The beauty of friendship: Foucault, masculinity and the work of art

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 5, 2002, Pages 558-577

  Garlick, Steve ^a  

^a University of New York   (United States)

Author keywords

art; beauty; Derrida; finitude; Foucault; friendship; heterosexuality; masculinity; Nietzsche

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998075662     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028005593     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in W. Kaufmann (ed. and trans.) The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976); originally published 1883–5, p. 168.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 239; originally published 1887.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 193; originally published 1878.
4. John Coker, ‘On Becoming Great Friends’, International Studies in Philosophy 25(2) (1993): 116.
5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 124.
6. Linda Williams, ‘Woman as Rupture(?)’, International Studies in Philosophy 25(2) (1993): 130.
7. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
8. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (New York: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1991), p. 11.
9. Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal 29 (Spring, 1990): 8.
10. We could, indeed, trace this source of anxiety all the way back to classical antiquity. I will return to this point below when considering Foucault's ‘return to the Greeks’. 13–14.
11. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), pp. 67–8.
12. Alan Bray and Michel Rey, ‘The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century’, in T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds) English Masculinities 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 79–84.
13. Michel Foucault, ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997); originally published 1984.
14. The question of why friendships between men undergo a change in the modern period is not a simple one however. Drury Sherrod, for example, argues that changes in men's work, urbanization, and family organization, brought on by the industrial revolution, are the key determinant. See Drury Sherrod, ‘The Bonds of Men: Problems and Possibilities in Close Male Relationships’, in H. Brod (ed.) The Making of Masculinities (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1987). I think that such arguments seriously underestimate the role that changes in gender categories and the institution of heterosexuality play in constituting the modern ideal of male friendship. Furthermore, they neglect the earlier signs of this change. Here, however, I am concerned not so much with making an argument to this effect, but rather with simply establishing that such a shift indeed took place at the same time as homosexuality was appearing in the public consciousness.
15. Jeffrey Richards, ‘“Passing the Love of Women”: Manly Love and Victorian Society’, in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (eds) Manliness and Morality (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987), p. 117.
16. Barbara Franco, ‘The Ritualization of Male Friendship’, in K. Martinez and K. L. Ames (eds) The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of Material Culture (Hanover: University of New England, 1997), pp. 287–8, 292.
17. Robert Martin, ‘Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America’, in M. Duberman, M. Vicinas and G. Chauncey (eds) Hidden from History (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 170–4.
18. Donald Yacovone, ‘“Surpassing the Love of Women”: Victorian Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love’, in L. McCall and D. Yacovone (eds) A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 215.
19. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 21–2; originally published 1978.
20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987); originally published 1790.
21. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); originally published 1984.
22. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); originally published 1984.
23. See: Daniel O'Hara, ‘Michel Foucault and the Fate of Friendship’, Boundary 2 18(1) (1991): 83–103;
24. Herman Nilson, Michel Foucault and the Games of Truth, trans. R. Clark (London: Macmillan, 1998); and
25. Marli Huijer, ‘The Aesthetics of Existence in the Work of Michel Foucault’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 25(2) (1999): 61–85.
26. Michel Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’, trans. A. Sheridan, in L. D. Kritzman (ed.) Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York: Routledge, 1988); originally published 1984.
27. Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: the New Press, 1997). It should also be noted that in the same interview Foucault compares the idea of creating ourselves as a work of art with Nietzsche's project of giving style to one's life, and, as we have seen above, for Nietzsche friendship is an important part of this practice.
28. There is an interesting parallel here in terms of the position of the friend (philos) in ancient knowledge (philos-ophy) and the place of (hetero) sexuality in modern knowledge. The connection between friendship and the origins of philosophy is one that has attracted some attention in recent French thought. Deleuze and Guattari, for example, ask: ‘Does not the friend reintroduce into thought a vital relationship with the Other that was supposed to have been excluded from pure thought?’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 4; originally published 1991.
29. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’, trans. B. Lemon, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 160; originally published 1982.
30. It should be noted here that the Greek term philia is not exactly equivalent to the English ‘friendship’. In an illuminating discussion David Konstan has detailed the broad range of application which philia had to many different forms of affectionate relationships in antiquity, some of which, he argues, are often misleadingly translated as ‘friendship’. I do not think Konstan's work has any significant bearing on how we read Foucault's texts. It is perhaps useful, however, to consider the essential connections which prevailed between philia and other forms of Greek love when trying to envisage the sort of friendships of the future towards which Foucault is gesturing. See David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
31. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 233–4, 236–7, 238–9.
32. Foucault, The Care of the Self, p. 163, 198, 205–6.
33. Andrew Thacker, ‘Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence’, Radical Philosophy 63 (1993): 14.
34. Timothy O'Leary, ‘Foucault, Politics and the Autonomy of the Aesthetic’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4(2) (1996): 285.
35. Michel Foucault, ‘Michel Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997); originally published 1982.
36. See, for example: Nilson, Michel Foucault and the Games of Truth, p. 101;
37. Andrew Lamb, ‘Freedom, the Self, and Ethical Practice According to Michel Foucault’, International Philosophical Quarterly 35(4) (1995): 455; and
38. Huijer, ‘The Aesthetics of Existence in the Work of Michel Foucault’, p. 71.
39. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 66; originally published 1950.
40. Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, trans. Catherine Porter, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 315–16.
41. Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, trans. P. Aranov and D. McGrawth, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 287; originally published 1984.
42. Romand Coles, ‘Foucault's Dialogical Artistic Ethos’, in B. Smart (ed.) Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, Vol. III (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 368–74.
43. Richard Wolin, ‘Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism’, in B. Smart (ed.) Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, Vol. III (London: Routledge, 1994).
44. Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1993).
45. Rainer Rochlitz, ‘The Aesthetics of Existence: Post-conventional Morality and the Theory of Power in Michel Foucault’, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. T. J. Armstrong (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).
46. Transcripts of these lectures have not yet been published, but see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and
47. Thomas Flynn, ‘Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France (1984)’, in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
48. For a discussion of the function of parrhesia in antiquity, see Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, pp. 93–103.
49. Flynn, ‘Foucault as Parrhesiast’, p. 109.
50. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); originally published 1954.
51. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997); originally published 1994, p. 61.
52. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); originally published 1976.
53. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 12.
54. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 8.
55. For Foucault also, ‘[the care of the self] can be centred totally on the acceptance of death … and can even, up to a point, become almost a desire for death’ (‘The Ethics of the Concern for the Self’, p. 289). For a good discussion of Foucault's ethics ‘beyond life and death’, see James Bernauer and Michael Mahon, ‘The Ethics of Michel Foucault’, in G. Gutting (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
56. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 78.