Nadia Bou Ali Lacan Contra Foucault Subjectivity Sex and Politics

Lacan Contra Foucault
Also available from Bloomsbury
Between Levinas and Lacan, Mari Ruti

Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms
Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Foucault and Power, Marcelo Hoffman
Žižek and his Contemporaries, Jones Irwin
Lacanian Realism, Duane Rousselle
Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited by Simon

Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano
Subjectivity, Sex and Politics
Edited by Nadia Bou Ali, American University of Beirut,

Lebanon, and Rohit Goel, Jnanapravaha, India
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © Nadia Bou Ali, Rohit Goel and contributors, 2019
Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel have asserted their rights under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of

this copyright page.
Cover design: Irene Marinez-Costa

Cover image © Giancarlo Botti/Getty Images and © INTERFOTO/
Alamy Stock Photo
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3688-8

ePDF: 978-1-3500-3687-1
eBook: 978-1-3500-3689-5
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
Contents
List of Contributors vi
Acknowledgements viii
Measure Against Measure: Why Lacan Contra Foucault?
Nadia Bou Ali 1
1 Cutting Off the King’s Head

Mladen Dolar 37
2 Author, Subject, Structure: Lacan Contra Foucault
Lorenzo Chiesa 55
3 Better Failures: Science and Psychoanalysis
Samo Tomšič 81
4 Merely Analogical: Structuralism and the Critique of Political
Economy
Anne van Leeuwen 109
5 Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism
Joan Copjec 139
6 Foucault’s Neoliberal Post-Marxism
Zdravko Kobe 161
Author Index 210

Subject Index 212
List of Contributors
Anne van Leeuwen has a PhD from the New School for Social Research (2010).
She is currently an Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Religion at James
Madison University (Virginia). Her research is in twentieth-century French and
German philosophy – from critical theory to psychoanalysis to structuralism
and post-structuralism, and she is particularly interested in the relationship
between feminist theory and materialist politics within this tradition. In addition
to various articles on this topic, she is working on a monograph on Simone
de Beauvoir that situates her thought with the traditions of structuralism,
psychoanalysis and Marxism. Anne teaches a range of courses at JMU, from
twentieth-century French philosophy, critical theory, philosophy and film, to
philosophy, art and literature, and she also runs the Philosophy & Film Club.
Joan Copjec is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Before moving to Brown she was for many years an editor of the art journal
October and Director of the Center for Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at
the University at Buffalo, where she cofounded the journal, Umbr(a). She was
also editor of the book series, S, at Verso Press. She is the editor of several books
and author of Read My Desire, Imagine There’s No Woman and the forthcoming
The First Picture Show: Kiarostami, Corbin, Lacan.
Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher who has published extensively on psychoanalytic

theory, biopolitics and Marxism. His most recent books include The Not-Two:
Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016) and The Virtual Point of Freedom:
Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion (Northwestern University Press, 2016).
He is Visiting Professor at the European University at Saint Petersburg and
teaches at the Freud Museum, London. Previously, he was Professor of Modern
European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the
Centre for Critical Thought.
Mladen Dolar, born in 1951 in Maribor, Slovenia (former Yugoslavia), is

Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy,
University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis,
modern French philosophy, German idealism and philosophy of music. Apart
List of Contributors vii
from a dozen books in Slovene, his book publications include most notably
A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into nine languages) and
Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, translated into three
languages). Two new English books are forthcoming with Duke UP and Verso.
He regularly teaches at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and at the
University of Chicago. He is one of the founding members of what has become
known as the Ljubljana Lacanian School.
Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana,

Slovenia, and is currently researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin,
Germany. His research areas comprise contemporary European philosophy,
structuralism and post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and epistemology. He is
the author of The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (Verso, 2015) and the
forthcoming The Labour of Enjoyment (August Verlag, 2018).
Zdravko Kobe teaches Classical German Philosophy at the University of

Ljubljana. He has published four books on Kant’s theoretical and practical
philosophy and numerous articles, especially on Kant, Hegel and contemporary
philosophy.
Acknowledgements
This volume was inspired by the conference ‘Lacan Contra Foucault: Subjectivity,
Universalism, Politics’, held at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon,
2–4 December 2015. We would like to thank the co-organizers, Ira Allen and
Ray Brassier, as well as all of the conference participants. The conference was
sponsored by AUB’s Centre for Arts and Humanities and supported by the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences. We would like to thank Ahmad Dallal, Maher
Jarrar and Patrick McGreevy for their help in making the conference possible.
Measure Against Measure:
Why Lacan Contra Foucault?
Nadia Bou Ali
Given their profound and often polarizing influence on the humanities and
social sciences, the paucity of sustained engagement with the (dis)connections
between Foucault and Lacan ‘strikes the eye’. Lacan Contra Foucault was
originally conceived as a staging of a ‘civil war’, an intimate enmity between two
of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. The idea grew out of an
eponymous conference held in Beirut, itself a site of protracted civil war that
Lacan visited in 1974. Just four years later and a decade after he left Tunisia,
Foucault travelled to Iran to witness the Islamic revolution.
Civil war and revolution … Lacan and Foucault. In Beirut, Lacan met
with students who were working in a context in which war has recurred since
Lebanon’s inception, since class struggle has been disavowed only to return,
with equal force, in the form of ‘sectarian’ strife. Lacan was a subtle analyst of
repetition, attentive not only to the phenomenon’s more obvious capacity to
maintain order but also to its less apparent, transformative potential. He saw in
repetition – of traumas, historical events, symptoms and so on – an unconscious
plea to change the existing order of things.
By way of contrast, Foucault went to Iran in 1978 in search of something
radically new, a conscious break from the past and present of Europe: the
‘political spirituality’ of the mass revolution was an opportunity to reignite
political imagination beyond what he took to be an anachronistic Marxism that
was unable to contend with a new European regime of power. By the 1970s,
when Foucault was delivering his late lectures on neoliberalism, he went to Iran
looking for a new way to resist a force that no longer only governed with the
sword of juridical repression, nor just through the disciplining of docile bodies,
but more on a (neoliberal) basis of freedom that it therefore actively promoted.
2 Lacan Contra Foucault
For Foucault, resistance meant finding a new beginning from which to launch
ethical, political and subjective politics. Lacan, on the other hand, warned of
the ever-present possibility of the return of the repressed. The relations between
social institutions and the unconscious inform a political topology that requires
a psychoanalytic act, a scilicet, to incite a new form of knowledge, one that
inverts the relationship between truth and knowledge and frees the former from
the mechanisms of jouissance that dictate relations of exploitation in society.1
Thus, for Lacan, transforming the present order requires analytical attention to
the return of the repressed, a focused listening to symptoms even if, upon first
hear, they sound like a broken record.
Lacan and Foucault maintained different positions for thinking of politics,
for Lacan, working-through and transformation; for Foucault, variously,
anarchic violent resistance (his endorsement of the 1792 Paris massacres),
increased visibility (his support of the Prisoner Information Group), silence
(the Ars Erotica interlude in The Will to Knowledge), ‘care of the self ’ (his later
efforts to develop a neoclassicist ethics of constructing the self). The difference
between Lacan and Foucault was prefigured in their disparate evaluations of
May 1968. Lacan did not waver in his critical analysis of the movement. Students
indignant about what they felt as an incapacity of structural linguistics to ground
meaningful political change battle cried that ‘structures don’t go down into the
streets’. Lacan couldn’t help but see irony in the slogan, grafittied in classrooms
and on city walls, an affirmation of precisely what the slogan claimed to negate.
He warned the students that their actions heralded the bureaucratization of
the university and saw May ’68 as a symptom of capitalism, a site of ‘struggle
between capitalistic accumulation of knowledge and the irruption of truth
linked to jouissance’.2 He thus refused the fake opposition between structure and
event and began formulating his theory of the four discourses in an attempt to
formalize the contingency and contradiction inherent to structure itself.3
It was between 1967 and 1968 that Lacan turned to Marx’s concept of surplus-
value, Mehrwert, and Freud’s Lust to formulate his own concept of surplus-
jouissance, plus-de-jouir, in order to analyse the institutional stakes of capitalist
exploitation. What Lacan saw in the student protests was an instantiation of
what he called ‘university discourse’, an enjoyment of knowledge – in this case an
empirical knowledge of the particular, the excluded, the supposedly substantial
pleb – at the cost of ‘truth’: ‘a knowledge is always paid at its price below the use-
value that truth generates, and always for others than those who are in the truth.
It is thus marked by surplus enjoyment. And this Mehrlust laughs at us since we
don’t know where its hidden …. That’s why in May, all hell got loose.’4
Why Lacan Contra Foucault? 3
Foucault actively promoted a ‘dangerous’ form of ‘hyper and pessimistic

activism’5 that he argued must be grounded in acknowledging that resistance
to power had to appeal to the immanent normative justifications of that power.
He as well opposed May ’68, but only briefly and for more superficial reasons.
If Lacan saw in ’68 a symptom of a ‘university discourse’ structuring capitalist
society, Foucault initially railed against the lack of risk in the movement, as
compared to March ’68 in Tunisia, where people took to the streets facing the
real threat of losing their lives. A cosmetic opposition, very soon after returning
to Paris Foucault would switch positions and embrace the movement, celebrating
’68 for pushing him to analyse the situation of the plebs – the mad, the prisoner,
the pervert and so on.
If this were to be a ‘civil war’ between Lacan and Foucault, however, we can
not but recall Marx’s claim that all civil wars are generally without a principle,
a staging of an antagonism that is a mere respite from the monotonous pace of
production. It is not then a ‘civil war’ that needs to be staged, for in fact the volume
has culminated in contributions that have done the precise opposite; rather than
further instantiate non-principled divisions in the already diminishing field of
critical theory, Lacan Contra Foucault redraws the contours of two irreconcilable
trajectories for the purpose of reactivating the absent cause or principle of real
antagonism in their theoretical corpus: structuralism itself and its relationship
to politics.
Lacan Contra Foucault is a retroactively staged conflict after the passing of
the event of structuralism in the mid-twentieth century: it is a Nachträglichkeit
in the Freudian sense, whereby a conflict is introduced but only to reconstitute
an event as an après coup, an afterwardness. We cannot but recall Lacan’s
interpretation of Nachtraglichkeit as the only possible sense for history in as
far as ‘history is already being made on the stage where it will be played out
once it has been written down, both in one’s heart of hearts and outside’.6 In
this sense, the volume seeks to reconstruct a series of facts that have already
determined the historical turning point that was the eclipse of structuralism in
the wake of neoliberal politics globally. Can we however insist on rereading this
turning point retroactively as a moment in the maturation of the intellectual and
political potency of structuralism? Moreover, in what way are the differences
between Lacan and Foucault ultimately irreconcilable when it comes to politics?
Their works clearly have had different afterlives: on one hand, we have a curious
emergent link posited between Foucault and neoliberal theories of subjectivity;7
on the other hand, we see a growing number of analyses that posit homological
links between Lacan and Marx.8 The task of this volume then is to demarcate the
overpass that characterizes the Lacan–Foucault relation. By ‘overpass’, we mean

a relation of non-intersecting correspondence between two independent but
superimposed planes.
Although Lacan and Foucault have had a number of direct encounters –
via the 1968 student movement, Diego Vasquez’s Las Meninas and the Cercle
d’Epistemologie – it is important to ground their divergences and confluences
in relation to the topics of sexuality, the theory of the subject, history and
historicism, scientific formalization and ultimately to politics. This volume
builds on a small but sophisticated body of scholarship about Foucault and
Lacan. Three works stand out: first, Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire, which offers
a systematic Lacanian critique of historicism – ‘the reduction of society to its
indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge’ – and demonstrates
how the psychoanalytic conception of history and historical processes addresses
Foucault’s concerns more adequately than his own historicist program. Second,
Knox Peden’s ‘Foucault and the Subject of Method’ (in Concept and Form.
Volume Two: Interviews and Essays on the Cahiers Pour l’Analyse)9 demonstrates
how Foucault grappled with a theory of the subject throughout his oeuvre in
ways closer to Lacan than either thinker’s disciples are willing to countenance.
Like Lacan, Foucault was preoccupied by the relation between the subject and
truth, but refused to ground this relation transcendentally. Third, the Cercle
d’épistemologie’s ‘A Michel Foucault’ in the Cahiers pour l’analyse Vol. 9, 1968.10
In this text, a group of young normaliens posed a series of methodological
questions to Foucault on how to think the subject in relation to truth while
maintaining a non-synthetic approach to the subject and method. Foucault’s
attempt to answer these questions resulted in The Archaeology of Knowledge,
a transitional text between the ‘young’ Foucault’s structuralist phase and the
‘later’ ‘post-structuralism’ of The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish.
Foucault’s ‘final’, 1980s work on The Hermeneutics of the Subject,11 might be seen
as a third wave in which he returns to the questions of the subject and truth,
grounding the relation in ‘spiritual’ rather than formal scientific practice.
Born in 1901, a quarter of a century before Foucault (1926–84), Lacan died
three years earlier (1981). Their intellectual chronologies carry some echoes of
the parallel but not overlapping trajectories, or the overpass, of their respective
concerns. Lacan elaborates his graph of desire in Seminar V Formations of the
Unconscious (1957–58) and Seminar VI Desire and Its Interpretations (1958–59).12
Foucault publishes the History of Madness in 1961 and the Birth of the Clinic in
1963. Lacan discusses knowledge and jouissance in Seminar VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis (1959–60) and Seminar VIII: Transference (1960–61),13 Foucault’s
Archeology of Knowledge appears in 1969. In 1970, Foucault delivers his lecture

The Order of Discourse. The following year, 1971, is the year of Lacan’s Seminar
XVIII: On A Discourse that is Not of a Semblance.14 Finally, Foucault publishes
Discipline and Punish in 1975, while Lacan’s Seminar on the Sinthome, in which
he considers the possibility of a non-ideological subject, is delivered in 1975–76.
Thus we see that their trajectories are often parallel but rarely if ever intersecting.
In this introduction, we will first set out what is at stake in the Lacan–Foucault
confrontation for contemporary critical theory; we will then summarize
Foucault’s conception of the historical a priori in relation to the nexus tying
together subject and truth, as well as his conflictual relation to psychoanalysis;
next we will elaborate Lacan’s accounts of the subject, science, desire and
knowledge, before finally introducing and summarizing the six contributions
to this volume.
The sublime object of critical theory
In 1989, Slavoj Zizek proposed that the true antagonism at the heart of critical
theory is not Foucault against Habermas – power-knowledge versus ideal
communicative speech – but the unresolved conflict between Althusser and
Lacan over the clean cut of interpellation and subject formation. In Zizek’s
formulation, Habermas and Foucault are two sides of the same coin insofar as
they take no account of the fantasy that structures social reality or its ideological
form of appearance. Nor does their mode of thought allow for the consideration
of the category of desire as what is inarticulable. In other words, Habermas
and Foucault have no account of the structures that belong to the order of the
real, as what is unsymbolizable in Lacan’s formulation, and which ought not
to be confused with everyday reality. In Habermas’s theory of communicative
rationality, the social order appears as the result of an inter-subjective process:
the aim of human speech is to reach understanding; the illocutionary effect
of speech is to reach a rationally motivated consensus. Speech does not miss
the mark but the task of communication is to somehow mark understanding.15
The task of communicative action for Habermas would be to make normative
distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power in a manner that
would posit unavoidable universals; hence his debate with Foucault centred
fundamentally on the latter’s challenge to the normative and universal function
of communicative action. For Foucault, critique cannot be guarded by universal
norms, it must be the defiant practice of genealogy from within the axes of self,
knowledge and power. Discipline conceived as any mode for creating distinctions
always subordinates. While Habermas wishes to isolate critique from power in
order to pragmatically justify universal norms in ethics and politics, Foucault
sees no possibility of a power-free discourse through which to conduct critique;
hence his later propositions concerning the hermeneutics of the subject of
aufklarung as the permanent reactivation of the attitude of an ethical self as a
process through which the subject prepares for its access to truth.16
But if the Foucault–Habermas debate is one that never really happened, it is
clear in retrospect that were it to have happened, the debate would have centred
on how to defend the project of liberal modernism, with its ethos and norms, by
reconsidering the task of the philosophical notion of critique after Kant. Indeed,
it seems that Habermas and Foucault had more in common than first appears:
both proceeded from a rejection of the Kantian concept of critique grounded
upon the notion of a self-constituting transcendental subject.17
Today, it is evident that Habermas and Foucault, through their different yet
converging influences upon the humanities and social sciences, have hastened the
eclipse of an alternative intersection between psychoanalysis and structuralism;
one that is concerned with upholding the potency of post-Enlightenment
modernity together with the modern category of the subject, against their
liberal co-option (whether as homo oeconomicus or homo psychologicus). Is the
Foucault that emerges from the Habermas encounter altogether different from
the one that emerges from a confrontation with Lacan?
Warren Montag has argued that Habermas’s reaction to Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish and E. P. Thompson’s reaction to Althusser’s Ideology and the
Ideological State Apparatus raise the same set of concerns about the structuralist
analysis of domination (power and ideology) as a deadlock, a ploy from which
there is no escape ‘insofar as the effect of their work was to paralyze individual
initiative and to overwhelm critical thought with the idea that ideology or
power were inescapable’.18 The questioning of the category of the subject is
rejected and the subject is redefined as the individual in an attempt to save
human experience: Habermas makes way for liberal humanitarianism, the new
ideology of imperialism, while E. P Thompson paves the way for rational choice
theory. Althusser and Foucault, as main figures of structuralism, are silenced,
‘overlooked by their commentators with the regularity of a symptom’.19
The distance between Althusser and Foucault proves to be less than originally
thought, unsurprisingly, since both thinkers share a very similar theoretical
orientation grounded in the French historical epistemology of Gaston Bachelard
and George Canguilhem. Their two primary concerns are the category of the
subject as that which is not reducible to the individual or to transparent self-

consciousness and uncovering the function of specific concepts in historical
conjunctures. Moreover, there seems to be proximity between Foucault’s
conception of discipline and Althusser’s conception of ideology. Montag has
argued that for both thinkers, there is a ‘cosubstantiality of force and persuasion’
whereby the mind and body are subjugated in a manner that obfuscates the
distinction between the external and internal. For both Foucault and Althusser,
interiority and consciousness are fictitious categories that are necessary for the
imposition of servitude and domination.20 Moreover, they both reproduce a
notion of materiality that is tethered to the subjugated body and hence opposed
to subjectivity: to use Montag’s formulation, for both thinkers it appears that
‘the soul is the prison of the body’. The question that they pose is: How can
we prevent the dominant ideology or disciplinary powers from infiltrating our
interiority? How can the forces that individuate and separate us be diminished?
And how can liberation be possible without transcendence?21
Both Althusser and Foucault are philosophers who put into practice the
task of symptomatic reading; Althusser by reading Marx through the concepts
foretold but absent from Marx’s own text, and Foucault through his hyper-
historicist reading of history in an attempt to be free from its constraints.22
What discourse is better equipped to engage analytically with them both than
that of psychoanalysis in its Freudian-Lacanian strain? If the distance between
Althusser and Foucault is less than often imagined, while Althusser and Lacan
are farther apart than once thought, how are we to measure the distance between
Foucault and Lacan?
The missed encounter
It is well known that Foucault had little if any systematic engagement with
Lacan in his own works, yet the ghost of Lacan seems to haunt his oeuvre from
the very beginning. For what is the aim of The Order of Things if not ‘to reveal
the positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness
of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse’.23 Yet the unconscious –
which is after all the fundamental notion of psychoanalysis – is constantly
circumvented by Foucault, only for it to resurface in other guises throughout
his corpus and particularly in his attempts to outline a theory of the subject that
breaks with Kantian transcendentalism. The main aim of Foucault’s method
was the refutation of the idea that there can be an a priori truth that is objective
for the subject and that can be accessed through the reflective inquiry of
transcendental philosophy. Despite the prevalent readings of Foucault as
introducing a purely relativist conception of truth in place of the universalist
truth defended by transcendental philosophy, the relativity he proposes is of
a different nature, for it is one that ‘defines itself within a system of variants
to which it itself belongs’.24 The episteme in this sense is only conceivable in its
different instantiations as a ‘historical a priori’ reiterated by Foucault throughout
his works. In her scrupulous reading of Foucault’s method, Beatrice Hans views
the three stages of his critical project (from archaeology to genealogy to the
hermeneutics of the subject) as different iterations of the same fundamental
attempt to reactivate the Kantian project of critique without relapsing into an
empiricism that assumes causal conditions for the possibility of knowledge.25 It
seems then that Foucault’s basic concern was with finding a way to define the
historical a priori that would be neither subjective (i.e. as is Kant’s anthropological
a priori for Foucault) nor trans-historical (a condition that can account for the
history of cumulative knowledge). Rather, Foucault understands the historical
a priori, the object of knowledge of the archaeological method, as ‘that which
determines the reciprocal relation and the mutual play of the knowing subject
and that which is to be known’.26 Moreover, this determinant is the condition of
possibility for the constitution of objects of knowledge as objects of discourse
in a manner that is purely discursive, without any transcendent referent. With
this move, Foucault brings together a nominalism (it is through words that
objects of discourse can be conceived) and a quasi-structuralism (objects don’t
correspond to things but to a set of rules that dictate their formation).27 Thus,
the historical a priori designates the historically variable conditions through
which ‘the mode of being of objects which appear in the field of experience [as
a form of knowledge] can be defined’.28 The historical a priori is the grounds for
understanding the epistemic variations of the episteme that Foucault designated
in terms of different epochs.
The ambivalence of the historical a priori can be detected in Foucault’s
simultaneous rejection of the idealist Hegelian Weltanschaung (defined as a
history of the chronology of representations), materialist Marxism (defined as
the reduction to superstructure and economic base as final determinants) and
Heideggerian ontology (Being cannot be identified with the order of things,
which for Foucault oscillates between the subjective and objective throughout
his works) as adequate answers to the quandaries raised in post-Kantian
philosophy. It is as though Foucault hyper-historicized, in a hysteric mode of
‘hystoricisation’, in order to leave no space for the transcendental, at the risk of
smuggling back in a positivism of the Baconian kind: knowledge will always be

subordinated to power, but the techniques of that subjugation can and must be
controlled.
Foucault maintained an anti-humanist stance but through an ‘agnostic
empiricism’29 grounded in the historical conditions of possibility of any science.
Épisteme is the concept Foucault uses to denote the means by which power
disperses, and as the field in which the subject intervenes by reconstructing the
historical processes through which we have been led to make certain distinctions
(such as between madness and reason). Foucault emphasizes the historicity at
work in the production of knowledge by focusing on a structural analysis of
discourse that asks: What are the determined positions which an individual
must occupy if she is to be a subject at all? Lacan on the other hand argues that
the subject’s intervention, in so far as we understand the subject as a subject
of language, is always already formed or structured in the symbolic order. The
Symbolic forms within which discursive practices occur are themselves also
always already structured. But for Lacan, a subject’s formation happens in its
failure to integrate into the symbolic structure; a failure evidenced in jokes, slips
of the tongue, dreams, neuroses and psychosis. In these moments, the subject
is revealed in persistently negative relation to existing orders: it is the subject of
the unconscious.
Hystoricization
The site of Foucault’s intervention in his later propositions for the ‘care of
the self ’ is no longer surprising as the counterpart of ‘hyper-historicization’,
or what we are calling ‘hystoricization’. On the one hand, we have the work
of archaeology and genealogy as a constant subversion of the transcendental
subject, and on the other the care of the self is a constant hyper-practice of
ethical reconstitution as the only available path for the subject. The ambivalence
of the historical a priori throughout Foucault’s corpus is ultimately resolved by a
Nietzchean perspectivism that involves grasping the power-knowledge at work
in the constitution of objects [ex: homo criminalus by prisons and ultimately
‘man’ for the human sciences] in relation to whatever affirms or denies true or
false propositions. Truth as such can only be found in practices of subjectivation
and in the modes through which epistemological power ‘extracts from the
individuals a knowledge [savoir]’.30 After all, Foucault was committed to a theory
of government rather than a theory of the state and he employed the concept of
‘governmentality’ as what fundamentally defined liberalism. Governmentality

is what can be discerned in the ‘truth-telling’ of economics and economists as
producers of veridiction. His ultimate aim was to propose a theory for society
that was neither moral nor juridical but that could understand the variations of
human behaviour in relation to power: in this regard, Foucault comes very close
to neoliberal pundits, yet he maintains a distance from them in his later works
on subjectivity.31
The care of the self in the late Foucault is the project by which there is a
constant measuring of the distance between the conditions of possibility of the
subject as an object of knowledge and the subject as a mode of practice. It is a
constant site of struggle determined in the last instance by considering oneself
from the position of death: it is only in the face of death that the moral progress of
the subject can be ascertained. Ironically, Foucault concludes The Hermeneutics
of the Subject with the a reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
How can what is given as the object of knowledge (savoir) connected to the
mastery of tekhne, at the same time be the site where the truth of the subject we
are appears, or is experienced and fulfilled with difficulty? How can the world,
which is given as the object of knowledge (connaissance) on the basis of the
mastery of tekhne, at the same time be the site where the ‘self ’ as ethical subject
of truth appears and is experienced? If this really is the problem of Western
philosophy – how can the world be the object of knowledge (connaissance) and
at the same time the place of the subject’s test; how can there be a subject of
knowledge (connaissance) which takes the world as object through a tekhne, and
a subject of self-experience which takes this same world, but in the radically
different form of the place of its test? – if this really is the challenge of Western
philosophy, you will see why The Phenomenology of Spirit is the summit of this
philosophy.32
Which subject of the cogito?
Can we not read the disjuncture that Hegel’s Phenomenology culminates in with
Lacan? Lacan had already made the claim that Hegel’s philosophical gesture
was fundamentally that of the hysteric insofar as it shows that the production of
knowledge cannot be limited to the discourse of the university or the Master: that
the drive for knowledge belongs to a subject that cannot know itself. Lacan’s wager
on Hegel was that the development of self-consciousness could not be reduced to
understanding or a process of recognition: ‘understanding is finding oneself in
fantasy, reestablishing its framework to accommodate more and more, enlarging

it, not dissipating it, not traversing it – but traversing the fantasy is the point that
psychoanalysis should lead to in a process that is contrary to understanding, a
dissipation of understanding and hence an affair of knowledge’.33 Thus, rather
than reiterating the ancient injunction to ‘know thyself ’, psychoanalysis reveals
that knowledge is produced precisely when the subject fails to find itself: there
is a jouissance tethered to this excessive process that fundamentally divides the
subject. The subject of the signifier is not the subject of knowledge and it is this
non-alignment that circumscribes the position of truth: only by failing to grasp
the truth that underlies the fantasies that constitute the subject can the truth be
circumscribed.
Foucault had singled out psychoanalysis and anthropology as discourses
that break with the representationalist paradigm in favour of a practice of
knowledge.34 They are thus at once technologies of power and means for the
displacement of truth through the ethical reconstitution of the subject. It is
striking that Foucault’s only reference to Lacan in the Hermeneutics of the Subject
comes at precisely this juncture. For Foucault, Lacan was the only one who posed
the question of the subject’s relation to truth:
The interest and force of Lacan’s analyses seems to me to be due precisely to this:
It seems to me that Lacan has been the only one since Freud who has sought
to refocus the question of psychoanalysis on precisely this question of the
relations between the subject and truth … Lacan tried to pose what historically
is the specifically spiritual question: that of the price the subject must pay for
saying the truth, and of the effect on the subject of the fact that he has said,
that he can and has said the truth about himself. By restoring this question I
think Lacan actually reintroduced into psychoanalysis the oldest tradition, the
oldest questioning, and the oldest disquiet of the epimeleia heautou, which was
the most general form of spirituality. Of course, a question arises, which I will
not answer, of whether psychoanalysis itself can, in its own terms, that is to say
in terms of the effects of knowledge (connaissance), pose the question of the
relations of the subject to truth, which by definition – from the point of view of
spirituality, and anyway of the epimeleia heautou – cannot be posed in terms of
knowledge (connaissance).35
Surprisingly, Foucault deemed Lacan’s gesture of reintroducing ancient

spirituality into the question of the subject positively, yet he posed an open
question to psychoanalysis: how can it as a discourse escape the terms of
knowledge-power introduced by modern philosophy as inaugurated by
Descartes? Lacan is important for Foucault because he is seen to re-pose the

fundamental question of Greek philosophy against Descartes and Kant:
What is the price I have to pay for access to the truth? This price is situated in the
subject himself in the form of: What then is the work I must carry out on myself,
what fashioning of myself must I undertake, what modification of being must I
carry out to be able to have access to the truth?36
During his 1981–82 course subsequently published as The Hermeneutics of the

Subject, Foucault is asked by a member of his audience about his proximity
to Lacanian concepts despite their absence in his works, especially in relation
to his conception of the truth as what only emerges from the interrogation of
established norms of truth. Foucault responds as follows:
I think that if we do not take up the history of the relations between the subject and
truth from the point of view of what I call, roughly, the techniques, technologies,
practices, etcetera, which have linked them together and established their
norms, we will hardly understand what is involved in the human sciences, if we
want to use this term, and in psychoanalysis in particular. So, in a sense I am
talking about this. Now, once again, no doubt it is not for me to say what comes
from Lacan in the way in which I approach this. I couldn’t say.
Member of Audience: ‘For example, when you say “this is true” and “this
is not true at the same time.” Does not this “it is not true” have a systematic
retrospective function (une fonction économique d’après-coup)?’
Foucault: What do you mean? [laughter]
That as a presupposition behind this (that: what has been said, this is not true
as it was shortly before) is there not the implicit function of Lacanian concepts
that precisely provide this kind of gap between what has been said and what is
not yet or maybe never said?
Foucault: We can say Lacanian, we can also say Nietzschean. In short, let’s say
that any problematic of the truth as game leads in fact to this kind of discourse.
All right, let’s take things quite differently. Let’s say that there have not been that
many people who in the last years – I will say in the twentieth century – have
posed the question of truth. Not that many people have posed the question:
What is involved in the case of the subject and of the truth? And: What is the
relationship of the subject to the truth? What is the subject of truth, what is the
subject who speaks the truth, etcetera? As far as I’m concerned, I see only two.
I see only Heidegger and Lacan. Personally, myself, you must have heard this,
I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from
Heidegger. There you are. However, certainly you cannot avoid Lacan when you
pose these kinds of questions. Any other questions?37
Foucault’s strategy of overlooking Lacan and forefronting Heidegger in his

engagement with subjectivity reveals an excess vis-à-vis what it conceals. Lacan
himself had insisted that psychoanalysis is in fact a return to the cogito rather
than a denunciation of it: the unconscious is unthinkable without Descartes’s
challenge to the transparent subject of self-consciousness.38 We can then restate
Foucault’s question in Lacanian parlance. The question that Foucault seems
to be asking is: How does the discourse of psychoanalysis undo the desire for
knowledge insofar as it is a desire for power? In other words, is the discourse
of analysis implicated in the power-knowledge nexus, and if not, how does it
escape it?
Desire and knowledge
The answer lies in the way in which Lacan, in 1969–70, plots an entirely
different trajectory for the emergence of the modern subject. Lacan claims
that psychoanalysis is obstinate – mordicus is the precise word he uses – in its
assertion that ‘the desire to know has no relationship with knowledge’.39 Lacan
claims that Descartes undoes the primitive relationship between enjoyment and
knowledge. Before Descartes, philosophy provided the designation by which
the episteme can be characterized as the theft of knowledge from the slave.
The Master’s discourse for Lacan is not one that is concerned with a desire for
knowledge but with a desire to put things to work, and the ‘theft of knowledge’
or savoir-faire from the slave is fundamental for the discourse of the Master, with
which Cartesian philosophy introduces a break. The ‘theft of knowledge’ is also
twofold: it has an articulated aspect, which is the function of the episteme, ‘the
payback’ from the slave to the master, and an aspect of know-how. Lacan argued
that the episteme
is a funny word, I do not know whether you have ever thought about it a lot –
putting oneself in the right position, in short it is the same word as verstehen
[Vorstellung?]. It is the question of finding the position that enables knowledge
to become knowledge of the Master. The function of episteme in so far as it is
specified as transmissible knowledge – consult Plato’s dialogues – is still entirely
borrowed from the techniques of the craftsman, that is to say, of serfs. It is a
matter of extracting its essence so that this knowledge becomes the Master’s
knowledge. And then, that is naturally increased by a little return shock, which
is called a slip, a return of the repressed. But, says someone or other, Karl Marx
or someone else, where am I in this?40
The history of philosophy for Lacan is a history of this bargaining over the Master’s
knowledge up until Descartes, Hegel and Marx, when the modern category
of the subject is introduced as a schism, a divide in the chain of signification
between the Master and the Slave, S2 and S1. The subject of the unconscious is
then unthinkable without the Cartesian cogito: the subject of the unconscious
cannot but be the subject of modern science, ‘a merely formal subjectivity
purified of all substance and content’.41 The Cogito is understood by Lacan as
an empty spot in the chain of being; a non-place that is not equivalent to the
imaginary identification of the ego. The ego of the self-identical subject emerges
precisely at the point of aphanisis of the subject. There is a formative choice, a
vel (or) of alienation that determines the relationship between the subject and
the Other. While for Hegel the subject and the other are somewhat equal, in that
the subject is nothing but its own self-exteriorization as other, for Lacan, in the
confrontation with the other, the subject drops out of the picture: the subject’s
own disappearance is the first step towards subjectivity. In Lacan’s mirror stage,
the ego as imaginary identification, as an I, is what comes to replace a non-
existing subject; in other words, the subject only retroactively emerges as an
imaginary identification when faced with the other (the mirror image, the other
child, the Other – Lacan proceeds in his seminars from the small other to the big
Other). Alienation is a process through which the subject appears precisely as a
non-being, as a lacking being or even better as a subjectivized lack.42 There is no
subject prior to the Other and the encounter with the Other affirms the subject as
an ‘empty set’, as what is out of place in the chain of signifiers that constitute the
social link. But the subject of the unconscious is not reducible to the desire of the
other or the stage of alienation, for there is an excess element that emerges from
the desire to fulfil a lack in the other, one that Lacan denotes as the process of
separation. This is the precise function of jouissance in the Lacanian schema: the
attempt to fulfil the lack in the Other through the recognition of an object within
the subject is premised on a fantasy of an enjoying other, a subject supposed to
enjoy, in whose enjoyment the subject wishes to partake.
The relationship between jouissance and the subject of the unconscious is
what Lacan addresses in the development of his thought. As Mladen Dolar puts
it, this is the development from ‘the mirror stage as formative of the function of
the I’ to the ‘Cogito as formative of the function of the I’.43 It is important here to
recall Dolar’s formulation:
The Lacanian cogito is not the modern subject that philosophers love to talk
about; caught as it is in the structure of alienation, it cannot found its being
in its thought; rather, the repressed part of thought (the unconscious) comes
constantly to haunt it and dislocate it, and it is maintained only through this
repression. It emerges only through the impossibility of integrating this lost part,
the intersection where sense and being would seemingly coincide and ground
the subject. Yet, for not being the modern subject of the philosophical doxa, it
is not something else either: it emerges with and within cogito, as its invisible
reverse side. There is a recurring criticism that Lacan’s subject still remains
within the framework of cogito – but this is the whole point.44
The forced choice of the cogito as a choice of a being (I think therefore I am)
curtails the unconscious as an excluded form of thought: ‘The choice endeavors
to secure a mastery over one’s being and to reject, or disavow, the part where the
subject is an effect of language and dependent on the signifier.’45 Throughout
Lacan’s entire teaching, there is an oscillation around the question of the cogito:
in imaginary identification the cogito is rejected as the support of an illusory
self-transparent ego, as an alienating function; with the focus on the Symbolic
and the register of separation, the cogito is perceived as the subject of desire;
and finally in the Real the cogito is considered in relation to fantasy and the
drives (objet a as the point of intersection between ‘I’ and the subject of the
unconscious). The crucial aspect throughout lies in the disjuncture between
thought and being which is articulated in Lacan’s understanding of the symptom
as the very core of subjectivity.
The ‘I don’t think,’ as correlative of It [ça], is called to join the ‘I am not,’ as

correlative of the unconscious, but in such a way that they eclipse and occult
each other in being superimposed. In the place of ‘I am not’ It [ça] will come,
giving it a positive form of ‘I am It [ça]’ which is a pure imperative, precisely the
imperative which Freud has formulated in Wo es war, soil Ich werden. (Lacan
1966–67,11 January 1967. Translation by Mladen Dolar.)46
Thus it is evident that Lacan, like Foucault, proclaims the insubstantiality of the
subject in its nominal interiority. However, this has very different repercussions
in their respective bodies of thought. While Lacan maintains that there is the
possibility of a discourse that is not that of the Master, one that can only be
possible by grounding the subject of the unconscious in modern science, Foucault
calls for a discursive voluntarism centred on the ‘will to truth’ and ultimately
‘the care of the self ’, in which there is no possible escape from the Master
except by reintroducing the ancient pact between spirituality and philosophy
in the new form of governmentality: self-care. In his last lectures, Foucault’s
fundamental objection to Marxism and psychoanalysis is that they in fact deny
the pact between spirituality and truth as constitutive of the subject while in fact
reactivating this ancient pact of epimeleia heautou between subjectification and

the cost paid for saying the truth.47
Self-care or subjective destitution?
For Foucault, in the ancient Greek model, the Master is ‘the mediator in the
individual’s relationship to his constitution as a subject’. To ‘know thyself ’ is
only possible through a relationship to the Other. Furthermore, there can be no
knowledge except through a modification of the subject’s being. The nineteenth
century (Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl) reintroduced
this problem of ‘spirituality’ into philosophy, one that had been discarded by
Cartesianism.48 What Foucault overlooks however is that the very possibility
of psychoanalysis is grounded in the epistemic cut inaugurated by scientific
modernity.49 Psychoanalysis is not a return to the ancient pact between spirituality
and philosophy; rather, it reveals that the relation between the discourse of the
Master (the theft of knowledge) and philosophy (as the desire for knowledge) is
grounded in the discourse of the hysteric.
It is only because of Descartes’s inauguration of the university discourse in
the form of modern science that psychoanalysis becomes possible. The cogito
transforms the knowledge of the Master into the discourse of the university,
but not without a surplus, for the cogito is nothing but the split subject divided
between the enunciation and the statement enunciated.50 The contingent pairing
of discourses, of the Master, hysteric and university makes the discourse of
analysis possible in modernity. Lacan’s four discourses or structures of social
bonds (the Master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse
and the discourse of the analysis) are essentially a continuation of Freudian
psychoanalysis in its consideration of the social and political as realms organized
around a peculiar set of symbolic identifications. According to Lacan, every
form of identification is essentially based on the identification with the signifier.
This ‘unary trait’, as he called it, would be the basis that underlies all signifiers,
allowing for identification with the signifier to be possible. All One-ness is
symbolic, a semblance, constituted around a relation between the subject and
satisfaction or enjoyment. Relations of satisfaction or enjoyment are structured
around a loss of the object of enjoyment. Loss of the object, ‘the unary trait’,
comes to occupy the place of the lost object. The unary trait takes the position
of S1 or the signifier, and loss becomes less like loss and more like waste. Loss is
implicit in the process of identification and does not remain as a lack, a gap or an
absence but becomes a presence, a jouissance, that ‘serves no real purpose’.51 But
although jouissance does not serve a purpose, it necessitates a cycle of repetition
that constantly produces a useless surplus, a form of waste. The subject thus
emerges as a lack, and the signifier comes to ‘represent the subject for another
signifier’.52 This process unfolds within the four discourses described above,
which all revolve around the impossibility of mastery, education and analysis.53
Lacan’s theory of the four discourses is premised on cuts: there is no historical
progression from one discourse to the other but only conjunctural moments.
History does not exist and there is no metalanguage outside the emergence of
specific discourses. In other words, the unconscious and sexuality cannot be
reduced to epistemic objects that correspond to a specific historical epoch.54
Moreover, structures do not change in themselves: there are no mutations of
structure, but shifts in discourse that are fundamentally possible because
structure itself is always incomplete.55
The pivotal shift in modernity, which Lacan arguably describes more accurately
than Foucault, is the conjunction of capital with the university discourse;
a conjunction that is not simply the binding of power and enjoyment but the
very impossibility of this alliance that suddenly comes to generate a ‘surplus-
enjoyment’.56 The watershed of modernity is the eclipse of the Master’s discourse,
the symbolic death of the king. While for Foucault this generates a multiplicity of
heterogeneous disciplinary measures or biopower, for Lacan the onset of modern
capitalist relations designates a shift in the structure of jouissance or enjoyment;
a shift through which for the first time enjoyment itself becomes valorized.
The relationship between power and enjoyment clearly goes back to antiquity.
However, it is only with the alliance between capitalism and university discourse
that enjoyment comes to serve as a source of surplus value. Thus the distance
between Foucault and Lacan is one between two entirely different measures. This
is evident in Foucault’s ambiguous and unreconciled relation to psychoanalysis:
on the one hand, he chastises it for being implicated in a regime of modern bio-
power, while on the other hand, he praises it in his later works for fore fronting
the relation between subject and truth. This ambiguity in Foucault’s relationship
with psychoanalysis is explored in detail in the contributions to this volume.
How to think sex?
In the History of Sexuality, Foucault seems to dismiss psychoanalysis altogether

with his critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ as the claim that human un-freedom
results from social constraints on our desires. Yet Freud and Lacan, as well as Marx,
never actually held this position. With Foucault, they refused to posit an authentic,
auto-affective and self-transparent subject who exists prior to entering the alienating
structure of discourse. For Freud and Lacan, the desiring subject – the subject of
the unconscious – is born of a constitutive alienation (‘primary repression’) or lack
that can never be undone. Foucault obscures this alienated ontology of the subject
in focusing strictly on conscious subjectivity, on the secondary or constituted
alienation of the subject in the Western discourse on sexuality.
One of the main points of agreement between Foucault and Lacan is
their insistence on posing the question of sex as a philosophical and political
problem, but with very different repercussions. They both agreed in 1968
that the liberation of sex doesn’t counter the capitalist repressive hypothesis.
But this is where they part ways, while Foucault claimed that sex can not be
thought without sexuality, which is ‘the result and instrument of power’57 under
capitalism, Lacan maintained that it is only with capitalism that sex is rendered
non-existent, made to disappear. The task of psychoanalysis is not to posit sex as
an existing thing, as a what is, but to ask how is that sex comes into being. Joan
Copjec frames the distinction as such:
While Foucault argues that bio-power, abetted by the Freudian theory of sex,
eliminates the void between life as function and life as historical experience,
or between life and law, and thus eliminates the political space or space of
possibility of human action, Lacan argues the opposite: Freud conceives sex as
that which takes place in and holds open the space of human action.58
Foucault opposed psychoanalysis because it reduced all questions to sex as a

cause ‘in itself ’. In his account sex cannot be considered as the Other of power,
as what exists outside and beyond bodies and pleasures.59 In other words, sex
cannot be considered as the element that provides evidence of an economy of
pleasures that always attempts to ‘circumvent the law’.60 Foucault argued the
problem lies in the very function of a ‘fictitious’ notion of sex which presents
itself through psychoanalysis as ‘unique signifier and as a universal signified’.61
Moreover, sex has an even more sinister function because it ‘inverts the
representation of the relationships of power to sexuality’ causing sexuality to
appear as what is related to a more intrinsic layer, sex, rather than power that
seeks to dominate. For Foucault, sex then is nothing but an idea or an ideal point
that ‘makes it possible to evade what gives “power” its power; it enables one to
conceive power solely as law and taboo’.62 Sex is a dangerous modern notion
because it becomes the ‘imaginary point’, the rite of initiation through which
individuals gain intelligibility of their body and identity. The problem with sex,
Foucault continues, is that it has become more important than the ‘soul’, than
‘our life’, it is that aspect in us that is more than us,
with a density that makes it more serious than any other. The Faustian pact,
whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now
as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the
sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.63
Foucault thus enlists psychoanalysis in the service of scientia sexualis, the modern
regime of biopower because it binds sexuality in a ‘retro-vision’ to the law
to conceive the category of the sexual in terms of the law, death, blood, and
sovereignty – whatever the references to Sade and Bataille, and however one
might gauge their ‘subversive’ influence – is in the last analysis a historical ‘retro-
version’. We must conceptualize the deployment of sexuality on the basis of the
techniques of power that are contemporary with it.64
The essential feature of sexuality is not simply that it is a false representation,

or a distortion caused by taboos and laws, but that it corresponds ‘to the
functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth’.65 Further
Foucault argues that sexuality is not a ‘stubborn drive’ that is ‘by nature alien
and disobedient to a power which exhausts itself in trying to subdue it … it
appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’.66 Thus
for Foucault, sex is a form of biopower that emerges from an imposed relation
between history and life:
If the question of man was raised – insofar as he was a specific living being, and
specifically related to other living beings – the reason for this is to be sought in
the new mode of relation between history and life: in this dual position of life
that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and
inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and
power.67
Sexuality, in his account, emerges as an entirely new technology of power, a

productive force that disciplines individual bodies in a manner by which they
come to impose upon themselves constant surveillance. From this vitalist stance,
Foucault sought to conceive of the means of resistance to normative discipline
and the regulation of bodies – imposed through sex as an imaginary ideal – by
a commitment to an ‘aesthetics of existence’ that ‘counter the grips of power
with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and
their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the
deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex – desire, but bodies and pleasures’.68
Foucault’s main assertion in The History of Sexuality is that sex emerges as
a ‘singular form of experience’ in the nineteenth century.69 The notion of the
repressive hypothesis is put forth by him to argue that although sex is taken to
be a natural phenomenon, it is in fact produced by a distinctive historical genesis
that involves a specific combination of systems of knowledge and modalities
of power. The case of the medieval hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin allowed
Foucault to argue that a shift occurred in the nineteenth century whereby
psychiatry, as a modern form of knowledge, constructed a discourse around
sexuality and its normal and pathological manifestations. The discourse on
sexuality that came with the rise of bourgeois society was not repressive, but
acted by incitement:
Nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois’ society – and it is doubtless still with us – was

a society of blatant and fragmented perversion. And this was not by way of
hypocrisy, for nothing was more manifest and more prolix, or more manifestly
taken over by discourses and institutions. Not because, having tried to erect too
rigid or too general a barrier against sexuality, society succeeded only in giving
rise to a whole perverse outbreak and a long pathology of the sexual instinct. At
issue, rather, is the type of power it brought to bear on the body and on sex. In
point of fact, this power had neither the form of the law, nor the effects of the
taboo. On the contrary, it acted by multiplication of singular sexualities.70
For Foucault the discourse on sexuality is an encroachment of power on

bodies and their pleasures. The rupture that occurred with the end of the
eighteenth century was the birth of modern ‘bio-power’ as a specific ‘mode of
relation between history and life’ by which life is annexed by power and the
incommensurability between life and history comes to be ignored. Capitalism
is premised on the denial of this particular relation through the promulgation
of a discourse on sexuality that overtakes lived experience. Sex for Foucault is
a ‘biopolitical notion’, a ‘fictitious entity as a causal principle, an omnipresent
meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere’.71 Thus, sex for Foucault is an
imaginary point, a fiction that generates a set of practices that are heterogeneous
and multiple, but all premised on establishing a relation between incompatible
terms for the purpose of the management of life. The invention of sex in Foucault’s
understanding is complicit in the construction of an individualized notion of
the subject, of multiple subjectivities as instants of the individual. Foucault
maintains that capitalism produces sex as a bio-political force that constricts the
subject to the boundaries of the individual, and normatively subjugates their

experience to the constrains of sex.
For Foucault sex is a speculative element,72 an ideal that is necessary for
the internal operation of sexuality, and it was none other than Freud who
transformed sexuality into a discourse, ‘an austere monarchy of sex’.73 But does
this not miss the main Freudian point, which is that sexuality is not equivalent to
underlying cause, it is not reducible to a biological function, and the knowledge
that is sought from sex (as that which does not work) is what defines the human
subject. For psychoanalysis the type of knowledge that emerges from sexuality,
or the failures of sexuality, is one that does not know itself. This knowledge
is the unconscious. It would be worth recalling Hyppolite who said in one of
Lacan’s seminars while commenting on the topology of the unconscious that
Lacan had designated with the intersection of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary,
‘knowledge, that is to say humanity, is the failure of sexuality’.74 The most
fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that sexuality and its corollary the
unconscious cannot be reduced to consciousness and body, rather both of them
emerge from the subject’s desire for recognition in the desire of the other. The
body, for Lacan, is only what emerges in the gap between ‘the satisfaction of a
desire and the pursuit of fulfillment of desire’.75 The body is what fails to convey
the sexual non-relation.76 Thus, for psychoanalysis, sex is not ubiquitous and it
is not a final cause to which all phenomena are reduced, rather, as Joan Copjec
argues,
What is essential is not the substitution of a plurality of causes for a single one but
the fact that sex as cause cannot be located in any positive phenomenon, word or
object, but is manifest in negative phenomena exclusively: lapses, interruptions
that index a discontinuity or jamming of the causal chain.77
Lacan could not have been farther from Foucault with regard to the question of
sex. Sex for Lacan is not a predicate or a category and it is not an epistemological
problem. Sex is not an underlying cause to which everything is reduced, and it
does not overdetermine the subject, rather sex (like the logic of the signifier) is
what divides the subject: ‘sexual difference (and all the contrived dialectics of
sexuality, desire, love) is a consequence, not simply of the signifying order, but of
the fact that’s something is lacking in it (and at the same time there is something
excessive in it – surplus-enjoyment)’.78 The question of sex as Alenka Zupančič
recently put it in her book, What Is Sex?, does not emerge from a relation between
two different grounds, a ‘difference between two “homelands” (which would then
sign an agreement and then establish a relation). Their homeland is one and the
same … it is the oneness and sameness of pure difference’.79 The subject is always
already sexed because of the logic of the signifier and surplus-enjoyment.
In a directly opposing manner to Foucault, Lacan maintained that if sex does
not exist it is capitalism that has rendered it so. In Television, Lacan said, ‘Back
to zero, then, for the issue of sex, since anyway capitalism, that was its starting
point: getting rid of sex.’80 Here we must recall Lacan’s other famous statement,
there is no sexual relation, Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. What Lacan meant is
not that in the absence of a relation all we have is a multiplicity of singularities
as Foucault would have it (what is more than the element of sexuality in the
individual), but rather that the non-relation is the a priori negative condition
that operates at the core of the social order. It is only by acknowledging the non-
relation as a non-neutral condition, a negativity already at work in the social
order that political intervention can become possible.81 Capitalism functions
precisely by foreclosing this negativity. Zupančič argues that the sexual non-
relation does not necessarily imply the ‘invisible hand of the market’:
The (acknowledged) absence of the relation does not leave us with a pure
pluralistic neutrality of (social) being. This kind of acknowledging of the non-
relation does not really acknowledge it. What the (Lacanian) non-relation means
it precisely that there is no neutrality of (social) being. At its most fundamental
level, (social) being is already biased … to conceive democracy, for example, as a
more or less successful negotiation between elements of a fundamentally neutral
social being is to overlook – indeed, to repress – this consequential negativity,
operative at the very core of the social order.82
For Lacan Contra Foucault, sexuality insofar as it is linked to the unconscious is

not an epistemic problem rather ‘is the point of short-circuit between ontology
and epistemology’.83 The question of sex for psychoanalysis consists in thinking
the ‘very structural incompleteness of being’.84 Psychoanalysis poses the question
of sex through insisting on thinking: how is it that sex coincides with the failure
of the sexual relation, how does it coincide with the inexistence of the relation?85
Zupančič argues that contrary to the common belief that psychoanalysis
instantiates the sexual difference, the heteronormative model of the feminine and
masculine, what psychoanalysis makes thinkable is the emergence of difference
from the ‘indifference of the “sexual thing”’.86 The feminine and masculine are
in fact one and the same insofar as they do not exist and ‘since they do not
exist, there is sexual difference’.87 Rather than resort to thinking multiplicity and
heterogeneity, psychoanalysis insists on thinking the non-existence of the One
(if not the two).88 Furthermore, sex cannot be a matter of discourse precisely
because it is not a symbolic function or a symbolic construction, rather ‘sex is

real because it marks an irreducible limit (contradiction) of the signifying order
(and not something beyond or outside this order)’.89 The sexual non-relation
is then always already one between the subject and the Other and it has to do
with the very nature of enjoyment, jouissance. Enjoyment emerges from this
non-relation, as Lacan argues, and it is what entails the presence of a locus of
signifiers (the Other) within the subject. This is not to be understood in the
sense of an opposition of a symbolic order to the body; rather, the Other is both
the locus of the signifier and enjoyment, and it is a point of negativity which
generates any relationship of exploitation.90 The symbolic order as we know
from Lacan never exhausts the signifier, there is always a remnant of the Real
which relates to the contradictions of symbolic reality itself, and it is the Real
that sustains jouissance.
Ultimately, what compounds the incompatibility between Lacan and Foucault
is the distance between representation and production that emerges in their
work. Foucault is more interested in the issues of representation and the unveiling
of power relations, which he sees as de-centralized forms of domination; it is
these relations that generate the direct production of subjugated subjectivities.
In Lacan, on the other hand, this very repression is seen as a form of double
production: the production of a surplus object and an alienated subject, of
jouissance and a subjection to negativity. Lacan thus introduces the subject of
the unconscious, in which desire and language have material consequences that
are not necessarily positive, homeostatic or reproductive of structure. Here we
find yet another fundamental divergence between Lacan and Foucault: one that
can be read as the divergence between the politics of bio-power and the politics
of class struggle.
Thus the shadowy third figure lurking in the background of this confrontation
is Marx. Given recent systematic readings of Lacan’s modifications of Saussurean
structuralism in homology with Marx’s critique of political economy,91 it is clear
that what is at stake in pitting Lacan against Foucault is the afterlife of structuralism
and the theory of the subject, whether of science or politics. Foucault heralds
the advent of post-structuralism, in which the subject, following Nietzsche, is
conceived as a product of anonymous forces. The Nietzschean destitution of the
subject paves the way for the care of the self. Lacan, by way of contrast, retains the
emphasis on a laboring subject irreducible to its imaginary self-identification; a
subject that emerges from the gaps and slippages of structure, rather than from
its consolidation. The first three contributions to this volume, Dolar, Chiesa
and Tomsic, examine Foucault’s ambiguous relationship to psychoanalysis by
focusing on the relation between structure and subject in both his work and
Lacan’s.
In ‘Cutting off the King’s Head’ (Chapter 1), Mladen Dolar proposes that
Foucault’s concept of power as ‘what does not exist’ (ça n’existe pas) works to de-
totalize the social as that which cannot be delimited. Power in Dolar’s reading
emerges as a non-concept, neither substance nor subject, which is accompanied
by Foucault’s notion of self-care as a practice rather than a type of consciousness.
Self-care becomes ‘a relation of power to itself, a power bending on itself, as it
were, an internal loop of power’. From this relation between power and self-
care, Foucault’s subject appears to be irreducible to either the imaginary or the
symbolic; instead, it is the result of a regime of governmentality or discipline
that is characterized by multiplicity and heterogeneity versus the pre-modern
sovereign or One as a locus of power. The question raised by Dolar is whether
the great break of modernity, in Foucault’s analysis, can be read as a disavowal
of the One. Could Foucault’s dismissal of psychoanalysis as a discourse of bio-
power, as a repressive hypothesis that merely re-instantiates the ‘monarchy
of Sex, the monarchy of the Father, the monarchy of One’, be the result of his
own blind fixation on the King’s head? Dolar argues that psychoanalysis’s key
contribution with regard to the regime of modern power is its attention to ‘the
rise of the underside of the symbolic father’ in the super-ego as an injunction
to enjoy, rather than a repressive force. Ultimately, Dolar argues, what Foucault
leaves us with is an alternative between two choices: multiplicity or Oneness,
sovereignty or heterogeneous dispositifs. He does so at the cost of curtailing the
very interrogation of sex as what doesn’t exist but insists in its impossibility.
Chiesa picks up on Dolar’s reposing of the question of power in Foucault as
a disavowal of the One, to argue that the latter’s reliance on a transcendental
concept of power reproduces an ontological concept of life as what is outside
structure.
In ‘Author, Subject, Structure’ (Chapter 2), Lorenzo Chiesa discusses the
similarities between Foucault’s and Lacan’s understandings of the category of
the subject as what is irreducible to the ego conceived as a locus of the unity of
representation. Both Foucault and Lacan highlight the importance of Freud as
an event that disrupts the totality of the discourse of an author; Lacan through
his insistence on the return to Freud and Foucault in his understanding of the
author as a function that is not equivalent to the characteristics of the individual
subject. Chiesa shows that the question of the subject in Foucault and Lacan
outlines the central problematic of structuralism: how to maintain a position
that neither obliterates the subject ‘in a nihilistic iconoclastic killing spree of
ontological categories’ nor reintroduces it ‘in the guise of a vacuously structural

old-fashioned apriori’. However, as Chiesa points out, the fundamental
divergence between Foucault and Lacan can be located in the vitalist conclusions
that Foucault, due to a circuitous reliance on a transcendental concept of power,
draws from the question ‘what is an author?’. Thus for Foucault, the concept of
life acquires an ontological connotation as what is outside structure. For Lacan,
however, there is a reciprocity between the subject and structure, a reciprocity
anchored in the signifier that is at once the locus of representation and the
impasse of representation. Contra Foucault, Lacan rejects the ideality of matter
(conceived as Nature or Life) by positing structure itself as ‘matter’ insofar as it
is an ontological cut or the real of the subject: ‘structure is the most real as the
absolute difference of the logical flaw of structure.’ Moreover, this logical flaw
of structure, as the un-thought, is only formalized retroactively by the thinking
subject as that which is ‘discursively impossible’. For Chiesa, this dialectical co-
implication of subject and structure, as what is generated from a condition of
impossibility, is the kernel of structuralism in Lacan’s understanding. By way of
contrast, Foucault’s version of structuralism as a different mode of perceiving
ultimately results in an ‘indifferent perception of life’ as a positive force.
While Foucault rejects the category of subject in order to counter humanism
with a crypto-vitalist anti-humanism, Lacan maintains that the subject of
the unconscious is neither human nor un-human but inextricable from the
modern subject of science. What we have with Lacan, Chiesa proposes, is a
minimalist hyperstructuralism: the subject is not merely a necessary property
of structure but its most extimate element. The inextricability of the subject of
psychoanalysis from the modern subject of science that is examined by Chiesa is
further elaborated on in Tomsic’s chapter.
In ‘Better Failures: Science and Psychoanalysis’ (Chapter 3), Samo Tomšič
argues that despite Foucault’s rejection of psychoanalysis as part of the modern
regime of bio-power, many of the problems that he encounters in accounting for
the workings of power-knowledge have answers that lie in the psychoanalytic
account of libidinal economies. While Foucault sought the answers to the libidinal
link between enjoyment and power in ancient Greece, Lacan proposes that there
is a fundamental shift in the nature of enjoyment (jouissance) with the capitalist
invention of ‘surplus jouissance’ and the quantification of enjoyment. Lacan’s
critical epistemology is not far from Foucault’s insofar as they both take their
cue from the radical de-psychologization of knowledge in scientific modernity,
as a result of which knowledge is no longer grounded in subjective illusions
but in ‘efficient objective fictions’ such as structure and force. Tomšič argues
that Foucault’s death of man is indeed nothing but the discovery of the subject
of the unconscious as a new topology, which is not de-subjectivized. Tomšič
examines the critical epistemologies of Lacan and Foucault through the specific
topics of failure and error and argues that in both their accounts the subject is
the conflictual point which reveals the ‘inconvenient truth of power relations’:
it exposes the link between knowledge and exploitation as well as being a site
of resistance to them. The ‘epistemology of failure’ that psychoanalysis posits
through its mobilization of discursive errors and failures of language is premised
on a structure of repetition that is comparable to Beckett’s imperative of ‘failing
better’. It is an imperative of action against the structure through the process
of working-through: ‘work on structure and work against structural resistance’.
Tomšič argues that this critical epistemology can be traced back to Alexander
Koyre’s rejection of positivist epistemologies and his proposition that scientific
truth is that which in its insistence exposes the impossibility of the real. But while
Lacan sides with Koyre, Foucault inherits Canguilhem’s vitalist preoccupation
with the life-sciences. Tomšič concludes that there are two contradictory images
at work in Foucault’s understanding of psychoanalysis: it is considered both as
a component in the regime of power-knowledge and as introducing a radically
new form of interpretation. The later Foucault removes the function of error
and failure from psychoanalysis, which are fundamental for its epistemology,
and misconstrues the unconscious and sexuality as epistemic objects or positive
ontological entities, whereas Lacan’s entire practice is in fact a radical subversion
of both. In Chapter 4, Anne van Leeuwen interrogates the repercussions of
Foucault’s understanding of sexuality in twentieth-century feminist thought.
In ‘Merely Analogical: Structuralism and the Critique of Political Economy’,
Anne van Leeuwen analyses the Foucauldian influence on twentieth-century
feminism, in the specific works of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, that she
argues, virtually eliminate a materialist Marxist analysis of political economy
from the scope of feminism. Van Leeuwen proposes that feminist readings of
Marxism as a humanism foreclose the fundamental insights generated from the
encounter between Marxism and structuralism, in particular Levi Straussian
anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Van Leeuwen argues that there is an
un-dialectical analysis that has characterized most modern feminist theory, one
that reduces feminist critique to the ‘deconstruction of imaginary production’,
on the one hand, and ‘a humanist materialist analysis of commodity production
that would endeavor to dissolve all forms of social antagonism’, on the other.
Tracing the genealogy of the feminist analysis of the reproduction of gender/
sex in the capitalist mode of production to Foucault, Van Leeuwen argues
that while Butler and Rubin maintain a trans-historical understanding of the

production of gender/sex, Foucault’s history of sexuality cannot but be read as
the history of capitalist modernity: sex is a product of modern bio-power and so
is its repression. Foucault rejects a ‘naïve speculative pseudo-materialism’ which
perceives of sex as what exists prior to the interpellation by bio-power as well
as the ‘liberal idealist form of emancipation’ offered as a correlate to that thesis.
However, Foucault in his concept of bio-power makes way for feminist theory’s
shift of focus from commodity production to productive power rendering
the ‘critique of political economy and the critique of the political economy
of sex merely analogical’. In order to counter this logic, Van Leeuwen instead
employs the homological reading of Marx and Lacan, put forth by Tomšič in
The Capitalist Unconscious, to argue that commodity fetishism is an objective
distortion that is supported by a fantasy of union of exchange-value and use-
value in the commodity form. Marx’s critique of fetishism is homologous to the
psychoanalytic notion of fantasy and exposes the structural negativity underlying
the social link. Furthermore, the Marxian critique can be supplemented by Levi
Strauss’s analysis of cultural forms as what come to fill the void generated from the
universality of the sexual division of labour. Both Levi-Strauss and Marx expose
the structural negativity that ‘is elided by the very relations that are an expression
of it’ and thus provide the grounds for understanding the function of socio-
symbolic forms in the reproduction of structure. The rejection of structuralism
and psychoanalysis by feminist theory comes at the cost of overlooking the
isomorphism between the commodity form and the sexual (non) relation
thereby rendering the structural antagonism generated through them to a mere
analogy that resists theorization. Picking up on the epistemological question of
repetition introduced by Tomsic, and the notion of biopower interrogated by
Dolar, Chiesa and Van Leeuwen, Joan Copjec’s chapter (Chapter 5) questions
biopower through employing the psychoanalytic challenge to the ontology that
informs Foucault’s notion of biopower: ontology is not simply about being and
non-being but about the production of more than being in being and it is only
by realizing the negativity at work (surplus jouissance) in the social link that a
critique of capitalism becomes possible.
In ‘Battle Fatigue: Kairostami and Capitalism’, Joan Copjec analyses
Kairostami’s film, Taste of Cherry, as a staging of two of the fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis, repetition and the drive. The film revolves around
the story of the main protagonist, Badii, who pursues suicide and searches for an
accomplice to carry out the task. According to Copjec, Taste of Cherry provides
a commentary on the ‘radical impasse of being’ that emerges in a context in
which a combination of ‘war, capitalism, and theocratic-legalism’ prevails. The

premise of the film, Copjec argues, is not a testimony of resistance to bio-power,
a force which emerges according to Foucault in modernity as an abandonment
of the ‘ancient right to live and let live’ and that commands life with the ultimate
threat of death, rather, it stages an ‘ontological declivity’, an excess that the
‘finalism of Being has neither time nor use for’. Departing from both Foucault’s
notion of bio-power and Heidegger’s Being-toward-death, Copjec instead
reads Kairostami and Levinas through psychoanalysis as critics of capitalism
insofar as they indict it for its ‘refusal to affirm the exorbitant nature of desire’.
According to Copjec, what capitalism demands is a sacrifice of desire and a
reduction of it to a biological register of needs that are to be gained through the
sacrifice of labour by the worker. Against the final cause of death, Copjec poses
fatigue as a necessary lost cause, a Lacanian ‘short-circuit’ that is a moment
of respite in the repetition compulsion of the drive, which exists only in its
insistence as an internal fault in Being itself. To make sense of Badii’s search for
an assurance that death is possible despite all evidence of the contrary, Copjec
employs one of Lacan’s fundamental insights: dying is an impossibility and it
is only by placing faith in it that one can withstand the pressure of living, what
Copjec deems as the ‘indefectibility of existence’. Kairostami’s preoccupation
with the theme of death, according to Copjec, is with the ‘death of others’, it is
a commentary on a radically lost past that acts as burden of existence. Badii’s
failure at despair, his inability to surrender to suicide and his ultimate failure at
nihilism can be read as an act of freedom against capitalism. Copjec argues that
the capitalist understanding of freedom as what constrains the efforts of labour
is countered by Kairostami’s depiction of fatigue and despair as fundamental
components of the death drive: fatigue is what ‘lurches forth’ from the ‘small
difference drawn off by repetition’. For Copjec, fatigue like the death drive
insists in a structure of repetition, which meets its own internal resistance
through the production of surplus jouissance, an excess element that cannot be
consumed. Copjec seeks the possibility of freedom in recognizing that element
which remains in the present as an irreducible remainder. This ‘always missed
element’ stands for that which defines the present in its ‘evanescence’. Copjec
argues that this evanescence of the present is not equivalent to its transitory
nature but is evident in the persistent demand for repetition. The present
persists in the insistence of repetition that gives it ‘an absolute character, denied
by legalist bound to the past as well the venture capitalists bent on the future’.
Continuing with the interrogation of Foucault’s relation to capitalism, already
explored in Tomsic, Van Leeuwen and Copjec’s contributions, Zdravko Kobe
provides a meticulous examination of Foucault’s troubled relation with both

Marxism and psychoanalysis.
In ‘Foucault’s Neoliberal Post-Marxism’ (Chapter 6), Zdravko Kobe provides
a detailed reading of Foucault’s lectures on governmentality between 1977 and
1979, his conflicted relationship to Marxism and his consideration of the subject
of neoliberalism. Kobe begins with Foucault’s early structuralist phase where he
argued, close to Althusser, for a theoretical anti-humanism that would be the
grounds for compatibility between Marxism and structuralism against official
Marxism. The chapter tracks the different phases of Foucault’s engagement with
Marxism, Maoism and Freudo-Marxism leading to 1975 when an official break
can be discerned with Marx and Freud when the notions of power and discipline
that he formulated in Discipline and Punish and The Will to Knowledge could
no longer fit into the Marxian framework of The History of Sexuality. In 1977,
Foucault reacted in support to the rise of the Nouveau Philsophes and the Second
Left movement in France in declaration of his belief that the era of revolutions
is over. Kobe tracks meticulously through Foucault’s interviews from the time
to show how Foucault reaches a moment of refutation of the entire Marxian
and socialist body of thought from 1830 onwards. By then, Foucault deemed
Marxism as ‘completely enmeshed in nineteenth-century problems’ and ‘useless
for thinking the problems of modern society’. The task that Foucault sets out
to complete after 1977, Kobe argues, is a ‘reinvention of the political thought
of the left’. From the refusal to reduce political questions to economic reasons
– Foucault’s understanding of Marxism – emerged the notion of power and
biopower that addresses itself to populations and their life processes rather
than simply individuals. Kobe shows how the notion of biopower introduced
a fundamental problem for Foucault as it brought his analysis back to the state
formation, which he was trying to avoid. Foucault, Kobe argues, introduces
the concept of governmentality in order to eliminate the state and to replace
the history of apparatuses of security with an analysis of forms of power. It is
during this phase of Foucault’s intellectual development that neoliberalism
becomes a focus of discussion, whereby as a mode of governance it comes to
produce freedom rather than restrict it. Kobe provides a scrupulous account
of Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism in order to show that what attracted him
to it was in fact his previous commitments: anti-humanism and socialism. The
question that irked Foucault in his investigation of neoliberalism was: how
can a socialist governmentality be invented? However, as Kobe points out, the
proximity of Foucault to neoliberalism can be discerned in the manner by which
he represents it according to its own mode of self-presentation and in the way he
accepts its rejection of the welfare state. It is as though Foucault forgets his initial
claims against any political form of governance that appears neutral. Kobe shows
that there is an ‘uncritical leniency and unusual simplifications’ in Foucault,
whereby neoliberalism was seen as a project to be mined for the renovation of
political thought on the left. Kobe traces this moment in Foucault’s thought to
Maoism, ‘as a generic Marxism, a quasi Marxism without Marx, Maoism thus
turned out to be a necessary stage of development in the path from Marxism
to neo-liberalism’. In the appendix to his chapter, Kobe provides a close reading
of Foucault’s shifting relation to psychoanalysis, pointing out that it is before
his rejection of Marxism that Foucault was highly critical of psychoanalysis
as a regime of power immanent to capitalism. After 1977, which appears to
be a real watershed in Foucault’s theoretical development according to Kobe,
criticizing psychoanalysis became futile. This rendered Foucault’s engagement
with fundamental psychoanalytic concepts like the unconscious facile. This led
Foucault to side with the ‘humility’ of liberal dictums regarding pleasure against
Freud and Lacan’s ‘conceit’ with regard to their negative conception of power.
Notes
1 Cf. Jean-Michel Rabate, ‘Lacan’s “annee erotique”’, in Jacques Lacan, between

Psychoanalysis and Politics, edited by Samo Tomšič and Andrea Zevnik (London:
Routledge, 2016), 15–27.
2 Ibid., 20.
3 Cf. Samo Tomšič discussion of this in The Capitalist Unconscious (London: Verso,
2015), 206–09.
4 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI: D’un Autre a l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 41.
5 Alan D. Schrift, ‘Discipline and Punish’, in A Companion to Foucault, ed.
Christopher Falzon (London: Blackwells Publishing, 2013), 151.
6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. 2nd edition.
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 216.
7 The intention is not to pit a radical Lacan versus a reactionary Foucault, after all
there are strong links between the early Foucault and Marx, refer for example to
Jacques Bidet’s Foucault with Marx (Zed Books, 2016). As well, Zdravko Kobe’s
contribution to this volume tracks these links very meticulously. We can also
mention Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and American neoliberalism where he
puts forth an understanding of human capital that is very close to that of Gary
Becker’s. Refer to ‘Becker On Ewald On Foucault on Becker’, a conversation held at
The University of Chicago on 9 May 2012.
8 Cf. Slavoj Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) first introduced
this link, to be followed by Alenka Zupančič’S ‘Surplus Enjoyment as Surplus
Jouissance’, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Reflections on
Seminar XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006), and for the most recent systematic work that explores the homology
between Marx and Lacan, refer to Samo Tomšič’s The Capitalist Unconscious, and
Jacques Lacan, Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, edited by Samo Tomšič and
Adreja Zevnik (London: Routledge, 2016).
9 Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, Concept and Form: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour
l’analyse, Volumes 1 and 2 (London: Verso, 2012).
10 A translation can be found in ibid., 151–58.
11 As Alain Badiou suggests in his 1984 obituary of Foucault subsequently published
in Pocket Pantheon (London: Verso, 2009).
12 Le séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation, unpublished, and Le séminaire,
Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
13 Le séminaire, Livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986). The Seminar,
Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company
Norton, 1992), and Le séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
14 Le séminaire, Livre XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, unpublished.
15 Cf. Michael Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault-Habermas Debate
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994).
16 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France
1981–1982, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 43.
17 Kelly, Critique and Power, 4.
18 Warren Montag, ‘The Soul is the Prison of the Body’, Yale French Studies, no. 88,
Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading (1995): 55.
19 Ibid., 57.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 77.
22 Ibid.
23 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1989), 6.
24 Patrice Maniglier, ‘The Order of Things’, in A Companion to Foucault, ed.
Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2013), 114.
25 Cf. Beatrice Hans, Foucault’s Critical Project, Between the Transcendental and the
Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002).
26 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M.
Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1986), 121.
27 Hans, Foucault’s Critical Project, 50–54.
28 Foucault, The Order of Things, 158. We can consider here the example of the
concept of life as it emerges in the nineteenth century, of sex as it emerges in the
Victorian era and so on.
29 Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form, Volume 2, 72.
30 Foucault, Dits et Ecrits: 1954–1988, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 619.
31 Refer to Francois Eswald’s discussion in ‘American Neoliberalism and Foucault’s
1970 Biopolitics lectures’ where he argues that Foucault saw in Gary Becker’s
thought the truth of the fiction of man as it is produced in liberalism.
32 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 487. We have amended ‘Mind’ to ‘Spirit’
in accordance with the more recent translations of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
33 Mladen Dolar, ‘Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis’, in Lacan and the Other
Side of Psychoanalysis, 147.
34 Cf. Patrice Maniglier’s discussion of this in ‘The Order of Things’, 104–22.
35 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 30.
36 Ibid., 190.
37 Ibid.
38 Slavoj Zizek’s edited volume, Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1998) is the fundamental contribution to this question.
39 Lacan, Seminar XVII, 6.
40 Ibid.
41 Dolar, ‘Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis’, 15.
42 Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 6.
43 Dolar, ‘Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis’, 35.
44 Ibid., 23.
45 Ibid., 29.
46 Ibid., 39.
47 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 29.
48 Ibid., 28.
49 What Slavoj Zizek called the theoretical Shibboleth of psychoanalysis in Cogito and
the Unconscious.
50 Refer to Oliver Feltham’s ‘Enjoy Your Stay: Structural Change in Seminar XVII’ in
Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 179–94.
51 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore on Feminine
Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 10.
52 Ibid.
53 Cf. Alenka Zupančič, ‘When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value’, in Lacan and
the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 159.
54 Refer to Samo Tomšič’s chapter in this volume.
55 Refer to Lorenzo Chiesa’s chapter in this volume.

56 Zupančič ‘When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Jouissance’, 173.
57 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978), 151..
58 Joan Copjec, ‘The Sexual Compact’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
17, no. 2 (2012): 42.
59 Ibid., 152.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 155.
63 Ibid., 156.
64 Ibid., 150.
65 Ibid.,157.
66 Ibid., 103.
67 Ibid., 139.
68 Ibid., 157.
69 Ibid., 47.
70 Ibid., 49.
71 Ibid., 154.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 155.
74 Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, ed. Jacque Alain Miller,
trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 146.
75 Ibid.
76 Refer to Zupančič’s discussion of the Christian disavowal of unconscious
knowledge, of the scene of Adam and Eve in the Bible in What Is Sex? (USA: MIT
Press, 2017), 12–18.
77 Copjec, ‘The Sexual Compact’, 32.
78 Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 60.
79 Ibid., 61.
80 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed.
Joan Copjec; trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Jeffrey
Mehlman (New York: Norton,1990), 30.
81 Ibid.,
82 Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 26.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 As Joan Copjec puts it in Read My Desire: ‘Sex is then the impossibility of
completing meaning, not (as Butler’s historicist/deconstrionalist argument would
have it) a meaning that is incomplete’, 206.
86 Zupančič, What Is Sex?,45.

87 Ibid.
88 Cf. Lorenzo Chiesa, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
2016).
89 Ibid., 46.
90 Cf. Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 21–30.
91 Refer to Samo Tomšič’s The Capitalist Unconscious.
Bibliography
Badiou, Alain. Pocket Pantheon. London: Verso, 2009.

Becker, Gary S., François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt. ‘Becker on Ewald on
Foucault on Becker American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 “Birth of
Biopolitics” Lectures’. Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics, Working Paper,
no. 614 (2012).
Bidet, Jacques. Foucault with Marx. London: Zed Books, 2016.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Copjec, Joan. ‘The Sexual Compact’. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 17,
no. 2 (2012): 31–48.
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. London: Verso, 2015.
Dolar, Mladen. ‘Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis’. In Lacan and the Other Side
of Psychoanalysis, edited by Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg, 129–54. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006.
Feltham, Oliver. ‘Enjoy Your Stay: Structural Change in Seminar XVII’. In Lacan and
the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg, 179–94.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Translated by
A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 1989.
Foucault, Michel. Dits et Ecrits: 1954–1988, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Edited by Joseph Pearson. New York: Semiotexte,
2001.
Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France
1981–1982. Edited by Arnold Davidson. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Hallward, Peter and Knox Peden. Concept and Form: Volume One: Key Texts from the
Cahiers pour l’Analyse. London: Verso, 2012a.
Hallward, Peter and Knox Peden. Concept and Form: Volume Two: Interviews and Essays on
Cahiers pour l’Analyse Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. London: Verso, 2012b.
Hans, Beatrice. Foucault’s Critical Project, Between the Transcendental and the Historical.
Translated by Edward Pile. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Kelly, Michael. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault-Habermas Debate.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VII: L’ Éthique de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1986.
Lacan, Jacques. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques Alain Miller.
Translated by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Lacan, Jacques. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Edited by
Joan Copjec. Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and
Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Norton, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VIII: Le Transfert. Paris: Seuil, 1991.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60. New York:
Norton, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre V: Les Formations de l’Inconscient. Paris: Seuil,
1998a.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1998b.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XVI: D’un Autre a l’Autre. Paris: Seuil, 2006a.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. 2nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2006b.
Lacan Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le Désir et son Interpretation, unpublished.
Lacan Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XVIII: D’un Discours qui ne Serait Pas du Semblant,
unpublished.
Maniglier, Patrice. ‘The Order of Things’. In A Companion to Foucault, edited by
Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, 104–22. London: Blackwell
Publishing, 2013.
Montag , Warren. ‘The Soul is the Prison of the Body’. Yale French Studies, no. 88,
Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading (1995): 53–77.
Rabate, Jean-Michel. ‘Lacan’s Année Érotique’. In Jacques Lacan, Between Psychoanalysis
and Politics, edited by Samo Tomšič and Andrea Zevnik, 15–27. London: Routledge,
2016.
Schrift, Alan D. ‘Discipline and Punish’. In A Companion to Foucault, edited by
Christopher Falzon, 137–54. London: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy.
Tomšič, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious. London: Verso, 2015.
Tomšič, Samo and Adreja Zevnik, eds. Jacques Lacan, Between Psychoanalysis and
Politics. London: Routledge, 2016.
Zizek, Slavoj. Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
Zizek, Slavoj. Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1998.
Zupančič, Alenka. ‘Surplus Enjoyment as Surplus Jouissance’. In Jacques Lacan and the
Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Reflections on Seminar XVII, edited by Justin Clemens
and Russel Grigg, 155–79. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Zupančič, Alenka. What Is Sex? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
1
Cutting Off the King’s Head

Mladen Dolar
In a famous interview in 1977, Michel Foucault stated: ‘We need to cut off
the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.’1 This slogan-like
pronouncement is perhaps best suited to summarize Foucault’s endeavours,
which took a tortuous road through a number of different areas, his oeuvre
stretching over decades and often changing positions, expanding in rich and
detailed accounts, engaging in great theoretical breakthroughs and in political
struggles, spelling out vast patterns and ramifications that cannot but inspire
awe and admiration. In relation to this, my starting point might appear meagre,
yet it addresses one of Foucault’s central points.
If we try to spell out the assumptions on which Foucault’s slogan is premised,
we could say this: one could cut off the king’s head in the revolutionary
enthusiasm of two hundred years ago, but the inveterate assumption which saw
in the king’s head the bearer and the centre of power survived the guillotine.
What did not lose its head by cutting off the king’s head was the general view
that understood power in terms of sovereignty, law, prohibition and repression.
As Foucault said in the same interview:
The sovereign, law, prohibition, all this formed a system of representation of

power which was promoted in the next period by legal theories: political theory
never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories
even today continue to deal with the problem of sovereignty. But what we need
is a political theory that wouldn’t be built on the problem of sovereignty and
therefore not around problems of law and prohibition. […] If the effects of
power are defined as repression, we assume an entirely legal concept of power;
power is identified with a law that says no; we regard it in the first place as a force
of prohibition. This is in my view an entirely negative, narrow, rough concept of
power, but which is incredibly widespread. If power was merely repressive, if it
didn’t do anything else except say no, do you believe that anyone would obey it?
The reason that power is doing well and that it is accepted is the simple fact that
it doesn’t weigh on us with the simple force of no, but that it traverses bodies,
produces things, arouses pleasure, informs knowledge, produces discourse.
Rather than a negative instance whose function is repression it should be
envisaged as a productive network which runs through the entire social body.2
There are many similar passages in Foucault’s work and they are all set in harsh
opposition to the predominant dogmas of political theories, especially left-wing
dogmas of the time, which could not abandon ways of seeing power as repressive,
as a function of the sovereign, the ruling class, the law, the state. Foucault’s
enormous effort was to present power as a new object of thought, something that
has been obfuscated in virtually all political theories. First of all, power is not a
place, a definable location, a locus in the social that can be limited to a particular
site. This was the classical and the most common illusion: to see power situated
in a particular person – the sovereign, in a particular group of people – a social
class, or in a privileged institution – the state. For power could then be seen
as emanating from these points downwards – it would display a pyramidal
structure, against which the natural counter-strategy would be to get hold of
the particular locus at the top in order to exercise power in turn, or eventually
to try to eliminate it (cut off the king’s head, abolish the state along with class
domination, etc.). In this seemingly self-evident view, power is something that
can be possessed by somebody and exercised from a privileged point.
At an even more rudimentary level, Foucault argues that power is irreducible
to either violence or law. The two entities are both opposed – the rule of law
supposedly being the end of the rule of violence – and imbricated – the law
takes support in violence by assigning a monopoly over it to certain institutions,
violence is exercised within the limits of the law. For Foucault, power presents a
problem insofar as it cannot be reduced to physical coercion or simple repression.
‘Power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free. […]
Slavery is not a power relation when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question
of a physical relationship of constraint.)’3 Power can be reduced neither to the
Law as the foundation of society – the basic contract that holds society together
and provides legitimacy for its distribution of power – nor to particular forms of
legality brought about by procedures of consensus and participation. The legal
or juridical may be important, but it is far from the whole story.
Power also cannot be reduced to something more fundamental lying behind
it, of which it would be but a mask (e.g. the economic sphere, productive forces
and relations of production). It is not an epiphenomenon or a superstructure
Cutting Off the King’s Head 39
whose base would be somewhere else. There is no hidden depth of power; it is

all on the surface and what is on the surface is all there is to it. Neither can power
be reduced to an origin, transcendent or ‘natural’, from which it would derive
and which would endow it with authority. There is nothing behind power; it is
always already there, supported only by itself.
With this argument (and I apologize for this rough simplification), Foucault
gradually discarded virtually all classical and common approaches to power and
the bulk of the standard political theories for failing to account for a number
of diverse effects and mechanisms of power. Furthermore, their key concepts
(sovereignty, legitimacy, state, etc.) are not the foundations that they claim to be;
they are involved, as important parts and regions, in strategies of power that do
not stem from these concepts but enclose, comprehend and incorporate them.4
One could say that the monarch, the sovereign, the state, the law and so on do
have an existence whereas power does not. Power permeates and constantly
displaces them. Hence Foucault’s famous proclamation that ‘power doesn’t exist’
(‘Le pouvoir, ça n’existe pas’).5
But Foucault’s discarded entities had one thing in common: they all made
a totality out of the social, they made it into a whole. Taking those entities as a
starting point, one could delimit the social and consider it as a totality as well as
discern its underlying power structure. Whereas for Foucault, and this is the first
important consequence, power does not form a totality or totalize the social,
it rather makes it a non-whole, not-all, something that cannot be delimited. If
those entities formed a totality, it was always by a certain logic of exclusion or
external division – one excluded the monarch from the social as a transcending
point; one excluded the Law as a symbolic foundation and authority, opposed
to the social texture it founded; one divided the social into opposing spheres,
for example, state and civil society, the state being the agency of totalizing the
social. Foucault’s step, on the other hand, is based on a logic of inclusion: there
is no outside of power and if it operates by constant divisions, those divisions
are internal to it – or more precisely, the division into internal and external is
thereby made superfluous and non-pertinent. So power has no exteriority and
it is therefore by its nature ‘non-totalizable’. Nor does it have an essence or an
interiority, and this is why the ‘what’ question has to be replaced by a ‘how’
question – not ‘what is power?’ but ‘how does power work?’ Power is neither
a substance nor a subject (in Hegelian terms), neither an agency nor a place,
and it is ultimately not a concept at all, insofar as a concept presupposes an
ordered totality. As non-totalizable, it is also non-conceptualizable – not in any
traditional sense. Power emerges in a paradoxical status of a non-concept (and
I perhaps need to add that this is not meant as a critique). Power is not One.
This produces a side effect of Foucault having to constantly multiply power’s
attributes: proliferation, multiplicity, dispersion, prolixity, inciting, enhancement,
diversification, production, fermentation, heterogeneity, innumerable and so on
(attributes that very often appear in the plural). But this is an external mark
and consequence of the radical stance that power is a non-concept. It has many
names because it is, strictly speaking, unnamable. Another way to see this is as
the process of immanentization: any transcendent entity has become a moment
of inner deployment.
To be sure, power can have totalizing effects, but those are to be seen as
divergent processes of totalization as opposed to totality, that is, as processes that
cannot reach their end or stabilize themselves, processes of permanently shifting
borders, always partial, unstable and constantly undermined. As Deleuze put
it in a succinct slogan: ‘One, Totality, Truth, object, subject are not universals,
but singular processes of unification, totalization, verification, objectification,
subjectification, processes which are immanent to certain dispositives.’6
A further consequence of political theories that assume the pure exteriority
of power is that Foucault discards another line of thinking which was common
in many approaches to power, the one that envisions power in terms of
‘ideology and consciousness’. The problems of the type of consciousness that
makes possible the power relations, its inherent illusions, its essential blinding,
the false consciousness which enraptures the individuals and turns them into
subjects, the intertwining of recognition and miscognition – these problems
do not arise for Foucault at all, for they would entail – in the widest sense – a
space of interiority and a mechanism of repression, the entities he is trying to
do away with. To be specific, there is a constant problem of how a disciplinary
programme is to be translated into a subjective conduct, but the problem
has to be solved without recurring to the ideological representations and the
traditional themes of consciousness, its interiority and self-comprehension.
This is why the problem of the subject, once it explicitly arises in Foucault’s later
work, is posed in entirely different terms: the terms of practices of self-relation,
the practical self-production of the self rather than a universality of subjectivity
or its self-reflection. ‘Care for the self,’ figuring in the title of his last book, is not
a type of consciousness, but a type of practice. And most importantly, it is not
something external to power, opposing some realm of interiority or the psychic
to the power relations, but rather a relation of power to itself, a power bending
on itself, as it were, an internal loop of power. An internal loop to be conceived
in opposition to the self-reflective turn of the classical self-consciousness, it is a
self-referentiality devoid of self-reflexivity, and thus of any notion of recognition

or mirroring.7
This is why the Foucauldian subject cannot be accounted for either in
its imaginary form, for it doesn’t emerge in the dialectics of recognition/
miscognition, nor in its symbolic form, for it is in no way reducible to the
function of a lack and negativity implied by the symbolic. Neither the ego nor
the barred subject. This is also why Foucault avoids the notion of desire and
proposes to replace it by an analysis based on ‘bodies and pleasures’ (Foucault
1976: 209). Desire, for Foucault, implies a ‘negative ontology’ of a lack and of an
object supposedly detained by the Other, an object which would be able to fill
the lack – pleasure instead of desire, body instead of castration, the positivity of
event instead of the lack, the multiplicity of power relations instead of sovereignty.
But this nature of power is tightly linked to the advent of modernity and
could only become apparent with it. There is an essential discontinuity, a rupture
that has shaped the fate of power and which inaugurated our era. This is what
Foucault tries to pinpoint on different levels throughout his work: the exclusion
of the mad with le grand renfermement as opposed to their liberation framed by
the new disciplinary techniques; the spectacle of public punishment as opposed
to incarceration; power that displays itself as opposed to power that controls; the
dispositive of alliance as opposed to the dispositive of sexuality; power which
takes – the goods, ultimately one’s life – as opposed to power which produces and
enhances, the bio-power that promulgates life. In each of those instances, there
is a shift from a negative functioning of the law to the positive and immanent
deployment of a norm, from the law as a restriction to the norm as a progressive
incorporation and constant proliferation, from exclusion to inclusion. The norm
is now seen to be immanent to, and constitutive of, the field of its application; its
supposed restrictiveness ultimately constitutes what it is supposed to repress. It
does not negate or repress something external to it, but it presents the moment
of its inner ‘condition of possibility’; it does not restrict something which was
already there before, but rather brings it about.8
The whole issue of ‘governmentality’, the subject of Foucault’s scrupulous
reflection in his later period, aims precisely at this point of dissociation between
sovereignty and legality on the one hand and the pervasive power mechanisms on
the other. What is at stake is a power aiming at disposition of things, a multiform
tactics which has a finality of its own beyond issues of law and sovereignty – the
new techniques of governing, enhancing and controlling populations, statistical
methods, calculations of risk and so on.9 The emergence of the ‘reason of state’,
la raison d’État, and its curious new logic, along with the emergence of the new
entity, the police (in the seventeenth-century sense of the word), are the two
most marked signals of a modality of power which has moved well beyond the
framework of sovereignty and law into an area of immanent enhancement and
deployment. So the paradoxical non-totalizable nature of power only becomes
fully deployed with the disciplinary society (although the different breaks
that Foucault studies are not simply homologous and cannot be reduced to a
simple common denominator – they have been brought about by multiple and
heterogeneous ways). Most political theory remained stuck with the notions of
sovereignty, legality, state and so on, so the novelty of disciplinary mechanisms
could not be fully understood, and thus it was unable to account for the most
important ways in which modern power is exercised. As Foucault put it: ‘Maybe
what is really important for our modernity […] is not so much the étatisation of
society, as the “governmentalization” of the state.’10 Here lies Foucault’s enormous
endeavour to invent power as a new phenomenon and to think its specificity
beyond its antiquated models – an object that has never been thought before.
If there is a negative aspect to Foucault’s theory of power, establishing
what power is not, then this side has to be seen as a preliminary step towards
establishing power in its positivity. Indeed, the point of rejecting the traditional
approaches was precisely an attempt to think power in its pure positivity, since
to posit power in terms of sovereignty or law was to take it basically as a ‘power
which says no’, an agency of repression. The point of Foucault’s famous critique of
the ‘repressive hypothesis’ was to reverse the perspective and to envision power
as production, a proliferation, an inducement, an enhancement, an increase and
so on, rather than negation, exclusion, prohibition or limitation. So the negative
side of Foucault’s theory ultimately aimed precisely at discarding the negativity
that the traditional theories introduced as pertaining to the very nature of power.
The real difficulty emerges with thinking power as positive.
Foucault is telling a story which is suspended between two poles. There once
was an era of sovereignty, and after the break, without our quite taking stock of
it, it has turned into something very different. To take just one quote:
The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the
force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite
extreme of this new physics of power […]: a physics of a relational and multiple
power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the
bodies that can be individualized by these relations.11
The story is premised on a massive opposition, the great Break between the pre-
modern and modern forms of power – although one should not be prey to the
illusion of a great Break and should scrutinize the heterogeneous multiplicity of

micro-discontinuities. But perhaps the constant evoking of heterogeneity and
multiplicity rather obfuscates the Break that has been presupposed from the
outset? Did sovereignty, so necessary to this narrative, ever exist in this proposed
form?12 Finally, is multiplicity good, and One bad? Perhaps the multiple and
heterogeneous stories and levels that form the texture of power are based not
on One, but rather on a disavowed one which has not been done away with nor
conceptualized, but disavowed (and tends to revenge itself posthumously). Is
the rejection of One (and hence of universality) and the espousal of the ontology
of multiplicity and heterogeneity the only possible outcome and move after we
have cut off the king’s head?
The status of One in Panopticon can be taken as symptomatic: isn’t Panopticon
precisely a rule of One, a central fantasy ruling over the microphysics of bodies,
languages, pleasures, architecture and so on with an invisible hand? What is the
status of this One? The stand-in for the king after his head has been cut off,
but it functions equally well? A regulative One? This fiction actually does not
describe real life in nineteenth-century prisons at all, Foucault tells us, but it is
nevertheless indispensable for their description.
If I had wanted to describe ‘real life’ in the prisons, I wouldn’t indeed have gone
to Bentham. But the fact that this real life isn’t the same thing as the theoreticians’
schemas doesn’t entail that these schemas are therefore utopian, imaginary, etc.
One could only think that if one had a very impoverished notion of the real.13
It is not an ‘ideal type’ to be opposed to actuality, the difference ‘is not one
between the purity of the ideal and the disorderly impurity of the real’.14 Neither
is it the difference between illusion and reality – it is rather a part of fiction
that is necessary to account for reality itself, or rather, to bring about a certain
reality. It is a paradoxical entity which relates absolutely heterogeneous terms,
something ‘suprasensible’, ‘un non-lieu’, a fiction that produces real effects and
functions as a ‘historical apriori’, a ‘grid of perception’. ‘Is it surprising that the
prison resembles the factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble
prisons?’15 If Foucault raises the rhetorical question, which actually closes the
chapter on Panopticon, one could venture an answer: yes, it is surprising, even
astonishing, that the multiplicity of dispersed and heterogeneous micro-relations
converges into one single image of power and its fictitious One. A naive question:
doesn’t Foucault’s strategy of dispersed micro-relations eventually converge in a
pattern of power where the Master (the King, the Father, etc.) may well be absent,
replaced by architecture and geometry, reduced to pure function and fiction, yet
his empty place makes his presence all the more pervasive and intractable? Did
not what was discarded at the outset return in the end, both triumphantly and
surreptitiously, as a figure all the more haunting and powerful?
The relation between Foucault and psychoanalysis is not a story with a

happy ending. He was engaging with psychoanalysis throughout his life, to the
point that the whole project of The History of Sexuality started as a settling
of accounts with, or indeed a crusade against psychoanalysis, a vast proposal
of a different account of sexuality than what he saw as the generally accepted
psychoanalytic account.16 The story started already with the first text that
Foucault ever published, with his lengthy introduction to the French translation
of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1954). Perhaps one should mention
at the outset the massive fact, namely that Foucault, a meticulous reader of
archives, the scrupulous researcher of forgotten texts and authors, throughout
his life-long engagement with psychoanalysis never ever quoted Freud himself
(nor Lacan for that matter). If my own archival research is correct, then there is
a single exception: the last time that Foucault ever quoted Freud was in the first
text he ever published in 1954, where he briefly quoted from Freud’s analysis of
Schreber and Dora. And then never again. His typical pronouncements take the
form of ‘psychoanalysis maintains … ’ this or that, without a single attempt to
substantialize his claims with some textual support. The fact is rather staggering
and highly symptomatic, and the first consequence to be drawn is that Foucault
engages with psychoanalysis on the level of doxa, of the received opinion,
of the ways that psychoanalysis figures in the zeitgeist, never on the level of
episteme and knowledge. The whole criticism, and very harsh criticism it is,
is waged against what the opponent ‘really’, ‘ultimately’ wanted to say without
ever seriously considering what he actually said. As if the opponent, if he was
given the word, would only lead us astray as to what is ‘really’ at stake, as if in
fear that he would gain a misleading advantage. If History of Sexuality is an
attempt at a genealogy of psychoanalysis, then this is a genealogy singularly
devoid of any statements, énoncés. To be sure, opinions are not to be discarded
easily, they shape the ways of perception and they can be highly symptomatic
of the thing itself, the vulgate pertaining to some disavowed aspect of theory,
theory brought to earth and made practical, not merely the noble cause wasted
on ignorant folk. But then this would demand a different kind of analysis
which could not be spared the other half of the job, namely to conceptually
show what was wrong with the theory itself if it could be watered down to this
kind of opinion and stereotype. But Foucault never even tried to engage with
psychoanalytic theory, as if he was haunted by the ghost of its massive presence
in the doxa of the sixties/seventies and dismissed it in horror. He blatantly

imputed so many views to this opponent that neither Freud nor Lacan would
ever dream of espousing.
The only major exception is actually the first text, the introduction to
Binswanger, where Foucault argues for the status of the image (particularly
in dreams), a ‘morphology of imaginary space’, that escapes psychoanalysis
in its obsession with the hermeneutics of meaning, its endeavour to excavate
hidden meanings beyond the image. Its major fault would thus be the privileged
place assigned to language, so that the image is merely ‘a cover of language’,
and language is supposed to spell out its truth. There is a surplus of image
over meaning that would constitute the ‘authentic’ experience of otherness
(and Freud always reduced the dream to the spoken account of the dream, its
linguistic expression). Foucault tried to pave his way, as pinpointed already by
Binswanger, between two dangers, one presented by psychoanalysis in its search
for hidden sense to be spelled out by language (image is just ‘a less transparent
word’), and phenomenology, which seeks to constitute the image in terms of
‘expressive intentionality’, thus turning it into a hostage of interiority. Neither
the one nor the other is true to the experience, and both reduce its alterity.
There is a major misunderstanding at stake, for to see in psychoanalysis the
hermeneutics of hidden meaning (a hermeneutics of the self, to use Foucault’s
ulterior formulation) is precisely to miss what is at stake with the unconscious.
And here is the crucial problem: Foucault’s whole polemics with psychoanalysis
completely circumvents the problem of the unconscious (it is not mentioned one
single time in the whole History of Sexuality); in his ulterior work, he pinned his
argument entirely on the notion of sexuality, leaving the unconscious completely
out of the picture:
In the History of Madness (1961) the indictment is expanded, more extensive
and harsher than in his first writing:
Freud made sure that all the structures integrated by Pinel and Tuke into
confinement were appropriated by the doctor. He freed the patient from that
asylum existence to which his ‘liberators’ had condemned him, but he failed
to spare him the essential components of that existence. He concentrated its
powers, stretched them to the limit, and placed them in the hands of the doctor.
He created the psychoanalytic situation, where, in the short circuit of a stroke
of genius, alienation became disalienating because, in the doctor, it became
subject. The doctor, as an alienating figure, remains the key to psychoanalysis.
Perhaps because it has never suppressed that ultimate structure, but included all
the others in it instead, psychoanalysis cannot and will never be able to hear the
voices of unreason nor decipher on their own terms the signs of the insane.17
So psychoanalysis would thus preserve the inveterate core of authority; it

transformed everything else except for this core, the asylum brought to the gist,
the authority of judgement over madness, rather than entering the dangerous
domain where madness would present a judgement over us. The modern
psychiatrist secretly gathers in his hands the authorities of the Father, the Judge,
the Law, the Order and psychoanalysis presents its most insidious and subtlest
avatar. It has retained the magical, mystical basis of the authority of a thaumaturge,
the worker of miracles.18 But at the same time, Derrida has patiently followed
this trajectory in ‘To Do Justice to Freud,’19 Freud is throughout the book also
placed on the other side, the one to institute the dialogue with madness instead
of classifying and objectifying it, the one who is often listed alongside with ‘great
madmen’ (Nerval, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Artaud). Is there a good
Freud and a bad Freud? Or is psychoanalysis precisely to be placed on this edge,
the strange intersection of clinical reason and of the other of reason? Why didn’t
Foucault attempt to reconcile this obvious contradiction?
In Les mots et les choses (The order of discourse, 1966), we are very surprised
to learn, at the end of the book, that the very fault, the fatal flaw that served as
the basis of condemnation, is actually the lever that enables psychoanalysis to
confront the advent of modernity. If transference is the psychoanalytic name for
the alleged authority of the analyst, the clue to the mechanism of authority and
its ‘deconstruction’, then the most promising and lucid point of psychoanalysis is
now seen precisely in transference.20
Neither hypnosis, nor the patient’s alienation within the fantasmatic character
of the doctor, is constitutive of psychoanalysis; but [it] can be deployed only in
the calm violence of a particular relationship and the transference it produces
[…] But psychoanalysis makes use of the particular relation of the transference
in order to reveal, on the outer confines of representation, Desire, Law, and
Death, which outline, at the extremity of analytic language and practice, the
concrete figures of finitude […] Not only [is psychoanalysis] able to do without
the concept of man, [it is] also unable to do with it, for it always addresses itself
to that which constitutes his outer limits.21
So psychoanalysis would thus be the harbinger of the ‘death of man’, the most
notorious slogan of the book, which at the time came to epitomize the very
stance of structuralism. Psychoanalysis is praised for its confronting Desire, Law
and Death as the figures of finitude.22 I rather think it is praised for all the wrong
reasons, but what is highly symptomatic in this is the oscillation of Foucault’s
relation to it, the harsh rejection virtually coexisting with the enthusiastic
espousal, without any transition. As if there was an affective kernel which

pushed him either in one direction or the other, something intractable that never
allowed for the impassive view of the archaeologist. And one can be equally
bemused by Deleuze’s turn from the high praise of psychoanalysis in Difference
and Repetition (1968) and the harsh indictment in Anti-Oedipus (1972), which
seems to belong to the same syndrome. No transition between promotion and
rejection, and in both cases one can detect the analogous conceptual endeavours
in different guises.
Then, with the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), this tortuous
journey reached its final stage, where sexuality, for Foucault, emerged at the
same time with the concept of biopolitics and thus sexuality, together with
psychoanalysis, was ultimately treated as the vintage case of a biopolitical
dispositive. If psychoanalysis treated sexuality as an ahistorical phenomenon
pertaining to ‘human nature’, then Foucault’s major point is to show that sexuality
is something that was historically produced in a certain period, its ‘invention’
coincided with the advent of modernity (and the rise of the bourgeoisie). The
new dispositive of sexuality, not based on its repression as one might mistakenly
surmise, but on its incitement, on the proliferation of discourses and so on,
emerged in opposition to the prior ‘pre-modern’ dispositive of alliance, based
on kinship, family, blood relations, the social hierarchies based on them. But
there lies the fatal flaw of psychoanalysis:
But despite everything, psychoanalysis, whose technical procedure seemed to

place the confession of sexuality outside family jurisdiction, rediscovered the law
of alliance, the involved workings of marriage and kinship, and incest at the heart
of this sexuality, as the principle of its formation and the key to its intelligibility.
The guarantee that one would find the parents-children relationship at the root
of everyone’s sexuality made it possible – even when everything seemed to point
to the reverse process – to keep the deployment of sexuality coupled to the
system of alliance […] With psychoanalysis, sexuality gave body and life to the
rules of alliance by saturating them with desire.23
The key discovery of psychoanalysis would thus amount to claiming that the
truth of sexuality as the new dispositive ultimately lies in the old model of
alliance, in the figure of the Father, Family, Oedipus, Law and Desire, desire now
only figuring as the obverse side of the law, chained to the Oedipal scenario. It
is like a repetition of the story told in the history of madness, ultimately saving
the Authority. The great mistake of the political theory, which, when faced with
the new models of power, could only see sovereignty as its true mover and swore
by the juridical model of the law, would thus find its striking counterpart in
the great error of psychoanalysis, which keeps reducing, in an analogous way,
sexuality to the antiquated figures of paternal authority and law, finding them
at the very core of intimacy. What political theory is doing at the level of society,
psychoanalysis would thus accomplish at the level of the individual and the
psychic. Briefly, it has not cut off the king’s head, but continued to see in the
king’s-father’s head the truth of sex and desire – even worse, it turned even
the cutting off of the king’s head into the problem of castration as the Law of
Desire (Foucault does not quite spell out this connection, though). Speaking of
the king’s head, on the last page of the book sexuality is literally placed into the
realm of monarchy.
[W]e need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different
economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how
the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able
to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to
the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from
the shadow. The irony of this dispositive: it wants to make us believe that this
is the matter of our ‘liberation’.24
The monarchy of Sex, the monarchy of King, the monarchy of the Father, the
monarchy of Meaning, the monarchy of One – they all sustain each other,
the inveterate persistence of regressive conviction that cannot come to terms
with the new plurality, heterogeneity, dispersion, the proliferation of practices,
dispositives and discourses. This quasi-atavistic belief does not want to see the
new object that Foucault so persistently displays for us and keeps being blindly
fixed on the king’s head.
To take up just one point: Does psychoanalysis present the re-emergence of
the authority of the father, thus extolling the alliance vs. sexuality?25 It is rather
that Freud discerned the function of the father and its vicissitudes precisely at the
time when the traditional account has historically lost its sway, and envisaged its
historical transformation. To be sure, Freud proposed his myth of the murder of
the father, of the dead father acquiring more force as the living one, ruling as the
Name of the Father, as the symbolic authority, authority of the symbolic. But one
could say that with the advent of modernity – the French revolution marking a
symbolic cut and presenting a shorthand for many different processes – it was the
dead father himself who died. He lost his symbolic impact, his name stopped being
the foundation of authority, it was revealed as an imposture. Fathers, both ‘real’
and symbolic, lost their power, which could then be retroactively seen as tainted
with imposture from the outset. So these massive historic presuppositions made it
possible for Freud to discern the father, not as a source of authority, natural, religious
or symbolic, but in the contingency of his function. It was not that any father or
ruler or god could no longer measure up to his function, but rather the symbolic
function itself lost the power of measure. There are many ways and vocabularies to
describe the ascent of modernity, and this could be one economical proposal: the
dead father, the reference point of symbolic authority, has met his demise. However,
the outburst of joy at this dwindling of authority would be premature, for what
comes after the overthrow of kings and the decline of symbolic authority is not just
the happy spread of triumphant democracy, but rather the rise of the underside
of the symbolic father, and the psychoanalytic name for it is the superego, whose
rule is more intractable, or far more difficult to cope with. Lacan had great knack
for inventing slogans, and this is one of them: Père ou pire, ‘Father or worse.’ The
patriarchal rule was bad enough, but what we are facing with its demise is even
worse. In the structure of the superego, one can detect what Foucault has described
as the traits of the norm vs. the law. Not any longer the prohibition of enjoyment,
but precisely the injunction to enjoy – this is Lacan’s formula of the superego. Hence
proliferation and enhancement, including the production of new discourses on
sexuality and its truth – couldn’t these lines of reflection be considered as precisely
analogous to what Foucault keeps describing? Freud is not quite the harbinger of the
law of the father behind the sexual dispositive nor the harbinger of a newly liberated
sexuality – his harsh criticism of restrictive morality never simply spilled into the
praise for its liberation; it is rather that sexuality finally freed from its traditional
bonds is another way of obfuscating what is at stake in psychoanalysis. So if Freud
was sceptical, then it was precisely because of the new link of sexuality not with the
law that prohibits and takes, but with the superegoic injunction.
Does one have to cut off the king’s head? Is psychoanalysis, together with
the bulk of political theories, the last venerator of monarchy? Is our ingrained
fixation on the king’s head what prevents emancipation? Biopolitics and sexuality
are for Foucault two connected dispositives that defined the ground after the
demise of the old sovereignty, and the chances of revolt and invention demand
that we cease to see the old models under the guise of the new ones. But isn’t
this picture perhaps too clear-cut? Doesn’t it assume an opposition that Foucault
never ceases to reiterate under ever new forms?
There is an alternative: either the monarchy of sex-desire or the plurality of
bodies and pleasures; either the framework of sovereignty or the heterogeneous
dispositives, multiple strategies, governmentality;. either the rule of One or the
dispersion of multiplicity, proliferation, production. This seems to be Foucault’s

very fundamental ‘ontological’ stance, and the variety of analyses mostly
reiterate and come back to this ineluctable alternative. The same goes for the
alternative between the negativity implied in the power that says no, along with
the prohibitions weighing on sexuality (with the father’s ‘no’ at their bottom),
and the positive account of proliferation and productivity. Isn’t there something
missing in this alternative? Is it a matter of decision and choice?
I would like to maintain, for the end, that it is beyond this alternative that
the problems in psychoanalysis really start, and particularly the problems with
sexuality. First, the espousal of multiplicity and heterogeneity is rather a way of
escaping the paradoxes of one. One can coin the simple adage for psychoanalysis,
‘not One’, but ‘not One’ doesn’t entail either ‘the two’26 or the multiple, it involves
the question of a split that is not the split into the one and the multiple (which
is Foucault’s ultimate alternative), a split one whose other side (beyond One)
is rather something that does not simply exist as a positive entity, but insists
in its impossibility. Hence Lacan’s formulas proposing non-existence: the Other
doesn’t exist, the Woman (as the Other sex) doesn’t exist, but this non-existence
doesn’t amount to a zero or a simple absence. Hence, second, the problem of
sexuality haunted by the problem of sexual difference – a difference which is not
a split of One nor the dual binary relation nor the proliferation of multiplicity
of sexual positions beyond the imposed matrix of the two – but something, not
even something, that insists as a real traversing the utopian fantasy of ‘bodies
and pleasures’ beyond the supposed monarchy of sex. It is by showing fidelity
to this real that psychoanalysis could never be squeezed into the model of
alliance, law, family, father, nor would it ever espouse what Foucault presented
as the biopolitical dispositive of sexuality. Its problem only emerges beyond and
outside this alternative.
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: The Harvester

Press, 1980), 120.
2 Ibid., 120–21.
3 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Brighton: The
Harvester Press, 1982), 221. Cf.: ‘A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to
force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when
his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then
he has been caused to behave in a certain way. His freedom has been subjected to
power. He has been submitted to government. If an individual can remain free,
however little his freedom may be, power can subject him to government. There is
no power without potential refusal of revolt.’ Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy,
Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), 83–84. It is strange
how Foucault, an anti-Hegelian if there ever was one, reproduces here the very
Hegelian setting of ‘master and slave’ as the minimal pattern of any power relation.
4 Cf., for example: ‘I don’t want to say that State isn’t important; what I want to
say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them,
necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State. In two senses: first of all because
the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to
occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can
only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The State is
superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body,
sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth.’ Foucault, Power/
Knowledge, 122.
5 Michel Foucault, ‘Le jeu de Michel Foucault (entretien avec D. Colas, A.
Grosrichard, G. Le Gaufey, J. Livi, G. Miller, J. Miller, J.-A. Miller, C, Millot, G.
Wajeman),’ Ornicar?, no. 10 (1977): 66. The statement seemed so blunt that the
English translation (in Power/Knowledge) deemed it necessary to interpret: ‘Power
in the substantive sense, “le” pouvoir, doesn’t exist’ (198). Foucault explains in
the interview: ‘What I mean is this. The idea that there is either located at – or
emanating from – a given point something which is a “power” seems to me to
be based on a misguided analysis, one which at all events fails to account for a
considerable number of phenomena. In reality, power means relations, a more-or-
less organized, hierarchical, coordinated cluster of relations’. Ibid.
6 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?’, in Michel Foucault philosophe (Paris:
Seuil, 1989), 188.
7 Produced in an entirely different way, it comes close to Deleuze’s notion of le pli,
the fold, or at least Deleuze tried hard to make the two resonate. Gilles Deleuze,
Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
104–23.
8 Cf. Pierre Macheray, ‘Pour une histoire naturelle des normes,’ in Michel Foucault
philosophe, for an excellent account of this shift.
9 Cf., for example, Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies
in Governmentality, eds. Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
94–95.
10 Ibid., 103.
11 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 208; emphasis added.
12 This was Agamben’s crucial argument: sovereignty was ‘always already’ based on
biopolitics, so that what we are witnessing in modernity is its obverse side, not its
demise. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
13 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 81.
14 Ibid., 80.
15 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 228.
16 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
17 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa and trans. Jean Khalfa and
Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006), 510–11.
18 Ibid., 510.
19 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of
Psychoanalysis’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 227–66.
20 It is curious how Freud’s notorious three impossible professions, governance,
education and analysis, can be mapped on Foucault’s proclaimed three major
axes of his work, power-knowledge-subject. The three professions are impossible
precisely because they involve transference.
21 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage, 1994), 376–78.
22 This is one of the very few spots where Foucault mentions the unconscious, putting
it on par with the formal model proposed by linguistics. ‘[…] the unconscious
also possesses, or rather it is in itself, a certain formal structure.’ Foucault, Order
of Things, 379. Formalization, such as proposed by linguistics (and expounded in
structuralism), formalization beyond mathematization, is seen as a complementary
strategy to the devices of modern literature.
23 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 112–13.
24 Ibid., 159.
25 And is Oedipus a reduction to the family? This is a dysfunctional family if there
ever was one, to say the least. It can hardly count as a reduction to the family, but
rather as the impossibility of any such reduction. It rather presents what uproots
the family, dislocates it, prevents its normal function, thwarts it in its goal. It makes
any assumption of social functions and roles laden with a conflict with uncertain
outcome; it doesn’t secure social and family roles, but subverts them. As Étienne
Balibar lucidly put it: ‘[…] the family structure is not based on Oedipus, but
Oedipus, to the contrary, inscribes the conflict and the variability of subjective
positions into its core and thus hinders any possibility for the family to impose the
roles which it prescribes as simple functions for individuals to fulfil “normally”
[…]’ Étienne Balibar, La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après
Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 337.
26 Cf. the programmatic title of Lorenzo Chiesa’s book, The Not-Two: Logic and God in
Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2016), which argues along similar lines.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorigio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Balibar, Étienne. La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx.
Paris: Galilée, 1997.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?’. In Michel Foucault philosophe, 185–95.
Paris: Seuil, 1989.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of
Psychoanalysis’. Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 227–66.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977a.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Le jeu de Michel Foucault (entretien avec D. Colas, A. Grosrichard,
G. Le Gaufey, J. Livi, G. Miller, J. Miller, J.-A. Miller, C, Millot, G. Wajeman)’.
Ornicar?, no. 10 (1977b): 62–93.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by
Robert Hurley. New York, Pantheon, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Edited by Colin Gordon. Brighton: The Harvester
Press Press, 1980.
Foucault, Michel. ‘The Subject and Power’. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, 208–26, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Brighton: The
Harvester Press, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman.
London: Routledge, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Governmentality’. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
edited by Graham Burchell, Collin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Vintage, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa and translated by Jean
Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy. London: Routledge, 2006.
Macheray, Pierre. ‘Pour une histoire naturelle des norms’. In Michel Foucault philosophe,
203–21. Paris: Seuil, 1989.
54
2
Author, Subject, Structure:

Lorenzo Chiesa
Freud and psychoanalysis figure prominently in Foucault’s 1969 text ‘What Is an

Author?’ For Foucault, Freud is nothing short of the author par excellence. More
precisely, the author’s name ‘Freud’ in its relation to the origins and development
of psychoanalysis should be taken not only as indicative of what Foucault calls
‘the author function’ but also as the ‘first and most important case’ (along with
Marx) of the possibility of raising this function to the level of the ‘founders of
discursivity’.1
In short, among other things, the author as a function opposes every naïve
understanding of the author in terms of the ‘writing subject’s individual
characteristics’.2 The author does not precede the work.3 But the author as a
function also opposes the exaltation of the work itself – of its structure, Foucault
specifies – as the presumed effacement of the author.4 In fact, this move only
‘transposes the empirical characteristics of the author into [the] transcendental
anonymity’ of the notion of writing, which, as another a priori, preserves
the privileges of the author through the ‘singularity of his absence’ (and thus
indirectly also the idea of the author as the genial creator of a work).5
It is precisely against this reification of the ‘death of the author’,6 brought about
by vulgar structuralism, that the founders of discursivity are particularly effective.
Foucault argues that, first of all, an author like Freud is irreducible to being just
the author of his own work. Freud established nothing less than ‘an endless
possibility of discourse’.7 He did so by founding a discourse – psychoanalysis
– that makes it possible for something different from his discourse to belong to
what he founded (such as Abraham’s and Klein’s psychoanalysis; Foucault does
not mention Lacan). Expanding on Foucault, we could suggest that here the
author does not precede his work – instituted as a new discourse – in the strong
sense that its foundation, now shared, no longer coincides with the foundation
of his own discourse. Different psychoanalysts may adopt one or the other aspect
of the latter while setting aside the rest of it. Freud is an author primarily in that
he is not the author of his own work but of a work that gives him his name.
Yet, conversely and more importantly, the work – the new discourse – is in
this way constantly modified. It necessarily entails what Foucault himself calls a
continuous ‘return to the origin’8 – to the founding act – that, we may add, keeps
the structure of the work open. Authors like Freud therefore enable us to ‘locate
the space left empty by the [traditional] author’s disappearance, follow the
distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance
uncovers’.9
Lacan always characterized his work as a return to Freud, a return for which,
as Foucault has it, ‘re-examining Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself ’.10
Lacan attended Foucault’s presentation of ‘What Is an Author?’ at the Société
Française de Philosophie. In Seminar XVI he comments on it quite extensively.
He praises Foucault’s ‘perfect address’ for placing Freud at the centre of his
investigation of the author.11
First, Foucault would rightly stress the role of Freud as an event that gives
rise to novelty. Second, this event is strictly associated with the ‘function of the
author’s name’. Third, the originality of this very function acquires its value
only if it is interrogated as something ‘internal to discourse’. Fourth, such an
interrogation of the reciprocal implication of the author’s name and the structure
of discourse puts into question, and even ‘tears apart’, the university discourse’s
claim to absolute knowledge.12
That is to say, the evental name of the author – as the innovative founding act
to which one does not stop returning – internally disrupts the supposed totality
of discourse. In Foucault’s own words, on the one hand, the author’s name
assures a ‘classificatory function’ and shows that ‘this discourse [of an author]
is no ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes’; in this sense, ‘it
[the author’s name] does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the exterior
individual who produced it’.13 But on the other hand, and for the same reason,
the author’s name cannot be regarded as just another element in a discourse: it
Author, Subject, Structure 57
‘marks off the edges’ of it, or better, ‘it is located in the break that founds a certain
discursive construct’.14
Lacan obviously does not fail to appreciate Foucault’s highlighting of the
importance of the ‘return to Freud’ in psychoanalysis as crucial to the problem
of the author and his name (and quips ‘I considered myself as having been
summoned to this presentation; there is no one who more than me has given
weight to the “return to”’.)15 He further links the theme of the ‘return to’ with that
of retroaction as a methodology that opens onto the field of ethics as the field
of the real (of the deadlock of symbolization, which is admittedly ‘difficult to
access’16). He also singles out the proximity between the retroactive approach in
psychoanalysis and the procedure of what is ‘bizarrely labelled’ as structuralism
(‘a term that undoubtedly none of those who are its key players assumes, but by
which we now find ourselves affected’17).
In the remaining part of the same lesson from Seminar XVI, Lacan dwells on
the ‘event Freud’. He pays particular attention to an issue closely connected with
that of the author, the effacement of its traditional figure as the bearer of the
writer’s individual traits, and the risk that, as Foucault puts it, ‘the real meaning
of his disappearance’ could be suppressed. This is quite bluntly the issue of the
subject; the issue of psychoanalysis’s replacement of the subject as idealistically
conceived in various guises, even if not especially after Kant – whereby ‘the
thinking being is only dealing with his own measure, posed as a referential
point, from which he believes he is able to state in a priori fashion at least the
fundamental laws of representation’18 – with the subject of the unconscious –
for which there is no ‘complicity’ between representation and what is being
represented.19
Here, for Lacan, it is not, or not only, a matter of acknowledging how the
‘radical economy’ of the unconscious dictates the content of our thoughts
through fantasies, or even hallucinations.20 As Foucault well sees in his critique
of the ‘transcendental anonymity’ of writing, stopping at this stage would involve
the danger of reifying the impersonal unconscious into a ‘dream of the world’21 –
which is only one step from lapsing into a Jungian archetypal distortion of it. The
further step that is needed is realizing that, from a Freudian standpoint, the very
disjunction between the process of representation and what is ultimately being
represented – which is the unconscious – nonetheless rests on an articulated,
albeit open, linguistic structure ‘made of frameworks and networks’.22 The latter
lie indeed outside the circuit of a subject, or ego, with which one claimed to
‘unify representation’.23 But at the same time this incomplete linguistic structure
does not go without a real – yet fleeting – subject as that which, following Lacan’s
famous motto, is represented by a signifier for another signifier. The ‘gaps and
breaches’ that, according to Foucault, are left behind by the death of the author
– which, we should add, he far too quickly juxtaposes to the death of God and
man – do not simply amount to the intervals of a self-contained differentiality
of language but mark the locus of the emergence of subjectivity as the impasse of
representation, the limit of knowledge and, as such, the springboard for thought.
Foucault seems to be briefly glimpsing this when he tackles what Lacan
would call the ‘extimacy’24 (the external intimacy) of the author’s name with
respect to the structure of discourse. However, it is only by establishing the
precise coordinates of the subject as real – as emerging from the structural flaw
of structure – that a problematization of the function of the author and his name
overcomes its confinement to literary debates – which still heavily influence
Foucault’s text – and unveils its full epistemological, ethical and ontological
potential.
In Seminar XVI, Lacan does not comment on Foucault’s considerations on the

subject in the conclusion of ‘What Is an Author?’ which are quite revealing.
In line with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucault spells out that the ultimate
aim of an enquiry into the function of the author is the re-examination of the
‘privileges’ of the traditional philosophical subject.25 This means calling into
question the ‘absolute character’ of the subject and thus ‘overturning’ the classical
metaphysical problem.26 In other words, we should no longer ask ‘how can a free
subject penetrate the density of things and give it meaning?’ but rather ‘how,
under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in
the order of discourse?’27 And also – using words that profoundly resonate with
Lacan’s contemporary theory of structural discursive changes – ‘what place’ can
the subject as a ‘variable […] occupy in each type of discourse, what functions
can it assume, and by obeying what rules?’28
In one sentence, what is fundamentally at stake is grasping the ‘subject’s points
of insertion’ in a linguistic structure of which he cannot simply be regarded as
the ‘originator’.29 Here Foucault offers a clear outline of what structuralism (this
label which in Lacan’s view ‘has been stuck on our back without our consent’ but
affected them all30) should steer away from: it is a matter neither of obliterating the
subject once and for all in a nihilistically iconoclastic killing spree of ontological
categories nor of surreptitiously reintroducing the pre-eminence of its founding
role in the guise of a vacuously ‘structural’ old-fashioned a priori (be it writing

or the unconscious). And this is the case also and especially because, on close
inspection, these two familiar and ever fashionable deviations go together.
Given the surprising convergence between Foucault and Lacan on this
specific yet crucial point – surprising since both Foucauldians and Lacanians
have almost invariably played it down – we should recall Badiou’s amicable
criticism of Foucault in his otherwise laudatory obituary: ‘The only conformism
one could detect in Foucault – a conformism established and maintained by
almost all recognized French philosophers – was that […] he tried to avoid
Lacan.’31 And we should add: at least at this stage of Foucault’s work it looks very
difficult to avoid, as he does, Lacan’s theory of the subject.32
But the conclusion of ‘What Is an Author?’ soon takes a more ambiguous
direction and ends in a rather enigmatic fashion. On the one hand, as we have
just seen, Foucault is interested in highlighting the ‘places’ left open in discursive
structure by the death of the author where, in his words, ‘there is room for
possible subjects’.33 Yet, on the other hand and at the same time – outside any
apparent dialectical mediation with the first point – the death of the traditional
author will be followed by the death of the author function (‘the author function
will disappear’34), which, we should not forget, Freud epitomizes. No doubt
another ‘system of constraint’ will arise, one that however will be experienced
and felt as the ‘anonymity of a murmur’.35
So eventually in ‘What Is an Author?’ Foucault moves from a critique of the
‘transcendental anonymity’ of vulgar structuralism (the reification of the gaping
structure into ‘writing’) to the enthusiastic prefiguration of the ‘anonymity of a
murmur’ – also cheerfully saluted as the ‘cancerous and dangerous proliferation
of significations’.36 Freud and psychoanalysis would stand just as an intermediate
passage in this itinerary, a helpful but in the end inconclusive tool in the
deconstruction of the ‘ideological’37 status of the author. Consolidating a line of
thought already present in Histoire de la folie (1961), the linguistic unconscious
must give way to the ‘lyric rupture of madness’38; anticipating the indictment of
La volonté de savoir (1976), psychoanalysis has itself a ‘normalizing function’.39
We should here ask very bluntly: leaving aside the later Foucault’s unashamed
and cheap bashing of psychoanalysis, is the anonymous murmur he advocates
compatible with the real subject in a Lacanian sense? I believe it is not and that
what Foucault ultimately has in mind, in spite of all his stress on historicism
and genealogy, and even thanks to it, is a form of life – however still somehow
‘constrained’ in a weak ‘system’ – that experiences an acephalous force of life and
resolves itself into it. Nobody has – sympathetically – grasped this better than
Deleuze: for Foucault, ‘we must reach life as the power of the outside’; ‘is not
the force that comes from the outside a certain idea of Life, a certain vitalism,
in which Foucault’s thought culminates?’40 Not coincidentally, over the last
three decades, this is the basic (repressed) argument that has inspired a host
of – variously successful, consistent and conformist – biopolitical ontologies
explicitly derived from Foucault.41
In the very last, and complacently lyric, sentence of ‘What Is an Author?’
the anonymous murmur indeed acquires a specific ontological connotation; it
amounts to ‘the noise [bruit] of an indifference’ – which significantly lies ‘behind’,
or outside, all the questions Foucault has previously asked.42 Finally, on this
level, determining ‘who is speaking’ no longer makes any difference, Foucault
concludes.43 The indifference at stake, conceived as a kind of supposedly
‘immanent rule’ (but actually relying on the transcendence of the force of Life),
would also admittedly be ‘ethical’.44
Contrary to this crypto-vitalist stance – rightly deciphered by Deleuze –
according to Lacan what fundamentally and materialistically matters in the
human form of life, or speaking being, is, as he reminds us also in Seminar XVI,
absolute difference.45 Again, the latter should not be limited to the differentiality
of the linguistic structure (as formulated by Saussure’s structural linguistics)
since it rather marks its real incompleteness, which the subject inhabits.46
Although he does not mention it in Seminar XVI, Lacan intervened in the

discussion that followed the presentation of ‘What Is an Author?’47 The chair
of the session, Jean Wahl, did not give Foucault the time to reply. Lacan’s main
remark revolves around the subject. It is far from polemical with Foucault but
could equally be read as the index of an incipient disagreement. According to
Lacan, we should not confuse the ‘dependence’ of the subject with its ‘negation’,
or death.48 The subject depends on the signifier. In a nutshell, this is what Freud
and psychoanalysis teach.
Yet, on the other hand, it is not the case that structures do not walk on the
streets. The fact that protesters of May 1968 write ‘structures do not walk on
the streets’ on the walls of the very streets where they are protesting proves the
opposite.49 It proves that the subject structurally ‘misrecognizes’ itself (as the
complicity of representation and what is being represented; as independent from
structure) in the same act with which it founds itself.50
For Lacan, there is no subject without a structure, and vice versa. As plainly
stated in Seminar XVI: ‘in psychoanalysis, when we are dealing with the subject,
it is always essential to resume the question of structure’.51 But at the same time,
unless we are happy to accept that what we speak about when we speak of
structure has no kind of existence, ‘the subject has an existence’, one that cannot
simply be ‘imagined’.52 The field vaguely defined as ‘structuralism’, in which both
Lacan and Foucault have been unwillingly caught up yet must come to terms
with, should deal with nothing else than the reciprocity of subject and structure.
Lacan’s theory of the subject evolved throughout his work, reaching its most
sophisticated expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the time Lacan
attended Foucault’s lecture in 1969, the following points – as formulated in
Seminar XVI – are acquired, specifically with regard to the subject as real and its
mutual implication with structure.
First, the subject amounts to what a signifier represents for another signifier
of the discursive structure. The subject does not determine the signifiers; they
are not subsumed under the subject. Conversely, the signifiers cannot represent
themselves. The subject is an ‘effect of saying’; it depends on the signifiers,
which, however, have ‘no head’. This means that the subject is ‘stifled and effaced
as soon as it appears’. Representation and the impasse of representation are two
sides of the same coin.53
Second and consequently, the subject should be approached not as a person
but as a function of the discursive structure. Independently of its historical
permutations, the latter is always as such flawed. The flaw heralds the real as
the discursively impossible (the impasse of representation). The function of the
subject, which originates from the flaw, can compensate for it only by means of
an artificial – imaginary-symbolic – suture. The whole question lies in how the
subject as a concomitance of emergence and disappearance can accomplish this
by itself achieving a semblance of identity (that is, by representing itself).54
Third, the subject manages to represent itself in the unconscious fantasy as
a suture (or ‘soldering’). The fantasy provides the unity of the subject as a split
subject. The fantasy is neither a subject nor an object but a screen on which
the emerging subject represents its emergence as vanishing in an object (the
object a) the subject would lose. The semblance of identity can therefore be
paradoxically achieved only by staging the loss of a mythical identity that was
never there to begin with. Unconsciously, the subject rather first identifies itself
with the object a as lost; the thinking subject as cogito or self-consciousness then
‘masks’, or better represses, the object a since it reveals the subject’s structural
non-autonomy.55
Fourth, in setting up the unconscious as the divided identity of the subject –
which subsequently enables the subject to misrecognize itself as the conscious
subject that masters discourse – fantasy also sutures the real flaw of structure.
But the latter resurfaces as the circumscribed ‘hole in the Other’. The Other is
nothing else than structure insofar as it constitutes for each and every subject
the locus of intersubjectivity. It is the locus where structural and undetermined
signifierness is given to the subject as incomplete signification. In this way, the
real flaw of structure turns into the inscrutable desire of the Other – or, from a
slightly different perspective, into sexuality and sociality as the impossibility of
the sexual and social relation – on which the subject (its desire) now depends.
The object a through which fantasy sutures the structure via the subject thus
concomitantly also stands as the real cause of desire.56
Fifth, the subject finally lies ‘inside-outside’ structure as the Other. It is
not that the subject is not included in the Other, so much so that the subject
even phantasmatically awards the Other the object it has ‘lost’. Yet, the point
where the subject represents itself as vanishing – which is again the object a
that equally founds the Other – nonetheless remains external to the Other as an
alleged ‘universe of discourse’ (or knowledge). In this sense, the subject is real.57
Lacan takes seriously his being included against his consent under the label
of structuralism. Certainly, on a first level ‘structuralism’ is only mass media
‘rubbish’. But after all one could easily find oneself in far worse company (such as
that of mainstream psychoanalytic societies).58 Throughout Seminar XVI, Lacan
associates not only Foucault but also Deleuze and Marx (even independently of
Althusser’s work) with a certain approach to structure that he by and large shares
and approves of.59 On this second level, ‘structuralism can only be identified with
something I would simply call seriousness [le sérieux]’.60 In Seminar XIX, Lacan
will then claim that ‘seriousness, as I understand it, is the serial [sériel]’.61 In turn,
the principle of the serial is nothing else than the series of whole numbers, where
a property can be transferred from n to n + 1, and where this property (the
subject) can only amount to what is first transferred from 0 to 1.62
Leaving aside these numerical considerations – which I have investigated

elsewhere and are by no means metaphorical63 – what does Lacan mean by
structuralism in Seminar XVI? How does he delineate it out of and against
a ‘publicistic’ (and soon after even academic) ‘universe of discourse’ that –
paraphrasing what Foucault says about the common idea of the author – limits
and excludes? As seen, for Lacan, the kernel of structuralism lies in the co-
implication of structure and subject. But in Seminar XVI – where structuralisme
and structuraliste are mentioned over twenty times – he goes further in this
direction, more or less explicitly paving the way for a novel ontology based on
his psychoanalytic theory.
Starting from the beginning of the very first lesson, Lacan opposes serious
structuralism to traditional philosophy as an idealistic Weltanschaaung.
The latter essentially aims at ‘guaranteeing the position of thought’, that is, at
‘harmonising thought with itself ’.64 But psychoanalysis shows that the subject’s
thought cannot be regulated according to his own wishes; it is rather regulated
by the unconscious structure. The subject is a thinking subject primarily with
respect to the ‘out-of-meaning’ element of his remarks.65 More importantly,
the unconscious structure as the ‘rule of thought’ in turn originates from and
relies on a ‘non-thought’ (la non-pensée), which is the real cause of discourse.66
Lacan also claims that the ‘non-thought’ as the real cause of discourse ultimately
amounts to the ‘being of thought’.67 The unconscious rule of thought (the
serial structure of the signifying chain that repeatedly represents the subject as
vanishing) thus eventually is the structural ‘process of a flaw’.68 On the one hand,
structuralist psychoanalysis can seize, or better formalize, the flawed rule of
thought as such: ‘If we can qualify my discourse as structuralist […] it is insofar
as it demonstrates the relationship there is between what allows the edification
of a rigorous logic and what on the other hand is shown to us in the unconscious
by certain irreducible flaws of articulation.’69 Yet, on the other hand, the subject
cannot ‘overcome’ the flawed rule of thought.70
Although structuralism as understood by Lacan ‘puts into question
metaphysics’, it is therefore equally the case that it should not confide excessively
in anti-metaphysical ‘dis-illusion’.71 This stance in fact tends to support a new
form of ‘superstition’, which Lacan calls ‘the ideality of matter’72 – as Nature, he
specifies (or Life, we may add). The way in which materialist structuralism avoids
embracing such a ‘transcendence of matter’, and accordingly rightly conceives of
the ‘being of thought’, is by positing an ontological ‘cut’ in matter.73 This cut in
matter is ‘the real of the subject’.74 For materialist structuralism, structure should
indeed be regarded as ‘the most real, the real itself ’75; structure is the most real
as the absolute difference of the logical flaw of structure (i.e. ‘non-thought’). Yet
the real of the logical flaw exists only as the matter of the subject.76
First, the subject is no doubt an ‘effect of language’.77 Structuralist
psychoanalysis establishes a discourse in which the subject can recognize itself
not as a cogito but as an effect of language (that paradoxically represents itself in
the object it loses). More generally, as Lacan already anticipated in Seminar XV,
‘the common factor of structuralism’ is taking as its object the subject as nothing
more than an effect of language.78
Second, states of affairs in the world do not properly become facts unless they
are articulated by signifiers.79
But, third, a subject is needed for saying these facts. The subject as an effect of
language is also ‘the subject of a saying’.80 While the one who says comes second,
the ‘event’ of discourse is nonetheless a saying, not just a chain of signifiers.81
And, crucially, it is only by means of ‘the most extreme tightening [serrage] of
saying’ that the real (structure as the flaw of structure) is introduced in the world
instead of being simply enunciated.82 The real as cause – the being of thought
– retroactively becomes such when it passes through the subject’s thinking the
real as the discursively impossible. Lacan could not be more adamant on this
last point: ‘What, passing through my thought, is the cause lets pass purely and
simply what has been as being’; ‘The subversion at stake here is the one the
subject introduces certainly, but through which the real sticks together [se serre],
which in this perspective is defined as the impossible.’83 Conversely, it is only
this last level, where the subject thinks and formalizes the real as the discursively
impossible, and acts accordingly, that makes the subject really a subject.84
Finally, ‘whether you want to call it structuralism or not […] what I call the
condition of seriousness’ – dialectical materialism, Lacan himself acknowledges,
as opposed to both idealistic delusion and materialist superstition – goes down
to one principle: ‘it is not worth speaking of anything except the real within
which discourse as such has consequences’.85
‘I have never used the word “structure.”’86 This is the first thing Foucault says in the
debate that follows the presentation of ‘What Is an Author?’ Clearly irritated, he
then invites his interlocutors to open Les mots et les choses (widely regarded – still
today – as his most structuralist work) and verify it.87 ‘I would be grateful if you
could spare me all platitudes on structuralism, or make the effort to justify them.’88
Two years earlier, Foucault gave an interview to a Tunisian newspaper. The

tone is very different. Not only does he repeatedly use the terms ‘structure’ and
‘structuralism’, but he clearly positions his work with respect to them. It would
not be exaggerated to claim that he sees himself as ‘inside-outside’ structuralism:
‘I have a relation to structuralism that is, at the same time, one of distance and
of redoubling. Of distance, since I speak of it without practicing it directly. Of
redoubling, since I do not want to speak of it without speaking its language.’89
Foucault regards himself as the ‘choirboy’ of structuralism, as someone who
‘rang the bell’ in a ceremony that he does not officiate and has already started.
The choirboy would still remain an ‘innocent observer’ before the ‘true mystery’
that is being accomplished.90
The short but intense discussion with the journalist revolves around three
main issues: the different variants of structuralism; the role of philosophy in
structuralism; Foucault’s own relation with structuralism.
Foucault distinguishes structuralism as a ‘method’ from ‘generalized’
structuralism. The first, epitomized by structural linguistics, studies ‘the relations
that preside over a set of elements’ and is interested in the current equilibrium
of this set rather than in the process of its history.91 It however allowed for the
emergence of new scientific objects (such as Saussure’s langue). The second kind of
structuralism – which appears to follow the first according to Foucault – is a non-
specialized theoretical activity that investigates ‘the relations […] between such
and such element of our culture, such and such science, such practical domain and
such theoretical domain’. In short, generalized structuralism would offer nothing
less than a diagnosis of ‘our current world’ beyond the confines of a given science.92
Foucault contends that in this latter – diagnostic – sense structuralism is
a philosophy, as long as we acknowledge that philosophy no longer claims to
predicate what ‘exists eternally’ (a Weltanschaaung in Lacan’s sense) but rather
focuses on ‘what is today’.93 Unlike the interviewer, who suggests that philosophy
has been overcome by structuralist social sciences, which in applying to everyday
life now ‘walk on the streets’, Foucault more cautiously believes that philosophy
has evolved over the last century or so. It has indeed lost its privileged status with
respect to knowledge and science, yet, at the same time, it has also demonstrated
it can reconfigure itself as a more practical ‘activity engaged in several other
domains’.94 More to the point, the very foundation of structuralist sciences such
as linguistics and psychoanalysis required a ‘philosophical act’ (‘in discovering
the unconscious Freud carried out a philosophical act’95). Because of that one
could even argue that philosophy installed itself in the streets well before social
sciences started to walk on them.
As for Foucault’s own ‘extimate’ relation with structuralism, one thing clearly
emerges from this interview. In spite of his respect and appreciation for both
specific structuralist social sciences and generalized structuralist philosophy –
where, as just seen, the border between the two is ephemeral if not contradictory
(philosophy can reinvent itself as generalized structuralism yet the founding act
of specific structuralist social sciences is already a philosophical act) – Foucault’s
work should not be confused with them. His aim is admittedly different. He
started off from an analysis of the ‘history of ideas and the history of theories’
that was ‘structuralist in style’ (in this sense, as he says, he ‘speaks the language’
of structuralism), but this soon led him to a more ambitious enterprise, namely,
analysing in terms of structure the birth of structuralism itself.96
In what is arguably one of the most inspiring and consistent investigations of

structuralism available to date, Le périple structural (2002–08), Jean-Claude
Milner does not hesitate to state that Foucault ‘did not at all belong to it’.97 For
Milner, structuralism needs to be considered as both a ‘programme of research’
that presented a ‘coherent and unitary scientific paradigm’ and a ‘doxastic
movement’, which should be distinguished from the programme of research,
yet not underestimated.98 On the one hand, Foucault was – unintentionally –
involved in the doxastic movement; on the other, he cannot be inscribed in
the structuralist scientific paradigm, ‘neither directly nor indirectly’.99 At the
same time, Milner believes that precisely because of Foucault extraneousness to
structuralism, he ‘was able to determine with precision some [of its] distinctive
traits’, especially if not exclusively in Les mots et les choses.100 In approaching
the external ‘relations Foucault maintained with the structuralist paradigm, at
least for some time’,101 I think Milner also manages to shed light on Foucault’s
otherwise quite vague agenda in this regard (his self-professed ‘analysing in
terms of structure the birth of structuralism itself ’).
Milner’s general point is straightforward: the Foucault of Les mots et les
choses determines with precision some of the distinctive traits of structuralism
when he uses it to combat modern knowledge as a knowledge about man.102
Structuralism (Jakobson’s linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’s ethnology and Freud’s
psychoanalysis103) becomes a ‘necessary lever’ to complete what Foucault calls
the archaeology of human sciences.104 Most importantly, it can function as such
a lever because it displaces the modern question par excellence ‘What is man?’
onto a structural interrogation of – in Foucault’s own words – ‘the region that

generally makes possible knowledge about man’ (be it langue, kinship relations,
or the unconscious).105 Milner adds that, in this sense, the three key disciplines
of structuralism should be regarded, from Foucault’s own stance, as ‘counter-
human sciences’ (sciences contre-humaines).106
Returning to Foucault’s avowed intention – which Milner does not openly
tackle – we should therefore add that analysing in terms of structure the birth
of structuralism basically means two things: first, structuralism arises as ‘an
accomplishment and completion’107 of the human sciences that profoundly
contests them; second, this emergence (happening at the time when Foucault
is writing; recall that structuralism concerns ‘what is today’) can be analysed in
terms of structure precisely because ‘pure language’ as ‘exterior to man’108 is what,
in breaking with modernity, structuralism evidences as its most characteristic
trait.
More specifically, following closely and citing abundantly Les mots et les
choses, Milner shows how, for Foucault, the defining features of structuralism
are as follows: (a) linguistics founds a counter-human science of pure language;
(b) ethnology and psychoanalysis acquire their counter-human status in relation
to this formal model; (c) the formal model of language (structure as ‘an invariant
relation in a set of elements’) reopens the question of the alleged divide between
human sciences and mathematics; (d) the non-hierarchical rapprochement
between human and hard sciences problematizes the modern assumption that
human behaviours can be measured objectively.109
Milner fully agrees with Foucault here. However, he soon after disputes the
non-dialectical consequence Foucault draws from such a structuralist ‘death
of man’. Dialectics is for Milner a method of explanation. Structuralism aims
at replacing a method of explanation with another: modern human sciences
are replaced with what Milner calls an ‘extended Galileanism’ that unearths
the subject of science as irreducible to a scientific object.110 Structuralism is
in this sense dialectical. But for the same reason, Foucault is ultimately not a
structuralist, not even in Les mots et les choses; for Foucault, ‘the radical novelty
of [structuralism] did not amount to explaining differently; it amounted to
perceiving differently’.111
Milner does not develop his verdict. But we already know from ‘What Is an
Author?’ that the new ‘system of constraints’ – the structuralists’s structure as
rendered anonymous by Foucault – is there to be ‘experienced’ and felt. ‘Pure
language’ is in this sense, according to Les mots et les choses, ‘the order of positivities
exterior to man’.112 If, as Milner does not fail to remind us, for structuralism –
from Saussure to Lacan – (non-positive) ‘opposition and difference come first’113

in structure, then – going beyond Milner’s generous assessment – Foucault’s
analysis of the birth of structuralism in terms of structure after all claims to
decree the death of structure (as opposition and difference). Indicatively, in Les
mots et les choses, Foucault speaks of ‘counter-sciences’ [contre-sciences] and
not of ‘counter-human sciences’.114 Maybe it is here that we find the right key to
read Foucault as a vitalistic and on the whole anti-scientific post-structuralist –
according to him, structuralism can at most pave the way for a counter-science
of ‘perceiving differently’ that ultimately results into the indifferent perception of
life as a ‘positivity’.
Milner shows how, starting already from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969),
Foucault increasingly and explicitly distances himself from structuralism. The
‘epistemic solidarity’ between structuralism as a counter-human science and
archaeology as a counter-history turns into a separation.115 And we should add:
given the opposite ontological presuppositions at stake (materialist and vitalistic,
respectively), it could not have been otherwise. In the 1970s and ’80s, Foucault
continues to focus on the ‘effacement of man’ but, lacking the support of the
counter-human sciences, the archaeology of the knowledge of modernity gives
way to a more generalized programme of ‘systematic de-anthropologization of
knowledge’ – which according to Milner soon acquires the status of a distant
‘object of faith’.116 Significantly, in The Will to Knowledge (1976), the ‘lever’ of
psychoanalysis becomes itself the object of a ferocious critique in the context
of a long-term ‘history’ (of sexuality) that has lost its concrete archaeological
bearings and eventually appears to be speaking, or better murmuring, meta-
historically.
10
Lacan never replied to The Will to Knowledge. The last time he mentions Foucault
is in 1971 (in Seminar XIX). This silence is eloquent especially if we consider how
much he seemed to appreciate the Foucault who, by the latter’s own admission,
‘spoke the language’ of structuralism – that is, as Foucault puts it, his stylistically
structuralist analysis of the modern ‘history of ideas and theories’. In addition to
praising ‘What Is an Author?’ in Seminar XVI, in Seminars XII, XIII and XIX,
Lacan also commends Foucault’s treatment of the gaze in The Birth of the Clinic
and in Les mots et les choses, and of psychiatry in History of Madness.117
However, there is one specific and crucial aspect of Les mots et les choses
Lacan resolutely rejects. Unsurprisingly, it concerns Foucault’s emphasis on anti-
humanism – which applies a fortiori to the ‘systematic de-anthropologization
of knowledge’ of the later Foucault. In Seminar XIV, Lacan presents the ‘end of
humanism’ as ‘something accomplished long ago’, at a time that does not need
to be determined and most possibly is contemporary to the very appearance of
the varying idea of ‘man’ – ‘it does not date back to yesterday, the day before
yesterday, or the moment in which Michel Foucault articulates it, or even
myself [could articulate it].’118 In other words, expanding on Lacan’s remark,
humanism and anti-humanism have always been two sides of the same coin: the
Promethean myth of man as the resourceful measure of all things does not go
without man’s being left devoid of any natural quality, naked and unprotected;
Pico della Mirandola’s Renaissance humanism insists on this motif; and as
Lacan shows throughout his work, even the reassuring pastoral-humanist care
of Christianity (which Foucault misleadingly associates with psychoanalysis in
The Will to Knowledge) is continuously threatened from within by the abysmal
thought of the inappropriateness of man (and God) and the ‘filthy truth’119 of
incompleteness and insufficient enjoyment.
In Seminar XV, this same issue – Foucault’s empty stress on anti-humanism –
is then directly linked to the question of structuralism. Quite bluntly, we should
not ‘mak[e] vain gestures, I dare to say, like those of our friend Michel Foucault
performing the last rites for a humanism, so long dead that it has gone down the
river without anyone knowing where it has got to – as if it were still a question
and as if it was what was essential about structuralism. Let us pass on’.120 Lacan
marks here a profound disagreement but he equally stops it short of becoming
a sustained attack (‘let us pass on … ’). The reason for this rare reticence on
Lacan’s part, and his subsequent silence, is that structuralist psychoanalysis itself
requires a historical approach to address the role of knowledge (‘I don’t see how
the structural reference would misrecognise the dimension of history’121). Yet,
the archaeology of modern knowledge, which in many respects Foucault sets
up correctly, should not be carried out in the name of the ‘death of man’. The
end result of a structural analysis of the – historical – birth of structuralism is
not the rise of anti-humanism and the institution of ‘counter-sciences’ (which
in turn would have to be overcome by Foucault’s own fideistically ‘systematic
de-anthropologization of knowledge’). Quite on the contrary, it amounts to the
subject of psychoanalysis – the subject of the real that is neither humanist nor
anti-humanist – as the product of modern science.
11
For Lacan, the novel scientific experience of psychoanalysis is always concerned

with one major point of praxis: the traumatic dimension of human sexuality as ‘the
meaningless event, the accident, bad luck’122 from which the subject originates. This
real point stands as the ‘truth as cause’123 or, which is the same, the void of structure.
Lacan’s basic historical argument is that the subject of psychoanalysis as
concretely troubled by its sexuality is the subject of science insofar as it is not
sutured by science. In short, in modernity, the subject’s suturing of structure via
fantasy (which could be regarded as more effective than in traditional – mostly
religious – knowledge) directly reveals as its counterpart the unsutured subject
(in a possibly unprecedented way). In this sense, the subject of psychoanalysis
and the subject of science – as the subject of knowledge – are inextricable; modern
science manages not only to repress but also to foreclose truth as an impasse of
knowledge, yet truth virulently reappears in the psychoanalytic consulting room
through symptoms and the other formations of the unconscious.
That is to say, psychoanalysis is the historical product of the subject of science’s
own renewed quest for truth. To put it bluntly, it is the analysand who demands
to know the truth about his symptom, a formation that does not make any sense
for scientific knowledge. Here we grasp the twofold paradox of psychoanalysis’s
relation to science in its purest form: the ‘science of psychoanalysis’124 cannot be
equated with scientific knowledge. But it can nonetheless operate on its subject
only as the subject of science.125
Moving from such a point of praxis, Lacan can then infer that if science at last
does not manage to suture the subject, it is because there is no meta-language,
no totalizing truth of language; language and the symbolizations it creates
are structurally incomplete. In other words, the emergence of the differential
logic of the signifier is concomitant with the introduction of a void. This is the
only truth as evinced in the psychoanalytic setting; the theory of the subject’s
Spaltung between consciousness and the unconscious ensues from it. Lacan
hence understands the truth of incompleteness in causal terms: the ‘truth as
cause’ is nothing else than structure tout court. He in fact specifies that this
cause is not a mere ‘logical category’ but that which ‘caus[es] the whole effect’126:
in short, it is real, the real of structure, or better, structure as the real. And this is
valid both in the sense that the would-be cause belongs in an immanent way to
nature as the material dimension of the signifying structure – that is, of the logic
of sexuation – independently from the latter’s subjective significations, which
it will have caused, and in the more technical Lacanian sense for which the real
marks for the subject the – sexually – illogical limit of the logic of the signifier.
These two acceptations of the real are inseparable.
12
According to Milner, Lacan’s structuralism is eventually to be understood as

hyperstructuralism.127 That is to say, Lacan postulates that any structure must
have minimal properties that are themselves necessary. The subject is one of
these essential properties of any structure. While Milner does not tackle this
point openly, for Lacan, the subject is not only a necessary but also a sufficient
property of any structure.
Lacan’s hyperstructuralism originates from a deadlock of structuralism.
Milner calls it ‘the risk of the void’.128 I would rather define it as the risk of reifying
the void. In structuralism, beginning with structural linguistics, ‘difference is
given first, it is that which authorises properties’,129 which are then just derived
differential relations. But, as a consequence of this, difference cannot be posited as
the necessary and sufficient condition of structure, since it cannot be considered
to be a structural property in the first place. Instead, difference is the structure
tout-court, and structure thus remains undetermined. As Milner has it in his
unforgiving critique of Benveniste’s linguistics, in the end ‘structure in general does
not have any property’ but a paradoxical one, namely, the property of homology
‘for which every structure is homologous to another’.130 Structure in general as
devoid of any property is thus turned into the void as a positive property. Most
problematically, brought to this limit – that of homology – ‘structure founded
upon difference only encounters the indefinite repetition of the Same’.131
Lacan’s hyperstructuralism finds a way out of this predicament. It supplements
and corrects structural linguistics’ equation of structure with difference (which
ends up giving rise to the indefinite repetition of the Same) precisely by means of
the reciprocity of structure and subject; the subject is the necessary and sufficient
property of structure but it remains different from it. More precisely, structure
contains the subject through a relation of ‘external inclusion’.132
Milner discusses extensively what he calls the ‘minimalism’ of the structuralist
programme. With regard to its object, structural linguistics considers language as
a mere differential system of oppositions (and thus somehow empties language

out only to subsequently reify it as void); with regard to the properties of its
object, these are reduced to relations of difference that are entirely dependent on
the system itself (and thus cannot be thought as discrete properties).133
Lacan radicalizes this minimalism in an attempt to avert the disappearance
of the very notion of structure – that is, the transformation of difference into
sameness. From the standpoint of the object, he conceives the unconscious as a
minimal differential system, a mono-dimensional signifying chain that is always
in praesentia, or, as Milner clearly explains, can be ‘grasped at one glance, in one
instant’, without any need for stratification.134 Going beyond Saussure’s division
of language into two axes – syntagmatic and paradigmatic, actual and virtual
– this is precisely what Lacan tries to convey with the motto ‘there is no meta-
language’: the unconscious is not a hidden and ultimate entity that as such lends
itself to reification; rather, the unconscious perfectly coincides with its linguistic
formations (symptoms, jokes, slips of the tongue, etc.). The same kind of
extreme minimalism is then developed at the level of properties. Not only does
Lacan follow structural linguistics in reducing the properties of the elements of
the signifying chain – called signifiers – to differential relations induced by the
structure, but also acknowledge that, in doing so, the structure as such causes its
own properties. In other words, the signifying chain ‘does not have properties,
but makes them: it is action’, the unfolding of the chain.135
At this stage, Lacan’s radical structuralism – his radicalization of structural
minimalism – summons the subject as the determined structural property of
pure undetermined action and, as a result, turns into a hyperstructuralism.
The differential and active chain supports itself thanks to an external term, the
subject, which sustains the irreducibly oppositional nature (or non-identity with
itself) of each term of the chain. The subject thus becomes itself one of the terms
of the chain; inasmuch as, in the minimal chain, any hierarchy between system,
term and property has disappeared, the property of a term is itself a term.136
Milner is very accurate on this point: ‘The subject becomes an inherent property
of the chain […]: every signifying chain, as such, includes the subject; but the
subject himself can only be defined as the term Y in a ternary relation where X
is a signifier and Z is another signifier.’137 In Lacanian jargon, this means that the
subject is that which one signifier represents for another signifier.
But, again, the subject is externally included in the signifying chain. In
sustaining the non-identity with itself of each term of the chain, the subject also
concentrates its own non-identity with itself138; the subject vanishes as it emerges
and maps itself as such. On the one hand, this concentration of non-identity
allows the subject to internally imagine each term of the chain as identical with
itself. On the other hand, and with the same movement, the subject is externally
circumscribed as real.
Milner concludes that Saussure’s original disruption of classical metaphysics
and its principle of identity finds here new and fertile ontological applications.
‘The little episode of French structuralism’ Foucault belittles in a 1983 interview
(‘I have never been a structuralist […] I have never been a Freudian’139) still has
a philosophical future through psychoanalysis.
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.

James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 216–17 [henceforth WIA].
2 Ibid., 206.
3 See ibid., 221.
4 See ibid., 207–09.
5 Ibid., 207–09, 221.
6 Ibid., 207.
7 Ibid., 217.
8 Ibid., 219.
9 Ibid., 209.
10 Ibid., 219.
11 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 187
[henceforth SXVI].
12 Ibid., 188; emphases added.
13 Foucault, WIA, 210–11.
14 Ibid., 211; emphasis added.
15 Lacan, SXVI, 188.
16 Ibid., 187–89.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 194.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 193.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 194.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 224, 239.
25 Foucault, WIA, 220.

26 Ibid., 220–21.
27 Ibid., 221.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
31 Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon (London: Verso, 2009), 124.
32 Coincidentally, one of the few – if not the only – place in which Foucault fully
acknowledges the importance of Lacan’s theory of the subject is an interview he
gave two days after his death:
It seems to me that [Lacan’s] novelty was the following: we discovered that

philosophy and human sciences relied on a very traditional conception of the
human subject, and that it did not suffice to say either that the subject was
radically free or that it was determined by social conditions. We discovered
that it was necessary to free all that is hidden behind the apparently simple use
of the pronoun “I”. The subject: a complex, fragile thing, of which it is difficult
to talk, and without which we cannot talk.
Michel Foucault, ‘Lacan il “liberatore” della psicoanalisi (intervista con

J. Nobécourt)’, Corriere della sera 106, no. 212 (11 September 1981): 1.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.; emphases added.
36 Ibid., 221.
37 Ibid.
38 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 537.
39 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 5.
40 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 1999),
78–79, 77, translation modified. The English translation of Deleuze’s book is
highly unreliable and philosophically very confusing. Suffice it to mention the
sentence that immediately follows the passage I have cited: ‘la vie n’est-elle pas
cette capacité de resister de la force?’ is translated as ‘is not life this capacity to
resist force?’ where, on the contrary, what is clearly at stake is life as a force that
resists.
41 Limiting myself to the most successful and consistent of these biopolitical
ontologies, I would argue that, mutatis mutandis, Agamben, Esposito and Negri
all share and support Foucault’s vitalism, especially as mediated via Deleuze. For a
critique of Agamben’s and Esposito’s vitalism, see Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda,
‘The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism’, Angelaki
16, no. 3 (2011): 163–80 and Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘The Bio-Theo-Politics of Birth’,
Angelaki 16, no. 3 (2011): 101–15.
42 Foucault, WIA, 222; emphasis added, translation modified. ‘The inside as an
operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an
inside which is merely the fold of the outside.’ Deleuze, Foucault, 81.
44 Ibid., 206.
46 I have elsewhere argued that, starting from such an absolute or pure difference,
one can develop a Lacan-oriented, and materialist, philosophy of nature based on
what I call ‘pure difference as in-difference’, or ‘the point of in-difference’. To put it
very simply, this is the point of the contingent emergence of (linguistic) difference,
and the subject with it, out of natural indifference. (Linguistic) difference both is
in a strong ontological sense (against Foucault, it is not an ideological product to
be reabsorbed by the indifference of life) and remains indifferent (against Deleuze,
linguistic difference does not refer to a Difference that differentiates itself but to
itself as indifference). See Lorenzo Chiesa, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), especially Chapter 2.5; Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Exalted
Obscenity and the Lawyer of God’, in Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis,
eds. B. Nedoh and A. Zevnik (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016),
141–62.
47 See Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ in Dits et écrits, tome I (Paris:
Gallimard, 2001), no. 69 [henceforth QEA].
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 30. On the reciprocity of subject and structure in Lacan, see Lorenzo Chiesa,
Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007), especially Chapter 4. On the question of the subject’s existence –
which Lacan deems to be inextricably bound to in-existence and ex-sistence – see
Chiesa, The Not-Two, especially Chapter 4 and the Conclusion.
53 See Lacan, SXVI, 72–3, 20–1, 66.
54 Ibid., 317, 48, 66, 21.
55 Ibid., 22, 23, 21, 160, 318, 344. On this last passage, see also Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Wounds
of Testimony and Martyrs of the Unconscious’, in Lacan and Philosophy: The New
Generation, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa (Melbourne: re.press, 2014), especially 174–76, 182.
56 Lacan, SXVI, 60, 72, 344.
57 Ibid., 301, 77. For a treatment of how this ‘extimate’ topology of the subject
corresponds to the topology of enjoyment as a relation to the body the subject
accesses through an ‘exclusion that is at the same time an inclusion’ (ibid., 114), see
Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘The Trojan Castle: Lacan on All-Knowledge, Surplus-Enjoyment,

and the Big Other’ (unpublished).
58 Lacan, SXVI, 11–12.
59 On Deleuze and structuralism, see ibid., 218–20, 225–27. On Marx and
structuralism, with or without Althusser, see ibid., 16–17, 29–30, 45–46, 64–65.
60 Ibid., 12.
61 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre XIX… ou pire (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 82.
62 Ibid.
63 On how structure as real corresponds to 0 and 1, or what Lacan calls the ‘bifidity’ of
the one, see the Conclusion of The Not-Two.
64 Lacan, SXVI, 13.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.; emphasis added.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 291.
70 Ibid., 13.
71 Ibid., 67.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 68, 31.
74 Ibid., 31.
75 Ibid., 30.
76 On the real as both il-logical and material, see Chiesa, The Not-Two, especially
Chapter 2.
78 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XV, The Psychoanalytic Act (unpublished), lesson of 13
March 1968 [henceforth SXV].
79 Lacan, SXVI, 67.
81 Ibid., 83.
82 Ibid., 66.
83 Ibid., 13, 66. I follow here the transcription of Seminar XVI provided by the École
Lacanienne de Psychanalyse. See http://staferla.free.fr/S16/S16%20D’UN%20
AUTRE… %20.pdf. The official edition of the seminar opts for ‘se sert’ (‘uses’; ‘[…]
but which the real uses […]’), which is unlikely, especially given that, as seen, Lacan
speaks also of a ‘serrage’ in the same context.
84 This reading also explains an otherwise enigmatic, but very important, statement
Lacan makes shortly after: ‘It is there that we locate the gap where we have to
interrogate what produces our [psychoanalytic] experience, which is something
other, and goes much further, than the being that speaks insofar as it is human.’
Lacan, SXVI, 66–67; emphasis added. One can here appreciate the proximity
between Lacan’s theory of the subject and Badiou’s theory of the evental subject as
distinct from the human animal.
85 Ibid., 31. On how this dictum should itself be complicated when considering the co-
implication of structure and subject in nature, see Chiesa, The Not-Two, Chapter 2.5.
86 Foucault, QEA.
87 The term ‘structure’, used in different ways, actually appears around two-hundred
times in Les mots et les choses. It is even the title of the third section of Chapter 5.
88 Foucault, QEA.
89 Michel Foucault, ‘La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est
“aujourd’hui”’ (entretien avec G Fellous), La Presse de Tunisie (12 April 1967)
[republished in Foucault, Dits et écrits, tome I, no. 47].
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
97 Jean-Claude Milner, Le périple structural. Figures et paradigme (Lagrasse: Verdier,
2002–2008), 9 [henceforth PS].
98 Ibid., 7–9.
99 Ibid., 9.
100 Ibid., 10.
101 Ibid.
102 See ibid., 250.
103 ‘Psychoanalysis is referred to Freud, but we cannot deny that the terms Desire, Law,
and “Law-Language (at once speech and system of speech)” come from Lacan’.
Ibid., 238.
104 Ibid., 250.
105 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2001), 412; translation
modified [henceforth OT].
106 Milner, PS, 242.
107 Ibid., 241.
108 Foucault, OT, 415.
109 See ibid., 415–17.
110 For an extensive treatment of this issue, see Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Hyperstructuralism’s
Necessity of Contingency’, S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian
Ideology Critique 3 (2010): 159–77.
111 Milner, PS, 246; emphasis added.
112 Foucault, OT, 415; emphasis added.

113 Milner, PS, 259–60.
114 Foucault, OT, 414, 416. Milner acknowledges this but he then reconciles the two
phrases – in favour of science – far too quickly. See PS, 342.
116 Ibid., 260. Deleuze arrives at a similar conclusion about the late Foucault’s
‘systematic de-anthropologization’, although he gives it an opposite (positive) value:
the emblem of this programme would be ‘The Use of Pleasure’s searing phrase: “to
get free of oneself ”’. Deleuze, Foucault, 79.
117 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XII, Problèmes cruciaux de la psychanalyse (unpublished),
lessons of 31 March and 7 April 1965; Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIII, L’objet de la
psychanalyse (unpublished), lessons of 27 April, 4 May, 18 May, 15 June 1966;
Jacques Lacan, Je parle aux murs (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 14.
118 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV, Logique du fantasme (unpublished), lesson of 11
January 1967.
119 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, trans. Bruce Fink
(London: Norton, 1999), 107.
120 Lacan, SXV, lesson of 6 March 1968.
122 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (London:
Vintage, 1998), 69.
123 Jacques Lacan, ‘Science and Truth’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (London: Norton,
2006), 738–41.
125 See ibid., 729.
126 Ibid., 738.
127 Milner, PS, 211–33. What follows has been discussed at length from a slightly
different perspective in Chiesa, ‘Hyperstructuralism’s Necessity of Contingency’.
129 Jean-Claude Milner, L’Œuvre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 99 [henceforth OC].
130 Milner, PS, 343–44.
131 Ibid., 344.
132 Milner, OC, 105.
133 Ibid., 96–98.
134 Milner, PS, 216–17.
135 Milner, OC, 103.
136 Milner, PS, 228–29.
137 Milner, OC, 105–06.
138 Milner, PS, 229; emphasis added.
139 Michel Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’, in Dits et écrits, tome IV,
no. 330 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
Bibliography
Badiou, Alain. Pocket Pantheon. London: Verso, 2009.

Chiesa, Lorenzo. ‘Hyperstructuralism’s Necessity of Contingency’. S: Journal of the Jan
Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 3 (2010): 159–77.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. ‘The Bio-Theo-Politics of Birth’. Angelaki 16, no. 3 (2011): 101–15.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. ‘Wounds of Testimony and Martyrs of the Unconscious’. In Lacan and
Philosophy: The New Generation, edited by Lorenzo Chiesa, 165–91. Melbourne: re.
press, 2014.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. ‘Exalted Obscenity and the Lawyer of God’. In Lacan and Deleuze:
A Disjunctive Synthesis, edited by B. Nedoh and A. Zevnik, 141–62. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2016a.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2016b.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. ‘The Trojan Castle: Lacan on All-Knowledge, Surplus-Enjoyment, and
the Big Other’ (unpublished).
Chiesa, Lorenzo and Frank Ruda. ‘The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s
Linguistic Vitalism’. Angelaki 16, no. 3 (2011): 163–80.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. London: Continuum, 1999.
Foucault, Michel. ‘La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est
‘aujourd’hui’’ (entretien avec G Fellous), La Presse de Tunisie (12 April 1967)
[republished in Foucault, Dits et écrits, tome I, no. 47].
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by
Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Lacan il ‘liberatore’ della psicoanalisi (intervista con J. Nobécourt)’.
Corriere della sera 106, no. 212 (11 September 1981): 1.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’. In Dits et écrits, tome IV, no.
330. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an Author?’. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited
by James D. Faubion, 205–22. New York: The New Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 2001a.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’. In Dits et écrits, tome I, no. 69. Paris:
Gallimard, 2001b.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XII, Problèmes cruciaux de la psychanalyse (unpublished),
lessons of 31 March and 7 April 1965.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XIII, L’objet de la psychanalyse (unpublished), lessons of 27
April, 4 May, 18 May, 15 June 1966.
Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XIV, Logique du fantasme (unpublished), lesson of 11 January
1967.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XV, The Psychoanalytic Act (unpublished), lesson of

13 March 1968.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. London: Vintage,
1998.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore. Translated by Bruce
Fink. London: Norton, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. ‘Science and Truth’. In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 726–45. London:
Norton, 2007.
Lacan, Jacques. Je parle aux murs. Paris: Seuil, 2011a.
Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire. Livre XIX … ou pire. Paris: Seuil, 2011b.
Milner, Jean-Claude. L’Œuvre claire. Paris: Seuil, 1995.
Milner, Jean-Claude. Le périple structural. Figures et paradigme. Lagrasse: Verdier,
2002–2008.
3
Better Failures: Science and Psychoanalysis

Samo Tomšič
Since his dramatic U-turn in 1976, Foucault’s work has been treated almost
exclusively as a radical critique of psychoanalysis. The Will to Knowledge, the
controversial first volume of The History of Sexuality, was conceived as an
‘archaeology of psychoanalysis’,1 which was supposed to demystify Freud and
question the revolutionary character of his work: Foucault wanted to prove the
historical continuity between the Freudian method and Christian confession
techniques and at the same time argued that psychoanalysis participates in
the modern regime of biopower. One can hardly overlook that even before
this development Foucault kept an ambiguous relation to psychoanalysis. It
should therefore not come as a surprise that his last archaeological attempt
outlines a historical framework in which he could insert the negative image of
psychoanalysis that had been circulating in the French intellectual milieu after
May 1968.2
In a 1977 conversation with a circle of Lacan’s younger students, Foucault
admitted that The Will to Knowledge was conceived as an experiment, wager
or deliberate exaggeration.3 Indeed, the book can be read as a manifesto that
tendentiously blows up the negative image of psychoanalysis in order to test
to which extent the Freudian project (unknowingly) participates in the nexus
of science and capitalism. This modern regime of power for which Foucault
introduced expressions such as ‘power-knowledge’, ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’
surely stretches its tentacles into psychoanalysis. It would be easy to pinpoint
a whole post-Freudian line that perfectly corresponds to Foucault’s criticism.
Freud’s name, concepts and work remain a battleground in which Lacan’s return
to Freud only partially succeeded in reclaiming the ‘cutting edge of his discovery’,4
the philosophically, epistemologically and politically subversive potential of his
theory and practice.
But Foucault’s 1976 quarrel with psychoanalysis blurs a shared effort in his
and Lacan’s work. On the one hand, they both elaborate a sobering critique of
scientific discourse, which exposes its participation in sustaining the capitalist
power-mechanisms. By focusing his critique of biopower on scientia sexualis,
Foucault seemed to have upgraded his earlier notion of power-knowledge
with a fundamental psychoanalytic insight: the libidinal anchoring of power-
relations, the nexus of power-enjoyment.5 But this move stumbled upon a
major problem which had lasting consequences for Foucault’s final project: in
difference to power-knowledge, which stands for a specifically capitalist form
of power and hence implies a capitalist organization of ‘libidinal economy’,
the link between enjoyment and power is anything but a capitalist invention.
Differently put, power-knowledge is a modern form of power-enjoyment, in
which knowledge assumes the central status among the means of production,
or in Lacan’s wording, knowledge becomes the ‘means of enjoyment’.6 In order
to continue writing his history of sexuality, which was, again, from the very
offset conceived around the problem of libidinal anchoring of power-relations,
Foucault had to descend from scientific and capitalist modernity to the way the
link between organization of enjoyment (libidinal economy) and production
of political subjectivity was, on his account, organized in Greek and Roman
Antiquity.7
Lacan did not have any comparable theoretical problems, since his work
remained consistently focused on the historical discontinuity brought about by
the modern nexus of scientific knowledge and capitalist mode of production.
He examined the distinctive features of the capitalist libidinal economy in his
Seminars D’un autre à l’autre (1968–69) and The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
(1969–70), where he recognized in the quantification of enjoyment the main
capitalist achievement in libidinal-economic matters:
Something changed in the master’s discourse at a certain point in history. We are

not going to break our backs finding out if it was because of Luther, or Calvin, or
some unknown traffic of ships around Genoa, or in the Mediterranean Sea, or
anywhere else, for the important point is that on a certain day surplus enjoyment
became calculable, could be counted, totalized. This is where what is called the
accumulation of capital begins.8
In difference to Max Weber’s search for the origin of capitalism in protestant

ethics or Fernand Braudel’s extensive historical research on the early modern
innovations in the organization of trade,9 Lacan argues that the key factor for
the efficiency of capitalism lies in its integration of enjoyment in the regime of
Better Failures: Science and Psychoanalysis 83
value: the overlapping of exchange value with something that Lacan elsewhere
called ‘value of enjoyment’. On the level of the subject, the main epistemological
and political achievement of the modern regime of knowledge thus consists
in organizing social economy and libidinal economy in a homologous way.
Only under the epistemic conditions introduced by scientific modernity
could enjoyment become countable, quantifiable and eventually obtain the
socioeconomic expression in surplus value, this enjoyment of the capitalist
system.
Despite all the differences, Foucault and Lacan both strived for a critical
epistemology, which would highlight the problematic aspects of the inclusion of
natural sciences, life sciences and even human sciences in the capitalist regime
of power. Or, this critical orientation was not meant to promote some superficial
anti-scientism but instead continued to affirm the subversive and emancipatory
potentials of the epistemic paradigm introduced by classical science (sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries). These potentials were mobilized less by the
natural sciences themselves than by what Foucault brought together under
the category of ‘human counter-sciences’: linguistics, ethnology and, precisely,
psychoanalysis. In his reading of Foucault’s The Order of Things, Jean-Claude
Milner proposed to supplement Foucault’s expression with ‘counter-human
sciences’.10 An important reason for this verbal turn lies in an implicit thesis
that traverses various takes in French epistemology, from which Lacan and
Foucault took their departure: namely that scientific modernity accomplishes
a radical depsychologization of knowledge by abolishing the central position of
conscious human observer from the production of knowledge – a consequence
of modern science first observed by Alexandre Koyré in relation to classical
physics. Physics no longer describes the world of appearances; its object deviates
from what appears to the human eye and is experimentally (re)constructed
by means of technological apparatus and formal language. With this shift,
scientific knowledge is no longer grounded on inefficient subjective illusions
(e.g. harmony, regularity and stability) but rather on efficient objective fictions
(e.g. force, structure, code).
Foucault’s thesis in The Order of Things – and in this respect his epistemological
perspective is indeed compatible with Lacan’s – was that psychoanalysis, together
with ethnology and linguistics, extends or rather repeats the rejection of man
in the field of human objects: life, work and language are depsychologized but
not desubjectivized. By rejecting the figure of man, linguistics, ethnology and
psychoanalysis, too, removed the centralizing human perspective from their
objects, which now appear in their absolute autonomy and instability, since they
lost the anchoring point to which other sciences still related them.11 With the
rejection in question, the modern regime of knowledge erased the human face,
thereby creating a void, which enables a new mode of thought. As Foucault puts
it, ‘this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must
be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in
which it is once more possible to think.’12 This famous ending of The Order of
Things openly acknowledges the decentralization of thinking achieved by the
‘counter-human sciences’ and resonates well with Lacan’s anti-psychological
notion of the subject (even if this resonance was unintended). The death of man
and the discovery of the subject of the unconscious indeed imply a new topology
of thought and language, a ‘new transcendental aesthetics’.13
The three critical sciences that Foucault narrows down to their structuralist
guise hence replace man as fixing point with the subject as unstable and conflictual
structural effect.14 In what follows, I want to focus on a particular form of this
instability that Foucault and Lacan examined in a broader epistemological
context: failure and error. By doing so, I would like to draw attention to the
minimal common nominator that binds Foucault’s and Lacan’s effort to pursue
the critical orientation in epistemology, even if the direction, in which they took
it, contains a series of differences.
The psychoanalytic epistemology of failure
Against the positivist regime, where the opposition of truth and error brings the
former down to the impoverished idea of adequate relation and excludes error
from knowledge, Foucault and Lacan recognize in error, failure and irregularity
a crucial dimension of truth, which is closely related to the production of
subjectivity. For both, the subject enters the stage as a conflictual figure.
Recall the Foucauldian preoccupation with ‘the abnormal’, which assumes
the ambiguous limit position of objects and abjects of knowledge. Due to
this conflictuality and ambiguity, the subject stands for a figure of negativity,
in which modern power-knowledge encounters both its limit and the driving
force of production and accumulation of normative knowledge. The epistemic
economy thus always contains the point of internal exclusion that crystallizes
in the exploited ‘abnormal’ subject. Be it madman or prisoner, woman or child,
in these figures Foucault repeatedly recognizes the personifications of the same
antagonistic subjectivity that provides the insight into the constitution and
reproduction as well as in contradiction of modern mechanisms of domination
and subjection, discipline and punish. Foucault treats these subjects as epistemic
symptoms, which always-already assume the status of social symptoms and
reveal the fantasmatic status of normative subjectivity fabricated by the
discursive machine of power-knowledge. Hence the double role of the subject
in critical epistemology: on the one hand, it names a conflictual point where
an inconvenient truth of power-relations can be revealed, the link between
production of knowledge and exploitation of subjectivity; and on the other
hand, it stands for a structural place where resistance can be articulated, and in
this respect the subject can also be understood as a failure of the system. This
double function of the subject was most systematically revealed, explored and
mobilized by psychoanalysis, so it should not be surprising that Foucault in his
final years returned to the articulation of subject and truth (as well as to the risks
every subject has to take when speaking the truth).15
In his critical and clinical perspectives, Lacan constantly insisted that speech
and other forms of action contain the knot of the subject, truth and failure. In
this respect, psychoanalysis consequently pursues the massively quoted lines
from Worstward Ho, which indicate Beckett’s implicit epistemology: ‘All of
old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again.
Fail better.’16 Repetition of failure stands for an antagonistic link between the
established order and a subjective attempt in producing the new – of course this
holds only under the condition that this failure qualifies as ‘better’. Although
one can easily provide a pessimistic reading of the formula – ‘every attempt in
breaking with the existing order ends up in a fall-back’ – Beckett conceives the
process of transformation through the combination of repetition, failure and
displacement. The lines indicate a possible link between failure and production
and, more concretely, reject the view according to which failure and more broadly
the register of error cannot have any transformative consequences whatsoever.
‘Failing better’ – an imperative that Beckett addresses to the subject, and this
somewhat successfully resonates with the tasks of psychoanalysis – therefore does
not lead to the fetishization of failure. The predicate ‘better’ sufficiently indicates
that Beckett does not speak of failure for the sake of failure. In a structure or
situation that makes the opposition between success and failure inoperative,
invalid or insufficient, a subject can either fail or fail better, but he or she must
engage in a repetition, which also means a process of work, in order to bring
about a gradual change. The notion and the imperative of ‘better failure’ rejects
the ideology of progress and replaces it with the idea of displacement, which is
produced in a conflictual process that the subject can never master alone. Put
differently, the process has no master, merely a subject or an alliance of subjects
that suffer under the existing order. The wager of psychoanalysis from the very
offset concerned the possibility of this ‘damaged’ subjectivity to act back onto
the structure that produced it. For this precise reason, psychoanalysis radically
breaks with various psychotherapies that always target personal success without
addressing the complex issue of structural change or the imperative of working-
through (work on structure and work against structural resistance).17
Alexandre Koyré claimed something similar about modern science, thereby
rejecting the predominant analytical and positivist epistemologies. Rather than
being a victorious progress in cognition, science is a conflictual process anything
but immune to the production of errors. The scientist is no ‘subject supposed to
know’ (Lacan) but rather a subject of the ongoing epistemic struggle of overcoming
internal (psychological) and external (social) obstacles and resistances. Error
and failure as inherent components of theory (Popper called this falsifiability18)
trigger new orientations in thinking. From Koyré’s perspective modern science,
whose object and process is unstable and untotalizable, is indeed a series of
‘better failures’.19 No theory succeeds in producing an immanent (self-)closure,
but precisely in this failure thinking encounters a real.
At this point, it is worth recalling Lacan’s opening lines from Television, which
thematize the logic of error and failure in a way that is surprisingly compatible
with Beckett: ‘I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no
way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through
this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.’20 Instead of hearing
Lacan profess some flat wisdom about the inaccessibility of truth, one should
focus on the association of truth, enunciation and impossibility. Words have
failure inscribed in their very essence. They fail the subject in saying ‘the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, but precisely because of this failure
something like psychoanalysis is possible. The failure of words must be repeated
and this repetition is a crucial component of the analytic cure. Psychoanalysis
mobilizes the failure of words, not in order to offer the analysands a more
accurate description of their psychopathological complexes, but in order to
manipulate the structural antagonism at stake in the subject’s history by means
of fictions (signifiers). The impossibility that the failure of words attests to makes
of truth more than an adequate relation between words and things, symbolic
and real, fiction and trauma. It makes of truth itself something that stands for
the inclusion of the symbolic into the real (given that Lacan, following Koyré,
defines the real as impossible). Truth partakes of (the impossibility of) the real
only insofar as the enunciation of all truth fails again and again, in other words,
insofar as it repeatedly turns out impossible to eliminate conflictuality from the
register of truth (the symbolic order). Lacan, too, does not fetishize the failure of
words. Instead, he addresses the subject with an imperative that resonates with
Beckett: because words fail one has to say well. ‘Well-saying’ (bien-dire) is Lacan’s
version of Beckett’s ‘better failing’, and one could conclude that an important
task of psychoanalysis is to assist the subject in learning how to fail better (rather
than simply fail).
That truth cannot be said all clearly does not imply that truth cannot be said
at all. Would Lacan say the latter, he would inevitably end up in the fetishization
of failure or in Wittgenstein’s imperative of silence (which is no less an extreme
form of fetishization of linguistic failures). For Lacan the impossibility of truth
is intimately linked with its ‘half-saying’ (mi-dire), which is a driving force of
linguistic production and which at the same time exposes that speaking or
enunciation is immanently traversed by an ongoing conflict or tension (we
can again think of Freud’s thematization of resistance and censorship during
the process of analysis). In order for psychoanalysis to be possible, the illusion
of ‘all truth’ (truth as stable and adequate relation, truth without conflictuality)
must be abandoned. ‘Truth holding on to the real’ stands for a conflictual non-
relation and its emergence from the failure of words brings an encounter of
two impossibilities into the game: the impossibility of the symbolic and the
impossibility of the real. Every time a discourse confronts its own impossibility,
its inclusion or perhaps better intrusion, into the real is demonstrated. This
demonstration is always accompanied by a demonstration of the impossible
character of the real itself, namely that it does not form a totalizable order, in
relation to which one could establish a stable, meaningful and adequate symbolic
link. For psychoanalysis, the subject of the unconscious results from this double
demonstration, which is why Lacan occasionally described it as a ‘response of
the real’.21
The failure of words and the psychoanalytic mobilization of discursive errors,
the imperfection of language, thus contain a most basic epistemological lesson:
the decentralized space of thought and language. In contrast, the phenomenon
of resistance and censorship, which was so crucial for Freud, strives towards the
opposite spatialization. From this perspective, one should understand Lacan’s
somewhat enigmatic claim that ‘the universe is the place where, due to the fact
of speaking, everything succeeds’.22 The English translation omits an important
nuance in the French original: l’univers, c’est là où, de dire, tout réussit,23 the
universe is where, of saying, everything succeeds; or to unfold Lacan’s remark a
bit further, the universe emerges as a specific effect of enunciation only when all
saying is marked by a certain success. Lacan uses the term ‘universe’ for describing
a structural order, in which error is presumably removed from thought and

language, or differently, in which language appears to be entirely disciplined
and normalized. All saying succeeds or, inversely, saying succeeds in producing
the All. Lacan thus identifies here ‘universe’ with ‘cosmos’, the closed, totalized,
finite world of premodern physics and astronomy.24 This success of enunciation
stands for rejecting the impossible from language and hence for producing a
fantasmatic structural closure that leaves no room for incompleteness, dynamic
or transformation. ‘Universe’ stands for a static epistemic and structural order,
from which negativity is presumably eliminated. In contrast, the enunciation
in psychoanalysis and mathematical formalization in modern natural sciences
stand for a specific organization of the impossibility that comes in pair with the
failure in saying ‘all’.
Both Beckett and Lacan focus on the tension exposed in the act of failure. This
is what lapsus, inhibition, anxiety and other forms of failure, these minuscule
and apparently insignificant disruptions of conscious, consistent and articulated
discourse demonstrate for psychoanalysis. Freud recognized that the formations
of the unconscious (dream, lapsus, symptom etc.) contain a repetition of failure
and should therefore be regarded as compromise formations, which encompass
reproduction of the established order and subjective resistance against the
exploitative character of this order. All these unconscious formations are signs of
an ongoing conflict in the mental apparatus testifying to the split of unconscious
work that is channelled or invested in both directions: repetition of the same
and disruption of repetition. When psychoanalysis addresses the analysand
with the imperative of working-through it strives to replace the existing split
of unconscious work with a new antagonism, to move from the analysands’
repetition of one and the same failure, which merely testifies that they remain
stuck in the position of impotency, to something like a ‘better failure’, which
‘elevates’ them to the position of impossibility. Repetition of failures thus must
not become self-sufficient. As others have already noted in relation to Beckett, the
accent is on failing better rather than on failing better. Failure obliges the subject
to try again and, through this disruptive repetition, to force a displacement.
Beckett in this respect abolishes the fantasy of singular interruptions or radical
events, which would change reality out of the blue, and instead focuses on the
process of work. This is Beckett’s realism, which is all the more compatible with
Freud’s analysis of resistance and the organization of work in analysis.25
The efficiency of a failed act can only be estimated retrospectively, with
respect to the consequences it produces, and these consequences can be
measured in accordance with the extent to which they succeed in shaking the
structural resistance of the established order and trigger a transformative work

process. In the end, modern science and psychoanalysis but also emancipatory
politics come down to the juncture of repetition and failure, brought together
in the process of working-through, as precondition for producing the new. In
premodernity, the reproduction of the same (the closed world of Aristotelian and
Ptolomeian science, the ancient and the medieval Master and the metaphysical
soul) stands for an order that Lacan targets with his critique of the ‘universe of
enunciation’ in which discourse succeeds in keeping negativity at the margins
of the epistemic, political and subjective order. Modern science, psychoanalysis
and emancipatory politics, on the other hand, strive to fail better because their
repeated efforts are grounded on the mobilization of the conflict between the
structural tendencies of repression and the return of the repressed. When
Lacan claimed that the unconscious is politics, he targeted the logic that Freud
uncovered as constitutive of the unconscious: the redoubling of repression, the
simultaneity of repression and the return of the repressed. This does not mean
that this structure does not apply to premodernity; however, the important
difference lies in the fact that in the modern epistemo-political regime the
return of the repressed assumed an organized form rather than being reduced to
sporadic outbursts that disturb – rather than disrupt – the established epistemo-
political order. Modern science and psychoanalysis are such organized form of
the return of the repressed – to which it must be added that they clearly do
not stand for some kind of metapositions, but rather take place at the core of
the conflict that marks the modern social mode of production and subjective
mode of enjoyment, and reproduce the same tension in the midst of their fields.
They are themselves terrains, which need to be reclaimed again and again for
emancipatory purposes.
Lacan at some point drew attention to the problematic epistemological
idea, according to which the real is something that functions flawlessly. It is
this appearance of functioning that makes the real indistinguishable from the
semblance: repetition of the same or success in saying, which is expressed in
another well-known Lacanian formula, ‘the real always returns to the same
place’. Lacan describes this ‘same place’ as ‘the place of the semblance’.26 The
most obvious example of such repetitive return would be the circular movement
of planets. Modern science revealed the fantasmatic status of this regularity
and replaced it with a structure in which the primacy of places (semblances) is
overturned: ‘Man (…) was far from ever having been shaken by the discovery
that the earth is not at the center. He had no problem substituting the sun for
it. Of course it is now obvious that the sun is not a center either, and that it is
strolling through a space whose status is ever more precariously established.’27

Lacan then adds that the true revolution in science happened in the moment
when turning was equated with falling, regular movement with accelerated
movement, which finally unfolded the consequences of the abolition not only of
the central place, but of the stabilizing function of places altogether. Premodern
science was anchored in the imaginary, its epistemic elements such as the
qualitative difference of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ forms, regular movement of
planets and constellations,28 as well as hierarchical and harmonious order of the
cosmic spheres all testify to this false imaginary stabilization of the real.
Lacan somewhat surprisingly included repetition among the fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis – next to the unconscious, transference and the drive
– and one could indeed argue that repetition in conjunction with failure or qua
repetition of failure clarifies the other three. For transference, Freud already stated
that it is a specific bond between the analysand and the analyst that contains
repetition of psychopathological complexes and traumatic scenes under the
presumably artificial conditions of analysis. The analysands take the figure of the
analyst as some kind of screen-surface on which they project their inner world
and where this world can be confronted in externalized conditions. But there is
a crucial dimension of failure involved in this scenario, for the analyst does not
simply respond to the analysand’s demands: he does not conform to the image to
which the analysand’s transference struggles to reduce him. The imperative that
the analytic situation addresses to the analyst consists in constant withdrawal
from transference, its mobilization in order to keep the analysand engaged in
the process of analytic work and notably in the effort of repeatedly overcoming
resistance against analysis. A ‘better failure’ that repeats itself in psychoanalysis
could be located in this comedy of transference and withdrawal, which is crucial
for bringing a clinical case forward. If the analyst indeed identifies with the
image to which the analysand strives to reduce him and adopts the position of a
‘subject supposed to know’, then both cases lead to a fiasco and the failed analysis
falls in the regime of the worse rather than the better.
The drive, too, comes down to a repetition of failure. Lacan points out this
connection by distinguishing between the aim and the goal of the drive:
[L]et us concentrate on this term but, and on the two meanings it may present.
In order to differentiate them, I have chosen to notate them here in a language in
which they are particularly expressive, English. When you entrust someone with
a mission, the aim is not what he brings back, but the itinerary he must take.
The aim is the way taken. The French word but may be translated by another
word in English, goal. In archery, the goal is not the but either, it is not the bird
you shoot, it is having scored a hit and thereby attained your but. If the drive
may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point of view of a biological
totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is
because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit.29
The gap between the aim and goal shows that the drive is a failed, or rather,
an introverted teleology, which makes of the pleasure that accompanies the
satisfaction of needs an object of demand. The drive demands pleasure qua
object, pleasure for the sake of pleasure, as the ultimate object of satisfaction. In
comparison to the satisfaction of needs, one could say that the drive repeats the
failure of satisfaction, the impossibility of ultimate satisfaction, which already
characterizes the need. This is why the drive makes of the act of satisfaction an
independent goal, an economization of failure through its repetition. This, if
anything, is a fetishization of failure to the extent that it becomes a self-sufficient
goal and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Finally, there is the repetition inscribed in the very notion of the unconscious.
Rather than speaking of some positive mental substance (res cogitans), Freud
conceived the unconscious as a specific form of repetitive disruption of
articulated discourse. This was one aspect of his quarrel with Jung, who regressed
from the unconscious as a form of repetition in thinking to the unconscious as
a reservoir of transhistoric cultural sediments and archetypes. For Freud, the
unconscious does not describe an accumulative regime of transhistoric and
transcultural knowledge, which would give meaning to particular complexes
and traumatisms, but instead stands for a dynamic and conflictual form of
knowledge. The unconscious consists entirely in the repetition of cracks,
deadlocks and conflicts, which throw thinking out of joint. Lacan brought
this to the point in his later teaching, when he translated the German das
Unbewusste, the unconscious, with the French homophony une bévue, meaning
precisely error, mistake, overlooking, for which Lacan specifies that it stands for
‘the very texture of the unconscious’.30 The materiality (texture, tissue, fabric)
of the unconscious resides in the combination of the chains of signifiers, their
interruptions through the ongoing condensations and displacements, and the
manifestations of these errors or perturbations in the speaking body. The two
dynamic operations, condensation and displacement, are the main achievements
of the unconscious work that produces ‘chains of joui-sens’,31 signifying chains
containing the pole of sense and the pole of enjoyment.32
Given the link between repetition and error in the three fundamental
concepts, one can better understand Lacan’s later idea that reinvention of
psychoanalysis is among the central tasks of every particular analysis.33
Reinvention stands for inventive repetition of the singularity of psychoanalysis.

At first sight, Lacan seems to turn his back on his previous engagement with
the transmission of psychoanalysis by means of mathematical formalization.
Transmission would mean first and foremost communication of accumulated
knowledge; however, this knowledge is anything but a secured and
unchangeable conglomerate that could be passed on as granted and taken at
its face value. In psychoanalysis, it would be more appropriate to speak of the
transmission of deadlocks, which serve other or future analysts as lessons in
failure and enable them to draw the necessary lessons in how to ‘fail better’.
Such is the case with Freud’s case studies, which are full of reports of patients’
resistance against psychoanalysis, failed analytic interpretations, the struggle
of overcoming the subjective and social circumstances that served as obstacles
to the progress of treatment and so on. This does not imply that the only thing
transmitted is failure but rather a combination of failure and technique of its
overcoming, as well as the insight that psychoanalysis does not consist in the
application of already acquired knowledge but rather in the experimentation
with the causal dimension of language: the unconscious is already a sign
that constant experimentation takes place in the subject, and analysis, too,
intervenes as an experimentation with the power of language to produce
transformative effects in the subject.34
A crucial problem of psychoanalysis, around which all its fundamental concepts
evolve, lies in the specific relation between two opposite yet interrelated modes
of repetition, automaton and tyche. Lacan associates automaton with necessity
and tyche with the ‘encounter of the real’,35 a specific mode of disruption or
short-circuit of necessity by the impossible. Epistemologically speaking, Lacan’s
attempt to think the two modes of repetition in their conflictual interrelation
rather than external opposition goes against the move that was at the heart of
Aristotle’s strategy, which rejected tyche from the field of science (physics): for
Aristotle there could not have been any science of chance.36 Psychoanalysis,
on the other hand, examines the consequences of inconsistency or instability
built into the apparently necessary structural relations, thus not simply rejecting
the register of necessity as fantasmatic, but rather as always-already traversed
and short-circuited by negativity (which echoes the Heraclitian combination
of logos and flux, a possible translation of automaton and tyché). As Slavoj
Žižek put it, what is examined in this epistemic perspective is the contingency
within necessity, which can be best exemplified in the notion of becoming: ‘[T]
he process of becoming is not itself necessary, but the becoming (the gradual
contingent emergence) of necessity itself.’37
Epistemology of error: From Lacan to Foucault
To recapitulate, the two modes of repetition, tyché and automaton, contingency

and necessity, are adopted from premodern (Aristotelian) physics, which
excluded ‘error’ from its epistemic field and object, and instead focused on
apparent order and harmony, regular automaton. In doing so, premodern
physics was a science of natural semblances, which were united in the notion
of cosmos, closed and regular natural order, in which all natural movement
is presumably grounded in an underlying ontological necessity and stability.
Classical physics, on the other hand, inverts the perspective by focusing on what
the Aristotelian epistemological paradigm rejected from the scientific field,
what in the appearances that form the texture of reality manifests as distortion,
discontinuity, disturbance of order. Reality is no longer approached from the
viewpoint of what the observer’s gaze perceives as necessary, regular and stable,
but from the position of discourse in its absolute autonomy (detached from
psychological consciousness). Several modern sciences believed to have found
the privileged expression of this autonomy in mathematics (or mathematical
logic), while for psychoanalysis this autonomy traverses all forms of language
(there is no metalanguage). The notion of lalangue that Lacan introduced in
his later teaching was supposed to conceptualize this autonomous level for
the multiplicity of natural languages. At the same time, lalangue stands for the
instability that is characteristic for the structure of language and that Lacan
initially strived to formalize through the operations of metaphor and metonymy.
In this way, language was theorized from the perspective of error, instability
and incompleteness, in contrast to the predominant analytic philosophies
of language, which continue treating it exclusively as tool and means of
communication. Metaphor and metonymy (the Freudian condensation and
displacement) stand for two fundamental symbolic operations but also for two
dynamic procedures in the symbolic order: they determine the production
of errors, with the difference that these errors are precisely not defined in
opposition to correctness but instead stand for a constitutive discrepancy,
inadequation and disfunctioning that marks language. Put differently, metaphor
and metonymy stand for the logical status of error, even for the logic of error, as
well as for the instability and dynamic of structure.
Psychoanalysis was not the only discipline to emerge from the recognition
of the impossible character of the real. The same insight underpins the French
epistemological tradition that Lacan and Foucault perpetuated each in his own
way. In his revised preface to the English edition of Canguilhem’s The Normal and
the Pathological, Foucault draws attention to the fact that the French intellectual
landscape did not contain many logicians but in turn blossomed with historians
of sciences. One of the key features of French epistemology is that a major part
of its representatives most vehemently rejects the two main components of the
progressivist ideology in the scientific field: accumulation of knowledge and
progress of cognition. The twentieth-century French epistemology conceives
science as perpetual Kampfplatz between the tendencies of revolution and the
tendencies of normalization. These opposing tendencies find their philosophical
expression in the perpetuation of the conflict between idealism and materialism,
or perhaps better, between naïve empiricism and dialectical materialism. The
idealist core of empiricism would consist in the idea that scientific discourse
ultimately encounters a stable, ordered and functioning real beyond the strata
of appearances; whereas the dialectical core of materialism would insist that the
real is inherently unstable, non-all and endowed with dynamic consistency.
Lacan and Foucault both pursued a critical orientation in epistemology but
chose to follow different authorities in the history of science: Lacan sided with
Koyré’s study of natural sciences, Foucault with Canguilhem’s preoccupation
with life sciences. It may seem that these epistemological frameworks are worlds
apart, given that they deal with incomparable sciences: classical physics and
astronomy in Koyré, modern biology and medicine in Canguilhem. Perhaps
a minimal ground for overcoming the dichotomy of ‘formalist’ and ‘vitalist’
epistemologies could be found in Koyré’s insisting that natural sciences are
anchored in the experimental character of mathematics, a thesis adopted from
Jean Cavaillès and the mathematical collective Nicolas Bourbaki. With this
move, the formalist epistemological line reproduced a peculiar vitalist moment,
addressing the ‘life’ or the ‘becoming’ of mathematical structures themselves.
Lacan’s notion of lalangue extends this ‘vitalist’ endeavour of formalism from
the life of mathematics to the life of language.38 However, in the framework of
biological structures, the instability of the real and the function of error lead
well beyond the subject, knowledge and truth. Vitalism here introduces a proper
ontology of error that Foucault addresses in the following way:
[A]t the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give
way to a chance occurrence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or
a monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system,
something like a ‘mistake’. In this sense, life – and this is its radical feature –
is that which is capable of error. And perhaps it is this datum or rather this
contingency which must be asked to account for the fact that the question of
anomaly permeates the whole of biology. And it must also be asked to account
for the mutations and evolutive processes to which they lead. Further, it must be
questioned in regard to that singular but hereditary error which explains the fact
that, with man, life has led to a living being that is never completely in the right
place, that is destined to ‘err’ and to be ‘wrong’.39
Without entering the terrain of ontology of error one can still ask whether the
biological process of coding and decoding does not stand in a homologous
relation to living structure as the mathematical process of formalization to
physical structure and the linguistic process of cyphering and deciphering to
mental structure, in other words, whether the same discursive action is at stake
in different scientific registers. The three epistemic objects – biological code,
mathematical formula and linguistic signifier – namely assume the double status of
symbolic fictions and real structures, thus enabling a particular discourse (biology,
physics, psychoanalysis) to intervene in a real structural dynamic by means of the
symbolic apparatus. Lacan at some point introduced a peculiar metaphor, which
is supposed to illustrate what is at stake in these epistemic processes:
The textual work that comes out of the spider’s belly, its web. It is a truly
miraculous function to see, on the very surface emerging from an opaque point
of this strange being, the trace of these writings taking form, in which one can
grasp the limits, impasses, and dead ends that show the real acceding to the
symbolic.40
Although the metaphor would deserve an extensive commentary, it should

suffice here to remark that Lacan vividly illustrates what Jean-Claude Milner
called literalization. The textual work stands for the discursive action such
as mathematical writing, the literality of genetic code and Lacan’s own use of
mathemes.41 Fundamentally these processes are ‘never completely in the right
place’, to put it with Foucault, constitutively out of joint, decentralized and beyond
adequation: processes of erring. The homology between the three registers, the
biological, the physical and the linguistic, is only strengthened through the fact
that error assumes in all a central status.
The ontological negativity that Foucault addresses through the figure of
error is not unrelated to the Lacanian concept of the real. Towards the end of
his teaching, Lacan formulated the main features of the real as follows: the real
is without law, the real forecloses sense and the real does not form a whole. The
three negative features should not mislead us in believing that Lacan abolished
structuralism and instead began promoting some sort of epistemological
postmodernism. Rather, one should see in them the sharpening of theses, which
have marked his take on structuralism from the beginning. ‘The real is without a
law’ does not imply that we are slipping into some kind of ontological anarchy.42
Behind the statement there is a precise concept of the real, which is no longer
understood in terms of regular functioning sustained by stable structure and
transcendental law, but rather from the viewpoint of ‘the evolution of laws’.43
Rather than departing from the dichotomy of instability and structure, Lacan
conceives structure qua organized instability – insofar as structure stands for
something real (and not symbolic or imaginary, which is to say, grounded on
invariable necessary laws, univocal meaning and closed totality). The other two
features of the real – foreclosure of meaning and incompleteness – operate in the
same horizon, in which structure and instability are more than intertwined; they
are one and the same.
But let us return to Foucault, whose speculative examination of the function
of error in natural and human sciences casts a bridge from the domain of life to
that of human objects:
And if one grants that the concept is the reply that life itself has given to that
chance process, one must agree that error is the root of what produces human
thought and its history. The opposition of the true and the false, the values that
are attributed to the one and the other, the power effects that different societies
and different institutions link to that division – all this may be nothing but the
most belated response to that possibility of error inherent in life. If the history
of the sciences is discontinuous – that is, if it can be analyzed only as a series of
‘corrections’, as a new distribution that never sets free, finally and forever, the
terminal moment of truth – the reason, again, is that ‘error’ constitutes not a
neglect or a delay of the promised fulfilment but the dimension peculiar to the
life of human beings and indispensable to the duration [temps] of the species.44
Foucault formulates here his own version of history of science in terms of a

series of ‘better failures’ and points out that such critical conception of science
inevitably implies an overall philosophical conflict in epistemological matters.
For his homage to Canguilhem concludes with the opposition between
‘philosophy of meaning’ and ‘philosophy of error’, which clearly points towards
two competitive epistemologies with hardly any common ground between
them. Foucault’s opposition immediately recalls another one that we find
in Cavaillès’ posthumously published writing On the Logic and the Theory of
Science, ‘philosophy of consciousness’ and ‘philosophy of concept’.45 Cavaillès
famously concludes that only the philosophy of concept can provide a rigorous
theory of science and, one could add, a materialist epistemology, the elaboration
of which was a collective effort of the major representatives of the twentieth-

century epistemological turn in French philosophy. One could continue in
this line by recalling Lacan’s notorious and often misunderstood opposition
of ‘philosophy’ and ‘antiphilosophy’,46 which in the end criticizes the tendency
of certain philosophies (notably of Aristotelianism and analytic philosophy)
towards stability, meaning and totalization.
As already mentioned above, the popularity of Foucault’s later embedding of
the Freudian method in the history of Western confession techniques and of the
psychoanalytic theory of sexuality in the modern epistemo-political regime of
biopolitics lead to an overestimation of his criticism of psychoanalysis. That this
move stands rather isolated in the entirety of Foucault’s work can be observed not
only in relation to the course taken by the history of sexuality in the early 1980s
but also in relation to Foucault’s ‘structuralist moment’ in the mid-1960s, where
an entirely opposite image of psychoanalysis is presented. The Order of Things
celebrates the Freudian invention alongside linguistics and ethnology as one
of the human sciences that produced an epistemological break leading no less
than to the death of man.47 The writing ‘Nietzsche, Freud and Marx’, published
shortly after The Order of Things, makes a step further in this direction. The
radical nature of the three thinkers consists according to Foucault in the fact
that they ‘did not give new meaning to things without meaning’, but ‘actually
changed the nature of signs and the way of how it was possible to interpret signs
in general’.48 In other words, they invented a new mode of interpretation, which
– rather than searching for some presupposed continuity or relation between
words and things, thereby proliferating meaning in the game of their mutual
reflections and imitations – reveals a dimension of language where the relation
between the two orders is marked by an immanent inadaequatio, non-relation.
This non-relation demonstrates that there is indeed something like an autonomy
of language or that language short-circuits itself from within. To rephrase this
issue in Marxian terms, what Nietzsche, Marx and Freud discover in language is
production of a problematic surplus, which reveals that language is irreducible
to its communicative ‘use-value’ (as traditional philosophies of language would
want). To the representational nature of signs, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud
oppose their productive nature, and so the non-relation between words and
things progressively transforms into a non-relation between words themselves,
more precisely between the signifier and the signified.49 Nietzsche, Marx and
Freud prepare the conditions of possibility of the structuralist break with the
philosophy of language, insofar as this break consists in the full epistemological
recognition of the autonomy of language that the three thinkers already
encountered each in his own way. In this respect, Foucault seems to suggest
that they can be considered as the necessary precursors of structuralism – not
as structuralists avant la lettre but as the ones who laid ground both for the
structuralist revolution in the science of language and for its post-structuralist
beyond. No wonder that their names will eventually serve as supplements for the
presumably rigid structuralist notion of structure.50
Invention of a new mode of interpretation is deeply connected with the
features of space, in which the distribution of signs unfolds. According to
Foucault in renaissance and classicism, signs were ‘homogeneously distributed
in a space, which was itself homogenous in all directions’,51 a transparent space
without distortions, breaks or inconsistencies. This homogenous space is best
represented by the sphere. The classical space of signs and interpretation is
thus characterized precisely by what Lacan criticized through his notion of the
‘universe’, the domination of the symbolic by the imaginary of regular shapes.
Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, on the other hand, place the interpretation of signs
in a space that is ‘much more differentiated, in dimension that one could call
depth, but under condition that with depth we do not understand interiority
but exteriority’.52 This is how the autonomy of the symbolic postulated by
structuralism can be translated into topological terms. The topological object,
which would provide the best visualization of the spatialization of language
in Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, as well as in structuralism, would be the Klein
bottle: an object in which the interior continuously passes over into exterior,
and vice versa. The new regime of interpretation relies on a non-typical depth,
which is delocalized and decentralized, an interior exteriority, which does
not exist on the level of the sphere, the traditional metaphor of harmonious
totality. In the spherical space all signs and interpretations gravitate towards
a common centre of meaning, which sustains the appearance of relationality
of language and of its encounter with the order of things. In contrast to this
idealist scenario, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx did not simply open up the
perspective of radical exteriority or make a hole in the sphere. They detected
an immanent torsion in the topological order of signifiers, thereby subverting
the logic of interpretation on the background of the modified relation between
surface and depth. By mobilizing the torsion in language, they indeed rejected
the dichotomy of surface and depth as a false topological framework. Depth
is now revealed as pure semblance and ‘completely superfluous secret’.53 For
Freud the secret of the unconscious lies in the form of thinking and not in its
content or hidden meaning. The Freudian interpretation of dreams has nothing
in common with the hermeneutical quest for original and authentic meaning or
coded signification buried somewhere in the depths of language or in the mental

archive of thoughts. According to Foucault, we find the same formal torsion in
Nietzsche concerning the secret of morality and in Marx concerning the secret
of commodity fetishism; in all three cases, we are dealing with the analysis of
surface, which reveals that ‘the depth was merely a torsion and a fold on the
surface’.54 The interpretation in Nietzsche, Freud and Marx is as such efficient:
it does not merely play with the already given curvatures but itself curves the
space of signs, thereby producing reorientations of thinking, transformations
of structural connections and short-circuits in the network of mechanisms that
capture the subject in the given order. On the curved surface of language every
point, or rather, every difference (the signifier) is already an impossible passage
between the inside and the outside and the spatialization of linguistic structure
can no longer be the sphere but the ‘asphere’ (to use Lacan’s neologism). This
torsion of space, where the passage inside-out has always-already happened,
explains according to Foucault the common feature of Nietzsche’s, Marx’s and
Freud’s doctrine of interpretation: its infinity, its inner fold, for interpretation is
uniform with the space in which it proceeds.
But the question remains, whether the radicality of the new regime of
interpretation described by Foucault truly lies in its infinity? Is not its radicality
precisely in the opposite, namely that interpretation intervenes as a suspension,
discontinuity, short-circuit of the endless erring inside structure, thereby
providing a minimal ground for the subject to act? Is interpretation not itself
on the side of the act? At least in psychoanalysis this is indeed the case. From
this point of view, infinitization of interpretation would signify its neutralization
and failure (and clearly not in Beckett’s sense of ‘better failure’). If there is
something that unites all three ‘modern interpreters’, then it is their shared
effort in defetishization of language. By rejecting the hermeneutic interpretation
orientated towards an enigmatic depth or forgotten secret, they demonstrate that
this relation to language is destined to conceal or repress the fact that the essence
of language is neither relational nor does it unveil some presumably authentic
being but instead shows its productive power at the point where philosophers
have hitherto recognized the question of being. Lacan went furthest in this
critique of traditional philosophy. The appearance that ‘being is’ is for him
probably the biggest sophism that philosophers have taken at face value, the
main trick that language played on philosophers. Predominant philosophies
have been duped by language, privileged being and rejected non-being, thereby
overlooking not only the intertwinement of being and non-being in the process
of becoming but also the fact that there is something like ‘enjoyment of being’.55
In other words, philosophers have mistakenly taken being, this enjoyment of

philosophy, as an absolute and most real ontological reality.56
In the 1960s, Foucault thus claimed that psychoanalysis reveals no less than
the real space of thinking (in opposition to the imaginary of ‘correct’ forms that
have preoccupied philosophy since antiquity) and participates in the invention
of a new mode of interpretation (in opposition to hermeneutics), which no
longer anchors in the production of meaning but in a non-interpretation or even
anti-interpretation that would require a different name since it fundamentally
negates the main feature of the logic of interpretation, the quest for the ‘meaning
of meaning’. In short, what was invented is not a hermeneutics of surface, which
would unfold as endlessly as the hermeneutics of depth; a more appropriate name
for the new mode of interpretation would be forcing. Psychoanalysis mobilizes
the force of language, its power of causality, its violence, in order to bring about
displacements in the structural coordinates, subvert the conditions of possibility
of thinking and invent new conditions of possibility for future thinking.
Standing for a new practice of interpretation, psychoanalysis brings about an
epistemological break, for which Foucault goes as far as saying that it would
demand a historiography of its own: a ‘history of techniques of interpretation’.57
Although Foucault never embarked on this project, his 1967 lecture sufficiently
indicates that this hypothetic history of techniques of interpretation would
have taken a wholly different course from the 1976 attempt in ‘archaeology of
psychoanalysis’ (an attempt that ended up in failure, for which it remains open
if it was for the better or for the worse).
So we have two contrasting and even contradictory images of psychoanalysis
in Foucault’s work: on the one hand, psychoanalysis as a discipline standing
in direct historical and epistemic continuity with the Christian confession, its
secularized displacement in the field of science and a modern confessional
component in the regime of power-knowledge; and on the other hand, a wide-
reaching discontinuity in the history of interpretation, which introduced radical
insights into the libidinal nature of power relations and opened up a new chapter
of critique, a critique of power-enjoyment. Freud showed that the unconscious
is not to be mistaken with madness and non-reason, but should instead be
recognized as a manifestation of discursive materiality, which takes the form of
disruptions that are entirely rational in their character. To the rationality of sound
reason, Freud opposes the rationality of error, the logos of disruption. The slip of
logos remains part of logos, its internal dynamic, its Heraclitian moment. One of
Foucault’s later errors consists in removing failure and error from psychoanalysis.
Not only could this removal produce a distorted picture of Freud’s discipline,
but it also misplaced the object of psychoanalysis, unconscious and sexuality:

neither of them is either a positive ontological entity or an epistemic object that
could be assigned to a strictly determined historical epoch. It is precisely because
of its dependence on the discursive error that the unconscious and sexuality
stand neither for positive ontological existences nor for epistemic constructs of
modern power-knowledge. As Lacan put it, ‘what truly belongs to the order of
the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor non-being, but the non-realised’.58
Notes

2 Foucault later toned down his critique of psychoanalysis. In a short interview for
the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera on the occasion of Lacan’s death in 1981,
he associates Lacan’s work with the anti-psychiatric movement and with his own
critique of psychiatric discourse:
He wanted to subtract psychoanalysis from the proximity – which he considered

dangerous – to medicine and medical institutions. In psychoanalysis he was
not searching for a process of normalisation of behaviours but a theory of the
subject. This is why, in spite of apparently extremely speculative discourse,
his thought is not foreign to all the efforts that were made in questioning the
practices of mental medicine. (Foucault 2001: 1023)
One could object that this was merely a polite gesture: one does not spit on the
graves of the dead. Still, Foucault’s 1982 lectures continue in similar tone:
It seems to me that Lacan has been the only one since Freud who has sought
to refocus the question of psychoanalysis on precisely this question of
the relations between the subject and truth. (…) Lacan tried to pose what
historically is the specifically spiritual question: that of the price the subject
must pay for saying the truth, and of the effect on the subject of the fact that
he has said, that he can and has said the truth about himself.
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), 30. The Will to Knowledge did not pass the final verdict.
3 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, tome I (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 298–329.
4 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan
Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 97.
5 The link between Triebökonomie (economy of drives) and social structures is
a constant in Freud’s work. It obtained a systematic expression in his cultural
writings such as Mass-Psychology and Analysis of the Ego or Civilization and

Its Discontents. Lacan pushed this line further by defining every social link as
discourse of enjoyment. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006), 78.
6 Ibid., 50–51.
7 The history of sexuality would not stop there. It would have to reach further back
into history. For a critical stance towards Foucault’s later project, see Jacques-Alain
Miller, ‘Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse’, in Michel Foucault philosophe (Paris:
Seuil, 1989), 77–82. Foucault does not speak of jouissance (enjoyment) but instead
uses the term plaisir (pleasure). The latter is also the standard French translation for
Freud’s Lust, for which Lacan introduced the term jouissance. This terminological
confusion blurs the fact that Foucault after all dealt with the same key problematic
as psychoanalysis, the impossibility to establish balance, relationality or
homeostasis in the field of pleasure.
8 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 177.
9 Lacan’s comment leaves no doubt that he was familiar with both historical-
theoretical efforts.
10 Jean-Claude Milner, Le periple structural (Paris: Verdier, 2008), 242.
11 Foucault argues that biology, sociology and philology remain humanist, and
while this could be easily understood for the last two sciences, biology seems
more problematic. Why would biology participate in the conglomerate of
human sciences? Lacan provides an answer to this question: the problem lies in
the hypothesis of ‘the soul as the assumed sum of the body’s functions. A most
problematic sum, despite the fact that from Aristotle to Uexküll, it has been
postulated as though with one voice, and it is still what biologists presuppose,
whether they know it or not.’ Lacan, Television, 6. The problem with biology thus
lies in the spiritualization of life.
York: Vintage, 1994), 324..
13 Jacques Lacan, Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 472. For a broader context of
Lacan’s thesis, see Samo Tomšič, ‘Towards a New Transcendental Aesthetics?’, in
Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives, eds. Michael Friedman and Samo Tomšič
(Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 95–124. Foucault’s talk about the ‘death of man’
is not incompatible with Lacan’s thesis that Descartes laid the epistemic foundations
for the Freudian discovery of the subject of the unconscious. For Foucault the
historical unfolding of modern episteme contains the rise and fall of the figure
of man, and for Lacan the rise and fall of the subject of cognition. But given the
current condition in sciences, it is more than questionable that the subjectivized
void opened up by the death of man or the subject of the unconscious came out of
this historical sequence as victorious. On the contrary, today the figure of man is
back with a vengeance.
14 Or to put it with Marx’s phrasing from his Theses on Feuerbach, they replace the
idealist man-qua-essence with the materialist man-qua-effect of the ensemble of
social (discursive) relations: an ensemble, for which one should never get tired
of repeating that it forms an immanently conflictual conglomerate of symbolic
relations rather than a well-grounded and solidified social relation. Foucault was
definitely wrong to restrict Marx to the nineteenth-century episteme. See Foucault,
The Order of Things, 262. Or better, if there is a segment of Marx’s thought, which
remains in the nineteenth-century epistemological paradigm, it is the (precritical)
Marx of Parisian Manuscripts of 1844.
15 Still, Foucault’s later attempts in reconciling with psychoanalysis (if that was
indeed his attempt) leave one unsatisfied, especially when one compares them with
Foucault’s work from the 1960s, where his readings of psychoanalysis appeared
more radical. I will return to the ‘constructive’ features of Foucault’s earlier dealings
with psychoanalysis towards the end of this paper.
16 Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York:
Grove Press, 1995), 89.
17 This is also why Freud saw in working-through a crucial component of
psychoanalytic work. Working-through is in the last instance perpetual intellectual
effort in counteracting the various forms of resistance that threaten to sabotage
the analytic cure. Indeed, psychoanalysis can serve as a paradigmatic example of
‘better failure’ insofar as it rejects that the aim of the cure should consist in the
re-adaptation or reintegration of individuals into the established libidinal and
economical order. Such re-adaptation or reintegration, even when it is not entirely
successful, would stand for nothing less than a success of the capitalist system in
‘privatizing’ the problems, maladies and sufferings of the subject.
18 Despite apparent similarity, Popper’s epistemology leaves no room for the subject of
the unconscious and, what is more, does not question the progress of cognition. No
surprise, then, that Popper does not appear among the standard references in the
anti-progressist French epistemology.
19 One could argue the same for philosophy; no wonder that Koyré insisted on the
persistence of philosophical and even metaphysical derivatives in hard sciences
rather than seeing in scientific modernity the ultimate divorce of science and
philosophy. If any philosopher thoroughly demonstrated that the entire history of
philosophy is a series of attempts in failing better, then it was Hegel.
20 Lacan, Television, 3.
21 Lacan, Autres écrits, 459.
22 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XX, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 56.
23 Ibid., 53.
24 In doing so, he goes beyond Koyré’s thesis that the early modern physics
progressively accomplishes the move from the closed world to the infinite universe.
See From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1957). In relation to language, the first philosophical attempt to construct a ‘universe

of discourse’ coincides with the invention of logic, Aristotle’s attempt to normalize
or discipline language. Analytic philosophy perpetuates this tradition, seeing in
logic a therapy of language. Wittgenstein most directly declared this link between
linguistic therapy and totalization of language, yet his philosophy demonstrates that
the presumable success in constructing the universe of discourse (normalization and
stabilization of language) ends up in utter epistemological failure.
25 Freud thematized the division of work in psychoanalysis in his short paper
‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, ed. James Strachey
(London: Vintage, 2001), 145–56.
26 Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 15–16.
27 Lacan, Encore, 42.
28 Constellations are another example of an imaginary object, which has no
grounding in the real and which has been abolished as an epistemic object by
modern physics. See Jean-Claude Milner, ‘The Tell-Tale Constellations’, S: Journal of
the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 9 (2016), trans. Christian R. Gelder: 31–32.
29 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 179.
30 Jacques Lacan, ‘Séminaire du 16 Novembre 1976’, Ornicar? 12, no. 13 (1977): 5.
31 Lacan, Television, 7–8.
32 This was implicitly Freud’s point ever since The Interpretation of Dreams, where
it already becomes clear that unconscious formations contain a double character:
on the one hand, they can certainly be analysed in a hermeneutic way, as
meaningful intellectual products; on the other hand, this hermeneutic analysis
never truly grasps the production of pleasure, which is constantly demanded by the
unconscious desire. Hermeneutic interpretation thus inevitably fails in grasping the
core of unconscious thought-processes.
33 ‘Psychoanalysis, as I manage to think it now, is non-transmissible. This is quite
annoying. It is quite annoying that every psychoanalyst is forced – for it must be
that he is forced – to reinvent psychoanalysis.’ Jacques Lacan, ‘Conclusions’, Lettres
de l’École freudienne de Paris 2, no. 25 (1979): 219.
34 Lacan’s return to Freud went even more openly in the direction of transmission
of errors, not simply those of psychoanalysis, but even more so of those that mark
the symbolic order as such: ‘there is no sexual relation,’ ‘the Woman does not exist,’
‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier,’ the four discourses and
their structural impossibilities, ‘the real as impossible’, all these are formulations of
fundamental deadlocks that mark the subject, language and in the last instance the
real itself. It is therefore questionable if the imperative of reinvention and the ideal
of transmission stand in mutual opposition instead of supplementing each other.
35 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 52.
36 For a systematic discussion of the tyché-automaton issue in Lacan, see notably

Mladen Dolar, ‘Tyché, Clinamen, Den’, Continental Philosophy Review 46, no. 2
(2013): 223–39.
37 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Is It Still Possible to Be a Hegelian Today?’, in The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham
Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 217. In Lacan’s conceptual apparatus, the
contingency of necessity is one possible formulation of ‘the inexistence of the Other
of the Other’, the void at the heart of the Other, which makes of the Other (the
symbolic order, the field of language) organized inexistence, the instability of which
is nevertheless endowed with the power to produce real consequences (sexuality
and the unconscious being two primary consequences that psychoanalysis
systematically examines in all their complexity and problematic character).
38 This clearly does not mean that Lacan’s examination of the life of language and
his interest in formalist epistemology simply overlaps with Foucault’s interest in
biological vitalism and vitalist epistemology. The main and most obvious difference
consists in the importance of death drive in psychoanalytic vitalism. Foucault’s
vitalism circumvents this problem.
39 Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion
(New York: The New Press, 1998), 476. Thought, too, is what is capable of error, as
Freud rigorously demonstrated from the very offset, thus placing psychoanalysis
at the flipside of modern philosophies of consciousness, for which thought is
most certain, most itself when it reduces all risks of error, eliminates all traces of
contingency from the constitution of necessity, in short, when it arrives at clear and
distinct ideas.
40 Lacan, Encore, 93.
41 The value of mathemes ‘lies in centering the symbolic, on the condition of
knowing how to use it, for what? To retain a congruous truth – not the truth that
claims to be whole, but that of the half-saying’. Ibid., 93; translation modified.
The re-emergence of half-saying in this context is crucial since it goes against the
exceptional status of scientific language. The formulation nevertheless points out a
major difference between science and psychoanalysis, which, according to Lacan’s
famous dictum, consists in the fact that natural sciences foreclose the subject and
the dimension of conflictual truth. The epistemological efforts of Lacan’s teaching
were centred around the demonstration in which respect the foreclosed subject and
truth continue to concern science.
42 In the same seminar an audience member asked Lacan: ‘Are you an anarchist?’ to
which Lacan vehemently replied: ‘Certainly not.’ Lacan, Sinthome, 119.
43 Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2015), 81–82. Lacan refers to a polemic between Henri Poincaré and Émile
Boutroux regarding the contingency of natural laws. The idea of evolution of laws
resonates with Cavaillès’ thesis on mathematics as becoming.
44 Foucault, Aesthetics, 476.

45 Jean Cavaillès, Oeuvres completes de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Hermann,
1994), 560.
46 Lacan, Autres écrits, 314.
47 The proper names of this triplet would then be Freud, Saussure and Mauss, but
as Milner already pointed out, Foucault’s reading explicitly addresses the mature
structuralist turn in the three fields. The true proper names in question are
therefore Lacan, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. For a detailed discussion of Foucault’s
relation to structuralism, see Milner, Le periple structural, 235–62.
48 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, tome I (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 595–96.
49 Lacan will say that the referentiality of language is merely approximate, which
sounds rather scandalous for a universe based on the ideal of measurability, the
‘universe of precision’. Alexandre Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophiques
(Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 311. If the premodern cosmos was merely a ‘world
of approximation’, as Koyré claims, then Lacan’s reference to approximation in the
relation between the signifier and the signified points out something else. It is not
that words do not describe things or that no relation of adaequatio is to be found in
language. His point is simply that this is not the fundamental feature of language.
Language is not a relation but a non-relation, a space of production.
50 For instance, Nietzsche in Deleuze and Foucault, Freud and Marx in Lacan and
Althusser. One problematic aspect of Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, Freud and
Marx is that he places the philosophical, historical-materialist and psychoanalytic
interpretation on the same level, or even creates the impression that they can be
treated as equivalent, as three variations of the same mode of interpretation.
51 Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 596.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid. Note that Foucault claims here exactly the opposite from his later take on
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis as an epistemological discontinuity contains a
rupture with the fetishization of linguistic depths (‘secret’) and in doing so it rejects
the Christian confession, where fetishism of the secret (the intimate) reaches its peak.
54 Ibid.
55 Lacan, Encore, 70; translation modified.
56 For a detailed development of this point, see Samo Tomšič, ‘Sein und Lust: Der
ontologische Skandal der Sprachautonomie’, in Heidegger: Die Falte der Sprache,
edited by Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi (Vienna: Tura + Kant Verlag, 2017),
89–118. Lacan’s phrasing ‘enjoyment of being’ is clearly directed against Heidegger’s
philosophy of language, and notably against his famous conception of language as a
‘house of being’. From Lacan’s perspective, language is rather a factory of enjoyment,
hence a means of production. No surprise, then, that Lacan preferred Heraclitus
against Parmenides, becoming against being, since Heraclitus’ materialism stands for
the first philosophical confrontation with ontological instability.
57 Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 592.

58 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 30; translation modified.
Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. New York: Grove
Press, 1995.
Cavaillès, Jean. Oeuvres completes de philosophie des sciences. Paris: Hermann, 1994.
Dolar, Mladen. ‘Tyché, Clinamen, Den’. Continental Philosophy Review 46, no. 2 (2013):
223–39.
Vintage, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James D. Faubion.
New York: The New Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits, tome I. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, edited by
James Strachey, 145–56. London: Vintage, 2001.
Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1957.
Koyré, Alexandre. Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophiques. Paris: Armand Colin,
1961.
Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre XX, Encore. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Lacan, Jacques. ‘Séminaire du 16 Novembre 1976’. Ornicar? 12, no. 13 (1977): 5–9.
Lacan, Jacques. ‘Conclusions’. Lettres de l’École freudienne de Paris 2, no. 25 (1979):
219–20.
Lacan, Jacques. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Edited by
Joan Copjec. New York: Norton, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Translated by
Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. The Triumph of Religion. Translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2015.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar, Book XXIII: The Sinthome. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. ‘Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse’. In Michel Foucault
philosophe, 77–82. Paris: Seuil, 1989.
Milner, Jean-Claude. Le periple structural. Paris: Verdier, 2008.
Milner, Jean-Claude. ‘The Tell-Tale Constellations’. Translated by Christian R. Gelder. S:

Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 9 (2016): 31–38.
Tomšič, Samo. ‘Towards a New Transcendental Aesthetics?’ In Psychoanalysis:
Topological Perspectives, edited by Michael Friedman and Samo Tomšič, 95–124.
Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016.
Tomšič, Samo. ‘Sein und Lust: Der ontologische Skandal der Sprachautonomie’. In
Heidegger: Die Falte der Sprache, edited by Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi,
89–118. Vienna: Turia + Kant Verlag, 2017.
Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Is It Still Possible to Be a Hegelian Today?’ In The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and
Graham Harman, 202–23. Melbourne: re.press, 2011.
4
Merely Analogical: Structuralism and the

Critique of Political Economy
Anne van Leeuwen
If Lévi-Strauss is correct in seeing the exchange of women as a fundamental

principle of kinship, the subordination of women can be seen as a product
of the relationships by which sex and gender are organized and produced.
The economic oppression of women is derivative and secondary. But there is
an ‘economics’ of sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy
of sexual systems. We need to study each society to determine the exact
mechanisms by which particular conventions of sexuality are produced and
maintained.
– Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political
Economy” of Sex’
Joining the larger exodus of intellectuals from Marxism, most feminist theorists
took ‘the cultural turn’. With the exception of a few holdouts, even those who
rejected psychoanalysis came to understand gender as an identity or a ‘cultural
construction’. Today, accordingly, gender theory is largely a branch of cultural
studies. As such, it has further attenuated, if not wholly lost, its historical links
to Marxism – and to social theory and political economy more generally.
– Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism
Introduction
I propose to take up the debate between Lacan and Foucault in the context
of twentieth-century feminist theory. The text that emerges as a watershed
in this debate is Gayle Rubin’s ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political
economy” of sex.’1 On one hand, Rubin directly engages with structuralism

in this text, particularly the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan,
in order to develop a ‘materialist’ critique of what she identifies as the
‘political economy of sex’. Rubin’s essay thus stages one of the few encounters
between Marxism and structuralism in twentieth-century feminist theory.
On the other hand, ironically, it is precisely Rubin’s analysis of this encounter
between Marxism and structuralism that forecloses a deeper exploration
of the import of a structuralist reading of Marx for a materialist feminist
position. That is, despite the constellation that she brings together in this
text, her essay effectively pushes feminist theory in a Foucauldian direction
that will prove to be decisive for late twentieth-century theory – a trajectory
that virtually eliminates a materialist critique of political economy from the
scope of feminism. At the same time, feminist critiques of this trajectory
tend to invoke a humanist reading of Marx that largely ignores the most
radical insights of his critique of political economy, namely the insights that
appear in the encounter between Marxism and structuralism. What is so
interesting and paradoxical about Rubin’s essay, then, is that the very text
that introduces this fecund constellation into the context of feminist theory
turns out to be the text that practically forecloses its further exploration and
analysis.
In contrast with the Foucauldian trajectory that emerges in the aftermath
of Rubin’s work, this essay seeks to return to the radical insight of her
text: that we need a feminist critique of political economy and her turn to
structuralism – both anthropology and psychoanalysis – in order to pursue
this critical project. This essay repeats her return to Lévi-Strauss as a crucial
interlocutor for feminism and attempts to take up what remains unthought
in Rubin’s gesture. This analysis, however, seeks to avoid the undialectical
alternative that has characterized much of contemporary feminist theory in its
wake – the alternative between an analysis that has reduced a feminist critique
of political economy to deconstructing imaginary production, on one hand,
and a humanist materialist analysis of commodity production that would
endeavour to dissolve all forms of social antagonism, on the other hand. What
we need, as Rubin insisted, is a feminist critique of political economy, which
means: a critique of the structural antagonisms that constitute our social
reality along with the forms through which these contradictions appear and
are dissimulated. What we need, in other words, is a critique of fetishism,
beginning with an analysis of the isomorphism of the value form of the
commodity and the sexual non-relation.
Structuralism and the Critique of Political Economy 111
Production, the sex/gender system and biopower
The central thesis of Rubin’s essay is that there is a crucial analogy between
capitalism as the system of commodity production and the ‘sex/gender
system’ as the system of gender production – that is, the system ‘by which
the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by
human, social intervention’.2 Rubin thus invokes Marx while at the same time
breaking with earlier socialist feminist analyses that identified the constitutive
role of women’s unpaid labour within commodity production as integral
to exploitation.3 In contrast with the classical socialist feminist position,
Rubin argues that insofar as the oppression of women transcends capitalist
modernity,4 feminists cannot and should not ‘attempt to extract all phenomena
of social subordination from the first volume of Capital’.5 Rubin thus insists
on the distinction between these two systems of production, capitalism and
the sex/gender system, and thus on the distinction between the oppression
of women and exploitation under the conditions of commodity production.
According to her, it is only the analogy of commodity production that is
useful to feminism, and it is with this claim that she positions the ‘women’s
movement’ as ‘analogous to, rather than isomorphic with, the working-class
movement’.6
Rubin turns to structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis in the light
of this reading of Marx as a supplement to a strictly ‘economic’ analysis of
production, that is, an analysis in which production refers to commodity
production. What she finds in the work of Lévi-Strauss in particular is a critique
of the production of gender outside of the historical specificity of capitalist
modernity and the system of commodity production.7 On her reading, Lévi-
Strauss presents an analysis of kinship systems as systems of production: ‘[a]
kinship system is an imposition of social ends upon a part of natural world. It
is therefore “production” in the most general sense of the term: a molding, a
transformation of objects (in this case, people) to and by a subjective purpose
(for this sense of production, see Marx).’8 According to Rubin, Lévi-Strauss’s
analysis of the structure of kinship preserves what she sees as the materialist
kernel of Marx’s position – namely an analysis of production – while at the same
time introducing a more expansive idea of production that is not limited to
the historical parameters of the commodity form. Rubin argues that this more
expansive sense of production has primacy within feminist theory: as she puts
it, ‘the subordination of women can be seen as a product of the relationships by
which sex and gender are organized and produced. The economic oppression
of women is derivative and secondary. But there is an “economics” of sex and

gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems.’9 Her claim,
then, is that structuralist anthropology provides the basis for a feminist critique
of the political economy of sex that exceeds the too limited parameters of a
strictly materialist analysis.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of Rubin’s essay for late-twentieth-
century feminist theory (as well as queer theory). In her essay ‘Merely Cultural’
(1997), Judith Butler takes up and defends the trajectory established by Rubin’s
essay in face of what she identifies as the ‘leftist-Marxist’ criticisms that have
dismissed feminist and queer theory as merely ‘cultural politics’.10 According to
Butler, these ‘leftist-Marxists’ claim that
the cultural focus of leftist politics has abandoned the materialist project of
Marxism, failing to address questions of economic equity and redistribution,
and failing as well to situate culture in terms of a systematic understanding
of social and economic modes of production; that the cultural focus of leftist
politics has splintered the Left into identitarian sects, … that the cultural focus
of leftist politics substitutes a self-centered and trivial form of politics that
focuses on transient events, practices and objects for a more robust, serious, and
comprehensive vision of the systematic interrelatedness of social and economic
conditions.11
In the face of these criticisms, Butler returns to Rubin’s analysis of the sex/gender
system in order to underscore and defend what she identifies as the essentially
materialist kernel of feminist theory that emerged in the wake of Rubin’s path-
breaking essay. The fundamental materialist insight of this essay, for Butler, is that
‘the regulation of sexuality [is] systematically tied to the mode of production proper to
the functioning of political economy’.12 Butler thus insists on the materialist crux of
Rubin’s critique of the political economy of sex, while at the same time acknowledging
its break with earlier versions of socialist feminism. She argues that for Rubin,
Struggles to transform the social field of sexuality do not become central to

political economy to the extent that they can be directly tied to questions of
unpaid and exploited labor, but rather because they cannot be understood
without an expansion of the “economic” sphere itself to include both the
reproduction of goods as well as the social reproduction of persons.13
Thus according to Butler, Rubin does not jettison the insights of a socialist
feminist position but simply extends a strictly ‘economic’ analysis of production.
As Butler puts it, ‘[i]f one continues to take the mode of production as the defining
structure of political economy, then surely it would make no sense for feminists
to dismiss the hard-won insight that sexuality must be understood as part of that
mode of production.’14 This, then, is Butler’s fundamental claim: that in place
of an analysis of commodity production, Rubin enlarges the field of a critique
of political economy to include an analysis of the production of sex, that is, the
production of gender identity and the production of compulsory heterosexuality.
Butler rejoins ‘leftist-Marxist’ critiques of feminism theory on this basis.
Having identified the production of sex, gender identity and compulsory
heterosexuality as integral to any system of production (capitalist or otherwise)
and, on this basis, as within the field of a critique of political economy, Butler
argues that to dismiss feminist attempts to deconstruct these systems of
production as peripheral to a properly materialist analysis (i.e. to dismiss
feminist theory as ‘merely cultural’) betrays the ‘neoconservativism’ of the
‘orthodox Marxist Left’:
Given the socialist-feminist effort to understand how the reproduction of persons

and the social regulation of sexuality were part of the very process of production
and hence, part of the ‘materialist conception’ of political economy, how is it
that suddenly when the focus of critical analysis turns from the question of
how normative sexuality is reproduced to the queer question of how that very
normativity is confounded by the nonnormative sexualities that it harbors
within its own terms – that the link between such an analysis and the mode of
production is suddenly dropped?15
The point, for Butler, is that once feminist theory (vis-à-vis Rubin) locates an
analysis of the sex/gender system as integral to a critique of political economy,
the door is open for feminist and queer theory to deconstruct the normalizations
of sex/gender that functions as part of this mechanism of production. As she
puts it:
The economic, tied to the reproductive, is necessarily linked to the reproduction

of heterosexuality. It is not that nonheterosexual forms of sexuality are simply
left out, but that their suppression is essential to the operation of that prior
normativity. This is not simply a question of certain people suffering a lack of
cultural recognition by others, but, rather, is a specific mode of sexual production
and exchange that works to maintain the stability of gender, the heterosexuality
of desire, and the naturalization of the family.16
Butler thus takes it as given that Rubin’s analysis indeed preserves the
fundamental insights of a materialist critique as it purports to do and she locates
the deconstruction of the production of compulsory heterosexuality as part of

the materialist legacy of this project. Disrupting or unworking the sex/gender
system thereby appears as integral to a critique of political economy.17
Butler’s interpretation of Rubin’s essay dovetails with the position that we
see in Foucault’s La volonté de savoir to the extent that in Foucault we find a
critique of political economy that takes the form of a critique of productive
power disjoined from an analysis of commodity production. According to
Foucault, psychoanalysis and the repressive hypothesis – the hypothesis that the
seventeenth century inaugurates an age of sexual prohibition – operates hand in
glove with a classical Marxist position:
By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century,

after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to
coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the
bourgeois order. The minor chronicles of sex and its trials is transposed into the
ceremonious history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect fades from
view. A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously
repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work
imperative. At a time when labor [power] was being systematically exploited,
how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits,
except in those – reduced to a minimum – that enabled it to reproduce itself?18
According to this hypothesis, by restricting sexuality to the bedroom of the

procreative couple and prohibiting non-procreative sexualities, repression
thereby appears as part of a set of broader mechanisms of enclosure and
confinement that allowed for the accumulation of labour power within the
system of commodity production.
Foucault, however, abandons an analysis of commodity production in
favour of a ‘materialist’ analysis of the ‘productivity’ of biopower. According
to him, it is not commodity production but the productivity of biopower that
marks the threshold of modernity that defines the history of sexuality. As he
puts it, ‘[f]or millennia, man remained as he was for Aristotle: a living animal
with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal
whole politics places his existence as a living being in question.’19 Political
power takes the form of biopower – not as sovereignty, that is, the power to
take life – but rather productive power in the form of investment into and
management of life. With the development of biopower, Foucault argues that
biological existence is politicized and life itself enters into the field of power’s
control and intervention.
In his analysis of sexuality, Foucault tracks the deployment of biopower

according to two axes20 – the disciplining of bodies and the calculated
management of population. In his analysis of biopower, Foucault makes two
claims: first, he argues that sexuality is the effect of the deployment of biopower
along these two axes’ reproduction of biological life – ‘sex was a means of access
both to life of the body and the life of the species’21; second, he claims that the
deployment of biopower ‘was without question an indispensible element in
the development of capitalism’,22 that is, that the development of capitalism
‘would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of
population to economic processes’.23 He is critical of the repressive hypothesis,
then, not because it aligns the deployment of sexuality with the development
of capitalism, but because, according to him, it fails to grasp the way in which
sexuality deployed the disciplining of labour and management within capitalist
production and functions as an expression of biopower.
What he argues, then, is that at the level of bodies and the species, the
target of biopower is production – from the sexualization of children and the
hystericization of women, on one hand, to the institution of demographics and
the imposition of techniques to manage populations, on the other hand.24 These
techniques of biopower operate in conjunction. In the case of psychiatrization,
it is the life of species, the ‘themes of health, progeny, race, the future of species,
the vitality of the social body’ that motivate access to individual life body.25 The
health of the species is protected and the collective welfare of society secured
through the subjection of the bodies of hysterics and children to medical
discourse. On the other hand, disciplining the reproductive body vis-à-vis the
imposition of population controls – for example, control over contraception,
infanticide – becomes a crucial point of access for the control of population
concerned with the management of birthrates, public health and migration.26
For Foucault, the idea of sex as a pre-political, biological substratum of
the life of bodies and species that would be prohibited, censored or erased is
an ideological illusion. Rather, sexuality refers to biopower’s investment in
reproduction at the level of bodies and the species.27 As such, he argues that ‘sex
is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment
of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their
forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures’.28 Indeed, conceived as a biological
substratum outside of the field of power effects, sex is precisely the imaginary,
ideological unity constituted through the deployment of sexuality.29 Sexuality
refers to a set of functions, behaviours and material practices that exist in various
institutions that Foucault examines, from schools to medical apparatuses to

families. In this sense, for Foucault, unlike the transhistorical analysis proposed
by Rubin and Butler, if biopower constitutes the threshold of modernity, if sex
was the means of access to the life of the body and the life of the species and
if bio-power’s deployment of sexuality was crucial for the development of this
productive apparatus that defines modernity, then the history of sexuality traced
by Foucault functions as a history of capitalist modernity.30
From the other side, it is exactly the model of sexual revolution offered by the
repressive hypothesis that Foucault rejects. According to this hypothesis, if sex
has been repressed and in its place a mute, puritanical and constrained sexuality
has been installed, this repressed sexuality amounts to a distortion of sex that is
constituted via the imposition of forms of erasure and silencing. On this model,
sexual revolution amounts to the liberation of sexuality. As Foucault puts it,
There may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the
relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that
one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is condemned to
prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking
about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds
forth in such language place himself to some extent outside the reach of power;
he upsets the established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom.31
What Foucault rejects, then, under the auspices of the repressive hypothesis is,
on one hand, a naïve, speculative pseudo-materialism that claims that sex exists
outside of and exists prior to its interpellation by biopower and, on the other
hand, a liberal idealist form of emancipation that is offered as a correlate of this
thesis.32 The sex that the repressive hypothesis enjoins us to liberate is already
the effect of biopower.33
At this point, we return to the trajectory established by Rubin’s essay. Indeed,
it is in Foucault work that we find exactly the shift in the critique of political
economy from commodity production to productive power outside a critique of
the commodity form. If, as Rubin argues, the theoretical insight of Marxism
is located in an analysis of production outside of an analysis of commodity
production, Foucault’s description of the productivity of biopower appears
as part of a broadly materialist legacy. It is not surprising, then, that Foucault
becomes the primary interlocutor for subsequent ‘materialist’ feminist critiques
of the sex/gender system. The problem, however, is that Rubin’s analysis of the
production of sex ultimately jettisons the core theoretical insight of a materialist
critique. This is the problem of identity or ‘cultural politics’ that Butler names in
her defence of Rubin but at the same time misidentifies. The problem is not, as
Butler claims, that feminist theory has dispensed with an analysis of production
– and indeed, as Butler demonstrates, it is just the opposite. The problem of
identity or cultural politics is rather an expression of the fact that feminist
theory has largely ceased to analyse production as the site of social antagonism
that is irreducibly connected to the commodity form. The result is that Rubin’s
promissory call for ‘an analysis of the evolution of sexual exchange along the lines
of Marx’s discussion in Capital of the evolution of money and commodities’34 is
the very thing that she forecloses in positioning the critique of political economy
and the critique of the political economy of sex as merely analogical.35
Fetishism and the commodity form
While, as we saw, Rubin cautioned feminists against the attempt to theorize

exploitation on the basis of a reading of the first chapter of Capital, it is exactly
this analysis of the commodity form that is missing from Rubin’s essay and
the subsequent trajectory it has established.36 In Capital, Marx analyses the
constitutively split form of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value. On
the face of it, the dual nature of the commodity appears to index two perspectives,
the commodity as a bearer of use-value and the commodity as a quantity of
abstract expenditure. Use-value appears in the relation between the commodity
as a useful object and the subject of need. As Marx puts it, the commodity as
use-value is ‘a thing which through its qualities satisfies human need of whatever
kind’.37 While it is ‘the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value’,38 need, Marx
insists, is not natural but socio-symbolically mediated. That is, need is itself
generated in the production of the commodity as a use-value. The point, then, is
that use-value does not refer to a real quality but to an imaginary one – that is,
‘a fantasy of quality, which represents the minimal ground for the production of
a corresponding need … [and maintains] the fiction of usefulness and need, no
matter how practical and utilitarian or abstract and fantasmatic’.39 In turn, the
production of use-value as an imaginary quality corresponds to the production
of the imaginary subject of need. Use-value thus refers to the imaginary quality
of the useful object and the imaginary subject as its correlate.
While use-value appears in the relation between subject and object, exchange-
value appears in the relationship between commodities, that is, between two use-
values.40 As Marx puts it, ‘exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative
relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-
values of another kind’41 – that is, that ‘x commodity A = y commodity B’.42 Use-
values stand in relation to each other and are commensurable on the basis of an
abstraction: they are commensurable as products of human labour. According
to Marx,
If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains,

that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor has already been
transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract
also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no
longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous
characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of labor of the
joiner, the mason or the spinner, or any other particular kind of productive
labor. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labor,
the useful character of the kinds of labor embodied in them also disappears; this
in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labor. They
can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of
labor, human labor in the abstract. Let us now look at the residue of the products
of labor. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like
objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor, i.e.,
of human labor-power expended without regard to the form of expenditure.43
Exchange-value thus refers to the relation of equivalence between use-values

as congealed quantities of abstract labour, what Marx refers to as labour-
power. What is expressed in the form exchange-value, then, is precisely the
abstract equality of labour as a homogeneous expression of expenditure, that
is, that ‘the equality of the kinds of human labor takes on a physical form in
the equal objectivity of the products of labor as values’.44 Of course, as Marx
points out, it is only in the context of commodity production that ‘the equality
of the kinds of human labor takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of
the products of labor as values’.45 This is because the production and exchange
of commodities as quantities of abstract labour-power entails that capitalism
commands labour, as Eric Santner puts it, ‘with utter indifference as to its
specific nature’,46 that is, that commodity production treats all human labour
as abstract expenditure. Consequently, under the conditions of commodity
production, ‘what remains of productive labor once we abstract its qualitative
dimension is, precisely, an abstract materiality generated by the historical
relations of production’.47 That is, ‘homogeneous labor is the labor that has,
as Marx likes to say, congealed as value rather than taken phenomenal shape
of this or that particular commodity’.48 Exchange-value, then, refers to this
abstract or phantom-like materiality – that is, the objective form of abstract

human labour as labour-power.49
The crucial point is that insofar as Marx elaborates the dual nature of the
value-form as constitutively split, not only does he show that value is constituted
within an autonomous system of differences, he also identifies the structural
antagonism that subtends the apparent identity and universality of the value-
form.50 As Samo Tomšič argues, ‘[w]hen Marx departs from the gap between
the use-value and the exchange-value that determines the double character of
commodities – he in fact anticipates the main achievement of structuralism: the
isolation of the system of differences.’51 The signifier thus has the same objectivity
as the form of value. Indeed value, as Sami Khatib points out, is nothing other
than this difference that ‘obtains objectivity [Gegenstandlichkeit]’ in the split
form of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value.52 As Marx puts it:
This division of the product of labor into a useful thing and a thing possessing
value appears in practice only when exchange has already acquired a sufficient
extension and importance to allow useful things to be produced only for the
purpose of being exchanged, so that their character as values has already to be
taken into consideration during production. From this moment on, the labor of
the individual producer acquires a twofold social character.53
The dual nature of the commodity thus refers to the split form of value as
‘two heterogeneous and unrelated’ orders of difference – exchange-value and
use-value. Marx shows, then, that rather than a relation between use-value
and exchange-value, a relation that posits exchange-value as an expression of
use-value, the dual nature of the commodity indexes the non-relation that is
constitutive of the essentially split form of value.
This analysis of value – the non-relation of use-value and exchange-value – is
at the heart of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism. As Tomšič argues, it is in
virtue of this split form that a critique of political economy must operate at the
level of both exchange-value and use-value, that is, the ‘logic of production’ and
the ‘logic of fantasy’:
Marx locates the revolutionary potential not so much in a specific consciousness,

that of the working class, but in a structural negativity, labor-power, which
occupies the place where the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production
are brought together. At the same time, the appearance of capital is associated
with a vitalist fantasy, ‘money-breeding money’, in which psychoanalysis helps
us to discern the fictional hypothesis of a subject without negativity … Marx
thus continuously moves on two different but intimately related levels, that of
the logic of production, which explains how the abstract and seemingly neutral
relations between values support and reproduce concrete social antagonisms,
and that of the logic of fantasy, which examines the reproduction of objective
appearances, whose function is to repress, distort and mystify the existing
structural contradictions.54
For Marx, it is the apparent relation between use-value and exchange-value

that functions as the structuring fantasy of political economy: ‘the mysterious
character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the
commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective
characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural
properties of these things.’55 By donning the form of useful things, these socio-
historical relations of men appear as something natural or non-symbolic, as a
‘second nature’.56 Value, however, is not a property of useful things – as Marx
quips, ‘so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or
a diamond.’57 Nonetheless, the imaginary form of use-value supports the fantasy
that there is a relation between use-value and exchange-value, a relation that
posits exchange-value as an abstract expression of use-value.58 This fantasy is
the central target of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, the fantasy ‘that
supports the union of use-value and exchange-value’.59
Against this fantasy, Marx insists that the commodity is the objective form of
value (i.e. an autonomous system of difference), which ‘can never appear as such;
it is always covered and embodied by the Gegenstande’.60 This means that value
can only appear vis-à-vis the commodity as its ‘objective shell’ (‘sachliche Hulle’),
that is, it can appear only as positive quality of things.61 Commodity fetishism
refers to exactly this objective and constitutive distortion. Marx’s critique of
commodity fetishism thus presents the dialectical relationship between the
structural negativity of labour-power and value as its objective veil. His critique
aims to expose this structural negativity that is elided by the very relations that
are an expression of it. With this account of Marx’s critique of political economy
in view, we can turn to Lévi-Strauss.
Return to Lévi-Strauss: Kinship and the

political economy of sex
There are two texts by Lévi-Strauss that play an important role in Rubin’s essay,
The Elementary Structures of Kinship62 (1949) and ‘The Family’63 (1956). Lévi-
Strauss’s analyses of the incest prohibition and the sexual division of labour
in these texts draw on Saussure’s analysis of linguistic structure in Course
in General Linguistics (1912). In his analysis of language, Saussure famously
brackets the subjective and temporal dimension of language, speech (la
parole), in order to isolate a pure, abstract object, namely linguistic structure
(la langue).64 As he points out, ‘[b]y distinguishing between language itself and
linguistic structure, we distinguish … what is social from what is individual.’65
Unlike speech, which is individual, linguistic structure demarcates the social
dimension of language. As such, linguistic structure is irreducible to subjective
consciousness – that is, to conscious intention, individual expression and
so on. Rather linguistic structure refers to an autonomous system of values
constituted by the differential relation between signifiers and signifieds. As
Saussure famously claims:
In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that
is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms
between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and
no positive terms. Whether we take the [signified] or the [signifier], the language
includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only
conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system.66
This means that the identity of a linguistic unit is purely differential – ‘[w]hat
characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not.’67 Linguistic
structure is constituted vis-à-vis the relation between these two orders of
difference. As Saussure puts it,
A linguistic system is a series of phonetic differences that match with a series

of conceptual differences. But this matching of a certain number of auditory
signals and a similar number of significations itself carved out from the mass
of thought gives rise to a system of values … Although signification and signal
are each, in isolation, purely differential and negative, their combination is a
fact of a positive nature. It is, indeed, the only order of facts linguistic structure
comprises.68
Insofar as the relation between these two orders of difference is arbitrary and
unmotivated,69 Saussure demonstrates that linguistic structure ultimately refers
to the non-relation between two orders of difference. Saussure’s analysis of
linguistic structure thus inaugurates the fundamental insight of structuralism
– what Tomšič describes as the ‘minimalism of structure’. Structure refers only
to difference, and in this sense, as Tomšič points out, ‘the structure is a cut.’70
Linguistic structure refers only to the purely negative difference that, as Saussure
shows, is constitutive differentiation as such.71
Saussure’s analysis of linguistic structure is crucial for Lévi-Strauss. In the
essay ‘History and Anthropology’ (1949), he credits Franz Boas with having
identified the fundamental importance of this insight of structuralist linguistics
for anthropology.72 According to him, what Boas discovered was the ‘unconscious
nature’ of social phenomena. Citing Boas, he argues that the task of anthropology
in the wake of structuralist linguistics is to ‘grasp the unconscious structure
underlying each institution and each custom’,73 that is, to identify social structure
‘beyond the conscious and always shifting images which men hold’.74 Lévi-Strauss
invokes Marx’s formulation from the 18th Brumaire to elaborate this idea – ‘men
make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’.75 Lévi-Strauss
reiterates this claim in the first volume of Mythologiques, the Raw and the Cooked
(1964): ‘[m]ythological analysis has not, and cannot have, as its aim to show how
men think … I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how
myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact’.76
Lévi-Strauss develops his analysis of unconscious structure in The
Elementary Structures of Kinship. Here he famously investigates the apparently
contradictory nature of the incest prohibition, that is, that it is characterized by
both the universality of nature and the coercive function of law.77 According to
Lévi-Strauss, the situation is this: reproduction is doubly circumscribed by the
determinacy of heredity – not only must one have parents (in the sense that
there is no spontaneous generation), nature also determines that one will be like
them.78 At the same time, nature is wholly indifferent to the actual content of
heredity: ‘[n]ature assigns to each individual determinants transmitted by those
who are in fact his parents, but it has nothing to do with deciding who these
parents will be’.79 The spontaneity and universality of reproduction thus coincides
with the indeterminacy of alliance. Culture, according to Lévi-Strauss, emerges
in the space of this indeterminacy, giving form to reproduction where it remains
everywhere undetermined. The universality of the incest prohibition thus marks
the void that is filled in by culture, that is, the law of the socio-symbolic order. As
he puts it, ‘[t]he universality [of the incest prohibition] merely expresses the fact
that culture has at all times and at all places filled this empty form as a bubbling
spring first fills the depressions surrounding its source.’80 The incest prohibition
thereby marks the threshold culture as the emergence of a rule in the space of
this void.
Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the sexual division of labour in ‘The Family’
ultimately returns to the ground of the incest prohibition. Here he discusses the
pre-eminence of the monogamous family. Like in the case of incest prohibition,

he argues that the monogamous family appears to be an institution that is at
once cultural and yet virtually universal: while there is ‘no natural law making
the family universal … it is found practically everywhere’.81 He argues that
the pre-eminence of the family is the expression of a prohibition, namely the
division of labour that enjoins and forbids each sex from performing certain
tasks, that is, the sexual division of labour. Like the incest prohibition, there is no
natural ground for this division – biological specialization is as little the origin of
the sexual division of labour as the genetic dangers of consanguineous marriage
are the origin of incest taboo.82 That is, according to Lévi-Strauss, the sexual
division of labour cannot be explained by appealing to biological reproductive
roles or instinctual behaviour, that is, it does not have as its origin ‘purely natural
grounds of procreation, motherly instinct, and psychological feelings between
man and woman and between father and children’.83 While it is certainly true,
he argues, ‘that in every group, women give birth to children and take care of
them, and men rather have as their specialty hunting and warlike activities,’84
he insists that ‘we should be careful to distinguish the fact of the division of
labor between the sexes that is practically universal, from the way according to
which different tasks are attributed to one or the other sex’.85 The point is that
while this division is universal, its form is entirely undetermined: all societies are
structured by a sexual division of labour and at the same time the way in which
work is prohibited and allocated varies so vastly that the actual content of this
division would appear to be totally irrelevant. Ultimately, Lévi-Strauss argues
that the universality of the sexual division of labour refers to the universality of
the sexual division of labour in reproduction – what Marx referred to as the ‘the
division of labor in the sexual act (die Teilung der Arbeit im Geschlechtsakt)’.86
The necessity of the division of sexual labour in reproduction, that is, that
reproduction must be heterosexual, nonetheless leaves undetermined the actual
content of this division of sexual labour. The universality of the sexual division
of labour, then, like the universality of the incest prohibition, points to a void
that is filled in by culture.
In both cases, the imposition of a rule establishes a system of exchange,
constituting the social relation that is the basic form of culture. As Lévi-
Strauss points out, ‘the content of the prohibition is not exhausted by the fact
of prohibition: the latter is instituted only in order to guarantee and establish,
directly or indirectly, immediately or mediately, an exchange.’87 That is, the
injunction of heterosexual alliance and the prohibition of consanguineous
marriage ensure the circulation of women that constitutes the basic form
of social relation. This, according to Lévi-Strauss, is the essentially social

function of law: ‘the risk of seeing a biological family established as a closed
system is eliminated; the biological group can no longer stand apart, and the
bond of alliance with another family ensures the dominance of the social over
the biological, and of the culture over the natural’.88 Culture thereby supplants
nature, instituting the preeminence of the socio-symbolic over the biological.
The point, however, is that the preeminence of this socio-symbolic order has
always already taken place, that is, culture has always already filled in nature’s
void. It is not the case, then, that this void could remain empty, that is, that
‘society might not have been’.89 As Lévi-Strauss puts it, ‘the rules of kinship and
marriage are not made necessary by the social state. They are the social state
itself reshaping biological relationship and natural sentiments, forcing them into
structures implying them as well as others, and compelling them to rise above
their original characteristics.’90
According to Lévi-Strauss, this socio-symbolic structure amounts to a system
of values. Each position – mother, sister, daughter, wife and so on – is defined
by the two operations of exchange that constitute value, that is, substitution for
something dissimilar and comparison with something similar.91 Lévi-Strauss’s
analysis of the incest prohibition thus returns to the ground of Marx’s critique
of political economy and commodity fetishism. For Marx, as we have seen, it is
the apparent relation between use-value and exchange-value that he identifies as
the structuring fantasy of political economy, that is, that by taking on the form of
useful things, these socio-historical relations appear as something natural or non-
symbolic, as a ‘second nature’.92 Yet exchange-value, he insists, is not a property
of useful things. The same of course must be said of women, that is, that their
exchange-value is not an expression of some natural characteristic or property.
To paraphrase Marx, so far no sociobiologist has ever discovered exchange-value
in any woman.93 What Lévi-Strauss shows is that there is no relation between the
production and circulation of women as exchange-value, on one hand, and the
imaginary form of their use-value (e.g. reproductive functions, beauty, sexual
desirability, care labour etc.), on the other hand.94 Like Marx, then, his analysis
of kinship operates on two levels: at the level of production, he identifies the
socio-symbolic system in which women circulate as commodities; at the level
of fantasy, he identifies the appearance of these socio-symbolic relations as a
natural property, for example, the appeal to the ‘deep polygamous’ tendencies
among men and the inevitable scarcity of desirable women.95 In this sense,
what Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship introduces is a critique of the political
economy of sex, that is, a critique of fetishism: that the appearance of women’s
value as second-nature dissimulates the system of production and circulation

that functions as its ground.
If Marx’s critique of political economy exposes the structural negativity that is
elided by the very relations that are an expression of it, Lévi-Strauss’s critique of
sexual economies brings us to the same point. Its task is to expose the structural
negativity of the sexual relation – what we could call, with Lacan, the sexual
non-relation – and the forms of gender and sexual relations that operate as its
objective veil. As such, what he shows is that sexuality is nothing other than a
point of structural negativity and he identifies the material, fantasmatic effects
of this negativity that take the form of social institutions and bodily practices –
that is, the way in which the practices and institutions around gender, sexuality
and family, like the value form, appear as a second nature. Both of the critical
philosophies of Marx and Lévi-Strauss thus have the fetishism of the political
and sexual economies as their target. With this isomorphism of the method and
aim of Lévi-Strauss and Marx in view, we can once again take up Rubin’s essay
and its legacy within feminist theory.
A feminist critique of political economy
By returning to Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship and the family and Marx’s

critique of commodity fetishism, we find an alternative way in which the
encounter of structuralism and Marxism might be developed within feminist
theory. It is significant that this trajectory has been occluded even in those
critiques of Rubin’s essay and its legacy – critiques of ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-
structuralist’ positions in feminist theory. What these critiques share, broadly, is
the aim to reclaim a materialist orientation of feminist theory and the objection
that structuralist and poststructuralist theories of discourse are anathema to
this orientation. What these critiques tend to miss, however, is the real affinity
in method and aim of feminism, structuralism and Marxism. Two examples
in particular are worth considering here – Teresa Ebert’s critique of what she
identifies as poststructuralist feminism and Nancy Fraser’s critique of what she
describes as Lacanian feminism.
In Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late
Capitalism (1996), Ebert develops a critique of ‘poststructuralist’ or ‘ludic
feminism’. For Ebert, poststructuralist feminism refers to feminist theory
produced vis-à-vis an engagement with ‘poststructuralist’ theories of language,
ranging from the idea of textuality in Derrida to the idea of the sign in Lacan to
the idea of discourse in Foucault.96 According to Ebert, these poststructuralist

interlocutors furnish feminist theory with a form of materialism that obviates
a critique of social antagonism. Materialism is supplanted by ‘matterialism’, a
form of idealist materialism that revolves around ‘the matter of the body, the
matter of sexuality, the matter of race, and, above all the matter of language’.97
It is on the basis of this shift, she argues, that feminist theory becomes a
form of cultural politics, that is, a politics of representation. As Ebert puts
it, ‘If the matter of social reality is language, then changes in this reality can
best be brought about by changing the constituents of that reality – namely,
signs. Therefore, politics as collective action for emancipation is abandoned,
and politics as intervention in discursive representation is adopted as a truly
progressive politics.’98 Ludic feminism thus signals, for Ebert, that the critique
of the ‘economy of signs’ has supplanted a critique of political economy. In
tarrying only with ‘superstructural’ issues of representation, ludic feminism
leaves a critique of structural social antagonism untheorized. As such, she
argues that this ludic materialism is in fact ‘an outcome of the contradictions
of the social divisions of labor in class society … in short, [it is] a strategy for
maintaining the crisis of class relations’.99
Ebert identifies Rubin’s work with this shift in feminist theory. According
to her, ‘Rubin dissolves the relations of production into an abstract notion of
exchange that is then replaced – through analogy – with the symbolic production
of gender in a kinship system of exchange.’100 As such, Rubin’s essay establishes
this separation of the economy of signs from political economy, and according
to her, this at least implicitly is precisely the appeal for some feminists of Rubin’s
position:
Rubin’s work has been influential in part because of the role it has played in
localizing feminism: isolating feminist understandings of gender construction
from the material, economic conditions – the division of labor and relations of
production – crucial to (re)producing gender and sexuality and determining the
exploitation of women, lesbians and gays. Such a separation of gender and sex
from economic practices legitimates the class interests of ludic feminists, who
would, for the most part, like to see some measure of gender equality but who
argue for it within the existing class relations so as not to disturb their own class
privileges. In other words, they want to modify and reform but not to transform
the existing social relations. Any analysis that engages the material conditions of
gender and sexuality is thus dismissed as supplying Marxist answers to feminist
questions, as if feminist questions are somehow outside the history of relations
of production.101
According to Ebert, Rubin thus dissociates a feminist critique of political

economy from a structural critique of constitutive social antagonism,
establishing the deconstruction of normative representations of sex/gender as
the emancipatory horizon of feminism. In contrast with this discursive turn,
Ebert insists that a feminist critique of political economy must in fact aim to
transform the mechanism of production and existing material social relations.
As she puts it:
The struggle to end the exploitation and oppression of all women, and in
particular of people of color, lesbians, and gays, within the metropole as well
as the periphery, is not simply a matter of discursive or semiotic liberation or
a question of resisting ‘matter of the body’, but a global social relation: it thus
requires the transformation of material conditions – the relations of production
– producing these forms of oppression.102
Structuralist and poststructuralist feminism thus represents a myopic focus on

symbolic representation and a critique of symbolic economies that occludes a
materialist feminist critique of political economy. For Ebert, Rubin’s essay is the
starting point of this trajectory of bourgeois feminism.
In Fortunes of Feminism (2013), Nancy Fraser formulates a critique of the
feminist turn to Lacan and the limits of structuralism and poststructuralism
for feminist theory. The real target of this critique, Fraser points out, is not in
fact Lacan but what she describes as ‘Lacanianism’ – a conception of discourse
operative within feminist theory that is ‘widely considered “poststructuralist”
but that remain[s] wedded in important respects to structuralism’.103 On the face
of it, she suggests that the appeal of Lacanianism is its theory of discourse, and
unlike Ebert, Fraser argues that feminism requires a theory of discourse in order
to theorize the ‘discursive construction of subjectivity’.104 According to her:
A conception of discourse can help us understand at least four things, all of which
are interrelated. First, it can help us understand how people’s social identities
are fashioned and altered over time. Second, it can help us understand how,
under conditions of inequality, social groups in the sense of collective agents
are formed and unformed. Third, a conception of discourse can illuminate how
the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society is secured and contested.
Fourth and finally, it can shed light on the prospects for emancipatory social
change and political practice.105
Feminists have turned to Lacan’s theory of discourse, she argues, because

it appears to take up the most productive insights of Saussure and Freud. As
such, this theory promises to surpass the limits of both classical structuralism
and classical psychoanalysis, that is, the spectres of ahistorical formalism and
biologism, respectively.106
Ultimately, however, Fraser argues that a ‘Lacanian’ theory of discourse
fails to deliver on this promissory potential. The problem, she argues, is
twofold – Lacanianism replaces Freud’s biologism with an equally problematic
‘psychologism’ and Saussure’s formalism with an equally abstract and ahistorical
‘symbolicism’.107 On one hand, what Fraser identifies as the psychologism of
Lacanian psychoanalysis refers to the sense in which ‘individual psychology
is dictated by an autonomous psychology’, namely a ‘phallocentric’ symbolic
order.108 On Fraser’s reading of Lacanianism, gendered subjectivity is constituted
vis-à-vis symbolic inscription. As a result, ‘women’s disadvantaged place
in the symbolic order, the encoding of cultural authority as masculine, the
impossibility of describing a nonphallic sexuality – in short, any number of
historically contingent trappings of male dominance – now appear as invariable
features of the human condition’.109 As such, Fraser argues that the vestiges of
the biological determinism of classical psychoanalysis reappear in Lacanian
psychoanalysis in the form of a psychological essentialism.110 On the other hand,
from the standpoint of structuralism, she argues that Lacan’s concept of the
symbolic constitutes another iteration of the monolithic, totalizing, abstract and
atemporal idea of structure in Saussure. As such, she claims that Lacan at once
endows the symbolic order with ahistorical power to constitute psychic identity
independently of historical institutions and practices, and at the same time he
conflates ‘the ahistorical structure of langue with variable historical phenomena
like family forms and childrearing practices; cultural representations of love and
authority in art, literature and philosophy; the gender division of labor; form of
political organization and of other institutional sources of power and status’.111
Not only then does Lacanianism insufficiently overcome the ahistoricism of
classical structuralism, it inscribes these dehistoricized cultural phenomena into
its analysis of structure.
According to Fraser, the consequence is that Lacanianism’s account of
discourse is inadequate for a feminist theory – it cannot provide a model for
understanding social identity, the formation of collective identity or function
as the basis of political practice. From the standpoint of social identity, this
theory presents gender identity as binary and fixed, rather than as complex,
intersectional and fluid. From the standpoint of collective identity, Lacanianism
presents identity of social groups as imaginary and fictive, thereby mitigating
against the idea of agential identity as the basis of collective solidarity. As she
puts it, ‘from the perspective of Lacanianism, collective movements would

by definition be vehicles of delusion; they could not even in principle be
emancipatory.’112 The most serious problem for Fraser, however, comes from
the standpoint of political practice: that on the basis of this theory of discourse,
the idea of transformative change is elided. The ahistorical nature of structure
implies that ‘speaking subjects could only ever reproduce the existing symbolic
order; they could not possibly alter it’.113 What’s more, Lacan’s account of the
constitution of the subject implies that there is no subject of politics, that is, no
social agent. As Fraser puts it, ‘Lacanianism posits a view of the person as non-
sutured congeries of three moments, none of which can qualify as a political
agent’ – the grammatical ‘I’ of the speaking subject inscribed in the symbolic
order, the ego as imaginary projection and the unconscious.114 For Fraser, then, it
is precisely the legacy of structuralism that mitigates against an alliance between
feminist theory and Lacanianism, and in place of this structuralist legacy she
advocates for a ‘pragmatic’ theory of discourse along the lines of what we find in
Foucault and Habermas.
What is significant is that while both of these critiques target Rubin’s
analysis of production as inadequate, neither of them identify an analysis of the
isomorphism of the sexual non-relation and the value form of the commodity
form as the crucial elision. On one hand, Ebert identifies structuralist and
poststructuralist analyses of discourse as antithetical with a materialist
critique precisely insofar as they replace a critique of material production
with a critique of symbolic production. According to Ebert, ‘what is at stake
in this displacement of the economic by discourse is the elision of the issue
of exploitation and the substitution of discursive identity politics for the
struggle for full social and economic emancipation’.115 In part, Ebert’s critique
is on point – the feminist turn to an analysis of symbolic production did in
fact tend to reduce the emancipatory horizon of feminist theory to identity
politics. The problem with Ebert’s critique, however, is that she identifies as the
materialist alternative a return to a critique of the real, empirical conditions of
exploitation. As she puts it, ‘social relations and practices are, in other words,
prior to signification and are objective. The subjugation of women, then, is
an objective historical reality: it not simply a matter of representation by self-
legitimating discourses.’116 Yet it is exactly this undialectical opposition between
the ideality of symbolic production and the reality of material production that
positions of Marx and Lévi-Strauss undermine. The commodity form and
sexuality refer to constitutively split forms: a social relation constituted by
antagonism and the negativity that constitutes the very form of this relation.
What we have, in each case, is a ‘sensuous supersensuous form’ – structural

negativity and its objective shell. Read in the light of this isomorphism, it is
equally important to supplement Ebert’s critique of identity politics with a
critique of a humanist materialism that, in claiming to dispense with ‘merely’
symbolic structures, presents the abolition of capitalist production as the
abolition of social antagonism as such.117 Only on this basis is it clear that
the task of critical philosophy, including a materialist feminism, is to proceed
dialectically in order to analyse this constitutively split form that is at the heart
of a critique of political economy.
On the other hand, Fraser identifies structuralist and poststructuralist
theories of discourse as incompatible with pragmatic theories of discourse
that allow feminists to theorize political agency and radical political action.
For Fraser, these pragmatic models allow feminists to theorize the symbolic
constitution of subjectivity that is the basis of political agency and action.
What Fraser’s critique misses, however, is that Marx disaggregates subjectivity
and consciousness, thereby dispensing with the problematic of agency and
recognition that are at the centre of Fraser’s account of a materialist feminist
politics. The subject of politics, for Marx, is not the subject of consciousness.
The subject of politics is rather a paradoxical, non-subjective subject – as
Tomšič puts it, ‘practical, multiple, anonymous and by definition not conscious
of itself.’118 In this sense, the subject that Marx describes as the proletariat is
exactly the subject psychoanalysis and structuralist anthropology identify as the
subject of the unconscious.
What we see, then, is that even these positions reproduce the undialectical
alternative between identity politics and humanist materialism that has
characterized much of contemporary feminist theory produced in the wake
Rubin’s critique of political economy – the alternative between an analysis
that has reduced a feminist critique of political economy to deconstructing
imaginary production, on one hand, and a humanist materialist analysis of
commodity production that would endeavour to dissolve all forms of social
antagonism, on the other hand. The point is that we find the resources for
moving beyond this undialectical alternative already in Rubin’s essay, precisely
in the encounter between Marx and Lévi-Strauss that she introduces into the
field of feminism. What we need, as Rubin insisted, is a feminist critique
of political economy, which means: a critique of the structural antagonisms
and contradictions that constitute our social reality and an analysis of the
isomorphism of the value form and the sexual non-relation. To develop a
feminist critique of political economy is thus to dispense with the claim
that a critique of sexual economy and a critique of political economy are

merely analogical. It is rather to theorize this social antagonism and bring it
to light – the antagonism dissimulated by the fantasmatic forms of capitalist-
patriarchy.
Notes
1 See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’,
in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly
Review, 1975), 157–210.
2 Ibid., 165.
3 Rubin explicitly distances her analysis from a socialist feminist position – the claim
that ‘it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are articulated into
the surplus value nexus which is the sine qua non of capitalism’. Ibid., 162.
4 According to Rubin,
To explain women’s usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this

usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is another. It is
precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very
much about women and the oppression of women. Women are oppressed in
societies which can by no stretch of the imagination be described as capitalist.
Ibid., 163.
5 Ibid., 158.
6 Ibid., 203.
7 If Lévi-Strauss is correct in seeing the exchange of women as a fundamental
principle of kinship, the subordination of women can be seen as a product of the
relationships by which sex and gender are organized and produced. The economic
oppression of women is derivative and secondary. But there is an ‘economics’ of
sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems. We
need to study each society to determine the exact mechanisms by which particular
conventions of sexuality are produced and maintained. Ibid., 177
8 Ibid., 176.
9 Ibid., 177.
10 Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, Social Text, no. 52/53 (1997): 265–77.
11 Ibid., 265.
12 Ibid., 272.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 273.
15 Ibid., 272.
16 Ibid., 274.
17 Why, Butler asks rhetorically, ‘would a movement concerned to criticize and
transform the ways in which sexuality is socially regulated not be understood as
central to the functioning of political economy?’ Ibid., 271.
18 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 5.
19 Ibid., 143.
20 Ibid., 139.
21 Ibid., 146. Biopower is thus the ‘background that enables us to understand the
importance assumed by sex as a political issue. It was at the pivot of the two axes
along which developed the entire political technology of life’. Ibid., 145.
22 Ibid., 140.
23 Ibid., 140–41.
24 Ibid., 147.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 140.
27 ‘We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an autonomous agency
which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of
its surface of contact with power.’ Ibid., 155.
28 Ibid., 155.
29 Ibid.
30 The third volume of the history of sexuality, however, departs from his earlier
analysis of the relationship between the productivity of biopower and capitalism.
31 Ibid., 6.
32 ‘And this was far from being a matter of the class which in the eighteenth century
became hegemonic believing itself obliged to amputate from its body a sex that was
useless, expensive, dangerous as soon as it was no longer given over exclusively to
reproduction.’ Ibid., 123.
33 ‘Let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of
knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted
for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are
invited to free, is already himself an effect and instrument of political anatomy; the
soul is the prison of the body.’ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 30.
34 Rubin, ‘Traffic in Women’, 204–05.
35 Brooke Beloso develops a similar argument: ‘it is precisely this line of inquiry that
Rubin forecloses in her postulation of the sex/gender system as a process whereby
human beings are transformed into the helpmates of men but not into commodities’.
Brooke Meredith Beloso, ‘Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class’, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 1 (September 2012): 53.
My claim is that the problem with this analogical argument is that it cannot theorize
the fundamental relationship between capitalism and patriarchy.
36 Rubin, ‘Traffic in Women’, 158.
37 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes
(London: Penguin, 1990), 125.
38 Ibid., 126.
39 Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 2015),
28.
40 Ibid.
41 Marx, Capital, 126.
42 Ibid., 187.
43 Ibid., 128.
44 Ibid., 164. As Marx puts it,
Men do not therefore bring the products of their labor into relation with
each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material
integuments of homogeneous human labor. The reverse is true: by equating
different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their
different kinds of labor as human labor. They do this without being aware of
it. Ibid., 166–67.
45 Ibid., 164.
46 Eric Santer, The Weight of all Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 104.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 103–04.
49 This means that ultimately, then, expenditure refers to the expenditure as time, that
is, of abstract, socially necessary labour time.
50 Tomšič, Capitalist Unconscious, 9.
51 Ibid., 6.
52 Sami Khatib, ‘Sensuous Supra-Sensuous: The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction’, in
Aesthetic Marx, eds. Samir Gandesha and Hohan F. Hartle (London: Bloomsbury,
2017).
56 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971),
86.
58 As Samo Tomšič puts it, ‘[t]he science of value thus begins already at the level of
the [supposedly] non-symbolic use-value that precedes exchange’. See Tomšič,
Capitalist Unconscious, 30.
59 Ibid., 29.
60 Khatib, ‘Aesthetics of Real Abstraction’.
61 Ibid.
62 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969).
63 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Family’, in Man, Culture and Society, ed. Harry Lionel
Shapiro (New York: Galaxy, 1960).
64 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Illinois: Open Court, 1986),
118
65 Ibid., 13.
66 Ibid., 118.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 118–19.
69 So we can envisage the linguistic phenomenon in its entirety – the language, that is –
as a series of adjoining subdivisions simultaneously imprinted both on the plane of
vague, amorphous thought (A), and the equally featureless plan of sound (B) … The
characteristic role of a language in relation to thought is not to supply the material
phonetic means by which ideas may be expressed. It is to act as an intermediary
between thought and sound, in such a way that the combination of both necessarily
produces a mutually complementary delimitation of units. Ibid., 110.
71 Here I’m following Tomšič’s analysis of the minimalism of structure:
We can recall that the bar in question does not aim at the external relation
between words things but at the internal consistency of linguistic signs. It thus
designates the absence of any substantial essential or immanent link between
two components, which implies that the relation between the signifier (the
series of sounds) and the signified (the associated mental representation) is
actually a non-relation: an instable, shifting and groundless link. Saussure
thereby exposes the structuring function of the bar and conceives the
autonomy of the signifier, independent from its association to the signified
and even more so from its relation to the referent, the element of external
reality. Ibid.
72 ‘By comparing cultural phenomena to language from this point of view, he

anticipated both the subsequent development of linguistic theory and a future for
anthropology whose rich promise we are just beginning to perceive.’ Claude Lévi-
Strauss, ‘Introduction to History and Anthropology’, in Structural Anthropology
(London: Basic Books, 1963), 19.
73 Ibid., 21.
74 Ibid., 23.
75 As Lévi-Strauss puts it, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not know that
they are making it.’ Ibid. In Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1971), Levi-
Strauss claims, ‘I rarely broach a new sociological problem without first stimulating
my thought by rereading a few pages of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or
the Critique of Political Economy’, 61.
76 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, I (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 12.
77 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, 32.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Family’, 266.
82 Geneticists have shown that while consanguineous marriages are likely to bring ill
effects in a society which has consistently avoided them in the past, the danger would
be much smaller if the prohibition had never existed, since this would have given
ample opportunity for the harmful hereditary characters to become apparent and be
automatically eliminated through selection: as a matter of fact this is the way breeders
improve the quality of their subjects. Therefore, the dangers of consanguineous
marriages are the outcome of the incest prohibition rather than actually explaining it.
Furthermore, since very many primitive people do not share our belief in biological
harm resulting from consanguineous marriages, but have entirely different theories,
the reason should be sought elsewhere, in a way more generally consistent with the
opinions generally held by mankind as a whole. Ibid., 277.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 274.
85 Ibid., 275.
86 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus, 1998), 50.
87 Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, 51.
88 Ibid., 479.
89 Ibid., 490.
90 Ibid.
91 Saussure 1986: 113.
92 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 86.
94 It is unsurprising, then, as he points out that very often marriage institutionalizes
this form: for example, ‘[t]here is no need to call upon the matrimonial vocabulary
of Great Russia where the groom was called the “merchant” and the bride the
“merchandise” for the likening of women to commodities… to be acknowledged’.
See Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures, 36.
95 Ibid., 38.
96 According to Ebert, this non-Marxist feminism ‘is developed entirely out of

feminist encounters with poststructuralist theories (especially those of Derrida,
Foucault, and Lacan) and rearticulates materialism as a mode of idealism, what
I call matterialism: the matter of the body, the matter of sexuality, the matter
of race, and, above all the matter of language’. Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism
and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 25.
97 Ibid., 25.
98 Ibid., 28.
99 Ibid., 26. According to Ebert,
[l]udic feminism becomes – in its effects, if not in its intentions – a theory that
inscribes the class interests of what bourgeois sociology calls the upper middle
class. Ludic feminism does not acknowledge the existence of a historical series
independent from the consciousness of the subject and autonomous from
textuality. Such a recognition would lead to acknowledgment of the materiality
of the social contradictions brought about the social relations of production
founded up the priority of private property. Ludic feminism cannot accept a
social theory that finds private property – the congealed surplus labor of others
– to be the cause of social inequalities that can be remedied only through
revolution. Ludic feminism is, in effect, a theory for property holders. Ibid.
100 Ibid., 46.

101 Ibid., 47.
102 Ibid., 37.
103 Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism (London: Verso, 2014), 145. Fraser’s exact
target is a quasi-structuralist reading of Lacan:
By ‘Lacanianism’, I do not mean the actual thought of Jacques Lacan, which is

far too complex to tackle here. I mean, rather, an ideal-typical neo-structuralist
reading of Lacan that is widely credited among English-speaking feminists.
In discussing ‘Lacanianism’, I shall bracket the question of the fidelity of this
reading, which could be faulted for overemphasizing the influence of Saussure
at the expense of other, countervailing influences, such as Hegel. For my
purposes, however, this ideal-typical, Saussurean reading of Lacan is useful
precisely because it evinces with unusual clarity the difficulties that beset
many conceptions of discourse that are widely considered ‘post-structuralist’
but that remain wedded in important respect to structuralism. Ibid., 144–45.
104 Ibid., 139.

105 Ibid., 140.
106 The introduction of the Freudian problematic promises to supply the speaking
subject that is missing in Saussure and thereby reopen the excluded questions
about identity, speech and social practice. Conversely, the use of the Saussurean
model promises to remedy some of Freud’s deficiencies. By insisting that gender
identity is discursively constructed, Lacan appears to eliminate the lingering
vestiges of biologism in Freud, to treat gender as socio-cultural all the way down,
and to render it in principle more open to change. Ibid., 145.
107 Ibid., 146–47.
108 Ibid., 146.
109 Ibid.
110 Of course, one could argue, as Zupančič does, that Freud discovers human
sexuality at precisely the moment of rupture with organic, biological need, as the
constitutively dysfunctional departure from biological life. See Alenka Zupančič,
Why Psychoanalysis? (Copenhagen: NSU Press, 2013), 14–20.
111 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 147.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.
115 Ebert, Ludic Feminism, 42.
116 Ibid., 38.
117 See Chapter Two of Lorenzo Chiesa’s Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical
Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and his discussion of the
relationship between Lacan’s idea of the Other and Lévi-Strauss’s account of the
symbolic structure of law.
Bibliography
Beloso, Brooke M. ‘Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class’. Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 1 (September 2012): 47–70.
Butler, Judith. ‘Merely Cultural’. Social Text, no. 52/53 (1997): 265–77.
Ebert, Teresa. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late
Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism. London: Verso, 2014.
Khatib, Sami. ‘The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction’. In Marx and the Aesthetic, edited by
Samir Gandesha and Hohan F. Hartle. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ‘The Family’. In Man, Culture and Society, edited by Harry Lionel
Shapiro, 261–285. New York: Galaxy, 1960.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ‘Introduction to History and Anthropology’. In Structural
Anthropology, 1–30. London: Basic Books, 1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press,
1969a.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, I.
New York: Harper & Row, 1969b.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Atheneum, 1971.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben
Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990.
Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus, 1998.
Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’. In
Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York:
Monthly Review, 1975.
Santer, Eric. The Weight of all Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016.
Tomšič, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. London: Verso, 2015.
Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis? Copenhagen: NSU Press, 2013.
5
Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism

Joan Copjec
Taste of Cherry, winner of the 1997 Cannes film prize, is the bleakest film in Abbas
Kiarostami’s oeuvre. By 1988, Iran’s devastating eight-year war with Iraq, which
erupted on the heels of the bloody 1978/79 revolution, had finally ended, but
battle fatigue and disillusionment are still palpable throughout the film. Explicit
references to these conflicts and the lingering presence of militia, together with
the desperate conditions of day labourers, who hang around looking to pick up
whatever work they can, serve as reminders that capitalism had been operating
behind the scenes all along, manipulating and prolonging the conflicts for sheer
financial gain. The lush vistas of the director’s other films are sadly absent,
replaced here by a flinty, peri-urban landscape. Bulldozers emit harsh sounds as
they claw the ground as if to rip out, root and branch, the lone tree on a hill that
is a signature presence in many of Kiarostami’s films but nowhere visible here.
That this is a world made up almost entirely of men is an indication not of the
director’s indifference to the plight of women, as some feminists complained,
but of the arid conditions that everywhere quash desire and foster despair.
Sometime before the film began, Mr. Badii apparently took the decision to
commit suicide, for he spends most of his screen time trying to accomplish what
turns out to be this not-so-simple task. The film focuses on his unusual strategy
to carry out his resolve. Regarding Mr. Badii’s nihilistic decision, Kiarostami had
this to say in an interview: ‘the choice of death is the only prerogative left to
a human being with respect to God and social norms. Because everything in
our life has been imposed on us from birth, our date and place of birth, our
parents, our home, our nationality, our build, the color of our skin, our culture.’1
If Kiarostami felt compelled to offer an explanation, it is because the narrative
does not. Badii, an urban, educated, middle-class man who minds his health
and drives a Land Rover, seems to have been favoured by God and social norms,
unlike the out-of-work labourers from Iran’s ethnic underclass, who struggle to
eke out a living. There is no hint of anything lacking in his life, of any particular
circumstance that might produce the sense of unfreedom and despair evoked
in the director’s explanation. This is not to retract the suggestion that Badii’s
despondency is related to the grim political and economic conditions on view in
every frame. It suggests, rather, that by making its protagonist more of a cipher,
the film transforms the way we read the site of traumatic inscription. Rather than
a psycho-social narrative about the debilitating effects on the psyche of this new
form of poverty, Kiarostami gives us something else. In place of psychological
depth, he focuses on psychic interiority.
In order to understand this transformation, I want to supplement Kiarostami’s
explanation with a passage in which Emmanuel Levinas describes a situation
very much like the one in which Badii finds himself:
There exists a weariness which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and

above all a weariness of oneself. What wearies then is not a particular form of our
life – our surroundings, because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends,
because they are vulgar and cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself […]
in weariness existence is something like the reminder of a commitment to exist
[ … and] the impossible refusal of this ultimate obligation. In weariness we want
to escape existence itself, and not only one of its landscapes. An evasion without
an itinerary or end, it is not trying to come ashore anywhere.2
Kiarostami’s film, I will argue, is legible through the concept of fatigue

elaborated by Levinas in Existence and Existents. This concept helps highlight
the odd arduousness of the film’s trajectory and permits us to examine both
the contemporary issues at the film’s centre – issues of war, capitalism and their
inhospitable relation to fatigue – and the philosophical background informing
Kiarostami’s image-making practice.
While the antipathy of Kiarostami to narrative and character psychology is
well known, little has been written about the source of this attitude in what is
regarded as a heretical strain of Islamic thought. Henry Corbin, one of the most
important Islamicists of the twentieth century, is known not only for enlarging
our understanding of this philosophical strain but also for introducing Heidegger
into French circles. In fact, Corbin claimed that he found in Heidegger the key to
understanding Islamic philosophy. This claim is, however, an exaggeration, for
Corbin jiggered the lock with a number of keys and as he took direct inspiration
from philosophers such as Sohravardi and Mulla Sadra, he was often obliged to
move beyond his German mentor. For Levinas, too, Heidegger was a first and
abiding inspiration, but in Existence and Existents, he expressed a ‘profound need
Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism 141
to leave the climate’ of his mentor’s philosophy.3 I will suggest that if Corbin and
Levinas strayed from the confines of Heideggerian thought, it was to meet up in
the same place: a place that happens to be known in Islamic philosophy as the
Eighth Climate. The Eighth Climate, another name for the imaginal world, is a
meta-geographical and meta-historical realm in which the empirical appearance
of the world is absolved and the real apparition of the subject takes place.4 It is a
speculative realm, ontologically real, despite having no existence in reality.
We will say more about this realm after attending further to Levinas’s
concept of fatigue, which is best grasped by setting it against the background
of a heightened concern with the body’s susceptibility to fatigue that steadily
increased, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, to the point
of obsession. Fatigue emerged as a problem whose very insurmountability
spawned utopian dreams not only of its eradication but of the body’s eventual
obsolescence. Why? Because war and capitalism – and who in the last century
would think of separating them? – have little patience for the down time human
bodies require. An account of this obsession with fatigue is given in Anson
Rabinbach’s The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity,
which centres on the German concept of Kraft, a universal energy or force that
became the fetishized focus of much late nineteenth-century science.5 Many
of the names that crop up in the study – including those of Hermann von
Helmholtz, the German pioneer of the theory of thermodynamics, of the laws
of energy’s maintenance and loss; and Gustav Fechner, who introduced theories
of energy conservation into psychology – are familiar to readers of Freud and
Marx, who will be able to see in the crucial notion of Kraft the beginnings of the
conceptions of libido and Arbeitkraft.
Devoted, however, to the Taylorist regime of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and a now antiquated vocabulary, Rabinbach’s book calls
out for updating. Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
responds to this call by dwelling on a new form of unmitigated capitalism,
which – devoid of the utopian impulses that once characterized early modern
industry and buttressed by a capacity, thanks to advances in science, to remain
unblinkingly awake – regards fatigue with an unprecedented enmity.6 The aim
of 24/7 is to expose the latest phase of what we can think of as capitalism’s war
on bodies and to imagine ways of resisting it. To this end the book looks to
dreams and sleep as precious reserves to be defended against the incursions of
capitalism (even as it rejects entirely not just Freud’s work on dreams but the
whole of psychoanalysis), and evokes as an ally the work of Levinas (without
giving any real account of the latter’s argument or its specific concept of fatigue).
The price Crary pays for this double neglect is a failure to get beyond the
notion of a physiological need for sleep, even as he rails against the capitalist
reduction of human existence to its bodily needs. What he seeks from Levinas
is a philosophical pedigree to support his plea for the reimagining of a being-
in-common with others that would spring us from the trap of self-isolation in
which capitalism places us. What he loses is what we are looking to find out here.
Now, had Crary paid attention to rather than dismissed The Interpretation
of Dreams, he would have discovered there the extraordinary thesis that certain
dreams testify to what Freud calls a ‘wish to sleep’, a wish Lacan later describes
as ‘the greatest enigma’.7 Not a response to a physiological deficit, this de-
psychologized wish involves something more profound: an ontological declivity.
In German, this wish is manifest in Wiederholen, in repetition; etymologically, a
‘hauling’ by which the subject ‘drags [himself] into a certain path that he cannot
get out of ’,8 and retains in the Freudian context, Lacan says, all ‘its connotation
of something tiring, exhausting’.9 If ‘nothing is more enigmatic’ nor central
to the structure of psychoanalysis than Wiederholen, the idea itself precedes
psychoanalysis and is present in Islamic philosophy’s conception of ta’wil, a
tenacious hermeneutical return to and repetition of obscure origins that ends
up in the non-place of the imaginal world, the Eighth Climate.
Levinas began writing Existence and Existents in 1940, while being retained
in a forced labour camp. At this point, he had already become disaffected with
Heidegger’s philosophy, but the rift could only have been aggravated as the
official motto of National Socialism (and unofficial motto of capitalism), Arbeit
Macht Frei, was being mounted on the gates of various concentration camps.
Heidegger’s thesis – that Dasein was consigned in its Being, that it had to assume
as a task what was given – began to appear all the more unpalatable. During his
imprisonment, Levinas composed his reflections on fatigue, which he conceived
not as something that befalls a worn-out subject, but as contributory to the event
of the subject, its coming into existence. Stated simply, fatigue is a recoil from
and return to anonymous existence, or to what Levinas refers to as the il y a (the
‘there is’), a term he substitutes for Heidegger’s term, es gibt. The substitution
removes Dasein’s ‘pre-understanding’ of and concern for Being to introduce a
note of indifference, even inhospitability, into the field of Being.
The concept of ‘being-toward-death’ is the primary target of Levinas’s critique,
which – viewed from its widest angle – proceeds from the general observation
that the ‘development of biological science in the nineteenth century … had an
incalculable influence on the whole of contemporary philosophy’.10 ‘Including
Heidegger’s’ is implied. From this point, Levinas sketches an argument that
resonates in the one Foucault sets out in amplified form decades later regarding
biopower’s roots in this same science. While previously the living and living
things were assumed to have been given life, which thus belonged to them, in
some ‘quasi-perceptible fashion’, the nineteenth-century life sciences transformed
life into the object of a struggle to preserve itself. From here on out it became
possible to define life as having a purpose or final cause, namely life itself.
Foucault famously characterized the shift to biopower as an abandonment
of ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’ in favour of the adoption of a new
conception of power as that which ‘foster[s] life or disallow[s] it to the point
of death’.11 Yet, while biopower retreats from the business of death, which is no
longer a territory it commands, the ultimate threat of death is what gives the
concern for life its urgency. It is in order to save Heidegger from association
with this ‘bio-problematic’ that Derrida warns us against confusing Heidegger’s
being-toward-death with a privileging of the end of living, or perishing, or
‘kicking of the bucket’.12 Being-toward-death’s goal must not be confused with
biological death; for what is at stake in Heidegger is, rather, death in its ‘proper’
sense, death as one’s ‘ownmost possibility’, as uniquely mine. By anticipating my
death, I do not experience my own expiry, for the sovereignty of death ensures
that it never discloses itself to me in actuality. In being-toward-death, I instead
confront the ‘closest closeness one might have’, which is for Heidegger the
possibility of the impossibility that is death.13 That is, I confront not the absolute
Nothing that annihilates all possibilities, but the ‘nothing actual’, which is to say:
possibility itself. Through our anticipatory stance towards death, we discover
our capacity to transcend not death (which remains ineluctable, certain), but
the limitations placed on us by our having been thrown into the world. That
is, we cease to be limited by the ontic dispositions thrust on us before we had a
chance to choose them – ‘our parents, our home, our nationality, our build, the
color of our skin, our culture’ (to borrow – why not? – Kiarostami’s list) – and
become capable of all the possibilities available to me on this side of death. The
anticipation of death throws open being in its totality, in all its possibilities, and
discloses our primordial power to transcend our ontic limits.
This is not the place to adjudicate Derrida’s claim that Levinas confuses
Heidegger’s ‘proper’ death with perishing; we will focus, rather, on Levinas’s
stated objection, which is that being-toward-death appeals to an ontological
finality. This critique focuses on Dasein’s concern for Being, its care for existing.
Levinas’s complaint is that Heidegger constrains us within the horizon of Being.
The following assertion clearly articulates this complaint, ‘There is, according
to Heidegger, a circuit that leads each moment of our existence to the task of
existing; thus in turning the handle of our door we open the totality of existence,
for beyond the action[,] we have already traversed the intermediaries separating
this action from our concern for being itself.’14 The threat of nothingness, of
being’s imminent annihilation, demands that every act serve as a means to
a specific end: the endurance and conservation of being. Just as Aristotle’s
finalism of the Good sacrificed, or dismissed, excess pleasure as accidental, as
mere aberration, so the finalism of Being sacrifices desire, along with all the
intermediary instances through which the teleological circuit passes.
Taste of Cherry appeals, through its very title, to a voluptuousness of existence
for which the finalism of Being has neither time nor use. One must be careful,
however, not to mistake the seemingly saccharine tone of the title as a call for
a return to a plainer life or more modest pleasures, for anything like a longing
for ‘the depersonalization of slumber, [that would allow us to] inhabit a world
in common, a shared enactment of withdrawal from the calamitous nullity and
waste of 24/7 praxis’, endorsed by Crary; nor to confuse it with the acquisitiveness
with which he associates the Freudian notion of desire.15 Desire seeks neither
assuagement nor the nullification of singularity; it is exorbitant, an opening onto
an unsettling alterity. Before we learn that his approaches to random men are
part of the search by which Badii hopes to find someone willing to assist in his
suicide, the film lends credence to the suspicion that he is soliciting sex from
them. Taste, then, not of a comforting of nameable pleasure but of a scandalous
otherness. Not unlike Levinas, Kiarostami indicts the metaphysical calamity
that grounds capitalism’s refusal to affirm the exorbitant nature of desire, which
– far from sustaining the care for being – actively relaxes it. That desire must
be regarded as unsacrificable should be evident, a contrario, in the fact that
under capitalism so many, like the work-deprived workers in Kiarostami’s film,
are forced ‘to eat, drink and warm [themselves] in order not to die, [for them]
nourishment becomes fuel, as in certain kinds of hard labor’.16 To those to whom
this is not evident, Existence and Existents addresses itself in an attempt to open
their eyes ‘to the lies of capitalist idealism’.17
Rudolph Hoss, whose decision it was to display the infamous Nazi motto
at the entry of Auschwitz, is said to have regarded that motto as a ‘mystical
declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor brings a kind of
spiritual freedom’.18 Levinas’s argument is a stiff rebuttal of that declaration; it
opposes itself to ‘every labor mystique, which [is essentially an appeal] to themes
of joy and freedom’.19 The only joy offered by this mystique is the one Lacan, in
like manner, described as the superegoic pleasure of sacrifice and ‘duty fulfilled’.
Ultimately, the mystique of freedom-promising labour relies on the supposition
of a lack or deficit, which the subject seeks to overcome through the willing
sacrifice of her labour in return for some greater and far off gain. This calculation
reposes on a duality: on the one side, constraint and the despair arising from it,
the matter of the body, dense with the weight of its frailties and its inert resistance
to will; on the other, the effortless effort of freedom and will able to overcome
frailties and resistance as long as it keeps its eye on the rewards that await us in
the future. A naive notion of matter as inert substance is met with an equally
naive notion of action as propelled by a freedom ‘simply present and ready’ to
do whatever it wants, a freedom as ‘free as the wind’ (as Levinas sarcastically put
it) or as a ‘flowing river’ (as the mother in Kiarostami’s film, 10, too credulously
declares to her properly incredulous son20).
This notion of freedom as simply there from the start, a potential we
originally possess and can make use of at will, discounts the intermediaries
of ‘satisfaction and avowal’ and reduces the body to its physiological caducity,
fatigue to spent energy, mere waste.21 To overturn this capitalist idea of freedom,
Levinas theorizes fatigue not as an entropic dwindling of energy but as a deeply
enigmatic movement of return that ‘describes a closed circle’ which effaces ‘every
ulterior finality’.22 Fatigue – which is fatigued with the future – recoils from it
and from existence itself, not in order to escape but to coil back to existence from
a slight distance. Fatigue installs a lag or interval within existence, a present, that
interrupts the link tying the moment before to the moment after. It is by virtue
of this interruption that fatigue can be said to form a closed circle; otherwise, the
phrase is misleading insofar as this circle represents a kind of opening rather
than a closing. It would be more accurate to describe it as Lacan does, as a
‘short circuit’. As opposed to that circuit, magnetized by the future, ‘which leads
every moment of our existence to the task of existing’, fatigue is magnetized by
existence as a never experienced past, a lost rather than final cause. It forms a
circuit in which ‘I am obliged to pick up again the discourse … bequeathed to
me … because one can’t stop the chain … and it is precisely my duty to transmit
it in its aberrant form to someone else.’23
This short circuit is homologous to the realm I invoked earlier, that of the
Eighth Climate or imaginal world, in which heterogeneous terms emerge not as
entirely separate but as implicated in one another. Steeply schooled in Protestant
theology, Corbin describes what takes place in this realm by borrowing from
Martin Luther’s explanation of significatio passiva, or passive meaning. Puzzled
at first, the young Luther, in a flash of insight, suddenly understood what the
Psalm verse In justitia tua libera me (liberate me in your justice) meant: in
attributing to God the justice that makes us just or the holiness that hallows
us, we do not actually confer these qualities ‘upon divine Essence as such [ …
but] discover [these qualities] only insofar as they occur and are made within
us, [that is] according to what they make of us, insofar as they are our passion’.24
With respect to the Eighth Climate, this means that what we encounter in this
region is not the divine Essence but, rather, the fault in being instituted by His
primordial withdrawal from us. Thus, the qualities we experience are not His
but those excited in us through our passive relation or exposure to the fault
created by His withdrawal. We emerge as modes of being, as subjects, through
our relation to our own alterity or our capacity to be affected by the fault in
Being created by His retreat from us. The heterogeneous terms brought together
in this imaginal space – as in Levinas’s notion of the present – constitute thus a
primitive duality, composed (again) not of two separate terms but of the disjunct
term of a subject stretched between an active and a passive pole, between a past
that never was and a future that is not yet.
This explains perhaps a peculiarity in Kiarostami’s manner of filming Taste
of Cherry. Although the film consists mainly of a series of dialogues between
Badii and the passengers he picks up along the way, there are not only no two-
shots of the interlocutors but, in addition, when one or the other partner of the
dialogue is being filmed, there is no character off-screen in the other seat. The
other seat is always empty. While the film appears to promote the importance of
camaraderie, the fond memories of which Badii retains from his experience in
the military, Kiarostami’s focus is on the sense of inner otherness, which is the
condition of the possibility of the subject’s appreciation of the otherness of other
persons, and on the treacherous nature of our relation to the lost past, which is
both horrifying and a source of joy.
Let us break off here to return to the notion of entropy in its historical
association with fatigue and the development of psychoanalysis. It is known that
Freud was seduced by Fechner’s contention that the psyche sought to maintain
libidinal excitation in a state of equilibrium, despite copious evidence of the
inefficacy of this principle of constancy. That there was at work in the psyche
‘a circuit at the limit of sense and nonsense’ that ran counter to the arc of self-
preservation, progress and mastery seemed irrefutable and thus again and again
Freud acknowledged the existence of a ‘daemonic force’ at odds with the tendency
towards progress and well-being.25 Yet, because his ‘Fechnerism’ continued to
get the better of him, even in his remarkably bold Beyond the Pleasure Principle;
he attempted to remain within the conceptual framework of thermodynamics by
embracing its second principle and suggesting that this daemonic counterforce
behaved ‘somewhat like entropy’.26 With this, drive’s recursive movement became
confused with a winding down to the state of inanimation, of the total vastation
of energy.
This account runs counter to the notion of drive Freud develops elsewhere
in which drive entails a maximum perturbation rather than a winding down.
Consider, for example, his concept of Hilflosigkeit or radical helplessness. Faced
with Otto Rank’s proposal that the trauma of birth results from the loss of the
mother, which arouses the child’s anxiety, Freud objects that this thesis, while
promising, ‘floats in the air’ without an argument to sustain it.27 His counter
argument amounts to the proposal that the child suffers not from the simple
absence of its mother but from a lethal, suffocating jouissance, which marks her
absence. The special fault of Hilflosigkeit is ‘introduced, perpetuated in man in
relation to [a dimension of externality or otherness] infinitely more fatal for him
than [is the external world] for any other animal’.28 In other words, we misconstrue
the infant’s wild cries of helplessness by treating them as inarticulate pleas for the
mother’s presence; what provokes them, rather, is an overwhelming imminence
that announces to the child that she will be taken back up into the mother. If,
as Freud says, the ‘initial helplessness of human beings’ makes us dependent on
the ‘extraneous help of an experienced person’ and establishes helplessness as
‘the primal source of all moral motives’, we would be wrong to conflate his lesson
with the humanist assumption that man’s helplessness is founded in lack, in
inadequacies, which the society of others makes whole.29 The child finds himself
not so much abandoned as alone with an ‘essentially alien [existence that] strikes
against’ him.30 The society of others is salutary only insofar as it distances us
from the threat of the latter.
This notion of Hilflosigkeit helps us to read the distinction Levinas draws
between existence and existents. That he separates existence from existents
has often be said, including by Derrida, who admonishes Levinas for not
understanding that in Heidegger’s thought ‘nothing is more clear’ than the fact
the ‘Being is nothing outside the existent […] and does not exist outside [the
existent] as a foreign power, or as a hostile and neutral impersonal element.[…]
Being is not an archia which would permit Levinas to insert the fact of a faceless
tyrant under the name of Being.’31 This criticism – that Levinas is smuggling in
ontic content under ontological clothing – misses the mark. Levinas does not
dispute the fact that existence is nothing outside the existent; what he disputes
is the characterization of this nothing as a simple nullity. Far from separating
existence from existents, Levinas insists that existence is irremissible, that we are
riveted to it in a way that sometimes suffocates us. Overturning Heidegger’s thesis
that the ‘closest closeness one might have’ is to the possibility of impossibility,
Levinas associates that closeness with impossibility, a blockage of breath and

comprehension that leaves the existent utterly helpless. This negativity or
fault concerns not a ‘contingent fact – the frailties of [the human] organism’,
but a radical impasse or fault in being itself; and, ‘far from being an “insult” to
freedom [this fault, which exposes us, fatally, to a dimension of otherness] is
freedom’s faithful companion.’32 Two points must be stressed: first, this ‘special
fault’ is strictly homologous to the one we encountered in our discussion of the
withdrawal of divine Essence, where its positive valance was highlighted; here, its
threatening aspect is brought to the fore. This variation defines the treacherous
nature of our relation to this fault. Second, it is with the neglect of this impasse
in Being that Levinas charges Heidegger.
While Dasein is threatened by the definiteness of death, which remains
unimaginable, Levinas’s existent is threatened by an indefinite limitless.33 The
unimaginable nothingness on which Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death
reposes comes under assault by Levinas, who adamantly opposes the idea that
nothing lies outside being and like ‘an ocean … beats up against it on all sides’.34
Appealing first for support to Bergson’s argument that negation no longer makes
any sense when applied to the whole of being, Levinas nevertheless declines
to endorse Bergson’s counter-proposal that there is something that escapes
negation. This demurral indicates his unwilling to accept the idea that there
is a residual entity, a vital force, that is immune to negation. Rejecting both
positions, Levinas asserts that while there is something negation cannot cancel, it
is not a thing, does not exist and falls not outside being, but within it, an internal,
ineliminable fault within being itself. He describes this indefectible nothing as the
murmuring ‘presence of an absence’, a dense atmosphere of nothingness, lying
in the very heart of being.35
Something is primordially lost, withdrawn from us, leaving us not only
unsupported, but helplessly exposed to the atmosphere of a potentially lethal
alterity. It is from this helplessness that Mr. Badii suffers. For him, ‘everything-has-
already-been-imposed-at-birth’ is not the ontic affliction Heidegger describes, a
condition of immanence to be transcended by anticipating and assuming his
ownmost death. ‘Already imposed at birth’ is an ontological condition that stifles
him, prevents him from coming into being. And yet, while there is no ‘faceless
face of a tyrant’ hidden ‘under’ existence, as Derrida’s criticism would have it, no
content, no ‘something’ hidden in the impersonal ‘there is’, it is also true that this
atmosphere of presence can, as Levinas plainly states, ‘appear later as content’ as
the face of tyranny.36 Whenever the always already lost past is recast as a once
actual past of which a people have been robbed or which they themselves have
squandered, the figure of tyranny presents itself in the engineering of efforts

to recover the loss. It is precisely the fact that the radical impasse of being has
emerged as content in the combined forces of war, capitalism and theocratic-
legalism, to which Taste of Cherry testifies.
As previously indicated, the remarkable premise of the film is that Badii feels
obliged to solicit the assistance of another person to accomplish his suicide.
He thus attempts through long conversations to convince three strangers he
happens to meet – a Kurdish soldier, an Afghani seminarian and a Turkish
taxidermist – to assist him. Curiously, he does not ask his potential accomplices
to help him perform the deed, but to come along afterward and see to his
burial. It would be mistake, however, to regard Badii as a sort of Polynices,
searching for his Antigone. He is not looking for a symbolic sprinkling of dust,
a ceremonial gesture to spare him the ignominy of dying in the open, like a dog.
No, Badii’s request is more mundane and oddly excessive; he requests that his
companion call out his name twice, toss a few pebbles at him, and then throw
twenty shovels-full of dirt on his grave. It appears that he requires an accomplice
not to manage the obsequies marking his demise, but to make sure that he is
well and truly dead.37 This suggests that Badii is plagued not by the anxiety that
accompanies being-toward-death, but by the impossibility of dying. That is, it
appears that he has lost faith in the possibility of dying.38 It is undeadness – or to
use Levinas’ phrase, ‘the indefectibility of existence itself ’ – that fills Badii with
horror. It presses against him, stifles him; it is what he wants to put an end to
through suicide. But if the ‘there is’ of anonymous existence insists beyond every
negation, how can suicide succeed as a strategy? How can Badii be assured that
he will die, given that it is the very indefectibility of existence that drove him to
contemplate suicide in the first place?
Taste of Cherry is not the only Kiarostami film to focus on death. The wind
will carry us, which features a graveyard as one of its primary locations, tells
of a documentary news team that has descended on a small village in order to
film the funeral of a one-hundred-year-old woman, who does not oblige the
filmmakers by dying until well after the plug has been pulled on their project.
Life and Nothing More tells of another documentary filmmaker who visits a
small village after an earthquake claims the lives of many of its inhabitants;
it is up to the living to figure out how to go on. It seems that it is the death of
others that is Kiarostami’s theme and this is true, I argue, of Taste of Cherry as
well. For, while in this film it is the protagonist’s impending death with which
the film is concerned, it is still the death of others (the unseen, off-screen
ancestors) that motivate his quest. It is their death that imposes on him the
burden of existence, binding him irremissibly to a radically lost, because never

experienced, past.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze produces a reading of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle that continues to challenge the ‘Fechnerism’ that sometimes
mars the argument. Against Freud, he insists that ‘[d]eath does not appear in the
objective model of an indifferent inanimate matter to which the living would
“return.”’39 This idea acknowledges only one aspect of death; one that
signifies the personal disappearance of the person, the annihilation of this

difference represented by the I … This is a difference which existed only in
order to die, and a disappearance of which can be objectively represented by a
return to inanimate matter, as though calculated by a kind of entropy. Despite
appearances, this death always comes from without, even at the moment when
it constitutes the most personal possibility.40
Deleuze chides Freud for allowing the personal aspect of death to hijack his
profound conception of the death drive, which should have led to a consideration
of death’s strangely impersonal. Deleuze cites Maurice Blanchot’s description of
this other aspect,
which is without any relation to me … the unreality of the indefinite …. It is not

the irreversible step beyond which there would be no return, [but] that which is
not accomplished …. It is inevitable but inaccessible death; … it is that toward
which I cannot go forth, for in it, I do not die, I have fallen from the power to
die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not finish dying … [it is] not the
term, but the interminable, not proper but featureless death.41
The ‘they’ in question, unlike the inhabitants of the world into which Dasein
is thrown, cannot be outdistanced through an ecstatic flight of transcendence
nor do they have anything to do with the ontic limitations of everyday banality:
instead, they figure a ceaseless limitlessness. In an argument that seems designed
to discredit Heidegger’s concept of being-toward-death as well as a localized
misfire in Freud’s conception of the death drive, Deleuze claims that ‘death
cannot be reduced to negation, […] neither the limitation imposed by matter
upon mortal life, nor the opposition between matter and immortal life.’42 This
is not to deny the scientific fact that at death the body acquires the inertness of
matter, but to grasp the manner in which death occurs to the subject.
Death occurs to the subject never as its own but always as what happens to
others. Freud proposed that even though the subject is able to accept the abstract
idea of death, his own death is completely unacceptable to him. All men are
mortal, and while I may count myself among them, I – in my singularity –

escape the universal condition. Blanchot’s phrase, ‘one dies’, on the other hand,
should not be read as an abstraction, a generality added by the intellect, but as a
reality in the subject that renders her indefinite. It is precisely because we are not
protected by the umbrella of the universal, that we are subjected to the torrent
of interminable, featureless death. That is, ‘one dies’ is not the equivalent of ‘all
men are mortal’, but the result of the fact that man is marked by the absence
of ground. It is not just that he lacks the specificity of a predetermined nature,
but more: this lack inhabits him as a presence. Similarly, when Levinas ascribes
to the ‘there is’ the impersonality of ‘it rains’, what is implied is homologous to
Freud’s impersonal term id, a preindividual reality that operates in the subject, a
loss not preceded by a having, a ‘wound [that] existed before me’.43
Deleuze ends his discussion with a statement that reflects on Mr. Badii’s
precise dilemma: ‘in confronting these two aspects of death’, the impersonal
and ceaseless and the personal and definitive, ‘it is apparent that even suicide
does not make them coincide’.44 The death of an individual is incapable of
bringing to an end the unending ‘one dies’. This raises a question for the film.
Does Badii discover this lesson of suicide’s futility? According to a basic formula
of Kiarostami’s films, a doggedly determined protagonist often fails at his own
clearly defined task and in failing succeeds. This film veers from the usual
formula insofar as the protagonist’s task has a nihilistic rather than positive goal;
Badii wants to surrender completely to despair, to give into the impossibility
imposed on him by his subjection to an unexperienced and oppressive past.
Can Kiarostami’s formula be maintained; is it possible to say that Badii fails at
despair?45
We will attempt to answer by returning once again to Levinas’s critique of the
way capitalism conceives the battle for freedom. In that conception, constraint
is viewed as external to the efforts of labour, which liquidate obstacles by force,
while fatigue limps behind, unable to keep pace with the efforts required.
In Levinas’s alternative account, however, fatigue and despair both cling to
constraint (that is, to irremissible existence) as ‘effort lurches forth out of
fatigue’.46 ‘Lurches forth’ points to something sudden, unexpected, as if effort
emerged by surprise, unanticipated by the fatigue that seems to occasion it. It
is striking that Deleuze – who also aligns fatigue with the death drive, as I do –
notes specifically that fatigue marks the point at which ‘the soul can no longer
contract what it contemplates’.47 While this comment appears at first to reorder
Levinas’s scenario, turning fatigue once again into that which limps behind, that
which fails to keep up with the effort of contraction, it is possible to read that
which fatigue cannot contract as precisely what ‘lurches forth’ from it: a small
difference drawn off by repetition, which in turn fuels effort.
‘Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance
which essentially involves repetition,’ says Deleuze.48 I have emphasized three
terms of this statement to foreground their co-occurrence, for together they
disambiguate each other: need cannot be conflated here with ‘vital needs’, but
implies ‘something that wishes’, in Freud’s strong sense; instance, too, suggests
an urgency or pressing demand as well as a decisive process; and repetition in
this context returns not to the same, but to the place where something escapes it,
to the place where a fugitive elsewhere is glimpsed from behind, in the moment
it withdraws from us.49 To say that fatigue, like the death drive, insists beyond
reason, beyond the needs of survival or the preservation of being, is not to say
that it has the force of inertia that inevitably ends in a state of inanimation. It
is necessary to distinguish, in short, between insistence and inertia.50 Inertia
continues on the same path unless or until it is met by another force – such as
death – sufficient to stop it in its tracks. Fatigue – and the death drive – insist and
this insistence insists not on a specific trajectory or goal but on its own repetition.
This insistent form of repetition is met with its own form of resistance, but this
time it is internal rather than external. Repetition gives rise to its own resistance,
its own failure, insofar as it continuously produces a heterogeneous element – or
‘draws off a difference’ – it can only circle but not contain. This is the moment
in which the death drive is eroticized, when a surplus jouissance arises to mark
this heterogeneity. This is also the way in which despair – precipitated by a
failure of belief and a consequent retreat from any goals or care for being – fails:
by meeting unexpectedly an element it cannot consume, a heterogeneity that
paralyses doubt by providing proof of a true alterity.
It is one thing, however, to show how fatigue and despair can be met with
a hope, another to discern whether or not Taste of Cherry gives Badii or its
audience any reason to hold out for the same. Throughout the film, Badii has
driven around in a desolate landscape; the penultimate sequence takes place in
a different location, at his home as he awaits the taxi that will take him to his
gravesite. Shot from a great distance, the scene is filled almost entirely with the
vast, rustling darkness of night. Badii, a small speck in the bottom of the frame,
nearly imperceptible but for the light of his cigarette, regards the impersonal
night with a sleepless intensity as he moves restlessly from room to room,
making, we imagine, his final preparations. We cannot be sure of this, however.
The fact that we can barely see him and that the camera, in its refusal to budge,
calls attention to the edge of the frame leaves open the possibility that it is he who
is being watched by the ceaseless, uncaring night. That it is he who is exposed to

the anonymous gaze.
The ‘vigilance of insomnia which keeps our eyes open has no subject’, Levinas
writes, almost as if commenting on Badii’s restless but dwarfed presence.51 While
attention, ‘which presupposes the freedom of the ego that directs it’, navigates
a world filled with dangers to be avoided and opportunities to be seized, the
vigilance that defines insomnia turns away from the world.52 It remains helplessly
awake to the anonymous rustling that live on, refusing to disappear from the
world of objects that ordinarily holds it in abeyance and implies the impossibility
of sleep or any sort of respite from wakefulness. And yet, Levinas concedes, if I
am aware of being an object of anonymous vigilance, I must be so in such a way
that my ‘I is already detached from anonymity’.53 My very awareness implies that
I have allowed a minimal distance to slip between myself and that vigilance in
which my subjectivity is eclipsed.
Levinas’s theoretical description of vigilance is poised on an edge of
discernibility as fine as the one on which Kiarostami ends his film. What
is striking about this penultimate sequence, however, is less how well it
accommodates Levinas’s description of insomnia, that how characteristically
Kiarostami it is. The sequence itself is an extension of the cosmic long shot for
which he is known. Some read these shots as figurations of man’s insignificance
in comparison with the vastness of the universe. But if we read in the scene
the slight detachment that permits the present – the location of the subject and
consciousness – to come into being, a different reading is possible. In order to
appear to a subject, vast landscapes have to recede, withdraw from her. This
is not to say that they are thereby diminished but, on the contrary, it is only
through their withdrawal that they acquire their majesty.
Most audiences seek to locate an answer to the question of Badii’s fate in
Taste of Cherry’s puzzling coda; for this very reason, no discussion of the film
can fail to say something about it. In fact this ending recapitulates several points
of my argument and brings out a few more. I can only briefly mention some of
them here. Set in the spring rather than the autumn of the nominal narrative
and shot in video rather than film, the coda shows the actors, no longer in
character, along with Kiarostami and the film crew, as if engaged in post- or
preproduction work, moving about freely amid soldiers on manoeuvers. This
sequence is suggestive of ta’ ziyeh, a traditional Persian dramatic form in which
actors do not inhabit their roles but merely recite the lines of the characters while
holding their scripts visibly in hand as they re-enact the seventh-century battle
of Karbala. Corbin writes not about ta’ ziyeh explicitly but about ceremonious
re-enactments of events from a mythical past; from these re-enactments he

derives a theory of history, or a certain notion of history.54 There is an ambiguity
of history, he contends, that resides in the fact that its narration of events is
intimately bound up with a ‘mimesis’, which I take to mean ‘repetition’. Corbin
illustrates this ambiguity by describing an interchange in which a respondent
answers his interlocutor by including in his response a solecism, or grammatical
error, created by the ‘mimicking’ of the interlocutor’s speech. The point seems
to be that the response contains a ‘stain’ or ‘anamorphosis’, a heterogeneous
element that does not bear the speaker’s signature and expresses, instead, a lack
of simultaneity with the response.
I mentioned at the beginning that Levinas and Corbin each diverged from
Heidegger only to meet up in a similar place. We can now rename that place
(the Eighth Climate) by its Levinasian name: the present. The present, like the
Eighth Climate (or imaginal world), is defined by a certain priority; it is the
first location and the beginning of time. The present is free of the past, from
which it breaks. And yet, despite this break, a fatality weighs down on the
present, a fatality that, unlike ‘heredity, … [is] not imposed on [the present]
because it was born without having chosen its birth. The present is pure
beginning’.55 The present is the moment in which ‘the act of being’ (Mullah
Sadra’s coinage and conception, operative again in Levinas) takes place, in
which the subject brings itself into being in an instant. ‘A beginning does not
start out of the instant that precedes the beginning; its point of departure is
contained in its arrival, like a rebound movement. It is out of this withdrawal
in the very heart of the present that the present is effected, and an instant
taken up.’56 The ‘ransom’ the present must pay for its freedom from the past is,
Levinas says, its evanescence. The present cannot make a legacy of itself or lay
claim to any durability.
This same argument is made elsewhere in Existence and Existents: ‘the
conquest of being continually recommences … at discrete instants each of which
issues out of nothingness,’ but there Levinas adds as a warning that is meant to
rebuke Heidegger. Do not mistake my point, Levinas cautions, for ‘a tautology,
where we would have set that which exists to one side, so as to then imagine an
act by which an existent takes over its existence. We are not being duped by this
verbal repetition’.57 In a tautology the terms of the duality are reversible. Levinas
is indicting Heidegger’s claim – that Dasein gains, through ‘being-toward-death’,
the capacity to ‘take over’ or define what supposedly antecedes it, namely:
Being – as tautological insofar as it maintains that the present is able to behave
‘performatively’, by defining its own the past.
Levinas counters the idealism of this performative tautology by confronting

us with the insistence of the instant, which introduces an asymmetry, a certain
irreversibility that takes it beyond tautology. Levinas does this not by restoring
agency to the past – agency remains with the instant – but by noting (to quote him
again) that ‘in the very heart of the present’, a ‘withdrawal’ effects the present and
permits an instant to be taken up. That which withdraws – not just the past, but the
‘immemorial past’, the past that never was – is equivalent to the ‘difference drawn
off ’ by repetition insofar as each name an irreducible remainder, a non-synchronic,
always missed element, produced each time, in the present. The evanescence of the
present refers not to its fragility, its unpreservability or transitory nature, but to
the fact that it demands repetition. This gives the present an absolute character,
denied by legalist bound to the past as well as the venture capitalist bent on the
future. Can we see in Taste of Cherry’s code this same evanescence?
Notes
1 This statement is taken from an interview with Abbas Kiarostami by Michel Ciment
and Stephane Goudet that Goudet quotes in ‘Le Gout de la cerise…et la saveur de
la mure,’ L’Avant scene, no. 471 (April 1998), 2; my translation.
2 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 11–12.
3 Ibid., 4.
4 Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite
Iran, trans. Nancy Pearson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 82.
5 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
(New York: Basic Books, 1990).
6 In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), need is
italicized in reference to ‘the scientific quest …to reduce the body’s need for sleep,’
4. I am assuming from this and other evidence that Crary wishes to distinguish
from this scientific notion another relation to sleep, more like desire.
7 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 5, 570 [hereafter SE].
8 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London:
Hogarth, 1977), 51.
9 Ibid., 67.
10 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 10.
12 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1993), 63.
13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 310.
14 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, 36. Compare, also, ibid., 10: ‘the
notion of the struggle for existence…. taken at the level of the…economic order…
appears as struggle for a future, as the care that a being takes for its endurance and
conservation. It is the struggle of an already existent being for the prolongation
of its existence’, to Lacan: ‘Man, being but an object, serves an end. He is founded
on the basis of his final cause…which in this case is to live or, more precisely, to
survive … to postpone death and dominate his rival’, in The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (London:
Norton, 1998), 105.
15 Crary, 24/7, 126; and 109, where he indicts ‘the psychoanalytic reduction’ of
dream wishes to a matter of ‘individual desire and acquisitiveness’, which rendered
unthinkable any other than ‘wishes for a dream house, a dream car, or a vacation’.
17 Ibid.
18 Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz, 1940–1945 (London: Harper Perennial,
1994), 2–3.
20 Ibid., 14. See my, ‘Cinema as Thought Experiment: On Movement and Movements’,
Differences 27, no. 1 (2016): 143–75, in which I try to show the way the mother in
10 attempts to negotiate the conflicting pulls of the piety movement and a naïve,
idealist feminism.
22 Ibid.
23 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana
Tomaselli (London: Norton, 1988), 89.
24 Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn
‘Arabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 116.
25 Lacan, Book II, 89.
26 Ibid., 114.
27 Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,’ in SE20, 152.
28 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (London: Norton, 1988), 149.
29 Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in The Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 1, trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, 1953b,
318.
31 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 136.
32 Jacques Lacan, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’, in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink
(London: W.W. Norton, 2006), 144.
33 I have altered the between death and fatigue proposed by Roland Barthes; see his
The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind
Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 20.
35 Lacan, also, somewhere characterizes the real as ‘teeming with nothingness’.
37 See Derrida’s Aporias for a discussion of the German term, Ableben [to demise],
a medico-legal term that declares, or makes official, the death of human subjects,
exclusively.
38 In Jacques Lacan Speaks (Francoise Wolff, 1972), a documentary video of a lecture
he gave at the University of Louvain, Lacan tells us that death is not a certainty,
but ‘belongs to the realm of faith. You’re right to believe you’ll die; it sustains you.
Otherwise you couldn’t bear life…The worse thing is that you’re not sure’.
39 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Paton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 112.
40 Ibid., 113.
41 Ibid., 112.
42 Ibid.
43 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester
(London: Althone Press, 1990), 152.
44 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 113.
45 Another question raised by the film concerns its own escape from censorship.
Suicide is strictly prohibited in Islam, which surely made it a controversial film, but
how is it that it was allowed to be made in the first place? This question is indirectly
answered in Stefania Pandolfo’s remarkable essay, ‘“The Burning”: Finitude and
the Politico-Theological Imagination of Illegal Migration,’ Anthropological Theory
7, no. 3 (2007): 329–63. Based on Pandolfo’s ethnographic research with young
Moroccan’s living in deplorable conditions not unlike those of the day workers
in Taste of Cherry, the essay examines the risks of heresy associated with suicide
and despair alongside Islamic ethical-political conceptions such as jihad an-nafs,
the struggle of and against the self. Despair, Pandololfo tells us, is not summarily
condemned in Islam but regarded rather as a trial that must be undergone insofar
as belief is assumed to be ‘an open ethical work’ rather than a given. Despair thrusts
the subject into a battle in which she is forced to struggle ‘against an internal other,
impossible to eliminate, and [yet] necessary for life’. Ibid., 348.
47 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 77.
48 Ibid.; emphases added.

49 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacaques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1992), 46, 48, 50 for a discussion of Freud’s term die Not des Lebens
as ‘need’ or ‘pressure’ of life. A concise and useful discussion of the concept of
‘agency/instance,’ by Étienne Balibar, can be found in Dictionary of Untranslatables:
A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. eds. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra,
and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 22–23.
50 Lacan, Book II, 201–11.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 63.
54 Henry Corbin, ‘Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics,’ Swedenborg and Esoteric
Islam, trans. Leonard Fox (West Chester, PA: Swendenborg Foundation, 1999).
56 Ibid., 75.
57 Ibid., 8.
Bibliography
Balibar, Étienne. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Edited by

Barbara Cassin and translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael
Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Barthes, Roland. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977–1978).
Translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007.
Copjec, Joan. ‘Cinema as Thought Experiment: On Movement and Movements’.
Differences 27, no. 1 (2016): 143–75.
Corbin, Henry. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Corbin, Henry. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran.
Translated by Nancy Pearson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Corbin, Henry. ‘Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics’. Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam.
Translated by Leonard Fox. West Chester, PA: Swendenborg Foundation, 1999.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas and translated by
Mark Lester. London: Althone Press, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Paton. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. In Writing and Difference, translated by
Alan Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1993.
Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by
James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953a.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety’. In The Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 20, translated by James Strachey, 87–174. London:
Hogarth, 1953b.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. In The Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 1, translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth,
1953c.
Friedrich, Otto. The Kingdom of Auschwitz, 1940 – 1945. London: Harper Perennial,
1994.
Goudet, Stephane. ‘Le Gout de la cerise … et la saveur de la mure’. L’Avant scene, no. 471
(April 1998): 1–5.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Alan Sheridan.
London: Hogarth, 1977.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by John Forrester. London: Norton,
1988a.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and
in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by
Sylvana Tomaselli. London: Norton, 1988b.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
Edited by Jacaques-Alain Miller and translated by Dennis Porter. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller and translated by Bruce Fink. London: Norton, 1998.
Lacan, Jacques. ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’. In Ecrits, translated by Bruce
Fink,123–158. London: W.W. Norton, 2006.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001.
Pandolfo, Stefania. “‘The Burning’: Finitude and the Politico-Theological Imagination of
Illegal Migration.” Anthropological Theory 7, no. 3 (2007): 329–63.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity.
New York: Basic Books, 1990.
Wolff, Francoise Dir. Jacques Lacan Speaks [Film]. 1972.
160
6
Foucault’s Neoliberal Post-Marxism

Zdravko Kobe
Michel Foucault is one of the most renowned protagonists of what Badiou

once called the ‘French moment’ in philosophy.1 On a purely quantitative basis,
he can even be considered the champion of French theory, for it was around
him that the most extensive theoretical production workshop was created,
especially in English. This success is partly due to the fact that from the end of
the 1960s, Foucault’s work was in a process of constant innovation, providing
several generations of students in various fields with ever new conceptual tools
to establish themselves in the political and academic world. Yet when we try
to determine what the permanent contribution of his theory consists in, we
find ourselves perplexed. What are we talking about when we speak of Michel
Foucault?
In describing himself, Foucault was sufficiently clear that he never fought in
the name of any idea, that he was no ‘universal combatant against the sufferings
of the mankind’: ‘If I fight for this or that, I do it because this fight is important
to me in my subjectivity.’2 Time and again he emphasized that he proceeded
from immediate circumstances and tried to solve concrete problems, and that
consequently his concepts were attempts to orient himself in a given space, not a
general scheme that could be applied outside the conditions they were originally
formulated in. And if he indeed did make theory, wrote books and delivered
lectures, he, once again, did it first and foremost because this was important to
him in his subjectivity. In a remarkable conversation with Duccio Trombadori in
1978, Foucault comments in retrospect:
Many things have certainly been surpassed. I’m perfectly aware of having
continuously made shifts both in the things that have interested me and in what
I have already thought. I never think exactly the same thing, since the books I
write constitute an experience for me that I’d like to be as rich as possible. An
experience is something you come out of changed. … In this sense I consider

myself more an experimenter than a theorist.3
Quite amazingly, Foucault seems to apply to himself a Hegelian notion of

experience. But if we leave aside the question thus raised,4 it certainly permits
us to draw two methodological conclusions. First, that in Foucault’s case, it
is impossible to talk of an oeuvre, at least not in the sense where a number of
propositions support each other to form an integrated whole under a unified
denomination. And second, that his theoretical production should always
be read in relation to the concrete circumstances in which it was formulated,
according to its place value.
Following this methodological maxim, we will try to elucidate the
conditions in which his lectures on governmentality in 1977/78 and 1978/79
were delivered. In reconstructing the historical space of his thought, special
attention will be devoted to the reasons that made Foucault consider
neoliberalism an interesting subject of inquiry. We will argue that the interest
shown should be read as an attempt to resolve a serious theoretical crisis
that he found himself in at that time – a crisis that was closely related to his
changing assessment of Marxism, and to the political events on the French left
in the 1970s in general.5
If one tries to determine Foucault’s relation to Marx on the basis of his own
characterizations, one would be put in an impossible position: with respect to
Marx, Foucault said tout et son contraire. For him, Marx was dead,6 someone
who cannot die,7 and he who is bound to rise again.8 Marx is the man of the
past,9 present10 and eternity.11 We cannot but agree with Balibar remarking
that ‘the entire work of Foucault is coextensive with a real struggle with Marx’;
however, this ‘confrontation is not always addressed at the same “Marx”, the
same “Marxism”’.12
Following the mores of the time, Foucault was initially a Marxist.13 In 1954,
he published a book entitled Mental Illness and Personality, where he defended
the most orthodox views, praising the achievements of Soviet psychiatry and
emphasizing the importance of the class position in science. The fervour was
soon followed by a gradual distancing from the official Marxism of the French
Communist Party (and from the party itself).14 This distancing was mainly
Foucault’s Neoliberal Post-Marxism 163
brought about, according to Foucault, by political events, in particular by Soviet

intervention in Hungary and a weak response to the Algerian war,15 but also
by his reading of Nietzsche – it is difficult to be a ‘Nietzschean communist’. In
1966, the rupture seemed to be assumed. In The Order of Things, Foucault writes
that ‘Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is,
it is unable to breathe anywhere else’.16 In the same vein, Foucault declared that
‘at the deep level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real break’,
a declaration that provoked a series of condemnations from virtually every
corner of the left.17 Sartre described him as the ‘last obstacle that the bourgeois
can still erect against Marxism’, while Godard – to take an extreme example –
immortalized him in La Chinoise, in a scene where the main character, using a
toy bow, shoots at a target depicting the ‘enemies of the people’, where under No.
122 (sic) there is the front cover of The Order of Things (for comparison, under
No. 4 there was Descartes, and under No. 11 the words ‘Emmanuel Kant, the
Heinrich Himmler of Western philosophy’).18
Very soon, however, Foucault felt obliged to correct his judgement. Together
with Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Lacan, he rose to prominence as one of the leading
protagonists of the new school of thought, structuralism, which in that year,
1966, almost turned into a fad. True, Foucault claimed for himself a peculiar
type of structuralism, far from the official doctrine,19 so that his later apostasy –
‘I have never been a structuralist’ – is not entirely unfounded.20 Yet, at that time
he did not reject the label, rather the contrary. In one of his interviews, he clearly
stated: ‘I attempted to introduce analysis in the structuralist style into fields
that it hadn’t entered before.’21 But as a structuralist and anti-Marxist, Foucault
found himself in a rather awkward position. Althusser, another leading figure of
structuralism and a pronounced Marxist, argued convincingly that Marx was a
modern thinker, indeed a structuralist himself.
In this situation, Foucault deployed a double strategy. On the one hand,
he identified the defining trait of structuralist authors in the rejection of
humanism.22 Contrary to the dominant philosophical tradition in France,
which always relied on the figure of the foundational subject, the new authors
had in common the thesis that the subject was something secondary, even
superfluous. So, if in their struggle against traditional philosophy they often
willingly borrowed from structural linguistics, it was because the latter offered
them a modern conceptual tool to abandon the notion of subject. For Foucault,
structuralism was thus primarily theoretical anti-humanism.23 On the other
hand, the decisive divide between humanism and anti-humanism was supposed
to cut across Marxism itself. Various topics – such as working class, historical
necessity or alienation – provided a sufficient illustration of how deeply the

dominant Marxist discourse was inscribed in the notion of the foundational
subject. ‘But fortunately’, Foucault now adds, ‘Marxism is something else.’24 This
other, true Marxism did not so much investigate the conditions of production,
it was rather supposed to developed a social theory that ‘opened a completely
new epistemological field’. Once Marx is comprehended without ‘falsifications’,
Foucault now argues, ‘there cannot be even a shadow of incompatibility between
Marxism and structuralism’.25
With this shifted appraisal of Marx – which, to be sure, is truly remarkable26
– Foucault moved close to Althusser’s platform of relying on Marx in fighting
official Marxism.27 At first, however, he hardly made any positive use of Marxist
theory or engaged in the activism of a leftist intellectual, quite the contrary.28 All
this changed significantly only in 1968, when the personal experience of student
unrest pushed him into the arena of radical political activity. That year Foucault
taught at the University of Tunis, which, like most of the world’s universities,
was profoundly shaken by student protests. Except that there, in Tunisia, they
took place under the conditions of a repressive political regime. And when,
following mass demonstrations in March 1968, the regime arrested the main
student leaders, subjected them to torture and charged them with posing a
threat to national security, Foucault became involved in activities supporting
them (he turned his apartment into a meeting point for student activists and
hid a cyclostyle in his garden). For Foucault, the formative experience of student
revolts by no means referred to ‘May of ’68 in France’, it was ‘March of ’68, in a
third-world country’.29
The first difference is that, in Tunis, it was for real. ‘There’s no comparison
between the barricades of the Latin Quarter and the risk of doing fifteen years in
prison, as was the case in Tunisia.’30 The limit experience, and willingness to make
a real sacrifice which may profoundly shake one’s life, strengthened Foucault’s
mistrust against that type of activism where demonstrations were primarily an
interesting social event. The second difference related to the role of Marxism
within the emancipatory struggles. In France, Foucault was familiar with the
praxis of reading Marx as a holy script where every nuance, every comma, was
of decisive importance, which then inevitably led to sterile factional struggles
that eventually blocked any political action. For those young people in Tunis,
however, ‘Marxism did not represent merely the best way to analyze reality; it
was also a kind of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied.’31 And so,
upon his return to France, Foucault made the teachings of March ’68 a guiding
principle of his own theoretical and political activity.
From that moment on I decided to remain aloof from that round of endless
discussions, of ‘hyper-Marxisation’, of indomitable discursivity, that was the life
of the universities, and especially of Vincennes in 1969. I tried to make things
that would imply a personal, physical commitment that was real and that posed
problems in concrete, precise, definite terms, within a determinate situation. –
Only by starting from there could the necessary investigations and analyses be
developed.32
Foucault, the head of the philosophy department at Vincennes and professor at

the prestigious Collège de France, now entered the orbit of the radical Maoist
movement Gauche prolétarienne, one of the organizations that emerged from the
student protests. In part, this was provoked by purely external circumstances: in
March 1970, the authorities dissolved the ‘G.P.’ and imprisoned its leaders, so
that Foucault found himself in a virtually identical situation as before in Tunisia
(and once again, this time with Sartre, distributed illegal material). Since France
began to use Tunisian methods, it was only natural for Foucault to repeat his
Tunisian experience.
At the same time, however, Foucault’s support for the ‘G.P.’ revealed an ideological
affinity with French Maoism, which, in an effort to revive the revolutionary spirit,
found new stimulation in China.33 ‘The wind from the East’ felt fresh, if only because,
due to its specific conditions, Chinese revolutionary thought was formed outside
the orthodox Marxist framework, and although it typically invoked ‘Marxism-
Leninism’, it was essentially anti-theoretical. ‘The great complexity of Marxism can
be reduced to one sentence: One has reason to revolt.’34 In addition, the Cultural
Revolution triggered widespread social agitation that shook all conventional ideas
and all established hierarchies to their very foundations. It displayed – at least for
the view from the West – an endless confidence in the masses, a commitment to
direct democracy, an iconoclastic opposition to any authority, be it of bourgeois
or socialist origin, a pronounced emphasis on concrete experience, and finally, a
conviction that a true revolution does not consist in a simple takeover of power:
the political revolution must rather turn into a cultural revolution that reshapes
the mores at the level of the most everyday habits and thoughts. The quotations
from the Little Red Book were thus adopted by those left-wingers who fought both
bourgeois society and Marxist orthodoxy at the same time.35 And in this respect,
Foucault was definitely one of them.36
The rapprochement with Maoism produced some characteristic manifestations
from the repertoire of the Cultural Revolution. For example, Foucault joined the
ritual of public self-criticism, admitting the error in his previous assessment of
Marx.37 He now began to advocate a militant variety of Marxism, where the key
role is accorded to the masses striving for a radically different social order. As
Chairman Mao said that revolution is not a dinner party, so Foucault now warned
that the revolutionary masses should not be bound by bourgeois ideas. The true
goal of class struggle is rather the re-evaluation of all values, the establishment
of a new regime of truth in which the accepted distinctions of right and wrong
would lose any foundation. On this point, Foucault was sometimes able to go
even further than the French Maoists. In a debate in 1972, he vehemently rejected
the idea of a people’s court, claiming that such would continue to reproduce the
bourgeois model of truth, with weighing reasons pro and contra; instead, as an
example of popular justice he proposed the massacres of September 1792 when
the masses, in a wave of revolutionary violence, killed over 1,200 enemies of
the people in Paris alone.38 With regard to prisoners, he similarly emphasized
that he did not want to merely improve their condition, but rather to question
‘the moral and social distinction between innocent and guilty’ as such.39 The
most notorious outburst of his Maoist fervour was probably exhibited in the
public debate on human nature, when Foucault made a whole series of strong
statements, ranging from the claim that ‘we live in a regime of class dictatorship’,
which Chomsky might even agree to, to declarations defending the necessity of
extreme working class violence: ‘When the proletariat takes power, it may be
quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has
just triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what
objection one could make to this.’40
But perhaps these statements were not meant to be taken seriously. For
Foucault, the Maoist connection was more important for strategic reasons, since
it offered him the possibility of a new type of political engagement. The activists
of the Proletarian Left were consciously at work in the field. So, after their
imprisoned comrades started a hunger strike to gain political prisoner status, in
early 1971, they formed the Prison Information Group (with the official address
in Foucault’s apartment). The G.I.P. did not act as a usual pressure group, it just
wanted, according to the approved Maoist method, to gather information and
let the general public know what prison life looked like from within. In this way,
they were able to trigger a wide public debate on imprisonment, which actually
proved to be effective in changing everyday life in prisons. Similar actions were
carried out in other areas as well, generally speaking everywhere where people,
preferably workers, came into contact with the state, for instance when dealing
with the police or regarding workplace accidents.
The experience of activist fieldwork left deep marks on Foucault’s theory.41 For
instance, it can be considered the birthplace of the notion of ‘specific intellectual’.
It made him grow attentive to concrete techniques of power relations, to the

so-called microphysics of power, where the question was no longer to whom
it belongs, but how it is exercised, in what manner, by which means, and to
what concrete effect. Since the classical Marxist categories proved ineffective in
analysing modern conflicts, Foucault felt the need to develop a new, post-Marxist
analytical vocabulary, especially after the pre-election coalition in the summer of
1972 reanimated fears of the intellectual hegemony of the Communist Party on
the left.42 Instead of referring to the working class, which allegedly implied the
notion of historical subject, Foucault now started to talk of ‘plebs’ and even of
‘deproletarized proletariat’; and while he continued to think of society as being
permeated with power relations which, in the last instance, might indeed be an
expression of class struggle, the emphasis was increasingly transferred from the
classes to struggle.43
It is important to note, however, that this divergence did not imply, at least
not immediately, the abandonment of the Marxist frame of reference. While at
the tactical level Foucault often warned against the inadequacy of traditional
Marxist schemes, he still, ‘in the last instance’, inhabited the space that was
essentially marked by Marx.44 This double relation can be identified in both
main works from this period. Discipline and Punish published in February
1975 describes a radical change that took place in the eighteenth century when
the visible, punitive, but punctual power was replaced by a much milder and
more humane, yet much more systematic power regime that transpired through
the entire fabric of society. Using effective images, the book highlighted the
structural affinity between prisons and typical institutions of modern society,
such as schools, hospitals and factories. It showed, against the idealism of the
‘juridical’ conception of power, that modern power actually acts upon the body
and that its disciplinary practices possess an utterly material existence. To the
emancipatory movement on the left Foucault thus opened an entirely new field
of struggle beyond the rigid Marxist dichotomy of workers and capitalists.45
However, the emergence of the new disciplinary power – with its techniques
of quadrillage, concentration, panoptical surveillance and the like – was still
explained by Foucault economically, in terms of progress in the capitalistic mode
of production. His critique of the traditional Marxist conception of power
continued to be formulated in the concepts committed to Marx.
The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary
power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in
short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes,
apparatuses or institutions.46
In his next work, The Will to Knowledge, the first and only book of the
initial project of The History of Sexuality, completed in August and published
in December 1976, Foucault extended his analysis to the realm of sexuality
and slightly changed his position again.47 True, in his exposition he drew on a
number of themes that were already present in Discipline and Punish, ranging
from the productivity of power, through its intimate connection with knowledge,
to its subjectivizing effects.48 However, in the meantime his discontent with
the prevailing leftist discourse deepened to the point that open criticism
of his own camp became inevitable.49 The book is in effect a direct attack on
‘Freudo-Marxism’, an influential school of thought that saw the basic matrix of
modern society in the arrangement of sexual and class repression, and above all
an attack on psychoanalysis itself, including Freud and Lacan.50 In The Will to
Knowledge, Foucault fiercely rejects the ‘repressive hypothesis’,51 thus denying
the anti-capitalist character of the sexual liberation movement, and declares,
on the contrary, that the defining trait of modern society is rather obsession
with sexuality, its omnipresence and encouragement to speak about it. Foucault
claims that sexuality is not so much a space of the subject’s liberation, but – at
least in a society such as ours – the place through which it is subjected to power.52
As the royal science of sexuality, psychoanalysis, far from any subversiveness,
turns out to be one of the main levers of power.53
From 1975 on, Foucault thus increasingly distanced himself from both
Freud and Marx; however, as argued by Balibar, this movement was largely
asymmetrical, and in order to criticize Freud, Foucault ultimately still relied on
Marx.54 The entire plan of The History of Sexuality, from the Christian pastorate
to the regulation of population, was drawn in parallel with the economic logic
of capitalist development,55 and sexuality was explicitly described as a class
phenomenon.
We must return, therefore, to formulations that have long been disparaged;

we must say that there is a bourgeois sexuality, that there are class sexualities.
Or rather, that sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its
successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects.56
There was a problem, however. Disciplinary power from Discipline and Punish
and regulatory power introduced at the end of The Will to Knowledge, although
presented by Foucault as complementary, had in fact an opposite inner logic.
This is perhaps the reason why Foucault still referred to the Marxist framework,
for it offered him at least an outline of a unified ground. But more importantly,
the very model of disciplinary power proved to be affected by serious limitations,
in practice as well as in theory. If we are always and completely penetrated by

power relations, then any revolt is senseless; in such case, every power is equally
ubiquitous and every state equally ‘fascist’ – as was repeatedly denounced, to
Foucault’s annoyance, by leftist activists. At the same time, the disciplinary
apparatus continued to entertain the illusion of a central place of power
traditionally occupied by the state. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the
notorious panopticon metaphor. If, therefore, in The Will to Knowledge Foucault
claims that in political analysis ‘we still have not cut off the head of the king’, this
criticism is not only addressed to Marxism but also to Foucault himself, who,
with his disciplinary apparatus, remained enclosed within the power model
he was fighting against. Or more precisely, in this criticism, we could see an
acknowledgement that his theoretical impasse might be related to the fact that
he was still thinking in traditional, ultimately Marxist categories.
It was only a series of political events in 1977 that finally helped him break this
theoretical blockade. In the spring the French intellectual scene was first shaken
by nouveaux philosophes, a group of younger writers, mostly former Maoists,
who, after having realized their mistake, now wanted, under the benevolent eye
of the media, to raise their voice against every universalistic project, especially
the socialist one. Their success was facilitated by abundant use of Solzhenitsyn,
whose book had just recently triggered a lively debate about totalitarianism that
was strongly marked by the animosity of French leftist intellectuals towards
the Communist Party.57 For from the philosophical point of view, the New
Philosophers were indeed anything but new. When asked what he thought of
them, Deleuze could calmly respond: ‘Nothing. I think that their thought is
worthless.’58
Foucault’s position was different, though. He lent his name in support of
them, and in May 1977, he published a laudatory presentation of Les maîtres
penseurs by André Glucksmann. The decisive test for the philosophers of
modern times, writes Foucault, ‘is their skills in justifying massacres’; the Gulag
is by no means a consequence of ‘an unfortunate error’ that should somehow be
explained by a ‘rereading of Marx or Lenin’, as a certain left would like to have
it; on the contrary, it is a positive ‘effect of the theories that were “truest” in the
realm of politics’.59 The support given by Foucault is strange.60 True, Glucksmann
knew Foucault personally from Maoist times and in his books he resorted
extensively to the latter’s arguments. On the other hand, however, Foucault was
constantly dismissive precisely of that kind of humanism: it was always alien to
him to defend human rights or to speak of Man (with a capital M) so dear to the
New Philosophers. In his support of Glucksmann, we should therefore – such
is at least our contention – see primarily a pretext for something else, that is, an
opportunity to make a public break with Marxism as the guiding theory of the
left. Foucault wanted to announce that, for him, the revolution was over.61
At the same time, something important was happening on the left, too.
Within the Socialist Party a strong movement emerged that, in contrast to
the traditional, more or less statist model, advocated self-management as the
form of reference of social organization. At the Socialist Party Congress in
Nantes in June 1977, Michel Rocard, the leading figure of the new direction,
presented the idea of two cultures on the left, and against ‘the first left, Jacobin,
centralized, statist’, argued for ‘the second left, decentralizing, regionalist, heir to
the tradition of self-management which relies on citizen participation’. Foucault
supported the reformist initiative.62 In September 1977, he took part in a forum
of the Second Left and, in a casual interview, declared: ‘I write and I think for
the people who are here, for these new people who ask new questions.’ He drew
attention to a ‘profound ideological change’ that started ‘about fifteen years
ago’ and resulted in the transformation of an entire population, which moves
and searches outside the usual vocabularies. ‘This is … I dare not say a cultural
revolution, but definitely a cultural mobilisation.’63
He dared not say, of course, since the Cultural Revolution, which had inspired
the radical left for a decade, failed miserably. The troubles in paradise started to
appear at the latest in the unusual circumstances surrounding the disappearance
of Lin Bao. ‘The impression is that hundreds of millions of Chinese now know
what it is to speak, revolt, proclaim. How is it possible that they are told stories
about Lin Bao’s death, that they accept it?’ asked Foucault in January 1974.64
After violent succession struggles that followed Mao’s death in September 1976,
even the French Maoists were forced to admit that the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution was fictitious. Yet, this was not just one defeat out of many. Since it
was the last project that kept alive the hopes for radical social transformation, its
manifest failure marked the end of the period of revolutions as such!
In such circumstances, Foucault, in an interview with a German paper,
made one of the most radical, relentless and bitter declarations in the history of
modern philosophy. Asked whether we could still imagine an alternative to the
police state, he confessed that ‘the answer is sad, given the dark days we live in’:
Today, October 14 [1977], on the day that we can say – perhaps for the first
time since the Russian Revolution in October 1917, perhaps even since the great
European revolutionary movements in 1848, that is, after sixty years, or if you
prefer, after one hundred and fifty – that there is not a single point on the earth
from which a ray of hope could glow. There is no longer any orientation. …
After what just happened in China, for the first time, the left, all this thought of
the European left, this European revolutionary thought … has lost its concrete
points of reference … This state of things is remarkable! I would say that we have
been sent back to the year 1830, that is to say, that everything has to be started
again!65
We must forget, everything! We must forget more than everything, we must

begin with less than nothing, because not only must we erase 150 years of
history of the theoretical and practical struggles under the banner of socialism,
not only ‘everything that this socialist tradition has produced in history is to be
condemned’ – we must return back to 1830 and erase its illusions, too.66
Obviously, we must first get rid of Marxism, which, for Foucault, was
responsible for the paralysis of thought and the ‘poverty of imagination at the
socio-political level of the twentieth-century’.67 And in order to do this, it is
perhaps of even greater importance to provide an explanation of how this state
of affairs was possible in the first place. For this purpose, Foucault now seems
to turn back to the decisive events of 1968. ‘It is certain … that without May of
’68 I would have never done the things I’m doing today, such as the investigation
on the prison, delinquency, sexuality’, admits Foucault.68 Since at that time,
for a number of reasons, the French left was dominated by Marxist discourse,
‘the May movement diffused a vocabulary, borrowed from Marx’.69 But in fact,
Foucault now warns, this was a colossal misunderstanding, a self-delusion, for
what had happened since 1968 was ‘profoundly anti-Marxist’.70
On the basis of May ’68 and its consequences, Foucault once again, this time
definitively, came to the conclusion that Marxism was irremediably enmeshed
in nineteenth-century problems, such us poverty and exploitation, and that it
was therefore useless for thinking the problems of modern society. But if we
admit that ‘in recent years society has changed,’ and if we further declare that
we need a ‘political economy of power’ that would think ‘the development of
a society without discipline,’71 the problem remains that there is no such theory
at our disposal. ‘Thinking back to that period,’ notes Foucault, ‘I would say that
what was happening [after May ’68] definitely did not have its own theory, its
own vocabulary.’72 In the absence of appropriate theory, the events of May ’68
still relied on the old Marxist vocabulary, which then inevitably led to a double
breakdown: to the final collapse of Marxism, on the one hand, and to the inner
deadlock of new social movements, on the other. It is in this situation of total
paralysis that Foucault declared, in October 1977, that the entire tradition of
the political struggle of the left after the French Revolution should be forgotten.
However, and this is important, despite its bleak ambience, the statement is
not a sign of indifference:
I would say that being conscious of the difficulties of the situation does not
necessarily mean pessimism. … It must be possible to start over! That is to say, to
re-start the analysis, the critique – of course not purely and simply the analysis
of the so-called ‘capitalist’ society, but the analysis of the social, statist, powerful
system that is to be found in socialist and capitalist countries. This is the critique
that has to be made.73
Foucault declared that he always acted on a postulate of ‘absolute optimism’, his

statements were considered by him as means for the transformation of reality:
‘Everything I do, I do it in order that it might serve.’74 Similarly, when he affirms
that by the revolution no longer being desirable ‘we are perhaps living the end of
politics’, this is not to be read as a renouncement of political activity, but rather
as a call ‘to invent a different politics or something that would supplant it’.75 The
above declaration is to be understood in the same sense, as an expression of
active optimism. We have to think on, think differently.
I still believe that it is possible, at the logical and political levels alike, to recuperate
what has been monopolised by Marxism and Marxist parties. … Consequently,
the new chance of intellectual deciphering that philosophy must provide today
is a group of concepts and methods from the strategic point of view. I said ‘must’,
but this means simply that we have to try to go in this direction, and that we
might fail. In any case, we have to try.76
After the traditional reference points have been lost, we have to ‘rouse this
new political imaginary’,77 to reinvent the political thought of the left78 which,
in a transformed society inhabited by different individuals, would be able to
formulate a critical stance. This was Foucault’s theoretical project after the turn
in 1977.
II
In his theoretical interventions in the 1970s, Foucault strived to think strategically,

stemming from concrete political struggles; and in doing so, he somehow
naturally inscribed himself in the Marxist field. His use of Marx was particular,
for sure. What interested him were not so much the economic observations or
theories on historical development, but rather analyses of real social conflicts, for
instance in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, or descriptions of the labour

process where profit extraction is always conditioned by subjugation techniques.
Convinced that the basic matrix for understanding twentieth-century society is
provided by power, Foucault transformed concepts of Marxian origin in order
to think modern relations of domination. One of them was the concept of class
struggle. Especially in his Maoist phase, he sought to analyse social relations
using the key of struggle, and, by inversing von Clausewitz’s proposition, he
defined politics as ‘the continuation of war by other means’.79 The existing legal,
economic, political, ideological relations, in short, all that which we call society,
is nothing but a crystallization of the current relationship of force in the midst
of the war that is constantly raging through every pore of the social tissue. The
notion of discipline is an integral part of this framework.
In developing the vocabulary of a disciplinary society, however, Foucault,
as we have seen, soon realized its limits. On the one hand, the implications
of the initial model led him to question the well-foundedness of the Marxist
framework. ‘Roughly speaking, I think that what is at stake in all this is this:
Can the analysis of power, or the analyses of powers, be in one way or another
deduced from the economy?’80 On the other hand, the use of military discourse
has made power too ubiquitous and too similar to the juridical conception of
power as an instance that says no. ‘I think that the twin notions of “repression”
and “war” have to be considerably modified and ultimately, perhaps, abandoned’,
notes Foucault in his opening lecture at the Collège de France in January 1976.81
And if he – against the announced plan82 – throughout the course continued
to speak of society in terms of ‘tacit war’, in the final lecture he warned that the
exercise of power could not be reduced to repression: ‘I think we see something
new emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century: a new technology of
power, but this time it is not disciplinary.’83
This new technology of power, known as biopower, is no longer addressed to
individual bodies, it is rather applied to the entire population and its life process.
And more importantly, instead of controlling, disciplining, repressing and
concentrating, biopower now attaches itself to vital processes, allowing and even
promoting their free play, contingency and dispersion. Relying on the average
norms established empirically, it limits itself to regulating the extremes that these
processes are not supposed to exceed. ‘In a word, security mechanisms have
to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living
beings so as to optimize a state of life.’84 However, while the introduction of the
new regime of power may look convincing at the analytical level, the problem
is that it agrees badly with disciplinary power. Foucault brings together two
series whose elements are not only without a common intersection but rather
act as the opposite: ‘the body–organism–discipline–institutions series, and the
population–biological processes–regulatory [or assuring] mechanisms–State
series’.85 What is more, apparatus of security results in the state that Foucault
wanted precisely to avoid. Instead of providing a solution, the introduction of
biopower thus only emphasized the depth of Foucault’s entanglement.
As we have seen, partly as a consequence and partly as an amplifier of
the theoretical crisis, a series of events followed that prompted Foucault to
accomplish a definitive split with Marxism, and to search for a radically new
conceptual frame for what once used to be revolutionary thought. In this context
of deep crisis,86 two lecture series on governmentality were delivered: Security,
Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitcs. They were delivered at the
beginning of 1978 and 1979, respectively, and due to their shared premises have
to be treated in concert.
At first, Foucault’s intention was simply to pick up the thread of his previous
course and latest published book, by expounding the analyses of biopower,87
starting with the apparatus of security which, he argued, underwrote the ‘general
economy of power’ in society. The aim of the lectures was to write a ‘history of
technologies of security and try to identify whether we can really speak of a
society of security’.88
His initial answer to the question appeared to be rather negative, in the sense
that in historical development it is misplaced to talk about the substitution of
one element over the other, but rather about complementarity: ‘There is not a
succession of law, then discipline, then security, but security is a way of making
the old armatures of law and discipline function in addition to the specific
mechanism of security.’89 The task of harmonizing discipline and security proved
to be impracticable, however. Over the course of the next two lectures, Foucault
concluded that the inner logic of the system of security is ‘exactly the opposite
of the one we have seen with the disciplines’.90 In addition, it turns out that the
disciplinary apparatus was still moving within the juridical conception of power.
Foucault now admits openly that the ‘panopticon is the oldest dream of the
oldest sovereign’,91 and instead of writing a history of technologies of security,
this line of thought abruptly ends and a completely new subject is introduced –
governmentality.92
Whence the rupture? Foucault’s decision to replace the history of
apparatuses of security with the history of governmentality – a vague notion
indeed that has never been given a unified definition93 – was certainly related
to his abandonment of discipline.94 However, it was also a consequence of his
endeavour to eliminate the concept of state and so finally to fulfil the task set
in The Will to Knowledge, that is, to cut off the head of the king. The notion
of ‘governmentality’, understood as a common denomination for the ‘conduct
of conducts’, is general enough to comprise the exercise of power in any form,
including the one called state. Foucault warns against theoretical fascination
with the state (against ‘overestimating the problem of the state’), and contrary to
those who denounce the ‘statisation of society’, he asked whether ‘the state were
nothing more than a way of governing?’95 What if the state had no substance
of its own, if it were not that cold monster, but had to be explained as only an
episode in the history of governmentality? Foucault, who had already portrayed
the birth of institutions, such as the asylum, hospital and prison, now wanted to
provide something similar for the emergence of what we call the state.
Is it possible to place the modern state in a general technology of power that

assured its mutations, development, and functioning? Can we talk of something
like ‘governmentality’ that would be to the state what techniques of segregation
were to psychiatry, what techniques of disciplines were to the penal system, and
what biopolitics was to medical institutions?96
In these lectures, Foucault gave an account of how, ‘from the archaic model of
the Christian pastorate’,97 after the governmentality crisis at the end of the Middle
Ages, a new regime emerged, formed around the ‘reason of the state’, and how
in the second half of the eighteenth century this model began to be supplanted
by a new apparatus that, this time, was a strictly governmental one. Each of
these stages is associated with a characteristic set of procedures and institutions
giving rise to different levels of ordered series (for example: juridical state –
administrative state – governmental state, or: feudal territory – frontier territory
– population).98 Foucault’s aim was to construct a ‘genealogy of the modern
state’ that was not founded on ‘a circular ontology’ but rather ‘on the basis of a
history of governmental reason’.99 This is the major theoretical achievement of
the concept of governmentality: it enables Foucault to think relations of power
independently of the state.
There is also a practical lesson involved, however. The genealogy of the state
demonstrates that the state is something derived, having its particular moment of
emergence, its conditions of possibility, and consequently its end. Since Foucault
warns that we again live in ‘a crisis of governmentality’,100 comparable to the
one following the end of the Middle Ages, it is safe to assume that he wanted
his analyses to contribute to the formation of a new conceptual apparatus that
would be capable of thinking and conducting ‘counter-conducts’ in this crisis.
Moreover, it seems that he even saw therein ‘the possibility of an eschatology in

which civil society will prevail over the state’, delineating the last horizon where
state governmentality would finally be brought to its end. By what? For Foucault,
it would be through the emergence of society itself: ‘The day when civil society
can free itself of the constraints and controls of the state … the time … of the
state will come to an end.’101
During the next year, Foucault devoted his lectures to an analysis of
neoliberalism. At first, the choice seems unusual again. Judging by the title and
given that Foucault himself declared he would do a course on biopolitics that
year, one would have expected a discussion of biopolitics which remained all
but absent in the lectures (the word itself appears six times on three different
occasions, always marginally). In the course of the seminar, he iterated once
again that he ‘really did intend to talk about biopolitics’, but then, ‘things
being what they are’, he ‘ended up talking at length, maybe for too long, about
neoliberalism, and neoliberalism in its German form’.102 Such declarations
may suggest that neoliberalism happened to him incidentally, as something
unexpected. However, we must not forget that a year prior to that Foucault
already referred to ‘the American, but also European techniques that we are now
seeing’,103 and that in the following lecture he even announced that ‘the next
time’, he would, he hoped, ‘return to this problem of freedom’.104 From this point
of view, the lectures on neoliberalism can actually be read as the fulfilment of a
promise: they fit neatly within the initial biopolitical project that, after having
been briefly interrupted by the genealogy of the modern state, now returns to
its starting point.
The return to the problem of freedom was also necessary due to another shift
that Foucault had made in his time of crisis.
I said somewhere that we could not understand the establishment of liberal

ideologies and a liberal politics in the eighteenth century without keeping in
mind that the same eighteenth century, which made such a strong demand for
freedoms, had all the same ballasted these freedoms with a disciplinary technique
that, taking children, soldiers, and workers where they were, considerably
restricted freedom and provided, as it were, guarantees for the exercise of this
freedom. Well, I think I was wrong. … I think something completely different
is at stake. … More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing else but the
correlative of the deployment of the apparatuses of security.105
For Foucault, the establishment of the apparatus of security was related to two
important innovations. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning
of the nineteenth century, it was found that even seemingly completely

contingent events – suicides, illegitimate births, or workplace accidents – can
exhibit surprisingly rigid regularities when observed from a distance with the
help of new statistical devices. Such an accident, itself a result of a myriad of
other contingent events, can nonetheless, if based on the appropriate data, be
predicted with a considerable degree of accuracy, and thus it was possible to
determine in advance, for instance, how many new cases of a certain disease
would be discovered the following year in London. And second, approximately
in the same period (or a bit earlier), physiocrats developed a new technique to
combat shortages (usually modelled on the problem of grain supply). Instead of
using the traditional method of just prices that would enable workers to have
a decent living, they proposed to liberate the prices, letting the equilibrium be
brought about by the dynamics of offer and demand alone. The key is, however,
that this mechanism functions precisely through deviations: for instance, the
scarcity of grain makes its price rise, provoking thereby higher supply, which
in turn brings the prices down. To establish an effective balance, the eventual
shortages must not be avoided; in a sense, they should even be promoted as they
are supposed to accelerate the stabilization process.
Thanks to these innovations, a new governmental apparatus was able to
emerge that recommended itself by cognitive and regulatory modesty. The
disciplinary apparatus was based on a detailed organization that required a great
deal of resources for planning and even more for controlling docile bodies. The
apparatus of security, on the contrary, functions without detailed insight into
social processes. For it, external regularities completely suffice, and it limits its
regulatory interventions to only those deviations that exceed a certain, empirically
determined threshold. If disciplinary regulation constantly interfered with the
social processes, the maxim of this apparatus of security states that they should
be left to themselves as much as possible. Quieta non movere! And, if previously
it was necessary to limit the space of indeterminacy, the new apparatus attaches
itself to such unhindered activity and positively depends on freedom.
The new governmental reason needs freedom therefore, the new art of
government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must
produce it.106
The apparatus of security extends the spaces of freedom, it encourages risk-

taking: ‘There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.’107 The promotion
of living dangerously, on the other hand, correlates with security nets that
enter when the threshold is overstepped. It is of decisive importance that here,
however, the activation of security mechanisms is in no way related to questions

of blame or guilt. Accidents happen, as it were. Even more, following statistical
laws, we can even deem them inevitable. The question of responsibility here
becomes, in the ‘inverted social contract’, irrelevant.108
Due to the very nature of market interactions – ‘there is no sovereign in
economy’109 – the conceptual tools for this type of regulation were first developed
in the field of political economy, especially by economic liberalism. But since
this kind of analysis in principle applies to every social interaction, Foucault
argues that it is ‘absolutely fundamental’ that we change our usual conception of
liberalism: ‘It is not an ideology; it is not exactly, fundamentally, or primarily an
ideology. First of all and above all it is a technology of power.’110
Foucault consequently devoted his next lectures to a close reading of
liberalism as a governmental technology. At a very early stage he was able –
which is remarkable – to detect the crisis of a disciplinary society, and to
uncover, in the heat of the ideological confusion, a current of thought which
at that time was utterly unknown outside narrow professional circles. Foucault
even managed – again, remarkably – to identify rather accurately the typical
traits that distinguish European and American neoliberalism from the classical
liberalism of the eighteenth century. Both find the market to be the economically
most effective and politically most acceptable way to coordinate the activities
of decentralized actors. However, for neoliberals, the market is no longer a
fact of nature, but an artificial formation that has demanding conditions for
its existence and consequently requires constant maintenance. Moreover, for
neoliberals the market is not primarily a place of exchange, but rather a place
where the competitive advantages of singular market actors come to the fore. As
a consequence, the neoliberal subjects are essentially thought according to the
model of enterprise, as undertakers of themselves, but who otherwise have no
psychological depth.111
Let us just add that in his confrontation with neoliberalism, Foucault came
across another modern phenomenon, the destatization of society. American
neoliberalism, attempting to expand the economic model to the entire society,
made him notice how even in the field which, officially, was dominated by the
state, the political type of agency was being gradually supplanted by a novel
organizing principle. As Nazism actually reduced the power of the state, so
Foucault now warns ‘all those who share in the great state phobia’ that they are
in fact ‘following the direction of the wind’: ‘For years and years, an effective
reduction of the state has been on the way, a reduction of both the growth of state
control and of a “statifying” and “statified governmentality.”’112 In a time when
the veterans of May ’68 still directed their attacks against the rising power of the
‘fascists state’, Foucault correctly diagnosed its demise. Here too, he saw it further.
III
The very fact that Foucault studied neoliberalism without univocally rejecting
it has recently led to speculation that perhaps he might have even supported it.
What if Foucault was actually a neoliberal?
As it stands, the question is meaningless. When Foucault uncovered
neoliberalism the label had a significantly different meaning than today, after
forty years of destructive social development. It should be noted, in addition,
that Foucault never considered himself a prophet or lawmaker who would tell
people what to think. If he had to assume the role of a philosopher, which he did
reluctantly, he defended an ‘analytical philosophy of power’, that is, a philosophy
‘whose task is to analyze what happens everyday in power relations’ and which
provides us with tools to – if so we decide – ‘intensify the struggles taking
place around power’.113 Hence, his receptiveness to conceptual innovations, his
readiness to assume theoretical risks and his infinite boredom with internal
confrontations so typical of the leftist groups that did not allow for the existence
of thought outside of their own. When it comes to neoliberalism, notes Foucault,
three standard answers have always been provided, which attempt to reduce it to
either the free market, a commodified society or a globalized Gulag – that is to
say, to another variety of the already known.
Now what I would like to show you is precisely that neo-liberalism is really
something else. Whether it is of great significance or not, I don’t know, but
assuredly it is something, and I would like to grasp it in its singularity.114
The first reason that made Foucault take neoliberalism seriously is simply
intellectual curiosity. At the same time, however, we must not overlook a certain
structural proximity.115 Foucault proved more receptive to what was brought by
neoliberalism, because it was something that he himself had been after under
the name of anti-humanism. Indeed, in his structuralist phase, we can already
find explorations where he speaks of ‘the optimum of social functioning’ in a
sense that we would otherwise expect within a neoliberal discourse.116 A similar
effect is brought about by the gesture to depsychologize the subject, in particular
the penal subject. While traditional criminology attempted to understand the
subject and eventually to make a better person out of her, the neoliberal approach
is characterized by an ‘anthropological erasure of the criminal’. In Becker’s theory

of human capital, ‘the criminal is nothing other than absolutely whomsoever’
who, in weighing preferences, simply chose an act that the law prohibits – free
from any ‘moral or anthropological’ considerations.117 Well, as a spokesman for
the Prison Information Group, Foucault had already proclaimed that its action
‘does not search for the soul or man behind the criminal, but tries to eradicate
this profound frontier between innocence and guilt’.118 What attracted Foucault
in neoliberalism proves to be the same anti-humanism that once brought him
close first to structuralism and then to Maoism. In this respect, his sympathy
for neoliberalism can hardly be read as a mark that he renounced his previous
commitments.
Something similar applies to Foucault’s claim that there is no ‘autonomous
socialist governmentality’, that ‘socialism can only be implemented connected
up to diverse types of governmentality’.119 The affirmation – which, in many
respects, reads as a paraphrase of Foucault’s claim connecting Marxism to
power structures – is once again suspiciously general. If it is perhaps possible
to argue that, historically, the power of the soviets inevitably resulted in a party
dictatorship, one would still expect Foucault, the promoter of the ‘age of self-
management’, to pay a little closer attention to the Yugoslav experiment of
socialist self-management.120 Or, to ‘the Chilean way to socialism’.121 But leaving
such considerations aside, we have to emphasize that Foucault takes his statement
as an assessment of the present state of affairs,122 which is immediately followed
by a call for action. If there is no ‘really socialist governmentality’, this can mean
only one thing, adds Foucault, namely that ‘it must be invented’.123
From this perspective, Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism can be seen
as a positive attempt to renew the political thought of the left, after the recognition
of a deep crisis in the emancipatory project when ‘we must forget everything’
and start from scratch. In a situation like this, it is inevitable that old habits of
thought must be abandoned. Foucault was just brave enough, one might say,
to take the risk and tear down the theoretical barriers that kept the left in an
enclosure – in a sense, this was his last lesson.124
And yet, there are some uncomfortable details that disturb this image.
In the summary of the course, Foucault claims that he ‘tried to analyse
liberalism’ – and neoliberalism, for that matter – ‘not as a theory or an ideology
… but, rather, as a practice, which is to say, as a “way of doing things”’.125
However, as Rehmann notes, ‘this is exactly not what he is actually doing.
… Foucault’s definitions coincide entirely with the ideological self-image of
liberalism’.126 Instead of studying how it works as a technology of governing,
what its goals are in the always specific circumstances (in Chile, for instance),
what means it engages and what effects it produces as a matter of fact, Foucault
took neoliberalism according to its own self-presentation.
A good example of this indulgence is his critique of the welfare state.
Foucault points out on several occasions that social security – in addition to
its undeniable advantages – also has ‘perverse effects’ which are not only of an
economic nature (such as increasing expenses and the rigidity of the labour
market). The welfare state, suggests Foucault, ‘increases the dependence’ of
those it helps, and since its support is conditioned on specific circumstances,
it actually expands the surveillance system, including the distinction ‘between
the good and bad poor’.127 The social state as we know it in France, for instance,
therefore has strong subjectivizing effects. ‘Our social insurance system imposes
a specific way of life it subjugates individuals under, and every person or every
group who, for one reason or another, does not want to or cannot attain this
way of life finds itself by the very play of institutions marginalized.’128 Against
this type of social policy, Foucault, with unconcealed sympathy, describes the
neoliberal proposal of a negative income tax, where it is completely irrelevant
why someone needs assistance, the only thing that counts is ‘whether he is above
or below the threshold’.129 True, Foucault subsequently names some additional
criteria designed to ensure sufficient motivation to return to the labour market,
which, as it were, undermines the conceptual purity of the initial proposal. But
this is not essential. What is really striking is rather the fact that Foucault never
asks the question of what kind of power effects might be brought about by such
a social policy.130 After all, neoliberalism is a humanism, too, since it massively
promotes a certain image of the subject, namely the subject as the undertaker of
herself. As if, in the case of neoliberalism, Foucault suddenly forgot his former
guiding principle that ‘the real political task in a society such as ours’ is ‘to criticize
the working of institutions, which appear to be neutral’, and so to unmask ‘the
political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them’.131
In addition to uncritical leniency, there are unusual simplifications132 and
curious inaccuracies to be found in Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. This is
partly due to his poor knowledge of the original texts. Contrary to his reputation
of being a careful document reader, it seems that most of Foucault’s information
on German economic history in general and on German ordoliberalism in
particular was obtained from secondary sources, especially from the monograph
Liberal Economic Thought in Contemporary Germany by François Bilger,
published in 1964. Since the shortcomings of Bilger’s book were thus translated
into Foucault’s reading, this could, at least in principle, account for his eventual
deficiencies. However, there are at least some inadequacies that seem hard to
explain away in this way.
To illustrate the point, let us take the attitude towards the state of German
ordoliberals. In his lectures, Foucault presents the following narrative. The first
foundations of the new doctrine were laid as a critique of German economic
policy in the years ‘1925–1930’, when centralized economic models with strong
state interventionism prevailed, for instance the ‘Lautenbach Plan’.133 Against
this proto-Keynesian policy, the future ordoliberals, particularly Eucken, Röpke
and Rüstow, advocated ‘the negative theology of the state as the absolute evil’,134
which should be minimized as much as possible, leaving the economy to the
invisible hand of market competition. Instead of the state running the economy,
they proposed to ‘turn the formula around and adopt the free market as the
organizing and regulating principle of the state’.135 Alas, they were not listened
to. The consequence was a deepening of the economic crisis and the rise of
Nazism, ‘the product and effect of a society that economically does not accept
this liberalism’.136 Being fervent defenders of freedom, Foucault continues,
the German ordoliberals found themselves under severe pressure: some had
to emigrate, others were more or less marginalized. They profited from these
years to further develop their arguments in silence. As a consequence, when
the war finally ended, they were able to come forward with a detailed economic
program, presented by Erhard’s speech in 1948, that defended market freedom
as a foundation of state legitimacy – and which made possible the German
economic miracle.
The story is actually quite different. According to modern research, the origin of
ordoliberal thought is commonly situated in the ambiance of the global economic
crisis in 1929 that, in Germany, developed under the specific conditions of heavy
war reparations.137 Contrary to Foucault’s account, however, for ordoliberals, the
crisis was not a product of excessive state interventions in the economy, it was
rather interpreted as evidence of what happens under the conditions of a weak
state, and consequently, as a definitive discrediting of liberalism. The judgements
are unequivocal. Rüstow, a representative figure, in his The Failure of Economic
Liberalism, clearly states that ‘the social and economic catastrophe of economic
liberalism was essentially a consequence of the absoluteness with which it applied
its maxim “Laissez faire, laissez passer.”’138 According to him, the principle of
the invisible hand – itself an illusion of a religious sort – should be abandoned;
what was needed was a ‘radical and fundamental renovation of liberalism’ that
must start with ‘a critique of the old liberalism and its capitalistic mis-realisation’,
including ‘its unbounded overestimation of economy’.139 Against this ‘paleo-
liberalism’, Rüstow calls for a ‘third way’ (i.e. between ‘the collapsed historical
liberalism and the looming collectivism’), which would limit the principles of
market competition to the sphere of economic activities, and build a strong state
that would not only ensure the basic order for the functioning of the market but
would, in the light of its destructive effects, also provide for those activities that
cannot be left to the market, that is, for social integration. This is one of the main
tasks set by Rüstow’s Vitalpolitk, whose guiding principle already in 1932 read
Freie Wirtschaft, starker Staat.
The new liberalism … demands a strong state, a state above the economy, above
interests. … Whoever avows this strong state must want liberal economic policy,
and whoever finds liberal economic policy true must want a strong state.140
Considering their assessment of the causes and proposals to solve the crisis, it
is hardly surprising that the major part of the ordoliberals, including Eucken
and Röpke, actually supported the Lautenbach Plan. When the conditions for
the functioning of market competition are not met, the state must intervene in
the economic field. Likewise, their resistance to Nazism was not always total.141
Rüstow and Röpke were indeed forced to emigrate, but others remained and
were essentially able to continue their work, often at important posts in the state
administration. Their advocacy of market competition within a strong state did
not predispose them to oppose the Nazi regime. In 1933, for instance, Erhard
sketched out an economic policy where – in ‘ensuring the basic guarantee to
private property’ – ‘the protection and promotion of interests would be judged
against the plan to serve the wellbeing of the whole, a plan which at the same
time would balance to the greatest possible satisfaction the dualism of striving
for freedom, on the one hand, and for an organic binding and inclusion in the
broader framework of economic and social life, on the other’.142 In any case,
for him, economic freedom and attachment to a ‘greater and binding idea
encompassing the whole’ presupposed each other.
This phrase freedom and attachment (or freedom and binding) is of crucial
importance for a correct assessment of the post-war economic program, in
particular when it comes to the question of how, in the conditions of inexistent
sovereignty, the source of state legitimacy could be performed by the market
economy. It is interesting to note that Foucault’s analysis of Erhard’s reform
program is once again suspiciously defective. The date of birth of the new
German state was, according to Foucault, the liberalization of prices on 24 June
1948. Foucault ignores the confrontations with the leftist trade unions that the
military authorities had to suppress in order to make the brave new world of
liberalism possible in the first place.143 Foucault ignores as well another legal
measure, the monetary reform of 20 June 1948, when the military occupation
authority, by means of a typical gesture of sovereigns, introduced new currency
and distributed 40 DM to each inhabitant. Although the law on the liberalization
of prices in its very name refers to the Geldreform, Grenier and Orléan note,
‘Foucault says not a word of it’.144 For that reason, however, he pays much more
attention to the speech delivered at the session of 21 April 1948, when Erhard
supposedly established the principle entailing that no state can be legitimate
unless it offers its citizens liberté et responsabilité.
However, neither anarchy nor the termite state is suitable as a human life form.
Only where Freiheit und Bindung become the binding law does the state find the
moral justification to speak and act in the name of the people.145
What exactly did Erhard want to say? Considering the context of three sentences
earlier, where Erhard speaks of ‘the eternal tension between individual and
community’ which ‘can never be overcome by the negation and denial of one
or the other’, and further considering that Erhard uses the conceptual double
of Freiheit und Binding with all the implications of the model it pertains to, it
is safe to affirm that Erhard does not advocate the formation of public law out
of the logic of the market, as proclaimed by Foucault, but rather a policy of the
third way between unbridled liberalism and a planned economy, that is, a social
market economy.146
In the present case, Foucault was possibly misled by Bilger’s translation
of Erhard’s speech, wherein Freiheit und Bindung was rendered as liberté et
responsabilité. However, as we have seen, Erhard’s speech was just one expression
of a very broad and manifest line of thought that was hard to miss. Moreover,
and this is perhaps the real problem, it seems that Foucault’s oversights occurred
according to a certain method. For instance, Bilger unequivocally writes that
‘this [Lautenbach’s] plan was supported by W. Eucken and W. Röpke’147, and yet
this did not prevent Foucault from proposing a completely different reading. On
the basis of such observations, it is hard to discount that Foucault might have
indeed ‘flirted with neo-liberalism’; even more, that he may have seen it as a
proper means to renovate political thought on the left. The statement according
to which the crucial question is how, ‘in revolution and in struggle, individual
wills articulate each other with other levels of will’, especially since ‘today, these
multiple wills begin to shine in the breach in the hegemony once held by the
traditional left’,148 definitely does not contradict such an understanding.
In Foucault himself, it was hardly anything else but flirting. His very
example, however, suggests that there may be a not so strange attraction
between neoliberalism and the post-Marxist left149 – in the same way as the case
of François Ewald, Foucault’s assistant at the Collège de France, later to become
a consultant to the French association of employers, proves that a business-
friendly Foucauldianism is not a contradiction in terms.150
IV
Although at some point neoliberalism represented a serious intellectual challenge

to Foucault, after the lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics it virtually vanished. Just as
it unexpectedly appeared, it suddenly and without special explanation disappeared.
Names such as Eucken, Rüstow and Hayek were no longer mentioned.
Foucault’s interests soon shifted elsewhere, to the world of Greek and Roman
moralists. Despite the apparent change in direction, however, even this can be
seen as a continuation of the same movement that previously brought him close
to neoliberalism, that is to say, as a prolonged search for a new beginning after the
erasure of the socialist tradition. Care for oneself is still inscribed in the problem
of power151 – and is there anything more natural for a philosopher starting from
scratch than to return to the Greeks? On the other hand, from a late interview
we can conclude that Foucault did indeed turn away from neoliberalism. If once
liberalism was for him ‘a rather complex form of government and governmental
“rationality”’,152 which he intended to use in order to renew the conceptual
categories for thinking society, he now linked it to the opposition of civil society
and state, warning that liberalism was a ‘quasi polemical concept’ formulated in
a specific context and with a precise purpose. ‘The liberal economists proposed
it at the end of the eighteenth century in order to limit the sphere of state action,
whereby civil society was understood as a space of autonomous economic
processes.’153 However, not only does such manner of opposition no longer
correspond to the ‘complex’ relations in modern society, Foucault was even
more disturbed by something else: ‘The reference to this antagonistic couple
is never exempt from some Manichaeism afflicting the notion of state with a
pejorative connotation, while at the same time idealizing society into a good,
lively and warm community.’ Foucault obviously parted with ‘post-revolutionary
eschatology’154: in the interview he advocated the development of the welfare
state155 and even allowed for a positive role of trade unions in the opening of
spaces for social invention.
In the lectures on neoliberalism, Foucault was able to detect remarkably early

a profound change in the structure of power relations in modern society, and
thus the need for new tools of critique. While his colleagues continued to rail
against the institutions of surveillance, he realized that the disciplinary society
was disappearing, that a new regime of power was in the making instead, a
regime which governs on the basis of freedom and therefore actively promotes it.
All different, all equal! With a rare conceptual sensibility, Foucault outlined the
key traits of this new governmental apparatus that even today, after its effects have
become tangible, we are often unable to describe, let alone think. He did not want
to limit himself to formulating a new analytical philosophy of power, though.
What he was really interested in was ‘to stir up this new political imagination’, to
agitate the poverty of political imagination, to explore new strategies, to reinvest
the space monopolized by Marxism. Hence, his tendency to cross borders, hence
his experimentation with new forms of struggle that led him – at the very same
time as he was delivering lectures on neoliberalism – to support the Islamic
revolution in Iran. Foucault is precisely the point where the two coincide.
At the same time, Foucault’s journey warns us against the dangers that come
with such a theoretical practice. It is not only that constant displacements prevent
us from creating a unified platform called Foucault. Nor is it that borrowing
a tool from Foucault’s workshop is accompanied by a serious theoretical risk,
since it is always uncertain what implicit assumptions individual concepts carry
with them and to what extent they are compatible with each other at all. In
this sense, Foucault does not offer a safety net for theoretical practice. But, as
already stated, this is not the key issue. Rather, the journey of Michel Foucault
helps us to understand how it was possible to come, starting from more or less
Marxist principles, to a new moral discourse and neoliberalism. It seems that,
here, the strategic role was performed by Maoism, which stripped Marxism
of its economic foundations and transformed the working class struggle into
a completely undetermined revolt of the abstract masses against an equally
abstract power. As a generic Marxism, a quasi-Marxism without Marx, Maoism
thus turned out to be a necessary stage of development in the path from Marxism
to neoliberalism.
Finally, the journey of Michel Foucault helps us diagnose what is today. And if
we were to repeat his gesture and ask ourselves where this socio-political poverty
of imagination at the beginning of the twenty-first century came from, we would
probably come to a similar conclusion as Foucault once did, only that instead of
Marxism we would have to name the schools of thought that have occupied his
place since.
Coda: Foucault’s Critique of Psychoanalysis

The Will to Knowledge had a strange destiny. Published in December 1976 as
an introduction to the ambitious plan of The History of Sexuality, it was a huge
success. At the same time, however, it left its readers perplexed since its attack
on Freudo-Marxism, and psychoanalysis in general, was rather difficult to
situate in the theoretical, ideological and political landscape of the time. The
reception was additionally complicated by Foucault’s subsequent theoretical
crisis described above, which provoked a prolonged publishing break and
ultimately led to a substantial modification of his basic position. When in 1984,
after a gap of almost eight years, the second and third volumes of The History of
Sexuality finally appeared, it was immediately clear that Foucault’s initial project
had been abandoned, both thematically and theoretically. In a sense, The Will to
Knowledge proved to be an introduction to a non-existing work.
As a consequence, its attack on psychoanalysis is often not really taken
seriously. It is usual to claim that the attempted ‘genealogy of psychoanalysis’
turned out to be too difficult for Foucault to swallow, forcing him to stretch back
to the very beginning of times and ultimately to fail.156 Or else it is claimed that
Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in The Will to Knowledge was astonishingly
superficial, for he never engaged in Freud directly and not once bothered to
mention the decisive psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious. In what
follows I will try to show that both allegations are misplaced. More exactly,
first, that Foucault abandoned his engagement with psychoanalysis for reasons
that had little to do with psychoanalysis itself, which leaves the relevance of
his critique very much in vigour. And second, that indeed he avoided a close
reading of key psychoanalytical texts and concepts, yet this was done as a result
of a conscious methodological decision and in accordance with his general
discursive strategy. This method of ‘external’ critique can certainly be declared
faulty; what is not feasible, however, is to endorse it in general and denounce it
in its specific application to psychoanalysis.
As we have seen, after Foucault’s sudden shift in his evaluation of Marxism
around 1968, Marx and Freud were spoken of in exact parallel and both were
assigned an utterly exceptional role. In What Is an Author? they were baptized the
‘founders of discursivity’, having ‘established an endless possibility of discourse’,
and were in a sense not susceptible to falsity. Foucault proceeded as if this new
kind of author just happened to appear ‘in the course of the nineteenth century’,
and he even affirmed: ‘I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them
to be both the first and the most important cases.’157 However, it is rather clear
that they were meant to be the only examples, and that the whole category of
founders of discursivity was created for the sole purpose of giving them this
position of a unique double. The Marx-Freud parallelism was so pronounced
that Foucault even in retrospect described his personal experience with the
Communist Party, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other, in almost
exactly the same terms.158 And when the special relation started to cool, the
critique was initially enounced in parallel as well. In March 1972, Foucault joked
with Deleuze, saying ‘We must get rid of Freudo-Marxism’, to which Deleuze
replied: ‘I will take care of Freud, will you occupy yourself with Marx?’159
However, here the symmetry ends. Foucault turned rather against
psychoanalysis, and he did it by using Marx as an implicit frame of reference.
In The Will to Knowledge, written in 1976, he began his archaeology of
psychoanalysis with a simple observation. Contrary to our self-perception,
there is a profound continuity between Victorian society and our own, since
they both assign special importance to sexuality, often regarding it as a place of
our intimate, personal truth and constantly inducing endless discussion thereof.
While we consider ourselves to be other, it turns out that, in this respect, we
are Victorians ourselves. On the basis of this observation, Foucault rejected the
‘repressive hypothesis’, together with its negative conception of power; instead, he
formulated his own hypothesis stating that sexuality is a privileged place through
which, in modern society, power is exercised and individuals are subjectivized.
Such an assessment – which, surprisingly enough, Foucault may have found in
Marcuse160 – has two immediate implications. First, that the sexual liberation
movement associated with Freudo-Marxism, whatever its merits, ultimately
works against its declared goals since, by its insistence on the importance of
sexuality, it bestows an additional strength on the apparatus of sexuality and its
corresponding system of power. And second, that psychoanalysis, a privileged
discipline of knowledge relating to sexuality, is not a subversive challenge to the
existing regime, but actually one of the major instruments of its consolidation. A
critique of power therefore entails a critique of psychoanalysis.
In this critique, he repeated the gesture he had once addressed to Marx.
Foucault now claims that ‘as everyone knows’, Freud’s investigations on sexuality
were just an integral part of the history of medicine of that time.
For me, Freud [without a doubt does not] appear as a radical rupture starting
from where everything else should be thought again. I will probably show that
around the eighteenth century, for economic, historical reasons, a general
apparatus was put in place where Freud would have its place.161
And in his critique, Foucault turned our attention to the role of psychoanalysis in
reproducing the existing order, more precisely, to the curious omission regarding
the economic and power conditions implied in psychoanalytical practice.
The exercise of power that takes place within the psychoanalytical session should
have been the object of study, and it never was. And psychoanalysis, at least in
France, refuses it. … I’m not an analyst. But what draws my attention is that, when
psychoanalysts speak of psychoanalytical practice, there is a series of elements
that are never present: the price of the session, the general economic costs of
the treatment, decisions regarding the cure, the border between acceptable and
unacceptable … All this is present in analytical practice and has effects on it. It is
a mechanism of power that it conveys, without ever questioning it.162
The subsequent critique of psychoanalysis was so formulated with an explicit

reference to capitalism. ‘I wanted to show … how this technology of power is
absolutely immanent in the development of capitalism.’163 As already expounded
on above, in his critique of psychoanalysis, Foucault still relied on a broadly
Marxist discourse – which is to some extent understandable, since in order to
launch an attack one has to have some firm ground to stand on. This ground was
very soon to collapse, however. In the following year of 1977, Foucault found
himself in a deep theoretical crisis that ultimately, as we have seen, led him to
reject not only Marxism but also the whole socialist tradition of emancipatory
struggle dating from the 1830s on. In these circumstances, having lost his frame
of reference, a critique of psychoanalysis was no longer possible for Foucault.
And it was not necessary either, since he was now facing a task that was infinitely
more urgent, that is, to develop a new theory to fill the place once occupied
by Marxism. In a sense, criticizing psychoanalysis became futile for Foucault,
and he simply gave up on it. This does not mean, however, that his critique was
impertinent – quite the contrary, since the questions regarding the economic and
power relations involved in the psychoanalytic practice and the role performed
by psychoanalysis, with its often bourgeois allure, in the reproduction of the
existing order were very much to the point. However, the very fact that Foucault
abandoned his critique allowed for the persistence of this pudeur sacralisante that
‘consists in saying that psychoanalysis has nothing to do with normalization’.164
The other point regarding the alleged superficiality of Foucault’s arguments is
in a way correct. Foucault was very well aware, and he often said it himself, that the
unconscious stood for something novel and extremely important. But to expect of
him that he should have addressed it directly is to fall into a ‘misunderstanding’.165
If therefore in his critique of psychoanalysis he nonetheless avoided a direct
assessment of the unconscious, this should be read as a result of a deliberate

methodological decision. In fact, in reviewing his comments on the matter, it is
not difficult to draw rather detailed argumentation to justify his decisions.
To start with, Foucault’s discursive strategy in the case of the ‘archeology of
psychoanalysis’ is a fairly usual example of his general archaeological method
that, precisely, starts by erasing the hierarchy of more or less important authors.
All the statements are in principle equal, and it is the task of archaeology to
establish the rules governing their distribution. An additional reason for this
strategy was probably provided by Foucault’s pronounced aversion to these
endless theoretical confrontations, which he found sterile.
Yes, the critique of the critique … This perpetual referring from one book to
another that leads to a game of mirrors … this doesn’t interest me, and if one
wants to introduce moderately new things, change the ambience a little, one
must not get into these things.166
This provision is, according to Foucault, even more imperative in the case of
psychoanalysis, since it tends to monopolize the discourse on psychoanalysis
and to submit every critique of itself to a psychoanalytic interpretation. This is
why Foucault wanted to speak about psychoanalytical practice from the ‘outside’:
I don’t think we should fall into the trap, anyway an ancient one, set up by
Freud himself, and which consists in saying that at the very moment when our
discourse enters into the psychoanalytical field, it falls under the domination of
analytical interpretation. … I would like to stay in a position of exteriority against
the psychoanalytical institution. … I will never enter into the psychoanalytical
discourse and say: the concept of desire in Freud isn’t well developed, or Melanie
Klein’s divided body is nonsense. I will never say that. But I say it myself that I
will never say that.167
Despite this methodological reservation, Foucault was otherwise well aware

of the inner diversity of the psychoanalytical field. ‘Freud’s thought is in effect
much more subtle than the image presented here’, he acknowledges in a lecture
of November 1976. He was likewise familiar with the difference separating
Reich and Marcuse, on one hand, and Klein and Lacan, on the other, especially
regarding the notions of repression and suppression, respectively. However,
Foucault adds:
It is to avoid this difficult problem of Freudian interpretation that I spoke of

repression only, because historians of sexuality never happen to use any other
notion than repression, and for a very simple reason: this notion makes visible
the social structure that determines the repression.168
Furthermore, from a strategic point of view, this difference becomes of secondary

importance, since according to Foucault, both Reich and Lacan share the same
negative conception of power.
Once again, I don’t want to blame anyone. I just know that a proposition, such
as ‘the law is constitutive of desire,’ functions in a certain limited or in a very
general way. You will find it. However, this proposition has a series of effects, and
when you try to analyze it, [you find] that it supposes this juridical and negative
conception of power.169
To make it clear, at least in his view, that Lacan was very much included in his
critique of psychoanalysis, Foucault made an almost formal declaration:
And although he has invented many things, Lacan is still situated within the
Freudian field, and this prevents him from creating new categories.170
Once again, it is possible to question the validity of Foucault’s archaeological

method. It seems in effect that statements not only happen to be distributed
in a certain way but that they are also related to each other according to some
rational rules that make some of them more important and others less so. In any
case, one has to choose either to accept the pertinence of Foucault’s critique of
psychoanalysis, including Freud and Lacan, or to reject his method altogether.
As we have seen, his critique of psychoanalysis was well considered and
consistent. We may finally add that everything suggests it was persistent. If
Foucault opened his lectures on neoliberalism at the beginning of 1979 with
a quotation from Freud, Acheronta movebo!, this was not in order to pay him a
tribute, but rather to contrast his conceit against the humility of the liberal motto
Quieta non movere!171 And in 1981, he still claimed that psychoanalysis was ‘not
a science’, but rather ‘a technique of control’.172
Notes
1 This article relies in part on material previously published in the journal Problemi.
2 Michel Foucault, ‘Interview de Michel Foucault’ (May 1981), in Dits et écrits,
tome II: 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1486. Foucault’s minor publications
(interviews, journal articles and interventions) are generally cited according to
the two-volume edition Dits et écrits [hereafter DE I or DE II], published in 2001

by Gallimard, Paris, in the Quarto collection; reference to a subsequent English
translation – which might be modified without special notification – is given
in square brackets. In accordance with our emphasis on the inner dynamics of
Foucault’s thought, in each case the approximate date of composition is given.
3 Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’ (end 1978), in DE II, 860 [Michel
Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James
Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 26–27].
4 The question is, of course, what would constitute the unity of Foucault’s project, and
what could represent the moment of absolute knowing. A certain encouragement in
this direction was given by Foucault himself: ‘I think I have in fact been situated in
most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes
simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit
or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, etc.… None of
these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean
something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.’ Foucault, ‘Polémique,
politique et problématisations’ (May 1984), in DE II, 1412 [Michel Foucault, The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 383–84]. For an
attempt to read Foucault’s work as a unified project, see Béatrice Han, Foucault’s
Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002); for a substantially different view, see José Luis Moreno Pestaña,
Foucault, la gauche et la politique. Une approche non scolastique (Paris: Textuel, 2010).
5 For a general presentation, see Michael C. Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism:
Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979’, Modern Intellectual
History 6, no. 3 (2009): 539–68 [included in Foucault and Neoliberalism, eds.
Michael C. Behrent and Daniel Zamora (London: Polity Press, 2015), 24–62].
6 See Foucault, ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie’ (end 1975), in DE II,
38: ‘For me, Marx doesn’t exist’.
7 See Foucault, ‘Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarasser
du marxisme’ (July 1978), in DE II, 600: ‘I don’t find it very pertinent to come to
terms with Marx himself. Marx is … something undeniable as a historical event’.
8 See Foucault,‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’ (beginning 1983?), in DE II,
1276 [Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubian
(New York: The New Press, 1998), 458]: ‘It is clear that even if one admits that Marx
will disappear for now, he will reappear one day.’
9 See Foucault, ‘Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se
débarasser du marxisme’ (July 1978), in DE II, 602: ‘In the 19th century Marx
played a particular, almost determining role. However, this role is typical of the
19th century and cannot function but there.’
10 See ibid., 606: ‘What I would like to discuss, starting from Marx, is not the problem
of the sociology of classes, but the strategic method concerning struggle. It is there
that I place my interest in Marx, and it is starting from there that I would like to
formulate the problems.’
11 See Foucault, ‘Entretien sur la prison’ (June 1975), in DE I, 1621: ‘At the limit, one
could ask oneself what difference there possibly is between being a historian and
being a Marxist.… And it is within this general horizon defined and coded by Marx
that the discussion begins.’
12 Étienne Balibar, La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx
(Paris: Galilée, 1997), 282.
13 See, for instance, Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’ (beginning
1983?), in DE II,1253 [Foucault, Aesthetics, 436]: ‘Since 1945, for a whole range of
political and cultural reasons, Marxism in France was a kind of horizon that Sartre
thought for a time was impossible to surpass.’
14 See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 162:
‘After he quit the Communist Party [1953?], and especially since he lived in Poland
[1958–1959], Foucault developed a ferocious hatred of everything that evokes
communism, directly or indirectly.’
15 It is worth noting, however, that Foucault used to recite these reason only afterwards,
as he started to mingle with the New Philosophers. At the time of the war in Algeria,
his resistance left virtually no public traces, at least not to our knowledge.
York: Vintage, 1994), 262.
17 See Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’ (end 1978), in DE II, 888–9
[Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 106–07]: ‘Those who immediately had a real shock
[upon the publication of The Order of Things] were those young neo-Marxist
intellectuals who were … to become Marxist-Leninist or even Maoist in 1968.’
18 See Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Lutter sur deux fronts’, in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc
Godard, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Étoile-Cahiers du cinema, 1985), 312: ‘It is
precisely for this reason that we make movies: so future Foucaults will not be able
to affirm such things with such a presumption.’
19 In an interview in 1967, Foucault drew a distinction between ‘two forms of
structuralism’: the first is simply a ‘method’ which ‘enabled the foundation of certain
sciences such as linguistics’, while the second, ‘generalized structuralism’, can be defined
as ‘an activity which permits one to diagnose what is today’. Foucault, ‘La philosophie
structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est “aujourd’hui”’ (April 1967), in DE I, 609.
20 See Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’ (beginning 1983?), in DE II,
1254 [Foucault, Aesthetics, 437]: ‘I have never been a Freudian, I have never been
a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist.’ Rather awkwardly, Foucault
claims that ‘save within a very limited circle, before 1968 my work found almost
no resonance’, attributing it to the fact that precisely he was not a structuralist.
Foucault, ‘Une interview de Michel Foucault’ (June 1982), in DE II, 1349. Foucault’s
description is hard to comprehend: The Order of Things was a major public
sensation and a huge publishing success. See James Miller, The Passion of Michel
Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 149.
21 Foucault, ‘La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est
“aujourd’hui”’ (April 1967), in DE I, 611. Approximately a year later, Foucault flatly
denied that he intended to do anything similar; see Michel Foucault, Archéologie de
savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 25 [The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 15]: ‘My aim is not to transfer to the
field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge, a structuralist
method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis.’
22 See Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal’ (May 1966), in DE I, 542: ‘Our
task is to finally get rid of humanism.’
23 See, for instance, Foucault, ‘La scène de la philosophie’ (April 1978), in DE II, 590:
‘This non-fundamental, non-original character of the subject – this is, I believe, the
point common to all those which have been called structuralists.’
24 Foucault, ‘La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est
“aujourd’hui”’ (April 1967), in DE I, 611.
25 Ibid.
26 Foucault’s shift in relation to Marx is spectacular, especially since it happened so
swiftly: while in The Order of Things Marx is treated as a hopelessly outdated author,
already in the lecture ‘What Is an Author?’, in February 1969, he is awarded the
timeless title of ‘founder of discursivity’. See Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in
DE I, 832 [Foucault, Aesthetics, 217]. Along with the revaluation of Marx, Foucault
also changed his assessment of Sartre. In 1966, Foucault’s theoretical project was
an attempt to distance himself from philosophy and, consequently, from Sartre.
See Foucault, ‘L’homme est-il mort?’ (June 1966), in DE I, 569–70: ‘The Critique of
Dialectical Reason is a magnificent and pathetic effort of a man of the nineteenth
century to think the twentieth century. In this sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian,
and I would even say, the last Marxist.’ Following Sartre’s public response, however,
Foucault’s position rapidly changed: from the man of the past Sartre suddenly
became the man of the future. See Foucault, ‘Une mise au point de Michel Foucault’
(March 1968), in DE I, 697: ‘I think that Sartre’s work, immense as it is, that his
activity, will mark an epoch.’ Moreover, it seems that it was mostly due to Sartre’s
objections against structuralism in general, and Foucault in particular, that Foucault
was led to rework his theoretical frame of reference for the Archaeology of Knowledge
– in any case, the entire concluding chapter reads like a dialog with an imaginary
interlocutor who bears an unmistakable resemblance of Sartre.
27 It is not entirely unthinkable that Althusser was personally involved in Foucault’s
volte-face. In a letter to Franca in August 1966, he complained that recently
Foucault ‘gave some stupid interviews on Marx’, so that ‘one of these days’ he would
have ‘to berate him seriously.’ Louis Althusser, Lettres à Franca (1963–1973) (Paris:
STOCK/IMEC, 1998), 698.
28 In the mid-1960s, his colleague Dumézil could take him to be ‘a rather

conventional, even conservative academic mandarin’. Miller, Passion of Michel
Foucault, 172.
29 Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’ (end 1978), in DE II, 898 [Foucault,
Remarks on Marx, 136].
30 Ibid., 899 [138].
31 Ibid., 898 [135].
32 Ibid., 899 [139]. Regarding the bodily dimension of thought, Foucault cites the
importance of ‘Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille.’ See ibid., 867–68 [46–47]: ‘For
me, the politics was essentially … an occasion to have an experience à la Nietzsche
or à la Bataille.’
33 In a letter from 13 January 1967, Foucault writes: ‘I am very excited about what is
going on in China’ (in DE I, 39).
34 The motto was bound to have a rich destiny. It clearly resounds in Foucault’s later
definition of critique.
35 Their hostility towards the state can be compared only to their hatred for the
(French) Communist Party. See Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals
against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2004), 53.
36 It is interesting to note that the Maoists considered themselves partisans of the third
way. See, for instance, On a raison de se révolter, eds. Gavi et al. (Paris: Gallimard,
1974), 357: ‘We must think triangle. There is the actual regime, Pompidou; there is
the state regime defended by the Union of the Left; and then there is a third force,
the force of ideological revolution, the New Left.’ Incidentally, the first neoliberals
and the German ordoliberals, too, explicitly argued for the third way (see below).
37 See Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’ (1971), in DE I, 1038: ‘In this respect
I have to make a self-criticism. When in The Order of Things I spoke of Marxism I
didn’t make it sufficiently clear what I wanted to say.… When I spoke of Marxism
in this book, I should have said … that it was about Marxism as it functioned in
Europe until the beginning of the twentieth century, at most.’
38 The entire debate On Popular Justice is remarkable in that Victor (alias Benny
Lévy), one of the leaders of the Maoist Left, advocated a moderate view
compared to Foucault (see Foucault, ‘Sur la justice populaire. Débat avec le maos’
[February 1972], in DE I, 1208, 1214, 1220, 1229).
39 Foucault, ‘Par-delà le bien et le mal’ (November 1971), in DE I, 1099. Apparently, it
is easier to be a ‘Nietzschean Maoist’.
40 Foucault, ‘De la nature humaine’ (November 1971), in DE I, 1371 [Michel Foucault
and Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York:
The New Press, 2006, 52)].
41 See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2010), 18. For a general presentation, see M.P. Karlsen and K. Villadsen, ‘Foucault,
Maoism, Genealogy: The Influence of Political Militancy in Michel Foucault’s
Thought’, New Political Science 37, no. 1 (2015): 91–117.
42 Benny Lévy remarked (Gavi et al., On a raison de se révolter, 354–55): ‘The Union
of the Left is primarily the Communist Party; the Communist Party is the cultural
counter-revolution. As for the Socialist Party … it acts as the principal machine to
recuperate the cultural revolution.’
43 As late as 1977, Foucault complained (Foucault, ‘Le jeu de Michel Foucault’
[July 1977], in DE II, 310–1): ‘What strikes me, in the majority of texts, if not
by Marx, then at least by Marxists, is that they always tacitly skip over (with the
exception, perhaps, of Trotsky) what is understood by struggle when they talk of
the class struggle.’
44 See Foucault, ‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir’ (March 1972), in DE I, 1183; emphasis
added: ‘By engaging in this struggle [i.e. against power, not against exploitation]
… they enter the revolutionary process. As allies of the proletariat, of course, for
if power is exercised the way it is, it is indeed in order to maintain the capitalist
exploitation.’ Foucault’s standpoint is here remarkably close to Althusser, another
fellow-traveller as regards Maoism. In the controversy with John Lewis, Althusser
strongly rejected the ‘revisionist’ conception of class struggle modelled after
a football match, with fixed rules and a predetermined field. However, if class
struggle is indeed the primary fact, as claimed by Althusser, what guarantees do
we have, then, that it is going to produce precisely the familiar opposition of the
working class and the capitalist class? It is the material basis, of course: ‘Now the
class struggle does not go on in the air … It is rooted in the mode of production
and exploitation in a given class society.’ Louis Althusser, ‘Louis Althusser replies to
John Lewis’, Australian Left Review 1, no. 38 (1972): 30.
45 Concerning the reception among the former radicals who struggled for a way
to ‘be revolutionaries and not to be Marxists’, Ewald noted: ‘We read Discipline
and Punish in the urgency of our lost identity, and we found in “power” and
its analyses a way to continue to be ourselves.’ Quoted in Michael C. Behrent,
‘Accidents Happen: Francois Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the
Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State’, The Journal of Modern History 82,
no. 3 (2010): 599. This type of reading perhaps explains the persistent popularity
of the book.
46 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage, 1995), 221; emphasis added. See also Foucault, ‘La vérité
et les formes juridiques’ (June 1974), in DE I, 1490 [Michel Foucault, Power, ed.
James D. Faubian (New York: The New Press, 2001), 86–87]: ‘The fact is, capitalism
penetrates much more deeply into our existence.… This binding of man to labour
is synthetic, political; it is a linkage brought about by power. There is no hyperprofit
without an infrapower.’
47 On this point, an important role is usually attributed to Foucault’s stay in California

in May 1975. See Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault, 245: ‘Foucault was about to
enjoy what he would later call the greatest experience in his life – an epiphany that
climaxed a series of similarly intense “limit-experiences” in the gay community
of San Francisco.’ Regarding homosexuality, Foucault was no advocate of the
enthusiastic ‘Vivat!’; see ‘Subjectivité et vérité’ (1981), in DE II, 1034.
48 See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard,
1975), 195–96 [Discipline and Punish, 194].
49 See Foucault, ‘Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons’ (October 1975), in DE I, 1647–48: ‘[We
have] to liberate [ourselves] from Marx and Freud as reference points for solving
the problems as they present themselves today. Neither Marx nor Freud is adequate
for solving these problems, at least as they present themselves in Europe. One of the
main tasks of this struggle, which has lasted for about fifteen years now [sic], was to
desacralize these two personalities.’
50 ‘Foucault and psychoanalysis’ opens a vast field; for a brief assessment, see the
Coda.
51 See Foucault, ‘Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons’ (October 1975), in DE I, 1647: ‘For a
long period of time it was believed that certain sexual regularity was absolutely
indispensable to the well-functioning of society. But today, sexual irregularity is
perfectly acceptable. North American capitalism suffers no harm due to the fact
that 20% of San Francisco’s population is homosexual.’
52 See Foucault, ‘Non au sexe roi’ (March 1977), in DE II, 262 [Michel Foucault,
Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa
Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 219]: ‘This
ensues from the idea that sexuality is not fundamentally something that is
feared by power; it is without a doubt more a means through which power is
exercised.’
53 See Foucault, ‘Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons’ (October 1975), in DE I, 1681–82: ‘To me,
the metaphor of liberation doesn’t seem appropriate to describe psychoanalytic
practise. For that reason I tried to make an archaeology of confession, confession of
sexuality, and to show how the fundamental techniques of psychoanalysis already
existed within the system of power.’
54 See Balibar, La crainte des masses, 290, 293: ‘Here, however, the symmetry ends.
In the context of The Will to Knowledge, Marx and Freud are treated entirely
differently.… Therefore, the rejection of Freudo-Marxism can be understood
simply as a precondition for a Marxist critique of psychoanalysis.’ See Foucault,
‘Non au sexe roi’ (March 1977), in DE II, 257–8 [Foucault, Foucault Live, 216]:
‘I’m going to make a presumptuous comparison. What did Marx do when in
his analysis of capital he encountered the problem of working-class misery? …
Marx substituted the analysis of production for the denunciation of theft. Mutatis
mutandis, that’s approximately what I wanted to do.’
55 Foucault even mentions ‘Spätkapitalismus’. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité

I. La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 150–51 [Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon, 1978), 114].
56 Ibid., 168 [127].
57 See Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, 90.
58 Gilles Deleuze, ‘On the New Philosophers and a More General Problem’, Discourse
20, no. 3 (1998): 37–43.
59 Foucault, ‘La grande colère des faits’ (May 1977), in DE II, 278–79 [Michael
C. Behrent and Daniel Zamora (eds.), Foucault and Neoliberalism (London: Polity
Press, 2015), 171–72].
60 Cf. Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, 100ff; Serge Audier, Penser le
‘néolibéralisme’. Le moment néolibéral, Foucault et la crise du socialisme (Lormont:
Le bord de l’eau, 2015), 173ff.
61 From this point of view, Foucault’s conduct in the Croissant affair is also significant
(for a brief assessment, see Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault, 297f).
62 For Foucault’s relation to the ‘Second Left’, see Audier, Penser le ‘néolibéralisme’, 199ff.
63 Foucault,‘Une mobilisation culturelle’ (September 1977), in DE II, 330.
64 Foucault, ‘Sur “La Seconde Révolution chinoise”’ (January 1974), in DE I,1381.
65 Foucault, ‘La torture, c’est la raison’ (October 1977), in DE II, 397–98. In an
otherwise banal interview in March 1975, J. Chanel comments: ‘Michel Foucault, I
have the impression that now you would like to free yourself of your great burden
of knowledge, to go elsewhere. That you are almost tempted to start over again
from scratch.’ Foucault replies: ‘Odd of you to say that, because it is very true.…
Yes, absolutely. You are a formidable diagnostician’ DE I, 1669 [Foucault, Foucault
Live, 145].
66 Interestingly enough, Foucault’s damnation of the past does not include the French
Revolution, and equally not the Enlightenment. Why? The answer may lay in his
support for the New Philosophers; see Foucault, ‘La grande colère des faits’ (May
1977), in DE II, 278 [Behrent and Zamora, Foucault and Neoliberalism, 171]: ‘And
yet the question well remains – as it does for every philosopher of the last 150 years
– how to no longer be Hegelian.’ See Foucault, ‘Michel Foucault. Les réponses du
philosophe’ (October 1975), in DE I, 1685: ‘Since 1831 [sic] Europe hasn’t stopped
believing that the overturn of capitalism is set for the next decade.’
67 Foucault, ‘Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarasser
du marxisme’ (April 1978), in DE II, 599. Foucault often denounces Marxism for
its dependence on power structures, a state or party; see ibid., 601: ‘The fact that
Marxism could not function without the existence of a state which needed it as a
philosophy is a rare phenomenon.’ This reproach is strange, for it definitely cannot
apply to the various currents of the so-called Western Marxism, for instance, to the
Frankfurt School – which was incidentally little known to Foucault.
69 Ibid., 889 [107].
70 Foucault, ‘Pouvoir et corps’ (June 1975), in DE I, 1624. In one of his very last
conversations, Foucault again spoke of ‘completely contradictory elements’ in May
’68 as regards to Marxism. Foucault, ‘Polémique, politique et problématisations’
(May 1984), in DE II, 1414 [Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 385–86]. It has to be
added, however, that something very similar applies to structuralism as well; see
Foucault, ‘Revenir à l’histoire’ (October 1970), in DE I, 1139: ‘The fact [is] that the
revolutionary movements which emerged, and are still emerging among students
and intellectuals, owe almost nothing to the structuralist movement.’ A similar
assessment is given by François Dosse in History of Structuralism, Volume II, trans.
Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 114.
71 Foucault, ‘La société disciplinaire en crise’ (April 1978), in DE II, 533. The verdict
is revealing: it not only confirms that, in April 1978, Foucault indeed abandoned
disciplinary power as a reference model for modern society but also suggests that
he understood discipline in the context of nineteenth-century thought, that is to
say, of Marxism.
72 Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’ (end 1978), in DE II, 889–900 [Foucault,
Remarks on Marx, 109–11]. It could be added that even today we remain stuck in
this very problem.
73 Foucault, ‘La torture, c’est la raison’ (October 1977), in DE II, 398.
75 Foucault, ‘Non au sexe roi’ (March 1977), in DE II, 267 [Foucault, Foucault Live, 223].
du marxisme’ (April 1978), in DE II, 603, 605.
77 Ibid., 599.
78 As regards Foucault’s relation to the left, see the unpublished interview for Rouge from
July 1977: ‘Now, concerning the second point you mentioned: “You are now taking
steps against the leftism you used to be connected to, or you just want to make a stop.”
I do not agree with these words. It is not a step against, it is not a temporary stop, it is
more like an incentive to accelerate.’ A similar description of Foucault’s project at that
time was given by Ewald: ‘If the work undertaken by Foucault is important to us, it is
because it launches and develops the imperative to which we and our future are tied,
that of a new political philosophy.’ Quoted in Behrent, ‘Accidents Happen’, 597.
79 Michel Foucault, ‘Il faut défendre la société’. Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris:
Gallimard-Seuil, 1997), 16 [‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2004), 15].
80 Ibid., 14 [13].
81 Ibid., 18 [29].
82 The opening lecture clearly exposes Foucault’s discontent with the state his
theoretical project was in at the time. See ibid., 5 [3–4]: ‘So what was I going to say
to you this year? That I’ve just about had enough … We are making no progress,
and it’s all leading nowhere.’
83 Ibid., 215 [242].
84 Ibid., 219 [246]. Foucault considers biopower as a technique to regulate
randomness, which is named ‘l’aléatoire’. A comparison to late Althusser may be
meaningful.
85 Ibid., 223 [250].
86 The ambience of crisis is tangible in an (anonymous) recollection by one of
Foucault’s closest associates; see Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault, 299: ‘For a long
time Foucault didn’t know where he was going.… But it is clear that it was a time
of crisis. When the series of lectures began, nobody could have foreseen that the
subject would be absolutely different.… When you heard each lecture, you heard
the suffering, the pain. It was absolutely clear.’
87 See Michel Foucault, Securité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France,
1977–1978 (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 2004), 3 [Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 16]: ‘This year I would like to begin by studying something that I
have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power.’
88 Ibid., 12 [25].
89 Ibid. See ibid., 10 [22].
90 Ibid., 65 [91].
91 Ibid., 68 [94]. A similar point was made in an interview in April 1978 entitled
‘Disciplinary Society in Crisis’, in DE II, 532–33.
92 Foucault, Securité, territoire, population, 111 [Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population, 144].
93 At the moment of its introduction, Foucault notes that with this notion of
governmentality he means three things; see ibid.
94 Pasquino, Foucault’s student, wrote: ‘It became clear during our discussions of the
second half of the 1970s that the discourse of discipline had reached an impasse
and could go no further. That it threatened above all to lead to an extremist
denunciation of power – envisioned according to a repressive model – that left
both of us dissatisfied from a theoretical point of view.… Hence the question of
government.’ Quoted in Behrent, ‘Accidents Happen’, 598–99.
Population, 325].
96 Ibid., 124 [166]. See ibid., 253 [325]: ‘What I would like to show you, and will try to
show you, is how the emergence of the state as a fundamental political issue can in
fact be situated within a more general history of governmentality, or, if you like, in
the field of practices of power.’
97 Ibid., 113 [145].

98 See ibid., 112f [144f].
99 Ibid., 362 [452]; emphasis added.
Remarks on Marx, 176–77].
Population, 453].
102 Ibid., 191 [185].
103 Ibid., 8 [21].
104 Ibid., 49 [70].
105 Ibid., 50 [70–71]; emphasis added. This claim was, of course, made in Discipline
and Punish, 223–24 [222]: ‘The real, corporeal disciplines constituted the
foundations of the formal, juridical liberties.… The “Enlightenment,” which
discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’ The thesis was a cornerstone
of Foucault’s teaching of the time. See Foucault, ‘Sur la sellette’ (March 1975), in
DE I, 1590: ‘Discipline is the other side of democracy.’
106 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France,
1978–1979 (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 2004), 65 [The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 63].
107 Ibid., 68 [67].
108 In his research on workplace accidents, Ewald discovered the Law of 9 April
1898, regulating the question of responsibility. In a book dedicated to Foucault,
Ewald described this law as a ‘considerable philosophical event’ that brings ‘a
profound change of man’s relation to himself ’, and establishes ‘a new ontological
situation’, since it basically declares that under certain circumstances no one is
to blame for accidents. Accidents happen, that is all. A ‘new social contract’ was
made in this way: ‘Society is nothing but wide security against the risks brought
about by its own development.’ François Ewald, L’Etat providence (Paris: Grasse,
1986), 11.
109 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 287 [Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283].
Population, 71].
111 For a systematic exploration of the implications of Foucault’s reading of German
and American neoliberalism, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way
of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2014).
112 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 197 [Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics,
191–92]. For a detailed presentation, see Thomas Lemke, ‘Foucault,
Governmentality, and Critique’, Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 3 (2002): 60.
113 Foucault, ‘La philosophie analytique de la politique’ (April 1978), in DE II, 540–41.
See Foucault, ‘Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir’ (February 1974?),
in DE I, 1391: ‘I would like that my books were a toolbox where others could go to
search for a tool, to use it for whatever they find appropriate, in their domain.’
See Christian Laval, ‘L’entreprise comme nouvelle forme de gouvernement. Usages
et mésusages de Michel Foucault’, in Usages de Foucault, ed. Hervé Oulc’hen
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 157: ‘Foucault conducted a “positive”
analysis of neo-liberal power … not in order to exalt its “emancipatory” character,
but to indicate that the modes of governing which are becoming widespread
oblige us to modify grammars of the critique and resources of the struggle.’
115 Behrent equally speaks of ‘the elective theoretical affinity that Foucault perceived
between neoliberalism and his own philosophical project’. Michael C. Behrent,
‘Can the Critique of Capitalism be Antihumanist?’, History and Theory 54, no. 3
(2015): 373.
116 See Foucault, ‘“Qui êtes vous, professeur Foucault?”’ (September 1967), in DE
I, 645–47: ‘I think it is possible to determine the optimum of social functioning
by obtaining, thanks to a certain relation between demographic growth,
consumption, and individual liberty, the possibility of pleasure for everyone,
without ever referring to the idea of man. An optimum of functioning can be
determined internally, without having to say “for whom” it is the best that it is so.’
118 Foucault, ‘Par-delà le bien et le mal’ (September 1971?), in DE I, 1099.
120 Foucault only rarely mentioned Yugoslavia, yet he was aware of the relevance of
its case. See Foucault, ‘Manières de justice’ (February 1979), in DE II, 758. The
Yugoslav case is equally emphasized in Bilger’s monograph on German liberalism,
a major reference to Foucault. See François Bilger, La pensée économique libérale
dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (Paris: Pichon & Durand-Auzias, 1964), 304–05,
fn. 12: ‘In any case, Yugoslavia proves in a concrete way that socialism and
liberalism are not incompatible, and inversely, that capitalism is not essential to
liberalism.’
121 The case of Chile is strange indeed, on at least three accounts. First, the coup d’état
of 11 September 1973, when General Pinochet overthrew the ‘democratically
elected’ President Salvatore Allende, constituted one of the most notorious events
of the period, especially on the left. Second, Allende launched ‘the Chilean way to
socialism’, a new type of non-revolutionary leftist government that worked under
the conditions of formal democracy. And third, after power had been taken over
by the military junta, it turned for help to the ‘Chicago Boys’, who then introduced
a vast program of neoliberal economic reforms. In these circumstances, it is really
hard to understand that in his lectures on neoliberal governmentality Foucault
not once paused on the Chilean example. In the articles of that time, he never
mentioned Allende, and Chile but once.
122 See Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 94 [Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics,

93]; emphasis added: ‘But in any case, I do not think that for the moment there is
an autonomous governmentality of socialism.’
123 Ibid., 95 [94].
124 See Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault (Paris: Fayard,
2012), 28: ‘The great audacity of Foucault, which explicates the incomprehension
of his texts on the matter, consists in that he had broken into pieces the symbolic
barrier set up by the intellectual left with regard to the neo-liberal tradition.’
125 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 323 [Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity
and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 73–74].
126 Rehmann 2014, 146 [80].
128 Foucault, ‘Un système fini face à une demande infinie’ (1983), in DE II, 1190–91.
130 See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New
York: Zone Books, 2014), 50.
131 Foucault, ‘De la nature humaine’ (November 1971), in DE I, 1364 [Foucault and
Chomsky, The Foucault and Chomsky Debate, 41]. As regards the causes of this
‘surprising critical moderation’, Garo cites the fact that both Foucault and the
neoliberals were related by ‘a radical critique of anthropology and humanism’.
Isabelle Garo, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx. La politique dans la
philosophie (Paris: Demopolis, 2011), 152.
132 For example, according to Foucault, the subject of interests and the subject of
rights are completely heterogeneous: ‘The market and the contract function in
exactly opposite ways.’ Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 279 [Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics, 276]. This statement is strange not only in that it
overlooks authors, such as Hegel or Pashukanis, who tried to think precisely
the structural coincidence of the market and the logic of contracts. What is
more, it leads to the complete erasure of the problem of propriety. See Jean-
Yves Grenier and André Orléan, ‘Michel Foucault, l’économie politique et
le libéralisme’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 5 (September–October
2007): 1159: ‘This removal of the law comes with a price. It leads in effect to
the exclusion of property law, a notion which is totally absent in Foucault’s
reflection.’
133 See Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 112 [Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 108].
134 Ibid., 119 [116].
135 Ibid., 120 [116].
136 Ibid., 118 [114].
137 As for the development of German ordoliberalism, see in particular Rolf Ptak,
Vom Ordoliberalismus zur Sozialen Marktwirtschaft: Stationen des Neoliberalismus
in Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2004).
138 Alexander Rüstow, Das Versagen des Wirtschfatsliberalismus (Marburg:

Metropolis, 2001), 26.
139 Ibid., 142.
140 Alexander Rüstow, ‘Interessenpolitik oder Staatspolitik’, Der deutsche Volkswirt 7,
no. 6 (1932): 172. For a diagnosis of the crisis, see ibid., 171: ‘The phenomenon
that Carl Schmitt in reference to Ernst Jünger called the “total state” … is in
reality the very opposite of it: not the state’s might, but the state’s feebleness.’
The ordoliberal critique of the total state is, therefore, directed against the weak
state, not against the state as such. See Ptak, Vom Ordoliberalismus zur Sozialen
Marktwirtschaft, 33ff.
141 For an examination of the ordoliberals’ relation to the Nazi regime and its economic
policy, see ibid., 57ff. Furthermore, the attitude of fascism and Nazism towards
liberalism was much more ambiguous than the usual account would like to
have it. Ishay Landa claims, for instance, ‘that fascism was not an outsider to the
liberal, “open society”, but in fact an intimate insider to that society, which was not
particularly open, either’. Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and
Fascism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 9. Landa supports his claim by a close reading
of Hitler’s pre-war economic program. He convincingly shows that Hitler advocated
liberalism in the economy and, for that reason, opposed liberalism in politics.
142 L. Erhard, ‘Nationalwirtschaft’, Die Deutsche Fertigware, vol. 2, A, 1933, 19 (see
Ptak 2004, 77).
143 When Marcuse, then an intelligence analyst, composed reports on the situation
in Germany, he wrote that after the end of the war ‘in the western zones, the
occupation authorities on numerous occasions took the position that the radical
political activity of the new trade-unions infringes upon their sovereignty.…
Consequently, many trade-union committees were dissolved, and gradually
replaced by an “apolitical” type of organisation.’ Franz Neumann, Herbert
Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt
School Contribution to the War Efforts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2013), 561.
144 Grenier and Orléan, ‘Michel Foucault, l’économie politique et le libéralisme’, 1174.
145 Erhard 1977, II, 441.
146 To illustrate the political discourse on the right of that period (and to show how
drastically the times have changed), it is instructive to look at the CDU program
documents that consistently emphasized the third-way logic. The so-called Ahlen
Program of February 1947, entitled CDU Overcomes Capitalism and Marxism,
declares: ‘The capitalist economic system was not appropriate for the state
and vital interests of the German people.’ (CDU überwindet Kapitalismus und
Marxismus) The Düsseldorf Guidelines of July 1949 explain the principles of the
‘social market economy’ as follows: ‘The “social market economy” is a socially
bound arrangement of competitive economy into which the efforts of free and
diligent people are brought in an order that brings the maximum of economic
benefit and social justice for all. This order is established by freedom and
attachment [Freiheit und Bindung] … The “social market economy” is in sharp
opposition to the system of a planned economy, which we reject … However, the
“social market economy” is equally in opposition to the so-called “free economy”
of the liberal mold.’ (Düsseldorfer Leitsätze, 15 July 1949, 1–2)
147 Bilger, La pensée économique libérale, 29.
du marxisme’ (April 1978), in DE II, 615.
149 See Audier, Penser le ‘néolibéralisme’, 24.
150 For an excellent examination of this, see Behrent, ‘Accidents Happen’.
151 See Foucault, ‘Une esthétique de l’existence’ (April 1984), in DE II, 1552 [Foucault,
Foucault Live, 452]: ‘I think … that the subject is constituted through practices
of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of
freedom, as in Antiquity.’
152 Foucault, ‘Postface’ (1980?), in DE II, 855.
153 Foucault, ‘Un système fini face à une demande infinie’ (1983), in DE II, 1193.
154 Ibid.
155 In this regard, Foucault proposed two types of measures, experimental and
conceptual ones. See ibid., 1191–92.
156 See, for instance, Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse’, in
Michel Foucault philosophe: Rencontre internationale, Paris, 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988,
ed. Georges Canghuilhem (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 80.
157 Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur’ (February 1969), in DE I, 832–5 [Foucault
1998, II, 217–20].
158 See Foucault, ‘Foucault répond à Sartre’ (February 1968), in DE I, 694: ‘I was in
the Communist Party, once, oh!, for several months, or a little more.’ See also
Foucault, ‘Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons’ (October 1975), in DE I, 1644: ‘I was touched
by it [i.e., the analysis] twice, and I finally abandoned it three or four months
later.’
159 See the ‘Chronologie’ established by Daniel Denfert, in DE I, 55.
160 In the One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse introduces the notion of ‘repressive
desublimation’, implying that replacing mediated by immediate gratification
of sexual drive may have repressive effects itself, and that consequently the
liberalization of sexuality may indeed be used to reinforce the grip of the
capitalist power system. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies
in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002),
75–76: ‘It appears that such repressive desublimation is indeed operative in the
sexual sphere, and here … it operates as the by-product of the social controls of
technological reality, which extend liberty while intensifying domination.’
161 Foucault, ‘Le jeu de Michel Foucault’ (July 1977), in DE II, 314.
162 Foucault, ‘Michel Foucault. Les réponses du philosophe’ (October 1975), in DE I,

in DEI, 1685.
163 Foucault, ‘Les mailles du pouvoir’ (November 1976), in DE II, 1019. See also
Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 150–1 [Foucault, History of Sexuality, 114], where
he draws a parallel between two stages in capitalist development, on the one
hand, and the corresponding change in attitudes regarding sexuality, on the other.
This reference is of special importance since here Foucault uses the expression
‘une désublimation sur-répressive’, thus confirming the relevance of the Marcuse
connection.
164 Foucault, ‘Pouvoir et corps’ (June 1975), in DE I, 1627. 1623.
165 See Mauro Basaure Foucault y el psycoánalisis. Gramática de un malentendid
(Santiago: Cuarto Proprio, 2011) and ‘Être juste avec Foucault. La sociologie
implicite de Foucault et sa critique de la psychanalyse’, Incidence 4–5 (2008/2009):
199, 214.
166 ‘Entretien inédit pour le Rougue’ (July 1977).
167 Foucault, ‘Michel Foucault. Les réponses du philosophe’ (October 1975), in DE I,
1685.
168 Ibid.
169 ‘Entretien inédit pour le Rougue’ (July 1977). See also Foucault, La volonté de savoir,
109 [Foucault, History of Sexuality, 83]: ‘They both rely on a common representation
of power, which … leads to two contrary results: either to the promise of a
“liberation”, if power is seen as having only an external hold on desire, or, if it is
constitutive of desire itself, to the affirmation: you are always already trapped.’
170 Foucault, ‘Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons’ (October 1975), in DE I, 1648.
171 See Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 3 [Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1].
172 Foucault, ‘Interview de Michel Foucault’ (May 1981), in DE II, 1484.
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. ‘Louis Althusser replies to John Lewis’. Australian Left Review 1, no. 38
(1972): 23–36.
Althusser, Louis. Lettres à Franca (1963–1973). Paris: STOCK/IMEC, 1998.
Audier, Serge. Penser le ‘néolibéralisme.’ Le moment néolibéral, Foucault et la crise du
socialisme. Lormont: Le bord de l’eau, 2015.
Balibar, Étienne. La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx.
Paris: Galilée, 1997.
Basaure, Mauro. ‘Être juste avec Foucault. La sociologie implicite de Foucault et sa
critique de la psychanalyse’. Incidence 4–5 (2008): 195–217.
Basaure, Mauro. Foucault y el psycoánalisis. Gramática de un malentendido. Santiago:
Cuarto Proprio, 2011.
Behrent, Michael C. ‘Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-
Market Creed, 1976–1979’. Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 3 (2009): 539–68.
Behrent, Michael C. ‘Accidents Happen: Francois Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary”
Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State’. The Journal of
Modern History 82, no. 3 (2010): 585–624.
Behrent, Michael C. ‘Can the Critique of Capitalism be Antihumanist?’ History and
Theory 54, no. 3 (2015): 372–88.
Behrent, Michael C. and Daniel Zamora, eds. Foucault and Neoliberalism. London:
Polity Press, 2015.
Bilger, François. La pensée économique libérale dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. Paris:
Pichon & Durand-Auzias, 1964.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone
Books, 2014.
Christofferson, Michael Scott. French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian
Moment of the 1970s. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004.
Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society.
Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2014.
De Lagasnerie, Geoffroy. La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault. Paris: Fayard, 2012.
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘On the New Philosophers and a More General Problem’. Discourse 20,
no. 3 (1998): 37–43.
Dosse, François. History of Structuralism, Volume II. Translated by Deborah Glassman.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Paris: Flammarion, 1989.
Ewald, François. L’Etat providence. Paris: Grasset, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. Archéologie de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan M. Sheridan Smith.
New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon,
1984.
Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Translated
by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
Vintage, 1994.
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
and translated by Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e),
1996.
Foucault, Michel. “Il faut défendre la société.” Cours au Collège de France, 1976. Paris:
Gallimard-Seuil, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James D. Faubian.
New York: The New Press, 1998a.
Foucault, Michel. ‘What Is an Author?’ In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited
by James D. Faubian, 205–22. New York: The New Press, 1998b.
Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The
New Press, 1998c.
Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits, tome I: 1954–1975. Paris: Gallimard, 2001a.
Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits, tome II: 1976–1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001b.
Foucault, Michel. Power. Edited by James D. Faubian. New York: The New Press, 2001c.
Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979.
Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 2004a.
Foucault, Michel. Securité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978.
Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 2004b.
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975–76. Translated by David Macey. London: Penguin, 2004c.
Foucault, Michel and Noam Chomsky. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human
Nature. New York: The New Press, 2006.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977–78. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79.
Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Garo, Isabelle. Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx. La politique dans la philosophie.
Paris: Demopolis, 2011.
Gavi, Phillipe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pierre Victor, eds. On a raison de se révolter. Paris:
Gallimard, 1974.
Godard, Jean-Luc. ‘Lutter sur deux fronts’. In Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard,
edited by Alain Bergala, 303–327. Paris: Étoile-Cahiers du cinema, 1985.
Grenier, Jean-Yves and André Orléan. ‘Michel Foucault, l’économie politique et le
libéralisme’. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 5 (September–October 2007):
1155–82.
Han, Béatrice. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Karlsen, M.P. and K. Villadsen. ‘Foucault, Maoism, Genealogy: The Influence of
Political Militancy in Michel Foucault’s Thought’. New Political Science 37, no. 1
(2015): 91–117.
Landa, Ishay. The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism. Chicago:
Haymarket, 2012.
Laval, Christian. ‘L’entreprise comme nouvelle forme de gouvernement. Usages et
mésusages de Michel Foucault’. In Usages de Foucault, edited by Hervé Oulc’hen,
143–173. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Lemke, Thomas. ‘Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique’. Rethinking Marxism 14,

no. 3 (2002): 49–64.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society. London: Routledge, 2002.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. ‘Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse’. In Michel Foucault
philosophe: Rencontre internationale, Paris, 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988, edited by Georges
Canghuilhem, 77–84. Paris: Seuil, 1989.
Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Pestaña, José Luis Moreno. Foucault, la gauche et la politique. Une approche non
scolastique. Paris: Textuel, 2010.
Ptak, Rolf. Vom Ordoliberalismus zur Sozialen Marktwirtschaft: Stationen des
Neoliberalismus in Deutschland. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2004.
Rüstow, Alexander. Das Versagen des Wirtschfatsliberalismus. Marburg: Metropolis,
2001.
Rüstow, Alexander. ‘Interessenpolitik oder Staatspolitik’. Der deutsche Volkswirt 7, no. 6
(1932): 169–172.
Wolin, Richard. The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,
and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Author Index
Abraham, Karl 55 Descartes, René 12, 13, 14, 16, 102 n.13,
Agamben, Giorgio 52 n.12, 74 n.41 163
Allende, Salvatore 202 n.121 Dolar, Mladen 14, 15, 23–4, 27, 37–53
Althusser, Louis 5, 6–7, 29, 62, 106 n.50,
163, 164, 194 n.27, 196 n.44 Ebert, Teresa 125–30, 136 n.96
Aristotle 92, 102 n.11, 104 n.24, 114, 144 Erhard, Ludwig 182, 183–4
Artaud, Antonin 46 Esposito, Roberto 74 n.41
Eswald, Francois 32 n.31
Bachelard, Gaston 6 Eucken, Walter 182, 183, 184, 185
Badiou, Alain 31 n.11, 59, 77, 161 Ewald, François 185, 196 n.45, 199 n.78,
Balibar, Étienne 52 n.25, 158 n.49, 162, 168 201 n.108
Barbin, Herculine 20
Barthes, Roland 157 n.33, 163 Fechner, Gustav 141, 146
Bataille, Georges 19, 195 n.32 Fraser, Nancy 109, 125, 127–30, 136 n.103
Becker, Gary 30 n.7, 32 n.31, 180 Freud, Sigmund 2, 3, 7, 11, 15, 16, 18, 21,
Beckett, Samuel 26, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99 24, 29, 30, 44–6, 48–9, 52 n.20, 55–
Beloso, Brooke 132 n.35 60, 65–6, 73, 77 n.103, 81, 87–93,
Bidet, Jacques 30 n.7 97–101, 102 n.7, 102 n.13, 103 n.17,
Bilger, François 181–2, 184, 202 n.120 104 n.25, 104 n.32, 104 n.34, 105
Blanchot, Maurice 150–1, 195 n.32 n.39, 106 n.47, 106 n.50, 127–8,
Boas, Franz 122 136–7 n.106, 137 n.110, 141–2, 144,
Bourbaki, Nicolas 94 146–7, 150–2, 168, 187–8, 190–1
Boutroux, Émile 105 n.43
Braudel, Fernand 82 Glucksmann, André 169–70
Godard, Jean-Luc 163
Calvin, John 82 Goudet, Stephane 155 n.1
Canguilhem, George 6, 26, 93–4, 96 Grenier, Jean-Yves 184, 203 n.132
Cavaillè, Jean 94, 96–7, 105 n.43
Chiesa, Lorenzo 23, 24–5, 27, 55–78 Habermas, Jürgen 5–6, 129
Chomsky, Noam 166 Hans, Beatrice 8
Ciment, Michel 155 n.1 Hayek, Friedrich 185
Copjec, Joan 4, 18, 21, 27–9, 33 n.85, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 10, 14,
139–58 16, 32 n.32, 39, 51 n.3, 103 n.19,
Corbin, Henry 140–1, 145, 153–4 136 n.103, 162, 194 n.26, 198 n.66,
Crary, Jonathan 141–2, 144, 155 n.6, 156 203 n.132
n.15 Heidegger, Martin 8, 12–13, 28, 106 n.56,
140–3, 147–8, 150, 154
Deleuze, Gilles 40, 47, 51 n.7, 60, 62, 74 Helmholtz, Hermann von 141
nn.40–1, 75 n.46, 78 n.116, 106 Heraclitus 106 n.56
n.50, 150–2, 169, 188 Hitler, Adolf 204 n.141
Derrida, Jacques 46, 125–6, 136 n.96, 143, Hölderlin, Friedrich 46
147, 148 Hoss, Rudolph 144
Author Index 211
Husserl, Edmund 16 Plato 13

Hyppolite 21 Poincaré, Henri 105 n.43
Jakobson, Roman 66, 106 n.47 Rabinbach, Anson 141

Jung, Carl 57, 91 Rank, Otto 147
Jünger, Ernst 204 n.140 Rehmann 180–1
Reich, Wilhelm 190, 191
Kant, Emmanuel 6, 7, 8, 12, 57, 163 Rocard, Michel 170
Khatib, Sami 119 Röpke, Wilhelm 182, 183, 184
Kiarostami, Abbas 139–58 Rubin, Gayle 26, 27, 109–17, 120, 125,
Klein, Melanie 55, 98, 190 126–7, 129–30, 131 nn.3–4, 132
Kobe, Zdravko 29–30, 161–206 n.35
Koyré, Alexandre 26, 83, 86, 94, 103 n.19, Rüstow, Alexander 182–3, 185
103 n.24, 106 n.49
Sade, Marquis de 19
Landa, Ishay 204 n.141 Sadra, Mullah 140, 154
Levinas, Emmanuel 28, 140–9, 151–5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 163, 165, 193 n.13, 194
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 26, 27, 66, 109, 110, n.26
111, 120–5, 129, 130, 131 n.7, 135 Saussure, Ferdinand de 23, 60, 65, 68, 72,
n.75, 163 73, 106 n.47, 121–2, 127–8, 134
Lévy, Benny 196 n.42 n.71, 136–7 n.106, 136 n.103
Lewis, John 196 n.44 Schelling, Friedrich 16
Lin Bao 170 Schmitt, Carl 204 n.140
Luther, Martin 82, 145 Schopenhauer, Arthur 16
Sohravardi 140
Mao Zedong 166, 170 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 169
Marcuse, Herbert 188, 190, 204 n.143, 205
n.160, 206 n.163 Thompson, E.P. 6
Marx, Karl 3, 7, 13–14, 18, 23, 27, 29–30, Tomšič, Samo 23–4, 25–6, 27, 28–9, 31
55, 62, 97–9, 103 n.14, 106 n.50, n.8, 81–107, 119, 121–2, 130, 133
110–11, 117–20, 123, 124–5, n.58, 134 n.71
129–30, 141, 161–206 Trombadori, Duccio 161–2
Milner, Jean-Claude 66–8, 71–3, 78 n.114, Trotsky, Leon 196 n.43
83, 95, 106 n.47
Mirandola, Pico della 69 Uexküll 102 n.11
Montag, Warren 6, 7
Van Gogh, Vincent 46
Negri, Toni 74 n.41 van Leeuwen, Anne 26–9, 109–37
Nerval, Gérard de 46 Vasquez, Diego 4
Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 16, 23, 46, 97–9, von Clausewitz, Carl 173
106 n.50, 163, 195 n.32, 195 n.39
Wahl, Jean 60
Orléan, André 184, 203 n.132 Weber, Max 82
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 67, 104 n.24
Pandolfo, Stefania 157 n.45
Parmenides 106 n.56 Žižek, Slavoj 5, 32 n.38, 32 n.49, 92
Pashukanis, Evgeny 203 n.132 Zupančič, Alenka 21–2, 33 n.76,
Peden, Knox 4 137 n.110
Subject Index
Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes.
agency 39, 42, 130, 132 n.27, 155, 158 168, 172, 182, 189, 196 n.44, 196
n.49, 178 n.46, 197 n.51, 198 n.66, 202 n.120,
Ahlen Program 204 n.146 204 n.146, 205 n.160, 205 n.163
alienation 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 45, 46, 147, 164 bourgeois society 20, 47, 114, 127, 136
anthropology 11, 26, 110, 111, 112, 122, n.99, 163, 165–6, 168, 189
130, 134 n.72, 180, 203 n.131 and commodity fetishism 27, 99, 119,
anti-humanism 9, 25, 29, 69–70, 163–4, 120, 124, 125
179, 180 commodity form 27, 111, 116, 117–20,
Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze) 47 129
antiphilosophy 97 commodity production 26–7, 110, 111,
anti-psychiatric movement 101 n.2 113, 114, 116, 118, 130
anxiety 88, 147, 149 exchange-value 27, 83, 117–20, 123–4,
Arbeitkraft 141 126, 131 n.7, 133 n.44
archaeology 8, 9, 66, 68, 69, 81, 100, 188, exploitation 2, 23, 26, 84, 85, 88, 111,
190, 191, 197 n.53 112, 114, 117, 126, 127, 129, 171,
Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) 196 n.44
4, 5, 68, 194 n.26 surplus-value (Mehrwert) 2
Aristotelianism 89, 93, 97 use-value 97, 117–20, 124, 133 n.58
aufklarung 6 ‘care of the self ’ 2, 9–10, 15, 23
Auschwitz 144 censorship 87, 115, 157 n.45
author function 55, 59 Cercle d’Epistemologie 4
automaton 92, 93 class/class struggle 1, 23, 38, 98, 111,
119, 126, 128, 132 n.32, 136 n.99,
‘being-toward-death’ 28, 142–3, 148, 150, 154 139–40, 162, 163–4, 166, 167, 168,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 146, 173, 186, 192 n.10, 196 nn.43–4,
150 197 n.54
biological determinism 128 cogito 10–13, 14–15, 16, 62, 64
biologism 128, 137 n.106 communicative rationality 5
biopolitics 20–1, 30 n.7, 47, 49, 50, 52 Communist Party, France 162–3, 167, 169,
n.12, 60, 74 n.41, 81, 97, 175, 176 188, 196 n.42
biopower 17–22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 41, consciousness 7, 10, 13, 21, 24, 40–1, 62,
81–2, 114–16, 132 n.21, 132 n.30, 70, 93, 96, 105 n.39, 119–21, 130,
143, 173–4, 199 n.84, 200 n.87 136 n.99, 153
Birth of Biopolitics, The (Foucault) 174, 185 contingency 2, 49, 92, 93, 94, 105 n.37, 105
Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault) 4, 69 n.39, 105 n.43, 173
Course in General Linguistics (Saussure) 121
capitalism 2–3, 17, 18, 20–2, 25–8, 30, critical theory 3, 5–7
81–3, 103 n.17, 111, 113–16, Cultural Revolution 165–6, 170, 196 n.42
118–19, 125, 130, 131, 131 nn.3–4, culture 65, 112, 122, 123, 124, 139, 143,
132 n.30, 133 n.35, 139–58, 167, 170, 177
Subject Index 213
Dasein 142, 143–4, 148, 150, 154 entropy 146–7, 150

death drive 28, 105 n.38, 150, 151, 152 episteme 8, 9, 13, 44, 102 n.13, 103 n.14
‘death of man’ 26, 46, 60, 67, 69, 84, 97, epistemology 6, 9, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 58,
102 n.13 81, 83, 84–101, 103 n.14, 103 n.18,
death of the author 55, 58, 59 104 n.24, 105 n.38, 105 n.41, 106
deconstruction 26, 46, 59, 110, 113–14, n.53, 164
127, 130 of error and failure 26, 81–101
desire 4, 5, 18, 20, 21, 28, 62, 104 n.32, 113, ethnology 66, 67, 83, 97
139, 155 n.6, 156 n.15, 206 n.169 Existence and Existents (Levinas) 140–2,
and knowledge 13–16 144, 147, 154, 156 n.14
and language 23 experience 6, 8, 10, 20, 45, 59, 67, 161–2,
notions of 41, 46–50, 144, 190, 191 164, 165, 166, 188, 197 n.47
dialectics 21, 25, 41, 59, 64, 67, 94, 120, 130 ‘extimacy’ 58, 71, 75 n.57
difference 21–2, 25, 28, 43, 50, 60, 64, 68,
71–2, 75 n.46, 99, 118, 119, 120, Failure of Economic Liberalism, The
121–2, 150, 152, 155 (Rüstow) 182–3
Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 47, 150 Family, The’ (Lévi-Strauss) 120–1, 122–3
discipline, notion of 6, 7, 19, 24, 29, 85, fantasy 5, 11, 14, 15, 27, 43, 46, 50, 57,
100–1, 171, 173, 174, 175, 199 n.71, 61–2, 70, 85, 88, 89, 92, 117,
200 n.94, 201 n.105 119–20, 124–5, 131
Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 4, 5, 6, fascism 169, 179, 204 n.141
29, 85, 167, 168, 196 n.45, 201 n.105 fatigue 27–8, 139–58
discourse feminism/feminist theory 26–7, 109–37,
of analysis 16, 17 139, 156 n.20
feminist theory 127–9 fetishism/fetishization 27, 85, 87, 91, 99,
hysteric 10, 16, 17, 115 106 n.53, 110, 117–20, 124–5, 141
Master’s 10, 13–14, 16, 17, 43, 62, 82 Fortunes of Feminism (Fraser) 109, 127,
objects of 8 136 n.103
scientific 82, 94, 95 ‘Foucault and the Subject of Method’
theory(ies) of 125, 127–8, 130, 136 (Peden) 4
n.103, 164, 168, 171, 173, 179, freedom 182, 183–4, 186, 205 n.146
186–90, 200 n.94, 204 n.146 neoliberal basis of 1
university 2, 3, 10, 16, 17, 56, 62–3, notions of 28, 29, 51 n.3, 116, 144–5,
104 n.24 148, 153, 154, 176–7, 205 n.151
discursive voluntarism 15 French Revolution 48, 171, 198 n.66
division of labour 27, 121–3, 126, 128 French theory/French left 161–206
Dora, Freud’s analysis of 44 Freudo-Marxism 29, 168, 187, 188, 197
Dream and Existence (Binswanger) 44 n.49, 197 n.54
dreams 9, 45, 57, 88, 98–9, 141–2, 156
n.15, 174 Gauche prolétarienne 165
drive 27, 28, 90–1, 146–7 gaze 69, 93, 153
Geldreform 184
ego 14, 15, 24, 41, 57, 129, 153 gender theory 109
18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The governmentality 10, 15, 24, 29, 41, 49–50,
(Marx) 135 n.75, 173 162, 174–9, 180, 200 n.93, 200 n.96,
Elementary Structures of Kinship, The 202 n.121, 203 n.122
(Lévi-Strauss) 120–1, 122
emancipation 27, 49, 83, 89, 116, 126, 127, hermeneutics 6, 8, 45, 98–100, 104 n.32, 142
129, 164, 167, 180, 189, 202 n.114 Hermeneutics of the Subject, The
energy 141, 145, 147 (Foucault) 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12
214 Subject Index
Hilflosigkeit (radical helplessness) 147–8 Kampfplatz 94

historical a priori 8, 9 kinship 47, 51 n.4, 67, 109, 111, 120–5,
history, notions of 17, 19–20, 66, 68–9, 126, 131 n.7
100, 154, 170–1, 174–5, 194 n.21, family and 47, 50, 52 n.25, 113, 123,
200 n.96 124–5, 128
‘History and Anthropology’ (Lévi-Strauss) incest prohibition 121, 122–4,
122 135 n.82
History of Madness (Foucault) 4, 45–6, 47, knowledge 66–7
69 desire and 5, 13–16
history of philosophy 14, 103 n.19 history of 194 n.21
History of Sexuality (Foucault) 4, 17–18, object of 8, 9, 10, 132 n.33
20, 27, 29, 44, 45, 47, 81, 82, 97, 102 and power 4, 5–6, 9, 11–13, 19–20,
n.7, 114, 116, 132 n.30, 168, 187, 25–6, 52 n.20, 81–2, 84–5, 100–1,
206 n.163, 206 n.169 168, 188
homology 3, 23, 27, 31 n.8, 42, 71, 82, 83, production of 9, 10, 11, 83
95, 145, 148, 151 ‘systematic de-anthropologization of
humanism 26, 69–70, 102 n.11, 110, 130, knowledge’ 68–70, 78 n.116
147, 163, 169, 181, 194 n.22, 203 theft of 13–14, 16
n.131 and truth 2, 94
Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and Kraft 141
the Origins of Modernity, The
(Rabinbach) 141 Lacanianism 127–9, 136 n.103
human sciences 9, 12, 66–7, 74 n.32, 83, La Chinoise (Godard) 163
96, 97, 102 n.11 lack 14, 41, 113, 145, 147, 151, 154
hyperstructuralism 25, 71–3 loss, waste, surplus 16–17
hystoricisation 8–10 lalangue 93, 94
language
idealism 8, 27, 57, 63, 64, 94, 98, 103 n.14, autonomy of 93, 97–9, 104 n.24
116, 126, 136 n.96, 144, 155, 156 desire and 23
n.20, 167 formal 83
identity/identity politics 19, 61–2, 72–3, metalanguage 17, 70, 72, 93
116–17, 119, 121, 128–30, 137 referentiality of 106 n.49
n.106, 196 n.45 Saussure’s division 72, 121, 128
ideology 6, 7, 40, 85, 94, 178, 180 and truth 45, 70
Ideology and the Ideological State Las Meninas (Vasquez) 4
Apparatus (Althusser) 6 Lautenbach Plan, Germany 182–3, 184
imperialism 6 Law 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 201 n.108
indifference 22, 60, 75 n.46, 118, 139, 142, Le périple structural (Milner) 66
172 Les maîtres penseurs (Glucksmann) 169
Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) 104 Les mots et les choses (Foucault) 46, 64, 66,
n.32, 142 67–8, 69, 77 n.87
Iran–Iraq War 139 Liberal Economic Thought in
Islamic revolution 1–5, 140–2, 157 n.45, Contemporary Germany (Bilger)
186 181–2
liberalism 10, 176, 178, 180, 185
jouissance (enjoyment) 2, 4, 11, 14, 17, 23, libidinal economy 25, 82–3, 100, 103 n.17,
25, 102 n.7, 147 146
surplus-jouissance 2, 21–2, 25, 27, 28, libido 141
152 linguistics 52 n.22, 65, 66, 67, 71, 83, 97,
value of enjoyment 83 193 n.19
Subject Index 215
linguistic structure. See structural neoliberalism 1, 29–30, 162, 176, 178,

linguistics 179–86, 191, 195 n.36, 202 n.115,
literalization 95 202 n.121, 203 n.130
Little Red Book (Mao) 165 ‘Nietzsche, Freud and Marx’ 97
logos 92, 100 nominalism 8
ludic feminism. See poststructuralist Normal and the Pathological, The
feminism (Canguilhem) 20, 93–4
Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, nouveaux philosophes (New Philosophers)
Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism 169–70
(Ebert) 125–6
Lust (Freud) 2, 102 n.7 objet a 15
Oedipus 47, 52 n.25
madness 9, 46, 47, 59, 100 One/One-ness 16, 24, 40, 43, 48–50
Maoism 29, 30, 165–6, 169–70, 173, On the Logic and the Theory of Science
180, 186, 193 n.17, 195 n.36, 195 (Cavaillès) 96
nn.38–9, 196 n.44 ontology 8, 18, 22, 24–8, 41, 43, 50, 58, 60,
market competition 182, 183 63, 68, 73, 74 n.41, 75 n.46, 93–6,
marriage 47, 123–4, 135 n.82, 135 n.94 100–1, 106 n.56, 141–3, 147–8, 175,
Marxism 8, 15, 109, 161–206 201 n.108
and Maoism 165–7, 180, 186 becoming 92, 94, 99–100, 105 n.43,
and psychoanalysis 15, 29, 187–91 106 n.56
and structuralism 26, 29, 110, 164 being 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 22, 27, 28, 57,
Marxism-Leninism 165, 193 n.17 60, 62, 69, 99–100, 101, 106 n.56,
materialism 7, 8, 26–7, 60, 63–4, 68, 75 142, 143–4, 146, 147, 148–9, 152,
n.46, 91, 94, 96–7, 100, 103 n.14, 153, 154, 156 n.14
106 n.50, 106 n.56, 110–19, 125–30, Order of Discourse, The (Foucault) 5
136 n.96, 136 n.99, 145 Order of Things, The (Foucault) 7, 8, 83–4,
Mental Illness and Personality (Foucault) 97, 98, 163, 193 n.20, 194 n.26, 195
162 n.37
metaphor and metonymy 93, 95, 98, 169, Other Side of Psychoanalysis, The (Lacan)
197 n.53 82
condensation 91, 93
displacement 11, 85, 88, 91, 93, 100, Panopticon 43, 167, 169, 174
129, 186 Paris massacres, 1792 2
metaphysics 58, 63, 73, 89, 103 n.19, 144 patriarchy 49, 131, 133 n.35
‘Michel Foucault, A’ (Cercle phenomenology 45
d’Epistemologie) 4 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 10
Middle Ages 175 pleasure 18–20, 30, 38, 41, 43, 48, 49–50,
minimalism 25, 71–2, 121, 134 n.71 91, 102 n.7, 104 n.32, 115, 144, 202
modernity 6, 16, 17, 24, 25, 27, 28, 41, 42, n.116
46, 47, 48, 49, 52 n.12, 67, 68, 70, political economy 23, 26–7, 109–37, 171,
82–3, 89, 103 n.19, 111, 114, 116 178
Mythologiques, the Raw and the Cooked politics, defined 173
(Lévi-Strauss) 122 poststructuralism 4, 23, 68, 95, 98, 136
n.106
Nachtraglichkeit 3 poststructuralist feminism 125–7, 136
Name of the Father 47, 48 n.99
National Socialism 142 power
Nazism 144, 178, 182, 183, 204 n.141 critique and 5–7
negation 42, 60, 148, 149, 150, 184 disciplinary 29, 167–9, 173, 177
216 Subject Index
and enjoyment 17, 25, 82 Seminar XVI 69, 82

and ideology 6 Seminar XVIII: On A Discourse that is
and law 174 Not of a Semblance 5
knowledge and 4, 5–6, 9, 11–13, 19–20, sex
25–6, 52 n.20, 81–2, 84–5, 100–1, and biopolitics 47–50
168, 188 and biopower 17–22, 82, 111–17
Prison Information Group 2, 166, 180 discourse on 18, 20–3, 45, 49, 55, 97
proletariat 130, 166, 167, 196 n.44 division of labour 121, 122–3
psychoanalysis, critique of 187–91 feminist perspectives 109–37
non-relation 21, 22–3, 27, 110, 125,
rational choice theory 6 129, 130
Read My Desire (Copjec) 4 and power 18–19, 116, 188–9, 196 n.52
Real 15, 21, 23, 86, 95–6 regulation of 112–13
realism 88 revolution 116
repetition 1, 17, 26–8, 47, 71, 90–3, 142, signifier 11, 14, 15–17, 18, 21–2, 23, 25,
152, 154, 155 58, 60, 61–2, 64, 70, 71, 72, 86, 91,
of failure 85, 88–9, 90–1 95–9, 104 n.34, 106 n.49, 119, 121,
notion of ‘better failure’ 85–7, 88, 92, 134 n.71
103 n.19 Sinthome (Lacan) 5
representation 8, 11, 18, 19, 23, 24, 37, 46, socialism 29, 171, 180, 202–3 nn.120–122
57–8, 60, 61, 97, 126, 127, 128, 129, Socialist Party, France 170, 196 n.42
134 n.71, 206 n.169 Société Française de Philosophie 56
repression 1, 15, 18, 23, 24, 27, 37–8, sophism 99
40, 42, 47, 89, 116, 164, 168, 173, sovereignty 19, 24, 37, 38, 39, 41–3, 47,
190–1, 200 n.94 49–50, 114, 143, 174, 178, 183–4,
repressive hypothesis 17–18, 20, 24, 42, 204 n.143
114, 115, 116, 168, 188 state, the 9–10, 29, 38, 39, 42, 51 n.4, 166,
resistance 2, 3, 19, 20, 26, 28, 85–90, 92, 169, 174, 175–6, 178, 182–5, 195
103 n.17, 145, 152, 183 nn.35–6, 200 n.82, 200 n.96, 204
n.140, 204 n.146
Schreber, Freud’s analysis of 44 welfare state 30, 181, 185
scientific formalization 4, 52 n.22, 88, 92, structural linguistics 2, 57–8, 60, 65, 71–3,
94, 95, 105 n.38, 128 93, 99, 121–2, 163, 193 n.19
scientific modernity 14, 15, 83, 86, 89–90, structure/structuralism
93–4 and anti-humanism 68–70, 163–4, 180
conception of 70, 94, 96–7, 100 author, subject and 24, 55–78
self-care 15, 16–17, 24 and feminism 109–25
self-consciousness 10–11, 13, 40–1, 62 forms of 193 n.19, 194 n.26
Seminars, Lacan’s generalized 65–6, 193 n.19
Seminar V: Formations of the as hyperstructuralism 71–3
Unconscious 4 and Marxism 26, 29, 110, 125, 163–4
Seminar VI: Desire and Its and minimalism 25, 71–2, 121, 134
Interpretations 4 n.71
Seminar VII: Ethics of Psychoanalysis 4 negativity 27, 119–20, 125, 130
Seminar VIII: Transference 4 traits/features of 66–8
Seminar XII 69 subject and subjectivity 1–13, 146
Seminar XIII 69 category of the subject 6–7, 14, 24, 25
Seminar XIV 69 failure and error 84–101
Seminar XIX 62, 68, 69 neoliberal discourse 178, 179–86
Seminar XV 69 and object 117–20
Subject Index 217
and the Other 14, 16, 18, 23, 137 n.117, subject and 4–13, 17, 85, 101 n.2, 105
146 n.41
and power 39, 48, 51 n.3 whole/‘all’ 86–7
and structure 24–5, 55–78, 84 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
theory of the subject 3, 4, 7, 23, 59, (Crary) 141–2, 144
61–2, 70, 74 n.32, 77 n.84, 101 tyche 92, 93, 105 n.36
n.2
and truth 4–13, 17, 85, 101 n.2, 105 unary trait 16
n.41 unconscious 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 13–18, 21–3,
25–7, 30, 45, 52 n.22, 57, 59, 61–3,
Taste of Cherry (dir. Kiarostami) 139–40, 65, 67, 70, 72, 84, 87–92, 98, 100–1,
144–6, 149–53, 155, 157 n.45 102 n.13, 103 n.18, 104 n.32, 105
Television (Lacan) 22, 86 n.37, 122, 129, 130, 187, 189–90
10 (dir. Kiarostami) 145
theoretical anti-humanism 29, 163 vitalism 19, 25, 26, 60, 68, 74 n.41, 94, 105
theory of four discourses 2, 16, 17, 104 n.38, 119
n.34 Vitalpolitk (Rüstow) 183
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 103 n.14
‘To Do Justice to Freud’ (Derrida) 46 Weltanschaung 8
‘Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political ‘What is an Author?’ (Foucault) 25, 55–60,
Economy” of Sex, The’ (Rubin) 64, 67–9, 187–8, 194 n.26
109–10 Will to Knowledge, The (Foucault) 2, 29,
transference 46, 52 n.20, 90 68, 69, 81, 168–9, 175, 187, 188,
Triebökonomie (economy of drives) 101–2 197 n.54
n.5 ‘will to truth’ 15
truth working-through 2, 26, 88–9, 103 n.17
‘as cause’ 70 Worstward Ho (Beckett) 85
and knowledge 2, 94
language and 45, 70 zeitgeist 44
218
219
220
221
222
223
224

Nadia Bou Ali Lacan Contra Foucault Subjectivity Sex and Politics

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Nadia Bou Ali Lacan Contra Foucault Subjectivity Sex and Politics

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Lacan Contra Foucault

Also available from Bloomsbury

Between Levinas and Lacan, Mari Ruti

Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited by Simon

Subjectivity, Sex and Politics

Edited by Nadia Bou Ali, American University of Beirut,

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Nadia Bou Ali, Rohit Goel and contributors, 2019

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of

Cover design: Irene Marinez-Costa

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3688-8

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

1 Cutting Off the King’s Head

Author Index 210

Joan Copjec is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher who has published extensively on psychoanalytic

Mladen Dolar, born in 1951 in Maribor, Slovenia (former Yugoslavia), is

Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana,

Zdravko Kobe teaches Classical German Philosophy at the University of

Foucault actively promoted a ‘dangerous’ form of ‘hyper and pessimistic

overpass that characterizes the Lacan–Foucault relation. By ‘overpass’, we mean

Archeology of Knowledge appears in 1969. In 1970, Foucault delivers his lecture

The sublime object of critical theory

subject as that which is not reducible to the individual or to transparent self-

The missed encounter

smuggling back in a positivism of the Baconian kind: knowledge will always be

‘governmentality’ as what fundamentally defined liberalism. Governmentality

Which subject of the cogito?

fantasy, reestablishing its framework to accommodate more and more, enlarging

Surprisingly, Foucault deemed Lacan’s gesture of reintroducing ancient

Descartes? Lacan is important for Foucault because he is seen to re-pose the

During his 1981–82 course subsequently published as The Hermeneutics of the

Foucault’s strategy of overlooking Lacan and forefronting Heidegger in his

Desire and knowledge

The ‘I don’t think,’ as correlative of It [ça], is called to join the ‘I am not,’ as

reactivating this ancient pact of epimeleia heautou between subjectification and

Self-care or subjective destitution?

How to think sex?

In the History of Sexuality, Foucault seems to dismiss psychoanalysis altogether

Foucault opposed psychoanalysis because it reduced all questions to sex as a

The essential feature of sexuality is not simply that it is a false representation,

Sexuality, in his account, emerges as an entirely new technology of power, a

Nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois’ society – and it is doubtless still with us – was

For Foucault the discourse on sexuality is an encroachment of power on

subject to the boundaries of the individual, and normatively subjugates their

For Lacan Contra Foucault, sexuality insofar as it is linked to the unconscious is

because it is not a symbolic function or a symbolic construction, rather ‘sex is

ontological categories’ nor reintroduces it ‘in the guise of a vacuously structural

that while Butler and Rubin maintain a trans-historical understanding of the

which a combination of ‘war, capitalism, and theocratic-legalism’ prevails. The

provides a meticulous examination of Foucault’s troubled relation with both

1 Cf. Jean-Michel Rabate, ‘Lacan’s “annee erotique”’, in Jacques Lacan, between

55 Refer to Lorenzo Chiesa’s chapter in this volume.

86 Zupančič, What Is Sex?,45.

Badiou, Alain. Pocket Pantheon. London: Verso, 2009.

Cutting Off the King’s Head

The sovereign, law, prohibition, all this formed a system of representation of

whose base would be somewhere else. There is no hidden depth of power; it is

self-referentiality devoid of self-reflexivity, and thus of any notion of recognition

illusion of a great Break and should scrutinize the heterogeneous multiplicity of

The relation between Foucault and psychoanalysis is not a story with a

in the doxa of the sixties/seventies and dismissed it in horror. He blatantly

Author Index 210