Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism 9781628927702, 9781501323621, 9781628927726

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Series Preface
Abbreviations
Epigraph
Introduction: Foucault’s Modernisms
What of the Enlightenment? The modern questionand the Frankfurt School
Foucault’s questions
An unrecognized precursor: Fenollosa
The fiction-making of history, the epic of critique
The obligation to write: From modern literatureand the hermeneutic of self
Conclusion
Notes
Part One Conceptualizing Foucault
1 The Origin of Parresia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth and Freedom in the History of Madness
An entire readjustment of the ethical world: Summary of the History of Madness
The repetition of The Critique of Pure Reason in The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: The reciprocal transcenden
The transcendence of delirium, or the reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom
Conclusion: The origin of Parresia in Foucault’s thought
Notes
2 The Secret of the Corpse-Language Machine: The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel
Introduction
The birth of the clinic
Classificatory medicine to anatomo-clinical method
The normalizing gaze
A politicization of consciousness: The hospital and the epidemic
Open up a few corpses
Through the incision of writing
Roussel’s secret
The simple fact of language
Some words open language to depth
Hermeneutic of the secret of the secret
Corpse-language machine
Notes
3 Intersections of the Concept and Literature in The Order of Things: Foucault and Canguilhem
Introduction
Convergences and intersections
Canguilhem’s philosophy of the concept
Thinking the archive
The trihedron: Man’s space
Literature: Without end
Notes
4 Archaeology of Knowledge: Foucault and the Time of Discourse
The historical a priori and the archive
The unities of discourse and discursive formations
Archaeology and temporality
Notes
5 Carceral, Capital, Power: The “Dark Side” of the Enlightenment in Discipline and Punish
Conclusion
Notes
6 Foucault’s The History of Sexuality
Questioning the theory of repression
Confession
The social construction of sexualities
Power
Legacy
Notes
Part Two Foucault and Aesthetics
7 Technologies of Modernism: Historicism in Foucault and Dos Passos
Modernism, historicism, and technique
Technologies of the subject, or the novel exploded
Prismatic narratives
The polyvalence of discourse
An anti-.exceptionalist U.S.A.: The contingencies of time and space
Coda: Rethinking leftism
Notes
8 Thought as Spirituality in Raymond Roussel
Toward a spirituality of contestation1
Bataille’s inner experience: Beyond the triumph of the will
Hegel’s mutilation
Nietzsche’s tears
Blanchot: Death beyond good and evil
The death of Hegalian negation
Nietzsche’s aphorisms are not true
The space of Roussel’s language: Writing at the limit
The process paper (Process I): The productive power of silences
The ready-mades (Process II)
Notes
9 Life Escaping: Foucault, Vitalism, and Gertrude Stein’s Life-Writing
Notes
10 The Specter of Manet: A Contribution to the Archaeology of Painting
Notes
11 The Hermaphroditic Image: Modern Art, Thought, and Expérience in Michel Foucault
Art in Foucault
Hermaphrodite images
Photogenic painting
Experience of the acategorical
Passion as an experience of the acategorical
Notes
Part Three Glossary Essays
Archaeology
The “Author-Function”
Notes
Biopower
Notes
Discipline
Episteme
Note
Genealogy
Power
Problematization
Notes
Transgression
Truth
Subjectivation
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Index
Name Index

Citation preview

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Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism

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Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination. Series Editors: Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Volumes in the Series: Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism edited by Anat Matar Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism edited by David Scott Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Patrick M. Bray Understanding James, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by David H. Evans Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Paola Marrati Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Christopher Langlois Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Ariane Mildenberg Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

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Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism Edited by David Scott

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © David Scott and Contributors, 2017 The editor would especially like to thank Zach Linge for his hard work in formatting and editorial assistance. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editor. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Scott, David (David Michael Ryan Davis), editor. Title: Understanding Foucault, understanding modernism / edited by David Scott. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Understanding philosophy, understanding modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016034476 (print) | LCCN 2016038139 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628927702 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781628927719 (ePub) | ISBN 9781628927726 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Modernism (Literature) Classification: LCC B2430.F724 U53 2017 (print) | LCC B2430.F724 (ebook) | DDC 194--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034476 ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​6289-​2770-​2 ePub: 978-​1-​6289-​2771-​9 ePDF: 978-​1-​6289-​2772-​6 Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Cover image © Getty Images/Ralph Crane Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

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Series Preface Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear literary history in favor of the multi-​ perspectival history implicit in “new historicism” or, say, varieties of “presentism.” Amid current reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited various “new” or alternative modernisms—​postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, or even “bad” modernisms. In doing so, they have not only reassessed modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, rethought epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism, history, and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only which texts we read as modernist, but also how we read those texts. Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favor of modernism as mode (or mode of production) or concept. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on key philosophical thinkers influential both to the moment of modernism and to our current understanding of that moment’s geneology, archeology, and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps, folds, interrelationships, interleavings, or cross-​pollinations of modernism and philosophy. Our goal in each volume of the series is to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism. The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to offer both accessibility to the philosopher’s principle texts and to current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on “conceptualizing” the philosopher through close readings of seminal texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A second section, on aesthetics, maps connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure, often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves as an extended glossary of principal terms in the philosopher’s work, each treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement with and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory ways terms are deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy, theory, and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and often to the sciences as well.

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Abbreviations Texts by Michel Foucault in English Translation EAK EBC ECF-​AB ECF-​COT

ECF-​GSO

ECF-​HOS ECF-​PP ECF-​SMD ECF-​STP EDL EDP EEF EEW1 EEW2

The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–​1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–​1984. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–​1983. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–​ 1982. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–​1974. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–​1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–​ 1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Trans. Charles Ruas. New York: Continuum, 2007. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. The Essential Foucault. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press, 2003. Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1997. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998.

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Abbreviations EEW3 EFB

EFL EFR EFS EHM EHS1 EHS2 EHS3 EIKA EINP ELCP

EMP EOT EPGP

EPK EPPC

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Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2000. Foucault/​Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, by Michel Foucault, and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, by Maurice Blanchot. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi. New York: Zone Books, 1987. Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–​1984. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotexte, 1996. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Fearless Speech. Ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles, Semiotexte, 2001. History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality, Volume 3. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1988. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2008. Georges Canguilhem. The Normal and the Pathological, with an Introduction by Michel Foucault. Zone Books: New York, 1991. Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Manet and the Object of Painting. Trans. Nicolas Bourriaud. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994. “Photogenic Painting.” Trans. Dafydd Roberts, in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Revisions 2: Photogenic Painting. London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999. 81–​104. Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–​1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interview and Other Writings, 1977–​1984. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988.

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Abbreviations The Politics of Truth. Trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007. Remarks on Marx. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotexte, 1991.

Text by Michel Foucault in French L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1969. Le beau danger: Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2011. FCF-​ANO Les anormaux, Cours au Collège de France, 1974–​1975. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 1999. FCF-​CV Le courage de la vérité, le gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Cours au Collège de France, 1984. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2009. FCF-​FDS “Il faut défendre la société,” Cours au Collège de France, 1976. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 1997. FCF-​GSA Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collège de France, 1982–​ 1983. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2008. FCF-​HDS L’Herméneutique du sujet, Cours au Collège de France, 1981–​1982. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2001. FCF-​LSV Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France.1970-​1071. Suivi de Le savoir d’Œdipe. Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2011. FCF-​NBIO Naissance de la biopolitique, Cours au Collège de France,1978–​1979. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2004. FCF-​PSY Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Cours au Collège de France, 1973–​1974. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2003. FCF-​STP Sécurité, territoire, population, Cours au Collège de France, 1977–​78. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2004. FDE1 Dits et écrits, I, 1954–​1969. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994. FDE2 Dits et écrits, II, 1970–​1976. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994. FDE3 Dits et écrits, IV, 1976–​1979. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994. FDE4 Dits et écrits, IV, 1980–​1988. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994. FDE1a Dits et écrits, I, 1954–​1975. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001. FDE2a Dits et écrits, II, 1976–​1988. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001. FFD Folie et déraison. Paris: Plon, 1961. FHF Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1972. FHS1 Histoire de la sexualité 1, la volonté de savoir. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1976. FAS FBD

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Abbreviations FHS2 FHS3 FKF FMC FMFE FNC FOD FPM FRR FSP

Histoire de la sexualité 2, l’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1984. Histoire de la sexualité 3, le souci de soi. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1984. Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique & Foucault Introduction à l’Anthropologie. Paris: Vrin, 2009. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1966. Michel Foucault, entretiens. Ed. Roger-​Pol Droit. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004. Naissance de la Clinique. Paris: Quadrige Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. L’ordre du discours. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971. La peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard, sous la direction de Maryvonne Saison. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Raymond Roussel. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1963. Surveiller et punir. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1975.

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I would bathe myself in strangeness: These comforts heaped upon me, smother me! I burn, I scald so for the new, New friends, new faces, Places! Oh to be out of this, This that is all I wanted —​save the new.

“The Plunge,” Ezra Pound

Pour moi vous êtes celui qui, dans notre génération, fait une œuvre admirable et vraiment nouvelle. Gilles Deleuze in a letter written to Michel Foucault, 1970

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with the modernist problematic, all the while remaining true to its Foucaultian origins. In all of them, Foucault’s engagement with the question of modernism is explored through bringing a focus to his analysis of the plastic arts and literature. In either case, the essays, which make up this part, consider the practical application of his question “What is Enlightenment?” as it helps our understanding of modernism both within and without his work. I consider this introduction as belonging to Foucault and Aesthetics, at least, insofar as I attempt to bring Foucault’s question into the same orbit as Ezra Pound. As I hope will become clearer below, this introduction uses Pound’s formation of modernism and, more specifically, his promoting the work of Ernest Fenollosa as a way to frame how the authors in this second part address a Foucaultian modernism. This volume’s third and final part is a glossary of Foucault’s key terms. Since these pieces are short essays in and of themselves, we hope that this feature will permit a full engagement and examination of the many, often contradictory, ways Foucault’s terms have been applied. In this way, we believe we might satisfy readers at all levels of familiarity with this philosopher’s work by introducing terms in a comprehensible way to the neophyte, while also mapping their various permutations throughout Foucault’s corpus for the more experienced reader of his work. It is entirely fitting that this volume should follow closely the one in the series dedicated to Foucault’s one-​time colleague and friend, Gilles Deleuze. If Foucault declares: “perhaps, one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (EEW2, 343), for his part, Deleuze refers to Foucault as “the greatest thinker of our time.”1 The mutual admiration the two philosophers have for the thought of one another is built not only on personal familiarity but as well a particular attitude toward Kant, filtered through a shared Nietzschean skepticism. And it is a strange Kantian-​Nietzschean hybridity that forms their respective interrogations of modernity. Yet, perhaps, more directly than Deleuze, Foucault addresses the problem of modernity. Foucault’s work discovers within the problem of modernity great potential for breaking open the relationship between things and words. What is more, he implants a critical gaze, necessary if one is to overthrow representation and the logical and metaphysical imperatives imbedded within the discourse, divulging, as a result, the void at the center of language.

What of the Enlightenment? The modern question and the Frankfurt School Among the characteristics insuring Foucault’s influence on contemporary thought, not only for philosophers but also for art and literary theorists, sociologists, political theorists, and the like, is his thought’s blurring of the border separating philosophy, literature, and the arts. However, this transdisciplinary approach is only carried out on the basis of Foucault’s taking as his fundamental objective the diagnosis of complexities of modernity, not simply as a given, but in the form of a problem yet to be fully construed. After all, I would suggest that if there is any disagreement among the scholars making up this volume, it is over how or what Foucault calls the “modern.”

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Is it a historical period, idea? Is it a kind of practice? Is it grouping of works, a line of thought, a state of mind? Is it the exterior manifestation of a transformation carried out at the level of the formation of knowledge, or aesthetically, is it definable by its products? Or is it what compels the transformation itself? Still, all seem to fully agree—​ at least implicitly—​that more generally Foucault’s modernist project is the outcome of the reclamation by transformation of the Enlightenment legacy. Prior to Foucault, the Frankfurt School theorists engaged most directly with the idea of modernity and took it as a problem fundamental to how they defined their methods and goals; and, indeed, it was they who saw themselves as transforming Kant’s critical heritage, while placing the engagement with remnants of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) at the center of their philosophical and aesthetic projects. Foucault confessed his admiration. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the stakes for how the Enlightenment must be interpreted become all the more greater when revaluating its legacy in the shade of human ruin left after the Second World War. Even though obviously Kantian, Foucault specifically highlighted the question Adorno and Horkheimer asked, which placed Kantian rationalism under direct threat: “Couldn’t it be concluded that the promise of Aufklärung, of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason, has been, on the contrary, overturned within the domain of Reason itself, that it is taking more and more space away from freedom” (ERM, 118)? After all, might one reach the conclusion that this promise of freedom won through the exercise of reason has instead been lost because of reason? Might reason—​and the Enlightenment by extension—​be almost solely responsible for providing the conditions which make possible the mechanisms, procedures, and techniques giving birth to the variant forms of oppression that naturally follow capitalist societies and socialist societies alike—​Nazism and Fascism being just two of the obvious examples? The Frankfurt School, Foucault stresses, “measured its relationship with Marx” on the basis of the hypothesis that the legacy of the Enlightenment, that is, the promotion of reason reduced to its positivist instrumental uses, beyond all else, is to blame for the horrors and absurdities of totalitarianism (ERM, 117–​18). Perhaps, as Horkheimer argues, the “eclipse of reason” is required.2 Horkheimer and Adorno, in fact, were unyielding in their assertion that the “Enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system.”3 Nevertheless, while Foucault agrees with the Frankfurt School on the primary question that must be asked and answered, he disagrees with them as to the means by and the end to which Kant’s formulation of critique must be directed. And, more specifically, this difference is reflected in the differing characterizations Foucault and the Frankfurt School give of the question—​ “What is Enlightenment?”—​ corresponding respectively to the different forms the critical project assumes for them. Horkheimer and Adorno, for their part, see the “the program of the Enlightenment” as “the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy.”4 The critique of the “technologically educated masses,” controlled by despotic forces outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is based on playing out the self-​destructiveness of the Enlightenment, leading to popular paranoia. So it goes that “the metamorphoses of criticism into affirmation” require a direct challenge to the

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modern technological faculty, the knowledge privileged by Enlightenment, which refers to the “method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital.”5 Where universality supremely reigns, language serves the conditions which assure capitalist domination; abstraction, both metaphysical and scientific, is privileged above all else by bourgeois society. Once authority is granted to the language of science, the means for reinforcing the social power is established, inequality is validated, and, Horkheimer and Adorno claim, the path is laid for the final desuetude of ideas. For it is this abstract language, with its reduction of dissimilarity to abstract quantities, which bourgeois society takes to be ideally suited for how it organizes itself in terms of the equivalences that language universally enshrines.6 For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment is the return of reason to mythology. And in this regard, it ultimately contains within itself a profoundly antimodernist impulse: a desire for timelessness, for the universal, the buttress against the forces of history. That which is expressed is subsumed by the “culture industry,” as they call it,7 into the language of popular music, film, and television, mercilessly criticized by Adorno on the grounds that these forms of entertainment promote the mythologizing hope that all will be and (must be) reconciled “with the idea of true generality.”8 The Enlightenment provides the conditions for the emergence of culture as it contains “in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification,” which brings it “within the sphere of administration.”9 The outcome of Enlightenment thinking is that “domination survives as an end in itself, in the form of economic power.”10 Economic power becomes political power (and potentially fascism) with the creation of a unified, systematic, scientific order. Its principles are the principles of self-​preservation, of mastery over Nature. Reason constitutes “the court of judgment of calculation,” which adjusts the world to serve the ends of human self-​preservation; self-​preservation is the “constitutive principle” of Enlightenment rationality. And Truth? It is made identical with scientific systematization: “far removed from reflective consideration of its own goal as are other forms of labor under the pressure of the system.”11 Foucault, like the Frankfurt School theorists, characterizes as an interminable task the striving to comprehend the nature of modernity. However, unlike the Frankfurt School theorists, his approach is more total; for each of his specific works—​from History of Madness to Discipline and Punishment to the volumes of the History of Sexuality and the brilliant Collège de France lectures of his final years—​fit within the genealogy of modernism Foucault constructs. Perhaps, the impetus only slowly reveals itself as Foucault progresses, which is fully on display with his return to Kant’s question. And yet, here, we find Foucault’s interests and the goals of the Frankfurt School converging once again: “What is Enlightenment?” as raising to the foreground the countervailing forces of intolerance and oppression, which provides the conditions for the birth of antimodernity, in particular the rise of radical neofascist perspectives, religious and political, that, although differing in ideology, are allied by anti-​intellectualism and the rejection of critique. As it is for Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment per se is not the issue for Foucault. It is the very act of asking the question “What is the Enlightenment?” as a way for Kant to reflect upon the reality of today, which

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draws Foucault’s interest. And it is critique, finally, which Foucault takes to be most fundamental to his advocating for reclamation of the legacy of the Enlightenment. Foucault’s engagement with the problem of modernity complicates the analyses of the Frankfurt School. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, who specify that fascism is unsurprisingly the logical outcome of Enlightenment rationalism, Foucault looks to critique and Kant’s analysis of the Enlightenment as the model and catalyst for developing practices, laying the groundwork for organizing a “non-​ fascist life” (EEW3). His seeking to reclaim “the right to criticism” indirectly requests a more robust Kantian sense of critique (even if, politically, it might lead to profoundly anti-​ Kantian results). Instead of presuming that criticism is the unavoidable royal path leading to the transformation of reason into a tool for the instrumental subjugation of human beings and Nature (as the Frankfurt School worried), Foucault embraced it as “the precondition for the exercise of autonomy and, if not the pursuit of absolute truth, then the rectification of error.”12 In the end, the fight over modernity is for Foucault largely a fight over the form Critique assumes today.

Foucault’s questions Basically, I  only have a sole object of historical study:  the threshold of modernity. Who are we, we who speak this language such that it has powers that we impose on ourselves in our society, and other societies? What is this language that one is able to turn against us, that we can turn against ourselves? What is this formidable burst of enthusiasm for the passage to the universality of Occidental discourse? There you have it: my historical problem. (FMFE 2004, 127)13

Despite Foucault’s “zigzagging” [zigzagant] path of thought (FMFE 2004, 123),14 the thread connecting nearly every one of Foucault’s major and minor works is the issue of modernity, acquiring its most explicit declaration in the writings gathering around the question, “Was ist Aufklärung?” “I believe the question that has never stopped occupying me was the philosophical question: What is Enlightenment?” He continues, “All my books have been a response to this question.”15 It is the question that modern philosophy “has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either,” Foucault never tires of repeating. This is why he believes that we feel the relevance of Kant’s asking this question even now. We too seek for ourselves answers to “what we are, what we think, and what we do today.”16 Foucault establishes a line of continuity through this question from his archaeologies to his genealogies to his final preoccupation with truth and his later ethical turn (the “hermeneutics of self,” and focus on the ethics of the “care for the self ”)—​best demonstrated by the series of lectures which he gives in the 1980s at Berkeley and the Collège de France. But in order for us to understand properly the great weight Foucault places on the question “Was ist Aufklärung?” [What is Enlightenment?], it must be made clear how this question refashions Kant heralding what Foucault believes to be the nascence of philosophical “modernity.” Kant’s text “What is Enlightenment?” interrogates the

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present philosophical event in which the philosopher, who speaks of it, belongs. Foucault believes Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” first ratified this question as the modern directive. This is why I  would describe the entire series of texts coalescing around “Was ist Aufklärung?” in their different manners as making up a kind genealogy “of modernity as a question” (ECF-​GSO, 14). Philosophy fulfills one of its most primary functions when it speaks to, and speaks as, “modern,” Foucault claims. It does this when it carries out its most essential function: “to deliberate upon its own actuality” (FCF-​GSA, 14). For Kant, this deliberation is carried out in response to his posing “Was ist Aufklärung?” for himself and to himself. It is the question of his time. In doing so, Kant demonstrates for Foucault that philosophical discourse must “take its own present reality into account in order, [first], to find its own place in it, second to express its meaning, and third to designate and specify the mode of action, the mode of effectuation that it realizes with this present reality” (ECF-​GSO, 14). This is why Foucault claims that nearly all of modern philosophy since the nineteenth century continues to be haunted by this question.17 Here Foucault identifies a largely unacknowledged and still clandestine fork in the road of the post-​Kantian legacy, one that demands a choice be made. Instead of this question leading to an analytic of truth, it is a question that points Foucault in the direction of “an ontology of the present, an ontology of actuality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves” (ECF-​GSO, 21). Kant’s asking and answering this question, Foucault believes, give the practice of philosophy its raison d’être and the condition making it possible. Philosophy as the surface of emergence of an actuality, as a questioning of the philosophical meaning of present reality [actualité] of which it is a part, and philosophy as the philosopher’s questioning of this “we” to which it belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself. It is a distinctive feature of philosophy as discourse of modernity and on modernity. (ECF-​GSO, 13)

It follows that a philosopher cannot avoid posing to herself the question of this practice in tandem with how she belongs to the present. Accordingly, philosophical practice no longer is simply a matter of adherence to a doctrine or a tradition. Foucault wants the philosopher to be brought to question whatever certain “we” to which she belongs. It is the actual “we”—​this social, cultural, or political ensemble, and how it individuates itself—​that becomes for Foucault the object of his own self-​reflection. According to Foucault, Classicism presupposed the transparency of language, if only so that language found its preassigned place in the classical project of the taxonomic distribution of identities and differences, to be assigned translucently across the surface of a predetermined “homogenous field of orderable representation” (EOT, 243). With modernism, conversely, “representation has lost the power to provide a foundation—​ with its own being, its own deployment and its power of doubling over itself ” (EOT, 238). Language is freed to disclose to us its density, its obstinate materiality. “Language begins to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own,” Foucault writes in The Order of Things (EOT, 296). It is the advent of “literature,” or rather the particular engagement with language

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defined as a literary “event,” when “language acquires a being proper to itself ” (EOT, 295), that signals the advent of modernism. This volume, and in particular the specific essays composing Foucault and Aesthetics in the second part, presume that Foucault’s engagement with aesthetic Modernism (Joyce, Magritte, Beckett, Mallarmé, etc.), both how it constitutes and defines itself as a formal event, presents useful possibilities for how modernity might be framed. But what are we to make of Foucault’s relative consistent “periodization” of it, spanning the History of Madness to the late Dartmouth and Berkeley lectures; that is, his establishing and largely holding to the historical narrative, which describes the arc of movement of Classical thought, until finally tipping into what he calls “modernity” with late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century? This is even more complicated when we consider the challenge of literature and philosophy defining modernism in distinct ways—​not only formally but also historically. If we adopt the perspective of literary studies, 1922 must be the watershed moment:  the year James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce were all published. These works have become for their respective genres and societies the aesthetic summation in word, image, and sound of the contemporary moment, encapsulating those modernizing impulses evident at that time: Einsteinian physics as well as the potency of Freudian unconscious, the thrust of urbanization and the new mercantilism. And yet, this dating of artistic or literary modernism remains at odds with how the history of philosophy conceptualizes modernism beginning as early as the seventeenth century and concluding somewhere during the twentieth century. The invention of literary modernism disables representation previously governing Classicism. A  faith in the immediate correspondence between what is spoken and is spoken of, as it was in Classicism, is made absurd. But what is gained in return is the opportunity for the emergence of the “dark, concave, inner side of visibility” (EOT, 237). As Foucault writes, speaking of Mallarmé and Artaud, Modernism finally achieves “the revelation of language in its crude being” (EOT, 298). In the end, Foucault’s work always circles back to the question “What is modernism?” even if sometimes the question lies beneath unrecognizable guises and acute angles. Certainly, he asks “What is the Enlightenment?” but we discern as well that other questions are motivated by this one question:  What is sexuality? What is madness? What is criminality? When Foucault interrogates modernity, is he not also asking “what is our contemporaneity?” As Foucault argues, is it not this act of resolute self-​interrogation that precisely identifies what is modern in modernism? The schism between the two historical notions of modernism—​on the one hand, literary or artistic, and, on the other, philosophical—​regardless of how we date their appearance on the historical scene, offers two distinct though not necessarily opposed viewpoints. Whether they converge or not, or at least discover for themselves a point of convergence with the other, is but the productive impetus for the ongoing, perhaps, most modernist of modernism’s practices. It is less a period in history than an attitude; a disposition that must be cultivated in order to reexamine the contemporary in the struggles against what Foucault calls the attitude of “counter-​modernity.” We must not deny our present, Foucault argues; we must “face the task of a permanent critique of

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our historical era” (EPT, 109), in short, of ourselves. And perhaps it is here that we might find the irresolvable, though useful, tension that exists between literature and philosophy in the attempt to construct for ourselves the idea of modernism today.

An unrecognized precursor: Fenollosa In the rest of this introduction, I would like to bring the conception of modernisms that Foucault develops into a greater focus by opening a path of negotiation with the established notion of Modernism. My reason for doing this is that I would like to not only build a frame for the more general project to which Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism belongs but also provide a frame for the specific chosen approaches and objects adopted by the essays making up Foucault and Aesthetics. In order to carry out this task, I  will turn to Ezra Pound and, most especially, Ernest Fenollosa, who inspired not only Pound’s Modernist poetics but also his critique of the contemporary culture and society, which for Pound is an action that must be fulfilled if there is to be any hope of making something “New.” Ultimately, what connects Foucault and Pound, I  would argue, is a shared acknowledgment of the power and poetry of the act of “fiction-​making,” blurring the line between literature and history, lie and truth. And it is the blurring of the two, I believe, which defines Foucault’s and Pound’s modernity, because it foregrounds the problem of writing. For both, writing not only is the obvious means by which literature and history are fashioned; it also serves as a motive, as well as gives the poet and the philosopher their subject matter. The Enlightenment, perhaps, might explain the quixotic and often dangerously idiotic battles Ezra Pound wages to the end of his life, which lead him into the calamitous bosom of racists and totalitarian absurdities and the strange inanities of anticapitalist, antidemocratic libertarianism. Perhaps. But the Frankfurt School’s critique of the Enlightenment leaves unexplained the nature of Pound’s modernity. In fact, on several points Pound might agree with Horkheimer and Adorno—​an incongruity Adorno might be too repulsed to consider. Pound, after all, in no sense endorses rationalism. On the contrary, Pound’s failures, I believe, are more the result of the perils of Romanticism than the faults of the Enlightenment. Indeed, Pound’s modernity can more usefully be grasped as the consequence of the battle he wages against the Western attitude toward generalization and abstraction in language, that is, the transformation of “positive verbal conceptions . . . into so-​called negatives.”18 And it is Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” that became, with Pound’s ceaseless propagandizing, the central modernist document enshrining Fenollosa’s characterization of “ideogramic thinking,”19 an imagistically based speculative model and a practice of writing. This is not only poetically significant for modernist poetics but also, for Pound, it offers to the West a kind metaphysical-​poetic cure-​all for the cultural malaise he believes afflicts it. Pound, like Nietzsche, proclaims that poetry must cultivate a kind of “historical spirit,” identical to a “milder and continuous hygiene.”20 Without irony, Pound takes this to be wholly compatible with his suggestion that Europe must become more Chinese, more

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Confucian. “I reply that I am writing on the ‘need for Confucius,’ ” Pound claims. “I am trying to diagnose Western disease. Western disease has raged for over two centuries.”21 Elsewhere Pound asserts: “If only for the sake of understanding and valuating our own European past, we have need of the Master Kung.”22 Fenollosa’s importance, therefore, is to instigate a new poetics and a new kind of thought, which Pound hopes will provide the necessary catalyst for Europe’s self-​renewal. Here, a point of intersection linking Pound and Foucault opens before us, where a comparison between them is not only possible but also necessary. Fenollosa’s analysis of Chinese writing stresses its inextricable association to the kind of idiomatic thought, which evades the abstract and embraces the concrete in language through image. It is a “kind of thought,” Pound believes, “that is now atrophied in the Occident,”23 because the Occident has not yet “recognized the limits of knowledge transmissible by verbal definitions.”24 The path modern poetry must follow, according to Pound, is first laid down by this “different modality of thought” captured within the gestures on the page of the Chinese written character.25 Fenollosa’s goal, therefore, is less an accurate representation of Chinese culture than the dramatization of the act of translation. The translation into English of the Chinese characters, Pound argues, is both a diagnostic and therapeutic practice, critical and clinical at once.26 Translation is not the returning of language to what is familiar, recognizable; instead, it opens a path to where language must reflect on those conditions presumed when it is being written, or when history is being fabricated, following the linguistic imperatives it obligates itself to adhere to. Our contemporary François Jullien expands on Fenollosa’s injunction. Jullien makes the claim that the European must “rework his own language there, recast it and put it back under construction: with a view to making it more receptive and opening it to what it would not dream of saying, by making new possibilities arise there.” Translation is a powerful tool, Jullien insists, precisely because it de-​assimilates as it assimilates, de-​categorizes as it re-​categorizes language.27 And so it is for Pound that Fenollosa’s essay is an “écart,” as Jullien describes it, a gap or fissure, opening the European language itself to the birth of modernism out of the encounter with the so-​called “East.” Fenollosa reminds us his “subject is poetry, not language.” And yet he also admits, “the roots of poetry are in language.”28 One begins to fully appreciate the nature of poetry upon directly engaging with the nature and operation of language; and, indeed, the very practice of poetics—​in this case, written—​reveals the way the poet is structured by the language he structures. Fenollosa argues that the Chinese language (like all languages) structures itself on the basis of “universal elements of form.” But to experience language at this level requires acquiescing to how it operates, most effectively displayed in the written form of poetry. Pound seems at first to echo Martin Heidegger’s (or vice versa) late obsession with poetry and translation. However, the impulse behind Heidegger’s retreat to Classical sources is the belief that the true experience of the nature of language as given by poetry, once it happens, is “too much for us moderns.”29 Pound and Fenollosa, on the contrary, make exactly the opposite claim: Modernism is born once we finally allow ourselves to fully experience language through poetry. Only the Chinese ideogram makes possible the experiencing of the

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“awesome materiality” of language, or as Foucault’s describes it, the “thickness” of language (EAK 216; EWII 265). It is uncontestable today, as was the case in his day, that Pound’s work—​aesthetically and morally—​is first and foremost compelled by the question: “What is my actuality?” In other words: “What is my modernity?” Pound is for this reason the central figure of Anglo-​European aesthetic modernism; his work embodies all its beauties and ambiguities, its idealism and worst possible ugliness. And it is Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, which Pound transformed by radically editing it to suit his intentions, which allows the grasping of the Modernist attitude as it pertains to its treatment of language; the opportunity for comparing Fenollosa’s text with Foucault’s own discussion of language and literary modernism becomes possible.

The fiction-​making of history, the epic of critique “For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it otherwise than it is and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is,” Foucault writes (EPT, 108). Escaping History through history exploits what History has always been: the coconspirator of fiction-​ing or fiction-​making. Hence, “I have never written anything except fictions,” Foucault declares. I don’t want to go so far and say it’s outside truth. It seems to me that there is a possibility of making work fiction in truth, of inducing some effects of truth with a discourse of fiction, and of making from it a sort of discourse of truth provoking, fabricating something which doesn’t exist yet, therefore “fiction” [fictionne]. One “fictions” [fictionne] history beginning with a political reality that renders it true; we “fiction” [fictionne] a politics that doesn’t exist yet starting from an historical truth. (FDE3, 236)

Once the Aufklärung becomes for Foucault the central problem to be addressed, it makes sense that Foucault will feel the need to become more forthcoming about the risks affecting his historical-​philosophical practice and reflected in his relationship to his own practice of writing. That is, Foucault from the beginning engages a particular kind of historical and philosophical practice, which seeks to distance his thought from philosophy of history or history of philosophy. But to do so Foucault must expose the fiction-​making aspect of his practice:  “In this historical-​philosophical practice, one has to make one’s own history, fabricate history, as if through fiction, in terms of how it would be traversed by the question of the relationships between structures of rationality which articulate true discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it” (EPT, 56). This is how we must understand Foucault’s historical-​philosophical practice, particularly in comparing his approach to that of the Frankfurt School. One writes of oneself as one writes history. It is written “as if through fiction” (EPT, 56); the writing of history is traversed by the questions Foucault puts to himself, necessitating his questioning how he conceives

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the relationship between structures of rationality, making his own discourse possible and those mechanisms of subjugation he struggles against only revealed through the de-​subjugatifying practice of writing itself. “I am an artificer [artificier]” (FMFE 2004, 92),30 Foucault says with obvious satisfaction. He is indifferent to the objections of historians. He wants us to appreciate how “real subjection is born from [the] fictitious relation” (EDP, 202). As a result, Foucault requires a new practice and the honest acknowledgment of his dependence on the mode of fiction-​making: “to desubjectify the philosophical question by way of historical contents, to liberate historical contents by examining the effects of power whose truth affects them and from which they supposedly derive” (EPT, 57). In this regard, fiction is to history for Foucault what history is to poetry for Pound. Pound famously describes the epic as “a poem including history.”31 Before Foucault, Pound defines the goal of every poem to be the creation of a response to the question:  “What is literature?” Thus, if aesthetic modernism is born with this question, still this question belongs to a series of questions: “What is Critique?” “What is Revolution?” “What is Enlightenment?” In nearly all his works, most especially the Cantos, and his Confucian “translations,” Pound blurs history and literature, the historical and literary modes of discourse. Both satisfying and subverting “tradition,” Pound’s Cantos in every sense is critique: the critique of the economics of usury, the politics of democracy, the critique of modernist poetics. The subject of Pound’s epic is the fiction-​making of history, the history of fiction-​making. Reflecting on the very practice of writing, Pound’s epic “not only says what it says, what it narrates, its story, its fable, but also, it says what literature is.”32 That is, if modernity is born with the ascent of the problem of writing, as Pound and Foucault establish it, “as if through fiction” (EPT, 56), then “all ages are contemporaneous.”33 A  new historical perspective establishes itself, where literature takes its place in Foucault’s constructing of a genealogy of the Modern with the purpose of disclosing by presenting the “thickness of language” (FDE1a, 502; EEW2, 265), namely, the multitudinous chatter, the anomalous murmur feeding every word of Pound’s epic.

The obligation to write: From modern literature and the hermeneutic of self What is modern in Kant’s question is that it forces the foregrounding of the practice of writing. Insistent, Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” returns. Already I  have tried to demonstrate Foucault’s argument that this question dramatizes the modernist moment in philosophy precisely because here we observe how Kant philosophically addresses his “now” as the model for our speaking to “the ‘now’ in which we all live and which is the site, the point [from which] I am writing” (ECF-​ GSO, 13). Thus, the question, which Foucault argues lays the groundwork for how modernism philosophically defines itself, is the same one that pushes philosophy to explore the practice of writing. Writing—​this “raw and naked act” (FDE1, 556)—​raises language to the point where its “ponderous, awesome materiality” (EAK, 216) stands

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nakedly revealed to be an active participant in fiction-​making, inseparable, as Foucault understands it, from the obligation to write. Literature is the direct interrogation of language itself in its prescribed or normalized uses; it issues a challenge to the prerogatives knowledge insists on, most especially the reduction of language to it being the carrier of meaning and the vehicle for communication. Thus, in a passage from The Order of Things, Foucault describes how, by the end of the nineteenth century with the revelation of the “crude being of language,” literature becomes the destroyer of syntax, shattering “tyrannical modes of speech, to turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them” (EOT, 298). The birth of the “Pound Era” is this moment when words are liberated as words, crudely insisting on their self-​prepossessed autonomy:  “Words, similarly, without loss of precision, have ceased to specify in the manner of words that deliver one by one those concepts we call ‘meanings’ . . . The words so raised by prosody to attention assent themselves as words, and make a numinous claim on our attention, from which visual, tactile and mythic associations radiate.”34

The simple act of writing forces language to directly confront the “precipitous existence” of words, to see itself as parallel with the abruptness of human existence, obliging language, consequently, to fold back upon itself not only so that the writer can reflect on the specific role and goal it has in fabricating knowledge but also to “address itself to itself as a writing subjectivity” (EOT, 300). In the pure and simple act of writing, through the process and imperative it requires, not only is fiction-​ making validated, but the finitude of the subject writing is expressed. This fully ratifies Foucault’s pronouncement that “man is a recent invention,” insofar as we are brought to comprehend that “man” is a figment of knowledge because “man” is a written figment meant to perish “as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon” (EOT, 386).35 One day, following a lecture, Foucault is asked a question: “Can one consider what is happening in modern literature (the overthrow of narrative discourse, the subject’s disintegration, etc.), reflecting the attempt at getting rid of the hermeneutics of the self?” In other words, might modern literature be a reaction against the hermeneutics of self, traceable to Christian and Classical origins, which must then be determined to be antimodern? Foucault’s response is fascinating; it provides insight into how a connecting thread might be found to make sense of the course his later thought will take. He assures the questioner that it is a “very important and very difficult” question. Foucault then responds, “Modern literature began, I believe, when the hermeneutics of self gave place to a certain type of writing.” The development of the hermeneutic of the self, with connections to Martin Luther and the Counter-​Reformation, nourishes the “roots of modern literature,” as Foucault understands it. Not surprisingly, the interlocutor incredulously tries to remind him that in fact the question aims at getting Foucault to acknowledge the obvious incongruity between modern literature and the hermeneutic of self. Foucault complicates the interlocutor’s question by suggesting that, on the contrary, these modes of writing are complementary. Foucault argues that what makes them modern (less a period than an ethos, an extending of the critical

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attitude) is their reflecting on what must be confronted by the problem of writing: “it is the relation between this hermeneutics of self and the sacrifice of self or at the same time a sacrifice of self and the transposition of self into another order of things, into another time, beneath another light, etc.” For this reason, it is through the writing mode that Foucault genealogically situates the modern writer directly in line with the first Christian ascetic. He writes, “I believe that the same problem of relations between the hermeneutic of self and the disappearance of self, the sacrifice, the negation of self, is the nucleus of the literary experience into the modern world.”36 What is more, the contemporary relevance of his chosen Christian and Classical sources, therefore, lies not simply in how they appear to build a case against modernity; rather, within their texts, Foucault discloses a counter-​modernity not hostile to his engagement with the problem of modernity, beginning with the question of the Aufklärung and sustaining the arc the questioning follows. Foucault draws upon the Stoic concept of askēsis to define the nature of writing, the primary role it assumes as a technique of self. Foucault intends it to be understood as “the progressive consideration of self, or mastery over oneself, obtained not through the renunciation of reality but through the acquisition and assimilation of truth” (EEW1, 238). Referencing Plutarch, Foucault assigns to writing an ethopoietic function to the extent that through it the subject acquires agency by the “transformation of truth into ethos” (EEW1, 209). Writing offers a practice that is the “intensification of subjectivity” (EEW1, 239); it orients and directs the care of the self. And so we find Foucault, yet again, raising the question—​“What is our present?”—​in the foreground of the question “What is our modernity?,” compelling him to reflect on those conditions which have led to his acceptance of the obligation to write. And his adopting the Stoic technical understanding of the role of writing is analogous at least in its modernist impulse, I would argue, with Pound’s translating Confucius’ Analects:  both, self-​consciously, are exercises in preparing the writer-​ translator for the inevitability of his death. Or as it states in one of the Analects Pound translates, “You are alive, how should I venture to die?”37 If Foucault’s own relation to writing, and through it his relation to the mode of literature, is predicated on finding in this practice a kind of askēsis that presents its relation to language as “a way of making death actual in life;”38 accordingly, the relation between the hermeneutic of self and modern literature is brought full circle, connecting early works like Raymond Roussel with Foucault’s later works like History of Sexuality. As Foucault describes his writing: “I’m trying to absorb my own existence into the distance that separates it from death and, probably, by that same gesture, guides it toward death.”39

Conclusion Inspiring the essays in this volume, especially those making up part two, Foucault and Aesthetics, is the idea that the best way to clarify the uncertainty infecting the term modernism is through an appraisal of Foucault’s own struggles with trying to define it. The formulation of the notion of modernism that Christopher Breu presents in his essay

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(Chapter 7),“Technologies of Modernism: Historicism in Foucault and Dos Passos,” sets itself against the largely uncontested hylemorphism lurking behind its definition. Breu stresses that in order to begin to rethink modernism through Foucault’s writings, the categories of form and content must be abandoned. He argues that this is required because these categories bear within themselves unacknowledged epistemological and metaphysical presumptions. If one is to “engender thinking” (to use Deleuze’s language), one must instead progress along the path constituted by technologies, and the discourses and truths, which govern the development of technology, disrupting and shaping, as a result, whatever historical conjuncture. Once we follow Foucault’s lead, Breu argues, a reconceptualized idea of a modernism emerges, irreducible to its being employed in opposition to realism.40 Formal innovations do not define it, which privilege the aesthetic and the linguistic over the representational; in its place a modernism is conceived that addresses the various technologies, discourses, and practices that inform and are informed by the constitution of the specific historical moment. Gerald Brun’s essay, “Foucault’s Modernism “(which several essays in this volume directly reference), on the other hand, puts the claim forward that Foucault requires his interpreters to accept the idea that “modernism” is more akin to “a type of historical disposition” (which might condition philosophy, art, or politics).41 As a result, Brun feels compelled to wonder if there is actually a fully developed concept of modernism of any kind that plays a substantive role within Foucault’s thought. In the way literature transforms language into an “object,” equally Foucault argues that modernism is ushered into the visual arts, in particular by Édouard Manet, with the reinvention (or invention) of the “picture-​object,” which raises to its highest intensity the “pure materiality” of invisible forces at the very interior of the picture’s representation (EMP, 31, 30). In his essay “The Specter of Manet: A Contribution to the Archaeology of Painting,” Joseph Tanke (Chapter 10) focuses on Foucault’s analysis of this painter and how Foucault’s interpretation of Manet’s works complicate perception. Nicole Ridgway (Chapter 11), on the other hand, in her essay “The Hermaphroditic Image:  Modern Art, Thought, and Expérience in Michel Foucault,” which takes up Foucault’s largely neglected analysis of the paintings of Gérard Fromanger, accordingly offers a much different discussion of perception filtered through the formation of the “hermaphroditic image,” a figure that Foucault conceptualizes in order to contain and suspend meaning, reserving rather than negating it. But because the hermaphroditic image acts as a prodigious reserve of sense, Ridgeway argues it leads us to see the visible invisible, orienting perception to where language and categories (aesthetic) and norms (political) implicate one another, organizing a perceptual experience that speaks of nothing other than this otherwise mute relationship. Foucault conceptualizes this figure as pointing to what motivates his determination to discern the category, to reveal the constitutive practices of categorization, of representation, and normalization. Both Ridgway and Tanke support one of the primary assumptions, which I take to motivate the editing of this volume: if we are to fully appreciate Foucault’s too rare discussions of art, we must likewise acknowledge that they only emerge in relation to his abiding interests in how truthful discourse successively reshapes history through the desire in society to explain and conceptualize modernity.

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Ann Burlein’s (Chapter 8) “Thought as Spirituality in Raymond Roussel,” for example, engages Foucault’s analysis (borrowing from Bataille) of Roussel’s writing as a “limit-​ experience.” As such, she argues that Roussel’s works, through their experimentation with the noninstrumental materiality of language, become for Foucault a sustained mediation with and through death. In doing so, she addresses Bataille and Blanchot within the wider context of modern thinking of spirituality.42 What becomes clear, as a result, is that it has only ever been the case that Foucault infuses ethical and spiritual imperatives into his conception of writing: it is there where “language experiences a death that clings to life, and its very life is prolonged in death” (EDL, 56). Writing enacts the “constant attitude that one must take toward oneself ” (EHS3, 63), which, Foucault argues, discloses as having always assumed responsibility for presenting indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject, of transforming ourselves. Writing brings Foucault, as he understands it, truly and most directly into a negotiation with death, and so productively contributes to how one might construct for oneself a writing-​life. Sarah Posman’s (Chapter 9) focus on the concept of life and on Gertrude Stein, in this regard, is not opposed but rather is the obverse to the one presented by Burlein. In the end, Foucault frames the entire problem of modernity around the protean and multifarious practice of writing, impeding our looking for a clearly distinguished idea to explain the one modernism in his work. Instead, more generally, as we begin to think through its implications, Foucault invites the idea that there are in fact several modernisms. All of the essays present in this volume take full advantage of the freedom offered by Foucault’s thinking through the problem of modernism. Each in its fashion confronts the challenge of finding a way to explore the variant forms modernity assumes in his work, while preserving the ambiguity and slippages in the meaning he invites. How must the idea of modernity play a structural role in the manner Foucault orients the philosophical goals he sets for himself? The other task confronting this volume relates to how Foucault might apply these numerous and variant definitions (sometimes contradictory even) to make sense of this, our shared contemporary moment. Whatever the instance or mode of cultural expression, at issue is the ethical obligation Foucault discovers by speaking of and to modernity: to tell the truth oneself, to explore those effects of power compelling the fabrication of oneself as an object of this question and, in doing so, fabricating for oneself a subjectivity that claims this right to ask the question: “What is our today?”

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze. Negotiations, 1972–​1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 102. Cf. especially Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 2 This is the title of, perhaps, Max Horkheimer’s most famous work. 3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972. 24. 4 Ibid. 3.

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5 Ibid. 4. 6 “Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them. Under the leveling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), the freedom themselves finally came to form that ‘herd’ which Hegel has declared to be the result of the Enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 13). 7 Horkheimer and Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 37. 8 Ibid. 130. 9 Ibid. 131. 10 Ibid. 104. 11 Ibid. 85. 12 Stephen Eric Bronner. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 67. 13 My translation and italics. 14 My translation. 15 Michel Foucault. L’origine De L’hermèneutique De Soi: Confèrences Prononcèes À Dartmouth College, 1980. Paris: J. Vrin, 2013. 128. My translation and italics. Foucault discusses Kant’s essay in a number of articles, interviews, and lectures referenced directly and indirectly in this introduction: most obviously, in “What is Enlightenment?” but as well in “For a morality of Discomfort,” “Subject and Power,” “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” “What is Critique?,” “What is Revolution?,” “Life: Experience and Science,” “Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” and the first lecture of the 1982–​1983 Collège de France lectures. 16 Michel Foucault. L’origine De L’hermèneutique De Soi: Confèrences Prononcèes À Dartmouth College, 1980. 97. My translation. 17 “After all, the Aufklärung, at once as singular event inaugurating European modernity and as permanent process which emerges and converts itself into the history of reason, the development and instauration of the forms of rationality and technique, autonomy and authority of knowledge [savoir], all this, this question of Aufklärung—​if you want again: of reason and the use of reason as historical problem—​has, it seems to me, traversed all philosophical thought since Kant until now” (FGSA, 21). My translation. 18 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 49. 19 Ezra Pound. Selected Prose, 1909–​1965. New York: New Directions Pub, 1973. 78. 20 Ibid. 79. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 78. 24 Ibid. 25 Ezra Pound. Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Trans. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 88. 26 This idea of the critical and clinical, of course, is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze [cf. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.] 27 Francois Jullien. The Book of Beginnings. Trans. Jody Gladding. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 111. 28 Fenollosa and Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. 43.

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29 Martin Heidegger. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. 58. 30 My translation. 31 Ezra Pound. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. 26. 32 Foucault, Michel. Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. 55. 33 Ezra Pound. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 2005. 6. 34 Hugh Kenner. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. 187. 35 Writing is “a process that pushes the real to the limits of inexistence” (Foucault, Michel. La Grande Étrangère: À Propos De Littérature. Paris: EHESS, 2013. 164.) It extends the imagination, what permits it to multiply, to cross from frontiers and reduce the real to nearly nothing. “Writing is what is in a way going to allow to repel much further from the frontiers of the imagination the principle of reality; or rather writing, is what by forcing to repel, to shift always beyond the imagination the moment of knowledge, writing is what forces working on the imagination and bringing a delay to the moment of the real, is going to finally substitute for the principle of reality. Thanks to writing, the imaginary will not have to cross what was until then for it absolutely indispensible, the step of reality. Writing is going to resist reality to the point of being as unreal as the imagination itself; writing is what takes the place of the principle of reality and what absolves the imagination from never reaching reality” (Foucault. La Grande Étrangère: À Propos De Littérature. 164). 36 Foucault. L’origine De L’hermèneutique De Soi: Confèrences Prononcèes À Dartmouth College, 1980. 125, 126. 37 Ezra Pound. Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 2003. 704. 38 Michel Foucault. “The Hermeneutic of the Subject.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1998. 104. 39 Michel Foucault and Claude Bonnefoy. Speech Begins after Death. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 75. 40 For a recent account of the complex relationship between modernism and realism, see Fredric Jameson. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. 195–​231. 41 Gerald Bruns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” The Cambridge Companioin to Foucault. Ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348. 42 Although not a primary focus in Burlein’s essay in this volume, she inspires, nevertheless, further research into Foucault’s relationship to Pierre Hadot (especially, Philosophy as Way of Life) as an inspiration for his use of Hellenistic resources in defining the role of writing as a spiritual exercise.

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Part One

Conceptualizing Foucault

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of Madness provides a history of the relation between unreason and madness. Even though Foucault removed Folie et déraison from the book’s cover, this relationship is the book’s core theme. The 1961 analysis of madness and unreason anticipates Foucault’s description of his work in 1984 as a “history of thought” (EFR, 334). Thus, one is able to juxtapose, to the discontinuity thesis, a continuity thesis:  Foucault’s thinking follows an unbroken path from unreason to parrēsia, his last great concept. In what follows, we intend to follow this path from unreason to parrēsia (an ancient Greek term that is rendered in French as “franc-​parler” and in English as “speaking freely” or “speaking frankly”). We intend to show that the three characteristics by means of which Foucault defines speaking frankly in his 1983 lecture course, The Government of Self and Others, can be traced back to his analysis of delirium in the central chapter of the History of Madness called “The Transcendence of Delirium” (EHM, 208–​250). As we shall see, both the discourse of delirium and the speaking that speaks the truth frankly are intensifications of freedom. In order to be able to demonstrate the connection of parrēsia back to unreason or delirium, we must return to Foucault’s secondary thesis, the one that accompanied the submission of the History of Madness as his primary thesis in 1961:  Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology.4 In addition to our continuity thesis (from parrēsia to unreason), we are also arguing that it is impossible to understand the History of Madness without understanding Foucault’s Introduction. Here, we see Foucault reconstruct the structure of Kant’s thought, going from the level of the a priori of knowledge, as it is presented in The Critique of Pure Reason, to the level of what Foucault calls “a priori of existence,” presented in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and finally to the “fundamental level” of what Kant himself calls “transcendental philosophy” in his Opus Postumum.5 It is only by following Foucault’s reconstruction of the fundamental level that we are able to see that, for Foucault, the central concern of his thinking is the relation between truth and freedom. When we are able to see that the fundamental level, for Foucault, concerns the relation of truth and freedom, then we are able to see unreason or delirium as an act of freedom in relation to truth; and then we are able to see the act of unreason as the origin of parrēsia in Foucault’s thinking. Parrēsia as “the highest exercise of freedom” (ECF-​GSO, 67)  originates from the “absolute freedom” of unreason (EHM, 157). In order to approach the origin of parrēsia in Foucault’s thinking, let us first set up the context for seeing it.

An entire readjustment of the ethical world: Summary of the History of Madness What we intend to do now is chart the most crucial moments in Foucault’s “archeology” of unreason in the History of Madness (EHM, xxviii). “Archeology” is a technical term in Foucault’s thought. It designates, as Foucault says in the 1969 Archeology of Knowledge, “a description that questions the already-​said at the level of existence” (EAK, 131). Archeology therefore, in The Archeology of Knowledge, investigates the background of

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linguistic or theoretical acts such as the statement of the truth of madness as well as practices such as the confinement of the mad. In the History of Madness, in 1961, its use seems to be less rigorous and more indeterminate. As with his use of “experience,” his use of the term “archeology” looks to be closer to its use in phenomenology where it means a “dismantling” of constructed forms in order to reveal the original act that constituted the forms. This act would be a combination of immanence (subjective and internal) and transcendent (objective and external). Therefore, we are able to view Foucault’s history of madness through these phenomenological terms; Foucault is recounting a history that moves from transcendence to immanence. Moving from a transcendent god to immanent human experience, the movement is, as Foucault says, one of “desacralization” (EHM, 90). The History of Madness is divided into three parts, the first of which begins with madness in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this opening epoch, madness was a great peril, the mad man a tragic figure of the end of the world that constantly threatened, haunted, and fascinated man’s imagination. But it was also a figure of irony and derision, the error and folly of man in the world (EHM, 13). This liminal ambiguity of the characters of madness and the mad man is played out in the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, especially Bosch’s the “Ship of Fools,” on one hand, and the literature of Brant’s Narrenschiff and Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, on the other. Figural art and language, image and word, which for a long time were complementary, begin to come apart and take different directions. In particular, rather than portraying in a dark flash the tragic end of the world that threatens man, the discourses of Brant and Erasmus take hold of man and show him his moral truth. Madness is no longer tied to the truth of the world, “but rather about man and the truth about himself that he can perceive” (EHM, 23). Madness becomes the object of a moral discourse in which it is tied to all of man’s various errors, faults, and defects. Madness’s truth is grasped and criticized in this objectifying discourse. The derisory surface of irony covers over the profound threat of apocalypse. The division between the tragic vision of the world and the critical consciousness of madness marks the beginning of a separation that will only continue to widen in the Classical Age. The experience of madness that felt the imminent threat of an apocalyptic end recedes into the shadows, while the experience of madness captured in the language that criticized the conduct proper to man’s nature is put under a brighter and more clarifying light (EHM, 27). It is with the great confinement of the Classical Age, instituted by Louis XIV’s 1656 edict of Nantes that established the Hôpital Général in Paris, that this division takes on a concrete institutional form. For Foucault, confinement is a “decisive event” in the history of unreason (EHM, 77). It is the event in which madness comes to be perceived against the same social and moral horizon as poverty, idleness, and libertinage. It is the event in which madness came to be seen as one type of unreason among others with which it had a shared kinship. Now, against this moral horizon, madness would take on new meanings, meanings distinct from those it had in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Madness was now part of the ethical decision of the Classical Age: it was the decision within which certain groups, all of which could be classified under the title “unreason,” were divided

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from other groups, those placed under “reason.” Confinement was the practice that concretely accomplished the ethical decision that animated the moral perception of the Classical Age. Confinement was not a medical establishment. It was “a semi-​juridical structure, . . . an instrument of order, of the new bourgeois and monarchical order that was beginning to take shape in the France of that time” (EHM, 49). The shift in meaning of libertinage in the first and second halves of the seventeenth century is a good example of this. (We should not overlook the fact that, for Foucault, eighteenth century “free thinking” echoes Greek parrēsia.) The shift of meaning manifests a “certain kinship of immorality and error” (EHM, 97). Libertinage was a kind of skepticism that demonstrated the constant threat of madness in the search for a reasonable ordering of the heart’s passions. But by the second half of the seventeenth century, the libertine’s free thinking comes to be seen as a consequence “of a licentious life” (EHM, 98). In order to bring him back to the truth, one must limit his freedom by curbing his unreasonable passions and desires. And so the libertines were confined. Confinement then served the purpose of moral reform. It brought “one back to the truth through moral constraints” (EHM, 96). Confinement is the concrete manifestation of an entire readjustment of the ethical world. It is the immanent space of the movement of desacralization, the gesture that divides reason from unreason. Through this readjustment the figures of unreason—​ those who have transgressed the ethical limits of bourgeois society—​appear and can be grasped by objective knowledge. What the example of the libertine shows us is that an ethical perception and moral condemnation is at the foundation of the objective knowledge of madness that begins to develop in the Classical Age. The observation and study of the nature of madness is now possible because it is understood as the alienation of man’s reason from itself. Man’s natural passions and desires turn his reason against itself, against what is otherwise understood as his truth. Libertinage shows us that what the medical knowledge of madness identifies as the nature of man is in fact the result of a reorganization of social space along the lines of an ethical perception. All of the figures who appear in confinement are those who challenged, in one way or another, the sovereignty of reason. As such, they can all be classified under the term “unreason.” For the Classical Age, reason belonged to what was human in man’s nature. Madness, then, was man’s loss of his humanity and his return to the immediacy of his animality (EHM, 148). This animality was not, however, the space of a determinism from which the mechanisms of madness could be derived. It was instead “a space of unpredictable freedom where fury was unleashed” (EHM, 150; original emphasis). The unpredictable freedom of the mad person’s animal fury threatened Classical man’s essentially rational nature with its violent counter-​nature. In the Classical Age, madness was felt as a negativity that threatened the natural order of reason. Within the walls of confinement, madness begins to stand out against the other forms of unreason. The threat of madness’s animal fury meant that reason could at any moment be scandalized by madness. Madness could reveal the violent unpredictable animality that lies underneath man’s calm rational order. But madness was confined because its fall into animal fury is the consequence of a moral abandon. Ethical choice and animal fury, the Classical Age’s experience of madness understood the mad person

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as both at once. The mad person was on the immoral side of an ethical decision, but was also at the same time an example of the human being’s animal nature, one into which we could all possibly slip. We can now see that the movement of desacralization that we’ve been following is also a movement of internalization. Madness is no longer a transcendent threat but an immanent one. Madness threatens man’s reason from within. The concrete gesture of confinement institutionalizes this movement through a division of reason from unreason on the basis of a moral perception. The figures of unreason captured behind the walls of confinement form the background against which madness can be taken up as an object of knowledge. A paradox animates Foucault’s analyses in Part Two: while there is no difficulty in recognizing the mad person in all of his various manifestations, the medical knowledge of the Classical Age is unable to grasp madness as such. Reason is able to say with no hesitation what is not reason, what is its other, and yet its putative opposite, madness, is absent. Reason has a double relation to madness then: it is a norm against which the mad person can be recognized in his conduct and language; and it is the subject of knowledge, the one who takes hold of madness as an object. In short, there is reason as structures of the reasonable and reason as structures of the rational, and madness is either fully present or totally absent in relation to one or the other (EHM, 182). Unreason is the void, the chasm between the truth of the mad person recognized in an instant and the truth of madness analyzed according to its virtual phenomena (EHM, 205). It is precisely that experience that unifies what otherwise appears to us as contradictory or paradoxical. And what appears to us as contradictory and paradoxical is that madness; as the manifestation in signs, words, and gestures of what is error, illusion, phantasm, and dream—​that is, the manifestation of nonbeing in appearance, the undeniable logic of a delirious imagination—​madness can only say of itself through reason that which is the negation of reason. “A rational hold on madness is possible and necessary,” Foucault writes, “to the extent that madness is non-​reason” (EHM, 243; original emphasis). Unreason is the singular experience that underlies this paradox of the Age of the Understanding. As the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progress, the two perspectives on madness slip into one another as the mad person becomes more and more an object of knowledge. The mixture of the two perspectives, however, does not take place because nineteenth-​century positive psychiatry accounts for this paradox of unreason through a progressive series of teleological developments. Instead, madness is separated from unreason and brought to the surface of an already constituted discursive truth, while unreason sinks into the background where it is eventually forgotten. The various attempts to understand madness theoretically are accompanied by various attempts at a cure. Neither of these levels is purely and simply medical. Extra-​ medical practices, those animated by an ethical perception, begin to understand madness as the “psychological effect of a moral fault” (EHM, 296; original emphasis). For the medical practice of the Classical Age, there is no distinction between physical and moral treatments, at least not until “the problem of madness is displaced towards an interrogation of the responsible subject” in the first half of the nineteenth century

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(EHM, 325). Here therapies that focus on the physical body become the cure of innocent determinism, while moral therapies treat “blameworthy freedom” (EHM, 325). But one can isolate a difference in nature between the two kinds of treatment: those that aim at transforming qualities of passions, in which “the essence of madness is taken as nature and as sickness,” and those that use discourse to restore madness to its truth, madness here taken as unreason, or delirium (EHM, 339). We can see the unity of these two approaches in the treatment whose method was a return to the immediacy of nature. The thought was that the illusion and delirium of madness could be cured by returning madness “to its own truth,” since its truth, as an illness, is nature; and “to its closest contradiction” since “delirium as appearance without content” is the contrary of the plenitude of nature (EHM, 334). In this treatment, the mad person is returned to the truth of nature by freeing him from his passionate, delirious freedom through a return to “the gentle constraints of nature,” while avoiding the wild fury of his counter-​natural animality (EHM, 335–​6). The liberation of madness through the laws of nature—​laws that are in fact mediated by morality—​brought him back to the man of reason (EHM, 338). This treatment, which took place within confinement, is an example of the continuing movement of desacralization—​of the flattening out of madness onto the surface of its visible phenomena and natural truth—​that leads to the establishment of positive psychiatry in the Modern Age. It is an example of how the space of confinement, without ever changing its external structures, undergoes an internal reorganization and a change in its meaning. In the first half of the seventeenth century, confinement was an undifferentiated space of exclusion and banishment of reason’s other. By the time of the start of the nineteenth century, it begins taking on positive moral values, those in which madness is perceived solely on the surface of its natural phenomena and comes to be seen as entirely pathological (EHM, 338). Part Three traces out the slow but eventual “detachment” of madness from unreason that makes positive knowledge of madness possible. And the practice of confinement is the concrete a priori condition of this possibility. More specifically, positive knowledge of madness occurs when confinement takes on a medical value, when its purpose becomes to cure. But to get to this point, confinement must undergo a series of crises, crises that lead to a further rearrangement of its internal space, breaking it from the complex unity it had in the seventeenth century. This rearrangement is not merely practical, but it is infused with and carried along by political, economic, medical, and moral values. What is at stake in Part Three is the analysis and history of these crises and discontinuities. They form the broken line that leads to madness’s final detachment from unreason. In the new form of confinement, the mad are given a “restrained and organized freedom” (EHM, 435). In contrast to the first half of the Classical Age, in which the mad person’s freedom was tied to his violent animality, now, at the end of the eighteenth century, appears “a gentle animality” (EHM, 435). This animality does not destroy in its violence the mad person’s human truth, but “lets emerge one of nature’s secrets” (EHM, 435). Confinement, then, becomes “as much a space of truth as a space of constraint” (EHM, 435). By giving the mad person a restrained physical freedom, the wanderings

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of his imagination are constrained by the reality they confront. As a result, freedom is aligned with man’s nature. Madness, then, alienates man from his nature. The situation of madness in confinement becomes nature by “recurrence” (EHM, 438): the internal space of confinement is reorganized according to the forms that it itself gave birth to. The relationship of principle and consequence is inverted: what was once the space of appearance and error—​in short, the negativity of unreason—​has become the space of nature and truth, the privileged space for positive knowledge of madness. The reorganization of the internal space of confinement, though, is not sufficient for the establishing of positive psychiatry in the nineteenth century. What was needed was also a reorganization of the social space external to confinement. This takes place through the scandalized conscience subjected to the gaze and judgment of others. During the Classical Age, the scandal of the mad person’s animal and counter-​natural fury was hidden away in confinement to be at most made into a spectacle. Now, around the time of the French Revolution, bourgeois “revolutionary consciousness” makes into a public scandal the mad person’s interior life, one which betrays the immorality at the heart of man. In this way, “psychological interiority was constituted on the basis of the exteriority of scandalized consciousness” (EHM, 449). The movement of desacralization, which we saw as one of interiorization, we now see is also a movement of moralization. Everything that was transcendent, secret, and obscure in madness from the Renaissance through the Classical Age is flattened out to the horizontal surface of man’s natural truth and the moral values of bourgeois society. It is only at this point that Pinel and Tuke could claim to “free” the mad from their chains so as to cure them in the asylum.6 Madness’s positivity is now completely detached from the negativity of unreason, and as such can be offered up as an object of knowledge. The consequence of this movement of desacralization is a fundamental shift in man’s relation to truth. It is no longer the case that madness reveals to man the truth of the world, but rather madness reveals to man his truth. Man’s relation to alterity through madness in the Renaissance and Classical Age was a relation to the transcendent otherness of death and the end of the world. Now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, man’s relation to alterity is a relationship to himself, mediated by the alienating character of madness. At the moment madness becomes an object of knowledge, madness becomes “the first great figure of the objectification of man” (EHM, 461). Man’s relation to alterity is reduced to the circle of the same, to what Foucault, in the title of the History of Madness’s final chapter, calls “the anthropological circle.” As Foucault says in that final chapter, “there is no question here of concluding” (EHM, 512). In the nineteenth century, the language of unreason, the speech of “free thinking,” recedes into the background as madness comes to speak the truth of man in the reorganized space of the asylum. Unreason, according to Foucault, reappears only in the poetic language of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Nerval, and Artaud in the work of those whose eventual madness meant the absence of work. What we aim to show now is how the expressive act of freedom by those who attempt to speak the drunken immediacy of the sensible, “the eternally recommenced courage of this ordeal,” is also the instant in which the truth of madness—​and thus the truth of man—​escapes (EHM, 536). In this way we can understand the reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom.

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The repetition of The Critique of Pure Reason in The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View:  The reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom Kant’s name appears only three times in the History of Madness (EHM, 123, 126, and 240 n.67). Nevertheless, the insights Foucault gains from his study of Kant organize structural moments in the movement of the History of Madness. Most clearly, the History of Madness’s final chapter, “The Anthropological Circle,” builds on the final section of the Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Both the final section of the Introduction and the final chapter of the History of Madness, as we were just discussing, criticize contemporary philosophy’s relation to anthropology.7 In particular, Foucault criticizes the circular structure of contemporary philosophical thinking. Therefore, although the question that Foucault asks, in his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, is the role of anthropology in Kant’s thought, Foucault’s real target in his Introduction is what he calls “contemporary philosophy,” that is, French thought after the Second World War. On the basis of his reading of Kant’s Anthropology in relation to both the critical project and what Kant, near the end of his life, calls “transcendental philosophy,” Foucault accuses “contemporary philosophy” of a confusion that results in it suffering an illusion. In order for us to understand the criticism and in order to develop positive conclusions that will lead us to the History of Madness, we need to note only three points in Foucault’s dense and detailed account of Kant’s Anthropology. First, in his investigation of the relation of critical thinking and anthropology, Foucault lays out a threefold movement that goes from the a priori of knowledge, that is, the critique as presented in The Critique of Pure Reason, to the a priori of existence, as presented in The Anthropology itself. And then, from the anthropological or existential a priori, Foucault takes us to the fundamental level, which is the concern of “transcendental philosophy.” Each step along this path is a repetition. The nature of this repetition (or of repetition in general) is Foucault’s central concern. Is the repetition a movement of the same or a movement of difference (EIKA, 83, 108)? Foucault thinks that, in Kant himself, the nature of the anthropologico-​critical repetition is not clear (EIKA, 108). However, in “philosophy since Kant,” the repetition is precisely a circular movement of the same. The repetitions therefore take place between three levels: the a priori of knowledge (critical thinking); the a priori of existence (anthropology); and the fundamental level (transcendental philosophy). The first repetition from critique to anthropology arrives at the level of existential a priori, a level that Foucault also calls “the originary.”8 Foucault defines “the originary” as an a priori that is structurally conditioning (or essential) but a structure that appears empirically in the course of time. We shall speak more about temporal dispersion in the third point below. Most simply, “the originary” refers to what is structurally prior and nonintuitable, and yet something given in an intuition and posterior. Its most general definition is the “already there” (EIKA, 68). The combination of structural condition and empirically determined appearance makes the originary ambiguous. Lying between the level of the critique and the level of the

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foundation, the originary plays a crucial role in Foucault’s criticism of “contemporary philosophy.” The second point we need to note is the nature of the fundamental. Foucault turns to Kant’s Logic, in which Kant repeats the famous questions near the end of The Critique of Pure Reason—​what can I know; what should I do; and what may I hope—​ and adds a fourth question: what is man. According to Foucault, the fourth, additional, anthropological question repeats the first three questions at the fundamental level of “transcendental philosophy.” Oriented by notions like source, domain, and limit, Kant in his “transcendental philosophy,” according to Foucault, confronts two interrelated problems. On the one hand, there is the problem of the relationship between God, the world, and man. On the other hand, there is the problem of “the appurtenance of truth and freedom” (EIKA, 104). The question of man in relation to the first problem receives the answer that man is in the middle as the synthesis between the world as the domain of existence and God as the absolute source. The answer in relation to the second question is that man is a “citizen of the world”; in the world, man articulates truth and freedom. Therefore, like the originary, man is ambiguous between being the synthesis between the world and an infinite God and being a citizen of the world. In both sides of the ambiguity, man must be defined by finitude. The third important point is this:  despite leading us into the fundamental level, anthropology is still empirical. While Foucault pursues anthropological empiricity through the themes of time and language, he determines time and language, and thus empiricity, and consequently the originary, as dispersion. Here however, Foucault is not interested in the question of the a priori. He is interested in the effects of temporal dispersion on truth and community. Because of the dispersion, truthful judgments are always threatened with loss. Synthetic activities can be failures and judgments erroneous since future appearances may falsify the judgments. Similarly, in language, the exchange of words and sentences proliferate meanings. The proliferation of meaning may have an effect on truth. But more seriously, for Kant, the proliferation might lead to disputes and threaten the social bond. As Foucault stresses, both the spontaneous act of synthesizing and the production of meaning are acts of freedom. Because these acts might result in the loss of truth and community, Foucault calls this freedom “dangerous” (EIKA, 91). In the question of empiricity, we are really confronting the problematic relation of truth and freedom. However, binding Können to Sollen, Kant in the Anthropology, according to Foucault, proposes a moral obligation to seek the truth and to form a universal community (EIKA, 64, 71–​72). In fact, because of the moral obligation, it is possible to see time indicating “the hypothesis and the hypothec of an exhaustive determination” (Foucault 2008, p.  90). The building up of truthful syntheses can lead the mind to “postulate” (hypothesis) that an absolute truth lies at the end of the temporal development, and the building up of truthful syntheses can lead the mind to think of the successes and errors as a kind of “deposit” (hypothec) toward the goal of absolute truth. To summarize, the three points are: repetition (and the originary); the fundamental (and finitude); and empiricity understood as dispersion (the relation of truth and freedom). We are now able to examine Foucault’s criticism of “contemporary philosophy.”9 To be clear, the criticism aims at the movement of “contemporary philosophy.” In

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“contemporary philosophy,” Kant’s thought, according to Foucault, is made to return to its “fundamental rootedness” in the dispersion of empiricity. “Contemporary philosophy” investigates the dispersion of empiricity (human history and language), that is, it investigates the originary, as if it were the fundamental level, in order to form a concrete critique, one that is freed from the abstractness of the a priori. In other words, “contemporary philosophy,” according to Foucault, repeats the divisions of Kantian critique into the a priori, the originary, and by repeating the division into empiricity, “contemporary philosophy” thinks it has provided the foundation for the division. What it has done, in reality, is mix the three sides of the division together within the level of the originary, that is, within the level of the anthropological. As the intermediary between the a priori and the fundamental, the originary takes on the privileges of the a priori and the meaning of the fundamental. Most importantly, in order to understand the movement of “contemporary philosophy,” “the originary is developed,” as Foucault says, “by going from the problematic of the necessary to that of existence without making any difference between the two” (EIKA, 106; our emphasis). Through the originary, the analysis of conditions and the interrogation of finitude are the same. In other words, in this contemporary mode of thinking, one finds finitude not only in the conditions but also in existence. And, therefore, the movement of “contemporary philosophy” is circular. In Kant, as we saw, the mistakes and errors that threaten truth are treated as a kind of “deposit” (hypothec) toward an absolute truth. In short, the mistakes are given a teleological sense. Similarly, in “contemporary philosophy,” as soon as the anthropological opening to the fundamental fails to provide the meaning and justification of the opening itself, the problematic of human existence attaches itself to “the hypothec of empiricity” (EIKA, 106). In “contemporary philosophy,” “the hypothec of empiricity” is interpreted not simply as teleological but also as dialectical. Instead of leading teleologically to a regulative idea, the “deposit” “returns” to an origin:  original truth affirmed; truth lost or negated in errors; and finally, returning to the origin, truth rediscovered and reaffirmed. In this dialectic, truth is always alienated from itself (EIKA, 122). Therefore, “contemporary philosophy’s” movement, its kind of repetition, is the dialectic of the same and other. On the basis of the criticism of “contemporary philosophy,” we are able to draw two positive conclusions. First, through the recognition of the contemporary confusion, we can see now that, in order to reach the fundamental level, there must be difference, not sameness. Without stating it explicitly, Foucault places his work under the following transcendental or critical principle: the foundation can never resemble or be the same as the founded.10 Any attempt to analyze the dispersion of time and language must be guided by this principle.11 We can see this kind of foundation in the History of Madness, where Foucault differentiates between the practices in which the mad are confined and the medical and scientific conceptions of the mad. However, this difference is not a sameness or mirror relation between practices and theories. In fact, Foucault throughout the History of Madness insists that the scientific knowledge of madness is always engaged in practices aiming at a cure, while the practices of confining the mad are always connected to theories of the individuals (EIKA, 172). This structure (of

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power and knowledge) is not simply bifurcated between the practices and knowledge; the two sides are “unfolded” from one another and dissymmetrical.12 Therefore, this structure is in the dispersion of theories and practices, but it is different from the dispersion itself. Indeed, the archeological excavation of this structure or apparatus is what Kant would have called “transcendental philosophy.” The structure is really fundamental. Second, above all else we must stress that, for Foucault, temporal and linguistic dispersion can never be overcome: “this dispersion that no confusion, dialectical or phenomenological, will have the right to reduce” (EIKA, 106). Foucault will reiterate this claim in The Archeology of Knowledge (EAK, 125 and 127). If dispersion cannot be overcome, then time or history must not be conceived as a circle. If one thinks that the movement of immanent desacralization that we described above is a “return” to the sacred and transcendent, then one is suffering from an illusion. Although Foucault does not say this (but his numerous allusions to Nietzsche’s eternal return doctrine suggest this comment), time must be conceived as a straight line. Of course, dispersion indicates a more complicated image than a straight line. Nevertheless, the image of the straight line helps us see that the circular dialectic of finitude must be unwound. If the circle is unwound, then we must not conceive errors as steps of mediation leading to the truth. We must not conceive events of error or truth as a kind of deposit made on the future appearance of truth itself. For Foucault, there is no truth of truth. There are only truth events. Most importantly, with time unwound, freedom (or power) is not bound to and closed in by the moral imperative commanding the pursuit of the truth. Of all the ideas that one is able to find in the Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, the most important idea is this: the problematic of the fundamental level is the relationship of truth and freedom (EIKA, 106). More precisely, the problematic is “the reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom” (EIKA, 86). As we shall see, the reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom is the very heart of the History of Madness, which we find in the chapter called “The Transcendence of Delirium.”

The transcendence of delirium, or the reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom We are privileging the middle chapter of the History of Madness, “The Transcendence of Delirium,” for several reasons. Although, as we have seen, the Classical Age is the age of division, Foucault tells us the experience of delirium is discernible “within” the division, “in the order of speculative knowledge as well as in the order of the institution” (EHM, 250). Moreover, Foucault claims that delirium is the essence of madness; it is true madness (EHM, 238). In “The Transcendence of Delirium,” Foucault sketches out the structures that “properly [propre: or really] belong to madness” (EHM, 214). Finally, he tells us that the experience of delirium is unreason (déraison) itself (EHM, 243). On the basis of these statements, it is clear that for Foucault himself this chapter is very important. Indeed, in the History of Madness’s concluding chapter, he will reuse many of the formulas developed in “The Transcendence of Delirium.”

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Like the overall movement of the History of Madness, “The Transcendence of Delirium” description of the medical knowledge of madness in the Classical Age moves from what is exterior to what is interior. Coming from the exterior, the body undergoes immediate causes such as accidents to the brain but also remote causes such as changes in the environment. Among the remote causes, we find in Classical Age medical theory the passions. According to Foucault, the passions are found among the more remote causes, and as one of the more invariant and obstinate cause of madness. As the point of contact between the soul and the body, and between activity and passivity, passion, according to the Classical Age, produces metaphorical relations between the body and the soul. These metaphorical relations can be rational. However, in the case of madness, a passion is able to produce or cause an image to appear in the mind, an image of an object of desire, for example. But also, and at the same time, the passion makes “animal spirits” circulate through the body, turning the body into “a sort of geometrical figure of the passion” (EHM, 226). Then, however, when the passion has been transposed into the corporeal space, the mind is no longer able to divert its attention from the image. The mind becomes finally more passionate for the desired object represented. Because passion coordinates the relations of the soul and the body, Foucault claims that in the Classical Age passion is not at the center point between the soul and the body. It is a bit prior to their relations. As prior, passion can be the starting point for the movement of madness. And despite the fact that the movement takes place within the union of the soul and the body, madness ends up dissociating the soul from the body, leading to an “irrational movement, and at that point, slipping away from the weight of truth” (EHM, 231). While passion can be the cause of madness, the determinism of passion is “the freedom offered to madness to penetrate the world of reason” (EHM, 228). Starting with the passions which refer to the sensibility (EHM, 224–​225), the movement Foucault describes goes on to the power of imagination. The imagination, of course, has the power to produce arbitrary images. Arbitrariness and arbitrary images are not mad and they even have a kind of innocence to them. Emerging from a dream, a reasonable man might observe, “I saw myself as dead.” However, when one makes this observation, one is measuring the arbitrary image against reality, against “the weight of the truth.” Consequently, one realizes that the image is false. In contrast, according to Foucault, in madness, one has the formation of the image, which is not yet madness. Madness occurs when the subject posits that he is dead as an assertion and valorizes the assertion as truth. As Foucault says, “Madness therefore goes beyond the image and yet is deeply embedded in it, for it solely consists of allowing the image to take on the value of total and absolute truth” (EHM, 232). The madman (the subject) is deeply embedded in the image because, unlike the reasonable man, he does not measure the image and the assertion against reality. Yet, the madman is beyond the image, because in madness there is “the act of secret constitution” (EHM, 232). According to Foucault, this act of constitution is an act of belief. The madman really believes that the image corresponds to reality. In the act of belief, the madman makes a judgment that he really believes is true. The discourse he then develops does not dispute the image. The discourse works the image over, hollows it out, and distends

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it throughout a process of reasoning, which rotates around the judgment. Again, a person might dream that he is dead. The death image is not madness. A  person is mad who imagines himself dead, takes the image as true, asserts the supposedly true judgment that “I am dead,” and then reasons that, because he is dead, he has no need of food or heat, and so on. Foucault stresses that the discourse developed around the supposedly true judgment is entirely rational, and medical theorists of the Classical Age recognize the “full rigor of logic” in the madman’s reasoning (EHM, 233). The mad discourse is reason really underway; it is even a kind of “pure reason” since what has been constituted is an idea that corresponds to no existence (EHM, 234). This idea is indeed “a total and absolute truth.” Foucault calls such ideas “unreal” or “irreal” (irréel) (EHM, 231). The irreality or ideality suggests that the freedom of the constitutive act, belief, is a “vain freedom,” where the word “vain” is being used in its sense of “emptiness.” This vain freedom is the same “dangerous freedom,” of which Foucault spoke in his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. It is vain and dangerous because this freedom intends only the appearance of being, or, more precisely, only nonbeing (EHM, 232). To reiterate, the movement of madness that Foucault is describing in “The Transcendence of Delirium” goes from external causes to the internal soul or mind. However, the movement really begins with the passions, which are prior to the actual relations between the soul and the body. As prior, we could say that the entire movement that Foucault sketches for us refers to passion.13 As Foucault says, “passion is the general possibility of madness.” However, the sketch provides more details. Passion refers first of all to the sensibility (EHM, 141), which receives impressions or causes from the external world. From the sensibility, we then go to the power of imagination. The power of imagination is the freedom to produce images, which, lacking a judgment, are neither true nor false. Now, from the viewpoint of the sensibility, the imagination produces images. However, from the viewpoint of the imagination’s, so to speak, “other side” (the side opposite to the sensibility), imagination is the freedom to believe, to assert, to affirm, and to judge the veracity of the image. Imagination is therefore a moment of synthesis in the movement of madness; this moment of synthesis is the side of the understanding. Then, from the understanding, we went to “pure reason,” as Foucault says. The judgment and the image are surrounded by a rational discourse. Finally, because the rational discourse surrounds an image and a false judgment, the discourse is really that of unreason. Unreason (or delirium), however, is not madness. According to Foucault, what defines madness in the Classical Age is “the relation” between image, which is neither true nor false, and the reasoning, which has the simple form of logic. Foucault concludes that madness in the Classical Age does not therefore refer to changes in the body or the mind. It refers to the existence of a “delirious discourse” “beneath” (sous) the alterations of the body and the strangeness of behavior and speech, below the various relations of image and reasoning which might be the phenomena of madness. As Foucault says, “Delirium is both madness itself, and beyond each of its phenomena, the silent transcendence that constitutes madness, in its truth” (EHM, 238). Delirium (unreason) is fundamental: the general possibility of madness. In this foundation, the synthesis of imagination is the root of transcendence.

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Through this reiteration of the movement, we can see that the structure Foucault has sketched parallels that of Kant’s faculties, going from the sensibility to understanding, to reason, via the imagination. Moreover, like his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault moves from something like an a priori of knowledge (medical knowledge) to the fundamental, which is unreason, via the union of the soul and the body. Here again, this union (or disunion, which is madness) is made possible by the imagination. Most importantly, we can see now that what unreason or delirium most concern is “the reciprocal transcendence of truth and freedom.” In the History of Madness, Foucault calls this freedom “absolute freedom” (EHM, 156–​157). It is absolute because this freedom is relative to neither an external reality nor a moral value. This freedom is not “a semi-​freedom” (EHM, 436). In particular, the synthesis enacted by this freedom is not a “moral synthesis” (EHM, 495). The irrational synthesis is a “bad use” of freedom (EHM, 439). The bad use of freedom disrupts commonsense knowledge and commonsense morality.14 The judgment produced by this synthesis is really delirious. The word “delirious” literally means a babbling or a raving, a way of speaking that deviates from “the straight path of reason” (EHM, 237).15 This delirious speaking uses temporal and linguistic dispersion to unmake cognitive and moral syntheses. It unmakes truths already instituted. Nevertheless, as we saw, the delirium affirms “a total and absolute truth.” Like absolute freedom, absolute truth means a truth relative to neither the correct truth of knowledge nor the good truth of morality. As such, it moves out in a straight line away from any given reality. This truth might be the illusion of madness or the transfiguration of humanity. No matter what, the free act of affirmation, that is, unreason, is not only the constitutive act of madness; it also produces a truth that goes further than any truth that corresponds to a real thing. We should not forget that the madman could be “the moment of truth [and] speak the truth” (EHM, 210).

Conclusion: The origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s thought At the end of the opening lecture in the 1983 course called The Government of Self and Others, Foucault speaks of two lineages that have evolved from Kant. Based in The Critique of Pure Reason, the first lineage is that of “the analytic of truth”: the critical analysis of the conditions of possibility of true knowledge (ECF-​GSO, 20). However, Foucault asserts there is a second lineage, which poses the following questions: “what is actuality [or present reality: l’actualité]?”; “what is the actual field of our experience?”; “what is the actual field of possible experiences?” (ECF-​GSO, 20). The second lineage results in what Foucault calls “an ontology of the present, [or] of actuality.” And in these closing minutes of the first lecture, Foucault confirms that he has linked himself to the second lineage. However, we see now that Foucault’s link to an ontology of actuality begins in his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. As we saw, in the Introduction, Foucault considers the relation between truth, as it is analyzed in Kant’s critical philosophy, and freedom, as it is analyzed in Kant’s pragmatic anthropology, moving finally to the fundamental level which in 1983 he calls “an ontology of the present.”

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Presented in 1983, this lecture is the basis for Foucault’s 1984 text called “What is Enlightenment” (EFR, 32–​50). This text concerns how Foucault sees his own work in relation to what Kant says in his own text called “What is Enlightenment.” Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment,” which remained unpublished during his lifetime, is cited frequently as the final definitive word on his thinking. It is important to recognize, however, that “What is Enlightenment” originates in the context of the course, The Government of Self and Others (ECF-​GSO). This course, and with it The Hermeneutics of the Subject (ECF-​HOS) and The Courage of Truth (HCF-​COT), concerns the ancient practice of parrēsia. Given this context, it is not implausible to claim that, when Foucault speaks of critique in “What is Enlightenment,” he is attempting to retrieve the idea of parrēsia for the contemporary “philosophical ethics.” This claim is even less implausible when we recognize that, although the word “franc-​parler” does not appear in “What is Enlightenment,” Foucault hints at it through his use of the verb “franchir”: “I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-​paractical test of the limits that we are able to cross over [franchir], and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (EEW1, 316). With the verb “franchir,” Foucault harkens back to the idea of transcendence found in his first publications, but also it alludes (at least) to the act of freedom that is parrēsia. In the lecture courses on parrēsia, Foucault isolates three characteristics, which he calls “the crux”; “the essence”; and “the heart” of parrēsia (ECF-​GSO, 56, 64, 66). For Foucault, “the crux” of parrēsia lies in the fact that parrēsia is an “irruptive event,” that is, parrēsia is a speech act, a doing that produces unforeseen effects on the one who hears the frank-​speaking. Speaking-​frankly is based on no institution, no defined or coded context. Not producing a coded effect, parrēsia, as Foucault states frequently in The Government of Self and Others, produces an “unspecified risk,” the worst of which is the death of the speaker. Parrēsia is dangerous. “The essence” of parrēsia lies in the fact that speaking-​frankly requires something like a “personal relation between the person who utters and the statement.” The personal relation is that the speaker authentically believes that what he is saying is genuinely true. The parrhesiastic statement is the affirmation of the affirmation (or the assertion of the assertion). The assertion of the assertion leads us to “the heart” of parrēsia. The assertion of the assertion means that the speaker asserts his or her own freedom. The exercise of one’s own freedom is why we find “courage in the heart of parrēsia.” It is why the Romans translated “parrēsia” as “libertas” (ECF-​GSO 46). Parrēsia therefore aims to “intensify” freedom; it is “the highest exercise of freedom” (ECF-​GSO, 67). The movement of unreason (or delirium) that Foucault sketches in “The Transcendence of Delirium” is structurally similar to the three characteristics of parrēsia. Like parrēsia, unreason does not produce a coded effect. It is an event that irrupts and disrupts instituted codes of knowledge and value. Of course, the irrational speech is dangerous. As the libertines knew, irrational discourse results in one being confined within a general hospital. Or, we could say—​and the libertines knew this too—​that irrational speech “crosses over” (franchir) the limits within which we find ourselves enclosed. Crossing over the limits might land us in an illusion—​or in a truth that exceeds any truth that corresponds to reality. Unreason has a second characteristic that mirrors parrēsia. There

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is no unreason without the act of belief; unreason requires that one believe in what one is asserting. Here too, with unreason the subject binds himself to the assertion he is making: this is the truth and I am the person saying it. And finally, because of its dangers, unreason, this “dangerous freedom,” would have to require courage. For Foucault, in The Government of Self and Others, it is Plato who exhibits this courage. Plato had the courage to tell the truth to the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus. As is well known, Plato’s courageous speech act almost resulted in his death. In light of the History of Madness, we could say that when Plato said that he thinks Dionysus is not a good man, he was a bit irrational or even delirious. Here, with this anecdote about Plato we truly see freedom being intensified. Perhaps, Plato had broken through the confines of the Greek restrictions on freedom. Perhaps he had reached what Foucault, at the beginning of his career, called “absolute freedom.” It is this absolute freedom that we seek within the “semi-​freedoms,” which regimes of power have constructed for us. Within the actuality of the present, we seek this freedom so that we might say a truth that is not a repetition of the same, but truly other: “truth is never the same” (ECF-​COT, 340).

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 31–​63. 2 For more on Foucault’s relation to psychology, see Saïd Chebili. Foucault et la psychologie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. 3 For more on Foucault’s concept of apparatus, and for all of his concepts and terms, see Leonard Lawlor and John Nale. Eds. The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 4 Foucault’s investigation of the relation of freedom to truth is inspired by Heidegger. Of course, Foucault claims in one of his last interviews that his entire philosophical itinerary was determined by his reading of Heidegger—​even though Foucault never wrote a book or even an article on Heidegger. We see Heidegger’s influence (even though Heidegger’s name is never mentioned) most directly in Foucault’s introduction to his own French translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Foucault’s “Kant book” builds on Heidegger’s Kant book. For studies of Foucault’s relation to Heidegger, see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Béatrice Han’s essay “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude” in this volume is particularly interesting. See also Jean Zoungrana. Michel Foucault. Un parcours croisé: Lévi-​Strauss, Heidegger. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998; and Leonard Lawlor. “Heidegger and Foucault.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger. Ed. François Raffoul and Eric Nelson. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 409–​416. 5 Commentators have generally overlooked Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. In an otherwise excellent book, Marc Djaballah does not discuss the Introduction at all. See Marc Djaballah. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. London: Routledge, 2008. Similarly, Fréderic Gros overlooks the Introduction in his Foucault et la folie. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1997.

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6 A Quaker, Samuel Tuke (1784–​1857) organized the “York Retreat” near the end of the eighteenth century. It was famous for its “moral treatment” of the mad. Like Tuke, Philippe Pinel (1745–​1826) reorganized the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris for a more “humane treatment” of the mad. In 1974, he ordered the removal of the chains from the mad at Bicêtre. Charles Louis Muller’s painting, called “Pinel Orders the Chains Removed,” captures this moment. Foucault devotes Chapter Four of Part Three (“The Birth of the Asylum”) to Pinel and Tuke. See Foucault 2006, pp. 463–​511. 7 Both this chapter and the final section anticipate Foucault’s final two chapters in The Order of Things (EOT, 303–​387). 8 Foucault appropriates this term from the phenomenological tradition and, in particular, from Heidegger’s Being and Time. 9 This paragraph is based on the last two sections of Foucault’s Introduction (Foucault 2008), see especially, pp. 106 and 121. 10 Gilles Deleuze. Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London: Athlone, 1990. 99. 11 A few years later, Foucault will speak of “historical a priori” and “dispositions” (EHM, 157–​159); much later he will speak of “apparatuses” (dispositifs) (EDP, 204–​207). 12 Gilles Deleuze. Foucault. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986. 111–​3. 13 Here, we could say that Foucault’s sketch of delirium intersects with Deleuze’s Kant book, where Deleuze speaks of a higher form of the faculties, in particular in relation to The Critique of Judgment where the faculty of pleasure and pain is at play. See Gilles Deleuze. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1984. 3–​4, 50–​2. 14 Deleuze stresses constantly the need to disrupt the harmony of common sense and good sense. See Gilles Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone, 1983. 103–​110; and Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone, 1994. 131. 15 For the good use of faculties in Kant, see Gilles Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone, 1983. 92.

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The Secret of the Corpse-​Language Machine: The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel David Scott

I have never written anything but fictions.1

Introduction Published in the same year (1963), The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel from that moment to this day continue to be Michel Foucault’s most disregarded and most misunderstood works. Why? Finding an explanation is, perhaps, a worthy challenge. But this is not the challenge I will take up. Instead, the challenge, which this chapter accepts, requires bracketing the stylistic variances, methods, and, especially, subject matter, belonging to each, respectively, so that focus can shift to how each is composed by Foucault with the other in mind. What I propose in this chapter is that The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth can only be meaningfully comprehended if one first recognizes that these works are only ever in dialogue with one another. In other words, the near simultaneous publication of both works is not accidental. The interpretation of the archeological method, which Gilles Deleuze advances in his brilliant study of Foucault’s thought, builds off of the idea that knowledge, as Foucault organizes it, is formed of distinct “planes of visibility and fields of legibility.” As neither is defined by conformity or common form, “truth” is but the disjunction, the intense flicker of disparity, indicating the threshold lying between visibilities and statements but irreducible to neither. “As soon as we open up words and things, as soon as we discover statements and visibilities, words and sight are raised to the higher exercise that is a priori, so that each reaches its own unique limit which separates it from the other, the visible element that can only be seen, an articulable element that can only be spoken.”2 This limit of manifest truth that separates the visible and the statement, the legible, is also the “common limit” they share, guaranteeing mutual reliance on the other. The visible and the statement, seeing and speaking, while fundamentally different in nature, with distinct forms and genesis, “ceaselessly interpenetrate” one another without winning dominance over the other. The task, therefore, which The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel set before us, is then the

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“extracting” of legibility or statements from words and things, simultaneous with the extraction of units of visibility or, what Deleuze calls, those “luminous forms, created by light itself.” In short, the clinician, on the one hand, and the poet, on the other, realize their respective goals because they partition the same field into differing planes of the “determinable visible” and “determinant sayable.”3 The discursive space, the consequence of language being forced into a struggle with the ineluctable being of the visible opening before us, likewise permits our becoming aware of the motivation behind the clinician or the poet’s gaze. They share the assigning of a fundamental structural role to the discursive mode of description or the descriptive, for it is here that Foucault discerns the point of disjunction and commonality between the visible and the sayable, where the problem is to speak of seeing is to see speaking. This problem of description rises to a greater intensity in the skirmish with the challenge death presents. After all, how does one describe death or how does death making speaking impossible? Ultimately, Foucault’s primary concern is the identifying of those conditions which lead to medicine’s formation of a truth, which cannot be separated from the more obvious goals of the clinic and Raymond Roussel. And to the extent this is the case, Kant remains no less a definite presence in both The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth. It is Kant who first offers a discourse that is about modernity, Foucault argues, quite in line with Nietzsche. Indeed, it is Foucault’s bringing into direct relation Kant and Nietzsche which authorizes Foucault to assert that his analysis of the clinical experience is both “historical and critical” because it is concerned “with determining the conditions of possibility of medical experience in modern times” (EBC, xix). Moreover, to understand the meaning and structure of clinical experience by rewriting the history of the institutions in which its organization has been carried out requires admitting the fact that, ironically, medicine is to a great degree an “unseeing knowledge,” very much “haunted by metaphysics” (EBC, 56). Here Foucault’s Kantianism meets his Nietzscheism.

The birth of the clinic Classificatory medicine to anatomo-​clinical method This work, as nearly all of his works up to his final phase of thought, reflects Foucault’s abiding interest in comprehending “in what consists in this threshold of modernity that we are able to locate between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (FMFE 2004, 126, 127). The Birth of the Clinic denotes this threshold with its exploring the transition from classical medicine to modern medicine, the pivotal moment arriving at the end of eighteenth century with the introduction of pathological anatomy. Philosophically, situating it between, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and, on the other, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, Foucault unapologetically refers to The Birth of the Clinic as a “structural study,” with the goal of disentangling “the conditions of [the clinic’s] history from the density of discourse” (EBC, xix).

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Consequently, it dramatizes how discourse is to be treated “not as autonomous nuclei of multiple significations but as events and functional segments gradually coming together to form a system” (EBC, xvii). Instead of a hidden intention—​a “secret”—​ whose meaning then must be ferreted out of a statement, “meaning” is the “difference” which articulates “the other real or possible statements, which are contemporary to it or to which it is opposed in the linear series of time” (EBC, xvii). The main argument driving The Birth of the Clinic is that the constituent elements of a clinical experience surface with a “new style of totalization,” open, infinitely extendable, and insistently revisable. The unity of the medical gaze registers this change, so that it too becomes an all-​encompassing “collective consciousness, divergent lines of information uniting, growing in a complex, ever-​proliferating way until it finally achieves the dimensions of a history, a geography, a state” (EBC, 29). This is immediately clear as Foucault begins by showing how “classificatory medicine” (as he calls it) makes disease comprehensible within a hierarchical “table,” which organizes itself on the basis of representational similarities into the categories of families, genera, species. As Foucault describes it, this space is “at once distinct and yet inseparable from the corporeal body that presents the disease to our gaze” (EBC, 7). Even so, it is not the body but, instead, disease that is determined by the specific “space of configuration,” the field which sets the conditions for becoming visible. The underlying methodological table formed by eighteenth century classificatory medicine correlates with the presumed rational epistemology. The order of disease represents as a rational “carbon copy” the rationally ordered world. Rationality of life is identical with the rationality ascribed to the disease that presents a threat. Everything—​spatially and temporally—​is therefore reduced to the same identical, depthless, and timeless homogeneous plane of simultaneity. If a disease is to be diagnosed and named, the physician must first recognize its place within the vast configuration of the apodictic “nosological picture” or “portrait” medicine presumes. Thus, more important than localizing the disease, classificatory medicine wants to confirm the fundamental system it has organized for itself; justifying its own practice, according to resemblances, divisions, subordinations, and envelopments, where the disease supposedly organizes itself into a hierarchical relationship with other diseases, until the moment “emerging beneath our gaze,” it becomes embodied in a living organism. However, in order to know the truth of the pathological fact, the doctor’s gaze must overcome the concrete and visible body lying before it. Diseases exist (and demonstrates this existence) in a rational space, preexisting both doctor and patient, who are at best tolerated as indeterminate disruptions relative to the perfect systematic coherency of pathological space. As such, medicine carries out a “paradoxical” function, which “neutralizes” the significance of the doctor-​patient dynamic “in maintaining the maximum difference between them, so that, in the void that appears between them, the ideal configuration of the disease becomes a concrete, free form, totalizing at last in a motionless, simultaneous picture, lacking both density and secrecy, where recognition opens of itself onto the order of essences” (EBC, 9). Classificatory thought constructs this essential space, which effaces the patient’s body, thereby permitting disease to manifest

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as if spontaneously, without condition or assistance. The problem, Foucault writes, is that disease as a result appears to be always “out of phase” with this space insofar as a fundamental incongruence remains between the ideality promoted by this space and the real body where disease actually appears.

The normalizing gaze Though not often recognized as such, the patient-​and-​doctor relationship is only ever the figment of the constantly changing grid formed by the clinical gaze, “according to which this experience was given, was articulated into analyzable elements, and found a discursive formulation” (EBC, 54). In other words, “perceptual codes” mediate the doctor-​patient relationship, which is constantly reforming and changing. And it is these perceptual codes by which observation addresses itself, that when applied to patients’ bodies prescribe the field of visibility. It is this field of visibility the doctor’s gaze traverses, for it is “the whole system of orientation of this gaze” (EBC, 54). The formation of the gaze changes how the structure of the visible and the invisible are related to one another through medical knowledge. Where the clinic had been in the eighteenth century only a marginal appendage to the hospital, which grouped medical experience “around the play of a verbal unmasking,” as we move toward that centuries end, it undergoes a radical restructuring. “A new alliance was forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say” (EBC, xii). It is not the gaze itself that has the power of analysis and synthesis; rather, as Foucault describes the clinical method—​in particular in its nascent formulation—​it is the “synthetic truth of language, which is added from the outside, as a reward for the vigilant gaze of the student” (EBC, 60). Thus, it is less a matter of examining a patient’s body than it is the “deciphering” of a language, its symbols, and syntax. The patient is but the accident of his disease, “the transitory object that it happens to be seized upon” (EBC, 59). The gaze seizes the disease. Yet, the patient becomes visible through language, through how the disease is spoken about, to how its ancillary presence is displayed and its morbidity discursively laid before the entire world to see. A pedagogical imperative drives the restructuring of medical experience; the requirement of explaining phenomena to the naïve observer necessitates a responsive language that reflects the clinician’s observational experience. Therefore, in seeking a language that did not owe its truth to speech but to the gaze, a new configuration of medicine was born out of the “necessity of the truth that communicated itself to the gaze” (EBC, 69), which, in turn, defines its own institutional and scientific prerogatives and the structures that are made necessary for them to be carried out. “Alone, the gaze dominates the entire field of possible knowledge” (EBC, 167). The clinical gaze, as Foucault defines this concept, organizes a field of observation, thereby constituting a space by which the political and epistemological motives are disclosed which direct the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century of medical experience. The gaze is that “operational concept” of visibility, I argue, that establishes the conditions for possible medical knowledge. The gaze is performative both within medical knowledge and Foucault’s own discourse; it demonstrates, I would suggest, by

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the very structure of visibility it grants disease, the epistemological presuppositions underlying the medical explication of human life, and as such the gaze discursively reveals the operational role it plays for Foucault in the explication itself. In other words, with the “gaze” Foucault formulates a concept with dual and simultaneous purposes: it is the structural product of the knowledge of the individuation of medical experience and it is the very operation by which the individuation of medical knowledge is carried out. The gaze, operationally, constitutes a field of visibility; it is where what had been previously obscured and made invisible, and, accordingly, indescribable and unintelligible, is given a space to be brought into the light and spoken of. In this regard, it is both a structure and a structuring operation, a way to bridge word and thing. In the primacy of the gaze (“the unimpeded empire of the gaze” [EBC, 39])—​structuring of the medical field—​Foucault finds the convergence between political ideology and medical technology present in the “double system of observation” instantiated within the hospital (EBC, 42). The gaze does not excise the disease from all the other social ills to be eliminated; rather, it seeks its point of reintegration and mediation into society.

A politicization of consciousness: The hospital and the epidemic With the concluding of the eighteenth century, a “field” of coincidences is constructed that indicates causal connections or even kinships between diseases. The act of medical knowledge no longer is pinpointed in the encounter between doctor and patient alone, nor for that matter in the confrontation of a body of knowledge and perception. Medical space now coincides with social space. For the first time, the experience of doctors becomes ubiquitous; everywhere, their “intersecting gazes” form together an ever-​present social “network” of “constant, mobile, differentiated supervision” (EBC, 31). With the birth of the hospital, disease is socialized where the truth of humanity emerges and is confined (EBC, 18). As Foucault writes: “In the hospital, disease meets, as it were, the forced residence of its truth” (EBC, 38, 42). Only fifteen years later, after the publication of The Birth of the Clinic, will Foucault overtly establish how the hospital is tied to the “politics of speaking the truth” as politicizing of knowledge. More than a place whose goal is the curing of the sick, the hospital assumes a normative role through the transmission of knowledge by which it normalizes or “makes normal” the abnormal or deviant elements infecting the social body, protecting society from itself by separating and confining disease. The clinic appears as the essential dimension of the hospital; it is “the organization of the hospital as the place for the formation and transmission of knowledge [savoir]” (FDE2a, 521). Foucault appropriates and extends the formation of the normal and pathological, and he demonstrates how thoroughly Canguilhem’s influence falls on Foucault’s thought at this early point in his development. “When one spoke of life of groups and societies, of the life of the race, or even of the ‘psychological life,’ ” Foucault echoes Canguilhem, “one did not think first of the internal structure of the organized being, but of the medical bipolarity of the normal and the pathological” (EBC, 35–​36). With the adoption and adaption by nineteenth-​century medicine of the concept of normality and pathology, medicine’s relationship to health is transformed. The politicization of

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medicine is one and the same movement with the medicalization of knowledge. The normative concept of normality as oriented by the gaze organizes this correspondence of the medicine of social space and the medicine of pathological spaces. And it is the concept of “population” which adds to the discussion of the clinic, providing Foucault with the next logical step in the discussion of socialization of knowledge by addressing the spatializing of social space. Although not as fully developed in The Birth of the Clinic, it still has an important if implicit presence, which is why I  would suggest that the concept of population provides the missing link to Foucault’s later development of “bio-​power.”4 As Foucault characterizes it, the turning point in medicine arrives when the limits of its perspective are breached, revealing those underlying epistemological postulations that inform its practice. This happens with medicine’s struggle to comprehend epidemics. What terrifies medicine is what terrifies us all:  epidemics to whatever degree escape categorization; that is, they seem to remain to some extent stubbornly unrepresentable and, therefore, unexplainable. This feeling of being unspeakable is the same as it was in yesteryears. But more specifically, it made classificatory medicine obsolete. Medicine is forced to grapple with an epidemic’s particular process, which varies relative to those specific circumstances leading to its emergence. And while a collective phenomenon, the specificity of an epidemic tests the methods of observation tailored to how and where it suddenly becomes visible.5 For if the physician is to grasp its nature, to see the epidemic for what it is and how it appears, there cannot be for this reason any single universal “perceptual structure” credited with being capable of totally and adequately describing and explaining it. The “medicine of populations” attempts to fulfill the need medicine has to find a correlate and correlative structure or technique of power to supplement disciplinary structures of normalization. What is more, with the clinic, medicine finds a willing partner useful for coercing people into conformity to the particular normalizing model of health proposed and organized by the institution’s perceptual structure. Foucault later more expansively develops the kernel of this idea outlined in The Birth of the Clinic in his Collège de France lectures: A constant interplay between techniques of power and their object gradually carves out in reality, as a field of reality, population and its specific phenomena. A whole series of objects were made visible for possible forms of knowledge on the basis of the constitution of the population as the correlate of techniques of power. In turn, because these forms of knowledge constantly carve out new objects, the population could be formed, continue, and remain as the privileged correlate of modern mechanisms of power. (ECF-​STP, 79)

Unsurprisingly, very quickly Foucault notes the emergence of the security or policing mechanism: “A medicine of epidemics could exist only if supplemented by a police” (EBC, 25). Indeed, the medicine of epidemics establishes the imperatives for not only the momentary obligation decreed to the police but, in fact, for its permanent responsibility sanctioned by the medicine of epidemics to protect the public health of population. And if The Birth of the Clinic only makes this connection in passing,6 nonetheless, Foucault unambiguously argues that medicine and police are joined by

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“the definition of a political status for medicine and the constitution at state level, of a medical consciousness whose constant task would be to provide information, supervision, and constraint, all of which ‘relate as much to the police as to the field of medicine proper’ ” (EBC, 26). This feeds the great myths Foucault identifies as emerging after the French Revolution—​which marks the birth of the modern: first, the myth of a nationalized medical profession organized as a kind of “therapeutic clergy” invested with powers over men’s souls as well as their bodies; and, secondly, the myth of the total disappearance of disease as restoring society to its prelapsarian health. Both myths, Foucault suggests, are in fact “isomorphic,” reflecting in their fashion the single ambition of the medicalization of society.7 The task of medicine, he writes, “is therefore political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government” (EBC, 33). As such, the hospital is only the anachronistic solution that stigmatizes the sick because they exist in a state of penury for the sake of curing what sickens the health of the ideal State.

Open up a few corpses But let us return more strictly to the problem of medical knowledge, the ostensive object of The Birth of the Clinic. At the end of the eighteenth century, where previously it had been rendered transparent as a result of being seen within the ideal absolute and homogeneous space presumed by classificatory medicine, reduced solely to the plane of visible resemblances, now, the physician suddenly gazes upon a body in all its density as if seeing it for the first time. Whatever falls outside the scale of visibility also falls outside the domain of possible medical knowledge. Once liberated from the narrow grid of structure imposed by classificatory medicine, the clinical gaze begins to “see” colors, to see the densities of the body, the compiling variations of an organ, the tiny anomalies and deviancies. This presents another kind of challenge, “one has to read the deep structures of visibility in which field and gaze are bound together by codes of knowledge.” But a whole series of questions immediately present themselves:  How does one reconcile the linguistic structure of the sign with the aleatory structure of the individual case (EBC, 90)? How is it possible to organize a rational language around the gaze, to discover a descriptive positivity, given the freedom to observe in depth the formal reorganization occurring beyond the surface? Pathological anatomy takes on all these questions head-​on, which is why Foucault proposes that once clinical experience organizes knowledge in conformity with pathological anatomy, the modern age of medicine is born: “The age of Bichat” (EBC, 122). Once the practice of autopsy is standardized, medical experience is transformed. Bichat describes the body as composed of multiple and intersecting networks composing corporeal densities, accretions of homogeneous tissues. Each tissual surface registers other invisible surfaces. So, if a disease is present, it appears only indirectly, in the modification of the tissual surface, affecting, in turn, the way an organ functions. Bichat for this reason proposes a “diagonal reading of the body,” where the individual organ can only be comprehended if inextricably linked to the other organs, other folds

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of tissue, each tissue folds of folds, composing “a whole system of communications inscribed in the deep configuration of the body” (EBC, 130).8 This image of corporeal depth, Foucault believes, forces medicine to revaluate the relationship between language and the gaze. And in so doing any epistemological faith in the unimpeachable adequacy between language and truth is called into question, potentially invalidating the clinician’s naivety in presuming that language means what it says and says what is seen. That is, prior to the invention of corporeal depth, the material reality of the sign is presumed to be identical with the symptom, while the symptom is presumed to be the indispensible morphological support of the sign. The symptom emerges as “sign” against the “background of an essential identity” fixed by its history—​and policed by the clinician’s gaze. But because a disease emerges only as an affect of tissual depth, it becomes no more than a certain complex movement of tissue reacting to a causal irritant. Every disease is but an event, a singularity. No longer can we say that there either are “essential diseases or essences of diseases.”9 The clinician must now establish a network which accounts for this singularity of disease as an effect. “What is very important is not that such analyses bring a whole group of derived phenomena back to a cause, but rather that they are capable of making a singular positivity intelligible precisely in terms of that which makes it singular” (EPT, 64). It is for this reason that, in facing this new corporeal depth, the clinician’s art of observation gives way to the certainty of calculative science, and language looks for its raison d’être in the rehabilitation of objectivity. What I  am suggesting here is that Foucault finds a kind of proto-​genealogical method in Bichat’s introduction of pathological anatomy to clinical experience and, more specifically, Bichat’s formulation of an image of the body. With it, medicine “attempts to restore the conditions for the appearance of a singularity born out of multiple determining elements of which it is not the product, but rather the effect” (EPT, 64). This is the moment Kantianism shows itself to be directly an influence on how medicine constructs for itself its practice; and, as such, it is the moment medicine defines for itself the nature of its modernity. Bichat assigns disease a functional, analytical value. A value that derives from the usefulness it acquires for the clinician in forming an anatomo-​clinical experience as disease inversely reveals the anatomical structure of a healthy organ while staging the travels of infection through the pathological traces left throughout a living body. Disease becomes for reason “an autopsy in the darkness of the body, dissection alive” (EBC, 131). The anatomo-​clinical experience structures the medical gaze so that it describes a horizontal and vertical picture of an illness as it spreads and descends throughout its corporeal depths. What had been fundamentally invisible is now “suddenly offered to the brightness of the gaze” (EBC, 195). With the sovereignty of the gaze, conditions emerge for the clinic to constitute a discourse to describe and, accordingly, make visible “that opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lies hidden” (EBC, 122)—​previously unseen because it could not be spoken of because it was not intelligible. “What one did not know was how to express in words what one knew to be given only to the gaze” (EBC, 51). How to speak the truth of the death we see—​this is the problem. However, the primary motive for the construction of the gaze is to respond

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to the experience of death. If “the clinic brings into play . . . the fundamental relation between the perceptual act and the element of language,” as Foucault argues, then the adequacy of medical knowledge, specifically in how it describes death, is valued according to how successfully knowledge makes death discursively visible (EBC, 95). The gaze is an epistemological construct, a kind of philosophical “fiction” whose goal is to bring into the Visible this problem. And it is the obsession with the relationship between the practice of looking and the orientation of thought which medicine adopts that guides medical knowledge in making itself truth. “Knowledge invents the Secret” (EBC, 163). And what is that secret? Death. Life is rendered visible and therefore intelligible, but only foregrounded against the shadow death casts, falling across the living body. Death’s secret locates the nexus of knowledge and being—​internal to life, where clinical discourse, through its analysis of the disease, finally is able to account for its own obsession to see. Foucault explains that pathological anatomy is the “technique of the corpse” that provides medicine finally with the means for the “conceptual mastery of death.” Finally, clinical method has a way to form an epistemological conception of the significance of death, to form a coherent picture of life’s process. With the “opening up of corpses” as the integral element in pathological anatomy, the latency period between death and the autopsy diminishes, causing pathological time to nearly coincide with cadaveric time. Death becomes an “itinerant death,” nomadic, a process only ever in the midst of becoming (EBC, 142).10 The emphasis on organic decomposition gives way to the movement of death, with its own time. Thus, in addition to the natural, chronological picture typically used to describe death, a more spatial picture emerges, showing it to be not a singular event; it is a fabric of multiple interactions, where each triggers a series of partial deaths which, in total, makeup the organism’s morbidity. All of these deaths offer the clinician a point of view on how the pathological is clinically grasped (EBC, 143). Bichat relativizes the concept of death. This is his great innovation, Foucault believes. Death is brought “down from that absolute in which it appeared as an indivisible, decisive, irrecoverable event” and distributed “throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths, deaths that are so slow in occurring that they extend even beyond death itself ” (EBC, 144). Death is therefore multiple, and dispersed in time: it is not that absolute, privileged point at which time stops and moves back; like disease itself, it has a teeming presence that analysis may divide into time and space; gradually, there and there, each of the knots breaks, until organic life ceases, at least in its major forms, since longer after the death of the individual, minuscule, partial deaths continue to dissociate the islets of life that still subsist. (EBC, 142)

As a result, no longer a mystery, “death loses its opaque character” and becomes more positively a useful analytic tool. As such, the anatomo-​clinical gaze forms a perspective by which disease can no longer be characterized as a collection of properties spreading silently over the surface of the body while, somehow, remaining a statistically relatable phenomena. As a singularity, disease finally can be appreciated in

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all its multiple guises, permitted to reveal itself not for what it is but for how it variously appears, never completely present in itself, only observable through the processes of morbidity, which the clinician follows step by step. The orientation medical knowledge gains, as the condition which makes possible the forming of an image of the disease, is part and parcel of “a coincidence of the morbid time and the mappable course of organic masses” (EBC, 139). Death is presented in a new way, more rigorously, with the development of pathological anatomy. “It becomes, paradoxically, and by virtue of its effect of temporal interruption, the instrument by which the duration of the disease can be integrated with the immobile space of a dissected body” (EBC, 143–​44). The clinician obtains a new experience of time. “Death is the great analyst that shows the connections by unfolding them, and bursts open the wonders of genesis in the rigors of decomposition,” writes Foucault. The “story” the corpse tells the clinician is of the travels of disease, the path left behind on the tissues of the body (EBC, 144). It is through the phenomenon of disease that a path opens onto its truth. Bichat’s introducing descriptive pathology brings the visible and the invisible into proximity through a use of language, so that morbidity discloses itself; and, in doing so, life is brought into our present, given a presence, as manifesting the ontological background against which the deviation wrought by disease has significance—​so that “deviation in life is of the order of life, but of a life that moves towards death” (EBC, 156). To see disease from the perspective Death offers discloses and makes manifest what otherwise would remain invisible:  life, the “truth” of its own being via those processes phenomenally available, is the result of clinically observing the progression of morbidity. “In the visibility of death,” Foucault writes, “the content [of medicine] appears in positive terms” (EBC, 196). Foucault’s analysis in this regard is not really concerned with the reality of the clinic and its presumed practices. More so, the focus of The Birth of the Clinic wants to demonstrate “a new outline of the perceptible and the statable” (EBC, xviii). As such, Foucault contends that most of the theoretical focus brought to bear on the archeologically tracing of how clinical experience structures itself is placed on the problem of the description or the descriptive act. “One can, therefore, as an initial approximation, define this clinical gaze as a perceptual act sustained by a logic of operations; it is analytic because it restores the genesis of composition; but it is pure of all intervention insofar as this genesis is only the syntax of the language spoken by things themselves in an original silence” (EBC, 109). Knowledge becomes operational (ontologically) once the perceptual act is converted into language. The clinical gaze restores to truth the genesis of what is produced. In this regard, truth and genesis are made synonymous through the gaze: in other words, the latter (gaze) “must reproduce in its own operations what has been given in the very movement of composition” (EBC, 108). Historicity, as Foucault defines it, is in fact the descriptive narration of the operation of knowledge, whereby one structure converts or is transformed into another. Knowledge is individuated and becomes “clinical experience,” truth, while perception operationally is transformed. “The genesis of the manifestation of truth is also the genesis of the knowledge of truth” (EBC, 110). According to Foucault, “the discursive space of the corpse,” as the anatomo-​clinical gaze assumes it, provides the

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“stable, visible, legible basis” upon which “the language of description should rest” (EBC, 196).

Through the incision of writing It was precisely anatomy, autopsy, diagnostic, and the mode of medical knowledge that was in question in The Birth of the Clinic. But if this mode of medical knowledge obsessed me, it was doubtlessly because it was at the very interior of my gesture of writing. (FBD, 46)

For Foucault, the gesture of writing is internal to the way medical knowledge constitutes for itself diagnostic truth; if this gesture is unrecognized, it is only because medicine is blind to how it forces it to, like a mirror facing a mirror, reflect back upon itself, its own practice, infinitely, and most especially, the imperative it follows when trying to speak a truth about death: I am in the situation of the anatomist who does an autopsy. With my writing, I travel through other’s bodies, I cut into them, I lift up the teguments and skin; I try to discover the organs and, exposing them to the light, I cause this foyer of lesion to finally appear, this foyer of illness, this something that characterized their life, their thought and which, in its negativity, organized finally all they had been. (FBD, 37)

The practices of the writer and surgeon, Foucault suggests, go hand and hand with the requirements for a new way to see, to perceive differently, a new distribution of the visible and language. Here I find an obvious theme bridging The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth. Specifically, the tracing of the effects of pathological anatomy on medical experience, on one hand, and the analysis of Raymond Roussel’s literary “process,” on the other, is encapsulated in Foucault’s response to the interviewer Claude Bonnefoy: Philosopher or a historian or a sociologist . . . I  am a physician [médecin], a diagnostician. I want to make a diagnostic and my work consists in bringing to light by the very incision of writing something that is the truth of what is death. In this measure there, the axis of my writing is not from death to life or from life to death. It is rather in the axis from death to truth and from truth to death. I think that the alternative to death isn’t life but truth. What is necessary is to retrieve through the whiteness and inertia of death. It is not the lost shudder of life. It’s the meticulous deployment of truth. And it is in this sense that I would call myself a diagnostician. (FBD, 40–​41)

Clearly taking up Nietzsche’s call for a “philosophical physician,”11 Foucault characterizes truth as an alternative to death; instead of life disclosed through this whiteness of the page, “the whiteness of death” is the result of his confronting the problem of the act of writing, brought into focus by his more implicitly conceptualizing the clinical or

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medical gaze as inextricably conditioning the diagnostic act. Clearly he hopes that his adoption of the persona of philosophical physician will invite a direct confrontation with the “activity of language” (FBD, 41). Yet, it is without contradiction that Foucault insists he “always had a nearly moral mistrust of writing” (FBD, 28). What is the reason for this skepticism? He continues to be aware of the essential incompatibility of the pleasure [plaisir] of writing and the possibility of speaking. In fact, when it is no longer possible to speak, “one discovers the secret charm of writing, difficult, and a bit dangerous.”12 The physician and the poet metaphorically are related because of their foregrounding writing; at the same time, they remain cognizant of the danger this exposes, the problem of death, as it opens unexpected historical and metaphysical questions. Still, a surprising element lies behind Foucault’s metaphor of the writer-​surgeon, beyond Nietzsche. If “writing, for me, is tied to death,” Foucault claims, then “for me, writing, is very much to have an affair with the death of others, but it is essentially a way to deal with others insofar as they are already dead,” he continues (FBD, 37). In a surprisingly candid admission—​one extremely rare and, in fact, never to be repeated—​Foucault admits that his self-​characterization as a diagnostician replicates the understanding of writing as providing the means for his realizing greater intimacy with the familial heritage of his family, specifically, with his deceased father, a respected surgeon in life. This becomes obvious when Foucault admits: “My medical heredity was for me present in the act of writing” (FBD, 46). A surprising admission, perhaps, when we consider that this self-​described “masked philosopher,” who once published under the nom de plume “Maurice Florence,” famously wrote: “Ne me demandez pas qui je suis et ne me dites pas de rester le même” (FAS, 28). How then are we to explain this surprising breach of confidentiality on Foucault’s part? Perhaps, it permits the recognition more generally of the irresolvable paradox of every writer’s situation when she or he must acknowledge the pleasure in the obligation to write, which death makes available? How does one find a way to distance oneself from the pleasure one takes in being who one is, a writer, and what one does, write? Only the distance death affords makes this possible. “I do not write to order to give to my existence a monument’s solidity,” Foucault writes. “I tried rather to absorb my own existence into the distance that separates it from death and probably, by the same token, guide to death” (FBD, 63–​64). Thus, for me, the role of writing is essentially a role of putting at a distance and measuring of distance. To write is to place in this distance what separates us from death and what is death. At the same time its this in what death comes to unfold itself into its truth, not in its hidden and secret truth, not in its truth of what it had been but in this truth that separates us from it and which causes us not to die, I am not dead at the moment when I write on this dead things. It is this relationship that writing, for me, must constitute. (FBD, 62–​63)

This passage helps to bring a greater focus on the opening pages of The Birth of the Clinic. It begins:  “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze” (EBC, v.) This first sentence epitomizes the mixture

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of mystery and suggestiveness typifying Foucault’s prose throughout The Birth of the Clinic. If, overall, this sentence appears only as a random listing of unrelatable elements or events, in the second clause of the sentence Foucault qualifies the first by suggesting that, in truth, everything listed is already relatable but through the singular act of the “gaze” [le regard]. If Foucault’s book is “about” anything, it is not “about” space, language, or death, in-​themselves, that is, some named autonomous state of being or nonbeing. If it must be “about” something The Birth of the Clinic then is “about” the relationality, which is maintained between space, language and death; but, more to the point, it brings about the specific ways these shared interstices of space, language, and death open to one another to produce the experience of the clinician. “A question of space, of language, and of death”: all three constitute specific questions, and where any one of these questions, although individually distinct, are important, none can be answered without being related—​space, language, and death, each provides the condition of possibility for the others; all analytically gravitate around medicine’s formation of the gaze. Even so, Foucault’s interest in The Birth of the Clinic is not peaked by the clinic per se; rather, it is the gesture of writing internal to its mode of discursive description which leaves medical discourse vulnerable to the risk accompanying any admission of the poverty or silence at the core of an espoused language. Foucault writes: “I want to make [writing] this element of discourse that doctors everyday reduce to silence” (FBD, 41). On the other hand, in Death and the Labyrinth the question Foucault wants us to ask is:  What is the nature of literature, if we presume that it too, like medicine, creates for itself a uniquely discursive operational being, with an internal system of regulation effectively paralleling, yet in conflict, with the imperatives required by knowledge? Might the poverty at the heart of language, which Foucault argues medicine tries to silence, become, to ever more fantastical ends, the source of literary creation? Medicine, with the challenge of having to directly confront death, to speak of it clearly and make it visible, is a case study for Foucault of the internal work of language in pursuit of perception, instead of the reverse. Clinical medicine compels the recalibration of the relation of knowledge to its primary medium, language, through the challenge of describing its decided object relative to any pretense of truth; this requires a semblance of adequacy between what is seen and what must be spoken. Literature, on the other hand, has no such pretense and finds creative potential in the inadequacy of the relation between words and things. As a result, for literature truth is an endless and interminable “secret,” always present, only ever on the verge of discovery. Foucault makes this association between the two experiences, medical and literary, in order to define at last for both this “language of internal artifice,” which intimates that the “secret of the secret” is only ever “hidden within a basic movement that communicates with the visible, and comes without problem or deformation to an understanding of things” (EEW2, 27). Foucault concludes The Birth of The Clinic with his admission of the primary concern that had been all along his main focus: “Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret” (EBC, 172). His

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goal in this work is to establish how medicine transforms our human relation, once language is forced to encounter its expressive limits in revealing the finitude, the essential powerlessness, of the one who speaks of death and is spoken about. Writing on Raymond Roussel, Foucault tries to demonstrate what happens when, if permitted, one is willing to risk the collapse of language, if only one dare to stare directly into death’s corona.

Roussel’s secret The simple fact of language “Things are perceived because words are lacking; the light of their being is the fiery crater where language breaks down” (EDL, 168). The works of Raymond Roussel usefully dramatize this abiding conviction (shared with Blanchot and Deleuze), which is that the source for the greatest expressive power of language, most responsible for the birth of modern literature, is the powerlessness internal to it, the “the fiery crater” at the center of language. “This illuminating flaw of language was experienced by Roussel as anguish, as an obsession, if you will,” writes Foucault (EDL, 168). It is not as one might assume a matter of the absence of meaning; it is more so the consequence, or anxiety growing with the proliferation of meanings, once the writer frees himself to fully experience language. “The poverty of language must become its very source of wealth,” Deleuze writes.13 So it is that Foucault’s analysis of Roussel’s work grounds itself on the “simple fundamental fact of language.” What is this simple fact? It is that there are more things to designate than there are words available for designating them. And while this simple fact seems obvious, certainly, too often it is forgotten, or ignored. Foucault, however, postulates that the entirety of Roussel’s writings is the product of his struggle with this fact. Roussel’s method or “process” [procès], as Foucault describes it, exploits and is largely invented for the purpose of dissembling “the fundamental poverty at the core of language.” The “constitutional flaw of language, its poverty” fuels Roussel’s anxious obsessions. But the experiencing of this disadvantage is for Roussel the gateway to other ways of experiencing language, either compensating for its failures with other forms of experience (sometimes “deviant” like madness or criminality), or falling (or is it diving?) into the linguistic abyss. In either case, “this bare linguistic fact stands exposed: that language speaks only from something essential that is lacking.” For Roussel, this lack, rather than a simple failure, is the condition for experiencing “the ‘play’ of language,” the form and practice of repetition—​as both its limit and its principle of genesis. Deleuze asserts, “a vacuum opens up” in language where “the repetition of a word leaves the difference of its meaning gaping.” Consequently, Foucault reads Roussel’s entire enterprise as widening this gape further, to the “maximum and thus determine and measure it, already filling it with a whole machinery, a whole phantasmagoria that binds the difference to, and integrates them with, repetition.”14

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Some words open language to depth In the posthumously published essay “How I Wrote Certain of My Books,” for Foucault the key text for fully explaining the “process,” Roussel describes how he gives the same word a structuring role insofar as it designates two different things, while the same sentence, if repeated, can develop a different meaning. From this it follows that access is won to fully experiencing linguistic power by the “simple repetition of things never said, nor heard, nor seen.” The fantastic is wholly organic to the interior linguistic maneuverings of expression. The constraining rules, which Roussel invents in response to “the simple fact of language,” provide the elements for the process by which he extracts “wealth from the inherent but empowering destitution of language,” lending credence, Foucault believes, to the idea that the visible—​written—​form acts for Roussel as itself “the resource for new significations and limitations.” Consequently, not only does Roussel direct literature to the source of the internal movement of language, but he also opens language to the ever expanding “circle of possibilities, which allows for chance, coincidence, effects, and all the rules of the game” (EDL, 17). What is the work of literature other than opening language to “this strange thing inside,” where literature discovers the impetus for its mode of expression; it is here where literature “constitutes a space of its own,” where “language dwells on itself.” And so modernity in literature is identified by the practice it carries out, which bestows upon language a depth, or as Foucault writes: “the murmur, which thickens the transparency of signs and words and, thus, establishes a certain opaque volume.”15 And this practice is writing. Further, if we focus specifically on Roussel’s practice of writing, Foucault wants us to see that the apparent surface of his prose, truthfully, reflects a specific kind of depth, a specific kind of strange emptiness composed of “anti-​words,” which are themselves never directly written anywhere else in the work (EDL, 35). Roussel chooses nearly two identical “anti-​words” like “billard” [billiard table] and “pillard” [plunderer]. He then adds other near-​similar words, which generate, as a result, more and more variations of meaning. Obtaining apparent identical phrases, they continue to be slightly askew because of their differing senses. Thus: “Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes de vieux billard . . .” [“The white letters on the cushions of the old billard table . . .”], resonates with: “Lettres du blanc sur les bandes de vieux pillard . . .” [“The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer . . .”]. The first phrase uses “lettres” in the sense of “lettering;” accordingly, “blanc” has the sense of a piece of “chalk,” and “bandes” more closely has the sense of “cushions.” In the second phrase “lettres” plays upon the sense of “missives” or letters. In this second phrase “white man” more immediately is designated by “blanc”; while, “bandes” presumes the sense of “hordes.” Here we see that each phrase, in its manner and variant senses, owes its birth to the doubledness of words. Words substituting words, one sense opening to another, all engendered by anti-​words, which are in themselves rarely if ever present, except indirectly, and then only through the differing and distinct images and the possible infinite permutations of sense. Foucault refers to it as a kind of “mirror play”:  as if facing mirrors together, Roussel’s prose infinitely reflects upon itself, multiplying reflections upon reflections, the first reflection, the genesis of them all, imperceptible

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as it multiplies the next and the next and so on. Here we are able to recall his previous use of this metaphor in The Birth of the Clinic. Ephemeral flashes out of the void. These phrases together not only inspire, they build the fantastical inventions of Roussel’s stories, plays, and poems. Such is the case with these phrases. They are the germ for “Among the Blacks,” Roussel’s story about a white explorer who publishes an epistolary narrative (that is, in the form of a series of “letters”) describing the “hordes of a plunderer (black king).” The story develops as Roussel seeks words related to billard, “always giving them a meaning other than that which first came to mind,” he writes. And, each time, Roussel is provided with elements of further creation.16 The minute morphological difference—​“billard” and “pillard”—​serves as the organizing principle for the whole.17 This is how we might describe Roussel’s “negative writing,” as characterized by Foucault. The apparent fullness of a described “thing” (in the blackness of letters) is in fact an invention of some “anti-​word” (pillard, billard), whose presence is experienced at the surface, on the page’s whiteness, but only in the negative space bounding, which gives the outline a form and volume, a surface that names the thing. As such, it is the negative or reversed image of whatever positive or nameable thing language claims to bring into appearance. By bringing the narrative back to the simple phrase that sums it up—​“the hordes of the old plunderer,” for example—​Foucault argues, it is possible to discern “the imperceptible sentence, noted, really almost felt as a surface undulation but never really seen” (EDL, 36). It does not dictate the construction of the language, perhaps because the entire scenic structure is prescribed internally by the words both hidden and revealed there, just as the letters are visible signs—​black on white, white on black—​wherein dwell words that live and sleep beneath these strange signs . . . written in the negative (in white), then brought back to the black words of a legible and common language . . . negative form which, when applied to a surface and seen at a glance, leaves its own reversed image—​the positive—​in the same way that materials are “imprinted.” (EDL, 34)

The presence of those “nucleus sentences” (EDL, 36), on whose footing Locus Solus or Impressions of Africa are built, remain ever there but only as a “legible echo,” Foucault writes, whose silence, since they are never uttered, frees Roussel’s “whole brilliant and vibrant surface of words” (EDL, 34). In this regard, I  would like to point to the tacit analogy, which I  believe links Death and the Labyrinth and The Birth of the Clinic: the anti-​word is to Roussel’s narrative what the pathological lesion is to the disease named by the clinician. Anti-​word or lesion: in either case the surface filigree—​discursive or corporeal—​ is organized by what lies imperceptibly in the depths. And in both instances, this depth brings the clinician and the poet directly into confrontation with the problem of death: how to speak of it, how to speak in spite of it, and how to speak in relation to it. Foucault’s theorizing of a “telescopic ontology”—​finally naming the ontology informing his concept of the gaze in The Birth Of The Clinic—​is a response to this threefold question emerging with the problem of death, making sense of

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the relationship at different depths between the “nucleus sentence” and visibility’s “secret verticality” at play (EDL, 84).18 Once language is encouraged to reflect upon its own operation, here Foucault believes literature engages with the problem of death, this “fatal space in which language speaks of itself,” in the secret verticality, where language strives to “represent itself as already existing behind itself, already active beyond itself, to infinity” (EEW2, 91).

Hermeneutic of the secret of the secret Foucault looks to Roussel’s work for a way of challenging the post-​Heideggerian hermeneutical methodology of interpretation dominating post–​Second World War French intellectual life at the time Foucault is writing. Indeed, it should be argued that Roussel becomes the embodiment of the modernism attitude Foucault defines precisely because his work and, more specifically, his “process” directly challenge the association made between the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and modernism. Foucault knew the work of Paul Ricoeur well, who coined the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” as a way to summarize the critical attitude ushered in by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Influenced by Heidegger, Ricoeur places the entirety of ontological significance on meaning. Ricoeur argues that Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are most responsible for the attitude of suspicion, which he takes to be synonymous with modernity, as a product of the interpretative or hermeneutical method emerging out of the work of these thinkers. All three promote the idea that beneath the surface phenomena there must lie other true, hidden causal forces (unconscious desires, economic relations, will to power), which ultimately are the real determinant of human action, even if only in the last instance. As to phenomenal being, the only proper modern attitude is suspicion, promoted by the interpretive stances of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. For in their fashion, each promotes, Ricoeur claims, an attitude of suspicion that transforms the phenomenal world into a false face, requiring a form of interpretation to bring light to the obscuring depths where the “secret” truth lurks. These purveyors of modernity search for the meaningfulness of being in the world, which defines modernism for itself. The method of interpretation necessary for the search is hermeneutics, while suspicion is both the condition necessary for the search and the effect conditioned by its action: the disclosing of the latent or “secret” meaning, Truth. Accordingly, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche “all clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.”19 Language, as Ricoeur characterizes it, becomes secondary to the hermeneutical disclosure of meaning. As a way to try to distance his diagnostic from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, Foucault writes, “a hermeneutic that wraps itself in itself enters the domain of language.” As such, it implicates itself in “that intermediate region of madness and pure language” (EEW2, 278). And it is there that Foucault finds a place for Roussel. Roussel’s works, Foucault suggests, only seem to invite the hermeneutics of the secret; in actuality, his texts actually parody this modernist expectation, proliferating ad infinitum the impression of a secret, with the key always just out of reach. The Birth

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of the Clinic theorizes that with the introduction of pathological anatomy, clinical experience formulates a kind of transversal hermeneutics, which makes it possible for the physician to “read” a body’s depths for signs of disease. Raymond Roussel, on the other hand, takes the idea of a hermeneutics and turns it on its head, and back on itself. “The farther one goes in interpretation, the closer one comes at the same time to an absolutely dangerous region where interpretation not only will find its point of return but where it will disappear as interpretation, perhaps, involving the disappearance of the interpreter himself ” (EEW2, 274). Roussel invites Foucault’s fabricating of an “absolute point of interpretation,” a kind of false truth or secret, that at the same time becomes a point of rupture. In this regard, Foucault inverts the goal the hermeneutics of suspicion sets for itself, turning the authority of interpretation against itself, extending it to its logical conclusions: self-​annihilation. As Foucault conceives Roussel’s true goal, it is to exploit the absurdity of adopting a hermeneutical stance given “the simple fact of language” as already discussed, which becomes clear with any attempt at interpreting Roussel’s texts. The infinitely repeated attempts and inevitable failure of language to explain itself, to push back to infinity the limit it bears within itself, doubles and reduplicates itself; and, in doing so, it discloses the struggle against finitude, transforming language through the “ ‘all too human’ practice of writing.” The multiform way Roussel speaks of death inflects his speaking of the “secret;” not conveying it “through an external and symbolic language in order to disguise it, but to set up an additional barrier within the language, part of a whole system of invisible paths, evasions, and subtle defenses” (EDL, 12). As an idea and as a structure, Roussel’s “secret” becomes for Foucault an unanswerable question and a questionable answer. Not only does the secret acquire a significance through the linguistic prisms constituted within each of Roussel’s works, but as well for Foucault it establishes the grounds for how language will come to be inflected in the relationship Roussel creates between his work and the reader. “He forces the reader to learn a secret that he had not recognized and to feel trapped in an anonymous, amorphous, now-​you-​see-​it-​now-​ you-​don’t, never really demonstrable type of secret” (EDL, 5). Finally, Roussel leaves the reader with a nagging suspicion: Might the secret of the secret be that there is no secret (EDL, 5)? Might the entire point of Roussel’s work be that the illusion of truth is the only truth? Might this only become clear to us—​the reader, the writer—​once death is gazed upon?

Corpse-​language machine Finitude is the modern problem. In confronting the problem of death, The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel situate their analyses within “the fatal space in which language speaks of itself ” (EEW2, 92). Where life and death communicate, medical experience discovers its kinship with the poet’s lyrical experience. Perhaps there is no other way to look directly into death’s corona, to experience its ineffable being except for the traces it leaves on the surface of language; in the way it reflects itself to itself. “Where language is called upon to fatally repeat itself, and things to be absurdly

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confused,” death—​as a real idea and a linguistic affect—​enters and “makes audibly clear the strange promise that language will no longer repeat itself, but will be able to repeat infinitely that which is no more” (EDL, 167). The essential affinity between death and self-​representation of language is the decisive ontological event Foucault stresses. In the essay “Language to Infinity,” Foucault places the birth of literary modernism at that moment certain writers directly acknowledge “perhaps, there exists in speech an essential affinity between death, endless striving, and the self-​representation of language” (EEW2, 90). Might death present the writer with the challenge of how to speak of it and for it? With this challenge, language is made to interrogate its own mode of being, to test the silent imperatives directing the writer’s practice, even despite herself. Death forces the writer into the necessary, if uncomfortable, self-​interrogation of asking: “Why do I write now?” And in this question Foucault repeats a modernist refrain. He theorizes that “literature” comes into existence at precisely in the late eighteenth century when death becomes not merely something external to the operation of language, but directly and internally the problem, which must be taken into account for how language carries out its work. The very being of literature, therefore, is said to lie in the act of language, internally reflecting on its own work, as it acknowledges death to be internally significant for expressing its being. The writer accedes to the fact that finitude is the source of both absolute power and frightening impotence of language. When speaking of death, language is forced to reflect upon its own ineffability, the “secret” limit internal to its own expressive possibilities, “this limit to which language addresses itself and against which it is poised” (EEW2, 92), where language is threatened with inarticulateness, inexpressiveness, silence. No more pivotal episode is present in all of Roussel’s work that permits our appreciating the process and goals driving his work than Canterel’s resurrection of corpses in the novel Locus Solus. Canterel is the main “protagonist” of the novel, a hybrid of late nineteenth century scientist-​showman; he shepherds guests into the strange phantasmagoria of his invention, housed on his estate’s property. At one point Canterel pauses to demonstrate perhaps his strangest and most fantastic discovery. Canterel has discovered a way to resurrect the dead. He injects two drugs, resurrectine and vitalium, into a cadaver’s skull, causing a powerful current of electricity to penetrate the brain, which “overcame its cadaveric rigidity, endowing the subject with impressive artificial life.”20 Life and death are made to “communicate in order to remain one within the other, one in spite of the other, what they are indefinitely” (EDL, 78). The result is a kind of fantastical cadaveric machine, “corpse-​machines.” The permutations of the corpse-​machines are “the outward image of a discursive, mechanical, and absolutely powerless resurrection,” Foucault writes (EDL, 88). Unlike Mary Shelley’s monster, these corpse-​machines are not conscious; they are wholly mechanical, still really dead, yet pantomiming with strict exactitude, and without variation, repeating potentially indefinitely deeds that had once been carried out in life, until Canterel removes the plug of vitalium from the corpse-​machine’s skull, returning it to the purely inanimate. Canterel personifies for Foucault the nineteenth-​century physician as described in The

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Birth of the Clinic. He is the one who “cadaverizes life and rediscovers in the corpse the frail, broken nervure of life” (EBC, 166). The corpse-​machine opens a path, according to Foucault, that must be followed if one is to more directly experience death and to exploit it for literature. Merging the corpse and the language machine, ushering life through death, silent in themselves, Roussel’s corpse-​machines serve equally as “language machines,” speaking of life by making death’s radiance visible. These machines are “situated exactly at the point where language is articulated, a point both death and alive; they are the language which is born of suppressed language (consequently poetry); they are the figures which take in language before discourse and before words (also poetry).” What is more, the figure of the corpse-​machine and through the process leading to its figuration, language becomes victim and murderer, the resurrection and suppression of itself. An invented language machine, the corpse-​machine hides “no other secret outside of the process than the visible and profound relationship that all language maintains with, disengages itself from, takes up, and repeats indefinitely with death” (EDL, 55–​56). Canterel’s transformation of the corpse into the corpse-​machine as an act of resurrection Foucault takes to be the creation of “an image of the process itself,” for it, more generally, reenacts Roussel’s relationship to language (EDL, 59). The process “is essentially a poetic process” exploiting the phonetic combinations arising out of the impossible paradox trapping language. Roussel creates poetry from “the absolute division of language which restores it identically to itself, but on the other side of death” (EDL, 58). The corpse-​machine is the image Roussel creates to explain the process itself. Consequently, I would suggest, we also find yet again in Roussel’s extraordinary and fantastical episode a bridge to what Foucault details in The Birth of the Clinic, the analog to the moment clinicians began “opening up of a few corpses.” Like the clinicians, Roussel invites the risk of introducing “language into that penumbra where the gaze is bereft of words,” thereby, forcing language to reflect and, perhaps, to acknowledge its limit, casting a light on “the internal work of language in pursuit of perception” (EDL, 169). However, it carries its workings without promising anything else in return, especially meaning or signification. This is precisely the point: to liberate language from the obligation to signify. Is this not the failure always at risk once the fact of language is recognized, the void driving the obsession with meaning? “Directed not toward the most withheld secret but toward the imitation and the transmutation of the most visible forms: each word at the same time energized and drained, filled and emptied by the possibility of there being yet another meaning, this one or that one, or neither one nor the other, but a third, or none” (EDL, 13). Nothing else results, no secrets are revealed because, perhaps, there was never really a secret that needed to be revealed at all. There was only ever a process, which discloses another secret only ever visible and yet invisible, for the purposes of creating the fantastical to hide it: death.21 Canterel’s experiment specifically dramatizes “the suicidal and murderous gesture of imitation,” which more generally “recalls how much death is present in the work by the play of duplication and repetition of the language” (EDL, 163), anticipating and so, too, fulfilling Roussel’s hoped for glory of posthumous recognition.

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Notes 1 Michel Foucault. Dits Et Écrits 1954–​1988. Ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, vol. 3, 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 236. Author’s translation. 2 Gilles Deleuze. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 65. 3 Gilles Deleuze. “Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts.” Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–​1995. Ed. David Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(E), 2007. 248–​9. 4 In fact, it should be argued that the notion of population provides the threshold for blurring and, perhaps, conjoining Foucault’s archeological and genealogical periods. “Hence, the theme of man, and the ‘human sciences’ that analyze him as a living being, working individual, and speaking subject, should be understood on the basis of the emergence of population as the correlate of power and the object of knowledge. After all, man, as he is thought and defined by the so-​called human sciences of the 19th century, and as he is reflected in 19th century humanism, is nothing other than a figure of population” (ECF-​STP, 79). 5 The series of epidemics in this century have shown this to be clearly the case: from HIV/​AIDS to Ebola to Zika. 6 He will not fully flesh out the connection between the medicine of epidemics and the creation of the police until his 1977–​1978 College de France lectures (ECF-​STP, 324–​28). 7 “In the ordering of human existence it assumes a normative posture, which authorizes it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physical and moral relations of the individual and of the society in which he lives. It takes its place in that borderline, but for modern man paramount, area where a certain organic, unruffled, sensory happiness communicates by right with the order of a nation, the vigor of its armies, the fertility of its people, and the patient advance of its labors” (EBC, 34–​35). 8 In fact, as Foucault allows, it is no different from the earlier logical armature of Classical medicine’s nosological thought: a rediscovery of a fashion of the order of classification: “the paradoxical reactivation of classificatory thought” (EBC, 131). 9 Michel Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 189. 10 Translation slightly modified. 11 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 5–​6. Foucault’s Nietzcheanism is no longer usefully debatable. Nietzsche is the figure who for him most forcefully (in an echo of the Stoics) characterizes the role of the philosopher as “cultural physician.” Thus, Foucault writes: “I have always attempted to place my writing under the care [parenté] of this major, though a bit untimely, paternal figure of Nietzsche . . . for Nietzsche, philosophy was before everything diagnostic; it dealt with ‘man’ insofar as man was sick. In brief, for him, it [philosophy] was at once diagnostic and the violent therapeutic for the sicknesses of culture” (FBD, 41–​42). 12 Foucault, Michel and Claude Bonnefoy. Le beau danger. Paris: EHESS, 2011. 31. I would suggest that Foucault affirms the paradox of speaking as found in Samuel

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Beckett’s Unnameable: “I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Samuel Beckett. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 476. 13 Gilles Deleuze. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–​1974. Trans. Michael Taormina. Ed. David Lapoujade. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2004. 73. 14 Deleuze. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–​1974. 72. 15 Michel Foucault. Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 46. Translation slightly modified. This lecture given in December 1964 quickly follows the publications of The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel, while falling exactly in the middle of Foucault’s ‘literary cycle. 16 Raymond Roussel. “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.” Trans. Trevor Winkfield. How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings. Boston: Exact Change, 1995. 5. 17 It is this story, as Roussel points out, that is the basis for his novel Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa). Roussel. “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.” 4. 18 The ontological perspective Merleau-​Ponty develops in conceptualizing depth in “Eye and Mind” and particular notes in Visible and Invisible undoubtedly nurtures Foucault’s thinking concerning a “telescopic ontology.” cf. also EBC 5, 141, 183; and Michel Foucault. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Trans. Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984. Ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 2. New York: The New Press, 1998. 19 Paul Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. 33. 20 Raymond Roussel. Locus Solus. Trans. Rupert Copeland Cuningham. London: John Calder, 1983. 118. 21 “In all the texts using the process, beneath the secret technique of language there is another secret hidden, which, like it, is both visible and invisible. It’s the part essential to the whole mechanism of the process, the weight that fatally moves the cogs and dials—​Roussel’s death. In all these figures singing of infinite repetitions, Roussel’s unique and definite act in Palermo is inscribed as a future that was always present. All these secret rhythms echoing one another in the corridors of the work can be perceived as the metronomic progression of an event whose promise and necessity is continually repeated. In that way, all of Roussel’s works (not only in the last text) contains a figure that combines the ‘secret’ and the ‘posthumous’: every line of it is separated from its truth—​yet manifest: since it is not hidden—​by this bond with his future death which refers in turn to the posthumous revelation of an already visible, already exposed secret; as if vision, in order to see what there is to see what there is to see, needed the reflecting the presence of death. . . . To reveal the process, which is not perceptible in its invisibility but which radiates through all the figures” (RR 60).

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space of knowledge” (EOT, Foreword) occurred because the basic codes of Western culture had altered, establishing each time a new experience of order’s existence. And this “pure experience of order and of its modes of being,” (EOT, Foreword) as Foucault casts it, governs both the empirical orders that people encounter and the scientific or philosophical theories that seek to explain why order exists (EOT, Foreword). But the book is not only a report introducing the episteme and related concepts as derived from his earlier archaeologies. It also considers the implications of these earlier investigations for the object of human sciences, man [l’homme], arguing that man is not defined by an enduring, ontological finitude. Instead, man is a historical figure, born in a particular epistemic order and, thus, destined for death. The book concludes, tentatively suggesting that the process of man’s death may already be underway because of changes in the modern episteme. Foucault, it appeared to many, was arguing that no progress, whether epistemological or political, would ever be possible and that the project of liberating ourselves from alienation in the modern world was illusory. Sartre thus read the work as a structuralist denial of human agency,6 claiming that the book was popular only because it encouraged the status quo. For Sartre, to the contrary, philosophy’s task is to present the unexpected, thereby provoking individual freedom and responsibility.7 Foucault’s concept of the episteme, which Sartre takes as reducing man to the discontinuous sedimentary layers of history cum geology, was judged an obstacle to the progressive movement of modernity. But what exactly does Foucault think of “modernity” in his book?8 Rather than give a progressive account that comforts us in our modernity, I suggest, Foucault is interested in discovering what “our modernity” demands of thinking today (FDE1a, 570).9 Yet his relation to the modern, modernity, and modernism remains unclear today, especially in this book. He has appeared an opponent of modernism, since The Order of Things might seem to call for emergence of a postmodern experience. Others have rightly insisted on his abiding interest in the modern and modernity in this and other contemporaneous writings about literature, while also remarking on the absence of the word “modernism” in his vocabulary.10 Nevertheless, passing attention to the book also shows that modern literature does not fit neatly within “our modernity.” After all, Foucault proclaims Don Quixote the first work of modern literature (EOT, 48), though it appeared in the early seventeenth century, almost two hundred years before the modern period. Questions arise, then, about the status of Foucault’s archaeology. Does he not contradict himself when he locates the birth of modern literature in Don Quixote while maintaining that the modern episteme only emerges in the nineteenth century (FDE1a, 1040–​41)? I endeavor here to address such questions, not by showing how Foucault resolved the tensions animating them, but through a kind of micro-​archaeological account of Foucault’s ambitious application of the archaeological method. I  suggest that Foucault’s methods—​the rules of his discourse—​in The Order of Things are shared with work in what has been called historical epistemology.11 I  focus on Georges Canguilhem’s work, in particular, because his famous review of Foucault’s book shows what was at stake in it: the question of thought’s modernity.12 And, by reading the book as the development of methods and claims found in Canguilhem’s own

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work, we can better conceptualize how Foucault’s book formulates this question. As Foucault himself said, The Order of Things developed out of his discussions with Canguilhem (FDE2a, 886). My central claim is that the book, at the intersection of Canguilhem’s work and Foucault’s interest in literature, sought to undo structuralist and other modern approaches to man, including phenomenology, both by multiplying structures and by appealing to a pure experience of language in literature.

Convergences and intersections When Canguilhem wrote his review, he had been a major philosophical and institutional supporter of Foucault’s work for some time.13 Recalling their already famous appearance in the order of things, Canguilhem’s review points to the contemporary place of Don Quixote in psychiatry and Velázquez’ Las Meninas in painting.14 These works play a central role in Foucault’s book, each serving as an image of the threshold and transformation from one episteme to another. Moreover it was the reading of a story by Borges, another Spanish speaker, that Foucault explains led him to write this book. Canguilhem carefully suggests a “convergence”15 between Foucault’s book, contemporary literature, painting, and psychiatry, naming it espagnolisme. To understand this claim one must consider what Canguilhem points to regarding Don Quixote. Canguilhem mentions the appearance of Don Quixote’s image on the invitation to the 1966 World Congress of Psychiatry, but it is worth reading what Juan José López Ibor, President of the Congress, said about this figure. In the opening speech López Ibor gives an overview of the current state of psychiatric work and research that emphasizes the importance of varying psychiatric work and psychotherapeutic techniques to fit the patient’s cultural environment, since the forms of mental illness take shape in the relation between individual and environment. Regardless of the promises held out by drug therapy, for instance, López Ibor insists that the psychiatrist must look to the patient’s world in the endeavor to help. This approach would inform a psychiatry community designed to counteract the alienation, the “invisible and interior poverty,” produced by a modern world that shapes and molds human relationships.16 But in literature’s famous madman, López Ibor finds what is of greatest interest to psychiatry today, “coexistence, dialogue between madness and sanity, between reason and wrongheadedness, between the lights of reason and the specters of unreason. The absolutely mad does not exist.”17 Don Quixote teaches that it is in understanding the ill that something can be learned about the healthy and the relation between madness and sanity, further transformed into a “dialogue of peace.”18 As Foucault put it, the human sciences are ever less concerned with maintaining distinctions between the normal and the pathological, directing their attention, instead, to the unconscious conditions of human life. Much like Don Quixote, who brings reason and unreason into dialogue, Foucault’s book proceeds as an inquiry into the Same that seeks to set aside oppositional thinking.

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Rather than focus on structures of exclusion, it explores the conditions in a culture that brings together the most diverse knowledges and rationalities. An archeology of a silenced Other, such as his History of Madness, is now followed by an investigation of the Same, that is, the homogeneity required by science and knowledge, but without regard to its sanity or insanity, its truth or falsity.19 While this archaeology would focus on the Same as it appears in the human sciences and, thus, the figure of Man, this by no means entails that the Other be absolutely absent from Foucault’s study. Indeed, at important points the Other erupts into Foucault’s text, but not from the outside. The Order of Things, we will see, is attempting to make the Occident other to itself by tracking transformations in the element of the Same.20 And it is important that Foucault states, “Don Quixote is the first modern work of literature, because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature” (EOT, 48–​49). The work is appreciated for its alteration of one experience of order and introduction of another through its very repetition of the first order. It is not as a psychologist or ethnologist that Foucault discusses Don Quixote and Don Quixote, but in insisting that Don Quixote, the character, becomes literally a character, a mark upon the page, Foucault makes clear that this work is of interest as a novel experience of language. Literature and the literary experience of language, we will find, are central to The Order of Things. Having pointed to contemporary painting, psychiatry, and literature, Canguilhem identifies their tendency shared with Foucault as espagnolisme, following the nineteenth-​century writer Stendhal’s self-​characterization. For Stendhal, “espagnolisme meant hatred for preachiness and platitudes,” in short, for moralizing.21 As Canguilhem understood, Foucault’s book had caused a scandal because it was a direct attack on the moralists of the day.22 Alluding to Foucault’s association of man with the king’s sovereignty, Canguilhem suggests that the moralizing minds that did so well during the Bourbon Restoration, through which Stendhal lived, were still flourishing and ready to exercise their sovereign moral judgment publicly (EOT, 307–​12). Thus, Foucault’s refusal to issue judgments about what is right and what is wrong, and his considered conclusion that the man of modern, philosophical humanism may be fading away, scandalized these minds. But by aligning the book with contemporary painting, psychiatry, and literature, Canguilhem suggests that Foucault’s work obeys the transformative movement of thought demanded by modernity. Sartrean accusations of structuralism also fall apart on Canguilhem’s reading, since the name applies only to an amalgamation cobbled together for the sake of readily dismissing Foucault’s work in the name of authentic human freedom. It is not that Foucault condemns structuralism, but neither is he a structuralist. Instead, he endeavors to understand the common epistemological place that “structuralism” inhabits with other modern philosophical discourses, such as phenomenology (EOT, 299/​312). As he famously states, “[s]‌tructuralism is not a new method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness [conscience] of modern thought” (EOT, 208/​221).23 It is this consciousness, among others, that Foucault’s archaeology endeavors to explain.

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For Foucault, who follows Canguilhem, an awakened and troubled consciousness is not knowledge, but the condition that makes the pursuit of knowledge possible.24 There is no primary intuitive truth—​no original comprehended or founded by a consciousness—​upon which knowledge is based. Instead, knowledge is pursued in the wake of a disorienting experience that all is not as it should be. Consciousness follows upon—​is—​that experience and becomes the locus of a search for truth when other human techniques fail to comfort it. Foucault’s book pursues an understanding of culture that would, rather than comfort it, provide an account of structuralism as such experience. This does not mean that Foucault may not draw upon structuralist claims in his book, but simply that structuralism is neither Foucault’s endgame nor his starting point (EOT, 379).25 Rather, Foucault takes the work of his near contemporaries and, comparing it, investigates the archaeological reasons why these works became necessary and seeks to discover where they are leading, unbeknownst to their authors,26 not by arguing for them but by contributing to the movement to which these authors themselves had contributed. Foucault questions, thereby, what philosophy must think in light of modern human sciences and the more recent structuralist “counter-​ sciences.”27 Canguilhem, thus, can write, “[w]‌e are dealing with an explorer here, not a missionary of modern culture.”28 Foucault’s “objective originality” was achieved, according to Canguilhem, by situating “himself at a crossroads of disciplines. But to do this he was obliged to follow each discipline’s separate path. There was nothing to invent except the simultaneous use of the philosophical and philological inventions of the 19th century.”29 Much as Bachelard sought to subject philosophy to the methods and concepts of the new physics and make philosophical thought capable of thinking what it could not yet,30 Foucault, Canguilhem implied, was forcing philosophy to think the thoughts and methods—​ already more than a century old—​derived by the modern scientific study of language, ones that had hitherto been neglected by philosophers. Producing the intersection of nineteenth century philosophy and philology was the source of Foucault’s originality and, as in Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s own works, could only take the form of a contribution to the rethinking of history. History must no longer be thought as the enchanted realm of individualities that produce history, as authors write books,31 but according to the dictates of the concept. To understand this better, we must consider Canguilhem’s writings.32

Canguilhem’s philosophy of the concept Philosophy, for Canguilhem, is the critical activity of making judgments about already instituted norms; it is the “science of solved problems.”33 The philosopher’s entire endeavor is to think what is external to philosophy, not for the sake of judging the legitimacy of a solution, but rather to test current philosophical frameworks and hierarchies of values. This makes philosophical thought into a kind of action upon our values, not the pursuit of wisdom about the world. It is important to realize that for Canguilhem thought is an individual power and it is up to the individual to

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philosophize or not, to think as they see fit (FDE1a, 580–​81).34 This means testing the more or less spontaneous systematization of the diverse values found in one’s milieu, especially the cultural milieu.35 Philosophy is, then, philosophical anthropology.36 Canguilhem examines the history of science, therefore, with the aim of showing the connection that the sciences maintain with the rest of human cultural life. This is an important task, since he believes that the modern life sciences had fallen under the sway of the physical sciences, driven by the search for truth following deterministic laws of nature. Though some called him a vitalist, associating this with the horrors of Nazism, Canguilhem suggests that the real problem is not mechanism or vitalism, but the complete and total explanation of the human by science.37 Science is human insofar as humans undertake it, not because it takes humans as its object.38 The question of totality in the human being is instead an enduring philosophical question about how to harmonize and hierarchize the diverging, often contradictory values present in concrete life. Canguilhem pursues his philosophical anthropology by going to the sciences that tended to reduce the human being to one experiential form and studying the very history of these sciences through their concepts. This approach to history is clearly laid out in his study on the formation of the scientific concept of reflex motion, where he interrogates the history of this concept, popularly and scientifically understood to be part and parcel of a no-​nonsense mechanistic science believed to embody the essential methods and principles of scientific knowledge. Setting aside the myths told about this history by the reigning historiography in support of mechanistic reductions, Canguilhem argues that the actual history shows that the very concept of reflex motion was first expressed by an animist and vitalist researcher, not a mechanist. The lesson: no mechanist philosopher, scientist, or historian should reject vitalism altogether, since from it, the false, the truth had been born. Moreover, the implication of Canguilhem’s historiography is that one must ask, of every particular historical account of science, who is speaking.39 Instead of revealing a progressive accumulation of truth or a dialectical overcoming of the false, historical research shows a series of repetitions interspersed with sudden events and transformations that have contributed a unique temporal character to the reflex concept. But how does the historian recover this character as it was worked out and as it conditioned the possibility of further research into an experience of the reflex? The actual history is found, following Canguilhem, by employing rigorous but straightforward methods. Key is the careful reading of texts that contributed to the formation of the concept but which have been forgotten in libraries and archives in favor of national heroes and famous precursors, such as Descartes. The real history of a concept is to be found not in such backward-​looking reconstructions of today’s truth, but instead by studying the writing and logic of particular texts and, only after a text’s logic has been grasped, comparing this to the logic of other historical writings about the same object. Requiring intense specialization by the historian, this focused and time-​consuming method is the only way to set aside the prejudices of scientific truth. For truth is not guaranteed solely by scientific discourse, but by the extent to which, first borrowed from a popular metaphor and refined into a precise concept, this

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concept becomes the basis of some technique and is vulgarized as cultural common sense.40 Thus Canguilhem’s historiographical techniques aim to unsettle the (scientific) truths of modern society in all their intuitive immediacy.41 The historical study of concept formation is neither “paleontology of a deceased scientific spirit” nor the application of a priori ideas or ideology.42 Neither of these approaches would be worth much to the philosopher, who is concerned with the exposition and integration of diverse values and practices into concrete human life. History needs to lead, therefore, to a philosophical comprehension of the very duration of individual sciences, grasping each as a particular, authentic form of living with its own “humor.”43 Though this makes histories irregular, this singular humor remains present in the present, continuing to guide thought and research, even if the historical contours are always open to questioning via a reflexive rectification of concepts. In its imbrication of the materiality and logic of texts, scientific and nonscientific practices, the duration of concepts forms a tangled sort of historical a priori.44 Though he does not use this phrase, we can see that Canguilhem thinks the careful study of the history of concepts reveals the emergence and transformation of enduring forms of scientific thinking and writing that condition the possibility of later writing and thinking. Canguilhem’s conceptual histories demonstrate that it is no longer possible to philosophize, to conceive of reason and thought as linear or dialectical evolution. As he insists, careful history allows one to avoid the trap of anachronism by showing that in histories of science there are no precursors, but rather that there are moments of transformation in between which what is known conforms to the same basic rules.45 Yet Canguilhem’s technique of doing history shows that diverse scientific concepts have their own histories indicating the plurality of temporal characters at work in and through different sciences, even within one and the same science. The temporalities of concepts are then the historical a priori of the sciences, always in the plural. From here to Foucault’s idea of an episteme, all that is required is an empirically observable regularity shared by different discursive rationalities at a particular time and place.

Thinking the archive Foucault’s concept of the episteme was invented through his attempt “to defy the specialization of specialists, and to try to become a specialist not of generality, but inter-​regionality.”46 By comparing different discourses at more or less the same moments, his “other history” had led to the elaboration of the notion of the historical a priori47 in terms of the singularity of different epistemes. The sociologist Michel Amiot was astounded by Foucault’s erudition, and Canguilhem agrees, writing, in an allusion to Quixote, that it must have been “necessary to rise with the larks and go to bed with the owls.”48 But Amiot’s detailed study of Foucault’s book also worries that it was not possible for one episteme to understand another, leading directly to the kind of cultural relativism that disguises neocolonialist domination.49 Yet, Canguilhem responds, Foucault’s research did allow him to dive down and get to the shores of other epistemes. In accord with Canguilhem’s astute observation that “no philosophy is less normative

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than Foucault’s,” the book avoids making judgments about the quality or desirability of any particular episteme, even if it is written as a contribution to the dissolution of the present episteme. Foucault himself reveals the reasons for this approach in his discussion of Western philosophical moralities (EOT, 327).50 In short, no morality is possible in modernity because thought has become critique; recalling Canguilhem’s definition, philosophy is the science of solved problems. Values are generated by practices and events outside of philosophical thinking, which finds itself in the position of trying to bring harmony and order to these proliferating values.51 Locating judgment outside thought, in history, the eschatologies and teleologies found in Marxism and Comtean positivism would only be unsuccessful circumventions of the problem (EOT, 320–​21). And insofar as existentialists and phenomenologists refuse to question the primacy of the cogito, they too would remain incapable of understanding the need to think the Outside. Given thought’s inability to formulate a morality, archaeology abandons the search for signs of progress toward historical salvation in some definitive cultural order, adopting a different strategy. Following Canguilhem’s own historiographical methods to an extent, it multiplies discursive realities of discourse on the basis of what exists in the archive. Foucault’s strategy is not about domination, but the freeing of thought from totalizing rationalities.52 The Order of Things only briefly discusses the constitution of archives in the nineteenth century, though it was already an important topic for Foucault. His 1964 review of J.-​P. Richard’s Mallarmé book praises it for having done what his contemporaries could not yet, namely, addressing the implications of “stagnating language.” Stagnating, not to say dead, language appeared in the nineteenth century with the establishment of archives, yet Foucault’s contemporaries are still concerned with an author’s opus and oeuvre, concepts corresponding to the author’s life and living language, as if language continues to be defined by its circulation (FDE1a, 457). While historians of literature had been using archives for quite a while, Richard apart, they had yet to match their work to the new object constituted by them. The event of the archive needed to be registered in two ways: by inventing “the mode of exhaustively treating the verbal document and [cultivating] the consciousness that stagnant language is a new object for our culture” (FDE1a, 458). The Order of Things is Foucault’s effort to tackle such language at the most general level possible, that is, by considering all that has been written, all that is available in the archive. Foucault also notes in the review that the history of ideas is currently faced with the same problem, namely, what to do with the mass of language now available in the archive. So far, Foucault suggests, most historians still treat them as the forgotten remnants of “false sciences or quasi-​philosophies” (FDE1a, 458). Canguilhem’s methodical, text-​based exposition of vitalism as something other than false science, by contrast, resonates with Foucault’s effort to revisit the archives and find new ways to treat language.53 The archive and the discursive monuments that it preserves are read by Foucault as conditions of possibility, that is, as instances of the basic rules obeyed in veridical discourse—​discourse directed at truth, irrespective of whether it attains it or not—​ which themselves contribute to the transformation of these rules by following and repeating them. Addressing Amiot’s worry that The Order of Things makes a historical

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account of transformation impossible, Foucault writes, “I was looking to describe the set of transformations that serve as rule for an empirical discontinuity.”54 Thus, the discovery of “pre-​historical” epistemes, that is, the epistemes out of which the modern has emerged, is not uninteresting because they are “pre-​historical.” They are, instead, all the more important since they serve as the conditions of possibility governing the appearance of the modern and its break with the Classical episteme. Neither a transcendental nor an empirical psychology (FDE1a, 703), archaeology inquires into the positivity that conditions a given episteme, and this is nothing other than discourse itself, that is, language in its materiality and the deformations this materiality is subjected to in order to count as veridical discourse. Archaeology is concerned, therefore, to find the existing conditions of possibility for discourse and thought (EOT, 263–​79).55 The material existence of such conditions is “what makes it possible to articulate the history of thought within itself, [in] its internal conditions of possibility” (EOT, 275; FDE1a, 710). Doxology, the study of resemblances between different opinions (EOT, 200), is, however, only a distraction from the conditions governing discourse as they can be seen at work in texts. Instead, archaeology studies the material rules for composing texts, for these are the conditions of thinking.56 Foucault is not, then, producing a transcendental philosophy, but a philosophy of stagnant language, of writing in its archival materiality. And his research confirms the existence of two sorts of positivities, expanding the field of epistemology beyond inquiries into constituted sciences. In addition to a discursive positivity that supports science, Foucault identifies a positivity that supports a knowledge [savoir] that is not to be understood in relation to its possible scientific trajectory, nor as a mere opinion. The sciences are defined by certain projects of formalization that make them relatively independent from their cultural milieu. Knowledge, instead, exists in a much tighter relation to this milieu, which effectively functions as its existential condition, though knowledge also proliferates in multiple forms, each with its own particular concepts and tools, which are, nevertheless, interchangeable given their shared positivity. Indeed, Foucault claims to have discovered this simply by examining those discourses that have traditionally been defined as false sciences, that is, the human sciences, but without treating them as such. Instead, their archive is examined in order to determine the existence of discursive regularities within and between each of these knowledges. As Foucault understands them, they have an object—​man—​but are incapable of realizing any scientific truths about it since their research always refers back to the sciences grounding them.

The trihedron: Man’s space Foucault’s interest in space and spatialization is well known (EEW2, 175–​85).57 In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that Renaissance knowledge is spherical in character, inhabits a quadrilateral of language in the Classical period, and takes the shape of a trihedron in the Modern period.58 Foucault thus identifies geometrical figures formed

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by the folding, unfolding, and refolding of discourses. These formal images allow Foucault to think the intersection of different discourses and how these intersections give rise to an episteme with its own unique features, including its own blind spot. But the transformation from one spatialization to another does not occur at the level of the shapes themselves: Foucault does not square the circle. The shapes of order arise from the density of discourse.59 As Foucault wrote to Amiot, he did not invent the figures of the sphere and the grid but found them everywhere in writings from their respective epochs. Regarding the modern trihedron, Foucault claimed, “it was my invention. Perhaps it is worthless.”60 But it was meant to “facilitate the description of relations between multiple scientific domains such as they were tied together in the 19th century.”61 Thus, Foucault admits experimenting with figures of spatialization as a means to think the epistemic character of diverse epochs, but at the same time he is unwilling to regard these geometrical figures as some kind of rigid framework determinative of what people said and did. They rather mark out the regularities, the positivities present in veridical discourse at a given time and place. In this, they are also conceptual tools fashioned for the sake of achieving an end and will be set aside when no longer useful (FDE1a, 743–​44).62 While I do not have space to explore the other figures or epistemes in any detail, it is important to discuss the trihedron. For Foucault, man is a hybrid and strange character, long mis-​recognized as such and thought to have a definitive essence, a fundamental finitude.63 The epistemological trihedron, as Foucault calls it, is formed within three dimensions of discourse: one composed of the formalizing discourses of mathematics and physics; another by the empirical sciences of life, economics, and philology; and the third by philosophy. The intersections of these three dimensions form three planes that then intersect to form the trihedron.64 Together, these three planes open up a space in which man appears as the figure common to them all; yet, and this is the image’s point, man is not the primary figure but a figure appearing in the “interpositivity” of these three planes. In short, man emerges as a figure in the hollow or open volume of the trihedron as a “positive domain of knowledge,” but one that can never be “an object of science” (EOT, 367). Whereas life, labor, and language had not even existed in the Classical age—​there was, for example, no biology, only natural history—​in modernity each had come to be a thing unto itself, invested with a depth that made it an inexhaustible area of scientific inquiry. This happened because language lost the power to pose the universal order of things, allowing discrete empirical sciences to emerge as the study of their own particular object in all its manifestations. In the classical age, language spread out all possible differences and identities on a tabular surface according to its own basic order. The modern age, however, was associated with the invention of a kind of inexhaustible depth in things themselves. The figure of man, duly invested with life, labor, and language, came to appear then as a kind of inexhaustible object of study, but at the same time one that had no proper science of its own, as evident in the variety of human sciences, for example, anthropology, psychology, and sociology.65 Moreover, an object of empirical perception, the human is studied according to the finite, but unconscious, forms of life, labor, and language as if these are the transcendental

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conditions of man’s existence. The human being appears as a fundamentally finite being in modernity, though Foucault’s archaeology demonstrates that this fundamental finitude is only one of the effects of a peculiar epistemic configuration of discourses. The Order of Things is, then, an attempt to make this state of affairs better known, to contribute to the overcoming of such finitude, such a paucity of possible modes of being. But the “anthropological sleep,” this experience of human finitude as the fundamental condition of all experience and knowledge, can only be dispelled by endeavors that repeat the very rules of “our modernity.” Thus, this sleep will continue until repetition brings out what is implicit within it but absolutely overlooked, its blind spot. And it is this toward which the entire book gestures, though with great uncertainty. Though Foucault was an explorer of modernity, not its missionary, he was not alone. Foucault discusses in a concluding chapter the three structuralist counter-​ sciences that have arisen in the same domain as the human sciences: psychoanalysis, ethnography, and linguistics, each of which has contributed to man’s dissolution, to the realization that the anthropological order of modern, colonial Europe is just one possible experience of order among many other possibilities. Lacanian psychoanalysis goes beyond man as the finite and individual center of his life, inserting the individual in a formal network. The unconscious is no longer something that an individual has in her life, but becomes language itself. So, too, ethnography and linguistics show the centrality of conceptual and formal structures in the organization of experience. Moreover, Foucault explains, none of these three counter-​sciences can aspire to be a general science of man, since each has its local object that it studies in terms of the structural relations that give meaning and shape to it. Perhaps structural linguistics would be in the best position to achieve such a general science, but even it cannot be the science of man, since it concerns language alone (EOT, 382). At certain points, Foucault seems to join the structuralists by competing with them, casting his own work as a new Critique of Pure Reason, with all its attendant formalizations of thought (EOT, 383).66 Just as Hume had awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber, so too the suggestion appeared to be that Foucault’s book would awaken someone, even Foucault himself, from his anthropological slumber, leading to a new formalization of thought and experience.67 Established structuralists might have worried that Foucault was suggesting a more general structural science, one that would compensate for the insufficiencies of previous structuralist discourses. It is important though that a structuralist like Jean Piaget worried instead that Foucault offered a “structuralism without structures.”68 This also fits with Canguilhem’s reading, which suggests that, for Foucault, a purely formal systematics of legitimate and illegitimate forms of thought is no longer possible.69

Literature: Without end Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction about a radically other classificatory order provoked an experience of pure order that was the initial impetus behind The Order of Things

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(EOT, Preface).70 This was an experience of the fact of order that brought with it a consciousness of the real multiplicity of heterogeneous orders.71 Foucault’s book does just this, showing off these glittering and disparate epistemic orders of discourse side by side, perhaps becoming a book that contains all books. Emerging on the basis of continuities in the repetition of discursive regimes, epistemic discontinuity is not the product of a (structuralist) formalization, but the result of a literary experience. With Stéphane Mallarmé, Foucault finds, the modern question about speech is no longer about who is speaking, as it was for Nietzsche (and Canguilhem), but about the “Word itself ” that speaks in language (EOT, 382). The question concerns the being of language as we experience it in the written and spoken word. In Mallarmé’s poetry, according to Foucault, language achieves an autonomous existence as literature; language does not represent, but is experienced in its “raw being” (EOT, 44). In this, poetry since the nineteenth century has come to require a secondary language, not criticism, but commentary, though Foucault suggests that while language continues to be experienced in terms of representation, all secondary languages will be “trapped within the alternative of criticism or commentary. And in their indecision they will proliferate ad infinitum” (EOT, 81). The poet has broken through to raw language, but Foucault does not claim that the culture has, or even that he has. Indeed, everything suggests that he remains in this space of indecision, even if he makes every effort to avoid giving commentary or criticism. Recall that the conclusion of the book, despite a few perhaps overly confident declarations, is a tissue of questions about what it means to speak. Recall also that Foucault appears to liken his position to that of “certain aphasics” in the preface (EOT, Preface). Indeed, Foucault links aphasia to the raw being of language, discovered by Mallarmé in its “impotent power” (EOT, 300). It is “Mallarmé’s project—​that of enclosing all possible discourse within the fragile density of the word, within that slim, material black line traced by ink upon paper” that continues to dominate contemporary endeavors to restore “the fragmented being of language once more within a perhaps impossible unity” (EOT, 305). What, for Mallarmé, speaks in language is, “in its solitude, in its fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself—​ not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic and precarious being” (EOT, 305). Thus, Mallarmé’s poetry and writing poses the question today: “What, then, is this language that says nothing, is never silent, and is called ‘literature’ ” (EOT, 306)? Contemporary structural analyses are the long route to questions already posed by Mallarmé, the poet. The Order of Things is a “work of language,” neither literature nor theory, but their intersection. It is an archaeology that vastly expands the scope of knowledge by writing a new history [récit] of the modern situation. Following Bachelard and Canguilhem, Foucault endeavors to subject thinking to the demands of this situation, a highly complex proliferation of theories and practices of writing combined with philosophical, scientific, and political concerns. If Canguilhem finds that no thought is less normative than Foucault’s, this is because no thought is more dedicated to thinking its present moment. Having followed Canguilhem to the archive, Foucault discovered the episteme; and The Order of Things tests this concept in order to determine whether it can address the complexity of the modern situation. Is there a knowledge that is implicitly present everywhere in

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this situation, but strictly unthinkable? Though structuralism also leads to the questions that Foucault asks, it does not appear—​to him—​to glimpse the blind spot of modern knowledge. In modern literature, rather, Foucault finds the unthinkable positivity of modern knowledge:  the informe, the formless (EOT, 383/​395). Literature as experience of the informe involves the free proliferation of words in their materiality, a materiality nevertheless that speaks us, within which I lose my sovereign voice. This literature is a “formalism,” but only in the sense that it is the proliferation of disparate forms of the word in its being (EOT, 384). Foucault does not know what new unity could possibly arise in this thought, indeed the formless appears just barely on the horizon of his book. Yet The Order of Things, as a work of language, is an attempt to bring the experience of the formless to the reader, not by confronting us with a jumbled mass of marks, but by showing the proliferation of epistemic orders as the ever-​repeating, never-​successful endeavors to grapple with the formless. And the formless shines through in the interstices of knowledge as its fundamental condition of existence. Perhaps the power of modern literature to produce such an experience of the formless explains its temporal scope, already apparent at the end of the Renaissance in Don Quixote. Multiplying and amplifying stagnant language, adding its voice to the endless murmur of the archive, The Order of Things, in the madness of its erudition, seeks to realize the most modern thought. For Foucault, there is no question of the postmodern, since thought has always to become modern to transform itself by repeating its history in the face of what the contemporary situation demands. Thinking, then, is irremediably subject to the materiality and forms of contemporary knowledge, from the sciences to literature and painting. And the continuing proliferation of the archive today enabled by the informational powers of computer and communication networks suggests that Foucault’s modernity remains, still, ours.

Notes 1 Cervantes, Don Quixote. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Norton, 1999. 14. 2 See David Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage, 1993. 160; and Dominique Lecourt. The Mediocracy: French Philosophy since the Mid-​1970s. New York: Verso, 2001. 35–​36. For criticism of the book, see Michel Foucault. Les mots et les choses de Michel Foucault: Regards critiques 1966–​1968 [Regards Critiques]. Ed. Philippe Artières. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2009. 3 I have translated récit above as “history,” rather than “account.” 4 He discusses these later in EAK. 5 Note my translation of the French phrase in brackets. 6 It is hard to see how Sartre’s existentialism and his Marxism could avoid taking issue with Foucault. Still, Flynn has argued that Foucault and Sartre may have had more in common than each was willing to admit. See Thomas Flynn. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

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7 See J.-​P. Sartre, “Jean-​Paul Sartre répond” reprinted in Artières, Regards Critiques, 76. 8 Foucault uses the term “modern” adjectivally throughout the book, though he also refers to “our modernity,” EOT. Perhaps Foucault’s most remarkable mention of modernity occurs here: “The threshold between Classicism and modernity (though the terms themselves have no importance—​let us say between our prehistory and what is still contemporary) had been definitively crossed when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things.” Ibid. 304. 9 Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Jean-​Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1. Trans. Alan Sheridan-​Smith. New York: Verso, 2004), by contrast, is “the magnificent and touching effort of a 19th century man to think the 20th century.” 10 Gerald L. Bruns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” Cambridge Companion [Companion], 2. Ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 11 Dominique Lecourt. Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, London: NLB, 1975. Lecourt’s discussions here are responsible for introducing the term “historical epistemology,” which has been used to describe these authors and adopted as a name for a current school in the history of science. See Yves Gingras. “Naming without Necessity: On the Genealogy and Uses of the Label Historical Epistemology.” Revue de Synthèse, 2010, 131:3. 439–​54. See also Antonella Cutro. Technique et vie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010; and Luca Paltrinieri. L’expérience du concept. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012. 12 Georges Canguilhem. “The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito?” in Gutting, Cambridge Companion. 13 On Canguilhem’s relation to structuralism, see François Dosse. Histoire du structuralisme, Vol. 1. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. 114. 14 The modernity of The Order of Things can also be shown in relation to painting, especially Las Meninas. Unfortunately, there is no space here to discuss this. 15 On Canguilhem’s use of “convergence,” see Samuel Talcott. “Errant life, Molecular Biology, and Biopower: Canguilhem, Jacob, and Foucault.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 36. 2, 2014. 254–​79. 16 Juan José López Ibor. “Opening Speech.” Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Psychiatry Madrid, 5–​11 September 1966. Amsterdam, New York: Excerpta Medica, 1968. 61. 17 Ibid. 62. 18 Ibid. 62. 19 Foucault maintains that an archaeology of an experience, namely, the perception of disease, could be pursued in terms of the Same and the Other. See EBC. 20 See Jean Zoungrana. “Épistémè.” Michel Foucault: Un héritage critique. Ed. Bert et Jamy. Paris: CNRS Editions. 2014. 103–​112. 21 Canguilhem in Gutting, Cambridge Companion, 75. See also Stendhal. The Life of Henry Brulard. New York: NYRB, 2002. 22 Canguilhem makes clear that his comments are addressed to one who, having refused to be considered part of the establishment, as Sartre had done, is now “acting like ‘an academician embittered by the imminence of his replacement in the position of mastery.’ ” Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 75. 23 Ibid. 208/​221. These lines are usually quoted to establish Foucault’s alleged structuralism. See for example, Dosse. Histoire du structuralisme. 384; and Patrice Maniglier. “The Order of Things.” A Companion to Foucault. Ed. O’Leary Falzon and Sawicki. New Jersy: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013. 104–​21.

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24 On the origin of medical art and life sciences, see Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone, 1989; and “Introduction: Thought and the Living.” Knowledge of Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 25 Indeed, at times, it seems that The Order of Things does nothing but present the claims of others. Thus, for example, the book’s most famous claim, that Man is in the process of vanishing, was presented by Foucault as a claim made by Lévi-​Strauss about what psychoanalysis and ethnography do. Foucault. EOT. 379. 26 Canguilhem mentions Dumézil, Lévi-​Strauss, and Martinet in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 76. 27 I discuss what Foucault calls “counter-​sciences” (psychoanalysis, ethnography, and linguistics) below. 28 Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 79. 29 Ibid. 86. 30 Gaston Bachelard. The New Scientific Spirit. Michigan: Beacon Press, 1984. 171. 31 Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 85. 32 Gary Gutting has clearly shown that Foucault’s archaeological method is an extension and at least partial transformation of Canguilhem’s own historical work on scientific concepts. Webb, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology. 33 Canguilhem. The Normal and the Pathological. 35. 34 Foucault later espouses this idea himself in “Qu’est-​ce’qu’un philosophe?” 35 Canguilhem. A Vital Rationalist. New York: Zone, 1994. 383–​84. 36 Canguilhem. Knowledge of Life. 133. 37 Canguilhem. La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Vrin, 1977 [FRC]. 157. 38 Thus he famously suggested the so-​called human sciences become truly scientific by focusing on the truth of particular aspects of human experience, not that of the whole of the human being. Canguilhem, “Qu’est-​ce que la psychologie?” in Études, 365–​82. 39 Canguilhem. FRC. 36/​155. 40 Thus, regarding the reflex concept, Canguilhem points to the widespread testing of reflexes by medical professionals and the idiomatic expression of “having good reflexes,” and comments on the cultural need for such concepts and practices in a society that requires the operation of machinery at high speeds and under intense pressures to perform. Ibid. 162–​3. 41 Canguilhem’s work here is surely responding to Bachelard’s demand to conceive thought not according to the dictum cogito ergo sum, but cogitatur ergo est. This is also why Canguilhem, and Foucault through him, would be opposed to any philosophy, phenomenological or otherwise, that asserts the primacy of consciousness. 42 Ibid. 166. 43 The history of biology has not only its own logic but also, in an allusion to the medical theory, “its own humor.” Ibid. 171. 44 Hacking notes that both Canguilhem and Foucault deployed the concept and that Canguilhem is the most perceptive reader of MC. Ian Hacking. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 91. Thinking through these points about writing might clarify debates about Foucault’s relation to phenomenology and critique. See for instance, David Webb. Foucault’s Archeology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013; and Colin Koopman. “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages.” Foucault Studies, 8. 2010. 100–​121. 45 Canguilhem. FRC. 172.

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46 Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 85. 47 Cutrofello gives a succinct account of the connection to and difference from Husserl’s notion of the historical a priori. Andrew Cutrofello. “The Completeness of Foucault’s Table of the Classical Episteme.” Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement 2003. 56–​57. 48 Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 85. 49 See the essay by Michel Amiot. “Le relativisme culturel de Michel Foucault.” Reprinted in Artières. Regards Critiques. 91–​130. 50 Foucault sets religious moralities to the side. 51 Compare this to Foucault’s discussion of Blanchot in EEW2, 147–​70. 52 This is not structuralism because there is no ultimate structure. And his structuralist critics understood this. See Piaget’s discussion in Le structuralisme. Paris: PUF, 1968. 108–​15. 53 While Canguilhem’s archival research focused on multiplying the living and life with an eventual eye to show the authentic place of science in human life, Foucault’s episteme concept can be read as an attempt to expose the epistemic basis and limits of Canguilhem’s own work. Despite this critical moment, Foucault also clearly acknowledges his continuing debt to Canguilhem. See for example, Foucault’s acknowledgement that Canguilhem’s review supplied him with the concept of the discursive monument. Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 75; Foucault, EAK, 138–​39; EEW2, 210. 54 Michel Foucault. “Lettre de Michel Foucault du 8 mars 1967 en réponse à Michel Amiot.” Artières. Regards Critiques. 138. 55 Foucault uses the phrase “conditions of possibility” most frequently, though he does occasionally discuss these as “conditions of existence.” It is from the new biology of the nineteenth century that Foucault gets the term. 56 Foucault has something like conditions of existence in mind with the historical a priori, not just a condition of possibility. He is interested in discovering the rules that led to the actual existence of particular historical formations of knowledge. 57 See also Casey, Ed. The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 296–​301. 58 On Foucault’s interest in formal geometries, see Webb, Foucault’s Archaeology. 59 The sphere is a form of cosmological spatialization implied by the Renaissance notion of resemblance; the table is a form of analytical spatialization implied by the Classical search for differences. In the first period, resemblance had been the rule of thought, guiding people in their perceptions and discourses, whether theoretical or practical. Thus language played the important role of showing the connections between the most diverse things, drawing them together into one harmonious, closed world. 60 Foucault in Artières. Regards Critiques. 140. 61 Ibid. 140. 62 By 1968, Foucault discusses the four elements of the quadrilateral without invoking this figure. Together they now form “a theoretical network [un réseau théorique].” 63 And Immanuel Kant, despite being so well positioned to recognize the hybridity of this figure, would be the first to do this according to Foucault. 64 For more details about this, see Samuel Talcott. “Human Sciences.” The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Ed. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 65 Foucault could have read Canguilhem’s biological philosophy as arising in the intersection of philosophy and the empirical science of life, but he might have

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also worried that the figure of man remains too important in Canguilhem’s work. Foucault did not make such claims, publishing very little about Canguilhem until later in his life. Michel Foucault. “Introduction.” Canguilhem. The Normal and the Pathological. See also Eduardo Mendieta. “Life.” The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. 254–​62. 66 Foucault writes about “a second critique of pure reason [constituted] on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori.” 67 Thus, Amiot thought that Foucault had done everything possible to set himself up as the new Kant. Amiot in Artières, ed. Regards Critiques. 129. 68 Jean Piaget. Le structuralisme. 108. 69 In addition to the discussion of Foucault’s espagnolisme discussed above, see Canguilhem in Gutting. Cambridge Companion. 93. Canguilhem clearly understands that Foucault is not interested in the purity of reason or its structures. 70 Jorge Luis Borges. “John Wilkin’s Analytical Language.” Other Inquisitions, 1937–​1952. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. 71 Foucault’s appeal to order and his choice of The Order of Things as the title of the English translation reflect his interest in Georges Bataille.

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Despite how it may sound, the archaeology of knowledge is not a search for origins (arche), for primordial experiences or founding acts at the origin of a domain of knowledge. Rather, it is a method for displacing the subject and operating at a “particular level” or “privileged region” that Foucault calls the archive (EAK, 130).2 Archaeology, as Foucault formulates it, is a method for reversing the movement by which domains of knowledge come to be taken as scientific, that is, as progressing continuously toward the truth on the basis of correct theories, well-​formed concepts, clearly defined modes of speech, and specific objects. The sciences with which Foucault is concerned are all recent inventions, two or three hundred years old at the most. They are modern, not just in the historical sense, but in a philosophical one, to the extent that they regard knowledge from the standpoint of the knowing subject. Archaeology is a method of reversal, first, in that it seeks to overturn the subject-​centered approach to the history of sciences and focus instead on the field of discourses, practices, and institutions in which subjects of knowledge are embedded. Whereas intellectual historians tend to focus on the founders of a field and those who revolutionize it, Foucault views these same individuals as speaking and writing from within a network of relations that shape their discourse. Archaeology is a method of reversal in another sense, because not only does it displace the subject as the locus of explanation, but it also challenges a predominant model of history as a form of collective memory. On this model, history is primarily recollection, through which past events are connected by a meaning and a truth that it is the role of historians to discover. For Foucault, this kind of history depends on a retrograde movement of truth by which consciousness provides a dispersion of events with the order of a continuous advancement toward present knowledge. Archaeology attempts to reverse this movement of reconstitution, this synthesis of past time, and redistribute events across a certain privileged space, the field of discourse.3 In the reading of The Archaeology of Knowledge that follows, I will examine how Foucault’s method of analysis displaces the subject by focusing on this field of discourse, and how it replaces the time of consciousness not only with a space of dispersion, but with a different mode of temporality, which he calls “the time of discourse” (EAK, 210).

The historical a priori and the archive Before defining archaeology as a method, Foucault had practiced it in the historical analyses presented in his major works of the 1960s. The term “archaeology” appears in the subtitles of two of his books from this period: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (EOT), and Birth of the Clinic:  An Archaeology of Medical Perception (EBC). Although it does not appear in History of Madness (later translated as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), he treats that work as the first of his archaeological studies.4 At the time of these early appearances of the term, Foucault had not yet developed archaeology into a systematic method, but he used the term simply to indicate the peculiarity of his approach to history. In The Order of Things, he speaks of the “archaeological level,” where one finds the conditions for the

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possibility of the configuration of knowledge in the Classical Age (EOT, 31, 63). In that period, Foucault writes, “naturalists, economists, and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories. It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right . . . that I have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, archaeological” (EOT, xi). The archaeological level is that of “a positive unconscious of knowledge” (EOT, xi), in other words, “the general system of thought, whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible” (EOT, 75). In contrast to typical intellectual history, archaeology is the description of a certain a priori: “what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true” (EOT, 158). On this account, the archaeological conditions for the human sciences do not consist of invariant structures of consciousness, but rather a “historical a priori” (EOT, 158, 378). Foucault uses this paradoxical term, the historical a priori—​which he admits is “startling” and even “barbarous”—​to refer to the conditions for knowledge that archaeology seeks to describe. Readers of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are familiar with the term “synthetic a priori,” an unusual hybrid in its own time, which is evoked by Foucault’s neologism. The synthetic a priori, for Kant, refers to propositions that are “pure,” rather than empirical (a posteriori), and that add to knowledge rather than merely unpacking the meaning of concepts (analytic).5 Kant argues that such propositions deal with the conditions for the possibility for objective experience, that is, whatever makes it possible for us to form valid judgments about the world as a spatiotemporal field ruled by causal laws. In his view, synthetic a priori cognitions provide the foundation for universal, necessary truths in mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics. In the first Critique, he attempts to demonstrate how such synthetic a priori propositions reveal the way knowing subjects organize experience by overturning the assumption that “all our knowledge must conform to the objects [of experience]” and assuming instead that “the objects must conform to our cognition.”6 The synthetic a priori is therefore key to Kant’s attempt at a Copernican revolution in philosophy, which would turn attention from questions concerning “things in themselves,” or reality as such, to questions about “things as they appear” and the contributions of the knowing subject. With the historical a priori, Foucault evokes Kant’s synthetic a priori to define a method of analysis that renounces not only the assumption that subjects play no role in the constitution of experience, but also the pretension that knowledge is the result of a pure exercise of reason by knowing subjects. Foucault’s archaeological works are critical in a Kantian sense, exploring the limits of reason; yet, he views those limits quite differently from Kant.7 His style of criticism is not transcendental but archaeological, “in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge . . . but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events” (EEF, 53–​54). As such, his archaeologies may

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be viewed as contributions to the project of a “critique of historical reason.”8 The archaeological method is directed toward what may appear to be universal and necessary at a particular moment of history in a particular discursive community, or “an a priori that is not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements” (EAK, 127). The historical a priori is thus to be found in the “positivity of discourse,” or in what is actually said (or written) rather than what could possibly be experienced. Instead of providing a key to discovering what can be known with absolute necessity, regardless of one’s specific time and place, the historical a priori is limited to a specific field. According to Foucault, “it does not constitute, above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal structure; it is defined as the group of rules that characterize a discursive practice” (EAK, 127). In other words, the relationship between a particular discourse and the conditions that regulate it is not one of contingent, fleeting propositions to necessary, permanent forms. Instead, the rules of discourse are immanent in it, “not imposed from the outside on the elements that they relate together [but] caught up in the very things they connect” (EAK, 127). As such, the task of describing the historical a priori of a field of knowledge like the ones Foucault investigates in his archaeologies is not a matter of distinguishing the universally valid from the historically particular. For an archaeologist, history becomes a “complex volume” of layered formations to be described with respect to their limits. Foucault’s concept of the historical a priori sets the stage for his definition of archaeology as the positive description of the archive. He uses this term, too, in a surprising and idiosyncratic way. By “archive,” Foucault writes: I do not mean the sum of all texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation. (EAK, 128–​9)

The archive, in the sense that Foucault wishes to give it, is not a storehouse full of knowledge or a memory palace for scholars. Instead, it is “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (EAK, 129). In other words, the archive is a not a collection of written works so much as a set of rules or norms determining what can be said or written.9 As such, “the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance or external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures” (EAK, 129). In this way, the archive limits discourse, making it possible for an archaeologist to distinguish between different historical formations. One way that Foucault’s use of the term “archive” is unusual is that he simultaneously plays on and distances it from the sense of a collection of texts or documents, focusing instead on the statements that happen to appear, to be repeated, and to be contested therein. Even more strangely, he treats statements not merely as units of discourse but as events with their own distinctive mode of existence. A second way that Foucault’s use of this term is strange is that although

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we typically think of an archive as a place where documents—​often rare ones—​are kept in order to preserve them and make them accessible to scholars, it seems as if he is not thinking of a place at all, but rather a system. As such, it would be misleading to think of the archive as a shelter for works produced by a single author or gathered by an individual collector. Third, and perhaps most difficult, the archive has an interstitial status with respect to more familiar phenomena. As Foucault writes:  “Between the language that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated” (EAK, 130). Thus, the archive is more than a particular body of work, but less than the rules of syntax according to which an infinitude of things could be written (or said). Similarly: “It does not have the weight of tradition . . . nor is it the welcoming of oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational field of its freedom” (EAK, 130, emphasis added). That is, the archive is more than a heap of neglected works, abandoned to the passage of time, but less than the wealth of cultural memory that serves as the basis for a collective identity. Between memory and forgetting, the archive “reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (EAK, 130). As such, it is a system that regulates what is said in relation to its object, modality, concepts, and theme—​the four aspects by which a particular figure of discourse or “discursive formation” can be recognized. Since it is hard to do away with the spatial metaphor altogether, we may still want to think of Foucault’s archive as a certain kind of place, and even a mundane one: a workplace. As he characterizes it, the archive is less of a library than a level, “that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events” (EAK, 130). To work at this level is to abandon conventional notions such as those of the author, the œuvre, and the discipline, and to cast one’s gaze over a space of dispersion. It is to examine the relationships between statements belonging to a certain domain of knowledge or field of discourse, with the limits of that field being always in question. It is not to seek the underlying meaning of statements or assess their truth, but to listen to them in relation to others that are purportedly about the same thing or within the same region of inquiry. It is to map the territory around these statements, allowing them to speak for themselves, and to draw and redraw their own borders. To work in the archive is thus to explore a surface full of folds, but without depth. Contrary to how it may sound, Foucault’s archaeology is not a type of “geological excavation,” digging for hidden artifacts, but more of a geographical or topographical exploration, a mapping of “the already-​said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates in it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs” (EAK, 131). If there is any digging here, it is not beneath what has been said to the motivating intentions, but between language, with its endless possibilities for meaningful expression, and the “dubious unities” by which discourse is organized for the sake of knowledge.

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The unities of discourse and discursive formations The archaeological level, as Foucault calls it, may not lie hidden beneath statements, waiting to be uncovered by a skillful interpreter, but neither is it simply given. An archaeologist is required to take certain steps in order to reach the level of the archive. The first requirement of archaeology is to suspend certain familiar ways of carving up the field of discourse that enjoys “virtual self-​evidence.” Before the archive can be explored as a system of formation and transformation of statements, “we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity” (EAK, 21). Chief among these notions are those of intellectual tradition, influence, development, and spirit. For Foucault, such ideas are conventional means, yet highly problematic ones, “by which we usually link the discourse of one man with that of another” (EAK, 22). Each of these, in its own way, imposes unity on “a population of dispersed events” (EAK, 22)  for the sake of providing history with a semblance of temporal continuity. It is also necessary to call into question equally familiar distinctions between types of discourse, such as literature and politics, philosophy and science, which have not always been distinguished as we now distinguish them. Although we may regard such categories as simply given, Foucault argues that they, too, are contingent and contestable ways of carving up discourse. Likewise, the unities of book and œuvre must be suspended despite—​or perhaps because of—​their apparent self-​evidence as principles of individuation. According to Foucault, behind both the unity of the book as a material thing and that of the œuvre as a collection of texts linked by a proper name is an “expressive function” (EAK, 24). The author is not just the individual responsible for a work or body of work, but equally a name that outlives the person to whom it belonged and stands for a multitude of choices by editors, translators, and interpreters. Archaeology recognizes the utility of such notions but puts them on hold, treating them as “the result of a construction the rules of which must be known, and the justification of which must be scrutinized” (EAK, 25). By suspending these unities, archaeology opens up a field, “the field of the facts of discourse” (EAK, 26), a field consisting of “the totality [ensemble] of all effective statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events and in the occurrence [instance] that is proper to them” (EAK, 27). Once conventional discursive unities are suspended, the second requirement of archaeology is to survey the field of discourse in search of the conditions for those things that were actually said or written. Accordingly, statements are to be examined in their specificity, and the question is not what rules make statements of a certain kind possible, but “how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?” (EAK, 27). The task is not to interpret discourse by attempting, as much intellectual history does, “to rediscover beyond the statements themselves the intention of the speaking subject” (EAK, 27). Foucault opposes archaeology to the subject-​centered orientation of modern philosophy, the “anthropology” that regards language as a vehicle for meaning, and meaning as a product of conscious activity. By displacing the subject, archaeology shifts the focus from conscious intentions to rules and structures that those who speak may not even be aware of. This is not to say that archaeology

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follows psychoanalysis in probing beneath consciousness to the unconscious drives, wishes, and motivations revealed in a person’s speech. Analysis of the unconscious, to the extent that it aims to discover hidden meanings and intentions of the speaking subject, remains anthropological for Foucault. Archaeology attempts to displace the subject and treat discourse as autonomous, impersonal, and organized not just by individuals in the pursuit of knowledge, but more importantly the practices and institutions in which they take part. For this reason, Foucault insists that archaeology approach discourse as a field of events:  “we must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes” (EAK, 28). The aim is to reveal relations between statements rather than to say what the author meant, and to replace supposedly “natural, immediate, universal unities” (EAK, 29) with different groupings whose unity may be less obvious but more enlightening. Foucault’s own archaeologies of the 1960s begin with a field of discourse that is delimited according to a broad theme: the “human sciences,” that is, discourses that take “man” as their object. Foucault stresses that this delimitation is provisional rather than definitive, and that it is not the only field in which archaeological analysis can be practiced. With regard to these studies, he raises the question of what kind of unity characterizes such things as clinical medicine, grammar, and political economy. “Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through time? Do they conceal other unities?” (EAK, 31). From the standpoint of archaeology, such things are discursive formations, and the central question around which these others revolve is this: by virtue of what do statements belong to the same discursive formation? In other words, what is the principle of individuation of discourses such as these? Foucault offers and rejects four hypotheses. First, the statements in a discursive formation refer to the same object. Second, the statements in a discursive formation share a certain style. Third, the statements in a discursive formation employ a common set of concepts. Fourth, the statements in a discursive formation deal with a common theme. While each hypothesis has some intuitive appeal, there are problems with each that Foucault considers insurmountable. The first hypothesis, that their objects individuate discourses, is illustrated by the example of psychopathology as the discourse of madness (History of Madness). However, there are several problems with this view. Despite the long history of representations of madness in literature and visual art, it is problematic to suggest that it existed as such prior to the discourse that treats it as mental illness. On the contrary, Foucault claims, the object of psychopathology “was constituted by all that was said in the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it” (EAK, 32). Moreover, it is not the case that all the statements in a discursive formation refer to the same object, even broadly speaking, or that the objects of discourse remain the same over time. According to Foucault, “the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of objects as

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on the space in which objects emerge and are continuously transformed” (EAK, 32). The second hypothesis, that discourses are individuated by a certain style or manner of speaking, is illustrated by the example of clinical medicine as a set of descriptive statements concerning illness (The Birth of the Clinic). The problem with this view is simply that description may play a central role, but it is by no means the only kind of statement involved in this field of discourse. Through his research, Foucault arrived at the realization that “clinical discourse was just as much a group of hypotheses about life and death, of ethical choices, of therapeutic decisions, of institutional regulations, of teaching models, as a group of descriptions” (EAK, 33). The third hypothesis, that discourses are individuated by the basic concepts they employ, is illustrated by grammar (The Order of Things). Such concepts as “judgment,” “subject” and “predicate,” “noun,” “verb,” and even “word” appear to distinguish classical grammar from other discourses. If this were true, then how could a discourse maintain its unity when new concepts are introduced, particularly if they are incompatible with the old ones? Whatever unites the statements in a discursive formation, it must be able to weather the appearance and disappearance of particular concepts, even those most distinctive to it. The fourth hypothesis, that discourses are individuated by a common theme or themes, is illustrated by biology and the theme of evolution (The Order of Things). But there are two problems with this view. On one hand, Foucault claims, the same theme may be “articulated on the basis of two sets of concepts, two types of analysis, two perfectly different fields of objects” (EAK, 36), resulting in two discourses that should be distinguished. On the other hand, two opposing themes may be developed on the basis of the same set of concepts, resulting in different theoretical options. In order not to rule out the possible coexistence of competing theories and strategies within a single discourse, Foucault abandons the notion that a discursive formation is individualized by a common theme, and he pays closer attention to “the dispersion of points of choice that the discourse leaves free” (EAK, 36). Instead of searching for “the permanence of themes, images, and opinions through time,” he becomes more concerned with describing the system of this dispersion, which establishes “prior to any option, to any thematic preference, a field of strategic possibilities” (EAK, 37). Foucault does not follow these four hypotheses with a fifth of his own, but incorporates them into a detailed account of the fourfold structure of discursive formation. He writes: Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between [1]‌objects, [2] types of statement, [3] concepts, or [4] thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation. . . . The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected we shall call the rules of formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance). (EAK, 38; numbering added)

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This passage highlights several crucial points about archaeology. Although Foucault emphasizes the dispersion of statements, archaeology seeks to describe their regularity, which is why he speaks of systems of dispersion. Statements are made and transformed according to certain rules of formation governing all four of the elements that he denies are responsible for the unity of a discourse. These rules may be formal, but unlike the rules of logic or grammar, they are conditions of existence, regulating not just what it is possible to think or say, but what is actually said. It is in this sense that such rules comprise a historical a priori: the themes, concepts, manners of speaking, and even the objects of a discourse are constituted differently at various periods of history, but according to rules and practices that are (or at least seem) unquestionable at the time they apply. The regularity of a discourse depends on the interplay of the rules and practices governing it. Each of the four aspects of the regularity of discourse helps Foucault to shed light on what it means to work at the archaeological level. In the first place, he considers what is involved in treating the objects of a particular discourse as constituted by it rather than as existing prior to it. Taking the example of madness as the object of psychopathology, he distinguishes between three aspects that an archaeological analysis should consider: the object’s “surfaces of emergence,” such as the family, the religious community, and the state; its “authorities of delimitation,” such as the medical profession, the penal code, religious authority, and art and literary criticism; and its “grids of specification,” such as the soul, the body, the history of individuals; and the network of causal correlations. The key here is not so much to identify the privileged objects formed at these levels, but to describe the group of relations between them, for example, the relations between medical and judicial authority, or between moral norms and pathological symptoms. Foucault makes several important points about the formation of objects of discourse. First, the appearance of new objects involves a multitude of positive conditions, such that “one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, or to be aware for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground” (EAK, 44–​45). Second, the relations that are constitutive of objects are not internal to them, but they define a “field of exteriority” (EAK, 45), once again consisting of norms, practices, and institutions. Third, what Foucault calls “discursive relations” must be distinguished from both “real dependencies” between institutions such as the family and the law, and reflexive relations between such institutions and the authors commenting on them; and fourth, discursive relations are neither internal to discourse, like a deductive structure, nor external to it, like forms imposed from beyond it, but “at the limit of discourse” (EAK, 46). The task of archaeology is not to “return to the state anterior to discourse” in search of the silent origin of things, nor is it to “pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it” (EAK, 48). Rather, the task is to understand discourses as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (EAK, 49). In the second place, Foucault considers what it is that links the various styles of statement that characterize a particular discourse. Questions about the distinctive manner or manners of speaking in a particular discourse help to specify the

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“enunciative modalities” of discourse. Using clinical medicine as an example, he explains how archaeology describes a specific modality by asking questions such as these: “Who is speaking, or better, who is authorized to make statements?” In the case of clinical discourse, this leads to the investigation of how doctors are authorized to speak about illness. From where are such statements made, or what is its institutional context? The modality of clinical discourse is associated with such sites as the hospital, the laboratory, and the library. What position must one occupy in order to make such statements, or how must a speaking subject be situated? In clinical discourse, the subject occupies a field of observation, interrogation, and instruction; as such, the speaker is a node in the network of diagnosis, treatment, and training. One may wonder if this treatment of enunciative modalities is consistent with Foucault’s aim of displacing the subject. He explains that the point is not to “refer the various enunciative modalities to the unity of the subject,” either empirical or transcendental, and that archaeological analysis, “instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject,” demonstrates how the speaking subject is constituted as such by a system of dispersion (EAK, 54). Foucault elaborates: I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression—​the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I  shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity. Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed. (EAK, 55)10

Thus, the description of enunciative modalities is not only consistent with Foucault’s strategy of displacing the knowing subject, but it is a crucial component of it. Modalities of discourse cannot be explained on the basis of subjectivity, but different forms of subjectivity may show up in the light of the discursive practices that determine who may speak, in what ways, and how they must be situated. In the third place, Foucault considers how it might be possible to think of discourse not as supported by a stable conceptual edifice, but as organized into a field of statements in which concepts appear and circulate. The key would be not to deduce all the concepts of a particular discursive formation to a common principle, but to describe the ways they are organized and systematically related to one another. With this in mind, Foucault distinguishes between three forms of organization that concern archaeology: succession, coexistence, and modification. Concepts are never formed on their own, but are distributed in a series of statements arranged according to certain rules. Statements form a complex enunciative field including ones that are accepted as true and well-​founded, ones that were once accepted but no longer are, and ones that belong to other discourses but serve some function in the one under analysis. Finally, they may be reiterated and modified in various ways, such as transcription, translation, approximation, and systematization. For Foucault, the concepts of a discourse such as natural history do not emerge like “the stone-​by-​stone construction of an edifice” (EAK, 56), but rather, “what makes it possible to delimit a group of concepts, disparate as they

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may be, that are specific to it, is the way in which these different elements are related to one another” (EAK, 58–​59). The task is not to analyze “the conceptual architecture of an isolated text, and individual œuvre, or a science at a particular moment in time,” but rather to describe the “schemata” that account for the relations between statements and “their anonymous dispersion through texts, books, and œuvres. . . . Such an analysis, then, concerns, at a kind of preconceptual level, the field in which concepts can coexist and the rules to which this field is subjected” (EAK, 60). That said, archaeology does not seek a logical a priori from which concepts originate, such as the “essences” of phenomenology. Although we may associate archaeology with excavation, Foucault writes, “the ‘preconceptual’ thus described is, at the most ‘superficial’ level (at the level of discourse)” (EAK, 62). If the rules of formation are hidden, it is because they “operate not only in the mind or consciousness of individuals, but in discourse itself ” (EAK, 63). Such rules are a priori in the sense that they operate on all individuals working in a particular discourse, but “one does not suppose them universally valid for every domain” (EAK, 63). Fourth, Foucault considers how, if a discursive formation is not defined by certain themes or theoretical choices, it may nevertheless be defined as a field of strategic possibilities from which they emerge. Supposing the themes of a discourse are linked neither by necessity nor chance, can their regularity be described systematically? Foucault transitions from using his previous books to illustrate his method to indicating directions for future research. With regard to the role of strategies in a particular discourse, one task would be to determine its “points of diffraction” (EAK, 65) where incompatible theoretical options are possible within the same system. Another task would be to describe the authorities guiding actual theoretical choices, which permit certain options and exclude others. Yet another would be to situate discourses with respect to nondiscursive practices, which are not merely “disturbing” but “formative elements” of discourse (EAK, 68). In what appears to be a revival of his rejected fourth hypothesis, Foucault claims: “A discursive formation will be individualized if one can define the system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it” (EAK, 68). This is precisely what Foucault calls a system of formation, which is not merely “the sum of all these various options,” but rather a set of “systematically different ways of treating objects of discourse . . ., of arranging forms of enunciation . . ., of manipulating concepts” (EAK, 69–​70). Thus, the analysis of strategies is not independent of the other three aspects of discursive formation; it encompasses but does not supersede the analysis of objects, styles, and concepts.

Archaeology and temporality To work at the archaeological level, as Foucault describes it, is to dispense with certain kinds of historical unity—​tradition, influence, development, and so on—​and replace them with another: the discursive formation. But what kind of unity is this? If it cannot be defined by common themes, concepts, styles of statement, or objects, what unifies it? Is it a unity at all? Foucault anticipates this objection and replies that a discourse such

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as medicine, political economy, or natural history is unified by its system of formation, “the specific rules in accordance with which its object, statements, concepts, and theoretical options have been formed” (EAK, 72). It is this system that regulates the dispersion of elements, making a coherent, organized space of knowledge possible. The archaeological level really consists of four levels: a four-​tiered field of relations where an archaeologist attempts to establish relations of dependence between objects of discourse and positions of the speaking subject; manners of speaking and conceptual frameworks; divergence in concepts; and strategic possibilities. These relations form a hierarchy that determines a priori what can be said—​or, from a historical perspective, what was actually said. Thus, the unity of a discourse, if there is one, cannot be reduced to anything that remains constant over time. Instead, it depends on rules and relations that are stable for a period but subject to transformation. The unities that archaeology suspends, from tradition to the œuvre, are all variations on the theme of temporal continuity. Foucault makes it known from the beginning that he views history as discontinuous—​as divided by periodic reorganizations of the space of knowledge. In opposition to anthropologism, he attacks the temporality of continuity, arguing: Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject. . . . Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness. (EAK, 12)11

One of the tasks of archaeology is to overturn the subject-​centered approach to history, and to do so, it must also disrupt the movement by which the dispersion of events is reconstituted into a continuous progression toward present knowledge. Foucault stands opposed to any view of history that is based on the time of consciousness: “History must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long . . . that of an age-​old collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh its memory” (EAK, 7). To think of history in terms of memory is to privilege the standpoint of consciousness, thus to protect the sovereignty of the subject. The theme, that displacing the knowing subject entails detaching discourse from the time of consciousness, reappears throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge. In one instance, Foucault claims that if discourse can be analyzed at the level of a field of statements “no longer situated in relation to a sovereign subjectivity,” then that field “does not obey the temporality of consciousness as a necessary model” (EAK, 122). Later, he relates this mode of temporality to both speaking and thinking: To constitute an archaeological history of discourse, then, one must free oneself of two models that have for so long imposed their image:  the linear model of speech (and partly at least of writing), in which all events succeed one another, without any effect of coincidence and superposition; and the model of the stream of consciousness whose presence always eludes itself in its openness to the future and its retention of the past. Paradoxical as it may be, discursive formations do not

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have the same model of historicity as the flow of consciousness or the linearity of language. (EAK, 173)

In his conclusion, Foucault imagines that the prospect of displacing this mode of temporality will produce great anxiety and unease: “Must we admit that the time of discourse is not the time of consciousness extrapolated to the dimension of history?” (EAK, 210). Nevertheless, he insists, in a typically provocative fashion: “Discourse is not life: its time is not your time” (EAK, 211). But if history is not recollection, and discourse is neither a succession of words nor a stream of thoughts, what mode of temporality can be assigned to a discursive formation? Foucault cautions against the notion that the only other option is to seek rules of discourse that are timeless: “These systems of formation must not be taken as blocks of immobility, static forms that are imposed on discourse from the outside, and that define once and for all its characteristics and possibilities” (EAK, 74). Archaeology does not seek to overturn the time of consciousness by discovering structures that lie outside of history, impermeable to change. In this respect, Foucault distinguishes his approach from not only phenomenology, but also structuralism: A discursive formation, then, does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes it for decades or centuries; it determines a regularity proper to temporal processes; it presents the principle of articulation between a series of discursive events and other series of events, transformations, mutations, and processes. It is not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondence between several temporal series. (EAK, 74)

While archaeology detaches history from the time of consciousness, it cannot dispense with time altogether. The point is not to reduce discourse to an a priori that remains constant, to display it against a background of permanence. But to the extent that discursive formations possess any constancy or stability, while always being susceptible to transformation, archaeology is concerned with how to characterize their temporality. Foucault explores the time of discourse first by describing the specific temporality of statements. Supposing that the basic unit of discourse is a statement—​which is not the same as a sentence, a proposition, or a speech act—​then what mode or modes of temporality does it possess? Foucault proposes that a statement be understood not as a logical or grammatical unit, but as “a function of existence that properly belongs to signs” (EAK, 86). As such, a statement is correlated with a domain of objects to which it refers, to the position of a subject authorized to make it, to a field of other coexisting statements, and to a material medium of support. At the archaeological level, the position of a statement in the “living present” of consciousness loses its primacy (EAK, 94). Its position in an associated field of other statements is of greater importance, but one aspect of this field is succession: “a statement always belongs to a series or a whole” (EAK, 99). A statement is something that is not only thought, but spoken or written, so to the extent that it requires material support, it would seem to be located in both time and space. However, Foucault distinguishes a statement from the “unrepeatable event” of its formulation, and he characterizes its temporality as a kind of repeatable materiality (EAK, 101–​102). On this account, a statement is neither “an event that

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occurred in a particular time and place,” which can only be preserved by memory, nor “an ideal form that can be actualized in any body, at any time, in any circumstances” (EAK, 104). The statement is a “paradoxical object” with a degree of permanence in time that nevertheless allows for its modification and even destruction. These efforts to define the statement lead Foucault to the conclusion that archaeology must abandon not only the model of history based on temporal continuity, but also the assumption that every discursive formation, insofar as it is historical, possesses the same mode of temporality. Instead of regarding a system of formation as “an ideal, timeless form” that was somehow “enabled to emerge and become embodied at this point in time,” archaeology investigates “its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality” (EAK, 117). Foucault does consider several modes of temporality that characterize any field of discourse as such under the rubric of “accumulation.” Statements are not merely “written symbols piling up in dusty libraries,” not inert or dormant ideas waiting to be reawakened by chance, but things that remain, thanks to certain “material techniques,” of which books and libraries are only the most obvious (EAK, 123). Archaeology is thus concerned with the remanance of statements, a non-​accidental preservation that is distinctive of them and cannot be reduced to memory. Similarly, it is concerned with the recurrence of a statement, a relation to prior statements by which it “constitutes its own past” not merely as a succession of events, but “as a form that can be modified, as material to be transformed” (EAK, 124). Despite these modes of temporality that define all statements as such, Foucault proposes that each discursive formation defines its own temporal specificity. From the perspective of conventional intellectual history, archaeology “seems to treat history only to freeze it . . . [to] impose the constricting figure of synchrony on a development” (EAK, 167). However, the point is not to replace continuous history with a series of discontinuous fragments, to do away with chronological succession in favor of “a purely logical schema of simultaneities,” but rather to allow for different forms of succession, different rhythms of duration, different temporal vectors of derivation (EAK, 168–​9). Thus, despite the way that Foucault’s archaeologies describe epistemic ruptures between periods, he asserts that it is never a matter of a sudden break, but “always a discontinuity specified by a number of distinct transformations,” where “each transformation may have its own particular index of temporal ‘viscosity’ ” (EAK, 175). By describing major epochal changes in terms of “transformations at different levels,” Foucault attempts to “reject a uniform model of temporalization” (EAK, 200) and allow for different modes of temporality, various forms of historicity, in different discursive formations. Foucault says a great deal more in The Archaeology of Knowledge about what the time of discourse is not than what it is. First and foremost, it is not the time of consciousness which imposes continuity on the dispersion of events. This mode of temporality promotes the confusion of history with memory, which he denounces. It does not follow, however, that discourse is atemporal, or that the regularity of a discursive formation is somehow timeless. The relations that archaeology seeks to describe may be stable, but they are not permanent. The analysis of fields of discourse is not an attempt to replace succession with simultaneity, or diachronic explanations with synchronic ones. The

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archive, as Foucault conceives of it, is not a level of abstraction from change, mobility, and duration. The breaks between discursive formations are not like sharp boundaries between layers of sedimentation. For Foucault, then, archaeology may be a method of reversal, but it is not just a reversal of the anthropological privilege of time (continuity) over space (discontinuity), but an effort to introduce into the field of historical analysis a variety of strategies for challenging this opposition.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. 2 See Stuart Elden. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum, 2001. 95. 3 In this respect, Foucault’s archaeology “concerns the spatialization of time; it concerns a kind of strange place.” Leonard Lawlor. Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 43. I am interested in the way in which it also concerns a strange kind of temporality, in other words, “a counter-​memory” (45). 4 There is, however, a famous passage from the 1961 preface to that work, in which Foucault writes: “In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman . . . [T]‌he constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in dialogue . . . The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence. My intention was not to write the history of that language, but rather draw up the archaeology of that silence” (EHM, xxviii). 5 See the Introduction to Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 136–​152 (B 1–​30). 6 Ibid. 110 (B xvi). 7 The limits that concern Foucault differ from one period of history to another. “Unlike Kant, he is not concerned with determining the a priori, necessary conditions governing the exercise of reason but with reflection on what seem to be such conditions to reveal the extent to which they in fact have a contingent historical origin.” Gary Gutting. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 3. Foucault situates his philosophical project with respect to Kant in the essay “What Is Enlightenment?” reprinted in EEF. 8 See Thomas Flynn. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, 2. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 9 We could call the archive an epistemological structure, but Foucault later denies that his method is a type of “structural analysis.” The conclusion to The Archaeology of Knowledge begins with Foucault imagining an objection: “Throughout this book, you have been at great pains to dissociate yourself from ‘structuralism,’ or at least from what is ordinarily understood by that term,” and yet, “Like a certain form of linguistics, you have tried to dispense with the speaking subject; you believed that one could cut off from discourse all its anthropological references, and treat it as if it had never been formulated by anyone . . . you have refused to see that discourse, unlike the language

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(langue), perhaps, is essentially historical, that it was made up not of available elements, but of real, successive events, that it cannot be analysed outside the time in which it occurred” (EAK, 199–​200). He replies that his aim was not to reduce discourse to “laws of construction or forms that could be applied in the same way by all speaking subjects,” but to demonstrate “how it was possible for men, within the same discursive practice, to speak of different objects, to have contrary opinions, and to make different choices” (EAK, 200). For this reason, he does not exclude the speaking subject but focuses precisely on “the positions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity of discourse” (EAK, 200). If the archive is a structure, it is neither universal nor ahistorical. On Foucault’s complicated relationship with structuralism, see Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Ed. Dreyfus Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 10 With this reference to expression, Foucault distinguishes his method from that of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, who occasionally uses the term “archaeology” to characterize his own phenomenological approach. See Lawlor, Thinking through French Philosophy, 31ff. Later, in his conclusion, Foucault mentions Merleau-​Ponty along with Husserl and Kant as philosophers who, in his view, approached the history of thought through a kind of “transcendental narcissism,” which he strongly opposes (EAK, 203). 11 In a 1976 interview, Foucault reiterates this point in defense of his preference for spatial thinking: “Anyone envisaging the analysis of discourses solely in terms of temporal continuity would inevitably be led to approach and analyse it like the internal transformations of an individual consciousness . . . Metaphorising the transformations of discourse in a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to the utilization of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporality. Endeavoring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power” (EPK, 69–​70).

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function of force relations. By Foucault’s own admission, archaeological critique, which analyzes “the conditions of emergence of statements” (EAK, 127) characteristic of discourse in a given period, could not explain the discontinuous historical shifts from one episteme to another. For its part, Discipline and Punish answers this question of “epistemological causation” by attributing epistemico-​historical agency to power, conceived as an integrated set of coercive and productive strategies for organizing and controlling multiplicities of bodies and forces. To identify the exercise of power as a constitutive condition for epistemic formations is to call into question the politics of truth, which is to say, both the status of truth as an effect of power and the power effects of truth. To take an especially pertinent example, on Foucault’s view, the “discoveries” of the Enlightenment, including political liberty, legal equality, and the rights of man, are made possible by a system of domination the very operation of which they serve, in turn, to mask (and thereby to support). In a word, genealogical critique prepares the analysis of power-​knowledge—​that is, “the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth” (EEW3, 133)—​a dominant modern form which Foucault terms “discipline.” A  genealogy of modernity, then, will focus on the constitutive role played by disciplinary power in the emergence of the social and epistemic formations of the West: Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-​ power that are essentially non-​ egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. (EDP, 222)

There would thus be two sides of modernity, the apparent opposition of which is belied by their insidious relation of reciprocal support. The first side is the form in which the modern world recognizes itself: namely, the Enlightenment narrative of the progressivist evolution of reason and human society, including the liberalization of legal, political, and economic institutions, relations, and practices. On the other hand, there is an underside to this enlightened modernism, the preparation and proliferation of myriad, systematically linked techniques of coercion, subjection, forced production, and social control. Beneath the juridical surface of formal equality and freedom extends a profound and diffuse network of power relations, traversing and structuring the social field in a manner that consolidates political dominance and socioeconomic hegemony. These “tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms,” which Foucault will refer to as a “micro-​ physics” of power, impose on the population an order (maintained by “panoptic” techniques of hierarchized surveillance) and a function (controlling the conduct of human multiplicities, the composite forces of which operate within the circuits of social and economic production). Thus, insofar as “the disciplines provide, at the base,

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a guarantee of the submission of bodies and forces,” they satisfy a necessary condition for the post-​monarchical, “representative regime” of modern government: The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The “Enlightenment,” which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (EDP, 222, emphasis added)

Indeed, if the disciplines are the historical foundation of the liberties, then the Enlightenment’s discovery of the latter is only possible by means of having invented the former. A micro-​political system of coercion and generalized strategy of domination via the disciplines found the liberal modernist project of political, social, moral, and economic progress; and the formal discourses and institutions justifying and securing liberty, equality, and the rights of man, by virtue of their very mantle of universality, effectively conceal the constitutive operations of disciplinary power that underlie them. Discipline and Punish thereby levels a radical and systematic political critique of modernity, and it does so most immediately by analyzing the birth of the prison, that distinctively modern form of punishment whose essential strategic operation continues unabated today. We will have the occasion below to consider the specificity of the prison as a privileged side of power-​knowledge, including Foucault’s own engagement with the prison revolt movement of the early 1970s (which oriented his history of the prisons) and the enduring relevance of his analysis for contemporary critiques of mass incarceration and the prison-​industrial complex. Indeed, understanding the latter will be the surest way to evaluate the legacy of Foucault’s work as a history of the present. However, taking our cue from his thesis on the two sides of modernity, let us begin more generally by analyzing the concept of discipline, including the mechanics of its exercise, the conditions of its historical realization, and the political strategy of its operation as a “complex social function” (EDP, 23). If Foucault will later define power generally as “a set of actions upon other actions” (EEW3, 341), he conceives disciplinary power in particular as a set of actions upon the actions of bodies: “an infinitesimal power over the active body,” “a ‘new micro-​physics’ of power,” a “ ‘political anatomy,’ which was also a ‘mechanics of power’ ” (EDP, 137–​ 8). In short, as he will put it the following year in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), power delineates “an anatomo-​politics of the human body” (EHS1, 139). As a set of coercive techniques and practices for the organization, development, control, and use of the actions and forces of bodies and the human multiplicities they compose, discipline functions less to repress (though it has repressive effects) than to produce, inducing within the body itself “a relation of docility-​utility” (EDP, 137). Indeed, it is in just this way that discipline directly invests the body, establishing an inverse relation between its powers of economic-​productive activity and its powers of political-​transformative activity. The body is thus made “more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely”: “Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic

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terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). . . . If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination” (EDP, 138). In the first instance, then, what discipline produces are docile and useful individual and collective bodies, which become the instruments of their own subjection to the extent that they are inscribed in an apparatus of production (economic production in the factories, but also educational and moral production in the schools, the production of illegality and delinquency in the prisons, the production of destructive might in the military, the production of convalescence in the hospitals, etc.). As we will see below, this docility-​ utility relation corresponds to the fundamental economico-​ political problem (mutually adjusting processes of capital accumulation and social control) to which the disciplines, as “general formulas of domination” (EDP, 138), were to serve as the historical response. Before analyzing the larger strategic dimensions of discipline, however, we must first understand the mechanics by means of which this microphysics of power operates. Disciplinary power pursues four major operating objectives:  (1)  the spatial distribution of individuals, (2) the control of their activity, (3) the temporal production of genetic series, and (4) the tactical combination of forces. These four objectives, in turn, are brought about through specific sets of techniques that function as processes of individualization. Disciplinary distribution produces a “cellular,” isolated, and hierarchically situated locus of individuality. Disciplinary control of activity, by coding and becoming incorporated into the micro-​workings of the body itself (its rhythms, gestures, movements, postures, relations to objects), produces an “organic” form of individuality from which can be obtained an “exhaustive use.” Disciplinary temporalization produces a “genetic” duration of individuality or serialized identity, a modality of time that has been invested by power, segmented, accumulated, and optimized for capitalization. Finally, disciplinary tactics, through a compositional calculus that constructs a maximally useful arrangement of forces, produce a “combinatory” structure of individuality, each body “constituted as a part of a multi-​ segmentary machine” (EDP, 164, 167). In short, discipline, through an individualizing (and totalizing) set of procedures, acts upon the actions of bodies (increasing their utility and docility) by controlling the spatiotemporal conditions of the field of possible individual and collective actions. We will consider aspects of the latter objectives in our discussion of discipline and capitalism below, particularly the chronometric capture of activity and the capitalization of time. Since they bear directly on the panoptic model of control so fundamental to the prison, however, what immediately concerns us are the techniques for the cellular construction of disciplinary space. First, as an “art of distributions,” “[d]‌iscipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself ” (EDP, 141). Disciplinary institutions—​among them, the barracks, the factory, the hospital, the school, and the prison—​therefore tend to be spaces of confinement, the earliest historical examples of which come from the Christian monastic tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.2 However,

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it is worth emphasizing that “the principle of ‘enclosure’ is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary machinery” (EDP, 143). That is, discipline can also operate in open spaces, especially as panoptic mechanisms of surveillance become more diffuse throughout the social field, a process characteristic of modern society. The second distributive technique follows “the principle of elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual” (EDP, 143). Discipline thus constructs a cellular space through which the constitutive elements of a human multiplicity become individualized, ordering the set of possible relations among them and more readily permitting the knowledge and control of each individual’s activity. If “the man of modern humanism was born” (EDP, 141) of disciplinary techniques, the rudimentary outline of his form is delineated by elementary location, a process that defuses the dangerous, unpredictable, or unproductive possibilities intrinsic to any multitude. “Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyze confused, massive or transient pluralities. . . . One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation” (EDP, 143). By means of regulating or preventing lateral connections among the individuals distributed in disciplinary space, the totalizing technique of partitioning simultaneously makes possible a system of individualizing surveillance. The aim of this disciplinary technique “was . . . to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using” (EDP, 143). The form of the modern individual, “man,” is produced as an effect of power-​ knowledge, bearing the trace of cellular isolation the very mechanism of which is to secure obedience. It is thus difficult to see how such a form could provide the basis for transformative politics, the pretensions of humanism notwithstanding. Because discipline must serve not only “to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space,” the “principle of individualizing partitioning” finds its complement in the third distributive technique: namely, the “rule of functional sites,” a coding of architectural space by means of which the set of ordered relations among individuals becomes integrated into the apparatus of production (EDP, 143–​4). An instructive example of this rule is provided by the division of labor in the factories of the late eighteenth century: “It was a question of distributing individuals in a space in which one might isolate them and map them; but also of articulating this distribution on a production machinery that had its own requirements. The distribution of bodies, the spatial arrangement of production machinery and the different forms of activity in the distribution of ‘posts’ had to be linked together” (EDP, 144–​5). What resulted was a serialization of workers that “formed a permanent grid,” organized according to the particular kinds of labor and subjected to a general, centralized surveillance by which the individual aptitudes of each worker could be constantly measured and evaluated relative to those of every other: “Thus, spread out in a perfectly legible way over the whole series of individual bodies, the work force may be analyzed in individual units. At

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the emergence of large-​scale industry, one finds, beneath the division of the production process, the individualizing fragmentation of labour power; the distributions of the disciplinary space often assured both” (EDP, 145). Once again we see that discipline installs a relation of docility-​utility in the body; only in this case, in addition to the individual workers who compose it, the body in question can be considered the workforce as a whole, a social body whose powers of economic-​productive activity are augmented (through “the division of the production process”) as its powers of political-​transformative activity diminish (through “the individualizing fragmentation of labor power”). In such a way, the labor force becomes disciplined. The final technique that disciplinary power employs to achieve its distributive objective is the organizational schema of “the rank”: “Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements” (EDP, 145–​6). The hierarchical system of rank order completes the process by means of which a potentially “unusable and dangerous” mass is molded into a useful, seamlessly operating human multiplicity. Take, for example, the schools: “The organization of a serial space was one of the great technical mutations of elementary education. . . . By assigning individual places it made possible the supervision of each individual and the simultaneous work of all. . . . It made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding” (EDP, 147). At once individualizing and totalizing, the rank structure forms a set of essentially non-​egalitarian relations, an evaluative schema for “organizing the multiple . . . imposing upon it an ‘order,’ ” “treating multiplicity itself, distributing it and deriving from it as many effects as possible” (EDP, 148–​9). A  group or mass of human beings having been partitioned and integrated into a functional site of production, the rank order allows for the normalization of that human collectivity, instituting a classificatory structure and hierarchized set of differences that assign each individual a value (and basis for continuous evaluation) through the imposition of a norm or rule for conduct that governs the network of their interrelations. The distributive objective of disciplinary power thus ultimately serves to “transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” (EDP, 148); and the techniques developed for this end are integral to the broader deployment of discipline as a strategy of social control. We might call this distributive ordering procedure discipline’s denumerating function. What is indicated by this term is the process by which “[t]‌he crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities” (EDP, 201). The first condition for the disciplinary production of docile and useful bodies is this denumeration of human multiplicities into discretely quantifiable individual beings. It is not a sufficient condition, however. As is already implied by the distributive techniques of partitioning, functional sites, and rank, the activities and relations of the “separated individualities” who are collected must be organized and controlled through a system of hierarchical surveillance. In addition to being an “art of distributions” and an “art of rank,” discipline constitutes an “art of light and the visible”: “The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means

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of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible” (EDP, 171). An entire political optics thus develops by which power directly invests light itself—​what Foucault will term “panopticism.” Now, discipline is not the first form of power that had operated by means of manipulating visibility. To understand the specificity of the panoptic regime in this regard, it would thus be instructive to distinguish it briefly from the form of power that preceded it historically: namely, sovereign power, the dominant punitive exercise of which was torture or public execution (la supplice). As “a whole quantitative art of pain” (EDP, 34), the technique of torture performs three integrated operations. First and most immediately, it produces a calculable, legally coded degree of pain on the body of the condemned, regulated and performed according to “a long course in physico-​penal knowledge” (EDP, 34). Second, torture marks the body in a “legal ceremonial” that brands and codes it, forming it into a visible sign “open for all to see” that effectively testifies to “the truth of the crime” (EDP, 35). Third, it composes a public spectacle that glorifies through excessive violence the dominant physical force of sovereign power. In short, penal torture is “a differentiated production of pain, an organized ritual for the marking of victims and the expression of the power that punishes . . . In the ‘excesses’ of torture, a whole economy of power is invested” (EDP, 35), an economy the strategy of which can be most succinctly described as “a policy of terror: to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-​establish justice; it reactivated power” (EDP, 49). The tortured body, then, becomes an instrument for the exercise of power through a semio-​technique of pain, its very agony forming the clearly legible sign of sovereign might. In this way, the body is subjected to power through a mechanism that makes it visible (for an instant), transforming it into a spectacular object that “displayed for all to see the power relation that gave [the sovereign’s] force to the law” (EDP, 50). A certain production of visibility is thus essential to what Foucault calls “the juridico-​political function” (EDP, 48)  of torture. However, in keeping with the logic of terror, which aims to take effect principally on those who consume the spectacle (rather than on those who directly suffer its production), “the main character” of the public ritual was not the body of the criminal who occasioned it, but rather “the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance. . . . Not only must the people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment” (EDP, 57–​ 8). It is therefore the people who are the “main” if indirect object of power’s exercise in ritual torture, the unviewed viewers who take in (and remember) the dark signification of its production; for what manifests itself visibly through this “performance,” as both its author and its subject, is the power of the sovereign, “the prince show[ing] himself, indissociably, both as head of justice and head of war” (EDP, 50). That is, sovereign power—​an injured party of the original crime (“since the force of the law is the force of the prince” [EDP, 47])—​reconstitutes itself by making itself visible, seeking “a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations” (EDP, 57) by forming a

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memory in the minds of the spectating public. As in Nietzsche, this punitive semio-​ technique is thus also a mnemo-​technique.3 According to the spectacular logic of the regime of light operative in torture, the very visibility of power constitutes its exercise; and while the immediate object of sovereign power’s violence is made visible, too, for its momentary flash of signification, those on whom power is properly exercised, the people, stand at a remove from the scene. In this regard, by contrast, discipline transforms the “economy of visibility” through which power operates: Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade; they received light only from . . . the reflection of [power] that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. (EDP, 187)

The logic of surveillance thus inverts the politico-​optical arrangement of the spectacle: for a visible power exercised indirectly and discontinuously over a non-​visible crowd, there is substituted an invisible power exercised directly and continuously over a visible collection of individual subjects. Despite the cruel grotesquerie of torture’s immediate violence upon the body of the condemned, it is discipline that establishes a more effective and insidious hold over the bodies it coerces, that is, controls and makes use of; for it is the disciplined body itself, as an object of surveillance and normalization, that becomes the agent of its own subjection (hence the directness of power’s exercise). In tandem with its denumerating function, then, disciplinary power must construct a field of visibility that “permit[s]‌an internal, articulated, detailed control” over the separated individualities it makes visible: “A whole problematic then develops . . . [of] an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold of their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. . . . The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly” (EDP, 173). The rudimentary historical form of such a disciplinary architecture is provided by the military camp, which “is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility,” designed on the principle of “the spatial ‘nesting’ of hierarchized surveillance” and used as a model “in the construction of working-​class housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools” (EDP, 171–​2). Lines of visibility are arranged to compose a perpetual human observatory, such that the very fact of being continually observed enables the actions and forces of denumerated bodies to be controlled; and this control is ultimately achieved through the individual internalizing the normalizing judgment of the gaze that surveils it. By the lightest of means—​which is to say, without directly exerting violence—​a conduct can thus be obtained and a human multiplicity “trained.” “Thanks

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to the techniques of surveillance,” Foucault suggests, “the ‘physics’ of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics . . . It is a power that seems all the less ‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical’ ” (EDP, 177). This is, indeed, a distinctive feature of Foucault’s analytic of modern power: as the point of application for the exercise of power becomes lighter and more imperceptible, its operation as a system of coercion becomes more effective, since it more thoroughly invests and conditions the spatiotemporal field of possible action.4 In other words, the corporal attenuation of power’s repressive application comes at the expense of the physical intensification of its productive effect.5 As power grows more diffuse, functioning as “a network of relations,” it achieves its effect more automatically and insidiously, penetrating more deeply into the domain of its exercise: “The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes” (EDP, 176–​7). If the military camp offered a basic empirical “diagram” for the spatial arrangement of a disciplinary mechanism of surveillance, it is Jeremy Bentham’s figure of the Panopticon, “as a pure architectural and optical system,” that maps out “the diagram of [this] mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (EDP, 205). The panoptic design boasts an elegant simplicity: a central watchtower surrounded by stacked, concentric rings of individually partitioned cells, where, “[b]‌y the effect of backlighting,” the one who observes from the tower remains hidden while those in their cells remain perpetually on display, “perfectly individualized and constantly visible” (EDP, 200). Power is exercised through a gaze that sees without being seen, whereas each individual upon whom power is exercised is seen but cannot see. The Panopticon is thus “a machine for dissociating the see/​being seen dyad” (EDP, 202), and the panoptic power relation functions by means of this asymmetrical production of the visible and the invisible. Indeed, Bentham’s architectural plan, composing the “ideal form” of disciplinary power, diagrams the network of force relations operative in panoptic space according to two major optical lines: (1) “an axial visibility,” which is imposed on the cellular individual by “the arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower”; and (2) “a lateral invisibility,” which is imposed by the cell walls, the isolating effect of partitioning (EDP, 200). In turn, this dual production of visibility-​ invisibility realizes the two major functions of discipline, namely, normalizing subjection and denumeration. The axial line “induce[s]‌in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (EDP, 201); for, ceaselessly subject to the certain possibility (though uncertain reality) of being observed, the inmate internalizes the panoptic gaze by incorporating its normalizing judgment as the rule guiding and constraining his or her own conduct. In such a way, individuals become the agents of their own subjection, “caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers” (EDP, 201). In tandem, the lateral line of invisibility is fundamental for discipline’s denumerating function:  by separating and maintaining individuals “in a

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strict hierarchical framework, with no lateral relation” (EDP, 238), “this invisibility is a guarantee of order” (EDP, 200), preventing dangerous, unusable, or counterproductive collective effects that might result from unregulated connections among individuals.6 Panoptic processes of individualization are at the same time practices of social division, diminishing the political-​transformative force of the disciplined collectivity by blocking the possibility of uncontrolled lateral lines of popular alliance; this, indeed, will be a feature of the political strategy effectuated through panoptic techniques of social control. The docility and utility of a potentially unruly mass is thus secured through the construction of “a denumerable and controllable multiplicity” (EDP, 201, translation altered7), operating by means of axial visibility and lateral invisibility “to ‘train’ . . . the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements” (EDP, 170). As a formal and “generalizable model of functioning” for relations of power, panopticism can be set to multifarious uses, deployed in any domain where “one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed” (EDP, 205). We have already noted the tactics of panoptic surveillance at work in particular disciplinary institutions, including the barracks, the factory, the school, the hospital, the prison, and the asylum, all of which are spaces of confinement. However, what is specifically modern about disciplinary power—​which, after all, first emerged as a basic technique in medieval monasteries and was then developed throughout the classical period—​is the way the “panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function” (EDP, 207).8 For example, this dispersed mode of panopticism takes form through the modern police, which, deployed as “the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance,” constitutes “the indefinite world of a supervision [contrôle] that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social body . . . the infinitely small of political power” (EDP, 213–​4). Now, in order to grasp what “complex social function” is performed by the panoptic system linking the police and the prison, which is also to say, in order to understand the broader strategy effectuated through the operation of power in modern society, we must briefly consider, in addition to the mechanics of its exercise, the historical conditions for the realization of panopticism as the dominant “way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (EDP, 205). At issue is the macro-​ political problem to which discipline constitutes a micro-​political response, which requires examining the reciprocal relation between the historical emergence of industrial capitalism and the articulation of disciplinary techniques. We have seen that the basic operation of disciplinary power is to induce a docility-​utility relation into the functioning of individual and collective bodies, allowing (ideally) the optimization of power’s productive intensity and operational efficiency: an economic multiplication of productive force and a political diminution (through division) of potentially resistant or transformative force. This economico-​political operation, in turn, corresponds to the major historical conjunction at the root of industrialization (and thereby of modernity) between the expansion of the apparatus of economic production (the

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increasing costs of which required heightened profitability) and the growth in “the floating population” (following the demographic boom in the eighteenth century, processes of urbanization, etc.) (EDP, 218). More specifically, discipline develops as the technology of power best adapted to facilitate this historical conjunction, that is, to mutually adjust the processes of expanding capital accumulation, on one hand, and the processes of intensifying social control over the accumulation of human beings, on the other. In short, disciplinary power provides a strategic response to what might be termed the problem of double accumulation: If the economic take-​off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-​off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes—​the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital—​cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. (EDP, 220–​1)9

If the global strategic objective of discipline is to bring into reciprocal relation the two processes of accumulation, the denumerating function sets to work upon the problem of the floating population, integrating the accumulated flow of human beings into an apparatus of production; in turn, the function of normalizing subjection, maintained through hierarchical surveillance, trains the assembled collection of ordered individuals, extracting from them an “exhaustive use” by imposing an “anatomo-​chronological schema of behaviour” (EDP, 152)  through which power invests both time (which becomes capitalizable as labor time) and the body (which acquires an aptitude that becomes capitalizable as labor power). As a necessary condition for the acceleration of capital accumulation, a “web of microscopic, capillary political power had to be established at the level of man’s very existence, attaching men to the production apparatus, while making them into agents of production, into workers” (EEW3, 86). Just before he quotes Marx on the capitalist function of “superintending,”10 Foucault writes, “Surveillance thus becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power” (EDP, 175). Capital and discipline thereby mutually condition and support one another.11 In the first instance, capitalism poses the problem of double accumulation, thereby directing the strategy for which the disciplinary tactics of docility-​ utility production are cultivated and deployed; it is in this sense that “the growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power” (EDP, 221). In turn, disciplinary power both increases the profitability of economic production (as we saw in the disciplining of the labor force in the factory) and enables processes of capitalization

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to more insidiously invest the micro-​functioning of the body and its relation to time. Indeed, the reality of exploitation notwithstanding, it is through this productive exercise of disciplinary coercion that power acts upon (captures) the actions of the worker: “disciplinary power appears to have the function not so much of deduction as of synthesis, not so much of exploitation of the product as of coercive link with the apparatus of production” (EDP, 153). To prevent misunderstanding, let us pause here to take stock of Foucault’s relation to Marx; for the distance between the two is sometimes overstated, and we should not construe disciplinary coercion as being incompatible with exploitation, on the contrary. It is no doubt true that Foucault rejected numerous philosophical aspects of traditional Marxism, among them the Marxist conception of power, when understood as an attribute or property to be possessed (“class power”) or as a repressive instance of the State apparatus. Further, he rejected the Marxist notion of ideology, which fails to grasp the constitutive or productive force and material effects of power-​knowledge; the Marxist appeal to dialectical materialism as a positive science, which misapprehends what was Marx’s essentially critical project; and relatedly, the Marxist conception of history, which is parasitic on a Hegelian model of teleological progressivism and linear continuity. However, as regards Marx’s work itself, the case can be made12 that Foucault often thinks in its company, certainly as regards the necessity of a critique of capitalism for any diagnosis of the modern or contemporary operations of power. Indeed, in a lecture given in 1976 on the topic of factory discipline in Marx, Foucault suggests that he could just as well have used the second volume of Capital as the work of Bentham (“the great theoretician of bourgeois power”) for an “analysis of power in its positive mechanisms” (FDE2a, 1005, my translation). Nevertheless, one basis for which Foucault does explicitly critique Marx, even if only “the Marx of a certain period,” is the residual humanism in the philosophical anthropologic appeal to labor as “man’s concrete essence” (EEW3, 86). The problem is that Marx has not (or has not yet) carried the critique of political economy far enough, since he retains a naturalized ontology of labor; but the category of labor, taken to be a universal essence, must itself be called into question, for it is in fact the contingent historical product of the operation of discipline in capitalist society: “In order for men to be brought into labor, tied to labor, an operation is necessary, or a complex series of operations, by which men are effectively—​not analytically but synthetically—​bound to the production apparatus for which they labor. It takes this operation, or this synthesis effected by a political power, for man’s essence to appear as being labor” (ibid). In other words, “man” becomes a laboring being, comes to recognize his being in labor, as the result of a disciplinary synthesis by which he has been coercively joined with and captured by the apparatus of production. For Foucault, then, the project of transformative politics will not seek the liberation, recovery, or reconstitution of a human essence, since this would be instead to repeat the form of our subjection; rather, it will begin with a genealogical critique of the way in which that essence has been given, which is to say, its historico-​ political conditions of production. If the form of the modern individual, “the man of modern humanism,” is the product of power-​knowledge, the effect of panoptic

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processes of individualization, then resisting these processes of individualization will become an objective of transformative political struggle. As Foucault puts the point in his “Preface to Anti-​Oedipus” (1977), attributing it there to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as one of their principles for a counter-​fascist “art of living”: “The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-​individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-​ individualization” (EEW3, 109). Indeed, this strategic commitment to de-​individualization traverses the entirety of Foucault’s oeuvre. It first emerges in his early fascination with the tragic limit-​ experience as a “project of desubjectivation” (EEW3, 241); for example, the experience of the death-​dream in “Dream and Existence,” of unreason in History of Madness, of death in The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, and of the being of literary language in The Order of Things. Concomitantly, it motivates his well-​known critique of the subject and the archaeological project of the death of man, seeking to free thought from its modern determinations as humanism and anthropological positivism (e.g, through Bataillian transgression or Blanchot’s thought of the outside); and it animates his late ethico-​political writings on collective queer becoming (as the principle for constructing a new form of community based on lateral lines of affective alliance13) and “transversal” struggles against the power of subjection, that is, “against the ‘government of individualization’ ” (EEW3, 329–​30). In short, from intensive aesthesis to collective politics, what Foucault consistently pursues across three decades is a form of thought that would itself function as a “constant generator of de-​individualization.” Moreover, the efforts of the Prison Information Group (GIP), which Foucault helped to found in 1971 as part of the prison revolt movement, constituted precisely such a form of struggle against panoptic processes of normalization and subjection; and this political experience, in turn, deeply informed Foucault’s radical critique of modernity in Discipline and Punish. To better understand how, we must finally turn to the prison in its specificity as a panoptic institution, for the factory is not the only disciplinary machine the operation of which responds to the problem of double accumulation. Or rather, more comprehensively, we must analyze the “courts-​police-​ prison” (EPK, 14) system, which forms a network of surveillance power that institutes the economico-​political strategy of capital accumulation and social control. In an industrial capitalist society where wealth was widely invested in constant capital—​that is, in the apparatus of production itself, with which the popular and increasingly pauperized masses were also in daily proximity—​“there emerged the need for a constant policing” to ward against what Foucault calls “the illegality of property” (EDP, 87), for example, sabotage and theft. Thus was born that infinitesimal dispersion of the panoptic gaze known as the modern police:14 an exemplar of the characteristically modern dispersion of panoptic techniques throughout the social field, the police subject the “plebeian, popular, working, peasant population” to a “general, continuous surveillance” (FDE1a, 1305, my translation), thereby serving to consolidate “a social hegemony which [the bourgeoisie] has never relinquished” (EPK, 156).

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Further, by means of this system of surveillance, the popular masses can be controlled and the threat of their forming insurrectionary alliances defused. As we have seen, one method for achieving this political effect is through the general formative procedures of proletarianization induced through factory discipline. However, it was also necessary to produce and maintain a division among the popular multitudes, a technique of social control the function of which would be akin to that of the lateral invisibility produced by panoptic partitioning in the prison. That is, the courts-​ police-​prison system, through the disciplinary tactics of hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgment, must rive the social field, marginalizing and excluding that portion of the plebeian population that goes un-​proletarianized: “there is within the global mass of the plebe a divide between the proletariat and the non-​proletarianized plebe, and I believe institutions like the police, the justice system, and the penal system, are one of the means used for endlessly deepening this divide, which capitalism requires” (FDE1a, 1202, my translation). The major productive effect of this triple system is therefore the inverse process in relation to proletarianization, which is to say, the criminalization of the unproductive, unruly, or otherwise abnormal segments of the plebeian population. The function of the juridico-​politico-​carceral apparatus is not to diminish the phenomenon of crime, but to produce a criminal social body, which enters indefinitely into the network of surveillance and contains a certain utility from the perspective of power: “the real aim was to create a specific criminalized sphere, a sector that must be isolated from the rest of the population . . . [T]‌he capitalist system claims to combat criminality . . . by means of this carceral system that precisely produces criminality . . . [T]he criminal produced by the prison is a useful criminal, useful for the system” (FDE2a, 392–​3). From the nineteenth century on, the delinquent population, produced through the denumeration-​subjection functions of the prison, can be controlled and used for the purposes of reenforcing or promoting bourgeois hegemony—​for example, “as soldiers, policemen, racketeers and thugs” deployed “for the surveillance and repression of the proletariat” (EPK, 16), or as the famous “reserve army of labor,” integral to capitalism, that can be employed sporadically to break up strikes or respond to temporary or sudden changes in economic conditions. The production of criminality thus functions strategically in response to the economico-​political problem proper to capitalism, realizing the dual objective of marrying social control to capital accumulation and thereby strengthening the dominant arrangement of power relations. Such is, finally, the “complex social function” of the carceral, which shows there to have been a kind of prison-​industrial complex since the birth of the prison. The strategic importance of the prison revolts is therefore to “call into question . . . the status of the marginal plebeian in capitalist society”; and the allied strategy of Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish is to indicate possible lines of resistance through “a critique of the system that explains the process by which contemporary society marginalizes a part of the population” (FDE1a, 1174, my translation). Generally speaking, a chief objective in the struggle against individualization is to foster connections capable of sparking insurrectionary ferment across the social field, not by integrating the marginal plebe into class struggle as defined by the proletariat, but by providing the former with the resources for articulating and developing its own

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forms of struggle.15 The strategy, in other words, is to intensify the relational fabric of the plebeian population so as to multiply and relay the sites of popular contestation to power’s exercise, problematizing the dividing practices that support the economico-​ political function of power. In the case of prisons, where inmates become the objects of a form of knowledge (criminology, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, etc.) of which they are also subjects (to the extent they internalize it), the prisoner must not speak and be listened to, but rather must reply to questions that he is posed so that his responses can then be examined. The condemned effectively exist in the plural only by virtue of a “scientific” discourse held by any given official. . . . Thus can it be assured that they will form nothing other than a collection, never a collective movement itself bringing to bear its own form of reflection [jamais un mouvement collectif porteur lui-​même de sa proper reflexion]. (FDE1a, 1264, my translation)

The aim of the GIP is thus to facilitate a counter-​network that would undermine the instituted system of lateral blockage and normalizing individualization, a connective strategy operating on two levels: (1) establishing lines of communication and possible alliance among prisoners themselves, both within and between prisons; and (2) enabling the construction of such lines between prisoners and the greater population. As Foucault puts it: “We want to break up the double isolation in which the inmates find themselves: through our inquiry, we want for them to be able to communicate with each other, to relay to each other what they know, and to speak with each other from prison to prison, cell to cell. We want for them to address themselves to the population and for the population to speak to them” (FDE1a, 1044, my translation). The means employed by the GIP may seem relatively modest, for example, distributing questionnaires among, and collecting and publishing the responses of, the inmate population, so that they could have the occasion to both speak out and speak to one another about the conditions of their own confinement. However, the objective of this project was much farther-​reaching: namely, to help enable prisoners to constitute themselves collectively in such a way as to augment their powers of transformative-​ political activity. Those who compose a marginalized and criminalized population might then generate a political counterforce by modifying the conditions of what can be said, and by whom, regarding the intolerable exercise of power over them.16 Because inmates had only ever been “the object of information, never a subject in communication” (EDP, 200), the aim of the GIP should be understood as the effort to realize a new form of collective political agency by intervening in the field of discursive practices, forming a counter-​discourse.

Conclusion Discipline and Punish is written as a strategic work, emerging from a context of political struggle and articulating itself as “the history of the present,” where that “present” is framed by explicit reference to the “prison revolts” that “[i]‌n recent years” had “occurred throughout the world” (EDP, 30–​1). If the prison revolt movement

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had disclosed the intolerable exercise of power, Foucault will show how that specific regime emerged, what major role it plays in the constitution and consolidation of the modern social formation, and where it might be susceptible to contestation. Since panoptic power operates by means of its own invisibility, the critical analysis that calls into question the mechanics, historical conditions, and political strategy of its functioning will already constitute a kind of resistance—​or an enabling condition for such resistance, in any case. Foucault’s first major work of political philosophy thus takes as its own objective the production of political effects: “I would like to produce effects of truth which might be used for a possible battle. . . . Telling the truth so that it might be attackable. Deciphering a layer of reality in such a way that the lines of force and the lines of fragility come forth, the possible points of resistance and attack” (EFL, 191, 189, translation modified). As a genealogical history of the present, moreover, Discipline and Punish is a profoundly Nietzschean work. For example, it is Nietzsche in the Genealogy who (1) politicizes “justice” as a legally coded force-​relation established after a dominant power is strong enough to do so; (2) offers a genealogical account of the “modern soul” as bad conscience, that is, the historically contingent effect of an internalized auto-​ punishment; and (3) defamiliarizes the meaning of “punishment” itself by proliferating historical examples, which all perform different juridico-​political functions: Punishment as festival, namely, as mocking and doing violence to a finally defeated enemy. Punishment as making a memory, whether for the one who suffers the punishment—​so-​called “improvement”—​or for the witness of the execution. . . . Punishment as declaration of war and war-​time measure against an enemy of peace, of law, of order, of authority, whom one battles—​with the means that war furnishes—​as dangerous to the community, as in breach of contract with respect to its presuppositions, as a rebel, traitor, and breaker of the peace.17

Nietzschean genealogy provides two analytic procedures which, animating Discipline and Punish, preserve its contemporary relevance for a treatment of the carceral today: (1) it de-​familiarizes the field of contemporary reality by means of a historical critique, which demonstrates that what is given as self-​evident, for example, the necessity of the prisons, is historically contingent, hence mutable; and (2) it politicizes the field of contemporary reality through this same historical critique, since what is given as necessary is in fact, as Foucault puts it in “What is Enlightenment?” (1984), “the product of arbitrary constraints” (EEW1, 315). The function of defamiliarization allows for that which is intolerable yet unquestioned in the present to be problematized; the function of politicization, in turn, permits the exercise and strategic functioning of power to be analyzed and possibly resisted. I would like to conclude by suggesting, though here it can be barely even a gesture, that Discipline and Punish remains just as pertinent today for a history of the present as it was in 1975, especially as regards a historico-​critical analysis of mass incarceration and the prison-​ industrial complex. Foucault’s work provides the following insights:  that the “Enlightenment” project in the West, under the mantle of formal legal equality, has always been predicated on a dark underside of coercion, forced

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production, marginalization, and control; that the prison is not a necessary form of punishment, but the penal practice that best realizes the dual objective of accelerating capital accumulation and intensifying social control; that this social control operates to consolidate a dominant, hierarchical arrangement of power relations; and that the carceral mechanism to achieve this strategic effect operates through the normalizing production of criminality, dividing and neutralizing the popular social field while expanding the apparatus of capitalist production through the prison-​ industrial complex. And what more persuasive illustration could be given of this view than Michelle Alexander’s analysis of “the new Jim Crow,” the American courts-​police-​prison system of mass incarceration: a structurally (though not explicitly) racist caste system, mantled in the “colorblind” language of formal legal equality, that consolidates hierarchical relations of social and economic dominance through the production, strategic distribution, and capitalization of popular illegality, criminalizing, normalizing, and indefinitely marginalizing a massive segment of the plebeian population (particularly poor communities of color), all while accelerating the process of capital accumulation.

Notes 1 In the original preface to History of Madness, Foucault refers to that work as an “archaeology of . . . silence” (EHM, xii). The archaeological status of The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things is more explicit: their subtitles are, respectively, “An Archaeology of Medical Perception” and “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.” 2 See Foucault, “La philosophie analytique de la politique,” (FDE2a, 549–​50); cf. “Le pouvoir, une bête magnifique,” (FDE2a, 375–​6). 3 “Whenever man considered it necessary to make a memory for himself it was never done without blood, torment, sacrifice . . . all of this has its origin in that instinct that intuited in pain the most powerful aid of mnemonics” (Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. 38). 4 Jason Read has described this as a “fundamental paradox” of power: “as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions” (Jason Read. “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity.” Foucault Studies, 6. 2009. 29). 5 Indeed, panoptic subjection is a striking illustration of this trade-​off between the corporeal severity and physical efficacy of power: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-​corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance” (EDP, 202–​3).

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6 Foucault elaborates: “If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents” (EDP, 200–​1). 7 The original French reads “une multiplicité dénombrable et contrôlable” (FSP, 234), which Alan Sheridan translates as, “a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised.” 8 “On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine,’ to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’ ” (EDP, 216). 9 Cf.: “I would say that the disciplinary systems had a primary, massive, overall function which appears clearly in the eighteenth century: to adjust the multiplicity of individuals to the apparatuses of production, or to the State apparatuses (appareils) which control them, or again, to adjust the combination of men to the accumulation of capital” (ECF-​PP, 110). 10 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1992. 313. 11 Speaking of the historical transformation by which discipline replaces sovereignty as the dominant modality of power operative in the social formation, Foucault describes the relation of reciprocal conditioning between discipline and capitalism as follows: “this mutation in the technology of power is absolutely part of the development of capitalism . . . insofar as, on the one hand, the development of capitalism rendered this technological mutation necessary, yet, on the other, this mutation rendered possible the development of capitalism: in brief, a permanent implication of the two movements, which are in a way enmeshed in one another” (Foucault, “Les mailles du pouvoir,” FDE2a, 1019, my translation). 12 See for example, Jason Read. The Micro-​Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. Especially ­chapter 2. 13 See EEW1, 136–​8. 14 Foucault gives the example of the London police, which “was born of the need to protect the docks, wharves, warehouses, and stocks” (EEW3, 69). 15 For a contemporaneous example of Foucault discussing the singularization and radicalization of the worker’s struggle, see “Pour une chronique de la mémoire ouvrière” (FDE1a, 1267–​8). 16 To put this point in the language of Foucault’s archaeological period, the culmination of which (in The Archaeology of Knowledge from 1969 and The Discourse on Language from 1970) immediately preceded his involvement with the GIP: the objective of the GIP is to transform the epistemic conditions for the production of statements (les énoncés). 17 Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality. 53–​4.

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again” (EHS1, 7). The “repressive hypothesis” is also a universalizing history of sex in that it assumes that repression works on a sexuality that was always already there, that is an innate, primordial and static drive. Both the universalizing view of sex and the teleological view of sexual liberation are called into question by The History of Sexuality:  for Foucault, sex is a socially constituted phenomenon, thoroughly cultural, contingent, and caught up in shifting forms of knowledge/​power that the sexual liberation movement has extended rather than escaped.

Questioning the theory of repression The repressive hypothesis assumes a negative relation between sex and power. Power is thought to forbid sex, to deny the very existence of many kinds of sex, to try not to see it or talk about it, to censor and silence sex. The only kind of sex that is permitted is between heterosexual, married people, and even this should be discrete, utilitarian, and productive. These are “the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie” in which there is “a single locus of sexuality . . . the parents’ bedroom” (EHS1, 3). Who actually upholds this hypothesis? Foucault’s most direct target is the Marxist-​ Freudians, such as the German psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich and social theorist Herbert Marcuse. Reich and Marcuse’s writings from the 1920s through the 50s influenced the countercultural class struggles and sexual liberation movements of the 60s and 70s.1 Marxist-​Freudians responded critically to works such as Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud argued that sexual repression is necessary for civilization. For Freud, most sexual urges are necessarily sublimated into the energy needed for work and progress. Although psychoanalysis could bring sexual repressions to light, its ultimate goal was not to abolish all repressions but to eliminate only a select few while fortifying the rest. For Freud, analysis should aim not to liberate sexual instincts but to domesticate them.2 Marxist-​Freudians such as Marcuse disagreed. In Eros and Civilization Marcuse argued that it was specifically the sexual lives of the working class that were being repressed so as to be channeled into alienated labor. For Marcuse, Freud had failed to think beyond the bourgeois morality of his time, but the role of psychoanalysis should be to help patients overcome sexual repression, to bring about a non-​repressed civilization characterized by non-​alienated libidinal work and non-​ repressive sublimation. While the most direct target of Foucault’s argument is the Marxist-​Freudians, and he is concerned to refute Marxist ideas about power and Freudian notions about sex throughout his book, he also thinks that, more generally, almost everyone at this time, even if not a card-​carrying Marxist or Freudian, held a certain view of sexual repression. This was the view of the “sexual liberation movement” of the 60s and 70s, and still holds true today. We think that the Victorian age entailed a new prudishness, and that it was only in the late twentieth century that people began to break free of this sexual repressiveness. According to the repressive hypothesis, although the sexual liberation movement is underway, there is still work to be done:  we are still “other Victorians,” inheritors of a sexually repressive legacy.

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In 1929 Virginia Woolf would write A Room of One’s Own, in which she anticipates Foucault’s argument that far from sex being silenced in her era, there was a proliferation of texts on sexuality, and of scientific texts in particular.3 Woolf describes going to the British Museum to do research on the female sex and being astounded by the number of books she found. Woolf draws attention to the fact that these books were being written about women and by male scientists. She would address her female audience by asking: Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many of them were written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? [ . . . ] Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—​women, that is to say—​also attracts agreeable essayists, light-​fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A.  degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently [ . . . ] one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men—​a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.4

Woolf points out that both professionals and nonprofessionals, so long as they were men, felt authoritatively positioned to produce books on sex in her age. To some degree, simply belonging to the male sex made these authors feel like experts on the female sex. Woolf scoffs at men who do not have a graduate degree who nevertheless felt qualified to write about sex, however. In this attitude we see that sex has become the proper domain of academics, or that the legitimate discourse on sex in the modern West had become that of science. The reason women were not writing books on sex is that women were rarely academics at this time, as is clear from Woolf ’s account of being harassed on her way to the library. Today, when women have gained access to academe, they are writing books about sex. Since A Room of One’s Own, the proliferation of texts on sex has only grown, and Woolf might have been appalled to know that today we have departments of Sexology, Psychology, and Gender Studies that are dominated by women. For Foucault, what this indicates is that sex has become something “to be put into words.” Far from being silent on sex, we talk about it constantly, even if the way we talk about it has changed. We now talk about sex in ways that are informed by authoritative discourses. Thus even when we exchange sexual secrets with friends and lovers, we take up expert discourses: we engage in analysis and self-​analysis,

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we taxonomize our sexualities, we see sex as a health issue, we are concerned with what is sexually normal, and we talk about sex as if we were describing something important. Speech about sex is understood as a quasi-​scientific and confessional revelation of who we are, a way to understand and describe our nature, character, and identity. It is odd, for Foucault, that we believe in the “repressive hypothesis,” because it is clear that we live in a society inundated with sexual discourses. Today sex is an omnipresent theme in television, film, and advertising; pornography occupies the majority of the internet; sexologists are continually on radio and talk shows; and we devote courses to sex at universities. Yet, despite all this evidence to the contrary, we still frequently hear people talk about sex as repressed. Why would the “repressive hypothesis” have such staying power although it is refuted by so much evidence around us? Foucault’s response is that “This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold” (EHS1, 5). This theory is “easy to uphold” for two reasons. First, by placing the dawn of sexual repression at the beginning of the seventeenth century, we make sexual repression correspond with the rise of capitalism. It is then easy to argue that the only kind of sex that would be permitted—​especially for the proletariat—​would be the kind that reproduces the labor force. This Marxist explanation is too simplistic for Foucault, however. Foucault rejects the Marxist interpretation of sexual repression by showing that power is not inflicted from above on those below. On the contrary, in the era that saw the rise of capitalism, the bourgeoisie inflicted their sexual inquiries and ethics on themselves rather than the proletariat (EHS1, 121–​4). The bourgeoisie submitted themselves to scientific study, subjected their own wives and children to psychiatric and pedagogical forms of disciplinary power. They did not send their workers to psychiatrists or prevent the proletariat’s children from masturbating. For Foucault, modern power does not move from above to those below but circulates, and usually it is those who try to wield power who are first submitted to it: the prison warden is himself subjected to surveillance, and the clergy who insist that everyone needs to confess are the very people who confess most frequently. Similarly, and contra Marcuse, the bourgeois scientists who examine sexuality are affected by the power effects of their studies long before the working classes. The second reason that the “repressive hypothesis” is easy to uphold is that it is gratifying. This is what Foucault calls the “speaker’s benefit.” By describing sex as repressed, we make speaking about sex transgressive. A person who speaks about sex feels that he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom . . . we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. (EHS1, 6–​7)

By positing sex as repressed, we thus derive the benefit of feeling that we are engaged in a serious, emancipatory political task when we talk about sex. We, moreover, get to

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feel that we are contributing to the generation of knowledge. Just by speaking of sex we are thus able to believe we are contributing to science, emancipating ourselves and our society from an oppressive sexual censorship, and paving the way to a more sensual future. With these three positive ends, talking about sex becomes a laudable activity. Indeed, far from being a forbidden activity, speaking about sex has gained enough legitimacy to be enshrined in academe and made into science. Indeed, talking about sex is so important today that such talk even has a “market value”: Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so, have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some individuals have even offered their ears for hire. (EHS1, 7)

For Foucault, the very existence of psychoanalysis—​or the fact that listening could be commodified—​indicates not so much that sex is repressed or silenced, but that we talk so much about it that there are not enough people to listen. Despite these reasons to be skeptical of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault does not want to deny that there was ever any censorship of sex (EHS1, 12). Obviously these forms of repression have existed, and we can point to any number of examples. What he wants to argue, however, is that in the last few centuries the relationship between sex and power has been much more complicated and positive than such instances of prohibition, and that even these instances of repression have had productive effects. The relationship between sex and power is not fundamentally characterized by negation; rather, what is remarkable, what we need to attend to, is the fact that there has been a proliferation of discourses about sex, and these discourses have been creative: they have produced sexualities rather than (or even while) prohibiting them. Far from sex being taboo, for power to get a hold on sex, it required data, which meant that it required people to speak. The sciences of sex required sexual confessions—​and this is exactly what the sexual liberation movement provided. Misunderstanding the relation between sex and power as repressive, the sexual liberation movement incites us to come out of our closets, to break the silence. This, however, has not so much been a resistance to power but an extension of power: Foucault will argue that such comings-​out-​of-​closets are exactly what needed to take place for power to take hold of our bodies and the population.

Confession Although the “repressive hypothesis” assumes that the two great causes of our supposed sexual silence were Christianity and Victorianism, in fact, for Foucault, the Counter-​Reformation and the nineteenth century were remarkable for having produced compulsory technologies of sexual confession (EHS1, 116). In the mid-​ sixteenth century the Council of Trent ordered all Christians to confess to their local parish priest at least once a year. Confession had already been a practice of the Catholic Church for centuries, but outside of the monasteries it was not practiced frequently.5

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When practiced at all, it was usually reserved for very serious sins or for a sacrament on one’s deathbed. Many Christians would never have confessed at all. The Counter-​ Reformation Catholic Church mandated annual confession at Lent; however, it responded to Reformation critiques of the practice by insisting that priests not use certain words and not inquire into specific acts and positions. Although we might be inclined to say that there was a censorship here, what this circumspection in language enabled was greater numbers of sexual interrogations and confessions. Censorship did not contradict the increase in sexual discourses, but rather facilitated that increase. Confession did not begin willingly. The Council of Trent decreed that anyone who did not confess annually be excommunicated. There was mass resistance to this order on the parts of priests, the laity, and even of theologians.6 Nevertheless, over generations and centuries, the habit of confession was successfully inculcated in most Catholics, to the extent that it became a desire. For Foucault, this is how discipline works: first a practice is forced on you, but if you repeat it enough, it becomes a habit, and eventually a habit becomes a desire. At this point, one ceases to see the act one desires as an effect of power. Thus, confession came to feel like a psychic need, and confession manuals came to complain of “scrupulous” penitents who confessed too often, who came every day, who could never confess enough.7 An important effect of the Council of Trent was that it shifted “the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—​so difficult to perceive and formulate—​of desire” (EHS1, 19–​20). For the Church, it was not only adultery that was a sin, but even the glimmer of desire for an adulterous act. Such mental states are often difficult to perceive and to formulate. This means two things: first, the analysis of one’s mind can be endless; second, we require an expert to help us discover and interpret the truth of our inner states. This role of expert was first fulfilled by priests and later by doctors, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. In these ways, sex became something complicated: it was no longer a matter of acts of which the actor was fully aware. Rather, sex became about subtle mental temptations that might come from the devil, desires that might be unconscious, or whose causality might have unconscious sources. In each case, a certain expertise in deciphering them was required, placing the sexual subject in the hands of priests and, later, of doctors. Although the Catholic Church initially found confession difficult to enforce, once the compulsion to confess was internalized in Western subjects, it not only produced “scrupulous” confessants, but also spread to secular domains. Foucault writes of the confessional writings found in My Secret Life and the writings of Sade. Of the author of My Secret Life, he writes: “This nameless Englishman will serve better than his queen as the central figure for a sexuality whose main features were already taking shape with the Christian pastoral” (EHS1, 22). For Foucault, the author of this autobiographically pornographic work, offered up as a quasi-​scientific contribution to human knowledge, supplants Queen Victoria as exemplary of the modern age. We are not so much “other Victorians” as we are beings who compulsively turn sex into discourse. One explanation for the spread of sexual confession from a religious to a secular practice is that once Western subjects internalized the habit of confession, they would create new outlets for this habit as the Church became less central to their lives. Foucault

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argues, however, that the secularization of confession also occurred because of the creation of new technologies to elicit confessions outside the Church. These arose as a result of the vested interests that scientists and the state came to have in hearing people speak about sex. He writes that “Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex” (EHS1, 23). Sex became “in the nature of a public potential; it called for management procedures” (EHS1, 24). For the first time, states needed to know how many children were being born within their borders, and in what contexts:  how many are legitimate and how many are illegitimate? Who is raising them? Are people using birth control? How many people are having nonreproductive sex or are in nonreproductive relationships? At what age are people having children? What groups of people are having the most children? How many children are people having on average? How much perversity is there in the country? Is the population degenerating or decadent or in decline? All this was necessary to forecast labor and military power, or was caught up with political and economic concerns. The result of these concerns was a new fervor to gather information about sex. For the first time, demographers were sent out to ask people about their sexual practices and statistics were generated. Beyond these demographic inquiries, sexual confessions were elicited by scientists, by doctors, and in the realm of criminal justice. In all these cases sex was presented as dangerous, and this was why experts needed to know about it. Much as the Church had used the sinfulness of sex as an excuse to inquire into it, so doctors used the potential dangerousness of sex to health and the population. Sex could endanger individuals in the form of diseases and unwanted pregnancies, and it could endanger populations should the wrong people reproduce. For all these reasons, doctors were justified to ask about sex so that they or others could intervene in it. Just like Catholics in the sixteenth century initially resisted the order to confess, however, so Foucault thinks that at first patients would have been wary of the obligation to confess to doctors. While we have today become used to doctors questioning us about our sexuality, nineteenth-​century patients would not have immediately seen why such intrusive inquiries were justified. Foucault describes five methods that doctors developed to quell these suspicions. First, doctors employed a “clinical codification of the inducement to speak” (EHS1, 65), which is similar to the “neutralization” of language in the Catholic confessional after Reformation critiques, and in the sexual education courses, of which Foucault also writes (EHS1, 28–​ 9). Against allegations of sexual curiosity, priests were instructed to keep their interrogations into the sexual lives of confessants vague and couched in codified language. Similarly, patients were reassured that the questions were professional and of scientific interest by the use of technical terminology. Second, medical interrogations into patients’ sex lives were justified through “the postulate of a general and diffuse causality” (EHS1, 65). As Foucault writes, “Having to tell everything, being able to pose questions about everything, found their justification in the principle that endowed sex with an inexhaustible and polymorphous causal power” (EHS1, 65). A striking example of such diffuse causal power being attributed to sexual acts is the case of masturbation. Well into the twentieth century, parents and children were instructed by doctors that masturbation could cause paleness,

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sweating, trembling, bags under the eyes, difficulties in concentration, troubles in equilibrium, and eventually led to the softening of the brain, lesions to the bone marrow, epileptic fits, loss of consciousness, and premature death.8 As a sin of youth, masturbation threatened to undermine the entire fabric of society, or was a serious threat to population. In this case as in others, private sexual acts took on enormous proportions in the modern imaginary. The positing of such dramatic dangers to a child’s health justified a doctor questioning a child about his masturbatory habits; just as, centuries earlier, the understanding of masturbation as a mortal sin permitted intrusive soliciting of sexual confessions from adolescents on the part of priests. As Foucault writes, “The limitless dangers that sex carried with it justified the exhaustive character of the inquisition to which it was subjected” (EHS1, 66). Today we realize that nineteenth-​century doctors were mistaken about the debilitating effects that they attributed to many sex acts, but by now we are so used to sexual confessions being required of us that we give them willingly, and the postulate of a “general and diffuse causality” has done its work. The third justification for inquisitiveness on the part of nineteenth-​century doctors was “the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality” (EHS1, 66). Freud saw this, for instance, in the relegation of sexual impulses to the unconscious. Doctors and sexologists were required to extract confessions because sex was not only dangerous but had a tendency to remain hidden. Similarly, the fourth reason Victorian doctors had to extract sexual confessions was that sexuality was now known to be extremely complex, and to require experts to interpret it (EHS1, 66). Finally, having doctors listen to sexual confessions was scientifically justified “through the medicalization of the effects of confession” (EHS1, 67). Patients came to believe that just talking about sex with an expert could be therapeutic not only for their sexual problems but for all the other problems to which sex was tenuously linked as well. This is an assumption that Freud and Breuer would elaborate when they wrote about the “talking cure” in their Studies on Hysteria.9 In this early work, Freud and Breuer thought that the act of patients confessing to them led to them being cured of their psychological and hysterically physiological ailments: confession served as “chimney sweeping,” and the psyche was clean afterward. Freud would quickly reject the notion of confession as magically cathartic, and would realize that talking could repeat rather than heal trauma within a relation of transference.10 The transference relation, and not mere confession, was also the means through which healing could occur. Despite Freud’s later and more nuanced view, it is the early and immature psychoanalytic notion of a “talking cure” that has remained influential in popular psychology: we believe that speaking is therapeutic and silence always indicates oppression. The popularization of the notion of a “talking cure” is an enormous incitement to confessional discourse today, even though it was almost immediately rejected within psychoanalytic theory itself. As a result of these incitements, Foucault writes that there has been a “radiation” of discourses about sex throughout society. The effects of these radiating discourses are a medicalization of sex and a society convinced of the importance and dangers of sex, vigilant in the need to talk about sex, and to report anything abnormal to authorities.

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As a result, Foucault describes the modern, Western subject as a “confessing animal.”11 This transformation of the Western subject into a bête d’aveu has meant a change not only in how we talk to doctors and lovers, but transformations in literature, politics, and philosophy. We have invented confessional genres; we are prolific writers of autobiographies, memoirs, diaries and letters; we are consumers and producers of reality television, confessional talk shows, social networking and blogs; we are increasingly habituated to the public confessions of politicians. Philosophers have turned inward to find the truth: we have ceased to seek answers about the cosmos, God, space, and time, and instead seek the truths of our selves—​indeed arguing, in the Kantian and phenomenological traditions, that these are the only kinds of truths that we can find. In the seventeenth century, Descartes sat by the fire in his dressing gown and meditated on the contents of his own mind to draw conclusions about God and knowledge. A hundred and thirty years later, Rousseau would write his Confessions, and these began with an exploration of his sexual masochism. As Foucault argues, sex is not what we are secretive about; on the contrary, sex has become what we confess.

The social construction of sexualities Foucault gives an example of compulsory medical confession and its power effects in his discussion of Charles Jouy.12 As Foucault describes the situation, Jouy was a cognitively disabled (or “simpleminded”) peasant living in Lapcourt, France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, who did odd jobs for scant pay and slept in barns.13 Because he was poor and homeless, Jouy could not afford a wife or seduce a woman his own age. It was due to this context, for Foucault, that “At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl” (EHS1, 31). In Abnormal, the volume of lectures from the Collège de France that he was giving at the same time that he wrote The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes this case in greater detail (ECF-​AB, 292–​303). Here, it becomes clear that Jouy raped the little girl at the border of a field, and afterward gave her some coins. The girl, whose name was Sophie Adam, went to a fair after the rape and spent the coins on almonds, and Foucault takes this to indicate that she was not bothered by the assault. In Abnormal, Foucault goes so far as to suggest that because Sophie had masturbated boys, whereas Jouy was cognitively disabled, it may have been the girl who raped the man. The fact that the girl had had prior sexual experiences—​or was not an “ideal victim”—​seems to invalidate the rape for Foucault in a way that is all too familiar for feminist readers.14 In The History of Sexuality Foucault, moreover, uses euphemisms to describe the rape: it was an adult “obtaining a few caresses from a little girl,” “these inconsequential bucolic pleasures,” and “these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-​minded adults and alert children.” Feminist philosophers have objected to Foucault’s use of the term “alert” to describe Sophie, which seems to responsibilize the child for her rape. They have been angered by Foucault’s trivializing of the rape as “inconsequential” and “bucolic,” and by his

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description of it as “pleasure between” an adult and child, rather than the pleasure of an adult taken at the expense of a child.15 Granting the problematic nature of Foucault’s discussion of the case, it is, nevertheless, true that we can witness a significant historical shift in the history of sexuality in the case of Charles Jouy. Foucault is correct that events such as the rape of Sophie Adam had occurred regularly throughout history and no one had paid much attention to these incidents before.16 In the mid-​nineteenth century, however, Jouy was not only apprehended by the police for his act, but was handed over to doctors. These doctors not only subjected Jouy to medical tests, but wrote reports on his case and incarcerated him for the rest of his life. Jouy’s sexual acts were not interpreted as arising from his situation, but as an expression of his being. Although the term “pedophile” had not yet been invented, Jouy was diagnosed by doctors as innately perverse, and thus it was decided that he could never be released from hospital, even though, as an “idiot,” he was technically innocent. With respect to cases such as Jouy’s, Foucault argues that nineteenth-​century psychiatry was not so much repressing perversions as implanting them and “incorporating” them into individuals. Even if scientists spoke of these perversions with disapprobation and disdain, their objective was not so much prohibition as understanding:  they wanted to categorize perversions, to know what gave rise to them, and what their characteristics were. In this taxonomical fervor, “to marry a close relative or practice sodomy, to seduce a nun or engage in sadism, to deceive one’s wife or violate cadavers, became things that were essentially different” (EHS1, 39). Although these acts were not novel, what was new to the nineteenth century was the interpretation of these acts as revelatory of identities. As Foucault writes: It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fixture of this game. (EHS1, 48)

Previously, Foucault argues, the perpetrator of a forbidden act “was nothing more than the juridical subject of them” (EHS1, 43). In contrast, The nineteenth-​century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. (EHS1, 43)

Foucault notes that homosexuality in this period was “characterized . . . less by a type of sexual relation than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself ” (EHS1, 43). Homosexuality—​like other sexualities—​was not so much about what sexual actions an individual had performed

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as it was about the kind of being that they were. As a result, “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (EHS1, 43). How does the perverse implantation occur? It is one thing to note that scientists labeled individuals according to their so-​called perversions, but how did those individuals incorporate those labels as who they were? Why did we submit to medical power such that we have long since accepted the view that we have sexualities and these sexualities characterize us in significant ways? One explanation is that if a person is spoken about in a certain way and made to speak about herself in that way, she will eventually come to see herself that way, at which point she will act according to how she has come to see herself. If a child is continually told that she is “no good,” she will eventually believe she is “no good,” and then she will likely act in ways that confirm this judgment. We can see this both as a submission to power—​she submits to being what she is told that she is—​but also as an unintentional resistance to power: the child is being chastised as “no good” in order to make her behave better, and yet the end result is more bad behavior on her part. This process of internalizing what we are told we are is particularly predictable when it is people in positions of authority who label us, and scientists and doctors are the authorities par excellence of our time. Indeed, Foucault wrote in The History of Madness that madness was vanquished because the mad respected the authority of doctors and thus accepted the doctors’ view that they were mentally ill (EHM). In this way, former madmen became so mentally enchained by psychiatry that they could be released from their physical chains within psychiatric asylums and, eventually, from the asylums themselves. We become chained to what doctors say about us because we give their discourses authority. We believe them because they have medical licenses and educations, although Foucault’s claim is consistently that what psychiatrists are doing has nothing to do with medicine and does not draw on a medical education at all.17 Psychiatry, for Foucault, has always been social hygiene, and has had more to do with morality and social norms than science. Another reason, according to Foucault, that subjects internalize the labels that are assigned to them is that this very categorization of sexualities has become an erotic act: although he contrasts the scientia sexualis of the West with the ars erotica of the East, he also argues that the sexual sciences have made confession into an erotic art of their own (EHS1, 57–​8; 71–​2). What this means is that the acts of sexual labeling and self-​labeling—​and hence the interactions between doctors and patients, confessors and confessants—​have been eroticized. As Foucault writes: This form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required an exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. It implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense sensations. The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and the instrument of this . . . The power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled moments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. (EHS1, 44)

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Foucault describes the new role of medicine in eliciting sexual confessions in consistently sexual language. Medicine enquires into people’s intimate lives, into the secrets of their bodies and souls, and as a result medicine becomes sex, doctors take on erotic roles. Priests, teachers, and psychiatrists, like doctors, have been similarly eroticized as a result of their roles in eliciting sexual confessions and the prohibition on sexual relations with them. Foucault writes: There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure . . . Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered . . . The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-​all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it . . . Power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and seduction. Confrontation and mutual reinforcement, parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist and his hysteric . . . all have played this game continually since the nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. (EHS1, 44–​5)

Sexual confessions are pleasurable, they are sex acts in themselves; often they are foreplay and often they are seductions. We then believe in the tales we tell, and tell them again, because we are erotically invested in them. Foucault thus writes that “The growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures” (EHS1, 48). What this means is that perversions are not resistances to power but the effects of power (EHS1, 48). Needless to say, the “perverse implantation” is not what was intended by sexual scientists. Scientists had a will to know about sex, to taxonomize sexual perversions, and perhaps even to “cure” them. Their wish was never to produce perversions and to incorporate them into patients. This unintended effect of the interpenetration of pleasure and power illustrates two points that Foucault will make in the final sections of The History of Sexuality: resistance follows from power and power is always in excess of the intentions of those who try to wield it.

Power Although Foucault has shown throughout the first three parts of The History of Sexuality that power is working not so much to repress sex as to constitute it, in Part

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Four he argues that we do not recognize power in its constitutive forms. Indeed, we tend only to recognize power when it occurs as discursive prohibition, censorship, or repression (EHS1, 86). We thus fail to see power as power when it does not come in the form of the law. For Foucault, this is because “Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” (EHS1, 86). So far as power is successful, we are usually not aware of it. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that disciplinary power is more efficient than traditional, legal-​juridical, or sovereign power precisely because it is not self-​evident, is not expressed for all to see in the form of public laws or blatantly violent spectacles. Instead, disciplinary power is subtle, internalized, and hidden: very often it does not even seem like power (EDP).18 When we are disciplined to behave in certain ways, and have internalized this discipline, we may feel that, far from being subjected to power, we are acting of our own volition. Disciplinary power is not recognized as power because it is experienced as coming from within rather than without us, and because it works through relations with doctors, teachers, parents, social workers, and psychiatrists. In each case, we believe that these individuals are helping us, caring for us, educating us, or healing us—​to some extent, they may be—​and thus we submit to them voluntarily and do not see this submission as an effect of power. And yet, Foucault writes: To conceive of power on the basis of [sovereignty] is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy. Characteristic yet transitory. For while many of its forms have persisted to the present, it has gradually been penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are probably irreducible to the representation of law. (EHS1, 89)

For Foucault, philosophical descriptions of legal-​juridical power (such as Hobbes’) are “useful for representing . . . A power that was centered primarily around deduction and death”; however, such descriptions are “utterly incongruous with the new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus” (EHS1, 89). Thus, the sovereign model of power is not useful for understanding what Foucault calls disciplinary power and biopower, because these new forms of power are not legal or juridical, they do not operate primarily through law codes and the shedding of blood, but rather through the management of life and normalization. Consequently, Foucault argues that “We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” and “We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king” (EHS1, 90). Foucault then sketches the main features of power, as he sees it working in the modern West (EHS1, 94–​102). First, power is omnipresent. Foucault writes: “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (EHS1, 93). Second, power is not something we have, possess, acquire, seize, share, or lose. Rather, we are always in many mobile relations or networks of power. These are “non-​egalitarian” relations:  although no one “has” power, some people are in more

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privileged positions than others within these networks. Nevertheless, power relations are always mobile and complex, and no one is completely powerless in them. Foucault also argues that power is immanent in all relationships. Thus, power does not only exist in our relations to the state or the king or the police or the law, it exists in all our relationships, even in our sexual and romantic relationships. It will thus not be possible to define “good” sexual or romantic relationships as those that are free of power, and “bad” sexual relations as those that involve power, for no relations are free of power.19 Foucault, moreover, argues that power comes from below and laterally, despite the fact that we normally imagine it coming from above. In other words, we miss much of how power works when we focus exclusively on politicians and laws, without seeing how our peers, lovers, students, and even children are normalizing us.20 Foucault also argues that power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. This means that although there are very often self-​conscious calculations and strategies involved in power relations, and people are often quite aware of what they are trying to do in these machinations, there is no mastermind who sees the bigger picture. Psychiatrists and doctors see themselves doing what they do in order to help people, or they engage in research for the sake of knowledge, unaware of the spiraling power-​effects of their work. Finally, Foucault argues that resistance is another feature of power. As he famously writes, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet . . . this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (EHS1, 95). What this means is that we always resist power—​resistance is described by Foucault as an automatic effect of power rather than an assertion of agency21—​but this resistance never sets us outside of power. We cannot hope to liberate sex from power, as is imagined by the sexual liberation movement. In contrast to sovereign or juridico-​legal power, disciplinary power does not so much as write laws and punish those who transgress them as it situates individuals in relation to norms. This does not mean that legal institutions and legal codes are disappearing. Instead, the law has been infiltrated by norms, and the courtroom has been infiltrated by medicine. Laws employ moralistic and vague terms such as “decency” and “outrage,” and psychiatrists serve as “expert witnesses” on these matters (EPPC, 271–​85). Indeed, there has been a great deal more talk about laws and rights than ever before, in this era when, for Foucault, law has ceased to characterize the workings of power. We have written more constitutions in these years, and engaged in much “clamouring legislative activities” than in the past, and yet this “clamouring legislative activity” is not evidence that power is still legalistic. Rather, it is one of “the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable” (EHS1, 144). We can demand and be granted so many more constitutional rights and legislative protections than before precisely because the law is not primarily where power is working anymore. To take an example, we can consider the “clamoring legislative activities” around gay marriage in recent years. Gay politics have been approached in terms of rights and laws, amending the constitution to refer to sexual preference or orientation. But, as numerous queer theorists have argued, what is really happening in these legislative struggles is that gay couples are situating themselves closer to the heterosexual norm rather than affirming their transgression of that norm.22 Gay couples may now be

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granted the right to marry precisely because their very desire to marry shows how effectively power has normalized them. Gay couples then feel they are transgressing social norms by getting married, and such marriages are celebrated as signs of social change, when in fact their very desire to marry shows how subjected to power—​to normalization—​they have already been. Gay couples can be granted rights—​the right to be normal—​precisely because their “clamoring legislative activities” serve so well to mask how power is really working. Disciplinary power has worked to normalize gay subjects to such a degree that the most subversive act they can imagine is marriage, or the emulation of the heterosexual status quo. Just as subjects imagine they are resisting power when they confess, when in fact their very desire to confess only shows how thoroughly power has constituted them, so gay couples who imagine that they are resisting power when they marry are perhaps only showing how completely power has succeeded in making them into quasi-​heterosexual subjects. In Part Five of The History of Sexuality, Foucault connects the foregoing discussion of the interpenetration of power and sex to issues of major historical significance such as modern warfare, Nazism, racism, genocide, and eugenics. This is also where he introduces the important concept of biopower. Foucault describes juridico-​legal power in this part of the book as a “right of death”: The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. (EHS1, 136)

Sovereign power was “essentially a right of seizure:  of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself ” (EHS1, 136). Slavery is an example of sovereign power because it entails bodies being seized, time being seized, labor being seized, life itself being seized, and this power is maintained through the threat of violence. Under disciplinary power, in contrast, the soul is colonized, so there is less need for physical violence. Those under sovereign power submit through fear of pain and death, but their minds do not submit as under disciplinary power. In contrast, disciplinary power works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them” (EHS1, 136). Power now administers life rather than having a right of death. Foucault argues that when power came to administer life, new relations to death resulted,23 and new justifications to kill were required. He writes: Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death . . . now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it . . . Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. (EHS1, 137)

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The Holocaust was justified in the name of German life and health, the well-​being of the Aryan race and the nation. More recently, the 2003 US-​led invasion of Iraq was justified by the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was affiliated with Al-​Qaeda. War was justified in the name of protecting American life through “a preemptive strike,” because Iraqi president Hussein, it was insisted, was preparing to “strike” the United States. When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and no link with Al-​Qaeda could be established, the US administration shifted tactics, emphasizing the massacres that Hussein had visited on his own people. Now the invasion of Iraq was recast as a civilizing and charity mission: its purpose had not been to protect American lives so much as to save Iraqi lives. While it is clear that this claim, like the claims about weapons of mass destruction, was a pretense, the important point is that governments now need a pretense to wage war. For most of history, armies could invade foreign countries without such hypocrisy. The Ancient Romans felt no need to pretend they were liberating people through their military conquests; they could be upfront about their objectives. There was no need to disguise war as self-​defense or a humanitarian effort, even when one’s first acts were to slaughter thousands of people, turn millions more into refugees, and immediately secure oil fields. Today, however, nations must justify slaughter in the name of life. Foucault argues that there will paradoxically be more genocide under disciplinary power than under sovereign power. He writes: If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill, it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-​scale phenomena of population. (EHS1, 137)

When a racist state aims to manage the population, to purify that population of racial elements that are construed as contaminating, genocidal forms of racial violence can be justified. When the purity of the race is seen to be at stake, there is a biological justification for wholesale slaughter of subpopulations.24 Much like war, Foucault argues that the use of the death penalty has changed under biopower (EHS1, 137–​8). While people were once executed for undermining the power of the sovereign, today executions have become rare in the West because the function of power is to manage life, not to seize it. On those occasions when Western states do execute people, it is said to be done, like the waging of war, in the name of life. While some of the worst executions were once for people who had opposed the political power of the king, today no politician in the West could execute his political opponents. Those who are executed must be seen as vital threats to the population, and are thus most often killers. One of the last women to be executed in France was thirty-​nine-​year-​old housewife Marie-​Louise Giraud, who was executed in 1943 for performing twenty-​seven abortions. In a generation of world wars and massive losses to the French population, whose birthrate was already low compared to Germany, escalating numbers of abortions could be posed as a threat to an endangered population. In this context, a poor faiseuse d’anges could be construed as a biopolitical threat.

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Having theorized disciplinary power in his earlier Discipline and Punish, Foucault now argues that discipline is but one of two forms that biopower takes. Foucault recasts disciplinary power as biopower, targeting individual bodies, or anatomo-​politics (EHS1, 139). Biopower also targets the species body, however, or the population as a whole, and this he calls biopolitics (EHS1, 139). Foucault writes that sex is the pivot of both axes of biopower. Sex is central both to managing individual bodies and the species body. As he writes: “Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species” (EHS1, 146). This is why sex became a central political concern under biopower as it never was under sovereign power, and sex became important in the modern period as it had never been before. We have accepted this belief that sex is important, and thus that the sexual practices of the species, the population, and our selves should be subjects of study and concern. It is the shift from sovereign power to biopower that explains why we, as a society, are saturated by sexual images and discourses, and why we, as individuals, have come to see our identities as caught up with sex. Foucault argues that when power was exercised through bloodshed, identity was also caught up with blood:  one identified oneself according to one’s bloodline, descent, family alliance, legitimacy of blood, blue blood, French blood (EHS1, 124). Now, under biopower, we identify ourselves according to our sexual practices and desires.

Legacy The first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century. As Jana Sawicki and Shannon Winnubst write in their Editor’s Introduction to a Special Topics issue on Queer Theory in the journal Foucault Studies, “Historian of sexuality David Halperin half-​jokingly dubbed Foucault the patron saint of this nascent critical project. If Foucault was its saint, History of Sexuality, Volume I became its bible. To put it inaptly, Foucault was a seminal figure in queer theory.”25 Similarly, in Mad for Foucault, Lynne Huffer argues that Queer Theory has been little more than a (problematic) fusion of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and Freud.26 More recently, but just as fruitfully, Foucault’s analysis of normalization in The History of Sexuality has been appropriated by Critical Disability scholars such as Shelley Tremain,27 and his comments on racism and eugenics in Book V of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction have been taken up by postcolonial and Critical Race scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler and Ladelle McWhorter.28 Beyond the impact of this book on various liberation movements and their theorists, Foucault’s History of Sexuality: An Introduction is read and continues to influence scholarship in a range of disciplines beyond Philosophy—​including Sociology, Anthropology, literary and film studies, and Political Science—​ offering political philosophers, political theorists, social theorists, and students of history and culture generally with crucial insights into modern power and its relation to knowledge. In 1976, Foucault’s intention was to write four more volumes of The History of Sexuality, and he laid out four domains of analysis that he intended the remaining volumes of his History of Sexuality to study. These were:  the hystericization of

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women’s bodies, the pedagogization of children’s sex, the control of fertility, and the psychiatrization of perversions (EHS1, 104–​5). As we now know, Foucault would abandon this plan, publishing volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality on sexual ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome (EHS2).29 Volume 4 of The History of Sexuality, Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh), was complete at Foucault’s death and concerns the early Christian period; however, at Foucault’s wish, it has not been published.30 Although we will thus never read complete books by Foucault on the subjects of the hystericized woman, the sexualized child, the reproductive couple, and the pathologized pervert, Foucault does map out the argument that he would have made in each of these cases in his introductory volume, and we can see quite well the arguments that he was forming with respect to the child and the pervert in particular. Foucault’s thesis was that, for each of these subjects, sexuality must not be “thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct” (EHS1, 105). When power tried to know about sex in the case of the woman, the child, the Malthusian couple, and the pervert, what it in fact did was to construct their sexualities. For instance, in the case of the child, once adults began to inquire into children’s sexuality, to monitor and prohibit it, adult-​child relations—​much like priest-​penitent, doctor-​patient, and teacher-​student relations—​were eroticized (EHS1, 109). While the ostensible objective of monitoring children’s sexuality was to protect children from sexual interference from adults and from the health risks of their own autoerotic activities, new forms of infantile sexuality were produced through these interventions. Children were eroticized as objects of particular kinds of desire and, of course, took up this eroticized role in unpredictable and unintended ways. For Foucault, the family became perverse and incestuous under biopower: precisely because the family wants to protect its children from molestation, incest, and pedophilia, it continually sees children in the light of these dangers, as sexual prey and, consequently, as sexual objects. In this way it sexualizes children, producing new and tenacious desires for children and on the parts of children through the very ways that it aims to protect children from these desires. Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality would forego these topics. In the first course lecture in “Society Must Be Defended,” delivered in January of 1976 when The History of Sexuality: An Introduction was going to press, Foucault seems so demoralized by his research trajectory that it comes as little surprise that he abandoned it. He said to his students: So what was I going to say to you this year? That I’ve just about had enough; in other words, I’d like to bring to a close, to put an end to . . . the series of research projects . . . that we’ve been working on for four or five years . . . and I realize that there were more and more drawbacks, for both you and me. Lines of research that were very closely interrelated but that never added up to a coherent body of work, that had no continuity. Fragments of research, none of which was completed, and none of which was followed through; bits and pieces of research, and at the same time it was getting very repetitive, always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same concepts . . . we are making no progress, and it’s all leading nowhere. It’s all

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repetitive, and it doesn’t add up. Basically, we keep saying the same thing, and there again, perhaps we’re not saying anything at all. It’s all getting us nowhere, as they say. (ECF-​SMD, 3–​4)

Foucault makes repeated references to his work as “useless knowledge . . . sumptuary knowledge” and “useless erudition” in this lecture (ECF-​SMD, 4–​5). He admits: I felt a bit like a sperm whale that breaks the surface of the water, makes a little splash, and lets you believe, makes you believe, or want to believe, that down there where it can’t be seen, down there where it is neither seen nor monitored by anyone, it is followed by a deep, coherent, and premeditated trajectory. (ECF-​SMD, 4)

It seems that Foucault felt that writing four more volumes of The History of Sexuality according to his original plan, with each volume making the same argument—​that sexualities are socially constructed—​simply with respect to different kinds of subjects, was repetitive and useless: not only would he have been showing the same thing each time, but he would not have been offering his readers any alternative to the picture of modern sexuality that he was describing. He would not have answered the pressing question:  how, beyond agentless “resistance effects,” can we resist biopower and the medicalization of sex? As they were eventually written, volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality have been far less influential than volume 1.  Although James Bernauer and David Rasmussen published The Final Foucault in 1988,31 this was preceded and followed by periods of relative neglect. Many readers of Foucault’s work who had appreciated his studies of modern power were disappointed by his leap back in history to Ancient Greece and Rome in his final texts, by his apparent turn from politics to (what he called) ethics, and by his focus in these last books on relations that privileged subjects had to themselves rather than power relations involving marginalized subjects. In the last decade, however, considerable attention has been paid to Foucault’s final “ethical” volumes, as is attested to by important works such as Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges’s Feminism and the Final Foucault32 and Cressida Heyes’s Self-​Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies.33 Recent studies of The Use of Pleasure (volume 2) and The Care of the Self (volume 3)  reconsider their position in Foucault’s oeuvre, with authors suggesting that these—​and Foucault’s shorter writings from the time34—​ were not a retreat from his earlier concern with modern power relations, but were a sustained attempt to think through the contingency of modern power and to explore alternatives, antidotes, and strategies of resistance to biopower and psychosexualized subjectivity.

Notes 1 Wilhelm Reich. The Sexual Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1945; Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

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2 Sigmund Freud. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud 23. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. 227. 3 Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1957 (1929). 4 Ibid. 26–​7. 5 See Chloë Taylor. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the “Confession Animal.” New York and London: Routledge, 2009. 13–​65. 6 Ibid. 52–​5. 7 Ibid. 55–​63. 8 See Ingmar Bergman’s discussion of masturbation in his autobiography, Laterna Magica. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. 9 Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer. Studies in Hysteria. Ed. and trans. James and Alix Strachey. London: Penguin, 1978. 10 Sigmund Freud. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 23. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. 211–​53. 11 Ibid. 80. 12 Ibid. 31–​2. 13 For a critical disability theory reading of this case, see Shelley Tremain, “Educating Jouy.” Hypatia 28. 4. 2013. 801–​17. 14 This logic has been observed frequently in rape trials, where a woman’s sexual history is used to deny that a rape occurred or to blame the woman for her own rape. See Wendy Larcombe. “The ‘Ideal’ Victim v Successful Rape Complainants: Not What You Might Expect.” Feminist Legal Studies 10: 2. Norwell: Kluwer Academic, 2002. 131–​48. 15 See Linda Alcoff. “Dangerous Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia.” Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. Ed. Susan J. Hekman. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 99–​135. For other feminist discussions of this case, see Ann J. Cahill. “Foucault, Rape, and the Construction of the Feminine Body.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 15, 1. 2000. 43–​63; Laura Hengehold. “An Immodest Proposal: Foucault, Hysterization, and the ‘Second Rape.’” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 9, 3.1994. 88–​107; Monique Plaza. “Nos dommages et leurs intérêts.” Questions Féministes. 3. 1978. 93–​103; Jana Sawiki’s Review of Abnormal in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews http://​ ndpr.nd.edu/​review.cfii?id=1581 (accessed July 29, 2010); Chloë Taylor. “Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24, 4. 2009. 1–​25; and Woodhull, Winnifred. “Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape.” Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. 167–​176. 16 See Georges Vigarello. Histoire du viol: XVI-​XX siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1998; Guido Ruggiero. Violence in Early Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980; Guido Ruggiero. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 17 Foucault makes this argument in many of his works. For instance, see ECF-​PP; ECF-​ AB; EPPC, 125–​51 and 178–​210. 18 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1977.

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19 For an interesting discussion of how this insight might make us reconsider the ways we frame sexual harassment regulations, see Joanna Brewis. “Foucault, Politics and Organizations: (Re)-​constructing Sexual Harassment.” Gender, Work, and Organization. 8, 1. 2001. 37–​60. 20 For a discussion of children disciplining other children, see Ellen K. Feder. “Disciplining the Family: The Case of Gender Identity Disorder.” Philosophical Studies 85. 1997. 195–​211. 21 It appears that resistance for Foucault is often something that happens in bodies when there are gaps or contradictions in power, or that resistance is an unpredictable result of the excesses of power on the body. Such is the picture of resistance that Foucault provides in two of his most sustained descriptions of resistance in his contemporary course lectures: in Psychiatric Power, Foucault writes of hysteria as a kind of involuntary resistance to doctors on the part of intensely medicalized women, and in Abnormal he writes of the phenomenon of demonic “possession” as a “resistance effect” to confession on the part of religious women. In neither, the case of hysteria or possession, was the resistance intentional, and in neither case did the resistance liberate the resistors from their hospitals or convent cells. For Foucault, these phenomena were, nevertheless, resistance in that they entailed rebellions of the body—​or “convulsions of the flesh”—​against those who would dominate them, and because they threw wrenches into the smooth operations of disciplinary power. 22 See for instance, Judith Butler’s discussion on gay marriage in “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge. 102–​30. 23 For a discussion of Foucault’s account of the changing relations that subjects have to death in biopolitical times, see Chloë Taylor. “Birth of the Suicidal Subject: Nelly Arcan, Michel Foucault, and Voluntary Death.” Culture, Theory, and Critique. 2014. 1–​21. 24 For close readings of Foucault’s arguments about race and racism in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction and in his course lectures from the same period, see Ladelle McWhorter. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-​America: A Genealogy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009; Chloë Taylor. “Race and Racism in Foucault’s Collège de France Lectures.” Philosophy Compass. 2011. 746–​56. 25 Shannon Winnubst and Jana Sawicki. “Guest Editor’s Introduction.” Foucault Studies. 14 2012. 4. 26 Lynne Huffer. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. Columbia University Press, 2009. 27 See Shelley Tremain. “On the Government of Disability.” Social Theory and Practice. 27, 4. 2001. 617–​36. 28 See Ann Laura Stoler. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995; Ladelle McWhorter. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-​America: A Genealogy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Print. 29 Michel Foucault. The Care of the Self. New York: Vintage, 1986. 30 Didier Eribon. Michel Foucault. Paris: Flamarion, 1991. 341–​6. 31 James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. 32 Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges. Feminism and the Final Foucault. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

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33 Cressida Heyes. Self-​Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 34 See for instance, Michel Foucault. “On the Genealogy of Ethics.” Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 229–​52; EFL, 371–​81; EPPC, 47–​53.

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Part Two

Foucault and Aesthetics

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What emerges from such a reconceptualized understanding is a modernism that is less about an absolute break with realism; nor is it one that is primarily about formal innovations that privilege the aesthetic and the linguistic over the representational, historical, and the content-​based.2 It is instead a modernism that is about how various technologies, discourses, and practices inform and are informed by the constitution of the everyday in a specific historical moment. Form is not opposed to content; they are instead bound together such that what is represented is inextricable from the technologies via which it is represented. Modernism, in this sense, becomes not a question of form as much as one of technique, and as Foucault reminds us in The History of Sexuality Volume Three, the word “technology” (“technologie”) comes from the ancient Greek technē, meaning “art” (EHS3, 106).3 It also becomes, par excellence, a technology (or art) of writing in the period of modernity, one that is able to, in Foucault’s description of the discourse of Enlightenment, “reflect on its own present” (EFR, 33).4 Within such a conception of modernism, where technology and technique become central questions, John Dos Passos’s complex interweaving of realist writing practices with those that are conventional to modernism in the U.S.A. trilogy becomes central rather than marginal. Dos Passos produces a prose that, like Foucault’s histories (from the History of Madness to the three volumes of the History of Sexuality), constructs what Gary Gutting calls a “history of the present”: “Foucault’s histories aim to show the contingency—​and hence the surpassability—​of what history has given us” (10).5 While the idea of history as contingent may seem unproblematic from our twenty-​first-​century vantage, in which the insights of post-​structuralism and postmodernism have become relatively commonplace, it is important to remember the kinds of history that Foucault and Dos Passos were writing against. These were the twin historicisms of an eschatological Marxism and a triumphalist nationalism. And while the first historicism is perhaps a less pressing problem in the present moment, the second is still very much with us. Moreover, eschatology and inevitabilism in historicism is easier to criticize than it is to eschew. Both Foucault and Dos Passos, thus, still have much to teach us about writing a history of the present. U.S.A., with its mixing of realist and modernist techniques, its emphasis on technology, its attention to the marginal as much as the central, its open-​ended and often paratactic prose style that emphasizes the quotidian and the contingent, and its collaging of different voices, official, unofficial, sensationalist, and prosaic, becomes its own history of the present, one that retells the immediate past with an eye toward understanding the organization of power in the present of its composition in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The trilogy, as a reflection on its own present, suggests that the United States of capitalist inequality, wildly unequal power relationships, and institutions that limit rather than foster democracy is not an inevitable product of US history but a specific power formation in the present, one that could have been otherwise and may be otherwise in the future. While Dos Passos is generally considered a New Left writer (at least in this point of his career), one that is influenced by Marxist historiography, his actual historical

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methodology and approach to historicism have more in common with Foucault than with the teleological logic and inevitabilist rhetoric of the Second and Third Internationals. Such is at least the gambit of this essay.6 In making this argument, I don’t want to transform Dos Passos into a Foucauldian or erase the range of differences, historical, conceptual, and political, that separate the writer from the theorist. Moreover, this is not an attempt to turn Dos Passos into a poststructuralist avant la lettre or to somehow strip Dos Passos’s vision of its Marxist and socialist trappings. For the record, I have as much invested in the kind of nondogmatic Marxism represented by a figure like Dos Passos as I do in Foucault’s genealogical accounts of institutional power. I do want to suggest, however, that the two can be read profitably together as well as against each other, and that performing such a reading illuminates aspects of each writer’s approach to historiography and a kind of modernist writing practice that is otherwise relatively marginal to the institutional histories of modernism. What emerges in reading the two writers together is a different genealogy of modernism than is associated with the experimental avant-​garde, the very forms of modernism that are often championed by Foucault in print. If Foucault was an advocate of writers like Mallarmé, Artaud, and Blanchot, celebrating their investment in a will to transgression that is at once artistic and social, then his histories, particularly the histories of the 1970s such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume One, are much closer in spirit to Dos Passos and the paratactic and open-​ ended techniques of composition that he shared with Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway.7 If a certain strain of modernism focused on the hermeneutics of the subject (and here one thinks of the stream-​of-​consciousness work of Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and the Faulkner of the 30s), another tradition focused on the relationship of subjectivity to the transforming, contingent, and radically open object world of modernity (what Foucault would describe as the construction of self via various technologies of the self).8 In this second stream, produced by writers like Stein and Williams, and which was adapted by Hemingway as well as pulp writers like Dashiell Hammett into a kind of modernist realism, the emphasis is not on the isolated, psychologized or transcendent subject, but instead on the subject as immanently bound up with a world constituted by the contingencies as well as the constraints of language and the object world (including the technologies of representation, inscription, and organization associated with both).9 In this context, the subject is as much one object among many as it is a privileged point in apprehending the world of objects and the forms of technology in which it is immersed. This conceptual position, the immersion of subjects in a larger world of contingency, technology, and constraint, manifests itself in the specific writing techniques employed by both Foucault and Dos Passos, in which any understanding of the subject is mediated and structured in relationship to the technologies, discourses, institutions, and materialities that enable, shape, and constrain a conception of subjectivity as thoroughly immanent and partially objectified. In what follows, then, I will trace out the confluence as well as differences of Foucault’s and Dos Passos’s contingent historicisms, their representations of both subjects-​in-​process and the world-​in-​process that they inhabit. In doing so, I will attend to the way in which writer and theorist represent

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technology, discourse, institutions, and the historicity of political possibility and constraint. I will also demonstrate the way in which this vision is enabled and enacted by the writing techniques employed by both writers. After doing so, I will conclude by suggesting what the approach of both writers can teach us about a leftism adequate to our present.

Technologies of the subject, or the novel exploded Central to both Foucault’s histories and Dos Passos’s trilogy is a decentering of the human subject. This decentering of human subject is a central feature of Foucault’s celebrated antihumanism, but it is present in almost equal measure in Dos Passos. While the debates around the definitions of antihumanism central to structuralism and post-​structuralism continue into the present, as a recent interview with Alain Badiou demonstrates, in the context of Foucault’s writings the term represents distinctive features of his conception of the subject, which is opposed to the humanist subject as both invariant (the subject of human nature) and adamic (the subject as author and controller of the world in which she operates).10 The subject in Foucault is both an embodiment (a biological and enfleshed one, but one whose very materiality is shaped by the contingencies and practices of the everyday) and a positive locus of subjectification produced within and by historically specific discourses and technologies of power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes subjectification as a process of subjection as much as subject construction. It is a production of subjectivity, but one that also situates such a subject as subjected to the very positive forms of power by which she is constituted. In a typically Nietzschean reversal of conventional cause and effect, Foucault describes subjectivity as an effect of the disciplinary and technological production of the “soul” (EDP, 29).11 Rather than a transhistorical conception of the humanist soul as the motive force of history, Foucault presents humanism as an historical effect of the technological production of the soul and the subject tethered to this soul: This real, non-​corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations gave rise to a corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses and the moral claims of humanism. (EDP, 29–​30)

Thus, humanism and the human subject are an effect of “a certain type of power and the reference of a certain kind of knowledge” for Foucault. This is Foucault’s antihumanism in a nutshell. Humanism and the human subject are not the unchanging ground upon which historical analysis unfolds. Instead they are an effect of the changing dimensions

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of knowledge and power. In the case of humanism, we can read it as an effect of the growth of human sciences that Foucault traces in The Order of Things (EOT, esp. pp. 303–​87).12 In the case of the human subject, at least in its specific manifestations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is an effect of the forms of disciplinary subjectification, normalization, and individualization that Foucault details in Discipline and Punish, as well as the growth of biopower and biopolitics as massifying techniques of subjectification and normalization that he describes in The History of Sexuality Volume One, as well as in three volumes of posthumously published lectures from the Collège de France.13 What makes this an antihumanism, as opposed to the posthumanism that has been championed by contemporary theorists like Carey Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti, is that while the human subject is decentered (becoming an effect rather than a primary cause), it is still the human subject that is the focus of this decentering.14 Although, as Claire Colebrook notes, contemporary posthumanism may exaggerate its claims of going beyond the human (functioning as much as a domestication of the nonhuman as an exploration of its alterity), the ideal of posthumanism is to attend to those beings and materialities that exceed the frame of the human or lie outside of it altogether.15 In making this distinction between antihumanism and present-​day posthumanism, I am not arguing for the inapplicability of Foucault’s thought for posthumanism; what I am arguing instead is that Foucault’s antihumanism is a specific historical discourse, one that is echoed in Dos Passos’s modernism. For both the theorist and the novelist, subjectivities are bound up with specific historical manifestations of technology in Foucault’s extended sense of the term, in which discourses, knowledges, and practices represent specific manifestations of technology (they are literally what Foucault calls “techniques of the self ” or technological instantiations of the subject) as much as the mechanical forms of technology more prosaically associated with the word. This is not to say that there isn’t a relationship between the two. Thus, Foucault’s most famous metaphor for the regime of disciplinary, productive power that emerges near the end of the eighteenth century and shapes the period of modernity is the panopticon. While Foucault borrows the concept of the panopticon from Jeremy Bentham’s description of an ideal prison, it is a handy condensation or metaphor for “a general model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the general life of men” (EDP, 205). Yet, even as Foucault employs the panopticon as a metaphor for the disciplinary form of positive power he associates with modernity (positive power’s “aim is to strengthen the social forces—​ to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply”), it is also grounded in specific material techniques such as the examination, the inspection, and the chart; and technologies, including various technologies of vision and the architecture of the prison, hospital, and school (EDP, 205). For Dos Passos, writing about the early twentieth century, the technologies have changed, but their effect of producing subjects has not. The U.S.A. trilogy directly emphasizes the mediation of subjectivity via technology. As I  suggested before, the trilogy can be characterized by its mix of modernist and realist techniques. Another more precise way to put this is that it stages the technology of the realist novel as

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exploded. Rather than the technology of the novel and of everyday life functioning as a seamless and pervasive, yet unobtrusive, force to present a story or a set of stories in their human completeness, Dos Passos presents an array of disparate technologies (including the different “Camera Eye,” “News Reel,” biographical, and narrative sections of the novel) all existing in obvious and overt tension with each other. As in Foucault’s histories, the technology is foregrounded, marking the way in which the subjectivities presented in the novel are inextricable from the technologies of subjection through which we are given access to them. Take for example the “Camera Eye” sections of the novel. On one level, these biographical sections (what really read more like prose poems) present Dos Passos at his most canonically modernist. The writing echoes the stream-​of-​consciousness techniques employed by modernists like Joyce, Woolf, or Proust even as it also invokes the fragmentary, allusive verse of an Eliot, Pound, or Loy. Yet, central to the sections is less a typically modernist emphasis on consciousness as opening out onto larger symbolic systems as such and more an emphasis on the technologies of subjectification. One of these technologies is the camera, whether filmic or photographic. And the “Camera Eye” sections emphasize the technology of the camera as one that in the early twentieth century was becoming a dominant cultural medium that shaped (via movies, newsreels, the circulation of photographs in periodicals and newspapers, etc.) the apprehension of everyday life. Take, for example, this passage when the autobiographical narrator discovers that his father has died: when the cable came that He was dead I  walked through the streets full of fiveoclock Madrid seething with twilight in shivered cubes of aguardiente redwine gaslamp green sunsetpink tileochre eyes lips red cheeks brown pillar of the throat climbed on the night train at the Norte station without knowing why I’m so tired of violets Take them all away the shattered iridescent bellglass the carefully copied bursts the architectural details the grammar of styles it was the end of that book and I left the Oxford pockets in the little noisy room that smelt of stale oliveoil in the Pension Boston Ahora Now Maintenant Vita Nuova but we who had heard Copey’s beautiful reading voice and read the handsomely bound books and breathed deep (breathe deep on two three four) of the waxwork lilies and the artificial parmaviolet scent under the ethercone and sat breakfasting in the library where the bust was of Octavius. were now dead at the cableoffice16

This particular instantiation of the “Camera Eye” is actually more symbolically freighted than most of the instances that occur with regularity throughout the trilogy (there are fifty-​one such sections in all). We are given indications of the impact that the father’s death has on the narrator in his injunction to “breathe deep, one two three four,” his attempt to stay cognizant of the present in three different languages and imagine a

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new life, while recalling Dante’s title, in a fourth, and in the capitalization of “He” throughout. This capitalization, which differs strikingly from the non-​capitalization of “she” for his mother in the paragraph above the one I  quote, suggests both the patriarchal force that the narrator’s father has and the size of the absence that his death creates (and absence that is also suggested by the way in which sentences and thought trail off into emptiness in the passage). Moreover, the capitalization of “He” in the passage can also be read as one of the rare moments in the “Camera Eye” sections of the novel that employs overt (rather than private, coded, or accidental) symbolism, the death of God as a condition of modernity and modernist language more generally. Yet, for all the ways in which the passage seems to conform to the hermeneutics of a certain kind of modernist writing, in which surface details open out onto a larger set of subjective, social, aesthetic, and/​or metaphysical meanings, it also works in multiple ways to refuse these larger symbolic contexts. Instead the passage seems to be primarily about the work of perception or apprehension (and this is even more the case in the other “Camera Eye” sections, which emphasize the contingency of meaning more fully). Thus the passage functions in a phenomenological register as much, if not more, than it does in a symbolic register. The act of perception and memory are emphasized throughout, producing perceptual condensations like “sunsetpink” and “fiveoclock.” Moreover, the lack of punctuation and the moments of metonymy (like the shift from the memory of breathing deep to the internal command to breath deep) suggest that the logic of the “Camera Eye” sections emphasize the movements of thought and perception. Part of what is emphasized in the “Camera Eye” passages, outside of or beyond any symbolic dimensions they may contain, is the technology of the modernist “I” itself and the subjectifying effects it produces. These effects produce a kind of phenomenological subjectivity and thus are about the modernist “I” as much as the Camera “eye.” Yet they are also, of course, about the eye of the camera, as is emphasized by the moments in the above passage in which the camera objectifies the narrator (“eyes lips red cheeks brown pillar of the throat”). Just as the narrator’s external perceptions are fragmentary and metonymic, so too are the images registered by the camera when it is trained on the narrator. The passage thus emphasizes the intertwined dimensions of both the modernist I and the camera eye, suggesting the way in which the subject of modernism, and the emphasis on subjectivity and subjective perception itself that we associate with modernism, is an effect of a specific conjunction of technologies of the self and the selves fashioned from such technologies.

Prismatic narratives Rather than naturalizing the apparatus that produces modernist subjectivity, then, the “Camera Eye” sections (especially as they contrast with the other sections of the trilogy) foreground that this understanding of subjectivity is the product of certain technologies of narrative and vision. This emphasis on the technologies of narration are perhaps most apparent in the moments in U.S.A. in which the same events are

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apprehended or represented in the different sections. For example, during the narration of Americans in wartime Europe that forms the core of much of 1919, the same burning tanker off the coast of Genoa is narrated multiple times through two different narratorial apparatuses, one fictional and the other nonfictional. We first encounter the burning tanker in one of the “Camera Eye” sections: “Genoa eyes flared with the light of the burning tanker Genoa what are you looking for? The flare in the moon down the midnight streets in boys’ and girls’ faces Genoa eyes the question in their eyes.”17 Here the rendering, true to the “Camera Eye” sections, is in first person and poetic, although it perhaps demonstrates less of the emphasis on perception itself that we saw in the section analyzed above. The next time we encounter the burning tanker, it is one of the fictional narrative sections. The point of view in these sections are third-​person limited, and these sections, on the whole, seem to function via mimetic realism, even as surface realism is complicated in a number of different ways, as I will explore more fully below. The narrative section in which the tanker appears is one of those that is focalized via (and named after) the character Richard Ellsworth Savage, who is a cash poor but well educated East Coaster with wavering radical commitments, and, during the period narrated by the passage, working as an Ambulance driver on the Italian front during the first world war. The tanker illuminates the town itself in the passage: “The town was all marble. Every façade that faced the sea was pink with the glow of the fire . . . They were cold and went into one of the shiny nickel and plateglass cafés to have a grog. The waiter told them in broken English that the fire was on an American tanker that had hit a mine and that she’d been burning for three days.”18 Like the many different narrative passages that structure Dos Passos’s trilogy, this passage achieves its effects less by what it directly narrates, which is relatively straightforward and pedestrian (as in the “Camera Eye” sections, there is a phenomenological dimension to the narratives, they emphasize life, consciousness, and experience in process), and more by the different ways in which the narrative can unfold. While they may represent major events in the lives of the characters and even in national and world history, what they represent is less important and more prosaic than how it is represented and how these events are experienced by the characters themselves. They thus achieve a kind of modernist realism in which the representation of the object world (or the world outside the subject) is not so much attenuated (as it can be in certain forms of stream-​of-​consciousness writing) as it is represented as complexly shaped by, intertwined with, and structured in part by subjective apprehension. Such an understanding of the intersections of technology, subjectivity, and the material world parallels, in large part, those that populate Foucault’s histories. While Dos Passos’s stated beliefs may be Marxist and he may finally put more representational weight on the object world as separate and in dialectical tension with the subject, on the level of novelistic practice, subjectivity, technology, and world are complexly intertwined and mutually constitutive. As Steven Shaviro has noted, such a perspective doesn’t mean that Foucault is antimaterialist (or a crypto-​idealist as some unsympathetic Marxist readings would have it); it does mean that there is a distinctive materialism to Foucault’s histories of the 1970s and in his contemporaneous lectures at the Collège of France.19 This materialism emphasizes the intertwining (via the “rule of

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immanence,” i.e., the analyst must assume the immanence of all entities, including the perspective of the analyst herself) of the technological, the institutional, the subjective, the biological, and the material as different instantiations of power (EHS1, 98). As Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality Volume One: “Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter . . . relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play” (EHS1, 94). It is a mistake to consider objects, subjects, and relationships in isolation of their intertwining or their mutual constitution. The different sections of Dos Passos’s trilogy thus not only foreground the technology that works to produce the subject, but it also emphasizes the immanent relationships among subjectivity, the material world, discourse, and technologies. Like Foucault’s histories, the trilogy also refuses to produce a synthesis of its different sections. Instead it works like, to borrow a phrase from Dos Passos’s biography of Thorstein Veblen (one of the many biographical sections of U.S.A.), “a sharp clear prism.”20 The novel refracts its narrative materials into a thousand different voices, technologies, and fragments. The fictional narrative sections in particular achieve this prismatic effect. While seemingly more realist, their proliferation (there are thirteen different main characters who function as thirteen different points of focalization) complicates this effect. This alternation among the different characters’ narratives produces multiple perspectives on many of the same material events, indicating the immanence of the narrative voice in relationship to that which it narrates. The prismatic proliferation of narrative voices is particularly emphasized by a couple of other stylistic techniques employed in these sections. First, while we often get origin stories for the characters, we rarely get end stories for them. The narrative often leaves them in medias res, disrupting the humanist fantasy of closure and the privileging of a singular narrative that accompanies it. Moreover, while events are witnessed from multiple perspectives (we get at least three different accounts of the same series of events in Paris at the end of the war in 1919), these perspectives do not alternate in the moment, as they might in a realist novel. Instead, what we get is descriptions of the same events rendered hundreds of pages apart, suggesting, in their lack of continuity, the incompatibility of these different perspectives. As this already suggests, temporality is also complicated in the narrative, working recursively rather than with any sense of linearity. While realist novels often employ analepses and other nonlinear techniques, the recursive, stuttering narrative structure of U.S.A. feels mechanical, echoing the Taylorist technologies and Fordist assembly line that, as Dos Passos indicates in his parodic biographies of Fredrick Taylor and Henry Ford, both defined and enchained life in the early twentieth-​century United States. Indeed, the alternation of these passages in such a mechanical manner suggests the way in which, as Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, bodily discipline and the shaping of subjectivity by serialization was part of the more general technologies of discipline that he chronicles and that worked to render subjectivity more productive and the body more controllable and controlled: “These methods, which made possible

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the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-​utility, might be called ‘disciplines’ ” (EDP, 137). While Dos Passos locates the production of bodily, subjective, and political-​economic discipline in the moment of Taylorism and incipient Fordism (thus echoing Lukács’s contemporaneous account of reification), Foucault locates it earlier in the initial moment of industrialization and marks it as a discursive and technological dynamic (in the broad sense that he uses the concept of technology) rather than only a political-​economic one.21 Rather than choosing sides between these two accounts, I think (as Antonio Negri and other Autonomist Marxists have done) they can be thought together.22 The creation of a disciplinary society that Foucault charts in Discipline and Punish lays the groundwork for the reification of labor and time that reaches its apotheosis in Taylorism and Fordism in the twentieth century. The narrative passages in Dos Passos’s text, then, become indices of such a dynamic of reification, even as they also indicate the ways in which reification is “double conditioned” and “polyvalent” in Foucault’s terms: as Lukács also suggests (although Foucault would have no truck with Lukács’ Hegelianism), reification enables certain political formations even as it does violence to and works to close down others (EHS1, 99–​100).

The polyvalence of discourse Foucault articulates what he terms “tactical polyvalence” specifically in relationship to workings of discourse in The History of Sexuality Volume One, “Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can both be an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing power” (EHS1, 101). While it may seem like a stretch to present reification as a discourse, we must remember that discourses for Foucault are about material institutions and practices as much as language-​based regimes of truth. In this sense, reification is a discourse, one articulated (though with different political intentions and effects) by both Taylor and Lukács. It is, of course, also a technology (i.e., a form of political-​economic organization) and a political-​economic practice as well as a discourse, and Foucault’s insights about the tactical polyvalence of discourses can, I would argue, be applied to technologies and practices as much as discourse. It is here where we need to keep in mind the immanent and bound-​together relationship of all of Foucault’s categories, which, like the forms of power they describe, are meant to be tactical rather than a priori. The tactical polyvalence of reification as both a discourse and a technology is captured by Dos Passos’s appropriation of it for his own antihumanist ends in his creation of a mechanized and serialized compendium of texts in the trilogy. It is also captured in the various narratives of labor resistance that the novel famously chronicles, from the IWW organizing of Ben Compton and Mac (which takes him eventually to Mexico during the revolution), to the radical journalism work that Mary French does

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for the Steelworkers union, to any number of other radical activities undertaken by other characters. Part of what is so striking about the representation of these radical activities and commitments is that they are not structured around a Manichean logic. While the rhetoric of various leftist groups may be strategically Manichean, turning on the opposition between workers and owners, this rhetoric is taken up by the characters in a more contingent and aleatory manner.23 Indeed, the representation of power in these struggles is fundamentally Foucauldian. While it may need to be marshalled by a binary rhetoric in order to effectively combat the capitalist class and its state representatives, the workings of power are capillary and function within what Foucault describes as “matrices of transformation” (EHS1, 99). Within such matrices, power and the forms of subjectivity with which it interacts and enables are subject to “constant modifications, continual shifts” (EHS1, 99). Thus, characters like Charlie Anderson and “Daughter” go from participating in strikes and having radical identifications to becoming part of the very power structure they were resisting. Similarly, radical class language mixes with reactionary or indifferent language around race and gender. Moreover, this mix is clearly part of Dos Passos’s novelistic practice. Like Foucault, part of the political dimensions of Dos Passos’s texts is that he registers and juxtaposes different popular discourses as indices of different social formations. This discursive understanding of power extends to the trilogy’s representation of class formation. In contrast to the post–​Second International language of international communism, which presumes a teleology organized around class struggle and a well-​ nigh metaphysical opposition between classes, Dos Passos presents class formations, as well as all other categories of political struggle and social definition, as contingent, malleable, and immanent; in a word, they are fundamentally discursive. By discursive, Foucault doesn’t mean entirely language-​based. Instead he means the mix of professional and popular languages, institutional practices, subjective formations, everyday practices, and forms of knowledge that constitute the immanent workings of power in any given historical formation. Similarly, while emphasizing the “speech of the people,” Dos Passos also posits the United States of America as a “group of holding companies, some aggregation of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, public-​library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil.”24 Thus, power in Dos Passos’s trilogy is polyvalent and reversible, just as it is for Foucault. Such an understanding of power situates it as part of a “complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-​block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (EHS1, 101). This understanding of power doesn’t forego the need for binarized struggle, but it does suggest that lasting and more thorough forms of political-​economic transformation needs to attend to the productive as well as the repressive dimensions of power. Moreover, any truly complex and supple understanding of social power will recognize the ways in which power is characterized by persistence as well as change, complex nodes of functioning as well as militarized and binarized sites of struggle.

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Dos Passos’s discursive understanding of power is captured nowhere more compellingly than in the trilogy’s many “Newsreel” sections. Despite their name, the “Newsreel” sections of the trilogy are more accurately described as multimedia collages or assemblages that combine aspects of the technology of the newsreel with that of the newspaper and the popular song. Moreover, they are text-​based analogues to each of these technologies. Thus, the sixty-​seven sections that go by this name in the trilogy are not just textual approximations of the form of the newsreels that accompanied feature films in theaters in the early-​to mid-​twentieth century. They are collages of such newsreels, which often featured a few quick stories and a few longer ones. Moreover, the newsreel sections present fragments or lead-​ins, what also read like newspaper headlines (and they are produced in large part via the literal collage of headlines and passages from the Chicago Tribune) that are juxtaposed with each other and with song fragments.25 While both the headlines and the song fragments can be understood to signify part of the newsreel process (popular songs were often played as accompaniments to them in the silent era and were part of the recorded soundtrack for early sound films), the different media embedded in the “Newsreel” sections suggest instead a collage of different historically produced technologies of the subject. Thus, we get the newspaper, which, as Benedict Anderson has famously pointed out, is one of the technologies of modern nationalism, producing the historical effect of empty synchronous time and an imagined community.26 The newspaper is thus a technology of the subject par excellence. Dos Passos presents it as not only a technology of the national subject, but of related forms of subjectivity such as the bellicose subject (the sections that precede or run contemporary to the First World War and the Spanish-​ American War mark the hegemonizing of discourse necessary to undertake the work of war, even as they, and the narrative sections they interrupt, continue to register the resistance to such violence), the commercial subject (and it is fascinating to see how Dos Passos registers the growth of the field of advertising from The 42nd Parallel, which is set mostly in the first decade of the twentieth century to The Big Money set in the 1920s), and even the frivolous subject (Dos Passos also charts, in his biography section on William Randolph Hearst, the growth of what he describes as journalism that plays to the “lowest common denominator” and holds “power over the dreams of the adolescents of the world”).27 Moreover, in contrast to Anderson’s account, the newspaper is one among many technologies of the subject presented by Dos Passos, including the mechanical reproduction of popular songs by the emerging technologies of the phonograph and the radio, and the parallel technologies of the cinema, nonfiction biographies, and the novel (which Anderson does focus on, although in Dos Passos it is the modernist novel rather than the realist one that is privileged by Anderson). Thus, like Foucault, Dos Passos emphasizes the polyvalence of discourses and technologies that shape the subject as well as their historical malleability and immanence. All these qualities are captured in the materiality of the “Newsreel” sections themselves, which often read as found poems and draw on the phenomenological, cubist, and materialist modernism of figures like Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky, and points toward the cutups championed by William Burroughs in his experimental novels of the 1960s. Thus, there are passages like this one:  “say

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circus animals only eat Chicago horsemeat Taxsale of Indiana lots marks finale of World Fair boom uses flag as ragbag killed on cannibal isle keeper falls into water and scallions attack him.”28 Part of what such passages capture is the jumble of information produced by early mass-​cultural information and entertainment technologies such as the cinema, the newspaper, and the radio. It not only suggests the proliferation of such discourses but the contingent and fragmented ways in which they intersect with the psyche of a given subject. They also suggest the materiality of discourse itself—​the way in which it becomes a material and polyphonic entity that has a weight, presence, and force of its own and can produce, in its proliferation, unexpected conjunctions and possibilities. Usually the “Newsreel” sections are more lucid, if similarly fragmentary and often suggesting a “multiplicity of discursive elements” as well as the possibilities for their articulations and reversals (EHS1, 100). Thus, if the sections before various wars or during the post–​Second World War crackdown on radical activities suggest the violent hegemonies that the historically specific assemblage of discourses can produce, then other moments, like the “Newsreel” sections that record different discourses around radical actions in Paris or around a Pittsburgh strike—​events that are also presented in the trilogy’s narrative sections—​suggest the possibility for oppositional and transformational movements to be formed via such assemblages as well.29 At their most striking, the “Newsreel” sections also present such polyvalent and reversible possibilities as existing as different elements—​or even sometimes the same ambiguous element—​within the same historical moment (e.g., the discourses of condemnation and celebration around the events of the Russian Revolution are often couched in much of the same language and exist side by side in specific “Newsreel” sections). This is then the materialist presentation of discourse as constraining and enabling, polyvalent, yet also producing certain clusters of possibility that is present in both Dos Passos and Foucault.

An anti-​exceptionalist U.S.A.: The contingencies of time and space If the “Newsreel” sections capture a sense of history as both shaped by power yet also open and contingent, then the trilogy’s representations of time and space function similarly. Indeed, the representation of time and space in the trilogy parallels in large part their construction in Foucault’s histories from the 1970s. As I have already argued, for Foucault power is not transcendent but immanent; it is embedded in and shaped by, even as it shapes and delimits, specific temporal manifestations. Hence the centrality of the genealogy for Foucault’s writings of the 1970s. As he puts it, genealogy is “an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history” (EFR, 76–​100). Thus, any given manifestation of power is both tool and object, shaped by history and shaping of it. Power structures historical manifestations of the body and subjectivity, but the body and subjectivity also form the locations by which power is lived, contested, and transformed. What emerges from such a conception is a concept of time that is a reflection of the history of power and its contestations and

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is fundamentally open. Like the empty, homogeneous time that Anderson associated with nationalism, time is open and radically non-​teleological for both Dos Passos and Foucault. Where the latter two writers break with Anderson is around the idea of such a time being somehow necessarily homogenous and fundamentally tied to the nation-​ state form. This form is one possible temporal formation, one organization of power. Dos Passos’ conception of space in U.S.A. echoes the conception of time just elaborated. For Dos Passos, as for Foucault, power is spatialized, and space also becomes a locus by which power is realized, hegemonized, contested, transformed, or reversed. For a trilogy entitled U.S.A., the novels are remarkably anti-​exceptionalist in their understanding of the nation-​state. Part of this anti-​exceptionalism is an understanding of the state as a collection of material apparatuses that are articulated within a specific spatiotemporal formation, but one that intersects with, overlaps with, and is dependent on other ones.30 This materialist understanding of the nation-​state is nowhere better captured than in the opening description of the nation in the Preface to the trilogy. I have quoted part of it above, but it is worth quoting in full: U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled in the margin in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.31

Here the nation-​state is a geography, an ecosystem, a set of political-​economic practices, a contested history, a site of material struggle, a thanatopolitical collection of militarized bodies, a biopolitical organization of a population, a collection of communication technologies and a set of discourses.32 This is a thoroughly materialist definition of the nation-​state, one in which the very borders of the nation do not fully contain the operations found within it. Such a transnational understanding of the United States is captured in the text itself, in which specific sections of it play out in Mexico (during the Mexican revolution), in Paris and Italy (during the First World War), in shipping lanes in the Atlantic and off of Cuba, and so on. While, on one level, such a transnational understanding of the nation-​state may portend the growth of US power and imperial reach during the period of US global hegemony that Giovani Arrighi terms the long twentieth century, the transnational understanding of the nation-​state here feels less expansionist than it does situated: it is an understanding of the U.S.A. as embedded in a network of different power relationships and material formations.33 This is a very different understanding of the nation-​state than is present in most exceptionalist invocations of “America” in American fiction, presenting America first and foremost as an unfolding and teleological idea, one that functions in radical distinction to the history and idea of any other nation-​state. The use of U.S.A. as the trilogy’s title rather than America is instructive here; the emphasis is on the material

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state rather than the national idea. Indeed, the rare moments when Dos Passos does use exceptionalist rhetoric, it is almost always strategic in the Foucauldian sense. The most obvious moment of such a rhetoric is when he invokes an idea of America to contest and contrast an inclusive, progressive, exceptionalist understanding to the exclusionary, triumphalist one that allowed the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti: “allright we are two nations America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.”34 While the rhetoric here may seem xenophobic, it is an intentional reversal of the xenophobic rhetoric that justified the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. And to make this clear, Dos Passos immediately contrasts these exploiting “strangers” with various immigrant and ethnic populations who “know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight” and who know “the old American speech of hatred for oppression.”35 Thus, like Foucault’s account of the “reverse discourse” made possible by “a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality,” Dos Passos uses the xenophobia as well as material and discursive exclusions of the nationalist right against itself (EHS1, 101). Such a use of exceptionalism makes it not foundational but merely strategic, and thus opens back up onto the more materialist understanding of the nation-​state that is typical of U.S.A. This materialist understanding also contrasts with Anderson’s notion of the imagined community. While the latter may be one discursive effect of a dominant formation of nationalism, it is only one such effect and one such manifestation of the contingent forms of organization and association that intersect with the nation-​state. Instead, what we are given by both Dos Passos and Foucault is an understanding of space/​time, and spatiotemporal formations like the nation -​state, as both powerfully shaping, but also as polyvalent, contingent, and open to the workings of power.36

Coda: Rethinking leftism The vision of the nation-​state as one material and discursive formation among others indicates what both Foucault and Dos Passos can contribute to the project of rethinking leftist politics for our present.37 Of course, Foucault’s career as a whole and the complex (and more fraught) political trajectory of Dos Passos’ career can be described as intimate arguments with dominant leftist paradigms. Foucault clearly knew his Marx, and was in dialogue with Marxism throughout his career, even as he worked to revise it and challenge many of its institutionalized assumptions (particularly as they were manifested in the ossified structures of the French Communist Party). Similarly, while Dos Passos’s eventual disillusionment with various forms of international leftism manifested as an ever rightward drift, such that he wound up speaking for the kind of right-​wing exceptionalism of which he was once so critical, at his best (as in the U.S.A. trilogy) he can be read as a writer who is productively critical of left sectarianism while deeply committed to an ecumenical leftist vision. What is especially valuable about both writers’ visions is their commitment to an open and contingent,

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yet structured, materialism, one not tied to a teleological vision of history. In both writers we get a vision of the historical moment as both structured in power and open to material transformation. Moreover, rather than an understanding of power as grounded primarily in law or imaginary entities like the nation (although these are also important), it is instead grounded in the workings of discourses (as they circulate in various institutions, material practices, and forms of knowledge), the operations of various technologies (including various techniques of the subject or the self), and the organization of various materialities. The potentially revisionist Marxist or “postmarxist” vision presented by both writers, with its emphasis on discursive political struggle and against teleology, might seem to point toward Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s celebrated postmarxist classic, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.38 Yet, while I don’t want to efface the commonalities between these different thinkers, and certainly Foucault influenced Laclau and Mouffe, the version of Foucault that they incorporate into their thought is the largely language-​ based one that was read through the lens of poststructuralist doxa. While this latter Foucault is certainly one possible version of Foucault (one that had great influence on new historicism), it is not the only version possible. Indeed, Foucault has been reread by a contemporary generation of scholars (who have access to the publication and translation of his lecture transcripts from the Collège de France) in a much more materialist vein, one in which discourse itself is understood as a materialist category, in which the shaping of biological life and the body are tantamount, and in which material forms of governmentality and institutional practice are central. It is this latter Foucault that intersects with the novelistic practices of Dos Passos. And indeed, while there is much commonality between the two figures (as this chapter has worked to demonstrate), it is Dos Passos, particularly in the quotation from the Preface with which I concluded my reading of the trilogy, who more fully emphasizes aspects of the material that have become central to much recent speculative realist or new materialist thought. He not only emphasizes the materiality of the world economic system, and various communication technologies, technologies of the subject, and discursive practices, but also of nonhuman geographies and ecologies. The two writers taken together suggest that what is needed in the present moment within leftist discourse is not a becoming linguistic of various categories, so much as a becoming simultaneously more material and more contingent, what Louis Althusser describes in his late writings as a “materialism of the encounter.”39 Such a reading would not be a return to an old base/​superstructure model of causality (with its privileging of the economy as the motor of history), but rather an understanding of all aspects of life as material, from the economic, ecological, technological, and institutional to the discursive, and subjective.40 The emphasis on materialities, technologies, and the open constitution of the subject is central to what makes both Dos Passos and Foucault modernist thinkers. It is also specific to the modernism that they represent, one that is less about the representation of consciousness divorced from its material embeddedness in various technologies and practices, and more about the various material coordinates of the human and the nonhuman. We have much to learn from such a modernism. To rework a phrase from

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new materialist thinker Bruno Latour, if such is modernism, we have never been fully modernist.41

Notes 1 Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1978. 2 For a recent account of the complex relationship between modernism and realism, see Fredric Jameson. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. 195–​231. 3 Michel Foucault,. The Care of the Self: Volume Three of the History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986. 4 Michel Foucault. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 5 Gary Gutting. “Michel Foucault: A User’s Manual.” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 1–​28. 6 On Dos Passos as a New Left writer (and U.S.A. as his greatest contribution to the new left), see Michael Denning. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997. 161–​99. 7 On Foucault’s relationship to Modernism, see Gerald R. Burns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” Ed. Gary Gutting. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348–​78. 8 This opposition between a more experimental and hermetic modernism vs. a more socially embedded realist modernism can be charted as being in different places along the opposition between what Fredric Jameson describes as “the form of the form,” in the former case, and the “form of the content” in the latter case. They thus represent two different modernist attempts to overcome the form and content opposition (which may be different than Foucault’s approach, which tends to abolish the difference altogether, but which works, in their complex combinations, in the same spirit). See Fredric Jameson. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. xiv–​xix. 9 For my own account of the cross-​pollinations among modernist, realist, and pulp writings in this era, see Christopher Breu. Hard-​Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 10 Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco. Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue. Trans. Jason E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 11 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. 12 Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970. 13 In addition to The History of Sexuality Volume One, pp. 133–​159, see Michel Foucault. “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–​1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003; Michel Foucault. Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–​1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007; Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–​1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008. 14 See Carey Wolfe. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. xi–​xxxiv; and Rosi Braidotti. “The Notion of the Univocity of Being or

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Single Matter Positions: Difference as Verb or Process at the Heart of Matter.” New Materialisms: Cartographies and Interviews. Ed. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012. 19–​37. 15 See Clare Colebrook. Sex after Life: Essays on Extinction Volume Two. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014. 7–​22. 16 John Dos Passos. U.S.A.; The 42nd Parallel; 1919; The Big Money. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 369–​70. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and reproduce the peculiarities of Dos Passos’s punctuation, syntax, and spacing. 17 Ibid. 488. 18 Ibid. 525–​6. 19 Steven Shaviro. “The Pinocchio Theory.” Shaviro. January 2, 2015. http://​www.shaviro. com/​Blog/​ 20 Dos Passos, U.S.A. 855. 21 See Georg Lukács. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. 83–​222. 22 See Antonio Negri. “A Marxist Experience of Foucault.” Generation Online. Trans. Arianna Bove. January 2, 2015. See also Roberto Esposito. Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 217–​35. 23 The emphasis on the aleatory in Foucault’s thought presents another intersection with Marxism, in this case with Louis Althusser’s late theorization of aleatory materialism. See Louis Althusser. Philosophy of the Encounter: Late Writings 1978–​1987. Trans. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2006. 163–​207. 24 Dos Passos, U.S.A. 2–​3. 25 For a rich and provocative reading of the News Reels in terms of posthumanist ecotheory, see Kevin Trumpeter. “Furnishing Modernist Fiction: The Aesthetics of Refuse.” Modernism/​Modernity 20, 2. 2013. 307–​326. For an account of the influence of cinema, and especially Soviet, avant-​garde cinema, on Dos Passos’s writing, see Carol Shloss. In Visible Light, Photography and the Writer 1840–​1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 145–​75. 26 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991. 9–​39. For an account of Dos Passos’s relationship to nationalism, see Gayle Rogers. “Restaging the Disaster: Dos Passos and National Literatures after the Spanish-​American War.” Journal of Modern Literature. 36, 2. 2013. 61–​78. 27 Dos Passos. U.S.A. 1164 and 1169. 28 Ibid. 29. 29 On the notion of the assemblage as “variously formed matters of different dates and speeds,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 3. 30 My understanding of American exceptionalism is shaped by the work of Donald Pease. See Donald Pease. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 1–​39. 31 Ibid. 2–​3.

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32 On thanatopolitics, see Roberto Esposito. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 110–​45. 33 Giovanni Arrighi. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times. New and Updated Edition. London: Verso, 2010. 34 Dos Passos. U.S.A. 1157. 35 Ibid. 36 This materialist understanding of the nation-​state as embedded in a larger network of relations echoes Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s argument for a new understanding of the United States that conceptualizes it “as a cosmopolitan node, or a turnstile in the global flows, where America is a pivotal but not the singular moment of arrival and departure” (9). See Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. “Introduction; Globalizing American Studies.” Globalizing American Studies. Ed. Edwards and Gaonkar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 1–​44. 37 On the relationship between Marxist and Foucauldian thought, see the following texts: Michel Foucault. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 325–​50; Christopher Breu. “Subject and Substance: The Limits of Biopolitics and the Status of Critique.” English Language Notes (51. 2). 45–​60. 38 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2001. 39 Louis Althusser. Philosophy of the Encounter: Late Writings, 1978–​1987. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2006. 173. 40 For my own account of such a materialist approach, see Christopher Breu. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 1–​34. 41 Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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Birth of the Clinic.2 Yet the anomaly of its genre remains, especially when paired with the strong statement against commentary that opens Birth of the Clinic (EBC, xvi)3:  There is no other book devoted to the literary analysis of a single author in Foucault’s oeuvre. In Raymond Roussel we see Foucault—​writer of carefully controlled historical set-​pieces—​let himself go, be fascinated in the way we do when we fall in love. In a 1968 interview with Claude Bonnefoy, Foucault explicitly articulates what drew him to writers like Roussel or Artaud, insisting that he was not interested in “knowing how madness or mental illness can become creative”; nor was he interested in “asking about the expressive relationship that might exist between their work and their madness.” Instead, what catches him is how their texts can be “immediately recognized as being related to mental illness”; how Roussel and Artaud themselves articulated “at the level of their everyday experience, a very deep, ongoing relationship between their writing and mental illness”—​and, nevertheless, their work can “function in a way that’s absolutely positive.” What does it reveal about modernity’s relation to language, and especially its “system of regulation of literature,” if Roussel’s “incredibly naive and perfectly pathological exercises” can “play a very powerful role [in modern art], even to the point of anticipating the literature of the second half of the twentieth century? . . . It’s this positive function of the negative,” Foucault avows, “that has never ceased to interest me.”4 Foucault here treats Roussel’s oeuvre in the way he reads that of Sade or Don Quixote in The Order of Things: as “threshold texts” that presage the relation between words and things, saying and seeing, of a subsequent era.5 More generally, Foucault contends that before modernity, “writing was a matter of establishing one’s speech inside a given language.” In modernity, however, “it is time to understand that the language of literature is not defined by what it says, nor by the structures that make it signify something, but that it has a being, and that it is about that being that it should be questioned” (EHM, 547). Recall how Birth of a Clinic opens by insisting that critical thought no longer begins with the fact that there is knowledge (as it did for Kant) but with the fact that there is language (EBC, xvi). Both Foucault’s literary analysis of Roussel and his archaeology of medicine explore language as a limit-​experience: as a movement against, but also toward, death. But if Birth of the Clinic traces the emergence of a gaze that intervenes in human suffering by classifying bodies as normal or pathological, Foucault seeks to find ways of knowing Roussel without exposing his sexuality or his mental disturbance (Roussel’s or Foucault’s). As Blanchot asks, how might we encounter the obscure—​ as obscure, without assimilating it to the same? How can speech “maintain in its irreducible difference a foreign truth”?6 Foucault called this experience/​ experiment, in which thought encounters the outside, spirituality. As is well known, later in his life when influenced by classicist Pierre Hadot, Foucault contrasted the transformations required by “spirituality” with the demonstrative truths of philosophy. If philosophy “attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth,” spirituality, by contrast, entails cultivating practices that transform the subject into something other than

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him-​or herself (ECF-​HOS, 15). But the eighties were not the first time that Foucault used the “s” word. In a 1964 discussion about the new novel, Foucault declares himself struck by the reference that these novels (particularly those of Sollers) make “to a certain number of experiences—​experiences, if you like, that I will call, in quotation marks, ‘spiritual experiences’ (although, ultimately, ‘spiritual’ is not a good term) such as dreams, madness, unreason, repetition, the double, the disruption of time, the return, etc.” (ERC, 72). Despite discomfort, Foucault uses the term “spiritual” to articulate the Tel Quel group’s difference from surrealism insofar as surrealism confines such experiences to the narrow realm of psychology. He notes wryly:  “People who do philosophy are perplexed by this effort to reinstate certain tests of the limits [épreuves limites] like reason, dreams, and waking life, to the level of thought, an enigmatic and not easily accessible level of experience . . . Why else would Bataille have been such an important figure for the Tel Quel group, if he had not uncovered within the psychological dimensions of surrealism what he called ‘limit,’ ‘transgression,’ ‘laughter,’ or ‘madness,’ in order to make them experiences of thought?” Foucault insists that the “spiritual” force of literary experience emerges in the question: “what does it mean to think, what is this extraordinary experience known as thought?” Rejecting an instrumental understanding of language, the new novel treats language as “the thick space within—​ and between—​ whose layers these experiments/​ experiences are conducted . . . as in the elements of water or air.” Amid the material positivity of language, Sollers explores the space opened “by the little linking word or conjunction ‘and’ . . . between to think AND to speak.” In so doing, Foucault asserts, Sollers draws on Roussel’s previous investigations into what it means “to see AND to speak” (ERC, 72). In what follows, I  will explore Foucault’s modernism as an inquiry into the “spirituality of thought” by investigating Foucault’s analysis of Roussel’s writing as a limit-​experience whose experiment with the noninstrumental materiality of language involves a sustained meditation on, with, and through death. To do this will require a lengthy digression, in which I situate first Bataille and then Blanchot within a modernist genealogy of “spirituality” that identifies “spirit” with noninstrumental styles of thought. Rejecting the confinement of language to the transmission of information, noninstrumental views of language seek to question language in its being. Given space limitations, I will confine my analysis to the two books that I think had the greatest impact on Foucault’s reading of Roussel: Bataille’s Inner Experience and Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. My argument will be that Bataille and Blanchot develop what Foucault calls a “spirituality of thought” out of a complex response to Hegel’s dialectic: how to hold together contradictions without reconciling them in absolute knowledge? Their answer will be contestation:  holding together contraries past any resolution to the point of “a radical break with transitivity” (EEW2, 74–​75). If Hegelian negation begets memory and interiorization by bringing “the negative” inside, the passionate negativity of contestation opens thought not to a beyond, but outside. This is what Foucault will call desubjectivation:  an encounter with the outside that dissociates the one who is

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thinking from the personal “I” as well as from the absolute “Eye” that commands knowledge-​power relations in modernity. Thus, dual dissociation from the I/​Eye is crucial to Nietzsche’s eternal return. Both Bataille and Blanchot understand eternal return as a limit experience in which thought encounters what it cannot think. Bataille lived this thought as “a mad experience of the divine” that explored “the will to chance” as it emerges in the body, sexuality, and extreme affect.7 Blanchot lived this impossible circular thought primarily in writing, whose space he experienced as a dying that we can never accomplish in an outside that is not a place.

Bataille’s inner experience: Beyond the triumph of the will By inner experience I  understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere until now, than of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I do not like the term mystical. Nor do I like narrow definitions. Inner experience responds to the necessity in which I  find myself—​human existence with me—​of challenging everything (of putting everything into question) without permissible rest . . . I wanted experience to lead where it would, not to lead to some end point given in advance. And I say at once that it leads to no harbor (but to a place of bewilderment, of nonsense). I wanted non-​knowledge to be its principle.8

Bataille uses the phrase “inner experience” to speak of something that is neither an experience nor inner in any conventional sense. We think of experience as having an object, but inner experience does not. While inner experience begins with the individual not the group, it does not occur “deep within” a subject; nor does it primarily aim to attain ecstatic states.9 Rather, “inner” connotes a strategic turning away from external goals and pragmatic action. By detaching the senses from their objects and aims, “inner experience” intensifies sensation and affect. Bataille compares this strategy of somatic intensification to the way that darkness sharpens vision by dilating the pupil: “Here darkness is not absence of light (or of sound) but absorption into the outside. . . . In this silence made of the inside, it is no longer an organ, it is entire sensibility, it is the heart which has dilated.”10 Bataille thinks we cannot avoid the paradox inherent in trying to renounce trying: “inner experience” is a project that renounces projects! After all, the essence of language, he insists, is project: communicating to get something done. Thus, inner experience must use language against itself. By rejecting what Bataille calls the positive project of salvation, inner experience cultivates the negative project of abolishing the power of words, and thereby abolishing “project.”11 Inner experience is a snake that eats its own tail by cultivating the mind/​spirit’s will to become something other than a self-​possessed I/​Eye. Understanding Bataille’s project of going beyond the triumph of the will (as the incarnation of the I/​Eye) is where Hegel comes in.

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Hegel’s mutilation What Bataille learned from Hegel is that when we strain toward an object, any object, we turn the mind into the absolute Eye/​I that assimilates all. Thus, Bataille criticizes Hegel’s expansion of the philosophical notion of experience for not going far enough: “But desire, poetry, laughter unceasingly cause life to slip in the opposite direction, moving from the known to the unknown . . . Hegel gets rid of them in a hurry.”12 Following Kojeve, Bataille imagines the young Hegel attaining the summit of knowing himself absolute/​God, and pulling back from such madness. Unable to withstand the “circular agitation” of a dialectic without rest, Hegel invents the system, mutilating his mind in the process: “Of him, only the handle of a shovel remained, a modern man.”13 Bataille presents Inner Experience as an effort to “recommence and undo” the philosophy of work, or project, elaborated in Hegel’s Phenomenology, whose protagonist is, after all, a slave.14 Hence the paradox with which Inner Experience begins: given that humans need an experience of the absolute, by what means can we calm within ourselves the desire to be everything, a la Hegel?15 Bataille’s answer is contestation: “[T]‌o no longer wish oneself to be everything is to put everything into question.”16 While such extremity clearly requires a renunciation, Bataille contends that “if askēsis is a sacrifice, it is so only in a part of itself which one loses with an eye to saving the other.”17 To lose the I completely, one must not fear the blind spot in the mind’s eye: “But should one desire to lose oneself completely: that is possible starting from a movement of drunken revelry; in no way is it possible without emotion . . . If it is possible for others, for Orientals whose imagination does not burn at the names of Theresa, Heloise, Isolde, to abandon themselves to empty infinity with no other desire, we cannot conceive of the ultimate collapse in a way other than in love.”18 Here we see Bataille as a man of his time and place. While people today still sacralize eroticism and experience its power to undo the self (often in complex circuits of Orientalism), I am not sure that sexuality still retains the explosive sociopolitical force it had for Bataille, who once wrote that the brothel was his true church.19 Taking eroticism as his model, Bataille values inner experience because it dissolves blocks to what he calls “communication”: “I traverse an empty depth and the empty depth traverses me . . . two terms merge in a single wrenching, barely differing from a void—​not able to be distinguished from it by anything that I can grasp—​nevertheless differing from it more than does the world of a thousand colors.”20 Ultimately, for Bataille, “Life is never situated at a particular point: it passes rapidly from one point to another (or from multiple points to other points), like a current or like a sort of streaming of electricity. Thus, there where you would like to grasp your timeless substance, you encounter only a slipping, only the poorly coordinated play of your perishable elements . . . I am and you are, in the vast flow of things, only a stopping point favoring a resurgence. Do not delay in becoming precisely aware of this anguishing position.”21 While Bataille thinks that God, knowledge, the Buddhist suppression of pain, or even the pleasures of rapture have ceased to be convincing forms of salvation for us as

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moderns, he thinks this absence makes religion all the more necessary. To live one’s life ruled by projects, goals, the doing of what is useful; to always be subject not only to the will to power of others, but even to one’s own will to power: this is a life of degradation, a life without passion, a slave’s life. In contrast, what makes inner experience “spiritual” is that it has no goal other than itself. Inner experience is opposed to action and action’s “way of being in paradoxical time: it [action] is the putting off of existence to a later point.”22 The value of reading mystics like Angela of Foligno or Meister Eckhart for Bataille, then, is that salvation orients them to the summit and thus negates all other “projects of momentary interest. At the extreme limit, the desire for salvation turns into the hatred of all project (of the putting off of existence until later): of salvation itself, suspected of having a commonplace motive.”23 Much as, for Nietzsche, Christianity’s inculcation of the virtue of truth led to its own demise as people came to realize that Christianity itself was not true, for Bataille the mystical desire for salvation through union with God leads to its own undoing as moderns come to realize that salvation is just another way to turn spirit into a shovel. In equating spirit with the noninstrumental, Bataille radicalizes forms of thought in the West that react against industrialization and rationalist knowledge. Think about the Romantics and the genre of the fantastic; the Orientalist fascination with “the ancient wisdom of the East,” the occult and hermeticism, obsessing much of twentieth-​ century modern art.24 Think, too, of phenomenology, which also took up the effort to reclaim things from industrialization: through Heidegger’s critique of technology and his desire to dwell in language; or through Merleau-​Ponty’s lifelong engagement with the body’s “relation to” objects.25 Bataille stands within this tradition to radicalize it—​because for Bataille the issue is ultimately fascism.26 And while Foucault does not, I think, share Bataille’s personal religiosity, Foucault’s approach to discourse and politics is deeply shaped by Bataille’s experimentation with “spirituality” as a weapon against the psychological structure of fascism.

Nietzsche’s tears But how can “inner experience” help us resist the psychological appeal of fascism? For Bataille, the difficulty is inherent in language: “To speak is to imagine knowing.”27 Merely by opening our mouths, we commit the crime of authority. We assume the position of subject. We require “a personal idea . . . the idea [itself] matters little.”28 Like Hegel, we make our minds into shovels, simply because predication assumes action. The I/​Eye strives for the summit, inevitably, unavoidably. Bataille thinks we cannot get around this. However, “sovereignty resides, not in consolidating power, but in the relinquishment of profane relations of utility.”29 This is what Hegel could not face: sacrifice is an attitude of thought “contrary to reason, but enabled by reason.”30 Bataille offers sacrifice as a counter-​operation to the economy of profit, production, and utility that dominates daily life in modernity. If to speak is to imagine knowing, then the crime of authority must be expiated (“expiation” being what Bataille credits Blanchot with teaching him at a crucial moment in his exploration of inner experience).31 Enter

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Nietzsche, whom Bataille hails as the first person to express “an extreme unconditional yearning . . . independently of moral goals or of serving God.”32 This, then, is how Bataille lives the death of God: without an omniscient Knower (be it God or his human representative), “man is dispossessed of the means for becoming everything, he is a bewildered madman, a question without a way out.”33 Rather than being fascinated with returning to primordial madness, Bataille imagines the philosopher GONE mad. Reason GONE. “I imagine,” Bataille writes, “that Nietzsche had the experience of the eternal return in a form which is properly speaking mystical, confused with discursive representations.”34 What dissolves the ground under Nietzsche’s/​Bataille’s feet was not some doctrine—​it “was not the return (not even time), but what the return laid bare, the impossible depth of things”—​ and with it, the impotence of truth.35 Nietzsche wept too much, Bataille writes in Inner Experience “because he laughed too much; . . . ultimately these affects become confused or fused when the closed circle of the I/​Eye ruptures, spills over, and falls” (EEW2, 81–​4). What made Nietzsche weep, Bataille writes, is the way that eternal return demotivates all action—​whereas “every moral system proclaims that ‘each moment of life ought to be motivated.’ ”36 If the same events recur inevitably, relinquishing one’s will to control the future can enable another way of loving one’s fate to emerge, one that Bataille contends is “the inverse of project (it demands that one reject delay, that one decide on the spot, with everything at stake: what follows matters second).”37 As we have seen, Bataille insists that in the modern West, suppressing will or desire, ambition, or investment in outcomes does not effect this transformation. Instead, the thought of eternal return heightens such affects, only to scramble them all. There is no necessary continuity between who you were and who you are and who you will be one day. Eternal return discloses the self as a series of masks. In so doing, the “inner experience” of eternal return dissolves the tendency, crucial in modernity, to calculate odds and hedge our bets. In the modern world, the way to play life’s dice game is to strategize. If, however, we reject the I/​Eye cultivated by the will to power in favor of affirming the will to chance, then a different way to play appears. If we are “willing” to renounce the instrumental forms of power that enslave the I/​Eye, then we can become not master of the universe, not its God, but its dream. Bataille imagines that “the idea of being the dream of the unknown (of God, of the universe) is, it seems, the extreme point which Nietzsche attained.”38 Thus Bataille introduces into Foucault’s repertoire those dimensions of Western thought that link the “death of God” and “spirituality” to somatic forms of transgression that focus on extreme affect (sexuality, sacrifice, madness, will, rage): the first edition of Inner Experience was wrapped in a band proclaiming “Beyond Poetry.”39 Given that Bataille and Blanchot were conversation partners for over twenty years, it would be a mistake to overdraw this contrast. Yet, Blanchot works less with undoing the incarnation of I/​Eye through somatic forms of transgression in favor of working more intensively with those strands within Western thought which identify “spirit” and “inspiration” with art in order to undo the power fantasy of the artist’s I/​Eye. By according primacy to images over objects (in what is sometimes compared to Deleuze’s

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notion of a “simulacrum”), Blanchot’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return radicalizes the “spirituality” that emerges in modernist literature.

Blanchot: Death beyond good and evil The essence of the image is to be a shade . . . The cadaver is its own image.40

Like the previous section on Bataille, this section will track Blanchot’s rejection of Hegelian negation in favor of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Yet, unlike Bataille who polemicizes against Hegel and Nietzsche, Blanchot does not skewer his philosophical influences head-​on. Instead, in The Space of Literature, Blanchot critiques philosophy (especially that of Heidegger) by reflecting on the experience of death as articulated by various modern writers: Kafka, Mallarmé, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and, above all, Rilke, on whom this section will focus. In the process, Blanchot critiques modern philosophy by radicalizing the understanding of “spirit” at work in modernist literature through a meditation on how death undoes the power fantasy of the artist’s I/​Eye. When Blanchot discusses Rilke’s thoughts on death, he sounds like Foucault in Birth of the Clinic becoming entranced with Xavier Bichat: “it [death] is too great a force for us: it is our own force which outdoes us and which we do not recognize . . . [Death is] life itself but related otherwise, become other, the other relation.”41 While one might think “that I produce my death as the body produces cancer,” Blanchot denies this: “despite the biological reality of the event, one must always reflect, beyond the organic phenomenon, upon death’s being. One never dies simply of an illness, but of one’s death, and that is why Rilke [like Foucault] shied so stubbornly from learning of what he was dying: he did not want to put between himself and his end the mediation of any general knowledge.”42 Using Bataille’s notion of inner experience, Blanchot reinterprets Rilke’s talk of making death “always more inward . . . the silence of my most hidden secret.”43 Blanchot insists that Rilke’s modernist desire to make his death/​life a work of art will ultimately lead Rilke (sometimes even despite himself) to reject the interiority fabricated by the biomedical secret (much less the doctor’s fantasy of his mind as “the great white eye that unties the knot of life”) in favor of a ceaseless interrogation of death’s being that does not try to master death’s unknowability (EBC, xvi).44

The death of Hegalian negation But that is not where Rilke begins. Rilke begins where moderns like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger do. Repulsed by anonymous urban death, Rilke wants his death to be what he makes it: “This ‘I’ wants to be concentrated in the very fact of dying, so that my death might be the moment of my greatest authenticity, the moment toward which ‘I’ propel myself as if toward the possibility which is absolutely proper to me.”45 Identifying death as life’s most original possibility leads Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to see voluntary death as the most authentic human decision. For them, the death of God means that it is up to humans to make their deaths true.

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Blanchot critiques this philosophical celebration of authentic death for cultivating the desire “to be conscious of disappearing and not consciousness disappearing.”46 Today we call this “conscious dying”—​and Blanchot would want us to interrogate the power fantasy of the I/​Eye lurking behind its seeming benevolence: “Death, if it arrived at the time we choose, would be an apotheosis of the instant; the instant in it would be the very flash of brilliance the mystics speak of.”47 We want to relate to death as a decisive cut that “can triumph over the limitlessness of the indecisive, over the immense irresolution . . . by making ‘death understood’ its only content.”48 But “understood” is precisely what death can never be. We do not grasp death. Even when we bravely go forward to meet it, death grasps us: “Do I myself die, or do I not rather die always other from myself, so that I would have to say that properly speaking I do not die?”49 Taking a page from Bataille, Blanchot criticizes the philosophical celebration of an authentic death for seeking “to make of nothingness the road to salvation. [Whereas w]hoever dwells with negation cannot use it.”50 So opposed is Blanchot to the agency of the I/​ Eye, that he goes so far as to call suicide “a bizarre play on words. I go to meet the death which is in the world, at my disposal, and I think that thereby I can reach the other death.”51 The trick, of course, as Bataille would say, is that we cannot avoid such inauthenticity: “this [decision to die] is madness, but it is madness we could not be spared without being excluded from the human condition.”52 This madness links death and art: “Not that the artist makes death his work of art, but it can be said he is linked to the work in the same strange way in which the man who takes death for a goal is linked to death.”53 The strange project of deciding to go forth toward death, no less than Orpheus’s strange project of descending to Hades to bring Eurydice back, “both involve a power that wants to be power even in the region of the ungraspable.” But in both cases, a leap intervenes:  a “radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold on myself by casting me out of the power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me—​that which is stripped of all possibility—​the unreality of the indefinite.”54 What Blanchot learns with Rilke is that when we moderns seek to enclose death in life as art, we find, amid our powerlessness, that Death’s space discloses the Untrue as essential. Ultimately, then, Rilke will embrace the space of the word as Orphic space. As such, it is not the lightning flash of revelation valued by Mallarmé as the force of the writer’s active decision.55 Rejecting Mallarmé’s idealization of Hegelian negation, Blanchot insists that the inspiring gaze that enables the work culminates not in decisive force but in an experience of inspiration whose heart harbors worklessness or inertia.

Nietzsche’s aphorisms are not true I contend that this is what art as a limit-​experience means for Blanchot: not acceptance of finitude as human truth, but rather holding together contrary movements so as to “ruin[] in me the power of knowing, the right to grasp . . . And that which I cannot take, I  must take up again.”56 As I  read Blanchot, this circular but nondialectical

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movement—​alogical, profoundly passive, and fragmentizing—​is what the outside is: a space of dispersal. Blanchot insists that only this kind of “other relation”—​to the outside, not as another world, but as the other of all worlds—​will enable thought to do more than proliferate different perspectives and become truly plural. This is where Nietzsche enters for Blanchot. Blanchot reads the eternal return as necessitating a double refusal: “refusal of the immediate, refusal of mediation. It is from the true . . . that we should attempt to withdraw, ‘we philosophers of the beyond, of the beyond good and evil, if you please,’ if we wish to speak, to write in the direction of the unknown.”57 I read Blanchot’s reflections on the impossibility of making modern death true as radicalizing the modernist “spirituality” of language. Yes, Blanchot agrees with Heidegger that a modern object “disappears altogether into its uses,” announcing only “how it serves.” Thus, if the object is to appear, there must be “a break in the circuit of usage.”58 Creating this break is the work of spirit. Blanchot regards this apparition as “the object’s double, if you will. The category of art is linked to this possibility for objects to ‘appear,’ to surrender, that is, to the pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing—​but being.”59 This leads Blanchot, unlike Heidegger, to liken the image to a cadaver, developing a poetics of the image in which this experience of double rupture—​the appearance of nothing but being—​refuses all resolution, including truth. Thus, Blanchot parts ways with Rilke, who embraces this double refusal as an imperative to sacralize impermanence: “Here, among those who pass, in the Kingdom of decline/​Be the glass that rings, and in the brilliant resonance, is already broken.”60 I read this as a classic expression of the spirituality that emerges in modernist literature and phenomenology, with its “valorization of the details of everyday life, its finely tuned descriptions of the flow of consciousness, and its new reverence for ordinary objects and their capacity to reflect the universal.”61 In contrast, Blanchot’s poetics of the image draws on the fragmentary style of Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return. Contending that “[t]‌he impersonality toward which death tends in Rilke is ideal,” Blanchot insists that it is only in the light of day that the shattered ring of broken glass can be “desired, planned, decided upon—​reached.”62 But humans do not live in daylight alone. Death, as night, does not serve to enrich our daytime concerns—​death contests them. Death does not serve. In place of the dialectical embrace of death as the night OF day, Blanchot insists that moderns live in night AND day—​just as Hölderlin lived in “the double absence of the gods, who are no longer and who are not yet. Hölderlin is this and . . .”63 For Blanchot, the space of literature is defined by the space opened by this little word “and,” whose linkage does not provide a place in which to dwell but rather indicates a site of endless contestation. We think objects come first, and images after. The experience of modern death asks us to rethink. For Blanchot, the limit-​experience of modernity reveals that “the work of spirit” creates a double rupture which is fundamentally not about truth—​just as we moderns struggle with the fact that death is fundamentally not true and no amount of individual effort can make it so. In Rilke, when he is at his best, Blanchot sees a writer struggling to open to the fact that what we moderns need to come to terms with is not the truth of our death but its fundamental error. Faced with modern death, my I/​Eye

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experiences a worklessness so radical that the central question for modernity becomes not truth but fiction (EEW2, 147–​54 and 164–​8). To sum up: Bataille cultivates the paradox of inner experience as a way of breaking the power of words so as to open himself (and us) to the non-​knowledge of the body and its radical affirmation of chance. Blanchot insists that the experience of writing renders us unable to say “I” insofar as it engages us in an encounter with an unmasterable outside which we cannot make true: death discloses the spirituality of fiction. Drawing on these insights, I return now to Foucault’s attraction to Roussel’s writing: “there is an attempt at modification of one’s way of being through the act of writing. It is this transformation of his way of being that he observed, he believed in, he sought after, and for which he suffered horribly” (EDL, 184). To anticipate, I will argue that Foucault reads Roussel’s oeuvre as a series of limit experiences whose experiments with the noninstrumental materiality of language comprise meditations on the death that arises when an artist disappears behind his or her work in order that thought, in language, might encounter a double it cannot master.

The space of Roussel’s language: Writing at the limit Reading Roussel . . . demonstrated to me that psychology was a dispensable fashion.64

Suspicious of any attempt to craft themes or motifs that can be found in both the artist’s life and his or her works, Foucault’s reading of Roussel’s oeuvre rejects both a psychologizing read of Roussel’s work and life, as well as a phenomenological approach like that of Jean Starobinski or J. P. Richard.65 Yet, unlike his introduction to Rousseau’s Dialogues, in which Foucault pretends not to know about Rousseau’s mental instability, Foucault does not ignore Roussel’s mental disturbance or his closeted sexuality (EEW2, 50). Instead, Foucault attempts to chart a “third” relation by analyzing Roussel’s experiments with language as an “inner experience” of “the misery and festival of the signifier, anguish before too many and too few signs” (EDL, 164, 159 and 167). Foucault contends that there is no common place in which we unite language and life, seeing and saying, words and things: the space of the little linking word “and” is the void of contestation and death.66 Thus, Foucault analyzes all Roussel’s writing as unfolding in the space of this central hollow (le creux central) that opens amid the positivity of signs:  the doubling “and” by which language simultaneously duplicates and divides, concealing even as it enables us to “see” what someone means (EDL, 167). Foucault’s argument goes like this:  Without words, things would “remain in darkness.” But while language enables meaning, it can do so only because there are fewer words than things. If language were as rich as things, we would not need words (EDL, 167). The poverty of words, however, exposes us to the danger of the double (EEW2, 123–​9): when we say one thing, we can end up meaning another; when we read one word, we are simultaneously reading another word that is both different and the same. “Language, like the sun, is this brilliance which cuts, peels off the cardboard

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surface and proclaims that it is this double, this pure and simple double . . .” This proliferation is cruel: “rather than being the perfect sphere that illuminates the world, language divides things to introduce darkness into them” (EDL, 165), revealing truth and the self to be a game of masks, a play of secrets: the labyrinth of eternal return. In this labyrinth of thought, the I/​Eye circles around the void at its heart: thinking AND speaking, seeing AND saying, come undone. Roussel’s big secret, of course, was what he called “the process”—​the complex language games by which he produced the physical “sensations of art” which he sought in his writing.67 Roussel worked hard so that his readers would not suspect the existence of this linguistic machinery.68 But once you DO know, Foucault contends, everything changes. As Foucault explained to Ruas:  “the knowledge that there is a process throws the reader into a state of being uncertain,” Foucault continues, “and even while knowing that there is no way of rediscovering the process, the fact that there is a secret transforms the experience of reading into one of deciphering, a game, a more complex undertaking, more disturbing, more anxious than when one reads a simple text for the pleasure of it” (EDL, 183). Consider Roussel’s last work. Foucault does not doubt that this text, entitled How I  Wrote Certain of My Books, lays out an anatomy of “the process” for future generations to see.69 Often described as a positivist, Roussel seems to have sincerely believed that he had made discoveries that could be of use to future writers. Yet, in this posthumous text, the “positive function of explication . . . turns immediately into a game of uncertainty without end” (EDL, 11), revealing that the secret of the process “has but one effect: to propagate doubt” (EDL, 8). If there was one secret you did not suspect, how can you know there might not be “yet another meaning, this one or that one, or neither one nor the other, but a third, or none?” (EDL, 13). How I Wrote Certain of My Books is, of course, one of Roussel’s books: does this mean that How holds its own secret? And what about the other books which Roussel says are “completely outside” the process that How reveals? Do they utilize a different process? And if not, how do we know which books use the process and which fall outside it? How do we know? How to know? Roussel’s texts provide Foucault with an experience in which knowledge is the problem. Roussel’s relation to secrets can induce you to second-​guess not just the text, but your very own mind. This is the spirituality of contestation, ruining the ability of words to grasp and with it the mind’s power to know. Rather than writing to create another world which would be the double of this one, Roussel “systematically imposes a formless anxiety” that orients us toward the unsettling character of the visible multiplication and proliferation of this world which is both the same as, and other from, itself (EDL, 13). To read Roussel is to stand on this threshold where knowledge flickers into ignorance, and life into death back and forth interminably, imperceptibly, inevitably: the space of language is the time of eternal return. Foucault traces several stages in the language games Roussel called “the process.” In the preliminary stage leading up to the process proper, Roussel writes circular compositions, which start with one sentence and end with the same sentence repeated, except for one change (in the most famous case, the word billard is changed to pillard or plunderer). In the space of this tiny phonetic displacement, a whole world arises.

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Thus, Roussel’s language mocks our trust in the use-​value of language by denying that words represent things. Roussel does not transform the scarcity of words into the beautiful richness of rhetoric. Nor does he transform death into a power that can wield a Mallarmé-​like agency. Instead, Roussel’s early manipulations of the materiality of language—​its tropological space—​reveals words to be no different than carnival masks, concealing what they repeat, separated from the face by a thin but irrevocable slice of night. “The redoubling of words will be like the redoubling of the mask above the face: it will open onto the same eclipse of being” (EDL, 20).

The process paper (Process I): The productive power of silences Roussel develops the process proper out of these early ring narratives, by burying the two former bookend sentences inside the text. The two key terms—​billard and pillard—​are not hidden, but they are not visibly used either. It’s as if you were looking into a clear reflecting pool and saw, in the depths, the white pebble of the original phrase, whose silence (Foucault says) sets free the brilliant and glittering surface of words (EDL, 36). I call this liquid archaeology: it is akin to what Foucault does in Birth of the Clinic when he forsakes the chronological development of scientific themes and ideas about the body and explores how the space of the clinic composes conceptual rules by which doctors join seeing and saying in a very tight way, thereby forming the anatomical atlas (and with it, our sense of our bodily interiority). Central to the ability of Roussel’s texts to get us to question our own minds is the way his noninstrumental use of language plays havoc with the mind’s I/​Eye. Roussel obtains the words that he uses on the visible surface of his text through a horizontal association: he replaces billard with a series of kindred words. For example, the billiard table makes him think of how a billiard cue is often inlaid with the owner’s initials (chiffre). But Roussel uses chiffre in the narrative only in a second, unrelated sense: number. Similarly, the chalk makes him think of the protective paper at cue’s base. This paper is attached to the chalk by glue (colle), but Roussel uses “colle” only in its second meaning: punishment. Many of these associations are formed through the preposition à. Roussel’s task is to find the narrative which joins all these points with the greatest economy, resulting in a star-​shaped structure. Breton celebrated Roussel’s process as a form of automatic writing which uses rules to efface rational control so that a pure unconscious can speak: how else to make sense of singing mites, or a rooster that writes his name by spitting blood? But the secret beneath these playful signs, Foucault says, is “a language enslaved,” obedient to an imperious law. Contra Breton, Foucault reads Roussel’s process as an extreme use of reason to efface inspiration and fantasy (not to mention literary rhetoric and individual style). In so doing, Roussel’s language games place him (and us) face to face with what Foucault calls “the only serious form of chance in language”: not the surface play of signs, not what language is (à la Saussure and Derrida), but that there is language at all: “At the moment of speaking, words are already there . . . But before speaking, there

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is nothing.” Akin to Foucault’s archaeological explorations, Roussel uses the process as a laboratory to control surface variables in favor of the non-​place out of which language emerges: “Short of awakening, there is no consciousness. But as soon as day breaks, the night lies before us, already exploded into stubborn pebbles through which we must make our way” (EDL, 41). Archaeology gestures toward genealogy here, insofar as the order of things could have been otherwise. But it also mocks the moral imperative that we attribute to meaning, as if meaning were something we need to “find,” or make happen, lest our lives lack integrity.

The ready-​mades (Process II) Out of this profound but everyday encounter with chance—​I open my mouth:  and there is language—​the next stage of the process evolves:  we all speak the words we find. As Roussel describes it: “I was led to take a sentence at random from which I drew images by dislocating it, a little as if it was a question of extracting them from the drawings of a rebus. For example: « J’ai du bon tabac dans ma tabatière » gives: jade, tube, onde (water), aubade en mat (mat object)” (EDL, 43). From the series jade-​tube-​ water-​mat object, Roussel releases “a completely magical oriental night”: “Beneath the clear sky stretched a magnificent garden filled with seductive flowers. In the middle of a marble basin a jet of water in the outline of a gracious curve sprang from a jade tube . . . Beneath the window near the marble basin stood a young man with curly hair . . . He lifted the face of an inspired poet toward the couple and he sang a few elegies in his own fashion, using a megaphone of mat silver metal” (EDL, 44). Beneath the magical Oriental night that is released by repeating the series jade-​ tube-​water-​mat object, “there’s a profound repetition . . . It is not the lateral repetition . . . poetry”—​even if it is the flattest prose (EDL, 48)70. This more radical repetition pushes syllables—​ and memory—​ through the fissure of death so that they arise on the other side, similar and connected but different and, therefore, also separate (EDL, 58). Instead of the stubborn white pebble whose silence sets free the surface of words, Foucault imagines the full-​blown process pulverizing and detonating the material denseness of words, so that they “gush forth elements of identity, like so many minuscule sequins, which will be immediately plunged into another verbal body infinitely larger because it has to envelop the volume covered by the secret explosion of words” (EDL, 44). For Foucault, language is the radical repetition that passes into the void of death and recommences on the other side as poetry (or sequins). “It is this sudden void of death in everyday language, and immediately the birth of stars, that defines the distance of poetry” (EDL, 47). I contend that this distancing movement—​ through death to stars—​ is what Foucault thinks ALL language does, including the language of medical science. The author-​function “Roussel” can anticipate many of the major developments in twentieth-​century literature because Roussel’s process imitates the nature of modern death: namely, death has become first and foremost an event in language—​be it the death of God or a death like that of Terri Schaivo.71

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Consider how Foucault reads the character from Locus Solus of Martial Canterel (often taken as Roussel’s alter ego). After years of experimentation, Canterel discovered two elements, resurrectine and vitalium, whose combination reanimates dead bodies. Foucault reads Canterel’s chemical cocktail as an allegory for Roussel’s process:  it provides an image for the dual and expansive relation that Roussel’s language bears to death. What is resurrectine? A red liquid, which Canterel injects into the skull between the skin and the brain, so that it forms an interior envelope, Foucault compares to the repetitions, rhymes, and metagrams that fill the vertical depths of Roussel’s text. Into that red and rigid envelope, Canterel inserts a rod of vitalium, which, Foucault contends, “brings to the secret shell the vivacity of the moment:  the horizontal movement of chronological time” (EDL, 57). The result of Canterel’s two-​step chemical process is that the undead bodies relive a key moment from their lives. But while this moment is the same as life—​its exact and precise image down to the most minute detail—​it is not life. “The whole order of animal life can be overcome, and mites imprisoned in a tarot card become musicians singing a scotch chorus, but never does death become life again . . . the great leisure of Locus Solus, its holiday, is an Easter Sunday which remains empty. Search among the dead, says Canterel, for the one who is to be found there; he is here, in effect, he has not been resuscitated” (EDL, 87–​88). Canterel keeps these bodies in glass cells:  they are half-​dead and half-​alive, half human and half thing: “Neither belief nor concern for the positivism of science has forbidden Roussel to cross the threshold of resurrection, but only the basic structure of his language and the experiment he performed on himself of ending (finality, termination, death) and of renewal (repetition, identity, endless cycle)” (EDL, 88). What Bichat learned from opening up a few corpses, Roussel learns from opening up a few words:  there is a “one dies” (to use Blanchot’s phrase) that is both more everyday and more profound than the “I die” on which Heidegger and Sartre built their accounts of an authentic self or subject. Modern language (clinical or critical) “repeats life beyond its limit” (EDL, 73)—​to a degree and depth that puts the whole ensemble into question. To Foucault’s mind, Roussel’s process—​the “it” that reasons and rhymes in him72—​anticipates this historical shift in the modern practice of language. As Foucault said to Bonnefoy in 1968: “In any case, the topic that we frequently find in all justifications of writing—​that we write to bring something to life again, that we write to discover the secret of life, or to actualize this living speech that is simultaneously that of men, and probably, of God—​is deeply foreign to me. For me, speech begins after death and once that break has been established. For me writing is a wandering after death and not a path to the source of life. It is in this sense that my language is profoundly anti-​Christian, probably more so than the themes that I invoke.”73 For Foucault, knowledge and truth (no less than fiction) are marked by the cadaverous essence of the image, the positive function of the negative. Foucault contrasts this modern experience with the way that speech, in the ancient and medieval West, averted death by redeeming it:  the Greek hero dies young in exchange for immortal memory; the philosopher learns to die in exchange for uniting with the universal Logos; and the suffering of the Christian martyr is redeemed by the Word Become Flesh. “Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it

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encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors . . . where it can represent itself as already existing behind itself, already active beyond itself, to infinity. The possibility of a work of language finds its original fold in this duplication” (EEW2, 90–​91). Foucault thinks moderns can no longer believe our lives supported by the speech of infinity—​be it religious, philosophical, or heroic. Rooted in but “queering” the tropological space of language (billard to pillard), Roussel’s process discloses the space of modern language to be that of the library or archive, incessant jingles (“I have some good tobacco . . .”), or Facebook and the blogosphere. “The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer.” (EEW2, 206). Roussel’s language games bend the forces of reason against itself by using its secrets to trouble our limits, to disturb what we can acknowledge of the cruel optimism by which our intimate bonds bind us to others and to the world. Roussel’s experience of language is not murderous because of his neurotic obsessions or because of the pain surrounding his homosexuality. His language kills because writing/​ thought must sever itself from itself, passing through the valley of the shadow of the non-​true, in order that the fragmentary and fragile sequins of truth might appear.

Notes 1 I wish to thank Hofstra University for providing the sabbatical during which this paper was written. I also thank David Powell for his invaluable help with translation, and Kent Brintnall for his generosity in sharing resources regarding Bataille. 2 David Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage, 1993. 129. 3 Michel Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. 4 Michel Foucault. Speech Begins After Death: In Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013. 57–​60. 5 Hugh Silverman. “Literature,” in Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, ed. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale. New York: Cambridge University, 2014. 265. 6 Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1993. 40, 63. 7 Georges Bataille. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: State University of New York, 1988. 33. 8 Ibid. 3 9 Ibid. 7. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 22. 12 Ibid. 111. 13 Ibid. 43. 14 Ibid. 80. 15 Ibid. xxxiii. 16 Ibid.

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17 Ibid. 22–​3. 18 Ibid. 23 and 120. 19 Bataille’s Madame Edwardia parodies Christian mystical experiences, with God revealing himself as a female prostitute. Comments the narrator, “God figured as a public whore and gone crazy—​that, viewed from the optic of philosophy, makes no sense at all.” Stuart Kendall. Georges Bataille. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 160–​1. 20 Bataille. Inner Experience. 125. 21 Ibid. 94–​5. 22 Ibid. 46. 23 Ibid. 47. 24 Bataille suggests that “when the goal of salvation ceased to be motivating, in some cases, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts . . . People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies.” On Nietzsche. Trans. Bruce Boone. St. Paul: Paragon House, 1992. xxxiii. 25 David McMahan. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University, 2008. 220. 26 Georges Bataille. “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.” Visions of Excess. Ed. and Trans. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985. 137–​60. 27 Bataille. Inner Experience. 13. 28 Ibid. 68. 29 Jeremy Biles. Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form. New York: Fordham University, 2007. 54. 30 Ibid. 32. 31 Bataille. Inner Experience. 53. 32 Bataille. On Nietzsche. xx. Emphasis in original. 33 Bataille. Inner Experience. 24–​5. 34 Ibid. 27. 35 Ibid. 154 and On Nietzsche. 161. 36 Bataille. On Nietzsche. xxxiii. 37 Bataille. Inner Experience. 26. 38 Ibid. 28. 39 Kendall. Georges Bataille. 168. For more on the sacralization of sexuality, see Jeffrey Kripal. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Amanda Porterfield argues that American religion has moved toward embracing the body more generally; Amanda Porterfield. The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late-​Twentieth Century Awakening. New York, Oxford University, 2001. 40 Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982. 255, 258. 41 Ibid. 123, 133. 42 Ibid. 125–​6. Emphasis in original. 43 Ibid. 126. 44 For more on Blanchot’s critique of vision and the self, see the essay entitled “Speaking Is Not Seeing,” in Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation. 25–​32. 45 Blanchot. Space of Literature. 128. 46 Ibid. 99. 47 Ibid. 103. 48 Ibid. 100.

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49 Ibid. 98. 50 Ibid. 103. 51 Ibid. 104. 52 Ibid. 105. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 106. 55 Ibid. 158–​9. 56 Ibid. 31. 57 Blanchot. Infinite Conversation. 163. Emphasis in original. 58 Blanchot. Space of Literature. 222. 59 Ibid. 258–​9. 60 Ibid. 145; citing Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II. 13. 61 McMahan. Making of Buddhist Modernism. 218. While this is not the place for a full genealogy of religion and literature, this modernist literary sensibility ultimately reverbs back to change modern forms of religiosity such as Western Buddhism. For all Foucault’s care in the eighties to distinguish his use of the term “spirituality” from what he dismissed as the California cult of the self, high French theory’s use of the term spirituality is by no means removed from this popular terrain. Foucault himself was a fan of Eugen Herrigel’s work on Zen. For a blistering critique of Herrigel’s Orientalism, see Shodji Yamada. Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen and the West. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. 62 Blanchot. Space of Literature. 149 and 168. Blanchot reformulates this argument in his programmatic 1954 essay “The Great Refusal.” Infinite Conversation. 36–​8. 63 Blanchot. Space of Literature. 123–​4, 168. 64 Novelist Harry Mathews, cited in Mark Ford. Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2000. 232. 65 Simon During. Foucault and Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. 68–​73. 66 Leonard Lawlor. The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. New York: Fordham University, 2006. 67 Ford. Republic of Dreams. 99. 68 Ibid. 4. 69 Foucault thinks Roussel had decided to die when he sent the major part of How I Wrote Certain of My Books to his publisher in April 1932. To reveal the fact of the secret, for Roussel, was to decide to die; what rendered “the process” secret, and what makes it not fully knowable even when exposed, is death. This reading of Roussel’s “suicide” is akin to Foucault’s reading of Binswanger’s interpretation of the suicide of Ellen West that rejects its pathologization in favor of seeing suicide as an act of imagination. Michel Foucault. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry XIX, Trans. Forrest Williams. no. 1. 1984–​1985. 65–​66. 70 Translation is slightly modified. 71 In 1990, Terri Schaivo suffered cardiac arrest, which led to massive brain damage due to lack of oxygen. In 1998, her husband petitioned to have her feeding tube removed. Her parents opposed this course of action, arguing that she was conscious. The result was a lengthy legal case that involved removal and reinsertion of the feeding tube; multiple appeals in the Florida state courts; several suits in federal district court; as well as government intervention via legislation on both the state and federal level (the most dramatic of which saw then president George

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W. Bush returning to the White House to sign special legislation). Her feeding tube was ultimately disconnected in March 2005 and Terri Schaivo died about two weeks later. 72 Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Judith Norman. New York: Cambridge University, 2002. 16–​17. 73 Foucault. Speech Begins After Death. 43–​4.

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Life Escaping: Foucault, Vitalism, and Gertrude Stein’s Life-​Writing Sarah Posman

For many students and scholars of literature, Foucault is first and foremost the author of the 1969 essay “What is an author?” In dialogue with Roland Barthes’s text “The Death of the Author” (1967), it has urged us to look beyond the persona of the author and get to work with “discourse,” and thus to see the text as given shape by forces of history rather than by individual genius. As Foucault makes clear, the disappearance of the author was, paradoxical as this may sound, high on the agenda of modernist authors. In Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka, he notes, the work is granted the right to supersede the writer. “[T]‌he mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.”1 The way in which Foucault draws on a modernist literary aesthetics in outlining his understanding of the contingent phenomenon, that “man” is a figure created in the interstice of a particular mode of seeing the world (things) and a particular understanding of language (words), has often been commented upon.2 Modernism, for Foucault as for many others, amounts to the severing of language from life. Before the nineteenth century, literature was bound up with the very organization of public life; it served the Church, glorified the monarch, established the contours of the empire or nation, and represented the bourgeoisie. From the nineteenth century onward, and the “maelstrom” of modernity that era unchained, literature started turning in upon itself.3 Writing composed under the flag of aestheticism and the l’art-​pour-​l’art-​ cry valued unique stylistic experiment more than message. Rhetoric was vilified as dishonest and the alluring challenge to capture “the thing” in writing left little room for authorial personality. Modernist literature, building on aestheticism, further exploited the gap between life and language, packing layers of history in single words (Joyce) or composing nonsense poems (dada).4 The author, as Jean Paulhan saw it, became a slave of the doomed “terrorist” quest for originality.5 When Foucault tackles modernist experimenters, from Hölderlin and Mallarmé to Roussel, Artaud, and the composer Pierre Boulez, he admires their work for announcing the imminent dispersal of man:  form gets to triumph over meaning (ELCP, 68–​86; EDL; EEW2, 241–​244; EOT).6 In some ways this resonates with the trumpeting of “impersonality” by modernism’s key players. Of course, T. S. Eliot, when

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asked whether with his definition of poetry in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as “an escape from emotion . . . not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” he had in mind the dispersal of the subject, would have answered no.7 Even if we ignore what we know about its author, the bulk of that essay breathes a conservative humanist agenda. And yet, the imagery to which Eliot reverts to get the point of impersonality across sits uneasy with that of the ever-​expanding ideal library that is “tradition.” Chemicals eat their way into the library when the mind of the poet is compared to a shred of platinum that acts as catalyst for oxygen (emotions) and sulfur dioxide (feelings) to transform into the “sulfurous acid” that is poetry.8 In this instance, the forces at work in the text, which gives us creation in terms of chemical reactions and experimentation eclipsing individual genius, leave the author little agency. Foucault is the first to point out that the death of the author in modernist writing is easy to spot. In “What is an author?” he prompts us to do more than observe this point and scrutinize the alternatives, oeuvre and écriture, that have replaced the privileged position of the author. He concludes the essay by projecting a future literary system in which we would not be guided by the voice of the author or any of its surrogate presences, but by “the anonymity of a murmur” or language at work.9 Following Foucault’s prompt to do more than diagnose the death of the author in modernism, I suggest we pause at the metaphor of “death.” Is the gap left by the author filled by “life” in a different guise? If Foucault envisions an anonymous murmur out of which literature crystallizes, does he mean that language “lives”? And does he turn to opaque poetic language because, like Heidegger, he finds it opens up to “being”? Those are less bizarre questions than they might seem. Foucault repeatedly acknowledged how important Heidegger’s work had been to his own intellectual trajectory, and, via Heidegger, Nietzsche (EFL, 470).10 And, as we will see, Foucault’s project has both been criticized and applauded for either “recycling” or “reinvigorating” a Nietzschean vitalism. I argue that the question of Foucault’s understanding of life, which I address in the first section of this chapter, enables us to modify the escape from life by which we traditionally define modernism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, I disentangle the relationship between Foucault and vitalism before I look into how Foucault’s understanding of life relates to his fascination with an opaque modernist language. By way of conclusion, I touch on Gertrude Stein’s poetic struggle with writing about life. In an obvious sense, “life,” and the question of how to make sense of it, is philosophy’s perennial question. Yet the life that Foucault is fascinated by—​the bodies we manage and the systems we are managed by, in the name of “life”—​is an eighteenth-​century invention. In The Order of Things (1966) Foucault argues that “[u]‌p to the end of the eighteenth century . . . life does not exist: only living beings” (EOT, 175). This modern autonomous life, and the way in which it is entangled with the judicial, legislative, and executive apparatuses, preoccupies Foucault in his writings of the next decade, when he coins the concept of “biopolitics.”11 Biopolitics, as the word says, deals with the relation between life (bios) and politics. Yet the life that is at stake in biopolitics is not the traditional bios, or “formed,” communal life of Aristotle’s polis. Analogously, “politics” in biopolitics does not pertain to the cornerstones of traditional political theory, the questions of how to govern, further the good, and speak right. Rather,

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“life” in biopolitics refers to the living organisms that are our individual bodies as well as the larger constellations we call populations—​zōē or life in the grip of what we traditionally think of as “natural” rhythms (pleasure and pain, growth and decline) rather than morality (good and evil). The mechanisms controlling life are not so much a matter of good governance or justice, but go from statistics and demographics, over genetically modified crops and personal data protection, to end-​of-​life scenarios—​ issues that political organs are increasingly struggling to regulate. “Right of Death and Power over Life,” the conclusion to The Will to Knowledge, is the first text in which Foucault offers an extended analysis of the concept of biopolitics.12 Foucault returned to the issue in his lectures at the Collège de France, in the series Society Must be Defended (1976), Security, Territory, Population (1977–​1978), and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–​1979), but never developed his ideas into a book-​length study.13 In “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Foucault pinpoints the threshold of modernity by sketching a change in the relation between the processes of history and the movements of life, which he calls bio-​history, and the concomitant appearance of an apparatus that seeks to control life, what he calls bio-​power. “[W]‌hat might be called a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached,” he claims, when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle:  a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. (EHS1, 143)

Modernity, for Foucault, implies that life is no longer in the grip of death, be that in the form of an absolute sovereign’s penalty, natural disaster, or famine. Life, rather, replaces death as the determining factor. The economic and agricultural developments in the eighteenth century allowed for relief from the immediate and unforeseeable threat of death (bio-​history). At the same time, they made available the space for knowledge production in the fields of economics, agricultural theory, statistics, and medicine that in turn improved living conditions and made it possible to predict disaster and cure disease, or, in other words, to control life (bio-​power). If death, according to Foucault, embarks on a retreat from life, both in that people live longer and in that death becomes an increasingly private experience, without public presence, then life assumes autonomy. Politics is no longer what qualifies human life, something extra if and when death allows the space, but starts merging with life. “What is meant by biopolitics . . .,” Jean-​Luc Nancy explains, “is not ‘a politics about life or living’ but rather, ‘life determining politics,’ or else ‘the sphere of politics coextensive with the sphere of life.’ ”14 This implies that politics, as the domain of “making” and “organizing,” extends into the depths of life that were, “[f]‌or millennia,” closed to it. Because of that it also shifts in nature: the stress is on managing and maintaining life rather than on “forming” life. Conversely, our understanding of life changes. It can no longer be thought of as “pure” or “unmade” but becomes inseparable from the technological conditions in which it develops. “Thus,” Nancy concludes, “bios—​or life as a ‘form of life,’ as the engagement of a meaning or of a ‘being’—​merges with zōē, bare life, although such life has, in fact, already become technē.”15

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This shift, the reaching of the threshold of modernity, has important implications for living. People are no longer only subjected to external laws but are confronted with an array of norms, a set of changeable measurements, which they internalize and from which they derive what counts as optimal living. In The Will to Knowledge Foucault unfolds how jurisprudence, which in premodern times laid down the law, gets involved in what he calls “apparatuses,” which are heterogeneous formations that shape our lives or that, as Deleuze puts it, “mak[e]‌us see and speak.”16 Although these apparatuses condition us, they make us think that our life is an individual project and responsibility. The idea of life as an object—​something that can be “wagered”—​is what gets played back to us through consumerist slogans such as “It’s your life.” But it is not only on the level of the individual body that life assumes a presence. As mentioned before, Foucault, in The Order of Things, situates the invention of autonomous life in the eighteenth century. In that era the scope of critical thinking changes when Kant addressed the question of the conditions of thinking. Life can no longer be the background of universality against which relations of identity or difference are established. Life, rather “escapes” from eighteenth-​century critical frameworks which were grounded on “a determinate knowledge” of living beings (EOT, 177, 176). For Foucault, this act of escape implies two things. First, Life becomes an object of knowledge among others. Second, it objects to its status as an object of knowledge and the practice of criticism that it is subjected to. Life, vitalist thinkers start claiming, cannot be explained by mechanist formulae alone; life is more than an entity on which formulae can be applied. Nineteenth-​century Lebensphilosophen, from Dilthey and Nietzsche to Bergson, Foucault points out, operate in a climate of competition and exchange over what constitutes life, how it functions, and how it should be made to flourish. What is at stake in this nineteenth-​century Lebensphilosophie or vitalism and how does it relate to Foucault’s own project? What “being,” “Nature,” “God” or “Ego” was for previous ages, “Life” becomes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, notes Georg Simmel.17 Life, as the central concept of nineteenth-​century philosophy, assumes the function of tribunal.18 In the work of vitalist thinkers, a pure, strong, or true life force becomes the benchmark for dealing with epistemological and ethical questions. That, of course, would get tragically absorbed by twentieth-​ century fascist doctrines, which partly explains why critics have long been so reluctant to return to vitalism as a serious theoretical framework.19 Herbert Schnädelbach explains the foundations of nineteenth-​century vitalism. He shows that vitalism was fuelled by Hegelianism, with life as an anticipation of spirit, and by Schopenhauer’s account of the “Will to life,” which opposes the idealist notion of an Absolute and instead posits impulse and process as essential to life. In addition, the critique on a positivist intellectual climate, in which scientists were intent on explaining the universe by stripping it to its foundations or unearthing the past “as it actually happened,” furthered vitalist accounts of life as driven by irrational forces and, therefore, impossible to logically order and explain.20 Foucault’s thinking on biopolitics skirts a Nietzschean vitalist scheme driven by a “will to power” (FCF-​LSV, 202–​23).21 If Nietzsche approaches life in terms of energy and flux, then Foucault is first and foremost a system-​thinker. Yet, here and

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there we can spot fissures in that system-​thinking. An example can be found in one of the lectures collected in Society Must Be Defended. The lecture of March 17, 1976 deals with the function of racism within the biopolitical. Foucault shows that when biology gets inscribed in the mechanisms of the State, a development that started after Darwin and found a climax in Nazism, its “scientific” classificatory mechanisms work to divide communities and exclude certain segments of the population. Second, this biological perspective twists the old antagonistic political stance, what Foucault calls “the relationship of war,” into the idea that the death of the other (“the death of the bad race, of the inferior race”) will strengthen and purify life itself. Enemies, in other words, mutate into “threats” (ECF-​SMD, 55, 256). In this scheme, racism, embedded in a State apparatus, makes it justifiable for the State to kill. In rehearsing this point, Foucault pauses at his choice of words. This is what he says: “So you can understand the importance—​I almost said the vital importance—​of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill” (ECF-​SMD, 256). The phrase “vital importance” conjures up a Nietzschean struggle of competing forces, fought in the name of life, with racism having to align with the State in order to survive. What Foucault says here, or almost says, ties in with the way in which he discusses the techniques of normalization in The Abnormal. In those lectures he anticipates his work on bio-​power by venturing that the techniques and powers of normalization are not simply the result of the intertwining of medicine and jurisprudence, but “that a certain type of power” has taken hold of those institutions, using them for its own goals, and according to “its own rules and autonomy” (ECF-​AB, 26).22 On one hand, then, Foucault’s account of biopower conjures up the image of a malignant force or will. On the other hand, he gets criticized for cherishing the dream of a possible return to a pristine “free” or “pure” state of life, unspoiled by bio-​power. The problem of the relation between Foucault’s understanding of (bio-​)power and vitalism has led to diverging appreciations. Jürgen Habermas, for example, finds that when Foucault refuses to stake a postmodern normativity, he implicitly endorses a backward vitalism, according to which some kind of “pure” redemptive life force hides beneath smothering power structures. Whereas in Nietzsche and Blanchot, both important influences on Foucault, Habermas finds a (not unproblematic) normativity in the way in which they incorporate aesthetic modernity in their thinking on will to power and sovereignty, he can only trace echoes of such an aesthetic normativity in Foucault’s work on power.23 Those echoes, which he locates in Foucault’s fascination with the body, cannot build toward a postmodern ethics because, Habermas argues, they smack of a naturalist metaphysics that centers on the alleged subversive power of prediscursive referents: If Foucault’s concept of power preserves for itself some remnant of aesthetic content, then it owes this to his vitalistic, Lebensphilosophie way of reading the body’s experience of itself. The History of Sexuality closes with the unusual statement:  “We have to dream that perhaps one day, in another economy of bodies and pleasures, it will no longer be rightly comprehensible how [the rules of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization] were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex.”24

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As Habermas points out, Foucault defended himself against the lingering presence of such a naturalist metaphysic in his work. In a letter to Bernard-​Henri Lévy, Foucault makes explicit that there is no “primordial vitality” to be found underneath power, no “spontaneity of madness” behind asylum walls, no “purity of desire” beneath sexual prohibitions.25 Power, for Foucault, is omnipresent, and while subjectification through power is inevitable, it cannot be considered straightforwardly “bad.” “[A]‌s soon as there is a power relation,” Foucault notes in “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” “there is the possibility of resistance” (EFL, 224). Resistance, in other words, takes place within the mechanisms of power. While Foucault’s focus on immanence is incompatible with a framework in which freedom is to be sought “out of this world”—​in a mysterious life force that escapes materialist explanations—​it is not in conflict with vitalism, as Gilles Deleuze understands it. A Deleuzean vitalism will help us understand those instances in Foucault that echo a Nietzschean “will to power.” In thinking about vitalism, Claire Colebrook clarifies that we need to distinguish between two tendencies.26 One encompasses those diverse theories and doctrines that seek to protect life from disintegrating (as in protest against research into cloning) or running its true course (as in the pro-​life movements). The other is a line of thought that connects the nineteenth-​century projects of Henri Bergson and William James to that of Deleuze—​and via Deleuze, I argue, Foucault. Instead of seeking to preserve the sanctity of life, this latter vitalism builds on nineteenth-​century work on evolution and geological time to highlight the differentiating potential in life, to approach life as change. To think of life as difference implies not only that “man” diminishes in importance because there is so much more than human history. It also means that we have to rethink the dynamics of the connections and relations by which “man” has ordered the universe. Darwin, in uncanny anticipation of Foucault’s The Order of Things, already pointed out that “[i]‌f man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.”27 And while Darwin, for Deleuze, “had a false conception of vital difference” in that difference was bound by space as determining condition, it is his work, as Elizabeth Grosz shows, that forms the ground for the vitalist framework of Henri Bergson, in which vital difference comes to be associated with indetermination, the unforeseeable, the open.28 In his book on Foucault, Deleuze argues that Foucault’s thought culminates in “a certain vitalism” because the Foucauldian notion of power is in line with life as differentiation.29 Deleuze explains Foucault’s understanding of power by highlighting the term “diagram,” which Foucault introduces in Discipline and Punish. The concept of diagram enables us to see “power” not as a repressive system but as a neutral facilitating grid that triggers movement, both toward control and in opposition to control. “The diagram,” Deleuze defines, “is the map of relations between forces . . . which proceeds by primary non-​localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, ‘or rather in every relation from one point to another.’ ”30 As a grid or “abstract machine” it should not be confused with an ideological superstructure or economic infrastructure; it is what makes possible such ideological and economic constellations. In Deleuze’s words:

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[T]‌he diagram acts as a non-​unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place “not above” but within the very tissues of the assemblages they produce.31

Because power, for Foucault, happens before it “belongs” to someone, and in fact never “belongs” somewhere but always moves in order to change and connect, Deleuze concludes that Foucault practices “[a]‌profound Nietzscheanism.”32 How is this Nietzscheanism compatible with Foucault’s grounding everything in history, in what is real and practical? Everything in Foucault may be practical, Deleuze acknowledges, but power operates in a different mode than knowledge. Knowledge, Deleuze explains, passes through forms. That is what The Archaeology of Knowledge theorizes. Each stratum of historical formulation is characterized by systems of visibility and language—​seeing and speaking, things and words—​that are unique to it. Knowledge is there and can be looked at and read, dug up and archivized. Forces, on the other hand, inflect power. Power and knowledge do not operate distinctly from each other; bio-​history and bio-​power, as we have seen, are entangled. Yet power is what Foucault describes in his lecture on Nietzsche as something “behind” knowledge, “something altogether different something foreign, opaque, and irreducible to it,” instinctual rather than rational (FCF-​LSV, 203). Power needs to be conceived of in terms of what Foucault in Discipline and Punish calls a “microphysics,” with “micro” referring to a different type of relations; non-​localizable and mobile connections, which Deleuze relates to the concept of the virtual that is so central to his own thinking.33 Connections are “virtual,” in Deleuze, not when they are not real and, therefore, opposed to what is actually there. Both the virtual and the actual are “real.” Drawing on Bergson, Deleuze understands “virtual” to refer to those aspects of being that fall outside of established conceptual frameworks. For example, affects, those hard-​to-​ place emotional and/​or physical frictions, are virtual precisely because we find them “hard to place.” And Bergsonian memory is virtual because it is an ongoing function, not a storeroom or specific part of our brain but an integral part of our being, which we cannot locate. The Foucauldian power diagram is virtual precisely in that it is a “non-​place” or an “outside.”34 Such an “outside” does not refer to an exteriority, be that a divine transcendent realm or an alien intelligence. Thinking draws on speaking and seeing, which are historical formations, but it is also related to “the outside” in that the diagram of forces, “an abstract storm,” is what feeds the interstice between seeing and speaking.35 The notion of outside is important for Foucault because it enables him to move away from the bounded organism that is man. Thinking is not an activity that defines the self, that enables the self to synthesize and distill what he sees and what he finds articulated around him. Thinking, rather, “is carried under the intrusion of an outside that eats into the interval and forces or dismembers the internal.”36 When thinking is an impersonal interplay of forces, then the traditional man-​cogito of philosophy ceases to exist. This is what Foucault announces at the end of The Order of Things when he builds on Nietzsche to proclaim the death of man: “Rather than the death of God—​or, rather, in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it—​what

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Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer” (EOT, 420). What Foucault envisions, Deleuze explains, is a dice throw that will reassemble the forces which, in the modern episteme, made up “man,” struggling with finitude, and previously, in the classical age, “God” in infinity. And Foucault already points out which direction this reassembling of forces will take. Since the diagram of power always includes both the potential for repression and resistance, the increasing hold of biopower will go hand in hand with a resistance to biopower—​both in the name of life. “Life” in Foucault, for Deleuze, becomes the ground for a resistance to power. “When power becomes bio-​ power,” Deleuze explains, Resistance becomes the power of life, a vital power that cannot be confined within species, environment or the paths of a particular diagram. Is not the force that comes from outside a certain idea of Life, a certain vitalism in which Foucault’s thought culminates? Is not life this capacity to resist force?

When John S. Ransom answers those questions in the negative, in his article with the programmatic title “Forget Vitalism:  Foucault and Lebensphilosophie,” he misreads Deleuze’s understanding of vitalism. Precisely because both Foucault and Deleuze, in thinking about what the one calls “power” and the other “desire,” build on Nietzsche’s vitalist scheme, in which an impersonal “will to power” generates change, do they invest in what Colebrook calls an “inorganic vitalism.”37 Deleuze’s reading of Foucault is not nostalgic. Unlike Simmel, whom Ransom associates with a “fin-​de-​siècle ennui,” “alienation” is not a danger Deleuze warns against.38 And he does not champion an ethics of difference as an alternative to power, which is what Ransom diagnoses in the many deconstructionist approaches to Foucault. Differentiation, rather, is what the Foucauldian power diagram generates. The inorganic, for Colebrook, relates to error, death, and the unbridled development of systems, such as capitalism. Those aspects are what an organic vitalism seeks to ward off as destructive and meaningless because they hamper the organic development of the individual organism. Such an opposition of “good” organic growth versus “evil” chaos, Colebrook concludes, “is at once a normative privileging of the bounded organism over other forms of life and movement, at the same time as it is eminently theological.”39 Colebrook’s point is not that an inorganic vitalism promotes death or the devouring expansion of capitalism, but that it fosters resistance to oppressive forces from within the power diagram. This view makes Foucault’s appreciation of life as error, which Ransom uses against a vitalist reading of Foucault, into a significant argument to situate him in the vitalist tradition that Colebrook sketches. Importantly, the notion of error enables us to return to Foucault’s thinking on language. Foucault talks about life in terms of error in the introduction he wrote for the English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1978). Canguilhem (1904–​1995) was a historian of science, who, like most intellectuals of his generation, was influenced by Bergson, yet who took this influence into the opposite direction of phenomenology and the philosophy of existence, into formalism and system-​thinking. In The Normal and the Pathological he tries to grasp the specificity of life: the concept of life. Error, Foucault explains, is at the heart of the book, since

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Canguilhem takes the old question of the normal and the pathological into a framework that biology has borrowed from information theory: For at life’s most basic level, the play of code and decoding leaves room for chance, which, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something like perturbation in the information system, something like a “mistake.” In the extreme, life is what is capable of error. (EINP, 21–​22)

When Foucault stresses that this does not open the door for the myths and lies of vitalism, he refers to the vitalist mode he emphatically denied in his letter to Lévy. That Foucault, in reading Canguilhem, is drawn to the language of information theory is not surprising. Codes, like systems, are abstract machines that do not in any straightforward way represent reality. A code is, by definition, not readily transparent but dense. As such, it is in line with the modernist tradition of poetic language that Foucault admires, and in which he sees the possibility for “life” to outstrip “man.” In The Order of Things, Foucault focuses on modernist writing as a potential gateway to the “raw being” of language: Throughout the nineteenth century, and right up to our own day—​from Hölderlin to Mallarmé and on to Antonin Artaud—​literature achieved autonomous existence, and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of “counter-​discourse,” and by finding its way back from the representative or signifying function of language to this raw being that had been forgotten since the sixteenth century . . . Through literature, the being of language shines once more on the frontiers of Western culture—​and at its centre—​for it is what has been most foreign to that culture since the sixteenth century; but it has also, since this same century, been at the very centre of what Western culture has overlain. This is why literature is appearing more and more as that which must be thought; but equally, and for the same reason, as that which can never, in any circumstance, be thought in accordance with a theory of signification. (EOT, 48–​9)

For all the Heideggerian overtones of this trumpeting of poetic language, Foucault’s understanding of the life that language opens up to differs from Heidegger and from those thinkers, such as Agamben, whose criticism on Foucault’s work on the biopolitical comes with a strong Heideggerian inflection. What poetic language effectuates, for Heidegger, is the process of revealing the primary relation between the act of speaking and what is spoken. Instead of a name for processed content, poetic language offers the possibility to undo the grounds for thinking that, in the course of the history of philosophy, have been established (ratio, the subject, the will). In staging an encounter with language, in its capacity of not depending on logic, it reveals a zone from which thinking, and grounding, can start again. Poiesis, in Heidegger, “unconceals” man’s true relationship with language and the world.40 Yet, what Foucault does, Deleuze highlights, is move beyond man as the pinnacle of meaning. When Foucault calls for a return to “the raw being” of language, which he glimpses in modernist writing, he does not nostalgically long for a pure relationship with language that would trigger a new mode of living, severed from the logic of biopolitics. The

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similarity he sees between the autonomous status of language in the sixteenth century, when the material presence of language was “unique and absolute,” and the autonomy that language assumes in modernism serves the rearranging of forces within the power diagram; the way in which “seeing” and “saying” combine no longer lead to “man” but to “life.” Following on his twist on Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God at the very end of The Order of Things, Foucault relates the “shining of language” to the disappearance of man. The whole episteme in which modern man flourished, Foucault argues, accommodated “the shift of language towards objectivity” (EOT, 421). Whereas in the Classical age the order of language corresponded to and made possible the order of things, the post-​Kantian critical mode showed the system of language to be an object of knowledge among others. At the same time, and analogous to the concept of life, language reappeared “in a strictly opposite modality”: a literature entirely directed toward itself, with “nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being” (EOT, 327). This development of a language “which has no other law than that of affirming—​in opposition to all other forms of discourse—​its own precipitous existence” (EOT, 327) demands the questions of the dispersal of man. But how should we understand the processes by which concepts that brought about modernity because they enabled “man” to structure and control his environment—​language as representationalist medium, capitalist economy, and, ultimately, bio-​ power—​ exceed their function of control and acquire an autonomous dimension without falling into despair? Foucault concludes The Order of Things with the caveat that it is impossible to formulate a clear answer to these questions: “they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with the knowledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the way to a future thought” (EOT, 421). And the direction that Foucault’s own work takes after his writings on biopolitics is not, at first sight, one that stampedes away from “man.” If a modernist aesthetic had been an anchor for Foucault in The Order of Things, with Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and Artaud opening our eyes to the shining of language, and the mechanisms of normalization a focal point in Discipline and Punish, The Will to Knowledge, and the writings on biopolitics, then aestheticism returns in the third volume of The History of Sexuality. Only this time it is not modernist impersonality that is in the spotlight, but “the care of the self ” ’ in antiquity. What, for some, constitutes a bizarre twist in Foucault’s trajectory makes perfect sense to Deleuze. Where else but “in man himself ” can we liberate life, “since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man”?41 The notion of the self in Foucault’s The Care of the Self, Edward McGushin clarifies, does not refer to an essence or entity but, in tune with the understanding of the self in antiquity, to a set of practices.42 The care of the self that Foucault argues for is less self-​love than an agitated state of self-​reflexivity—​ souci, in the French title Le souci de soi, means worry more than tenderness—​in which one continuously checks oneself, and strives to attain a state of freedom by mastering oppressive forces rather than being enslaved by them.43 Power, in other words, does not unilaterally “produce” determined subjects; subjects are constituted in an ongoing struggle, for which “the self ” is the arena. Because bio-​power is what makes us, modern subjects, it is in the name of life that we will be able to “unmake,” appeal to freedom. As Deleuze puts it, quoting from The Will to Knowledge:

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Spinoza said that there was no telling what the human body might achieve, once freed from human discipline. To which Foucault replies that there is no telling what man might achieve “as a living being,” as the set of forces that resist.44

The concept of life, as it was made visible from the eighteenth century onward because “man” assumed a position of autonomy over death, has developed beyond control and has informed the very ways in which we organize and structure our world. That that is what happened—​life as autonomous construct, exceeding our grasp—​is for Deleuze what both his own and Foucault’s vitalism make us see. The “microphysics” of life functions by way of excess; no concept, theory, or system can be contained, no loop of coding and decoding is free from error, no “making” is final. In this sense, life always escapes. What modernism has shown, to maddening effects, is that language is not only a means for seeing and representing the world but that it has a materiality, a visibility of its own, which we need to look at rather than see through. Modernist writing problematizes representation and, in a self-​ reflexive move, makes writing deal with the question of what constitutes writing. Critics of modernism, faced with an increasingly insular field in a globalizing world, have tended to highlight the schism between modernist aesthetics and everyday life in order to salvage the former as a critical apparatus. For Clement Greenberg, for example, the “discontinuity between art and life” makes for a zone of critical reflection that can serve as a safeguard against totalitarianism.45 The self-​reflexivity of modernism centers not only on medium but also on the concept of identity. Rimbaud’s famous phrase Je est un autre resonates with Foucault’s approach to subjectivity as “a form . . . not primarily or always identical to itself ” (EFL, 440). For Gerald Bruns this figure of the “internal alien” goes to the very heart of Foucault’s thinking.46 In “The Cogito and the Unthought” section in The Order of Things, Foucault presents “the Other” as “a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality” (EOT, 356). When, for Foucault, the modernist author “assumes the role of the dead man in the game of writing,” language does not simply fill the spot where the author had been. Language, the opaque “shining” of it, is what confronts the author with “the Other.” What gets killed is the idea of an autonomous, coherent self, a “personality,” or “character.” Freud’s work on the unconscious, and the issue of how it relates to language, is an obvious point of reference in tackling the modernist fascination with masks or split selves. But the escape from a drab everyday life into either an underlying or a heightened reality, as proclaimed by, for example, surrealism, does not tell the whole story. Following Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, modernism’s “shining language” does not lead away from life, but, teamed up with a changing formation of “seeing,” which Foucault elaborates on in his book on Roussel, points to the inhuman, differentiating potential of life. Such an “inorganic vitalism,” I want to show by way of conclusion, is the pivot of Gertrude Stein’s modernist poetics. Of course, the relationship between things and words was a particularly acute problem for many modernist writers. What makes Stein into a particularly interesting case study is the fact that she highlights the way in which her intellectual development was informed by theories of evolution. In her late memoir Wars

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I Have Seen, Stein looks back on her days as a science and medical student in the 1890s. She reflects on how biology installed life as a determining factor, how it got entangled with politics (war and peace), and how its stress on determination ultimately disappointed: And I began with evolution. Most pleasant and exciting and decisive. It justified peace and justified war. It also justified life and it also justified death and it also justified life. Evolution did all that. And now. Evolution is no longer interesting. It is historical now and no longer actual. Not even pleasant or exciting, not at all. To those of us who were interested in science then it had to do tremendously with the history of the world, the history of all animals, the history of death and life, and all that had to do with the round world. Evolution was as exciting as the discovery of America, by Columbus quite as exciting, and quite as much an opening up and a limiting, quite as much. By that I mean that discovering America, by reasoning and then finding, opened up a new world and at the same time closed the circle, there was no longer any beyond. Evolution did the same thing, it opened up the history of all animals vegetables and minerals, and man, and at the same time it made them all confined, confined within a circle, no excitement of creation any more. It is funny all this and this was my childhood and youth and beginning of existence.47

Stein addresses her disillusionment with evolution in her literary work by turning not to a divine “beyond” or subconscious below, but, as may be expected, to the folds of writing. In an explicit sense, writing for Stein occurs at the intersection of “seeing” and “saying.” For example, Stein’s famous “portraits,” a genre we tend to associate with the visual arts, problematize description in that they do not appear to represent the person, or thing, portrayed. They are word portraits, made up of repetitive sentences or, in the later work, colorful short phrases. Not sketches or impressions, they stage a process of input and output, action and reaction, that the observer and observed tap into, yet which leads to an image that only illuminates itself. Less a snapshot taken of something by someone, a Steinian portrait is a thing-​like image, “perceptible but not decipherable.”48 Analogously, the odd language of these portraits does not cohere into a story by which someone makes sense of something, but serves to subvert the logic of description and definition. Especially the early portraits teem with variations on the formula “x is,” which effectuates an ongoing process of nonidentity. Be it through slight variations in repetitive structures (“One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming”), through paradoxical negations (“Sugar is not a vegetable”), or through meta-​comments (‘the difference is spreading’), Stein creates a thing that is always different from itself.49 And that, she explains in “Portraits and Repetition,” is what she, and with her the other modernists, mean by life: I said in the beginning of saying this thing that if it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving. This is what we mean by life and in my way I have tried to make portraits of this thing always have tried always may try to make portraits of this thing.50

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Life as “this thing,” for Stein, emerges when both “seeing” and “saying” transcend the one who sees and says. And because writing such as hers—​new writing or, synonymously, “American” writing—​stands apart from what we consider everyday life, she posits, in tune with Foucault, that contemporary writing aligns with sixteenth-​century literature, when writing was “out there,” as an activity and visual presence. As Stein phrases it in “What Is English Literature”: American literature in a kind of way is more connected with English Elizabethan than with later and that if you remember was at a time when words where chosen to be next one to the other and because in a kind of way at that time it was a bother to feel inside one that one was a writer because things were separated away one thing from another thing.51

“The bother to feel inside one that one was a writer” was an acute experience for Stein in the 1930s. In 1933 she published The Autobiography of Alice B.  Toklas, in which she mocks the notion of an individual poetic genius in having “Gertrude Stein”as the protagonist and writer of her partner Alice B. Toklas’s life story thus turning the book, and the life, into a collaborative project. The book’s unexpected huge success, and audience’s consequent interest in her personal life, sharpened Stein’s reflections on what it meant to write about life. Until her death in 1946 she would return to this problem, expanding the idea of collectivity in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) or experimenting with an elusive, changing twin in Ida. A Novel (1941). Two particularly interesting texts in this respect are Stein’s failed detective novel Blood on the Dining Room Floor, which she wrote in the summer of 1933, and The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, which was published in 1936. Stein thought the detective novel was the most modern of literary genres because in it “the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins.”52 As if to compensate for unfolding the story about her life in The Autobiography, she now composes a detective story in which nobody is doing any detecting. The absence of a detective hero implies that there is no free agent who can move in and out of social spheres and work toward a resolution. There is no one who embodies order, yet ordering-​forces are at work in the rural community in which the novel is set, and those point to a biopolitical understanding of life. There is, for example, the issue of immigrants being no longer welcome by nations and the problems this gives rise to: if they are no longer immigrants, then what are they? Second, there is the matter of whether it is allowed to die in certain countries. What does that mean for people living in those countries? Third, Stein touches on the issue of what makes a crime and whether that can change in time. Can you switch from civilian to criminal if the laws change? Fourth, she returns again and again to the issue of war, which can be the memory of the First World War alive in the community, or refer to the possibility of a future war. Legal and political discourse and how this affects living and one’s understanding of life is a strong undercurrent in the story. Stein wrote Blood on the Dining Room Floor in the summer of 1933—​a year that witnessed that well-​known string of political events that would lead up to the Second World War. “How to think about life?” was not only a personal issue for Stein, the unlikely

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successful autobiographer suffering an identity crisis, but also a collective issue. How to keep within the law when the law is changing? Who gets to decide what death means? The book’s conclusion, which of course isn’t a proper conclusion, can be read both as a reflection on the mystery that Stein’s text is, and as an appeal to the readers to share in Stein’s anxiety—​she asks them whether they understand, how they see the state of their collective being, presses them to remember, stresses that remembering/​seeing (saw) is what connects (sew), wonders whether “changing” (discharging, sending away) people (servants) isn’t wrong: Do you understand anything. How do we do. Do you remember. It made its impression. Not only which they sew. Thank you for anxiously. No one is amiss after servants are changed. Are they.53

If Blood on the Dining Room Floor is an anxious text, then The Geographical History of America or The Relation between Human Nature and the Human Mind is a dizzying exercise in nonidentity. What it adds to the portraits and the autobiographies is that it problematizes the looking at, and the writing of, life beyond the closed organic form. To that end, Stein distinguishes between, on the one hand, human nature, which encompasses everything that we readily recognize as “shaping” our lives, from communism and individualism, over sex, jealousy, tears and laughter, to chatter and aging, and, on the other hand, the human mind, which “lives alone” and is associated with abstract systems:  writing, counting, and money.54 Stein repeatedly shares her intention to “tell the history of [her] life” freed from the paradigm of identity, and, in a sense, that is what she does.55 What Stein’s writing effectuates in The Geographical History of America is not a pristine schism between human nature and the human mind. In repeating over and again that there is no connection between the two, while occasionally pointing out that “[t]‌here is always a relation between one thing and any other thing such as human nature and the human mind,”56 she confronts us with a fractured world, in which our everyday lives and impersonal systems and patterns are in constant tension. Both literature and the discipline of history have failed in getting this tension across because they have tended to solve or sidestep confusion. If history amounts to “the state of confusion between anybody doing anything and anything happening,” then the historian, Stein ridicules, “would rather not know than know anything of the confusion between any one doing anything and something happening.”57 The text is a “geographical history” not because it deals with (geographical) particulars but because Stein draws inspiration from the experience of sitting in a plane and seeing the ground beneath her stretch out as flat land, a canvass that unfolds instead of an environment to live in. As such, it is a history not structured by events (war and peace, death and glory) but inflected by abstract patterns, “wandering line[s],” invisible from on the ground, in everyday life.58 Writing, for Stein, was not an escape into formal brilliance from which the chaos of modern life could be kept at bay, as it was for T. S.

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Eliot. In writing, rather, Stein could sense life escaping, exceeding. To Stein’s sketch of the historian, we can imagine, Foucault might have riposted that since she knew better she should have plunged into the archives and explain the intermingling of things happening and people acting. For all Stein’s fascination with the mechanisms of history, there is very little history in her work, and where she excels in abstraction, she flounders when life starts closing in, as it did in Europe soon after she wrote The Geographical History of America.59 But Foucault might also have marvelled at Stein’s stating that “there are so many things which are not the same,” at her shining language brimming with error.60

Notes 1 Michel Foucault. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-​ Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. 143. 2 See for example, Gerald Bruns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Michel Foucault. Ed. Gary Gutting. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348–​78. 3 Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. 16. 4 Bürger Peter. Theory of the Avant-​Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, argues that the historical avant-​garde differs from the aestheticist/​modernist tradition in that it attempts to reintegrate art into life. 5 See Jean Paulhan. The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature. Trans. Michael Syrotinski. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 6 Michel Foucault. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Trans. Charles Ruas. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986; Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002. 7 T. S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen,1922. 52–​3. 8 Eliot. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 48. 9 Foucault. “What Is an Author?” 160. 10 In the interview “The Return of Morality,” Foucault notes: “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher. I started by reading Hegel, then Marx, and I began to read Heidegger in 1951 or 1952; then in 1952 or 1953, I no longer remember, I read Nietzsche. I still have the notes I took while reading Heidegger—​I have tons of them!—​and they are far more important than the ones I took on Hegel or Marx. My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I recognize that Nietzsche prevailed over him. . . . I probably wouldn’t have read Nietzsche if I hadn’t read Heidegger.” 11 Roberto Esposito outlines the history of the concept, discussing Foucault’s implicit frame of reference in Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 16–​24. 12 As Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze note, it was not at all clear in the 1970s that the concept would trigger such a vibrant line of critical debate across disciplines. See

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Campbell and Sitze. “Biopolitics: An Encounter.” Biopolitics: A Reader. Ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. 3ff. 13 On the presence of the concept of biopolitics in Foucault’s oeuvre, see Marc Schuilenburg and Sjoerd van Tuinen. “Michel Foucault: Biopolitiek en bestuurlijkheid.” Krisis: tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie 3, 1. 2009. 3. 14 Jean-​Luc Nancy. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. and introduction François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 93. 15 Ibid. 16 Gilles Deleuze. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hánd. London: The Athlone Press, 1988. 82. 17 Georg Simmel. “The Conflict of Modern Culture.” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1997. 78. 18 See Herbert Schnädelbach. Philosophy in Germany: 1831–​1933. Trans. Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 139. 19 See Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 20 Schnädelbach. Philosophy in Germany. 139–​60. 21 For Foucault on the notion of will to power, see his 1971 “Lecture on Nietzsche.” Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–​1971 and Oedipal Knowledge. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 22 Michel Foucault. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-​1975 26. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell. London and New York: Verso, 2003. 23 Jürgen Habermas. “Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again.” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990. 284. 24 Habermas. “Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again.” 285. 25 Foucault quoted in Habermas. “Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again.” 285. 26 Claire Colebrook. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. London: Continuum, 2010. 1ff. 27 Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex 1871, 1:191. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, as quoted by Elizabeth Grosz in Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 15. 28 Gilles Deleuze. “Bergson’s Conception of Difference.” Desert Islands and Other Texts. 1953–​1974. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. 39; Gosz, Becoming Undone, 26. 29 Deleuze. Foucault. 93. 30 Ibid. 36. 31 Ibid. 37. 32 Ibid. 71. 33 Ibid. 74. “[R]‌elations between forces will remain transitive, unstable, faint, almost virtual, at all events unknown, unless they are carried out by the formed or stratified relations which make up forms of knowledge [savoirs].” 34 Deleuze. Foucault. 85. 35 Ibid. 87. While Deleuze’s description in Foucault is too poetic to be of much help—​he calls it “a different dimension” or “an outside which is farther away than any external world and even any form of exteriority, which henceforth becomes infinitely closer”—​ his cue that we relate Foucault’s lecture on Nietzsche, in which he addresses the

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“something altogether different than knowledge,” to his 1966 talk on Blanchot, entitled “La pensée du dehors,” is helpful. 36 Deleuze. Foucault. 87. 37 The link between Foucault’s notion of power and Deleuze’s concept of desire is made in Jean Baudrillard. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987; Colebrook. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. 109–​28. 38 John S. Ransom “Forget Vitalism. Foucault and Lebensphilosophie.” Philosophy Social Criticism 23.1. 1997. 44. 39 Colebrook. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. 108. 40 Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 41 Deleuze. Foucault. 92. 42 Edward McGushin. Foucault’s Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 31ff. 43 Ibid. 32. 44 Deleuze. Foucault. 93. 45 Clement Greenberg. “Avant-​Garde and Kitsch.” Clement Greenberg. The Collected Essays and Criticism. Ed. John O’Brian. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 16. 46 Bruns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” 360. 47 Gertrude Stein. Wars I Have Seen. London: Brilliance Books, 1984. 61. 48 Michel Foucault, quoted in Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-​Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 398. 49 Gertrude Stein. “Picasso.” Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1903–​1932. Ed. Harriet Chessman and Catharine Stimpson. New York: The Library of America, 1998. 282; Tender Buttons. The Corrected Centennial Edition. Ed. Seth Perlow. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2014. 11. 50 Gertrude Stein. “Portraits and Repetition.” Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–​1946. Ed. Harriet Chessman and Catharine Stimpson. New York: The Library of America, 1998. 290. 51 Ibid. 220. 52 Gertrude Stein. “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them.” What Are Masterpieces. New York: Pitman, 1970. 87. 53 Gertrude Stein. Blood on the Dining Room Floor. London: Virago, 1985. 73. 54 Gertrude Stein. “The Geographical History of America or the Relation between Human Nature and the Human Mind.” Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–​1946. Ed. Harriet Chessman and Catharine Stimpson. New York: The Library of America, 1988. 458. 55 Ibid. 453. 56 Ibid. 394. 57 Ibid. 422. 58 Ibid. 387. 59 I am referring here to Stein’s translations of the speeches by Marshal Pétain, head of Vichy France. For more on this, see Barbara Will. Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 60 Stein. “The Geographical History of America.” 430.

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The Specter of Manet: A Contribution to the Archaeology of Painting Joseph J. Tanke

Michel Foucault’s essays dedicated to painting have fared poorly in terms of scholarly attention, notwithstanding his memorable treatments of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas and René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe.1 When we open up a systematic perspective on these occasional essays, however, it is clear that Foucault was engaged in an effort to define a distinctive, philosophical approach to works of art in accordance with the method that he developed under the name of archaeology. Foucault’s writings on visual art were the attempt to fashion a type of thinking that would allow him to analyze modern painting in terms of its historical uniqueness. Accordingly, what we find is that each of these essays seeks to highlight the distance that separates one set of cultural practices from another, and they do this by means of a careful analysis of the painting itself. When taken together, Foucault’s essays form an unwritten genealogical project, one that tells the story of modern art through the analysis of some of its representative cultural products. Essential to this claim is familiarity with some of Foucault’s final lecture courses on Hellenistic Cynicism, in particular the 1984 course Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: le courage de la vérité, in which he explicitly links the modernity of art with the self-​stylizations of the Cynics and, more importantly, with the traces of his lifelong preoccupation with the painter Édouard Manet.2 Taken together, these materials allow us to begin to define a specifically Foucaultian way of seeing. While in this essay we will be concerned primarily with Foucault’s treatment of Manet and its contributions to this project, it should be noted that the final genealogies of Hellenistic philosophy are replete with many important insights, such as Foucault’s use of the ancient modality of truth known as parrhēsia or frank speech, in order to explain how the nonfigurative and simulacral cultural products, nevertheless, manifest a critical capacity for truth. Additionally, this “Final Foucault” enables us to grasp some of the motivations behind the earlier works, in particular the archaeological method that he forged through his studies of medicine in The Birth of the Clinic, of the human sciences in The Order of Things, and his analyses of paintings throughout the 1960s. In this essay, therefore, I  explore how this method influenced Foucault’s understanding of Manet as well as assess archaeology’s potential contributions to discussions of visual art. I conclude by explaining how the different

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levels of analysis Foucault opened up might stimulate an interest in the metaphilosophy of aesthetics. In particular, I  demonstrate how Foucault’s insights might contribute to discussions in which aesthetics is brought into conversation with art history, politics, and forms of cultural critique that analyze the relationships between art and subjectivity. The basis for this endeavor is a recently published lecture that Foucault delivered at the Tahar Haddad Cultural Club in Tunis on May 20, 1971. Parts of this lecture have been preserved on audiotape and are available for consultation in the Foucault archives. Recently, with the aid of yet another audiotape, a more complete version of this lecture has been assembled and published in France under the title La peinture de Manet (FPM).3 It is generally accepted that Foucault left for Tunis in September of 1966 seeking to expand his intellectual horizons and to dodge some of the attacks prompted by the publication of The Order of Things in April of the same year. Before leaving France, however, he capitalized upon some of the celebrity from the book’s reception and signed a contract with Jérôme Lindon, then editor-​in-​chief of Minuit, for a book devoted to Manet, provisionally titled Le noir et la couleur. A fair amount of mystique surrounds this work, prompted in large part by Gilles Deleuze’s tantalizing references to a “destroyed manuscript” and easy familiarity with the project.4 Unfortunately, nothing as extensive as a manuscript ever existed, and any sketches compiled between September and October of 1970 have been destroyed. Foucault’s activities in Tunis reflected both his concern for the issues left lingering by The Order of Things, in particular those posed by the methodological assumptions of archaeology itself, and the desire to move his research away from the history of science and toward topics in literature and aesthetics. According to Rachida Triki, the benefit of Foucault’s time in Tunisia should be understood as threefold. It afforded him the opportunity to take leave from his early books and to clarify the theoretical issues associated with archaeology. This work culminated in the publication of L’Archéologie du Savoir in March of 1969 (translated as The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1972). Second, the cultural distance entailed in his trip abroad provided the opportunity for the investigation of the pictorial conventions of Western art. In 1968, Foucault gave a public course dedicated to the Italian art of the fifteenth century. This was a preliminary investigation into the pictorial conventions of quattrocento painting, with which he would have contrasted Manet’s work in order to signal its departure. The course was no doubt intended to deepen his investigation into the ways in which Manet’s work broke with the pictorial conventions that governed painting for nearly five hundred years. As we will see, he outlines these conventions at the beginning of his lecture in order to bring Manet’s rupture with this tradition into greater relief. Finally, Foucault became immersed in the local political struggles that were waged between university students and Habib Bourguiba’s Destour party. While I do not wish to discount the significance of the political events of 1967–​1968, I here concern myself with the first two points, as they are essential for understanding the lecture that Foucault gave upon returning to Tunisia in 1971.5 Given that the lecture on Manet had its genesis during the same period as The Archaeology and that it is the most significant extension of that method into the realm of visual culture, we must remain sensitive to how some of the positions

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developed in the later work inform the analysis of Manet. Not only is it essential for understanding some of the moves that Foucault makes throughout his analysis, but it also affords the opportunity to envision a project that Foucault once outlined, but never completed: the archaeology of painting. At the conclusion of the methodological treatise, Foucault, no doubt anticipating the book he was under contract to write, speculates about the possible development of archaeology beyond its use in the analysis of scientific discourses. He asks, “Could one conceive of an archaeological analysis that would reveal the regularity of a body of knowledge, but which would not set out to analyze it in terms of epistemological figures and sciences?” (EAK, 192). That is, can the resources developed to describe discursive regularities be applied to fields that are only loosely discursive? “Is an orientation towards the episteme the only one open to archaeology,” or might we develop analyses of other practices that adhere to rules but which are not sciences? (EAK, 192). Can one trace the regularity of a field that does not claim to be scientific, but nevertheless follows rules like scientific discourse? Foucault hesitates, ultimately responding in the affirmative by sketching three possible directions. One of these, anticipating the study of Manet, is the use of archaeology for the analysis of painting.6 As is well known, Foucault treated the visual with a certain amount of autonomy and thought that it needed to be analyzed according to its own “logic.” Speaking, therefore, of an archaeology of painting, despite some of the language that it borrows from archaeology proper—​for example, discursive formation—​should not be understood as an equation of the visual with the discursive. It is the attempt, rather, to use some of the notions formed in the analysis of discursive regularities to describe the stylistic patterns found in the history of art. Archaeology, in an aesthetic context, is a method of historical analysis that takes as its object a selection of major cultural products, those that have generated tremendous amounts of discursive investment, construes them as events, and endeavors to work backward to the rules, regularities, and practices that occasion their appearance. This method attempts to isolate the moment of rupture, that point at which painted events cease to be governed by the rules of a previous order and themselves generate new ones. The aim of this method is to draw sharp comparisons between two different historical periods and to explain how those differences play out within individual works. Concretely, this means that throughout Foucault’s work the hermeneutic question—​What does this work of art mean?—​is forced to yield to the archaeological question: What does this work of art do? Accordingly, the paintings under consideration are construed as events, ones that, like historical events, continue to shape the space we inhabit and must be thought and viewed according to the historico-​visual tapestry to which they respond. Archaeology thus allows us to watch as select tableaus displace the pictorial conventions of those that have preceded them, and to understand how they themselves supply new rules for the distribution of painting’s formal elements, how they are indicative of new relationships between painting and truth, and how these in turn necessitate changes in the comportment of both producers and viewers. Given the political nature of Foucault’s concerns throughout the 1970s, his questions about the extension of archaeology into nondiscursive domains of analysis,

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and painting, in particular, have remained largely unanswered. Foucault abandoned his plans to devote a book to Manet and, as the analysis of power relations assumed a greater role in his studies, reconceived of his approach as genealogical. We know, however, that Foucault remained fascinated with Manet throughout his life, mentioning his work periodically during interviews, and even in his final course at the Collège de France in 1984. There, he links Manet with a rather unique understanding of Hellenistic Cynicism. In his lectures, Foucault demonstrates how, far from being a singular event extinct with ancient philosophy, Cynicism is “a historical category that traverses—​under diverse forms and with varied objectives—​all of Western history.”7 This should give us pause, for the philosopher who continually pointed to the great ruptures in Western thought here attempts to highlight “the permanent existence of something that can appear as Cynicism across all of European culture.”8 Foucault’s “transhistoric Cynicism” presupposes, of course, that we do not look for any sort of doctrinal fidelity, but that we construe it as an ethical category, a way of relating to oneself, that is, as an attitude. Cynicism is, above all, “the putting in contact (la mise en rapport entre) a form of existence and the manifestation of the truth.”9 Cynicism is thus, for Foucault, a way of life that links, in a very precise fashion, subjectivity and truth such that the rigors of ethical self-​stylization (askēsis) serve as a guarantee for a subject’s worthiness of attaining and speaking the truth. Foucault thus implicitly rejects the traditional appraisal according to which Cynicism is understood as a philosophy of extreme individuality. For him, the heart of Cynicism is this ethical relationship that makes the stylization of existence the essential condition for the manifestation of truth. Modern art is accordingly understood as the rediscovery and redeployment of this ancient pairing of truth and subjectivity. For Foucault, this means that modern art justifies its claims to truth with recourse to the harmony that exists between the practices of life and the practices of art. Modern art, according to Foucault, should be viewed as a form of Cynicism in a second sense:  it redeploys Cynical strategies in its anti-​Platonic search for the elementary truth of existence. Like the Cynic who attempts to shun all that is inessential to human existence by stripping life down to its most elementary conditions, modern art manifests a similar tendency when it purges its various media of ornamentation and illusion. Modern art “must establish a real rapport with that which is no longer the nature of ornamentation, which is no longer the nature of imitation . . . but that is the nature of stripping naked (de l’ordre de la mise `a nu), of demasking, of scouring, of excavation, of the violent reduction to elementary existence.”10 This excavation of the elemental, characteristic of both literary and visual modernity, is increasingly prevalent from the nineteenth century onward. In this context Foucault cites Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Samuel Beckett, as well as Manet and the painter Francis Bacon. These are artists whose work can be understood as interrogating the reigning practices of artistic production with the aim of founding works that avoid the tradition’s excesses and penchant for illusion. This is more than Clement Greenberg’s thesis on modernity translated into a French idiom. For Foucault, this notion captures that tendency of art to “constitute itself as a place of eruption . . . from what in culture is not right, or at least does not have the possibility of expression.”11 That is, “anti-​Platonic” is Foucault’s way

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of describing the ability of art to transgress its own boundaries and impact culture at large. To claim, as Foucault does, that the work of art is a process of reduction is not to grant interpretive privilege to the work’s material elements, but to recognize that each work of art is inherently unstable and capable of overturning what has come before in the world of culture. Foucault is therefore calling attention to the movement by which an aesthetic challenge, like those posed by the Cynics at the level of bodily existence, moves into the more general sphere of culture. He explains: [T]‌here is an anti-​Platonism of modern art, which was the great scandal of Manet, and which is, I believe, the profound tendency . . . that you find again from Manet up to Francis Bacon . . . that you find from Baudelaire up to Beckett or up to Burroughs, etc. Anti-​Platonism of art as the place of eruption of the elementary, the stripping bare of existence (mise à nu de l’existence); and by that, art establishes in culture, establishes with social norms, with values and aesthetic canons a polemical rapport of reduction, of refusal and aggression. And it is what makes modern art since the nineteenth century this incessant movement by which each rule that is posed, or each rule that is deduced, induced or inferred from each of the preceding acts, finds itself rejected and refused by the following act. There is a sort of permanent cynicism regarding all established art in all new forms of art.12

These comments on the essentially polemical nature of Manet’s work reiterate a claim that he made in a 1975 interview, wherein he characterized it as manifesting a “systematic indifference to all aesthetic canons” (FDE1a, 1574).13 This is not to say that Manet was not engaged with the history of painting, for his compositional borrowings are legendary and the abiding influence of Spanish painting, notably that of Velázquez and Goya, is undeniable. Foucault, however, interprets Manet’s attitude toward these sources as fundamentally critical. Rather than simply incorporating them or even “referencing” them, Manet’s canvases transform their cultural valuations with a semi-​hostile gesture that pits culture against itself. And Foucault is most interested in charting how the repudiation of certain aesthetic decisions—​the handling of light, for example—​translates into larger, anticultural forms of criticism. It should be noted that Foucault viewed Manet’s work as providing something of the essential energy for the modernist undertaking, and he speaks of it at various points throughout his career as constituting a “profound rupture” with the art that preceded it. For him, Manet’s work is exemplary because it is an instance where a cynicism for aesthetic propriety translates into a critique of social norms. As we shall see, this is how Foucault describes the scandal produced by some of Manet’s more famous works: they exploded onto the Salon scene, overturning established conventions—​first pictorial and then cultural. The most significant result of this lifelong interest in the work of Édouard Manet is a series of public lectures, all of which were delivered outside of France and none of which have been collected in the four-​volume Dits et écrits. The last of these lectures was delivered on May 20, 1971 at the Tahar Haddad Cultural Club in Tunis, a place where Foucault would occasionally give informal lectures for the general public. The publication of this lecture is valuable for three primary reasons:  First, it allows us to understand why Manet was such an important figure for Foucault. As will be

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explained, Manet was, for him, the first modern painter, in that his work breaks with past visual conventions to chart a new direction for painting. Second, this lecture is the most extensive and explicit use of archaeology in the study of painting. It illustrates the promise that the archaeological way of seeing holds for the analysis of painting, and thereby enables us to begin to answer some of the questions posed at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge. Finally, this lecture brings into greater relief the archaeological dimensions of Foucault’s more famous discussions of art, notably, Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe and Velázquez Las Meninas. In general, it allows us to distill some lessons about Foucault’s way of seeing and the deeply historical type of vision that he was hoping to develop in the book on Manet. Before turning to this lecture, I describe the archaeological approach in a bit more detail inasmuch as it shapes Foucault’s discussion and helps to explain some of the turns that his analysis takes. The archaeological analysis of painting eschews some of the usual devices of historical research. Above all, commentary is to be avoided. Commentary, as Foucault understands it, attempts to find behind a given visual arrangement the true intention of the painter as a way of understanding what we find before us. It would analyze the painting as a way of recounting the latent intentions of the artist, or the implicit philosophy of his or her vision (EAK, 193).14 Foucault’s concern is that this method remains allegorical, setting itself up as that which is able to restore meaning by referring to what is concealed, implicit, or unsaid. Commentary depends upon constructing a level, “as deep as it is necessary to imagine,” upon which it is possible to reconcile all the contradictory directions opened up by a work (EAK, 24). This type of analysis is thus dependent upon unifying operations that—​and this is debatable—​defy rational presentation and explication. By way of contrast, archaeology “would not set out to show that the painting is a certain way of ‘meaning’ or ‘saying’ that is peculiar in that it dispenses with words. It would try to show that, at least in one of its dimensions, it is a discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects” (EAK, 194). In order to demonstrate this, the archaeologist attempts to isolate the existence of regularities, that is, common arrangements in the visual field, throughout a given historical period. If, for Foucault, commentary is theoretically problematic, formalism is equally suspect, for the reason that it also neglects treating painting at the level of its historical existence. While in The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault does not mention any of the aesthetic formalisms commonly used in discussions of visual art, his remarks about linguistic formalism make it clear that such methodologies, despite what certain commentators have written, are not what he has in mind in delimiting an archaeological level of analysis. Extrapolating from his critiques of linguistic analysis, one can say that aesthetic formal analysis, instead of describing a painting as an event that has already taken place, remains caught in discussions of possible combinations. As Foucault presents it, formalism can never explain how a cultural product occupies a place of historical necessity or how it relates to other products within a given visual formation. This is essential, for it takes us to the central aspiration of archaeology: that of accounting for the historical uniqueness of a given discourse or visual arrangement. Rather than working in the realm of possibility, archaeology wishes to show “why [a discourse] could not be other than

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it was, in what respect it is exclusive of any other, how it assumes, in the midst of others and in relation to them, a place that no other could occupy” (EAK, 28). While Foucault’s discussion of painting’s material properties looks, at first glance, like a type of formalism, his insistence upon treating painting at the level of its historical existence means that his analysis moves quickly from a work’s formal properties to a discussion of the historical factors that occasion their distribution with a given regularity. This, then, is how I  understand Foucault’s approach and what he means when he writes: “The painting is not a pure vision that must then be transcribed into the materiality of space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty meanings must be free from subsequent interpretations. It is shot through . . . with the positivity of knowledge (savoir)” (EAK, 194). Painting is thus understood by archaeology as a practical knowledge complete with rules, sequences, and transformations, which it is the job of archaeology to clarify and make explicit. In the first instance, archaeology attempts to show how the distribution of a painting’s formal elements occur with a describable regularity throughout a given period, that is, how they are to some extent predictable given the tableau’s place in the archive. This mode of analysis recounts how color, space, depth, lighting, distance, and volume recur consistently as a result of uniform rules of formation. In the second moment, the particular canvas is situated within the discursive formation with an eye toward those moments where it either confirms or disrupts those regularities. This portion of the analysis seeks to understand the canvas in terms of the ways of seeing that it makes possible or denies, the positions that it assigns to the viewer, the historical position required on the part of the artist to create it, the theoretical reflections that it gives rise to, and the transformations that the work inaugurates in the visible field. In this phase of the analysis, one looks for a break in one of these directions. That is, archaeology searches for an indication that a particular canvas does not belong to a prior formation but that it supplies the rules for a new one. In sum, when considering a work from the archaeological point of view, one attempts to open up a distinctly historical way of seeing by attending to the historical-​ visual tapestry to which it belongs. The archaeologist first describes the material properties of a given work, specifying, as closely as possible, how these positivities operate within a historical field. Concretely, this takes place through an examination of the distributions of lighting, space, and the position the work assigns to the viewer as an addressee. One then brings this canvas into comparison with other works in order to describe how it operates, either confirming or contesting the practical rules which shape its distributions. This priority reflects the archaeologist’s goal of describing how certain paintings depart from a system of established rules and themselves posit new regularities, as well as the conviction that it is possible to accomplish this type of description by sticking closely to the surface of a painting or discourse. “Rupture” is the term that archaeology reserves for these transformations in the practices that are responsible for the distribution of visual arrangements. It is appropriate to claim that archaeology attempts to understand canvases as moves within a game, provided that we keep in mind how certain canvases are events that fundamentally alter the received codes of culture.

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It is in these archaeological terms that Foucault describes Manet’s paintings as operations that de-​structure painting’s rules of formation, reverse its direction, and fundamentally alter the practices of representation in Western art. His lecture has the ambitious goal of illustrating one such “profound rupture” that Manet’s work opens up at the threshold of our modernity, and showing how this rupture, despite the chronologies that see Manet as the forerunner of Impressionism, finds its real legacy in twentieth-​century abstract painting. He accomplishes this by means of an argument that is, by now, well-​worn in studies of modernity:  modern painting is a departure from the Classical period in that it calls attention to its own construction as an object. In undertaking to represent that the painting is something that represents, Manet supplants a pictorial tradition that had long sought to mask its own materiality, that is, the fact that the painting rests on plaster, wood, canvas, or paper, that it is constituted by the limits of its shape and size, and that it struggles, for a large part of its history, to pull three dimensions out of two. Foucault, however, fashions this familiar story into a philosophical point by considering this tendency of modern painting as a displacement of the visual values of representation more generally, as he had described them in The Order of Things. When understood in the light of the breakdown of representation analyzed in this work, we can see how this movement by which representation surpasses itself is related to the broader intellectual transformations taking place within European intellectual culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this sense, “post-​representational” means that art occupies itself with its formal properties, that is, the very conditions of representation, in much the same way that Continental thought from Kant through Heidegger attempts to think that which resides outside of mental representation in an effort to either justify it with a transcendental account or critique it from the perspective of fundamental ontology. Manet’s canvases open up a visual discourse upon representation itself, much like the Kantian critical project, and thereby escape the fate of simple representation. His work removes art from the business of imitating and copying something exterior to itself, and, thus freed, painting occupies itself with that which necessarily resides outside of representation. There, painting discovers finitude and concerns itself with those movements of force that are at work beneath the type of visibility that can be fit into representation. And just as the European sciences will discover, throughout the nineteenth century, a new depth beyond representation, Manet’s canvases experiment with abstraction, exploring the force of paint, canvas, and gesture. In this insistence upon materiality that we find throughout the long life of artistic modernism, we see something of philosophy’s analysis of finitude and force taking a visual form. With Manet, painting’s materiality is brought into the frame and represented within the painting itself, and his work can, in large part, be read as an effort to find the visual means to indicate painting’s new relationship with itself (EOT, 217–​302).15 Consider, for example, the meta-​representational device Manet deploys in Le Port de Bordeaux (1871). As Foucault points out, certain painterly flourishes accentuate and incorporate the woven tissue of the canvas in order to bring one of painting’s most fundamental conditions into the tableau itself. The cluster of vertical and horizontal

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lines formed by the boats’ masts at the top left of the canvas is said to reproduce the web of intertwining fibers that were used in the canvas’s construction. It is, for Foucault, “as if the tissue of the canvas has started to appear and to manifest its internal geometry” within the scene itself (FPM, 30). This interplay not only enhances our sense of materiality, furthering the sense of texture in the painted image, but it also comments upon the actual material support that underlies this painting. The warp and weft of the canvas brought into the representation itself, thereby forming both the precondition for and, according to Foucault’s rather idiosyncratic reading, the subject of this scene. With readings such as this, Foucault shows how Manet’s work operates against, and ultimately displaces, the regularities inaugurated by fifteenth century. Florentine art, referred to by Foucualt alternatively as quattrocento painting or simply “classical painting,” is characterized, above all, by the game of evasion (jeu d’esquive) that it instantiates between the material limitations of painting and the demands of representative illusion. Given Foucault’s well-​known analysis, we can take Diego Velázquez Las Meninas of 1656 as an example of this interplay. Classical painting makes three substitutions that constitute it as representation and which are overturned in modern painting. In the first place, it seeks to make viewers forget the material place of the painting to the advantage of the representational space that it opens up. As such, the internal dynamics of classical composition are given over to the challenge of pulling three dimensions out of two, with orthogonal lines, spirals, right angles, and tonal shadings deployed to configure a rationalized, geometrical space. Second, classical painting substitutes a represented light internal to the composition for the actual light of the room in which the canvas is positioned. Whether it comes from a source like a candle or window inside the tableau, the interior light directs the way the painting opens itself up for inspection and disguises the fact that the painting rests on a surface struck by real light. The lighting thus represented distances the viewer from customary expectations and subordinates his or her vision to the optical logic of the represented scene. Within Las Meninas, the represented light provides the scene with its general visibility and helps to establish the illusionistic space in which the figures repose. As the light moves in from the extreme right of the canvas, it washes over the figures in the foreground, composing them into a fragile unity. This lighting enhances the illusion of depth in the painter’s studio, and, as we would expect from a canvas of the Baroque period, seems to break from the picture plane in order to draw the viewer into the scene. The lighting thereby enhances the illusion that we are there, posing before the painter within this representation. The combination of these first two elements, the substitution of representational space for the materiality of the canvas and the use of light to establish the viewer’s entrance into the scene, brings us to the third characteristic of classical painting:  it establishes, for the spectator, an ideal position from which to view the tableau. Quattrocento scenes such as Las Meninas are not intended to be viewed from any angle or distance. Indeed, their formal elements usher the viewer into a specific position from which to experience their full force. As one Renaissance historian puts it: “The perspective system not only creates a space inside the picture, but positions the viewer in the space before the painting as well, dictating a position out from the painting on

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a center line.”16 Foucault’s description of Las Meninas is again instructive: “From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers, have no power of evading:  it runs through the real picture and emerges from its surface to join the place from which we see the painter observing us; this dotted line reaches out to us ineluctably, and links us to the representation of the picture” (EOT, 4). One of the reasons that Las Meninas is so striking is that it exploits these three elements of classical painting—​the substitution of representational space for material place, the illustration of interior light, and the assignation of an ideal viewing position—​to a dramatic effect. As has been explained, archaeology’s central task is to locate and describe ruptures at the level of these regularities. Manet’s canvases work against these three facets of classical painting to reverse the quattrocento’s game of evasion. They accomplish this by creating, as we saw with the warp and weft of the canvas in Le Port de Bordeaux, a visual language that comments on the representative function of classical painting within the representation itself. According to Foucault, this movement ultimately destabilizes the representative function of painting and forces it onto a new plane. Foucault speaks of this in a number of ways, but all of his formulations indicate that representation is transformed, indeed “thrown off,” by the process of being forced to represent that which sustains and supports it. In some lesser known interviews, for example, he describes modern painting as manifesting a type of self-​knowledge (le savoir de la peinture) (FDE1a, 572).17 This is the movement by which painting’s fundamental properties form, at the same time, the starting point for and subject matter of an art that continually composes and recomposes itself through an exchange with what has come before it. Likewise, in an important essay on Flaubert, Foucault describes Manet’s paintings as the first to be “of the museum,” not in order to highlight the series of art-​historical references that populate these canvases, but to show how he paints “in a fundamental rapport . . . with that in painting . . . which remains open indefinitely” (ELCP, 92).18 This means that, for Foucault, Manet’s work is not simply composed of conscious quotations, as Georges Bataille once formulated it, but that it aims to overturn the regularities that distribute painting’s formal properties.19 Take, for example, Manet’s Le Bal masque à l’Opéra of 1874. At the same time as this is ostensibly a highly representational work, Foucault points out that it is characterized by a number of visual ploys that at once recall and suppress the space of classical painting. The figures that crowd the foreground deny the viewer access to the would-​be depth of the scene. The line of top hats near the top of the canvas calls attention to this impediment, repeating the white horizontal wall at the back of the room. The wall itself redoubles the grand horizontal axis that frames the composition, and when compounded by the vertical barriers on either side of the scene, reduplicates the entire frame on the inside of the image. All of these devices reinforce the viewer’s overall experience of flatness; however, armed with the visual expectations of classical painting and the purported subject of this scene, one nevertheless anticipates the three-​dimensional depth that these elements deny. Frustration mounts as we strain to see past these obstacles, with some relief granted by a conspicuous opening at the bottom left, where vision is forced to take refuge. As Foucault is quick to point out, this

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temporary clearing is accompanied by a “sort of irony,” for nothing is offered to sight except the feet of those present in this area. What is of interest to Foucault is the way in which these games conspire to displace the representational space of classical painting while marking this transition within the painting itself. After being confronted with the brutal insistence of the medium’s formal properties, we are given a glimpse of depth, just enough to let us know that the rules have changed and that painting is no longer structured around the illusion of three dimensions. As such, Foucault invites us to see how the scene’s fashionably dressed revelers function more as packets of volume and color than as figurative elements—​thus anticipating the pure use of color one finds in full-​fledged twentieth-​century abstraction. The displacement of the internal lighting scheme, characteristic of the Classical age, is nicely illustrated by one of Manet’s more infamous canvases, Olympia of 1863, and the comparison it evokes with its Renaissance prototype, Titian’s Venus of Urbino of 1539. Foucault calls attention to the ways in which the fictional lighting of the quattrocento has, in Manet’s Olympia, been replaced by the real light from the exterior of the canvas. Whereas the former system helped to hide the fact that the painting rested upon a rectangular surface struck by an external light, the latter exploits this real light, drawing attention to the materiality of the painting’s surface, the place in which the canvas resides, and the need for the viewer to negotiate his or her position before the scene. Thus, with the breakdown of the representational lighting scheme, and its replacement by the real light of the room, the position of the viewer is also thrown into question. While the interplay between light and the viewer is put to different uses in different works, it is, according to Foucault, important for understanding the scandal—​the well-​known Olympia controversy—​that greeted this work’s debut at the Salon of 1865.What Foucault endeavors to show is how the questions that this work raises about the relationships between representation, race, and gender are precipitated and intensified by the lighting of Olympia, to the degree that it departs from that of the Venus. While it may, upon first reading, be startling that Foucault’s presentation neglects many important historical details, including the fact that guards were stationed around this work to prevent it from being attacked by an outraged public and that it had an interesting life in the correspondence of Manet and Baudelaire, this reflects the methodological decision to attend first to the object and then move to the effects that it generates. With Olympia, the analysis is designed to show how “the moral scandal was only a maladroit way of formulating something which was an aesthetic scandal” (FPM, 22). While the title left little doubt that Manet had indeed substituted a Parisian prostitute for Titian’s goddess, Foucault insists that this substitution alone is not sufficient to explain the anger experienced by the art-​viewing public. The thesis he sustains, therefore, is that the content of the image is experienced as disruptive precisely because of the interplay of compositional elements carried out by Manet. In the language of archaeology:  Olympia demonstrates how the transformation of painting’s rules of formation compounds the affront contained in its subject matter, by implicating the viewer in the visual exploitation of its subject. The comparison with Titian’s Venus is instructive in this sense. The Renaissance prototype is coy about the act of representing the female form, muting its voyeurism

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with a lighting scheme that allows for a certain amount of discretion. Light enters the scene from the upper right of the room and, as it sweeps to the left, gently envelops the woman’s body. This lateral movement of light is the “principle of visibility” that structures the canvas and renders the woman’s body viewable. As the light performs this, however, it remains separate from the viewer stationed before the canvas. Thus, on one hand, there is the movement of light by which the body is rendered visible, and then there is the spectator, who happens upon this game. As Foucault summarizes this interplay: “if the Venus of Titian is visible, if she gives herself to the regard, it is because there is this luminous source, discreet, lateral and golden which surprises her . . . despite us” (FPM, 40). It is important to underscore that in Titian’s Venus the principle of visibility is fundamentally different from the position of the viewer. We might say that the spectator is largely incidental to this game by which the light brings visibility to the nude, and indeed the scene has the air of an accidental encounter from which it is possible to withdraw. This, at least, is an arrangement and an explanation that allows viewers to avoid difficult conversations about representation and visual exploitation, about art and commerce, and about what might be a prurient interest in the flesh of Venus. Manet’s Olympia, on the other hand, does not deny what is obvious: this scene has been shaped and this woman has been undressed for the viewer’s pleasure. Even more strongly, Foucault claims that we are “necessarily implicated in this nudity and we are, up to a certain point, responsible for it”(FPM, 40). This results from the identification of the viewer’s gaze and the external lighting used in this scene. Manet’s “violent light” strikes the scene directly at a perpendicular angle, reduplicating and intensifying the viewer’s gaze directly upon Olympia. The work thereby equates the viewer with the light by which Olympia’s nudity is rendered visible. This complicity is such that it denies the pretenses of disinterestedness afforded by Titian’s scene. Foucault explains: “She is only naked for us because it is we who render her nude and we render her nude because, in looking at her, we light her up, we illuminate her, because, in any case, our gaze and the lighting do one and the same thing” (FPM, 40). Whereas in Titian’s composition there was a distinction between the principle of visibility and the place of the spectator, Manet collapses the two. Manet’s manipulation of lighting changes the viewer’s relationship with scenes such as this, and forces open questions about sexuality, gender, race, commerce, and art. This analysis demonstrates how, as Foucault will contend as late as his final courses in 1984, an aesthetic challenge, one which eschews the inessential, harbors the potential to impact culture more broadly. The outcome of this operation is that painting is no longer coy about what is at stake in these arrangements: these are representations created according to the dictates of a market that has an interest in the female form. In this sense, we might even say that, despite Manet’s less-​than-​progressive attitudes toward womankind, this work holds an implicit critique of the role that male pleasure has played in the construction of Western art. One thing, however, is certain: Manet’s reliance upon the real, external light surrounding this canvas brings the viewer to an awareness of its material presence and to the play of light upon the flat, painted surface. This strategy takes apart the illusionistic space of representation and denies painting the ability to evade its own

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preconditions. This inversion of the quattrocento’s lighting scheme also means that painting is deprived of one of its more powerful means for directing the viewer into the representational illusion. Manet’s operations thereby force a confrontation with what Foucault calls the “tableau-​objet.” Speaking of the painting as an object is Foucault’s way of indicating that modern painting can no longer be experienced as representation inasmuch as the work’s conditions of possibility are present in the experience itself. Foucault is very clear that he does not think Manet “invented” nonrepresentational painting. Rather, he claims Manet inaugurates some of the momentum that makes it possible for representation to surpass itself. He does this by commenting upon the devices by which painting had constituted itself as representation for over four hundred years. The de-​ structuring to which he subjects painting’s rules of formation take the form of a meta-​ representational presentation of painting’s materiality. By forcing representation into this consideration of its own conditions, Manet pushes painting into that place where it can occupy itself with itself. His folding back of painting upon itself, considered at the archaeological level, is the rupture that opens the possibility for the experimentation in abstraction that we find throughout the twentieth century; because Manet, rather than marshaling the formal conditions of painting into the representation of something exterior, brings these elements into a self-​relation that surpasses any interpretive approach to his canvases. Indeed, the form of painting that no longer sets itself up as a mirror of the world, but instead as something self-​reflexive, material, and finite, requires an approach suitable for the analysis of power relationships as much as philosophical aesthetics. To conclude, let me just indicate some of the challenges that Foucault’s archaeological approach to art in general, and his analysis of Manet in particular, raise for the philosophy of art. In the first instance, his work is a reminder of the need for philosophers to, as some art historians put it, “develop an eye.” In many ways it is impressive how Foucault remains faithful to the goal of presenting a careful description of a given visual arrangement, even as he outlines a large and debatable thesis about the history and direction of Western painting. It is likewise startling the degree to which philosophy, even those methods that espouse close description, too often take refuge in the worst forms of speculation. Foucault demonstrates at the level of his own practice how sticking directly with what is given need not be an impediment to creative, philosophical labor. His analysis of Manet indicates how careful observation can be used to generate theory and how reflection can in turn sharpen observation. Foucault’s work, therefore, might serve as a starting point for a renewed interest in metaphilosophical conversations in the philosophy of art, one that would take its starting point from the analysis of individual works of art. Indeed, I think that it is precisely the absence of a heavy theoretical apparatus that has allowed Foucault’s discussions to exercise such a strong hold over the scholarly imagination since the middle of the 1960s. Not only can this engender a rapprochement between aesthetics and art history, as Gary Shapiro’s work indicates, but it can also facilitate the development of a more dynamic theory of vision—​one that is sensitive to the shifting boundaries that are recomposed as we see and say.

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Foucault’s attentiveness to the historicality of the work of art is obviously what differentiates his approach from other projects carried out within the discipline of philosophy throughout the twentieth century. The goal for Foucault was always, I suggest, to have history become part of the field of vision, to actively integrate it into the way in which a given work presents itself. This form of historical seeing, however, is not one that aims to construct a narrative about the development of artistic styles or movements. It is not a seeing that locates sameness and similarity across different historical periods. It is a seeing that attempts to see differently. Accordingly, this seeing introduces comparisons to work against the ready-​made unities that our historical accounts take for granted. This means, as we see from many of Foucault’s discussions, that analysis takes as its point of departure a painted event that transforms one or more of art’s historical formations. It proceeds by seeking understanding, and it attempts to find this in a history of techniques and distributions, as they are manifest in cultural products. Archaeology attempts to enrich the visual experience, along with the reflections that a work might generate, by placing it in contact with those that bring it into greater relief, that is, those from whose rules of formation it departs. Of course, neither of these points should be taken as an indication that the philosophical discussion of art collapses into art history. The dynamic and interactive conception of historical “seeing-​thinking” that I  am proposing suggests that the philosophy of art might, by taking its cue from some of Foucault’s final investigations, develop itself as an askēsis. This means that a method of philosophical analysis that immerses itself in the history of art does so with the aim of seeing better, that is, of constituting a subject who is able to see more than traditional analytical schemes have allowed. Retrieving this ancient conception, wherein philosophy is construed as an exercise, promises to forefront questions of subjectivity in the reception and discussion of works of art. Much as archaeology was used by Foucault to articulate how a given arrangement interpellates its viewer, most notably with Las Meninas and Manet’s Olympia, the rehabilitation of askēsis will open the way for much more forthright discussions of art, truth, and the politics of viewership. It seems to me that the very ancient question about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, currently undergoing a renaissance, thanks to the work of Jacques Rancière, should be posed on a local scale, and that archaeology as Foucault developed it has the ability to make us more sensitive to the ways in which different visual compositions coerce from viewers different forms of participation and subjectivity. Take, for example, three variations on Las Meninas and their different ways of situating the viewer. With Diego Velázquez’s composition, the viewer’s position is marked out in advance, implied by the gazes of these figures and situated before the center of the canvas at an ideal distance of about five feet. In Picasso’s reworkings of this scene, this “deployment of subjectivity” has been taken apart, subjected to a number of critical reinterpretations that leave the viewer free to negotiate his or her own relationship with the scene. There is no ideal position from which to view Picasso’s canvases, and part of what we are grappling with before such scenes is the visual freedom by which each change of position simultaneously reveals and hides something new. Eve Sussman’s video installation 89 Seconds at Alcázar from the 2004 Whitney Biennial

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remains, for me, deeply ambiguous in terms of its politics of viewership. On the one hand, the twelve-​minute video loop allows the viewer unprecedented visual access to the private spaces of the Alcazar palace of Velázquez’s painting. The camera circles slowly in 360 degrees, showing the room from the perspective of each of Velázquez’s characters, thereby democratizing a space previously restricted to royal personages and their attendants.20 At the same time as it does this, however, the camera, and thus the viewer’s regard, remains firmly in Sussman’s control. What we see unfolds according to a preordained logic: the viewer is constituted by Sussman’s choice of angles, lighting, and pacing. In fact, the whole experience is mesmerizing to the extent that the viewer’s will is surrendered to Sussman’s direction. Writing about culture in this way would mean that images, objects, installations, and actions are not simply subordinated to ready-​made political frameworks or interpreted according to the expressed political intentions of a given artist; such an approach would consider the politics of a work according to the interplay of its formal arrangements and the viewers before it. This means that aesthetic critique would do well to include a moment of political analysis, one that is attentive to how a scene’s formal properties implicate and, to some extent, shape the viewer before it. It would mean that aesthetic reflection is also, in part, the historico-​ontological critique of ourselves.

Notes 1 There are, of course, some notable exceptions. Gary Shapiro. Archaeology of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. University of Chicago Press, 2003, is an impressive effort to present Foucault’s writings on art as, on the one hand, inflected by Nietzschean questions about the historicality of vision and, on the other, interventions within the twentieth-​century discussions of aesthetics. Gilles Deleuze. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. University of Minnesota Press, 1988, was the first to document the visual thrust of the philosopher’s work in general and archaeology in particular. John Rachman. “Foucault’s Art of Seeing.” October 44 (1988): 89–​117, follows Deleuze’s reading in order to demonstrate how Foucault’s sensitivity to the complexity of vision informs the images that populate his own written works. Likewise, James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette note that Foucault’s work displays a certain “visual piety” that they attribute to French Catholic culture and the philosopher’s interest in the history of religious practice and ritual; James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette. “Introduction: The Enduring Problem: Foucault, Theology and Culture.” Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. Ed. James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. 1–​16. 2 I have commented extensively upon this former topic in Joseph J. Tanke. “Cynical Aesthetics: A Theme from Michel Foucault’s 1984 Lectures at the Collège de France.” Philosophy Today. 46. 2002. 170–​84. For this essay, I focus on the recently published Manet lecture as a way of understanding what I take to be some of the useful features of archaeology for the analysis and discussion of visual art; however, I quote from an unpublished transcription of this final course, inasmuch as it helps to reconstruct Foucault’s abiding interest in Manet. The lectures for Le Gouvernement de soi et des

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autres: le courage de la vérité were delivered at the Collège de France from February 1, 1984 to March 28, 1984. Foucault gave a total of nine lectures, which were transcribed from audiotapes by Michael Behrent. Each lecture is paginated individually, and the numbers cited refer to pages within each lecture. I am grateful to James Bernauer for making this material available to me. A copy of this transcript is available for consultation in the O’Neill Library at Boston College. All translations of this text are my own. 3 All translations of this text are my own. 4 Deleuze. Foucault. 58. 5 For accounts of Foucault’s political involvements in Tunisia, see Rachida Triki. “Foucault en Tunisie.” La peinture de Manet. Ed. Maryvonne Saison. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004. 61–​3; also, David Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography. New York: Pantheon, 1993. 190–​3, 203–​8; also, Didier Eribon. Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Harvard University Press, 1991. 192–​5. 6 The other two possible analyses that Foucault mentions are (1) the archaeology of “sexuality,” aimed at showing how all manifestations of sexuality, verbal and nonverbal alike, are governed by practices that control, limit, and proscribe its appearance. This analysis, which Foucault terms “ethical,” would show how values, prohibitions, and transgressions enter into the discursive field. (2) An archaeology of political knowledges and behaviors inasmuch as one can describe how bodies of knowledge, strategies of action, and political theories enter the field of enunciation. According to Foucault, such an analysis would not attempt to reconstitute the political consciousness of political actors or groups, but describe the formations and transformations of knowledges, discourses, and strategies in their reciprocal relationships. (EAK, 192–​95). 7 Michel Foucault. February 29, 1984. Lecture at the Collège de France. 38. 8 Foucault. Lecture. 45. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 61. 11 Ibid. 62. 12 Ibid. 62–​3. 13 All translations of this text are my own. 14 “In analyzing a painting, one can reconstitute the latent discourse of the painter; one can try to recapture the murmur of his intentions, which are not transcribed into words, but into lines, surfaces, and colours; one can try to uncover the implicit philosophy that is supposed to form his view of the world.” 15 For Foucault’s account of the displacement of the values of representation within European intellectual culture, see the chapters “The Limits of Representation” and “Labor, Life, Language.” 16 John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. 205. 17 In this interview, Foucault is discussing the painter Paul Klee; however, his comments about modern painting more generally are indicative of the trajectory that he views as stemming from the work of Manet. 18 This essay originally served as the preface to the German translation of The Temptation of Saint Anthony; it was published without a title in Gustave Flaubert. Die Versuchung des Heiligen Antonius. Francfort: Insel Verlag, 1964. It was published in French under the title “Un ‘fantastique’ de bibliothèque.” Cahiers

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de la compagnie Madeleine Renaud-​Jean-​Louis Barrault. 59, 1967. 7–​30. This essay was republished in 1970 with alterations by Foucault. It appeared as Michel Foucault. “La bibliothèque fantastique.” Flaubert. Ed. Raymonde Debray-​Genette. Paris: Firmin-​Didot, M. Didier, 1970. 171–​90. The essay is collected as Michel Foucault (Sans titre), in FDE1a, 321–​53. This version incorporates Foucault’s revisions into the essay by means of footnotes. I have modified Bouchard’s translation slightly. 19 Georges Bataille. Manet. Paris: Editions d’Art Albert Skira S.A., 1994. 20 I should note that it is unusual for a tableau of Velázquez’s period to feature someone who is in essence a craftsperson, albeit one who was held in high esteem by King Philip, on par with members of the royal family. In the realm of historical anecdote, we know that after its completion, Las Meninas was taken directly from Velázquez’s studio and sequestered in Philip’s private study, where very few spectators were permitted to view it during his lifetime. Until the time of his death, Philip was, in the estimation of one historian, “virtually the only person allowed to gaze upon it.” See Ana Martín Moreno. Las Meninas. Trans. Nigel Williams. Madrid: ALDEASA, 2003. 28. The force of Sussman’s installation resides not only in its magisterial handling of light, color, timing, and costume, but in providing viewers with intimate access to a space that had previously been restricted.

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The Hermaphroditic Image: Modern Art, Thought, and Expérience in Michel Foucault Nicole Ridgway

In his catalogue essay on the French painter Gérard Fromanger written to accompany an exhibition in 1975, Foucault celebrates the way in which Fromanger volatizes the image, drawing attention to the limits of form, medium, art, and the self. Foucault variously names these paintings “transit images” and “hermaphrodite images,” and, as in so much of his writing on art, the paintings demand of him the cultivation of a particular kind of experience. Art, certainly as it appears in Foucault’s occasional essays, I will argue, provides one possibility of an encounter with, and opportunity for, thought. This thought is neither coterminous with subjects, nor universally enacted by subjects, but is an event in which knowing subjects are rendered foreign to themselves. In this way, art may push us to grow our capacities “disconnected from the intensification of power relations,” through cultivating our “legitimate strangeness,” if only as fragile, uncertain, and transitory events always within a wider political context, and the politics of norms (EEW1, 316).1

Art in Foucault Foucault writes and speaks often of escaping philosophy, of starting out from philosophy, bringing it into play, questioning it, and going back into it. This necessary lack of deference, these exits and entrances, make “philosophy permeable” and make the walls between philosophy and nonphilosophy derisory (EPPC, 313). One cannot get beyond deference within philosophy, he asserts, by refining it through commentary. “No. It is by opposing it with a sort of astonished, joyful stupidity, a sort of uncomprehending burst of laughter, which, in the end, understands, or in any case shatters. Yes . . . it shatters rather than understands” (EPPC, 312). Shattering is immanent to, is the condition of possibility for, thinking again. Exercising oneself in thought is a “losing one’s way for the subject of knowledge,” a losing one’s way as the price of self-​transformation (ECF-​HOS, xxiv).2 Thought is possible only where one experiences displacement from oneself and one’s actions, and

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displacement in turn allows thought as an inventional moment, in which objects and actions, forms and relations, are problematized, opening up the present to the possible. Only by creating the present as a problem, a problem that cannot be easily resolved, can the work of thought begin and with it the freedom “to think differently” (penseé autrement) (EHS2, 9).3 What haunts all of Foucault’s work is his preoccupation with the “act of engendering thinking in thought” (to borrow Deleuze’s phrase). Or, more precisely, how thinking becomes possible in thought again. In this, in all sorts of ways, art appears. Art is always, for Foucault, a question of “how thought proceeds.”4 In the “critical tradition” in Western philosophy, as opposed to the great tradition of the “analytics of truth,” problematization provokes thought by helping to create conditions of difficulty and uncertainty, by “making facile gestures difficult,” by provoking reflection on the virtual fractures of the present (EFS, 170 and 155). Problematization, insofar as it attempts to return points of fixity and immobilization to mobility and possibility, could be characterized as a “moral” endeavor in a uniquely Foucauldian sense. In an interview with Michael Bess, in San Francisco in 1980, Foucault, somewhat strangely and ironically, asserts that he is a moralist because he follows three principles always:  “refusal, curiosity, innovation.”5 If power tends to render things as fixed and presents them to us as good and true, then a moralist must refuse the self-​evident, must enact an acute curiosity for what exists, and must seek out, must imagine, and inaugurate possibility. In making apparently apodictic conditions of possibility problematic, a moralist does not provide theories with justifications, or programs for action, or engage in the “ludicrous philosophical enterprise” of telling others where their truth is or making a case against it.6 Rather, to provoke differential capacities, to flush out thought, a moralist gives “density” to what is immediately present, to what is too close and too visible.7 And in this the moralist and her auditor might, for a moment, imagine how to become, again, what they never were. How is it that Foucault teaches himself to think? In his early work he often starts with art, literature, and music; and he often doubles, in his thinking and style of writing, the artworks that he thinks with. And art, when it appears, does not function as an example to illustrate philosophical concepts or as a modeling/​metonymy of a larger analysis. It does not appear as the unthought of philosophy, or as philosophy itself (as connaissance, although it is a form of savoir); rather it appears as central to Foucault’s practice of astonishment and ethic of discomfort: it is both a flash of foreignness within and discomposure of established thinking. His philosophical astonishment traces “some indefatigable expectation of a history that is other,” and he finds, in art, events of thought yet to come.8 Thinking alongside art, Foucault thinks, sees thought and art as experimenting with, and transfiguring, actuality. Experimentation, in art as in thought, generates lines of force that reveal the outside of historical determinations—​ contingencies presented as necessities. Art holds a strategic place in terms of the critical distance it allows into philosophy, history, and politics. For Foucault, critical thought begins in nonrecognition, and art is one place that forces disturbance and defamiliarization. It is in the context of his thinking with art and alongside “mad” and “marginalized” philosophies that Foucault’s “critical ethos” develops.9 The modern art Foucault chooses to write about, the art he

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is attracted to and that gives him pleasure, does not exist in an autonomous realm or provide a critique of modernity. Rather it puts into practice the ethos of critique that he argues characterizes modernity. As a mode of critical reflection, it confronts, disturbs, and experiments with the limits of the present.

Hermaphrodite images Before turning to Foucault’s essay written for Fromanger’s exhibition, I would like to turn to Foucault’s explorations in the archive, pronouncements in the lecture hall, and in his writing, nearly simultaneous with this essay, the modern figure of the hermaphrodite as a “monster” that emerges in the late nineteenth century. When Foucault writes of “hermaphrodite images” that mirror the frenzied freedom of images in the brief period before modernist art purifies itself, holds itself aloof from the image, and turns in on itself formally, and before photography loses its insolent freedom and unscrupulous fakery to become evidentiary and referential, we should take note. The only commentator to address this and not take the analogy as self-​ evident is Gary Shapiro in his Archaeologies of Vision:  Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. He argues that the hermaphrodite is a new figure of “visual desire” for which Foucault provides a genealogy.10 My understanding of what hermaphrodite images are is somewhat different. As I argue below, it is my contention that they have less to do with figures of desire than with categories and experiences. I am using Foucault’s brief comments on the figure of the hermaphrodite in the lecture course of 1974–​1975 on the subject of the “Abnormal” and Foucault’s introduction to Herculine Barbin’s memoirs in 1980, originally published in 1978 (the transvestite is not, sadly, addressed in any detail in the extant work), which addresses the entangled questions of art, freedom, and the political. In the 1974–​1975 course, Foucault makes it clear that he wants to shift from an analysis of representations to one that starts from apparatuses of power (dispositifs du pouvoir): the tactics and strategies of power in the forces of normalization. The new figure of the “monster” that appears at the end of the eighteenth century, and is at work by the nineteenth century, “is elaborated, or begins to be elaborated, around the question of hermaphrodites.”11 Certainly, Foucault makes clear that the hermaphrodite had been understood to be monstrous in previous periods; this is, however, very different from the abnormal monster who emerges in modern Europe. A hermaphrodite is now understood to be defective, a monstrosity born of eccentricity, of errors of nature. These “stammerings of nature” are, however, merely a slight deviation that makes possible the real monstrosity, which is the “monstrosity of character” that results in immoral and criminal conduct.12 Sexual abnormality at first appears as a series of particular cases, but soon after, around 1880–​1890, “it emerges as the root, foundation, and general etiological principle of most other forms of abnormality.”13 The field of abnormality is opened up contemporaneously with the becoming-​problematic of the field of sexuality and with what Foucault characterizes, in his essay on Fromanger, as the last frenzied freedom of the image.

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In Foucault’s original plan for the six volumes of the History of Sexuality series, one book was supposed to examine the hermaphrodite, among other perversions. As the series takes on a different trajectory, this book never appears, and Foucault publishes in its stead the memoir as the first in the Parallel Lives series. In the first French edition, published in 1978, the memoir (first discovered when she committed suicide in February 1868, then by the public in 1872 when Auguste Ambroise Tardieu published excerpts, and again by Foucault in the archives of the Department of Public Hygiene) is published in full without editorial commentary. Foucault includes a “Dossier” comprised of a section of Tardieu’s book, the graphic medical descriptions of her body before death and during her autopsy, as well as legal reports, press stories, and letters from those who knew her.14 In the subsequent English edition (1980), as well as later French editions, Foucault includes in the final third of the book a novella by the German psychiatrist Oscar Panizza, “A Scandal at the Convent,” where the story is told from the first person plural point of view of a “we” who closely observes Herculine. Foucault’s introductory essay (excised in the later French reissues of the book) does little to ameliorate the jarring juxtaposition between the voice of the memoir (or the conventions it so clearly deploys both in terms of memoir and the romantic novel), the perspectives (legal, medical, theological, “objective,” and personal) of the dossier, and the satirical tone of the novella in its fictionalizing of various responses to hermaphrodism. Herculine Barbin (called Alexina by her familiars, and Camille, at times, by herself) was an orphan who was taken at an early age to live in a convent. Here she thrived, getting an education and later becoming a teacher in a boarding school for girls. Her milieu was almost exclusively feminine and religious, until she falls in love with Sara. This makes acute the sense of unease at her difference and, full of questions and needing reassurance, she approaches a priest, who in turn sends her to a doctor who precipitates the legal proceedings in which Alexina is forced to become a man. As Abel Barbin, Alexina struggled to find gainful employment outside teaching, and to adapt to her new masculine identity. She commits suicide less than a decade after being forced to live as Abel. Foucault writes that he “would be tempted to call the story banal” if it were not for a number of aspects that give it “a particular intensity.”15 The first of these is the date as well as the number of documents left in the archive. From 1860 to 1870 are precisely the years in which investigations of sexual identity reach a new level of vigor, and Alexina’s court proceedings are preserved, the case appears in a medical review and in press reports. Although he does not state it explicitly, it is clear in Foucault’s introduction that another aspect of the story that gives it a particular intensity is the memoir itself: “With that elegant, affected, and allusive style that is somewhat turgid and outdated . . . the narrative baffles every possible attempt to make an identification. It seems that nobody in Alexina’s feminine milieu consented to play that difficult game of truth.”16 Writing after her “true” identity is established, Alexina does not write from Abel’s point of view. And, if “one gives credence to Alexina’s story,” then her world in the convent and girls school was one awash with “feelings—​enthusiasm, pleasure, sorrow, warmth, sweetness, bitterness—​where the identity of the partners and above all the

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enigmatic character around whom everything centered, had no importance. It was a world in which grins hung about without the cat.”17 And, like the phantasmagoria of the Cheshire cat, what she evokes in that past is ambiguity, “the happy limbo of non-​ identity.”18 If, of course, one gives credence to Alexina’s story. The final aspect that makes this story take on the particular valence that it does, for Foucault, is the echo of Alexina’s life in Panizza’s story. As a psychiatrist who lived in France in 1881, he would more than likely have been acquainted with Tardieu’s book, so this is not what makes the echo remarkable. What does make it remarkable is the imaginary encounter between a French girl of indeterminate sex and a psychiatrist who would later die in the asylum at Bayreuth. Panizza’s novella invents a whole landscape of perverse gallantry but deliberately keeps the centre of the narrative, where Alexina is placed, shadowy and obscure. “Panizza presents her only in the fleeting profiles which the others see. This boy-​girl . . . is nothing more than what passes at night in the dreams, the desires, and the fears of everyone.”19 What Alexina’s dossier allows us to see is how powerfully the late nineteenth century is haunted by the theme of the hermaphrodite. As to why the hermaphrodite should form such a specter requires that we return to the question Foucault raises at the beginning of his introduction: “Do we truly need a true sex?” “With a persistence that borders on stubbornness,” Foucault asserts, “modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative,” obstinately bringing “true sex” into play in an order of things “where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures.”20 While this oversimplification is corrected in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century medicine, the idea that one must, in the final determination, have a true sex is far from being completely banished. We may be prepared to admit that those who do not fit one true sex in a heterosexual binary (for example, “virile” women and “passive” men) do not disturb the established order, but we are also willing to believe that there is still something like an “error” involved in what they do. Sexual irregularity is now seen as chimerical. This is why, Foucault concludes, we may have rid ourselves of the idea that these are crimes, but we are less willing to let go “of the suspicion that they are fictions.”21 While this introduction has elicited many complex and nuanced engagements, a dominant reading has emerged:  namely, that Alexina represents the possibility of passage to a resistance of normalization, to a beyond of true sex and heteronomativity. Allied to this, it has become a major criticism, mutatis mutandis, that, to quote Judith Butler, this is a “sentimental indulgence” in the type of emancipatory discourse that he so vigorously criticizes in The History of Sexuality Volume One.22 Citing the description of Alexina’s world as a “limbo” without identity, and in which “grins hung about with the cat,” Butler argues that, in his presentation of Alexina’s sexuality, Foucault employs the model of an unregulated “prediscursive libidinal multiplicity.”23 So, while he challenges naturalized accounts of sex, gender, and heterosexuality, as Butler sees it, he also ascribes an exteriority to sexual subject-​formation in the matrix of power-​ knowledge. For Foucault, however, I  would argue that the significance of Alexina’s story is not found in her escape from the categories of sex and gender (even if we give credence to Alexina’s account), but is rather in the particular intensities her story has,

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and the ways in which the imposition of the emerging dispositif of sexuality and its “truth” are amplified: the ways in which identities that are subject to social opprobrium are positioned at the center, so that it is through “abnormal” subjects that “normal” identities come to be defined. Hermaphrodite images are not then, in any simple or straightforward way, oppositional to the order of things; they are not the encapsulation of images as having emancipatory potential with regard to the regulation and the dispositifs of sexuality, image practices, or, for that matter, modern subject-​formation before or beyond the matrix of power-​knowledge. They may, however, be acategorical, not insofar as they are beyond or beneath categories but insofar as they are at the center of the drive to discern the category, they reveal the constitutive practices of categorization. If categories create a space for the operation of truth and falsity in their stipulation of the supplement of error, to experience the acategorical is an action, a practice in which one abandons the safety of the category (be it medium, form, or self). “This is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his series of advertising smiles” (ELCP, 189). When one concentrates on this “boundless monotony,” there is the illumination of multiplicity, an encounter with perversity, a game of paradoxes that gives rise to “a flickering light that travels even faster than the eye” and allows the event to tear through the darkness (ELCP, 189). Hermaphrodite images are a passage to/​through which/​in which we pay attention to, undergo, an experience of the acategorical. As Laura Hengehold notes, experiences in Foucault’s writing about art and literature involve “the revelation of contingency in a given world or a historical sense, a potential for breakdown accompanied by positive affects toward what may lay outside . . . [T]‌hey anticipate a new experience of the world as a whole or the failure of sense in such a whole.”24 Experience, in this instance, would be an ethical practice—​as a passage or thoroughfare—​that establishes a relationship of foreignness with the self, as well as an attentiveness to otherness. It is a creative dissolution of the habits that codify a form; it is a fissuring, a tearing, a decomposition that momentarily produces a place for the unknown, the not-​yet thought, by making art and thought pass through the knowledge one has of it. Art, certainly as it appears in Foucault’s occasional essays, may provide one possibility of an encounter with, and opportunity for, thought, and thereby push us, allow us, to grow our capacities and to cultivate our “legitimate strangeness,” if only as fragile, uncertain, and transitory events, but always within a wider political context, the politics of norms.

Photogenic painting In Foucault’s essay on Fromanger, we find a certain textual exuberance, an ekphrasis full of movement, intensity, and delight. Foucault celebrates these “transit images” and “hermaphrodite images” for the way they volatize the image, drawing attention to the limit of form, medium, art, and the self. As in so much of his writing on art, the paintings also demand of him the cultivation of a particular kind of attention that provides him with extraordinary pleasure.25

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Entitled “Photogenic Painting” (which recalls William Henry Fox Talbot’s process of photogenic drawing in which he created contact prints by exposing sheets of paper covered in photosensitive materials), the essay is written for an exhibition at Galerie Jeanne-​Bucher in February 1975. Fromanger was, as Sarah Wilson states in her introduction to the English translation, “the political artist of 1968 and its aftermath: from his posters, his Soufflés or bubble sculptures (transparent ripostes to the riot police shields) or his political subject matter [and] . . . the later photorealist paintings of contemporary scandals, such as the Toul Prison riot” (EPGP, Intro). He was a participant in Foucault’s Information Group on Prisons (GIP), and the title of this show, “Desire is Everywhere,” obviously reiterates, with a difference, Foucault’s “prison is everywhere” declaration (FDE1, 1061).26 Foucault discusses Fromanger’s process at some length. He starts with documentary photographs, some appropriated from the media and others that he takes in the street without a privileged subject, in order to capture the “anonymous flux of events” (EPGP, 92). Unlike fellow photorealist painters, Richard Estes and Robert Cottingham, Fromanger’s photographs do not have already within them “the virtual presence of a painting”; his images are, rather, “innocent of any complicity” with the painting to come (EPGP, 92). He makes black and white transparencies that he then projects onto a canvas; “he looks, he contemplates,” Foucault emphasizes, for hours and hours. He looks, not for what might have happened—​the instant of the past the photograph captures—​but for “the event which is taking place and which continues endlessly to take place in the image, by virtue of the image” (EPGP, 92). He looks, in other words, for that which is “reproducible, irreplaceable and aleatory” (EPGP, 93). Fromanger then paints the cast shadows by applying paint directly to the canvas alla prima (a Renaissance painting technique): a first layer of black or white paint to which color is added. Fromanger gives the color no support other than shadow. Without the intervention of drawing, the colors and their differences “create a painting-​event on the photo-​event” (EPGP, 93). When he removes the projected photographic substrate from the canvas, the painting-​event slips through his hands, it spreads out and gains speed, joining with and multiplying times and places, generating looks and gestures, as it traces a thousand possible paths between photograph and painting, subject and object, work and viewer, and past, present, and future. The images race toward the viewer creating a between “peopled by a thousand and future exteriors” (EPGP, 95). These paintings, Foucault writes, do not fix images, instead they “pass them on.” As transit images, they are a “thoroughfare,” a passage to the outside (EPGP, 95). The painting-​event transmits and amplifies the photograph-​event, and the two events combine to give rise, for every gaze, “to an infinite series of new passages,” Foucault contends (EPGP, 93). The photo-​slide-​projection-​painting sequence present in every painting ensures that the movement of things in the original photograph animates, concentrates, and magnifies “the movement of the image through its successive supporting media” (EPGP, 94). In The Revolution at the Prison Toul 1 and 2 (1974), Fromanger uses two press photographs that have, Foucault states, been reproduced everywhere. These images had become ubiquitous with the prison uprisings of 1972. But, asks Foucault, who has

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actually seen what is happening in them, the multiplicity of the event that Fromanger’s paintings let through? Toul is the first in what became a number of prison revolts. The press image Fromanger uses is actually from a mutiny a month later at the Charles III prison in Nancy, where prisoners, after occupying the prison, made their demands known by throwing leaflets off the rooftops (the tiles of which later become weapons against the police). Fromanger’s diptych is almost entirely in monochrome (the roof and the figures of the prisoners all painted in a limited palette of grays, white and black), alleviated only by blocks of color that fly through the air, and single color masks that cover the features of the human figures. These blobs of color de-​individualize, removing faces while specifying—​no two prisoners have the same color mask. Foucault characterizes these color blocks and masks as “confetti,” as if they had been thrown randomly to fall where they may (EPGP, 94). The diptych, Foucault claims, generates electricity, conveys a charge and force beyond itself and the photo event it transfigures, but it takes “responsibility for the celebrations it will ignite” (EPGP, 94). The two panels repeat the same point of view of the press camera (from below, looking up from the ground) but provide two slightly different views of the roof. Some of the figures recur in different positions and postures in both. The diptych thereby conveys a sense of time passing but also of a hiatus, a catch, and a stutter in the flow of time. This is a sense, in other words, of the specificity and generality of the uprising: this prison and all prisons at the same time. The diptych presents a certain kind of visual resistance, it works “outside of time; not only historical time, the time of continuity, but also outside of the time of any system; it works on the borders, ‘in between time.’ ”27 Fromanger tends to work in series, either in a set of transformative repetitions or through thematically related reflections; he explores painting’s capacity to understand itself in intricate metonymies and “complex reflections on the spaces and means of representation,” and focused investigations “of the materiality and immateriality of the image” (EPGP, 27). This seriality is primary to Fromanger’s sense “of the drift and displacement at meaning’s most general level” (EPGP, 27). In the street sweeper series, there is a single image of a street sweeper repeated sixteen times, differentiated only by title (rather whimsically, they have titles like Rue de la savene, Street of the Savannah, Rue du peuple, Street of my People, Rue de la saison des plules, Street of the Rainy Season, and so on) and by color (for example, a single wash of red in the background, blocks of yellow and green in the middle of a single image, or streaks of color applied to highlight an aspect of the image). There is monotony in the repetition of this image of low-​skilled, invisible labor that the colors contradict. The “abrasion of an absolute similitude of image against the absolute dissimilarity of the colors and titles” radically undermines the possibility of fixing the subject in some sad story; the otherness of the street sweeper maintains its, “which is also that of painting, and in his essay Foucault responds to this ‘new dispersion of events’ ” (EPGP, 99). Foucault notes how, at a certain point, Fromanger’s shadowy self-​image, his shadow that interrupted the light of the projection, vanishes from his paintings. The intermediary moment it represents, the meeting of photograph and canvas, disappears and “the image is fired off by a firework-​engineer of whom not even the shadow is any longer visible” (EPGP, 99). This reveals the “strange being without a subject that is part of Fromanger’s complexity.”28

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Images of rain in the forest, of a village square, of the sea, that the spectator does not see, emerge out of the depth of the space of the paintings; impelled by an unseen force, they leap out of a single image to diverge in different paintings, each of which, in turn, could potentially give rise to a new series at any time. This is not the same depth, Foucault clarifies, from which the painter has historically wrested secrets, it is, rather, the opening up of the photograph through painting so that there is now “a new acceleration” that allows for the “the autonomous transhumance of the image” (EPGP, 102). Fromanger returns painting to “a space in the figurability of the present,” without a return to the security of a referent, a fixed for all time “ ‘out there’ of the social” (EPGP, 36). When painting recovers the photograph, Foucault begins his essay, when it occupies it “insidiously or triumphantly,” it does so not in order to admit to the photograph’s beauty or its fidelity to the real moment or movement it captures; instead, it does one better:  “it produces the beautiful hermaphrodite of instantaneous photograph and painted canvas, the androgyne image” (EPGP, 83). To understand this occupation we have, Foucault contends, to go back to the years between 1860 and 1880 where there was a new mania for images circulating between canvas and plate. In this moment we find a frenzied freedom of “transposition, displacement, and transformation,” of “dissimulation, of reproduction, duplication and trickery of effect,” and engendered through the wholesale theft of images there is “an appropriation still utterly novel, but already dexterous, amused and unscrupulous” (EPGP, 83). A vast field of play emerged where technicians, amateurs, artists, and illusionists, unworried about the boundaries of medium, “took pleasure in disporting themselves” (EPGP, 84). What they loved, Foucault argues, was neither painting nor photograph, but images themselves—​“their migration and perversion, their transvestism, their disguised difference” (EPGP, 84). While images were no doubt well liked for their ability to make one think of something else, what was, Foucault surmises, especially “enchanting” was their ability, “in their surreptitious difference, to be mistaken for one another” (EPGP, 84). Like Fromanger’s images, Foucault’s prose accelerates as he conveys the frenzied freedom of the unscrupulous theft of images with excited lists. In talking about one instance of appropriation, those photographers who faked paintings, Foucault breathlessly writes: What Rejlander did with Raphael’s Madonna, what Julia Margaret Cameron did for Perrugino, what Richard Polack did for Peter de Hooch, Paul Richier for Böcklin, Fred Boissonas for Rembrandt, and Lejaren and Hiller for all the Depositions from the Cross to be found. Six weeks and thirty negatives for the biggest photograph in the world: Oscar Gustav Rejlander’s Two ways of life (1857)—​the equivalent of Raphael’s School of Athens or Couture’s Romans of the decadence! (EPGP, 84)

In the early decades of photography, there was a playful indulgence in a wide variety of operations on, and with, images. In that brief moment, images travelled, refusing to remain captive to one author, one medium, or to one syntax. Here both artists and amateurs engage in a “shared practice of the image” (EPGP, 85). This liberation of the image is halted by the reinstated austerity of art. The emergence of austere realism

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and the purity of high modernism is perhaps the counterpoint to, made possible by, and alleviated by this “glide of images” that dance and turn, always “the same but imperceptibly different” (EPGP, 84). How, Foucault asks, might we recover “this madness, this insolent freedom that accompanied the birth of photography?” (EPGP, 84). Modern painting has committed itself to the destruction of the image, while claiming to have freed itself from it. This painting has tried “to convince us that the image, the spectacle, resemblance and dissimulation are all bad, both theoretically and aesthetically, and that it would be beneath us not to despise all such folderols” (EPGP, 88–​9). When images are subjugated to an aesthetics of art without images, and when images are subjected to the theoretical imperative to preclude them, then we are forced “to read them only like a language” (EPGP, 89). Once we are compelled to read images as a language, then we are handed over to, we are bound by, the power of images both political and commercial. How do we relearn not just to decipher or read the images that are imposed on us, Foucault asks? How do we learn again the power to experience and to play, “in, with, and against the powers of the image” (EPGP, 89)? Pop art and hyperrealism have both, without returning to figuration, retaught us how to play by inserting us into the circulation of images, Foucault argues. Both return us to an experience of the image not by incorporating images through technique, but by extending technique into the circulation of images, so that their paintings act as a relay in that circulation. In this, they teach us “a way of looking/​thinking that creatively confronts the photographic transformation of the world.”29 We are now emerging out of a long period in which painting sought to minimize itself as painting “in order to ‘purify’ itself, to sharpen and intensify itself as art,” writes Foucault (EPGP, 102). Perhaps with photogenic painting, painting is at last coming to laugh “at that part of itself which sought the intransitive gesture, the pure sign, the ‘trace’ ” (EPGP, 102). When painting becomes a passage, a thoroughfare, it reestablishes its relationship to images (of advertising and the media, of consumption and power) so that it may disturb them, or displace them, or deflect them. The exhibition closes on two paintings, two thresholds of desire. In the first, at the furthest reaches of the steppes in Hu-​Xian, an amateur peasant painter gets to work. The Portrait of Liu-​Tchi-​Tei, Amateur Peasant Painter (1975) shows the amateur artist is seated on a bench, and he and the bench and wall behind him are all for the most part rendered in shades of red. The window in the wall to his left opens onto no landscape, but onto four planes of color, which are transposed into the light that bathes him and his piece of paper.30 The second, At the Versailles Opera. Portrait of Michel Bulteau the Greatest Poet in the World (1975), is a splash of almost psychedelic colors: a chandelier, a light, and a mirror all decompose at the symbolic center of the sumptuousness of power. “Royal fireworks, Handel falling like rain; at the Bar of the Folies Royales, Manet’s mirror shatters into fragments” (EPGP, 103). If the mirror in A Bar at the Folies-​Bèrgere (1881–​1882) is a double negation of depth, and thus the inversion of Velázquez’s mirror, and if Manet created three systems of incompatibility—​a “triple impossibility” which excludes every stable and defined place where we may locate ourselves, rendering the Bar a fantastic space where only the canvas is real—​then

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Fromanger implodes this play with the properties of representation and the dispositif of painting (EMP, 74). Foucault begins and ends his essay with an androgyne:  Ingres’s androgynous image—​the hermaphrodite marriage of photograph and canvas—​and Fromanger’s androgynous photo-​based painting of Michel Bulteau who officiates in drag as Manet’s bar-​girl 1970s-​style. The regulated images of etiquette take flight at a high speed, leaving behind them only “the event of their passage,” the cascade of colors having gone off elsewhere toward “future passageways” beyond the canvas (EPGP, 103 and 98). Between these two works, between the greatest poet in the world at Versailles and the humble amateur painter of Hu-​Xian, a multitude of images bursts out to short-​ circuit the intransitive gesture of modern painting. In her introduction to the English translation of Foucault’s essay, Sarah Wilson argues that the essay is strangely apolitical, given both the subject matter of Fromanger’s paintings and his status as the political artist of Paris in the seventies.31 But here, as elsewhere in Foucault, perhaps only a certain notion of the political might strategically disappear (certainly the subject of politics disappears), and instead we have something that might be characterized as an ethical practice of freedom. This is not a disavowal of political projects and the necessity of the struggle for social justice, but it is rather the recognition that one cannot expect politics to provide the forms in which our subjectivities and experiences would “cease to be a problem” (EEW1, 3).

Experience of the acategorical Experience is an extraordinarily difficult, ambiguous, and controversial concept in modern Western philosophy. In his essay, “Foucault’s Modernism,” Gerald Bruns goes so far as to call it “the most impoverished and useless of concepts.”32 Foucault, alert to its difficulties, in particular in his trenchant critiques of phenomenology’s notion of “lived experience” (Erlebnis, le véctí), his rejection of the incoherence of philosophies of the subject on the experience of subjectness, and his animus to any humanist instantiations of the subjective, nonetheless, holds on to the concept. It appears in Foucault’s work from his early writings on madness and literature right up to his last lectures and interviews in 1984. While it is not used unproblematically in his early work, this term largely disappears in the works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but returns more fully to be explored in the final works and interviews. What emerges is a polyvalent and complex understanding of experience despite his early dissatisfaction at the fluidity of, and traps inherent in, the concept. In the introduction to The Uses of Pleasure, Foucault writes that the modern experience of sexuality is something “that can and must be thought” (EHS2, 7). This experience is a “correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity” that are always historically and culturally specific.33 In an earlier version of the same text published elsewhere, he explains his entire trajectory in these terms. His task, he now states, had always been to investigate the possibility of thinking “the very historicity of forms of experience” (EFR, 334).34 Foucault sees his

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work as having been two opposite ways of approaching the same question: “how is an ‘experience’ formed in which the relationship to oneself and the relationship to others are linked together?” (EPPC, 258). Experience, in Foucault, is both the historically specific, dominant background of feeling, thought and action, and a transformative force, a practice of freedom (of resistance and counter-​conduct, of counter-​memory and subjugated knowledges). The relationship between these two senses of experience (between experience as the general form in which being is given to us and experience as that which tears us away from the familiarity of our everyday lives and forces us to enter into a new relation with ourselves and others) is, for Foucault, mutually conditioning. An experience, such as the reading of a certain kind of book, an encounter with a certain kind of art, or the immersion of oneself in certain “mad” philosophies, “is distinctive in that it intervenes in, and potentially undermines, the general form of experience that is given as its background. It has the power to do this precisely because it constitutes an experience,” and because the background of experience is historically singular, it is, thus, transformable.35 The experience that must be thought is, for Foucault, a form of thinking. This is Foucault’s principle of the irreducibility of thought: that all forms of experience are also a way of thinking, and can thus be analyzed from within a history of thought. Foucault transfigures the phenomenological insight that meaning is pervasive in order to think experience as thought, unburdened by an a priori subject-​object dualism. “From this standpoint, systematically organized thought, and not immediately available meaning, is invested in everything that can be experienced.”36 Thought is, for Foucault, an action, a conduct, a practice, it is not restricted to the knowing subject or to the manifestation of subjective thought within discourse. As the organizing category of Foucault’s analysis of experience, practices are the visible matter of lived experience, and any aspect of cultural reality that can be experienced is realized in the medium of thought. Foucault’s project is to write critical histories which “bring to light transformable singularities,” singularities that could be changed through the work of thought upon itself. These histories seek to show just “how contingent, prevailing specifications really are, and so how vulnerable they are to the concerted pressure for change.”37 Transformation can only come about through a practice that combines critical interrogation with forms of experimental action. In his 1983 lecture, “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault characterizes his understanding of critique as “the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (EEW1, 316). In this essay Foucault examines two exemplary modes of subjectivation—​one personified by Kant, the other by Baudelaire—​that directly, again, address art and the passage (Ausgang) away from the anthropological subject. Despite the vast differences between these two, he recognizes in both a historical and critical attitude that is experimental and that opens up, on one hand, a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, puts itself to a test of reality. This “limit-​attitude” is not an analysis of, or reflection on, limits, or even an address to the Kantian question of how we know the limits of knowledge. Rather, it asks: “In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? . . . [And it] experiments with the possibility of

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going beyond them” (EEW1, 319). Going beyond, says Foucault, does not amount to the annulment of reality, “but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom” (EEW1, 311). As Timothy O’Leary has cogently argued in his writings on ethics and literature in Foucault:  experience, as Foucault uses it, activates and amplifies an aspect of the experimental (which is lost in the translation from the French). In the French, the idea of experience as an activity of, rather than a happening to, the individual (“faire une expérience—​to make an experience”) is evident. This could also be translated as “doing an experiment.”38 In her exploration of the political imagination in both Kant and Foucault, Laura Hengehold asks what this imagination might be in Foucault once he dispenses with the phenomenological subject of experience and political action and does not suggest another to replace it. Perhaps, Hengehold answers, it is the reader’s invention in the exterior perspectives he provides in his writings, just as he finds in art and literature experiences of such perspectives. Every time we encounter the insufficiency in our “familiar landmarks of thought,” there is a potential for a breakdown “accompanied by positive affects toward what may lay outside” (EEW1, 316). For Foucault the idea of experience as a practice and as an experimental engagement with moments of desubjectification and subjectivation—​be it in Fromanger, Manet, or Magritte—​is where thought wakes up, before becoming dominant in its turn.

Passion as an experience of the acategorical Passion, which is often evident in Foucault’s writing on art, is another experience that resides at the limits between modern epistemological categories; it disrupts the distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object. In The History of Madness Foucault maintains the precocity of passion when he argues that both before Descartes and long after his influence diminishes, “passion continued to be the meeting ground of body and soul; the point where the latter’s activity makes contact with the former’s passivity; each being a limit imposed upon their other and the locus of their communication.”39 Passion is, Foucault states, A state that is always mobile, but never moves toward a given point. There are strong and weak moments, moments when it becomes incandescent. It floats, it evens out. It is a kind of unstable time that is pursued for obscure reasons, perhaps through inertia. In the extreme, it tries to maintain itself and to disappear. Passion gives itself all the conditions necessary to continue, and, at the same time, it destroys itself. In a state of passion one is not blind. One is simply not oneself. To be oneself no longer makes sense. (EFL, 313)

In his interview with the filmmaker Werner Schroeter (The Death of Maria Malibran, Willow Springs), Foucault distinguishes between passion and love as the difference between two kinds of individuation:  love happens through persons, while the intensity of passion dissolves persons, not into something undifferentiated, “but into a field of various persisting and mutually interdependent intensities.”40 Passion is a

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subpersonal event; it is “an opening, a movement, and an acceleration that creates new possibilities of existence.”41 Foucault’s celebration of such experiences is a celebration of the capacity to resist passive forms of interiorization. “Art, books, and so on have the potential to provoke differentiated capacities for acting and being acted upon than those presently available.”42 Experiences like passion, in Foucault, are not empirical, or intentional, or phenomenological, they are instead instances in which the subject is displaced from itself, instances in which the subject cannot keep itself intact. Experiences like passion are never, for Foucault, pre-​discursive, because they are always caught up in relations of power. The three dimensions of experience—​ knowledge, power, self—​cannot be reduced to each other, although they constantly imply one another. They are, argues Deleuze, three “ontologies,” but Foucault is clear they are also historical, because they do not set universal conditions. Each condition is never more general than the conditioned element, and each only gains its value from its particular historical status. “Given certain conditions, they do not vary historically; but they do vary with history.”43 These conditions are not “apodictic” but problematic. They present the way in which a problem or limit appears in a particular historical formation. Acategorical experiences are experiences of the limit realized in language, in art, or in experience as the limit. For Foucault, then, a book or a painting might be capable of engendering an experience that intervenes into the background experience, and in this “limit-​experience” art may push us to think otherwise. This is why Foucault claims that his books are fictions that he hopes become true after he has written them. His books are, he states, “experience-​books,” as opposed to “truth books” or “demonstration books” (EEW3, 243). The function of the experience-​book is to put thought in contact with the outside in order to “fiction” an experience of subjectivity in relation to history, to power, and to knowledge such that the reader emerges from the encounter transformed. “It seems to me,” Foucault declares, “that the possibility exists to make fiction work in truth, to induce effects of truth with a discourse of fiction,” to make it so that the discourse of truth one creates “fabricates” something that does not yet exist starting from a political reality or historical truth (EFL, 213). An experience-​book fictionalizes truth as a possibility in the future, within the context of certain practices; and the experience that results is neither true nor false, because every experience is always a fiction too: “it’s something one fabricates oneself.”44 And, most importantly for Foucault, this is not something that happens to a subject, or something that presupposes a subject, or is an act whereby one rediscovers an alienated or lost subjectivity; it is rather about innovation and imagination, to make something that is not-​yet, to imagine something even without being able to know what it might become. The thinkers who helped him “deviate” from his training (Bataille, Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Klossowski, among others) were not philosophers in the institutional sense, they did not set out to construct systems, but experiences. What we owe to thinkers like Breton, for example, is the discovery “of a space that is not that of philosophy, nor that of literature, nor that of art, but which would be that of an experience” (EFL, 65). In his catalogue essay on the works of American photographer

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Duane Michals, Foucault writes that “they attract me as experiences (elles m’attirent comme expériences)” that arouse pleasure, evoke disquietude (FDE4, 1063). They gift us with a “test” and an “experience” (éprouver). Like Fromanger’s paintings, they contain the power of transport: they put into play emotions, thoughts, and identities, and are, thus, passageways that take us beyond ourselves. These works seduce us, through their indiscretions, into a freedom of thinking, feeling, and seeing otherwise. With Fromanger, as with Breton and Michals, the experience we are gifted with is not that of the reflective gaze brought to bear on the everyday in order to decipher its meanings. It is rather an event in which we experiment with wrenching ourselves from ourselves, with growing our capacities without amplifying the capacities, at least for a while, of power relations. In this way too, Foucault’s books on madness, the prison, or the care of the self not only examine our forms of knowledge but also seek to transform them. For Foucault, transformative experiences are practices of freedom, always inescapably conditioned by power, both with respect to their emergence as a capacity and with respect to their exercise, but they are still practices of freedom, nonetheless. As evidenced in his occasional essays on art, art might be one of those practices of freedom; if we pay attention, we might get to imagine, think, experience, develop capacities from time to time. If, for Foucault, thought is freedom in relation to one’s actions/​practices, then this freedom, states Hallward, needs to be understood in a loosely neo-​Kantian sense; that is, “as something accessible exclusively as a practice or experience, and not as a specifiable object of knowledge.”45 As he says of Pierre Boulez, Foucault expects from thought that it make possible something different from what he was already doing, that it open up a new space of freedom. Thought’s role is “to supply the strength for breaking the rules with the act that brings them into play” (EEW2, 224). In experimenting with the received identities of his media, Fromanger reactivates a space of insolent freedom; his unscrupulous images draw us, through perverse pleasure, into thinking. They are events that immerse us in the image’s happening, and in this they disclose new possibilities of relating to others and ourselves. Art in this instance is a practice within the larger art “of voluntary non-​servitude, of considered non-​docility” that Foucault later celebrates in his essay on the Enlightenment and with the historical and critical attitude of modernity; it is a doubled gesture of refusing who we are and inventing and creating new forms of subjectivity (always in relationship to the other) (EEW1, 316).46 With Fromanger and the other modern artists, Foucault makes concrete a practice of freedom, exacerbating lines of fracture in the present to open up spaces of dissension and of possible transformation. Fromanger’s paintings cause a force to pass, and they thereby introduce something novel into the clutter world of already-​subjects, already-​objects, already-​forms, namely, thought. This thought is neither coterminous with subjects nor universally enacted by subjects, but is rather the event, the taking place that renders knowing subjects foreign to themselves. These indiscrete images are thus ethical in their insolence: they transport us so that we are no longer self-​possessed, in our pleasures, our bodies, or our thinking.

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Notes 1 Michel Foucault. “What is Enlightenment?.” Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth: The Essential Works of Foucault Volume 1. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1998. The latter phrase is an unattributed citation to a poem by René Char, “Partage formel” in Seuls demeurrent, which Foucault uses to close his 1961 preface to The History of Madness. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. xxxvi. 2 Arnold Davidson’s introduction to Michel Foucault. The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–​1982. Ed. Fredéric Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 3 Michel Foucault. The Use of Pleasure, Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 4 Gary Shapiro. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 198. Deleuze writes: “To think is to create—​there is no other creation—​but to create is first of all to engender ‘thinking’ within thought” (Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 147). 5 Michel Foucault. “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual: An Interview with Michel Foucault by Michael Bess.” History of the Present. 4. Spring 1988. 1. 6 Michel Foucault. Speech Begins After Death: In Conversation with Claude Bonnefoy. Ed. Philippe Artières. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 45. 7 Ibid. 8 Michel De Certeau. “The Black Sun of Language.” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. 198. 9 Jon Simons. “Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault’s Aesthetics.” Cultural Values. 4. 1. 2000. 40. 10 This, argues Shapiro in Archaeologies of Vision, is a part of Foucault’s “iconophillia.” That is, his “general project of finding ways for the enjoyment of ‘bodies and pleasures,’ despite the disciplinary regimes to which they have been subjected, even the disciplinary regimes of socially established taste and criticism” (367 and 369). 11 Michel Foucault. Abnormal, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–​1975. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador Books, 1999. 67. 12 Ibid. 73. 13 Ibid. 168. 14 The Tardieu book is entitled, Question médico-​légale de l’identité dans ses rapport avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels, contenant les souvenirs et impressions d’un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu (Forensics of Identity Involving Deformities of the Sexual Organs, Along With the Memoirs and Impressions of an Individual Whose Sex Was Misidentified) Paris: J.-​B. Ballière et Fils, 1872. 15 Michel Foucault. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-​Century French Hermaphrodite. Trans. Richard McDougall. New York: Pantheon, 1980. xi. 16 Ibid. xii. 17 Ibid. xiii. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. xvi.

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20 Ibid. vii. 21 Ibid. x. 22 Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. 96. 23 Ibid. 97. 24 Laura Hengehold. The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault. Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 2007. 207. 25 Infamously, Foucault conceives the experience of pleasure as one practice in which moderns may confront and contest the categories of their “true” or “normal” selves. Pleasure describes for Foucault an event at the limit of the subject. Pleasure, Foucault states at various points, is, however, a “very difficult behavior” (see for example, Michel Foucault. “The Minimalist Self.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–​1984. Ed. Lawrence Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1990. 12). Pleasure is, interestingly, something Foucault experiences with painting. In a short interview, “What Do Philosopher’s Dream Of?” (“À quoi rêvent les philosophes,” L’Imprévu, Janvier 28, 1975, 13) cited in Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 193–​4), Foucault admits: What pleases me precisely in painting is that one is truly constrained to look at it. There it is, there is my rest. It is one of the rare things on which I write with pleasure and without fighting with what it is. I believe I have no tactical or strategic relationship with painting . . . For example, when the canvases of some hack [pompiers] painters like Clovis Trouille had been brought together in Paris (which is always a bit behind the times), I was struck by my pleasure in looking and at the pleasure of the viewers. It was a joy! A current passed around bodily and sexually. All at once it became self-​evident what an unbelievable Jansenism painting had imposed on us for decades. 26 Both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write essays on Fromanger, and he not only paints the portraits of these two, but also of a number of other philosophers alive at the time. As with so many of his occasional essays on art, Foucault’s essay comes out of networks of friendship. 27 David Boothroyd. “Foucault’s Alimentary Philosophy: Care of the Self and Responsibility for the Other.” Man and World. 29. 1996. 368. 28 Rifkin, “A Space Between,” 26. In this regard, Gary Shapiro argues that Foucault is interested in Fromanger’s engagement with the dispositif of painting: “After the trajectory defined by Velazquez [sic] and Cézanne, this is one place where ‘the figure of man is being erased.’ ” (Archaeologies of Vision, 366.) 29 Joseph Tanke. Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity. New York: Continuum, 2009. 145. 30 This work, as with others on the show, emerges from a trip Fromanger made to China in 1972 with the Belgium Communist filmmaker Boris Ivens. Foucault mentions this work only in passing (perhaps because of his unease at the repressive regime under Maoism, argues Sarah Wilson. But his ironizing of technique and “its apparent dilemma,” together with “the post-​dialectical switching” between the French boulevards and Mao’s China in terms of subject matter, anticipate the multimedia and communications revolution of today. Sarah Wilson. “Fromanger, Deleuze, Bacon,” Courtauld Institute of Art (Web. November 12, 2010).

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31 Foucault does not mention the other history of the photograph, which has to do with increasing surveillance and the growth of the police. 32 Gerald Bruns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” Ed. Gary Gutting. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 361. 33 Ibid. 4. In The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 2010, Foucault criticizes his early use of the concept: The History of Madness “accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what was termed experience [the English translation of The Archeology renders this as ‘experiment’ which will be discussed below], revealing by this how close this text was to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history,” 16. 34 Michel Foucault. “Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume II.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin Books, 1991. 35 Timothy O’Leary. “Foucault, Dewey, and the Experience of Literature.” New Literary History. 36. 4. Autumn, 2005. 550. 36 Marc Djaballah. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. 16. 37 Peter Hallward. “The Limits of Individuation, or How to Distinguish Deleuze and Foucault.” Angelaki. 5. 2. August 2000. 100. 38 Timothy O’Leary. “Foucault, Experience, Literature,” Foucault Studies. 5. January 2007. 19. Experience in English, according to Raymond Williams, also had the sense of experiment until the eighteenth century, O’Leary writes. It was until that time “not only a conscious test or trail but a consciousness of what has been tested or tried, and thence a consciousness of an effect or state.” 39 Brady Thomas Heider. “The Passions of Michel Foucault,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 14. 1. 2008. 86. 40 Gilles Deleuze. Negotiations, 1972–​1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1997. 116. 41 Heider. “The Passions of Michel Foucault.” 68. 42 Hengehold. The Body Problematic. 195. 43 Deleuze. Negotiations. 114. 44 Foucault. “Interview with Michel Foucault.” 243. 45 Hallward. “The Limits of Individuation.” 100. 46 Although the occasional essays on art precede the work on the “art of not being governed thus,” they enact, albeit in a different register, a concern with ethics and the labor of the ethical, with histories of the present, with contestation, and the possibility of thinking otherwise.

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Part Three

Glossary Essays

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Archaeology Heath Massey

Archaeology is a method of analysis that Foucault practices in his early works, formulates more explicitly in The Archaeology of Knowledge, and eventually supplements with genealogy. In the essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault asserts that if the style of critical, historical analysis that characterizes his thought “is genealogical in its design,” nonetheless, it is “archaeological in its method.” He continues:  “Archaeological—​ and not transcendental—​in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events” (EEF, 53–​54). Before defining archaeology as a method, he uses it to refer to the level of analysis at which his historical studies of madness, clinical medicine, and the human sciences are directed. He characterizes the first as an archaeology of the silence to which madness is reduced by the discourse of psychiatry. The second is an archaeology of the medical gaze as it was transformed by the practices of clinical medicine. The third is an archaeology of the fields of knowledge that take “man” as their object. The archaeological level, as Foucault defines it, is that of the conditions, or rules of formation, that make knowledge possible. The archaeological method is directed toward what may appear to be universal and necessary in a specific period of history. Foucault opposes archaeology to the subject-​ centered orientation of modern philosophy, the “anthropology” that regards language as a vehicle for meaning, and meaning as a product of conscious activity. By displacing the subject, archaeology shifts the focus from conscious intentions to rules and structures that those who speak may not even be aware of. Archaeology is the analysis of discourse as autonomous, impersonal, and organized not just by individuals in the pursuit of knowledge, but more importantly the practices and institutions in which they are situated. Approaching discourse as a field of events, archaeology aims to reveal the relations between statements and the system of rules that determines what is said. Although Foucault emphasizes the dispersion of statements, archaeology seeks to describe their regularity. Statements are made and transformed according to certain rules of formation governing a discourse. These rules may be formal, but unlike the rules of logic or grammar, they are conditions of existence, regulating not just what it is possible to think or say, but what is actually said. It is in this sense that such rules comprise a “historical a priori”: the themes, concepts, manners of speaking, and even the objects

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of a discourse are constituted differently at various periods of history, but according to rules and practices that are (or at least seem) unquestionable at the time they apply. Archaeology is the positive description of what Foucault calls the archive. The archive, in the sense that he wishes to give it, is not a storehouse full of knowledge or a memory palace for scholars. Instead, it is a system of formation for the objects, modes of statement, concepts, and strategies of a particular discourse. In other words, the archive is a not a collection of written works so much as a set of rules or norms determining what can be said or written. To work at the level of the archive is to abandon conventional notions such as those of the author, the œuvre, and the discipline, and to cast one’s gaze over a space of dispersion. It is to examine the relationships between statements belonging to certain domain of knowledge or field of discourse, with the limits of that field being always in question. It is not to seek the underlying meaning of statements or assess their truth, but to listen to them in relation to others that are purportedly about the same thing or within the same region of inquiry. It is to map the territory around these statements, allowing them to speak for themselves, and to draw and redraw their own borders. Finally, it is to detach discourse from the time of consciousness, which imposes continuity on the dispersion of events. Not only does archaeology displace the subject as the locus of explanation, but it also challenges a predominant model of history as a form of collective memory.

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The “Author-​Function” Seth Forrest

Though a familiarity with “The Subject and Power” and The Order of Things is useful for a fuller understanding of the author-​function, Foucault’s most succinct and salient discussion comes in the 1969 lecture published with the very nearly eponymous title “What is an Author?,” and it is that essay on which I will focus here (ELCP, 113–​138). Though Foucault’s preliminary remarks indicate that the lecture begins as a response to criticisms of The Order of Things, familiarity with those critical reviews is probably less important to the context of “What is an Author?” than is familiarity with Derrida’s concepts of écriture and differance and with Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” both of which are clearly, if not explicitly, referenced here.1 “What is an Author?” is framed by Foucault’s interest in “the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text.” What exactly is happening when we use the name of an author? Where and how does an author stand in relation to the text? Foucault begins to answer these questions by recognizing that contemporary writing is often transgressive and unrelated to self-​expression and by recognizing, per post-​ structuralism, that writing signifies the absence of the author. In these first forays into the question of the author, Foucault departs from the positions previously articulated by Barthes and Derrida. He departs in both senses of the term, taking these positions as a starting point but also as a point of leaving-​off. Foucault is willing to grant that the death of the author in Barthes’s sense has released the written work from the Author-​ as-​center, from the gravitational singularity of the Author. He is likewise willing to grant that the theory of écriture “stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment.” Yet, Foucault finds that without the author the work becomes problematic, as the lost gravity of the author allows questions about the work to proliferate to the point that the oeuvre loses its necessary unity. Foucault says, “It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void. We should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance.” In what follows, Foucault’s careful, probing analysis is pointedly different from the sometimes hasty willingness of Barthes or Derrida to ascend into

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theory without retaining a grain of pragmatism. Foucault recognizes that, despite the aptness of the theory of écriture and the corresponding effacement of the Author, contemporary discourses still require the functions of an author: “the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulations, and operation of certain discourses within a society.” Thus we can see the hallmarks of Foucault’s analytical and genealogical approach even in this short work, a crystallization of the style of his own oeuvre. Arriving at the heart of the essay, Foucault identifies four “features” of the author-​ function. The first of these is related to state power and property ownership: the author may be held responsible for his or her work, may be punished (and may thus transgress), and may own the work as intellectual property. The second is that authorship is not constant across those discourses that recognize and utilize an author. Scientific discourse may use the author differently than literary discourse, and furthermore the requirements of an author may change within a single discourse over time as historical circumstances change. The third function is that the construction of authorship is inextricably linked to the way we approach the text. The author exists in a state of variable metonymy to the texts; at times the author is a synecdoche of the work, at other times the work “refer[s]‌to a real speaker and to an actual deictic situation.” Finally, the author can rarely function as a sort of anchor when the work is such that it founds a new discursive practice, as in the case of Marxism or Freudian psychoanalysis. As this volume has indicated, modernism is by no means a settled term, having different reference points for literature and the arts, historiography, and philosophy. Foucault is as comfortable working between these various modernisms as he is working with a slippery, but nonetheless necessary, set of author-​functions. In terms of literature, the merest glance at the functioning of authors in “What is an Author?” is enough to show the extent to which literary Modernism has opened a space for Foucault’s inquiries. The figures of Beckett and Mallarmé, crucial authors in the development of what Marjorie Perloff has called the “poetics of indeterminacy,” loom large even as Foucault casts his analysis back toward Homer, Aristotle, and Shakespeare.2 The author-​function, as it is conceptualized here, remains a remarkably useful apparatus through which to view the project of the arts in an age of collage, montage, found-​text, and chance operations. Even in our contemporary moment of conceptualisms, the author may have disappeared, but the metonymic push and pull between the author-​function and the work is worth continued attention as a way to understand what modernity means.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes. “Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. and Ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. 142–​8. The most essential text for Derrida’s conception of écriture is probably Of Grammatology, Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 2 See Marjorie Perloff. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

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Biopower Chloë Taylor

In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction and “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault describes biopower as a power that takes hold of life. In both these works Foucault traces the shift from classical, juridico-​legal or sovereign power to two typically modern forms of power, discipline and biopower, as a shift from a right of death to a power over life: “in the classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death was one of sovereignty’s basic attributes. [. . .] The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die” (ECF-​SMD, 240–​41).1 Sovereign power is a power that deduces. It is the right to take away not only life but wealth, services, labor, and products. Its only power over life is to seize that life, to end, impoverish, or enslave it; what it does not seize it leaves alone. Sovereign power’s right over life is merely the right of subtraction, not of regulation or control. In contrast to this power to “take life or let live,” biopower is the power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (EHS1, 138). Foucault describes this as “a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power,” in which power would be “working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (EHS1, 136). In his 1977–​1978 Collège de France course, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault takes the example of a prohibition such as “do not steal” or “do not murder” to illustrate the differences between sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower (ECF-​STP, 4–​5).2 Under sovereign power, which predominated up until the end of the seventeenth century, an individual who transgressed these prohibitions would be subjected to the law and punished on the basis of his crime; he might, for instance, be executed, exiled, or fined. Under disciplinary power, which emerged in the eighteenth century, the criminal will still be subjected to the law; however, it will no longer be a mere matter of his crime. Rather, power will now be at least as interested in the thief ’s or murderer’s character. It will want to know the psychological conditions under which the individual committed his crime. This information will be deemed important in order to anticipate and intervene in the likelihood that the criminal will reoffend. In order to predict and control the individual’s chance of recidivating, the criminal needs to be subjected to examinations, surveillance, and rehabilitative practices unknown under sovereign

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power. For this reason, the punishment is less likely to put an end to the criminal’s life, and more likely to control his life through tactics such as prison, psychiatric treatment, parole, and probation. Finally, under biopower, which emerged later in the eighteenth century, the focus and target of power becomes the numbers of thefts and murders occurring in the population. Power now takes an interest in whether crime rates are rising or falling, in which demographic groups particular crimes are predominant, and how crime rates can be optimally controlled. While many of the same tactics will be employed under biopower as under disciplinary power, the focus will now be on the population rather than on the individual. Although in Security, Territory, Population, biopower seems distinct from disciplinary power, in other works Foucault describes discipline as one of the two levels at which biopower operates. Biopower is a power over bios or life, and lives may be managed on both an individual and a group basis. While at one level disciplinary institutions such as schools, workshops, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals target individual bodies as they deviate from norms, at another level the state is concerned with knowing and administrating the norms of the population as a whole and thus with understanding and regulating “the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration” (EHS1, 140). Disciplinary power works primarily through disciplinary institutions, while biopower works primarily through the state; however, the state is also directly involved in many disciplinary institutions, such as schools and prisons. Discipline may thus be seen as biopower as it targets the individual body, while another level of biopower targets the species-​body. Foucault will describe these two levels as “the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed” (EHS1, 140).

Notes 1 For a similar passage, see Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978. 136. 2 Michel Foucault. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–​ 78. New York: Picador, 2009.

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Discipline Steve Tammelleo

Discipline is a form of power that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the 1820s, discipline had become the dominant form of power in Western societies, and it continues to function as the primary mechanism for social control. Foucault’s articulation of the concept of discipline occurs primarily in Discipline and Punish (EDP), first published in 1975. As a technique of power, discipline involves five characteristics: (1) The creation of a controlled space architecturally designed for the surveillance of subjects; (2) The regimentation of time into a timetable to maximize the efficiency of training individuals; (3)  The use of normalizing judgment and examinations to measure the progress of each individual; (4) An infinitesimal training of the body to create precision and efficiency in bodily movements; (5) A combination of forces in which individual bodies are trained to work together as part of a larger whole. The purpose of discipline is to train individuals to become both submissive and useful. Discipline creates “docile bodies”: “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (EDP, 136). In schools, children are educated to become productive workers and citizens; in factories, workers become efficient and obedient; in the army, recruits are trained to be soldiers; in hospitals, patients regain their health or are prevented from spreading their diseases. Discipline aims to mold and shape individuals to increase both their productive powers and their willingness to submit to authority in order to ensure the smooth functioning of society as a whole. Foucault describes disciplinary power as a micro-​power or capillary power. When compared to the power of the classical monarch who tried to impress itself upon citizens through spectacular displays of power, disciplinary power works on a much smaller scale; it applies itself to individuals, not crowds, and in its application it modifies its form to address the unique character of each individual. An underperforming student, worker, or soldier will be forced to perform extra exercises to enable him to meet the norms of the disciplinary regime. Foucault also claims that each disciplinary practice has its own history and evolution. For example, the disciplinary power to educate children evolves and changes for reasons that are internal to its disciplinary practice. For this reason, each discipline has a degree of independence, and changes in state power (coups or revolutions) may or may not result in changes to disciplinary forms.

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The earliest forms of disciplinary power first emerged within the Christian monastery. In the monastery, we can clearly recognize several of the central characteristics of disciplinary power: the architectural space allows for separation and surveillance, the use of exercises and examinations, and a timetable for the productive use of time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disciplinary power escaped beyond the walls of the monastery and gradually came to dominate five important social institutions:  the school, the army, the hospital, the factory, and the prison. The military reforms of Fredrick II gave Prussia a decisive advantage and were quickly copied by other military leaders across Europe. The religious schools founded by Jean-​ Baptiste de La Salle established educational techniques that were copied by the mutual improvements schools of the nineteenth century. The sick house, a place of care and comfort, was replaced by the hospital, a space of examination, treatment, and research. The guild-​system disappeared with the emergence of the factory. The prison replaced the spectacles of public execution. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, disciplinary power began to move beyond the five social institutions of school, army, factory, hospital, school, and prison to penetrate society at large. Charity organizations began to investigate vagabonds and the poor, to seek out their causes and to apply treatments. Schools began to investigate the social environment of children and to regulate parental behavior. The police emerged as a social institution to monitor society as a whole. Discipline was no longer merely the technique of social control employed within important social institutions; discipline had penetrated all aspects of social life. A disciplinary society had emerged. Foucault claims that disciplinary power plays a central role in the formation of new forms of knowledge. For example, the power to enclose patients within the space of a hospital enables doctors to engage in regular examinations that produce a new form of clinical medicine. In a similar way, when applied to students, recruits, workers, and criminals, disciplinary techniques have made possible the new social sciences of educational psychology, military tactics, industrial organization, and criminology. Although the Enlightenment brought about advances in human freedom by guaranteeing basic rights (voting rights, property rights, freedom of religion), Foucault notes that the emergence of disciplinary power also took place during the Enlightenment. For Foucault, the Enlightenment is a mixed bag: the new human rights emerged hand in hand with new forms of coercion.

241

Episteme Samuel Talcott

The episteme [épistémè] is, perhaps, the key concept for understanding Foucault’s archaeological works. While earlier work had gestured toward it, The Order of Things is the locus classicus in which he first deploys the concept and puts it to extensive work. But it is in Archaeology of Knowledge that one finds the clearest account of it, so this entry focuses on this book, though with references to The Order of Things, and a brief account of what becomes of the episteme in Foucault’s later thinking. In its final, major formulation, Foucault defines the episteme as “the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive rationalities” (EAK, 191). Discursive rationalities are existing practices of speaking, writing, reading (and any other practice of discourse) that function as conditions of possibility for the emergence of sciences, such as physics and biology, and formal systems, such as logic or mathematics. But discursive rationalities also exist as “positivities,” defined as systems for the formation of statements (EAK, 186), and “epistemological figures,” defined as positivities with norms for discovering truth (EAK, 187), whether successful or not, what Foucault calls veridical discourse. Foucault understands the episteme to be the set of relations existing between positivities, epistemological figures, sciences, and formalized discourses at a given moment and place. In their intersections, these discursive rationalities form different shapes and space within which knowledge is sought, spaces that can be transformed from within by contributing to a discursive practice. In some epistemes, discursive knowledge is formal, as in the Classical episteme, whereas in others, knowledge is the basis against which science and formal systems distinguish themselves, as in the Modern episteme. Thus, the episteme also concerns the way in which transitions to different forms of knowledge occur in the crossing of thresholds of epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization (EAK, 191). Moreover, as the space of the relation between discursive practices, whether these are positivities, epistemological figures, sciences, or formal systems, the episteme also describes all of the particular relations that hold between these practices. Thus in The Order of Things, for example, the “human sciences,” which are not sciences but knowledge [savoirs], are described and partially conditioned by their proximity to the biological, economic, and philological sciences that took shape in the mutation discursive practices underwent at the turn of the nineteenth century. A difficulty arises

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for English readers since two different words—​connaissance and savoir—​each translate as “knowledge.” For Foucault, specific truth claims grounded in a science are instances of connaissance, whereas savoir refers to the general conditions of practice governing a particular discourse and the epistemes shaped by the set of particular discursive practices. The episteme is, thus, not a connaissance, the kind of knowledge that could be grasped in its “sovereign unity” by a “subject, a spirit, or a period.” Rather, it is only in the material archive of texts and writings that an episteme can be slowly and laboriously reconstructed. Epistemic regularity, perhaps, the episteme as unity, can be revealed through such research, but this is never guaranteed by any unified consciousness, however coherent (a transcendental subject or spirit) or arbitrary (awareness of some historical range of dates) it might be. At best, the archaeologist becomes conscious of an episteme thanks to her patient work in the archive. As Foucault insists in Archaeology of Knowledge, the episteme thus revealed is not to be understood as frozen and incapable of transformation. If language in the archive is a massive, frozen, and immobile block, then it is a monument that attests to the existence of the episteme as an inexhaustible, because indefinite, field of relations between discursive practices. The episteme is, thus, a field in which the inscription and reinscription of these relations and practices lead to modifications within and to new sorts of relations, practices, and objects. Thus, The Order of Things, for example, famously shows the emergence of a new object and science—​life and biology—​in the radical transformation undergone by the classificatory projects of natural history with the collapse of language’s ability to name and represent. Importantly, the episteme is based on the positivities supporting all discursive practices, by which Foucault means that it is based on the fact that particular discourses exist and function according to general rules, even if these are themselves open to transformation. In the archive, statements would be an instance of such rules and, thus, part of the positivity, but in such a way that they do not establish the fundamental legitimacy of one discourse over another. Other statements may be monuments to the same rules, or they may contest such a discourse. In charting archival regularities, then, the archaeologist discovers an emergent episteme, but not as a picture of true and false scientific discourses, but as the existing conditions by which nonscientific knowledge is distinguished from scientific knowledge. The episteme is not guaranteed by an all-​knowing consciousness, but simply “relates to the processes of a historical practice” (EAK, 192). Thus, epistemic analysis establishes discontinuities, but it studies these discontinuities in their very positivity as continuous transformations in existing discursive practices over time. The stakes of the episteme are found at the level of positivities and epistemological figures. Through the concept of episteme, Foucault was able to argue that there are forms of knowledge not reducible to scientific or formal thinking opening up philosophical work to far broader fields of inquiry than it had been customary to address. Continuity between Foucault’s different areas of investigation is evident with regard to the episteme. In a 1977 interview, during his genealogical period, he explains it via the dispositif, claiming that “the episteme is a specifically discursive dispositif, different than the dispositif that is, itself, discursive and non-​discursive, its elements being much more heterogeneous” (FDE2a, 300–​1). Thus the episteme is “the strategic dispositif”

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that “permits the separation, not of the true from the false, but that which cannot be qualified as scientific from that which can” (FDE2a, 301). Later still, after his turn to ethics and the care of the self, he continues to insist that he is interested in exploring the many modes of veridiction.1

Note 1 Michel Foucault. Wrong Doing, Truth Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Trans. Stephen W. Sawyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 20.

244

Genealogy Brad Elliott Stone

Genealogy is the antimetaphysical historical study of the emergence of knowledges, techniques, and subjectivations. It is erroneous to claim, as some scholars do, that genealogy is simply the study of power and power relations. Genealogists study power relationships, not because power is the object of genealogical analysis, but because power is everywhere, so one cannot analyze practices without running into the question of power. Equally erroneous is the effort to delimit genealogy to a subset of Foucault’s works (e.g., EDP and EHS1) or to pit genealogy against archaeological method. In light of genealogy, we can say that archaeology is the study of the structures that result from the emergences that genealogy studies. In light of archaeology, genealogy is the study of the battles, the winners and the losers, and the problems that accompany the structure of knowledges, techniques, and subjectivities. Often, genealogy is described as the analysis of nondiscursive practices (with archaeology addressing discursive practices). This is a correct distinction, but the distinction follows from the description of genealogy given here. Once something emerges, it will be discursive in some way (be it a discursive object, a mode of speaking or system of authorizing speaking, a concept, or a strategy), but the conditions that give rise to such emergence need not themselves be discursive. So the account of the emergence of X (which will always be discursive in some way) is not cleanly captured by archaeological analysis. In this sense, genealogy is more dynamic than archaeology, which is comparably the static, structural analysis of what emerged (without too much concern with how it emerged). To make an analogy to the very metaphysics that Foucault rejects, genealogy addresses the question of becoming (the dynamic structure of reality) compared to archaeology’s analysis of being. There are at least three main ways that genealogy is a critique of traditional metaphysics. First of all, genealogy rejects essences, necessities, and teleologies. Genealogy instead explores the contingencies and discontinuities, inherent contradictions and errors, and the possibilities and virtualities associated with the object of analysis. Second, genealogy replaces identity with difference and multiplicity. Traditional points of stability (e.g., the author, the subject/​cogito, and the Truth) are themselves turned into objects of analysis and explained in terms of the multiplicity of statements, forces, and choices. In lieu of grand, continuous, and universal themes across the whole of time, genealogy focuses on local, discrete, and discontinuous

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singularities. Third, genealogy is anti-​foundationalist and anarchical. Practices “go all the way down”: there are no primitive statements, forces, and choices from which all other practices derive. Instead, there are only relations and formations (hence Foucault’s use, inspired by Bachelard, of the term “microphysics” as used in modern physics). This is why genealogy resists the pursuit of “origins” and “golden ages.” Genealogy is the historical account of the emergence of practices. Yet emergence is not to be confused with “evolution” or “development.” By emergence we mean something akin to “come into being.” The question of the emergence of what came into being is rarely understood in terms of what came into being. Instead, the emergence of what came into being is the effective result of many factors, some of which are prima facie unrelated. This emergence is usually the result of a problem or battle of solutions. Underneath the things we take to be universal, necessary, and stable is a continued struggle of forces. Genealogy accounts for the struggle of forces (hence Foucault’s use of the term “effective” to describe genealogy’s use of historical analysis). Once victors emerge, the story of the vanquished is often delegitimized, disregarded, and ultimately discarded. Historiography usually follows the story of the winners of the battles, often to justify the win by appealing to notions such as “destiny” and “progress.” Genealogy seeks to interrupt such tales of evolution and development with the “counter-​memory” of what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges.” What other possibilities could have emerged? How did the possibility that did emerge overpower the forces of those other possibilities? Genealogy answers these questions. The proper genealogy of something requires the analysis of power relations. This is why genealogy is often equated with the study of power relations. Foucault frequently states that power itself is not the object of analysis: the object of genealogical analysis is emergence. Since the emergence of juridical forms occupies Foucault’s work in the 1970s, “political” power relations are analyzed because they are the appropriate power relations to investigate. Were Foucault not to address juridical forms, politics might not have entered the equation, yet genealogical methodology would still analyze emergence in terms of the struggle of forces. Thus, the erroneous equation of genealogy with the analysis of political power is an understandable error, but erroneous nonetheless.

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Power Brad Elliott Stone

POWER (pouvoir) is a key term in Foucault’s philosophy, although often misinterpreted and misused. Pouvoir has to do with being or not being “able to do X.” At the level of statements, power pertains to what can or cannot be said in a given configuration of knowledge. At the level of techniques, power pertains to what can or cannot be done in a particular apparatus of force relations. At the level of subjectivations, power pertains to what kind of person one can or cannot be in a given situation or problematization. It is important from the start to note that power for Foucault is not, per se, political, although politics is one form of power. Therefore, when Foucault tells us that power is omnipresent, he is not suggesting that everything is political (at least not in our standard understanding of the term); rather, everything is the result of saying or not saying, doing or not doing, or choosing or not choosing. Foucault, influenced by Bachelard’s work in the history and philosophy of science, uses the term “microphysics” to orient his account of power. Microphysics is the rejection of atomic-​level reality, referring instead to descriptions of physical phenomena in terms of subatomic relationships. Likewise, power is not a thing, nor is it “had” by anyone who is allegedly “in power.” Rather, everything that is exists due to multiple relationships of forces under the surface. Forces, like statements and ethical substances, are the forms of prime matter in Foucauldian ontology. The arrangement of forces “creates” bodies (in both physical and figurative senses, e.g., “bodies of knowledge”); these are the objects of study, but power is the “material” of those objects. Hence, everything “has” power insofar as everything supervenes on relationships of force. As a result of the microphysics of power, it is incorrect to claim that, in a given conflict, one side “has” the power and the other side does not. In such conflicts, the two sides each have their respective power. The victorious side is the one that overpowers the weaker side. This overpowering is not once and for all:  relationships of power are dynamic, and a side that was once victorious can be overpowered by a newly organized, more greatly empowered “losing” side. This is why Foucault is so interested in resistance to the perceived dominating power: resistance is itself a counterpower. In the area of “scientific” knowledge, these counterpowers are called “subjugated knowledges.” Since knowledge is itself the result of power relations, Foucault often uses terms like “power/​knowledge” and “truth-​power.” Truth (with a capital T) is not

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a neutral arbitrator between two conflicting powers. In fact, Truth is itself part of the power dynamic, revealing more about the battling parties than about Plato’s forms. No one is “for” or “against” the Truth, because each side is fighting precisely for the possession of it. Foucault argues that we have misunderstood power due to what he calls the “juridico-​discursive” interpretation of power. One often associates power with its negative uses:  censorship, prohibition, silencing, and (in extreme political cases) execution. Due to such association, one fails to recognize the power in the places that seem to be oppressed by such negative uses of power. Instead, Foucault argues, we are to recognize power as positive insofar as it “makes” things. For example, homophobia for Foucault is not the result of discriminating against homosexuals; rather, it is the advent of homophobia that “created” homosexuals. The power struggle comes first, followed by objects, discourses, and persons. Most scholars who are interested in Foucault’s theory of power are interested in Foucault’s analysis of political power (governmentality). Foucault outlines two main kinds of political power:  sovereignty and bio-​power. Sovereign power follows the juridico-​discursive interpretation of power (it is due to the undue focus on sovereignty that we miss the fuller array of power relations). Foucault summarizes the negative relation of sovereign power in terms of letting live and making die. The sovereign exerts the power to execute his enemies (both foreign and domestic) as well as demand his subjects to give up their own lives for his defense. Bio-​ power takes two main forms:  disciplinary power and regulatory power. Foucault sees these two forms as distinct from sovereignty insofar as the negative relation is not as prevalent, which allows the positive, creative aspects of power to show. If sovereignty is understood in terms of making die and letting live, bio-​power can be understood in terms of making live and letting die. At the heart of bio-​power is the differentiation of the normal and the abnormal. The normal is promoted and the abnormal is classified, contained, and, hopefully, diminished. Discipline is a deployment of power that classifies and individuates individuals. Regulation works at the level of whole populations by means of “rates” and other statistical determinations.

248

Problematization Daniele Lorenzini

A few weeks before his death, in an interview with François Ewald, Michel Foucault claimed that “the notion common to all the work that I have done since Histoire de la folie is that of problematization” (EPPC, 257). It should be noted, however, that Foucault explicitly thematized this notion only in 1983, in an interview with Paul Rabinow (EFR, 388–​90) as well as in a series of conferences on Discourse and Truth he gave at the University of California, Berkeley.1 Here, the notion of problematization is presented as the methodological cornerstone of Foucault’s long-​term project of a history of thought—​as distinct both from a history of ideas and from a history of mentalities—​whose aim is to understand how and why certain things, behaviors, phenomena, processes, and so on, become a problem at a given historical moment. In fact, according to Foucault, thought is what allows one to step back from a certain way of acting or reacting, and to question it in its meaning, its conditions, and its goals:  “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem” (EFR, 388). Hence, if it is not possible to study a problematization outside of a specific historical context, Foucault maintains that a problematization is not a mere effect or a necessary consequence of it. Problematization is always an answer, an original response to a specific situation, and the task of the historian of thought consists precisely in explaining how and why this peculiar form of problematization was elaborated as a response to some elements of reality.2 The notion of problematization informs Foucault’s last works on parrēsia and on aphrodisia in antiquity. On one hand, Foucault is interested in understanding how the practice of truth-​telling was problematized in the context of the “crisis” of the Athenian democratic institutions at the end of the fifth and during the fourth centuries bc, when the relation between freedom, power, and truth came to be questioned (ECF-​GSO, 180–​84, 301–​03; ECF-​COT, 34–​52). On the other hand, Foucault examines how, in Greco-​Roman antiquity, sexual activity and pleasures were problematized through a series of “practices of the self ” within the framework of what he calls an “aesthetics of existence” (EHS2, 11–​12, 14–​24, 35–​93).3 But it is also possible to use the notion of problematization in order to retrospectively reconstruct the inquiries Foucault made in his major works.4 Thus, History of Madness raises the question of how and why, between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, madness was problematized

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through a number of social and institutional practices and a certain apparatus of knowledge. Similarly, The Order of Things takes into account the problematization of life, language, and labor in modern discursive practices, and Discipline and Punish analyzes the changes in the problematization of the relations between crime and punishment through penal practices and penitentiary institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (EPPC, 257; EHS2, 12). Therefore, the notion of problematization plays a crucial role in Foucault’s different attempts to confront the issue of modernity. Besides, at the end of his life, in one of his texts on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?, Foucault characterized philosophy as an interrogation by the philosopher of his own actualité, that is, of the historical configuration of which he is a part and in relation to which he has to situate himself. And since we are still moderns, according to Foucault, philosophy itself should be understood and practiced not only as the analysis of a series of problematizations, but also and at the same time as a way to problematize our own relationship to modernity (FDE2a, 1499–​1500).

Notes 1 Michel Foucault. Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrēsia. IMEC/​Fonds Michel Foucault, C100. “30 November 1983.” 2 Foucault. Discourse and Truth. “30 November 1983.” 3 Michel Foucault. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 4 See Colin Koopman. Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

250

Transgression Janae Sholtz

Foucault’s interest in the genealogical histories of madness and sexuality, which is to say the priority given to uncovering or revealing various responses to unreason (déraison) as sites of domination motivated by will to power, underlies the importance of transgression for his oeuvre. Foucault deals with transgression most directly in “A Preface to Transgression,” an essay that first appeared in “Hommage à Georges Bataille” (EEW2, 69–​87). The logic of transgression is predicated on Bataille’s understanding of sexuality and violence, both in terms of the necessity of their suppression and the inevitable need to release these excessive urges, as irreducible elements of human experience. Bataille claims that communities impose limitations upon sexuality and other forms of excess to make work and productivity possible. Transgression is a necessary component of this economy, in that it constitutes a temporary suspension of these limits sanctioned by a community in order to mitigate the desire for extravagant expenditures of energy and safely release cultural libidinal desires. In this sense, transgression, rather than overcoming limits and law, sustains them, and is thus reabsorbed into the economy of utility. Bataille, of course, recognizes a more radical possibility for transgressive practices to produce an experience that would explode the contrived interiority of the Subject produced by these taboos. Foucault develops the critical or radical possibility of transgression that results from its logical form, wherein transgression simultaneously allows recognition of the constitutive nature of the limit and exposes or challenges the legitimacy, originality, and even rationality of limits. Transgression can be thought of as a momentary, yet incessantly oscillating, event that makes the being of the limit, both the necessity of its form as well as the contingency of its particular appearances, appear. For Foucault, this recognition foregrounds the contestation of knowledge-​power regimes by which the interior limits of subjects and their “truths” are constituted. Transgression implies the possibility of an experience that resists the forms of closure, interiority, and transcendental necessity that modernity, through Enlightenment values in particular, has invented. And it constitutes the basis for the shattering of the philosophical subject, which is a necessary precursor to desubjectification as a process of construction and deconstruction through the continual crossing of boundaries. Following Bataille, Foucault identifies the possibility of considering the logical, empty form of transgression with the historical moment associated with the death

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of god. Bataille describes the modern experience of transgression as a secularized version of the distinction between the sacred and profane, marked by absence of content or referral to the transcendent. The rejection of the limitless (the transcendent) instantiates an experience of interiority constituted by and through limitation and marked by finitude, wherein limit involves its own limitless contestation. For Foucault, this logic of transgression plays itself out in language, wherein the Subject confronts the limits of meaning, due to the absence of any absolute transcendent ground. Given that thought becomes a discourse about the limit, Foucault is interested in finding a language that remains faithful to this thought. It is for this reason that Blanchot’s literary form of contestation, his constant invocation of thought from the outside through the unworking of language, is identified by Foucault, in “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside” (1965), as a transgressive act par excellence, which “undoes every figure of interiority” by exposing language as the infinite, silent exteriority from which the speaking subject is constituted (EFB, 31). Blanchot’s attempt to negate his own discourse, taking language to its extremes, reveals the void that envelops and sustains language. This void is only experienced through the lightning flash of transgression, which makes visible the invisibility of the limit and its interminable relationship with that which it is not. The perpetual transgression of language itself is a matter of resistance, critique, and creativity, which challenges the hegemony of modern reason and the sovereignty of the subject, hence Foucault’s fascination with figures such as Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Hölderlin, whose work occupies the liminal boundaries of desire, sense, and subjectivity. The issue of transgression returns in his 1984 lecture, “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Foucault seeks to transform Kant’s transcendental critique of the limits of reason into a sociohistorical, practical one (EFR, 32–​50). There Foucault advocates adopting what he calls a critical limit-​attitude and engaging in limit-​ crossing experiences that extend to a whole variety of social and institutional practices, whereby the possibility arises to effectively produce new forms of subjectivity. Transgression animates Foucault’s thinking with regard to the experience of finitude, the contestation of the interiority of the subject, and the exposure of the will to power as the substrate of the will to truth. Thus, transgression provides a powerful tool of analysis, as it reveals the divisions that constitute discourses of rationality. These are discourses that emerge in relation to power, distributing bodies, pleasures, rules, norms, truths. Though the logic of limitation can never be overcome, the exposure of the limiting process itself is a means of disruption that can allow new discourses and configurations to emerge.

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Truth Marc De Kesel

Rather than emphasizing the truth (vérité) in itself, truth-​saying (véridiction) is a significant focus in Foucault’s work. Instead of trying to define what truth is or exploring its “conditions of possibility,” Foucault’s analyses intend to show “truth” as part of a “practice,” that is, as a central element in a set of discourses constituting the world we live in, our “self ” or “subject” included. The way in which the reference to truth functions within the dispositive of power or within the procedures of governmentality is the question—​concerning truth—​Foucault deals with in his oeuvre. In an addendum to his first Collège de France seminar entitled La volonté de savoir (The will to know), he, for instance, analyses Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Rather than as the story of a proto-​philosopher seeking the truth, Foucault reads the play as a textual platform on which “cinq saviors,” five ways of knowing—​five discourses on truth, five truth-​sayings—​“confront and adjust each other” (FCF-​LSV, 225). Truth is an element in a discourse, and man’s truth is only what it is in and through that discourse. Though considering himself to be the subject of that discourse in the sense of the origin, producer and owner of it, man is in fact rather the opposite: the effect or product of that very discourse, supposing himself to be the ground or subject of that discourse he basically is subjected to it. So, like almost all topics in Foucault, the issue of truth is inextricably connected to the question of the subject and its genealogy. In each of his major studies—​on madness and psychiatry, on crime and punishment, on human sciences—​he shows how the discourses on truth function in relatively autonomous ways, and how man, in each historical period, constitutes differently what he is by subjecting himself to the discourses he lives in. Truth is an instrument of the power at work in those discourses, and so it disciplines us. Remember, for instance, nineteenth-​century psychiatry that often took the shape of a “truth-​therapy” (EPT, 148). We are the “object” of a historically specific truth-​saying, for instance, that of the human sciences, and in this quality of scientific object, “man” may cease to exist once the human sciences will decline, as Foucault suggests in the last words of the Order or Things (EOT, 422). Yet, truth is not only part of an oppressive discursive power. In his work on governmentality, Foucault shows how power, rather than something monolithic, is a variety of mechanisms by which man is governed and which he governs himself at the same time. Governance is Foucault’s concept for the procedure in which active

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self-​governance—​what he calls the “techniques of the self ”—​is intertwined with the passive condition of being subjugated (EPT, 154). The introduction, in the late seventies, of concepts such as “governmentality” and “technique of the self ” brings about a fundamental change in Foucault’s analysis of truth. Truth and truth-​saying are no longer exclusively discourses that man is subjected to. Since then, truth is thought by Foucault to be something the subject can freely utter. This was the case, so he argues, in the parrèsia, the Ancient Greek democratic procedure of free speech, as well as in the antique ethics of epimeleia, the care of the self. Here again, Foucault’s analysis is not about the content of truth, but only about the way the subject relates himself to the discourse he is constituted by. This kind of véridiction does not make someone subjected to a truth but instead allows him to express his own truth and, on that basis, freely give shape to his life. In Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity, human ethics found its truth not in submission to a law, but in the way in which one gives shape to his life. At the very end of his oeuvre, in the last sessions of the last seminar he gave at the Collège de France, entitled The Courage of the Truth, Foucault seems to go beyond his purely formal approach, giving “truth” a definition which is more on the level of content (ECF-​COT). In these sessions, he analyses ancient cynicism as a radical form of parresiastic truth-​saying, uttering itself directly in a way of life, in a “true life.” In a sense, this describes truth as what it is: as the “broken mirror” in which all traditional philosophies can see that what they are about—​truth—​is a scandal in their own eyes. Cynicism shows the unbearable truth of any truth-​saying, it shows truth as “the other” of all truth-​saying. In his way, Foucault joins the numerous twentieth-​century philosophers emphasizing truth as radical alterity.

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Subjectivation Mark Murphy

Foucault used the concept of subjectivation as a way to comprehend the construction of the subject through disciplinary practices. Such an understanding was a cornerstone of Foucault’s theorization of power and its deployment via institutions of governance—​ a theorization that emerged gradually alongside his own intellectual development. A focus on the “self ” had been present from the beginning of his academic career, with, for example, a concern over technologies of the self permeating his doctoral thesis (EHM). In Foucault’s later studies of health and sexuality, a key question became: how are self-​perceptions of supposedly personal issues like mental health, sexuality, and delinquency regulated and bureaucratized from the outside—​that is, via mechanisms of institutional control? This question becomes the driving force in the shift from Foucault’s archaeology to genealogy. This shift saw Foucault move from examining the fictitious nature of the subject, to a concern with detailing the material context of subject construction alongside its political consequences.1 This shift also saw Foucault make more explicit connections between subjectivation and power, using the concept to illuminate his theory of how new exercises of power emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Importantly, this concept of subjectivation offered him a position from which to critique the prevailing view on the left of how power operated—​as that “which abstracts, which negates the body, represses, suppresses” (EFR, 66). Instead, according to him, the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries witnessed a form of power come into being that exercised itself through social production and social service, becoming more a matter of obtaining productive service from individuals. The consequence was that a “real and effective ‘incorporation’ of power was necessary, in the sense that power had to be able to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of social behaviour” (EFR, 66). Power in this conceptualization works not through destruction and repression, but through production and incorporation—​that is, through a process of control, which sees the institutions of health, education, justice, and morality exercise their disciplinary practices via the “docile bodies” of subjects (EDP, 135). The best means of maintaining obedience and control over subjects (pupils, patients, prisoners, etc.) via disciplinary technologies is if these subjects “become self-​ implementing systems, functions of a subject’s reflexive relation to self.”2

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This notion of selfhood as subjectivation is a particular focus in works such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality (1980), finding further clarification in his writings on panopticism. Central to Foucault’s discussion of panopticism and power is the way in which subjects, encouraged to engage in the observation of the self, become their own panopticon. Taking on the duty of self-​ surveillance results in external monitoring becoming “permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (EDP). This conception of subject construction and the operation of power has had considerable influence in subsequent decades, particularly in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze elaborated on the concept, arguing that subjectivation has little to do with people, but instead it refers to the process of “individuation,” that is, a process of coming into being. According to Deleuze, there is no subject, just the production of a mode of existence.3 Further influence can also be witnessed in the work of theorists such as Judith Butler. The legacy of the concept lives on most strongly, however, in the dramatically altered discourses surrounding conceptions of power that can be found in modern social theory, which have lost the sense of rigidity and one-​dimensionalism pursued by some strands of Marxism and mainstream political science.

Notes 1 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press, 1991. 47. 2 Derek Hook. Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 36. 3 Gilles Deleuze. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. New York: Continuum, 2006. 110.

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Christopher Breu is associate professor of English at Illinois State University where he teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-​first century literature and culture as well as cultural and critical theory. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minnesota, 2014) and Hard-​Boiled Masculinities (Minnesota, 2005). Ann Burlein is associate professor at Hofstra University in the department of Religion. She earned her PhD from Duke University. Her work focuses on contemporary religion and the body, particularly sexuality. Her first book is Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge (Duke, 2002). One track of her current research concentrates on the analysis of shame by using Michel Foucault’s historical practice in order to think through the relationship of religion and the body. Marc De Kesel is associate professor in Philosophy at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canada. His fields of research are Public Ethics, Continental Philosophy, Political Theory, Holocaust Studies, Religion Studies, and Freudo-​ Lacanian Theory. He published on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Eros & Ethics, Albany, 2009), on the critical core of monotheism (Goden breken [Breaking Gods], Amsterdam, 2010), on the logic of gift-​giving (Niets dan liefde [Nothing but Love], Amsterdam, 2012), on Holocaust reception (Auschwitz mon amour, Amsterdam, 2012), and on Slavoj Zizek (Zizek, Amsterdam, 2012). Seth Forrest is assistant professor of English Literature at Coppin State University. He earned his PhD from University of California, Davis. His research interests involve the relationship between sound and language, with a specific focus on poetry. Leonard Lawlor is currently Sparks professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Stony Brook University in 1988. Cofounder and coeditor of Chiasmi International:  Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-​Ponty, he has translated into English works by Merleau-​Ponty, Derrida, and Jean Hyppolite, as well as editing major collections dedicated to major figures and issues in Continental philosophy. Lawlor has authored numerous works, including the recent Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2011). He is currently finishing a work on violence and metaphysics, to be published by Edinburgh Press.

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Daniele Lorenzini is currently a lecturer in Ethics at the University of Paris-​Est Créteil. He is the author of Éthique et politique de soi: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell et les techniques de l’ordinaire (Vrin, 2015) and of Jacques Maritain e i diritti umani: Fra totalitarismo, antisemitismo e democrazia, 1936–​1951 (Morcelliana, 2012), as well as the coeditor of Foucault e le genealogie del dir-​vero (Cronopio, 2014), Michel Foucault: Éthique et vérité, 1980–​1984 (Vrin, 2013), Un demi-​siècle d’“Histoire de la folie” (Kimé, 2013), and Le travail de la littérature: Usages du littéraire en philosophie (PUR, 2012). Cofounder and editor of the journal materiali foucaultiani (www.materialifoucaultiani.org), Lorenzini is also the coeditor of Michel Foucault’s lectures Discours et vérité (précédé de La parrêsia) (Vrin, 2016), Qu’est-​ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi (Vrin, 2015), and L’origine de l’herméneutique de soi (Vrin, 2013). Heath Massey is the author of The Origin of Time:  Heidegger and Bergson, and co-​ translator of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s Institution and Passivity. He is an associate professor of Philosophy at Beloit College. Mark Murphy is reader in Education and Public Policy at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. His recent publications include Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research:  The Art of Application (with C. Costa, Palgrave, 2015), Habermas, Critical Theory and Education (paperback, with T. Fleming, Routledge, 2012), and Social Theory and Education Research:  Understanding Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu and Derrida (Routledge, April 2013). He is codirector of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change at the University of Glasgow. Daniel J. Palumbo is a fourth year philosophy doctoral student at Penn State University. He is in the process of writing a doctoral dissertation on Derrida and Levinas. Christopher Penfield is a recent PhD in Philosophy from Purdue University. He is the author of several articles on Foucault, including “Toward a Theory of Transversal Politics” in Foucault Studies (2014), and an editor of Between Foucault and Derrida (2016), to which he wrote the extended introduction. His article treating word-​image relations in twentieth-​century painting is forthcoming for Tate Research. Sarah Posman is a postdoctoral researcher (FWO) at Ghent University. Her research concentrates on modernist and avant-​garde poetry. She has coedited The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-​Garde and Material Exchange (De Gruyter, 2013) and Gertrude Stein’s Europe: Talking and Listening (forthcoming). Nicole Ridgway is an Andrew W.  Mellon fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and an adjunct associate professor in the department of Art and Design in the Peck School of Arts at the University of Wisconsin-​Milwaukee. She has published a number of essays that explore the relationship of philosophy to art, and is currently writing a book tentatively titled, “Thinking Art with Michel Foucault.” David Scott is associate professor and coordinator of the Philosophy Program at Coppin State University, Baltimore, MD. Originally trained as a fine-​arts painter, he holds a doctorate in Literature from University of Virginia and a doctorate in

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Philosophy from the University of Memphis. He is the author of several published articles and chapters on Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze, and Merleau-​Ponty, Simondon; and is translator of Deleuze’s first published work on Hume’s philosophy. Edinburgh Press has published his book-​length study of Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation. Janae Sholtz is assistant professor of Philosophy at Alvernia University. She researches primarily in Twentieth Century and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh Press has published her book The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and Political, which explores the intersections between ontology, art, and the political in Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze, within the larger context of contemporary philosophical conversation concerning community. Brad Elliott Stone is professor of Philosophy and chair of the department of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. His research interests include contemporary continental metaphysics, American philosophy, and the codetermination of race, sexuality, and gender. His works on Foucault have been published in Foucault Studies, The Pluralist, and several edited collections. He is the coeditor (with Jacob Goodson) of Rorty and the Religious (Cascade, 2012). Samuel Talcott is assistant professor of Philosophy at University of the Sciences. Dr. Talcott’s research interests cover topics from the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, ethics, philosophy of medicine, social-​ political philosophy, and philosophy of the life sciences. His primary publications have focused on Foucault and epistemology. Seve Tammelleo is assistant professor of Philosophy at University of San Diego. His research interests include Foucault, Border Policy, and Ethnic Identity. Using Foucauldian conceptions of power, his research examines the ways in which border policies have transformed the identities and life chances of undocumented immigrants. Joseph Tanke earned his PhD at Boston College. He lectures and publishes extensively on issues and figures in Continental philosophy and aesthetics. His major publications are Foucault’s Philosophy of Art:  A  Genealogy of Modernity (Continuum, 2009), Jacques Rancière:  An Introduction—​ Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2011), and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2012)  with Colin McQuillan. Professor Tanke’s interests include comparative aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and the historical ontology of pain within Western thought and medicine. Chloë Taylor is assistant professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy department at McGill University. Her research interests include twentieth-​century French philosophy, philosophy of gender and sexuality, and animal ethics. She is the author of The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (Routledge, 2008)  and the coeditor of Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics (Routledge, 2014).

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Index abnormal 43, 108, 120, 121, 215, 218, 247 actuality 6, 10, 34, 36, 214 aesthetics 177, 187, 196, 207, 208, 209, 222 “aesthetics of existence” 248 animality 24, 26 anthropology, anthropologism 28, 29, 34, 70, 79, 84, 90, 129, 233 anti-​Platonism 199 archaeology 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79–​94, 111, 158, 169, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 233–​4, 244, 254 archive 68, 69, 72, 73, 80, 82, 83, 84, 93, 94, 172, 191, 196, 201, 215, 234, 242 art history 196, 199, 202, 207, 208 askēsis 13, 161, 198, 208 author 84, 101, 170, 177, 178, 187, 234, 235–​6, 244 bio-​history 179, 183 bio-​politics 129, 141, 178–​9, 180, 185, 186 biopower 44, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 141, 179, 181, 183, 184, 186, 237–​8, 247 body 26, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 45–​6, 47, 48, 49, 56, 87, 92, 96, 97–​8, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 117, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 133 n.21, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 158, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169, 171, 173 n.39, 178, 179, 180, 181, 187, 206, 210 n.6, 216, 217, 225, 227, 228 n.10, 238, 239, 240, 246, 251, 254 capital, capitalism 3, 4, 98, 104, 105–​6, 107, 108, 111, 112 n.9, 112 n.11, 116, 130, 143, 147, 184, 186 care of the self 5, 13, 186, 227, 243, 253 Christianity 113, 117–​19, 162

classical age, classicism 6, 7, 21, 23–​4, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 61, 70, 74, 81, 184, 186, 205 cogito 68, 183, 244 confession 116, 117–​21, 123, 124, 133 n.21, 160 counter-​memory 93 n.3, 224, 245 criminal, criminality 7, 52, 101, 108, 109, 111, 119, 189, 215, 237, 238, 240 critique 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 28, 30, 35, 55, 68, 75 n.44, 77 n.66, 82, 95, 96, 97, 106, 107, 108, 110, 118, 119, 162, 164, 165, 173 n.44, 174 n.61, 180, 196, 199, 200, 202, 206, 209, 215, 223, 224, 244, 251, 254 death 13, 15, 27, 33, 35, 36, 40, 46–​52, 54–​8, 60 n.21, 62, 86, 107, 113, 120, 125, 127, 128, 133 n.23, 142, 143, 158, 159, 163, 164–​5, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174 n.69, 178, 179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190, 216, 237 death of the author 177, 178, 235 death of God 143, 163, 164, 170, 183, 186, 250–​1 death of man 107, 183 death of the other 181 delirium 22, 26, 31, 32, 33–​4, 35, 37 n.13 desire 4, 14, 24, 32, 55, 113, 118, 127, 129, 130, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 182, 184, 193 n.37, 196, 215, 217, 219, 222, 250, 251 desubjectivation 11, 107, 159, 225, 250 diagram 102, 103, 182–​3, 184, 186 discipline 65, 83, 96, 97–​102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 112 n.8, 112 n.11, 118, 125, 129, 145, 146, 187, 190, 191 n.12, 208, 234, 237, 238, 239–​40, 247, 252 discourse 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 22, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 51, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76 n.59, 79–​92, 93–​4 n.9, 94 n.11, 95, 96, 97,

260

260

Index

109, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 123, 129, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145–​9, 150, 151, 152, 162, 177, 185, 186, 189, 197, 200, 201, 202, 210 n.6, 210 n.14, 217, 224, 226, 233, 234, 236, 241, 242, 247, 251, 252, 253, 255 dispositif 21, 37 n.11, 215, 218, 223, 229 n.28, 242 enlightenment 3, 4, 5, 8, 16 n.6, 96, 97, 110, 138, 227, 240, 250 “What is Enlightenment?” 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 16 n.15, 35, 110, 224, 233, 249, 251 episteme, épistème 61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 76 n.53, 95, 96, 184, 186, 197, 241–3 epistemology 41, 62, 69, 74 n.11 eternal return 31, 160, 163, 164, 166, 168 ethics 5, 21, 35, 116, 130, 131, 181, 184, 225, 230 n.46, 243, 253 event 6, 7, 16 n.17, 23, 31, 35, 41, 46, 47, 51, 60 n.21, 66, 68, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 92, 94 n.9, 95, 103, 122, 143, 144, 145, 149, 163, 164, 170, 189, 190, 192 n.33, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 208, 213, 214, 218, 219, 220, 223, 226, 227, 229 n.25, 233, 234, 250 experience 9, 13, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24, 25, 31, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74 n.19, 75 n.38, 80, 81, 82, 107, 121, 125, 144, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173 n.19, 179, 181, 189, 190, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 213, 215, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229 n.25, 230 n.33, 230 n.38, 250, 251 inner experience 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 167 fascism 3, 4, 5, 162 freedom 3, 15, 16 n.6, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 36 n.4, 45, 62, 64, 83, 96, 116, 182, 186, 208, 214, 215, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 240, 248 gaze 2, 21, 27, 40, 41, 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 58, 83, 102, 103,

107, 158, 165, 206, 208, 211 n.20, 219, 227, 233, 234 genealogy 4, 6, 11, 40, 95, 96, 110, 113, 139, 149, 159, 170, 174 n.61, 215, 233, 244–5, 252, 254 governmentality 152, 247, 252, 253 Hellenistic philosophy (Cynicism, Stoicism) 13, 59 n.11, 195, 198, 199, 253 hermeneutics 55, 56, 143, 197 of the secret 55–6 of self 5, 12, 13 of the subject 139 of suspicion 55, 56 historical a priori 37 n.11, 67, 76 n.47, 76 n.56, 80–2, 87, 233 historicism 14, 137, 138, 139, 152 historiography 66, 138, 139, 236, 245 history 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16 n.17, 22, 23, 26, 30, 31, 40, 41, 46, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 73 n.3, 74 n.8, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90–2, 93 n.4, 93 n.7, 94 n.10, 97, 106, 113, 114, 122, 128, 129, 131, 132 n.14, 137, 138, 140, 144, 147, 149, 150, 152, 157, 177, 179, 182, 183, 185, 188, 190, 191, 191 n.11, 196, 197, 198, 207, 208, 209 n.1, 214, 224, 226, 230 n.31, 230 n.33, 233, 234, 239, 246, 248 of philosophy 1, 7, 10, 185 of science 66, 74 n.11, 75 n.43, 80, 196 “history of the present” 97, 109, 110, 138 homosexuality 122, 151, 172 humanism, antihumanism 59 n.4, 64, 99, 106, 107, 140, 141 posthumanism 141 human sciences 59 n.4, 62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 75 n.38, 79, 81, 85, 95, 141, 195, 233, 241, 252 imagination 17 n.35, 23, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 161, 174 n.69, 207, 225, 226 immanence 23, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 182, 183, 213 individuation 43, 84, 85, 225, 255 invisibility 60 n.21, 102, 103, 104, 108, 110, 251

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Index Kantanism 40, 46 knowledge 3, 4, 9, 12, 16 n.17, 17 n.35, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 59 n.4, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 n.8, 76 n.56, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 90, 95, 99, 101, 109, 117, 118, 121, 126, 129, 130, 131, 137, 140, 141, 145, 147, 152, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 168, 179, 180, 183, 186, 192 n.33, 193 n.35, 197, 201, 204, 210 n.6, 213, 218, 223, 224, 226, 227, 233, 234, 240, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 249 knowledge-​power 114, 160, 250 non-​knowledge 160, 167 language 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60 n.21, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76 n.59, 83, 84, 91, 93 n.4, 93 n.9, 107, 111, 118, 119, 124, 139, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 152, 158, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 177, 178, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 222, 226, 233, 242, 249, 251 law 6, 21, 87, 97, 101, 110, 116, 125, 126, 147, 150, 151, 152, 169, 180, 189, 190, 237, 250, 253 juridical 21, 24, 96, 97, 122, 125, 245 juridico-​legal 125, 126, 127, 237 jurisprudence 180, 181 life 13, 15, 41, 43, 47, 48, 49, 56, 57, 58, 59 n.7, 63, 66, 67, 70, 76 n.53, 76 n.65, 86, 91, 104, 122, 125, 127, 128, 129, 141, 142, 144, 152, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 177, 178–80, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 191 n.4, 198, 237, 238, 242, 249, 253 limit-​attitude 224, 251 limit-​experience 15, 107, 158, 159, 160, 165, 166, 167, 226 literature 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 23, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 64, 68, 72, 73, 84, 85, 121, 137, 158, 164, 166, 170, 174 n.61, 177, 178, 185, 186, 189, 190, 196, 214, 218, 223, 225, 226, 236

261

madness 7, 21, 22, 23–7, 31, 32–4, 52, 55, 63, 73, 79, 85, 87, 93 n.4, 113, 123, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 182, 222, 223, 227, 233, 248, 250, 252 man 12, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 51, 59 n.4, 59 n.7, 59 n.11, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 75 n.25, 77 n.65, 79, 85, 93 n.4, 95, 96, 97, 99, 106, 107, 111 n.3, 161, 163, 177, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 229 n.28, 233, 235, 252, 253 marxism 68, 73 n.6, 106, 138, 139, 151, 154 n.23, 236, 255 materialism, materiality 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 67, 69, 73, 91, 106, 140, 144, 148, 149, 152, 154 n.23, 159, 167, 169, 187, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 220 memory 80, 82, 83, 90, 92, 102, 110, 111 n.3, 143, 159, 170, 171, 183, 189, 234 mnemonics, mnemo-​technique 102, 111 n.3 monster 57, 215 morality, immorality 24, 26, 27, 34, 68, 113, 114, 123, 141, 157, 179, 254 multiplicity 72, 83, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 112 n.7, 112 n.9, 149, 217, 218, 220, 244 nationalism 138, 148, 150, 151, 154 n.26 natural history 70, 88, 90, 242 Nazism 3 Nietzscheanism 183 normal and the pathological 43, 63, 185 ontology 54, 106, 202, 246 of the actuality, of the present 6, 34 of ourselves 6, 35 telescopic ontology 54, 60 n.18 originary 28–9, 30 outside (dehors) 68, 107, 166, 167, 183, 184, 192 n.35, 219, 220, 225, 226, 251 panopticon, panopticism 1, 21, 97, 101, 103, 104, 112 n.8, 141, 255 Parrēsia 22, 24, 35, 248, 253 phenomenology 21, 23, 63, 64, 75 n.44, 79, 89, 91, 162, 166, 184, 223 philosophical anthropology 66 philosophy 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 28, 29, 30, 59 n.11, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,

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Index

75 n.41, 76 n.65, 79, 81, 84, 121, 129, 158, 159, 161, 164, 173 n.19, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185, 198, 200, 202, 207, 208, 210 n.14, 213, 214, 223, 226, 233, 236, 246, 249 pleasure 37 n.13, 50, 121, 122, 124, 157, 161, 168, 179, 181, 206, 215, 216, 217, 218, 221, 227, 228 n.10, 229 n.25, 248, 251 population 44, 59 n.4, 84, 96, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 117, 119, 120, 127, 128, 129, 150, 151, 179, 181, 238, 247 post-​structuralism 138, 140, 235 power 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 15, 21, 31, 36, 44, 45, 52, 57, 59, 65, 70, 72, 73, 81, 94 n.11, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 111 n.4, 111 n.5, 112 n.11, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–​7, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133 n.21, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149–​50, 151, 152, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 193 n.37, 198, 207, 213, 214, 215, 222, 224, 226, 227, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 246–​7, 248, 251, 252, 254, 255 power-​knowledge 31, 97, 99, 106, 141, 215, 218, 246 powerlessness 52, 57, 126, 165 problematic 2, 29, 30, 31, 84, 85, 102, 122, 129, 200, 214, 215, 226, 235 problematization 214, 246, 248–​9 psychiatry 25, 26, 27, 63, 64, 93 n.4, 95, 109, 113, 116, 122, 123, 124, 233, 238, 252 psychoanalysis 71, 75 n.25, 75 n.27, 85, 114, 117, 236 race, racism 43, 127, 128, 129, 133 n.24, 147, 181, 205, 206 reason 3, 4, 5, 16 n.17, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34, 46, 63, 64, 67, 77 n.66, 77 n.69, 81, 82, 93 n.4, 93 n.7, 96, 159, 162, 163, 169, 171, 172, 251 sex, sexuality 7, 79, 113–​33, 145, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 167, 173 n.39, 181, 182,

190, 206, 210 n.6, 215, 216, 217, 218, 223, 229 n.25, 248, 250, 254 singularity, singularities 45, 47, 67, 95, 117, 224, 235, 245 sociology 70, 109, 129 space, spatialization 24, 26, 27, 32, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 69, 70, 72, 76 n.59, 80, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 93 n.3, 95, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 113, 121, 149, 150, 159, 160, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 179, 182, 197, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 209, 211 n.20, 218, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 234, 235, 236, 239, 240, 241 space/​time (spatial temporal formations) 151 spirituality 15, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 174 n.61 structuralism 64, 65, 71, 73, 74 n.13, 74 n.23, 76 n.52, 91, 93–​4 n.9, 140 subject 13, 15, 21, 25, 32, 36, 57, 59, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93–​4 n.9, 95, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 115, 118, 121, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133 n.23, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 152, 157, 158, 160, 162, 171, 178, 185, 186, 198, 208, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229 n.25, 230 n.33, 233, 234, 239, 242, 244, 247, 250, 251, 252, 254 subjectification 140, 141, 143, 182, 252 subjection 11, 86, 89, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111 n.5, 116, 120, 122, 125, 127, 140, 142, 146, 180, 253 subjectivation 224, 225, 244, 246, 254–​5 subjectivity 12, 13, 15, 88, 90, 131, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 187, 196, 198, 208, 223, 226, 227, 244, 251 surveillance 96, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 116, 230 n.31, 237, 239, 240, 255 technology 14, 43, 105, 112 n.11, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 162

263

Index time, temporality 29, 30, 31, 41, 47–​8, 67, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90–​2, 93, 93 n.3, 93–​4 n.9, 94 n.11, 98, 105, 106, 121, 127, 145, 146, 148, 149–​50, 159, 162, 163, 168, 171, 182, 219, 220, 221, 225, 234, 239, 240, 244 timelessness 4, 41, 91, 92, 121, 161 transcendence 23, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 transgression 107, 118, 126, 139, 159, 163, 210 n.6, 250–​1 truth 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 36 n.4, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 60 n.21, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 75 n.38, 80, 81, 83, 96, 101, 110, 118, 121, 137, 146, 158, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 195, 197, 198, 208, 214, 216, 218, 225, 226, 234, 241, 242, 244, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252–​3

263

unconscious 7, 55, 63, 70, 71, 81, 85, 118, 120, 169, 187 unreason (déraison) 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 63, 107, 159, 250 violence 21, 26, 101, 102, 110, 112 n.6, 127, 128, 146, 148, 250 visibility 7, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 55, 101, 102, 103, 104, 111 n.5, 183, 187, 202, 203, 206 visibility-​invisibility 103, 104 vitalism 66, 68, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187 will to power 55, 162, 163, 180, 181, 182, 184, 192 n.21, 250, 251 writing 8, 9, 10, 11–​13, 15, 17 n.35, 17 n.42, 49–​52, 53, 54, 56, 59 n.11, 72, 75 n.44, 80, 138, 139, 140, 158, 160, 167, 168–​ 9, 171, 172, 173 n.24, 177, 178, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 209, 214, 216, 235, 241

264

Name Index Adorno, Theodor 3, 4, 5, 8, 16 n.6 Althusser, Louis 152, 154 n.23 Artaud, Antonin 7, 27, 139, 158, 177, 185, 186, 251 Bataille, Georges 15, 77 n.71, 159, 160–​4, 165, 167, 173 n.19, 173 n.24, 204, 226, 250, 251 Baudelaire, Charles 198, 199, 205, 224 Beckett, Samuel 7, 60 n.12, 198, 199, 236 Bergson, Henri 180, 182, 183, 184 Bichat, Xavier 45, 46, 47, 48, 164, 171 Blanchot, Maurice 15, 52, 76 n.51, 107, 139, 158, 159, 160, 162–​7, 171, 173 n.44, 174 n.62, 181, 193 n.35, 226, 251 Borges, Jorge-​Luis 63, 71 Bruns, Gerald 187, 223 Butler, Judith 133 n.22, 217, 255 Canguilhem, Georges 43, 62, 63–​7, 68, 71, 72, 74 n.13, 74 n.15, 74 n.22, 75 n.26, 75 n.32, 75 n.40, 75 n.41, 75 n.44, 76 n.53, 76 n.65, 77 n.65, 77 n.69, 184, 185 Cervantes, Miguel de 61 Colebrook, Claire 141, 182, 184 Darwin, Charles 181, 182 Deleuze, Gilles xii, 2, 14, 16 n.26, 37 n.13, 37 n.14, 39, 40, 52, 107, 154 n.29, 163, 178, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192 n.35, 193 n.37, 196, 209 n.1, 214, 226, 228 n.4, 229 n.26, 255 Derrida, Jacques 21, 169, 235, 236 n.1 Descartes, René 66, 121, 225 Eliot, T. S. 7, 142, 177–​8, 191 Flaubert, Gustav 177, 198, 204 Freud, Sigmund 7, 55, 120, 129, 144, 187, 236

Habermas, Jürgen 181, 182 Hadot, Pierre 17 n.42, 158 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 16 n.6, 106, 146, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 180, 191 n.10 Heidegger, Martin 9, 36 n.4, 37 n.8, 55, 162, 164, 166, 171, 178, 185, 191 n.10, 202 Hengehold, Laura 218, 225 Hölderlin, Friedrich 27, 166, 177, 185, 186, 251 Horkheimer, Max 3, 4, 5, 8, 16 n.6 Jouy, Charles 121, 122 Joyce, James 7, 139, 142, 177 Jullien, François 9 Kant, Immanuel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 16 n.15, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36 n.4, 37 n.13, 37 n.15, 40, 71, 76 n.63, 77 n.67, 81, 93 n.7, 94 n.10, 158, 180, 202, 224, 225, 249, 251 Klossowski, Pierre 226 Laclau, Ernesto 152 Magritte, René 7, 195, 200, 224 Mallarmé, Stéphane 7, 68, 72, 139, 164, 165, 169, 177, 185, 186, 236 Manet, Édouard 14, 195–​200, 202–​7, 208, 209 n.2, 210 n.17, 222, 223, 225 Marcus, Herbert 114, 116 Marx, Karl 3, 55, 105, 106, 151, 191 n.10 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 60 n.18, 94 n.10, 162 Mouffe, Chantal 152 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 179 Negri, Antonio 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 8, 27, 31, 40, 49, 50, 55, 59 n.11, 72, 102, 110, 111 n.3, 113, 140, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,

265

Name Index 178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 191 n.10, 192 n.35, 226, 251 Panizza, Oscar 216, 217 Piaget, Jean 71, 76 n.52 Plato 36, 247 Proust, Marcel 139, 142, 177 Ransom, John 184 Reich, Wilhelm 114 Rilke, Rainer Maria 7, 164, 165, 166

265

Roussel, Raymond 15, 40, 49, 52–​8, 60 n.17, 60 n.21, 157, 158, 159, 167–​72, 174 n.69, 177, 187 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 61, 62, 73 n.6, 74 n.9, 74 n.22, 171 Simmel, Georg 180, 184 Stein, Gertrude 15, 139, 148, 178,  187–​91 Woolf, Virginia 115, 139, 142

266

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