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Freedom and the subject were guiding themes for Michel Foucault
throughout his philosophical career. In this clear and comprehensive
analysis of his thought, Johanna Oksala identifies the different interpretations of freedom in his philosophy and examines three major divisions
of it: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical. She shows
convincingly that in order to appreciate Foucaults project fully we must
understand his complex relationship to phenomenology, and she discusses Foucaults treatment of the body in relation to recent feminist
work on this topic. Her sophisticated but lucid book illuminates the possibilities which Foucaults philosophy opens up for us in thinking about
freedom.
j o h a n n a o k s a l a is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She has published articles on Foucault,
phenomenology and feminist philosophy.
F O U C A U LT O N F R E E D O M
JOHANNA OKSALA
University of Helsinki
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521847797
C Johanna Oksala 2005
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS
page vii
Acknowledgements
viii
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1
part i language
Philosophical laughter
An archaeology of order
The three epistemes
The birth and death of man
The being of language
17
19
23
30
34
40
41
53
70
71
78
81
part ii body
4
93
95
104
Anarchic bodies
The body of power
The discursive body
110
111
117
v
vi
co n ten t s
121
124
Female freedom
The anonymous subjectivity of the body
The historical constitution of the body
Female freedom?
135
138
145
150
157
157
160
161
165
169
175
176
182
188
The other
Ethical subject and the other
Subjectivity as passivity
The other as precondition of ethics
193
195
199
204
208
References
211
Index
220
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
vii
A B B R E V I AT I O N S F O R W O R K S
B Y F O U C A U LT
Books in English
AK
DL
DP
HS
OT
UP
ATT
B/P
CF
viii
list o f abbreviat io ns
CT
CT/IH
EPF
GE
HES
IHB
INP
MS
NGH
OWH
ix
PE
PS
PT
PR
QG
RM
SC
SP
SPPI
SPS
list o f abbreviat io ns
ST
STW
TES
TJF
TL
TP
WA
WC
WE
xi
Subjectivity and Truth, in The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1997, 17198.
A Swimmer Between Two Words, in Aesthetics, Method
and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, ed.
James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert
Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1998, 171
4.
Technologies of the Self, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth:
Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, ed. Paul Rabinow,
trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New Press, 1997,
22351.
Truth and Juridical Forms, in Power: Essential Works of
Foucault 19541984, ed. James D. Foubion, series ed. Paul
Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: New
Press, 1997, 189.
Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writing 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin
Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper.
Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 78108.
Truth and Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writing 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans.
Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper.
Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, 10933.
What is an Author?, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 101
20.
What is Critique?, in The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault,
ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997, 2382.
What is Enlightenment?, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984,
3250.
Books in French
AS
MC
RR
xii
SEP
UPL
VS
CJ
EPL
IMF
JMF
PA
PC
PEI
QA
QL1
QL2
list o f abbreviat io ns
SEPS
SFH
VES
xiii
INTRODUCTION
fo u c au lt o n fr ee dom
in tro d u c t io n
Before focusing on the topic of freedom, I will explicate the understanding of the subject to which the question of freedom in Foucaults
thought is essentially tied. When it is argued that there is no freedom
in it, the argument rests on the claim that there is no autonomous
subject. When, on the other hand, it is argued that freedom is what
Foucaults thought is fundamentally about, it is often claimed that this
is due to the fact that his work reveals constraining forms of subjectivity
as historically contingent.
Foucault himself claimed that the general theme of his research was
the subject (e.g. SP, 208). Even though many commentators argue that
his own interpretations of his work were continuously changing, not
compatible, and were therefore not to be trusted,2 I take this claim to
be significant. I will argue that Foucaults archaeologies and genealogies not only contain implicit assumptions and presuppositions about
the subject while their actual objects of study, focus and domain are
elsewhere for example, systems of thought, power, social history but
that they also contain explicit efforts to rethink the subject. Foucault
characterized his work as a genealogy of the modern subject: a history of
the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made
subjects. He further distinguished three modes of objectification that
transform human beings into subjects. These modes correspond with
three relatively distinct periods in his thought (SP, 208.)
The first is the modes of inquiry that give themselves the status of
science. Human beings are turned into subjects in processes of scientific study and classification, for example, into speaking subjects in
linguistics, subjects who labour in economics, subjects of life in biology.
Foucaults archaeology deals with this first mode in analyzing systems of
knowledge. In The Order of Things he showed how the discourses of life,
labour and language historically developed and structured themselves
as sciences, and how human sciences further constituted man as their
object of study.
The second phase of Foucaults work, his genealogies, studied what
he himself called dividing practices (SP, 208). These are practices of
manipulation and examination that classify, locate and shape bodies
in the social field. His books Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality are inquiries into this second mode of
objectification. He shows how modern disciplinary technologies constitute the subject as their object of control: human beings are examined, measured and categorized. This process defines them as modern
2 See e.g. Hoy 1986, 2.
fo u c au lt o n fr ee dom
in tro d u c t io n
fo u c au lt o n fr ee dom
in tro d u c t io n
I will argue that Foucaults thought links up with the phenomenological tradition in at least two senses: (1) it is a critical inquiry into the
conditions of possibility of knowledge and the historicity of reason;
and (2) as a philosophical study of the subject, it is an effort to rethink
critically the phenomenological subject.
It may seem difficult to defend a view linking Foucaults thought
to phenomenology, given the fact that he explicitly distanced himself
from it in various texts and interviews. The Order of Things, for example,
contains explicit criticism, which I discuss in chapter 2. In his introduction to the English translation, he furthermore presents his whole
method specifically as an alternative and antidote to phenomenology.7
His criticism of phenomenology in OT is, however, partly self-criticism.
Foucaults first published works a monograph Maladie mental et personalite (1954) and an introduction to the French translation of Ludwig
Binswangers Dream and Existence (1954) were both strongly influenced by existential phenomenology. He argues in the first edition
of Maladie mentale et personalite that to understand mental illness we
have to take into account the lived experience of the patient, we need
a phenomenology of mental illness. The second edition, published
in 1962, was radically rewritten. Keith Hoeller (1993) notes that it
reflects the views of mental illness that Foucault put forth in Madness
and Civilization in 1961: we need a historical study of madness. Hoeller
dates the marked turn in Foucaults thought from the lived experience to a broader historical and political analysis of its preconditions in
these intervening years. Foucault himself describes his turn away from
phenomenology:
I belong to the generation who as students had before their eyes, and
were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and
existentialism . . . at the time I was working on my book about the history of
madness [Folie et deraison]. I was divided between existential psychology
and phenomenology, and my research was an attempt to discover the
extent that these could be defined in historical terms . . . Thats when I
discovered that the subject would have to be defined in other terms than
Marxism or phenomenology.
(PS, 174)8
fo u c au lt o n fr ee dom
Hence, while it is uncontestable that Foucault was a critic of phenomenology and not a phenomenologist, phenomenology nevertheless
forms an important background from which he sought to differentiate
and distance his own thought. He started from phenomenology, but
he also significantly returned to it in his late texts by reformulating his
relationship to it: it no longer appears in terms of an opposition, but is
rather presented as a continuum. In a text on the Enlightenment written in late 1970s, he turns to Husserls late writings, reading him not
essentially as presenting a philosophy of the subject, but as inquiring
into the legitimacy of reason. Foucault associates the Enlightenment
firmly with critique, a critical attitude that questions not only obstacles
to the use of reason, but also reason itself and its limits. According to
Foucault, this critical attitude took the form of questioning reason in
its connection with power, the relationships between the structures of
rationality which articulate true discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it (WC, 45). Foucault saw the critique of
reason as responsible for excesses of power taking different forms in the
history of philosophy from the Hegelian left to the Frankfurt School.
Husserl is also used as an example here, who, according to Foucault,
referred to the crisis of European humanity as something that involved
the changing relationship between knowledge and technique. Foucault
considered Husserls thought as importantly questioning rationalization and hence studying reason as a historical phenomenon.
In an introduction to the English translation of Georges Canguilhems The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault argues that, in his
late works, Husserl was not asking traditional epistemological questions about the universal nature of knowledge or its timeless conditions of possibility, but he was rather posing a critical question about
our epistemic history as well as about our present reality.9 He thereby
situates Husserl in the tradition of thought that questioned western
rationality about its claims of universality and autonomy, and hence
penetrated the historico-critical dimension of philosophy. Foucault
writes:
9 Foucault distinguishes two different modalities according to which French thinkers appropriated Husserls thought after his Paris lectures in 1929. One was the existentialist reading of Sartre, which took Husserl in the direction of a philosophy of the subject, and the
other was Cavaill`es reading, which, according to Foucault, brought it back to its founding
principles in formalism and the theory of science (INP, 89). Foucault situates his own
thought in the tradition of Cavaill`es, which developed as the history of thought and the
philosophy of science.
in tro d u c t io n
And if phenomenology, after quite a long period when it was kept at the
border, finally penetrated in its turn, it was undoubtedly the day when
Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis, posed the question of
the relations between the western project of a universal development
of reason, the positivity of the sciences and the radicality of philosophy.
(INP, 11)10
10
fo u c au lt o n freedom
This book is divided into three parts: Language (chapters 1, 2, and 3),
Body (chapters 4, 5, and 6) and Ethics (chapters, 7, 8, and 9). These three
parts explicate the three constitutive modes of subjectivity in Foucaults
thought, and they also correspond loosely with the three chronological
periods in it: archaeology, genealogy and his late writings on ethics.
The structure of the book is primarily thematic, however. I do not offer
a chronological reading of the development of Foucaults thought, or
a philosophical reconstruction of Foucaults theory of the subject.
Instead, I ask what freedom means at different points in his work and
study its preconditions as well as its problems. My argument is that
language, the body and ethics are the domains in which the different senses
of freedom can be found. My focus on certain Foucault texts, and the
omission of others, are based on this thematic priority.
The first part of the book, Language, inquires into the idea of freedom present in Foucaults archaeology. The focus of my reading is
on The Order of Things, which studies the question of language most
explicitly. I explicate Foucaults philosophical position by contrasting it
to Husserls phenomenology, particularly to his late work, The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. This is illuminative
in terms of understanding the philosophical implications of Foucaults
treatment of the history of science in OT. I also make a stronger claim
about the importance of reading OT in relation to phenomenology. I
will show how many of the central philosophical issues, as well as the
methodological directions, that are present in OT are motivated by the
problems arising out of the phenomenological enterprise.
In OT Foucault advocates the idea of language as something that
always outruns the subject, who can never completely master it. Language is not simply an instrument of expression, it also generates an
excess of meanings. Foucault gives language a regulative role in the
mode of scientific discourse, but it also demarcates a domain of freedom in the mode of literature, particularly as avant-garde writing. There
is an ontological order of things implicit in the theories of scientific discourse. Language as avant-garde writing is, however, capable of forming alternative, unscientific and irrational ontological realms: different
experiences of order on the basis of which different perceptual and
practical grids become possible, and hence lead to new ways of seeing
and experiencing. While Foucaults archaeology is generally viewed as
emphasizing the necessary structures of thought and opposing humanist aspirations of looking for the freedom of man, there is an antihumanist understanding of freedom as an opening of new possibilities
in tro d u c t io n
11
12
fo u c au lt o n freedom
in tro d u c t io n
13
I
L ANGU AGE
1
PHILOSOPHICAL LAUGHTER
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his eyes. Whither is God? he cried; I will tell you. We have
killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how
did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave
us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we
doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it
moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are
we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward,
in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not
straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the
breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night
continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns
in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the
gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as
yet of the divine decomposition? Gods too decompose. God
is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
(Nietzsche 1887/1974,181)
The instant bestseller that made Foucault famous, The Order of Things
(OT), arose out of laughter. Foucault opens the book by writing that the
book arouse out of a passage in Borges, from a laughter that shattered
all the familiar landmarks of his thought and continued long afterwards
to disturb and threaten with collapse the age-old distinction between
the Same and the Other. This passage quoted a certain Chinese
encyclopedia which presented a wholly other system of thought and
therefore broke up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing
things (OT, xv). The shattering impossibility to think in certain ways
17
18
fo u c au lt o n freedom
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
19
shows the continuity of the two projects as well as their roots in a common Kantian origin. According to Han, for Foucault, phenomenology
is both an interlocutor and a favoured target, because it also attempts
to overcome the obstacle of pure transcendentalism. Despite appearances, archaeology is profoundly connected to phenomenology in that
it attempts to find a solution to the same problem and adopts a method
that is similar in aspects such as its descriptive rather than explicative
outlook (Han 1998/2002, 5).
This first chapter presents a concise explication of the main philosophical arguments in OT. The explication prepares the way for the
reading put forward in the second chapter, which contrasts OT to
Husserls thought, particularly to his late work, The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Following the presentation
of the negative or critical side of archaeology as an effort to overcome
the problems inherent in phenomenology, the third chapter evaluates
the positive contribution of Foucaults archaeology to philosophical
questioning. It focuses on the topic that is the overriding theme of
the present book: the question of freedom in Foucaults thought. I will
argue that OT contains an idea of otherness a realm outside the discursive order of things which represents freedom for Foucault. This
possibility of an otherness outside of what can be scientifically ordered
and brought within the realm of knowledge does not lie in some pure
and prelinguistic sphere of originary experience, however, but in language itself.
An archaeology of order
Foucault argues in OT that there is a level of order, a positive unconscious of knowledge, that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and
yet is formative of scientific discourse. This level gives us the organizing principles of knowledge, the unconscious structures that order scientific discourses. Even though individual scientists never formulated
these principles, nor were they even aware of them at the time, this
level nevertheless defines the objects proper to their study. It constitutes the condition of possibility for forming concepts and building
theories (OT, xi). Hence, beyond the level of scientific discoveries, discussions, theories and philosophical views exists an archaeological level
formative of them. This level consists of the ontological order of things
assumed to exist, and also of the principles that organize the relationships between things and words in terms of what exists and how it
20
fo u c au lt o n freedom
The question that guides Foucaults archaeology is thus a transcendental question in the sense that it concerns the condition of possibility
of knowledge: what determines different forms of scientific knowledge
and makes possible certain discussions and problems? The condition
3 Cet a priori, cest ce qui, a` une e poque donnee, decoupe dans lexperience un champ
de savoir possible, definit le mode detre des objets qui y apparaissent, arme le regard
quotidien de pouvoirs theoriques, et definit les conditions dans lesquelles on peut tenir
sur les choses un discours reconnu pour vrai. (MC, 171)
4 Une telle analyse, on le voit, ne rel`eve pas de lhistoire des idees ou des sciences: cest
plutot une e tude qui sefforce de retrouver a` partir de quoi connaissances et theories
ont e te possibles; selon quel espace dordre sest constitue le savoir; sur fond de quel a
priori historique et dans lelement de quelle positivite des idees ont pu apparatre, des
sciences se constituer, des experiences se reflechir dans des philosophies, des rationalites
se former, pour, peut-etre, se denouer et sevanouir bientot. (MC, 13)
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
21
of possibility must, however, in connection with Foucaults archaeology, be understood in a specific way. It is not universal a priori, but
conditions that are importantly historical: they are formed in history
and also change in it. Neither can they be found through an analysis
of the subjects faculties or experiences. They condition, significantly,
also the subjects experiences. By revealing the conditions of possibility
of the thought of a particular period, Foucault seeks to reveal the nonsubjective conditions that make subjective experiences of order and
knowledge possible.5 His aim is thus to write a history of the transcendental:
a historical description of the varying conditions of possibility of knowledge in different periods.
Foucault introduces the concept of episteme (epistem`e) in OT. There
has been much discussion and confusion about what exactly he means
by this, and he himself has offered different definitions.6 One common
but mistaken reading is to understand it to simply refer to the existing field of different forms of knowledge in a specific period. Claire
OFarrell, for example, describes episteme as the differing configurations of knowledge at different periods.7 Understood in this way,
the main function of the concept would be to enable Foucault to
locate the points of discontinuity in the western history of thought.8
Foucaults archaeological inquiry in OT distinguishes three epistemes,
and analyzes the epistemic systems underlying three historical epochs:
the Renaissance, the classical age and modernity.
The notion of the episteme is not only a tool for writing the history of
thought and describing ruptures in it. I argue that it is, most of all, a tool
for understanding the historical conditions of possibility of knowledge
5 Beatrice Han (1998/2002) shows that Foucaults inquiry into the historical a priori of
knowledge is a search for a principle of determination, which is non-subjective. It has
the function of introducing into the field of knowledge a principle of nonsubjective
determination, which defines for a given period and geographical area the historical
form taken by the constitution of various forms of knowledge (45).
6 The notion of episteme presented in OT was widely criticized for being a totality as well
as a static notion that excludes change. In the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of
Knowledge (AK), Foucault answers this criticism and modifies his stance. He denies that
there is one episteme for the science of a particular period: the relations that he describes
are valid only in order to define a particular configuration (AK, 159). He also writes that
episteme is not an immobile figure but rather an infinitely mobile group of scansions,
shifts, and coincidences which establish and dismantle themselves (AK, 250).
7 OFarrell (1989, 545) argues that when the notion of episteme is introduced for the
first time in OT, Foucault uses it in two different ways: firstly to denote the entirety of
western knowledge, and secondly to describe different configurations of knowledge at
different periods.
8 See e.g. Machado 1989/1992, 14.
22
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23
24
fo u c au lt o n freedom
resemblances: they were signatures of resemblances that made it possible to recognize them. According to Foucault, The sixteenth century
superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude
(OT, 29). To search for a meaning meant bringing to light a resemblance. To search for a law governing signs was to discover things that
were alike. Language was thus one of the things in the world to be interpreted. There was a common order for words and things, the relation
of languages to the world is one of analogy rather than signification
(OT, 37).
Because words were signs woven into the overall network of similitudes that had to be interpreted, observation, accepted authority and
magical divination were on the same level of knowledge. According to
Foucault, for Renaissance knowledge there is no difference between
the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so
that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved
for us by tradition (OT, 33). He argues that, although it is easy for us to
interpret that rational beliefs and esoteric knowledge were in conflict
during the Renaissance, and that esotericism lost the battle as western science and rationality developed, if we study the archaeological
level of knowledge the level that makes different forms of knowledge
possible this does not hold. The Renaissance episteme not only made
possible the coexistence of what, for us, are rational arguments, erudition and magic, it also made it impossible to distinguish them as
different forms of knowledge, since they all relied on the same principles of organization. The prose of the world was formed as one infinite
text binding together words and things through resemblance.
The classical episteme. With the advent of the classical age there occurred
a change. At the beginning of the seventeenth century similitude ceased
to be the organizing principle of words and things. It was, rather, understood as the occasion for error, something that tempted man to draw
conclusions from the deceiving senses (OT, 51). The hierarchy of analogies was substituted by the analysis of identity and difference. Rationalism was to replace old superstitious beliefs. It was firmly believed in the
classical age that being had a universal order that could be analyzed
by a universal method and that could be represented by signs that mirrored perfectly this order of being. Knowledge was organized in a table,
it could be displayed as a perfect system. The method was to find the
simple nature of beings and proceed from them to more complex ones
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
25
26
fo u c au lt o n freedom
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
27
The fundamental change from one episteme to another is again recognizable in the specific changes in the areas of knowledge that Foucault
examines. Language evolved with its own density, and therefore also
philology. Words no longer simply represented things, but for a word
to be able to convey meaning it had to belong to a grammatical totality
which, in relation to the word, was primary, fundamental and determining (OT, 281). In biology, living beings were ordered and conceived of
on the basis of functional homogeneity, not visible identities and differences. Life was a non-perceptible, purely functional aspect, it had
left the tabulated space of order and become wild again (OT, 277).
In economics, wealth was no longer considered to be distributed over a
table as a system of equivalencies, but was organized and accumulated
in a temporal sequence.
11 Ainsi, la culture europeenne sinvente une profondeur ou` il sera question non plus des
identites, des caract`eres distinctifs, des tables permanentes avec tous leurs chemins et
parcours possibles, mais des grandes forces cachees developpees a` partir de leur noyau
primitif et inaccessible, mais de lorigine, de la causalite et de lhistoire. (MC, 263)
28
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ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
29
Man was simply another being in Gods well-ordered table. His place
as the organizer of the representations was never problematised in the
classical episteme. According to Foucault, man as an ordering subject
thus did not appear in western thought until Kant. In Kants thought,
man has taken the place of God as the organizer of the world, but he
has done this by virtue of being tied to finitude, by being limited. It is
the limits of his knowledge that make knowledge of the world possible.
Foucault describes the philosophy following Kant up to the present
as different efforts to deal with the dissolution of the homogenous field
of orderable representations. He distinguishes between two correlative
new forms of thought. On the one hand, there is the reformulation
of transcendental philosophy in the form of phenomenology: the questioning of the conditions of possibility of representation from the point
of view of the experiencing subject. On the other hand, there are the
forms of thought in which knowledge is grounded in the mode of being
of the object. Foucault writes that in the latter modes of thought, the
conditions of possibility of experience are being sought in the conditions of possibility of the object and its existence whereas in transcendental reflection the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience are identified with the conditions of possibility of experience itself
(OT, 244). Foucault refers here, on the one hand, to positivism: There
are philosophies that set themselves no other task than the observation of precisely that which is given to positive knowledge (OT, 244).
The other possible counterpart to transcendental philosophy of the
subject are the various metaphysics of the object. For these forms of
thought there are transcendentals Will for Schopenhauer, Life for
Nietzsche which form the conditions of possibility of the always partial
knowledge of the subject. These metaphysics of the object, according
to Foucault, posit an objective foundation behind experience, with its
own rationality that the subject is never able to bring to light completely.
The modern episteme thus has become severely fractured. There is no
one unified archaeological basis of knowledge.12
12 Foucault argues that there are, in fact, two forms of fracture. Firstly, there is the split
between forms of knowledge finding their basis in transcendental subjectivity and those
finding a basis in the mode of being of the object. Secondly, because of the emergence of
empirical fields of which mere internal analysis of representation can no longer provide
an account, there is also a split between the field of a priori sciences, pure, formal
sciences, and the domain of a posteri sciences, empirical sciences. These two forms of
fracture give rise to the modern problem concerning the relations between the formal
field and the transcendental field, the domain of empiricity and the transcendental
foundation of knowledge (OT, 248).
30
fo u c au lt o n freedom
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
31
knowledge of the world, and at the same a being in the world that can be
known. Foucault calls man an empirico-transcendental doublet. Man,
finite, yet a basis of all knowledge, is an invention of modern thought.
In his double aspect, man is at the same time a fact among other facts
to be studied empirically, and he is the transcendental ground of all
knowledge. He is formed by a complex network of background practices that he can never fully understand, and yet he is the possibility
of their elucidation. He is a product of a history whose beginning he
cannot reach and at the same time he is the writer of that history.
Foucault claims that the new conceptual space in which the human
sciences were formed in the modern age took shape in the figure of
man:
In classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists,
and who represents himself within it, recognizes himself therein as an
image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of
the representation in the form of the table he is never to be found
in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did
not exist anymore than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or
the historical density of language. He is quite a recent creature, which
the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with his own hands less than two
hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only
too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in
the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he could finally
be known.
(OT, 308)13
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to Foucault, modern thought has been a series of attempts to overcome the paradox inherent in the figure of man. It has been searching
for
a discourse whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both; a discourse that would make it
possible to analyze man as a subject, that is, as a locus of knowledge which
has been empirically acquired but referred back as closely as possible to
what makes it possible, and as a pure form immediately present to those
contents.
(OT, 3201)14
According to Foucault, the first attempt by post-Kantian thinkers to overcome the paradox of man was through reductionism: if they reduced
man to his empirical side they could not account for the possibility
of knowledge, and if they emphasized the transcendental side, they
could not claim scientific objectivity or account for the contingency
of mans empirical nature. Foucault associates this stage with the positivism of Comte and the thought of Hegel and Marx. Foucault places
phenomenology within the next stage in which the problem was stabilized, that is, in the coexistence of empiricism and transcendentalism
in an ambiguous balance. His discussion of the three doubles of man
empirical/transcendental, the cogito/the unthought, the retreat/the
return of origin is an explicit criticism of phenomenology. He engages
with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger respectively. I will
focus in the following chapter on Foucaults criticism of Husserl,
although Foucaults argument follows the same structure in connection with all of the three doubles: a mode of thought that centres on
man a human being in the order of positivity and in the order of a
foundation, as both the source of meaning as well as the outcome of the
natural world, human culture and history necessarily remains ambiguous and circular. It superimposes the transcendental and the empirical
dimensions of man.15 Phenomenology can only show how what is given
14 un discours dont la tension maintiendrait separes lempirique et le transcendantal,
en permettant pourtant de viser lun et lautre en meme temps; un discours qui permettrait danalyser lhomme comme sujet, cest-`a-dire comme lieu de connaissances
empiriques mais ramenees au plus pr`es de ce qui les rend possibles, et comme forme
pure immediatement presente a` ces contenus (MC, 331).
15 Beatrice Han (1998/2002) argues that Foucaults critique of phenomenology and of
all post-Kantian theory, which is denounced as being imprisoned by the analytic of finitude in OT, applies to Kant himself. According to Han, Foucaults presentation of Kants
position in OT is ambivalent. On the one hand, Foucault credits Kant with being the
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
33
34
fo u c au lt o n freedom
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
35
Hence, one can say that Foucault considers the whole network of knowledge, in its positivity, also to constitute its own unconscious, the historical a priori that makes certain problems and ways of questioning
possible. Thus, he does not claim that there exists two separate ontological levels, the network of scientific discourses, on the one hand, and
the conditions that form it, on the other. There is only the network of
discourses, which can, however, be retrospectively analyzed on different levels. Archaeological analysis reveals the structures of this network
that have remained unconscious to its practitioners while conditioning
their thought and experience.
The nominalist idea that discourse systematically forms the objects
of which it speaks, as well as the ontological order on the basis of which
they become possible, is made more explicit in the book that followed
17 For more on Foucaults nominalism, see e.g. Flynn 1994, Rouse 1994.
18 Si on veut entreprendre une analyse archeologique du savoir lui-meme . . . Il faut
reconstituer le syst`eme general de pensee dont le reseau, en sa positivite, rend possible
un jeu dopinions simultanees et apparemment contradictoires. Cest ce reseau qui
definit les conditions de possibilite dun debat ou dun probl`eme, cest lui qui est porteur
de lhistoricite du savoir. (MC, 89)
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fo u c au lt o n freedom
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
37
38
fo u c au lt o n freedom
transcendental philosophy in the sense that his aim was to isolate the
conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge for an epoch, in AK he
restricts his analysis more strictly to particular discursive fields and their
conditions of existence.
I will show in the following chapter how the central role Foucault
gives to language, as well as the methodological paths that he explores
in studying it, can be read as reactions to the problems arising out of phenomenology. I take the main motivation in Foucaults criticism of phenomenology in OT to be to reveal the problems involved in grounding
knowledge on the being of man and to press upon us the need to find
a new direction for philosophical inquiry in the study of language. By
comparing Foucaults archaeology to Husserls phenomenology, especially to the formulations Husserl gives his project in his late work The
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, I hope to
bring to light both the common forms of questioning as well as the
profound methodological differences.
The philosophical laughter that inaugurates OT reappears later on
in the book as laughter directed at phenomenology as a prime example
of a thought centred on man. Philosophical laughter is what Foucault
thinks is needed in order to shatter the familiar landmarks, the domineering forms of thought, and to inaugurate a new mode of thinking.
However, he must have been aware of the vulnerability of his own philosophical position, since his philosophical laughter could only ever be
silent laughter. He ends his criticism of phenomenology in chapter 9
by writing:
Anthropology constitutes perhaps the fundamental arrangement that
has governed and controlled the path of philosophical thought from
Kant until our own day. This arrangement is essential, since it forms
part of our history; but it is disintegrating before our eyes, since we are
beginning to recognize and to denounce in it, in a critical mode, both a
forgetfulness of the opening that made it possible and a stubborn obstacle
standing obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of thought. To
all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or liberation,
to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his
essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting point in their
attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all
knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to
formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without
demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is
ph ilo so ph ic al lau g h t e r
39
man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection
we can answer only with a philosophical laugh which means, to a certain
extent, a silent one.
(OT, 3423)22
22 LAnthropologie constitue peut-etre la disposition fondamentale qui a commande et
conduit la pensee philosophique depuis Kant jusqu`a nous. Cette disposition, elle est
essentielle puisquelle fait partie de notre histoire; mais elle est en train de se dissocier
sous nos yeux puisque nous commencons a` y reconnatre, a` y denoncer sur un mode
critique, a` la fois loubli de louverture qui la rendue possible, et lobstacle tetu qui
soppose obstinement a` une pensee prochaine. A tous ceux qui veulent encore parler
de lhomme, de son r`egne ou de sa liberation, a` tous ceux qui posent encore des questions sur ce quest lhomme en son essence, a` tous ceux qui veulent partir de lui pour
avoir acc`es a` la verite, a` tous ceux en revanche qui reconduisent toute connaissance aux
verite de lhomme lui-meme, a` tous ceux qui ne veulent pas formaliser sans anthropologiser, qui ne veulent pas mythologiser sans demystifier, qui ne veulent pas penser sans
penser aussitot que cest lhomme qui pense, a` toutes ces formes de reflexion gauches et
gauchies, on ne peut quopposer un rire philosophique cest-`a-dire, pour une certaine
part, silencieux. (MC, 3534)
2
T H E F O U C A U LT I A N FA I L U R E
OF PHENOMENOLOGY
40
41
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fo u c au lt o n freedom
practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily
as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live
is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world.
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 142)2
Husserl argues that the life-world forms the basis of all human praxis,
including all scientific praxis. All theories of science not just empirical
sciences but also the a priori sciences, such as mathematics and logic
derive their meaning and grounds for validity from the life-world. They
presuppose the existence of a directly experienceable world, and set
themselves the task of making this prescientific and subjective knowledge into perfect and objective knowledge. In the process, however,
they lose sight of this ground on which their theoretical formulations
rest and can only rest. The objective-true world that results from the
theoretical activity of the sciences and of the scientists is a construction
of something that, in principle, is not perceivable or experienceable in
its own being. Husserl writes:
The contrast between the subjectivity of the life-world and the objective,
the true world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical substruction, the substruction of something that is in principle not perceivable,
in principle not experienceable in its own proper being, whereas the
subjective, in the life-world, is distinguished in all respects precisely by its
being actually experienceable.
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 127)3
The life-world is, by its being, experienceable and is therefore the realm
of original self-evidences. It consists of what is intuitable in principle
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 127). It is thus both the reference point of meaning for the theories of objective science as well the concrete unity that
2 Die Lebenswelt ist . . . fur uns, die in ihr wach Lebenden, immer schon da, im voraus fu r
uns seiend, Boden fur alle, ob theoretische oder auertheoretische Praxis. Die Welt ist
uns, den wachen, den immerzu irgendwie praktisch interessierten Subjekten, nicht gelegentlich einmal, sondern immer und notwendig als Universalfeld aller wirklichen und
moglichen Praxis, als Horizont vorgegeben. Leben ist standig In-Weltgewiheit-leben.
(Husserl 1954/1962, 145)
3 Der Kontrast zwischen dem Subjektiven der Lebenswelt und der objektiven, der
wahren Welt liegt nun darin, da die letztere eine theoretisch-logische Substruktion
ist, die eines prinzipiell nicht Wahrnehmbaren, prinzipiell in seinem eigenen Selbstsein
nicht Erfarhrbaren, wahrend das lebensweltlich Subjektive in allem und jedem eben
durch seine wirkliche Erfahrbarkeit ausgezeichnet ist (Husserl 1954/1976, 130).
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is now reduced to the life-world which is valid for us prescientifically; it
is just that we may use no sort of knowledge arising from the sciences
as premises, and we may take the sciences into consideration only as
historical facts, taking no position of our own on their truth.
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 147)4
It then becomes necessary to accomplish a second epoche the transcendental epoche, which reveals the transcendental correlation between
the world and world consciousness.5 This is accomplished by the withholding of natural, naive validities and in general of validities already in
effect (135). By placing himself above his practical and natural interests, and even his own natural being, the philosopher arrives at an attitude that is above the pregivenness of the validity of the world (150) and
is therefore capable of discovering its mode of giveness in the constituting consciousness. After all natural interests have been put out of play,
the world appears purely as a correlate of the subjectivity which gives it
ontic meaning, through whose validities the world is at all (152). The
life-world is studied as multiplicities of manners of appearing, which
refer back to the ego-pole as constitutive of their unity. The general
structure of all experience, as well as the manner of being of the world,
are comprehended under three headings: the ego-pole, the subjective
as appearance tied together synthetically, and the object-poles (171).
Foucaults critique of phenomenology in OT questions the possibility of accomplishing either one of the steps or epoches that Husserl
presents in The Crisis. While Foucault explicitly attacks the second in
his discussion of the double of man, the cogito and the unthought,
4 Wir bemerken dabei, da jener nachste Schritt, der anfangs zu helfen schien, jene
Epoche, in der wir uns aller objektiven Wissenschaften als Geltungsbodens entheben
muten, keineswegs schon genugt. Im Vollzug dieser Epoche stehen wir offenbar noch
weiter auf dem Boden der Welt; sie ist nun reduziert auf die vorwissenschaftlich uns geltende Lebenswelt, nur da wir keinerlei Wissen, das aus den Wissenschaften herstammt,
als Pramisse verwenden und die Wissenschaften nur in der Weise historischer Tatsachen,
ohne eigene Stellungnahme zu ihrer Wahrheit, in Rechnung ziehen durfen.
(Husserl
1954/1962, 150)
5 Recent studies in phenomenology argue that reduction is not strictly speaking something
that is accomplished. It is not a planned procedure or an expected result, but rather,
unanticipated experience. Juha Himanka (1999) emphasizes that reduction allows us to
move from the habitual to the unforeseen and the unexpected: after reduction we are
able to look as if for the first time. On this kind of interpretation of reduction, see e.g.
Waldenfels 1993, Himanka 1999 and 2001, Heinamaa 2002. See also already Fink 1933,
Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994.
45
I will show here that the method and overall understanding of the history of science present in OT also makes it impossible to accomplish
the first epoche.
Husserls aim in The Crisis, in concise terms, is to show how the lifeworld is the starting point for all scientific abstractions and theories. All
scientific truths, even the detailed calculations of observed phenomena given by complicated measuring devices, must derive their ground
of validity from the life-world, which alone is directly experienceable.
Foucault, on the other hand, understands scientific development as
irreversibly removed from direct intuition and experience.
In order to explicate the difference between Foucaults and Husserls
understanding of the philosophy of science, I will argue here that many
of the central ideas that Foucault inherits from Gaston Bachelards
and George Canguilhems thought are illuminative.6 A third important influence would be Jean Cavaill`es, whose posthumously published
essays contain an explicit critique of Husserlian phenomenology and a
call to abandon the subject and to develop in its place a philosophy of
the concept.7
6 Gary Gutting (1989) explicates the relationship between Foucaults archaeology and Canguilhems and Bachelards philosophies of science in his book Michel Foucaults Archaeology
of Scientific Reason. Gutting argues that Foucaults method in OT is primarily an application and an extension of Canguilhems history of concepts, as well as a refinement of
Bachelards understanding of the historicity of scientific conceptions. Gutting (1989, 54,
21820) also points out, however, that Foucaults archaeology is not only a continuation
of Bachelards and Canguilhems work. His archaeology is an original method for the
study of history of science, with its own distinctive topics and concerns. Even in areas
where Bachelards and Canguilhems influence is particularly strong, Foucault extends,
adapts and transforms their ideas and methods. As a historian of biology, Canguilhem
focused on concepts that were in fact deployed by the biologists whose work he was analyzing. Foucault, however, deals not only with first-order biological concepts, but also
with concepts that define the conditions of possibility for formulating such concepts.
According to Gutting, Foucaults extension of the history of concepts thus undermines
the privileged role of disciplines in the history of thought and introduces a level of conceptual history that is more fundamental than that of the first-order concepts of scientific
disciplines. While Foucaults work follows Bachelard in emphasizing the epistemological factors working below the level of first-order concepts as well as the consciousness
of the scientists, unlike Bachelard, Foucault does not see this level as entirely negative.
For Bachelard, such factors are residues of outdated modes of thought that obstruct the
path of scientific development. For Foucault, this deep epistemological level has positive
significance: it embodies the conditions that make possible the formation of new concepts. Since my principal topic is Foucaults relationship to phenomenology and not to
French philosophy of science, my presentation of Foucaults relationship to Bachelards
and Canguilhems thought relies considerably on Guttings work.
7 See Cavaill`es 1947/1994, 473560.
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fo u c au lt o n freedom
47
48
fo u c au lt o n freedom
49
of one episteme incompatible with, sometimes even totally incomprehensible in the next, is thus an implicit criticism of Husserls method
of reading the history of philosophy and science in The Crisis. Husserl
begins his search for the origins of the contemporary crisis in philosophy and science with a critical study of Galileos mathematization of
nature. Husserl shows how the mathematical idea of nature was given
priority in philosophy, and how this led to the fatal separation of philosophy and the natural sciences and to the forgetting of the life-world
as the meaning-fundament of natural science (Husserl 1954/1970a,
48). After arriving at the discovery of transcendental subjectivity, first
Descartes, and later Kant, made the mistake of objectifying it and therefore postponed the forging of a true basis of science.
In the light of Foucaults history of thought, it would be pointless to blame Galileo for leading western thought in the wrong direction, or Descartes and Kant for failing to discover transcendental subjectivity. Not only do epistemic breaks make the questions of one
episteme impossible in another, but Foucaults method of writing the
history of thought in terms of concepts rather than individual discoveries also argues against Husserls approach. Canguilhems influence on
Foucaults archaeology is apparent here.
Canguilhems history of science as a critique of phenomenology. Canguilhems
aim as a historian of science was to write histories of concepts, particularly the concepts of life sciences such as reflex, cell and the immune
system. According to Canguilhem, concepts regulate the production
of forms of knowledge: The history of science should be a history
of the formation, deformation and rectification of scientific concepts
(Canguilhem 1994a, 110). He discusses the origins of cell theory to
argue that theories never proceed from simple facts. Cell theory was
not formulated because cells could be observed with the new aid of a
microscope; the first premise of cell theory was not that living things are
composed of cells, but that all living things consist of nothing but cells.
Such an assertion could not be justified by observations made through
a microscope (Canguilhem 1994a, 161). Canguilhem shows how ideas
and concepts borrowed from political theory in fact dominated debates
in early cell theory; whether cells are elementary, independent organisms akin to the individuals of liberalism, or simply parts of a whole
unable to exist independently. While facts act as a stimulus to theory,
they neither engender the concepts that provide the theories with their
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51
So long as texts and other works yoked together by the heuristic compression of time have not been subject to critical analysis for the purpose
of explicitly demonstrating that two researchers sought to answer identical questions for identical reasons, using identical guiding concepts,
defined by identical systems, then insofar as an authentic history of science is concerned, it is completely artificial, arbitrary and unsatisfactory
to say that one man finished what the other started or anticipated what
the other achieved. By substituting the logical time of truth relations for
the historical time of these relations inventions, one treats the history of
science as though it were a copy of science and its object a copy of the
object of science. The result is the creation of an artifact, a counterfeit
historical object the precursor.
(Canguilhem 1994a, 51)12
The discovery of a precursor is thus usually based on the failure to recognize fundamental conceptual differences that underlie superficially
similar formulations. It also relies on an individualist model of scientific
discovery. In Canguilhems view, as soon as the methods and problems
of modern science become adjusted to each other, and instruments
become so highly specialized that their very use implies the acceptance
of common working hypotheses, then it will be true to say that science
shapes scientists just as much as scientists shape science (107).
Foucault reiterates this idea in OT by showing, for example, that the
so-called precursors of evolutionary theory in the classical age, despite
superficial similarities, were in fact relying on a wholly different understanding of nature. For them, nature was only conceivable as a unified, ahistorical table in which changes were shifts of the whole towards
a higher state of perfection. It was only the emergence of the modern concept of life understood as a historical, dynamic phenomenon
that made possible the idea of the evolutionary development of
a species.
Contrary to Husserls presentation of Galileos fundamental discovery of mathematized nature, and to Descartes and Kants mistakes
of objectifying transcendental subjectivity, Foucault would argue that
these individual discoveries or errors were, in fact, made possible,
even necessary, by certain epistemic conditions and concepts. Galileos
idea of calculable nature was only one part of the classical idea of
an orderable nature as mathesis. The mathematization of nature that
Husserl attributed to Galileo, was, for Foucault, simply a typical mode of
12 The original French is not available.
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knowledge in the classical episteme, structured in terms of representation.13 Similarly, Foucault would object to the idea of viewing the
philosophies of Descartes and Kant in terms of mistakes. As Gerard
Lebrun (1989/1992, 24) writes, for Foucault There is no point in
regretting that Descartes missed the idea of the transcendental ego,
when he was far from being able to foresee it. Or, to see in Kantianism
a way of thinking that allowed the continued predominance of the evidence of objectivity was not only futile, but also missed the essential
point. Kants thought inaugurated an epistemic break and with him the
classical mathesis was swept away forever (Lebrun 1989/1992, 27).
This same criticism also, implicitly, includes phenomenology itself.
From Foucaults point of view, phenomenology is not sensitive enough
to the historicity of its own project its historical conditions of possibility in Kants thought and in the modern episteme. Rather than
phenomenology being able to reveal the true ground of the sciences,
its own project, in fact, depends on their discoveries. The coming into
being of new positive elements life, work, language which to a large
extent determined what it was to be a human being, posed the problem of how a human being was to understand himself as the subjective
ground of science, as well a being dependent on a life-world he could
not subjectively create. Phenomenology is, thus, a child of its time, an
offspring of the modern episteme, which discovered life, labour, language and therefore also man, a double figure, dependent on the positivities it discovered. This is why phenomenology . . . has never been
able to exorcise its insidious kinship, its simultaneously promising and
threatening proximity, to the empirical sciences of man (OT, 326).
In The Vienna lecture, Husserl presented phenomenology as the
culmination of the European teleology of the infinite goal of reason.
Its aim was to realize the ancient ideal of philosophy as an infinite task,
and to inaugurate the total reorientation of the task of knowledge
(Husserl 1954/1970b, 298).14 Foucaults historical contextualization
of the phenomenological project as a necessary moment in the modern episteme is thus an implicit criticism of the aims or pretensions
of phenomenology. He does not consider phenomenology to be the
culmination of the history of philosophy, but, rather, gives it a far more
13 Cf. Lebrun 1989/1992, 23.
14 According to Husserl, phenomenology alone has been capable of attaining the higher
stage of reflexivity which is decisive for the new form of philosophy and of European
humanity by realizing the aim of philosophy as a rigorous science on which all objective
sciences are based (Husserl 1954/1970b, 292).
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differing degrees to all phenomenological projects. My aim in reconstructing Foucaults three doubles as an explicit criticism of Husserls
thought is not to argue for the philosophical superiority of Foucaults
thought in relation to Husserl. What is clearly contestable is whether
the problems at issue are insurmountable within the phenomenological enterprise itself, and require us to reject it, as Foucault claims. My
point in reconstructing Foucaults criticism of phenomenology is firstly
to argue that, despite its undeniable vagueness, it points to profound
philosophical questions about the relationships between history and
philosophy, the transcendental and the empirical, language and the
subject. Secondly, I will show that the problems that Foucault points to
are not external but rather internal to phenomenology: they were evident to Husserl himself to a certain extent, but certainly to his followers,
both in France and Germany. Hence, my argument is that Foucaults
work should be seen not as a total break with phenomenology but
rather as part of a continuum, even if the relationship is fundamentally
critical.
The cornerstone of Foucaults criticism of phenomenology is his
claim that Kants distinction between the empirical field of knowledge
and its a priori conditions becomes blurred in the modes of thought
that Foucault calls the analytic of finitude.16 This is a configuration of
knowledge, or a mode of thinking, that is characterized by the fact that
knowledge is grounded on the human being in his finitude. This leads
to the paradox of man. Foucault discusses three forms of this paradox
the three doubles of man, as he calls them empirical/transcendental,
the cogito/the unthought, the retreat/the return of origin.
The empirical and the transcendental. The first paradox, the empirical
and the transcendental, refers to the paradoxical role a human being
has as an empirically limited being and a transcendentally determining subject: such a being that knowledge will be attained in him of
what renders all knowledge possible (OT, 318). Man is both part
of the world and, as such, an object of empirical sciences, and at
the same time the transcendental ground of all knowledge, including these very same empirical sciences. Foucault argues that this analytic of finitude transforms questions about the empirical limits of
the knowing subject into questions about the conditions of possibility of knowledge. The anthropological becomes the transcendental
16 Cf. Han 1998/2002, 1720.
55
when the empirical determinations of the knowing subject are understood as the condition of possibility of the subjects knowledge.
Foucault credits Husserl with an acute diagnosis of the paradox of
man. He presents phenomenology as the sensitive and precisely formulated acknowledgement of the great hiatus that occured in the modern
episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (OT,
325). He argues that Husserl acknowledged the historicity of the knowing subject, its dependence on positivities it did not create, nor can ever
fully elucidate. At the same time, Husserl strongly argued that empirical sciences cannot provide the condition of possibility of knowledge.
Foucault clearly echoes Husserl by arguing that naturalism and historicism have common roots; two modes of thought that appeared out of a
discourse centred on man. His criticism of the claims of the autonomy of
naturalism and historicism can furthermore be seen as a representation
of Husserls anti-naturalism. The problem, according to both Husserl
and Foucault, is the foundation of knowledge, which naturalism and
historicism are unable to study. Husserls criticism of naturalism and
historicism, especially in his Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911/1965),
seeks to show that naturalism and historicism are unfounded modes of
thought. Their presuppositions concerning the possibilities of knowledge are never made explicit, and the rules governing their concepts,
theories and values of research are never revealed or grounded. These
theories claim objectivity, but the claims are, in fact, empty rhetoric.
The status of what is true and stable scientific discourse remains
undefined.
Husserls line of argument is reiterated by Foucault, when he argues
that the first efforts to solve the paradox of man meant trying reductionism. However, attempts to reduce man to his empirical side, as
positivism did, could not account for the possibility of knowledge, and
when the emphasis turned to the transcendental side, in the manner
that, for example, Hegels phenomenology did, it was not possible to
claim scientific objectivity, or to account for the contingency of mans
empirical nature. Foucault writes:
For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply
objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of
an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man. Two kinds
of analysis then came into being: There are those that operate within
the space of the body . . . ; these led to the discovery that knowledge
has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within
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the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it,
but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning;
in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its
forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own
empirical contents. There were also analyses that . . . functioned as a sort
of transcendental dialectic; by this means it was shown that knowledge
had historical, social or economic conditions, that it was formed within
the relations that are woven between men, and that it was not independent of the particular form they might take here or there; in short that
there was a history of human knowledge which could both be given to
empirical knowledge and which prescribe its forms . . . they claim to be
able to rest entirely on themselves, since it is the contents themselves that
function as transcendental reflection. But in fact the search for a nature
or a history of knowledge, in the movement by which the dimension
proper to the critique is fitted over the contents of empirical knowledge,
already presupposes the use of a certain critique a critique that is not
the exercise of pure reflection, but the result of a series of more or less
obscure divisions.
(OT, 319)17
Both Foucault and Husserl thus claim that naturalism and historicism
stand on the same epistemological ground. Naturalism, which presupposes that empirical sciences can answer philosophical questions
about the possibility of knowledge, and historicism, according to which
17 Car le seuil de notre modernite nest pas situe au moment ou` on a voulu appliquer
a` letude de lhomme des methodes objectives, mais bien le jour ou` sest constitue un
doublet empirico-transcendantal quon a appele lhomme. On a vu natre alors deux
sortes danalyses: celles qui se sont logees dans lespace du corps . . . on y decouvrait que
la connaissance avait des conditions anatomo-physiologiques, quelle se formait peu a`
peu dans la nervure du corps, quelle y avait peut-etre un si`ege privilegie, que ses formes
en tout cas ne pouvaient pas e tre dissociees des singularites de son fonctionnement; bref,
quil y avait une nature de la connaissance humaine qui en determinait les formes et
qui pouvait en meme temps lui e tre manifestee dans ses propres contenus empiriques.
Il y a eu aussi les analyses qui . . . ont fonctionne comme une sorte de dialectique
transcendantale; on montrait ainsi que la connaissance avait des conditions historiques,
sociales, ou e conomiques, quelle se formait a` linterieur des rapports qui se tissent entre
les hommes et quelle netait pas independante de la figure particuli`ere quils pouvaient
prendre ici ou` l`a, bref quil y avait une histoire de la connaissance humaine, qui pouvait
a` la fois e tre donnee au savoir empirique et lui prescrire ses formes . . . elles pretendent
pouvoir ne reposer que sur elles-memes, puisque ce sont les contenus eux-memes qui
fonctionnent comme reflexion transcendantale. Mais, en fait, la recherche dune nature
ou dune histoire de la connaissance, dans le mouvement ou` elle rabat la dimension
propre de la critique sur les contenus dune connaissance empirique, suppose lusage
dune certaine critique. Critique qui nest pas lexercise dune reflexion pure, mais le
resultat dune serie de partages plus ou moins obscurs. (MC, 32930)
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my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether? Can I say that
I am this labour I perform with my hands, yet which eludes me not only
when I have finished it, but even before I have begun it? Can I say that I
am this life I sense deep within me, but which envelops me both in the
irresistible time that grows side by side with it and poses me for a moment
on its crest, and in the imminent time that prescribes my death?
(OT, 3245)18
According to Foucault, Husserl was trying to make explicit the horizon that provides experience with its background of immediate and disarmed proof (OT, 327). But he could only accomplish this through the
already existing figure of man, and was therefore trapped in inevitable
circularity. The life-world makes all thought and action of the subject
possible, it is the horizon within which all beings must be situated in
order to be. Yet Husserls aim was to show how the world in its pregivenness can be understood through the constitutive acts of the phenomenologizing subject. How can a being that can only have validity
within the pregiven world constitute that world? Foucault concludes:
The phenomenological project continually resolves itself, before our
eyes, into a description empirical despite of itself of actual experience, and into an ontology of the unthought that automatically shortcircuits the primacy of the I think (OT, 326).
Husserl himself, however, was well aware of the apparent circularity
of his project. He himself formulates Foucaults paradox of man in
The Crisis:
How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute
the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one
which has always already become what it is and continues to develop,
formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing
subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation,
are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?
The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole
world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which
18 puis-je dire, en effet, que je suis ce langage que je parle et ou` ma pensee se glisse au point
de trouver en lui le syst`eme de toutes ses possibilites propres, mais qui nexiste pourtant
que dans la lourdeur de sedimentations quelle ne sera jamais capable dactualiser
enti`erement? Puis-je dire que je suis ce travail que je fais de mes mains, mais qui
mechappe non seulement lorsque je lai fini, mais avant meme que je laie entame?
Puis-je dire que je suis cette vie que je sens au fond de moi, mais qui menveloppe a` la
fois par le temps formidable quelle pousse avec soi et qui me juche un instant sur sa
crete, mais aussi par le temps imminent qui me prescrit ma mort? (MC, 335)
59
Husserl continues to argue that the paradox vanishes once the epoche
has been radically and universally carried out. At this point, we do
not have human beings either as subjects constituting the world or as
objects dependent on it, because we have achieved the attitude above
the subjectobject correlation which belongs to the world and thus the
attitude of focus upon the transcendental subjectobject correlation
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 181). We are led to recognize the constitutive
function, not of human beings, but of transcendental subjectivity constitutive even of the phenomena of human beings (1803). After the
reduction, the reflecting subject is annulled as man, and transcendental subjectivity, previously concealed, reflectively turns to inquire about
itself. Thus, for Husserl, Foucaults paradox of man is only a paradox if
the reduction has not been accomplished. Man as both a subject and
an object of knowledge is a figure of the natural attitude and its reality
is suspended in the reduction. Underlying both sides of the double is
transcendental subjectivity, above or beyond the subject/object distinction and constitutive of all worldly objectivities.
What still remains a problem in Husserls account is how mundane
subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity are related to each other, if
they cannot be conflated. Transcendental subjectivity is not a human
being in either one of its two aspects or sides. Yet, in order to reveal
transcendental subjectivity, the starting point of the investigation must
be mundane subjectivity, subjectivity as it is in everyday life. The phenomenologist is thus both part of the universal field of the life-world,
as well as curiously being able to stand outside of it. Husserls assistant
19 Wie soll ein Teilbestand der Welt, ihre menschliche Subjektivitat, die ganze Welt konstituieren, namlich konstituieren als ihr intentionales Gebilde? Welt, ein immer schon
gewordenes und fortwerdendes Gebilde des universalen Konnexes der intentional leistenden Subjektivitat wobei sie, die im Miteinander leistenden Subjekte, selbst nur
Teilgebilde der totalen Leistung sein sollen? Der Subjektbestand der Welt verschlingt
sozusagen die gesamte Welt und damit sich selbst. Welch ein Widersinn. Oder ist es
doch eine sinnvoll auflosbare, sogar eine notwendige Paradoxie, notwendig entspringend aus der bestandigen Spannung zwischen der Macht der Selbstverstandlichkeit der
naturlichen objektiven Einstellung . . . und der sich ihr gegenubersetzenden
Einstellung
der uninteressierten Betrachters? (Husserl 1954/1962, 183)
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Eugen Fink formulates this problem clearly in The Sixth Cartesian Meditation.20 He takes issue precisely with the relationship between the transcendental ego and the human ego, with their necessary difference on
the one hand, and their necessary identity on the other.21 He raises
two questions in particular: (1) how pre/non-existent transcendental
subjectivity relates to mundane/human subjectivity, forming a unity in
difference; and (2) how that same transcendental agency as an absolute
constitutive source relates to the world that is its constitutive end product, forming with it a unity in bipolar differentation (Bruzina 1995,
lvi). Fink indicates and anticipates solutions by arguing that the fullsided subject of phenomenology is neither the transcendental subject
taken purely in its transcendentality, nor the human subject taken as
uninvolved with the transcendental, but it is rather transcendental subjectivity appearing in the world. He writes:
In the universal epoche, in the disconnection of all belief-positings,
the phenomenological onlooker produces himself. The transcendental
tendency that awakens in man and drives him to inhibit all acceptednesses nullifies man himself; man unhumanizes himself in performing
the epoche, that is, he lays bare the transcendental onlooker in himself,
he passes into him. This onlooker, however, does not first come to be by
the epoche, but is only freed of the shrouding cover of human being.
(Fink 1932/1995, 3940)22
20 There are different interpretations as to the extent to which Finks presentation of
phenomenology is attributable to Husserl. Ronald Bruzina (1995, xxviii, xxxii), for
example, writes in his translators introduction to Finks Sixth Cartesian Meditation that
Husserls phenomenology, at least as it reached its maturity in his last years, was not
just Husserls it was Husserls and Finks. The differences from Husserl that emerged
in Finks thinking were genuine problems for and within transcendental phenomenology, which developed intrinsically within it rather than antagonistically confronting or
undercutting it from the outside. According to Bruzina, Husserl agreed in principle
with what Fink was writing, even though he might not have grasped the depth of the
implications of Finks thought or the radicality with which the fundamental ideas of
phenomenology were being challenged, thus implying the need for critical rethinking.
Dan Zahavi (1994), on the other hand, argues that Finks position is ultimately incompatible with and fundamentally foreign to Husserls approach, because Fink did not
acknowledge the constitutive importance of transcendental intersubjectivity, or consequently the radical transformation that Husserls thinking underwent in the last period
of his life, due to his preoccupation with intersubjectivity.
21 See in particular chapter 5, Phenomenologizing as the Action of Reduction, and
chapter 8 Phenomenologizing as a Theoretical Experience.
22 In der universalen Epoche, in der Ausschaltung aller Glaubenssetzungen, produziert
sich der phanomenologische Zuschauer selbst. Die transzendentale Tendenz, die im
Menschen erwacht, die ihn dazu treibt, einmal alle Geltungen zu inhibieren, hebt den
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The act of describing the life-world necessarily gives it a theoretical form, which futhermore becomes constitutive of mans own selfunderstanding, since he is dependent on the life-world as a part of it.
The pure description of the pregiven life-world becomes, in fact, an
interpretative act, constitutive of both the world around us as well as of
ourselves as parts of it.
24 Elle fait aussitot bouger ce quelle touche: elle ne peut decouvrir limpense, ou du
moins aller dans sa direction, sans lapprocher aussitot de soi, ou peut-etre encore
sans leloigner, sans que letre de lhomme, en tout cas, puisquil se deploie dans cette
distance, ne se trouve du fait meme altere. (MC, 338)
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sentences in natural language, taking a mere appearance for the thing
itself to his own self-deception . . . The transformation that natural
language, as expressive of that which is existent, undergoes in being
claimed by the phenomenologizing I must always be kept in mind as
transformation of ontic-naive meanings into analogically indicated,
transcendental-ontic meanings. It signifies a lapse into dogmatism (that
of the natural attitude) if explicit knowledge of this necessary transformation dies away, and the phenomenologist thereby in his explications
falsifies the object of his theoretical experiences.
(Fink 1932/1995, 923)28
erst gelesen werden im Nachvollzug der Forschungen selbst. Wer das unterlasst, liest gar
nicht phanomenologische Satze, sondern liest absonderliche Satze der naturlichen
Sprache, nimmt die blosse Erscheinung fur die Sache selbst und betru gt sich . . . Die
Verwandlung, die die naturliche Sprache, als Aussprechen von Seiendem, durch die
Inanspruchnahme durch das phanomenologisierende Ich erfahrt, muss immer als
Verwandlung der ontisch-naiven Bedeutungen in die sich analogisch anzeigenden
transzendental-ontischen Bedeutungen bewusst bleiben. Es bedeutet ein Verfallen in
den Dogmatismus (der naturlichen Einstellung), wenn das ausdruckliche
Wissen um
die notwendige Verwandlung erlischt und damit der Phanomenologe den Gegenstand
seiner theoretischen Erfahrungen auslegend verfalscht. (Fink 1932/1988, 1012)
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69
3
THE ANONYMITY OF LANGUAGE
The Order of Things has been severely criticized by both historians and
philosophers.1 Since its publication, the philosophical criticism has centred around two themes. Firstly, a common charge is that Foucault does
not problematize his own position, but assumes it to be situated outside
of the epistemic orders he studies. This means that he ends up reiterating the problem of empirical/transcendental circularity of which
phenomenology stands accused. Secondly, it has been claimed that
Foucaults alternative to the subject-centred approach of phenomenology leads to serious difficulties in conceiving change and consequently
also freedom. Archaeology is therefore a step backwards rather than a
step forwards from phenomenology: it does not manage to solve the
problems with which phenomenology is riddled, but rather adds to
them by creating a host of new ones.
Both strands of the criticism are connected to the question of the
subject. On the one hand it raises questions about the subject as the
1 Gary Gutting (1989, 1759, 221) notes that, of all Foucaults books, OT has been the
most severely criticized by historians. In order to assess the impact of these criticisms,
he distinguishes several different historical levels on which OT operates. The first is that
of specific history: the interpretation of particular texts in their own terms. Second, the
level of constructive history, which builds general interpretative frameworks connecting
a range of texts. Third is the level of critical history: the use of the outcomes of specific and constructive history to question the self-understanding of various contemporary
disciplines. Following this schema, Gutting argues that Foucaults interpretations of particular authors have drawn some criticism, but the primary objection has been to the lack
of detailed evidence for the sweeping claims of his constructive history. Nevertheless, he
defends Foucault by pointing out that the value of his work is most of all as a source
of fruitful suggestions rather than as accurate generalizations. Foucaults account of the
modern episteme is important primarily as the basis of his critical history of the human
sciences. My focus here is on the philosophical criticism of Foucaults archaeology. For
more on Foucault as a historian, see e.g. Veyne 1971/1997, Flynn 1994 and Goldstein
1994.
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71
writer of its own history. Who is the writer of archaeology? To what extent
was Foucault himself determined by the discursive structures under
study? The other strand concerns the subject as the agent of change.
How can we understand change if we do not study the intentions and
motives of the subject? Does freedom not become an impossible idea?
My aim in this chapter is to explicate the question of the subject in
connection with the criticism of OT. I will not attempt to clear up all the
ambiguities in Foucaults archaeology, however. It contains several contradictions, problems and errors that have been thoroughly discussed
by other commentators.2 My principle goal is to show how the central,
philosophical role Foucault assigns to language has important consequences in terms of how we conceive of our subjectivity as well as of our
freedom. I will show that, despite its firm refusal to accept the subject
as the basis of explanation, Foucaults archaeology does not eradicate
it as a question. Neither does it eradicate freedom, but charts instead
new dimensions of it, which are not tied to the subjects expressions
and initiatives, but rather make them possible.
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archaeology to phenomenology in that the archaeologist, like the phenomenologist, claims to be able to accomplish a bracketing, which
enables him to situate himself outside of his own thought and thus
to study its underlying structures.3
[T]he archaeologist, like Husserls transcendental phenomenologist,
must perform an ego split in order to look on as a detached spectator at the very phenomena in which, as an empirical interested ego . . .
one cant help being involved. Foucault the archaeologist looks on, as a
detached metaphenomenologist, at the historical Foucault who cant, if
he thinks about human beings in a serious way, help thinking in terms of
the meaning and truth claims governed by the latest discursive formation.
(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 87)
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object of description and an ensemble of relations linked to discourse, to
the statements that are the objects of interpretation. It is our age and it
alone that makes possible the appearance of that ensemble of texts which
treat grammar, natural history, or political economy as so many objects.
So, in that respect and only in that respect, the author is constitutive of
the thing he is talking about . . . So the subject is, in fact, present in the
whole book, but it is the anonymous one who speaks today in everything
that is said.
(OWH, 286)6
th e a n o n ymity o f la n g ua ge
75
characteristic of an age are grounded. What becomes a question of scientific study and the method through which it is approached is determined by the ontological order through which the world is interpreted
and presents itself. Heidegger writes: Metaphysics grounds an age, in
that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age a basis upon which it
is essentially formed (Heidegger 1952/1977, 115). The metaphysical
ground plan sketches out in advance the manner in which something
can appear as an object of scientific investigation. Only within the perspective of this ground plan does an event in nature become visible
as such an event (119). The world picture, like Foucaults concept of
episteme, thus refers to the overall schema, the implicit order of things,
on the basis of which reality is comprehended.
This normally hidden ontological order can only be made visible by
comparing it with the different modes of thinking of the past. Heidegger
writes, for example, that the metaphysics underlying the modern age
can be characterized by throwing it into relief over against the medieval
and ancient world pictures (Heidegger 1952/1977, 128). Similarly,
Foucault emphasizes that it is only against the background of what is
different in history that the epistemic structures show up.
I can, in fact, define the classical age in its particular configuration by the
twofold difference that contrasts it with the sixteenth century, on the one
hand, and with the nineteenth century, on the other. But I can define the
modern age in its singularity only by contrasting it with the seventeenth
century, on the one hand, and with us, on the other hand; so, in order to
effect this transition, it is necessary to bring out in all our statements the
difference that separates us from it. It is a matter of pulling oneself free
of that modern age which begins around 1790 to 1810 and goes up to
about 1950, whereas for the classical age its only a matter of describing
it.
(OWH, 293)8
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the modern episteme only when we manage to pull ourselves free from
it and analyze it as a past that is in some important ways different from
our present. The ability to recognize the differences signals the break
that separates us from it.9
In the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault
avoids the notion of episteme and introduces that of archive, which he
defines as the general system of the formation and transformation of
statements (AK, 130). In this connection, he states explicitly that it is
not possible for us to describe our own archive (AK, 130). We cannot
free ourselves from the rules ordering our own discursive practices and
submit them for archaeological analysis. Foucault thus argues against
the possibility of studying the conditions of possibility of our own knowledge at all, whether or not these conditions are understood as historical
or not. All that he presents is a historical description, a study of the conditions of existence, which is conducted from the vantage point of the
present in regard to the past.
Unlike the Husserlian phenomenologist, Foucault thus does not
claim to be able to study the constitutive conditions of our own thought
and experience. It is my contention that this impossibility is exactly why
he had to engage in historical study in his quest to understand the
semantic relationships between words and things. It is only from the
vantage point of the present ontological order that the semantic relationships of another epoch can be described. This description cannot
reveal any ultimate foundations. Not only are the ontological orders
historical, they can only appear as such from our own interpretative perspective. This perspectivism is the positive condition that allows such
orders to appear at all. Foucaults question of the historical limits of
language, for example, is a question that can only self-consciously be
asked after the linguistic turn in philosophy. Reading history through
our questions, concepts and ways of thinking makes it possible to reveal
what is different.
Hence, Foucault does not hold that the other epistemic orders are
completely cut off from us. But neither is his archaeology anachronistic in the sense that past forms of thinking were treated as directly
accessible and understandable. Because they are based on a different
9 Thomas Flynn (1997, 2515) argues that Foucaults aim was to distance himself from the
modern episteme by questioning its basic presuppositions and by viewing it from without.
He refers to the end of OT, where Foucault charts the privileged positions of ethnology
and psychoanalysis in our present-day knowledge, and argues that he was undertaking an
ethnology of his own culture.
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10 Gary Gutting (1989, 2278, 244, 269) argues that archaeology must be read primarily
as a distinctive approach to the history of thought. It is a historical counterpart of the
structuralist counter-sciences and a move away from the modes of thought centred on
the concept of man. It is only open to the devastating philosophical criticism that Dreyfus
and Rabinow develop in their study of Foucault when it is understood as a general philosophical theory. Gutting argues that it should not be construed along these theoretical
lines. Foucaults aim was not to develop a general theory of discursive regularities at all.
What might appear to be foundational philosophical theories of language, for example,
are better construed as no more than attempts to show that the archaeological approach
can be coherently formulated without relying on the modern philosophical category of
the subject.
11 Claire OFarrell writes (1989, 33) that history reveals the limits of the formation of ideas
and objects which are both part of historical order and beyond that order. History is
thus in a unique position to attach philosophy to empirical realities while studying their
conditions of possibility at the same time. Shortly before his death Foucault himself
described his books as historical studies but noted that they were not the work of a
historian, as they were embarked on as a philosophical exercise (UP, 15).
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preface to OT, his aim is to bring to light the history of the conditions
of possibility of knowledge (OT, xxii).
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do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities
that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences. I should like to
know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not
determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity,
and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even
overwhelm them.
(OT, xiiixiv)
One of Foucaults questions in OT was thus exactly to what extent subjects are determined by rules and structures unknown to them. His aim
was to chart the conditions of possibility of their initiatives. Rather than
eradicating the subject or taking it as the unproblematic starting point
of his analyses, he wanted to question it. He also explicitly denied in
AK that he had excluded the question of the subject. He writes that his
aim instead is to define the positions and functions that the subject
could occupy in the diversity of language (AK, 200). The archaeological approach does not mean the denial of the subjects initiatives:
These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative
of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated . . . I have
not denied far from it the possibility of changing discourse: I have
deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it (AK, 209).13 Although the subjects of scientific discourse are regulated and even partly constituted by the rules immanent
to the discourse itself, they are not completely determined by them: the
subject is not without the initiative or the capacity to effect changes in
the discourse. Archaeology is simply not about the subjects abilities to
cause changes, but rather focuses on the more fundamental discursive
structures that make different initiatives possible or impossible.
Foucault was thus trying to develop a method that allows us to study
discourse as a relatively autonomous field of regularities and transformations without positing the subject as the cause and principle of these
unities, regularities and transformations. Archaeology is a method for
analyzing and accounting for the constitution of meanings that are not
dependent on individual speakers. It is an alternative to subject-centred
approaches to the history of thought. Although statements are uttered
by individual speakers, in making a statement the speaker takes up a
position that has already been defined quite apart from his mental
activity by the rules of the relevant discursive formation. Foucault thus
13 Il sagit moins des bornes posees a` linitiative des sujets que du champ ou` elle
sarticule . . . Je nai pas nie, loin de l`a, la possibilite de changer le discours: jen ai
retire le droit exclusif et instantane a` la souverainete du sujet. (AS, 272)
th e a n o n ymity o f la n g ua ge
81
claims that every statement has a subject, but that this subject is not a
speaking consciousness but rather a position that may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals (AK, 115). The subject position
is established by the rules of the discursive formation.
By focusing on the systems of the actual statements that define the
space in which speaking subjects operate, archaeology seeks to question the fundamental role of the human subject in the constitution of
knowledge. Statements are studied historically in their own right, not
as means of understanding the thoughts of the dead. The source of
scientific discourse is an anonymous field of discursive practices, not
the meaning-giving subject. Foucault writes ironically in AK that it is
unpleasant to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice where
one is used to seeing, in all its pure transparency, the expression of
genius and freedom (AK, 210).
Even though archaeology describes the discursive conditions that
limit and make different subject positions possible, it is not until Foucaults genealogy introduces the notion of productive power that his
idea of a constituted subject gets its full force. Archaeology describes
the possibility and availability of various subject positions. It also concerns the ways in which scientific discourses produce subjects as their
object of study, for example, the speaking subject in general grammar,
philology and linguistics, and the labouring subject in the analysis of
wealth or economics. Nevertheless, these studies only bring out partial
analyses of subjectivity. As Foucault himself admitted later, his archaeology presented only one of the axes of the constitution of the subject
(SP, 208).
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14 Rajchman (1985, 111) identifies Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and
Jacques Derrida as central figures in this movement.
15 Foucault said (PS, 185) in an interview that he was happy that no one had paid much
attention to this book, because it had remained his secret affair. He also claimed that
it did not have a place in the sequence of his books.
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What is important in connection with a different understanding of freedom is that Foucault read Roussels work as an effort to capture what
lies outside the discursive order of things by means of language. As he
noted, Roussel doesnt want to duplicate the reality of another world,
but, in the spontaneous duality of language, he wants to discover an
unexpected space, and to cover it with things never said before (DL,
16). The task of avant-garde literature was thus not so much to create an alternative ontological order another world but to show the
instability of the order of things that we take for granted.
This idea of literary writing as constitutive of alternative forms of reality also underlies Foucaults interest in Surrealism. In an interview he
gave in 1966, he discusses the importance of Andre Breton to contemporary thought. He was asked what Breton and Surrealism represented
to a philosopher of 1966 who concerned himself with language and
knowledge (STW, 171). Foucault replied that, for Breton, writing had
the power to change the world. He reiterated the idea present in OT
that language and writing used to be understood as transparent instruments in which the world was reflected. However, Breton was one of the
figures with whom the status of writing changed. As Foucault suggested,
Perhaps there is a writing so radical and so sovereign that it manages
to face up to the world, to counterbalance it, to offset it, even to utterly
destroy it and scintillate outside it (STW, 173). He argued that Breton
had contributed to the changing status of writing in two ways. Firstly,
he had remoralized it by demoralizing it completely: the ethic of writing no longer came from what one had to say, from the ideas that one
expressed, but it emerged from the very act of writing. In that raw and
naked act, the writers freedom is fully committed at the same time as
the counter-universe of words takes form (STW, 173).
While freedom as an attribute of the writing subject loses strength,
there is a freedom in language itself, in the creation of unexpected
worlds. This is the second characteristic of literary language: writing
solidifies and asserts itself apart from everything that might be said
through it. Writing and art constitute reality, they create objects. Underlying all the activities of the Surrealists, whether writing, painting or wandering around the city, is the aim to constitute new, previously unimaginable objects, to see things differently and expand the domain of what
can be thought and imagined.
For Foucault, literature thus forms a sort of counter-discourse (OT,
300) freed from the principles of order regulating scientific as well
as everyday discourses. Its aim is precisely to transgress the limits of
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th e a n o n ymity o f la n g ua ge
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Foucault does not claim that there are no subjects writing books
with their pens or on their computers. What he claims is that we cannot
understand what an author is by only studying the individual writing a
book. We need a new method. Apart from presenting a new method,
however, he also seems to suggest that his approach has an additional
advantage. He ends his essay with a curious, Utopian twist that brings us
back to the question of freedom. The author as a functional principle
not only organizes the work in a certain way, but also limits, excludes and
chooses. It is the means by which the free circulation, manipulation,
composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction is impended
(WA, 119). The author for Foucault is thus both a contingent and a constraining figure.19 Although there will never be a completely free circulation of texts, the modes of constraint are historically changing, and
it is therefore possible that one day we might live in a culture in which
we are not limited by the figure of the author, but rather surrounded
by an anonymous murmur, an endless proliferation of meanings (WA,
11920).
Hence, by a curious twist, the methodological disappearance of the
subject in Foucaults thought does not signal the disappearance of freedom. It is, rather, the case that freedom is understood as the endless
proliferation of meanings, which undermines the stability of the historical a priori determining possible ways of seeing, understanding and
acting. Rather than thinking of the subject in terms of individuals, and
of freedom as something they have or do not have, he suggests that we
attempt to think of the subject as a discursive effect and freedom as
a non-subjective opening up of possibilities for multiple creative practices. This does not mean that he denies the possibility of understanding
subjects as individuals or agents, and freedom as a capacity that is tied
to their initiatives. His analysis simply does not operate on this level. It
charts new dimensions of freedom. He is trying to find freedom on a
level that orders and regulates subjective expressions and initiatives.
In the realm of scientific discourse, Foucault emphasized the rules
and formal conditions of thinking, and questioned the possibility of
saying something completely new. In the realm of literature this possibility is emphasized, however, because the ontological order of things,
the historical a priori, can be suspended, even thrown out. Language
solidifies the identity of things by repetition, it creates an ontological
order taken as unquestioned reality, but it can also act as a thin blade
19 Cf. DL, 156.
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that slits the identity of things, showing them as hopelessly double and
self-divided even as they are repeated (RR, 23). There is a dimension of
language capable of undermining reality instead of only materializing
and solidifying it according to pre-existing rules.
Hence, as it is often argued that Foucault wanted to construct a
history and politics without human nature,20 it could equally well be
argued that he wanted to rethink freedom without human nature. In
the same way as archaeology questions the privileged role of the subject
in the constitution of knowledge without eradicating it as a question, it
also seeks to understand freedom in non-subjective terms without eradicating the notion. Freedom characterizes language rather than the
subject. The limits of freedom are the limits of the discursive order, and
they must not be conflated with the limits of the social order or of acceptance. Although Foucault showed interest in marginal subjectivities
throughout his work, he did not romanticize marginal lifestyles, nor did
he see them as exemplifying freedom. The limits that he attempted to
identify demarcated discursively constructed ontological realms. What
lies outside of them is not socially unacceptable, it is unintelligible in
existing modes of order.
The history of madness would be the history of the Other of that
which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be
excluded . . . whereas the history of the order imposed on things would
be the history of the Same of that which, for a given culture, is both
dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be
collected together into identities.
(OT, xxiv)21
Clare OFarrell (1989, vii) points to this passage, and argues that Foucaults whole work can be read as a history of limits, of that edge between
the systems societies impose upon order (the Same), and that which
is outside or beyond that order (the Other). His work of the 1960s
presents, in this sense, a consistent ontological view of a changing
boundary between the Same and the Other, apparent in the events
of history (OFarrell 1989, 40, 90). In Madness and Civilization, the
confrontation between the Same and the Other was between reason
20 See Davidson 1997b, 15.
21 Lhistoire de la folie serait lhistoire de lAutre de ce qui, pour une culture, est a`
la fois interieur et e tranger, donc a` exclure . . . lhistoire de lordre des choses serait
lhistoire du Meme, de ce qui pour une culture est a` la fois disperse et apparente, donc
a` distinguer par des marques et a` recueillir dans des identites. (MC, 15)
th e a n o n ymity o f la n g ua ge
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and madness, while in The Birth of the Clinic the Other was represented
by death, and in The Order of Things by the being of language. OFarrell
nevertheless claims that, during the 1970s, Foucault gradually constructed a vision of society and history in which the Same and the
Other were totally coextensive and indeed interchangeable, inextricably bound together in their movement. Notions of power and politics
came to occupy an important place in his thought at the expense of
the Other. According to OFarrell, the problem of the limit did not
reappear until the 1980s, when the notion of the subject took centre
stage and the Same and the Other become distinct and free terms again
(41, 91, 115).
I will argue, against OFarrell, that the limit, and freedom as its
transgression, never disappears from Foucaults thought. I now turn
my attention to Foucaults thought in the 1970s, and my focus is on
the question of the body. Although the realm of freedom opened up by
literary writing or in OFarrells conceptual terminology, the Other
is harder to locate in the tightly knit networks of power and knowledge,
it is nevertheless present. The body will come to represent resistance
to power, and it will open up new ways of understanding freedom. In
the works following The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge,
Foucault further developed the idea that subjects are formed in discursive practices, but he also turned to study other axes of the constitution
of the subject in non-discursive practices as well as in the technologies of
the self. This means that the realms of freedom are also expanded. Freedom emerges not only through the practice of writing as constitutive of
an ontological otherness to the discursive order, but also in other kinds
of practice. At the same time, writing becomes entangled with subjectivity in even more integral ways: it becomes inseparable from sexuality
and life: The private life of an individual, his sexual preferences, and
his work are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual life,
but because the work includes the whole life as well as the text. The
work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the
work (PS, 184).
II
B ODY
4
A GENEALOGY OF THE SUBJECT
So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a history.
Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of
conscience, of pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty? Even
a comparative history of law or at least of punishment is so
far lacking completely. Has anyone made a study of different
ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular
schedule of work, festivals and rest?
(Nietzsche 1887/1974, 812)
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Reading Foucaults genealogy as an effort to rethink the phenomenological subject opens up a new angle on his relationship with phenomenology. I have argued in the previous section that Foucaults
archaeology and phenomenology shared a common mode of questioning in inquiring into the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge. Here I will cast their relationship in a slightly different mould
through the question of the subject: my aim in this chapter is to explicate
Foucaults genealogical conception of the subject as a critical reaction
to the phenomenological subject. I will ask what Foucault meant by his
controversial claims that power makes individuals subjects and that the
subject is an effect of power. I will argue that we must not understand
the constitution of the subject as a causal process.3 Power relations are
immanent to the social reality and have empirical causal effects, but
they are also paradoxically transcendental, in the sense that they are a
condition of possibility for the constitution of the subject. Pheng Cheah
(1996, 126), for example, argues that power is quasi-transcendental for
Foucault, because it is both the immanent causal origin of empiricality
and physicality and a condition of possibility for grasping social reality, a
grid of its intelligibility, which cannot itself be accessible to cognitive or
practical-intentional mastery and control. While Foucaults genealogy
of the subject is thus a critical reaction to the phenomenological subject,
I argue that it nonetheless presents a modification of transcendental
analysis: the network of power/knowledge is understood primarily to
provide the condition of possibility for the subject, not the material
2 Originally delivered in English.
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cause. Historical and transcendental constitution are again inseparable in the sense that the conditions of possibility of the subject are to
be found in the historical practices and discourses structured by power
relations.
By claiming that power relations are productive of forms of the subject, Foucault does thus not simply suggest that individuals are produced
as subjects just as cars are produced from various materials in a factory.
Rather, we must understand the subject to be intrinsically entangled
with power and knowledge. Power/knowledge network constitutes the
subject in the sense of forming the grid of intelligibility for its actions,
intentions, desires and motivations.
My discussion ends by considering the problems involved in this
transcendental reading. I will question the apparent circularity of
Foucaults understanding of the constitution of the subject, and will
suggest ways of combating this problem.
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did not, however, elaborate on how the close tie between the discursive
and the non-discursive should be understood, except that he clearly
denied both that they symbolically reflect each other, and that nondiscursive changes should be studied in terms of a causality communicated through the consciousness of the speaking subject (e.g., AK, 163).
By suspending causal analysis of discursive changes, he denied that he
was trying to give discourse the status of pure ideality and total historical
independence, but was rather doing it in order to discover the domain
of existence and functioning of a discursive practice (AK, 1645).
Foucaults focus on discourse was thus a methodological choice, not the
ontological choice of discursive idealism. He did not hold that discursive
formations were completely autonomous, nor did he later give up this
position despite its problems in favour of a completely new position
emphasizing non-discursive practices. Instead, he further developed
his central philosophical claim that scientific objects are constituted in
history through discursive practices. Foucaults genealogy in the 1970s
also looked more comprehensively at the tie between discursive and
non-discursive practices through the notion of power/knowledge.
Beatrice Han (1998/2002) also argues that a shift of attention from
discursive to non-discursive practices is not sufficient to mark the difference between archaeology and genealogy.5 According to her, what
is important in the introduction of genealogy is the claim that it is
impossible to understand the conditions of possibility of scientific discourse without taking into account the development of new forms of
power. With genealogy Foucault is able to analyze the way non-epistemic
demands not only control the effective predication of scientific truths,
but also shape the overall conditions of possibility of scientific discourse
(Han 1998/2002, 104, 10910). The conditions of possibility under
investigation are thus no longer a set of purely epistemic rules, but
a power/knowledge network consisting of all kinds of practices: institutional, architectonic, juridical and medical. The episteme, or what
Foucault now refers to as the regime of discourses, only constitutes
the specifically discursive element of a more general regime, the dispositif or apparatus (Han 1998/2002, 1378). Foucault clarifies their
relationship by writing that the episteme is a specifically discursive
apparatus, whereas the apparatus in its general form is both discursive
5 Gary Gutting (1989, 271) also argues that genealogy does not replace or even seriously
revise Foucaults archaeological method, but rather combines it with the complementary
technique of causal analysis, which establishes an essential symbiotic relation between
power and knowledge.
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analyzes the ways disciplinary technologies subject prisoners by manipulating and materially inscribing their bodies. Their bodies are separated
from others in practices of classification and examination, but also concretely and spatially. They are manipulated through exercise regimes,
diet and strict time schedules. These processes of subjection are essentially objectifying: through processes of classification and examination
the individual is given a social and a personal identity: he/she is objectivized as mad, criminal or sick, for example.
Disciplinary power thus constitutes criminal subjects through concrete bodily manipulation and discursive objectification. These two
dimensions strengthen each other. On the one hand, material subjection made theoretical objectification possible, resulting in the birth of
human sciences such as criminology, criminal psychiatry and pedagogy.
The development of the corresponding sciences, on the other hand,
helped the development and rationalization of disciplinary technologies. The two dimensions furthermore link together effectively through
normalization. Scientific discourses produce truths that function as the
norm. Norms further the subjection by reducing individuality to a common measure. They also make possible the subjection of individuals
through the internalization of norms. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault
analyzes the disciplinary strategy that utilizes the idea of an inner core or
essence in the subjection of criminals. Where prisoners are concerned,
disciplinary power does not aim at repressing their interests or desires,
but rather at constructing them as normal. This is done on and through
the bodies of criminals who subject themselves to power to the extent
that its aims become their own inner meaning of normal. In a later text,
in a famous passage, Foucault writes: There are two meanings of the
word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and
subject tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both
meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject
to (SP, 212).
Hence, a novel aspect of modern disciplinary power is that it is not
external to the bodies that it subjects. Although the body has also in
the past been intimately tied to power and social order, Foucault claims
that disciplinary power is essentially a modern phenomenon. It differs from earlier forms of bodily manipulation, which were violent and
often performative public tortures, slavery and hanging. Disciplinary
power does not subject the body to external violence, it is not external
or spectacular. It focuses on details, on single movements, on their timing and rapidity. It organizes bodies in space and schedules their every
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In his Two Lectures, which dates from around the same period as
Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the relationship between body,
power and the subject. These lectures represent one of his early efforts
to conceptualize power in new terms.8 He wanted to find an alternative to theorizing power in terms of sovereignty as well as in terms of
rights, repression or economy. He turned to the Nietzschean alternative, according to which the basis of the relationships of power lie
in the hostile engagement of forces (TL, 91). Foucault also wanted
to construct a model that would better account for the new form of
power, disciplinary power. This type of power functions through material operators; it presupposes a tightly knit grid of material coercions
rather than the physical existence of a sovereign (TL, 104). Foucault
suggests that we should not look for the centre of power, but rather
study it at its extremities, the points at which it becomes capillary
7 Lhomme dont on nous parle et quon invite a` liberer est dej`a en lui-meme leffet dun
assujettissement bien plus profond que lui. Une ame lhabite et le porte a` lexistence,
qui est elle-meme une pi`ece dans la matrise que le pouvoir exerce sur le corps. Lame,
effet et instrument dune anatomie politique; lame, prison du corps. (SEP, 38)
8 Foucault presents his account of power as a series of propositions in HS and elucidates
it further in numerous interviews and essays. Foucaults account of power should not be
understood as a universally applicable theory of power. His goal in HS is rather to find a
method that will help us to understand a certain form of knowledge regarding sex (HS,
92). See also e.g. Cousins and Hussain 1984, 2 and Gutting 1994, 1920.
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(TL, 96). Neither should we look for the individuals who dominate, or
question their motives, but rather study the myriad of bodies which are
constituted as peripheral subjects as results of the effects of power (TL,
98). Rather than studying how subjects exercise power, Foucault turns
the question around and asks how the subject emerges as an effect of
power. Now he clearly formulates his project in terms of constitutional
analysis.9
[R]ather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to us in his lofty
isolation, we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually,
progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of
organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should
try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.
(TL, 97)10
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produce subjects per se, but is only one part of a complex network of
power/knowledge, or apparatus, which forms the constitutive conditions of subjectivity. Bodily subjection partakes in the formation of a
discursive order, through the birth of human sciences, for example.
This discursive order then feeds back to the non-discursive practices
by creating material effects. Human sciences and their truths create
objects not only of science, but also of reality: desires, forms of experience, certain kinds of bodies. Scientific discourse and practice constitute not only conceptual objects and identities, but also the subjects
who make them materialize. Hence, the manipulation of bodies forms
only one dimension of a complex power/knowledge network, which
further constitutes subjects through the material effects generated by
scientific truths.
Ian Hacking (1984, 115, 122) argues that Foucault restricts his analysis to the human sciences exactly for the reason that it is only in the
human sciences that scientific truths have constitutive effects on the
subjects under study. In the natural sciences our invention of new identities and categories does not really change the way the world works.
Even though we may create new phenomena that did not exist before
our scientific endeavours, what happens in our experiments is constrained by the world: if we do certain things, certain phenomena will
always appear. But in the social sciences we may generate kinds of people and kinds of action as we devise new classifications and categories.
Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of
people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way
interaction between these processes.13
Beatrice Han (1998/2002, 125) also explains this process in her
discussion of a course given by Foucault in 1974 at the College de
France, in which the effects of truth specific to medical discourse
on hysteric patients were analyzed. Medical discourse elaborated a
13 One of Hackings examples is the notion of psychic trauma. He discusses it along with the
three axes that Foucault distinguishes in his analyses of the constitution of the subject:
knowledge, power and ethics. First, there is the person as known about, as having a kind
of behaviour and sense of self that is produced by psychic trauma. There is a vast body
of knowledge in the growing field of tramatology. Second, in addition to the power of
courts and legislatures, there is the anonymous power that this concept has in peoples
lives. It organizes their ideas and emotions by creating a new sense of self. At the third,
moral level, the new sense of self as a victim of childhood trauma, for example, also
creates a new moral being. An understanding of who one is and why one is as one is has
implications for our understanding of a persons responsibilities and duties (Hacking
2002, 1820).
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5
ANARCHIC BODIES
1 Susan Bordo (1989, 1993) has appropriated Foucaults ideas about power and the body in
order to study the different ways that women shape their bodies from cosmetic surgery
to dieting and eating disorders and has analyzed these micro-practices of everyday
life as disciplinary technologies in the service of normalizing power. According to Bordo,
these normative feminine practices train the female body in docility and obedience to
cultural demands, while at the same time they are paradoxically experienced in terms
of power and control by the women themselves. For other feminist appropriations
of Foucault, see e.g. Diamond and Quinby 1988, Butler 1990, Hekman 1990, Braidotti
1991, Sawicki 1991 and McNay 1992.
2 See e.g. Bigwood 1991, McNay 1991, Soper 1993.
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In order to evaluate Foucaults account of the body from the perspective of feminist theory, we must first ask what exactly is meant by
the Foucaultian body. The feminist appropriations are based on varying
readings of it. Foucault did not present a theory of the body anywhere,
or even a unified account of it, and thus his conception of it has to be
discerned from his genealogical books and articles, which aim at bringing the body into the focus of history. I will therefore start by taking a
brief look at the central texts in which he discusses the body. My main
focus will be on The History of Sexuality, vol. i, which, I argue, presents
the most fruitful account of the body from the point of view of feminist
philosophy. I will then study three different ways of understanding the
Foucaultian body on the basis of these texts. I will finish by arguing for
a fourth reading, which, unlike most feminist appropriations, gives a
central role to Foucaults claims about the body as a locus of resistance
to normalizing power.
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system through the bodies of criminals, and thus brings under scrutiny
the connection between power and the body by analyzing the ways in
which the body is consciously manipulated by disciplinary power. As I
pointed out in the previous chapter, discipline is a form of power that
operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim
at making the body docile and useful. It has both a practical dimension institutions such as prison, school, hospital and an abstract
dimension, represented by the human and social sciences, which developed in tandem with them, such as criminology, psychology and pedagogy. Disciplinary power thus demonstrates Foucaults central idea of
the intertwining of power and knowledge: disciplinary techniques are
important instances of the power/knowledge network.
Foucaults thought continued to focus on the body throughout the
1970s. His next major work, The History of Sexuality, vol. i, thematizes the
body through the question of sexuality and studies the development of
sexuality as a discursive construct during the last two centuries. Foucault
argues against the repressive hypothesis which claims that sexuality in
the Victorian era was repressed and discourse on it silenced. It was
rather that sexuality became the object of a new kind of discourse
medical, juridical and psychological and that discourse on it actually multiplied. It also became importantly linked to truth: these new
discourses were able to tell us the truth about ourselves through our
sexuality. Sexuality became essential in determining not only a persons
moral worth, but his or her health, desire and identity.
The society that emerged in the nineteenth century bourgeois, capitalist
or industrial society, call it what you will did not confront sex with a
fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation
an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not
only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to
formulate the uniform truth of sex.
(HS, 69)4
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that completely evades the materiality of the body and the biologically
established existence of sexual functions (HS, 1501). His response is
that the purpose of the study is, in fact, to show
how deployments of power are directly connected to the body to bodies,
functions, physiological processes, sensations and pleasures . . . what is
needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the biological and
the historical are not consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of
the first sociologists, but are bound together in an increasingly complex
fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies
of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envisage a
history of mentalities that would take account of bodies only through
the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and
value; but a history of the bodies and the manner in which what is most
material and most vital in them has been invested.
(HS, 1512)5
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This passage, among others, has contributed to the feminist interpretations that read Foucaults claims about sex as interventions in debates
on the sexgender distinction. In the 1980s the distinction between
biological sex and social gender, which upheld feminist theory in the
1970s, was subjected to fundamental criticism.9 One strand in this criticism was the questioning of the idea of sex as a natural foundation.
Feminist theorists Judith Butler in particular referred to Foucault
7 See e.g. Bigwood 1991, 60.
8 Il ne faut pas imaginer une instance autonome du sexe qui produirait secondairement
les effets multiples de la sexualite tout au long de sa surface de contact avec le pouvoir.
Le sexe est au contraire lelement le plus speculatif, le plus ideal, le plus interieur aussi
dans un dispositif de sexualite que le pouvoir organise dans ses prises sur les corps, leur
materialite, leur forces, leur e nergies, leur sensations, leur plaisirs. (VS, 205)
9 The conceptual distinction between biological sex and social gender formed the framework that was used to formulate the questions and the possible answers in regard to female
subjectivity. This distinction has, however, been subjected to fundamental criticism in feminist research. It has been argued that it suffers from manifold theoretical ambiguities,
it reproduces the mindbody as well as biologicalcultural distinctions that feminist theorists themselves have criticized, and it is politically amorphous and unfocused. See e.g.
Gatens 1983/1991, Butler 1990, Heinamaa 1996.
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and argued that sex, like gender, was a social product or a cultural
construct.10
Foucaults discussion of sex at the end of HS is not, however, a comment on feminist discussions of sex or gender, and therefore to read it
through this distinction can be misleading. The original French word
sexe can refer to the categories of male and female in the sense of sex
organs anatomy and biology that differentiates males from females
but Foucaults stress is clearly on the sense of the natural function, an
embodied foundation or principle that belongs in common to both
men and women. Sex is understood as a hidden cause behind observable characteristics and behaviour. Foucault argues that sex is a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality. It is an
idea of an inner truth, an idea that there exists something other than
bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatomo-physiological
systems, sensations, and pleasures; something else and something more,
with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: sex (HS, 1523). He elaborates the idea further by writing that sex is a form of secret causality,
an interplay of the visible and hidden (HS, 152).
Foucault thus did not problematize sex in the sense that feminist
theory has done. He did not question how the categories of male
and female are constructed or what consequences they have for the
behaviour or empowerment of women. By claiming that sex is imaginary (HS, 156) and the most ideal element in strategies of power
(HS, 155), he was not arguing that femaleness is imaginary, ideal or arbitrary. Rather, he was trying to problematize a certain kind of explanatory
framework of sexuality: the idea of a foundation or an invisible cause
that supports the visible effects.
Foucault takes up the question of sex as a principle of explanation
for the classification of bodies into females and males in his introduction to the book Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of
a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Foucault now poses the question whether we really need the idea of a true sex. Using the example of
a hermaphrodite, he attempts to make visible how deep in our thinking lies the idea that everybody has a definite and naturally given sex
that is the truth and cause of our behaviour as well as of the observable
sexual characteristics. This true sex determines the individuals gender
identity, behaviour and desire for the opposite sex. What the body of
a hermaphrodite can show is that there is no true sex to be found in
10 See Butler 1990.
an a r c hic bo d ies
117
our body, but that this idea is rather a product of the development of
scientific discourse and juridical procedures (IHB, xxi).
Foucault refers to the Middle Ages, when it was common practice to
think that a hermaphrodite was a person that combined both masculine
and feminine characteristics. When the individual had legally reached
adulthood, he or she could choose which sex to keep. This conception was superceded by scientific theories about sex, which developed
around the same time as juridical concepts and practices relating to
the idea of a true sex. Everybody had only one true sex, which could
be settled conclusively by experts. All the characteristics of the opposite
sex in ones body and soul were deemed arbitrary, imaginary or superficial. The true sex further determined the individuals gender role,
and his or her moral responsibility was to behave according to this true
sex. The doctor, as the expert in recognizing this true sex, had to strip
the body of its anatomical deceptions and discover the one true sex
behind organs that might have put on the forms of the opposite sex
(IHB, viiiix).
Here, Foucault is using the notion of sex in more or less the way it
is understood in the sex/gender discourse. He discusses the idea of a
true sex from which gender, understood as social roles and culturally
acquired characteristics, follows. This idea also underlies the feminist
distinction between sex and gender, which feminists have used to argue
that natural sex does not determine social gender. Foucault does, however, also critically appraise the idea of natural, scientifically true sex by
revealing its historical construction. His aim, again, is to question the
whole explanatory framework of natural foundations and secondary
effects. He does not claim here, either, that sex as the categories of
maleness and femaleness was invented in a particular historical period
and that we could give them up when we wanted to. He rather analyzes the ways in which these categories were scientifically founded and
explained in discourses of truth, and how this pure explanation in fact
constituted these categories so that they were understood as natural.
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an a r c hic bo d ies
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how is it possible that there are several different variations of it? Even
if we identify with the subject positions to which we are summoned
in the case of gender, even if my gender identity appears almost selfevident both to myself and to others I still have the singular style
of living my female embodiment. Despite providing an explanation
of the normative construction of the female body, feminist theory has
not yet accounted for or explained in any way the variations of female
embodiment.
The third, and from my perspective the most interesting, set of questions concerns the possibility of resistance to normative power. The
only possibilities for resistance against subjection that a strong interpretation of the discursive body seems to allow open up through the
gaps in the struggle with competing regimes. The subjection of bodies
is never complete because the deployments of power are always partial and contradictory. Foucault insists that where there is power there
is resistance (HS, 95). The points of resistance are distributed in an
irregular fashion throughout the power network. They are the odd
term in relations of power (HS, 96), its blind spot or evading limit.
Power is thus not deterministic machinery, but a dynamic and complex strategical situation. In her book The Psychic Life of Power, Butler
analyzes and concisely explicates this idea of resistance in Foucaults
thought. In Foucault, resistance appears (a) in the course of a subjectivation that exceeds the normalizing aims by which it is mobilized, or
(b) through convergence with other discursive regimes, whereby inadvertently produced discursive complexity undermines the teleological
aims of normalization. Butler concludes: Thus resistance appears as the
effect of power, as part of power, its self-subversion (Butler 1997, 93).
Hence, she puts forward the view that resistance constitutes a hazard in
normalizing power as the only viable account of resistance in Foucault.
The idea that bodies themselves could generate any resistance, she thus
sees as either a naive mistake by Foucault or as simply impossible within
his framework.
From a feminist point of view, this means that, while a focus on bodies seems to open up important connections with Foucaults thought,
the apparent denial of the bodys capacity for resistance seems to refute
all feminist political goals. Lois McNay (1992), for example, argues in
her book Foucault and Feminism that Foucaults historical studies give
the impression that the body presents no resistance to the operations
of power. Although Foucault insists that power is always accompanied
by resistance, he does not elaborate on how this resistance manifests itself through the body. McNay (1992, 12) argues that this is
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Here Foucault suggests that it is in the body that the seeds for subverting
the normalizing aims of power are sown. The body becomes a locus of
resistance. Foucault elaborates further on this in an interview:
Mastery and awareness of ones own body can be acquired only through
the effect of an investment of power in the body . . . But once power
17 Ne pas croire quen disant oui au sexe, on dit non au pouvoir; on suit au contraire le
fil du dispositif general de sexualite. Cest de linstance du sexe quil faut saffranchir si,
par un retournement tactique des divers mecanismes de la sexualite, on veut faire valoir
contre les prises du pouvoir, les corps, les plaisirs, les savoirs, dans leur multiplicite et
leur possibilite de resistance. Contre le dispositif de sexualite, le point dappui de la
contre-attaque ne doit pas e tre le sexe desir, mais les corps et les plaisirs. (VS, 2078)
an a r c hic bo d ies
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produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and
affirmations, those of ones own body against power, of health against
the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality,
marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used
to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed
to a counterattack in the same body.
(B/P, 56)18
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overthrow of a univocal sex cannot result in sexual multiplicity or undefined pleasures. Herculines body and pleasures are still produced by
power, only her body is produced as a sign of fatal ambivalence in the
practices and discourses based on the idea of a univocal sex (956).
Are Foucaults references to the body as the locus of resistance
merely naive slippages into the idea of a prediscursive body? Do we
have to accept Butlers reading of the Foucaultian body according to
which these passages are implicit contradictions within his thought?
Are bodies and pleasures within the same discursive order as sex and
sexuality? What can bodies and pleasures as an alternative to sex desire
mean? I will argue that we must take seriously Foucaults idea of bodies
and pleasures as forms of resistance, and not treat it as a naive fallback to the prediscursive body, or as a return to the non-normalizable
wilderness.
Gilles Deleuze wrote in private notebooks originally given to
Foucault:
The last time we saw each other, Michel told me, with much kindness and
affection, something like, I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use
it differently, I cannot keep myself from thinking or living that desire =
lack, or that desire is repressed. Michel added, whereas myself, what I call
pleasure is perhaps what you call desire; but in any case I need another
word than desire.
(Deleuze 1994/1997, 189)20
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an a r c hic bo d ies
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an a r c hic bo d ies
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body would function as a stable reference point for truth, and hence
provide a position from which to criticize the deployments of power
(167). Dreyfus and Rabinow write:
If the lived body is more than the result of the disciplinary technologies that have been brought to bear upon it, it would perhaps provide a
position from which to criticize these practices, and maybe even a way
to account for the tendency towards rationalization and the tendency of
this tendency to hide itself.
(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 167)
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therefore the later understanding of the experiential body that he introduces in connection with sexuality is not further elaborated other than
with a few remarks. I argue that a radically historized phenomenology of the body could therefore fill in some of the gaps in Foucaults
understanding of bodies and pleasures as a form of resistance.
Butler writes in The Psychic Life of Power about Foucaults understanding of the body: Perhaps the body has come to substitute for the psyche
in Foucault that is, as that which exceeds and confounds the injunctions of normalization (Butler 1997, 94). According to Butler, this
means that Foucault has invested the body with psychic meanings that
he cannot elaborate within the terms that he uses (95). While Butlers
conclusion seems to hit the point as far as what is lacking from Foucaults conception of the body, I will argue that the only way to account
for these gaps is not to turn to psychic meanings but instead to study
the meanings generated by the lived body.
To conclude, I have two aims in my effort to create an uneasy alliance
between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty in the next chapter. On the one
hand, I argue that phenomenological insights concerning the lived
body could enrich Foucaults idea of the body as a locus of resistance.
On the other hand, I also want to argue that the feminist appropriations of Merleau-Pontys lived body can benefit from a Foucaultian
interpretation of it, because it can provide feminist theory with new ways
of understanding female freedom. Emancipation does not require a
body with nascent logos and pure of cultural inscription, but one that
is inscribed in ways that are open to reinterpretations and multiple
meanings.
6
FEMALE FREEDOM
Iris Marion Youngs book Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist
Philosophy and Social Theory represented one of the most notable efforts
to apply Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body to explicitly feminist issues.1 The essay Throwing like a Girl traces some of the basic
modalities of feminine comportment, manner of moving and relation
in space. With the help of these modalities Young seeks to make understandable the ways in which women in our society typically comport
themselves and move differently from the ways in which men do. She
argues, with the help of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body,
that the modalities of feminine comportment, motility and spatiality are
restricted modes of embodiment. According to Young, Merleau-Ponty
describes the lived body as a transcendence that moves out from the
body in its immanence in an open and unbroken directness upon the
world in action. The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action,
the continuous calling forth of capacities that are applied to the world.
In the case of feminine movement the most primordial intentional act
the motion of the body orienting itself with respect to and moving within
its surroundings is inhibited (Young 1990,148). A woman lives her
body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and
retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from
engagement in the worlds possibilities (150).
Jean Grimshaw criticizes Youngs analysis of female embodiment of
the problematic opposition of the repressed female body and the free
or unrepressed male body. In her view, Young idealizes masculine movement by assuming it unproblematically as a norm. Merleau-Ponty could
1 It can be argued that Simone de Beauvoir had already put forward a phenomenological
description of female embodiment in The Second Sex. See e.g. Kruks 1990, Vintges 1992,
Heinamaa 2003.
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the reality-constituting principle. In this second reading, MerleauPontys understanding of the body-subject is seen as compatible rather
than opposed to post-structuralist approaches, for example Foucault:
the body-subject is fundamentally structured as intersubjectivity, and is
always historically constituted.
I will finish by showing how the two different readings of MerleauPontys body-subject result in two different views of the freedom of the
body. While the first one is open to criticism for naively assuming a
realm of female freedom outside of sexist oppression, I will argue that
the second reading suggests new and interesting ways of thinking about
the freedom of the female body.
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Hence, Merleau-Ponty clearly claims that the tacit cogito, or the anonymous body-subject, is foundational in relation to individual, personal
subjectivity. It forms the latters condition of possibility. What is not so
clear in his account of subjectivity, however, is the relationship between
9 Si, reflechissant sur lessence de la subjectivite, je la trouve liee a` celle du corps et a`
celle du monde, cest que mon existence comme subjectivite ne fait quun avec mon
existence comme corps et avec lexistence du monde et que finalement le sujet que je
suis, concr`etement pris, est inseparable de ce corps-ci et de ce monde-ci. (Merleau-Ponty
1945/72, 467)
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the other two. It forms the condition of possibility, not only for individual consciousness but also for intersubjectivity understood as comprising the linguistic community, culture and history. In this reading,
Merleau-Ponty presents a foundational account of subjectivity. There
is a rudimentary level, the perceptual flow of the singular subject, on
which all forms of subjectivity are founded.
Even though, according to this reading, the anonymous existence
of the body forms a universal foundation, the subject is still not an
ahistorical constant. This is because the body-subject is, for MerleauPonty, always and by necessity historically situated and circumscribed.
The phenomenological account of the lived body shows that it is always
situated within or intertwined with its environment. It actively takes
up its situation in the world and transforms it through its bodily acts,
attitudes or styles. This activity of the body is, moreover, normatively
generative: the body has optimal ways of acting in the world. Normality
for the lived body can, thus, according to this reading, be understood
as what is optimal for it. Optima are instituted within experience by the
very fact that the body takes a perspective on things and is embedded in
the surrounding world. As bodies we can be more open to the givenness
of objects or more closed to them.11 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
refers to normal as optimal when he writes that for each object, as for
each painting in a gallery, there is an optimal distance from which it
demands to be viewed, an orientation through which it gives the most
of itself . . . the distance from me to the object is not a size which
decreases or increases, but a tension that oscillates around a norm
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 302).
In this reading, phenomenology of the lived body can be criticized
for approaching the notions of normal and abnormal with respect to the
lived body and its immediate surroundings, not with respect to an interpersonal community. What characterizes the living body is its ability to
instigate norms, and norms are founded on the experience of the lived
body. This understanding of the foundational role of the structures of
the body in establishing the normal seems to be in stark contrast to
the feminist theorists who claim that normal and abnormal are always
defined in a social context and attached to the polarity of positive
negative. Norms offer possibilities for reference and judgement; instituting and identifying norms are always acts of power.
11 See Steinbock 1995, 13843. Steinbock argues that, when Husserl refers to normal as
optimal, the optimal as a norm is instituted and generated from within experience.
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Hence, according to my first reading, while emphasizing that the subject is always historically situated, Merleau-Ponty does not problematize
how the normal subject itself is fundamentally constituted in history.
As Elmar Holenstein (1985/1999, 87) argues, he neglects to question
both the possible historical and sociological dependence of the structuring and orientation of the world as well as of the body. Merleau-Pontys
account of the body-subject would reject the strong version of historical constitution, according to which intersubjectivity understood as
language, tradition and community provides the very condition of
possibility for individual subjectivity as well as for objective reality. The
historicity of the subject in Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body
would, as Judith Butler claims, be historical situatedness, not historical
constitution. History as constitutive of the body-subject, even on the
level of rudimentary perceptual flow, would be redundant.
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as well as for objective reality. Instead of the tacit cogito being a foundational layer of subjectivity on which the personal and intersubjective
depend, I will argue that it is a dimension of intersubjective sense constitution. It is not a foundation, but a constitutive condition.
Merleau-Ponty clearly emphasizes the reciprocity of all constitutive
processes. For instance, subjectivity and the world can never be understood in isolation from each other. He also explicitly states that transcendental subjectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity (Merleau-Ponty
1945/1994, 3612). How transcendental intersubjectivity is understood is, however, decisive for the way we understand its relationship to
the body-subject.
Dan Zahavi, among others, effectively argues for an intersubjective
transformation of Husserls phenomenology in his late, posthumously
published writings.13 These texts by Husserl had the greatest influence
on Merleau-Ponty, who saw the main thrust of Husserls work to be
contained in the manuscripts.14 Zahavi shows that, from the winter
of 1910/11 up until his death in 1938, Husserls aim was to develop
a transcendental theory of intersubjectivity. According to Zahavi, what
has made Husserls account difficult to explicate and understand is that
he operated with several different kinds of intersubjectivity. He did not
only understand it to refer to the subjects cultural context, to the fact
that we are constantly confronted with intersubjective meanings such as
social institutions and cultural products. Neither does intersubjectivity
refer exclusively to other peoples actual presence in the subjects field
of experience. The core in Husserls reflections on intersubjectivity lies
in its fundamental reality-constitutive function.
In terms of understanding Merleau-Pontys body-subject as intersubjectivity, Husserls major claim is that the experience of objective validity is made possible by the experience of the transcendence of foreign
subjectivity. Objects cannot be reduced to being merely my intentional
correlates if they can be experienced by others. Our primal experience
of others permanently transforms our categories of experience. The
objective validity of my experiences does not, after the initial encounter,
require the others actual presence. The precondition for objective reality is, however, that it can only be constituted by a subject that has
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relevant to us. It is the world that our body intends and spins around us.
The subjects embeddedness in this living tradition and its anonymous
normality forms a third type of intersubjectivity. Normality is understood as conventionality, which in its being transcends the individual.
Our horizon of anticipations is structured in accordance with the intersubjectively handed-down forms of apperception (Zahavi 1996, 239
42). Social normativity cannot therefore be regarded only as secondary
or derivative of individual, lived normativity.16
When intersubjectivity is understood as social normativity, the bodysubject cannot be understood as historically situated, but rather as historically constituted. According to this view, there can be no universal
or inherent normativity of the living body. The anonymous body is
not foundational for social normativity, but the relationship between
the living body and the surrounding culture is complex and chiasmic.
The structures of the body are structures of the world, but not only of the
natural world. The shared normativity of the living tradition also constitutes and structures the intentionality of perceptions, sexuality and
embodiment.
Merleau-Ponty does not defend the view that posits the body as
immune to the influence of history. According to him, Man is a historical idea, not a natural species (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 170).
This claim is often interpreted to mean that the fundamental structures of the anonymous body for example temporality, spatiality and
sexuality form a foundation that simply assumes different guises in
different historical situations. Merleau-Pontys emphasis on history can,
however, be interpreted through Husserls theory of transcendental
intersubjectivity as defending a stronger version of historical constitution. The structures of the anonymous body come into being only
as intersubjectively generated. Merleau-Pontys conditions of possibility for perception must not be understood as ahistorical or universal
forms, but rather as dynamic and developing structures derived from
our cultural environment, constantly in a state of change. The anonymous body is not a natural foundation on which intersubjectivity, understood as tradition and community, forms a secondary layer. Nor is it the
16 Anthony Steinbock (1995, 267) argues that, when Husserl turned to generative phenomena, he no longer addressed the problem of normality and abnormality in terms of
normal as optimal for the living being and abnormal as one-sidedly dependent on the
normal, but rather treated them intersubjectively in terms of homeworld and alienworld. By doing this, Husserl implicitly reinterpreted the concepts of normality and
abnormality.
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case that, in emphasizing transcendental intersubjectivity as constitutive of the body-subject, culture is privileged over nature. It is rather
that transcendental intersubjectivity represents the very effort to dismantle the natureculture dichotomy and to rethink nature as well as
culture. Merleau-Pontys aim throughout Phenomenology of Perception is
to argue against all dichotomous and causal modes of thinking, which
reduce lived phenomena to primary causes and secondary effects.
The phenomenological conception of intersubjectivity comprises
areas that are traditionally posited not only on the side of culture
but also on the side of nature: geography, physiology, materiality, the
body. The fundamental bodily nature of subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty
emphasizes with his notion of the body-subject is not part of nature
or culture, but it problematizes the distinction between them. The
anonymity of perception must be understood as a layer or dimension of
intersubjectivity that we cannot localize or isolate.17 Our relationship
to the world is fundamentally ambiguous and therefore resists conceptualization. This does not mean that there exists a sphere of pure
bodily experiences independent of intersubjectively constituted structures, meanings and linguistic representations of the body.
In his essay The Childs Relations with Others, Merleau-Ponty studies
intersubjectivity in very concrete terms (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 96155).
He discusses the development of a childs corporal schema and shows,
through a detailed study of child psychology, how intersubjectivity forms
the condition of possibility for singular subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty
gives a detailed account of how a childs bodily awareness, as well as
its perceptual consciousness, develop as a consequence of being in
an intersubjective situation, and how these therefore correspond to
cultural variations in the childs environment. The development of a
childs corporal schema is tied internally to the process that leads to
the distinction between itself and others. It develops only in a concrete
social, historical and cultural situation. The corporal schema is not an
a priori form that the child receives intact at birth, but is historically
constituted and structured as intersubjectivity. The structures of the
anonymous body come into being only as historically sedimented structures derived from our cultural environment. Subjectivity, even on the
level of the anonymous body, is always dynamic. It is constituted and
structured by language, community and culture. Our perceptions of the
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Female freedom?
When Merleau-Pontys body-subject is not understood as universal or
foundational, but as essentially dynamic and historically constituted,
the implication for feminist theory is that there are no normal or foundational modes of female embodiment, motility or sexuality. There is no
inhibited female corporeality and free and normal male corporeality
in societies of sexist oppression, but rather two differently gendered
and historically constituted experiences and modalities of embodiment. What is called normal depends on the values of the society in
question.
This view comes close to Foucaults idea that power/knowledge networks constitute normalcy. According to Foucault, modernity is characterized by life becoming an object of scientific discourse intrinsically
tied to political aims and technologies. Biopower targets individual bodies and the populations health as a whole. An important consequence
of its development is the growing importance assumed by the action
of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Unlike
laws which function according to the binary logic of the forbidden
and the permitted, norms are individualizing: they make it possible
to demarcate distributions, measure differences, construct scales and
classify in various categories. Biopower is dependent on this individualizing knowledge about particular bodies, and about the population as a
whole. It is power for normalizing judgement, power to identify scientific
criteria for what is normal.
According to Foucault, norms are thus an important part of the
power/knowledge network, and as such constitutive of the subject. Scientific discourse creates norms that are utilized by political discourse
and institutional practices and vice versa: political problems are taken
up by scientific discourse and its experts, on whose authority the normal is identified. Structures of power/knowledge create not only new
objects of science, but also new kinds of subjects.
Foucaults studies of dividing practices show how the normal subject is constituted by a distinction and physical separation between normal and abnormal subjects. Scientific normativity and its third-person
accounts contribute to the constitution of our lived bodily sense of the
normal. They also shape the liminal encounters of the home-world and
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in constant oscillation: shifting, resisting and adapting. While individual bodily normativity responds to established sets of norms female
embodiment is constituted in a certain way in a patriarchal culture
it never mechanically reiterates the existing norms. The body is constantly materializing different social norms, it reiterates them but always
through its individual style. It is not a replica or a carbon copy of preestablished normativity, but rather materializes an individual style of
being. The constitution of meaning, even in the singular living body,
is always intersubjective, but never mechanical. The body-subject is initiatory and capable of resistance, and at the same time constituted by
intersubjective normativity. According to Merleau-Ponty, The question
is always how I can be open to phenomena which transcend me, and
which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and live
them (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 363).
Hence, my argument is that a non-foundationalist reading of
Merleau-Pontys body-subject can provide feminist theory with an
account of the female body that acknowledges its generative status
instead of viewing it only as a passive product of cultural crafting. At
the same time, Merleau-Pontys thought refutes the possibility of feminist theory returning to a fixed or pure female embodiment or essential femininity.20 Because the body-subject is always historical as well
as generative, the emergence of new sexual styles, new sets of bodily normativities, constantly shifts the meaning of sexual difference.
The intersubjective horizon of meaning is transformed because what
the lived body generates is unpredictable. As Elizabeth Grosz writes
in Volatile Bodies, what fascinates her is the ability of bodies to always
extend the frameworks that attempt to contain them and seep beyond
their domains of control. Bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new,
surprising, unpredictable (Grosz 1994, xi).
The lived body cannot be emancipated from sexist oppression to
free modes of motility or sexuality. Nevertheless, Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body potentially furthers understanding not only of
the cultural constitution of the body, but also of its resistance against this
constitution. There is freedom in the unpredictability of our embodied experiences that establishes the always incomplete character of the
bodys cultural constitution. This freedom is not to be understood as an
inherent capacity or an attribute of the body as such, but is more like
20 On the possibility of feminist phenomenology, see also Oksala 2004.
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III
E THICS
7
THE SILENCE OF ETHICS
Foucault never developed a theory of ethics, yet his two last books, The
History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, could be characterized as being
concerned primarily with ethics. They deal with the sexual morality
of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The question that guides
Foucaults inquiry is: How, why and in what form was sexuality constituted as a moral domain? (UP, 10). The focus of the inquiry is thus
on the manner in which sexual activity was problematized, mainly by
philosophers and doctors in texts written as guides for others. In the
second volume of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasures, the period
under study is the classical Greek culture of the fourth century bc. The
third volume, The Care of the Self, deals with the same problematization
in the Roman Empire of the first two centuries ad.
History of ethics
What emerges out of Foucaults historical studies of sexual morality is a
particular conception of ethics that he traces to antiquity. He begins by
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t he silen c e o f eth i c s
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Ethics as practice
The History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, thus presents us with a historical study of the forms of an ethical problematization of a remote past.
Ethics refers to a specific component of morality and provides a useful
analytical tool for studying its history. Foucaults work on ethics should
not be read solely as a new methodological approach to historical studies of sexual morality, however. His notion of ethics refers not only to
a component of morality that deals with the ways individuals constitute
themselves as moral subjects, but also to a certain way of understanding
morality. I argue that when his last books are combined with his late
interviews and other texts, an idea of ethics in the prescriptive sense of
the word emerges too; a conception of ethics as an individual ethos, an
attitude or a way of life. Foucaults late work on ethics represents a continuation of his on-going concern with forms of subjection, and makes a
contribution to the task of rethinking ethics in the postmodern world.
Foucault explicitly admitted that he wrote the last two volumes of
The History of Sexuality in terms of a contemporary situation (CT, 263).
He denied, however, that he was suggesting that we adopt the ethics
of ancient Greece. He condemns outright the ancient Greek ethics of
pleasure in many ways as something quite disgusting, and refers to how
it was linked to the ideas of a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of
the other and an obsession with penetration, for example (GE, 346).
Yet, he suggests there is something we can learn from it.
My idea is that its not necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific
knowledge. Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury
of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly
be reactivated but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point
of view which can be useful as a tool or analyzing what is going on now
and to change it.
(GE, 349350)2
In ancient Greece morality was not related to religion or religious preoccupations, nor was it related to social, legal or institutional systems.
Its domain was the relationship one had towards the self, namely, the
aesthetics of existence. What Foucault found striking was the similarity
of the ethical problems with the problems of our society:
2 The interview is the result of a series of working sessions with Michel Foucault conducted
by Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus at Berkley in 1983, and was originally published in
English.
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I wonder if our problem is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us
no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal
system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation
movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on
which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but
they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called
scientific knowledge.
(GE, 343)
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t he silen c e o f eth i c s
163
Gregory exhorts one to light the lamp and turn the house over and
search, until gleaming in the shadow one sees the drachma within. In
order to recover the efficacy which God has printed on ones soul and
which the body has tarnished, one must take care of oneself and search
every corner of the soul.
(TES, 227)
Foucault thus argues that there has been an inversion between the
hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, Take care of yourself and
Know thyself. Knowledge of the self was understood in Greco-Roman
culture as a consequence of taking care of the self and therefore was
subordinated to it. In the modern world, it constitutes the fundamental
principle. Foucault was not only referring to our religious tradition. He
also claims that the principle of knowing the self underlies all those
philosophies of the subject in which knowledge of the thinking subject
constitutes the first step in the theory of knowledge (TES, 228).
Foucaults studies of the history of ethics can thus be seen as a continuation of his attempt to rethink the subject, this time the forms of the
self: the forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself or herself and the practices by which he or she transforms his or
her mode of being. Rather than understanding the ethical relationship
one has to oneself as a relationship of knowledge, Foucault advocates
an understanding of it as a care or concern for oneself. With his
explication of ancient Greek ethics, he clearly wanted to further argue
the point that there is no true self that can be deciphered and emancipated, but that the self is something that has been and must be
created. There is a whole new axis of analysis present in his late studies
of the subject, however.
The last two volumes of The History of Sexuality appeared in a very
different form from the one that Foucault had originally planned and
proposed.4 He indicates in the introduction to volume ii that there was
an analytical axis missing from his previous work. To be able to study
the history of the experience of sexuality, he also needed, besides
the methodological tools with which his archaeologies and genealogies
4 The back cover of the first volume of The History of Sexuality announced the five forthcoming volumes: The second volume was to be called The Flesh and the Body and it was going
to deal with the problematization of sex in early Christianity; volume iii, The Childrens
Crusade, with the sexuality of children; volume iv, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, with the ways in
which sexuality had been invested in the female body; volume v, Perverts; with the person
of the pervert; and volume vi, Population and Races, with bio-politics. See Davidson 1994,
117.
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had provided him, to study the modes according to which individuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual subjects (UP, 5). He
then turned to studying the historical constitution of the self: the
forms of understanding subjects create about themselves and the ways
they form themselves as subjects of a morality, for example. While
his earlier genealogical studies investigated the ways in which the
power/knowledge network constitutes the subject, in his late work the
emphasis is on the subjects own role in implementing or refusing
forms of subjectivity. His late work thus brings into focus a new component of the constitution of the subject modes of relation to oneself
and thus presents a more elaborated understanding of the subject than
is found in his earlier writings.
Many commentators refer to a third phase in Foucaults thinking,
and note a marked change in his concerns. How this change is interpreted varies, however. Commentators such as Peter Dews (1989) see
it as an abrupt theoretical shift and a return of the subject, while
others, such as Paul Rabinow (1984) understand it, in my view more
correctly, simply as a shift of emphasis.5 Foucault himself describes this
change in his thinking in various contexts in terms of a recasting of his
interests:6
Perhaps I have insisted too much on the technology of domination and
power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself
and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the
mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of
the technologies of the self.
(TES, 225)
Technologies of the self are not separate from technologies of domination, which had been the focus of Foucaults earlier studies. He points
out the necessary link between them. He argues that if one wishes to
analyze the genealogy of the subject in western civilization, one must
take into account the interaction between techniques of domination
and techniques of the self. This means analyzing the points at which
the technologies of domination of individuals over one another overlap processes by which the individual acts upon himself. Conversely, the
analyses must also take account of the points at which the techniques
of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination
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(ST, 181). These contact points are what Foucault calls governmentality
(TES, 225).
Hence, technologies of the self do not introduce a totally autonomous subject to Foucaults late thinking. As he commented, even
if he was interested in the way in which the subject constituted himself or herself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these
practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by
himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are
proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society
and his social group (EPF, 11). Neither are technologies of the self
simple extensions of techniques of domination disguised as voluntary,
however. Foucault must presuppose a subject with some relative independence with regard to the constitutive power/knowledge network in
order to describe a subject capable of critical self-reflection and ethical
work on the self. As Gilles Deleuze (1986/1988, 101) argues, Foucaults
fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from the
power/knowledge network without being dependent on it. The subject
constituted by the power/knowledge network is now capable of turning
back upon itself: of critically studying the processes of its own constitution, but also of subverting them and effecting changes in them.
This understanding of the subject as being, on the one hand, constituted by the power/knowledge network, while on the other hand
retaining a relative independence from it, is, in my view, one of the
most problematic aspects of Foucaults late thinking on ethics. I will
explicate my criticism in detail in chapter 9, but I will first defend Foucault against a number of other criticisms that have been levelled against
his ethics. I will argue that it is important to understand correctly his
idea of an aesthetics of existence, as well as his aim in inquiring into
the possibility of contemporary ethics. Foucaults ethics must be read
as a continuation of his genealogy of the subject and of his on-going
concern with oppressive forms of subjection.
Ethics as aesthetics
The new focus on the government of the self by ones self is crucial
in Foucaults elaboration of resistance. Ethics is the domain in which
he situates it. Ethics becomes an important mediator in the triangle
of relationships between the subject, knowledge and power. In his late
thinking Foucault returns to the idea, found in his early work, of the
subversive role of art. The ethical practices of the self are closely linked,
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or even fused with aesthetics. When asked what kind of ethics it was
possible to build in our society, he replied:
[I]n our society, art has become something that is related only to objects
and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized
or done by experts who are artists. But couldnt everyones life become a
work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not
our life?
(GE, 350)
This idea of creating oneself as a work of art has fuelled a lot of heated
criticism against Foucault.8 He has been accused of retreating into
amoral aesthetics, privileging an elitist notion of self-centred stylization, and undermining all possibilities of emancipatory politics. The
7 Par l`a il faut entendre des pratiques reflechies et volontaires par lesquelles les hommes,
non seulement se fixent des r`egles de conduite, mais cherchent a` se transformer euxmemes, a` se modifier dans leur e tre singulier, et a` faire de leur vie une uvre qui porte
certaines valeurs esthetiques et reponde a` certains crit`eres de style. (UPL, 1617).
8 See e.g. Wolin 1986, Fraser 1989. Foucaults practices of the self incorporate certain
intellectual attitudes an attitude of permanent criticism yet they are principally bodily
techniques that focus on everyday life and on the choices one makes in ones way of life,
diet and habits. They also incorporate ones sexuality and aspects of ones gender. To
turn ones life into a form of art involves ones body, its experiences and pleasures, not
the renunciation of them. This connection between ethics, sexuality and embodiment
seems to open up interesting connections between Foucault and feminist ethics. Yet perhaps surprisingly, feminist theorists have commented very little on Foucaults late work,
and generally their critical stance is derivative of an established ethical and theoretical
framework. In Foucault and Feminism, Lois McNay (1992), for example, follows Habermas
and argues that there is a problematic lack of normative grounding to Foucaults implicit
criticism of modern society, and that his thinking therefore slips into a politically and ethically disabling relativism. Some feminist writers, such as Jean Grimshaw (1993), simply
dismiss Foucaults studies of Greek morality as elitist and male-dominated, that therefore
sidestep questions that are crucial for feminist theory.
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Philosophy lived
When Foucaults ethics is understood as personal practice, it means that
ethical acts are primary in the sense that they will not find their justification in any general theory or principle. Foucault therefore invites
readers who are more accustomed to normative ethics to ask the obvious question: are all creative and transgressive acts ethical, and if not,
which ones are? Rape and murder could be seen as creative and transgressive, since for a lot of us it would certainly constitute a new field of
experience. Since there are no normative guidelines or rational justifications, there seems to be no way to make distinctions between different
acts and no way to determine which ones are ethical. As Foucaults critics argue, what is wrong with his aesthetics of existence is that it can
never provide the critical framework necessary for being able to condemn certain actions, such as rape or murder, as being simply wrong.13
Therefore it fails to create the normative space of judgement which
these critics assume ethics should provide.
For Foucault, however, it was an impossibility to provide people with
normative grounding, guidelines, rules or criteria for passing moral
judgements. The task of an intellectual is not to tell others what to
do, people have to build their own ethics (MS, 16). What Foucault is
12 Paul Veyne (1986/1997, 231) also argues that style in Foucaults thought does not mean
a distinction; the word should be understood in the sense in which the Greeks used it,
for whom an artist was first of all an artisan, and a work of art first of all a work.
13 Jurgen Habermas is perhaps the best-known critic of Foucault, and has accused him of
a lack of normative grounding in his analyses. See e.g. Habermas 1985/1987. See also
e.g. Walzer 1986, Taylor 1986, Fraser 1989. The planned discussion between Foucault
and Habermas never took place. For a reconstruction of the Foucaultian portion of this
exchange, see Flynn 1989.
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conveyed. While being aware of the impossible task of giving an authentic voice to madness, Foucault nevertheless wrote a book with an impossible aim. As Derrida formulates this, Foucaults determination to avoid
the trap that would have led him to write a history of untamed madness
with the restraining language of reason is the maddest aspect of his
project (Derrida 1967/1978, 34). As with ethics, so in connection with
madness, it seems, Foucault was trying to say something that could not
be said in philosophy.
Nevertheless, Derrida ends up suggesting that, although the silence
of madness cannot be expressed in the logos of the book, it can be
found in its pathos. The resolution of the difficulty is practised rather
than formulated. This again echoes Wittgenstein and his distinction
between saying and showing.15 What cannot be said in the book can be
shown by it. Foucaults book on madness becomes an act that renders
madness present. Madness escapes philosophy only to appear in its
intensive style and its power to arouse emotions. Derrida formulates
this by writing: What I mean is that the silence of madness is not said,
cannot be said in the logos of this book, but is indirectly made present,
metaphorically, if I may say so, in the pathos I take the word in its best
sense of this book (Derrida 1967/1978, 37).
Similarly, we can think that, for Foucault, the ideal of freedom is
something that can be shown with philosophy even if it cannot be said
in its (propositional) language. Even though values are not and cannot
be communicated as an explicit normative ground or framework, they
can be understood as part of Foucaults philosophy as lived. His books
speak directly of the lack of freedom and hence indirectly of freedom:
the oppressive treatment of madness, the internment of criminals, sexual normalization and marginalization. Typically, they begin with his
perception that something is terribly wrong in the present and through
a study of history aim to show the contingency of our present. This opens
up the possibility for seeing to what extent it could be different. Philosophy as an ethical practice does thus not necessarily mean that we
write lots of academic books on ethics, but that our philosophical life is
ethical. As Foucault wrote: The key to the personal poetic attitude of
a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced
15 The famous distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown
obtains a decisive philosophical significance in Tractatus. According to Wittgenstein,
what can be shown is, in the end, what matters, as the privileged object of philosophical insight. If all epistemic worries were suddenly, one beautiful morning,
resolved by scientific inquiry, the problems of life have still not been touched at all
(6.52).
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8
THE FREEDOM OF PHILOSOPHY
Enlightenment is mans release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is mans inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this
tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack
of resolution and courage to use it without direction from
another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your reason!
that is the motto of enlightenment.
(Kant 1784/1997, 7)
Apart from the focus on the self, Foucaults ethics has another
dimension: critical responding to ones time. Critical work encompasses
the subjects personal work on him/herself, and also a critique of society, power relations and structures. While I have argued that to criticize Foucaults late work for a lack of normative guidelines misses
the point of his effort to rethink ethics, the need for a normative
grounding becomes more pressing in connection with politics. The
subjects ethical work on him/herself may be based on unthematized
values and experiences of liberation, but a shared conception of freedom seems necessary in emancipatory politics. Concepts empower, they
incite discussions, arguments, dialogues. Normative ideals such as freedom, equality and justice articulate Utopian possibilities and give imaginations a concrete form that can be communicated and shared as a
common political ideal and goal.
The connection between philosophy and politics in Foucaults
thought is, to say the least, ambiguous. David Couzens Hoy (1998,
1820), for example, argues that, although Foucaults writings seem
to be politically engaged, exactly how they generate this effect is not
clear. Hoy finds evidence in Foucaults writings that he asserted both
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that philosophy and politics are profoundly linked, and that they are
not linked.1 Wendy Brown (1998, 33) argues similarly that Foucaults
responses to expressly political questions in interviews are frequently
vague, oblique, deflective or simply bland. While Hoy seeks to redeem
Foucaults thought for progressive politics by pointing to his involvement in various political struggles, Brown argues for the opposite. She
claims that Foucaults thinking opposes all traditional understandings
of politics, and instead reformulates the political as opposition to politicization on the one hand, and to policy on the other (Brown 1998, 42).
She challenges the idea that Foucaults particular political positions and
enthusiasms were an outcome of his genealogical studies: a genealogical politics has no necessary political entailments.
I will argue in this chapter that Foucaults understanding of the connection between philosophy and emancipatory politics turns on his
stance on the Enlightenment. In order to understand his late thinking on ethics we have to read it in connection with his other writings, his genealogies of subject and power, but particularly with his
writings on the Enlightenment. In what follows, I will briefly present
the common form of criticism against the political implications of
Foucaults thought, and then present two possible readings of his position in regard to emancipatory politics, arguing for the latter. I will
conclude by distinguishing four different meanings of freedom that I
find in his work.
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becoming aware of types of social behaviour will lead to readers becoming critical of that behaviour. However, as Brown argues, genealogical
diagnosis itself would have no necessary political entailments. Foucault
sought to diagnose our present, our political rationality, the forms of our
subjectivity and the kind of deployments of power that have produced
them. Brown writes (1998, 347) that genealogy opens up a political
space that harbours no explicit political aims but which is replete with
challenging exposures and destabilizations. It reveals the necessary as
contingent, and can thus be deployed to incite possible futures, but not
to prescribe any political positions or specific futures.
It can, furthermore, be argued that it is not a question of Foucaults
diagnostic position being uncritical and politically defective, but that
the novelty of his thought lies exactly in the fact that he manages to
challenge our traditional ideas of what critique is. His work severs critique from prescription and effectively questions the claim that the
clarification of a normative grounding is a prerequisite for criticism.7
Hence, we may disagree with Foucault, we may disagree with his diagnosis, the aims that he set himself and his implicit moral engagements.
An explicit normative grounding, however, will not bring about general consensus. Explicitly stating that a universal principle of freedom
should underline any social practice will not solve the problem of the
different interpretations and value judgements connected with modern forms of power. As Benhabib herself clearly points out, the second
level of critique is normative and philosophical, it deals with morality
or ethics, and therefore no rational consensus on matters of fact can
ultimately solve it.
Foucault was clearly not advocating the impossibility of critical judgement and action; his engagement in various political and ethical confrontations during his own time are a demonstration of this. According
to my first readings, however, on the basis of his philosophy, he could
only pass these ethical and political judgements as a person, and they
contained no ideals for everybody to follow. Philosophers cannot be
politicians: the task of philosophy is to call into question our understanding of politics.
I have especially wanted to question politics, and to bring to light in
the political field, as in the field of historical and political interrogation,
some problems that had not been recognized there before. I mean that
the questions I am trying to ask are not determined by a pre-established
7 See e.g. Flynn 1989.
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political outlook and do not tend towards the realization of some political
project. This is doubtless what people mean when they reproach me for
not presenting an overall theory. But I believe precisely that the forms
of totalization offered by politics are always, in fact, very limited. I am
attempting, to the contrary, apart from any totalization which would be
at once abstract and limiting to open up problems that are as concrete as
possible, problems that approach politics from behind and cut societies
on the diagonal, problems that are at once constituents of our history
and constituted by that history.
(PE, 3756)8
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Freedom as ethos
According to my first reading, Foucaults work is critical in the sense
that, although purely descriptive, it nevertheless represents the critical practice of freedom in posing questions about the constitutive
conditions of subjectivity. I will, however, argue for a second reading, according to which it is not purely descriptive, but incorporates
a normative dimension. This normative dimension is, I claim, what
gives his thought its political character.11 Foucaults analyses are undertaken with the explicit aim of changing social reality in the direction of
freedom.
The ideal of freedom as emancipation from the effects of power is
an important part of the Enlightenment thinking and the subsequent
understanding of emancipatory politics. Foucault, however, is notorious for his clear objection to the universalistic discourse of Enlightenment emancipation: there is no inherent human nature justifying
the demands for human freedom or guaranteeing the possibility of
progress. Foucault warned us that the Enlightenment ideal of individual autonomy was one effect of normalizing power, power that is
totalizing and individualizing at the same time (SP, 213). According to
Foucault, Enlightenment humanisms have furthermore either masked
forms of disciplinary power that operate to produce forms of modern
individuality, or have participated in extending domination (Sawicki
1996, 169).
Consequently, when, shortly before his death, Foucault wrote a reading of an article by Kant entitled What is Enlightenment (WE), in
which he located himself squarely within the Enlightenment tradition
of philosophy, many of his readers were surprised and confused.12 I
11 Cf. Hindes 1998.
12 For more on Foucaults writings on the Enlightenment, see also ATT, WC.
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Through his reading of Kant, Foucault explicitly presents his own work
from his early archaeological writings to his genealogies of the modern
subject as well as the diagnosis of modern forms of power essentially as
an Enlightenment project: a series of historico-critical analyses studying
the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking and saying (WE, 46).
This critical ontology of ourselves is a philosophical, ethical and political task all at the same time: it is an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical
life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the
historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (WE, 50). Foucault
calls the philosophical ethos characterizing his work a limit-attitude. He
16 quest-ce qui se passe aujourdhui? Quest-ce qui se passe maintenant? Et quest-ce
que cest que ce maintenant a` linterieur duquel nous sommes les uns et les autres;
et qui definit le moment ou` jecris? . . . la question a` laquelle Kant repond . . . nest
pas simplement: quest-ce qui, dans la situation actuelle, peut determiner telle ou telle
decision dordre philosophique? La question porte sur ce que cest que ce present,
elle porte dabord sur la determination dun certain e lement du present quil sagit de
reconnatre, de distinguer, de dechiffrer parmi tous les autres. Quest-ce qui, dans le
present, fait sens actuellement pour une reflexion philosophique? (QL2, 67980)
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185
wants to turn the Kantian question around: rather than asking what
limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, he is asking, In what
is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory . . . what place is occupied by what ever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary
constraints? (WE, 45). He was thus not interested in showing what are
the necessary conditions determining the limits of reason, but in revealing the extent to which the limits presenting themselves as necessary
are actually contingent.
Hence, Foucault does not simply embrace traditional Enlightenment
ideals, but submits them to critical reappropriation. Through reservation, he denied that his work was simply for or against the Enlightenment. He refused the blackmail of the Enlightenment, the idea that
one has to be for or against the Enlightenment (WE, 43). For
him, reappropriating the critical ethos of the Enlightenment means
precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in
the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative (WE, 43). Foucault also clearly distances himself from humanism, warning us that We
must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the
theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment (WE, 45).
He thus saw humanism not as a critical questioning of the present, but as
a diverse and inconsistent set of themes designed to justify and promote
particular values. It necessarily leans on conceptions of what it means
to be human borrowed from religion, science or politics, and thus functions as a form of justification, not as a form of critique. Enlightenment
and humanism are therefore in a state of tension rather than identity
(WE, 44).
The limit-attitude characterizing the philosophical ethos of the
Enlightenment has to be translated into specific inquiries. It is in this
context that Foucault presents his analyses of the three axes of the
constitution of the subject knowledge, power, ethics as the concrete forms into which the limit-attitude translates. The ontology of
ourselves poses the questions: How are we constituted as subjects of our
knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit
to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our
own actions? (WE, 49). Archaeology and genealogy are methods in
this inquiry into the constitution of the subject conducted as a study of
practices or practical systems (WE, 48). Nevertheless, these historicocritical reflections must also be put to the test of contemporary reality,
both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and
to determine the precise form this change should take (WE, 46).
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practices delineate a realm where freedom understood as an ontological condition can be given a considered form. When freedom is
brought into the realm of ethics and politics informed by reflection
it becomes a concrete practice of freedom as well as a historical ideal,
an ethos of our culture. I am now in a position to sum up the different
meanings of freedom operative in Foucaults thought.
Freedom as ontological contingency. I have shown in connection with
Foucaults archaeology how freedom refers to the indeterminacy of
discursive structures: language can never be fully mastered or tamed,
but results in unexpected orders and unimaginable conjunctions of
meanings. Foucault not only gives language a regulative role in the
mode of scientific discourse, he also demarcates a domain of freedom
in the mode of literature, particularly as avant-garde writing. While
scientific discourses form an ontological order of things that is implicit
in theories and practices, language as avant-garde writing is capable
of forming alternative, unscientific and irrational ontological realms:
different experiences of order on the basis of which different perceptual
and practical grids become possible, and hence new ways of seeing
and experiencing emerge. While Foucaults archaeology is generally
viewed as emphasizing the necessary structures of scientific discourse
and opposing humanist aspirations of looking for the freedom of man,
it contains an anti-humanist understanding of freedom as an opening
of new possibilities of thought and experience. Foucaults aim was not
only to show how the limits of knowledge were constituted, but also to
study what distorted them.
In connection with Foucaults genealogy, I have argued that this
indeterminacy or ontological contingency characterizes not only discursive structures, but also embodiment and experience. Subjection
sets the limits for normal experiences, but these limits make possible transgressions that affirm the limitlessness of bodies and pleasures.
The Foucaultian body is capable of generating resistance, of presenting excess and transgression, not just malleability. This resistance is
not, however, a return to a wild and natural body, but rather is made
possible by the normalizing power. The body is a construction of scientific discourses and disciplinary technologies, but is also capable of
multiplying, distorting and overflowing its discursive definitions, classifications and coordinations. Even if linguistic intelligibility structures
and partly constitutes experience, there are nevertheless experiences
that fall outside of discourse in the sense that these abject or transgressive experiences are rendered mute and unintelligible in our culture.
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At the same time, they are necessary outsiders because they constitute
the limits of the normal and the intelligible. In Foucaults genealogy,
like in his archaeology, there is a dimension of freedom in the sense of
a constitutive outside to the discursive order, even if there is no outside
to the apparatus or network of practices as a whole.
Practices of freedom. Foucaults late thinking identifies ethics as the
deliberate dimension of freedom. Ethics is a practice of freedom.
Hence, while freedom in the previous sense is an ontological condition
of ethics, ethics as a practice is the deliberate form it assumes. Foucaults
thinking on ethics thus develops a fuller understanding of freedom,
elaborates it by introducing a deliberate dimension to it. Freedom is
not only a non-subjective opening of possibilities, it can be deliberately
cultivated and practised by subjects. The subject exercises freedom in
critically reflecting on itself and its behaviour, on beliefs and the social
field of which it is part. It materializes the possibilities that are opened
around it. The practices of freedom may challenge, contest and even
change the constitutive conditions of our subjectivity as well as its actual
forms. Ethics as practices of freedom means exploring possibilities for
new forms of the subject, new fields of experiences, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking. It consists of creative activity as well
as the critical interrogation of our present, and of the contemporary
field of possible experience. The quest for freedom in Foucaults ethics
is a question of developing forms of the subject that are capable of
functioning as resistance to the normalizing power.
Freedom as the ethos of the Enlightenment. Foucaults essays on the
Enlightenment put forward the idea of freedom as a historical ideal
originating from it. He does not simply embrace traditional Enlightenment ideals, but submits them for critical reappropriation. What, for
him, characterizes the philosophical ethos originating in the Enlightenment is that it is a permanent critique of our own era. By linking
his thought to the Enlightenment, he makes the normative move of
adopting the ideals associated with it critical reason and personal
autonomy as the implicit ground on which his critiques of domination, abusive forms of power and reason rest. The Enlightenment
provides him with the historical not transcendental values on which
to base his critiques. The ideal of freedom is a commitment to a specific
historical tradition within which we think about human life and politics.
Freedom is the contingent historical ethos and precondition of critical
reflection on our present.
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9
THE OTHER
Unlike the claim of some of his critics, Foucaults ethics is not a solitary
pursuit, nor does he prioritize isolated individuality. Ethical subjectivity
is given a form in the practices of the self, but these practices always
take place and derive their meaning from an interpersonal situation.
Care for the self, according to Foucault, implies complex relationships
with others: relationships and duties towards ones family members,
society at large, ones spiritual master or guide. The ethos of freedom
and self-mastery can only take concrete shape and become a style of life
in a particular interpersonal situation in which the ethical acts become
ways of dealing with the surrounding community. The self that is cared
for is never isolated, but always linked to larger societal structures.1
Moreover, the ethical relationship always exists between free individuals. When Foucault was asked whether care for the self released
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from the care of others ran the risk of absolutizing itself and therefore
becoming an exercise of power on others, he replied:
[T]he risk of dominating others and exercising over them a tyrannical
power only comes from the fact that one did not care for ones self and
that one has become a slave for his desires. But if you care for yourself
correctly, that is to say if you know ontologically what you are . . . you can
not abuse your power over others.
(EPF, 8)2
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Subjectivity as passivity
In his late work Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Levinas sets out
to do the impossible: to articulate, using the language of philosophy,
the inevitable silence of philosophy. He seeks to describe in language
what by definition is unthematizable, a sphere that cannot be an object
of knowledge, understanding or any other intentional act. To write
about ethics means to describe what is beyond being and non-being,
the otherwise than being. Ontology traditionally refers to an area of
philosophy that studies being in all its forms and modes. It seeks to
comprehend being and thus to bring it into the realm of knowledge.
For Levinas, however, ethics is beyond being and therefore beyond
ontological inquiry. It is not a relation of knowledge, but it is in direct
opposition to ontology.7 However, before philosophy can describe what
5 See e.g. Bailhache 1994.
6 My presentation of Levinas understanding of subjectivity is based mainly on his late
thought, particularly Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974/1981). There are significant changes as well as shifts of emphasis between this book and Totality and Infinity
(1961/1969), for example, on the question of the ethical significance of sensibility, on
the role of language and on the emphasis on justice and the third party. Discussion of
the changes is, however, beyond the scope of this study. See e.g. Critchley 1992, Peperzak
1993.
7 Ontology is Levinas general term for any relation to otherness that is reducible to
comprehension or understanding (Critchley 2002, 11).
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lies beyond being what is otherwise than being it must give up the
language of ontology without sinking into incomprehensibility.
An important distinction in Levinas thought is therefore the one
he makes in Otherwise than Being between saying (le dire) and the said
(le dit).8 The language of philosophy has traditionally consisted only of
the said: of sentences and arguments that have a truth-value. Everything
that can be named, discussed and debated can only be expressed in the
said. Philosophy has therefore neglected the other aspect of language,
the saying. By saying, Levinas refers to speech as aimed at the other.
Speaking to the other addressing and responding is the condition
of possibility of all language and philosophy. There can be no language
without the other, because words are always for the other. Saying is thus
similar to Levinas idea of responsibility: it is a relationship of openness
and vulnerability to the other which cannot be thematized or brought
to the said.
The only way to approach the saying in philosophy is through the
said. However, the effort to thematize saying in the said is always, by
necessity, an act of its destruction: to succeed in thematizing what
cannot be thematized, paradoxically, means to fail. Philosophy is thus
doomed to this recurring failure, and therefore has to start anew time
and time again. Hence, it is necessary to do the impossible in order
to write about ethics. The ethical relation to the other will always be
beyond the language of philosophy, rationality, totality, order and
being. Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise than being, the
very possibility of the beyond (Levinas 1989, 179).
This fundamental paradox in philosophical language underlies the
description of subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. Ethical subjectivity
is described in the language of philosophy, which is, nevertheless, constantly undoing itself: subjectivity is equated with passivity, vulnerability,
sensibility, maternity, materiality, responsibility and substitution. These
terms may each express something about it, but it cannot be reduced
to any one of them. Levinas writes, for example, that ethical subjectivity is essentially passivity, but this is not passivity in the sense in which
we normally understand it, as the opposite of activity. Subjectivity as
ultimate passivity does not belong to the order in which the alternative
of active/passive retains its meaning: Our western passivity refers to
8 Otherwise than Being is often read as Levinas attempt to address the questions Derrida
posed in Violence et metaphysique (1967/1987). On Derridas relationship to Levinas
thought, see e.g. Bernasconi 1991, Critchley 1991, 1992.
t he o th er
201
a subject who is passive when he does not give himself the contents
of perceptual and cognitive acts. This passivity is not passive enough
because the subject is still receptive. Sensations are produced in a subject who grasps himself through these sensations and conceives them.
Levinas seeks a new degree of passivity, more passive than passivity, that
does not take charge of itself, but that breaks the unity of subjectivity.
The passivity of subjectivity ultimately means its fission (Levinas 1986/
1998, 89).
The radical understanding of subjectivity as responsibility prior to
commitment is also developed further. Levinas said in an interview:
In this book [Otherwise than Being] I speak of responsibility as the
essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity (Levinas
1982/1985, 95). Responsibility is the absolute principle of becoming a human subject, and as such is the primordial structure of subjectivity. Through substitution, literally putting myself in the place of
the other, I become responsible even for the others responsibility, I
become a hostage for the other. The possibility of putting oneself in
the place of the other is a condition of possibility for solidarity and
ethical behaviour. It is through the condition of being a hostage that
there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity
even the little there is, even the simple After you, sir (Levinas 1974/
1981, 117).
Responsibility for the other is not, however, only a demand, a weight
on the shoulders. It is also the freedom that constitutes the subjects
uniqueness. Levinas had already repudiated the modern humanist idea
of the essential similarity and equality of subjects in his book Time and
the Other (1947/1987). My responsibility constitutes my singularity and
uniqueness because no one can carry my responsibility for me. No one
can substitute himself for me, who substitutes myself for all (Levinas
1989, 115). My selfhood comes into being through my responsibility
for the other. The inescapable responsibility makes me an individual I:
to be myself can only mean being for the other.
The identity of the subject is thus determined by the uniqueness of
his or her responsibility for everybody and everything. Responsibility is
fundamental and yet impossible. I cannot shed its demand/command
because it is a fundamental structure of my being, but neither can I
ever fulfil it: the more just I am, the greater is my responsibility. I am
responsible for that which has preceded me and that which will outlive
me. No one else can take my place and carry my responsibility, which
is always more than anyone elses. Responsibility for the neighbour is
202
fo u c au lt o n freedom
precisely what goes beyond the legal and obliges beyond contracts; it
comes to me from what is prior to my freedom, from a non-present, an
immemorial (Levinas 1989, 180).
Like the phenomenological subject, the subject for Levinas is always
the singular I. Husserls subject is singular for methodological reasons, but for Levinas the singularity is integral for his understanding
of ethics.9 The ethical demand can only be placed upon me. Ethical
subjectivity cannot be objectified or studied as generic. Responsibility,
as the assignment of the other, always arises in a singular and particular
situation and concerns only me.
Unlike the phenomenological subject, the subject that Levinas
aims at describing does not constitute the world in perceptions or
any meaning-giving acts. An ethical relation is not like a relation of
knowledge; it cannot be reduced to knowledge about the other. The
other cannot be posited by any constituting, intentional act of the subject, because he or she cannot be an intentional object, but always overflows the limits of perception and comprehension. This constitutes the
paradox of the presence of alterity in a finite act of a self-possessed
subject. To encounter something truly other is, by definition, impossible, because it would be incomprehensible and unexperienceable.
For something to be able to preserve its alterity means that it must
exceed my categories of experience and understanding, and therefore
be a non-experience, unexperienceable. This core problem in Levinas
thought is also already articulated in the early work Time and the Other:
How can an event that cannot be grasped still happen to me? What
can the others relationship with a being, an existent, be? . . . How can a
being enter into a relationship with the other without allowing its very
self to be crushed by the other? (Levinas 1947/1987, 77). It is this
paradox that founds subjectivity, which is not reducible to consciousness or to any kind of intentionality. Subjectivity as passivity does not
constitute the other through meaning-giving acts, but the other breaks
up the unity of transcendental constitution.
The paradoxical understanding of subjectivity becomes even more
pronounced in Otherwise than Being. The reason the subject cannot constitute the other is not only because the other as radical alterity always
overflows the limits of experience, but also because the subject itself
9 Although Levinas conception of the subject is often read as a critique of Husserls
transcendental Ego, it can also be understood as its radicalization. (See e.g. Levinas
1987/1994, 1518.) For an illuminative analysis of the differences between Husserls
and Levinas thought, see e.g. Bernet 1998.
t he o th er
203
204
fo u c au lt o n freedom
t he o th er
205
206
fo u c au lt o n freedom
t he o th er
207
divine spark that dwells within it, as it was for the ancient philosophers,
but rather the subjects determination by history. It is no longer divinity
but history that guarantees us an experience of the Other at the core
of our own subjectivity and brings it about that any direct encounter
with the self must also be a confrontation with the not-self (Halperin
1995, 104). The study of history becomes a spiritual exercise when it is
conducted as an inquiry into our own alterity (Halperin 1995, 105).
If we accept the Levinasian idea that ethical subjectivity is constituted
by the other, understood as the other person, I suggest that we do not
necessarily need to study history to encounter our own alterity. We
can also think that an encounter with other people will bring about a
confrontation with the not-self, but also an experience of the other as
passivity, responsibility and vulnerability at the core our subjectivity.
The other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted subject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know. The arts of
existence aiming to transgress normalized individuality would succeed
in opening up an ethical sphere exceeding totality and determination
because the other is capable of introducing alterity to the constituted
subject. The other makes ethical subjectivity possible, but also breaks
the totality of constituted experience by introducing a plurality in being
that resists all efforts of totalization and normalization. Only the other
ultimately reveals the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempts to
transgress them an ethical meaning.
CONCLUSION: FREEDOM AS AN
O P E R AT I O N A L C O N C E P T
For Foucault, freedom refers to the indeterminateness of the constitutive matrix and to the contingency of all structures. It is the virtual
fractures that appear in the invisible walls of our world, the opening up
of possibilities for seeing how that which is might no longer be what it
is. Freedom does not mean that everything is possible, but neither is
the present a necessity. Foucault writes:
I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead by following lines of fragility in
the present in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no
longer be that-which-is.
(CT/IH, 36)1
Even though freedom for Foucault is thus not an attribute of the subject, this does not commit us to political apathy and cynicism. Freedom
is anarchic in the sense that it disturbs and even breaks every totality, but it must nevertheless not be understood as some absolute and
mystical outside. The virtual fractures for thinking and being otherwise will not just appear in the invisible walls of our world, they can
only emerge from our practices. We must try to open up possibilities
1 Ce que je voudrais aussi dire a` propos de cette fonction du diagnostic sur ce quest
aujourdhui, cest quelle ne consiste pas a` caracteriser simplement ce que nous sommes,
mais, en suivant les lignes de fragilite daujourdhui, a` parvenir a` saisir par ou` ce qui est et
comment ce qui est pourrait ne plus e tre ce qui est. Et cest en ce sens que la description
doit e tre toujours faite selon cette esp`ece de fracture virtuelle, qui ouvre un espace de liberte, entendu comme espace de liberte concr`ete, cest-`a-dire de transformation possible.
(SEPS, 4489)
208
for seeing to what extent that which is might no longer be what it is.
Foucault continues: In this sense, any description must always be made
in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the
space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of
possible transformation (CT/IH, 36).
I will conclude by putting forward one more definition of freedom
that does not directly emerge from Foucaults thinking, but which nevertheless, in my view, captures something essential about it: freedom
as an operational concept. According to dictionaries of philosophy, an
operational definition is the characterization of a concept through the
operations performed to check it, such as the characterization of weight
as that which scales measure and intelligence as that which IQ tests measure. Freedom as an operational concept would thus mean that freedom
is defined and gains a meaning only through the concrete operations
through which its existence is tested. It emerges through the particular,
political and/or personal struggles that try and test its limits, possibilities or extent. Foucault writes about philosophy that it is important in
that it should be put to the test of contemporary reality:
But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of
freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be
an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves
must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the
other, put itself to the test of reality, both to grasp the points where change
is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change
should take.
(WE, 46)2
Freedom can only gain meaning through our practices of resistance and
the fleeting experiences of liberation resulting from them, both collective and personal. It is always dangerous and precarious. Sometimes its
testing turns into riots and violence, and what emerges is not freedom
but anger and resentment. Sometimes it results in nothing but dry pages
filled with exercises of common sense. Freedom is a fragile moment, a
2 Mais pour quil ne sagisse pas simplement de laffirmation ou du reve vide de la liberte, il
me semble que cette attitude historico-critique doit e tre aussi une attitude experimentale.
Je veux dire que ce travail fait aux limites de nous-memes doit dun cote ouvrir un domaine
denquetes historiques et de lautre se mettre a` lepreuve de la realite et de lactualite, a` la
fois pour saisir ler points ou` le changement est possible et souhaitable et pour determiner
la forme precise a` donner a` ce changement. (QL1, 574)
210
fo u c au lt o n freedom
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Spatial History. London: Continuum.
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Hall, Stuart (1996), Introduction: Who Needs Identity?, in Stuart Hall and
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referen c es
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217
218
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219
INDEX
220
in d ex
counter-, 845
scientific, 1920, 357, 478, 55, 78,
7980, 812, 87, 96, 98, 102, 117,
130, 1501, 189
discursive formation, 37, 81
Dreyfus, Hubert, 713, 77, 119, 1323,
191
Enlightenment, 5, 8, 1213, 170, 172,
176, 1824, 1857, 190
episteme, 213, 2730, 334, 47, 489,
75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 967, 130
classical, 21, 22, 247, 28, 29, 31, 52,
85
modern, 21, 22, 2730, 31, 33, 34, 52,
76
Renaissance, 21, 234, 26, 85
epoche, 435, 47, 57, 59, 60, 645, 66
ethics
feminist, 166n8
Foucault on, 4, 12, 85n17, 15761,
162, 163, 1657, 16971, 1723,
175, 186, 1912, 1934, 1956,
206
Levinas on, 196205
experience, 12731, 132, 133, 163, 174,
18990, 191
feminist
criticism of Foucault, 101, 114
theory, 46, 11, 101, 11011, 11516,
120, 121, 1223, 124, 127, 134,
1358, 144, 150, 152, 153, 179
Fink, Eugene, 60n20, 61, 656
Flynn, Thomas, 76n9, 105, 173n16,
176n1, 181n10, 187
Frankfurt School, 8, 186
Fraser, Nancy, 176
freedom, 1213, 132, 1523, 168, 170,
172, 175, 178, 180, 181, 1823, 186,
187, 18892, 193, 20810
and language, see language
female, 12, 134, 1503
practice of, 1812, 186, 188, 189,
190, 206
gender, 11517, 120, 1212, 123,
150
genealogy, 3, 11, 73, 74, 81, 82, 94,
95n4, 96, 97, 101, 1045, 106, 107,
111, 112, 112n3, 11314, 119, 120,
130, 132, 1634, 175, 177, 17980,
185, 188, 18990
of the subject, 3, 18, 164, 184
governmentality, 4, 164
Gregory of Nyssa, 1623
Grimshaw, Jean, 1357, 166n8
221
169n13
Hacking, Ian, 102
Hadot, Pierre, 173n17
Hall, Stuart
Halperin, David, 129n24, 129n25,
206
Han, Beatrice, 1819, 21n5, 323n15,
36n19, 68, 73n4, 96, 102, 1045
Haraway, Donna, 5
Heidegger, Martin, 32, 53, 745
Heinamaa, Sara, 72n3, 1201n13
Hekman, Susan, 6
Herculine Barbin, 116
hermeneutics, 73, 74
of the self, 162
Himanka, Juha, 44n5
historicism, 55, 567, 678
historicity, 9, 55, 679, 133, 137, 148
history, 21, 4950, 67, 689, 779, 112,
114, 118, 119, 132
History of Sexuality, vol. i, 34, 11, 100,
105n16, 111, 113, 124, 125, 1278,
163n4
History of Sexuality, vol. ii, 4, 157,
15960, 162, 163
History of Sexuality, vol. iii, 4, 157,
15960, 162, 163
Hoeller, Keith, 7
Holenstein, Elmar, 145
Hoy, David Couzens, 119, 133n30,
1756, 179
Husserl, Edmund, 6, 89, 10, 32, 38,
406, 478, 49, 512, 534, 5560,
60n20, 623, 64n25, 64n26, 68,
69, 72, 79, 139, 144, 1467, 148,
202
intentionality, 13940, 203
Irigaray, Luce, 5
Kant, Immanuel, 2830, 323n15, 49,
512, 54, 68, 159, 182, 183, 1845,
186, 187
Kaufman, Walter, 183n15
knowledge
and power, see power
conditions of possibility of, 18, 203,
29, 38, 55, 61, 67, 689, 73, 76, 78,
94
empirical, 28, 545, 56
scientific, 18, 22, 48
Kristeva, Julia, 82n14
222
in d ex
in d ex
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8n9, 13, 32, 53
Schilder, Paul, 139n4
science, 3, 745, 129, 185
and discourse, see discourse
and knowledge, see knowledge
and phenomenology, see phenomenology
history of, 22, 28, 48, 4951, 79, 80
human sciences, 31, 35, 98, 102, 103,
113
self, 4, 1635, 171, 174, 175, 181, 206
care of the, 11, 12, 161, 1623, 170,
171, 174, 188, 1934
practices of the, see practices
relationship to the, 4, 1589, 163,
194
technologies of the, 4, 89, 1615, 196
sex (sexe), 11417, 122, 1246
sexuality, 4, 89, 104, 109, 11315, 116,
120, 1246, 127, 129, 1334, 1578,
162, 163
Merleau-Ponty on, 1367, 138, 1401,
148
Shepherdson, Charles, 118n11, 130n27
Smart, Barry, 1978
Steinbock, Anthony, 144n11, 148n16,
151
structuralism, 9, 18, 73, 74, 93
subject, 3, 12, 701, 88, 1089, 199,
201, 2023
conditions of possibility for, 945, 97,
100, 1068, 182
ethical, 13, 1589, 160, 161, 1634,
166, 167, 185, 192, 1956, 197,
1989, 2001, 202, 2035, 206,
207
223