Genealogy and the problem of affirmation in Nietzsche, Foucault and Bakhtin

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 41-65

  Evans, Fred ^a  

^a DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Bakhtinian voice ; Friedrich Nietzsche; genealogy; Michel Foucault; Mikhail Bakhtin; multi voiced body; power resistance; will to power; heteroglossia

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998183754     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370102700303     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 129; hereafter cited as ‘TSZ’.
2. Some commentators have even suggested that genealogy should restrict itself to critique — see Paul Bové, ‘The Foucault Phenomenon: the Problematics of Style’, foreword to Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, ed. and trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xxxiv;
3. Michael Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 139;
4. Rudy Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 129–30.
5. See, for example, Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Paul Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 2 (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 382
6. where Foucault speaks approvingly of Nietzsche's acknowledgment that genealogy is a ‘vertical projection of its position [upon history]’ — a perspective or an interpretation that, like all others, selects its own standards and imposes its own direction upon things (p. 378); hereafter ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ will be cited as ‘NGH’.
7. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 77.
8. See James M. Curtis, ‘Michael Bakhtin, Nietzsche, and Russian Pre-Revolutionary Thought’, in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Curtis points out that one of Bakhtin's main teachers, the classicist Tadeusz Zielinski, was a Nietzsche scholar and enthusiast. He also delineates Bakhtin's use of images that are similar to Nietzsche's and shows how the Nietzschean features of Bakhtin's work clarify the relationship between Bakhtin and the Russian formalists of that period.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974), pp. 168–9; hereafter cited as ‘GS’.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Press, 1967); hereafter cited as ‘WP’.
11. WP 550. See also WP 338–9 and Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 48.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 153; hereafter cited as ‘GM’.
13. Nietzsche explicitly identifies his outlook with naturalism: ‘When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?’ (GS 169).
14. This claim is an extrapolation from the passages cited in this paragraph and from Nietzsche's comments concerning the ‘will to nothingness’ (GM 162–3). It is also inspired by Deleuze's interpretation of will-to-power: Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 53–4.
15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 88–91; hereafter cited as ‘HS’.
16. HS 92; see also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 26–7; hereafter cited as ‘DP’.
17. See, too, Michel Foucault, ‘Power and Strategies’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 142.
18. HS 98; see also DP 27 and Michel Foucault, ‘Prison Talk’, in Power/Knowledge, p. 52.
19. Sometimes Foucault speaks as if the relation between power and knowledge is asymmetrical — for example, ‘power produces [knowledge]’ (‘Body Power’, in Power/Knowledge, p. 59) — but that is the exception to the rule and to what he intends.
20. DP 28; see also Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge, pp. 118, 133.
21. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 273; hereafter cited as ‘DN’.
22. DN 358. Bakhtin identifies these ‘social languages’ with ‘socio-linguistic belief systems’ that carve out distinct, though not completed, identities for themselves within the boundaries of a language that is only abstractly unitary; for example, formal (e.g. mathematics) or national (e.g. Chinese) languages (DN 273, 288). Dialogue can take place among interlocutors within a single social language, across social languages within a single national language, across national languages within a single culture, or (though Bakhtin does not discuss this) across different national languages belonging to different cultures (DN 275); cf. Emily A. Schultz, Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf, Bakhtin, and Linguistic Relativity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 52–3.
23. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), p. 47; hereafter cited as ‘PDP’.
24. Bakhtin explicitly uses the term ‘dialogized heteroglossia’ in only two passages (DN 272–3). In these, he introduces it in connection with the opposition between ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’, that is, between the tendency to proliferate languages and the contrary tendency to subordinate them to a single ‘master language’ (see below). But one would be correct, following Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 143, to use this term, as we are doing, to cover all utterances; for Bakhtin clearly holds that all utterances directly involve a contest among different voices or social languages; thus dialogized heteroglossia usefully summarizes the major point of his linguistics.
25. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 169.
26. For a discussion of Bakhtin's notion of voice that relates it to current studies of language by psychologists and linguists, see James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
27. For a comparison with and a contrast of Bakhtin's view with Benjamin Lee Whorf's holism and emphasis on grammar, see Schultz, Dialogues at the Margins. Bakhtin adds that these voices possess ‘height, range, timbre, aesthetic category (lyric, dramatic, etc.)’ as well as articulate particular ‘world views and fates’ (PDP 293).
28. DN 362; see also Bakhtin, Speech Genres, p. 92.
29. Some other examples of hybridization are Irigaray's anti-phallocentric practice of ‘mimicry’ (Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985], pp. 76
30. the ‘double-consciousnesses’ of which W. E. B. Du Bois and, more recently, Gilroy speak (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic [London: Verso, 1993], p. 48)
31. Derrida's deconstructive practices (e.g. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978]).
32. For other treatments of genealogy as ‘critique’, see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 32–3
33. David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 17–18
34. passim. Genealogical critique differs from Kant's notion of critique in that it seeks the historical conditions of actual occurrences and practices rather than the transcendental conditions of possibilities (see Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy, p. 139).
35. WP 12–13. Cf. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 147–8.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, pp. 477–9.
37. Nietzsche's contrast between an ‘immaculate’ form of perception and knowledge and a more creative form of perception and knowledge (‘solar love’) also provides an illustration of genealogy (TSZ 233–6); for an extended treatment of this example, see Fred Evans, ‘“Solar Love”: Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and the Fortunes of Perception’, Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998): 171–93.
38. For another extended illustration of genealogy, a genealogical critique of the computational model of mind in contemporary psychology, see Fred Evans, Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).
39. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 169; hereafter cited as ‘FT’.
40. FT 26; see also Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 62, 317; hereafter cited as ‘RW’. Nietzsche, too, says that the body is the source of our desire to ‘create beyond [ourselves]’ (TSZ 147). Foucault notes that the body is ‘a volume in perpetual disintegration’ and that it is genealogy's task ‘to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body’ (NGH 375–6).
41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 258.
42. Much ink has been expended on the interpretation of Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return. My interpretation is closest to that of Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, which includes both the ‘cosmological’ and ‘practical’ renderings of the eternal return (pp. 27–9, 47–9, 68–72).
43. For an emphasis on the ‘practical’, ‘psychological’, or ‘corporeal’, as opposed to the ‘cosmological’, treatment of the eternal return, see Maudemaire Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chap. 8
44. Didier Franck, Nietzsche et l'ombre de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), Part VI, Chap. 6.
45. Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Paul Hurley et al., Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1 (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 316; hereafter cited as ‘WE’.
46. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 221; hereafter cited as ‘SP’.
47. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Rabinow, Essential Works, Vol. 1, p. 292; hereafter cited as ‘ESPF’.
48. For further confirmation of this point, though in his pre-ethical writings, see Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge, pp. 73–4, and DP 27–8.
49. For a later corroborating comment in relation to the limits on the self-constitution of subjects, see Michel Foucault, ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, in Foucault Live: Interviews (1966–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 313.
50. Foucault also valorizes the transforming possibilities of new experiences (Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito [New York: Semiotext(e), 1991], pp. 33–4;
51. relevant passage cited in David M. Halperin, Saint-Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 105)
52. ‘the new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation’ that go along with ‘our desires’ (Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, ‘Michel Foucault. An Interview: Sex, Power, and the Politics of 63 Identity’, The Advocate 400 [7 August 1984]: 26–30 [27];
53. cited in Halperin, Saint-Foucault, p. 73). And preceding the quote about the ‘undefined work of freedom’, Foucault speaks about ‘the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (WE 315–16), indicating that the work of freedom is connected to bringing about novel forms of existence.
54. Cf. Reiner Schüermann, ‘On Constituting Oneself as Anarchistic Subject’, Praxis International 6 (1986): 294–309, and his remark that the modern subject for Foucault can be described as ‘anarchistic’ (and context-bound) rather than ‘transgressive’, i.e. against particular laws rather than against social totalizations (p. 307).
55. Olivia Custer, ‘Expressing Foucault: Kant and Foucault’, Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 137–46, Supplement, argues that Foucault's notion of freedom includes inventing alternatives that are different (‘a positive shifting of alternative’) from those set up by the governing structure of a situation (p. 140).
56. The following recollection of a statement in one of Foucault's lecture courses is recorded by Paul Veyne, ‘The Final Foucault and His Ethics’, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. I. Davidson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 230: ‘I am going to describe certain aspects of the contemporary world and its governmentality; this course will not tell you what you should do or what you have to fight against, but it will give you a map; thus it will tell you: if you want to attack in such-and-such a direction, well, here, there is a knot of resistance and there a possible passage.’ On the one hand, Foucault's unwillingness to impose a ‘line’ on his students seems laudatory; on the other hand, his words could be read as those of an instructor of mercenaries, without regard for whom and against whom these instructees will fight.
57. See also Remarks on Marx, p. 38, where Foucault says that he will not ‘prescribe solutions’ because this ‘can only contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to my mind must be criticized’;
58. cited in Halperin, Saint-Foucault, p. 205, n. 89. Halperin provides a very strong defense and an informed discussion of Foucault's ‘facilitator’ view of the intellectual's political role, and of resistance rather than liberation as the goal of politics (see especially pp. 52–6).
59. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Rabinow p. 262.
60. Indeed, in HS, Foucault attacks the essentialist implications of ‘sex/desire’ (and of fixed identities generally) and proposes to replace it with ‘bodies/pleasures’. For a friendly counter to Foucault in the name of desire, see Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Davidson. Foucault's view on self-creation is very close to Nietzsche's. For example, Nietzsche indicates that genealogical critique paves the way for a ‘creative spirit of great love and contempt’, an ‘antinihilist’ Zarathustra (GM 96). In another text Nietzsche specifies that this creative spirit means that ‘we want to become those we are — human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (GS 266).
61. For a criticism of the standard, cognitive psychological way of explaining communication across cultures, see Evans, Psychology and Nihilism.
62. For an extended illustration of the production of a new voice, see Fred Evans, ‘Voices of Chiapas: the Zapatistas, Bakhtin, and Human Rights’, Philosophy Today 42 (2000, pp. 196–210). This is the supplement text Volume 25 of Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, ed. Linda Martin Alcoff and Walter Brogan.
63. I have in mind here Nietzsche's famous ‘perspectivism’ (GM 119) and his claim that the distinction between appearance and reality does not really apply to the world (Twilight of the Idols, p. 484);
64. also what we have seen Foucault and Bakhtin say about power/knowledge regimes and social languages producing the inhabitants of their domains. For a comprehensive treatment of the epistemological problems of relativity and self-referentiality in Nietzsche's perspectival theory of knowledge, see Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy.
65. For a treatment of the same issue in relation to Foucault, see Bové, ‘The Foucault Phenomenon: The Problematics of Style’, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)
66. Michael Kelly, ‘Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-referentiality Critique’, in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994)
67. and Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique.