The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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transcendental ield in which empirical objects appear. For Foucault, the problem of initude can be traced back to Kant, for whom man was both an object in the empirical world and the transcendental source of that world. The result is that, as Foucault puts it, “each of the positive forms in which man can learn that he is inite is given to him against the background of his own initude” (EOT, 314). This realization gives rise to the “analytic of initude,” or the various modes of thought that grapple with the paradox that man is at once an empirical object within, and the transcendental origin of, the modern discourses of life, labor, and language. The paradox is grounded in the fact that it is none other than the initude of human beings that is the condition for their knowledge of that initude. “Modern culture can conceive of man because it conceives of the inite on the basis of itself” (EOT, 318). Hence Foucault’s analysis is concerned with the “repetition of the positive within the fundamental,” such that initude “rests on nothing but its own existence as fact” (EOT, 315). This understanding of man’s initude is one of the hallmarks of modernity on Foucault’s account, and the modern conception of initude is one where it is conceived in “an interminable cross reference” with itself (EOT, 318). The fact that Foucault is inclined to use images of “cross-referencing,” “folding,” “overlapping,” and “internal torsion” in his discussions of initude marks his understanding of this igure as inherently relexive, such that “the contents of experience are already their own conditions” (EOT, 339). Foucault’s investigations of the analytic of initude emphasize several moments of paradox, or doubling, that result from conceiving man as the transcendental grounds of empirical knowledge, and the object of knowledge, at once. The analytic of initude is generative of the three doubles – the transcendental and the empirical, the cogito and the unthought, and the retreat and return of the origin that Foucault explores in the ninth chapter of
The Order of Things.
Foucault’s analytic of initude outlines various attempts made in philosophical modernity to respond to the problem of initude, or the idea that man is irreducibly transcendental and empirical. In other words, the analytic of initude traces various efforts to respond to the idea that man is both constituting and constituted in relation to exteriority. Attempts are made to reduce the transcendental to the empirical, for instance in the positivist aspiration to account for knowledge strictly in relation to the natural sciences. The inverse attempt has been made in transcendental phenomenology by subordinating empirical science to the transcendental ield constituted by the subject. In Foucault’s account, however, neither effort can resolve the tension that persists here. In the end, neither is successful, a fact that forecasts the demise of the modern episteme as Foucault understood it. Man is always irreducibly transcendental and empirical; he cannot be one or the other. The projects of philosophical modernity that take the reduction of one to the other as their aim are unsuccessful. Instead, the unending vacillation between the empirical and the transcendental yields a fundamental opacity at the heart of knowledge, and a distance at
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the heart of the self. The result is that the human subject proves incapable of giving an account of its own genesis. This is one problem that deines philosophical modernity as Foucault understood it.
Ann V. Murphy
See Also
Death
The Double
Man
Phenomenology
Martin Heidegger
Immanuel Kant
Suggested Reading
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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FREEDOM
Freedom is a central concern of Foucault’s writing. In his genealogies of the emergence and intensiication of disciplinary power, the apparatus of sexuality, and governmentality, he hoped to create a shared experience with his readers
of the contingency of present constraints on human possibilities. He attempted to loosen the threshold of acceptance of established ways of thinking and being, including ways of thinking about both power and freedom. More speciically, he encouraged his readers to question humanist understandings of freedom that appeal to a universal moral (hence rational and impartial) core, or to the end state of a universal history of human progress. He did not believe that a society without power relations was possible (or desirable), but this is not tantamount to a denial of freedom. In fact, he wanted to show people that they are freer than they think – to inspire his readers to practice freedom by opening up new possibilities for thinking and being in order to minimize situations of domination in which people are unable to alter the power relations in which they are enmeshed.
Given the centrality of freedom to his project, it is, perhaps, surprising that a commonly received view of Foucault represents him as denying the possibility of freedom at all, as describing modern subjects who are constituted within productive disciplinary and normalizing power relations in which they are trapped. Thus, he is said to confront a problem of agency. Foucault rejected this reading of his work: “The idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me” (EEW1, 293). Power is not domination. In a domination relation, asymmetrical power relations are ixed, allowing no real possibilities for change. In contrast, Foucault claimed, power relations are “mobile, reversible, and unstable” (EEW1, 292). Foucault described a form of power, pastoral or governmental, in which one tries to control the conduct of another (“a conduct of conduct”) to manage their possibilities (EEW3, 341). This form of power is not a negative force that operates by repression and prohibition
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(though repression and prohibition do exist); instead, it produces knowledge, techniques, subjects, objects, and rationalities. It is a form of power that “makes individuals subjects,” gripping them at the level of their everyday behavior and their desire to be normal, healthy, secure, or free (EEW3, 331). Power does not determine us, but it does structure the ield of possibilities in which we make choices and constitute ourselves. Moreover, if power relations are everywhere, as Foucault contended, this is because freedom is everywhere. Power relations only emerge because subjects confront a range of possible actions and do not necessarily do or think what others want. Thus power and freedom are coconstitutive.
Foucault typically responded to critics who believed there was no room for freedom in his writings in two ways: (1) by noting that this response takes for granted humanist understandings of freedom that he regarded as inadequate for understanding our situation in the modern West, and (2) by clarifying his own understanding of freedom.
What is wrong with humanism? Foucault’s account of freedom can be understood as the correlative of his analytic of power, as we have seen. Moreover, just as disciplinary and normalizing biopower (later described as “pastoral power” or “governmentality”) represent an alternative to the model of sovereign power in which power is understood as repressive, centralized, and possessed (by a monarch, a people, a class, whites, men, etc.), the freedom Foucault appeals to represents an alternative to dominant historical understandings. The problem with the sovereign model of power is that it obscures other power relations (biopower) dispersed throughout the ield that serve as its matrix – power relations that operate by attaching us to particular identities and self-understandings. The problem with humanist accounts of freedom is similar; they obscure and channel the freedom that we already have by subjecting us to an abstract model of humanity as something to be realized either through universal ethics and obedience to moral and political law or through selfknowledge and technologies of self-improvement. Here freedom is represented as a possession or a state of being rather than a concrete practice.
For example, consider two dominant understandings of freedom that Foucault thought were insuficient. The irst, an older humanism associated with liberal theories of sovereign power, deines freedom as a natural human right, as something residing in the presocial individual that is not only transferable to the state for the purposes of security and peace but also a limit on illegitimate state power and legal authority. Here the role of the state is to preserve and protect our natural freedom. The second understanding of freedom, a more recent form of humanism associated with the liberal art of government and the rise of the human sciences and concomitant political technologies of individualization, describes freedom as the progressive development of techniques for training, regulating, examining, observing, measuring, and reforming individuals as well as attending to the health, education, and welfare of both individuals and populations in order to make them more productive. In
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this case, governmental power is not opposed to human liberty but is a vehicle for cultivating and domesticating it in the name of social progress and universal human lourishing. Hence, Foucault claimed, “Liberalism ... must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion and obligations relying on threats, etc.” (ECF-BBIO, 64).
Both of these understandings of freedom appeal to the humanist ideal of a true or universal humanity. In the irst case, humanity is understood as in need of law and order lest it abuse the natural freedom of others who are also inherently free and equal (liberalism), or as naturally predisposed to live peacefully with others and realize its potential as long as its basic needs are met and it is not alienated from its true humanity by oppression or economic exploitation (Marxism). In the second account, the progress of humanity and its freedom is associated with the modern historical process of learning how to domesticate its antisocial nature by cultivating its capacity for developing rational (and moral) institutions and behaviors in order to be free. Furthermore, even if one is a pragmatist about the nature of humanity, one might be inclined to think that these humanist stories about ourselves are indispensable to preserving or securing human freedom.
Foucault was wary of humanist philosophies because of their universalizing tendencies. Concerning liberationist theories of freedom associated with Marxism, for example, he remarked:
I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because if it is not treated ... within certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there exists a human nature or base that ... has been concealed, or alienated or imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression. According to this hypothesis, all that is required is to break these repressive deadlocks and man will be reconciled with himself, rediscover his nature or regain contact with his origin and reestablish a full and positive relationship with himself. I think this idea should not be accepted without scrutiny. (EEW1, 283)
Kantian humanism is equally problematic for him insofar as it presents “a certain form of ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom” (ETS, 15).
What does he propose instead? When he spoke of freedom, which was rare, Foucault implicitly appealed to two different capacities: (1) our capacity for critical relection on who we are in the present, a form of historical relection that he called the “historical ontology of ourselves,” and (2) our capacity to transform relations of power through ethical practices of freedom (EEW1, 315). For example, in his relections on Kant’s historical essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” he situated himself within the very Enlightenment tradition he was criticizing. In this essay, Foucault locates Kant’s sensitivity to a “historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself” – one that is in tension with humanism (EEW1, 314). In a dramatic reversal
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of Kant’s understanding of critique, he described the historical ontology of ourselves as follows:
It will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, thinking what we are, do or think. (EEW1, 315–316)
Whereas Kantian critique tries to establish necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, Foucault’s genealogical writings pose the question: “In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints” (EEW1, 315)? Hence, freedom in relation to critical thought is our capacity to “step back” from entrenched ways of acting and reacting, to engage in historical relection on our concepts and practices, and to question them concerning their signiicance, their conditions of possibility, and their aims. Critical thought identiies historical, and thus contingent, constraints on our possibilities, not necessary ones. In turn, in revealing the non-necessity of present ways of thinking, doing, and being, this form of critical work “seeks to give new impetus to ... the undeined work of freedom” (EEW1, 316).
This phrase “the undeined work of freedom” captures the experimental nature of the practices of freedom Foucault invoked in his late ethical writings – writings that explore historical shifts in our self-relations from antiquity to early Christianity. As we have seen, although he understood the importance of moments in which a people or a group throws off the yoke of domination, he did not regard liberation as suficient. Freedom is not a matter of lifting constraints: nor do laws or institutions guarantee it. “Liberty is a practice,” he remarked, and “the guarantee of freedom is freedom” (EEW3, 355–356). Thus he encouraged the cultivation of practices of freedom that might help deine new and acceptable forms of life and new forms of subjectivity that resist the government of individualization and sever the ways it enhances capacities (namely discipline) from their aims – rendering subjects more useful and controllable. In appealing as he did to practices of freedom, Foucault drew on Marx’s idea that “man produces man.” He stated: “[W]hat ought to be produced is not man as nature supposedly designed him, or as his essence ordains him to be – we need to produce something that doesn’t exist yet, without being able to know what it will be” (EEW3, 275).
The work of freedom is indeinable because, constituted as we are within myriad power relations, we are not capable of grasping all of the forces operating on us. After all, Foucault’s genealogies are not universal or totalizing. He was skeptical about the possibility of grasping everything about our historical situation. His genealogies are speciic histories about only some of the forces that make us who we are. And this set of forces is always in motion. As a result, all we can do is experiment
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with ourselves, engage in practices of self-transformation that might resist some of the intolerable normalizing trends in which we ind ourselves, and test the limits of our present sense of possibility. We cannot create ourselves ex nihilo but must work with the materials made available to us, bend them to a different will, deploy them within different strategies, and keep the ield of possibilities within which we are constituted open.
Take, for example, a privileged case for Foucault, the case of sexuality. Foucault acknowledged that a number of liberations vis-à-vis sexuality were clearly necessary – liberation from male domination or from compulsory heterosexuality and its morality. Yet to be free of such forces is not tantamount to being a “happy human being imbued with a sexuality to which the subject could achieve a complete and satisfying relationship” (EEW1, 283). Liberation will be followed by new power relationships, which, he noted, “must be controlled by practices of freedom” (EEW1, 284). Accordingly, sexual freedom is not merely a matter of securing the right to express the truth of our desires but our capacity to invent new pleasures and forms of life, to experiment with our bodies and ourselves as they have been constituted within the current apparatus of sexuality in order to produce new experiences and other forms of life. On one of the rare occasions in which he offered advice, he urged gays not to be but to become homosexual.
In the end, we cannot know in advance where these experiments will take us, whether they will lead to something better or whether they will end up becoming just as intolerable as those we are resisting. This is why our capacity for critical historical relection on what we have become, an exercise in transforming our selfunderstanding, is just as necessary as experiments in living. Both are indispensable elements of Foucault’s practice of freedom.
Jana Sawicki
See Also
Critique
Liberalism
Man
Marxism
Power
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Suggested Reading
Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Ingram, David. 2005. “Foucault and Habermas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault,
2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
May, Todd. 2011. “Foucault’s Conception of Freedom,” in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, ed.
Dianna Taylor. Durham: Acumen Publishing, pp. 73–81.
McWhorter, LaDelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rajchman, John. 1985. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Thompson, Kevin. 2003. “Forms of Resistance: Foucault on Tactical Reversal and SelfFormation,” Continental Philosophy Review 36, no. 2:113–138.
30
FRIENDSHIP
In a 1982 interview, Michel Foucault announced a new direction for his research that he would never have the chance to follow, much less complete. He declared that “now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships” (EEW1, 171). His rationale builds on the themes of biopower and governmentality that he began studying during the middle and late 1970s. Accordingly, he offers the hypothesis “that the disappearance of friendship as a social relation” occurring between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem” in the eighteenth century “are the same process” (ibid.). That is, the problematization of friendship as an open-ended relationship through which individuals determine their obligations and value to one another on broadly aesthetic grounds and the problematization of homosexuality as an apparent violation and, much more, exploitation of both social and biological rules and processes belong to the same system of biopower forming normative prescriptive rules for individuals on the basis of ostensibly
descriptive claims about the population or species as a whole.
The theme of friendship in Foucault’s work helps to bridge the apparent gap between Foucault’s work on power in the 1970s and his work on ethics in the 1980s. Scholars writing on Foucault’s analysis of friendship note that this topic, because it involves a political relationship among many individuals while being determined on aesthetic rather than universal normative grounds of duty, utility, or virtue, rebuts criticisms of Foucault’s apoliticism, ethical aestheticism, and critical nihilism. In the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault explores ancient Greek and Roman practices of askesis, “the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one never attains” (EEW1, 137), in order to offer an aestheticized counterexample to contemporary ethical frameworks rooted in duty, utility, or virtue, which allows the creative costs of these universalizing approaches to become conspicuous. Signiicantly, this aesthetic
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sense of care of the self implicates others in friendship by a creative interaction that pushes ethical and political valuations toward aesthetic considerations beyond oppositions of subjectivity and objectivity, activity and passivity, that curtail contemporary discourses.
In the third volume of The History of Sexuality, subtitled The Care of the Self, Foucault uses the concept of parresia as both an interpersonal, ethicopolitical relationship of friendship and an epistemological relation to truth in order to question the contemporary standards regarding the individual’s relation to knowledge. In contrast to scientiic standards according to which individuals passively submit to objective truth, the parresiast’s relationship to truth consists of the use he makes of truth based irst on a personal relationship to those for and with whom the truth may be told. The basis for the parresiast’s truth owes in part to what he stands to lose or the danger in which he places himself by telling the truth. In another sense, the parresiast’s truth depends on the beauty with which the truth is disclosed or conveyed in consideration of the power relations involved. As with the ethicopolitical relationship of friendship, the value of parresiastic truth depends on an aesthetic valuation judged in terms of creativity expressed within a given set of personal, political, and epistemological constraints rather than being compromised by such constraints as an obligation to empirical observation, systematic unity, methodological veriiability, or metaphysical doctrine as contemporary measures of truth insist.
Foucault connects the practices of friendship associated with the themes of askesis and parresia to discussions of the creation of culture in general and gay culture or homosexual “askesis” in particular throughout a series of interviews in gay periodicals in both America and France published during the 1980s. In this context, the significance of friendship, especially friendships between men, results from the ways that gay culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s constituted a way of life that exposed and challenged standards of heterosexist orthodoxy rooted in and maintained by the institution of the family, whose iliation by means of blood served as an example of the microphysics of biopower operative at the level of industrial society at large. By attempting to create forms of pleasure and relationships between individuals outside the institution of the family ringed by the twin legacies of law and biology, the creation of gay culture, or simply “friendship” between men, challenged contemporary forms of governmentality organized according to the function of biopower. Against the knowledge of homosexuality as the breach of either human or divine law, or else a biological aberration or a violation of natural drives, Foucault counterposes homosexuality as an example of an ethical, political, and epistemic order organized around aesthetic practices in which individuals “face each other without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward each other. They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything throughout which they can give each other pleasure” (EEW1, 136).