The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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discovers is that this origin has always already begun. In this sense, Man inds that in his attempt to return to the origin, that origin is always retreating further into the past.
Having displayed the four constituent segments out of which Man has emerged, we can now see how Foucault answers Kant’s question “What is Man?” Man is that igure who “resides in the ‘and’ of retreat and return, of thought and unthought, of the empirical and the transcendental, of what belongs to the order of positivity and what belongs to the order of foundations” (EOT, 340). This igure did not exist before the beginning of the nineteenth century; rather, Man emerged at the birth of modernity, his being simply “that historical a priori which, since the nineteenth century, has served as an almost self-evident ground for our thought” (EOT, 344). Foucault’s “archaeology of the human sciences” reveals that “anthropology as an analytic of man has certainly played a constituent role in modern thought” (EOT, 340).
But of course Foucault’s story in The Order of Things does not end here, for he suggests we are perhaps witnessing the birth of a new episteme, one whose earliest indications he locates in Nietzsche:
Perhaps we should see the irst attempt at this uprooting of Anthropology – to which, no doubt, contemporary thought is dedicated – in the Nietzschean experience: by means of a philological critique, by means of a certain form of biologism, Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another, at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the irst, and at which the promise of the superman signiies irst and foremost the imminence of the death of man. (EOT, 342)
Although Man has been privileged in the discourse of the human sciences since the earliest years of the nineteenth century, Foucault locates the beginning of this end of Man in Nietzsche’s doctrines of the Übermensch and eternal return, as we see clearly in Foucault’s inal reference to Nietzsche in The Order of Things, where he couples Nietzsche’s death of God with the death of man:
Rather than the death of God – or, rather, in the wake of that death and in profound correlation with it – what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks; it is the scattering of the profound stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man. (EOT, 385)
Nietzsche’s waking us from Kant’s anthropological slumber, which recalls the conclusion of Foucault’s introduction to Kant’s Anthropologie, is tied to his broader view
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of Nietzsche in The Order of Things as the precursor of the episteme of the twentieth century, the episteme that erupted with the question of language as “an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered” (EOT, 305).
It is important to recognize that Foucault’s desire to delate Man as epistemically and discursively privileged was never conjoined with an attempt to eliminate the subject entirely. Instead, Foucault seeks to analyze the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse and power, which, he writes, means not to ask, as an existential phenomenologist might, “How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning?” but to ask instead: “How, under what conditions and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?” (EEW2, 221). What this means, and what has been largely misunderstood by many of Foucault’s critics, is that his “anti-humanism” was not a rejection of the human per se; it was instead an assault on the philosophically modern idea that sought to place Man in a position of epistemic, metaphysical, and moral privilege that earlier thought had set aside for God. It was also an assault on the phenomenological transhistorical subject who was thought to have escaped the epistemic constraints of the world through acts of phenomenologically reduced relection. What must be kept in mind whenever one reads Foucault, and especially when he is discussing Man or the subject, is that it is a fundamental axiom in Foucault’s work that there is a “history of the subject” to be told (EEW2, 438), and Man is simply one moment in that history. Foucault’s work is therefore less an antihumanism than an attempt to think of the human subject after the end of (modern) Man.
It is typical to restrict the discussion of Man to Foucault’s earlier works, those associated with his archaeological period. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Foucault recalls this account of Man often in his works of the 1970s, and especially in his lectures at the Collège de France. For example, in the 1973–1974 lectures on “Psychiatric Power,” he concludes the lecture of November 21, 1973, where he irst introduces the notion of “disciplinary power,” by linking disciplinary power with the construction of the “individual” and the emergence of the human sciences. There he deines discipline as “that technique of power by which the subject-function is exactly superimposed and fastened on the somatic singularity” (ECF-PP, 55). And it is “the function of the discourse of the human sciences” to conjoin this disciplinary individual with the juridical individual of the philosophers and legal theorists who is an “abstract individual, deined by individual rights” (ECF-PP, 57). Foucault concludes by noting that “the illusion and the reality of” “What I call Man, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is nothing other than the kind of after-image of this oscillation between the juridical individual ... and the disciplinary individual” (ECF-PP, 58).
Linking his relections on discipline and the birth of the prison to his earlier relections on Man and the birth of the human sciences is not restricted to the lectures, however. In fact, although it is common to periodize Foucault’s work by
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situating Discipline and Punish as the central text in the genealogical period, thereby distinguishing it from his earlier archaeological works, Foucault takes pains in the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish to link it to his earlier relections on Man and the emergence of the human sciences. His goal in Discipline and Punish is to move beyond a mere history of punishment by leading us to understand “in what way a speciic mode of subjection [assujettissement] was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientiic’ status” (EDP, 24). This speciic mode of subjection, tied to relations of disciplinary power and born out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint, will disclose the genealogy of the modern soul as “the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power” (EDP, 29). Whether understood as the psyche, personality, subjectivity, or consciousness, this “soul is the prison of the body,” an “effect and instrument of a political anatomy” that inhabits the object that the human sciences seek to know – Man (EDP, 30). And Foucault returns to this point in the closing pages, after introducing the carceral system as the extension of the penitentiary technique “from the penal institution to the entire social body” (EDP, 298), noting that the panoptic functioning of this new power has given rise to the extension of the examination from specialized institutions (the school, the hospital) to the whole of society. By means of constant and omnipresent examination, the disciplinary power of the carceral system
required the involvement of deinite relations of knowledge in relations of power; it called for a technique of overlapping subjection [assujettissement] and objectiication; it brought with it new procedures of individualization. The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation. (EDP, 305)
To mention one inal example of Foucault’s return to Man in the late 1970s, in his 1978–1979 lecture course “Society, Territory, Population,” he relates the concept of “population” to his earlier work, noting that the epistemic rupture that is charted in The Order of Things also marks the introduction of the concept of “population” as the new object of the art of government. Population emerges “as the correlate of power and the object of knowledge” and, moreover, “man, as he is thought and deined by the so-called human sciences of the nineteenth century, and as he is relected in nineteenth century humanism, is nothing other than a igure of population” (ECF-STP, 79).
Alan D. Schrift
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See Also
Archaeology
Finitude
Human Sciences
Language
Nature
Phenomenology
Immanuel Kant
Friedrich Nietzsche
Suggested Reading
Canguilhem, Georges. 2005. “The Death of Man, or the Exhaustion of the Cogito?” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–94. Essay originally published
in 1967.
Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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MARXISM
“Marxism” now means so many things that perhaps it only makes sense to speak of “Marxism proper” as that set of theories that develops and extends the understanding of modes of production, especially the
capitalist mode of production, that Marx expounds in Capital. Foucault obviously does not it under this heading, but we must say that he contributes to the idea of historical materialism understood in a broad sense. Indeed, if we deine Marxism in this very proper sense, we must say that not only does Foucault not it the Marxist label, neither does Sartre – and, surprisingly, and despite having coauthored a text called Reading Capital, it is at least arguable that Althusser does not it under this heading either. Comparison with these igures lands Foucault more on the side of Marx. Despite Althusser’s innovative reading of the mode of production in struc- tural-synchronic terms, and despite Sartre’s understanding of reiication as seriality, both igures carry out their work on the terrain of philosophy. Meanwhile, if Foucault was not grounded or interested in political economy in quite the way that Marx was, both still preferred something closer to the social sciences than philosophy – or at least this is true of Foucault up to a point, and both could be described (again, up to a point) by Foucault’s term “happy positivism.”
This term became attached to Foucault because of a characterization Foucault gave to his own methodology in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “If, by substituting the analysis of rarity for the search for totalities, the description of relations of exteriority for the theme of transcendental foundation, the analysis of accumulations for the quest of origin, one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be one” (EAK, 124). Although Foucault’s positivism is unconventional, the core issue is opposition to an analysis of social phenomena that is illed out by subject-centered and/or teleological conceptions, anything tending toward theodicy. As Foucault understood things in the midand late 1950s, this opposition was a matter of rejecting the Marxism of the Communist Party of France (PCF) on the one side and Jean-Paul Sartre on the
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other. (In order to assess Foucault’s relation to Marxism, we shall rely on the interview called “Interview with Michel Foucault” [EEW3, 239–297], in which Foucault at least tangentially discusses Marxism.) Sartre, it can be argued, was politically radical and philosophically innovative in his engagement with Marx and Marxism. For the most part, the PCF was neither radical nor innovative; despite the tremendous prestige earned by the Party through its role in the Resistance to the German occupation, from the end of World War II onward the PCF was fundamentally a conservative, “establishment” force. Foucault had joined the PCF for a couple of years in the period 1950–1952; this was the sort of thing done by young people simply “as a matter of course.” The more important point, however, is that even as a member of the PCF, Foucault did not consider himself to be a Marxist. Instead, even then, Foucault was avowedly “a Nietzschean communist [which] was really untenable and even absurd” (EEW3, 249).
To encounter something more of Marx and Marxism in the postwar period in France, one had to get around the establishment version, which claimed to be “humanistic” but also not in the least radical. There was also a certain exhaustion of Marxism that any intellectual (if not necessarily all activists) would encounter in the vicinity of the PCF, associated in essence with Stalin. Foucault left the PCF speciically in the wake of the “doctor’s plot” to assassinate Stalin – or, it could be said, in the wake of yet another attempt to screw his head around what was clearly “opposed to what one could believe” (EEW3, 249). Out of this kind of experience, some people set about projects of Marxist reconception and regrouping, whereas others pursued a radical current more Nietzschean in cast. Among the former group were not only Sartre but also Althusser – Foucault’s teacher but also cothinker, who also interrogated humanism and the organizing role of the concept of the subject.
Whereas Althusser went back into Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, Foucault drew inspiration from thinkers outside of the academy: Pierre Klossowski,Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot (EEW3, 249). Signiicantly, Foucault’s speciic methodologies and investigations, in rejecting humanistic and teleological formulations of Marxism, had more in common with Althusser’s reworking of “scientiic Marxism” than with Sartre’s more ethically motivated attempts to come to grips with the Stalin period and what is opposed to what one could believe. This is also to say that Foucault aimed to be a materialist, which meant rejecting what he saw as the Cartesian thread running through so much of French philosophy, and certainly through Sartre’s work. As with Althusser, Foucault was impressed by the “epistemological break” proposed by Canguilhem, but Foucault arguably took this break further than Althusser did. Asked about the role played by “the problematic which revolved around the history of science” in his intellectual formation, Foucault responds by saying that
Paradoxically, more or less the same as Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille. One part was asking how far the history of a science can pose a challenge to its
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rationality, indicate its limits, or show its linkage with external factors. What are the contingent effects that go into a science, given that it has a history and develops in a historically determined society? Other questions followed. Can there be a rational history of science? Can a principle of intelligibility be found that explains the different vicissitudes and also, in some cases, the irrational elements that creep into the history of the sciences? Broadly stated, these were the problems raised both in Marxism and in phenomenology. For me, though, the questions were raised in a slightly different way. It was here that reading Nietzsche was very important to me. It’s not enough to do a history of rationality; one needs to do the history of truth itself.... Truth itself forms part of the history of discourse and is like an effect internal to a discourse or a practice. (EEW3, 253)
With his application of this methodology in The History of Madness, Foucault thought he would gain the attention of “those with highly developed political concerns,” or at least “it would appeal to Marxists. And there was total silence” (EEW3, 259).
We might consider two reasons for this lack of interest in The History of Madness, at least from Marxists. These reasons have to be considered (again) against the background of not only the conservative orthodoxy of the PCF, and almost all of the Marxism-inspired Left, for that matter, but also against pervasive “economism.” Economism is the reduction of the struggle for the transformation of the world to the most narrow forms of economic struggle, most often to trade-union demands that are fully within the terms of the wage contract. On the one hand, then, Marxists (of whatever sort) might wonder what Foucault has to do with the mode of production and the economic sphere; on the other hand, radicals (Marxist or otherwise) wondered what Foucault was doing that might be called liberatory – how was he contributing to an emancipatory politics? The common assumption that Foucault did not relate to economic categories is not borne out by either Foucault’s actual investigations or by his own self-understanding. Speaking of The History of Madness,
Foucault says that
I tried to see how a discourse claiming to be scientiic, psychiatry, was formed out of historical situations. I had tried to do a history of psychiatry on the basis of the transformations in the modes of production which affected the population in such a way that problems of pauperization became prominent, but also differences between the various categories of the poor, the sick, and the mad. (EEW3, 259)
Keep in mind that Foucault’s investigations were performed in a set of contexts (French, European, Western, global) in which the meaning of the terms “working
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class” and “proletariat” was being reexamined, and where others, such as Marcuse, were speaking of the “new social movements.” Orthodox Marxists did not understand how Foucault’s work related to class and class struggle as they understood it, even while many of these Marxists were themselves unable to see beyond the increasingly obvious limitations of their categories.
For those still thinking in Marxist terms, even while attempting to reformulate basic categories such as class, class struggle, division of labor, and the mode, forces, and relations of production, there remained the question of whether Foucault’s expansion of the range of inquiry at the same time demonstrated much more deeply what any liberatory project was up against. Foucault cannot be faulted for his realism: showing what people are really up against is not the same thing as pessimism. There is, however, something about the way Foucault understood power, as all-encompassing and all-enveloping, as inseparable from any concept of truth or knowledge, as always co-implicated in any epistemological or scientiic project, that seemed to encourage the pessimistic conclusion that people are simply “stuck,” too stitched into the webs of power to ind freedom as it is understood in the Enlightenment sense – a sense that, to all appearances, Marx inherits and extends. Consider the following seemingly dramatic conclusion that Foucault comes to concerning what many Marxists still consider a pivotal moment:
Who would disagree now that May 68 involved a rebellion against a whole series of forms of power that were exerted with a special intensity on certain age groups in certain social milieus? For all these experiences, mine included, there emerged one word, similar to those written with invisible ink, ready to appear on the paper when the right reagent is applied – the word “power.” (EEW3, 283–284)
Though not everyone will agree with this perspective, let us take it as a given that the “Events of May 1968” and their aftermath remain a crucial reference in any contemporary accounting of Marxism and (what Badiou calls) the “communist hypothesis”; how does Foucault’s seemingly singular focus on power help with the further projects of an emancipatory politics?
It is very much worth noting that Foucault’s discussion of May 1968 participates in the Tiers Mondialism that had spread in France largely as a result of the struggles against French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria. Foucault compares the experiences of students in Paris and Tunis. Quite possibly the most remarkable passages in “Interview with Michel Foucault,” and the ones that say the most about the actual meaning of Marx and Marxism for Foucault’s work, are to be found in the pages on “May ’68 in France,” in which, again with a swerve away from Marxism as it existed in a French and Eurocentric frame, Foucault was most interested in talking about the students in Tunisia:
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I remember those cold academic discussions on Marxism in which I had participated in France at the beginning of the sixties. In Tunisia, by contrast, everyone appealed to Marxism with a radical vehemence and intensity and with an impressive enthusiasm. For those young people, Marxism didn’t just represent a better way of analyzing reality; at the same time, it was a kind of moral energy, a kind of existential act that was quite remarkable. I felt a wave of bitterness and disappointment when I thought of the gap that existed between the Tunisian students’ way of being Marxist and what I knew about the way Marxism functioned in Europe (France, Poland, or the Soviet Union). That’s what Tunisia was for me: I was compelled to join the political debate. It wasn’t May ’68 in France but March ’68, in a country of the third world. (EEW3, 280)
Foucault was not in France during summer 1968, so his view of things was likely inluenced by his not having seen the actual uprising at its most intense. However, he does press the comparison with Tunisia further and makes it into a point about the various attempts to revive Marxism in the aftermath of 1968:
When I returned to France in November or December 1968, I was surprised, astonished, and even disappointed.... There’s no comparison between the barricades of the Latin Quarter and the real risk of getting, as in Tunisia, ifteen years of prison. People in France spoke of hyper-Marxism, of a proliferation of theories, of a splintering into small groups. It was exactly the opposite, the reverse, the contrary of what had intrigued me in Tunisia. (EEW3, 281)
Foucault goes on to speak of “the formation of small groups, ... the pulverization of Marxism into little bodies of doctrine that anathematized each other” (EEW3, 282) in the French scene, while in the other case he asks,
I wonder about the meaning of that enthusiasm for radical rebellion demonstrated by the students of Tunis. What was it that was everywhere being called into question? The way in which power was exercised – not just state power but the power exercised by other institutions and forms of constraint, a sort of abiding oppression in everyday life. What was hard to bear and was always put in question, what produced that type of malaise, and what had not been spoken of for twelve years, was power. And not only the power of the state but the power that’s exercised throughout the social body, through extremely different channels, forms, and institutions. People no longer accepted being governed in the broad sense of government. (EEW3, 283)
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Despite Foucault’s explicit disappointment with the Latin Quarter barricades, and despite what Foucault said later about the “groupuscules” (the little sectarian groups in France), he continued to be politically engaged, as we see in his work for GIP (Prison Information Group). We see this again in his famous discussion with Gilles Deleuze on “Intellectuals and Power” and the idea of theoretical work providing a “tool kit for revolutionaries” (in ELCP, 205–217). Moreover, Foucault helped Sartre distribute the banned Maoist newspaper La cause du people in the streets, risking arrest. In North America, the book that brought Foucault to the attention of a wider audience was a collection of interviews and short essays published under the title Power/Knowledge, which leads off with “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with
Maoists” (EPK, 1–36). It could of course be argued that these engagements had more to do with third worldism, an interest in marginal subjects, and Foucault’s more speciic intellectual agenda than with topics of concern within orthodox Marxism. Once again, however, we must see Foucault trying to forge an alternative to this orthodoxy, and that he found himself in a milieu with others inspired by the events of May, events and developments in the third world, and the rise of new social movements and new liberatory actors (in the ields of sexuality or in prisons). There was an exceedingly complex negotiation to be accomplished here involving the avoidance of simply falling back into a new “Marxist” orthodoxy on the one side and on the other side the betrayals of the “New Philosophers” (in the 1970s, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkelkraut, for example). Whether Foucault was able to avoid these dialectically linked pitfalls really hinges on how helpful his intellectual project is for emancipatory politics – regardless of how we understand this project in relation to some conception of Marxism. In the quotation “People no longer accepted being governed in the broad sense of government,” we saw an opening to the questions that would preoccupy Foucault in the last years of his life, which coalesce under the term “governmentality.” It is perhaps within the idea of governmentality that we ind an answer to the question of emancipatory politics in Foucault. Here Foucault addresses large macropolitical issues.
Bill Martin
See Also
Governmentality
Philosophy
Politics
Power
Louis Althusser
Jean-Paul Sartre