Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century 1783485752, 9781783485758

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
VISUAL ARTICULATIONS
Unreason and the Ambiguities of Silence
The Photogenic Invention of Thought-Emotion
Documents, Monuments, and Photographs
BODILY EXPERIENCE IN DANCE AND MUSIC
Body Techniques and Techniques of the Self
Discipline and Pianist
HEROIC AND TRAGIC SUBJECTIVITIES
Foucault’s Baudelaire
Foucault’s Beckett
The Role of Parrhesia in
AESTHETICS TRANSFORMED
Deleuze on Foucault
Critical Travels, Discursive Practices
Remaking the Self in Heterotopia
The Aesthetics of
Index
Notes on Contributors
About the Author

Citation preview

Foucault on the Arts and Letters

Global Aesthetic Research Series Editor: Joseph J. Tanke, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary, and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the discipline’s central concepts.

Titles in the Series Early Modern Aesthetics by J. Colin McQuillan. Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century edited by Catherine M. Soussloff.

Foucault on the Arts and Letters Perspectives for the 21st Century

Edited by Catherine M. Soussloff

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © Catherine M. Soussloff 2016 Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8573-4 PB 978-1-7834-8574-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-78348-573-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78348-574-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78348-575-8 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For my dear daughter Genya in France

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction: Perspectives on Foucault and the Arts and Letters Catherine M. Soussloff

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PART I: VISUAL ARTICULATIONS

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1 Unreason and the Ambiguities of Silence Dana Arnold

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2 The Photogenic Invention of Thought-Emotion: Duane Michals and Michel Foucault Anton Lee

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3 Documents, Monuments, and Photographs: Jean-Luc Moulène with Michel Foucault Sophie Berrebi

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PART II: BODILY EXPERIENCE IN DANCE AND MUSIC

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4 Body Techniques and Techniques of the Self: On Some Uses of Foucault’s Concepts in the Choreographic Field Frédéric Pouillaude

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5 Discipline and Pianist: Foucault and the Genealogy of the Étude Brandon Konoval PART III: HEROIC AND TRAGIC SUBJECTIVITIES 6 Foucault’s Baudelaire Sima Godfrey

79 103 105

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7 Foucault’s Beckett Marisa C. Sánchez

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8 The Role of Parrhēsia in King Lear135 Arianna Sforzini PART IV: AESTHETICS TRANSFORMED 9 Deleuze on Foucault: The Recourse to Painting Catherine M. Soussloff

147 149

10 Critical Travels, Discursive Practices: Foucault in Tunis Ilka Kressner

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11 Remaking the Self in Heterotopia Andrew Ballantyne

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12 The Aesthetics of Bios199 Frédéric Gros Translated by Sima Godfrey Index207 Notes on Contributors

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

This book began as a conference jointly sponsored by the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris (IEA) and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS), University of British Columbia, held in Paris on June 12–13, 2014. I remain extremely grateful to Gretty Mirdal, director, and Simon Luck, scientific coordinator, at the IEA for their enthusiastic intellectual and financial support of this project and for the generous hospitality offered to all the participants in the conference in Paris. The IEA location and its professional staff allowed all of the conference presenters and attendees to experience in the best circumstances the vital exchange of research and ideas that has resulted in this book and other projects. I thank Janis Sarra, director at the PWIAS, for her unwavering support of this conference and for her mentorship during my tenure as a distinguished scholar in residence, when my research for this project began. While in Paris, the Embassy of Canada provided important connections for this conference and book, especially through the knowledgeable and kind offices of Catherine Bédard, director, Centre Culturel Canadien, and Jacques-Henri Gagnon, head of communications and academic relations. Taking a series of academic conference papers, no matter how innovative, and additional commissioned essays to the state of completion required for publication with a scholarly press requires a great deal of time and support from a number of people and institutions. I thank the editors at Rowman and Littlefield International for their faith in this project and Joseph Tanke for including the book in his series “Global Aesthetic Research.” Without the editorial acumen of Greg Gibson, the conference management of Victoria Lam, and the administrative support of Andrea Tuele at the University of British Columbia, this project could not have come to fruition. Last-minute and much-needed research support for the publication of this book was provided ix

x Acknowledgments

by the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, where Matthew Evenden, associate dean of research and graduate studies, was extremely helpful. With a bibliography on the scale of that presented by the writings and thought of Michel Foucault, I am more than usually indebted to scholars in many countries, most especially Canada, France, the United States, and Great Britain. I have been fortunate to have the friendship and intellectual collaboration of a number of colleagues, not least the original conference participants and the subsequent contributors to this book, from whom I have learned a great deal and upon whose expertise I have depended. Although not able to participate in the conference, Arnold Davidson was essential in helping me to formulate the reasons for the necessity of further work on Foucault’s thinking about painting, in particular, and about the arts and letters, in general. Like all readers of Foucault, I also am indebted to Arnold Davidson for his many publications on the philosopher and for his continuing interest in this project. The authors of the chapters in this book have all been essential to the intellectual shape of the book as a whole, and I thank them for their patience with my commentaries on their work throughout the long editing process. Although Ed Dimendberg, Françoise Gaillard, T’ai Smith, and Elisabetta Villari do not have chapters in this book, their participation in the conference deserves mention here. My PhD student Anton Lee is always enormously helpful concerning every detail of the Foucault corpus of writings on the arts. Dana Arnold and Sima Godfrey have been especially important in aiding me in the formulation of the issues central to a book on Foucault and the arts and letters. Additionally, I cannot thank Sima Godfrey enough for her expertise in French translation and bibliography throughout the course of this project. She co-chaired the IEA conference proceedings and was an important link for me to the French academic world. I thank the following people for sharing their learning and friendship over the time that I worked through the complex issues involved in this book: Karen Bassi, Susanna Braund, Margaret Brose, Dana Claxton, Hubert Damisch, Derek Gregory, Michael Kelly, Michelle LeBaron, Adam Morton, Keith Moxey, Michael Roth, James Rubin, John Tagg, Teri Wehn-Damisch, and Hayden White. Finally, it is with much sadness that I wish to acknowledge the recent passing of Michael Sheringham, who was an essential participant and interlocutor at the IEA conference on Foucault and the arts and letters, and whose many contributions to the field of French literary studies and theory have been important for all of us.

Introduction Perspectives on Foucault and the Arts and Letters Catherine M. Soussloff

Michel Foucault was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His books, essays, interviews, seminars, and lectures continue to be significant for many fields in the humanities and social sciences today.1 Born in Poitiers, France, in 1926, he died prematurely of AIDS in Paris on June 25, 1984. Although Foucault wrote and spoke about the arts and letters for most of his life – notably painting, literature, music, architecture, and photography – after his death he has been best known as a philosopher of political and social theory. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, sympathetic social and political theorists have invariably turned to recent events and contemporary global social conditions when explaining the overriding significance of Foucault’s later seminars to an assessment of his contribution to political theory. In Foucault’s later work, they have found an ethics and methods that could respond to the assaults on the rights and freedoms of contemporary political subjects made in the name of necessity and brought about as a response to world events by democratically elected governments and social institutions in a neoliberal and globalized society. When viewed as a whole, this book offers numerous intersections with the efficacy that Foucault’s thought presents for contemporary geopolitical thinking and activism. These intersections between the arts and letters and the positive perceptions of Foucauldian political theory should not surprise, although they have not been extracted in the contemporary literature to a remarkable extent.2 Nor should we expect, given Foucault’s insights into “the archaeologies of silence” characteristic of discourse, that such intersections between Foucault’s political theory and the literary, visual, and performance arts should be explicit or obvious. The contributors to this book accept that Foucault’s own thinking and methods did not divide neatly into categories determined by legibility and distributed according to normative disciplinary, institutional, and xi

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methodological means. Research into Foucault’s philosophy and the arts and letters requires a suspension of the usual expectations of how to read an oeuvre, in favor of close visual and textual analyses attuned to often overlooked ruptures and dissonances in the discursive field. The chapters in this book propose the value of understanding Foucault’s corpus of writing as characterized by his synthetic method through which means the alliance between aesthetics and political theory can be made visible in the contemporary situation. In his own times, Foucault found the matter – something that should be understood here as “the arts and letters” – and concerns of aesthetics all too frequently separated or occluded from political realities and events. He made it part of his project to find the topics – most famously the prison and sexuality – in which he might reveal the intertwined configurations of the two. Scholars have increasingly considered that Foucault’s synthetic method allowed him to address with greater and greater clarity – given the evidence of the later seminars – the proximity of the aesthetic in the political, a point made in this book by Frédéric Gros and also in a number of earlier publications by Daniel Defert, Arnold Davidson, and Gros himself. While it is true that since the 1960s Foucault has not infrequently been criticized for his synthetic approach to the construction of historical and theoretical thought, and for his conclusions regarding the social institutions and discourses upon which those methods were brought to bear – such as prison, language, and medicine – the approach itself has remained productive, indeed essential to engendering comparativity in the disciplines where the criticism and interpretation of the arts and letters are concerned. The comparative and synthetic method gleaned from Foucault does not serve so much as a model here, but rather allows for alternative critical positions to the cultural materials encountered by each author in their respective contributions to the book. Therefore, the chapters in this book – whether focused biographically, critically according to medium, or theoretically – while employing a synthetic method, refer the reader to the core of Foucault’s political and philosophical commitments and their efficacy for the global political situation today. The main aim of the chapters is not the elaboration of the uses of Foucault for inquiry into the arts and letters, but to understand the meaning and integrity of his positions. Thus, this book could be said to present a series of important forays into areas that are implicit in the literature on Foucault, but that have not been explored as much as other aspects of his work. Using an overall comparative methodology, Foucault on the Arts and Letters explores the shape of Foucault’s approach to the visual arts, performance and music, literature, architecture, and aesthetics throughout his writing. The chapters in this book articulate the many ways in which the extension of Foucault’s contributions to thinking about the arts and letters provides significant insights for the future of cultural interpretation.

Introduction

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A review of Foucault’s writings from their beginnings in the 1950s to his last seminars reveals that the philosopher drew and redrew a picture of the modern and contemporary subject, intertwined with a society and the cultural productions that determined it. Foucault constantly refined his ideas about the subject and the ideas of subjectivity that resulted from his examinations of philosophical and literary texts, scientific documents and treatises, material artifacts, the built environment, and historical descriptions of social practices. The Foucauldian archive was apparently limitless, but confined, in fact and with few exceptions, to the European tradition. For some – even for many – in the postcolonial world, this comes across as a major limitation of Foucault’s contribution to political theory and proof of the poverty of his idea of freedom. On the other hand, advocates of Foucault in the twenty-first century understand the current globalized society, particularly in its economic aspects, as a result of the imposition over centuries of Western culture and Westernized policies onto the rest of the world. They see Foucault’s philosophy as providing potential ways of intervening from within centers of power. Certainly, few philosophers in the twentieth century examined their own political reality and its history as closely as Foucault did. In this sense he is an archetypical Europeanist. The chapters in this book take on the vast subject matter of Foucault’s specific archive, including its limitations, and the reader will encounter all kinds of materials in this book. While many profound explanations for the place of the individual subject in our present globalized society have relied on the insights of Foucault into the sources on the self and the political theory that might explain contemporary existence, the ramifications in the actual cultural fabric and artifacts of that existence will be found here in chapters that explore both Foucault’s own investment in material culture and in chapters that use insights found in his writing – such as disciplinary techniques – to explore contemporary forms of existence. For, beyond arguing and attempting to demonstrate how the methods of government and institutions achieve their ideal subjects through discourse and the manipulation of power in disciplinary contexts (preeminently forms of surveillance), Foucault sought to suggest the means available for the contemporary individual to gain a measure of freedom in the presence of such subjectivation. In his own writing, even on topics seemingly far removed from the arts and letters, Foucault not infrequently turned to this material as exemplary sites in which his idea of freedom from subjectivation might be visualized and deployed. Furthermore, Foucault’s ideas about the subject and subjectivities emerged according to the nature of the lens that he turned upon the topic, most famously his archaeological method that he explained in The Archaeology of Knowledge. However, as the chapters in this book reveal so clearly, in his thinking and writing Foucault also drew extensively from methods found in

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art and literary criticism, such as description or ekphrasis, and from ideas of embodied practices, such as those found in the fields of performance and in the disciplines of cultural anthropology and medicine. For all of these reasons, this book argues that Foucault’s particular approach to philosophy as a way of thinking the self through the work of art provides significant grounds for the reconsideration of his impact today. It can be observed that the chapters in this book move across as many disciplinary boundaries as Foucault himself did, and the book, therefore, may be said to take on the integration of the aesthetic and political dimensions of thought found in Foucault’s writings in order to offer deep and, at times, unusual investigations of major figures in the history of literature and critical theory – Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Beckett – and major artistic media, such as photography, dance, music, architecture, and literature. The organization of the book according to sections corresponds with the editor’s desire to maintain a synthetic, comparative, and nonchronological approach to the issues raised by a consideration of the arts and letters in Foucault’s work. The titles of the sections indicate the contemporary perspective from which the contents of the chapters of each may be viewed. The chapters within each section are arranged according to the strong associations that can be built upon in reading through them in the given order. The book begins with the section Visual Articulations and the chapter by Dana Arnold, which offers a historiographically nuanced interpretation of Madness and Civilization. This was Foucault’s first major book and, as Gilles Deleuze recognized, the source of many ideas pursued over the rest of his life. One striking contribution of Arnold’s chapter is to underline the importance of locating invisibilities and silences in Foucault’s overall project of the articulation of existence. Virtually every chapter in the book resonates in some way with this facet of Foucault’s method and arguments. Arnold locates William Hogarth’s print cycle A Rake’s Progress (1732–1733) and the architecture of the Bedlam hospital-asylum in London within Foucault’s historical account of madness where she finds both a conception of “unreason” and the “archaeology of silence.” This juxtaposition of what she calls the “visual articulations of madness and its spaces in painting and architecture” allows her to use Foucault’s approach to madness within a context that reveals both its strengths as an interpretative frame and the ambiguity of its historical applicability. In “The Photogenic Invention of Thought-Emotion,” Anton Lee explores Foucault’s sole essay on photography and his last published text on the visual arts, the essay on his American contemporary Duane Michals. Lee argues that this later essay exhibits a proclivity for a “post-Cartesian photography,” which intersects with the philosopher’s interest in the formation of alternative subjectivities that aspire to contingent truth-values in opposition to traditional photographic representation. The ambivalent sexuality

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of Michals’s subject and the sequential ordering and narrative elements of the images calls forth a reconceptualization of the medium of photography and of the viewer’s own expectations, demonstrating how Foucault used Michals’s photographic visualizations of a shifting identity to explore the theoretical issue of subjectivity. The importance of the visual in Foucault’s own thought and its significance for the interpretation of contemporary art emerge in Sophie Berrebi’s chapter on the French artist Jean-Luc Moulène. Berrebi demonstrates that the inheritance of Foucault for contemporary visual art may be particularly strong in the area of photographic installation work that uses documents and a revised concept of the archive, proposed first by Foucault, to critique the institutions of art. Moulène’s project in the Louvre is a particularly acute example of the resonance of Foucault’s work on the archive with a dominant trend in contemporary installation art in the museum and it brings the philosopher and the artist into a sort of disputation with the theories on photography of John Tagg and Alan Sekula. In all of these players, Berrebi locates a refusal to accept the evidence of photography and its appeal to reality, which, so she argues, should urge contemporary viewers to maintain a skeptical perspective on all visual practices reliant on a concept of the transparency of the archive. The two chapters in the section Bodily Experience in Dance and Music address the complexity of the intertwining of the body and experience in Foucault’s writing, as discussed in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality volumes, but also in later essays on the construction of the self and the 1982–1983 seminars on The Hermeneutics of the Subject. While Foucault’s writing on dance and music is sparse, if practically nonexistent, the body may be considered central to much of his writing from the beginning, as encountered in Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic. In their originality, the chapters in this section reveal more precisely the significance of these fields for the interpretation of the body in Foucault’s philosophy. In “Body Techniques and Techniques of the Self,” Frédéric Pouillaude proposes choreographed techniques in dance as exemplary of Foucault’s concept of “lived experience” and integrally related to the idea of the self in the world. Pouillaude opposes Foucault’s approach to the disciplined body in action to the static artwork made for contemplation, and he argues that dance allows us to understand both the power dynamics inherent in technique and the Foucauldian concept of ideal existence as an ethical aesthetics.3 In “Discipline and Pianist: Foucault and the Genealogy of the Étude,” Brandon Konoval provides a fine-grained history of the piano étude at the end of the nineteenth century/beginning of the twentieth century and relates its technical rigors and practices to Foucault’s interpretation of disciplinary techniques. Following Foucault’s method in Discipline and Punish, Konoval compares the musical practice of the early twentieth century with contemporaneous military drills

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and procedures in order to situate more precisely the historical material to the concept of disciplinary techniques and the operations of power. As Pouillaude does with the art form of dance, Konoval sees a productive slippage in the piano étude between disciplinary techniques imposed upon and learned by the body and the self-conscious production of the self as an aspect of the aesthetics of existence. The section Heroic and Tragic Subjectivities begins with Sima Godfrey’s examination of the sources for Foucault’s conception of modernity, starting with Kant, which might be said to have engendered his unique historical method. In seeking the intellectual roots of Foucault’s approach to modern life, Godfrey finds an insistence on contemporaneity – what she calls “the heroization of the present moment” – that differs significantly from the two other major theorists of modernity: Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Godfrey’s careful historiographical analysis of the reception of Baudelaire and Benjamin in post–World War II France locates the intellectual originality of Foucault’s own brand of modernity more precisely in a tradition of FrancoGermanic literary critique. Indeed, in many of the chapters that follow here, the authors supply telling analyses of Foucault’s reliance on conceptions of the heroic and the tragic as found in the literary landscape of the European tradition in order to nuance his interpretation of contemporary subjectivity. Marisa C. Sánchez explores the significance of the major literary work of Samuel Beckett for Foucault’s approach to language and representation, particularly at the crucial moment of his election to the Collège de France in 1970. In describing the intersections – some visible, some not so visible – between Beckett’s writing and Foucault’s philosophy, Sánchez suggests an affinity for the representation of the “de-centered subject” in both, which is achieved through the manipulation of language in order to reveal what theretofore had been unidentifiable. In Arianna Sforzini’s chapter “The Role of Parrhēsia in King Lear,” Shakespeare becomes the protagonist in the Foucauldian canon, not so much, according to the author, due to his literary status in it, but because of the ostentatious dramatic aspects of his concept and use of tragedy in the plays. Looking into the meaning of the event in Foucault’s political theory, Sforzini finds theatrical tragedy as the paradigmatic location for the expression of the event as political discourse. In this view, the play of King Lear – both in its historical mise-en-scène of seventeenth-century Britain and in its depiction of the tragic sovereign hero – gives the ultimate example of a reflection on the practice of truth-telling, or parrhēsia. According to Sforzini’s argument, Lear is the ethical lesson found in the aesthetic artifact and thus a central text for analyzing Foucault’s philosophy of existence. The final section of the book addresses the idea of Aesthetics Transformed, a title referring to Foucault’s conception of ethics as coming from and in accord with aesthetic principles and practices that can be actually

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transformative for subjectivity. The section begins with my chapter, “Deleuze on Foucault: The Recourse to Painting,” because Gilles Deleuze’s book Foucault is one of the first attempts to define Foucault’s contribution to philosophy through an examination of his method, and it does so by turning to a concept of “visibility” taken from the uses made of painting in Foucault’s writing beginning with Madness and Civilization. Deleuze’s dual focus in his book on Foucault’s method and on the particular kind of visibility offered by painting allows the reader to understand the imbricated nature of the relationship of Foucault’s use of the techniques and terminologies associated with visual analysis and the work of art. I argue that Deleuze’s assessment of Foucault’s philosophy indicates the strength that painting maintained as both a historical tool and a conceptual methodology in a system conceived of as centrally concerned with vision and visibility as a way of understanding the situation of the subject in the world. In “Critical Travels, Discursive Practices: Foucault in Tunis,” Ilka Kressner turns to a specific, but little-studied, moment in Foucault’s biography when his work on painting intersected crucially with a transformation of his understanding of politics: Tunis, Tunisia, 1966–1968. Kressner thus links the approach to painting and its visibilities taken by Foucault in his lectures at the University of Tunis with the transformation of his self as seen in North African ascetics. Moreover, in the years in Tunis she discerns a change of course in Foucault’s approach, a turning toward literary discourse and otherness, not found in philosophy per se or in his prior Eurocentric experience, which allowed for new perspectives found in the seminars following his appointment at the Collège de France. In the chapter “Remaking the Self in Heterotopia,” Andrew Ballantyne, an architectural historian, addresses the famously difficult Foucauldian concept of heterotopic space and argues for its centrality in understanding the meaning of the making of the self in Foucault’s thought. Ballantyne gets at heterotopia through the figures of Defoe’s Robinson, Flaubert’s St. Anthony, and Henry David Thoreau’s self-representation in Walden, each of them seen as a different sort of embodiment of the practice of the heterotopian ideal. Ballantyne explains that they exist in “spaces that are apart from the commonplace world where a society’s dominant values freely operate.” Turning to Deleuze and Guattari as support for his argument concerning Foucault’s heterotopia, Ballantyne asserts that these are places of liberation for a freedom of the self that transgresses the boundaries of consciousness and that can be truly “known” only through the experience of literary characters. In the final chapter, “The Aesthetics of Bios,” Frédéric Gros reprises two aspects of his seminal and ongoing interpretation of Foucault’s political philosophy: the importance of the concept of the work of art and the meaning of the philosopher’s “aesthetics of existence.” Gros summarizes how the themes of the construction of the self, the issue of subjectivity, the issue of freedom,

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and the issue of existence inter-articulate with and through the work of art in Foucault’s thought. In this way, we see that the philosopher understands the idea of being in the world as a particular way of being, expressed in the word “existence,” which has significant resonances with German philosophy but which has been reformed, one might say, in Foucault to the point of “coexistence” with aesthetics. In this regard, Gros considers aesthetics as the determinant discourse of Foucault’s political philosophy. NOTES 1. For a recent meditation on “the archive of Foucault,” spurred by the thirtieth anniversary of his death, see http://www.telerama.fr/idees/la-seconde-vie-de-michelfoucault,113884.php. 2. There are important exceptions to this statement. See the essays and commentary in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1998) and Philippe Artières, ed., Michel Foucault: La littérature et les arts. Actes du Colloque de Cerisy, juin 2001 (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2004). See also Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault on Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2009); some of the essays in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, Jana Sawicki, eds., A Companion to Foucault (Maiden, MA: J. Wiley, 2013). My forthcoming book Michel Foucault and the Pleasure of Painting (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) will also address at length issues regarding painting, theory, and the visual arts. In what follows here, I have sought to keep the endnote references to a minimum and I refer the reader to the scholarly apparatus of the chapters in the book for specific references to Foucault’s work. 3. For an earlier exploration of Foucault’s concept of dance, discipline and the body, see Mark Franko, “Archaeological Choreographic Practices: Foucault and Forsythe,” History of the Human Sciences 24 (October 2011): 97–112.

Part I

VISUAL ARTICULATIONS

Chapter 1

Unreason and the Ambiguities of Silence Dana Arnold

William Hogarth’s picture cycle A Rake’s Progress (1732–1733) tells the story of Tom Rakewell, a wastrel heir who inherits his miserly father’s fortune. Originally a series of eight paintings that was later translated into popular prints, the scenes narrate Tom’s moral and financial decline. We see how money and manners make Tom socially acceptable and the lengths he is prepared to go to in order to maintain his newly found status and wealth. His actions and ambitions are parodied in the final scene, where we see his descent into madness and incarceration in the London lunatic asylum known as Bedlam. Rakewell’s rejection by the society he sought to please has resonance with Foucault’s exploration of why the mad have been confined, isolated, and excluded throughout modern history in his seminal work Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961). My concern here is with visual manifestations of madness and the spaces in which they take place. First I consider the complexities of the publishing history and the reception of Foucault’s text in both the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. This underpins my discussion of the spaces of madness in eighteenth-century Britain as evident in the architecture of Bedlam and Hogarth’s depiction of this as part of his visual narrative of the “progress” of Tom Rakewell. THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK In Folie et déraison, Foucault argues that madness exists only in society and comes into being only when societal forces seek to repress it. The essence of madness is that it cannot be verbalized, as language is the tool of reason. Instead, he suggests we can write the story of madness by writing about what 3

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makes madness such a linguistically impenetrable zone. According to Foucault, this would be an “archaeology of silence” that in turn would help us to understand other forms of exclusion.1 In Folie et déraison, Foucault charts the journey of the mad from liberty and discourse to confinement and silence, and explores how this transition is achieved through the exercise of power. He starts in the sixteenth century, when madness was an “undifferentiated experience,”2 a time when the mad roamed the countryside in “an easy wandering existence.”3 Foucault presents madness as an active force in Renaissance society that was part of daily life. Madness was not controlled or encountered in specific situations nor was it observed in particular conditions; it was simply part of everyday social experience. In Renaissance society madness was public and present everywhere, not exhibited behind bars. An important distinction is drawn between the different experience of madness during the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, when the mad were separated from the rest of society. Foucault identified a shift in attitudes toward the insane that resulted in their confinement or incarceration. This confinement hid away unreason but drew attention to madness in order to organize and exhibit it. Foucault shows the historical and cultural developments that lead to “that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours.”4 Foucault examines the “great incarceration” of the insane into asylums during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and England. This was both a physical and a moral incarceration, a stigmatization of madness to replace the old stigma of leprosy. The madhouse isolated unreason, substituting “for the free terror of madness the stifling anguish of responsibility.”5 We learn how the mad came first to be identified and confined; how moral and economic factors determined those who ought to be confined; how they were perceived as dangerous as a result of being confined, partly through association with the lepers who they had replaced as outcasts. Madness became the antithesis of reason, and the dialogue of reason and unreason – such as Shakespeare had portrayed between the fool and King Lear – was ended. Reason had triumphed at the expense of the unusual, the nonconformist, and, ultimately, the individual human being. And this signals Foucault’s broader concern with the notion of existence and the social systems that work to contain and control it. Madness is germane to this train of thought. FOUCAULT AND ARCHAEOLOGY The concept of archaeology is no stranger to Foucault’s writing. Indeed, The Archaeology of Knowledge is arguably one of Foucault’s best-known works,6



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albeit that it stands distinct from his other writings. Here, Foucault reflects on the mode of analysis he employed in his previous works Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. Foucault presents a historiographic review of his methodological processes in these earlier works. To this end he uses “archaeology” or the “archaeological method” as a means of critiquing the established narrative structures of both history and philosophy. Foucault sees the need for continuity and progression in constructing narratives of the past as processes of exclusion where we project our own consciousness on to the past. Instead, Foucault argues that systems of knowledge define the boundaries of thought and language used in a given period. These epistemes, or discursive formations, function outside the consciousness of the individual subjects. There is no doubt that Foucault’s thoughts about the “archaeology of knowledge” are perhaps better known than his thinking about an “archaeology of silence.”7 That said, I would like to begin with an “archaeological” exploration of the book itself as this text, perhaps more than any other of Foucault’s writings, has been through several transformations, not least due to the author’s own editorial interventions. My method here resembles, in some ways, a more traditional archaeological digging through the layers of the text to establish its publishing history. But at the same time, I also explore the anachronisms, deviations, and indeed ambiguities in the history of the text and its reception by the Anglophone and Francophone scholarly communities. I contest that here Foucault’s own archaeological method of exploring knowledge and historical circumstance comes into play. It is important to explore the publication and translation history as it differs greatly between the French and Anglo-American contexts. Moreover, the unevenness between the two linguistic realms impacted on the critical reception of Foucault’s early work. Subsequent developments in Foucault’s own thinking and his oftentimes unsystematic editorial interventions mean there is the lack of fixity in the text. Added to this are the vagaries of the translations into English. The problematic relationship between different versions and different languages has caused some disquiet among scholars, especially the resolutely Anglophone. But to my mind the protean nature of this text makes it all the more interesting. THE PUBLISHING HISTORY OF THE BOOK Folie et déraison was first published by Plon in 1961. It was an enormous volume based on Foucault’s doctoral thesis. An abridged version appeared only three years later as Histoire de la folie published by Union générale d’éditions

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(UGE). This version, which had been shortened by Foucault himself, was translated into English by Richard Howard and published in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon). The same translation was published in Britain by Tavistock in 1967 in a series edited by R. D. Laing, a leading light in the anti-psychiatry movement (see below).8 This version had a preface by David Cooper, who was also part of the anti-psychiatry movement, and included some of the material from the original 1961 text. Foucault returned to the abridged version in 1972, making minor amendments to the text and adding a new preface that replaced the original one and two new appendices. This was published by Gallimard as Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. The two appendices that were added in 1972, “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” and “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu,” were subsequently withdrawn from a further edition also published by Gallimard in 1976. This work is commonly known as Histoire de la folie. An English version of the original full-length 1961 text appeared forty-five years after the first French edition. It was published in 2006 by Routledge under the title History of Madness, with a new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. An additional “archaeological” layer was added to this new version as R. D. Laing’s review of the text for the 1967 version is included in the front matter.9 Debates about the scholarly worth and historical accuracy of Folie et déraison have straddled the Francophone and Anglophone worlds since its first appearance in 1961. It is not my concern here either to rehearse these arguments in depth or to add to the many gallons (or liters) of academic ink that have been spilled in their furtherance.10 What follows is, if you will, a shallow archaeology of the critique and reception of the work in its various manifestations. This gives context to my Foucauldian reading of two discrete but related articulations of madness in eighteenth-century Britain: scene eight of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress and the architecture of Bedlam. On the French side of the Channel, Foucault received immediate, if not extraordinary, praise from Fernand Braudel and other intellectual luminaries including Roland Barthes and Michel Serres.11 Braudel’s postscript to a positive review by Robert Mandrou in the Annales in 1962 was in his own words to underscore the “originality and pioneering character” of Foucault’s book.12 To my mind, Braudel puts his finger on it when he reflects on the “ambiguity” in the work: I am adding a few lines to the account above in order to underscore the original, pioneering character of Michel Foucault’s book. … In this work, I recognise and admire a rare ability to address a problem from three of four different viewpoints, this ambiguity sometimes inflects on the material approach of the book (one must be very attentive in order to follow the argument), but it is this very ambiguity of every collective phenomenon: a



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truth about civilization that is plunged into obscurity by contradictory motivations that are both conscious and unconscious. This magnificent work attempts to analyze, the particular phenomenon of madness, which can be the mysterious progression of the mindset of a civilisation, and how it can set itself free.13

Only a few years later, Jacques Derrida articulated doubts about the work, particularly in regard to the feasibility of writing about madness. He claimed it is impossible to articulate madness verbally as, by Foucault’s own definition, language is the tool of reason. And therein lies the conundrum or indeed the intellectual double bind of Folie et déraison.14 Derrida also took issue with Foucault’s historical analysis of madness in relation to philosophical thinking. Derrida was particularly aggrieved at the historical significance Foucault placed on the way Descartes treats madness in his Meditations on First Philosophy.15 This prompted a very public exchange of ideas between the two savants, not least in the two appendices “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” and “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” added by Foucault to the 1972 edition mentioned above. Folie et déraison prompted equal controversy in the Anglophone world.16 This was due in part because it was available for decades only in the abridged version and partly due to the linguistic barriers of working in translation and the inevitable debates about accuracy, a fact not without irony in the age of the linguistic turn.17 Historians berated Foucault for the absence of rigor when in fact much of this “rigor” (not least some eight hundred footnotes) had been cut from the 1964 edition and its subsequent English translation. Footnotes or not, Foucault’s approach was considered too philosophical to be historical for the Anglophone scholars of the 1960s, who were at best unfamiliar with the tradition of historical philosophy/philosophical history. Predictably, it was also viewed as too historically and factually based to be of interest to philosophers. The intellectual consternation at such a genuinely interdisciplinary work might seem anachronistic in the present-day academic climate, where at least lip service to transdisciplinary enquiry is almost mandatory. Moreover, the acceptance of the text by sociologists, coupled with the use of Foucault’s study by the anti-psychiatry movement, served only to provoke more academic anxiety. As mentioned above, Laing’s collaborator David Cooper wrote the introduction to the 1967 version of the text that was published in Britain in which he claims Foucault’s historical analysis of madness as proof of the failure of institutions/psychiatry and the invention of madness. Subsequently, the anti-psychiatry movement lost much of its scholarly credibility and became just an episode in the history of that discipline.18 As such, Foucault was no longer required as its champion. The sociologists survived and now form part of the academic establishment, and the interdisciplinary nature of

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their concerns and methods provides ample library shelf space for Foucault’s work. And we will find Foucault scattered across libraries and reading lists for the sciences de l’homme (social sciences). But it is his importance for the arts and letters that is the concern of this chapter and indeed this book as a whole. The early history of Folie et déraison is, then, potentially one of a disastrous path to academic oblivion – at least in its significance for the arts and letters in the Anglophone world. Luckily for us, Foucault’s later writings, many of which are discussed elsewhere in this book, and the ever-expanding field of secondary literature have made his work generally more accessible – concepts such as the “episteme”19 and his use of the terms “archaeology” and “dispositif,”20 which were both novel and provocative in their own right, now seem part of a familiar academic tool kit. Importantly here, they helped our understanding of the historical philosophy and the philosophical history and provide a way into Foucault’s earlier writings. Returning to Folie et déraison and its archaeology, I would suggest that to read Foucault as a historian who assembles facts about attitudes toward madness in the long eighteenth century is at best an underestimation of the value of this study, if not a way to fundamentally miss the point of what is going on.21 Here my concerns are very simple: how this book by Foucault, in all its complexities, can help us to interrogate two specific visual (i.e., nonverbal) representations of madness in the eighteenth century. One of these is the purpose-built lunatic asylum known as Bedlam that stood in Moorfields in the City of London. The other is the final scene of Hogarth’s picture series A Rake’s Progress, where, as mentioned above, we see Tom Rakewell confined to Bedlam. The connective tissue between these two examples is that each visually articulates the spaces of the confinement of the insane. In doing so, they both go beyond the confines of language, thus enabling an exploration of the archaeology of silence and its contingent ambiguities. Bearing in mind Braudel’s remark about the ambiguity in the text, I want to pursue three discrete lines of enquiry that cohere around the notion of an archaeology of silence and particularly the “imperfect words” referred to by Foucault in his preface to the book: The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.22

First, I consider the word “unreason” (déraison), which was dropped from the title. This leads me to think about its articulation through the archaeology



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of silence in the visual representation of madness and the spaces that confine it in the final scene of A Rake’s Progress and in the visual aesthetic of the lunatic asylum known as Bedlam. DÉRAISON My interest begins with the word “unreason,” which in itself is not an unproblematic category. I want to concentrate on what this might mean to Anglophone scholars and how it might lead to a rethinking of two visual articulations of a crucial moment in eighteenth-century British history. The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology can appear to be one of the last places of refuge for idea-bound academics.23 But, surprisingly, it gives examples of the use of “unreason” only in the Renaissance and the nineteenth century (mostly used pejoratively about women) but not in the eighteenth century, where we might well have expected to find it. Surely, the “Age of Reason” must have its antithesis! It fascinates me that the word is absent from the discourses of madness and reason in this period. Is it then one of the “imperfect words” in “which the exchange between madness and reason [is] carried out”?24 To explore this I would like to use the concepts of “Unreason” and “Reason” to tease out meanings and ambiguities in A Rake’s Progress and Bedlam. It is not my intention to set up binaries; rather, I wish to explore the slippage between these two discursive formations. THE SPACES OF UNREASON Bedlam was founded in 1247 with a gift of land from the Bishop of Bethlehem to found a priory of the order of St. Mary of Bethlehem. But early on in its history, Bedlam began to specialize in the treatment of the insane. It remained unique in this role up until the seventeenth century.25 Demand for the treatment of the insane was such that the hospital was rebuilt in a new location on the open site of Moorfields in the City of London. The impressive new premises, which were designed by Robert Hooke from 1674 to 1676, propelled Bedlam into the public sphere. The hospital was mostly supported financially by middle-class merchants, who were based in the City of London.26 They enjoyed great power in the City of London, yet had no political clout outside of this discrete area of the metropolis. At this time the middle classes had no vote and were remote from the processes of national government based in the City of Westminster.27 This was the cause of tension between the governing aristocratic elite and the middle-class city merchants, not least as the City of London was essential for the economy and enterprise of the whole of London, if not England itself. Bedlam became a flagship for

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the city merchants’ importance, as expressed through paternalistic values and social control. Indeed, philanthropy and madness were put on the same stage as the asylum was opened up to the general public. Viewing the mad in their confined state became a popular pastime for polite society. The spatial significance of Bedlam is important for our understanding of unreason. The public who paid to see madmen helped to set them in their place, and by being observed, the insane could be placed in a particular social space within unreason. In this way architecture (and its spaces) operates as an ordered physical structure that acts as a metonym for other inherited structures – this encompasses the makeup of society as a whole, a code of morality, a body of manners, a system of language, and the way in which individuals relate to their spatial surroundings. Architectural style was a means of enabling these kinds of performances. The changing relationship between the aristocratic and bourgeois classes is part of the performance of these rituals, and architecture provides both the space and the aesthetic for this ongoing process. In this way, domestic architecture – here I mean the grand houses of the ruling elite – became the physical embodiment of governmental and social systems. These private mansions, found in both rural and urban settings, were the most splendid forms of architecture in Britain during the long eighteenth century. The architecture of antiquity remained a constant referent, but their design moved from a kind of European baroque toward a distinctive form of classicism. Importantly for us, the style of the aristocratic great house influenced other forms of architecture. The added ingredient here, in the specific instance of Bedlam, is the aesthetic expression and reception of the housing of the insane in such a splendid architectural setting. This could only work to rupture the architectural embodiment of the social status quo as mad paupers appeared to be housed as if they were kings. UNREASONABLE ARCHITECTURE/ ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE The design of Bedlam, as far as we know it, hovered somewhere between a two-dimensional stage set and the more traditional great house design. The long, thin structure occupied the southernmost edge of Moorfields, which formed a grand space or “place” in front of the hospital. The popular myth that the design was modeled on the European baroque of the Palais des Tuileries in Paris may or may not have substance, but it is indicative of the importance attached to the aesthetic of the building and its visual impact on its immediate environment.28 The important thing here is that a hospital for lunatic paupers made a more significant contribution to the



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grandeur of the urban topography of London than any royal or indeed aristocratic palace. The resulting urban phenomenon rivaled the architectural aesthetic of other major European capitals as well as the supremacist language of the classically inspired great house. The role of architecture, specifically here the lunatic asylum, as a symbol of patrician authority is seen in the relationship between the style of architecture and the style of politics, and in the rhetoric of the ruling elite. To this end, architecture functioned as a space for the performance of highly visible paternalistic displays that, in the case for instance of the asylum, included medical succor, charity, and prudent governance. All these elements were used to exact deference from the lower orders and reinforce the social system. In this way the performative elements of the display of power were important and architecture functioned as the spatial focus for these. The difference here is that the recipients of charity were not in a position to recognize the beneficence bestowed upon them.29 In this way the middle-class governors of Bedlam adopted the architectural gestures and manners of the aristocratic great house. And, as I explore later on in this chapter, I do not find this too dissimilar to Tom’s action in The Levee scene. In both cases the manners, gestures, or the aesthetics, if you will, of the elite are adopted (or performed) by their social inferiors in the reasonable pursuit of social advancement. Of particular note in the case of the architecture of Bedlam is the adoption of the long gallery as the mainstay of the spatial planning. The long gallery was a hallmark of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury great houses, comprising a long narrow space usually well lit on one side by large windows. They were spaces of display where the elite would walk up and down in a kind of social parade. The galleries often contained artistic treasures that could be admired by the promenaders. There were two galleries, each running the entire length of the two stories of Bedlam. Each long gallery was approximately six hundred feet in length and around forty feet deep and punctuated only in the center by the redundant double-height lobby. Both of Bedlam’s long galleries gave access to the cells for individual patients, which were about twelve feet wide, each with a window at the rear of the hospital. Bedlam was, then, an extremely long, narrow, single-pile building with two completely contrasting facades. The drama and majesty of the interior spaces of Bedlam were matched by the design of its exterior. The pattern of fenestration and the classically inspired detailing of the six-hundred-foot-long entrance facade ensured the hospital’s monumental aesthetic. No wonder the baroque architecture of the Paris of Louis XIV was seen as an inspiration, or indeed competition, for such an imposing edifice. The choice of such a palatial entrance facade by the governors of this location in the City of London has been the cause of much comment and debate. Perceived as extravagant and its magnificence ridiculed, the new design was

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criticized as a palace for paupers whose exterior masked the grim reality of its interior form and function (figure 1.1). This caused contemporaries to question who were madder – the occupants or the governors who had commissioned such an “ostentatious piece of vanity.” In this way Bedlam shares the ambiguities of the second and final scenes of A Rake’s Progress. The rear facade of Bedlam offers a striking contrast to the baroque classicism of the entrance facade. An isolated Serlian window on the flank of the hospital provides a transition point from the grandeur of the entrance facade. But the rear facade of Bedlam is plain and unarticulated. Its design is as functional as it is rational, and to highlight its separateness, it is hidden from view (figure 1.2). The mask is London Wall, the historic fabric of the city that encases and articulates or muffles the double-height run of individual cells contained within. The window apertures of these are just visible. We could see the juxtaposition of the wall and facade as a mask for the repulsion that the building houses – the unacceptable or off-putting aspect of humanity. Architecturally and aesthetically this is ingrained in the urban fabric of the city. The binaries at play here between inside/outside, attraction/repulsion, open/closed, reason/unreason are highlighted by the two facades of Bedlam.

Figure 1.1  Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), Moorfields, engraving by Robert White, 1677. Source: Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.



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There is no doubt that these binaries offer certainties through the play between opposites. But there is a kind of linguistic reasonableness in this explanation of the architecture of Bedlam that jars with Foucault’s exploration of madness. How does the idea of reason relate to the discourses around architecture in the classical age? And what might this tell us about the imperfect words that articulate unreason?

Figure 1.2  South-west view of Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) and London Wall, engraving by J. T. Smith, 1814. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Guildhall Library, City of London.

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HETERONOMY The relationship between architecture and (un)reason makes me think about Emil Kaufmann’s Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and PostBaroque in England, Italy, and France (posthumously published in 1955).30 Kaufmann examined the production and theories of architecture in Europe in the long eighteenth century. His innovative approach made this distinctive period relevant to his contemporaries as he forged connections between eighteenth- and twentieth-century rationalism in architectural design. Kaufmann juxtaposed architecture and morality by using the notion of heteronomy. He arrived at this through Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy of acting in accordance with one’s desires rather than reason or moral duty. Here Kant refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of nonmoral actions. These actions are subject to laws or standards that are external to the individual. As such, heteronomy is the counterpoint or opposite of autonomy. Kaufmann combined formal stylistic analysis with architectural theory to define the social-historical significance of reason in design. He created what Germain Bazin termed the “hétéronome” baroque, a form of architectural production that is influenced by a force outside the individual. Is then heteronomy a form of déraison? Returning to the architecture of Bedlam, does “heteronomy” become one of the imperfect words that help us explain and understand its design? Madness is as present in the architectural style and the motivation of the patrons of Bedlam as it is in its occupants. Each is subject to external forces that make actions appear both reasonable and unreasonable. And it is these ambiguities that I wish to explore further. UNREASONABLE ACTIONS A Rake’s Progress reflects Hogarth’s concern with modern moral subjects, which is also evident, for instance, in his earlier picture cycle A Harlot’s Progress (1730).31 The moralizing tale is that of Tom Rakewell, the spendthrift heir of a miserly father. We meet Tom as he inherits his father’s wealth while at the same time rejecting his pregnant fiancée, Sarah Young, whom he now refuses to marry. In the second scene, Tom adopts the manners of a fashionable gentleman holding a morning levee in his new palatial accommodation. We next find Tom squandering his fortune in a brothel. In these first three scenes, Tom is shown to be naïve, being duped, and robbed by those who surround him. The only goodness Tom experiences throughout this story is from Sarah Young. In scene four, she reappears and pays his bail money with her own earnings when he narrowly escapes arrest for debt on the way to a party at St James’s Palace. Regardless of the kindness, Tom goes on to



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marry a rich elderly widow in an attempt to solve his financial problems. But by scene six he loses his second fortune in the Gaming House, where we see him kneeling and wigless and cursing his fate in a gesture suggestive of madness. The final two scenes trace Tom’s journey from the Fleet, London’s debtor’s prison, to Bedlam, the well-known London lunatic asylum. His gestures of despair at a rejected script of a play he has written in the hope of securing his freedom from the Fleet soon turn to the manners of madness in Bedlam. The story is a commentary on avarice, moral turpitude, and the perils of the modern consumer society. In The Levée, Tom is fashionably dressed and at his morning levee in his smart, new London house attended by musicians, other hangers-on, and acolytes (figure 1.3). This is in part a commentary on the cultural pursuits of contemporary society, many of which took place in a domestic setting. The fact that certain well-known cultural figures can be identified gives this scene added piquancy. Of particular note is the music master at a harpsichord, who is supposed to be George Frideric Handel. In addition, the landscape gardener Charles Bridgeman is also represented. There are also a number of generic cultural types including a fencing master and a dancing master with a violin. It is a microcosm of the social and cultural world of the long eighteenth century as played out in the country house and town residence of the elite. Tom’s inevitable moral, physical, and financial decline culminates in the final scene, where he is confined in Bedlam (figure 1.4). The madhouse where Tom ends his days is a mirror image of his home in the second scene of the picture cycle. In a parody of the levee, we see Tom manacled and practically naked, lying on the ground unable to get up. This dystopian image is emphasized as Tom is surrounded by his fellow inmates, all of whom present a strange echo of the outside world and in some ways of Tom’s earlier levee scene. The characters represented, who appear in the large space of the long gallery, include a tailor, a musician, an astronomer, and an archbishop. In the door to one of the cells is a man who believes he is a king – he is naked and carries a straw crown and scepter. Tom himself has become part of the display or spectacle of Bedlam. And we are reminded of this by the presence of two fashionably dressed women who have come to the asylum as a social occasion, to be entertained by the bizarre antics of the poor suffering lunatics. The lighting that streams in from a small window placed high up in one of the cells that opens onto the long gallery emphasizes the strangeness of the scene. My question here is at what point do Tom’s actions become unreasonable? Two lines of enquiry help me to explore this: the philosophy of action and the history of capitalism,32 as witnessed here through the philanthropy of the middle-class patrons in the City of London who supported Bedlam. The connective tissue between these is the aesthetics of manners and gesture.

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Figure 1.3  A Rake’s Progress: The Levée Scene, William Hogarth, 1733. Source: Private collection.

Figure 1.4  A Rake’s Progress: Bedlam Scene, William Hogarth, 1733. Source: Private collection.



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Together these elements combine to shed light on or indeed point to the ambiguities about who is mad and what is madness. This leads me to the aesthetics of manners and gesture – the behaviors or affectations that define social and mental states that can be seen as performative. Throughout the series of prints Tom performs a variety of roles, and these actions articulate madness. HEDONISM In the context of Tom Rakewell’s story, I suggest that manners and gestures help point us toward the imperfect words that can articulate unreason. Tom assumes polite manners through the adoption of gestures that make him acceptable to polite society, and these are parodied in Bedlam. Perhaps it is the adoption of these manners and gestures that is the beginning of Tom’s unreason, in which case The Levée is as likely to be the spatial articulation of the madhouse as Bedlam itself. Should we then read backward from Bedlam? Indeed, if we look again at the final scene in Bedlam, we see that Tom is calm, physically different, and presented as a quasi-religious figure. His gestures and pose are based on the Christian images of the Deposition or the Lamentation of Christ. What then of the presence or absence of reason in other episodes from Tom’s story? The philosophy of action can help shed some light here.33 Pleasure and pain are both essential to hedonistic actions and are fundamental sources of practical reasons. In this way, beliefs, actions, and desires can all be rational on the basis of rational elements that transfer rationality to them. Tom’s story raises questions about the relationship between desire and actions. Of particular interest here is how desires, taken together with beliefs, justify actions. Tom’s story offers a comprehensive account of practical and theoretical reasons that can help us understand the notion of a rational person. But a rational person need not act consistently in a rational way; it is possible to exhibit some irrational actions. Certain beliefs or behaviors may not be rational but at the same time cannot be considered irrational. In this way it is perfectly possible for a rational person to actively develop certain nonrational elements in themselves and, perhaps more importantly here, allow these beliefs to play a significant role in their behavior. With this in mind we can see Tom’s visit to the brothel or tavern, his marriage of convenience, and his financially ruinous gambling in scenes three, five, and six as distasteful, and they certainly paved the way to his ruin. But all of these were part of modern life and outside the context of Hogarth’s linear moralizing narrative considered reasonable actions, or at least the hedonistic actions of someone who is not mad. Equally, actions carried out in the pursuit of social status as we see in scenes two and four (the levée and Tom’s attendance at a society party) can be seen as hedonistic as they are reasonable.

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Foucault argues that madness exists only in society and comes into being only when societal forces seek to repress it. If we accept through the philosophy of action that Tom’s behavior is reasonable, we have to ask what exactly is being repressed here? Tom’s story takes place in the City of Westminster, and he courts the attention of the ruling elite. Yet, Tom’s incarceration is in the City of London and is part of the history of capitalism as he is in Bedlam, fiat of the middle-class city merchants. This social group is responding to unreason according to Foucault’s idea that “men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours.”34 The act of confinement gave this social class a standing otherwise denied to them by their disenfranchised status. Here, their importance is expressed through paternalistic values and social control. In the case of Tom Rakewell it was both a physical and a moral incarceration, a stigmatization of madness as the failure of social aspiration. Tom’s actions are driven by external forces that made him strive for social betterment and approval. In this way his adoption of the manners and gestures of the elite can be seen as akin to the heteronomy at play in the architecture of Bedlam. AMBIGUITIES My starting point for this chapter was a curiosity about how our knowledge and understanding of madness in eighteenth-century Britain can be influenced by Foucault’s Folie et déraison. This led me to consider how visual articulations of madness and its spaces in painting and architecture interact with a linguistically impenetrable zone to reveal the discourses of what Foucault termed the “archaeology of silence.” I contest that here Foucault’s own archaeological method of exploring knowledge and historical circumstance comes into play. In this way we are able to explore the anachronisms, deviations, and indeed ambiguities in the history of the text and its reception by the Anglophone and Francophone scholarly communities. Beyond this, the ambiguities of this Foucauldian method come to the fore in my anachronistic use of the word déraison, as this term became silent in Foucault’s own discourse. An analysis of the visual manifestations of déraison within this distinct Foucauldian paradigm can work in unexpected ways. On one level we find in the discourses of Bedlam and Tom Rakewell evidence of the shift in social attitudes toward madness outlined by Foucault in Folie et déraison. But it is the ambiguities in the discourses around Bedlam and Tom that unravel the “historical” binaries to reveal the “imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made.”35 And it is, then, the slippage between these two states that comes to the fore. Within the historical



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context of the long eighteenth century, we find the notions of heteronomy and hedonism point toward epistemes, or discursive formations, that function outside the consciousness of the individual subject. Here, issues of class and class aspiration in the age of capitalism as expressed through manners and gesture boil down to questions of free will and autonomy and the societal forces that impact on the actions of an individual. What becomes clear is the ambiguities present in visual representations of the adoption of emblems of power and resulting acts of unreason. I want to give the last word to Foucault, and indeed the original title of his book Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. He sees fit to name madness and unreason separately, and I wonder if this is what is at play in Bedlam and A Rake’s Progress.

NOTES 1. Foucault was not the first philosopher to think about silence. He may have been influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s essay that had appeared a decade earlier, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 76–120. My thanks to Catherine M. Soussloff for this observation. 2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1967), ix. 3. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, 8. 4. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, ix. 5. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, 234. 6. Michel Foucault, 1969. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). 7. Foucault did use the term “archaeology of knowledge” in Madness and Civilisation, 265. 8. R. D. Laing had published the key work on this field, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock) in 1959. 9. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). 10. For a comprehensive outline of the book and of the debates surrounding its translation, see the review by Alain Beaulieu and Réal Fillion in Foucault Studies 5 (January 2008): 74–89. The book is also the subject of an edited book that looks at its historical and historiographic context and the reception of the work by various scholarly communities: Arthur Still and Irving Velody, eds., Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s “Histoire de la Folie” (New York: Routledge, 1992). 11. Roland Barthes, “Savoir et folie,” Critique 17 (1961): 915–22; Michel Serres, “Géométrie de la folie,” Mercure de France 1188 (August 1962): 683–96, and 1189 (September 1962): 63–81.

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12. Fernand Braudel, “Trois clefs pour comprendre la folie à l’époque classique [Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Collection ‘Civilisations d’hier et d’aujourd’hui’],” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 17th year, no. 4 (1962): 761–72. 13. “J’ajoute quelques lignes au compte rendu qui précède pour souligner l’originalité, le caractère pionnier du livre de Michel Foucault. … J’y reconnais et j’y admire une aptitude singulière à aborder un problème par trois ou quatre biais différents, dans une ambiguïté qui a le tort de se refléter parfois dans la démarche matérielle du livre (il faut être très attentif à en suivre le fil), mais qui est l’ambiguïté même de tout phénomène collectif: une vérité de civilisation plonge dans l’obscurité de motivations contradictoires, conscientes et inconscientes. Ce oeuvre magnifique essaie de poursuivre, à propos d’un phénomène particulier, la folie, ce que peut être le cheminement mystérieux des structures mentales d’une civilisation, comment elle peut se déprendre. (My trans.)” Fernand Braudel, “Trois clefs pour comprendre la folie à l’époque classique [Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Collection ‘Civilisations d’hier et d’aujourd’hui’],” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 17th year, no. 4 (1962): 771. 14. As a response to this, my purpose here is to explore visual and spatial articulations of madness that exist outside the confines of language. 15. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 36–76. This book was first published as L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). 16. The essays in Arthur Still and Irving Velody, eds., Rewriting the History of Madness, give a comprehensive overview of the response to Madness and Civilisation. H. C. Erik Midelfort outlines historians’ critiques of Madness and Civilisation in “Madness and Civilisation in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault,” in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 247–65. I also list below a selection of the vast literature on the reception of the work: Peter Sedgwick, Psycho Politics (London: Pluto, 1982); José Merquior, Foucault (London: Fontana, 1985); Colin Gordon, “Histoire de la folie: An Unknown Book by Michel Foucault,” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 3–26; Andrew Scull, “Michel Foucault’s History of Madness,” History of the Human Sciences, 3, no. 1 (1990): 57–67; Colin Gordon, “History, Madness and Other Errors: A Response,” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 3 (1990): 381–96; Elisabeth Roudinesco et al., Penser la folie: Essaies sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Galilée, 1992); Gary Gutting, “Foucault and the History of Madness,” in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47–70. 17. I worry about the ongoing rejection or resistance to Foucault and the metadiscourses he articulates by historians and philosophers wedded to the empirical tradition of Anglophone thought, although I do have some empathy with the problematics of working across the Anglo-French linguistic divide. I work in both languages, and I do find myself articulating thoughts in different ways. But to my mind the ambiguous relationship between my thoughts and the language in which they are expressed makes things all the more interesting.



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18. For an overview of the development of psychiatry, see for instance Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 1997). 19. Foucault used the term épistème in The Order of Things (1969). Although normally used to refer to a justified true belief, Foucault used the term in a more specialized way to refer to the historical a priori and discursive formations that ground knowledge and its discourses. In this way the episteme represents the conditions within which knowledge can exist within a particular epoch. 20. Dispositif can be translated in several ways, including “device,” “machinery,” and “apparatus.” It is a term Foucault uses to refer to institutional, administrative mechanisms and to knowledge structures that operate to augment and maintain the exercise of power within social structures. See Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977 interview), in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, et al (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194–228. 21. See, for example, the work of Roy Porter, who rarely mentions Foucault despite their parallel interests. Porter dwells on apparent factual inaccuracies in the abridged version of Madness and Civilisation. See, for instance, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone, 1987). In a later work, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94–95, Porter takes issue with Foucault about the nature of confinement in eighteenth-century Britain. He challenges Foucault’s theory that the confinement of the poor was the result of a bourgeois capitalist society. Porter contests that this is not relevant, as he had found no evidence to suggest inmates had to work. Moreover, he asserts those from the genteel classes who were confined were not expected to and did not expect to work. Part of Porter’s evidence base is that it was only in 1808 that an Act of Parliament was passed permitting the use of public funds for asylums. 22. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, xii. 23. The definitions and uses of a given word in a dictionary of etymology can point toward the episteme, the discursive formations that ground knowledge and its discourses, in a given epoch. 24. Foucault, History of Madness, xxviii. 25. For a full discussion of the building’s history, see Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture, 1660–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 26. For a discussion of the tense relationship between the Cities of London and Westminster, see Dana Arnold, “London Bridge and Its Symbolic Identity in the Regency Metropolis: The Dialectic of Civic and National Pride,” Art History 22, no. 4 (November 1999): 545–66. 27. London comprised three discrete areas: the City of London, Westminster, and the Borough of Southwark. Westminster was the site of national government, royal residences, and the West End of London, where many of the ruling elite had their townhouses. The division between the City and Westminster is typified by the fact the monarch was allowed to enter the City only with permission from the Lord Mayor of London.

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28. The Palais des Tuileries (Tuileries Palace) was begun in 1564 under the patronage of Catherine de’ Medici, widow of Henri II. It was gradually extended until it closed off the western end of the Louvre courtyard and displayed an immense facade of 875 feet. It remained the Parisian residence of French monarchs from Henry IV to Napoleon III. It was burned down by the Paris Commune in 1871. See André Devêche, The Tuileries Palace and Gardens, trans. Jonathan Eden (Paris: Éditions de la Tourelle-Maloine, 1981). 29. I discuss this aspect of Bedlam fully in The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London 1680–1820 (London: Routledge, 2013). 30. Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy, and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). 31. Much has been written about Hogarth’s social satires. See, for instance, Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed. (London: Print Room, 1989). 32. For a fuller discussion of the philosophy of action, see Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 33. See Audi, Architecture of Reason, especially chapter 8. 34. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, ix. 35. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, xii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Dana. “London Bridge and Its Symbolic Identity in the Regency Metropolis: The Dialectic of Civic and National Pride.” Art History 22, no. 4 (November 1999): 545–66. ———. The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London 1680–1820. London: Routledge, 2013. Audi, Robert. The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Barthes, Roland. “Savoir et folie.” Critique 17 (1961): 915–22. Beaulieu, Alain, and Réal Fillion. Review of History of Madness by Michel Foucault. Foucault Studies 5 (January 2008): 74–89. Braudel, Fernand. “Trois clefs pour comprendre la folie à l’époque classique [Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Collection ‘Civilisations d’hier et d’aujourd’hui’].” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 17th year, no. 4 (1962): 771. Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 36–76. London: Routledge, 1978. Devêche, André. The Tuileries Palace and Gardens. Translated by Jonathan Eden. Paris: Éditions de la Tourelle-Maloine, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. “The Confession of the Flesh” (interview). In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by



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Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, 194–228. New York: Pantheon, 1980. ———. History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Tavistock, 1967. Gordon, Colin. “Histoire de la folie: An Unknown Book by Michel Foucault.” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 3–26. ———. “History, Madness and Other Errors: A Response.” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 3 (1990): 381–96. Gutting, Gary. “Foucault and the History of Madness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 47–70. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Kaufmann, Emil. Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy, and France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock, 1959. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952). In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, edited by Galen A. Johnson, translated by Michael B. Smith, 76–120. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994. Merquior, José. Foucault. London: Fontana, 1985. Midelfort, H. C. Erik. “Madness and Civilisation in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault.” In After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, edited by Barbara C. Malament, 247–65. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. 3rd ed. London: Print Room, 1989. Porter, Roy. Madness: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. London: Athlone, 1987. Roudinesco, Elisabeth et al. Penser la folie: essaies sur Michel Foucault. Paris: Galilée, 1992. Scull, Andrew. “Michel Foucault’s History of Madness.” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 57–67. Sedgwick, Peter. Psycho Politics. London: Pluto, 1982. Serres, Michel. “Géométrie de la folie.” Mercure de France 1188 (August 1962): 683–96, and 1189 (September 1962): 63–81. Shorter, Edward. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 1997. Stevenson, Christine. Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture, 1660–1815. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Still, Arthur, and Irving Velody, eds. Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s “Histoire de la Folie.” New York: Routledge, 1992.

Chapter 2

The Photogenic Invention of Thought-Emotion Duane Michals and Michel Foucault Anton Lee American photographer Duane Michals (b. 1932) has been “acknowledged internationally as an innovator in the medium.”1 His first photobook, Sequences (1970), presented fifteen small photo sequences, some of which dated back to 1968.2 They narrated oneiric and unresolved stories about an angel, a spirit, a ghost, or death throughout multiple images ranging from five to eight. Each photograph was preconceived and staged by Michals, and the figures in the photographs were blurred or overlapped with one another by double exposure. In 1972, Michals started adding poetic sentences, first typed but soon after scribbled by himself, at the margin of the photographs, as in A Letter from My Father (1975).3 This experiment with words stretched to the extent of deserting photography altogether in Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality (1975), which consisted of a handwritten paragraph. Furthermore, Michals embarked on painting over photographs in 1978, one of the earliest examples of which is Ceci n’est pas une photo d’une pipe (1978). All these approaches speak to the desire of Michals to free the medium of photography from its expected transparency as a means of representation: “What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see. … They cannot be photographed, only suggested.”4 Enumerated above, the wide spectrum of reinventions Duane Michals brought to bear on photography throughout the 1970s was not compliant with any existing understandings of the medium at the time. His staged photographs disobeyed the snapshot aesthetics of street photography, not to mention photojournalism; his fuzzy pictures failed the sharp focus of straight photography in the traditions of Camera Work and Ansel Adams; the attempt to navigate time in visual sequences held against the “decisive moment” initiated by Henri Cartier-Bresson; and, most importantly, his mélange of painting, texts, and photography transgressed the credo of medium specificity upheld by John 25

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Szarkowski, who was the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.5 This estrangement from the established categories resulted in a paucity of scholarly attention to Michals in North America. Although new exhibitions and publications of Michals received fleeting reviews on the pages of newspapers and photo magazines,6 his work has not been written about in depth as a significant influence on post-1960s photography, except for the catalog published concurrently with his retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 2014.7 Contrary to this account, Michals’s photographs have been intrinsic to the foundation of photographic discourse in France. His work was frequently reproduced since the mid-1970s in amateur photo magazines such as Photo (1967–), and this led to more serious analyses and lengthy critiques published throughout the 1980s in the newly launched academic journals dedicated to photography, such as Les Cahiers de la Photographie (1981–1994), edited by Gilles Mora.8 Moreover, from essayist and poet Renaud Camus to film theorist Raymond Bellour, the range of French intellectuals who wrote on the work of Duane Michals during the 1980s encompassed various disciplinary backgrounds.9 Such a passionate acceptance of Michals’s photographs in France has to do with the domestic situations in which photographic discourse found itself around the 1980s. Unlike the United States, where photography had secured the status of an independent aesthetic medium as early as the 1930s and immediately went through a historicization,10 the strong traditions of Beaux Arts in France had hindered photography from being considered as a legitimate subject of art historical research until the late 1970s, when Michel Frizot began to deliver the first courses on the history of photography at the University of Dijon and the University Paris-Sorbonne. Thus, in the early 1980s, the field of photographic studies in France was receptive to various perspectives and methodologies outside traditional art history, including semiology (Roland Barthes), sociology (Pierre Bourdieu), and psychoanalysis (François Soulages).11 In 1980, this pluralism of photographic discourses met with financial and administrative support as part of the governmental effort to promote photography on a national scale.12 During this period, French scholars and curators actively participated in introducing the original approaches of American photographers, most conspicuously Ralph Gibson, Robert Frank, Les Krims, and Duane Michals.13 Michel Foucault’s essay “Thought and Emotion” (1982) is an outcome as well as constitutive of such an efflorescence of the French photographic discourse around the work of Duane Michals in the early 1980s.14 On the one hand, Foucault wrote the essay for the catalog of Michals’s retrospective held in 1982 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as part of the Mois de la Photo, a newly devised biennial festivity devoted to the promotion of photography in the capital. The essay was commissioned by curator



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Philippe Stoeckel via Hervé Guibert, who was a novelist, photographer, and photo critic, and more importantly a close acquaintance of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.15 Between 1978 and 1982, Guibert played a crucial role in the introduction of Duane Michals in France by releasing articles about and interviews with the American photographer in Le Monde.16 If it were not Guibert who delivered the request, Foucault might have declined to write, considering his lack of “taste for the photo narrative.”17 On the other hand, Foucault’s essay joined a cascade of canonical writings on photography, all of which cited the work of Michals to varying degrees: notably, the French translation of Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) in 1979 (and its retranslation in 1983); the publication of Barthes’s Camera Lucida in 1980 (1981 in English); and Guibert’s Ghost Image in 1981 (1998 in English).18 Among these writings, Foucault’s “Thought and Emotion” offers the most comprehensive view on the photographer’s methods, in that Michals’s 1982 retrospective was the first to survey the entire spectrum of his experimental works, comprising 125 works of sequences, portraits, photographs with texts, texts without photographs, painted photographs, and drawings. Therefore, Foucault’s essay deserves critical attention as a primary entrance into the 1980s French discourse formed around the photography of Duane Michals. The main intent of this chapter is to establish what Foucault’s theory of photography might be, given his essay “Thought and Emotion.” The essay remains Foucault’s sole treatise on photography and his last text on the visual arts, following a gap of six years from “Photogenic Painting” (1975), his essay on the painting of Gérard Fromanger.19 The essay sits amidst the writings produced in the later period of Foucault’s life, when the philosopher immersed himself in the problems of the subject and truth, in order to find an alternative to the Cartesian self-affirmation of one’s own existence as a thinking being.20 By scrutinizing his essay “Thought and Emotion,” I will substantiate that Foucault situated the work of Duane Michals after the “Cartesian moment” by introducing a set of theoretical vocabularies coeval with his philosophical project of the early 1980s. To do so, my chapter will try to answer the following questions from the Foucauldian perspective: What was the role of photography in the Modern Age ruled by Cartesian reason? How do Michals’s photographs break from the medium’s traditional identity assigned by the modern visual regime? Lastly, what will be the task for photography after the demise of the Modern Age envisioned by Michals and formulated by Foucault? From the outset of his essay, Foucault differentiates the photography of Duane Michals from the medium’s most basic functionality of offering things to look at. Foucault asserts that the work of Michals lacks “an impeccable and imperious eye that dictates to others what they must have seen.”21 Foucault

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examines the photograph Narcissus (1974), which shows a young man with his eyes closed in front of his reflection on a mirrored surface (figure 2.1). Foucault underscores that the young man avoids the gaze of the viewer as well as his own. For Foucault, this is a visual metaphor for a photography that does not want to see, but thinks or dreams. Michals grants to his photographs “the power of dream and the invention of thought,” according to Foucault.22 What Foucault does not mention is that Michals learned from Caravaggio’s painting Narcissus (1597–1599) the technique to render his photograph nonreflective of the spectator’s gaze. In Caravaggio’s Narcissus, the body of the mythic figure is almost hidden in the darkness, except for his two arms, his neck, and the left side of his face, which constitute the shape of a half circle. His eyes, looking down to the water equally dark as the background, draw the viewer’s attention to his reflection, which complements the missing half of the circle. As a result, the picture frustrates the viewer’s desire to penetrate its meaning by keeping his gaze trapped in the loop made up of the man and his double. By mimicking the iconography of Caravaggio’s Narcissus, Michals’s Narcissus achieves the pensive opacity similar to the baroque painting. Using the photograph Narcissus as an example, Foucault claims the annulment of “the ocular function of photography” and “the burdensome ethics of the gaze.”23 With this assertion, Foucault tries to unfetter the photographs of Michals from the medium’s servitude to visualization and observation during the Modern Age, which had been inaugurated “around 1790 and 1810” and stayed valid “up to about 1950,” as he stated in an interview about his book The Order of Things (1966; 1970 in English).24 In The Order of Things, Foucault identified the epistemological condition of the Modern Age with the emergence of man as the subject as well as the object of knowledge.25 If Foucault reserved his analysis in The Order of Things to the realm of discourse, he expanded the inquiry about the sudden visibility of man in the Modern Age to social institutions in Discipline and Punish (1975; 1977 in English).26 In this book, Foucault dealt with various “technologies” in operation at hospitals, prisons, schools, and factories, which molded an individual into the modern subject by submitting him or her to observation, scientific knowledge, and disciplinary power. For Foucault, these were the “technique of overlapping subjection and objectification,” which registered man as a locus of power and knowledge and thereby made him visible in the Modern Age.27 Even though Foucault did not list photography next to these technologies, his work greatly influenced photography scholars such as John Tagg and Jonathan Crary.28 Crary, in particular, contended in his first book, Techniques of the Observer (1990), that photography had been indispensable to the formation of the modern subject as outlined by Foucault. According to him, the invention of the camera and chemical photography in 1839 stood for a much larger systemic



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Figure 2.1  Duane Michals, Narcissus, 1974, Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text. Source: © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

shift, through which “vision” was liberated from a spatial restriction of the camera obscura and relocated in the human body as “measurable and thus exchangeable” sensations and stimuli.29 This caused “a remaking of an individual as observer” who was at once “a spectator” of the undeterred spectacle and a subject of the technologies “to recode the activity of the eye, to regiment it, to heighten its productivity and to prevent its distraction.”30 From this perspective, the role of photography during the Modern Age was to propel the visibility of man as the subject and the object of observation. In this regard, Foucault diverts the photographs of Duane Michals from the modern visual regime by arguing that they are less about feeding the eye than about arousing thought and imagination in mind. Foucault goes on to explore the pensiveness of photography in relation to the economy of words employed by Michals. In usual instances, according to Foucault, the text that accompanies pictures performs as caption that fixes the meaning of the image by expatiating upon the contents of the visual. Contrary to these, Foucault is convinced that the words in Michals’s photographs exist only to destabilize the logical penetration into photographs. Foucault takes Certain Words Must Be Said (1976) as an example, which shows two women, one looking outside a window and the other turning her head to the

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opposite direction. The photograph is followed by handwritten text, which tells a story of an estranged couple apprehensive about the impending closure of their relationship. Foucault finds it impossible to decide if the handwritten monologue belongs to one of the portrayed models or the imaginary character she is assigned to play in front of the camera or the photographer himself or the omniscient narrator of the story. A concatenation of nebulous thoughts emerges, even as the image is out of sync with the text. To push Foucault’s interpretation further, I will suggest that it is precisely the subject of the “statement” [l’énoncé] that is effaced amidst the game of polysemy.31 As a consequence, the photograph is brimming with thoughts claimed by no owner or multiple owners. Foucault continues: These confusedly shared, mixed thoughts, this obscure circulation, these are what Duane Michals presents to anyone who looks at his photographs, inviting him to an undecided role of reader-spectator and proposing thought-emotions [pensée-émotions] (because emotion is this movement that makes the soul tremble and spreads spontaneously from one soul to another).32

To me, this quotation spares little room for argument about Foucault’s reference to Descartes, who construed the feelings of love, hatred, fear, and anger as “emotions or passions of the soul” and classified them as the “confused and obscure thoughts” caused by the movement of the spirits.33 In the Cartesian meditations, these emotions, along with imaginations, dreams, and sensory experiences, are subjected to severe doubt, in that they are prone to error and therefore barren of truthful knowledge.34 Thus, the coinage of “thoughtemotion” that advocates those impure thoughts is Foucault’s attack on the Cartesian cogito, the true knowledge about one’s own existence purely based on “clear and distinct ideas.”35 Here, Foucault reinstates what Descartes once ostracized from the pursuit of truth. In fact, it is one of the quintessential points that Foucault wrestled to illuminate throughout his life, that man as a “recent creation” of the Modern Age has elicited its power of self-knowledge from the existence of the “unthought” [l’impensée], “all the experiences of unaccustomed-for thought,” including error, illusion, dreams, and madness.36 Now, in respect to Michals’s photographs, Foucault ascribes to emotion the ability to diffuse the experience of the “unthought” from one subject to another. It is important to note that in 1982 Foucault dedicated his course at the Collège de France to the search for a model of truth and subjectivity divergent from the “Cartesian moment,” which remained unabated until the end of the Modern Age, as Foucault formulated in the lecture.37 Throughout the course named The Hermeneutics of the Subjet, Foucault unraveled the “parrhēsiastic” approach to truth, which had been disqualified since Descartes



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confined the source of truth to the knowledge verified by the intrinsic consciousness. Parrhēsia, in contrast, is “the naked transmission of truth itself … from the person who already possesses it to the person who must receive it, must be impregnated by it, and who must be able to use it and subjectivize it.”38 The parrhesiastic transfer as such is a modality of “experience,” Foucault underlines, which is thoroughly different from the objectification of the world by instrumental reason. Whereas the Cartesian method defines access to truth in a closed structure of self-evident reason, Parrhēsia presupposes an interactive experience between two minds and the concomitant transformations in their belief and subjectivity caused by emotion. The parrhesiastic concept of malleable subjectivity corresponds well with the dissolution of the speaking subject, which I suggested earlier with the example of Certain Words Must Be Said. As a matter of fact, in “Thought and Emotion,” Foucault takes on the possible corrosion of subjectivity more seriously in relation to his emotional experience of Michals’s photographs. Foucault enumerates the bizarre feelings stirred up in his mind while looking at Michals’s photographs: “a pleasure, an encounter that has no future, an irrational anxiety in a familiar street, the sense of a strange presence nobody else believes in and we talk about to even fewer people.”39 Although Foucault admits that he owes these experiences to Michals, he is baffled whether they, now thriving in Foucault’s mind, are his own or the artist’s. He is also unsure whether these are the emotions drawn from the reservoir of his old memories or simply implanted in his mind by the photographer. Experiences no one but he had, but which, I do not quite understand how, glide towards me – and, I think, towards anyone who looks at them – evoking pleasures, anxieties, ways of seeing, and sensations I have already had or I anticipate having to feel one day, and therefore I always wonder if they are his or mine, although I know very well that I owe them to Duane Michals.40

What Foucault delineates in this passage is neither an imposition of didactic information by the visual content of the photographs nor an abuse of interpretative liberty on the part of the critic. It is the “crossing” [croisement] of experience, Foucault tentatively concludes. It seems to me that Foucault considers each photograph of Michals as a sort of conduit that travels from one subject to another and germinates a new experience in their minds through the mysterious provocation of thought-emotion. Still, Foucault’s notion of experience awaits further explanation. To do so, it is crucial to afford a nuanced interpretation of the French word expérience, which can mean both “experience” and “experiment,” as Gary Gutting advises.41 The sense of ambiguity conveyed by the term must be noted when Foucault writes in “Thought and Emotion” that the photographs of Michals

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“attract me as experiences.”42 According to Timothy O’Leary, the term “experience” began to gain significant visibility in Foucault’s philosophical works and lectures after the late 1970s.43 In these sources coexist two different conceptualizations of experience: On the one hand, experiences facilitate the knowledge about “the set of conditions” upon which the mentality of the period and culture stands. In this sense, experience unveils the shape of the epistemological, social, and ethical foundation consolidated as the historical a priori. On the other hand, through experiences an individual can isolate or loosen himself or herself from the norms of societies, so as to afford a critical distance from them and venture into the alternative manners toward knowledge, power relations, and subjectivity. In short, experience is a means of both apprehending and inventing our relations to the world. Between these two conceptualizations of experience, Foucault’s use of the term in “Thought and Emotion” inclines toward the one with the implication of experiment and transgression, given Foucault’s argument that the photographs of Michals have nothing to do with the intention to “grasp the real [le réel], arrest the scene, capture the movement, and display something to see.”44 As elaborated earlier, the photographs of Duane Michals do not give in to the responsibility to cultivate the observing subject, the duty imposed by the modern visual regime. Instead, they discover a new raison d’être in the parrhesiastic dissemination of experience among the viewers in the form of thought-emotion. Near the end of his essay “Thought and Emotion,” Foucault discerns another way of engendering thought-emotions in Michals’s sequential arrangement of photographs. Foucault separates Michals’s sequences from the historical precedents, such as Little Red Riding Hood (1858) by Henry Peach Robinson or the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge. Unlike these examples, the photo sequences of Michals do not deliver fables in a coherent fashion nor do they reveal the invisible secret imbricated in the fragments of time, according to Foucault. Rather, Michals’s sequence “eludes the event it should have captured” by skipping certain moments in the narrative or messing up the linear time.45 For Foucault, what is the most authentic about Michals’s consecutive photographs is “the formless continuation of sensations and emotions,” which survives the ruptures, leaps, detours, and folds inflicted upon the flow of time.46 If Duane Michals has often resorted to sequences, it is not because he sees in them a form capable of reconciling the snapshot of photography with the continuity of time in order to tell a story. Rather, it is to show by means of photography that, although time and experience continue to play together, they do not belong to the same world. Time may bring changes, aging, and death, but thought-emotion is much stronger than time; thought-emotion, only it can see and show the invisible wrinkles of time.47



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The stark opposition between experience (or thought-emotion) and time in this passage tends to suggest a great affinity with the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung: while Erlebnis indicates the immediate and often ephemeral experience, Erfahrung refers to rather cumulated and elongated experiences.48 Even so, I propose to limit our discussion in this chapter to the photographic discourse contemporary with “Thought and Emotion.” This brings Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida into the scope of my analysis. In this book, published two years prior to Foucault’s “Thought and Emotion,” Barthes scrutinizes what he calls the punctum, the moment of intensity that connects the experience of “the observed subject” and that of “the observing subject.”49 Barthes quotes Proust: “Photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced it one day when … there suddenly came to him his grandmother’s true face, ‘whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory.’”50 For Barthes, the ultimate experience of a photograph is the affirmation on the part of the viewer about the “that-has-been” of the referent that once stood before the camera but no longer exists. Therefore, this ontological revelation is always rooted in the past, to which the viewer has no access. In the segment entitled “Time as Punctum” in Camera Lucida, Barthes identifies time with the punctum. There, such a melancholic attachment to the past is expressed in its extremity: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”51 In this regard, the quotation above reads as though Foucault counterposes his concept of thought-emotion and its capability to transmit experience to the punctum as time. It is also true, however, that Barthes’s conceptualization of the punctum resonates with Foucault’s insight into Michals’s photographs, in terms of their mutual focus on the migration of experience between two subjects through the photographic image: Looking at his mother’s “Winter Garden Photograph,” Barthes confesses, “I experienced [vivais] her as my feminine child” by the aid of photography’s movement “back through Time.”52 Foucault certainly sounds alike when he writes about his bewilderment as to whether the experiences that “glide towards” him from Michals’s photographs are his own or the photographer’s.53 Nonetheless, the differences between the two views about the photographic experience override their similarity. Barthes makes it clear that what the punctum enables is “my truth” about the “that-has-been” of the referent arrested in a photograph.54 In other words, Barthes stands fast to his hypothesis that the indexical truth of a photograph, its “noeme,” is the personal linkage between the viewer and the referent. Jacques Derrida corroborates this point in his eulogy of Barthes by comparing the return of the referent in the viewer’s mind to “a sort of hallucinating metonymy”: “It is something else, a piece come from the other (from the referent) that finds itself in me, before me, but also in me like a piece of me.”55 In contrast, Foucault’s theorization of thought-emotion

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moors the experience of a photograph neither to the spectator nor to the referent. First, there is no place for the referent in Foucault’s understanding of photography, in that it is essential for a photograph to cease to be the imprint of “the real proposed to the eye of the photographer” in order to mobilize thought in the viewer’s mind.56 Second, for Foucault, the value of emotion lies in its ability to “spread spontaneously from one soul to another” by infiltrating the rigid shell of individual subjectivity.57 Hence, Foucault’s notion of thought-emotion prefers to permeate horizontally by pollinating singular yet interconnected experiences from one mind to another, whereas the Barthesian punctum pierces through the thick strata of time accumulated within one spectator’s mind. To reiterate, the thought-emotion animates the undetermined realm of the interpersonal, while the operation of the punctum remains inevitably personal. To summarize, Foucault theorizes the ways in which the work of Duane Michals fosters the thought-emotion that propagates the experience of a photograph from one mind to another. Foucault credits this unique mechanism of the photographic experience to Michals’s strategic composition of the visual and textual properties as well as the sequential arrangement of multiple photographs. The methods of Michals preclude his photographs from being the visual testimony of what has happened, so that they can be divorced from the traditional use of the medium as a technique of cultivating the observing subject during the Modern Age, as argued by Crary. Exempted from the burden of representation, according to Foucault, the photographs of Michals populate the mind of the viewer with confused thoughts and emotions, which once were exorcized from the pursuit of truth by Descartes. Foucault explains that these thought-emotions distribute the experience of Michals’s photographs to anyone who looks at them, thanks to the contagious movement inherent in emotion. The transference of experience among the viewers, formulated as such by Foucault, places the photography of Michals adjacent to the parrhēsiastic approach to truth, which requires an interaction between two subjects and subsequent modifications in their status of mind. This emphasis on the interactive aspect marks a profound difference between Foucault’s theory of the photographic experience and Barthes’s concept of the punctum put forward in Camera Lucida: while the Barthesian punctum is the observer’s private and noncommunicable epiphany about the existence of the referent, Foucault’s notion of thought-emotion aims at the reinvention or experiment of new subjectivity in the realm of the interpersonal. By way of conclusion, I will analyze Duane Michals’s photo sequence The Man in the Room (1975), which gives a good example of Foucault’s theory of the photographic experience (figure 2.2).58 The work consists of seven photographs with short sentences handwritten below the images. In the



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Figure 2.2  Duane Michals, The Man in the Room, 1975, Seven gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text. Source: © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

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first photograph, one can recognize only a room with a fireplace where an anonymous young man is sitting in a chair turning his back to the camera. The second photograph shows only the upper half of the man’s body, which implies that the camera has moved toward him. The man looks back to the camera in the third picture with his eyes wide open in astonishment. The fourth photograph is a blurred close-up of his profile, which is followed by the fifth photograph of a mirror on the top of the fireplace. In the sixth photograph, the size of the man’s body returns to the bust shot as in the second picture. However, the photograph is out of focus and one cannot discern the man’s face, even though he is looking back to the camera. The trouble with blurredness is maintained in the last photograph, but the camera has retreated from the figure and shows the entire room like the first picture. As far as the visual is concerned, it is equivocal what the sequence tries to present and what it wants us to look at. There is barely an event, except for the movement of the camera that frightened the man. The dissatisfaction with the visual reorients the viewer’s attention to the handwritten texts. The sentences constitute a monologue written by the subject who confesses his astonishment at encountering a dead friend in the room. At this point, the viewer may think that the man caught in the photographs is the dead friend mentioned in the writing, because the common use of caption encourages the identification between the speaking subject of the text and the observing subject from whose perspective the picture is constructed, that is, the photographer. Here emerges the first confusion and strange sensation: if the man in the photograph is dead, this image cannot be a photograph per se. Otherwise, how is it possible to photograph a ghost? As the sequence proceeds, the speaking subject is perplexed by the mirror, which does not reflect his image, and realizes that it is no one but himself who has died. To know that the man in the photographs is not a specter does not alleviate the viewer’s confusion. The second thoughtemotion is brought about in mind: if the subject of the speech is a ghost, he cannot be the same person as the photographer, Duane Michals, who pressed the shutter and made these pictures. A dead person cannot take photographs. This thought cancels the habitual mode of reading a picture that accompanies words by shattering the previous identification between the photographer and the speaking subject. Furthermore, it turns out that the speaking subject of the text had secretly desired the man in the photographs, although he had a lover named Helen. Another thought-emotion joins already hopeless confusion on the part of the viewer: this dead person was homosexual, whether a closeted gay man who loved the man in the photographs or a lesbian woman who had a relationship with Helen. On every level of the experience, the photo sequence menaces the accustomed belief in the truth-value of the photographic representation, the inveterate expectation of the synchronization between pictures and texts, and eventually the spectator’s self-confidence in his or her identity.



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Each photograph in the sequence by Michals activates the transgressive experience in the Foucauldian sense, which inspires the reinvention of the self by shaking the core of one’s subjectivity. NOTES 1. David B. Boyce, “Duane Michals: Photographer, Storyteller,” The Gay & Lesbian Review 10, no. 1 (January–February 2003): 28. 2. Duane Michals, Sequences (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970). 3. Duane Michals, Take One and See Mt. Fujiyama (New York: Stefan Mihal, 1977). 4. Duane Michals, “Real Dreams,” in Real Dreams (Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1977), 4, 10. 5. About John Szarkowski’s emphasis on the medium specificity of photography, see his introduction to The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 6–11. 6. In the 1970s and 1980s, a few photo critics for American newspapers and magazines, such as Gene Thornton, A. D. Coleman, Vicky Goldberg, Andy Grundberg, and Max Kozloff, offered continuous updates on the activities of emerging photographers, including Duane Michals. 7. The retrospective was held at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, from November 1, 2014, to February 16, 2015, and was organized by Linda BenedictJones, curator of photography at the museum. The catalog of the exhibition was published as Linda Benedict-Jones, with contributions by Allen Ellenzweig, Marah Gubar, Adam Ryan, and Aaron Schuman, Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, with DelMonico/Prestel, 2014). 8. The writings on Duane Michals published in Les Cahiers de la Photographie include Alain Fleig, “Duane Michals ou la photographie légendaire: American Dreams,” Les Cahiers de la Photographie, no. 2 (1981): 55–63; Jean Arrouye, “Les plaisirs du gant,” Les Cahiers de la Photographie, no. 5 (1982): 38–44. 9. Renaud Camus, “L’Ombre d’un double,” in Duane Michals. Photo Poche, no. 12 (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1983), unpaginated. Translated in English as “The Shadow of a Double,” in Duane Michals (New York: Pantheon, 1986), unpaginated. Raymond Bellour, “La durée-cristal,” in Le Temps d’un mouvement: Aventures et mesaventures de l’instant photographique, ed. Robert Delpire (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1986), 144–45. The English version appears as “The Crystal Duration” (1987), trans. Allyn Hardyck, in Between-the-Image (Zurich: JPR/Ringier, with Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2012), 112–16. 10. In the United States, major art institutions embarked on collecting photographs around the 1930s, almost half a century earlier than their French counterparts. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art began collecting photographs in 1928, when Alfred Stieglitz made the first donation of his own twenty-two photographs to the museum. The Museum of Modern Art in New York started collecting photographs in 1930 and established its Department of Photography in 1940 with Beaumont

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Newhall as its inaugural director. The establishment of photography collections in these institutions stimulated the formulation of the medium’s history, which was led by the catalog of Newhall’s first exhibition at MoMA: Photography, 1839–1937 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937). 11. For the semiological approach to photography, see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). Originally published as Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). And see Barthes’s articles “The Photographic Message,” “Rhetoric of the Image,” and “The Third Meaning,” which are translated and collected in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 3–62. For the sociological perspective on photography, see Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Dominique Schnapper, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). Originally published as Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: Minuit, 1965). Finally, for the psychoanalytic take on photography, consult François Soulages et al., Photographie et inconscient: Séminaire de philosophie, octobre 1985–janvier 1986 (Paris: Osiris, 1986). 12. In France, with the foundation of the Centre Pompidou in 1977, the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne started collecting photographs and established its Cabinet de la Photographie in 1981. Almost contemporary with this, the Musée d’Orsay decided to build its own photography collection in 1978, even before opening its doors to the public in 1986. Throughout the 1980s, the promotion of photography in France was strongly supported by the socialist government of François Mitterrand and its cultural minister, Jack Lang. About these governmental maneuvers to support photography in France, see Gaëlle Morel, “La figure de l’auteur,” Études photographiques, no. 13 (July 2003). http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/350; Gaëlle Morel, “Entre art et culture,” Études photographiques, no. 16 (May 2005). http://etudesphotographiques. revues.org/715. 13. Anne Biroleau, ed. 70’ Le Choc de la photographie américaine (Paris: Bibliothèque national de France, 2008). 14. Michel Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1062–69. Originally published in Duane Michals, Photographies de 1958 à 1982 (Paris: Paris Audiovisuel; Direction des Affaires Culturelles de la Ville de Paris, 1982), iii–vii. English translation by Jeffrey Kime appears in the same catalog as “Thought and Emotion,” viii–xii. I kept the English title throughout my chapter, but used my own translation and referred to Dits et écrits II because Kime’s translation requires considerable revisions. 15. Hervé Guibert was one of the young gay men who frequented Foucault’s apartment in the Rue de Vaugirard from the late 1970s up to 1980. About the relationship between Foucault and Guibert, see Nicholas De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 37–62; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 478–80. Guibert also built an intellectual relationship with Roland Barthes. See Ralph Sarkonak, Angelic Echoes: Hervé Guibert and Company (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). The letters Barthes and Guibert



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exchanged were published in Roland Barthes, Album: Inédits, correspondences et varia, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2015), 359–68. 16. Guibert was one of the first admirers of Michals in France. In Le Monde, Guibert wrote frequently about the photographer’s activities in France: “Histoire photographiques de Duane Michals. La nécessité du contact,” Le Monde, February 9, 1978, 15; “Entretien avec Duane Michals. Abandonner la tyranie des règles,” Le Monde, November 16, 1978, 23; “Inédits de Duane Michals à la Remise du Parc. Décompositions,” Le Monde, October 2, 1979, 28; and “Duane Michals et le réexamen des apparences,” Le Monde, November 17, 1982, 19. Except for the last, which reviews Michals’s 1982 retrospective in Paris, these articles have been collected in La Photo inéluctablement. Recueil d’articles sur la photographie, 1977–1985 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). Moreover, the work of Michals inspired Guibert to publish his own “roman-photo” Suzanne et Louise (Paris: Hallier, 1980), and Guibert also contributed to the texts in Michals’s book Changements (Paris: Herscher, 1981). 17. According to the editors of Dits et écrits, Hervé Guibert asked Foucault to write the introduction to Duane Michals’s retrospective. Foucault accepted the request, “although he had no taste for the photo narrative.” See the note in Michel Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1063. 18. In On Photography, Susan Sontag took Michals as an example of the “auteur” photographers, who created their own signature by investing “a formal conceit” in their oeuvre. Susan Sontag, “Photographic Evangels,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 137–38. The French translation of Sontag’s On Photography initially appeared as La photographie, trans. Gérard-Henri and Guy Durand (Paris: Seuil, 1979). Due to Sontag’s dissatisfaction with this edition, the book was retranslated in 1983 as On Photography – Sur la photographie, trans. Philippe Blanchard in collaboration with the author (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1983). Meanwhile, in Camera Lucida, Barthes examined Michals’s portrait of Andy Warhol (1958), in which the model covered his face with two hands, as an example that delivered the punctum by occluding the studium. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 45. Originally published as La chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma; Gallimard; Seuil, 1980). Finally, in addition to his Le Monde articles on Michals (see note 16), Guibert mentioned in his book Ghost Image that Michals’s photograph The Captive Child (1976) is one of his favorite photographs. Hervé Guibert, Ghost Image, trans. Robert Bonnono (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1998), 113. Reprinted in 2014 by University of Chicago Press. Originally published as L’Image fantôme (Paris: Minuit, 1981). 19. Michel Foucault, “La peinture photogénique,” in Dits et écrits II, 1575–83. Originally published in Le désir est partout. Fromanger (Paris: Galerie Jeanne Bucher, 1975), 1–11. English translation “Photogenic Painting” appears alongside the original French text in Gérard Fromanger: Photogenic Painting, ed. Sarah Wilson, trans. Dafydd Roberts (London: Black Dog, 1999), 82–104. 20. Michel Foucault, “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: un aperçu du travail en cours (entretien avec H. Dreyfus et P. Rabinow),” trans. G. Barbedette, in Dits et écrits II, 1212. This conversation was originally conducted in English and published

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as “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., by Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 229–52. 21. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1065. 22. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1064. 23. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1065. 24. Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire (entretien avec Raymond Bellour),” in Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 613–28. Reprinted from Les Lettres françaises, no. 1187 (June 15–21, 1967): 6–9. English translation appears as “On the Ways of Writing History,” trans. Robert Hurley, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 279–96. 25. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970). Originally published as Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). For his overview of the episteme of the Modern Age, consult chapter 9, “Man and His Double,” 330–74. 26. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 305. 28. For Foucault’s influence on these photography scholars, see John Tagg, Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 29. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 17. 30. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 24. 31. There exists a possibility to relate such an erosion of the speaking subject in Michals’s photography to Foucault’s notion of “author function.” Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et écrits I, 817–40. Reprinted from Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 63, no. 3 (June–September 1969): 73–104. English translation appears as “What Is an Author?,” trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interview, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 32. Michel Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1067–68. 33. René Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy” (1644), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugard Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 281. 34. René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy” (1641), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugard Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–62. 35. René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” 54. 36. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 352. 37. Michel Foucault, “6 January 1982,” in The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–42. Originally published as



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L’Herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Seuil; Gallimard, 2001). For a rigorous study of Foucault’s notion of the “Cartesian moment,” see Beatrice Han, “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 176–209. 38. Michel Foucault, “10 March 1982: First Hour,” in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 382. 39. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1062–63. 40. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1063. 41. Gary Gutting, “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience,” boundary 2 29, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 73. 42. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1063. 43. I owe my understanding of the Foucauldian notion of experience to Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (London: Continuum, 2009). O’Leary finds the initial moment when Foucault laid conspicuous gravity on the term expérience in an interview conducted in 1978. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault (entretien avec D. Trornbadori, Paris, fin 1978),” in Dits et écrits II, 860–914. Translated in English as “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 239–97. 44. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1065. 45. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1067. 46. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1068. 47. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1069. 48. About the conceptual differentiation between Erlebnis and Erfahrung in the tradition of German philosophy, consult Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 10–11. 49. “The observing subject” is my translation of “[le] sujet regardant.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10. 50. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77. 51. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 52. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 72. 53. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1063. 54. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 98. 55. Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Psyche, Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 285. The essay is reprinted with changes by the editors from Continental Philosophy 1 (1987): 259–96. Originally published as “Les morts de Roland Barthes,” Poétique 47 (September 1981): 269–92. Reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 273–304. 56. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1064. 57. Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” 1068. 58. According to the catalog, The Man in the Room (1975) was not included in the 1982 retrospective of Michals at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

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Therefore, Foucault did not mention this work in his essay “Thought and Emotion.” However, Guibert appraised The Man in the Room as “the most beautiful” sequence of the photographer in his critique published in Le Monde in 1978. Hervé Guibert, La Photo inéluctablement, 43.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Originally published as L’obvie et l’obtus: Essais critiques III (Paris: Seuil, 1982). ———. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Originally published as La chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma; Gallimard; Seuil, 1980). Bellour, Raymond. Between-the-Image. Zurich: JPR/Ringier, with Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2012. Originally published as L’Entre-images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 1990). Benedict-Jones, Linda. Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals. Contributions by Allen Ellenzweig, Marah Gubar, Adam Ryan, and Aaron Schuman. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, with DelMonico/Prestel, 2014. Boyce, David B. “Duane Michals: Photographer, Storyteller.” The Gay & Lesbian Review 10, no. 1 (January–February 2003): 28–30. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. Psyche, Inventions of the Other, vol. 1. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Originally published as Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugard Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugard Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). ———. Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, with Jacques Lagrange. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). ———. Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, with Jacques Lagrange. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981– 82. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Originally published as L’Herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, edited by Frédéric Gros (Paris: Seuil; Gallimard, 2001).



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———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Originally published as Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Guibert, Hervé. Ghost Image. Translated by Robert Bonnono. Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1998. Originally published as L’Image fantôme (Paris: Minuit, 1981). ———. La Photo inéluctablement. Recueil d’articles sur la photographie, 1977– 1985. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Gutting, Gary. “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience.” boundary 2 29, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 69–85. Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Michals, Duane. Sequences. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. ———. Take One and See Mt. Fujiyama. New York: Stefan Mihal, 1977. ———. Real Dreams. Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1977. Michals, Duane, and Renaud Camus. Duane Michals. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Originally published as Duane Michals. Photo Poche, no. 12. Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1983. Michals, Duane, and Michel Foucault. Duane Michals, Photographies de 1958 à 1982. Paris: Paris Audiovisuel; Direction des Affaires Culturelles de la Ville de Paris, 1982. O’Leary, Timothy. Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book. London: Continuum, 2009. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Chapter 3

Documents, Monuments, and Photographs Jean-Luc Moulène with Michel Foucault Sophie Berrebi As it is well known, the publication, in 1977, of the English translation of Michel Foucault’s landmark analysis of power and surveillance techniques in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir, 1975), prompted new directions of research in the field of photography studies. Historians began to leave aside the study of artistic uses of the medium to delve into archives of state institutions such as prisons and hospitals and to examine their usage of photography. In key publications released in the years following the English translation of Foucault’s book, artist and theorist Allan Sekula and art historian John Tagg applied Foucault’s study of the microphysics of power to argue that photography played a key role as a producer of evidence within a network of technologies developed by modern states.1 Around the same time that Sekula and Tagg published their first articles, a number of artists, including Sekula himself and Martha Rosler, working in the aftermath of photo-conceptualism, developed photographybased work in which they examined the relationship between photography and power structures, and explored possibilities of resistance to them. In a book entitled The Shape of Evidence that I published in 2014, I looked at the ways in which a younger generation of artists takes up the legacy of Foucault’s first reception and remakes or appropriates visual or written documents to expose their undersides, to show how documents are not so much solid pieces of evidence as images or text that are produced within specific, given contexts in order to be read in particular ways. By focusing on the formal characteristics, the shape rather than the factual content of evidence, I argued that artists from this younger generation rendered visible otherwise imperceptible power structures. In this chapter I examine several works by one of these artists, Jean-Luc Moulène (b. 1955, Reims, France), in relation to the legacy of Tagg and Sekula’s reading of Foucault. Before turning to 45

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Tagg and Sekula, I address another influential aspect of Foucault’s thought, namely, the articulation between document and monument that he exposes at the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). When read within the context of a critical reflection on the notion of document in the field of history, Foucault’s remarks on the relationship between document and monument offer a productive model to think through the use of visual documents in contemporary art. AUTHOR AND AUTHORITY: PERSONNE In French, personne is an ambiguous word: a noun identifying someone and a pronoun that can indicate an unknown human presence, someone, just anyone, or an absence: nobody. More to the point, it is also the title of a work by Moulène: an artist’s book, or rather an artist’s newspaper, a type of publication Moulène has long favored. Berliner format, minimally designed, the newspaper contains thirty-two of his photographs printed full-page on thick white semi-gloss paper.2 There is no text apart from the artist’s name and the title printed in large block letters that stretch across the top of the cover page. Below the headline is a photograph of a taxidermically preserved lion that seemingly leaps out from a glass display case to confront the viewer with mock hostility (Skin [Dépouille], 2002). The pictures that follow are similarly enigmatic. Shot, so it seems, in different places around the globe, they include street views, still-lifes, shop windows, and unnamed people caught by the camera on the street or in public places. One of the most striking photos shows a young woman leaning against a partition wall in an airport hall (EasyJet Girl, 2006). Her posture visually transforms her into a caryatid supporting the wall, no more alive, despite her sun-kissed skin, than the plastic mannequin I come across a few pages later. Scantily clothed, like a sci-fi game heroine, it stands in a department store alley, brandishing a bejeweled scepter (Princesse Surcouf, 2006). On another page, several tailor’s dummies dressed in creased white shirts are huddled together as if preparing to pose for a group portrait (Shirted [En chemise], 2007). Although there is no explicit connection between the images, they all exude the same stifling atmosphere: men and women with averted gazes seem frozen, similar to the inanimate things they mingle with and to the stuffed lion on the cover – dead yet contorted into a life-like posture. The only clue as to what these pictures may be about is in the title of the work, which comes back to me in the form of a banal remark in French: there is no one in these images (“Il n’y a personne dans ces images”). It is as if the air has been sucked out of them, as if they have all been photographed in the same way, the result of a camera scanning evenly the visual field and making no distinction between objects dead and alive.



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Personne as “anyone” is the meaning I want to hold on to for now, not only because the subject of these photographs seems to be a generic and global street life in which nobody and nothing in particular is identified, but more pointedly because the idea of anyone bears an important role in the history of photography. Photography indeed was recognized early on as a deskilled technology of reproduction: unlike etching or drawing, it could be practiced by anyone. The idea that anyone can use photographic equipment had already been made clear by the mid-nineteenth century, in relation to one of the earliest forms of photography, the daguerreotype. In his famous speech at the French Chamber of Deputies in July 1839, given as he attempted to convince his fellow parliament members of the validity of the discovery of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce, François Arago lauded the simplicity of the new procedure. Daguerreotype, he said, “calls for no manipulations and can be performed by anyone. It presumes no knowledge of the art of drawing and demands no special dexterity. When a few simple prescribed rules are followed step by step, there is no one who cannot succeed as certainly and as well as can M. Daguerre himself.”3 For Arago, presenting his report in order to secure a patent on the invention that would ensure lifelong revenues for Daguerre and Niépce, the simplicity of the technique was crucial. If the daguerreotype could be used by anyone with equal success, the resulting photographic documentation was sure to display a scientifically objective sameness. This versatility was augmented, Arago explained in his plea, by the suitability of the technique for a diversity of scientific applications, ranging widely from Egyptology to meteorology. The number of such applications would eventually soar, and Arago was certainly prescient in his argument concerning the sameness of photographic reproduction, which came to play an important role in the characterization of scientific objectivity in the nineteenth century.4 But the public use of photography was by no means restricted to the scientific realm. In the last decades of that century, following technical innovations such as dry plates and portable equipment that simplified its process, judiciary and medical institutions would increasingly employ photography to identify and record the populations that passed through them. In the 1880s, Alphonse Bertillon developed for the French police a modern system for classifying and identifying repeat offenders thanks to physical characteristics, using photography. This so-called bertillonnage was but one of many uses of the medium that Sekula and Tagg identified in their writings. On the basis of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), they drew a connection between the elaboration and strengthening of capitalist states in the late nineteenth century and the use of photography. Both authors reprised Foucault’s analysis of the shift in the exertion of power from a spectacular and largely inefficient domination

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of the state over individuals in the prerevolutionary era to the development of a network of institutions, through which almost all of the population would be identified, taught, treated, or punished. Hospitals, barracks, prisons, and schools became tools through which countries such as Great Britain and France could distill what Foucault called a microphysics of power. Working with different case studies, and in dialogue with Sekula’s research, Tagg speaks of a rendezvous between a “novel form of the state and a new and developing technology of knowledge” that included photography. In the context of a positivist approach to knowledge, and within a network of procedures and techniques attached to different state institutions, photography “functioned as a means of record and a source of evidence” capable of producing truth.5 For such a technology to function as evidence, a prerequisite was the visual sameness of photographic documents produced in different places and by different individuals. Evidence cannot stand to be obstructed by the idiosyncrasies of a photographer. Both Tagg and Sekula cite rules and manuals describing photography shoots: they involve specifics of light, framing, and preferred poses. Although detailed technical descriptions appear only in police manuals in the twentieth century, a certain photographic sameness and anonymity of authorship is visible in the portraits of inmates from medical, educational, and coercive institutions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that both authors reproduce. In all cases the anonymity of the photographer is a necessity for the institution, and the archives consisting of such uniform documents are the extension of its invisible power. The document, in other words, can bear authority only if it is anonymous in its constitution. Another form of anonymity can be encountered in slogans hastily painted or drawn on walls in urban public spaces. Such graffiti are the subject of a work by Moulène from 2005, entitled The Tunnel (Le Tunnel). It consists of a series of photographs of anonymous messages scrawled on the wall of a covered passageway in Paris, juxtaposed with typographic transcriptions of the messages. The photographs were recorded at several intervals between 1998 and 2001, and the photographs and transcriptions were published as a book in 2005 and as a printed supplement in newspaper format in 2007. The pictures of the graffiti evoke all at once ethnographic and sociological fieldwork, but also, in a more sinister way, police records serving to register the defacing of public property. The second part of the work renders such proximities more complex. The artist transcribed the messages, most of them violent menaces, in typographic characters. Rather than correcting the wild syntax and spelling of the messages, the typographic text is contaminated by the slang. In its text and photo structure, documenting a limited urban space, The Tunnel is reminiscent of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive



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Systems (1974–1975). Rosler’s photo and text piece consists of black-andwhite photographs of storefronts littered with empty bottles and cigarette butts, alternating with blank cards – unprinted photo paper – that carry typed words describing the vagrant population of the Bowery that is absent from the photographs. The piece addresses what Rosler perceived as the incompetence of words and images to represent the poverty of the Bowery. It clearly shows her objections to the strand of reformist documentary photography she calls “victim photography.”6 But here, rather than feeding on the inability of photography and text to do justice to a social reality, Moulène stages what Alexandre Costanzo and Daniel Costanzo call the “power of the anonymous.”7 The authority of language is demoted as the straight photographs let the unruly, violent language permeate and ultimately overcome the strictures of language. The credit line suggests as much. It reads: “The tunnel is anonymous. … The documents of the tunnel, located boulevard de Bercy in Paris, taken in 1996, then on 8 September 1998, 31 May 2000 and on 3 March 2001 are by Jean-Luc Moulène.”8 That the tunnel would remain anonymous is the proof of the failure of photography to act here as a police auxiliary. The identity of the perpetrators remains unknown, and anonymity is displaced from state authority to the street.

MONUMENTS AND DOCUMENTS In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, analyzing the methodology he had used in his preceding works, Foucault describes what he considers to be a pressing issue for historians: History, in its traditional form, undertook to memorize the monuments of the past, to transform them into documents and to make those traces speak even when they are not verbal or when they say silently something else than they say. In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.9

“Monuments” and “documents” are both italicized in this passage that comes after several paragraphs in which Foucault discusses current developments in the field of history and the history of ideas. He points out how, in the field of history, the linear description of events has given way to studies that explore deeper processes of change that occur over long periods of time. Here it is easy to recognize, even though he names no names, principles associated with the Annales school, named after the journal Les Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre with the aim of expanding and redefining the methods, aims, and objects of historical research, notably through bringing in other disciplines. Many of these principles later became associated with what

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is known as the new history (nouvelle histoire). Foucault contrasts the interest in the longue durée that is characteristic of the Annales’s approach with contemporary positions in epistemology. In regard to Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, Foucault argues that scientific discourse underscores moments of rupture rather than permanence. Beyond the distinction between continuity and discontinuity, Foucault identifies one main issue at stake within these reevaluations of history and the history of ideas, and this can be summed up, he writes, by questioning the status of the document: History has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it: history now organizes the document, divides it up, distributes it, orders it, arranges it in levels, establishes series. … The document, then, is no longer for history an inert material.10

What Foucault is addressing here is a discussion around the redefinition and critique of the document that had been going on in the field of history already for a few decades, especially amidst historians working in the legacy of the Annales journal. In The Historian’s Craft published posthumously in 1949, Marc Bloch addressed this issue of the definition of the document. In this seminal book of historiography, written during a wartime situation of crisis, precisely at a moment when he had no access to sources or documents, Bloch proposed that equal weight should be given to the written records willingly transmitted from the past into the present, such as memoirs, minutes of official meetings, and so on, and to those material traces left over accidentally or involuntarily, such as archaeological findings of everyday life. Beyond the simple search for truth versus falseness, Bloch explained, historians must examine both types of documents with renewed skepticism. While it is necessary to read between the lines of traces and documents preserved voluntarily by those who produced them, and to deconstruct their discourse, it is also necessary to be wary of traces left involuntarily. The latter can be admissible as proof, Bloch argues, only if one knows what one is looking for; in his words, documents speak only “when they are properly questioned.”11 This call for an active, critical consideration of the document was set up against French nineteenth-century positivist history, which sought the “submission and passivity to facts” demanded by the likes of Fustel de Coulanges.12 Bloch and the Annales historians criticized the positivists’ favoring of political history and their reliance upon official, state-produced archives – what Michel Foucault referred to as monuments – large collections of which had been assembled and made available to citizens during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire.13



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Along with a critical approach and a widening of the idea of the document, historians of the Annales school advocated opening up history toward the social sciences, working, for instance, with demographers and geographers. In enabling historians to move beyond their disciplinary confines, the historiographical scrutiny of the production and interpretation of documents led to a broader reflection on methods of knowledge production. This widening of the idea of the document together with the acknowledgment that what was traditionally thought to be an objective source is in reality fraught with ideological undertones implies that it be rethought in relation to monuments, a term that underscored the official nature of compilations of sources destined to be passed on to future generations as the authoritative story. While Foucault does not mention Marc Bloch in the introductory pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, his discussion of the document is certainly fed by those ideas, while in the last part of the passage, in which he evokes the organization and distribution of documents in “series,” Foucault alludes more directly to the short-lived school of quantitative history that employed emerging computing technologies to assemble and process vast quantities of data. The conclusion of this passage makes this point clear: History, in its traditional form, undertook to memorize the monuments of the past, to transform them into documents. In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.14 With this rather swift and catchy formula, Foucault not only summarizes the opposition between the positivist tradition and the Annales critical approach to its monuments (signified by their turning monuments into documents to be critically dissected), but also alludes to the more recently formed school of quantitative history connected to the legacy of the Annales in which documents were grouped together in extensive series, using early computer tools, and transformed into data, or what Foucault derided as “monuments.” Foucault’s complex relations with historians of his generation are well documented, and it is of little surprise that in the years following the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge, historians, in turn, felt the need to unpack Foucault’s neat, but rather abbreviated, formula.15 In 1975, medievalist historians Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Toubert, at the forefront of the nouvelle histoire, responded to Foucault by contracting the terms monument and document. They wrote: The document is a monument. It is the result of the effort made by historical societies to impose – voluntarily or involuntarily – a certain image of themselves into the future. There is no truthful document. Every document is a lie. It is the task of the historian to deconstruct, to demolish this montage, to destructure this construction, and to analyze the conditions of production of these document-monuments.16

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Here, Toubert and Le Goff seem to answer to Foucault’s suggestion of a shift from a time when the monument, the official statement, was taken at face value, and a contemporary situation in which the document, through its compilation and transformation into data is being hailed as a new unquestionable source. They answer by pointing out the need to deconstruct both document and monument, although by monument here, they seem to refer to a more general idea of anything that is authoritative. They fail to address what I believe is a certain humor or irony on the part of Foucault in his last sentence: “In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.” It is also possible to detect a light critique of history as an institutionalized practice that comes close to what Michel de Certeau, also somewhat of an outsider to the field of history, wrote in his book The Writing of History,17 also published in 1975: In history everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into “documents.” This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in producing such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and their status.18

Certeau here shifts the attention from the materials of historians to the historians themselves, reminding us that the practice of history is an institutionalized discipline by which no “document” is accidentally found, but is instead always willingly constructed as such by the historian through her/his practice. Both outsiders in relation to more established, academic historians working in France in the 1960s and 1970s, De Certeau and Foucault developed powerful methodological reflection on the nature, construction, and use of documents in the field of history that provide useful tools to analyze how, in turn, artists address the institutional uses of documents. THE ORDER OF THE MUSEUM: LE MONDE, LE LOUVRE At this juncture I want to discuss a work by Jean-Luc Moulène entitled Le Monde, Le Louvre in which the artist investigates the space and collections of the Louvre museum, a form of monument in the traditional sense of the term, in order to show how documents are institutionalized constructions – as Michel de Certeau pointed out – and how visual documents, in this case, photographs, can produce an interpretation that shifts between the monument and the document. A pensive-looking execration figure from ancient Egypt, a seventeenthcentury ceramic Magdalene in ecstasy, a demure Aphrodite, and the Babylonian Pazuzu raising his hand as if to say, “Beware!” or perhaps just to greet



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me are, along with twenty other precious statuettes of divinities from different periods and places, the protagonists of Le Monde, Le Louvre, a work that Moulène exhibited in the Louvre in November 2005.19 It consists of twentyfour photographs, a newspaper supplement printed and distributed with the French newspaper Le Monde, as well as a video entitled + d’ordre, – d’ordre, Le Louvre. Through these different components, the artist addresses the authoritative discourse of the museum and its rituals of conservation, along with its rules of classification and presentation.20 Awoken from their slumber in the museum’s storage or removed from their glass display cases, the twenty-four small sculptures – mostly, but not exclusively, representing human figures – have been photographed individually, in natural light, against bare, neutrally colored backgrounds, ranging from grayish-blue to light ochre (figure 3.1). These statuettes, which unquestionably belong to the French cultural heritage and reflect the history and policy of its foremost museum, have been grouped together by the artist. Usually overshadowed by larger masterpieces in museum displays or juxtaposed with others in vitrines, here for once they take center stage. The artist’s arbitrary selection of twenty-four objects – a gesture that likens him to a curator – moreover cuts through the collections of the museum and does away with its rigid divisions into departments and periods. It proposes an alternative narrative throughout the museum holdings. I can walk from a dancing Greek youth to a medieval Christ, compare a carved alabaster Babylonian goddess with a predynastic Egyptian woman made of crocodile bone. The intervention of the artist upsets the hierarchy of the museum, its codes and rituals. This space is given physical and psychological expression through another work in the November 2005 exhibition in the Louvre: the newspaper supplement entitled Le Monde, Le Louvre containing the same series of photographs.21 The newspaper was available in the exhibition of November 2005, piled high on wooden palettes for visitors to take home (figure 3.2); it was also distributed with the regular Île-de-France edition of Le Monde dated November 30, 2005. Circulated in fifty thousand copies, Le Monde, Le Louvre brought to light the geopolitical background of Moulène’s selection of objects. The juxtaposed names of two preeminent French institutions present side-by-side two conceptions of the world (figure 3.3). The world according to the Louvre begins with France in its middle and radiates outward, expanding historically through cultural affinities, colonial histories, and war. The world of Le Monde analyzes and informs its readers about the world today seen from a center-left perspective. Moving across these geopolitical mappings, Moulène’s tour of the world in twenty-four images brings together different cults and civilizations, from France to Greece and from Egypt to Syria, and juxtaposes contrasting perspectives of ancient history and current affairs. In distributing his newspaper object so widely, the artist moreover addresses

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Figure 3.1  Jean-Luc Moulène, Le Louvre, 2005, Series of 24 cibachromes under Diasec, newspapers on a pallet, video, Detail. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. All rights reserved.

the extra-diegetic space of the museum conceived as an institution in which each object has a particular place and role within an organized narrative. Le Monde, Le Louvre displaces the habitual role of photography within the walls of the Louvre. In the traditional order of this museum, photography belongs to the curatorial files; the galleries are reserved for works of art. Photographs of the works in the collection, accompanied by written catalogue entries, are to be found in Atlas, the digital database of the museum. In photographing statuettes from the Louvre collections, Moulène not only displaces photography from the digital archive to the galleries but also produces new



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Figure 3.2  Jean-Luc Moulène, Le Monde, Le Louvre, Installation view, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2005–2006. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

images that expose the way in which the order of the museum is inscribed within its archival photographs. The visual documentation in the Atlas database of Saint Magdalen in Ecstasy (Sainte Madeleine en extase) reveals how closely the archival image matches the sculpture’s title. By presenting the statuette from the side, the black-and-white photographic document included in the Atlas reproduction highlights the tension of her body directed toward the sky. Similarly, a terracotta figurine from Smyrna is tilted upward and shot in low-angled illumination that accentuates its distorted smirk as well as the figure’s twisted torso, quite fittingly for an object interpreted as representing a fit of hysteria or tetanus.22 Bernini’s model for his allegorical monument Truth Unveiled by Time (1645–1652) is shot from below to bring out its main sculptural lines and against a background of white veined marble in anticipation of the planned monumental version preserved in the Galleria Borghese.23 Moulène’s photographs create visual and conceptual opposites to these archival images. Aiming his camera at their eyes as if to capture their gaze, he shows another side of the same objects. Instead of staring adoringly toward the heavens, Mary Magdalene looks back toward us viewers, as does the Smyrna figurine, which now beams against a luminous blue ground.24

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Figure 3.3  Jean-Luc Moulène, Insert in the daily Le Monde, no. 18926, November 30, 2005, 24 pages, folded, color print, 47 × 32 cm. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.



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Bernini’s bozzetto of Truth is no longer majestic. She is a voluptuous figure with a radiant face emerging from the ample pleats of a gown that seems to hide truths rather than reveal them.25 Whereas the pictures included in Atlas optimize the outlines of the sculptures, often opting for profile or threequarter views that avert the faces, Moulène’s reverse shots modify these conventions. Facing front, the objects become more compact and less legible and identifiable in terms of period or style. The contrast between the different images reveals how closely the archival photographs match the curatorial information provided in the titles of the works; this is the case whatever the period at which the archival photographs were taken.26 If the museum assigns a particular place and role to a work, its documentary reproductions tend to reflect that placement. Moulène’s reverse shots challenge the visual conventions and illustrative nature of archival documentation. The focus, in the photographs, on the gaze of the sculptures recalls the unwavering look of African sculptures captured by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais in a sequence of Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), their anticolonial film essay. In that sequence, sculpted heads and masks emerge and disappear from a dark background to confront the viewer with an indomitable gaze. An off-screen voice-over comments on the masks’ lost histories and on colonialism’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and domination: “Colonizers of the world, we want everything to speak to us: the animals, the dead, the statues. But these statues are mute.”27 Like Moulène’s statuettes, the African masks and sculptures filmed by Marker and Resnais will not speak; they refuse the probing of the colonizer, the historian, and the curator. They refuse, in other terms, to be turned into documents, and filmmakers and artists question those modes of appropriation. While the filmmakers can use montage, sound effects, and voice-over commentary to put into evidence processes of cultural appropriation and resistance to them, photographers must resort to other devices. In Le Monde, Le Louvre, Moulène exposes the metal screws protruding from the inside of statuettes along with the inventory numbers painted directly onto their surfaces. These marks, which are usually concealed in archival and documentary reproductions that show sculptures on their plinths, indicate more glaringly the missing limbs that have disappeared over time. This absorption becomes striking in the video that accompanies the photographs: +d’ordre, – d’ordre shows in close-ups the objects being manipulated by the expert hands of curators and restorers as they are brought into the artist’s temporary studio in an attic room in the Louvre. We see the objects appearing wrapped up and being unpacked by hands that embody a series of protocols established by conservators. These hands manipulating the objects are drastically different from those that would have made them or used them. They are the hands of the institution, and this manipulation, which

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is fascinating to watch, takes us back to that statement of Michel Foucault this chapter began with. It forces us to question where is the monument and where is the document in the object itself? Are these documents of a culture or works of art, that is, monuments? Foucault’s statement invites us to look at how these objects oscillate from one status to the other. And Moulène’s work shows us how the gesture of cutting the sculptures off from a context, the protocols that preside over wrapping them up and sitting them in a vitrine, plays a role in the ways we consider them and gives them a place in a particular context. But how do such protocols function when the photographs are not of objects but of people? What remains then in question is the role of the artist. What does it mean for an artist to be the author of documents, as the credit line of The Tunnel states? John Tagg formulates the problem in The Burden of Representation. Surveying the decades following the invention of photography, he argues that the photography industry was “divided between the domain of artistic property, whose privilege, resting on copyright protection, was a function of its lack of power, and the scientific-technical domain, whose power was a function of its renunciation of privilege.”28 In other words, he posits a clearcut separation between the renunciation of power by individual authors and anonymous photography used as an instrument to exert power. In authoring the “documents” of The Tunnel, Moulène messes up the neat opposition conceived by John Tagg. The artist manifests an interest in analyzing the manifestations of authority in photography and developing a practice that questions these manifestations by developing a dialectical relation between authorship and anonymity. This has been Moulène’s recurring interest. In a book published in 2007 alongside a monographic exhibition of his work at Culturgest in Lisbon, reproductions of the artist’s drawings, objects, and photographs are combined with documents from American and French archives showing prison inmates and arrested alleged prostitutes posing with name plates, a series of photographs that had given rise to legal battles, and a series of nineteenthcentury pornographic photographs in which women’s sexes are visible while their faces are concealed.29 The artist’s own pictures are in dialogue with these found images. In the series The Prostitutes of Amsterdam (Les Filles d’Amsterdam), Dutch sex workers pose naked with their legs apart and their face toward the camera, combining in a disturbing way the poses of the faceless porn photographs and police identity portraits, thus subverting both conventions. In After the Law (Après la loi), Moulène asked a woman to pose in a photo booth to make a portrait that followed the then newly passed legislation concerning identity photographs.30 This kind of work takes after that of Michel Journiac, one of the principal figures of the French body art scene in the 1970s, for whom Moulène at one time worked as an assistant.31 Producing



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objects, installations, and performances, Journiac used photography not only as documentation of live performances but also as an integral part of his work. He developed a specific vocabulary indicating the status of each category of photographic work. Next to the term actions photographiques used for performances that were specifically done to be recorded on camera, he frequently used the phrase “certified report of an action” (constat d’action). This terminology endowed the data collected from a performance with the official value of a certificate or an affidavit. In Homage to Freud – Critical Report on a Travestied Mythology (Hommage à Freud – constat critique d’une mythologie travestie) (1972), Journiac took up the format of identity photos. Dressing up successively as his mother and father and pairing the resulting images with portraits of his mother and father, the artist disrupted the exactitude of identity photographs commonly used in official documents, thanks to the inexact likenesses in each of the pairs, which in turn suggested complex issues of family relations. There is a clear continuity between a work such as Homage to Freud and Moulène’s own After the Law or Personne, but in these images as in his vocabulary of constats d’action, Journiac appears less to question the formal construction of photographic evidence than to upturn it, to turn the coercive power of the police inside out, by appropriating it for his own work. Moulène’s practice certainly finds its roots in the identity politics of Journiac, yet his interest goes further. In Le Tunnel, Personne, Le Monde, Le Louvre, and other works, Moulène addresses the way visual conventions of documentary evidence are developed in photography and imposed as generic and innocuous. His invitation to unravel the shape of evidence suggests that Foucault’s words are not lost today in a context of a cult for the real that seems to pervade in contemporary culture, especially visible in the ubiquitous presence of documentary strategies in the field of contemporary art. NOTES 1. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64; and John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988). 2. Personne (Bordeaux: Evento, 2009), 32 pages, color, 46 × 31 cm, print run unknown. 3. François Arago, “Report” (July 3, 1839), in Allan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 19. 4. Concerning the history of scientific objectivity and the role of photography within it, see Lorraine Galison and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007).

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5. Tagg, Burden of Representation, 63. 6. See Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 151–206. 7. Alexandre Costanzo and Daniel Costanzo, “La puissance de l’anonyme,” de(s) générations 14 (October 2011). 8. Jean-Luc Moulène, Le Monde, Le Louvre (Paris, 2005) unpaginated, print run 50,000. (My trans.) 9. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 2010), 6. 10. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 6–7. 11. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (London: Vintage, 1964), 53. 12. Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “L’Histoire dite ‘positiviste’ en France,” Romantisme 21–22 (1978): 183. 13. Carbonell, “L’Histoire dite ‘positiviste,’” 183. 14. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 6–7. 15. Jacques Le Goff recognized the importance of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge in conceptualizing the orientations of the nouvelle histoire. See Jacques Le Goff, “Foucault et la ‘nouvelle histoire,’” in Au risque de Foucault, ed. Dominique Franche et al. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou and Centre Michel Foucault, 1997), 132–37. More critical accounts of this relation between Foucault and historians of his generation are detailed in Jacques Revel, “Le Moment historiographique,” in Michel Foucault, Lire l’oeuvre, ed. Luce Giard (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992); François Dosse, L’Histoire en Miettes. Des Annales à la nouvelle histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1987); and Christophe Prochasson, “L’Histoire et Foucault,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 50, no. 1 (April–June 1996): 123–24. 16. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Toubert, “Une histoire totale du Moyen Age est-elle possible?” in Actes du 100e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Paris 1975, section de philolologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610, tendances, perspectives et méthodes de l’histoire médiévale (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1975), 31–44. (My trans.) 17. De Certeau contributed to the book Faire de l’histoire, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., published by Gallimard in 1974, which was the birth year of the nouvelle histoire. 18. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 72. 19. The exhibition, which resulted from a commission to the artist by the Louvre, ran from December 1, 2005, to February 10, 2006, in the Salle d’actualité du Louvre médiéval, aile Sully. 20. Concerning this spatialization of art history in the museum and in particular the way it can be recapitulated by walking through the museum, see Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9. 21. Moulène has explained in an interview that the print version is the original format he had in mind when he made the photographs. Corinne Diserens, “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Moulène,” in Le Monde, Le Louvre (Paris, 2005): ivn26.



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22. Figure of a “grotesque”: a fit of hysteria or tetanus? Roman Imperial era, terracotta figurine, 10.8 cm tall. The artist discusses this object in Corinne Diserens, “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Moulène,” in Le Monde, Le Louvre (Paris, 2005): iv. 23. Gianlorenzo Bernini, La Verità, c. 1645, terracotta, 53 × 36 × 36 cm. 24. Jean-Luc Moulène, Le Louvre / Crise (Crisis), Paris, 2005, C-print Diasec, 45.6 × 36.5 cm. 25. Jean-Luc Moulène, Le Louvre / La Vérité (Truth), Paris, 2005, C-print Diasec, 45 × 36 cm. 26. The photographs in the Atlas database are undated, but in some cases the date can be deduced from the registration information when the objects entered the collection. 27. Chris Marker, Les Statues meurent aussi (film script), in Chris Marker, Commentaires, (Paris: Seuil, 1961), 7–23. 28. Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 63. 29. Jean-Luc Moulène, Opus 1995–2007 / Documents 1999–2007 (exhibition catalog), ed., Corinne Diserens (Lisbon: Culturgest, 2007). 30. Jean-Luc Moulène, Après la loi, 16 avril 1990, “Photomaton” photograph, 4 × 5 cm. 31. Moulène recollects his relation with Michel Journiac in “Histoire de l’image de Darek: témoignage de Jean-Luc Moulène” in Michel Journiac (exhibition catalog), ed., Vincent Labaume (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts; Strasbourg: Les Musées de Strasbourg, 2004), 166.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arago, François. “Report.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Allan Trachtenberg, 15–25. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Carbonell, Charles-Olivier. “L’Histoire dite ‘positiviste’ en France.” Romantisme 21–22 (1978): 173–85. de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Costanzo, Alexandre, and Daniel Costanzo. “La puissance de l’anonyme.” In de(s) générations 14 (2011). Diserens, Corinne. “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Moulène.” In Le Monde/Le Louvre Paris, 2005. Dosse, François. L’Histoire en Miettes. Des Annales à la nouvelle histoire Paris: La Découverte, 1987. Fisher, Philip. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 2010. Galison, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007. Jean-Luc Moulène, Opus 1995–2007/Documents 1999–2007 (exhibition catalog). Edited by Corinne Diserens. Lisbon: Culturgest 2007. Le Goff, Jacques. “Foucault et la ‘nouvelle histoire.’” In Au risque de Foucault, edited by Sabine Franche et al., 132–37. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou and Centre Michel Foucault, 1997.

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Le Goff, Jacques, and Pierre Nora. Faire de l’histoire. Nouveaux problèmes nouvelles approches, nouveaux objets. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Le Goff, Jacques, and Pierre Toubert. “Une histoire totale du Moyen Age est-elle possible?” In Actes du 100e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Paris 1975, section de philolologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610, tendances, perspectives et méthodes de l’histoire medieval. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1977. Marker, Chris. Les Statues meurent aussi (film script). In Chris Marker, Commentaires. Paris: Seuil, 1961. Moulène, Jean-Luc. “Histoire de l’image de Darek: Témoignage de Jean-Luc Moulène.” In Michel Journiac (exhibition catalog), edited by Vincent Labaume. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts; Strasbourg: Les Musées de Strasbourg, 2004. Prochasson, Christophe. “L’Histoire et Foucault.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 50 (1996): 123–24. Revel, Jacques. “Le Moment historiographique.” In Michel Foucault, Lire l’oeuvre, edited by Luce Giard. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992. Rosler, Martha. “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography).” In Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975–2001, 151–206. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and The Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Part II

BODILY EXPERIENCE IN DANCE AND MUSIC

Chapter 4

Body Techniques and Techniques of the Self On Some Uses of Foucault’s Concepts in the Choreographic Field Frédéric Pouillaude Let us suppose that any artwork is the reification of an experience, using the form of the object as a vehicle for its divulgation and future reactivation. Let us say, then, that dance is one of the most reluctant arts in the process of reification, inviting us to replace the notion of work with that of experience. Two reasons are pleading for this substitution. First, the durability of the objects produced by dance is very short. Choreographic works live very rarely beyond their initial cycle of touring. On this point, we should not focus on great exceptions – as dance history too often does – and we should pay more attention to the fate of the overwhelming majority of productions, which have an almost immediate oblivion and disappearance, encouraged by the system of production and diffusion itself. In that regard, the contemporary situation is not fundamentally different from the one of the seventeenth-century Ballet de Cour or the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Divertissement d’Opéra: from one season to another, works are produced that will be forgotten by the end of summer, or at least will not be danced anymore. Moreover, this very short “life” of choreographic works is not generally prolonged by a real “survival.”1 Speaking of the “life” of a work, I mean the continuity of its performances and executions within the group that has originally created it; speaking of its “survival,” I mean its deposit in some material and external traces that make possible its reenactment and reactivation by people not belonging to the original group. Regarding such a “survival,” one must admit that its material basis is often quite thin: scores are very rare, the production and the broadcast of dance films are almost non-existent, and video recordings generally stay inside the dance company with no external diffusion. Even if the issue of memory and work perpetuation in dance has been considerably transformed 65

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during the past twenty years, the situation of choreographic works remains incomparable with that of theater and music. The second reason for challenging dance as work would be more radical. Let us assume that dance works may survive beyond the moment of their performance, that repertoires and archives may conserve some traces of the past performances in order to let them be performed again. More generally, let us assume that the survival issue is already resolved. The fact remains that dance is not reducible to its theatrical and spectacular part. More precisely, one can say that there is a permanent and secret tension that opposes the experience of dancing to its requirement of “spectacularization,” to its desire of being shown. First, any dance performance, or rather any dance show, if it has to be received as dance and not as moving pictures, implies from the audience a complex operation of sensorial translation from visual sensations to kinesthetic simulations. One can certainly call the problem as John Martin did Metakinesis;2 one can also refer to the too oft-cited “Mirror Neurons” of Giacomo Rizzolati, supposed to “explain” the underlying mechanisms of our visual understanding of other people’s movements.3 Better, however, to stay sober with the theoretical use of the notion of empathy and, above all, not overestimate its actual capacities. Most of the time, the kinesthetic conversion of a movement that is only seen remains very vague and blurred, except for people who have already physically experienced that kind of movement. Empathy, which should bridge the divide between individuals, is, in fact, quite often available only to insiders. This gap between the visual and the kinesthetic necessarily weakens any stage exhibition of dance. At the very least, it creates the constant risk of shifting from one object to another: from movement to animated figures, from kinesthetic experience to visual forms. Second, the heterogeneity of the theatrical space obliges dance to make necessary concessions to other artistic forms: with music, with visual arts, and even with literature understood in its widest sense. Showing a dance performance always implies some artistic choices that do not belong to the experience of movement as such: What stage set and what scenography? What music or what sound environment? What intention or, more trivially, what topics? A naked stage, the silence, and a strict refusal of any narrative or any thematic object already constitute, by themselves, some kind of choice. Resolving these choices is the function of the “stage director” or, perhaps more precisely, of the “performance maker,” two notions that are not analytically included in the very concept of a “choreograph,” even if they are usually melted together. Or, rather, it is that the notion of “choreograph” also implies, together with the invention of singular bodily vocabularies, the art of constructing some “staged heterogeneities” whose elements are far beyond the simple experience of movement. These two reasons (the constitutive fragility of dance works and the potential inadequacy of the stage structure relative to the experience of dancing)



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reinforce the feeling of a deep gap between the dancer’s daily corporeal experience and its rare moments of visibility. A dance performance would, then, not give access to anything except a very tiny part of what dance effectively is. So a doubt appears: what if the dance performance and the dance work were finally nothing else than the result of an institutional transaction allowing dance to be part of the artistic field (with its authors, its performers, its audiences, but also its economy and its management), to be counted among what were formerly called the fine arts, while fundamentally continuing to belong, in its daily effectivity, to another space, to the one of experience and practice, and certainly not to the one of poiesis? Following this doubt and these reasons, one is running the risk of having to argue that dance is not exactly an art, if by “art” one means nothing but a determined sector of the production and the presentation of objects, that is, a poiesis. In a sense, while shifting from artworks to experiences and practices, we will be constantly exposed to that risk. BODY TECHNIQUES AND TECHNIQUES OF THE SELF Dance’s historical inventions consist less in the renewal of theatrical forms than in the proposition of new ways of experiencing and working the body, less in the creation of theatrical layouts than in the invention of some apparatuses that disturb, shift, and unsettle the own body’s routines, in short, less in a “poetics of choreography” than in some bodily techniques of subjectivity that have only limited and partial access to a staged visibility. If one were to write a history of these dancing techniques of the subject and the body, it would be a history that would not be limited, as dance history too often is, to the superficial chronology of works, authors, and titles, but would be devoted to the body practices themselves and to their weak visibility. Such a history could only be a geo-history, in the sense of a history of transfers and disseminations throughout the world of dance, a history of these things that are never named in a class or a workshop but that are nevertheless crucial: Where does this exercise come from? Who taught it to me? And why reenact it in a new context, different from its initial moment of invention and transmission? Dance remains locked up in an unhistorical present, by always avoiding that kind of question. This is not the place for delineating the methodological framework of such a history. Here, I will simply analyze the notion that would be the key concept of that history: that of “techniques of the body.” I will put aside Marcel Mauss’s famous lecture, which deals only with the traditional transmission of gestures allowing a given society to construct and to perpetuate itself through the socialization of its members.4 The ethnological background of that lecture

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creates a slight bias insofar as it is focused on traditional transmission and self-perpetuation of society through the cultural configuration of bodily capabilities, whereas a considerable part of dance practices are rather researching the invention of new techniques and new uses of bodily movement. Thus, in order to construct a notion of body techniques adequate to dance practices in particular, I prefer to lean on Foucault’s writings and, more specifically, on the shift operating between Discipline and Punish and the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality.5 Foucault’s long silence after the first volume of The History of Sexuality is well known.6 Largely commented upon in the introduction to second volume, The Use of Pleasure, it is explained by Foucault as the response to the necessity of opening up a new problematic radically different from the genealogy of disciplines instituted by Discipline and Punish.7 To the disciplinary question that left no room for the existence of a subject and could only speak of “individuals” as the application point of the power-knowledge complex, Foucault decided, at the very beginning of the 1980s, to substitute the question of subjectivation, by which he meant the different operations by which an individual discovers himself or herself as a subject through various kinds of theoretical and practical reflexivity. This change of the philosophical problematic went hand-in-hand with a modification of the historical corpus: from the late eighteenth century, center of gravity of Discipline and Punish, to the ethics of classical and Hellenistic antiquity, the main object of the two last volumes of The History of Sexuality. The shift from the disciplines topics to the later concept of the care of the self is highly problematic. Nevertheless, in both contexts, one element, the concept of “technique,” remains unchanged. The third part of Discipline and Punish, devoted to disciplines, is integrally based on the technical model of a knowledge that can immediately be equated to a power. More precisely, the body techniques imposed by the army, the school, and the factory always correspond simultaneously to the improvement of a capability and to the stabilization of a subjection. When I learn to handle a rifle, I become more efficient and thus, in some respects, more free in relation to my own body, to its heaviness and clumsiness, but at the same time I find myself infinitely more dependent on the institution that provides such learning. The disciplinary moment of the techniques of the body is nothing else than this conjunction between an improved capability (opening up a certain space of freedom) and a reinforced subjection (closing down any possibility of emancipation). In Foucault, this would be the genius of discipline: the compliance to technical norms appears as a path for bodily emancipation and paradoxically brings the subject back to a reinforced structure of subjection. In other words, the disciplines create an infinite circle between efficiency and order, between (bodily) knowledge and (social) power, as Foucault wrote:



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The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. … If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labor, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.8

Foucault always maintained the ambiguity of these “political technologies of the body” operating in the army, the school, and the factory. This ambiguity is nothing else than the one of the technique, understood as an improvement of the individual and implying his direct submission to an anonymous power. In contrast, what is surprising is the fact that, when Foucault left behind that problematic of the “disciplines” for the benefit of the care of the self, he conserved the very same concept of technique. When applied to subjectivation, he named it “techniques of the self” (in French texts) or “technologies of the self” (in English contexts): The guiding thread that seems the most useful for this inquiry is constituted by what one might call the “techniques of the self,” which is to say, the procedures, which no doubt exist in every civilization, suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of self-mastery or self-knowledge.9

Or, according to another definition proposed in the 1982 seminar given at the University of Vermont, [The] technologies of the self … permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conducts, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.10

The tension appears obvious. On the one hand, body techniques, as disciplinary, create nothing but a conjunction of an improved efficiency and an increased subjection. On the other, techniques of the self, which included since antiquity a significant bodily dimension, would consist in nothing else but a wholly free and virgin relationship of the subject to itself. This pits an idea of bad disciplinary techniques against one of nice techniques of the self. One might be tempted to apply this axiological opposition to dance. One could say, for instance, that the ballet is entirely on the side of discipline and that, liberating the body from its own inertia and clumsiness, it makes the subject more dependent on the institution that educates it. Such an analysis would

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not be completely irrelevant, since ballet was codified, such as we know it today, at the same time as the disciplines analyzed by Foucault were set up. Conversely, the subjectivating part of the technique, by which one simultaneously discovers, invents, and transforms oneself, would be due integrally to the great merits of modern and contemporary dance, which would have been the only dance trends capable of focusing on the body not as an individual, but rather as a subject. Such an opposition is obviously absurd, and a more moderate answer must be preferred. A dance technique, whatever its kind, is always at the same time “body technique” and “technique of the self,” in the specific meaning given by Foucault to these expressions. One only needs to see some great ballet solos to understand that even the most disciplinary bodily practices imply and even appeal to some real breaches of subjectivation, some moments when the compliance to the norm becomes the occasion for a risky transaction between oneself and oneself. Conversely, one only needs to have been working for a while in a dance company to realize that the ethics of subjectivity and of the care of the self, which may constitute the spontaneous ethos of modern and contemporary dance, frequently lead to relationships of power and of psycho-affective dependency even more violent than in a frank and explicitly disciplinary context. It is precisely because my own subjectivity, as a dancer and a person, is at stake in that kind of modern or contemporary movement that I may find myself even weaker and alienated, precisely because no social field is free of power relations and none is completely devoid of liberty and emancipatory possibilities. TECHNIQUES OF THE SELF AND “AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE”: DESCRIPTION AND PRESCRIPTION Any dance technique is always at the same time “body technique” and “technique of the self,” disciplinary subjection and bodily subjectivation, a “technique of the subject-body” and a “technique of the body as a subject,” in the double meaning of “being-a-subject” that implies both subjectivation and subjection. And it is precisely that ambiguity or imbrication that was already indicated by Foucault in the remains of the word “technique” within the move from disciplines to the care of the self. The fact that a same word, “technique,” can be applied both to an apparatus of subjection and to some procedures of subjectivation must lead us to a less naïve reading of the notion of “technique of the self.” These “techniques of the self” never referred to a purely naked and virgin relationship of oneself to oneself. They had always been saturated with sociality and normativity. I quote here Foucault in a 1984 interview entitled “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a



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Practice of Freedom”: “If I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture, his society, and his social group.”11 In other words, these “techniques of the self” are not produced or invented by the subject himself. They are always already given, or even imposed and prescribed, by a cultural and social exteriority. That means that the technical and practical conditions of the apparition of a subject are by themselves anonymous and a-subjective, disseminated throughout the historical and social field, in the practices that a given society may invent in order to shape, stimulate, and control the relation of oneself to oneself. The only thing that differentiates them from the disciplinary techniques is the fact that they generate their application point not as an object (an individual) but rather as a reflexive structure, as a being that can exist only by questioning the modalities of its own existing, as a moral and existential subject. Whether this subject may escape from subjection thanks to subjectivation only is still another question. Thus, the gap formerly alleged between Discipline and Punish and the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality doesn’t seem to be as great as it has generally been held. More exactly, it is necessary to dissociate the historical analysis of the subjectivation structures – a kind of historical and philosophical genealogy of the moral subject – from the actual ethics that Foucault was trying to sketch at the end of his life through the name of “The Aesthetics of Existence.” The analysis of subjectivation structures is useful and fruitful insofar as it provides us with some tools for the descriptive and historical analysis of a variety of phenomena: among them, dance, understood as a certain bodily practice of the self, given in such or such social and historical context. “The Aesthetics of Existence” appears as a dead end, at least if it must lead to a concrete ethics concerning other individuals than Foucault himself. Indeed, what is Foucault doing when he associates the ancient topics of the “care of the self” to the modern idea of the “The Aesthetics of Existence,” when he appeals to an aesthetical way of addressing the ethical matter? What is made possible by his detour at this point of his philosophy through the vocabulary of beauty and artworks? It seems to me that this reference to aesthetics is fundamentally a way of suspending the question of ethical content and normativity, a way of conserving ethics as a question, a matter, or a concern profoundly embedded in the heart of subjectivity, while revoking the idea of any universal or transcendent norm, or even, finally, of any ethical content. The word “aesthetics” would be here nothing else than the positive name given to this refusal of any external norm, refusal that finds in the artwork the perfect model of its immanent and autotelic regulation.

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Given this interpretation, two options would then be available. Either one sticks to the perfect emptiness that delegates the determination of the ethical content to the aesthetical choices of the subject, rejoining thus a kind of aestheticizing individualism close to dandyism, or one seeks in spite of all to give a real content to the ethics of the care of the self, taking the risk of transforming oneself into a moral legislator.12 In both cases, we have not really advanced: there remains either an empty ethics or a new catechism. That is why the concept of “techniques of the self” must remain a descriptive and axiologically neutral tool, and must not be erected as a moral norm or an ideal that practices, bodily or not, should try to rejoin, if the concept is to be truly useful for the historical and aesthetical analysis of dance practices. Without such a precaution, a theoretician would become some kind of evaluator, a judge of good and bad practices, distributing blame and praise. There is certainly some ethical substance in the bodily relation of oneself to oneself, and first of all in dance, but that substance cannot be accessed through a normative and external theorization; it can only be described, in its social and historical mechanisms, in its games of power and its effects of subjectivation, always determined and always particular. THE “NORMATIVE TURN” OF PRAGMATISM: SHUSTERMAN AND FOUCAULT In my introduction, I left aside the issue of choreographic works for bodily experience delivered by dance practices. This shift from artwork to experience, while weakening the “making dimension” of the choreographic activity, is also an attempt to enlarge the field of what is traditionally called “aesthetics.” In that regard, such a move finds support in Richard Shusterman’s argument in Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics.13 In his previous book, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Shusterman had already proposed a double reduction that might be linked to my own shift from choreography to dance experience: first, a reduction of the artistic to the aesthetical, that is, of the artworks to the sensorial experiences that are their fundament or their effect (through which creators and spectators are put on the same level); second, a reduction of the aesthetical to the pragmatic, where the artistic practices seek the general improvement and enhancement of everybody’s experience.14 It is on that double reduction, borrowed from Dewey, that Shusterman grounded his defense of popular aesthetics, in particular hip-hop. As he wrote: “It was the instrumental aim of improving our immediate experience through sociocultural transformation where art would be richer and more satisfying to more people, because it would be closer to their most vital interests and better



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integrated into their lives.”15 Body Consciousness extends this ameliorative and pragmatic concern to bodily experience and the embodied relation that one has to oneself. Leaning on his own background as a Feldenkrais practitioner and mentioning other somatic practices such as yoga and Alexander technique, Shusterman proposes to establish a new discipline, both practical and theoretical, which researches the improvement of the individual as well as collective bodily experience. He baptizes that new discipline somaesthetics and defines it as follows: “We can briefly describe somaesthetics as concerned with the critical study and meliorative cultivation of how we experience and use the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”16 Here, an aesthetics is not thought of as work, or as object, or as presentation, but rather as a general “aesthetical becoming” of a whole existence centered on the body. One might wonder whether dance, as a field of constant body experiments, has not found in Shusterman its mentor. One certainly can rejoice in this promotion of somatic techniques to the level of philosophical objects, especially since many dancers are nowadays practicing these techniques of somatic awareness. In that regard, dance practices would only be a particular sector, perhaps a little eclectic and marginal, of a larger set of bodily practices of the self that Shusterman calls “somaesthetics.” Dancers would find in somaesthetics their discipline in its true essence, removed from any imperatives of stage or poiesis. Further, it is precisely the experience of dancing that constituted a source for Pragmatist Aesthetics and led Shusterman to abandon Adorno’s Marxism in favor of Dewey’s pragmatism: My ultimate “conversion” to pragmatist aesthetics and the idea of this book did not take shape … until the Spring of 1988, when I taught an aesthetics seminar to a very mixed and lively audience of graduate students in philosophy and dance. My debt to them is greater than I can here record. I had originally intended to use Dewey as a foil to what I then regarded as the far superior aesthetic theory of Adorno (which I still greatly admire). But by the end of the semester, having scrutinized the different arguments in class and tested some issues on the dance floor, I could not help but trade Adorno’s austere, gloomy, and haughtily elitist Marxism for Dewey’s more earthy, upbeat, and democratic pragmatism.17

Twenty years later, Body Consciousness, by choosing the moving body as its gravity center, pays a secret homage to that first choreographic impulse on the dance floor, reported above as an anecdote. Shusterman’s pragmatism should be biographically anchored in a certain experience of dancing, and conversely, dance should find in it a theoretical framework adequate to it. Nevertheless, two important qualifications must be stated regarding this potential “pragmatic turn” of philosophical discourses on dance. First, the profound and extreme normativity of Shusterman’s “somaesthetics” deserves

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emphasizing. Its meliorative ground (no doubt, its goal is to make us “happier” in our relation to our own body, and even, as Shusterman writes, more “adapted”) necessarily leads to producing a strong opposition between “good” and “bad” practices. Leaning on this axiological opposition and its supposed clarity, Shusterman distributes blame and praise to various philosophers, according to how adequately they have anticipated (or not) his own theory. For instance, Foucault must be praised for having proposed the notion of “techniques of the self,” but should be blamed for the practical content of what can be extracted as a “somaesthetics” from his texts, which Shusterman considers as excessively focused on drugs, sadomasochism, and Baudelaire. In criticism of Foucault’s texts, he says: If Foucault’s own pragmatic somaesthetics of pleasure has a transformative spiritual dimension, the power of its spirituality seems diminished or put in question not merely by his excessive concentration on the sensationalist pleasures of strong drugs and sexual violence, but also by choosing Charles Baudelaire’s model of dandyism to embody his own ideal of transformative somaesthetic askesis.18

This kind of critique is obviously absurd and ridiculous, and perhaps suffices to evaluate the philosophical relevance of “somaesthetics.” Thus, one must pay attention to and be very concerned with the extreme and violent normativity that underlies Shusterman’s statements. The somatic techniques in which Shusterman is interested are essentially normative, providing a specific mixture of ethics and therapeutics. With these techniques, it is always about producing a healthy and happy body, that is to say a “well adapted” individual (the “adaptation” vocabulary coming directly from Feldenkrais). Then, if this somaesthetics were to be directly applied to dance, a strong division between “good” and “bad” practices would appear very quickly, Shusterman neglects the fact that dance practices do not necessarily aim to make us healthier, happier, and more adapted, and that they can sometimes deal with altered states of consciousness or marginal sex practices. In her article “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of Somatics,” Isabelle Ginot perfectly pointed out the illegitimate generalization on which Shusterman’s argument is based.19 Shusterman extracts from somatic techniques like Alexander or Feldenkrais some specific features: the will of awareness and mastery, the accurateness of perception, a range of movements avoiding extreme and violent sensations; getting these features out of their context, he implicitly transforms them into a set of general norms that should rule the whole bodily existence and should exclude any extreme or violent experience. But neither Alexander nor Feldenkrais had ever said that the specific features of a somatic lesson should become the general model of life and bodily behavior. Shusterman’s normativity derives from a basic



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confusion between the level of what a somatic lesson is and the level of what life and bodily experiences, with their huge diversity, can provide. Second, even if we assume that dance practices were effectively aiming to enhance and refine our bodily experience, such an enhancement could have sense, pragmatically speaking, only through its enlargement to the whole society. One cannot see why the improvements of bodily experience brought about by dance practices should be limited to the studio space and to the realm of professional dancers. Foucault noticed very well how the ancient ethics of the care of the self had been made possible, thanks only to the slave structure of the Greco-Roman society: “Attending to oneself is a privilege; it is the mark of a social superiority, as against those who must attend to others in order to serve them or attend to a trade in order to live. The advantage afforded by wealth, status and birth is expressed by the fact that one has the possibility of attending to oneself.”20 The same remark could certainly be applied today to the bodily concern of the self and to dance seen as such. A dance theory that would elect the notion of bodily experience as its center could become coherent within itself, or at least egalitarian, only by wishing the extreme generalization of amateur practices, unless it resigned itself to the imprisonment of the dance field in itself. ANOTHER PRACTICE: DANCE AND SITE To escape this evident dead end, I propose finally to distinguish between experience and practice, in order to reconsider and reevaluate the public exposure of dance. By “practice,” I do not mean the intimate movements by which a subject experiences and transforms himself, but rather the public conditions by which dance finally comes to be exposed. The dance performance could then be thought of not as a finished object, regardless of whatever place it is performed, but rather as a social and political practice aiming to intervene in sites that do not necessarily desire and welcome it. This notion of a “practice of exposure” would allow dance to maintain a relation with some exteriority, while short-circuiting all the absurdities that theatrical space gives. To distinguish between experience and practice means to avoid two traps: first, the aberrations of the performance production system and of its conception of works written for eternity when dance disappears after one season; second, the imprisonment of the field in itself, because of the refinements of bodily experience allowed by studio alone. This notion of “practice of exposure” becomes relevant for today when the public exhibition of dance is considered not as a structure that one passively endures in accordance with the traditional laws of the theatrical space, but rather as the very place for artistic choices, inventions, and decisions. This practice entails the lucid consciousness of the

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strict singularity of each situation, and thus also the frank acceptance of its own disappearance, once the event is consumed. Thus, while delineating the potentiality of an artistic operation beyond the concept of a work, it conserves the idea of experience and its necessary grounding in the lived present. This is a transformed notion of experience, which appears as a contextualized and shared experience, rather than a singular imprisonment in the individual body. If the studio is a “heterotopia,” according to Foucault, a space that, like the ship or the whorehouse, interrogates and reflects, by its own enclosure, the functioning of more regular and normal places, it is then necessary to make this heterotopy play outside itself, breaking its enclosure and exposing it in some sites that are not necessarily calling for dance.21 Such sites locate dance in public squares, in streets, in stations, in shopping malls, in gardens, and also in theater itself. A Foucauldian notion of heterotopian dance puts dancing where dance has no institutional reason to be and, thus, gives to its exposure the force of an intervention. NOTES 1. Speaking of the “life” of a work, I mean the continuity of its performances and executions within the group that has originally created it; speaking of its “survival,” I mean its deposit in some material and external traces that make possible its reenactment and reactivation by people not belonging to the original group. 2. John Martin, The Modern Dance (1933; New York: Dance Horizons, 1968), 13–16. 3. Giacomo Rizzolati and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 4. Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps” (1934), in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950); “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York: Berghahn, 2006). 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), and The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988). Originally published as Histoire de la sexualité II. L’Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), and Histoire de la sexualité III. Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). Originally published as Histoire de la sexualité I. La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 7. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, 3–13. 8. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 162; Discipline and Punish, 137–38.



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9. Michel Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 87. Originally published as “Subjectivité et vérité,” text no. 304 in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1032. 10. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics, 225. 11. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics, 291. Originally published as “L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté,” text no. 356 in Dits et écrits II, 1538. 12. On this final figure of the dandy, see Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” in Ethics, 303. 13. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 14. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 15. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 19. 16. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 1. 17. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, xvii. My emphasis. 18. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 45. 19. Isabelle Ginot, “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of Somatics,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 1 (2010): 12–29. 20. Michel Foucault, “The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” in Ethics, 95. Originally published as “L’Herméneutique du sujet,” text no. 323 in Dits et écrits II, 1174. 21. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Critical Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1998), 330–36.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. Dits et écrits. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. Ethics: Subjecting and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: New Press, 1997. ———. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1988. Ginot, Isabelle. “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of Somatics.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 1 (2010): 12–29. Martin, John. The Modern Dance. New York: Dance Horizons, 1968. Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” In Techniques, Technology and Civilization, edited by Nathan Schlanger. New York: Berghahn, 2006.

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Rizzolati, Giacomo, and Sinigaglia, Corrado. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shusterman, Richard. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. 2nd ed. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.

Chapter 5

Discipline and Pianist Foucault and the Genealogy of the Étude Brandon Konoval

Fingers march steadfastly up and down the keyboard, little soldiers in close formation. Dissonant A-flats are repeatedly lobbed over their heads, the sharp reports arriving closer and closer together. Caught in the featureless expanse of pure C major, the fingers lose rank and file, tumbling in disarray over diminished sevenths – a rootless, unreliable terrain for the foot soldiers of tonality. With a plucky if naïve discipline schooled by eighteenth-century strategy, they attempt to regroup on a dominant position, but antagonists abruptly crash down upon them with even greater ferocity – this time a mere semitone away – unleashing rapid-fire, five-finger volleys of their own to provoke yet another disorderly retreat. The timing of this musical ambush can be dated to 1915; its strategist, Claude Debussy; the staging area, his first étude for piano; and the outcome, in many respects still undecided over a century later. For some, this militaristic impression of the opening passages of the étude might strike a discordant note, given Debussy’s more familiar profile as musical “Impressionist” extraordinaire; for surely, no composer’s music should be less attuned to the bugle’s summons or less driven by the beat of a drum.1 But consider Debussy in the same year, reflecting upon France’s engagement on more than just one battlefront: For seven months now, music has been subordinated to the military regime. … We can console ourselves in the knowledge that [music] … will soon be able to resume her magnificent, if temporarily interrupted task. She may even emerge purer from her ordeals of fire: more brilliant, and stronger. The outcome of the war will undoubtedly have immediate repercussions in the next chapter of our history of the Art, and we should understand that victory will bring a necessary liberation to the French musical consciousness. … We tolerated overblown 79

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orchestras, tortuous forms, cheap luxury and clashing colors, and we were about to give the seal of approval to even more suspect naturalizations when the sound of gunfire put a sudden stop to it all. … Today, when the virtues of our race are being exalted, the victory should give our artists a sense of purity and remind them of the nobility of the French blood. We have a whole intellectual province to recapture!2

Debussy knew his audience, composing this call-to-arms for the March 11, 1915, edition of the anti-Dreyfusard newspaper L’Intransigeant, which gave him the opportunity to develop themes previously essayed in his personal correspondence (“French art needs to take revenge quite as seriously as the French army does!”).3 The Great War as a marker of decisive cultural transformation is familiar enough from scholarly and critical accounts of modernism, including a specifically musical modernism.4 To judge from contemporary accounts like Debussy’s, war truly did have much to offer the musician, promising the opportunity for a distinctively French sensibility to penetrate and subdue fresh artistic terrain, while correspondingly securing a cordon sanitaire for cultural purification. With his account of “overblown orchestras,” “cheap luxury and clashing colors,” Debussy protested the decadent embrace – “suspect naturalizations” – of an odious Germanic sensuousness in dire need of a reasserted Gallic discipline.5 Such a victory, however, could not be won without cost: as Debussy ruefully observed in a letter from the previous September, “I think we’re going to pay dearly for the right to dislike the music of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg.”6 Many combative themes emerge from Debussy’s Kulturkampf, but correspondingly, many different types of contention, whether intellectual, cultural, moral, or racial (the “purity” of “our artists,” and the “nobility of the French blood”). Debussy himself was soon able to resume his temporarily interrupted task of composition, and it was with the concert étude that he answered the call, marshaling a set of highly experimental works that he was able to complete not long before his death in 1918. With what ears should we listen to such works – or, for that matter, to the militaristic themes of the article for L’Intransigeant? If Debussy appears to have been susceptible to the nationalist hysteria that enthralled so many with the outbreak of World War I, it was another kind of hysteria that caught the attention of “the most famous ears of our time,” as described in a work that likewise addressed themes of nobility, purity, and race, as well as cultural and national asceticism: Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge.7 Foucault’s reference, of course, was to Sigmund Freud; moreover, to Freud’s determination to listen to the hysterics he encountered in the hypnosis-induced clinical spectacles directed by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière. Though the role of attentive listening in Foucault’s work and thought has itself received a hearing,8 Foucault’s



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own ears have not achieved a notoriety corresponding to those of Freud: the author of but a few, comparatively short pieces devoted to music and musicrelated topics9 – and these offered with a measure of evidently sincere selfdeprecation – Foucault has been largely bypassed as a critical resource for music. And yet, it may be precisely for the genre of the étude – and of the piano étude in particular – that Foucault can offer a compelling genealogy, a distinctive aperture through which to probe the relationship between bodies and power, piano technique and technologies of the self. What can account for the extraordinary popularity of the étude – or of its cognate genres, whether the leçon or the Übungsstücke, the “study” or the “exercise” – a work so strikingly private in conception and with an aesthetic beholden to the ascetic, yet destined to become emblematic of musical Romanticism in its characteristic prolixity and spectacular public display? The étude presents a node at which converge a disciplinary body and a disciplinary pedagogy, a disciplinary aesthetics and a disciplinary creativity, a disciplinary time and a disciplinary hero for the times. All of these developments both found expression in and brought stimulus to a musical genre that enshrined a disciplinary culture for the pianist that persists to the present day, from the privacy of the home to the arena of international competition, from conservatory to concert hall, and from self-surveillance to the spectacle of the self. Though never directly addressed by Foucault, the étude is nevertheless peculiarly responsive to Foucauldian analysis in all these senses and powerfully resonant with central works of Foucault’s oeuvre. Discipline and Punish provides the most compelling overall framework for such an undertaking,10 but the History of Sexuality and The Hermeneutics of the Subject likewise offer a distinctive perspective on the milieu of the étude,11 in light of Foucault’s attention to the ascetic practices of the individual and the ascetic orientation of the socioeconomic class in which both composers and performers of the étude flourished. Guided by Foucault, therefore, we might ask what cultural forces shaped this genre as it in turn sought to shape musicians. We might come to appreciate why not just Debussy but generations of composers and performers have proven unable to resist the siren song of the study. DISCIPLINE AND MUSIC Associations between music and the military come in a wide variety of forms. In Europe, a direct connection between music and modernized armed forces began following the creation of standing armies in the seventeenth century and their regimental musicians in the eighteenth;12 Foucault himself quotes an early seventeenth-century source in Discipline and Punish (Louis de Montgommery, La Milice françoise, 1636) on the importance of the drum for

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the coordination of marching.13 The growth of this regimental role for music was significant: as Simon Werrett observes, “The military was probably the largest employer of European musicians in the first half of the nineteenth century.”14 Furthermore, the popularization of military music in commercial society became a noteworthy phenomenon, such as Debussy’s march in “Fêtes” drew upon (cf. n.1).15 But beyond such overt connections, Foucault would have us attend to a deeper level of shared concerns, concerns that drew upon and permeated a wider disciplinary culture: the étude for piano – a genre not conceived to serve any explicitly militaristic musical regime – highlights such an orientation, and it is Foucault’s compatriot, Debussy, who guides the reconnaissance of this disciplinary terrain. How did Debussy bide his wartime? His nationalist enthusiasms notwithstanding, Debussy was finding wartime production difficult, and in August 1914, he entreated his publisher, Jacques Durand, for suggestions: “If you have any work you can put my way, please think of me.”16 Perhaps it is only coincidence that, in the same letter, Debussy observed nearby “soldiers … at their exercises,” accompanied by music, “some with bugles, some with drums.”17 In response to Debussy’s request, Durand suggested that Debussy edit some well-known musical rather than martial exercises for the piano, the études of Frédéric Chopin. The suggestion was inspired: Debussy found himself drawn back not just to composition, but to the composition of a set of piano études that marked his enthusiastic reenlistment in the avant-garde. Such a development was surprising in many ways, the allure of wartime discipline notwithstanding: Debussy, after all, was a notorious conscientious objector to the discipline of the Conservatoire de Paris.18 One might have thought that études – a genre principally if not exclusively devoted to the development of a musician’s technical skills and closely connected with the history of the Conservatoire itself – would have been the last thing Debussy would have written for the piano; and, as it turned out, they nearly were. Whatever Debussy’s aesthetic aspirations, even the cessation of hostilities might not have distanced the études from the military regime: well before the war, Debussy’s colleague Vincent D’Indy, as new director of the Paris Schola Cantorum (est. 1896) – a rival institution to the Conservatoire – decided that études should likewise form a core regime for his students. It was a regime that both he and Debussy knew intimately as students at the Conservatoire, where they had been pupils of the professor for piano, Antoine Marmontel, himself a composer of several sets of études. At the Schola Cantorum as at the Conservatoire, études were to be used not only to hone musical skills in general but to discipline students’ bodies as one might a soldier’s, an association made explicit by d’Indy himself, who likened them to the “warm-up exercises in a military drill.”19



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D’Indy’s association of the étude with drill is of more than anecdotal interest, for the étude was among the most distinctive instruments of bodily discipline initially developed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, inviting distinctive parallels with the history of military discipline. When Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish of “a new set of restraints [that] had been brought into play, another degree of precision in the breakdown of gestures and movements, another way of adjusting the body to temporal imperatives,”20 one could imagine him remarking as much on the development of the étude as on developments of late eighteenth-century rifle drills in Prussia – developments in which the public took close interest, given the victories won by rifle regiments under the command of Frederick II (“The Great”).21 And it was not just Prussian rifle regiments that inspired emulation: when the British Royal Artillery Band was formed in 1762, not only was the Prussian military band taken as its model, but all eight members of its original contingent were themselves Prussian.22 DISCIPLINE AND VIRTUOSITY If we may consider the modern, professional soldier to offer a paradigm of the disciplined body, we might ask whether the modern, professional virtuoso who appeared soon after offers any less emblematic disciplinary figure. Likewise, if the military camp served as Foucault’s gateway to the exploration of disciplinary culture in the school, the hospital, and the factory, then the distinctive institutional setting that emerged in the late eighteenth century for the production of musical virtuosi – the conservatory – merits corresponding consideration. The École Royale de Chant et de Déclamation, founded in 1784, was to be integrated following the Revolution with the Institut National de Musique (est. 1793), itself originally founded as the École Gratuite de la Garde Nationale, and which had provided training for the band of the Garde Nationale. These musical and military institutions were conjoined in 1795 to form the Conservatoire de Paris, offering a rigorous training for which the étude provided a central disciplinary apparatus.23 The conservatory model did not go unchallenged in setting the standards or defining the character of virtuosity: there were many for whom the conservatory-bred virtuoso offered a critical target against which to measure other ideals of virtuosity – after all, one of the more famous rejects of the Conservatoire de Paris was the young Franz Liszt, who thereafter loved to mock what he characterized as conservatory-style playing.24 Nevertheless, the relentless growth of the conservatory throughout the nineteenth century, as a pedagogical apparatus distinct from the domestic or private, studio-based training of musicians, was to establish a benchmark for musical discipline that has

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persisted to the present day, whether constituted as an independent institutional structure, as a program within a college or university, or as an affiliated curriculum for otherwise dispersed private instruction. Much conservatory training concerned the programmatic development of the bodily skills of individuals, and one of the outcomes of that rational approach to bodily discipline was the privileging of the étude as a preeminent pedagogical genre that nonetheless became a leading genre for performance.25 This odd development – one of those curious shifts in cultural practice such as Nietzsche highlighted with his genealogy of punishment (Genealogy of Morality, II, §13), the germ of Discipline and Punish – is often accounted for in terms of the culture of the spectacle;26 but neither the idiosyncrasies of that spectacle nor the quirky career of the étude itself is so neatly grasped. And with good reason, for what, if anything, is an étude? It is striking that a genre devoted to the disciplining of bodies should itself have been so protean, from the Transcendental Études of Liszt to the finger drills of Hanon. With its origins in practical training, the conventional étude embraced monomania, intently focused on a particular musical figure – an idée fixe – deployed in as many configurations as the instrumentalist might conceivably encounter. The étude therefore manifested a “whole analytical pedagogy …, meticulous in its detail,” which “broke down the subject being taught into its simplest elements” and “hierarchized each stage of development into small steps.”27 However singular its attention, the étude typically comes in a collection, since any particular technical obsession assumes a larger network of obsessions that train particular facets of technique, as though the pianist were to emerge from an industrial process that refines each component of mechanical function before final assemblage. Even the transcendental virtuoso might be captured from such a perspective: “Liszt’s peculiar strength … was that the individual branches of technique so assiduously cultivated and displayed on a selective basis by his contemporaries – octaves, scales, repeated notes, leaps – were all rolled into one in him.”28

DISCIPLINE AND TIME This isolation of a particular figurative/physical challenge aligns itself with a strict temporal coordination for components of the body. Once again, although Foucault takes military drill as his point of departure, he describes principles that underwrite no less the piano étude: A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement [is] assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration;



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their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.29

Time – or timing – is the crucial constraint that, in counterpoint with the pitch structure of the musical score, creates the performative disciplinary context for the instrumentalist, for, without such constraint, bodily motion would otherwise be a choreography beholden solely to the inclinations of the performer: Disciplinary control does not consist simply in teaching or imposing a series of particular gestures; it imposes the best relation between a gesture and the overall position of the body, which is its condition of efficiency and speed. In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time, nothing must remain idle or useless.30

With its “correct use,” time itself becomes subject to discipline, a chronometric or “linear time,”31 producing a carceral series of moments that the wily musician could now seek to escape through tempo rubato. A “transgressive” performance in this sense relied upon recognition of the disciplinary boundaries of time, whether its performer was Liszt or one of the creatures of the conservatory he disparaged. The framing of those chronometric boundaries brought music in close contact with the increasing standardization of measures – efforts both scientific and political – that found new musical impetus in the early nineteenth century with the creation of the metronome by Mälzel and Winkel, capping numerous efforts from the late sixteenth century onward to standardize measurement of the beat.32 Foucault correspondingly notes the increasing importance of precisely timed coordination in military exercises and engagements beginning in the seventeenth century, whether involving chronometric marching (Montgommery) or chronometric shooting (Vauban, Guibert), with the corps of soldiers thereby disciplined to interact as a well-coordinated body.33 In a world deeply invested in speed, efficiency, and close coordination, the metronome became far more than just a measuring device, offering distinctive application to the professionalization of instrumentalists or singers charged with performing the music of others. From a Foucauldian perspective, the temporal orthopedics of the metronome would register among the more far reaching of the mechanical devices deployed in the training of musicians because of the exceptional discrimination with which it could discipline the use of time. The metronome subdivided the minute according to the demands and structure of the musical work itself – determining the number of beats per minute, unrestricted by the number of seconds per minute – a superlative technology of the “eminence of detail”34 that Foucault associates with a virtuosic use of time:

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Discipline … poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: … it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. … One must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency.35

Apart from simply establishing a “correct” tempo at the behest of the composer, the metronome could be used throughout the performer’s practice, establishing an “obligatory rhythm, imposed from the outside”36 that framed an étude’s technical hurdles with an inescapable, infinitesimal precision that could be successively refined. The mechanism of the metronome was therefore ideally suited both to physico-temporal disciplining in general and to the disciplinary genre of the étude that cultivated it in particular. DISCIPLINE AND PERFORMANCE Foucault’s emphasis on speed and efficiency in his account of the disciplined body – “the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces”37 – is suggestive of many things, not least of which is an appreciation of mechanical speed and efficiency. Paul Metzner writes of La Mettrie’s appreciation of functional marvels in L’homme machine: He regards humans as machines, but … he does not regard them as mere machines. Rather, he regards them as admirable machines, as the absolute epitome of machinery. Human beings are marvels because they function so well. And whoever or whatever – La Mettrie refuses to choose between God and Nature – designed and constructed these admirable machines is also admirable.38

L’homme machine might seem a suitable catchphrase for the disciplinary goal of conventional études, the constituents of a manufactory process. The étude in this sense functions as a disciplinary interface between instrument and player that recalls Foucault’s “instrumental coding of the body (le codage instrumental du corps)”:39 It consists of a breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body to be used (right hand, left hand, different fingers of the hand … etc.) and that of the parts of the object manipulated …; then the two sets of parts are correlated together according to a number of simple gestures.40



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Foucault is once again discussing military training – and, yet again, techniques of rifle handling – but the result, a “body-machine complex,”41 recalls the observations of contemporary writers for whom the virtuoso could appear simultaneously as monster and as marvel. Clara Schumann described an almost centaur-like symbiosis of Liszt and his instrument: “He arouses fright and astonishment. … His appearance at the piano is indescribable. … He is absorbed by the piano.”42 Heinrich Heine saw more a musical culture of the cyborg: “technical perfection, the precision of an automaton, the identification of the musician with stringed wood, the transformation of a man into an instrument of sound, [this] is what is now praised and exalted as the highest art.”43 Whether monster or marvel, the disciplinary performer appeared not just as an uncanny hybrid of human and machine, but as a hybrid offering a new means of production in a radically transforming musical economy. In tracing the departure of the manufactory process from craftsmanship, and the corresponding divergence in modes of training, Foucault comments on the displacement of the chef d’oeuvre or masterwork as the culmination of such training, to be replaced by a series of examinations.44 In music, where the growth of a standardized repertoire simultaneously served examinations and public performance, the masterpiece became the product of other hands, those of the composer whose intentions the performer-interpreter was to divine and serve in a disciplinary division of labor. This professionalization of the performer, allied with the development of the concept of the “musical work” as it has been identified by musicologists,45 appears well served by the efficacy of fingers capable of machine-like productivity: that is, able to summon whatever technical feats were demanded of them in precisely the same way and with the same desired result, near-faultless servants of reliable reproduction. But with the development of a new body mechanics, there was likewise the constitution of a new “body-politic,” as it were, a “mechanics of power”46 that may not be conveniently reduced to “an ethos of individuality and freedom”:47 Discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile” bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an “aptitude,” a “capacity” which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection.48

Foucault can be understood to speak not just to the hybrid political character of the body-machine, but to the hybrid moral character of the “virtuoso” himself or herself. In the entry “Virtuosité,” for his Dictionnaire de Musique (1703), Sébastien de Brossard stressed that “in Italian, virtù means not simply that habit of the soul than makes us agreeable to God.”49 Brossard thereby

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recalled Machiavelli’s genealogy of virtue in the Discourses on the First Decade of Livy (2.2): “Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It has assigned as man’s highest good humility, abnegation, … whereas the other identified it with magnanimity, bodily strength.”50 The latter is what is most famously associated with the “virtù” of Machiavelli’s Prince, derived from the Latin vir for “man,” the distinctively manly “man” rather than the generic homo.51 The disciplinary virtuoso is a moral hybrid possessed of both forms of virtue, the creature of that “historical moment of the disciplines when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills” and power but – in a musical culture increasingly dominated by master composers and their masterpieces – “at the formation of a relation that … makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful.”52 DISCIPLINE AND ROMANTICISM With its aura of subjection, “disciplinary culture” does not sound at first like an especially inviting culture for Romanticism, except perhaps for a Romanticism of ressentiment that seeks to undermine the forces commanded by a restrictive or repressive regime. “Discipline” in this sense evokes an understanding of power – power as imposition, as a force acting upon an object – such as Foucault was in fact to contest in Discipline and Punish,53 and to polemically engage in his critique of the “repressive hypothesis” in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. A “reactive” reading of Romanticism – whether in revolt against eighteenth-century rationality or the growth of industrialization – has proven no less inviting than the “repressive hypothesis” itself, but it would appear that, at least in musical terms, disciplinary culture was in fact particularly well attuned to nurturing musical Romanticism in some of its most characteristic features. Foucault observes the growth of disciplinary works and texts in relation to the disciplinary individual, namely, “the constitution of the individual as describable, analyzable object, not in order to reduce him to ‘speciesrepresentative’54 features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his … particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities.”55 The particular case that Foucault addressed in such terms was indeed the medical case and its relationship to medical documentation in the emergent disciplinary hospital, but Foucault views such developments more broadly as being “of decisive importance in the epistemological ‘thaw’ of the sciences of the individual.”56 Thus, we witness the growth of the “ignoble archives” in which “this turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization” – at least, not in a received sense – and for which the



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“everyday individuality of everybody” no longer “remained below the threshold of description.”57 With this development, literary culture transitions from “the epic to the novel” and from “monuments” to “documents.”58 By way of illustration, Foucault observes that “the adventure of our childhood no longer finds expression in ‘le bon petit Henri’ [i.e., Henry IV], but in the misfortunes of ‘little Hans.’”59 In musical terms, this lowering of the threshold of “the chronicle of man”60 is appreciable in eighteenth-century opera, with the transition from the mythography of opera seria to the more quotidian ambitions of opera buffa. However, it is the concert étude as character piece – literally, one of the characteristic genres of musical Romanticism – that engenders an especially close encounter between a musical and an individualistic disciplinary culture. The étude was singularly “characterizing” in that it established a common framework within which both the aptitudes and limitations, the capacities and vulnerabilities of the performer could be appreciated, while offering disciplinary spectacles for the consumption of an audience attuned to disciplinary musical experiences. The étude thus helped to establish the coordinates for a novel, disciplinary aesthetic landscape, in which the performer manifests charisma through calculable command over daunting obstacles that insist upon their normativity, and in which the audience can experience a corresponding, disciplinary catharsis, whether appreciating the distinctive speed and power of Liszt’s octaves or the uncanny evenness of Friedrich Kalkbrenner’s passagework. This perspective somewhat disenchants the familiar cult of the virtuoso: rather than a “mystification of art in the Romantic era,” or a virtuosity that “traded in a Faustian pact,”61 the étude evidently cleared a space on the cultural shelf for a new sort of hero, the disciplinary virtuoso, whose deeds and exploits could be both expressed and recognized in measurable terms, deploying feats of strength, dexterity, and speed upon a normative field of thirds and sixths, scales and octaves. This is not some mythopoeic, Dionysian, or Byronic figure, breaching the boundaries of convention and propriety to assert a heroic individualism; it is, rather, a more aspirational, recognizably bourgeois figure, at play in the fields of the norm. Jim Samson characterizes the nineteenth-century virtuoso as “heroically overcoming his instrument,” an instrument “there for the slaying, as contemporary cartoonists were quick to notice.”62 In light of the concert étude, we might ask whether that hero could likewise be understood as a self-conqueror in an arena of stringently framed demands – demands made on the self, by the self, in a public ascetic exercise. That such ascetic display might conceivably appeal to a culture of the spectacle is not particularly discerning in either a historical or a generic sense: virtuosity in opera or violin repertoires drew appreciative consumption already in the seventeenth century, well before the advent of the étude;63 and, soon after the piano had been invented and

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sufficiently refined to assume a preeminent position in instrumental performance, pianists likewise had their concertos and their opera-fantasies with which to thrill their audiences. What appears to be distinctive of the étude was its peculiar fecundity as a vehicle for demonstrating self-overcoming or self-transcendence – a Selbstüberwindung, in Nietzsche’s terminology. This suggests another mode of appeal for the étude in all its varieties, an appeal that did not depend upon a zeal for enlistment with either a Prussian rifle regiment or a Royal Artillery Band, but one that could engage an aptitude for other, non-militaristic codes of discipline. DISCIPLINE AND PENANCE If the standing army made a significant contribution to the flowering of disciplinary conduct in the modern era, it was arguably something of a latecomer, for religious orders, and especially monastic communities, had long flourished as crucibles of conduct, and religious institutions and practices feature prominently in Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary culture. A recurrent theme for Foucault in Discipline and Punish and in the first volume of the History of Sexuality – and, above all, in the course of lectures delivered immediately thereafter in 1978 at the Collège de France, “Security, Territory, Population”64 – is the persistence and transformation of Christian practices and institutions to serve newer, ostensibly secular objectives. In Discipline and Punish, Christian religious orders – “the specialists of time, the great technicians of rhythm”65 – are highlighted as a rich resource for all manner of disciplinary apparatuses: Foucault notes that “the schools and poorhouses extended the life and the regularity of the monastic communities to which they were often attached” and that “the rigours of the industrial period long retained a religious air,”66 principally through the accountancy of the timetable and optimization of the use of time. Moreover, Foucault envisages “disciplinary space” as “always, basically, cellular,” for “solitude was necessary to both body and soul, according to a certain asceticism”67: thus, if the étude or “study” emerged from a characteristically solitary disciplinary space, it brought a corresponding ascetic sensibility into whatever further spaces it ventured to colonize. What goes on in the cell has a distinctive character – “the protected place of disciplinary monotony”68 – oriented to the repetitive and the penitential in equal measure. Perhaps no classically trained keyboardist alive today – or indeed, at any point over the past century – requires any introduction to that epitome of penitential pianism, the chef d'oeuvre of Charles-Louis Hanon: “The virtuoso pianist in 60 exercises calculated to develop agility, independence, strength and the most perfect equality of the fingers, as well as the flexibility



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of the wrists”(1873).69 Hanon moved to Boulogne-sur-mer in 1846, where he became associated with one of the schools founded there sometime after 1815 by the monastic order known as “Les Frères Ignorantins,” identified in Discipline and Punish as “Brothers of the Christian Schools,” an order that was established by the figure who Foucault highlights as an emblematic disciplinary pedagogical authority, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651–1719). For La Salle, penance rather than punishment was proper to pedagogy, and “of all penances, impositions” – that is, exercises – “make it possible to ‘derive, from the very offences of the children, means of … correcting their defects’;”70 not solely through the physical imprint of repetition, but relying above all on the consistent examination and selfexamination they inculcated. Hanon’s basic exercises mark a distinctive application of La Salle’s principles, composed of some of the most unimaginative passagework imaginable, as if any hint of musical interest or pleasure threatened temptations that could distract or derail proper disciplining of the pianist’s fallible flesh. “Le pianiste virtuose” thus appears characterized above all by the virtue of patience, a virtue demanded by the sheer monotony of relentlessly drilling all those patterns, hour after hour, day after day, and year after year, in devotional practice worthy of an anchorite. Samson observes the moral dimension of such practice, the goal of which, “the total command of technique,” betokened “a sense of sacrifice; it was hard won, and that (ethical) quality was of its essence.”71 At the same time, that sacrifice clearly served an instrumental rather than a purely intrinsic end by cultivating the endurance and dexterity of the practitioner, an ascetic practice that recalls the askesis or self-training of the classical world both in ethos and in its idiosyncratic means. Foucault addresses this “ascesis” as a technology of the self (“as exercise of self on self”)72 in the 1981–1982 lecture series “The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” observing that “it did not involve the aim of arriving at self-renunciation … [but] rather, constituting oneself through askesis …, arriving at the formation of a full, perfect, complete, and self-sufficient relationship with oneself.”73 Asceticism as an empowering practice or ideology plays a central role in Foucault’s response to the “repressive hypothesis” in The History of Sexuality, for – following Nietzsche’s account of noble values in the Genealogy of Morality – he claims the strictures of bourgeois sexuality to have been a fundamentally positive, self-directed measure of the bourgeoisie – to enhance their vigor and distinguish themselves as a class – rather than an oppressive measure directed against the sexuality of the working class.74 Setting class interests aside for the moment, ancient asceticism is considered in more individualized terms in “The Hermeneutics of the Subject” and as a programmatic activity that links the training of the athlete to that of the sage:

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The good athlete’s training, then, must be training in some elementary moves which are sufficiently general and effective for them to be adapted to every circumstance and – on condition of their being sufficiently simple and well-learned – for one to be able to make immediate use of them when the need arises. It is this apprenticeship in some elementary moves, necessary and sufficient for every possible circumstance, that constitutes good training, good ascesis.75

If the passage above commenced with “the virtuoso pianist’s training” rather than “the good athlete’s,” it might well have been composed by Hanon himself, but Hanon’s close association with the Christian Brothers is potentially problematic: on Foucault’s account, the “athlete of ancient spirituality” is to be distinguished from the “Christian athlete,” who “must surpass himself even to the point of renouncing himself.”76 If the Christian and the classical were thus at odds, how did the penitential and the ascetic come to meet in the étude and its performers? In one of its more wry moments, Nietzsche’s Genealogy posits a solution to this seeming contradiction in vocations, for Nietzsche locates a culture of the spectacle right at the heart of Christian ascetic practice. In the spiritual athleticism of the Syrian desert saints, fasting and standing on pillars for more than forty days and forty nights – competing with both the record set by Jesus and the style in which he set it – Nietzsche detects a “theatrical” or “stage desert (Theater-Wüste),”77 as if the top of one of those pillars were a proscenium, the very precariousness of which served only to heighten the dramatic spectacle staged upon it. The tactic worked wonders, as Theodoret of Cyrrhus (393–466) testifies in his account of Symeon Stylites – namely, “the famous Symeon, the great wonder of the world, [who] is known of by all the subjects of the Roman empire and has also been heard of by the Persians, the Medes, the Ethiopians.”78 Symeon was evidently a Liszt of the Levant, drawing crowds from across the empire to witness his virtuoso feats of virtue, and it was an appreciably measured performance that his spectators got to see: Night and day he is standing within view of all … now standing for a long time, and now bending down repeatedly and offering worship to God. Many of those standing by count the number of these acts of worship. Once one of those with me counted one thousand two hundred and forty-four of them, before slackening and giving up count.79

St. Symeon’s pyrotechnics of prostration highlight what Samson – the musicologist – calls a “heroic resolution,” an attribute just as fitting for the devotees of Hanon.80 But more than that, it is the ascetic feat of a recognizably disciplinary virtuoso, manifested through obsessively repeated motions that



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are countable and appreciable through the measure of time. The disciplining of the self has become a spectacle of the self – the apotheosis of penitential virtuosity – performed, all alone, upon a stage. DISCIPLINE AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE ASCETIC But what of the creators of those vehicles for ascetic display, composers like Debussy who did not pursue careers in public virtuosity – or, for that matter, Chopin, eschewing the concert stage for the intimacy of the salon: What creative prospects could have inspired their embrace of the étude? Within the narrow, cell-like confines of its pedagogical ambitions and the reductive, seemingly mechanical character of its materials, Chopin nonetheless discerned an immanent organic structure in the idea of the étude, an individualistic principle of compositional development dear to the Romantic avant-garde – what German Romantic biologists like the Göttingen physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) associated with an Eigentümlichkeit, a “true-to-itselfness” through which the character piece might intrinsically define its character. Through the Chopin études, the pianist could both absorb and transcend the machinery of discipline on its own terms, and thus, “a new object was being formed; slowly, it superseded the mechanical body … the image of which had for so long haunted those who dreamt of disciplinary perfection. This new object is the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration.”81 This disciplinary dream haunted the militaire and the musicien in equal measure: the general and military theorist Jacques-AntoineHippolyte de Guibert (1743–1790), archcritic of artificiality in movement, asserted that “if we studied the intention of nature and the construction of the human body, we should find the position and the bearing that nature clearly prescribes for the soldier.”82 Guibert sought after l’homme de la nature of the disciplinary age – neither l’homme machine nor l’homme de guerre, and at home whether in camp or conservatory.83 Yet, however “organic” in compositional design, the pianistic demands of the Chopin études were not always seen as appreciably naturalistic. The influential contemporary critic Ludwig Rellstab – the man who gave Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” its popular title – wrote of Chopin’s études: “Those who have distorted fingers may put them right by practising these études; but those who have not should not play them, at least not without having a surgeon at hand.”84 Charles Rosen observes an evocation in the first Chopin étude of the first prelude in Bach’s instructional work, The Well-tempered Clavier, Book I, suggesting that Chopin’s étude is fundamentally homologous with it: “Like Bach’s introductory piece, Chopin’s is nothing but a string of arpeggios.”85 Rellstab is nearer the mark: the configuration of Bach’s arpeggios

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lies consistently and comfortably within the compass of the most ordinary of hands, never extending beyond the range of an octave; the smallest compass inscribed by Chopin’s figuration, on the other hand, is the ninth – a moreor-less conventional limit for the average hand – and more often reaches to the tenth and, frequently, the eleventh. Furthermore, the awkwardness of this span cannot be measured by its compass alone: Chopin often demands that the fingers within the span of the hand stretch over near-tortuous interval configurations, and he makes these demands right from the beginning of the étude. This was a disruptive technology of the self that provided a stimulating example for a fellow iconoclast like Debussy, who ultimately chose to dedicate his own études to Chopin (after initially considering the late seventeenth-century claveciniste François Couperin). Though contributing to a quintessential disciplinary genre, the études of neither composer promoted the conventional “finger-strengthening,” close positioning of the hand that the first Debussy étude parodies before its tactical ambush. But with the étude there further remained the prospect of an ascetic compositional exercise: if modernism in music is often associated with a celebration of the body and of physicality, then the bare thirds, sixths, octaves, scales, arpeggios, and so on used to discipline the body could become a mode for disciplining music itself, defining an experimental choreography for the score like the dance of Jeux or Le Sacre du Printemps. The results were striking even to the composer: in a letter to his publisher, Debussy referred to études that “deal with the search for special sonorities, including ‘Pour les quartes’ [the étude in fourths] in which you’ll find unheard-of things, even though your ears are accustomed to curiosities.”86 The étude thus promised the composer a rite of self-purification, uncovering new possibilities for sonority via a return to the very elements of music, clearing away the cultural embellishments and overgrowths to which less-hardy souls clung: a healthful undertaking at any time, no doubt, but perhaps finding optimum conditions in a climate of war. What, then, of the “purity” and “nobility of the French blood” proclaimed by Debussy in L’Intransigeant? If the disciplinary composer and the disciplinary performer shared an ascetic ideology, then, on Foucault’s account in The History of Sexuality, they likewise shared that ideology with the bourgeoisie, the ascendant nobility of the modern era concerned above all with the vitality of its own progeniture and of its political and cultural hegemony.87 In this sense, and on the evidence of Debussy’s account, the Germanic threat of World War I recalled an earlier threat to the health and welfare of the body politic: specifically, a threat that had once been enthusiastically welcomed into the citadel of French culture via the Trojan Horse of Wagnerian music. The “hysteria” of Wagnerism, as it was frequently characterized, was associated in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with several varieties of “nervous” disease, including those of a specifically sexual



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pathology: as James Kennaway observes, “At no time before or since has one figure so dominated the debate on pathological music.”88 The chronology of Kennaway’s account takes 1914 as its terminus, but its relevance surely extends at least to 1915, the year in which Debussy’s article appeared in L’Intransigeant;89 and, for Debussy, it could have been extended well back into the eighteenth century, when the waves of “Glucko-Wagnerian importation” had begun, introducing invasive musical species that stifled “our native genius.”90 Debussy himself had not been immune to the allure of Wagnerism (cf. n.5): those “suspect naturalizations” were known at first hand, a recollection from decades past of the enemy within. With his turn to the resolute dressage of the étude, Debussy may have found a means to resist their recurrence as well as some respite from the horrors of war.

NOTES 1. Setting aside one of the most irresistible marches ever scored, striding all too briefly through the second of the orchestral Trois Nocturnes, “Fêtes.” 2.François Lesure, Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy, trans. and ed. Richard Langham Smith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 322–23. 3. Claude Debussy to Nicolas Coronio, September 1914, in Claude Debussy, Debussy Letters, ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols, trans. Roger Nichols (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 293. (Originally published as Claude Debussy, Claude Debussy: Lettres 1884–1918 [Paris: HERMANN, éditeurs des sciences et des arts, 1980]). Debussy’s “revenge” comment immediately follows his assertion that French composers had been misguided in trying to follow in the footsteps of Wagner, something that “only a German could [properly] attempt.” 4. Cf. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 5. Debussy’s critical target is unmistakable: with the advent of war – and as a former Wagnerite (like many in France associated with the Symbolist movement), for whom Wagnerism was originally associated with his youthful rebellion at the Conservatoire – Debussy embraced a lingering anti-German sentiment that had been inflamed by the humiliating conclusion to the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 (which had directly impacted Debussy’s childhood when his own father became disastrously embroiled in the Paris Commune). Debussy’s growing antipathy toward Germanic culture echoes the deep anxiety about Prussian military prowess that informed works by French military theorists like the Maréchal de Saxe, who features repeatedly in Discipline and Punish. 6. Debussy, Debussy Letters (to Nicolas Coronio, September 1914), 292. 7. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 112. Although published in English as The History of Sexuality,

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Volume I: An Introduction, I translate the original title in view of the particular critical interests of this discussion – that is, with its significant, specifically Nietzschean subtitle, Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). For Nietzschean influences on the History of Sexuality, see Brandon Konoval, “Toward a Psycho-Analytics of Power: Nietzsche’s Ascetic Priest in Foucault’s Genealogy of Sexuality,” Nietzsche-Studien 42 (November 2013): 204–42. 8. See Lauri Siisiäinen, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing (New York: Routledge, 2012). 9. Michel Foucault and Pierre Boulez, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” Perspectives of New Music 24, no. 1 (Autumn–Winter 1985): 6–12; Michel Foucault, “The Imagination of the Nineteenth Century,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Alex Susteric (New York: New Press, 1998), 235–39; Ibid., “Pierre Boulez: Passing Through the Screen,” trans. Robert Hurley, 241–44. On Foucault’s accounts of Boulez, see Mary Roriche, “Passing Through the Screen: Pierre Boulez and Michel Foucault,” Journal of Literary Studies 22, nos. 3–4 (2006): 294–321. Foucault addresses Boulez as conductor of Wagner (the Ring cycle), but not as one of the leading interpreters of Debussy’s orchestral music. 10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); first English-language edition in 1977. In light of the powerful critical tools it brings to the study of the performative body, it is somewhat surprising that Discipline and Punish has not found sustained application to the study of musical virtuosity, even where Foucault is referred to (cf. Wolfgang Scherer, Klavier-spiele: Die Psychotechnik der Klaviere in 18. und 19. Jahrhundert [Munich: W. Fink, 1989]). 11. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005). 12. A classic overall account is Henry George Farmer, The Rise and Development of Military Music (London: William Reeves, 1912); for more recent discussion, see Simon Werrett, “Disciplinary Culture: Artillery, Sound, and Science in Woolwich, 1800–1850,” 19th Century Music 39, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 87–98. The suggestive title notwithstanding, Werrett makes only passing reference to Foucault (88), and outside of any musical context. 13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 151. The original title is misidentified in the bibliography as La Milice française, along with the author initial “J.” 14. Werrett, “Disciplinary Culture,” 88. 15. On the association of the “march” with the business strategies of the piano character piece, see Denise Gallo, “Selling ‘Celebrity’: The Role of the Dedication in Marketing Piano Arrangements of Rossini’s Military Marches,” in The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930, ed. Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 18–38. 16. Debussy, Debussy Letters (to Jacques Durand, August 8, 1914), 291. 17. Debussy, Debussy Letters (to Jacques Durand, October 9, 1914), 294. 18. On Debussy’s “turbulent” career at the Conservatoire, which he entered in 1872 at the age of ten and where he remained as a pupil for twelve years, see the compilation of examination records and documents assembled by John R. Clevenger,



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“Debussy’s Paris Conservatoire Training,” in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane E. Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 299–361. 19. Gail Hilson Woldu, “Debussy, Fauré, and d’Indy and Conceptions of the Artist: the Institutions, the Dialogues, the Conflicts,” in Debussy and His World, 236. 20. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 151. 21. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 154. 22. Werrett, “Disciplinary Culture,” 89. 23. On the role of the Conservatoire de Paris in Establishing the étude as a standard genre, see Peter Ganz, “The Development of the Etude for Pianoforte,” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1960), 20. 24. Cf. Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 188. On different models for musical virtuosity, see Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75–76. 25. For a classic account of the “rationalization” of music, see Max Weber, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1958); orig. ed., 1921. 26. Cf. Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 159. 28. Cf. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 167. 29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152. 30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152. 31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160. 32. See Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 183–97. Jackson likewise offers a very engaging account of virtuosity and pedagogy in music (albeit, like Scherer, Klavier-spiele, without the Foucauldian framework applied here) in chapter 8, “Physics, Machines, and Musical Pedagogy,” 231–79. 33. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 150–51. 34. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 140. 35. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 154. 36. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152. 37. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136. 38. Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso, 239. 39. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 179. 40. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 153. 41. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 153. 42. As reported in Alan Walker, Reflections on Liszt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 46. 43. Letter dated Paris, March 20, 1843, later published in the Augsburger Gazette, as quoted in Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso, 143.

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44. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184–94. 45. For a concentrated assessment of this rich concept, corresponding somewhat to Foucault’s considerations on the oeuvre in “What Is an Author?,” see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Michael Talbot, ed., The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), for a variety of scholarly perspectives, partially framed in response to Goehr’s original publication (1992). 46. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 47. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 78. 48. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138 (emphasis added). 49.Sébastien de Brossard, Dictionaire de Musique, Contenant Une Explication Des Termes Grecs, Latins, Italiens, & François les plus usitez dans la Musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1703), s.v. “Virtuosité” (no pagination). 50. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker, rev. Brian Richardson (London: Penguin, 2003), 278. 51. However popular it became as a bourgeois “domestic” instrument par excellence – Weber emphasizes this with respect to northern Europe in particular (Foundations of Music, 124) – the piano likewise offered an escape from gendered domestic roles for extraordinary pianists like Clara Schumann, Sophie Menter, and Teresa Carreño, the virtuoso evoking the classical virago. 52. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137–38. 53. “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms; [namely, that] it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces.” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194). 54. Translation modified from Sheridan. Foucault’s original term, “spécifiques” (Surveiller et punir, 223), is not captured by the English “specific,” which reads plainly contrary to the sense of the text. 55. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 190. 56. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 191. 57. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 191. 58. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 193, 191. 59. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 193–94. 60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 191. 61. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 78. 62. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 75, 82. 63. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 69. 64. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 65.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 150. 66. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 149. 67. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143. 68. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141. 69. Charles-Louis Hanon, Le pianiste virtuose en 60 exercices calculés pour acquérir l’agilité, l’indépendance, la force et la plus parfaite égalité des doigts ainsi que la souplesse des poignets (Boulogne-sur-Mer: Printed by author, 1873).



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70. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 179. 71. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 77. 72. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject (lecture of February 24, 1982), 315; Foucault’s initial text of reference is the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, Peri askeseos (Of ascesis, or Of exercise). 73. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 319–20. 74. “The primary concern was not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that ‘ruled.’ … It has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another.” (Foucault, History of Sexuality, 123). 75. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 321. 76. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 322. 77. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift (1887), III, §8 (Kritische Studienausgabe 5.353). 78.“Theodoret of Cyrrhus,” in Mary-Ann Stouck, ed., Medieval Saints: A Reader, R. M. Price, trans. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 115. 79. “Theodoret,” in Medieval Saints, 124. 80. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, 77. 81. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155. 82. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155. 83. Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 168, on the distinction between the militaire and l’homme de guerre. 84. Walker, Franz Liszt, 183–84, n.14. 85. Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 362. 86. Debussy, Debussy Letters (to Jacques Durand, August 28, 1915), 300. 87. On the self-directed nature of bourgeois sexuality and its relationship to nobility and concerns with hegemony, see Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 120–27. 88. James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 63. 89. See Kennaway, “Modern Music and Nervous Modernity: Wagnerism as a Disease of Civilization, 1850–1914,” Bad Vibrations, 63–98. 90. Debussy, “Preface in the Form of a Letter to Pour la Musique Française: Douze Causeries” (December 1916), in Lesure, Debussy on Music, 325. Debussy’s reference is to the Bavarian-born composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714– 1787), who became a dominant figure of lasting influence on the French operatic scene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brossard, Sébastien de. Dictionaire de Musique, Contenant Une Explication Des Termes Grecs, Latins, Italiens, & François les plus usitez dans la Musique. Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1703. Clevenger, John R. “Debussy’s Paris Conservatoire Training.” In Debussy and His World, edited by Jane E. Fulcher, 299–361. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Debussy Claude, Debussy Letters. Edited by François Lesure and Roger Nichols. Translated by Roger Nichols. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Farmer, Henry George. The Rise and Development of Military Music. London: William Reeves, 1912. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. ———. History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. ———. “The Imagination of the Nineteenth Century.” In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Alex Susteric, 235–39. New York: New Press, 1998. ———. “Pierre Boulez: Passing Through the Screen.” In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, 241–44. New York: New Press, 1998. ———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981– 1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2005. Foucault, Michel, and Pierre Boulez. “Contemporary Music and the Public.” Perspectives of New Music 24, no. 1 (Autumn–Winter 1985): 6–12. Gallo, Denise. “Selling ‘Celebrity’: The Role of the Dedication in Marketing Piano Arrangements of Rossini’s Military Marches.” In The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930, edited by Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin), 18–38. Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2016. Ganz, Peter. “The Development of the Étude for Pianoforte.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1960. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hamilton, Kenneth. After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Jackson, Myles W. Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Kennaway, James. Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Konoval, Brandon. “Toward a Psycho-Analytics of Power: Nietzsche’s Ascetic Priest in Foucault’s Genealogy of Sexuality.” Nietzsche-Studien 42 (November 2013): 204–42. Lesure, François. Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy. Edited and translated by Richard Langham Smith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Discourses. Translated by Leslie J. Walker. Revised by Brian Richardson. London: Penguin, 2003.



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Metzner, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift (1887). Kritische Studienausgabe 5. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999. Roriche, Mary. “Passing Through the Screen: Pierre Boulez and Michel Foucault.” Journal of Literary Studies 22, nos. 3–4 (2006): 294–321. Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Samson, Jim. Virtuosity and the Musical Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Scherer, Wolfgang. Klavier-spiele: Die Psychotechnik der Klaviere in 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: W. Fink, 1989. Siisiäinen, Lauri. Foucault and the Politics of Hearing. New York: Routledge, 2012. Stouck, Mary-Ann, ed. Medieval Saints: A Reader. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999. Talbot, Michael, ed. The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Walker, Alan. Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847. New York: Knopf, 1983. ———. Reflections on Liszt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Weber, Max. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Edited and translated by Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1958. Werrett, Simon. “Disciplinary Culture: Artillery, Sound, and Science in Woolwich, 1800–1850.” 19th Century Music 39, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 87–98. Woldu, Gail Hilson. “Debussy, Fauré, and d’Indy and Conceptions of the Artist: The Institutions, the Dialogues, the Conflicts.” In Debussy and His World, edited by Jane E. Fulcher, 235–53. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Part III

HEROIC AND TRAGIC SUBJECTIVITIES

Chapter 6

Foucault’s Baudelaire Sima Godfrey

This is the story about a conversation between a French philosopher and a French poet and how they connected. When in 1984 Michel Foucault, the great counter-Enlightenment philosopher and historian, offered a qualified endorsement of Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment?” in an essay of the same name, readers were taken aback. “Foucault appeared to betray his earlier understanding of the Enlightenment as the age that had paved the way for … the sciences of discipline and normalization, of surveillance and control of bodies and souls, of marginalization and exclusion of the deviant, the abnormal, the insane,” people noted.1 James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenberg speculated, “Since Foucault spent so much of his career ‘showing that every alleged victory of enlightenment marked the triumph of a new and insidious form of domination’ many will likely wonder: ‘Foucault … a Kantian? … Who … is kidding whom?’”2 For Foucault, however, this brief text by Kant on the Enlightenment represented something new; it was located at the crossroads of “critical reflection” and “reflection on history,” and it inaugurated a new way of thinking about the relation between philosophy and the present as well as the autonomy of the self. Foucault noted several reasons why Kant’s brief essay merited attention, the most important being that it posed the problem of how best to reflect on one’s present and on the difference of the “now.” “It seems to me,” Foucault noted, “that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way … a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.”3 Foucault’s discussion and endorsement of Kant then took an unexpected turn. Speculating about modernity as a product of the Enlightenment, 105

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he recruited the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire to help articulate the implications of Kant’s reflections. Surprising as the coupling of Immanuel Kant and Charles Baudelaire may seem to the reader approaching “What Is Enlightenment?” for the first time, it never struck me as an odd association for Foucault, given the centrality of that poet’s work in French culture. In the course of the twentieth century, Baudelaire had become the literary “angel” with whom every serious French critic or critical movement had to wrestle. His works could – and did – enter into dialogue with just about every French thinker before or after. In the nineteenth century he had been mobilized to exemplify, simultaneously, Swedenborgian mysticism, Satanism, Symbolism, and “épater-les-bourgeois-ism.” For some he was “le poète maudit,” a damned poet; for others he was a damned fine poet. Tellingly, it was the works of Baudelaire that inaugurated the very first Pléiade edition – the canonical reference edition of complete works by classic authors – created by Jacques Schiffrin in 1931. Dressed in fine leather binding with gold lettering, his poems printed on bible paper, Baudelaire became the symbolic cornerstone of that monument to French culture. That same year, 1931, sixty-four years after his death, Baudelaire, filtered through his poetry, became the first French author to undergo Freudian psychoanalysis. The analyst in question was Dr. René Laforgue, who had founded the Société Psychanalytique de Paris in 1927 and belonged to the first generation of Freudian analysts in France. (Freud had ambivalent feelings about him, far preferring Marie Bonaparte as his French disciple. She went on to write The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation.) In The Defeat of Baudelaire: A Psycho-analytical Study of the Neurosis of Charles Baudelaire (L’Échec de Baudelaire), Laforgue argued that “Baudelaire offers a clear illustration of cases in which neurotics will commit offences just to enjoy the pleasures of anxiety and then the pleasures of remorse and punishment.”4 For Laforgue, Baudelaire’s writings provided a ready – if reductive – substitute for the man on the couch and offered impeccable ground for the insights of psychoanalysis. Fifteen years later, in the aftermath of World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre would choose Baudelaire as the subject for his first existentialist case study following the publication in 1943 of his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant). Reflecting on human consciousness and the freedom of choice, in his book Baudelaire, Sartre concluded from the poet’s journals and letters that he wanted to be not just subjective consciousness but also its object: “Baudelaire’s favorite occupation is travesty. He travestied his body, his feelings and his life. He pursued the impossible ideal of self-creation. … He wanted to take himself up to correct himself as one corrects a picture or a poem. He wanted to be his own poem.”5 For the committed postwar



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existentialist, the pursuit of “the impossible ideal of self-creation” had prevented the poet – regrettably – from engaging meaningfully with the real world outside himself. Then, fifteen years after the publication of Sartre’s Baudelaire, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss produced jointly the now famous depersonalized structuralist prototype for literary analysis with their reading of a Baudelaire sonnet called “Cats” (“Les Chats”). Their reading of Baudelaire was not, in fact, a reading of the poet or his oeuvre, but rather a descriptive analysis of the prosody and linguistic structures of fourteen lines of verse that happened to have been penned by Baudelaire. Disengaging the significance of the poem from all personal and historical context, they commented instead on textual structures: “Neither the dichotomous partition of the sonnet nor the division into three stanzas results in an equilibrium of the isometric constituents.”6 This radically formalist exercise that excluded the poet from the words on the page spawned a virtual “Cats” industry, with more readings and counterreadings of Baudelaire to accompany the larger debates on the production of meaning (figure 6.1).7 The French poet and theorist Henri Meschonnic called this kind of descriptive (as opposed to interpretive) analysis “bricklayer scholasticism.”8 Meanwhile, across the Rhine, some fifteen years after the emergence of the structuralist Baudelaire, German critics such as Wolfgang Fietkau found exemplary material for a Marxist reading in the works of Baudelaire. The poet’s career had, indeed, coincided with a popular revolution in the streets of Paris in 1848, a coup d’état in 1852, the installation of a new emperor, and massive urban upheaval throughout.9 Particularly significant was the impact of the work of the late German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, whose essays on Baudelaire had circulated piecemeal in the mid-1950s. It was primarily the 1974 publication of the Collected Works (Gesammelte Schriften), though, that made available to a new generation of German critics Benjamin’s startlingly original, idiosyncratic readings of Baudelaire. Writing in the 1930s, in reaction to conventional readings of Baudelaire’s poetry as lyric rêveries, Benjamin had allowed readers to see the poet’s Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) as the product of a historical experience that rendered the social processes of the nineteenth century intelligible to art. As he saw it, the question at the heart of Baudelaire’s writings, both poetic and critical, was how to interpret and give form to the modern. For Benjamin, Baudelaire gave expression to the fragmentation of experience in the nineteenth-century metropolis occasioned by anonymous crowds and commodification in the cultural domain. In the introduction to his anthology of Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, Michael Jennings simply states: “Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire accomplished nothing less than the wholesale reinvention of the great French poet as the representative writer of urban, capitalist

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Figure 6.1  Les Chats de Baudelaire. Source: © Presses universitaires de Namur, 1980.



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modernity.”10 The “great French poet” was, in short, available for reinvention and ready mobilization by all sides: a monument indeed, but one open to periodic renovation. It is no surprise, therefore, that for Foucault, as for most French readers, Baudelaire – the inescapable author to whom all turned – should have figured as the iconic poet of the French canon; “almost indispensable,” Foucault notes.11 In a 1975 interview, where he was asked about the university and the role of the intellectual, Foucault invoked Baudelaire as the model of the canonical author par excellence.12 Nor is it surprising, then, that in “What Is Enlightenment?,” this late essay that marked a critical turning point in Foucault’s relation to Kant and the Enlightenment, Foucault should turn to Baudelaire – as had others before him – to reinforce his argument. As he indicates, the poet’s writing on modernity, fragments of which are cited in the essay, allowed him to reconsider Kant’s answer to the question “Was ist Aufklärung?” In his essay, Foucault states: “Kant defines Aufklärung … as an Ausgang, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out.’ … He deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?”13 In reading Kant with Baudelaire by his side, Foucault finds the “novelty” in the philosopher’s text. Kant’s “Ausgang” leads him to “the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity”14 where modernity will ultimately represent an individually chosen attitude and ethos that arises out of, and at the same time responds critically to, one’s own historical situation. What Foucault saw, in looking at Kant through a Baudelairian prism, was the passage from a discourse on modernity premised on ideas of knowledge, reason, and truth, to an “attitude of modernity” that predicates the individual’s autonomous self-creation and accepts its condition as an ephemeral state of contingency and perpetual transformation. Modernity, as Baudelaire had pointed out in the final section of his “Salon of 1846,” provides a source of imaginative strength by ironically “heroizing” the present moment and the scope it offers for aesthetic self-creation.15 “By ‘modernity,’” Baudelaire later noted in 1863, “I mean the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. … This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with.”16 Reflecting on the Baudelairian attitude of modernity, Foucault would state, “this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.”17 It should now be clear that, given the centrality of Baudelaire in French letters, and the pertinence of the poet’s reflections on modernity, Foucault’s

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conversation with Baudelaire in an essay on Kant and the Enlightenment is not that surprising after all. What does come as a surprise is discovering that, despite the apparent “indispensability” of the poet, Foucault had never written about Baudelaire before this essay. In the 1960s Foucault had been repeatedly attracted to literature and to a way of thinking about literature that prioritized the themes of transgression and the dissolution of subjectivity. He looked to many French authors – Diderot, Sade, Mallarmé, Proust, Artaud, Bataille, Beckett, Roussel, etc., heroes of the avant garde – but Baudelaire, deliberate transgressions notwithstanding, was not among them. In the above-mentioned interview on universities and the intellectual, the poet is invoked in passing just once, in his role as the canonical author who, Foucault goes on, had to wait half a century before making it onto university reading lists, as opposed to contemporary authors such as Alain RobbeGrillet, Michel Butor, and Philippe Sollers, whose work was welcomed into the university immediately.18 In another interview, on “Madness and Society” (“La Folie et la société”) given in Tokyo in 1970, where Foucault reflects at length on nineteenth-century literature as a new form of discourse – an argument in which Baudelaire might well be expected to make an appearance – the poet is simply invoked in a quick aside as one of several writers who used drugs: “One could just as well cite all those writers who willingly chose, in the course of their literary career, to imitate or try to arrive at madness, all those who took drugs, from Edgar Poe to Baudelaire and right up to Michaux.”19 Neither reference to Baudelaire in the interviews suggests any deep engagement with Baudelaire’s writings; they simply repeat two “idées reçues” regarding a generalized Baudelaire who had become a literary commodity. Where exactly did Baudelaire fit into Foucault’s “espace littéraire”?20 The truth is that from the 1970s on, Foucault’s literary space had shrunk, and he increasingly challenged the “institutional sacralization” of literature. In an interview on “The Function of Literature” (1975), he argues that “our culture accords literature a place that in a sense is extraordinarily limited: how many people read literature? What place does it really have in the general expansion of discourses? But this same culture forces all its children, as they move towards culture, to pass through a whole ideology, a whole ideology of literature during their studies. There is a kind of paradox here.”21 In 1975, he acknowledged that perhaps literature was something he didn’t quite get: “I used to read a lot of what people call ‘literature.’ I finished by rejecting a lot of it through sheer incapability, because I clearly lacked the right code for reading.”22 What were, in effect, the codes for reading Baudelaire in France at that time? We have already mentioned some of the dominant ones: a Freudian code, a Marxist code, a structuralist code. Codes that Foucault actively



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denied: “I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist.”23 The statement is contained in a 1983 interview on “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” in which Foucault also reflected on the function of modern philosophy. Having dismissed Freudian, Marxist, and structuralist readings, he goes on: “I have never really understood the meaning attached to modernity in France. In Baudelaire, yes; but after that it seems to me that the meaning gets a bit lost.”24 This is how Baudelaire enters into Foucault’s literary space in 1983, as the poet of modernity. Why did Baudelaire suddenly appear in Foucault’s work at this precise moment? The answer, I contend, is as material as it is intellectual. Baudelaire’s appearance coincides with the discovery – or rediscovery – of Walter Benjamin in France in the early 1980s, a result, most notably, of Jean Lacoste’s translation of Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism in 1979.25 (The central essay of that volume, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” [“Sur quelques thèmes Baudelairiens] is a reprint of the 1959 translation of the essay by Foucault’s colleague Maurice de Gandillac.) In 1981, Marc de Launay and Marc Jimenez edited a special issue of the Revue Esthétique, devoted to Benjamin, and then, in June 1983, Heinz Wizman organized the major international conference “Walter Benjamin et Paris” that subsequently gave rise to an important book published after Foucault’s death.26 In other words, the Baudelaire who entered Foucault’s “espace littéraire” – Foucault’s lack of formal acknowledgment notwithstanding – was Benjamin’s Baudelaire. To be sure, the Baudelaire whom Foucault cites in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” is the same Baudelaire, complete with quotations, that Benjamin had declared the writer of modernity. And, I would maintain, it is in Benjamin – rather than in the Pléiade edition – that Foucault found him. Here, from the essay “What Is Enlightenment?” is Foucault’s transition from reflections on Kant’s text to four extended observations on Baudelaire: “To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable example, namely Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.”27 Hitherto, as we have noted, what Foucault had publicly recognized in Baudelaire was a canonical figure and a drug user. If Baudelaire’s acute consciousness of modernity “is widely recognized,” it is because of Walter Benjamin, who, by this time, had himself become “almost indispensable,” with his most “acute consciousness” of Baudelaire’s work. Foucault seems to take his lead from Benjamin in the selective passages he cites, which, significantly, come from two essays on art, “The Salon of 1846” (“Le Salon de 1846”) and “The Painter of Modern Life” (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 1859/1863). (Most critics identify these quotations as coming from the latter essay alone.) We recall the celebrated passages he quotes: “By

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‘modernity’ I mean the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.” Foucault, unlike Benjamin, was not interested in definitions of art or beauty – the critical pretext of Baudelaire’s essays on painting. Where Baudelaire would use the concept of modernity to deconstruct the idea of “absolute beauty,” Foucault would use it to challenge Enlightenment claims of transcendental reason. Baudelaire writes: All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, have within them something eternal and something transitory – an absolute and a particular element. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather, it is nothing but an abstract notion, creamed off from the general surface of different types of beauty. The specific element of each type of beauty comes from the passions, and just as we each have our particular passions, so we have our own type of beauty.28

These reflections come from the final section of Baudelaire’s essay on the Salon of 1846, entitled “On the Heroism of Modern Life.” Benjamin latched on to this idea of modern heroism – a term he uses constantly throughout his essays on Baudelaire – and so did Foucault. But whereas Benjamin associated heroism with individuals jolted by relentless forces in a dizzying world, for Foucault it remained an impersonal abstraction, one ultimately tinged with irony. For Walter Benjamin, “The hero is the true subject of la modernité. In other words, it takes a heroic constitution to live modernity.”29 For Foucault, on the other hand, “Modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to ‘heroize’ the present.”30 Baudelaire celebrates the heroism of modern life, Benjamin celebrates the heroism of the alienated individual living in the modern world, Foucault celebrates the heroization of the present moment. All three are inspired by Baudelaire’s painter of modern life: “He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory.”31 There are, of course, significant differences in the way Benjamin and Foucault each interpreted modernity and the poetry in history that the artist extracted from fashion or actuality. Foucault clearly takes his distance from Benjamin in his reading of identical passages. Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s modernity in “The Painter of Modern Life” grew out of his careful reading of Baudelaire’s poetry, especially the section entitled “Parisian Tableaux” (“Les Tableaux parisiens”) in Les Fleurs du mal and the prose poems of Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris). It is grounded in social, political, and material realities of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century. As he stated to Gershom Scholem, “I want to show how Baudelaire is embedded in the 19th century.”32 He describes the conditions for the constitution of an aesthetics



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of modernity that is founded on the awareness of a crisis affecting man’s relationship to his socio-historic environment. For Benjamin, Baudelaire is also key because of his preoccupation with capturing and articulating the contemporary itself, with giving voice to the transformation of experience. Foucault’s appreciation of Baudelaire’s concept of modernity is not inflected by Baudelaire’s poetry. In contradistinction to Benjamin’s reading, the modernity Foucault appreciates in Baudelaire is ahistorical and decidedly apolitical. He makes it a point to insist that the modernity he speaks of is not an epoch, but an attitude. For Baudelaire, Foucault argues, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting the perpetual movement and discontinuities of time. “It is the will to ‘heroize’ the present.” Furthermore, he concludes, Baudelaire does not imagine that the modern heroization of the present has any place in society itself, or in the body politic. It is “produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.”33 Accordingly, while Benjamin privileged the heroism of Baudelaire’s man in the crowd, the artist-flâneur who roams the streets of the city, finding poetry in mundane actuality, Foucault is drawn to Baudelaire’s dandy, the man dedicated to aesthetic self-creation who becomes his own poem, “who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art.”34 (In this Foucault celebrates the self-centered program Sartre had regretted in Baudelaire.) Indeed, I would maintain that Foucault’s casual dismissal of the flâneur’s activity contains a veiled critique of Benjamin’s reading of modernity. Harvesting the passing moment “as a fleeting and interesting curiosity … the flâneur, the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories.”35 To be modern, Foucault asserts, “is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of [the] ‘complex and difficult elaboration’ Baudelaire calls dandysme.”36 The oppositional figure of the dandy as characterized by Baudelaire leads Foucault to assert the liberty to fashion one’s self as the stamp of the authentically modern. “Modern man, for Baudelaire,” he concludes, “is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.”37 But before making that now well-known declaration, Foucault coyly offers fragments of quotations from Baudelaire’s writing on dandyism: “Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages [des pages qui sont trop connues] on ‘vulgar, earthy, vile nature’; on man’s indispensable revolt against himself; on the ‘doctrine of elegance’ which imposes ‘upon its ambitious and humble disciples’ a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions.”38 It is safe to say that prior to Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, these pages, as opposed to so many other pages from the poet’s writings, were

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far from “trop connues” – all too well known. If, in 1984, they had become well known even to nonreaders of Baudelaire’s poetry, it is largely because of the attention Walter Benjamin had drawn to them and to Baudelaire’s reflections on modernity in general. And it is through Walter Benjamin, I suggest, that these pages were filtered to Foucault, allowing him to revisit the writings of this “canonical writer” and to discover a modern, enlightened aesthetics of the self in the work of a Romantic drug-taking poet.39 In his writings, as in his lectures at the Collège de France in the early 1980s, Foucault was focusing ever increasingly on the construction, the ethics, and the aesthetics of care of the self.40 In particular, he emphasized the role of Stoic philosophy in the ethics of care of the self, a kind of self-love that is based on ascetic practice, as Frédéric Gros has argued in the chapter in this book. Even as he may not have endorsed this position philosophically, Walter Benjamin, in his reading of the later writings of Baudelaire, allowed Foucault in his own later writings to explore the aesthetics of existence and care for the self not just from the perspective of the ancient Greeks but more immediately through the eyes of a modern French writer whose canonical status and previous interlocutors may have earlier distracted him. Benjamin drew Foucault to the poet of modern life and directed him to Baudelaire’s thinking of dandyism and the art of the self. And now, in the wake of Foucault’s reflections on Baudelaire, the modern reader approaches with renewed attention other previously unaccentuated statements by the poet that resonate with Foucauldian overtones: “At certain points, dandyism borders on the spiritual and stoical … a system of gymnastics designed to fortify the will and discipline the soul.”41 And so, following upon the Freudian, Sartrian, Lévi-Straussian, and Benjaminian Baudelaires, Foucault provides yet another incarnation of the “damned” poet as a spokesperson for the ethics and aesthetics of care for the self. In his seminal essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin – having insisted on the inescapability of the crowd in the poet’s experience – makes the following remarkable statement: “The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his work.”42 For Foucault, writing in the final years of his life on the aesthetics of existence, I would make the same case with reference to Walter Benjamin: he had become such a part of Foucault’s thinking on Baudelaire that he is invisible in his work. There is, in fact, only one direct, fleeting reference to Walter Benjamin in Foucault’s entire corpus, in a brief footnote in The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure. Foucault is defining his “aesthetics of existence”: “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.” He regrets the absence of a long history of these aesthetics of existence and technologies of the self



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and refers to the work of Burckhardt on the Renaissance. Here he inserts the footnote: “It is not quite correct to imply that since Burckhardt the study of these arts and this aesthetics of existence has been completely neglected. One thinks of Benjamin’s study on Baudelaire.”43 To paraphrase Foucault himself, Benjamin was not beyond Foucault’s Baudelaire, not behind it, but within it. That is to say, the conversation between the great French philosopher and the great French poet was mediated by a great German cultural critic, who spent his last years in exile in France. Along with Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin was the necessary angel Foucault had to wrestle in order to affirm his own Baudelaire. NOTES 1. Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves, “Critique and Enlightenment. Michel Foucault on ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’” (working paper 118, Institut de Cièncias Polítiques i Socials, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1996), 1, accessed July 15, 2015, http:// www.icps.cat/archivos/workingpapers/wp_i_118.pdf. 2. James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 284. 3. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 39. 4. “Baudelaire illustre bien des cas de ces névrosés qui ne commettent leur délit que pour éprouver la volupté de l’angoisse, puis celle du remords et de la punition.” René Laforgue, L’Échec de Baudelaire, étude psychanalytique (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1931), 152. (My trans.) 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 151. “Travestir, voilà l’occupation favorite de Baudelaire: travestir son corps, ses sentiments et sa vie; il poursuit l’idéal impossible de se créer lui-même. … Il veut se reprendre, se corriger, comme il le fait d’un poème. Il veut être à lui-même son propre poème.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 144. (My trans.) Whereas both Sartre and Foucault emphasize Baudelaire’s pursuit of self-creation, for Sartre this commitment exemplified the poet’s lack of engagement with the world, while for Foucault it was the hallmark of his modernity: “Modern man, for Baudelaire … is the man who tries to invent himself.” Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42. 6. Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 185. “Ni la scission dichotomique du sonnet, ni le partage en trois strophes n’aboutissent à un équilibre des parties isométriques.” Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson, “‘Les Chats’ de Charles Baudelaire,” L’Homme 2, no. 1 (January– April 1962): 9. (My trans.)

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7. See, for instance, Walter Geerts and Maurice Delcroix, eds., Les chats de Baudelaire: une confrontation de méthodes (Presses universitaires de Namur, 1980). 8. Henri Meschonnic, “Modernity, Modernity,” NLH 23, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 409. 9. Wolfgang Fietkau, Schwanengesang auf 1848 – Ein Rendevouz am Louvre: Baudelaire, Marx, Proudhon und Victor Hugo (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1978). 10. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1. 11. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 40. 12. Michel Foucault, “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons.” text no. 160 in Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1650. 13. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 34. 14. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 38. 15. The final section of the “Salon of 1846” is entitled “On the Heroism of Modern Life” (“De l’Héroïsme de la vie moderne”). 16. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 13. “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable. … Cet élément transitoire, fugitif, dont les métamorphoses sont si fréquentes, vous n’avez pas le droit de les mépriser ou de vous en passer.” Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, vol. 2, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 695. (My trans.) 17. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 39. 18. Foucault, “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons,” 1650. 19. “On pourrait également citer tous ceux qui ont, volontairement, dans leur expérience littéraire, imité ou essayé de rejoindre la folie, tous ceux qui se sont drogués, par exemple depuis Edgar Poe ou Baudelaire, jusqu’à Michaux.” Michel Foucault, “La folie et la société,” text no. 222 in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 490. (My trans.) 20. The reference is to the French literary critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, whose 1955 book The Space of Literature (L’Espace littéraire) reflects on the power of language and the nature of the literary experience. As for so many modern French theorists, Blanchot’s work had a significant impact on Foucault. 21. Michel Foucault, “The Function of Literature,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 310. 22. My emphasis. “J’ai lu beaucoup ce qu’on appelle la ‘littérature,’ autrefois. J’ai rejeté finalement un grand nombre par incapacité, parce que je n’avais sans doute pas le bon code pour lire.” Michel Foucault, “La fête de lècriture,” text no. 154 in Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975, 1602. (My trans.) 23. “Je n’ai jamais été freudien, je n’ai jamais été marxiste et je n’ai jamais été structuraliste.” Michel Foucault, “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” text no. 330 in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988, 1254. (My trans.)



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24. “Je n’ai jamais très bien compris quel était le sens que l’on donnait en France au mot modernité; chez Baudelaire, oui; mais ensuite, il me semble que le sens se perd un peu.” Foucault, “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” 1265. (My trans.) 25. Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme, ed. Jean Lacoste (Paris: Payot, 1979). 26. Hans Wizman, Walter Benjamin et Paris (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986). 27. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 39. 28. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 104–5. “Toutes les beautés contiennent, comme tous les phénomènes possibles, quelque chose d’éternel et quelque chose de transitoire, – d’absolu et de particulier. La beauté absolue et éternelle n’existe pas, ou plutôt elle n’est qu’une abstraction écrémée à la surface générale des beautés diverses. L’élément particulier de chaque beauté vient des passions, et comme nous avons nos passions particulières, nous avons notre beauté.” Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 493. (My trans.) 29. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 44. 30. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 40. 31. Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 12. “Il s’agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique, de tirer l’éternel du transitoire.” Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 694. 32. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 554. 33. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42. 34. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 41–42. In early nineteenth-century France the figure of the dandy referred to the man, generally Parisian, sometimes foppish, whose primary preoccupation was with elegance in his dress, his language, and his aristocratic manner. Baudelaire elevated the dandy to an oppositional figure whose life demonstrates the primacy of aesthetics over the mundane occupations of bourgeois society. On the transformations and logic of the dandy, see Sima Godfrey, “The Dandy as Ironic Figure” SubStance 11, no. 3, issue 36 (1982): 21–33. 35. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 40. 36. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 41. 37. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42. (my emphasis). 38. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 41. 39. The association of Baudelaire with hallucinogenic drugs relates to his youthful participation in the Club of Haschich Smokers (Club des Haschichins) and his 1860 essay on “Artificial Paradises” (“Les Paradis artificiels”). In that essay Baudelaire reflects on the relation between drugs and poetic creation, a relation he ultimately rejects. By uncanny coincidence, the talk from which this chapter derives was presented in Paris at the Hôtel de Lauzun (previously the Hôtel Pimodan), which housed the Club des Haschichins from 1844–1849.

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40. See, for instance, volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality – The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, both of which appeared in France in 1984 and were published in English translation the following year. 41. Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 28. “Par de certains côtés, le dandysme confine au spiritualisme et au stoïcisme. … Pour ceux qui en sont à la fois les prêtres et les victimes, toutes les conditions matérielles compliquées auxquelles ils se soumettent … ne sont qu’une gymnastique propre à fortifier la volonté et à discipliner l’âme.” Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 710. (My trans.) 42. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 167. 43. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 10–11.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Claude Pichois. 2 vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. ———. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. 2nd ed. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1995. ———. “The Salon of 1846.” In Selected Writings on Art and Artists, translated by P. E. Charvet, 47–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. ———. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Michael Jennings, 3–92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Edited by Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Fietkau, Wolfgang. Schwanengesang auf 1848 – Ein Rendezvous am Louvre: Baudelaire, Marx, Proudhon und Victor Hugo. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1978. Foucault, Michel. “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons.” Text no. 160 in Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange, 1639– 1650. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. “La folie et la société.” Text no. 222 in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange, 477–499. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. “The Function of Literature.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Lawrence Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan, 307–13. New York: Routledge, 1988.



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———. “La Fête de lécriture.” Text no. 154 in Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange, 1599–1602. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1985. ———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986. ———. “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” Text no. 339 in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange, 1381–1397. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme.” Text no. 330 in Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange, 1250– 1276. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Geerts, Walter, and Maurice Delcroix, eds. Les chats de Baudelaire: une confrontation de méthodes. Namur: Presses universitaires de Namur, 1980. Godfrey, Sima. “The Dandy as Ironic Figure.” SubStance 11, no. 3, issue 36 (1982): 21–33. Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Laforgue, René. L’Échec de Baudelaire, étude psychanalytique. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1931. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, and Roman Jakobson. “‘Les Chats’ de Charles Baudelaire.” L’Homme 2, no. 1 (January–April 1962): 5–21. Meschonnic, Henri. “Modernity, Modernity.” NLH 23, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 401–30. Passerin D’Entrèves, Maurizio. “Critique and Enlightenment. Michel Foucault on ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’” Working paper 118, Institut de Cièncias politices i socials, Universitat autonoma de Barcelona, 1996. http://www.icps.cat/archivos/workingpapers/wp_i_118.pdf. Accessed July 15, 2015. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. ———. Baudelaire. Translated by Martin Turnell. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949. Schmidt, James, and Thomas E. Wartenberg. “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self.” In Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault / Habermas Debate, edited by Michael Kelly, 283–314. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Wizman, Hans. Walter Benjamin et Paris. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986.

Chapter 7

Foucault’s Beckett Marisa C. Sánchez

More than four decades have passed since Michel Foucault delivered his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970. In looking back at the content of that important talk, I consider the place occupied by Samuel Beckett, whose literary work “bore one hole after another” into language, as Beckett described it, thereby providing Foucault several openings through which to explore the function of the author and discourse formation.1 By erecting his theoretical discussion in that lecture on a scaffold of one of Beckett’s characters, Foucault framed his discourse on language, which pointed to a number of references that not only reflected the plurality of voices intersecting and guiding Foucault’s thought up to that moment but also mirrored the question of subject formation grounding Beckett’s work as well. This chapter, therefore, concerns itself with some points of intersection that can be traced between these two influential intellectuals working in Paris, France, during the middle of the twentieth century. In taking note of the ways in which Foucault situates direct citations of Beckett in his philosophical arguments, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, this examination encourages a close reading of how Beckett is employed by Foucault during that time, specifically in relation to Foucault’s ideas of the author-function and discursive structures. More broadly, however, this topic is pursued in order to understand more fully how Foucault’s notion of the discursive role played by the author-function both reflects and informs a reading of the place Beckett has occupied as “an attractor and accelerator of new forms of work”2 within the field of the visual arts (although this is too expansive a topic to explore in this chapter).3 Foucault’s views on the formation of discursive practices within knowledge production sheds light on the position Beckett occupies within contemporary art as an “initiator of discursive practices,” to use Foucault’s own words.4 As a 121

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“figure of discursivity,” Beckett performs an author-function within contemporary discourse; his name “manifest[ing] the appearance of a certain discursive set … a certain discursive construct.”5 When framed this way, we can read the reverberating effects of Beckett within several disciplines in terms Foucault best described as being “characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.”6 In order to arrive at this position, I begin with Foucault’s Beckett. There are three instances in Foucault’s writing, which have been noted to date, where he referenced Beckett. In these cases, Foucault did not turn to Beckett’s texts of the period in which he cited the author, for instance the late 1960s/early 1970s, but he quoted instead from Beckett’s early texts dating from between 1951 and 1955.7 These years mark a pivotal turn in Beckett’s refinement of an expressive language that communicates the author’s development of an unconventional narrative structure as well as his approach to subjectivity, whereby subjective experience is simultaneously and radically both affirmed and denied. As historian Carla Locatelli claims: “The pars construens of Beckett’s poetics can clearly be seen in the 1950s, when The Trilogy and Texts for Nothing (1954) [sic], Waiting for Godot (1952), and Endgame (1958) provide the full appropriation of a precise voice, the delineation of a universe, and the recurrence of a number of unmistakably idiosyncratic motives.”8 Foucault noticeably turned to each of these texts except Endgame, quoting passages that pertained to his own interests at the time, including his analysis of the role of the author as a function of discourse. Foucault found resonance with Beckett in the ways in which Michael Sheringham, in his insightful book on Beckett’s novel Molloy, offers: “Beckett’s fictions are haunted by a sense that the mind’s quintessential mode is citation: in quest of the source of its own authority, it can only cite alien authorities. When it wishes to play the author, it finds it can only quote.”9 Given Foucault’s propensity for questioning the role of the author and his claim that “discourses are objects of appropriation,”10 we can move forward with the question: how did Foucault put these Beckettian appropriations into play? Thomas Hunkeler notes that “in each of the few references Foucault makes to Beckett, he attributes a crucial position to him: that of a break with a certain past, of a new starting point for a fundamentally different kind of discourse.”11 We see this in Foucault’s citation of Beckett’s 1952 play, which Foucault saw in January 1953, when Waiting for Godot debuted in Paris at the Théâtre de Babylone. In an interview with Charles Ruas in September 1983, Foucault remarked on the impact Beckett had on his younger self, recalling how: “I belong to that generation who as students had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism. … I was like all other students of philosophy at that time, and for me the break was first Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.”12



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This rupture came early in Foucault’s career. During the 1952–1953 academic year, he was living in Paris and teaching psychology at the University of Lille while working on Mental Illness and Psychology, his first book, which would later be published in 1954.13 Importantly, the theatrical event in Paris offered an unforeseen direction for Foucault, given that the language of Beckett’s play provided another framework within which Foucault found not only a reflection of his desire to abandon convention, but also an opening through which he could enter other directions of thought, unencumbered by the legacies of Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. Borrowing from literary sources was not unusual for Foucault, who throughout his career had sustained an interest in figures including Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorge Luis Borges, and Raymond Roussel. In these writers (and I would add Beckett to this group), Foucault found “ways of exiting from philosophy,” an idea he discussed with Sylvère Lotringer in an interview addressing the role of literary texts in his research.14 Foucault noted how “in the violence of Bataille, in the sort of insidious and disturbing softness of Blanchot, in [Pierre] Klossowski’s spirals, there was something that began with philosophy, put it into play and into question, then left it and returned. … These comings and goings around the position of philosophy finally rendered permeable – and thus finally derisory – the frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy.”15 Seeking out this interplay by abandoning the boundaries that held philosophy outside of other disciplines, Foucault returned to Beckett in his 1969 essay, “What Is an Author?,” quoting from the author’s prose monologues Texts for Nothing, the first of which had been published in 1954.16 In this essay, Foucault took the following quote from Beckett: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?”17 In bringing this question of the speaking subject into his analysis of the role of the author, Foucault noted that “Beckett supplies a direction,” which enabled Foucault to then discuss writing as an act that “implies an action that is always testing the limits of its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it accepts and manipulates.”18 Further, Foucault argued that this methodology “is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.”19 Foucault’s direction of thought in this essay is in dialogue with Beckett, who also wrestled with language and the role of the author. Writing in a letter to Axel Kaun in 1937, Beckett expressed his view that language is “like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things (or Nothingness) behind it,” with the aim being “to bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”20 By boring holes to create openings, Foucault and Beckett envisioned language as a permeable surface through which new possibilities could be created beyond existing or

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perceived limits. In the year after Foucault’s essay was published, he would perform the “writing subject” in his inaugural lecture. By this I mean that the position Foucault takes in his lecture reinforces his idea that the author is a process of interpretive practice. It is not a question of who is speaking the text, but what the text communicates through the author-function and how discourse opens through appropriation.21 Foucault’s third citation of Beckett, a “close paraphrase” and deliberate misattribution of a character in Beckett’s The Unnamable, appeared in Foucault’s inaugural lecture on December 2, 1970, at the Collège de France. On that day in December, Foucault delivered (what came to be titled) “The Discourse on Language” in which he presented an analysis on the network of external and internal systems that exercise control over discourse.22 This lecture falls at the important juncture of Foucault’s entry as a professor into the French university system,23 as Didier Eribon noted, and is where the philosopher staked his claim to an interdisciplinary approach within it. In fact, one aspect of Foucault’s lecture was his critique of the limitations imposed on discourse by the very formation of discrete disciplines, a tradition he defied; this approach made evident, in part, through his commitment to literature. When viewed in this significant context, Foucault’s citation of Beckett, which occurred at the start of his lecture that day, must be read in perspective: establishing his position as the newly appointed Chair of the History of Systems of Thought, Foucault not only demonstrated his approach and the scope of his philosophical thinking, but also underlined his resistance to the very structure of the event itself.24 This subtle gesture of defiance came in three ways. First, it can be seen in Foucault’s inclusion of a citation by Beckett in his talk; second, it is visible in Foucault’s analysis of the construction of discourse; and third, in the very moment when Foucault officially assumed a position of authority within French academia, during a ceremonial event that makes visible a “system of valorization,”25 to borrow a Foucauldian phrase, Foucault challenged that visibility by proposing instead his wish “to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture.”26 Foucault framed his compulsion toward disappearance, and his difficulty in finding a beginning from which to speak, by situating himself in relation to another figure, or alter-ego, one whom he donned in order to communicate his struggle to initiate the discourse he sought to shape and define. Foucault confesses: Behind me, I should like to have heard … the voice of Molloy, beginning to speak thus: I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words; I must say them until they find me, until they say me – heavy burden, heavy sin; I must go on; maybe it’s been done already; maybe they’ve already said me; maybe they’ve already borne me to the threshold of my story; right to the door opening onto my story; I’d be surprised if it opened.27



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Foucault stopped short of the full quotation, which appears on the last page, at the very end of Beckett’s The Unnamable. If Foucault had continued, he would have proceeded from “if it opened”: “It will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”28 Foucault’s audacious insertion of this second voice relied upon the fact that Beckett, a contemporary literary figure in Paris at that time, would have been well known to Foucault’s audience.29 Folded into Foucault’s discourse in this way, Beckett is a “buried subtext,” a position he most often occupied, as Richard Begam claims “in French poststructuralism, [as] the writer who spoke most resonantly to those thinkers in France who came after Sartre.”30 Foucault did not need to name Beckett when he quoted from his novel The Unnamable; he simply “pointed to” the author by referring to Molloy, a character from Beckett’s Trilogy. However, Foucault deliberately assigned the wrong attribution to the speaker of these words. His quotation is drawn from the nameless narrator in Beckett’s The Unnamable, not from words spoken by Molloy, who is instead the subject of Beckett’s first novel of the same name, of which The Unnamable is the final novel in the Trilogy; Molloy, published in 1951, is the first and Malone meurt (Malone Dies), published that same year, is the second in the series. When read as a strategic misattribution, Foucault’s alignment with this character of Molloy set the tone of the lecture and was motivated by the fact that Molloy’s very existence in Beckett’s novel corresponded to Foucault’s critique of the role of the author in the production of discourse. In Beckett’s Molloy, as Sheringham writes: “We are … given a gross parody of an archetypal authorial situation with its public and private dimensions. A man is writing in a room, drawing on the stuff of his own experience but complying with external criteria.”31 This is the very type of author Foucault debunks. Further, Sheringham perceptively views “Molloy [as] one of those books which makes us acutely aware of language, not just its language but language itself. … The world of Molloy is first and foremost one of discourse, or discourses.”32 Foucault’s topic is a discourse on language, and his misappropriation of Beckett reinforces “the continual process of modification,” to borrow Foucault’s words, that occur through citation. By quoting Beckett at the start of his presentation, Foucault sets into motion the ways in which many types of discourses are embedded in, and materialize from, a single text.33 Foucault’s deliberate misattribution of the voice of Molloy could have been shaped by George Bataille’s 1951 review of Beckett’s novel Molloy, which in all probability Foucault read given the long-standing importance of Bataille, in Foucault’s work.34 Through Bataille, then, Foucault converges again with Beckett, who also turned to Bataille’s writing. This convergence with Foucault is significant, given that both Bataille and Beckett were outsiders to philosophy and both were linked in their themes of negation, paralysis, failure,

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and abjection, among others. Foucault took Bataille as his subject in his essay “A Preface to Transgression,” first published in 1963,35 and Foucault also contributed an introduction to Bataille’s Oeuvres completes, published in 1970.36 In his essay on transgression, Foucault focused on Bataille’s “evocation of ‘limit experiences,’ which push us to extremes where conventional categories of intelligibility begin to break down,”37 a concept that also echoes themes profoundly expressed in Beckett’s Trilogy. Eribon observes: “For Foucault the strength and liberating voice of Bataille’s work lay in its having dynamited traditional philosophical language by demolishing the idea of a speaking subject.”38 With this in mind, Foucault’s citation of Beckett, and his specific act of recitation, quoting the voice in The Unnamable, yet claiming it to be Molloy, demonstrates Foucault’s idea that commentary “gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text itself. … The novelty lies no longer in what is said, but in its reappearance.”39 Or, to think it differently, through repetition language is continuously reborn, thereby giving rise to new discourses.40 The actual source of Foucault’s citation comes from the end of Beckett’s The Unnamable, at which point in the text Beckett eliminated any certainty in the first-person pronoun, “I,” with the effect being, as Daniel Katz noted, “a refusal to make a gesture of appropriation, to demarcate linguistically a point of origin of discourse.”41 This abandonment occurs gradually throughout the novel through several other characters, whose presence splinters the identity of the nameless narrator. These characters are the ones who give the unnameable what he speaks, not unlike the multiple “voices” or texts Foucault assembled in his lecture.42 As a result of these voices in Beckett’s novel, the identity of the narrator progressively (and some may argue, violently) disperses, leaving no unity or authenticity in the subject.43 Katz argues that “in the very complex network of representations in the trilogy, Beckett does not privilege the figure of the author, trapped in his struggle to find the proper objective correlative to exteriorize his solitary interior life.”44 Beckett’s unnamed narrator, whose mental and physical condition is in constant flux, continuously shifting between states of knowing and unknowing his own identity, unhinges the subject, thereby dispersing the singular into a multiplicity of voices. In Foucault’s opening passages to his inaugural lecture, he said: “At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless [my emphasis] voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me.”45 Foucault called on a “nameless voice,” a voice with no name, the unnameable, a voice that cannot precisely be identified, but one which is nevertheless perceived. This attempt to classify a subject through a process of negation is also posed by the nameless narrator in Beckett’s novel in the following passage (although there



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are many other segments of the text that could be quoted): “First I’ll say what I’m not, that’s how they taught me to proceed. … I am neither … Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier, nor – I can’t even bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very names I forget, who told me I was they, who I must have tried to be, under duress, or through fear, or to avoid acknowledging me.”46 Here, it is important to emphasize that Murphy, Watt, and Mercier are characters in prior novels by Beckett, and the recurrence of them in this passage, as a means to point back to those other narratives, indicates a certain intertextuality in Beckett’s work. This self-referencing points to the network of relations that exist across his early oeuvre. In addition, a close reading of the first three paragraphs of Foucault’s inaugural lecture, in which Foucault spoke of his desire “to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings,” mirrors Beckett’s interest in giving form and sensation to one’s relationship to language. Further, Foucault’s desire to be released from one’s responsibility to express oneself is clearly stated when he emphasizes his want “to be freed from the obligation to begin,”47 echoing too Beckett’s approach to navigating the distance between silence and the compulsion or responsibility to speak. Moreover, Foucault’s self-consciousness of this textual space, as when he expressed his want to be inside a field of words, to be within their texture, absorbed within their form, standing within them, not outside of them, noticeably points to the “ponderous, awesome materiality” of discourse, to use Foucault’s words, a materiality that is also shaped in Beckett’s work.48 The structure of The Unnamable, from which Foucault quoted, is composed by Beckett to convey the sheer volume of thought that accumulates in the main character, and which the main character cannot restrain from communicating, as the narrative develops. Specifically illustrating this point is the format of the novel, which begins with traditional paragraph breaks and, as the narrator proceeds through his story, the structure breaks down, becoming a field of words. This “dissolution of traditional narrative structure”49 through a stream of uninterrupted, unrestrained, and fluctuating thought is delivered at a pace in which readers must make great efforts to digest the content and meaning, exerting themselves and laboring to consume the text itself. Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to describe intersections that can be traced within Foucault’s texts and in Beckett’s writings. Both Foucault and Beckett shared a love of ambiguity, as well as skepticism for ideology and a concern with figures whose visibility within modern society was obscured and suppressed. They also decentered the modern subject and had mutual interests in developing language to challenge convention. The points of connection examined in this chapter show how Foucault found resonance primarily with Beckett’s Molloy and The Unnamable because these fictions so poignantly make visible how “the writing subject endlessly disappears.”

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At the end of Foucault’s lecture, in a stroke of contradiction, however, he is compelled to name the nameless voice that he wished had long preceded him, leaving him to enmesh himself in it. In the final paragraph, Foucault assigns an identity to the author of his discourse. There Foucault expresses his desire to have been inhabited by the voice of his venerated professor, Jean Hyppolite, who had advocated for Foucault’s election to the Collège in 1966 (just two years prior to Hyppolite’s death in 1968).50 In naming Hyppolite, Foucault demonstrated precisely how discourse is constructed and produced, identifying the others who stand alongside his speech. Foucault’s gesture to call on Hyppolite to speak from “beyond the grave” echoes too Beckett’s words from 1956 when he reflected on his novel The Unnamable saying: “At the end of my work there’s nothing but dust – the namable.”51 NOTES 1. In 1937, Samuel Beckett described his desire “to bore one hole after another in it [specifically, the English language] until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.” See later in this chapter for further comment. Samuel Beckett, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 3, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Norton, 1991), 258. 2. Daniela Caselli et al., introduction to “Other Becketts,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2000–Spring 2001): xii. 3. This chapter is part of a larger body of research for my dissertation, “The Beckett Effect,” which I am currently writing as a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, which will concern the multiple ways in which visual artists, working since the 1960s and in a number of mediums, have sourced Beckett’s work. 4. See Foucault when he writes about the cultural phenomenon of caring for oneself that arose in: “It seems to me that the stake, the challenge for any history of thought, is precisely that of grasping when a cultural phenomenon of a determinate scale actually constitutes within the history of thought a decisive moment that is still significant for our modern mode of being subjects,” as quoted in Arnold I. Davidson, introduction to Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xx. 5. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969) in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 106–7. 6. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 108. 7. This is the same time frame that Didier Eribon highlights as a fundamentally important time for Foucault, saying, “Certain of Foucault’s great themes of this period would appear in lectures and in texts.” See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 50. 8. Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 2.



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9. I am grateful to Michael Sheringham for his perceptive and encouraging comments in response to my paper at the conference Michel Foucault (1926–1984): Arts & letters in the 21st century at L’Institut d’études avancées de Paris, France, June 12–13, 2014. See Michael Sheringham, Beckett: Molloy (London: Grant and Cutler, 1985), 82. 10. Foucault, “What Is An Author?,” 108. 11. Thomas Hunkeler, “The Role of the Dead Man in the Game of Writing: Beckett and Foucault,” in Beckett and Philosophy, ed. Richard Lane (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 69. 12. Charles Ruas, “An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas et al. (London: Continuum, 2004), 176. The impact of this theatrical performance and the play itself was impressed on many others, not just Foucault. Kenneth Tynan observed how the play made way for audiences to “reexamine the rules which have hitherto governed drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough.” See Kenneth Tynan in The Observer, August 7, 1955; reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 97. As cited in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 350. 13. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 63. Foucault wrote Maladie mentale et personalité, which was published in 1954, revised in 1962, and then published in English in 1976 as Mental Illness and Psychology. 14. Michel Foucault, “On Literature,” in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84), ed. Sylvère Lotringer et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 153. 15. Foucault, “On Literature,” 153. A useful text sketching the relation between the fields of philosophy and literature, using Beckett as a test case, is Robert Eaglestone, “Beckett in the Wilderness: Writing about (Not) Writing about Beckett,” in Beckett and Philosophy, 40–52. In addition, Foucault’s description of the shifting position of philosophy to literature as one of “comings and goings” recalls, to this reader, the movement of dialogue among three figures in Samuel Beckett’s “Come and Go,” written in English in 1965 and first published in French as Va et vient, translated by Beckett, in Comédie et Actes divers (Paris: Minuit, 1966). 16. Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” was first presented as a lecture at the Collège de France in February 1969. The lecture was translated into English in 1977. See also Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 142. 17. Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, trans. Samuel Beckett (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974), 16. As quoted by Foucault in “What Is an Author?,” 101. 18. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 116. 19. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 116. 20. Samuel Beckett, quoted in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 3, 258. 21. In preparing this chapter, I revisited Foucault’s 1973 book This Is Not a Pipe. It is worth mentioning that in his reading of the visual games of the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, Foucault questions who [my emphasis] exactly is speaking in his painting. In his analysis of the multiple pictorial/textual elements, including the phrase “This is not a pipe,” situated within Magritte’s painting Les Deux mystères

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(1966), Foucault asks: “Who speaks in the statement?” His reading leads him to claim that within this one painting there are seven discourses, all of which confirm his claim of “discourse’s ambiguous power to deny and to redouble.” See Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, ed. and trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 37, 48. 22. This text was published in French in 1971 (Paris: Gallimard). The English version, translated by Rupert Swyer, appeared in Social Science Information in April 1971. The text is included subsequently as an appendix to Michel Foucault, “The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,” trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 215–37. L’archéologie du savoir was originally published in France in 1969 Gallimard without the lecture. 23. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 213. 24. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana note: “On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the Collège de France and replaced that of ‘The History of Philosophical Thought’ held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. He was 43 years old.” Quoted from the foreword to Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, xi. 25. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 115. 26. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 215. Although not explicitly referenced, Foucault’s introduction engages in a dialogue with Roland Barthes’s 1968 essay “The Death of the Author,” in which he claimed that writing (écriture) is where “a subject slips away.” For an in-depth analysis, see Adrian Wilson, “‘Question of the Author’: A Critical Exegesis,” in The Modern Language Review 99, no. 2 (April 2004): 142–48. 27. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 215. 28. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnamable, trans. Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author (New York: Grove, 1955), 414. 29. Paul Veyne notes: “Around 1955, there were, according to him [Foucault], two literary camps in France, one of which, discounted by many, included Brecht, Sartre, and Saint-Jean Perse, while the other, generally considered the only good one, was composed of critics and writers such as Beckett, Blanchot, Bataille, and Char.” See Paul Veyne, Foucault: His Thought, His Character (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 144. 30. Eaglestone, “Beckett in the Wilderness: Writing about (Not) Writing about Beckett,” 47. 31. Sheringham, Beckett: Molloy, 14. 32. Sheringham, Beckett: Molloy, 74–75. 33. Sheringham, Beckett: Molloy, 74–75. 34. In Bataille’s review of Beckett’s 1951 novel Molloy, Bataille uses the term “unnamable” in his review, published prior to his first meeting with Beckett and prior to the publication of Beckett’s third novel of the same name. Bataille wrote: “What we see is so very much the basis of being … that we identify it immediately: We



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cannot give it a name, it is elusive, crucial, slippery, it is silence. … What we in our impotence call vagrant or wretch, which in truth is unnamable (though unnamable is a word calculated to enmesh us).” See Georges Bataille, “Molloy’s Silence,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. and intro. S. E. Gontarski, (New York: Grove, 1986), 131–32. 35. This essay was first published in 1963 in Critique with the title “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” and was written in reflection on Bataille’s death the prior year. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29. 36. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 149. 37. Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published April 2, 2003; substantive revision on May 22, 2013; http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/foucault. 38. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 189. 39. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 221. 40. See Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 221. 41. Daniel Katz, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 99. 42. Katz, Saying I No More, 104. 43. Katz, Saying I No More, 100. 44. Katz, Saying I No More, 104. 45. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 215. 46. Beckett, The Unnamable, 326. 47. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 215. 48. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 216. 49. Locatelli, 57. 50. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 213. 51. Locatelli, 52. Quoted from Israel Shenker, “An Interview with Beckett,” New York Times (May 5, 1956) Section II, I, 3. Graver and Federman, 146–49.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arghiani, Mohammadreza. “Diminishing I’s: The Unnamable’s Absent Subjecthood and the Disintegration of Meaning in the Face of Foucault’s Panopticon.” Philosophy and Literature 36, no. 2 (October 2012): 465–75. Attridge, Derek, and Jacques Derrida. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, edited and translated by Derek Attridge, 33–75. New York: Routledge, 1992. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1967). In Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–48. London: Fontana/Collins, 1977. Bataille, Georges. “Molloy’s Silence.” In On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, edited and introduction by S. E. Gontarski, 131–32. New York: Grove, 1986.

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Beckett, Samuel. Texts for Nothing. Translated by Samuel Beckett. London: Calder and Boyars, 1974. ———. The Unnamable. In Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author, 289–414. New York: Grove, 1955. Bryden, Mary. “Deleuze Reading Beckett.” In Beckett and Philosophy, edited by Richard Lane, 80–92. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Burke, Seán. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Caselli, Daniela, Steven Connor, and Laura Salisbury. Introduction to “Other Becketts.” Journal of Beckett Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2000–Spring 2001): i–xvi. Deane, Seamus, ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 3. New York: Norton, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Foreword by Paul Bové. Translated and edited by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. “The Exhausted.” Translated by Anthony Uhlmann. Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 24, no. 3, issue 78 (1995): 3–28. Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1972. ———. “An Interview with Michel Foucault.” In Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, translated by Charles Ruas, introduction by James Faubion and postscript by John Ashbery, 171–88. London: Continuum, 2004. ———. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited and with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. ———. Michel Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84). Translated by John Johnston. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. ———. Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2005. ———. This Is Not a Pipe. Translated and edited by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. ———. “What Is an Author?” (1969). In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–20. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Hunkeler, Thomas. “The Role of the Dead Man in the Game of Writing: Beckett and Foucault.” In Beckett and Philosophy, edited by Richard Lane, 68–79. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Katz, Daniel. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1999.



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Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Lane, Richard, ed. Beckett and Philosophy. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Locatelli, Carla. Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Sheringham, Michael. Beckett: Molloy. London: Grant and Cutler, 1985. Tubridy, Derval. “‘The subject doesn’t matter, there is none’: Language, Subjectivity and Aporia in Beckett’s Unnamable.” Journal of Beckett Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2000–Spring 2001), i–xvi. Uhlmann, Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Veyne, Paul. Foucault: His Thought, His Character. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010. Wilson, Adrian. “‘Question of the Author’: A Critical Exegesis.” The Modern Language Review 99, no. 2 (April 2004): 339–63.

Chapter 8

The Role of Parrhēsia in King Lear Arianna Sforzini

Shakespeare’s theater is a constant reference in Foucault’s philosophy, from History of Madness to his last course at the Collège de France, The Courage of the Truth. His tragedies are representative of some of the main themes of Foucauldian analyses: the problematization of sovereignty as a paradigm of power; the relation between madness and truth; parrhēsia (the courage of saying the truth even at the price of his own death);1 and the power of truthtelling in political contexts. Here, I propose to follow the references to the tragedy King Lear, the most cited Shakespearean play in Foucault’s works. I will begin with a description of the role of this tragedy in Foucault’s PhD dissertation History of Madness (first published in 1961). I will then try to show how the analysis of King Lear, as a tragedy built upon the question of truth, is reelaborated in Foucault’s last works on parrhēsia. I will finally reflect in a more general way on the use Foucault makes of Shakespearian tragedy as a form of problematization of the games of truth in a specific historical paradigm of power, that of sovereignty. I will assume that, in Foucault’s works, Shakespeare is a perfect example of the possibility of analyzing the history of Western tragedy as a cultural and political reflection on the practices of truth and the processes of the foundation of law. FOUCAULT ON KING LEAR First, it is important to briefly summarize the plot of the tragedy of King Lear.2 Lear is the ruler of Britain, and he has decided, as he grows old and tired, to divide his kingdom into three parts, each one to be governed by one of his three daughters: Goneril, Reagan, and Cordelia. He plans to keep a train of one hundred servants and to spend the rest of his life visiting his daughters 135

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in turns. Before giving away his power, however, he wants to know which daughter loves him the most. While Goneril and Reagan are eager to please him with the most rhetorical claims of love, Cordelia is overwhelmed by the sincerity of the love she feels for her father and finds no appropriated words to express it. Lear is angered by her reticent answer and repudiates her, banishing her from Britain. His other two daughters, however, reveal very soon their true feelings toward their father: they are annoyed by his visits and want him to renounce a part of his court of servants, that is to say, to indefinitely give up his royal status. Stricken by his daughters’ ingratitude and feeling he has lost everything, including the title of king, Lear’s mind snaps: he wanders as a madman under a raging storm, and only the return of Cordelia makes him recover his senses. But his happiness is short lived: due to her sisters’ plots, Cordelia is killed, and the tragedy ends with poor old Lear, devastated by grief and remorse, dying over his youngest daughter’s body. There is also a secondary plot in the tragedy, pivoting on a faithful subject of the old king, the Earl of Gloucester. Gloucester is clearly a duplicate of Lear: he has two sons, one legitimate and one illegitimate. Deceived by the second one, who wants the whole inheritance for himself, he thinks that his first son has betrayed him and therefore banishes him. He is then forced to realize he was wrong when he himself is betrayed by his illegitimate son to Goneril and Reagan and cruelly blinded, despite the courage of one servant who tries to save him and is consequently killed. The whole plot pivots, then, on the problems of sovereignty and truth, questioning the relation between the exercise of power and the acknowledgment of truth, with madness – a metaphorical or physical blindness to truth – being a sort of operator between these two dimensions. It is only when he loses both his power and his senses that the king is finally able to see the truth and to recognize Cordelia as the only truthful one and consequently the only one who could have respected, perhaps saved, his royalty and power. The final scene, the death of Cordelia and Lear, is the climax of Lear’s wretchedness, but it is also the restoration of truth. In his analysis, Foucault exploits precisely this dramatic relation between power, madness, and truth. Foucault’s first reference to King Lear is actually in his PhD dissertation, History of Madness (written between 1956 and 1961).3 King Lear is to him, like Shakespeare’s theater in general in his first works, the expression of a tragic sense of life and madness, which, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was about to disappear from the field of performance. It is one of the last presences in drama of a mad hero on the level of a cosmic madness, which classical Cartesian reason would soon reduce to silence. In this sense, Shakespeare is still a Renaissance man: he puts on the scene a tragic conception of madness as a force unveiling the chaos, the nothingness, the unreason hidden under the pretenses, and the illusions of men’s existence. The madman had been for a long time in European culture a sort of “naïf prophet,” an unaware “parrhēsiaste” whose role was to



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show and tell the tragic truth of reality that men desperately try to mask and forget. In a 1970 interview in Japan, Foucault said: “King Lear is actually a victim of his own shadows, but he is also someone who tells the truth. In other words, the madman is on the stage a character who expresses with his own body the truth of which the other actors and the spectators are unaware, he is the character by which the truth reveals itself.”4 When this special bond to truth is dissolved, the madman as an “exceptional” character also disappears. King Lear, Lady Macbeth, and Ophelia are therefore, according to Foucault, “the very rare, the very lonely expression of an experience fully and completely tragic of madness”; they are characters “without equal, without any equal in a culture like ours, as our culture has always worried about keeping madness at a distance and looking at it with the distant and always justified, even if sometimes partly complaisant, gaze of comic.”5 The clear Cartesian separation between the order of reason and what is left out (madness and delirium) is reflected in the refusal by classical theater of the possibility of a mad hero. Madness as a tragic experience can no longer take the floor, as it is precisely the opposite of the light of reason: the pure night of error, which cannot have a voice for itself. Foucault writes: The tragic hero – in contrast to the baroque character of the preceding period – can never be mad; and that conversely madness cannot bear within itself those values of tragedy, which we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical period, the man of tragedy and the man of madness confront each other, without a possible dialogue, without a common language; for the former can utter only the decisive words of being, uniting in a flash the truth of light and the depth of darkness; the latter endlessly drones out the indifferent murmur which cancels out both the day’s chatter and the lying dark.6

The configuration of knowledge in the classical age (seventeenth century), based, as Foucault explains in Les Mots et les choses (1966), on the epistemic paradigm of representation,7 prevents the theater from finding new connections to the “un-reasonable” powers, the forces potentially subversive of our conception of truth. “In the end, the very essence of the classical work is to be found in theatre – be it Shakespeare or Racine – where one finds oneself in the world of representation.”8 Classical theater is the privileged locus of representation. The organization of discourse into scenes, a “taxonomic” discourse of sorts, is in effect a characteristic element of classical knowledge. This said, defining theater through representation conceived this way implies reducing its power to a calm, neutral space. It is as if theater in the classical age were simply an expression of the influence of (Cartesian) reason by which the space of true discourses were limited to the truth that reason alone could understand, the domain of manageable, objectifiable representation. The rigorous order in classical theater reduces to silence “the bitter and sweet madness of King Lear.”9

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KING LEAR, THE TYRANT King Lear puts on stage the tragic relation to truth that European culture has rejected and lost. Foucault reelaborates this idea of King Lear as a tragedy of truth in his last course at the Collège de France, The Courage of the Truth.10 However, there, the truth is no longer seen as a cosmic and tragic aspect of reality, but as a complex game of discourse and power. It is a powerful act of speech. The Shakespearean tragedy is used again in the context of the Foucauldian analyses of the cynic’s parrhēsia: the frankness that fears no scandal, the courage of telling the truth even if it means risking his own life. King Lear is firstly an expression of the theme of the cynic king, the king of derision, the hidden king: “The banished king who has been driven from his land and travels through the world without being recognized by anyone … the concealed personage, king, saint, hero, or knight, whose truth, heroism, and highly beneficial value for humanity are not recognized by the whole of humanity.”11 This is a Christ-like figure, carrying an unrecognized and unbearable truth. But this unbearable truth is not only a mad king’s feature. The whole tragedy is built on the ethical and political problem of telling the truth and accepting or rejecting this truth that is told. As he states in his last course, Foucault sees in King Lear a tragedy of parrhēsia. And it’s this idea of King Lear as the drama of truth-telling that I would like to examine in the second part of this chapter,12 by arguing that a parrhēsiastic game of truth can be found in two main scenes of the tragedy. In the initial scene, when Lear renounces the crown but asks in return his daughters to tell him how much they love him, he acts as if he were able to maintain his royalty even after the division of his kingdom. He asks for what is in fact a tribute to his power, a tribute to be paid by means of the expression of love. Lear may not want a “true” declaration of love, but an act of submission. He was most probably aware of Reagan and Goneril’s flattery, but in his eyes this adulation was a necessary part of the subordination and dependency his subjects must show him. Cordelia’s parrhēsia breaks this game of flattery and reveals Lear’s request for what it really is: the despotism of an old ruler, determining on a whim the destiny of his kingdom. From the beginning of the play, Lear is dominated by a specific passion: the wrath of anger. Shakespeare seems to know the essay by Plutarch “On the Control of Anger,”13 in which the Greek author describes the physical and mental decline of old people. The elderly are more impulsive, more eager to fly into a rage, and vulnerable to mood swings. Lear opens the tragedy with a burst of passionate anger, punishing his daughter Cordelia much more severely than it would have been appropriate to her deed. But anger is not only the fault of old age. It is a traditional feature of tyrannical power. The tyrant exposes his subjects to rampant terror and arbitrary decisions. Lear



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represents, therefore, an excessive and unmeasured power. He is blinded by anger first as his conception and practice of power are distorted. At the very beginning of the tragedy (Act I, Scene I), Lear commits an unforgivable crime, which leads to his fall. This crime is not the repudiation of his only loving daughter, Cordelia (or rather, this is a consequent error), but the decision of giving the crown away and dividing the kingdom among his daughters. Lear acts as if the kingdom were his own property, something he has the right to divide as a heritage among his daughters. He does not realize that in this way he destroys the kingdom’s unity and strength. As a consequence, he disqualifies himself as a king: he is no longer able to distinguish truth from error and flattery. The impossibility for Lear of entering a constructive game of truth is due to the wounds he inflicts on the body of the kingdom. In Foucauldian terms, Lear disqualifies himself as an active subject of power and truth. After losing his power, Lear becomes the anti-king, the hidden king: he no longer embodies the sovereign’s sacred authority but is reduced to an exiled and deprived body, the banal nakedness of an old madman. As it is widely known, in this tragedy (first performed on December 26, 1606), Shakespeare reflects upon his contemporary debates about the nature of sovereignty, under the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.14 More specifically, King Lear is in a certain way the tragic counterpart of the juridical theory of the king’s two bodies, as described by Ernst Kantorovicz: the idea that a king has both a mortal, natural human body and a divine, immortal, powerful political body that guarantees the continuity of royal power.15 The king is dead, long live the king! Lear is the dramatic example of the abjection to which the double body of the king is subjected when the king himself loses or betrays his sovereignty. The fear is that the king might always turn into his opposite, the Fool or the Deserter. Having lost his royal dignity, he becomes even less than a natural human body: Deus absconditus, Christ exposed and martyred on the cross, the cynic king of derision – in Shakespeare’s plays the character who, making a fool of everybody, actually tells the truth. The king loses his identity and asks: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” It is his Fool who answers: “Lear’s shadow” (Act I, scene IV).16 Moreover, Lear is not an innocent victim; he has guilt to expiate. And this guilt is political: Lear has violated the kingdom’s body, condemning it to ruin. CORDELIA, THE PARRHĒSIASTIC CHARACTER Facing Lear in the initial scene, and revealing all the violence and non-sense of his asking for a love speech, we find the real parrhēsiastic character of the tragedy: Cordelia. Cordelia simply opposes to the anger and power of her old father with the sincerity of her heart, which is impossible to put into

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words. Any elaborated speech would corrupt the integrity of her feelings with the rhetorical artifices and risks of sweet talk. The reticence of Cordelia is a dramatic example of parrhēsia as the “degree zero” of rhetoric that Foucault described in his 1982 course at the Collège de France, The Hermeneutics of the Self.17 The real truth, the truth that can change subjectivities and existences, is at the lowest discursive level. As Seneca says in his Letter 75 to Lucilius (an example used in Foucault’s last works)18: If it were possible, I should prefer to show, rather than speak, my feelings. Even if I were arguing a point, I should not stamp my foot, or toss my arms about, or raise my voice; but I should leave that sort of thing to the orator, and should be content to have conveyed my feelings to you without having either embellished them or lowered their dignity. I should like to convince you entirely of this one fact, – that I feel whatever I say, that I not only feel it, but am wedded to it. It is one sort of kiss which a man gives his mistress and another which he gives his children; yet in the father’s embrace also, holy and restrained as it is, plenty of affection is disclosed.19

Cordelia’s speech is true precisely as it is “holy and restrained.” Parrhēsia is the ideal of a speech fully permeated by truth: a truth that is not an ornament of discourse but a form of life, a way for the subject to bound himself ethically to the truth he is telling, and for the others to be “changed,” in some political and ethical way, by the truth they see and hear (the truth as a weapon to transform reality and existence). As Foucault says about the Christian notion of parrhēsia: “Parrēsia [sic] is simply a mode of being, a mode of human activity. … This mode of human activity does include, to some extent, in a certain context, and in certain circumstances, the connotation of courage, of speaking boldly, but it is also an attitude of the heart, a way of being, which does not need to manifest itself in discourse and speech.”20 Cordelia is then definitely a parrhēsiastic character as, on the one hand, she cannot but act and speak conformingly to the integrity of her heart and, on the other hand, she has the courage to reject the request of her father and king, a more powerful political subject. She exposes herself to the risk of banishment and repudiation in order to remain coherent to the truth that substantiates her own existence. Cordelia’s apparent lack of feeling for her father is therefore a paradoxical affirmation of true love through silence. And it constitutes itself as an act of resistance: the refusal to validate Lear’s perverted game of power and truth. Cordelia constitutes her own subjectivity through a precise relation to truth: she identifies herself with the truth she feels and embodies, and she refuses to express it, even at the price of losing the tenderness of her beloved father. As Foucault stated since the first volume of his History of Sexuality (The Will to Knowledge, 1976),21 from the early Christian theology to modern medicine and psychoanalysis, the individual has been induced to look for



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the truth about himself in the deepness of his heart, soul, and thoughts, and then to tell, to express verbally, this true identity he had to discover. Cordelia affirms her subjectivity by the refusal of telling what she really feels: by means of a truth that is not the expression of a pre-constituted identity or the acceptation of others’ desires and expectations, but the free affirmation of a coherence between actions and discourses, between what she is and what she tells and does. Her parrhēsia is, therefore, an example of a process of subjectivation throughout a truthful speech (a speech paradoxically silent, in her case), which is very different from the traditional Western one. Cordelia’s relation to truth is not conveyed by words and does not aim to build and reveal her own identity. THE SERVANT’S PARRHĒSIA AGAINST KINGLY VIOLENCE The second “parrhēsiastic scene” of the tragedy is the blinding of Gloucester. It is an important scene, as Gloucester can be considered the dramatic counterpart of King Lear: he is a foolish old man who is not able to distinguish between truth and falseness, between the loving and the cruel son. Both Lear and Gloucester suffer from having been blind to the truth, and lose their sight due to a real blinding or to madness. Gloucester is betrayed by his own son and cruelly punished by Lear’s daughters and Reagan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall, who gouge out his eyes. But, as for the initial scene opposing Lear and Cordelia, even in this atrocious scene there is a positive character, a servant who has “the courage of the truth.” He tries to prevent his lord, Reagan’s husband, from committing violence against Gloucester. He dares to say to his master that he is doing something wrong; he tells the truth to his powerful lord, and in so doing he breaks, in a certain way, the spiral of violence. “Hold your hand, my Lord./ I have serv’d you ever since I was a child,/ But better service have I never done you/ Than now to bid you hold” (Act III, scene VII).22 These courageous words cannot save Gloucester’s eyes nor the servant’s life, but they represent the survival of virtue and justice in a world completely ruined by ambition and cruelty. The servant’s act of bravery marks the reversal point of the tragedy, which will lead to Reagan and Goneril’s catastrophe and to the reunion of Lear and Cordelia.23 Both Cordelia’s and the servant’s speeches tell, then, a truth that is a gesture of resistance against an act of violence. Their truth is not the truth of science or confession: it does not represent the true essence of reality or the deep intimacy of the self. It can be told more silently than discursively. It is really the courage to stand against power, accepting even the risk of dying. A destructive power – the tyrannical sovereignty of King Lear or the limitless cruelty of Reagan and her husband – is unable to accept the game of parrhēsia, the possibility

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of truth-telling, and sentence the parrhēsiaste to exile or to death. By doing so, however, this power defeats itself: Goneril, Cornwall, and his wife die, losing everything, and Lear is condemned to wander mad and lonely, as the tragic shadow of the supreme royalty he used to embody. TRAGEDY AND POWER In conclusion, King Lear is the tragedy of sovereignty: the tragedy of this particular form of sovereignty, which, in Elizabethan England, was built on the juridical theory of “the king’s two bodies.” Foucault reads King Lear – and, more generally, the Shakespearian tragedies – as a problematization of a historical political paradigm of power and of the games of truth and the forms of subjectivity that can be related to this political paradigm. King Lear has in Foucault’s studies on sovereignty the same place Las Meninas of Velázquez has in Les Mots et les choses, or Oedipus the King by Sophocles in the genealogy of the relations between truth and juridical practices. King Lear is the vivid, visual, dramatic incarnation of a specific configuration of power, knowledge, and truth. Foucault’s concern with Shakespeare has nothing to do with an aesthetic consideration or a mere intellectual attention to cultural history. It is a way to detach himself from a traditional and merely juridical analysis of power, by exploring not merely theatrically but by means of the theater the political rituals and ceremonies, the governmental technologies, the figures of truth that compose the very life of power. Foucault perceives power not only as a set of laws, institutions, and authoritarian practices but also as a theatrical set of forces; not simply a battleground, but a “drama”: the concrete manifestation of historical political devices and discourses, and the relations that can be established between these political games of truth and the subjects they involve and shape. I think the role Shakespearean tragedy plays in Foucault’s works might be applied to tragedy itself, and more generally to theater.24 Foucault stated in his course of 1980 at the Collège de France (Lectures on the Government of the Living) that in ancient Greece theater was a way in which Western societies represented and at the same time challenged their conceptions and practices of truth. Every Greek tragedy is an alethurgy, that is to say a ritual manifestation of truth; an alethurgy in the completely general sense of the term, since tragedy, of course, makes truth audible and visible through the myths and heroes, through the actors and their masks. In Greece, the stage, the theatre is a site on which the truth is manifested.25

Theater constitutes in particular a reflection on the emergence and the institutionalization of law, as Foucault clearly explains in the course he holds



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at the University of Louvain in 1981 (Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling). The tragedies by Shakespeare, for example, but also the later ones by Corneille, Racine, and Schiller, put into question the modern form of the state – the monarchic power and the public law – which emerges at the beginning of the sixteenth century and that will go on to characterize successive European and Western history. It seems to me that, generally speaking, in most societies we would refer to as Indo-European, or at least from the theater of Greece to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this question of the representation of law in theater was a constant. After all, the central problem in Shakespeare – or in the political plays among Shakespeare’s works – it seems to me, is the question of the foundation of sovereign right: How … can a sovereign succeed in legitimately exercising power that he seized through war, revolt, civil war, crime, or violating oaths? It seems to me as well that classical French theater – I am thinking especially of Corneille, of course – touches on and represents these problems of public law. It also seems to me that the question of law and of representing the foundation of law through theater was essential for Schiller as well. It could be interesting, I think, to study the entire history of theater in our societies from the perspective of this question of the representation of law.26

To recall, as I do here, the definition of “dramatic” that Foucault gives in Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, the “dramatic” is not “a mere ornamental addition,” but “every element in a scene that brings forth the foundation of legitimacy and the meaning of what is taking place.”27 By saying so, Foucault does not mean that it is possible, analyzing history as a sequence of “scenes” and by the means of “dramas,” to reveal or produce the essential nature and meaning of historical events, processes, and phenomena. The question is to understand which elements, paths, and strategies formed the conditions (always plural, open, and moving) of every single event and every contingent form of truth. Theater – tragedy in particular – is at the same time an important expression and a meaningful starting point for this “dramatic” analysis of discourses and political structures. Reading the history of power and truth within a “dramatic” frame, by means of the concepts and the history of theater, might, therefore, be a fruitful way to draw out the multiple and complex set of relations forming the several political/juridical scenes throughout history. And reading King Lear “dramatically,” as Foucault invites us to do, is a way to reactivate its political and ethical force. As contemporary political and feminist thinker Bonnie Honig writes: Approaching the play with its dramaturgy in mind has, paradoxically, more to offer political theory than any “arguments” we may cull from the play. A dramaturgical approach treats the text as a performance that may succeed or fail

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rather than as an argument that may be true or false, right or wrong. … Such an approach is attentive to the asymmetrical powers of different speakers, the errancy of utterance which may end up in the wrong place, the pace and trajectory of textual and historical events, the possibility of conspiracy, coded communication, irony, sarcasm and hyperbole.28

NOTES 1. “Parrēsia [sic] – and I am summarizing here, asking you to forgive me for having been so slow and plodding – is therefore a certain way of speaking. More precisely, it is a way of telling the truth. Third, it is a way of telling the truth that lays one open to a risk by the very fact that one tells the truth. Fourth, parrēsia is a way of opening up this risk linked to truth-telling by, as it were, constituting oneself as the partner of oneself when one speaks, by binding oneself to the statement of the truth and to the act of stating the truth. Finally, parrēsia is a way of binding oneself to oneself in the statement of the truth, of freely binding oneself to oneself, and in the form of a courageous act. Parrēsia is the free courage by which one binds oneself in the act of telling the truth. Or again, parrēsia is the ethics of truth-telling as an action which is risky and free.” Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, ed., Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 66. 2. Cf. King Lear. Notes (Toronto: Coles, 1980) and Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear: Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2015). 3. Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965) is an abridged version of Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961). An English translation of the complete 1961 edition was published in June 2006 as History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). 4. Michel Foucault, “La folie et la société,” text no. 83 in Dits et écrits I: 1954– 1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1001. (My trans.) 5. Michel Foucault, “Le silence des fous,” in La grande étrangère (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2013), 32. (My trans.) 6. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 110. 7. “Resemblance, which had for long been the fundamental category of knowledge – both the form and the content of what we know – became dissociated in an analysis based on terms of identity and difference; moreover, whether indirectly by the intermediary of measurement, or directly and, as it were, on the same footing, comparison became a function of order; and, lastly, comparison ceased to fulfill the function of revealing how the world is ordered, since it was now accomplished according to the order laid down by thought, progressing naturally from the simple to the complex. As a result, the entire episteme of Western culture found its fundamental arrangements modified. And, in particular, the empirical domain which sixteenthcentury man saw as a complex of kinships, resemblances, and affinities, and in which language and things were endlessly interwoven – this whole vast field was to take on



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a new configuration. This new configuration may, I suppose, be called ‘rationalism’; one might say, if one’s mind is filled with ready-made concepts, that the seventeenth century marks the disappearance of the old superstitious or magical beliefs and the entry of nature, at long last, into the scientific order. But what we must grasp and attempt to reconstitute are the modifications that affected knowledge itself, at that archaic level which makes possible both knowledge itself and the mode of being of what is to be known.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989; Routledge Classics, 2002), 60. 8. Michel Foucault, “Littérature et langage; Première séance,” in La grande étrangère (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2013), 102. (My trans.) 9. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 31. 10. Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 11. Foucault, Courage of the Truth, 285–86. 12. Cf. Nadia Fusini, Di vita si muore (Milan: Mondadori, 2010), 278–86. 13. Plutarch, “On the Control of Anger,” in Moralia, vol. 6, trans. W. C. Helmbold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1939), 90–159. 14. Cf. Keith Linley, “King Lear” in Context: The Cultural Background (London: Anthem, 2015), and Edwin Muir, The Politics of King Lear (Glasgow: Jackson, Son and Company, 1947). 15. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 16. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972), 45. 17. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 18. Cf. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject; Foucault, The Courage of the Truth; “La Parrêsia,” Anabases 16 (2012): 157–88. 19. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “On the Diseases of the Soul,” letter 75 in Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, trans. E. Phillips Barker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932). 20. Foucault, The Courage of the Truth, 329. 21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). 22. Shakespeare, King Lear, 134. 23. Cf. Fusini, Di vita si muore. 24. Cf. Arianna Sforzini, “Ceremonies, Rituals, Dramatics: A Theatrical Ethnology of Power,” Carceral Notebooks 9 (2013): 89–95. 25. Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 23. 26. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, trans. Stephen S. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2014), 58. 27. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 210.

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28. Bonnie Honig, Antigone, interrupted (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Foucault, Michel. The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. Dits et écrits II: 1976–1988. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. La grande étrangère. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2013. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981– 1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. Madness and Civilisation: History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965. ———. On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979– 1980. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 1989. ———. “La Parrêsia,” Anabases 16 (2012): 157–88. ———. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Translated by Stephen S. Sawyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2014. Fusini, Nadia. Di vita si muore. Milan: Mondadori, 2010. Honig, Bonnie. Antigone, interrupted. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. King Lear. Notes. Toronto: Coles, 1980. Linley, Keith. “King Lear” in Context: the Cultural Background. London: Anthem, 2015. Muir, Edwin. The Politics of King Lear. Glasgow: Jackson, Son and Company, 1947. Muir, Kenneth, ed. King Lear: Critical Essays. London: Routledge, 2015. Plutarch. “On the Control of Anger,” in Moralia, vol. 6, translated by W. C. Helmbold. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1939. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. “On the Diseases of the Soul.” Letter 75 in Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. Translated by E. Phillips Barker. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932. Sforzini, Arianna. “Ceremonies, Rituals, Dramatics: A Theatrical Ethnology of Power.” Carceral Notebooks 9 (2013): 89–95. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by Kenneth Muir. London: Methuen, 1972.

Part IV

AESTHETICS TRANSFORMED

Chapter 9

Deleuze on Foucault The Recourse to Painting Catherine M. Soussloff

The artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most men take part without really seeing it and who makes it visible to the most “human” among them. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty1

In this chapter I propose to read Gilles Deleuze on Foucault in regard to the primary significance of vision and “visibilities” in the latter’s thought. In the book Foucault, published in 1986, two years after Foucault’s death, Deleuze contends that “the theory of visibility” offered by Foucault presented important evidence that could be distinguished from other, historically determined discursive practices and a distinctive philosophical method.2 I want to pay particular attention to the place of paintings in Deleuze’s argument – both in the material specificity of the paintings and painters he names, and which Foucault had written about, and in the more general sense of paintings as bearers of meanings intrinsic to a particular artistic practice with a distinctive historical and conceptual apparatus. For, in Foucault’s thought the duality of a painting’s material and conceptual functions made it both a tangible basis for historically determined subjects and forms and a referent to the nature of representation itself, as the famous first chapter of The Order of Things with its analysis of Las Meninas proposed.3 Does Deleuze understand the function of paintings in this way when he proposes the centrality of “visibilities” in terms of Foucault’s larger project of “what it means to think”?4 The major aim of this chapter is to ask about the significance of Deleuze’s assessment of Foucault’s theory of visibility to the larger project of understanding painting in Foucault’s work, which I have explored at length elsewhere.5

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In spite of Deleuze’s emphasis on vision and visibility, an examination of Foucault’s writing results immediately in the observation that if we understand the visual arts to include the traditional triumvirate of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as photography, drawing, and printmaking, Foucault does not have a great deal to say, given his total corpus. Martin Jay has argued that Foucault’s interest in the visual arts must be understood as concerning primarily “the gaze” and the related issues of vision, visibility, and the visual in his work.6 While Deleuze briefly mentions the gaze in Foucault, he maintains that Foucault’s categories of analysis sediment in a particular method of using visualities to understand power, seen most clearly in Discipline and Punish (1975).7 Although by no means unanimously in agreement with Deleuze on Foucault, critics since 1986 have at times taken up his view of the primacy of visibilities in Foucault’s thought in order to explain how painting functions in Foucault’s philosophy, but few of these have performed a close reading of the Deleuze text.8 The two philosophers had a friendship and a close professional relationship that extended over many years. Moreover, the serious attention paid to the visual media by Deleuze in his own work – the books on cinema of 1983 and 1985 and the book on the baroque of 1988 – confirms the importance of his understanding of Foucault’s philosophical and art historical significance. As early as 1961, the date of the publication of Folie et déraison, Foucault made the point that the congruence between the material and the conceptual in paintings did not refer to a unity between word and image, a matter taken up later in Les Mots et les choses (1966) and in the essay “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (1968 and 1973) on paintings by René Magritte.9 In a lengthy analysis of Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony in Lisbon, Foucault contrasted the painting’s approach to the subject of madness with the written discourse of the same historical period: By its own means painting was beginning the long process of experimentation that would take it ever further from language, regardless of the superficial identity of a theme. Language and figure still illustrate the same fable of madness in the moral world, but they are beginning to take different directions, indicating, through a crack that was still barely perceptible, the great divide that was yet to come in the Western experience of madness.10

In the careful analysis of some of the details of the central panel that followed, Foucault went on to argue that in its substance, the painting realized the revelatory power of madness, which written discourse would find only much later: “The vain images of blind foolishness turned out to be the truth of the world, and in this grand disorder, this mad universe, the cruelty that lay in the day of judgement began to appear.”11 Foucault’s view of Bosch’s painting



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as a manifestation of the idea of the world and of madness itself had been acknowledged first by art historians, as he would have known.12 However, in his book Foucault wove these earlier monographic interpretations of the artist’s work into a long history from the Renaissance to the twentieth century of the coming into visibility of madness (figure 9.1). Significantly, Foucault’s study of the unfolding of the meaning of madness over time concluded with another notion taken from art history: the idea of an artist’s oeuvre, that is, the collection of the complete works by a named master, such as Van Gogh or Artaud.13 Art history calls the comprehensive listing of an artist’s works arranged chronologically according to medium and including the correct titles and known measurements of each work a catalogue raisonné. To allude to the “reasoned” collection of an artist’s work in the context of a study of madness, or “unreason,” may well have occurred to Foucault, who often used puns and other word plays in his discussion of paintings. However, for Foucault, an oeuvre constituted the limit case of what a given culture allows madness to be: “Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness: and yet madness is contemporaneous with the oeuvre, as it is the harbinger of the time of its truth. The instant in which, together, madness and an oeuvre come into being and reach fulfillment is the beginning of the time when the world first finds itself summoned by the oeuvre, and is responsible for all that it is in the face of it.”14 In a recent essay that engages with Foucault’s use of oeuvre in History of Madness, Michael Kelly has argued that with this concept painting assumed an even greater significance as an “enactment of critical agency” in his thought.15 In History of Madness, then, paintings offer a particular kind of visibility not available in language, and art history offers methods of classification of significance to “the world,” as Foucault had put it. In Foucault, Deleuze begins with the case for Foucault as “a new archivist,” who examined “the statement” according to a unique archaeological method, which refused the traditional techniques of “formalization” and “interpretation.”16 Deleuze claims that Foucault discovered statements to be “formations thrown up by the corpus in question only when the subjects of the phrase, the objects of the proposition and the signifieds of words change in nature: they then occupy the place of the ‘One [who] speaks’ and become dispersed throughout the opacity of language.”17 Deleuze refers to the location of the statement that Foucault discovered as “a new dimension,” capable of being analyzed only according to the methods used in visual analysis.18 Having established the characteristics of statements in Foucault’s writing, Deleuze turns to the centrality of visibilities for Foucault’s philosophy, which he asserts rest on Discipline and Punish. According to Deleuze, the political ramifications of these visibilities would not fully emerge until The History of Sexuality.19

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Figure 9.1  Hieronymous Bosch, The Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1501–1516, oil on panel. Source: Collection of Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Image reproduced under Wikimedia Commons public domain guidelines.

Deleuze asserts that Foucault’s collaboration with Daniel Defert in the reformist Group for Information about Prisons (GIP) transformed Foucault’s theory from what it had been in his earlier books, such as History of Madness. Deleuze found a “new conception of power” linked to “strategic” methods of making visible articulated in Discipline and Punish.20 At the same time, Deleuze goes to some lengths to explain the turn to visibilities and vision found in the book by tracing their emergence in the studies that immediately preceded it, where the aforementioned “statement” had been the major concern. Deleuze asserts that Foucault said that Les Mots et les choses was neither about things nor about words, inferring that nascent visibilities had some role to play there.21 Further, he alleges that in the next book, that is, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), “archaeology put forward a distinction between two types of practical formations: the one ‘discursive,’ involving statements, the other ‘non-discursive,’ involving environment, to which paintings belonged.”22 Indeed, from the time of Madness and Civilization, Deleuze finds a growing interest in the division between “the visible” and “the articulable” in Foucault’s conception of knowledge. As text, Deleuze’s Foucault structures an assessment of the philosopher’s contribution to thinking around this polarity between the visible and the articulable, ultimately concluding that “if knowledge is constituted by two forms,” the ontologies of the subject and subjectivation (power) can be found only in the fold between them.23 In this formulation, visibilities allow us to perceive the content of the fold, and, if we follow Deleuze’s subsequent thinking on the matter of the fold, works of art constitute whatever materiality the fold contains.24



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Significant to these last points on the visible in contrast to the articulable, the publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975 coincided with Foucault’s essay “La peinture photogénique” on the painter Gérard Fromanger, Foucault’s contemporary and an ally in the prison reform movement, in which Deleuze also participated.25 In regard to Deleuze’s interest in Foucault’s understanding of “visibilities” and for what follows here, it is noteworthy that he had written on Fromanger’s paintings two years earlier than Foucault. Foucault’s essay appeared in a small catalogue for a solo exhibition by Fromanger at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris. While one might have expected Foucault to address at some length the issue of prison reform that consumed both men at this time, his essay on Fromanger rather probed the significance of painting’s relationship to photography and “all the techniques of the image,” particularly the use of light.26 So too, in Foucault, Deleuze takes up the significance of light as central to visibility. He opposes light to language in the opposition between the visible and the articulable. The title of Foucault’s essay on Fromanger, “Photogenic Painting,” betrays the significance of “the techniques of the image” he alleged for Fromanger’s pictures. Foucault made a pun on the term “photogenic drawing” (le dessin photogénique), a proto-photographic technique attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). Fox Talbot coined the term “photogenic drawing” to refer to the results of his first, camera-less photographic process on treated paper, derived from experiments announced in 1839.27 Fox Talbot produced photographic “drawings” by placing objects on prepared white paper and exposing them to direct light.28 The results were flat silhouettes, or shadow images, in which only the outlines referred to the original object. Foucault coined “photogenic painting” in order to link the early history of photographic techniques of projection that resulted in the silhouette – what we might call the form of the object – with Fromanger’s process of projecting slide images in the studio of “pictures taken in the street, random photos, taken almost blindly,” and which resulted in a finished oil painting.29 These paintings were no more indexical to reality – no more representational and no more like the photographic projections that engendered them – than Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawings had been to their object or scene.30 According to Foucault, the photographic “shadow” in Fromanger’s process produced a new order of painting: another kind of image “left to exist ‘all by itself’” (laisse la toile exister “toute seule”).31 In what might be called its ontological status, then, the completed painted canvas did not directly reference or index the prior image projection. Thus, Fromanger’s canvases freed painting’s images from the indexicality presumed of the photograph by the history of photography.32 To state the matter in terms of visibility, in the catalog essay Foucault argued that through the process of projection Fromanger’s paintings were no longer imprisoned by their prior visual discourse. In being freed from

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it, these paintings revealed or made visible what had heretofore been invisible in photographic images. The essay on Fromanger allows Foucault to interpret what is not seen, what might be called the hermeneutical opposite of the commonly used methods of art history, which seek through language and statements to identify the subjects and objects visualized in the art object. In his essay on Fromanger’s painting, Foucault moves back and forth between what is represented and what is not visible in order to understand the significance of painting as a system of knowledge. Deleuze had concluded his essay on Fromanger with the idea of the image, “the transformation of the image in the painting, the change the painting produces in the image.” However, more importantly for the later interpretation of visibility found in Foucault, the problematic of the interrelation of vision and the image in painting predominated in both of their essays on Fromanger.33 Thus, Deleuze’s posthumous book on Foucault carries forward an earlier topic of concern to both philosophers at the time when they were both involved in GIP.34 In Foucault, Deleuze argued that Foucault’s method of focusing on the interaction between the statement and visibilities allowed him to achieve significant insights into the history of madness, the clinic, language, the prison, and sexuality. However, in going back to Discipline and Punish as the text central to his argument about the significance of visibilities, Deleuze allied Foucault’s understanding of visibility not only with the prison reform movement but also with their shared interest in Fromanger’s figurative painting between 1973 and 1975. In the chapter of Foucault entitled “Strata or Historical Formations: The Visible and Articulable (Knowledge),” Deleuze explains at length what is meant by vision and visibility in Foucault’s writing from Madness and Civilization to Discipline and Punish. At least theoretically, as Deleuze states, these concepts have little to do with the gaze, or with surveillance for that matter. Rather, these vision-terms oppose to language and its operations as expression. Vision-terms apply specifically to “forms of content.”35 According to Deleuze, such forms could be seen only with the eyes; by so perceiving them, they could be brought into visibility: the sense of sight, or vision, is extremely important in this process. Further, these forms brought into visibility work together with statements, but they consist of a certain “luminosity” belonging to them alone, just as, we might say following Foucault on Fromanger, the particular forms in a photogenic drawing emerge only when direct light is cast on photosensitive paper. Moreover, given the significance of vision for perceiving luminosities, the place of the viewer may be understood as superseding the place of the speaker of the statement. In this manner, the artist and the viewer may be said to collude in the signification of visibilities. At a crucial point in his development of the idea of the visible in relation to the statement, Deleuze takes recourse to painting: he compares Foucault’s



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conception of the visible to “pictorial” examples: Manet, Delauney, Cézanne. Through their paintings these artists freed the statement and brought its occulted meanings into visibility as the contents of the form, that is, the painting. Deleuze argues that different pictures and different architecture show different visibilities, depending on the distribution of light, of what it reveals and leaves in obscurity. Again, using another pictorial example he writes: In one famous section, The Order of Things describes Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas as a system of light that opens up the space of classical representation and distributes what is seen and who sees, the exchanges and reflections, right up to the place of the king who can only be inferred as existing outside the painting (didn’t the destroyed manuscript on Manet describe a completely different system of light, with a different use of the mirror and a different distribution of reflections?).36

Deleuze must have known that Foucault’s missing book manuscript had used Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (London, Courtauld Institute Gallery) – in which the scene depicted appears as a reflection in the large mirror behind the barmaid – as “a painting that fascinated him as the inverse of Las Meninas.”37 The comparison that Deleuze makes between Las Meninas and Manet’s paintings in regard to the operations of light deserves further attention here. First, what was Deleuze citing in regard to Las Meninas? Foucault had understood Velázquez’s painting in terms of the mirror depicted on the back wall in the painting, which bore the reflection of the absent king and queen of Spain and referred essentially to the fact that “the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing – despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits.”38 In their criticisms of Foucault’s interpretation of Las Meninas, art historians have naturally focused on the prominence given to the mirror.39 Leo Steinberg went so far as to call Foucault’s chapter not simply “an epistemological riddle,” but in sum, a verification of all painting as “a mirror of consciousness.”40 Hubert Damisch made an important point concerning Foucault’s simultaneous attention to the mirror and to the light coming into the room from the open door next to it: To use Foucault’s own term, the spectator’s attention “flutters” (papillote), being simultaneously solicited by the painter’s gaze at him, by the mirror facing him, and by the open door at the rear of the painting, similar to a “light” (though it illuminates only itself), at whose threshold, a bit inside it there stands another spectator, as presented to us by the painter, and yet whose view encompasses all of it, including the other painting, the one we can’t see, to which no one in the scene pays any attention, not even the painter himself in this suspended moment.41

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As Foucault had observed, the passages of light in the painting – seen in the open door and the mirror on the wall and coming from the window on the right side of the central group – simultaneously attract the viewer’s attention and reveal what otherwise cannot not be seen in the darker passages of the composition. Similarly, Deleuze remained faithful to Foucault in his emphasis on the mirror’s function in bringing visibilities into the light of day: “The mirror provides a metathesis of visibility that affects both the space represented in the picture and its nature as representation; it allows us to see, in the centre of the canvas, what in the painting is of necessity doubly visible.”42 Second, what does Deleuze mean when he notes the different use of the mirror in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère? Foucault had said: “Manet plays with the picture’s property of being not in the least a normative space whereby the representation fixes us or the viewer to a point, a unique point from which to look.”43 He suggested that Manet’s picture provides us with a mobile point of view: “In a picture like this one, or in any case in this one, it is not possible to know where the painter has placed himself in order to paint the picture as he has done it, and where we must place ourselves in order to see a spectacle such as this.”44 As Foucault explained, this destabilization in the painting produces juxtaposed and contradictory feelings in the viewer; it “explains at once the enchantment and the malaise that one feels in looking at it.”45 Joseph Tanke has argued that this self-reflexivity induced by Manet’s painting allowed Foucault to understand how painting could “supersede representation.”46 In the comparison that Deleuze draws between the paintings by Velázquez and Manet, the viewer’s subjectivity changes from a fixity on the mirror’s reflection and the other lighting effects to the object of the painting itself. Thus, when Deleuze compares Foucault’s approach to Velázquez and Manet, he makes both a theoretical point about visibility’s role in subjectivity and a historical one about the change in the function of visibilities from the classical age to modernity. The distinctive imbrication of the theoretical with the historical in paintings had been made earlier by Foucault’s teacher, Merleau-Ponty: Later, both [art and poetry] know a classic age which is the secularization of the sacred age; art is then the representation of a Nature that it can at best embellish – but according to formulas taught to it by Nature herself. As La Bruyère would have it, speech has no other role than finding the exact expression assigned in advance to each thought by a language of things themselves; and this double recourse to an art before art, to a speech before speech, prescribes to the work a certain point of perfection, completeness, or fullness which makes all human beings assent to it as they assent to the things which fall under their senses.47

According to Deleuze, Foucault pursued Merleau-Ponty’s point through the history of painting as he traced the breaking apart of a unitary subjectivity



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found in the classical period to the ruptures characteristic of modernity: “It was Merleau-Ponty who showed us how a radical, ‘vertical’ visibility was folded into a Self-seeing, and from that point on made possible the horizontal relation between a seeing and a seen.”48 However, Deleuze asserts that Foucault also differed from his teacher (and from Heidegger) in proposing that the “disjunction” between the ones who see – the artist and viewer – and the seen – the painting – remains.49 It is in this “crack,” as Foucault had named it in History of Madness, that power relations may be found. Deleuze, therefore, argues that Foucault transformed our understanding of painting by insisting on the role of power found outside the painting with the forces perceived in it.50 Foucault’s writing on Manet illustrates this important aspect of Deleuze’s argument. Foucault maintained that Manet’s paintings operated according to a system of painterly invisibilities, caused by the use of black paint and dark shadows. For example, when Foucault had spoken about Manet’s The Balcony (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) he observed that the significance of the “rupture in depth” caused by Manet’s use of black relates both to the figures in the painting and to the viewer’s subjectivity: “Here you have a window which opens onto something which is entirely obscure [obscur], entirely black. One distinguishes with difficulty a very vague reflection of a metallic object…. And all of this great hollow space, this great empty space which must normally open onto a depth [sur une profondeur] why is it rendered invisible to us and why does it render us invisible?”51 In this view of the effects of painting, the subjects in the composition are rendered invisible through the very methods of the visibility of painting itself. Following on from this point, we have seen that Fromanger’s paintings showed how the very invisibility of the process of projection resulted in paintings that changed the idea of the image, using a method of painting itself that freed the image from the processes of subjectivation, as materialized in projection. In the penultimate chapter of Foucault, entitled “Strategies or the NonStratified: The Thought of the Outside (Power),” Deleuze considers the distinctive quality of Foucault’s concept of visibilities by insisting on the importance of description for it. Again, he turns to the analysis of painting as the evidence of method: “This leads to Foucault’s passion for describing scenes, or, even more so, for offering descriptions that stand as scenes: descriptions of Las Meninas, Manet, Magritte, the admirable descriptions of the chain gang, the asylum, the prison and the little prison van, as though they were scenes and Foucault were a painter.”52 Deleuze’s understanding of description and its relationship to painting here relies on a well-known article of 1970 by Foucault’s contemporary Louis Marin. Marin had considered the function of “descriptive discourse” in the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin, where he had argued that it constituted the kind of discourse that painting

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by nature of its very visibility elicits. Description indicates the place where “language and image are primordially intertwined,” that is, on the surface of the canvas.53 Marin proposed that descriptions of paintings achieve a set of “fundamental relations” for the painting in which the viewer-speaker of the painting designates himself.54 By nominating Foucault as a writer who describes like a painter – and who describes paintings – Deleuze reveals his intention to bring into visibility that which is hidden: “a viewer who reads the figures of his own desire in those that the painter’s desire, in representing, traces and displaces in the surface of the painting.”55 Further, Deleuze suggests that Foucault’s close descriptions of paintings in his books offer a meta-art history. In so doing, Deleuze insists on Foucault’s method of using paintings in his writing as initiating descriptive discourse. This approach through a painting allows Foucault to stand above the text, much as a surveyor might, while placing its expression and contents in a new light. From this position engendered by the description of the visual image, historical truths and meanings can be seen and knowledge produced. Deleuze sees this as Foucault’s signal contribution to history writing: “He writes a history, but a history of thought as such.”56 In conclusion, in Foucault Deleuze insists on the importance of understanding Foucault’s method as “between seeing and speaking,” and he uses Foucault’s writing about painting to explain the significance of it for history and philosophy. Deleuze found Foucault’s approach to painting to be extraordinarily complex. It appears to have engendered Deleuze’s own thinking about the inside and the outside of the fold in his book published a few years later and in which he turned to numerous examples from the history of art in order to conceptualize a visualized theory. Deleuze realized that Foucault used paintings in a historical manner, not as illustrations of a situated topic, but as indicators of historical trends not visible in the written archive. At the same time, Foucault used paintings and the painterly techniques found in them as the material instantiations of his own method of bringing into light or visibility what had theretofore been invisible or occluded. Deleuze’s assessment of Foucault’s philosophy indicates the strength that painting maintained both as historical tool and as conceptual methodology in a system conceived of as centrally concerned with vision and visibility. In this regard, we must understand both Foucault’s and Deleuze’s debts to the emphasis on visibility in the later philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, who also had used painting to think through the situation of the subject, or the body, in the world. Finally, in our age of the digital image, the significance of painting and paintings for the theoretical contributions of both Foucault and Deleuze toward our understanding of the image should not be underestimated. For, like the stain of the paint that bled through the back of a poorly primed canvas and remains visible even today, painting lies behind the idea of the image in contemporary theory.



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NOTES 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 69. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 50. 3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 3–16. 4. Deleuze, Foucault, 120. 5. Catherine M. Soussloff, Michel Foucault and the Pleasure of Painting (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), which examines in depth all of Foucault’s writing on painting. See also Soussloff, “Michel Foucault’s Ironic Object,” in Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee History of Art (Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2014), vol. 3: 69–72; Soussloff, “Foucault on Painting,” History of the Human Sciences (HHS) 24 (2011): 113–23; Soussloff, “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” Art History 32 (September 2009): 734–54, republished in Art History: Contemporary Perspectives in Method, ed. Dana Arnold (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2010). 6. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 381–416. 7. My understanding of Foucault’s approach to power throughout his so-called middle period has been aided by Hans Sluga, “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210–39. 8. See John Rajchman, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” 44 (Spring 1988): 88–117, whose study is fundamental for this point but who says he will not explore Deleuze in detail. See also, Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault on Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2009), who offers insightful comments on Deleuze and visuality throughout his book, which, however, differ from my interpretation here. 9. The genealogy of Foucault’s approach to the image can be traced even earlier: to his lengthy introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s book Dream and Existence, translated into French by Jacqueline Verdeaux in 1954. See the interpretation of Foucault by Forrest Williams in the English edition, “Dream, Imagination and Existence,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19 (1984–1985): 29–85. 10. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 16. 11. Foucault, History of Madness, 21. 12. In 1937 the French art historian Charles de Tolnay characterized the central panel as a “resumé of the universe”; see Hieronymous Bosch (Baden-Baden: Reynal and Company, 1966), 357. In 1960, Ludwig von Baldass asserted that Bosch had studied insane persons for the figures in the central panel; see Hieronymous Bosch (New York: Abrams, 1960), 47.

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13. Foucault, History of Madness, 535–38. 14. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. 15. Michael Kelly, “Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2013), 246. 16. Deleuze, Foucault, 14–15. 17. Deleuze, Foucault, 18. 18. Deleuze, Foucault, 22, where Deleuze is quoting from Pierre Boulez on Webern to illustrate Foucault’s archaeological method. 19. Deleuze, Foucault, 24, 31. 20. Deleuze, Foucault, 24. 21. Deleuze, Foucault, 12. 22. Deleuze, Foucault, 31. 23. Deleuze, Foucault, 111. 24. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Originally published in 1988, only two years after Foucault, this book may be considered an extension of Deleuze’s thinking about the fold. Although I cannot explore the matter here, in The Fold Deleuze uses works of art from the baroque period as exemplary material manifestations of his understanding of the ontological operations of the fold. 25. For more on Foucault, Fromanger, and prison reform, see Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 145. 26. Michel Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, ed. Sarah Wilson, trans. Dafydd Roberts (London: Black Dog, 1999), 102. 27. From Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (Los Angeles: Getty, 1991), 15, illus. 3. 28. Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, 16: “Using ferns, lace, or flowers, Talbot reproduced images of the object by simply placing it on to the sensitized paper and exposing the paper to light equivalent to wearing a wrist-watch while sunbathing. Once again the terms in which he spoke of his discovery were typical of the period. The images, he said, had ‘the utmost truth and fidelity’ and were part of a ‘natural magic’ and ‘natural chemistry’ which could do ‘in the space of a few seconds’ what it would otherwise take ‘days or weeks of labour to trace or to copy.’” 29. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 92. 30. In this sense, we might construe Foucault’s sense of the photograph as analogical rather than indexical, as per Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, Part I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 31. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 94. Felix Guattari is particularly indebted to Foucault’s understanding of the silhouette in his 1984 essay on Fromanger; see “Gérard Fromanger, La Nuit, Le Jour,” in Les Années d’Hiver 1980–1985 (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaries, 2009), 260. 32. Foucault’s points are in direct opposition to those of Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). See the chapter by Anton Lee in this book for further on this point.



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33. Deleuze, Foucault, 61: “Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element.” 34. A useful view of the GIP and Foucault may be found in Gilles Deleuze, “Foucault and Prison,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975– 1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 277–86. Fromanger is not mentioned. 35. Deleuze, Foucault, 49. 36. Deleuze, Foucault, 57–58. Foucault proposed a book on the French impressionist Édouard Manet, which he provisionally called Le Noir et la couleur (Black and Color). See the chronology as laid out by Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 41–53. See Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: La Peinture de Manet, ed. Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Seuil, 2004) and Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate, 2009). 37. Defert, “Chronologie,” 49. Manet’s inversion of his appropriation of Velázquez had already occurred to Georges Bataille in 1955, who, however, insisted on the primary significance of Goya for the artist; see Georges Bataille, Manet (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), 49–59. 38. Foucault, Order of Things, 16. 39. For a good overview of the impact of Foucault’s chapter on the discipline of art history, see Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas,” Representations 1 (February 1983): 30–42. 40. Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas,’” October 19 (Winter 1981): 45, 54. 41. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). This book was published in French in 1987 and would have been known to Deleuze. 42. Foucault, Order of Things, 8. 43. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 78. 44. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 78. 45. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 78, n. 21. 46. Joseph J. Tanke, “On the Powers of the False: Foucault’s Engagement with the Arts,” in A Companion to Foucault, 131. 47. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 84. First published in 1952 in the journal Les Temps Modernes and again without changes in Signes (1960). 48. Deleuze, Foucault, 110. Deleuze refers here to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the nature of the visible and the subject in the famous chapter on the chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 136: “Since the total visible is always behind, or after, or between the aspects we see of it, there is access to it only through an experience which, like it, is wholly outside of itself. It is thus, and not as the bearer of a knowing subject, that our body commands the visible for us, but it does not explain it, does not clarify it,

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it only concentrates the mystery of its scattered visibility; and it is indeed a paradox of Being, not a paradox of man, that we are dealing with here.” 49. Deleuze, Foucault, 111. 50. For further details on the complexity of this transformation, see Deleuze, Foucault, 112–14. 51. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 68. Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, 41–42: “là vous avez une fenêtre qui s’ouvre sur quelque chose qui est entièrement obscur; entièrement noir: on distingue à peine un très vague reflet d’objet métallique … Et tout ce grand espace creux, ce grand espace vide qui normalement devrait ouvrir sur une profondeur, nous est rendu absolument invisible et il nous est rendu invisible pourquoi?” 52. Deleuze, Foucault, 80. 53. Louis Marin, “Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin,” in Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 33. The article first appeared in Communications 15, no. 1 (1970): 186–208. 54. Marin, “Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin,” 43. 55. Marin, “Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin,” 61. 56. Deleuze, Foucault, 116.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alpers, Svetlana. “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas.” Representations 1 (February 1983): 30–42. Baldass, Ludwig von. Hieronymous Bosch. New York: Abrams, 1960. Baldwin, Gordon. Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms. Los Angeles: Getty, 1991. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bataille, Georges. Manet. New York: Rizzoli, 1983. Damisch, Hubert. The Origin of Perspective. Translated by John Goodman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Defert, Daniel. “Chronologie.” In Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975, 41–53. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. “Foucault and Prison.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 277–86. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007. ———. Foucault. Translated and edited by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Translated by Forrest Williams. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19 (1984–85): 29–85. ———. History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006.



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———. Manet and the Object of Painting. Translated by Matthew Barr. London: Tate, 2009. ———. Michel Foucault: La Peinture de Manet. Edited by Maryvonne Saison. Paris: Seuil, 2004. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House, 1970. ———. “Photogenic Painting.” In Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, translated by Dafydd Roberts, edited by Sarah Wilson, 81–104. London: Black Dog, 1999. Guattari, Félix. “Gérard Fromanger, La Nuit, Le Jour” (1984). In Les Années d’Hiver 1980–1985, 256–65. Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2009. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kelly, Michael. “Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence.” In A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, 243–63. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2013. Marin, Louis. “Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin.” In Sublime Poussin, translated by Catherine Porter, 29–103. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, 59–75. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993. ———. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, 76–120. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Rajchman, John. “Foucault’s Art of Seeing.” October 44 (Spring 1988): 88–117. Shapiro, Gary. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault on Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, Part I. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Sluga, Hans. “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., edited by Gary Gutting, 210–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Soussloff, Catherine M. “Foucault on Painting.” History of the Human Sciences (HHS) 24 (2011): 113–23. ———. “Michel Foucault’s Ironic Object.” In Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee History of Art, vol. 3, 69–72. Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2014. ———. “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting.” Art History 32 (September 2009): 734–54. Republished in Art History: Contemporary Perspectives in Method, edited by Dana Arnold. London: John Wiley and Sons, 2010. ———. Michel Foucault and the Pleasure of Painting. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming. Steinberg, Leo. “Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas.’” October 19 (Winter 1981): 45–54.

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Tanke, Joseph J. Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity. London: Continuum, 2009. ———. “On the Powers of the False: Foucault’s Engagement with the Arts.” In A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, 122–36. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2013. Tolnay, Charles de. Hieronymous Bosch. Baden-Baden: Reynal and Company, 1966. Wilson, Sarah. The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Chapter 10

Critical Travels, Discursive Practices Foucault in Tunis Ilka Kressner

In the extensive research on the oeuvre and life of Michel Foucault, the years he spent in Tunisia do not occupy a prominent role. More precisely, they have been mentioned only in passing. David Macey’s six-hundred-page English biography, The Lives of Michel Foucault, discusses the time in Tunisia only briefly.1 In his biography in French, Didier Eribon dedicates some scarce seven pages to the time Foucault worked as visiting professor of philosophy at Tunis University. Eribon introduces his account as follows: “Why Tunis? This was, once again, a strange set of co-occurrences.”2 The concurring circumstances Eribon refers to were a faculty opening at the Department of Social Sciences at the newly founded university in Tunis and the fact that Foucault’s partner, Daniel Defert, was about to travel to the same city to fulfill his volunteer service.3 In a comparable way, voices from the other side of the Mediterranean describe Foucault’s time in Tunis as an “interlude” before he would return to Paris and become Chair at the Collège de France. In Foucault in Tunisia (Foucault en Tunisie), a special issue of The Tunisian Journal (Les cahiers de Tunisie), Ben Dana-Mechri gives the following account: “The interlude in Tunis, where Michel Foucault taught from September 1966 to August 1968 shows a philosopher already well respected, almost famous; his teaching influenced a generation of students here, just as it would soon influence [students at] the University at Vincennes and the new department of philosophy he would be in charge of.”4 The university in Tunis was indeed the last of several places where Foucault held visiting appointments before returning to France. He had taught, albeit for shorter periods of time, at the universities in Uppsala (Sweden), Warsaw (Poland), and Hamburg (Germany) prior to his lectureship in Tunisia. Yet his stay at a public university in the Maghreb, which was founded only six years before his arrival and four years 165

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after the Tunisian independence (1956), might have been more meaningful than the simple result of a concurrence of circumstances or mere interlude. Given Foucault’s lifelong interest in the roles of institutions of education and comparative studies of the production of knowledge in different spatial and temporal contexts, the years in Tunis were likely a critical time of proving his own practices of thinking, a period that allowed him to revisit the limits of disciplinary thought and reflect “on the outer limits of philosophy, very close to it, up against it, at its expense, in the direction of a future philosophy and in lieu, perhaps, of all possible philosophy.”5 I interpret the two years Foucault spent in Tunisia to be crucial for his continued practice of an engaged philosophy. In this chapter, I propose to reassess the significance of the Tunisian experience in the broader context of his critical thinking and writing. Foucault’s encounters with alternative realities and discourses – those of the Tunisian student revolts of the late 1960s – were decisive moments that helped reshape his conception of a research that draws inspiration from a variety of disciplines, cultures, and socio-historical approaches. The humanities have an affinity for the other. They are engaged, in diverse ways, in the thinking of the other, be it another human being, social context, or language. Michel Foucault has been one of the most perspicacious and passionate humanists of the twentieth century.6 As a traveler between and beyond disciplines and lover of words and arguments (according to the etymology of the terms “philology” and “philosophy”), he was acutely aware that communication, and at best understanding, can take place only in a fragile space of interaction. Tunisia in the late 1960s was such an exemplary and delicate space of in-between-ness for Foucault. In an interview with Duccio Trombadori, he described his time in Tunis as “a true political experience.”7 The word “experience” is of particular significance; it reappears numerous times in writings and interviews related to the years spent in the Maghreb. For Foucault, an experience is a rare and precious moment, a watershed, “something you come out of changed.”8 The student revolts and upheavals of 1968 that influenced him the most took place two months prior to and about 1,100 miles south of those in Paris. He recounted in the interview cited above: “I remember that Marcuse said reproachfully one day, where was Foucault at the time of the May barricades? Well, I was in Tunisia, on account of my work. And I must add that this experience was a decisive one for me…. Tunisia, for me, represented in some ways the chance to reinsert myself in the political debate. It wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of ’68, in a third-world country.”9 Foucault returned to France as an even more committed activist-philosopher or, as he called it, diagnostician.10 My focus on a particular historical situation that, I hope to show, can help provide insight into underlying epistemes and the formation of a discursive practice, which is itself Foucauldian. I argue that the historical situation of



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the late 1960s in Tunisia can be interpreted as a paradigmatic moment of a confluence of discourses of power that lead to an experience of what “we are today, of what is not only our past but also our present.”11 Foucault’s critical analysis from that time was marked by an emphasis on power and mobility and the study of strategies of embodiment in discourse. Initially, Tunis provided for him a lesson in self-examination and reassessment of his own, rather orientalizing, expectations. It rendered possible to immerse himself into a highly politicized present. In a statement, published in 1967 in The Tunisian Press (La Presse de Tunisie) Foucault openly admits that he came attracted by those myths that all Europeans have about Tunisia nowadays: sun, sea, the African charitableness, in short, I came in search of a Thebaid [Thebes] without ascetics. And when I met the Tunisian students, it was really an awakening.12 It was probably only in Brazil and Tunisia that I met students as serious and as passionate, with such serious passions, and, what fascinates me even more, an absolute avidity for learning.13

In such an environment of curiosity and thirst for knowledge, Foucault’s teaching topics were highly diverse. He gave lectures on Nietzsche, Descartes, and Husserl and on anthropocentrism in Western philosophy. For instance, one of his lectures was titled “Man in Western Thought” (“L’homme dans la pensée occidentale”).14 He worked and taught on psychoanalysis, in particular the process of projection. Furthermore, he lectured on painting and the problem of representation, with a focus on the works of Édouard Manet and René Magritte. The essay “This Is Not a Pipe” (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), from 1968, is based on the Tunisian lectures.15 He joined his students’ philosophical clubs and gave talks at different cultural centers of the city. Among others, he gave three lectures at the Club Tahar Haddad on “Structuralism and Literary Analysis” (“Structuralisme et analyse littéraire”), “Madness and Civilization” (“Folie et civilisation”), and “Manet’s Painting” (“La peinture de Manet”).16 In April 1967, The Tunisian Press described his weekly Friday lectures at the university as significant public events: “Every Friday afternoon, the biggest lecture hall of the University at Tunis is not large enough to hold the hundreds of students and other interested members of the community who have come to attend the lectures given by Michel Foucault.”17 Students admired his erudition and progressive teaching style, but were initially reserved as to his political position. This was likely a result of Foucault’s open distrust of revolutionary idealism, normative universalism, and outright critique of Marxism as an obsolete orthodoxy of the nineteenth century, while many of his students were committed Marxists.18 Yet their reservation toward their professor

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changed once they became aware of his commitment and active support of their cause. Unlike some of the protesters, who had suggested copying strategies of civil disobedience from other cultural contexts, Foucault insisted on the necessity of insurgency as a specific form of struggle appropriate to the technologies of control in place in Tunisia at that time. He warned against an implicit eurocentrism and maintained that the choice of any successful strategy could develop only out of a concrete situation.19 December 1966 saw the outbreak of a revolt on campus. The reason had been the severe beating of a student by police forces for not having paid his bus ticket.20 The uprising increased in the first months of 1967 and culminated in massive protests after the Six-Day War or Arab-Israeli War from June 5 to 10, 1967. Unlike Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, Tunisia was not at war with Israel, but it had supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) since its creation in 1964. The Tunisian uprisings from 1967, this first large-scale call for democratic freedom that took place in the young independent country, linked national with pan-Arabic demands for justice.21 Protesters denounced the repressive course of action by the Tunisian government around President Habib Bourguiba and, in broader terms, the impingement of political rights established by the constitution.22 They opposed the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai, West Bank (including Jerusalem), and Golan Heights. Not all protests were peaceful, as some pro-Palestine demonstrations degenerated into anti-Semitic acts of vandalism of Jewish shops in the capital. In a letter, Foucault remarked however that some of those acts had been committed by sections of the Tunisian police in order to have an alibi to arrest the demonstrators.23 The response by the police forces was of extreme brutality. After a demonstration in mid-July 1967, about three hundred protesters were imprisoned; among those were several of Foucault’s students. Many were held without trial until September 1968. According to Burleigh Hendrickson, reports of torture “included acid burns on the feet, ripping off fingernails, leaving infectious wounds by burning the skin with ether, electroshock and cigarette burns.”24 March 1968 saw a new massive uprising that demanded the liberation of the students who had been imprisoned. Most of the demonstrations were held at the University of Tunis’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences (Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Sociales). Students also held assemblies at other faculties, neighboring colleges, and high schools.25 The School of Humanities and Social Sciences, which was Foucault’s home institution at that moment, was taken by assault by the Tunisian police in late March 1968. Readers of Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison) from 1975 might recognize similarities between Foucault’s descriptions of the Panopticon, the Benthamite prison building that exemplifies surveillance technologies and the architecture of the School of Humanities and



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Social Sciences at the University of Tunis (figure 10.1). All buildings of the school surround a single large inner courtyard called the Red Square (Place Rouge). During the demonstrations, police forces were positioned strategically on the flat roofs of the buildings, from where a relatively small number of officers were able to control the more than two thousand students gathered at the Red Square.26 Police forces trapped the protesters by simply blocking the entrance doors to the buildings from the inside. They spoke to the students via loudspeakers from the top of the roofs of the buildings. Foucault lived and taught in the midst of this unrest. He showed great respect for the protesters who faced severe government repression for taking part in the movement.27 He hid the students’ printing press in his garden for several months and provided logistic and financial support for their cause.28 He gave sanctuary to one of the student leaders, Ahmed Othmani, while authorities sought his arrest.29 He met with President Bourguiba, but his attempts to mediate between protesters and government remained fruitless.30 On several occasions, he approached the French ambassador, Jean Sauvagnargues, and urged him to intervene on behalf of the protesters, yet to no avail. Furthermore, he attempted to give testimony during the accused students’ processes in September 1968, but did not receive authorization to speak. During those

Figure 10.1  Inner Courtyard of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tunis. Source: Photo: Lotfi Sayahi.

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trials, 134 students were convicted. Othmani was sentenced to fourteen years in prison; he served the entire sentence.31 After returning to France in 1970 to assume the Chair of the History of the Systems of Thought (Histoire des systèmes de pensée) at the Collège de France, and after having formed GIP, the Group of Information about Prisons (Groupe d’information sur les prisons) in 1971, Foucault returned to Tunis on the occasion of several trials of former protesters in May 1971, to speak again on their behalf. Yet again, he was denied.32 The Tunisian civil rights movements Foucault witnessed and was involved in were attacked with extreme violence and repression. Bourguiba’s ruthless reactions to the demonstrations instilled a shift in the nature of the protesters’ claims.33 What had its beginnings in international solidarity with anti-imperialist movements, most significantly the support of the Palestinian liberation and the opposition to the Vietnam War, “led to calls for democratic reform” on the national level “that were not present at the outset.”34 The repression by the government during this early moment of Tunisian nation building fueled large-scale human rights activism and a straight articulation of opposition to the country’s single-party state.35 Foucault voiced his admiration for the protesters on several occasions, in writing and conversations. In an interview with Duccio Trombadori, he recounts: The police entered the university and attacked many students, injuring them and throwing them into jail…. During those upheavals I was profoundly struck and amazed by those young men and women who exposed themselves to serious risks for the simple fact of having written or distributed a leaflet, or for having incited others to go on strike. Such actions were enough to place at risk one’s life, one’s freedom, and one’s body.36

In his interpretations of the events, published in The Tunisian Press, Foucault maintained that the response to the power system in place at that moment had to be mobile and local, and not adapt foreign practices of insurgency. The element of mobility assumed novel prominence in his writings from the late 1960s, which conceived power as intrinsically relational and mobile. Therefore, any successful resistance to such a mobile power in the form of people’s own participation needed to be even more adaptable and mobile. Given the fact that for Foucault, as a committed philologist, writing and reading were forms of activism alongside direct political action, I propose to contextualize some of his essays and readings from the Tunisian years in order to elucidate connections between his political thinking and activism. My aim is not to read his texts in a confessional mode, or worse, to find an underlying psychological interpretation.37 Yet given the fact that for Foucault, experience was often an inspiration and first impulse for his critical



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and theoretical analyses, a parallel reading of his experience and thought proves to be mutually illuminating. Life was a source and impulse for him to “diagnose a current state of affairs of a culture.”38 He conceived the task of the philosopher to be that of an observer and speaker, not only of realities and facts but moreover of “what is happening today.”39 Such a philosophy of contemporaneity he proposed can only be mobile: it is conscious of the present, situated once in the midst of things happening, and taking active part in events; and once at a certain critical distance, which allows for reflection and the drawing of theoretical and historical connections. Two lines of inquiry assume particular prominence during the years in Tunis: those are the vindication of the physical, material reality in relation to critical thought – the body, the materiality of, for instance, language and painting – and the examination of the semantic field of movement, oscillation, play, and change of perspective. In Foucault’s writings from the late 1960s, the analyses of materiality and movement have become central to understanding how systems of power function, how they limit us, and how we might liberate ourselves. In that context, the Foucault of the late 1960s and observer of the Tunisian students’ protests, who related the demise of colonialism to the crisis of traditional episteme of Western philosophy and philology, is certainly less controversial than the partly orientalizing supporter of the Iranian Revolution some ten years later.40 Among the most significant ideas that Foucault further develops during his time at the University of Tunis are those of discourses of mobility and, more specifically, strategies of a mobile challenging of established systems of power. Mobility is for him not a given; instead, it is embodied as well as practiced. In addition to the traditional notion of power as the result of a regulation of mobility, Foucault proposes to conceive power as the regulation through mobility.41 If power can be conceived as multiple, multiplied, and moving, a “thin, inescapable film that covers all human interactions, whether inside institutions or out,”42 volatility and changes of perspectives become crucial concepts and liberating practices of establishing an alternative sovereignty. Any subversive strategy less versatile than a specific mobile power in place, Foucault argues, would be fruitless; it might even be absorbed by and ultimately fortify a hegemonic system in place. In an interview with Pietro Caruso, published in September 1967 in the Italian The Literary Fair (La fiera letteraria), Foucault gives a provocative example of a discourse he calls “limp humanism” (“humanisme mou”). This kind of perverted humanism, which he detects in later writings by Camus and in Sartre’s existentialism, “served as justification of Stalinism and of the hegemony of the Christian democracy in 1948…. At the end, that humanism was a sort of little prostitute of thought, culture, morals and of politics during the last twenty years.”43 Foucault excoriated what he described as a co-opted position that was based on stasis and

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intellectual passivity. He emphasized that a critique of hegemony had to be mobile to maintain its critical distance toward it. Alongside the focus on mobility and power, Foucault studied the physical reality of speech acts. He underscored the materiality of encounters and moments of exchange between humans, things, and discourses. Within this line of inquiry, he conceived discourse as a construct, hence an entity that was made, and could thus be unmade or modified. The heightened emphasis on discourse as a physical entity is noticeable if one compares its conception in The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’archéologie du savoir), the books published prior to and after Foucault’s stay in Tunisia, respectively. While in The Order of Things, the description of the materiality of discourse is still tentative, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault portrays discourse as a thing or space (at times, he uses the metaphor of discourse as a labyrinth or underground passage), object, or entity that emerges in “its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and fields of use, is subjected to transferences or modifications, is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced.”44 In an interview with Claude Bonnefoy from 1968, Foucault summarizes his conception of a material discourse as follows: “Speech has its own consistency. Its own thickness and density, its way of functioning. The laws of speech exist the way economic laws exist. Speech exists the way a monument does, the way a technique does, the way a system of social relationship does. It’s this density characteristic of speech that I’m trying to interrogate.”45 The conception of speech as thing has far-reaching consequences: instead of being weightless and intangible, such a discourse as body has become a phenomenon that can be observed, analyzed, weighted, touched, even dissected, and reassembled, to be understood.46 On several occasions, Foucault, the son and grandson of medical doctors, described his work as that of a surgeon of language, a careful observer or diagnostician of its physiognomy, laws, and techniques.47 The often-quoted description of the stimulus of The Order of Things is a compelling initial case in point of Foucault’s critical travels between heterogeneous systems of thought and drawing of connections between thought and the physical body. He described that the book rose out of a reader’s experience of a passage of a short story on the excesses of taxonomy. A passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” combined with the reader’s spontaneous bodily reaction – laughter – lies thus at the beginning of a rigorous, original examination of Western ways of thinking and making sense. Foucault portrays as one of the aims of his study to unearth the material fundaments of language, “destroy syntax, shatter tyrannical modes of speech [so as] to perceive all facets of that which is being said.”48 What he describes in partially tentative and abstract terms in 1966 is stated in a more explicit way in his writings from Tunis, most prominently in The



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Archaeology of Knowledge, which now conceives speech as being “endowed with a certain modifiable heaviness, a weight relative to the field in which it is placed…. [It] emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various fields of use … is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced.”49 Literature and modern art have become paradigms of such a transgressive critical discourse. Foucault had been an avid reader and keen observer of art prior to traveling to Tunisia. He had included literary examples and analyses of visual arts as powerful stimuli into his earlier writings (such as the study of Borges’s short fiction mentioned above, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the preface and the first and third chapters of The Order of Things, respectively). But it is during his time in Tunis that he described art and literature not only as punctual exempla, but, moreover, as continuous influences and parallel discourses to his own critical thought. In 1968, he openly discussed his practice and described that for The Order of Things, “I used material I had gathered in the preceding years almost at random, without knowing what I would do with it, with no certainty about the possibility of ever writing an essay.”50 During the act of writing, “a certain coloration of language, a certain rhythm, a certain form of analysis … gave me the impression … – false, perhaps – that I had found exactly the right language by which the distance between ourselves and the classical philosophy of representation … could come into focus and be evaluated.”51 Art not only inspired his critical thinking; it furthermore helped measure and maintain the right distance to, for instance, an existing discourse to be analyzed. Moreover, it had a metacritical role and provided the opportunity to evaluate the process of creating knowledge. The practice of writing itself became an interstice that allowed for the assembling and assessing of material from a great variety of contexts. In Tunis, Foucault continued his studies of the archaeology of subjectivity in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. He read Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution and Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (the essay “The Words and the Images” [“Les mots et les images”] published in Le Nouvel Observateur in October 1967 is his critical response to Panofsky’s work). He reread Blanchot, Klossowski, and Bataille, three authors whose thoughts and works, with their transgressive impetus, became paradigmatic for him during the late 1960s. The ludic quality and irreverence toward established disciplinary boundaries in the three authors’ literary works served as models for Foucault’s own search for a new philosophical thought and language. In an interview with Roger-Pol Droit, he elaborated: “In Bataille’s violence, in Blanchot’s insidious, disturbing sweetness, in Klossowski’s spirals, there was something that, while setting out from philosophy, brought it into play and into question.”52 For Foucault, these authors’ literary discourses emerged out of philosophical inquiry, escaped from it, then traveled back to it, and again back to the

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outside. They fathomed the space between established systems of knowledge and even ventured beyond. Foucault had already approached this potential of the literary discourse to travel the interstices between abstract thought and body in his essay “Behind the Fable” (“L’arrière-fable”) on the motif of travel in Jules Verne’s writings from May 1966 and “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside” (“La pensée du dehors”), the long essay dedicated to the writings of revered author Maurice Blanchot from June 1966, both written shortly prior to Foucault’s journey to Tunisia. The second text, which I read as an inter-discursive aperture for his later writings on discourses of mobility, positions literature as an event and experience that takes place in the gap between disciplinary discourses and stable subject positions: The event that gave rise to what we call “literature” in the strict sense is only superficially an interiorisation; it is far more a question of a passage to the “outside”: language escapes the mode of being of discourse…. Literature is not language approaching itself until it reaches the point of its fiery manifestation, it is rather language getting as far away from itself as possible. And if, in this “setting outside itself,” it unveils its own being, the sudden clarity reveals not a folding back but a gap, not a turning back of signs upon themselves but a dispersion.53

Foucault emphasized the importance of notions of play and movement toward an exteriority for philosophical inquiry. He described thought as a shared encounter in an in-between space that is not limited to a subjective conscience but may well include a collective consciousness. Thus, “The Thought from Outside” prefigures the notion of the heterotopos, conceptualized in “Of Other Spaces” (“Des espaces autres”), an essay Foucault wrote in Tunis that would be published only after his death in 1984.54 Foucault’s writing was not only inspired and paralleled by literary discourse. It became itself in part literary. His review of Gilles Deleuze’s book Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition), published in the Nouvel Observateur in March–April 1969, adopted the form of a folk tale starring mythological figures such as Ariane and the young warrior Theseus.55 He invited the readers of his review to “open Deleuze’s book like you would push open the doors to a theatre, when the lights are being turned on and when the curtain is about to be raised. The characters of [the performance] are invited authors and nameless references alike…. They appear, but never at one same place, and never with the same identity.”56 In this truly exceptional review of a philosophical book, Foucault underscores what he describes as Deleuze’s venture to “think intensity.”57 Modern art is a paradigm for the philosophical approach to such a transgressive intensity, which would allow one to



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free oneself in order to think and love that which … clangs since Nietzsche, those insurgent differences and repetitions without origins which have enlightened literature since Mallarmé, fissured and multiplied space in painting (graduations in Rothko, furrows in Noland, modified repetitions in Warhol), categorically shattered the continuous line in music since Webern, and announced a myriad of ruptures of our worlds. We can finally think the differences of today, think of today as a difference of differences.58

Foucault bases his radical thought of contemporaneity on the value of rupture (in the Nietzschean sense) and speaks from a fragile and mobile position. Such a position allows for the analysis of representation that undertakes to represent itself. In the lecture “Manet’s Painting,” which Foucault wrote in Tunis in 1967, the cornerstone of a material discourse of mobility reappears in a different fashion. For Foucault, Manet reintroduced the materiality of the painting on the painting itself, and thus mobilized the perspective of the observer: “Manet reinvents, or maybe he invents, the painting-as-object, as a materiality, as a coloured thing that is illuminated by an exterior light…. The observer looks at it and walks around it.”59 In a comparable way to his examination of literature as a physical entity, Manet’s paintings do not vanish behind that which they represent but elucidate or perform the process of representation. It is through our physical reaction to art (or any discourse) as object that we, observers, change perspectives and experience this new reality. In The Order of Things, Foucault had conjured a philology that would be able to “turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them.”60 The encounter with the alternative discourses and political realities in Tunis became a test case for such a devised philological close reading. Furthermore, it was a time of forging new “words” (discourses) in relation to “things” (experiences). According to Foucault, “What was about to happen” in the late 1960s “did not have its own proper theory, its own vocabulary.”61 His writings from that time attest to his arduous attempts to formulate a language and theory that render the exceptional experience in an appropriate way, without integrating rupture or otherness into a hegemonic discourse. Foucault’s focus on the material reality, with its particular physical configuration that requires the readers, observers, and diagnosticians to change perspectives, and the thinking of mobility as a subversive practice, became keystones for his future examinations of the formation of “discourseobjects,” this “ponderous, awesome materiality”62 that we inhabit and shape.63 NOTES 1. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 203–5.

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2. Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 199. (My trans.) 3. The chair of the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Tunis had invited the philosopher Jean Wahl, a friend and mentor of Foucault, to teach in Tunis for a period of two years, but he had to decline and suggested to extend the invitation to Foucault in his stead. 4. Ben Dana-Mechri, “L’impossible biographie?” Foucault en Tunisie, special issue of Les cahiers de la Tunisie 39, no. 149–50 (1989): 5. (My trans.) 5. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 42. 6. I am aware that Foucault himself was suspicious of the denomination, particularly during the 1960s at the height of structuralism, when his position was decidedly anti-humanist. The humanism I am referring to here is that of a firm belief in the human faculty of learning and understanding combined with an intellectual intrepidity, in line with the Kantian sapere aude, which echoes the discourse of the early Enlightenment. 7. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 134. 8. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 27. 9. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 132, 136. The demonstrations that led to an occupation of the Sorbonne took place during the first weeks of May 1968: they began on May 3 and culminated in a general strike and demonstration on May 14. Foucault traveled to Paris on May 27, where he stayed for a week. He returned to France to participate in the last demonstrations at the end of June. “Chronologie,” in Dits et écrits I: 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 43. 10. In an interview with Claude Bonnefoy, Foucault describes his scholarly approach as akin to that of a medical diagnosis and elucidates his terminological wavering as follows: “When I write, I couldn’t tell you if I’m doing history or philosophy. I’ve often been asked what it meant to me to write what I wrote…. If I was a philosopher or a historian or a sociologist, and so on. I had a hard time answering. Had I been given as much latitude in responding as you’re giving me today, I think I would have simply answered, quite frankly: I’m neither one nor the other, I’m a doctor, let’s say I’m a diagnostician.” Michel Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, interview with Claude Bonnefoy, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 43–44. 11. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 33. A paradigmatic historical situation that became of singular importance in Foucault’s earlier research was the end of the eighteenth century, which saw the birth of institutional medicine. 12. The French coup de foudre, which I translate as “awakening,” is polyvalent. Its significance ranges from “thunderclap” to “love at first sight.” 13. Foucault, “La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourďj1hui’,” in Dits et écrits I, 612. (My trans.) 14. For a list of the titles of all of Foucault’s lectures at the unviersity in Tunis, see Dana-Mechri, Foucault en Tunisie, 3–18.



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15. Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” in Dits et écrits I, 663–78. René Magritte died in August 1967. 16. These three lectures are compiled in Michel Foucault, Foucault en Tunisie, special issue of Les cahiers de la Tunisie, 39, no. 149–50 (1989): 20–87. 17. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 40. (My trans.) 18. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 201–2. Foucault himself had been a Marxist and member of the communist student union while a doctoral student working with Louis Althusser. His commitment, however, lasted only a couple of months; he soon began to criticize the system’s orthodoxy and universalist claims. 19. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Introduction: Foucault and the Politics of Experience,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. and introd. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1990), xvi. 20. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 204. 21. Burleigh Hendrickson, “March 1968: Practicing Transnational Activism from Tunis to Paris,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (November 2012): 755. The political agenda of the uprisings of the late 1960s is similar to that of the protests that led to the Arab Spring movements in 2011. In 1967–1968, the two forces behind the uprising were Tunisian nationalists and pan-Arabic human rights groups. Thirty-four years later, these two were joined by progressive Islamist groups. 22. Habib Bourguiba had been the leader of the Tunisian independence movement. He had deposed the monarch Muhammed VIII al-Hamin and proclaimed the Tunisian republic in 1956. He won the presidential elections three times before he did away with democratic elections and proclaimed himself president for life. Bourguiba was in power from 1957 until 1987. James L. Gelvin, The Arab Spring: What Everybody Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37. 23. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 207. Foucault refers to the context as follows: “The pogroms against Jewish businesses were most likely instigated by the police with the intention to find a pretext to arrest the opponents.” Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 41 (my translation). 24. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 761. 25. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 761. 26. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 761. 27. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 140. 28. Transpontine, “Foucault on Tunisia,” History Is Made at Night: The Politics of Dancing and Musicking (blog), March 6, 2011; Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 43. 29. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 764. 30. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 41. The chronology that is included in Dits et écrits I describes rather ambiguously that in June 1967 the Tunisian authorities “brusquely” installed a phone line at Foucault’s apartment as the result of President Bourguiba’s “immense solicitude [for his] well-being” (40, My trans.). It is likely that this “solicitude” might also have been a sign of partially veiled surveillance tactics

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by the authorities of the prominent intellectual living in the Tunisian capital, who had close connections to French academia and political organizations. 31. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 44. 32. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 50. Foucault would later reflect on this experience during his series of lectures on the Greek notion of parrhēsia (frankness in speaking the truth), entitled “Discourse and Truth” at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983 and that are published as Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 19–25. 33. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 757. 34. Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 761. 35. Burleigh Hendrickson argues that the 1968 protesters played an instrumental long-term role in the “creation of the Tunisian League for Human Rights (Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l’Homme) in 1976 and the establishment of the first Amnesty International section in Tunisia in 1981.” Hendrickson, “March 1968,” 757. 36. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 133–34. 37. Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, 264. Such a proceeding would indeed be a performative contradiction, as Foucault himself targeted these two discourses all throughout his career as modern forms of repression and mystification. 38. Foucault, “Les Mots et les Images,” in Dits et écrits I, 648. (My trans.) 39. Foucault, “La Philosophie structuraliste,” Dits et écrits I, 609. (My trans.) 40. To this day, the controversy over Foucault’s writing on Iran continues to undercut his legacy in France. 41. Anne Jensen, “Mobility, Space and Power: On the Multiplicities of Seeing Mobility,” Mobilities 6, no. 2 (2011): 255–76. 42. John Caputo and Mark Yount, introduction to Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, ed. John Caputo and Mark Yount (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 4. 43. Foucault, “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” in Dits et écrits I, 643–44. (My trans.) 44. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 105. 45. Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, 37. 46. Readers of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words will likely see parallels between Austin’s and Foucault’s descriptions. 47. In the interview with Bonnefoy, Foucault refers to the work of a physician as follows: “The physician – and especially the surgeon, I’m the son of a surgeon – isn’t someone who speaks, he’s someone who listens. He listens to other people’s words, not because he takes them seriously, not to understand what they say, but to track down through them the sign of a serious disease…. The physician listens, but does so to cut through the speech of the other and reach the silent truth of the body.” Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, 35. 48. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 298. 49. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 105. In Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971 (Leçons sur la volonté de



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savoir. Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971 [Paris: Gallimard, 2011]), this “material reality of discourse” (48, my translation), which Foucault had analyzed the previous years, has become a cornerstone of his thought. 50. Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, 80. 51. Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, 80. 52. Michel Foucault, “The Functions of Literature,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. and introd. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1990), 312. 53. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,” in Foucault/ Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Zone, 1987), 23–24. 54. Foucault defines the heterotopos as a real space of contestation, which may consist in several overlapping spaces of different temporal contexts, or sites, that simultaneously include diverse perspectives. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–49. 55. Theseus (Thésée) is the protagonist of the homonymous baroque opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully. 56. Foucault, “Ariane s’est perdue,” in Dits et écrits I, 796. (My trans.) 57. Foucault, “Ariane s’est perdue,” in Dits et écrits I, 796. (My trans.) 58. Foucault, “Ariane s’est perdue,” in Dits et écrits I, 796. (My trans.) 59. Dana-Mechri, “L’impossible biographie?,” 62–64. (My trans.) 60. Foucault, The Order of Things, 298. 61. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 109. 62. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 140, 216. 63. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault elucidates this embracing discursivity as follows: “One is not seeking … to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from the exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the pure recollection of the moment, from superficial multiplicity to profound unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse” (76).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Afary, Janet, and Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Caputo, John, and Mark Yount. “Introduction,” Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, edited by John Caputo and Mark Yount, 3–23. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Dana-Mechri, Ben. “L’impossible biographie?” Foucault en Tunisie. Special issue of Les cahiers de la Tunisie 39, no. 149–50 (1989): 3–18. Eribon, Didier. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Translated by Michael Lucey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. Michel Foucault. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

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———. “Behind the Fable.” Translated by Pierre A. Walker. Critical Texts 5, no. 2 (1989): 1–5. ———. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973. ———. Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. Fearless Speech. Edited by Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001. ———. “The Functions of Literature.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited and introduced by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan, 307–13. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside.” In Foucault/Blanchot, translated by Brian Massumi, 7–60. New York: Zone, 1987. ———. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–49. http://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault. heterotopia.en.html ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970. ———. “La peinture de Manet.” Foucault en Tunisie. Special issue of Les cahiers de la Tunisie. 39, no. 149–50 (1989): 62–87. ———. Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971. Edited by François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Daniel Defert. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. ———. “What Is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, 41–81. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. ———. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. ———. Speech Begins After Death. Interview with Claude Bonnefoy. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Gelvin, James L. The Arab Spring: What Everybody Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hendrickson, Burleigh. “March 1968: Practicing Transnational Activism from Tunis to Paris.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (November 2012): 755–74. Jensen, Anne. “Mobility, Space and Power: On the Multiplicities of Seeing Mobility.” Mobilities 6, no. 2 (2011): 255–76. Kritzman, Lawrence, D. “Introduction: Foucault and the Politics of Experience.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited and introduced by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan, ix–xxv. New York: Routledge, 1990. Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Transpontine. “Foucault on Tunisia.” History Is Made at Night: The Politics of Dancing and Musicking (blog). March 6, 2011. http://history-is-made-at-night. blogspot.com/2011/03/foucault-on-tunisia.html.

Chapter 11

Remaking the Self in Heterotopia Andrew Ballantyne

It was Deleuze and Guattari who said we should make deserts of ourselves. We can make ourselves receptive to being settled by nomadic ideas that live in us for a while and then move on. “The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us.”1 The concepts that inhabit us shape who we are and how we interact, so they are part of us even if they move on from us, and they have a political dimension to them. Deleuze and Guattari make this image of thought seem like a personal discipline, something we can encourage in ourselves and in our attitudes to dealing with the world. As an image it seems benign and welcoming, and it has much in common with Foucault’s sense of the self and the ideas that operate through it, but where Deleuze and Guattari’s desert is a temporary home for ideas that seem more or less welcome, Foucault’s is rather different. It is a place where the tribes of ideas might set up camp rather forcibly. Their presence might not be welcome and they might not move on. With Deleuze and Guattari the sense of the self is fluid and constantly engaged with the surrounding milieu, and Foucault shares that sense of engagement, but with him the self often seems not so much fluid as malleable. It adapts and can be reshaped in any number of ways, but it is hammered into shape. Nietzsche’s thought lies behind all of them as a formative influence, and Deleuze remade Nietzsche in his own way, but Foucault carries more evident traces of philosophizing with a hammer.2 He wrote about the prison, the psychiatric hospital, and the school: institutions in which people are remade for the sake of society. These institutions take in people who have a will of their own that may be as-yet unformed, or be actively antisocial, and they are knocked into shape, learning and internalizing attitudes and patterns 181

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of behavior that allow them to lead productive, well-regulated lives in the social world. Foucault coined the term heterotopia for such spaces that are apart from the commonplace world where a society’s dominant values freely operate. In a heterotopia they are suspended to a degree and maybe one is held in it until one can show a suitable degree of conformity to the norms.3 The conditions may be coercive and brutalizing, or might offer greater-than-usual freedoms for transgression, but they are set apart from the places where normal polite behavior is in play and where routine transactions are made. There are some identifiable places where such conditions apply, but the heterotopia is a heterotopia not because it is a particular spot, but because the range of concepts and power relations there are outside the societal norm. It can be institutionalized, as in a prison, a school, or a honeymoon hotel, but equally it can be more personal than that – an interior space withdrawn from social conformity – such as a room of one’s own, or the desert. SAINT ANTHONY The historical figure whom we know as Saint Anthony lived in Egypt in the third century AD, and there is an account of his life by Athanasius, but there is little in it that can be verified from external sources.4 He is associated with the development of early monasticism and has a reputation as a hermit – one of the church’s “desert fathers.” In History of Madness Foucault used a painting of Saint Anthony by Hieronymous Bosch to illustrate the idea of madness found in the Renaissance. Foucault later wrote a commentary not on Anthony’s life or reputation, but on La tentation de Saint Antoine, a novel by Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) that takes the persona of the saint as a vehicle to explore a range of ideas, some of which Foucault picked up in his essay.5 He did not mention, but in my context it is worth mentioning, that the place in which the action unfolds – if it can be called “action” – is heterotopic. The place is specified by Flaubert as the summit of a mountain in the Thebaid – the area around Thebes in Upper Egypt. There is some historical reason for this, as early monasteries, including some associated with Anthony, were in deliberately remote places, and mountains were seen as deserted, set apart from society. It is this remoteness that makes the place heterotopic and appropriate as a place of retreat when there is a need to distance oneself from society’s established normative thought. For seventeenth-century painters like Salvator Rosa, mountains were thrillingly dangerous places, but Rousseau (1712–1776) is generally credited with showing mountain scenery as more benignly beautiful. Lord Byron set his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in the Alps, which were still surprisingly little visited.6 His character Harold said:



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I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture.7

The “human cities” are the places where there is an established society, with codes and conventions, and where societal norms can be enforced. In the remote isolation of high mountains, there is only nature and the cultural baggage that one brings to bear on it oneself. In cities the forms of behavior are required by convention, and it is one’s mastery of the convention that demonstrates effective participation in society, whether that be as a productive machine-like worker or as a participant in a Proustian salon. In the account by Athanasius, Anthony’s isolation is in many ways like that of a prisoner, except that he has chosen to be shut away with his thoughts. His position is like that of Jean Genet’s protagonists, finding redemption in unpromising surroundings.8 For Flaubert the choice of setting was informed by his nineteenth-century sensibility, which could have made a mountain’s summit a place from which to survey the world, like Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (Kunsthalle, Hamburg) by Caspar David Friedrich, his contemporary. In fact, though, there is no noteworthy view: it is the place’s remoteness that is its crucial characteristic. The external world does not figure at all. The subject matter is internal to Anthony – his states of mind, his reading of the Bible, his hallucinations – made apparent in the text on the page. Foucault resorts to a diagram to illustrate the complex blending of perspectives, which means that we the readers are implicated in the events as they unfold.9 Flaubert revisited and rewrote The Temptation of Saint Anthony over many years, eventually publishing it in 1874. It is less like a novel than a screenplay. It uses the format of a work for the theater, but the “stage directions” include elaborate special effects that cry out for computer-generated images: apparitions of literary characters, fabulous beasts, deadly sins, and heresiarchs. It opens with Saint Anthony involved with his reading of the Bible and the visitations – apparitions or hallucinations – prompted by it. The desert is a heterotopia, and in it the saint remakes himself. The process of transformation is effected by meeting and disputing with the apparitions, building up to an ecstatic culmination with a vision of the face of Christ in the disc of the sun at dawn, as Anthony deliriously declaims. O joy! O bliss! I have beheld the birth of life. I have seen the beginning of motion! My pulses throb even to the point of bursting. I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell, – that I could breathe out smoke, weird a trunk, – make my body writhe, – divide myself everywhere, – be in everything, – emanate with all the odours, – develop myself like the plants, – flow like water, – vibrate like sounds, – shine like

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light, – assume all forms – penetrate each atom – descend to the very bottom of matter, – be matter itself!10

Anthony is shedding his human conceptions and becoming part of nature – in biblical terms, recapturing the state of affairs before the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. He is becoming instinctual and matter-like, responding to stimuli without the mediation of intellectual processes. Foucault articulates this as the “relationship between sainthood and stupidity.”11 Saint Anthony, he says, “wished to be a saint through a total deadening of his senses, intelligence, and emotions.”12 But his desire to identify with the things he sees triumphs when faced with pure matter: he wishes to be blind, drowsy, greedy, and as stupid as the “Catoblepas”; he wishes that he were unable to lift his head higher than his stomach and that his eyelids would become so heavy that no light could possibly reach his eyes. He wishes to be a dumb creature – an animal, a plant, a cell. He wishes to be pure matter. Through this sleep of reason and in the innocence of desires that have become pure movement, he could at least be reunited to the saintly stupidity of things.13

The Catoblepas is a mythical wild beast, resembling a bull, mentioned in ancient literature by the elder Pliny and Claudius Aelianus. The name derives from Greek, suggesting that it looks downward, apparently because of the heaviness of its head – a head like a wild boar’s, attached to a body like a buffalo’s by a neck “as flaccid as a gut.”14 It declares that it once ate its own feet without knowing it. Anthony says that “his stupidity fascinates me.”15 It is part of a sequence of mythical creatures that visit Anthony and speak in the build-up to the final delirium. This “stupidity” is an affirmed and achieved state that puts Anthony in tune with vibrating matter, cells, and atoms. THE OTHER ROBINSON CRUSOE This state has a parallel in the conclusion of Vendredi, a novel by Michel Tournier, whose cultural world overlapped with Deleuze’s and Foucault’s. Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique was published in March 1967, the same month as Foucault’s commentary on Saint Anthony and his lecture on heterotopias.16 The original subtitle, Limbo of the Pacific, makes clear the sense of the heterotopic distance from everyday life that is evident and inescapable on the island. The English translation adjusted the title to Friday, or, The Other Island, which coincidentally sounds closer to Foucault’s “des éspaces autres” – the title of his lecture about heterotopias.17 Tournier and Deleuze were students together and were friends as students, but Tournier (much to his



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surprise – he declared that it was his ambition to be the Hegel of his generation) failed the examination where Deleuze succeeded.18 Tournier’s narrative takes Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as his point of departure, but Tournier’s Robinson is transformed by his experiences on his desert island in a way that Defoe’s character was not. The novel takes Robinson from his arrival on the island to the moment when he might be “rescued,” when in fact he decides to stay, but his “man Friday” (the Vendredi of the title), who has evidently been changed by his encounter with Robinson, decides to go. One way of describing the plot is that it is an account of Robinson’s descent into madness, but it is not told like that. The reader is carried along by the developments in Robinson’s ways of thinking, which become more ecstatic and elemental, rather in the manner of Flaubert’s Anthony. He is caught up in “becoming mineral,” and it seems as if, irradiated by sunlight and glittering with crystallized salt-spray, he might live forever like the rocks and the ocean. He had named his island “Speranza,” hope. If he had not been cast ashore on Speranza he would now be in his fifties, a greybeard with creaking bones. His children would be older than he had been when he left them, and perhaps he would be a grandfather. But none of these things had happened to him. Speranza lay only two cables distant from the ship and the miasma that pervaded it, a glowing denial of that sinister degradation. The truth was that he was younger today than the pious and self-seeking young man who had set sail in the Virginia, not young with a biological youth, corruptible and harboring the seeds of its decrepitude, but with a mineral youth, solar and divine. Every day was for him a first beginning, an absolute beginning of the history of the world. Beneath the rays of the sun-god, Speranza trembled in an eternal present, without past or future. He could not forsake that eternal instant, poised at the needle point of ecstasy, to sink back into a world of usury, dust, and decay.19

There is something magical or delusional about the transformation, when seen from outside. How could Robinson be younger than when he arrived? This mineral-becoming is exactly like the vibrant matter-becoming of Saint Anthony and may have its literary roots there. Tournier admired Flaubert’s work and can be found drawing on it in various works, obliquely making use of ideas that can be seen to derive from Flaubert’s texts.20 Le Roi des aulnes, the novel with which Tournier won the Prix Goncourt, has an epigraph from Flaubert.21 If the literary antecedent is there, the philosophical affinity is with Deleuze. The passage that seems to have the closest affinity here is in Anti-Oedipus, which would come out in 1972, with a preface by Michel Foucault.22 Its opening chapter suggests that we try to see the world through the eyes of a schizophrenic, drawing on a text by Georg Büchner to give an account of an incident

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in the life of Jakob Lenz, a poet and a friend of Goethe. This involves, according to Deleuze and Guattari, dissolving the sense of the body’s boundaries, so Lenz projects himself into the hills around him, and the snowflakes, and internalizes them at the same time. The surroundings are part of him, and he is part of his milieu.23 It has been noticed before that Robinson’s philosophical speculations start (at the time of the shipwreck) in a conventionally rational frame of mind and progress through to “a radical contestation of Sartrean phenomenology.”24 Robinson does not hold back from dissolving the boundaries between the observer and the thing observed – the subject and object of phenomenology – so he is by the end of the book a Deleuzian “schizo,” bonded to and implicated in the island – in a way formed by it. Certainly he has become inseparable from it, and he does not realize that fully until the moment when leaving the island becomes a physical possibility. Only then does the will to resist separation become apparent and conscious. Deleuze’s essay on Tournier’s novel was first printed in a journal, Critique, soon after the novel.25 It was republished in 1969 in Logique du sens, and then since 1972 it has been integrated in the folio paperback edition of the novel. There is a special bond between the two. They help each other along. Tournier helps us to see what Deleuze might mean in a practical sense, Deleuze helps us to see why Tournier might matter in a philosophical sense. Their shared enterprise is the reimagining of Cartesian Man, continuing Flaubert’s project (or more precisely Saint Anthony’s project as imagined by Flaubert), which was also Foucault’s project – most concretely articulated at the end of Les Mots et les choses of 1966. Foucault describes “man” as a relatively recent invention – appearing “a century and a half ago and … now perhaps drawing to a close.”26 So, from round about 1800, fading away from the 1960s, this is “man” the romantic hero figure, in control of his destiny and able to master and shape the world. This is the figure who dominates and is presented as rational and in control, and Foucault identifies him as someone whose days are numbered. He has been replaced in “posthuman” discourses as an actor in ecological networks, and in the theory-world has already rather faded from view, as Foucault said he would, “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”27 An image from a desert island. If Saint Anthony is becoming matter, and Robinson is becoming desert island, the matter is not inert but formative – vibrant and pulsating. We are moving away from a position where “man” gives form to matter that is seen as characterless substance, to one where the matter has an innate form-generating role, but the matter’s idea of form might be very different from man’s. This brings us into the realm of the posthuman, which developed after Foucault’s death but in his wake. It is a world in which matter and things have a role, and (all things being equal) sometimes have a say. W. J. T. Mitchell said:



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Objects are the way things appear to a subject – that is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template…. Things, on the other hand…, [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls “a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectionable depth from which objects rise up toward our superficial knowledge.”28

INTO THE WOODS, WITH HENRY THOREAU The metaphysics of the object was taken up by Jane Bennett in her discussion of “thing-power.”29 Her “vibrant matter” is clearly recognizable as a relative of Anthony’s and Robinson’s, but she finds her way to it by way of Henry Thoreau, who spent time in the woods by Walden Pond, communing with nature and becoming part of it by putting the habits of civilized life at a distance. Thoreau’s immersion in the wild is mediated by his thought-processes and book-learning, and is far from feral. He spent two years in the woods, so it was not adopted as a permanent way of life, but as an experiment. Without doubt it was transformational and made him a different person by the end of the experiment, and he wrote about his experiences both in his book Walden and in the journal that he kept while he was there.30 There are close observations of the flora and fauna of the woods – the birds that kept him company, and the food he found and tried to cultivate. There is also discussion of books and many allusions to and quotations from published material – classical authors, the Bible – so it is not an experiment in living without knowledge of the world. On the contrary, the idea is to come to know the world more immediately and more deeply by putting oneself in touch with the primitive experiences of someone who is free from social expectations but not ignorant of them. Thoreau explains that he very nearly bought himself a farm and is pleased that he did not. Had he done so then he would have spent his life working to pay back the loan and would have convinced himself that it was necessary to toil for hours in the fields to produce the means to do so. If he analyzed his real needs and cut back on the things he did not need, then he could easily earn enough money to live on. There is something a little delusional in his actions when this is put into practice, because he needed the cooperation of friends and relatives. For example, on a point of principle he refused to pay taxes: he thought it wrong to support a government that acquiesced in the slavery that was still at that time continuing in the southern states. He withheld payment and was put in prison at Concord. An aunt paid his tax and he was released. “Released” might be the wrong word, as he refused to leave

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until he was ejected. Apparently the aunt continued to pay his taxes so as to avoid the family name being brought into disrepute. Thoreau was always at a distance from social normality – ill-adjusted, we might say. He famously said that he was walking to the beat of a different drummer: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”31 The condition of heterotopia is here internalized. There may be a physical place – like the woods – that helps to bring about this alteration. Deleuze and Guattari used the term “reterritorialization” for this restructuring of experience. Thoreau has internalized the experience of the woods and is in himself heterotopic – at an angle to the rest of the society around him. He had his characteristic way of looking at things, which was not conventional. People often liked him, but thought that he was odd.32 He seemed at odds with the commercial outlook that was coming to be seen as characteristically American, and he was therefore accused of undermining American values by promoting his frugal and ecological thinking. However, he was not averse to helping with the family business, which was making pencils, and he earned an income from surveying land. The surveying of land seems like the sort of activity that should have suited him well enough, as it involved the close scrutiny of the terrain that he elsewhere observed for its wildlife. However, the activity of surveying is in practice commissioned when land is bought and sold, and the purpose is usually to define boundaries of property.33 The life goes unrecorded, but the edges of the parcel of land are clearly measured and indicated. Areas are known, and the price calculated per acre, so that the potential for crop-plating or grazing can be assessed. Thoreau turned away from owning land, as an unnecessary encumbrance, but he sold his services to others who wanted to bind themselves to it, while he used money for his travels – wandering across boundaries, following rivers, finding surprises everywhere. I was here surprised to discover looking down, through the fir tops – a large bright downy fair weather cloud covering the lower world far beneath us – & there it was the greater part of the time we were there like a lake – while the snow & alpine summit was to be seen above us on the other side at about the same angle. The pure white crescent of snow was our sky – & the dark mt side above our permanent cloud.34

In the journal he is not thinking like a farmer or a land surveyor. The writing is lyrical and observant rather than an attempt to weigh up the utility of the place. When Thoreau is in land-surveyor mode, he is in alignment with the values of commercial society and can charge a fee for the work. When he wrote about ecology and nature, he lost money. It turned out to have lasting value, but did not make an income for him to live on, and the thoughts



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might not have been put into writing had it not been for the encouragement and more-practical support of friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now we can read Thoreau’s words as serenely authoritative, but they were based on heterotypic adventures, putting Thoreau in touch with wildness and discovering how satisfying that is – how well equipped we are to deal with it. This intuitive leap underpins the thinking of contemporary writers like Jay Griffiths and George Monbiot.35 If we feel so much “at home” in the wild, and if it is so satisfying to encounter it, then why do we find ourselves living in cities, regulated by social institutions that trap most of us into leading what Thoreau described as “lives of quiet desperation.”36 One might think that it would be this artificially developed world that would be classed as heterotopic, but it is reason that has brought us there and reason that controls the conscious language in which we explain ourselves, our aims, and our interests. The instinctual realm, where we adjust to the wild and become matter in nature, engaged in processes of ecology and geology, is the place where Robinson and Saint Anthony were heading, and the language of reason has ways of making that sound stupid and, of course, unreasonable. FORM AND IMMANENCE There is liveliness in matter before there is organic life, and I do not need to pursue the limit-conditions of the argument to make the point that I need to make here. There are interactions involved in chemical processes that are in effect highly localized decisions that bring about results that are statistically predictable but at the level of individual molecules, they are events that can resolve one way or another, depending on the proximity of another molecule, the pressure, the temperature, and so on. The sedimentations and turbulences of geological formation leave traces in the strata of a bed of limestone, or the whorls in a slab of marble. The characteristic shapes of mountain ranges or drifts of sand dunes are determined not by a designer working out the form from outside, but by the materials deciding the form from within, interacting with the circumstances. The hylomorphic model of design – a term taken up from Gilbert Simondon by Deleuze and Guattari – resolves form from outside and has ways of measuring and determining the form that involve delineation of geometric shapes. A craftsman follows the grain of the material, understanding what it will do if a metal is cast or hammered into shape, what a piece of timber will do if it is planed or chiseled. When Deleuze and Guattari present this idea, with reference to Simondon, it might seem that the individuation in Simondon’s text would be that of the products of artisans, whereas his discussion is rooted in electronics.37 There has been significant development of thinking about this issue in recent years, and the idea of

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form being generated from within – or seeing the human agents as part of a material formation – takes forward the thinking that Foucault set in play. Le Corbusier illustrated Vers une architecture with drawings of Euclidean solids and said that architecture was “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”38 That now sounds philosophically problematic in various ways. “Masterly” sounds much too coercive after we have learned some lessons from feminism and is definitively hylomorphic in its approach, which we have learned to distrust from Simondon, Deleuze, and Guattari. “Form,” says Simondon, “corresponds to what the man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible.”39 “Correct” suggests an authoritative scale of values against which these judgments can be made, and philosophers of aesthetics keep trying to argue that there is such a scale, despite the fact that in practice everyone else behaves as if it remains in abeyance. “Brought together in light” makes architecture definitively visual, whereas the visual impression made by a building is only an aspect of it and often far from the most important aspect of buildings that we use and know well, as opposed to those we visit as spectacles. Foucault particularly drew attention to the power relations in states of affairs, which gives his work political character, but power relations are not restricted to interactions between people. Deleuze and Guattari developed a micropolitics of unconscious interactions that do whatever it is that they do in the body and between bodies, giving rise to the more conscious states of mind that lead us to act – the desires that we feel and that we might be able to articulate. When it comes to form and matter, there are some forms that are generated by human will – as shorthand let’s call them Euclidean solids – and others that are formed by processes that are remote from human control – the Chinese “scholars’ rocks,” for example, which are natural rock specimens that have been selected for their sculptural value and their evocative qualities.40 In between there is the work of a skilled joiner, who knows timber well and can coax it into doing what is needed, making sure that the grain is running in the appropriate direction so the leg of a chair can be refined without being inclined to snap off, knowing how to express or conceal a joint or an imperfection, being able to polish the surface to a sheen that shows the quality and character of the wood. Bernard Stiegler has drawn attention to the role of tools in the development of a sense of agency and interiority in the subject.41 In a socially grounded form-making there is an interaction between a material and a society – the society acting through the agency of a set of tools, learned practices, resources that have been made available or withheld, knowhow that is somehow available in that society, and perhaps inventiveness and ingenuity (which are more evident in some societies than others). The material is not separate from the instruments that develop its form, and they are guided not



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only by the material but also by the societal elements that impinge. Matter, by the time we encounter it, is in a socialized fabric. When it comes to even primitive instruments like stone tools, they can tell us something about the society that made and used them, but even without evident tools – the things we might think of doing with matter or feeling in response to it are socially structured. In the absence of the actual people, it might be difficult to adduce any evidence, but an anthropological study would catch the differences between different groups of hunter-gatherers using maybe similar tools. If we suspend the distinction between interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, and see matter as circulating in an ecology, then perhaps we find ourselves in a state of mind to empathize with Saint Anthony, Robinson Crusoe, and Henry Thoreau. It is certainly the position that was articulated by Félix Guattari in The Three Ecologies – the interdependent ecologies of environment, society, and mind – with its epigraph from Gregory Bateson: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.”42 In Foucault’s presentation Saint Anthony is escaping the ecology of ideas, good or bad – at least escaping the consciously articulated ideas that normally inform decisions. The unconscious decision-making that forms matter is normally given a separate vocabulary – sedimentation, erosion, chemical reaction, biomineralization – but this is a question of convention rather than of material difference. Samuel Butler made a persuasive argument for the continuity or organic and inorganic mechanisms in his “Book of the Machines,”43 which Deleuze and Guattari took up and made the basis of their idea of “agencements” – assemblages – that bring things together to make temporary entities that can be reassembled or reconnect in different ways. These “things” can include molecules, ideas, affects, tunes – whatever. The point is that the matter is organized by the milieu, including its interior substance and the circumstances in which it finds itself, or (e.g., in the case of Saint Anthony) loses itself. The mountain, the desert island, these are heterotopias not of social coercion – like the prisons, madhouses, and schools – but heterotopias of liberation, where the self can open up to experiment, rewilded, inhabited by the rocks and wind, miraculated by sunbeams. On such a plateau of immanence the self can lose its outline and be washed away by lapping waves, or dispersed like the morning vapors as the sun rises and shines on Saint Anthony.

NOTES 1. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977); translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam as Dialogues (London: Athlone, 1987), 11; reissued with supplementary material as Dialogues II (London:

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Continuum, 2002). See also Gilles Deleuze, “Causes et raisons des îles desertes,” written in the 1950s, but unpublished until its inclusion in Gilles Deleuze, L’île déserte, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 11–17; the English translation of the essay appeared in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e,) 2004), 9–14. See also Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), translated by Seán Hand as Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 2. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); translated by Hugh Tomlinson as Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone, 1983). Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (Leipzig: 1889); trans. R. J. Hollindale as Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 145–72; translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64; and in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 369–91. 3. Foucault presented the idea of the heterotopia in a lecture in 1967: Michel Foucault, “Des éspaces autres.” It was eventually published in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–49, and collected in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) 4 vols. The text has been published in two different English translations, one by Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27; the other by Robert Hurley, “Different Spaces,” in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 175–85. Page references below are given to the Hurley translation. There is a website dedicated to “heterotopian studies” – http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/blog/ – and an online bibliography: http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Bibliography-word-updated-March-2013-pdf-final.pdf 4. Athanasius, The Life of St Anthony, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist, 1980). This Saint Anthony is known as Saint Anthony the Great, or Saint Anthony of Alexandria, or Egypt, or Thebes. He is not the same person as Saint Anthony of Padua or Lisbon (who lived nine hundred years later and was a Portuguese monk who moved to Italy). There are many artworks of both saints. The Egyptian is depicted with demons, wild animals, or voluptuous women. The Paduan is conventionally shown as a young man in Franciscan robes, with the Christ child. He took the name Anthony on account of the Egyptian Church Father. 5. The essay first appeared in 1967; the first English translation, by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, was “Fantasia of the Library,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977)87–109; page references here are given to “Afterword to The Temptation of Saint Anthony” in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 103–22. The essay is also to be found as an introduction in Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of The Temptation of Saint Anthony (New York: Random House, 1992).



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6. Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (London: Granta, 2008), 76. Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949). Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (London: Granta, 2000). 7. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 3, st. 72. 8. Jean Genet, Notre dame des fleurs (Paris: Marc Barbezat – l’Arbalète, 1946). Jean Genet, Miracle de la rose (Paris: Marc Barbezat – l’Arbalète, 1948). See also Pascaline Hamon, “Notre-Dame des Fleurs et Miracle de la rose, de Jean Genet. L’écriture mise au secret,” in Les dossiers du GRIHL (Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire) 2011: Écrire en prison, écrire la prison (XVIIe–XXe siècles), https://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/5000#ftn26. Hamon discusses Genet’s prison fantasies in connection with Foucault’s heterotopia in “Les éspaces autres,” and Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); translated by Alan Sheridan as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977). Genet’s reputation was built on Jean-Paul Sartre’s recognition of the quality of his work and the significance of his themes, developed at length in Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952); translated by Bernard Frechtman as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: G. Braziller, 1963). See also David M. Halperin, Saint = Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 9. Foucault, “Afterword,” 112. 10. Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine (Paris: 1874); translated by Lafcadio Hearn as The Temptation of Saint Anthony (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 190. 11. Foucault, “Afterword,” 120. 12. Foucault, “Afterword,” 120. 13. Foucault, “Afterword,” 120–21. 14. Flaubert, Temptation, 186. 15. Flaubert, Temptation, 186. 16. Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); translated by Norman Denny as Friday, or, The Other Island (New York: Doubleday, 1969). 17. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 175–85. 18. Michel Tournier, Le Vent paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 127–34. 19. Tournier, Friday, 226. 20. A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopaedia, ed. Laurence M. Porter (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 333–34. Essays on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Trois Contes in Michel Tournier, Le Vol du vampire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). 21. Michel Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); translated by Barbara Bray as The Ogre (New York: Doubleday, 1972), and the same translation with a different title in the United Kingdom: The Erl-King (London: Collins, 1972). The book is dedicated to “the slandered memory” of Rasputin, and the epigraph cites Flaubert: “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” 22. Foucault presents the book as an introduction to the non-Fascist life and tries to codify its ethics. Michel Foucault, “Préface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972); translated by

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Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane as Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977), xiii–xiv. 23. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 2. 24. David Platten, Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 67; referencing Colin Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 9–33. 25. In Gilles Deleuze, “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui,” Critique 241 (1967): 503–25. Republished in Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969); translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas as “Michel Tournier and the World Without Others,” in The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 301–21. The essay is Deleuze’s most-distributed work. 26. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); translated (but no translator’s name is cited) as The Order of Things (New York: Tavistock, 1970), 386. 27. Foucault, The Order of Things, 387. 28. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156–57; Mitchell’s quotation comes from Foucault, The Order of Things, 245. Mitchell is quoted by Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 29. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2ff. See also Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, new ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 30. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or: Life in the Woods (1854). There are many editions, but the page references here are to the Norton Critical Edition edited by Owen Thomas (New York: Norton, 1966). Thoreau’s journal is accessible online: http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals.html 31. Thoreau, Walden, 215. 32. Henry Abelove, “From Thoreau to Queer Politics,” in Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 29–41. 33. Patrick Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010). 34. Thoreau’s Journal, “At Camp in Tuckerman’s Ravine,” Friday July 9, 1858 (New Hampshire). 35. Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006). George Monbiot Feral: Rewinding the Land, the Sea and Human Life (New York: Allen Lane, 2013). 36. Thoreau, Walden, 5. 37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980); trans. Brian Massumi as Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 408–10. The first part of Gilbert Simondon’s text was published as L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) and was cited by Deleuze and Guattari in that form. It has subsequently been published in full, under its original title as Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forma et d’information (Grenoble: Millon, 2005).



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38. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Crès, 1924); trans. John Goodman as Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Frances Lincoln, 2006). 39. Simondon, L’individu, cited by Deleuze and Guattari and trans. Massumi in Thousand Plateaus, 555, n.33. 40. Kevin Hu, Scholars’ Rocks in Ancient China: The Suyuan Stone Catalogue (Bangkok: Orchid, 2003). 41. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, 1: La Faute d’ Épiméthée (Paris: Galilée, 1994); translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins as Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), cited by Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 31. 42. Félix Guattari, Les Trois écologies (Paris: Galilée, 1989); translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton as The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone, 2000), 27; citing Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). 43. Samuel Butler’s “The Book of the Machines” is a powerful argument embedded in a fictional work. It makes up three of the chapters of Erewhon (1872) and is given substantial weight by Deleuze and Guattari (“a profound text”) Anti-Oedipus, 284–85. It is reprinted in Andrew Ballantyne, ed., Architecture Theory: A Reader in Philosophy and Culture (London: Continuum, 2005), 126–43.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abelove, Henry. “From Thoreau to Queer Politics.” In Deep Gossip, 29–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Athanasius. The Life of St Anthony. Translated by Robert C. Gregg. New York: Paulist, 1980. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. New ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Butler, Samuel. “The Book of the Machines.” In Architecture Theory: A Reader in Philosophy and Culture, edited by Andrew Ballantyne, 126–43. London: Continuum, 2005. Byron. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Chura, Patrick. Thoreau the Land Surveyor. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010. Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. London: John Murray, 1949. Davis, Colin. Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. “Causes et raisons des îles desertes.” In L’île déserte, edited by David Lapoujade, 11–17. Paris: Minuit, 2002. ———. Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986. Translated by Paul Bové as Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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———. “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui.” Critique 241 (1967): 503–25. ———. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972. ———. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Flaubert, Gustave. A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopaedia. Edited by Laurence M. Porter. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. ———. La tentation de Saint Antoine. Paris: 1874. Translated by Lafcadio Hearn as The Temptation of Saint Anthony (New York: Modern Library, 1992). Fleming, Fergus. Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps. London: Granta, 2000. Foucault, Michel. “Afterword to The Temptation of Saint Anthony.” In Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, 103–22. New York: New Press, 1998. ———. “Des éspaces autres.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–49. ———. Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. ———. “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” In Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, 145–72. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. ———. “Préface.” In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972). ———. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Genet, Jean. Miracle de la rose. Paris: Marc Barbezat – l’Arbalète, 1948. ———. Notre dame des fleurs. Paris: Marc Barbezat – l’Arbalète, 1946. Griffiths, Jay. Wild: An Elemental Journey. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006. Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies. Paris: Galilée, 1989. Halperin, David M. Saint = Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hamon, Pascaline. “Notre-Dame des Fleurs et Miracle de la rose, de Jean Genet. L’écriture mise au secret.” Les dossiers du GRIHL (Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire) 2011: Écrire en prison, écrire la prison (XVIIe–XXe siècles). https://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/5000#ftn26. Hu, Kevin. Scholars’ Rocks in Ancient China: The Suyuan Stone Catalogue. Bangkok: Orchid, 2003. Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture. Paris: Crès, 1924. Translated by John Goodman as Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Frances Lincoln, 2006). Macfarlane, Robert. Mountains of the Mind. London: Granta, 2008. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewinding the Land, the Sea and Human Life. New York: Allen Lane, 2013.



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Nietzsche, Friedrich. Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt. Leipzig: 1889. Platten, David. Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet: comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forma et d’information. Grenoble: Millon, 2005. ———. L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps, 1: La Faute d’ Épiméthée. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Thoreau, Henry David. Journal, “At Camp in Tuckerman’s Ravine,” Friday July 9th 1858 (New Hampshire). ———. Walden, or: Life in the Woods (1854). Tournier, Michel. Le Roi des aulnes. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. ———. Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. ———. Le Vent paraclet. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. ———. Le Vol du Vampire. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.

Chapter 12

The Aesthetics of Bios Frédéric Gros Translated by Sima Godfrey

The question of art is one that Foucault addressed in a series of reflections on classical, modern, and contemporary artists. His texts on Velázquez, Manet, and Magritte are the best known,1 but he also wrote on the Italian Quattrocento, Picasso, and Andy Warhol. In this chapter, I would like to consider, instead, two specific expressions regarding art that he used in his last texts that focus on the ethics of the Ancients: “the aesthetics of existence” and “to make one’s life a work of art.”2 The two expressions, clearly convergent, designate at least two concerns or “cares” [soucis]: the first, a concern with the “artistic” type of work any person can perform on himself;3 and the second, a concern with the application of judgments of beauty to things other than external objects. When I speak here of “care,” it is to suggest a general frame of analysis. For, the aesthetic construction of the self is elaborated against the horizon of “the care of the self” (epimeleia heautou) that for Foucault lies at the very core of the ethical demands of the Ancients:4 “The individual fulfilled himself as an ethical subject by shaping a precisely measured conduct that was plainly visible to all and deserving to be long remembered.”5 To be sure, in his last texts Foucault saw himself as a historian and maintained that his work was descriptive, a term that Deleuze noted had a particular significance in Foucault’s method.6 Nevertheless, the idea of an “aesthetic morality”7 provoked at least two sets of questions and critiques among readers of Foucault’s last works. First of all, does this concept actually correspond to the content of the principal texts of ancient wisdom? Second, doesn’t this concept constitute a dangerous and irresponsible ethics? Let us consider briefly the principal accusations lobbed at the ethical proposition,8 before addressing what are, in my view, Foucault’s original, critical intentions. We will then offer a brief 199

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overview of the main references to the Ancients that Foucault mobilized to illustrate this “aesthetic morality.” A first set of objections directed at Foucault focused on what one might call the critique of “aestheticism,” a term associated with the literary and artistic movement that emerged in England and France at the end of the nineteenth century. The movement proclaimed the sublime uselessness of art, denounced the vulgarity of naturalism, and glorified the pleasures of artifice. But in a more general way, “aestheticism” was understood as the tendency to make the beautiful, over and above the good or the just, the one criterion of judgment, to evaluate behaviors and actions in terms of their beauty or ugliness, and ultimately to valorize existences and individuals based solely on their outward luster. Since the end of the nineteenth century, this brand of aestheticism has been considered decadent and nihilist. It is as if conforming to canons of beauty alone were symptomatic of a degenerate civilization floundering in futility; as if forgetting or refusing the transcendence of a certain moral good or higher Justice would hurtle nations to a sure and certain demise. The very idea of applying the criterion of beauty to existence rather than to external works was enough to incur the accusation of dandyism. The “beautiful life” would simply amount to a stylish existence that cultivated refined nonconformism, sought out rarity, and practiced a kind of perverse asceticism associated with the quest for perfect elegance. It connoted an aristocratic care of the self to earn worldly acknowledgment in communities of the elite. This first set of rebukes leveled at Foucault thus consisted of projecting onto “the aesthetics of existence” the gloss of fin-de-siècle decadence, as if the philosopher were trying to find in Socrates and Marcus Aurelius the provocations of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. A second set of critiques aimed at Foucault were more political in nature and focused on the individualism underlying his project of an aesthetic morality. The project of giving beautiful form to one’s existence involves one person alone. No longer attentive to the good of others, you strive to create the beauty of your individuality for all others to see. The aesthetics of existence by this account necessarily leads to a depoliticization, since it encourages individuals to turn inward, oblivious to the collectivity and to the common good. Such individualism additionally smacks of narcissism, for aesthetics also refers to the pleasure one derives from beauty. At the heart of this project of self-construction there is the languid swoon of fascination with one’s own performance, with self-indulgent introspection, and with self-centered hedonism. In the case of this critique, the cultural references are more contemporary. The aesthetics of existence is denounced for its ethical stance, as evidence of a contemporary era that is characterized by a disregard for politics and signals the end of collective identities. Within the frame of this critique, Foucault’s rereading of Greek ethics is juxtaposed with doctrines of



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personal growth, with a “Californian cult of the self,” and with the celebration of a mystical quest for one’s inner depths. These critiques of Foucault are based on at least two misunderstandings. As a result of simple, superficial similarities, the uniqueness of Foucault’s discourse gets mixed up with two cultural moments: the decadent fin-de-siècle aestheticism of the late nineteenth century and contemporary individualistic hedonism. The “ethics of care of the self,” then, looks irresponsible, nihilistic, and facile, far removed from the lofty demands of a republican morality founded on the principle of self-sacrifice for the public good, or a Kantian ethic based on the purity of a universalizing intention. Foucault was perfectly aware of these possible misunderstandings even as he was writing his texts, and he never stopped trying to prevent them. But a serious close reading of the texts and lessons at the Collège de France from the 1980s contradicts these hasty approximations and reveals rigorous austerity and hard work behind the description of the “aestheticizing” ethics of antiquity, remote from a facile hedonism and more open to the collectivity than it would appear at first sight. To be sure, when Foucault was striving to uncover an ethics of self-construction in antiquity, he didn’t look to Oscar Wilde or to New Age doctrines, but primarily to Nietzsche. For, in the history of aesthetics, Nietzsche represents a major turning point where aesthetics begins to be understood not from the perspective of the spectator’s feelings but from the experience of the artist or creator. The creative work of giving form becomes more important than judgments of taste. The approach by way of “form” helps us see how aesthetics became for Nietzsche a grid for reading all phenomena. Knowledge can thus be described as giving form, as recreating the real; politics can be seen as giving shape to history through action, etc. The concern with finding the productive elaboration at the core of every process holds too, especially for rethinking one’s relationship with the self and with human freedom. Freedom in the highest meaning does not represent the simple ability to choose; it is not a basic metaphysical determination: it is, rather, the continuous effort through which I give my life a form of destiny. This Nietzschean aesthetic lies at the heart of Foucault’s reading of the Ancients. What Foucault calls “ethics” has as its aim precisely this creative dimension of active elaboration. Thus, while “morality” (“la morale”) raises questions about the rational foundation or transcendental systematicity of values and prohibitions, “ethics” (“l’éthique”) designates the position of the subject from which, through regular exercises, he elaborates and constructs a relationship with his self that allows him to perform certain actions, to adopt certain behaviors, and to pursue certain objectives. The second major concept in Nietzschean aesthetics is the concept of style, which follows from the notion of form. Style designates the regularity of form, more specifically the external results that come from giving form.

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The reference to style allows us to break free of the determination of the classical, restrictive oppositions found in philosophy, such as truth/error, good/ evil, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it points to an irreducible plurality, to a surpassing of Universal Law as the single horizon of all moral thought. Once we have acknowledged the significance of the reference to Nietzsche, we can unpack the meaning of the concept of the “aesthetics of existence” for Foucault, in order to show how the above-mentioned critiques miss the mark. Foucault looked to the Ancients for a rigorous ethics of work by the self on the self that would give form to one’s existence. In the end, it may well be the figure of the artisan or craftsman, as opposed to the artist, that is most pertinent. Several references in the Discourses of Epictetus emphasize the idea that for the wise man bios (life, existence) is like a workable material. The potter takes clay and by working on it gives it the form of a vase, the shoemaker working with leather gives it the form of a shoe or a bag, and so on. In the same way, every man must endeavor to see his bios as a material to which he gives form. Life is thus viewed as a map of indeterminate immanence, and ethical work consists in effect of bringing to it determination, obligations, and the regularity of form. Every man is the craftsman of his own existence, but the work can be brought to perfection only if the subject imposes on himself regular exercises, initiating himself to “techniques of subjectivation.” In his courses at the Collège de France, Foucault carefully described some of these exercises: first, there is the morning examination where I contemplate my day, imagining the worst hypotheses possible so I can prepare myself for failures without being debilitated by their occurrence;9 then, there is the evening examination where I review what I accomplished during the day in order to see how closely my actions matched the principles I had set for myself.10 There are exercises in “decomposition” that allow me to explain my fascination with a representation by analyzing the elementary material components of its content;11 then there are all the other exercises of critical distancing that assure that I do not simply let myself become a passive receptor of representations from the outside world, but that I am able to purposefully ask what use I should make of the events that befall me, what reaction I should have, the most appropriate behaviors I should adopt.12 In short, a series of techniques that allow me to control the “interior discourse” by which I qualify what happens to me. Through these techniques, if they are properly and regularly put into practice, the wise man gives his life external, visible, consistent form. When Foucault speaks of an aesthetics of existence, he is not thinking of the elegant dandy parading his anti-conformity to taunt the establishment. He is invoking the wise man who, through strict exercises, manages to give his life form and regularity; who, through good habits and coherent choices gives order to his life through the expression of internal discipline. The “aesthetic” principle of morality is discernable on at least three levels. In the first place, the aesthetic is evident in the way the wise man makes



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visible principles of justice and moral rules in the exteriority of phenomena: they become transparent through his wise conduct. But this exteriority, even as it is opposed to the deep psychological intimacy or pure intention, is not at all superficial; it is the exteriority of the passage to action, of expressive vitality and practical exemplarity. The aesthetic is also apparent in the sense that this exteriorization directly articulates the harmony between words and acts, between fundamental principles and real action. The aesthetic is also present in the way the wise man’s conduct communicates order, proportion, and measure. This ordered life based on criteria of coherence and regularity has, of course, to be distinguished from the normalized existence shaped by disciplinary systems like those Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, the ethics of the Ancients remains from start to finish an exercise in freedom. This aesthetics of existence, the effort to turn one’s life into a work of art by imposing criteria of order and regularity, demands a rigorous relationship to self that precludes compromise with all forms of smug narcissism or even hedonistic tolerance. Recalling Nietzsche, the aesthetic paradigm is one of creation rather than contemplation. The ethics of the self does not imply the exaggerated narcissistic fascination with one’s self because it is part of the perpetual effort to establish the form of life one has chosen. The required relationship to self is demanding and austere. The dominant method is work, as in labor, on the self. The subject, as we have noted, is progressively initiated into techniques and the daily practice of exercises; he routinely checks in on himself in order to assess his progress on the path to wisdom. This ethical task straightaway rules out pleasure, as pleasure presupposes passivity and abandon. Simply put, the wise man who has reached the height of his art can in some way enjoy the perfect mastery of the self that he has finally achieved and take pride in contemplating his own existence. But that contentment is neither egotistical nor useless nor worldly; it is comparable to the artist’s satisfaction when he has happily completed a work that demanded time and effort. The aesthetics of existence in Foucault is “ascetic,” keeping in mind that in Greek askêsis means an “exercise.” And it is through exercise that one acquires new methods of being. But when we speak of work and effort in the ethics of self-construction, no sacrifice is involved. The subject is never asked to renounce himself. Perhaps in neoplatonic ethics, to which Foucault rarely alludes, the construction of the self proceeds from a stripping away and polishing that peels away the layers of identity in order to get to the heart of one’s being. Plotinus in the Enneads uses the example of sculpture: the sculptor scrapes, chisels, and polishes; he removes what is extraneous and smoothes over the rough patches. The individual should in this way become the sculptor of his own statue, which means getting rid of what is inessential, removing what is useless. To these negative aesthetics of purification, Foucault prefers

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Stoic asceses that imply the coming into or the endowment of existence. The art of the self as he presents it is a positive construction: it is not about the subject attaining a divine, transparent principle at his core, but giving himself consistency, producing himself, becoming more real for himself by transforming his self. There are several important references worth citing that Foucault uses to situate the theme of aesthetics of existence at the heart of Greek ethics. Even if it remains peripheral, there is the obvious reference to Homer. The epic poet bequeathed to posterity the brilliant record of a heroic act worthy of remembrance, whose beauty merits eternal preservation. In truth it is not so much a beautiful life as a “beautiful death” that Homeric heroes seek, that is, the incandescent moment that encapsulates the grandeur of a life and the glory of a heroic death.13 The second major reference is to Socrates, as he is portrayed by Plato in Laches and Apology, where he represents an ethics of harmony: harmony between words and acts, which produces an inner consonance he calls “friendship with oneself.” But it is the philosophical school of Stoicism that Foucault quotes the most and from which he draws many examples. In Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, he finds vivid representations of a noble wisdom that demonstrate at every instance evidence of the highest forms of mastery, regularity, tranquility, and order. It is in these texts above all that the key exercises are defined in all their technical detail and precision, to assure that radiant, exemplary life.14 Finally, in March 1984, several months before his death, Foucault devoted his extraordinary lessons at the Collège de France to the ancient Cynics.15 The Cynic, it turns out, unsettles the concept of the aesthetics of existence by subverting it. He applies to the letter the principles of “the beautiful life,” but he exaggerates their application in such a way that they are fraught with startling dissonance. Lead a purified life? The Cynics get rid of everything, right down to sleeping outdoors and living like dogs. Follow nature? They follow the example of animals. Hide nothing? Diogenes masturbates in public. The Cynic introduces an aesthetics of provocation and grimace, of ugliness and caricature. Cynicism renders philosophy theatrical; that is, the Cynic performs philosophy on the stage of the real. But in resolutely realizing the principles of philosophy without compromise on the stage of existence, Cynicism renders the spectacle of those principles unbearable. From Homer to Diogenes, by way of Socrates and Epictetus, Foucault tried to describe an aesthetics of existence where the beautiful is never the source of indulgent, narcissistic joy, but introduces into the boundless undertaking of self-construction a tension that challenges our relationship to ourselves. This morality does not entail sacrifice, it is never selfish, it is not puerile. It dictates at the very core of our being the demands of beauty as a tension that structures us.



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NOTES 1. See the well-known opening to The Order of Things (chapter 1, “Las Meninas”); Foucault’s 1971 Tunis lecture on Manet, reprinted in Manet and the Order of Painting; and This Is Not a Pipe. 2. On this concept, see the end of chapter 4, “Freedom and Truth,” in The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure. See also “An Aesthetics of Existence” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interview and Other Writings 1977–1984, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47–53 and “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 340–72. 3. For grammatical purposes, the word “person” is designated as masculine throughout this text. 4. See, in particular, the January 1982 Collège de France lessons in Michel Foucault The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981– 1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005). 5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 91. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). See the discussion of description by Catherine M. Soussloff in this book. 7. The term “aesthetic morality” comes from Michel Onfray, who, in his widely read book La Sculpture de Soi: La Morale esthétique [Sculpturing the self: moral aesthetics] (Paris: Grasset, 1993), offers a hedonist version of the aesthetics of existence that Foucault would certainly have rejected. 8. I refer here to a wave of critical commentaries, examples of which can be found in L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi: Regards Critiques 1984–1987 [The use of pleasure and the care of the self; critical perspectives, 1984–1987], ed. Luca Paltrinieri (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2014), as well as in Pierre Hadot, “Réflexions sur la notion de ‘culture de soi,’” [Reflections on the notion “care of the self”] in Michel Foucault philosophe: Rencontre internationale Paris, 9, 10, 11 Janvier 1988 (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 9. Michael Foucault, “Lesson, March 24, 1982,” in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. 10. Foucault, “Lesson, March 24, 1982.” 11. Foucault, “Lesson, February 24, 1982.” 12. Foucault, “Lesson, February 24, 1982.” 13. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, trans. Froma Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 50–75. 14. For Foucault’s reading of the Apology of Socrates, see The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For his reading of Laches, see The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures

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at the Collège de France, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, 1983–1984 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 15. Collected in The Courage of the Truth.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Lawrence Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan, 47–53. New York: Routledge, 1988. ———. The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981– 1982. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2005. ———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1985. ———. Manet and the Object of Painting. Translated by Matthew Barr. London: Tate, 2005. ———. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 340–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. ———. This Is Not a Pipe. Edited and translated by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hadot, Pierre. “Réflexions sur la notion de ‘culture de soi.’” In Michel Foucault philosophe: Rencontre internationale Paris, 9, 10, 11 Janvier 1988. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Onfray, Michel. La Sculpture de Soi: La Morale esthétique. Paris: Grasset, 1993. Paltrinieri, Luca, ed. L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi: Regards Critiques 1984–1987, Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2014. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic.” In Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, translated by Froma Zeitlin, 50–75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Index

Note: Page references for figures are italicized; page references with letter ‘n’ refer to notes. abjection, 126, 139 absolute beauty, 112 abstraction, 112 absurd, 70, 74, 75 actuality, 112, 113 Adam and Eve, 184 Adams, Ansel, 25 Adorno, Theodor W., 73 aesthetic morality, 199–200, 202–4, 205n7 aesthetics, xii; aesthetical becoming, 73; aestheticism, critique of, 200–201; of bios, 199–205; of dance, 72–74; disciplinary, 81; of manners and gesture, 11, 15, 17; of modernity, 112–14; pragmatist, 72–74; of scale, 190; of street photography, 25 aesthetics of existence, xvi, xvii, 71–72, 114–15, 199, 202–4, 205n7 aesthetics of the self, 114. See also dandy/dandyism affectation, 17 affects, 191 agency, 151, 190 Age of Reason, 4, 9

Alexander technique, 73, 74 Alps, 182 alter-ego, 124 Althusser, Louis, 177n18 Amnesty International, Tunisia, 178n35 anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour, 84–85 Ancients, ethics of the, 201–3 Annales, 6, 49, 50–51 anti-psychiatry movement, 6, 7 anti-Semitism, 168, 177n23 anxiety, 7, 31, 95n5, 106 appropriation, 57, 122, 124, 126, 161n37 a priori, historical, 21n19, 32 Arab-Israeli War, 168 Arab Spring, 177n21 Arago, François, 47 archaeological method, xiii, 5, 18, 151 archaeology: of knowledge, xiii, 4–5, 19n7, 46, 49, 51, 60n15, 130n22, 130n26, 152, 172, 173, 179n63; of silence, xi, xiv, 4, 5, 8–9, 10–13, 18; of subjectivity, 173 architecture, xi, xii, xiv, 10–14, 18–19, 150; light and, 190; of madness, xiv, 3, 6, 8–14; and (un)reason, 13, 14; and visibility, 150, 155 archive, xiii, xv, 45, 48, 50, 54–55, 58, 66, 88, 158, xviiin1 207

208 Index

Ariane, 174 aristocracy, 9–11, 117n34, 200 Arnold, Dana, x, xiv, 3–22 arpeggios, 93–94 art: and Baudelaire, 107, 109, 111–14; body, 58–59, 69; classical, 199; contemporary, xv, 46, 59, 121–22, 199; and dance, xvi, 65, 67, 72; and inspiration, 173, 175; institutions, xv, 26, 37–38n10; modern, 173, 174; music, 66, 80, 87, 88, 89; and Nature, 156; and photography, xv, 26, 45–46, 47, 59; of the self, 113–14, 204; visual, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, 27, 66, 121, 128n3, 150, 173; work of, xiv, xvii–xviii, 54, 58, 113, 152, 160n24, 199–205 art and literature, xiv, 156, 173; nineteenth century movement, 200 Artaud, Antonin, 110, 123, 137, 151 art history, 26, 45, 60n20, 150, 151, 154, 155, 158, 159n12 art theory, xiv, xvii, xviii asceticism/ascetic, xvii, 80, 81, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93–95, 114, 167, 200, 203 askesis, 74, 91, 203 asylum. See Bedlam, London Athanasius, 182, 183 attitude of modernity, 109, 111 Aufklärung. See Enlightenment Aurelius, Marcus, 200, 204 author function, 40n31, 121–22, 126 autonomy, 14, 19, 105, 109 avant garde, 82, 110 Bach, Johann Sebastian: The Welltempered Clavier, 93–94 Bachelard, Gaston, 50 Ballantyne, Andrew, xvii, 181–95 ballet, 69, 70 Ballet de Cour, 65 baroque: architecture, 10, 11, 12, 14; “hétéronome,” 14; painting, 28, 160n24; tragedy, 137 Barthes, Roland, 6, 26; Camera Lucida, 27, 33, 34, 35, 39n18; “The

Death of the Author,” 130n26; and Guibert relationship, 27, 38–39n15; punctum, 33–34, 35, 39n18 Bataille, Georges, 110, 123, 125–26, 130n29, 161n37, 173; death, 131n35; Oeuvres completes, 126; review of Beckett’s Molloy, 125–26, 130–31n34 Bateson, Gregory, 191 Baudelaire, Charles, xiv, 74, 105–18; “Artificial Paradises” (“Les Paradis artificiels”), 117n39; “Cats” (“Les Chats”), 107, 108; codes for reading, 110–11; critics of, 107, 111; dandy/dandyism, 113–14, 117n34; Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal), 107, 112; and French literature, 106; on modernity, 109– 10, 111–12, 114; “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” 112, 116n15; “The Painter of Modern Life” (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne”), 111, 112; on painting, 111–12; “Parisian Tableaux” (“Les Tableaux parisiens”), 112; Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris), 112; readings of, 105–18; “Salon of 1846” (“Le Salon de 1846”), 109, 111, 112; use of drugs, 110, 111, 114, 117–18n39; writings on, 106, 107, 109 Bazin, Germain, 14 beat (music), 79, 85, 188 beauty, 112, 199, 200, 204 Beaux Arts, 26 Beckett, Samuel, xiv, xvi, 110; Endgame, 122; and language, 122–24, 127; Molloy, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130n34; readings of, 121–31; Texts for Nothing, 122, 123; The Trilogy, 122, 125, 126; The Unnamable, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130–31n34; Waiting for Godot, 122 becoming: aesthetical, 73; desert island, 186; matter/nature, 184, 185, 186, 187; mineral, 185

Index

Bedlam, London: architecture of, xiv, 3, 6, 8, 9–14, 12, 13; Hogarth’s depiction of, 3, 6, 8, 14–18, 16, 19 Begam, Richard, 125 being-a-subject, 70 belief, 17, 21n19, 31, 36, 145n7, 176 Bellour, Raymond, 26 Benedict-Jones, Linda, 37n7 Benjamin, Walter, xiv; Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism, 107, 111; Collected Works (Gesammelte Schriften), 107; on heroism, 112; on modernity, xvi, 112–14; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (“Sur quelques thèmes Baudelairiens”), 111, 114 Bennett, Jane, 187 Benthamite prison, 168–69 Bernini, Gianlorenzo: La Verità, 55, 57 Berrebi, Sophie, xv, 45–61; The Shape of Evidence, 45 Bertillon, Alphonse, 47 bertillonnage, 47 Bible, 183, 187 binaries, 9, 12–13, 18 Binswanger, Ludwig: Dream and Existence, 159n9 bios (life, existence), 202–3 Blanchot, Maurice, 123, 130n29, 173, 174; The Space of Literature (L’Espace littéraire), 116n20 Bloch, Marc, 49, 51; The Historian’s Craft, 50 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 93 bodily experience, 72, 73, 75 body, 10, 28, 30, 36; and dance, 65–77; Deleuzian-Guattarian, 186, 190; disciplined, 81, 83, 84–88; double, 139; instrumental coding of, 86–87; of manners, 10; and music, 79–99; thought and, 172, 174 body art, 58–59 body-politic, 87, 94, 113 body techniques, xv, 65–77

209

Bonaparte, Marie, 106; The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, 106 Bonnefoy, Claude, 172, 176n10, 178n47 Borges, Jorge Luis, 123; “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” 172, 173 Borough of Southwark, 21n27 Bosch, Hieronymous, 159n12, 182; Temptation of St. Anthony, 150–51, 152 Boulez, Pierre, 96n9 Boulogne-sur-mer, 91 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26 bourgeois/bourgeosie, 9–11, 15, 21n21, 89, 91, 94, 98n51, 99n74, 99n87, 106, 117n34 Bourguiba, Habib, 168, 169, 170, 177n22, 177n30 Braudel, Fernand, 6–7, 8 Brazil, 167 Bridgeman, Charles, 15 Britain: aristocracy vs. bourgeoisie, 9–12, 15, 16; asylum architecture in. See Bedlam; literary and artistic movement in, 200; network of institutions, 48; sovereignty depicted in King Lear, 135–46 Brossard, Sébastien de: Dictionnaire de Musique, 87–88 Büchner, Georg, 185–86 Burckhardt, Jacob, 115 Butler, Samuel: “Book of the Machines,” 191, 195n43 Butor, Michel, 110 Byron, Lord: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 182–83 “Californian cult of the self,” 201 camera, invention of, 28–29 Camera Work, 25 Camus, Albert, 171 Camus, Renaud, 26 Canguilhem, Georges, 50 capitalism, 15, 18, 19, 21n21, 47, 107, 109

210 Index

Caravaggio: Narcissus, 28 care of the self (epimeleia heautou), 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 114, 199, 200, 201 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 26, 37n7 Carreño, Teresa, 98n51 Cartesian moment. See Descartes, René Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 25 Caruso, Pietro, 171 Catherine de’ Medici, 22n28 Centre Pompidou, France, 38n12 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 173 Cézanne, 155 Channel (English Channel), 6 Char, René, 130n29 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 80 chef d’oeuvre, 87, 90 chemical photography, 28–29 Chopin, Frédéric, 82, 93–94 choreography, xv, 65–77, 85, 94 Christ, 17, 53, 138, 139, 183, 192n4 Christian/Christianity, 17, 90, 91, 92, 140, 171 chronophotography, 33. See also photography citation, 122, 124, 125, 126 City of London, 8, 9, 11, 15, 18, 21n27 classical age, 13, 68, 137, 156–57 classical art, 199 classicism, 10, 12, 19 Club of Haschich Smokers (Club des Haschichins), 117–18n39 Club Tahar Haddad, Tunisia, 167 cogito, 30 Collège de France, xvi, xvii, 30, 31, 90, 114, 121, 124, 130n24, 135, 138, 140, 142, 165, 170, 201, 202, 204; History of Systems of Thought, 124 colonialism, 53, 57, 171 comparative methodology, xii, xiv consciousness, xvii, 5, 19, 31, 74, 75–76, 79–80, 106, 111, 127, 155, 174 Conservatoire de Paris, 82, 83 conservatory/Conservatory, 81, 83–84, 85, 93

contemporary art, xv, 46, 59, 121–22, 199 contingency, xiv, 8, 83, 109, 112, 143 Cooper, David, 6, 7 Corneille, Pierre, 143 Costanzo, Alexandre, 49 Costanzo, Daniel, 49 Coulanges, Fustel de, 50 Couperin, François, 94 Crary, Jonathan, 28–29, 34; Techniques of the Observer, 28 critical agency, 151 critique: of aestheticism, 200, 201–2; of art institutions, xv; of discourse/author, 124, 125; of document, 50; FrancoGermanic, xvi; of hegemony, 172; of history, 50, 52; of individualism, 200–201; of Marxism, 167; of modernity, 113; of repressive hypothesis, 88 Critique, 186; “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” 131n35 cultural productions, xiii Culturgest, Lisbon, 58 cyborg, 87 Cynics/Cynicism, 138, 139, 204 Daguerre, Louis, 47 daguerreotype, 47 Damisch, Hubert, 155 Dana-Mechri, Ben: Foucault in Tunisia (Foucault en Tunisie), 165 dance, xiv, xv, xvi, 65–77, 94; and body techniques, 67–70; challenges, 65–67; experience and practice, 75–76; films, 65; “good” and “bad” practices, 72, 74; heterotopian, 76; history, 65, 67; pragmatist aesthetics, 72–75; public exhibition of, 75–76; somaesthetics, 73–75; stage director/performance maker’s role, 66; survival issue, 65–66, 76n1; and techniques of the self, 70–72; theory, 75; visual/ kinesthetic conversion, 66

Index

dandy/dandyism, 72, 74, 113, 114, 117n34, 200, 202 Davidson, Arnold, xii Debussy, Claude, 79–82, 93, 94–95, 96n18; Étude for piano, 79, 82, 94; Kulturkampf, 80; L’Intransigeant article, 79–80, 94, 95 de Certeau, Michel: Writing of History, 52 Defert, Daniel, xii, 152, 165 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, xvii, 185 Delauney, Jules Elie, 155 Deleuze, Gilles, xiv; on baroque, 150; on cinema, 150; Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition), 174; the fold, 152, 160n24; Foucault, 149–62, 199; and Foucault relationship, 150, 153, 154; on Fromanger, 153, 154; on Nietzsche, 181; on painting, 153, 154; and prison reform, 153, 154; think intensity, 174; and Tournier relationship, 184–85; on Tournier’s novel, 186; view of Foucault’s writing on painting, 149–58; and visuality, 152–53 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari: agencements/assemblages, 191; AntiOedipus, 185–86; the body, 186, 190; desert, 181; hylomorphism, 189; reterritorialization, 188; schizophrenia, 185–86; the self, 181 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 33 de Saxe, Maréchal, 95n5 Descartes, René: cogito, 31; emotions/ passions of the soul, 30–31; madness, 7, 136, 137; man, 186; Meditations on First Philosophy, 7; reason, 136, 137; truth, 31, 35, 137 description (ekphrasis), xiv, 48, 49, 70–72, 114, 135, 157–58, 168, 172, 178n46, 199, 201 descriptive discourse, 157–58 desert, 92, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 191

211

desire, 14, 17, 25, 28, 36, 66, 75, 123, 127, 128, 128n1, 141, 158, 184, 190 destiny, 138, 186, 201 Dewey, John, 72, 73 diagnostician, 166, 172, 175, 176n10 Diderot, Denis, 110 difference, 105, 144n7, 175, 191 digital data/image, 54, 158, 183 D’Indy, Vincent, 82–83 Diogenes, 204 discipline/disciplinary, xv, 52, 68–69, 70, 71, 73, 79–99, 105, 113, 114, 124, 181, 202, 203; and ascetic ideology, 93–95; and music, 81–83; and penance, 90–93; and performance, 86–88; and Romanticism, 88–90; and time, 84–86; and virtuosity, 83–84 discourse, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii, xviii; aesthetics, 199–205; archaeology, 18; architecture, 13; author, 121, 122; critical, 172–73; dance, 73–74; descriptive, 157–58, 199; drama, 137, 142, 143; interior, 202; knowledge, 21n19, 21n23, 174; language, 121, 123–28, 174, 175; literary, 110, 173–74; madness, 4, 9, 18, 150; man, 28; material, 127, 172, 175, 179n49; mobility, 167, 171, 174, 175; modernity, 109; objects, 122, 175; photographic, 26–28, 33; political, xvi; posthuman, 186; and power, 130n21, 138, 171–72; reason, 9, 13; scientific, 50; truth, 140 discourse formation, 121 Discourses of Epictetus, 202 discursive formation, 5, 9, 19, 21n19, 21n23 discursive/linguistic formation/ language, 152, 154 discursive practices, 165–79 discursive structures, 121 dispositif, 8, 21n20 Divertissement d’Opéra, 65

212 Index

documents, 49–52; Annales’s approach, 50–51; Bloch, 49–51; de Certeau, 52; medical, 88; and monuments, 50–52, 89; Toubert and Le Goff, 51–52 dramatic, 143 drawings, 27, 47, 58, 150, 153, 154, 190 Droit, Roger-Pol, 173 drugs, 74, 110, 111, 114, 117n39 Durand, Jacques, 82 dystopia, 15 École Gratuite de la Garde Nationale, 83 École Royale de Chant et de Déclamation, 83 Egypt, 52, 53, 168, 182, 192n4 Egyptology, 47 Eigentümlichkeit, 93 elite, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 21n27, 200 Elizabeth I, 139 emancipation, 68 embodied/embodiment, xiv, xvii, 10, 73, 167, 171 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 189 emotion, 30–31, 33, 34, 184. See also thought-emotion (pensée-émotion) empathy, 20n17, 66, 191 England, 4, 9, 14, 142, 200 Enlightenment, 105–6, 109–12 épater-les-bourgeois-ism, 106 epic, 89, 204 Epictetus, 202, 204 episteme, 5, 8, 19, 21n19, 21n23, 144, 171 Eribon, Didier, 124, 126, 128n7, 165 Erlebnis/Erfahrung distinction, 33, 41n48 ethics, xi, xvi, 28, 71, 114, 201; and aesthetics, 70, 71, 72, 75, 114; of the Ancients, 199–205; and methods, xi, xvi–xvii; neoplatonic, 203; of subjectivity, 70, 71, 72, 75 ethos, 70, 87, 91, 109 étude, piano, 79–99; Chopin, 82, 93–94; Debussy, 79–80, 82, 93; development of, 81–83,

88–90; Hanon, 91; Kalkbrenner, 89; Liszt, 84, 89; metronome, 85–86; military institutions, 83–84, 85; popularity of, 81 eurocentrism, xvii, 168 Europe/European, xiii, xvi, 10–11, 14, 45, 81–82, 98n51, 136–38, 143, 167 Ewald, François, 130n24 exclusion, 4, 5, 105 existentialism, 106, 107, 122, 171 experience (expérience): bodily, 65–77, 79–99; of dancing, 65–77; heterotopic, 181–95; limit, 126; literary, 107, 113, 114, 174; lived, xv; of madness, 4, 30, 137, 150; musical, 79–99; notion of, 31–32, 166, 170–71, 175; and practice, 75–77; restructuring of, 187–88; time and, 32–34 experimentation, 31, 32, 34, 73, 94, 150, 153, 181, 187, 191 extremity, 33 fall of man, 184 Febvre, Lucien, 49 Feldenkrais therapy, 73, 74 feminism, 33, 143, 190 Fietkau, Wolfgang, 107 fin-de-siècle aestheticism, 200, 201 flâneur, 113 Flaubert, Gustave, xvii, 182–83, 185–86; The Temptation of Saint Anthony (La tentation de Saint Antoine), 182, 183; Tournier on, 185 Fontana, Alessandro, 130n24 form: and aesthetics, 200, 201–3; architectural function, 12, 14; and content, 155; and immanence, 189–91, 202; and matter, 190–91; of the object, 65, 153 Foucault, Michel, biography: birth, xi; critique and reception of, xii, 6–7, 155, 200; death, xi, 111, 149, 174, 186, 204; Eurocentric experience, xvii; formation of GIP, 152, 154,

Index

170; and Guibert relationship, 27, 38n15, 39n17; interview in Japan, 137; personal life and legacy, xi; political views, 167–68; position at Tunis University and Tunisian experience, xvii, 165–79; position at University of Vincennes, 165; positions at French universities, xvii, 124, 130n24, 165, 170; return to France, 166, 170, 176n9; teaching style, 167; as visiting professor in European universities, 165–66 Foucault, Michel, works/interviews/ lectures: The Archaeology of Knowledge, xiii, 4–5, 46, 49, 51, 60n15, 152, 172, 173, 179n63; “Behind the Fable” (“L’arrièrefable”), 174; The Birth of the Clinic, xv, 5; Black and Color (Le Noir et la couleur), 161n36; The Care of the Self, 118n40; “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” 150, 167; The Courage of the Truth, 135, 138; “des éspaces autres,” 184, 192n3; Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison), xv, 28, 45, 47, 68, 71, 81–82, 83, 84, 88, 90, 91, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 168–69, 203; “Discourse and Truth,” 178n32; “The Discourse on Language,” 124; “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 70–71; “The Function of Literature,” 110; On the Government of the Living, 142; The Hermeneutics of the Self, 31, 81, 140; “The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” xv, 81, 91–92; History of Madness, 6, 135, 136, 144n3, 151, 152, 157, 182; The History of Sexuality, xv, 68, 71, 80, 81, 88, 90, 91, 94, 114, 140, 151; “Madness and Civilization” (“Folie et civilisation”), 167; Madness and Civilization (Folie et déraison), xiv, xvii, 3–8, 18, 19, 150, 152, 154; “Madness and

213

Society” (“La Folie et la société”), 110; “Manet’s Painting” (“La peinture de Manet”), 167, 175; “Man in Western Thought” (“L’homme dans la pensée occidentale”), 167; “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside” (“La pensée du dehors”), 174; Mental Illness and Psychology, 123, 129n13; “Of Other Spaces” (“Des espaces autres”), 174; The Order of Things (Les Mots et Les Choses), 5, 28, 137, 142, 149, 150, 155, 172, 173, 175, 186; “Photogenic Painting” (“La peinture photogénique”), 27, 153–54; “A Preface to Transgression,” 126; review of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in Nouvel Observateur, 174; “Security, Territory, Population,” 90; “Structuralism and Literary Analysis” (“Structuralisme et analyse littéraire”), 167; “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” 111; “Thought and Emotion,” 26–33; The Use of Pleasure, 68, 114; “What Is an Author?”, 123–24, 129n16; “What Is Enlightenment?”, 105, 106, 109, 111; “The Words and the Images” (“Les mots et les images”), 173; Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 143 France/French: architecture in, 11; asylums in, 4; blood, racial purity, 80, 94; Chamber of Deputies, 47; classical theater, 143; coup d’état of 1852, 107; historical/cultural heritage, 52–59, 106; intellectuals, xvi, 6, 26, 80, 110, 121, 178n30; literary and artistic movement in, 200; network of institutions, 48; operatic scene, 99n90; promotion of photography in, 26–27, 37n10, 38n12; psychoanalysis and literature, 106; reception of Baudelaire and Benjamin, xvi, 110–11; university

214 Index

system, 109, 110, 124; use of music in war, 79–80, 94, 95n5 Franco-Prussian War, 95n5 Frank, Robert, 26 Frederick II, 83 freedom, xi, xiii, 87, 106, 170, 182, 201, 203 freedom of choice, 106 freedom of the self, 181–95 free will, 19 French Revolution, 50, 83, 107 Freud, Sigmund, 59, 80–81, 106, 110–11, 114, 173 Friedrich, Caspar David: Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, 183 Frizot, Michel, 26 Fromanger, Gérard, 27, 153–54, 157 Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, 153 Galleria Borghese, Rome, 55 Gandillac, Maurice de, 111 Garde Nationale, 83 gay men, 38n15. See also homosexuality Gaza Strip, Israeli invasion of, 168 gaze: comic, 137; and painting, 150, 154, 155; and photography, 28, 46, 55, 57 genealogy, 68, 71, 81, 84, 88, 90, 92, 142, 159n9 Genet, Jean, 183, 193n8 Germany/German: anti-German sentiment, 80, 95n5; literary critique, xvi, 107, 115; philosophy, xviii, 41n48; threat of World War I, 94; universities in, 165 gestures, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19, 52, 53, 58, 67, 83, 85, 86, 124, 126, 128, 141 Gibson, Ralph, 26 Ginot, Isabelle: “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of Somatics,” 74–75 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 95, 99n90 Godfrey, Sima, 105–18, 199–205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 186 Golan Heights, Israeli invasion of, 168

good/evil, 202 Goya, Francisco, 161n37 graffiti, 48 Great War. See World War I Greece, ancient: ethics, 200–201, 203, 204; images, 53; literature, 114, 184; theater, 138, 142–43 Griffiths, Jay, 189 Gros, Frédéric, xii, 114, 199–205 Group of Information about Prisons (Groupe d’information sur les prisons; GIP), 152, 153, 154, 170 Guattari, Félix: The Three Ecologies, 191. See also Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari Guibert, Hervé: and Barthes relationship, 27, 38–39n15; and Foucault relationship, 27, 38n15, 39n17; Ghost Image, 27, 39n18; Le Monde articles, 27, 39n18; on Michals, 27, 39n16, 39n18; Suzanne et Louise, 39n16 Gutting, Gary, 31 Handel, George Frideric, 15 Hanon, Charles-Louis, 84, 90, 91, 92 harmony, 203, 204 hedonism, 17–18, 19, 200– 201, 203, 205n7 Hegel, 185 hegemony, 94, 171, 172, 175 Heidegger, Martin, 157 Heine, Heinrich, 87 Hendrickson, Burleigh, 168, 178n35 Henri II, 22n28 Henry IV, 22n28, 89 heroism, 112, 113, 138 heroization of the present moment, xvi, 109, 112, 113 heteronomy, 14, 18, 19 heterotopias, xvii, 76, 181–95 heterotopos, 174, 179n54 hip-hop, 72 historicism, 5–8, 21n19, 26, 32 historiography, xiv, xvi, 5, 50, 51

Index

history: developments in, 49–51; institutional uses of documents, 50–51, 52; quantitative, 51 history of ideas, 49, 50 Hogarth, William: A Harlot’s Progress, 14; A Rake’s Progress, xiv, 3, 6, 8, 14–18, 16, 19 Homer, 204 homosexuality, 36 Honig, Bonnie, 143–44 Hooke, Robert, 9 Hôtel de Lauzun, Paris, 118n39 Howard, Richard, 6 humanism, 166, 171, 176n6 Hunkeler, Thomas, 122 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 200 hybrid character, 87, 88 Hyppolite, Jean, 128, 130n24 hysteria, 55, 80, 94 iconography, 28 idealism, 167 idée fixe (music), 84 identity and difference, 144n7 identity photographs, 58–59 identity politics, 59 image(s): archival, 45–61; Christian, 17; digital, 158, 183; and language/ text, 30, 34–35, 49, 55, 150, 158; in paintings, 14–17, 149–62; photographic, xv, 25–42, 45–61, 153–54; of the self, 51, 181, 186; shadow, 153; techniques of, 153–54 imagination, 29, 30–31, 83, 113, 184, 186, 202 immanence, 71, 93, 189–91, 202 imperfect words, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18 incarceration, 3, 4, 18 individualism, 72, 87, 89, 91, 93, 200, 201 industrialization, 88 Institut National de Musique, 83 interdisciplinary/interdisciplinarity, 7–8, 124 interior discourse, 202

215

interiority/exteriority, 11–12, 126, 174, 179n63, 182, 190, 191, 202–3 intertextuality, 127 invisible/invisibilities, xiv, 32, 48, 114, 154, 155, 157, 158 Iranian Revolution, 171 irony, 7, 52, 112 Islamist groups, 177n21 isolation, 3, 4, 12, 32, 84, 183 Jakobson, Roman, 107 James I, 139 Japan, 110, 137 Jay, Martin, 150 Jennings, Michael, 107 Jerusalem, Israeli invasion of, 168 Jimenez, Marc, 111 Jordan, 168 Journiac, Michel, 58–59; Homage to Freud – Critical Report on a Travestied Mythology, 59 Kalkbrenner, Friedrich, 89 Kant, Immanuel: Ausgang, 109; Enlightenment philosophy, 105–6, 109, 110, 176n6; ethics, 201; modernity, xvi, 105–6, 109, 111; moral philosophy, 14; sapere aude, 176n6 Kantorovicz, Ernst: king’s two bodies theory, 139, 142 Katz, Daniel, 126 Kaufmann, Emil: Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Postbaroque in England, Italy, and France, 14 Kaun, Axel, 123 Kelly, Michael, 151 Kennaway, James, 95 Khalfa, Jean, 6 King Lear, xvi, 4, 135–46 king’s two bodies theory, the, 139, 142 Klossowski, Pierre, 123, 173 knowledge: archaeology of, xiii, 4–5, 18, 46, 49, 51, 60n15, 152, 172, 173,

216 Index

179n63; classical, 137; creation, 173; and Deleuze, 152; discourse, 21n19, 21n23; experience, 32; and madness, 18; and man, 28; and modernity, 109; notions of, 152, 201; and power, 28, 32, 57, 68, 69, 142, 152; production, 51, 121, 158, 166, 173; and resemblance, 144–45n7; scientific, 28; self-, 30, 69; structures, 21n20; technology of, 48, 68; and truth, 30–31, 142; visible and articulable, 154, 158 Konoval, Brandon, xv–xvi, 79–99 Kressner, Ilka, xvii, 165–79 Krims, Les, 26 Lacoste, Jean, 111 Laforgue, René, 106; The Defeat of Baudelaire: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Neurosis of Charles Baudelaire, 106 Laing, R. D., 6, 7 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de: L’homme machine, 86 Lang, Jack, 38n12 language: in Baudelairian literature, 105–18; in Beckettian literature, 121–31; discourse on, xii, xvi, 121–31, 172, 173, 174, 175; and documentary photography, 46–49; materiality of, 172–73; and painting, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 166, 171, 172; power of, 116n20; and reason, 3, 7, 8, 189; and repetition, 126; and role of the author, 123, 125; and speech, 172–73; and theory, 175; thought and, 5, 156, 173 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de, 91 Launay, Marc de, 111 Le Corbusier: Vers une architecture, 190 Lee, Anton, xiv, 25–42 Le Goff, Jacques, 51–52, 60n15 Le Monde, 27, 39n16, 39n18, 42n58 Le Nouvel Observateur, 173

Lenz, Jakob, 186 leprosy, 4 Les Annales, 49, 50 lesbian, 36 Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 26 Les Freres Ignorantins (Christian Brothers), 91, 92 Les Statues meurent aussi (Marker and Resnais), 57 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 107, 114 liberation, xvii, 29, 69, 79, 113, 126, 168, 171, 191 “limp humanism,” 171 L’Intransigeant, 80, 94, 95 Lisbon, 58, 150, 192n4 Liszt, Franz, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92; Transcendental Études, 84 literary criticism, xiv literary culture, 89 The Literary Fair (La fiera letteraria), 171 literary texts, role of, 123 literature: ancient, 184; art and, xiv, 156, 173, 200; Baudelairian, 105–18; Beckettian, 121–31; discourse and, 165–79 Locatelli, Carla, 122 Logique du sens, 186 London Wall, 12, 13 Lotringer, Sylvère, 123 Louis XIV, 11 Louvre museum, Paris, 52–59 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 179n55 Macey, David: The Lives of Michel Foucault, 165 Machiavelli, Niccolò: Discourses on the First Decade of Livy, 88 madness: ambiguities about, 12, 17, 18–19; architecture, xiv, 3, 6, 8–14; and Braudel, 6–7; and confinement/ incarceration/exclusion, 3, 4, 18; and Derrida, 7; and Descartes, 7; experiences of, 4, 150; meaning of, 151; and oeuvre, 151; old age, 138–

Index

39; painting, 3, 6, 14–19, 150–51, 154, 182; philanthropy and, 10, 11, 15; psychiatry, 7; public display of, 10, 11, 15, 16; and reason, 4, 8, 9, 18, 19, 137; and Shakespeare, 4, 136; stigmatization of, 4, 18; tragedy and, 137; and truth, 135–38, 151; visibility of, 150–51; visual and spatial articulations of, 3, 6, 8–19; wrath and anger, 138–39 Maghreb, 165–66 Magritte, René, 129–30n21, 150, 157, 167, 199; Les Deux mystères, 129–30n21 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 110, 175 Mälzel, Johann Nepomuk, 85 man: Baudelairian, 113, 115n5; Cartesian, 186; Modern, 28, 31, 34, 113, 115n5, 186 Mandrou, Robert, 6 Manet, Édouard, 155–57, 161n36, 167, 175, 199; The Balcony, 157; A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 155, 156 manners, 3, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 32 Marin, Louis, 157–58 Marker, Chris, 57 Marmontel, Antoine, 82 Martin, John, 66 Marx, Karl, 173 Marxism, 73, 107, 110–11, 122, 167, 177n18 materiality/material culture, xiii, xvi, 6, 50, 52, 65, 93, 107, 111, 112, 125, 127, 149, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160n24, 171–75, 189–91, 202 matter (material), xii, 171, 184–87, 189–91 Mauss, Marcel, 67–68 meaning, xvi, xvii, 9, 28, 29, 70, 107, 111, 127, 143, 149, 151, 155, 158, 201, 202 means of production, 87 medicine, xii, xiv, 140, 176n11 Mediterranean, 165

217

Menter, Sophie, 98n51 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 19n1, 149, 156–57, 158; on the visible and the invisible, 161–62n48 Meschonnic, Henri, 107 Metakinesis, 66 metaphor, 28, 136, 172 metaphysics of the object, 187 meteorology, 47 metronome, 85–86 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 37n10 Metzner, Paul, 86 Michals, Duane, xiv, 25–37; The Captive Child, 39n18; Ceci n’est pas une photo d’une pipe, 25; Certain Words Must Be Said, 29–30, 31; Changements, 39n16; Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality, 25; A Letter from My Father, 25; The Man in the Room, 29, 34–37, 35, 41n58; Narcissus, 28, 29; Sequences, 25 Michaux, Henri, 110 milieu, 81, 181, 186, 191 military music, xv–xvi, 79–99; bands, 83, 90; body-machine complex, 86–88; conservatory-based training, 83–84, 85; Debussy’s work, 79–80, 82; development of, 81–83; exercises/drills, 82–83, 85, 86–88; institutions, 83–84; marches, 82; physicotemporal coordination, 84–86; popularization of, 79–80, 81–82; temporal coordination, 83 misattribution, 124, 125 Mitchell, W. J. T., 186–87 Mitterrand, François, 38n12 mobility and power, 167, 170–72, 174, 175 Modern Age, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34 modern art, 26, 173, 174, 199 modernism, 80, 94 modernity, xvi; Baudelairian, 109–12; Benjaminian, 112–14;

218 Index

Foucauldian, xvi, 112, 113; Kantian, xvi, 105–6, 109, 111 Mois de la Photo, 26 monasteries, 90–91, 182 Monbiot, George, 189 Montgommery, Louis de, 81, 85 monument, 46, 49–52, 55, 58, 89, 106, 109, 172 Moorfields, London, 8, 9, 10, 12 Mora, Gilles, 26 morality/moralizing, 10, 14, 17, 199–205 Moulène, Jean-Luc, 45–61; After the Law (Après la loi), 58, 59; Le Monde, Le Louvre, 52–59, 54, 55, 56; The Prostitutes of Amsterdam (Les Filles d’Amsterdam), 58; The Tunnel (Le Tunnel), 48, 49, 58, 59 mountains, 182–83, 189, 191 Muhammed VIII al-Hamin, 177n22 Murphy, Jonathan, 6 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 26, 41n58 Musée d’Orsay, 38n12, 157 Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, 38n12 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 26, 37–38n10 music, xi, xii; conservatory, 81, 83–84, 85, 93; Debussy on, 79–80; discipline and, 81–83; military, xv–xvi, 79–99; and modernism, 80, 94; pathological notions, 94–95; professionalization/musical work, 85, 87; rationalization of, 88; and Romanticism, 81, 88–90; theater and, 66; virtuoso/ virtuosity in, 83–84, 87–89, 90, 92–93; Wagnerian, 94–95; during wartime, 79–80, 82, 94–95 Muybridge, Eadweard, 33 mysticism, 106, 201 mystification, 89, 178n37 mythography, 89 nameless, 125, 126–27, 128, 174

Napoleonic Empire, 50 Napoleon III, 22n28 narcissism, 28, 200, 203, 204 naturalism, 88, 93, 200 negation, 125–26 neoplatonic ethics, 203 New Age doctrines, 201 Newhall, Beaumont, 37–38n10 new history (nouvelle histoire), 50, 51 Niépce, Nicéphore, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 84, 137, 167, 173, 175, 181; aesthetics, 201, 202, 203; Genealogy of Morality, 84, 91, 92; self-transcendence (Selbstüberwindung), 90; stage desert (Theater-Wüste), 92 Noland, Kenneth, 175 nomadic thought, 181 nonmoral actions, 14 normativity, xi, 70, 71, 72–75, 89, 156, 167, 182 nothingness, 106, 123, 136 object, 28, 30, 71, 73, 75, 86, 88, 93, 106, 113, 153–54, 155, 172, 175, 186, 187 objectification, 28, 31 oeuvre, xii, 39n18, 81, 98n45, 107, 114, 126, 127, 151, 165 O’Leary, Timothy, 32, 41n43 opera, 89–90, 99n90, 179n55 opera buffa, 89 opera seria, 89 order of things, 5, 21, 28, 144–45n7, 149, 155, 172, 173, 175 Othmani, Ahmed, 169, 170 Oxford Dictionary of Etymology, 9 pain, 17 painting: catalogue raisonné, 151; as conceptual methodology, 149, 158; critical agency in, 151; Deleuze on, 153, 154; Deleuze on Foucault’s work on, 149–58; description of, 157–58; and gaze, 150, 154, 155;

Index

as historical tool, 149, 158; history of, 156–57; Kelly on, 151; and knowledge, 154; and language, 150, 151, 153, 154, 158, 170; light and lighting effects, 153–56, 160n28; madness, 3, 6, 14–19, 150–51, 154, 182; materiality of, 175; mirror’s function, 155, 156; object of, 151, 153–54, 156, 157; and photography, 153–54; vision and visibility concepts, 149–58 Palais des Tuileries (Tuileries Palace), Paris, 10, 22n28 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 168, 170 pan-Arabic human rights groups, 168, 177n21 Panofsky, Erwin: Studies in Iconology, 173 Panopticon, 168 Paris, xi, 10, 11, 22n28, 49, 55, 56, 82, 83, 107, 112, 117n34, 117n39, 121, 122–23, 125, 153, 157, 165, 166, 176n9 Paris Commune, 22n28, 95n5 parody, 3, 15, 17, 94, 125 parrhēsia, xvi, 31, 32, 34, 35, 135–46, 178n32; Christian notion of, 140–41; of Cordelia and the servant in King Lear, 139–42 pedagogy/pedagogical, 81, 83, 84, 91, 93, 97n32 penance, 90–93 Perse, Saint-Jean, 130n29 personne, 46–49 perspectives, 26, 29, 36, 53, 81, 84, 85, 89, 114, 124, 143, 171, 175, 183, 201 phenomenology, 122, 186 philology, 166, 170, 171, 175 philosophy: of action, 15, 17–18; Cartesian, 31; of the Cynic, 204; engaged, 166; of existence, xvi; exiting, 123; and literature, 123, 129n15; modern, 111; and philology, 166, 171; and play, 123, 174

219

Photo, 26 photo-conceptualism, 45 photogenic drawing, 153, 154 photogenic painting, 153 photography, xi, xiv, 25–42, 150; archival photographs, 45–61; authorship and anonymity, 48–49, 58; Barthes on, 33–34, 35; cameraless process, 153; chemical, 28–29; documentary, 48–49, 52–59; as evidence, 48, 59; vs. filmmaking, 57; and history, 49–52; identity photographs, 58–59; innovations in, 47; invention of, 47, 58; Journiac’s work, 58–59; lighting effects, 153– 56; Michals’s photographs, 25–42; in the Modern Age, 30; Moulène’s photographs, 52–59; and painting, 153–54; photographic experience, 31–37; porn photographs, 58; Proust on, 33; rules and manuals, 48; scientific applications, 47; Sontag on, 27, 39n18; straight, 25, 49; street, 25; techniques in, 153–54 photojournalism, 25 Picasso, Pablo, 199 plane of immanence, 191 Plato: Laches and Apology, 204 pleasure, 17, 31, 74, 91, 106, 200, 203 Pléiade, 106, 111 Plon, 5 Plotinus: Enneads, 203 Plutarch: On the Control of Anger, 138 Poe, Edgar, 110 poetry, 106–7, 112–14, 156, 182–83 poiesis, 66, 73 point of view, 156 Poitiers, France, xi political theory, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, 143 porn photographs, 58 Porter, Roy, 21n21 posthumanism, 186 poststructuralism, 125 Pouillaude, Frédéric, xv, xvi, 65–77 Poussin, Nicolas, 157–58

220 Index

power: discourse, 130n21, 138, 171–72; and knowledge, 28, 32, 57, 68, 69, 142, 152; of language, 116n20; and mobility, 167, 170–72, 174, 175; role in painting, 150, 152, 157; and subjectivation, 72; and surveillance, 45–61; and tragedy, 142–44; and truth, 136–40, 142, 143; tyrannical, 138–39; and unreason, 3–22 power of the anonymous, 49 power relations, 32, 70, 157, 182, 190 practice of exposure, 75–76 practices of truth, 135, 142. See also parrhēsia pragmatism, 72–75 principles and actions, 202–3 printmaking, 150 prison, xii, 15, 28, 45, 48, 58, 152, 153, 154, 157, 168, 170, 181, 182, 187, 191 prison reform movement. See Group of Information about Prisons Prix Goncourt, 185 Proust, Marcel, 33, 110, 183 Prussian military prowess, 83, 90 psychoanalysis, 26, 38, 106, 140–41, 167 punctum, 33–34, 39 quantitative history, 51 Quattrocento, 199

Renaissance, 4, 9, 115, 136, 151, 182 repetition, 91, 126, 175 repression, 88, 99n74, 168, 169, 170, 178n37 repressive hypothesis, 88, 91 resemblance, 144n7 Resnais, Alain, 57 ressentiment, 88 reterritorialization, 188 Revue Esthétique, 111 Rhine, 107 Rizzolati, G.: Mirror Neurons, 66 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 110 Robinson, Henry Peach: Little Red Riding Hood, 32 Robinson Crusoe (character), xvii, 184–87, 189, 191 Roman empire, 92 Romanticism/Romantic, 81, 88–90, 93, 114, 186 Rosa, Salvator, 182 Rosen, Charles, 93 Rosler, Martha, 45; The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 48–49 Rothko, Mark, 175 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14, 182 Roussel, Albert, 110 Roussel, Raymond, 123 Routledge, 6 Royal Artillery Band, 83, 90 Ruas, Charles, 122

Racine, Jean, 137, 143 raison d’être, 32 rationalism, 14, 145n7 ready-made concepts, 145n7 reason: and action, 17, 19; age of, 4, 9; language and, 3–4, 7, 8, 189; modernity and, 109; and unreason/ madness, 3–4, 8, 9, 12, 18, 137 redemption, 183 Red Square (Place Rouge), Tunis, 169 reflexivity, 68, 71, 156 religion, 88, 113 remorse and punishment, 106

sacrifice, 91, 201, 203, 204 Sade, Marquis de, 110 sadomasochism, 74 Saint Anthony, 182–84, 185– 86, 189, 191, 192n4 Saint Anthony of Padua, 192n4 Salpêtrière, 80 Samson, Jim, 89, 91, 92 Sánchez, Marisa C., xvi, 121–31 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 106–7, 113, 115n5, 125, 130n29, 193n8; Baudelaire, 106, 107; Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant),

Index

106; existentialism, 171; legacies of, 123; phenomenology, 186 Satanism, 106 Sauvagnargues, Jean, 169 scene, 137, 141, 143, 153, 155, 157 Schiffrin, Jacques, 106 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich Von, 143 Schmidt, James, 105 Schoenberg, Arnold, 80 Schola Cantorum, Paris, 82 Scholem, Gershom, 112 Schumann, Clara, 87, 98n51 sculptor, 203 sculpture, 53, 55, 57–58, 150, 203 secularization, 156 Sekula, Allan, xv, 45–46, 47, 48 self: -consciousness, 127; -construction, 200–204; -creation, 106–7, 109, 113, 115n5; Deleuzian-Guattarian, 181; -knowledge, 30, 69; -love, 114; -purification, 93–95; relationship with, 201–2, 203, 204; -sacrifice, 201; -transcendence, 90 semiology, 26 sensations, 29, 31, 32, 36, 66, 74, 127 Serres, Michel, 6 sex and sexuality, xii, xiv–xv, 36, 58, 74, 91, 94–95, 99n74, 99n87, 154 Sforzini, Arianna, xvi, 135–46 Shakespeare, William, xiv; King Lear, xvi, 4, 135–46 Sheringham, Michael, 122, 125, 129n9 Shusterman, Richard, 72–75; Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, 72, 73–74; Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 72–73 silence, xiv, 4, 8, 19n1, 66, 68, 125, 127, 136, 137, 140, 179n63 silhouette, 153, 160n31 Simondon, Gilbert, 189, 190, 194n37 Sinai, Israeli invasion of, 168 Six-Day War. See Arab-Israeli War

221

Smith, J. T., south-west view of Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) and London Wall, 13 Social Science Information, 130n22 social theory, xi Société Psychanalytique de Paris, 106 Socrates, 200, 204 Sollers, Philippe, 110 somaesthetics, 72–74 somatic techniques, 73–74 Sontag, Susan: On Photography, 27, 39n18 Sophocles: Oedipus the King, 142 Sorbonne, occupation of, 176n9 Soulages, François, 26 Soussloff, Catherine M., xi–xviii, 149–62 sovereignty, xvi, 4, 18, 135–46, 171 space/spatiality: of classical representation, 155–56; disciplinary, 90; heterotopic, 181–95; of madness, 3–22; of museum, 52–59; theatrical/ studio, 66–67, 75–76; urban, 48–49 spectacle, 15, 29, 80, 81, 84, 89, 92, 93, 149, 156, 190, 204 speech, concept of, 172–73 Stalinism, 171 statement (l’énoncé), 30, 52, 58, 111, 151–55 Steinberg, Leo, 155 Stiegler, Bernard, 190 Stieglitz, Alfred, 37n10 stigmatization, 4, 18 Stoeckel, Philippe, 27 Stoicism, 114, 204 straight photography, 25, 49 Strauss, Richard, 80 street photography, 25 structuralism, 107, 110–11, 176n6 style: architectural, 10, 11, 14; archival documentation, 57; conservatory, 83–84; Nietzschean, 92, 201–2; teaching, 167 subject: -body techniques, 65–77; disciplined, 79–99; and object,

222 Index

154, 186–87; observed/observing, 33, 34, 36; of photographs, 25–42, 45–61; of power and truth, 27, 30, 34, 135–46; speaking, 36, 40n31, 123, 126, 127; writing, 123, 124 subjection, 28, 68–71, 87, 88 subjectivation, xiii, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 141, 152, 157, 202 subjectivity, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii–xviii, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 67, 70, 71, 110, 122, 140, 141, 142, 156–57, 173 superstitious/magical beliefs, 145n7 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 106 Swyer, Rupert, 130n22 symbiosis, 87 symbol, 11, 106 Symbolism, 106 Symbolist movement, 95n5 Symeon Stylites, 92 synthetic method, xii, xiv Syria, 53, 92, 168 Szarkowski, John, 25–26 tableau, 112 Tagg, John, xv, 28, 45–48, 58; Burden of Representation, 58 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 153 Tanke, Joseph, 156 Tavistock, 6 technique of the body as a subject, 70 technique of the subject-body, 70 techniques of subjectivation, 67, 202 techniques/technologies of the self, 65–77, 81, 91, 114–15 tempo rubato, 85 theater, 66, 76, 135–46, 183 Théâtre de Babylone, Paris, 122, 123 Thebes, Egypt, 167, 182, 194n4 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 92 Theseus, 174 “thing-power,” 187 things, 184–88, 191 “think intensity,” 174 Thoreau, Henry, 187–89, 191; Walden, 187–89

thought-emotion (penséeémotion), 30–35, 36 time/temporality: chronometric/linear, 32, 85; discipline and, 84–86; and experience, 32–34; as punctum, 33 Tokyo, 110 tolerance, 203 Tolnay, Charles de, 159n12 Toubert, Pierre, 51–52 Tournier, Michel, 184–86; Le Roi des aulnes, 185; Vendredi, 184–85 tragedy: in King Lear, xvi, 135– 44; of parrhēsia/truth, 138, 139–42; and power, 142–44 transformation, xvii, 5, 31, 52, 72, 80, 87, 90, 109, 113, 154, 183, 185, 187 transgression, xvii, 25–26, 32, 37, 85, 110, 123, 126, 173, 174, 182 travesty, 106 Trombadori, Duccio, 166, 170 Trotsky, Leon: Permanent Revolution, 173 truth: Christian notion of, 140–41; discourse, 140; and error, 141, 202; identity, 141; knowledge and, 30–31, 142; madness and, 135–38, 151; modernity and, 109; parrhēsiastic, 138, 139–42; power and, 136–40, 142, 143; sovereignty/power and, 136–40; and subjectivity, 27, 30, 34, 142 Tunisia: civil rights movements, 170; Foucault’s intervention on behalf of protesters, 168, 169–70; Foucault’s teaching career in, 165–79; independence (1956), 166, 177n22; myths about, 167; police brutality, 168, 169, 170; student revolts, 166, 168–69; surveillance tactics, 168–69, 177–78n30; during uprisings of late 1960s, 166, 168–70, 177n21 The Tunisian Journal (Les cahiers de Tunisie), 165 Tunisian League for Human Rights (Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l’Homme), 178n35

Index

The Tunisian Press (La Presse de Tunisie), 167, 170 tyranny, 138–39, 141, 172 Union générale d’éditions (UGE), 5–6 United States: American values, 188; archival documents, 58; “Californian cult of the self,” 201; promotion of photography in, 26, 37–38n10 universalism, 71, 167, 201 Universal Law, 202 universities and the intellectual, 109, 110 University at Vincennes, 165 University of California, 178n32 University of Dijon, 26 University of Hamburg, 165 University of Lille, 123 University of Louvain, 143 University of Tunis, xvii, 165; Department of Social Sciences, 165, 176n3; School of Humanities and Social Sciences, 168–69, 169 University of Uppsala, 165 University of Vermont, 69 University of Warsaw, 165 University Paris-Sorbonne, 26 unreason (déraison), xiv, 4, 8–10, 12–15, 17–19, 136, 151 unthought (l’impensée), 30 Van Gogh, Vincent, 151 Velázquez, Diego, 142, 155–57, 161n37, 173, 199; Las Meninas, 142, 149, 155, 157, 173 Verdeaux, Jacqueline, 159n9 Verne, Jules, 174 Veyne, Paul, 130n29 “vibrant matter,” 185, 187 victim photography, 49

223

Vietnam War, 170 virago, 98n51 virtuoso/virtuosity, 83–85, 87–93, 96n10, 98n51 visibility, xvii, 28, 30, 32, 124; dance performances and its, 67; discourse of, 124, 127; gaze and, 150, 154, 155; of madness, 150–51; of man, 28, 29; portraits and its, 48, 58, 59, 149–62; and power, 150, 152, 157; statement and, 151–55; vertical, 157; visible vs. articulable knowledge, 152–55, 157; vision and, 149–62 visual art, xii, xiv, xv, 9, 18, 27, 66, 121, 150, 173 visuality. See visibility von Baldass, Ludwig, 159n12 Wagner, Richard, 95n3, 96n9 Wagnerism, 94, 95, 95n5 Wahl, Jean, 176n3 Walter Benjamin et Paris conference, 111 Warhol, Andy, 39n18, 175, 199 Wartenberg, Thomas, 105 Weber, Max, 98n51 Webern, Anton, 175 West Bank, Israeli invasion of, 168 Westminster, 9, 18, 21n26 White, Robert, Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), Moorfields, 12 Wilde, Oscar, 200 Winkel, Dietrich Nikolaus, 85 Wizman, Heinz, 111 words and acts, 203, 204 World War I, 80, 94–95 World War II, 106 yoga, 73

Notes on Contributors

Dana Arnold is Professor of Art History at the University of East Anglia. Her work explores the interactions between cultural theory and architectural history. She has published a trilogy of books on London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that look at the city’s architecture and urban plan in their cultural context: The Spaces of the Hospital (2013), London Landscapes in the Early Nineteenth Century (2006), and Representing the Metropolis (2000). Her next book, Description: Architecture as Ekphrasis, will be published in 2017. Andrew Ballantyne is Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University and has a particular interest in French literature, architecture, and philosophy, and the many resonances between them. His books include Deleuze and Guattari for Architects: What Is Architecture?, Architecture Theory: A Reader in Philosophy and Culture, and Architecture: A Very Short Introduction. He has published studies of two polymaths with intense feelings for places and our relationship with them: Richard Payne Knight (in Architecture, Landscape and Liberty) and John Ruskin. Sophie Berrebi (PhD 2003, University of London) is the author of The Shape of Evidence. Contemporary Art and the Document (Valiz, Amsterdam, 2015) and the editor of Entrée en matière: Hubert Damisch et Jean Dubuffet, Textes et correspondances 1961–2001 (JRP|Ringier/La Maison Rouge, 2016, partially translated in October 154 [winter 2015–2016]). Born in Paris, Berrebi is Associate Professor in the History and Theory of Art at the University of Amsterdam. She is on the editorial board of the academic journal Stedelijk Studies. She is currently writing a book: Elements of Fashion: Icons, Gestures, Details. 225

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Notes on Contributors

Sima Godfrey teaches in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. A specialist in nineteenthcentury French literature and cultural history, her work ranges from poetry and art criticism to the concept of fashionability. She has published widely on Baudelaire and his critics and is currently working on a study of representations of the Crimean War in nineteenth-century French culture. Frédéric Gros is Professor of Political Thought at the Centre de recherches politiques, Sciences Po. His research area is contemporary French philosophy, particularly the thought of Michel Foucault. He has edited many of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, including Subjectivity and Truth, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of Self and Others, and The Courage of Truth. Gros has published numerous books and articles on political philosophy, including work on rights and punishment; the problematics of war and security; and ethics and the political subject, particularly obedience and disobedience. He is the author of the recent award-winning book A Philosophy of Walking (Verso, 2015). Brandon Konoval holds a cross-appointment with the School of Music and the Arts One Program at the University of British Columbia. Trained as a pianist, his doctoral research was on the application of mathematical models to the middle period piano works of Béla Bartók, and he continues to pursue research on the relationship between music and mathematical empiricism in early modern science. He has published in Annals of Science, Perspectives on Science, Modern Intellectual History, and Nietzsche-Studien, where he assessed the relationship between Foucault and Nietzsche. His current work on a genealogy of modernity traces the shared critical concerns of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Ilka Kressner is Associate Professor of Spanish, University at Albany, SUNY. Her work examines Spanish American literatures, films, visual art, conceptions of space, and ecocriticism using a comparative perspective. Her monograph Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations (Purdue University Press, 2013) examines representations of alternative spaces in Spanish American short narratives and their adaptations to the screen. She has co-edited Walter Benjamin Unbound (2015), a special issue of Annals of Scholarship, and is currently working on a book manuscript on Latin American travel photography and writings from the 1950s to the 1970s. Anton Lee is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of British Columbia, completing his doctoral dissertation “Narrative Forms and



Notes on Contributors

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Visual Sequences: The New Photography in American Practice and French Discourse, 1970–1990.” In 2015, Lee was Visiting Researcher at the Centre Victor Basch, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, supported by a Mitacs Globalink Research Award. In April 2016, Lee was the Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellow in Residence at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. Lee received his MA in 2011 from the Seoul National University, Seoul, in Western Aesthetics and Art Theory with a master’s thesis on Foucault and painting. Frédéric Pouillaude is Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at Paris-Sorbonne University. He has published Le Désœuvrement chorégraphique. Etude sur la notion d’œuvre en danse (Paris: Vrin, 2009); English trans. Unworking Choreography: The Work in Dance (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). His essays in English include: “Scène and Contemporaneity,” TDR 147 (2007) and “To the Letter: Lettrism, Dance, Reenactment,” in Mark Franko, ed., Handbook of Danced Reenactment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Based on Archive by Arkadi Zaides (2014), Samedi Détente by Dorothée Munyaneza (2013), and Wagons Libres by Sandra Iché (2012), his current research explores the relationship between documents and moving bodies on stage and interrogates the documentary potentialities of dance in relation to historical and violent events. Marisa C. Sánchez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where she is writing her dissertation “The Beckett Effect,” an interdisciplinary study of the continued effect of Beckett’s textual “body” on contemporary art practice since the 1960s. Sánchez holds a master’s degree in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sánchez was the Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, where she curated many exhibitions, including love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death – Andy Warhol Media Works and solo shows on artists Mika Tajima, Heide Hinrichs, and Corin Hewitt, among others. Arianna Sforzini is Associated Researcher at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. She wrote a PhD dissertation on the role of theater in the philosophy of Michel Foucault (Scènes de la vérité, Pessac: Le bord de l’eau, forthcoming). She is the author of Michel Foucault: Une pensée du corps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), and the co-editor of Un demi-siècle d’Histoire de la folie (Paris: Kimé, 2013) and Michel Foucault: Éthique et vérité (1980–1984) (Paris: Vrin, 2013).

About the Author

Catherine M. Soussloff is Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory and Associate, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of The Absolute Artist (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Subject in Art (Duke University Press, 2006), editor of Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (University of California Press, 1999), and co-editor of Editing the Image (University of Toronto Press, 2006). Known for her comparative and historiographical approaches to the central theoretical concerns of European and North American art and aesthetics, Soussloff has published articles and essays on topics that range across time periods, media, and discourses. Recently appointed as Visiting Lecturer by the Collège de France, she lectured on the topic of her forthcoming book: Michel Foucault and the Pleasure of Painting (University of Minnesota Press).

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