After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century [1 ed.] 1316506045, 9781316506042, 9781316492864, 9781107140493

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
A Note on Editions Used
Introduction
Part I Going After Foucault
1 Foucault’s Genealogy
2 Foucault’s Subjectivities
3 Foucault’s History of Neoliberalism
4 Foucault’s Biopower
Part II Coming After Foucault
5 Foucault and Literary Theory
6 Foucault and Queer Theory
7 Foucault, Race, and Racism
8 Foucault and Ecology
Part III Reading After Foucault
9 Foucault and Sex
10 Foucault’s Ethics
11 Foucault and the Queer Pharmatopia
12 Foucault and True Crime
Index

Citation preview

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A F T E R F O U C AU LT

The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, contextualize, and contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault’s work, or a series of interventions aimed specifically at experts, After Foucault explores his critical afterlives, situates his work in current debates, and explains his intellectual legacy. As well as offering up-to-date assessments of Foucault’s ongoing importance in fields such as literary studies, sexuality studies, and history, chapters explore his relevance for urgent and emerging disciplines and debates, including ecology, animal studies, and the analysis of neoliberalism. Written in an accessible style, by leading experts, After Foucault demonstrates a commitment to taking seriously the work of a key twentieth-century thinker for contemporary academic disciplines, political phenomena, and cultural life. Lisa Downing is an internationally renowned specialist of history and theories of sexuality, who is currently Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is author, co-author, and editor of scores of publications, including The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (2008). In 2009, her interdisciplinary work was recognized by the award of the prestigious Phillip Leverhulme Prize (for outstanding scholars under the age of thirty-six). Her publications on gender, sexuality, murder, and perversion have attracted considerable media interest, and she has most recently appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Aloud.

AFTER SERIES This series focuses on the legacy of several iconic figures, and key themes, in the origins and development of literary theory. Each book in the series attempts to isolate the influence, legacy and the impact of thinkers. Each figure addressed not only bequeathed specific concepts and doctrines to literary study, but they effectively opened up new critical landscapes for research. It is this legacy that this series tries to capture, with every book being designed specifically for use in literature departments. Throughout each book the concept of ‘After’ is used in 3 ways: After in the sense of trying to define what is quintessential about each figure: ‘What has each figure introduced into the world of literary studies, criticism and interpretation?’ After in a purely chronological sense: ‘What comes after each figure?’, ‘What has his/her influence and legacy been?’ and ‘How have they changed the landscape of literary studies?’ Lastly, After in a practical sense: ‘How have their respective critical legacies impacted on an understanding of literary texts?’ Each book is a collaborative volume with an international cast of critics and their level is suited for recommended reading on courses.

Published Titles After Foucault: Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century Edited by Lisa Downing University of Birmingham After Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté University of Pennsylvania After Lacan: Literature, Theory, and Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Ankhi Mukherjee University of Oxford Forthcoming titles After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the 21st Century Edited by Bashir Abu-Manneh University of Kent

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A F T E R F O U C AU LT Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century

Edi ted by L I S A D OW N I N G University of Birmingham

University Printing House, Cambridge CB 2 8BS , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316506042 DOI: 10.1017/9781316492864 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication 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 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-14049-3 Hardback ISBN 978-1-316-50604-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URL s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors A Note on Editions Used

page vii ix xiii

Introduction

1

Lisa Downing

Part I Go ing A f ter F oucault 1

Foucault’s Genealogy

17

Robert Gillett

2

Foucault’s Subjectivities

31

Monica Greco and Martin Savransky

3

Foucault’s History of Neoliberalism

46

Nicholas Gane

4

Foucault’s Biopower

61

Kay Peggs and Barry Smart

Part II C om i ng A f ter F oucault 5

Foucault and Literary Theory

79

Simon During

6

Foucault and Queer Theory

93

Lynne Huffer

7

Foucault, Race, and Racism

107

Rey Chow

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Contents

vi 8

Foucault and Ecology

122

Emma A. Foster

P art III Re adi ng Af ter F oucault 9

Foucault and Sex

141

Tim Dean

10

Foucault’s Ethics

155

Jacques Khalip

11

Foucault and the Queer Pharmatopia

170

Oliver Davis

12

Foucault and True Crime

185

Lisa Downing

Index

201

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press, Ray Ryan, and his assistant, Edgar Mendez, for their help and support in the course of the planning and production of this book. Thanks also to the anonymous expert readers for their enthusiasm for this project and for their suggestions. My postgraduate student Katie Masters is owed a debt of gratitude for her meticulous assistance with the preparation of the manuscript and proofs. Finally, to all of my contributors, thank you for your commitment and for making it a pleasure for me to work with you on this project.

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Notes on Contributors

Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University, USA, and the author of numerous influential books on modern literature, film, critical theory, and cultural politics. Her previous writings on Foucault can be found in her books such as The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002); Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (2012); and Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (2014). Chow’s work has appeared in more than ten languages. Oliver Davis is Reader in French Studies at Warwick University, UK. He is the author of Jacques Rancière (2010) and editor of a volume of essays, Rancière Now (2013). He co-edited a special issue of Paragraph entitled Queer Theory’s Return to France (35, 2) and a special issue of Sexualities on bareback sex and queer theory (18, 1–2). His work involves politics, philosophy, literature, history, cultural studies, and critical theory, in particular queer theory. He is currently writing a book which presents a genealogical analysis of the security society, starting at the Mettray reformatory. Tim Dean is Professor of English and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, USA. He is the author or editor of six books, most recently Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009) and co-editor, with Steven Ruszczycky and David Squires, of Porn Archives (2014). He has a forthcoming book titled What Is Psychoanalytic Thinking? Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is a specialist in sexuality and gender studies, critical theory, and the history of medicine. She is author or co-author of six books and numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editor of six book-length works. Recent ix

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Notes on Contributors authored books include The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (2008); The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (2013); and Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (co-authored with Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, 2015).

Simon During holds an Australian Professorial Research Fellowship at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has previously taught at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is well known internationally as a critic and theorist, with essays and books on postcolonialism, cultural studies, British literary history, and secularization theory, among other topics. His monographs include Foucault and Literature (1991), Modern Enchantments:  The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2000), and Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of the Emancipations (2013). Emma A. Foster is Lecturer in International Politics and Gender at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include queer theory, international sustainable development policy, and development studies more broadly. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on these subjects. She is currently researching the dynamics of constructions of gender in international environmental policy in relation to the economic crisis, and the links between depoliticization and Foucault’s conception of governmentality in relation to international and British politics. Nicholas Gane is Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, UK. His current research addresses questions of banking, finance, and crisis. His previous publications include Max Weber and Contemporary Capitalism (2012), New Media: Key Concepts (with David Beer, 2008), The Future of Social Theory (2004), and Max Weber and Postmodern Theory (2002). Robert Gillett is Reader in German and Comparative Cultural Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is the editor, with Lisa Downing, of Queer in Europe (2011), and of the special issue of Sexualities on European Queer Culture (2012). With B. J. Epstein he edited Queer in Translation (2017). His articles on queer theory include one co-authored with Downing on the English translation of Michel Foucault’s La volonté de savoir. His monograph on the proto-queer German author Hubert Fichte appeared in 2013, and he has written numerous articles on queer in German and/or German queer.

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Notes on Contributors

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Monica Greco is a Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and a fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation. Her research addresses the political and ethical implications of concepts in medicine and psychiatry with a particular focus on psychosomatics. She is the author of Illness as a Work of Thought: A Foucauldian Perspective on Psychosomatics (1998) and of numerous articles on a range of topics, including health as a vector of neoliberal forms of subjectivity and self-governance, vitalism, and normativity; medical humanities; and performativity in relation to the problem of contested illnesses and ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, USA. She received her PhD in French from the University of Michigan (1989), and has taught at Yale and Rice Universities. She is the author of four books:  Are the Lips a Grave? A  Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (2013); Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (2010); Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia and the Question of Difference (1998); and Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (1992). She is currently completing an artist’s book with Chicago artist Jennifer Yorke. Jacques Khalip is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Brown University, USA. He is the author of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (2009) and the co-editor of Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011) and Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism (2016). His recent book, Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (2018), is a study of reflections on extinction and wasted life through literature, photography, and film. He is currently co-authoring a book with Claire Colebrook and Lee Edelman entitled Unlivable. Kay Peggs is Professor of Sociology at Kingston University and is Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Animal Ethics, UK. Publications include Identity and Repartnering after Separation (2007) with Richard Lampard; Animals and Sociology (2012); and articles in journals such as Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, and Sociological Review. She is co-editor of Observation Methods (2013) and Critical Social Research Ethics (2018) with Barry Smart and Joseph Burridge and is assistant editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics. Forthcoming publications include Experiments, Animal Bodies and Human Values and the co-authored (Not) Consuming Animals:  Ethics, Environment and Lifestyle Choices.

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Notes on Contributors

Martin Savransky is Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he directs the Unit of Play and teaches philosophy, social theory, and pluralistic politics and ethics. Working in the interstices of a variety of disciplines, Savransky is the author of The Adventure of Relevance (2016, with a foreword by Isabelle Stengers) and co-editor of Speculative Research:  The Lure of Possible Futures (2017), and has published widely in the fields of social and cultural theory, pragmatist and process philosophy, and postcolonial studies. Barry Smart is Professor of Sociology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Publications include Foucault, Marxism and Critique (1983, republished 2009); Michel Foucault, Key Sociologists series (1985, revised edition 2002); Facing Modernity:  Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality (1999); and Consumer Society: Critical Issues and Environmental Consequences (2010), as well as the edited volumes Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments I (1994) and Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments II (1995). He is co-editor of Handbook of Social Theory (2001) with George Ritzer, and Observation Methods (2013) and Critical Social Research Ethics (2018) with Kay Peggs and Joseph Burridge.

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A Note on Editions Used

Authors refer to and quote from different versions of English translations of texts by Foucault throughout the book. This can, in some cases, be attributed to the differing availability of certain titles in the countries in which authors are based, and in others to the preference of an author for a given translation of a work, or, indeed, to draw attention to word choices made in translation in specific editions. For these reasons, and for easy excerpting of individual chapters for use in teaching and research, each chapter is followed by complete references, in the form of endnotes, enabling each chapter to stand alone.

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Introduction Lisa Downing

I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me. Michel Foucault, interview, 1971

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will. Michel Foucault, interview, 1989

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) considered himself a ‘historian of the present’.1 By this, he meant that he intended his archeological and genealogical studies of institutions and phenomena, such as psychiatry, prisons, and criminality, to reveal, via analysis of the past conditions that produced them, a truth about our enduring relationship with them in the present. Foucault first used the term ‘history of the present’ in Discipline and Punish (1975), where he rhetorically asks why he is motivated to carry out a historical analysis of the carceral system: ‘Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present’.2 Thus, a ‘history of the present’ is not anachronism, that is, the past viewed and distorted through the necessarily biased lens of the present; rather, as Foucault put it: ‘I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present’.3 Given Foucault’s desire to write a history of the present, it bears asking in what ways, and to what extent, the concerns of his present speak, still today, to ours. The work of Foucault is much read, widely cited, and often misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this book aims to clarify, contextualize, and contribute to knowledge about Foucault in 1

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a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault’s work for absolute beginners (for several works of this kind already exist), or yet a series of interventions aimed specifically at Foucault specialists, and contributing to the scholarly debates of a small group of initiates, After Foucault instead explores a range of Foucault’s critical afterlives in an accessible and wide-ranging way, appealing to multiple readerships, contextualizing the place of his thought in current debates, and explaining the legacy with which Foucault leaves us today. While an array of disparate, disciplinary perspectives are brought together in the book, one contention underlies all the contributions: the ideas, concepts, and phenomena Foucault was working on in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s continue to speak to us today, some thirty-two years after his death. Eight years ago, in the afterword to my Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault, I wrote: If readers continue to be interested in Foucault – and all the signs suggest that this is the case  – it is, perhaps, because these very tensions and internal contradictions make him one of the most relevant thinkers for our current age.4

The ‘tensions and internal contradictions’ to which I drew attention here are key features of the Foucauldian œuvre and are, for many, a source of fascination that keeps us going back to Foucault. These include his ability to evoke, at the same time, a rejection of ‘depth claims’ and a paradoxical valorization of the transcendental or mystical voice of unreason exposed in the words of ‘mad’ writers. They recall his suspicion of the idea of the sovereign human self, on the one hand, and his propounding of ‘self-stylization’ as a project of ethics, on the other. And they point to his critique of the dominance of discourses about sexuality over techniques for producing bodily pleasures in the modern West, at the same time as his own multivolume History of Sexuality cannot but also constitute an example of a ‘discourse about sex’. My 2008  ‘Afterword’ reads, in hindsight, as a statement of the need, not so much for the book I was writing then, but rather for the current book. It signals the ongoing aptness of Foucault’s thought for helping us to apprehend ‘the political, ecological and ideological conditions in which we live’5 – conditions which are increasingly often marked by discourses of crisis, of conflict, of rupture, and of end times. In particular, our postmillennial condition seems marked precisely by this idea of ‘after’, encapsulated in the discourse of ‘post-’. Yet being ‘post’ is never so simple as it may seem. We are allegedly ‘post-human’, yet we are troubled, in an

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all-too-human way, by the ills of our age; we are immersed in neoliberal values and systems, and yet we often tend to understand our discontent in individualistic terms and to seek respite from it via the very consumerist pursuits neoliberalism encourages (so-called ‘post-feminism’ in particular epitomizes this trend); we are in an era of ‘post-truth’ politics, yet (therefore) in truly desperate need of the skills of apprehending in whose interests lies are being told. Foucault, in all his difficult, rich, debunkingyet-still-oddly-idealistic, complexity is relevant, then, precisely because we are living in profoundly contradictory times, in times in which surface and depth are often perceived as interchangeable, and in which the notion that something is over – is ‘post-’ – may be used to exculpate those who benefit from getting us to avert our eyes from still-operational ideologies and phenomena. Just as Foucault’s histories of the present involved identifying or ‘diagnosing’ a contemporary phenomenon or problematic, and then tracing its emergence in order to destabilize or disturb the commonplace apprehension of it,6 so we may look back to Foucault and his methods to re-view our troubled world through fresh eyes.

The Foucault Industry This book is not the first to consider how Foucault’s writing and thought have gone on to shape ways of approaching the search for knowledge in the disciplines and in the world. Jonathan Arac’s 1988 collection, entitled, along similar lines to the current work, After Foucault:  Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges,7 reflects on possible applications of Foucault’s work for a number of fields and disciplines, most notably philology, history, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Published only four years after Foucault’s death, and emerging from a conference that took place three years prior to publication, the book’s reflection on how Foucault’s ‘history’ speaks to ‘the present’ evokes, inevitably, largely the same ‘present’ as that in which Foucault himself was working. Its disciplinary focus also very much reflects the fashions of the 1980s in the humanities disciplines, making it a historical work in its own right now, a product of its own (and of Foucault’s) time. Therefore, while Arac’s book is a valuable contribution to Foucault studies, which contains some significant essays, it is time for a work that brings some of the concerns raised therein bang up to date. More recently, Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli’s Foucault and the History of Our Present (2014)8 reads Foucault as a practitioner of ‘radical journalism’, observing the present from a position of ‘dislocation from the space where we are’.9 The book sets out to examine

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contemporary questions of governmentality, subjectivity, and politics, from a Foucauldian perspective. While this agenda superficially resembles that of the current work, Fuggle et al.’s book is aimed at a specialist readership, and the co-authored introduction to the collection is densely, and at times opaquely, written.10 Other existing works focus on how Foucault’s legacy influences a specific field, with numerous titles appearing particularly in the field of history and historiography. Examples include Robert S. Leventhal’s collection Reading After Foucault (1994),11 which focuses specifically on a Foucauldian reading of German history in the period 1750–1830, and John Neubauer’s edited book of 1999, Cultural History After Foucault,12 the aim of which is to examine how Foucault’s work casts new light on the cultural historical scholarship of Antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century. Several works on politics after Foucault also exist. Richard Marsden’s The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault (1999)13 attempts to challenge the critical orthodoxy that Foucault and Marx are incompatible intellectual and political bedfellows by re-reading them both, retroactively, through the philosophy of critical realism. Michael Clifford’s Political Genealogy After Foucault:  Savage Identities (2001)14 uses the figures of the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘savage noble’ to carry out a genealogical analysis of the political subject of modernity. More recently, Magnus Hörnqvist’s 2010 work, Risk, Power and the State: After Foucault,15 assesses the strengths – and weaknesses – of Foucault’s models of governmentality, discourse analysis, and critique of Deleuzianism for understanding the workings of contemporary state power. In some fields and sub-disciplines, then, Foucauldian thought has become axiomatic, and the number of recent publications charting and evaluating his influence attests to this. In addition to history and politics, the related interdisciplinary fields of gender studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory are notable inheritors of Foucauldian ideas. And it is these fields of enquiry that have most meaningfully imported a Foucauldian methodology, more or less wholesale, into their epistemology and hermeneutics. Judith Butler, often (and not unproblematically) considered one of the principal inaugurators of gender studies and ‘queer’,16 employs recognizably Foucauldian methods throughout her œuvre on gender, bodies, and sex.17 Butler’s notions of performativity and drag, developed most fully in Gender Trouble (1990), build on Foucauldian insights from the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) which hold that sexual desire is not natural or deeply individual, but rather produced in and through discourse, and is both social and political. (Butler develops Foucault’s

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analysis of sexuality to include also gender identity and gender performance.) Similarly, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential Epistemology of the Closet (1990),18 published in the same year as Gender Trouble, builds on Foucauldian ideas about the relationship of knowledge to power to explore the meanings of ‘closetedness’, of knowing and not-knowing, in the sphere of sexual identity. She argues that, from the nineteenth century onwards, Western discourse has organized knowledge along binary lines, that can be understood as mapping on to the assumed heterosexual/homosexual dyad (where the former term is unmarked and positive and the latter othered and subordinated). More recently, Lynne Huffer’s monograph, Mad for Foucault (2010),19 has re-envisioned queer’s inheritance of Foucault by paying attention to Foucauldian texts other than the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in particular his early writings on madness, in order to show that the queer insights Foucault offers us for understanding the world are both sprinkled throughout his œuvre and are, indeed at the heart of his entire life’s project in all its disparate glory. The existence of a not insignificant number of titles on varying aspects of Foucault’s afterlives, then, corroborates the strength of his enduring relevance beyond his lived moment. Yet, what none of these titles quite does, and what precisely motivates the writers of the present book, is, first, to offer clarification of key concepts from Foucault’s œuvre that persist in shaping our understanding of the world; second, to contextualize Foucault’s texts and thought in a range of both traditional and emergent academic fields; and, third and finally, to carry out a series of readings after Foucault. In this way, by attending to these three distinct but connected concerns in one book, After Foucault does not stop at elaborating the ongoing usefulness of the Foucauldian ‘toolbox’, but goes on to deploy it in a series of timely, innovative, and heuristic ways.

After Foucault The division of the book into three parts is underpinned by its three aims, as stated earlier: clarifying, contextualizing, and carrying out readings. Accordingly, the chapters in Part I, ‘Going After Foucault’, analyse what is particular to, or at the heart of, a series of key Foucauldian concepts. (They ‘go after’ the substance of these concepts.) These are notions that, despite first appearing in works by Foucault between the 1960s and the 1980s, continue to animate critical debates today. Beginning with the central question of thinking of  history differently, the opening chapter by Robert Gillett shows how ‘genealogy’, developed in the work of Friedrich

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Nietzsche, and providing a distinct alternative in the nineteenth century to the contemporaneous and competing Hegelian model of dialectics, inspired Foucault precisely because it offers an account of history that foregrounds the place of power relations and discontinuity in historical processes.20 Gillett demonstrates how this concept, that animated Foucault’s late work, continues to be productive for thinking about narratives of identity in our epoch. By showing how genealogical thought is key to queer thinking and politics, Gillett argues that understanding genealogy fully offers insight also into understanding the ongoing political necessity of queer. He therefore suggests strongly that, contrary to some recent claims, we are very far from being ‘post-queer’.21 In their chapter on Foucault’s multiple theorizations of subjectivity, Monica Greco and Martin Savransky contend that Foucault’s work constitutes ‘a veritable event in the history of modern thought’, such that thinking about subjectivity after Foucault always, inevitably, involves thinking it with and through him. This is the nature, they suggest, of inheritance. Looking at the models of the self offered by Foucault enables them to plot two historical/philosophical ways of thinking:  first of the self in relation to, and as revelatory of, truth, and second of the self as aligned with the question, not of what one is, but of what one might become. Following the second model, they offer a reading of Foucault’s later work on the ethical care for the self as an interrogatory gesture, opening up for contemporary and later readers the question of what kinds of relationship we may build between subjectivity, truth, and freedom. The problematic nature of freedom and selfhood is picked up again in Nicholas Gane’s chapter on Foucault’s controversial and much-debated lectures and texts on neoliberalism. Gane focuses on Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France, published in English as The Birth of Biopolitics in 2008, which are notable both for being one of Foucault’s rare historical analyses of twentieth-century phenomena, and for having been delivered in France at the very time that the pro-free market ideology of neoliberalism was taking hold in Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan’s United States. Rather than seeking to answer unequivocally the oft-posed question of whether Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism was approbatory or condemnatory, Gane instead takes the eminently Foucauldian position of tracing the genealogy of neoliberalism back through Austrian and American economic philosophical traditions, in order to show up the logic and contradictions inherent to, and subtending, neoliberal philosophy. In the context of the recent financial crisis, and ongoing global economic uncertainty, the task of seeking a deeper and fuller understanding of where

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neoliberalism comes from, and what it aims toward, via the genealogical method, appears not only salient, but urgent. The final chapter in Part I focusses on Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics, the system by which the organization and governance of human populations as living individuals and groups are arrived at. After situating biopower in Foucault’s œuvre, as one of several modes of power he chose to investigate (along with sovereign power and disciplinary power), the authors, Kay Peggs and Barry Smart, explore an implication of biopower that Foucault himself raised, but did not pursue in any great depth: the question of the instrumentalization by human beings of non-human animals. Peggs and Smart show how Foucault’s work is a central tool for thinking about the form of power that operates in battery farms and scientific laboratories, and for raising ethical questions about human–non-human power relations and the largely unchallenged bigotry of speciesism. The chapters in Part I, then, offer critical insights into some of Foucault’s most intriguing ideas, enabling readers with an interest in Foucault to get to grips with the particularity of his theory and the flavour of his legacy, and, in each case, linking a key concept to phenomena, events, and debates that are relevant to the contemporary world. The chapters in Part II, entitled ‘Coming After Foucault’, attend to the chronological and influential senses of ‘after’. In particular, they examine the influence of Foucault’s writings on a range of the disciplinary/discursive fields (in the academy and in political movements), where his ideas have permeated, sometimes in ways that are implicit, partial, or not apparent from outside the discipline in question. In the first chapter of this part of the book, Simon During explores Foucault’s impact on the sphere of literary theory. He charts Foucault’s uneven reception in the Anglophone world and isolates an element in Foucault’s writing about literature – a concern with the mystical and the sacred – that may have placed him at odds with what During identifies as the secular, identitarian, and liberatory underpinnings of critical theory of the late twentieth century. During argues that, where Foucault has been taken up for literary criticism, the texts that have been mined are those that examine institutions and power, not those that explore the transcendental voice of ‘mad’ writers. It is, then, this earlier, oft-ignored element of Foucault’s corpus that During envisages as the potential inspiration for a ‘secular criticism-to-come, willing to risk attaching itself to literature’s metaphysical and mystical capacities’. During’s monograph, Foucault and Literature (1992),22 is one of the few extant, full-length works about Foucault’s own literary criticism and on the uses of Foucault for

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literary criticism. In his chapter of After Foucault, he brings the insights in this key text up to date for the twenty-first century. In somewhat similar vein, Lynne Huffer’s chapter on Foucault and queer theory, much like her ground-breaking monograph Mad for Foucault, discussed earlier in this Introduction, takes as its starting point the fact that, while the idea of Foucault as a progenitor of queer is widely accepted, only certain parts of Foucault’s corpus tend to be credited with being properly queer (namely The History of Sexuality). Reading Foucault through queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on love, Huffer suggests that attending to a genealogy of love in Foucault may offer a new perspective on how he contributes to the history of queer. This suggestion comes in tandem with an observation that very recent texts of queer theory are marked by a move away from Foucault’s hermeneutics of suspicion, and in the direction of an affective or ‘new materialist’ turn. This broad ‘turn’, which has impacted critical theory in recent years, aims to relativize the post-structuralist focus on language (or discourse understood as language + power) with a consideration of embodied experiences of, in Huffer’s words, ‘sensation, matter, and affect’. In her chapter on Foucault, race, and racism, Rey Chow charts some of the criticisms levelled at Foucault with regard to race – particularly the common accusation that he is guilty of Eurocentrism. She then goes on to reject such easy accusations in favour of a more nuanced reading of Foucault’s writing on race to show what it might bring to a critical apprehension of race and racism. She argues that a careful reading of Foucault allows for an understanding of racialization as, not simply a matter of prejudice based on perceived skin colour, but rather as aligned with ‘state institutions, social practices, and individual conscience productions that continue to be galvanized by Christian techniques of power’. Ending on a note of warning, Chow suggests that, at the time of writing, in 2016, Muslims have come to wear the mantle of ‘racialized other’, with Islam consistently associated with the terror against which (Western) ‘society must be defended’. Part II closes with Emma A. Foster’s consideration of ecology and environmentalism, fields that are seldom considered in works about Foucault, but that have nevertheless been influenced in recent years by Foucauldian insights. Foster shows how Foucault’s thought is pertinent for the field in terms of the challenge it poses to simple or singular definitions both of ‘Nature’ and of the human subject who interacts with it. A Foucauldian analysis, fully aware of the workings of discursive power, allows for problematization of the notion of the ‘good ecosubject’, who is often

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constructed along ‘racialized, gendered and heteronormative lines’. Given the intensifying focus on ecological concerns in politics and international relations, and the recent turn in literary and cultural studies towards ecocriticism, Foster’s chapter provides both a crucial survey of existing uses of Foucault for the field and an analysis of the import of resisting the normativity inherent in some assumptions underlying ecocritique. Part III, ‘Reading After Foucault’, addresses the question of how our readings of texts and visual culture, of cultural products, and of social phenomena have changed, or may be inflected, as a result of Foucault’s intellectual legacy. This part of the book opens with a chapter by Tim Dean, who interrogates what is understood in the twenty-first century by ‘sex’, how this differs from ‘sexuality’, and how a close reading of Foucault may help us to make sense of both. Using examples from contemporary culture, including recent campaigns about sexual assault on US university campuses, Dean argues that Foucault offers a necessary corrective to ‘US myths of individualism’, by offering an account of (sexual) ‘power as relational’. Further, he wonders what would need to be done to wrest ‘sex’ away from ‘sexuality’, that is, away from the discursive province of the medical and psy sciences, and to reframe it, as Foucault would have wished, on the side of aesthetics. Jacques Khalip, in his chapter on Foucauldian ethics, also opens with a focus on aesthetics. Khalip uses an auto-fictional literary text (Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 1990)  and a photographic artwork (Robert Mapplethorpe’s Fist Fuck/Double, 1978), alongside Foucault’s essays and interviews, to argue that ethics, for Foucault, must not be understood either as straightforward care for others, nor as material self-interest. Rather, he argues that Foucault propounds ‘a care for the self that rejects narcissistic claims about defending the future well-being of one’s own “life” ’. Engaging with recent work in antisocial queer theory, by names such as Lee Edelman,23 Khalip posits that Foucauldian ethics takes us beyond the horizons of personal aims and ambitions to suggest an almost post-human commitment to detachment. In short, Khalip reads against the grain to reveal a cruel and depersonalized Foucauldian ethics that stands in stark contradistinction to the more commonly recognizable one that asks ‘but couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?’24 Also drawing on semi-auto/biographical fiction as a starting point, Oliver Davis’s chapter on the ‘queer pharmatopia’ examines Mathieu Lindon’s novel, Learning What Love Means (2011), which depicts the life of a group of young students and philosophers, including a fictionalized version of the author, who frequented the apartment of the charismatic figure of ‘Michel’

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(the novel’s representative of Foucault) in the 1960s, and partook of recreational drugs. Via discussion of the fictional work, Davis undertakes a Foucauldian critique of the contemporary medicalized discourse of drug addiction, and the pathologization of the practice particularly when carried out by gay men (referencing the contemporary ‘epidemic’  – or ‘moral panic’, depending on one’s position  – of ‘chemsex’, or uninhibited sexual activity, enhanced by the influence of drugs, often in a party setting). Davis examines the extent to which Foucault’s recreational drug use can be understood, less as a pathological practice, and more as a creative ‘practice of the self ’. Finally, Part III closes with my chapter on Foucault and true crime. This chapter considers the fact that much ink has been spilled in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the service of writing about true crime and criminals, both in popular and academic contexts. It also notes that Foucault’s analysis of the criminal figure as an exceptional, ‘abnormal’ subject is a reference point for much writing of this kind. Yet, despite these facts, very little has been done to respond to Foucault’s recommendation in I Pierre Rivière… (1973) that researchers should assemble and analyse dossiers around crimes in order to identify the dominant discursive conditions surrounding and producing them. My chapter attempts precisely to take Foucault up on this: it undertakes a Foucauldian reading of three texts produced around a twentieth-century British criminal case, that of the Moors Murders (the killings of a number of children, carried out by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady in the North of England in the 1960s). The texts in the dossier are a work of classic New-Journalisminspired ‘true crime’, Emlyn Williams’s Beyond Belief (1967), a book about the psychology of murder written by the killer Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus (2001), and Myra, Beyond Saddleworth (2012), a novel by Jean Rafferty that explores what might have happened had Myra Hindley not died in prison in 2002, but instead been released. The chapter reflects upon the place of genre writing in contributing to the non-normative and mythical subjectification of the criminal; it looks at the porousness of genre, since each book considered deviates in key ways from being mere reportage; and it asks, finally, why the figure of the ‘abnormal’ criminal fascinated Foucault and continues to fascinate contemporary Western readers quite so much. In some ways, then, Part III is the most obviously relevant section of the book for students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, as three of its chapters take texts that span fact and fiction – semi-autobiographical novels and works in the true crime genre – as their objects of Foucauldian enquiry. Others ‘read’ a phenomenon – sex in the case of Dean’s chapter;

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ethics in Khalip’s – with and through Foucauldian texts and concepts. By examining a given text, trend, or phenomenon in light of Foucauldian ideas, the chapters in Part III offer the reader blueprints for undertaking their own Foucauldian readings of literary and cultural products. It is notable that some concepts and issues are discussed multiple times across the different chapters. Unsurprisingly, questions of power, history, and the self receive multiple treatments. But more strikingly, and in keeping with a work that brings the afterlives of Foucault up to the present day, questions of neoliberalism, community, and individuality; issues of ecological responsibility and animal welfare; debates about the sacred and the secular; and vexed questions of sexual identity – or queer dis-identification – recur in the context of several different analyses and discussions, pointing up areas of especial relevance to contemporary concerns. Throughout the book, the heterogeneity of both the Foucauldian corpus and potential approaches to it are preserved and foregrounded. Each of the authors takes his or her own analytical, political, and epistemological approach to the concepts, contexts, and texts he or she considers, and some of these stand in contradiction to, or disagreement with, each other. Contradictions are left deliberately unreconciled within the book, as they mark the precise multiplicity of resonances and possible interpretations that Foucault’s work opens up, and that render it, as discussed throughout this introduction, so eminently timely. Notes 1 For a thorough account of what Foucault means by this term, and where in his œuvre he uses it, see David Garland, ‘What Is a “History of the Present”? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions’, Punishment and Society, 16:4, 2014, 365–384. 2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), 31. 3 Lawrence D. Kritzman, ‘Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. L. D. Kritzman (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), 262. 4 Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118. 5 Ibid., 119. 6 Garland, ‘What Is a “History of the Present”?’, 368. 7 Jonathan Arac, After Foucault:  Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 8 Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli, eds., Foucault and the History of Our Present (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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9 Ibid., 1. 10 Additionally, many of the essays included in this work, while interesting in their own right, do not consider, as the editors claim, how Foucault’s work impacts the present, so much as the (fairly) recent past (e.g. the chapter on Marxism by Alberto Toscano, 26–42). See my review of this work:  Lisa Downing, ‘Review:  Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci and Martina Tazzioli (eds.), Foucault and the History of Our Present. Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015’, French Studies, 70:4, 2016, www.fs.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/08/13/fs.knw202.full.pdf 11 Robert S. Leventhal, ed., Reading After Foucault:  Institutions, Disciplines and Technologies of the Self in Germany, 1750–1830 (Detroit, MI:  Wayne State University Press, 1994). 12 John Neubauer, ed., Cultural History After Foucault (New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999). 13 Richard Marsden, The Nature of Capital:  Marx After Foucault (New  York, NY: Routledge, 1999). 14 Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy After Foucault: Savage Identities (London: Routledge, 2001). 15 Magnus Hörnqvist, Risk, Power and the State: After Foucault (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010). 16 First, since queer resists the narrative of origins and the myth of originators, it is always tricky to attribute such labels to names in the field. Second, it is worth being aware of the fact that the history of queer theory is susceptible to accusations of ‘whitewashing’. The coining of the term ‘queer’ is often attributed to Teresa de Lauretis, yet others argue that the radical woman of colour, Gloria Anzaldúa, both coined ‘queer’ and carried out queer work before either de Lauretis or Butler. See This Bridge Called My Back:  Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981). 17 From Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), through Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London:  Routledge, 1993), to Undoing Gender (London:  Routledge, 2004), Butler’s works on sex, gender, and bodies are thoroughgoingly underpinned by Foucauldian ideas of the importance of thinking sex through discourse (as suggested by the subtitle of Bodies That Matter). 18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 19 Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010). 20 ‘Genealogy’ is understood in Gillett’s account, and also in Lynne Huffer’s chapter in Section 2 of the book, as a critical reading practice as well as a way of understanding history. For Foucault, of course, who famously claimed ‘I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions’, the two are not distinct undertakings, as less queer versions of historiography might hold. See Foucault, ‘Interview with Lucille Finas’, in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. M. Morris and P. Patton (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979), 79.

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21 For an exploration of the contention that the work of queer is done and we are ‘post-queer’, see David V. Ruffalo, Post-Queer Politics (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2009) and James Penney, After Queer Theory:  The Limits of Sexual Politics (London: Pluto, 2014). 22 Simon During, Foucault and Literature:  Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992). 23 Lee Edelman’s No Future:  Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2004) is often considered the foundational text of ‘anti-social queer’, a Lacanian- rather than Foucauldian-influenced branch of queer that argues that discourses of health, reproduction, ‘The Child’, and, indeed, the future itself, are heteronormative concepts that are mobilized to other the dissident queer subject. Such a subject would do well, Edelman suggests, to reject these discourses of futurity rather than to seek assimilation with their values. 24 Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York, NY: New Press, 1997), 261.

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P a rt   I

Going After Foucault

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Ch apter 1

Foucault’s Genealogy Robert Gillett

Introduction Genealogy is, without a doubt, one of the key concepts in Foucault. As such, it has been extensively discussed in the secondary literature.1 The aim here is not to repeat these accounts. Rather, it is to approach the topic specifically from the perspective of a queer philologist. That is because, in the opinion of the author, Foucault’s genealogy can be closely related to queer theory and practice. And because Foucault, like Nietzsche before him, is programmatically concerned with the questionable relationship between words and things, Les mots et les choses.2 Now genealogy, of course, has been with us at least since Adam and Eve. Long before Americans began poring over parish registers looking for their ancestors, important people had relied on family trees as the justification for their place in society. Why else, after all, would the Holy Book of the Christians include such seemingly endless litanies of ‘begats’? That the word is ‘begat’, though, and not ‘brought forth’ points to a serious flaw in the system; for in the days before DNA testing there was no way of knowing for sure who did actually do the begetting. Hence it becomes necessary to take the written word for it: the appearance of certain names in chronicles like the Bible was the only thing that stood between legitimacy and bastardy, with all that implied. And precisely because so much is at stake, it becomes impossible not to mistrust the written sources on this point. From the very beginning then, genealogy, the documentary basis for structures of power, is tendentious and unreliable. It is also, of course, constitutively heteropatriarchal and profoundly misogynist. In this system, everything depends on couplings between people of different sexes, in which the only significant participant is the man. Accordingly, the place allotted to women in the Book of Chronicles is exiguous. And while we do not know (and should not care) what Seth and Co. did with their seed in their spare time, the obligation on them 17

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to be seen to have sons makes of these lists a stick and a carrot for the sexually less successful. For these others – the impotent, the barren, and those married to them, the onanist, the sodomite, and the unwed – society reserved some of its severest strictures. So much so, indeed, that in certain cases it was necessary to have recourse to (a) God. And family trees, if they take note of non-procreators at all, present them as irrelevant deviancies, as dead ends. In this sense, genealogy can exert tremendous pressure of a totalitarian and exclusionary kind. Unlike the arid catalogues of the Bible, however, family trees do at least make space for the unfruitful. In that sense they are more democratic than other dynastic records. They embody a shift, which is also observable in historiography more generally, from the political to the social, from the personage to the person. They are narrow in focus, but within that, they are comprehensive in their ambition. As a result, they are often partial and incomplete. Their concern for small details can intersect with and relativize grander trajectories, but need not do so. And they themselves make no attempt to narrate or explain. Rather than elaborating patterns of significance, they simply present traces of filiation. So while genealogies do share their diachronicity with history, the actual space they occupy within it is in fact quite different. As the title of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? makes clear, one of the purposes of this kind of genealogy is bound up with questions of identity. Discovering the ethnic or religious identity of an ancestor can profoundly affect a descendant’s sense of self. In some cases this can involve actively assuming membership of a particular group. Equally, stress can be laid on family likenesses and the extent to which allegedly individual traits are recognizably present in others. Indeed, it is often precisely in this field of similarity and difference that personal characteristics are established and understood. To that extent, genealogy can help to construct the subject by inserting it into a force field of filiations. The medical form of that force field, the one that is most likely to impinge on the body, is known as genetics. This is of course no more an exact science than trying to identify with ancestors. Like character traits, physical characteristics, illnesses, and liabilities to illness are not necessarily passed down from one generation to the next. Their presence in a family tree can have explicative but never predictive value. The danger of scientists failing to see this cannot be overestimated. For here the purchase that discourses of genealogy can have on the social construction of the individual becomes terrifyingly palpable. Even without recalling National Socialist notions of eugenics and racial purity, or the taxonomies

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of pathology enshrined in diagnostic manuals, the possibility of being assigned to a particular (risk) group simply on the basis of an involuntary association with others is the stuff of nightmare. The essence of that nightmare is the invention of categories of persons. If genealogy then is to neutralize the associated perils of genetics, it must do so by showing up the contingency of these categories. And this it can do by stressing its own flaws, breaks, gaps, and discontinuities. In other words, it is by insisting on its status as the opposite of a science, indeed as an ‘anti-science’, that genealogy can assert its emancipatory potential. To readers of Michel Foucault, the term ‘anti-science’ will be familiar. In a retrospective and summative lecture from 1976, Foucault writes that genealogies are quite precisely anti-sciences.3 Taken seriously, this sentence should preclude both approaches to the subject of genealogy in and after Foucault that seek to systematize his thought and those on the contrary that pretend it is diffuse and ill thought through. Hence the need to establish what genealogy is before examining what Foucault does with it.

Re-Reading Nietzsche It would also seem indispensable to revisit the ancestry of the term. And this leads us back, inescapably, to Friedrich Nietzsche. The importance of Nietzsche generally, and in particular of his 1887 polemic Zur Genealogie der Moral,4 for Foucault as a whole, and especially for that aspect of his method which is the subject of this chapter, has become axiomatic. Foucault himself acknowledged it, describing himself as ‘simply Nietzschean’.5 And many critics have reiterated the point – none perhaps more succinctly than C. G. Prado.6 It is sometimes assumed that this is because Nietzsche was the first genealogist of morality. Martin Saar, for example, is expansive on the point: Since Nietzsche introduced the term ‘genealogy’ into philosophical discourse, the most obvious thing to say about it is that it is a way of writing history. Nietzsche’s interest in genetic and evolutionary reflection on the ‘origin of morality’ in the middle of the 1880s was born out of an interest in a potentially critical historicization of something that until then wasn’t historicized, namely moral attitudes and values, ideals, norms and institutionalized modes of thinking and acting.7

Yet Nietzsche’s text is in fact a sustained engagement with other, previous practitioners of the genre. He uses the plural, and the shorthand designation ‘englisch’ to implicate a whole tradition.8 But his actual target,

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as he explicitly states, is a single book by Paul Rée.9 Rée is an unreconstructed Darwinist; and he does not believe in free will. So for him the reasons why human beings value altruism, suffer from pangs of conscience, and punish wrongdoing present a serious philosophical problem. And the solution he proposes is genealogical in a very specific sense. It cannot be historical because Rée cannot yet conceive of Christian morality as changeable. Instead, like Rousseau seeking a space for egalitarianism in pre-revolutionary France, Rée has recourse to a tendentious and imaginary prehistory embodied in the figure of the primitive. This ‘Wilder’, of course, is a pure projection; and what drives him is merely the logic of Rée’s philosophical convictions. The result is shallow and circular, and fatally confuses the ontological, the psychological, and the phylogenetic. And it produced in Nietzsche something like an allergic reaction. Returning to what Smith renders as ‘our genealogists of morals’ in the second part of his treatise, he is openly scathing: They are of no use. A smattering of personal experience, limited merely to the ‘modern’, no knowledge, no will to knowledge of the past; even less of a historical instinct, the ‘second sight’ which is the very thing required here – and […] still to [dabble in] the history of morality: this must […] produce results whose relationship to the truth is a good deal less than tenuous.10

And he goes on to accuse Rée and his ilk of ‘interfering with clumsy fingers with the psychology of earlier man’.11 From this it is possible to derive, ex negativo, a programme for Nietzsche’s own genealogical practice. That this requires a profound experience, a sustained and serious engagement at a more than intellectual level with the issues at stake – an engagement moreover that mistrusts and sees further than the fashionable ideas of its time – would help to explain why Nietzsche starts his text by recounting the story of his own passionate and unorthodox struggle with the sources of Western morality. Similarly, the fact that Smith here refers to the absence of a ‘will to knowledge’ even though what is actually meant is mere indifference suggests that he may have been influenced by Foucault’s use of that term.12 And in Nietzsche, as in Foucault, the effect of the phrase is to take knowledge out of the sphere of mere accumulated learning and to make of it something altogether more political and existential. The notion of the ‘historical instinct’ not only refers to that extra-rational predisposition that guides the good historian, but also semantically enacts a crucial element in it: for the instinct qua instinct has something archaic about it and thus itself partakes of history. The ‘second sight’ acts in the first instance as a corrective of the first;

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it sees things that others do not see. But it is also uncanny because in an inexplicable way it is infallibly attuned to the future. What is at stake, moreover, is not mere veracity; it is the nature of the relationship between a particular way of proceeding and the truth. And that relationship, crucially, implicates psychology. In his discussion of the eminently Foucauldian topic of punishment, moreover, Nietzsche sharply attacks another besetting error of the moral genealogists: teleology. Accusing his antagonists of naively confusing cause and effect, he insists that there is, in Smith’s words, ‘a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put’.13 He rejects the old utilitarianism, which believed that eyes were made for seeing (or, as Voltaire’s Pangloss might add, that noses were made to bear spectacles), and concludes: The “development” of a thing, a custom, an organ does not in the least resemble a progressus towards a goal […]. Rather this development assumes the form of the succession of the more or less far-reaching, more or less independent processes of overpowering which affect it – including also in each case the resistance marshalled against these processes, the changes of form attempted with a view to defence and reaction, and the results of these successful counteractions.14

For Nietzsche, then, genealogy consists not in reconstructing a grand narrative of purposive development, but in understanding apparently independent contingent events in terms of processes of overcoming and reaction, defence and mutability, power and resistance. Or, to put it in characteristically Nietzschean translation: ‘But all aims, all uses, are merely signs indicating that a will to power has mastered something less powerful than itself […]’.15 The most spectacular example of such a victory in Nietzsche’s text is that of the ascetic priest. The whole last section of the book is concerned with the way in which this particular caste of people asserted their will to power by perverting originally aristocratic moral values for their own ends. This is revolutionary because it reimagines the place of power in social relations, making it possible to conceive of power as coming from below as well as above. In this respect too, understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical method leads directly to Foucault.

Foucault Reading Nietzsche Though Nietzsche is a constant presence in Foucault’s work, there is only one text devoted entirely to him, namely ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’

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(1971).16 This essay, though, is generally regarded as being of central importance. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, for instance, see it as holding the key to all Foucault’s subsequent works.17 And crucially, it is not only a sustained meditation on, but also explicitly an exercise in, genealogy. In it, the boundary between exegesis and appropriation is deliberately obscured, so it is hard to know whether Foucault is merely expounding Nietzsche’s ideas or putting forward his own. The text begins with a remark borrowed from Nietzsche about the greyness of genealogy – by which is meant the need for a proper documentary foundation – and proceeds to add a Foucauldian gloss about palimpsests before offering fifty-six footnotes referring to no fewer than nine different texts by Nietzsche. The sheer breadth of these references in turn serves to underline the connection Foucault repeatedly makes between genealogy and disparateness.18 In a paragraph concerned with the need for genealogies to focus on events – understood as representative collocations of forces – Foucault notices the importance of Rée for Nietzsche’s work and remembers how, in Rée, particular traditions of English philosophy come together. And having explained that the work of genealogy involves identifying such events in the different scenarios in which they do and significantly do not occur, Foucault, mindful of Nietzsche’s rejection of the teleological dimension implicit in Rée’s search for origins, neatly proceeds to examine when historically Nietzsche uses, or avoids, Rée’s German word for origins – noting in the process when this matters and when, apparently, it doesn’t. This Nietzsche-inspired meditation on the contingency of origins then enables Foucault to deconstruct the idea of essence and to debunk allegedly authentic ideals such as reason, integrity, scientific method, and freedom in a series of rhetorical questions whose punctuation marks enact the interrogation and provide an instantly ironic answer to it. This irony tips over into outright laughter when the metaphysics of origins are confronted with Darwinian evolution. And finally, the refusal of origins has the effect of dislodging allegedly timeless truth claims – a move perfectly encapsulated when Foucault, in another piece of Nietzschean rhetoric, punningly conjures the history of a fallacy named truth.19 Then, in a characteristic coda, Foucault explains what the genealogist should turn his attention to instead:  namely the contingent and discontinuous base matter of history, with which he draws a parallel to the body at its most physical as the site of afflictions – rendering the confusing minutiae in both cases as arbitrary but rhythmically persuasive lists. In place of ‘Ursprung’, or ‘origin’, Foucault substitutes two other words from Nietzsche’s lexis: ‘Herkunft’ and ‘Entstehung’. The former he glosses

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as ‘provenance’ and opposes to evolution and destiny as something accidental and messy, a way of deconstructing the unified self by attributing it to innumerable beginnings. He further links the word to ‘Erbschaft’, ‘inheritance’, re-enacting a Nietzschean genealogy of scientific thinking in which academics’ allegedly disinterested habits of mind are traced back to their fathers’ professions. With this Lamarckian parody he destroys the illusion of objectivity (and indeed of originality) and demonstrates the workings of patriarchy at a genealogical level. Yet at the same time he is well aware of the dangers of a kind of inheritance that encompasses both ways of thinking and congenital traits. For him, the realities of racism and genetics are ultimately written on the body, which thus also becomes the site of genealogy as the conjunction of the individual with history. In Clare O’Farrell’s ‘alternative translation’: ‘Genealogy, as an analysis of where things come from is thus situated at the point of articulation of the body and history. It must show a body totally inscribed by history, and history destroying the body’.20 ‘Entstehung’, on the other hand, is a seismic coming into being like that of a volcano. And Foucault’s account of it is properly inchoate. In a hectic and apparently disparate jumble of observations and metaphors he marshals crucial ideas of his own and of Nietzsche’s – power and resistance, domestication and struggle, the reciprocal exertion of anonymous forces, morality as exegesis – to bring to birth the idea of history as a cycle of dominations. The primary paradigm here is the forces of physics. But it is relativized by references to the theatre and non-space, to ritual and regulation. Foucault then goes on to trace the provenance and appearance of genealogy from the facts and idea of what, following Nietzsche, he calls ‘die wirkliche Historie’.21 In glossing this as ‘histoire “effective” ’,22 he sees Nietzsche’s adjective as a pun referring not only to something, en effet, real (as opposed to something dialectical, ideological, teleological) but also to something that makes a difference (‘wirkt’). This is a stridently anti-metaphysical history of events seen from close to, which insists on its own perspective and dispels any idea of unity, identity, continuity. With a biting Nietzschean irony, Foucault goes on to trace the lineage of the historian  – a hypocritical demagogue of plebeian origin and therefore a close relative of Socrates – and the emergence of traditional history from the epigonal impotence of the nineteenth century. And he ends with a systematic confrontation between meaningful history, or genealogy, and its anaemic counterpart along lines derived from Nietzsche and in a way that enacts a temporal turn. As Bouchard and Simon put it:

24

Robert Gillett The historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the three Platonic modalities of history. The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a countermemory – a transformation of history into a totally different form of time.23

In its invocation of a filiation that goes back via Nietzsche to Plato; its deployment of opposing forces; its rejection of the traditional philosophical values of idealism, ontology, and epistemology; and its refusal to accept established categories of truth – but also in its use of the triad and its careful attention to matters of language and rhythm, this passage displays a number of crucial features of the way in which Foucault does genealogy. And given Foucault’s insistence on the discontinuous and the inductive, it matters that these be shown in the first instance at the level of the text, through exegesis.

Foucault’s Genealogy Indeed, given Foucault’s insistence on ‘real’ history, avoiding undue abstraction in discussions of his genealogy is of paramount importance. If genealogy is the study of how people and things come to exist, their genesis, so Foucault speaks of his desire to examine the genesis of particular fields of empirical enquiry.24 In contradistinction to the hegemonic view of ancestry, though, which links legitimacy to descent from a single noble forbear, Foucault insists on the opposite procedure, understanding individuals, ideas and practices as springing from multiple antecedents.25 His aim is explicitly revisionist, concerned with what Kate Soper renders as ‘an insurrection of subjugated knowledges’.26 By these he means both the knowledges hidden in the archives and those that are the preserve of ordinary human beings, especially perhaps marginalized human beings. What links the two is the historical sense of struggle they preserve – a struggle that is paradigmatically related to, but by no means coextensive with, class conflict as Marx envisaged it. And the precondition for their coalescing to form a critical genealogy is precisely the toppling of hierarchical history and elitist avant-garde theory.27 This is achieved, though, not by setting aside legitimating documents, but by proliferating them; not by removing the allegedly rightful heir, but by standing up for bastards.

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In both cases, the task is to bring to light what had previously been hidden away. Hence Foucault’s genealogy turns out not to be the opposite of his archaeology, as some critics maintain, but its complement.28 As Foucault puts it: ‘The genealogy is the finality of the analysis, and the archaeology is the material and methodological framework’.29 So far from agreeing with critics like Dreyfus and Rabinow, who posit a genealogical turn at the start of the 1970s, Foucault dates the beginnings of his genealogical practice to his first work. And he attributes to that work an autobiographical dimension that makes it comparable to Nietzsche’s Genealogie, explaining that psychiatry was important to him precisely because it was a site of struggle and tension.30 Like Nietzsche, Foucault elsewhere detects in his earliest essay in the field a possible lack of clarity. But at the same time he identifies three possible ‘axes’ or ‘domains’ of genealogy, which he sees realized to different degrees in his own works: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents. So three axes are possible for genealogy. All three were present, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilization. The truth axis was studied in The Birth of the Clinic and the Order of Things. The power axis was studied in Discipline and Punish, and the ethical axis in The History of Sexuality.31

Michael Mahon follows Foucault’s lead on this, pursuing what he calls the axes of truth, power, and the subject throughout Foucault’s work.32 He identifies equal and equivalent triads in both History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic, whereby power, broadly speaking, is seen in terms of space, truth in terms of the changing relationship between signs and essences, and the subject in terms of the location of discourse in the individual. He sees The Order of Things as centrally concerned with the truth axis, particularly in the form of language, linguistic paralysis, and epistemic rupture, but he also identifies rudiments of the other two axes, notably in a concern with ‘man’ and time. He sees a continuation of these concerns in Discipline and Punish, too, but also uses a quotation from Foucault to mark a significant shift in the direction of practices of power. And he uses his three axes to explain the unexpected change of direction in the History of Sexuality. He is thus able convincingly to demonstrate the absolute centrality of genealogical thinking in Foucault.

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As we have seen, this thinking is linked, insistently, to the process of the constitution of the self. Elsewhere, Foucault specifies the agent of that constitution as ‘discursive events’.33 With this paradoxical formulation, he disarms the theory/practice debate and sets himself apart from other contemporary intellectuals. As Colin Gordon renders it: The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another. From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.34

Like the famous ‘dispositif ’, then, Foucauldian genealogy resembles nothing so much as the disposition of troops on a battlefield. And as a genealogy of power, it is adopted precisely as a politically effective alternative to Saussurean linguistics on the one hand and logical positivism on the other. Rather than taking either of these two paths, says Foucault, I have tried to get out from the philosophy of the subject, through a genealogy of the modern subject as a historical and cultural reality  – which means as something that can eventually change. That, of course, is politically important.35

In other words, the problem which Foucault sought to solve with his genealogical method is the problem of how to have politics without identity; how to deal with power inherent in discourse; how to defend theory from charges of quietism, elitism, and inefficacity; and how to do justice to a history of more or less unremitting struggle. And it is a problem which theoreticians and practitioners of queer have not stopped wrestling with.

Genealogy after Foucault The connections between Foucault and queer theory are well known.36 After all, Judith Butler can be seen, among other things, as doing a genealogy of gender.37 And Epistemology of the Closet concerns, among other things, the will to ignorance.38 Accordingly, Nikki Sullivan presents her Critical Introduction to Queer Theory as a Foucauldian genealogy.39 Thus queer is the most obvious inheritor of Foucault’s genealogy in all the facets

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outlined here. As a theory, it is paradigmatically eclectic in its ancestries, self-evidently rooted in struggle and allergic to teleology. It is constantly carrying out sceptical exegesis on barely legible palimpsests, and the people it sheds the spotlight on have been massively marginalized. As the victims of its exclusions, queer people will have no truck with the idea of history as a destined trajectory or an inevitable evolution. For them it is a messy battlefield, and the guns that need to be disabled are precisely hegemonic truths. To the alleged reality of history they oppose their own form of parody – camp. To the essentialist fiction of sameness across time, of identity, they oppose the eternal present of performance and the discontinuity of epistemic ruptures. And in the process they have to sacrifice the safe sense of themselves in order to defy the violence that knowledge does to them. Hence one of the central achievements  – and provocations  – of queer theory is precisely the way in which it manages to think the history of gender and sexuality without having recourse to the pre-existing subject. At the same time there does exist a kind of intersectional second sight that has become expert at unmasking in allegedly self-evident categories of persons the deleterious operations of hegemonic power. As the event of AIDS made clear, this power operates in and through institutions such as clinics, laboratories, and organs of publication, but also caucus groups and the government agencies on which they exert pressure. But it is also inextricably bound up with knowledges, dictating even what is allowed to count as such. Thus women, homosexuals, and intersex people have every reason to be anti-science. In particular, they have learned that all discourses of origins are founding myths by which illegitimate regimes of power consolidate their influence. For them, both psychology and epistemology stand at the point of articulation between discourse and power. And the ideals of reason, objectivity, and scientific method are euphemisms for totalitarian control. A queer perspective, then, really can illuminate Foucault’s genealogy. The victims of homophobic attacks know what a discursive event is and how it shapes the subject. For queers, the axes of truth, power, and the subject make perfect sense. It is obvious to them how subjects are constructed by what is known about them; that their every action is constrained not by an order or a prohibition, not by a proclamation from the King, but by a whole force field of discourse that literally dictates the position of the little finger; and that as a result a whole raft of techniques of the self, constantly produced in an attritional tug-of-war with the dominant discourse, constitutes the subject as an ineluctably ethical being. And the corpses of gay men shot dead in a nightclub, like the emaciated frames

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of patients in the late stages of AIDS-related illnesses, provide incontrovertible illustrations of the thesis that the discourses of history are visibly written on the bodies of individuals. For as long as this continues to happen, we owe it to the victims to go on doing genealogy after Foucault. Notes 1 See Michael Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy:  Truth, Power and the Subject (Albany, NY:  State University of New York Press, 1992); Jeffrey Minson, Genealogies of Morals. Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Martin Saar, Genealogie als Kritik. Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault (Frankfurt am Main:  Campus Verlag, 2007); and the succinct summary in Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12–16. 2 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses:  Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris:  Gallimard, 1966). For purely aleatory reasons, the title of the English translation departs from the literal sense of the original: Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Random House, 1970). Discrepancies of this kind mean that the English translations quoted here are only an approximate guide to the French original. 3 Foucault, Dits et Écrits 1954–1988, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 165. Hereafter as DE, with volume and page number. A translation by Kate Soper is available in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, NY:  Pantheon, 1980), 83. 4 The word ‘Moral’ in German means a system of ethical values. Accordingly translators are not sure whether to render it as ‘morals’ or ‘morality’. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality:  A Polemic, translated with notes by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 119. 5 DE4, 704. 6 C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault:  An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder, CO:  Westview, 1995), 5:  ‘[Foucault] was much influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’. 7 Martin Saar, ‘Genealogy and Subjectivity’, in Michel Foucault, ed. David Owen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 72. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift’, in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, Vol. 2 (Munich: Hanser, 1966), 804. Hereafter as GM. Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 94. Hereafter as GME. 9 GM, 765–766; GME, 5. Paul Rée, ‘Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (1877)’, in Gesammelte Werke 1875–1885, ed. Hubert Treiber (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 126–211. Cf. Paul Rée, ‘The Origin of the Moral Sensations’, in Basic Writings, trans. and ed. Robin Small (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2003), 85–165.

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10 GM, 804, GME, 44, slightly adapted. The word translated here as ‘tenuous’ is ‘spröde’, which makes of the truth a lady who is not inclined to accept the advances of her suitors. 11 GM, 804, my translation. ‘Sich vergreifen’ is to make a mistake when reaching for something and is also used of inappropriate sexual advances. 12 Foucault, La volonté de savoir:  Histoire de la sexualité: 1 (Paris:  Gallimard, 1976). It was only in later editions in the UK that Robert Hurley’s translation, which originally appeared under the title The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1:  An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) was given its proper title of The Will to Knowledge. 13 GM, 817–818; GME, 57. 14 GM, 818–819; GME, 58. 15 GM, 818; GME, 58. 16 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’, DE2, 136–156. Hereafter as Ngh. The standard English translation, alas, is that by Donald F.  Bouchard and Sherry Simon, most readily available in The Foucault Reader ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 76–100. Hereafter as NGHE. 17 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL:  Harvester, 1982), 106:  ‘It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the essay for understanding the progression of the work which followed: all of the seeds of Foucault’s work of the 1970s can be found in this discussion of Nietzsche’. 18 On this, see The Foucault Reader, 98, n. 14. 19 Ngh, 139–140. 20 Ngh, 143. www.michel-foucault.com/trans/ngh.html (accessed 8 August 2016). 21 The phrase does occur in Nietzsche (see GM, 769); and it is associated with a meditation on the realities, as opposed to the speculations, of history. Similarly, Nietzsche devotes the second of his Untimely Meditations to the question of the usefulness of history. (Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, in Werke I, 209–285. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale as ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–122.) Foucault’s gloss, however, is his own conflation, which has come back to haunt Nietzsche studies. 22 Ngh, 148. 23 Ngh, 152–153; NGHE, 93. 24 DE2, 808. 25 Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que la critique’, Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 84:2, April–June 1990, 51. 26 DE2, 163; Soper, 81. The italics seem to be Soper’s. 27 DE2, 165; Soper, 83. 28 On this see Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, 101–106. 29 Foucault, ‘The Culture of the Self ’, quoted in Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, 105. The lecture was given in English in 1983. 30 DE3, 29.

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31 Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in The Foucault Reader, 340–372, here 351–352. This text, originally conceived in English, exists in various versions. A French translation of this passage is to be found in DE4, 618, where the third axis is ‘L’axe moral’. 32 Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, passim. 33 Foucault, ‘The Culture of the Self ’. See note 29. 34 DE3, 145. An English translation by Colin Gordon is available in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 104. 35 Foucault, ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, in The Essential Foucault, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2000), 176–177. DE4, 170. (The essay was originally written in English.) 36 See Tamsin Spargo, Foucault and Queer Theory (Duxford:  Icon, 1999); Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009); and the succinct summary in Downing’s Cambridge Introduction, 110–117. 37 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Annemarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York, NY: New York University Press 1996), 133, describes Butler’s book as a ‘Foucauldian study’. 38 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). 39 Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1.

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Ch apter 2

Foucault’s Subjectivities Monica Greco and Martin Savransky

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth, power, self ’

Introduction: Inheriting Foucault, Again How to inherit Foucault? To take up the challenge of thinking the concept of subjectivity after Foucault is, first of all, to recognize that while his work remains widely debated, reinterpreted, and often critiqued, it has constituted a veritable event in the history of modern thought, in the sense of marking the difference between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. His analyses wrested the concept of subjectivity from the dominant problematics in which it had been hitherto situated, transformed its trajectory, and reinvented the problems to which it may constitute a response. Stated in the broadest terms, Foucault proposed a genealogy of subjectivity in explicit contrast to the project of developing a philosophy of the subject as ‘the foundation for all knowledge and the principle of all signification’.1 This move reversed the relation that had traditionally been posited between subjectivity and the possibility of knowledge. Thereafter, subjectivity became intelligible as the product, rather than the origin, of historically specific concepts and theories embedded in the working of normative institutions. Beyond this, as we will go on to argue, Foucault’s engagement with the problem of subjectivity effected an even more profound displacement, by historicizing the privilege of knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) as a modality of relation to the truth in the constitution of human beings as subjects. It is in light of these profound displacements that engaging with the concept of subjectivity in modern thought today – whether to endorse, interpret, criticize, or transform it – is to become, directly or indirectly,

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faithfully or unfaithfully, Foucault’s heirs. Our aim in this chapter is to explore what inheriting Foucault may involve, what it may demand of those who think and write about subjectivity after him. And yet, have we not inherited Foucault already? Have we not already learned the lessons that stemmed from his historical and philosophical inquiries into subjectivity? We might respond affirmatively to such questions if the effects of what we may call a ‘Foucault-event’ are understood as a matter of the degree of scholarly attention and commentary that his work has inspired, and of the profound influence that it has had across a remarkable range of debates, disciplines, traditions, curricula, and on the thought of other prominent authors. As this volume shows, the influence of Foucault’s thought on the entire register of the humanities and the social sciences has been inestimable, and his transformative exploration of the concept of subjectivity is no exception.2 Not only are elements of his work on subjectivity taught, studied, and commented on across the world, but they also have been an explicit source of inspiration for other prominent contemporary philosophers of subjectivity, power, and politics such as Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, among others. They have also provided the philosophical and methodological foundations for a very prolific field of studies in sociology, psychology, and political science known as ‘governmentality studies’.3 There is no doubt that notable differences exist among these heirs. Still, when one attends to the Foucault-event as a matter of the influence his work has had on other authors and on entire fields – as a matter, in other words, of the manner in which an event has become a general ‘approach’ in the social sciences, the Foucauldian approach – the contours of a dominant pattern of inheritance become apparent. As we will explore in more detail in the text that follows, this manner of inheriting Foucault is one that understands his work on subjectivity as disclosing the ways in which subjects and their modes of being are brought into existence, shaped and fashioned, at the historical intersections between forms of knowledge, normative institutions, and technologies of the self – or those techniques by which individuals ‘effect … a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’.4 To put it bluntly, this account is one for which the notion of ‘subjectivity’ would become a third term to complement the famous Foucauldian couplet, ‘power/knowledge’. Significantly, this account makes of the now-triplet ‘power/knowledge/subjectivity’ something of a model, a method, through which the emergence of particular

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processes of subjectivation can be analysed. The result of this, we suggest, is that we are invited to inherit Foucault as a theorist, and his historicalphilosophical exploration of diverse modes of subjectivation as a theory of subjectivity aimed at critically diagnosing our contemporary experience. This would be a theory which, despite its strong historicist sensibility, would be capable in principle of enabling us to know at any historical conjuncture how subjectivities are formed, and ultimately, what a subject is. One of the issues with this account is that it presents serious difficulties in making sense of the last period of Foucault’s work. For what is evinced in this period in which Foucault turned his attention to Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian ethics is a move away from questions of knowledge, power, and technologies of government, towards a focus on modes of the relation of individuals to themselves, and on how technologies of the self might be conceived as ‘practices of freedom’.5 The importance of the concept of freedom in this later period of his work has proven puzzling for scholars, for it seems to challenge precisely the theory of the subject as an effect of the operations of knowledge and power. Thus, it has raised questions as to whether or not such a transition constitutes a break in Foucault’s exploration of questions of subjectivity, one that after the proclamation of the ‘Death of Man’6 might see a return to the conception of a purposeful subject, capable of shaping itself7; or whether, by contrast, a continuity between these two seemingly contradictory ‘theories’ can be discerned.8 In what follows we explore some aspects of these debates in conjunction with Foucault’s own writings, lectures, and interviews in order to suggest that, in contrast to those who discern the presence of more than one kind of theory of the subject in Foucault, as well as to those who argue for the possibility of a continuous ‘Foucauldian’ theorization of subjectivity across his œuvre, such transitions and the interpretative hesitations they give rise to may be taken as an opportunity to raise again the question about how to inherit Foucault. Inheriting Foucault again invites us to take seriously his plea not to be asked to ‘remain the same’, and to pay attention to his work on subjectivity as itself a certain kind of exercise and philosophical practice of subjectivation, ‘an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’.9 Attempting to inherit Foucault again, to inherit his work otherwise, we argue that what becomes apparent in his later work is that the relationship between subjectivity and power/knowledge is itself but a modern – and thus historically contingent – form of expression of a more encompassing and complex problem. It is a problem that, by its very nature, demands a permanent form of experimentation and creativity whose exercise is itself a

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practice of freedom. This is the problem of the different modes of relation between subjectivity and truth.

The Modern Matrix of Experience: Domains of Knowledge, Types of Normativity, Modes of Relation to the Self The fact that we have so far inherited an account of subjectivity and of processes of subjectivation that emphasizes the manner in which these emerge at the historical intersections between power/knowledge and technologies of the self cannot be ascribed to a simple misinterpretation. Rather, it is to be understood in relation to the contingencies of publication and transcriptions of Foucault’s writings and lectures, such that the reception of his philosophy in the anglophone humanities and social sciences throughout the 1970s to 1990s was one for which ‘[t]he ideas of government and the self encapsulate[d] [his] thought on two major themes that run throughout his work, those of power and the subject’.10 Indeed, in an often-quoted passage from ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, one of several lectures Foucault delivered in English in 1980, he made such intersections central to his characterization of the concept of government and to his project of a genealogy of the subject in Western civilization. Tracing this genealogy would involve taking into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another overlap processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely […] the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination. […] Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word […] is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which impose coercion and processes through which the self is modified by itself.11

This passage became particularly significant in terms of extending Foucault’s appeal for social scientists from the early 1990s onwards, in the context of the task of producing a post-Marxist critique of neoliberalism. As Thomas Lemke has argued, the critique could draw on Foucault for a nuanced account of the concept of power, one that would distinguish between power relations generically understood as ‘strategic games between liberties’; govermentality as the exercise of power informed by specific rationalities or mentalities and associated technologies; and domination as the situation where relations of power are ‘fixed in such a way that they are permanently asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom’.12 This critical account gave prominence to technologies of the

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self, premised on the existence of a certain margin of freedom, in articulating how they might form part of a neoliberal rationality of government that transcended and transformed the traditional dichotomies of Marxist analysis (e.g. between knowledge and power, state and economy, emancipation and repression). But in so doing it also assimilated the problem of subjectivity in Foucault to questions of governance and political rationality, diverting attention from the more puzzling focus on ethics, freedom, and truth in his later work. In other words, insofar as the problem of government and the concept of ‘governmentality’ came to be understood as the ‘missing link’ between two ‘seemingly disparate’ research interests in Foucault,13 they became for many the lens through which his later works on subjectivity could be read (or safely ignored). Elsewhere, Foucault described his project on the history of sexuality – the focus of his work in the years immediately before his death – as being concerned with sexuality as a ‘historically singular form of experience’.14 It is in relation to the problem of experience, rather than subjectivity, that Foucault explicitly outlined something like a theoretico-methodological framework organized around three analytical ‘axes’: domains of knowledge, types of normativity, and modes of relation to the self. While, together, these axes might be said to ‘constitute any matrix of experience’, Foucault also stressed that the relative importance of each of them ‘is not always the same for all forms of experience’.15 Arguably, the main function of this retrospective articulation of a tripartite methodological framework – insofar as it can be described as such – was to allow Foucault to distinguish the domain of ‘relations to the self ’ as one that had hitherto been relatively neglected in his analyses, or that had been subsumed under the analysis of coercive practices or of scientific knowledge.16 Indeed, from The Order of Things, to Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault’s engagement with subjectivity was specifically focussed on the ways in which ‘epistêmês’, mechanisms of power/knowledge, disciplinary practices and spaces, and specific forms of self-problematization incited by religious, medical, and therapeutic techniques contributed neither to containing, nor repressing, a preexistent subject that could be moulded according to their aims, but instead to producing a certain form of subjectivity as the result of the particular kinds of power relations through which they were instituted. When in Discipline and Punish, for example, Foucault attends to the modern history of what he referred to as ‘disciplinary power’ and presents us with a meticulous analysis of the precise rationalization of time, the prescriptions of movement, the spatial distribution of lines of visibility, and so on, that

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configure the types of power relations through which certain institutions and spaces operate, he insists on the fact that the purpose of discipline is not simply to coerce or restrain the body, or to contain pre-existing unruly subjects as if it acted upon them from without. Rather, discipline mobilizes forms of knowledge, instructions of practice, and techniques of administration of bodily gestures that make it possible ‘to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them’.17 The result of such a process of knowing, carrying power, and altering is a particular kind of subjection instituted through ‘a fictitious relation’18 – in the case of the prisoner caught in the Panopticon, the internalization of the unavoidable possibility of being under constant observation by a guard who can see everything but cannot be seen. It is through this process that disciplinary power can be said to produce certain types of subjectivity. While in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault’s concern was not just with disciplinary forms of power but with the processes by which a new kind of collective being, the population becomes itself the object and instrument of politics, his critique of what he termed the ‘repressive hypothesis’ was similarly attentive to how this very drive towards censorship had created ‘a veritable discursive explosion’ of statements around and about sex.19 This explosion of statements, brought about both by the Christian pastoral with its practice of confession, and by a medical, psychological, political, economic, pedagogical, and technical ‘incitement to talk about sex’, had the effect not so much of repressing sex but of rendering it knowable, manageable, and operative, in order to be able to deal more effectively with the economic and political problem of ‘the emergence of “population” ’.20 Interestingly, the paradoxical effect of this entire economy of discourses and practices through which sex was rendered knowable and governable was not the repression of sexual practices but ‘the very production of sexuality’  – the production of individuals who would recognize themselves as subjects of a sexuality, inscribed in a complex and diverse ‘process that spreads [sex] over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it out and bids it speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth.’21 The reading of Foucault’s conceptualization of subjectivity that sees it as a correlate of knowledge and power is thus not the product of a mere confusion. In fact, it is arguably because it is not a simple case of misunderstanding that the progressive publication of his later work has created such puzzlement, controversy, and debate among scholars. For there,

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Foucault not only performed an unexpected turn to ancient Greece. He also claimed that, in fact ‘it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research’,22 and quite openly wondered whether ‘perhaps’ he had ‘insisted too much on the technology of domination and power’, and confessed to have found himself ‘more and more interested in the interaction between self and others, […] in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self ’.23 Such ‘confessions’ of past mistakes and present interests, as well as the transition from an exploration of subjectivity in terms of knowledge, power, and technologies of government, to one centred on notions like ethics, freedom, and the ‘aesthetics of existence’, have driven some scholars to diagnose a profound rupture in the trajectory of Foucault’s thought. For example, in an act of joyful celebration, Eric Paras affirms that Foucault had at last abandoned his ‘fire-eating antihumanism’ in order to embrace an ‘independent and freestanding subject’.24 Others have insisted that despite this apparent shift, there is a fundamental consistency between the two periods, by virtue of the fact that, for him, the theorization of the concept of ‘subjectivation’ (assujettissement) includes both senses of the term – of a subject that, as Butler puts it, is ‘neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both)’.25 The Foucault of the ‘care of the self ’ would thus be completing a theory of subjectivity premised both on practices of coercion and practices of freedom. Faithful to his plea not to be asked to remain the same, however, when asked directly about the nature of this seeming shift, Foucault provided an entirely different, and equally perplexing, account. He suggested that the problem he had always been interested in was not how to theorize subjectivity, but to analyse ‘how the human subject fits into certain games of truth’.26 The question of whether or not there is a rupture in his conceptualization of subjectivity and power/knowledge vis-à-vis his later emphasis on ethics presupposes that indeed what is at stake across his œuvre is the elaboration of a theory of subjectivity in relation to questions of agency and coercion – something Foucault, as we have seen, explicitly ‘rejected’.27 In contrast to this reading, we suggest the possibility of a different manner of inheriting Foucault:  one that proceeds from his characterization of subjectivity as ‘that which constitutes and transforms itself though the relationship with its own truth’28 and one that regards the tight correlation between power/ knowledge and subjectivity – or between these three ‘axes’ of experience – as a specifically modern articulation of that relationship. This different manner of inheriting the work makes sense of Foucault’s turn to Antiquity

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as the vantage point for analysing the axis of relations to the self independently of the other two, since in the Greek and Roman civilizations ‘practices of the self were more important and especially more autonomous than they were later, after they were taken over to a certain extent by religious, pedagogical, medical, or psychiatric institutions’.29 Insofar as Foucault still posited subjectivity, even in the context of Antiquity, as constituting itself ‘through the relationship with its own truth’, what this move produces is a decoupling of the problem of subjectivity and truth ‘both from power as a relation between forces, and from knowledge as a stratified form’.30

Resisting the Cartesian Moment: From the Truth of Power to the Power of Truth Foucault’s inquiry into the relationship between subjectivity and truth began to take explicit shape in the course he delivered at the Collège de France under that title (Subjectivité et Vérité) in 1980–1981. In the synoptic summary he submitted at the end of the academic year, he described the thrust of that inquiry as ‘a matter of placing the imperative to “know oneself ” – which to us appears so characteristic of our civilization – back in the much broader interrogation that serves as its implicit or explicit context: What should one do with oneself? What work should be carried out on the self?’31 This broad theme was taken up again in the course he offered the following year, under the title of The Hermeneutics of the Subject.32 For the purpose of articulating an alternative mode of inheritance of Foucault’s work on subjectivity, it is worth dwelling briefly on the first lecture of the 1981–1982 course, which begins by restating the problem:  ‘In what historical form do the relations between the “subject” and “truth” […] take shape in the West?’33 From this initial question Foucault proceeded by announcing that he would approach it through the Greek notion of epimeleiea heautou, or ‘care of the self ’, and immediately noted that this decision might seem somewhat ‘paradoxical and artificial’ because ‘everyone knows, says, and repeats’ that ‘the question of the subject (the question of knowledge of the subject, of the subject’s knowledge of himself ) was originally posed in a very different expression and a very different precept: the famous Delphic prescription of gnōthi seauton or ‘know yourself ’.34 Contesting the interpretation according to which ‘know yourself ’ would be equated with an imperative for self-knowledge, Foucault suggested that, in fact, the injunction to know oneself belongs to the more general framework of taking

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care of oneself, and it is just one of the many forms this notion of care may take. Moreover, not only was the exercise of taking care of oneself more encompassing and important than that of knowing oneself, but it remained ‘a fundamental principle for describing the philosophical attitude throughout Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman culture’ and indeed, in Christian spirituality.35 Foucault argued that a fundamental shift was produced, however, with the advent of modern thought – a double shift that he sees epitomized in Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1654) and to which therefore he gives the name of the ‘Cartesian moment’. For Foucault what is significant about this moment is, first, that the self-evidence of the subject’s own existence becomes the point of departure of philosophical inquiry. Insofar as this knowledge of oneself, this impossibility to doubt one’s existence as a subject of thought, comes to be regarded as ‘the very source of access to being’, the Cartesian moment turns the ‘ “know yourself ” into a fundamental means of access to truth’.36 In other words, the advent of modern thought is, in one sense, the revaluation of the imperative to know oneself that situates it as the central means by which a subject may access the truth. But this moment involved more than a simple revaluation. In Antiquity, the theme of the ‘care of the self ’ was intimately linked to the possibility of accessing truth, in the sense that the subject was deemed incapable of accessing truth without undergoing a process of transformation, whether through ‘conversion’ or by ‘a work of the self on the self, an elaboration of the self by the self, a progressive transformation of the self by the self for which one takes responsibility in a long labour of ascesis’.37 In this sense, ‘the philosophical question of “how to have access to the truth” and the practice of spirituality … were never separate’.38 Importantly, insofar as the truth was not given to the subject but was rather ‘achieved’ through a certain process of transformation, the quality of this truth also differed from that of a truth acquired as a simple act of knowledge. The spiritual truth required the development of a certain art of existence, and it was in turn an active truth, a truth that, once achieved, was intrinsically associated with certain effects on the subject. Foucault described these as ‘rebound’ (de retour) effects of the truth, effects of the order of enlightenment, beatitude, and tranquillity of the soul:  ‘in the truth and in access to the truth, there is something that fulfils the subject himself, which fulfils or transfigures his very being’.39 By contrast, to the extent that modern thought posits a stable, self-evident subject as the fundamental means of access to the truth, ‘the condition for the subject’s

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access to the truth, is knowledge (savoir) and knowledge alone’.40 In other words, the modern relationship between subjectivity and truth is such that the philosopher (or the scientists, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as subject.41

The shift is thus double indeed, for it is not just a matter of a specific emphasis placed on the imperative to ‘know oneself ’. More radically, the Cartesian moment defines the event whereby the act of knowledge marginalizes and disqualifies the practice of the care of the self. This does not mean, of course, that in order to know, to have access to the truth, the subject no longer has to meet any conditions. But as Foucault rightly noted, these modern conditions are extrinsic to the subject:  they are formal, methodological, objective, cultural, and so on. In other words, they condition the appropriate means of access (scientific, institutional, economic, political) to knowledge.42 Thus, the transfiguration of the subject brought about when his relationship to the truth was established in the form of a care of the self no longer exists. Instead, ‘the modern age of relations between the subject and truth begin [sic] when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject’.43 In light of this, we may ask: Does the theme of a correlation between certain regimes of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity not constitute a characterization of the specifically modern mode of subjectivation, the modern form that the relationship between subjectivity and truth has taken? Is this particular form of relationship between subjectivity and truth, this relationship based entirely on the production of knowledge of the subject by way of a subjection to extrinsic conditions of access, not what is captured by the triplet power/knowledge/subjectivity? If this is the case, then an entirely different way of inheriting Foucault becomes possible. For indeed, we can no longer read Foucault’s work on subjectivity according to the assumption that what is at stake is a more or less successful theorization of subjectivity. To read Foucault in that sense would be to situate his contribution within the very modern register of knowledge that his work on subjectivity specifically invites us to resist. Similarly, we can no longer read this work on the assumption that what is at stake in the relationship between subjectivity and ‘truth’ is simply a process whereby subjects are produced in the image of power and knowledge, such that subjectivation is always, simultaneously, also a subjection

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to the ‘truth of power’.44 For again, to pose the problem of truth in terms of a dialectic between freedom and determination, agency and coercion, is to remain trapped in the Cartesian moment. Instead, this reading may invite us to explore Foucault’s work as a transformative exercise in thought – in the first instance, an exercise concerned with resisting the specific kind of relationship between subjectivity and truth through which the Cartesian moment inaugurates modernity. But equally, an exercise aimed at affirming that another relationship is possible – a relationship that, no longer premised on the truth of power, can risk imagining a different power of truth, ‘a truth that would release transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power’,45 a truth that may not tell us who we are, but lure us towards what we are in the process of becoming. In a sense, this affirmation creates a possibility by disclosing a historical precedent in the form of the notion of ‘care of the self ’ in Greek culture. But this possibility does not have to signal a ‘return’ to the practices or modes of life of the Greeks. What we can glean by analysing those practices in contrast to modern ones is the contrast between two modalities of self-constitution, each mediated by a different kind of relationship to the ‘truth’. As a way of concluding, we briefly explore this qualitative difference in the text that follows, not only as a matter of highlighting the importance of the ‘relationship to the truth’ as a theme in Foucault’s writings on subjectivity, but also as a matter of how the question of the relationship to truth might mediate our own manner of inheriting them.

Thoughtful Transformations: Relating to the Truth as a Practice of Freedom In the first lecture of the course entitled Subjectivité et Vérité (1980–1981), Foucault presented a definition of ‘truth’ specifically relevant to the spirit of his investigation. He defined truth neither as the specific content of knowledge that one might consider to be universally valid, nor in terms of formal and universal criteria, but as ‘a system of obligations […] What is important, with regard to this question of truth, is that a certain number of things effectively pass as true and that the subject must either produce them himself, or accept them, or submit to them’.46 The forms of this obligation to truth, and thus the mode of relationship that human beings establish with themselves, vary considerably in terms of both their premises and consequences. While Foucault examined the variety and nuances of these modes of relationship in detail,

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for illustrative purposes it will suffice here to recall the broad contrast he draws between the Stoic and the Christian practices of the examination of conscience. For the Stoics, in the context of a philosophical practice whose goal was ‘to give the individual the quality which would permit him to live differently, better, more happily, than other people’, the examination of conscience is the means by which, at the end of each day, the subject ‘takes stock of things, and sees if everything has been done correctly’, like a good administrator.47 The ‘truth’ to which the Stoic subject refers is the truth of a set of principles or rules of conduct to which he endeavours to conform in his actions. The examination of conscience measures the distance between what has been done and what should have been done, and evaluates the adjustment between aims and means in the sequence of action performed during the day. The Christian examination of conscience, by contrast, is an entirely different truth-game, a process designed to elicit or extract a truth conceived as ‘hidden in the subject’ – the truth of the desires, intentions, or sins secretly harboured in his soul.48 This is a truth that is also understood to define the subject’s nature, an indication of what he is as opposed to what he might become. The purpose of the elicitation of truth – the obligation this type of truth commands  – is to renounce the (sinful) self. Christianity instituted practices of self-observation coupled with obligations of voluntary selfdisclosure and self-exposure as forms of penance. While penance is an ‘affect of change, of rupture with the self, past, and world’, the truth that is disclosed as part of this process does not specify a new identity or form to be attained, but rather retrospectively demonstrates ‘the truth of the state of being of the sinner’.49 Foucault would go on to claim that the aim of the human sciences and of medical, psychological, and psychiatric institutions since the eighteenth century has been to found a hermeneutics of the self that would substitute a ‘positive’ self for the self-sacrifice imposed by the Christian imperative of renunciation.50 Despite this difference, there is a profound continuity between the positive truth affirmed in the human sciences as modern forms of knowledge and the truth that Christianity obliged the subject to renounce: this continuity lies in the representational aspiration of this truth, its orientation towards the specification of what the subject is, or indeed what we might call the theorization of the subject. We can contrast the qualities of this (mode of relation to) the truth with those Foucault saw in the Stoic practice of self-examination and confession as part of a ‘care of the self ’:

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in [the] game between Serenus’s confession and Seneca’s consultation, truth […] is not defined by a correspondence to reality but as a force inherent to principles and which has to be developed in a discourse. […] this truth is not something which is hidden […] but something which is in front of the individual as a point of attraction, a kind of magnetic force that attracts him towards a goal.51

If the Christian (and, later, scientific) modality of self-constitution through a relationship to truth is one that identifies the subject, that is, holds him to a description of what he is, by contrast the Stoic modality of self-constitution is one that aligns the subject with what he might become, that places him on a vector of transformation. In this sense, we might recall the observation that in Foucault’s original French (souci de soi) as well as in the Latin (cura sui) and Greek (epimeleia heautou), the ‘self ’ in ‘care of the self’ is a reflexive pronoun – it does not specify a pre-existing entity to which the pronoun refers.52 In other words, the subject is emphatically ‘not a substance. It is a form, and this form is not primarily or always identical to itself’.53 In this way, the efficacy of this possibility that is created by attending to the ancient practice of ‘care of the self ’ is not the reinstitution of Greek ethics as a normatively superior set of principles that might inform an ‘art of life’, but rather that of opening up again the question of what kind of relationship may be cultivated between subjectivity and truth. Any response to that question will itself demand an exercise of permanent ethical experimentation, a creative activity by the self on the self. As Foucault puts it, ‘we should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity’.54 Escaping the constraints associated with a theory of subjectivity, Foucault’s ethical experimentation would constitute, then, a practice whose very development is the expression of a form of freedom. For indeed, ‘what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the thoughtful practice of freedom?’55 Notes 1 Michel Foucault, ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 147–168; 149. 2 See also Gary Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3 Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Andrea Rossi, The Labour of Subjectivity (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

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4 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self ’, in Ethics:  Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 223–252: 225. 5 Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault, 281–302: 283. 6 Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002 [1966]). 7 See, for example, Peter Dews, ‘The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault’, Radical Philosophy, 51 (1989), 37–41; and Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York, NY: Other Press, 2006). 8 See, for example, John S. Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 9 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 (London:  Penguin, 1984), 9. For Foucault’s plea not to be asked to ‘remain the same’, see Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 2002 [1969]), 19. 10 Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 2. See also Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault (London: SAGE, 2005). 11 Foucault, ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, 154. 12 Thomas Lemke, ‘Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique’, Rethinking Marxism, 14, 2002, 49–64; Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Boston, MA:  MIT Press, 1988), 1–20:  19; and Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self ’, 292. 13 Lemke, ‘Foucault, Govermentality, and Critique’, 50. The two ‘seemingly disparate’ interests are the genealogy of the state and the genealogy of the subject. 14 Foucault, ‘Preface to The History of Sexuality, Vol. II, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1994), 333–372: 335. 15 Ibid., 338, 337. 16 Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for the Self ’, 281–282. 17 Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New  York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1995 [1975]), 172. 18 Ibid., 202. 19 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1978 [1976]), 17. 20 Ibid., 23, 25. 21 Ibid.,105, 72; emphasis added. 22 Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954– 1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 326–348: 327. 23 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self ’, 225. 24 See Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, 4, 101; see also Dews, ‘The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault’. 25 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1997), 17. 26 Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self ’, 281. 27 Ibid., 290. 28 Foucault, Subjectivité et Vérité – Cours au Collège de France, 1980–1981 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2014), 15.

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29 Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self ’, 282; emphasis added. 30 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis, MN:  University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 100. 31 Foucault, ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, in Ethics:  Essential Works of Foucault, 87–92; 87. 32 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject:  Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982 (New York, NY: Picador, 2001). 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Ibid., 3. 35 Ibid., 8; 10. 36 Ibid., 14. 37 Ibid., 16. 38 Ibid., 16–17. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 Ibid., 17. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 18. 43 Ibid., 19. 44 Deleuze, Foucault, 94. 45 Ibid., 95. 46 Foucault, Subjectivité et Vérité, 15. 47 Foucault, ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, 156, 159. 48 Ibid., 160. 49 Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self ’, 245. 50 Ibid., 249. 51 Foucault, ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, 163. 52 O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, 120. 53 Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self ’, 290. 54 Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, in Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault, 253–280; 262. 55 Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self ’, 284. Translation modified.

Ch apter 3

Foucault’s History of Neoliberalism Nicholas Gane

In the wake of the recent financial crisis (2007–), there has been renewed interest in thinking critically about the pro-market form of governance known as neoliberalism. Foucault’s 1978–9 lectures at the Collège de France – translated into English under the title The Birth of Biopolitics – have been central to this task. For, in spite of their title, these lectures have no explicit connection to the study of biopolitics, but instead map the emergence of different national trajectories of neoliberal reason from the mid-twentieth century onwards. These lectures are one of Foucault’s few historical excursions into the twentieth century and are also remarkable because of their timing:  Foucault delivered them at the point that neoliberalism was being rolled out as a concrete governmental form in the United Kingdom and United States, and they were published in English at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. For these reasons, these lectures have attracted a mass readership, and have led many to return to Foucault’s work in order to think historically and critically about the neoliberal present. The reception of these lectures, however, has not always been positive, as some have questioned the motives behind Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism and with this the political commitments, more generally, of his later work. Readers of these lectures have fallen into two main camps: those, on the one hand, who treat them as a valuable resource for understanding the historical basis and complexities of neoliberal reason, and those, on the other, who think Foucault devoted a series of lectures to the study of neoliberalism because he was attracted to many of the ideas in question. These lectures have, as a consequence, become a contested site for thinking about Foucault’s political commitments and legacy, and for considering, more generally, the grounds upon which it is possible to engage critically with the neoliberal project.1 This chapter argues that while Foucault’s biopolitics lectures are of value for analysing the formation and operation of neoliberal reason, nonetheless 46

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they should be read critically as, among other things, they provide a partial history of neoliberalism that contains many gaps and inaccuracies. It is important to remember that these lectures are just that:  lectures that were written up on a weekly basis and never intended for publication in their present form. Because of this, it is necessary to treat them not as Foucault’s final word on neoliberalism, but as openings onto a complex set of histories that have taken on a new significance in the post-crisis present. On this basis, the chapter proceeds in three parts: first, it provides an overview of the key points of Foucault’s history of liberal and neoliberal governance; second, it points to a number of gaps and blind spots in this history; and third, it provides an assessment of the value of Foucault’s biopolitics lectures for thinking historically and critically about different trajectories of neoliberalism that are still very much alive today.

Towards a Genealogy of Neoliberalism: The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, which were delivered at the Collège de France on a weekly basis from January to April 1979, open with an analysis of the liberal ‘art’ of government, and document a shift from the raison d’État of the Middle Ages to new forms of liberal governmentality that emerged in the late eighteenth century. This shift was underpinned by a change in the structural relation of the state to the market, for whereas under the raison d’État markets were subject to strict forms of governmental regulation, by the end of the eighteenth century, they had started to appear as something that ‘obeyed and had to obey “natural”, that is to say, spontaneous mechanisms’.2 In early liberal texts such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Foucault observes, the market was conceived less in terms of regulation and justice and more as a site of truth or ‘veridiction’. This, he argues, signals the beginning of a different relationship between the state and market in which the market, increasingly, is freed from the powers of the state and is left to regulate itself, while the state is called upon to place limits on the scope and reach of its activities. But how can the state impose limits upon itself? One philosophical answer to this problem is to prioritize questions of law, and, more specifically, to forge new concepts of right and sovereignty (an approach Foucault ascribes to Rousseau). Another is to analyse the rationale, reach, and extent of government in order to establish its ‘de facto limits’. Foucault is more interested in the latter of these approaches and focuses on utilitarian philosophies that sought to overturn the previous raison d’État by redefining the government in terms of its utility. What emerges in such approaches is

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a reconfiguration of the relation of the state to the market in which, paradoxically, new freedoms are granted to the latter through the application of a model of discipline. Foucault argues, for example, that for markets to operate freely or for the existence of property rights there must be government in the form of ‘control, constraint, and coercion’.3 Hence, while classical liberalism is, on the surface, framed by a call for the self-limitation or ‘frugality’ of government, as in the work of Adam Smith, it is more than simply an argument for laissez-faire economics. Rather, the question it seeks to address is how the state should govern the market in order to guarantee its freedom. Foucault again outlines two main approaches to this problem. First, there is the solution provided by Bentham’s model of the Panopticon, whereby ‘Government, initially limited to the function of supervision, is only to intervene when it sees that something is not happening according to the general mechanics of behaviour, exchange and economic life’.4 Second, there are more direct strategies of government that have ‘the function of producing, breathing life into, and increasing freedom, of introducing additional freedom through additional control and intervention’.5 Foucault cites Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welfare policies of the 1930s as an example of such practice, something that he returns to in his lectures on American neoliberalism (see later). Foucault’s immediate concern, however, is for Bentham’s Panopticon, which, he claims, is ‘not a regional mechanics limited to certain institutions’ but instead is ‘the very formula of liberal government’.6 Expanding the arguments of his earlier Discipline and Punish, he explains that the Panopticon is more than simply a prisonbased architecture of discipline and punishment. Rather, it is a normative model of governance that recasts the connection between the state and the market by promoting conditions of economic freedom through the exercise of disciplinary techniques of surveillance. In this model the state is to create the conditions for the free operation of the market while watching over it and intervening only in the last instance: surveillance of the market is seen to be regulation enough. In the following lectures, Foucault documents the reworking and, to a large extent, rejection of these classical liberal ideas by new forms of liberal thought that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. He begins with German neoliberalism, and focuses on a group of political economists associated with the journal Ordo, founded by Walter Eucken in 1948. Foucault observes that the main challenge for this group was how to reconstruct the German state following the horrors of the Second World War. Their answer was to reconceive of the state as an economic rather than a

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political entity, or, in Foucault’s words, to treat state formation as a form of ‘commercial opening’. Foucault argues that this approach reverses the liberal model of the Panopticon, for rather than the state watching over the market, the market is now called upon to produce legitimacy for the state, which in turn is redefined as the market’s ‘guarantor’. Underpinning this new arrangement is a ‘permanent genesis’ or ‘circuit’ that goes ‘constantly from the economic institution to the state’ and is designed to ensure the ‘guaranteed exercise of an economic freedom’.7 The question this begs is, how can a state be founded upon, and yet at the same time be limited by, a principle of economic freedom? The answer provided by ordoliberalism is that market principles should not merely give the state its underlying rationale, but also be used to regulate its powers and actions more generally. Foucault explains: instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it were under state supervision – which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism …  – the ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as an organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state.8

At the heart of ordoliberalism, then, is a radical rethinking of what the state is and how it should be positioned in relation to the market:  the free market economy is to serve as the ‘principle, form, and model’ of the state and provides the benchmarks for redefining and evaluating all of its activities. The figure of the market thus becomes all-important in this type of new liberal thought. Foucault argues that for classical liberal economists such as Adam Smith, the market was theorized in terms of free exchange between trading partners, but that the ordoliberals broke with this approach by conceiving of the market in terms of both exchange and competition. This has important consequences, for against late-nineteenth-century ideas of competition as a biological fact, the ordoliberals argued instead that neither competition nor markets are natural; instead they have to be made. This is a key point of departure from laissez-faire or libertarian forms of economic thought as the state is now seen to be able to play a key role in making competition, and markets more generally, work. Foucault states: Government must accompany the market economy from start to finish. The market economy does not take something away from government. Rather, it indicates, it constitutes the general index in which one must place

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Nicholas Gane the rule for defining governmental action. One must govern for the market, rather than because of the market. To that extent you can see that the relationship defined by eighteenth-century liberalism is completely reversed.9

German neoliberalism, or what Foucault calls ordoliberalism, thus does not call for the withering of the state or for small government, but rather for government invention and a strong state of a certain kind. Ordoliberalism is an argument for the state to be subjected to principles of marketization, and for government to be active in ensuring that competition plays a ‘regulatory role at every moment and every point in society’ by ensuring the ‘general regulation of society by the market’.10 Under these conditions, market principles are everything and everywhere, and nothing, conceivably, remains sacred. Indeed, as Foucault observes, the question for ordoliberalism is now less what the market can and cannot touch, but how it should touch domains and objects that previously were out of its reach. Foucault considers the ‘diffusion’ of this ordoliberal model of neoliberalism in France11 before turning to a quite different trajectory of neoliberal reason that is specific to the United States.12 He argues that neoliberalism in the United States can be traced to the liberal critique of the interventionist policies associated with the New Deal, the Beveridge plan, and government programmes on poverty, education, and segregation that emerged from the late 1940s onwards. There are, he observes, commonalities between the emergence of neoliberalism in Europe and the United States, as these strands of neoliberal thinking are united by an aversion to Keynesian economics and to centralized forms of ‘planning’. But there are also crucial differences: first, in the United States there was no prior raison d’État to respond to as ‘economic claims’ and a certain type of economic liberalism were central to American independence from the outset; second, as a consequence, the ‘question’ of liberalism has been ‘the recurrent element of all the political discussions and choices of the United States’13; and third, particularly from the mid-1940s onwards, both the political Left and the Right developed sharp critiques of the powers of the state. Foucault does not consider the importance of this historical context in detail but instead addresses the theoretical basis of American neoliberalism by focusing on ideas of human capital that are associated with the work of Gary Becker. Foucault argues that these ideas are rooted in a critique of Marxist theories of labour for being too abstract in their concern for general economic processes. Neoliberal economics responds by shifting attention to the capacity of individuals to allocate scarce means in order to make concrete choices between different outcomes or ends, and

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work (rather than labour) becomes one such choice. This move redefines economics so that it is focussed on ‘the internal rationality of … human behaviour’ and on the analysis of individual activities rather than broader social and economic processes.14 In so doing, the figure of homo economicus, which is central to classical forms of political economy, takes on a new life. In a key passage, Foucault explains: In neo-liberalism – and it does not hide this; it proclaims it – there is also a theory of homo economicus, but he is not at all a partner of exchange. Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself. This is true to the extent that, in practice, the stake in all neoliberal analyzes is the replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.15

There are parallels here with Foucault’s account of German neoliberalism, which documents a move beyond exchange to a universal norm of competition that comes from the market and is injected into all forms of social and cultural life. But at the core of American neoliberalism is something perhaps more disturbing: the birth of a subject that can be reduced to a form of capital and individualized according to its choices and behaviours. Such an approach carries with it a political suggestion: that individuals, as entrepreneurs of themselves, are best left to their own devices, meaning that state support in the form of welfare is no longer necessary.16 Foucault argues that this new conception of homo economicus is part of a broader movement towards the understanding of all forms of human life through principles drawn from the analysis of the market economy. He states that this idea that economic analysis can be applied to ‘non-market relationships and phenomena’17 can be traced to Ludwig von Mises’s key work Human Action. In fact, this idea comes from an earlier work by Mises on the epistemological basis of economics in which it is argued that all forms of human action obey an economic principle.18 But Foucault’s point still stands: what is at stake here is an ‘inversion’ in the relation of the social to the economic so that the latter always takes priority as an explanatory force. Foucault argues that this is the key feature of American neoliberalism as it involves ‘the generalization of the economic form of the market. It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges’.19 Foucault argues that this development narrows our ‘grid of intelligibility’, as now everything, seemingly, is cast in economic terms. Indeed, there appears to be no limit to the application of

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this neoliberal ‘economic grid’: from the analysis of crime as something which ‘makes the individual incur the risk of being sentenced to penalty’20 through to relationships between mother and child, which can ‘be analyzed in terms of investment, capital costs, and profit – both economic and psychological profit – on the capital invested’.21

Historical Limits Foucault’s account was groundbreaking in its attempt to map different trajectories of German and North American neoliberalism from the midtwentieth century onwards. At the time these lectures were delivered, few sensed the importance of the neoliberal project and what, from the early1980s onwards, was to come. But in spite of their brilliance in exploring the epistemological basis of new forms of liberalism that broke in important ways with the nineteenth-century model of political economy, there are clear limits to Foucault’s analysis, and in particular to his model of classical liberalism and to his genealogy of the early neoliberal project. That there are limits to these lectures is to be expected given that they were written at short notice and never intended for publication. For this reason, Foucault’s biopolitics lectures should not be embraced or rejected tout court as they provide valuable insights into the complex trajectories of neoliberal reason, while at the same time calling for further work. The question this poses is how can they be extended and refined to produce a fuller and more nuanced critical history of neoliberalism. With this in mind, the following are some of the key gaps and problems in these lectures that can be used as starting points for thinking through and beyond Foucault’s account: 1. Foucault’s history of liberalism jumps from Bentham’s writings on the Panopticon at the end of the eighteenth century through to the emergence of ordoliberalism in post-war Germany with little consideration of the history that lies in between. Because of this, he misses important epistemic shifts that took place through the latter decades of the nineteenth century through the course of which political economy was displaced by the disciplines of economics, in one direction, and sociology in another. This omission is not unique to Foucault’s biopolitics lectures, as his earlier Order of Things traces the formation of modern economic thought only as far as the 1830s and Ricardo’s theory of value.22 In the biopolitics lectures, however, Foucault develops an idealtypical characterization of liberalism from the work of Bentham that is based upon an oversimplistic model of state-market surveillance. This

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model might have heuristic value for teaching (in a lecture environment) but does little to capture the full range and complexity of early liberal understandings of the state, the market, and the relationship between the two. Indeed, on such questions the key figure is, arguably, not Bentham but John Stuart Mill: the most prominent figure in nineteenth-century political economy,23 who provided a new understanding of the market as something social rather than natural.24 Mill divided later neoliberal and libertarian thinkers,25 some of whom, most notably Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises, accused him of corrupting the liberal project with socialist ideals. Oddly, Mill, even though he formulated the very idea of the homo economicus, is nowhere mentioned by Foucault. If, however, neoliberalism is born out of a rejection of classical liberal ideas, as Foucault suggests, then it is necessary to trace the development of the liberal canon from Smith through Ricardo, Bentham, and other figures such as Thomas Malthus forward into the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. It is only by doing so that the neoliberal dissatisfaction with earlier liberal understandings of the state and market become clear, and hence what is new or neo- about the positions advanced by figures such as Hayek by way of response. 2. While Foucault makes occasional references to the work of von Mises and Hayek, he largely neglects the Austrian trajectory of neoliberal thought. This trajectory is important, as it based upon, among other things, a critique of neoclassical principles of perfect competition, market equilibrium (as something that can be proved mathematically), and the figure of homo economicus. Hayek, in particular, advances an epistemology different from that found within German and American neoliberal thought as he argues that the tacit rationalities of individual economic actors are necessarily limited and can be co-ordinated only by the ‘marvel’ of the market. These ideas, in turn, involve an important but neglected relationship with the discipline of sociology. Foucault identifies Max Weber as a key figure in the history of neoliberalism, as his work was developed in opposite directions by the Freiburg and Frankfurt Schools (the former identifying economic solutions to social irrationalities and the latter the reverse). This claim, however, not only overplays the connection between Weber and ordoliberal thought but also overlooks the fact that Weber developed his ideal-typical methodology from Carl Menger, a key figure in Austrian economics whose work deeply influenced Hayek.26 Hayek, in turn, attempted to produce the first English translation of the first chapter of Economy and Society, and both he and his mentor, von Mises, developed individualistic

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economic philosophies based largely on a critical reading of this text.27 These developments, which underpin a neoliberal epistemology that seeks at all costs to prioritize economic principles over social concerns, are missing from Foucault’s account, which, as stated earlier, barely touches on the period between the decline of political economy at the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War. This is a problem because it is precisely the period in which neoliberal economics was born. 3. Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism is predominantly discursive in basis and thus pays little attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideas and policies are mobilized and put into practice. This leaves the task of explaining how the economic and political rationalities of different trajectories of neoliberalism are materialized into concrete governmental forms. Foucault draws attention to the importance of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, at which the term ‘neoliberalism’ was coined, but neglects the organizational development of neoliberalism beyond this point. Nowhere, for example, does he mention the organization that grew out of this event, the Mont Pèlerin Society, which was founded by Hayek in 1947. This Society was, and for that matter still is, the global think-tank to champion the neoliberal cause.28 Such think-tanks have played a vital role in connecting the seemingly esoteric and abstract arguments of figures such as Hayek to the interests of big business and to the concrete concerns of front bench politics.29 For this reason, it is necessary to move beyond Foucault by paying closer attention to the institutional basis of neoliberal governance, and to the political mechanisms through which ideas are drawn out of discourse and are turned into governmental practices. 4. Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism is restricted both in terms of its origin story and the present to which it now speaks. For while Foucault’s account captures the main features of American neoliberal thought as it stood in 1979, much has changed since. Although this is not the place to explore the contemporary form and operation of neoliberal reason in any detail, it is worth pointing to one development, in particular, that lies beyond the reach of Foucault’s lectures: financialization. This is the subject of Wendy Brown’s recent work Undoing the Demos, in which she argues that a Foucauldian account of neoliberalism must now consider ‘the rise of finance capital, the financialization of everything, and the importance of debt and derivatives in shaping the economy and political reason as well as transforming neoliberal rationality itself – its formulation of markets, subjects, and rational action’.30 Brown adds

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that is also necessary to confront new ideas of human capital that cast states and individuals in the image of firms, and which promote new forms of subjectivity based upon financial principles of speculation, leveraging, and risk-taking. It is only by addressing such developments, and thereby moving beyond the historical limits of Foucault’s account, that a critical history of different trajectories of neoliberal reason can be extended into the present.

Where Now? The question this leaves is whether, in spite of their limits, Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism continue to be of value for thinking critically about neoliberalism today. This question has divided readers of Foucault’s later work,31 with some arguing that the biopolitics lectures are the starting point for a historical and critical engagement with the basis of neoliberal reason, and others that they were motivated by an attraction to the neoliberal ideas they document. This latter position is advanced by Philip Mirowski, who argues in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste that while these lectures ‘drew out stunning implications’ of the work of key neoliberal thinkers such as Gary Becker, they stopped short of analysing neoliberalism ‘on the ground’, and accepted a neoliberal view of the unbridled powers of ‘the market’. Mirowski argues that the main problem with Foucault’s biopolitics lectures is that they fail to question the neoliberal conception of the market as the ‘sole legitimate site for the production of indubitable knowledge of the whole.’32 He adds: ‘If I had to summarize where the otherwise prescient Foucault took a wrong turn, it was in too readily swallowing the basic neoliberal precept that the market was an information processor more powerful and encompassing than any human being or organization of humans’.33 Mirowski’s position, by way of response, is to insist that the first step in any critique of neoliberalism must be to question the neoliberal view of ‘the market’ as a site of truth and power, something, he claims, that Foucault did not do in his lectures on biopolitics. Mirowski is not the only figure to cast doubt on the underlying politics of Foucault’s biopolitics lectures. In 2012, François Ewald – Foucault’s former assistant and one of the main editors of his Collège de France lectures – participated in a seminar with Gary Becker at the University of Chicago. Ewald surprised both Becker and the audience by remarking that Foucault’s biopolitics lectures should be read as an ‘apology of neoliberalism’ in general, and as a statement of support for the work of Becker in particular.34 While figures such as Maurizio Lazzarato and Jacques Donzelot

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have responded by dismissing Ewald’s view out of hand, others have taken them seriously and have argued that Foucault’s later work was attracted to the neoliberal cause. The key text here is Zamora and Behrent’s edited collection Foucault and Neoliberalism, which, implicitly, extends many of the criticisms of Foucault advanced previously by Mirowski. Michael Behrent sets the tone of this volume by arguing at the outset that Foucault’s ‘attraction to neoliberalism was real’ and that his ‘neoliberal moment’ can be understood only in relation to the ‘broad shift of allegiances that transformed French intellectual politics in the 1970s’.35 More specifically, Foucault is said to have been drawn to neoliberalism for the following reasons: he was critical of social security as an exercise of biopower (a position, it is argued, that places him close to Milton Friedman36); he developed a non-juridical and anti-Marxist conception of power that shared affinities with the approach of key neoliberal thinkers; he ‘appreciated’ the non-anthropological approach of economic liberalism37; he was suspicious of the powers of the state; he believed neoliberalism could teach the political Left how to govern; and he sympathized with the writings of ‘New Philosophers’ such as André Glucksmann.38 There is a common strategy that underpins many of the criticisms advanced by Mirowski, Zamora, and Behrent and which is worthy of immediate comment: the tendency to read Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism as a normative commitment to the ideas under study. Mirowski, for example, argues that the main problem with Foucault’s lectures is that they sympathize with the neoliberal figure of the market as the site for the production of all forms of truth and legitimacy. Nowhere, however, in the actual text of the biopolitics lectures is this apparent. Rather, Foucault provides a historical account, first, of how the market is constituted as a site of veridiction in early forms of classical liberalism, and second, of how ordoliberalism understands markets and competition as things that have to be made. There is no argument here for the sovereignty of ‘the market’, but rather an analysis of the discourses that have made such understandings and commitments possible. Similarly, Behrent argues that Foucault’s ‘liberal moment’ was inspired by ‘economic liberals like Adam Smith, Wilhelm Röpke, and the Chicago School’.39 But, again, where in the text of the biopolitics lectures does Foucault display any sympathy for the ideas of these thinkers? The problem is that because Foucault does not openly dismiss the grounds of neoliberal reason in his biopolitics lectures, these are consequently read as a statement of support rather than of critique. But to write the history of a form of reason is not necessarily the same thing as supporting it or giving it legitimacy. Here, it is important to reflect on the

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value of genealogy as a critical method, and to consider the importance of thinking historically about the neoliberal present. One of the most valuable aspects of the historical work that underpins Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics is that it refuses to treat neoliberalism as a single discursive entity and instead maps out different trajectories of neoliberal reason that have distinct political and epistemological commitments. Neoliberalism is a messy and hybrid form of political reason that has varied both in its conception and application within different national and historical contexts.40 This is important, first, because neoliberalism contains its own fracture lines that can potentially be exploited by those positioned on the political Left; and second, the recognition of neoliberalism as a form of political reason demands for it to be treated as a serious political and epistemological project rather than dismissed out of hand as mere ideology. Indeed, by refusing to dismiss neoliberalism as shorthand for anything associated with free markets and the political Right, Foucault poses the question of how this form of reason works to redefine the state and individual subjectivities through the economization of the social, and why, moreover, it has proved so effective. Rather than turn to Foucault for answers, it more productive to use the biopolitics lectures to pose such questions, and to do so, as Serge Audier has argued, it is necessary to ‘stop constructing Foucault as a provider of political dogmas and prescriptions – something he never wanted to be’.41 Foucault’s work is of value because it provides a detailed understanding of the emergence, development, and workings of neoliberal reason and, rather than this being complicit with neoliberalism, it can instead be seen as preparing the ground for the formulation of a response and a potential alternative. Foucault’s biopolitics lectures provide a starting point for this task, but, as argued earlier, they also leave much work for us to do. For while they examine emergent configurations between the state and market (ordoliberalism) and the market and the individual (the Chicago School), they tell us little, for example, about the practical technologies of neoliberal governance and the operation of associated forms of what Wendy Brown calls ‘soft’ power. Here, a key question that takes us beyond Foucault is how neoliberalism is a form of political reason but also more than this: What is its organizational basis and how do different trajectories of neoliberalism infuse different practices and styles of governance? Does the history of neoliberalism then matter? It might be argued that any analysis of neoliberalism should start with the ‘revolution’ that took place post-197942 or that we need nothing more than a ‘brief history’ of its development.43 But, by looking closely at the emergence of neoliberalism

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from the 1920s onwards it is possible to identify the political, epistemological, and organizational bases upon which the neoliberal project is built. By adding into and extending Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism and addressing points such as the demise of political economy at the end of the nineteenth century and the role of Austrian economics, it becomes possible, among other things, to explore tensions within the neoliberal project and the political Right more generally that otherwise lie concealed. These tensions emerge out of disagreements over key questions, such as the exact role that government should play in relation to the market, and where the line should be drawn between the state and the market,44 disagreements that played out in organizations such as the Mont Pèlerin Society.45 It is here worth recalling that the purpose of a genealogy, including one of neoliberal reason, is to think critically about the lines of descent that lead to the present, and to show how things could have, and still can be, otherwise. This concern lay at the heart of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France: from the first lectures in 1970 on truth46 through to the final lecture series in 1984 that turns back to Antiquity to explore different conceptions of the self.47 The key question that unites these lecture series with Foucault’s history of neoliberalism is:  what can truth and the self be outside of their current capture by the market? It is hard to imagine a more pressing question today, in a time in which neoliberalism exercises a near-hegemonic grip over contemporary politics and culture. Against this backdrop, it is of little significance whether Foucault was hostile or sympathetic to neoliberalism; the point instead is to consider the ways in which his work can be developed and transcended in order to think historically and critically about the limits of neoliberal reason, and, with this, ask how things might be otherwise. Notes 1 See, for example, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 2 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2008), 31. Henceforth TBOB. 3 Ibid., 67. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 84. 8 Ibid., 116. 9 Ibid., 121. 10 Ibid., 145.

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Ibid., 185–213. Ibid., 215–265. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 226. For further consideration of this neoliberal idea of ‘self as enterprise’, see Lois McNay, ‘Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 26:6, 2009, 55–77. TBOB, 240. Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1960). TBOB, 243. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 244. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1970). Keith Tribe, ‘Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930–80’, in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009), 68–97. Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Nicholas Gane, ‘The Emergence of Neoliberalism:  Thinking through and Beyond Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Biopolitics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31:4, 2014, 3–27. Friedrich Hayek, The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek: The Fortunes of Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61–107. Gane, ‘Sociology and Neoliberalism: A Missing History’, Sociology, 48:6, 2014, 1092–1106. For a detailed study of this organization, see The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). On the role of think-tanks within the neoliberal project, see Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Brown, 70. For a useful overview of the critical reception of these lectures, see Serge Audier, Penser le ‘Néolibéralisme: Le Moment Néolibéral, Foucault et la Crise du Socialisme (Lormont: Le Bord de L’eau, 2015). Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (London:  Verso, 2013), 98. Ibid., 98. See www.vimeo.com/43984248 Michael Behrent, ‘Liberalism with Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free Market Creed, 1976–1979’, in Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 24–62.

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36 Daniel Zamora, ‘Foucault, the Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the State’, in Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 75. 37 Behrent, 54. 38 Michael Scott Christofferson ‘Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers’, in Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge:  Polity, 2016), 6–23. 39 Behrent, 30. 40 For further reflection on this point, see Jamie Peck Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 41 Audier, 42, translation mine. 42 Stuart Hall, ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’, Cultural Studies, 25:6, 2011, 705–728. 43 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005). 44 Jamie Peck rightly argues that this is a key tension that lies at the heart of the neoliberal project; see ‘Remaking Laissez-Faire’, Progress in Human Geography, 32:1, 2008, 3–43. 45 On this point, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion:  Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 123–151. 46 Foucault, The Will to Know (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 47 Foucault, The Courage of Truth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).

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Ch apter 4

Foucault’s Biopower Kay Peggs and Barry Smart

Introduction When reflecting on his earlier works Discipline and Punish1 and the first volume of The History of Sexuality,2 Michel Foucault commented that ‘the question at the center of everything was: what is power? And to be more specific: how is it exercised, what exactly happens when someone exercises power over another?’3 He exposed the complexities associated with assembling answers to these questions when he engaged analytically with the discursive and institutional traces inscribed by multifaceted relations of power on ‘the living’. Following Foucault’s analyses of the multiple relations, networks, and mechanisms of power, through which conduct is governed, action is structured, and forms of subjectivity are constituted, a notion of ‘biopower’ and an associated term, ‘biopolitics’, have become prominent for discussions of his work and in subsequent analyses of the administration of life and government of the living.4 The primary focus of this chapter is these interrelated notions of biopower and biopolitics, notions that are of considerable import both for understanding the development of Foucault’s work and for trying to make some sense of the complex, speciesentangled world in which we live. We seek to take issue with anthropocentric conceptualizations of biopower by suggesting that both Foucault’s own, and much current, thinking has failed to adequately address ‘the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species’.5 This is exemplified by the relative neglect in his work of human and non-human animal species relations, which often resemble ‘states of domination’, as we will explore in the concluding sections of the chapter. Modern civilization has generated ‘the most complex system of knowledge, the most sophisticated structures of power’.6 Power, in Foucault’s terms, is relational and relations of power are multiple and exist everywhere. It is to the various ways in which Foucault considers power is manifested and exercised that our attention is initially directed.7 Given 61

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that Foucault’s consideration of relations of power extends across the complex interconnections among sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical forms, we contemplate (1) the juridical framework of sovereign power, as well as disciplinary technologies of power. We then proceed to consider (2) the loose designation of the ‘new technology of power … biopolitics … biopower’,8 including the development of a series of ‘apparatuses’ through which power is exercised over life, where ‘life’ appears to be species-specific, and is addressed in terms of human forms alone. This leads us, finally, to reflect on (3) the question of human and non-human animal relations in respect of the exercise of biopower and the government of the living.

Sovereignty, Discipline, and Power over Life In a series of interviews and other texts, Foucault reflected on the prevalence of a particular conception of power as repressive, as negative: ‘posed … in terms of constitution, sovereignty, etc., that is, in juridical terms’.9 He comments that, within political philosophy, the tendency has been for power to be thought about and discussed principally in terms of law and sovereignty to the relative neglect of other complex, multiple, capillary power relations that are ‘technical and positive’. Consequently, he directed attention to such complex, multiple, positive, and productive relations of power, articulated within ‘a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements’ as truth.10 It is clear that what interested Foucault the most was to explore the previously ignored workings of forms of relations of power that are not obviously coercive, repressive, or bound up with the agency of a sovereign or state exercising jurisdiction over legal subjects.11 In a series of lectures delivered in 1973, and subsequently published under the title ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, Foucault described how he aimed to bring to light ‘the power relations that permeate the whole fabric of our existence’.12 Following a description in these lectures of the development of mechanisms and effects of sovereign or juridical power, he describes the subsequent gradual diffusion of disciplinary methods and power relations, leading to the establishment of ‘disciplinary society’.13 The term ‘disciplinary society’ is employed to begin to outline relations of power of a different order from sovereign power, relations of power articulated with, and between, living beings. A  disciplinary society is concerned with relations of knowledge and power, issuing from a range of institutions, that constitute individuals and act upon their potentialities throughout their lives. These include

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‘pedagogic institutions such as the school, psychological or psychiatric institutions such as the hospital, the asylum, the police, and so on’.14 Foucault argues that with disciplinary society a new era commences: We … enter the age of what I would call social orthopedics. I’m talking about a form of power, a type of society that I term ‘disciplinary society’ in contrast to the penal societies known hitherto. This is the age of social control. Among the theorists I cited earlier, there was one who in a sense foresaw and presented a kind of diagram of this society of supervision [surveillance], of this great social orthopedics – I’m thinking of Jeremy Bentham.15

Bentham is credited with having conceptualized the relations of power to which modern individuals are subject, as having provided a ‘model of this society of generalized orthopedics’,16 and as having identified the significance of the architectural form of the Panopticon. In Discipline and Punish Foucault elaborates how the architectural Panopticon enables the spatial exercise of the new mechanics of power he describes. It individualizes bodies; it distributes bodies in visible spaces; and it submits these bodies to ‘permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance’.17 In contrast to the juridical notion of sovereign power, which rests on the inquiry, panopticism, or discipline as a technique of power involves examination, observation, and supervision. Through these actions, forms of knowledge are generated and deployed in respect of individuals and their behaviour. Discipline as a technique of power is thus exercised as and through examination, hierarchical observation–supervision–surveillance, and normalizing judgement. It is in and through the formation of this ‘new type of power over bodies’ that knowledge is expressed and derived about the lives and bodies of individuals, and it is in this context that Foucault situates the emergence of the disciplines of the human sciences of sociology, psychology, and psychiatry.18 Foucault’s discussion of panopticism and discipline reveals the network of relations of power and knowledge to which individuals and their bodies became subject in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his re-theorization of relations of power and the relative shift from sovereignty to discipline, Foucault’s focus is on the respects in which the human body became subject to ‘ “political anatomy” which was also a “mechanics of power” ’, the ways in which trained, docile, and practised bodies were produced and individuals were made more useful, accommodating, compliant, and capable in modern societies, including in respect of the ‘little powers’, the techniques in and through which ‘people’s bodies and their time would become labour power and labour time’.19

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In his discussion of the emergence of biopower, Foucault focuses especially closely upon the development of one ‘particular strand of panoptic disciplinary power’, namely ‘the normative medical or rehabilitative gaze’.20 Panoptical power undergoes an ‘intensification’ in this case. The importance for Foucault of medicine and medical intervention in the development of techniques of power exercised over life and the living is restated in a series of observations on ‘biohistory’, which recognize the ‘introduction of life into history’ in the course of which the related notion of biopolitics is introduced: Society’s control over individuals was accomplished not only through consciousness or ideology but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society, it was biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, [and] the corporeal that mattered more than anything else. The body is a biopolitical reality; medicine is a biopolitical strategy.21

Biopower For Foucault biopower is the exercise of power over life (bios). It is to the first volume of The History of Sexuality that reference is generally made in considerations of Foucault’s use of the term. In the final part of the text, ‘The Right of Death and Power over Life’, Foucault uses the term ‘biopower’ ‘to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’.22 In contrast to the juridical character of sovereign power and the ‘ancient right to take life or let live’, biopower is exercised over individuals and populations, and, in administering or governing life, it has the capacity to ‘foster life, or disallow it’.23 The two dimensions of biopower identified, along which the exercise of power over life developed, are (1): ‘an anatomo-politics of the human body’, focussed on the living body as machine, the ‘optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’; and (2) ‘a biopolitics of the population’, focussed on the social body, the ‘species body’ and its constitutive living characteristics, which include ‘propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’.24 With the advent of biopower, what we might call a species-consciousness developed. And, as the emphasis shifted to fostering life, interrogation of and intervention in the processes of life promoted knowledge and understanding of ‘what it meant to be a living species in a living world’.25 While biopower assumes many forms, the common denominator is the respects

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in which living beings (or, to be more precise, living human beings), individually and collectively, become subject to observation, calculation, statistical assessments, intervention, etc., as they are inscribed ‘into the order of knowledge and power’.26 In a lecture delivered on 17 March 1976 and published in Society Must Be Defended,27 Foucault identifies a series of transformations associated with the exercise of power in the course of the nineteenth century. In particular, he considers the ways in which sovereign power is ‘complemented’ by the complex articulation of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies of power, which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a new technology of power, ‘biopolitics’, which appears in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Foucault describes the latter as merging and integrating with, modifying to an extent, and ‘infiltrating … [and] embedding itself in’ existing disciplinary techniques.28 Elaborating on ‘this biopolitics, this biopower’, Foucault shows how, through a demographic assembly of statistics, population became an object of knowledge and target for administration, management, and control.29 This led to a series of developments in the exercise of power over life, including a medicine focused on public hygiene, institutions and campaigns to organize and promote medical care by teaching hygiene, as well as other interventions in reproduction, mortality, old age, and ‘accidents, infirmities, and various anomalies’, to which the establishment of charities, forms of insurance, and savings and pension schemes were associated responses.30 In this way, biopolitics engages with the population ‘as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem’.31 Biopolitics is concerned with the unpredictable, collective ‘living’ phenomena that vary over time and employs mechanisms such as ‘forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures’ to provide a basis on which to intervene to achieve continuous purchase over, and regulation of, the ‘population of living beings’.32 Whereas disciplinary mechanisms operate at the level of the individual body and its capacities, the technology of biopower is directed towards regulating the ‘biological processes’ of the population of living beings. Notwithstanding the complex relationships among all living beings and the dependence in various significant respects of human beings on other living beings, Foucault’s consideration of the ‘technology of biopower’ is restricted to ‘the biological processes of man-as-species’.33 The distinctiveness of biopower is outlined succinctly by Foucault in the following terms: it is reducible neither to the sovereign theory of ‘right’, with its juridical contractual conception of the individual and society, nor to the disciplines and associated technologies of power operating

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upon the bodies of individuals. It is, rather, power exercised to regularize and enhance the existence of the multiplicity of living beings, following ‘a demographic explosion and industrialization’, and it includes forms of intervention calculated to reduce random events and risks, prevent accidents where possible, and diminish deficiencies – or at least compensate for such eventualities  – as they bear on the ‘control of life in general’.34 Such developments subsequently led Foucault to ask whether, and to what extent, ‘the general economy of power in our societies is becoming a domain of security?’35

Security and Population: Power over Life and the Government of the Living The notions of biopower and biopolitics are integral to subsequent lecture series delivered by Foucault in 1978 and 1979, and published in Security, Territory and Population36 and The Birth of Biopolitics,37 respectively. Both texts focus on the historical background and context for the development of complex forms of power over life. In Security, Territory and Population, Foucault acknowledges the relative vagueness of the term ‘biopower’ and promises further study and elaboration of the mechanisms involved. He states in the first lecture, ‘[b]y this [bio-power] I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species’.38 But discussion in the subsequent series of lectures offers relatively little explicit consideration of the notion of biopower. Rather, Foucault introduces a series of additional terms with which to trace with greater precision the complex historical roots of the forms of rationality, mechanisms, and technologies associated with the exercise of power over (social and economic) life. The central concern is analysis of the historical emergence of a form of political rationality and a new technique of power directed towards population. Foucault analyzes the development of mechanisms, technologies, and ‘apparatuses (dispositifs)’ of security, population as a new collective ‘political subject’, and in due course ‘government’ as the pre-eminent form of power.39 What is indicated here is the emergence in the eighteenth century of new realities, new economic and political problems, a ‘different economy

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of power’, and a ‘new political personage’  – the population  – which became an object or target, as both human species and public, of governmental practice and management, and which ‘appears in a whole series of knowledges’.40 The emergence of ‘population’ is articulated with a series of transformations in the field of knowledge, including transitions ‘from natural history to biology’ and from ‘the analysis of wealth to political economy’, in tandem with an increasing concern with questions of government and the governing of life and living.41 In a further reconsideration of the substance of his lecture course Foucault remarks that a more appropriate title for his deliberations would be ‘a history of governmentality’. By the latter, Foucault means analysis of the complex combination of institutions, mechanisms, techniques, and tactics that facilitate the exercise of power over population as a system of living beings, the establishment of ‘political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’.42 In addressing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century roots of governmentality, which is accorded ‘pre-eminence’ over other forms of power, Foucault describes how the intention is to get behind or outside the institution of the state, to uncover the internal structures, forms of knowledge, and technologies of power constitutive of the ‘governmentalization of the state’.43 In a following set of lectures on liberalism, discussed in detail in Chapter 3 of the current book, Foucault explains that his focus had become ‘governmental reason’ or ‘governmentality’ because an analysis of biopolitics is ultimately bound up with an understanding of the complex ways in which problems arising from the attributes and features of population are rationalized and addressed in governmental practice.44 In particular, endemic to the political rationality of liberalism, and later neoliberalism, there is a continual critical monitoring, measuring, and questioning of the parameters and processes of the practices of governing and associated social and economic consequences. And it is to the respects in which ‘the problems of life and population have been posed within a technology of government … constantly haunted by the question of liberalism’ that, Foucault concludes, attention now needs to be directed.45 But there are other relevant questions haunting the ways in which the exercise of power over life, over the living, has been posed and explored to which critical consideration also needs to be given. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault remarks that ‘[f ]or millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle:  a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’.46 It is to the complex forms of articulation of

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the living human, as one animal among and alongside countless animal species, that we now turn our attention.

On the Government of the Living: Human and ‘Animal’ The exercise of power over life and the government of the living invite searching questions regarding ‘life’ and ‘the living’, comparable to those posed by Foucault of ‘power’. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that in the course of the nineteenth century biological existence was increasingly ‘reflected in political existence’, such that ‘the fact of living … passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention’.47 This particular passage continues with a reference to power ‘dealing … with living beings’ and to biopower designating ‘what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’.48 Whereas in History of Madness49 and The Order of Things,50 as Jeffrey Nealon notes, some consideration is given to non-human animals – to animal life and animality – the later discussion of the exercise of power over ‘life’ and ‘the living’ is limited merely to one form of life, to one species: humans.51 There is a case for arguing (as Foucault himself observed, ironically enough, in his deliberations on genealogy52) that his consideration of the forms in which power is exercised over different types of living beings has been ‘insufficiently elaborated’. Forms of knowledge about non-human animals and the associated mechanisms of material coercion to which they have been subjected, and from which the lives and bodies of individual human beings and populations have benefitted in various ways, have been ‘disqualified’ and/or ‘subjugated’. Foucault observes that ‘modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’.53 And he might have added (as we wish to) that, simultaneously, modern humanity’s existence routinely subjugates and terminates the lives of endless multitudes of nonhuman animals in the course of, for example, scientific research and food production/consumption. Throughout history, human existence has been inextricably articulated with other forms of life and living, in particular with other species being subjected to ‘explicit calculations’ made manifest in the form of ‘domestication’,54 genetic and other types of biological engineering, industrialized rearing and slaughtering, and episodes of extinction.55 The politics, ethics, and mode(s) of living of modern humans have been predicated upon the routine subjection of virtually every other species of animal to multiple mechanisms of power  – sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical  – which, on an industrial scale, have at the

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minimum significantly transformed the lives and living of other species and placed their very lives in jeopardy. While Foucault clearly recognized the significance of the historical entry of ‘life’ into the order of power– knowledge, Nicole Shukin comments that ‘[a]ctual animals have … been subtly displaced from the category of “species” in Foucault’s … remarks on biopower, as well as in the work of subsequent theorists of biopower’.56 But analysts are now drawing on Foucault’s work to explore ‘the question of life across the human–animal divide’.57 This is because consideration of the complex biopolitical power–knowledge relations between human and non-human animals is integral to an effective understanding of biopower, the production and reproduction of ‘life’, and the government of all living beings. For example, the combination of mechanisms ‘organized around discipline and regulation’, the technologies of biopower operating to cultivate and manage subjugated species, and a presumed sovereign right to take life, is emblematic of ‘speciesism’, of the fateful life to which a multiplicity of other species are consigned in fields, pens, farms, factories, laboratories, and slaughterhouses. Of such practices, Coetzee writes: ‘[l]et me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.’58 His comment is reminiscent of that attributed to Theodor Adorno, who is alleged to have said that ‘Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals’.59 Although Foucault included ‘no sustained meditation on Nazism and the Holocaust’,60 his clarification of a comment in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, on genocide as ‘the dream of modern power’61 does anticipate a relevant line of thinking that is developed in a subsequent course of lectures published as Society Must Be Defended.62 In the course of a series of reflections on transformations in the mechanisms of power, Foucault refers to the fact that there has been a ‘shift in the right of death’, away from the ‘ancient right’.63 But death, destruction, massacres, wars, and ‘wholesale slaughter’ have, if anything, increased in scale and scope as a ‘formidable power of death’, which is arguably most significantly exemplified by the daily, routine laboratory, factory, and slaughterhouse killing of billions of non-human animals. This ‘power of death’ presents itself as the counterpart of biopower which is ‘situated and exercised at the level of life, … species, …race, and the large-scale phenomena of population’.64 Taking heed of transformations in the mechanisms of power, and in particular the development, extension, and increasing prominence of

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biopower, Foucault asks how under such conditions it is possible to conceptualize the political power to kill. He asks: ‘[since] this power’s objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die?’65 The answer is that the modern State has tended to draw on racist reasoning in a number of contexts, when it deemed ‘the right to take life was imperative’.66 (See Chapter  7 of this book for a more detailed discussion of these points.) Recourse to forms of evolutionism facilitated the differentiation of the human species into ‘races’ and subdivided populations in accordance with ascribed characteristics and qualities, which are judged and hierarchically ordered, creating ‘caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower’. Such reasoning allows ‘others’ to be constituted as ‘bad’, ‘inferior’, a threat, and, ultimately, as expendable. As Foucault comments, ‘the death of the other … is [represented as] something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer’, and a perceived internal or external ‘biological threat’ to the well-being of a population has led to a range of sovereign-like measures exposing those designated as ‘other’ to harm, including ‘death, increasing the risk of death …, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’.67 Foucault notes the articulation, which developed in the nineteenth century, between a form of knowledge – biology – and associated technologies of power, which through the invocation of evolutionist themes led to modern racism and which met its ‘paroxysmal development’ in the Nazi state’s deployment of a combination of disciplinary power, a generalization of biopower or biopolitical regulation, and a ‘murderous’ sovereign right to kill, throughout the social body.68 Foucault’s work contributes to our understanding of the relations of power implicated in the events of the Holocaust, and may alert us to the prospect of future holocausts.69 It may also provide a basis from which to generate understanding of the complexity of human and non-human animal relations, specifically the respects in which speciesism promotes and legitimates differentiations and hierarchical orderings of living beings within ‘the domain of life that is under power’s control’, thereby fragmenting the population of species.70 But while Foucault’s work may provide tools for engaging with the complex consequences of the multiple relations of power and knowledge through which humans differentiate themselves from non-human animals, it is Charles Patterson who has provided a sustained analysis of the respects in which the industrialized, assembly-line slaughter of non-human animals bears comparison with the Holocaust. The title of Patterson’s book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, is taken from the story ‘The Letter Writer’, in which

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the author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, writes: ‘[i]n relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka’.71 In his critical social and historical study Patterson demonstrates the complicated, and for some controversial, associations between the Holocaust and the human subjugation of non-human animals by assembling a history of how the dominant species – human – objectifies, terrorizes, and mutilates non-human animals and sends them for slaughter on an industrial scale. Like Foucault, Patterson is influenced by the writings of Bentham. Unlike Foucault, who focussed on Bentham’s ‘architectural figure’ of the Panopticon, Patterson turns his attention to Bentham’s concern for the plight of non-human animals, arguing that he ‘recognized the domestication of animals as tyrannical’.72 Bentham hoped that ‘[t]he day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny’.73 Does the industrial subjugation, chemical and genetic treatment, and slaughtering of non-human animals represent an exemplification of what Foucault identifies as ‘sovereign power’, where the right to ‘take life or let live’ is assumed? Non-human animals on intensive ‘farms’ are born to an increasingly biogenetically designed and regulated life, to be killable, to be killed. Their lives and deaths are inextricably bound to production and consumption. Discipline produces docile bodies, bodies that may be ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’,74 and, as Joel Novek argues, intensive ‘farms’, like those for ‘hog production’ in Canada, routinely employ disciplinary technologies of power to produce ‘docile’ non-human animal bodies that are submissive and amenable to ‘intensive confinement’ and ‘the colonization of animal reproductive cycles’, in order to facilitate ‘greater productivity’.75 Biopower is also increasingly prominent in intensive farming practices. As Cary Wolfe notes, there is now on ‘display in the modern factory farm, as perhaps nowhere else in biopolitical history’, a range of bio-technologies of power which have as their aim ‘maximizing control over life and death […] “making live”, in Foucault’s words, through eugenics, artificial insemination and selective breeding, pharmaceutical enhancement, inoculation, and the like’.76 As our foregoing observations indicate, the forms of articulation between sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopolitical power seem to be particularly complex and evident in respect of relations between human and non-human animals. These relations are multifaceted, and there are important distinctions that need to be made between the relations of power between humans and non-human animals in different contexts. For example, there are significant differences between the uses of power

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to which non-human animals are subjected in scientific laboratories and industrialized agricultural factory farms and the power relations to which companion animals are exposed, as Wolfe and Donna Haraway consider in different ways.77 In a discussion of the relationships between human and non-human animal species in scientific laboratories and in household contexts, Haraway acknowledges the relevance of Foucault’s work on ‘biopower and the proliferative powers of biological discourses’.78 Disturbing features of Haraway’s discussion include the particular attributes she ascribes to non-human animals in scientific laboratories, who are accorded the status of ‘workers’ and are ascribed ‘freedoms’. In a series of clarifications, she argues that as ‘lab actors’, non-human animals in laboratories ‘have many degrees of freedom’ in the sense that if they ‘do not cooperate’, then the experiments will not work. She adds: ‘factory meat industries have to face the disaster of chickens’ or pigs’ refusal to live when their cooperation is utterly disregarded in an excess of human engineering arrogance’.79 Haraway’s account of human and non-human animal power relations seems to draw on Foucault’s view that ‘freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power’,80 since, for Foucault, resistance or recalcitrance is as integral to the working of power relations as the attempt to bring power to bear on a subject. Yet, we might ask (unlike Haraway):  What does this look like when applied to extreme or limit cases? About the exercise of power, Foucault writes that ‘in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely’.81 Elsewhere, he returns to a consideration of such extremes, describing relations of power that have become ‘blocked, frozen’, or immobilized, and where ‘any reversibility of movement’ is prevented.82 Foucault refers to these as ‘situations or states of domination’ and adds that in such circumstances ‘practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained or limited’.83 It is precisely the states of domination imposed on non-human animals, who are forced to conform to the human way of life, whether in the laboratory, the factory farm, or as household companions, that Haraway disregards.

Concluding Remarks Non-human animals are central to society. A consideration of relations of power exercised over life and living beings needs to address human and non-human animal relations if it is to engage fully with the implications of Foucault’s observation that humans are merely one species among many, a species whose being is closely bound up in a myriad of ways with the lives

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of other beings. In his references to the exercise of power over life, Foucault draws a contrast between the sovereign power to take life and biopower understood as a series of interventions, predicated upon and generative of knowledge, that seek to make live and to improve life. However, the life in question, the lives discussed as being disciplined, managed, and regularized, are those of an undifferentiated ‘man-as-species’.84 Foucault does not address, in this context at least, the complex forms of articulation between species, the relations of power between the lives of humans and the multiple species of non-human animals, which have a significant bearing on, to take one example, the development of medicine. Nevertheless, his work on forms of power is integral to a critical study of the techniques through which (1) ‘states of domination’ that prevail in human and nonhuman animal relations ‘are established and maintained’, and (2) a ‘right to decide life and death’ continues to be exercised over multitudes of non-human animals, and indeed has been extended in scale and scope within late modern intensive factory farms, slaughterhouses, and scientific laboratories.85 Notes 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977 [1975]). 2 Foucault, A History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin. 1979 [1976]). 3 Foucault ‘On Power’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture:  Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (London:  Routledge 1988 [1978]) 96–109:  101–102. See also Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 24; 31–32. 4 See Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar, ‘Introduction:  Why Biopower? Why Now?’ in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, ed. Cisney and Morar (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1–25; Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011); Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York, NY:  New York University Press, 2011); and Jeffery T. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 5 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population – Lectures at the Collége de France 1977– 78, ed. Michel Senellart (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. 6 Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge:  Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton:  The Harvester Press, 1980a [1977]), 78–108, and Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (London:  University of Utah Press, 1981), 224–254: 239–240.

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7 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1:  The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin. 1979 [1976]), 93; and Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Ethics:  Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London, Penguin 2000), 281–301: 283. 8 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 43, and Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. 9 Foucault ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton:  The Harvester Press, 1980 [1977]), 109–133: 115. 10 Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, 133. 11 Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, 36. 12 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, in Michel Foucault: Power – Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (London, Penguin 2002 [1973]), 1–89: 17. 13 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, 52. 14 Ibid., 57, and Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 36–40. 15 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, 57–58. 16 Ibid., 58. 17 Foucault, Discipline, 214. 18 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, 59, and Foucault, Discipline, 191 and 193. 19 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, 86–87. 20 Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 46–47. 21 Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, 137; emphasis added. 22 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 143. 23 Ibid., 138–139. 24 Ibid., 139. 25 Ibid., 142–143. 26 Ibid., 142. 27 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. 28 Ibid., 242. 29 Ibid., 243. 30 Ibid., 244. 31 Ibid., 245. 32 Ibid., 245–246. 33 Ibid., 247. 34 Ibid., 249 and 253. 35 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population,10. 36 Ibid. 37 Foucault, The Birth of BioPolitics – Lectures at the Collége de France 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 38 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1. 39 Ibid., 6, 11, and 108. 40 Ibid., 67, 70, and 76.

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55 56 57

58 59

60 61 62 63 64

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Ibid., 78 and 88–89. Ibid., 108. Ibid.. Foucault, Birth of BioPolitics. Ibid., 323–324. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 143. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 142–143. Foucault, History of Madness (London: Routledge, 2006 [1961]). Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974 [1966]). Jeffrery T. Nealon, ‘The Archaeology of Biopower: From Plant to Animal Life in The Order of Things’, in Cisney and Morar, eds., Biopower:  Foucault and Beyond, 138–157. Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, 82. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 143. David Nibert’s term ‘domesecration’, is more appropriate as it refers to the ‘systemic practice of violence in which social animals are enslaved and biologically manipulated, resulting in their objectification, subordination, and oppression’. See David Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (New  York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2013), 12. See Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage. 2011) and Nealon, ‘Archaeology of Biopower’. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital:  Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 9–10. See Thomas Lemke, ‘New Materialisms:  Foucault and the “Government of Things” ’, Theory, Culture & Society, 32:4, 2015, 3–25; Jeffrey, T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2015); Jonathan Tran, Foucault and Theology (London:  T&T Clark International, 2011); and Carey Wolfe, Before the Law:  Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2013). J.  M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press,1999), 21. Despite rigorous searches we have found it impossible to find an original source of the comment attributed to Adorno. Patterson (2002) does not provide one in his book Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, (New York, NY: Lantern Books, 2002), 53. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, ‘Michel Foucault and the Genealogy of the Holocaust’, in The European Legacy, 2:4, 1997, 697–699: 697. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 143. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Foucault History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 137. Ibid., 137.

76 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Kay Peggs and Barry Smart Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 255–256. Ibid., 259. Milchman and Rosenberg ‘Genealogy of the Holocaust’, 699. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254–255. Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, vii. Ibid., 12. Quoted in ibid., 12. Foucault, Discipline, 136. Joel Novek, ‘Pigs and People: Sociological Perspectives on the Discipline of Nonhuman Animals in Intensive Confinement’, in Society and Animals 13:3, 2005, 221–244. Wolfe, Before the Law, 46. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Posthumanities) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Ibid., 59. Ibid., 72–73. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Critical Inquiry, 8:4, 1982, 777–795: 790. Ibid., 789. Foucault, ‘Ethics of the Concern’, 283. Ibid., 283. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 247. Foucault, ‘Ethics of the Concern’, 299, and Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 135.

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Coming After Foucault

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Ch apter 5

Foucault and Literary Theory Simon During

Michel Foucault began his career in an intellectual world for which literature and literary theory mattered a great deal. So it is understandable that, early in his career, literature, or, at any rate, a particular conception of literature, was a touchstone for him. More that that:  it was a centre around which his work as a whole turned. That remained the case up until about 1968, when the student/worker ‘revolution’ transformed the political and cultural order in France. Although Foucault was not himself directly involved in these events, in their wake for a short period, he moved towards a kind of Maoism. In 1969, he published ‘What Is an Author?’, an essay which subjected the literary field to a distinctly post-literary inspection. Here he was interested not in literature as such but in the ‘author function’, by which he meant the terms on which certain texts and discourses came to have authors while others did not, and in the features and structures which enabled these texts to be authored.1 The essay implied that anonymity, and the radical equality it enabled, was a condition for a less elitist literary world. But during his high literary period, from about 1963 to 1969, he published a series of more insistently literary essays and reviews, as well as a monograph on Raymond Roussel (first as simply Raymond Roussel in 1963 and translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel in 1986).2 At this point in his career, his interest in literature spills across into his non-literary works too. Most importantly, it underpins his breakthrough 1961 monograph on madness, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (first translated into English as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason in 1965), just as it does in his famous revisioning of intellectual history, Les mots et les choses (1967) (translated into English as The Order of Things in 1970).3 In The Order of Things, for instance, the works of avant-garde or outsider writers such as the Marquis de Sade, Stephan Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, 79

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Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge reveal experiences and impulsions that have been occluded by both the ‘classical’ and the ‘modern’ epistemes (or regimes of knowledge) that the book describes. In the classical episteme, knowledge is constituted by ordered representations of a coherent and rational world, and what writers like these reveal is that language is not simply a set of signs open to rational analysis and bounded patterns but is, instead, ‘penetrated as far as we can reach within it by inexhaustible values’.4 We might say that inside literature it is possible to enact that endlessness of signification which early-modern rationality could not contain. In the modern episteme, on the other hand, knowledge uncovers the origins and determinations of finite things; it outlines the determinations of Foucault’s particular objects of study (life, labour, language) by referring back to the obscure forces in which these objects find their origins. Here too, literary writing breaks the bounds of finitude conceived in this way. Indeed writers such as Antoine Artaud and Roussel who are excluded from normativity in this period – deemed ‘mad’ indeed – articulate an ‘experience’ of the limits of modern finitude and causality. The concept ‘experience’ is problematic but crucial here, and I will return to it.5 From an intellectual-historical point of view, literature is central to Foucault’s early work because he comes to it mainly by way of two particular schools of thought. To begin with, in this period, Foucault’s method remains broadly structuralist. Which is to say that he sets out to analyse relations that connect different conceptual orders to one another in terms that posit particular structures for those relations and he does so in ‘neutral’ terms, that is, without adhering, or seeming to adhere, to any particular political or ethical program, especially not to progressivism or humanism. (In this anti-humanist, anti-progressivist context, the word ‘neutral’ bears a surprisingly heavy conceptual weight, as we are about to see.) Thus in the History of Madness, Foucault is interested in how a new formation – ‘madness’ – emerged throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century alongside, or, rather, within, a particular governmental practice he calls ‘confinement’. Here the connection between the emergence of a new social and medical type  – namely, the mad person  – and the practice of confinement is not posited as external and causal, but rather, as internal and structural. Although, broadly speaking, this kind of structural analysis was established first in linguistics (by Ferdinand de Saussure), anthropology (by Claude Levi-Strauss), Marxism (by Louis Althusser), and comparative philology (Georges Dumézil, the young Foucault’s most important institutional patron), it was then being most effectively popularized in

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literary studies, and in particular by Roland Barthes. Foucault’s short book on Roussel, which describes various kinds of writing protocols in Roussel’s strange but wonderful œuvre is, on one level at least, an exercise in Barthesian structuralism, one which demonstrates how a ‘mad’ writer reveals the borders that delimit the rationalities of his time. Roussel attests not to madness as the psychiatrists and the state define it, but rather to the déraison that, for structural reasons, inhabits reason itself. Death and the Labyrinth is simultaneously a structuralist literary analysis and a contribution to the history of madness. As these remarks have begun to suggest, literature has a double function for Foucault. It provides content for structural analysis but it also exceeds or stands outside formal structuration. In this way it forms the ground upon which Foucault’s analysis of structures stands: as just noted, already in the History of Madness, for instance, writers from within Foucault’s preferred literary genealogy – in this case the Marquis de Sade and Artaud as well as Roussel – maintain that form of fundamental ‘unreason’ which madness as a psychiatric and confined condition displaces. Literature is, as it were, a ‘space’ which cannot be contained by the madness/confinement structure, and which allows us to see madness as neither a rational nor natural phenomenon but as a construct.6 Moving away from epistemology, it is also important to note that this non-containment is not a matter of resistance. It is not political. It is rather, as I say, bound to an experience, an experience which indeed, as I will suggest, resonates with older mysticisms and negative theologies. It is as if by positing a literary/mystical experience of unreason, Foucault can treat the madness/confinement couple analytically, neutrally, structurally. So, a little paradoxically, this allows us to recognize that, during this period and for all Foucault’s adherence to the movement, structuralism was not the most important context for his understanding of literature. The notion that literature is a use of language that could elude the binds of organized knowledge and structures has another lineage – which emerges out of Georges Bataille and Leiris’s work and, probably most significantly, out of Maurice Blanchot’s, too. Three of Foucault’s essays deal with this lineage explicitly and in detail:  (1) ‘A Preface to Transgression’, which appeared in a 1963 issue of Bataille’s journal Critique devoted to Bataille himself; (2) ‘Language to Infinity’, which appeared the same year in Tel Quel and which amounts to a position paper for that journal’s distinct and influential project; and (3)  ‘The Thought of the Outside’, an essay on Blanchot, which also appeared in Critique three years later.

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Let us briefly examine each in turn. But, first, a caution. In these essays – as in some of his later work – Foucault deploys a distinctive rhetoric of ambiguity.7 On the one hand, these texts present themselves as neutral descriptions or expositions of particular writers and works. Under that rubric, they imply no commitment by their author to the projects of the writers whom he is examining. On the other, subtly and without any explicit declaration, Foucault seems to be endorsing  – celebrating  – his chosen writers, absorbing their arguments and perceptions into his own. Or to risk a further step: Is he (just perhaps) also ironizing it?8 Foucault’s multilayered ambiguity is helped by Bataille and Blanchot’s own methods: they are providing a post-Heideggerian phenomenological and ethical account of the modern condition (describing a metaphysical experience if one likes) as based in a particular relation to language and literature, and which thus can be pursued as a mode of philosophical literary criticism, that is, one that is unstably and ambiguously positioned between literary theory/criticism and philosophy. At any rate, in his ambiguous neutrality Foucault has it several ways. Is he committing himself to, say, Bataille’s ethic and metaphysics of transgression? No, he is merely describing it. But doesn’t the intensity, the poetry, the literariness of Foucault’s own prose, modelled on the writers he is describing, express enthusiasm and endorsement? That is hard to deny. But isn’t that enthusiasm a little literary, a little excessive to any philosophical case being made … A little ironical? Which is also hard sometimes not to think. Back to the literary essays of the mid-1960s. First, ‘A Preface to Transgression’. Bataille, Foucault here insists, is preoccupied with the ‘related categories of exhaustion, excess, the limit and transgression’, which have come to interrupt the twentieth century’s urgent need to produce and consume.9 And, in Bataille, this preoccupation – this commitment to breaking out of capitalism’s dispositions and limits – is bound to sexuality, in particular to sexuality’s relation to radical secularity or what Foucault calls, after Nietzsche, ‘the death of God’.10 By this, Foucault means not the social retreat of Latin Christianity  – secularization as sociologists understand it  – but the profound metaphysical/spiritual/epistemic shift occasioned by the disappearance of a particular mode of infinity – God’s infinity  – from European thought and experience, and the subsequent reign of finitude or what Foucault calls ‘the limitless reign of the limit’.11 This ‘reign of the limit’ is another way of describing the modern episteme in which proper thought happens in distinct fields or disciplines which, however, and as we have noted, refers back to opaque origins and forces.

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Foucault’s claim in this essay is that it is possible to entertain an ‘inner experience’ of this new finitude. ‘Inner experience’ was itself the title of a book Bataille had published during the war to which Blanchot had also made a cogent contribution. To put it bluntly: inner experience is a spiritual experience of that nothingness which exists where God once was.12 As such, Foucault claims, it is ‘impossible’ but not non-existent, all the more so because God’s death is the ‘death of a God who has never existed’ and who thus cannot finally die. God was always a simulacrum, and in Bataille this opens inner experience – a mystical experience – up to affects not traditionally associated with mysticism or indeed any of the spirit’s operations: mockery, cruelty, eroticism, profanation.13 For Bataille, sexuality stages such inner experiences not just because, via psychoanalysis (a modern form of knowledge par excellence), it has provided a master code for the limitless reign of limits, but because, so Foucault contends, sexuality was itself ‘discovered’ in the late eighteenth century – by Sade no less – in and through transgression itself. In sexuality, the hidden forces uncovered (or imagined) by modern disciplined knowledge hold energies that that knowledge cannot constrain. For all that, neither Bataille’s nor Foucault’s interest in the ‘inner experience’ of finitude is primarily sexual. It is, rather, philosophical and literary. At one level, it is bound to communication, and bound to communication structurally. It is as if the experience of transgressing limits cannot but take the form of utterance. Foucault affirms this via a classical literary reference: ‘as Homer has said, the gods send disasters to men so that they can tell of them’ and as men tell of these disasters (or these limit experiences) finitude vanishes into the boundlessly adaptable network of language, and ‘speech finds its infinite resourcefulness’.14 In this way, the experience of the nothing that lies outside (not beyond) the finite provides ‘the basis for finally liberating our language’.15 In Bataille this use of language, which ‘arriving at its confines, overleaps itself ’, does so because it does not posit or come under the control of a sovereign subject, and, in this way, ‘outlines its essential emptiness’.16 In what becomes an important thematic for French literary theory of this period and provides the justification for much avantgarde writing, especially that associated with the magazine Tel Quel, this sweeping away of the sovereign subject also enables this literary language to fold back in on itself and ‘tell of itself ’.17 Let’s put it like this: literary language which approaches metaphysical and spiritual nullity, which frees itself from the control of individual subjects, becomes a language that points to its own linguisticity. This proposition is not argued for by Foucault (or Bataille). It is phatically announced. In its bare emphaticness,

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it seems to represent an experience, if (as we can say a little sceptically) an experience actually grounded on whatever authority the French literary system was then able to ascribe to Bataille. In ‘Language to Infinity’ (a programmatic essay for Tel Quel’s project, almost a manifesto) Foucault takes up this line of thought from a different, if no less philosophical and literary, perspective.18 Here, once more, he points to language’s capacity to pursue an empty space beyond finitude. This time Foucault presents this possibility as a breaking down of the distinction which helped ground Kantian critique:  the difference between ‘nihil negativum’ and ‘nihil privitum’ – that is, between a nothing which lies beyond conceptualization and a nothing that is merely a determinate absence or gap. Today, however, so Foucault argues, the void cannot be thought of as a nothing in either of these senses. It is to be figured, somewhat confusingly, as an ‘empty infinity’, a phrase with Blanchotian resonances. (‘Confusingly’ because the modern episteme as Foucault presents it, while it gestures towards opaque origins and forces, it does not set them into an infinity.) But, leaving this aside, this empty infinity is figured here as the space in which literary language appears and does so, once again, endlessly to extend and double itself. In this essay, Foucault calls this space, the space of the ‘library’ in which words lose their temporality as they are ceaselessly archived. Or, as we can also say, for Foucault here literary language is language that is true to the endless written production of meaning and thought, a production that, from within itself, ultimately empties out the tangible world, and, somewhat mysteriously, allows the written archive to become just about itself. This line of thought allows Foucault to present an early statement of that method which would come to be called deconstruction in the United States, and to be associated with Derrida’s name rather with Foucault’s. He contends that natural languages have as their condition of possibility another kind of ‘work of language’ which can neither be contained within discrete utterances or finite texts nor aligned to particular situations and presences. It is, instead, a ‘murmuring that repeats, recounts and redoubles itself ’ endlessly, and undergoes ‘an uncanny process of amplification and thickening, in which our language today is lodged and hidden’.19 And, once again, this enabling ‘grammatology’ (as we can call the murmuring of the library, loosely borrowing Derrida’s term) appears only as directed towards the null place that appears on the far side of secular finitude. In Foucault then (but not in Derrida), the emergence of this kind of language is a historicizable condition just because it exists in and for the modern era of secular, spiritual, and epistemic finitude. It comes

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into being just as literature alongside (or inside) the modern episteme. More specifically, of course, literature emerges when thickened, doubled, ceaseless language takes written form, something that can happen only in ‘flashes’ directed towards the null void. But as Foucault claims, channelling Blanchot, in the late eighteenth century they are directed towards the null void as it appears under the cover of personal death itself – that modern death that promises no immortality. By this account, ‘literature’ as such appears most concretely in late eighteenth-century Gothic fictions where language takes flight from its received usages and genres to confront the consequences of tombs in which bodies merely rot. It is in these terms that in 1962 Foucault published an important essay about the little known Gothic writer Révéroni de Saint-Cyr and his recently reprinted novel, Pauliska ou la pervesité (1795), whose underground cages and traps, devoted to ‘counter-natural’ eroticisms, ‘mark the boundaries of the human and inhuman’ and thus a kind of living death.20 And it’s a novel which (although Foucault does not himself explicitly gesture at this) is difficult to read today except as tinged by an irony, a libertine self-mockery we might say. Of the three major literary essays I am describing, ‘Language to Infinity’ perhaps comes the closest to being just analytic. At any rate, its programmatic and literary nature remains more tightly under wraps. That is less the case with the piece on Blanchot that Foucault published in 1966. Here, Foucault returns to the question of literature’s origins both at a particular historical conjuncture and in a particular turn in language, or, to state this more carefully, in the new relation that language has to itself. Literature begins, Foucault here proposes, riffing on his 1963 essays, not where language becomes self-conscious and self-referential but where it ‘gets as far away from itself as possible’.21 It comes into being when language passes itself off not in thoughts about the world or in representations of the world or in expressions of interiority but in performative and selfreferential speech acts as modelled in the bare statement: ‘I speak’. Such performances in their nakedness and apparent independence of the system of language that they nonetheless depend upon dissolve the subject itself. Here sheer utterance stands in the place of the self. This line of thought has, of course, a familiar ring. But what is important this time is that the ‘fiction’ (as Foucault also now calls it) through which language detaches itself from representation and subjectivity, and thus empties itself out, is presented as a ‘neutral space’ which is also an ‘outside’. It is neutral, in particular, because it lies outside subjectivity. Neutral, too, because it is a ‘language spoken by nobody’ and because it belongs to ‘a space in which

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no existence can take root’.22 More particularly, it has no truck with the human itself. And for Foucault here once again, it is possible to experience this neutrality, this outside. It is this insistence on experience that demands that we understand his analysis of the emergence of modern literary language not just as a prophecy or as an announcement reliant on accumulated authority but in relation to the history of mysticism. This is especially true because here Foucault again insists that the experience of the neutral happens via an attraction to the null void that envelops the modern cosmos, which opens up with death. For him, it is just such an experience that Blanchot’s writings, his fictions or récits articulate, and which form the basis, it may appear, of Foucault’s own literary (and spiritual) disposition at the time. At any rate, it is in the context of making this point that Foucault’s own language becomes poetic: Language – in its attentive and forgetful being, with its power of dissimulation that effaces every determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker, in the gray neutrality that constitutes the hiding place of all being and thereby frees the space of the image – is neither truth nor time, neither eternity nor man; it is instead the always undone form of the outside. It places the origin in contact with death (il fait communiquer ... l’origine et la mort), or rather brings them both to light in the flash of their infinite (indéfinie) oscillation – a momentary in a boundless space. The pure outside of the origin, if that is indeed what language is eager to greet (attentive à accueillir), never solidifies into a penetrable and immobile positivity; and the perpetually rebegun outside of death, although carried toward the light by the essential forgetting of language, never sets the limit at which truth would finally begin to take shape. They immediately flip sides. The origin takes on the transparency of the endless; death opens interminably onto the repetition of the beginning. And what language is (not what it means, not the form in which it says what it means), what language is in its being, is that softest of voices (cette voix si fine), that nearly imperceptible retreat, that weakness deep inside and surrounding every thing and every face – what bathes the belated effort of the origin and the dawnlike erosion of death in the same neutral light, at once day and night. Orpheus’s murderous forgetting, Ulysses’ wait in chains, are the very being of language.23

This is a paean to how modern literary language bleaches the world into a timeless grey melancholy. But the passage is, of course, deeply ambiguous. Is the passage merely ventriloquizing Blanchot? Or is it better understood as Foucault’s own assent to Blanchot’s project, and a prophetic affirmative evocation of a turn in language which has the capacity to erase all traces of

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historical humanity? Or do overwritten phrases like ‘dawnlight erosion of death’ bear with them an excess that points to their own undoing? At the very least, it is possible to accept the final pages of Foucault’s essay on Blanchot as the culmination of an attraction to what we might call deconstructive mysticism, as sketched out by Blanchot most of all. But as we know, by the early 1970s, this attraction and the writerly mode it solicits disappear in Foucault’s work. That statement needs a crucial qualification, however. Foucault’s position on the various objects and forms that he analyses after 1968 remains ‘neutral’. This, however, is not that kind of neutrality which grounds objectivity, for instance, scientific neutrality. Nor is it quite Blanchot’s literary-mystical neutrality:  it is at the very least, the ambiguous neutrality of someone who believes that neutrality is, strictly speaking, impossible, and who accepts that neutrality is a desire for, or an attraction to, a fiction of an outside which bears with it an ambiguity, an ‘oscillation’ to use Foucault’s word in the passage just cited, between inside and outside, evocation and description, commitment and detachment, affirmation and irony. And indeed, bears with it, at whatever remove, an oscillation between what is living and has force and what is dead and has none. This ambiguity is, in the end, literary. Or, better put, it comes most powerfully into existence at the point at which the spiritual, metaphysical, and literary intersect. Foucault’s relations to many of those formations he will examine from the 1970s on – disciplinarity and prison, sexuality, the truth/power relation, biopower, governmentality in general, philosophical forms of ancient Greek care of self, neoliberalism – are neutral in this literary sense, that is to say, ambiguous, suggestive, ungraspable. Did his turn, for a moment, to thinking about how lives might be shaped aesthetically contain an element of social and political critique? Did, for instance, Foucault become a proto-neoliberal? A cynic? A partisan of governmental rationalities? It is ambiguous. And that ambiguity is, as I say, finally literary. I have attempted to describe Foucault’s understanding of literature during the period it mattered most to him intellectually. But what about the impact of that understanding on others? On Anglophone literary studies in particular? After all, if today we wish to treat Foucault other than in terms of intellectual history, then it is the traces of his work on others – its continuing shaping force  – that is important. As a literary theorist, Foucault was, as we have seen, positioned between structuralism and a particular strand of post-Heideggerian phenomenology for which language

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possesses, unstably, profound metaphysical and spiritual capacities. Which is to say that he was, ambiguously, something like a mystical deconstructionist. But his contributions to literary theory were not taken up in the English-speaking world. In particular, they had no impact comparable to Derrida’s less prophetic, less ambiguous, more philosophically ‘serious’ version of deconstruction. Foucault’s contribution to Anglophone literary studies was less direct. What English-speaking literary critics and historians came to find useful in his œuvre was not his own work on literature as such but his startlingly original historical arguments. Let me give just three instances: his concept of a carceral society and, especially, his typification of Bentham’s Panopticon, was taken up by new historicists in the 1980s.24 His famous denunciation of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ – namely his argument against the claim that sexuality had been repressed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and liberated in the 1960s – and his suggestion that, to the contrary, sexuality as a concept was produced in the effort to know and control it (a line of thought already implicit in his literary essay on Bataille) had an immense impact on theory, for instance, because it detached the concepts of sexuality and of sexual identity from gender. (And so his counterintuitive notion that there were no homosexuals until the late nineteenth century helped liberate queer literary theory.) Last, his interest in ‘care of self ’ and ‘self-fashioning’ in the period following the first volume of his History of Sexuality lay behind new-historicist interpretations of the early-modern period as mounted, in particular, by Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-fashioning of 1980 (which actually also influenced Foucault). It continues to inform recent accounts of literary reading as a practice of self.25 More broadly still, Foucauldian historiography which is neither progressivist nor conservative, which does not think in terms of traditions, nations, or epochs, helped order new historicism’s understanding of history, as a more or less contingent assembly of genealogies, problematizations, and relations. These reflections solicit the question: Why did the literary theory that Foucault was associated with not take a firmer grip on the Anglophone academy? The reasons for this, I  would argue, are fundamentally structural. But in order to acknowledge this fully we need a firmer understanding of what Anglophone literary criticism has been. Academic literary criticism, as practised in the United States and, more especially, in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, was a very specific disciplinary formation.26 Up until the mid-1970s, it took various forms of which, however, two were central – in the United States ‘new criticism’,

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and in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, ‘Leavisism’. Both were offshoots of a critical mode that had been established by T. S. Eliot in his literary journalism around 1920, and first developed for pedagogy and scholarship by I.  A. Richards, William Empson, and others at the University of Cambridge.27 To present this new form of knowledge and practice in summary form, we can say that it assumed a particular account of cultural history, namely that, as traditional society disappeared under capitalism, rational thought was torn asunder from emotion. As a result, modern experience was disjoined, prone to cruel instrumentalisms on the one side and sentimentalisms on the other. But traces of and possibilities for experiences that unified affect and reason were still to be found in certain literary texts – most of all in metaphysical poetry and Elizabethan drama, but also in some novels. To read such works was, if the reader were properly trained, to have an experience that came from outside modernity and its modes of experience. The task of the literary critic was to scrutinize and assess the archive to select a canon of texts that had this capacity, and to train students to recognize and respond properly to them too. That educative process proceeded through minute attention to linguistic detail, through so-called ‘close reading’. This project was most fully realized by F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, who had been trained at Cambridge in the immediate post-war period. Especially after the Second World War, they attempted to institutionalize it from within the social democratic state, in their idea for an ‘English school’. For their part, the American new critics, however, downplayed the ethical and political dimensions of Eliot and Leavis’s enterprise by emphasizing the unity and balance of the literary text just as a discrete verbal thing. The canon’s restitutive powers were less apparent to them. Obviously enough, this project is very different from Foucault’s own account of literature in the 1960s. But they share a couple of significant features. First, both Foucault and early Anglophone literary criticism proposed a literary canon against normative modernity. Of course their visions of literary resistance were very different. As we have seen, Foucault’s canon was selected from the French avant-garde, while Eliot, Leavis, Cleanth Brooks’, etc. canon was Anglophone and mainstream. Also, for the Anglophone critics, old literature countered modernity primarily because it carried traces of traditional society, while Foucault’s canon  – from de Sade to Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski – took modernity to its limits. It did not so much resist modernity as spill out of it. Second, and relatedly, for both Foucault and the Anglophone critics, literary texts were not just linguistic. They were experiences. As we know, this was what tied Foucault’s

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affirmation of the transgressive or exorbitant canon to mysticism. And, in F. R. Leavis’s case in particular, this is what allowed him to think of literary training as a practice of self – a reshaping of ‘sensibility’ – so as to make students responsive to those fuller, more coherent experiences, those traces of the past, that some texts (supposedly) offer. Foucault’s contributions to literary theory were written just before the moment that this particular form of literary criticism disintegrated in the English-speaking world. By the time that they were translated, new criticism and Leavisism had been replaced by a heterogeneous set of practices, of which the most important were, first, the kind of poststructuralism developed each in their own way by Derrida and Paul de Man, and, second, identity politics critique heralded by feminism in particular. In this context, Foucault’s own literary theory, based on Bataille and Blanchot, made little headway. Why? The answer must be:  because unlike other post-structuralisms, but like the forms of criticism that followed from Eliot, it was based in counter-hegemonic experience, and indeed in an abstract, universal, mystical experience. As such, unlike the criticism that followed Eliot, it held no promise for pastorality: it was not trying to form fuller, richer, more sensitive sensibilities or selves. Au contraire. Nor was it emancipatory in intent, unlike feminism or post-colonialism for instance. That, I would further argue, was precisely because it was French. In France, the state carried out a centralizing, universalist, republican ideological programme which officially took care of pastorality and emancipation. Resistance to the French state project, which was commonplace in and after the Gaullist period, did not, however, take the form of emancipating identities or supplementing or intensifying citizens’ self-care; it rather contended for different, less restrictive, less hierarchical power structures. Politics and the formation of selves were not considered to be a responsibility of, or even a possibility for, a literary pedagogy which was, anyway, under the control of the state. That was true of Foucault’s literary theory of the 1960s, too; it had no political or pastoral charge. It turned itself, rather, to emptiness, to impossible infinities, to language’s inexhaustibility, to death – a message that was not especially attractive to Anglophone liberal-arts intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s who, in the absence of state ideology, felt they had the responsibility to ‘raise consciousness’ across civil society, not to annul it. And, as we have seen, Foucault’s immense influence on literary studies from the 1980s on has drawn, rather, from his nonliterary work. Nonetheless, his literary criticism proper remains a reserve for any serious, secular criticism-to-come, willing to risk attaching itself to literature’s metaphysical and mystical capacities.

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Notes 1 ‘What Is an Author?’ in Aesthetics:  The Essential Works, Vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et  al. (London:  Allen Lane 1998), 221. Henceforth Aesthetics. 2 Secondary sources on Foucault and literature include Simon During, Foucault and Literature (London:  Routledge 1992); and Timothy O’Leary, ‘Foucault, Experience, Literature’, Foucault Studies, 5, 2008, 5–25. 3 Another unexpurgated English translation of Folie et Déraison was published as The History of Madness in 2006. 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Pantheon 1971), 114. 5 For an insightful line into Foucault, literature, and experience, see Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (London: Bloomsbury 2011). 6 For another articulation of this way of thinking, see Judith Revel, ‘The Literary Birth of Biopolitics’, in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, ed. V. Cisney and N. Moraer (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–42. 7 Foucault’s use of ambiguity is not a topic that has received as much attention by Foucault scholars as it might. But see Alan Megill, ‘Foucault, Ambiguity, and the Rhetoric of Historiography’, History of the Human Sciences 3:3, 1990, 381–396. 8 On Foucault’s irony, see Mark D. Jordan, ‘Foucault’s Ironies and the Important Earnest of Theory’, Foucault Studies, 14, 2012, 7–19. 9 ‘A Preface to Transgression’, Aesthetics, 84. 10 Aesthetics, 71. 11 Ibid., 71. It is important to understand here that this account of the modern finitude stands in more or less direct contradiction of Alexandre Koyré‘s famous 1959 theory of modern cosmology as moving from a closed Aristotelian system to an infinite one. 12 Ibid., 72. 13 Ibid., 74. 14 Ibid., 89. 15 Ibid., 76. 16 Ibid., 83. 17 Ibid., 90. 18 For Tel Quel and literature, and Foucault’s role, see Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 19 Aesthetics, 91. 20 Ibid., 65. 21 Ibid., 149. 22 Ibid., 166. 23 Ibid., 168. Because the translation does not quite catch all the tones of the original (no translation can), I have inserted some important phrases from the original in brackets. They come from Foucault, ‘La pensée du dehors’, in Dit et écrits 1. 1954–1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris:  Gallimard 2001), 546–567.

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24 Perhaps the book most often referred to in this vein is D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1988). 25 As, for instance, in Joshua Landy’s excellent recent book:  How to Do Things with Fictions (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012). 26 The most useful available history of modern literary criticism is Chris Baldick’s Criticism and Literary Theory:  1890 to the Present (London:  Longman 1996). William Marx’s Naissance de la critique:  La literature selon Eliot et Valéry (Arras-Cedex: Artois Presses Université, 2002) shows that modern French and Anglophone literary criticism were on different tracks from the beginning of the twentieth century. Its argument helped suggest my own here. 27 The following paragraphs condense the argument of my ‘When Literary Criticism Mattered’ in The Values of Literary Studies, ed. Ronan McDonald (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016), 120–136. See also Mark Janowitz, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Foucault and Queer Theory Lynne Huffer

In A Dialogue on Love, ‘love’ was the word Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offered for a queer experiment about being with others. ‘Queer stuff’, she wrote, is ‘like a big dare’, also like a big allegory about love. Experimental. And at least to me metamorphic (which is how I recognize love.)1

This metamorphic experiment in love was also a mode of knowing that offered some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception

and ‘if you lose the thread of this intimacy both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment’.2 The queer love whose theory Sedgwick helped to invent included a politics whose aim was not state recognition or the registration of couples into the archives of marriage. In its athwart relation to regulatory norms and sexual identity itself, Sedgwick’s queer love was deeply Foucauldian. As Sedgwick put it in Epistemology of the Closet, she took the ‘results’ of ‘Foucault’s demonstration’ of the problematic privileging of sexuality in modern Western culture as nothing less than ‘axiomatic’.3 Foucault’s cruel exposure of sexual minorities’ attachment to the same identity-based structures their claims for freedom sought to contest became axiomatic not only for Sedgwick but also for subsequent generations of queer theorists. As Shannon Winnubst and Jana Sawicki put it in their 93

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introduction to a 2012 special issue of Foucault Studies on Foucault and queer theory, queer theorists pursued a ‘ “slantwise” and eccentric position within particular socio-cultural frames’.4 Winnubst and Sawicki’s description of queer theory over the past three decades describes a proliferation of Foucault-inspired projects that move far beyond the subjects covered in Foucault’s writings. ‘The first generation of so-called “queer Foucauldians” ’, they note, ‘were quite distinct in outlook and approach’.5 However, subsequent ‘queer theoretical projects expanded to include a diverse constituency:  trans people, postcolonial queers, and queers of color’.6 They conclude that this later ‘diversity’ in queer thought ‘seemed fitting given Foucault’s assertions that his work constituted not a theory or ideology, but a set of tools that he hoped others might find useful in their struggles against unnecessary constraints on freedom’.7 Together with Sedgwick’s axiomatic Foucault, Winnubst and Sawicki’s generational narrative frames the stakes of this chapter. Twenty-five years after queer theory’s beginnings, I look to Sedgwick, as a first-generation queer Foucauldian, for a twist on the standard evolutionary story of queer theory’s post-Foucauldian, generational expansion. I  focus on some of the specific ways in which Sedgwick metabolized the Foucauldian corpus that inspired her aegis-creating work. By tracking the shift in Sedgwick’s own writing from a purportedly Foucauldian hermeneutics of suspicion to an other-than-paranoid, phenomenological attention to experience, sensation, and affect, this chapter brings out Sedgwick’s fraught relation to Foucault over a long career of writing about him. The complexity we find in Sedgwick’s uses of Foucault, both before and after his ‘axiomatic’ appearance in Epistemology of the Closet, not only complicates the continuity and progression of a generational narrative that moves from a narrow and restricted Foucault to one that is more capacious. Revisiting Sedgwick also allows us to rethink the contemporary queer shift, mostly away from Foucault, toward experience, sensation, matter, and affect. Specifically, my return to an initial Foucault–Sedgwick relation serves to disrupt the canonical story about queer theory’s Foucault as the paranoid reader par excellence of Western culture’s foundational texts. If, on the one hand, we situate Sedgwick within the canonical frame, it is tempting to read the narrative of queer theory as the tale of increasing disappointment with a paranoid thinker whose History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, in particular, had achieved the status of a sacred queer text. But if, on the other hand, we read Sedgwick, Foucault, and the story of queer theory not as the continuous evolution of a history but, instead, in a genealogical mode, the fissures and inconsistencies within that evolution begin to appear. Read genealogically,

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the story of Foucault and queer theory begins to reshape itself into something surprising that might be useful for those engaged in the affective or new materialist turns. To return to Sedgwick’s queer love:  queer theory becomes not so much a tale about falling in love and the inevitable disappointment that follows; rather, it becomes a poetic practice, a Dialogue on Love that insists on queer as a verb: metamorphic and experimental. This approach to Sedgwick’s old, first-generation love of Foucault through a recursive movement thus uses genealogy to interrupt the now institutionalized story of a canned queer theory. The story retold gives us a different narrative, one that is out of sync with the generational story we pedagogues of the queer have come to tell about ourselves. Shaking up the generational story of queer theory also shakes up our understanding of Foucault as the paranoid queer thinker we thought we knew. I am especially interested in how contemporary queer theorists, in all the diversity Winnubst and Sawicki bring out, have massively taken up, in myriad ways, the kinds of projects toward which Sedgwick turned in her later work: writings directed away from epistemology and subjectivity toward phenomenological, ontological, and metaphysical questions grounded in the sciences of biology, psychology, and physics, with particular attention to touch, sensation, bodies, feeling, matter, affect, and the nature of life itself. This anti-subjective, anti-epistemological turn has taken a variety of forms both within and beyond queer theory, and it is not my goal to cover them here.8 Rather, I invoke its existence in order to argue for Foucault’s relevance to the most salient questions in contemporary queer theory. Epitomizing for many the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ Paul Ricoeur famously located in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, Foucault became synonymous with paranoid reading: to be paranoid was to be Foucauldian.9 The reading of Foucault as paranoid tends to align with a reading of him as overly focussed on language. This received wisdom about Foucault is inaccurate on both the paranoid and linguistic counts. Nonetheless, because a paranoid, language-bound Foucault is the most prominent version we receive of him, queer post-humanist thinkers of matter, bodies, biology, affect, and life often invoke Foucault in order to correct him not only in his paranoia but also in his outdated attachment to human language and his purported lack of attention to biological matters. As Karen Barad somewhat confusingly puts it: ‘Foucault does not tell us in what way the biological and the historical are “bound together” ’;10 and further, she writes, for Foucault ‘agency belongs only to the human domain’.11 This chapter will tell a different story by mining Sedgwick’s vexed, paradoxical relation to Foucault for what those paradoxes might have to offer

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to us today. Somewhat surprisingly, I have found the best way to trace this different genealogy of Foucauldian queer theory is by retelling the story Sedgwick told about her own moves away from Foucault toward phenomenological and ontological questions about biology, sensation, and affect. I do so not to negate or contest Sedgwick’s story about herself, but rather to focus on what Sedgwick and Foucault shared, even and especially at those points in Sedgwick’s writing when she seemed to be most overtly distancing herself from him. Especially in the face of queer theory’s now well entrenched institutionalization – not only in the academy, but in spaces as mainstream as the Huffington Post, where previously ‘Gay Voices’ are now ‘Queer’12  – Sedgwick’s and Foucault’s shared attention to practices of self-transformation through experimentation on what Foucault called ‘the soul’ – affect, sensation, instinct, and inner life – troubles the lines of demarcation now codified as queer theory. The codification of queer theory is not only paradoxical but also constitutive of what is now understood as queer. For example, queer antinormativity has become paradoxically normative and many of queer theory’s most restless, code-bending thinkers have been slotted into categories and the neat rubrics of syllabi.13 The same codification has transformed Foucault and Sedgwick into the flat simulacra of their original work. Just as Foucault’s mind-altering histories of sexuality became conventionalized as a paranoid queer theory whose only aim was the unveiling of masked violence, so too Sedgwick’s explorations of a more reparative queer theory – drawing on Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, Marcel Proust, and Buddhism – have been generalized and tossed into the academic grab bag of affect theory. We might view these repeated codifications as part of what Roderick Ferguson calls a paradoxical ‘will to institutionality’ that ‘not only absorbs institutions and modern subjects’ but also functions as ‘a mode of subjection’.14 Ferguson links this will to institutionality to the incorporation of race, gender, and sexuality into what he calls an ‘administrative university’ that ‘adapts to modes of difference by attempting to normalize them’. In doing so it has produced ‘queerness as an administrative object’.15 Indeed, these panoptical captures of a restless queer verb reveal the constitutive paradox of queer theory’s Foucauldian founding in an impossible critique of the repressive hypothesis. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault both demonstrated the ruse of modern sexuality as a libido liberated from its Victorian repression and, at the same time, showed that saying no to that Victorian story reinforced the nay-saying logic of repression. In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick lamented the ‘almost delirious promise’16 of getting around a repressive conception of sex, ‘almost delirious’ because

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the promise was inextricably bound to the impossibility of its fulfilment. Sparked by Foucault’s electrifying critique of a repressive hypothesis whose incitement to sex talk was also the gateway to the truth of ourselves, queer theorists were caught, from the start, in the repressive trap. What better describes institutionalized queer theory than Foucault’s claims about our civilization’s ‘immense verbosity’ about matters of sex?17 ‘It may well be’, Foucault wrote, ‘that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject’.18 From that perspective, queer theory’s current institutional success is also queer love’s betrayal. If Sedgwick imagined queer love as a dialogue that was at once poetic and experimental, the institutionalization of queer theory marks the death of that dialogic queer love. To operationalize the poetic is to turn it into a science. To conventionalize the experimental is to betray it. Sedgwick herself progressively signalled, over the course of her career, her own sense of institutionalized queer theory’s disloyalty to the love experiment she called queer. A mere five years after Epistemology of the Closet helped put queer theory on the map, in Shame and Its Sisters Sedgwick criticized, with Adam Frank, what she saw as the moralistic dualisms of a queer theory built on a resistance to normative moralities and the dualisms that support them. For Sedgwick, queer theory became that which, ostensibly, it set out to contest, disrupt, and disorganize: it became a scientia sexualis that ‘functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica’,19 intensifying our ‘pleasure in the truth of pleasure’ and proliferating its results through the ‘specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure’.20 Sedgwick diagnosed, then, a queer-theoretical-pleasure circuit that increasingly intensified the pleasure in ‘(mis?)understanding’21 Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. The result, Sedgwick noted, was a ‘moralistic tautology’ or ‘self-reinforcing’ feedback loop that conceptually re-imposed History of Sexuality, Vol. 1’s ‘pseudodichotomy’ between repression and liberation as ‘the hegemonic and the subversive’.22 This ‘kind of Gramscian-Foucauldian contagion’23 became, for Sedgwick, a new queer code whose bipolar logic – hegemonic or subversive? – was repeatedly intensified by queer moral judgements about how subversive certain thinkers and practices might be. At the same time, queer theory settled into the academic order of things, but with a highly moralized twist, binding queer rationalities to queer moralities: it took the form of a canon, a publishing niche, programs and syllabi, a hierarchy of stars and their students. It soon accumulated into a great discursive mass, adding to the already enormous archive of sexualities to be known, commented upon, cited, and

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subjected to further study. ‘Surely’, we might conclude, echoing Foucault, ‘no other type of society has ever accumulated – and in such a relatively short span of time – a similar quantity of discourses concerned with sex’.24 And all the while, that project of accumulation was driven by the moral belief ‘that our “liberation” [was] in the balance’.25 To be sure, queer theory’s own fraught paradoxical condition vis-à-vis Foucault as one of its founding thinkers was due, in large part, to what Foucault himself recognized as the ‘sterile paradox’ of the critique of the repressive hypothesis: the paralyzing continuity between repression and its critique. To say ‘no’ to the repressive hypothesis is to perform the very truth that is being negated. Nonetheless, Sedgwick found in Foucault’s work, as did many queer theorists, an ‘implicit promise’ to find a way out of the cruel irony of the repressive trap. As Sedgwick put it in Touching Feeling:  ‘The triumphally charismatic rhetorical force of Volume One suggests that Foucault convinced himself  – certainly he has convinced many readers – that that analysis itself represented an exemplary instance of working outside of the repressive hypothesis’.26 She worried that Foucault ultimately led us not into a metamorphic experiment in loving and knowing but back into business as usual. Sedgwick wrote: ‘Rather than working outside of [the repressive hypothesis], Volume One, like much of Foucault’s earlier work, might better be described as propagating the repressive hypothesis ever more broadly’.27 With Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust, published posthumously in 2011, the ‘radiantly heightened mode of perception’ Sedgwick might have experienced when she first fell for Foucault had disappeared. Here she asserted that Foucault was an ‘inapt choice’ as ‘a French exemplar for American queer theory’.28 In particular, she found that ‘the invigorating perspectives [of ] an emphasis on affect, à la Tomkins or Klein, [made] Foucault look particularly marmoreal’.29 In a chronological reading of Sedgwick’s work, one might be struck by the fact that Sedgwick’s ultimate dismissal of Foucault as ‘marmoreal’ occurred, post-Epistemology and Tendencies, in concert with her turn to the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins and the biology of innate affects as measured by density of neural firing; it is here where Sedgwick first linked queer theory’s impossible ‘Foucauldian deprecations of “the repressive hypothesis” ’30 with ‘the good dog/bad dog rhetoric of puppy obedience school’,31 and also challenged the anti-biological habits of such theories. One might also note that Sedgwick’s doubts about Foucault seemed to increase as she moved deeper into affect theory and expanded beyond Tomkins to embrace other-than-paranoid, Kleinian reparative affordances.

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But we might also read the chronology of Sedgwick’s doubts as less evolutionary than such a framing would suggest. In fact, in 1986, in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions,32 before Epistemology of the Closet and the birth of queer theory, Sedgwick already worried about Foucault, and paranoia specifically, as an ungenerous (not queer?) form of love. In 2003, in Touching Feeling, Sedgwick recalled her 1986 diagnosis of Foucault as paranoid: obviously not as a claim about a psycho-biographical subject but as a methodological one about his approach to reading as distant and suspicious rather than open and generous. If Foucault was, for Sedgwick, always already paranoid, the change we can track from 1986 to 2003 marks, more than anything, a shift in her. In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick appeared to doubt, retrospectively, what she saw as her own problematic Foucauldianism. Specifically, she displaced her earlier epistemological questions about subjectivity and its relation to truth – questions, we might say, about love as a mode of knowing – in favour of the affective, textural, phenomenological focus of Touching Feeling. Importantly, Sedgwick’s well-known critique of the Foucauldian paranoid in Touching Feeling did not cite Foucault at all; rather, Sedgwick cited herself in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions as an emblem of Foucauldian paranoia. In her retrospective critique of queer critical paranoia in herself and others, Sedgwick drew on Klein’s depressive position to explore possibilities for ‘reparative’ critical practices as alternatives to the ‘infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling [that had] become the common currency’33 of critical work. Such protocols were, in Sedgwick’s view, the consequence of a Foucauldian pedagogy of paranoid (not queer?) love. Most importantly, Sedgwick’s diagnosis of paranoia in herself, as in Foucault, was indeed a diagnosis of ‘a form of love’.34 By 2003 Sedgwick expressed disappointment with her own prior Foucauldian love: ‘Of all the forms of love’, she wrote in Touching Feeling, ‘paranoia is the most ascetic: the love that demands least from its object’.35 This critique of her former ascetic self lies, I  think, at the heart of her critique of queer theory beginning with her 1995 turn to Tomkins in Shame and Its Sisters. In Sedgwick’s view, because of its Foucauldianism, much queer theory was always, from the start, ascetic – dualistic, moralizing, stingy, judgemental – per Sedgwick’s definition of paranoid love. It was ascetic because its dismissals came with little to no engagement with those objects or positions or points of view it derided as hegemonic. Its subversive protocols of unveiling had become so easy, so readily replicated and absorbed, that they demanded very little from their readers.

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Sedgwick’s diagnosis of the Foucauldian paranoid was also, then, a diagnosis of the ascetic love that drove queer theory and the ‘moralistic tautology’ of its hegemonic-versus-subversive protocols. Brilliantly, she helped us to see how the same paranoia that drove them could not help but turn that paranoia against itself, swallowing, as it were, its own Foucauldian queer tail. If much queer theory has now turned away from Foucault in seemingly more reparative directions, Sedgwick helps us to see that turning away as part of a feedback loop structured by the dualism Sedgwick diagnosed in paranoia. Indeed, the either/or logic of the current anti-linguistic or reparative turns  – as if one could be only against language or only reparative – is itself a symptom of that paranoid structure. Queer theory’s anti-linguistic, reparative turn to affect, matter, ontology, and biology as pathways away from Foucauldian paranoia might be, per Sedgwick’s logic, the product of its own ascetic love. How, then, can queer theory find a way out of this tail-swallowing trap of its own making? One way might be to question the received clichés about the Foucauldian paranoid: we live in a Panopticon; there’s no way out; resistance is futile; coming out is a trap; and love is a moralizing, rationalist ideal that masks Western culture’s constitutive violence. This vision of Foucault, most strongly associated with his early work, defined his project through the paranoid lens of unveiling hidden violence. Indeed, for Sedgwick and others who turned away from Foucault precisely because of his paranoid method, if other-than-paranoid possibilities emerged in Foucault they were discernible – and barely so – only in his later work on the ancient world. Foucault’s descriptions of Greco-Roman practices of self-care seemed to constitute a form of love that was less paranoid and more ethically promising than what was found in his earlier work. But these received ideas and uninterrogated assumptions miss Foucault – including the early-to-middle books and essays – as an important resource for contemporary queer thinking about bodies and affects – what Sedgwick so aptly called touching feeling. Specifically, they miss the possibilities of genealogy not only for a rupturing excavation of bodies and affects but also for genealogy’s post-moral interruption of the dualistic codes that have tended to shape queer theory as an ascetic, moralizing form of pleasure-driven love. Importantly, Foucault’s opening description of genealogy’s task in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ focused precisely on the same field of concerns articulated by post-Foucauldian queer theorists of touch and affect. Foucault wrote in the essay’s first paragraph that genealogy seeks out ‘the singularity of events’ in ‘the most unpromising places’,36 those

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unpromising places ‘that we tend to feel are without history’ are bodily, sensory, material, and affective. Foucault listed some of them: ‘sentiments, love, conscience, instincts’.37 Genealogy, then, is a method – an approach to the past  – that interrogates those supposedly post-Foucauldian places towards which so much queer work has shifted in the contemporary ‘antilinguistic turn’. Importantly, those places we tend to feel are without history are also the stuff of what Foucault called the soul. It is worth recalling here that Discipline and Punish was less a history of prisons than it was ‘a genealogy of the modern “soul” ’.38 The soul, Foucault insisted, is neither ‘an illusion’ nor ‘an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality’.39 If Discipline and Punish performs a genealogy of the modern soul, we might say that genealogy includes a tracking of affect, sensation, and inchoate experiences of the discursive and nondiscursive that reveal the modern soul’s policing. Thus Foucault’s implicit question – how do we unlearn the policing of the soul? – can be re-read, not only through the lens of epistemology and subjectivity, but also with an eye to the cultivation of affects and the reshaping of feelings and bodies. This brief recall of the place of the soul in Foucault’s genealogies allows us to see that, pace Sedgwick, Foucault’s form of love was not only ascetic. To put it slightly differently, Foucault was not simply a paranoid reader, even and especially in his early work. Importantly, Foucault’s early writings, and History of Madness in particular, articulated an ethics of eros at odds with the commonly accepted picture of an ascetic Foucauldian paranoid.40 In fact, years later, in his 1981–2 course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault insisted on two modes of self-transformation and two forms of love. In addition to askesis, he described another movement, ‘the movement of eros (love)’, through which ‘the subject can and must transform himself in order to have access to the truth’.41 Foucault concluded that Eros and askesis are … the two major forms in Western spirituality for conceptualizing the modalities by which the subject must be transformed in order finally to become capable of truth.42

To read Foucault only through the lens of paranoid unveiling, as an ascetic, is to miss the erotic transformation of the soul at play throughout his entire oeuvre, from History of Madness in the early 1960s through the work of the 1970s and into the final reflections on the ancients. Indeed, erotic transformation was crucial to Foucault’s genealogical method, an approach to history he explicitly distinguished from ascetic ones. As Foucault put it toward the end of ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, it is not the genealogist but ‘the historian [who] belongs to the family of ascetics’.43 The distinction

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here between genealogist and historian is important. When Foucault wrote that the genealogist tracks those things of the soul we tend to feel are without history (sentiment, love, conscience, instinct, for example), this did not mean he was calling on us to ‘historicize’ those things by unveiling them through paranoid readings and then placing them neatly in slots on timelines, filling in their content accordingly. At the same time, although the genealogist is not a historian, genealogy is not opposed to history. Rather, to take one of those things – love – that Foucault described as a possible object of genealogical tracking, a genealogy of love would be opposed not to history but to metahistory:  ‘the metahistorical deployment’ of love as an ‘ideal’ with an ‘indefinite teleolog[y]’.44 This tendency of historians to write their histories as metahistory  – such as a history of love as an ideal  – puts historians in conflict with the genealogist’s erotic attention to love’s dispersion by the contingencies of time and its ultimate strangeness and resistance to being known. This is why Foucault often said: I’m not a historian. He was not a historian because for him the history of historians was a Hegelian invention, driven by a dialectical, teleological motor where time finds its end, its victory, and its plenitude in us. And as Nietzsche showed, it is that historian who belongs to the non-erotic, priestly cast: the capital H Historian is a member of a ‘life-inimical species’ that wants to become master ‘over life itself ’:45 ‘life against life’.46 It is in this specifically Nietzschean, priestly sense that the historian belongs to what Foucault called ‘the family of ascetics’. The genealogist, by contrast, understands history writing as an erotic process whose aim is the transformation of the soul. Returning to Sedgwick, we might say then that she and those queer theorists who constructed Foucault as paranoid were misreading him as the priestly Historian of an ungenerous love rather than as a Nietzschean genealogist of love as a strange kind of eros. What is the mark par excellence of the genealogist? His suspicion of ideals, of those systems of reason and morality that, ‘gazing around haphazardly in the blue’,47 as Nietzsche put it, build themselves out of speculative structures rather than the realities of how people actually live. And if such suspiciousness sounds like paranoia, it’s not: the genealogist’s suspicion of ideals is grounded in the material, discursive and nondiscursive, traces of the real: again, as Nietzsche wrote, ‘what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind’.48 Paranoia, in this sense, is merely one side of an idealist coin whose other side is redemption. In Nietzsche’s terms, both sides express the ascetic ideal. And ideals are not Foucauldian.

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Unlike the genealogist’s love as strange eros, the historian’s love is ascetic.49 This is another way of saying his love is idealistic. If such a love is paranoid, as Sedgwick suggested, it is its idealism that makes it ungenerous. (This is perhaps why Foucault was critical of utopias.) For what is less generous than the ideal of love whose story  – whose history  – has been written a thousand times, in a thousand fairy tales and a thousand more romances, Valentine’s Day cards, and wedding vows? As Lauren Berlant reminds us in Desire/Love: ‘The reduction of life’s legitimate possibility to one plot is the source of romantic love’s terrorizing, coercive, shaming, manipulative, or just diminishing effects – on the imagination as well as on practice’.50 This take on the historian’s love – a love that’s stingy because it is idealistic  – can help us to better understand what Foucault meant when he said that love in particular is a place ‘we tend to feel is without history’. This is obviously not an ascetic’s love, since the historian belongs to the family of ascetics and will therefore miss altogether this unpromising place that is a love without history. The historian-ascetic’s love is the love of metahistorical deployments, ideal significations, and indefinite teleologies: it is the love of History (with a capital H); it is love as we know it: a stingy love that, coming out of the blue, demands next to nothing from its pre-programmed objects. The genealogist’s love, by contrast, is patient, documentary, and grey. It is a love that has left traces, as a murmur, but has not been heard or read. It is an accumulation of marks or sounds that we cannot decipher. It is not linguistic in any sense we might find in a phrase like the ‘linguistic turn’ to which Foucault is so often attached. For that reason alone, Foucault fails to fall into the linguistic and therefore all-too-human camp so pervasively dismissed by his new materialist critics. Because we cannot decipher the marks and sounds of this love without history, it cannot speak. Why can’t we decipher it? Not for lack of generosity on the part of the genealogist who, as I’ve mentioned, demands much from his readers. Rather, we can’t read it because knowing love too much – blinded by our ideals – we pass it over. As paranoid idealist historian-ascetics we read stingily. When we read the archives of love, we cannot hear love speak because its language – patient, grey, documentary – is incommensurate with History’s one-plot story of romantic, reparative love. In Desire/Love, Berlant associates love with what she calls the ‘fantasy of narrative repair’.51 If psychoanalysis is ‘the science of desire’s shattering and traumatic history’, Berlant writes, love and romance ‘involve[ ] magical thinking about desire’s future’.52 Through the fantasy of narrative repair, the conventions of love create and reinforce a normative world of romance.

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Of course this conventional repair is not the only repair on offer. In ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, Sedgwick showed that reparative love could be more generous and more generative than either what she called the ‘dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality’53 or the convention-bound love plots Berlant describes as the normative ‘fantasy world of romance’. As Sedgwick showed in her reparative approach to a queer camp aesthetic, this form of love is attentive to ‘startling, juicy displays of excess erudition’, ‘passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism[s], the prodigal production of alternative historiographies’, ‘fragmentary, marginal’ forms, interruptive affect, ‘ventriloquistic experimentation’, a mixing of ‘high and popular culture’, a disorienting temporality that mingles ‘past and present’.54 We can re-read, then, Sedgwick’s reparative perspective on a camp aesthetic to open a new window onto Foucault and his startling, juicy, erudite, passionate, hilarious, fragmentary, ventriloquistic, disorienting genealogies. If genealogy seeks out those places, including love, that we tend to feel are without history, we can hardly approach them through modes of knowing that are conventional or already plotted. Rather, such love-seeking methods might impel us toward what Sedgwick called the ‘metamorphic’55 in her Dialogue on Love. As Foucault famously put it, what does it mean to think if not to ‘free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently’?56 As Nietzsche wrote, preparing the way for Foucault’s attention to practices that teach us to reshape the soul: ‘We have to learn to think differently – in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more:  to feel differently’.57 Perhaps here, in the end, Foucault might rejoin Sedgwick in another Dialogue on Love, in an other-than-paranoid return to the queer stuff Sedgwick called ‘a big allegory about love. Experimental’.58 That Foucauldian erotic, genealogical love demands much of its readers far beyond the pages of his books. Remembering Sedgwick, perhaps we might read him now as generous, demanding, and metamorphic, in a specifically genealogical sense. That sense – at once historical and poetic – beckons us back into the archives of our own queer histories, inviting us to think-feel them, as Foucault did, as surprising sites of self-undoing. Notes 1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston, MA:  Beacon Press, 2000), 155. 2 Ibid., 168. 3 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1990), 3.

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4 Shannon Winnubst and Jana Sawicki, ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction’, Foucault Studies, 14, 2012, 4. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 The number of works in this vein is too vast to cite. For a recent example see Mel Chen and Dana Luciano, ‘Queer Inhumanisms’, special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, 2015. 9 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1970). Ricoeur wrote that ‘hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience’, 27. He further clarified that ‘three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’, 32. 10 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:  Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007), 65. 11 Ibid., 145. 12 See Noah Michelson, ‘Here’s Why HuffPost Gay Voices Just Changed Its Name to HuffPost Queer Voices’, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/huffpost-gayvoices-changed-name-huffpost-queer-voices_us_56a78f78e4b0172c659422f9 (accessed 2 October 2016). 13 For a critique of queer theory’s pervasive anti-normativity, see Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Queer Theory without Antinormativity’, special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 26, 2015. 14 Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things:  The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis, MN:  University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 214. 15 Ibid. 16 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling:  Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. 17 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1:  An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage, 1990), 33. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 70–71. 20 Ibid., 71. 21 Sedgwick, Touching, 11. 22 Ibid.,12. 23 Ibid. 24 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 33. 25 Ibid., 159. 26 Sedgwick, Touching, 11. 27 Ibid. 28 Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 182 n. 8.

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29 Ibid. 30 Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1995), 16. 31 Ibid., 5. 32 Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 33 Sedgwick, Touching, 143. 34 Ibid., 132. 35 Ibid. 36 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Essential Works of Foucault II, 1954–84, ed. James Faubion (New York, NY: New Press, 1999), 369. 37 Ibid. 38 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Random House, 1977), 29. 39 Ibid. 40 See especially Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010). 41 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject:  Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 16. 42 Ibid. 43 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche’, 384. 44 Ibid., 370. 45 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak:  Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 117. 46 Ibid., 120. 47 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New  York, NY: Vintage, 1989), 21. 48 Ibid. 49 For an exploration of eros in Foucault, see especially Lynne Huffer, ‘Strange Eros:  Foucault, Ethics, and the Historical A  Priori’, Continental Philosophy Review, 49, 2015, 103–114. 50 Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (New York, NY: Punctum, 2012), 87. 51 Ibid., 86. 52 Ibid. 53 Sedgwick, Touching, 147. 54 Ibid., 150. 55 Sedgwick, Dialogue, 155. 56 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage, 1990), 9. 57 Nietzsche, Daybreak, 103. 58 Sedgwick, Dialogue, 155.

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Ch apter 7

Foucault, Race, and Racism Rey Chow

It is generally recognized today that no scientific definition of race is possible. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control:  the break between what must live and what must die. Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended ’

When it comes to Foucault and questions of race, the critical challenge to date seems to be the ready reproach of Eurocentrism  – the charge that Foucault’s perspectives, derived as they are from close studies of European cultures and histories, stand negligent of other parts of the modern world. In particular, the disciplinary institutions in Europe that he analyzes with such brilliance were, chronologically speaking, evolving during the very period when European nations aggressively pursued their imperial enterprises overseas, but Foucault has not offered any analysis of such enterprises. Even as he helped popularize the important concept of heterotopia, then, Foucault has been found guilty of not being heterotopic enough. This chapter is an attempt to argue the relevance of Foucault’s work to the study of race in a different manner from this justifiable, though in my view not necessarily productive, approach.

Foucauldian Discourse and Its Post-Colonial Inflection In his critique of European imperialism, Edward Said, greatly influenced by Foucault’s early work on discourse, performs the trend-setting task of mapping the systemic and structural correlations between textual formations and economical-political formations. Said’s Orientalism argues that these correlations constitute a kind of material history – one based as much on representational traditions as it is on empirical invasions and 107

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annexations, a history that has contributed to the construction of the Orient as a distinct entity from the Western world and inferior to it.1 From the standpoint of race, Foucault’s imprints on Said’s seminal work are less a matter of the objects of study chosen (the texts that make reference to oriental identities and cultures) than a new, reflexive way of conceptualizing the colonial situation and its aftermath. By positioning the East and the West as clusters of discourses rather than as ontological fixities, and by showing that the East as such is constituted through the collaborative criss-crossings of different branches of Western knowledge (such as history, art, literature, philosophy, economics, politics, and so forth), Said inaugurated a secular theoretical approach that has proven resiliently adoptable and adaptable, and that remains current in many scholars’ investigations of (post) colonial histories and cultures. Similarly, in his book Time and the Other:  How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Johannes Fabian interrogates the philosophical, theological, and historical foundations of Western anthropological thinking along the lines introduced by Foucault in early works such as The Order of Things. Writing in the wake of Said’s anti-orientalist critique, Fabian goes further (than Foucault) in underscoring a basic unevenness embedded in ethnographic practice, the medium in which Western anthropologists report their findings about non-Western cultures back to audiences in the West. In an ingenious stroke, Fabian defines this unevenness in terms of a politics of time:  whereas Western researchers write about other cultures to Western readers in the forward-looking present, the cultures being studied are, or so his argument goes, typically objectified in ways that make them seem frozen in some other temporality, one that is, moreover, implicitly deemed primitive, backward, and unchanging.2 In Fabian’s account, as in Said’s, using the Foucauldian notion of discourse  – an ever-shifting, textual-cum-social grid of articulations spread over the course of time – means foregrounding not only an open-ended multiplicity of constituents and players but also a persistent relation of inequality between cultures. As in the case of the transatlantic slave trade in the context of the United States, so the economical-political aspects of European empire building of the past few centuries have definitively moulded the understanding of race in the global post-colonial context. Even when they are not explicitly invoked, the infrastructural relations between colonizer and colonized  – much like the infrastructural relations between slave traders/owners and slaves  – have largely determined the stakes in contemporary debates about race and modern Western thought.3 In these debates, race is usually

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understood in terms of skin colour, and racism as the practices of exploitation and discrimination by those on the side of the victors (associated with political success and economic privilege) against those on the side of the victims (deemed linguistically, culturally, and institutionally inferior, and unfairly deprived of opportunities for social mobility and advancement).4 In the ready (and understandable) articulation of race and racism in these terms, an important and, arguably, more critical contribution made by Foucault is often elided. Foucauldian discourse has exerted such impact through its Saidian inflection, it would seem, not necessarily simply because of Said’s pioneering politicization of Western representations of the East. In a manner quite worthy of Foucauldian analytics, not only has Said brought divergent (and discontinuous) series of historical events into alignment with one another; he has also strategically halted their multidirectional movements by conjoining them at a particular nexus. If there are no intrinsic connections between colonial territorial conquests, military occupations, and economic exploitations, on the one hand, and linguistic, textual, and visual representations, on the other, Said’s deployment of discourse, together with the post-colonial studies that follows its lead, has successfully interpellated audiences by insisting that such connections are incontrovertible, a certitude. In some ways, the controversy of race as it continues to be generated in the Anglo-American academy today is an outcome of such strategic halting and binding – and essentializing – of the fluid transitions among contingent events into a continuous master narrative. This is one reason why some scholars have, for instance, disputed the origins (or causes) of orientalism as advanced by Said, citing the major counterexample of German orientalism, in which the seeming contiguity between empire and orientalist textual studies is not necessarily self-evident or consistent, and in which religious, spiritual, and philosophical preoccupations rather than economical-political conquests assumed a pivotal role in modern Europe’s encounters with the East.5 Although this is not the place to enter into the complexities of different orientalist traditions, my point is simply that in the context of critical race studies, Foucault’s contribution to the politics of discourse needs to be carefully re-evaluated. If our current understanding of race has been pre-emptively shaped by post-colonial studies’ articulation of the dialectic between colonizer and colonized, it behooves us to ask, after Foucault: What are the factors that make this possible? Could it have been otherwise? Are there other evental series in operation that could have led to different configurations of race and racism?

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Race Studies’ Repressive Hypothesis? The suturing of race to the hierarchical colonizer–colonized relation is so powerful that any attempt to conceptualize race differently would seem counterintuitive. To this extent, post-Saidian post-colonial studies has been instrumental in enabling, indeed empowering, representations of those who are historically disadvantaged, peripheralized, or silenced. At the same time, as an increasingly hegemonic trend in spotlighting victimhood reproduces itself across the studies of intercultural encounters, post-colonial studies’ version of race – as oppression based on skin colour, tout court – can seem to resonate a little too neatly with the Freudian paradigm of sexual repression, if only because race, too, is often depicted in terms of lack, castration, melancholia, and other naturalized psychoanalytic coordinates. Foucault’s critique of Freudian repression is too well known to warrant repeating in full, though the salient aspects of his argument remain noteworthy. As a mechanism of discourse, repression functions not merely as a means to articulate sexual differentiations from within an individual; it is also, according to Foucault, the motor for an entire logic of thinking, rendering our sense of self in the binary terms of imprisonment and liberation. This collaboration between a negative referent, repressed sexuality, on the one hand, and the positive significatory potency of discourse, on the other, is what Foucault intends by the phrase ‘the repressive hypothesis’. Unlike Freud, Foucault is not exactly interested in asking why or how we are repressed, but rather in how we come to believe that we are. His oft-cited remarks to this effect go as follows: The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? But rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?6

For Foucault, writing in the mid-twentieth century, sexuality is not exactly ‘a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely’. Instead of this romantic approach, he proposes thinking of sexuality as ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’–one that is, moreover, ‘endowed with the greatest instrumentality’.7 If it succeeds in challenging the beliefs in lack and castration that underpin the narrative of sexual repression, Foucault’s critique meanwhile

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acknowledges how effectively the repressive hypothesis works as a mode of discourse. Indeed, Foucault’s notion of discourse’s power is in part based on his grasp of how incessant talk about sexual repression, as instigated and encouraged by Freudian clinical custom, has activated an unprecedented proliferation of discourses and practices. Might not Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis also be instructive for thinking about race? Consider the monumental figure of Frantz Fanon, whose work speaks to colonial oppression as psychic repression. For Fanon, writing in the 1940s as a colonial émigré from French Martinique educated in the metropole, race connotes above all the psychic injury that the black subject endures at the hands of his white oppressors. As identification with the white oppressor is both required and impossible, self-alienation becomes the defining limit for black identity formation. According to Fanon, such internal fragmentation is reinforced by denigrating interactions in the metropolis, in which the black subject is regularly reduced to his skin colour and hailed as resolutely other, so much so that the fragmentation tends to gravitate outward, creating psychic schisms within the colonized population as a whole. Notably, the unforgettable street scene of racial hailing as described by Fanon is no less constitutive of the self-image of the white child who cries out ‘Look! A Negro!’ at the sight of the black man.8 For this child, race means subjecting the other to exoticism, a type of recognition based in the aesthetics of shock and wonderment. In Fanon’s descriptions, not only is race soldered to the entanglement between colonizer and colonized; it is also theorized in Oedipal terms. The white man occupies the position of the father who must be removed in order for his reign of tyranny to end and for the black man, the angry son, to gain a positive sense of identity. Injury seems capable only of being countered with injury, as violent overthrow is the only means by which the black man can externally compensate for his internal loss, repossess what was taken from him, and assume a renewed sense of wholeness. Race (or racism), as experienced by the black subject, seems symptomatic of the repressive logic that characterizes the paternalistic functioning of power. Above all, race (or racism) heralds the sign of castration, a perpetually internalized state of negation, of being repressed, that can only be ameliorated through periodic eruptions of revolutionary violence.9

The Entry of Life into History His leftist political sympathies notwithstanding, Foucault’s take on race and racism is quite different from the classic depiction of repressive violence as

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advanced by Fanon, not least because Foucault was guided by his lifelong interest in critiquing modern Western political reason. To begin to explore Foucault’s vision of race, which is inextricable from the sustained project of that critique, we need to turn to Part 5 of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 – ‘Right of Death and Power Over Life’ – which he considered the ‘fundamental part’ of that book.10 In the sections preceding Part 5, Foucault offers a riveting account of the history of sexuality in modern Europe as a history of the will to knowledge. The abnormalities and perversions Freud discusses as variants of a polymorphous sexuality are rewritten by Foucault as Western society’s way, since the eighteenth century, of monitoring human populations by mechanisms of regulation and surveillance, implemented through medicine, law, education, the family, and statistics (the science of government).11 Foucault’s meticulous discussion of the regimentations and penalizations of sexual behaviours suggests that while his work proceeds fully in accordance with Freud’s argument that the sexual instinct is non-essentialist in character, he has chosen to sidestep that argument in order to theorize sexuality in a new way, as a rationalistic deployment of bodies and institutions through steadily expanding apparatuses of measurement and supervision. Rather than a matter of instincts and their vicissitudes, as Freud calls them, which require ever more nuanced efforts at classification and interpretation, sexuality for Foucault is a vast, heterogeneous network of modern knowledge production that includes legal, moral, scientific, architectural, philosophical, and administrative discourses, all of which involve shifting boundaries as well as effects of inclusion and exclusion. Foucault’s remarks on race in ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’ should be read in tandem with sexuality understood in the terms of this historically emergent nexus of the will to knowledge. Both sexuality and race, that is, have to do with what he calls the entry of life into history – ‘the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques’.12 Rather than taking race through the route of the repressive hypothesis and equating it (as Fanon, for instance, does) with racism understood as an injurious subjective experience, Foucault approaches race primarily as an outcome of the bureaucratization and normalization of life, whose rise to epistemic power, as he tells us in The Order of Things, was signaled by a shift from classical natural history (with its continuous and homogeneous space for organizing data) to the modern science of biology, a shift that was made possible by a newly synthetic notion of life’s own deep historicity. As life was increasingly understood as constituted by correlations of

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multiple functions shared (intangibly and invisibly) across different species and organisms, ‘it became possible to replace natural history with a “history” of nature’.13 Because of this emphasis on life, race in Foucault’s work, like sexuality, requires a different kind of amplification. Foucault does not exactly conceptualize race as something with positive features (epidermis, individual orientations, group identities, or geographical regions). Nor does he view the antagonisms around racialization simply in terms of repressive violence. Instead, in keeping with his interrogations of the will to knowledge, Foucault writes about race as an epistemic fault line that erupts with major historical transitions – such as the transition from a society governed by the symbolics of blood and sovereignty as invested in the monarch, to one administered through disciplinary institutions, and finally to one managed through biopolitical networks. This is how Foucault describes the phenomenon of Nazi racism, for instance: Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality. Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, ‘biologizing,’ statist form): it was then that a whole politics of settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.14

Whether we agree with him or not, Foucault’s point is thought-provoking:  for all their seemingly old-fashioned talk about preserving the purity of Aryan blood, he suggests, the Nazis actually operated on a modern premise of life as is characteristic of disciplinary society, the premise on which massacres and genocides are carried out as vital rather than death events. Exterminations of entire populations are, from this perspective, performed for the progressive purpose of augmenting life (through exaltation of a superior group), of strengthening and regenerating it. The ultimate act of negation – killing someone – is thus subsumed under an eminently positive logic, that of eugenics, with its implied intensification of micropowers over the social body and promise of a better species and race to come. ‘The objective of the Nazi regime was … not really the destruction of other races’.15

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Interestingly, while dissecting the monstrosity of Nazism’s modernity, Foucault, in a memorable aside, compliments psychoanalysis on its comprehension of an older politics of life (and death), one that is bound to law and prohibition (and thus, from that perspective, to the necessity of repression): It is to the political credit of psychoanalysis … that it regarded with suspicion … the irrevocably proliferating aspects which might be contained in these power mechanisms aimed at controlling and administering the everyday life of sexuality: whence the Freudian endeavor (out of reaction no doubt to the great surge of racism that was contemporary with it) to ground sexuality in the law – the law of alliance, tabooed consanguinity, and the Sovereign-Father, in short, to surround desire with all the trappings of the old order of power. It was owing to this that psychoanalysis was – in the main, with a few exceptions – in theoretical and practical opposition to fascism.16

Although he goes on to call psychoanalysis’s way of handling the sexual a ‘historical “retro-version” ’17 – that is, obsolete – and although he criticizes the popularization of the repressive hypothesis as a type of belief (or what, after his teacher Louis Althusser, may be called ‘ideology’), Foucault does justice to Freud by acknowledging the latter’s grasp of the strategic historical place occupied by sexuality at the intersection of knowledge and power. To consider Foucault’s relevance to the study of race, it would therefore be necessary to see his major works, from The History of Madness and The Order of Things to The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and the Collège de France lectures as a continual series of critical commentaries on life’s entry into history. This entry has to do not only with masses as bodies but also with the methods and mechanisms by which masses are handled in abstraction – that is, produced in the form of a calculable and manageable aggregate, a social body. As he puts it, a technology of power newly emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century applied ‘not to man-as-body but … to man-as-species’.18 This new technology is addressed to a multiplicity of men ‘to the extent that they form … a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on’.19 Foucault calls this new technology of power ‘a “biopolitics” of the human race’.20 In using the word race, he clearly intends something akin to group, class, or speciation. As in his efforts to historicize how madness becomes first compartmentalized and then segregated from Western society, or how different fields of knowledge come into being through shifting rearrangements of established boundaries and their fault lines, what fascinates him is how the

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will to know invariably involves geometric and epistemic moves – dividing and subdividing – that are in turn about exclusion and marginalization. It is in this process of humanity’s being carved up into foreclosed spaces and, in that manner, objectified for purposes of statist management, that race, in tandem with sex, materializes as a relation of force. Foucault’s understanding of race may be glimpsed in a number of statements he makes in the lectures entitled ‘Society Must Be Defended ’. He writes that ‘the war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war’.21 ‘The social body is basically articulated around two races’, he adds. ‘It is this idea that this clash between two races runs through society from top to bottom which we see being formulated as early as the seventeenth century’.22 He goes on to distinguish between a biological transcription of race war (in the form of evolutionism, such as that manifested in European policies of colonization), and a social transcription of race war in the form of a class struggle.23 He indicates his attempt to trace this ‘biologico-social racism’, with the reminder that ‘the other race’ is not from elsewhere but a race ‘that is permanently, ceaselessly infiltrating the social body, or which is, rather, constantly being re-created in and by the social fabric’.24 Finally, Foucault holds that the function of racism is twofold:  ‘to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower’; and ‘to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: … “The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more” ’.25 In sum, Foucault’s ongoing intellectual project has to do with the historical expansion of life – the ‘I – as species rather than as individual’26 – in the form of an abstraction, a transcendent generality/universality in whose name empirical practices have flourished and proliferated. The endless endeavours to know life, involving ever more complicated, quantifying mechanisms of measurement, calculation, forecast, and projection are part and parcel of the modern state’s I-as-species mission. Seeing race primarily in these terms  – that is, as part of a regime dedicated to the advocacy of life and to the sanctification of the human population abstractly imagined as a whole – raises a fundamental question. As Foucault writes: How can a power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings? … Given that this power’s objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?27

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This is the juncture at which he introduces the remarks, as cited in the second epigraph to this chapter, about racism as the state’s way of introducing a break in the domain of life. Rather than understanding racism by way of tensions and antagonisms derived from positive markers such as skin colour and geopolitical location, Foucault describes it, characteristically, as a relation of power (together with the historical discourses that revolve around such a relation). More specifically, racism is a means to an end rather than an end in itself; it is a technique of power that may be adopted whenever and wherever populations need to be brought under control in the state’s biopolitical warfare. This is why, in a controversial gesture, he suggests that even socialism is marked by racism insofar as the socialist state can rationalize the murder of its enemies for purposes of advancing the class struggle.28 Whereas our current understanding of racism tends to see it as a form of prejudice and hatred, or as mutual contempt, with all the subjective and subjectivizing connotations these words conjure, for Foucault racism is not simply a malicious frame of mind or a form of pathology. Instead, racism is a systemic and regulatory capacity – a wedge that can be driven productively between groups in order to instigate a warlike struggle between those who can live (and perpetuate their lifestyles) and those who must die. As a technique of power, racism is eminently enabling – ‘the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State’.29 For these reasons, it would be insufficient simply to ask who is being racialized. Far more critical for Foucault is the question of what institutional purposes such acts of racialization – negative or positive – serve. Conversely, as a category steeped in the power effects of racism, race cannot simply be claimed in the form of an identity in resistance to power. Under some circumstances, in fact, embracing the idea of race would be tantamount to being racist.30

The Afterlives of Pastoral Power, or How ‘Society Must Be Defended’ Involving historically specific configurations, yet pertaining to the universal of death, this ‘permanent class struggle’ that is race (with its twin, socio-biological makeup) can also be traced in Foucault’s discussions of the processes of mental and physical subordination, in particular through the legacy of the Christian pastorate.31

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Foucault offers a bold outline of the form of government he calls pastoral power in the essay ‘Omnes et Singulatim’.32 Identifying various aspects of the conception of such power in pre-Christian antiquity and stressing the important changes Christianity introduced, he suggests that the religio-moral paradigm of leadership in the form of a shepherd king (or shepherd god) is key to the evolving practices of the political state in the entirety of Western history. Charged with safeguarding the flock from danger and with binding it into a community, the shepherd figure embodies ‘the relations between political power at work within the state as a legal framework of unity, and a power we can call “pastoral,” whose role is to constantly ensure, sustain, and improve the lives of each and everyone’.33 In Foucault’s readings, the effective bind between the shepherd and each member of the flock – the individual sheep – makes up Christianity’s unique contribution to historically existing models of obedience. ‘In Christianity’, he writes, ‘the tie with the shepherd is an individual one. It is personal submission to him … Obedience is a virtue. This means that it is not, as for the Greeks, a provisional means to an end but, rather, an end in itself …’34 This constantly renewed bind between the leader and the individual on the basis of guidance produces a special kind of soul or conscience: ‘the sheep didn’t let itself be led only to come through any rough passage victoriously, it let itself be led every second. Being guided was a state and you were fatally lost if you tried to escape it’.35 As for self-examination, a practice the ancient Greeks shared, the Christian aim is ‘not to close selfawareness in upon itself but, rather, to enable it to open up entirely to its director – to unveil to him the depths of the soul’.36 Christianity’s ultimate objective is ‘to get individuals to work at their own “mortification” in this world’ – that is to say, a kind of relation of oneself to oneself that involves ‘a renunciation of this world and of oneself, a kind of everyday death – a death that is supposed to provide life in another world’.37 In the rest of this remarkable essay, through a discussion of various authors such as Turquet, De Lamare, Huhenthal, Willebrand, and in particular von Justi, Foucault sketches an intellectual history in which the police emerges as the culminating instance of what he calls the reason of state – an apparatus with a palpably identified object. ‘Proceeding through the eighteenth century, and especially in Germany, we see that what is defined as the object of the police is population, that is, a group of beings living in a given area’.38 Like his thinking on sexuality and race, Foucault’s decidedly Nietzschean reflections on Christianity should be contextualized within his sustained critique of Western political rationality. Two important features stand out

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in these intense reflections. On the one hand, there is the tremendous moral impact Christianity exerts over the individual – and what may be called the individualization of the soul – by way of pastoral techniques such as the ritual of confession.39 On the other hand, we see the armed influence of the police wielded as the supreme objectification of the reason of state. These two intimately linked anchorage points of Foucault’s dissection of Western political rationality make his work freshly germane to the study of race and racism in the twenty-first century. Unlike the post-colonial inflection of his notion of discourse, the relevant alignment Foucault offers here is less a matter of pairing cultural forms with geopolitical or economical-political aggressions (as in Said’s Orientalism) than a matter of tracing cultural practices to lingering religious dominance. Rather than the couples master/slave, colonizer/colonized, and their variants, Foucault’s analysis of political rationality proposes another type of twosome: shepherd/sheep; priest/confessant; police/citizen (alongside doctor/patient in The Birth of the Clinic and prison guard/inmate in Discipline and Punish). Absent here is the Manichaean logic of treating the two parties involved as absolute (moral) opposites. Instead, the couples – and their coupling – are epistemically and historically enmeshed through entrenched mechanisms of inculcating obedience and subordination to a higher, transcendent authority – mechanisms that have been passed down through Bible-based religion and its secular avatars. By spotlighting the police as the exemplary icon of government and by placing this icon in a modern global situation still dominated by residual Christian techniques of power, Foucault prepares the ground for our confrontation, in the early twenty-first century, with the phenomenon of police racism – of racism as a type of combat gear the police routinely puts on in the service of law and order. I am referring to the police murders of black citizens, including unarmed women and youths, that occur repeatedly in contemporary US cities, murders that seem logical mutations of Western political rationality as Foucault dissects it, with the police officers being an extreme incarnation of the shepherd king. Furthermore, if the police are the core of the reason of state, the nations that take it upon themselves to safeguard the entire globe would perhaps need to be redefined as transnationalism’s versions of the Christian pastorate, with its firm mission to protect the flock that is the world population. The guardianship exercised by this transnational police force and the salvational bind it seeks to create between itself and the ordinary citizen around the world suggest that a new race war is solidifying as a crosscultural strategy and reality.

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In 2016 (the time I  am writing this chapter), it is increasingly those associated with Islam who have come to occupy the place of the racialized other (those who have to die in order for us to live, according to Foucault’s formulation of race). One instance of this new racism deployed by the transnational police force is the stigma of terrorism now borne by Muslims. This new race war rests much less on a division of cultures in the form of mutual suspicion or contempt than on a multinational consensus to govern  – to monopolize the terms, or rationales, of governing  – the world by ostracizing specific groups of people. Although arrest, incarceration, torture, and execution are involved as governing techniques, this consensus is typically promulgated in the pastoral rhetoric of peace, tolerance, benevolent leadership, respect for diversity, and the well-being of the entire flock  – of how, to paraphrase Foucault, our ‘society must be defended’ against the infidels, those who are not like us. It is to these struggles in the current transnational setting that Foucault’s work makes its singularly trenchant contributions today. Instead of discourses reifying ‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘yellow’, and ‘white’, his writings provoke us to ask: What if racialization is aligned with the state institutions, social practices, and individual conscience productions that continue to be galvanized by Christian techniques of power? What if race becomes linked to controversies over embodied religious conduct in an avowedly secular society? Finally, what if struggles against racism are waged alongside a historical analysis of vestiges of the Christian hermeneutics of the self – including the self that, in our neoliberal times, is led to embrace race (as well as sexuality) as a way of self-disclosure and self-discovery? Notes 1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New  York, NY:  Pantheon, 1978). See also Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY: Vintage, 1993). 2 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:  How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983). 3 See, for instance, Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 4 For an examination of the historical usages of the term ‘racism’, together with analyses of the antiracism that is the spirit of our time, see Pierre-André Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles, trans. and ed. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 5 See Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire:  Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia, PA:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

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6 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1978) (hereafter HS), 8–9. 7 Ibid., 103. 8 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New  York, NY: Grove, 1967), 89. 9 For a full-fledged discussion, see Pooja Rangan and Rey Chow, ‘Race, Racism, and Postcoloniality’, in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 396–411. 10 See Foucault, Power/Knowledge:  Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1977), 222. For helpful discussions of Foucault and race, see Stuart Elden, ‘The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault’s “Il faut défendre la société” and the Politics of Calculation’, boundary 2 29:1, 2002, 125–151. See also the informed debates in the special issue ‘Foucault and Race’, in Foucault Studies, 12, October 2011, n.p. 11 See Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Essential Foucault:  Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New  York, NY:  The New Press, 2003), 229–245; on the art of not being governed quite so much, see Foucault, ‘What Is Critique?’, in The Essential Foucault, 263–278. 12 See HS, 141–42. Following Foucault’s lead, Ann Laura Stoler examines this nexus in the context of the Dutch Indies, showing how the regulations and controls Foucault describes are in play in European states’ and citizens’ practices in the colonies overseas; see her Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1995). 13 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), 275. 14 HS, 149. Emphasis in original. 15 Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (hereafter ‘Society’), ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York, NY: Picador 2003), 259. 16 HS, 150. 17 Ibid. 18 ‘Society’, 242. 19 Ibid., 242–243. 20 Ibid., 243. 21 Ibid., 59–60. 22 Ibid., 60. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 61. My emphasis. Referring to psychiatry, Foucault uses the term ‘neoracism’ to describe the abnormalizations created from within the social fabric (in this case, by bio-medical interventions); see Foucault, Abnormal:  Lectures at the Collège de France 1945–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New  York, NY:  Picador 2003), 317.

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‘Society’, 255. Ibid. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 261–262. Ibid., 256; my emphases. For discussions of the nuances and complications involved, see, for instance, Paul Gilroy, Against Race:  Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2002); Frieda Ekotto, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical, and Theater Discourse (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2011); and Targuieff, The Force of Prejudice. Foucault elaborates on the phrase “pastoral power” in ‘Society’, 62, as ‘the internal racism of permanent purification’, one of the basic dimensions of social normalization under state racism. See also ‘The Subject and Power’, in The Essential Foucault, 126–144 for another detailed discussion of pastoral power. Foucault, ‘ “Omnes et Singulatim ”: Toward a Critique of Political Reason’, in The Essential Foucault, 180–201. Ibid., 187–188. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 190; my emphasis. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 200; my emphasis. See, for instance, the chapter ‘Christianity and Confession’, in Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self:  Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, intro. Laura Cremonesi et al., trans. Graham Burchell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 53–92.

Ch apter 8

Foucault and Ecology Emma A. Foster

Introduction A Foucauldian perspective offers a number of interesting and significant insights into the relationship between the cultural representations of ‘Nature’ and the processes of subjectification that underpin environmentalism and ecologism. Generally speaking, environmentalism refers to a perspective where one seeks to protect and conserve the natural environment in an effort to keep the planet a habitable (and pleasant) place for humans. Often, environmentalism is a perspective that can be attached to fairly mainstream political ideologies such as liberalism. On the other hand, ecologism, while also advocating the conservation and preservation of the natural world, can be defined as an ideology that places the ecosystem central to its critique of our current socio-political and economic condition and to its future objectives. Ecologists, then, recognize the ecosystem, and its constituent parts, as inherently valuable and seek to preserve and conserve the natural world based on this ethic. From these brief descriptions, it is clear to see that environmentalism and ecologism tend to rely on a clear definition of nature as their focal point. Stemming from this conceptualization of nature, a number of other assumptions flow, such as a valorization of that which is considered natural. The work of Michel Foucault allows us to interrogate environmentalism and ecologism in important and exciting ways by highlighting, and potentially offering a corrective to, the discourses that perpetuate problematic power dynamics, such as (hetero)sexism, racism and speciesism, integral to established environmental/ecological theory and practice. This is because hierarchies determined by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and species have long been justified through a valorization of that which is considered natural, thereby simultaneously naturalizing inequalities. That being said, it is perhaps surprising that many scholars interested in the environment have found Foucault’s work useful, given that, by all 122

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accounts, Foucault appeared to find little inspiration in that which is culturally accepted as ‘Nature’. Indeed, Eric Darier1 offers an interesting story that suggests that Michel Foucault is an unlikely candidate for generating a robust ecological ethic. Darier recounts how, while on a trip to the Alps, Foucault’s colleague Jacqueline Verdeaux compelled him to appreciate a particular vista. Foucault reacted by walking away and exclaiming: ‘My back is turned to it’. Indeed, in line with this story, it is widely accepted that Foucault disliked ‘Nature’, preferring to visit more cultural attractions, and being considered more akin to the stereotype of ‘a highly urbanized intellectual and a member of the big cities’ philosophical intelligentsia’.2 Yet, since at least the mid-1990s,3 there has been a burgeoning literature that uses a Foucauldian lens to understand ecologism and environmentalism. In this vein, this chapter argues that Foucault’s work has both contributed to a robust form of eco-critique, reflecting on the operation of discourse/knowledge/power within accepted mainstream and established environmental discourses, and given rise to new types of radical/liberation/queer ecologism that reject stable categories of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, humanity, and animality  – indeed, that reject the notion of a singular, uncontestable ‘Nature’ in and of itself. With regard to the former, this chapter reviews the literature that has applied Foucauldian scholarship to environmental matters, first detailing eco-critique that has as its key focus discourse and discourse analysis and, second, looking at environmental scholarship that has found the application of governmentality to be fruitful. With regard to the latter, I demonstrate the radical potential of a resistant, queer and/or liberation ecology that challenges the problematic power dynamics perpetuated via contemporary environmental and ecological discourses and therefore provides a new basis for making sense of human–nature relations. Overall, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that while Foucault may himself have ‘turned his back’ to ‘Nature’, his work offers important insights for contemporary environmental politics and activism.

Foucauldian Inspired Eco-Critique As outlined in the preceding section, Foucault’s own disregard for ‘Nature’, and his apparent suspicion of that which is purported to be natural, has made him an unusual bedfellow for ecology and environmental scholars.4 Nonetheless, despite this seeming disconnect, Foucault’s work, more than that of his contemporaries, became central to the post-structuralist turn in political ecology that occurred in the mid-1990s.5 Generally speaking,

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the application of Foucauldian analysis enables scholars to reflect critically on mainstream and established environmental discourses, as well as the practices performed in an effort to ameliorate (at least ostensibly) environmental problems. In other words, Foucault’s work is utilized to generate a robust and reflexive form of eco-critique in order primarily to ‘reveal how natures and bodily behaviours are drawn into existence through the generation of knowledge and why such practices should be theorized as exercises of power’.6 In order to produce this eco-critique the two main Foucauldian approaches or methodologies common to post-structuralist political ecology are derived from Foucault’s interpretations of discourse/ power/knowledge and governmentality,7 each of which I discuss in the text that follows.

Discourse/ Power/ Knowledge As indicated earlier, it is in the field of political ecology that discourse approaches to the environment have been particularly prevalent in recent years. By ‘discourse approaches’ I refer to analyses that take into account systems of signs and meanings commonly, but not exclusively, delivered through language systems of talk and text. Generally speaking, political ecology is the study of human–nature relations through the acknowledgement that politics (in both the narrow and the broad sense) is central to understanding said relations and, subsequently, the understanding that political ecology works as a corrective to the apparently apolitical environmental studies that preceded it.8 Since the mid-1990s, political ecology has been increasingly concerned with discourse and exploring how narratives about ‘Nature’ and subsequently ‘the environment/environmental problems’ have been produced, and how power relations have been perpetuated, transformed, and challenged by said narratives.9 In that vein, eco-critique informed by Foucault’s work on discourse, and how discourse relates to knowledge and power, has tended to examine the silencing, marginalizing, and enabling effects of constructing the ‘object’ of environmentalism and ecologism (namely ‘the environment’ or ‘Nature’) and, subsequently, its subjects (in the guise of environmental citizens). Foucault’s work on discourse, knowledge, and power, while inspiring a variety of studies within the social sciences and humanities, including studies on the environment and ecology, was never prescriptive. In other words, while numerous studies claim to utilize Foucault’s conceptualization of the relationship between discourse, knowledge and power to inform their method(ologies) and research designs, Foucault himself did not leave

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precise guidelines as to how to apply this formula. This has led to a multiple and rich variety of discourse analytical studies informed by Foucault’s work. Nonetheless, there are some common themes to Foucauldian inspired discourse analyses. Most notably, there is the acknowledgement that discourse works to make and shape realities (in that discourse inscribes things and events with meaning) and their associated rationalities (in that discourse provides the logic to enable thinking about things and events and legitimize particular courses of action). The inscription of meaning and the rationalities associated with these meanings, when accepted by a particular societal group at a particular historical moment and in a particular geographical space, produces a ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ regime or – in Foucault’s words – ‘the type of discourse which [society] accepts and makes function as true’.10 These discourses or knowledge/truth regimes then link to power in that they result in a system of inclusion and exclusion where alternative realities and rationalities are cast as illegitimate and are often silenced or pathologized. As such, discourse is enabling, in that it provides a framework for making sense of the world, while simultaneously being constraining, in that it curtails alternative and multiple visions of reality and rationality.11 In relation to environmental and ecological scholarship, then, Foucault’s work has been applied in order to examine how meaning is made with regards to ‘Nature’, ‘the environment’, and ‘environmental problems’ and the ways in which this ‘meaning making’ has been a battleground of contestation. Indeed, Foucauldian inspired discourse analyses have had as their ‘[c]entral […] task […] a concern to appreciate how that environment is constituted through struggles over material practices and struggles over meaning’.12 Moreover, scholarship in this area has also sought to explore the consequences of environmental truth regimes, in particular, the ways in which these regimes work to construct (environmental) subjects and (re)produce particular power relations, given that the ‘production of environmental interventions is intimately connected to the production of environmental knowledge, both of which are intrinsically bound up with power relations’.13 Arguably the most profound, if not obvious, point of departure for many environmental scholars undertaking discourse analysis relates to the construction of ‘Nature’ as a singular object of environmental policy and as the opposite of ‘Culture’. This, in itself, works to marginalize and exclude counter discourses that recognize natures in the plural sense and consider the lines between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ to be arbitrarily drawn and illusory. Indeed, constructing ‘Nature’ (in the singular) in diametric opposition to ‘Culture’ (again in the singular) renders it distinct from, and inferior

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to, (hu)man(ity). This has a number of consequences for human–human and human–nature relations and it also accommodates an oversimplification of explanations pertaining to environmental change. With regard to the former, the adherence to the belief that ‘Nature’ is that which is not ‘Culture’ is implicated in a series of Cartesian dualisms that work to reinforce unequal power dynamics; most notably mind/body, reason/emotion, and man/woman. Here ‘Culture’ is associated with man and the mind and ‘Nature’ with woman and the body, with the second term in the binary being considered the inferior Other and distinct from the capacity for thought and agency.14 As such, the construction of ‘Nature’ in diametric opposition to ‘Culture’ works to reinforce the exploitation of that which is intelligible as ‘Nature’ and operates as part of a matrix that simultaneously devalues women (as well as other groups based on ethnicity and species) owing to their constructed proximity to ‘Nature’, thereby fuelling (hetero)sexism, racism, and speciesism. In addition, with regards to the latter point, the construction of ‘Nature’ as ‘other-than-human’ within the ‘Nature/Culture’ nexus also works to oversimplify human–nature relations and related environmental change. Take, for example, how one might think of an extreme weather event such as severe flooding. Often this would be framed as a natural disaster – yet this framing encourages a perception of ‘Nature’ as a threat to human living standards or even life. Equally, one might see the same extreme weather event described as the outcome of anthropogenic climate change. This framing renders ‘Nature’ passive and recognizes human action to be the root cause of the disaster affecting human living standards and/or life. The separation of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ here works to simplify human–nature relations in an either/or scenario whereby either humans or nature are deemed responsible for extreme weather events – even though it would arguably be more useful, and perhaps accurate, to recognize the event to be socio-natural.15 In other words, as a consequence of the complex interplay and interrelationship between that which is intelligible as cultural and that which is intelligible as natural. This circumnavigates the problems associated with constructing ‘Nature’ as a threat (read in need of taming) or as passive (read available for exploitation), as these constructions of ‘Nature’ (as threatening and/or passive) have arguably legitimized human hostility to and exploitations of the environment in the first place. As well as identifying and critiquing the ways in which the ‘Culture’/ ‘Nature’ dichotomy works to encourage the exploitation of nature, scholarship has also sought to explore the ways in which particular constructions of ‘Nature’ work to (re)produce particular power dynamics and provoke appropriate processes of subjectification. For example, Raymond Bryant16

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explores the discourses of ‘scientific forestry’ as a truth regime that perpetuated colonial (and more recently perpetuates neo-colonial) relations. ‘Science forestry’ was a system of forest management introduced by colonial powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to cultivate particular species of tree that were marketable at the time. The cultivation of these marketable goods, on which the imperial economies relied, was backed up by horticultural science, which therefore afforded this commercial endeavour further legitimacy as ‘good forest management’. Consequently, local (indigenous) forest users were simultaneously constructed as engaging in ‘bad forest management’ as they sought to use the forests in different ways, potentially ‘contaminating’ these pristine resource rich environments with competitor species. As Bryant notes, this logic of ‘Nature’ as resource in line with market principles produced [a] discourse of ‘forestry as progress’ … in which ‘appropriate’ forest use was defined largely in terms of a commercial timber extraction, which was asserted to be both ecologically sound and financially renumerative to the state, while other local activities were denigrated … marginalized … and even criminalized.17

This example demonstrates the ways in which power dynamics, such as those embedded in colonial relations, were legitimized and reinforced through Enlightenment discourses of science that, in this instance, worked to perpetuate racialized power hierarchies through constructing the figure of the ecologically destructive, indigenous forest-user in contrast to the ecologically sound and progressive colonialist. Indeed, these colonial power dynamics certainly continue to pervade contemporary environmental management discourses and, in contemporary environmental politics, the reliance on techno-science and the logic of the market has arguably intensified. These Enlightenment discourses are ever the more important as, for example, many Western nation-states, scientists, and some businesses construct the forest and woodland as a carbon sink, absorbing greenhouse gases, and therefore offering a marketable environmental service in regulating the air. Here, these forests are again constructed in terms of their value on the carbon market,18 although in this formulation the forest needs to be protected (usually from humans, often indigenous to the forest, who intend to use the forest ‘unwisely’) on the understanding that its value resides in ‘cleaning up’ the planet from the poisonous gases released by industry rather than as a raw material for producing commodity goods (as was the case under colonial rule).

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As is demonstrated in the foregoing example, the role of scientific and market-based discourses in constructing contemporary paradigms relating to ‘Nature’ and the environment have played, and continue to play, a crucial role in producing the environmental subject. Thinking about the environment more broadly, the construction of an environment in crisis, often supported by scientists and technocrats, (re) produces problematic power relations, as ‘the process of problem definition, and associated plans for problem solution’ are ‘highly political’.19 For example, authors such as Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands20 have demonstrated the ways in which gendered, heterosexist and racialized power dynamics are reinforced by constructing environmental degradation as the result of ‘underdevelopment’ (the logic being that more developed countries are better able to adapt to and mitigate environmental change) and overpopulation (as this increases waste production and resource depletion). In this particular construction of ‘Nature in crisis’ women of the Global South are constituted as bad ecological citizens for their (over)reproductive behaviours. Further, the solution to environmental problems is constructed as encouraging women to have smaller families through, in part, improving their access to waged employment (which expediently helps to boost economic growth and development). Here the construction of an ‘environment in crisis’, a crisis exacerbated by overpopulation and ‘underdevelopment’, links good environmental citizenship to individuals who ‘choose’ smaller families and who engage with formal wage labour – families more akin to the nuclear and adult-earner models common to the Global North and, conveniently, more appropriate for the operation of neoliberal capitalism. Not only do the discourses of ‘environment in crisis’ work to encourage certain types of reproductive and economic behaviour, but they also fit into a wider framing of ‘Nature’ as a security threat. For instance, Brian Massumi,21 through an exploration of the discourses surrounding Hurricane Katrina, swine flu, and other supposedly ‘natural’ threats, discusses what he calls the ‘war–weather’ continuum. He notes that the construction of natural threats works to produce a militarized ecological citizen, stating that in ‘a crisis prone environment, threat is endemic, uncertainty is everywhere; a negative can never be proven. Positive military response must then be ever at the ready’.22 Here the roles of the citizen and the military are merged  – calling for the militarization of civilians as ‘first responders’ in the face of ‘natural’ disaster(s). He notes that the ‘fabled first responder is the most visible figure of the hero in the “waging of peace” against indiscriminate threat’.23 As is obvious, increased

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militarization, and a militarized subject, is the direct response to the construction of ‘Nature’ as a threat. Overall, it is clear that the ways in which ‘Nature’ is discursively constructed, whether it be as a resource or as a threat, work to produce knowledge and truth regimes that dictate differing policy outcomes, power dynamics, and processes of subjectification. Indeed, Foucault’s discourse, knowledge, and power formulation allow for the contestability of ‘Nature’ (in the singular) to be exposed and a level of conscientiousness as to the political and social effects of interpreting ‘Nature’ in one way or another to be critically examined.

Environmental Governmentality and Environmentality Studies examining the processes of discourse, knowledge, and power in the construction of environmental knowledge(s) and hegemonies frequently engage with Foucault’s conception of governmentality to supplement their analyses. As such, there is a well-developed, and somewhat divergent, literature on environmental governmentality and, what is often referred to as, environmentality. Since the translation into English of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures on governmentality, there has been an explosion of scholarship utilizing this concept in order to understand what Mitchell Dean24 terms ‘the analytics of government’. Further, many authors25 have found that Foucault’s lectures, despite being delivered very early on in the development of neoliberalism in the late 1970s, offer important insights into the ways in which neoliberalism operates as a governing rationality. For Foucault, ‘government’ and ‘governing’ are not restricted to the role of the State but, rather, refer to the ways in which power is exercised to regulate conduct (often referred to as ‘the conduct of conduct’) across various domains, from the traditional, formal, and obvious institutions of government (such as parliament) through to peer-to-peer government and internalized self-government. Governmentality helps to make sense of the ways in which subjects appear to govern themselves and others in a way that is often synchronous with more obvious governing institutions.26 As such, governmentality, as a framework, helps to unpick the analytics of government, thereby exposing the (governing) rationality that shapes the conduct of conduct. In other words, governmentality when used as a methodological tool helps to identify the knowledge and truth regimes that direct government (across domains) and promote particular processes of subjectification. In Foucault’s words, governmentality is

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Emma A. Foster The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections. The calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target populations, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security’.27

At this juncture it is worth unpacking this quotation further. For instance, Foucault notes that this governing that is at once part of, but also detached from, the government ‘has as its target populations’. In other words, governmentality is concerned with the regulation of populations, often through discourses of the welfare and well-being of species and therefore refers to power that permeates all life (understood by Foucault as biopower). This point rings true in the discourses of environmentalism and ecologism which are explicitly concerned with the management of both human and non-human populations and how these populations impact on waste production, pollution, and resource use. As Timothy Luke, drawing explicitly on Foucault’s concepts, argues: Ecology merely echoes the effects from ‘one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century’: namely, the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem.28

Second, Foucault argued that the principal form of knowledge shaping government is political economy, and it is here that scholars such as Thomas Lemke29 have sought to demonstrate the ways in which neoliberalism has become the dominant logic of contemporary governing rationalities. Here, it is argued that market logic underpins all aspects of governing, including self-government.30 Indeed, the hegemonic status of neoliberalism as a governing rationality has combined with mainstream environmental discourses in intricate and complex ways, including the trading of carbon between high- and low-income countries, the conflation of companies’ green credentials with increased profitability and more efficient resource use, and the increased consumer-as-eco-citizen demand for ethical goods. Third, Foucault refers to the way in which ‘security’ is the instrument that holds governing rationalities in place. Security and associated processes of monitoring and surveillance work to encourage individuals to behave in line with the governing rationality given that, it is suggested, behaving otherwise could result in insecurity. For example, in relation to environmental politics, systems of production, consumption, and reproduction are monitored in synchronicity with the circulation of education and information that suggests particular types of production, consumption, and reproduction will hasten humanity’s journey towards

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global environmental Armageddon.31 This monitoring and the threat of insecurity encourage particular behaviours, for example, choosing to have a smaller family, recycling waste, and buying sustainable goods, in line with ‘good’ eco-citizenship. As outlined in the preceding text, Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality is particularly relevant to political ecology. As a result, the application of governmentality as an inroad into understanding environmental politics has been broad and varied, covering specific environmental issues such as forest policy,32 community-based resource management,33 and conservation/biodiversity34 to larger environmental paradigms, such as climate change35 and sustainable development.36 Moreover, and perhaps more interestingly, the ways in which governmentality has been applied to environmental politics have also varied considerably, from demonstrating how the governing rationality of neoliberalism has pervaded constructions of the environment/environmental problems (often referred to as environmental governmentality) to offering examples of how environmentalism itself has operated in the production and discipline of environmental subjects (often referred to as environmentality). Through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, many argue37 that neoliberalism, as a governing rationality, colours mainstream environmental action and policy. Indeed, Luke38 discusses the way in which environmentalism, once typified by counter-cultural tree-hugging hippies rebelling against the prevailing governing rationality, becomes ‘part of the machine’ by the 1990s as environmental initiatives that seek to improve the environment via market mechanisms become established in international and local governance. Similarly, Adger et al.39 argue that although Global Environmental Management (GEM) ‘discourses [are] on the role of states, [they are] essentially neoliberal in espousing market oriented solutions … GEM discourses are, in essence, based on neoliberal values’. Returning to the representation of ‘Nature’, introduced in the previous section, here the environment is framed as a resource and as a provider of environmental goods and services (water, clean air, ozone layer protection, and so on). In addition, neoliberal environmental governmentality works to construct the solution to environmental degradation along the same market logic whereby the solution to environmental ills is more economic growth and development so that humans can improve their technological capacities to adapt to and mitigate environmental damage (through the use of greener technologies). Further, individuals are encouraged to ‘look after’ the environment insofar as they are incentivized to do so through various economic innovations and internalized cost–benefit analyses (like any

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good neoliberal subject). Overall, ‘neoliberal environmentality’… [can be described as] an effort to combat environmental degradation in the interest of biopower through the creation of incentive structures intended to influence individuals’ use of natural resources by altering the cost-benefit ratio of resource extraction so as to encourage in situ preservation’.40 As such, ‘Nature’ is afforded a market value for exchange and, subsequently, citizens (at least good ecological citizens) will behave as rational actors ensuring they buy ‘green’ and recycle their waste.41 The ‘conduct of conduct’ from governments (in the formal sense), to businesses, to individuals is very much tied to a market logic that perpetuates the idea that good environmental citizenship and the neoliberal subject are complementary categories. While neoliberal environmental governmentality scholarship tends to focus on the ways in which neoliberalism infiltrates environmental politics as the prevailing governing rationality, work on environmentality tends to focus more on processes of subjectification. Most famously, Arun Agrawal42 has applied Foucault comprehensively to his various ethnographic studies that investigate how environmental subjects  – i.e., those that care about the environment – are produced through both technologies of power and technologies of the self. Applying Foucault’s notion of governmentality, he understands environmentality to be ‘a framework for understanding the ways in which technologies of self and power are involved in the creation of new subjects concerned about the environment’.43 Agrawal’s ethnographic study of villagers in Kumaon in India sought to explore the processes involved in producing environmental subjects. He noted a change in attitude towards the environment generally, and forest management in particular, between the dates of 1989 and 1993. During his earlier visit in 1989, the villagers he encountered appeared to have little concern for forest conservation and were hostile towards the officials who policed the forests, one participant noting: ‘What does it matter if all the trees are cut? There is always more forest’.44 By 1993, however, this particular participant in Agrawal’s study, who had since become a member of the forest council, appeared to have wholeheartedly converted to both forest protection and a wider environmental ethic. Agrawal explains this transition as being related to the way in which technologies of government and technologies of the self had merged. He recounts that in 1989 the Kumoani villagers’ attitude towards forest management continued to be shaped by colonial legacies. Indeed, under colonial rule the forest was something that was guarded from indigenous populations, who were considered to be unreliable in its management and conservation. As such, the indigenous communities were positioned

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in conflict with the forest officials. However, because it was not possible to police the ‘unruly’ Kumaonis, who ignored the rules surrounding forest use, more sophisticated governance structures were formulated, in the guise of forest councils. Ultimately, by 1993, these forest councils effectively interpellated some Kumoanis by placing them in decision-making positions. As such, the Kumoani villagers became appropriated as instruments of forest management themselves – simultaneously becoming the government and the governed. As Agrawal notes: ‘On the one hand they are the instruments of environment-related regulatory authority. On the other, they represent villagers’ interests in forests’.45 Further, these headmen sought to make the remaining villagers ‘aware’ of the ‘need’ to preserve the forests, thereby initiating peer-to-peer government. This multilevel government, whereby the interests of the formal organizations of government (forest officials) and the villagers are convincingly narrated as synchronous and government becomes internalized, is a good example of effective environmentality  – demonstrating how one becomes a ‘good eco-citizen’.

New Political Ecologies While a great deal of energy has gone into producing critiques of established and mainstream environmental discourses, Foucault’s work has also offered ways to imagine new political ecologies, be they liberatory, resistant, queer, pluralist and/or a combination thereof. These new political ecologies tend to derive from an acknowledgment of Foucauldian critiques briefly discussed in the previous sections. Arguably the first and most important contribution of Foucault’s work to environmental and ecological studies is the corrective drawn from understanding that ‘Nature’ is a term which is contingent and contestable and therefore that ‘Nature’ in the singular does political work when presented as singular and in diametric opposition to ‘Culture’. Moving on from this, Foucault inspires an environmentalism/ ecologism that acknowledges and accepts contestability and contingency; embracing ‘natures’ in the plural46 and exposing that the line between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ is arbitrarily drawn and that natures and cultures, insofar as they exist, are symbiotic and intimately conjoined.47 Through acknowledging the plurality of natures that exist and the fallacy of the ‘Nature-Culture’ divide, multiple human  –  nature relations, separated from the dominating logic of the market and security, can be imagined and potentially realized. Inspired by scholarship that recognizes the contestability and contingency of ‘Nature’, as well as the ways in which singular constructions of

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‘Nature’ do political work, another body of work, namely Queer Ecology/ Ecologies has developed.48 Queer ecology is based on the eco-critique that constructions of ‘Nature’ and ‘naturalness’ have worked to discipline bodies and behaviours in line with heteronormative expectations (e.g., by invoking the naturalness associated with childrearing and heterosexuality). Unsurprisingly, given that ‘Nature’ is the key focus of environmentalism and ecologism, these heteronormative expectations have significantly shaped environmental discourses. For example, a common trope well rehearsed within mainstream and established environmental discourses is that of intergenerational justice whereby the often-repeated cliché of ‘save the planet for your children and grandchildren’ is utilized to promote environmental action. However, this motivation to save the environment is very much premised on ideas of inheritance through heterosexual kinship ties – in other words, through blood and marriage whereby saving the planet is reduced to an evolutionary imperative to ensure the longevity of one’s genes. Queer ecologists,49 in response to this, argue that mobilizing a discourse of ‘saving the planet for one’s own children and grandchildren’ leads to a very narrow form of environmentalism. They50 suggest that saving the planet on this instrumental and anthropocentric basis means that only the aspects of the natural world considered useful to (some) humans would be protected and conserved. Arguably, this view of ‘Nature’ (as a resource for humankind currently and in the future) is what has led to the destruction and exploitation of nature(s) in the first place. Further, queer ecologists highlight how the discourses of futurity work to reinforce the prevailing power dynamics associated with heteronormativity, where non-normative gender and sexual behaviours are marginalized and pathologized within the environmental movement. In other words, queer ecologists highlight the ways in which mainstream environmental discourses perpetuate the idea that those who engage in non-normative sexual behaviours do not hold the same investment in ‘protecting’ the planet. For example, people who do not have children, especially those who choose to remain childfree, have less regard for the environment, as they need not protect the longevity of their gene pool. Contrary to these mainstream discourses of futurity, queer ecologists argue that a queer perspective allows ‘for a unique standpoint on resisting [the] destructive relations’51 between that which is culturally intelligible as ‘Nature’ and humans. By breaking down the categories of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ and through displacing the impetus for saving the planet away from (biologically related) future generations, queer ecologists envision an ethic of care for the environment that has the potential to expand beyond the confines of the heterosexual family unit or even

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the human species itself. Here the impetus to save natures is not reduced to a biological investment in the future but is, instead, based on an expanded potential scope to love, protect, and desire outside of the remit of heterosexual kinship. In other words, queer ecology [L]ooks out into the world and does not see only males desiring females, and females desiring males, with the sole aim of reproducing the species by any means necessary. It does not see bodies as mere carriers for the seeds of future life. It rejects this vision because reproductive heteronormativity is ontologically insufficient (it does not do justice to the biodiversity of bodies and pleasures, of aims and desires, in the world) and it is axiologically problematic (it values beings instrumentally only insofar as those beings have the capacity to produce the next generation, their supposed destiny).52

As such, queer ecology is informed by love or desire for that which includes but is outside of one’s species: human, non-human, living, non-living, and so on. This ethic of care, being more expansive, would arguably lead to a more holistic respect for that which is currently classified as ‘Nature’.

Conclusion Generally speaking, the application of Foucault’s work to environmental politics and ecology challenges singular definitions of ‘Nature’ and the processes of subjectification that accompany said definitions. As Winkel53 notes, a Foucauldian perspectives offers a skeptical attitude towards claims of a single rationality and objective truth and particularly towards central state and capitalist discourses; an inclination to regard knowledge as contingent and principally contestable; an understanding that language and knowledge need to be addressed as aspects of power; an interest of the suppressive effects of dominant types of language and knowledge; and, an emancipatory motive and interest in broadening the available knowledge base and democratizing policy making.

Indeed, Foucault-inspired studies tend to demonstrate the contestability of ‘common sense’ and singular narratives of ‘Nature’ and subsequently environmental degradation. Further, Foucauldian work on the environment explores the ways in which good and bad (eco)subjects are constructed in relation to definitions of ‘Nature’ and environmental problems. These processes of subjectification often demonstrate how good (eco)subjects are constructed along racialized, gendered, and heteronormative lines – as well as being good ethical consumers and potential first responders (as discussed earlier). Finally, through the acknowledgement that various

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understandings of ‘Nature’ are contingent and contestable and should be treated cautiously by examining the political work they do, a pluralized and creative interpretation of natures (and cultures) is rendered possible. As such, Foucault’s work has, and continues to be, a lens through which contemporary environmental paradigms can be scrutinized and more liberatory environmental ethics can be envisioned and pursued. Notes 1 Eric Darier (ed.), Discourses of the Environment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 5–6. 2 Georg Winkel, ‘Foucault in the Forests: A Review of the Use of “Foucauldian” Concepts in Forest Policy Analysis’, Forest Policy and Economics, 16, 2012, 81. 3 Raymond L. Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology in the Third World: A Review’, Progress in Physical Geography, 22:1, 1998, 79–94. 4 Darier, Discourses of the Environment; and Winkel, ‘Foucault in the Forests’. 5 Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology’. 6 Andrew Baldwin cited in Winkel, ‘Foucault in the Forests’, 85. 7 Ibid. 8 Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology’. 9 W. Neil Adger, Tor A. Benjaminsen, Katrina Brown, and Hanne Svarstad, ‘Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses’, Development and Change, 32, 2001, 682. 10 Michel Foucault, Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald, and David Macey, Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 2003), 131. 11 Winkel, ‘Foucault in the Forests’, 82. 12 Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology’, 84. 13 Julie Guthman cited in Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology’, 88. 14 Karen J. Warren, Ecological Feminist Philosophies:  An Overview of the Issues (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). 15 Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, Social Nature:  Theory, Practice and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 16 Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology’, 87. 17 Ibid. 18 Adger et al., ‘Advancing a Political Ecology’, 698. 19 Bryant, ‘Power, Knowledge and Political Ecology’, 88. 20 Catriona Sandilands, ‘Sex at the Limits’, in Discourses of the Environment, ed. Eric Darier (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1999), 79–94; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, ‘Unnatural Passions? Notes toward a Queer Ecology’, Invisible Culture, 9, 2005, www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/issue9_sandilands.pdf (accessed 15 September 2016). See also Emma A. Foster, ‘Problematising the Centrality of Gender in Environmental Governmentality’, Globalizations, 8:2, 2011, 135–149; and Emma A. Foster, ‘Deconstructing International Sustainable Development and Population Policy Directives: The (Re)production of Sexual Norms through Environmental Discourses’, Gender, Place and Culture, 21:8, 2014, 1029–1044.

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21 Brian Massumi, ‘National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Towards an Ecology of Powers’, Theory, Culture and Society, 26:6, 2009, 153–185. 22 Ibid., 158. 23 Ibid., 163. 24 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: SAGE, 1999). 25 Most notably see Thomas Lemke, ‘The Birth of Bio-politics: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30:2, 2001, 190–207. 26 Ibid. 27 Foucault et al., ‘Society Must Be Defended’, 108. 28 Timothy W. Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality’, in Discourses of the Environment, ed. Eric Darier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 149. 29 Lemke, ‘The Birth of Bio-politics’. 30 Wendy Larner. ‘Neo-liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality’, Studies in Political Economy, 63:1, 2000, 5–25. 31 Foster, ‘Deconstructing International Sustainable Development’. 32 Winkel, ‘Foucault in the Forests’, 82. 33 Arun Agrawal, ‘Environmentality:  Community, Intimate Government, and the Making of Environmental Subjects in Kumaon, India 1’, Current Anthropology, 46:2, 2005, 161–190. 34 Robert Fletcher, ‘Neoliberal Environmentality:  Towards a Poststructuralist Political Ecology of the Conservation Debate’, Conservation and Society, 8:3, 2010, 171–181. 35 Adger et al., ‘Advancing a Political Ecology’. 36 Foster, ‘Deconstructing International Sustainable Development’. 37 For example, see ibid.; Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality’; Sandilands, ‘Sex at the Limits’; and Eric Swyngedouw, ‘The Non-Political Politics of Climate Change’, ACME:  An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 12: 1, 2013, 1–8. 38 Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality’. 39 Adger et al., ‘Advancing a Political Ecology’, 701. 40 Fletcher, ‘Neoliberal Environmentality’, 175. 41 Catriona Sandilands, ‘On “Green” Consumerism: Environmental Privatization and “Family Values” ’, Canadian Woman Studies, 13:3, 1993, 45. 42 Agrawal, ‘Environmentality’. 43 Ibid., 166. 44 Ibid., 161. 45 Ibid. 169. 46 Most notably see Arturo Escobar, ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’, Current Anthropology, 40: 1, 1999, 1–30. 47 For a good example, see Castree and Braun, Social Nature. Also see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions:  Gender, Race and Nation in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989). 48 Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, Queer Ecologies:  Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).

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49 Sarah Ensor, ‘Spinster Ecology:  Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity’, American Literature, 84:2, 2012, 409–435; and Sandilands, ‘Sex at the Limits’. 50 Ensor, ‘Spinster Ecology’. 51 Mortimer-Sandilands, ‘Unnatural Passions?’, 5. 52 Jill E. Anderson, Robert Azzarello, Gavin Brown, et al., ‘Queer Ecology: A Roundtable Discussion’, European Journal of Ecopsychology, 3:1, 2012, 82–103. 53 Winkel, ‘Foucault in the Forests’, 89.

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Ch apter 9

Foucault and Sex Tim Dean

So much depends on what you mean by the term sex.1 Elevating sex from a word (whose meaning we all intuitively know) to a term (whose meaning becomes apparent only within a constellation of philosophically specific concepts) suggests that already we have segued into a different world. In this world sex, far from a natural given, is culturally conditioned and historically produced. Certainly we are not being controversial in observing that the experience of sex, as well as its social organization and meaning, changes over time and across different cultures. The work of Michel Foucault is largely responsible for the fact that today such claims hardly seem daring or new. Yet there are elements of Foucault’s thinking about sex and sexuality that remain to be fully appreciated in our current critical landscape. When, for example, he contends that ‘sex … is doubtless but an ideal point made necessary by the deployment of sexuality’, this conception of sex seems far from obvious.2 For reasons that will become apparent, Foucault’s readers have had considerably more to say about his account of sexuality than about his conception of sex. It is striking how frequently the canonical guides to Foucault skirt the problem of sex.3 Even Foucauldian scholars who bill their books as being about ‘sex’ often end up writing almost exclusively about gender.4 Given such elisions, I want to make clear from the outset that by the term sex I refer not to who you are (male, female, trans, intersex), but to what you do (or might do) with your body for the purposes of pleasure. In other words, here sex refers to erotic practice, not to sexual difference, sexual identity, or sexual role. We need this distinction because the word ‘sex’ describes both a status and an activity, with the heteronormative assumption being that one determines the other. It is a fallacy of our time – one that Foucault helps demystify – to assume that what you do sexually should give rise to an identity. The very idea of ‘sexual identity’ is a contradiction in terms, yet we continue to believe in it for an array of historically specific reasons. 141

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Foucault’s emphasis on discursive and embodied practices helps to complicate, if not obliterate entirely, stubborn myths of identity. Despite their substantial differences and discontinuities, all three volumes of The History of Sexuality make plain his preoccupation with transformations in erotic practices and the discourses through which those practices become meaningful. Foucault is concerned ultimately with what people say and do, not who they are. So what does Foucault think sexuality is, if sex counts merely as ‘an ideal point made necessary’ by its deployment? For him sexuality is not about whether you imagine yourself as lesbian, straight, gay, or bisexual. Those are identity questions. Rather, Foucault sees sexuality as a social apparatus for producing knowledge and, indeed, for generating a certain kind of truth about human subjects. Because it has become a means that societies use to gather information about their populations, sexuality constitutes a site less of liberation than of regulation and control. Through mechanisms of self-identification, sexuality forms a crucial part of the disciplinary society that Foucault described in Discipline and Punish.5 The disciplinary society enlists sex to serve purposes beyond itself. ‘As if it was essential’, he writes, ‘that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge’.6 People have always had sex; however, sexuality emerged historically as erotic pleasure became something not simply to experience but also to understand, interpret, and categorize.7 Foucault the philosopher is interested in how sex gradually metamorphosed from an ethical problem into an epistemological one, a question of knowledge. Associating the rise of sexuality with the hegemony of science over religion, he declines to regard this historical transformation with the equanimity shared by most of his secular contemporaries. Instead, Foucault sees sexuality – and with it ‘the fictitious point of sex’ – as a ruse of modern power.8 It would be easy to feel that he sounds somewhat paranoid about sex. Indeed, one could be forgiven for concluding from the first volume of The History of Sexuality that the paucity of recognizable erotic action in this book tells us rather too much about its author. Perhaps Foucault just needed to be having more or better sex? According to the terms he lays out, however, better sex would mean an experience of pleasure that eludes capture by those systems of knowledge that make sexuality intelligible in the first place. It would not mean sex outside of, or somehow beyond, relations of power, since Foucault does not consider such a thing to be possible. From his perspective, the contemporary commonplace that ‘rape is not about sex, it’s about power’ – an idea that derives from

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second-wave feminism and has been naturalized in mainstream US culture  – promulgates a myth of erotic experience as exempt from power relations. Feminist Susan Brownmiller’s claim that rape is used to enforce patriarchal power has led to the distorted view that heterosexual sex should somehow be free from power.9 Yet, acknowledging that sex always involves power dynamics does not condone rape or gender hierarchies; it should not vitiate the struggle against sexual coercion or exploitation. On the contrary: it may be necessary to grasp how power dynamics animate all erotic contact in order to enlarge a sense of women’s sexual agency. In this era of renewed attention to sexual assaults on college campuses, it seems important to insist that the false dichotomy of rape versus power-free sex exacerbates widespread misconceptions about sexual relations in a way that harms everyone.10 Attempts to purify eros of the taint of power impede the aims of social justice. Another way of putting this would be to say that the influence of Foucault on US college campuses is not being felt where it may be needed most. Despite the enormous impact of his work across the humanities and social sciences, there remains something about Foucault’s thinking that is deeply antithetical to the American mind. Partly this has to do with the incompatibility between US myths of individualism and Foucault’s account of power as relational – as omnipresent and ineluctable yet not necessarily malign or authoritarian. The incompatibility also has to do with how the science of sexuality he so vigorously critiques in The History of Sexuality achieved its greatest triumph in the United States.11 For at least the past century, American sex has been subject to the authority less of religious institutions (though they have hardly quit) than of those proliferating forms of expertise generated by sexology, psychology, psychiatry, and medicine. The hegemony of what Foucault calls scientia sexualis may be gauged from the fact that today almost no one doubts that sex is above all a matter of health. Perhaps it is preferable to think of it in terms of health rather than in terms of sin; but Foucault wants to know how we might conceive of bodily pleasures without reference to religion, morality, or science. The key distinction between scientia sexualis and what Foucault calls ars erotica suggests that the alternative frame of reference for pleasure would be that of aesthetics. It is an art, not a science, with a quite different relation to knowledge and its transmission. On one side (the side of Western modernity), we have scientific knowledge and its discourses of sexuality, within which ‘sex’ functions as the imaginary lodestar. On the other side, we have the arts of eros organized primarily by pleasure – arts in which any

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secure distinction between aesthetic and erotic pleasure becomes impossible to sustain since both involve the sensate body. This is how Foucault puts it: Historically, there have been two great procedures for producing the truth of sex. On the one hand, the societies  – and they are numerous:  China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies – which endowed themselves with an ars erotica. In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.12

By contrast, ‘our civilization possesses no ars erotica’, claims Foucault. Instead, Western culture practises a scientia sexualis, defined as ‘procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret’.13 To be sure, Foucault’s distinction, polarized here into what is effectively a binary opposition, has received its share of criticism – as essentializing, Eurocentric, Orientalist, historically inaccurate, and ultimately untenable.14 In terms other than these, Foucault himself undermined the distinction a few pages later, suggesting wryly that the sciences of sexuality have proliferated their own subtle forms of pleasure: [W]e must ask whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis – under the guise of its decent positivism – has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica. Perhaps this production of truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model, multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures. It is often said that we have been incapable of imagining any new pleasures. We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open – the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.15

The sciences of sexuality compensate for their subordination of pleasure by producing a paradoxical, second-order metapleasure  – what Foucault refers to as ‘the formidable “pleasure of analysis” ’.16 Modernity enforces Cartesian dualism by displacing pleasure from the body to the mind. Assessing the distinction between scientia sexualis and ars erotica, we should take care not to lose sight of its force. In my view, the distinction

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should not be considered as an insidiously essentializing difference between Occident and Orient, but as a heuristic that helps us to think sexuality otherwise. The point, to put it plainly, is to reconceptualize what we call ‘sex’ outside the sciences of sexuality. Appealing to established differences between space (East versus West), time (ancient versus modern), and technē (art versus science), Foucault’s distinction endeavours above all to differentiate between ‘sex’ and something called eros. Far from synonymous, sex and eros were for him closer to antonyms. This, it seems to me, is the crucial distinction – not whether Foucault was historically accurate about non-Western societies, or relied on questionable sources, or was indulging in Orientalist speculation about the East.17 Those complaints, valid though they may be, do not vitiate the force of the conceptual distinction he’s making. Foucault’s distinction between sex and eros is no less vital for his having sketched it out in just a few pages, never to return to it as such. It is as if, having posited the distinction, Foucault pursued the scientia sexualis side of it in the first volume of The History of Sexuality and then discovered, when researching subsequent volumes, that erotic matters in the ancient world were not quite as he had supposed. His extended focus on pleasure in Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, did not yield an ars erotica.18 Foucault conceded as much in an interview from 1983, where he responds to a question about Volume 1 by observing, ‘One of the numerous points where I  was wrong in that book was what I  said about this ars erotica. I should have opposed our science of sex to a contrasting practice in our own culture. The Greeks and Romans did not have any ars erotica to be compared with the Chinese ars erotica’.19 Here he tantalizingly suggests – revising his claims in The Will to Knowledge – that Western culture may in fact possess a practice that qualifies as an ars erotica. If Foucault’s concern with the problematic of pleasure took him back to classical civilizations, what he found there was neither the sexual sciences of Western modernity in embryonic form nor yet an ars erotica strictly speaking. The Greek preoccupation with pleasure was too bound up with projects of self-mastery; their aesthetics of existence differed from the aesthetics of erotic practice that he desired. When Foucault says, in the passage quoted above, ‘I should have opposed our science of sex to a contrasting practice in our own culture’, my suggestion is that he may be referring to a practice of SM as he has by that point reconceived it.20 Although never completely explicit on this point, Foucault implied that SM should be understood as a twentieth-century ars erotica. There are things Foucault did not say that his work makes possible for us to say. His

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implication, developed in the remainder of this chapter, is that SM is not sex; moreover, this is to its credit. Hence, it is less a question of defending SM as the practice of a particular sexual minority than of grasping the extent to which it falls outside scientia sexualis altogether. The idea of SM as an aesthetic practice rather than a sexuality entails considerable reorientation in our thinking. After all, it is hardly the case that the sciences of sexuality have neglected sadomasochism. On the contrary, SM practices have elicited intense expert interest, not to mention widespread general curiosity, ever since Krafft-Ebing codified them as sexual perversions toward the end of the nineteenth century.21 The categories of sadism and masochism were subsequently taken up by Freud and became central to psychoanalysis, which redescribed as components of ‘normal’ human sexuality what Krafft-Ebing had designated as unequivocally perverse and pathological. From the perspective of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we are all perverts to some degree: the sadist or masochist is no longer ‘other’.22 Freud’s obsessive focus on the vagaries of pleasure prompted him to go much further than has been appreciated in the project of depathologizing SM. But he did so only by rendering the psychology of sadism and, especially, masochism infinitely more complex. In order to bring SM within the ambit of normal sexual experience, Freud had to psychologize it. That is a great contribution, yet it is also Freud’s limitation. Psychoanalysis establishes as an ongoing problematic the question of how pleasure may be derived from pain and, indeed, how that apparently dysfunctional, albeit universally human, capacity may be understood psychologically. Why are we so ready to take pleasure in pain – not only the pain of others but also our own? Foucault’s response to this question involves resolutely depsychologizing it. In mythological terms, he wishes to divorce Eros from Psyche – yet without losing sight of pleasure, which, in the form of Hedone (or Voluptas), was the fruit of their union.23 Foucault is searching for an account of eros that emphasizes pleasure without interiorizing it, and he rejects psychoanalysis in part for what he calls its ‘undervaluation of pleasure’.24 If, in order to understand pleasure and its vicissitudes in SM, psychoanalysis looks inward to the subject’s interior (psyche), then Foucault wishes to look outward to the play of bodily surfaces that, in their aesthetic dimension, may not be governed by psychological principles. Foucault wants Eros without Psyche – which also entails queering the ancient myth. He wants pleasures that stay superficial, immune to depth psychology, even when intensified and prolonged – as, for instance, by flogging. The example of flogging (a staple of SM practice) refers to the repeated working of a surface with a

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tool, almost like playing a musical instrument or beating the surface of a canvas; it does not refer to a desire for punishment (which would assume a psychological interiority with a particular relation to law and transgression). The pleasures of flogging are aesthetic pleasures  – the pleasure of rhythm, of percussion, of working a surface, of transforming the colour of that surface, of making skin sing, and, indeed, the pleasure of creating an aesthetic spectacle that solicits an audience of witnesses. Those pleasures circulate among the bodies involved, rather than remaining the property of any single individual or psyche. This, I  believe, is what Foucault was gesturing toward when, in that famous sentence at the end of The Will to Knowledge, he claimed, ‘The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures’.25 After all, flogging as it is practised in SM communities is not exactly ‘sex’ as we conventionally understand it (flogging is neither fucking nor foreplay). Instead, flogging entails the generation and sharing of bodily pleasures that need not involve anyone’s genitals. Foucault’s less obvious point is that it need not involve anyone’s psyche, either – or at least flogging should not be explicable principally by reference to the psychodynamics of punishment or domination. If its mise-en-scène and outcome are aesthetic, then flogging’s aim may be to leave psychology and selfhood behind, to eclipse interiority for a little while by focussing on the surface. Our claim that flogging is not about the psychodynamics of punishment must confront the objection that what is involved in an SM scene appears exactly like the lust for discipline anatomized in Discipline and Punish. Surely SM exemplifies the punitive social organization of which Foucault was so critical? This is the burden of Leo Bersani’s argument, in Homos, against Foucault’s account of SM: S/M, far from dissociating itself from a fascistic master–slave relation, actually confirms an identity between that relation and its own practices. […] It is a kind of X-ray of power’s body, a laboratory testing of the erotic potential in the most oppressive structures. […] S/M profoundly – and in spite of itself – argues for the continuity between political structures of oppression and the body’s erotic economy.26

Bersani’s critique of Foucault is more complex than this brief quotation suggests. Nevertheless, it hinges on two assumptions: first, that pleasure in SM is continuous with, rather than distinct from, political structures of oppression; second, that, as Bersani subsequently puts it, ‘sadomasochism is nothing but psychology. With its costumes, its roles, its rituals,

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its theatricalized dialogue, S/M is the extravagantly fantasmatic logos of the psyche’.27 Bersani develops his critique of SM in a fascinating direction, but only by relying on the very assumptions that Foucault wished to contest. Here I think it may be worth pursuing the distinction between a psychologized SM that revels in fantasy, on one hand, and an aestheticized SM that explores the potential of bodies for pleasurable contact, on the other. Let’s keep Eros and Psyche apart a while longer, to see where it gets us. Above and beyond the distinctions captured in the rubric of BDSM, sadomasochism is never simply one thing. Considering an interview he gave on the subject of Sade during the period he was writing The History of Sexuality, we can see that Foucault was trying to think through what might be called this SM which is not one. There he limns a distinction between Sadeian sadism  – characterized as ‘an eroticism proper to a disciplinary society’  – and a paradoxically non-Sadeian SM.28 The Sadeian version is ordered, hierarchical, and structured around relations of surveillance and obedience. By contrast, non-Sadeian SM involves ‘an anarchizing of the body, in which hierarchies, localizations and designations, organicity if you like, is being undone’.29 Sounding very much like his comrade Gilles Deleuze extolling the virtues of deterritorialization, Foucault appeals in this interview to ‘the body made entirely malleable by pleasure:  something that opens itself, tightens, palpitates, beats, gapes’.30 Given the effort to resituate ars erotica in an aesthetic framework, it is significant that Foucault’s account of the human body disaggregated by pleasure emerges in the context of a discussion of cinema. His references to Werner Schroeter’s experimental film The Death of Maria Malibran (1972) as an example of the ‘antisadism’ he’s trying to outline suggest that it may be in certain instances of visual art that ‘a nondisciplinary eroticism’ first becomes apparent. This is art not merely as representation but as embodied practice: ‘We must invent with the body, with its elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses, a nondisciplinary eroticism – that of a body in a volatile and diffused state, with its chance encounters and unplanned pleasures’, he insists.31 In this sketch of nondisciplinary eroticism, there appear no genitals, no orifices, no predetermined erogenous zones, and no penetration. Instead, the erotic body comprises ‘elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses’ – descriptors that are aesthetic, referring to a sculptural materiality that remains dynamic. Perhaps most strikingly, we have here an image of eroticism unburdened by the ordering principle of gender.

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So much has been removed from the picture that what Foucault outlines is barely recognizable as erotic, let alone as SM. Its unrecognizability and, indeed, unfamiliarity may be the point. When discussing SM elsewhere, Foucault spoke of its participants ‘inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body’ – a formulation that I take to mean unpredictable areas of the body, corporeal zones that remain underdetermined by cultural narratives of sex/gender.32 The genitals are socially scripted for sex, but the back or the shoulders (to take examples that pertain to flogging) are not. This unscripted dimension is evoked also by Foucault’s reference, in the passage quoted earlier, to ‘chance encounters and unplanned pleasures’. Here the emphasis on contingency appears at odds with much that we associate with SM, including contracts, scripts, and rituals, all of which to some extent predetermine patterns of erotic activity. In the ‘chance encounters and unplanned pleasures’, there is no mention of sexual consent. Moreover, those aspects of SM that focalize consent – contracts, scripts, safewords – remain consistently absent from his account. As may already be apparent, Foucault’s vision of SM differs substantially from the standard accounts produced by the Anglophone SM community, where the mechanisms and indispensability of consent are always emphasized.33 It is not that Foucault doesn’t care whether people being flogged have consented to it. Rather, he views the notion of consent as woefully inadequate to account for power relations. Sexual consent operates on a contractual model of human relations that assumes people are autonomous agents exercising their freedom to participate in (or refuse) a transaction or encounter. Foucault’s understanding of power negates the contractual model and the individualistic assumptions about autonomy on which it relies. The disequilibriums of power in erotic encounters are masked, not solved, by consent.34 Foucault wishes to make visible the full dynamism of power relations in sex, including the varying degrees of force and resistance experienced by every single body involved. His focus on the microphysics of power extends to the different zones of each human body  – their ‘elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses’ – over which force, resistance, and pleasure may be distributed unpredictably. Owing perhaps to his thinking about erotic relations primarily between men, he regarded SM as a practice in which power operates at its most mobile. Far from ossified in structures of domination and subordination, power relations in SM were for Foucault an opportunity to generate pleasures unanticipated by the sciences of sexuality. Here is how he explains oscillations between the scripted and the unscripted in SM:

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Tim Dean S&M is not a relationship between he (or she) who suffers and he (or she) who inflicts suffering, but between the master and the one on whom he exercises his mastery. What interests the practitioners of S&M is that the relationship is at the same time regulated and open. It resembles a chess game in the sense that one can win and the other lose. The master can lose in the S&M game if he finds he is unable to respond to the needs and trials of his victim. Conversely, the servant can lose if he fails to meet or can’t stand meeting the challenge thrown at him by the master. This mixture of rules and openness has the effect of intensifying sexual relations by introducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpetual uncertainty, which the simple consummation of the act lacks. The idea is also to make use of every part of the body as a sexual instrument.35

Foucault’s analogy of the chess game suggests that SM may be regarded as a scenario with rules that permit virtually endless permutation. These ‘rules’ do not rise to the level of sexual norms. The scenario, while regulated, maximizes possibilities for contingency and invention. This, I think, is what Foucault was referring to when he spoke of the ‘chance encounters and unplanned pleasures’ of nondisciplinary eroticism. It is not that things are random in SM, but they are a long way from predetermined. The chess game analogy is useful to bear in mind when considering Foucault’s allusion to the figure of the master, which takes us back to his description of ars erotica. According to the passage quoted immediately above, the master is a contingent and relational position: in principle anybody can occupy it. And, as anyone who has participated in SM knows, the ‘slave’ can become the ‘master’ and frequently does. Foucault’s conviction about the heightened mobility of power in SM has to do in part with this reversibility of roles – a reversibility that is, arguably, more common in same-sex SM than in heterosexual SM. But in his description of ars erotica, the figure of the master is far less contingent. The passage I quoted toward the beginning of this chapter continues thus: Moreover, this knowledge must be deflected back into the sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as though from within and amplify its effects. In this way, there is formed a knowledge that must remain secret, not because of an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged. Consequently, the relationship to the master who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he, working alone, can transmit this art in an esoteric manner and as the culmination of an initiation in which he guides the disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and severity.36

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I want to offer some qualifications around this figure of the master since I’m aware of how heavily gendered, even patriarchal, Foucault’s language may sound to contemporary ears. He is trying to distinguish the master of ars erotica from the expert of scientia sexualis: what accompanies the figure of the expert are universal norms, proliferating institutions, administrative bureaucracies  – in short, a wholly different organization of knowledge. The pleasure-knowledge developed within an ars erotica is of a different order than scientific knowledge and cannot be verified or administered any more than can, say, poetic knowledge. It is not knowledge that can be ferreted out by confession but remains inviolably private, accessible only via experience. When Foucault observes that the knowledge generated via ars erotica ‘would lose its effectiveness […] by being divulged’, he puts his finger on what makes it difficult to think about – even for him. The notion that it ‘must remain secret’ in order to properly qualify as knowledge is at odds with how the transmission and verification of knowledge work in modernity. Its inherent resistance to specification makes the concept of ars erotica potentially frustrating to contemporary readers, who quite naturally want to know more about how exactly it functions and what it entails. I believe that part of what Foucault found appealing about ars erotica was precisely this frustration of our will to know. It is vital that ars erotica not yield too much to the sexual sciences of modernity. At the same time, however, his line about the master transmitting ‘this art in an esoteric manner and as the culmination of an initiation in which he guides the disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and severity’ offers a suspiciously exact description of those gay SM novels and short stories that, following the relaxation of obscenity laws, were published in the United States during the period of Foucault’s research on The Will to Knowledge. As queer literary scholar Steven Ruszczycky argues, SM fiction by writers such as William Carney generated a pornographic counterpublic that mediated gay sexual sociability in the 1970s.37 SM as ars erotica became increasingly available to a select audience of practitioners and readers during this period. No doubt familiar with these developments, Foucault strategically declined to discuss them publicly. His reluctance on this score betokens more than a sign of the closet. To specify too closely how an SM scenario might unfold – or to delineate exactly which ‘strange parts of the body’ constitute sites of pleasure – would be to risk offering a formula and thereby to circumscribe the inventiveness of this erotic experience. During the 1970s, SM was poised on the cusp of becoming a sexuality, with all the disciplinary implications attached to that designation.38 It is to Foucault’s

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credit that, at this transitional moment, he endeavored to keep SM on the side of art – an art that could never be for everyone but might be for anyone to experiment with and to know through experience. Notes 1 Conversations with Leo Bersani, Steven Ruszczycky, and Ramón Soto-Crespo have proven especially helpful for thinking through the issues discussed in this chapter. Thanks to Lisa Downing for editorial acumen and Erin Grogan for research assistance. 2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Random House, 1978), 155. 3 See, for example, Timothy J. Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault, Philosopher (New  York, NY:  Routledge, 1992) and Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), whose combined forty-two chapters manage to avoid almost completely any discussion of this central problematic in Foucault’s œuvre. A  notable exception to this general trend is Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008). Usually the topic of sex in Foucault is relegated to more specialized studies; see, for example, David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, eds., Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1998), and Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, eds., The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 4 See, for example, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993). 5 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Random House, 1979). 6 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 69. 7 The best account of sexuality’s historical emergence and how to think about it methodologically is given in Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 8 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 156. 9 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will:  Men, Women, and Rape (New  York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1975). 10 For an up-to-date assessment of campus rape statistics, see Rebecca L. Stotzer and Danielle MacCartney, ‘The Role of Institutional Factors on On-Campus Reported Rape Prevalence’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 31:16, 2016, 2687–2707. 11 For a compelling account of this triumph, see Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York, NY: Feminist Press, 2013). 12 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 57. 13 Ibid., 58.

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14 For examples of such criticisms, see Mark Johnson, ‘Sexuality’, in Cultural Geography:  A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, ed. David Sibley, Peter Jackson, David Atkinson, and Neil Washbourne (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 124; Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire:  Male–Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1900 (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1999), 7, 13; James Grantham Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), 18; and Valerie Traub, ‘The Past Is a Foreign Country? The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies’, in Islamicate Sexualities:  Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2008), 17. The most thoughtful critical account of the scientia sexualis/ ars erotica distinction is given in Leon Antonio Rocha, ‘Scientia Sexualis versus Ars Erotica: Foucault, van Gulik, Needham’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 42, 2011, 328–343. 15 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 70–71. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 The best discussion of Foucault’s Indian sources is Sanjay K. Gautam, Foucault and the Kamasutra: The Courtesan, the Dandy, and the Birth of Ars Erotica as Theater in India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016); an excellent discussion of his Chinese sources may be found in Rocha, ‘Scientia Sexualis versus Ars Erotica’; on his Japanese sources, see Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire. 18 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Random House, 1985). 19 Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York, NY: New Press, 1997), 259. 20 I use the term SM rather than S/M, S&M, sadomasochism, or BDSM. As a term, BDSM is both more specific and wider ranging in the number of practices it encompasses  – bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism – but in the gay community SM is routinely understood to cover this range of practices. While I do not consider SM as necessarily queer in itself, the term SM is to BDSM as queer is to LGBTQI – and I prefer the more concise term. After drafting this chapter, I came across Romana Byrne, Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), which characterizes SM as an ‘aesthetic sexuality’ that resembles Foucault’s ars erotica. Byrne’s overarching argument is close to mine, though our emphases differ. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault:  Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995) also discusses SM in Foucault, primarily in order to claim how queer it all is; he does not appear interested in ars erotica. 21 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis:  A Medico-Forensic Study [1886], trans. Harry E. Wedeck (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s, 1965). 22 See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans.

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Tim Dean James Strachey, Vol. 7 (London:  Hogarth Press, 1953), 123–243. Freud’s relocating of perversion as internal to ‘normal’ sexuality is clearest in the original, 1905 edition of this work; see Deconstructing Normativity? Re-reading Freud’s 1905 Three Essays, ed. Philippe Van Haute and Herman Westerink (London: Routledge, 2017). When referring to the characters of Eros and Psyche in the myth, I capitalize those words as proper names. When referring to the naturalized concepts that bear those names – eros, psyche – I use lowercase letters. Foucault, ‘The Culture of the Self ’ (unpublished lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, on 12 April, 1983), quoted in Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 97. The question of how psychoanalysis treats pleasure versus how Foucault treats it warrants further consideration. For one such attempt, see Tim Dean, ‘The Biopolitics of Pleasure’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111:3, 2012, 477–496; and see Adam Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures (London:  Hamish Hamilton, 2015) for an original rethinking of the status of pleasure in psychoanalysis, albeit without reference to Foucault. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 157. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 89–90. Ibid., 91. Foucault, ‘Sade: Sergeant of Sex’, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: New Press, 1998), 226. Ibid., 224. Ibid. Ibid., 227. Foucault, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, in Essential Works, Vol. 1, 165. See, for example, Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker, eds., Safe, Sane and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The best critique of consent on this score is given in Joseph J. Fischel, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Foucault, ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’, in Essential Works, Vol. 1, 151–152. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 57. See Steven Ruszczycky, Vulgar Genres:  On Pornography, Sexuality, and Law in US Literature after 1966 (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Exemplary in this regard are William Carney, The Real Thing [1968] (New  York, NY:  Richard Kasak Books, 1995), and Carney, The Rose Exterminator (New York, NY: Everest House, 1982). Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure:  BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011) provides a thorough account of how, in the twenty-first century, SM has become a disciplinary sexuality in the Foucauldian sense.

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Foucault’s Ethics Jacques Khalip

In his auto-fiction To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, originally published in French in 1990, Hervé Guibert paints a thinly disguised portrait of Michel Foucault in the character of Muzil, who lies dying of AIDSrelated complications in a hospital. ‘[L]ike a spy, like an adversary’, the narrator jots down all the things ‘around the periphery of [Muzil’s] life’ that contrast with the ‘well-polished bare bones enclosing the black diamond … that seemed destined for his biography’.1 The question of how to speak or not speak about the life of another weighs upon the narrator who, on returning home from the hospital, breaks down: What right did I  have to record all that? What right did I  have to use friendship in such a mean fashion? And with someone I adored with all my heart? And then I sensed – it’s extraordinary – a kind of vision, or vertigo, that gave me complete authority, putting me in charge of these ignoble transcripts and legitimizing them by revealing to me (so it was what’s called a premonition, a powerful presentiment) that I was completely entitled to do this since it wasn’t so much my friend’s last agony I was describing as it was my own, which was waiting for me and would be just like his, for it was now clear that besides being bound by friendship, we would share the same fate in death.2

The narrator’s ‘vision, or vertigo’ of mastery is shamelessly intrusive, but it also unleashes a counterforce that blurs the differences between the two men’s lives. Knowing that he will only minimally survive Muzil, the narrator considers what it means to disown one’s self just as one is transformed by and projected into the mortality of the other. He confronts an ethical dimension that isn’t mobilized in the name of rights, of life, or the saving of a life; rather, he encounters something else entirely, a care for the self that rejects narcissistic claims about defending the future wellbeing of one’s own ‘life’. In his book The Body of This Death, William Haver gives a radically counterintuitive interpretation of Foucault’s concept of ethics. Instead of 155

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aligning it with a moral subject’s conduct and self-transformation, Haver reads ethics as a ‘question’ that exposes the self to the impossible limits of its life and its humanity: The question of the ethical comes to us, first and last, from beyond any possible epistemological horizon as a scream of abject, sovereign terror; it is indeed the call of a silent curse, which calls us and condemns us to a certain attention to an inassimilable singularity. The call of the ethical, the thought of the ethical, the thought that there is, or at least might be, an ethicality, is in its essence cruel, the very cruelty of thought itself. The thought of the ethical is the wound of trauma, the edge, the cut, the slash of the nontranscendence of the world [.]3

Ethics or ‘ethicality’ is the sound or ‘call’ of the inhuman: brutally terrorizing, it lies somewhere between a ‘scream of abject, sovereign terror’ and the ‘call of a silent curse’. In this fantasy (or nightmare), ethics is less about safekeeping and reasoning than it is a force that penetrates and rips apart the existence of a self-possessed subject. Ethics, ultimately, is cruel. In the pages that follow, I  want to build on Haver’s suggestion that there is a cruelty derived from Foucault’s ethics because a side of it is just as incompatible with the concept of life as it is apparently devoted to its enhancement. To be sure, this is far afield from the Foucault who once asked: ‘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?’4 This Wildean and ascetic impulse in Foucault’s thought has often supported characterizations of his ethics as synonymous with lifestyles and practices that enrich the self over time. In such a critical context, Haver’s remarks remain decidedly idiosyncratic: How can ethics be an experience that occurs over and against the human, a figure that is ineluctably held to the measure of life? Perhaps this question’s most heated resonance occurs in the debates around the so-called ‘anti-social turn’ in recent queer studies, where ‘gay desire’ is theorized (in the words of Leo Bersani) as possessing a ‘revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality’.5 Foucault’s early injunction in an interview – ‘we have to create a gay life. To become’6 – has been turned into a rallying cry for various contemporary projects of self-actualization, projects that take the future (or lack of it) as a conceptual linchpin for exploring the endless creativity of queer ethics and world-making. I will return to these debates later, but for now, I want to suggest that they often bypass Foucault’s own cruel skepticism about any view of ethics that takes the future of the human subject as its telos. If ethics were only about selfamelioration and progress, we would miss Foucault’s frequent emphases

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on how unlivable ethics can be, not just because it challenges the self ’s styles of living, but because it displaces the false triumphs of the human in a way that follows Foucault’s demolition of the latter in his earlier critiques of the human sciences. For example, in the famously lyrical conclusion to The Order of Things, we read a quietly non-apocalyptic erasure of man’s primacy, one that might come about if the ‘arrangements of knowledge’ that made his invention central ‘were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility … were to cause them to crumble … then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.7 Foucault here suggests that in conditions without a human future, ethics couldn’t merely function as a response to man’s erasure (as if to remedy it) but it would have to emerge out of it: in other words, an ethics specific to that very scene of inhuman, agentless undrawing that the sea indifferently figures. Thus ethics might spell a release from a certain perspective of life entangled with the humanistic uplift of certain normative modes of future thinking. To begin developing this point, I start by focusing on the ‘care of the self ’ and its centrality in Foucault’s ethics, as well as its theoretical afterlife in Giorgio Agamben’s own recent engagements with the concept. After a brief detour through Robert Mapplethorpe, I move to passages in Foucault’s final lectures collected in The Hermeneutics of the Subject where what he calls the ‘nullifying making present of the future’ is linked to the ethically inflected movements of the praemeditatio malorum (meditation on death) which unsettle the scales of life and deprioritize the self.8

Other People and Ourselves It is a standard claim that what Foucault calls ethics doesn’t involve adjudicating or sifting through various codes, goods, and positions. Rather, it takes the unfathomability of the subject as a locus of action. It is important to remember that one doesn’t simply perform ethics for the sake of results: ethics founders if we see it only as a road map for stabilizing spaces of judgment. Whether one is aware of making a decision to do x or not, or the body is reacting to what one cannot bear to consciously think or do, there is always a logic of a weak or strong decision making at play whenever we think that morality depends upon the integrity of a judging subject. Throughout Foucault’s late writings and interviews, the ‘care of the self ’ (epimeleia heautou) returns as a main tenet of his ethical thinking, although he himself cautioned that we should not assume

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that ethics is always interchangeable with it. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault states that ‘we can say that there is clearly something a bit disturbing for us in this principle of the care of the self … we see [it] expressed in a variety of phrases like: “caring for oneself,” “taking care of the self,” “withdrawing into oneself,” “retiring into the self,” “finding one’s pleasure in oneself,” “seeking no other delight but in the self,” ’ etc.9 What might be disturbing about this list of spiritual practices and exercises is that it takes seriously the task of conceiving self-examination in terms other than psychologized narcissism. For the ancient Greeks, caring for the self was essentially and ‘ethically prior in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior’.10 Foucault points out that the idea of care didn’t just coincide with self-knowledge, but rather expressed a formal mode, one committed to cultivating various relations or ‘actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, transforms, and transfigures oneself ’.11 Foucault here stresses structure over content: one must learn to govern oneself before one can govern others, an aspiration of the Greek citizen who endeavored to ‘occupy his rightful position in the city, the community, or interpersonal relationships’.12 In the interview ‘On The Genealogy of Ethics’, as well as in The History of Sexuality, Foucault delineates four crucial components of the rapport à soi: ethical substance, or what is ‘the aspect or the part of myself or my behavior which is concerned with moral conduct’?: subjectivation [mode d’assujettissement], or how are ‘people … invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations’?; self-forming [pratique de soi] or asceticism, ‘What are we to do, either to moderate our acts, or to decipher what we are, or to eradicate our desires’?; and telos [téléologie], or ‘Which is the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way?’13 These questions pose ethics as a formal reaction to the moving parts of the self: all of our different relationships – to ourselves, to others, and to other things and social structures – are theoretically fraught, and expose sites of potentially productive asymmetries between the self and what lies inside and outside of it. In Ian Hacking’s pithy summary, here we begin to read Foucault as someone who had ‘written enough about other people’ and ‘had now become preoccupied with what we say and do to ourselves’.14 Indeed, in The Care of the Self, Foucault refers to care as an ‘art of existence’, but the kind of art he envisions works both for and against the self, relating it to other persons, things, and systems through practices that endlessly unravel its groundings:

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[The care of the self ] also took the form of an attitude, a mode of behavior; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on, developed, perfected, and taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to relationships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and at times even to institutions.15

Notice how care moves from being exclusively an attitude, a behavior, and a way of life, to a name for ‘procedures, practices, and formulas’ that evolve from but also inscribe the institutionality of these relations. It is for these reasons that Foucault states that ethics concerns freedom and not liberation: the former is the ‘ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection’.16 Liberation evokes detachment, a fantasy of an unimpeded ‘human nature or base … that has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned’.17 Such a nature would seemingly give authority to itself, enabling its own emancipation. Freedom is far harder, delimited, and inscribed by power relations. Thus parrhesia – ‘truth-telling’ or candid speech – becomes a signal form of care for Foucault in his last years: the rules that bind one between ‘the obligation to speak the truth, procedures and techniques of governmentality, and the constitution of the relationship to self ’ obtains by way of parrhesia’s implication in relations of force.18 Ethics thus traces the relation of the subject to truth through various ‘games of truth, practices of power’.19 While liberation might be a precondition for certain freedoms to be practised (for example, certain coercive discourses of sexuality had to be overcome in order for freedom to be possible), freedom is a mark of the self ’s capacity to practise an ethics of curtailment and possibility, a ‘conscious [reflechie] practice of freedom’ which, as Foucault points out, isn’t afforded to just anyone at all: in Antiquity, women and slaves had no freedom: ‘a slave has no ethics. Freedom is thus inherently political. And it also has a political model insofar as being free means not being a slave to oneself and one’s appetites’.20 It was ‘the morality of the first centuries B.C.  and the first centuries A.D.’, notes Foucault, which developed the ‘paradoxes’ of the care of the self as a ‘positive principle’ of ethical stewardship. In early Christianity, however, care is codified and transposed into ‘a morality of non-egoism whereas in actual fact they were born within an environment strongly marked by the obligation to take care of oneself ’.21 Non-egoism is not a mere reproof of egocentrism but a shadow version of it: it is a far more inhibited and weaker style of ethics because it renounces self-knowledge in

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favor of normative morality. With the historical emergence of the ‘Cartesian moment’, or the cogito’s colonization of the external world, knowledge of the self became prized over care because it signified a precious enterprise of extraction: the value of ‘self-evidence (l’évidence) at the origin, the point of departure’ for Western philosophy inaugurated (just as it proceeded to mine) depth, interiority, complexity, intellectual resourcefulness, privacy – in a word, the too-muchness of the subject.22 The historical and philosophical significance of this turn should not be underestimated. Lynne Huffer has shown how, at this juncture, the birth of the Cartesian cogito buried a rival philosophy of unreason or eros that Foucault had sought to unearth in works like the History of Madness. The ethics of eros was the road definitively not taken by Western philosophy and culture: eros spells encounters with the otherness of history, knowledge, and subjectivity, and it conceives ethical care as a passion that derails and tests the coherence of the moral subject. Huffer glosses Foucault’s philosophizing as a ‘desubjectivating ethics’23 that mandates (what he calls) the necessity ‘to think in terms of a crisis of the subject, or rather a crisis of subjectivation – that is, in terms of a difficulty in the manner in which the individual could form himself as the ethical subject of his actions, and efforts to find in devotion to self that which could enable him to submit to rules and give a purpose to his existence’.24 Such a crisis is exactly the kind of unsettling of accounts that precipitates ethical reflection for Foucault. In a lengthy interview for the Italian journal Il Contributo in 1980, he spoke about a kind of exposure that is formally continuous with the ethics of care, one that is impossible, inarticulable, and unlivable, and yet completely needful. Affirming that he is neither a theorist nor a philosopher, Foucault calls himself an ‘experimenter in the sense that I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before’.25 He describes his books as an ‘experience’ rather than a communication of ‘what I’m already thinking before I begin to write’: ‘An experience is something that one comes out of transformed’.26 Foucault’s use of the word ‘experience’ is indebted to thinkers like Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski who were indefatigable experimenters with a non-dialectical philosophy of the negative.27 While for the phenomenologist, lived experience is the essence of analysis, Foucault gestures towards an impossible limit where life, understood either as a material base or a series of performative effects, suddenly vanishes and fails to buoy the sensuous self-maintenance of the subject through time. One tries ‘to reach a certain point in life that is as close as possible to the “unlivable,” to that which can’t be lived through. What is required is the maximum of intensity and

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the maximum impossibility at the same time’.28 Whereas phenomenology plumbs that experience as a ‘field of possibilities … in order to rediscover the sense in which the subject that I  am is indeed responsible’, the desubjectivating negativity of experience that Foucault experiments with ‘has the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution’.29 Ethics thus revolves around a (non-)subjectivity in which mind and body are indistinguishable: ‘[The subject] is not a substance. It is a form, and this form is not primarily or always identical to itself ’.30 What does this mean? The point is extraordinary: ethics isn’t necessarily about what we want human life to have been, to be, or to become; in this way, its ‘goals’ cannot be mapped onto the immediate situations we wish ethics to resolve for our lives. Recalling Haver, ethics is cruel because it isn’t for us: it doesn’t try to make our lives better; nor does it help us make decisions that will further nourish our lives in a future that meets our best expectations. Ethics is itself the figure of a traumatic scream or ‘call of a silent curse’ that is without a human face, that comes out of nowhere and yet is immanent to things as they are. And as a figure, it at once brings about and dissolves the realms of the social and political that depend on ‘the figurality that is always essential to identity’, as Lee Edelman puts it, ‘and thus on the figural relations in which social identities are always inscribed’.31 Going back to Foucault’s 1966 essay on Maurice Blanchot, care for the self reads several shades closer to what he calls there a ‘thought from the outside’, or a ‘thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth’.32 This impossible ‘space’ or ‘void’ is the negativity or unthought that inscribes logos: it neutralizes the divisions that the Cartesian moment institutes. Thus contra the historical shift to the rights of the subject, Foucault envisions a non-recuperative ethics that doesn’t transpose the past onto the present and the future, but rather transgresses the normative temporalities that bind the subject’s life.

Using, Caring Writing against current theoretical turns to the body, affect, the animal, and the inhuman, Claire Colebrook has argued that the assumption of life as a norm inhibits the ways in which we think about our position in a so-called post-human world:  ‘We seem to think not only that the prima facie value of life lies in its modes of flourishing, but that something

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like destruction and annihilation are other than life and therefore unacceptable.’33 For Colebrook, the impossibility of imagining the non-value of life precludes thinking ethics beyond the precincts of the personal. And part of that impossibility turns on a distinct temporal burden: If care for the self also sustains that self through time, how can one get around the requirement that a self seemingly precedes itself, that it cares and carries itself into the future as the very thing whose preeminence we should somehow dethrone? In his recent writings, Giorgio Agamben has explicitly shifted to examining Foucault’s ethics as the terrain where different models of ontology and politics might be developed – models that rethink care in terms of its inoperativity, non-functionality, or, more specifically, its use. In the chapter ‘Use and Care’ in The Uses of Bodies, he focuses on a moment in The Hermeneutics of the Subject where Foucault struggles with the meaning of the word chresthai in the context of Plato’s Alcibiades. There Foucault shows ‘that “the one who uses” (ho chromenos) and “that which one uses” (hoi chretai) are not the same thing’.34 As one preliminary example, Foucault asks: ‘What does it mean when we say: “Socrates speaks to Alcibiades”? The answer given is: we mean that Socrates makes use of language’,35 but as he goes on to note, the question of use isn’t that simple. Plato’s sense of ‘taking care of oneself ’ is ‘not an instrumental relationship of the soul to the rest of the world or to the body, but rather the subject’s singular, transcendent position, as it were, with regard to what surrounds him, to the objects available to him, but also to other people with whom he has a relationship, to his body itself, and finally to himself ’.36 For Agamben, there is a circularity between use and care: only if the subject is one of use can care be posited but, in turn, the subject of care and use invariably merge: ‘If “to use” means “to enter into a relationship with the self insofar as one is in relationship with another,” in what way could something like a care-of-oneself legitimately claim to define a dimension other than use?’37 This tension between care and use compels Foucault (writes Agamben) to imagine a ‘dispossession and abandonment of the self, where it again becomes mixed up with use’.38 Agamben is interested in the ethical dimension of this non-relationality of use: it renders inoperative the instrumentalization of the very categories of identity and action that are of a piece with any ethics premised on the differentiation of subjects from objects. Referring to Foucault’s thoughts on sadomasochism as an example, Agamben points to the reversibility of sadist and masochist as an instance where each can ‘pass into one another and are incessantly indeterminated’, which is to say, they become indiscernible as discrete, useable bodies.39

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What remains unexplored, he maintains, is ‘the possibility of another figure of human praxis, in which enjoyment and labor (which is restrained desire) are in the last analysis unassignable’.40 By way of illustration, a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe entitled Fist Fuck/Double (1978), helps to concretize this point: in close-up, two arms (one possibly belonging to the fister/fistee) are stuffed inside a (hopefully) greased and enormous asshole, athletically stretched to such a degree that it appears to ingest them, squid-like, all mouth and no teeth.41 On the one hand, we might read the image as exemplifying what David Halperin has called a ‘queer praxis’, and without a doubt, Mapplethorpe’s art exalts the centrality of gay subcultural sex practices.42 On the other hand, if we read the photograph only as indexical, we overlook how it also dwells with something happening at the very moment we look at it, which is to say: it is a photograph of an event in time where spectators and photographic subjects (just like the body of the fister and the fistee) pass into one another, blurring the borders between art object, user, and observer. As Jonathan Katz has described the particular formal queerness of Mapplethorpe’s art: ‘sexuality wasn’t in the photograph; it was the photograph’.43 In its perspectival vanishing point, Fist Fuck/Double invites and stops any exploration of the huge orifice; indeed, it is as if Mapplethorpe is perversely citing the episode from The Gospel of John where Doubting Thomas is invited by Christ to ‘reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’. In Fist Fuck/Double, the spectator’s ‘belief ’ is blocked in the asshole’s queer divinity. Through Mapplethorpe’s lens, we momentarily perceive not bodies and pleasures but body parts disarticulated in their stillness, the fists almost extensions of the camera partaking in an anonymously shared penetration. The frame of Mapplethorpe’s photograph disuses the ass, the asshole, and the arms; it evokes unseen fists as if to redirect the skeptical look and manual reach of penetrative extension away from epistemology and towards a different kind of queer ethical work. What do we, as spectators, do or say through this photograph? What do its elements teach us? Care and use palpably turn into each other through a work of art that brings us up against the limits of what the self can experience. If looking is ethical and a central aspect of aesthetics (etymologically, it refers to sense perception), then the photo literally enacts a work of the self upon the self that renders it ‘indeterminated’. This is a kind of looking that looks not for the sake of fulfilling one’s desire, but to detach the eye from its narrowly defined teleological focus as an organ of the self ’s integrity, one that ideally serves to project ‘us’ into a future horizon which we are meant to behold and believe in as an extension of our own life-world.

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Fist Fuck/Double thus exemplifies an ethical and photographic ‘take’ on a kind of impossible, Foucauldian care that comes as ‘close as possible to the “unlivable.” ’ There is quite literally nothing beyond the frame, no ‘future’ to it. What the camera sees is something that neither the photographer nor the subjects in the photograph could ever undergo themselves: an erotic and ethical event that illuminates, photographs, or writes in light nothing but its own non-originary splendor, transpiring outside the lives of the photographer, his subjects, and his spectators  – an ethical transformation that de-realizes all of these positions in the absence of futurity, recognition, and progress. Although Agamben concedes that sadomasochism is an ‘insufficient attempt’ at ethically surpassing the master/slave dialectic, what sticks is his insistence on imagining ethics as inoperative: ‘the ethical subject is that subject … who bears witness to its tastes, takes responsibility for the mode in which it is affected by its inclinations. Modal ontology, the ontology of the how, coincides with an ethics’.44 Reading with and against Foucault, Agamben extends his ethical cruelty by figuring use/care as terms that do not ‘do’ anything at all for the subject. To be sure, ethics is still on the side of life for Agamben, but use/care are also terms that have little to do with conduct or an art of existence. They point to a sluggish, non-workable, and recalcitrant kind of ontology. In this way, Agamben’s ethics contributes to pulling apart the subject as a locus of agency and reflection. Such a project, I  have been arguing, is not peripheral but central to Foucault’s reflections:  care pivots on a negative, unlivable knowledge that depends upon but is irreducible to the demands of a nonsubstantial ‘self ’. To come close to that which ‘can’t be lived through’ summons something speculative: it is an experience that can be imagined but not entirely lived – like the face in the sand that is erased by the sea. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault points to the Greek word ethopoiein which ‘means making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos, the individual’s way of being, his mode of existence’.45 Ethos is about character and self-presentation, whether it concerns how one dresses, what one eats, or how one has sex with others. But it also refers to place or custom, and in this way, ethics balances a eudaimonic narrative of care with a disruptive folding over of the unstable spatiality of the ethical as both support and vertiginous hole, reinventing us and other things through transformational forces that exceed the ‘meaning’ of life. Transformation, in this case, doesn’t specify what results from that change, that is, whether it is salubrious or not; it doesn’t assimilate ethics to a series of questions about what is good for us or for others. Rather, change is ethical in that its effects

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are incalculable and disinterested: they happen in the absence of our own hopes and desires for future redemption.

Nullified Futures This non-redemptive ethics conspicuously colors the kind of queer subject who becomes a radical cog in what Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’, or the figure for temporal continuity that underpins heteronormative liberal subjectivity. In part responding to Edelman’s work, scholars have championed alternative ‘anti-social’ futurities that are affectively, politically, socially, and ethically queer insofar as they espouse upsetting temporal narratives of progress and development. For example, for José Esteban Muñoz, utopia spells a transformative aspiration to perform embodied practices of freedom:  ‘The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’.46 In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam concludes with the following watchwords: ‘To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die … Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures’.47 In each of these cases, ethics is edifying and compensatory: utopia and failure do not derail our ethical life, but sumptuously improve it in the name of an anti-sociality that rehabilitates opposition as a component of what care does best – glorify the self. And as a consequence, futurity becomes a conserving principle: it extends care in perpetuum as a symptom of a life defined for us and at our disposal.48 Thus this version of ethics is synonymous with a strangely non-queer (and socialized) definition of desire as a ‘structuring and educated mode’, a desire that is tutored and, in turn, teaches, a desire that is good for you, and that fuels a queer self that egotistically lives and cares only for itself. The Mapplethorpe photograph here stages the pitfalls of literalizing the romance for this antisocial fetishism: remarkably indifferent to sociality, there is no shareable future in the image, no attempt to visualize what it would mean to ‘use’ it for queer solidarity or politics. The ‘temporal turn’ in queer theory, which has focused on arguments between futurity/no future, anachronism, and asynchronicity, has often just as well been about life, bodies, and affects, which is to say, following Colebrook, that if things are truly ‘like destruction and annihilation’ then they must be ‘other than life and therefore unacceptable’. It is as if queerness cannot possibly occasion a vision of ethics that is irreducible to its own (human) mirror reflection and self-love. It recalls the lure of futurity

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that Foucault critiques, in his essay on Blanchot, through the figure of the mythological sirens who promise a false future that repeats Ulysses’ past: ‘the song is but the attraction of song; yet what it promises the hero is nothing other than a duplicate of what he has lived through, known, and suffered, precisely what he himself is’.49 The false futurity of song marks, Foucault implies, the impossibility of ever coinciding with the wishful temporality of the desires we make for ourselves. In one of the final lectures in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault directly addresses the question of the future’s relation to ethics by surveying several ancient ascetic meletai (meditations), exercises, or tests that ask a pressing question: ‘Am I really the ethical subject of the truth I know?’50 The praemeditatio malorum becomes the choice example for this line of self-examination, ‘the premeditation or presumption of evils’.51 Centring on the philosophical ‘mistrust of the future, of thinking about the future, and of the orientation of life, reflection, and imagination towards the future’ in ancient Greek thought,52 Foucault writes that the ‘mind is preabsorbed by the future’ and hence not free because it is seized up by what it cannot know or anticipate.53 Furthermore, thinking about the future is ‘nothingness: it does not exist, or at any rate not for man’.54 As a temporality that cannot be accounted for, longing for futurity is a projection of our wishes, and for this reason, it is utterly superfluous. As a ‘test of the worst’, the praemeditatio malorum trains us to think that ‘all possible evils, whatever they may be, are bound to occur’, as well as compels us to think that ‘they will happen in any event and are not just possibilities’.55 Hence the exercise is ‘more a case of sealing off the future … systematically nullifying’ it so that it doesn’t figure for openness. Conversely, ‘[a]ll possibilities are given, or the worst at any rate’.56 The effect of this sealing is to gather up temporality into a single point, a pared and precise spot of ‘immediate time’ that summons up ‘the present you are living’: This nullifying making present of the future … is at the same time a reduction of reality. We do not make the whole of the future present in this way so as to make it more real. Rather it is to make it as least real as possible, or at least to nullify that which could be envisaged as or considered to be an evil in the future.57

In his essay on Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Foucault argues for practising history and philosophy in a way that urgently concentrates on the singularity of what is happening today. Kant, he writes, ‘is not seeking to understand on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect

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to yesterday?’58 The ethical mandate here – to think the matter of today – resonates with the preparatory work of the praemeditatio malorum that seals, reduces, and strips down the imagination of a reality that cannot be given in the figure of ‘the future’. This subtractive stillpoint explicitly refuses to instrumentalize things to our hopes and desires, as if to prevent them from falling into the error of turning the nothingness of our longing into a fantasy of useful projections. In this queer ethics, one cares for all possibilities in their strict adjacency to one another: time is levelled and becomes lateral, disinterested, inhuman. Ethics, in turn, is what prepares us for the cancelling out of the future and the uncertainty of the worst. Such apparent cruelty is precisely what we need: to transgress the bounds of subjectivity, and to care in the most extreme and necessary ways possible. Notes 1 Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, trans. L. Coverdale (New York, NY: High Risk Books, 1991 [1990]), 87, 88. 2 Ibid., 91. 3 William Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 181. 4 Michel Foucault, Ethics:  Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York, NY: New Press, 1997), 261. 5 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7. 6 Foucault, Ethics, 163. 7 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Random House, 1970), 387. 8 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject:  Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. F. Gros, trans. G.  Burchell (New  York, NY:  Picador Press, 2005), 471. 9 Ibid., 12. 10 Foucault, Ethics, 287. 11 Ibid., 11. 12 Ibid., 287. 13 Ibid., 263–265. 14 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 115. 15 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage, 1986), 43, 45. 16 Foucault, Ethics, 284. 17 Ibid., 282. 18 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York, NY: Picador, 2010), 45. 19 Foucault, Ethics, 290.

168 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Jacques Khalip Ibid., 286. Foucault, Hermeneutics, 13. Ibid., 17. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 244. Foucault, Care of the Self, 95. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, Power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York, NY: New Press, 2000), 240. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 241. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, Ethics, 290. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 17. Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought of the Outside’, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J.  D. Faubion, trans. R.  Hurley et  al. (New  York, NY: New Press, 1998), 150. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 203. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 31. Foucault, Hermeneutics, 54. Ibid., 56–57; also cited in Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 32. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37. A reproduction of the photograph appears in the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) P.S.1 show Into Me/ Out of Me, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 309. David Halperin, Saint Foucault:  Towards a Gay Hagiography (New  York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), 86. Jonathan Katz, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Queer Classicism: The Substance of Style’, in Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen (eds.), Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2016), 261. Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 231. Foucault, Hermeneutics, 237. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2009), 1. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011), 186–187. For a critique of recent trends around queer temporalities, see Tim Dean, ‘Bareback Time’, Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2011), 75–99.

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49 Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought of the Outside’, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al. (New York, NY: New Press, 1998), 161. 50 Foucault, Hermeneutics, 463. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 464. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 470. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 471. 58 Foucault, Ethics, 303–319.

Ch apter 11

Foucault and the Queer Pharmatopia Oliver Davis

Get a life you drug addicts! Phlash! featuring Steve Hill, ‘Get a Life’

Before – and after – the psy sciences confected the regulatory concept of ‘addiction’ for their police paymasters, ordinary people have sought out intoxication, sometimes by way of the psychoactive drugs which that concept has been used to prohibit.1 Critical scholarship on the discourse of addiction has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault’s work and it has also long been known that Foucault took drugs, especially during what was arguably his most intellectually inventive period. This chapter looks again at Foucault’s use of drugs – the kind of life and community he got from them – in conjunction with the powerful critique his work frames of the dominant securitarian consensus under neoliberalism today, according to which such unauthorized drug-use is inevitably addictive and pathological. The stimulant pre-text for this discussion is the auto/biographical portrait by Mathieu Lindon, Learning What Love Means (2011).2 At a discreet distance of some three decades, Lindon paints a rich picture of the six years of his mid-twenties spent ‘alongside Michel’, in the philosopher’s entourage gravitating around his flat on Rue de Vaugirard, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, not far from Montparnasse.3 During these last six years of Foucault’s life (1978–84) Lindon shows the philosopher as a friend, mentor, benefactor, and queer father figure. The author is a prolific novelist, journalist, and son of Jérôme Lindon, director of the avant-garde press Les Éditions de Minuit. Much of the book is concerned with a reflective parsing and intertwining of these two paternal influences: the aloof biological father and the permissive queer father, although this exploration of queer kinship and the difficult relationships between gay men and their fathers is a dimension of the book I gladly leave to other readers. My focus instead is on the autonomous social structures of care and meaningmaking elaborated in an environment in which the consumption of illegal 170

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drugs is more the norm than the exception: opium, LSD, and heroin are all taken in significant quantities, by Foucault as by his younger entourage. The reader who searches the book like a sniffer dog with an abacus will lay paws on references to at least twenty-four occasions on which one or more of these substances are used.4 I  call the structures of care and meaning-making developed by Foucault and his entourage to support their collective exploration of these substances the ‘queer pharmatopia’ and delineate them by reading and extrapolating from Lindon’s account. While Foucault and his friends may have used drugs in copious quantities, the only addict in Lindon’s book, in any meaningful sense of that term, is an alcoholic who passes quickly through.5 Since much critical scholarship on addiction discourse is profoundly indebted to Foucault’s work, this biographical return to its fons et origo is either hazardously apt, or, by an influential reading of that work advanced by David Halperin, a self-defeating contradiction in terms.6 Halperin denounced James Miller’s ‘anti-Foucauldian’ biographical study, The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), for strengthening ‘the very disciplinary controls that Foucault’s whole life was dedicated to resisting’.7 While admitting he had at one point felt ‘grateful’ that Miller had spoken seriously about Foucault’s sex life, Halperin ultimately delivered a ferocious denunciation of a book which, by speaking so openly about the philosopher’s ‘stigmatized personal practices’ had allegedly conferred ‘upon everyone else a power of irrefutable judgment over him’.8 Halperin’s verdict, which is quite orthodox in its poststructuralist insistence on the separation between life and text, seems to have had a chilling disciplinary effect on subsequent scholarship, yet it recalls something of the prudish haste with which Noah’s sons rushed to cover their intoxicated and somnolent father’s nakedness.9 Halperin overstated his case: nowhere in Foucault’s work is there so absolute an injunction against biography as Halperin sees fit to find there and even were it to contain the unlikely commandment ‘Thou shalt not write biography!’ only an exaggerated pastoral or filial piety would seek to bind others to obedient observance of that rule. It is not news that Foucault took drugs, or that he wrote and spoke publicly about them. He mentioned them several times in his lectures on psychiatry.10 He discussed drugs in interviews, although he never spoke confessionally or even constatively in his own name about his own experience. Yet the anonymous though recognizable philosopher Foucault chose to become while interviewing twenty-year-old leftist activist Thierry Voeltzel,

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in a book first published in France in 1978, is candid about his use of LSD, cannabis, and tranquilizers.11 And in an interview conducted in Toronto in 1982 but not published until three days after his death, in August 1984, Foucault famously declared: We have to study drugs. We have to experience drugs. We have to do good drugs, which can produce very intense pleasure. I  think this puritanism about drugs, which implies that you can either be for drugs or against drugs, is mistaken. Drugs have now become a part of our culture. Just as there is bad music and good music, there are bad drugs and good drugs. We can’t say we are “against” drugs any more than we can say we’re “against” music.12

This was his most enthusiastic public pronouncement on the subject of drugs. While an implicit appeal to personal experience may be gleaned between the lines, even in this most programmatic of declarations the speaker remains guarded, concealed within the collective gay, or queer, subject of an ethical obligation still to be realized (it is ‘we’ who ‘have to’ experience drugs), in an interview appearing in English after his death in a gay magazine published on the other side of the Atlantic, The Advocate. Cautious though these remarks are about Foucault’s own involvement in the programme he so enthusiastically recommends, they are nevertheless forceful. Kane Race recalls being struck by their ‘advice’, which was ‘hardly equivocal’, and wondering whether and how to ‘take the author at his word here’.13 As Race rightly observes: ‘Given the force of contemporary prohibition around the positive articulation of drugs, it is almost impossible to occupy a docile relation to this text’.14 Lindon’s book offers just such a positive articulation in its presentation of the queer pharmatopia, unfolding in material detail the bewilderingly brief exhortation in this posthumously published interview, an impertinent codicil by another hand. Lindon was not quite the first to break the news of Foucault’s narcotic proclivities beyond his immediate circle. Miller’s biography had reported an extraordinary account of Foucault’s first experience of LSD in Death Valley in 1975 and a Time magazine profile published in 1981 had mentioned ‘a marijuana plant burgeoning among the petunias’ on the balcony of his flat in Paris as ‘the only sign of frivolity’.15 The first mention of Foucault’s personal involvement with drugs in Didier Eribon’s semi-official biography, first published in 1989, is to be found only in its third edition of 2011, in a brief addition manifestly motivated primarily by the publication of Lindon’s book that same year.16 While Foucault’s involvement with drugs was not news, Lindon’s book nevertheless corroborates earlier disputed claims and offers by far and away the most extensive insight there

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is into this suppressed but significant personal dimension of Foucault’s last decade. Lindon introduces the reader to his drug theme gently and at a cautious distance from Foucault, with a narrative of his own rapid conversion to narcotics. Gérard, a teenage sweetheart of the same Thierry with whom Foucault spoke anonymously in the book-length interview and a former lover of the narrator’s own polyamorous girlfriend Valérie, returns from a year in Afghanistan with a quantity of opium, some which he removes from its hiding place in his underpants to share with the narrator. Such is the speed of the conversion that we move in the space of a single paragraph from trepidation (‘I had never taken any drug. I  knew nothing about them and shared the general sense of panic about the slightest use of them’) to devotion (‘from then on, never again would I refuse even the tiniest morsel of opium’17). While I am not suggesting Lindon’s order of narration is purely tactical, he does lead the reader very gently towards the pharmatopia, with a trail of opium, the most venerable of all ‘hard’ drugs and also the most extensively inscribed in French history and culture before prohibition. There is archaeological evidence of opium use on the Iberian peninsula as far back as 4200 BC, the drug was in wide usage as a remedy for centuries and readily available over the counter in France as elsewhere, before drug control legislation first restricted its general availability early in the twentieth century; opium was also the first drug to fall prey to internationally organized prohibition in the 1912 International Opium Convention.18 In nineteenth-century France, as in the United States and Britain, recreational use of opium was closely associated with East Asian immigrant communities in port cities and the impetus for control came from militaristic anxieties about the drug’s compromising effect on the war-readiness of the masses, xenophobic concerns about the racial purity of the national stock, and patriarchal preoccupations with the chastity of the ‘vulnerable’ white women ‘lured’ into these ‘opium dens’.19 Just as it was in English Romanticism, opium was deeply inscribed in aesthetic culture in France in the not too distant past, in the life and work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, and Artaud, among others: there was indeed, as one befuddled interlocutor of William Burroughs suggested crudely, a ‘sustained tradition of sense-derangement among decadent frogs of the so-called Quality-Lit crowd’.20 The account of Lindon’s instantaneous conversion is by turns ‘pushily’ pedagogical, imparting technical knowledge to the reader about how to take the drug before they can decide whether or not they wanted to know, and tantalizingly excluding. The singularity of the drug is emphasized (‘opium resembles only opium’); it

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is said to give access to experience which cannot be known by those who have not tried it; it has a ‘unsuspected softness’ a mollifying effect so at odds in this subjective report with its status as a ‘hard’ drug in mainstream addiction discourse and it heightens experience of ‘the sensuality of bodies and emotions’.21 Under the drug’s queering influence Lindon and Gérard make love, even though ‘homosexuality wasn’t his strong point’.22 Lindon first takes LSD in New York and heroin in Paris with another character. While Foucault is spared the blame, or credit, for getting him started on any of these drugs, his organizing and enabling role in the pharmatopia is acknowledged: ‘Michel suggested I come over so the three of us could take LSD together on Wednesday afternoon’.23 The material environment of Foucault’s spacious and well-lit apartment is ideally calibrated for the pleasures of pharmacology: ‘Its spaciousness and the way it was fitted out made it an ideal place for this kind of pleasure’.24 At the heart of this queer pharmatopia is a hidden ‘recess’ next to the record player, where the psychonauts sit on armchairs, occasionally under blankets, listening to Mahler’s early symphonies as the LSD takes hold; this ‘Mahler corner’ is ‘what we call our nest’ for its ‘familiar comfort’.25 As they become more adept, they learn to combine drugs in sequence, such that the come-down from the LSD is softened by opium or heroin. They share their experiences of the drugs (‘We all offered commentary on the way the acid made us feel as we came up on it’, as of the cultural objects that also form part of the pharmatopia: the desublimatory effects of particular drugs are complemented and compensated by pairing them with carefully chosen sublimated objects of aesthetic culture.26 It is not long before a film projector is introduced, although not for the unending pornographic parade that has, according to the caricature conveyed by its concerned detractors, become the obligatory backdrop to much of today’s tawdry ‘chemsex’.27 Instead, a film of the Marx Brothers is matched to the LSD, with Citizen Kane for the opium. It is all too easy to dismiss this as decadent preciousness, as though fine wine were being paired with good cheese. Yet the role accorded to desublimatory pharmacological experience within a carefully structured collective and communicative encounter with sublimated objects of aesthetic culture de-dramatizes the substances involved, detaching them from their far more familiar abject contexts in mainstream addiction discourse and placing a million miles of cultural refinement between those who are enjoying them and the desperate junkies of such official propaganda.28 Like wines or artworks, these illicit substances become amenable to comparative judgments of taste which work against the prevailing platitudes of addiction discourse about

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their ‘hardness’:  ‘Like morphine, heroin undoubtedly lacks the taste of opium but shares its softness’.29 The very fact of being able to frame such judgments is expressive of the freedom of the subject in relation to these substances and also a departure from the dominant narrative of enslavement to inescapable addiction. In the queer pharmatopia these stigmatized substances become tools or techniques which can be used by subjects who, despite seeking intoxication, retain a measure of their freedom and composure. Drugs may be hazardous and require careful handling but so do other tools: like screwdrivers, chainsaws, or indeed writing, drugs lack intrinsic cultural or moral meaning but can rather become implicated in and give effect to any number of worthwhile, worthless or harmful pursuits and projects. The notion that drugs in the queer pharmatopia are potent but morally neutral techniques is prefigured in Foucault’s analysis of their role in the history of French psychiatric medicine. Foucault suggested that laudanum and ether had been used to extend the asylum’s regime of disciplined quietude by force into the body of the patient.30 He showed how the nineteenth-century pioneer of psychiatric medicine Moreau de Tours had used cannabis as a technique which, he claimed, allowed the psychiatrist to reproduce on demand an authentic simulation of mental illness and thereby to know it authoritatively, from the inside.31 Much of his interest falls on the uses which psychiatric medicine had made of psychoactive substances to shore up its own authority as discipline by disciplining its patients. Similarly, the disciplinary use of the tranquilizer diazepam at the ‘model prison’ of Fleury-Mérogis was something Foucault had drawn public attention to as one of the figureheads of the significant but short-lived (1971–2) prison campaign group also run out of his flat on Rue de Vaugirard.32 Foucault is critical of these historical and contemporary disciplinary uses of drugs as techniques, yet in Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality he reminds the reader again that if drugs are technical instruments then their ethical function is to be determined not by inherent properties of the substance but by the agency of human freedom: In the Laws, Plato goes so far as to imagine a drug that has not yet been invented:  it would make everything look frightening to anyone who ingested it, and it could be used for trying one’s courage: either in private “out of a sense of shame at being seen before he was in what he considered good condition,” or in a group and even in public “in the company of many fellow drinkers,” to show that one was able to overcome “the power of the necessary transformation effected by the drink”. In the same way, banquets could be planned and accepted as tests of self-control, so to speak, based on this artificial and ideal model.33

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Allowing in this Platonic limit case that good use could be made even of ‘bad’ (pharmacologically predominantly toxic) drugs emphasizes the status of drugs as morally neutral instruments or techniques of self-fashioning: even drugs which simply serve to ‘make everything frightening’ can in principle still be incorporated into positive ascetic and political projects. Although Lindon states explicitly that Foucault’s entourage rejected such an austere conception of drug use as an ascesis of self-mastery and even though Foucault by no means shared the authoritarian politics presupposed in Plato’s insistence on self-mastery as a prerequisite for governing others, the queer pharmatopia does reflect a common Classical insistence on moderation in enjoyment of the pleasures and the value of not getting entirely carried away by them.34 The consistent emphasis on drugs as techniques amenable to a variety of socially inscribed uses runs counter to the premises of drug control legislation, which locates the harm caused by drugs in the action of intrinsic properties of the particular substances on individuals considered in isolation from one another.35 The queerness of the pharmatopia consists not only in the fact that its drugs bring a heightened sensual experience of corporeality and enable meaningfully erotic encounters which overstep participants’ usual sense of their own sexual identity or orientation. The pharmatopia illuminates – by materializing and embodying – Foucault’s somewhat enigmatic queer alternative to ‘sexuality’, in the sense of the regime of stabilized identities constituted by the expert practice of veridiction he names scientia sexualis: ‘bodies and pleasures’.36 The notion that drugs could help explain Foucault’s queer alternative to ‘sexuality’ has been entertained but not developed by several of his earlier readers.37 Foucault suggested that both S/M practices and drugs are techniques which can be conducive to ‘the desexualization of pleasure’, in other words the explosive expansion of eroticism beyond its conventional confines in the ‘erogenous zones’, in particular the genitalia.38 ‘Pleasures’ are differentiated from ‘desire’ in that desire is a construct of expert discourse, a product of scientia sexualis. Pleasures, by contrast, are immediately accessible to the thinking and feeling embodied subject but may be understood, intensified, and combined in an ars erotica.39 Foucault’s call for the creative invention of new pleasures, as distinct from desire, is echoed in a rare moment of explicit instruction reported by Lindon: ‘Michel also made me realize that I had not experienced desire for LSD – how could I have done without knowing what it was? It’s the pleasure of the drug which creates the desire for it’.40 The pleasures of drugs exist in a directly accessible realm of bodily experience quite distinct from the authorized expertise of the psy sciences, to one

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side of the official languages of scientia sexualis and addiction discourse, in the other space – or ‘heterotopia’, to use another of Foucault’s terms – of the queer pharmatopia, one of those ‘heterotopias that are linked […] to time in its most futile, most transitory and precarious aspect, and in the form of the festival’.41 Foucault expands on this desexualization of pleasure in the anonymous interview with Voeltzel, where he even jokes that drugs are synonymous with ‘pleasures’.42 Without the possibility of pleasure enabled by drugs, as experienced creatively in a heterotopic space affording protection and critical distance from official addiction discourse and expertise, it is by no means obvious what the interest or value would be in abandoning genitally organized sexuality. The idea that strong drugs, self-administered, can be used as techniques in a worthwhile project of creative self-fashioning seems far less outlandish today than it did in the 1970s, thanks very largely to critical reflection on pharmacology informed by trans scholarship and self-writing, most notably Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie.43 In that text, Beatriz – as the author was known at the time of publication  – self-administers testosterone sourced from the internet in an account of experimental self-transformation. Preciado performs a rite of mourning for and homage to Guillaume Dustan and undertakes a vivid theoretically informed demonstration, drawing explicitly on Foucault, of the way in which mind- and body-altering drugs can be taken in furtherance of autonomous ascetic projects of self-fashioning beyond the circuits of authorized expert knowledge. Nevertheless, some readers may still wonder to what extent the pharmatopia’s structure of care can be detached from the socially privileged and largely male environment of Foucault’s entourage. The medical monopoly on pharmacology which their autonomous enjoyment of controlled substances flouts was established in large part during the witch-hunts:  the organized persecution of female folk healers went hand in hand with the establishment of modern medicine as, at the outset, a male profession.44 Is it too fanciful to suggest that, in their disregard of a monopoly imposed by burning, these drug-users commune with the witches? At any rate, there is nothing necessarily middle-class or male about people caring for each other while they take drugs together. The queer pharmatopia insulates both from the stereotypes of ambient addiction discourse and from the potential for harm in the substances consumed, functioning as an autonomous ‘holding environment’ for narcotic experience.45 Its ‘thousand precautions’, improvised from experience and gleaned from the wider counterculture, form the basis of its intersubjective care, although as in the queer drug subcultures Race describes in Sydney,

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its ‘specific practices of care and attention are being brought to the question of how to use drugs, such that considerations of safety appear as part of a concern to maximise pleasure’.46 As a structure of care it proves remarkably effective in Lindon’s account, without being infallible. Lindon recounts one bad trip: Foucault is particularly affected, abruptly leaving the flat and heading straight for a local doctor’s surgery.47 Following this undignified incident, which saw Foucault flee into the arms of the medical establishment and confess his sins, LSD is ‘ejected’ from the pharmatopia at Rue de Vaugirard, although Lindon continues to take this drug elsewhere.48 The capacity to make rational adjustments of this kind further confirms that Lindon’s portrait is one of careful substance users as opposed to reckless addicts. Yet even to show users of some of these substances, particularly heroin, who are not addicts dependent on them is a heretical undertaking which flies in the face of a century of extremely well organized official propagandizing about drugs by prohibitionists and members of the enforcement industries, ostensibly backed by a daunting volume of research in the social and psy sciences, which is nevertheless highly selective in the distribution of its attention. As Michael Gossop notes: ‘There have been very few studies of drug takers who keep their use of illicit drugs under control’.49 There is a glaring epistemological circularity: the vast majority of scientific research has studied problematic (dependent or addicted) substance users and thereby given crushing discursive volume to the concept of addiction, to the point where the sheer quantity of this material appears to lay readers and policymakers to validate what in reality was merely a contingent fact about the samples of subjects routinely selected. This unconscionably narrow distribution of researchers’ attention on addicted and problematic users has furnished repressive policymaking with a mountain of research with which to graphically illustrate rather than validate its preconceptions. This circularity – which is vicious politically, if not in narrowly methodological scientific terms – can also be characterized by reference to what the Foucauldian sociologist Nikolas Rose calls the ‘low epistemological threshold’ of the psy sciences: so frequently the norms that enable their objects to become visualized and inscribed become part of the scientific programme of perception as a consequence of having first been part of a social and institutional programme of regulation – and to such programmes they are destined to return.50

While addiction research may be informative about how addicts think and behave as addicts, strictly speaking it is only informative about these addicts and their addiction; moreover, such research focuses on addiction largely

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because that is what prevailing social norms highlight as the researchworthy side of substance use and its illustrative efforts feed directly back into regulatory efforts to expand prohibition. The looming edifice of addiction discourse has served a century of repressive policymaking well by offering a semblance of scientific backing and a veneer of legitimacy to increasingly prohibitionist drug control legislation. Had there been a more equal distribution of research between problematic and non-problematic substance use, or a greater determination among researchers to ensure that the findings of their studies were not traduced when translated into the policy arena, it would have been much harder to garner public support for drug control, even allowing for the scare-mongering propagandizing to which I turn in a moment. Yet successive cohorts of addiction researchers, with only a handful of striking exceptions, have eagerly ploughed the furrows of their own studies – which reflect back the lines of grant money they regularly hoover up from their political paymasters – and extended this field principally in one particular direction, while abnegating wider political responsibility for the way in which the discourse to which they contribute is then used, as a storehouse of stereotypes and a pretext for policing. Even the most nuanced theoretical and moral arguments for the conceptual coherence, therapeutic utility and social benefit of the concept of addiction – such as those advanced by Darin Weinberg – amount to little more, or less, in the final analysis, than the suggestion that addiction is our culture’s functionally equivalent way of talking about what in other times and places has been construed as demonic or spirit possession.51 It is worth trying to salvage the concept of addiction, this argument goes, because it lends social intelligibility and moral integrity to the decision to cure rather than punish. Unfortunately, Weinberg’s plea for the value of addiction as a concept underestimates the degree of protection from punishment which being classed as an ‘addict’ typically affords individuals and overestimates the entitlement to meaningful therapeutic help which being branded with such a label conveys today, as neoliberal economic reforms continue to shrink health and welfare budgets. Addiction is more stigmatizing than ever in a culture which increasingly values self-possession in its subjects: to be labelled an addict invalidates more than it opens the door to treatment. Similar criticism can be levelled against the brain dysfunction model of addiction favoured by contemporary neuroscience:  the morally neutralizing effect of describing addiction as an illness of the brain is socially offset by the side effects of this very pathologization: modification of the brain’s reward systems leaves the user permanently prone to relapse.52

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By contrast with Weinberg’s approach, Suzanne Fraser, David Moore, and Helen Keane argue that ‘addiction is not a thing that can be better or worse understood and measured and addressed […] it is an unstable assemblage made in practice and  – an effect of politics  – it is multiple and contingent, its shape, scale and content dependent upon a range of other equally labile phenomena’.53 Critically analysing addiction discourse as an ‘assemblage’, which needs continually to be re-made, allows these scholars to show how readily the knowledge–power generated by addiction research becomes available for repressive uses and also how unstable, selective, politically inflected, and in principle prone to disruption the entire field is in its need to continually self-renew. Having examined the move in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) to open out the ‘assemblage’ of addiction to include patterns of behaviour not related to substances, specifically compulsive gambling, and considered pressure from some of the experts who produced this handbook, reflecting and feeding tendencies in the wider culture, to allow for the inclusion of food and sex within the scope of addictive disorders, these researchers conclude that contemporary neoliberal society is addicted to addiction.54 If scientists, politicians, the law enforcement industry, and the wider culture are indeed, as Burroughs put it, ‘addicts at second-hand’ – obsessed with other people’s obsession with drugs, a condition for which, he added, ‘there is no cure’ – then critical research on addiction discourse can usefully be situated at three removes from the underlying substances of addiction, as can the work of strategists who wield such discourse as an instrument of governance.55 ‘To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs. Total war means war on all fronts against an enemy with many faces’, Richard Nixon wrote privately in 1969.56 His presidency’s ‘War on Drugs’ saw executives responsible for 90 per cent of domestic primetime television, along with representatives of the major advertising agencies, invited to the White House in April 1970 to be extensively briefed on the dangers of the drug menace, in a carefully choreographed day which included a planned impromptu appearance by Nixon.57 By the autumn at least twenty television programmes had at least one drug theme and a whole gamut of documentaries on the ‘epidemic’ had also been commissioned, all drawing, as Edward Epstein notes, on ‘a simple but terrifying set of stereotypes about drug addiction’.58 Dispatching former chairman of IBM, Arthur (‘Dick’) Watson, to France as its new ambassador in 1970, Nixon ordered him to make solving ‘the heroin problem in France’ his top priority.59 On discovering that this problem did not exist in the eyes of

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French public opinion, he arranged for stories to be planted in the French media about heroin addicts and for gruesome American documentaries to be adapted for screening on French national television.60 Watson even sent American agents wading through the sewers of Marseilles in an attempt to locate ‘labs’ used to convert morphine into heroin by searching for the chemical by-products of this process.61 While it would be misleading to suggest that many of the footsoldiers or generals in this or follow-up ‘wars’ on drugs were fighting cynically, a Foucauldian governmentality perspective demands that attention also be paid to the political side effects of a conflict waged with such fanaticism.62 The War on Drugs established much of the ideological and technical groundwork for the more radical ‘state of exception’ subsequently invoked in the ‘War on Terror’: in the ‘total war […] on all fronts’ called for by Nixon, invasive policing techniques would increasingly be tolerated at home by a populace which had been terrorized by state-orchestrated propaganda about an ‘epidemic’ – ‘no-knock’ search warrants, preventative detention of ‘addicts’ and the rise of paramilitarystyle interventions – and exported to other jurisdictions abroad.63 Successive campaigns in the ‘War on Drugs’ have witnessed a parade of demonized substances each presented in the official discourse with greater hyperbole than the last: heroin, crack, and crystal methamphetamine.64 While second-degree addiction research may be plundered as a storehouse of stereotypes by third-degree strategists of the War on Drugs to justify increasingly coercive policing and repressive lawmaking, it also takes hold in the more subtle and less directly coercive mode of governmentality whereby expert discourses constitute the ‘complex skein of governmental practices that operate in the space between the state and the family’, by supplying the terms in which subjects scrutinize and manage their own inner lives and outward behaviours.65 Foucault argued that alongside nineteenth-century liberalism’s explicit commitment to economic and political freedom ran ‘an entire education and culture of danger’.66 The subject of neoliberalism receives much of its schooling in danger today from second-degree addiction research, especially as this increasingly ramifies out to quite ordinary substances and activities:  food, sex, pornography, cleaning, and shopping all carry risks of pathological addiction against which the subject must guard with unfailing vigilance. It is not difficult to see how this generalization of the risk of addiction is conducive to a more individualized and anxious society. The queer pharmatopia may insulate from the constant worry produced by second-degree expert addiction discourse yet it can paradoxically only be accessed by way of a prior decision temporarily to disregard the socially pervasive ‘education

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in danger’ and suspend risk-assessing neoliberal subjectivity in a leap of faith. Lindon’s account suggests that pharmacological experience may then reward with untold – and generally untellable – pleasure this autonomous self-abstraction from the insidious governmentality of fear, as though consecrating a secular celebration of human freedom. The queer pharmatopia is destined to a cycle of surfacing and submergence, a fragile islet of sense amid a churning securitarian sea. Notes 1 I am grateful to Lisa Downing and James Miller for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 Mathieu Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire (Paris: POL, 2011); all references to the Folio edition and all translations are my own. An English translation by Bruce Benderson was due to be published by Semiotext(e) in December 2016 but unfortunately was not yet available when the final draft of this chapter was prepared. Lindon’s book is ‘auto/biographical’ in that it tells both the story of its author and those of Foucault and the author’s father. 3 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 295. 4 This can only be an indicative rather than an exact accounting because a few are non-specific references to repeated consumption over a period of time. 5 Pierre-Jean, whose kisses transmit drunkenness. Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 83–84. As James Miller notes, after separating from his first partner, the heavydrinking composer Jean Barraqué, Foucault seldom touched alcohol. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), 91. 6 Suzanne Fraser, David Moore, and Helen Keane, Habits: Remaking Addiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. 7 David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 145. 8 Ibid., 9, 133. 9 Stuart Elden, for example, holds very scrupulously to his focus on Foucault’s work in Foucault’s Last Decade (Cambridge:  Polity, 2016), 5, which entails a very abstract treatment of the ‘crisis in his thought’ in 1975 (70); and Genesis, 9, 21–23. 10 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. A. Davidson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 277–280. 11 Thierry Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après (Paris:  Verticales, 2014), 103–104, 107–108. 12 Foucault, ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’, in S. Lotringer, ed., Foucault Live:  Collected Interviews, 1961–1984 (Paris:  Semiotext(e), 1989), 382–390; 348. 13 Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 150. 14 Ibid., 150.

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15 Miller, Passion, 249–251; Otto Friedrich and Sandra Burton, ‘France’s Philosopher of Power’, Time, 16 November 1981. 16 Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 511–512. 17 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 45–46. 18 Stuart Walton, Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), 111. 19 Ibid., 165. 20 Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: Private Conversations with a Modern Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 100–101. 21 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 46. 22 Ibid., 47. 23 Ibid., 131. 24 Ibid., 56–57. 25 Ibid., 57, 69, and 70, whereas according to Miller’s reported account of Foucault’s experience in California, the musical accompaniment there was Stockhausen. Miller, Passion, 245. 26 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 57. 27 See the alarmist documentary film, Chemsex (Fairman & Gogarty, 2015). As the uptake of the film within and beyond queer communities across the UK attests, its medicalized concern has functioned as a prelude to policing. 28 For a summary and analysis of this hackneyed trope see Edward Jay Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (London: Verso, 1990), 165–170. 29 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 85. 30 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 181. 31 Ibid., 279–280. 32 Philippe Artières, ed., and Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, Intolérable (Paris: Verticales, 2013), 89, 94. 33 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 75. 34 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 113. 35 Michael Gossop, Living with Drugs (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 24. 36 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 157. 37 Halperin, Saint Foucault, 93–94; Eribon, Michel Foucault, 512; Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, xi. 38 Foucault, ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’, 348. 39 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 57. 40 Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 129. 41 Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 175–185: 182. 42 Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, 100. 43 Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie:  Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 2013). 44 Gossop, Living, 6; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses (New York, NY:  The Feminist Press, 2010 [1973]), 47;

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

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Oliver Davis and Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch:  Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 2014 [2004]), 201. Although she is right that he was not as interested as he should have been in them, Federici is mistaken in claiming that Foucault ‘never mentions’ the witchhunts:  see Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (London: Picador, 2004), 201–227 and Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade, 72. Donald Winnicott, ‘The Theory of the Parent  –  Infant Relationship’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 1960, 585–595. Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 57; and Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, 154; emphasis in original. Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire, 140. Ibid., 148. Gossop, Living, 43. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1999), 137. Darin Weinberg, Of Others Inside: Insanity, Addiction, and Belonging in America (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 2005). Weinberg conceptualizes addictions as ‘non-human agents residing in the bodies of those who are addicted’, in the words of Fraser et al., Habits, 14. See also Fraser et al., Habits, 56. Ibid., 235–236. Ibid., 236. William Burroughs, Junky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 140. Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion:  A Global History of Narcotics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 421. Epstein, Agency, 170. Ibid., 170, 165. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 93–94. Ibid., 95. See the emphasis on ‘unintended consequences’ in Thomas Biebricher and Frieder Vogelmann, ‘Governmentality and State Theory:  Reinventing the Reinvented Wheel?’, Theory & Event, 15, 3, 2012, n.p. Although here whether the effects were intended or otherwise is not salient, hence my preferred language of side effects. Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Epstein, Agency, 165; and Davenport-Hines, Pursuit, 430. Fraser et al., Habits, 64. David Garland, ‘ “Governmentality” and the Problem of Crime:  Foucault, Criminology, Sociology’, Theoretical Criminology 1, 2 (1997), 173–214: 179. This is similarly the overarching Foucauldian framework in Rose, Governing. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. M. Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66.

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Foucault and True Crime Lisa Downing

When all is said and done, battles simply stamp the mark of history on nameless slaughters, while narrative makes the stuff of history from mere street brawls. The frontier between the two is perpetually crossed. It is crossed in the case of an event of prime interest – murder. Murder is where history and crime intersect. Foucault, I Pierre Rivière…

Crime is glorified, because it is one of the fine arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because villainy is yet another mode of privilege. Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Introduction: Murder Most Discursive Murder, one could say, is the opium of modernity.1 As I explored in my 2013 book, The Subject of Murder, the figure of ‘the criminal’ appears in Foucault’s work as one of the quintessential modern subjects produced by the medico-legal and psy disciplines, alongside ‘the homosexual’ and ‘the pervert’.2 But as well as being as an ‘abnormal’ pathologized personage, the figure of the murderer accrues an attractiveness, a sheen of glamour, and an association with rebellious, Romantic creativity owing to the link between murder and art forged in modernity. For writers such as the Marquis de Sade and Thomas De Quincey, whose work ‘On Murder as a Fine Art’ (1827) Foucault references in the quotation forming the epigraph of this chapter, writing and crime are imbricated as aspects of genius and individuality. And the relationship between writing and crime is precisely what is at stake in this chapter, where I reflect upon the legacy of Foucault’s writing on murder for a consideration of the increasingly popular, and increasingly hybrid, twentieth- and twenty-first-century genre of ‘true crime’, a genre that while lending itself to a Foucauldian approach, has not yet been interrogated from this perspective in any substantive or extensive way. 185

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Texts by Foucault that have relatively recently appeared in English for the first time, such as the 2003 Verso collection entitled Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75,3 and the documents produced by Foucault’s anti-prison group, the GIP (Prisons Information Group),4 reveal Foucault’s enduring interest in the social construction of criminality and the corporeal treatment of those labelled ‘criminals’. The existence of these documents also demonstrates that his concern with this subject extended well beyond his best-known works on the subject, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother…: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth-Century (1973), the latter of which I will discuss in detail in this chapter. In I, Pierre Rivière… Foucault and his team of researchers bring together a ‘dossier’ of texts concerning the murder committed by the eponymous French peasant who, in 1835, killed his mother and two siblings, in order, he claimed, to liberate himself and his father from maternal tyranny. The book comprises a number of medical and legal reports produced about Rivière, including those by leading names of the day, producer of the diagnosis of monomania Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol and toxicologist Mathieu Orfila; an extensive and detailed autobiographical text and confession, penned by the murderer; and notes and commentary by Foucault and his research team. The aim of Foucault and his fellow researchers in this text is to demonstrate the genealogical insight that dominant knowledge (about the psychology of murder, leading to the production of the specific figure of the murderer, in this case) is arrived at as an effect of the outcome of historically specific debates between disciplinary discourses that are in competition with each other. In the case of Rivière, Foucault et al. are able to show how proponents of the emergent medico-legal discipline of psychiatry (termed ‘alienism’ in early nineteenth-century France) played out their differences with regard to diagnostic authority, and staged their struggles for legal legitimacy, around the figure and body of this murderer, such that the case constituted ‘a battle among discourses and through discourses’.5 Rivière’s own text is read as revealing a key fact about the relationship between words and acts, discourse and crime, namely that it is not sufficient or accurate to describe confessions as the mere retroactive reporting of acts. Rather, Rivière’s confessions demonstrate narrative uncertainty and epistemic ambiguity regarding what ‘came first’: the idea of committing the crime and narrating it, the act itself, or the text produced. Neither writing nor killing alone has originary status. In ‘Tales of Murder’, the essay Foucault writes to accompany the historical dossier, he puts it thus: ‘the fact

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of killing and the fact of writing, the deeds done and the things narrated coincided since they were elements of a like nature’.6 Conceiving of crime and committing crime are inextricably intertwined in this understanding. Also key to Foucault’s method here is the fact that the focus on the confession, as well as on the expert testimonies, is resolutely de-psychologizing. Foucault suggests that we might read reports and accounts about murderers not (only) to learn more about murders and those who commit them, but (primarily) to learn more about the society which produces them, the sorts of discourses that are made around them, and the normalizing forms of power that happen to be in contestation and/or ascendancy at the time of the crimes. In suggesting this, I Pierre Rivière… can be read as both issuing an invitation, and offering a didactic model or guide for carrying out work of this kind – a notion that is suggested explicitly at moments in the text. For example, Foucault closes the Foreword to the work by setting out in four numbered points the methodological and theoretical steps taken in collating and presenting the dossier and notes, writing that the work might ‘draw a map’ for those who come after, and provide ‘an example of existing records that are available for potential analysis’.7 Just as it is commonly recognized by those of a Foucauldian bent that discourses such as creative and autobiographical writing contribute, alongside the texts of the ‘authority disciplines’ of sexology and psychoanalysis, to cultural constructions of sexuality and sexual identity, so Foucault shows in I Pierre Rivière… how it is crucial to explore the means by which confessional and descriptive writing (of and about crime) contributes to making intelligible, while also risking reifying, the identity of the criminal qua criminal, just as much as a psychiatric report or a legal judgment. One form that writing about crime and criminals has taken, from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, is the popular genre of ‘true crime’. Texts of this kind might, therefore, form the primary material for an analysis, of the kind that Foucault recommends, of the recent discursive forms of knowledge via which crime is imagined and documented. ‘True crime’ can describe the kind of writing about murder cases and murderers that attempts to be factual, descriptive, journalistic, or straightforwardly biographical. It can also, however, be used as the label for a semi-fictionalized genre, related to the imaginative techniques of New Journalism, in which fictional embellishments and the author’s own interpretations of, and projections onto, the conditions of a criminal case are used in telling the story of nonfictional murders. Although true crime writing has distant historical antecedents dating back several centuries (David Schmid traces it to 16518), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) is often thought

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to be the first example of such a modern work of imaginative true crime. However, despite the considerable cultural influence of Foucault’s ideas on our understanding of the construction of the criminal, and despite the fact that I Pierre Rivière… can itself be broadly understand as an example of true crime, relatively few works either of true crime writing or about true crime writing can be said to have responded to Foucault’s challenge and explicitly used the guidance in the Foreword of I Pierre Rivière… as a theoretical or methodological starting point.9 In this chapter, I aim to examine writing produced about one infamous murder case – that of the ‘Moors Murders’ – to see whether the method proposed by Foucault in I Pierre Rivière… offers an enduring and transferrable model for reading true crime. Like Foucault and his researchers, I will examine writings about the case in an attempt to understand, not the criminals’ motivations, but rather the historical, epistemic conditions  – the cultural preoccupations, fantasies, fears, norms, and power struggles for authority – that conditioned the production of the crimes and shape our understanding of the case. My ‘dossier’ here will consist of true crime writing, rather than medico-legal reports, but, like the Rivière dossier, it will include writing both about the killer and by (one of ) the killers. The Moors Murders have been described as ‘a landmark case’10 for true crime writing, based on the sheer number of words written about them and the length of time they have remained in the public eye. The soubriquet refers to the killing of a number of children in the North of England in the 1960s by a young couple, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. The pair was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966 for the murders of three young victims, Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride, and Edward Evans. In 1985, Brady confessed that they had been responsible for two further murders, those of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Shortly thereafter, Brady was moved from a maximum-security prison to a high-security psychiatric hospital, where he died in 2017. Brady and Hindley’s faces and stories continued to appear in newspapers, true crime writing, biographies, and fictionalized representations throughout the following decades. Hindley, widely dubbed ‘the most evil woman in Britain’, made several unsuccessful appeals for release. Both wrote copiously during their incarceration, and while Hindley’s confessional journal remains unpublished, it is discussed and excerpted in Carol Ann Lee’s biography of Hindley published in 2010, eight years after her death in prison.11 With the help of existentialist murder ‘expert’ Colin Wilson, Brady was allowed to publish a book, The Gates of Janus, in 2001, on the condition that he wrote only about other murderers and the philosophy and psychology of killing, rather than revealing any

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fact or thoughts about his own crimes. News stories about Brady appeared frequently until his death, often reporting on his taunting of the press and victims’ families regarding the whereabouts of the still-missing body of one of the victims, Keith Bennett, and his claims that he was no longer mentally ill and should be allowed to return to a regular prison. In order to explore the ways in which Brady and Hindley’s personae and crimes have been depicted, and to untangle the map of discursive lines of knowledge and power intersecting them along Foucauldian lines, I  will consider three texts that all fit, in different ways, my deliberately broad category of ‘true crime’. The first of these is Emlyn Williams’s wellknown, highly speculative, New Journalism–style work Beyond Belief (1967). Second, I consider the aforementioned book-length philosophical text on murder authored by Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, in which he offers advice to forensic specialists about identifying serial murderers at large using psycho-biographical sketches of incarcerated killers including John Wayne Gacy, Peter Sutcliffe, and Ted Bundy. Finally, I turn to Myra, Beyond Saddleworth (2012), a novel by Jean Rafferty that takes as its starting point the premise that Myra Hindley did not die in prison in 2002, but was, instead, covertly released while suffering from terminal lung cancer (based on a conspiracy theory that circulated at the time). The novel, which draws on factual elements from the case, widely represented in the true crime canon, creates an entirely fictitious plot around Hindley’s fate.

The Moors Murders and the Mores That Made Them Emlyn Williams’s Beyond Belief appeared just a year after the killers’ trial. In its Introduction, Williams describes the intended tone of his book as ‘serious and dispassionate’,12 and its method as ‘composed […] of three elements:  Fact; Interpretation of Fact, and Surmise’.13 We can read the discourses Williams engages with (regardless of which of his three categories he may wish a given discourse to fit) as indications of the preoccupations of the containing culture, and of the moment that produced Brady and Hindley. One very obvious discourse of the time that Williams insists upon is the danger of pornography, visible in Williams’s extensive lingering over Brady’s reading habits. Williams devotes a chapter entitled ‘Unholy Writ’ to the Marquis de Sade, questioning whether Justine, a ‘dirty book without dirty words’,14 which Brady shared with Myra Hindley and her brotherin-law David Smith, and which allegedly inspired Brady’s criminal philosophy, is ‘sinister’ or instead merely ‘silly’.15 His conclusion is that it depends

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who is reading: to most people it would be ‘silly’, but ‘along this road, for him who stops to pick, there are clumps of deadly nightshade’.16 Implicit in Williams’s worrying about reading is a contemporary fear of the contagious effect of literature and pornography – especially on ‘the masses’. The Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, that had ushered in the decade of the 1960s seven years earlier, was still fresh in the cultural imaginary at the time of the trial of Brady and Hindley. And, in the courtroom, much was made of the fact that a working-class, albeit upwardly mobile, couple had on their bookshelves sexological tomes (including Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, 1886) and texts of Nazi propaganda, as well as works by the Marquis de Sade. The Attorney General’s words to Ian Brady on the subject of reading were accusatory: ‘this was the diet you were consuming? Pornographic books, books on violence and murder? […] This is the atmosphere of your mind. A sink of pornography, was it not?’, to which Brady responded, pointing out the class-bound implications underlying the line of questioning: ‘No. There are better collections than that in lords’ manors all over the country’.17 The dual concern with class mobility and the perception of increased – and dangerous – sexual freedoms that were available in the wake of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ formed the discursive soup in which the case unfolded. And the sexual behaviour – and nature – of the killers is a theme that runs throughout Beyond Belief. The chapter entitled ‘Hindley Wakes’ depicts for the reader a Sadeian spectacle. While stating that ‘the idea that sex can be tinged with cruelty has never been new – the permanence of many a marriage is based on love-play in which one partner consciously simulates brutality while the other simulates the fear of it’,18 Williams imagines, as a counterpoint to this idea of a commonplace, collaborative scenario of erotic counterfeit, a simulation-free scene of ‘authentic’ erotic domination and submission, when he analogizes the first time Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have sex to an unusual Victorian marital defloration. Consider the following, lengthy description: In the last century a husband would find himself, on his wedding night, faced more often than not with just this situation. If he was a good man, he would coax his frightened bride, step by step, with love and understanding, along the road that led, ultimately, to mutual ecstasy. But if the bride groom was the exception… He looks down at his wife. A new look, very different from the face he used to put on […] The hood has fallen, and the heart begins to beat. The lips moisten. The breath comes quicker. This is it. She is like a soft and frightened bird, please, please be gentle. Then…

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The bird is ensnared, in the all-powerful trap of male arms and legs; the well-mannered suitor has turned into the savage invader. Hanging wings of hair, and the pulsing neck utterly at his mercy, please… And like the invader with his sword, the bridegroom drives brutally home. […] Then, in that Victorian bedroom, there would come the sounds of sobs:  weeping which meant, too often, the foundering of a marriage for a wife who was to remain, through years of patient child bearing, quite frigid. […] But suppose she had been the rare, rare exception? The woman in a thousand? In ten thousand? Suppose the terrified bride, in the midst of her agony, had suddenly realized – without knowing yet what she was realizing – that the brutality of the naked beast above her was mysteriously arousing, in her, a new and exciting servitude? […] The dead bird stirs. And awakens. Moves. Moves. The moans again. But different. Frenzy again. But a different frenzy. Mounting, mounting, mounting, and with it the moans, until the moment when the moans rise to a cry. But this time it is the cry of love: the consummation of a marriage which will be, of necessity, a strange one. The deed is done.19

The construction of the imagined sexual act here is multilayered. Williams first sets the scene of a Victorian wedding night, in which a frightened, innocent bride is confronted with the brutality of male lust and the violence of heterosexual intercourse. Yet, he suggests, if the husband happened to be (what the sexological taxonomical system calls) a sadist, and the bride (what it calls) a masochist, an unusual partnership of complementary desires might be born. Williams collapses the figure of that ‘rare, rare exception’, the kinky Victorian lady, onto the figure of the deviant Hindley, who is set up as an ‘other’ sort of woman and of sexual being. So, despite spending many pages exploring the influence on the murdering couple of Sade, other erotic writings, and  – tellingly  – true crime itself (Brady was especially fascinated by texts and films depicting the case of Leopold and Loeb, who had plotted a ‘pure act’; an existentialist murder for pleasure20), Williams here ignores the ways in which Brady and Hindley may have constructed their own erotic stories and selves on the basis of widely available discursive material, that is, the processes of subjectification, and instead espouses the language of sexual ‘nature’: the idea that the truth of one’s sexuality is a deeply buried, innate secret that may be unlocked. This is the very idea that Foucault famously debunks in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge (1976), where he writes: ‘this oft-stated theme, that sex is outside of discourse and

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that only the removing of an obstacle, the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it, is precisely what needs to be examined’.21 Moreover, in the passage about Hindley’s ‘waking’, the subject matter apparently under suspicious scrutiny becomes the substance of the text, as the description of brutal deflowering is written in a rapturous, eroticized, florid, quasi-pornographic, Mills-and-Boon-esque – some may say entirely prurient – way, while the rhetorical textual alibi of the hypothetical Victorian couple is used to insulate the author against accusations of dwelling too lovingly on imagined details of Myra Hindley’s actual devirgination. A striking feature of the text is the fact that, in it, Williams blends the most salacious of speculations about the killers’ activities and relationship with an almost reverential and moralistic discourse about detection and the processes of law enforcement. It is not coincidental that the book is dedicated to Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Benfield of Cheshire C.  I. D.  and Superintendent Robert Talbot of Stalybridge, officers who had played a part in solving the Moors Murders case. Nor is it by chance that the bravery, rectitude, and honour of the police force are insisted upon, time and again, throughout the text (the national stereotype of the tenacious, British policeman is embodied for Williams in the figure of DCI Joe Mounsey, a ‘bull-dog with something between his teeth’22). In this way, Williams seeks to preserve his status as ‘a self-respecting writer’,23 a member of the establishment, all the while allowing the text to dwell lingeringly on sensationalist subject matter. Beyond Belief, as a key text of true crime, then, both refers to and enacts several (sometimes contradictory) discourses of the 1960s that shaped understanding of the Moors Murders case. It insists on the dangers of sex and pornography, especially when experienced by the working classes, while also demonstrating a fascination with the same.24 It expresses the desire to temper the threat of the permissiveness of the new society, that was perceived to be spilling out of control in the shocking events of the Moors Murders case, with a reassuring focus on the power of institutions:  the police and judicial system. Unlike Beyond Belief, in which Williams’s one writerly voice enacts numerous (often contradictory) discourses in the same text, The Gates of Janus may be said to constitute a properly polyvocal ‘dossier’, in the Rivière sense, in and of itself. But if it enacts a battle map of competing interpretative discourses, these discourses are far from being orthodox or hegemonic. Brady’s text is sandwiched between paratexts written by voices from different disciplinary settings. It is preceded by a Foreword by Dr Alan Keightley, former Head of Religious Studies at King Edward VI College,

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Stourbridge, and a long-time confidant of Brady, and an Introduction by Colin Wilson, existentialist author of The Outsider (1956) and of several books on serial killing, who encouraged and enabled Brady’s publishing project. It is followed by an Afterword by Peter Sotos, an American writer and musician whose creative works explore the themes of violent pornography and child sexual abuse, often voiced from the perspective of the pornographer/abuser. What is quite extraordinary about this line-up is that the convention of bookending texts by patients, criminals, and other marginalized or dangerous subjects with texts by ‘experts’, purveyors of the dominant authority discourse, is disrupted or undermined here by the voices included. Keightley is an academic (a status insisted upon by the unusual inclusion of his title ‘Dr’ on the book cover), but not in the field of criminology or psychiatry and, as Brady’s personal friend, the conventionally expected ‘objectivity’ of his contribution is lost. Wilson, while widely respected in some circles as an intellectual, has himself produced idealizing statements about criminality as exceptional genius that align him closely with the perspective of killers such as Brady.25 And Sotos is a controversial figure, who, in 1986 was the first US citizen to be convicted of possessing images of child sexual abuse, and whose work has been received with ambivalence as to whether it offensively perpetuates and revels in the violent and abusive themes it explores, or whether it in fact parodies and critiques the normalization of violence and abuse in culture. In the context of this map of dubious discourses by the dodgy, the voice of Brady, whose aim, in Keightley’s words is to offer ‘a hunting manual for the tracking down of the serial killer by the use of psychological profiling’ stands  – bizarrely  – as the voice of authority among the four.26 Brady’s becomes the ‘expert voice’, addressing the intended readers in law enforcement, criminology, and psychiatry to bestow the benefits of his insight into serial killing, gained by dint of experience. The text, especially in Colin Wilson’s Introduction, embodies one of the myths of identity that Foucault debunks: the idea that identity is the key to truth; that having killed, and thereby assumed the label of ‘the murderer’, Brady’s words must be imbued with authenticity. Wilson writes: ‘I advised him to do the thing I  would have done:  to think about writing a book. Since he obviously knew about serial murder “from the inside” this suggested itself as the obvious subject’.27 Yet, at the same time as providing an ego trip for Brady, this odd work is paradoxically, and deliberately, devoid of authenticity as, at every turn, the voices in it – not only, but principally Brady’s – insist on moral ambivalence and a play with in/sincerity and undermining. For example, Brady writes:

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Lisa Downing In this book I  have offered a few modest methods which may assist in tracking down the serial killer. Some may regard this as generous coming from me, some may not. Both arguments hold water. For I could write several more chapters, or even another book, on how to foil police forensics and confound the methodology of psychological profilers. In not doing so, am I displaying a sense of morality, exhibiting praiseworthy altruism? Or am I  simply bowing to the fact that no publisher would dare print such subversive information? Or do I care at all either way?28

And, in similar, deliberately self-contradictory fashion, Sotos devotes his Afterword to a dizzying and disturbing mixture of semi-pornographic reflections on the rape and killing of Lesley Ann Downey and an upbraiding of Colin Wilson for ever having invited Brady to write the very book to which Soto is contributing: First off, you don’t ask a child molester to write a book on serial killing. A child rapist. A child pornographer. A child murderer. You don’t ask him to do the obvious. […] Because the child rapist and murderer and pornographer will obviously lie.29

Statements of this kind, from both Brady and Sotos, interrupt the reader’s ability to read the text in a linear way or for any remnant of ‘truth’ in the ‘true crime’. More traditional true crime appears, at least superficially, as a didactic, moralistic genre, despite often dwelling on the unsavory detail of the crimes. We may think of Williams’s claim that ‘when a shocking scandal blows up […] it is salutary to inquire: the proper study of mankind is Man. And Man cannot be ignored because he has become vile. Women neither’.30 The Gates of Janus, on the other hand, is less an ‘inquiry’ (for all Keightley, Wilson and Brady’s claims that it undertakes ‘offender profiling’) than it is a postmodern, self-deconstructing, altogether darker version thereof, whereby the promise of shining the light of reason on the unfathomable, is constantly undermined by a relentless moral nihilism. Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, as a novel, is, at first glance, the least ‘true crime’-like of the texts in my Moors Murder dossier. Yet, author Jean Rafferty makes for it the very claims that are often made for that genre. She writes in the book’s Author Foreword:  ‘As a former journalist I  am well aware of the power of factual writing, but fiction is a more exploratory form. Like many people, I have often wondered what kind of person commits such atrocities. Myra, Beyond Saddleworth is an honest attempt to find out’.31 Here, Rafferty makes the claim that fiction does not only allow her artistic license, but that it may help her (and us, the reader), to

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get closer to the deep secret truth of Hindley’s identity – albeit a Hindley she is creating from a patchwork of existing discourses. The discourse of nature, of authenticity, that Williams espouses, and that Brady evokes in order to toy with, is on display here once again. Yet fiction (or the amalgam of the discourses of reportage and fiction) is being identified as its truest generic form (in a rather Foucauldian gesture, and undermining somewhat Williams’s neat taxonomy of ‘Fact’, ‘Interpretation of Fact’, and ‘Surmise’). While sharing elements of Williams’s desire to evoke the true, deep nature of Myra Hindley, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth is less fascinated by Hindley’s relationship with Brady, and focuses more attention on her lesbian feelings and past prison affairs. Written in 2012, the novel is able to draw on the repository of information that filtered through the tabloid press and lurid publications about Hindley’s amorous encounters in prison. ‘No more quickies on a quilt under the bed, with someone else keeping watch outside the door’,32 the fictional ‘Myra’ muses. Moreover, perhaps, because this is a text authored by a woman, ‘Myra’ is imagined less as the sidekick of Brady and the erotic submissive that we espied in Williams’s account, and more as a subject of will-to-power. Williams’s descriptions of masochism are replaced with Rafferty’s projections of the female killer’s own narcissistic and sadistic power fantasies (something male commentators on the case, in both the 1960s and subsequently, seemed unable to imagine). Thus, a dream sequence in the book focuses on this aspect of the fictionalized killer: Under the surface of her eyelids cars whizz up the motorway, their drivers standing up in the front seat, arms stiffly held in front of them like Hitler inspecting a rally of his troops. Lights probe and arc across the road, irradiating the whole night sky. She is Hitler. She is standing up in the front seat of the car and the other drivers become soldiers, marching in procession up the glorious path to … to what? To power? godhead? honour? Heil Hessie! Heil Hessie! Heil Hessie!33

‘Hessie’ here is a reference to the pet name Brady gave Hindley, after both Myra Hess, her pianist namesake, and Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s lieutenant. The novel makes self-conscious references to such ‘true crime’ facts and artifacts throughout, including a mention of the oft-reproduced, now iconic, blonde mugshot of Hindley, taken on her arrest, an image with which she became synonymous.34 Rafferty has it flashing up on the TV news in the fictional world depicted to accompany the story of Myra’s faked death and funeral: ‘For fuck’s sake, not that bloody mugshot again. She wants to put her fist right through the television screen. Forty years

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that picture’s been following her around’.35 The novel also references the generosity of Hindley’s influential male benefactors: ‘She was better off in the bloody jail with Lord Astor giving her two hundred and fifty quid a month for her “expenses” ’.36 There are even digs at the publication of The Gates of Janus: ‘She’s always been good at writing […] maybe she could get a book published like Brady, bring in a bit of brass’.37 All of these references create intertexts with existing journalism and true crime writing on the Moors Murders, playing on readers’ familiarity with the crimes. And the tension between familiarity and otherness is a key feature of the text’s narration. By choosing to write the text in free indirect discourse, so that the reader is closely aligned with ‘Myra’s’ feelings and thoughts, while not quite experiencing a first-person account, Rafferty suggests an uneasy complicity and intimacy with the character. Yet, it is also worth pointing out, with an eye to the gender politics of true crime (and broader cultural treatment of celebrity killers) that while Brady was allowed to publish his work, Hindley was not and that, time and again, she has been imaged and ‘voiced’ by others – from Williams to Rafferty – and all those who have represented and commented in between. Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, then, is in some ways an example of a metatrue crime text; a comment on the form. It shows up, by citation and parody some of the facets of broader media and true crime representation: the way both make ‘personages’, exceptional subjects, out of those who commit crimes; how they tend to fix the image, meaning, and personae of infamous criminals; and how they accord those subjects a kind of attractive-repellant glamour. Moreover, a text such as Ritchie’s draws attention to the instability of the ‘true’ in ‘true crime’. Despite his emphasis on ‘facts’ being a key component of his text, Emlyn Williams’s ‘facts’ inevitably approximate truth only from the point of view of an interested perspective. Foucault teaches us precisely that there is no disinterested truth, only discursive struggles, a point that later, more hybrid and creative texts of true crime may make visible rather than work to conceal.

Fact, Fiction, Fascination, Foucault In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes of a historical cultural shift whereby ‘a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime’ occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which constituted ‘the discovery of the beauty and greatness of crime’.38 That murder has continued to be an object of fascination and aestheticization in modern culture is a phenomenon amply testified to by the enduring popularity of true crime writing in all its forms and the enduring infamy – or fame – of figures such as Brady

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and Hindley. Yet, while commenting on this phenomenon, Foucault himself at times seems to fall prey to the very fascination he describes. The terms in which he discusses the act of murder are often ambiguous and ambivalent:  they occupy a place somewhere between describing an attitude and embodying it. Consider the following, perhaps most extreme, example of this tension: [M]urder is the supreme event. […] Murder prowls the confines of the law, on one side or the other, above or below it; it frequents power, sometimes against and sometimes with it. The narrative of murder settles into this dangerous area; it provides the communication between interdict and subjection, anonymity and heroism; through it infamy attains immortality.39

About this passage from I Pierre Rivière…, we might ask the question: is Foucault citing, mimicking the popular hyperbolic fantasy of the act of murder as rebellious gesture of social contestation, committed by the ‘outsider’ (in Colin Wilson’s terms), or is he (unwittingly, perhaps) glorifying it, reveling in it? It is not easy to arrive at a definitive answer to the question, as the hyperbolic language (‘supreme’, ‘heroism’, ‘immortality’), repetition of the talismanic term ‘murder’, and almost rapturous rhythm suggest a libidinous excitation erupting within the prose. Similarly, the terms in which Foucault explains his reasons for having chosen to work on Rivière’s memoir – ‘the beauty’40 of it – and his description of his/his team’s relationship with Rivière – ‘we fell under the spell of the parricide with the reddish-brown eyes’41  – are suggestive of an idealizing aesthetic and erotic investment. I have written elsewhere about the aspects of erotic fascination or seduction suggested in Foucault’s writing on criminals, which strikes a discordant note with Foucault’s notorious taste for employing the hermeneutics of suspicion.42 It is perhaps here that the erotically charged elements of his thought and practice, his ‘ethics of eros’, meet, clash with, and sit uneasily alongside, his persona as a rational demystifier. What is also of note, of course, is the fact that the pleasure Foucault finds in Pierre Rivière’s confession is inevitably a ‘pleasure of the text’. This recalls his argument in The Will to Knowledge, that in the modern Western mode, the erotic thrill of confessional sexual discourse (written, spoken, and, we might add, read) stands in for bodily acts, when he writes of ‘a kind of general discursive erethism’,43 a stimulation of the body by discursive proxy. This pleasure of the text, in the specific case of writing about crime, has also been visible in the three true crime texts that formed my Moors Murders dossier. It is in evidence in Emlyn Williams’s prurient imagining of the sex between the killers, tempered by mainstream moral ‘common sense’ and a professed identification with, and celebration of, detection and law

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enforcement. It is manifest in Brady’s discernible pleasure in pronouncing on the psychology of other killers and on that of society in the voice of ‘expert’ in The Gates of Janus, while taunting us sadistically as to his sincerity. And it is discernible as an illicit thrill in Rafferty’s imagining of freedom, rather than punishment through death, for a dissident (anti-)heroine in Myra, Beyond Saddleworth. Thus, in a range of differing but parallel ways, the texts discussed reveal what Anita Biressi points out in her book on true crime:  that this is a genre that deals in and produces pleasure, as well as knowledge.44 I would go further here and say that it is a genre by means of which identification with, and objectification of, the criminal figure may produce an erotic frisson for both writer and reader, a true example of that famous, above-mentioned Foucauldian ‘discursive erethism’. Lastly, what Foucault’s own fascination with criminality (and writers’ and readers’ with true crime) suggests most compellingly, perhaps, is the extent to which, just as none of us can step outside of power relations, so none of us is entirely separate from the tastes and seductions of our own cultural moment  – even if we are professional commentators on them. Even the most critical self will be implicated in, and interpellated by, the discursive trends that he or she critiques. The almost unbearable push-and-pull to which Brady subjects the reader of The Gates of Janus (sincerity/insincerity; contributing/withholding) acts as a grotesque, exaggerated parody of how true crime makes us complicit in the pleasures of crime, while assuring us that it is merely instructing us about it. If I stated, somewhat boldly, at the opening of this chapter that murder is the opium of modernity, then I  will conclude by proposing that true crime, in all its simulating, stimulating, discursive hybridization of thrilling fact and fiction, may continue to be the crack cocaine of our post-modern epoch. Notes 1 I would like to thank David Schmid and Het Phillips for discussions, suggestions, and inspiration for writing this chapter. Between them, they know more about true crime than anyone else I have encountered. 2 Lisa Downing, The Subject of Murder:  Gender, Exceptionality and the Modern Killer (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2013). 3 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75, ed. V. Machetti and A. Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003). 4 See Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn, eds., Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016). In her chapter of the book, ‘The Untimely Speech of the

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5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

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GIP Counter-Archive’ (41–58), Lynne Huffer describes the documents of the GIP as constituting an ‘ “ignoble archive” of captured speech’, 42. Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century… [1973], trans. F. Jellinek (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), x. Ibid., 200. Ibid., xi. David Schmid, ‘True Crime’, in An Introduction to Crime Fiction, ed. C. J. Rzepka and L. Horsley (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 198–209: 198. Some partial exceptions to this generalization follow. My aforementioned book, The Subject of Murder, focusses on the construction of the figure of the murderer as an ‘exceptional’ modern subject, using Foucauldian theory, in a range of cultural products including, but not limited to, and not including an extended discussion of, the generic conditions of true crime. Lisa Duggan’s Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2000) undertakes what is in many ways an eminently Foucauldian reading of discourses surrounding the murder of Freda Ward by her lover Alice Mitchell, showing how coverage of the case was both coexistent with, and productive of, the emergence of the figure of the modern American lesbian, shot through with stigmatizing notions of lesbian abnormality. But any debt to Foucault or to the case study model offered in I Pierre Rivière… is not made an explicit feature of Duggan’s study. (Indeed, Foucault is mentioned by name only twice throughout the book and neither time in the context of his writing on murder cases.) The study that perhaps comes closest to carrying out a Foucauldian analysis of true crime is Anita Biressi’s Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2001). Biressi grounds her reading of true crime as a genre in firmly Foucauldian terms. She contends that ‘the discourses of true crime, like all popular narratives, produce relations of power, establishing and exploring the place of subject and object, agency and will in modern life. However, power is not merely repressive but productive…’, 39. Biressi, Crime, Fear and the Law, 67. Carol Ann Lee, One of Your Own:  The Life and Death of Myra Hindley (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2010). Emlyn Williams, ‘Author’s Foreword’, Beyond Belief [1967] (London:  Pan, 1968), 9. Ibid., 10. Williams, Beyond Belief, 170. Ibid., 172. Ibid. A full transcript of the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley is published as Jonathan Goodman, The Moors Murders: The Trial of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady [1973](London: Magpie, 1994), 191. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 124.

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20 Brady reputedly read Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1956), based on this case, and saw Richard Fleischer’s filmic adaptation of the same name (1959) at the cinema. 21 Foucault, The Will To Knowledge, The History of Sexuality 1 [1976], trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 34. 22 Williams, Beyond Belief, e.g. 312. 23 Williams, ‘Author’s Foreword’, Beyond Belief, 9. 24 In her unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘Cultural Representations of the “Moors Murders” and “Yorkshire Ripper” Cases’, University of Birmingham, 2016, Het Phillips analyzes scenes in which Williams describes Brady’s teenage masturbation habits, to reveal a prurient focus on the male killer’s sexuality, which serves as a counterpoint to my discussion of the scene of Hindley’s deflowering. 25 See the Introduction of Downing, Subject of Murder, 1–31. 26 Dr Alan Keightley, ‘Foreword’, Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis, by the ‘Moors Murderer’, Ian Brady (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2001) 1–3: 1. 27 Colin Wilson, ‘Introduction’, Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, 4–32, 29. 28 Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, 288. 29 Peter Sotos, ‘Afterword’, Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, 289–305: 292. 30 Williams, ‘Author’s Foreword’, Beyond Belief, 9. 31 Jean Rafferty, ‘Author’s Foreword’, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth (London: Wild Wolf Publishing, 2012), 3. 32 Rafferty, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, 8. 33 Ibid., 10. 34 For discussions of Hindley’s mugshot, see, for example, Lizzie Seal, Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 89. 35 Rafferty, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, 8. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 9. 38 Foucault, Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.  Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), 68. 39 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière…, 206. 40 Ibid., x. 41 Ibid., xiii. 42 See:  Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 74–75 and Downing, Subject of Murder, 2–3; 9. 43 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 32. 44 ‘True crime, then, is a genre that produces particular forms of knowledge and–lest it be forgotten–pleasure’. Biressi, Crime, Fear and the Law, 38.

201

Index

Adger, W. Neil, 131 Adorno, Theodor, 69 The Advocate, 172 After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges (Arac, J.), 3 Agamben, Giorgio, 32, 157, 162, 164 The Uses of Bodies, 162 Agrawal, Arun, 132–3 Althusser, Louis, 80, 114 Arac, Jonathan, 3 After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, 3 ars erotica, 97, 143–5, 148, 150–1, 176 Artaud, Antoine, 80–1, 173 Audier, Serge, 57 Barad, Karen, 95 Bataille, Georges, 81–4, 88, 90, 160 Baudelaire, Charles, 173 Becker, Gary, 50, 55 Behrent, Michael, 56 Foucault and Neoliberalism, 56 Bennett, Keith, 188–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 48, 52–3, 63, 71, 88 Berlant, Lauren, 103–4 Desire/Love, 103 Bersani, Leo, 147–8, 156 Homos, 147 Beyond Belief (Williams, E.), 10, 189–90, 192 biopolitics, 7, 46–7, 52, 55–7, 61–2, 64–71, 113–14, 116 biopower, 7, 56, 61–2, 64–6, 68–73, 87, 115–16, 130, 132 Biressi, Anita, 198 The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault, M.), 6, 46–7, 57, 66 The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault, M.), 25, 114, 118 Blanchot, Maurice, 81–7, 89–90, 160–1, 166 The Body of This Death (Haver, W.), 155 Bouchard, Donald F., 23 Brady, Ian, 10, 188–96, 198

The Gates of Janus, 10, 188–9, 192, 194, 196, 198 Brown, Wendy, 54, 57 Undoing the Demos, 54 Brownmiller, Susan, 143 Bryant, Raymond, 126–7 Bundy, Ted, 189 Burrough, William, 173, 180 Butler, Judith, 4, 26, 32, 37 Gender Trouble, 4–5 The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Downing, L.), 2 Capote, Truman, 187 In Cold Blood, 187 The Care of the Self (Foucault, M.), 158 Carney, William, 151 Chow, Rey, 8, 107 Christianity, 8, 17, 20, 33, 36, 39, 42–3, 82, 116–19, 159 Clifford, Michael, 4 Political Genealogy After Foucault: Savage Identities, 4 Cocteau, Jean, 173 Coetzee, J. M., 69 The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (Sedgwick, E.), 99 Colebrook, Claire, 161–2, 165 Collège de France, 6, 38, 46–7, 55, 58, 114, 129, 186 Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Sullivan, N.), 26 Cultural History After Foucault (Neubauer, J.), 4 Darier, Eric, 123 Davis, Oliver, 9–10, 170 Dean, Mitchell, 129 Dean, Tim, 9–10, 141 Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (Foucault, M.), 79 The Death of Maria Malibran (Schroeter, W.), 148

201

202

Index

Deleuze, Gilles, 148 Derrida, Jacques, 84, 88, 90 Descartes, René, 39 Meditations on First Philosophy, 39 Desire/Love (Berlant, L.), 103 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association), 180 A Dialogue on Love (Sedgwick, E.), 93 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault, M.), 1, 25, 35, 48, 61, 63, 101, 114, 118, 142, 147, 185–6, 196 Donzelot, Jacques, 55 Downey, Lesley Ann, 188, 194 Downing, Lisa, 1, 185 The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault, 2 The Subject of Murder, 185 Dreyfus, Hubert, 22, 25 During, Simon, 7, 79 Foucault and Literature, 7 Dustan, Guillaume, 177 ecologism, 2, 8–9, 11, 122–5, 127–8, 130–5 Edelman, Lee, 9, 161, 165 Eliot, T. S., 89–90 Empson, William, 89 environmentalism, 122–36 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick, E.), 5, 26, 93–4, 97, 99 Epstein, Edward, 180 Eribon, Didier, 172 Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique, 186 Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (Patterson, C.), 70 ethics, 2, 9, 11, 25, 33, 35, 37, 43, 68, 101, 136, 155–62, 164–7, 197 Evans, Edward, 188 Ewald, François, 55–6 Fabian, Johannes, 108 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 108 Fanon, Frantz, 111–12 feminism, 3, 90, 143 Ferguson, Roderick, 96 Fist Fuck/Double (Mapplethorpe, R.), 9, 163–4 Fleury-Mérogis, 175 Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Foucault, M.), 79 Foster, Emma A., 8–9, 122 Foucault and the History of Our Present (Fuggle, S.; Lanci, Y.; Tazzioli, M.), 3 Foucault and Literature (During, S.), 7 Foucault and Neoliberalism (Zamora, D.; Behrent, M.), 56

Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics, 6, 46–7, 57, 66 The Birth of the Clinic, 25, 114, 118 The Care of the Self, 158 Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, 79 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1, 25, 35, 48, 61, 63, 101, 114, 118, 142, 147, 185–6, 196 Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 79 The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 38, 101, 157–8, 162, 164, 166 History of Madness, 25, 68, 80–1, 101, 114, 160 The History of Sexuality, 2, 4–5, 8, 25, 35–6, 61, 64, 67–9, 88, 94, 96–7, 112, 114, 142–3, 145, 148, 158, 175, 191 I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother ...: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth-Century, 10, 185–8, 192, 197 ‘Language to Infinity’, 81, 84–5 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 25, 79 Les mots et les choses, 17, 79 ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, 117 The Order of Things, 25, 35, 52, 68, 79, 108, 112, 114, 157 ‘A Preface to Transgression’, 81–2 Raymond Roussel, 79 Security, Territory and Population, 66 Society Must Be Defended, 65, 69, 107, 115–16 Subjectivité et Vérité, 38, 41 ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, 34 ‘Tales of Murder’, 186 ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, 62 ‘What Is an Author?’, 79 The Will to Knowledge, 145, 147, 151, 191, 197 Foucault Studies, 94 Frank, Adam, 97 Fraser, Suzanne, 180 freedom, 6, 22, 33–5, 37, 41, 43, 48–9, 72, 93–4, 149, 159, 165, 175, 181–2, 190, 198 Freud, Sigmund, 95, 110–12, 114, 146 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 146 Friedman, Milton, 56 Fuggle, Sophie, 3–4 Foucault and the History of Our Present, 3 Gacy, John Wayne, 189 Gane, Nicholas, 6, 46 The Gates of Janus (Brady, I.), 10, 188–9, 192, 194, 196, 198 Gender Trouble (Butler, J.), 4–5

203

Index genealogy, 1, 5–6, 8, 17–19, 21–8, 31, 34, 47, 52, 54, 56–8, 68, 81, 95–6, 100–2, 104, 158 Gillett, Robert, 5–6, 17 Glucksmann, André, 56 Gordon, Colin, 26 Gossop, Michael, 178 governmentality, 4, 32, 35, 47, 67, 87, 123–4, 129–32, 159, 181–2 Greco, Monica, 6, 31 Greenblatt, Stephen, 88 Renaissance Self-fashioning, 88 Guibert, Hervé, 9, 155 To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 9, 155 Hacking, Ian, 158 Halberstam, Jack, 165 The Queer Art of Failure, 165 Halperin, David, 163, 171 Haraway, Donna, 72 Hardt, Michael, 32 Haver, William, 155–6, 161 The Body of This Death, 155 Hayek, Friedrich, 53–4 The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault, M.), 38, 101, 157–8, 162, 164, 166 Hindley, Myra, 10, 188–92, 195–7 History of Madness (Foucault, M.), 25, 68, 80–1, 101, 114, 160 The History of Sexuality (Foucault, M.), 2, 4–5, 8, 25, 35–6, 61, 64, 67–9, 88, 94, 96–7, 112, 114, 142–3, 145, 148, 158, 175, 191 Homos (Bersani, L.), 147 Hörnqvist, Magnus, 4 Risk, Power and the State: After Foucault, 4 Huffer, Lynne, 5, 8, 93, 160 Mad for Foucault, 5, 8 Huffington Post, 96 Human Action (Mises, L.), 51 I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother...: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth-Century (Foucault, M.), 10, 185–8, 192, 197 Il Contributo, 160 In Cold Blood (Capote, T.), 187 Justine (Sade, M.), 189 Kant, Immanuel, 84, 166 Katz, Jonathan, 163 Keane, Helen, 180 Keightley, Alan, 192–4 Khalip, Jacques, 9, 11, 155 Kilbride, John, 188 Klein, Melanie, 96, 98–9

203

Klossowski, Pierre, 89, 160 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 146, 190 Psychopathia Sexualis, 190 Kumaon (India), 132–3 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, D. H.), 190 Lanci, Yari, 3 Foucault and the History of Our Present, 3 ‘Language to Infinity’ (Foucault, M.), 81, 84–5 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 55 Learning What Love Means (Lindon, M.), 9, 170 Leavis, F. R., 89–90 Lee, Carol Ann, 188 Leiris, Michel, 80–1 Lemke, Thomas, 34, 130 ‘The Letter Writer’ (Singer, I.), 70 Leventhal, Robert S., 4 Reading After Foucault, 4, 9 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 80 liberalism, 48, 50, 52, 56, 67, 122, 181 Lindon, Jérôme, 170 Lindon, Mathieu, 9, 170–4, 176, 178, 182 Learning What Love Means, 9, 170 Luke, Timothy, 130–1 Mad for Foucault (Huffer, L.), 5, 8 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Foucault, M.), 25, 79 Mahon, Michael, 25 Mallarmé, Stephan, 79 Malthus, Thomas, 53 Man, Paul de, 90 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 9, 157, 163, 165 Fist Fuck/Double, 9, 163–4 Marsden, Richard, 4 The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault, 4 Marx, Karl, 4, 24, 34–5, 50, 56, 80, 95 Massumi, Brian, 128 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, R.), 39 Menger, Carl, 53 Mill, John Stuart, 53 Miller, James, 171–2 The Passion of Michel Foucault, 171 Mirowski, Philip, 55–6 Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 55 Mises, Ludwig von, 51, 53 Human Action, 51 Mont Pèlerin Society, 54, 58 Moore, David, 180 Moors Murder, 10, 188–9, 192, 194, 196–7 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, 128 Les mots et les choses (Foucault, M.), 17, 79 Muñoz, José Esteban, 165 Myra, Beyond Saddleworth (Rafferty, J.), 10, 189, 194–6, 198

204

Index

The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault (Marsden, R.), 4 Nazism, 69–71, 113–14, 190 Nealon, Jeffrey, 68 Negri, Toni, 32 neoliberalism, 3, 6–7, 11, 34–5, 46–8, 50–8, 67, 87, 119, 128–32, 170, 179–82 Neubauer, John, 4 Cultural History After Foucault, 4 Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (Mirowski, P.), 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 17, 19–25, 82, 95, 100–2, 104, 117, 160 Zur Genealogie der Moral, 19, 25 Nixon, Richard, 180–1 non-human, 7, 61, 68–73, 130, 135 Novek, Joel, 71 O’Farrell, Clare, 23 ‘Omnes et Singulatim’ (Foucault, M.), 117 ‘On Murder as a Fine Art’ (Quincey, T.), 185 opium, 171, 173–5, 185, 198 The Order of Things (Foucault, M.), 25, 35, 52, 68, 79, 108, 112, 114, 157 ordoliberalism, 49–50, 52–3, 56–7 Orfila, Mathieu, 186 orientalism, 108–9, 144–5 Orientalism (Said, E.), 107, 118 The Outsider (Wilson, C.), 193 Panopticism, 36, 48–9, 52, 63–4, 71, 88, 96, 100 Paras, Eric, 37 The Passion of Michel Foucault (Miller, J.), 171 Patterson, Charles, 70–1 Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, 70 Pauliska ou la pervesité (Saint-Cyr, R.), 85 Peggs, Kay, 7, 61 philosophy, 4, 6, 22, 26, 31, 34, 62, 82, 108, 160, 166, 188 Political Genealogy After Foucault: Savage Identities (Clifford, M.), 4 Ponge, Francis, 80 Prado, C. G., 19 Preciado, Paul, 177 Testo Junkie, 177 ‘A Preface to Transgression’ (Foucault, M.), 81–2 Prisons Information Group (GIP), 186 Proust, Marcel, 96 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebing, R.), 190 The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam, J.), 165 queer ecology, 134–5 queer theory, 4, 8–9, 17, 26–7, 94–100, 165 Quincey, Thomas De, 185 ‘On Murder as a Fine Art’, 185

Rabinow, Paul, 22, 25 Race, Kane, 172, 177 racism, 8–9, 18, 23, 69–70, 96, 107–19, 122, 126–8, 135, 173 Rafferty, Jean, 10, 189, 194–6, 198 Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, 10, 189, 194–6, 198 Raymond Roussel (Foucault, M.), 79 Reade, Pauline, 188 Reading After Foucault (Leventhal, R.), 4, 9 Renaissance Self-fashioning (Greenblatt, S.), 88 Rée, Paul, 20, 22 Richards, I. A., 89 Ricoeur, Paul, 95 Rimbaud, Arthur, 173 Risk, Power and the State: After Foucault (Hörnqvist, M.), 4 Röpke, Wilhelm, 56 Rose, Nikolas, 178 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20, 47 Roussel, Raymond, 79–81 Ruszczycky, Steven, 151 Saar, Martin, 19 Sade, Marquis de, 79, 81, 83, 89, 148, 185, 189–91 Justine, 189 sadomasochism, 145–52, 162, 164, 176, 191, 195, 198 Said, Edward, 107–10, 118 Orientalism, 107, 118 Saint-Cyr, Révéroni de, 85 Pauliska ou la pervesité, 85 Savransky, Martin, 6, 31 Sawicki, Jana, 93–5 Schmid, David, 187 Schroeter, Werner, 148 The Death of Maria Malibran, 148 scientia sexualis, 97, 143–6, 151, 176–7 Second World War, 48, 54, 89 Security, Territory and Population (Foucault, M.), 66 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5, 8, 93–104 The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 99 A Dialogue on Love, 93 Epistemology of the Closet, 5, 26, 93–4, 97, 99 Shame and Its Sisters, 97, 99 Touching Feeling, 96, 98–9 The Weather in Proust, 98 sexuality, 2, 4–5, 9, 27, 35–6, 82–3, 87–8, 96, 110, 112–14, 117, 119, 122–3, 141–7, 149, 151, 159, 163, 176–7, 187, 191 Shame and Its Sisters (Sedgwick, E.), 97, 99 Shukin, Nicole, 69 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 71 ‘The Letter Writer’, 70 Smart, Barry, 7, 61 Smith, Adam, 47–9, 53, 56 Wealth of Nations, 47

205

Index Smith, David, 189 Smith, Douglas, 20–1 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault, M.), 65, 69, 107, 115–16 Soper, Kate, 24 Sotos, Peter, 193–4 speciesism, 7, 61–2, 64–73, 102, 112–15, 122, 126–7, 130, 135 The Subject of Murder (Downing, L.), 185 Subjectivité et Vérité (Foucault, M.), 38, 41 subjectivity, 4, 6, 31–8, 40–1, 43, 55, 61, 85, 95, 99, 101, 160–1, 165, 167, 182 ‘Subjectivity and Truth’ (Foucault, M.), 34 Sullivan, Nikki, 26 Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 26 Sutcliffe, Peter, 189 ‘Tales of Murder’ (Foucault, M.), 186 Tazzioli, Martina, 3 Foucault and the History of Our Present, 3 Tel Quel, 81, 83–4 Testo Junkie (Preciado, P.), 177 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, S.), 146 Time (magazine), 172 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Fabian, J.), 108 To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (Guibert, H.), 9, 155 Tomkins, Silvan, 96, 98–9 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick, E.), 96, 98–9

205

Tours, Moreau de, 175 ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’ (Foucault, M.), 62 Undoing the Demos (Brown, W.), 54 The Uses of Bodies (Agamben, G.), 162 Verdeaux, Jacqueline, 123 Voeltzel, Thierry, 171, 177 Voltaire, 21 Walter Lippmann Colloquium, 54 War on Drugs, 180–1 Watson, Arthur (Dick), 180–1 Wealth of Nations (Smith, A.), 47 The Weather in Proust (Sedgwick, E.), 98 Weber, Max, 53 Weinberg, Darin, 179–80 ‘What Is an Author?’ (Foucault, M.), 79 The Will to Knowledge (Foucault, M.), 145, 147, 151, 191, 197 Williams, Emlyn, 10, 189–92, 194–7 Beyond Belief, 10, 189–90, 192 Wilson, Colin, 188, 193–4, 197 The Outsider, 193 Winkel, Georg, 135 Winnubst, Shannon, 93–5 Wolfe, Cary, 71–2 Zamora, Daniel, 56 Foucault and Neoliberalism, 56 Zur Genealogie der Moral (Nietzsche, F.), 19, 25