Foucault’s 1970-1 Lecture Course
[©Peter Gratton. These lecture notes are provided for the pedagogical use of
students. Bibliographical details are often missing.]
Last week, I provided a substantial overview to the five or six years of Foucault’s
course work we will cover this semester. Tonight, we will cover his 1972 essay,
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History”—deservedly, one of his most read—as well as
selections of his 1970-1 lecture course at the College de France, published under the
title Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, Lessons on the Will to Know. Given that the
editors only had Foucault’s contemporary notes for these lectures, they also filled it
out with two remarkable lectures, one titled “Lesson on Nietzsche: How to think the
history of truth with Nietzsche without relying on the truth,” which was a text
delivered at McGill in 1971, as well as the text “Oedipus’s Knowledge,” given at two
American universities in 1972.
At 43, Foucault had been named elected to the College de France, the highest
position in the French university system, taking the title of “chair of the history of
systems of thought.” Foucault’s inaugural lecture, “The Order of Discourse,” in honor
of Jean-Hyppolyte, the famed French Hegelian, was given just one week prior to the
start of this course as we are reading it. These lectures are rather incredible in their
scope and, quite obviously in the course of tonight and given our limited reading of
it, we cannot go through its all of its complexity or its build-up of arguments. The
essay on Oedipus, for example, challenges Freud and other readings, and would be
worthy of two or three of our classes alone. I do not wish to take up our time as I did
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last week before we move to discussion, but let me mark out some important
indices or indications of where a much longer discussion than ours tonight would
have to go.
First:
This text can and should be read as the means by which Foucault showed the
importance of juxtaposing the two “methods” by which he is largely known:
archaeology and genealogy. As I noted last week, the former seeks to understand the
historical conditions of possibility by which any set of propositional truths come to
be taken, well, as true. That is, how does a discourse constitute itself? What are the
specific modes and strategies, that is, the techniques, through which each forms
itself? The problem a genealogy attempts to identify is the specific formations of
power that allowed this constitution of discourse to take place—all the more to then
denaturalize a given discourse and its socio-political ramifications. What does this
make of genealogy? We will see this throughout today.
Second:
In 1974, Foucault derided the “Heideggerian habit” of tracing all of Western thought
back to Greece, saying he did not wish to “fall into the trap of Hellenistic archaism”
(cited in Behrent’s review essay, 160). And it’s certainly true that much of Foucault’s
genealogical work of the 1970s centered on the early and late modern periods, say,
from the 17th centuries to the 20th, without tracing any of this back to the Greeks. As
is well known, Foucault around 1979 returns to ancient sources to discover and
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discuss a “care of the self” on the margins of various apparatuses of power. This
later turn to classical sources, as these lectures make clear, was not a one-off, but
show Foucault’s long focus on this period—however little he published on it during
much of the 1970s.
But despite this change in how we will have to look at Foucault, it is remarkable that
he does perform a certain “Hellenistic archaism” he delineates in others. In fact, this
is one point we can consider when coming to Derrida: is there any link between
what Foucault delineates as a Western will to know and the Western political
theology that Derrida describes in his death penalty lectures? Both Derrida and
Foucault were deeply influenced by Nietzsche and his own genealogies of the will to
power and the knowledges that it parlayed as part of that power. Here’s my quick
thought: there is indeed a deep link between what Foucault details here as the “will
to truth” in the earliest philosophy and the injunction of a certain thinking of the law
in early Greece around Salon’s laws—in short, a certain neutrality of the law and of
truth, with one seeking the other depending on the site within Ancient Greece
(agora or law court)—and the will to supercede finitude, that is, to know death
down to its passing moment in the imposition of the death penalty, as discussed by
Derrida in his most important death penalty lecture. This is a complicated point and
I will need to come back to this time and again this semester—as well as many other
points of convergence. Derrida’s thinking of radical finitude follows in part from a
rejection of making death knowable and meaningful—that is, bringing this alterity
back within the circuit of the will to know. Let’s allow this point to linger.
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But coming back to an overall point about a certain Hellenism in Foucault’s lectures:
we will know nothing of Foucault if we do not understand “power knowledge”—and
then are able to see how Western forms of punishment, right up to today, are
informed by specific discursive formations. But let me pause over what I take to an
important dictum of reading Continental philosophy going back to Heidegger. At
least since Nietzsche, one should also be aware of each philosopher’s relation to
what he called Platonism. Let me give some examples:
Nietzsche argued that Christianity merely took over a vulgar Platonism, where this
life is to be of no value over and against what is not available in the sense world.
Moreover, there was always a politics linked to each form of Platonism—namely a
certain ordering of the polis that followed from the ordering of the cosmos. There is
no thinking of truth, Nietzsche argued, that is not itself a move in an overall
existence “ruled,” if you will, by the will to power. The “will to knowledge,” he
argued, was a particularly ingenious move invented by Platonism, since it gave to an
elite beyond the laboring many access to knowledge that could not be shared, while
also denying, through its very neutrality, the power dynamics that produced this
knowledge.
Heidegger’s relation is far too complex to give in a few words, but here goes:
Heidegger argued that since Plato—at least since Plato—there has been a
fundamental split between praxis and theoria. Platonism, by methodologically
linking philosophy to theory (and we’ll see soon how well this fits with Foucault’s
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diagnosis of Aristotle), then privileged a mode of seeing (theoria in the Greek being
etymologically linked to Idea and other Greek words related to seeing, e.g., theoros is
a spectator, which derives from thea, a view, and horan, which means “to look at”)
that found the truth of things in their correlation of an object of thought back to the
theoretical glance. This theoretical glance, then, would, make present the objects of
thought, and this was based, Heidegger argued, on a notion of presence that made
all of Being an “object” standing over and against the thinking being, that is, present
to a given being. This served to give us an ill-conceived notion of time—vulgar clock
time—as well as a thinking of the human being as primarily a theoretical entity. The
apotheosis of this, he suggests, is Husserl’s phenomenology, and Heidegger’s Being
and Time, as most of you know, begins its Destruktion of the history of ontology by
redescribing Dasein in terms of its practical, worldly engagements that form the
background for any supposed theoretical endeavors—which at best are reductive of
our originary being in the world with others.
Hannah Arendt, in her The Human Condition and other works of the 1950s, argues
that Plato and Aristotle—despite some notable places in the latter—ultimately
confused politics with poiesis or making: they thought politics was not a messy
space of action, but rather one was to take a given Eidos or Idea of the political (for
example, the politeia of Plato’s Republic) and perform the violence necessary to
institute it in the polis, exactly on the model by which one does violence to given
materials in order to bring into the world by way of poiesis a given craft object—a
pair of shoes or what have you. And what made this eidos available was the theoria
of the philosopher. As such, beginning in Plato, philosophy has always privileged
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theoria over praxis, theory over action. The political effect of this is that politics is
seen less as the space of action or praxis than as getting the theory right. One can
see this in so many classes on political liberalism today—so abstracted from
contemporary practices and the historical circumstances in which liberalism came
to be. But it also gives rise to the default Platonism of the philosopher: we—whoever
we are—are to give to the people the proper ordering of the political, which
requires first and foremost not being one of the actors in a democratic space of
action. After Arendt, this calls for a fundamental modesty on the part of the
philosopher: we are to witness moments and spacings of plurality, to recognize our
own praxis in given fields, but not see ourselves as philosophers—a title Arendt
herself rejected—as providing an ordering of the political that would erase the the
plural space of action. This critique of political Platonism is also, in different ways,
shared by Jacques Ranciere.
Derrida’s critique of the history of metaphysics is based, as in Heidegger, on the
metaphysics of presence as well as the later political theology to which it clings. To
skip a few steps in Derrida—we will come to this later obviously—this ultimately
means that all is knowable, and here he follows Levinas in thinking the
comprehension of alterity—including the alterity of the future, of the Other, of
death—is ultimately a subjectivism and violence.
Where does Foucault fit in with all of this? First, it’s clear in these lectures that he,
too, thinks there is an originary “decision” in the West towards a specific definition
of knowledge that afflicts our history no matter its various changes up to the
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present period. Despite his many differences from Derrida and others, he follows a
certain Heideggerian thesis about a closure of the West that circles around a given
view of knowledge from which one can’t extricate oneself by simply moving beyond
this Western paradigm. For Derrida, this will mean a certain “play” found within the
given structures of the West; for Foucault this means thinking history not as codified
knowledge, but as a “carnival” (NGH, 161), as a “counter-history” that seeks to
disrobe the power formations while not making any claims to objectivity or
neutrality for one’s own genealogies of the history of truth.
This brings us to the beginning lectures of Lectures on the Will to Know. Rereading
the first lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Foucault aims to show that far from
“innocent,” Aristotle’s opening dictum that each man by nature desires to know
envelops all desire ultimately in a form of knowledge. He writes:
As a result, body and desire are elided; the movement leading to the great
serene and incorporeal knowledge of causes [in Aristotle] is in itself already,
at the level of sensation, the obsure will to this wisdom, it is already
philosophy. Thus philosophy, performing the role of supreme knowledge—
knowledge of first principles and causes—also has the role of enveloping all
desire to know from the start. Its function is to ensure what is really
knowledge coming from sensation, from the body, belonging already, by
nature and according to the final cause that directs it, to the realm of
contemplation and theory (LWN, 12-3).
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The highest pleasure is knowledge itself, or better, pure contemplation is without
any bodily pleasure. This form of Platonism is well known—its disparagement of the
body as well as its occlusion of other forms of knowledge, for example, the tragic
knowledge of an Aeschylus or Sophocles, which associates knowledge with death, as
well as the knowledge of the sophists, which is merely traded like any other
commodity. In this way, desire and knowledge share a seeking of truth—outside the
plays of desires and the body. To put it another way, knowledge, a supposed end in
itself, denies any relation to praxis and power; its neutrality mean that one cannot
contest the philosopher by asking about his or her subject position, his or her
historically situated place from which claims to knowledge are made. Knowledge is
dried of its productive site—and philosophy continues apace as a theoretical
endeavor neutral in its teleological and eternal quest for descriptions of reality. The
task Foucault sets himself—and this is very analogous to Arendt’s move to think a
Homeric notion of politics prior to Platonism, as well as Heidegger’s readings of the
early Greeks to find an originary relation to being covered over by the history of
metaphysics—is to find other relations and forms of knowledge prior to the
Western will to know. We can discuss what these are in a bit.
But—and here all the care in the world must be taken with Foucault’s next few
moves—taking up Nietzsche’s perspectivalism comes fraught with the ultimate
skepticism of knowledge, that is, that any truth claims are simply a product of a
given power, or rather, are moves within overall relations and fields of power, since
on Foucault’s account power is never held in the sovereign self, but is always
relationial.
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In sections we didn’t read for tonight, Foucault highlights Aristotle’s critique of the
Sophists, whom he seems to valorize, a point that would have everyone from Plato
to Heidegger and beyond aghast. For Foucault, philosophers valorize the syllogism
and the logic of the concept dried of language’s materiality and any logic other than
truth and falsity, while the sophists, sounding quasi-Nietzschean, are said to see
language less as apophantic or propositional than as an expression of power, as a
tool in game in which one wins or loses. We know this well from our own law
courts: the legal dictum is that trials are not about the truth, but about winning or
losing. This in many ways will ultimately be Foucault’s view of language—that it is
productive of events that shift balances of power—not a representational apparatus
that is reflective of reality. Language is hence not primarily theoretical but a praxis.
As Korijo Fujita puts it in the recommended reading for today, “there is no
transcendent which sustains, regulates, or referees that confrontation [among
language users] in the background” (120). Knowledge is not outside the play of
power relations, but is itself another power relation, for example, the very relation
of power between the world as represented by a given discourse and the world
itself. Recall a quotation from the essay “Truth and Juridical Forms” I mentioned last
week. 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).
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Thus any genealogy is not itself extrinsic to the historical milieu in which it is
produced, but is immanent to it, taking as its critical task to unmask the attempts of
other discourses to hide what it includes within itself in its exclusion, i.e., desire. To
put it another way, philosophy constitutes itself, Foucault argues, through a relation
to “an outside whose elimination makes possible the very existence of philosophy;
an outside on which philosophical discourse obscurely depends” (38). This outside
is “desire” and Foucault makes clear, alas in a crucial passage we didn’t read for
tonight, the ultimate import of this, since on the first page of our reading, he
announces that he is particularly interested in the human sciences of psychiatry,
history, and so on:
[If] we accept that science had its origin within philosophical discourse, we
can see what is at stake in the problem posed. The act that, by exclusion,
defined an outside of philosophical discourse and tied philosophy and truth
together in a certain mode, must in fact characterize our will to know. It is
that act that has to be uncovered” (38).
It is this “act” that must be uncovered at each turn in each claim to scientificity. As
Chris Chitty puts it, “this challenges a basic assumption of the entire Western
philosophical tradition: that knowledge of the world is desirable for itself and is
politically neutral” (review in New Inquiry). In his early works, such as the History of
Madness, Foucault had argued that reason announced itself in modernity by what it
is not, namely madness, and thus this exclusion produced modernity. In these
lectures, he uses this logic of exclusion in order to show how philosophy itself—
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which, recall, begins in Socrates’s dictum that the true desire is to know, to love the
truth—excludes desire, the body, in short, the praxis out of which any knowledge
claims are made, and thus constitutes itself as neutralized of this. In order to keep
this from going too long, this is precisely what is behind his lecture on Nietzsche,
and describes what he takes from Nietzsche. We will move into that discussion in a
moment.
Before handing off things to Kyla, I should note another crucial part of these
lectures, namely Foucault’s genealogy of the juridical subject in early Greece, who is
the subject who faces the rule of law, under which each is said to be equal—the law
is universal or it is nothing. Under this paradigm, which Foucault dates after
Homeric Greece and after the production of Hesiod’s Works and Days circa 700BCE,
a judge makes evaluations based upon his supposed neutrality and objective
descriptions of evidence and so on. This paradigm, as we know, is very much with us
today, at least the regulative ideal of our legal systems. Michael Behrent summarizes
this nicely:
At the risk of oversimplication, Foucault sees Western culture as resting on
twin pillars: the myth of truth’s incompatibility with power and the reality of
a discreet but highly effective form of power-knowledge in the wielded
through the legal system. It is the very denial of power-knowledge in the
West that explains the most characteristic form of power-knowledge, of
which the judge is emblematic. (166)
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That is, the particular long-range power-knowledge of the West is that it sees any
form of knowledge qua knowledge as neutrally pronounced, even in the most
political of circumstances, as in the political practice of judges. But more
importantly, though in a quick search I didn’t find a spot in the text where Foucault
says this explicitly, it’s notable that the juridical form of power-knowledge he
explains is prior to the philosophical claims of Aristotle that he spends much time
on. In short, the philosopher who would say he does not belong to a given historicity
in fact is produced out of a given historical milieu or politics that had already
situated desire on the outside of knowledge and which philosophy used as its model.
Arendt, in several key essays, makes similar claims, namely, that philosophy’s
toolkit—so matter of course after several millennia, is but a mimesis of other,
supposedly lower, forms of earlier Greek life.
The radicality of this position—or rather, a non-position, since no genealogy holding
the above can ground itself outside the event of its discourse—is, of course, up front:
to those who claim to do a given science, such as the psychiatries of the 20th century
investigated in the lectures we will be reading starting next week, Foucault argues
that these supposed apophantic discourses of propositions cover over their own
place within a given set of power dynamics. To those who would wish to unmask the
misogyny of Freud’s account of the unconscious, or the commodification of the
human down to the synapse in the age of neuronal man and his big Pharma
counterpart, we would of course cheer quickly Foucault’s obliteration of their
pretense to neutrality. Of course it’s clear that it’s a form of power-knowledge that
produces the very subjects that it diagnoses. But Foucault’s point in these lectures, by
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going back to Aristotle and making claims for philosophy’s self-avowed task ever
since, is to target metaphysics tout court. The ideal of any metaphysics—using the
term more loosely than Heidegger and Derrida—is to describe reality as it is, even if
after Kant this means a speculative twisting away from the fact of subjectivity to the
nature of which that subject is a part. In his later work, Husserl attempted to
historically situate the rise of geometry from the practices of farmers and such in
Egypt. This making-historic mathematics, though, was ultimately to ground
mathematics in history while never questioning its objectivity and universality.
Foucault’s moves here are clearly different: he privileges a pre-Platonist conception
of truth as event, not as established fact, not as universal and objective; to read these
lectures is to be reminded that, however very different in style and politics,
Foucault’s historicism owes much to Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of
ontology and the latter’s own genealogies of apophantic discourse in such places as
Being and Time and the later lectures on technology. But what does this do to what I
think many of take to be dear here at Memorial, namely metaphysics as practiced by
Jim Bradley, Sean, and perhaps even on occasion myself—let alone a host of others?
Any metaphysics, on Foucault’s account, must realize it is a mode that neutralizes its
own modes of production, speaking to a reality that it can’t help but produce all its
own. To some this is the power of Western thought—namely it comes out of a
special and specific delineation of power-knowledge that looks to differentiate itself
from the movements of power that produced it. Moreover, some would say that of
course metaphysics grew out of a given historical milieu and nothing Foucault (or
Heidegger or Arendt for that matter) write, despite the polemics of their prose, says
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anything more than that. To say this is merely to say that humans, not gods,
philosophize—and then fill in the details: it grew out of this set of practices and
philosophy’s continued existence meant the loss of other forms of life, such as the
tragic view of knowledge and so on. Yes it might have grown up using the
metaphors, models, and such, derived from the spaces of action, etc., in Ancient
Greece. But this is a specific achievement, not a loss, and we need not adhere to any
belief that says we are all fallen since Plato—yawn. Nevertheless, the question
Foucault leaves open for us is whether indeed our claims to truth have ever been so
innocent and necessarily carry along a politics that must be given over to critique
and genealogy. What would it mean to think truth as event and not as adequation?
Discourse as contest and not a neutral aggregation of facts, even the facts of
existence, or systems that arrange these very facts? Should not the claim to any
metaphysics—to bring this to more contemporary or direct questions, especially
those that claim to be neutral of any gender propositions—entail first thinking
through the very language, means, and techniques of its production? Broad
questions—but nice ones to come back to perhaps later tonight, given the pints on
hand here at Bitters.
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