THOUGHTS ON THE UNTHOUGHT : NIETZSCHE -BATAILLE-FOUCAULT

Manos Tsakiris

Foreword

I presented the essay Thoughts on the unthought in the course History of Ideas during the academic year 1997-1998. Its length was about 21,000 words. As it is obvious I did not translate the entire essay but I tried to produce a summary of the Greek text.

Introduction

The title of this essay indicates the quaintness of the project: to think the unthought. But how can we think the unthought, that is the structure which is by definition outside the thought, which arises as a stubborn exteriority1 ? Shall we prepare the modern cogito so as to be able to accept its double -the unthought- or shall we let the unthought to exercise its sovereignty on the cogito ? What is important into this introduction is the justification of the philosophers and of the texts that are used in order to investigate the relation between the thought and the unthought. In the heart of the problem we are examining, that is the relation of the modern cogito with the unthought, we can find F.Nietzsche. According to Habermas in his well-known lectures of the The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Nietzsche is the turning point of the entrance into postmodernity. Taking into consideration that postmodernsim has created the possibility of a complete criticism of the subject-centered reason of modernity, we can easily understand the necessity of a postmodern point of view as far as our study is concerned.. Next to Nietzsche we can find two other philosophers of the 20th century who are, according to their own confession, his students : Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille. The structure of this essay is shortly unorthodox : the starting point is M.Foucaults work The Order of Things and in particular the chapter The cogito and the Unthought. By using the work of Foucault, we can easily approach the genealogical programme of Nietzsche which is straightly connected with the nietzschenian point of view of the body, of the language and of the unthought. Finally, we refer to the anthropology proposed by G.Bataille and to a literary expression of the unthought. Our decision to begin with Foucault is justified by our intention to show that the unthought starts to appear in the same time with all the other doubles of man and finally at the same time with man as an object and a subject at the beginning of modernity. In The History of Madness and The Order of Things M.Foucault tried to investigate the archaeology and the genealogy of the history of the Other and of the History of the Same. In the end of his work he discovered the appearance of the man with his doubles: the empirical and the transcendental, the retreat and the return of the origin and above all the cogito and the unthought. In that moment he reached the thought from outside, a way of thought which in its most external point touches the limits of the unthought. But it is almost certain that Foucault would never be able to cover the

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997,pp.323.

distance from the cogito to the unthought without the continuous reference to Nietzsche and to the criticism of the latest of the subject-centered reason of Enlightenment. Nietzsche is introduced in this study in two ways : firstly by the use of genealogy and in particular with its connection to the study of the history of body, and secondly by his thought on the language and the changes that Nietzsche himself caused with his own language. Finally, Bataille is introduced via his wild anthropology which goes beyond metaphysics and which makes a dangerous gesture from eroticism to death. This gesture takes place in two ways : into the philosophical papers of Bataille and into his literary works of early 30s. According to the above preliminary notes it is obvious that our purpose is to approach three different ways of appearance of the unthought, three ways that are related and supplementary. But as far as the motive of writing the present study is concerned we have to admit that only a phrase of Foucault was enough to generate our thoughts on the unthought. In the chapter The cogito and the unthought Foucault writes : thought -which is now rooted in non-thought-, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action, a perilous act. Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud and Bataille have understood this on behalf of all those who tried to ignore it.1 According to this point of view it is obvious that modern man has no choice : the modern cogito which exists simply because it has found its double is beyond everything else a perilous act since it has only the choice to think the unthought by using the thought of a subject which is an empirico-transcendental doublet, that is to say man is a mode of being which accommodates the dimension between cogito and unthought. Consequently, the I think does not lead to the evident truth of the I am. Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault tried to show that this stretch is the fundamental component of a philosophy of difference which tries to accept the death of the subject and to propose the acceptance of the difference which will not obey in any effort of identification of itself. Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault by destroying the transcendental subject-centered discourse and by

premising the command to think the unthought they were becoming dangerous because they were showing what has always been beyond the continuous control of man : the exuberance of the desire and the necessity of liberating the raw materials of Being. Paradoxically, as these three philosophers put it, we must rake these substances in the most exterior part of the human existence, in the absolute exteriority of man because man was named man by a discourse whose

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997,pp. 328.

purpose was to escape from what is always missing in the human being. And what is missing is the difference which conflates with the identity, is the unthought which cannot be found in the cogito.

The thoughts on the unthought

1. In 1959 Foucault supports his thesis Madness and Civilisation which will be published a few years later. In the introduction of this book Foucault states that his intention was not the writing of the history of psychiatry, but the discovery of the archaeology of the silence into which the Western civilisation obliged madness and almost every expression of the unreason. Taking as a starting point the Ship of Fools and the treatment of lepers, Foucault tries to prove that the epistemological status of psychiatry is based on the great confinement of the Otherness which took place during the 16th century and has continued until our days : what the classical period had confined was not only an abstract unreason which mingled madmen and libertines, invalids, and criminals, but also an enormous reservoir of the fantastic, a dormant world of monsters supposedly engulfed in the darkness of Hieronymous Bosch which had spewed them forth1. During this period of his work Foucault tries, according to Habermas, to work out the internal kinship between humanism and terrorism that endows his critique of modernity with its sharpness and mercilessness and to demonstrate, for the first time, that double movement of liberation and enslavement which he will recognise later in various fields, such as the penal system, the health system, the educational system and so forth.2 A few years later, in 1966, Foucault publishes The Order of Things, an archaeology of the human sciences. In this book, Foucaults intention is to demonstrate that man -the study of whom is supposed by the nave to be the oldest investigation since Socrates3- is only a recent invention, a figure which appeared during the last two centuries because of the new position he has taken up in the field of knowledge. Foucault himself admits that this book is the echo of the previous Madness and Civilization and that in both cases the goal is the archaeological analysis of the whole of Classical knowledge. Foucault notes : The history of madness would be the history of Other -of that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcise the interior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness); whereas the history of the order imposed on things would be the history of the Same -of that
1 2

Foucault M., Madness and Civilisation, Tavistock, 1967, pp. 209. Habermas J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, twelve lectures, The MIT

Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996. p.246.

3

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp. xxiii

which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities.1

2. According to Foucault the whole context of the Classical Age is straightly related to the structure of representation of world, of nature and of man. Stemming from the examination of the painting of Velasquez Las Meninas Foucault points out that the Classical Age did exist because of the rise of representation, that is to say because the Classical Age set itself the problem of an exhaustive ordering of world in terms of the system of a mathesis, a taxinomia and a genetic analysis. The preferential place for the ordering of the representations of nature, world and man was the table on to which every particular science took its place. At this moment, man was not the maker, the artificer -God- but his role was to clarify the order of the world, he was the reliable and transparent medium of representation. And if the activity of man was to construct the table, it is obvious according to Foucault that this activity could not itself be represented. Therefore on the table there was a place for the human knower as a rational animal, but not for the representer per se. All this age of representation can be summed up in the examination of Velasquezs painting Las Meninas which thematizes the structure of knowledge in the Classical Age. In Las Meninas, the five-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, the Infanta Margareta-Teresa, stands in the centre of the canvas surrounded by her retinue of maids and dwarfs. Velasquez has depicted himself on the left of the canvas, painting a huge portrait of the King and Queen who can be seen reflected in the mirror directly behind Infantas head. Foucault writes: The painter is standing a little back from his canvas. He is glancing at his model; perhaps he is considering whether to add some finishing touch, thought it is also possible that the first stroke has not yet been made. The arm holding the brush is bent to the left, towards the palette; it is motionless, for an instant, between canvas and paints. The skilled hand is suspended in mid-air, arrested in rapt attention on the painters gaze; the gaze, in return, waits upon the arrested gesture. Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.2 In Las Meninas we can read three aspects of representation: the producing of the
1

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp. xxiv

2

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp.3

representation (the painter), the object represented (the models and their gaze) and the viewing of the representation (the spectator). For Foucault, the painting is successful because it shows all the functions required for representation and at the same time it shows the impossibility of bringing them together into a unified representation of their activity, the impossibility of representing a unified subject which would be capable of confirming the existence of the representation and not just become object of his own viewing.

3. But suddenly at the end of the 18th century occurred a profound upheaval, an archaeological mutation because suddenly representation became opaque and Foucault does not offer us any reasons for this crisis.1What takes place in this period is the transformation of natural history into biology, of analysis of wealth into economics and of reflection upon language into philology and as a consequence classical discourse can no longer be the perfectable medium of representation : words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things. In the beginning of the 19th century, they rediscovered their ancient, enigmatic density2. In other words, things have started to draw away from the words and man appeared in the place that the unthought of Las Meninas had reserved for him : he is now the subject and the object of knowledge and at the same time the organiser of the spectacle in which he appears, he is now the observed spectator. What is important for Foucault is the fact that due to this transformation of classical discourse it became possible to articulate interrogations as to the mode of being implied by the cogito. All these interrogations were defined by the doubles of man that appeared: the empirical and the transcendental, the cogito and the unthought, the retreat and return of the origin. And all these doubles where implied by the analytic of finitude: finitude is the identity and the difference of the positivities, and of their foundation, and it permits the repeat of the transcendental by the empirical, the repeat of the cogito by the unthought, the repeat of the retreat by the return of the origin until the final invention of man by the modern thought.

4.

Dreyfus H., Rabinow P., Michel Foucault : Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982, pp.27

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp.304

As far as the cogito and the unthought are concerned Foucault notes : man cannot posit himself in the immediate and sovereign transparency of a cogito ; nor , on the other hand, can he inhabit the objective inertia of something that , by rights, does not and never can lead to selfconsciousness. Man is a mode of being which accommodates that dimension which extends from a part of himself not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part ; and which, in the inverse dimension, extends from the pure apprehension to the empirical clutter, the chaotic accumulation of contents, the weight of experiences constantly eluding themselves, the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought1. Since, man is the locus of an empirical-transcendental doublet into which the cogito and the unthought define the dimension of his existence it becomes obvious that the question is no longer the same :if for Kant the question was how the experience of nature could give rise to necessary judgements, for Foucault the question is how man can think the unthought, how he can continue living in the exteriority of the unrecognised experiences of his doublet, how he can show that the Other, the Distant is also the Near and the Same. In the question what is man? Foucaults answer will be: I am and I am not all this, that is to say that cogito itself does not lead to an affirmation of being, but it does live next to the obscure existence of non-thought for which man can only say that he is rooted in this field of non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues2, which is both exterior and indispensable to him. In terms of the relation between thought and unthought Foucault states that the philosophical consequence of the above double is the need of reinventing the distance between what has been thought to be the exteriority and of what has been thought to be the interiority of man so that a new thought will be established which will be rightfully Being and Speech, even if it is the silence beyond all language and the nothingness beyond all being.3 The unthought, being interior as far as the human experience is concerned and at the same time exterior for his field of knowledge, obliges the modern thought to reflect the contents of the In-itself in the form of the For-itself

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp. 322-323.

2

Foucault M., Maurice Blanchot : The Thought from Outside, Zone Books, New York,

1987, pp. 15
3

Foucault M., Maurice Blanchot : The Thought from Outside, Zone Books, New York,

1987, pp.15

and to end the mans alienation by reconciling him with his own essence1. According to Foucault, this new way of thinking is above all an act : whatever the modern thought touches it immediately causes it to move, and even the morality it formulates is no morality. As Foucault puts it, for modern thought no morality is possible because thought had already left itself in its own being as early as the nineteenth century; it is no longer theoretical.2 It is quite impressing that Foucault in order to describe the modern thought uses ten quite aggressive verbs in the same way that Nietzsche had used six verbs to describe the Self in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Foucault states that as soon as the modern thought functions, it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning , is in itself an action a perilous act. Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud and Bataille have understood this on behalf of all those who tried to ignore it3

5. It is more than essential to understand the way in which Nietzsche guided Foucault in the direction of discovering the man with his doubles and of understanding the modern thought as a perilous act. Habermas states that at the moment Nietzsche appeared, three attempts to tailor the concept of reason had all ready been made: 1.Reason was conceived as a reconciling self-knowledge 2.Reason was conceived as a liberating appropriation 3.Finally, reason was conceived as a compensatory remembrance, so that it could emerge as the equivalent for the unifying power of religion and overcome the diremptions of modernity by means of its own driving forces4. Thus Nietzsche had two choices : the first one was to submit once more the subject-centered reason to a critique and the second one was to give up the entire

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp. 327.

2

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp. 328.

3

Foucault M., The Order of Things, an archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge,

1997, pp. 328.

4

Habermas J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, twelve lectures, The MIT

Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.pp.85.

10

programme by renouncing a renewed revision of the concept of reason and by abandoning the dialectic of enlightenment. At the same time he decides to offer a break-up of the principle of individuation which will become the escape route from modernity. According to Nietzsche modernity has been established on the basis of the subject-centered reason which is an unsalutary, masochistic inversion of the very core of the will to power1. Thus, Nietzsche believes that the nihilistic domination of subject-centered reason is the result and expression of a perversion of the will to power and his efforts will be directed in the genealogy of morality. Nietzsche decides to deny the Being, the God, the Reason, the Subject and to consent to the difference, to the body and to the unthought.

6. On the first essay Good and Evil, Good and Bad of his book On the Genealogy of Morality in 13 Nietzsche refers to the parable of lambs: there is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs.2 The meaning of this parable is simple : according to Nietzsche it is completely absurd to ask power not to express itself as power, not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst of enemies, resistance and triumphs, it is just as absurd as to ask weakness to express itself as power. But in the terms of the subject-centered reason and by faith to the language that gave birth to this form of reason. Nietzsche is more than clear in his analysis: popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength as though they were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no being behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it ; the doer is invented as an after-thought, - the doing is everything3, but due to the seduction of language and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it is supposed that there is a choice which can be made : to manifest power or not. In the philosophy of Nietzsche the power and the absence of power are permanent ontological characteristics which exclude the existence of an unbiased subject with freedom of choice that has an instinct of self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. God is dead, the modern thought is a perilous act and the man as a subject is dying: what is left to do is to find the possibilities of expression in
1

Habermas J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, twelve lectures, The MIT

Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.pp.95

2 3

Nietzsche F., On the Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.28. Nietzsche F., On the Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.28.

11

terms of an exteriority which will permit the acceptance of difference. Two places have been chosen where this search could take place: the language and the body. Nietzsche, according to Foucault, was always paving the way for a wholly new form of thought when, in the interior space of his language, he killed man and God and promised with the Return the multiple and reillumined light of gods which would take place into the vast play of language. In the same way the discovery of the unthought in the field of the body took place in a parallel form through the work of G.Bataille who tried to enrich the language with gestures of waste and excess and transgression of limits, in order to break out of the language of triumphant subjectivity.

7. In his essay on Blanchot, Foucault defined the new form of thought in these words : it is a thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence ; and that at the same time stands at the threshold of all positivity, not in order to grasp its foundation or justification but in order to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed -a thought that, in relation to the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge constitutes what in a word we might call the thought from the outside.1 This new form of thought will serve the new appearance of man which from the 19th century and forth will always be accompanied by his doubles. The language, in which the thought from the outside managed to be heard, is now stigmatised from its enigmatic and precarious being : until the 19th century the transition from the I think to the I am was accomplished in the light of evidence, but afterwards it can be objected to this transition that Being in general is not contained in thought, as Descartes wished.. Nietzsches force, Sades desire, Bataille s transgression and Blancot s attraction undertook the task of aggravating the crisis of representation until those buried, rationalized-away experiences that are to fill the abstract Being and sovereignty with life2 will be identified.

Foucault M., Maurice Blanchot : The Thought from Outside, Zone Books, New York,

1987, pp. 15-16.

2

Habermas J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, twelve lectures, The MIT

Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.pp. 102.

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8. What is important is the discovery of a mouth that will be able to speak these words which constitute the thought of the unthought without fearing the empty distance between identity and difference, without fainting to confront the venturousness of existing the Same next to the Other. The work of G.Bataille demonstrates the attempt to realise the transgression of limits in all the fields of human experience. For the success of his programme he uses both the anthropological researches and literature. Foucault states that transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses1. Bataille, through eroticism and the analysis of general economics, sought the excess of selftransgressing subjectivity in the experience of the erotic by positing an intrinsic link between the sexual horizon of experience and the death of God in order to permit a profanation without object which will continue Nietzsches philosophical programme. Batailles philosophical problem was not the discovering of the deeper foundations of subjectivity but the unbounding of it. The works of Bataille are placed in the constant movement to different levels of speech and a systematic disengagement from the I who has begun to speak and is already on the verge of deploying his language and installing himself in it. Similar to Foucaults point of view for the situation of language, Bataille showed in fact that it is at the centre of the subjects disappearance that philosophical language proceeds as if through a labyrinth in order to test the extremity of its loss. In 1928 Bataille publishes the Story of the Eye, a novel which tells the sexual plays of Simone and the narrator, of a girl and a boy of sixteen years old. According to Roland Barthes this novel is a metaphorical composition based on two chains of metaphors: the Eye seems to be the matrix of a run of objects that are like different stations of the ocular metaphor: the eye, the egg, the testicles. The second chain of metaphors is made up of all the avatars of liquid, an image linked equally with eye, egg and balls. Barthes says that it is as it were the manner of appearance of moisture But above all in this atmosphere of moisture where the erotic games reach death and loss of the subjectivity Foucault recognises under this transgression of every sense of holy, the violent entrance of the unthought, the presence of a thought that is dangerous from the very moment of its primal existence. Foucault writes : This eye as the fundamental figure of the place from which

Foucault M., A preface to Transgression, in Botting F., Wilson S., (ed.) , Bataille : A Critical Reader, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998, p.24-40, pp. 27

13

Bataille speaks and in which his broken language finds its uninterrupted domain establishes the connection, prior to any form of discourse, that exists between the death of God (a sun that rotates and the great eyelid that closes upon the world), the experience of finitude (springing up in death, twisting the light which is extinguished as it discovers that the interior is an empty skull, a central absence), and the turning back of language upon itself at the moment that it fails -a conjunction which undoubtedly has no other equivalent than the association, well known in other

philosophies, of sight to truth or of contemplation to the absolute. Revealed to this eye, which in its pivoting conceals itself for all time, is the being of the limit : I will never forget the violent and marvellous experience that comes from the will to open ones eyes, facing what exists, what happens.1 Batailles work in all its forms (philosophy, literature, short prose, and politics) is plenty of gestures that are based at the same time on the finitude of the body and on the endless production of its desires and differences which constitute the death of subjectivity and the existence of the unthought. In his work the concept of the unthought will take the meaning of the heterogeneous and his whole programme is directed to the apocalypse of the realm of the heterogeneous knowing that the realm of the heterogeneous is opened up only in explosive moments of fascinated shock, when the categories that guarantee the confident interaction of subject with himself and with the world in everyday life fall apart. Foucault found in Batailles work not the analytic tool of another approach of the unthought but different ways of existence of that double of man. Batailles experience and language became an ordeal, a deliberate drawing and quartering of that which speaks in philosophical language, a disposition of stars that come out at midnight, allowing voiceless words to be born.2

Foucault M., A preface to Transgression, in Botting F., Wilson S., (ed.) , Bataille : A Critical Reader, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998, p.24-40, pp.37.

Foucault M., A preface to Transgression, in Botting F., Wilson S., (ed.) , Bataille : A Critical Reader, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998, p.24-40, pp.33.

14

Epilogue

The concept of the unthought is crucial not only because of the philosophical observations that can be made, but also for the research that has to be made in the fields of politics and aesthetics. In the post-modern condition of our time, the demand of thinking the unthought is in fact a liberating movement that has to be made : it is the necessity to liberate the materials from their predefined forms ; the colour and the light, the words and the music, the voices and the silences, the actions and the bodies must reach their exile from whatever is predefined for them. J.-F. Lyotard, in his own theory for the non-representation, notes that in terms of the analytic of the sublime -which has replaced the analytic of the beautiful since the 18th century- the human subject is dying because of the pleasure and pain, of the joy and anxiety, of the exaltation and depression that he experiences in front of his face : the impossibility of existing as a unifier and unified subject. In Foucaults thought the disappearance of the subject will take the form of a continuous movement of the nonunified subject, it will be the loss of the transcendental not in a negative way but under the form of a constant metamorphoses, similar to those of Dionysus and Nietzsche. Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault are accordant : what is left to be made is the acceptance of the game ; since God is dead and man is dying the western metaphysics must be replaced by Nietzsches will to power, Batailles will to chance and Foucaults will to knowledge. The Being, in its own difference, must be expended not because it is the product of an ellipse, but because it is plethoric ; it has to forget the self that metaphysics has invested in it ; the Being has to wander in the exteriority of the unthought, for which nothing can ensure us that it exists, but for which all the signs martyr its presence ; the Being must be destroyed in order to reinvent its existence at the degree zero, at the moment when words, images, things and gestures are found immobilised , at the moment when the intensity is happening.

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