Foucault_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  Of course there are. Every language embodies a rich conceptual structure that dictates at every turn how I speak and even what I say. Shakespearean English is an excellent vehicle for discussing the sport of falconry but not of football. The fact that Shakespeare’s plays contain fluent and complex treatments of falconry is due as much to the resources of Elizabethan English as to Shakespeare’s interest in the topic. If Shakespeare came back to life to attend a final in the World Cup between Germany and England, he would, great writer that he is, be severely handicapped in giving an accurate account of the game. Our accounts of a football match would be far superior to Shakespeare’s, not because of our greater literary ability but because of the language we have available to us.

  But, you may say, this is just an accident, due to the fact that football did not exist in Shakespeare’s day, and one that can easily be remedied by adding an Elizabethan sub-vocabulary suitable for describing football matches. True, but, first, any language that we can actually use has to be at some specific point in its historical development and will have limitations accordingly. Second, it may be that there are fundamental limitations in the structure of any particular language that make it simply incapable of certain sorts of expression. Indeed, it seems likely that this is so – that, for example, there are things in Goethe’s or Rilke’s German that simply cannot be adequately put into English. Heidegger maintained – though it is hard to see how he could know – that only ancient Greek and German were adequate for the discussion of philosophy.

  Accordingly, when authors write, much of what they say is a product not of their distinctive insight or ability but the result of the language they are employing. For much of the text it is just language that is speaking. Authors can react to this fact in different ways. One standard (romantic) idea sees the author as straining against the structures of language to express unique individual insights. Here the assumption is that an author has access to a personal, prelinguistic vision, the expression of which must work against language’s tendency to merely conventional expression. A contrary ‘classical’ idea sees the author as accepting and deploying the standard structures to craft yet another work embodying a traditional vision. Both the classical and the romantic views present writing as a matter of individuals expressing themselves; they differ only over whether what is expressed should be the author’s own personal vision or the author’s appropriation of a tradition. Foucault, however, is especially interested in another mode in which authors can relate to language, one in which the point is not to use language for self-expression but to lose the self in language.

  This sort of authorship corresponds to a certain sense of literary modernism, associated with the ‘death of the author’ – although, as our discussion has shown, this is really just the death of the conception of the author as self-expressive. Replacing it is the idea of an author as a vehicle for letting language reveal itself. This idea, however, is less prominent in ‘What Is an Author?’ than in some of Foucault’s subsequent discussions. In The Order of Things, for example, he says: ‘The whole curiosity of our thought now resides in the question: What is language, how can we find a way around it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plentitude?’ (OT, 306).

  The notion is particularly prominent in Foucault’s inaugural address for his chair at the Collège de France (titled L’ordre du discours, but oddly translated into English as ‘The Discourse on Language’). Here we see the strongly personal resonance of this theme for Foucault, as he is required to give a public address: ‘I would’, he begins, ‘really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture … I would have preferred to be enveloped in words … At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it …’ (DL, 215). Foucault associates himself with the modernist voice of Beckett’s Molloy: ‘I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me …’ (Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215). Later in the lecture, he argues that the notion of the author as ‘the unifying principle in a group of writings or statement, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence’ (DL, 221) is less a source of creative expression than a principle of limitation, forcing us to read a text as conforming with a comprehensive authorial project. At the very end, he elegantly turns these theoretical flights back to the occasion at hand, saying that the voice he was wishing for, ‘preceding me, supporting me, inviting me to speak and lodging within my own speech’ was in fact that of Jean Hippolite, his revered former teacher and immediate predecessor in the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France (DL, 237). But it remains clear that, for Foucault, language can and must take us beyond the mode of subjective or even inter-subjective expression.

  But in what sense might language offer us a truth beyond our subjective selves? There is, of course, the fact that language provides the framework of our daily existence, through structures that are, so to speak, too close for us to notice. Anglophone ordinary-language philosophy, following Wittgenstein in the 1950s and 1960s, offered one way of uncovering this linguistic ‘unconscious’. The ‘archaeology of knowledge’ Foucault developed in the 1960s offered another, much more historical way. But the thread of his thought that we are currently following is not concerned with language as a substructure of everyday life. Here his fascination is rather with writing that puts extreme pressure on language, that presses it to its limits with paradox, and that, as a result, produces experiences of violation and transgression.

  A premier example of such writing is that of Georges Bataille, about whom Foucault wrote his passionately obscure essay ‘A Preface to Transgression’. Sexuality, the primary theme of Bataille’s violently pornographic fiction, is a primary locus of transgression because it is implicated in all of our limit-experiences (Foucault’s term for experiences of transgression, those that take us to or beyond the limits of intelligibility and propriety). Pushing consciousness to its limits leads to the unconscious, which after Freud we all know is a maelstrom of sexual desires. The limit of the laws of human societies is the universal taboo of incest. And the limits of language, specifying, in Foucault’s words, ‘just how far speech may advance upon the sands of silence’ (‘A Preface to Transgression’, EW II, 70), are, of course, always marked by the ‘forbidden words’ of sexuality.

  3. Georges Bataille

  Pornographic writing is typically a very conservative medium, of course, a series of clichés, clogged with erotic associations that stimulate desire, but not offering new modes of experience or thought. Bataille’s pornography, however, is less likely to arouse than to shock, repel, and dazzle through the extremity of its images, all the more disturbing because they are expressed in classically limpid prose. It is further intensified by the paradox implicit in the post-Nietzschean world Bataille inhabits. In this world, God is dead, which means that there are no objectively defined limits of thought or action against which we can hurl ourselves. ‘Profanation in a world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred – is this not more or less what we may call transgression?’ Our limits are ones that we know are set by ourselves, so passing beyond (transgressing) them can only mean rebelling against ourselves, via ‘a profanation that is empty and turned inward upon itself, whose instruments are brought to bear on nothing but each other’ (EW II, 70). But the very absurdity of this effort heightens the limit-experience through its defiance of the very laws of logic.

  The point of this exercise in extremism is to release forces within language that will hurl us to the limits of our ordinary concepts and experiences and give us a (perhaps transforming) glimpse of radically new modes of thought. In all this, Bataille the author can claim no access to special infra- or ultra-rational insight from another world (he was, after all, in real life the most mundane of men: a head librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale). But his writing is designed to unleash f
rom language new transgressive truths that will take him and his readers beyond the realm of their knowledge and capacity of expression.

  But Bataille’s pornographic violence is by no means the only way to make a space for language itself to speak. Whereas his prose flows from an excess of subjectivity, from erotic fantasy incited to extraordinary limits, the writing of Maurice Blanchot shimmers with a strangeness that seems due to the complete withdrawal of all subjectivity. As Foucault reads him, Blanchot is a master of the ‘thought of the outside’, a thought (or even an experience) that, just as in Bataille, embodies ‘the breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and its dispersion in a language that dispossesses it while multiplying it within the space created by its absence’ (‘A Preface to Transgression’, EW II, 79). Foucault traces this experience from Sade and Hölderlin though Nietzsche and Mallarmé to Artaud, Bataille, and Klossowski, to a culmination in Blanchot, whom, he says, ‘is perhaps more than just another witness to this thought’. For, while his predecessors have expressed the thought of the outside by, in their various ways, separating language from its roots in divine and human consciousness, Blanchot is so completely absent from his texts that ‘for us he is that thought itself – its real, absolutely distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its necessary destiny, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite, measured strength’ (‘The Thought of the Outside’, EW II, 151). We might say that to Bataille’s ecstatic of violation there corresponds Blanchot’s ascetic of withdrawal. In the paradoxes of limit-experience, the two are equivalent. For both – though Foucault may think more purely and decisively in Blanchot – the central and controlling subject is replaced by language itself. Not language as the instrument or expression of consciousness, but language ‘in its attentive and forgetful being, with its power of dissimulation that effaces every determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker’ (EW II, 168).

  Transgression, paradox, and the dispersion of subjectivity all converge on the ultimate limit-experience of madness itself, of those who have, as we say, ‘gone off the deep end’. We will discuss Foucault’s rich and provocative treatment of madness later, but it will be no surprise that he took special interest in the works of ‘mad’ authors such as Nietzsche, Artaud, and Raymond Roussel (all of whom were at one point or another clinically diagnosed as insane). Foucault, however, emphasizes that even in these cases the writer’s achievement is never literally that of a madman. ‘Madness’, he reminds us, ‘is precisely the absence of the work of art’ (MC, 287). Full-blown insanity makes significant writing impossible, and we do not, for example, consider Nietzsche’s last mad postcards from Turin (signed ‘Christ’ and ‘Dionysus’) as parts of his oeuvre. The privilege and special interest of ‘mad’ writers is due to their liminal position at the border of the sane world. Their writing operates in the twilight zone between coherence and incoherence, their mental ‘disturbances’ effecting the transgression and withdrawal that Bataille and Blanchot achieve by more deliberate means. We saw in Chapter 1 how Roussel used arbitrary restrictions to open the way for writing that was not driven by any intentions of expressing the author’s ideas and that cleared a field for an essentially unguided unfolding of a linguistic structure. Other authors, influenced by Roussel, have used similar devices, particularly members of the Oulipo group (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) such as Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Harry Mathews. The most famous example is Perec’s La disparition, a novel written in French without a single use of the letter ‘e’.

  Foucault’s fascination with avant-garde literature is an aspect of his tendency to seek, in extreme (limit-) experiences, a truth and fulfilment beyond that of ordinary existence. As he said in an interview (just two years before his death):

  those middle-range pleasures that make up everyday life … are nothing for me … A pleasure must be something incredibly intense … Some drugs are really important for me because they are the mediations to those incredibly intense joys that I’m looking for.

  (‘Michel Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins’, EW I, 129)

  But while this lure of intensity remained important for Foucault as a private individual, he seems, after the 1960s (when he wrote almost all of his literary essays), to have gradually become less convinced that limit-experiences and the literature that evokes them were the keys to transforming society. Instead, he moved to a much more political conception of what was needed to effect human liberation. In our next chapter, we will follow this thread of Foucault’s thought.

  Chapter 3

  Politics

  My point is not that everything is bad but that everything is dangerous.

  Michel Foucault was quite proud of the fact that he was difficult to classify politically:

  I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, and so forth … None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

  (‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’, EW III, 115)

  Although Foucault was away in Tunisia during the student revolts of May 1968, Maurice Blanchot reports having seen and spoken to him at a demonstration at this time. If so, this was the only encounter between Foucault and the man he said he once ‘dreamt of being’. Whether or not the story is true – Foucault may have returned for a few days that summer – it works nicely as a symbol of the tension between the aesthetic and the political in Foucault’s life and thought. Perhaps he met his literary hero only at the very point at which he began to move away from high art as our saving liberation to an acceptance of the mundane political sphere as the inevitable battleground for human freedom. At any rate, Foucault’s attitude changed at the end of the 1960s and, by 1977, he was speaking of modernist literary theory in the past tense, noting that the wave of interest in the 1960s (with critics such as Barthes, writers such as Sollers, and journals such as Tel Quel) amounted to its swan song. What Foucault failed to mention was that he was an important voice in the chorus.

  There may be no need to see Foucault’s writings as taking a radically new direction in the 1970s. His own suggestion – ‘I ask myself what else it was I was talking about in Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, but power’ – has some plausibility, though he goes on to say that he did not have the conceptual tools to thematize power in his book on madness (‘Truth and Power’, EW III, 117). But there is no doubt that after 1968 his work had a directly political cast that corresponded, in his life outside writing, to a much increased activism.

  Particularly since World War II – if not since the Dreyfus Affair or the French Revolution – there has been a strong political tone to French intellectual life. Abstruse philosophical or sociological treatises are denounced or praised because of their perceived prises de position on political issues of the day. This attitude is especially apparent in Jean-Paul Sartre’s insistence that writing must be committed (engagée). La littérature engagée is, for Sartre, writing that recognizes its inevitable relation to its historical situation and strives to make its readers aware of and act on the potential for human liberation implicit in that situation. Such writing is not, Sartre maintains, mere propaganda because it is not the servant of any specific ideology but expresses the ‘eternal values implicit in social and political debates’ (Situations II, 15).

  4. Foucault and Sartre at a demonstration in Paris, 27 November 1972

  Foucault, like all the intellectuals of his generation, grew up under the shadow of Sartre, and his politics in particular need to be understood vis-à-vis Sartre, whose defining political experience was the war and the German occupation of France. This experience led Sartre to see political decisions in the absolute terms of loyalty and betrayal, corresponding to the stark choice either to support the Resistance or t
o collaborate. As he put it: ‘whatever the circumstances, and wherever the site, a man is always free to choose to be a traitor or not’. (Much later, after citing this passage in an interview, he said that ‘when I read this, I said to myself: it’s incredible, I actually believed that!’ and attributed his attitude to the ‘drama of the war and the experience of heroism’ – Between Existentialism and Marxism, 33–4.) Another lesson of the war – and not just in Sartre’s mind – was the morally and politically privileged position of the French Communist Party. As the vanguard of the Resistance, the Communists had earned the gratitude and respect of even those French who did not sympathize with their political and social goals. For leftist intellectuals like Sartre, the Communists had an unquestionable credibility in post-war France. This did not entail membership of the Party, and Sartre himself never joined. But for a long time the Communists’ agenda dominated his political thought and activity, and there was a period in the 1950s when, whatever his private reservations, his public stance was one of total support for the Party, even at the price of breaking with his friends Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is no surprise that he came to see Marxism as ‘the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go beyond’ (Critique of Dialectical Reason, xxxiv).