Foucault

His Thought, His Character

Paul Veyne, Paul Veyne

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745646428, 9780745646411
• eBook ISBN: 9780745683805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Michel Foucault and Paul Veyne: the philosopher and the historian. Two major figures in the world of ideas, resisting all attempts at categorization. Two timeless thinkers who have long walked and fought together. In this short book Paul Veyne offers a fresh portrait of his friend and relaunches the debate about his ideas and legacy. 'Foucault is not who you think he is', writes Veyne; he stood neither on the left nor on the right and was frequently disowned by both. He was not so much a structuralist as a sceptic, an empiricist disciple of Montaigne, who never ceased in his work to reflect on 'truth games', on singular, constructed truths that belonged to their own time.

A unique testimony by a scholar who knew Foucault well, this book succeeds brilliantly in grasping the core of his thought and in stripping away the confusions and misunderstandings that have so often characterized the interpretation of Foucault and his work.

1

In Universal History, Everything is Singular: ‘Discourse’

When The History of Madness was published, some of the most well-disposed French historians (including myself) failed at first to appreciate the scale and significance of the book. I thought Foucault was simply showing that our conception of madness has varied greatly in the course of the centuries. But that told us nothing new; we already knew that human realities betray a radical contingency (well known in the form of the ‘arbitrariness of cultures’) or, at the very least, are diverse and variable. There are no historical invariants, no essences, no natural objects. Our ancestors developed strange ideas about madness, sexuality, punishment and power. But it was as though we ourselves had silently recognized that those days of error were over, and believed that we were doing better than our ancestors and had discovered the truth around which they had stumbled. ‘That Greek text speaks of love in accordance with the ideas of the time,’ we would say to ourselves. But was our modern idea of love any better than theirs? We should not have presumed so to claim had that apparently trifling and unimportant question been put to us. But do we, even now, think about it seriously and philosophically? Foucault did.

I had not realized that, without claiming to, Foucault was taking part in one of the great debates in modern thinking: does truth, or does it not, correspond to its object; does it or does it not resemble what it states, as common sense supposes? The fact is that it is hard to see how we could possibly know if it does resemble what it states, since we have no other source of information that might offer confirmation. But let that pass. For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, William James, Austin, Wittgenstein, Ian Hacking and many others, each of them with views of their own, knowledge cannot be a faithful mirror to reality. No more than Richard Rorty¹ does Foucault believe in that mirror, or in that ‘specular’ concept of knowledge. According to him, the object, in all its materiality, cannot be separated from the formal frameworks through which we come to know it, frameworks that Foucault, settling upon an ill-chosen word, calls ‘discourse’. That, in a nutshell, says it all.

Misunderstood, this concept of truth not corresponding to reality has made some people believe² that, according to Foucault, mad people were not mad and that to speak of madness was nothing but ideology. Even a man such as Raymond Aron believed this to be the line taken by A History of Madness, as he told me, without beating about the bush; he protested that madness is all too real: you only need to see a madman to be sure of that. And he was quite right. Foucault himself held that, even though madness was not what its ‘discourse’ claimed it to be, that did not mean that there was no such thing.³

So what does Foucault mean by ‘discourse’? Something very simple: a most precise and close description of a historical formation, stripped bare, a revelation of its ultimate individual difference.⁴ Reaching the differentia ultima of a dated singularity requires an intellectual effort of perception: it is necessary to strip the event of the excessive draperies that make it unexceptional and rationalize it. The consequences of doing so are far-reaching, as we shall see.

In his first book, Foucault's heuristic starting point was a classification of the ‘discourse’ on what we call madness (or insanity, as earlier ‘discourse’ put it). The books that followed offered other subjects to exemplify the sceptic philosophy that he had developed from his attention to details. However, he himself never fully expounded his doctrine, but left that redoubtable task to his commentators.⁵

In the present work, I shall be endeavouring to explain to myself the thought of this man who was a great friend and, it seems to me, a great mind. I shall be citing repeatedly from his Dits et Ecrits (Sayings and Writings), as he refers there to the bases of his doctrine more often than he does in his major works.

Before I take the plunge, though, let us consider an example. Suppose we were planning to write a history of love or of sexuality through the ages. We might feel satisfied with our work when we had reached the point at which a reader could learn about the variations that pagans or Christians had elaborated, in their ideas and practices, on the well-known theme of sex. But suppose, having reached that point, there was still something that bothered us and we thought that we should press on further with our analysis. We might, for example, have felt that in one way or another a Greek or medieval author had expressed himself using particular words or turns of phrase which, despite our analysis, left a residue, a hint that suggested that, instead of taking no notice of that residue, as if it were just a clumsy expression, an approximation, a dead passage in the text, we should make an extra effort to make explicit what it appeared to imply. And suppose we were successful.

Then the scales would fall from our eyes: once a variation is made thoroughly explicit, the eternal theme is wiped out and all that remain in its place are successive variations, all different from one another, which we may call the ‘pleasures’ of Antiquity, the ‘flesh’ of the Middle Ages and the ‘sexuality’ of the modern age. Those are three general ideas that some people have successively elaborated around a kernel that is incontestably real and probably trans-historical, but that remains inaccessible, lurking behind them. Inaccessible or, rather, impossible to extricate: we would inevitably turn them into ‘discourse’.

Let us suppose that, thanks to the ‘programme’ of some branch of science, we learn something true, something scientific about homosexuality (for Foucault, the sciences amounted to more than empty words): for example (a gratuitous supposition on my part), that homosexual tastes are genetic in origin. Well, and then what? What, actually, is homosexuality? What should we do with that nugget, be it small or large, of the truth? Foucault wanted there to be some kind of ‘discourse’ on the subject of even an insignificant detail that related solely to anatomy or physiology, and not to the identity of individuals: in short, some detail that one would only discuss either in bed or with one's doctor.

Do we really need a true sex? [the ironic italics are Foucault's own.] With a consistency that borders on stubbornness, the societies of the modern West have replied in the affirmative. They have relentlessly brought up this question of ‘a true sex’ within an order of things in which one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of bodies and the intensity of their pleasures.⁶

Love in Antiquity gave rise to ‘discourse’ about the ‘pleasures’ of Aphrodite that were in no way suspect, and about how they should be controlled ethically and within the city. It addressed amorous gestures of the period, as timid as it was sinless, a period in which, at night, only a libertine would make love, not in the dark, but by lamplight, and in which civic morality distinguished not so much between the sexes as between the active and passive roles of the lovers – a period in which the ideal of self-control meant that a Don Juan would be considered effeminate and in which the obsessional reprobation of cunnilingus (which, nonetheless, was practised) implied a reversal of a hierarchy of the sexes; a period in which a pederast became a figure of fun because he carried his pleasure so far that his heart was left as bereft of feeling as an artichoke.

Now let us take an example less agreeable than love: the penal code through the ages. It is not enough to say that, under the ancien régime, punishments were atrocious, reflecting the brutality of the mores of the age. The royal sovereign ‘came down with all his might’, inflicting the horrific tortures of the period upon a rebellious subject, so as to demonstrate to all and sundry the enormity of both the punishment and the disproportion between the powers of the rebel and those of his king, whom the ceremonial torture avenged. With the advent of the Age of Enlightenment, punishment inflicted in private by a specialized administrative apparatus became preventative and corrective. Now imprisonment was to be a coercive technique of training, designed to set in place new habits in any citizen who had no respect for the law.⁷ This was assuredly an instance of humanitarian progress, but we need furthermore to recognize that it was not just an improvement: it was a total change.

Fifteen centuries earlier, in the arenas of the Roman Empire, the deaths of those condemned were prepared in mythological settings. A condemned man was dressed up in the costume of a Heracles committing suicide by fire, and was burnt alive; Christian women were disguised as Danaids and were accordingly raped before they died, or else as Dirce, strapped to the horns of a bull. These were sarcastic staged events, each one a ludibrium. The civic body, which the offender had presumed to rival, sneered at him, laughing in his face, to show him that he was not the stronger. Each of those successive ‘discourses’ was implied in the penal law, actions, institutions, powers, customs and even buildings, all of which reflected it and formed what Foucault calls the ‘set-up’ (dispositif). (Translator's note: dispositif is usually a hard word to translate, as it can mean so many things, depending on the context. In the present book, however, it consistently means what I have called the ‘set-up’.)

As you can see, we started off without any preconceptions, with detailed ‘concrete facts’;⁸ and we then discovered variations so original that each constituted a theme on its own. I have been using words such as ‘theme’ and ‘variations’, but Foucault had a better way of putting things. In 1979, he observed in his notebook: ‘Do not pass universals through the sieve of history; rather, strain history through a line of thought that rejects universals.’⁹ Ontologically speaking, variations are all that exist and the expression ‘a trans-historical theme’ is meaningless. Foucault, like Weber and all good historians, is a nominalist. Heuristically, it is better to start off with detailed practices, details of what was done and what was said, and then make the intellectual effort to make explicit the ‘discourse’ surrounding them. This is more fruitful (but more difficult both for the historian and for his readers)¹⁰ than starting off from a general, well-known idea, for if that is what you do, you are in danger of looking no further than that idea and failing to notice the ultimate, decisive differences that would reduce it to nothing.

But let us now forget those tortures and return to pleasures. It has been easy to distinguish pagan pleasures from the Christian concept of the ‘flesh’ (that ‘discourse’ on the sinful flesh and also on nature, which should be followed because it is a divine creation). That was followed by other ‘discourses’, for instance, the modern one about ‘sex’,¹¹ to which contributions have been made by physiology, medicine and psychiatry; and possibly also the discourse of postmodern ‘gender’ studies, along with feminism and permissiveness, or rather the subjective right to be oneself and say so (Didier Eribon would at this point remark that psychoanalysis would not survive this). One senses that every ‘discourse’ brings into play, around love, a whole host of associated elements: customs, words, bodies of knowledge, norms, laws and institutions; in fact, we should do better to speak of discursive practices or even, using a term loaded with meaning, to which we shall be returning, the whole ‘set-up’.¹²

But where were we? Instead of the commonplace notion of love, we thus discovered many bizarre little objects peculiar to the particular period, details that had never before been noticed. What we did was bring to light the submerged part of love in the period under consideration. The visible part, which was all that had been seen, was on the whole familiar. In contrast, once we had managed to make explicit the part that was not visible, not consciously recognized, what we were faced with was an object that was ‘incomplete and fragmented’,¹³ with jagged contours that corresponded to nothing sensible and by no means filled the capacious and imposing draperies that had previously covered it. Those contours put one in mind of the historical frontiers of nations that are traced in zigzag lines by the hazards of history, rather than by natural borders.

To be sure, our idea of sexuality or of madness (an idea that the subconscious, implicit ‘discourse’ follows closely, recording most precisely the singularity and strangeness that we cannot see) – that idea, together with its ‘discourse’, assuredly does relate to ‘the thing in itself’ (if I may take advantage of Kantian vocabulary), namely, the reality that it claims to represent. Sexuality and madness are things that certainly exist; they are not ideological inventions. However much one speculates, the fact remains that a human being is a sexual animal, as physiology and sexual instinct prove. All that has been thought about love and madness, down through the centuries, signals the existence and, as it were, emplacement of things in themselves. However, we are not in possession of a truth that corresponds to things, since we can only reach a ‘thing in itself’ by way of the idea that we have constructed of it in each different epoch (an idea of which its ‘discourse’ is the ultimate formulation, the differentia ultima). So we can only reach it as a ‘phenomenon’, for we cannot separate the thing in itself from the ‘discourse’ in which it is bound up for us or ‘buried in the sand’, as Foucault put it. We could know nothing without these kinds...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction
• 1: In Universal History, Everything is Singular: ‘Discourse’
• 2: There is No ‘a priori’ that is Not Historical
• 3: Foucault’s Scepticism
• 4: Archaeology
• 5: Universalism, Universals, Epigenesis: The Beginnings of Christianity
• 6: Notwithstanding Heidegger, Man is an Intelligent Animal
• 7: The Physical and Human Sciences: Foucault’s Programme
• 8: A Sociological History of Truths: Knowledge, Power, the Set-up
• 9: Was Foucault a Corrupter of the Young? Was He the Despair of the Workers’ Movement?
• 10: Foucault and Politics
• 11: Portrait of a Samurai
• Index