Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics 9780415903790, 0415903793, 9780415903806, 0415903807

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R OUT L E D G E L I B R A RY E DI T I ONS : M I C H E L F O U C AULT T R U T H A N D E ROS

TRUTH AND EROS

Foucault, Lacan, and The Question of Ethics

JOHN RAJCHMAN

Volume 3

First published in 1991 This edition first published in 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1991 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. Printed and bound in Great Britain All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 10: 0-415-56195-7 (Set) ISBN 10: 0-415-56211-2 (Volume 3) ISBN 10: 0-203-09280-5 (ebook)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-56195-2 (Set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-56211-9 (Volume 3) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-09280-4 (ebook)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

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TRUTHAND EROS

F 0 U C A U L T, L A C A N, AND THE

QUESTION OF ETHICS JOHN RAJCHMAN

ROUTLEDGE

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Publishedin 1991 by Routledge An imprint of Routledge,Chapmanand Hall, Inc. 29 West 35 Street New York, NY 10001 Publishedin Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1991 by Routledge,Chapmanand Hall, Inc. Printed in the United Statesof America All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reprinted or reproducedor utilized in any form or by any electronic,mechanicalor other means,now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying andrecording,or in any information storageor retrieval system,without permissionin writing from the publishers. Cover art Donna (lagellata e baccantedanzante,Pompeii, Villa dei Misteri used by permissionof Scala/Art Resource,New York. Library of CongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Rajchman,John. Truth and eros: Foucault,Lacan, and the questionof ethics / John Rajchman. p. cm. ISBN 0-415-90379-3.-ISBN0-415-90380-7(pbk.) 1. Ethics, French.2. Ethics, Modern-20thcentury. 3. Foucault, Michel-Ethics. 4. Lacan,Jacques,1901- -Ethics. I. Title. BJ704.F68R34 1991 170'.92'244-dc20 91-7328 CIP British Library Cataloguingin PublicationData also available.

For Joel Fineman In Memory and Friendship

Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1: Lacan 29

Part 2: Foucault 87

The Questionof Ethics 143

Notes 149

Index 155

Introduction One of the great questionsof ancientphilosophywas: What is the erosof thinking? What is the erosof the peculiarsort of truth of which philosophy is the pursuit? What is the passion that drives one to philosophize,and that philosophizingrequires of one? How does it comeupon one, and when, and with what effectson oneselfand one's relation with others?Doing philosophywas then thoughtto be a way of life, a whole gameof mastery,rivalry and freedomin knowing, that had to defenditself againstfalse pretenders.In theseancientagonistic "games of language," philosopherswere to be philoi, friends; but friends of what and in what sense? One cannotsay that theseare questionsthat playa very prominent role in contemporaryEnglish-speakingethicalphilosophy.In our great debatesover what is good for us and what is right for us to do, we have rather lost the sensein which to do philosophy is to entertain suchpassionateor erotic relationswith ourselvesandwith others.And yet, we are todayperhapsconfrontedwith just this question:What can the passionof philosophy and of philosophicalfriendship still be in our civilization wherescientificreasonrefusesall moral cosmology,and where socio-psychologicalexpertisetries to replaceall "charismatic" wisdom? It is in order to rediscoversuch questionsthat I have turned to the work of two recentFrenchthinkers, a psychoanalystand a historian, JacquesLacan and Michel Foucault.For I shall try to show that each of them in different ways tried to raise again the ancientquestionof truth and eros;eachof them in different ways re-eroticizedthe activity of philosophicalor critical thoughtfor our times. Together,they thus helpedto createan intellectualclimatethat wasto capturethe imagination of a generation,andwith which we areperhapsnot yet done. One aim of this book is to try to get at the ethos of this new passionfor philosophy or critical thought, which has incited in some fears of a corrosivenihilism and a cynical inactivity. 1

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In particular, I will arguethat by degrees,the questionof truth and eros involved thesetwo thinkers in a long and involuted reflection on ethics;and that, conversely,if the questionof ethicsin their work is of a peculiaror unfamiliar sort, it is becauseof the ways it is inseparable from the ancientquestionof the passionof thought. By way of introduction I start with the problem of the difficulty of their styles of thought or philosophy. Lacan and Foucaultwere formed by the different "generations"of the twenty-oddyearsthat separatethem.They held different andoften opposingviews. It is not sure whetherthey were friends or foes, for they wrote little about one another.And yet at the outset, we may observethat their attemptsto rethink eros,andto re-eroticizethought, were onesfraught with greatdifficulty; and that this difficulty was at the heart of their efforts to invent new styles of thought. What is a philosophicaldifficulty, the sort of difficulty that provokes one to philosophyand that philosophyis designedto treat?And why, in the caseof thesetwo thinkers, does this sort of difficulty become moreinsistentor tangiblethe morecloselyoneapproaches the question of ethicsin their work? Or, put the otherway around,why is the style of each,as a style of ethicalthought,sucha difficult one?Neitherfigure was an author of what might be thought to be the traditional ethical forms. They did not write novels,deliver sermonsor pronounceprophecies.They did not write Confessionsor Meditationsor Manifestoes; they left no ethical "treatise" and proposedno "groundwork" for the metaphysicsof moral codes.Why is it that the discussionof ethics is rather scatteredthroughout their work, and linked to many other preoccupations? As is the case for all great philosophy, the works of Lacan and Foucault were difficult ones, conceptually,rhetorically and thematically. And yet their difficulties were of a rather more peculiar and specific sort. The difficulty of Lacan'swork at least was in part by design.He prided himself on having written what othersmust initially find unreadable.In 1957 he declared: "I like to leave the readerno other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult"; 1 and many who thus found their way in nevercameout. He wantedto jolt or surprisewith the words he used,and could be quite blunt. At the sametime he cultivateda singularstyle he himselfcalled "Gongoristic"

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and "Baroque"-hermetic,highly literate, replete with sophisticated jokesandpuns,arcaneallusions,neologismsandstrangeformulaeand graphsto which he himself gave different readingsas he went along. And yet Lacan's difficulty was as much necessityas affectation: he thought he could write or speakin no other way and say what he thoughthe had to say. He was someonewho wrote and spokeout of difficulty. This style inevitably attracted charges of obscurantism,charlatanism, and intellectualism.Foucaultdid not seeit that way. He said peoplecameto Lacan for the merepleasureof readingor listening to a discoursewithout visible institutionalsupport;andif whattheyheard or read was difficult, it was becauseit was intendedthat they should "realize themselves"in readingor listening to it. It is significant that among those who would have thus come to Lacan, philosophers,those trained in philosophyin France,played a prominentpart. Lacan'sstyle may have beendifficult, but through it was createda whole allianceof psychoanalysis not just with the history of philosophy, but also with epistemology,logic and the history of science.Part of the drama and the difficulty of Foucault'slast work would lie in its attemptto departfrom the singularimportancepsychoanalysis had acquired in contemporaryFrench philosophy, largely through the work of Lacan. The difficulty of Foucault'sown work is of a different sort. He wrote in a much more classicalstyle, less extravagant,more synoptic and demonstrative,and in this sense,argumentativeand more combative. In contrastto Lacan,it wasa style to createsingleself-containedbooks, of which Discipline and Punishwould be the most realizedexamplea work Foucaultwould later call "my first book.,,2 And yet in his last writings, wherehe soughtto departfrom psychoanalysis,and where the questionof ethics is most insistently posed, Foucaulttried to abandonthis style, with its powerful philosophical and conceptualarmature.He thus found himself with a difficulty in which he tried to rethink what a style, and thus what his style in philosophy,was. In both caseswe may then say that the difficulty with which their work confronts us correspondsto a difficulty they experiencedin creatingit, a difficulty that recursin the reflection of eachon the style

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of his own thought,its means,its aims, its relationswith institutions. The question of their style was thus a question of who they saw themselvesas being in relation to their work, and that is how it came to be linked to the ethics, and to the eros of their thought. Accordingly, I will now look more closely at their difficulties and their styles, trying to trace how they come to involve ethics. In the following chaptersI will then reversedirections,and startingfrom the questioningof ethics m the work of eachthinker, show in what ways it led to an attemptto devisea new style or a new passionof thought for our times. Foucault'sFreeingof Himself In his last writings Foucaulttried to "disengagehimself" from the style of his previousbooks, and the kind of "philosophicalexperience"in which that style had beenrooted, or which it had served: Very abruptly, in 1975-76,I completelygaveup this style, for I hadit in mind to do a history of the subject, which is not that of an event that would be producedoneday andof which it would be necessaryto recount the genesisand the outcome.3

This abrupt "refusal" of his earlier style markeda shift in the basic questionsof his historical research.The "questionof the subject,"and thereforeof "individual conduct" cameto the fore. Foucaultdeclared that this question could not, and so should not, be separatedfrom thoseof his earlier work, and of "himself" in that work-namelythe questionsof truth and of power.He thustried to invent "other rhetorical methods" that would not avoid "the questionof the subject" in addressingtheseother two. At the sametime, this searchfor a style that would not avoid "the questionof the subject" provided Foucaultwith the occasionto raise in a new way the centralphilosophicalquestionthat had run throughout his work: What is thought(pensee)? What is its singularentangled history, and what are its unrecognizedcritical possibilities?In 197576, he startedto ask: What doesthoughthaveto do with subjectivity, or with the "questionof the subject"?In particular,in which ways can

INTRODUCTION

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it be saidthat "thought" forms part of a "way of life"? What role has it played, and might it yet play, in the mannerin which one leads or conductsone'sliving? That is how Foucault'ssearchfor a new style in his last writings led him back to the ancientproblemof philosophical ethics,and, more specifically, to the questionof the eros of thoughtin the conduct of one's life. For it was through a history of sexuality reachingback to the Greeksthat the questionof his style would be raised. The period of this searchand researchwas a time of difficulty. It was a time of shifting alliancesand friendships,and of many travels. Foucaultthoughthe might take a breakfrom his archival researchand try his hand at journalism. He spent time in a Zen monasteryin Japan.He went so far as to considertaking up residencein Berkeley, California. Gilles Deleuzespeaksof Foucaultas havinggone "through a crisis of all orders,political, vital, philosophical"; adding that "the logic of a thought (pensee)is the set of crisesit goesthrough.,,4 The way in which Foucaultelaboratedhis style of thoughtseemsto follow this Deleuzianprinciple. First there was the famous crisis in "Man" as a basic founding entity, through which Foucaultarguedit had becomepossibleto think again. The anonymity with which this new questionwas thus "posing itself" in our thought led Foucaultto invent a style that would refusethe individualizing "face" of traditional authorship.Then there was a crisis in the political assumptionsof an ambient "textualism," and the discovery of thought as a form of strategiccombat.It led to a style of writing as an act of resistanceor revolt. "All my books are tool-boxes," Foucaultdeclared.Yet a few yearslaterhe would saythat his bookswere"fragmentsof an autobiography." Therewasthen a third crisis, Foucault'sdifficulty with himself as anonymoushistorian andmilitant. It raisedthe questionof what the activity of critical thoughtmeansfor the experienceof thoseengagedin it. The problemof style in writing becamea problemof style in living. Style was thus a matterof "How I wrote certainof my Books," and belongedto a long tradition in which that sort of problem had been raised.RaymondRousselmay be thoughtto be the very exampleof a writer obsessedwith languageand not "the world." But in a late interviewaboutthis writer for whom he kepta specialaffinity, Foucault declaredthat Roussel'swork was important for his life, not because

6 TRUTH AND EROS

he expressedor representedhimself in it, but becauseof the singular way in which it formed part of the way he hadconductedit. The same would be true for Foucault: writing books would not be a way of expressinghimself, but would form part of a way of living. In his case at least,eachbookwould be an attemptto getawayfrom theexperience of the previousonesand to make a new start: "To write a book is in a certain way to abolish the precedingone.,,5 In introducing his last histories, Foucault says that this subjective experienceof making books is normally kept "off-stage," dans les coulisses,asonepresentsone'sbook asa finishedproductto the public. One might say that this was a preceptFoucaulthimself had adopted in his writing in the agonof revolt, and the anonymityof the question. But in his searchfor a style that would not avoid the questionof the subject,he tried to bring out the sensein which, for him, to write a book was an experienceand an exercisein thought: It would probablynot be worth the troubleof makingbooksif they failed to teachthe authorsomethinghe hadn'tknown before,if they didn't lead to unforeseenplaces,if they didn't disperseone toward a strangenew relation with himself. The pain and pleasureof the book is to be an 6 experience.

From 1961 to 1969,Foucaulthadpublishedsix books.By contrast, from 1976 to 1985, during his "difficulty," he publishedno books, exceptthosewhich, were it not for his dying, he would probablynot havepublished.He envisagedseveralbooks he never completed,and told of the manyuncertaintiessurroundingthosehe did. What remains from the "crisis years" is ratheran unwieldy massof courses,reviews, interviews,lectures,andpiecesof journalism,concerninga wide variety of topics and questions,given on variousoccasions,linked to different groupswithin academiaandwithout. It is difficult to graspas a whole. His searchfor "other rhetorical methods" that would not avoid the questionof the subjectremainedunfinished,the difficulty of his new style, unresolved.It is ratherthe searchfor a style that his last writings exemplify, somethingas when it is saidthat what was importantabout Socrateswas his pursuit of the good, rather than his discoveryof it. The difficulty of Foucault'slast writings is a puzzlehis work leaves

INTRODUCTION

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us. This "writing in difficulty" of the last decadeof his life remainsat once the most intimate and the most free part of his work-the one peoplehaveknown the leastwhat to makeof, or what to do with, the part that is the least classifiable,the most up for grabs. Thereareof coursethosewho don't want to seeFoucault'sdifficulty, or to see Foucault in difficulty, people who wish he had kept his difficulty to himself, private, "off-stage."Therearepeoplewho believe that tool-boxesoughtn'tto be confusedwith autobiographies, andthat Foucault'sproblems with himself should be distinguishedfrom his contributions as a critical intellectual and historian. They wish that Foucault had stuck with his earlier style of philosophy that avoided the questionof the subject,and that, in taking it up, he had forfeited the achievementsof his studiedanonymity. There are, in short, those who find Foucault'slast "concernwith himself" a self-centered,individualistic, and thereforeasocialor apolitical one. We might imagine Foucaultrespondingto such objectionsin the following manner. In the first place,to have a "concernfor oneself" hasbeena distinctive mark and a basic difficulty of critical or philosophicalthought since Socrates-partof what it is to be a philosopher."This critical function of philosophy,up to a certain point, emergesright from the Socraticimperative: 'Be concernedwith yourself, i.e. groundyourself in liberty, throughmasteryof self.' ,,7 To think critically or philosophically is thusto be concernedwith oneself;the difficulty is to know how. More strongly, "subjectivity" belongsto critical thought; it cannotbe avoided. Secondly,the view that such a concernis somethingthat one must try to eliminateor keepto oneselfis a late development,whoseassumptions merit examination.Througha long history, the ancientpreoccupation with the self was turned into a matter of vanity, pride, selfinterestor self-love, the very oppositeof "selfless" or charitablerelations with others,or a private obstacleto the realizationof a rational, public or collective good. A Christian tradition had taught that selfrenunciationis the meansto salvation.A seculartradition had tried to basemorality in a public law, externalto the self. And finally, with the scientific discoverythat Naturewasexternaland amoral,a philosophical tradition "from Descartesto Husserl" tried to shift the critical concernfor the self onto the "knowing" or epistemologicalsubject.It

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had tried to "superimposethe functions of spirituality on an ideal basedin scientificity."s Two interconnectedresultswould follow from theseprofounddevelopmentsin "the subjectivity" of critical thought. The first is that "our morality, a morality of asceticism,insiststhat the self is that which onecan reject"; the secondis that "knowing oneself" has obscuredand replacedthe ancienttask of taking careof, or being concernedwith, onesele It is then theseviews that had linked asceticismwith the ideal of a transcendentreasonmodelledon law, scienceor theology,from which Foucaultsoughtto departin his attemptto restorethe Socraticprinciple that to do critical philosophy is to be concernedwith oneself. His difficulty was correspondinglyto invent an askesis,a "subjectivizing" practiceof critical thought,where the relation to oneselfis not rooted in the idea that the self is what we can reject, and wherethe aim is not the submissionto an external law, independentof our experienceof ourselves. There is then a third point. There is a sense-onemight say a Wittgensteiniansense-inwhich Foucault's"difficulty" could not be a private one. For, in arguing that subjectivity cannotbe avoided in critical thought,Foucaultwas not attemptingto return to a pre-critical or pre-philosophicalexperienceof a founding subjecteverywherethe same. On the contrary, he held that "subjectivity" is constituted throughvariousand changingpublic practices.Our subjectivity is not given by an intrinsic nature,theological,theoretical,or natural.There is no onesingleform of it, andFoucaultthoughtthe attemptto discover such a form, applicableto all, had haddisastrousresults. In this Foucaultcontinuesa preceptof his earlierresearch;for there is nothing private aboutthe inheriteduseof words and practicaltechniques Foucault had set out to analyze in his histories of madness, crime or disease.On the contrary,he soughtto exposethe cunningor ruse of self-identificationor self-knowledgein making our subjective experienceseemprivate,naturalor absolute.That is why onemay say, as with Wittgenstein, that for Foucault, "subjective" experienceis never absolutely private. Unlike Wittgenstein, however, Foucault adoptedthe hypothesisthat the question of the subject cannot be separatedfrom the questionsof knowledgeand of power. His subjec-

INTRODUCTION

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tive difficulty with himself as historian and militant was tied up with the question of the relation of his critical thought to the kinds of scientific knowledgewe acceptaboutourselves,and the forms of governmentand self-governmentwith which they are linked. Foucault'sconcernwith himself was thus not a matterof an ascetic escapefrom earthly power and knowledgeto another"truer" realm. It ratherraisedthe questionof what form the experienceof free critical thought should assumewhen confrontedwith our ways of knowing and governingourselves.Foucault'sdifficulty was then not private in a further sense;the problem it defined was not a problem for him alone. One consequence of Foucault'shistorical,public conceptionof subjective experienceis that our "subjectivity" is not the same as our "individuality"; a person is not confined by logic or nature to his identificationsof himself. For there arise momentswhen peoplecease to acceptthe practicesthat definethem, momentsof "difficulty" in our historical constitutionof ourselves.It was just in such momentsthat Foucaultthoughtpeoplehad a particularkind of experienceof critical thinking. For this reason,he presentedhis own difficulty with himself asintellectualandhistorianaspart of a moregeneralcrisis or difficulty in the "function" of the intellectualand the historian,connectedwith the experienceof a failure in progressiveutopian ideals. His difficulty would then be part of our difficulty as critical thinkersor philosophers. Foucault'ssearchfor a style that would not avoid the questionof the subjectwas, in short, a searchfor an experienceand a practiceof critical thoughtthat would not be separatedfrom the forms of knowledge and power we accept, and which would not be basedin the "ascetic" assumptionthat the subjectis somethingwe can reject in the name of an ideal of rationality. What would it mean to be freely concernedwith ourselveswhen it is not a matterof sacrificingthe part of ourselvesthat standsin the way of our discoveryof a higher truer nature?What would it meanto speaktruly and critically about ourselves,without the assuranceof being able to know in advancethe invariant principlesor rules that would apply to the living of eachand all of us?Onecansayat leastthis: the erosof this experienceof critical thought would not be a sacrificial or renunciatoryone; it would not

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be perfectionist,salvationistor progressivist;and it would not assume the form of inducing peopleto acceptprinciplesor rules known independentlyof their experienceof themselves. It is not entirely fortuitous that Foucault'ssearchfor a new style in the subjectivity of critical thoughtcoincidedwith his researchinto the history of what we call our "sexuality." For sexual,passionate,erotic experienceis a domain in which the refusal of asceticismhas been particularly pronounced.It is here that the finger of suspicionabout asceticismhasbeenespeciallypointed,its illnessesmostdiagnosed,the social andpolitical consequences surroundingit mostclear. And, in all of this, of course,Freud has played a central part. But Foucaultthought it was not enoughto exposethe discontents of our erotic asceticism. He wanted to at least raise the question of anotherand non-asceticway of making our erotic "subjectivity," anothersort of philosophicalaskesis.He askedwhat role friendship amongmen, old and young, should play in this askesis,when traditional definitions and practiceshad becomeproblematic,and where what a "friendship" is becameopen and undefined. "Asceticism as the renunciationof pleasurehas bad connotations.But the askesisis somethingelse.... Can that be our problemtoday?We've rid ourselvesof asceticism.Yet it is up to us to advanceinto a homosexual askesisthat would make us work on ourselvesand invent, I do not say discover,a mannerof being that is still improbable.,,10

In short,Foucault'sdifficulty in his passionate,affective relationsas in his experienceof making books, was to invent a new non-ascetic eros in the exerciseof critical thought. In his last work, and his last conceptionof his work, Foucault formulated this difficulty in terms of the question:What doesit cost for reasonto tell the truth? With this question he reformulatedan earlier categoryof the experienceof his critical practice: the category of the intolerable.L'intolerable was the title of a publicationFoucault helped to establish that demandedto know, and to make known, "what the prison is." It said there arise occasionswhen people will no longer tolerate their conditions, without possessingin advancea procedureor theory to know what to do aboutit. They thus demand

INTRODUCTION

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"information" about this condition, not simply from officials, but, in this case, from anyone "who, in one capacity or another, has an experienceof the prison, or a relation to it."l1 The role of the "specific intellectual" is not to supply officials with a policy to resolve the difficulties in this complex and anonymousexperience,but rather to analyze the costs of everyone'sparticipation in maintaining it. The example of such a "specific" exercisein critical thought would be Discipline and Punish. Foucaultthen conceived"the intolerable" in terms ofthe themeof the costs of our own self-constitution.In his last writings, he often declaresthat we know ourselves,we govern ourselves,and we make ourselvesonly at a cost, which we often pay without recognizing,or without realizing that is not necessaryto do so. One task for "critical thought" is thus to exposethesecosts, to analyze what we did not realizewe had to sayand to do to ourselvesin orderto be who we are. That, at any rate, would have beenwhat Foucaulthimself had been trying to do. How doesit happenthat the humansubjectmakeshimself into an object of possibleknowledge,throughwhich forms of rationality,throughwhich historical necessities,and at what price? My questionis this: How much doesit costthe subjectto be ableto tell the truth aboutitself? How much does it cost the subject as a madmanto be able to tell the truth about itself? ... A complexand multi-layeredtotality with an institutionalized frame, class relationships,classconflicts, modalities of knowledge,and finally a whole history ... That is what I tried to reconstitute.... And I want to continuethat in respectto sexuality. How can the subjecttell the truth about itself as a subject of sexual gratification, and at what cost?12

The experienceof critical thought would start in the experienceof suchcosts.Thus,beforeasking,or at leastwhen asking,what we must do to behaverationally, this kind of thinking would ask: What are the "forms of rationality" that secureour identity and delimit our possibilities?It would ask what is "intolerable" about such forms of reason;"how much doesit cost Reasonto tell the truth?" This sort of critical experiencewould then confrontuswith a different sort of difficulty, and with a different relation to our difficulties

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thanthe "ascetic"onethat asksus to rejectourselvesin orderto behave properly or rationally. Foucaultputs the differencein a passagethat refers to Max Weber. It is a questionof the relation betweenasceticismand truth. Max Weber posedthe question:if one wants to behaverationally and regulateone's action accordingto true principles, what part of one's self should one renounce?What is the asceticprice of reason?To what kind of asceticism should one submit? I posed the opposite question. How have certain kinds of interdiction required the price of certain kinds of knowledge aboutoneself?What must one know aboutoneselfin order to be willing ' ,13 to renounceanythmgr

Asceticismtried to determinewhat we must sacrificeof ourselvesto know what is good or right; it had soughtto define the "legitimate" violence, the pain and the pleasures,of turning ourselvesinto beings of the right sort, virtuous or dutiful. Foucaultwould startinsteadwith a different sort of violence-theviolence of our own historical selfconstitution. Our freedom would lie in our recognitionthat this violenceis not a necessaryone,thatit is subjectto reversalandtransformation; it is a violence we can identify, we can ceaseto accept,and in whoseworkings we can refuseto participate.To recognizeit, to seek to reverseit, is alsoa violenceof sorts.But this violencein our capacities for critical reflection and action is not in itself ascetic: it does not supposethat we know in advancewho we shouldbe; it doesnot follow from it that we must renounceourselves.It instigatesanotherkind of critical reflection about ourselves and our possibilities, that asks whetherwe are still willing to tolerate the violencewe do to ourselves, to know, to govern, and to make ourselves. Maybe the target nowadaysis not to discoverwho we are but to refuse who we are, ... we have to promotenew forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has beenimposedon us for severalcenturies.14

But this refusal of our "individuality" is not an attemptto ascend to anotherpurer world, a philosophical republic, but to experience somethingnot yet done or thought in this world. It is the experience

INTRODUCTION

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of a critical "transcendence" without a "transcendental"ideal, regulative or constitutive.It is not a requirementof Eternity, but a concrete problem of history. That is why Foucault'sdeprise de soi would not be an ascetic"detachment"from life, but the start of a new way of living. Foucaultthus defined a particularkind of difficulty in thought: the difficulty of thosemomentswhen we ceaseto tolerateour conditions, bandingtogetherin critical action and reflection; the momentswhen our self-identificationsseemcontingentand violent in ways we hadn't realized; the moments that separateus from our "individualities," exposingtheir costsand raising the openquestionof their refusal.The subjectivizing experienceof critical thought would arise from these moments,when it is no longera matterof "discovering"ourselves,but of "crossingthe line" to a new and improbableidentity. It is then that philosophical friendship becomesa "friendship in difficulty." If the Platoniceroswas a matterof the philia of thosewho turn around the eyes of their souls to the timeless sophia they had forgotten,this would be the philia of thosewho experiencethe contingency of their historical being, and exposethemselvesto the unchartered sophia of a "strangeand new relation" to themselves. Foucault's"crisis" in his last work was thus not a personalcrisis in his ideals. He was not asking: What are the intrinsic values I have offended, and which I am now preparedto advanceand exemplify, and so attain wisdom or guidancein my actions?His "philosophical exercise," his "ascesis,"his "experimentation"with himself in his work would not, in the mannerof the "spiritual autobiography"of Augustine,assumethe form of an exemplaryconversion.On the contrary "se deprendrede soi-memeis the oppositeof a conversion."15 Unlike the "confessions"of Rousseau,it would not entail a searchfor a pre-social or natural identity or self-relation. On the contrary, it would be basedon the idea that "the subjectis not given." Unlike the "meditations" of Descartesit would not be a searchfor certainty or "evidence" in thought or action. On the contrary, it would question the evidenceon which our thoughtand our action rest. Unlike Freud's Interpretationof Dreams,it would not be the searchfor a constitutive desire; in contrastto Sartre,it would not be a searchfor a basicchoice. Foucaultdid not seethe difficulty in his last work as a spiritual, a

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sceptical,a moral or a psychologicalcrisis. The sourceof his ethical difficulty would not be a moral fault, a methodologicaldoubt, a bad faith, or a neurosis.And his responseto it did not assumethe form of an act of repentance,an overcomingof uncertainty,an auto-critique, or a psychotherapy.It would not have the "ascetic" form of: How haveI strayedfrom God or Reason(andso from myself), and how can I repent and rediscovermyself?; or How in sorting out which of my thoughtsare dubitable can I arrive at the certainty of a method?;or How can I find againwho I really am beyondall the social alienations to which I havebeensubmitted?It wasnot a practiceof "remembering" where he had gone astray,but of an anamnesisof what he had been unableto seein what he had beendoing and thinking. He thoughtof his crisis as a crisis in the limits of the work of which he was capable. What Foucaultcameto admire in Lacan was this difficulty he had found in his own searchfor a new style. It was in theseterms that, writing at the time of his death, Foucault paid this homageto the psychoanalyst: It seemsto me that what makesfor the whole interestand force of the analysesof Lacanis preciselythis: that Lacanwas the first sinceFreudto want to recenterthe questionof pscyhoanalysison the problem of the relationsbetweenthe subjectandtruth.... He tried to posethe question, which is historically a "spiritual" question: that of the cost the subject has to pay in order to say the true, and that of the effect on the subject of the fact that he can say the true about himself.16

In psychoanalysis,Lacanwould havefound a new way of formulating the "spiritual" questionof dire-vrai aboutour sex,or our eros.He would haveformulatedit for a time dominatedby market,bureaucracy and science,in which the older cosmological,holistic communitarian identificationshad erodedand lost their hold. He was the orator who broughtthis eros,and its difficulties, into the medicineof sex and the practice of philosophy. Lacan as a Self-MadeMan Lacanwas a greatorator. He spurnedwhat he called poubellicationcastinghis thoughtin the publishingtrashcan.What he publishedwas

INTRODUCTION

15

mostly what he hadalreadysaid.His thesisfrom the thirties, published in seventies,is his only real book. What are called his ecrits comprise pronouncementson occasions,condensationsof his Seminar,rococo proposals,reviews, peculiar institutional documentsand addresses. The centralvehicle of his thoughtwas not a written form at all. It was his thirty-yearlong Seminar,the mostconstantinstitution in his stormy institutional career,which, only late in his career,did he undertaketo havetranscribedand published.And yet in one suchSeminar,Encore of 1972, Lacanconfidesthat therewas one book he would have liked to preparefor publication. Its topic would be ethics. It is as if Lacan dreamt of a great book on ethics he could never bring himself to publish, of which his Seminarwould havebeena vastpreparationand exemplification.Lacan was thus like the masterof an ancientethical School,such as Stoicismor Cynicism, who leavesbehinddisciples,an entangledNachlassand many anecdotesof a history. We might understandthe "difficulty" of Lacan'sstyle-thedifficulty he had with it, and the difficulty he intendedit to make for othersin this contextof an oratorwho becomesthe masterof a School.Lacan was proud to say he had no "worldview," no Weltanschaung.In its placehe would have a style. "Le style c'estthommememe,"he wrote by way of introducing his Ecrits publishedin 1966 (the sameyear as Foucault's Les Mots et les Choses),giving the seventeenthcentury motto a new interpretationfor a period where "Man" was no longer so certaina reference.Perhaps,to "rally" people,it shouldnow, or in his case, be thought to refer to "the man" to whom the style was addressed-thisOther. And this style, in the absenceof a worldview, addressedto a now uncertain "man," was to form part of what he cameto call his "teaching" (mon enseignement), and it would lead, a few years later, to the founding of a "Freudian School," une ecole freudienne. It is throughthis style of a "teaching" that Lacangavea new erotic impetusto theactivity of thoughtin France.He declaredthatin offering peoplethe possibilityof speakingaboutthemselvesin a certainmanner, he had createda great demand(unlike the market mechanism where it is the demandthat createsthe supply, or offre). While he wrote not a single casestudy, he thus offered more than one generationa novel and concretepicture of what it is to conductan analysis.He helpedto

16

TRUTH AND EROS

invent a philosophico-literaryavant-garde,a "culture of the letter," that flourished in the sixties, and was later to becomeimportantin the Americanuniversity. He introducedpsychoanalysisinto the epistemological questionof what a scienceis and can be. He was someonewho broughtto psychoanalysisa greaterphilosophicalculture,andperhaps also a more insistentphilosophicaldesire,than is found in Freud. The history of Lacan'sSeminaris the history of its displacement throughthe clinical, academicandpublic institutionsof Paris.Around it crystallizeda new and increasinglydiversesort of public: the mostly clinical one at the Hospital of SainteAnne, the young Althhusserian one at the Ecole Normale Superieure,and the large disparateone at the Pantheon.But the "school" that thus came to form around this orator was not part of, and was not modelledon, the university or the professionalmedical association.It conferredno diplomas, required no thesisor maitrise,had no curriculum or "canon," and didn't define itself in relation to other "faculties." On the contrary, Lacan claimed for it an "extraterritorial" status;in it would reign a different sort of "mastery" than that of university discourse,or technocraticqualification. Lacan'sseminarhad taken up againthe risk and the dramaof a public oration where the one who speaksis recognizedor authorized by his own relation to the truth, his own activity of analysis. For Lacan's Seminar was not only a place for the formation of analysts,it was also the placeof his own self-formation.It was a place of his dreams;he investedhimself in it, he lived and died in it and throughit. It wasthe public spaceof his singularethos,of the necessity that compelledhim to continueencore.The Seminarwas "that thanks to which whatI teachis not self-analysis,"he declaredin an appearance on television in which he says,using the English expression,that he is a "self-mademan.,,1? The principle underlying Lacan's "difficulty" was not to separate this pedagogical,formativeandself-formativeerosfrom whatit taught, but to reintroducethe questionof what it taught into the mannerin which it was transmitted.The difficulty of his style would in this sense be the difficulty of what it is to acquireand to impart a knowledgeof the unconscious. In her history of Frenchpsychoanalysis,Elizabeth Roudinescoexplains that Lacan'sSeminarhad a philosophicalmodel or precursor:

INTRODUCTION

17

the Seminarof AlexandreKojeve that wasto havea varied and seminal influence on post-warFrenchphilosophy. And of courseKojeve was also someonewho found it difficult to write, but who influencedmany who did not. But one might also mention anothermore ancientphilosophicalmaster,who had notoriousdifficulties with writing-the one whose dictum was "impiety is ignorance."For as with Socrates,the difficulty of Lacan's teachingwas a difficulty in what it is to speak truly of oneself; it was the difficulty of an ethics. But if Lacan'sstyle was, in theserespects,like the orationalstyle of an ancientmasterin ethics, it was designedfor a moderntime much alteredin its basic assumptions-atime when the "man" to which it was addressedwas no longer so certain a reference,or which denied the possibility of a worldview. What is "modern" aboutLacan'sdifficulty, or what would distinguishthe teachingof the unconsciousfrom the teachingsof ancientwisdom, would lie in its principled refusal of any suppositionof a knowledgeof the Good, or of any Ideal we might imitate in virtue. Its ethic would rather be an ethic or teachingof the difficulties we havewith what is ideal in us, andwith what we suppose is our Good, and thus with our passionaterelationswith ourselvesand one another.That is why it requiresanothersort of passionthan the one that follows from the suppositionof a Good or an Ideal, and the relations of rivalry, mastery and identification such a supposition would carry with it. It requiresanothererosand anotherconceptionof erosfor a time markedby the ideologiesof ScienceandFreeEnterprise, which denyus the possibility of finding our erosin the generalgoodness of the world. The difficulty would be how to be "friends" in this modern world. It was Lacan'sview that Freud showedus how. The innovationof Freudwasto havesuppliedandsetto work a new kind of erosin our knowing or speakingtruly aboutourselves:"Psychoanalytic discoursehas a promise: to introduce somethingnew. This, chose enorme,in the field in which the unconsciousproducesitself, since its impasses,amongothersof course,but in the first place, are revealed in love."18 It is the kind of eroswe would experiencein the placeof wanting to know aboutourselves,the eros of the difficulty we experiencein relation to the good or the ideal. In introducing this eros in his teaching, Lacan'sschoolwould thus be a "FreudianSchool." "Psychoanalysisis

18

TRlJfH AND EROS

not an idealism," Lacanwould neverstop saying; it is not an ethic of the good. "My aim," he would declare,"is to extractethicsfrom Bien-

dire.,,19 It would seemthat Lacandevelopedthis picture of a new Freudian ethic in the thirties, when fascismwas on the rise in Europe.Between his early work as a young psychiatristin the thirties, before his style would assumeits difficult "Baroque" forms, and the institution of his Seminarin the fifties, the War intervened.The War was somethingof a "traumaticevent" in moreways than one. Its effectson psychoanalysis weredramatic;it servedto transportFreudandthe centerof psychoanalysisfrom centralEuropeto Britain andthe United States.In particular, it brought with it Lacan's own short war-time analysis with Lowenstein, en route to America, where he helped start the "egopsychology" Lacanwould seeas a betrayalof psychoanalysis.But the war may also be said to havehad anothereffect: to haveconfirmedin Lacan his inveteratehatred or horror of "idealism," and thus of an ethic of the good. Lacan's early writings were focused on the theme of agressivity, crimesof passionand the peculiaritiesof the eroticismof madwomen. Retrospectivelyat least,we may note how they provideda theoretical underpinningof this horror of idealism. In his analysisof the "erotomania"of the woman he called Aimee, and later in his famouspaperon the mirror phase,Lacanadvancedthe view that our relation to what is "ideal" in us, to our ideal-egosaswell asour ego-ideals,derivesfrom a fundamentalviolenceor "alienation," shown in the clinical imageryof Ie corps morcele.At bottom the ego is a self-"idealization" requiredto enter the social order; and that is why our identity is inherentlyviolent, involving us in the "imaginary passion." If psychoanalysisis not an idealism, it is becauseit proposeda treatmentwhose principle is to refuse to enter into this imaginary passion.For what is new or distinctive aboutpsychoanalysisis that it basesits treatmenton anotherconceptionof the being of the doctor and the patientthan that of what is ideal in one or the other, and on the passionthat follows from it. Psychoanalysis would be a treatment that doesnot proposean "ideal" for the self, but concernsitself with the inherent agressivityin our relation to such self-images.

INTRODUCTION

19

It thus introducesa peculiarethical difficulty: it can no longer base itself in the idealizing view of love or friendship as they have been traditionally understood. The passionthat binds doctor and patientin the difficult work of analysisis unlike that of the ancientphilosophical philoi, and unlike that of Christianneighbors.Analysis is neithereros nor agape;it is not wisdom or altruism, and an analystis not a "good Samaritan." Lacan endshis paperon the mirror phaseby sayingthat it is only whenwe departfrom thesetraditionalor idealizingforms of friendship or love, that the true voyage begins. The suffering of neurosisand psychosisare, for us, the school of the passionsof the soul. . . . Psychoanalysisalone recognizesthis knot of imaginaryservitudethat love hasalwaysto undo againor to cut free. For sucha task, the altruistic sentimentis without promisefor we who bring to light the agressivitythat underliesthe action of the philanthropist,of the idealist,of the pedagogue,andevenof the reformer.... Psychoanalysis can accompanythe patientto the ecstaticlimit of "You are that" in which is revealedto him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in the power of our practicealoneto bring him to this momentin which the true voyage begins.20

One may take thesesentencesfrom 1936 as announcingthe start of Lacan'svoyage,the beginningof the destiny of his style and his difficulty: it suppliedthe angle from which he was to undertakehis long and laborious rereadingof Freud. The centralactivity, especiallyin the early yearsof the Seminar,was an exegeticalone.Lacansetout on a newintricatereadingof the works of Freud. The purposewas to return to the sens, the meaning or direction,of psychoanalysis,beforeit hadtakenthe "idealizing" orthopedic form it had assumedin America. Lacan'saim was thus not the "progressivist"one of establishingor consolidatingthe "advances"in the discipline; it was rathera matterof going back to the writingsthat had foundedit. And yet this "return to Freud" was not a conservative preservationof doctrine, and did not issue in a defenseof Freudian orthodoxy.The psychoanalyticmovementwould havecompletelydissipateditself, Lacan declared,were it not for l'evenement-Freud-the event of Freud. And this event is to be found nowhereelse than in

20

TRUTH AND EROS

Freud'swritings. "The writings are the event; they participatein the temporalityinherentin discourse.,,21 Freud'swritings arelike the "shelter" of his thought or philosophy, like embersburning faintly in a convent. To return to Freud was to return to these embers in the conventof psychoanalysis.It was to say againwhat psychoanalysisis, shouldbe, had neverstoppedbeingdespiteits misconceptionsof itself: a new ethic. Two generalclaims underlie this conceptionof psychoanalysis.In the first place Lacan stressedthe singularity of Freud'sconceptof the unconsciousas a "fundamentalconcept."The unconsciousis not an addedcharacteristicto our thoughtsor our minds; it is a completely novel view of what ourthoughtsand minds are, and of their relations with our bodies.We cannotevenidentify it within our receivedvocabularies or practices,for it constitutesan "event" in them. Philosophicalinterpretationsof Freud at the time had attemptedto casthis thoughtinto a morefamiliar philosophicalvocabulary;Ricoeur andSartreeachreadFreudin termsof the philosophicallanguagesand assumptionsthat suppliedtheir points of departure.Lacan moved in the oppositedirection of defamiliarizingthe views we might startwith. He stressedthe ways Freud'sconceptionof the unconsciousdid not fit within any receivedphilosophicalor medical terminology; he tried to show how Freud's languagedid not overlap with any we already know. And he suggestedthat it was a symptomaticweaknessof these paradigmsor vocabulariesthat the precisesenseof the unconscious could not be statedwithin them. To readFreudwas to seehow novel and singular his discoverieswere, to rediscover what no one had conceivedbefore. It was to begin to seein just what way the intricate irrationalitiesof our words and our bodiesaremore importantto who we are than our "vaguely policed personalities." In the secondplace, Lacan held that this novelty or singularity of the Freudian conceptof the unconsciouswas an ethical one. "The statusof the unconsciousis ethical.,,22The "event" in Freud'sthought was an event in ethics. Under the Freudianconceptof the unconscious,"the subject" was not what Aristotle had called a "psyche," a functional principle of life in the body; for it introduceda non-functionallibidinal principle of the body in the way one lives one'slife. It was not what Descarteshad

INTRODUCTION

21

called a "thinking" or mental substance,since "it thinks where 1 am not," and, in particular,in the destiniesof "my" body, where "I" am not. It is not somethingthat can be inferred from a generaltheory of Humanity, for it is particular to each subject. And this event in philosophicalpsychology was also an event in ethicalpurpose.Psychoanalysis is not an ethic of intentionsor the will (the unconsciousis not a weaknessor failure of the will). It is not an ethic of actions and their predictableconsequences(unconscious symptomsare actions whose descriptionsand consequences no one wants to know anything about). It is not an ethic of basic needsand the adjustmentof social arrangements to meetthem (thereis no social arrangementthat could eliminatethe fact of the unconscious).Psychoanalysisreplacesa psychologyof intentions,actionsand needswith a "theory of the unconscious"-of our non-anatomicalbodily destinies, our symptomaticacts,andin a singularandcentralway, the difficulties of our words.The kind of difficulty it introducesinto ethicalthoughtis thusnot onethat canbe resolvedby moresubtlewaysof distinguishing reasonsfrom causes,"is" from "ought," passionfrom reason.For its aim is not to make us more virtuous citizens or more productive workers. It is not an attemptto insure that our actionscontributeto the goodof all, or of determiningwhich principleswe cannotrationally disagreewith. It is not an aim that can be realizedthroughthe institution of positive laws or moral sanctions. The difficulty of "teaching" aboutthe unconsciousis thus twofold. There is the difficulty of the singularity of the conceptof the unconsciousin our thought; and then there is the singular difficulty which, underthis concept,we would havein our living-the difficulty of that of which the unconsciousis the aveu. The Freud-eventis to havereadwhatin neurosisis the aveuof the subject: namely, that this aveu is nothing else than the hole through which all Otheris separatedfrom jouissance:understandingby that all that cannot accedeto it without his aveu.23

Lacan's"authorization"of himselfthuscamethroughhis relationonemight sayhis "transference"-toFreud,the author. The incredible importanceLacan attachedto close attentionto the "letter" of Freud

22

TRUTH AND EROS

is tied up with this fact. It seemsmoredecisivethan the relation Lacan had to Freudthrough his analysiswith Lowenstein.As a founder of a "School" of psychoanalysis(albeit an unofficial one), Lacan is distinguishedin not following the patternof filiation throughtraining analyses which characterizethe rest of psychoanalysis,at leastfor the first generation.In breakingwith this sort of filiation, Lacan was free to try to transformthe institution by transformingthe place of Freud's writings in it. Perhapsthis fact is connectedwith another:Lacanbreaks with the predominantlyJewish-Protestant compositionof the analytic community,with its roots in Germanculture; he introducedthe writings of Freud to a more Roman Catholic France. In the heady year of 1969, following the events of the previous spring, Foucaulthelpedto establisha foothold for Lacan'steachingin the new campusof the University of Parisin the Chateauof Vincennes. Thereexists a transcriptof Lacan'sown appearance there.In a heated exchange,he declaredto his radical studentaudiencethat the aspirationto revolution has but one conceivableissue, always, the discourseof the Master. That is what experiencehasproved.What you, as revolutionaries,aspireto is a Master. You will have one.24

Such was the moment of the marriage of Lacanian psychoanalysis and radical politics, and the start of what would become "French feminism." In the sameyear of 1969, in a papercalled "What is an author?" Foucaultpresenteda perspectiveon the epistemologicalpeculiarity of Lacan'sreadingof Freud,or his relationto Freud,the author.Foucault suggestedthatwe might regardMarx andFreudas authorsof a particular sort, that had emergedin Europein the nineteenthCentury. The sort of "discursivity" they introducedwould be characterizedjust by the mannerin which it could be alteredthrough a novel commentary of its paradigmor founding writings. In the caseof original scientists like Galileo, Cuvier or Saussure,it was only the subsequent"normal science"thatcorrectsanddetermineswhatis significantin the founding or paradigm texts. "[T]he founding act of a sciencecan always be reintroducedwithin the machineryof thosetransformationsthatderive from it. ,,25 That is why a close readingof original texts is not central

INTRODUCTION

23

to the investigationsto which they give rise. "ReexaminationofGalileo'stexts may well changeour knowledgeof the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to changemechanicsitself. ,,26 By contrast, Freud and Marx would have written things which matter not just to the history of the discipline, but to the discipline itself. "The work of initiators of discursivity is not situatedin the spacethe sciencedefines; rather it is the science,or the discursivity, which refers back to their work as primary coordinates.,,27 That is why "reexaminingFreud's texts modifies psychoanalysisitself, just as a reexaminationof Marx's would modify Marxism.,,28 And yet in Lacan's "modification" of psychoanalysisthrough his reexaminationof Freud'stexts, thereis an evenmore complexway of thinking of Freud"as an author." For Lacanaskedhimselfhow, before Freud had becomethe founder of an institution and a "movement," he had himself becomean "author"-howhe cameto put "himself" into his work and his conceptionof his work, how he introducedinto it his "self-analysis" conductedin an epistolary mannerthrough his transferencewith the odd Berlin nose doctor, Robert Fliess. For, as Lacan stressed,it is after all his own dream, and his own dream of himself as an analyst,with whoseinterpretationFreudinaugurateshis Interpretation of Dreams. In effect, Lacan said that the central "event" throughwhichFreud wasto becomethe authorof thosewritings which we now call "psychoanalytic," was his encounterwith hysteria. "It was the hysteric who taught Freud about the unconscious.,,29 Freud'sbecoming-an-author would startin France,in the clinic of Charcot.Suchwas the site of the eventthat would causeFreudto breakwith, or at leastto question,his own Vienneseanti-vitalist medical training. In Freud'sdream about getting Irma to acceptthe injection of his "solution" to her difficulties, and in the tensedramahe restagedin the Dora Case,we find Freudengagedin a greatstruggleover the aveuof the hysteric,in which Freud'sown worries aboutsecuringacceptance of his work as "science" seemedto him to be at stake. For these hystericalwomenobligedFreudto removethe very conceptof a "symptom" from a medicineof anatomicallocalization, making it insteada property of the idiosyncratic ways the hysteric at once maskedand gratified her desire with her body and her words. They thus obliged

24

TRUTH AND EROS

him to ask what "the subject" must be for this kind of symptomformation to be possible.And with this changein the conceptionof the symptomand its subject,went a new conceptionof the aims of its treatment: an "analysis" was something other than diagnosis and prescription.It becamea matterof respondingto the other's"desire," of adoptinga sort of suspensionor epochein the face of that desire, which would allow for a neutral"floating" way of listening-aneutrality and a listening that would createthe spaceof "transference"that would structure the work of rearticulating this desire in "concrete discourse." Freud'sencounterwith hysteriawas thus an epistemologicalevent, since it causedhim to abandonor qualify what his medical training had taught. It was also a "self-analytic" event, since it causedhim to reexaminehis own desires,and their role in his new practice,to the point of recognizingthe problem of his own "counter-transference." It was also somethingof a "literary" event, since it causedhim to invent new ways of writing up a case-study(whose"prurient" interest he feared), and of composinga scientific treatiseon dreamsthat includedan analysis,accordingto that science,of how it was discovered. But Lacan stressedthat the encounterwith hysteriawas in just these ways and at the sametime an ethical event. As he pointedly put it, wereit not for his encounterwith hysteria,Freudwould haveremained an idealist: "I would say that Freud would certainly have made a perfectimpassionedidealist had he not devotedhimself to the otherin the form of the hysteric.,,30 For his encounterwith hysteria obliged Freud to see that in one's "symptoms" one desiressomethingother than one's good, and that this "other satisfaction" was somethinginherently rebellious to the medical norms of health. In her sexuality, the hystericwas a defiance of the "mastery" of medicine,its claim to know what was good for her. For the other satisfactionthe hysteric flaunted with her "symptoms," was one for which there could be no generalized,ideal, "normal" manifestation.In some sense,the questionof the hysteric was the questionof enclosingsexual desirewithin the norms of a proper "healthy" satisfaction.The "symptoms"of the hystericwere not to be defined by referenceto an ideal of a healthy sexuality; it was, on the

INTRODUCTION

25

contrary,the idealsof healththat hadto be rethoughtin orderto come to termswith the sort of "desire" Freudcameto think thosesymptoms gratified. Freud'stheoreticalquestion-Whatmust the subject be in order for such symptomaticsatisfactionto be possible?-wasalso an ethical one: What to do about this desire for which there was no "cure" ? There is thus an ethical senseto this new relation to medicine. In ancientSchoolsof Ethics, medicineand philosophywent together,for it was thought that what was good or virtuous to do was always connectedto what, medically speaking,was good for one. Mens sana in corporesano.Somethingof this tradition is preservedin our contemporary preoccupationswith the holistic "wellness" promisedby the "alternativemedicine" of a "new age"-ofwhich Lacansaid it leaves our jouissancecold. In short, through his self-analysis(which he reportshaving dreamt about as a medical dissectionof his own body), Freud would have departedfrom the tradition in modernmedicineFoucaulthad analyzed in 1962 in The Birth of the Clinic. But while Freud broke with this medicinethatidentifiedhealthwith absenceof pathologyin the individual organism,he refusedto revertto theearlierholistic medicinerevived in hypnosis,spiritualism, the laying-on of hands,and eventually,the archetypesof the collective unconscious. Lacanpresentsthe "homeostatic"or "hydraulic" modelsof Freud's speculationsas in effect resortingto the earlier characterof medicine, where what is good is good for you. "What else is this famous least tension through which Freud articulatespleasurethan the ethics of Aristotle?,,31Converselyhe takesFreud'sspeculationsthat thereexists something"beyondthe pleasureprinciple," connectedwith aninherent aggressivity,asdepartingfrom suchanethic. For if aggressivitybelongs to our identity, our relation to ourselvessupposesour relations with others,andcannotbe conceivedas an isolatedperceptual"apparatus." Lacanemphasizeswhat in Freud'saccountof our drives insertsus into this fatal imaginarypassion,for which there is no cure. For Lacan,if Freud was a "biologist of the mind" it was thus in the sensethat he discoveredsomethingin the body that endlesslytroubled the mind, somethingthat goes "beyond" what the mind conceivesor calculates

26

TRUTH AND EROS

as its good. The ethic of Freud'smedicinewas the ethic of this endless difficulty. And it is to this difficulty that Freud would have alluded when he declaredthat psychoanalysiswas an "impossibletask." The difficulty of Lacan'steachingor his style was to provide for the "school" of this ethic, or of this "impossibletask." It would not be a school whosemasterteacheshow to overcomethe ignoranceof each as to what is good for all. It would rather be the school of a master who not only refusesthe knowledgeof sucha Good or Ideal, but who makes the eros of our not-knowing the principle of a new kind of medicine,a new kind of philosophy. Lacan was the orator who taught of the difficulty and the violence of our relation to our ideals,and of the passionand the cost of saying the truth about ourselves.He was the orator who introduced this difficulty and this passioninto the very conceptionof contemporary philosophicalactivity. He wrote no book; he left no fixed doctrine or principle of conduct.He left to thoseformed by his teachingto establish, if they could, the "book" of the ethicsof this strangenew "master in thought."

What then is philosophicaldifficulty? The later Wittgensteinspoke of the difficulties that arise when languagetakes a holiday from its ordinary,practically-rooteduses,entanglingitself in waysit would take a whole "therapy" in thought to undo. The later Heideggerthought he was confrontedwith another sort of difficulty, that of releasing philosophical thought from a "metaphysical" preoccupationthat would havedominatedits destinyin the West, rediscoveringa primordial "poetry." Perhapsdifficulty in philosophyis not always the same.A philosophermustdiscoveror define "his" or "her" difficulty, andthis difficulty becomeswhat is most distinctive abouthis or her philosophy.That is why philosophical difficulty is more than conceptualor rhetorical difficulty; it is also "subjective." Perhapsto startto think is to find oneselfin a peculiardifficulty one knows not yet how to define. And the problemof "style" in a philosophy is the problem of finding the words and the acts appropriateto the difficulty one thus discoversor brings to light. In any case,the

INTRODUCTION

27

styles of Foucaultand Lacan are difficult not simply conceptuallyor rhetorically, but in this "subjective" philosophical senseas well: a difficulty with "themselves"in the exerciseof their thought. It is that which makes of each of them, not just a brilliant historian or an original therapist,but a philosopher.But what is distinctive in their philosophiesfrom this perspective,is that eachconnectsthe difficulty he discoversto the ancientquestion,for which the enigmaticfigure of Socratesstands:What is the eros of doing philosophy? Indeed it is just in tying the philosophicalpassionfor the truth to their peculiar"difficulties with themselves"that they offer a distinctive imageof philosophyanda new sortof philia. The philia of philosophers would not lie in common love for the Idea, but in the passionate confrontationof their difficulties-with themselvesand with one another. To examine,discuss,questionor "read" the thoughtof another philosopher"philosophically," would thus not be to reconstructhis doctrineor his Idea, but to isolateand to rethink his difficulty. Philosophical friendship would be the passionof understandingthe difficulties of othersin termsof one'sown, and one'sown in relation with others.Suchis the sensein which Foucaultand Lacanwould havebeen friends. Each refrained from pronouncingon the work of the other, preferringinsteadto reinterpretor reintroducethe other'sdifficulty in terms of his own. One might thus say that their difficulty for us lies not so much in their doctrines as in their passions:in the kind of "experienceof thought" they tried todefine. That is why we might read them again today, not as authorsof implacablemonolithic systemsof thought,but as open-endedor unfinishedexercisesand experiencesin thought. To readthem in this way is to rediscoversomethingof the passionof their thought, and to raise again the ancient question of the passionof philosophy. In rereadingthe two in termsof their difficulties, I havethus sought, in this book, to isolateand define a difficulty or a questionwhich their work leavesus: the questionof what ethics is, has been,might be for us today.

Part 1

Lacan In psychoanalysisnothing is true exceptthe exaggerations.

-TheodoreAdorno

It happenedthat I did not publish The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. .. With time I learnedthat I could say a little more about it. And then I realizedthat what hadconstitutedmy path (mon cheminement)was of the orderof je n'en veuxrien savoir (I-do-not-want-to-know-anythingabout-it). That is no doubt what makesit that, with time, I am here still (encore), and that you too, you are here still (encore).1 This is what Lacantold his Seminarin 1972;thesearethe first words of his Encore. They suggestthat the Seminaron Ethics, the only one he wantedto write up as a book, enjoyedas specialplacein his oeuvre; he would have continuedalong his singular path, his cheminement, just becausehe would never be able to be done with it. The Seminaron Ethics was deliveredin 1959-60.It was the time of the Algerian War andthe political idealismit carriedwith it; andLacan arrangedto havethe portionsof the Seminardevotedto Antigone sent to his step-daughter,LaurenceBataille, then in jail for her part in the struggle for Algerian independence.It was also a dramatic moment for Lacan, and for psychoanalysisin France, following the famous DiscourseLacan had delivered in Rome six years earlier, which had becomea sort of manifestoof a split in the analytic institution. Lacan was the hero of that fateful institutional battle. And in the Seminar, Lacan presentsFreud as a kind of hero: the hero of a "revolution" in ethicalthought,who taughtof a "discontent"in civilization for which thereexistsno salvationand no reconciliation;the hero of a new kind of ethical practicethat might respondto the "tragedy" in our modern progressivist,scientific, "enlightened"culture. Therehad beentalk of tragedyfollowing the unspeakablebrutalities of the War. Sartre had said that in their uncritical enthusiasmfor 29

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consumptionand free enterprise,Americanslackedthe "tragic sense." Lacan thought as much of the "ego-psychology"of the New York School,throughwhich psychoanalysishad "adaptedto the reality" of America. In connectingthis "tragic sense"with the Freudiandiscoveryof an inherent"discontent"in our desire,Lacansoughtto introduceit into the domainof ethicsin a new way. Philosophicallyor intellectually,the "tragedy" of the EuropeanWorld War had beenunderstoodthrough Marxism andPhenomenology.Thesetwo kinds of thinking, as it were, had taken the place of ethics. But it wasethicsthatpreoccupiedLacan.It wasthe wholeconception of what our ethics are, which, he held, we neededto rethink. What was new or original in Freudwas to have reconceptualizedand reoriented our senseof ourselvesas ethical beings, promising something new, somethingother we might yet become.Thus, in theseyears in Gaullist France,Lacandeclaredto his Seminarthat this promiseof the Freudian"revolution" was before us still: the promise of something new in the ethics of our desire,our love, our eros, the strangebeauty of an original modern "erotic." A Revolution in Thought "The revolution in thought (pensee)that the effect of analytic experience brings with it concerningthe ethical domain,,,2 was thus, for Lacan,a revolutionin our very conceptionof this domain.Onedomain of ethics had been the ends of virtue, anotherhad been the rules of duty. Each had invented one way of raising the question of moral knowledge,or of what it is for us to have,or to acquire,a true logos aboutour lives. Why is one goal or good ratherthan anotherrational or wise for me to pursue?How can I know which rules or principles are rational for me to follow? If, in ancientethics, the rules of duty revolved aroundthe ends of virtue, for Kant it was the otherway around:the goodrevolvesaround the supremeprinciple of obligation.Freudwould thenhaveintroduced a third "revolution," redrawingthe map of the terrain of ethics. Kant had made duty abstract,separatingit from all "pathology," from anythingthat happensto us as sensualbeings.The problemfor Freud

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would be to rediscoverthe connectionbetweenethicsand "pathos"or experience,without reverting, as in ancient wisdom, to a supposed knowledgeof the good. In this revolution,Freudwould then reconnect ethicsand erosin a new way: both the knowledgeof the goodlife and the abstractrationality of the moral law would revolve around the "desire" to which eachof us gives testimonyin his unconscious. [Freud] set out, or set out again, from the ancient step of philosophy: namely that ethics can not derive from pure obligation. Man in his acts tendstowardsa good.Analysisputsdesirebackinto favor asthe principle of ethics. Even censorship,at first the only thing of desire to figure as morality, draws all its energyfrom it. There is no other root of ethics.3

The "step" ancientphilosophyhad taken in ethics was to raise the questionof how to bestlive one'slife. But what a "life" is, and what it meansto lead or conductor live it, havenot always beenconceived in the samemanner.To live a life has meantto discoveran essential natureor purity, to respondto one'sfate or destiny, to acquire selfsufficiency or autonomy,to maximize one's pleasuresand so forth. The questionof how bestto live hasvariedwith the conceptionsunder which peoplehaveplacedtheir lives andtheir living. In postulatingthe existenceof the unconscious,Freud was, in effect, offering a new picture of what it is to live one'sown life, to inhabit one'sworld, and to maintain relationswith oneselfand others: this unheimlichworld in which the egois not the masterof the house,or in which "the subject is chezlui in the unconscious." If Freud thus set out again on the ancientstep of ethics, it was by reintroducingthe problem of eros in our lives: the questionof ethical knowledge,the questionof giving a true logos or accountfor one's life, would becomean erotic problem.For the unconsciousis a strange and laborious sort of knowledgeabout our lives which we have repressedor forgotten; and the transferencethat structuresthe erotic "bond" of an analysis follows from the place this desire has in our living, of which the unconsciousis the knowledge.As Lacan put it in 1959: Why does analysis-whichhas brought such an important changein perspectiveabout love in placing it at the centerof ethical experience,

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which has brought such an original note, certainly distinct from the mode under which love had until then been situatedby moralists and philosophersin the interhumanrelation-why does not analysis push things further in the direction of what, strictly speaking,we must call an erotics?There is somethingthat merits reflection.4

This remark occurs in the midst of the picture of an analysiswith which the Seminar on Ethics opens: analysis is a demasquage,an "unmasking"of the relation a subjecthas to the "truth" of his desire; it is madepossibleby a bond of love, the bond of transference;and it aims at a certain "non-dependency"or freedom. And yet this unmasking,this bond of love, and this sort of freedom do not suppose or prescribeany norm for living. For what is "unmasked"is not a generalizablegood for all; the form of love that structuresthe unmaskingis not an altruism, or a sympathythat supposesknowledgeof such a good; what incites one to engagein it is not an abstractduty independentof all experienceof oneself;and the freedomit offers one is not a self-sufficiencyor a self-mastery. Unmasking the truth in analysis is thus not rooted in a general normativetheory asto who we shouldbe or what we mustdo. Psychoanalysisis not a sagesse,a generalwisdom as to what it is good to be; it is not a morale, a theory of a generalprinciple or rule of what it is right to do. On the contrary,it raisesnew questionsaboutthe placeof desirein the demandof Wisdom, and in the natureof obedienceto the Law of Duty, and so introducesa new task. In imagining the Cities of the Good or the Republicsof Duty, philosophyhassoughtto rationalize what is good for us, or the moral rules we must observe.Freud raised the questionof the place of "desire" in our ethical cities and moral republics,and of the placeof "discontent"in our "civilization." What can we make of ourselvesin virtue of this "discontent" which the effect of analytic experiencereveals? The picture Freud offered of what it meansfor us to live was thus a "tragic" one. It is a picture of a traumatic libidinal necessitythat exposesus to the fortune of our destinies and so divides us from ourselvesand one another.It is a picture of a basic "morbidity" that cannotbe avertedby anythingwe can know or calculateas our good. The storieswe tell of our lives, and which we can never stop writing

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in them, would betray this "truth" about us, this aveu of what it is that we love without knowing it. The Life of the Body A basicprinciple of psychoanalysisis that our life, evenand especially "the life of the mind," is an embodiedlife. But this embodimentis of a peculiarsort. Our bodieshave a part in our lives we had not recognized. We think with our bodiesin ways we had not realized. Analytic philosophershaveconductedthoughtexperimentsto determine whether or not we think we need ourbodiesto individuate or identify us: Could Jones start living in Smith's body? But in these conceptualexperiments,the body hasfigured asthe physicalorganism, or later as the physiological"hardware"our minds would "program." The Freudianor libidinal body would individuateus in our living in another,non-physiologicalmanner:it would submit eachone of us to a particulardestiny that confrontsus as an enigmaticcompulsionwe don't know what to do about. For our Freudian"embodiment"is a fundamentally traumatic one, and the unconsciousis the way this traumaworks itself out in the particularitiesof the living of eachone of us. That is why a "collective unconscious"is a contradiction in terms. Hysteriashowsthat if we think with our bodies,it is in idiosyncratic ways which no anatomycanclassify. But what Freudcallederogenous zonesare no more anatomicalthan are the hysterogenousones. The libidinal body is not the samething as the anatomicalor physiological body, and has anothersort of relation to our living. Nor is the libidinal body the instinctual body. For "drives," unlike instincts are not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction,but are submittedto an open-ended"plasticity," eversusceptibleto "substitutions" in their objectsandaims. Our drives areconstantlymissingtheir aims and deviating from their objects,and that is why our "desire" is not a "need" identifiable by what satisfiesit. Freud thus spokeof the "vicissitudes"or "destinies"of our bodily drives, picturing them as "brokenpaths"-pathsin our living that are not internally orderedor predetermined,but which "break" against the events that causethem to return on their histories and start up

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again. Even "affects" like anxiety, depressionor the "unconscious feeling of guilt," are not immediatementalstates,but rather statesof the libidinal body that go beyond the subjectthat experiencesthem, discoveringa complex connectionwith his peculiar bodily destinies. Our Freudian or libidinal "embodiment" is thus both "perverse" and "polymorphous."Our mouths,our anuses,our sexualorgans,our gazesand our voices,are thosebodily zonesin our living that are the sourcesof a libidinal "energy" whoseenigmaticdestinyrequiresof us a singular retrospectiveinterpretation.For Lacan, the basic senseof Freud'sbreak with his thermodynamicor hydraulic models was the discoveryof this non-methodicalcharacterof our bodily destinies:the "energy" that is thought to "push" the various drives through their vicissitudesis not one that can be calculated,but only interpretedafter the fact in its effects. It follows that while its effectscan be interpreted,the "work" of the unconsciouscan never be measuredor temperedas in a system of balances.And this is just what distinguishesit from the sort of destiny the body was thoughtto have in ancientethical Schools,what distinguishesit from hedonismor from the Aristoteleanmean. The promise of analysisis thus not a "balancedlife"but a sort of savoir-faire with this "incalculable" energy in our embodiedliving, whoseeffectscannotbe known in advance,but only read in the complexities, the maladaptations,the suffering, which make our lives our own. The Morbidity of Desire Lacanthoughtthat Freud's"pessimistic"speculationson the existence of a "death-instinct"play an essentialpart in his conceptionof our libidinal embodiment.Our desireis not only polymorphousand perverse; it is also "morbid." For through the singular destiniesof the libidinal body, one would be seekingone'sown dying; there is something in our living that prefersdeath.Thus at the start of his Seminar on Ethics,Lacanassertsthat analyticexperience,more than any before it, deepensour understandingof what the FrenchpsychiatristHesnard had called funivers morbide de La faute. It is for this reason,he declares,that we must count Civilization and

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its Discontentsas fundamentalwork, essentialfor understandingthe sort of beastwith which one is confrontedin an analysis.For in this work, Freuddiscoveredthat the superego(and its "culture of death") does not derive from social or psychologicalsourcesalone, but is a "structural" discontentof our own desire: its inherent "morbidity." The originality of Freud is to have shown that our ethical sensibility hasits roots in this fact, andto haveimagineda new way of conceiving our relation to it. The categoryof the "morbid" was a categoryintroducedby modern medicine.That was,at any rate,a centralclaim of Foucault'sThe Birth of the Clinic. In this book, he says that Freud didn't happento be a philosopher as well as a doctor; it was rather that in its history, "medicalthoughtis fully engagedin the philosophicalstatusof man.,,5 With whathe calls "the Clinic," Foucaultarguedthat modernmedicine brokefrom a previousholistic tradition, defining healthas the absence of diseasein the organsof a particularbody. The changebroughtwith it a new attitude towardsdeath.With Bichat, deathwas "individualized," or madean inherentpropertyof the pathologyof an individual body. At bottom, one does not die becauseone becomessick; it is rather becauseone must die, that one falls ill. The imageof death"attackinglife" wasthusreplacedwith the image of a "pathologicallife," and deathwas imaginednot as macabre,but as morbid. Thus the categoryof the "degenerate"becamefor the first time a positive medical category-thefigure of life caught up in the processof its own self-destruction,much as in the morbid nineteenthcenturyfigure of the "consumptive"genius.Therewasthus a profound alterationin the "philosophicalstatusof man"; Bichat would be a start of the rather morbid idea that deathis our "ownmostpossibility." As deathbecamea questionof individual "morbidity," diseasebroke away from the "metaphysicsof evil" where it had beenlinked to the problem of "fortune" in living: "Death left its tragic heavenand becamethe lyrical core of man.,,6 It becamesomethingthat singularizes us from within, somethingthat requiresof our body "a style of its own truth.,,7 In this respect,the new medicine of Revolutionary France would haverediscovereda Baroqueexperienceof deathand eroticism which, Foucaultsays,he will discussin a subsequentwork. Lacan found this sameBaroquesensibility in the categoryof the

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morbid in the thought of Freud. For, on the one hand, Freud linked the "silent" operationsof an instinct for death to the fact that there can exist no rule to know in advancewhat strangevicissitudesour libidinal bodieswill undergo.Thereis thussomething"beyond,"something "other" than what we think is good for us, and who we think we are, when we representto ourselveswhat we think we want or need."Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple" is not anotherprincipleof regulation, but somethingthat is always interrupting the "binding" of our energyto our purposes,submittingour eros to a whole entangledhistory. On the otherhand,Freudsaidthat thereis somethingfundamentally morbid in this "other satisfaction" that is peculiar to each and everyoneof us. That is why the morbidity of our desireindividualizes us, and why, in this sense,our deathis always our own. Our "symptoms" are the interpretationsof a fatality we cannotyet read,and the unconsciousis the knowledgeof this fatality at work in our lives. Psychoanalysisthus introducesa new kind of problem for ethical reflection: not the ancientproblem that we may live and act in ignoranceof what is truly good for us, but the modernproblemthat there is somethingin our desire that goes beyondwhat would direct us to whatwe think we want for ourselves.In particular,it raisesthequestion of fortune in our lives in a new way, for it links fortune not to the good we can know, but to the inherentmorbidity in our desirewhich takes us on paths we can never regulatenor foresee.Psychoanalysisholds that the "truth" of our mortal destiniesis not one for which there exists a generalwisdom, a generalmeansfor adequatingone'sliving to what is truly good for it. To give a true logos for one'slife is thus no longerto know how to wisely masterit, nor is it thereforeto submit to a masterwho teachesus how. A Causalityof Fortune What then is the fortune of this mortal erosin our living? Lacantook this to be the problem of a kind of causality irreducible to either a social or a psychologicaldeterminism.In what sensedo our libidinal bodies cause our symptoms, these maladaptationsto which our dreams, our compulsions,the stumblings in our acts and tongues, would bear witness?

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For Freud, this was the problem of "psychical causality" or of the effectsof the eventsthat breakopen new pathsin the network of our psychicalapparatuses.Following Lacan,Jacques-AlainMiller reconceptualizedit as the problemof "metonymicalcausality": the libidinal body would be neither a mechanicalnor an expressivecauseof our symptoms,but the "displacement"within a structure causedby a fundamentalor constitutiveabsenceor lack in it. Lacan,however,introducedthe questionof causalityinto an ethical setting. He connectedthe problemof causeto the ancientproblemof knowing how to respondto what happensto us. He connectedit to ancientreflectionson fortune, luck, or chancein living, to tuche and thus to the conceptof kairos, the opportunemoment,the"bon-heur." He tried "to put the accenton the encounterin the specifiedsenseof bonheur,or of the Greektuche,at the expenseof the automatismthat belongsto all function of adequation.,,8Thus "psychicalcausality,"or "metonymicalcausality" would be a "tuchical causality," a causality of fortune. Psychoanalysis would rediscoverthe sensein which "development is entirely animatedby accident, by the obstacleof tuche, insofar as tuchebrings us backto the samepoint at which pre-Socratic philosophysoughtto motivate the world itself.,,9 Lacan was not alone in returning to the ancientthemeof tuche in moral philosophy.Quite independently,BernardWilliams formulated it as the problem of "moral luck." As did Lacan, Williams connects the importanceof the problem to the insufficient attention paid by moral philosophersto ancient tragedy. For it is in tragedy that one would find the incompatibility betweenthe philosophicalideal of selfsufficiency and the "imperiousness"of contingency,fortune, tuche in our living. to More particularly,Williams finds that this incompatibility recursin an "erotic" context: in the attemptto reconcilethe passion of friendship with an ideal of self-control. Williams seemsto have a strongerthesis:that it hasbeena "limit" of moral philosophyto have sought to tell us in advancehow to respondrationally to whatever happensto us, and so to have asked of our reasonto make of us autonomousor independentbeings. But in reinsertingthis ancientproblemof tuchein a Freudiancontext, Lacan had somethingmore preciseand more dark in mind. In effect, he links the "fragility of goodness"to the "morbidity of desire." The

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reasonour goodnessis fragile is that our desireis morbid, and that is why our fortune and our destiny speakof a mortal truth that goes beyond any Aristotelean "excellencein living." Lacan's account of tragedy,andin particular,of Antigone,is, aswe shall see,distinguished by this view. Lacantook a decidelydim view of the developmentalstory of "psychosexual"stagesin a normalprocessof growth or maturation,whose deficienciesit would be the job of analysisto rectify. He declaredthat the great charts that tell personality-doctorswhat an infant must do and be at variousagesin orderto turn itself into a well-adjustedadult had no basisin biology. The erotic "events" of childhoodwith which Freudwasconcernedwere not at all of this sort; andhis aim in treating their effects in analysiswas not at all that of acquiring the habits of the genitally matureadult. On the contrary,talk of stagesmeansonly thatour oral, anal,sexual, our gazingandvocalizing bodies,are constantlyinterruptingthe regularities of our living, taking the occasionof what happensto us to undergoa processof frustration, repressionand regression,through which they confront us again in new ways. It is through this rhythm thatthe "psychosexual"eventsof our pastbelong,if not to our biology, then to our "bios," our lives. They become those "nodal points" aroundwhich Freudsaidour symptomsgrow like mushroomsin mycelium, where our living "straddlesthe unknown." Even affects like melancholyand mania are the responseof our bodiesto theseevents that break up our living and whoseeffects we cannotyet know. Lacan took Freud'sreconstructionof the "traumaticevent" in the Wolfman caseas exemplaryof the role psychicaleventsplay in our lives. That event acquiredits significance,or becamethe event that it was, only after the fact-nachtraglich-throughthe symptomatic recastingsFreudsoughtto unravel.Lacanthus referredto the "subjectivizations of the event which seemednecessaryto explain at each turning point where the subject restructureshimself."l1 That is why the "operationsof analysis" would be "those of history in so far as history constitutesthe emergenceof truth in the real."12 The sort of events with which an analysis deals would be such "turning points" in our relationsto ourselvesand to othersas mortal erotic beings.The aim would be to reconstitutethe "truth" they thus

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introduce in our histoires-a truth which always comes after and with which we are never done. The eventsthat makeup our libidinal destinieswould be eventsof a particularkind. They are the eventsthat are "forgotten" in what we sayanddo, andin who we areand become. They are the recurrenceor insistenceof somethingin those histoires that we canneveryet recount.Our unconsciousis the memoryof what we have forgotten. It is this Freudianconceptionof eventsthat Lacanwantedto reintroduce into the ancientdiscussionof tucheor fortune. The "fortune" of what happensto us would not, as Aristotle thought, be "defined by being able to cometo us only through being capableof choice,proairesis."13 It would rather be a matter of a "missed encounter,"une rencontremanquee.Eventsoccur too early, or their effects come too late, for us to be able to "assimilate"them in the portion of living that is governedby proairesis. Thus they remain en souffrance,recurring in symptomaticform. The problemof fortune is that things happento us which we can't regulate,and so we "forget" them and repeatthem in the disorderof our lives. But, if our fortune is not a simple matterof Aristoteleanproairesis, it is not either a matter of determinism.Libidinal necessity,this great ananke,doesnot determineor predeterminewhat we become.Rather, it puts the unconsciousto work; it suppliesthe unconsciouswith a chanceto work. Libidinal necessity,Lacansays,meansthat our bodies never stop "writing themselves"in our destinies.Thus, though our fortune as erotic beingscan never be foretold, the way it works itself out in the "censoredchapters"of our historiescan be interpreted.The "law" of "psychicalcausality"is thenneithersocialnor psychological, but "structural." The Laws of Our Desire

If there is thus a "law" of our destiny, a law of the "fatality" or "morbidity" of our desire,it has this peculiarity: we cannotknow it in advance.The art of reading it is not an art that subsumeswhat happensto us under a generalregularity. For the law of desireis not a generalprinciple of which one would be ignorant; on the contrary, it lies preciselyin the effects of occurrenceswe cannotplace under a

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general rule. That is why it is unlike what Hume called a "habit." Freudiantucheis incalculableor improbablechance.To readit is not to know how to predict and control it. Thus Lacan says "the Law" is not general, but "structural." It doesn'thappento desire;it "structures"the singularway desire"happens" in our lives. But if the law of desireis not a regularity, it is also not an interdiction, a sanction,a commandthat forbids. Freud held that all "secondary"repressionrestson a "primary" one. Lacanreads this as meaningthat the particularlaws that sanctionor forbid derive from a prior law that structuresdesireitself. This would be the premise of the fundamentaland paradoxicalFreudiandiscovery: that desire itself is the sourceof the moral law, the sourceof our moral obligation. Early on, in a letterto Fliess,Freudwrotethathe hadthepremonition that he was aboutto discoverthe origin of morality. He would tell the story of this origin through a kind of prehistoricfiction or myth. In Totemand Taboo,he thus recountsthe famousmurderof the "primal Father": it is when this dead father is turned into a "symbolic" one that our senseof moral duty would "begin." We have interpretedthe first rules of morality and moral restriction of primitive society as reactionsto a deedwhich gave the authorsof it the conceptionof crime. They regrettedthis deedand decidedthat it should not be repeatedand that its executionmust bring no gain. This creative senseof guilt has not becomeextinct with us. We find its asocialeffects in neuroticsproducingnew rules of morality and continuedrestrictions, in expiation for misdeedscommitted,or as precautionsagain misdeeds to be committed.But whenwe examinetheseneuroticsfor the deedwhich have called forth such reactionswe are disappointed.We do not find deedsbut only impulsesand feelings which soughtevil but which were restrainedfrom carrying it out. Only psychicalrealities not actual ones are at the basis of the neurotic'ssenseof guilt. 14

Thereis, of course,a problemwith this story: How could the brothers repentof their crime before the existenceof morality? The crime occurstoo early, or the moral descriptionof it too late, for it to be able to properly occur in Freud'sepic. Thus Lacanproposesto read it not as a descriptionof an actual historical occurrence,but as a kind of modern myth. He gives it a "structural" interpretation,saying that

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myth is "the attemptto give epic form to what operatesfrom structure.,,15 It is the "law of desire" to which Freud'stale would give epic form. Our desireis so "structured"by repressionthat it appearsto us like a fundamentalcrime that occasionsin us feelings of remorseor guilt. What Freud'sstory would then tell us is that "represseddesire" is basically a pleonasm,that the Law is our desire, is the imperious necessityof our desire. This law appliesto eachone of us. That is why if the neuroticis like a private or asocialmoral agent,a moral agentis a public, socialized neurotic. If obsession,hysteriaand paranoiaare like distortedpathological versionsof ourselvesas moral beings,our imagesof ourselves as moral beingsare like idealizedversionsof thesepathologicalconditions. And the principle that thus connectsduty and pathology, the principle that saysthat thereis no duty without pain is this: our desire is so structuredby the Law as to make of us "obligated" or "guilty" sortsof beingsbeforewe formulate just what our obligationsor duties are, and the principles that would govern them. Such would be the greatFreudianreversalin morality: we don't repressour desirebecause we have a conscience;we have a consciencebecauseour desire is always and alreadyrepressed. This reversalshedsa peculiar light on the long tradition in morals that holds that our desire is what we must struggle against, must restrainor control, in orderto be good or to do right. The postulation of the super-egomeansthat we gratify ourselvesin suchmoral struggle; it explainshow our desireis gratified throughthe very idealizationand de-eroticizationthrough which we come to demandof ourselvesits sacrifice.It explainswhy an "authoritarian"figure is not fundamentally someonewho lays down the law and says "no" to our desire, but someonewho assumesthe idealizedor de-eroticizedrole of such "authority," embodyingthe more basic law of our desire which always obligatesus in advance. It is then in this "structural" sensethat moral necessity,the necessity of "I ought," is fundamentallya libidinal necessityand draws all its energyfrom it. "Ought" is thus after all relatedto "is," but in a curious way Lacantries to capturewith the ambiguityof it faut: "it must"/"he fails." Putting desire back into favor in ethics thus raisesa particular problem: Can thereexist an "I ought" or an "I must"-a responsibil-

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ity-that is not just anothercommandof the super-ego?Can there be an ethic of what in our being-obligatedis prior to the formulation of any rule of conduct? That is the questionof the Freudian preceptLacan madehis own: Wo es war, soil ich werden. For this sollen is somethingelse than a Schuldigsein,and yet it not a simple mussen,somethingthat causesor determinesthat1become.And the ich to which the preceptis addressed is not an ego, not a genericentity the samein eachof us; the precept is not in this sensean appealto our "humanity." The ich is an "I" that doesnot yet, that cannotyet know who it is and what it will become. For the way "it" figures in our lives is through the improbabletuche of our fortune. The particular "ethical" problem with which psychoanalysisconfrontsus is, in short, the problemof not knowing the law of our own erotic fatalities. It is a problem which previous ethical thought had soughtto surmount in supposingthat thereexistssomethingor someonewho does know, someoneor somethingthat could adopt a "god's eye view" of ourselvesand our destinies.Freud'sdiscoverywas the discoveryof the erosthat underliesthis kind of supposition.Thenamewhich Freudgave to this suppositionandthe bondto which it givesrise is "transference." Transferenceis the suppositionof a subjectwho would know. And in analyzingit, Freudfound a way of letting us seesomethingof our basic incapacityto know, to masteror possessthe law of our own desire. Love, Truth and Transference Psychoanalysis thus introduces theproblemof a new kind of responsibility-the responsibilityfor our own desire.It involves a new kind of eros: that of telling the "truth" of this desire for which we can have no knowledge,but which is "written" in the puzzle of our destinies. An analysismustexposethe suppositionthat our desireis knowable. It must analyzethe confidenceor faith that somewhereor in someone there exists a knowledgeof it. This confidenceor faith is what Lacan calls our betise; the purposeof analysisis to deliver us from it. At the end of analysiswhat one would learn is that no one can know, not oneself, not even one's analyst. One sensesthe "presence" of the analyst, Lacan says, just when one credits him with knowing about

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this desirethat is disturbingone. And it is the analyst'srefusal of this confidence,or his not knowing, that would set the work of analysis gomg. In Lacan'seyes, analysis would be the form of love which never supposesthat it knows what is good for someoneelse; it would offer relief from the betiseof all those who have always known better. In this way, it would be distinguishedfrom philia and caritas. For philia is a love that brings men togetherin the knowledgeof the good that is the samein eachof us, and caritas supposesa knowledgeof salvation or grace.Lacanremarksthat Freudrecoiledin horror beforethe commandment"Love thy neighbouras thy self." And Freud said that he was not sadisticenoughto basehis treatmentin a sympathyfor his patient'ssufferings.Psychoanalysisis a form of love that is not based in thoseideal partsof ourselvesthat would allow us to masterour fate or to obtainsalvation.On the contrary,it would openup evenour first love, our love of ourselves,to a traumaticand fateful cause. Lacanputs "soul" and "love" into a single mot-valise;he speaksof our amour. Our souls would be inherently linked to our eros in a mannerthat is fundamentallytraumatic.The bondsof associationand identificationwhich our amourcreatescarry within them an aggressivity, a repulsion,a dissociationshownin what Lacancalls hainamoration (to be in love-hate). Tradition has taught us that love is what unitesus in reciprocity, complimentarityor fusion. Freud,saysLacan, would teachratherthat love is not what binds us togetherin a higher unity, but what "supplements"the hazardsandthe singularitiesof our libidinal destinies.For the truth of which our love stories speak is not fundamentallythat of an ideal symmetry or fusion, but of this structurallyenigmaticdesirewe would transferonto the asymmetries of the bond of analytic work. That is why the placeof sex in Lacan'sFreudianethic is not that of a mutual, normal "genital love." Rathersex is perverse;it is morbid; it is traumatic.It occursat the expenseof thoseidealizedself-relations that would unite us in the reciprocity of given equal positions,or in the mutuality in which we would compensatefor what is lacking in one another.Sexis not the samein eachoneof us; it doesnot separate us into kinds or genres that complementone another. Rather sex singularizesus in our libidinal destinies,and so divides us from our-

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selvesand one another.Thus thereare no "undivided" sexualassociations: il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.That is why there can be no sex betweencompletelyself-sufficientbeings,asthereis noneamongangels or "Platonic" friends. The eros of the practiceof an analysiswould thus introducea new ethical question,the questionof the responsibilityto somethingthat is prior to the just distribution of goods,and prior to the formulation of our obligationsand their principles.It would be a responsibilityto the "necessity"that is the law of our desire.This necessityis what Lacan calls "the real" as when he writes "the subjectis the responseto the real.,,16 Freud'srevolution in ethicscan then be picturedas the process by which the eros of giving a logos to our lives is reroutedfrom the Ideal to the Real that is its source. . . . a curious thing for a summaryreflection that would think that all explorationin ethics must have as its object the domain of the ideal, if not the unreal, we go, on the contrary, in the oppositedirection of a deepeningof the relation to the real. The ethical question,in as much as Freudmakesprogressin it, is articulatedby an orientationof the bearings (reperage) of man in relation to the real. To conceiveof it, we must see what has happenedin the interval betweenAristotle and Freud.17

The Interval BetweenAristotle and Freud To conceiveof the unconsciousas an ethical category is to rethink ethics; it is to define it in distinction from previous conceptionsof ethics. Lacan maintainedthat a readingof the great works of ethical philosophyshouldbe requiredfor the formationor trainingof analysts. But that readingwould mark a contrast.Psychoanalysis,rather than being an idealism, moves in the oppositedirection of deepeningour senseof our relationto "the real." Freudwould haveintroduceda new "realism" in ethics,as when he spokeof an analysisas an "education to the real." In Lacan'sidiom, Ie reel is not "reality." It is prior to the "realityprinciple" and the attemptto adjust the "pleasure-principle"to it. It is more "external" to us than the "externalworld," sincewe constitute our ideal imagesof ourselves(that is ourselves)only by excludingit or

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separatingourselvesfrom it. Le reel is ratherananke,libidinal necessity itself: it is this imperiousnessof our own eros which psychoanalysis deciphersin our living. We can't avoid it, can't avoid betraying it in the symptomswhich accompanyour formative self-idealizations. The "realism" of psychoanalysisis the realismof this necessityand its placein civilization. That is what distinguishesit from the philosophiesin the interval betweenAristotle and Freud.Psychoanalysis is an ethics "of the real," and confronts the "idealisms" of philosophical ethicswith it. In our troubledlibidinal existenceit finds somethingthat is prior to the "ideals" of Virtue, Duty and Utility, somethingwhich theseideals betrayand which they cannotavoid. It takesVirtue, Duty andUtility as "idealizations"of the discontentinherentin civilization; it treats them as "fictions" in one senseLacan gives to the term. The sexualimpassesecretesfictions which rationalizethe impossiblefrom which they derive. I don't say they are imagined; I read in them, like Freud, the invitation of the real which respondsto them.IS

The interval betweenAristotle and Freudis a very long one,roughly coextensivewith all of Westernethical thought. Apart from the question of Christianity, which assumesincreasingimportanceas Lacan goes along, we may neverthelessdistinguish three momentsin that history which, for Lacan, introduce new questionsor rework older ones-moments that are markedby the threegreatfigures of Aristotle, Kant and Bentham.Eachfigure is a figure of a different kind of ethical thought, involving a different view of the ethical bond, of the nature of ethical knowledge,and of the featuresof our experiencethat matter for such knowledgeor such a bond. Therewould thus be an ethics of the goodor eudaimonia,of duty or the moral imperative,andof utility or the calculableconsequences or actionsof the rulesthat governthem. What Lacan then does is to offer a sort of "psychoanalyticportrait" of each figure, or a "psychoanalysis"of the fictions of each kind of philosophy: the Good, the Law and the Useful would appearas idealizationsto rationalizeour bearingsin the real. What sort of bond, what type of obligation, and what new experienceof pleasureor jouissancemight come from the "invitation to the real" which Lacan, like Freud, would read in thesefictions?

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Aristotle's Friendship Aristotle offers Lacanthe supremeexampleof an "ethicsof the Good." Aristotle taught that "the Good itself" subsistssomewhereout there as the telos of all our various and sundry activities. Through proper patienceand self-restraint,men may come to know this supremeand "syncategorical"Good. The Good is lacking in nothing; it is selfsufficient, and thus, in knowing it, men would no longer do harm to themselvesand one another.For men are given to know, and to want to know, this Good by Natureherself.The most fully realizedlife, the onewith the greatestpotentialfor eudaimonia,consistsin actingupon this desire for knowledge, which, as a man, one would possessby nature.True friendship,of which merelyinstrumentalor pleasingrelations are imperfect versions,is the bond that ties togetherthose men who act upon the desire to know, thus discoveringthe harmony or accordwith themselvesand one another,which the universehas preparedfor them. And suchwisdom, such "friendship"-such"philosophy"-would be prior to the law of the City and its myths, evenwhen it is deemedwise to observesuch laws or myths, as in the case of Socrates'suicide. Lacanis amongthosefor whom suchan "ethicsof the Good" is no longer a real philosophicalpossibility for our modern scientific and industrial civilization; andhe dreamtof no othercivilization to restore it. Thus, when in 1959 Lacaninforms his then largely clinical Seminar that they must read the NicomatheanEthics, for they will rediscover in it the "field of experience"which they encounterevery day, it is in part to mark a "discontinuity" or "distance":we can no longer think of ourselvesas Aristoteleanpsyches,the excellenceof whoseactivities would constitute"virtue." The underlying"metaphysicalbiology" which supportsthe conception of eudaimoniaas virtue in the natural task of the soul, and the soul as the living principle in the activities of the body, is no longer credibleto modernScience.For the Nature known to modernScience is not intrinsically good,and doesnot reflect or indicateto us our basic ergon. And in order to know it, one does not have to know how to live well, to be virtuous,or discoverthe true harmonycharacteristicof philia. AlexanderKoyre is Lacan'sauthorityfor the change.The closed

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meaningfulworld of ancientcosmologieswould give way to an infinite universe of pointless particles; the natural world would no longer be thought to offer us an edifying spectacle:"Scientific discourseis somethingthat owes nothing to the assumptionsof the ancientsoul. And it is from this alone that psychoanalysisarises."19 An ethicalpredicamentwould follow from this fundamentalchange in the conceptionof Nature: "our bonheur has no worthy place in eitherthe macrocosmor the microcosm.,,20 Psychoanalysis would offer a view of eros in this modern world where our bonheur or fortune has no cosmic support. In what Freud called our "sexuality" or our "libido," thereis somethingfundamentallyrebelliousor inassimilable to our well-being or eudaimonia.It is not a matter of the virtues of a domesticor civic serviceto the aims of a physisthat would reflect it. It is not somethingwhich, when moderatedandrestrictedto appropriate occasions,servesto harmonizeus with the world of our activities. On the contrary,it is fundamentallytraumatic,and introducessomething "beyond" our participationin suchactivities. For Freud,our eros is at odds with our ethos; its occurrencein our lives is always unheimlich. Thus Lacan draws this contrastbetweenthe Freudiansubjectand the Aristoteleansoul: for Aristotle the soul or psychewas "the sum of the body's functions," whereasfor Freud "the subjectof the unconsciousis in touch with the soul via the body, here contradictingAristotle-mandoesnot think with his soul as the Philosopherthought.,,21 For Freud, the "thoughts" of the unconsciouswere like delegates that stand in for the body in its libidinal destinies.In this senseone "thinks" with one'sbody, andwhat provokesone to think in this way is somethingfor which the soul has no use. Hysteria would testify to this: the unconscious"thoughts" of the hysteric are not thoseof her body's functions, but rather of a desirethat defies any knowledgeof suchfunctions.And the samesort of "bodily" thinking would "happen to the soul with the obsessionalsymptom: a thoughtthat burdensthe soul-thatit does not know what to do with."22 Thus our libidinal bodieswould be constantlyintroducinginto our living thoughtsthat escapeand burdenour souls,interruptingthe harmonywith the world in which they find themselves. Accordingly, Freud had a quite different notion from Aristotle of the sensein which our thinking may be said to "move" us in our

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various activities. As libidinal beings we would be "embodied" in a differentway thanasAristoteleansouls.Whatwould "move" us would not be the needs or tasks defined by our ends or goods, but this imperiousdesirethat breaksin on such needs,and opensthe strange and entangledpaths of our singular destinies.Our bodies would be moved by somethingbeyond what in our souls might tend to our good, somethingother than this movementthat can be generatedor corrupted,but neverinterruptedandsuspended in the processesthough which we becomewho we are. Fundamentally,what would "animate" our bodieswould be their relation to this "other satisfaction."Thus Lacan arguesthat we may think of our World as tending to a Good we can know, only to the degreethat we have barred accessto this sort of satisfaction,and the way it moves us. Thoughtis disharmonywith the soul. And the Greeknousis the myth of thought accommodatingitself in conformity with the world, the world (Umwelt) for which the soul is responsible:whereasthe world is merely the fantasythroughwhich thoughtsustainsitself-reality, no doubt, but to be understoodas a grimaceof the real.23

For Lacan, the distancethat separatesus from eudaimonianethics lies in this "disharmony"of unconsciousbodily thought with respect to the soul, this incompatibility betweenour eros and our ethosthat would be characteristicof our modern scientific civilization and its "tragedies."Thus he seesAristotle's doctrine of friendship as having the consistencyof a great"fiction" that would "supplement"the basic impossibility, the basic Unheimlichkeit,of our libidinal existence-a fiction no longer credible to us. Lacan'sanalytic portrait of Aristotle concerns,in the first place,the great"desireto know," which enjoyssucha centralplacein Aristotle's conceptionof the relation of men to their good. A troublederoswould be at work in the tranquil reflective wisdom that infuses the notes Aristotle left for the leisuredLycenium lectures,to which men would gather,paying no fee, for the mere pleasureof "sharingin discussion and thought" concerningtheir happinessand their good. The lectures would not be an enactmentof the desirefor knowledgethat would be natural to man, as the Philosopherthought. It is not the casethat no

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difficulty, no peine, precededthis desireor worked itself out through it. On the contrary, Lacan maintains that it is precisely the sort of trouble that setsour bodiesthinking that provokesus to want to know our good, and to know the Good from which it would derive. Such indeedis one senseof his punning "translation" of psycheby tame.Inherentin our ameswould be this amourthat disruptsthe more or less temperatepursuit of our good; and that is what makes the "fiction" that the world be just so orderedas to harmonizewith this pursuit such a pleasingone. Thus it is not that the most fully realized life is the one that acts upon the desirefor knowledgethat Nature is kind enoughto give us. It is ratherthat our psychesareformed through an amour that troubles us and escapesour knowledge.That is why menwould everwish to attaina wisdom,andto enterinto a friendship, in which this trouble would have no part. The "philosophical" desire to know would thus have its sourcein the disturbancethe libido introducesinto our living. It would be the -thesuppodesireof the greatbetisewhich Lacancalls "transference" sition of someoneor somethingthat knows. As such it would in fact go back to a remark Socratesmakesin Plato'sSymposium:I may not know the good, but I do know somethingaboutthe erosof the search for it. Aristotle would, as it were,"naturalize"the pursuit for truth aboutwhoseeros Socratesthought he knew something.The supposition of Aristotle's teachingor paideia would be that it is of the very essenceof the soul to seekthis knowledgeof which the impious men would be ignorant-justthe desirethat Socratesknew how to induce in the young men of Athens. In his Seminaron Transferenceof 1960-61,Lacanwould continue his discussionof ancientethics through a minute commentaryof the Symposium,the dialogueof the friendly contestin which men deliver to one anotherin turn great discourseson the natureof the Eros that possesses them. The "transferential"characterof the discussionwould be exposedby Socrateswhen he tells thesemen that Diotima had said to him one day that Eros is fundamentallya lack, and that to speak truly of eros,or to want to know it, is to speakfrom this lack. In this mannerSocrateswould displacethe discussionof eros onto the prior questionof the erosof suchdiscussion.He would displacethe question of eros onto a prior desire to know about it, and its relations with

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happinessor the good. And that is just what he himself would know best. It is what would make of him a new kind of master:the master of this desire-to-know,this pursuitof truth, that would submitmen to a greatagon with and amongthemselves,andso requireof them a new techneand correspondingvirtue. Doxa would no longer be enoughto guide the conductof free men, or the pursuit of their happiness. For Lacan,this displacementwas not so unlike the one Freudwould discovercenturieslater in his erotic agon with the hysterical women of Vienna. In somesensethe hysteric, and indeedanyonewho enters analysis,would be in the Socraticposition of not knowing his good, while knowing somethingaboutthe erosof its pursuit.For, in masking her desirein symptomswhosemeaningshecould not say, the hysteric was demandingof her doctor that he tell her that meaningor produce the knowledge of the desire or eros that was possessingher. This demandis what establishedthe bond and the struggleof transference dramatizedin the Dora Case.Similarly it was just throughan ignorance thatSocrates(in whomLacandetectsa numberof hystericalsymptoms) inducedin the eros of his young interlocutorsa demandfor a knowledgeof the good they should pursue."This is how Socratescan give birth in anyone to his knowledge, a knowledge, which, in fact, he didn't know. In this he resembleswhat Freud much later called the unconscious. "24 It is from this sort of "transference"that would derive Aristotle's picture of a physiswhose beneficentends each man may discoverin his soul, thereby finding that good to which his habits or his ethos shoulddirect him. The Good Itself would, in effect, be a transferential entity, a vast subject-supposed-to-know; and it is thus that it would supportthe "patienceof the soul in toleratingthe world,"25 for which the soul would be responsiblein its being.The "sharingin thoughtand discussion"of philosophicalfriendswould presumethis Good,in much the sameway as God would be the transferentialassumptionof prayer. "If Aristotle supportedhis God through this immobile spherefor the usageof which eachfollows his good, it is becauseit is meantto know that good."26 And, for Lacan,what Aristotle calledphilia is thus "what representsthe possibilityof a bondof love betweentwo of thesebeings" eachof which "is in the world ... to identify its good, its own good, with the Good that shinesforth from the SupremeOther."27

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What then is the natureof this "tension" in the soul'spatienttoleranceof the world, which it owesto the wisdom of the SupremeOther? What is the natureof this troublesomeerostransferredonto the desireto-know-the-goodthroughwhich philoi would cometo recognizeand chooseone another? Lacan'sportrait of Aristotle is of a manwho wishedto know nothing about perversion,nor, therefore, about sex. "What constitutesthe body of sexualdesireis simply classifiedby Aristotle in the dimension of monstrousanomalies:it is the term "bestiality" (or "brutishness") he uses concerningthem.,,28 Aristotle's ideal "virtuous" friendship would be a friendship "out-of-sex." "The Horsexe-thereis the man ,,29 In the "speculations"of the souls upon which the soul speculated. of true friends therewould be, asit were,somethingmissingor lacking: the other partner. "What arisesunderthe designationAristotle offers of the sex relation," declaresLacan, is very exactly what analytic experienceallows us to recognizeas being, at least on one side of the sexual identification, the male side, as the object ... that comesin the place of the missing partner (Ie partenaire manquant).30

Thus "sexuality" and "sexual identification" would be at issue in this ethics for which a commoncontemplationor "speculation"on a self-sufficientG00d would constitutethe greatesthappinessavailable to man. "The morality of sexual behavioris the sous-entenduof all that was said of the good.,,31 That Aristotle's friendship was a friendship of "the man," and in this sense,a male friendship or "bonding," seemsas noteworthyto us as it was unproblematicfor Aristotle. The Philosophermodeledhis view of philia on friendship among free men. Friendshipwith one's wife was to be made "proportional" to this bond, and friendship amongwomen was hardly consideredat all. And, of course,no one could be friends with a slavequa slave; indeeda slavecould not even be friends with himself. Moreover, the "manly" characterof this ancient kind of bond or friendship was thoughtto be, as it were, underwrittenby the Cosmos. The great problem of the active and the passivein matterserotic was

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supportedby the metaphysicsof Form and Matter: "this relation that was so fundamental,to which was referred each step of Plato, and then Aristotle, concerningwhat there is of the natureof things.,,32 In particular,the "grosspolarity" of active form and passivematteris to be found in the accountof the origins of the Cosmos(and thus of the good), in the understandingof how the human speciesreproduces itself, and in the seriesof analogiesthat connectthe cosmosto the city and the household,and thus to the arche in the soul. As such it was, for Lacan, "supportedonly by a fantasy through which they tried to supplementwhat can in no way be said, namely, the sex relation.,,33 A kind of male pederastywas at issuein this greatmetaphysicaland ethical agon of "friendship." And there is a sensein which philia, in its very concept,was "homosexual"for Aristotle: he taughtthat it was incumbent upon friends to remain the same and to be alike, if not throughequality,thenthroughproportion.Indeed,for Aristotle, a true friend is "anothersoul." For the virtuous man relatesto himself as to his friend, and he is friends with anotherjust becausehe is his own best friend. By contrast,the impious or incontinentman, who cannot remain the same, can't befriend his own soul, or a fortiori that of another.That is why true friends need an orthos logos, and are the friends of it. For it is through such a logos, in which is evinced the highestsenseof the soul's activities, that one most assuredlybecomes steadfastor unchanging,and finds the accordwith oneselfthat enables one to be friends with someoneelse who does the same. This samenessand this alikeness,this homosin the bond of friendship which the logos assures,might then be contrastedwith a "heterosexuality": a bond of love that would not have to bar accessto the amourof the partners,to this "other satisfaction"which the steadfast wisdom of self-sufficientfriends would, at all costs,not want to know anything about. What Lacan calls the "missing partner" in the philia of virtuous soulsis this Other that would in fact neverlet them be the same. Thus, in Lacan'sidiom, friendship-in-virtuewas a matter of ['arne arne ['arne, a love or friendship not so much of one man for another, as a common love of "the Man" supposedin each. But, "as long as ['arne arne ['arne, there is no sex in the affair. Sex doesn'tcount. The elaborationfrom which it resultsis hommosexuelle as is perfectlyread-

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able in history."34 And this kind of "man-sexuality"would be found among women as well: they too would come to ame l'ame in their partner,to the point of desperation,to the point of hysteria. The "truth" of philia would thus reside in such perversity-such amoralite. The lawless,bestial,disgracefulpleasuresAristotle wanted to eliminateas anomalieswould be just the onesof which Freudwould saythe neuroticdreams-Forhow else,Lacanqueries,couldhe "attain his partner?"Amoralite would be the mark of somethingin the eros of "the Man" which departsfrom his ethos,from the patient performanceof his ergon in city andhouseholdas in the rule of his own soul. It thus "subverts"the knowledgeof his good, and the natureof things on which it would be based.For it binds him to a harm that is more than an ignoranceof his good, or of the wise temperateperformance of his role; it is linked to an "aggressivity"or a "mortality" inherent in his ame and his amours. For Aristotle, the "steadfastness" of the soul that would be the mark of its true virility, would, in particular,be displayedthroughexemplary contrastto the tearful "womanly" responseto death,loss and mourning. In his suicide, Socrateswould evince that philosophicalcourage that would prefer deathto living in a world in which one would not be free to contemplateand realize the good. It is such couragethat philoi would look for in one another.To becomemost fully a man, Aristotle taught, was to try to "immortalize" oneselfand so imitate the Gods, and one would desire this immortality above all for one's friend as for oneself.By contrast,in the sort of amour that would be the "truth" of this desire it is "mortality" that is at issue: amoralite raisesthe questionof a friendship that might recognizethat harm or aggressivityinherent in the mortal characterof psycheas ame, and thus would involve "the Woman." Thus, when Lacandeclaresthat "ancientspeculation[followed] the path of what can manifestly only articulate itself as the good of the Man,,,35 his contrast is to the role "the Woman" would assumein Christian doctrine and mysticism. There, the "active" male sexuality would appearas an original "passivity" with respectto the Fault and the violence of its devilish temptations.God's Law would replacethe philosopher'sgood, and a "charity," which requiresthe renunciation of the vanity of one's own good, and with it, the new practice of

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preaching,would turn to the mostdowntrodden,the mosthumble,the most "unequal" of men. There is then a social or political consequenceof this analysis of Aristoteleanphilia from the standpointof Freudianamour, a consequenceLacan rediscoversin ancient tragedy. For it follows that the householdor city is not in its essencea harmoniousliving togetherin a natural or wise division of functions and tasks, but must in some mannercometo termswith what in our libidinal existencemustremain "disharmonious"in it, must remain "disproportional" or "unequal" to its noble totality: this other satisfactionin the life of our bodies.It is thus that evenas we are "political animals"-or"domestic"oneswe remain beingstroubled or "sick" in our eros or in our homes. Conversely,there exists a kind of tyranny in supposingthis Good that would harmoniouslygovern our domesticand civic live. Thereis a violence in this friendly desire for the true good, or the godlike immortality, of another. The fatal consequences of this tyranny or violenceare the oneswhich (as we shall see) Lacanfound dramatized in what was called tragedy,this art that is so close to analysisitself. Thus for Lacan, Aristotle's ethics are not to be separatedfrom his poetics.For the "well" in "living well" hadan aestheticor poeticsense: to live nobly, finely, beautifully. But whereasAristotle taughtthat the life of contemplationof the self-sufficientGood was the finest or most noble life, tragedy would presentus with a beauty in living, which could not know that Gooditself, or which dispenseswith the transferential betiseof its supposition:a beauty born not of the immortality of knowledgebut of the mortality of our amours. Thus tragedysupplied,as it were, the "primal scene"of philosophical ethics. Lacan would picture the famous rivalry betweentragedy andphilosophyin this way: beforehis leisuredfriends at the Lycenium, Aristotle taughtof a Good which the free man would cometo know, finding in it the sourceof his ethos,andin its contemplation,the highest eudaimoniaof which the soul is capable.Againstsucha wisdom prior to myth or law, Lacanplacesthe pictureof a tragic universe,wherethe law in living is prior to the knowledgeof the good, and fundamentally incompatiblewith it; whereone cantransgressthe law without knowing it, or only knowing it after the fact, too late, as in the case of Oedipus Rex-a world in which knowledge is compatible with the

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harm and violence of fortune, and in which the ideal of the selfsufficiency of virtue carries a terror it cannot understand;the world for which the Good itself appearsas a "grimace of the real." Kant's Conscience Kantian respectfor the moral law is a different sort of thing from a commonwisdom as to our good. Kant was radical in distinguishing the two. He said that thereexistsno generalrule or principle for what is good for eachand all of us. The task of moral philosophyshouldno longer be the vain attempt to supply us with such a principle, but should turn to somethingelse: the natureof the law that governsour moral duties, and of its rationality. Kant thought that all our particular moral actions or duties were ruled by a single greatgenericprinciple. But this principle was a "law" in another than this logical senseof its generality. It was also an imperative;it obligatedpeopleto freely apply it to themselves.It was Kant's view that the groundof this meta-obligation-theobligationto be moral-could not be rooted in prudential considerations,in our love for our good, or in our passionsand compassions,indeed in anything in ourselvesor our world that affects us. It is this that Lacanadmiredin the greatKantian attemptto distinguish morality from prudenceand instrumentality:"this radical separation of the pathological,of any regardfor a good, a passion,evena compassion. . . through which Kant liberated the field of the moral law.,,36 With this radical separation,the very conceptionof moral struggle was transformed.Our moral dignity or freedom would no longer be shown in overcominga harm of which the immoral man is ignorant;it is ratherthat the moral agentmustplacehimself underthe aegis of a law-giving principle, without any regard for himself as a being in the naturalworld, and, in particular,in oppositionto at least someof his natural inclinations. Lacan's portrait of Kant concernsthe role of the libido in this liberation of morality from "pathology." It would fall to Freud to analyzethe peculiar eros that is involved in the "respect" we would havefor the law, and for ourselvesin as much as we "respect"it. Thus Lacanfinds that an eroticismsuffusesthe Critique ofPractical Reason

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to the point of comedy. Its spirit is capturedin the title of his 1961 essay:"Kant with Sade." What then is the natureof this submissionto a law that would be freed of all that affects us? Kant's accountof it is peculiar and even paradoxicalin a numberof ways, not the least of which is his view that our true freedom lies in this submission. Kant held that our observanceof our moral duties cannot be basedin sanction,in any rewardor punishment,natural or divine: thosewould be merely prudential or instrumentalconcerns.Particularduties determineamong possibleactions which are permitted,which forbidden and which required. But simply to obey theseduties is not worthy of our respect. For what we respectis a person'sreasonsor groundsfor obeyingthem, or his relation to the law or imperativeto follow them. To be worthy of respect, to be genuinely "moral," our submissionto the moral imperativemust be both "free" and "pure": the moral law is the sort of law thatit is only if we freely applyit to ourselves,andthe application is free only if we have no non-moralreasonsfor doing so. The moral imperative is thus "categorical," and Kant pictures it as a voice that would addresseachone of us individually, telling us to "act as if ..." How then do we respondto this curious imperious voice, and, in the first place, how do we representits necessityto ourselves?It is nowhereto be found in our inner selvesor in the world externalto us. Our representationof it can never be merely subjectiveor objective. For the necessityof the "act as if ... " cannotbe transposedfrom the transcendentalto the empirical plane without being turned from a categoricalimperativeinto a hypotheticalone. The solution to this difficulty residesin the nature of the "as if" which the moral imperative never stops saying to us. The types, the examples,the symbolswhich we would makeof ourselvesin our moral activity would have the status of this "as if." They would be the "fictions" of our practical reason,and as such,would distinguishthis reasonfrom the theoreticalkind, basedon the "schematism"of the understanding.Thusthe gapbetweenthe transcendental moral law and our observanceof it would be bridgedby "analogy."Our submissionto the law would be modeledon the very laws of the "pathology" which we must excludefrom it. Thus we must take the moral imperativeas if it were an externalnatural law, as if our freedom in applying it to

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ourselveswere a natural causation.But at the same time, we must judgeas if the imperativecamefrom within us. Our relation to it must be "spontaneous"sinceit is what it is only if we ourselvesmakeit so; but it must also be "receptive" since it neverthelessconfronts as a categoricalimperative.Thus Kant says that the moral law confronts us at once like an externalfear and like an internal inclination. What we exemplify in ourselves,and for one another,in our moral activity, can thereforenot simply be good actions. In theseactions, we must symbolically or analogicallyembodythe empirically unrepresentable "law" that compelsthem. An imperiousvoice that confrontsus like an objectlessfear and an unlocatabledesire,the attemptto embodywhat this voice commands symbolically in our actions, displaying it in all the stories we tell of ourselvesas moral beings-allthis is ratherfamiliar in the realm of the "pathologies"Freud identified or diagnosed.We find such a voice in obsession,where one is compelledby a law one knows only through a "free" or non-hypotheticalapplicationto oneselfof elaboraterituals whosemeaningand sourceescapeone. It is shown in hysteria,where the necessityto freely show or exemplify oneselfbecomesa defiance of any "natural" knowledgeaboutit and its origins. And in paranoia, an imperious voice speaksto one in such an enigmatic fashion that one becomessingledout for the mission of interpretingit for the rest of the world. What is characteristicof such disordersis that the law or necessity that compelsthem is not to be found in the subject'srepresentationof himself or his world, but is rather only shown in the symbolizations that comprisehis "symptoms." In the ethics of psychoanalysis,one "judges" this necessitythroughthe interpretationof the symptomsthat manifest it and that "transcend"the subject'sconsciousinterestsor prudentialconsiderations.But what one thus interpretsin this ethical judgmentis the subject'sdesire,his eros. One judgesas if he gratified himselfin his symptoms;the presumptionis that in our symptoms,our erosconfrontsus like a law or necessitywe can'trepresentto ourselves. In postulatingthe existenceof a "super-ego,"Freud was in effect connectingthe imperious"voice" of moral conscienceto this necessity of our own desire that is shown in our symptoms,beyond our selfinterestor prudence.The super-egowas Freud'sway of analyzinghow

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we gratify ourselvesin our submissionto the voice of moral duty, and how we can thus become"sick" from it. The super-egois, as it were, Freud'sdemonstrationof the inherent amorality-thea.moralite-of our conSCIence. Freud's"secondtopography"that stagesthe interplayof ego,superego and id has often been read in the mannerof the Kantian moral struggle: the super-egowould strugglewith the demonicimpulsesof the id, as in Kant, duty struggleswith inclination. Lacan arguesthat in fact Freud had a much more complex and perversepicture of the interrelationbetweenthe two, which in turn servesas a readingof the eroticsof the Kantian struggle.This picture is capturedin what Lacan calls the "paradoxical cruelty of conscience":the more one's consciencetendsto becomecruel, the lessit is disobeyed;it becomesmore exigentthe more it is refined,more fastidiousthe more closelyit tracks one down in one's innermostor unsuspecteddesires.This paradox betrayswhat Lacancalls the gourmandiseof the super-ego--themore you feed it the more it wants. Lacan likens it to a parasitethat feeds off the gratificationsone affords it. The crueltiesof this rapacioushungerof the super-egois then what is involved in Freud'sdiscoveryof an "unconsciousfeeling of guilt," and of a "moral masochism"in which pain figures not as punishment for disobedienceto conscience,but as a conditionfor its very existence. And, indeed, there is a sort of perversecruelty to the categorical imperative as Kant describesit. For, while this imperative can't be basedin sanction,while no pain or sacrificecan ever be equal to it, it our desireto nevertheless,just becauseit is an imperative,presupposes transgressit. Our wills are not "holy" in the sense Kant gave to the term, the holy will being the onewhosegood actionsrequire no imperative.As moral beings,we are thus thoseunholy wills that desire to transgressan imperative,for which transgressionno pain or punishment can ever atone. Lacan thus proposesthat we read Kant along with his Frenchcontemporary,the Marquis de Sade.In the emergenceof libertinage, he finds somethingfor which Christianitywould havepreparedthe way: the discovery that there is something"unnatural" about our desire, our eros, that is irreducible to our "natural" self-love, or the love or

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our own good, and the passionsand compassionsthat follow from it. Sadeinventeda greateroticson the endlessdemonstrationof this truth. And it is just this truth, just this "eroticism" of the "unnatural"law of our desire that recurs in Freud's account of the way we gratify ourselvesin obedienceto the voice of conscience:Freud patternshis accountof the relation betweensuper-egoand ego on the relation betweensadistandvictim, or masochistandmaster.Moral conscience and sadismare both possibilitiesof a single basicstructurethat finds in desiresomething"unnatural" or prior to any good. Thus the sadist has so strong a super-egothat he identifies with it, finding his ego outsidein his victim. And, conversely,what "moralizes"the sadismof the super-egoare the processesof internalizationand "de-sexualization" through which it becomesattachedto standards,and comesto be exercisedas though from within. That is why the sadism and masochismthat the neuroticshowsin his symptomswould provide a demonstrationof how we gratify ourselves,beyondour self-interest, in our submissionto the voice of duty. And more generally,Freudfinds that there is masochisticgratification in the "selflessness"of charity and forgiveness,as thereis sadisticgratification in pity or compassion for the sufferingsof others. It is thus our erosthat makesof us obligatedsortsof beingsprior to our observanceor transgressionof any particular obligation. And, conversely, our eros, our desire, confronts us as an imperative or necessitywe cannotlocatein ourselvesor in the world of our interests. The reasonwe cannot find it within or without, the reasonfor its "sublime" transcendence to us, is that it is structuredby repression. "The law is represseddesire," declaresLacan. This, for Lacan,is the basicprinciple of Freud'slargerpictureof the place of the institution of morality in modern society. A civilization that would baseitself in an abstract"law" of duty, liberatedfrom any "pathology," is a civilization that unleashesthis other law, which is the symptom of our eros in it. "The gourmandisethrough which [Freud] characterizes thesuperegois structural,not theeffectof civilization, but discontent[symptom] in civilization.,,37 Theprimary repression,the repressionthatis "structural"to civilization, or is symptomin it, is thus not an interdiction that happensto

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fall upon the natural inclinations we might representto ourselves as hypotheticalimperatives.Rather it determinesin a "categorical" mannerhow our erosfigures in our embodiedlibidinal existence.Thus, we don't just happento internalizepaternalinterdictionsor figures of interdiction: "That (to paint a picture) castrationis dueto what Daddy brandishesover his brat playing with his wee-wee-'We'llcut it off, no kidding, if you do that again.' "38 Structuralrefoulementis prior to such familial or social repression. Refoulementis the necessity,beyond any prudential calculation, that says we must, that we can never stop, applying interdictions to ourselves;it structuresthe mannerin which we do so, and the way we gratify ourselvesthrough it. Through interdictionsand figures of interdiction we come to presentto ourselvesand one another this "primordial" fact that we are constitutedin our responseto the law of our own desire. Thus our idealized identities as moral beings are built up from somethingin our familial and social existencethat we can never fully idealize: our bearingsin relation to "the real." "Morality" as distinct from prudenceor instrumentalitywould thus be categoricalnecessitybefore it is rational principle. That is why Kant's attempt to make the two coincide, or have the voice of conscienceask us to do only what, as rational beings, we must anyway agree to do, cannot explain how it is that we gratify ourselvesin responseto this voice. This notoriouslywell-disciplined Konisbergian bachelorwantedto know of this gratification in our amoursonly in the idealizedform of theexhilarationof a respectreleasedfrom interest, passionand compassion.For he wantedthis gratificationto fall within the boundsof reasonalone; he did not want to know anythingabout its amoralite. From his diagnosisof this "respect"from the standpointof amour, Freud derived a new sort of ethical concern.He worried that with a civilization that would baseitself, or its "regulative ideals," not in a supremegood but rather in the sublimity of an abstractLaw, there goesthe problemof this "discontentin civilization" that no agreement asto principlesalonewill eversettle.For beyondthe pleasureprinciple, beyondwhat we think is good and what we do to secureit, there in fact lies an aggressivityand a deathinstinct which recurin the cruelties of our moral conscienceand its categoricalcommands.That is why

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ratherthan a "metaphysicsof morals," Freudworried aboutwhat he called "the culture of the super-ego":this "culture of death." In identifying this problem,Freudcould no longeradoptthe Kantian aim of turning us into noumenalselves,showingone anotheranalogically our moral worth as "ends in ourselves."For freedom in erotic mattersis not moral autonomyany more than erotic "servitude" is a matterof submissionto a deterministicor lawlike nature.The problem is not that of the "heteronomy"of following our natural inclinations, but rather that the law itself, this nomosof our desire,is something heteros,somethingfundamentally"other" in our living which we can't representor control in advance. In offering a way of interpretingor judging the relation eachof us has, in his or her living, to this "other," Freud raisedthe questionof anothersort of eroticsthan Kantian respectandanothersort of obligation than Kantian duty: the obligation we have to ourselvesand one anotheras thoseamoral beings,the truth of whoseerosis "discontent in civilization"; our obligationto what in our desiresubmitsus to our obligations. Bentham'sUtility JeremyBenthamannouncedanotherway to replaceand to redefine the ancientethical philosophiesof prudenceand eudaimonia.Instead of "transcending"the entire world of the good, he soughtto rethink what can be known to be "good" in it, discoveringin its empirical or naturalhistory a principle and a new meansto secureit for ourselves. This new conceptionof the good, and the kind of knowledgewe have of it, is what Lacan admiredin Bentham'sphilosophy: If there was somethingthat aired out a bit all this Greek treading-ofwatersurroundingeudaimonismit wasdefinitely thediscoveryof utilitarianis.... [UJrilitarianism doesnot meananythingelse than this: the old words, thosethat alreadyserved,it is that for which they served,which had to be thought.39

In Bentham'sideaof the good,the rationality of pain, or the relation betweenpain andmoral reason,receivesa new conception.On the one

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hand,it is not that the immoral man is ignorantof a harm he is doing himself, but that he can be brought to seeclearly this his pleasurein his immorality will not payoff. On the other hand,it is not that there exists a greattranscendentlaw of duty to which, independentlyof all experience,rational agentswould cometo assent;it is ratherthat our experienceitself may be so orderedby our reasonas to obtain what is best for the greatestnumber. Thus, pain is rational not becausethe reasonof our duty requiresthe sacrificesof our unholy wills, and not becauseit is rooted in a prudentialignorance,but becauseit can be usedto betteror improve us-it can be usedto get us to do just what we ought to do. Benthamthus had little use for the sort of moral asceticismwhose erosLacandetectsin the Kantian "respect"for the law: the real worth of this asceticismamountsonly to its utility, and nothing but, and on Bentham'saccounting,that was not enough. Therewas nothing "transcendental"aboutBentham'snew principle of utility, nothing"symbolic" or "analogical"aboutthe way it governs our actions.On the contrary,the moral vocabularythat refersto such transcendence or makesuse of such symbols, must be reinterpreted. This is illustratedby a centraltopic in Bentham'sthought: the topic of punishment.Benthamthoughtthat the symboliccrueltiesof analogical punishments(of the type "an eye for an eye") were inefficient and gratuitous.Thus we shouldreplacethe public violenceof suchpunishmentswith the efficiency of enclosedrehabilitory ones.That was the greatthesisof his Panopticon;and it is well to recall that the principle of utilitarian moralswas formulatedin the courseof a greatunwieldy project to reform the penal code. The Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation shows his preoccupationwith a minute and detailed rethinking of law and punishment:ten volumes were projected. Centralto Bentham'sreform in our very conceptionof ethicsis this replacementof a transcendentlaw and its symbolismwith the more efficient work of a naturalone. In this light, he proposedto reexamine our old ideas and words of sympathy,compassionand self-sacrifice, and to reinterpretour old political fables of a divine or natural right. In law as in morals,Benthamwas indefatigablein his argumentthat it is much moreefficient to governthrougha knowledgeof the goodthat

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really motivates people than through an appeal to principles upon which they would haveto agreeirrespectiveof what they might naturally want. It was a time when doctorsand civil servantsstartedtheir long disputewith jurists over the knowledgeof that to which law and moralsshouldapply. Suchwas the "civilization" of utilitarian morals: the one that would no longer have any use for the "fiction" of a supremeLegislatoror Judgeof which Kant dreamt,the one that would govern through empirical knowledgealone. Lacan'sportrait of Bentham'sutility is aboutthe part our eroswould havein this new and more efficient type of civilization, and in the new kinds of knowledgeit brought with it. If it was through a principled refusalof all "pathology" that Kant would free the analogical"fiction" of the moral law, it was throughhis rejectionof just this sort of fiction that Benthamwould cometo calculatethe utility of moral action. For Lacan, thesetwo great opposingprinciples of modern morals would have a common sourcein a law of a different kind: the law of the discontentsof a libido releasedfrom its serviceto the endsof ancient eudaimonia. ThusLacantook the centralwork in Bentham'svoluminouswritings to be The Theory of Fictions. It was this theory that "allowed a great step in taking off from the old storiesof universalsin which one had beenengagedsincePlatoandAristotle, which haddraggedthroughout the entireMiddle Ages, andwhich still smotheredLeibniz, to the point where one wondershow he could have beenso intelligent.,,40 It was Ogdenwho extractedthis work from Bentham'swritings in the thirties, and Jakobsonwho then brought it to Lacan'sattentionin the fifties. For Lacan, the importanceof the work is that it spelledout the logic of Bentham'sattemptto rethink that for which our old moral words had served. In this opuscule,Benthamdraws a distinction between"fictions" and "fables." "Fictions" are not illusory, imaginary or misleading things as are "fables": wingedhorsesandunicornsare "fabulous,"not "fictions," entitiesin this new useof old words. In his logic, Bentham dreamtof a complete,fixed and unexceptionablesetof linguistic categories referring to the completeworld of existing things. Most of our words, he held, refer to fictitious entities-numbers,relations and classesare fictions and so are abstractnotionsof spaceand time. The

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only "real" or non-fictitious referentsof all our talk arethose"bodies" to which our sensesattest.It follows that most of what we say to one another is quite empty or useless;yet some of it can be translated into terms or sentencesreferring to real bodiesthrough paraphrastic redefinition: fictions asdistinctfrom fablescanberedefinedby translating the sentencesin which they occurinto othersentenceswhoseterms refer only to bodies. The rest of what we say, at least as far as our scienceand our law is concerned,is fabulous waste. In particular, Benthamheld that such terms as "duty," "title," or "power" would remainfabulousunlesstheywereredefinedasapplying to situationsin which one personis punishedby another:"without the notion of punishment,no notion could we have of either right or duty.,,41 Thus, he arguedthat it makes no senseto talk of "rights" exceptin caseswhere there exists a law protectingthe right through correspondingsanctions. In as much as it is not wasteful,emptyor misleadingchatter,all our moral and legal discoursewould refer to bodies,their pleasuresand pains.As Benthamdreamtof a languagereducedto the bareessentials of all and only expressionsthat can be translatedto refer to bodies,so he dreamt of an exhaustiveclassification of all possible crimes and matchingpunishments,suchthat the potentialoffendermight be able, through simple calculation,to discoverthat crime doesnot pay. The word "all-encompassing"which Benthamusesto characterizethe utility principle in morals capturesthis ideal mastery that inspired his theory of languageas of law. The logical parsimonythat would rid languageof its fabulouswastecorrespondedto the scrupulousclassification of what, in the sufferings and gratifications of people can be usedto improve them. Thus Bentham'slogic was a legislative one, and his legislature a logical one. The great meta-principlewas that there should be no waste in languageas in law: that is how he would "air out" the preoccupationsof ancienteudaimonia.Lacan'squestionis then what our eros had to do with this greatenterpriseof a "moral hygiene"at oncelogical andlegal. He approachesit from the standpointof what he termsla jouissance.It may be,he says,thatlaw (Ie droit) is essentially a matterof the division, the distribution and the retribution of "what

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there is of jouissance."But, he adds, "la jouissanceest ce qui ne sert arien" (is what is useful for nothing).42 The famous principle of utilitarian ethics saysthat the rightnessof any action is determinedby the contributionit makesto the happiness of everyoneaffectedby it. But for this principle itself to be useful,there mustexista goodway to estimatethe consequences of actions(whether or the onesit by this is meantthe actualor the intendedconsequences would berationalto expect).Onemusthavea completeandindividualized knowledgeof the population to which t~e principle is applied. And in addition one must also assumethat peopleare governable,that through the applicationof sanctionsthey can be got to do everything they oughtto do. ThusBenthamdeclares:"Naturehasplacedmankind underthe governanceof two masters,pain and pleasure.It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determinewhat we shall do.,,43 Utilitarian ethics thus assumesthe existenceof a particular kind of knowledge about us, a particular way of controlling our behavior. BehindBentham'sprinciple standsthe emergenceof a greatclassifying and enumerating"Baconian" naturalhistory of our customsand habits. Bentham'scompendiousefforts to tabulatewhat would serve"the greatestnumber"would soonbe linked to the new activity of assigning numbersto everythingthat was called "political arithmetic" or "statistics." This collection of numbersmay seem to us indiscriminate,as thoughtherewerenothingso unimportantthatit shouldnot be encompassedby it. But, Ian Hacking arguesthat it would payoff later in the discoveryqf an intrinsic "objectivity" of statisticallaws independent of any Laplacian determinism.44 Statistical inference and utilitarian ethics were to become tied to one another, and thus it would be askedwhetherBentham'stalk of the contributionto the happinessof "everyone" was to be understoodas aggregativeor distributative, averageor total. The "moral science"of the countingandaccountingof our behavior, to which Bentham'slogic belonged,would thus help to shapeour "fiduciary" societiesof calculatedrisk. It would alter the very idea of what it is to govern people, and for people to govern themselves. And yet it would have its limits, its problems,its opponents.Just as

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Bentham'spenal reformswere to have other consequences than those his assumptionsmadeobviousto him, so he had notoriousdifficulties in completinghis vast moral and legal catalogueof humanutility; the ideal of total masteryseemedever to elude him. For Lacan,this failure exposeswhat might be calledthe compulsive characterof Bentham'sinterminable cataloguing.Karl Marx called Bentham"the genius of bourgeoisstupidity"; and there is a kind of betise in the suppositionthat there is nothing in our experienceof pleasureand pain that cannot be so classified and tabulatedas to improve us. Lacan analyzesit as a bhise about our eros, about this ;ouisssancefor which we have no use. He says there is something aboutour ;ouissancethat would makethe perpetualfailure that drove Bentham'slogic everfurther a necessaryone;it would exposea "despotism" in the principle that we may be broughtto do just what we ought to do. "The Despotismof the Useful" is the title of a study of Bentham's Panopticon,written under the influence of Lacan, by Jacques-Alain characterof BenMiller. 45 For Miller, the "synoptic" all-encompassing tham'slogic is shown in the "panoptic" characterof his correctional werehousesto "materireform. For, in effect, panopticestablishments alize" Bentham'slegal and moral classifications;and conversely,those logical and legal classificationswere "prison-housesof language"restrictedto the fiction of function. In both instancesthe principle would be that everything should be put to as many uses as possible, that everything and everybody should be made to serve the maximum numberof purposes,without any wastein time or language. But thereis, Miller argues,at leastoneutility for which this wasteless universecanoffer no account:thatof the pleasuretakenin theprinciple of utility itself (or in the pain of its absence),namely Bentham'sown utility. The pleasureBenthamtook in his all-encompassing"fiction" is, for Miller, a pleasurethat can't be classifiedby it: it doesnot figure in any of the bodily pleasuresand pains, of which legal and moral categorieswould be the non-fabulousfictions, and Panopticestablishmentsthe materialrealizations.For it comesfrom a sourceunthinkable for such categories.The terrible cheerfulness,the indefatigableoptimism of the utilitarian reformerwould betraya desireto mastersomething he cannot explain: that there exists in our suffering and our

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gratificationssomethingthat cannotbe put to useto servethe greatest number, i.e., this "waste" that belongsto our libidinal existence,to our jouissance. This is where, for Lacan,Freud comesin: It is neverthelessherethat Freudeffectsa turn of the pendulum(fait jouer un retour de bascule).For experienceshowedhim that oncethe good is thus encompassed, pleasuredries up, and comesfrom elsewhere,and, in fact, from the fiction that holds up through the will of the symbolic (provient de la fiction qui tient au gre du symbolique).46

In this practice,Freuddiscoveredthat a patientclings to the imperious manifestationof his own desire,which are his symptoms,beyond any reasonableassessment of their utility, beyond anything that can be encompassed in the tabulatedworld of rewardsand punishments. In our Amour,thereis thus a jouissancethat occurselsewherein living than in avoiding bodily pain or seekingbodily pleasure.It is shownin those caseswhere the two mastersparadoxicallyconspirewith one anotherso that we takepleasurein the experienceof a pain, or require painin orderto experiencepleasure:casesof theguilt or moral masochism that exposesthe eroticsof our relation to crime and punishment. It is of this jouissancethat Lacan says that it is good for nothing. For it is not somethingwe measureor number(se chiffre), but only decipher (se dechiffre); it is what "never stops writing itself" in our libidinal destinies,or throughthis "fiction" that derivesfrom the symbolic. Its necessity,the imperiousnatureof its "writing" is that of the "law of desire"; and in this sense,Lacan remarks,what this law says to us is "Jouis." Thus Lacan saysthat the basic aim of Bentham'stheory of fictions was to make logical necessitycoincide with libidinal necessity:the necessityof pleasureand pain. In this respectit would resemblethe Stoic attempt,with the discoveryof material implication, to identify logical with practical or ethical necessity.But since La jouissanceis preciselysomethingwe have no use for, since it escapesany attempt to numberor measureits role in our living, this attemptis bound to fail. The "despotism" of the attempt to know and control the two mastersof our behaviorwould derive from this basiclack of mastery, this basic impossibility, this "failure" of our jouissance.

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And in the ethics of the useful there is thus a violence aboutwhich this ethics wants to know nothing. It is the violence that is done to everythingabout our jouissancethat distinguishesit from our needs, the violence to the "expenditures"or "investments"of our libidinal energyfor which there is no "return," no calculateduse. Thus Lacan declaresthat "the old words,thosethat alreadyserved"would basically have served for this: "that there be the jouissancethat is necessary (qu'i! y ait La jouissancequ'iL faut).,,47 Utilitarianism would be, as it were, a vast entangledpun on this "faut," which can mean "fails" as well as "is necessary,"which is pronouncedlike "faux" (false), and which is part of the expression "faute de," where "faute" connotesfault or lack, as in the expression "faute de fautre," for want of the other. The "translation"would be, roughly, that the jouissancenecessaryfor the "fiction" (or falseness) of utility (namely that peoplebe useful or servefor something)is the one that fails them, for it is the one they incur for want of this other (jouissance),becauseof this lack or fault. It is by referenceto the "failing" of our jouissancethat we would cometo want to makeourselves"useful" in the Benthamitesense,and so contribute to the happinessof the greatestnumber. We become capableof serving,or beinguseful,for something,declaresLacan "for want of (faute de) knowing how to jouir otherwisethan beingenjoyed or had (joui ou jouej, sinceit is preciselyLa jouissancethat we should not have (or should not fail us): c'est precisementfa jouissancequ'if ne faudrait pas.,,48 It is becauseof the existenceof this "other satisfaction"that people, particularly in their erotic being or in their amours,should prove so exasperatinglyrecalcitrantto the efficient calculationsof the utilitarian philanthropist:why, in all their "symptoms"they shouldseemto want somethingelse than what is obvious to the utilitarian should be good for them to do. To be unableto seethis perversity,or to seeit just as more inefficient waste, yet good for nothing, is, as it were, the constitutive betiseof utilitarian morals. That is why utilitarian reform could never understandwhy symbolic bonds of desire, and the sort of violence, crime and aggressivitythey carry with them, should be more important to peoplethan the classifiedutility of their bodily pleasuresand pains.It

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is why Bentham'sgreat project to naturalize and rationalize what makesus governableas corporealbeingsafter all involved a fabulous asceticismof a type he wouldn't recognize:it requiresa "sacrifice" of this jouissancewe have no use for; this jouissancewhich must be extinguishedor "dry up" in the kind of good he soughtto encompass. And it is just this asceticismthat recursin the caseof his own motivating desire,and the compulsivebusyworkof the investigationsit imposed on him, to help mankindimprove itself, telling it how it can be got to do only what it is good for it to do. In swinging backthe pendulum,Freudwould thus ask: What causes us to want to placeourselvesunderthe measuredguidanceof the two mastersof pleasureand pain? What is the "necessity" in our desire that makesus think we mustobservethe dictatesof utility: this {aut? What, in other words, is the nature of the pleasurewe take in the "fiction" of the theory of fictions? "The only thing to point out to the utilitarian is that man, if he still clings to this puppetry(tient encorea cette marionette),only takespleasurein this fiction. ,,49 For the stark utilitarian referenceto the bodily mastersof all our behaviorswould appearto Freud as having the consistencyof a "fiction" -of an "idealization" of the imperiousjouissancethat is always failing us. Thusthe aim of a psychoanalysis would not be the utilitarian one of making us productiveor "well-adapted"to the world in which we function. It would rather be about this "failing" in our amours, and in the words we use to tell of them, that would causeus to ever want to make ourselves"functional" or "useful for society." As an "ethics of the real," psychoanalysiswould not supposeto know what it might be in our pleasureand pain that points out what we should servefor. It is rather the ethics of what Lacan cameto call l'insuquec'est: the "unawares-that-it-is,"or the "lack-of-success."This is the sort of "impossibility" that the fiction of our utility would betray.

The friendship of the augustphilosophicalmaster,the respectof the dutiful law-abidingmoralist,the utility of thecheerfulsocialengineerthrough Lacan's portraits of these great ethical figures we see the lineamentsof anotherkind of erotics: that of analysisitself. For the analyst is neither a wise friend who knows the Good in which one

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flourishes,nor a supersensible ego who presentsto one theimperative of one'sobligations,nor an efficient mentalhygienistwho knows how to rehabilitate one's unproductiveor dysfunctional behavior. Thus unlike the ethical ideals that would "center" us by making us wise, autonomousor productive,psychoanalysisplacesat the heartof experience somethingthat "decenters"us, submittingus to the singularity of our desire,the unpredictablefortune of our amours.It thus raises the questionof anerotic bondthat would not be basedin communality, reciprocity or equality, but in the singular "bearings" each has to the real. Aristotle told of what brings us together as a harmonious purposefulnatural species.Kant explainedto us that a reflection on our freedom or autonomy requires us to observea sublime law of mutual respect.Benthamworked out for us how to attain the good of the greatestnumber through a logical ordering of the pleasuresand pains that would govern all our actions.Freud askedrather how we might be broughttogethernot by prudence,abstractduty or calculated utility alone,but in our sharingof the "structure"of repressionor the law which eachmakeshis or her own accordingto the contingencies of his or her fortune-thestructureof the "decentered"subjectand its responseto the real. What sort of "community" or "fraternity" can we have as divided subjects,eachrespondingto the real in the destiny of his or her amours? For Lacan,the questionof sucha bondis onethatwasraisedthrough the problemof "beauty" in living, which accompaniesall the changes in the interval betweenAristotle and Freud.It is found in the eros of tragic drama,with which ancientphilosophyrivalled, andwhich recurs in the Baroque and in Shakespeare.It informed the eros in Kant's doctrine of the "disinterested"love of the beautiful, which Romanticism, and then Modernism,would explore. It is at issuein the eros of the transgressivebeautythat onewould seekin the excessesand waste of utilitarian culture. The questionof this bond is the questionof a Freudian"aesthetic" inseparablefrom the Freudian"ethic." For Freud, "beauty" would no longer consistin an "imitation of the Good" (as Aristotle taught); it would no longer be the "symbol of morality" (which Kant took it to be); and it would involve this jouissancegood for nothing (whose utility Benthamfailed to calculate).

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What is the strange"value" this beautyhas for us, which is not a matterof "quality," or ofthe formal accordor harmonybetweenform and content?For Lacan,it is the value of sublimation: the capacitywe haveto presentto ourselvesthis reel that would lie at the sourceof the idealizing ethical fictions secretedin the interval betweenAristotle and Freud. Sublimation is the possibility "civilization" offers us for somethingelsethanthe symptomsof our discontent.That is why there is a curious kinship betweenanalytic and aestheticexperience. The Value of Sublimation Sublimationis in effect the other face of the explorationFreudpioneered of the roots of the ethical feeling in as much as it imposesitself in the form of interdictions,of moralconscience.It is the faceof thatexploration which, for any ear at all sensitive,is designatedso improperly and so comically in our century-outsidethe analyticfield, I mean-asthe "philosophy of values.,,50

Sublimationis "valued" in civilization in a way that would seemquite peculiarto what has beencalled the "philosophyof values," for in it we satisfy just what we would otherwisesatisfy in our symptoms:our imperiousdesire. Its value is thus not of a good it would be rational or wise for us to pursue.We "invest ourselves"in sublimatoryobjects in a different way from suchgoods;we extractfrom them, saysLacan, a satisfactionthat would demandnothingof us. The "value" of sublimation in civilization is thus an "erotic" one: a value for our amesand our amours. Sublimation is thus the face of Freud'sexploration of ethicsthat is turnedtowardsits promise:the promiseof a new kind of bond that would bring us togetheras subjectsof the unconscious,the promiseof a new erotics. Sublimationis thus an ethical as well as an aestheticcategory.And Lacan proposesthat we read the history of art, or of the "aesthetic feeling" togetherwith the history of love, or of amour. There is of courseSocrates'famoussubmissionto the vision of the Form of Beauty in the form of a beautiful boy, which is the initiation into philosophy. Another illustration given by Lacan is to be found in troubadour poetry: in somesensewe idealize the art-objectin just the sameway

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as the troubadouridealizedhis lady. In our amourswe find the same sort of idealization,the samesort of "distance"that we associatewith the experienceof art, and conversely,in our experienceof art we rediscoversomethingof our amours. It is thus our amourthat infusesand troublesthe "aestheticfeeling" so often held to have a "civilizing" effect on us. That is what we find in the great discussionsof the formal purity, the untouchableselfsufficiency, or the harmoniousself-accordof the beautiful object, or the distancethat would separateit from our mundaneexistence,and the aura it would thereby acquire for us-or, what amountsto the same thing, the demandthe beautiful object would make on us to renounceor suspendour "interest" in the existenceof things. Indeed it may be said that the Kantian doctrine of "disinterest," along with the later Heideggerianreadingof it as Gelassenheit,goesback to the mystical and Neoplatonicview of our love-affair with God, where "beauty" or "sublimity" has taken the place of "divinity." Sublimationwould be Freud'sway of analyzingthis love-affair we have with the things we call "art." We would relate to thoseobjects just as we relate to ourselvesand one anotheras love "objects"; we "overvalue"them in the way we "overvalue"thosewhom, in love, we idealize.Thusthey becometheobjectsof our depressions, our guilt, our anxiety and our mourning; they becomethe sourcesof the fluctuating Imaginary play of projection and introjection. They becomethose peculiar uncannyparts of ourselvesthat always seemother than ourselves:thosethings in which we die and live again, occasioningin us feelings of omnipotenceor dejection.And, in the form of heritageor tradition, they cometo confront us as a sourceof "symbolic debt," or as what is also known as the "anxiety of influence." In Freud'stheoreticalor "metapsychological"definition of it, sublimation is a kind of "vicissitude" or "destiny" of the libido. It is a "deviation" from the aims andobjectsof the basicpartial drives,which would be distinguishedby this: Unlike the caseof the repressionthat structuresour "private" symptomsor compulsions,it acquiresa "public" approval,or is introducedinto a socially acceptablespace.Sublimation is, as it were, the "public space" of this "other satisfaction" whosefatal effectspsychoanalysisreadsin the intricate pathologiesof our lives. Freudassociatedwith it what he calleda "secondaryvalue":

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through it one could gain fame and fortune out of what others must repress,incurring their envy and jealousy. But this "value" would derive from the "primary" deviationof the sublimatorydestinyof the body, a deviation which in fact never stopstroubling those to whom such reputationaccrues. Lacansaysthat this public spaceof approbationwhich sublimation createsfrom our perversedesireis a very odd one. Why shouldsociety approve of the objects which we make from the deviations of our libidos, and then credit with a basically uselesssenseof "elevation"? What is the "value"of that? What can society find satisfying in it? ... Therein lies the problem of sublimationin as much as it is creativeof a certainnumberof forms, of which art is not the only one-andit will be questionfor us of one art in particular, the literary art, so close for us to the ethical domain.51

One must ask, in particular,in what sensethe spaceof sublimation is a "public" one. For, as a libidinal destinyor vicissitude,sublimation is alwaysthe destinyof a particularbody, whosefortune is not known in advance."Sublimation," declaresLacan "is always individual.,,52 And what makesa sublimation"public" is not somethingthat reduces or eliminatesthis singularity. The public of sublimationis not, in this sense,a public of a commondenominator,or communality.Sublimation is rather the public spacein which our singular perversebodies may make contactwith one anotherthroughthe creationof beautiful objects that stand for them, without thereby abolishingwhat makes them singular. It is just for this reasonthat it createsa public unlike the onesin which peopleare broughttogetherin pursuit of a common purposeor good, and in identification with a commonideal. Sublimation involves anothersort of "bond" among us. Central to Lacan'saccountof what makesthis bond an amorous one is a themethat recursin all the literatureof love: the themeof the "loss of the object." Psychoanalysiswould take a radical view of this loss: our histoires are constitutedthrough a fundamentalsort of loss, which exceedsour representationsof it, and which becomes"forgotten" in the symptomaticmannerin which we live. Lossfor psychoanalysis is thus event and fortune. It is only in the hazardsof finding it

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again,after the fact, thatloss becomeswhat it is for us. Thus,in finding "substitutes"for the lost maternalobject, we would not be replacing somethingwe could otherwiserepresentto ourselves.Ratherit is only by comingacrosssuch"substitutions"in our lives that we realizewhat it hasmeantfor us to havelost it. That is why, accordingto Lacan,we are always demandingin love more than any "proof of love" can afford, and why to love is to give somethingwe do not possess. Sometimesputting it into German(Das Ding), Lacangives the name La Chose,The Thing, to what it is in our loss that we neverpossessor represent,but repeatin our histoires. He then definessublimationas "the elevationof an object to the statusof The Thing.,,53 Sublimation would not representthis Thing lost in our amours;it would "recreate" the vide left by this loss, which is structurally "unrepresentable"for us. Through this recreation, the loss of the object would discover anotherfate thanthoseof anxietyor depression,perversionor neurosis. As an illustration of this definition of sublimation, Lacan takes a sayingof PabloPicasso:"I do not seek,1find." Artistic or sublimatory "creation" is to find again this thing one was not looking for; it is to come acrossagain for the first time somethingthat one was not intending to find. It is the "surprise" of what we were not looking for, and so has the sameeffect on us a good analytic interpretation.Thus, if our "creations" disclosesomethingabout us, it is not a truth we were seeking:a truth about "intentions" we might know aboutindependentlyof them. Rather,our creationsmustsurpriseus, andso come to singularizeor individualize us in a different way from the goodswe more or less rationally undertaketo acquireand consume.Eachof us must "find again," must be surprisedto find again,what he or shehas lost, must thus find a style or idiom that is closer and more precious to onethan anythingonewants,"intends"or canpossess.Sublimation is the public spacein which thesesingularidioms or styles encounter and intersectwith one another.That is what we love in it, that is what we value it for. The ancientideaof poesiswould then offer only a restrictedconception of our sublimations;for our "creations"do not "imitate," do not expressor represent,somethingthat could be known to be already there"before" them. Accordingto Lacan,a bettermodel is to be found in the Judaicand later Christian story of God creatingthe world out

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of nothing,from which our notion of "creativity" derives.He saysthat God'sjudgmenton the seventhday, when he restedand contemplated his work of the previous days was, in effect, an instanceof divine sublimation. Or, at least, it would be, were it the casethat God's satisfactionwith himself on this day of "vacation" derived from the "vacancy" or vide from which he startedout. God would be a "Creator" in the FreudiansenseLacan gives to the term, if this vide were that of the Thing, or the lost object. Then his senseof omnipotenceof having creatingthings once and for all-would be the symptomof the unfathomabledesirethat provokedhim to createthe world in the first place. The reasonwe value and even "overvalue" sublimation is that in such creation, civilization permits a satisfactionof this reel which is incommensuratewith the "value" of our ideals or our goods.It is in this light that Lacanproposesto analyzethe "fine arts": thosearts that would be "fine" or "beautiful" in themselves,and not simply in what they represent.The "radical" or "sublimatory" function of such art would residein the way we love it, and so find it "beautiful." It would explain,for example,not just why a particularpaintingis beautiful,but why paintingis. In paintingwe would love what remains"invisible" in the visions it offers us; in architecturewhat is "uninhabitable"in the habitationsit makesfor us; in literaturewhat is "unsayable"in what it saysto us. Eachart would then find a way to recreatethe vide of our amours. Thus, in the Seminar on Ethics, Lacan says that apart from the functionalpurposesof buildings,therewould be in architecturebeauty or sublimity; throughtheguisesof religion or ideology,our monuments and dwellings would addressus and involve us as erotic beings, as ames. The sublimation, which would distinguish architecturefrom merebuilding, would lie in the relationof our experienceof built space to what it is in our erosthat is fundamentallyunheimlich: what in our eros is at odds with our ethos or our mannerof "dwelling" in the world. Archictectureis the attemptto encloseor encompassthe space of this vide in our dwelling as in a temple.And it would then be on the walls of this temple of our sublimationthat, as it were, our paintings would figure. It is several years later, in his Seminaron the Four Fundamental

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Concepts,that Lacan advancesthe famous thesisthat the "value" or "radical function" of painting is the sublimationof our experienceof "the gaze" regardedas objet a. Lacan arguesthat "the gaze" is the samesort of "object" as are the breastor feces in the psychoanalytic conceptionof them; and it can be, in its own way, as devouring or expulsive as thesemore familiar objets a. The gaze is thus an objet whosefate in our amourswe can neverrepresentor know in advance; it is the object before which we would never stop giving ourselvesto be seen.Or, put in anotherway, the gazeis the "tuchical cause"of the fortune of seeingand being seenin our lives, and thus of the regard and self-regardthat enjoys such an importantplacein our ethics, but whoseeros is revealedin pathologicalform in the paranoiaof being observedor watched,in the defiant theatricsof hysteria, and in the perversionsof voyeurismand exhibitionism. The "radical function" of painting would be to recreatefor us the spaceof this object:to find againthis spacewhich, in Picasso'swords, we were not looking for, and indeed,which we can neverseeas such, sinceit is always it that is looking at us. Sublimationin paintingis the art of the surprisethat makesvisible to us the function of this "gaze" that remainsinvisible in the great passionof our self-envisagements. We would, as it were, elevatethe canvasto the statusof this Thing, and, in contemplatingor "beholding" a tableau, what would "hold" us and fascinateus would be this "annihilation" characteristicof the loss of self in our amours,with its attendantmania, melancholiaand mourmng. In the Seminaron Ethics, however,it is the questionof the "literary art" that is particularly importantfor Lacan-thisart "so closefor us to the ethical domain." It is perhapsin this art that we best seethat there is more to ethics than the "values" of the philosophyof values, more than the philosophical"fictions" of what would be good for us. And the literary art that, for Lacan,would first stagethe irreconcilability between"beauty" in living and the philosopher'sGood is the art of tragedy. Thus the promise of Freud's exploration of the ethical feeling, and of the face of it that is sublimation,would rediscoverthis ancientart. And the tragedythat bestshowsthe essenceof tragedyis, for Lacan, that of Antigone.

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Antigone Onesenseof thepropositionthatpsychoanalysis hasa "tragic essence" is that it is itself mortal: it knows itself to havea finite or fatal history. In his polemicswith the I. P. A., Lacan underscoredthis "mortality": the "School" of Psychoanalysisshouldhave none of the ecclesiastical ambitionsof a church,whose"group psychology"Freudhadanalyzed. It is in the retrospectivelight of this mortality that we may understandthe kind of heroismwhich, in 1959, at a heroic momentof his own history, Lacanattributedto Freudand to his great "revolution in ethics." It was then that Lacan declaredthat psychoanalysishas a tragic essence;it was then that he was fascinatedby the figure of Antigone, fascinatedby her in the sameway he saysthe choruswas, by the eclat of her beauty,the beautyof a fatal passion,an "inhuman" heroism,at once fearlessand pitiless. Throughoutthe many changesin his career,Lacan was fascinated by a series of feminine figures, to which Antigone may be said to belong.At first therewas the "erotomania"of the crime of the patient he called Aimee (the Loved One), and the Papin sisters,the servants who decidedone day to slice up their bourgeoisemployers,producing a great affaire that was to capturethe imaginationof the surrealists. Later there would be the lady of the troubadours,this untouchable mattresse.And by the time Lacangot to Encore,in 1972,therewould be the mystic and her jaculations: these cries of an enigmatic and imperiousjouissanceonewould experienceknowing nothingaboutit. Lacandecidedhis own ecrits were of the sameorder as thesecries, as this jouissanceof which one can know only that oneexperiencesit. At the time of Charcot,one would have tried to reducesuch jouissance to sex, to affaires de foutre. But for Lacan, it was just the opposite. One had only to look at Bernini's Baroquealterpiecerepresentingthe passionof Saint Teresa-thisMaranosJewesswhose conversionto Christianity would discover an unnameableecstasy-hesaid, to see that somethingelsewas involved: "this face of the Other, this face of God, as supportedby the feminine jouissance.,,54 "I believe," he declared "in the jouissanceof the woman in as much as it is en piUS.,,55 And in Lacan'saccountof the "origins of psychoanalysis,"starting

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in the circle of Charcot, it is, again, feminine figures who play the crucial role. Indeed "the hysteric" would be the woman who taught Freud about the unconscious,setting him off on the path of the new nonidealisticethicof whatonehystericnamed"the talking cure." Later therewould bethe greatquestionFreudonly succeeded in formulating: What doesthe womanwant?Lacantook this to be the questionof the central and unresolvedproblem in psychoanalysisof the "feminine OedipalComplex,"or the relation of "the woman" or of "femininity" to the necessityor structurallaw of desire.He arguedthat becauseof the determinantrole of the "desireof the Mother," this questionwould not be avoided in the conception and analysis of the "masculine" Oedipal Complex Freud had delineated.And so, in Sophocleantragedy, it was Antigone rather than her father who capturedLacan's attention. For, in the fascinationthe feminine figures exertedover Lacan,and accordingto Lacan,over Freud,there would lie somethingwhich the tragedy of Antigone's death would dramatize: the possibility of a feminine beautyand heroismthat would comefrom this en plus than that for which men serve,this excessbeyondwhat societyholds to be good for us, this Thing held in souffrancein what we are or may become.Thus, therewould be somethingfatal aboutthe femmesthat held the psychoanalystin fascination; and it is in referenceto this fatality that the practiceof analysiswould assumeits "tragic essence." If there is a tragic heroismin Freud'srevolution in ethics,or in the new figure of "the analyst" whosepeculiarerosLacansoughtat once to define and assume,it may thus be said to residein this: Freud did not recoil from his fascinationwith this fatal feminine beauty;he did not seekto evade,to ignore or to repressit. He struggledwith it; he soughtto analyzeit; he tried to provide for a new kind of bond in which it would have a part. We may find this preoccupationin the heroic "self-analysis" he conductedin correspondencewith Robert Fliess,the nose-doctorof bisexuality.Could therebe a bond of love in which this fatal "femininity" would haveanotherfate than repression, or in which the truth of this en plus, aboutwhich we canknow nothing, might find a way to be saidor articulated?Could therebe a passionate bond in truth-andin this sensea new kind of ethical philia-that

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would include the question of "femininity," and therefore, of this necessityin our amourswe can neither possessnor master?A whole revolution in ethicswould be requiredto evenformulatethe question: What does the woman want? It was thus at a heroic momentof his own Seminarthat Lacanwas fascinatedby Antigone as the heroine of a tragedy whose"essence" Freud would have rediscoveredin the heart of our modern scientific civilization. In Sophocles' play, he sawthe dramaof theincommensurability betweenAntigone's passionand the law of the city, with its supposed goodor justice, upheld by Creon. Thus Antigonewas not for Lacan what it had been for Hegel: the drama of a conflict or contradictionbetweenthe spheresof the city andthe household,which would be resolvedat "the end of history," or in the modernstate.It was rather the drama of an irreconcilable tort or wrong, and the inhumanbeautyof Antigone'sself-sacrificialresponseto it. Thus, still very much under the spell of Kojeve, Lacan declaredthat just at the momentin which Hegel thoughtthat the work of History was coming to its end, "the divergenceeclate[burstsopen] betweenthe individual and the city, betweenthe individual and the State.,,56 It would fall to Freud to analyze another kind of "disorder" in history: "another dimensionthan thoseof the disordersof the Stateand the problemsof hierarchy.... [H]e was dealing directly with the powersof life in as much as they open onto thoseof death; he was dealing directly with the powersof life that flow from the knowledgeof good and evil. ,,57 For Lacan,Antigone'Stragedywas that of this "other dimension,"and that is why, he remarks,Anouilh wasnot so wrong to restageAntigone as a kind of allegory of Fascism.For the sort of violencein the city or statewhich Antigone'sfate exposesis one for which there can be no end in history: it is the immemorial violence of what always remains "forgotten" in our historical memory. In Lacan'svision of the play, Creonbecomesthe figure of the Mtise that lies in placing our faith in a Good men can know. What in the play is called Creon's"error" would consistin the confidencehe had in a Good that is, or could be, integrally embodiedin Dike, the justice of the city and of its written laws. Thus, when, on the basis of the "universalizablemaxim" that one cannotequally honor a traitor and

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a hero, Creonforbids Polynice a funeral, he showsus that "the good cannotreign over all without there appearingan excessaboutwhose fatal consequences tragedywarns us.,,58 Antigoneis by contrasta figure whosepassion,whoseworld, is that of death and the "powers of life." Her life is surroundedby death. Thereis the deathof Oedipus,her father, which leavesher abandoned; and Lacan remarksthat the Chorusrefers to her as La gosse,the kid (he pais). Thereare the deathsof her two brothersthat set the tragedy on its course;andAntigone,the kid, becomesthe figure of the impossibility of mourning. And finally there is her own death, what Lacan calls "the seconddeath." Antigone's deathis her own in the precise sensethat it is her own concertedaction that leadsto it. In becoming the heroine of the drama, Antigone will becomethis "so-voluntary victim," who preferredto die than to live in the city of Creon. Her fateful passionfollowed anotherlaw, anothersort of law, one that cannotbe written, and of which no man may be said to possessthe knowledge.Thus,Antigone'sheroismwasnot at all the "philosopher's virtue," the heroism of the Good we may know, as when Socrates definescourageas knowing what one is entitled to fear. On the contrary, Antigoneis fearlessassheis pitilessin theintransigencesheshows to her sisterIsmena:an intransigencewhich the Chorusrecognizesas like that of her father. If there is something"inhuman," something"inflexible," in what Antigone must do, if thereis somethingatroce abouther Ate, it is that she willingly commits and acceptsthe punishmentfor a crime which brings the very "legality" of the City itself into question,exposingits unintendedand irreconcilableviolence. In assumingthe fatal consequencesof an act for which the city providesno "image of virtue," no Goodto "imitate," Antigone,this willing victim, would discoverwhat, in our passions,Sadewould later call the unnatural"crime." The eclat of Antigone'sbeautywould lie in this incommensurability betweenthe unwritten law of her passionand the written law of the city. It is this eclat. over which the Choruswould lose its headin rapt fascination,that would be the sourceof the famous "catharsisof fear and pity" which Aristotle would take to be the teLos of a tragedy.The "beauty" of the excessof Antigone's unnaturalcrime would thus be the "essence"of catharsis,and so of tragedy itself. And it is this

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"essence"that Freudwould rediscovercenturieslater, in much altered circumstances, connectingit to sublimation,or to the surpriseof Beauty in our fatal amours. "Catharsis"was of coursea term employedin the early treatment of hysteria by Freud and Breuer. It referred to the flushing-out or "abreaction"of the unresolvedpassionthat would have its roots in those "reminiscences"from which the hysteric would suffer. In the early dramaof the "talking cure," there was this sort of "purgation" of somethingthat had remainedin suspense,en souffrance,in the passionof the hysteric,writing itself out in the enigmaticbodily symptoms of which she complained,and for which she demandeda cure. Dora, Irma, Anna and the otherswould thus becomethe Antigones of this Viennesetheatrewithout a chorusthat transpiredin the relative privacy of Freud'soffice, wherethe psychoanalystwas to seereenacted the story of Oedipus.In this theatre,Freud focusedon the "desire" thesehystericsdefied their doctorsto locate in their bodies,and so to "cure": a desirethat hewould be broughtto recognizewasasinflexible, as fearlessand pitiless, as that of Antigone herself. Thereseemslittle doubtthat Freudwas fascinatedby this desireand drawn into a greatstrugglewith its curiousintransigence.The dream that opens his semi-autobiographicalwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, is about this fascination and this intransigence.Why does Irma persistin refusingthe "solution" to her troubledpassion,as sure as the chemicalformula of a drug? And thereis the story of the great travails of his unsuccessfulanalysisof Dora. When this recalcitrant hystericbrokeoff her treatment,Freudwas forced to review his "solution," discoveringsomethingunanalyzedin the interpretationthat had soughtto link Dora's symptomsto the male figures of her story, and thus to himself-somethingone might say is closer to the story of Antigone, the kid, than to that of the father who abandonedher. Such was the story Freud told of his discoveryof his own "countertransference,"of his own fascinationwith this desire,for which he had so ambitiously and heroically tried to find the solution. With this little dramaof the failure of his interpretativebattle with the hysteric,we may perhapsseethe turn throughwhich psychoanalysis was to assumeits tragic or "pessimistic" cast. For the more Freud struggledwith this desire,and with his fascinationwith it, the more he

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cameto think that its resistanceto analysiswas an inherentfeatureof it: he cameto see just how "impossible" the task is of "making the unconsciousconscious."He cameto think that thereis in desiresomething incommensuratewith the knowledge of what is good or bad for us, somethingbeyond the workings of the pleasureand reality principles: an instinct of death.Thus, in the so-called"negativetherapeutic reaction," a patient shows that he or she will cling to the troublesomesatisfaction of his or her symptoms beyond anything analysis may reveal. The basic "lack of success"shown in Freud's strugglewith Dora is to be found in all of his dramaticcasestudies. In the intransigencewith which the desireof the hysteric had confronted him, Freud would thus find a law or a necessitywhich, as in the caseof Antigone, cannotbe reconciledwith the good of the city, of the family or of society.He then soughtan ethical bondthat would includethis necessity,or embodyits "tragic essence":a bond basedon a truth the knowledgeof which no one, not even, or especially,the analystwould be the master.Freud'srevolution in ethicsin this sense would be the onewhich, cognizantof the fatal consequences of Creon's betise,would extend a hand to Antigone, this abandonedkid. Such would be its promise: a new sort of ethical bond in which, unlike philia or caritas, the tragic anankeof our desirewould not haveto be "idealized." For, the analyticor philosophicalpassionthat would no longerneed to rationalizeor idealizewhat is impossibleor "uneducatable"in our desire, would be the one that would no longer need to evade the questionof the "feminine" face of our jouissance:this en plus. In such a passion,feminine "beauty" would becomesomethingelse than this "masquerade"that always concealswhat it revealsto men. It would becomethe beautyof this troubled, unheimlicheros in all our ethos, whosetruth is "discontentin civilization." And thus the "catharsis" of our unresolvedpassionsin analysiswould discover the beautyof "sublimation" Lacan would find in ancienttragedy. Psychoanalysiswould recreateIe reel in one'shistory, would bring one to the point of beautyor surpriseof a fate one did not realizewas one'sown. It would openthe possibility of "crossingthe line" of one's discontentsto an uncharteredvoyage: the singularart of a "sublimation." "The discourseI sayis analyticis the social bonddeterminedby

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an analysis.It deservesto beraisedto theheightsof the mostfundamental bondsthat remainfor us in activity. "59 In providing for this excess that "the woman wants," or in extendinga hand to Antigone, this social bond would be "tragic" in anothersense:it would not be "progressivist."For this bond, the existenceof evil would be more, or else, than the absenceof the Good, which, as in the caseof Creon, men think they can know. Thus, in his Seminaron Ethics, Lacan was at pains to insist that Freudplacedno faith in the Victorian idea of the "progress" of civilization, nor, therefore,in the Marxist hope for a "revolution of the proletariat." The desirefor such a revolution is at bottom a desirefor a masterwho would know what is good for us. It is as suchthat this hopewould succeedin our centuryin so mobilizing our amours. But, in passagesitalicized in the transcription, Lacan declaresthe problemof evil-of Ie mal-is not even worth raising so long as we cling to this hopefor a "progress"that would eliminateits very possibility. As long as we assumethat there exists before us "a good to dictateto man his duties," Lacansaid, evil will retain "all its revolutionaryforce.,,60 Our world is not, and will neverbe, so constructedas to protectus from fortune andsecureour good.For our eroshasno such"pastoral" state,knows no such "objective" good. No one and nothing, not even ourselvesor our society,is to blamefor the "violence" of the imperious law of desire in our living and our social arrangements.The ethical problemis ratherwhat we do with this violence,or the bondswe form with ourselvesand one anotherin responseto it. It is in this sensethat desirewould be the only "ethical universal" we have; and the novelty of Freud's revolutionary practice was to have placedthis tragic questionat the centerof our ethical thought, promisingus somethingnew in the possibilitiesof our amours.Or, as Lacan askedin 1959: Why does not analysis that has brought such an important changein perspectivesaboutlove, putting it at the centerof ethical experience,... distinct from the manner in which until then it had been situated by moralistsandphilosophers,... why doesit not pushthings further in the direction of the investigationof what mustbe called,strictly speaking,an erotic?61

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With SaintTeresatakingoverthe part of Antigone,andthe Baroque, the part of ancienttragedy,the dramaof Lacan'sown story, his own cheminement,would lie in his searchfor what we must, strictly speaking, call a new "erotic." In this pursuit,onemay saythat Lacanshowed himself to be intransigent,to be fearlessand pitiless,even "inhuman." Indeed,the tempestuous,and often incestuous,story of Lacan'sinability to abide any of the institutions which he founded,or in which he playeda part, had a sort of "tragic essence."Therecamea time when he cameto think that psychoanalysisitself, this tragic hero of modern civilization, being mortal, might itself perish and passaway. Lacan'slast years were to be "fatal" years,years of an impassein the revolution in ethics he had so heroically announcedto Gaullist Francein 1959,in this je n'en veuxrien savoir that would haveconstitutedthe nobility of his search.How would this "schoolof the passions of the soul" he had soughtso long and at suchcostto describeand to institute survive this impasse,this lack of success,this mortality of psychoanalysis?That was the questionwith which, in his last years, Lacan ended:it was the onehe left to us. It was in this "tragic" or "fatal" moment of Lacan's destiny in French thought and letters that Foucault'sproject of a new kind of "history of sexuality" would arise. It was then that the questionof ethics beganto preoccupyhim in a new way. It seemsthat Foucaultwantedto write sucha history from very early on, and quite independentlyof Lacan. In The Birth of the Clinic, and later in The Archeologyof Knowledge,he alludesto earlier versions of the project; and retrospectivelyone may seeits lineamentsalready in Madnessand Civilization. But the projectwas to assumeits particular shapein the years of the creative "crisis" Foucaultdated around 1975 or 1976: the yearsLacanwould entitle his SeminarL'insu-quec'est . ..-"unawares-that-it-is"or "the-Iack-of-success." In the new history Foucault formulatedduring those years, Freud was to have a quite different role from the one he had enjoyedin his previouswork, and, in particular,in the last chaptersof The Order of Things.Freudwas not the hero we had thoughthim to be. He was not this doctorwho hadopenedup a dialoguewith madnesswhich several centuriesof psychiatric "monologue" had closed off, and who had thus discoveredin our psychesthe same sort of absenced'oeuvre

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paintersand poetshad found in our languageand vision; he was not this practitionerof the "perilous act" of thought,the contemporaryof the "transgressive"philosophythat hadrediscoveredthe work of Sade. Thus we shouldno longer take Freudas belongingto the "critical" or "creative" presentthat renewsour thought,but on the contrary,as somethingfrom which we would be critically departing, something that is recedinginto the pastfrom which we mustdistinguishourselves. We should no longer think of him as the hero, but as a passingfigure in the genealogyof our conceptionof ourselvesas sexual beings. Thus Foucault startedto ask: How on earth could we have ever turned somethingso peculiar to us, and so transitory,as our "desire" or our "sexuality," into a greatethicaluniversal,the sourceof a modern tragic drama?How could we haveaskedof it to tell us the truth of our living, our becoming,our histoires?How did we evercometo associate it with this enigmatic Law it would take the interminablelabors of interpretationto readin our living, how did this imperious"hermeneutic of the self" take hold of our thoughtand our ethics?What had led us to thus superimposeon our private,internalpathologiesthe heroism of a greatepic or tragedy,and so believethat "beauty" in living-this "aestheticsof existence"-wasmarkedby a "tragic essence,"asthough the only alternativesto the violence of our existencewere brutality, repressionor sublimation? With this questioningFoucaultsetout on the strangenew voyageof his last work. His genealogyof our very ideas of "sexuality" and of "desire" would be a searchfor a new imageof the passionof thought, a newsenseof eroticpossibilities.And yet, in this philosophicalpursuit, Foucaultwould neverlose contactwith the problemhe thoughtLacan w~s the first to raise in psychoanalysisafter Freud: the question of truth, the questionof "spirituality."

Part 2

Foucault It is the samewith skepticismin ethics as it is with skepticismelsewhere, that the more generalit is, the more harmless. -BernardWilliams

Eros After Desire Foucaultfocusedon truth, on Wahrsagen.That is what he admiredin Lacan: the ethic of this difficult or "tragic" truth in our libidinal existencethat would exceedany knowledgeof our Good. Yet to this grand idea, he wantedto addressa seriesof skepticalquestions.Did we really have to place at the heart of our eros a "signifying chain" that would always be leading back to an impasseor failing in our desire,and forward to the intricate role this desirewould keephaving in our lives? Or was this not just the presumptionof a specificpractice of interpretation,a particular"hermeneuticof the self"? Indeed,could it be that the "revolutionary" idea of ourselvesas "subjectsof desire" in fact continuesa confessionaltradition, a jeu de verite of a time and place that had made it possibleto say only one sort of truth about ourselves:the truth concerningour "desire"? Foucault'squestionwas then: Outside the moral idealismsof our good, can we invent no other truths aboutourselves,no other passion for truth, no other "game of truth" than the psychoanalyticone? Foucaultbet that we could, and that in somesensewere alreadyin the processof doing so. Perhapswe were alreadydepartingfrom the thrall of the "desire of the analyst" and the strangedramaticworld of its interpretation;perhapswe were in fact no longer contentto conceive of ourselvesas "subjectsof desire"; perhapsindeed in our eros we were no longer Greek, no longer Christian, no longer Freudian,but were becomingsomethingelse. What sort of truth-sayingmight arise in this new erotic situation?-thatwas what Foucault called "my 87

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problem," the problem not of desire but of "truth, Wahrsagen,and the relation betweenit and the forms of reflexivity, the reflexivity of the self over the self."1 In his last work Foucault sought a new sort of Wahrsagen.How today might we "speak truly" of love and friendship without the nineteenth-century conceptionof our "sexuality" and its characteristic perversionsand deviancies,andwithout the Freudian"hermeneuticof the self" that tells us that our "desire" is always "written" in whatever we say and do, andthat we thereforerequirethe long hoursof analysis to "read" it? Foucault'sproblemabouttruth was thereforea problem about love and friendship: the problem, in short, of a "new erotic." To do this Foucaulttook it upon himself to show that the question of "desire" introduced through the Freudian "revolution in ethics" was not universal,but rather "historical"-a singular and contingent inventionwe may in fact be ableto do without. This was no meantask. It requiredof Foucault"to recentermy entirestudyon the genealogyof the desiringman, from classicalantiquity throughthe first centuriesto Christianity." For, "in orderto understandhow the modernindividual could experiencehimself as a subjectof a 'sexuality,'it was essential first to determinehow, for centuries,Westernman had been brought to recognizehimself as a subjectof desire.,,2 The Freudian "revolution in ethics" had placed us under a basic, evenoverriding, sort of obligation: to be true or faithful to our desire; concerningour desirewe mustneverdeceiveourselves,we mustalways be honestwith ourselves.What sort of duty was this? It was not part of the elaboration or justification of a fixed code of conduct, and was supportedby no Cosmologyor Moral Republic. Indeed, merely "conventional" or "bourgeois" moral rules stood in the way of it. Ratherit singledout in our experienceof ourselvessomethingat once recondite and internal. Locked within each of us was an uncivilized desire, and to be honestabout it, or faithful to it, would consist in releasingit, in showingand telling of it, in a "gameof truth" in which somewould becomemore adeptthan others. Foucault'sargumentis that this "desire" and this duty to exposeit, havenot alwaysbeenwith us. The famouscondition laid down by the Delphic Oraclefor thosewho consultedit was: "Know yourself!" But it is an anachronism tothink that this meant "Be faithful to your

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desire!" How then did this duty to desirearise?When did peoplestart to assumethat whatis mostquestionable,andpotentiallymostglorious or heroic aboutthemselvesas erotic beings,were not the occasionsand distinctivepleasuresof their activities, but the "truth" of the fantasies, wishesand thoughtslocked deepwithin the recessesof their minds or souls?How had it become possible to think that beingdishonestabout desire was the source of a "symptom-formation,"a disease,whose cure requiredthat one enterinto a discursivegamewith others?How hadthe ideaof such"self-deception"cometo requirea greatphilosophical rethinking of the very idea of consciousness or self? And why had this basic "miconnaissance"come to attachitself in a privileged way to sex, or erotic experience? How, in short, had people been brought to believe that a terrible truth abouttheir sex residedin someinaccessibleor "blocked" portion of their psyches,and thus that, in the deepestsense,their sex took placeprimarily in their heads?For Foucaultit was a practical matter. Basicto the duty towardsdesireand the new gameof extractingit and speakingtruly of it, was a principle of an "incitementto discourse": ever more sex, ever more truth. In an interview he stateswhat he sees as the result of this practiceof incitement: "we modernshave become obsessedwith our inner desires;acts don't matter so much to us; and pleasure-nobodyknows what it is any longer!,,3 Foucaultarguedthat our modernobsessionwith a reconditedesire was not so important in antiquity. Primarily it was an invention of Christianity.It is in Christianculturesthat sex would startto be linked to an arcaneencodingof inner impulsesit takesa "hermeneuticof the self" to unriddle. The fundamentalcontribution Christianity would makewould not residein its codeof forbiddenand permittedacts,but in the type of experienceone was thought to have of oneself as an erotic being. In Foucault'sreconstructionof the ethical discoursesof antiquity, what in sex was thoughtso dangerousor worrisomeas to becomethe object of a whole set of self-transformativepracticeswas not yet the sins of the flesh, or the odd bestial impulsesthat would fascinateus and lurk in the pathogenicrecessesof our heads.It was an excessive activity that threateneda loss of self-possessedness in thosemeantto rule: a dangerfor the ethos or appropriateconductof the free adult

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man. The ethosof the ancient"civic man" in health,home,and courtship, around which thesepracticeswould turn, was rather different from the ethos of the Christian "inward man," and the Augustinian problem that all of sex is infected by the Fall, and is the model of sin in general. Foucault'sidea was that the conceptionsunder which sex becomes problematicto a people have varied with the kinds of morality they invent to deal with it. Thus, if what was thoughtworrisomeaboutsex in antiquity has becomesomewhatunfamiliar to us, so too has the kind of ethicsthey devisedto treat it: ancientethicswas not a strategy to normalize a population, nor a matter of abstractinner obedience to universalizablerules. How then could one analyze the changing conceptionsof the relation betweensex and ethics? Foucault'slast books introduce a schemeto analyzethis question. He distinguishedthe questionof "ethics" from the questionof a moral code. It is one thing to issue an interdiction; another to determine whetherpeople actually obey it. Still anotheris to invent a way for peopleto becomenot simply moral agents,but moral kinds of being or persons.That is what Foucaultcalls "ethics." Given a more or less explicit set of prescriptionsand interdictions-whatFoucaultcalls a moral code-onecanexaminethe practicesthroughwhich peoplewere incited to acquire a moral nature. As Foucaultusesthe terms, "moral" refers to the prescriptivecode one is obliged to follow on pain of sanction, internal or external. "Ethical" refers to the kind of personone is supposedto aspireto be, the kind of life one is incited to lead, or the specialmoral stateone is invited to attain. Thereare thus "moral" problemsaboutthe code,its principles and its applications;and then there are "ethical" problems about how to turn oneself into the right kind of person. He then proposesto analyzesuch ethical problemsand their transformations in terms of a fourfold schemein which there is first an image of the right sort of personor life or soul; thenthe authoritywhich incitesone to attainit; thenthe meansprovidedto do so; andfinally the description under which one's sexual experiencebecomesrelevant for such selftransformation. Thus,Foucaultarguesthat in antiquity, the descriptionunderwhich erotic experiencewas placedwas that of aphrodisia: an interlocking

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of desirewith acts and the pleasuresthey procuredthat threatenedto undo the proud self-masteryof the free man, sexualpleasurebeing, in Plato's words, the most keen and frenzied. According to Foucault's analysis,in order to deal with this danger,ancientthought, medical, poetic and philosophical,inventedthe image of the master,his choice of a true and beautiful style of existence,and the meansto attain it. The intentof this analysiscanbe seenin contrastto the displacements Christianitywould introduce.In Christianitywhat onewould be asked to attain is no longer the proud virility of the master; it is an inner purity of being. What incites one to transformoneselfis no longer the choice of a noble existenceglorified for posterity; it is the commandmentor will of God. Sexualityis thoughtto be problematicnot because of the dangersof an excessive,unhealthyor dignified indulgence,but becausethe flesh is forever impure. And, it is thus that we find that the dietary, medical, poetic and erotic meansthe ancientsdevisedto maintain a noble self-possession are replacedby the endlessand arduous task of decipheringone's inner thoughts: the temptations,the seductions,the deceptionsthatthedevil hasput in our heads.Christianity would thus be the start of the internalizationof eros,or the process throughwhich peoplewereled to find their sexualitywithin themselves. One may recountFoucault'sstory throughthe figures of Artemidorus of Daldis, Saint Augustine and SigmundFreud. In the secondcentury A.D., Artemidorus wrote a book of dream interpretation which was widely used. It taught how to tell one's fortune by reading one's dreams.In particular, several chaptersare devotedto sexualdreams,and Foucaultprovidesan analysisof them. The principle of interpretationhe isolatesis basedon an assumption central,though not specific, to ancientviews aboutsexualexperience: the analogybetweenhierarchicalsocial roles andthe positionsor roles one assumesin sexual acts-activeor passive,on top or on bottom, and so on. It is a conceptionin which the act of penetration,and thus the male member,is what countsin sexualexperience,sinceit provides it with its social significance. Sexual dreamscan then symbolically confirm or reversepropersocial relationsand so augurwell or poorly. Thus the sexualdreamsin Artemirodus'book are onesin which someonedreamsabouthimselfin a little dramaof penetrationandpassivity or of pleasureandthe expenditureof energy,which tells of his fortune.

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The meaningof the dreamdependson the social statusof the dreamer. If, in one'sdreamonefinds oneselfin a passivepositionwith an inferior, things don't augur well. If, however,it is with a superior,the dream countsas a favorable sign. Artemidorus'readingsare somewhatunfamiliar to us. If, for example, a man dreamsthat he has sex with his mother, that meanshe is likely to succeedas a magistrate,since it is obvious that one'smother is the sign or symbolof one'scity or country. In Artemidorus,interpretation of dreamsis not focusedon the natureof the sexualact but on the social or civic statusof the partners:sexis relational,and relations of sex are indissociablefrom relations of status. In Saint Augustinewe would find anotherconceptionor ourselves as sexualbeings.Foucaultdraws attentionto the passageswhere Augustine offers a descriptionof the sexual act as a sort of horrendous spasm: the whole body is shakenby a terrible jerking in which one loses possessionof oneself, and, in particular, of one's capacity for deliberation.This descriptionis not new; it is virtually a transcription from the paganliteratureof the previouscentury.But Augustineinserts it into a new context;he wasapparentlyoneof the first ChurchFathers to admit that sex could have taken place in Paradisebefore the Fall. Sex in Paradisecould not, of course,have had the horrible epileptic form that it has unfortunatelyassumedfor us (or for us men). Before the Fall, the body, and eachpart of it, was wholly obedientto Adam's will, and sex occurredas though a handthat gently sows seedsin the earth. But, as we know, Adam rose up against Good with the pride or arroganceof acquiring a will of his own; and in losing the supportof the Word of God he lost his paradisiacpossessionof himself: his body, and its parts, were no longer obedientto the commandsof his will. They revolted againsthim, and the sexualpartswere the first to "rise up" in disobedience.Adam's shamewas this loss of his will over his body; that is why the famous fig leaf was said to concealan erection. Sex in erectionis the image of man'srevolt againstGod: the pride or arroganceof sex is the punishmentand the consequenceof the pride or arroganceof man. His uncontrollablesex is to him what he has beento God, a rebel who rises up in revolt. Augustinegives the name "libido" to the rebelliousor autonomous

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movementof the male organs.The strength,force, origins and effects of the libido becomea centralproblemthat confrontsman'swill. But the libido is not an externalobstacleto the will; it is a sortof worm that eatsat it from within. That is why the struggleagainstthe assertionsof the libido requiresthat one turn in on oneself;that is why it requires not simply a masteryof one'sactivities and relationswith others,but a diagnosisof the illusions and deceptions,the thoughtsand desires, in the most secret recessesof one's soul; that is why it requires a permanentor unendinghermeneuticsof desire-unendingsince one's will and one'slibido can never be substantiallydissociatedone from the other. Foucault goes on to analyze how such techniquesfor one's selfscrutiny as a libidinal being were introduced,elaboratedand transformed in the monasticcontext; and then how they cameto be spread far and wide through the agencyof the Christian pastoral. If we now look back to Artemidorus,we might say that the crucial questionof sexualethics has passedfrom the problem of penetration and relationswith othersto the problemof erectionand one'srelation with oneself,or more precisely,of one'swill to the involuntary assertions of one'slibido. We are still quite obviously concernedwith male sexuality;but the maleorgan-or"the phallus" as it is now sometimes fondly called-isno longer the proud organof activity throughwhich a man affirms his civic status;it has becomethe mark of a primordial passivitythat strikesto the coreof a man'sinnerwill. And, to overcome this passivity it is no longer sufficient to turn one's eyes upward to recall the eternaltruth one has forgotten; one must continually turn one'seyes downwardand inward to decipheramongthe movements of the soul thosethat arise from the libido. It is no longer a question of the appropriateor healthyoccasionsfor sexualactivity, but of the inner purity of sexualthoughtsand desires. And, if the light of faith is requiredfor this permanentobligation to track down impure thoughts,it is also the casethat one can have no accessto the truth without the purification of the soul. Foucaultthinks we needto wait until the curious sort of spiritual exercisesthat were Descartes'Meditationsto find a pathto truth basednot on purification, but simply on the self-certaintyor evidenceof representationsthemselves.

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But now what of Freud? Like Artemidorus, Freud wrote a highly influential book of dreaminterpretation.The InterpretationofDreams is one of the greatworks of the hermeneuticsof desireof our time. It is also a confessionalwork of sorts-thatis one thing that links it to Augustine.For it is Freud'sown dreamsthat are at issue;it is the book of the famousself-analysisthat led Freudto the truth he assertsin the last chapterof the book: that desireis the essenceor coreof our being. It is thereforeastonishingthat, unlike Artemidorus,in Freud'sbook, we find no sexualdreamsat all. It is rathernon-sexualdreamswhich tell of hidden sexualdesires.The principle of interpretationhas changed: meaningno longer dependson the social statusof the dreamer,but on the intricate web of associationsthat link his dreamto his innermost desire.WhereArtemidorustold us how to passfrom sexualdreamsto our fortune in civic life, Freudtold us how to passfrom our non-sexual dreamsto the truth of our inner being. In a footnote Freud explains whyhe included no sexualdreamsin his book. It is not that they are shameful or an improper topic of scientific investigation. Freud says he finds it laughablethat, in the German translation of Artemidorus, the chapterson sexual dreams were censored.The reasonhe offers for not including sexualdreams is ratherwhat he calls "the still unresolvedproblemsof perversionand bisexuality.,,4 What was important in such dreams for Freud was thus not, as with Artemidorus,what they tell about the fortune of a man with a particular"position," but what they tell abouta dreamer'sdeepsexual nature,his bisexualityor perversion.In this respectthey areno different from non-sexualdreams.But, if Foucaultis right, such a conceptof bisexualitywas completelyforeign to the conceptionof sexualexperience embodiedin Artemidorus' book. It was just assumedthat men might actually pursuepartnersof both sexes.But nobodyreferredthis fact to a deep bisexual nature or tendency.By contrastwhat Freud called a bisexualnatureor constitutiontypically belongedto a person who did not pursueboth sexes,who did not have a sexualpracticeor activity with both sexes.In ancientconceptionwheresuchactivity was taken for granted,it occurredto no one to imagine that outsideof it, a personmight harbor within himself a hidden bisexual or perverse constitution.

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For suchreasonsone might say that the internalizationof desirehas assumeda new form: sexuality becomesa truth about desiresburied in a childhoodwe refuseto recognizebut which returnsin our neurotic symptoms.Desire is still what is most questionableand most glorious aboutus; it still harborsa truth we havethe obligation to tell. But that obligation is no longer commandedby the will of God but by the norms of mental health; and the authority on which it is basedis no longer a theology of the flesh but a scienceof sexuality. This story of Artemidorus, Augustine and Freud illustrates something of the plot of Foucault'sstory, of his attemptto accountfor how we ever cameto conceiveof ourselvesas subjectsof desire. There is the problem of penetrationand status;there is the problem of libido and will; thereis the problemof desireandmentalillness. They belong to different ethical worlds, different possibilities of life. And as the descriptionof sexualitypassesfrom oneto another,we observea great processof transformationand internalizationin our conceptionsof ourselvesas ethical beings. It wasFoucault'sview thatour own ethicalpredicamenttodaywould be to rid ourselvesof this long internalizationthroughwhich we came to think of ourselvesas "subjects of desire." He thought that our times were marked by a new dissatisfaction,a new refusal, a new "problematization"in our conceptionof our erotic beingandits possibilities: we would want anotherkind of "erotic subjectivity" than the onesbasedon the virile model of penetrationand status,the Christian model of sin and confession,and the therapeuticmodel of hidden emotion and cure. And so we would want a new kind of ethic whose principles would not be derived from the demandsof the super-ego, the will of God, or the requirementsof a normal development. It was in relation to Time or History that Foucaultsoughtthis new type of Wahrsagen.Sex would no longer be a matterof the cosmological time of the opportunemoment,the kairos of sex in one'slife and the noble memoriesone leavesof it. It would no longer be a matterof the eschatologicalor Augustinianagesof history in which we should at last be deliveredof the terrible thorn in our flesh. It would no longer be a matterof the normal maturationor developmentin social forms. It would rather becomea questionof deforming, resisting,departing from what our history presentsto us as timeless,as universal,as given

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aboutwho we are and may be: a matterof undoing,complicatingand opening up the forces of our erotic fatality. Contemporarysex liberation movementsprovided Foucaultwith a site for this openingand rethinking of eros. What he found important in them was the way eros and ethicswere togetherdepartingfrom the categoriesof "sexuality" and the assumptionsof the inner truth of desire.Thus, in 1976, he declared: The real strength of the women's liberation movementis not that of having laid claim to the specificity of their sexuality and the rights pertaining to it, but that they have actually departedfrom the discourse conductedwithin the apparatuses of sexuality.TheAmericanhomosexual movementsmake that challengetheir starting-point.Like women, they begin to look for new forms of community, co-existence,pleasure.s

The American movementwas important for Foucault himself; he referredto what he called "the laboratoriesof sexualexperimentation in San Franciscoand New York.,,6 His research,subjectiveand archival, into the history of sexuality, would coincide with a time, which, in the words of David Halperin "would seem in retrospectto have beenthe high-watermark of the recentpolitical movementfor lesbian and gay freedom in the United States,"?where, of course,Lacanian psychoanalysishad little impact. In these"laboratories,"Foucaultdiscoveredthat the kinds of relations men may have with one anotherwere being openedup in new ways. In particular,gay men "haveto invent from A to Z a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say the sum of everythingthrough which they can give pleasureto one another.,,8 In this site not yet governedby law, rule or habit, what empassioned Foucaultwas this "still improbable" invention of new relationships. "What relations,throughhomosexuality,can be established,invented, multiplied and modulated?"9For Foucault this was a very different sort of ethical questionthan "Who am I?" or "What is the secretof my desire?"Ratherthana "form of desire,"here,at least,homosexuality was takento be "somethingdesirable."It was "an historic occasion to reopenaffective and relationalvirtualities," through the "diagonal line" it would trace in "the social fabric."lo For,

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To imaginea sexualact that doesn'tconform tolaw or natureis not what disturbspeople.But that individuals are beginningto love one anotherthere'sthe problem.... Institutional codescan'tvalidatetheserelations. . . .Theserelationsshort-circuitit and introducelove where there'ssupposedto be only law, rule or habit.l l

In particular we should see SI M in this light: not as an intrinsic "deviancy" rooted in infancy, of which the neurotic would dreamin horror, but as a preciseexperimentalgame people chooseto play in order to discovernew "virtualities" and augmentthe singularity and intensitiesof their pleasures.It servesto alleviatethe senseof boredom when the sexualact becomestoo available; it servesto attenuatethe assumptionthat all "passivity" is demeaning,asin the "macho" preoccupationsof ancientpederasty,which Foucaultfound so distateful. Somethingof the eros of Foucault'sdetailed analysis of the techniques of punishmentin Discipline and Punish is to be found in this "pragmatic" focus on just how things are done. And the feature of contemporarygay literaturethat capturedFoucault'scuriosity was the explicitnessand precisionof its descriptionsof the body and its activities. He thought that this great precisioncame from a form of living in which the anonymousencounterhad replacedthe lengthy rituals of courtship and seduction.It was a kind of erotic practice in which activity comesfirst and "spirituality" after. As suchthis literature,and the form of life from which it derived,would be a ratherdifferent sort of thing from a sublimation. The basicideaof sublimationis that thereexistssomethingso terrible about our desire that we must articulate it in "cultural" forms, and not directly througherotic practices.Sublimatory"spirituality" would be the response"civilization" offers to the endlesstrouble our perverse desireintroducesinto our living. In effect, in his last research,Foucault turned this idea around: it is only the strangeconceptionwe have of our "desire" that induces us to believe that we gratify it in a more fundamentalway through the beautiful forms that recreateit than through the "perverse" activities, apparently so much closer to it, which, left to themselves,would end in violence, brutality and death. For Freud the questionof sublimationhad been: What relation must the subject have to his own "desire" for him to satisfy it through

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creationsvery distant from sexual activity? Foucault askedinstead: What peculiarnotion of our desiremustwe haveto think that we must dissociateit from our erotic activitiesand "reinvest" it in objects?Thus Foucaultdeclared: What strikesme is the fact that in our societyart has becomesomething which is relatedonly to objects,and not to individuals, or to life. That art is somethingspecialized,which is doneonly by expertswho are artists. But couldn't everyone'slife becomea work of art? Why shouldthe lamp or the housebe an art object, but not life?12

Even in the caseof artists we may observethat the singularity of their creationsbelongsto the invention of singular ways of living. In contrastto Sartre,accordingly, we should not have to refer the creativeactivity of someoneto the kind of relation he hasto himself, but shouldratherrelatethe kind of relation he has to himself to a creativeactivity.13

In this way "beauty" would count as an importantethical categoryin how we might live. The questionof the "creative activity" of one's free formation of oneselfwas, of course,a very old one: the role of erosin the beautyof living was alreadyraisedin the time of Socratesand Alcibiades,rather independentlyof the questionof art-objects.Indeedin Foucault'sreconstruction,it wasthe choiceof a nobleexistence,andnot an abstract law, that suppliedthe motivation for ancientethical practices.In the "historic occasion"openedup by the liberation movementsand their laboratories,Foucault thought that this question, and this sort of motivation, might again form part of our ethics and our eros. In his last research,Foucaultsoughta new "erotic" after Desire.He wanted to restoreto eros its senseof improbability, innovation, the beauty of unguided "experimentation."To do this would be to put behind us the great psychoanalytictheatre of an arcanelibido; the "truth" of our eros neednot be thoughtto havethis "tragic essence." For "desire" is not prior to history, but only one of its singularinventions. Thus, for the "fatality" of our libidinal existence,we should substitutethe "determination"of the historical forms through which

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we become"subjects"of our erotic experience.Our history is not the memoryof an immemorialviolencewe haveforgotten;it is ratherwhat determinesand delimits who we can be through specific forms, from which we may neverthelessdepart. "Who we are" at a given time and place, while historically "determined" is yet neverhistorically "necessitated."Our freedomlies in the contingencyof our historical determination;and thus to our existence always belongsthe possibility of "new forms of community, co-existence, pleasure..." To reinvent ethical thought today, asking again the ancient questionof how to speaktruly of our lives, becamefor Foucaulta matterof understandinghow our bonds,our freedomand our truth might form part of a contemporarycritical philosophical activity. Bonds Community was a central questionin Foucault'sethic: it was about the bonds we may have with one another,affective and political; it was about who we are and may be. In stressing"subjectivity" and "subjectivization"he did not intend to abandona social or collective ethic in favor of an individual or private one. Rather, he wanted to rethink the great questionof "community": the questionof how and why people band together,of how and why they are bound to one another;the questionof the passionor eros of our identity. Foucaultheld that the answerto this questionwas not to be sought in a single generic"nature," sociological,theologicalor philosophical. For our "subjectivity" is in fact given to us throughmany "dispersed," contingentand changing"systemsof thought"-bodiesof discourse and practice that enableus to identify ourselvesboth as individuals and as collectivities. Foucault'sformulation of the questionof bonds was this: In what way do individual and collectiveexperiencesarisefrom singular forms of thought?that is, from what constitutesthe subjectin relationto the true, to rules, to itself?14 Behind these"singular forms of thought" there would be no single monolithic humannature.Foucaultadvancedno "theory of the sub-

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ject," and did his best not to supposeone. Rather,in the mannerof Wittgenstein'sattempt to divide up the unity of what is called "the mind" or "the mental" into a loosearrayof public language-practices, Foucaultsoughtto analyzethe many and various things peoplemust sayanddo to themselvesandeachotherin orderto identify themselves, andso play their partsin "forms of life." Therewould be an irreducible and changing "multiplicity" of such forms, with no single origin or source.To say that suchforms of thoughtare "singular" is to say that they are "contingent."Thatwasa basicassumptionof Foucault'sethic. Identificatory forms of thought are not inevitable or necessarybut rather change,undergoingtransformations,becomingthe objects of contestationand struggle,and confrontingother or new ones."Forms of thought" have a complex history, which is the object of no one's planning, and which often goes unrecognized. Thus we do not haveto seethe ancientethical questionof how best to live as either an individual or a collective matter. It is rather a questionof the kinds of individuality and of collectivity of which we are capableat a time and place,and of the relationsthey supposewith particular sorts of governmentand self-governments,knowledgeand self-knowledge. In the nineteenthcentury there had arisen the great dream of a Gemeinschaftthat would be prior to the social divisions and bureaucratic rule of modernstates.In it would reign a harmoniousdivision of goodsand tasks,a natural equilibrium of force and authority, and a stablesourcefor the identity of its members.How, it was demanded, might such Communitybe regained?Superimposedon labor struggles andurbandiscontents,Communitythusbecamethe sourceof a critique of the individualism, the privatism, the alienation, the atomism and the anomie of modern societies.Our modern individuality would be the dissolution of a great Community we must fight to regain. How might we live againbeyondprivate property,the monogamousfamily, or urban uprootedness? In this more or less Romantic senseof the term, Foucaultwas no "communautarian."The searchfor an essentiallygood or conflict-free communalexistencestruckhim ashavinghaddisastrousconsequences. He questionedthat there had ever existedsuch community, and held that the critique of contemporarysociety did not dependon it.

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The critical side of Foucault'sthought was rather directed to the "naturalness"throughwhich "systemsofthought" maintaintheir hold over us: there is nothing given or natural about our membershipin social groups, and we must ask "how [do] we recognizeourselvesas a society, as part of a social entity, as part of a nation or state?,,15 Similarly there is nothing given or natural about our "individuality," and we must ask how we come to recognizeourselvesas individuals. Our "subjectivity" is not an "individuality," an indivisible unit in which we locate our identity; and it is not "particularity" or the exemplificationof a commonnature.It is not a single thing, and there are asmany "subjectivities"as thereareacceptedforms of self-relation. Eachof us can havemore than one kind of subjectivity,more than one kind of social being.Thus,individual and social beingare not opposed to one anotheras absoluteentities,one requiringthe dissolutionof the other. Insteadthey are linked togetherin a commonhis-tory, theforms of one being able to survive a changein the forms of the other. Thus, they are not the givens of critical analysis, but just what requires it. Foucault's critical question was not the presenceor absenceof Community taken as a good in itself, but the kinds of communitywe may have with one another. We may distinguishthreekinds or sensesof "community" or "bond" in Foucault'scritical philosophy. First there is given community.It consistsin the possiblerelations to ourselvesand one anotherthat a particularsystemof recognitionmakesavailableto us. It is the kind of community peoplethink they have with one another.This thinking is rooted in an institutional or "material existence."But that doesn't mean that it is determinedor confronts us as an insuperableforce; rather it showswhat one is up against,should one attemptto contest or changeit. For, in the secondplace, there is tacit community.The ways peopledeviseto identify themselvesare supportedby their own activity. They mustbe willing to do their bit in maintainingthe systems that define and delimit them; they must play their parts in a "game" whoseintelligibility andlimits they take for granted.The tacit community of a systemof recognitionis everythingpeoplemustdo to maintain its hold over them. But this hold doesnot reduceto the force of arms or to ideologicalmystification; it residesin the force or authority ofits very self-evidence."Given community" is acceptedor toleratedbecause

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one cannotseewhat elseis possible.Thus, to acceptit is more than to find it just or legitimate, and to find it unacceptableor intolerableis morethanto find it unjust,evenif the exposuresof its hiddeninjustices can help make it so. In the third place,when a systemof identificationis found unacceptable, thereis critical community.The possibility of critical community comes when the interruption, refusal or reversal of forms of given community leads to the exposureof the tacit community which supports it. Thus, Foucaultmaintainedthat "resistance"has an analytic role, relatedto a truth: it exposeswhat a particularstrategyof "power" is. It disclosessomethingunseenand unacceptablein a form of identification, and exposesit to risk. Critical communityis thus the result of a "problematization"or "crisis" in the self-evidenceof a community of a time and place.It is the sort of communityor bond we may have in so far as we are free. In short, given community arisesfrom an identification: "I am an X." Tacit community is the materially-rootedsystemof thought that makes X a possibleobject of identification; and critical community seesthis systemof thought as singularor contingent,finds something "intolerable" about it, and starts to refuse to participatein it. It is the community that "problematizes"identity and thus makesof our "subjectivity" an open and endlessquestion,at once individual and collective. Foucaulttried to characterizesuch critical community in terms of the tradition thathadlinked the activity of "the intellectual"to philosophy. The nineteenthcenturyhadinventedthe "cosmopolitan"intellectual, defined in contrastto all "particularisms." But what Foucault called the "specific intellectual" was not a "particularist" one, delimited by a regional,national,ethnic,religious,or sexualidentity. On the contrary,it was the one who startsto seesuch "particularity" only as historical "specificity," or who questionsthe thinking that secures such "particular" identities. He then tried to insert such "specific" critical activity into the great post-Kantianphilosophicaltradition of historically-mindedcritique. This would requirethe following changes:the "community" of critical philosophywould separateitself from the assumptionsof a transcendental subjectivity, either individual or collective. And the aim of

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critical thoughtfor sucha communitywould not be to fix the universal or legitimateboundsof all possibleexperience,but to openexperience to new possibilities. "The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conductedin the form of a necessarylimitation into a practicalcritique that takes the form of a possibletransgression." 16 Thus, the "critical community" of Foucault'sethic was not a "transcendental"one, but the community of the specific momentsof critical "transcendence"in the forms which make a particular kind of "subjectivity" possible. Accordingly, the "responsibility" of critical philosophywould have to be redefined. It would not be the paternalistic responsibility of ancientcivic virtue. It would not be the liberal responsibilitytowards an "individuality" prior to socialidentity. It would not be the historical responsibility for the new Socialist Man. In what would its passion consists?What would motivate it or inform it? What would be its relation to truth, or its "spirituality"? In it Eros would not play its traditional part of binding us togetherinto an essentialcommunity,discoveringa naturalharmonyor equilibrium with oneanother.For "critical community" is a communityof struggle with its own historically constitutedidentity; its violence, and so also its "beauty" and passionwould be of a particular sort. Gilles Deleuzesaysof Foucaultthat he wasthe contemporaryphilosopher most free of the preoccupationsof the last century. And that is why those preoccupationswere such a constantobject in his critical histories.In particular,Foucaultwas concernedwith the failure of the progressiveideologiesor critical theoriesof the nineteenthcentury to understandand to confront the specific kind of racism that was to explodein the twentieth. Our twentieth-centuryproblemis not Gemeinschaft;it is "identity," the sort of identity shown in the spectacularirruption of racism and nationalism. We may view the opposition between "individualism" and "collectivism" in nineteenth-centuryphilosophyin terms of their attempts to overcome or eliminate the problem of "particularist" identity. Thus there was a model of the new socialist or communist man, transcendingall religious or ethnic identities in a great historical mission. And then there was a rival model, reactivating old ideas of contractor naturalright, of an "individuality" that would be prior to

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all particularcutlural or communalidentities,as in the situationof the individuals in John Rawls' "original position." Both models could appealto the progressive"cosmopolitan"sentimentsof intellectuals; they could seeracial or national identity as only an "imaginary" form superimposedon a real prior individuality or social being. Thus it would be thoughtthat nationalismandracismhadno "real" existence, but were rather "ideological" atavismsto be explainedin termsof the progressivemarchof history to eliminate,or to restrict, the State,and install "liberalism" or "socialism." With his The History of Sexuality,Foucaultwas working with anotherpicture: the twentiethcenturywas in fact rootedin a very "real" but singular or specific sort of identification and exclusion,central to forms of governmentthe War did not eliminate, and with which we arenot yet done.Insteadof seeingthe grandnineteenth-century philosophiesof Man andSocietyasthe only alternativesto this "technology" of government,we should analyzethesephilosophiesin terms of their critical responseto it, or the way they effectedinternal modifications in it. The nameFoucaultgave to this modernstrategyof government was "biopower." It had arisen in the seventeenthcentury with new forms of the administrationof the internal and externalpolicies of a statethat were directed to the "life" of its population. The central categorywas the great complex idea of norm and normality. "Normality" was not an abstractlegal principle of the entitlement to govern; it was not a prudentialprinciple of wise authority, or a way of insuring our insertion in traditional holistic communities;it was basedneitherin contractnor status.It was rathera way of identifying us, and of getting us to identify ourselvesin such a way as to make us governable.It was a "singular form of thought" from which individual and collective experiencearose. It did not at all oppose individual and collective experience,and its central problem was not the conflict betweenthe individual and society. On the contrary, the more "totalizing" the reachof its administrationof the life of society, the more "individualizing" the natureof its identificationof us became. Onemay observethat wherethe workings of this type of governmental thinking were securelyimplanted,therehasneverbeena modernrevolution. It was then in relation to this new concretemannerof securing our identity as individuals and as part of statesthat Foucaultproposed

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to rethink the nineteenth-centuryphilosophiesof liberalism and socialism. In particular,he arguedthat the capitalinvention of "political economy" was not that of the "ideology" that would be exposedby Marx. It was rather the proposalof an internal self-restrictionon the operations of bio-political administrationmade in the name of a greater efficiency in securingits goals.Thus, we shouldnot think its categories of "civil society" or "the people" were universalentities lying outside any "state." We should rather analyzehow they figured in the very historicalor specific "systemof thought" on which the effectiveexperienceof governmentrested. With his analysis of "normalization," Foucault refined a central themethat runs throughouthis reflectionson community: the problem of exclusion. His histories were directed to those whom a society deprivesof acceptablediscourse,or excludesfrom its self-definition. It would seemthat exclusionhas always beenpart of the philosophical attemptsto define what makesus part of communities.Athenian citizenshipsupposedthe exclusion of slaves; and modern citizenship is bound to the exclusionsof the nation-state.This was, in somesense, Foucault'sstartingpoint. At first he held a sacrificial or exclusionary view of what constitutesidentity in society. Traditional sociology, sociology of the Durkheim type presentedthe problem in this way: how can a society hold individuals together?what is the form of the relation, of symbolic or affective communication, that is establishedamongindividuals?I was interestedby the somewhat oppositeproblem,or, if you will, by the oppositeresponseto the problem, which is: through what systemof exclusion, by eliminating whom, by creatingwhat division, throughwhat gameof negationandrejection,can a society begin to function?!?

Thus, we would identify ourselvesas good, normal, rational people only by excluding from ourselves,our society or our acceptablediscourse,what we take to be abnormal,irrational or dangerousabout ourselves. But when he came to think of the workings of "power" as not fundamentally"negative" or "repressive,"but "positive" or "forma-

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tive," Foucaultqualified his view of systemsof identification.He sought to distinguishthe struggleof "critical community" from any Romantic identification with who or what a society would exclude in order to constituteitself. Ratherits critique would lie in thosemomentswhen suchworkings of a society,togetherwith its characteristictechniques of exclusion,beginsto erode,to lose its self-evidenthold and become "problematized."The "technology" of exclusion,or the rites of sacrifice, belong only to a particular systemof thought and discourse,or are an inherent feature of it. Thus, the punishmentof a regicide is a very different thing from the anonymousrehabilitationof an offender. "Being a criminal" is defined in a different way, the first questioning the rule of the Sovereign,the seconddisturbing the functioning of Society. It is one thing to identify with the passionof the delinquent; anotherto questionthe form of thinking that defineswhat delinquency is, andthe role it hasin society: the role of "critical community." Thus, more generally,"critical community" is not the communityof thosea society excludesin order to function, but of all those who start to refusetheir partin maintainingthe specificform of thinking thatdefines it and them, of those who depart from it, taking their identities or forms of experiencein new directions outsideits compass. In The History of Sexuality,Foucaultarguesthat the racism of our centuryrestedon specificeconomicandpolitical policies. And in those policies, "sexuality" played a particular role: there was a great fear of an aberrantor degeneratesexual activity and being, of another pathologicalkind of satisfaction,threateningthe existenceof society from within and without. The panic, the loathing, the murderous anxiety characteristicof the passionof national or racial purity and superioritywas thus linked to notionsof sex. Foucaultarguesthat this passionwas formed through a particular way of thinking, through particular racial and national techniquesof identification and exclusion, and the types of knowledgeon which they relied. Centralto this mannerof thinking was the partially "scientific" categoryof degeneracy. The category was not all foreign to socialist thought. Indeed, Foucaultdeclares: Modern antisemitismbeganin that form. The new forces of antisemitism developedin socialistmilieus, out of the theoryof degeneracy.It was said

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thatJewsare necessarilydegenerates, first becausethey are rich, secondly becausethey intermarry.They havetotally aberrantsexualand religious practices,so it is they who are the carriersof degeneracyin our societies. One encountersthis in socialistliterature down to the Dreyfus affair.18

Thus, the terrible specificity of "modern" anti-Semitismin the history of racismswould lie in the attempt on the part of a nation-stateto systematicallyeliminate the "degenerate"portion of its own "population." In the project Foucault outlined in The History of Sexuality, the basicconjecturewas that if "sexuality" had becomeimportantto our identity in so many ways, it is becauseits constructionor institution belongsto the history that implanted"normalizing" ways of government and self-government.It was under this heading that it would come to be thought to be an intrinsic property of our individual and our social being; and it would be as suchthat it would be connectedto "degeneracy."The nineteenth-century invention of "sexuality" would form part of the history thatgaveto the greatanxietyaboutdegeneracy in modernlife its sexualcoloring. The new sexualsciencewould help link the fear to the "perverts" and "deviants," who threatenedthe cohesionof society, and whosemyriad forms it catalogued,analyzed, and soughtto cure. Psychoanalysiswould have an importantbut ambivalent part in this process. Foucaultis the first to makethe whole questionof degeneracycentral to a history or an "archeology"of psychoanalysis.The political honor of Freud,he says,lies in his theoreticalrefusalof the notion of a natural sexual degeneracy.And yet what he found to opposeto it was an "archaic" or primitive "desire" connectedto older ideasof symbolic Law or Sovereignty.Againstthe categoryof the Norm of Society,Freud reintroduceda theory of the Law of Civilization, and its discontents. For Foucault,psychoanalysiswould still postulatea sourceof identity that would not be "historical" in his sense:a sourcethat would be prior to history, or which would seehistory itself as a responseand a repressionof its violence.It still hada "theoryof the subject"asdistinct from a "history of subjectivizations,"a theory that saysthat who we are is determinedby an order or a fatality which, if it is not familial, would be "symbolic." This would be the "archaic"or mythical element

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in Freud,the nineteenth-century faceof his thought,tied to the "tragic" theme of the origins of civilization which he expressedthrough a fictive anthropologyor prehistoryof the "primal"-just the featuresof Freud'sthoughtwhich Lacan reinterpretedin terms of "structure," in terms of the ontological or primordial "fact" of desire and its law. As against such erotic archaism,Foucault argued that "we must conceptualizethe deploymentof sexualityon the basisof the techniques of power that are contemporarywith it. ,,19 In particularit would be a sort of "retroversion"to analyzethe passionof modernfascism,with its "fantasiesof blood" and its "paroxysmsof disciplinary power" in terms of some great "crime" that would found civilization. Rather, Foucaultthought we should makethe historical constructionof identity andthe passionof identificationthe centralissue.Insteadof seeing "desire" as the great"other" of social,political or ethical relations,we should see it as only one elementin the history that constructsthe possibleforms of such relations.Insteadof analyzingour identities as "forms of desire," or as responsesto the archaicor primordial "fact" of our desire,we shouldopenthe questionof what we think is desirable about them. Thus, Foucault thought that the limitation of psychoanalysiswas shown in its inability to imagine a passionatemode of being in which the whole categoryof degeneracywould haveno part, as it had not in ancientethical thoughtand practice.Foucaultwrote that Deleuzeand Guatarri'sAnti-Oedipuswas a sort of manualfor a "non-fascistway of life." And he himself soughta kind of eros,a type or critical passion, that would be non-racist,or anti-racist, in the particular sensethat identity would not be the sourceof self-assertionand exclusionbut the target of a questioningthrough which people might start to depart from the historicallimits of their identifications,taking their particularities as so many historical specificities. It is in this contextthat peoplemight ask what is "desirable"about their mode of existence(and what not) rather than asking what form of Desire it expresses.In this passionthey might then rediscoverthe old theme of the "beauty" of a free existence.Such beautywould no longer be thoughtto lie in a discoveryof a harmonywith a pre-existent transcendentorder, but would ratherconsistin trying for form oneself just where there arises a "critical transcendence"in our historically

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given forms of identity, just when the art of living frees itself from "rule, law or habit." We may think of Baudelaireas a nineteenth-centuryfigure already concernedwith this question. His "ironic heroism of the present" would find no place in existing instituted social relations, but would transpire "in anotherdifferent place, which Baudelairecalled art.,,20 For Baudelaire,the sort of urban "anomie" againstwhich nineteenthcentury sociology recoiled in horror, searchingfor the security of a holistic Community,would becomeinsteadthe sourceof a greatunnatural or artificial beauty in living: the beauty not of a metaphysical harmony, dwelling or Heimat, but of a "still improbable" identity. Baudelairemay havethoughtof this searchas a sort of archaism,as a "sublimation" of archaicimpulses.Perhapstoday, Foucaultthought, we might take up again this questionof the "beautiful life" in terms of the bonds of a critical experiencenot limited to what Baudelaire hadcalled"art." We might think of it in termsof "critical community" and the kind of freedom that it experiences. Freedom The momentsof critical "problematization"within the history that constitutesus were, for Foucault, times when our thought and our beingis "freed" for new and unchartedspacesandpossibilities.In this sense"critical community" is a "free community" and the passionof the critical "bond" a passionof being free. As such it would continue the ancientethical themeaccordingto which the art of leadinga noble or beautiful life was an art of being, or of making oneself,free. "The critical function of philosophyup to a certainpoint emergesright from the Socraticimperative: ... ground yourself in freedom through the mastery of self.,,21 But in taking up the idea of freedom, Foucault soughtto rethink it: our freedom would not lie in our essencebut in our historically contingentsingularity. In this sense,the experienceof freedomwould not be an experience of an identity or a natural or pregivenstate,but, on the contrary, an experienceof the fragility of a kind of identificationtakenfor granted. Who we are would not be the imageor sourceof this freedom,but just what is constantlyfreed or openedto questionby it. Thus, it is not in

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our basic individualitiesor communitiesthat we are free; it is rather the historical forms of our individual and communalbeing themselves which must be freed or exposedto the risk of new and unforeseen transformations. Foucaultheld that there are as many kinds of freedom possibleas there are suchhistorical systemsof identification and servitude.There is no suchthing as freedomin general.The "subject" of freedomvaries with the specifictechniquespeopledevisein relation to their history to makethemselvesfree; a "free subject"canmeanmanydifferent things. I don't think there is actually a sovereign,founding subject,a universal form of subjectthat onecould find everywhere.... I think on the contrary that the subject is constitutedthrough practicesof subjection,or, in a more anonymousway, through practicesof liberation, of freedom,as in Antiquity, starting of coursefrom a certain numberof rules, styles and conventionsthat are found in the culture.22

The "commonstakes,"he declaredof historicalanalysisandpolitical critique, are that "we are not, and do not have to place ourselves under the sign of a unique necessity.,,23 For Foucault, freedom and determinismin history were not mutually exclusive.Freedomis not the absenceof historical determinationor fatality, andhistoricalfatality is not the absenceof freedom.For freedomis not "in" history as a great generalimage of an ideal stateconfrontedwith the brute necessityof nature.It is rathera "condition" of the history that delimits our being, and it always works itself out as a history: the history of the specific things people do to themselvesand their world to make themselves free. The existenceof freedom(that we are not underthe sign of a unique necessity)residesin the fact that no historical determinationof our beingis absolute,that any suchdeterminationis exposedto eventsthat interrupt it, transformit, and reinterpretwhat it is. The experienceof freedomis an experienceof such an eventthat frees our relation to the practicesandthe thinking that havehistoricallylimited our experience. And the practicesof freedomarewhatpeopletry to makeof themselves when they experiencethe existenceof freedomin the history that has formedthem.At the junctureof historicalanalysisandpolitical critique

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would thus lie the task of "freeing" this experiencein the history of our "subjections,"askingwhat then might specificallybe doneto make ourselvesanew. For Foucault freedom was thus not a state one achievesonce and for all, but a conditionof an "undefinedwork" of thought,action, and self-invention.As such he tried to introduceit into politics and ethics. To be free, he argued,we must be able to questionthe ways our own history definesus. In his idiom, to the degreethat a systemof thought or governmentseeksto rule out this possibility, it is a form of "domination." Foucault'sprinciple wasthatno form of poweris evercompletely "dominating" in this sense.The history of a kind of power is never suchas to in fact excludealtogetherthat peoplewill questionit, revolt againstit, organizeto overthrowit. Thus, if thereis no societywithout some kind of power, there is none whose power is total or absolute. Freedomis thereforenot the end of all power, but an inherentlimit of its continuing exercise: there is no face to face confrontationof power and freedom which is mutually exclusive (freedom disappearswheneverpower is exercised); ... rather than speakingof an essentialfreedom, it would be better to speakof an "agonism," ... a permanentprovocation.24

It follows that freeing ourselvesor liberating ourselvesis nevertotal or absoluteeither. "I don'tthink thereis anythingthat is functionallyby its very nature-absolutelyliberating.,,25 Freedomalways remains still to be done, and we are never done with it. Its basis is not to be found in anythinga cosmology,theology, psychology,or legality says we are; rather we must place such theories back into the primary practical context through which they concretelyaffect us. For that is the only guaranteeour freedom can have. Freedomis a practice; ... the freedom of men is never assuredby the laws and institutions that are intendedto guaranteethem. That is why almostall of theselaws andinstitutionsare quite capableof beingturned around.Not becausethey areambiguous,but simply because"freedom" is what must be exercised.. . . I think it can never be inherent in the structureof things to guaranteethe exerciseof freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.26

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To be free is thus to be able to questionpolitics, to questionthe way power is exercised,disputing its claims to domination. Such questioning involves our ethos,our ways of beingor becomingwho we are. Freedomis thus an "ethical" matter. "Freedom," Foucault declares, "is the ontological condition of ethics; but ethics is the deliberate form assumedby freedom.,,27 If the existenceof freedom in history conditions the elaborationof an ethics, that ethics is the attempt to endow this existencewith a specific practical form. Kant is the modernphilosopherto make of freedom a "condition" of the very possibility of ethics or morality. He helped to introduce into ethics the task of freely "constructing"or "making" ourselvesin a free spacenot governedby the necessityof nature, or basedin a natural knowledge.But by inserting the questionof identity into the heart of such critical philosophy,Foucaultdepartsfrom the complex Kantian distinction betweenlaws of freedom and laws of nature.For Foucault,the experienceof freedomis not the experienceof a law or principle. The "condition" of freedomdoesnot standto its "deliberate forms" as a general regularity to the casesit subsumes;it is not a "regulative ideal" one must instantiateor exemplify. It is rather the condition of the "undefined work" that opens new possibilities for being, and that exposesthe presumed"necessity" of inherited ones. That is why a critical philosophy of freedom "will not deducefrom the form of what we arewhat it is impossiblefor us to do andto know, but it will separateout, from the contingencythat has madeus what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do, or think. ,,28 This idea of freedom, as an "ontological condition," however,was not the dreamof an experienceof freedomreleasedfrom all "technology." On the contrary, Foucault stressedthe techniquesor practices of freedom. He wanted to rethink techne, making the question of freedom a "technological" one, a question of "technologiesof the self." Foucaultheld that what countsas "free action" or "free being" is always action or being under a particular sort of description; he then arguedthat such descriptionsacquiretheir intelligibility through concretepracticesor "deliberateforms." Thus, one may say that as an "ontological condition" freedom never prescribesthe descriptions under which our actions must fall, but rather "frees" us with respect

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to those descriptions.The experienceof freedom never tells us what we must do; that is just thejob of the "practicesof freedom." Critical philosophyis then the attemptto specifywhat it is aboutourselvesand our world that must be freed, and what we must thus do to make ourselvesfree. That is why freedom always remains a practical or "technological" matter. In particular, Foucault hoped to introduce this practical question into modern liberation struggles. I've always beena little distrustful of the generalthemeof liberation, to the extent that ... there is the dangerthat it will refer back to the idea that theredoesexist a natureor humanfoundationwhich, as a result of a certainnumberof historical, social or economicprocesses,found itself concealed,alienatedor imprisonedin andby somerepressivemechanism . . . . [For], when a colonial peopletries to free itself of its colonizer,that is truly an act of liberation, in the strict senseof the word. But as we also know, that in this extremelypreciseexample,this act of liberation is not sufficientto establishthe practicesof liberty thatlateron will be necessary for this people,this societyandtheseindividualsto decideuponreceivable and acceptableforms of their existenceor political society.That is why I insist on the practicesof freedom.29 Freedomis thus not the end of a liberation struggle,but the condition from which it derives and the questionit poses."Liberation" is not a state in which all possibility of domination has been eliminated, but the critical opening of new ways of determiningwhat is tolerable or acceptablein the mannerin which politics is conducted,and lives led. For in strugglesagainstoppression,or in favor of rights, peoplecease to tolerate their complicity in a form of power; it is then that the existenceof freedom occurs in their history, and the questionof the practicesof freedom is posedfor them. Sexual liberation strugglesare a casein point. Foucault sought to analyzemore concretelyjust what is "free" aboutthem, just what they serveto "free up" in our historical experienceof ourselves.He tried to locate the emergenceof a critical spaceof experience,in which, with respectto passionateor erotic relations,we might ask again what to do to "exercise" our freedom:

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doesthe expression"Let us liberateour sexuality" havea meaning?Isn't the problem rather to try to decide the practicesof freedom through which we could determinewhat is the sexualpleasureand what are our erotic, loving, passionaterelationswith others?It seemsto me that to use this ethical problem of the definition of practicesof freedom is more importantthan the affirmation (and repetitious,at that) that sexualityor desiremust be set free.30

Thus, "sexual freedom" would not lie in licenseor in self-control. It would not be a matterof the acts one mayor may not perform, or of an autonomyimperviousto what happensto one. For, the servitude against which it is directed is the historical limitation of our very conceptionof our erotic experience,and freedomis what would make that conceptionsomethingopen-endedand improbable. In his last research,Foucault tried to uncover the genealogicalsourcesof this conceptionof freedom, its condition and its practices. Freedomor eleutheria,he declared,was a central preoccupationin the practice and thought of ancientethical schools: in antiquity the will to be a moral subject... was principally an effort to affirm one'sfreedom and to give one'slife a certain form in which one could recognizeoneself,be recognizedby others,and in which posterity would find an example.31

Such affirmation of freedom was, however, not open to, or required of, everyone.On the contrary it concernedonly a very small minority amongthe peopleand evenamong thosewho were free. There were severalforms of freedom: the freedom of the chief of stateand of the army had nothing to do with that of the sage.32

And, indeedtoday it is very difficult to know who participatedin this morality in Antiquity and underthe Empire. We are thus very far from the moral communities schematizedby the sociologistsand historians who study an assumed · 33 averagepopuIatlOn.

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To understandthe underlyingway of thinking or "tacit community" that allowedthis minority to affirm its own freedom,Foucaultthought we must thus dispensewith "the platitude more or less derived from Hegel" accordingto which "the individual in ancientsocietywould be submergedin the noble totality of the city.,,34 For in fact freedomwas then an individual matter,evenif not yet an "inward" one.It was part of a "care for oneself,"which, in contrastto the "social ethics" to be developedlater, was primarily a matter of "self-regardingvirtue." Foucaultarguesthat it was the "carefor self" which requiredresponsibilities towardsothers,not thoseresponsibilitiesthat imposeda certain kind of relation on oneself.It was in order to makeoneselffree, or to affirm one'sfree being,in a recognizableandexemplaryform, that this minority of men came to observea particular sort of ethic in their relationswith one another. One may regardFoucault'sstudy of the medical,domestic,political and philosophicalliteratureof the period, with its problemsof excessive aphrodisiaand ethicalakrasia, as an attemptto isolatethe "singular form of thought" which madeof a man'sindividual and civic being the sourceof an affirmation of a virile freedom.Centralto this way of thinking was a specific dangerto oneselfand to the rule of the city, an ignoble servitude.It was not the dangerof poverty, unemploymentor deviance;it was not the dangerof Adamic vanity and original sin. It wasthe dangerof slavery,andin particular,slaveryto oneself.Eleutheria meant basically not being a slave. Accordingly, eleutheriawas not conceivedin contrastto a natural causality,a statisticalregularity, or the will of a God. The noble "selfmastery"of the ethical man was not yet a self-renunciation;"care for oneself" did not yet commanda "selfless" or charitablerelations to others.Yet this task of affirming a noble eleutheriawas not a task for slaves,but for the citizen's own relation to himself, and the example he sets for others. "[a] slave has no ethics. Freedomis then in itself political. ,,35 Thus, it was as a model or analogythat slavery was important for the ancient practicesof freedom. Through this analogy, mastery of oneselfwould be boundup with a masteryof othersin both household and city. One should rule oneselfas one should rule a slave. But, to properly rule others,one had first to know how to rule oneself;and it

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was bestfor thosewho could not do so to submit to the wise authority of those who could. Thus, the affirmation of freedom rested on a famouslack of reciprocity; it dependedon the existenceof thosewho could not exerciseit on their own. This pattern of thought is found in Plato's famous analogyof the soul and the city. For it was not just that governmentor arche in the soul is like governmentin the city, andinvolves analogousparts.It was also that the bestcity was the one wherethosewho know how to rule themselvesare the onesto rule others.And wherethis eidosof the best city is not yet instantiated,it should serveas a model for the relation a man must neverthelesshave to himself in order to be free. In ancient thought, the art of being free was in short an art of masteringoneselfin the face of the risks, the abuses,and the excesses of ruling others.But this art, as an art, also cameto involve another sort of maitre: the masterwho teacheshow to be free, what to do to truly masteroneselfin wise or temperaterule of others.Being free was thuslinked to paideia,andthe forms of knowledgeand self-knowledge it requiredof one; andso it would be linked to the freedomof the sage. It was in this pedagogicalcontext that Plato would argue that to be truly free one must know how to separateappearancefrom reality, and so contemplatethe true or metaphysicalnature of the soul. Foucault presentsthis "politico-pedagogical"matrix as governing the sorts of "practicesof freedom" that were inventedfrom Antiquity to the Empire.The matrix would be undoneasthe "spiritual" problem of inner freedom cameto be separatedfrom the externalproblem of civic duty of the exerciseof political power. Thus, Foucault tried to isolatea basic change in what might be calledthe "ethical subjectivity" of power, which he formulated in this way. The leader of Plato's Republic, he said, had to be a philosopher; later, with Aquinas, it would be enough for a monarch to be virtuous, a just government being the one that imitates God's creationin promotingthe honestas of man. Machiavelli would still be concernedwith how a Princemight reinforcehis relationswith his subjects.But with the new seventeenthcentury science of the administration of the objective population, wealth and territory of a state,a new sort of figure would emerge. For the first time, the personwho was to rule others had to be a "politician"-a figure characterizednot by membershipin a higher

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ethicalcommunity,but by the knowledgeof the "reasonof state"with its internal and externalpolicies. The politician would be judged not in terms of his philosophy,his godlinessor his virtu, but by the efficiency or competencethrough which he pursuedthe "policies" of his state.Indeed,an early namefor the knowledgeor sciencehe practiced was Polizeiwissenschaft.And in these "policies" or "policings," the individuals to be governedwould no longerbe conceivedin the ancient manner: "the marginalistic integration of individuals in the State's utility is not obtainedin the modernstatethrough the form of ethical community which was characteristicof the Greek city.,,36 In particular,it is throughthis processthat "economy"would cease to mean "the rule of the oikos" and the model it offered for wise or "paternalistic" government,and would becomethe name of an independentreality governedby its own naturallaws. The greatdiscovery of "political economy"would be the momentwhen the knowledge of this reality becamecentralto government.Classicalliberalismwould emergeas an internal limitation the state would impose on its own policies. In this modern political context, new practices of freedom were invented. One way the questionof freedomwould cometo be formulated would be this: Which part of one'sactionsor thoughtsare one's own to disposeof as onewills, andwhich partis oneobligedto transfer to the regulation of the State?At first, Foucaultsoughtto define his own view of freedom in contrastto the classicalsort of question. The contextfor this conceptionof freedomand the statewas a legal one.It is to a "reactualization"of Romanlaw in the writing of modern constitutionsthat we would owe what might be called the "propertyor ownership-theory"of freedom, power, and their relations to one another.According to this theory, freedom is somethingwe own or possessby natureor by right: it is a "good" we disposeof, and which we may thus togetherinvest in a sovereignauthority. The question then becomesto decidethe portion of this basic property individuals shouldbe entitled to keep,and the portion they shouldagreeor "contract" to turn over to an independentauthority, applicableequally to all of them. In contrastto this view, Foucaultadvancedhis own conceptionof power, and of modernforms of power in particular,not as sovereign

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authority, but as a complex anonymousstrategyof rule, with varied sources,and with the consistencyof a kind of knowledgeor reason. Accordingly, he proposedwhat might be called a "no-ownershiptheory" of freedom: the practicesof freedom are not somethingthat is ownedor belongsto anyone,by natureor by right. Freedomis not just a possessionwe disposeof and use. To have it we must "exercise"it, and to exerciseit is to be able to questiona kind of power, or refuse a kind of servitude,in the way we havebeenconstituted.ThusFoucault played on the word "constitution." In referenceto Hobbes,he said that insteadof thinking of power as "constituted"through agreement amongourselvesas ownersof freedom,we shouldthink of freedomin termsof the historical processthroughwhich we cometo "constitute" ourselvesas subjectsof the sort of activities throughwhich we may be governedand may govern ourselves. It follows that an historically constitutedmannerof governing-a form of "power"-does not itself arise from free consent,even if we may seek to restrict or limit its operationsthrough consensual procedures."Power is not a matter of consent.In itself it is not the renunciationof liberty, the transferof rights, the power of each and all delegatedto a few. ,,37 And yet a form of power supposesa tacit acceptanceor toleration: people must be willing to do their bit in maintaining it, and that is somethingthey may come to refuse. Thus, while freedom is not an individual possessionfrom whosetransferencethe authority of power derives,it is a "condition" of the history that delimits or "constitutes" individuals in the gameof governmentand self-governmentin which they participate. It wasthenunderthis conceptionthat Foucaulthopedto reintroduce the ancientconceptionof freedomas ethosor concreteway of being, and so to reconnectthe "spiritual" and "political" sensesof freedom, whoseancientpolitico-pedagogicalidentificationis no longerpossible, credible, or desirablefor us. In questioningthe "ownershiptheory" of liberty propoundedin the classicaldoctrineof sovereignty,Foucaultwas,of course,hardly alone. One finds objectionsto it alreadyin Spinoza'squarrelswith Hobbes; and one may arguethat this Spinozistictradition would be takenover by Marx. In our time it is continued,amongothers,by HannahArendt,

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who declaredthat "the greatestand most dangerousdifficulty" confronting our view of freedom, and thus our freedom itself, is the inadequacyof classical"sovereignty-theory. ,,38 Arendt brings out a question that was to increasinglypreoccupy Foucault in his last years: what it meansto speak publicly, freely, critically, or the link betweenthe "practicesof freedom" and thoseof critical discourse.The conceptualand practical interconnectionbetween "being free" and "speakingtruly" would be the topic of Foucault's last lectureson parrhesia, the word which in classicalAthens cameto be usedfor "free speech"or "freedomof speech."Among the "events" that would give rise to the invention of the art of philosophy would be a sort of crisis or "problematization"in the practicesof speakingfreely: in the critical practicesof Wahrsagen. As a type of free speaking, parrhesia was somethingmore than permittedspeech;its "freedom" was more than a right to speak.For a stateto permit or allow it is not sufficient for it to exist, just as for a stateto seekto suppressit is neverenoughto eliminateits possibility. Thus,we shouldnot restrictour understandingof it to our own modern constitutionalor legal view of the right to free speech.Ratherwe may take it as "ethical" in the senseFoucaultgave to the term: as a matter of how peoplerecognizethemselvesas "subjects" of free critical discourse, or of what relations to themselvesand to one another they must have in order to speaktruly about themselves.In this way we may seein ancientparrhesiaa startof the activity of critical Wahrsagen of which Foucaultdreamt: the attemptto open an experienceof the freedomthat conditionsour participationin the history that "constitutes" us as individuals, as membersof communities,and of states. Foucaultwould then formulate the questionof free public speechin a different way from HannahArendt; his accountdoesnot turn on her great distinction betweenprivate and public. For Arendt, being free was an intrinsic propertyof an "original" realm of thoughtand action. In this realm, "slavery" to the particular interestsand necessitiesof domesticor private life would be overcomeor suspended.Only in this way or in this placewould beingfree and speakingtruly discovertheir fundamentalor original tie to one another. Thus, Arendt saw the "sovereignty-theory"advancedby Rousseau and then introducedinto critical philosophyby Kant as a dangerous

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declinefrom this public realm. The modernconceptionof a subjective or private "free will" that would precedeand causeactions would obscurein a dangerousway its own derivationfrom the public realm. To be free again we must thus exposethe derivative characterof the very concept of the free will, rediscoveringthe primordial sort of "publicness"of which freedomis an intrinsic attribute.For Arendt, the greatdifficulty and dangerof sovereignty-theorywas to have removed freedom from the spacewhich gives it its true meaning: it had sought to transposethe conceptof freedomfrom an external,worldly, public activity to a subjective,internal, private state. Foucault'slectureson parrhesiaoffer anotherpicture. "Freespeech," even in Athens,was not fundamentallya speechthat transpiredin an original realm, dissociatedfrom the slavery or necessityof the oikos. Long before the invention of the "free will," parrhesia would have both "public" and "private" uses.Indeedpart of the "genealogy"of the conceptof "free will" is to be found in the elaborationsof both public andprivateparrhesiacactivities,in particularin Romanphilosophy, which Arendt declaresis no philosophyat all. Moreover,not only did the activity of parrhesia occur both in private and in public, but the public occurrenceof it was not restrictedto democraticassemblies. Another political use was in the councilor advice given to kings. The activities of free or critical discoursethus cut acrossthe private/ public distinction then as now. And Foucault sought to analyze the "realm" of speakingtruly and freely that ancientphilosophydefined for itself in anotherway. One sourcefor this historical questionis the hermeneuticalstudy of A. Momigliano of the term pharrhesia.39 He finds that until Athens of the fifth century, eleutheria-thecondition of not being a slave-and parrhesia-sayingwhateveronewantswithout regardfor conventional or traditionalrestrictionson doing so-werenot linked to oneanother. For Homer, eleutheriawas still conceivedin the context of war and conquest. The Athenian connectionbetweenthe two was a semantically,as well as a practically, complexone. For unlike isegoria, the equality or right to speakin assembly,parrhesiawas also thoughta privatevirtue: a matter of the way of being, the ethos,and even the eros of the one who speaks.It is as such that the term occurs in the debatesabout

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democracy,notably in the passages of Book IX of the Republic,where Plato arguesthat philosophy and democracyare incompatible, passagesto which Foucaultdraws attention. According to Momigliano's study, this distinction betweenisegoria and parrhesia would recur in the Latin distinction betweenlibertas and iicentia, and eventually in the modern distinction betweenthe "positive" and "negative" conceptionof freedom. It would come to figure as well in the Christian doctrine of the "truth of conscience"as the parrhesiaof speakingwith God; it would thus havea handin what Foucaultproposedto analyze as "pastoral" discourse. In his lectures,Foucaulthopedto addyet anothersense,or to rethink parrhesiain yet anotherway: in termsof the "concernfor truth" that would be characteristicof his own ethic, his own passionof free critical community. I believetoo much in truth not to supposethat there are different truths and different ways of sayingit. To be sure,one cannotdemanda government to speakthe truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. On the other hand,it is possibleto demandfrom governmentsa certaintruth as to final aims, a generalchoice of its tactics, and on a certain numberof particular points of its problem; that is parrhesia (free speech)of the governed,who can and must summon,in the name of knowledgeand their experienceand becausethey are citizens,the governmentto answer for what it does, the meaning of its actions, and the decisionsit has taken.40

Truth What is thought?What is philosophy?According to Gilles Deleuze, thesewere the questionsthat hauntedFoucaultthroughoutthe long laborsof his archivalresearch.Foucaultrejectedasludicrous(derisoire) an older imageof philosophyas a timelesssupervenientdiscoursethat would sit in judgment,assessingand fixing the boundsof what is true in all other discourses.Today philosophical "critique" must assume anotherform. There is always somethingludicrous in philosophicaldiscoursewhen it wants,from the outside,to dictatethe law to the other discourses,telling

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them wheretheir truth is and how to find it, or when it takesupon itself to inform their developmentinto a naive positivity; but it is entitled to explorewhat, in its own thought,can be changedthrough its exerciseof a knowledgethat is foreign to it. 41

Philosophywould thus be an "exercise"or "work" expendedon a knowledgeforeign to it. About the non-philosophicalthings people acceptas true (or reject as false), philosophywould not issuea metajudgment"legitimating what is alreadyknown"; but by referenceto such knowledge, it would changeitself. In what would its critical attitudethen consist?Foucault'sanswerin the last phaseof his work, is that philosophywould bethatexerciseor activity which,in determining the historical limits of the "thinking" foreign to it, would openthe questionof new or other sorts of thinking. It would ask what other things peoplemight yet acceptas true, what other sortsof relation to the truth they might yet have in what they know, what they do, and what they are. With respectto other truths, philosophywould ask: Is it possibleto think in other ways? [Wh]at, then, is philosophytoday-I meanthe activity of philosophyif it is not the critical work of thought on itself? In what doesit consist, if not, ratherthan legitimatingwhat is alreadyknown, in undertakingto know how andto what extentit might be possibleto think in otherways (penserautrement).42

Foucault'sown historical researchinto "systemsof thought," in any case,would have beenmotivatedby such a "philosophical" concern for the truth. That is what would make his investigationsinto forms of thought in their historical sites "philosophical" in a different way from the "philosophicalhistory" or "history of philosophy"of the last century. Thus, in a 1978 debatewith some French social historians, Foucaultdeclaredthatit waspreciselythis philosophicalconcernwhich distinguishedhis historical project from theirs. Social historians,he said, make of "society" the generalhorizon of their analysisand the element in relation to which they must locate one or anotherparticular object ("society, economy,civilization"). My generalthemeis not society, it is

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true/false discourse: I mean the correlative formation of domains, of objectsand of the verifiable and falsifiable discoursesthat are connected to them; and it is not just this formation that interestsme, but the effects of reality that are linked to it. 43

The point of studying the historical formation of "true/false discourse"would be somewhatdifferent from the point of studyingeverything in relation to "society." It would involve complicationsor "entanglements"of a sort which the history of society could more easily evade.Both kinds of history would involve problemsof method,or of the constitutionof sourcematerial, and the types of acceptableinferencethat can be made from it. But the "philosophical" or "critical" concernfor truth in Foucault'shistory did not reduceto suchproblems of methodology.Rather, it was a matter of two sensesof history; it was a questionof the relation of the history he wrote to the history from which he wrote, and to which he hopedto contributeby writing. For it is there that the exerciseof thinking in other ways would be deployed. A central problem for historians and philosophersof history had been explanation;how can we explain the occurrenceof events in history, and, on the basisof such explanations,what predictionscan we make?Foucaultwas interestedin anotherproblem: Why are some things ratherthan othersstudiedby historians,what kinds of "events" do they study or seekto explain? Thus, what he admiredin Annales social history, or in the Frenchhistory of science,was the discoveryof new classesof historicalevents,togetherwith new kinds of documents and styles of inference.Thesehistorianshad shown for examplethat a changein demographyor in the way bone structurewas studiedat different time were importanthistorical events.In the Introductionto The Archeologyof Knowledgehe tried to isolate somecommonfeaturesof thesetwo discoveriesof the newsortsof thingswhich historians might explain. In that book, Foucault argued that there is a sensein which the questionof "objectsof discourse"is prior to the questionof methods of explanation and prediction. In making this case, he considered himself to have discoveredyet anotherclassof events:thosecomplex occurrencesthoughwhich anonymousbodiesof discourseacquirethe

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characteristicobjectsfor which therecan be truths andfalsehoods.The study of eventsof this kind-the "eventsin thought"-wouldinvolve a particularsort of critical questionor questioning.It would ask: What are the events that changewhat we can explain, and the things for which we seek explanation?And the point of asking such questions would not be to makepredictions,but to raisethe issueof whetherwe need to restrict ourselves,or our ways of finding the truth, to such objects,or whetherwe might discoveryet other new ones.The critical aim of the study of the "events in thought" would thus be to "free" our historical sensefor other possibilities. Foucault declared that what irritated people the most about his work were not so much its findings or its methods,but this critical entanglementof his "philosophy" with the eventshe examined.What was disturbing was his attempt "to do the history of the 'objectivization' of thoseelementswhich historianstake as objectively given; ... an entanglement(embrouille), in short, which it is not easyto get out of. ,,44 But for Foucault,this "entanglement"with truth or objectivity was not just an epistemologicalmatteror a questionof what we can know. It was also a political entanglement,or a matter of what we can do. For Foucault had arrived at the view he expressedin a discussion aboutNietzsche,that "[t]he political question,to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienatedconsciousness or ideology; it is truth itself. ,,45 This remarkwas directedagainstcertain assumptionsof the philosophyof Ideologiekritik. In exposing the "misrecognition" or "misunderstanding" peoplewould have of their true place or role in history or society,this kind of critical philosophy,this "Interestof Reason,"had supposeditself to be in possessionof a "true" view of people'sessential nature or social being, one that would stand outside of all "power relations." Foucaultarguedthat it is not the casethat where power is exercised,our true nature is alienated,and nothing true can be said about us. Our critical questionshouldrather be: Why are there some sortsof truths aboutourselvesand not othersat a time andplace?And what are the costsand consequences to ourselvesand our societythat there exist thesesorts and not others? Thus, in his discussionwith the social historians,Foucault asked: "Is not the most generalpolitical problemthat of truth? How to link

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to oneanothera way of dividing up the true andthe false anda manner of governing oneself and others?,,46Since our "entanglement"with such "political" interconnectionbetweentruth and governmentis a matter of history, Foucault thenadvancedas the point of a critical examination"to discovera completely other divide through another way of governingoneself,and to govern oneselfin a completelyother way starting from another divide." This is what he then called the questionof "political spirituality." With this problemof "spirituality," Foucaultbecameentangledwith a third kind of truth: the sort that is involved when one is enjoinedto live a "true life." It is the problemof how we cantruly andfreely make ourselvesinto certainkinds of beings;it is the problemof who we can be. In short, the irritating entanglementof Foucault'sresearchwould consistin raisinga particular"philosophical"questionaboutthe truths of which we are capablein knowledge,in politics, andin poetics.Thus, he confronted a problem for contemporaryphilosophy: Does there exist a distinct sort of "concernfor truth" that would separatephilosophy from suchconcernsin domains"foreign to it," in science,government and the arts?Or must we "naturalize," "politicize" or "aestheticize" philosophy, reducing its concern to one of those others? Contemporaryphilosophymay be said to have courtedall three dangers. Somepeopletried to identify the critical attitude of philosophy with that of positive knowledge,and so turn it into a science;others soughtto insertthe critical questioningof philosophywithin the assurancesof a particulardoctrineof societyandpolitics, and so turn it into political theory; still others, objecting to the positivism of the first group, and the rationalismof the second,tried insteadto collapseits distinctive concernsinto considerationsof style, writing or "poetic thinking." In eachcasephilosophicalthinking would forfeit its specificity with respectto science,political theory, or literature. Against such reductivetendencies,Foucaultsoughtto preservethe critical distanceof philosophicalthoughtwith respectto what can be true in the thinking of science,politics, or art. That distancewould not allow philosophy to dictate how truths should be pursuedin these other areas.It would lie in the history of the formation of the thinking that delimits what can be true in them. By investigatingthat history,

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philosophymight ask what elsecan be known, can be done,or can be lived, in our historically bound activities of thought. Thus the means for Foucault'sexerciseor activity of "thinking in other ways" would be those of a history of particular "systemsof thought." And, conversely,what he wantedto introduceinto contemporarysocial history was precisely the existenceof those "events in thought," which, by introducing new possibilities,called for the activity of such critical or philosophicalintelligence. "What is the costto philosophyof a history of thought?What is the effect, within history, of thought and the eventsthat belong to it?,,47 With such questionsFoucaultsoughtto formulate again the ancient problemof the very natureof philosophy.In his last lectureson parrhesia, he was onto a new way of charaterizingits concernfor truth and of defining its characteristicpassion. For Foucault, "the truth" was thus not a single thing, everywhere the same. "I believe too much in the truth not to supposethat there are different truths and different ways of sayingit. ,,48 The lectureson parrhesia would elaboratethis distinction betweendifferent sorts of truth and different ways of saying it. Thus he introduced a grand distinction betweentwo kinds of basic questionsphilosophershad raisedconcerningthe truth. Therehadbeena long prestigioustradition of what he called the "analyticsof truth." It had beenconcernedwith how we arrive at truths,andevaluatethem.ThusFoucaulthimself had askedthrough what sorts of reasoningit is determinedwhich things may be true or false, or aboutwhich historically constituted"objects" there can be truths, or at least "warrantedassertions." But there had also existed anothertype of philosophicalreflection on the truth, less preeminentthan the first: what Foucaultcalled the problemof "the critical attitude to the truth." Here the questionwas not so much whatis true aswhat it meansto ourselvesandthe societies in which we find ourselvesto say what is true-therisks, the consequences,in a word, the "costs" of doing do. It was this tradition that Foucaulthoped to isolate and analyze: the one which asked "What doesit cost for reasonto tell the truth?" Such, in particular, was the problem raised in antiquity by the activities of parrhesia, of which Foucault isolates this general definition: parrhesia was the "speechactivity" in which a speakerwould expresshis own relation to the

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truth at the risk evenof his own life, becausehe held that it was a duty to do so in order to help or improve others,as well as himself. Since at least Descartes,the prestigeor primacy of the philosophy of the "analyticsof truth" had servedto downplayor marginalizethe philosophyof the "critical attitude." We may readthe Meditationsas an attemptto severthe ancientlink betweenthe two, with the scalpel of methodologicaldoubt. The central philosophical question would becomehow to squarethe activities of the practicalsubjectwith those of the prior theoretical one. In Antiquity, by contrast, the relation betweenthe two would be the other way around. "In Greco-Roman culture,knowledgeof oneselfappearedas a consequence of taking care of yourself. In modern culture, knowledgeof oneselfconstitutesthe fundamentalprinciple.,,49 In maintaining his critical distancefrom "legitimating what is already known," Foucault would rediscoversomethingof the ancient attitude.This, in turn, helpeddeterminewhat he focusedon in ancient philosophy. One effect of the Cartesianassertionof the primacy of "method" would lie in the mannerin which the history of philosophy would be conceived.In the way "antiquity" cameto be distinguishedfrom "modernity," the storythatleadsfrom thegreatphilosophersof Athens to those of Rome and Christianity would be that of decline, with little importance.For, in that centuries-longtradition in philosophical thought,the critical questionof sayingthe truth beganto separateitself from the greatmetaphysicaldoctrinesas to the natureof the truth. As Foucaultremarks: "Finally it camedown to this: in the first century, people said: philosophy doesn'thave to concernitself with truth in generalbut with useful truths: politics, and aboveall, morality.,,50 If, however,one turns one'sattentionaway from the "analytics of truth" to the problem of its "critical attitude," then the path that leads from Athens to Rome appearsnot as a loss and decline into insignificance,but ratheras a developmentin the attemptto interconnect knowledge,politics, and individual conduct, which had in fact beencentralto the greatAthenianphilosophersfrom Socratesto Aristotle. It is this development,marginalizedin our modern conception of the history of philosophy,which Foucaulttried to get at in his last lectureson parrhesia.

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The problem of the costs and consequences of speakingthe truth had been raised in many different contexts and frameworks. Sages, prophets,confessors,preachers,anarchists,psychiatrists,were all concernedwith this questionwithin practicesthat framed the way it was formulated.In taking up the problem, "philosophers"had to define it in contrastto theseothers,these"false pretenders"to the activity of speakingthe truth. Thus philosophy would be part of a history of "truth-speakingpractices," their emergence,ramifications, and their relationswith one another. Foucaultproposeda "grid" to analyzethis history that would address to it the following questions.How, in such practices,was it establishedwho is entitledto speakthe truth (andto whom), andunder what conditions, ethical, political, or "erotic"? About what sorts of things could one thus say the truth: divine, human,natural,or whatever?What sortsof risks and consequences for oneselfand societyare attachedto saying the truth? What sort of relation does the activity have to politics or government?Thus he would study the history of "parrhesiacthinking." The focus of this history would then be on the "events"that opened new possibilitiesin suchactivities. Foucault'squestionwould not simply be the social historian'squestionof the various roles of parrhesiac figures, and the type of "authority" they were creditedwith. He also wanted to examinethose momentswhen the very assumptionsthat defined and delimited these practicescame to be "problematized": How did peoplestartto "take careof themselves,"when the practices that provided for the who and the how of speakingthe truth lost the hold of self-evidenceover them? It was with this questionin mind that Foucault proposedto turn backto Socrates.Socrateswas a great"parrhesiac,"andwas regarded as such in the long history that led to Rome. In Socrates'famous quarrels with Sophists,tragedians,politicians, indeed with anyone willing to speakof the truth with him in the Agora,we find a "problematization" of what it is to speaktruly in relation to rhetoric, politics, wisdom, or poetry. With Socrates-theSocratesof the early Platonic dialogues-we find the emergenceor invention of a new "parrhesiac" gamewith its rules,roles,anddistinctive"costs."This gameintroduced

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a new way of formulating and respondingto the Delphic injunction "Know yourself." It cameto be called "philosophy." What was new or distinctive about this new philosophicalgame? Foucault'sanswer is simple. Socratesintroducedinto the history of parrhesiathe activity of "giving an accountfor oneself," of providing a logos for one's bios. Such an "account" or logos was, of course, not yet a Christian confession,a Cartesianmeditation, or a modern psychotherapy.It did not consist in recounting the story of one's exploitsin termsof the mythologyof the city, andits noblegenealogies; noble birth would not be essentialfor it. Instead it involved two principles. There was a principle of ignorance,or of the inability to accountfor oneselfon one'sown. The Socraticgamethus requireda masteror teacher.The secondprinciple concernedhow to recognize this master. Recognitionshould not be basedon fees or reputation, but on what Plato in the Lachescalled the "touchstone":the master is the one supposedto know how to accountfor himself, the one who lives his life in accordanceor harmony with his logos, the one who thus lives "truly." Unlike the rhetoritician or Sophist, the philosophicalmaster thus had to himself believe what he taught. Unlike the prophet,he had to speakin his own name,and not aboutthe future that will come, but aboutthe concretepresentin which he finds himself. Unlike the sage, whose esotericpronouncementson what there is involves an endless interpretation,he hadto concernhimselfwith theconcrete"ignorance" in which eachpersonfinds himself. "The unexaminedlife is not worth living," Socrates declared.But what is it to "examine" a life, and what are its "costs"?Thesewere questionspeople would ask themselvesfor a long time. Plato would provide one answer,Aristotle another,but the questionwould remain unsettled;it would undergomanyreformulationsandtransformations. In somesenseFoucault'sown attemptto "think in otherways" would be an instanceof it: the unexaminedlife would be the one where one is contentto think the same."The critical function of philosophyup to a certain point emergesright from the Socraticimperative.,,51 In reconstitutingthe parrhesiacfigure of Socratesas a sort of nodal point in the schools and traditions of ancient thought, it was this

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question of philosophy, and of its "critical attitude" that Foucault wantedto keep alive. He wantedto study how for centuriesit would remaincontroversialjust what sort of relation Socratic"truth-saying" should have with knowledge,with the city and its government,and with the "poetry" of creatinga noble existence.And it is just in this respectthat the ancientproblemof Socraticparrhesiawould discover its lineageswith Foucault'sown problemof the "entanglement"of his critical activity in "knowledgeforeign to it": in science,in politics, and in living. Foucault spoke of "fishing around" in ancient thought, looking againfor what seemsworth keepingor reviving, andwhat abandoning or historicizing. He thoughtthat this questionshould today be raised in a different way from the great Romantic and post-Kantianphilosophical preoccupationwith Antiquity, with its problemsof ancient "community" and modern"morality." At onepoint he put the matter in terms of the liberation movementswith which his own critical philosophyhad beeninvolved: Well, I wonderif our problem nowadaysis not, in a way, similar to this [ancient] one, sincemost of us no longer believethat ethicsis foundedin religion, nor do we wanta legalsystemto intervenein our moral,personal, private life. Recentliberation movementssuffer from the fact that they cannotfind any principle on which to basetheelaborationof a new ethics. They needan ethics, but they cannotfind any other ethicsthan an ethics foundedon so-calledscientific knowledgeof what the self is, what desire is, what the unconsciousis, and so on. I am struck by this similarity of problems.52

Partof the motivationof Foucault'slast lectureson parrhesiawould residein this problem of critical discoursein such a situation, where the questionof a "true" mannerof living would be raisedagain.They would supply somethingof a "genealogy" of his own philosophy, regardedas a speciesof free critical speech.Canwe today invent a free discoursethat would take up again the questionof the art of living, throughan activity of thoughtwhich would not baseits way of speaking truly on anygivenpositiveknowledgeaboutourselvesor our world, or on any theory of governmentpresumedto be final and sufficient, a

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critical philosophythat in questioningsuch knowledgeand such theory, would open new possibilities in what we might become? Plato had introducedSocraticfree speechinto threegreatareasthat would becometraditional for philosophy:knowledge,politics, poetry. Thushe advancedhis anti-Sophisticdoctrineof Forms,his new foundation for the City, and his argumentsfor the banishmentof the poets from it. It is the sameareaswith which Foucaultwould continueto be preoccupiedin the critical entanglementsof his own practice of thought.Startingfrom this initial Platonic responseto the questionof philosophy, we may thus gather together some of the fragmentsof Foucault's "fishing around" in ancient thought, finding thereby his own attitude to each domain of philosophicalinvestigation. A. Knowledge

Plato insertedthe Socraticactivity of providing an accountfor one's living within the framework of a general theory of knowledge or episteme,modeledin parton geometry,andresultingin the postulation of Forms. To know was for the soul to recall such Forms or Ideas which it hadforgottenin a pre-existence;and to accomplishthis it had to "reorient" itself, rediscoveringits true relation to itself. Thus, Plato helped initiate a "contemplative" tradition in philosophy, where an ascesisis requiredfor the soul to know anything. Descarteswould break with this part of the Platonic inheritance. "Certainty" would replace"wisdom" in the meditationalmonologue Descartesproposedfor any thinking being. Through a "method," anyonecouldlearnto separatehis true from his falseideas.The "critical attitude" would consist,or at least,startin this exercisein methodological doubt. Ancient parrhesia had not found this problem important; it was ratherconcernedwith the courageof sayingthe truth in the face of political or moral dangers. Foucault's "critical attitude" would be of another sort. It would arisefrom a generalizedcontemporarycrisis in the Cartesianor methodological conceptionof the critical relation to knowledge.Foucault wanted to replace the Cartesiansearchfor a method leading to the subjectiveattitudeof certaintywith the questionof the historicalconstitution of "objectsof knowledge."What securesthe objectsof knowledge would be an anonymousregularity in thinking not rooted in a

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subject's-evena transcendentalsubject's-relationto himself. "Objectivity" in knowledgewould be basedin suchregularities,andwould not be definedby a basicor founding "subjectivity," evenif somerules concernedthe sort of subjectswho may make objective assertions. Foucault'scritical attitudewould thuscontrastwith the "positivism" which, while it had also sought to eliminate "psychologism," had preservedthe searchfor a single invariant method of inference,or relation to experience,which would be found in all knowledge,and perhapsevenin all "meaningful" discourse.Foucaulttook up the work of the new historiansof sciencewho disputedthe assumptionof the methodologicalunity of knowledge,and who held that it was not the possessionof an "algorithm of appraisal,"but a history, that constituted objectivity in science.Foucaultsaid knowledgewas "dispersed" or disunified; and that a logic of inference(deductiveor inductive) was never enoughto accountfor the thinking that madeit objective. He then focusednot on "noble" sciencessuch as physicsor mathematics, but on much less formalized sorts of knowledgeconcerning madness,illness, crime and sex. In relation to suchobjectsat least,the critical aim of studying the thinking that advancedthem would be of a new scepticalsort. Unlike Cartesianscepticism,it would not be a questionof arriving at certainty, and would not be concernedwith Knowledgein general,but with specific kinds of it, and the discourses relatedto it. For in suchcases,what can be known is tied to what can be done, and such knowledge-poweris directedto the conceptionof particular forms of experiencepeoplehave of themselves.Foucault's scepticismwas directedto the certaintyor assurancethat this was the only way to conceptualizetheseforms of experience,the only way to obtain truths about them. This would becomea first aspectof Foucault'scritical philosophicalactivity: its specific scepticismconcerning the thinking which makescertainkinds of basicexperiencesusceptible to knowledge.This pluralizing scepticismwould then confront a second problem: that of the kinds of power which such "positivities" in knowledgesupposeand help to establish.As such,it would becomea "political" matter; it would discovera new sort of political parrhesia.

B. Politics Another areainto which Plato insertedSocraticparrhesiawas politics. He advancedthe principle, enshrinedin the soul/city analogy,that

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thosewho know how to "accountfor themselves,"and thereforehow to wisely masteror governthemselves,shouldbe the onesto rule those who cannot. Thus, he introduceda changein the framework of the debate surrounding parrhesia, over the risks of speaking freely in assembliesor in giving advice to a king. This changeis shownin Book IX of the Republic,wherePlatoobjects to democracy.Othershadalreadyarguedthat sincethe demosincludes the worst, what is bestfor the demoscannotbe bestfor the polis. Thus Isocrateshad held that the courageousorator is in fact the one who opposesthe demos. Plato introduced another line of thought and argument:the real dangerof democracywould not be that it leadsto bad decisionsor to corrupt or ignorant rulers, but that it inducesa democratic"way of life," a democraticethos.The dangerof this way of living is that it would ruin the unity or commonlogos of the city, the danger that there would be as many constitutions as there are citizens.Thus, Plato madeparrhesianot simply a problemof oratory, but a problemof the soul'srelation to itself. He connectedthe freedom to say what one wills (parrhesia) to the irresponsiblefreedomto do as onepleases,without regardfor "the true life." That is why the analogy betweenthe city and the soul would govern his accountof political constitutions.That accountwould involve the problem of "political spirituality," or the inherent link betweenthe truth one speaksand who one is. This problem of "political spirituality" would have a long history. Ancient "civic culture" would erodeand Christianity would posethe problemin other terms, as in what Paul Veyne hascalled "the democracy of shame."53In particular, Foucaultheld that with the figure of the "politician" who managesthe "policies" of a modernstate,there would be a break or crisis in the ancientview of political virtue. The "accountability" of running a state would no longer be thought to essentiallydependon the capacityof the politician to give an "account" for his life, or on the variantsof the practicedevelopedin Rome. In thesealteredhistorical conditions,critical philosophicalactivity in politics would assumeanotherrole, or define for itself anotherkind of philosophical "responsibility." It would seek to determineand to maintain limits on the "excesses"of the political managementof the state.It is in this contextthat the terms "critique" or "critical theory" would enterthe lexicon of philosophy'sconceptionof its political task.

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SinceKant the role of philosophyis to preventreasonfrom going beyond the limits of experience.But at the same moment-thatis since the developmentof the modernstateand the political managementof society-the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive 54 powersof political rationality. Which is a rather high expectation. Foucaultwrote from a senseof crisis in the high expectationsplaced in post-Kantianpolitical critique; his analysisof the "anthropological slumbers"in this tradition was an early diagnosisof it. The difficulty would lie in the attemptto insert political philosophicalcritique into a grandhistory of the West, whosetelos would be given by the social being of Man. In the post-Kantiantradition, one had imagined that the critical link between freedom and truth, and so "spirituality," residedin some"utopian" place,prior to the exerciseof power and its ideologies,which onewould thencall uponHistory to realize.Foucault took the crisis in this grand philosophicalproject to be a crisis in the role of the "intellectual," the figure who hademergedwith the Dreyfus affair, and who had assumedthe philosophicaltask Kant had set for the Aufklarer. His questioningof the assumptionsof Ideologiekritik was an attempt to sharpenour senseof this problematization.His distinction between specific and universal intellectuals was one responseto it. Foucaultfound in Nietzschea philosopherwho hadquestioned"the two great problemsof nineteenthcentury philosophy, passedon by Fichte and Hegel (the reciprocal basisof truth and freedom, and the possibility of absoluteknowledge)."55Nietzschethusintroduceda type of critical thought that did not look in Man or Society for a utopian "spirituality" outside of power. He was a "philosopherof power, a philosopherwho managedto think of powerwithout havingto enclose himself within a political theory to do so.,,56 In taking up this theme,Foucaultwould say we no longer needto think in terms of the progressor the declineof a single greatTruth or Rationality in general. It may not be wise to take as a whole the rationalizationof societyor of culture,but to analyzesucha processin severalfields, eachwith reference to a fundamentalexperience:madness,illness, death,crime, sexuality, and so forth.57

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In regard to such "specific rationalities," critical thought, in the absenceof a grandtheory, would then raisea particularkind of question. It would emergein the new social movementsor struggles.Foucault thought that such strugglesdid not arise in, and were not tied to, any single type of government;that they did not have the "high expectation" of a final liberation from all power; that there were directed to the kinds of "individuality" history makespossible; and that they thus raise a critical questionas to who we are and may be. In this they would discoverin a new way the Nietzscheancritique of power without the assuranceof political theory. For through them therewould arise"a plurality of questionsposedto politics ratherthan a reinscription of the act of questioningwithin the framework of a political doctrine.,,58 Thus a new type of political parrhesia would becomepossible.It would hold that no theory or no effective practice of government should be allowed to arrogate for itself the right to know and to regulatea single generaltruth as to how best to live, and the social arrangementsin which it is possible.Ratherone would be attentiveto thosemomentswhen, within a given situation of power, peoplestart to questiontheir social arrangementsand their participationin maintaining them,without possessinga theory to tell them in advancewhat to do. Nothing is more inconsistentthan a political regimethat is indifferent to the truth; but nothing is more dangerousthan a political system that claims to prescribethe truth. The function of "free speech"doesn'thave to take legal form, just as it would be vain to believe that it residesby right in spontaneous exchangesof communication.The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor: to respectit in its complexityis an obligation that no power can afford to shortchange,unless it would impose the silenceof slavery.59

C. Poetry

In his last research,Foucaulttried to isolate what, following Plutarch, he called the "etho-poetic" tradition in philosophy, in which poesis,or the work of artistic creation,would serve as a model for living well, as well as a techniquein the accomplishmentof this funda-

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mentaltask of ancient"virtue." How did Socraticfree speechfigure in the attempt to make of one's ethos a beautiful work that posterity might admire?In the lectureson parrhesia, Foucaultdrew a contrast betweentwo general strategiesthat would assumetheir most stark form in the challengeof Cynicism to Platonism. He distinguisheda "psycho-metaphysical"from a "bio-aesthetic"useof Socraticparrhesia. Each use offered a particular way of respondingto the advice of the Delphic Oracle to know yourself, and thus to a particular image of the "true life," associatedin Plato, respectively,with the Alcibiades andthe Laches.Eachwould involve a different passionin one'srelation to the truths one might say of oneself,a different sort of "cost." The first use of the "Socratic method" was turned towards the contemplationof the soul in the great metaphysicaldivide between Appearanceand Reality. Thus, there would be the image of the soul escapingthe prison of the body in order to seeagainthe Forms it had forgotten. The secondwas concernednot so much with the soul as with life, andnot so muchwith contemplationaswith a sortof practical testing or experimentationto determine whether one's life was in accordor harmonywith the truths one was capableof sayingaboutit. Thus, therewould be the imageof a life imprisonedin the unnecessary servitudeof habitual or inherited ways of living, and the attempt to "stylize" both body and soul in a departurethat would exposesuch servitude.The secondor bio-aestheticsort of "concernfor truth," or parrhesia, was thus preoccupiednot with "anotherworld," but with anothermannerof living. As suchit was elaboratedby the Cynics and opposedto the "psycho-metaphysical"or "contemplative"practices. From Cynicism there remainslittle by way of ethical doctrine or metaphysics.Rather there are storiesthat recount a way of life, and the critical attitude it embodied,the point of which is to show that a personis at bottom nothing else than the relation to the truth which gives his life its shapeand form. The principle of Cynicism was that the "true life" was not the otherworldly contemplativelife, but the scandalousone, opposedto the inveteratehypocrisiesof custom. As such the cynical idea was to have a long if unnoticedhistory. It would be found in the Christianmendicantsand hereticswho contradictedpublic normsof living. The early Christianswould adaptcynical parrhesiato the new practiceof preaching,applying it not simply to a

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privileged minority, but to everyone.The sametradition would also be found in nineteenth-century anarchism,wherescandalousor asocial lifestyles wherethoughtto be propheticof a new age and so critical of the presentone. In the arts, "cynical" themeswould appearin the theatreof the eighteenthcentury, and would later recur in "modern art," wherethe work of the ar~ist would be thoughtpart of his life, or of his "avant-garde"identity. Contemporary"counter-cultural" or "alternative" activities would then reactivatethe theme in yet other ways. In particular, Foucault hoped to rediscover this tradition in the modern"experienceof poetry," shownin the link betweenBaudelaire and dandysme.Indeed,one may say that along theselines, he hoped to rereadhis earlier discussion,in concertwith Maurice Blanchot, of the replacementof the Romantic idea of "genius" with the more anonymous"author" of ['absenced'oeuvre.For here there would be an experienceof oneselfin the activity of writing that would not seek to base itself on any pregiven "theory of the subject," but would rather start from the specific momentsof critical "transcendence"in historically given modesor styles of existence. Of neither Plato nor Aristotle could it be said that they cultivated the use of writing in this way as a "practice of the self"; the practice of ecriture was not important for their notion of how to live truly. Foucault disputes the view that a distinction between writing and speakingtruly was a central one for them. He arguesthat the hypomnematato which Plato refersin the Phaedruswere in fact notebooks or memorandain which one jotted down advice and sayingsin order to betteradministerone'slife. Plato'squestionwaswhetheror not they were suitedfor the task of true self-government,and it was only in this preciseform that they figured in the debatesabout the techniquesof writing within a culture of memory. It is only startingaroundthe first centuryA.D., accordingto Foucault, thatwriting asa "practiceof theself" would startto havewide currency in philosophy; it is to be found in Seneca,Epectetus,and Marcus Aurelius. Later, Christianity would invent new forms such as keeping a diary or journal in one's "spiritual exercises."Writing things down would thus start to becomean important instrumentin the attempts to freely form a "true life." It would become an integral part of

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Montaigne's"scepticism." Foucault came to see his own activity of writing as part of this tradition, or as "autobiographical"in this sense. To the scepticaland political activity of his critical parrhesia would thus belonga "poetic" one, concernedwith the formation of his own "subjectivity." In his attemptsto "think in other ways," he would adopt the rather cynical principle that says "to live well is to kill psychology." Foucaultdid not speakof an endof philosophyor of "metaphysics." He saw such talk as part of a hermeneuticenterprisewhich pictured the tradition as successiveinterpretationsof original sources,whose forgotten or hidden truth it would try to expose. Nothing is more foreign to me than the idea that philosophystrayedat a certain momentof time, and that it has forgotten somethingand that somewherein its history there exists a principle, a basis that must be 60 rediscovered.

The questionof truth in the history of philosophyshould be raised in anotherway. One would not try to historicize philosophy by inserting its eventsinto a single great interpretativeschemeone would thenhaveto surpassor overcome.Ratheronewould try to "eventalize" the history of philosophy by finding again the external events that causedit to rethink itself and to ask what else it is possibleto think. It was this sort of critical exercise,this sort of "perilous act" that Foucaultwantedto rediscoverand to reinvent in philosophy. PlatohadintroducedSocraticparrhesiainto knowledge,politics and poetry. Many centurieslater, Foucaultwould diagnosea crisis in the relation of philosophyto each area. A new kind of parrhesia, a new type of critical discoursewould then becomepossible:scepticalabout the institutions of informal knowledge,problematizingthe strategies of government,and counter-psychologicalin the free poetry of living. And so Foucaultwould be confrontedwith a fourth and, since Plato, an equally traditional question in philosophy-Whatis the eros of thinking; what is the passionof critical thought? D. Eros

In his first lecture-courseat the Collegede France,Foucaultdeclared that he wanted to set aside as vague and imprecisesuch traditional

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notionsof thepassionfor truth asthe "needfor masteryandappropriation through knowledge," or "distressbefore the unknown," or the "spirit of the period." Even psychoanalysishad not yet provided a useful idea. In their place, Foucault drew a contrast betweenan Aristotelian conceptionof the "pleasurein theoreticalcontemplation"supposedto be natural to Man, and a Nietzscheanconception of the "will to knowledge."This "will" would be neithercontemplativenor natural, nor everywherethe same. Rather, knowledge would be seen as an "invention," and as an "event, or at the very least,a seriesof events." It would be fundamentally"interested,"and its "interest" would involve a basicandparadoxical"falsification" of experience,that would allow people to say truths of some things but not of others.It was, then, such featuresof the "will to knowledge" that Foucaulthoped to develop in the courseof his concretehistorical studiesof various "discursivepractices.,,61 Six yearslater, after much hesitation,Foucaultdecidedto entitle the first and introductoryvolume of his History of Sexuality"La volonte de savoir" (the will to knowledge).What then would this will haveto do with eros and with its history? Antiquity hadmadeof Erosa centraltopic for the activity of philosophy. Eros would have a part in each of the areasin which Socratic parrhesia was exercised;and one could thus speakof the eros of the onewho knows, who mastershimself and others,andwho affirms the beautyof his noble virile freedom. It was in this erotico-pedagogical contextthat Foucaultplacedthe Platonicturn to contemplation.In his analysisof "true love" in the Phaedrusand the Symposium,Foucault tried to trace the argumentsthrough which the aestheticproblem of pederasticcourtship,with its difficulties of statusand passivity,would be replacedby the metaphysicalproblemof the inherentlink between eros and an otherworldly existence.Throughoutantiquity, he says, there was not much amour fou; one must wait for Ovid for the momentwhen you havethe possibility and the openingof an experiencein which the individual completelyloseshis headin someway, no longer knows who he is, is unawareof his identity, and lives his lover's experiencesasa perpetualforgettingof self. Now that'sa later experience that in no way correspondsto that of Plato and Aristotle.62

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There would be many avenuesthrough which eros would enter contemporaryphilosophy.Existentialismand phenomenologywould refer to it in their attemptsto opposethe "lived body" to the disembodied Cartesianthinking subject. Following Romanticism,it would be thought part of what it is to be a "genius" or "poet." The liberation movementswould make it important for "critical theory." With the erotisme of GeorgesBataille, it would play a part in the modern questioningof the subject;it would constitutea philosophical"event" in that it helpedto introducethe questionof the "limits of experience" through which the modernphilosophicalprivilege of the subjectwas challenged.Thus, in the sixties, Foucault would refer to "modern sexualityfrom Sadeto Freud": what would characterizeit was not to have liberatedthe true natureof sex, but rather to have "denatured" it, making it a limit of experience. We havenot in the leastliberatedsexuality,thoughwe have,to be exact, carried it to its limits: the limits of consciousness, becauseit ultimately dictatesthe only possiblereadingof our unconscious;the limit of law, becauseit seemsthe sole substanceof universal taboos; the limit of language,sinceit tracesthe line of foam showingjust how far speechmay advanceupon the sands of silence. Thus, it is not through sexuality that we communicatewith the orderly and pleasinglyprofaneworld of animals;rather,sexualityis a fissure-notonewhich surroundsus as the basisof our isolation or individuality, but onewhich marksthe limit with us and designatesas limit. 63

In rethinking this idea of limits and their "transgression,"Foucault came, in his last work, to see eros rather in relation to a parrhesiac situation, not so unlike the one with which Socrateshad confronted the youngPlato. In rejectingthe greatmoderninjunction to be true or faithful to our desire, we would want, as with Socrates,a critical activity of thought,which would not find its basisin religion, government, or science,in ecclesiastic,political or positivistic authority. We would require a kind of philosophicalactivity to maintain a sceptical distancewith respectto the positive knowledgeof sexualityoffered by doctors,socialworkers,statisticians,psychiatristsor gurus.We would needa philosophicalactivity that would allow us to maintaina critical distancefrom the constitutionof sexualityin strategiesof government.

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And finally we would want a philosophythat could usesuchsceptical and political distancein freely creatingnew ways of living. In this mannerwe might again becomeuncertainand curious as to how to tell the truth aboutour eros, and the erosof doing so. And so we might give a moreprecisesenseof the "wonderment"or "bewilderment" through which philosophyhad soughtto describethe passion to know, or the "will to knowledge."We might define a kind of critical "curiosity," the only kind of curiosity worth practicingwith a little obstinacy:not the one which seeksto assimilateitself with what is properto know, but the one which allows one to disengageoneselffrom oneself(se deprendrede of knowledge(l'acharnement soi-meme).What would the relentlessness du savoir) be worth it were to secureonly the acquisitionof knowledge and not, in a certain mannerand as much as it can, the straying (egarement) of the one who knows?64

The erosof Foucault'sphilosophy,its peculiar"will to truth," would residein this curious,experimental,critical passionto freely disengage oneselffrom oneself,discoveringagain what is possibleto know, to do, or to be. Thus, in the bonds of those brought together in the practiceof freedom would lie a characteristic"concernfor truth," a parrhesia, of which it may be said that: It would not consist in an expertisein the solution to our problems,but would turn its "curiosity" to the unnoticeddangersin the precisetechniqueswe employto conceiveandresolve our problems, to those questionableand questioning areas of experiencefor which we do not already have acceptedor acceptable"proceduresof solution." (2) It would not consistin an esotericwisdom to which one must convert as to a school or sect, but would start its "curiosity" rather from an experienceof "deconversion,"from a loss of assuranceor certainty as to who we are and may be, opening up spacesin which no one is as yet the master. (3) It would not consistin a nostalgiafor what has been,or in a prophesyor predictionasto what mustcome,but would direct its "curiosity" to thoseproblematizingeventsthatemergein the midstof our history,initiating newandunforeseenpossibilities. (1)

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(4) It would not consist in the contemplationof a Reasonfrom which to derive rules and norms applicableto all, and from which none could dissent,but would deploy its "curiosity" in those new areasof experiencethat questionthe "reason" of the rules or norms we have adopted,and so might require us to invent other ones.

In the restless,unfinished ruminations and studies, in the many interviewsand lectures,as in the "books of history" of Foucault'slast years,it wasthis passion,this philosophical"curiosity" concerningthe truth, which Foucaultsoughtto define and to put into practice.Thus would his own singular eros, and his own singular way of doing philosophy,come togetherfor a last time.

The Question of Ethics Why have I reviewedthis work that goes back over a half-century, its original contexts now receding from us to becomethe topic of biographiesand histories?It is not to promotea new orthodoxy,a new Masterto tell us what to do. On the contrary,I wantedto isolatein it somethingthat might yet engageour thoughttoday: "the questionof ethics." There may be many things to recommendmoral theory; one is not to have raisedthis question.The piety of moral theory is to try to say what is good for eachand all of us, and whereand how to find it. Our experiencemattersfor suchtheory only to the degreethat it conforms, or fails to conform, to such theoretical goods or obligations. The questionof who we are-historically,libidinally or "aesthetically"is a secondaryone. A different sort of philosophy is to be found in Lacan and Foucault. I have tried to show that the question of ethics is what is most "difficult" in the work of Lacan and Foucault: the least resolved,the mostopen.Yet, at thesametime, it is the mostintimateor "subjective," the mostcloselylinked to the singularitiesof their style or the peculiarities of their writing; it is the part thatleadsmostdirectly to the question of "truth" andso to the passionof their thought.A point of intersection or contact is to be found in a senseof impassein the promise of psychoanalysisin France,which cameto a headaround 1975-6. In the way of thinking eachelaborates,the questionof ethics arises with the discoveryof somethingthat would be irreducibleto the "constitution of the subject" in the order of language,or in historical systemsof thought, and so to the symbolic or discursive "idealism" that sayswe are only what a culture makesus be. In Foucaultthere would be thosemomentsof "transcendence"in the midst of our concrete histories; in Lacan, the ;ouissanceen plus, that "necessity" a civilization or "social bond" can never elude. Thus, there is Lacan's "realism" of what must always be left out in our self-idealization,and 143

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Foucault's"pragmatism"concerningwhat is yet free in our historical determinations. It is to these realistic or pragmatic junctures that they bring the questionof subjectivity-thatis where they raisethe questionof who we are, of our freedomwith respectto who or what we are said to be, and the bonds of which we are thus capable.And so they direct the passion of their thought to an analysis of what in our experience exceedsour identification with our ways of life, opening them to questioning and transformation,without the assuranceof an ideal "Platonic Republic." In this unsettlingof our identities would lie the problem of a "new erotics": of a new type of bond not basedon the exigenciesof the super-ego;or a new type of communitynot basedon what we already know of ourselvesand the ways we havecometo governourselves.In the "beauty" of our tragic libidos or historical fatalities, would thus lie an attemptto rethink the ancientquestionof ethos: how to be "at home" in a world where our identity is not given, our being-together in question, our destiny contingent or uncertain: the world of the violence of our own self-constitution.Such would be a questionthat we still today ignore only at the cost of a murderousbrutality. For it may be arguedthat the thirst for an unproblematicor "fundamental" identity, in thosesituationsthat raisethe questionof identity, has been a sourceof the most horrendousterror of which we have shownourselvescapable.Its impulsesare shownin the fear that someone is taking this identity from us, introducing an "other" passionor subjectivityin which it would be lost; or in the suppositionthat someone knows about it, knows how to extirpateor rid what preventsus from having it. The questionof a "new erotics" is the questionof how to live without such a suppositionof identity, or where it is made the object of analysis. And, conversely,to analyze this root of our "archaisms"or "fundamentalisms"is to rethink the questionof subjectivity, and of our bondswith one another. To rethink subjectivity in this way is thus not to postulatewhat we must be, but to introduce anothertype of thinking. There exists no Theory in the traditional sensefor what in our "desire" exceedsour "good," or for what is "intolerable" in our historically determined being. That is why Lacanwantedto extractethicsfrom Bien-dire, and

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Foucault,critical intelligencefrom the idealisticformationof a political will. And so they diagnosea crisis in our ethical thought of a particular kind, a crisis not so much in the rational grounds for assertingour idealsor the methodof their applicationto cases,as in what they mean to us and our experienceof ourselves:their costs,their consequences, their limits. Thus they promote a "suspiciousness"concerningthe demandsthat give rise to moral theory, and the senseof the degreeto which suchtheory satisfies,or can satisfy,thesedemands.It is just this "Nietzschean"sort of suspicionwhich BernardWilliams now tells us that the "receivedpieties" of contemporarymoral theoryhasforfeited; it has been left-unfortunately,Williams thinks-to the "historical and literary studies" influencedby the likes of Foucaultand Lacan.1 In moral philosophythere has been "applied ethics" in what Williams seesas the "unhelpful form" of deriving abstractprinciplesfrom casesand casting them in terms of a general theory or method of reasoning.Therehavebeenquestionsof equity in law and justice, and the "spheres" to which they apply. Over what, it has been asked, should the writ of moral theory range?There have been arguments over whetheror not governmentsshould avoid all conceptionsas to "the good life." But what has not beenaskedis whetherthere can be anything new in ethics. It is sometimessaid that we today live amongdifferent ethical traditions without beingable to say any longerwhy we shouldadoptthem, or how to chooseamongthem. "Pluralism" is the view that we should keep all of them at once, even if at the price of logical dissonanceor "incommensurability";"monism" is the view that we need or must have the single correct theory. But in neither casedoesthere arise the problemof what might yet cometo reshuffleandrethinkour traditions. The ethical thought of Foucaultand Lacan is not meantto preclude, replaceor "destroy" all others,but to raisethis question.The "question of ethics" is always the questionof what can be new in ethics,and so involves a "suspiciousness"aboutreceivedvalues,as has always been the case. Thus we must not supposethat our history is restrictedto what is already known about us. Our history is such that we cannotchoose from past possibilities as from a catalogue(we in fact always start

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somewhere),and suchthat we cannotprojectaheadan ideal to resolve in advanceall problemsthat will confront us (there in fact exists no such ideal). We are not condemnedto think that only Tradition or Eternity can tell us who we are and what is worthwhile about our existence;we are not condemnedto what Nietzschecalled "ressentiment." Indeedwe neednot submitto the blackmail of "folkways" that tells us that without them we can have no identity, or the blackmail of abstractprinciplesthat tells us without themwe can haveno independent way of criticizing our folkways. The "we" of the "questionof ethics" is not given through the specious"Hegelian" alternativebetweenuniversal principlesandparticularcommunities,between"rationalism" and "relativism." For it is in somesense"we" ourselvesthat are always in question,we ourselveswhose experienceis always departing from our identifications.What new forms of bonds,what new sortsof rules may we yet invent for ourselves,do we yet want to have? The ancientMasterwas the oneto know how to masterthe excesses of experiencein temperatewisdom. In dissociatingitself from such wisdom,philosophywould become"academic,"propoundingtheories modeledon a modern Science,as in the sort of Alexandrian "metaethics" from which Wittgensteinrecoiled, attractingdisciples. But the philosophiesof Foucaultand Lacanwould require another social form: not a school with its Master, not a University with its Experts. Lacan distrusted ecclesiasticalauthority, the "Church" of Psychoanalysis;Foucault rejected the Party with its presumptionto subordinateall "specific" political agency. Their work belongsto a crisis in ethical thought: Can there exist an ethical "authority" or "mastery" that would be neitherbureaucraticnor charismatic,neither scientific nor mediatic?Can thereexist a truth that would not be that of a timelessideal to which we mustaspire,or that of a traditional role we must assume,but would rather be a condition of "the question" which confrontsus with this otherwe might yet become?To makethe "questionof ethics" an unavoidablepartof ethics,no longerseparating who we think we are from what we think is properto do or good to be-suchwould be the modernform of Masteryof the ancientSocratic principle that the unexaminedlife is not worth living. One thing is for sure: we are not yet donewith this problemof our

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identity, this difficulty with ourselves,our concretefreedom and our bonds with one another.We are not yet done with the questionof what was once called our "spirituality." On the contrary, even if academicphilosophyhas beensomewhat disappointingin its responseto it, never has the "questionof ethics" been more alive or more free. We want to put behind us the secular ideologiesof perfection,and what led us into the Europeanwar and its genocide.Yet it is not certainwhat categorieswe haveto conceive of what would come after, of what we are becoming. New wavesof immigrationandthe creationof new forms of poverty and misery have again created"communities" whose identity is in question,occasioningfears and anxietiesas to "who we are." Perhaps the general symptom of this crisis is the impassethat combines a resurgenceof fundamentalismswith the comfortable"consensus"that all we needare the good old nineteenth-centuryidealsof market, law and parliamentarydemocracy.To analyze and to emergefrom this impasse,we might againrequirethe type of "suspicious"critical intelligencethat returnsus to what in our concreteexperienceexceedswhat we agree,acceptand know. Perhapswe needa kind of thinking that is not contentto leave the questionof who we are to moral theorists,but would introduceit into the heartof an ethical thoughtwhoseprinciple is that injustice is first and without end; an ethic that substitutesfor the searchfor values independentof our experiencethe questionsour concretesufferings andoppressionswould introduceinto our claimsto rights or to justice; an ethic that introduces thequestionof legality wherethereis only the rule of law, the questionof governmentwherethereis only the exercise of power, and the questionof self-invention where there is only the workings of knowledge. In this way, we might be able to raise again the questionsthat hauntedLacanandFoucault:What is the placeof eros-ofjouissance, of our suffering and pleasure-inthe truths by which we live? What is the place of truth in the ways we have inventedto live together?

Notes Introduction 1. JacquesLacan, Ecrits (Norton, 1977), p. 146. 2. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 303.

3. Ibid., p. 317. 4. Gilles Deleuze,Pourparlers (Minuit, 1990), p. 116. 5. Foucault, Foucault Live, p. 303. 6. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Pantheon, 1984), p. 339.

ot

7. Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of the Care for the Self as a Practice Freedom,"in Philosophyand SocialCriticism, vols. 2-3 (Summer1987), p. 131. 8. Michel Foucault,Technologiesof the Self, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutmanand Patrick H. Hutton (University of Massachusetts, 1988), p. 22.

9. Ibid. 10. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 206. 11. Quotedin Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Flammarion,1989), p. 239. 12. Foucault,Foucault Live, pp. 245-46. 13. Foucault,Technologiesof the Self, p. 17. 14. Michel Foucault, "Afterword," in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: BeyondStructuralismand Hermeneutics(Chicago, 1982), p. 216. 15. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 303. 16. Quotedin JacquesLagrange,"Versionsde la psychanalysedansIe texte de Foucault," in Psychanalyse L'universite (April 1987), p. 279.

a

17. JacquesLacan, Television (SeuiI, 1974), pp. 47-48.

18. Ibid., p. 49. 19. Ibid., p. 65. 20. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 7 (translationmodified). 149

150

NOTES

21. JacquesLacan,Compterenduavecinterpolationsdu Seminairede L'Ethique," in Ornicar, vol. 28 (Primptemps,1984), p. 13. 22. JacquesLacan,The Four FundamentalConceptsofPsychoanalysis(Norton, 1981), p. 33. 23. Lacan, "Compte rendu," p. 15. 24. JacquesLacan, "Impromtu at Vincennes," October, vol. 40 (Spring, 1987), p. 126. 25. Michel Foucault,P. Language,Counter-Memory,Practice, ed. D. Bouchard (Cornell, 1977), p. 133. 26. Ibid., p. 134. 27. Ibid., p. 136. 28. Ibid.

29. Lacan, The Four FundamentaLConcepts,p. 12. 30. Ibid., p. 28.

31. Lacan, Television,p. 36.

Part 1: Lacan 1. JacquesLacan, Encore (Seuil, 1975), p. 9. 2. JacquesLacan, L'Ethique de La Psychanalyse(Seuil, 1986), p. 71. 3. JacquesLacan, "Compte rendu avec interpolations du Seminaire de L'Ethique," in Ornicar, vol. 28 (Primptempts,1984), p. 8. 4. Lacan, L'Ethique de La Psychanalyse,p. 17. 5. Michel Foucault,The Birth of the CLinic (Pantheon,1973), p. 198. 6.

Ibid., p. 172.

7.

Ibid.

8. Lacan, "Compte rendu," p. 14. 9. Ibid.

to. SeeBernardWilliams, "Philosophy," in The Legacyof Greece: A New AppraisaL, ed. M. I. Finley (Oxford, 1981), pp. 202-5.

11. JacquesLacan, Ecrits (Norton, 1977), p. 49. 12. Ibid.

13. Lacan, "Compte rendu," p. 14. 14. SigmundFreud, Totem and Taboo (Pantheon,1946), p. 205. 15. JacquesLacan, Television (Seuil, 1974), p. 51.

NOTES

151

16. Quotedin Jacques-Alain Miller, "Reponsedu reel," in Aspectsdu Malaise dans la Civilisation (Navarin, 1987), p. 9. 17. Lacan, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse,pp. 20-21. 18. Lacan, Television,p. 51. 19. Lacan, Encore, p. 39. 20. Lacan, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse,p. 64. 21. Lacan, Television,p. 16. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 6. 24. JacquesLacan, Scilicet, vols. 6-7 (Seuil, 1974), p. 38. 25. Lacan, Encore, p. 78. 26. Ibid., p. 81. 27. Ibid., p. 78. 28. Lacan, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse,p. 13. 29. Lacan, Encore, p. 78. 30. Ibid., p. 58. 31. Ibid., p. 80. 32. Ibid., p. 76. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 78. 35. Ibid., p. 77. 36. JacquesLacan, "Kant avec Sade,"in Ecrits II (Seuil, 1966), p. 125. 37. Lacan, Television,p. 48. 38. Ibid. 39. Lacan, Encore, p. 55. 40. Ibid., p. 56. 41. JeremyBentham,A Fragmenton Government(Oxford, 1951), p. 63. 42. Lacan, Encore, p. 10. 43. JeremyBentham,An Introductionto thePrinciplesofMorals andLegislation, (Athlone, 1970), p. 7. 44. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance(Cambridge,1990). 45. Jacques-AlainMiller, "Jeremy Bentham'sPanoptic Device," October, vol. 41 (Summer1987). 46. Lacan, "Compte rendu," p. 12. 47. Lacan, Encore, p. 55.

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NOTES

48. Ibid., p. 57. 49. Lacan, "Compte rendu," p. 15. 50. Lacan, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse,p. 105.

51. Ibid., pp. 128-29. 52. Ibid., p. 110. 53. Ibid., p. 133. 54. Lacan, Encore, p. 70.

55. Ibid. 56. Lacan, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse,p. 126.

57. Ibid., pp. 126-27. 58. Ibid., p. 301. 59. Lacan, Television,p. 27. 60. Lacan, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse,p. 85.

61. Ibid., p. 17.

Part 2: Foucault 1. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 249. 2. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure(Pantheon,1986), p. 12.

3. The Foucault Reader,ed. Paul Rabinow (Pantheon,1984), p. 359. 4. SigmundFreud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Avon, 1965), pp. 64546, n. 2. 5. Michel Foucault,Power/Knowledge,ed. Colin Gordon(Pantheon,1980), p.220. 6. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 102. 7. David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Routledge, 1990), p. 6. 8. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 205.

9. Ibid., p. 204. 10. Ibid., p. 207. 11. Ibid., p. 205. 12. Foucault, The Foucault Reader,p. 350.

13. Ibid., p. 351. 14. Ibid., p. 335.

NOTES

153

15. Michel Foucault,Technologiesof the Self, eds.Luther H. Martin, Huck 1988), p. Gutmanand Patrick H. Hutton (University of Massachusetts, 152. 16. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 45. 17. Michel Foucault, "Michel Foucault on Attica," Telos, vol. 19 (1974), pp.155-56. 18. Foucault,Power/Knowledge,pp. 223-24. 19. Michel Foucault,The History of Sexuality(Pantheon,1980), p. 150. 20. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 45. 21. Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of the Care for the Self as a Practiceof Freedom,"in Philosophyand SocialCriticism, vols. 2-3 (Summer1987), p. 131. 22. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 313. 23. Michel Foucault,L'impossiblePrison (Seuil, 1980), p. 46. 24. Michel Foucault,"Afterword," in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: BeyondStructuralismand Hermeneutics(Chicago, 1982), p. 222. 25. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 245. 26. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 245. 27. Foucault, "The Ethic of the Care for the Self," p. 115. 28. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 46. 29. Foucault,"The Ethic of the Care for the Self," pp. 113-14. 30. Ibid., p. 114.

31. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 311. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid.

34. Foucault, "The Ethic of the Care for the Self," p. 116. 35. Ibid., p. 117.

36. Foucault,Technologiesof the Self, p. 153. 37. Foucault,"Afterword," p. 220. 38. HannahArendt, "What is Freedom?"in BetweenPastand Future (Viking, 1961), p. 145. 39. Arnaldo Momigliano, "Freedomof Speechin Antiquity" in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Scribners,1973), pp. 252-63. 40. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 314.

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NOTES

41. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (Random House, 1985), p. 9 (translationmodified). 42. Ibid., (translationmodified). 43. Foucault,L'impossiblePrison, p. 55. 44. Ibid., p. 55.

45. Foucault,Power/Knowledge,p. 133. 46. Foucault,L'impossiblePrison, p. 51. 47. Foucault, The Foucault Reader,p. 336. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 314. Foucault,Technologiesof the Self, p. 22. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 321. Foucault, "The Ethic of the Care for the Self," p. 131.

52. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 343. 53. PaulVeyne,"The RomanEmpire," in A History ofPrivateLife (Harvard, 1987). 54. Foucault, "Afterword," p. 210. 55. Foucault,Language,Counter-memory,Practice, p. 163. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Foucault,Power/Knowledge,p. 53. Foucault, "Afterword," p. 210. Foucault,The Foucault Reader,p. 386. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 308. Foucault, "The EthiC of the Care for the Self," p. 125. Foucault,Language,Counter-memory,Practice, pp. 202-203. Foucault,Foucault Live, p. 324. Foucault, Language,Counter-memory,Practice, p. 30.

64. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure,p. 8 (translationmodified).

The Question of Ethics 1. BernardWilliams, "The Need to be Skeptical," Times Literary Supplement (Feb. 16-22, 1990), pp. 163-64.

Index Kojeve, Alexandre, 17, 79 Koyre, Alexander,46

Adorno, Theodore,29 Aquinas,Thomas,116 Arendt, Hannah,118-20 Aristotle, 20, 25, 39, 46-55, 70, 71, 80, 139 Artemidorusof Daldis, 91-91, 93, 94 Augustine,Saint, 13, 92-93

Lowenstein,Rudolph, 18, 22 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 116 Marx, Karl, 22 Miller, Jacques-Alain,37, 66-67 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 120-121 Nietzsche,Freidrich, 124, 134, 139, 146

Bataille, Georges,140 Baudelaire,Charles,109, 137 Bentham,Jeremy,61-69, 70 Bichat, Marie Fran~ois Xavier, 35 Blanchot, Maurice, 137

Ovid, 139 Plato, 49, 116, 131, 132-33, 137

Charcot,JeanMartin, 23, 77, 78 Deleuze,Gilles,S, 103, 108, 121 Descartes,Rene, 13,20,93,131 Durkheim, Emile, 105 Freud,Sigmund,13, 17, 18,21,22, 30,31,32,33,35,40,41,42, 43, 47, 53, 57, 61, 69, 71, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 94 Guattari, Felix, 108 Hacking, Ian, 63 Halperin, David, 86 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich, 79 Heidegger,Martin, 26

Rawls, John, 104 Roudinesco,Elizabeth, 16 Rousseau,Jean-Jacques, 13, 119 Roussel,Raymond,5 Sade,Marquis de, 58, 59 Sartre,Jean-Paul,29 Shakespeare, William, 70 Spinoza,Benedict,118 Socrates,7,8, 17,27,49,128-130, 131, 132, 146 Sophocles,79 Teresa,Saint, 77, 84 Veyne, Paul, 133

Kant, Immanuel,30, 55-61, 63, 70, 112, 119, 134

Weber, Max, 12, 118 Williams, Bernard,37,87, 145 Wittgenstein,Ludwig, 8, 26, 146

155