiences, but rather than turning to the constituting transcendental subjectivity, he argues that these conditions are essentially non-subjective and anonymous, and that they can be made explicit only in regard to the past by the historical analysis of scientific discourses. Moreover, contrary to Husserl’s aim in The Crisis, Foucault aims to show in OT that the history of science is not a continuous and unified development of rationality. This idea is also central to Bachelard’s work. Bachelard argues that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the history of science, only various histories of different regions of scientific work. Philosophy thus cannot uncover one single, unified conception of rationality from reflections on the history of science, it can only find various regions of rationality (Gutting 1989, 14).11 Bachelard also emphasizes sharp breaks in the history of science and in the conception of reason, and claims that for a phenomenologist there can be no sharp breaks, because scientific discoveries are always additions of truth about the objects given to ordinary experience. For a phenomenologist, science rests on the indispensable and fundamental perceptual framework and proceeds from it (Gutting 1989, 27). Foucault’s presentation of the history of western thought in distinct epistemes in which the epistemic breaks make the central questions 10 See, in particular, the readings of Husserl that emphasize the importance of intersubjectivity and his phenomenology of the social world, most notably Steinbock 1995 and Zahavi 1996/2001. 11 See also Machado 1989/1992, 4.


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of one episteme incompatible with, sometimes even totally incomprehensible in the next, is thus an implicit criticism of Husserl’s method of reading the history of philosophy and science in The Crisis. Husserl begins his search for the origins of the contemporary crisis in philosophy and science with a critical study of Galileo’s mathematization of nature. Husserl shows how the mathematical idea of nature was given priority in philosophy, and how this led to the fatal separation of philosophy and the natural sciences and to the forgetting of the life-world as ‘the meaning-fundament of natural science’ (Husserl 1954/1970a, 48). After arriving at the discovery of transcendental subjectivity, first Descartes, and later Kant, made the mistake of objectifying it and therefore postponed the forging of a true basis of science. In the light of Foucault’s history of thought, it would be pointless to blame Galileo for leading western thought in the wrong direction, or Descartes and Kant for failing to discover transcendental subjectivity. Not only do epistemic breaks make the questions of one episteme impossible in another, but Foucault’s method of writing the history of thought in terms of concepts rather than individual discoveries also argues against Husserl’s approach. Canguilhem’s influence on Foucault’s archaeology is apparent here. Canguilhem’s history of science as a critique of phenomenology. Canguilhem’s aim as a historian of science was to write histories of concepts, particularly the concepts of life sciences such as reflex, cell and the immune system. According to Canguilhem, concepts regulate the production of forms of knowledge: ‘The history of science should be a history of the formation, deformation and rectification of scientific concepts’ (Canguilhem 1994a, 110). He discusses the origins of cell theory to argue that theories never proceed from simple facts. Cell theory was not formulated because cells could be observed with the new aid of a microscope; the first premise of cell theory was not that living things are composed of cells, but that all living things consist of nothing but cells. Such an assertion could not be justified by observations made through a microscope (Canguilhem 1994a, 161). Canguilhem shows how ideas and concepts borrowed from political theory in fact dominated debates in early cell theory; whether cells are elementary, independent organisms akin to the individuals of liberalism, or simply parts of a whole unable to exist independently. While facts act as a stimulus to theory, they neither engender the concepts that provide the theories with their

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internal coherence, nor initiate the intellectual ambitions that theories pursue (177). Another example that Canguilhem gives to illustrate the fundamental role of concepts in the development of science is Claude Bernard’s discovery in 1855 of the concept of ‘internal secretion’, a concept that ‘only a few years earlier would have been taken as a contradiction in terms, an impossibility as unthinkable as a square circle’ (Canguilhem 1944a, 265–6). The concept implied that animals were influenced and regulated not only by an external environment, but also by an internal environment. This meant, on the one hand, that the old distinction between the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, according to which plants could and animals could not synthesize simple organic compounds, was blown away. Life was seen in a new way, without the distinction between plant and animal. On the other hand, it also meant the birth of physiology: without the idea of an internal environment, there could be no autonomous science of physiology (266–9). Scientific concepts are thus not simply parts of the theories used to interpret phenomena. They often provide us with the cognitive and perceptual grids for understanding a phenomenon that make it possible to formulate scientific theories explaining it. Foucault’s aim in OT of showing how concepts such as life and labour fundamentally structured the theories of a discipline, follows this idea. As Gary Gutting (1989, 34) notes, the fundamental, regulative status of concepts makes it possible to write historical accounts of their formation and transformation that operate at a different, more fundamental level than accounts of a succession of explanatory theories. According to Canguilhem, this view of the development of science also makes it pointless to search for early precursors of major scientific discoveries: ‘Strictly speaking, if precursors existed, the history of science would loose all meaning, since science itself would merely appear to have a historical dimension’ (Canguilhem 1994a, 49). A precursor is generally understood as a thinker or a researcher who proceeded some distance along a path that was later explored all the way to the end by someone else. He is thus someone who belongs to more than one age: he is a man of his own time, but also simultaneously a contemporary of those later investigators credited with completing his unfinished project. He is therefore a thinker whom the historian believes can be extracted from his cultural milieu and inserted into others. Such adaptability is only obtained at the cost of neglecting the ‘historicity’ of the object under study. Canguilhem thus concludes:


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So long as texts and other works yoked together by the heuristic compression of time have not been subject to critical analysis for the purpose of explicitly demonstrating that two researchers sought to answer identical questions for identical reasons, using identical guiding concepts, defined by identical systems, then insofar as an authentic history of science is concerned, it is completely artificial, arbitrary and unsatisfactory to say that one man finished what the other started or anticipated what the other achieved. By substituting the logical time of truth relations for the historical time of these relations’ inventions, one treats the history of science as though it were a copy of science and its object a copy of the object of science. The result is the creation of an artifact, a counterfeit historical object – the precursor. (Canguilhem 1994a, 51)12

The ‘discovery’ of a precursor is thus usually based on the failure to recognize fundamental conceptual differences that underlie superficially similar formulations. It also relies on an individualist model of scientific discovery. In Canguilhem’s view, as soon as the methods and problems of modern science become adjusted to each other, and instruments become so highly specialized that their very use implies the acceptance of common working hypotheses, then it will be true to say that science shapes scientists just as much as scientists shape science (107). Foucault reiterates this idea in OT by showing, for example, that the so-called precursors of evolutionary theory in the classical age, despite superficial similarities, were in fact relying on a wholly different understanding of nature. For them, nature was only conceivable as a unified, ahistorical table in which changes were shifts of the whole towards a higher state of perfection. It was only the emergence of the modern concept of life understood as a historical, dynamic phenomenon that made possible the idea of the evolutionary development of a species. Contrary to Husserl’s presentation of Galileo’s fundamental discovery of mathematized nature, and to Descartes’ and Kant’s mistakes of objectifying transcendental subjectivity, Foucault would argue that these individual discoveries or ‘errors’ were, in fact, made possible, even necessary, by certain epistemic conditions and concepts. Galileo’s idea of calculable nature was only one part of the classical idea of an orderable nature as mathesis. The mathematization of nature that Husserl attributed to Galileo, was, for Foucault, simply a typical mode of 12 The original French is not available.

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knowledge in the classical episteme, structured in terms of representation.13 Similarly, Foucault would object to the idea of viewing the philosophies of Descartes and Kant in terms of mistakes. As Gérard Lebrun (1989/1992, 24) writes, for Foucault ‘There is no point in regretting that Descartes missed the idea of the transcendental ego, when he was far from being able to foresee it’. Or, to see in Kantianism a way of thinking that allowed the continued predominance of ‘the evidence of objectivity’ was not only futile, but also missed the essential point. Kant’s thought inaugurated an epistemic break and with him the classical mathesis was swept away forever (Lebrun 1989/1992, 27). This same criticism also, implicitly, includes phenomenology itself. From Foucault’s point of view, phenomenology is not sensitive enough to the historicity of its own project – its historical conditions of possibility in Kant’s thought and in the modern episteme. Rather than phenomenology being able to reveal the true ground of the sciences, its own project, in fact, depends on their discoveries. The coming into being of new positive elements – life, work, language – which to a large extent determined what it was to be a human being, posed the problem of how a human being was to understand himself as the subjective ground of science, as well a being dependent on a life-world he could not subjectively create. Phenomenology is, thus, a child of its time, an offspring of the modern episteme, which discovered life, labour, language and therefore also man, a double figure, dependent on the positivities it discovered. ‘This is why phenomenology . . . has never been able to exorcise its insidious kinship, its simultaneously promising and threatening proximity, to the empirical sciences of man’ (OT, 326). In ‘The Vienna lecture’, Husserl presented phenomenology as the culmination of the European teleology of the infinite goal of reason. Its aim was to realize the ancient ideal of philosophy as an infinite task, and to inaugurate ‘the total reorientation of the task of knowledge’ (Husserl 1954/1970b, 298).14 Foucault’s historical contextualization of the phenomenological project as a necessary moment in the modern episteme is thus an implicit criticism of the aims or pretensions of phenomenology. He does not consider phenomenology to be the culmination of the history of philosophy, but, rather, gives it a far more 13 Cf. Lebrun 1989/1992, 23. 14 According to Husserl, phenomenology alone has been capable of attaining ‘the higher stage of reflexivity which is decisive for the new form of philosophy and of European humanity’ by realizing the aim of philosophy as a rigorous science on which all objective sciences are based (Husserl 1954/1970b, 292).


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modest role. It is a sensitive acknowledgement of the paradox of man, a particular configuration in modern thought, but a failed effort to solve this paradox. Moreover, its ultimate failure means that all further reformulations of its project are equally futile. The true solution to the problem would require abandoning the starting point of the whole phenomenological project, questioning what has in fact rendered the whole of our contemporary thought historically possible. According to Foucault, the question we must ask is: how will we think after the death of man?

The analytic of finitude It is often argued that Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology in OT is inaccurate and that it is based on sweeping generalizations that are not supported by textual references. Gary Gutting (1989, 223), for example, notes that because Foucault’s discussions of the three ‘doubles’ contain some of the most convoluted and obscure passages in OT, readers can easily be fooled into thinking that there is a level of profound criticism that they have failed to penetrate. Gutting argues that whatever profundity there is in these analyses only concerns Foucault’s way of understanding the major projects of recent continental philosophy and relating them to one another. The contortions of his interpretative analysis serve only to hide the weakness of his criticism of phenomenology. Because Foucault does not provide any textual references, it is a matter of interpretation who exactly is the target of his criticism of phenomenology in chapter 9, ‘Man and his Doubles’. There are clear echoes of the three doubles in Merleau-Ponty’s, Husserl’s, Sartre’s and Heidegger’s thought. It could be argued that the discussion of the ‘actual experience’ in connection with the first double refers to Merleau-Ponty, while the criticism of the second mainly characterizes Husserl’s thought and the third double points to Heidegger.15 My aim here, however, is not to decodify Foucault’s cryptic and missing references. Instead, I will ‘translate’ the three doubles into a criticism of Husserl’s work, although it could be argued that this would apply in 15 See Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 33–41, Gutting 1989, 204. Didier Eribon (1991, 157) claims that OT was a challenge to Sartrean hegemony in France at the time. He points out that the book contained numerous attacks on Sartre that Foucault omitted from the final version.

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differing degrees to all phenomenological projects. My aim in reconstructing Foucault’s three doubles as an explicit criticism of Husserl’s thought is not to argue for the philosophical superiority of Foucault’s thought in relation to Husserl. What is clearly contestable is whether the problems at issue are insurmountable within the phenomenological enterprise itself, and require us to reject it, as Foucault claims. My point in reconstructing Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology is firstly to argue that, despite its undeniable vagueness, it points to profound philosophical questions about the relationships between history and philosophy, the transcendental and the empirical, language and the subject. Secondly, I will show that the problems that Foucault points to are not external but rather internal to phenomenology: they were evident to Husserl himself to a certain extent, but certainly to his followers, both in France and Germany. Hence, my argument is that Foucault’s work should be seen not as a total break with phenomenology but rather as part of a continuum, even if the relationship is fundamentally critical. The cornerstone of Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology is his claim that Kant’s distinction between the empirical field of knowledge and its a priori conditions becomes blurred in the modes of thought that Foucault calls ‘the analytic of finitude’.16 This is a configuration of knowledge, or a mode of thinking, that is characterized by the fact that knowledge is grounded on the human being in his finitude. This leads to the paradox of man. Foucault discusses three forms of this paradox – the three doubles of man, as he calls them – empirical/transcendental, the cogito/the unthought, the retreat/the return of origin. The empirical and the transcendental. The first paradox, the empirical and the transcendental, refers to the paradoxical role a human being has as an empirically limited being and a transcendentally determining subject: ‘such a being that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible’ (OT, 318). Man is both part of the world and, as such, an object of empirical sciences, and at the same time the transcendental ground of all knowledge, including these very same empirical sciences. Foucault argues that this analytic of finitude transforms questions about the empirical limits of the knowing subject into questions about the conditions of possibility of knowledge. The ‘anthropological’ becomes the transcendental 16 Cf. Han 1998/2002, 17–20.


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when the empirical determinations of the knowing subject are understood as the condition of possibility of the subject’s knowledge. Foucault credits Husserl with an acute diagnosis of the paradox of man. He presents phenomenology as ‘the sensitive and precisely formulated acknowledgement of the great hiatus that occured in the modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (OT, 325). He argues that Husserl acknowledged the historicity of the knowing subject, its dependence on positivities it did not create, nor can ever fully elucidate. At the same time, Husserl strongly argued that empirical sciences cannot provide the condition of possibility of knowledge. Foucault clearly echoes Husserl by arguing that naturalism and historicism have common roots; two modes of thought that appeared out of a discourse centred on man. His criticism of the claims of the autonomy of naturalism and historicism can furthermore be seen as a representation of Husserl’s anti-naturalism. The problem, according to both Husserl and Foucault, is the foundation of knowledge, which naturalism and historicism are unable to study. Husserl’s criticism of naturalism and historicism, especially in his Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911/1965), seeks to show that naturalism and historicism are unfounded modes of thought. Their presuppositions concerning the possibilities of knowledge are never made explicit, and the rules governing their concepts, theories and values of research are never revealed or grounded. These theories claim objectivity, but the claims are, in fact, empty rhetoric. The status of what is true and stable scientific discourse remains undefined. Husserl’s line of argument is reiterated by Foucault, when he argues that the first efforts to solve the paradox of man meant trying reductionism. However, attempts to reduce man to his empirical side, as positivism did, could not account for the possibility of knowledge, and when the emphasis turned to the transcendental side, in the manner that, for example, Hegel’s phenomenology did, it was not possible to claim scientific objectivity, or to account for the contingency of man’s empirical nature. Foucault writes: For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man. Two kinds of analysis then came into being: There are those that operate within the space of the body . . . ; these led to the discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own empirical contents. There were also analyses that . . . functioned as a sort of transcendental dialectic; by this means it was shown that knowledge had historical, social or economic conditions, that it was formed within the relations that are woven between men, and that it was not independent of the particular form they might take here or there; in short that there was a history of human knowledge which could both be given to empirical knowledge and which prescribe its forms . . . they claim to be able to rest entirely on themselves, since it is the contents themselves that function as transcendental reflection. But in fact the search for a nature or a history of knowledge, in the movement by which the dimension proper to the critique is fitted over the contents of empirical knowledge, already presupposes the use of a certain critique – a critique that is not the exercise of pure reflection, but the result of a series of more or less obscure divisions. (OT, 319)17

Both Foucault and Husserl thus claim that naturalism and historicism stand on the same epistemological ground. Naturalism, which presupposes that empirical sciences can answer philosophical questions about the possibility of knowledge, and historicism, according to which 17 ‘Car le seuil de notre modernité n’est pas situé au moment ou` on a voulu appliquer a` l’étude de l’homme des méthodes objectives, mais bien le jour ou` s’est constitué un doublet empirico-transcendantal qu’on a appelé l’homme. On a vu naˆıtre alors deux sortes d’analyses: celles qui se sont logées dans l’espace du corps . . . on y découvrait que la connaissance avait des conditions anatomo-physiologiques, qu’elle se formait peu a` peu dans la nervure du corps, qu’elle y avait peut-être un siège privilégié, que ses formes en tout cas ne pouvaient pas eˆ tre dissociées des singularités de son fonctionnement; bref, qu’il y avait une nature de la connaissance humaine qui en déterminait les formes et qui pouvait en même temps lui eˆ tre manifestée dans ses propres contenus empiriques. Il y a eu aussi les analyses qui . . . ont fonctionné comme une sorte de dialectique transcendantale; on montrait ainsi que la connaissance avait des conditions historiques, sociales, ou e´ conomiques, qu’elle se formait a` l’intérieur des rapports qui se tissent entre les hommes et qu’elle n’était pas indépendante de la figure particulière qu’ils pouvaient prendre ici ou` là, bref qu’il y avait une histoire de la connaissance humaine, qui pouvait a` la fois eˆ tre donnée au savoir empirique et lui prescrire ses formes . . . elles prétendent pouvoir ne reposer que sur elles-mêmes, puisque ce sont les contenus eux-mêmes qui fonctionnent comme réflexion transcendantale. Mais, en fait, la recherche d’une nature ou d’une histoire de la connaissance, dans le mouvement ou` elle rabat la dimension propre de la critique sur les contenus d’une connaissance empirique, suppose l’usage d’une certaine critique. Critique qui n’est pas l’exercise d’une réflexion pure, mais le résultat d’une série de partages plus ou moins obscurs.’ (MC, 329–30)


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factual history is capable of providing these answers, have common roots in how man is understood as an object of their study while at the same time, although this is not admitted, he is the foundation of all knowledge. The paradoxical role man has as the source of all knowledge and as an object of it is ignored. Discourse attempting to be both empirical and critical cannot but be both positivist and eschatological at the same time. ‘Man appears within it as a truth both reduced and promised. Precritical naivete holds undivided rule’ (OT, 320). Foucault presents phenomenology as ‘a radical contestation of positivism and eschatology’ and argues that it ‘has tried to restore the forgotten dimension of the transcendental’ and to ‘exorcise the naive discourse of truth reduced wholly to the empirical’ (OT, 321). However, phenomenology fails because it remains caught in the mode of thought that is structured by the paradoxical figure of man as an empirical/ transcendental double. In his late work, Husserl explored the idea that the life-world becomes the determiner of the subject’s experiences in the sense that he or she is an empirical object limited by his or her environment. At the same time, Husserl also became convinced of the transcendental importance of intersubjectivity, and consequently of the transcendental significance of the life-world. The life-world becomes the horizon of meaning that makes individual meaning-giving acts possible. Therefore if we are to understand the experiences that are ultimately constitutive of the world, we need to elucidate their implicit background, to make this background an object of phenomenological analysis. Husserl wanted to show how, by means of the two epoches, the initially unthinkable background could be elucidated. The first epoche brings the life-word into the view of the phenomenologist, making it possible for him to proceed to analyze its structures. The second epoche places the phenomenologist above this necessary horizon of his own thought, and therefore enables him to study its constitution in transcendental intersubjectivity. According to Foucault, the second epoche leads to the paradox of man as an empirical/transcendental double. This is because the knowing subject is essentially understood as fundamentally dependent on positivities it did not create. For can I, in fact, say that I am this language I speak, into which my thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its own possibilities, yet which exists only in the weight of sedimentations

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether? Can I say that I am this labour I perform with my hands, yet which eludes me not only when I have finished it, but even before I have begun it? Can I say that I am this life I sense deep within me, but which envelops me both in the irresistible time that grows side by side with it and poses me for a moment on its crest, and in the imminent time that prescribes my death? (OT, 324–5)18

According to Foucault, Husserl was trying to make explicit ‘the horizon that provides experience with its background of immediate and disarmed proof’ (OT, 327). But he could only accomplish this through the already existing figure of man, and was therefore trapped in inevitable circularity. The life-world makes all thought and action of the subject possible, it is the horizon within which all beings must be situated in order to be. Yet Husserl’s aim was to show how the world in its pregivenness can be understood through the constitutive acts of the phenomenologizing subject. How can a being that can only have validity within the pregiven world constitute that world? Foucault concludes: ‘The phenomenological project continually resolves itself, before our eyes, into a description – empirical despite of itself – of actual experience, and into an ontology of the unthought that automatically shortcircuits the primacy of the “I think”’ (OT, 326). Husserl himself, however, was well aware of the apparent circularity of his project. He himself formulates Foucault’s ‘paradox of man’ in The Crisis: How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which 18 ‘puis-je dire, en effet, que je suis ce langage que je parle et ou` ma pensée se glisse au point de trouver en lui le système de toutes ses possibilités propres, mais qui n’existe pourtant que dans la lourdeur de sédimentations qu’elle ne sera jamais capable d’actualiser entièrement? Puis-je dire que je suis ce travail que je fais de mes mains, mais qui m’échappe non seulement lorsque je l’ai fini, mais avant même que je l’aie entamé? Puis-je dire que je suis cette vie que je sens au fond de moi, mais qui m’enveloppe a` la fois par le temps formidable qu’elle pousse avec soi et qui me juche un instant sur sa crête, mais aussi par le temps imminent qui me prescrit ma mort?’ (MC, 335)


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can be sensibly resolved, even a necessary one, arising necessarily out of the constant tension between the power of what is taken for granted in the natural objective attitude . . . and the opposed attitude of the ‘disinterested spectator’? (Husserl 1954/1970a, 179–80)19

Husserl continues to argue that the paradox vanishes once the epoche has been radically and universally carried out. At this point, we do not have human beings either as subjects constituting the world or as objects dependent on it, because we have achieved the ‘attitude above the subject–object correlation which belongs to the world and thus the attitude of focus upon the transcendental subject–object correlation’ (Husserl 1954/1970a, 181). We are led to recognize the constitutive function, not of human beings, but of transcendental subjectivity constitutive even of the ‘phenomena’ of human beings (180–3). After the reduction, the reflecting subject is annulled as man, and transcendental subjectivity, previously concealed, reflectively turns to inquire about itself. Thus, for Husserl, Foucault’s paradox of man is only a paradox if the reduction has not been accomplished. Man as both a subject and an object of knowledge is a figure of the natural attitude and its reality is suspended in the reduction. Underlying both sides of the double is transcendental subjectivity, above or beyond the subject/object distinction and constitutive of all worldly objectivities. What still remains a problem in Husserl’s account is how mundane subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity are related to each other, if they cannot be conflated. Transcendental subjectivity is not a human being in either one of its two aspects or sides. Yet, in order to reveal transcendental subjectivity, the starting point of the investigation must be mundane subjectivity, subjectivity as it is in everyday life. The phenomenologist is thus both part of the universal field of the life-world, as well as curiously being able to stand outside of it. Husserl’s assistant 19 ‘Wie soll ein Teilbestand der Welt, ihre menschliche Subjektivität, die ganze Welt konstituieren, nämlich konstituieren als ihr intentionales Gebilde? – Welt, ein immer schon gewordenes und fortwerdendes Gebilde des universalen Konnexes der intentional leistenden Subjektivität – wobei sie, die im Miteinander leistenden Subjekte, selbst nur Teilgebilde der totalen Leistung sein sollen? Der Subjektbestand der Welt verschlingt sozusagen die gesamte Welt und damit sich selbst. Welch ein Widersinn. Oder ist es doch eine sinnvoll auflösbare, sogar eine notwendige Paradoxie, notwendig entspringend aus der beständigen Spannung zwischen der Macht der Selbstverständlichkeit der naturlichen ¨ objektiven Einstellung . . . und der sich ihr gegenubersetzenden ¨ Einstellung der “uninteressierten Betrachters”?’ (Husserl 1954/1962, 183)

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Eugen Fink formulates this problem clearly in The Sixth Cartesian Meditation.20 He takes issue precisely with the relationship between the transcendental ego and the human ego, with their necessary difference on the one hand, and their necessary identity on the other.21 He raises two questions in particular: (1) how ‘pre/non-existent’ transcendental subjectivity relates to mundane/human subjectivity, forming a unity in difference; and (2) how that same transcendental agency as an absolute constitutive source relates to the world that is its constitutive end product, forming with it a unity in bipolar differentation (Bruzina 1995, lvi). Fink indicates and anticipates solutions by arguing that the ‘fullsided subject’ of phenomenology is neither the transcendental subject taken purely in its transcendentality, nor the human subject taken as uninvolved with the transcendental, but it is rather transcendental subjectivity appearing in the world. He writes: In the universal epoche, in the disconnection of all belief-positings, the phenomenological onlooker produces himself. The transcendental tendency that awakens in man and drives him to inhibit all acceptednesses nullifies man himself; man unhumanizes himself in performing the epoche, that is, he lays bare the transcendental onlooker in himself, he passes into him. This onlooker, however, does not first come to be by the epoche, but is only freed of the shrouding cover of human being. (Fink 1932/1995, 39–40)22 20 There are different interpretations as to the extent to which Fink’s presentation of phenomenology is attributable to Husserl. Ronald Bruzina (1995, xxviii, xxxii), for example, writes in his translator’s introduction to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation that Husserl’s phenomenology, at least as it reached its maturity in his last years, was not just Husserl’s – it was Husserl’s and Fink’s. The differences from Husserl that emerged in Fink’s thinking were genuine problems for and within transcendental phenomenology, which developed intrinsically within it rather than antagonistically confronting or undercutting it from the outside. According to Bruzina, Husserl agreed in principle with what Fink was writing, even though he might not have grasped the depth of the implications of Fink’s thought or the radicality with which the fundamental ideas of phenomenology were being challenged, thus implying the need for critical rethinking. Dan Zahavi (1994), on the other hand, argues that Fink’s position is ultimately incompatible with and fundamentally foreign to Husserl’s approach, because Fink did not acknowledge the constitutive importance of transcendental intersubjectivity, or consequently the radical transformation that Husserl’s thinking underwent in the last period of his life, due to his preoccupation with intersubjectivity. 21 See in particular chapter 5, ‘Phenomenologizing as the Action of Reduction’, and chapter 8 ‘Phenomenologizing as a Theoretical Experience’. 22 ‘In der universalen Epoché, in der Ausschaltung aller Glaubenssetzungen, produziert sich der phänomenologische Zuschauer selbst. Die transzendentale Tendenz, die im Menschen erwacht, die ihn dazu treibt, einmal alle Geltungen zu inhibieren, hebt den


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Fink thus sought to avoid the paradox by positing a difference in a unity. He recognized that the phenomenologizing onlooker must always operate with already given habituated abilities which, however, must go through a transformation after the reduction. To show exactly how this peculiar transformation takes place ‘would be a major particular and far-reaching task of the transcendental theory of method’ (70). I will not go more deeply into Fink’s suggested solution here.23 My point is simply to show that Foucault’s paradox of man as an empiricotranscendental double reiterates the phenomenological question of the ‘full-sided subject’ – how mundane subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity are related to each other. The cogito and the unthought. I will now move on to the second of Foucault’s pradoxes – cogito and unthought – which surfaces as a consequence of the phenomenological method: self-reflection as a way of investigating subjectivity. The substance of this paradox is that the phenomenologizing subject is fundamentally constituted by what eludes his reflection – the unthought – yet reflection is the method for illuminating it. Foucault claims that, while modern thought has been forced to focus on the thinking subject as the precondition of knowledge, the modern cogito – for example Husserl’s transcendental ego – is not transparent to itself. It cannot reduce the whole being of things to thought in the way Descartes’ cogito could ‘without ramifying the being of thought right down to the inert network of what does not think’ (OT, 324). Self-reflection can no longer lead to the affirmation of being, or, as Foucault writes, ‘I think’ does not anymore lead to the evident truth of ‘I am’. The cogito cannot provide epistemic immediacy and selfcertainty because there are prereflective conditions of knowledge that obfuscate the evident truths of reflection. Instead, modern subjectivity is permeated by an unthought that eludes reflection, but that nevertheless must determine the ways of questioning it. Menschen selbst auf, der Mensch entmenscht sich im Vollzug der Epoché, d.h. er legt den transzendentalen Zuschauer in sich frei, er vergeht in ihn. Dieser ist aber nicht erst durch die Epoché geworden, sondern ist nur frei geworden von der verhu¨ llenden Verkleidung des Menschseins.’ (Fink 1932/1988, 43–4) 23 Of the contemporary phenomenologists, J. N. Mohanty and David Carr have extensively studied the problem of the relation between the transcendental subject and the empirical subject. See e.g. Mohanty 1989, 1997, and Carr 1999. On the relationship between Foucault’s critique of the paradox of subjectivity and contemporary phenomenological understandings of it, see Oksala 2003.

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Husserl claims that the life-world can be elucidated as a realm of subjective phenomena that has remained anonymous (Husserl 1954/1970a, 111). Although it is essentially an obscure horizon, it can still be opened up through methodological regressive inquiry, taking the phenomenologist back to its constitution in transcendental intersubjectivity. The phenomenological attempt to describe the pregivenness of the life-world in terms of its transcendental constitution is, however, itself a theoretical activity. Reflection is always already a theoretical attitude that involves an objectification of that which is the object of it. This inevitably means that the life-world, when elucidated through phenomenological description, will lose its pregivenness. A second problem is that not only is the pregiven experience inaccessible to reflection, but it is also inexpressible. All expression, any attempt to put something into words, objectifies. It transforms lived experience into conceptual entities, such as the life-world, for example. Foucault describes phenomenology as ‘the endeavor to raise the ground of experience, the sense of being, the lived horizon of all our knowledge to the level of discourse’ (OT, 299). The phenomenologist thus argues both that the life-world is pretheoretical, even prelinguistic, and that its essential structures can be described and articulated through phenomenological analysis; life-world ontology and transcendental phenomenological inquiry. Foucault writes about phenomenology: What it touches it immediately causes to move: it cannot discover the unthought, or at least move towards it, without immediately bringing it nearer to itself – or, even, perhaps, without pushing it further away, and in any case without causing man’s own being to undergo a change by that very fact, since it deploys the distance between them. (OT, 327)24

The act of describing the life-world necessarily gives it a theoretical form, which futhermore becomes constitutive of man’s own selfunderstanding, since he is dependent on the life-world as a part of it. The pure description of the pregiven life-world becomes, in fact, an interpretative act, constitutive of both the world around us as well as of ourselves as parts of it. 24 ‘Elle fait aussitôt bouger ce qu’elle touche: elle ne peut découvrir l’impensé, ou du moins aller dans sa direction, sans l’approcher aussitôt de soi, – ou peut-être encore sans l’éloigner, sans que l’être de l’homme, en tout cas, puisqu’il se déploie dans cette distance, ne se trouve du fait même altéré.’ (MC, 338)


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Furthermore, the unthought in Husserl’s phenomenology does not only refer to the prereflective horizon of all thought and praxis. Husserl also concedes that the intentional activity of the subject is founded upon and conditioned by an obscure and blind passivity, by drives and association. He argues in Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, for example, that there are constitutive processes of an anonymous and involuntary nature taking place in the underground or depth dimension of subjectivity, which can only be uncovered through an elaborate ‘archaeological effort’ (Zahavi 2001, 2). For Husserl, this ‘archaeological effort’ means a reflective investigation of consciousness. In the context of Foucault’s criticism, this means that a paradox surfaces again, albeit in a different form. The task is to make explicit through reflection something that, by definition, eludes reflection. Through reflective inquiry the depth-dimension of subjectivity becomes thematic and loses its prereflective elusiveness. As Dan Zahavi notes, reflection does not merely repeat or copy the original experience, it changes the givenness of the experience reflected upon – otherwise there would be no need for reflection (Zahavi 2001, 6). Thus, the paradox inherent in reflection means that we are obviously confronted with a fundamental limit: when I reflect, I encounter myself as a thematized ego, whereas functioning subjectivity always eludes my thematization and remains anonymous (8). Unlike Foucault, however, Zahavi argues that this does not constitute a major sceptical challenge for the phenomenological enterprise, but only creates a harmless and unavoidable impasse. Firstly, although reflection cannot apprehend the anonymous life in its very functioning, neither is it supposed to. The aim is to lift the naivete of prereflective experience, not to reproduce it. Secondly, although it must be acknowledged that there are depth-dimensions in the constitutive process that do not lie open to the view of reflection, this does not necessarily imply that they remain forever completely ineffable, beyond phenomenological investigation. They can be disclosed, not through direct thematization, but through an indirect operation of dismantling and deconstruction (Zahavi 2001, 8–9). I do not take a stand on this question. My point, again, is simply to show that Foucault’s criticisms of the double figure of man as a structural problem inherent in phenomenology – the phenomenologizing subject as both the object and subject of reflection – is accurate in the sense that it points to a genuine impasse in the phenomenological project, even if it is understood as a harmless one.

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The problem of explicating the unthought linguistically can be extended to include the explication of any of the results of the phenomenological inquiry after the reduction. If the epoche is carried out radically, then all wordly habitualities and abilities, such as logic, conceptuality and language, must also fall subject to bracketing. The phenomenologist must first bracket the existence and validity of language, but he is then forced to bring it back through the back door so to say, to be able to explicate and communicate the findings of his phenomenological inquiries. All notions like ‘transcendental ego’ and ‘flow of consciousness’ revealed by the epoche are worldly concepts already tied to shared and existing meanings and linguistic expressions.25 Husserl only touches on the problem of language in his analyses of the life-world.26 In The Crisis he notes that, after the transcendental epoche has been performed and the life-world has become a mere ‘component’ within transcendental subjectivity, words taken from the sphere of the natural attitude become dangerous and ‘the necessary 25 Derrida presents one of the most influential forms of this criticism in his introduction to Husserl’s essay ‘The Origin of Geometry’. In this essay, too, Husserl inquires into the production of the ideal objects of science, and shows how they originate in the life-world, from its pre-scientific, sensibly evident truths. Derrida shows (1962/1989, 63) that in order to study how the subjective egological evidence of the senses derived from the life-world can give rise to the ideal objects of science, Husserl must ask how this sense-evidence becomes objective and intersubjective. Derrida credits Husserl with acknowledging that the only possibility is through language. According to Derrida, however, Husserl ultimately fails to question how his own project must also depend on language. He argues that Husserl distinguishes ideal objectivities from the concepts of language. Ideal objects must be free from all factual subjectivity, from any de facto language and also from the fact of language in general. Nevertheless, Husserl claims that ideality comes to objectivity by means of language. According to Derrida, the paradox that emerges is, thus, that although objective ideality must be independent of language, nevertheless ‘without the apparent fall back into language and thereby into history, a fall which would alienate the ideal purity of sense, sense would remain an empirical formation imprisoned as fact in a psychological subjectivity – in the inventor’s head. Historical incarnation sets free the transcendental, instead of binding it’ (77). Hence, while being aware that only language can make possible ideal objectivity, Husserl does not follow up the consequences that this idea has for the phenomenological enterprise. 26 Earlier, Husserl dealt with language extensively in Logical Investigations. The First and Forth Investigations put forward a theory of expression and signification. This was before Husserl had introduced the idea of reduction in Ideas I, however, and the question of language in connection with the phenomenological reduction could thus not be initially asked. The second edition of Logical Investigations, which came out in 1913, was extensively rewritten by Husserl in the light of his new understanding of phenomenology. In the introduction to the second volume he takes up the problem of language, but solves it rather quickly by referring to a necessary transformation of sense. (Husserl 1913/2001, 171–2.) For more on language in Husserl, see e.g. Mohanty 1976, Edie 1976, Hutcheson 1981.


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transformation of their sense must therefore be noticed’ (Husserl 1954/1970a, 174). He does not, however, explain how this transformation takes place or what exactly it means. Fink took up the problem of language in more detail and set out to solve it in The Sixth Cartesian Meditation. He claimed at the outset that the problem would disappear ‘if there could be a proper transcendental language’ (Fink 1932/1995, 84), but that phenomenological inquiry does not lead to the construction of a new language, nor could it ever do so. ‘Language is indeed retained as habituality right through the epoche . . . the phenomenological onlooker must make use of it, if he at all wants to give predicative expression to his cognitions’ (86). Like Husserl, Fink saw a solution emerging from the necessary tranformation of sense. He argues that, in taking over language, the phenomenologizing onlooker transforms its natural sense. ‘If this kind of transformation did not occur, then the phenomenologist would slip out of the transcendental attitude every time he spoke’ (Fink 1932/1995, 86). He describes the transformation of sense as an uneasy tension, a rebellion inside the words of the natural attitude: On the one hand, the natural meaning of the word and sentence points analogously to a corresponding transcendental sense, while, on the other hand, the intended transcendental meaning protests, as it were, against its expressional formulation; the sense to be expresssed does not rest quietly in the expressional form, it is in constant rebellion against the constraint imposed upon it by the formulation in natural attitude. (Fink 1932/1995, 88–9)27

The necessary transformation of sense taking place in language has important implications for the phenomenological method. Although phenomenology becomes communicable through its necessary articulation in language, it must still retain a radically personal character. There is thus no phenomenological understanding that comes simply by reading reports of phenomenological research; these can only be ‘read’ at all by performing the investigations themselves. Whoever fails to do that just does not read phenomenological sentences; he reads queer 27 ‘Einerseits weist die natu¨ rliche Wort-und Satzbedeutung analogisierend auf einen entsprechenden transzendentalen Sinn hin, andererseits aber protestiert gleichsam die intendierte transzendentale Bedeutung gegen ihre Ausdrucksfassung; der auszudruckende ¨ Sinn kommt in der Ausdrucksform nicht zur Ruhe, er ist in ständiger Rebellion gegen den ihm durch die Fassung in natu¨ rlichen Worten und Sätzen angetanen Zwang.’ (Fink 1932/1988, 97–8)

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m sentences in natural language, taking a mere appearance for the thing itself to his own self-deception . . . The transformation that natural language, as expressive of that which is existent, undergoes in being claimed by the phenomenologizing I must always be kept in mind as transformation of ontic-naive meanings into ‘analogically’ indicated, transcendental-ontic meanings. It signifies a lapse into ‘dogmatism’ (that of the natural attitude) if explicit knowledge of this necessary transformation dies away, and the phenomenologist thereby in his explications falsifies the object of his theoretical experiences. (Fink 1932/1995, 92–3)28

Although the necessary transformation of sense taking place after the reduction seems to alleviate the problematic role of language in the phenomenological method, it still remains a difficult step to understand. An obvious objection springs to mind: how can we know that the personal transformation that I, as a phenomenologist, undergo in performing the epoche is the same as the transformation of other phenomenologists, and thus results in an identical transformation of the sense of language? The transformation of sense must enable communication in the same language. Even though the transformation of sense resulting from the epoche must be absolutely singular, it must also be generic enough not to result in multiple ‘queerings’ of language. To properly deal with these questions, one would have to go into Husserl’s complex account of semantics in Logical Investigations and Formal and Transcendental Logic. I will not do this, nor will I take a stance on the extent to which Fink manages or even attempts to solve the question of phenomenological language. Nevertheless, he should be credited with a clear formulation of the problem: he inquires into the necessary condition of possibility of the phenomenological project in language, and asks how its findings can be expressed in a language that is essentially a worldly phenomenon. My point is to show that against this 28 ‘Es gibt hier demnach kein phänomenologisches Verstehen durch das blosse Lesen phänomenologischer Forschungsberichte, sondern solche können uberhaupt ¨ erst ‘gelesen’ werden im Nachvollzug der Forschungen selbst. Wer das unterlässt, liest gar nicht phänomenologische Sätze, sondern liest absonderliche Sätze der naturlichen ¨ Sprache, nimmt die blosse Erscheinung fu¨ r die Sache selbst und betru¨ gt sich . . . Die Verwandlung, die die natu¨ rliche Sprache, als Aussprechen von Seiendem, durch die Inanspruchnahme durch das phänomenologisierende Ich erfährt, muss immer als Verwandlung der ontisch-naiven Bedeutungen in die sich “analogisch” anzeigenden transzendental-ontischen Bedeutungen bewusst bleiben. Es bedeutet ein Verfallen in den “Dogmatismus” (der naturlichen ¨ Einstellung), wenn das ausdruckliche ¨ Wissen um die notwendige Verwandlung erlischt und damit der Phänomenologe den Gegenstand seiner theoretischen Erfahrungen auslegend verfälscht.’ (Fink 1932/1988, 101–2)


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background, Foucault’s attempt to find the conditions of possibility of knowledge in the workings of discourse – the being of language instead of the being of man – is not only a break with phenomenology, but also an effort to solve one of its central problems. The retreat and the return of the origin. The third paradox – the return and the retreat of the origin – refers to man as both dependent on a history whose beginning will always elude him, and as the condition of possibility of writing that history. Man is essentially a historical being, he is burdened by a history that is not of his own making and ‘it is always against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect on what may serve for him as origin’ (OT, 330). Yet the world becomes a historical reality through man: ‘It is in him that things (those same things that hang over him) find their beginning’ (OT, 332). According to the phenomenologists, the structures of human consciousness are understood as the condition of possibility of all factual history. Husserl introduces the notion of historical a priori in his essay ‘The Origin of Geometry’. He emphasizes the historicity of ideal entities and theories by arguing that they always have a historical origin, and that this fact is essential to them and to their constitutive power. Sciences can only stand ‘within the historical horizon in which everything is historical’ (Husserl 1939/1989, 172). Husserl goes on to argue that this historicity cannot be revealed by factual history, in which the conclusions are always drawn naively and straightforwardly from the facts. It ‘never makes thematic the general ground of meaning upon which all such conclusions rest, has never investigated the immense structural a priori which is proper to it’ (174). Husserl thus again argues against the naivety of historicism in regard to the grounding of the sciences as well as the resulting relativism. He proposes a methodological inquiry that can reveal the essential structure of the necessary historical horizon of all sciences, ‘the apriori structure contained in this historicity’ (Husserl 1939/1989, 172). This is the historical a priori for Husserl. The proposed method for revealing it is free variation: ‘In running through the conceivable possibilities for the life-world, there arises, with apodictic self-evidence, an essentially general set of elements going through all the variants, and of this we can convince ourselves with truly apodictic certainty’ (177). Even if we know almost nothing of the historical surrounding world of the first geometers, we do know that it had an invariant, essential structure, which could be revealed to us through the method of free

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variation. Thus, the original meaning of geometry can be rediscovered by us. It follows that a study of the historical a priori is essential for Husserl, because all factual history presupposes it. Without it, historical inquiry would be a meaningless enterprise, since it alone can provide ‘the truly apodictic self-evidence extending beyond all historical facticities’ (Husserl 1939/1989, 175). An analysis of the historical a priori provides the ground on which it is possible to identify or recognize different cultural codes and historical events. ‘We need not first enter into some kind of critical discussion of the facts set out by historicism; it is enough that even the claim of their factualness presupposes the historical a priori if this claim is to have a meaning’ (176). Although geometrical idealities are thus essentially historical for Husserl in the sense that they can only originate in concrete historical events, they only become understandable as idealities on the basis of a universal and apodictic horizon of meaning. The historical a priori signifies this universal structure of meaning. As Beatrice Han writes, Husserl’s a priori is not ahistorical like the Kantian apriori, but it is ‘suprahistorical’: it exists essentially to guarantee the possibility of recovering, beyond the sedimentations of history and tradition, the primary evidences originally thematized by the ‘proto-founder’ of geometry (Han 1998/2002, 4). The historical a priori thus conveys the historicity of scientific idealities, but this historicity means only that they originate in history – in contrast to all formal a prioris – but they do not depend on factual history in the sense that they would change in it. The original meaning of geometry can be reactivated because, for Husserl, ‘the human surrounding world is the same today and always’ (Husserl 1939/1989, 180). The way Foucault appropriates Husserl’s notion of historical a priori can be seen as being symptomatic of the more general way in which he both criticizes and reappropriates phenomenology. By developing his own version of the historical a priori, he admits the necessity of finding a historical version of the transcendental, and thus acknowledges the importance of the Husserlian effort. Foucault’s reformulation of the historical a priori is, however, a critical reaction to the problems he identifies in it in its Husserlian form. By appropriating Husserl’s historical a priori, Foucault acknowledges the claim that factual history cannot reveal the basis of knowledge, which is also its own condition of possibility. This is why he clearly distinguished his archaeology from the history of ideas, representations and


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modes of behaviour. He claims that there is a more fundamental level that structures and unites observations, discussions and concepts by ordering and determining what can appear as an object of knowledge and how it can be known. This transcendental level is referred to as the historical a priori by Foucault. For him, however, the historical a priori is not a universal structure of meaning, but, rather, is revealed by factual history. It changes in history while also forming the conditions of possibility of knowledge of a period. It is thus not a principle of the constitution of objects in general, but always limited to local and particular forms of knowledge.29 Foucault’s method of studying the historical a priori is different, too. One of the central tenets of transcendental philosophy is that, while the aim is to study the conditions of possibility of thought and experience, we cannot, by definition, step outside of them and adopt a view from nowhere. This is why the phenomenological method is essentially characterized by reduction as the only way to achieve clarity about the conditions of possibility constituting our thought while starting from within our own experience. Foucault rejects the possibility that historical a priori could be revealed by starting from the meaning-giving activity of a subject. For him, the only means of studying the transcendental is through history: while it is impossible to study the conditions of possibility of our own thought, it is possible to reveal the fundamental level determining the order of knowledge of a different age. Hence, Foucault rejects the transcendental subject and postulates instead a transcendental without a subject. In this way he seeks to solve the paradox of man in all its forms. He also historized the transcendental more radically by introducing his own version of the historical a priori that changes in history. Through his criticism of phenomenology in OT, he sought to show the inadequacy of the phenomenological understanding of language as well as of the history of science, and he supported the radical historicity of the conditions of possibility of knowledge. By explicating the paradox of man that the phenomenological method leads to, he stressed the necessity of finding a new method. I will now take a closer look at Foucault’s proposed method, archaeology, of which the ‘aim is to free history from the grip of phenomenology’ (AK, 203). Is there philosophy after the death of man? 29 Cf. Han 1998/2002, 64–5.

3 THE ANONYMITY OF LANGUAGE

The Order of Things has been severely criticized by both historians and philosophers.1 Since its publication, the philosophical criticism has centred around two themes. Firstly, a common charge is that Foucault does not problematize his own position, but assumes it to be situated outside of the epistemic orders he studies. This means that he ends up reiterating the problem of empirical/transcendental circularity of which phenomenology stands accused. Secondly, it has been claimed that Foucault’s alternative to the subject-centred approach of phenomenology leads to serious difficulties in conceiving change and consequently also freedom. Archaeology is therefore a step backwards rather than a step forwards from phenomenology: it does not manage to solve the problems with which phenomenology is riddled, but rather adds to them by creating a host of new ones. Both strands of the criticism are connected to the question of the subject. On the one hand it raises questions about the subject as the 1 Gary Gutting (1989, 175–9, 221) notes that, of all Foucault’s books, OT has been the most severely criticized by historians. In order to assess the impact of these criticisms, he distinguishes several different historical levels on which OT operates. The first is that of specific history: the interpretation of particular texts in their own terms. Second, the level of constructive history, which builds general interpretative frameworks connecting a range of texts. Third is the level of critical history: the use of the outcomes of specific and constructive history to question the self-understanding of various contemporary disciplines. Following this schema, Gutting argues that Foucault’s interpretations of particular authors have drawn some criticism, but the primary objection has been to the lack of detailed evidence for the sweeping claims of his constructive history. Nevertheless, he defends Foucault by pointing out that the value of his work is most of all as a source of fruitful suggestions rather than as accurate generalizations. Foucault’s account of the modern episteme is important primarily as the basis of his critical history of the human sciences. My focus here is on the philosophical criticism of Foucault’s archaeology. For more on Foucault as a historian, see e.g. Veyne 1971/1997, Flynn 1994 and Goldstein 1994.

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t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e

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writer of its own history. Who is the writer of archaeology? To what extent was Foucault himself determined by the discursive structures under study? The other strand concerns the subject as the agent of change. How can we understand change if we do not study the intentions and motives of the subject? Does freedom not become an impossible idea? My aim in this chapter is to explicate the question of the subject in connection with the criticism of OT. I will not attempt to clear up all the ambiguities in Foucault’s archaeology, however. It contains several contradictions, problems and errors that have been thoroughly discussed by other commentators.2 My principle goal is to show how the central, philosophical role Foucault assigns to language has important consequences in terms of how we conceive of our subjectivity as well as of our freedom. I will show that, despite its firm refusal to accept the subject as the basis of explanation, Foucault’s archaeology does not eradicate it as a question. Neither does it eradicate freedom, but charts instead new dimensions of it, which are not tied to the subject’s expressions and initiatives, but rather make them possible.

A view from nowhere A central theme in the criticism of OT has been the question of the starting point of the description. What is Foucault’s own position with regard to the epistemes that condition all scientific practices? Is his own thought not also inevitably determined by the epistemic order underlying his archaeology? How can he analyze, using language, the grid that orders language? How can he escape the order that our discourse constitutes, and understand an order of a different kind, a different episteme? Dreyfus and Rabinow suggest in their influential book Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, that the archaeologist is situated outside of the epistemic orders he studies and therefore does not speak from within any horizon of intelligibility. They compare 2 See, in particular, Han 1998/2002. Roberto Machado (1989/1992, 17), on the other hand, argues that one of the essential characteristics of archaeology is exactly the multiple ways in which it can be defined, and another is its fluidity as a mode of research. The successive shifts are not marks of inadequacy or a lack of rigour: they illustrate the deliberate and well-considered provisional nature of the analysis. The tensions in archaeology are more prominent after the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, in which Foucault claims to present one method, archaeology, that characterizes all of his work. In reality, however, the methods, theoretical frameworks and aims in OT and in AK are not identical. Cf. Machado 1989/1992, 12, 17; Han 1998/2002, 52–4, 67–8.

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archaeology to phenomenology in that the archaeologist, like the phenomenologist, claims to be able to accomplish a bracketing, which enables him to situate himself outside of his own thought and thus to study its underlying structures.3 [T]he archaeologist, like Husserl’s transcendental phenomenologist, must perform an ‘ego split’ in order to look on as a detached spectator at the very phenomena in which, as an empirical interested ego . . . one can’t help being involved. Foucault the archaeologist looks on, as a detached metaphenomenologist, at the historical Foucault who can’t, if he thinks about human beings in a serious way, help thinking in terms of the meaning and truth claims governed by the latest discursive formation. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 87)

Despite Foucault’s criticism of the phenomenological method and the procedure of reduction, Dreyfus and Rabinow claim that he ends up making a similar move himself in trying to elucidate the epistemic conditions of scientific practices. This leads him to exactly the same type of circularity or ‘double trouble’ that he criticized phenomenology for. If discursive practices take the place of the transcendental in the sense that they condition what is said and known, and discourse is understood as a historically existing network of forms of knowledge and practice, then the empirical content becomes the transcendental condition. Foucault attempted to pass from the analysis of positivities to the historical a priori foundations that provide the ground of its own possibility – the very thing for which he had criticized phenomenology (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 93). Dreyfus and Rabinow thus understand archaeology to be an ahistorical, ‘quasi-structuralist theory’ conducted from a position of phenomenological detachment. They criticize it for falling into the trap of 3 Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, 85–90) argue that Foucault’s archaeology is a radicalization of Husserl’s reductions. Their argument is that the phenomenologist only brackets the truth of the statement he is studying, that is, its validity, but an archaeologist even brackets its meaning. Foucault’s approach is thus more radical in the sense that the ‘bracketing’ includes more entities: not just the truth, but also the meaning. This is a problematic characterization of both Foucault’s and Husserl’s methods, however. Heinämaa points out that Dreyfus and Rabinow’s comparison is based on a controversial interpretation of Husserl’s concept of noema as being similar to Frege’s sense. They presuppose that truth and meaning are two separate entities that can be bracketed one after the other. This is possible only if the noema is understood to be like the Fregean sense, between the act and the reference and distinct from both. Such an understanding is by no means self-evident or undisputed (see Heinämaa and Oksala 2000). For alternative readings of the noema, see e.g. Drummond 1990 and Haaparanta 1994.


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the empirical/transcendental doublet, and hail genealogy as Foucault’s breakthrough and corrective method, which avoids this trap by aligning itself with hermeneutical insights in certain respects. While Foucault the archaeologist aims at viewing the discursive practices with external neutrality, Foucault the genealogist realized that he could only describe them from the inside. Dreyfus and Rabinow go as far as to argue that the insoluble contradictions in archaeology ultimately led Foucault to abandon it as his method, and to take up genealogy a few years later (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 99–100). Their criticism of archaeology relies on some problematic assumptions, however. They understand it as a form of structuralism, a characterization that Foucault himself vehemently denied.4 They also read Foucault’s thought in terms of a radical break: archaeology failed as a method and was replaced by genealogy. This interpretation was also denied by Foucault on several occasions. He claimed that archaeology and genealogy were complementary methods of investigation representing different axes of analysis, not alternatives.5 In an interview in 1967 in which Foucault responds to the controversy surrounding the publication of OT, he explains his own position as the author of the book. While he argued that his position should be understood as anonymous, he did not claim to be situated outside of the discursive order characterizing his time. On the contrary, he was anonymous exactly because he was situated inside his own episteme and was a product of a specific historical development. [I]t should be possible to define the theoretical model to which not only my book belongs but also those which belong to the same configuration of knowledge [savoir]. It is doubtless the one that now allows us to treat history as a set of actually articulated statements, and language as an 4 Foucault himself explicitly refused this label in the preface to the English translation of OT, for example, and the significance of this refusal has been further discussed by commentators. Gary Gutting (1989, 228) argues that, although there is a close link between Foucault’s work and structuralism, we must understand why Foucault insists on several occasions that he is not a structuralist. According to Gutting, the link derives from the fact that, like structuralist work on language, culture and the unconscious, archaeology displaces man from his privileged position. At the same time, it is a historical method of inquiry, concerned not with structural possibilities but with actual occurrences and their effects. Beatrice Han (1998/2002, 45) also points out that Foucauldian understanding is distinguished from the structuralist model in that the historical a priori is understood neither as universal nor as invariant; rather, it undergoes the historical transformations that archaeology is to identify. On Foucault’s relationship with structuralism, see also e.g. Caws 1988, Dosse 1991, 1992, Frank 1989/1992. 5 See e.g. SP, UP.

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m object of description and an ensemble of relations linked to discourse, to the statements that are the objects of interpretation. It is our age and it alone that makes possible the appearance of that ensemble of texts which treat grammar, natural history, or political economy as so many objects. So, in that respect and only in that respect, the author is constitutive of the thing he is talking about . . . So the subject is, in fact, present in the whole book, but it is the anonymous ‘one’ who speaks today in everything that is said. (OWH, 286)6

Foucault self-consciously places his analysis in the general anonymity of all the investigations that were at the time revolving around language (OWH, 290). The new epistemic configuration signalled by the death of man made possible his questions about language. He also explained his method at this time by noting that ‘archaeology owes more to Nietszchean genealogy than to structuralism properly so called’ (294). It is my contention that the hermeneutical insight that the thinker is always situated inside a horizon of intelligibility that conditions his thought does not suddenly appear with genealogy, but is already central in OT. Although archaeology is strictly opposed to hermeneutics in the sense that it does not attempt to interpret the deep meaning of sentences, it is nevertheless a historically situated form of analysis and this is a definitive characteristic of it. Several commentators have remarked how OT relies heavily on Heidegger’s anti-humanism.7 In particular, there are striking similarities between OT and Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’. Heidegger’s aim in this text, like Foucault’s in OT, is to reveal the ontological order upon which the sciences as well as the everyday practices 6 ‘on devrait pouvoir définir le modèle théorique auquel appartient non seulement mon livre mais aussi ceux qui appartiennent a` la même configuration de savoir. Sans doute estce celle qui nous permet aujourd’hui de traiter de l’histoire comme ensemble d’énoncés effectivement articulés, de la langue comme objet de description et ensemble de relations par rapport au discours, aux e´ noncés qui font l’objet de l’interprétation. C’est notre e´ poque et elle seule qui rend possible l’apparition de cet ensemble de textes qui traitent de la grammaire, de l’histoire naturelle ou de l’économie politique comme autant d’objets. Si bien que l’auteur, en cela, et en cela seulement, est constitutif de ce dont il parle . . . Si bien que le sujet est en effet présent dans la totalité du livre, mais il est le “on” anonyme qui parle aujourd’hui dans tout ce qui se dit.’ (SFH, 591) 7 See e.g. Han 1998/2002, Elden 2001. Foucault hardly ever referred directly to Heidegger. In his last interview he made a surprisingly strong statement about him, however. ‘For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher . . . I have never written anything on Heidegger and I wrote only a small article on Nietzsche; these are nevertheless the two authors I have read the most.’ (RM, 250).


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characteristic of an age are grounded. What becomes a question of scientific study and the method through which it is approached is determined by the ontological order through which the world is interpreted and presents itself. Heidegger writes: ‘Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age a basis upon which it is essentially formed’ (Heidegger 1952/1977, 115). The metaphysical ground plan sketches out in advance the manner in which something can appear as an object of scientific investigation. ‘Only within the perspective of this ground plan does an event in nature become visible as such an event’ (119). The world picture, like Foucault’s concept of episteme, thus refers to the overall schema, the implicit order of things, on the basis of which reality is comprehended. This normally hidden ontological order can only be made visible by comparing it with the different modes of thinking of the past. Heidegger writes, for example, that the metaphysics underlying the modern age can be characterized by throwing it into relief over against the medieval and ancient world pictures (Heidegger 1952/1977, 128). Similarly, Foucault emphasizes that it is only against the background of what is different in history that the epistemic structures show up. I can, in fact, define the classical age in its particular configuration by the twofold difference that contrasts it with the sixteenth century, on the one hand, and with the nineteenth century, on the other. But I can define the modern age in its singularity only by contrasting it with the seventeenth century, on the one hand, and with us, on the other hand; so, in order to effect this transition, it is necessary to bring out in all our statements the difference that separates us from it. It is a matter of pulling oneself free of that modern age which begins around 1790 to 1810 and goes up to about 1950, whereas for the classical age it’s only a matter of describing it. (OWH, 293)8

Revealing the ontological structures of the past becomes possible only from the vantage point of the present. It is possible for us to describe 8 ‘Je peux, en effet, définir l’âge classique dans sa configuration propre par la double différence qui l’oppose au XVIe siècle, d’une part, au XIXe , de l’autre. En revanche, je ne peux définir l’âge moderne dans sa singularité qu’en l’opposant au XVIIe siècle, d’une part, et a` nous, d’autre part; il faut donc, pour pouvoir opérer sans cesse le partage, faire surgir sous chacune de nos phrases la différence qui nous en sépare. De cet aˆ ge moderne qui commence vers 1790–1810 et va jusque vers 1950, il s’agit de se déprendre alors qu’il ne s’agit, pour l’ aˆ ge classique, que de le décrire.’ (SFH, 598–9)

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the modern episteme only when we manage to pull ourselves free from it and analyze it as a past that is in some important ways different from our present. The ability to recognize the differences signals the break that separates us from it.9 In the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault avoids the notion of episteme and introduces that of archive, which he defines as ‘the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’ (AK, 130). In this connection, he states explicitly that it is not possible for us to describe our own archive (AK, 130). We cannot free ourselves from the rules ordering our own discursive practices and submit them for archaeological analysis. Foucault thus argues against the possibility of studying the conditions of possibility of our own knowledge at all, whether or not these conditions are understood as historical or not. All that he presents is a historical description, a study of the conditions of existence, which is conducted from the vantage point of the present in regard to the past. Unlike the Husserlian phenomenologist, Foucault thus does not claim to be able to study the constitutive conditions of our own thought and experience. It is my contention that this impossibility is exactly why he had to engage in historical study in his quest to understand the semantic relationships between words and things. It is only from the vantage point of the present ontological order that the semantic relationships of another epoch can be described. This description cannot reveal any ultimate foundations. Not only are the ontological orders historical, they can only appear as such from our own interpretative perspective. This perspectivism is the positive condition that allows such orders to appear at all. Foucault’s question of the historical limits of language, for example, is a question that can only self-consciously be asked after the linguistic turn in philosophy. Reading history through our questions, concepts and ways of thinking makes it possible to reveal what is different. Hence, Foucault does not hold that the other epistemic orders are completely cut off from us. But neither is his archaeology anachronistic in the sense that past forms of thinking were treated as directly accessible and understandable. Because they are based on a different 9 Thomas Flynn (1997, 251–5) argues that Foucault’s aim was to distance himself from the modern episteme by questioning its basic presuppositions and by viewing it from without. He refers to the end of OT, where Foucault charts the privileged positions of ethnology and psychoanalysis in our present-day knowledge, and argues that he was undertaking an ethnology of his own culture.


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ontological order, they cannot be directly accessible to us, but revealing them requires archaeological work. George Canguilhem (1994b, 78) explicates Foucault’s archaeology by arguing that, while the episteme of a given era cannot be fully grasped via the intellectual history of that era, which is subtended by the episteme of a different era, the two are not entirely foreign to one another. What remains is precisely the archaeological project, ‘the fact that painstakingly, slowly, laboriously, indirectly, we can dive deep down from our own epistemic shores and reach a submerged episteme’ (Canguilhem 1994b, 78). Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, 95) summarize their devastating criticism of archaeology by suggesting that if it is to avoid self-elimination it must either only study the past, or else, like therapy and phenomenology, it must see to it that its task is interminable. It is my contention that archaeology studies only the past. To the extent that it is intended as a method of writing history, this should be fairly uncontroversial.10 It is also possible to argue, however, that Foucault’s philosophical method is history understood as archaeology. Perhaps the most fruitful way to read OT is to see it as questioning the independence of history and philosophy. Foucault’s studies show how historical discourses and practices are both empirical facts and constitute the only possible philosophical basis of knowledge. They can be analyzed on an empirical level to explain historical events, and on a philosophical, ‘transcendental’ level to reveal structural regularities and conditions of possibility. Transcendental questions are, for Foucault, of necessity questions of history: the historical limits of knowledge and experience.11 As he writes in the

10 Gary Gutting (1989, 227–8, 244, 269) argues that archaeology must be read primarily as a distinctive approach to the history of thought. It is a historical counterpart of the structuralist counter-sciences and a move away from the modes of thought centred on the concept of man. It is only open to the devastating philosophical criticism that Dreyfus and Rabinow develop in their study of Foucault when it is understood as a general philosophical theory. Gutting argues that it should not be construed along these theoretical lines. Foucault’s aim was not to develop a general theory of discursive regularities at all. What might appear to be foundational philosophical theories of language, for example, are better construed as no more than attempts to show that the archaeological approach can be coherently formulated without relying on the modern philosophical category of the subject. 11 Claire O’Farrell writes (1989, 33) that history reveals the limits of the formation of ideas and objects which are both part of historical order and beyond that order. History is thus in a unique position to attach philosophy to empirical realities while studying their conditions of possibility at the same time. Shortly before his death Foucault himself described his books as ‘historical studies’ but noted that they were not the work of a historian, as they were embarked on as a ‘philosophical exercise’ (UP, 15).

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preface to OT, his aim is to bring to light the history of the conditions of possibility of knowledge (OT, xxii).

The subject of change In an interview, Foucault also further explained his aim of analyzing change in terms of a structure. The interviewer mentioned that the articles that attacked OT contained the words ‘to freeze history’, which recurred like a leitmotif and seemed to formulate the strongest accusation against it. Foucault replied that, in the context of the history of ideas, description of change follow two strategies: (1) one uses concepts such as influence, crisis, sudden realization or the interest taken in the problem; or (2) one moves to a level of explanation that is exterior to the level of analysis of the statements themselves, such as an explanation based on social conditions, mentality or the worldview. He explained that he wanted to avoid giving himself these two expedients and to describe statements by bringing out the relations of implication, opposition and exclusion that might connect them. Rather than inventing radical breaks between epistemes, he was in fact trying to chart the rapid changes in a precise way by establishing a set of transformations between two sets of scientific discourse. This set of transformations preserves a certain number of theoretical elements and displaces certain others (OWH, 282–3). Rather than denying change, Foucault was thus describing it, but only on the level of discourse, the domain of statements obeying rules. He was not attempting to provide causal explanations for the changes in history, but was, in a ‘positivist’ fashion, describing certain processes in it.12 The historical analysis of discursive practices will reveal numerous types of relationships and modes of connection that should be analyzed in different ways and along different axes. The archaeological method represents only the horizontal axis, which describes the theoretical coherence of discourses among themselves in a given period (OWH, 285). Foucault thus does not argue that discursive structures do not change or that they contain some autonomous mechanism of change. The subjects who engage in different types of practice still instigate the changes, but developments in the sciences cannot be explained by the 12 Arnold Davidson (1997b, 10–13) argues that the influence of structuralism on Foucault’s thought shows here: only a synchronic analysis allows one to define the field within which a causal explanation can then operate. An analysis of the logical structures of knowledge has to precede any effort to provide causal explanations.


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subject’s structures of consciousness. Here the fundamental influence that Jean Cavaillès’ thought had on Foucault’s understanding of the history of thought is apparent. Cavaillès’ philosophy was an effort to combine necessity and radical innovation in logic and mathematics, areas of science that are generally regarded as particularly rule-bound. Although Cavaillès initially followed Husserl’s thought closely, in his late work he became increasingly critical of it, arguing that mathematical objects, concepts, rules and procedures cannot be grounded in the structures of consciousness. This means that mathematics is an autonomous becoming; its historical development cannot be accounted for or grounded in any discipline other than itself. Its development is genuinely unpredictable. Analysis cannot find the new ideas within those already in use (Cavaillès 1947/1994, 504). David Webb (2003) summarizes Cavaillès’ position by writing that, for him, each act of thinking takes place within a defined context of rules that it did not itself frame, but this does not represent the end of its freedom. At stake is not the radical spontaneity of thinking, but the conviction on Cavaillès’ part that no set of formal conditions of thinking can be so primary or fundamental that they necessarily encompass all the changes in conceptual objects and their relations that the future may bring. Thinking may therefore engage in the necessary unfolding of ideas, while at the same time preserving its power to participate in the transformation of any given set of conceptual objects and relations (Webb 2003, 69). In connection with Foucault’s very similar understanding of the history of science, we must thus interpret that the idea of an episteme underlying the scientific thinking of an age does not imply epistemic determinacy. Rather, the implication would be that the development of science is always genuinely unpredictable. In the foreword to the English edition of OT Foucault lists three problems that were left open in the book: change, causality and the subject. While he explicitly states that he did not even attempt to address the first two, the question of the subject was not simply left aside. It was posed – albeit from a perspective that was different from the phenomenological one – even though he was not able to give any definitive answer at that point. I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts or themes. It is simply that I wonder whether such descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of scientific discourse, whether there

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f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences. I should like to know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them. (OT, xiii–xiv)

One of Foucault’s questions in OT was thus exactly to what extent subjects are determined by rules and structures unknown to them. His aim was to chart the conditions of possibility of their initiatives. Rather than eradicating the subject or taking it as the unproblematic starting point of his analyses, he wanted to question it. He also explicitly denied in AK that he had excluded the question of the subject. He writes that his aim instead is to ‘define the positions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity of language’ (AK, 200). The archaeological approach does not mean the denial of the subject’s initiatives: ‘These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated . . . I have not denied – far from it – the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it’ (AK, 209).13 Although the subjects of scientific discourse are regulated and even partly constituted by the rules immanent to the discourse itself, they are not completely determined by them: the subject is not without the initiative or the capacity to effect changes in the discourse. Archaeology is simply not about the subject’s abilities to cause changes, but rather focuses on the more fundamental discursive structures that make different initiatives possible or impossible. Foucault was thus trying to develop a method that allows us to study discourse as a relatively autonomous field of regularities and transformations without positing the subject as the cause and principle of these unities, regularities and transformations. Archaeology is a method for analyzing and accounting for the constitution of meanings that are not dependent on individual speakers. It is an alternative to subject-centred approaches to the history of thought. Although statements are uttered by individual speakers, in making a statement the speaker takes up a position that has already been defined – quite apart from his mental activity – by the rules of the relevant discursive formation. Foucault thus 13 ‘Il s’agit moins des bornes posées a` l’initiative des sujets que du champ ou` elle s’articule . . . Je n’ai pas nié, loin de là, la possibilité de changer le discours: j’en ai retiré le droit exclusif et instantané a` la souveraineté du sujet.’ (AS, 272)


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claims that every statement has a subject, but that this subject is not a ‘speaking consciousness’ but rather ‘a position that may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals’ (AK, 115). The subject position is established by the rules of the discursive formation. By focusing on the systems of the actual statements that define the space in which speaking subjects operate, archaeology seeks to question the fundamental role of the human subject in the constitution of knowledge. Statements are studied historically in their own right, not as means of understanding the thoughts of the dead. The source of scientific discourse is an anonymous field of discursive practices, not the meaning-giving subject. Foucault writes ironically in AK that it is unpleasant ‘to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice where one is used to seeing, in all its pure transparency, the expression of genius and freedom’ (AK, 210). Even though archaeology describes the discursive conditions that limit and make different subject positions possible, it is not until Foucault’s genealogy introduces the notion of productive power that his idea of a constituted subject gets its full force. Archaeology describes the possibility and availability of various subject positions. It also concerns the ways in which scientific discourses produce subjects as their object of study, for example, the speaking subject in general grammar, philology and linguistics, and the labouring subject in the analysis of wealth or economics. Nevertheless, these studies only bring out partial analyses of subjectivity. As Foucault himself admitted later, his archaeology presented only one of the axes of the constitution of the subject (SP, 208).

The freedom of language By establishing a new perspective on the question of the subject, archaeology also maps out new ideas of freedom that are not tied to the idea of a founding subject, its nature, initiatives or abilities. The intention is to draw a line marking the discursive limits of thought and experience of an age, and implicitly therefore also to question what falls outside of these limits. Foucault not only gives language a regulative role in the mode of scientific discourse, but also allows that it demarcates a domain of freedom in the mode of literature. While scientific discourses form an ontological order of things that is implicit in their theories and practices, language in the form of literature is capable of forming alternative, unscientific and irrational ontological realms: different experiences of order

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on the basis of which different perceptual and practical grids become possible, and hence new ways of seeing and experiencing emerge. Foucault generally emphasizes the necessary structures of knowledge and opposes the humanist aspirations of looking for the freedom of man, but there is an anti-humanist understanding of freedom as an opening of new possibilities of thought implicitly safeguarded in archaeology. He attempts to show not only how the discursive limits of scientific knowledge, representation and experience are constituted, but also what escapes them. According to John Rajchman (1985, 11–12), Foucault’s early thought conformed to the spirit of the influential movement in France in the 1960s that saw a revolution emerging from avant-garde writing.14 Foucault later came to realize that the central questions of our era are not, after all, about commentary, language and avant-garde art, but rather about the politics of documentation, secrecy and individuality, which have made subjectivity our basic problem. Rajchman clearly points to an important shift of emphasis in Foucault’s thought, which is often identified as his break from archaeology and move towards more politically motivated genealogy. I will argue, however, that the question of the subject was already prominent in his early thought, and, furthermore, that it was interwoven with the question of language. Foucault’s book Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel is among his works that have been least commented on.15 In writing a book about Raymond Roussel – an eccentric writer admired by the Surrealists – he raises questions about the writing subject as the origin of meaning. In writing some of his books, Roussel used a method he described in his posthumous work Comment j’ai ecrit certain de mes livres. He would take a phrase containing two words, each of which had a double meaning, and use the least likely meaning as the basis of a story. He would transform a common phrase, a book title, or a line of poetry into a series of words with similar sounds. By selecting a sentence at random, he would draw images from it by distorting it. John Ashbery (1986, xxiii–xxv) describes the method by referring to Roussel’s work in which the hazards of language result in strange but beautiful rhyming events, and banal mechanisms create convincing juxtapositions.

14 Rajchman (1985, 111) identifies Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida as central figures in this movement. 15 Foucault said (PS, 185) in an interview that he was happy that no one had paid much attention to this book, because it had remained his ‘secret affair’. He also claimed that it did not have a place in the sequence of his books.


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Foucault was clearly fascinated by Roussel’s experiments with language. He said in an interview that Roussel’s work was extremely interesting because it was not only a linguistic experiment, but also an experiment with the nature of language (PS, 175). Roussel’s experiments were mechanical processes that blindly followed certain rules and principles, and yet they were capable of creating new and beautiful meanings. It is clear in relation to Foucault’s own interests that the machine-like production of surreal beauty illustrated for him the idea that language produces meanings independently of the initiatives of the subject. While the Surrealists’ interest in Roussel was connected to their idea of automatic writing and the utilization of the unconscious mind, Foucault’s motivation was somewhat different: he was interested in the ‘unconscious’ of language, not of the writing subject. He saw Roussel’s work as celebrating the role of chance in the interstices of language. Roussel’s process of writing purified discourse of ‘all the false coincidences of inspiration’, in order to confront ‘the unbearable evidence that language comes to us from the depth of a perfectly clear night and is impossible to master’ (DL, 39). It seems that chance triumphs on the surface of the narrative in those forms which rise naturally out of the depths of the impossible; in the singing mites, the truncated man who is a one-man band, the rooster that writes his name by spitting blood, Fogar’s jellyfish, the gluttonous parasols. But these monstrosities without family or species are necessary associations; they obey mathematically the laws governing homonyms and the most exacting principles of order; they are inevitable . . . At the start no instrument or stratagem can predict their outcome. Then the marvelous mechanism takes over and transforms them, doubles their improbability by the game of homonyms, traces a ‘natural’ link between them, and delivers them at last with meticulous care. The reader thinks he recognizes the wayward wanderings of the imagination where in fact there is only random language, methodologically treated. (DL, 38)16 16 ‘En apparence le hasard triomphe a` la surface du récit, dans ces figures qui surgissent naturellement du fond de leur impossibilité – dans les cirons chanteurs, dans l’homme-tronc qui est un homme-orchestre, dans le coq qui e´ crit son nom en crachant du sang, dans les méduses de Fogar, ombrelles gloutonnes. Mais ces monstruosités sans espèces ni familles sont des rencontres obligées, elles obéissent, mathématiquement, a` la loi des synonymes et au principe de la plus juste e´ conomie; elles sont inévitables . . . Au départ, il y a ces lots, dont aucun instrument, aucune ruse ne prévoit la sortie; puis le merveilleux mécanisme s’en empare, les transforme, double leur improbabilité par le jeu des synonymes, trace entre eux un chemin “naturel”, et les livre enfin dans une nécessité méticuleuse. Le lecteur pense reconnaˆıtre les errements sans chemins de l’imagination là ou` il n’y a que les hasards de langage traités méthodiquement.’ (RR, 52–3)

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What is important in connection with a different understanding of freedom is that Foucault read Roussel’s work as an effort to capture what lies outside the discursive order of things by means of language. As he noted, Roussel ‘doesn’t want to duplicate the reality of another world, but, in the spontaneous duality of language, he wants to discover an unexpected space, and to cover it with things never said before’ (DL, 16). The task of avant-garde literature was thus not so much to create an alternative ontological order – another world – but to show the instability of the order of things that we take for granted. This idea of literary writing as constitutive of alternative forms of reality also underlies Foucault’s interest in Surrealism. In an interview he gave in 1966, he discusses the importance of André Breton to contemporary thought. He was asked what Breton and Surrealism represented to a philosopher of 1966 who concerned himself with language and knowledge (STW, 171). Foucault replied that, for Breton, writing had the power to change the world. He reiterated the idea present in OT that language and writing used to be understood as transparent instruments in which the world was reflected. However, Breton was one of the figures with whom the status of writing changed. As Foucault suggested, ‘Perhaps there is a writing so radical and so sovereign that it manages to face up to the world, to counterbalance it, to offset it, even to utterly destroy it and scintillate outside it’ (STW, 173). He argued that Breton had contributed to the changing status of writing in two ways. Firstly, he had remoralized it by demoralizing it completely: the ethic of writing no longer came from what one had to say, from the ideas that one expressed, but it emerged from the very act of writing. ‘In that raw and naked act, the writer’s freedom is fully committed at the same time as the counter-universe of words takes form’ (STW, 173). While freedom as an attribute of the writing subject loses strength, there is a freedom in language itself, in the creation of unexpected worlds. This is the second characteristic of literary language: writing solidifies and asserts itself apart from everything that might be said through it. Writing and art constitute reality, they create objects. Underlying all the activities of the Surrealists, whether writing, painting or wandering around the city, is the aim to constitute new, previously unimaginable objects, to see things differently and expand the domain of what can be thought and imagined. For Foucault, literature thus forms ‘a sort of counter-discourse’ (OT, 300) freed from the principles of order regulating scientific as well as everyday discourses. Its aim is precisely to transgress the limits of


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discourse, and thus to make them visible and contestable, to discover a ‘madness’ in language as ‘that formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom’ (OT, 383). Literary writing can express this freedom of language and also shatter our familiar order of thought. This also means, significantly, that it can make visible the limits of the discursive order. John Rajchman (1985, 24) takes this idea as far as to claim that the picture of an avant-garde writer as the hero of our age is built into the very structure of OT, and that this determines its plot. Literature, represented by figures such as Cervantes and Sade, is never placed directly within an episteme, but is rather in a position from which it can articulate its limits. Don Quixote signals the end of the Renaissance episteme, and Sade, by taking classification to its extreme limits, shows the impossibility of the classical modes of knowledge. According to Rajchman, arts as described in OT are thus meta-epistemic, allegories of the deep arrangements that make knowledge possible. Furthermore, Foucault himself adopted an avant-garde or vanguard position in relation to our modernity, and claimed to have announced a whole new form of thought. By being able to demonstrate the limits of a discursive order, literary writing is also able to reveal important limits of subjectivity. Because the discursive order is constitutive of the limits of subjectivity, counterdiscourse in the form of avant-garde writing, for example, can question these limits. Foucault aimed to show how modes of subjectivity are constituted in scientific discourse, and also how these limits are transcended in avant-garde writing and art.17 Foucault takes up the question of the relationship between the subject and language in an essay entitled What is an Author? His starting point is the claim that writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression and refers only to itself. He does not simply accept this claim, but seeks to problematize it further. It is not enough to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. Instead we must locate the space left empty by this disappearance: follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the opening that the disappearance 17 I will argue in chapter 7 that Foucault’s understanding of art as being capable of revealing and transgressing the limits of subjectivity was explicitly brought out in his late work on ethics. He saw ‘the arts of existence’ as a possibility for challenging normalizing power. Language and writing become tools for recreating the self – ways of opening new forms of experience, modes of thinking and living. According to Foucault, one writes to become someone other than who one is: language is a possibility for modifying one’s way of being through the act of writing. See e.g. UP, 8.

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uncovers (WA, 105). Foucault asks what happens in the openings of the discourse into which the writing subject has disappeared. Foucault suggests that analyses of discourse should proceed through the notion of an author function. The author’s name can no longer be thought of as simply referring to the actual person writing the books on the cover of which it appears, but it has other characteristics that can be analyzed and explicated. It performs certain unique roles with regard to narrative fiction. Analyses proceeding through the concept of author function can provide new methods for literary study, a new approach to a typology of discourse as well as a historical analysis of it. Foucault also attaches a third, distinctly philosophical importance to this type of study: the re-examining of the subject. I realize that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work (be it a literary text, a philosophical system, or scientific work), in setting aside biographical and psychological references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. Still perhaps one must return to this question, not in order to re-establish the theme of an originating subject, but to grasp the subject’s points of insertion, modes of functioning and systems of dependencies. (WA, 117–18)18

Foucault’s approach, far from eliminating the question of the subject, in fact poses this question explicitly, but from a new angle. It is no longer a case of analyzing the subject as the originator of discourse, but rather one of analyzing it as a variable and complex function. The author becomes one example of a discursively constructed subject position that has come into being with the development of a certain kind of narrative discourse, and which holds a specific function and position in relation to it. Therefore the questions that Foucault suggests we ask about the subject concern how, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse. What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what function can it assume, and by obeying what rules (WA, 118)? 18 ‘Je sais bien qu’en entreprenant l’analyse interne et architectonique d’une œuvre (qu’il s’agisse d’un texte littéraire, d’un système philosophique, ou d’une œuvre scientique), en mettant entre parenthèses les références biographiques ou psychologiques, on a déjà remis en question le caractère absolu, et le rôle fondateur du sujet. Mais il faudrait peuteˆ tre revenir sur ce suspens, non point pour restaurer le thème d’un sujet originaire, mais pour saisir les points d’insertion, les modes de fonctionnement et les dépendances du sujet.’ (QA, 810.)


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Foucault does not claim that there are no subjects writing books with their pens or on their computers. What he claims is that we cannot understand what an author is by only studying the individual writing a book. We need a new method. Apart from presenting a new method, however, he also seems to suggest that his approach has an additional advantage. He ends his essay with a curious, Utopian twist that brings us back to the question of freedom. The author as a functional principle not only organizes the work in a certain way, but also limits, excludes and chooses. It is the means by which the free circulation, manipulation, composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction is impended (WA, 119). The author for Foucault is thus both a contingent and a constraining figure.19 Although there will never be a completely free circulation of texts, the modes of constraint are historically changing, and it is therefore possible that one day we might live in a culture in which we are not limited by the figure of the author, but rather surrounded by an anonymous murmur, an endless proliferation of meanings (WA, 119–20). Hence, by a curious twist, the methodological ‘disappearance’ of the subject in Foucault’s thought does not signal the disappearance of freedom. It is, rather, the case that freedom is understood as the endless proliferation of meanings, which undermines the stability of the historical a priori determining possible ways of seeing, understanding and acting. Rather than thinking of the subject in terms of individuals, and of freedom as something they have or do not have, he suggests that we attempt to think of the subject as a discursive effect and freedom as a non-subjective opening up of possibilities for multiple creative practices. This does not mean that he denies the possibility of understanding subjects as individuals or agents, and freedom as a capacity that is tied to their initiatives. His analysis simply does not operate on this level. It charts new dimensions of freedom. He is trying to find freedom on a level that orders and regulates subjective expressions and initiatives. In the realm of scientific discourse, Foucault emphasized the rules and formal conditions of thinking, and questioned the possibility of saying something completely new. In the realm of literature this possibility is emphasized, however, because the ontological order of things, the historical a priori, can be suspended, even thrown out. Language solidifies the identity of things by repetition, it creates an ontological order taken as unquestioned reality, but it can also act as ‘a thin blade 19 Cf. DL, 156.

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that slits the identity of things, showing them as hopelessly double and self-divided even as they are repeated’ (RR, 23). There is a dimension of language capable of undermining reality instead of only materializing and solidifying it according to pre-existing rules. Hence, as it is often argued that Foucault wanted to construct a history and politics without human nature,20 it could equally well be argued that he wanted to rethink freedom without human nature. In the same way as archaeology questions the privileged role of the subject in the constitution of knowledge without eradicating it as a question, it also seeks to understand freedom in non-subjective terms without eradicating the notion. Freedom characterizes language rather than the subject. The limits of freedom are the limits of the discursive order, and they must not be conflated with the limits of the social order or of acceptance. Although Foucault showed interest in marginal subjectivities throughout his work, he did not romanticize marginal lifestyles, nor did he see them as exemplifying freedom. The limits that he attempted to identify demarcated discursively constructed ontological realms. What lies outside of them is not socially unacceptable, it is unintelligible in existing modes of order. The history of madness would be the history of the Other – of that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded . . . whereas the history of the order imposed on things would be the history of the Same – of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities. (OT, xxiv)21

Clare O’Farrell (1989, vii) points to this passage, and argues that Foucault’s whole work can be read as a history of limits, of that edge between the systems societies impose upon order (the Same), and that which is outside or beyond that order (the Other). His work of the 1960s presents, in this sense, a consistent ontological view of a changing boundary between the Same and the Other, apparent in the events of history (O’Farrell 1989, 40, 90). In Madness and Civilization, the confrontation between the Same and the Other was between reason 20 See Davidson 1997b, 15. 21 ‘L’histoire de la folie serait l’histoire de l’Autre – de ce qui, pour une culture, est a` la fois intérieur et e´ tranger, donc a` exclure . . . l’histoire de l’ordre des choses serait l’histoire du Même, – de ce qui pour une culture est a` la fois dispersé et apparenté, donc a` distinguer par des marques et a` recueillir dans des identités.’ (MC, 15)


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and madness, while in The Birth of the Clinic the Other was represented by death, and in The Order of Things by the being of language. O’Farrell nevertheless claims that, during the 1970s, Foucault gradually constructed a vision of society and history in which the Same and the Other were totally coextensive and indeed interchangeable, inextricably bound together in their movement. Notions of power and politics came to occupy an important place in his thought at the expense of the Other. According to O’Farrell, the problem of the limit did not reappear until the 1980s, when the notion of the subject took centre stage and the Same and the Other become distinct and free terms again (41, 91, 115). I will argue, against O’Farrell, that the limit, and freedom as its transgression, never disappears from Foucault’s thought. I now turn my attention to Foucault’s thought in the 1970s, and my focus is on the question of the body. Although the realm of freedom opened up by literary writing – or in O’Farrell’s conceptual terminology, the Other – is harder to locate in the tightly knit networks of power and knowledge, it is nevertheless present. The body will come to represent resistance to power, and it will open up new ways of understanding freedom. In the works following The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault further developed the idea that subjects are formed in discursive practices, but he also turned to study other axes of the constitution of the subject in non-discursive practices as well as in the technologies of the self. This means that the realms of freedom are also expanded. Freedom emerges not only through the practice of writing as constitutive of an ontological otherness to the discursive order, but also in other kinds of practice. At the same time, writing becomes entangled with subjectivity in even more integral ways: it becomes inseparable from sexuality and life: ‘The private life of an individual, his sexual preferences, and his work are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual life, but because the work includes the whole life as well as the text. The work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work’ (PS, 184).

II BODY

4 A GENEALOGY OF THE SUBJECT

So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a history. Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or at least of punishment is so far lacking completely. Has anyone made a study of different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals and rest? (Nietzsche 1887/1974, 81–2)

In an interview conducted in 1983, Foucault situates his thought, as well as the trends of thought influenced by structuralism, linguistic theory and psychoanalysis in the 1960s as explicit efforts to rethink the phenomenological subject. The phenomenological theory of the subject was his point of departure, and his thought has been an effort to make distance from it (SPS, 442). I would say that everything that took place in the sixties arose from a dissatisfaction with the phenomenological theory of the subject, and involved different escapades, subterfuges, breakthroughs, according to whether we use a negative or positive term, in the direction of linguistics, psychoanalysis or Nietzsche. (SPS, 438)1

The linguistic turn of structuralism and post-structuralism in French thought was thus, according to Foucault, a reaction to phenomenology. 1 ‘Donc, je dirais que tout ce qui sest passé autour des années soixante venait bien de cette insatisfaction devant la théorie phénoménologique du sujet, avec différentes e´ chappées, différentes e´ chappatoires, différentes percées, selon qu’on prend un terme négatif ou positif, vers la linguistique, vers la psychoanalyse, vers Nietzsche’ (SEPS, 437).

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The importance of the structuralist method and also of Nietzsche’s thought to Foucault lay in the fact that they provided ways of rethinking the phenomenological subject and the historicity of reason as forms of rationality. In his lecture ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, he also describes his choice of direction in terms of rethinking the phenomenological subject: I have tried to get out from the philosophy of the subject through a genealogy of this subject, by studying the constitution of the subject across history which has led us up to the modern concept of the self. This has not always been an easy task, since most historians prefer a history of social processes (where society plays the role of the subject) and most philosophers prefer a subject without history. (ST, 176)2

Reading Foucault’s genealogy as an effort to rethink the phenomenological subject opens up a new angle on his relationship with phenomenology. I have argued in the previous section that Foucault’s archaeology and phenomenology shared a common mode of questioning in inquiring into the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge. Here I will cast their relationship in a slightly different mould through the question of the subject: my aim in this chapter is to explicate Foucault’s genealogical conception of the subject as a critical reaction to the phenomenological subject. I will ask what Foucault meant by his controversial claims that power makes individuals subjects and that the subject is an effect of power. I will argue that we must not understand the constitution of the subject as a causal process.3 Power relations are immanent to the social reality and have empirical causal effects, but they are also paradoxically ‘transcendental’, in the sense that they are a condition of possibility for the constitution of the subject. Pheng Cheah (1996, 126), for example, argues that power is quasi-transcendental for Foucault, because it is both the immanent causal origin of empiricality and physicality and a condition of possibility for grasping social reality, a grid of its intelligibility, which cannot itself be accessible to cognitive or practical-intentional mastery and control. While Foucault’s genealogy of the subject is thus a critical reaction to the phenomenological subject, I argue that it nonetheless presents a modification of transcendental analysis: the network of power/knowledge is understood primarily to provide the condition of possibility for the subject, not the material 2 Originally delivered in English.

3 Cf. Flynn 1989, 189.

a ge n e a l o g y o f t h e s u b j e c t

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cause. Historical and transcendental constitution are again inseparable in the sense that the conditions of possibility of the subject are to be found in the historical practices and discourses structured by power relations. By claiming that power relations are productive of forms of the subject, Foucault does thus not simply suggest that individuals are produced as subjects just as cars are produced from various materials in a factory. Rather, we must understand the subject to be intrinsically entangled with power and knowledge. Power/knowledge network constitutes the subject in the sense of forming the grid of intelligibility for its actions, intentions, desires and motivations. My discussion ends by considering the problems involved in this ‘transcendental’ reading. I will question the apparent circularity of Foucault’s understanding of the constitution of the subject, and will suggest ways of combating this problem.

The constitution of the subject Foucault’s genealogy is often characterized by the fact that it introduces into his thought non-discursive practices and the relations of power.4 This kind of characterization is, however, misleading in many ways. Archaeology already treated discourse as a set of practices, making the opposition of discursive and non-discursive difficult to uphold. It also explicitly postulated a close tie between the discursive and the nondiscursive. Archaeology provided a distinctive approach to the relations between discourses and non-discursive domains such as ‘institutions, political events, economic practices and processes’ (AK, 162). It aimed to determine how the rules that govern a discursive formation ‘may be linked to non-discursive systems’ (AK, 162). Foucault explicitly stated in The Archaeology of Knowledge that discourse poses the question of power, because it is by nature an object of political struggle (AK, 120). He 4 Foucault introduced his conception of genealogy in an article Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971/1984), in which he presents an interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogy. The tone of the article is polemical, and Foucault presents his own ideas alongside those of Nietzsche without clear distinctions. Although his thought was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, there were also other major influences on it. His genealogy is by no means a faithful reapplication of Nietzsche’s method. Foucault does not introduce his own conception of genealogy as a coherent method in any of his other writings either. His idea of genealogy has therefore to be built up from different books, articles and interviews, which means that it is hard to give a uniform presentation of it. For a systematic explication of ‘Foucaultian’ genealogy, see Kusch 1991.

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did not, however, elaborate on how the close tie between the discursive and the non-discursive should be understood, except that he clearly denied both that they symbolically reflect each other, and that nondiscursive changes should be studied in terms of a causality communicated through the consciousness of the speaking subject (e.g., AK, 163). By suspending causal analysis of discursive changes, he denied that he was trying to give discourse ‘the status of pure ideality and total historical independence’, but was rather doing it ‘in order to discover the domain of existence and functioning of a discursive practice’ (AK, 164–5). Foucault’s focus on discourse was thus a methodological choice, not the ontological choice of discursive idealism. He did not hold that discursive formations were completely autonomous, nor did he later give up this position – despite its problems – in favour of a completely new position emphasizing non-discursive practices. Instead, he further developed his central philosophical claim that scientific objects are constituted in history through discursive practices. Foucault’s genealogy in the 1970s also looked more comprehensively at the tie between discursive and non-discursive practices through the notion of power/knowledge. Beatrice Han (1998/2002) also argues that a shift of attention from discursive to non-discursive practices is not sufficient to mark the difference between archaeology and genealogy.5 According to her, what is important in the introduction of genealogy is the claim that it is impossible to understand the conditions of possibility of scientific discourse without taking into account the development of new forms of power. With genealogy Foucault is able to analyze the way non-epistemic demands not only control the effective predication of scientific truths, but also shape the overall conditions of possibility of scientific discourse (Han 1998/2002, 104, 109–10). The conditions of possibility under investigation are thus no longer a set of purely epistemic rules, but a power/knowledge network consisting of all kinds of practices: institutional, architectonic, juridical and medical. The episteme, or what Foucault now refers to as the ‘regime of discourses’, only constitutes the specifically discursive element of a more general regime, the dispositif or apparatus (Han 1998/2002, 137–8). Foucault clarifies their relationship by writing that ‘the episteme is a specifically discursive apparatus, whereas the apparatus in its general form is both discursive 5 Gary Gutting (1989, 271) also argues that genealogy does not replace or even seriously revise Foucault’s archaeological method, but rather combines it with the complementary technique of causal analysis, which establishes an essential symbiotic relation between power and knowledge.


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and non-discursive, its elements being much more heterogeneous’ (CF, 197). It is not a question of power relations presenting a new level or a simple addition to previous analyses of discursive practices, but rather that the idea of the fundamental entanglement of power and knowledge, power/knowledge, becomes central: knowledge and power are intrinsically tied together, they condition each other and cannot be understood independently of each other. Foucault defines the new notion of apparatus by writing: What I am trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a wholly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (CF, 194)6

The apparatus now becomes the ‘transcendental’ in Foucault’s thought, in the sense of providing the conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific objects. It also, crucially, becomes the condition of possibility for the subject. While archaeology facilitated partial analysis of the subject by approaching it through the discursive subject positions made possible by the episteme and produced through a set of formative rules, the introduction of genealogy as Foucault’s method in the 1970s provided a way to present a more comprehensive account of the constitution of the subject. Genealogy analyzes the constitutive effects of non-discursive practices as well as of the scientific truths dependent on them. The subjection of the body. Central to Foucault’s genealogy is the idea of ‘subjection’ (assujettissement), which refers to the process of constituting subjects. The body is an important instrument in this process. In his first major genealogical book, Discipline and Punish Foucault 6 ‘Ce que j’essaie de repérer sous ce nom, c’est, premièrement, un emsemble résolument hétérogène, comportant des discours, des institutions, des aménagements architecturaux, des décisions réglementaires, des lois, des mesures administratives, des e´ noncés scientifiques, des propositions philosophiques, morales, philanthropiques, bref: du dit, aussi bien que du non-dit, voilà les e´ léments du dispositif. Le dispositif lui-même, cest le réseau qu’on peut e´ tablir entre ces e´ léments.’ (JMF, 299)

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analyzes the ways disciplinary technologies subject prisoners by manipulating and materially inscribing their bodies. Their bodies are separated from others in practices of classification and examination, but also concretely and spatially. They are manipulated through exercise regimes, diet and strict time schedules. These processes of subjection are essentially objectifying: through processes of classification and examination the individual is given a social and a personal identity: he/she is objectivized as mad, criminal or sick, for example. Disciplinary power thus constitutes criminal subjects through concrete bodily manipulation and discursive objectification. These two dimensions strengthen each other. On the one hand, material subjection made theoretical objectification possible, resulting in the birth of human sciences such as criminology, criminal psychiatry and pedagogy. The development of the corresponding sciences, on the other hand, helped the development and rationalization of disciplinary technologies. The two dimensions furthermore link together effectively through normalization. Scientific discourses produce truths that function as the norm. Norms further the subjection by reducing individuality to a common measure. They also make possible the subjection of individuals through the internalization of norms. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzes the disciplinary strategy that utilizes the idea of an inner core or essence in the subjection of criminals. Where prisoners are concerned, disciplinary power does not aim at repressing their interests or desires, but rather at constructing them as normal. This is done on and through the bodies of criminals who subject themselves to power to the extent that its aims become their own inner meaning of normal. In a later text, in a famous passage, Foucault writes: ‘There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and subject tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to’ (SP, 212). Hence, a novel aspect of modern disciplinary power is that it is not external to the bodies that it subjects. Although the body has also in the past been intimately tied to power and social order, Foucault claims that disciplinary power is essentially a modern phenomenon. It differs from earlier forms of bodily manipulation, which were violent and often performative – public tortures, slavery and hanging. Disciplinary power does not subject the body to external violence, it is not external or spectacular. It focuses on details, on single movements, on their timing and rapidity. It organizes bodies in space and schedules their every


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action for maximum effect. This is done in factories, schools, hospitals and prisons through fixed and minutely detailed rules, constant surveillance and frequent examinations and check-ups. Bodies are classified according to their best possible performance, their size, age and sex. Unlike older forms of bodily coercion, disciplinary power thus does not only causally mutilate and shape the criminal body. The criminal literally incorporates the objectives of power, which become the norm for his own aims and behaviour. Foucault formulates this poetically by writing that the ‘soul’ is an effect of the material reality of the subjection of the body (DP, 30). It is in this context that he presents his most extreme formulations of subjects as effects of power. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. ‘A soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (DP, 30)7

In his ‘Two Lectures’, which dates from around the same period as Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the relationship between body, power and the subject. These lectures represent one of his early efforts to conceptualize power in new terms.8 He wanted to find an alternative to theorizing power in terms of sovereignty as well as in terms of rights, repression or economy. He turned to the ‘Nietzschean’ alternative, according to which the basis of the relationships of power lie in the ‘hostile engagement of forces’ (TL, 91). Foucault also wanted to construct a model that would better account for the new form of power, disciplinary power. This type of power functions through material operators; it presupposes a ‘tightly knit grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign’ (TL, 104). Foucault suggests that we should not look for the centre of power, but rather study it at its extremities, the points at which it ‘becomes capillary’ 7 ‘L’homme dont on nous parle et qu’on invite a` libérer est déjà en lui-même l’effet d’un assujettissement bien plus profond que lui. Une “âme” l’habite et le porte a` l’existence, qui est elle-même une pièce dans la maˆıtrise que le pouvoir exerce sur le corps. L’âme, effet et instrument d’une anatomie politique; l’âme, prison du corps.’ (SEP, 38) 8 Foucault presents his account of power as a series of propositions in HS and elucidates it further in numerous interviews and essays. Foucault’s account of power should not be understood as a universally applicable theory of power. His goal in HS is rather to find a method that will help us to understand ‘a certain form of knowledge regarding sex’ (HS, 92). See also e.g. Cousins and Hussain 1984, 2 and Gutting 1994, 19–20.

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(TL, 96). Neither should we look for the individuals who dominate, or question their motives, but rather study ‘the myriad of bodies which are constituted as peripheral subjects as results of the effects of power’ (TL, 98). Rather than studying how subjects exercise power, Foucault turns the question around and asks how the subject emerges as an effect of power. Now he clearly formulates his project in terms of constitutional analysis.9 [R]ather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to us in his lofty isolation, we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. (TL, 97)10

The emphasis on material bodies as the locus of a struggle between power relations is also strong in Foucault’s introduction of the concept of biopower at the end of The History of Sexuality, volume i. Biopower is a particularly modern form of power, which links together power, sexuality and the body. Its function is to ‘invest life through and through’ by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life (HS, 139). This ‘power over life’ evolved in two basic forms, which were linked together. The first was the disciplinary power that centred on the individual body as a machine. The second focused on the species body, the population. It effected the regulatory control of propagation, births and mortality, the level of health and life expectancy, for example (HS, 139–40). Foucault’s aim again is to isolate the functions that the body has as a central component in the power relations of society. The forms of the subject. If we understand subjection to mean, on the one hand, that material bodies are causally formed into subjects in processes of subordination with different manipulative technologies of power, and on the other hand that individual bodies internalize the objectives of power to the extent that they become the meaning of their subjectivity, Foucault’s understanding of the subject seems to 9 See also e.g. EPF, TP. 10 ‘plutôt que de se demander comment le souverain apparaˆıt en haut, chercher a` savoir comment sont progressivement, réellement, matériellement constitués les sujets a` partir de la multiplicité des corps, des forces, des e´ nergies, des matières, des désirs, des pensées; saisir l’instance matérielle de l’assujettissement en tant que constitution des sujets’ (CJ, 179).


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be some kind of combination of behaviourist and social constructivist accounts of the subject. In fact, these kinds of labels have invariably been stuck on him. It has been argued that the core idea of Foucault’s genealogy is a reduction of subjects to bodies: he denies the existence of subjectivity, now understood as individual consciousness and transformative agency, and redefines it as disciplined, corporeal materiality causally formed and shaped. Power causally shapes material bodies into subjects through subjection, and subjectivity is an illusory effect of the subordination of bodies. This kind of conception often underlies the feminist criticisms of Foucault, according to which his understanding of the subject in terms of passive bodies is problematic for feminist theory because it cannot account for women’s experiences or agency.11 Power is not seen as the constitutional moment and precondition of any kind of subject – autonomous or determined – but is rather understood as the constraining grip that squeezes bodies into subjects. In the context of analyzing the functioning of disciplinary power, Foucault conceives of subjects as bodies. Furthermore, subjection always has as its correlate the process of objectification, the body of the criminal as an object-body, the body as useful and docile. This does not, however, mean that he adopts a mechanical view of the body and simply equates subjects with object-bodies.12 In his later work he insisted that the subject is not a substance: ‘It is a form and this form is not above all or always identical to itself’ (EPF, 10). The subject must thus be understood as the intelligible form of a human being, not as an object-body. Human beings become socially recognized as well as recognize themselves through a culturally and historically constituted form, and there is not just one universal form, but rather forms of this form, forms of the subject. ‘It is precisely the historical constitution of these different forms of the subject relating to the games of truth that interest me’ (EPF, 10). It is thus not merely that power causally turns bodies into subjects according to its requirements: the idea of subjection is more complex and sophisticated. The disciplinary manipulation of bodies does not 11 See e.g. McNay 1991, Soper 1993, Deveaux 1996. 12 According to Foucault, the body is not understood as a passive mechanism. In the next chapter I will argue that it is exactly in the body that a margin of excess and the possibility for subverting the normalizing aims of power take place. Foucault suggests ‘bodies and pleasures’ as a possible form of resistance. Although power constitutes the mastery and awareness of one’s body, it is the body that produces the resistance, ‘the counter-attacks’ against the same power (B/P, 56).

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produce subjects per se, but is only one part of a complex network of power/knowledge, or ‘apparatus’, which forms the constitutive conditions of subjectivity. Bodily subjection partakes in the formation of a discursive order, through the birth of human sciences, for example. This discursive order then feeds back to the non-discursive practices by creating material effects. Human sciences and their truths create objects not only of science, but also of reality: desires, forms of experience, certain kinds of bodies. Scientific discourse and practice constitute not only conceptual objects and identities, but also the subjects who make them materialize. Hence, the manipulation of bodies forms only one dimension of a complex power/knowledge network, which further constitutes subjects through the material effects generated by scientific truths. Ian Hacking (1984, 115, 122) argues that Foucault restricts his analysis to the human sciences exactly for the reason that it is only in the human sciences that scientific truths have constitutive effects on the subjects under study. In the natural sciences our invention of new identities and categories does not ‘really’ change the way the world works. Even though we may create new phenomena that did not exist before our scientific endeavours, what happens in our experiments is constrained by the world: if we do certain things, certain phenomena will always appear. But in the social sciences we may generate kinds of people and kinds of action as we devise new classifications and categories. Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interaction between these processes.13 Beatrice Han (1998/2002, 125) also explains this process in her discussion of a course given by Foucault in 1974 at the College de France, in which the effects of truth specific to medical discourse on hysteric patients were analyzed. Medical discourse elaborated a 13 One of Hacking’s examples is the notion of psychic trauma. He discusses it along with the three axes that Foucault distinguishes in his analyses of the constitution of the subject: knowledge, power and ethics. First, there is the person as known about, as having a kind of behaviour and sense of self that is produced by psychic trauma. There is a vast body of knowledge in the growing field of tramatology. Second, in addition to the power of courts and legislatures, there is the anonymous power that this concept has in people’s lives. It organizes their ideas and emotions by creating a new sense of self. At the third, moral level, the new sense of self as a victim of childhood trauma, for example, also creates a new moral being. An understanding of who one is and why one is as one is has implications for our understanding of a person’s responsibilities and duties (Hacking 2002, 18–20).


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theoretical object, following a process made possible by the hospital structure and therefore by the techniques of subjection practised on the patient. But by the same token, this discourse generated a real object corresponding to its knowledge. The conceptual objectification of the illness hysteria was therefore doubled by a second material form of objectification, in which the hysterical woman reproduced in her very person the phenomena. The objectification process was thus transposed from the theoretical level to that of reality, where in turn it produced concrete effects, since real forms of illness ended up corresponding to the newly constituted concept of the patient’s sickness. Hence, Foucault’s idea of subjection does not simply mean that power externally and causally forms human beings into subjects by disciplining them in their materiality. Bodily manipulation produces or constitutes modern forms of the subject by being an integral component of biopower, which not only controls subjects but also constitutes them through the normalizing effects of scientific truths. By urging us to dispense with the subject, Foucault does not deny that there are actual subjects exercising influence on their environments and on the course of historical events. What his genealogical account of the subject denies is the foundational status of the subject. This is done on several different levels. On an ontological level, Foucault denies all metaphysical claims that posit it as a substance or endow it with an essence. The subject is the intelligible form of a human being, not a static substance. In contrast to phenomenology, Foucault further seeks to historisize this form more radically. He does not only historically situate pre-existing subjects, but also puts forward a stronger version of historical constitution. Historically variable practices not only condition what is possible to know about the subject, but they also engender its experiences. Human sciences and the disciplinary practices tied to them constitute not only conceptual objects or identities, but also the subjects who materialize them.14 This ontological claim about the subject is motivated and argued for on both epistemological as well as ethical/political levels. Above 14 J. N. Mohanty (1997, 79) explains Foucault’s position concisely by suggesting that Foucault reworks the problem of constitution by rejecting transcendental subjectivity as constitutive of all objectivities, and by offering instead a theory of how the subject itself is historically constituted. The principle of this constitution is not history in the traditional sense, however, for the idea of one continuous historical process unfolding itself at one time is itself a construction, behind which stands the transcendental subject. Mohanty argues that the principle of constitution, ‘the transcendental’, is for Foucault, power (83–4).

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I discussed how Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology in The Order of Things aimed to show the instability of all efforts to ground knowledge on the subject. What is constituted in historical practices – namely the subject and its experiences – cannot provide the basis of explanation for these practices. The subject cannot have a foundational role in the constitution of meaning, because it is dependent on the nonsubjective mechanisms of signification and on historically changing discursive structures. The ethical or political motivation arises from the claim that the modern philosophies of the subject are intrinsically entangled with the modern forms of subjection. I will return to this idea in more detail below, when I focus on Foucault’s late work on ethics. According to my constitutional reading of Foucault, genealogy thus shares with phenomenology the transcendental mode of questioning as opposed to a purely empirical study of the subject, but it does not share the methodological starting point in the subject. Foucault rejects the phenomenological subject that is the ground and source of knowledge, meaning and value, and asks how the subject itself and its experiences are historically constituted through discursive games of truth, practices of power and technologies of the self. He does not deny subjectivity, but neither does he construct a general theory of it. He studies the historical constitution of different fields of experience – sexuality, delinquency, madness. His thought is in a sense left circulating around the place left empty by the transcendental subject.

The problem of circularity Foucault’s modification of the transcendental mode of questioning seems to open up a host of problems. We have to ask: how should we understand the power/knowledge network as the transcendental? Several commentators have pointed out that Foucault’s totalizing formulations at times give the impression that power/knowledge is a metaphysical, monolithic entity or a structural invariant. Charles Taylor (1986, 88) compares Foucault’s conception of power to ‘a strange kind of Schopenhauerian will, ungrounded in human action’. Beatrice Han (1998/2002, 143) argues that some of Foucault’s formulations reactivate the type of Hegelian schema so disliked by him, in which power/knowledge take different historical forms. Han points out that the idea that power/knowledge could be an essence definable in itself would return to exactly the sort of metaphysics that genealogy sought


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to combat by giving primacy to perspective and interpretation, against any essentialist ontology. It should be emphasized, however, that Foucault repeatedly used the notion of game in describing his understanding of the power/ knowledge network. He wrote, for example, that ‘relations of power, they are played; it is these games of power (jeux de pouvoir) that one must study in terms of tactics and strategy’ (PA, 542, trans. Davidson 1997a, 4). He explicitly related this study to the Anglo-American analysis of everyday language games, which does not give itself ‘the task of considering the being of language or the deep structures of language; it considers the everyday use that one makes of language in different types of discourse’ (PA, 541, trans. Davidson 1997a, 3). Similarly, the task of his genealogy would be to analyze what happens in everyday relations of power, rather than attempting to define the essence of power or to affect it with a pejorative or laudatory qualification.15 Foucault also described his genealogy as a study of the ‘games through which one sees certain forms of subjectivity, certain domains, certain types of knowledge come into being’ (TJF, 4). It was ‘a radical critique of the human subject by history’, which was accomplished by showing ‘the historical construction of a subject through a discourse understood as consisting of a set of strategies which are part of social practices’ (TJF, 3–4). Thomas Flynn (1994, 30) offers an illuminating explanation of Foucault’s conception of practice using Wittgenstein’s concept of game: practices are shaped by a preconceptual, anonymous, socially sanctioned body of rules that govern one’s manner of perceiving, judging, imagining and acting. This game analogy can be pushed further to illuminate the way socially recognized subjects are constituted through practices that are specific to particular social and historical contexts. All games contain meanings that are not reducible to the intentions or acts of individual players, but which make them possible. In a similar way, the power/knowledge network contains meanings and even intentions, but this intentionality is not in the intentions or acts of individual subjects, but rather constitutes the individual as a subject.16 15 On Foucault’s relationship to Wittgenstein and Anglo-American analytic philosophy, see Davidson 1997b. 16 This idea also makes understandable Foucault’s claim that power relations are nonsubjective but intentional. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in which he presents his account of power as a series of propositions, he writes that power relations are ‘imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from

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The transcendental reading of Foucault’s account of the subject must thus be qualified in the important respect that there are no a priori rules or categories of intelligibility that make individual meaninggiving acts possible. Rather, the historically variable rules only exist to the extent that the ‘players’ unconsciously follow them. The intentionality of power relations only arises out of the repeated actions of the intentional subjects. Foucault insisted that power relations do not pre-exist the individuals who are to be inserted in them as inert or consenting targets. Power only exists when it is exercised. Individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application (TL, 98). Even if we therefore pass off the extreme essentialism as a result of inadequately contextualized formulations, and accept that power/ knowledge always refers to particular practices and not to metaphysical essences, we still seem to encounter the problem of circularity. Foucault’s genealogy does not deny subjectivity. It is not a behaviourist account, but neither is it a social constructivist account. While some proponents of social constructivism would also claim that the idea of power being productive of subjectivity entails that the subject ‘internalizes’ its aims and objectives, the important idea in Foucault’s account is that the subject and the constitutive matrix are not understood as external to each other, but are rather regarded as importantly continuous and entangled in complex ways through the idea of a constitutive apparatus. Power/knowledge, understood as a network of practices, is not ontologically distinct from the subject. On the contrary, the emergence of any kind of subject is dependent on and ontologically tied to the existence of the power/knowledge network: it constitutes the subject by providing the historically variable conditions for its emergence. Foucault’s genealogies are thus not descriptions of how prepersonal beings are turned into subjects through causal processes of social conditioning, but rather analyses or genealogical mappings of the conditions of possibility of certain practices and forms of the subject. The circularity of Foucault’s understanding of the subject thus does not take the simple form of presupposing some kind of unconditioned subject to give an account of how a socially conditioned subject the choice or decision of an individual subject’ (HS, 95). This claim has often been interpreted as bestowing power with some ‘occult’ qualities, or as simply nonsensical. (See e.g. Waltzer 1986, 63; Taylor 1986, 85–6.) The claim is that power should be studied as a non-subjective form of intentionality: it cannot be theorized as an object-like entity, structure or state of affairs. It is an intentional, productive practice: a set of actions upon other actions (SP, 220).


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emerges.17 The circularity is more complex. The constitutive matrix of the subject, or its transcendental condition of possibility, is a power/knowledge network consisting of discursive and non-discursive practices constantly feeding back on each other. These practices, however, are only operational to the extent that the subjects are their agents. The subject as an effect of power relations is also the subject exercising power. If power/knowledge is identical with the apparatus, the overall network of practices, then the constituted – subjects as agents of these practices – and the constituting – the practices – become confused. What is supposed to explain the subject in fact already presupposes its existence insofar as there can be no practices without subjects. One way to defend Foucault’s account against this criticism of circularity is to insist that his aim was not to produce a general theory of the subject. What thus sets his account apart from behaviourist or constructivist theories, for example, is not just the transcendental mode of questioning, but also the strictly partial and historically contingent character. Even if psychiatric practices and the corresponding scientific truths constitute mentally ill subjects, for example, this is only one of myriad forms of the subject. There are different sets of practices, partly overlapping but distinct nevertheless, which constitute the subject. This constitution is thus not one unified and circular process, but consists of regions of practices in which different subjects act in different ways at different times. Rather than constructing a unified theory of the subject, Foucault focused on historically specific forms of it. The analysis must always be partial; there can be no unified theory or unique way of representing the subject. It is always multiple and dispersed. Foucault’s genealogies show how certain practices in specific domains – for example criminology in nineteenth-century France – function as historical conditions of a particular form of the subject. The transcendental conditions are thus again importantly historical: they are contingent, historically located and variable. Foucault’s focus is not on the subject as such, but on the conditions which make possible certain experiences and actions: the forms of rationality and the relationships between our thought and our 17 Nick Crossley (1994, 191), for example, has argued that what Foucault needs is an account of ‘a prepersonal being, a being which is less than a fully fledged subject but more than an object’. This being would then be turned into a subject through disciplinary technologies. This kind of account would, however, be impossible in Foucault’s genealogical framework, since Foucault very strongly rejects all a priori theories of a subject.

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practices in western society. The descriptions of how human beings are turned into subjects are always partial and limited to specific historical contexts. Another direction to take Foucault’s understanding of the subject in order to lead it out of the impasse of circularity is to make a sharp distinction between power/knowledge as an overall network and the power the subject exercises in acting upon the other’s actions. Foucault kept modifying or ‘redefining’ his account of power. In one of his last interviews he distinguished three different levels in his analyses of power: relationships of power as strategic games between individuals; states of domination; and governmental technologies (EPF, 19). We can interpret this as meaning that relationships between individuals, whether they are states of domination or strategic games, form a different level of analysis from governmental technologies understood as the non-subjective techniques of power/knowledge. Hence, although the power/knowledge network must consist of practices in which subjects act and exercise power, there is an important shift between the levels of the overall network and singular actions. The overall network, on the one hand, holds constitutive power by virtue of its stable, shared and sedimented meanings, while the singular actors, on the other hand, retain the possibility of giving creative and singular meanings to their actions, and hence, also offer the possibility of resistance. Judith Butler elaborates this possibility in her book The Psychic Life of Power. She takes up the question of circularity in Foucault’s account, but writes, ‘Luckily, the story survives this impasse’ (Butler 1997, 12). She argues that subjection has a double aspect: one is subjected to regulatory power, but this subordination is also the condition of possibility of the subject’s existence. Butler admits that this double aspect of subjection appears to lead to a vicious circle: the agency of the subject appears to be an effect of its subordination. This conception of the subject leads, furthermore, to pessimistic political views according to which forms of capital or symbolic domination are such that our acts are always already ‘domesticated’ in advance (Butler 1997, 17). Butler argues, however, that power as a condition of possibility of the subject is not the same as power considered as the subject’s agency – the power the subject wields by virtue of being a subject in the social matrix. A significant and potentially enabling reversal occurs when power shifts from its status as a condition of agency to the subject’s ‘own’ agency (12). She suggests that to understand this shift in subjection – how the subject is formed in subordination while becoming the guarantor of resistance


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and opposition at the same time – requires thinking the Foucaultian theory of power together with the psychoanalytic theory of the psyche (3). We must ask how the formation of the subject by the regulatory and productive effects of power involves the regulatory formation of the psyche. The resulting conception of the subject would work as a notion of political agency in post-liberatory times (18). I will not go more deeply into Butler’s solution here, but I will return to it in the next two chapters in connection with the question of resistance. I will show that the enabling shift in subjection that Butler locates on the level of the psyche could also be thought to take place on the level of the body. Hence, rather than complementing Foucault’s account of the constitution of the subject with a theory of the psyche, I will suggest that we return to his own formulations about the resistance of the body. Although Foucault’s genealogy combats some of the problems connected with the phenomenological subject, I will show in the next chapter that he never managed to completely leave it behind. There are gaps or silences in his conception of the subject, particularly in connection with sexuality and embodiment, which could be read as implicitly pointing in the direction of phenomenology.

5 ANARCHIC BODIES

Be a philosopher, be a mummy, represent monotono-theism by a gravedigger-mimicry – And away, above all, with the body, that pitiable idée fixe of the senses! Infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even, notwithstanding it is impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed! (Nietzsche 1889/1990, 45)

Foucault’s understanding of the historical constitution of the body through the network of power/knowledge has influenced feminist theory profoundly: it has provided a way to theorize the body in its materiality while avoiding all essentialist formulations, and has given tools for understanding the disciplinary production of the female body.1 While a shared focus on bodies has opened up important connections between feminist theory and Foucault’s thought, Foucault’s apparent denial of the body’s capacity for resistance has also been critically pointed out by several feminist writers. It has been argued that Foucault understands the body as too culturally malleable, and that his conception of it is thus one-sided and limited for feminist purposes.2

1 Susan Bordo (1989, 1993) has appropriated Foucault’s ideas about power and the body in order to study the different ways that women shape their bodies – from cosmetic surgery to dieting and eating disorders – and has analyzed these ‘micro-practices’ of everyday life as disciplinary technologies in the service of normalizing power. According to Bordo, these normative feminine practices train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands, while at the same time they are paradoxically experienced in terms of ‘power’ and ‘control’ by the women themselves. For other feminist appropriations of Foucault, see e.g. Diamond and Quinby 1988, Butler 1990, Hekman 1990, Braidotti 1991, Sawicki 1991 and McNay 1992. 2 See e.g. Bigwood 1991, McNay 1991, Soper 1993.

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In order to evaluate Foucault’s account of the body from the perspective of feminist theory, we must first ask what exactly is meant by the Foucaultian body. The feminist appropriations are based on varying readings of it. Foucault did not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and thus his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles, which aim at bringing the body into the focus of history. I will therefore start by taking a brief look at the central texts in which he discusses the body. My main focus will be on The History of Sexuality, vol. i, which, I argue, presents the most fruitful account of the body from the point of view of feminist philosophy. I will then study three different ways of understanding the Foucaultian body on the basis of these texts. I will finish by arguing for a fourth reading, which, unlike most feminist appropriations, gives a central role to Foucault’s claims about the body as a locus of resistance to normalizing power.

The body of power In terms of genealogy, the body is a central theme in Foucault’s thought. He writes in an article entitled Nietzsche, Genealogy, History that the task of genealogy is to focus on the body. Nietzsche had attacked philosophy for its denial of the materiality and vitality of the body, for its pretentious metaphysics that deals only with abstractions such as values, reason and the soul. Traditional history has been a ‘handmaiden for philosophy’, recounting the necessary birth of these philosophical abstractions (NGH, 90). Genealogy must, however, be ‘a curative science’, charting the long and winding history of metaphysical concepts in the materiality of bodies (NGH, 90). Rather than contemplating what is understood as high and noble, it will focus on the things nearest to it: the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion and energies (NGH, 89). Foucault writes polemically that the philosopher needs the genealogy of the body to ‘exorcise the shadow of his soul’ (NGH, 80). This focus on the body, however, does not mean that it is a genealogical constant, an anchorage point for the unfolding events of history. According to Foucault, what characterizes genealogy is exactly that it is without constants: it will reveal in history no recognitions or ‘rediscoverings of ourselves’ (NGH, 88). It makes no assumptions of foundations, constants or ‘natural’ origins. It is in this context that Foucault outlines the conception of the body as an unstable entity inscribed and shaped by history. According to him, we believe that the body obeys only the

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universal laws of physiology, and that history has no influence on it. In reality, the body is ‘totally imprinted by history’, it can be used and experienced in many different ways, and its characteristics vary according to cultural practices. It is moulded by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; shaped by eating habits and values. Foucault goes so far as to write that ‘nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (NGH, 87). The body is ‘the inscribed surface of events’, ‘the locus of a dissociated self’ (NGH, 83). Foucault’s aim in this presentation of the body as a historical construct is not to develop some kind of extreme social constructivist theory of the body. He does not consider the body here as an object of a theory, but rather as essential to his genealogy in two different ways. The first point is political or ethical: Foucault wants to use genealogy to study the history of the very things we believe do not have one: for example, values, essences, identities and the body. Gary Gutting (1994, 10) argues that, whereas much traditional history attempts to show that our present situation is inevitable, given the causes revealed by it, Foucault’s histories aim to show the contingency – and hence surpassability – of what history has given us.3 Foucault’s point is thus not to argue for an extreme view of the body as a cultural construction, but to place under suspicion all claims of its immutable being: essences, foundations and constants. The second is a methodological point: Foucault wants to bring the body into the focus of history and to study history through it. He does not want to write histories of mentalities or ideas, but to focus on the material practices of the subjection of bodies in order to rethink the methods of history. Genealogies are thus methodologically distinct in that they criticize the idea of power operating by the ideological manipulation of minds, as well as all theories in which the subject is understood as an autonomous free spirit. Foucault’s aim is to show the inadequacy of these conceptions of the subject by revealing the material instances that produce the subject. Foucault’s first major genealogical work, Discipline and Punish, demonstrates these central points of genealogy. It questions the inevitability of the prison system by tracking down the historical developments that brought it about. It also examines the functioning of this 3 Foucault himself also explicitly characterized genealogies as histories that have political meaning, utility and effectiveness. See e.g. QG, 64; TL, 83.

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system through the bodies of criminals, and thus brings under scrutiny the connection between power and the body by analyzing the ways in which the body is consciously manipulated by disciplinary power. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, discipline is a form of power that operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim at making the body docile and useful. It has both a practical dimension – institutions such as prison, school, hospital – and an abstract dimension, represented by the human and social sciences, which developed in tandem with them, such as criminology, psychology and pedagogy. Disciplinary power thus demonstrates Foucault’s central idea of the intertwining of power and knowledge: disciplinary techniques are important instances of the power/knowledge network. Foucault’s thought continued to focus on the body throughout the 1970s. His next major work, The History of Sexuality, vol. i, thematizes the body through the question of sexuality and studies the development of sexuality as a discursive construct during the last two centuries. Foucault argues against ‘the repressive hypothesis’ which claims that sexuality in the Victorian era was repressed and discourse on it silenced. It was rather that sexuality became the object of a new kind of discourse – medical, juridical and psychological – and that discourse on it actually multiplied. It also became importantly linked to truth: these new discourses were able to tell us the truth about ourselves through our sexuality. Sexuality became essential in determining not only a person’s moral worth, but his or her health, desire and identity. The society that emerged in the nineteenth century – bourgeois, capitalist or industrial society, call it what you will – did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. (HS, 69)4

Despite the emphasis on sexuality as a discursive construct, this study is also a genealogical investigation of the body. Foucault refutes the possible accusations against his analysis of sexuality as a discursive construct 4 ‘La société qui se développe au XVIIIe siècle – qu’on appelera comme on voudra bourgeoise, capitaliste ou industrielle – n’a pas opposé au sexe un refus fondamental de le reconnaˆıtre. Elle a au contraire mis en œuvre tout un appareil pour produire sur lui des discours vrais. Non seulement, elle a beaucoup parlé de lui et contraint chacun a` en parler; mais elle a entrepris d’en formuler la vérité réglée’ (VS, 92).

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that completely evades the materiality of the body and the biologically established existence of sexual functions (HS, 150–1). His response is that the purpose of the study is, in fact, to show how deployments of power are directly connected to the body – to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations and pleasures . . . what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of the first sociologists, but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envisage a ‘history of mentalities’ that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but a ‘history of the bodies’ and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (HS, 151–2)5

Foucault’s aim is to study the body outside of the dichotomies of biology–culture, materiality–ideology, prediscursive–discursive. Discursive representations and historical practices are intertwined with material bodies. By claiming that he is studying bodies in their ‘materiality’, he does not mean that he is approaching them through bio-scientific theories. These theories are themselves an outcome, as well as being dependent on certain scientific discourses and historical practices, as Foucault’s archaeological studies have demonstrated. Foucault takes up the question of sex (sexe) explicitly at the end of HS.6 He invents an imaginary opponent who claims that Foucault’s history of sexuality only manages to argue for the discursive construction of sexuality because he evades ‘the biologically established existence of sexual functions for the benefit of phenomena that are variable, perhaps, but secondary, and ultimately superficial’ (HS, 150–1). The imaginary critic thus raises the question that many feminist critics of Foucault have also raised: even if the manifestations of sexuality are culturally 5 ‘comment des dispositifs de pouvoir s’articulent directement sur le corps – sur des corps, des fonctions, des processus physiologiques, des sensations, des plaisirs; loin que le corps ait a` eˆ tre gommé, il s’agit de le faire apparaˆıtre dans une analyse ou` le biologique et l’historique ne se feraient pas suite, comme dans l’évolutionnisme des anciens sociologues, mais se lieraient selon une complexité croissant a` mesure que se développent les technologies modernes de pouvoir qui prennent la vie pour cible. Non pas donc “histoire des mentalités” qui ne tiendrait compte des corps que par la manière dont on les a per¸cus ou dont on leur a donné sens et valeur; mais “histoire des corps” et de la manière dont on a investi ce qu’il y a de plus matériel, de plus vivant en eux.’ (VS, 200) 6 HS, 150–9.

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constructed and variable, there is nevertheless a material foundation in the body, a prediscursive, embodied giveness, which cannot be bent at will.7 Foucault responds to his opponent by firstly denying that his analysis of sexuality implies ‘the elision of the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional’ (HS, 151). On the contrary, what is needed is an analysis that will overcome the biology–culture distinction (HS, 152). Secondly, he refutes the idea that sex is a material foundation, the ‘other’ with respect to power: ‘It is precisely this idea of sex in itself that we cannot accept without examination’ (HS, 152). He then proceeds to write about sex in quotation marks. He brackets the accepted meaning of the term in order to be able to study its constitution: how the idea of ‘sex’ took form in the different strategies of power, and what role it played in them. In a much quoted passage he writes: We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its surface of contact with power. On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures. (HS, 155)8

This passage, among others, has contributed to the feminist interpretations that read Foucault’s claims about sex as interventions in debates on the sex–gender distinction. In the 1980s the distinction between biological sex and social gender, which upheld feminist theory in the 1970s, was subjected to fundamental criticism.9 One strand in this criticism was the questioning of the idea of sex as a natural foundation. Feminist theorists – Judith Butler in particular – referred to Foucault 7 See e.g. Bigwood 1991, 60. 8 ‘Il ne faut pas imaginer une instance autonome du sexe qui produirait secondairement les effets multiples de la sexualité tout au long de sa surface de contact avec le pouvoir. Le sexe est au contraire l’élément le plus spéculatif, le plus idéal, le plus intérieur aussi dans un dispositif de sexualité que le pouvoir organise dans ses prises sur les corps, leur matérialité, leur forces, leur e´ nergies, leur sensations, leur plaisirs.’ (VS, 205) 9 The conceptual distinction between biological sex and social gender formed the framework that was used to formulate the questions and the possible answers in regard to female subjectivity. This distinction has, however, been subjected to fundamental criticism in feminist research. It has been argued that it suffers from manifold theoretical ambiguities, it reproduces the mind–body as well as biological–cultural distinctions that feminist theorists themselves have criticized, and it is politically amorphous and unfocused. See e.g. Gatens 1983/1991, Butler 1990, Heinämaa 1996.

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and argued that sex, like gender, was a social product or a cultural construct.10 Foucault’s discussion of sex at the end of HS is not, however, a comment on feminist discussions of sex or gender, and therefore to read it through this distinction can be misleading. The original French word sexe can refer to the categories of male and female in the sense of sex organs – anatomy and biology that differentiates males from females – but Foucault’s stress is clearly on the sense of the natural function, an embodied foundation or principle that belongs in common to both men and women. Sex is understood as a hidden cause behind observable characteristics and behaviour. Foucault argues that ‘sex’ is a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality. It is an idea of an inner truth, an idea that ‘there exists something other than bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatomo-physiological systems, sensations, and pleasures; something else and something more, with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: “sex”’ (HS, 152–3). He elaborates the idea further by writing that sex is a ‘form of secret causality’, an interplay of ‘the visible and hidden’ (HS, 152). Foucault thus did not problematize sex in the sense that feminist theory has done. He did not question how the categories of male and female are constructed or what consequences they have for the behaviour or empowerment of women. By claiming that sex is imaginary (HS, 156) and the most ideal element in strategies of power (HS, 155), he was not arguing that femaleness is imaginary, ideal or arbitrary. Rather, he was trying to problematize a certain kind of explanatory framework of sexuality: the idea of a foundation or an invisible cause that supports the visible effects. Foucault takes up the question of sex as a principle of explanation for the classification of bodies into females and males in his introduction to the book Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Foucault now poses the question whether we really need the idea of a true sex. Using the example of a hermaphrodite, he attempts to make visible how deep in our thinking lies the idea that everybody has a definite and naturally given sex that is the truth and cause of our behaviour as well as of the observable sexual characteristics. This true sex determines the individual’s gender identity, behaviour and desire for the opposite sex. What the body of a hermaphrodite can show is that there is no true sex to be found in 10 See Butler 1990.

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our body, but that this idea is rather a product of the development of scientific discourse and juridical procedures (IHB, x–xi). Foucault refers to the Middle Ages, when it was common practice to think that a hermaphrodite was a person that combined both masculine and feminine characteristics. When the individual had legally reached adulthood, he or she could choose which sex to keep. This conception was superceded by scientific theories about sex, which developed around the same time as juridical concepts and practices relating to the idea of a true sex. Everybody had only one true sex, which could be settled conclusively by experts. All the characteristics of the opposite sex in one’s body and soul were deemed arbitrary, imaginary or superficial. The true sex further determined the individual’s gender role, and his or her moral responsibility was to behave according to this true sex. The doctor, as the expert in recognizing this true sex, had to ‘strip the body of its anatomical deceptions and discover the one true sex behind organs that might have put on the forms of the opposite sex’ (IHB, viii–ix). Here, Foucault is using the notion of sex in more or less the way it is understood in the sex/gender discourse. He discusses the idea of a true sex from which gender, understood as social roles and culturally acquired characteristics, follows. This idea also underlies the feminist distinction between sex and gender, which feminists have used to argue that natural sex does not determine social gender. Foucault does, however, also critically appraise the idea of natural, scientifically true sex by revealing its historical construction. His aim, again, is to question the whole explanatory framework of natural foundations and secondary effects. He does not claim here, either, that sex as the categories of maleness and femaleness was invented in a particular historical period and that we could give them up when we wanted to. He rather analyzes the ways in which these categories were scientifically founded and explained in discourses of truth, and how this ‘pure’ explanation in fact constituted these categories so that they were understood as ‘natural’.

The discursive body Foucault’s conception of the body is often summarized by saying that he understands the body to be discursively constructed, but this claim is interpreted in very different ways. The first source of confusion is the fact that the notion of discourse is understood in different ways. Sometimes ‘discursive’ is understood in a strictly linguistic sense, as

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something that is linguistic or linguistically structured. Sometimes discourse is understood in a more general sense, as a cultural practice and discursive means, more or less the same as ‘cultural’ or ‘culturally constructed’. Furthermore, there are at least three different interpretations of discursive – linguistic or cultural – construction.11 First, we can understand discursive in the strict sense of linguistic, and argue that by denying the prediscursive body Foucault is claiming that the way we identify and understand the body is linguistically constructed. The prediscursive body is, by necessity, impossible to identify and theorize, because as soon as we name it and start to talk about it we have already brought it into the realm of discourse. William Turner (2000, 112), for example, explicates Foucault’s and Butler’s thinking by writing: ‘Our conceptions of our bodies, whether as material, or important, or neither, come to us through language; the belief in a preculturally material body as the ultimate ground of identity itself depends on the circulation of meanings in a culture.’ I call this first reading the weak version of the idea of a discursive body, because by denying the prediscursive body it in fact says nothing about the body itself. Even if the linguistic representations are inevitably constructed in networks of power, the body itself, in its materiality, could escape this linguistic construction. However, Foucault himself refutes this reading: Hence I do not envisage a ‘history of mentalities’ that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but ‘a history of bodies’ and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (HS, 152)12

The second interpretation, what I call the intermediate reading, claims that the cultural construction covers the body itself in its materiality and 11 The possibilities of understanding the discursive body are further increased if discursive is understood in the psychoanalytic sense of symbolic. Although Foucault’s relationship with psychoanalysis is explicitly critical in HS, one could argue that behind this explicit relationship lies an unacknowledged debt. Charles Shepherdson (2000, 182), for example, argues that the canonical reception that opposes Foucault and Lacan does not do justice to the complexity of their relation. On Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis, see also e.g. Miller 1989/1992. 12 ‘Non pas donc “histoire des mentalités” qui ne tiendrait compte des corps que par la manière dont on les a per¸cus ou dont on leur a donné sens et valeur; mais “histoire des corps” et de la manière dont on a investi ce qu’il y a de plus matériel, de plus vivant en eux’ (VS, 200).

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not just in its cultural and linguistic representations. However, there remains a stable core of the body, imposing a limit that cultural manipulation cannot cross. David Couzens Hoy (1999, 5), for example, takes up Foucault’s claim in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ that genealogy exposes ‘a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body’ (NGH, 83). Hoy argues that this sentence implies that there must be something natural before history, which is then destroyed by it. This intermediate reading thus accepts that the Foucaultian body is culturally constructed, even in its materiality, to a certain extent, but that we must posit some kind of universal invariance. The border between nature and culture in this kind of reading is variably drawn. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, 111) argue that the stable core in Foucault’s account is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and consists of ahistorical structures of the perceptual field, such as size constancy, brightness constancy and up–down asymmetry. Nevertheless, this second reading seems incompatible with Foucault’s explicit effort to dismantle the nature–culture dichotomy on which it heavily relies. In Foucault’s thought, we cannot make any claims about what in our bodies is natural and what is culturally variable. This distinction between nature and culture should itself be understood as an effect of a certain discourse that produces the idea of a natural body. This kind of interpretation, while relying on certain passages of NGH, must also either ignore or attribute to Nietzsche the strong formulations of a culturally constructed body that also occur in it. Foucault writes in NGH, for example, that ‘nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (NGH, 87). The third or strong reading denies any dimensions or variations of embodiment that are not historically and culturally constructed. We can only understand as well as experience our bodies through culturally mediated representations, but bodies themselves are also shaped in their very materiality by the rhythms of culture, diets, habits and norms. The body is, furthermore, not only constructed by cultural signifying practices, but its constitution is understood as inscription that marks it so that it becomes a signifying practice itself. Elisabeth Grosz (1994), for example, reads into Foucault’s account of the body a description of the corporeal inscription of the body-as-surface. She argues that in our culture there is a form of body writing and various techniques of inscription that bind all subjects both violently and in more subtle

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forms. In the first case, violence is demonstrable in social institutions of correction and training, such as prisons, juvenile homes and psychiatric institutions. Less openly violent are the inscriptions of cultural and personal values, norms and commitments according to categorizations of the body into socially significant groups such as male and female. The body is involuntarily marked, but it is also incised through ‘voluntary’ procedures, life-style and habits. Grosz claims that there is nothing natural or ahistorical about these modes of corporeal inscription that make bodies into particular types (Grosz 1994, 141–2). Judith Butler appropriates Foucault’s thought when she argues in Gender Trouble that the body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power relations. According to her, the body ‘is not a being, but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality’ (Butler 1990,139). Butler criticizes all feminist efforts to liberate the female body from the determinations of patriarchal power. The culturally constructed body cannot be liberated to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but only to an open future of cultural possibilities (Butler 1990, 93). The feminist task that Butler sets at the end of her book is the radical proliferation of gender, the displacement of gender norms by their parodic repetition. Both Butler and Grosz, while appropriating Foucault’s conception of the body, also criticize it for its hidden commitment to foundational, primordial materiality. Unlike some of the proponents of the second reading, they see this as a contradiction within Foucault’s account which denies the possibility of a body outside power, while at the same time implicitly presupposing it. According to Butler, Foucault seems to argue for the cultural construction of bodies, but his theory in fact contains hidden assumptions which reveal that he also understood them to be outside the reach of power (Butler 1990, 94–5). He saw the body as a medium, a blank page on which cultural values are inscribed. Thus he must have envisaged a body prior to this cultural inscription: the body as pure materiality prior to signification and form. According to Butler, this idea is not compatible with Foucault’s genealogical account of sex and sexuality. She demands a radicalization of Foucault’s theory: a genealogy of the body in its discreteness that addresses the issue of how bodily meanings as well as margins are invested with power (132–3).13 13 Sara Heinämaa (1996, 299) argues that Butler herself occasionally uses the terminology of raw material and production in Gender Trouble. The metaphor of production brings

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While the strong interpretation of the Foucaultian body has resulted in influential feminist appropriations – for example, Butler’s and Grosz’s – it also contains serious problems from a feminist point of view. The wide feminist criticism that Butler’s understanding of the body in Gender Trouble received testifies that there are at least some difficulties involved in trying to encapsulate female embodiment through strong cultural constructivist accounts of the body. I will take up three sets of questions that I see as problematic in Butler’s account of the body as presented in Gender Trouble,14 and therefore also in Foucault’s account when it is understood according to the strong reading.15 I will only briefly outline the first two. The third cluster of questions will be the focus of my discussion.

The resistance of the body The first problem can be called the question of identification. Butler, appropriating Foucault, argues in Gender Trouble that the unity of with it the idea of raw material, that is, a natural substance that is prior to and independent of the process of production. In the traditional sex/gender thinking that Butler sets out to criticize, females and males are treated as the raw material of gender production. Butler’s new claim is that even females and males are products, and thus there must be something that precedes these constructions and which passes as their raw material: a body that is free from the sexed categories of culture. Even though the line between naturally given and culturally produced is drawn in a new way, it is still there. Heinämaa argues that this is why, in order to get rid of the nature–culture distinction, Butler has to elaborate on her claim by adding that the production of sex is a process which even generates its own raw material, and that, in effect, becoming sexed must be conceived of as a process of repetitive and citational action. 14 Butler’s books that followed Gender Trouble, particularly Bodies that Matter and The Psychic Life of Power, partly answer these questions. She argues in Bodies that Matter that to defend a culturally constructed body does not mean that one understands cultural construction as a single, deterministic act or as a causal process initiated by the subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. In place of these conceptions of construction, she suggests a return to the notion of matter as ‘a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’ (Butler 1993, 9). Butler emphasizes the gaps and fissures that are opened up in this process of materialization: the constitutive instabilities become the deconstitutive possibilities. She also turns to psychoanalysis in order to understand these disruptions as imaginary contestations that effect a failure in the workings of the law, but also importantly as occasions for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic domain. The political dimension of her work is thus again safeguarded: even if the female body cannot be liberated, the meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body can be altered. 15 Despite Butler’s criticism of Foucault’s understanding of the body in Gender Trouble, her conception is often conflated with Foucault’s in feminist literature and referred to as the post-structuralist body. See e.g. Bigwood 1991.

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gender is an effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through compulsory heterosexuality. Cultural representations of the body and its sex as a natural and necessary ground for gender identity have a normative function in the power/knowledge strategy that forces individuals into two opposed gender categories. Gender identity is discursively constructed as a normative ideal and then performatively produced by those acts that are understood to be its effects. This normative unity is never fully installed, however. The dichotomies of male–female, masculine–feminine are constantly undermined by gender discontinuities in the sexual communities in which gender does not necessarily correspond with sex. Butler’s theory, while appropriating Foucault’s thought, also reveals the limitations of the Foucaultian framework when applied to the question of gender: it leads to an oversimplified notion of gender identity as an imposed effect. We cannot understand the constitution of gender identity only through the normative ideals and practices that prevail in our culture, nor through the individual’s conscious choices. There are experiences, sensations and lives that do not properly fit within the limits of the normal. People identify with stigmatized subject positions, or even socially abject positions, and often this identification is strongly tied to their bodies. As Stuart Hall (1996, 10–11) formulates the problem, Foucault’s thought ‘reveals little about why it is that certain individuals occupy some subject positions rather than others’ or ‘what might in any way interrupt, prevent or disturb the smooth insertion of individuals into the subject positions’. Corporeal feminist theory has emphasized that embodiment is definitive of subjectivity. Feminist theory must therefore develop some understanding of why or how subjects identify with the sexual subject positions, for example, to which, according to Foucault’s analysis, they are summoned.16 The second and related problem could be called the problem of singularity. The feminist question concerns not only how different subject positions are constituted, but also how subjects fashion, stylize and produce these positions, and why they never do so completely. If female embodiment as well as subjectivity is an effect of a constitutive power, 16 In interviews about sexuality or the politics of sexuality, Foucault stressed the dangers of legal control imposed on sexual practices. In connection with homosexuality, he showed concern about the strategic role played by sexual preference within a legal and social framework and said very little about the meaning of homosexual behaviour as such. He strongly refused to offer any comment as regards to the distinction between innate predisposition to homosexual behaviour and social conditioning (SC, 288). All he would grant is that there is ‘a certain style of existence . . . or art of living, which might be called “gay”’(SC, 292).

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how is it possible that there are several different variations of it? Even if we identify with the subject positions to which we are summoned – in the case of gender, even if my gender identity appears almost selfevident both to myself and to others – I still have the singular style of living my female embodiment. Despite providing an explanation of the normative construction of the female body, feminist theory has not yet accounted for or explained in any way the variations of female embodiment. The third, and from my perspective the most interesting, set of questions concerns the possibility of resistance to normative power. The only possibilities for resistance against subjection that a strong interpretation of the discursive body seems to allow open up through the gaps in the struggle with competing regimes. The subjection of bodies is never complete because the deployments of power are always partial and contradictory. Foucault insists that ‘where there is power there is resistance’ (HS, 95). The points of resistance are distributed in an irregular fashion throughout the power network. They are the ‘odd term in relations of power’ (HS, 96), its blind spot or evading limit. Power is thus not deterministic machinery, but a dynamic and complex strategical situation. In her book The Psychic Life of Power, Butler analyzes and concisely explicates this idea of resistance in Foucault’s thought. In Foucault, resistance appears (a) in the course of a subjectivation that exceeds the normalizing aims by which it is mobilized, or (b) through convergence with other discursive regimes, whereby inadvertently produced discursive complexity undermines the teleological aims of normalization. Butler concludes: ‘Thus resistance appears as the effect of power, as part of power, its self-subversion’ (Butler 1997, 93). Hence, she puts forward the view that resistance constitutes ‘a hazard’ in normalizing power as the only viable account of resistance in Foucault. The idea that bodies themselves could generate any resistance, she thus sees as either a naive mistake by Foucault or as simply impossible within his framework. From a feminist point of view, this means that, while a focus on bodies seems to open up important connections with Foucault’s thought, the apparent denial of the body’s capacity for resistance seems to refute all feminist political goals. Lois McNay (1992), for example, argues in her book Foucault and Feminism that Foucault’s historical studies give the impression that the body presents no resistance to the operations of power. Although Foucault insists that power is always accompanied by resistance, he does not elaborate on how this resistance manifests itself through the body. McNay (1992, 12) argues that this is

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particularly problematic for feminist theory, given that a significant aim of the feminist project is the rediscovery and revaluation of the experiences of women. Foucault cannot account for women’s strategies of resistance: for the fact that women did not simply slip passively into socially prescribed feminine roles (McNay 1992, 41). I will next argue for a fourth reading of Foucault’s understanding of the body, which does not operate with the dichotomies of nature–culture, prediscursive–discursive. I will take a closer look at what Foucault meant by the idea of bodies and pleasures as a form of resistance to power, and argue that this idea implies an understanding of the body as always extending the discursive frameworks that attempt to control and contain it. I argue that this fourth reading could provide a fruitful starting point for the feminist accounts that seek to understand not only the cultural construction of the female body, but also its propensity to resistance.

The anarchic body In an important passage of The History of Sexuality, vol. i, Foucault writes: We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grip of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex desire, but bodies and pleasures. (HS, 157)17

Here Foucault suggests that it is in the body that the seeds for subverting the normalizing aims of power are sown. The body becomes a locus of resistance. Foucault elaborates further on this in an interview: Mastery and awareness of one’s own body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body . . . But once power 17 ‘Ne pas croire qu’en disant oui au sexe, on dit non au pouvoir; on suit au contraire le fil du dispositif général de sexualité. C’est de l’instance du sexe qu’il faut s’affranchir si, par un retournement tactique des divers mécanismes de la sexualité, on veut faire valoir contre les prises du pouvoir, les corps, les plaisirs, les savoirs, dans leur multiplicité et leur possibilité de résistance. Contre le dispositif de sexualité, le point d’appui de la contre-attaque ne doit pas eˆ tre le sexe désir, mais les corps et les plaisirs.’ (VS, 207–8)

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produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counterattack in the same body. (B/P, 56)18

Passages like these have been read by Foucault’s critics as contradictory claims about the body’s return to ‘a non-normalizable wildness’ (Butler 1997, 92). In Gender Trouble Judith Butler criticizes Foucault’s understanding of the body along these lines.19 According to her, when we consider those ‘textual occasions on which Foucault criticizes the categories of sex and the power regime of sexuality, it is clear that his own theory maintains an unacknowledged emancipatory ideal that proves increasingly difficult to maintain, even within the strictures of his own critical apparatus’ (Butler 1997, 94). While Foucault advocates the critical deconstruction of sexuality and sex in HS, he does not extend it to the sexed body, but naively presents bodies and pleasures as the site of resistance against power. Butler argues that Foucault’s mistake is reiterated in his short but significant introduction to the journals of Herculine Barbin. He romanticizes Herculine’s sexuality as a world of pleasures and a happy limbo of non-identity by mistakenly presuming the hermaphrodite body and sexuality to be free from the categories of sex and of identity. According to Butler, Foucault fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine’s sexuality (94). He thus reads Herculine’s memoirs wrongly by suggesting that they can reveal something about the undefined field of pleasures, which is not marked by the categories of sex. The 18 ‘La maˆıtrise, la conscience de son corps n’ont pu eˆ tre acquises que par l’effet de l’investissement du corps par le pouvoir . . . Mais, dès lors que le pouvoir a produit cet effet, dans la ligne même de ses conquêtes, e´ merge inévitablement la revendication de son corps contre le pouvoir, la santé contre l’économie, le plaisir contre les normes morales de la sexualité, du mariage, de la pudeur. Et, du coup, ce par quoi le pouvoir e´ tait fort devient ce par quoi il est attaqué’ (PC, 754–5). 19 Elizabeth Grosz reiterates this criticism in her book Volatile Bodies. See Grosz 1994, 155. In her next book, Space, Time and Perversion, however, she presents what she calls ‘the most generous reading’ of what Foucault means by bodies and pleasures. She argues that Foucault is suggesting that the body may lend itself to economies and modes of production that are other than the ones that produce ‘sexuality’. A different economy of bodies and pleasures may find the organization of sexuality, the implantation of our sex as the secret of our being, curious and intriguing instead of self-evident (Grosz 1995, 218).

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overthrow of a univocal sex cannot result in sexual multiplicity or undefined pleasures. Herculine’s body and pleasures are still produced by power, only her body is produced as a sign of fatal ambivalence in the practices and discourses based on the idea of a univocal sex (95–6). Are Foucault’s references to the body as the locus of resistance merely naive slippages into the idea of a prediscursive body? Do we have to accept Butler’s reading of the Foucaultian body according to which these passages are implicit contradictions within his thought? Are bodies and pleasures within the same discursive order as sex and sexuality? What can bodies and pleasures as an alternative to sex desire mean? I will argue that we must take seriously Foucault’s idea of bodies and pleasures as forms of resistance, and not treat it as a naive fallback to the prediscursive body, or as a return to the non-normalizable wilderness. Gilles Deleuze wrote in private notebooks originally given to Foucault: The last time we saw each other, Michel told me, with much kindness and affection, something like, I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use it differently, I cannot keep myself from thinking or living that desire = lack, or that desire is repressed. Michel added, whereas myself, what I call pleasure is perhaps what you call desire; but in any case I need another word than desire. (Deleuze 1994/1997, 189)20

In his notebooks Deleuze poses the same question to Foucault as have many other commentators: if in Foucault’s thought the network of power/knowledge is constitutive, what is the status of the phenomena of resistance against it? Deleuze finds in Foucault three possible directions in which one could go for an answer: the relations of forces, truth and pleasure (Deleuze 1994/1997, 188). He takes up the possibility of pleasure and emphasizes the importance Foucault assigned to life as a way of giving a possible status to forces of resistance.21 Deleuze ends by 20 ‘La dernière fois que nous nous sommes vus, Michel me dit, avec beaucoup de gentillesse et affection, a` peu près: je ne peux pas supporter le mot désir; même si vous l’employez autrement, je ne peux pas m’empêcher de penser ou de vivre que désir = manque, ou que désir se dit réprimé. Michel ajoute: alors moi, ce que j’appelle “plaisir”, c’est peut-être ce que vous appelez ‘désir’; mais de toute fa¸con j’ai besoin d’un autre mot que désir.’ (Deleuze 1994, 63) 21 In his book Foucault (1986/1988), Deleuze attributes to Foucault the idea of life as resistance: ‘that power does not take life as its objective without revealing or giving rise to a life that resists power’ (94). See also HS, 144–5.

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suggesting that Foucault’s ‘pleasures body’ is the correlative of his own idea of ‘body without organs’, the body as a site of the production of positive forces and creative differences.22 It is also my contention that if we wish to consider Foucault’s idea of bodily resistance, we must leave behind the conception of the body as a mere material object, the body as an object of natural sciences and disciplinary technologies. If we conceive of the body as a passive object, it is possible to discipline it, but equally impossible to theorize about its resistance to normalizing power. The question of resistance arises if we take the experiential body – the body as experiencing in everyday practices of living – as the starting point. While Foucault conceived of the body strictly in terms of an object of disciplinary manipulation in Discipline and Punish, I argue that such a conception does not underlie his account of the body in The History of Sexuality, vol. i, in which he presupposes a more dynamic understanding of the body through sexuality. He does not explicitly mention experience in this work, but his claim about bodies and pleasures presupposes an understanding of the experiential body insofar as pleasure can only be understood as an experience of pleasure, not solely as a concept or a practice. While feminist theory has widely appropriated HS in connection with issues of sexuality and sex, it is normally interpreted as identical to DP in its account of the body as an object of disciplinary manipulation. Disciplinary power in connection with sexuality is simply complemented with biopower and deployments of sexuality. Such a reading, however, overlooks what I think are some of the most interesting aspects of the account of the body in HS, and which point to the potential of bodily resistance.23 22 Deleuze understands bodies as specific modes of events and intensities, series of processes, as active forces. To think of a ‘body without organs’ is to refuse any single organization or interpretation of the body and to view it as an active and positive multiplicity. The body is productive because it connects with other organs, flows and intensities. See Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1987. A study of the similarities and differences between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s conceptions of the body is beyond the scope of this work. On feminist interpretations of Deleuze’s conception of the body, see e.g. Braidotti 1994 and Grosz 1994. 23 Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 146) argues that for Foucault the body is the target of power and a stake in the struggle for power’s control over a materiality that is dangerous to it, precisely because it is unpredictable and able to be used in potentially infinite ways, according to infinitely variable cultural dictates. According to Grosz, Foucault derives his understanding of the body mainly from Nietzsche, who understands the body’s capacity for becoming as something that can never be known in advance or be charted. The body’s limits cannot be definitively listed because it is always in a position of self-overcoming, of expanding its capacities (Grosz 1994, 124).

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A much earlier text than Discipline and Punish illuminates Foucault’s idea of bodies and pleasure as put forward in The History of Sexuality, vol. i. ‘A Preface to Transgression’, written over ten years before HS and dedicated to Bataille, takes up the question of sexual experience. Foucault questions the limits of experience and the acts of transgression, and notes that ‘transgression is an action that involves the limit’, it demands it for its existence (PT, 73). The limit and the transgression depend on each other: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be ‘pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows’ (PT, 73). The excess of experience, the transgression, not only presupposes the limit, it constitutes it in overcoming it and momentarily opens it up to the limitless. It forces ‘the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes’ (PT, 73). Foucault argues that transgression is thus not a victory over limits, it is not a negative or a revolutionary act. Rather, it reaffirms limited being, while also momentarily opening up a zone of limitlessness to existence (PT, 74). However, this affirmation contains nothing positive either, in the sense that no content can bind this experience, which, by definition, has no limits. Foucault suggests that perhaps it is simply an affirmation of a division, a testing of the limit, a contestation. Transgression is not related to the limit ‘as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open space of a building to its enclosed spaces’ (PT, 73–4). The relationship between limit and transgression is rather like ‘a spiral that no simple infraction can exhaust’ (PT, 74). Limit and transgression are thus irrevocably tied to each other, they constitute each other and constantly reaffirm and contest each other. Transgression creates a limit that exists only in the movement which crosses it. If we read the idea of sexual experience as an overcoming of limits into Foucault’s understanding of the body, we can interpret this in two ways. Firstly, the experiential body can transgress the limit between the normal and the abnormal. There are transgressive experiences that fall outside the limits of the normal, but which are necessary for constituting its limits. In an interview Foucault opposed the term desire because it functions as a calibration in terms of normality: ‘I am advancing this term (pleasure), because it seems to me that it escapes the medical and naturalistic connotations inherent in the notion of desire . . . There is no “pathology” of pleasure, no “abnormal” pleasure’ (quoted in Halperin 1995, 93–4).

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While modern techniques of power use desire to attach to us a true self defined in part by our sexuality, the notion of pleasure cannot be used in the same way as a tool for social and scientific regulation.24 The sexual body understood as a body experiencing pleasure and not as a determinable object of the sciences and of institutional practices becomes a possibility for subverting normalization. Foucault’s view would thus be that bodies and pleasures can gain meaning in discourse only, but that this discourse would be different than the psychologico-medical discourse that produces our conception of normal sexuality. I argue that Foucault also makes a more radical claim by taking up limit experiences. He argues that the limit between discursive intelligibility and unintelligibility can also be crossed in experience. Like Bataille, he is interested in experiences at the limits of language. This is a more radical interpretation, because even the abnormal experiences may still be within discursive intelligibility. Foucault advanced pleasure and opposed desire as a grid of intelligibility: That notion has been used as a tool, as a grid of intelligibility, a calibration in terms of normality . . . Desire is not an event but a permanent feature of the subject: it provides a basis on to which that psychologico-medical armature can attach itself. The term pleasure, on the other hand, is virgin territory, unused, almost devoid of meaning . . . It is an event ‘outside the subject’, or at the limit of the subject, taking place in that something which is neither of the body or the soul, which is neither inside nor outside – in short, a notion neither assigned nor assignable. (quoted in Halperin 1995, 93–4)25 24 David Halperin (1995, 93–4) takes up Foucault’s distinction between desire and pleasure as his way of distancing himself from the idea of desire associated with Deleuze’s philosophy. According to Halperin, Foucault’s famous and rather cryptic remarks at the end of volume i of The History of Sexuality, about the political importance of attacking sexuality and promoting pleasures at the expense of sex, make more sense when they are set in the context of his insistent distinction between pleasure and desire. Halperin emphasizes the idea that pleasure is an event ‘at the limit of the subject’: intense pleasure is desubjectivating, impersonal. 25 The interview, conducted on 10 July 1978, was published in Dutch in 1982 (‘Vijftien vragen van homosexuele zijde san Michel Foucault’, Interviews met Michel Foucault, ed. M. Duyves and T. Massen, Utrecht: De Woelrat) and in French in 1988 (‘Le Gai savoir’, Mec Magazine). There is a transcription of the original interview in the Centre Michel Foucault in Paris, but the text has been omitted from the four-volume collection of Foucault’s texts, Dits et ećrits 1954–1988. The translation here is by David Halperin, who also provides the original French text in a footnote (181, p. 217). ‘Cette notion a e´ té utilisée comme un outil, une mise en intelligibilité, un e´ tanlonnage en terme de

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According to Foucault, the power/knowledge network constitutes the subject and also all forms of experience, but this does not mean that they are discursively constituted. As I showed in chapter 4 above, in Foucault’s genealogy the regime of discourse, the episteme, only constitutes the specifically discursive element of a more general regime, the dispositif or apparatus, which is both discursive and non-discursive.26 Hence, we can interpret that not all experiences are discursively constituted, even though their (linguistic) intelligibility is. There are experiences that fall outside of what is constituted by discourse in the sense that these abject or transgressive experiences are rendered mute and unintelligible in our culture. They might, for example, be experiences induced by drugs or experiences that we try to make intelligible by classifying them as forms of madness. However, what Foucault also seems to suggest is that sexual experiences of pleasure can never be wholly reduced to discursive meanings either. The sexual body is always discursive in the sense that it is an object of scientific discourses and disciplinary technologies. Nevertheless, the sexual body as experiencing is capable of multiplying, distorting and overflowing its discursive definitions, classifications and coordinates. The experiential body can take normal language to the point where it fails, where it loses its power of definition, even of expression. This does not mean a return to a prediscursive body, however. Rather, it is that the body as a contestation exists on the limits of discourse, in those moments ‘when language, arriving at its confines, overleaps itself, explodes and radically challenges itself in laughter, tears, the eyes rolled back in ecstasy’ (PT, 83). The experience of the limit can be realized in language but only at the moment ‘where it says what cannot be said’ (PT, 86).27 Sexual experiences transgress and also constitute the limit between the norm and what falls outside of it. The experiential body is not normalité . . . Le désir n’est pas un e´ vénement, mais une permanence du sujet, sur laquelle se greffe toute cette armature psychologico-médicale. Le terme de plaisir de son côté est vierge d’utilisation, quasiment vide de sens. Il n’y a pas de “pathologie” du plaisir, de plaisir “anormal”. C’est un e´ vénement “hors sujet”, ou a` la limite du sujet, dans ce quelque chose qui n’est ni du corps ni de l’âme, qui n’est ni a` l’intérieur, ni a` l’exterieur, bref une notion non assignée et non assignable.’ 26 See e.g. CF, 197. 27 Cf. Shepherdson 2000, 5. According to Shepherdson, Lacan understands transgression and law very similarly. The rule of law does not repress or prohibit, but produces its own exception. The symbolic order functions only on the basis of this exception or excess. The excess is not a natural phenomenon that disrupts the machinery of culture; it is rather a peculiar feature of culture itself, an effect of language, which includes its own malfunction, a remainder that marks its limits (Shepherdson 2000, 175–80).

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outside the norms, but neither is it fully within them. It cannot be reduced to either one of these alternatives. The very process of normalization sets the limits for normal experiences, but these limits open up possibilities of transgression that affirm the potential limitlessness of the body. The Foucaultian body is capable of generating resistance, of presenting not malleability but excess and transgression as pleasure. This resistance is not a return to a wild and natural body, however, but it is resistance made possible by the normalizing power. Foucault writes about sexuality in a passage that some readers would perhaps find surprising and unlike him: [Sexuality] is a part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create – it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality: it’s a possibility for a creative life. (SPPI, 163)28

In Bodies that Matter, Butler herself posits an outside to the culturally constructed body. She writes that there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, even though this is ‘not an absolute “outside”, an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of the discourse’ (Butler 1993, 8). Rather, it is a constitutive ‘outside’ ‘which can only be thought – when it can – in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders’ (8). Butler argues that the bodies that fail to materialize the norm provide the necessary ‘outside’ for the bodies that qualify as bodies that matter (16). Hence, Butler seems to hold that when Foucault assumes an outside to the discursively constructed body, he effects a naive slippage to an outside as ‘ontological thereness’, whereas her own notion of an ‘outside’ is always in quotation marks because it is not an ontological outside, but only becomes possible in relation to discourse. I argue, however, that Foucault’s understanding of the sexual body, like Butler’s account, is an effort to dismantle the dichotomy of the culturally constructed versus the natural, and to inquire into the discursive limits of the body and experience. Hence, when we discuss the different interpretations of a discursive body we must make one more distinction. Rather than referring only to the different senses or degrees of the cultural construction of the 28 This interview was conducted in Toronto in 1982, and appeared originally in English.

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body as a material and bio-scientific object, we must also distinguish when we talk about the cultural construction of experiences. The experiential body is a locus of resistance in the sense that it forms the spiral of limits and transgressions. Power/knowledge inscribes the limits of normal experiences, but it is exactly the existence of these limits that makes their transgression possible. The experiential body is constituted by power/knowledge networks, but the limits of its experiences can never be firmly set because they cannot ever be fully determined and articulated. The experiential body can multiply, distort and overflow the meanings, definitions and classifications that are attached to experiences, and in this sense it is capable of discursively undefined and unintelligible pleasures, for example. It is the permanent contestation of discursive definitions, values and normative practices. Transgressive experiences are necessary ‘outsiders’ because they constitute the limits of the normal and the intelligible. In Foucault’s genealogy, as in his archaeology, there is thus a dimension of freedom in the sense of a constitutive outside to the discursive order, even though there is no outside to the apparatus or cultural network of practices as a whole. If language can never be totally mastered and brought within the discursive order, neither can experience be ever wholly defined. It always remains contestable and resistant to articulation. Reading the Foucaultian body as the experiential body raises the question of its relationship to Merleau-Ponty’s lived body. As we saw in connection with the intermediate reading of the Foucaultian body, Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault’s background in phenomenology as formative of his account of the body.29 They suggest that he appropriates Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body but seeks to situate it more radically in history and particular historical contexts (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 111–12). They also suggest that an elaborated idea of a lived body would provide Foucault with a locus of resistance against normalizing biopower because of the nascent logos of the body. The 29 Merleau-Ponty’s and Foucault’s conceptions of the body are more often contrasted rather than seen as similar. David Levin (1991), for example, argues that, while Foucault describes a passive body, moulded, even totally rebuilt by regimes of power, MerleauPonty’s account emphasizes the activity of the body in shaping our cultural environment. According to Levin, the lived body thus shapes society while the Foucaultian body is shaped by it. As I have shown, however, Foucault’s conception of the body as an object of disciplinary manipulation put forward in DP is complemented by an understanding of the body as experiencing sexual pleasure in HS. The contrast between the passive Foucaultian body and the active, lived body can therefore not be upheld if Foucault’s thought as a whole is taken into account.

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body would function as a stable reference point for truth, and hence provide a position from which to criticize the deployments of power (167). Dreyfus and Rabinow write: If the lived body is more than the result of the disciplinary technologies that have been brought to bear upon it, it would perhaps provide a position from which to criticize these practices, and maybe even a way to account for the tendency towards rationalization and the tendency of this tendency to hide itself. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 167)

While I share the starting point of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s argument of relating Merleau-Ponty’s and Foucault’s accounts of the body, my argument in the next chapter proceeds in an almost diametrically opposite direction. Rather than grounding the possibility of resistance on a foundationalist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject, which assumes the body to have a nascent logos, I will construct a non-foundational reading that is compatible with Foucault’s understanding of the body as historically constituted.30 By foundationalism I refer here to a philosophical position that seeks in an analysis of the body’s structures a universal and stable foundation for subjectivity and a reference point for truth. I will show that the historicity of the body-subject in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body means that the body-subject is fundamentally constituted in history. Hence, the important idea in Merleau-Ponty from a Foucaultian perspective is not the alleged foundationalism of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body; the fact that the body has invariant and universal structures. The important idea is that the body is generative of an individual sexual style. Even when Foucault acknowledges the importance of experiences, particularly in the realm of sexuality, his understanding of experience remains curiously non-subjective and disembodied. He cannot elaborate on it through passive understanding of the body-object, which featured in his previous writings, and perhaps 30 David Couzens Hoy (1999, 6–11) also argues against Dreyfus’ and Rabinow’s effort to base resistance on the body’s universal and invariant structures. Hoy points out that firstly, even if there are bodily invariants, they may be too thin to serve as the basis of criticism and resistance. Secondly, Foucault’s genealogy is an effort to show that the way of thinking that there is a normal, natural or universal way to exist would itself be a variant of normalization. Instead of adopting the assumption of invariance, genealogy seeks to show how the body has been lived differently historically, and how it can therefore become ‘more’ than it is now. According to Hoy, critical resistance thus flows from the realization that the present’s self-interpretation is only one among several others that have been viable, and that it should keep itself open to alternative interpretations.

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therefore the later understanding of the experiential body that he introduces in connection with sexuality is not further elaborated other than with a few remarks. I argue that a radically historized phenomenology of the body could therefore fill in some of the gaps in Foucault’s understanding of bodies and pleasures as a form of resistance. Butler writes in The Psychic Life of Power about Foucault’s understanding of the body: ‘Perhaps the body has come to substitute for the psyche in Foucault – that is, as that which exceeds and confounds the injunctions of normalization’ (Butler 1997, 94). According to Butler, this means that ‘Foucault has invested the body with psychic meanings that he cannot elaborate within the terms that he uses’ (95). While Butler’s conclusion seems to hit the point as far as what is lacking from Foucault’s conception of the body, I will argue that the only way to account for these gaps is not to turn to ‘psychic meanings’ but instead to study the meanings generated by the lived body. To conclude, I have two aims in my effort to create an uneasy alliance between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty in the next chapter. On the one hand, I argue that phenomenological insights concerning the lived body could enrich Foucault’s idea of the body as a locus of resistance. On the other hand, I also want to argue that the feminist appropriations of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body can benefit from a ‘Foucaultian’ interpretation of it, because it can provide feminist theory with new ways of understanding ‘female freedom’. Emancipation does not require a body with nascent logos and pure of cultural inscription, but one that is inscribed in ways that are open to reinterpretations and multiple meanings.

6 FEMALE FREEDOM

Iris Marion Young’s book Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory represented one of the most notable efforts to apply Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body to explicitly feminist issues.1 The essay ‘Throwing like a Girl’ traces some of the basic modalities of feminine comportment, manner of moving and relation in space. With the help of these modalities Young seeks to make understandable the ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways in which men do. She argues, with the help of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, that the modalities of feminine comportment, motility and spatiality are restricted modes of embodiment. According to Young, Merleau-Ponty describes the lived body as a transcendence that moves out from the body in its immanence in an open and unbroken directness upon the world in action. The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action, the continuous calling forth of capacities that are applied to the world. In the case of feminine movement the most primordial intentional act – the motion of the body orienting itself with respect to and moving within its surroundings – is inhibited (Young 1990,148). A woman ‘lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities’ (150). Jean Grimshaw criticizes Young’s analysis of female embodiment of the problematic opposition of the repressed female body and the ‘free’ or unrepressed male body. In her view, Young idealizes masculine movement by assuming it unproblematically as a norm. Merleau-Ponty could 1 It can be argued that Simone de Beauvoir had already put forward a phenomenological description of female embodiment in The Second Sex. See e.g. Kruks 1990, Vintges 1992, Heinämaa 2003.

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be accused of giving ontological priority to certain kinds of immediate bodily movements and actions. His analysis of embodiment fails adequately to recognize the ways in which the meaning of all actions, however immediate, is always mediated by culture (Grimshaw 1999, 103). Consequently, rather than there being, on the one hand, normal, uninhibited or natural motility of men, and on the other a pathological, culturally repressed motility of women, we should see both male and female motility as culturally mediated modalities of movement, dependent on the cultural coding of the activities in question. According to Grimshaw, the female body cannot be simply ‘freed’ from repressive or inhibitive sexist oppression, nor can it be adequately understood simply in terms of capitulation to ideological pressures to conform to a particular norm of the feminine body (115).2 Grimshaw concludes that what Young’s analysis suggests is that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the ‘normal’ needs problematizing: within the category of ‘normal’ there may be different ‘modalities’ that cannot be identified simply as ‘disorders’. This point is also forcibly brought home by Judith Butler in her devastating criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality (Butler 1989).3 While Grimshaw’s and Young’s focus is on the motility of the body, Butler’s focus is on its sexuality. She claims that, although Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality seems to offer significant arguments against all naturalistic accounts by presenting sexuality as a mode of dramatizing and investigating a concrete historical situation, it in fact contains tacit normative assumptions about the heterosexual and male character of sexuality. Not only does Merleau-Ponty fail to acknowledge the extent to which sexuality is culturally constructed, but his descriptions of its universal features reproduce certain cultural constructions of sexual normalcy (Butler 1989, 92). Despite the alleged openness and cultural malleability of sexuality advocated by Merleau-Ponty, Butler claims that certain bodily structures emerge as existential and metaphysical necessities, and that this ultimately destroys Merleau-Ponty’s non-normative pretensions (89). I argue in what follows that underlying both Young’s adaptation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, and Grimshaw’s and Butler’s criticism of it, is a foundationalist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s 2 See also Grosz 1994, 144. 3 For more recent criticism accusing Merleau-Ponty of bodily fundamentalism, see Sullivan 1997. For an alternative reading, see Silvia Stoller’s reply to Sullivan, Stoller 2000. For criticisms of Butler’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, see Heinämaa 1997 and Waldenfels 1998.

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body-subject. This criticism can also be conceptualized in terms of a distinction between historical situatedness and historical constitution, or what Judith Butler calls ‘a stronger version of historical situatedness’ (Butler 1989, 90–1). Butler argues that the historicity of the subject in Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality is historical situatedness, not historical constitution. This means that the body forms a universal foundation for subjectivity that only assumes different guises in different historical situations. Rather than history constituting all bodily experiences and modalities, there is a normal, foundational body that can assume different modalities depending on the varying historical situations. While Young thus argues that the modalities of feminine bodily comportment and movement ‘have their source in the particular situation of women as conditioned by their sexist oppression in contemporary society’ (Young 1990, 153), Butler criticizes Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality by noting that sexuality cannot be understood as an expression of a historically situated subject’s existence. Yet, to say that the subject is historically situated in a loose sense is to say only that the decisions a subject makes are limited – not exclusively constituted – by a given set of historical possibilities. A stronger version of historical situatedness would locate the history as the very condition for the constitution of the subject, not only as a set of external possibilities for choice. If this stronger version were accepted . . . sexuality is itself formed through the sedimentation of the history of sexuality, and the embodied subject, rather than an existential constant, is itself partially constituted by the legacy of sexual relations which constitute its situation. (Butler 1989, 90–1)

I will argue, against foundationalist readings, that the historicity of the body-subject in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is not historical situatedness but historical constitution. Merleau-Ponty does not understand the body-subject as ‘an existential constant’. The structures of the body do not form a universal foundation for all forms of subjectivity. Instead, subjectivity, even on the level of the anonymous body, is always historically constituted. I will defend my argument by constructing two possible readings of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject. The first puts it forward as foundational and historically situated, and can be seen to underlie Young’s, Grimshaw’s and Butler’s accounts. I will argue against this by presenting a second reading which emphasizes transcendental intersubjectivity – language, tradition and community – as

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the reality-constituting principle. In this second reading, MerleauPonty’s understanding of the body-subject is seen as compatible rather than opposed to post-structuralist approaches, for example Foucault: the body-subject is fundamentally structured as intersubjectivity, and is always historically constituted. I will finish by showing how the two different readings of MerleauPonty’s body-subject result in two different views of the freedom of the body. While the first one is open to criticism for naively assuming a realm of ‘female freedom’ outside of sexist oppression, I will argue that the second reading suggests new and interesting ways of thinking about the freedom of the female body.

The anonymous subjectivity of the body Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception presents a detailed description of the experience of the living body. It introduces the concept of the lived body (corp propre, corps phénomenal) and seeks to study the body of our lived experience, not of bio-scientific descriptions. One of his central claims is that the human body is not an object, a bio-mechanical system described by scientific materialism, but a precondition of all objects. It is our basic framework of meaning and truth, both the source and the sedimentation of significations and values. The term lived body is also used in an attempt to describe and understand the fundamental interrelatedness of consciousness and embodiment, and thus to bypass the dualisms of mind–body, interior–exterior and consciousness–nature. In the phenomenological description the lived body must be understood as a totality of external and internal perceptions, intelligence, affectivity, motility and sexuality. Merleau-Ponty aims to show, on the one hand, how the mind is always based on corporeality while not reducible to computational or neurological processes, and on the other hand, how the body’s physiological processes, such as perceptions, are never purely mechanical but always incorporate values and meanings. Using various case studies of pathological embodiment, he brings to light the bodily abilities that a normal subject has and takes for granted. We know, for example, how our body is positioned in relation to its environment without having to complete a cognitive process. We can imitate movements without having first to translate those movements into verbal representations that the body follows or carries out. In short, we have a ‘bodily knowledge’ of the world.

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Merleau-Ponty uses the concepts of body schema and intentional arc to further describe the nature of this bodily knowledge; the mode and structure through which our body is intertwined with the world. The notion of body schema is often mistakenly equated with imaginary body.4 It is not, however, an image in the sense of being a mental representation of the body. It is not imaginary, and cannot be understood as some kind of a ghost of the material body. It is the material body itself, a structured capacity for actions and intentions. It describes the bond, the intentional arc, that connects us to the world. [T]he life of consciousness . . . is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects around us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 136)5

According to Merleau-Ponty, the mode or structure through which our body is intertwined with the world is possible through a special kind of intentionality, a prereflective, bodily intentionality. He adopts Husserl’s term operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität) to describe intentionality that is not limited to thetic acts – acts of consciousness that have the structure of act-object – but describes our basic bodily bond to the surrounding world. This basic bond or relationship is essentially non-thetic: it cannot be fully analyzed into acts and their objects, but is more like an intertwining of our body and the world.6 Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘We found beneath the intentionality of acts, or thetic intentionality, another kind which is the condition of the former’s possibility: namely an operative intentionality already at work before any positing or any judgement’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 429). Through operative intentionality the body is directed to the world, its acts intend it and anticipate it. The body is ‘what opens me out upon the world and places me in a situation there’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 4 See e.g. Gatens 1996, 12, 69–70. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of body schema was strongly influenced by psychoanalytical accounts of the body image, however, as well as by Paul Schilder’s research in neurophysiology. 5 ‘la vie de la conscience . . . est sous-tendue par un “arc intentionnel” qui projette autour de nous notre passé, notre avenir, notre milieu humain, notre situation physique, notre situation idéologique, notre situation morale, ou plutôt qui fait que nous soyons situés sous tous ces rapports. C’est cet arc intentionnel qui fait l’unité des sens, celle des sens et de intelligence, celle de la sensibilité et de la motricité.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1972, 158) 6 See Heinämaa 2002.

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165). Although Merleau-Ponty takes fundamental intentionality to be intentionality of the body rather than of consciousness, this does not mean that it is unconscious or mechanical. Bodily intentionality does not have the structure of an act and object because this separation of subject and object is accomplished on the level of individual consciousness. It is thus primary in the sense of being a precondition for intentional consciousness. According to Merleau-Ponty, our relationship to the world is, in the first place ‘not a matter of “I think” but of “I can”’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 137). Phenomenological account of sexuality. Basic bodily intentionality is also what underlies Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality in Phenomenology of Perception. Sexuality is an intending of the world and of the other body in a way that precedes intellectual signification and the separation of subject and object. It is an intertwining more basic than all conceptual and theoretical formulations of it. When I move my eye, I take account of the movement, without being expressly conscious of the fact, and am thereby aware that the upheaval caused in my field of vision is only apparent. Similarly sexuality, without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience. Taken in this way, as an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-extensive with life. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 169)7

Through a detailed discussion of Goldstein and Gelb’s case study of a brain-damaged patient called Schneider, Merleau-Ponty argues that sexuality is not a separable function or aspect of behaviour. Schneider was a veteran of the First World War and was wounded in the occipital region of the brain, which is generally believed to process visual data. What is peculiar about his case is that there was no specific function that was deficient. It was rather that his problems affected his whole way of being: his way of moving, perceiving and his relation to the world. As far as his sexuality was concerned, the breakdown of his sexual activity and interests had internal links with the whole of his active and cognitive 7 ‘Quand je bouge les yeux, je tiens compte de leur mouvement, sans en prendre conscience expresse, et je comprends par lui que le bouleversement du champ visuel n’est qu’apparent. De même la sexualité, sans eˆ tre l’objet d’un acte de conscience exprès, peut motiver les formes privilégiées de mon expérience. Prise ainsi, c’est-à-dire comme atmosphère ambiquë, la sexualité est coextensive a` la vie.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1972, 197)

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being. According to Merleau-Ponty, the very structure of perception and erotic experience underwent a change in Schneider (156). Sexuality lost its meaning for him. In a normal subject, sexuality permeates the whole living being and its situation. It is present in all acts and qualities, ‘like an odour or like a sound’ (168). Although Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality is allied with psychoanalysis in emphasizing the fact that sexuality does not express or present itself to us in determinate conscious acts, the opposite pole of conscious acts is not put forward as the unconscious, but as bodily anonymity, which also characterizes sexuality. Throughout Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presents us with examples of the anonymity of perceptions. He argues that every perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us anonymously. I cannot say that I see the blue of the sky in the sense that I can say that I decide to devote my life to mathematics. I can see blue because I am sensitive to colours, whereas I am a mathematician because I have decided to be one (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 215). In connection with sexuality, Merleau-Ponty takes the example of falling asleep. It is not an act of positing consciousness where the body simply expresses a conscious intention. It is a bodily act or an act realized only through the body. I lie down in bed, on my left side, with my knees drawn up: I close my eyes and breathe slowly, putting my plans out of mind. But the power of my will or consciousness stops there . . . There is a moment when sleep ‘comes’, settling on this imitation of itself which I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 163–4)8

Tacit cogito. In the chapter entitled ‘The Cogito’ in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presents his account of subjectivity – conveyed by his notion of body-subject – through a critique of the Cartesian cogito. There can be no subjectivity separable from our bodies because all consciousness is founded on perceptual consciousness; even the pure ideas of intellect derive their meaning from the world of 8 ‘je m’étends dans mon lit, sur le côté gauche, les genoux repliés, je ferme les yeux, je respire lentement, j’éloigne de moi mes projets. Mais le pouvoir de ma volonté ou de ma conscience s’arrête là . . . Il y a un moment ou` le sommeil “vient”, il se pose sur cette imitation de lui-même que je lui proposais, je réussis a` devenir ce que je feignais d’être’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1972, 191).

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perception. Similarly, self-consciousness arises through direct contact with the world perceived not by consciousness observing itself perceiving, or by inference from any idea of itself. Consciousness is not closed in on itself, but is always a relation to the world, a form of conduct. All knowledge of the world is, at the same time, knowledge of the self; ‘it is through my relation to “things” that I know myself’ (MerleauPonty 1945/1994, 383). At the same time, Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘there is an element of final truth in the Cartesian return of things or ideas to the self’ (369). The perceiving subject is a precondition of the experience of a transcendent world. The world only becomes meaningful through the perceptual acts of a transcendent subject. However, the cogito that Descartes should have discovered at the root of our experiences of the world is not the cogito of explicit experiences. In the place of the Cartesian cogito, Merleau-Ponty postulates a tacit cogito that is anonymous or prepersonal. This tacit cogito underlies or precedes the emergence of explicit self-consciousness, which comes into being through language. Martin Dillon characterizes the tacit cogito by writing that its corporeal reflexivity is latent and unexpressed, whereas the Cartesian cogito is personal and individual and its explicit reflexivity is thematized in language and thought. The tacit cogito is thus subjectivity that is yet curiously prereflective and unaware of itself (Dillon 1988, 105–8). It is bodily consciousness, an intertwining with the world. The structures of the world are structures of the body, not of the consciousness. [W]hen I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 408)9

Hence, Merleau-Ponty clearly claims that the tacit cogito, or the anonymous body-subject, is foundational in relation to individual, personal subjectivity. It forms the latter’s condition of possibility. What is not so clear in his account of subjectivity, however, is the relationship between 9 ‘Si, réfléchissant sur l’essence de la subjectivité, je la trouve liée a` celle du corps et a` celle du monde, c’est que mon existence comme subjectivité ne fait qu’un avec mon existence comme corps et avec l’existence du monde et que finalement le sujet que je suis, concrètement pris, est inséparable de ce corps-ci et de ce monde-ci.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/72, 467)

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the anonymous body and intersubjectivity. Although he considers subjectivity as fundamentally anonymous and general, it is tied to a singular body: ‘It is essential for me not only to have a body, but to have this body’ (431). My existence is tied to my singular experience of myself as a body as well as to my experience of the world. This is important because the prereflectivity or anonymity of perceptions does not mean coincidence with the perceived. As Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘We do not mean that the primordial I completely overlooks itself. If it did, it would indeed be a thing, and nothing could cause it subsequently to become consciousness’ (404). Self-awareness, even though tacit, thus becomes a precondition for the experience of a transcendent world. There has to be a space between the here of perception and the there of the phenomenon, and there has to be some kind of awareness of the here for the there to appear as such (Dillon 1988, 103).10 Although the tacit cogito or body-subject does not refer to personal subjectivity, but should rather be understood as an anonymous and preconscious layer of subjectivity, it must remain centralized or singularized in such a way that the acts and their object do not coincide. The perceiving body becomes constituted through its perceptions as a subject endowed with tacit reflexivity. This reflexivity or tacit self-consciousness becomes, on the one hand, a precondition for perception, while perceptions, on the other hand, constitute subjectivity as incarnate in the body (Dillon 1988, 105.) The anonymity of perception, rather than breaking or decentralizing subjectivity, in fact seems to presuppose not undifferentiated anonymous life but rather a subjectivity that is singularized in such a way that it is equated with an individual perceiving body. Foundational account of the body-subject. How, then, is the body-subject related to intersubjectivity: is it foundational in the sense of forming the latter’s condition of possibility? I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception allows for two possible readings. The first is that we distinguish three separate ‘layers’ of subjectivity: (1) anonymous, prepersonal subjectivity; (2) personal, individual subjectivity; and (3) interpersonal intersubjectivity. Thus, anonymous, prepersonal subjectivity is understood as foundational for 10 Dan Zahavi also argues that, for an experience to be anonymous means that it lacks explicit self-awareness; it does not mean that it lacks self-awareness, differentiation and individuation altogether. According to Zahavi, Merleau-Ponty occasionally flirts with this radical interpretation, but on closer scrutiny, this must be rejected. See Zahavi 2001.

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the other two. It forms the condition of possibility, not only for individual consciousness but also for intersubjectivity understood as comprising the linguistic community, culture and history. In this reading, Merleau-Ponty presents a foundational account of subjectivity. There is a rudimentary level, the perceptual flow of the singular subject, on which all forms of subjectivity are founded. Even though, according to this reading, the anonymous existence of the body forms a universal foundation, the subject is still not an ahistorical constant. This is because the body-subject is, for MerleauPonty, always and by necessity historically situated and circumscribed. The phenomenological account of the lived body shows that it is always situated within or intertwined with its environment. It actively takes up its situation in the world and transforms it through its bodily acts, attitudes or styles. This activity of the body is, moreover, normatively generative: the body has optimal ways of acting in the world. Normality for the lived body can, thus, according to this reading, be understood as what is optimal for it. Optima are instituted within experience by the very fact that the body takes a perspective on things and is embedded in the surrounding world. As bodies we can be more open to the givenness of objects or more closed to them.11 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty refers to normal as optimal when he writes that ‘for each object, as for each painting in a gallery, there is an optimal distance from which it demands to be viewed, an orientation through which it gives the most of itself . . . the distance from me to the object is not a size which decreases or increases, but a tension that oscillates around a norm’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 302). In this reading, phenomenology of the lived body can be criticized for approaching the notions of normal and abnormal with respect to the lived body and its immediate surroundings, not with respect to an interpersonal community. What characterizes the living body is its ability to instigate norms, and norms are founded on the experience of the lived body. This understanding of the foundational role of the structures of the body in establishing the normal seems to be in stark contrast to the feminist theorists who claim that normal and abnormal are always defined in a social context and attached to the polarity of positive– negative. Norms offer possibilities for reference and judgement; instituting and identifying norms are always acts of power. 11 See Steinbock 1995, 138–43. Steinbock argues that, when Husserl refers to normal as optimal, the optimal as a norm is instituted and generated from within experience.

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Hence, according to my first reading, while emphasizing that the subject is always historically situated, Merleau-Ponty does not problematize how the ‘normal subject’ itself is fundamentally constituted in history. As Elmar Holenstein (1985/1999, 87) argues, he neglects to question both the possible historical and sociological dependence of the structuring and orientation of the world as well as of the body. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body-subject would reject the strong version of historical constitution, according to which intersubjectivity – understood as language, tradition and community – provides the very condition of possibility for individual subjectivity as well as for objective reality. The historicity of the subject in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body would, as Judith Butler claims, be historical situatedness, not historical constitution. History as constitutive of the body-subject, even on the level of rudimentary perceptual flow, would be redundant.

The historical constitution of the body I will leave aside here the methodological questions connected with studying intersubjectivity – language, history, cultural normativity – that arise out of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body.12 I will argue that, despite possible methodological problems, his understanding of the body-subject is open to a second reading, which is more in line with Foucault’s insights about the historical constitution of the body. According to this second reading, transcendental intersubjectivity – language, tradition and community – is understood as the reality-constituting principle providing the conditions of possibility for all forms of subjectivity 12 As I have made clear in my discussion of phenomenology and Foucault in chapters 1 and 2, an obvious difference between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault concerns their methodologies. Although Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the fact that the constitution of subjectivity is fundamentally dependent on history, language and society, he applies the phenomenological method. Through phenomenological reduction one can reveal not only the eidetic structures of a singular subjectivity, but also intersubjectivity, understood as tradition and society. For a phenomenologist, intersubjectivity is not an objectively existing structure in the world which could be studied from a third-person perspective. Rather, it can only be disclosed through a description of the living body’s structures of experience. Intersubjectivity can thus unfold itself only in the relation between singular subjects. See e.g. Zahavi 1996, 237. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Foucault does not analyze the lived meanings of a singular body as constitutive of the meaningfulness of the world. He analyzes sense constitution only by studying its conditions of possibility in the intersubjective or socially shared meaning structures, such as language. A concrete description of the historical development of forms of rationality, technologies of subjection and techniques of the self can reveal the different modes through which forms of subjectivity are constituted.

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as well as for objective reality. Instead of the tacit cogito being a foundational layer of subjectivity on which the personal and intersubjective depend, I will argue that it is a dimension of intersubjective sense constitution. It is not a foundation, but a constitutive condition. Merleau-Ponty clearly emphasizes the reciprocity of all constitutive processes. For instance, subjectivity and the world can never be understood in isolation from each other. He also explicitly states that transcendental subjectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 361–2). How transcendental intersubjectivity is understood is, however, decisive for the way we understand its relationship to the body-subject. Dan Zahavi, among others, effectively argues for an intersubjective transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology in his late, posthumously published writings.13 These texts by Husserl had the greatest influence on Merleau-Ponty, who saw the main thrust of Husserl’s work to be contained in the manuscripts.14 Zahavi shows that, from the winter of 1910/11 up until his death in 1938, Husserl’s aim was to develop a transcendental theory of intersubjectivity. According to Zahavi, what has made Husserl’s account difficult to explicate and understand is that he operated with several different kinds of intersubjectivity. He did not only understand it to refer to the subject’s cultural context, to the fact that we are constantly confronted with intersubjective meanings such as social institutions and cultural products. Neither does intersubjectivity refer exclusively to other people’s actual presence in the subject’s field of experience. The core in Husserl’s reflections on intersubjectivity lies in its fundamental reality-constitutive function. In terms of understanding Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject as intersubjectivity, Husserl’s major claim is that the experience of objective validity is made possible by the experience of the transcendence of foreign subjectivity. Objects cannot be reduced to being merely my intentional correlates if they can be experienced by others. Our primal experience of others permanently transforms our categories of experience. The objective validity of my experiences does not, after the initial encounter, require the other’s actual presence. The precondition for objective reality is, however, that it can only be constituted by a subject that has

13 See e.g. Zahavi 1996, 1996/2001. 14 Zahavi refers to, for example, Ideen II, Erste Philosophie II, Erfahrung und Urteil, Analyzen zur passive Synthesis, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität I–III. See also e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 92–3; 1960/1964.

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experienced other subjects (Zahavi 1996, 233).15 Just as for Husserl, transcendental intersubjectivity forms the condition of possibility for our experiences of objective reality, similarly for Merleau-Ponty, other people function as a precondition for the objectivity of perceptions. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty discusses in detail the phenomenon of hallucinations. The fact that I classify the voices and visions of my interlocutor as hallucinations means that I find nothing similar in my visual field. The world that I perceive as objective reality is not only a correlate of my consciousness. An object appears to me only from one possible angle, but the other possible angles are implied in my perception of it. For something to be an object it must thus carry with it the potentiality of being perceived simultaneously from multiple angles. Intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty’s thought refers not only to the subject’s shared cultural context, but also to the fundamental condition of possibility of objective reality. Intersubjectivity forms the condition of possibility for perception. Even if the role of intersubjectivity in the constitution of objective reality is understood as an intertwining of the perceiving body with other people’s bodies and the natural world, the body-subject can still be understood as foundational. The constitutive process takes place in a threefold structure – subjectivity–intersubjectivity–world – and this structure is essential and universal. Intersubjectivity can, however, also be understood as comprising the linguistic community and historical tradition. Zahavi argues that this sense is present in Husserl’s late thinking. Intersubjectivity is now understood as the linguistic community that forms the fundamental condition of possibility for singular subjectivity. Zahavi argues that the question of normality and the concept of the home-world become constitutional core concepts for Husserl. Homeworld refers to the normatively significant life-world, with its unique language and tradition. It is the familiar life-world that is normatively 15 Zahavi further argues that it would be a mistake to assume that Husserl understood intersubjectivity as something which is exclusively attached to concrete bodily mediated interaction. He held a more fundamental view: the being of the subject as experiencing and constituting implies a reference to other subjects already prior to its concrete experience of them, that is, a priori. Husserl argues that an analysis of perceptual intentionality leads to a disclosure of the apodictic intersubjective structure of the transcendental ego. Our perceptions of objects are characterized by the horizontal appearance of the object, where a certain aspect is present and others are absent. All possible aspects can thus never be actualized by a single subject and therefore can only be accounted for through reference to a plurality of possible subjects. The being of the perceiving subject is thus referred to others already by the fact of the ontological structure of the object (Zahavi 1996, 233–4).

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relevant to us. It is the world that our body intends and spins around us. The subject’s embeddedness in this living tradition and its anonymous normality forms a third type of intersubjectivity. Normality is understood as conventionality, which in its being transcends the individual. Our horizon of anticipations is structured in accordance with the intersubjectively handed-down forms of apperception (Zahavi 1996, 239– 42). Social normativity cannot therefore be regarded only as secondary or derivative of individual, lived normativity.16 When intersubjectivity is understood as social normativity, the bodysubject cannot be understood as historically situated, but rather as historically constituted. According to this view, there can be no universal or inherent normativity of the living body. The anonymous body is not foundational for social normativity, but the relationship between the living body and the surrounding culture is complex and chiasmic. The structures of the body are structures of the world, but not only of the natural world. The shared normativity of the living tradition also constitutes and structures the intentionality of perceptions, sexuality and embodiment. Merleau-Ponty does not defend the view that posits the body as immune to the influence of history. According to him, ‘Man is a historical idea, not a natural species’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 170). This claim is often interpreted to mean that the fundamental structures of the anonymous body – for example temporality, spatiality and sexuality – form a foundation that simply assumes different guises in different historical situations. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on history can, however, be interpreted through Husserl’s theory of transcendental intersubjectivity as defending a stronger version of historical constitution. The structures of the anonymous body come into being only as intersubjectively generated. Merleau-Ponty’s conditions of possibility for perception must not be understood as ahistorical or universal forms, but rather as dynamic and developing structures derived from our cultural environment, constantly in a state of change. The anonymous body is not a natural foundation on which intersubjectivity, understood as tradition and community, forms a secondary layer. Nor is it the 16 Anthony Steinbock (1995, 267) argues that, when Husserl turned to generative phenomena, he no longer addressed the problem of normality and abnormality in terms of normal as optimal for the living being and abnormal as one-sidedly dependent on the normal, but rather treated them intersubjectively in terms of ‘homeworld’ and ‘alienworld’. By doing this, Husserl implicitly reinterpreted the concepts of normality and abnormality.

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case that, in emphasizing transcendental intersubjectivity as constitutive of the body-subject, culture is privileged over nature. It is rather that transcendental intersubjectivity represents the very effort to dismantle the nature–culture dichotomy and to rethink nature as well as culture. Merleau-Ponty’s aim throughout Phenomenology of Perception is to argue against all dichotomous and causal modes of thinking, which reduce lived phenomena to primary causes and secondary effects. The phenomenological conception of intersubjectivity comprises areas that are traditionally posited not only on the side of culture but also on the side of nature: geography, physiology, materiality, the body. The fundamental bodily nature of subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty emphasizes with his notion of the body-subject is not part of nature or culture, but it problematizes the distinction between them. The anonymity of perception must be understood as a layer or dimension of intersubjectivity that we cannot localize or isolate.17 Our relationship to the world is fundamentally ambiguous and therefore resists conceptualization. This does not mean that there exists a sphere of ‘pure’ bodily experiences independent of intersubjectively constituted structures, meanings and linguistic representations of the body. In his essay The Child’s Relations with Others, Merleau-Ponty studies intersubjectivity in very concrete terms (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 96–155). He discusses the development of a child’s corporal schema and shows, through a detailed study of child psychology, how intersubjectivity forms the condition of possibility for singular subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty gives a detailed account of how a child’s bodily awareness, as well as its perceptual consciousness, develop as a consequence of being in an intersubjective situation, and how these therefore correspond to cultural variations in the child’s environment. The development of a child’s corporal schema is tied internally to the process that leads to the distinction between itself and others. It develops only in a concrete social, historical and cultural situation. The corporal schema is not an a priori form that the child receives intact at birth, but is historically constituted and structured as intersubjectivity. The structures of the anonymous body come into being only as historically sedimented structures derived from our cultural environment. Subjectivity, even on the level of the anonymous body, is always dynamic. It is constituted and structured by language, community and culture. Our perceptions of the

17 Cf. Visker 1995, 120.

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world form an organic whole, not because of a universal foundation in the body, but because of opening on to the same world.

Female freedom? When Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject is not understood as universal or foundational, but as essentially dynamic and historically constituted, the implication for feminist theory is that there are no normal or foundational modes of female embodiment, motility or sexuality. There is no inhibited female corporeality and free and normal male corporeality in societies of sexist oppression, but rather two differently gendered and historically constituted experiences and modalities of embodiment. What is called normal depends on the values of the society in question. This view comes close to Foucault’s idea that power/knowledge networks constitute normalcy. According to Foucault, modernity is characterized by life becoming an object of scientific discourse intrinsically tied to political aims and technologies. Biopower targets individual bodies and the population’s health as a whole. An important consequence of its development is the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Unlike laws which function according to the binary logic of the forbidden and the permitted, norms are individualizing: they make it possible to demarcate distributions, measure differences, construct scales and classify in various categories. Biopower is dependent on this individualizing knowledge about particular bodies, and about the population as a whole. It is power for normalizing judgement, power to identify scientific criteria for what is normal. According to Foucault, norms are thus an important part of the power/knowledge network, and as such constitutive of the subject. Scientific discourse creates norms that are utilized by political discourse and institutional practices and vice versa: political problems are taken up by scientific discourse and its experts, on whose authority the normal is identified. Structures of power/knowledge create not only new objects of science, but also new kinds of subjects. Foucault’s studies of ‘dividing practices’ show how the ‘normal’ subject is constituted by a distinction and physical separation between normal and abnormal subjects. Scientific normativity and its third-person accounts contribute to the constitution of our lived bodily sense of the normal. They also shape the liminal encounters of the home-world and

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the alien-world, the normal and the abnormal. As Steinbock argues (1995, 180), for Foucault it was not a matter of inquiring into how we circumscribe a prefabricated alienness, but of understanding how alienness itself is constituted. His analyses show, for example, how the scientific status of psychiatric knowledge disqualifies the patient’s knowledge and thereby makes his life-world an alien-world, while constituting the doctor’s world as the home-world. Foucault’s thought thus effectively politicizes the level of intersubjective sense constitution by bringing in the idea of power being constitutive of forms of the subject. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological descriptions of the lived body, on the other hand, show how the body becomes an instigator of normative as well as transgressive reiteration. The body is not a surface or a site on which psychic meanings are played out. Neither is it a mute container of subjectivity. The body-subject is generative in the sense of being constitutive of different meanings: subjectivity means the embodied capacity to creatively respond to existing norms. As Rudi Visker notes, style for Merleau-Ponty is the moment of singularity (Visker 1995, 119).18 Although perception is fundamentally intersubjective and anonymous, it is also an expression; it creates a singular style. It actualizes a sexual style that the subject lives through all its engagements with the surrounding world. Instead of viewing perception as a process whereby the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning through the foundational structures of the body, we must understand it as an essentially open and ambiguous process. The sensory meanings that are ordered and constituted intersubjectively through our coexistence with the world take several forms. Perception therefore always remains indeterminate and incomplete.19 The lived body is characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy because its relationship to the world is essentially open and dynamic. The constant responding of bodily acts to existing cultural meanings is what interlocks the lived normativity of a singular body and social normativity. The relationship between subjective, bodily normativity and the intersubjective horizon of meanings is dynamically interlocked 18 In his article relating Merleau-Ponty’s and Foucault’s thought on the question of experience/discourse, Rudi Visker also argues that we do not have to choose between them. ‘What is at stake here is not the attempt to reduce discourse to existence, or existence to discourse, but to find in their mutual intrication some indication of what it could mean for us to be those subjects who take up positions we did not ourselves generate’ (see Visker 1995, 126). 19 According to Merleau-Ponty, sensation can be anonymous only because it is incomplete (Merleau-Ponty 1954/1994, 216).

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in constant oscillation: shifting, resisting and adapting. While individual bodily normativity responds to established sets of norms – female embodiment is constituted in a certain way in a patriarchal culture – it never mechanically reiterates the existing norms. The body is constantly materializing different social norms, it reiterates them but always through its individual style. It is not a replica or a carbon copy of preestablished normativity, but rather materializes an individual style of being. The constitution of meaning, even in the singular living body, is always intersubjective, but never mechanical. The body-subject is initiatory and capable of resistance, and at the same time constituted by intersubjective normativity. According to Merleau-Ponty, ‘The question is always how I can be open to phenomena which transcend me, and which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and live them’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 363). Hence, my argument is that a non-foundationalist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject can provide feminist theory with an account of the female body that acknowledges its generative status instead of viewing it only as a passive product of cultural crafting. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s thought refutes the possibility of feminist theory returning to a fixed or pure female embodiment or essential femininity.20 Because the body-subject is always historical as well as generative, the emergence of new ‘sexual styles’, new sets of bodily normativities, constantly shifts the meaning of sexual difference. The intersubjective horizon of meaning is transformed because what the lived body generates is unpredictable. As Elizabeth Grosz writes in Volatile Bodies, what fascinates her is the ability of bodies to always extend the frameworks that attempt to contain them and seep beyond their domains of control. ‘Bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new, surprising, unpredictable’ (Grosz 1994, xi). The lived body cannot be emancipated from sexist oppression to free modes of motility or sexuality. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body potentially furthers understanding not only of the cultural constitution of the body, but also of its resistance against this constitution. There is ‘freedom’ in the unpredictability of our embodied experiences that establishes the always incomplete character of the body’s cultural constitution. This freedom is not to be understood as an inherent capacity or an attribute of the body as such, but is more like 20 On the possibility of ‘feminist phenomenology’, see also Oksala 2004.

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a ‘Foucaultian’ understanding of freedom as the freeing or opening of new possibilities for living our bodies, sexualities and lives. This freedom of the body is thus not political freedom. The fact that the body will offer resistance to sexist forms of power does not mean that we can give up political struggles for feminist issues connected with the body – such as abortion or rape – and simply let the body do the job for us. Even if the cultural constitution of the body is never complete or uniform, the resistance it shows is never enough because it cannot rearticulate the terms of the body’s cultural constitution.21 The rearticulation of the intersubjective horizon of meanings cannot be accomplished by creative bodies alone, but only by creative politics. Nevertheless, even if the female body cannot be emancipated through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in this sense, our ways of inscribing and reading the body have important political consequences, particularly in the realm of sexual politics. Perhaps it is necessary for us to rethink emancipation: it requires not a body pure of cultural constitution, but one that is constituted in ways that are open to reinterpretation and multiple meanings. The undefined freedom of the lived body opens up a space in which political freedom can be sought. 21 Cf. Butler 1997, 89.

III ETHICS

7 THE SILENCE OF ETHICS

My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can have no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and would not for my life ridicule it. (Wittgenstein 1965, 11–12)

Foucault never developed a theory of ethics, yet his two last books, The History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, could be characterized as being concerned primarily with ethics. They deal with the sexual morality of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The question that guides Foucault’s inquiry is: ‘How, why and in what form was sexuality constituted as a moral domain?’ (UP, 10). The focus of the inquiry is thus on the manner in which sexual activity was problematized, mainly by philosophers and doctors in texts written as guides for others. In the second volume of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasures, the period under study is the classical Greek culture of the fourth century bc. The third volume, The Care of the Self, deals with the same problematization in the Roman Empire of the first two centuries ad.

History of ethics What emerges out of Foucault’s historical studies of sexual morality is a particular conception of ethics that he traces to antiquity. He begins by 157

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making a distinction between morality as a moral code and the morality of behaviours. The former refers to ‘a set of values and rules of action that are recommended to individuals through the intermediary of various prescriptive agencies such as the family, educational institutions, churches, etc’ (UP, 25). By morality of behaviours, he refers to the effective behaviour of people in relation to the code; how their actual behaviour matches the rules and values that are recommended to them. These components of sexual morality are studied through the history of morals and the social history of sexual practices, respectively. They are not the objects of Foucault’s ‘history of desiring man’ (UP, 6). Apart from these components of morality there is, according to Foucault, still one important component, which he calls ethics. He argues that for an action to be moral it is not enough to reduce it to an act that conforms to a moral rule. Ethics refers to the manner in which one forms oneself as a subject of a morality acting in reference to its prescriptive elements; the modes by which subjects problematize their activity and use of pleasures. It is necessary to undertake a study of ethics to be able to make visible the difference between the morality of antiquity and that of Christianity. Foucault argues that, contrary to what is often believed, on the level moral ideals, structures and codes of behaviour, there are striking similarities between antiquity and Christianity. Both express concern, even fear, about the effect of sexual expenditure on an individual’s health, both value conjugal fidelity and abstention, and both attach a negative image to homosexual relations. What constitutes a strong contrast between these two cultures, however, is the way in which they integrate moral ideals or demands in relation to the self and thus the forms in which sexual behaviour is problematized. In ancient Greece the themes of sexual austerity were not an expression of deep or essential prohibition, but ‘the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty’ (UP, 23). Hence, the important discovery behind Foucault’s ‘history of ethics’ is that ethics understood as a certain kind of relation to oneself differs from one morality to the other, just as do systems of values, rules and interdictions.1 Only by keeping this component of morality in view can the difference between Christian morality versus ancient morality be 1 Arnold Davidson (1986, 230–1) argues that Foucault’s understanding of ethics is an original contribution to the study of morality because it shows how a study of ethics can be fruitful even when there is little or no change in the moral codes examined. By isolating the relation to oneself as a separate component of morality, Foucault opens up a domain

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made clear. The main emphasis in Christian morality is on the code, its systemacity, its richness, its capacity to adjust to every possible case and to embrace every area of behaviour. The morality of antiquity, on the other hand, represents a morality in which the code and rules of behaviour are rudimentary. The emphasis is on the relationship with the self and the practices of the self rather than on conformity to a law. More important than the actual rules or contents of the law is the relationship that one has with the self the choice about the style of existence made by the individual (UP, 29–30). Foucault further distinguishes between four different aspects of ethics as the relation to oneself. The first he calls the ethical substance: the part of the subject constituted as the material that is going to be worked over. According to Foucault, for us the ethical substance would generally be feelings, or in the sexual realm, the desire, whereas for Kant, for example, it was intentions. Secondly, there is the mode of subjection; the way people are invited to recognize their moral obligations. One could, for example, practise conjugal fidelity because one acknowledges oneself to be part of a group that practises it, or because one wants to offer one’s self as an example for others to follow. Thirdly, there is what Foucault calls the ethical work, the self-forming activity – the actual means by which one attempts to change oneself in order to become a moral subject. This may take the form of a sudden renunciation of pleasures, self-interrogation, meditation, listening to others or the memorization of scriptures, for example. Finally there is the telos: the mode of being characteristic of the ethical subject one is aspiring to become. One’s ultimate aim may be immortality, self-mastery, purity, happiness, freedom (UP, 26–8). In The Use of Pleasure Foucault analyzes the four aspects of the relation to oneself in the sexual morality of ancient Greece through three austerity themes of the code: health, wives or women, and boys. The aim or telos of this morality was the beauty of life through self-control: superiority over appetites and pleasures and mastery in relation to one’s body, one’s household and society. The third part of The History of Sexuality, The Care for the Self, takes up the same themes and problematizations in the Roman Empire, and analyzes the gradual changes that had taken place in the realm of ethics. of analysis that can be profitably investigated both when moral codes are relatively static and when they undergo great upheaval. His ethics provides us with a way of writing a history of ethics that will not collapse into a history of moral codes.

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Ethics as practice The History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, thus presents us with a historical study of the forms of an ethical problematization of a remote past. Ethics refers to a specific component of morality and provides a useful analytical tool for studying its history. Foucault’s work on ethics should not be read solely as a new methodological approach to historical studies of sexual morality, however. His notion of ethics refers not only to a component of morality that deals with the ways individuals constitute themselves as moral subjects, but also to a certain way of understanding morality. I argue that when his last books are combined with his late interviews and other texts, an idea of ethics in the prescriptive sense of the word emerges too; a conception of ethics as an individual ethos, an attitude or a way of life. Foucault’s late work on ethics represents a continuation of his on-going concern with forms of subjection, and makes a contribution to the task of rethinking ethics in the ‘postmodern’ world. Foucault explicitly admitted that he wrote the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality in terms of a contemporary situation (CT, 263). He denied, however, that he was suggesting that we adopt the ethics of ancient Greece. He condemns outright the ancient Greek ethics of pleasure in many ways as something quite disgusting, and refers to how it was linked to the ideas of a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other and an obsession with penetration, for example (GE, 346). Yet, he suggests there is something we can learn from it. My idea is that it’s not necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific knowledge. Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be useful as a tool or analyzing what is going on now – and to change it. (GE, 349–350)2

In ancient Greece morality was not related to religion or religious preoccupations, nor was it related to social, legal or institutional systems. Its domain was the relationship one had towards the self, namely, the aesthetics of existence. What Foucault found striking was the similarity of the ethical problems with the problems of our society: 2 The interview is the result of a series of working sessions with Michel Foucault conducted by Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus at Berkley in 1983, and was originally published in English.


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I wonder if our problem is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge. (GE, 343)

Ancient Greek morality was not a system of rules or codes of conduct, but an ethos; it was the subject’s mode of being and a certain manner of acting visible to others. Moral actions were further indissociable from forms of self-activity, a set of practices relating to the principle of epimeleia heautou, of taking care of oneself. Foucault writes that the expression epimeleia heautou was a very powerful one in Greek: ‘It does not mean simply being interested in oneself, nor does it mean having a certain tendency to self-attachment or self-fascination . . . it describes a sort of work, an activity; it implies attention, knowledge, technique’ (GE, 359–60). This care of the self was considered as both a duty and a technique, a basic obligation and a set of carefully worked out procedures (HES, 95). Foucault thus clearly points to the potential of ethics as a care for the self in the secular, postmodernized world. He argues that we have inherited the tradition of Christian morality with its values of selfrenunciation and self-sacrifice, as well as the secular tradition that sees in external law the basis for morality. Against these traditions the care for the self appears as immorality, egoism or a means of escape from rules and responsibilities towards others (TES, 228). The care for the self that Foucault advocates should be understood as stemming from a wholly different conception of ethics, however, ethics as practice, creative activity, the permanent training of the self by oneself. To be an ethical subject means to engage in ‘a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal’ (UP, 28).

The ethical subject Foucault refers to the practices of the self in more general contexts as technologies of the self, which are an important point of focus both in

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his later understanding of the subject as well as in his effort to rethink the possible forms of morality for us today. Technologies of the self . . . permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (TES, 225)3

According to Foucault, technologies of the self have acquired different forms in different moral systems over the centuries, through antiquity and after the transition to Christian morality. In a seminar text, ‘Technologies of the Self’, written at around the same time as the last volumes of The History of Sexuality, he formulates his study of pagan and early Christian sexual morality in terms of ‘a hermeneutics of the self’. His aim is to study the link between the obligation to know oneself in telling the truth about oneself, and the obligation to submit to certain prohibitions against sexuality. He asks: ‘How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden? . . . What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce everything?’ (TES, 224). Foucault claims that the precept ‘to be concerned with oneself’ was the form that this hermeneutics of the self takes in ancient Greece. The other ancient maxim, ‘Know thyself’, was always subordinated to it. The concern for oneself underlies Socratic dialogues. Socrates presents himself in Plato’s Apology before his judges as a master of epimeleia heautou. He tells his judges that they should concern themselves with themselves, that is, with ‘wisdom, truth and the perfection of the soul’ (TES, 226). According to Foucault, there occurred a profound transformation in the moral principles of western culture with the development of the Christian tradition, as well as with the growing importance of the secular tradition. In Christianity, technologies of the self adopted the paradoxical position of being the means of deciphering the truth about the self while at the same time the ultimate aim was self-renunciation. Foucault takes Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise On Virginity as an example. For Gregory, taking care of oneself meant the movement of renunciation. 3 The text derives from a seminar Foucault gave at the University of Vermont in 1982, and was originally published in English.


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Gregory exhorts one to light the lamp and turn the house over and search, until gleaming in the shadow one sees the drachma within. In order to recover the efficacy which God has printed on one’s soul and which the body has tarnished, one must take care of oneself and search every corner of the soul. (TES, 227)

Foucault thus argues that there has been an inversion between the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, ‘Take care of yourself’ and ‘Know thyself’. Knowledge of the self was understood in Greco-Roman culture as a consequence of taking care of the self and therefore was subordinated to it. In the modern world, it constitutes the fundamental principle. Foucault was not only referring to our religious tradition. He also claims that the principle of knowing the self underlies all those ‘philosophies of the subject’ in which knowledge of the thinking subject constitutes the first step in the theory of knowledge (TES, 228). Foucault’s studies of the history of ethics can thus be seen as a continuation of his attempt to rethink the subject, this time the forms of the self: the forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself or herself and the practices by which he or she transforms his or her mode of being. Rather than understanding the ethical relationship one has to oneself as a relationship of knowledge, Foucault advocates an understanding of it as a ‘care’ or ‘concern for oneself’. With his explication of ancient Greek ethics, he clearly wanted to further argue the point that there is no true self that can be deciphered and emancipated, but that the self is something that has been – and must be – created. There is a whole new axis of analysis present in his late studies of the subject, however. The last two volumes of The History of Sexuality appeared in a very different form from the one that Foucault had originally planned and proposed.4 He indicates in the introduction to volume ii that there was an analytical axis missing from his previous work. To be able to study the history of ‘the experience of sexuality’, he also needed, besides the methodological tools with which his archaeologies and genealogies 4 The back cover of the first volume of The History of Sexuality announced the five forthcoming volumes: The second volume was to be called The Flesh and the Body and it was going to deal with the problematization of sex in early Christianity; volume iii, The Children’s Crusade, with the sexuality of children; volume iv, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, with the ways in which sexuality had been invested in the female body; volume v, Perverts; with the person of the pervert; and volume vi, Population and Races, with bio-politics. See Davidson 1994, 117.

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had provided him, to ‘study the modes according to which individuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual subjects’ (UP, 5). He then turned to studying the historical constitution of the self: the forms of understanding subjects create about themselves and the ways they form themselves as subjects of a morality, for example. While his earlier genealogical studies investigated the ways in which the power/knowledge network constitutes the subject, in his late work the emphasis is on the subject’s own role in implementing or refusing forms of subjectivity. His late work thus brings into focus a new component of the constitution of the subject – modes of relation to oneself – and thus presents a more elaborated understanding of the subject than is found in his earlier writings. Many commentators refer to a third phase in Foucault’s thinking, and note a marked change in his concerns. How this change is interpreted varies, however. Commentators such as Peter Dews (1989) see it as an ‘abrupt theoretical shift’ and a ‘return of the subject’, while others, such as Paul Rabinow (1984) understand it, in my view more correctly, simply as a shift of emphasis.5 Foucault himself describes this change in his thinking in various contexts in terms of a recasting of his interests:6 Perhaps I have insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self. (TES, 225)

Technologies of the self are not separate from technologies of domination, which had been the focus of Foucault’s earlier studies. He points out the necessary link between them. He argues that if one wishes to analyze the genealogy of the subject in western civilization, one must take into account the interaction between techniques of domination and techniques of the self. This means analyzing the points at which the technologies of domination of individuals over one another overlap processes by which the individual acts upon himself. Conversely, the analyses must also take account of the points at which the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination

5 See also e.g. Davidson 1986, 230.

6 See also e.g. UP, 11.


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(ST, 181). These contact points are what Foucault calls governmentality (TES, 225). Hence, technologies of the self do not introduce a totally autonomous subject to Foucault’s late thinking. As he commented, even if he was interested in the way in which the subject constituted himself or herself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, ‘these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (EPF, 11). Neither are technologies of the self simple extensions of techniques of domination disguised as voluntary, however. Foucault must presuppose a subject with some relative independence with regard to the constitutive power/knowledge network in order to describe a subject capable of critical self-reflection and ethical work on the self. As Gilles Deleuze (1986/1988, 101) argues, Foucault’s fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from the power/knowledge network without being dependent on it. The subject constituted by the power/knowledge network is now capable of turning back upon itself: of critically studying the processes of its own constitution, but also of subverting them and effecting changes in them. This understanding of the subject as being, on the one hand, constituted by the power/knowledge network, while on the other hand retaining a relative independence from it, is, in my view, one of the most problematic aspects of Foucault’s late thinking on ethics. I will explicate my criticism in detail in chapter 9, but I will first defend Foucault against a number of other criticisms that have been levelled against his ethics. I will argue that it is important to understand correctly his idea of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as well as his aim in inquiring into the possibility of contemporary ethics. Foucault’s ethics must be read as a continuation of his genealogy of the subject and of his on-going concern with oppressive forms of subjection.

Ethics as aesthetics The new focus on the government of the self by one’s self is crucial in Foucault’s elaboration of resistance. Ethics is the domain in which he situates it. Ethics becomes an important mediator in the triangle of relationships between the subject, knowledge and power. In his late thinking Foucault returns to the idea, found in his early work, of the subversive role of art. The ethical practices of the self are closely linked,

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or even fused with aesthetics. When asked what kind of ethics it was possible to build in our society, he replied: [I]n our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? (GE, 350)

The process by which subjects care for themselves, form themselves as ethical subjects, resembles the creation of a work of art. Foucault characterized the ethical practices of the self also in terms of arts of existence: What I mean by the phrase [arts of existence] are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make life into an œuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (UP, 10–11)7

This idea of creating oneself as a work of art has fuelled a lot of heated criticism against Foucault.8 He has been accused of retreating into amoral aesthetics, privileging an elitist notion of self-centred stylization, and undermining all possibilities of emancipatory politics. The

7 ‘Par là il faut entendre des pratiques réfléchies et volontaires par lesquelles les hommes, non seulement se fixent des règles de conduite, mais cherchent a` se transformer euxmêmes, a` se modifier dans leur eˆ tre singulier, et a` faire de leur vie une œuvre qui porte certaines valeurs esthétiques et réponde a` certains critères de style.’ (UPL, 16–17). 8 See e.g. Wolin 1986, Fraser 1989. Foucault’s practices of the self incorporate certain intellectual attitudes – an attitude of permanent criticism – yet they are principally bodily techniques that focus on everyday life and on the choices one makes in one’s way of life, diet and habits. They also incorporate one’s sexuality and aspects of one’s gender. To turn one’s life into a form of art involves one’s body, its experiences and pleasures, not the renunciation of them. This connection between ethics, sexuality and embodiment seems to open up interesting connections between Foucault and feminist ethics. Yet perhaps surprisingly, feminist theorists have commented very little on Foucault’s late work, and generally their critical stance is derivative of an established ethical and theoretical framework. In Foucault and Feminism, Lois McNay (1992), for example, follows Habermas and argues that there is a problematic lack of normative grounding to Foucault’s implicit criticism of modern society, and that his thinking therefore slips into a politically and ethically disabling relativism. Some feminist writers, such as Jean Grimshaw (1993), simply dismiss Foucault’s studies of Greek morality as elitist and male-dominated, that therefore sidestep questions that are crucial for feminist theory.


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idea has also provoked a number of sympathetic responses, but the ways in which it is interpreted still vary. Bernauer and Mahon (1994, 155) suggest that Foucault’s aesthetics of existence resists a ‘science of life’. They claim that to think of human existence in terms of aesthetic categories releases it from the realms of scientific knowledge and its psychological and biological norms. Lois McNay (1992, 161) places Foucault in the tradition of the romantic/modernist quest to retrieve a more intense or worthwhile form of experience, which escapes the deadening effects of the instrumental rationality pervading contemporary culture. She suggests that Foucault’s ethics explores the ways in which individuals may redefine their existence in an experientially impoverished world by adopting an ethical/aesthetical attitude in their actions towards the surrounding world. I will argue that Foucault’s ethics-as-aesthetics should be understood primarily as a continuation of his permanent questioning of the limits of subjectivity and the possibilities of crossing them. His ethics represents an attempt to seek ways of living and thinking that are transgressive in the extent to which, like a work of art, they are not simply the products of normalizing power. The target of these practices is not primarily the aesthetically impoverished forms of experience, but rather modes of normalization: the forms of power that produce forms of subjectivity. David Boothroyd (1996) points out that in order to properly understand the link between ethics and aesthetics in Foucault’s thought, it is important to understand the transgressive role Foucault assigns to art in his thinking. In many of his texts he repeatedly and significantly returns to the figure of the artist and the work of art: Van Gogh, Goya, Bataille, de Sade, Artaud, Roussel, Magritte, Las Meninas, Don Quixote. The work of art is always presented as exhibiting a certain resistance to the system, of being able to work at the borders of a system of thought without being totally incorporated into it. Art is thus able to mark the border between the sayable and the unsayable, and constitutes a relation between the inside and the outside of thought. According to Boothroyd, it is in this context that individual life as a work of art provides the basis for thinking practical forms of transgression. Resistance against forms of subjection cannot be situated outside the networks of power in Foucault’s thought, since subjectivity is only possible within them. This means that resistance also becomes possible only within them, through the subject’s lived practices, which help to constitute forms of subjectivity; through the refusal and the adoption of forms of subjectivity. Foucault’s later work on ethics is an inquiry into

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resistance: it represents the possibility of contesting determinations, of refusing what we are.9 The problem with modern state power is that it is normalizing power: it is individualizing and yet totalizing. It ignores individuality, difference and becoming. At the same time, it splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way. The modern state is a sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, but under one condition: that individuality will be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a very specific pattern (SP, 212). The way to contest this normalizing power is by shaping one’s self and one’s lifestyle creatively: by exploring possibilities for new forms of subjectivity, new fields of experiences, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking. It consists of creative activity as well as critical interrogation of our present and the contemporary field of possible experience.10 The quest for freedom in Foucault’s late thought, in short, becomes a question of developing forms of subjectivity that are capable of functioning as resistance to the normalizing power. Ethics is a practice that stretches the limits of the subject. It is in the context of normalizing power that we can also better understand the importance of the ancient practices of the self for Foucault’s thinking. As he points out, one cannot find any normalization in Stoic morality, there was no attempt to normalize the population. One reason for this was that the principle aim or target of this kind of morality was an aesthetical one. It was a morality involving personal choice, the choice to live a beautiful life and to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence (GE, 341).11 9 See SP, 216. 10 Foucault was not, however, suggesting that these practices of freedom are sufficient in themselves to resist abusive forms of power or states of domination. ‘We need to create the rules of law, the techniques of management, as well as the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which will allow relations of power to circulate with a minimum of domination’ (EPF, 18). I will return to this issue in the following chapter. 11 Timothy O’Leary (2002) discusses the extent to which Foucault overemphasizes the aesthetical aims of the ancient ethical practices by reading a completely different, modern notion of aesthetics into their thinking. By reading Stoicism through the lens of modern aesthetics, for example, he overemphasizes the free, creative, form-giving aspects of it and neglects the normative role of reason and nature. O’Leary points out, however, that the peculiarities of Foucault’s reading must be understood as part of his concern to develop a contemporary, post-Christian ethics of self-transformation. His historical studies are critical interventions in contemporary debates about ethical subjectivity and therefore they must balance the concern for truth and historical accuracy with a concern for the present.


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Foucault’s aesthetics of existence should thus not be understood as a narcissistic enterprise, nor as purely aesthetic in the narrow sense of visuality, of looking stylish.12 As Timothy O’Leary (2002, 138) writes, Foucault’s aesthetics of existence is an aesthetics not because it calls on us to make ourselves beautiful, but because it calls on us to relate to ourselves and our lives as to a material that can be formed and transformed. Foucault was very critical of the self-absorption and introspection characterizing our culture, and pointed out that the ancient practices of the self were almost diametrically opposed to the present ‘culture of the self’ (GE, 362). His aim was not self-stylization conducive to narcissism, but a personal transformation, a becoming, finding ways of thinking, living and relating to other people that were currently unimaginable.

Philosophy lived When Foucault’s ethics is understood as personal practice, it means that ethical acts are primary in the sense that they will not find their justification in any general theory or principle. Foucault therefore invites readers who are more accustomed to normative ethics to ask the obvious question: are all creative and transgressive acts ethical, and if not, which ones are? Rape and murder could be seen as creative and transgressive, since for a lot of us it would certainly constitute a new field of experience. Since there are no normative guidelines or rational justifications, there seems to be no way to make distinctions between different acts and no way to determine which ones are ethical. As Foucault’s critics argue, what is wrong with his aesthetics of existence is that it can never provide the critical framework necessary for being able to condemn certain actions, such as rape or murder, as being simply wrong.13 Therefore it fails to create the normative space of judgement which these critics assume ethics should provide. For Foucault, however, it was an impossibility to provide people with normative grounding, guidelines, rules or criteria for passing moral judgements. The task of an intellectual is not to tell others what to do, people have to build their own ethics (MS, 16). What Foucault is 12 Paul Veyne (1986/1997, 231) also argues that style in Foucault’s thought does not mean a distinction; the word should be understood in the sense in which the Greeks used it, for whom an artist was first of all an artisan, and a work of art first of all a work. 13 Jurgen ¨ Habermas is perhaps the best-known critic of Foucault, and has accused him of a lack of normative grounding in his analyses. See e.g. Habermas 1985/1987. See also e.g. Walzer 1986, Taylor 1986, Fraser 1989. The planned discussion between Foucault and Habermas never took place. For a reconstruction of the Foucaultian portion of this exchange, see Flynn 1989.

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advocating is the rejection of universal foundations of ethics. His aim was to offer an alternative to naturalistic ethics as well as to all other universal forms of morality. He openly stated, ‘The search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody strikes me as catastrophic’ (RM, 253– 4). His stance towards ethics also denies the possibility of normative ethics: ethics understood as an abstract normative code, a collection of rules or principles that would guide and justify our actions. The care for the self that he advocates cannot be a universally applicable theory, but only a practice, a transformative activity aiming to create a space for the ethical. Foucault’s is not an ethics of normative judgement, but one of critical practice and creativity. Does this mean, therefore, that since normative questions are unanswerable in Foucault’s thought, ultimately his ethics fails to tell us anything about what is ethical? Does his ethics turn out to be, after all, not ethics but aesthetics? It is my contention that his position seems to leave room for at least three possible readings. (1) He would hold a relativist position claiming that a philosopher should not go around patronizing, but should leave it up to the people to articulate their own moral values and the justification for them. The ethical aims of the practices of the self would thus be absolutely individual and relative to personal values. I will argue against this relativist position, but I still find two possible directions to take Foucault’s ethics. (2) He would hold that there is always an implicit level of values behind the practices of the self, even though it might be unsystematically articulated and varies in different historical and cultural contexts. For the ancient Greeks, this level consisted of the moral values and ideals dominant in their society, such as mastery of the self, nobility, brilliance and beauty. For us, this normative background consists of the moral values we have inherited from the Enlightenment, such as freedom, autonomy and equality. Commitment to the Enlightenment tradition and its values forms the shared moral framework within which our personal ethical practices are situated. Foucault’s writing, in fact all writing, lies on normative notions of some kind. What is significant, however, is the status of these notions and the ways they are argued for. I will discuss this interpretation in the next chapter. (3) The reading which I will explicate in this chapter holds that ethics cannot be grounded on any articulated moral framework at all. This reading is thus based on a radically different conception of ethics. The underlying values and normative criteria are unarticulated, not because the philosopher should not provide them for us, but because he or she cannot provide them. Ethical situations are characterized by


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an experience of a fundamental limit to what can be brought to the realm of language and knowledge. For philosophy, this reading would seem to mean, however, that we have to pass over in silence what we cannot talk about.14 If we want to interpret that Foucault shares this Wittgensteinian insight that ethics as a subject matter of philosophical inquiry is impossible, what, then, is the point of him writing about it? How could philosophy say what cannot be said? I will argue that, although Foucault’s ethics can never be completely salvaged from the point of view of normative ethics, nor should this be attempted, it is possible to show that as a style, a manner of writing, it does express ethical values. These values are not communicated as linguistic propositions providing a normative ground or framework; they must be understood as part of Foucault’s philosophy as lived. His understanding of ethics as personal practice – care for the self – therefore also challenges the role of philosophy. Philosophy cannot provide privileged access to moral truths, it cannot ground the ethical work one performs on oneself because it can only be this work: philosophy lived as an ethos, an ethical practice. To support my reading I will briefly turn to Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization. In making this detour to Foucault’s early work I will suggest that Derrida shows us one possible way out of Foucault’s impasse concerning the silence of ethics and the role of philosophy. In his essay ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Derrida takes up the question of the limits of language in Foucault’s thought. He criticizes Foucault’s attempt in Madness and Civilization to write an archaeology of silence that lets madness speak for itself before it is interned by the language of reason. To give a voice to madness itself within philosophy is what Derrida claims is the impossibility inherent in the very terms of Foucault’s project. Any effort to restore to madness its voice and its right to speak is already a form of repression, a form imposed upon it and therefore again an act of imprisonment and confinement. Derrida thus argues that Foucault did not seem to suspect the innocence of his own language or the order of rationality that it, by necessity, 14 Probably the single most often cited statement from the philosophical literature of the twentieth century is the concluding line from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (6.54). Read in combination with other statements – such as the line that ‘there can be no ethical propositions’ (6.522), a radical understanding of ethics, or rather the impossibility of it, in the usual sense of the word, emerges. Ethics is not a term for a subject matter alongside other subjects. It comes from our having a human world and a capacity to decipher ethical meanings in it. It frames or gives form to our propositions about facts, but cannot be any one of them.

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conveyed. While being aware of the impossible task of giving an authentic voice to madness, Foucault nevertheless wrote a book with an impossible aim. As Derrida formulates this, Foucault’s determination to avoid the trap that would have led him to write a history of untamed madness with the restraining language of reason is the maddest aspect of his project (Derrida 1967/1978, 34). As with ethics, so in connection with madness, it seems, Foucault was trying to say something that could not be said in philosophy. Nevertheless, Derrida ends up suggesting that, although the silence of madness cannot be expressed in the logos of the book, it can be found in its pathos. The resolution of the difficulty is practised rather than formulated. This again echoes Wittgenstein and his distinction between saying and showing.15 What cannot be said in the book can be shown by it. Foucault’s book on madness becomes an act that renders madness present. Madness escapes philosophy only to appear in its intensive style and its power to arouse emotions. Derrida formulates this by writing: ‘What I mean is that the silence of madness is not said, cannot be said in the logos of this book, but is indirectly made present, metaphorically, if I may say so, in the pathos – I take the word in its best sense – of this book’ (Derrida 1967/1978, 37). Similarly, we can think that, for Foucault, the ideal of freedom is something that can be shown with philosophy even if it cannot be said in its (propositional) language. Even though values are not and cannot be communicated as an explicit normative ground or framework, they can be understood as part of Foucault’s philosophy as lived. His books speak directly of the lack of freedom and hence indirectly of freedom: the oppressive treatment of madness, the internment of criminals, sexual normalization and marginalization. Typically, they begin with his perception that something is terribly wrong in the present and through a study of history aim to show the contingency of our present. This opens up the possibility for seeing to what extent it could be different. Philosophy as an ethical practice does thus not necessarily mean that we write lots of academic books on ethics, but that our philosophical life is ethical. As Foucault wrote: ‘The key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced 15 The famous distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown obtains a decisive philosophical significance in Tractatus. According to Wittgenstein, what can be shown is, in the end, what matters, as the privileged object of philosophical insight. If all epistemic worries were suddenly, one beautiful morning, resolved by scientific inquiry, ‘the problems of life have still not been touched at all’ (6.52).


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from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos’ (PE, 374). Thus, philosophy cannot simply pass over in silence what it cannot speak about. If we depart from the Tractatus view that only propositions make sense, we can and we have to write about ethics. The task of interrogating the limits of our present is not something that is done once so that the philosopher could quickly announce that behind our limits nothing exists. It is rather that philosophy as a critical practice is a movement of always having to turn back: to question time and again what is taken for granted, to start thinking anew. Philosophy must be practised as an attempt to transgress what is given; as an interrogation of the limits of our thought, language and world.16 Perhaps at times this critical practice of philosophy does succeed in penetrating the dimension of the ethical. To sum up, Foucault’s thought rejects formalist ethics and challenges the idea that philosophy can provide privileged access to moral truths. What is at stake are not rational arguments for a morally good code of conduct, but a way of life that involves the whole of one’s being: philosophy lived. As philosophy was a way of life, a spiritual exercise for the ancient Greeks, so it was for Foucault.17 Philosophy is something 16 Paul Veyne writes (1986/1997, 231) that, during the last eight months of Foucault’s life, the writing of his two last books played the role for him that philosophical writing and the personal journal played in ancient philosophy: that of a work of the self on the self, a self-stylization. Thomas Flynn (1989, 195–6) argues that Foucault’s trenchant nominalism, the inquiring scepticism, the distrust of power relations and his penchant for an aesthetics of existence suggest that he empathized with the Cynics’ concept of philosophy as ethos or life. His involvement in various political struggles of his time are marks of the parrhesiast, the truth-teller. Without being the applications of a complete political theory, such actions by their exemplary nature hold before us our own endangered freedom as in a critical mirror. 17 Arnold I. Davidson (1997a, 195–6) explicates the profound importance that Pierre Hadot’s writings had on the last works of Foucault. According to Davidson, Hadot’s focus on the notion of spiritual exercises is a way of primarily emphasizing that in ancient schools of thought philosophy was a way of life. It was an invitation to transform oneself and one’s way of life as well as a quest for wisdom. Philosophy understood as a form of life required spiritual exercises that aimed at realizing a transformation of one’s vision of the world and a metamorphosis of one’s personality. These aims are visible in Socratic dialogues, they are spiritual exercises practised in common. What is most important is not the solution to a particular problem, but rather the path traversed in arriving at this solution. Davidson argues that Foucault’s aim is to link the practices of the self exhibited in the domain of sexual behaviour to the spiritual training and exercise that govern the whole of one’s existence. Parallel to Hadot’s argument that spiritual exercises gradually became almost eclipsed by the conception of philosophy as an abstract, theoretical activity, Foucault argues that, in the realm of ethics, morality understood as codes of behaviour gradually came to be emphasized at the expense of forms of subjectivation (Davidson 1997a, 199–201). See also e.g. Hadot 1983/1997.

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that enables one to learn to think differently, and through thinking to change one’s mode of being, to transform oneself: ‘Transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is . . . something rather close to the aesthetic experience’ (MS, 14). Despite their dispute on reason and madness, Foucault and Derrida seem to agree that philosophy cannot and should not attempt to be a totalizing gesture, the master discourse. It should not tower above all other forms of knowledge, ruling us by passing moral judgements. If what is required from philosophy is precisely awareness of its limits and pretensions and an ability for self-criticism and even irony, then Foucault’s disconcerting thought can be seen to do just that. But it also shows us a Utopian moment: a deep commitment and belief in something that I take to resemble freedom. If Foucault’s archaeology of silence had an impossible aim, possibly his ethics of silence did too. Even so, it is one more thrust against the walls of our cage.

8 THE FREEDOM OF PHILOSOPHY

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have the courage to use your reason!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment. (Kant 1784/1997, 7)

Apart from the focus on the self, Foucault’s ethics has another dimension: critical responding to one’s time. Critical work encompasses the subject’s personal work on him/herself, and also a critique of society, power relations and structures. While I have argued that to criticize Foucault’s late work for a lack of normative guidelines misses the point of his effort to rethink ethics, the need for a normative grounding becomes more pressing in connection with politics. The subject’s ethical work on him/herself may be based on unthematized values and experiences of liberation, but a shared conception of freedom seems necessary in emancipatory politics. Concepts empower, they incite discussions, arguments, dialogues. Normative ideals such as freedom, equality and justice articulate Utopian possibilities and give imaginations a concrete form that can be communicated and shared as a common political ideal and goal. The connection between philosophy and politics in Foucault’s thought is, to say the least, ambiguous. David Couzens Hoy (1998, 18–20), for example, argues that, although Foucault’s writings seem to be politically engaged, exactly how they generate this effect is not clear. Hoy finds evidence in Foucault’s writings that he asserted both 175

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that philosophy and politics are profoundly linked, and that they are not linked.1 Wendy Brown (1998, 33) argues similarly that Foucault’s responses to expressly political questions in interviews are frequently vague, oblique, deflective or simply bland. While Hoy seeks to redeem Foucault’s thought for progressive politics by pointing to his involvement in various political struggles, Brown argues for the opposite. She claims that Foucault’s thinking opposes all traditional understandings of politics, and instead reformulates the political as opposition to politicization on the one hand, and to policy on the other (Brown 1998, 42). She challenges the idea that Foucault’s particular political positions and enthusiasms were an outcome of his genealogical studies: a genealogical politics has no necessary political entailments. I will argue in this chapter that Foucault’s understanding of the connection between philosophy and emancipatory politics turns on his stance on the Enlightenment. In order to understand his late thinking on ethics we have to read it in connection with his other writings, his genealogies of subject and power, but particularly with his writings on the Enlightenment. In what follows, I will briefly present the common form of criticism against the political implications of Foucault’s thought, and then present two possible readings of his position in regard to emancipatory politics, arguing for the latter. I will conclude by distinguishing four different meanings of freedom that I find in his work.

The freedom of critical reflection The criticism that claims that Foucault’s thought refutes emancipatory politics usually revolves around two themes. Firstly, because Foucault defends the view that social relations are inevitably power relations, and that there can be no Utopian position outside or beyond power, it is claimed that the idea of any kind of liberation becomes impossible. Since all relations are power relations, there is no possibility of progress in the sense that social relations will become less oppressive. Nancy Fraser, for example, has argued for this point: ‘Because Foucault has 1 Hoy (1998, 20–1) ends up arguing for the former stance: the idea of a profound link between philosophy and politics represents Foucault’s more mature view. Hoy claims that, for Foucault, philosophy is imbedded in an ethos critically involved in minimizing domination. In the ethos the political is personal and the personal is political. Thomas Flynn (1989, 188) also argues that if politics is the art/science of governance, if governance is the directing of power relationships, and if power, for Foucault, is all-pervasive, then so too is the ‘political’: every facet of human life carries a political dimension and stands subject to ‘political’ analysis.

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no basis for distinguishing, for example, forms of power that involve domination from those that do not, he appears to endorse a one-sided, wholesale rejection of modernity as such’ (Fraser 1989, 32–3). As I have argued in my discussion of Foucault’s genealogy, this kind of conclusion is based on a misunderstanding of his conception of power. A careful reading of his late texts on power, in particular, makes it possible to distinguish between different meanings and levels of power: (1) individual power relations; (2) domination; and (3) power as a strategic situation, an overall network. While it is impossible to step out of the social field structured by power relations, it is possible to effect changes in it: for example to free subjects from states of domination – situations in which the subject is unable to overturn or reverse the power relation – to a situation in which power relations are interchangeable, variable and allow for strategies for altering them. Foucault goes as far as to set this as an explicit task. I don’t believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behaviour of others. The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the Utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one’s self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with the minimum of domination. (EPF, 18)2

Hence, although there can be no overall liberation from power, there can and will be ‘particular’ emancipations from different systems of domination: from oppressive relations of power and the effects of the employment of certain normalizing techniques. Foucault again states explicitly: [W]e know from experience that the claim to escape from the systems of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions. I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our 2 ‘je crois qu’il ne peut pas y avoir de société sans relations de pouvoir, si on les entend comme stratégies par lesquelles les individus essaient de conduire, de déterminer la conduite des autres. Le problème n’est donc pas d’essayer de les dissoudre dans l’utopie d’une communication parfaitement transparente, mais de se donner les règles de droit, les techniques de gestion et aussi la morale, l’êthos, la pratique de soi, qui permettront, dans ces jeux de pouvoir, de jouer avec le minimum possible de domination.’ (EPL, 727)

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ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way we perceive insanity or illness. (WE, 46–7)3

This view of liberation as resistance to particular states of domination involves a negative view of freedom. Foucault claims that power relations arise when there is action upon the actions of others. Power only functions on free action, it is an action on action (SP, 221). It is thus always exercised on ‘free’ subjects, free, however, here meaning no more than being able to act in a variety of ways. Subjects free of domination are capable of instigating shifts in power relations by acting in different ways to influence each other’s behaviour. Why or how they should do this is not, however, discussed in this understanding of freedom. While the first objection to Foucault’s thought in connection with emancipatory politics results from a clear misunderstanding of his conception of power, the second objection is more serious. His critics claim that his analysis of power provides us with no normative grounds for condemning domination and arguing for liberation. If we do not share some kind of idea that freedom is desirable, then we cannot see why disciplinary power represents domination and an abuse of power. In short, how can we oppose domination or criticize oppression without any ideal of freedom: the desirability of liberation and human autonomy? Foucault explicitly claims that the role of philosophy is to be critical of power: it is to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality (SP, 210). When asked in one of his last interviews if philosophy had the duty of sounding a warning on the danger of power, he replied: That duty has always been an important function of philosophy. On the critical side – I mean critical in a very broad sense – philosophy is precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination at whatever level or under whatever form they present themselves – political, economic, sexual, institutional. (EPF, 20)4 3 ‘on sait par expérience que la prétention a` e´ chapper au système de l’actualité pour donner des programmes d’ensemble d’une autre société, d’un autre mode de penser, d’une autre culture, d’une autre vision du monde n’ont mené en fait qu’à reconduire les plus dangereuses traditions. Je préfère les transformations très précises qui ont pu avoir lieu depuis vingt ans dans un certain nombre de domaines qui concernent nos modes d’être et de penser, les relations d’autorité, les rapports de sexes, la fa¸con dont nous percevons la folie ou la maladie.’ (QL1, 575) 4 ‘Cette tâche a toujours e´ té une grande fonction de la philosophie. Dans son versant critique – j’entends critique au sens large – la philosophie est justement ce qui remet en question tous les phénomènes de domination a` quelque niveau et sous quelque forme qu’ils se présentent – politique, e´ conomique, sexuelle, institutionelle.’ (EPL, 729)


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Foucault thus presents philosophy as emancipatory insofar as it is a critique of power: a critical analysis of domination, abusive forms of power and the constraining forms of subjectivity that power produces. How exactly philosophy manages this critical task without a normative grounding, is, however, the question that Foucault’s critics repeatedly take up. I will present this critique, in a nutshell, through Sheila Benhabib’s work. Seyla Benhabib (1987) argues, in connection with feminist theory, that there are two necessary moments in social critique.5 Firstly, there is the explanatory-diagnostic analysis in which the social crisis is examined. Secondly, there is the anticipatory-Utopian moment, a which articulates the normative groundings of the critique. This second aspect is primarily normative and philosophical, ‘it involves the clarification of moral and political principles, both at the metaethical level, with respect to their logic of justification, and at the substantive, normative level, with reference to their concrete content’ (Benhabib 1987, 81). What Foucault’s thought is thus lacking, according to his critics, is the normative and philosophical level necessary for any form of critique to be a critique and not just a description. These critics thus claim that Foucault’s thought might be interesting, insightful and even true, but it is not critical. The first line of defence of Foucault’s position is to simply agree that if critique is understood in the way Benhabib understands it, then what Foucault offers us is not a critique but pure description or diagnosis. Foucault’s aim was to take up the Socratic or Nietzschean task of exposing the familiar as an illness. He writes of genealogy that its task is to become a curative science (NGH, 80). Foucault’s description can, however, be turned into an effective critique by its readers. Hoy (1998, 26–7) argues for this kind of reading of Foucault’s genealogy. He writes that genealogy observes and interprets contingent social formations and phenomena from the inside, without positing a transcendental perspective or transcendentally necessary universal standards. The genealogist tries to see as strange what the culture takes to be familiar. ‘Insiders’ reading a genealogical investigation come to see for the first time subliminal aspects of their behaviour. According to Hoy, simply becoming conscious of social practices that were previously unconscious often leads to difficulty in continuing to engage in those practices.6 Hence, 5 See also Benhabib 1986. 6 Foucault himself also seemed to suggest something like this when he wrote, ‘The history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism’ (PR, 83).

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becoming aware of types of social behaviour will lead to readers becoming critical of that behaviour. However, as Brown argues, genealogical diagnosis itself would have no necessary political entailments. Foucault sought to diagnose our present, our political rationality, the forms of our subjectivity and the kind of deployments of power that have produced them. Brown writes (1998, 34–7) that genealogy opens up a political space that harbours no explicit political aims but which is replete with challenging exposures and destabilizations. It reveals the necessary as contingent, and can thus be deployed to incite possible futures, but not to prescribe any political positions or specific futures. It can, furthermore, be argued that it is not a question of Foucault’s diagnostic position being uncritical and politically defective, but that the novelty of his thought lies exactly in the fact that he manages to challenge our traditional ideas of what critique is. His work severs critique from prescription and effectively questions the claim that the clarification of a normative grounding is a prerequisite for criticism.7 Hence, we may disagree with Foucault, we may disagree with his diagnosis, the aims that he set himself and his implicit moral engagements. An explicit normative grounding, however, will not bring about general consensus. Explicitly stating that a universal principle of freedom should underline any social practice will not solve the problem of the different interpretations and value judgements connected with modern forms of power. As Benhabib herself clearly points out, the second level of critique is normative and philosophical, it deals with morality or ethics, and therefore no rational consensus on matters of fact can ultimately solve it. Foucault was clearly not advocating the impossibility of critical judgement and action; his engagement in various political and ethical confrontations during his own time are a demonstration of this. According to my first readings, however, on the basis of his philosophy, he could only pass these ethical and political judgements as a person, and they contained no ideals for everybody to follow. Philosophers cannot be politicians: the task of philosophy is to call into question our understanding of politics. I have especially wanted to question politics, and to bring to light in the political field, as in the field of historical and political interrogation, some problems that had not been recognized there before. I mean that the questions I am trying to ask are not determined by a pre-established 7 See e.g. Flynn 1989.


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political outlook and do not tend towards the realization of some political project. This is doubtless what people mean when they reproach me for not presenting an overall theory. But I believe precisely that the forms of totalization offered by politics are always, in fact, very limited. I am attempting, to the contrary, apart from any totalization – which would be at once abstract and limiting – to open up problems that are as concrete as possible, problems that approach politics from behind and cut societies on the diagonal, problems that are at once constituents of our history and constituted by that history. (PE, 375–6)8

In one sense, Foucault’s work is emancipatory – promoting freedom – in that it might engage its readers in critical practices.9 It is also emancipatory in another sense, in that the studies themselves as inquiries into ways of understanding our selves and our society represent the freedom the subject exercises in turning to question its own constitutive conditions.10 One of the most important features of Foucault’s late thinking is that he recognized the significant role played by the freedom of critical thinking: the freedom to reflect on one’s self and potentially change aspects of the self, but also through reflection to change society at large. The freedom that opposes domination and abusive power in this view is the freedom embedded in critical inquiries and practices. Freedom is not a moral or political principle underlying specific practices, it is a practice. Neither is it a state of being of the subject or a legal or institutional structure. The subject exercises freedom in withdrawing from itself and problematizing its behaviour, beliefs and the social field of which it is part. The practices of freedom are the practices capable of changing the constitutive conditions of our subjectivity as well as its 8 ‘En fait j’ai surtout voulu poser des question a` la politique et faire apparaˆıtre dans le champ de la politique comme de l’interrogation historique et philosophique, des problèmes qui n’y avaient pas droit de cité. Les questions que j’essaie de poser ne sont pas déterminées par une conception politique préalable et ne tendent pas a` la réalisation d’un projet politique défini. C’est sans doute cela que les gens veulent dire lorsqu’ils me reprochent de ne pas présenter de théorie d’ensemble. Mais je crois justement que les formes de totalisation offertes par la politique sont toujours, en fait, très limitées. J’essaie, au contraire, en dehors de toute totalisation, a` la fois abstraite et limitative, d’ouvrir des problèmes aussi concrets et généraux que possible – des problèmes qui prennent la politique a` revers, traversent les sociétés en diagonal, et sont tout a` la fois constituants de notre histoire et constitués par elle.’ (PEI, 586–7) 9 See e.g. McWhorter 1999. 10 Thomas Flynn (1991, 115), for example, notes that the genealogical charting of the advent of the modern subject is itself a form of liberation.

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actual forms. John Rajchman formulates well this sense of freedom in Foucault’s thought: Our real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial or anarchical. No society or polity could be based on it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of constant change. Our real freedom is thus political, though it is never finalizable, legislatable, or rooted in our nature. (Rajchman 1985, 123)

Freedom as ethos According to my first reading, Foucault’s work is critical in the sense that, although purely descriptive, it nevertheless represents the critical practice of freedom in posing questions about the constitutive conditions of subjectivity. I will, however, argue for a second reading, according to which it is not purely descriptive, but incorporates a normative dimension. This normative dimension is, I claim, what gives his thought its political character.11 Foucault’s analyses are undertaken with the explicit aim of changing social reality in the direction of ‘freedom’. The ideal of freedom as emancipation from the effects of power is an important part of the Enlightenment thinking and the subsequent understanding of emancipatory politics. Foucault, however, is notorious for his clear objection to the universalistic discourse of Enlightenment emancipation: there is no inherent human nature justifying the demands for human freedom or guaranteeing the possibility of progress. Foucault warned us that the Enlightenment ideal of individual autonomy was one effect of normalizing power, power that is totalizing and individualizing at the same time (SP, 213). According to Foucault, Enlightenment humanisms have furthermore either masked forms of disciplinary power that operate to produce forms of modern individuality, or have participated in extending domination (Sawicki 1996, 169). Consequently, when, shortly before his death, Foucault wrote a reading of an article by Kant entitled ‘What is Enlightenment’ (WE), in which he located himself squarely within the Enlightenment tradition of philosophy, many of his readers were surprised and confused.12 I 11 Cf. Hindes 1998. 12 For more on Foucault’s writings on the Enlightenment, see also ATT, WC.


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take this move to be both theoretically as well as morally significant, however. I argue here that Foucault’s critical reappropriation of the Enlightenment was motivated by the urgency to elaborate his understanding of freedom and to build on it by introducing into it a deliberate dimension.13 By rooting his thought in the inheritance of the Enlightenment, he implicitly professed his faith in its values: the increase of autonomy among individuals and the importance of philosophy, that is, philosophy understood as critical thought. His writings on the Enlightenment can be read as a clear gesture of distancing himself from the ultra-relativist, neoconservative and postmodern labels that had been stuck on him.14 Foucault was interested in Kant from very early in his life and wrote his complementary doctoral thesis on him. This interest culminated in The Order of Things and Foucault did not refer directly to Kant again until the end of the 1970s. While strongly refusing all other political and philosophical labels, he explicitly asked to be called ‘simply Nietzschean’ (RM, 251). By accepting this label, what he was endorsing, however, was not the nihilism and pessimism that many of his critics see as the baneful influence of Nietzsche, but the idea that a philosopher is not someone who attempts to totalize his own time by building a system, but one who establishes a diagnosis of the present.15 When he turned to write about Kant again, it was precisely this idea of philosophy as a way of questioning our own present that he took up. Foucault’s text ‘What is Enlightenment?’ can be read as an interesting interpretation of the main impact and implications of the Enlightenment. What it meant for him was a set of political, economic, social, institutional and cultural events on which we still depend for the most part, and which therefore constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. It is also an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty, and in doing so, according to Foucault, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. What he found to be its most significant aspect, however, was that it initiated a new type of philosophical investigation. What characterizes the philosophical ethos 13 Cf. Sawicki 1996, 170. See also Sawicki 1994. 14 See also e.g. O’Leary 2002. 15 Nietzsche distanced himself from the optimism of the Enlightenment and is commonly criticized for his individualism and lack of concern for political community. According to Walter Kaufman, for example, Nietzsche gave up hope for his own people and for mankind, and addressed himself only to single human beings (Kaufman 1950/1974, 421). For Nietzsche, ethics could only be a task for the ‘single one’. While he was in this sense an anti-political thinker, I argue that this does not hold true of Foucault.

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originating in the Enlightenment is that it is a permanent critique of our own philosophical era. The philosopher should not occupy his mind with eternal or timeless truths, but must position himself at his own particular and historical moment and find the meaning of philosophy there. The task is not just to bring to philosophy the distinctive concerns of the present time, such as questions stemming from on-going political struggles. The aim is not just to offer a new topical content for philosophical inquiry, but more fundamentally, to question its meaning. What does it or can it mean to engage in philosophy today? What is happening today? What is happening now? And what is this ‘now’ within which all of us find ourselves; and who defines the moment at which I am writing? . . . the question Kant is answering . . . is not simply: what is it in the present situation that can determine this or that decision of a philosophical order? The question bears on what this present actually is, it bears firstly on the determination of a certain element of the present that is to be recognized, to be distinguished, to be deciphered among all the others. What is it in the present that produces meaning now for philosophical reflection? (ATT, 87)16

Through his reading of Kant, Foucault explicitly presents his own work – from his early archaeological writings to his genealogies of the modern subject as well as the diagnosis of modern forms of power – essentially as an Enlightenment project: a series of historico-critical analyses studying ‘the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking and saying’ (WE, 46). This critical ontology of ourselves is a philosophical, ethical and political task all at the same time: it is ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ (WE, 50). Foucault calls the philosophical ethos characterizing his work a limit-attitude. He 16 ‘qu’est-ce qui se passe aujourd’hui? Qu’est-ce qui se passe maintenant? Et qu’est-ce que c’est que ce “maintenant” a` l’intérieur duquel nous sommes les uns et les autres; et qui définit le moment ou` j’écris? . . . la question a` laquelle Kant répond . . . n’est pas simplement: qu’est-ce qui, dans la situation actuelle, peut déterminer telle ou telle décision d’ordre philosophique? La question porte sur ce que c’est que ce présent, elle porte d’abord sur la détermination d’un certain e´ lément du présent qu’il s’agit de reconnaˆıtre, de distinguer, de déchiffrer parmi tous les autres. Qu’est-ce qui, dans le présent, fait sens actuellement pour une réflexion philosophique?’ (QL2, 679–80)


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wants to turn the Kantian question around: rather than asking what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, he is asking, ‘In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory . . . what place is occupied by what ever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints?’ (WE, 45). He was thus not interested in showing what are the necessary conditions determining the limits of reason, but in revealing the extent to which the limits presenting themselves as necessary are actually contingent. Hence, Foucault does not simply embrace traditional Enlightenment ideals, but submits them to critical reappropriation. Through reservation, he denied that his work was simply for or against the Enlightenment. He refused the ‘blackmail of the Enlightenment’, the idea that ‘one has to be “for” or “against” the Enlightenment’ (WE, 43). For him, reappropriating the critical ethos of the Enlightenment ‘means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative’ (WE, 43). Foucault also clearly distances himself from humanism, warning us that ‘We must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment’ (WE, 45). He thus saw humanism not as a critical questioning of the present, but as a diverse and inconsistent set of themes designed to justify and promote particular values. It necessarily leans on conceptions of what it means to be human borrowed from religion, science or politics, and thus functions as a form of justification, not as a form of critique. Enlightenment and humanism are therefore ‘in a state of tension rather than identity’ (WE, 44). The limit-attitude characterizing the philosophical ethos of the Enlightenment has to be translated into specific inquiries. It is in this context that Foucault presents his analyses of the three axes of the constitution of the subject – knowledge, power, ethics – as the concrete forms into which the limit-attitude translates. The ontology of ourselves poses the questions: ‘How are we constituted as subjects of our knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?’ (WE, 49). Archaeology and genealogy are methods in this inquiry into the constitution of the subject conducted as a study of practices or ‘practical systems’ (WE, 48). Nevertheless, these historicocritical reflections must also be put to the test of contemporary reality, ‘both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’ (WE, 46).

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Even though, for Foucault, philosophy cannot ground knowledge in essential and universal truths, in analyzing our present it can break contingent and historical limits and constraints. The critical work on our limits is what, in Foucault’s thought, links ancient ethics and his understanding of the philosophical ethos of the Enlightenment. What is common to both is the necessity for a critical attitude towards the self that shows both an awareness of the contingency of one’s traits and a willingness to rework them (Moss 1998, 4). Furthermore, both ethical work on one’s self and philosophy as a historico-critical practice have ‘freedom’ as their implicit goal: the aim is to investigate limits and constraints, abusive forms of power, and in revealing them as contingent, to open up the possibilities for experimenting to transgress them. In the practices of freedom the subject exercises its relative autonomy to gain more autonomy: it creates a space for freedom. While this goal can be unarticulated in the realm of ethics, in the realm of politics it becomes a historical ideal, an ethos of our culture. Foucault associates the Enlightenment firmly with critique, a critical attitude that questions not only obstacles to the use of reason, but also reason itself and its limits. In an earlier lecture on the Enlightenment given in 1978 and published as, ‘What is Critique’, Foucault claimed that this critical attitude has, in modern philosophy, taken the form of questioning reason in its connection with power, ‘the relationships between the structures of rationality which articulate true discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it’ (WC, 45). This critique of reason as responsible for excesses of power has taken different forms in the history of philosophy. In Germany, for example, from the Hegelian left to the Frankfurt School, there has been a criticism of the relationships between ‘the fundamental project of science and techniques whose objective was to show the connections between science’s naive presumptions, on the one hand, and the forms of domination characteristic of contemporary society, on the other’ (WC, 38–9). In France, this critical work was taken up, on the one hand, by phenomenology through the question of what constitutes meaning and, on the other hand, by the history of the sciences. Where are we with this rationalization which can be said to characterize not only western thought and science since the sixteenth century, but also social relationships, state organizations, economic practices and perhaps even individual behaviors? . . . This problem, for which in France we must


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now shoulder responsibility, is this problem of what is the Aufklärung? We can approach it in different ways. And the way in which I would like to approach this – you should trust me about it – is absolutely not evoked here to be critical or polemical. (WC, 43–4)17

I argue that, by linking his thought to the Enlightenment, Foucault makes the normative move of adopting the ideals associated with it – critical reason and personal autonomy – as the implicit ground on which his critiques of domination, abusive forms of power and reason rest. The Enlightenment provides him with the historical – not transcendental – values on which to base his critiques. Unlike Kant, he endorses freedom not as an abstract and universal ideal, but as an outcome of a certain historical development: historical and sociological facts. The ideal of freedom behind the philosophical critique of domination or our political rationale emerges from historically concrete and specific practices, and can only emerge out of them. The championing of political freedom in the modern sense cannot be found as such in any pre-Enlightenment tradition, but is rather a product of a specific historical tradition of thought – the Enlightenment – which we are part of in any case. The ideal of freedom is a commitment to a tradition according to which we think about human life and politics. As Thomas Flynn (1989, 197) points out, this means that Foucault neither offers nor seeks foundations beyond the presumed commitment of his audience to freedom autonomy. To those who greet him with a ‘So what?’, there can be no answer. Freedom is thus not human autonomy as the transcendental condition of moral action, as it is for Kant, but rather it is the contingent historical condition of critical reflection on our present. Neither is freedom a Kantian regulative idea for Foucault. It does not provide us with a criterion for action – we must act as if we were free – but only gives a source of motivation, a commitment to a historical value. By revealing constraining forms of subjectivity as historically contingent, Foucault’s analyses can be read as actively advocating social change in the direction of ‘freedom’. Although such change must be understood in terms of specific and partial transformations rather than as general political programmes, Foucault’s thought is far from political nihilism. The analyses of our limits are analyses of freedom. 17 The French original is not available.

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The different meanings of freedom I have attempted to show so far in this, and the previous chapters, that when freedom in Foucault’s thought is brought into the realm of ethics and politics, it becomes a concrete practice as well as a historical ideal, an ethos. Foucault writes, rather cryptically, ‘Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection’ (EPF, 4, trans. modified). When the different conceptions of freedom present in the different phases of Foucault’s thought are elucidated, we can understand what Foucault means by this claim. Paul Patton argues that by ontological condition, Foucault refers to the concrete capacities of the subject: ‘Just as for Foucault political power exists only in the concrete forms of government of conduct, so freedom exists only in the concrete capacities to act of particular agents’ (Patton 1998, 45). I argue, however, that freedom as an ontological condition does not, for Foucault, refer to any capacity or potentiality of the subject. While the understanding of the subject in Foucault’s ethics implies that it is capable of engaging in reflexive practices of freedom – forms of critical self-reflection and care for the self – this capacity is not what Foucault meant by positing freedom as an ontological condition of ethics. Freedom is not an ontological characteristic of the subject. We are not born free, nor have we an inherent capacity to realize our freedom. There is no inherent human freedom in either sense; what Foucault aimed to do is, on the contrary, to separate the idea of our nature from freedom. John Rajchman points out that Foucault’s genealogy is a continuation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in this respect (Rajchman 1985, 121). I argue that, by presenting freedom as the ontological condition of ethics, Foucault, in fact, refers to the ontological contigency of the present: freedom is the opening up of possibilities of an age.18 This is the sense of freedom that I have explicated in the previous parts in connection with Foucault’s understanding of language on the one hand, and bodies and pleasures on the other. Freedom in this sense is the condition of possibility of Foucault’s ethics: it is the moment of the unexpected as opposed to the normalized, the unforeseen as opposed to the determined. My point has been to show, however, that ethics and politics – understood in Foucault’s thought as concrete 18 See Rajchman 1985, 46.


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practices – delineate a realm where freedom understood as an ontological condition can be given ‘a considered form’. When freedom is brought into the realm of ethics and politics – informed by reflection – it becomes a concrete practice of freedom as well as a historical ideal, an ethos of our culture. I am now in a position to sum up the different meanings of freedom operative in Foucault’s thought. Freedom as ontological contingency. I have shown in connection with Foucault’s archaeology how freedom refers to the indeterminacy of discursive structures: language can never be fully mastered or tamed, but results in unexpected orders and unimaginable conjunctions of meanings. Foucault not only gives language a regulative role in the mode of scientific discourse, he also demarcates a domain of freedom in the mode of literature, particularly as avant-garde writing. While scientific discourses form an ontological order of things that is implicit in theories and practices, language as avant-garde writing is capable of forming alternative, unscientific and irrational ontological realms: different experiences of order on the basis of which different perceptual and practical grids become possible, and hence new ways of seeing and experiencing emerge. While Foucault’s archaeology is generally viewed as emphasizing the necessary structures of scientific discourse and opposing humanist aspirations of looking for the freedom of man, it contains an anti-humanist understanding of freedom as an opening of new possibilities of thought and experience. Foucault’s aim was not only to show how the limits of knowledge were constituted, but also to study what distorted them. In connection with Foucault’s genealogy, I have argued that this indeterminacy or ontological contingency characterizes not only discursive structures, but also embodiment and experience. Subjection sets the limits for normal experiences, but these limits make possible transgressions that affirm the limitlessness of bodies and pleasures. The Foucaultian body is capable of generating resistance, of presenting excess and transgression, not just malleability. This resistance is not, however, a return to a wild and natural body, but rather is made possible by the normalizing power. The body is a construction of scientific discourses and disciplinary technologies, but is also capable of multiplying, distorting and overflowing its discursive definitions, classifications and coordinations. Even if linguistic intelligibility structures and partly constitutes experience, there are nevertheless experiences that fall outside of discourse in the sense that these abject or transgressive experiences are rendered mute and unintelligible in our culture.

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At the same time, they are necessary ‘outsiders’ because they constitute the limits of the normal and the intelligible. In Foucault’s genealogy, like in his archaeology, there is a dimension of freedom in the sense of a constitutive outside to the discursive order, even if there is no outside to the apparatus or network of practices as a whole. Practices of freedom. Foucault’s late thinking identifies ethics as the deliberate dimension of freedom. Ethics is a practice of freedom. Hence, while freedom in the previous sense is an ontological condition of ethics, ethics as a practice is the deliberate form it assumes. Foucault’s thinking on ethics thus develops a fuller understanding of freedom, elaborates it by introducing a deliberate dimension to it. Freedom is not only a non-subjective opening of possibilities, it can be deliberately cultivated and practised by subjects. The subject exercises freedom in critically reflecting on itself and its behaviour, on beliefs and the social field of which it is part. It materializes the possibilities that are opened around it. The practices of freedom may challenge, contest and even change the constitutive conditions of our subjectivity as well as its actual forms. Ethics as practices of freedom means exploring possibilities for new forms of the subject, new fields of experiences, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking. It consists of creative activity as well as the critical interrogation of our present, and of the contemporary field of possible experience. The quest for freedom in Foucault’s ethics is a question of developing forms of the subject that are capable of functioning as resistance to the normalizing power. Freedom as the ethos of the Enlightenment. Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment put forward the idea of freedom as a historical ideal originating from it. He does not simply embrace traditional Enlightenment ideals, but submits them for critical reappropriation. What, for him, characterizes the philosophical ethos originating in the Enlightenment is that it is a permanent critique of our own era. By linking his thought to the Enlightenment, he makes the normative move of adopting the ideals associated with it – critical reason and personal autonomy – as the implicit ground on which his critiques of domination, abusive forms of power and reason rest. The Enlightenment provides him with the historical – not transcendental – values on which to base his critiques. The ideal of freedom is a commitment to a specific historical tradition within which we think about human life and politics. Freedom is the contingent historical ethos and precondition of critical reflection on our present.


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Negative freedom. In his afterword to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Foucault defines power and freedom as very similar to the standard Anglo-American view. A relationship of power is a set of actions upon other actions. This means that the one over whom power is exercised is ‘thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, and possible inventions may open up’ (SP, 220). Power presupposes freedom in the sense that to be free means that one has a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving can be realized. ‘Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are free’ (SP, 221). Freedom is not the opposite of power, but is rather its precondition and permanent provocation. While the three previous definitions all opposed the humanist idea of freedom as a characteristic of a human being, and attached to it instead practices, experiences or language, this fourth definition posits freedom in the standard vocabulary of political philosophy as an attribute of the subject. This characterization is not typical of Foucault, however. Tuija Pulkkinen (1996/2000, 85) argues that Foucault’s afterword to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book gives a problematic view of his thinking because it was written for an American audience already engaged in a debate on what kind of ‘definition of power’ Foucault’s work involves. Pulkkinen sees in the background of Foucault’s text the urge to meet the demands of his new audience and this explains why he formulates the questions as well as the definitions of power in a way that is familiar to his Anglo-American readers. We might assume that his treatment of freedom in this text follows a similar motivation. I argue that, in general, we can conclude that freedom in Foucault’s philosophy is divorced from the subject understood as a stable entity and reference point, and is attached instead to practices, forms of experience or the being of language. The understanding of the subject underlying Foucault’s thinking of ethics and politics is consistent in this sense with his earlier explicit rejections of the humanist subject. Foucault sought to develop a way to think of ethics and politics that does not rely on any ahistorical, ontological assumptions about the subject. The subject is neither the starting point nor the foundation of morality, any more than it was of epistemology or history. Throughout his work Foucault warned us against fixed meanings of what a human being is. To be consistent, his ethics cannot be built on any foundational

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understanding of the ethical subject, but on the contrary, must aim to break essences, constants and human natures. Ethics becomes possible exactly through the movement of revealing forms of subjectivity as contingent and questioning constraining essences. Foucault’s late understanding of the subject, however, implicitly presupposes a curious autonomy: the subject is capable of engaging in practices of self-reflection, considered self-mastery and creation. It turns back upon itself, recognizes itself as a subject of a certain morality, problematizes normalized subjectivity and seeks to create itself a new. At the same time, and seemingly paradoxically, the subject does not invent itself, but only deploys modes of behaviour and forms of thinking of its cultural context. It internalizes ‘the exterior’, and by an act of appropriation turns it into a singular ethical style. This is, furthermore, a style of problematization, of contesting the normalizing practices formative of the subject. Foucault thus refuses to develop any general and invariant understanding of the subject of ethics and politics, while at the same time he locates ethics in the reflexive practices of the self. The questions that follow are questions about the ‘freedom’ of the subject. How can we understand the capacity of the subject for critical self-reflection? How is the constituted subject capable of engaging in truly critical practices? In the next chapter I will focus more explicitly on the question of the subject in Foucault’s ethics. I will explicate two interconnected problems that I claim are riddling Foucault’s understanding of the ethical subject: the autonomy of the subject and the role of the other in its constitution. I will show, through a reading of Emmanuel Levinas, how these problems are interconnected. As Foucault recognized, important preconditions for the morality of antiquity were that the subjects of that morality were free and active masters of themselves: slaves and women had no morality. In other words, moral subjects were always free men. My criticism will focus on this implicit understanding of the ethical subject underlying Foucault’s thinking. I will argue that his attempt to rethink ethics, starting from the ethics of antiquity and its practices of the self, leaves the meaning as well as the possibility of ethical subjectivity unproblematized. I will pose the question whether we can conceive of a form of contemporary ethics based on the model of ancient ethics without problematizing the understanding of ethical subjectivity underlying it. Is the ethical subject fundamentally an active master of the self?

9 THE OTHER

For men of courage physical sufferings (and privations) are often a test of endurance and of strength of soul. But there is a better use to be made of them. For me then, may they not be that. May they rather be a testimony, lived and felt, of human misery. May I endure them in a completely passive manner. Whatever happens, how could I ever think an affliction too great, since the wound of an affliction and the abasement to which those whom it strikes are condemned opens to them the knowledge of human misery, knowledge which is the door to all wisdom? (Weil 1952/1997, 31)

Unlike the claim of some of his critics, Foucault’s ethics is not a solitary pursuit, nor does he prioritize isolated individuality. Ethical subjectivity is given a form in the practices of the self, but these practices always take place and derive their meaning from an interpersonal situation. Care for the self, according to Foucault, implies complex relationships with others: relationships and duties towards one’s family members, society at large, one’s spiritual master or guide. The ethos of freedom and self-mastery can only take concrete shape and become a style of life in a particular interpersonal situation in which the ethical acts become ways of dealing with the surrounding community. The self that is cared for is never isolated, but always linked to larger societal structures.1 Moreover, the ethical relationship always exists between free individuals. When Foucault was asked whether care for the self released

1 Cf. Gros 2001.

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from the care of others ran the risk of absolutizing itself and therefore becoming an exercise of power on others, he replied: [T]he risk of dominating others and exercising over them a tyrannical power only comes from the fact that one did not care for one’s self and that one has become a slave for his desires. But if you care for yourself correctly, that is to say if you know ontologically what you are . . . you can not abuse your power over others. (EPF, 8)2

Foucault thus considered the ethical practice of caring for oneself as one way of controlling and limiting abuses of power. ‘It is the power over self which will regulate the power over others’ (EPF, 8). For the Greeks, the ethos of freedom was also a way of caring for others: when one cares for oneself properly this means that one also cares for the other. Ethical practices provide a way of resisting domination, and ethical conduct will be a conduct of non-domination. Thus, Foucault does not advocate blatant egoism, nor does he neglect the care for others. He does, however, relocate the ethical from interpersonal relationships to the relationship one has with one’s self, and this way rethinks the realm of ethics. In Foucault’s thought, care for the self is a precondition of care for others: ‘One must not have the care for others precede the care for self. The care for self takes moral precedence in the measure that the relationship to self takes ontological precedence’ (EPF, 7). Foucault understood the relationship to one’s self to be ontologically primary and thus a precondition for ethical relationships to others. When one cares for one’s self properly this means that one also cares for the other. However, care for the self is not ethical because it necessarily implies care for others. The meaning of the ethical does not originate from the other, but from a certain kind of relationship to one’s self. This ontological priority given to the relationship to one’s self in the ethical realm poses serious problems for efforts to think forms of contemporary subjectivity and ethics. I will argue in this chapter that we must acknowledge the fundamental importance of the other for the constitution of ethical subjectivity. Despite the problems and even 2 ‘le risque de dominer les autres et d’exercer sur eux un pouvoir tyrannique ne vient précisément que du fait qu’on ne s’est pas soucié de soi et qu’on est devenu l’esclave de ses désirs. Mais si vous vous souciez de vous comme il faut, c’est-à-dire si vous savez ontologiquement ce que vous eˆ tes . . . vous ne pouvez pas a` ce moment-là abuser de votre pouvoir sur les autres.’ (EPL, 716)

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paradoxes entailed by the idea, we must seek to understand the way in which other people form the precondition for ethical subjectivity. This means turning around Foucault’s ontological order of primacy: the most fundamental ethical question does not concern my relationship to myself, but to the other. This means also that the question of how to live a good life must be subordinated to the more primary question which alone can give life an ethical meaning: how do I respond to the other person?

Ethical subject and the other It is my contention that the problems with Foucault’s ethics stem from the conception of ethical subjectivity he adopts from ancient Greece. The ethical subject was a free man whose main moral concerns were related to the question of how to live a good and honourable life in the polis, not of how to respond ethically to the irreducible humanity of the other. In a culture built on institutional slavery and sexual practices of domination, the moral dilemmas clearly did not focus on the ethical demand of the other. Rather, the ethical problems posed by the existence of others were related to questions of how to rightfully govern them. As a moral subject, the free man had to know how to care properly for his wife, children and slaves. Timothy O’Leary (2002, 43) argues that Foucault’s reading of classical Greek ethics plays down its political motivations and aims. Classical ethics was an ethics whose primary concern was with establishing and maintaining relations of domination with one’s inferiors. The mastery over oneself was not the goal of this ethics only because it was a way of giving life more intensity and beauty, it was, most of all, the moral condition of possibility of one’s mastery over others. As Foucault himself also at times recognized, it was an ethics that was resolutely ‘virile’ in character; if one was a ‘man’ in relation to oneself, one could be a ‘man’ in relation to others. Self-mastery (enkrateia), both as a theme and as a social practice, was inseparable from the mastery of others. This isomorphism between self-mastery and mastery of others was particularly striking in the field of sexuality. This entire field was governed by the primary oppositions active–passive, penetrator–penetrated and dominator–dominated (O’Leary 2002, 62). The whole ethical framework and conception of ethical subjectivity is thus, in significant respects, foreign to our modern understanding of ethics. While this is clearly what Foucault found appealing about it

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in certain respects – the complete lack of normalizing and moralizing technologies of the self, for example – there are, nevertheless, other fundamental problems connected with it that he was not able to solve. He himself asked, in connection with Greek sexual ethics: ‘How can we have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other?’ (GE, 346). This question is, I argue, perhaps asked, but no attempt is made to answer it in Foucault’s thought. Although the subject is always constituted in an intersubjective and relational matrix, the constitutive community of others is an impersonal power/knowledge network. The personal other of the ethical relation – the sexual or ethical partner – is not given a decisive role, but instead rendered almost invisible and more or less irrelevant. In Foucault’s thought, an ethical relationship becomes possible when the subject has already been constituted as an ethical subject by him/herself through practices of the self. An ethical relationship to the other follows from ethical subjectivity rather than from being constitutive of it, and the other becomes contingent and exchangeable. As long as I have given my subjectivity a beautiful, courageous or honourable form and my ethical subjectivity is intact, I can relate to anyone in any circumstance in an ethical way. However, can a relationship be ethical if the personal other involved is contingent and not fundamentally constitutive of it? What kind of ethical relationship is not constituted by the singular, personal other who makes the relationship what it is? How or why should ethics mean anything at all without a personal other? How or why does anybody give an ethical meaning to the task of caring for oneself? The obvious place to look for an answer to these questions seems to be in Levinas, who has studied the question of the ethical relationship to the other to an extent that is perhaps incomparable in western philosophy. However, to stage a dialogue between Foucault and Levinas also seems an impossible task. The incommensurability of these two thinkers derives from the originality of their projects and their distinctive views of the role and scope of philosophy. Engaging in a dialogue with Levinas also seems impossible simply because of the notorious obscurity of his language, and would, by definition, require that one speaks his language. Levinas’ aim of breaking with the tradition of western philosophy and its language of ontology means that his own language is pushed to the limits of incomprehensibility. Ethics, furthermore, means very different things in Levinas’ and Foucault’s thought. For Levinas, it is first philosophy. It is the condition

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of possibility of a morality and frames the questions of how to live, think, act and treat others. It is not the study of values, virtues, rights or duties. It is not a distinct area of philosophy, not even an object of cognitive contemplation at all, but more like a passive opening to alterity. It precedes me: my choices, will and reason. I cannot choose it or practise it, it chooses and possesses me. The fundamental experience of the other constitutes ethics and precedes my subjectivity. For Foucault, on the other hand, ethics refers to a component of morality that consists of one’s relationship to one’s self. A study of ethics means a study of the different modes by which subjects problematize their relationship to different moral codes in different historical situations. Apart from the obvious incommensurability of the linguistic styles and their understanding of philosophy, the ethical frameworks of these two thinkers seem to be almost diametrically opposed. While Levinas’ thought also builds upon the philosophical tradition of antiquity, it is, importantly, influenced and structured by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Religious images and symbols intertwine with rational concepts and categories.3 While Foucault’s model for the ethical subject is built on the figure of a free man of antiquity aspiring to activity, virility, mastery and honour, Levinas’ text carries the ideals present in the Bible of a people driven into slavery: infinite responsibility, humbleness and subordination to the other. Levinas explicitly opposes the conception of subjectivity of the philosophical tradition originating in ancient Greece. He writes: ‘The rational subjectivity bequeathed to us by Greek philosophy . . . does not feature that passivity which . . . I have identified with the responsibility for the other’ (Levinas 1989, 206).4 The responsibility that, for Levinas, characterizes or even constitutes ethical subjectivity has to be understood in a specific sense, however. While I will suggest here that the question of ethical subjectivity is an important area of critical exchange between Foucault and Levinas, the question of responsibility of the subject does not constitute a simple contrast between these two thinkers. Barry Smart (1997) takes up the question of responsibility in Foucault’s and Levinas’ thought and argues that, despite Foucault’s later emphasis on the subject’s ethical self-constitution, there remains a significant absence in his discussion of the subject of any consideration of the question of moral responsibility (Smart 1997, 83). Preoccupation with the self leaves open the 3 On Levinas’ religious writings, see e.g. Levinas 1963, 1968. 4 The central idea of responsibility in Levinas’ thought is, according to him, also a central feature of Judaism (see e.g. Levinas 1989, 264).

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question about caring or taking responsibility for others. Smart turns to Levinas’ philosophy and advocates an understanding of ethics based on moral responsibility for others. He argues that it is ‘from the initial moral bearing of being, taking or assuming responsibility for the other that a particular ethical practice of caring for the self follows’ (87). Smart demands an ethically responsible agent for Foucault’s practices of the self in the sense of an individual who takes seriously his/her responsibility for the other. He assumes the subject of morality to be the modern subject characterized by autonomy and rationality, who then adopts responsibility as a subsequent act or attitude. Smart ends his article on Foucault’s ethics by accusing Foucault of irresponsible egoism. He asks if ‘the subject of responsibility for others has become a subject of indifference in our time?’ (91). Levinas’ notion of responsibility – like most of his concepts – does not, however, translate directly into the standard language of moral philosophy. Responsibility is not an ethical attitude for Levinas, as it is for Smart, but it is, rather, a fundamental structure of subjectivity. For Levinas, ethics is responsibility that is anterior to any volition. Responsibility is irreducible, something one cannot deny or shed, but neither can one take or assume it. I do not take responsibility, rather in the encounter with the other, responsibility falls upon me. I am passive in its regard and my humanity consists of this passivity – of not being able to shed fundamental responsibility. For Levinas, responsibility is thus not an ethical attitude that we could choose or promote in others. By emphasizing the subject’s absolute responsibility for the other, Levinas does not ‘place the emphasis firmly and deliberately on care for others, rather than care for the self’ (Smart 1997, 89). Despite the absolute and fundamental responsibility for the other, people kill and torture each other, not to mention polluting the environment and letting their fellow men go hungry. It is always possible to relate to the other as to an object, to oppress, exploit and even kill him or her. Even then, however, according to Levinas, I am not free from my responsibility for him, the relationship of responsibility can never be suppressed. Even in his or her death, my responsibility for the other is not resolved. Levinas’ contribution to rethinking ethics and ethical subjectivity in particular is thus not in the simple advocation of responsibility and condemnation of irresponsible egoism, nor is this where his thought contrasts with that of Foucault. The domain of interesting exchange is, in my view, in their understanding of the constitution of ethical subjectivity and its relationship to radical alterity. In my argumentation

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for this I will next briefly explicate Levinas’ conception of ethical subjectivity. Levinas’ account of subjectivity is modified throughout his writings, and like most of his notions is stretched in his late texts to the limits of comprehension, to a point where it almost vanishes. Indeed, it can be argued that there is no subject in Levinas.5 Ethics for him is beyond the realm of constitutional subjectivity, and therefore puts the whole conception of subjectivity into question. The subject of ethics is not the source of meaning and action. It is being that does not express itself, being that cannot be known or understood but only assigned as responsible for the other. Any explication of a single idea or concept in Levinas’ work, furthermore, always contorts the movement of his thought. My aim here is not to provide a comprehensive explication of his conception of subjectivity, however, but simply to take up some central features of it that enable me to articulate the problems in Foucault’s understanding of the ethical subject.6

Subjectivity as passivity In his late work Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Levinas sets out to do the impossible: to articulate, using the language of philosophy, the inevitable silence of philosophy. He seeks to describe in language what by definition is unthematizable, a sphere that cannot be an object of knowledge, understanding or any other intentional act. To write about ethics means to describe what is beyond being and non-being, the ‘otherwise than being’. Ontology traditionally refers to an area of philosophy that studies being in all its forms and modes. It seeks to comprehend being and thus to bring it into the realm of knowledge. For Levinas, however, ethics is beyond being and therefore beyond ontological inquiry. It is not a relation of knowledge, but it is in direct opposition to ontology.7 However, before philosophy can describe what 5 See e.g. Bailhache 1994. 6 My presentation of Levinas’ understanding of subjectivity is based mainly on his late thought, particularly Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974/1981). There are significant changes as well as shifts of emphasis between this book and Totality and Infinity (1961/1969), for example, on the question of the ethical significance of sensibility, on the role of language and on the emphasis on justice and the third party. Discussion of the changes is, however, beyond the scope of this study. See e.g. Critchley 1992, Peperzak 1993. 7 Ontology is Levinas’ general term for any relation to otherness that is reducible to comprehension or understanding (Critchley 2002, 11).

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lies beyond being – what is otherwise than being – it must give up the language of ontology without sinking into incomprehensibility. An important distinction in Levinas’ thought is therefore the one he makes in Otherwise than Being between saying (le dire) and the said (le dit).8 The language of philosophy has traditionally consisted only of the said: of sentences and arguments that have a truth-value. Everything that can be named, discussed and debated can only be expressed in the said. Philosophy has therefore neglected the other aspect of language, the saying. By saying, Levinas refers to speech as aimed at the other. Speaking to the other – addressing and responding – is the condition of possibility of all language and philosophy. There can be no language without the other, because words are always for the other. Saying is thus similar to Levinas’ idea of responsibility: it is a relationship of openness and vulnerability to the other which cannot be thematized or brought to the said. The only way to approach the saying in philosophy is through the said. However, the effort to thematize saying in the said is always, by necessity, an act of its destruction: to succeed in thematizing what cannot be thematized, paradoxically, means to fail. Philosophy is thus doomed to this recurring failure, and therefore has to start anew time and time again. Hence, it is necessary to do the impossible in order to write about ethics. The ethical relation to the other will always be beyond the language of philosophy, rationality, totality, order – and being. ‘Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise than being, the very possibility of the beyond’ (Levinas 1989, 179). This fundamental paradox in philosophical language underlies the description of subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. Ethical subjectivity is described in the language of philosophy, which is, nevertheless, constantly undoing itself: subjectivity is equated with passivity, vulnerability, sensibility, maternity, materiality, responsibility and substitution. These terms may each express something about it, but it cannot be reduced to any one of them. Levinas writes, for example, that ethical subjectivity is essentially passivity, but this is not passivity in the sense in which we normally understand it, as the opposite of activity. Subjectivity as ultimate passivity does not belong to the order in which the alternative of active/passive retains its meaning: ‘Our western passivity’ refers to 8 Otherwise than Being is often read as Levinas’ attempt to address the questions Derrida posed in ‘Violence et metaphysique’ (1967/1987). On Derrida’s relationship to Levinas’ thought, see e.g. Bernasconi 1991, Critchley 1991, 1992.

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a subject who is passive when he does not give himself the contents of perceptual and cognitive acts. This passivity is not passive enough because the subject is still receptive. Sensations are produced in a subject who grasps himself through these sensations and conceives them. Levinas seeks a new degree of passivity, ‘more passive than passivity’, that does not take charge of itself, but that breaks the unity of subjectivity. The passivity of subjectivity ultimately means its fission (Levinas 1986/ 1998, 89). The radical understanding of subjectivity as responsibility prior to commitment is also developed further. Levinas said in an interview: ‘In this book [Otherwise than Being] I speak of responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity’ (Levinas 1982/1985, 95). Responsibility is the absolute principle of becoming a human subject, and as such is the primordial structure of subjectivity. Through substitution, literally putting myself in the place of the other, I become responsible even for the other’s responsibility, I become a hostage for the other. The possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other is a condition of possibility for solidarity and ethical behaviour. ‘It is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity – even the little there is, even the simple After you, sir’ (Levinas 1974/ 1981, 117). Responsibility for the other is not, however, only a demand, a weight on the shoulders. It is also the freedom that constitutes the subject’s uniqueness. Levinas had already repudiated the modern humanist idea of the essential similarity and equality of subjects in his book Time and the Other (1947/1987). My responsibility constitutes my singularity and uniqueness because no one can carry my responsibility for me. ‘No one can substitute himself for me, who substitutes myself for all’ (Levinas 1989, 115). My selfhood comes into being through my responsibility for the other. The inescapable responsibility makes me an individual I: to be myself can only mean being for the other. The identity of the subject is thus determined by the uniqueness of his or her responsibility for everybody and everything. Responsibility is fundamental and yet impossible. I cannot shed its demand/command because it is a fundamental structure of my being, but neither can I ever fulfil it: the more just I am, the greater is my responsibility. I am responsible for that which has preceded me and that which will outlive me. No one else can take my place and carry my responsibility, which is always more than anyone else’s. ‘Responsibility for the neighbour is

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precisely what goes beyond the legal and obliges beyond contracts; it comes to me from what is prior to my freedom, from a non-present, an immemorial’ (Levinas 1989, 180). Like the phenomenological subject, the subject for Levinas is always the singular I. Husserl’s subject is singular for methodological reasons, but for Levinas the singularity is integral for his understanding of ethics.9 The ethical demand can only be placed upon me. Ethical subjectivity cannot be objectified or studied as generic. Responsibility, as the assignment of the other, always arises in a singular and particular situation and concerns only me. Unlike the phenomenological subject, the subject that Levinas aims at describing does not constitute the world in perceptions or any meaning-giving acts. An ethical relation is not like a relation of knowledge; it cannot be reduced to knowledge about the other. The other cannot be posited by any constituting, intentional act of the subject, because he or she cannot be an intentional object, but always overflows the limits of perception and comprehension. This constitutes the paradox of the presence of alterity in a finite act of a self-possessed subject. To encounter something truly other is, by definition, impossible, because it would be incomprehensible and unexperienceable. For something to be able to preserve its alterity means that it must exceed my categories of experience and understanding, and therefore be a non-experience, unexperienceable. This core problem in Levinas’ thought is also already articulated in the early work Time and the Other: ‘How can an event that cannot be grasped still happen to me? What can the other’s relationship with a being, an existent, be? . . . How can a being enter into a relationship with the other without allowing its very self to be crushed by the other?’ (Levinas 1947/1987, 77). It is this paradox that founds subjectivity, which is not reducible to consciousness or to any kind of intentionality. Subjectivity as passivity does not constitute the other through meaning-giving acts, but the other breaks up the unity of transcendental constitution. The paradoxical understanding of subjectivity becomes even more pronounced in Otherwise than Being. The reason the subject cannot constitute the other is not only because the other as radical alterity always overflows the limits of experience, but also because the subject itself 9 Although Levinas’ conception of the subject is often read as a critique of Husserl’s transcendental Ego, it can also be understood as its radicalization. (See e.g. Levinas 1987/1994, 151–8.) For an illuminative analysis of the differences between Husserl’s and Levinas’ thought, see e.g. Bernet 1998.

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does not exist as an ethical subject prior to the encounter. As Simon Critchley notes (2002, 12), Levinas does not posit, a priori, a conception of ethics that then instantiates itself in certain concrete experiences. It is, rather, that the ethical is an adjective that describes, a posteriori as it were, a certain event of being in a relation to the other irreducible to comprehension. The ethical relationship to the other is described in terms of a relationship of proximity, extreme closeness to the point of obsession. It is a relationship without the mediation of language, any principle, any ideality: ‘To thematize this relationship is already to lose it’ (Levinas 1989, 110). It is this proximity to the other that constitutes ethical subjectivity. Alphonso Lingis notes (1981, xvi) that embodiment becomes central in the descriptions of the ethical relationship in Otherwise than Being. The ethical relationship acquires, if not an erotic, then a sensuous character. Though realized in language, it is described as sensuous contact and closeness. Because the alterity of the other cannot be grasped by the subject in any intentional act, contact can only be through sensibility, understood as susceptibility and sensuality but also as pain. In extreme pain the subject loses the mastery of its world: rational consciousness, dignity, even perceptual reality. Pain reveals a level of subjectivity at which intentionality has broken down, and the subject of rational consciousness has been reduced to destitution and subjected to what is beyond it. The extreme passivity of ethical subjectivity is thus only possible because of embodiment. The subject of ethics is essentially an embodied, carnal subject, a subject capable of being hurt, wounded, shamed and humiliated. Only out of this bodily vulnerability can ethics arise as responsibility for the other, passivity in the face of overwhelming pain and pleasure. Hence, Levinas’ aim is to describe subjectivity prior to its ontological constitution as an entity among others. Ethical subjectivity cannot be defined by consciousness, rationality or intentionality, but precedes them. Since the ethical subject is not an entity or a being thematizable in language, we cannot even call it a subject. It has no stable form, but is constituted time and again in encounters with the other, in openness to the other, in responsibility for the other. The unthematizable relationship to alterity is fundamentally constitutive of ethical subjectivity. It is what is anterior or beyond the constituting subject and what makes individual constitution possible. ‘Ethics is when not only do I not thematize another; it is when another obsesses me or puts me in question’ (Levinas 1986/1998, 99).

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The other as precondition of ethics It is my contention that from the point of view of Foucault’s ethics, Levinas’ understanding of ethical subjectivity puts forward important ideas that are overlooked by Foucault. I will summarize them here in simple terms. Ethical situations are always absolutely singular, and ethical subjectivity is constituted anew in each encounter with the singular other. The ethical relationship is thus constitutive of its terms, rather than presupposing that they are already constituted before entering into it. In the encounter with the other, my ethical subjectivity as responsibility arises through my ability to put myself in the place of the other, or in Levinas’ terms, through becoming a hostage for the other. From this fundamental structure of my subjectivity arises my singular responsibility for the other and also the possibility for ethical behaviour towards him or her. The other is thus fundamentally constitutive of ethical subjectivity simply by virtue of his or her existence. Moreover, the other is always radically incomprehensible to me. Despite being able to put myself in his or her place, I also know that he or she has a unique way of experiencing the world that I can never completely grasp. Unlike everything else in the world, the other presents a radical limit to what I can experience. This basic phenomenological insight can be expressed simply by noting that I can never experience the world exactly the way the other experiences it. This idea has radical ethical consequences in Levinas’ thought, however. The other introduces radical alterity and plurality into my constituted world and thus deprives me of my sovereignty of it. As an ethical subject I am essentially passive and vulnerable, because the other puts my experiences into question. My aim in briefly turning to Levinas is thus to show that his thought studies the fundamental conditions of possibility of ethical subjectivity in the other that are overlooked by Foucault. The ethical subject cannot be determined by an exterior power/knowledge network, but neither can it be ‘set free’ by complementing it with an interior, a capacity for self-reflection. Only the other can give ethical meaning to the practices of the self. Alone on a desert island I do not have ethical problems and I cannot constitute myself as an ethical subject even though I may continue to engage in practices of the self. To problematize one’s place in the world and to engage in any kind of practice will only be ethically meaningful because of the fundamental encounter with the other. In short, for there to be ethics there has to be a more fundamental level

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of subjectivity than the one that Foucault describes in his analyses of the third axis of its constitution. The fundamental encounter with the other makes ethical questions possible. If we turn to Levinas in seeking to explicate the preconditions of ethical subjectivity, this does not mean that we have to compromise Foucault’s aim of breaking human essences, however. For Levinas, subjectivity as passivity or responsibility does not mean a universal essence or a fixed core of a human being. It is not something that can be posited as an entity, foundation or a principle for a certain kind of morality. Ethical subjectivity as responsibility is fundamental and primordial, but it is never generic. It is constituted anew in every singular encounter with the other. Like Foucault, Levinas repudiates the humanist understanding of the subject, but for different reasons. In Otherwise than Being Levinas writes: Modern antihumanism, which denies the primacy the human person, free and for itself, would have for the signification of being, is right over and beyond the reasons it gives itself. It clears the place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will. Its inspired intuition is to have abandoned the idea of a person, goal and origin itself, in which the ego is still a thing because it is still a being. Strictly speaking, the other is the end; I am a hostage, a responsibility and a substitution supporting the world in the passivity of assignation, even in an accusing persecution, which is undeclinable. Humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human. (Levinas 1974/1981, 127–8)10

From a Levinasian perspective it would thus seem that while Foucault managed to ‘clear the place’ of problematic humanist conceptions of the subject, he was not able to find an alternative understanding of ethical subjectivity that would still make ethics meaningful. A reflexive and critical relationship to one’s self can be constitutive of an aesthetical style of living, but only a relationship to the other can give it an ethical meaning. 10 ‘L’antihumanisme moderne, niant le primat qui, pour la signification de l’être, reviendrait a` la personne humaine, libre but d’elle-même, est vrai par-delà les raisons qu’il se donne. Il fait place nette a` la subjectivité se posant dans l’abnégation, dans le sacrifice, dans la substitution précédant la volonté. Son intuition géniale consiste a` avoir abandonné l’idée de personne, but et origine d’elle-même, ou` le moi est encore chose parce qu’il est encore un eˆ tre. A la rigueur autrui est “fin”, moi je suis otage, responsabilité et substitution supportant le monde dans la passivité de l’assignation allant jusqu’à la persécution accusatrice, indéclinable. L’humanisme ne doit eˆ tre dénoncé que parce qu’il n’est pas suffisamment humain.’ (Levinas 1974, 203)

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Recognizing the fundamental role of the other in the constitution of ethical subjectivity can also untangle another set of problems riddling Foucault’s late understanding of the subject, namely the question of encountering limits. For Foucault, ethics becomes possible because of the subject’s act of turning back upon him/herself: the subject maintains a critical distance to him/herself and participates in the constitution of moral, sexual and other forms of subjectivity. This critical distance in the act of self-reflection is what constitutes the subject’s relative autonomy, and critical thinking becomes one of the concrete forms that ethics takes. It is through considered practices of freedom that normalized subjectivity is contested and a space for the ethical is created. This late understanding of reflexive subjectivity raises a host of questions. The subject that engages in ethical practices is a subject constituted and embedded in power/knowledge networks. How can the constituted subject engage in truly critical thought questioning its own constitutive processes? Even if we grant that the subject constituted in power/knowledge networks is not totally determined by them but is capable of critical self-reflection, we must still ask in connection with ethics, how it can, by turning back upon itself, find anything but a constituted and normalized interior? The form that ethical subjectivity assumes in Foucault’s thought is that of a subject who engages in practices of creative selfformation. Ethics implies freedom in the sense of conscious practices contesting the borders of the habitual. But how is a subject embedded in the power/knowledge network going to encounter these borders? How can the subject engage in anything truly different, anything that would break or exceed the normalized self? How is the subject able to encounter something radically other through self-reflection: find different ways of being a subject? David Halperin argues that even though Foucault himself did not explicitly thematize the impersonal character of the self, his late writings nevertheless imply an impersonal understanding of it. It was the late antique philosophers, whom Foucault studied, who identified the self with the soul, which was not a principle of individuation but rather an errant particle of the Divine. The self, in the ancient philosophical view of it, was not the locus of a unique and private psychological depth in the model of humanism, but the site of radical alterity: the space within each human being where she or he encounters the not self, the beyond (Halperin 1995, 74–6). Halperin claims that the dimension of the self that makes it a site of irreducible alterity nowadays is no longer the

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divine spark that dwells within it, as it was for the ancient philosophers, but rather the subject’s determination by history. ‘It is no longer divinity but history that guarantees us an experience of the Other at the core of our own subjectivity and brings it about that any direct encounter with the self must also be a confrontation with the not-self’ (Halperin 1995, 104). The study of history becomes a spiritual exercise when it is conducted as an inquiry into our own alterity (Halperin 1995, 105). If we accept the Levinasian idea that ethical subjectivity is constituted by the other, understood as the other person, I suggest that we do not necessarily need to study history to encounter our own alterity. We can also think that an encounter with other people will bring about a confrontation with the not-self, but also an experience of the other as passivity, responsibility and vulnerability at the core our subjectivity. The other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted subject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know. The arts of existence aiming to transgress normalized individuality would succeed in opening up an ethical sphere exceeding totality and determination because the other is capable of introducing alterity to the constituted subject. The other makes ethical subjectivity possible, but also breaks the totality of constituted experience by introducing a plurality in being that resists all efforts of totalization and normalization. Only the other ultimately reveals the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempts to transgress them an ethical meaning.

CONCLUSION: FREEDOM AS AN O P E R AT I O N A L C O N C E P T

For Foucault, freedom refers to the indeterminateness of the constitutive matrix and to the contingency of all structures. It is the virtual fractures that appear in the invisible walls of our world, the opening up of possibilities for seeing how that which is might no longer be what it is. Freedom does not mean that everything is possible, but neither is the present a necessity. Foucault writes: I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead – by following lines of fragility in the present – in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. (CT/IH, 36)1

Even though freedom for Foucault is thus not an attribute of the subject, this does not commit us to political apathy and cynicism. Freedom is anarchic in the sense that it disturbs and even breaks every totality, but it must nevertheless not be understood as some absolute and mystical outside. The virtual fractures for thinking and being otherwise will not just appear in the invisible walls of our world, they can only emerge from our practices. We must try to open up possibilities 1 ‘Ce que je voudrais aussi dire a` propos de cette fonction du diagnostic sur ce qu’est aujourd’hui, c’est qu’elle ne consiste pas a` caractériser simplement ce que nous sommes, mais, en suivant les lignes de fragilité d’aujourd’hui, a` parvenir a` saisir par ou` ce qui est et comment ce qui est pourrait ne plus eˆ tre ce qui est. Et c’est en ce sens que la description doit eˆ tre toujours faite selon cette espèce de fracture virtuelle, qui ouvre un espace de liberté, entendu comme espace de liberté concrète, c’est-à-dire de transformation possible.’ (SEPS, 448–9)

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for seeing to what extent that which is might no longer be what it is. Foucault continues: ‘In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation’ (CT/IH, 36). I will conclude by putting forward one more definition of freedom that does not directly emerge from Foucault’s thinking, but which nevertheless, in my view, captures something essential about it: freedom as an operational concept. According to dictionaries of philosophy, an operational definition is the characterization of a concept through the operations performed to check it, such as the characterization of weight as that which scales measure and intelligence as that which IQ tests measure. Freedom as an operational concept would thus mean that freedom is defined and gains a meaning only through the concrete operations through which its existence is tested. It emerges through the particular, political and/or personal struggles that try and test its limits, possibilities or extent. Foucault writes about philosophy that it is important in that it should be put to the test of contemporary reality: But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. (WE, 46)2

Freedom can only gain meaning through our practices of resistance and the fleeting experiences of liberation resulting from them, both collective and personal. It is always dangerous and precarious. Sometimes its testing turns into riots and violence, and what emerges is not freedom but anger and resentment. Sometimes it results in nothing but dry pages filled with exercises of common sense. Freedom is a fragile moment, a 2 ‘Mais pour qu’il ne s’agisse pas simplement de l’affirmation ou du rêve vide de la liberté, il me semble que cette attitude historico-critique doit eˆ tre aussi une attitude expérimentale. Je veux dire que ce travail fait aux limites de nous-mêmes doit d’un côté ouvrir un domaine d’enquêtes historiques et de l’autre se mettre a` l’épreuve de la réalité et de l’actualité, a` la fois pour saisir ler points ou` le changement est possible et souhaitable et pour déterminer la forme précise a` donner a` ce changement.’ (QL1, 574)

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virtual fracture, which seldom endures the test of contemporary reality, but which nevertheless only emerges from it. It is a meaningless, empty word without the permanent testing of its possible forms, without ‘the patient labour giving form to our impatience for freedom’ (WE, 50, trans. modified).

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INDEX

aesthetics of existence, 159, 160, 165, 166–7, 168–9, 171, 174, 207 analytic of finitude, 54 apparatus (dispositif), 96–7, 102, 106, 130, 132 a priori, historical, 20–3, 35, 36n19, 37, 40, 47, 48, 67–9, 72, 87 archaeology, 3, 10–11, 18, 19, 20–2, 35, 36, 37–8, 68, 69, 70–1, 74, 76–8, 80–2, 88, 94, 95, 96, 97, 132, 163, 170, 171, 184, 185, 186, 189, 190 Archaeology of Knowledge, The, 21n6, 36–8, 76, 80, 81, 89, 95 archive, 76 Ashbery, John, 82

lived, 12, 119, 132–3, 134, 135, 138–40, 144, 148, 151, 152 phenomenology of the body, see phenomenology Boothroyd, David, 167 Bordo, Susan, 110n1 Braidotti, Rosi, 5 Brown, Wendy, 176, 180 Bruzina, Ronald, 60n20 Butler, Judith, 108–9, 115, 120–2, 123, 125–6, 131, 134, 136–7 Canguilhem, Georges, 8, 45, 45n6, 49–51, 77 Carr, David, 61n23 Cavaillés, Jean, 8n9, 45, 79 contingency, historical, 13, 107, 170, 172, 187, 188 Critchley, Simon, 203 critique, 8–9, 12–13, 173, 175, 178, 179–80, 182, 186–7, 188, 190 Crossley, Nick, 107n17

Bachelard, Gaston, 45, 45n6, 46n9, 47, 48 Barthes, Roland, 82n14 Bataille, Georges, 128, 129 Beauvoir, Simone de, 135n1 Benhabib, Seyla, 179, 180 Bernauer, James, 167 Binswanger, Ludwig, 7 Birth of the Clinique, The, 89 bodies and pleasures, 11, 124, 126, 127–8, 129, 134 and power, 11–12, 97–102, 113, 120, 131–2 and resistance, 11, 89, 109, 110, 111, 122, 123–6, 127, 131, 134, 153, 189 experiential, 11–12, 127, 128–9, 130–1, 132, 134 female, 110, 110n1, 120, 122–3, 124, 135–8, 150, 152, 153 Foucault’s understanding of, 11–12, 110–14, 117–1, 124, 128, 131, 132–4, 145, 150

Davidson, Arnold, 78n12, 158n1, 173n17 Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, 82 Deleuze, Gilles, 126–7, 165 Derrida, Jacques, 64n25, 82n14, 169–72, 174, 200n8 Descartes, René, 13, 28, 49, 51–2, 61 Dews, Peter, 164 Dillon, Martin, 142 Discipline and Punish, 3, 97, 98, 112, 127–8 discourse, 11, 32, 35, 36, 36n20, 38, 55, 67, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80–1, 84–5, 86, 95–6, 102–3, 113, 117, 130, 131, 182–9

220

index counter-, 84–5 scientific, 19–20, 35–7, 47–8, 55, 78, 79–80, 81–2, 87, 96, 98, 102, 117, 130, 150–1, 189 discursive formation, 37, 81 Dreyfus, Hubert, 71–3, 77, 119, 132–3, 191 Enlightenment, 5, 8, 12–13, 170, 172, 176, 182–4, 185–7, 190 episteme, 21–3, 27–30, 33–4, 47, 48–9, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 96–7, 130 classical, 21, 22, 24–7, 28, 29, 31, 52, 85 modern, 21, 22, 27–30, 31, 33, 34, 52, 76 Renaissance, 21, 23–4, 26, 85 epoche, 43–5, 47, 57, 59, 60, 64–5, 66 ethics feminist, 166n8 Foucault on, 4, 12, 85n17, 157–61, 162, 163, 165–7, 169–71, 172–3, 175, 186, 191–2, 193–4, 195–6, 206 Levinas on, 196–205 experience, 127–31, 132, 133, 163, 174, 189–90, 191 feminist criticism of Foucault, 101, 114 theory, 4–6, 11, 101, 110–11, 115–16, 120, 121, 122–3, 124, 127, 134, 135–8, 144, 150, 152, 153, 179 Fink, Eugene, 60n20, 61, 65–6 Flynn, Thomas, 76n9, 105, 173n16, 176n1, 181n10, 187 Frankfurt School, 8, 186 Fraser, Nancy, 176 freedom, 12–13, 132, 152–3, 168, 170, 172, 175, 178, 180, 181, 182–3, 186, 187, 188–92, 193, 208–10 and language, see language female, 12, 134, 150–3 practice of, 181–2, 186, 188, 189, 190, 206 gender, 115–17, 120, 121–2, 123, 150 genealogy, 3, 11, 73, 74, 81, 82, 94, 95n4, 96, 97, 101, 104–5, 106, 107, 111, 112, 112n3, 113–14, 119, 120, 130, 132, 163–4, 175, 177, 179–80, 185, 188, 189–90 of the subject, 3, 18, 164, 184 governmentality, 4, 164 Gregory of Nyssa, 162–3 Grimshaw, Jean, 135–7, 166n8

221

Grosz, Elisabeth, 11, 119–1, 125n19, 127n23, 152 Gutting, Gary, 2, 45n6, 46n8, 50, 53, 70n1, 73n4, 77n10, 96n5, 112 Habermas, Jurgen, ¨ 169n13 Hacking, Ian, 102 Hadot, Pierre, 173n17 Hall, Stuart Halperin, David, 129n24, 129n25, 206 Han, Beatrice, 18–19, 21n5, 32–3n15, 36n19, 68, 73n4, 96, 102, 104–5 Haraway, Donna, 5 Heidegger, Martin, 32, 53, 74–5 Heinämaa, Sara, 72n3, 120–1n13 Hekman, Susan, 6 Herculine Barbin, 116 hermeneutics, 73, 74 of the self, 162 Himanka, Juha, 44n5 historicism, 55, 56–7, 67–8 historicity, 9, 55, 67–9, 133, 137, 148 history, 21, 49–50, 67, 68–9, 77–9, 112, 114, 118, 119, 132 History of Sexuality, vol. i, 3–4, 11, 100, 105n16, 111, 113, 124, 125, 127–8, 163n4 History of Sexuality, vol. ii, 4, 157, 159–60, 162, 163 History of Sexuality, vol. iii, 4, 157, 159–60, 162, 163 Hoeller, Keith, 7 Holenstein, Elmar, 145 Hoy, David Couzens, 119, 133n30, 175–6, 179 Husserl, Edmund, 6, 8–9, 10, 32, 38, 40–6, 47–8, 49, 51–2, 53–4, 55–60, 60n20, 62–3, 64n25, 64n26, 68, 69, 72, 79, 139, 144, 146–7, 148, 202 intentionality, 139–40, 203 Irigaray, Luce, 5 Kant, Immanuel, 28–30, 32–3n15, 49, 51–2, 54, 68, 159, 182, 183, 184–5, 186, 187 Kaufman, Walter, 183n15 knowledge and power, see power conditions of possibility of, 18, 20–3, 29, 38, 55, 61, 67, 68–9, 73, 76, 78, 94 empirical, 28, 54–5, 56 scientific, 18, 22, 48 Kristeva, Julia, 82n14

222

index

Lacan, Jacques, 82n14, 118n11, 130n27 language, 10–11, 25–6, 27, 34, 34n6, 36, 74, 76, 87–8, 89, 118, 129, 130, 132, 170, 171, 172–3, 191 and freedom, 10–11, 19, 81–2, 84–5, 88, 89, 189 and phenomenology, see phenomenology Levinas on, 199–201 Lebrun, Gérard, 40, 52 Levin, David, 132n29 Levinas, Emmanuel, 9, 13, 192, 196–205 life-world, 41–5, 47–8, 49, 57, 58, 59, 62, 64, 67 Lingis, Alphonso, 203 literature, 10, 34n16, 81, 84–7 avant-garde, 10, 34n16, 82–5, 189 Machado, Robert, 71n2 Madness and Civilization, 7, 88, 169, 171 Mahon, Michel, 167 Maladie mental et personalité, 7 man as empirico-transcendental doublet, 31–3, 57, 73 doubles of, 32–3, 53–9 paradox of, 53, 54–3, 67–9 McNay, Lois, 123–4, 166n8, 167 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9, 12, 32, 53, 119, 132–3, 134, 135–47, 148–50, 151–3 Mohanty, J. N., 61n23, 103n14 naturalism, 55, 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 9, 29, 33, 34, 94, 95n4, 99, 111, 119, 183, 188 nominalism, 35 O’Farrell, Claire, 21, 77n11, 88–9 O’Leary, Timothy, 168n11, 169, 195 order, 19–20, 81, 89 Order of Things, The, 3, 7, 10, 17–18, 19–23, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40–1, 44–5, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 69, 70, 71, 74–5, 76, 78, 79–80, 84, 85, 89, 183 Patton, Paul, 188 Pheng Cheah, 94, 95 phenomenology, 4, 6–9, 29, 41–5, 204 and archaeology, 72–3, 77, 94 and language, 64–6, 142, 145 and science, 42–3, 45, 47–9, 52, 55

and the subject, 41, 44, 47, 58, 59–61, 93–4, 109, 137–8, 141–50, 151, 202 of the body, (see also bodies, lived), 135, 136, 137–41, 142–6, 147, 148–50, 151–3 Foucault and, 6–9, 30, 32–3, 35, 38, 40–1, 44–5, 47, 48–9, 52, 53–8, 67–9, 70, 76, 94–5, 103–4, 132, 134, 145n12 Plato, 162 pleasure, 126–7, 129, 132, 158, 159 and body, see bodies and resistance, see bodies and resistance positivism, 18, 29, 30, 32, 55, 57 post-structuralism, 1, 2, 5, 93 power, 12, 94–5, 97, 98–102, 106, 108–9, 113, 118, 123, 126, 129, 167, 176–9, 184, 186, 190, 191, 194 and body, see bodies and games, 105, 108 and knowledge, 4, 96, 97, 102, 104–5, 107, 108, 110, 113, 122, 126, 130, 132, 150, 165, 196, 204, 206 and sexuality, 115, 116 bio-, 100, 103, 127, 132, 150 normalizing, 12, 111, 127, 131, 132, 167, 168, 177, 182 practices, 11, 12, 36, 77, 104, 105–8, 119, 129, 132, 170, 171, 185, 191, 192 discursive, 20, 72–3, 78, 89, 96–7 dividing, 3, 150, 151–3 of the self, 159, 161, 165, 166n8, 168–70, 172, 193, 196, 204 scientific, 35, 71, 72, 102 present critique of the, 9, 12–13, 175, 184–5, 186, 187, 190 ontology of the, 13, 75–6, 184 psychoanalysis, 18, 93, 118n11, 139n4, 141 Pulkkinen, Tuija, 191 Rabinow, Paul, 46n9, 71–3, 77, 119, 132–3, 164, 191 Rajchman, John, 2, 82, 82n14, 85, 178, 182–9 relativism, 5n4, 67, 170, 172 resistance, 11, 108, 109, 123, 165, 167–8, 194, 209 and the body, see body responsibility, 197–8, 201–2, 203, 204 Roussel, Raymond, 82–5

index Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8n9, 13, 32, 53 Schilder, Paul, 139n4 science, 3, 74–5, 129, 185 and discourse, see discourse and knowledge, see knowledge and phenomenology, see phenomenology history of, 22, 28, 48, 49–51, 79, 80 human sciences, 31, 35, 98, 102, 103, 113 self, 4, 163–5, 171, 174, 175, 181, 206 care of the, 11, 12, 161, 162–3, 170, 171, 174, 188, 193–4 practices of the, see practices relationship to the, 4, 158–9, 163, 194 technologies of the, 4, 89, 161–5, 196 sex (sexe), 114–17, 122, 124–6 sexuality, 4, 89, 104, 109, 113–15, 116, 120, 124–6, 127, 129, 133–4, 157–8, 162, 163 Merleau-Ponty on, 136–7, 138, 140–1, 148 Shepherdson, Charles, 118n11, 130n27 Smart, Barry, 197–8 Steinbock, Anthony, 144n11, 148n16, 151 structuralism, 9, 18, 73, 74, 93 subject, 3, 12, 70–1, 88, 108–9, 199, 201, 202–3 conditions of possibility for, 94–5, 97, 100, 106–8, 182 ethical, 13, 158–9, 160, 161, 163–4, 166, 167, 185, 192, 195–6, 197, 198–9, 200–1, 202, 203–5, 206, 207

223

Foucault’s understanding of, 6, 7, 79–82, 85–7, 89, 94–5, 98, 100–2, 103–4, 105, 106–8, 130, 150–1, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167–8, 179, 180, 185, 187, 188, 190, 191–2, 194–5, 196, 206 in phenomenology, see phenomenology subjection, 97–8, 99, 100, 101–2, 103, 108–9, 123, 159, 160, 165, 167, 189 Surrealism, 82–4 Taylor, Charles, 104 technologies disciplinary, 3, 98, 103, 110n1, 130, 189 governmental, 108, 164–5 of the self, see self transcendental conditions, 21, 37, 69, 72, 107 intersubjectivity, 6, 43, 57, 60n20, 62, 137, 143–4, 145–50, 151–2, 153 subjectivity, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 59–61, 64–5, 69, 146 Veyne, Paul, 169n12, 173n16 Viskers, Rudi, 151 Webb, David, 79 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 105, 170, 171, 171n14, 172 Young, Iris Marion, 135–7 Zahavi, Dan, 60n20, 63, 143n10, 146, 146–7n14, 147n15

Foucault on Freedom

Foucault on Freedom and Truth

Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty