Citizen or subject? Michel foucault in the history of ideas

History of European Ideas

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 113-159

  Ghosh, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 22244492637     PISSN: 01916599     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S0191-6599(98)00014-X     Document Type: Article

References (337)

1. Report of Henri Gouhier on Foucault's doctoral examination 25.5.61, pr. Didier Eribon, Foucault [1988] (1991 tr.), p. 114.
2. 'À propos des faiseurs d'histoire' [21.1.83], 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971] in DE iv.413, ii.150;
3. cf. Discipline and Punish [1975] (1977), pp. 30-31;
4. History of Sexuality (1984), ii.9, etc.
5. Egg. (1) Foucault on Kant: 'He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?' in 'What is Enlightenment?', P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: 1984), p. 34.
6. (2) The remarks approving nostalgia for a past period as a constructive pole of opposition to the present: 'Truth, Power, Self' [25.10.82], in L. H. Martin et al. (Eds), Technologies of the Self (1988), p. 12.
7. (3) The transition from 'blood' to 'sex' offers a specific example, but one so gross that F. felt obliged to apologise: 'I do not mean to say that a substitution of sex for blood was by itself responsible for all the transformations that marked the threshold of our modernity'. Quite so. History of Sexuality [hereafter HS, 1976] (1978 tr.), I.148.
8. Going behind Christianity to pagan Antiquity in the late volumes of the History of Sexuality is only a partial exception: there was an aggravated academicism at work here, but the two poles thus mapped out largely covered F's notions of what the present was, and what it ought to be: see below pp. 20-22.
9. Egg. The Order of Things [1966] (tr.1970), xiii;
10. HS I.65-66.
11. For a textbook formulation, The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (tr. 1972), pp. 166-177.
12. Self-evidently, F. denounced 'evolutive curves' and teleologies as continuous phenomena, e.g. Archaeology of Knowledge, 12; but use of the traditional/modern couplet is implicitly teleological with or without the adjuncts of narrative continuity and the historically attributed causation that underpins the historian's (re-)fashioning of continuity.
13. Negotiations (1995), pp. 91-92.
14. The three dimensions constitute the kernel of Deleuze's Foucault [1986] (tr. 1988),
15. [Part II] Topology: Thinking Otherwise.
16. For Foucault's own anti-historical use of the terminology of 'dimensions', e.g. The Order of Things [1966], 347f,
17. and for self-interpretations very close to Deleuze see, e.g. 'Truth, Power, Self' [25.10.82], in Technologies of the Self, 15;
18. HS II [1984], 4, 6. Common candour also requires acknowledgement of Didier Eribon's biography, Michel Foucault [1988]: without it the historical approach essayed below would hardly be possible.
19. Note also D. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), an erudite compilation with a full Bibliography of Foucault's works, which glosses but does not significantly traverse Eribon.
20. Note especially one of the best known expositions, H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Stucturalism and Hermeneutics (1982). This suffers from three obvious disadvantages. First, it was written 3-4 years before F's death, leading to an obvious distortion of perpective in favour of the concerns of the 1970s. Secondly, insofar as its loosely chronological account of his evolution offers a form of intellectual history (cf. p. xv), it is, because of its theoretical focus, a species of neo-Hegelianism. Thirdly, the authors had (like Deleuze and Paul Veyne) already established their own theoretical agenda long before they wrote on Foucault. So no Foucauldian, let alone historian, should be surprised that their implied historical account is demonstrably inaccurate on fundamentals (F. is thought only to have utilised Nietzsche after 1969), or that poor history makes for demonstrably inaccurate conceptual exposition (as in the attempt to situate hermeneutics as one of F's two central points of reference). This is not to belittle a pioneering text, nor to take issue with the claims it makes about method in social science, only to query the vehicle chosen. See nn. 45, 68, 125 below on Heidegger and hermeneutics.
21. 'Vivre autrement le temps' [6.5.79], DE iii.788-790.
22. F. objected to some uses of the term 'discontinuity', either as a crude dogma or else as implying the existence of an explanatory gap that might really have been explained, but this does not affect the general point: cf. The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (tr. 1972), pp. 3-17.
23. F's only serious engagement with Husserl (and even then it is a critical one) occurs, predictably enough, in his very earliest work, the Introduction written in 1953 to the French translation of L. Binswanger Le Rêve et l'Existence (1954):
24. DE i.69, 74-79.
25. But this was before the break with phenomenology and Marxism noted below; cf. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.58.
26. 'Réponse à une question' [5.68], DE i.674.
27. 'Piéger sa propre culture, [30.9.72], DE ii.382.
28. Draft Preface to The History of Sexuality, Vol. II,
29. first pub. in P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: 1984), p. 336.
30. In lineal descent from Durkheim Raymond Aron was appointed as a teaching assistant in Köln in 1930-1931, and this led (famously) to his introducing Sartre to phenomenology and to Sartre's own visit to Germany in 1933. Note further: Husserl's own delivery of the Méditations Cartésiennes as lectures at the Sorbonne in 1929 (with the youthful Levinas as one of the French translators in 1931), Kojève's seminar on Hegel from 1933 at the École Pratique des Haut Études, and Lacan's reading of Freud in the 1930s.
31. 'Structuralism and Post-Structuralism', Telos 55 (1983), p. 200;
32. D. Trombadori, "Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.72f.
33. Although F. was aware of Marcuse at an earlier date, because of his involvement in student radicalism, he dismissed him as a 'para-Marxist' ('Pouvoir et corps' [6.75], DE ii.757).
34. He also knew Otto Kirchheimer's book Punishment and Social Structure (1939)
35. which he cited in Discipline and Punish [1975] (24): but this was a result of quite specific work on prisons, and not due to more general intellectual awareness or concern
36. (cf. DE iv.73). Significant interest in, and awareness of, the Frankfurt School dates only from the study of German Liberalism in his Collège de France course of 1978-1979.
37. This was in every way late in the day: Resumé des cours (Paris: 1989), pp. 117-118.
38. For candid acknowledgement of his (and general French) ignorance of German culture in 1978: 'Ein gewaltiges Erstaunen' [30.10.78], DE iii.699.
39. 'I confess with appropriate chagrin, that I am not an analytic philosopher. Nobody is perfect': 'Sexuality and Solitude' [20.11.80], London Review of Books, 21.5.81, p. 3d.
40. Given his interest in the history of science (as distinct from philosophy), it is not wholly surprising that F. should read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) as early as 1963-1964:
41. nonetheless, he had got all he wanted in this area from the home-grown product, Canguilhem, who 'had fashioned and inspired [Kuhn's] thought' (a striking re-reading!) and so did not bother to cite him: 'Foucault répond' [1971], DE ii.240.
42. 'Archaeology of a passion' [15.9.1983], DE iv.600.
43. The phrase is missing from the original English edition along with a number of other textual disparities: Charles Ruas, 'Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault' in M. Foucault (Ed.), Death and the Labyrinth (New York: 1986), pp. 169-186.
44. DE iv.78.
45. For 'transversalism' (really a Deleuze term), e.g. 'The Subject and Power' [c. 1981] in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982), p. 211. Another feature which plainly influenced his attitude to Francoist Spain in 1975 and Jaruzelski's Poland in 1981 was the memory of French pusillanimity regarding foreign policy in the 1930s: hence the importance of securing the signatures of André Malraux and Louis Aragon to an appeal on behalf of political prisoners in regard to Spain, and explicit reference to the 1930s in the Polish case: Eribon, 264;
46. 'Les Rendez-vous manques', Libération 15.12.80, pr. ibid., 299.
47. Text written June 1981; pr. as 'Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l'homme' in Libération 30.6.84;
48. cit. Eribon, 279; full text DE iv.707, 708. The extent of F's philosophical loyalty to Enlightenment thought is clear from his late piece 'What is Enlightenment?; P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (1984), pp. 32-50. Again, the chronology, geography and trajectory of his conception of the 'Occident' (a central item of vocabulary) was unchanged from that of Max Weber, born 60 years before. Although F. undoubtedly helped inspire some of the most recent criticism of the Enlightenment as a beneficent, foundation stone of Western culture, he never had to confront it, nor the more extreme stance which it sometimes propounds, as for example in the 'culture wars' in the USA.
49. 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971], DE ii.148;
50. Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (tr. 1972), 12, 21.
51. F. had a very distant glimpse of this in his approval of Cassirer's Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) which practiced traditional Ideengeschichte at the expense of individuals, contingency and biographical accident: but even in 1966 he was somewhat behind the times in regarding this as an original achievement: 'Une histoire restée muette' [1.7.66], DE i.545-549. On Pocock cf. my 'Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment', EHR 102 (1997), p. 372, n.5.
52. HS II [1984], pp. 8-12.
53. F. noted that the structuralist decentring of the individual subject could 'no doubt be traced back to Marx': but this was a statement made with unfeigned ennui given his lack of interest in tracing what he took to be lifeless origins of this sort, and betokened no significant allegiance. Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 11-12.
54. The Order of Things [1966], pp. 355-367;
55. cf. 'La folie et la société' [10.70] DE iii.478-479.
56. Nonetheless, Lévi-Strauss' dedication of Structural Anthropology (1958) to Emile Durkheim in the guise of 'an inconstant disciple' is a more balanced recognition of intellectual continuity combined with the need which every original thinker feels, to assert their intellectual autonomy.
57. The Order of Things, p. 374, cf. 346.
58. Surveillir et punir (Paris: 1975), jacket text.
59. 'La philosophie structuraliste ...' [12.4.67], DE i.581.
60. 'A verdade e as formas juridicas' [21-25.5.73], DE ii.635.
61. Eribon, 71, corrects the transcription of F's view on this subject reproduced in DE iv.58.
62. Preface to the first edition, which was subsequently (and predictably) withdrawn: quotations from DE i.159, 165.
63. For Canguilhem: Gouhier's report on Foucault's doctoral exam 25.5.61: pr. Eribon 114. He had earlier supposed it was Hegelian: report to obtain a printing permit 19.4.60, pr. ibid. 105. - Derrida, 'Cogito and the History of Madness' [4.3.63] in Writing and Difference (Chicago: 1978), pp. 31-64, esp. pp. 39-42, which query F's positing of an undivided Greek logos (aka Golden Age), and the privileged historical status allotted to the great interment (or formative evolutionary-historical moment). F. himself later admitted that 'there was an Hegelianism there that was still lingering on'.
64. 'On Literature' [20.6.75], Foucault Live (New York: 1996), p. 153,
65. and this is the obvious explanation as to why he waited so long before replying to Derrida - and then only in a detailed, textual sense - in 'Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu' [1972], DE ii.245-268.
66. For egg. of changes of terminology by the re-working of texts see Eribon, 185. The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] is of course F's major attempt to define his relations with, and establish independence from, "structuralism".
67. 'La philosophie structuraliste ...', [12.4.67], DE i.581;
68. cf. 'Sur les façons d'écrire l'histoire' [15.6.67], DE i.595.
69. The list could be extended amongst Foucault's contemporaries by considering de Certeau's Jesuit origins, the relationship of Deleuze and Bourdieu to Marx and Durkheim, etc.
70. Cf. HS I.138-139.
71. The latter pair are extensively treated in The Birth of the Clinic [1963] (tr.1973), e.g. pp. 78-82, 126-146.
72. On F's 'Introduction' to G. Canguilhem, On the Pathological and the Normal (Boston: 1978), see below pp. 23-26;
73. Eribon, 103, is too much disposed to take it at face value. The full-blown tradition mapped there may be compared with the very modest presentation given ten years before in The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (tr. 1972), when F. had no developed interest in tradition: 4, 190.
74. Eribon, 31, 45; quotation from 'Introduction' to G. Canguilhem, On the Pathological and the Normal, French text in DE iii.429.
75. Eribon, 101-105.
76. E.g. 35-36, 38 outlining the salient significance of the normal/pathological distinction (1973 trans.).
77. E.g. Titres et travaux [1969], DE i.844.
78. p. 30.
79. HS I.69.
80. Cf. 'The Discourse of History' [15.6.67], Foucault Live, 23, 24;
81. 'La volonté de savoir' [1970-1971], Resumé des cours (Paris: 1989), 10.
82. Much of the architecture of H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982) is based on the contrary proposition, that you can and should discriminate between 'autonomous discourse' and 'cultural practices'.
83. 'Inutile de soulever' [11.5.79], DE iii.794;
84. 'Pour en finir avec les mensonges' [1982], pr. Eribon, 294. For the traditional roots of the category of the 'intellectual': Christophe Charle, Naissance des "intellectuels", 1880-1900 (Paris: 1990).
85. Jean Lacouture, Le Monde 3.12.70 cit. Eribon, p. 222;
86. cf. Jean Lacouture, Le Monde ibid., p. 256 for Le Roy Ladurie's oral reminscence of F's commitment to the institutional life of the Collège de France.
87. L'ordre du discours [2.12.70] (Paris: 1971), pp. 72-82.
88. It may only be with the voice of the advocatus diaboli, but one should note that all Foucault's tributes to Hyppolite occurred after his death, cf. 'Jean Hyppolite' [1969], DE i.779-785,
89. though he is also briefly thanked in the 1961 Preface to Folie et déraison 5.2.60, DE i.167. If one is going to attribute intellectual content to this (rather than personal and pedagogical gratitude), it can only be that there was still a residual Hegelian element in the first edition of this work (above p. 5), supplying another reason for the revision of that text in 1972. But in any event Eribon's treatment, which takes Foucault's elegies at face value, would seem to be well wide of the mark when it results in the conclusion that 'basically, Foucault was not too far from MerleauPonty ... in 1970' (!), pp. 20-21; ditto D. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 233. Had Les Mots et les Choses been written in vain?
90. History of Sexuality [1984] (tr. 1985), II.9.
91. 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971], DE ii.150;
92. The Order of Things [1966] (tr. 1970), p. 371.
93. Discipline and Punish [1975] (tr. 1977),
94. see esp. Part III 'Discipline'; quotations from pp. 293, 209, respectively.
95. Discipline Ibid., 139,
96. cf. 'Foucault étudie la raison d'État' [24.10.79], DE iii.802-803 on the distinction between Foucault and Erving Goffman's institutional approach to asylums.
97. L'ordre du discours (1971), pp. 62-72 is an extended example. The brief reference to child pedagogy in HS I.27-30 is only made for the light that it casts on conceptions of child sexuality.
98. E.g. 'L'intellectuel sert à rassembler les idées mais son savoir est partiel par rapport au savoir ouvrier', Libération 26.5.73, DE ii.421-423.
99. 'The minimalist self' [1983], in L. D. Kritzman (Ed.), pr. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988), 7;
100. cf. 'Cours du 7 janvier 1976', DE iii.165-166.
101. The Order of Things, p. 345.
102. F. vehemently denied that savoir was 'the mask of power'; but seems not to have considered the extent to which power was, if not the same as, a mirror image of savoir: cf. 'Le souci de la verité' [5.84], DE iv.676. On power see below Sections II and III.
103. Libération 26.5.73, DE ii.421. All F's references to the situation of universities within society are in the mould of the interview of June 1976 where he labels them as 'privileged points of intersection': i.e. they engross literature and the old-style literary intellectual (such as Sartre), which in turn unites them with 'mainstream thought'. The only danger F. (a contemporary of Pierre Bourdieu) saw in this was that of exposure to trivialization, not that of institutionalized savoir: 'Intervista a Michel Foucault', DE iii.155;
104. 'Structuralism and post-Structuralism', Telos 55 (1983), pp. 210-211.
105. For an extended example of the resulting embarrassment he faced with political radicals on the subject after 1968, see the interview with lycée students: 'Par-delà le bien et le mal' [11.71], DE ii.223-236.
106. E.g. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.43.
107. 'Préface à la transgression' [1963], DE i.233-250, esp. 236, 248.
108. DE i.248.
109. The Order of Things [1966] (tr. 1970), pp. 312-318;
110. this is in contrast to the 'plethoric' and 'limitless' knowledge of the pre-modern world (p. 30); cf. 'Jean Hyppolite 1907-1968' [19.1.69], DE i.781.
111. F's last important 'literary' piece is 'La pensée du dehors' [6.66] on Blanchot. The change in his thought is apparent in 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur' of February 1969: this looks as if it might pursue the literary agenda, but instead of dissolving the subject into the infinite 'murmur' of language, it deconstructs the category of the author in concrete historical terms, DE i.789-809. On a teleological reading, this switch away from a hermetic F. would prefigure his public engagement with pouvoir.
112. Egg. 'Le langage à l'infini' [1963], 'La pensée du dehors' [6.66], DE i.250-261, 518-525, 537-539.
113. 'Pourquoi réédite-t-on l'oeuvre de Raymond Roussel', Le Monde 22.8.64, DE i.422; cf. 'Archaeology of a passion' [15.9.83], DE iv.602. F's consent to an altered English title, The Order of Things, may reflect, inter alia, an admission that the original was too closely wedded to his literary roots.
114. 'Postscript: an Interview with Michel Foucault, [9.83], Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Roussel (New York: 1986), p. 174;
115. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.48.
116. F's lack of interest in Roussel's relations with the Surrealists reflects no doubt the fact that he discovered Roussel much later than them (in 1957), but it should not obscure the fact that he derived similar lessons from both and so grouped them together: cf. 'Postscript' 174-175, 181-182;
117. 'La folie n'existe que dans une société' [22.7.61], DE i.168. - The treatment of grammar and language in Les Mots et les Choses could hardly have been written without a generalized awareness of Saussure and the vocabulary of the 'sign', but this is as much as one can say for his significance; cf. F's disavowal of interest in structuralist linguistics, 'Sur les façons d'écire l'histoire' [15.6.67], DE i.595.
118. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.48;
119. 'Structuralism and post-Structuralism', Telos 55 (1983), p. 199. F. read Nietzsche in 1953; Deleuze's important book on Nietzsche, a milestone in introducing him to the respectable philosophical and academic community, was published in 1962. Another, lesser case is that of Hölderlin, whom F. seems to have learned of from Blanchot, but whom he only discussed in the context of his French critics: 'Le "non" du père' [3.62], DE i.189-203, cf. 202n on Blanchot.
120. See (most obviously) 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971], DE ii.136-156.
121. With Nietzsche one might perhaps group Heidegger, whose work F. occasionally cited and expounded in conjunction with, and as an extension of, Nietzschean rupture: but if so, it had nothing in common with the post-Husserlian usage of Heidegger within the phenomenological tradition. However, this set of references is brought into question by the fact that F. never highlighted a debt to Heidegger until after Dreyfus and Rabinow pointed it out to him: a stark warning, whether it signifiy his complaisance or flippancy: 'Truth, Power, Self' [25.10.82], Technologies of the Self, pp. 12-13,
122. is followed by the more blatant exaggeration in 'Le retour de la morale' [28.6.84], DE iv.703. As to why F. became interested in creating a German genealogy for himself, with Heidegger as a possible component, see below pp. 23f.
123. Egg. Folie et déraison, Preface [1961], 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE i.161, iv.43-54 passim; 'The Functions of Literature' [20.6.75] in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988), pp. 311-312.
124. Another striking feature of this edition was that no German was involved in it: this was not intentional but Foucault felt obliged to comment on the fact: 'Michel Foucault et Gilles Deleuze veulent rendre à Nietzsche son vrai visage', [15.9.66], DE i.550.
125. 'Le retour de la morale' [29.5.84], DE iv.703. To 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971] should be added the (rather disappointing) piece 'Nietzsche, Freud, Marx' [1967].
126. 'C'était un nageur entre deux mots' [Andé Breton, 5.10.66], DE i.556.
127. 'En intervju med Michel Foucault' [3.68], DE i.652.
128. Words and Things, pp. 385-386.
129. Folie et déraison, Preface, DE i.159. Concern with lyricism was, of course, central to Surrealist aesthetics.
130. 'Cogito and the history of madness' [4.2.63] repr. in Writing and Difference (Chicago: 1978), p. 57. Derrida's line of argument was not overtly political, but the use of the term 'totalitarian' could hardly be anything else.
131. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978] DE iv.78. Of course, this was only a public construction of F., and besides the Utopianism of The Order of Things [1966] one should note the significant political dimension to The Birth of the Clinic [1963], Still such a construction certainly indicated the difficulty of placing him on a conventional political spectrum.
132. Cf. Eribon, pp. 201-202.
133. Macey detects something sinister in this silence, but his argument is opaque: concealing a set of radical actions in 1968 was hardly an interested act on F's part, Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 207.
134. I.e. in the riot of 23 January 1969 and in protesting against Olivier Guichard's attack on the philosophy teaching of 15.1.70: cf. previous note. Neither Foucault's biographers nor Daniel Defert's 'Chronologie' in DE (i.34-37) note any other radical activity inside France in the period May 1968 to February 1971. Macey thinks to question this by reference to one conversation in April 1968, where Foucault displayed 'interest' in what was happening in Paris, as reported in Jean Daniel's La Blessure (1992), Lives of Michel Foucault, pp. 206-207. But even if one did not query Daniel's memory, this is simply inadequate in the face of the catalogue of F's (in)actions and the words (or silences) attaching to these.
135. Eribon, pp. 206-207.
136. 'La piège de Vincennes' [9.2.70] DE ii.67-73, here 68; cf. Eribon, p. 209, Macey op. cit., p. 230, 'Par-delà le bien et le mal' [ii.71], DE ii.223-236 on F's distance from, and difficulties with, the students.
137. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.80.
138. Ibid., DE iv.79;
139. cf. 'Lettre ouverte à Mehdi Bazargan' [14.4.79], DE iii.780 ('pour beaucoup, ce "tout" n'était ni plus ni moins qu'eux-mêmes').
140. 'Le chef mythique de la révolte', Corriere della Sera, 26.11.78, DE iii.716; original emphases.
141. I have not attempted to trace the significant stream of Foucault's discussion of death in his later writings, but note, e.g. 'Right of Death and Power over Life', HS I.133-159.
142. DE iv.79 [1978]. 'The Absence of Myth' is pr. in Georges Bataille, in M. Richardson (Ed.), The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (1994), p. 48. It comes from the catalogue to the exhibition organised by Bataille 'Le Surréalisme en 1947': since Foucault was living in Paris at that date, it seems a very strong speculation that he visited the exhibition.
143. Cf. Eribon, 138. The dandy is, of course, a traditional figure in French literary culture, especially in the theory or practice of authors close to F., such as Baudelaire and Roussel. F. recognized the filiation of ideas when elaborating on the aesthetic conception of life as a work of art: 'On the Geanealogy of Ethics' in P. Rabinow, (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (1984), p. 362.
144. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.43, 49-50. Note that here F. applies the word 'intolerable' to his private situation ca. 1945, even though the word is much more famous in his lexicon in its public applications from 1971, as in the title of GIP's pamphlet no. 1 [28.5.71] DE ii.195,
145. or the leaflet of 8.2.71 pr. Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 261.
146. E.g. 'La pensée du dehors' [6.66], DE i.537-538;
147. cf. 'C'était un nageur entre deux mots' [5.10.66], DE i.555-556.
148. Compare Folie et déraison, Preface [1961], DE i.159; 'Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l'homme'. [6.81], DE iv.708. In HS I.150 [1976] reference to Sade and Bataille is firmly marked as out of date, and as we have seen, he virtually ceased to write about these authors after 1966.
149. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], The Foucault Reader (1984), p. 342.
150. This remark helps explain his contempt for the political conduct of 'the philosophers of engagement' who were always notionally committed to activity but never did a thing in the war, i.e. they lacked the comprehensive, Utopian vision that might either induce apathy or spur them on to (hyper)activity: 'Politics and Ethics' [4.83] The Foucault Reader ( ibid., p. 374.
151. E.g. 'Politics and Ethics: an Interview' [4.83], The Foucault Reader ( ibid., 373-380.
152. This was a recurrence to pre-1971 positions cf. 'C'était un nageur entre deux mots' [5.10.66], DE i.556,
153. but even in 1977 he is 'at a distance' from politics: 'Le jeu de Michel Foucault' [10.7.77], DE iii.314.
154. Respectively the title and the conclusion of F's éloge on Maurice Clavel, 30.4.79, DE iii.788-790, and in 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.49. Of course the latter refers to conceptions imputed to the late 1940s, but there is no reason to suppose they were any different when he made the imputation: the words 'autre' and 'autrement' remained key items of vocabulary. Cf. his interest in the 80s in writing a genealogy of party, with a view to promoting 'governing in a different way': Eribon, 306. The Utopianism of the belief in the éloge that 'a very great and very profound alteration' had taken place 'in the West's consciousness ... of history and of time' precisely echoes the conclusion to Les Mots et les Choses.
155. 'Je perçois l'intolérable' [24.7.71], DE ii.203.
156. Note, too, the absolutely visceral nature of this title phrase in context:: 'I have no [personal opinions] ... I simply perceive the intolerable', (DE ibid., p. 205)
157. For a retrospective description of his course in 1970-1971 in precisely the same terms, "Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l'intérieur des corps' [1.1.77], DE iii.228-229.
158. See below p. 17.
159. In one of numerous late 'excavations' of his own past, F. revealed his admiration for Malraux on the occasion of the anti-Franco protest at Madrid in 1975: 'as a student [he] knew pages and pages of his books by heart' - meaning at the very least the famous treatment of the Spanish Civil War in L'Espoir (1937) and probably Le Temps du mépris (1935) on the rise of Nazism: Claude Mauriac, Le Temps Immobile iii (Paris: 1976), [22.9.75] 555. Of course, F's enthusiasm for Malraux as a symbol in 1975 was proportionate to his dislike of Malraux's then current Gaullist incarnation: hence his regret that M. the 'revolutionary' was not 'shot at the age of 20': 'Ils ont dit de Malraux' [23.11.76], DE iii.108. - 'Nietzschean Communist', though a phrase used by Foucault to describe himself in the early 50s (DE iv.50), supplies, of course, a perfectly legitimate description for Malraux, and Eribon is uncharacteristically flat-footed in reproving the use of the term (52). On Abyssinia: 'The minimalist self' [1983] in Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988), p. 7.
160. (1) Compare the proposition of 8.2.71 that 'None of us is sure of escaping prison', with the considerably more sophisticated reformulation a year later (4.3.72): in the latter 'This problem of prison is a local and marginal problem, because no more than 100,000 persons pass through the prisons per annum', and the reason why prisons were deemed to be important was symbolic, 'the penal system is a form where power displays itself in the most obvious fashion': '[Manifeste du G.I.P.]' DE ii.174; 'Les intellectuels et le pouvoir', DE ii.310. (2) Eribon 243-250 illustrates Foucault's maturation 'on the hoof' regarding courts of justice.
161. 'Les intellectuels et le pouvoir' [4.3.72], DE ii.312-313.
162. Egg. 'Préface' to Enqête dans vingt prisons [28.5.71], 'Je perçois l'intolérable' 24.7.71, DE ii.195, 204. For 'surveillance' (not to mention 'Panopticism', 'subjection', 'discipline' etc.) see Discipline and Punish (Surveillir et Punir) [1975].
163. Foucault plainly did not agree with Althusser about Marx; but equally obviously common use of structuralist, or asubjective categories, and acceptance of the educational and university hierarchies could lead to a resemblance of this kind: e.g. 'Sur les façons d'écire l'histoire' [15.6.67], DE i.587
164. (where explicit ambiguity regarding Althusser is further supplemented by that regarding Marx) cf. Eribon, 57, 58, S. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution (1993), pp. 144-146.
165. 'Intervista a Michel Foucault' [6.76], DE iii.157-160
166. offers another commentary on these themes; on the GIP, Macey, Lives, pp. 288-289.
167. HS [1976] I.94; cf. 'Précisions sur le pouvoir' [2.78], DE iii.625-635. Contrast the previous discussion in Discipline and Punish [1975] (tr. 1977), pp. 26-27 where the hierarchical residue remains much more visible.
168. ['Il faut défendre la société', Collège de France] 'Cours du 14 janvier 1976', DE iii.181;
169. cf. Discipline and Punish, 26f
170. on the 'micro-physics of power'. - The account may be simplified here. It is certain that by 1976 F. sought to abjure hierarchical, repressive notions of power, but was he entirely successful? He continued to use the language of 'domination' (as in 'techniques of domination'), and conceptions of hierarchy are implicit in all his studies in 'governmentality' and Christian 'pastoral power' in the later 1970s: e.g. 'Omnes et singulatim, Tanner Lectures in Human Values, vol. 2 (Utah: 1981), pp. 225-254. However, this modification only serves to emphasise F's difficulties in handling power en gros.
171. HS I [1976], 37 for the admission that he did not know what was the 'ultimate objective' of power; cf. 93-96.
172. It is an instance of Foucault's ignorance of the canon of political and social thought, as well as of his then restricted view of German authors, that he did not think to invoke Max Weber's famous aphorism that 'the concept of "power" is sociologically amorphous' at this point - an analysis which anticipated his difficulties and which led to a vastly more convincing analysis of quotidian power without an apparent subject (in the shape of bureaucracy): cf. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Munich: 1985), 28.
173. F. referred implicitly to Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis in 1976 as an offshoot of his interest in sexual asceticism, but he (like most Germans) did not become a significant name until F's more general discovery of German Liberalism in the cours of 1978-1979: HS I [1976] 122, 141,
174. Resumé des cours (Paris: 1989), pp. 116-119.
175. 'L'éthique du souci de soi' [20.1.84], DE iv.709.
176. 'Cours du 7 janvier 1976', DE iii.169;
177. 'Précisions sur le pouvoir' [2.78], DE iii.631.
178. HS I [1976], 93;
179. cf. 'Précisions sur le pouvoir: 'dense, heavy, blind, obscure', DE iii.628.
180. 'Cours du 7 janvier 1976', DE iii.160-162. Of course, he then proceeded implicitly to justify himself against his own autocritique, partly by reference to the wider contemporary context, and partly by reference to the microscopic virtues of his work.
181. See below Section III.
182. 'On Power' [1978] in Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault, 103;
183. 'Technologies of the Self' [10.82] in L.H. Martin et al., (Eds), Technologies of the Self (1988), p. 19;
184. 'The Subject and Power' [ca. 1981], H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982), p. 209;
185. 'L'éthique du souci de soi' [20.1.84], DE iv.728.
186. Cf. G. Deleuze, Foucault [1986] (tr. 1988), p. 94.
187. 'En intervju med Michel Foucault' [3.68], DE i.662
188. . Precisely the same mixture of Utopianism and sceptical restraint can be found at the end of his life when he disavows prophecy and prescription, but still perceives the intellectual's task as the promotion of a free and thus 'a new age', unconstrained or unillusioned by specific discourses: e.g. 'Le philosophe masqué' [6.4.80], 'Le souci de verité' [5.84] DE iv.108 et seq., 676.
189. 'Preface à Enquête dans vingt prisons' [Intolérable no. 1], DE ii.195-196, emphases added; for later egg. of the same: G. Deleuze and M. Foucault, 'Les Intellectuels et le Pouvoir', [4.3.72] DE ii.306-315;
190. 'Inutile de se soulever?', 11.5.79, DE iii.794.
191. The Anglophone reader must bear in mind that in Continental countries where the legitimacy and cultural centrality of parliamentary tradition is markedly less than our own, the traditional political role of the intellectual outside parliament was markedly greater, and was held in greater respect, even if it is in apparent decline today.
192. 'Aller à Madrid' [24.9.75], DE ii.761.
193. 'L'éthique du souci de soi' [20.1.84], DE iv.727-728.
194. Respectively: 'L'article 15' [3.6.71], 'Inutile de se soulever?' [11.5.79] in DE ii.198-199, iii.794. Foucault's peculiar analysis of power as infinite and microscopic was, of course, an endeavour 'to detach power with its techniques and procedures from the form of law' i.e. to sideline a traditional, pre-discursive form of analysis.
195. But as a result law was untouched by his critical analysis of power and thus to some extent re-legitimised; furthermore, having suggested that 'life' struggles had replaced legal ones, he nonetheless encapsulated them in the language of 'rights': 'Intervista a Michel Foucault' [6.76], DE iii.152, HS [1976] I.144-145;
196. cf. 'The political technology of individuals' [10.82], in L. H. Martin et al. (eds), Technologies of the Self, p. 162.
197. See Eribon pp. 259-261; for F's detached awareness of the ulterior factors affecting BRD policy, 'Désormais, la sécurité est au-dessus des lois' [18.11.77], DE iii.367-368.
198. 'Michel Foucault: la sécurité et l'État' [24.11.77], DE iii.386-388;
199. cf. 'Inutile de se soulever?' [11.5.79]: 'I do not say that power by nature is evil; I do say that power, through its mechanisms, is infinite', DE iii.794;
200. 'The Subject and Power' [c. 1981] in Dreyfus and Rabinow (eds), 221 on the inclusion of freedom within power (sic).
201. 'Le chef mythique de la révolte de l'Iran' [26.11.78], DE iii.714.
202. Cf. Eribon in 'Est-il donc important de penser?' [30.5.81], DE iv.180.
203. Loc. cit; 'Pour une morale de l'inconfort' 23.4.79 (reviewing Jean Daniel's strikingly entitled L'Ère des Ruptures), DE iii.783-784; 'L'esprit d'un monde sans esprit' [1979] DE iii.743-755 passim.
204. 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971], DE ii.136 ['la minutie de savoir'], 140 ['les événements], 148 ["le cornet du hasard"];
205. 'Le chef mythique de la révolte' [26.11.78], DE iii.714 ['les dés'];
206. Discipline and Punish, p. 139 ['anatomy']. However, the analogy between history and journalism was not quite complete, since in history F., despite his emphasis on the tireless 'erudition' of the 'genealogist', resisted indiscriminate, presuppositionless empiricism;
207. whereas he never seems to have had any such reservation about journalism: cf. 'Nietzsche, généalogie, l'histoire' [1970], DE ii.150.
208. 'La souci de la verité' [5.84], DE iv.669,
209. cf. 'The Subject and Power' [ca. 1981] in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 212.
210. On the contrast between 'discours vrai' and 'discours de verité' see L'Ordre du Discours (1971), pp. 20-21; and passim on the theme of discursive restriction;
211. 'En intervju med Michel Foucault' [3.68], DE i.661-662.
212. For a later and entirely consistent view of the mass media', e.g. 'Le philosophe masqué' [6.4.80], DE iv.108-109.
213. (Of course, constraint to speak was also a constraint on discourse, as F. noted when considering what he deemed to the excessive talk about 'sexuality'. Thus 'Silence itself ... is less the absolute limit of discourse ... than an element that functions alongside things said, with them and in relation to them': HS [1976] I.27.) The acceptance of 'discours vrai' is one of many indications of F's lack of interest in hermeneutics and the hermeneutic tradition of thought. When at the end of his life he began to refer to a 'hermeneutics of the self' he made it clear that this had nothing to do with textual hermeneutics (thus he equally frequently referred to 'deciphering' and never to 'interpretation'); furthermore, his declared aim was to put an end to this tyrannical, discursive practice: egg. 'L'herméneutique du sujet' [1981-1982], Resumé des cours, pp. 160, 163;
214. 'Technologies of the Self' [10.82] in Technologies of the Self, p. 17.
215. He thus remained loyal to the anti-hermeneutic stance of earlier years, a stance which was also fundamental to his intellectual sympathy with Deleuze: egg. 'Philosophie et psychologie' [27.2.65], 'La pensée du dehors' [1966], 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971], DE i.442-447; 518-525; ii.146.
216. Textual references go back to the 1960 Preface to Folie et déraison, DE i.162, but see esp. 'Préface à la transgression' [8.63], DE i.233-236. We may fairly presume that the subject of sexual discourse and repression had been of interest to F. for as long as he had been consciously gay.
217. This is the moral of both HS I, and of Foucault's general reticence, which was that of a man of his generation, and is symbolised by his support for Arcadie, an organization founded in 1954 and so remote from aggressive gay discourse that it referred to itself as 'homophile': cf. Macey, Lives, pp. 362-364. We can safely say that, in terms of its overt message, the Introduction to the History of Sexuality has been by far the least influential book F. ever wrote.
218. Cf. HS II [1984] 8, where he acknowledges that 'In the effort to familiarize myself with the ancient texts, I also ran the contrary risk of losing the thread of the [present-day] questions I wanted to raise'. It is unclear whether F. ever intended to write a book on modern 'governmentality' and bio-power in the period 1977-1980 - his concerns certainly point in that direction and those close to him expected it - and it may have been a casualty of the turn "back" to the History of Sexuality in 1980: 'Une esthétique de l'existence' [28.5.84], DE iv.732;
219. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], Foucault Reader, 344.
220. - Foucault's own account of why he dropped the original programme for the History of Sexuality, was that it would have been boringly repetitive of work already done on madness, la clinique and prisons in the same period. This is plausible, but it ignores the fact that his continuing studies of 'governmentality' were open to the same objection - and yet the pursuit and decomposition of power did not appear so boring: Draft Preface [ca. 1983] to The History of Sexuality, Vol. II, in The Foucault Reader, 338-339;
221. cf. DE iv.583.
222. For the fabrication of consistency, HS II [1984] 4f. Between the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality in November 1976 and F's "breakthrough" to a different theory of subjectivity - in the lectures entitled 'Truth and Subjectivity' given at Berkeley in October 1980 and then at the Collège de France that same winter - there is no evidence of research into the history of sexuality, either in the form mapped out in 1976 or that arrived at in 1980: see Macey, Lives, 'Bibliography', pp. 553-560. Incidental pieces written for gay magazines and an essay 'Le Vrai Sexe', introducing the newly discovered memoirs of a 19th century French hermaphrodite [5.79], DE iv.115-123, do not constitute exceptions.
223. HS I [1976], 42-43 (original emphasis), 70.
224. Quotations: Discipline and Punish [1975] (tr. 1977), 209;
225. HS I [1976], 114
226. , cf. 'Draft Preface' to HS II [ca. 1983], DE iv.583.
227. See also: Resumé des Cours (Paris: 1989), 1977-1978, 'Securité, territoire et population';
228. Omnes et Singulatim' [10, 16.10.79] repr. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pp. 57-85.
229. Discipline and Punish [1975], p. 249,
230. cf. 'The Subject and Power' [ca. 1981], in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 213.
231. The same idea is encapsulated in the title of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Utah: 1981),
232. 'Omnes et singulatim' [10.79], vol. 2, pp. 225-254.
233. Discipline and Punish, 7, 141. Of course, when we say 1800 we really mean the French Revolution.
234. Discipline and Punish, Ibid., 194;
235. 'Les rapports de pouvoir' [1.1.77], DE iii.230.
236. Discipline and Punish, p. 184;
237. cf. HS I [1976], 143. Note again F's resistance to, or distance from German language terminology here, when he might so easily have used Lukács' (and originally Simmel's) 'reification'.
238. Even F's imperious way with historical data (or else his memory of the epistemic break ca. 1800) was bound to yield to the fact that raison d'état and Polizeiwissenschaft in the 18th century were not identical with classical Liberalism in the 19th: so, although he tried to subsume them both under the rubric of 'rationalization of the exercise of government', he was nonetheless forced to admit that Liberalism did indeed supply 'a form of critical reflection on governmental practice': in other words, it was no different from the philosophy F. himself sought to practice: 'Naissance de la biopolitique', 1978-1979, Resumé des Cours (Paris: 1989), pp. 110, 116.
239. For an earlier, equally unsatisfactory wrestle with this dilemma: 'Cours de 14 janvier 1976', DE iii.185-189.
240. Discipline and Punish, p. 31. Of course, not only his lycée education but also F's exposure to Nietzsche lent him, in principle, the ability to go back to classical antiquity. In the Cours of 1970-1971 already, he had looked at Aristotle and Nietzsche's use of classical examples for the light they cast on 'La volonté de savoir': nonetheless, this was only a reading of canonical philosophical texts: Resumé des Cours, pp. 9-16. In other words: F. read Nietzsche in 1953, but waited 26 yr for a serious scholarly and historical encounter with classical and late antiquity: thus some explanation berider literal obeisance to Nietzsche (though it was probably also this) is requisite.
241. Ibid., 'Du gouvernement des vivants', 127, 129. F's Tanner Lectures on Human Values given on 10, 16.10.79 are a way station: F. has identified the use of classical Greek authors as a means to undercut or unpick Christian 'pastoral power', but the idea of the 'self' makes no appearance there: vol. 2 (Utah: 1981), pp. 225-254.
242. For this see the next cours at the Collège de France, 'Subjectivité et vérité' given in the winter of 1980-1: this was shortly preceded by lectures at Berkeley under the same title on 20-21.10.80, and another in New York under the title 'Sexuality and Solitude' on 20.11.80: see Macey, Lives, Bibliography, # #313-314.
243. Negotiations, pp. 91-93, 95-96, 106, etc.
244. Eg. 'Sexuality and Solitude' [20.11.80], one of the first texts to announce the new position, is also one of the first attempts to map out a long-term intellectual and authorial path: London Review of Books. 21.5.81, p. 3d. However it is preceded in this by F's 1978 'Introduction' to Canguilhem, On the Pathological and the Normal (Boston, 1978): see below pp. 23f.
245. 'Structuralism and Post-Structuralism', Telos 55 (1983), p. 199;
246. 'Une esthétique de l'existence' [28.5.84], DE iv.733;
247. 'Sexuality and Solitude' [20.11.80], London Review of Books 21.5.81, p. 3d. Deleuze conveys Foucault's discursive subject through his own terminology: it is the result of a 'fold', 'the inside as an operation of the outside': in other words, there is no true interiority in this subject, Foucault [1986] (tr. 1988) 97.
248. As is well-known Foucault originally intended to publish Le Souci de Soi quite independently of the History of Sexuality, and never pretended that consideration of the latter could supply more than a part of the history of the self: cf. Eribon, 319 & n.5; 'L'herméneutique du sujet' [1981-1982], Resumé des Cours, 145. Of course, we can view the History of Sexuality project in more rounded form in other locations, most obviously in 'Technologies of the Self' [10.82], in L. H. Martin et al. (Eds), Technologies of the Self, pp. 16-49, but the later volumes of the History are a signal warning against any privileging of books as against shorter or more occasional productions.
249. 'Afterword' [10.82], Technologies of the Self, 163;
250. 'Le philosophe masqué' [2.80], DE iv.108, etc.
251. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], The Foucault Reader, p. 362.
252. Egg. 'Sexuality and Solitude' [20.11.80], London Review of Books 21.5.81, p. 5a;
253. 'Le souci de la verité' [5.84], DE iv.670,
254. 'L'éthique du souci de soi' [20.1.84], DE iv.709.
255. 'Sexuality and Solitude', p. 5a
256. cf. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], The Foucault Reader, p. 369;
257. 'Intervista a Michel Foucault' [6.76], DE iii.147.
258. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', pp. 351, 354-355.
259. E.g. 'Sexuality and Solitude', p. 5a.
260. 'Une esthétique de l'existence' [25.4.84], DE iv.731;
261. cf. also 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', pp. 343-350 on Foucault's personal relation to the Greek model. The stength of his fascination is already sufficiently apparent there, and in HS II [1984] he goes further than before by referring to 'a kind of golden age in the cultivation of the self'. (p. 45)
262. 'L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté' [20.1.84], DE iv.708-711;
263. 'Sexuality and Solitude' [20.11.80], London Review of Books 21.5.81, pp. 3d, 5a.
264. E.g. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], pp. 351-353;
265. 'Sexuality and Solitude' p. 3d.
266. HS II [1984], 4. The same indecision (albeit in softened form) occurs in a previous description of the mode d'assujettissement as 'the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations': 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', p. 353. (All emphases added.)
267. The famous article 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' of 1971 was an attempt at a theoretical statement which would take account of F's new concerns - power, domination, the body - and hence the specific linkage of 'genealogy' to these: DE ii.136-156 cf. 'Cours du 7 janvier 1976', DE iii.160-174 passim. However, it was precisely an overlay and not a rupture: it did not entail the abandonment of 'archaeology' - the archaeological conception of history outlined here could have been written a decade previously - but it did entail methodological pluralism and fragmentation. Hence the formal retreat from the ponderous systematizing of The Archaeology of Knowledge and its replacement by post-Nietzschean lyric.
268. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE iv.42. Again, in talking about methodological reflections made in articles and interviews he added: 'There is no general method, definitively valid for others and for myself. What I have written has never been prescriptive either for me or others. It is at most a tool and a form of revery'. Of course, even the pre-1969 Foucault was no methodological purist - he would hardly have turned to versions of historical empiricism in that case - but still it was the addition of pouvoir which was crucial in bringing him to an awareness of the fact.
269. 'Les intellectuels et le pouvoir' [4.3.72], DE ii.308.
270. DE Ibid., ii.310 (emphasis added).
271. 'Cours du 7 janvier 1976', DE iii.163, 167.
272. The quotation recalls in turn F's appeal to 'counter-sciences' which constituted 'a perpetual sources of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation ... within the general space of the episteme' as far back as 1966: The Order of Things, pp. 379, 373-374. Cf. HS I [1976], 101 on 'the formation of a 'reverse discourse' allowing not homosexuals but 'homosexuality' to speak on its behalf.
273. Especially c. 9, 'Man and his Doubles'.
274. The Order of Things [1966], (tr. 1970), esp. pp. 340-343, 385. On F's Introduction to Kant's Anthropologie (which was never published) see Eribon, pp. 156-157.
275. 'Introduction par Michel Foucault', to G. Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological [1978], French original in DE iii.429-442, quotation iii.431.
276. 'Naissance de la biopolitique', Resumé des cours (1989), pp. 109-119. Other elements in F's conjoncture allemande should be noted: first, his visits to Berlin in December 1977 and January 1978, and secondly his appreciation of the 'Paris-Berlin' exhibition in October 1978, where he discovered in German Expressionism a 'lyrical protest' analogous to that of French Surrealism: 'Ein gewaltiges Erstaunen' [30.10.78], DE iii.698-700, here 700.
277. Chronologically the first text to bring out this point is 'The Subject and Power', which has no precise date (cf. Macey, Lives, Bibliography #338) but is almost certainly from 1981 or late 1980: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 216.
278. Text quotations also come from 'The political technology of individuals' [10.82] in L. H. Martin et al. (Eds), The Political Technology of Individuals (1988), p. 145;
279. 'Qu'est ce-que les Lumières?' [5.1.83], DE iv.687.
280. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault', DE iv.42;
281. cf. 'Qu'est-ce qu'un philosophe?' [autumn 1966] and 'Theatrum philosophicum' [11.70], DE i.552-553, ii.99;
282. 'On Literature' [20.6.75], Foucault Live (New York: 1996), p. 153 for further antiphilosophical gestures.
283. The Order of Things [1966], 385.
284. 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?' [5.1.83] DE iv.688;
285. 'The Political Technology of Individuals' [10.82] assembles 'Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Husserl, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School': DE op. cit.145.
286. The first mention of Habermas is in the lecture 'Sexuality and Solitude' [20.11.80], London Review of Books 21.5.81, p. 5a;
287. the occasion for this reading must (again) have been the cours of 1978-1979 'Naissance de la biopolitique', which considered German Liberalism from Max Weber to the year 1962: Resumé des cours (1989), pp. 116-119.
288. On Max Weber and the Frankfurt School see nn. 15, 106 above.
289. 'Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present', in D. C. Hoy (Ed.), Foucault: a Critical Reader (Oxford: 1986), p. 107. Habermas' understanding of the full degree of self-contradiction in Foucault's late turn to Kant is, as one might expect, excellent; but since he is neither an historian of ideas, nor an intimate of Foucault, it was hardly to be expected that he should spend much time seeking for an explanation of the phenomenon.
290. D. C. Hoy Foucault: a Critical Reader Ibid., pp. 103-104.
291. Respectively: D. C. Hoy Foucault: a Critical Reader ibid., 108;
292. 'Foucault' [1984], DE iv.631.
293. The latter words were written by François Ewald, an intimate of Foucault from the mid-70s: but they are plainly consonant with the rest of the entry written by Foucault himself, since they lead into his own description of his oeuvre as a 'Critical History of Thought'.
294. Cf. HS [1984] II.9, 'Le retour de la morale' [29.5.84], DE iv.697, for other egg. of F. citing his work within the framework of 'philosophy'.
295. - It would seem clear that Habermas' was paying a homage to Foucault, sincere but unostentatious, in the title of his 1983-1984 lecture series Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.: 1985).
296. Hence the good-humoured and humorous espousal of Heidegger, which so deceived Dreyfus and Rabinow (n. 68 above) and Deleuze, Foucault [1986] (tr. 1988), p. 107.
297. 'Cours du 7 janvier 1976'; 'Le philosophe masqué' [2.80]: DE iii.162-163, iv.110. Even before 1976 the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipe (1972) had inspired Foucault to suggest that 'new thought is possible; thought, once more, [de nouveau] is possible. It is not in the offing, promised by very distant signs of new beginning. It is there in the texts of Deleuze, springing up, dancing in front of us and amongst us': DE ii.98. The extravagant praise of Deleuze in the years to 1977 suggests how important it was to F. to find that there were others who were breaking the mould of orthodox philosophy alongside him.
298. The collapse of ideological blocs in Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) is central to the history in the years after 1960 but has yet to find sympathetic treatment: Anglophone scholarship (which anyway regards ideology as something that happens elsewhere) is dominated by the (linked) work of Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani, who focus primarily on local political argument and seek to prove that Marxism 'lost' that argument. This is improbable or incomplete because (i) the matter of this argument refers primarily to Eastern Europe and not to French life; (ii) it does not explain parallel ideological decomposition in other countries; and (iii) it ignores the more fundamental phenomenon of which Foucault was the central representative. F. did not argue against Marx, Sartre or Althusser - texts such as 'Foucault répond à Sartre' [1.3.68] are exceptions which prove this rule, DE i.662-668.
299. Had he done so he would have had no more success than Raymond Aron had done in The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955).
300. Instead he espoused a qualitatively different position, dismissing totalizing discourses altogether - a gambit which came from the intellectual margins and might, for all he knew, have left him there. However, Les Mots et les Choses enjoyed an astonishing French vogue, and this,
301. along with the qualitatively related successes of Derrida and Deleuze, is at least as significant as a pointer to the decay of ideological politics as the French publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974:
302. cf. Tony Judt, 'French Marxism 1945-1975' in Marxism and the French Left (Cambridge: 1986);
303. Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: the Intellectual Left in Postwar France (1993).
304. S. Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: 1991) is too much a work of political science to help with such a profoundly historical question.
305. Cf. the treatments of sociology and 'society' in The Order of Things [1966], pp. 355-367, Resumé des cours [1978-1979], pp. 112-113. The hegemony of neo-Kantianism in the French public and intellectual life was effectively terminated by the German conquest of 1940.
306. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], Foucault Reader, 350
307. cf. 'Une esthétique de l'existence' [25.4.84], DE iv.731, etc.
308. Whilst this helps explain why he found classical ideals of the good and harmonious life so attractive and recognisable, it should not be thought that classical antiquity was in any way a source for this conception: after all, he had only discovered it as a serious area of study in his mid-50s.
309. 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [end 1978], DE iv.53-55; this relies on the scheme outlined in the Introduction to Canguilhem On the Pathological and the Normal, also of 1978, discussed above pp. 23f.
310. 'The minimalist self' [1983], in Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 7. Note also the joke on 'desires'.
311. The Order of Things [1966], p. 371. The term 'background' (fond) is one he repeated: e.g. 'Sur les façons d'écrire l'histoire' [15.6.67], DE i.598; Draft Preface [ca. 1983] HS II, Foucault Reader, 339.
312. 'Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire' [1971], DE ii.150.
313. See Eribon, 316; 'Le philosophe masqué' [2.80], DE iv.108-109: however, his personal position remained that of 'hyper- and pessimistic activism': cf. 'On the Genealogy of Ethics' [4.83], The Foucault Reader, 343. The old rejectionist was never entirely overcome.
314. 'Le souci de la verité' [5.84], DE iv.675. This interview was an early premonition of the considerable literature on the subject of the "decline" of the intellectuals which has followed since.
315. 'Theatrum philosophicum' [2.70], DE ii.76.
316. When Deleuze speaks of 'a sort of neo-Kantianism unique to Foucault', he is referring to a quite different idea, that of the synthetic a priori: Foucault, 60.
317. Egg. 'L'éthique du souci de soi' [20.1.84], DE iv.717-726; HS [1984] II.6,8. This in turn underlies Foucault's celebrated references to his published works as fictions, which always meant that they were assaults on ordered discourse, discours de verité, but did not preclude evidential verification of a conventional kind: egg.
318. 'La pensée du dehors' [6.66], 'Sur les façons d'écrire l'histoire' [15.5.67], 'Conversazione con Michel Foucault' [1978], DE i.523-525, 591; iv.44-46.
319. 'Structuralism and Post-structuralism', Telos 55 (1983), p. 205. The list of academic ignorami who are unaware of this point is an exceptionally long one.
320. Egg. L'Ordre du discours [2.12.70] (Paris: 1971), pp. 15-21;
321. Resumé des cours [1981-1982] (Paris: 1989), pp. 155-160.
322. As in his ingenious but ultimately implausible attempts to reconcile his own interest in rupture and the 'event' with that of his academic-political allies, the Annales historians, in the longue durée: the latter might well have been conceived as hostile to the individual, human subject, but they were emphatically not post-Nietzschean cf. The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (tr. 1972), pp. 3-17.
323. Cf. Foucault révolutionne l'histoire [1978]
324. repr. in Comment on écrit l'histoire (Paris: 1985). To be fair, Veyne's title is a misnomer, and should really read 'Foucault revolutionizes philosophy', since most of his text is an attempt to propound an extreme historically-based nominalism which 'completes' traditional history (347, 384) and implicitly dissolves independent philosophy altogether. That Foucault could recognise Veyne as an ally is clear, and he did refer favourably to Veyne's earlier nominalist statement, Comment on écrit l'histoire originally of 1971: e.g. Resumé des cours [1978-1979], p. 110. However, he never referred to the tract on himself, which (despite borrowings from Deleuze) is alarmingly amateurish in its philosophy. It is also a flagrant attempt to appropriate Foucault for a pre-established agenda, and attempts to produce a codified Foucault and Foucauldian 'method' - than which nothing could be less authentic.
325. The prolific writings of Roy Porter constitute a prominent and representative example of an author traversing the core Foucauldian territory of the histories of madness and medicine: e.g. Mind Forg'd Manacles: a History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (1987).
326. Of course the history of modern science is a continuous pursuit, which (so far as Britain and America are concerned) goes back at least to Sir Henry Wellcome's creation of a Museum for the History of Medicine in 1913; but more recent landmarks would include Herbert Butterfield's Origins of Modern Science (1949) which, like Foucault, owed much to the impact of the atom bomb in adjusting traditional historical priorities. The evolution of a specialised history of science then received many formal marks of esteem in the 1960s, such as the commencement of the British Journal for the History of Science in 1967; but the outstanding feature in Britain has been the fusion of this specialised pursuit with the wider study of the history of ideas, and even social history, thus overriding any preoccupation with a distinct form of savoir: John Burrow's Evolution and Society (1966) supplies a pioneering example of this trend.
327. The entire trajectory of recent historical writing on the Enlightenment has been to stress the originality of 18th century writing on history and political economy and on disciplines which became historicized as a result, including philology and biology, thus subverting (or ignoring) Foucault's chronology, which was patriotically but implausibly tied to that of the French Revolution: cf. my 'Gibbon's Timeless Verity' in D. J. Womersley (Ed.), Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays (Oxford: 1997), pp. 143-145.
328. The root of F's difficulties lay in his inability to accept history as anything other than a 'background' (rather than as the single most powerful form of savoir), leading inter alia to the risible assertion that man at the beginning of the 19th century was 'dehistoricized': The Order of Things [1966] (tr.1970), p. 369.
329. p. 15. The extreme uncertainty of this part of the text, which includes the famous injunction 'Do not ask me who I am' (p. 17), stems in part from F's embarrassment and uncertainty in seeming to explain to the historians how they should practise their craft: he should not have worried.
330. See especially Martin Jay, 'Should Intellectual History take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate' in D. LaCapra and S. Kaplan (Eds), Rethinking Intellectual History (1983).
331. Here again F. was a victim of his naive belief in history as a universal 'background' only; and thus he never paid any attention to its evolution as a form of savoir. For a case study of the 'division' of history see my 'Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment', EHR 102 (1997), pp. 358-395.
332. This lay at the root of their famous disagreement over Descartes, as is evident from Derrida's opening words: 'Foucault's enterprise is too rich, branches out in too many directions, to be preceded by a method or even a philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word'. 'Cogito and the History of Madness' [4.2.63], Writing and Difference (Chicago: 1978), 33; cf. 'Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu' [1972], DE ii.247.
333. On the aversion to prophecy e.g. 'The minimalist self' in Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 15.
334. 'What is an Author?' [1970, US version], pr. The Foucault Reader, 119.
335. See especially his appearance as 'Le philosophe masqué' [2.80] and the discussion of anonymity there: DE iv.104-109; but note also the the use of pseudonyms ('Louis Appert', 'Maurice Florence'), DE iii.801-818, iv.631-636, and the undertaking of co-operative work, as in Moi, Paul Rivière (1973) or Le Désordre des familles (1982).
336. 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?' [22.2.69], DE i.800.
337. This text is preceded by the important remarks in 'Sur les façons d'écire l'histoire' [15.6.67], where F. urges that 'we have to conquer anonymity, to justify to ourselves the enormous presumption of one day becoming anonymous', but then admits that the 'rage' to efface the individuality of a text itself constitutes 'so many marks of individuality and singularity': DE i.596-597.