The art of self-fashioning, or Foucault on Plato and Derrida

Foucault Studies

Volumn , Issue 2, 2005, Pages 54-74

  Miller, Paul Allen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33744780568     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18325203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22439/fs.v0i2.860     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. Michel Foucault, L'herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France. 1981-82, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001).
2. See also his resumé of the dialogue in his unpublished lecture of February 16 1983, in the course Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (1983), tapes of which are available at the Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine. I thank the Institut for making these recordings available to me.
3. For a survey of the problem and a persuasive argument for the dialogue's authenticity, see Nicholas Denyer, Plato: Alcibiades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14-26.
4. For a brief survey of the latest stylometric research, see Leonard Brandwood, "Stylometry and Chronology," The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 112. And for Foucault's position and an updated bibliography on the status of the controversy in France, see Foucault, L'herméneutique du subjet, 71, and Gros's accompanying note. Croiset's Budé edition, which would have been Foucault's reference volume, emphatically rejects all doubts about the dialogue's authenticity. Maurice Croiset, ed.
5. and trans., Platon: Introduction, Hippias Mineur, Alcibiade, Apologie de Socrate, Euthyphron, Criton, 9th ed. (Paris: Société d'Edition «Les Belles Lettres», 1960), 49-53. Original = 1920.
6. Foucault, L'herméneutique, 164;
7. Denyer, Plato: Alcibiades, 14;
8. Pierre Hadot, Qu'estce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 238-40.
9. Foucault lectured on the care of the self in the Laches, Apology, Crito and Phaedo.
10. See Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 163.
11. Frédéric Gros, "Situation du Cours," in Michel Foucault, L'herméneutique du subjet: Cours au Collège de France. 1981-82, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001), 490-93, 507;
12. Michel Sennellart, "La practique de la direction de conscience," Foucault et la philosophie antique, eds. Frédé ric Gros and Carlos Lévy (Paris: Kimé, 2003), 157.
13. Foucault, "L'herméneutique du sujet," Dits et écrits: 1954-1988, vol. 4, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 364;
14. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 322, 340.
15. J. Miller, Passion, 323-22, 340, 346-47;
16. David H. J Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, "Introduction: Situating the History of Sexuality." Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, eds. David H. J Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 22-33;
17. Alain Vizier, "Incipit Philosophia," Rethinking Sexuality, 67-68, 71.
18. On the relation between Foucault's late ethical thought and Anglo-American "virtue ethics, see Neil Levy, "Foucault as Virtue Ethicist," Foucault Studies 1 (2004): 20-31, who to my mind fails to emphasize sufficiently the importance of aesthetics in the final Foucault, but nonetheless notes some important points of meeting between these two bodies of thought.
19. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 180-81;
20. Gros, "Situation du cours," 524-25.
21. Jorge Davila, "Ethique de la parole et jeu de la vérité," Foucault et la philosophie antique, eds. Frédéric Gros et Carlos Lévy (Paris: Kimé, 2003), 207.
22. Foucault, "La sociéte punitive," Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 466-70;
23. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 135;
24. and Ron Sakolsky, "'Disciplinary Power,' the Labor Process, and the Constitution of the Laboring Subject," Rethinking MARXISM 5.4 (1992): 114-26.
25. Davidson, Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997).
26. Thomas Benatouïl, "Deux usages du stoicisme: Deleuze, Foucault," Foucault et la philosophie antique, eds. Frédéric Gros et Carlos Lévy (Paris: Kimé, 2003), 20.
27. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 17.
28. Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 172. Original = 1970
29. reprinted under the same title in Dits et écrits: 1954-1988, vol. 2, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 75-99.
30. Foucault, "Theatrum Philosphicum," 166-69;
31. Benatouïl. "Deux usages du stoicisme," 24, 30-31, 36;
32. Thomas Flynn, "Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France (1984)," The Final Foucault, eds. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 112. At this same period, in his inaugural address to the Collège de France, Foucault already envisaged returning to Plato and the sophists to examine the division between true and false discourses, which philosophy establishes, and how this division differs fundamentally from a the concept of truth embodied in the pronouncements of traditional poets such as Hesiod.
33. See L'ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 16-17, 64.
34. Anissa Castel-Bouchouchi, "Foucault et le paradoxe du platonisme," Foucault et la philosophie antique, eds. Frédé ric Gros et Carlos Lévy (Paris: Kimé, 2003), 176, 186-87.
35. For a defense of this approach to the dialogues, see Matthew Kenney, Seducing the Soul: Erôs and Protreptic in the Platonic Dialogues. Dissertation. University of South Carolina (2003), 8-27.
36. Hadot, "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy," trans. Arnold I. Davidson and Paula Wissing, Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 211-12
37. Hadot, Que'estce que la philosophie antique?, 102-03.
38. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to underestimate the influence of these earlier more traditional French Platonists on the later postmodernists' thought. Thus Festugière defines philosophie as "le soin de l'âme" ["care of the soul"] and opens his chapter on "La vie intérieure" with a citation from the Alcibiades, ti estin to heautou epimeleisthai? ["what is the care of the self?"]. A. J Festugière, Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1950), 61, 130. Original =1935.
39. Léon Robin, "Notice," Platon: Le Banquet (Paris: Société d'Edition «Les Belles Lettres», 1929), vii-cxxi;
40. La théorie platonicienne de l'amour, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), original =1933;
41. "Notice," Platon: Phèdre (Paris: Société d'Edition «Les Belles Lettres», 1985), vii-ccv. Original = 1933.
42. Auguste Diès, "Notice," Platon: Philèbe (Paris: Société d'Edition «Les Belles Lettres», 1941), vii-cxii.
43. Nicolas-Isidore Boussoulas, L'être et la composition des mixtes dans le «Philèbe» de Platon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952).
44. Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 74-76, 118.
45. Foucault, L'usage des plaisirs, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 11-14.
46. By all evidence, the debate continued to fascinate Derrida as well. See his analysis of the ambivalent place of Freud in Histoire de la Folie and Foucault's later work, "'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," trans.
47. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Naas, Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
48. Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu," Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique suivi de Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu et La folie, l'absence de l'oeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 584, 602.
49. Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu," 602.
50. See Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Michel Foucault: Archéologie et généalogie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1985), 131;
51. and Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 75.
52. Evidence of Foucault's counterdiscourse to Derrida can be seen already in Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
53. Where Derrida had argued in his early work De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967)
54. L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967)
55. and La voix et la phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967) that Western metaphysics was constituted by the systematic exclusion of writing in favor of the voice and consciousness's immediate self-presence to itself. Foucault, however, in Les mots et les choses argues for an alternative tradition of renaissance philosophy that privileges writing (p, 53).
56. This theme would be further developed in the 1982 course at the Collège de France where Montaigne is specifically seen as the heir to the late antique tradition of the care of the self (L'herméneutique, 240; "A propos de la généalogie de l'éthique," 410)
57. a theme that is later repeated by Hadot (Qu'estce que la philosophie antique, 395, 413)
58. and Nehamas (The Art of Living). Foucault's Les mots et les choses was published the year before Derrida published his three books, but the latter's ideas had been in circulation for some time in the form of lectures and conference papers.
59. Foucault, "L'herméneutique du sujet," 361.
60. Foucault, "Les techniques de soi," 796
61. In at least one case, Foucault's interviewers clearly invite him to situate his work relative to the problematic investigated by Derrida in "La Pharmacie." Foucault's response is to switch immediately to a discussion of the history and technical status of hupomnêmata, a move that appears to refuse the engagement with Derrida while simultaneously accepting it on his own terms ("A propos de la généalogie de l'éthique," 624-25).
62. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, vol. 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1965), 112.
63. The importance of the hupomnêmata as a genre of philosophic writing that was designed to serve as a spiritual exercise, and hence a technology of the self, was first discussed by Hadot in reference to Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (La citadelle intérieur: Introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle (Paris: Fayard, 1992) 40-49;
64. Arnold Davidson, "Introduction: Pierre Hadot and the Spiritual Phenomenon of Ancient Philosophy," Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Hadot to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 10-11.
65. Foucault, "L'écriture de soi," 425.
66. Foucault, "A propos de la généalogie de l'éthique," 625-26.
67. For a discussion of the concept, see Flynn "Foucault as Parrhesiast."
68. and David Konstan, "PARRHÊSIA: Ancient Philosophy in Opposition," MYTHOS and LOGOS: How to Regain the Love of Wisdom, eds. Albert A. Anderson, Steven V. Hicks, and Lech Witkowski (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 27.
69. Philodemus's text is now available in English under the title On Frank Criticism: Introduction, Translation and Notes by David Konstan, Diskin Clay, Clarence E. Glad, Johan C. Thom, and James Ware (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998).
70. See L'herméneutique du sujet as well, 232, 357-63, and 382-89.
71. For the changing meanings of parrhêsia from classical Athens to the Hellenistic period, see Konstan, "Friendship, Frankness, and Flattery," Friendship, Flattery, and Frankness of Speech: Studies of Friendship in the New Testament World, ed. John T. Fitzgerald (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 7-19.
72. He contends that 6, 7, and 8 are authentic, while the others are more likely to be forgeries. Cooper indicates that the seventh letter is "the least unlikely to have come from Plato's pen" and certainly dates from the period and shows a thorough acquaintance with Plato's personal history and philosophy. John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works, assoc. ed. D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1635. Irwin rejects it as spurious, but agrees that it must date from the period and be by the hand of "someone who knew Plato well." His note contains a good English bibliography on the question.
73. Terrence Irwin, "Plato: The Intellectual Background." The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51.
74. Julia Annas notes that such forgeries were a common rhetorical genre exercise throughout antiquity, Annas, "Plato," The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., eds. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
75. Brandwood, however, indicates that the seventh letter is stylometrically consonant with the late dialogues ("Stylometry and Chronology," 111-13), and Penner notes its thematic and tonal continuities with these same works. Terry Penner, "Socrates and the Early Dialogues," The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 130. Souilhé, the editor of the Budé edition of the letters, which was Foucault's reference text, has both an excellent history of the controversies surrounding the letters in general (v-xxxi) and what is to my mind a convincing defense of the authenticity of the seventh letter (xxxiii-lviii).
76. Joseph Souilhé, ed. and trans., Platon: Lettres (Paris: Société d'Edition «Les Belles Lettres», 1960).
77. See also Morrow's defense of the authenticity of the seventh and eighth letters (Glenn R. Morrow, Studies in the Platonic Epistles: With a Translation and Notes [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1935], 11-22) and Festugière on the Seventh (Contemplation, 61n. 1).
78. Morrow "Letters," Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, assoc. ed. D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1658. All other translations of the letters are from this edition. Plato only once tried to lecture on the Good. Aristotle tells us it was completely incomprehensible (Metaphysics A.6).
79. Foucault seems to be paraphrasing Souilhé (Platon: Lettres, l), but see also Festugière (Contemplation, 191)
80. Irwin, "Plato: The Intellectual Background," 65-66, 68-69;
81. Penner, "Socrates and the Early Dialogues," 139-47;
82. Gail Fine, "Inquiry in the Meno," The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203-11;
83. Souilhé, Platon: Lettres, liv-lv
84. Kenney, Seducing the Soul, 28-90.
85. Foucault notes that the term for this relationship is sunousia ("being with"), which often has an erotic sense; he then asserts that it has does not have that sense in the context of the seventh letter while admonishing us not to "overinterpret." It is difficult to know how seriously to take this admonition. On the one hand, it could be a deliberate attempt to innoculate his audience against a premature or facile psychoanalytic reading. On the other hand, Foucault is well aware of the erotic frame of the Alcibiades and its relation to Alcibiades' drunken entrance in the Symposium, which is the crux of Lacan's reading of this latter dialogue. By calling attention to the possibility of the erotic reading of sunousia before an audience of non-Hellenists, while simultaneously warning against it, Foucault both calls our attention to the intense affective relationship between master and disciple and cautions us against an overhasty assimilation of it to a purely genital one. Of course, the ancient satiric texts reveal that this assimilation was as common in a pre-Freudian era as it is today. See Juvenal 2 and Satyricon 85-87
86. as well as Daniel McGlathery, "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius's Satyricon," Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, eds. David H. J.Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
87. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire livre VIII: Le transfert, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
88. See Symposium, 211 a-b. For a comparison of this passage with the seventh letter
89. see Robin (Le Banquet, xci).
90. On the centrality of this concept in Platonic metaphysics, see Boussoulas (L'être et la composition des mixtes, pp.77-82).
91. Flynn, "Foucault's Mapping of History," The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29.
92. Souilhé, Lettres de Platon, lxxxix-xci
93. See Elizabeth Asmis, "Plato on Poetic Creativity," The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 338.
94. Desmond Lee, ed. and trans., Plato: The Republic, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1987), 178-79. All translations of the Republic are from this edition.
95. On the translation, see the note in Lee, Plato: The Republic and Adam's important discussion ad loc.
96. James Adam, The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
97. Trevor J. Saunders, Laws, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, assoc. ed. D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1483-84;
98. Asmis, "Plato on Poetic Creativity," 338
99. Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 88.
100. Walter Hamilton, ed and trans., Plato: Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (London: Penguin, 1973), 55 n.2.
101. The translation is my own. The passage is much controverted. For three very different translations see Claudio Moreschini and Paul Vicaire, eds., Platon: Phèdre (Paris: Société d'Edition «Les Belles Lettres», 1985);
102. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, eds. and trans., Plato: Phaedrus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995);
103. and Hamilton, Plato: Phaedrus. Nehamas and Woodruff adopt Badham's emendation of iont' for ion, which changes the subject of the last clause. This is in line with their overall interpretation of the dialogue as moving from the transcendental vision of the forms found in the Republic to a more immanent, almost Aristotelian vision, found in the Philebus (xlii-xliii).
104. Which is not to say that it does not also serve as such an illustration. See G. R. F. Ferrari, "Platonic Love," The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
105. Catherine H Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 201-16;
106. Allan Stoekl, Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 201.
107. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 219-20.
108. Alexander Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle Illustrated with Essays and Notes, vol. 1 (London: Longman's, 1866), 45.
109. For a discussion of recent readings of the Ion in relation to the Republic's "banishment" of the poets and the elaboration of Plato's mature metaphysical theories, see Ledbetter, who accepts a rigorous distinction between the early Socratic dialogues and the later Platonic dialogues. Grace M. Ledbetter, Poetics Before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 78-99.
110. It was Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1963) who most decisively, if somewhat monochromatically, demonstrated this. His text remains fundamental.
111. See Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue, 17;
112. Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 34;
113. John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), 62;
114. Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1;
115. Bruno Gentili, Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica: Da Omero al V secolo (Rome: Editori Latera, 1984), 53;
116. Peter W. Rose, Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 337;although its more extreme claims, particularly about alphabetic literacy and the direct causal effects of literacy are today questioned
117. See Thomas, Oral Tradition, 3, 17n.2, 26;
118. Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 17;
119. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989), 50n.23;
120. Rose, Sons of the Gods, pp.116-17).
121. See also Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Seuil, 1983) 34, 46;
122. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) 53;
123. Harry Berger, Jr., "Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscriptions," ed. Steven Shankman, Plato and Postmodernism (Glenside, PA: Aldine Press, 1994: 82);
124. Thomas, Literacy and Orality, p.18;
125. and Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), 5.
126. On poetry as the dominant form of paideia, and the lack of any significant form of book trade until the end of the fifth century BCE, see Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, 50;
127. Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 174;
128. Harris, Ancient Literacy, 57-59, 84-93;
129. Graff, Legacies of Literacy, 26;
130. Oral Tradition, 21
131. Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1991), 88;
132. Gregory Nagy, Greek Myth and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 38;
133. Nagy, Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 404.
134. Vernant, Mythe et pensée, vol. 1, 92-117
135. Michael L. Morgan, "Plato and Greek Religion," The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).