Scatter 1

The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida

Geoffrey Bennington

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823270538, 9780823270521
• eBook ISBN: 9780823270545
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

What if political rhetoric is unavoidable, an irreducible part of politics itself? In contrast to the familiar denunciations of political horse-trading, grandstanding, and corporate manipulation from those lamenting the crisis in liberal democracy, this book argues that the "politics of politics, " usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start.Denunciations of the sorry state of current politics draw on a dogmatism and moralism that share an essentially metaphysical and Platonic ground. Failure to deconstruct that ground generates a philosophically and politically debilitating selfrighteousness that this book attempts to understand and undermine.After a detailed analysis of Foucault's influential late concept of parrhesia, which is shown to be both philosophically and politically insufficient, close readings of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Derrida trace complex relations between sophistry, rhetoric, and philosophy; truth and untruth; decision; madness and stupidity in an exploration of the possibility of developing an affirmative thinking of politics that is not mortgaged to the metaphysics of presence.It is suggested that Heidegger's complex accounts of truth and decision must indeed be read in close conjunction with his notorious Nazi commitments but nevertheless contain essential insights that many strident responses to those commitments ignore or repress. Those insights are here developed—via an ambitious account of Derrida's often misunderstood interruption of teleology—into a deconstructive retrieval of the concept of dignity.This lucid and often witty account of a crucial set of developments in twentieth-century thought prepares the way for a more general re-reading of the possibilities of political philosophy that will be undertaken in Volume 2 of this work, under the sign of an essential scatter that defines the political as such.

CHAPTER 1

Parrhēsia

Sans doute l’acte premier de la philosophie est-il pour nous—et pour longtemps—la lecture: la tienne justement se donne avec évidence pour un tel acte. C’est pourquoi elle a cette royale honnêteté.¹

Lesen und lesen ist ein Unterschied.² (GA 31, 89/62)

I

In his recently published 1964–1965 seminar on Heidegger, Derrida has some passing reflections on the introduction of the idiom “toujours déjà” into French philosophical thinking in the wake of Heidegger’s immer schon, always already (HQE 77). Heidegger’s idiom, which according to Derrida shocks standard French philosophical logos, is presented by him as translating the traditional metaphysical concept of the a priori into a zone where it is newly marked by a kind of transcendental historicity. This comment relates to a later parenthetical remark on how a contestation of a Hegelian-Husserlian view of the historicity of meaning would have, paradoxically, to posit an ahistorical ground of meaning that might misleadingly appear to revert to seventeenth-century rationalism. In describing how this appearance would be deceptive, Derrida clearly enough alludes to the disagreement with Foucault famously articulated in his 1963 paper “Cogito and the History of Madness”:

The ahistoricity in question would then no longer be an eternal theological foundation, but a certain silent permanence of non-meaning, an origin of meaning and history that would precede any alternative of Reason and unreason, of a truth and an untruth and without which these alternatives could not emerge, any more than could any historicity. (HQE 167–168)

This gesture on Derrida’s part echoes a footnote in that earlier essay in which the motif of silence is more pronounced:

It is necessary, and it is perhaps time to come back to the ahistorical in a sense radically opposed to that of classical philosophy: not to misconstrue negativity, but this time to affirm it silently. It is negativity and not positive truth that is the nonhistorical fund of history. In question then would be a negativity so negative that it could no longer even be so named. Negativity has always been determined by dialectics—that is to say, by metaphysics—as work in the service of the constitution of meaning. To avow negativity in silence is to gain access to a nonclassical type of dissociation between thought and language. And perhaps between thought and philosophy as discourse, in the knowledge that this schism can be enunciated, thereby erasing itself, only within philosophy. (ED 55n/308n4; trans. mod.)

This difficult passing suggestion of a “nonclassical type of dissociation between thought and language” might serve as the matrix for further discussion of the already much-discussed “debate” between Derrida and Foucault, which extends well beyond its most obvious loci in Derrida’s original lecture and Foucault’s rather belated reply in the second edition of the Histoire de la folie.³ For example, comments Derrida makes near the beginning of the “Ellipsis of the Sun” section of “White Mythology” are clearly enough aimed at Foucault without naming him,⁴ and, at the end of the first section of The Archeology of the Frivolous, remarks about “a mythical epistēmē” and how “The general theory of epistēmēs has as its ground and condition of emergence the imaginary of one epistēmē, the one that supposedly makes of the table, the finite code and taxonomy its determining norm” (AF 33/48; trans. mod.) continue the criticism.⁵ Foucault too continues the themes of his reply in acerbic remarks in his late courses at the Collège de France (where, as we shall see, he virulently contests Derrida’s reading of Plato), not to mention some slightly scurrilous remarks reported by Searle and discussed by Derrida in the Afterword to Limited Inc. (LI 257n1/158–159n12). Derrida’s most sustained later discussion, in “To Do Justice to Freud,” after Foucault’s death, refers to Foucault’s own later admission that the whole theory of epistēmēs had led to an “impasse”⁶ but implies (specifically in relation to Foucault’s relation to Freud, but with much broader consequences) that this recognition on Foucault’s part does not answer the general questions Derrida is asking of him and to which I shall return in the conclusion to this chapter.

Rather than rehearse the now quite well-trodden “debate” around the Cogito paper itself—arguably a dialogue de sourds, in which historically inclined readers are impressed by the historical nature of Foucault’s reply to Derrida and his parting jibe at Derrida’s supposedly “historically well-determined little pedagogy” and philosophically inclined readers are more impressed by his failure to respond to Derrida’s more general questions except by means of invective⁷—in this chapter I will try to approach some of these questions more obliquely via Foucault’s attempts in his last lecture courses to reformulate the relationships between philosophy, rhetoric, truth, and politics. These courses are more relevant for my purposes than the slightly earlier and in fact rather brief interest in biopower and biopolitics, if only because they lead Foucault to explicit reflection on his own life’s work as a whole.

It can plausibly be argued that Heidegger is never very far below the surface of these questions and concerns: as we shall see, the immer schon structure, as taken up and radicalized by Derrida, will reappear regularly as a problem for Foucault’s readings. And although in some rather bad-tempered comments in The Beast and the Sovereign I Derrida suggests that Foucault “practically never talks about Heidegger” (BS I 430/323) or, a little later, that he “as always makes not the slightest allusion to Heidegger” (BS I 431/324),⁸ in fact, at the end of his life when these courses were being given, Foucault rather surprisingly described Heidegger as his “philosophe essentiel” and more generally aligned himself with Heidegger in a common concern with truth, that question of truth showing up saliently for Foucault around the concept of parrhēsia, which I will be taking as my guiding thread in this chapter. For example, in an interview conducted in May 1984 (just a month before his death), Foucault has the following (distinctly odd and perhaps not entirely consistent) paragraph:

Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher. I began by reading Hegel, then Marx, and I started reading Heidegger in 1951 or 1952; and in 1953 or 1952, I don’t remember now, I read Nietzsche. I still have here the notes that I took on Heidegger when I was reading him—I have tons of them!—and there are many more of them than I had taken on Hegel or Marx. My whole philosophical becoming was determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I recognize that Nietzsche is the one who won out. I don’t know Heidegger well enough, I practically don’t know Being and Time, nor the things published recently. My knowledge of Nietzsche is much better than the knowledge I have of Heidegger: the fact remains that these are the two fundamental experiences I had. It is probable that if I had not read Heidegger, I would not have read Nietzsche. I had tried to read Nietzsche in the 50s [so presumably before reading Heidegger—GB], but Nietzsche on his own didn’t speak to me! Whereas Nietzsche plus Heidegger was a philosophical electric shock! But I’ve never written anything about Heidegger and I’ve only written one little article on Nietzsche; and yet these are the two authors I have read most. (DE II 1522)⁹

So, even though Nietzsche “won out,” Heidegger was the “philosophe essentiel” who determined “tout mon devenir philosophique,” and indeed was the one without whom Nietzsche would have made no sense to me, and indeed had not made any sense to me when I tried to read him earlier (though when that could have been is hard to figure out from this passage).

Again, from a slightly earlier interview (1982, but published only in 1988):

I was surprised when two of my Berkeley friends [Dreyfus and Rabi-now] wrote in their book that I had been influenced by Heidegger. This is true, of course, but no one in France had ever emphasized the fact. Heidegger—and this is rather paradoxical—is not a very difficult author to understand for a Frenchman. That every word is an enigma does not put you in a bad place for understanding Heidegger. Being and Time is a difficult book, but the more recent writings are less enigmatic. (DE II 1599)

These curious references to Heidegger (which become no less curious when one notices that in Being and Time, the book that Foucault says he “practically” does not know, Heidegger twice says that any notion of “care for oneself”—which gives its title to Foucault’s last published work, also in 1984, the year of his death—would be a simple tautology [SZ 193/186, 318/304]) will help me formulate the problem I want to pursue. To put it too bluntly, I want to argue that Foucault’s appeal to the notion of parrhēsia, some of the detail of which we shall be following, brings him to a surprisingly Platonic, or at least Socratic, position on the relation of philosophy, politics, and rhetoric. Heidegger, by contrast, whatever his real importance for Foucault’s thinking, and taking (at least in the 1920s) an apparently more Aristotelian stance on these questions, opens some difficult issues for the Foucauldian position and, even as he too tends to close off the dimensions I shall be associating with rhetoric, asks some uncomfortable questions of anyone trying to think about philosophy and politics today. My broader suggestion (to be pursued in Volume 2 of this work) will be that these questions have been resolved dogmatically or at least moralistically by most explicitly political philosophers (be it Rawls or Rancière, Leo Strauss or Hardt and Negri, Rorty or Badiou) and that it is necessary to formulate the whole relationship of politics and philosophy rather differently if one wishes to escape that dogmatism and moralism.¹⁰

Some such reformulation is what Foucault seems at least to be turning around, in the many fascinating attempts in his late work (essentially the only recently published Collège de France lectures from just before his death in 1984, from “The Hermeneutics of the Subject” in 1982, through “The Government of Self and Others” in 1983, ending with “The Courage of Truth” in 1984) to isolate and define the value of parrhēsia, open speech, free speech, even “fearless speech,” as an unauthorized translation of some of this material has it, with a suitably stirring cover image of Foucault haranguing a crowd through a megaphone.¹¹ Foucault is keenly aware that his appeal to this term engages a whole problematic debate not only with the history of philosophy but more especially with the tradition of rhetoric, and he returns many times, complementing and sometimes contradicting his earlier formulations, to the attempt to clarify the terms of that debate and to arrive at a successful characterization of this apparently rather marginal term.

II

In the earliest seminar in which parrhēsia begins to be thematized (L’herméneutique du sujet, 1982, in which, after the previous year’s explorations of ancient sexuality—themselves following the rather brief interest in “biopower” and “biopolitics”—Foucault proposes to look more directly at the relations between subject and truth), it is first invoked, as if by chance, immediately after a discussion of the relation between philosophy and rhetoric. Philosophy presents itself as providing the means to govern oneself and others, giving the philosopher a special and eminent position: “He is the one who governs those who want to govern themselves and he is the one who governs those who want to govern others” (HS 131/135). Rhetoric, says Foucault, at least at the period he is discussing (around the turn of the second and first centuries B.C.E., but as always in Foucault, dating and periodization are more problematic than might at first appear), can be distinguished from philosophy as follows:

Rhetoric is the inventory and analysis of the means by which one can act on others by means of discourse. Philosophy is the set of principles and practices available to one, or which one makes available to others, for taking proper care of oneself or of others. (HS 131/135–136)

Immediately following this distinction, Foucault invokes the notion of parrhēsia for the first time, on the basis of a fragmentary text of that title by a certain Philodemus, who writes of the necessity for open, frank, disclosive speech between master and pupil, or director and directee, within the structure of Epicureanism, what Foucault a little later calls a “new ethic of the verbal relationship with the other” (HS 158/164) and which he promises to elaborate in the second part of the session (27 January 1982). Parrhēsia at first, then, means no more than open speech, speaking one’s mind, saying what one really thinks, saying what comes to mind, openly and directly, in sincere and plain speaking. Foucault’s promised further elaboration of the notion, however, is then deferred to the following week, when again he announces a detour via the neo-Platonic discussion of the probably apocryphal dialogue Alcibiades, and he returns to parrhēsia only a week later still, in a text of Epicurus opposing a practice of phusiologia to a practice of paideia, and saying here “parrhēsia [. . .] is essentially not frankness or freedom of speech, but the technique—parrhēsia is a technical term—which allows the master to make a proper use, from the true things he knows, of that which is useful or effective for his disciple’s work of transformation” (HS 232/242). This already elaborates a little on the initial value of parrhēsia as simply frank or open or truth-telling speech: now it is technical, part of a calculated technique, even a manipulation, and to that extent, one might imagine, subject to at least something like a rhetorical description. My hypothesis is that this liminal position of parrhēsia, on the border of philosophy and rhetoric (and thereby also, as we shall see, on the border of philosophy and politics), is what makes it so fascinating for Foucault but also so difficult for him to deal with directly. And indeed before coming back to parrhēsia as such, Foucault finds himself glossing Epictetus and Seneca and complicating his initial characterization of the supposedly clear separation between philosophy and rhetoric:

Philosophical discourse is not in fact wholly and entirely opposed to rhetorical discourse. Of course, philosophical discourse is meant to express the truth. But it cannot express it without ornament. Philosophical discourse should be listened to with all the active attention of someone who seeks the truth. But it also has effects that are due to its own materiality, as it were, to its own modeling [sa plastique propre], its own rhetoric. (HS 331/348; my emphasis)

This then turns out to be the real crux of this first approach to parrhēsia when Foucault finally returns explicitly to it on 3 March 1982, and he now characterizes it less as a symmetrical relationship of truth-telling between master and disciple and more as what corresponds on the side of the master to attentive silence on the part of the disciple. Parrhēsia is in fact an attribute of a certain kind of masterful speech rather than just the openness or frankness one might expect of any speaking subject (HS 348–349/366): parrhēsia, which one might have been tempted to associate with the pure absence of technique, with simply speaking one’s mind frankly and openly, takes on, says Foucault, “une signification technique fort precise” (HS 349/366–367). And this “technical” signification brings it back toward the domain of rhetoric:

basically what is involved in parrhēsia is that particular kind of rhetoric, or nonrhetorical rhetoric, which philosophical discourse must employ. [. . .] Parrhēsia is the necessary form of philosophical discourse, since [. . .] when we employ the logos, there is necessarily a lexis (a way of saying things) and the choice of particular words rather than others. Therefore, there can be no philosophical logos without this kind of body of language with its own qualities, its own figures, and its own necessary effects at th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Politics of Politics
• 1. Parrhēsia
• 2. Pseudos
• 3. Kairos
• 4. Mōria
• 5. Diakrisis
• 6. Axioma
• Appendix: Derrida’s Notes on Dignity
• Index