The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

44

LIFE

There is no other way to analyze Foucault’s engagement with the concept of “life” than through reference to his relationship to his teacher, mentor, and advocate Georges Canguilhem. Foucault biographies chronicle the different ways in which Canguilhem was central in Foucault’s own intellectual and profes-

sional itinerary. Yet the former’s deep inluence on the latter has yet to be properly studied (the essays by Paul Rabinow and Pierre Machinery are indispensable points of departure). Foucault himself acknowledged on several occasions his debt and gratitude to his teacher and, above all, the author of both Knowledge of Life (Canguilhem 2008 [1952]) and The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem 1991 [1943, 1966]). In a letter to Canguilhem from June 1965, Foucault wrote:

When I began to work, ten years ago, I did not know you – not your books. But the things I have done since I certainly would not have done had I not read you. You have had a great impact on [my work]. I cannot describe to you precisely how, nor precisely where, nor what my “method” owes to you; but you should be aware that even, and especially, my counter-positions – for example, on vitalism – are possible only on the basis of what you have done, on this layer of analysis introduced by you, on this epistemological eidetics that you invented. Actually The Birth of the Clinic and what follows it derive from this and, perhaps, are completely contained within it. Some day I shall have to come to grips with exactly what this relationship is. (quoted in Eribon 1991, 103)

This is surely a telling admission, especially when one considers that Canguilhem’s works are not listed in the bibliography of The Birth of the Clinic, though there is one indirect citation to him in chapter eight, endnote 48, when Foucault cites his Knowledge of Life as a warrant for the afirmation of Bichat’s “vitalism” (EBC, 144).

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In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on December 2, 1970, Foucault publicly acknowledged his gratitude to his teacher in the following way:

If I have wished to apply a similar method to discourse quite other than legendary or mythical narratives, it is because before me lay the works of the historians of science, above all, that of Monsieur Canguilhem. I owe it to him that I understood that the history of science did not necessarily involve, either an account of discoveries, or descriptions of the ideas and opinions bordering science either from the side of its doubtful beginnings, or from the side of its fall-out; but that one could – that one should – treat the history of science as an ensemble, at once coherent, and transformable into theoretical models and conceptual instruments. (EAK, 235)

In the introduction for the English translation of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, written in 1977, Foucault offers a synoptic and synthetic analysis of his teacher’s work while also evaluating his place within twentieth-century French thought. In fact, he wrote,

[T]ake away Canguilhem, and you will no longer understand very much about a whole series of discussions that took place among French Marxists; nor will you grasp what is speciic about sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Passeron, what makes them so distinctive in the ield of sociology; you will miss a whole aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysis and, in particular, by the Lacanians. Furthermore, in the whole debate of ideas that preceded or followed the movement of 1968, it is easy to ind the place of those who were shaped in one way or another by Canguilhem. (EEW2, 466)

This introductory essay, later edited and published in French with the title “Life: Experience and Science” furthermore maps the history of French thought in terms of a “dividing line” that crosses all the other dividing lines that have conigured the physiognomy of that thought. That dividing line is “one that separates a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept” (EEW2, 466). On one side of the line, Foucault places Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; on the other he places Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem. It is evident that Foucault is placing himself on this side of the dividing line. In this text, Foucault foregrounds four key ways in which Canguilhem reshaped the ields of the philosophy and history of science. First, Canguilhem took up the theme of the discontinuities in the history of the sciences. These discontinuities are not simply a result of battles against “resistances,” “preconceptions,” or “obstacles” in such a way that a narrative could weave them into a seamless story of triumph over error,

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prejudice, and ignorance: “The history of the sciences is not the history of the true, of its slow epiphany” (EEW2, 471). Science and the history of science cannot naively assume that truth as such is what it delivers, but at the same time it cannot adjure what it takes to be true, or afirms to be true. Canguilhem, following Cavaillès, shifts the ground from truth to “truthful discourses” and “truth-telling.” In this way, the history of science becomes the history of the different practices of “truth-telling,” of how the true is both discovered and fashioned. Second, Canguilhem triangulated among the scientist, the historian of science, and the epistemologist in such a way that the history of “truthful discourses” is not arbitrarily and extraneously discontinuous but internally and systematically punctuated by breaks brought about by methodological self-relexivity that challenges the epistemic transparency of scientiic concepts. Third, Canguilhem brought the history of science from the heights of abstraction (mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics) to the “regions where knowledge is much less deductive” (EEW2, 470), namely the life sciences, where he was able to decipher and make evident the uniqueness of those concepts operating in medicine, biology, anatomy, and other areas. Canguilhem showed us how it was not possible to have a science of the living “without taking into account, as something essential to its object, the possibility of disease, death, monstrosity, anomaly, and error” (EEW2, 474). Using Canguilhem’s language, we could say that his fundamental insight was to demonstrate that life is concerned not with the normal, or normality, but normativity, namely the generation of new norms. Life is not simply that which resists death and keeps it in abeyance by the muted healthy functioning of the organism. In Canguilhem’s words: “Life is the formation of forms” (Canguilhem 2008, xix). Fourth, inasmuch as Canguilhem’s work was about the history of the life sciences, he raised the question of knowledge as such, of what constitutes knowledge and how that knowledge comes to intervene in the object of that knowledge itself. According to Foucault: “Through an elucidation of knowledge about life and the concepts that articulate that knowledge, Canguilhem wishes to determine the situation of the concept in life. That is, of the concept insofar as it is of the modes of that information which every living being takes from its environment and by which conversely it structures its environment” (EEW2, 475, Foucault’s italics). Foucault summarized his assessment of Canguilhem’s work in this way:

Enlarging on the point, we could say that the constant problem in Canguilhem’s work, from the Essai sur le normal et le pathologique of 1943 to Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie (Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences) of 1977, has been the relation between science of life and vitalism: a problem which he tackled both in showing the irreducibility of the problem of disease as a problem essential to every science of life, and in studying what has constituted the speculative climate, the theoretical context of the life sciences. (EINP, 18–19)

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This sentence is not included in the edited version translated in EEW2. This is an important sentence because it also applies to Foucault’s own work with respect to the concept of life and the problem of vitalism, which in his 1965 letter to Canguilhem he identiied as something to which he offered a counterposition.

In addition to the texts we have cited, there are four other important places in Foucault’s work where he directly addresses the concept of life. In Chapter 8 of The Birth of the Clinic, provocatively titled “Open Up a Few Corpses,” Foucault discusses the revolutionary effect of Xavier Bichat’s work in the history of medicine. Bichat’s discovery of anatomical pathology allowed a radical rethinking of death. Whereas in the classical period death was an absolute external to life, the nadir of a horizon ever receding into forgetfulness and nonknowledge, after Bichat death was made multiple, internal to life, integral to the living. In Foucault’s words:

Bichat relativized the concept of death, bringing it down from the absolute in which it appeared as an invisible, decisive, irrecoverable event: he volatilized it, distributed it throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths, deaths that are so slow in occurring that they extend even beyond death itself. But from this fact he formed an essential structure of medical thought and perception: that to which life is opposed and to which it is exposed; that in relation to which it is living opposition, and therefore life, that in relation to which it is analytically exposed, and therefore true. (EBC, 144–145, Foucault’s italics)

After Bichat, life is no longer thinkable merely as either the name for the functioning of a mechanism or the catalysis of chemical reactions. Life is now to be thought of on its own grounds, grounds traced by the confrontation with disease and death. Death, in fact, has become the great “analyst of life,” for it is death that reveals “the space of the organism” and the “time of the disease” (EBC, 144). Death that calls to account life, before which life must give an account of itself, has become the retinal image of the “eye that unties the knot of life” (ibid.). It is for this reason that “[v]italism appears against the background of this ‘mortalism’” (EBC, 144–145). Death has acquired a positivity and truth that it had never possessed before, but, by the same token, so has life. If “[t]he living night is dissipated in the brightness of death” (EBC, 146), then it is also true that the night of death is illuminated by teeming, vibrant, exuberant life. Both of these, nonetheless, are caught in the gaze of a medicalized eye.

In the conclusion to The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault notes that when death became a basic presupposition of medical knowledge, it ceased to be an abstract, general, ethereal, and desingularizing eventuality. Instead, death became embodied and discrete in individuals. Death could now be individualizing. In this way, medicine participated in the formation of a “science of the individual” (EBC, 197). In

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modern thought, then, the question of individuality is intricately tied to the question of death; that is, the question of human temporality. If igures like Bichat, Freud, and many others who approached the question of human initude in terms of human mortality are central to European culture, it is not simply because they were philosophers who happened also to be doctors but because “medical thought is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man” (EBC, 198). In other words, it is because medical knowledge allows us to think of initude in terms of teeming, plural, volatized death that we can now tell a truth about the human condition: we are living beings who are both subject and object of their medical gaze, a gaze that looks at us as beings individualized by the exposure and threat of imminent and immanent death.

The second point of reference for Foucault’s discussion of life is The Order of Things. In fact, Chapter 8 in Part II is titled “Labor, Life, Language.” Section three of this chapter is simply named “Cuvier.” In fact, Cuvier is to The Order of Things what Bichat was to The Birth of the Clinic; namely, the personiication is a major shift in the way Europeans thought about life. Cuvier, in fact, marks the discovery of life itself, the living proper. Foucault puts it this way:

From Cuvier onward, it is life in its non-perceptible, purely functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a classiication. The classiication of living beings is no longer to be found in the great expanse of order; the possibility of classiication now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view. Before, the living being was a locality of natural classiication; now, the fact of being classiiable is a property of the living being. (EOT, 268)

During the classical age there could be a history of nature because nature itself was conceived in terms of a great chain of being, or the cosmic scala naturae, whose order and intelligibility were granted by divine providence or the logic of a mechanism held together by mathematical and dynamic lawfulness. In the eighteenth century, nature becomes discontinuous and heterogeneous because it is alive, and life is always singular, concrete, diverse, incipient, and vital; that is, unexpected and incalculable. Foucault continues:

From Cuvier onward, the living wraps itself in its own existence, breaks off its taxonomic links of adjacency, tears itself free from the vast, tyrannical plan of continuities, and constitutes itself as a new space: a double space, in fact – since it is both the interior one of anatomical coherences and physiological compatibilities, and the exterior one of the elements in which it resides and of which it forms its own body. But both these spaces are subject to a common control: it is no longer that of the possibilities of being, it is that of the conditions of life. (EOT, 274)

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Life, in other words, is that which is alive by virtue of certain internal coherence and compatibilities that enable its living, but also that which is self-sustaining and selfenhancing in a given milieu or environment. Life is self-relation through relating to an environment. Life is thus doubly singular and doubly individualizing, for to live is to generate norms for its health but to do so within a given horizon of constraints, or scarcity or abundance. With Cuvier, another break became possible, from natural history to a history of nature; that is, from the ahistoricality of nature to the temporality of the biological. In Foucault’s words: “It is true that the Classical space ... did not exclude the possibility of development, but that development did no more than provide a means of transversing the discreetly preordained table of possible variations. The breaking up of that space made it possible to reveal a historicity proper to life itself: that of its maintenance in its conditions of existence” (EOT, 275). The name for this historicity that is proper to life itself is what we call evolution, which has had profound consequences for European thought. One of those consequences was a turn toward “animality” as the privileged locus for the manifestation of life’s historicity. It is in the animal that life makes evident its distinct historicity in terms of its plurality, its wildness, its disorder, and its unforeseeable discontinuities. It is in the animal that life’s originality and vitality are made most evident, but it is in a unique animal, the human animal, that life’s own generativity is most provocatively embodied. In the last chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault carries forward the link between the human, the animal, and the human sciences, which aim to give an account of human beings, as both subject and object of their knowledge:

[M]an for the human sciences is not that living being with a very particular form (a somewhat special physiology and an almost unique anatomy); he is the living being who, from within the life to which he entirely belongs and by which he is traversed in his whole being, constitutes representations by means of which he lives, and on the basis of which he possesses the strange capacity of being able to represent to himself precisely that life. (EOT, 352)

The human being is the living being whose life is itself sustained or exposed by the concepts it generates in order to make sense of its own life. Human knowledge, as what is proper to the human animal, is part of his living, of his being alive, of his persevering in his life. Here, we should recall what Foucault was to write a decade later in his introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological: “Forming concepts is a way of living and not a way of killing life; it is a way to live in a relative mobility and not a way to immobilize life; it is to show, among those billions of living beings that inform their environment and inform themselves on the basis of it, an innovation that can be judged as one likes, tiny or substantial: a very special type of information” (EEW2, 475). If “[a]s the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date ... [a]nd one perhaps nearing its end” (EOT, 387),

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should we not also ask whether the human animal may intervene in his own living organism under the direction of his own representations, accelerating not only the disappearance of the idea of the human that has guided us but perhaps also his own very biological being?

This last question brings us to the third point of reference for Foucault’s discussion of life, which we ind in the last chapter of The Will to Knowledge, known in English as The History of Sexuality. There we can read this powerful passage: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (EHS1, 143). This putting into question the living of the human by politics is what Foucault calls biopolitics. The recognition of “life’s” entry into history, however, is not something that is new in Foucault’s late work. As we have seen, he had already been thinking about the relationship between a new conception of life, in medicine and modern biology, and the way in which humans could now be individualized under the gaze of the doctor who gazed at their living body through the lens of teeming death. In his later work, the accent is on the “political” uses of this medical knowledge. With a new concept of life and death, especially from the perspective of how it affects our self-understanding as human animals, the political itself is reconigured. In fact, a new form of sovereignty emerges that manifests itself not by killing but making live. From the eighteenth century forward, death, life, and disease have conigured a conceptual trinity that also forces us to reconigure the ield of the political. Inasmuch as death becomes immanent to life, and disease its auguring, annunciation, and threat, politics is now called to account before the tribunal of life, of the living. Politics becomes the securing, preserving, nurturing of life. Politics must become a means to intervene in the life of the human life, not simply by the force of the conceptions and representations it circulates but also by the institutions it constructs and empowers to frame the milieu of human existence. In the modern age, the new concept of life gives way by means of a new conception of politics to a technology of life. This technology of life, or biopolitics, is pivoted on the axis formed by two intersecting vectors of power: one aiming to discipline bodies, the other aiming to regulate populations.

In his last course at the Collège de France during the academic year of 1983– 1984, Foucault returned to the question of life, but now from the perspective of what he called an “aesthetics of existence” (ECF-COT, 162). The course, published with the title The Courage of Truth, is a close analysis of parresia, courageous, fearless, truthful discourse. The analysis, however, is carried out against the background of a rethinking of Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” which Foucault had undertaken the year before, in the course from 1982–1983, “The Government of Self and Others.” For Foucault, Kant’s question was about giving an account of oneself in relationship to one’s age in terms of a “truth-telling,” or game of veridiction. The study of parresia in this last set of courses became a lens through which to

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analyze how “modes of veridiction, the study of the techniques of governmentality, and the identiication of forms of practice of self interweave” (ECF-COT, 8). It is this interweaving that Foucault also aimed to make evident in his rethinking of the question of the Enlightenment, which he already had initiated in his 1977 essay on Canguilhem. In this last course, the entwinement between life and knowledge is articulated in terms of what Foucault calls “true life” (alêthês bios). As he put it: “What I wanted to try to recover was something of the relation between the art of existence and true discourse, between the beautiful existence and the true life, life in the truth, life for the truth” (ECF-COT, 163). “Truth-telling” is the name for a practice through which the true life is pursued, through which certain practices of the self are formed that establish forms of government of self and others. Parre¯sia, as a practice of telling the truth about others and oneself, as a distinct form of ethical practice, has as its essential object a mode of life, an aesthetics of existence, an askesis of the self. In other words, the analysis of fearless speech leads us to rethink both the subject and its relation to both knowledge and truth. Here we are again on the common ground between Foucault and Canguilhem. As Foucault wrote in his introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological:

This historian of rationalities, himself so “rationalistic,” is a philosopher of error – I mean that error provides him with the basis for posing philosophical problems; or, let us say more exactly, the problem of truth and life. Here we touch on one of the fundamental events, no doubt, in the history of modern philosophy: if the great Cartesian break raised the question of the relation between truth and subjectivity, the eighteenth century introduced a series of questions concerning truth and life, The Critique of Judgment and the Phenomenology of Spirit being the irst great formulations of these. And since that time this has been one of the great issues of philosophical discussion. Should life be considered as nothing more than one of the areas that raised the general question of truth, the subject, and knowledge? Or does it oblige us to pose the question in a different way? Should not the whole theory of the subject be reformulated, seeing that knowledge, rather than opening onto the truth of the world, is deeply rooted in the “errors” of life? (EEW2, 477)

The nuclear age has become the biotech century. The age of the atom bomb has given way to the age of the gene. Whether as the threat of planetary annihilation, a global thanatology, or as the promethean promise of new life through genetic manipulations of vegetable and animal genotypes, a globalized biopolitics, at the heart of our age is the concept of life that enabled new sciences, new technologies, new forms of political power. The question of life has become the more urgent precisely because the very grammar, code, and language of life are claimed to have been deciphered, promising to enable us to call forth into existence new forms of life.

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Against the background of a teeming mortalism, one that calls life to give account of itself in terms of a death that is produced by direct manipulation of life, we may have to oppose what has been called vitalism but which Leonard Lawlor has called a “life-ism” (Lawlor 2006). At the center of this vitalism or “life-ism” is a regard for the novelty of life. Or as Canguilhem put it: “Intelligence can apply itself to life only if it recognizes the originality of life. The thought of the living must take from the living the idea of the living” (Canguilhem 2008, xx). This intelligence that applies itself to life is nothing other than what Foucault called the “true life” and an “aesthetics of existence.” A concept of life can itself intervene in the art of living. Life is a concept that can spell death or life.

Eduardo Mendieta

See Also

Biohistory

Biopolitics

Biopower

Death

Finitude

Medicine

Parresia

Suggested Reading

Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological, with an introduction by Michel Foucault. New York: Zone Books.

2008. Knowledge of Life. New York: Fordham University Press.

Lawlor, Leonard. 2006. The Implication of Immanence: Towards a New Concept of Life. New York: Fordham University Press.

45

LITERATURE

In 1966, Foucault published his provocative “archaeology of the human sciences” that would have been entitled “Words and Things” had there not been a book of that title in English. Hence The Order of Things became its substitute title (EOT). Although much attention to this study was concerned with Foucault’s radically revised view of the “history of ideas,” hidden in the interstices between each of the epistemes that designate the dominant but latent mode of thinking and conceptualizing of each epoch (“resemblance” for the Renaissance, “representation” for the seventeenthand eighteenth-century neoclassical era, “man” for the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and something like “structure” for the postmodern mode of thinking that was appearing on the scene in 1966) was the key role of literary texts. The critical status of literary texts came in the form of what Foucault called “threshold texts,” writings that demonstrated the limits of a particular episteme and also indicated features of the new episteme that would replace it. In this sense, literature for Foucault was not some trivial source of entertainment but it was also not the product of a celebrated creative activity. Rather, literary texts would participate in a discursive practice that would prevail in a particular era. As with other important French igures of his time (Sartre, Derrida, Cixous, and Kristeva, for example), literature would be brought into conjunction with philosophy, political theory, psy-

chology, sociology, and historical studies.

Between the Renaissance and the neoclassical age, between the episteme of “resemblance” and that of “representation,” Foucault in The Order of Things offers a reading of the Golden Age Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes’s celebrated picaresque novel Don Quixote. Foucault shows that the “hero” of Don Quixote (in the irst of the two books that comprise the novel) appears as a great “knight errant” (reminiscent of those associated with medieval gallantry) who roams the countryside offering his services in multiple acts of good will. He singlehandedly (with the help of his aide Sancho Panza) attacks a giant threatening the people, confronts a

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