PHIL 6000/7000: Foucault and Derrida
Genealogy/Deconstruction and the Fate of the Death Penalty
Peter Gratton, PhD, Winter 2013
[©Peter Gratton. These lecture notes are provided for the pedagogical use of students.
Bibliographical details are often missing.]
Description and Objectives
This course will examine extensively two sets of writings: those around Foucault and his
genealogies of power in (mostly) the first half of the 1970s, and writings in and
surrounding Derrida’s lecture course on the death penalty in 1999-2000. The Foucault of
this period provides “genealogies of the present” in order to understand the contingency
of naturalized institutions (such as the prison), all to understand their historical conditions
of possibility. [Note how this differs from a Kantian transcendental analysis, or in fact
most analyses of political philosophy that look to work out transhistorical notions of
justice, etc.] Foucault’s 1960s work, from Madness and Civilization to The Order of
Things and beyond, had taken as their method “archaeologies” that would discern
different epistemic periods that were heterogeneous to one another. For example,
famously, Foucault detected an epistemê at the end of the order of things called “Man”—
that is the transcendental-empirico dublet—and that this epistemê, this very manner of
understanding ourselves as the human and such, would come to an end. What Foucault
understood by archaeology is the unconvering and discerning of different epistemes, that
is, periods geographically and temporally located governed by a given set of rules
operating beneath the conscious level but that determine what is true or false in that
period. To use a pithy example, it is more than our scientific knowledge that dictates that
witchcraft is “false.” Rather, a whole epistemic shift means that it is taken as false. An
archaeology, thus, would not rest on a history of events of great and known figures and in
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fact lies close, despite some denials by Foucault, to structuralist accounts. But Foucault’s
view was that structuralists could not think the events of historical change, and Foucault
more and more thought this a problem for archaeology: that it couldn’t account for the
power or movements of force that caused a given more from one episteme to another.
Around 1970, while engaged in deep readings of Nietzsche’s own ontology of power,
Foucault began to use the term genealogy to describe his mode of performing histories of
the present. It is this “period” in Foucault’s work—while always aware that there is no
“break” between one area of Foucault’s work and another---that will be the focus of our
course here. It is also the focus of our readings today, in which Foucault details his modes
of reading, as opposed to those of structuralist, Marxist, and other dominant forms of
historicism prior to the 1970s and to which he is responding. In particular, as we move
between this week and next, especially while looking to his works on Nietzsche:
1.
We should not believe that Foucault is a supposed anti-philosopher. It is
true that Foucault was given to criticize philosophy as such as a
universalizing procedure that ignores the bloody histories from below
that make its categories possible. But Foucault as several readings this
semester show—indeed, from his first lectures at the College de France
in 1970—he was always in dialogue with important thinkers of the
tradition. Moreover, his identification of a long-held Platonism in the
West not only aligns well with Nietzsche’s thesis about this history of
philosophy, but also means that to interrogate power, he will be in
dialogue with such figures as Aristotle and Spinoza. Foucault’s thinking
on power—on what we could call immanence—has a discernable
2
pedigree that is pervasive in his lectures, and thus his later work could
only build out from these considerations.
2.
That said, of course, Foucault argues that each geneaology is sui
generis. Take an idea and follow the practices, institutions, and so on
that are its historical conditions of possibility. Foucault is not out to
write a metahistory, a history from above, but to tease out the
displacements, intensifications, accidents, and so on, that led to the
prison, the madhouse, and so on.
3.
These genealogies are always, he writes, of and from the present.
Foucault, while giving these lectures, was deeply involved in both antipsychiatry and prison reform movements. I’ll leave this discussion for
now—but we must see, as with Derrida’s deconstruction of the death
penalty—the ways in which supposed ‘theory’ are anything but
abstracted from the political concerns of the day. In fact, if Foucault and
Derrida are right, it could not not be the case.
Foucault’s genealogical period—he borrows from Nietzsche the term
genealogy—aimed at discerning forms of society power as they concatenated in
modernity—from sovereign power of the 16th to 18th centuries, to disciplinary power, to
biopower, and so on. Delineating these quite different forms of power was central to his
work and his own political activism during this period on prison reform. Thus Foucault
would see a form of sovereigntism as something like the passé of the political—yes
something quite still around us, but not as central to thinking the political as it once was.
But more to the point, the difference between the archaeological period and the
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genealogical is the term power/knowledge coming to fore. Isolated in today’s writings
around the “science” of psychiatry and its given power, this is mostly taken to mean that
knowledge itself is a form of power, that any claims to knowledge also and always
operate in a societal milieu of forces; there can be no neutral science beyond this play of
forces. But more radically, power/knowledge means that the genealogist, too, is
implicated in those mileu—a dictum not far from Derrida’s deconstruction. Founded on
an ontology of power, knowledge itself is a power (think of Nietzsche’s descriptions of
Christianity). Foucault writes: “There can be no relation of natural continuity between
knowledge and the things that the knowledge must know. There can only be [my
emphasis] a relation of violence, domination, power, force, that is, a relation of violence.
Knowledge can only be a violence to the things to be known, and not a perception, a
recognition, an identification of or with those things.” (La vérité et les forms juridique,”
546). For Foucault, like Derrida, there is always what is called violence at the origin.
Politically this will become the anti-utopian point they both share: there can never be a
politics absolved of violence and violation and any program (especially a programming
of the future as such) that suggests otherwise would be a reification of a present Idea that
would absolve itself of the power dynamic it was to critique.
The key problem, then, in Foucault’s genealogies is to tease out a space for
critique: if one is, as Derrida too will argue, structured by a given set of power relations,
then how can one critique that system without being implicated in it? This will go quite
far in both. For example, in his 1975-6 lecture course, Foucault himself performs a
genealogy of genealogy, so to speak: both Foucault and Nietzsche replace thinking of
politics as a peaceful space between wars and instead think of its as societal war.
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Foucault then extends this: when was this very thinking of societal war invented? In this
way no knowledge is ever discovered but it an invention in a milieu in which it engages
in trials of strength—to use a phrase from Bruno Latour—against other forms of
knowledge. All knowledge, thus, is, to borrow from Nietzsche and the subtitle of his 70-1
lecture course, a volonté de savoir, a will to knowledge. “Genealogy demands relentless
erudition,” Foucault writes (NGH, 140). But this does not mean it can leap over its own
shadow to a given objective truth of history beyond its own life: [A]ccording to the mask
it bears, historical consciousness is neutral, devoid of passions, and committed solely to
truth. But if it examines itself and if, more generally, it interrogates the various forms of
scientific consciousness in its history, it finds that all these forms and transformations are
aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitors devotion, cruel subtlety,
and malice. It discovers the violence of a position that sides against those who are happy
in their ignorance” (NGH, 162). The task then, is to tease out of any archaeology that
delineates a system of connaissance its savoir, it’s will or desire, its how, as Foucault
notes in the readings for next week.
Let me then provide a quick overview of Foucault’s 1970s works:
1. In his Lectures on the Will to Know, when Foucault first takes his chair at the
College de France, he gives a ‘genealogy of the genealogical method, showing
how from Aristotle and informing all of Western philosophy, there is a
subsumption of the body and desire from knowledge. And yet, Foucault agrees
with Nietzsche that underlying each claim to knowledge is a certain desire or will,
a certain power move, if you will, in the background of forces operating on forces
in assemblages across society. His task in this course is to show the importance of
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will and power to what he had previously described in his work as archaeologies
of knowledge as connaissance. The key term now for knowledge is savoir, a
know-how that is a practice of institutions widely understood.
2. In the sections we will read from Foucault’s Psychiatric Power, delivered two
years later, Foucault isolates a particular form of power that will come to
disciplinary power—this disciplinary power, represented in the figure of the
British king going mad, shows the passing from one kind of power (sovereign) to
another (disciplinary).
3. What is significant is that these genealogies take up the contingent formations of
power in the period of early modernity that had interested Arendt in her accounts
of “race-thinking before racism.” In the 1970s, the historical epochs under study
by Foucault begin for the most part with the late Middle Ages and the
Renaissance and move to the period just before World War II, with the notable
exception of his 1978–79 lecture course on the rise of economic governmentality.
Foucault’s main target, as always in his career, was the “disinterested” humanistic
discourses of the post-Enlightenment.7 Foucault argues that far from a history of
progress, Enlightenment philosophies offer a cover for forms of power-knowledge
that may speak in the platitudes of rights and freedoms, as opposed to the
less-Enlightened past, but operate through strategies of societal exclusion and
normalization. In sum, defenders of the Enlightenment want to cherry-pick the
strains of rationalism in our history, making it an ahistorical force, while utterly
ignoring the contexts in which these Enlightened thinkers were writing. We will
also see this in Foucault’s treatment of King George III, who will not just be a
6
disciplined figure, as mad, but also, as the example of the disciplined, an
exceptional (and sovereign) figure that combines both the bare embodiment of the
mad under disciplinary power and sovereign power, even in its absence.
4. Foucault’s genealogies, however, are often far less polemical than one finds, for
example, in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of
Sexuality. Gary Gutting is right to point to the experimental form of Foucault’s
work as well as its specificity: “Foucault’s work is at root ad hoc, fragmentary,
and incomplete. Each of his works is determined by concerns and approaches
specific to it and should not be understood as developing or deploying a theory or
a method that is a general instrument of intellectual progress.”11 Jeffrey Nealon,
too, finds in a Foucault an “experimental research itinerary,” as opposed to the
ideologist of disciplinary power and the death of the author one often reads about.
Foucault himself notes, “I wouldn’t want what I may have said or written to be
seen as laying any claims to totality. I don’t try to universalize what I say.” But,
that said, one doesn’t stray far into Foucault’s texts without finding claims about
concatenations of power/knowledge that are not so “specific.” Indeed, each of his
genealogies offers a methodological approach—“the blue print of a general
method”12—about how such analyses should be broached beyond the specific
field of inquiry.
5. These are not minor arguments in his oeuvre; they are central to understanding
each of Foucault’s genealogies of the 1970s, and in fact each of his studies is
determined by showing the “micro-physics of power” producing various
institutions and institutionalization as a process itself, a macro claim: “I would
7
like to advance the hypothesis that something like disciplinary power exists in our
society,” Foucault argues in Psychiatric Power, and we would need to think much
further about the hesitations of this “hypothetical” move that announces
“something like” disciplinary power. This power, he continues, is a “particular,
terminal, capillary form of power…a particular modality by which political
power, power in general, finally reaches the level of bodies and gets hold of
them.”13 But this should not be taken as reason to dismiss Foucault’s genealogies
of power, which, especially in his lecture courses, operate experimentally and
heuristically through his nomination of dispositifs of power important to
contemporary concerns. His claims are far from homogeneous and homogenizing.
As such, we should follow Foucault in his wrestling with the specificity and
applicability of his claims (here regarding the rise of the prison):
The “invention” of this new political anatomy [the disciplining of bodies] must
not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is rather a multiplicity of often minor
processes, of different origins and scattered locations, which overlap, repeat, or
imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one
another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually
produce the blueprint of a general method.14
6. In“Society Must Be Defended.” In these lectures, Foucault lays out the
macro-micro movements of power first in a society at war with itself and then in a
society docile under disciplinary and bio-political regimes—all preceded by what
he rightly calls the “administrative monarchy” that becomes, after the nineteenth
century, a more insidious racist sovereignty.15 Thus, I am comfortable with the
8
supposed uncomfortableness of these broad claims, which have the much-feared
consequence of showing productions of power everywhere, making any
confrontation with power apparently pointless. Foucault’s work is thus said to
lead to a political quietism given the inevitability that one is always imprisoned
within these power formations.16 This complaint is as old as Foucault’s first
publications on madness. Indeed, critics of Foucault often measure their resistance
to his work quasi-aesthetically. They contend less with his work and methodology
than with what they take to be (wrongly) its distasteful consequence, namely that
all resistance is futile. It is rather odd, though often the case, that this is what
passes for serious rebuttals to Foucault’s work: his descriptions of power might
mean that I’m less free than I would like to presuppose, thus I can counter the
feared implications of his work with imbrications of age-old views of the
sovereign self. As such, I can avoid the quintessential Foucaultian insight that
power operates more than through coercion, and I can take a view that would
return to a classical notion of power, one which has the upshot that it can be more
easily resisted. This is theory as catharsis, a declaration of one’s fears while
quieting oneself by having an identifiable enemy: a state, a class, a demanding
family member—a teenage analysis of power that sees power as merely having to
with the “problems of law and prohibition,” as finding one’s freedom by taking on
mom and dad. Power would be localizable; it would have a position and a center
and my freedom would be nothing other than marking myself as outside that
center. This is, of course, the thinking behind all versions of negative freedom,
9
where power is denied its productive force, and places the sovereign subject, like
reason itself, outside of history.
7. As Foucault makes clear time and again, his interest is in exactly those places of
darkness left unexplored by the light of the Auklärung. Yet, he is careful to note
that he doesn’t want simply to repeat the exclusions that would merely have one,
for example, cast away light in favor of that which lurks in the shadows, since his
task was to shine a light specifically on what gave rise to shadow governments.
His genealogies, he says, must “outwit the problematic of the Enlightenment. It
has to outwit what was at the time described (and still described in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries) as the progress of enlightenment, the struggle of
knowledge against ignorance, of reason against chimeras, of experience, of reason
against error, and so on. All this has been described, or symbolized, by light
gradually dispelling darkness.”18 We must not see things in this way, but as “an
immense and multiple battle.”19 In describing the power/knowledge of particular
institutions, a siding with one or the other would return to a self-congratulatory
discourse of progress. If we emphasize all of this about Foucault’s work, it is
because, in thinking through challenges to sovereignty, we must also conceive
methods for historical understanding that are not just power speaking to power.
8. Foucault, as we noted, offers not a single genealogy of power (e.g., of discipline)
or genealogies of different powers ultimately reducible to one (e.g., as found in
base forms of Marxism, where discipline and state power would be the result of
given economic structures). Rather, he offers hetero-genealogies of power, and it
would take a stunted view to think power as subsumable under a given category,
10
such as a particular set of oppressive state actors. We will attempt to render
suspect discussions of power whose movement is but one way, for example,
top-down. Foucault, for his part, calls for a “strategic logic”—he opposes it to the
dialectical logic that would bring multiple powers into a given “homogeneity”—
that would “establish possible connections between disparate terms which remain
disparate.”20 This thinking of a heterogeneity, of multiple formations of power
interacting with one another, “is never a principle of exclusion; it never prevents
coexistence, conjunction, or connection” among modalities of power.21 This
“strategic logic” becomes even more plastic when one recalls that each genealogy
of power itself takes up the strands of a particular power (discipline,
governmental, sovereign, etc.) and its dispositifs, that is, the techniques of this
particular power’s appearance. Each dispositif itself, Foucault remarks, is
a resolutely heterogeneous ensemble comprised of discourses, institutions,
architectural models, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures,
scientific terminology, philosophical propositions, morality, philanthropy, in
short: of what is said as much as what is unsaid.…The dispositif itself is the grid
[réseau] that we can establish among these elements.”22
9. Let’s leave aside the aporia of writing a history of the “unsaid.” What we have in
Foucault are multiple folds of power that in turn operate according to
heterogeneous ensembles or technologies (dispositifs), a series of growing
complexification (heterogeneous dispositifs operative in heterogeneous
movements of power), but not one that becomes a mere mystification of power. In
this way, Foucault ultimately provides an answer to Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited
11
appeal in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “The tradition of the
oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping
with this insight.”23 Just as Foucault uses Las Meninas of Velasquez as a
presentation of three forms of linguistic-epistemic structures (resemblance
[sixteenth century], representation [seventeenth-eighteenth centuries], and as the
effect of the empirico-transcendental doublet of man [nineteenth-twentieth
centuries]) in the preface to The Order of Things, we view Foucault’s writings of
this period as providing a pluri-vocal recitation of the polyvalent and polymorphic
perversities of power. This should make sense in any serious thinking of power: if
we limit power to particular instantiations of itself, if we attempt to figure it, and
thus to figure it out, then we miss, to risk tautology, what makes power powerful.
If it is assumed to be but one figure, as with the monarch, it would be more easily
resisted. That power is polymorphic is what makes power, irreducible to the state,
in a sense irresistible. The point is to think the very dynamism of power, its
dynamis, its movements in and through various loci. Power is not just to be found
in the Leviathan of the state but in the multi-headed Hydra of the crystallizing and
always exceptional movements of sovereignty—and I will insist on the pertinence
of this term—and its permutations as disciplinary power, as governmentality, as
bio-power, and finally, as pastoral power. We will, over the next few weeks,
detail just what is meant by each of these terms. Disciplinary power will be, as of
next week, our first stop.
12
In the weeks that follow, we will turn to Foucault’s multiple genealogies of power not
just to recapitulate how he formulated different topologies of societal force, but to
conclude with what Foucault offers for advancing what he called a “counter-history”
of power. We begin with Foucault’s treatment of the madness of King George III in
lectures given at the Collège de France in 1973–74, collected in Psychiatric Power.
Here, we will allow Foucault himself to summarize what he takes, at that time, to be
the important distinctions between the powers of sovereignty and disciplinary power.
As we continue along, we will show how Foucault’s thinking of sovereignty becomes
more complicated in his later lectures, which offer multiple lessons on the state of
sovereignty and the political fictions of modernity.
After years of battling mental disease, King George III, the figure of the raison d’État
of Great Britain, fell into a mania. He was found at one point foaming at the mouth
and at another addressing his subjects as peacocks. In 1788, the king was put under
the care of Francis Willis, whose medical treatment was something of a
reverse-coronation, a taking away of his sovereignty. A previous bout of mania in
1765 had been treated by bleeding and Willis is said to have been brought in by aides
because of his reputation for “humaneness.” Foucault begins his narrative with
Philippe Pinel’s study, written as a “successful” case some ten years before the
monarch gave up his crown for the final time, living out his final days as something
of a sovereign scandal, if not a scandal to sovereignty. Allow me to quote at length, as
Foucault does, from Pinel’s recitation of the case:
A monarch falls into a mania, and in order to make his cure more speedy and
secure, no restrictions are placed on the prudence of the person who is to
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direct it; from then on, all trappings of royalty having disappeared, the
madman, separated from his family and his usual surroundings, is consigned
to an isolated place, and he is confined alone in a room whose tiled floor and
walls are covered with matting so that he cannot harm himself [and not
incidentally, communicate with the world outside]. The person directing the
treatment tells him that he is no longer sovereign, but that he must
henceforth be obedient and submissive. Two of his old pages…keep watch
over him in calm silence, but take every opportunity to make him aware of
how much stronger than him they are. One day, in a fiery delirium, the
madman harshly greets his old doctor who is making his visit, and daubs him
with filth and excrement. One of the pages immediately enters the room
without saying a word, grasps by his belt the delirious madman, who is
himself in a disgustingly filthy state, forcibly throws him down on a pile of
mattresses, strips him, washes him with a sponge, changes his clothes, and,
looking at him haughtily, immediately leaves to take up his post again. Such
lessons, repeated at intervals over some months and backed up by other
means of treatment, have produced a sound cure without relapse.24
Foucault emphasizes all the particulars of this remarkable scene, a ceremony of the
transition of sovereignty proclaimed not through the passing of the scepter or the
touching of swords or through the taking of a crown. The king had indeed, for all
concerned, lost his head along with the reason of his crown, and thus when the visitor
declares to the monarch that “he is no longer sovereign,” that “he must henceforth be
obedient and submissive,” it is an enunciation of what had already occurred to the king
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and a proclamation that, for Foucault, marks the passing away of sovereignty to
disciplinary power. It is this turn of events, this event of the turning of sovereignty, that
Foucault emphasizes: it is disciplinary power that will have the effect of calling into
question the self-sovereignty of each person, telling each one that he or she “must be
obedient and submissive,” that he or she is “no longer sovereign” over him or herself.
Here we have a scene, Foucault notes, of a “deposition, a sort of reverse coronation” in
which the king is “reduced to complete impotence.”25
Isolated from the outside world, we do not have the passing of sovereignty from one
entity to another, but its complete inversion: an abjection of sovereignty where the
once-sovereign is “reduced” to “his body” and left with no other defense but his own
abject defilement—the excrement he will hurl back so ineffectually at those treating him.
“This is not a case of one sovereign power falling under another sovereign power, but the
transition from a sovereign power—decapitated by the madness that has seized hold of
the king’s head, and dethroned by the ceremony that shows the king that he is no longer
sovereign—to a different power,” namely, disciplinary power.26 To paraphrase Augustin
Thierry’s claim about the king’s ineffectuality during the second French republic, this is
“a king who rules, but does not govern”; indeed, he does not even govern himself.
We are used to such “transitions” of sovereignty, and Foucault’s depiction plays on
all the scenes of the passing of the crown from one person to another, or even the passing
of sovereignty from the king to the people through regicides, revolutions, and so on. This
turn-over of sovereignty, between one sovereign and another, is the most dangerous
hiatus of sovereignty, its very interruption at its peak as power, and thus the need for so
many ceremonies around these moments of passing, of the passing away of one
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sovereignty to another—rituals of glory infused, as Foucault argues well, with narratives
of foundations and rights—natural, religious, and otherwise. But here, in this particular
dethronement, this scene of the unseen, as Foucault depicts it, we have the transition, the
passing and passing away of sovereignty to another power that operates, not through the
visibility of its apparatuses, but through its invisibility, in particular, the invisibility of
Willis. We thus see the visibility of an invisible power whose site is not the sovereign but
the impotent subject, the bare body on which “disciplinary power prevails” in all its
nakedness—and this becomes literal as the scene moves along. But, as is well known,
this passing of sovereignty does not last long. King George would regain power along
with his reason not long after his detention by Willis. And not long after Psychiatric
Power, Foucault, too, would return to the problem of sovereignty, no longer so
dismissive of its hold over the political imaginary.
Nevertheless, this scene allows Foucault to distinguish two forms of power, though
Foucault does note he’s being perhaps too schematic: it “seems” to him “that it is more
complicated, and what’s more will become increasingly complicated.”27 In any case,
despite this caveat, he argues at this time that there “are two absolutely distinct types of
power corresponding to two systems”:
The macrophysics of sovereignty, the power that could be put to work in a
post-feudal, pre-industrial government, and then the micro-physics of
disciplinary power.…There is a transformation, therefore, of the relationship
of sovereignty into disciplinary power. And you see at the heart of all of this,
at bottom, a kind of general proposition which is: “You may well be the king,
but if you are mad you will cease to be so,” or again: “You may well be mad,
16
but this won’t make you king.”…The king…could only be cured to the extent
that he was not treated as king, and to the extent that he was subjected to a
force that was not the force of royal power.28
For Foucault, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, we witness the
overtaking of sovereign power by disciplinary power. Let us quickly follow Foucault in
schematizing these “heterogeneous” forms of power. We will see, as he notes, that things
are not so simple.
1. Foucault argues that sovereignty operates by “deduction [prélèvement], a
subtraction mechanism…power in this instance was essentially a right to seizure:
of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to
seize hold of life in order to suppress it,” the latter being the sovereign’s right
over life and death, the right to let live and make die.29 In other words,
sovereignty operates as a positive freedom, leaving a space, as in Hobbes’s
Leviathan, of “negative freedom” beyond the reach of the sovereign. Secondly,
sovereignty founds itself in procedures and ceremonies marking its authorization
and authority, whether founded upon divine right, an act of submission by the
populace, rights of blood, or contracts.30 Sovereignty, Foucault argues, is thus
backward looking in legitimating itself.31 Nonetheless, it must always
“reactualize” itself through its rituals and ceremonies, its narratives and insignias.
Sovereignty is taken once and for all, but is also “fragile,” “always liable to disuse
or breakdown.”32 To forestall this breakdown, that is, for sovereignty to “really
hold,” there is the need, he says, for a “supplement or threat of violence.…The
other side of sovereignty is violence, it is war.”33
17
In Discipline and Punish, Psychiatric Power, and The History of Sexuality: Volume 1,
Foucault argues that there is a move from the type of power demonstrated during the
classical age (via the sovereign and the rule of law) and the polymorphic operations
of power in the contemporary period. It would seem, then, that the proponents of the
repressive hypothesis in psychoanalysis, to pick one discourse among others, are
engaged less in a naïve thinking of power than in describing its past. Psychoanalysis,
Foucault argues, by theorizing sexuality in “terms of the law, the symbolic order, and
sovereignty,” attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, “to surround
desire with all the trappings of the old order of power.”44 The psychoanalytic history
of sexuality is, Foucault writes, “in the last analysis a historical ‘retro-version.’ We
must conceptualize the deployment of sexuality on the basis of the techniques of
power that are contemporary with it.”45 Or, as he puts it in 1976,
2. [I]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the production of an
important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new
mechanism of power possessed of highly specific strategical
techniques…absolutely incompatible with the relations of
sovereignty.…This new type of power…can no longer be formulated in
terms of sovereignty.46
Foucault takes as his task asking after how to describe those forms of power
heterogeneous to the sovereign law:
From where is this conception of power borrowed that sees power impinging
massively from the outside, as it were, with a continuous violence that some
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(always the same) exercise over others (who are also always the
same)?…The idea that power has the essential function of prohibiting,
preventing, and isolating, rather than allowing the circulation, change, and
multiple combination of elements, seems to me a conception of power that
also refers to an outdated historical model.…[I]t seems to me that by making
the major characteristics we attribute to political power into an instance of
repression, a superstructural level, and an instance whose essential function
is to reproduce and preserve the relations of production, we do no more than
constitute, on the basis of a historically outdated and different models, a sort
of daguerreotype that we can find in power in a slave society, a caste society,
a feudal society, and in a society like the administrative monarchy.47
Of course, his target is not simply psychoanalytic discourses, but also theories of right
still fighting the politics of three to four centuries ago. Moreover, it’s his contention that,
in some sense, this provides a theoretical cover to secret away the dominant modes of
power underway today. Such retro-versionist theories, he writes, “allow a system of right
to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its
[discipline’s] procedures, the element of domination inherent in its techniques, and to
guarantee to everyone, by virtue of the sovereignty of state, the exercise of his [or her]
proper sovereign rights.”48 As such, if sovereignty has survived in the discourses of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, embedded in the legal codes of the West, it may
simply be as a ruse diverting attention from and “concealing” from view the disciplining
of the body. “Retro-versions” of sovereignty, for Foucault, reinforce rather than resist
other power formations; they “preclude the analysis” necessary for such resistance.49
19
The upshot of Foucault’s depiction of sovereignty in Psychiatric Power is that in
these non-isotopic relationships of sovereignty, individuality exists only at the summit,
not in the link of the subjects to sovereignty. To this schema, Foucault opposes
disciplinary power, which operates not from on high, but “from below.”50 This power has
a “total hold” over the individual’s body and it has no need for ceremonies, the old pomp
and circumstance, given its “procedures of continuous control…perpetually” putting the
individual under “one’s gaze.”51 As with Jeremy Bentham’s dream of the panopticon, a
prison where all are seen but can never see the gaze of power (an institutional inverse of
the ring of Gyges), the individual gains back his or her mastery only by internalizing this
gaze, always watching over him or herself as if he or she were still on view. This will be
the ultimate cure of King George, on Pinel’s account. Importantly, disciplinary power
will not be backward looking toward a particular foundation, theology, or a bloodless set
of contractual rights, as with sovereignty, but is forward-looking toward its telos of
“docile bodies”:
What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act on the body,
a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The
human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it
down, and rearranges it.…Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced
bodies, “docile” bodies.52
This docile body will be constantly aware—and this is why Foucault will focus on
the nudity of George III—of one’s absolute visibility, which is the mechanism of
disciplinary power, a “conscious and permanent visibility.”53 Disciplinary power, hence,
“looks forward to the future…when it will keep itself going by itself and only a virtual
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supervision will be required, when discipline, consequently will have become habit.”54
Remaking the body, disciplinary power is auto-poietic in the strict sense. Rather than the
discontinuous attention of the sovereign and the law, whose flip side is violence, the
“disciplinary relationship” renders “punishment.”55 And these relations of disciplinary
powers make everything visible, providing a record of any and all data deemed relevant
to the subjectivizing (assujettissement) of the subject.56 Unlike sovereign power,
disciplinary power is isotopic: its movements through different institutions mirror and
imitate one another, lining up to form a “disciplinary society.”57
This is not to say that there are not “residues” or remainders that cannot function
outside these topoi of disciplinary power. It is not totalizing: “All disciplinary power [and
the knowledge that is concomitant with it] has its margins,” such as the deserter to the
army escaping its disciplinary regime and regimens. But new disciplines, Foucault
argues, are invented to pick up these residues, capturing the mentally ill, the delinquents,
sexual deviants, and so on: “We can say that the underworld is the discipline of those
inaccessible,” for example, “to police discipline.”58 What “characterizes” discipline is its
continuing colonization of other discourses and other “disciplines” to enclose these
residues, to place them within a system entailing a normative center through which the
subject, alwaysalreadypathetically abnormal, maintains and measures ourselves.59
More importantly, for Foucault’s analysis, is that disciplinary power, as with
bureaucracy in Arendt, comes from nowhere and no one, and certainly not from the
height of the sovereign. And yet, it individualizes each one, such that the individual is, as
such, not prior to these mechanisms of discipline, but is, on the contrary, the result of
these mechanisms:
21
3.
[W]e can say that disciplinary power, and this is no doubt its fundamental
property, fabricates subjected bodies; it pins the subject-function exactly to
the body. It fabricates and distributes subjected bodies; it is individualizing
only in that the individual is nothing other than the subjected
body.…Disciplinary power is individualizing because it fastens the
subject-function to the somatic singularity by means of a system of
supervision-writing, or by a system of pangraphic panopticism, which
behind the somatic singularity projects, as its extension or as its beginning, a
core of virtualities, a psyche, and which further establishes the norm as the
principle of division and normalization, as the universal prescription for all
individuals constituted in this way.60
The individual, then, is the terminus of this relationship of power, in which the
subject is “fabricated” along a horizontal axis of relative normality, made to gaze upon
itself because of each one’s implacable abnormality. This normalizing power has subjects
but no sovereigns; even the “director” of any such system “is caught up within a broader
system in which he is supervised in turn…subject to discipline.”61 Foucault can thus set
out his well-known propositions in the first volume of the History of Sexuality with
regard to power in general: (1) it is not the property of an agent, but is “exercised from
innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations”62; (2) though
de-centered from any subject, power is “intentional,” operating through a “series of aims
and objectives63; and (3) relations of power are immanent to all social relations
(economic, scientific, pedagogic, sexual, and so forth). Power, consequently, is
irreducible to any entity or agent—including, significantly, though he doesn’t mention it,
22
the sovereign—since power “comes from below…all the way to the major dominations.”
The state, as such, is an effect of power relations already at work in the discursive
formations of a given society.64
One cannot confront this power, Foucault argues, with an enunciation of rights or
privileges derived from juridical power. We cannot reinstate the “juridical individual,”
since if we scratch below the surface of this individual, we quickly find the “normalized”
and “docile body” that is the result of disciplinary and normalizing power.65 This split,
Foucault finally argues, is “man” in the modern era:
What I call Man [presumably, a reference to the transcendental doublet of
the earlier Les mots et les choses], in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
is nothing other than the kind of after-image of this oscillation between the
juridical individual, which really was the instrument by which, in its
discourse, the bourgeoisie claimed power, and the disciplinary individual,
which is the result of the technology employed by the same bourgeoisie to
constitute the individual in the field of productive and political forces. From
this oscillation between the juridical individual—ideological instrument of
the demand for power—and the disciplinary individual—real instrument of
the physical exercise of power—from this oscillation between the power
claimed and the power exercised, were born the illusion and the reality of
what we call Man.66
But Foucault does not stop his analysis here. Returning to the madness of King
George III, it was not as if sovereignty ended on the day King George III was handed
over to the care of his doctors. In fact, he faced detention as part of a juridical process
23
(somewhat mitigated because of his stature and based upon a “legal fiction” that allowed
King George III, or rather his son, to stamp a letter to pass his powers to Lord
Commissioners) that was used to help fold more power into the ascendant sovereignty of
the British prime minister’s office. The history of this period is complex and I’ll refrain
from going into too many details here. Nonetheless, the “madness of King George” was
used as an example (disseminated by rumor in the late eighteenth century) for the rise of
another type of sovereignty (parliamentary, national) that no longer utilized the old forms
of ceremony in the use of its power. But this does not sound the death knell of
sovereigntism, since it is rather a mark of the historical change of ceremony and
sovereign pretense. The ascendance of new scientific-technological apparatuses provided
different forms for legitimation and authorization for the use of sovereign violence, even
one that would rebound upon the (no longer sovereign) monarch. This is what Benjamin
will describe, in a letter to Gerhard Scholem in 1938, as the rise of “the vast machinery of
officialdom whose functions are directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the
executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.”69 Its ceremonies are more
visible in their invisibility, dazzling less with displays of wealth and pageantry than with
an air of omniscience, cloaked with lab coats or the more prosaic uniforms of the petit
bureaucrat, carrying secretive checklists and so on—but no less ceremonial, and deadly,
for all that.
Sovereignty and disciplinary power work hand in glove, the latter forming the very
violence that reinforces the “claims”—to use Foucault’s word—of sovereignty. In order
to understand this better, we can point to the beginning of Discipline and Punish, where
Foucault carefully provides the narrative of Damien the regicide, drawn and quartered—
24
all the while asked to confess his crimes. Foucault argues that the tortured body is the flip
side, the logical inverse of sovereignty, even as he’ll argue later that sovereignty does not
“tactically” operate on the body as such. Let me quote from Foucault on this point,
At the opposite pole [of sovereignty] one might imagine placing the body of
the condemned man; he too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own
ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical discourse, not in order to
ground the “surplus power” possessed by the person of the sovereign, but in
order to code the “lack of power” with which those subjected to punishment
are marked. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man
represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.70
The supplice is no longer puts on view such public spectacles,71 but this does not
mean that sovereign power has not found, utilizing forms of disciplinary power, new and
insidious ways of providing lessons for its “others” in the darkest places of the political;
la question (torture) of sovereignty is not as dated as once believed. The death penalty is
no more “humane” in its procedures of last meals and last rites, with doctors on hand to
make sure the patient is as healthy as possible until, strapped to a chair, asked to say his
or her last words, the patient/prisoner is injected or gassed or electrocuted—all in front of
witnesses a glass partition away, spectators taking in the abject lessons of the continuing
sovereign power of the state.
The death penalty, thus, has not seen its day, perhaps its deadly end is always just
beginning, always just about underway, given how we find it so irradicable in the West’s
sacrificial politics. Before turning to Derrida, let’s simply elucidate the three major forms
of power Foucault describes in these lectures:
25
1. Sovereignty: Foucault uses this term, as we have seen, for the functioning and
logic of a given power of the state, especially the state in its monarchical form.
Where Foucault thinks sovereignty as such (its self-mastery, self-positioning, its
place of exception outside the law and outside any norm), we’ll mark it, since to
refuse to compare Foucault’s conceptualization of sovereignty, for instance, to the
work of Arendt, because he doesn’t use this term betrays the worst assumptions of
nominalism: if he doesn’t use the name, somehow he’s not discussing it. No doubt,
for his part, Foucault begins many of his lecture courses describing
“sovereignty”—considered not in terms of the self or the other ways found
hitherto in this book—as a “retro-version” of power. Many times, he discusses the
older, familial forms of power (the sovereign monarch) as a pedagogical means
for teasing out non-state dispositifs. Limited to the rule of law, sovereignty, in
Foucault’s use of the term, acts directly on the body (e.g., the supplice of Damien
the regicide in Discipline and Punish) in its right over life and death. It utilizes
ceremonies and fictions of the divine or mythological self in order to render the
king’s subject obedient. Foucault is said to think “sovereignty” as juridical, and
therefore conflated with the law.
2. Discipline: Unlike sovereignty, this power operates at the “micro”-level. The
scientist, the physician, and all manner of experts “break down…individuals,
places, times, actions, and operation,” fixing “processes of progressive training
[dressage] and permanent control,” in the end dividing the “normal from the
abnormal.”97 Discipline works “techniques of normation (normation)” that shape
subjectivities based upon prescriptive models.98 Foucault’s best-known example
26
is the panopticon, which functions through “the gaze” of the prison guard and the
“interiorization” of that gaze by its individual prisoners, who are unaware of when
and if they are being seen, Foucault’s primary example of political pedagogy in
the early 1970s. Whereas sovereignty is “deductive,” discipline is “productive” of
“docile bodies”; it is a technique, a “how” of power: “how to survey someone,
how to control her conduct, her comportment, her aptitudes, how to intensify her
capacities, how to put her in a place where she will be more useful.”99
3. Bio-power: This last quotation from Discipline and Punish—“how to put her
in a place where she will be more useful”—brings us to Foucaultian bio-power,
especially as it is developed in his 1978–79 lecture course, The Birth of
Biopolitics. Foucault argues that bio-power operates at the level of population and
on “life” itself, not on particular bodies. The science of bio-power is statistics.
Importantly, he teases out bio-power not just in terms of the rise of nationalisms,
as we have shown and will develop further, but also through the rise of civil
society (what Arendt dubbed the realm of the “social”) as well as liberal and
neoliberal thought. For Foucault, bio-power cannot be thought without reference
to “governmentality.”
2. On offer from Foucault are distinguishable genealogies tracing formations of
power that concatenated into the most devastating and deadly regimes of the
twentieth century. But we should not isolate these different powers, as often
occurs in the philosophical work on Foucault, and thus see them as
conceptually and historically heterogeneous. In the later 1970s, Foucault was
careful not to periodize these formations of power, arguing instead that each
27
was still operative, permeating one another at a time when “the problem of
sovereignty is made more acute than ever.”150 We need to see things not in
terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society
and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of
government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government,
which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism
the apparatuses of security.151
Derrida, for example, continued to read Foucault to the very end as providing
“periodizations” of history, of epistemic and genealogical “turning points,” with the
upshot that he erased the “singularity of event[s],” in turn producing a “homogeneity” on
either side of such “epistemic breaks.”152 For Agamben, this is his avowed means of
proceeding. But this view of Foucault was long in need of updating, and may indeed have
belonged to a particular “period” in Foucault’s writing that Derrida long before had
described in “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963).
In Derrida’s death penalty lectures, we see quite a different elaboration: a focus
principally on sovereignty and its right over life and death. At times in these lectures,
Derrida redefines “deconstruction” as principally an elaboration of how to remove
ourselves from a long era of the death penalty in all its guises. In this way, too, Derrida
takes up central questions about politics and punishment while also teasing out what is
happening under the name deconstruction. Like Foucault, Derrida found any attempt to
reduce his readings and work to a “method” a gross misreading, a vast simplification by
readers who couldn’t understand that this was not about subjects picking this or that
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method, but rather, in some sense, genealogies and deconstruction always already
underway in institutions and texts themselves. We will come back to this point
throughout the course. Nevertheless, its true that the manner of reading and the resources
Foucault and Derrida bring to bear are quite different: Foucault is more likely to argue
that his historical judgments and so on work from the ground up, if you will, seeing
crystalizations of power often hidden from the political philosopher, who rigidly keeps
herself within her discipline. Derrida, on the other hand, follows closely Heidegger’s
Destruktion of the history of ontology and with it, a long and necessary deconstruction of
its political theology. That is to say, I think it’s fair to say that Derrida would find
Foucault blind to a certain “metaphysics” diagnosed by Heidegger for the very condition
of possibility of those histories he’s elaborating. There were other disagreements between
them, but the task of this course is three fold:
1. To understand Foucaultian genealogy. We will have to handle its difference from
“archaeology” in the course through questions, since we do not have the time to
read closely his texts on archaeology, and so any difference between his “method”
(all caveats on this should be taken) of the 1960s and the 1970s will need to be
discussed that way. But we must also understand where he sees his work as both
continuous with Nietzsche’s own genealogies, and finally how this plays out in
his texts on punishment during the 1970s. What does a genealogy of the present
seek to do? Why is it “of the present”? Finally why is it not simply a step-by-step
method that can be applied to different historical circumstances? This, by the way,
will be the subject of your first short paper in the course.
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2. To understand the practices of deconstruction. In some way, Derrida is lecturing
in his course to those who already knew his long past work on this question. I will
fill in the gaps on this, but what’s interesting in this course is that while many take
deconstruction to be some “method” for reading texts, Derrida is explicit that it’s
not a method, but is that which happens and is always already underway in the
history of institutions and states, texts and peoples. He’s also clear, too, that he
thinks deconstruction must both account for the death penalty and also look to a
“post-deconstructive” thinking that would step unsteadily beyond the history of
political theology of sacrifice that made it possible. Your second paper will be to
answer “what is deconstruction”?
3. Thus you will need to use the writings in the course to think a certain style of
reading (one that be rigidified by bad readings into an A-B-C…method) and how
those styles differ between Foucault and Derrida. They wrote on each other—
often quite critically—but I will not cover those in this course. (The simple
reason: Derrida’s major critique came early in both their careers and I find they
are both arguing over much later ideas that each had made much more
complicated later their careers.) What I want instead is to look to the content of
these lectures to thnk how, often discussing overlapping periods in history, they
come to different conclusions about how counter-practices may be able to operate
against forms of marginalization in the contemporary period.
At each point along the way, we will need to elucidate crucial commonalities and
differences from their enterprises.
30