Foucault and the Political

Jonathan Simons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138150942
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134855506
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Michel Foucault's involvement with politics, both as an individual and a writer, has been much commented upon but until now has not been systematically reviewed. This is the first major introductory study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Jonathon Simons explores the importance of the political in all areas of Foucault's work and life, including important material only recently made available and the implications of various revelations about his private life. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, and to those challenging conventional political categories, especially people who write on feminist and gay theory, such as Judith Butler. Students of Foucault and of political and social theory, as well as those working in lesbian and gay theory, and feminist studies, will find this book essential.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203005149-1

The Refusal of What We Are

As the end of the twentieth century approaches, nobody who thinks about politics can fail to be struck by the enormous changes that have occurred. European colonial empires disintegrated, to be replaced by new nation states. The Soviet system of communist states came and went, inciting serious doubts about the viability of any socialist alternative to liberal capitalism and giving vent to another wave of nationalism. To some, the end of the century heralds the triumph of liberal capitalism (Fukuyama, 1989). To others, those embroiled in and witnesses of renewed ethnic and national conflict, the end of the century looks much like its middle: people kill other people because of who they are and the identities they have.

Michel Foucault is now recognized as a key figure in the intellectual scene of the contemporary West. Throughout his work, he reflected about the political present he lived in, from his birth in France in 1926 until his death in 1984. He engaged in a philosophical critique of the present, asking: ‘What is happening today? What is happening now? And what is this “now” which we all inhabit?’ (1986b:88). Reflecting today on our present, Foucault would perhaps have pursued two lines of discussion. Firstly, in spite of all the dramatic shifts, very little has changed. We are still tied to the identities around which ethnic, national and racial conflicts are fought. The same forms of power that bind us to these identities, through a process Foucault refers to as assujettissementor subjectification, still operate. Secondly, just as we are bound by the same types of identity, we are also bound in our political thinking to philosophies developed before the First World War, despite their failure to prevent the excesses of politics pursued around issues of identity. ¹

Most of Foucault’s thought is posed in oppositional terms. He urges us to ‘refuse what we are’ (1982a:216), meaning that we should refuse to remain tied to the identities to which we are subjected. He associated his own project with all those who struggle against the ways in which they are individualized, i.e. rendered into the psort of individuals who they are. For examle, he linked his work to prisoners who refused to be delinquents, and to gays who resist their definition as homosexuals. Foucault’s refusal to be what we are flows from analyses of the limiting conditions that subjectify us. Retrospectively, he perceives three axes of subjectification: truth, power and ethics (1984b:351). We are subjects of the truths of human sciences that constitute us as objects of study (such as delinquents) and define norms with which we identify (such as heterosexual).

Foucault’s earlier work analyses the limits of the discourses of those human sciences in which various definitions of human subjectivity developed. His attention shifts to the power axis because Foucault found that the conditions of possibility for true discourses about human subjects include complex relations between knowledge about people and systems of government. Human sciences and modern government mutually constitute each other in nexuses of power/knowledge, which Foucault labels variously as discipline, normalization, bio-politics, government, police and pastoralism. Having invested much work in the analysis of power, Foucault then claims that he is not interested in power as such, but in the different modes in which relations of power turn human beings into subjects (1982a:208). At this point, Foucault discerns ways in which people participate in their own subjectification by exercising power over themselves, tying themselves to scientific or moral definitions of who they are. He refers to this relationship to the self as ethics. Foucault’s key criticism of the modern era is that the three axes of subjectification are so closely entangled that the only subjectivities, or modes of being a subject, available to us are oppressive. Under these conditions, we should also reject humanist philosophies of the subject. Refusal of what we are thus entails resisting the truths that human sciences pronounce, the modern forms of government that subjectify us, and even our apparently autonomous self-definitions.

Foucault’s political project, however, is not merely oppositional. At the very point when Foucault formulated his aim as the refusal to be what we are, he also proposed an affirmative project, to promote ‘new forms of subjectivity’ (1982a:212). Most of this affirmative mood is expressed in Foucault’s later work, when he was concerned with notions such as ‘arts of the self’, ‘ethical relation to oneself’, ‘care of the self’ and ‘parrhesia’. However, his earlier discussions of avant-garde literature and art also suggest that we can do more than resist our humanist present. Just as Foucault indicates in his writing and life that it is possible to exist as subjects in ways other than those defined by humanism, he also attempts in his work to illustrate how to think in other ways. Thinking and being in ways other than humanist are for Foucault transgressions of its limits that give impetus to ‘the undefined work of freedom’ (1984c:46).

Unbearable Lightness and Heaviness

Foucault’s transgressive work on limits, which is also the exercise of freedom, is carried out within a field of forces generated by the productive tension between two irreconcilable poles in his work. On the one hand, Foucault is often tempted, especially in his oppositional mood, to depict our present as totally constraining. In this mood, Foucault is a prophet of entrapment who induces despair by indicating that there is no way out of our subjection. He generalizes from present circumstances, suggesting that we can only replace one domination with another. On the other hand, Foucault is also attracted in his aesthetic, affirmative mood to the pole of untrammelled freedom and an escape from all limitations. On the whole, but not always, Foucault resists the magnetism of the two poles, riding the tension by adopting unstable positions between them.

To illustrate the necessity of remaining between the two poles I invoke an image that originates with Nietzsche but has been formulated by Milan Kundera (1984) as ‘the unbearable lightness of being’. Life is unbearably light when it has no purpose to it. As Nietzsche (1956:299) says: ‘Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose.’ The purpose of Man, Kundera (1984:8) explains, is given by external and internal imperatives that Foucault would refer to as the power that turns humans into subjects. To be devoid of purpose is to be constrained by no limitations. Such an existence would be unbearably light. On the other hand, a life entirely bound to a purpose that is experienced as an ‘overriding necessity’ (193), as Foucault claims is the case at present, would be unbearably heavy. The key is to fashion a purpose so that being would be bearably light and heavy.

The most general set of poles to be found in Foucault’s work is the tension between constraining limitations and limitless freedom. Between them there is work on enabling limits. On the one hand, resentment of limitations can be overcome by recognizing that we are indebted to our constraints. ² Lives, works of art and political communities have shape because of constraints. Limitations are, as we shall see shortly in discussing Foucault’s reference to Kant, conditions of possibility. However, to accept given limitations as that which determines all that is possible would make being unbearably heavy. Limits are truly enabling when, having given something its form (such as the self), the form engages with its own limits to fashion its own style. Foucault’s notion of transgression signifies work on enabling limits. As it is conducted in an unstable force field, the freedom it attains remains undefined.

One of the main themes within which the tension of unbearable constraint and unbearable limitlessness is played out in Foucault’s work is that of the human subject. To be a subject can be understood in the sense of being subject tosomething, such as the power of a sovereign. This meaning bears a connotation of being dominated, constrained or subjugated by some force or by limits. In another sense, though, as in grammar, the subject of the sentence is attributed with agency and is thus empowered to act on the object. According to Foucault’s middle course, the subject is neither wholly subjected nor entirely self-defining and self-regulating. The subject is indebted to the limits, however oppressive, imposed on him or her for the possibility of being anyone at all, having an identity and capacities to act. Paradoxically, such subjective capacities include those of resisting the power that has made us what we are. However, only under certain circumstances can the subject successfully resist power in a way that does not also reinforce it or reinstall it on another plane. If the resistant capacities of the subject are combined with fortuitous conditions, if the subject works on the limits to which he or she is partially indebted and fashions new forms of subjectivity, then the subject attains unstable and undefined freedom.

Foucault’s concept of power also stretches between the poles of unbearable lightness and heaviness. On the side of constraining limitations, Foucault begins with a conventional notion of repressive, forbidding power that confines and excludes the insane. However, a repressive notion of power does not allow Foucault to explain how it functions positively to constitute human beings as particular subjects. Thus, he discusses disciplinary power, which produces a ‘subspecies’ of delinquents, as positive, though also oppressive, power. On the side of limitlessness, power appears, at least according to some critical interpretations, as an unconditioned or essential power of resistance, as if there is always something, such as the body, that can never be repressed by power. Unconditioned power might also be manifested as an unhindered capacity to make oneself as a work of art, on the assumption that we have a fundamental subjective capacity of creativity. Between these two poles, power is both constraint and freedom, there being no powers that are unconditioned, nor a realm of free capacities. Nonetheless, the interplay of powers engaged in strategic struggle can be more or less open. Foucault’s politics aims not for a world without power but to prevent the solidification of strategic relations into patterns of domination by maintaining the openness of agonistic relations.

The poles of heaviness and lightness as regards truth are less obvious. The truths of the human sciences are unbearably heavy because of the price we pay for identifying ourselves with them. To be bound to the truth of oneself as insane, delinquent or perverse is an imposition that restricts the possibility of free subjectivity. Such truths are also entangled with oppressive forms of power, which constitute constraining limitations. The truth is also unbearably heavy in an alternative sense of being necessary or determined. Foucault’s analyses of the discourse of human sciences show that the conditions that make it possible for its statements to be considered true consist of restrictive rules. Human scientific truth is then as much imposed, by what Foucault calls regimes of truth, as it imposes itself on subjects.

In contrast, some of Foucault’s formulations of alternative truths seem unconvincingly light. He suggests that there might be ‘subjugated knowledges’ uttered by oppressed groups such as prisoners, which, in spite of the domination of regimes of power/knowledge, have retained the unsullied, crystal truth of oppression. Alternatively, the truth that escapes all limits of power might be what Foucault calls the anti-science of his genealogies, informed by an untroubled ‘happy positivism’. Lighter still would be the ‘fictions’ he claims to write. If truth is but domination, he is not obliged to tell the truth but free to invent a tale of oppression. It would then be a question of choosing, arbitrarily or on aesthetic grounds, between his narrative and conventional accounts.

Between light-hearted notions of truth and conceptions of it as domination, Foucault investigated alternative modes of truth telling. Rather than focusing on the epistemological question of truth, which asks how we know that what we know is true, Foucault addressed the problem of the effects of our will to truth. To work on the limits of truth means, in part, to change those discursive and non-discursive limits that are the conditions of possibility of the human sciences. It also means to work on the limits of ourselves, in so far as our subjectivities are tied to truths of science. The work of freedom might then involve reconceiving ourselves in relation to another form of truth, such as ethical or artistic truth.

Foucault’s conceptualizations of thought also veer between lightness and heaviness. On the one hand, thought appears to be constrained by the same conditions as truth, to the extent that someone within a particular system of thought cannot render an account of its limits. Not only is thought absolutely constrained, but without the ability to discern limits, resistance is blind. On the other (light) hand, Foucault in his later work suggested that philosophy and reflection itself could be a way to become free of oneself and one’s thought. Operating precariously between these two poles, Foucault’s philosophy of working on limits is not an intellectual exercise, but is itself one of the ‘arts of the self’ that Foucault endorsed. Thought employs the constructive tension between the poles only when it is also lived as practice of undefined liberty.

Difficulties of Foucault's Work

The middle courses navigated between the poles of lightness and heaviness of limits, subjectivity, power, truth and thought, are not easily defined. As a consequence of Foucault’s thinking in this indeterminable, fluid space, it often becomes difficult to ascertain what his argument is. He is frequently more concerned to tell us what he is notattempting to do, most notably in The Archaeology of Knowledge(1972a). Perhaps it is out of frustration with the indeterminability of much of his writing that many commentators have tied his work down to one pole or the other, or pointed out the contradictions between them.

Definition of Foucault’s project as merely oppositional has credence as so much of Foucault’s work until 1976—his studies of madness, medicine, history of science, delinquency and sexuality—focuses on modern humanism as the imposition of constraining limitations. Portrayal of Foucault as humanism’s permanent and disloyal opponent also seems credible in light of his ‘failure’ to develop a vision of a non-humanist world or to elucidate the new forms of subjectivity to which he is drawn. However, by struggling to steer a course between lightness and heaviness, Foucault anticipates the general features of such a polity and of the new forms of subjectivity which would inhabit it. It is difficult to discern this affirmative potential because often the middle course is developed in the context of opposition to humanism and thus often seems to be merely oppositional.

Foucault offers an ethic of permanent resistance. The point is not that humanism can never be overcome, or that it can be replaced only by another system of domination, but that any mode of government entails limits that are apt to harden, tending to become permanent and rigid. This tendency curtails the openness of the agonistic relations in which Foucault’s ‘new subjectivities’ thrive. It follows that preferred polities are those which institutionalize the possibilities for agonism. However, even in the best modes of government and subjectification, the practice of liberty calls for resistance.

Another interpretive difficulty is that of categorizing Foucault’s work. There is no single adequate classification of his writing according to academic disciplines, as history, philosophy, sociology, or cultural criticism. ‘History of Systems of Thought’ was the name Foucault gave to his chair at the Collège de France in 1970, but that title distinguishes his work from the history of ideas rather than defining a distinct approach. It is also difficult to categorize Foucault politically, precisely because he was attempting to think in ways other than those we inherited from the nineteenth century. In fact, he was rather pleased with the difficulty which commentators and critics had in defining his politics (1984f:383–5). In addition, Foucault examined areas of our culture, such as madness, punishment and sexuality, which defy the supposedly comprehensive scope of those inherited political theories (1984e:375–6). However, it is precisely these difficulties that make Foucault’s work interesting and original.

Author and Oeuvre ³

The interpretive frame of lightness and heaviness is intended to lend a certain coherence to Foucault’s work as a whole, by locating apparent contradictions and shifts of position within an unstable but recognizable field. Instead, I could provide separate exegeses of Foucault’s main texts, ⁴ presenting his writing as discontinuous approaches to different themes. Indeed, addressing his work as a whole apparently contradicts Foucault’s position on the relation between author and oeuvre (1972a:24). Foucault objects to reference to the level of oeuvre in the analysis of discourse (139), in so far as it is held to be the expression, in various ways, of the author. He argues that we use certain rules derived from Christian exegesis to demonstrate that a unified oeuvre can be attributed to an individual subject. These rules include consistent quality and style, conceptual coherence, as well as the historical existence of an author. The last is particularly important as such things as the social position, life course or fundamental objectives of the author are used to explain unevenness within underlying unity in his or her writing. Themes of evolution or influence serve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foucault's Critical Ethos
• 3 The Analysis of Limits
• 4 The Limits of Humanism
• 5 Foucault's Regicide of Political Philosophy
• 6 Transgression and Aesthetics
• 7 Theoretical Transgression of Limits
• 8 Practical Transgression of Limits
• 9 Foucault in Contemporary Political Theory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index