C L I O 31:1 2001

DANIEL M. GROSS

Foucault's Analogies, or How to Be a

Historian of the Present without Being
a Presentist
Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of
devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly
be activated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain
point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's
going on nowand to change it. We don't have to choose between our
world and the Greek world. But since we can see very well that some
of the main principles of our ethics have been related at a certain
moment to an aesthetics of existence, I think that this kind of
historical analysis can be useful.
Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics"

It is easy to construct a story in which analogies as

traditionally conceived have no place for Foucault in the
writing of history.^ Prompted hy Foucault's own methodological proclamations in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,"
commentators have generally characterized genealogy as a
skeptical, even nihilistic strategy for writing history. It is
supposed to shatter our ability to identify a historical event
in a continuous narrative, to identify with past subjects, to
1. Along these lines see also Jan Goldstein's definition of genealogy, culled from
articles collected in Foucault and the Writing of History, 14; Larry Shiner,
"Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power-Knowledge," History
and Theory 21 (1982): 382-97 and "Introduction" in The New Cultural History, ed.
Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989); and Allan Megill, "The Reception
of Foucault by Historians," Journal ofthe History of Ideas 48 (1987): 117. Also, I
thank Judith Butler, Daniel Rosenberg, Jonathan Sheehan, Hans Sluga, Hayden
White, and Michael Witmore for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

58

Foucault's Analogies

identify ourselves in some essential way. Indeed the

piirpose of history guided by genealogy, Foucault insists, "is
not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself
to its dissipation."^ And as we will see, classical analogy in
the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition is often understood
simply as a figure that establishes an element of identity
over disparate objects or events.
So instead of writing history as reminiscence or
recognition, one should, for instance, parody the buffoonery
that supplied the French Revolution with Roman prototypes,
romanticism with knight's armor, and the Wagnerian era
with the sword of a German hero (160). Instead of fixing
similarities in an unreexive history of monuments and
origins, genealogical history, according to Foucault, should
correspond "to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes,
separates, and disperses, that is capable of liberating
divergence and marginal elements^the kind of dissociating
view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of
shattering the unity of man's being through which it was
thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events
of his past" (153). In a word, difference, not identity, should
serve as the affirmative principle when doing history, and
synthetic pretension should be decomposed as it appears.
Foucault actually might give the historian advice not unlike
what Wittgenstein gives to a great architect in a "bad
period":
"Don't take comparability, but rather
incomparability, as a matter of course."^ For, as we will see,
this is precisely what Foucault expressly tries to do in the
second chapter of The Order of Things, "The Prose of the
World," where he describes how the Renaissance hierarchy
of analogies supposedly crumbles under the weight of a
"Classical" science of order.
Foucault's practice, however, tells a very different story.
His genealogies continually propose crucial, synthetic
moments that produce new research domains. In fact, my
claim can be put in the strongest terms: there is no
Foucauldian method, whether genealogical or otherwise.
2. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Countermemory, Practice, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977),
162.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 2d ed., ed. G. H. Von Wright,
trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 74E.

Einiel M. Gross

59

without positive analogies. However, the way Foucault uses

analogies is complex and atraditional; it builds upon the
classical model while radically revising tradition in the
direction of his own philosophy of language. Distinguishing
Foucault's use of analogy from the classical prototype and
Wittgenstein's philosophical anti-metaphysics, this article
shows what sort of history one writes when relation is
characterized in Foucault's positive, analogical mode.
Like the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations,
Foucault's detective work traces how analogies are situated,
and both take the logic of reduction to task. Indeed,
Foucault explicitly uses Wittgenstein's "kinship ties" to link,
for instance, the modern pervert to the pre-modern libertine,
yielding the following proportional formula: as the libertine
was to tbe deployment of alliance, so the deviant is to the
deployment of sex.^ But neither for Wittgenstein nor for
Foucault are formal resemblances simply read off the world
and uniformly named, nor does language simply impose
likeness. Resemblances appear first as ad hoc kinships, or
sympathies, at whicb point they can he justified against the
associated fields that they help compose. Wittgenstein sees
these fields composed of various human practices, both
discursive and non-discvirsive, some of wbicb (logic and
psychoanalysis, for example) systematically reduce resemblances to identities. But always the philosopher,
Wittgenstein tested the limits of everyday language by way
of abistorical thought experiments rather than philology. In
contrast, Foucault locates when particvdar identities were
produced in language, what institutional conditions made
them stick, and how they might be transformed in tbe
writing of history.
The Persistence of Analogy

In the Renaissance as Foucault describes it, analogy bad

a potentially universalfieldof application, but tbis potential
could never be realized fully because divine order was
ultimately opaque. This limitation left man at tbe very
center of a complete signifying system, but with only
fragments of a decoding manual. Renaissance man was only
4. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R.
Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), 40, 106.

60

Foucault's Analogies

"half of a universal atlas," as Foucault puts it, but he could

nevertheless piece together a tremendous number of natviral
signs. Foucault recites a series of poetic observations drawn
from CroUius's Trait des signatures:
Man stands in proportion to the heavens, just as he does to
animals and plants, and as he does also to the earth, to metals,
to stalactites or storms. Upright between the surfaces of the
universe, he stands in relation to thefirmament(his face is to his
body what the face of heaven is to the ether; his pulse beats in
his veins as the stars circle the sky according to their own fixed
paths; the seven orifices in his head are to his face what the
seven planets are to the sky); but he is also the fulcrum upon
which all these relations turn, so that wefindthem again, their
similarity unimpaired, in the analogy of the human animal to the
earth it inhabits: his flesh is a glebe, his bones are rocks, his
veins great rivers, his bladder is the sea, and his seven principal
organs are the metals hidden in the shafts of mines.^

In the episteme shared by grammarians (such as Ramus),

naturalists (Belon), physiognomists (Porta)and, I will add,
a theologian such as Cajetan^word, nature, and man could
all be drawn together in a complex interlocking system of
signification, the nodes of which would be marked viltimately
by God's signature: "visible marks for the invisible analogies." It is, for instance, no accident that the walnut
resembles the human head, for this is the iconic sign given
to man that "wounds of the pericranium" can be cured by the
thick green rind covering the shell of the fi-uit, and so on.
But as Foucault insists in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," no episteme completely closes upon itself, guaranteeing certain knowledge, eternal truth, or transparency of the
system as a whole. And the job of the genealogist is ostensibly to draw out fissvires in a given system, both internal and
external. The holy "confusion" of Cajetan that we will see
undermines the univocal predication of mein, and God is
introduced by Foucault in a different form as the Renaissance episteme begins to crumble. There always will be a
"slight degree of non-coincidence" between resemblances, as
Foucault puts it, an insurmountable misalignment between
the graphics of the natural world and the graphics that form
its discourse. And this internal limit to the system leads
directly to external limits of the world. The whole world had
5. Foucault, The Order ofThings: an Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage, 1970), 22.

Daniel M. Gross

61

to be explored if even the slightest of analogies was to be

justified andfinallytake on the appearance of certainty, ind
thus from its very fovmdations, this knowledge was merely
"a thing of sand" (30).
Now, given Foucault's radical stance regarding the
absolute uniqueness of a given historical event, period, or
culture, and given his pronouncement of a total collapse of
the Renaissance episteme, one would not expect analogy to
resurface in Foucault's corpus as an analjrtic tool. Nor
should analogy reappear in Foucault's post-Renaissance
episteme unless resuscitated as a politically motivated
simulacnim^history as farce. "There is nothing now,"
Foucault insists, "either in our knowledge or in our refiection, that still recalls even the memory of that being (43,
emphasis mine). Nothing, except perhaps literatureand
even then "in a fashion more allusive and diagonal than
direct." But recur analogy does. In what form, and to what
end?
The key to answering these questions lies not in
Foucault's explicit theoretical statements, but rather in his
actual language of comparison and transformation. First,
we must look at the terms Foucault uses to compare various
discourses that compose one historicd period as well as the
objects that those discourses name. How, for instance, will
Foucault justify his comparison of prisons, factories, schools,
barracks, and hospitals^this illuminating synthesis that
has generated research projects across the himian sciences?
Then we must look at what stays the same as one historical
period gives way to another. So when we read Foucault's
description of the trsinsition from the Renaissance to the
Classical age (an age that is supposedly "responsible for the
new iurangement in which we are still caught" [43]), we
should be particularly sensitive to the strategy Foucault
employs to compare befores and afters. "What we must
grasp and attempt to reconstitute are the modifications that
affected knowledge itself, at that archaic level which makes
possible both knowledge itself and the mode of being of what
is to be known."
These modications may be summed up as follows. First, the
substitution of analysis for the hierarchy of analogies: in the
sixteenth century, the fundamental supposition was that of a
total system of correspondence (earth and sky, planets and faces,
microcosm and macrocosm), and each particular similitude was

62

Foucault's Analogies
then lodged within this overall relation. From now on, every
resemblance must be subjected to proof by comparison, that is,
it will not be accepted until its identity and the series of its
differences have been discovered by means of measurement with
a common unit, or, more radically, by its position in an order.
(55)

Clearly Foucault wants to say the figures that composed

sixteenth-century knowledge have been iraresfigured and
recontextualized in the wake of Baconian skepticism,
Linnaean taxonomia, and Cartesian/Newtonian mathesis (to
name a few of Foucault's favorite reference points). So, for
instance, the sixteenth-century accumulative sensibility
gives way to analysis, resemblances ire redistributed within
or without modern scientific categories, and order no longer
needs divine sanction to do its work. The universe of
analogies, in short, is to be superseded by an ordered world.
But why does Foucault rehearse this transition? In order
to pinpoint which sixteenth-centuryfiguresare "substituted"
for byfigfuresin the seventeenth century. And how then are
the two figures related? It seems, svirprisingly, by proportional analogy. Foucault sets himself the task of "reconstituting" the modifications that characterize a transition
between periods and thereby grasp the conditions that affect
the production and solidification of knowledge. But once
again we are presented with a contagion of positive analogies, which compare, for instance, accumulation, as it
functions in the sixteenth century, to analysis, as it functions in the seventeenth century. And, as we will see, the
classical theory of analogies suggests that, for each proportional analogy, an analogous term can be generated. For
example, the term "order" functions analogically in two
historically distinct expressions: "divine order" and "the
science of order." These are, moreover, anedogies that
function on the metalevel of Foucatdt's critique, not simply
"in" serious statements plucked from the historical record.
Though it might be unfair to ask Foucault to purge analogy
completely from his thinking, we should expect those that he
does use to waiver, to suggest dis-analogies, to function as
ad hoc sympathiesunless, that is, Foucault himself is
playing the Renaissance Man. Analogies should be motivated locally by a counterhistory and not by a totalizing
sensibility. So we will return to the text, focusing now on

Dziniel M. Gross

63

the mode of description in order to see if Foucault's analogies actually defeat his genealogical intentions.
Again the Classical age. Despite the Classical period's
radical distance from the Renaissance, Classical identities
apparently did not map completely over the vagaries of
similitude. Indeed, as Foucault describes the Classical
episteme, positive analogies seemed to multiply recklessly.
Hence the following: "Variations of price are to the initial
establishment of the relation between metal and wealth
what rhetorical displacements are to the original value of
verbal signs." And what's more, "the theory of money and
prices occupies the same position in the analysis of wealth
as the theory of character does in natural history. Like the
latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by
another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in
relation to what it designates." And finally: "What algebra
is to mathesis, signs, and words in particular, are to taxonomy: a constitution and evident manifestation of the order
of things." A breathless series of comparisons by positive,
proportional einalogy now seems complete within Foucault's
description of one historical episteme, and this despite the
fact that the new sciences of General Grammar, Natural
History, and the Analysis of Wealth all coincide in the
seventeenth century around the figure of mathesis universalis, the analji;ic grid designed to decompose vague analogies into scientifically justified identities and differences
(202).
However, The Order of Things (1966) was first published
five years before Foucault's supposed turn toward genealogy.
Thus it is not too surprising that analogy functions as a
synthetic tool for Foucault, despite his explicit claims about
our radical break from the Renaissance episteme. In fact,
Foucault still allows himself a range of tools familiar to
structuralists when writing The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1969), a work designed to distill the method motivating his
6. Foucault does say explicitly that when scientific knowledge begins to
dominate, similitudes are resuscitated on the level o imagination by gures such
as Condillac and Hume. Similitudes function, then, as the "mute and ineffaceable
necessity" that make knowledge possible. For without the power to cause two
impressions to appear as "quasi-likenesses" one could not begin to establish more
exacting identities and differences (68-69).

64

Foucault's Analogies

archival researcb. It turns out that relations of opposition,

complementarity, ind analogy can indeed all still be used to
study tbe economy of wbat Foucault calls a "discursive
constellation."'
More svirprisingis tbat little changes witb tbe publication
six years later of Discipline and Punish. Indeed, positive
analogies turn up tbrough all of Foucault's work^his
modernism notwithstanding^though tbe function of
analogies does change, as we will see. Moreover, tbe
appearance of analogy during tbis period in Foucault's work
is no mere anachronism. In Discipline and Punish, we find
both a synchronie use of analogy ostensibly enmesbed in tbe
historical record and analogies at work on tbe metalevel of
Foucault's descriptions. Here is one crucial example from
tbe panopticon cbapteran example tbat in fact ties
Discipline and Punish to The Order of Things. "[Disciplinary] investigations are perhaps to psychology, psychiatry,
pedagogy, criminology, Uid so many other strange sciences,
wbat the terrible power of investigation was to tbe calm
knowledge of tbe animals, tbe plants or tbe eartb. Anotber
power, anotber knowledge."^ We are tbus presented witb
two distinct technologies functioning in two distinct bistorical contexts, yet Foucavdt refers to tbem witb tbe same
analogous term: "enqute" ("investigation").^ As we will see
later, the traditional theory of analogy suggests tbat tbe
recurrence of tbis term is deeply significant.
In De nominum analogia, the late fifteentb-century work
designed to systematize Aristotelian/Thomistic theory.
Cardinal Tomasso de Vio Gaetano (Cajetan) calls analogy "a
mean between pure equivocation and univocation."^** For
Cajetan, analogy bas an ambiguous epistemologicd status
marked by the recurrence of a term. In order to vmderstand
7. Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge, trttns. A. M. Sheridin Smith (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), 66.
8. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trems. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977), 226.
9. Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard,
1975), 227-28.
10. Thomas De Vio Cardinas Caietanus (1469-1534), De nominum analogia.
De conceptu entis, eds. N. Zammit and H. Hering (Rome: Institutum Angelicum,
1952); The Analogy ofNames and the Concept of Being, trans. E. A. Bushinski and
H. J. Koren (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1959), 30.

Daniel M. Gross

65

how Foucault's analogies work, we must in fact get a better

sense of this traditional scheme against which Foucault's
innovation is contoured. Only then can we begin to clear
away the metaphysical assumptions that obscure the
function of analogy in Foucault's work.
The Classical Theory of Analogy and Its Scholastic Legacy
In its most basic form, tradition suggests that we analyze
analogy by means of the quasi-mathematical paradigm
2:4::3:6, an expression that reduces to a common ratio "2."^^
Given the Aristotelian formulation "knowledge:object of
knowledge: :sensation:object of sensation," we would look for
a term such as "perception" that would be the ratio expressed on both sides (this understanding of analogies is
still with us in the form of Miller's Analogy Tests).^^ The
semantic point would be that we can "perceive" the idea
"Helen is in love" as readily as we "perceive," say, a stone.
Ignoring pragmatic considerations thus has its price. No
interpretive problem arises if "perceiving" is understood
equivocally when ranging alternatively over ideas and
stones, but then again nothing has been gained by proposing
the formula in the first place. If strict proportionality is
maintained, however, then we are left with the impossible
proposition that an idea such as "Helen is in love" is perceived no differently than is a stone. Of course, the kejrword
"perception" functions neither equivoctilly nor univocally
with respect to ideas and objectsan observation of the sort
that launched the scholastic debate on the function of
analogy.
Analogy is no simple phenomenon of language according
to Cajetan, and it must be handled carefvilly. So tacked on
the end of Cajetan's infiuential treatise is a chapter entitled
11. Aristotle, Topics, trcins. E. S. Frster (Ctimbridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical
Library, 1989), 108a 7-17.
12. Miller's Analogies Tests operate as follows: proportionalities suggest an apt
common word generating one literal and one metaphorical sentence. We may
illustrate the principle with two examples drawn from J. F. Ross's Portraying
Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 32: fanner:seed::sun:fleunes {sows),
thief:money::age:beauty (steals). In our discussion of Foucault we will exploit the
possibility of moving between the doctrine of analogy of proper proportionality
among referents to the doctrine of analogical terms (analogy of attribute), a
possibility not realized in medieval discussions.

66

Foucault's Analogies

"Precautions to be Taken in the Understanding and Use of

Analogous Terms." It is introduced as an hors-text rebuttal
to those relativizing sophists who would overlook the "mode
of unity" hidden in antdogous terms. "First of all," writes
Cajetan,
we must beware lest from the univoca tion of an analogous name
with respect to certain things we are led to think that this name
is univocal in an absolute sense. Almost all analogous names
first were univocal and then by extension were rendered analogous, i.e. common by proportion to those things in which they are
univocal and to others or to another. For example, the name
wisdom was at first given to human wisdom and was univoctil to
the wisdom of all men. Then, when men rose to a knowledge of
the divine nature and saw the proportional similitude between
us insofar as we are wise and God, they extended the name
wisdom to signify in God that to which our wisdom is proportional. In this way what was xuiivocal to us was made analogous
to us and God. The same is true of other terms (73).

Cajetan first asks us to approach seemingly univocal

terms such as "wisdom," "good," and "powerful" with
caution, allowing them a complexity denied simple generic
terms such as "animal." Apparently the semantic nodes in a
language fork periodically, and if we are insensitive to the
division we n m the risk of following the low road to blasphemy. Indeed pantheist heresies ofjust this sort provoked
from the Fovirth Lateran Council of 1215 a famous tenet of
negative theology still effective for Cajetan: "no similarity
between creator and created is to be noted without noting a
greater dissimilitude.""
So the common term "wisdom" does indeed originate
univocally, as does the name "animal." But only "wisdom"
accrues analogous meaning when extended as a predicate of
God. Moreover, semantic extension in this case differs from
metaphorical extension ofthe sort that figures in an expression such as "God is a lion." For such metaphors ironically
extend the range of a common noun that has "absolutely one
13. Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum Commentariis
glossatorum, ed. Antonius Garca y Garcia, Monumenta Iuris Cannica, Series A:
Corpus Glossatorum, vol. 2 (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostlica Vaticsuia, 1981),
Constitutio 2.56-59 (translation mine). For an interesting philosophical reading
of this passage, see Erich Heintel, "Transzendenz und Analogie: Ein Beitrag zur
Frage der bestimmten Negation bei Thomas v. Aquin," in Wirklichkeit und
Reflexion: Walter Schulz zum 60. Geburstag, ed. Hohnut Fahrenbach (Pfullingen:
Gnther Neske, 1973), 267-90.

Daniel M. Gross

67

formal mesuiing" in order to indicate some shared property:

though Grod is not a lion, literally speaking, in this case God
and the lion share courage, in an analogous manner. By
way of contrast, "proper" analogy equitably extends the
range of a common property." So for Cajetan, comparing
the propositions "Socrates is wise" and "God is wise" is no
heresy. In fact it generates a story compatible with religious
doctrine. An allegory with its temporal, causal, and
evaluative force is what saves analogous terms from the fate
of mere equivocation.
To interpret analogous terms naivelyas isolated and
unevaluated linguistic samples^is to misunderstand everyday speech and to deny the harmony of natural order. "For
example, the animal itself is cfdled healthy formally,
whereas urine, medicine, and other similar things are called
healthy not because of health inherent to them, but
extrinsically after the health of the animal, insofar as they
signify it, cause it, or have some other relationship to it"
(17). In fact it is precisely such measurable and directed
relationships that give analogous terms a status far superior
to that of simple univocity or accidental equivocity. Without
knowledge of natural harmony (and vdtimately of divine
order), one might incorrectly take a person and tuine to be
indistinguishable insofar as they are both intrinsically
"healthy," or, on the contrary, one might view the health of
a person and the health of medicine as materially unrelated.
But "health}^" applies first to inimds, and then by mesins of
"extrinsic denomination" to urine, the sign of health in an
animal, and to medicine, the cause of health in an animal.
It is the situation of concepts and things in a universal story
of creation that determines their relations, not simply
intrinsic or nominative identities.^^
Turning abruptly from the profane to the sacred, Cajetan
affirms that the scheme thus generated is discreetly valued
as well. "The notion o good also, which is verified in the
essential good, and after which the others are denominated
good in the order of exemplarity, is realized formally only in
14. De nominum analogia is conceived of as an extended commentary upon "De
nominibus dei," in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. Petri Caramello (Italy:
Marieti, 1952), 1.13.
15. On the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic denomination see
Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.6.4.

68

Foucault's Analogies

the first good; the others are called good by extrinsic

denomination and in relation to the first good" (15, emphasis
mine). Not simply a means to produce neo-Aristotelian
categories, Cajetan's extrinsic denomination turns out to
follow as well the mies of a Platonic hierarchy, where, for
example, each good thing occupies a unique place
determined by its relative distance from the Good.
But even if we desire to conform to this perfectly ordered
system, our imperfect knowledge of God and his creations
means that the language we use will always be subject to
slippage. Cajetan's theory thus cannot help but murmur
colorfully about the d5niamic and contoured process that
generates his analogical system. When, for instance, we
abstract the emalogon "being" from its analogates (i.e.,
"things that are"), we gedn both the insight that comes
cloaked in identity and the confusion hidden beneath.
"Concealing, as it were, the inseparably concomitant
diversity," the analogon "both unites the diversity of notions
by proportional identity and confuses them in a certain way"
(43).^* Moreover, this confusion, or "incompleteness," is
structurally unavoidable, because "being" in its ideal form
will always be obscured.
As it turns out, it is this nagging threat of linguistic
failure that keeps Cajetan's system from calcifying.
Anticipating Foucault, we can say that Cajetan describes the
role analogy plays in fixing a discursive system (or language
game) at the same time that he indicates the internal and
external limits that system must generate. For Cajetan
those limits appear to be a result of a theological doctrine
that posits the realm of Godly perfection as "ineffable,""
whereas for Foucault it is the absence of strict formation
rules that ultimately keeps a "serious," or culturally
sanctioned, speech act from stabilizing. Moreover, in
Cajetan's scheme, only divine revelation could gfuarantee
perfect correspondence between word, object, and idea, and
therefore even the devout are usually left to their own
devices as they attempt to understand the world they live in.
16. It is precisely this scholastic confusion regarding how the analogon "being"
moves across its antdogates that leads Heidegger to the "question of being." See
Martin Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978).
17. Garcia y Garca, Constitutiones quarti Lateranensis, 1.3.

Daniel M. Gross

69

In fact, Cajetan's system remains viable even if a materially

effective "God" is reduced to a structureil function, leaving
only human culture as tbe force driving language.
Tbe conditions of discursive formation are also a deep
concern for Foucault. Moreover, tbe phenomenon of einalogy
serves Foucault botb as an object of analysis and as a vital
analytic toolas it did Thomas and Cajetan. However,
Foucault forcefully rejects the suggestion of a universal
scheme underl3dng specific analogies, even if that scbeme
exists only ideally. And it is faitb in tbis universal scbeme
tbat ultimately dulls Cajetan's sensitivity to tbe role buman
babits and bistories play in creating semantic stability.
Despite our inability to grasp oiir relationsbip to God in its
exactitude, for Cajetan tbe power of buman institutions
depends, in tbe end, on the power of God. Writing in the
wake of The Order of Things, Foucault tries to "think"
anidogy against any such epistemological guarantee^for
example, a repressive episteme or a "myth"tbat fixes
identity and underwrites perfect semantic convertibility.
Tbe result is a new understanding of how analogies work.
Analogies are irreducibly ambiguous speech acts that
perform a metalinguistic function. By proposing a patently
false identity while insisting nonetheless upon kinship,
analogy does tbe impossible. It formulates the nondiscursive in a linguistic scheme and manifests simultaneously the
absurdity of doing so. This is the insight that led the
traditional tbeory of emalogy away from tbe matbematicsil
paradigm outlined above. Cajetan tells a story in whicb the
univocal term "wise," a predicate of someone sucb as
Socrates, is extended to God, instituting botb tbe kinsbip of
bumans and God, as well as their radical difference.
Similarly in Foucault's scheme, tbe term "investigation"
becomes a predicate of botb the clinical uid tbe natviral,
thereby instituting both a kinship and a radical difference.
Drawing analogies generates similitude, but only grapbic or
pbonic identity remains, that is, as long as the rhetorical
context of the analogy is specified. If restrained in tbe
semantic field, Foucault's analogical terms could be reduced
to mere identities, and bistory woiild again become farce.
But semantic context matters, as Cajetan bad once observed. To call Plato and Socrates "wise" is simply to
predicate univocally. To call God and Socrates "wise," on the
other band, is to disambiguate context and bigbligbt tbe

70

Foucault's Analogies

limits of identity. Foucault specifies context by modifying

his key term. For example, the "clinical investigation" is
distinguished fi-om the "investigation of nature," and this
distinction figures in a broad argument about the difference
between Classical and disciplinary order. The investigation
of the natural world, pace Bacon and Linnaeus, was intentionally designed to extract a truth from its objects. The
"clinical investigation," on the other hand, passively disciplines the subject by way of micro-procedures instituted
from the bottom up: tests, interviews, ordered spaces, and
so forth. "Another power," "another knowledge."
Understood, then, in terms of isolated semantic identitiesunderstood, that is, as modern logic would have
itanalogy is either meaningless or paradoxical. But
precisely because analogy manifests such blatant semantic
confusion, it demands an interpretation, or argument,
sensitive to the disparate fields it draws together. When
successful, this comparative act generates a new rhetorical
field and new historical data to be assimilated (when
calcified, the comparative act becomes inscribed in myth).
For example, in Discipline and Punish, seemingly disparate
practices of judicial, natural, and clinical investigation are
drawn together, and a new research project is formed
around "technologies of the body." So drawing analogies
carries a rhetorical as well as a historical burden. And it is
on the level of situating analogies that Foucault most
obviously diverges from Cajetan's totalizing schemeand as
we will see, from Wittgenstein's ahistoricism. Though long
aware of the possible uses and abuses of systematic comparisons, Foucault nonetheless employs analogies in The Order
of Things to regularize his "epistemes" and their transformations. In terms of method. Discipline and Punish is a
transitional work, while The History of Sexuality is
Foucault's showpiece for the dual treatment of analogies:
seemingly "natural" comparisons are subjected to sharp
historical criticism, while new comparisons are drawn along
ethicsd lines.
In summary, Cajetan specifies both the natviral causal
order and the permanent divine order that together
underwrite the analogous predication of man and God.
Indeed, for Cajetan, all analogies come pre-justified. Their
function is to confirm that order from which they have
emerged. In Foucault's The History ofSexuality, we will see.

Daniel M. Gross

71

the story is practically reversed (though of course Foucault

never explicitly addresses Cajetan or the scholastic
problematic). Analogies are ad hoc sympathies that can both
mark the emergence of true genealogical thinking or prefigure the tyranny of identity and order. But that order,
whether godly or scientistic, is imposed_after the fact. When
Foucavilt writes, a system of relatioHsls no longer guaranteed a priori, and in this respect his method depends upon
Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, especially as it is
formulated in The Blue Book. Though methodological
similarities between Wittgenstein and Foucault have been
noted by Alec McHoul, Ian Hunter, Dreyfus, and Rabinow
among others, the critical distinction has never been
adequately characterized. That distinction can be formulated most precisely by comparing their use of analogies, and
it can be boiled down to a fundamental difference between
two disciplines: history and philosophy.
Wittgenstein's Analogies
By our method we try to counteract the misleading effect of certain
analogies....
The Blue Book
I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always
taken one over from someone else. . . . Can one take the case of
Breuer and Freud as an example of Jewish reproductiveness? What
I invent are new similes [Gleichnisse].
Culture and Value

An emerging virtue of analogya term that Wittgenstein

sometimes uses interchangeably with "simile" and sometimes employs as a justified simileis that it provides a
means to make synthetic statements without appeahng to a
strict rule. This central virtue of analogy is recognized
explicitly by Wittgenstein in The Blue Book lecture notes
and absorbed ten years later into the famous Investigations
treatment of "family resemblance" (especially ^67-^76). The
resemblances between different uses of a general term resist
any sort of identification, and this fact in turn precludes the
possibility of appropriately extending the term according to
a strict rule. The "crystalline purity" of Wittgenstein's
Tractarian fantasy is thereby shattered, and in its place
grows a rhizomatic network of resemblances characterized

72

Foucault's Analogies

and extended by analogy. Wittgenstein's theory of anedogy

thus contradicts the view that everyday language is rule
governed, whether that view be old scholastic or new. And
since Foucault's analogies extend precisely this turn in the
philosophy of language toward a new historicism, it is
helpful to examine first in some detail how Wittgenstein's
ahistoricd theory of analogy works.
As Wittgenstein sees it, sjnithetic statements are perilous.
Without a rule against which synthetic statements can be
tested, the seductive force of similitude, and grammatical
analogies in particularcan lead one astray: just because
I can talk about an "unconscious thought" does not mean
that I can talk about an "unconscious toothache."^^
Wittgenstein comes to the conclusion that the disciirsive
resemblances that first caught his attention are most
appropriately understood against a background of nondiscursive practices, that is, if they are to make sense without
depending on formal rules. It is also the point at which
Wittgenstein most forcefully recasts the traditional theory
of analogy with a rhetoricd sensibility, doing so in a meinner
somewhat different from Foucault. They agree in their
distaste for metaphysical unities, and they share practical
faith in the heuristic power of analogy. But Wittgenstein
does not rely on sophisticated forms of discursive knowledge
to provide a diseimbiguating context for analogical terms.
We do not have to know, for instance, that Socrates and God
are incomparable in their mutued wisdom (Cajetan), nor that
Classical order and disciplinary order differ (Foucault).
Instead, Wittgenstein asks us simply to look and see how
analogical terms fimction in different ways as they are used
in a variety of practical situations.
Reversing Descartes's famous plea for introspection,
Wittgenstein asks us in the Investigations simply to consider
the proceedings that we call "games." I mean board-games, cardgames, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common
to them all?Don't say: "There mus be something common, or
they would not be called 'games' "but look and see whether
there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you
will not see something that is common to all, but similarities,
relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat:
don't think, but look!Look for example at board-games, with

18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book (New York: Harper, 1958), 23.

Daniel M. Gross

73

their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here

you find many correspondences with the first group, but many
common features drop out, and others appear.*^

Both by means of his style and his explicit imperative,

Wittgenstein preempts the possibility that we could ever
talk about his "theorj^ of einalogy in a traditional sense.
Anedogies perform no single linguistic or metdinguistic
function that would render them for systematic treatment.
We are not asked first to consider what Cajetan, or new
schoolmen such as Ross and Mclnemy, would call the
analogical term "game" as it variously signifiesan
approach that tends to privilege some original or
paradigmatic use of the word and then systematically
derives others by way of a causal or logical argument.
Instead / the reader am asked to consider what is shared
between the various proceedings that we call "games,"
setting me on a path that teeters precariously between
spheres of discourse and nondiscursive practicethat is, the
ambiguous domain where tinalogy does its work.
"Don't think, but look!" is the imperative that undermines
the tyranny of systematic thought that superimposes
discursive identities over related human activities. I am
asked to give up my assumption that, in a set of activities
similarly named, all share something in common. Nor can
I begin with a definition of "game" (that they are "amusing,"
that they involve winning and losing, and so forth) and
derive from this examples that instantiate the rule.
Wittgenstein asks the reader instead to 'look for example at
board-games" and then to "pass to card-games." But he
refuses to specify in words what properties the two geimes
might share; that is, he refuses to circumscribe discursively
the intended domain of perception. Each reader will "look"
at different board games, at different card-games, and at
different aspects of these games, manifesting in practice the
ad hoc nature of normal synthetic observations.
But which s3Tithetic observations exactly? Oddly those
indicated by a general termin this case "game." After a
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, ed. G. E. M. Anascombe
and R. Rhees, trans. Anascombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 166.
20. See Ross, Portraying Analogy; Ralph Maclnemy, Studies in Analogy (The
Hague: Martinus Nyhoff, 1968); David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical
Language (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), 224.

74

Foucault's Analogies

sbort lap around the hermeneutic circle, tbe far side of

wbicb took us tbrougb tbe lonely realm of silent refiection,
we wind up together back at tbe beginning. Tbere we
wonder once again about relationships between various
activities gatbered under tbe rubric of a common term.
Now, bowever, relationsbips of identity have been left
behind, and tbe "network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing" between game activities bas been cbaracterized in terms of "family resemblances," or alternatively, by
analogy. Wittgenstein asks, "Isn't my knowledge, my
concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations
that I could give? Tbat is, in my describing examples of
various kinds of games; sbowing how all sorts of other
games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying
that I should scarcely include this or this among games; and
so on" (Investigations, 1175)." Wittgenstein is suggesting
that analogy is the proactive means by wbicb a concept such
as "game" can reach beyond extant cases, wbereas "family
resemblance" provides the retroactive means to describe the
spacings, or relationships, thereby created: two sides of the
same coin.^^ Moreover, we are now justified when we specify
that the term "game" functions neither equivocally nor
univocally, but ratber in a manner akin to that described by
Cajetan; that is, the term functions analogically.
But without semantic rules to differentiate games from
non-games, how do we know when our analogies are overextended? Analogies can certainly be misleading, but what
criteria do we use to make such a judgment? Here The Blue
Book helps us:
When we say that by our method we try to counteract the
misleading effect of certain analogies, it is important that you
should understand that the idea of an analogy being mislea<ng
is nothing sharply defined. No sharp boundary can be drawn
round the cases in which we should say that a man was misled
by an analogy. The use of expressions constructed on analogical
21. For an interesting variation on this passage, see Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Grammar, 3d ed., ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell,
1973), 173.
22. In a very helpful study entitled Familienhnlichkeit und Analogie: Zur
Sem,antik genereller Termini bei Wittgenstein und Thomas von Aquin (Mnchen:
Karl Alber Freiburg, 1988), 159, Rudolf Teuwsen specifies at least four similarities
between the scholastic theory of analogy and Wittgenstein's "informed" theory of
family resemblance.

Daniel M. Gross

75

patterns stresses analogies between cases often far apart. And

by doing this these expressions may be extremely useful. It is,
in most cases, impossible to show an exact point where an
analogy begins to mislead us. (28)

Are we bound to say that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are two
people or the same person who merely changes? Neither,
claims Wittgenstein in The Blue Book. All depends on how
we use the word "person." "For the ordinary use of the word
'person' is what one might call a composite use suitable
under the ordinary circumstances" (62). We can try to make
up a new notation or language game if we so desire, but it
will have neither use nor meaning if not tied in some
understandable way to the network of inherited language
gimes. This is Wittgenstein's argument against the possibility of a private language, and it is as well an argument for
the value of analogy that echoes through the writing of
Cajetan and Foucault.
In their critictd work Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow draw Wittgenstein and Foucault together precisely
at this point.^^ "To the question, are there metarules
describing transformations? he answers that 'archaeology
tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute change.' But this 'system' turns out to be more like a
case of Wittgenstein family resemblance, where, within a
family, certain similarities persist while others drop out and
new ones show up, than like rule-governed restructuring of
the sort one might find in Piaget or Lvi-Strauss" (74,
original emphasis). Dreyfus and Rabinow continue: "In the
last analysis, in the struggle between ultimate dispersion
and discontinuity on the one hand, and the rules for systematic change that would restore order and intelligibility on
the other, Foucavilt seems to hesitate, as if he is drawn to
both tdtematives and finds neither entirely satisfactory.
Like a true phenomenologist, whether Husserlian or
Wittgensteinian, his solution is to stick as closely as possible
to the facts of dispersion and then to call the resxilting
description a 'system of transformation' " (74). But Dreyfus
and Rabinow believe that such question-begging fails to
resolve Foucault's archaeological "hesitation," and so they
23. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982).

Beyond

76

Foucault's Analogies

ultimately tease fi-om Foucault's later work a theory of

Kuhnian "paradigms and practices" designed to explain how
transformations happen (197-202). My thesis is precisely
that historically sensitive analogies, and not paradigms,
take Foucault beyond structuralism and hermeneutics.
No strict rules determine how an expression can be
extended by analogy, and nothing general can be said that
might circumscribe such extension. Semantic nodes in our
language fork periodically and unpredictably, leaving
analogical terms behind. But fi'om Wittgenstein's perspective, linguistic exfoliation occurs according to chance,
circumstance and need, rather than according to a divine
plan. They provide a means to make unsystematic moves in
a language game, to stretch the boundaries of language as
described, say, by Cajetan. But ultimately such moves must
confront what Wittgenstein calls "the institution of language
and all its surroundings" (Investigations, ^540). None have
shown more clearly than Foucault that the surroundings of
lfinguage one must confront when drawing analogies are
composed in terms of history. In the final section, I show
how Foucault's poststructuralist methodology crystallized in
The History of Sexuality.
Foucault's Sympathetic Analogies
The later Foucault researches how sympathies have been
systematically confined, while plotting in his own creative
comparisons new routes for escape. However, Foucault
describes the magical play of sympathies first in a passage
firom The Grder of Thingsa passage that purports to
describe a figure unique to the Renaissance, but actually
appears to be a displaced description of Foucault's own
poststructuralist methodology. Unlike a systematic analogy,
sympathy "is not content to spring from a single contact and
speed through space; it excites the things of the world to
movement and can draw even the most distant of them
together. It is a principle of mobility.. . . Here, no path has
been determined in advance, no distance laid down, no links
prescribed" (The Order of Things, 23).^* In the History of
24. Foucault continues, citing Porta's Magie 7iaturee: "Sympathy plays through
the depth ofthe universe in a free state. It can traverse the vastest spaces in an
instint: it falls bke a thunderbolt from the distant planet upon the man ruled by

Daniel M. Gross

77

Sexuality it is the contingency of analogies that matters.

Analogies that could march lock-step across a grid of
categories inscribing themselves in allegory along the way
are left instead to wander from the system that justifies
them. Sympathetic ansdogies are rendered in their stead.
Take Foucault's pointed deconstruction of a typically modern
analogy: "father:family::sovereign:society.'' (And note that
this passage comes from a chapter of The History of Sexuality on "Method"):
the father in the family is not the "representative" of the
sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the
father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society,
just as society does not imitate the family. But the family
organization, precisely to the extent that it was insular and
heteromorphous with respect to the other power mechanisms,
was used to support the great "maneuvers" employed for the
Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist
incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the
psychiatrization of its nongenital forms. (100)

A typically knotty passage, but one worth close scrutiny.

The point is that no strict rule, no direct causality, and no
predetermined proportionedity generates the similarity
between the father and the sovereign, or between the family
and society. Rather these "insular and heteromorphous"
pairings were used at a particular historical moment to
implement and justify a particular kind of social policy. And
it is Foucault's job to generate an argument around this
seemingly natural analogy that reinscribes its local and
accidental character. That is genealogy in its negative
moment. Its positive momentexploited by Foucault
throughout his scholarly lifecan best be seen in volumes
two and three of The History of Sexuality.
Foucault's subtle game of argumentative defamiliarization
shapes the very last passage of his entire published
that planet; on the other heind, it can be brought into being by a simple contactas
with those "mourning roses that have been used at obsequies' which, simply from
their former adjacency with death, will render all persons who smell them 'sad and
moribxmd' " {The Order of Things, 72). In "Theatrum Philisophicum" (1970), a
review of Gilles Deleuze's Diffrence et Rptition and Logique du Sens, the
Renaissance concept of sympathy recurs importantly as "resonance" and the
"phantasmatic." Resonance, like sympathy, is a nomadic and ad hoc form of
similitude, contrasting identities that would be justified against a grid of
categories. See Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 192.

78

Foucault's Analogies

corpusa passage d e s i g n e ^ originally to serve as a

transition to Les Aveux de la Chair, the anticipated fourth
volume of The History of Sexuality. There he argues that
the Christian ethics that we still, in many ways, view as our
own "remain analogous" to those of fourth-century Greece,
but derive "from a different way of constituting oneself as
the ethical subject of one's sexual behavior."^^ This historical claim is set up in part by meeting the rhetorical burden
demanded by analogical terms lurking in the record. Among
other things, Foucault must explain precisely how the "sex
pathologies" that begin to emerge in austere medical tracts
are not exactly Christian evils, nor could they be univocally
related to modem sex pathologies. "In these [ancient]
medical regimens," Foucault reminds us,
one sees a certain "pathologization" of the sexual act take place.
But there must be no misunderstanding on this point: the
development in question is in no way similar to the one that
occurred much later in Western societies, when sexual behavior
was perceived as a bearer of unhealthy deviation. . . . It is
important to understand that this medicine of the chrsesis
aphrodision [or "uses of pleasure"] did not aim to delimit the
"pathological" forms of sexual behavior: rather, it uncovered, at
the root of sexual acts, an element of passivity that was also a
source of illness, according to the double meaning of the word
pathos. The sexual act is not an evil; it manifests a permanent
focus of possible ills. (142)

In fact, Foucault's genealogies regularly entail a reflexive

moment when analogical terms are carefully isolated:
isolated both from the xmivocal interpretation that produces
a mistaken history, andfromthe antihistory of equivocation.
Here Foucault does insist upon the kinship of an ancient
and a modern sexual "pathology," in the scare quotes that
remind us that he is making a discursive point. The kinship
is proposed as self-evident; one "sees" it at least in the
grapheme. But the next sentence insists that an ancient
sexual pathology is in no way similar to the modem.
This paradox with a purpose should now be fam,iliar. In
a manner reminiscent of Hegel's dialectic, the analogical
term "pathology" is proposed first as necessary, and then as
insufficient to capture the diversity of the practices to which
it refers; on the discursive level, one proposition logically
25. Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Vol. 3, trans. R.
Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986), 143, 239.

Daniel M. Gross

79

negates tbe otber. But, out of tbis logical contradiction, two

new directions are opened for tbougbt: first, it makes room
for an argument detailing bow two practices can differ in
every way wbile maintaining a kinsbipin tbe sense first
described by Wittgenstein. However, unlike Wittgenstein,
Foucault believes tbat tbe precise contours of tuiy a fortiori
description are critical. It matters wbo tells tbe story, in
wbat historical context, and what purposes are tbereby
served. In sbort, Foucault takes any weigbty description as
a function of power. Second, tbe psirticular danger of using
discursive means recklessly to identify tbe nondiscursive is
set before tbe eyes stylistically.'^^ It is tbe bsillmark of
Foucavdt's work, or tbe work of any rigorous analogical
tbinker, to characterize in language tbe troubled relationsbip between language and practice marked by tbe analogical aporia. Tbis done, tbe past is prepared for strategic use.
Foucault's passive positivities loosen tbe ties tbat bind
form to identity. His analogies do not commit tbe bistorian
to a surreptitious metapbysics, but neitber are tbey inert
descriptions. Tbey can be used. Witness for instance bow
tbe classicist David Halperin structures Saint Foucault
aroxmd tbe analogical term "homosexual ascesis." Tbe term
is first elaborated as tbe "spiritual exercises of etbical selffasbioning, by wbicb modern subjects can acbieve transcendence."^^ Tben the "structviral isomorphism" between
ancient and modern forms of ascesis is detailed as Foucault
would do in his skeptical moments: "it is secular, not
Christian . .. calls not for less pleasure but for vastly more
pleasure," and so on. Wbat a study such as Halperin's
suggests, as do works by the likes of Paul Veyne, Arnold
26. Hayden White indeed claims that a Rousselian nongeneralized "style" holds
Foucault's works together, be it the "certain constant manner of speaking" of
Foucault's early texts or the style renvers of his genealogies. I have been arguing
that the style that draws these two periods of Foucault's work together is
specically analogical. See White, "Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of
Anti-Humanism," The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987),
139-40.
27. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1995), 102. See also Paul Veyne, "The Final Foucault and His Ethics,"
trans. Catherine Porter and Arnold I. Davidson, Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993):
1-9; Arnold I. Davidson, "Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and
Ancient Thought," in Goldstein, ed. 63-80; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries:
Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992), 18, 25.

80

Foucault's Analogies

Davidson, and Jonathan Goldberg, is that Foucault's

revisionist history of ethics far exceeds the tour de force of a
clever and contrary antihistorian. It in fact provides a
positive historical method for scholars working in gender
studies and beyond.
Not surprisingly, a historical method that allows one to
move fiuidly between disparate discourses also has informed
cultural history, and especially its literary offspring, the
New Historicism. Analogy in a Foucauldian mode plays a
central role, for instance, in Jacqueline Lichtenstein's The
Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French

Classical Age (a book that appeared in the "Cultural Poetics"

series edited by Stephen Greenblatt): "in painting, color had
the same relation to drawing that the body had to discourse
in rhetoric: the same uncomfortable place that Platonic
metaphysics assigned to the visible and its images."^^ Or
consider the diachronic analogy already formed in the title
of Kevin Sharpe and Stephen N. Zwicker's Refiguring
Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English
Revolution to the Romantic Revolution: "where the English
Civil War had fractured the Renaissance body politic, the
French Revolution deconstructed the romantic self "^ For
literary historians, analogies between political and aesthetic
28. "Thus we can understand that the eloquent body and pictorial color provoked
similar perplexities in different domains that are centuries apart. . . . Rhetoric
wished to control its eloquence within the regulated discourse; painting, to inscrihe
the rules of discoiirse within its images." Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence
of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily
McVarish (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993), 6-7; Stephen Greenblatt famously
articulates the logic of analogous thinking in Shakespearean Negotiations: The
Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: U of California P,
1988), 5-12. There Greenblatt defines cultural poetics as "study of the collective
making of distinct cultured practices tind inquiry into the relations among these
practices," and then specifies the relational modes that transfer a social practice
to the stage, one of which he terms "metaphorical acquisition": "Metaphorical
acquisition works by teasing out latent homologies, similitudes, systems of
likeness, but it depends equally upon a deliberate distmcing or distortion that
precedes the disclosure of likeness. Hence a play will insist upon the difference
between its representation and the "real," only to draw out to the analogy or
proportion linking them." Like Foucault describing the play of sympathies in the
Renaissemce, Greenblatt's characterization of historical "content" bleeds into his
own methodology.
29. Kevin Sharpe and Stephen N. Zwicker, Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics
and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1998), 15.

Daniel M. Gross

81

discourses are a favorite topic, while historians of science

have favored analogies between political and scientific
discourses.^" If anything, literary and other sorts of cultural
historians overextend analogies just as Wittgenstein feared,
hopping nimbly firom one discourse to another or one
historical period to another, rather than providing causal
explanations for apparent similaritiesthe dirty work of
historical reasoning. Remember, Foucault avoids overextending analogies by asking in each case how discursive
similarities are a function of power. What purposes are
served in comparing the pervert to the libertine? What
research programs created? What historical narratives
rewritten?
Though innovative insofar as power is an explicit concern
when establishing sympathetic analogies, Foucault's
historical method is not completely without precedent.
Surprising is that the precedent is not established by
NietzscheFoucault's chosen masterbut rather by the
very masters of late nineteenth-century German historicism
against whom Nietzsche's genealogical method is positioned:
Ranke, Droysen, Dilthey, and, later in the tradition, HansGeorg Gadamer. For these proponents ofthe hermeneutic
method, as for Foucault, sympathy is a basic condition for
historical knowledge. It is, as Gadamer describes it, a form
of relationship between I and Thou, a form of love that
allows the historian to achieve an understanding ofthe past
that would otherwise be impossible. Whether the relation30. A kind of Foucauldian analogy in the history of science is exemplified by
John Rogers in The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age
of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), who argues in his preface that discourses of
seventeenth-centiuy political philosophy and natural philosophy are inseparable.
In a footnote, Rogers reveals his methodological inspiration: "I have found more
congenial to my own approach the histories of science that have studied the politics
of natural philosophy with an eye to the analogical rhetoric of physical
explanation," including Carolyn Merchant, The Death ofNature: Women, Ecology,
and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980); James R.
Jacoh and Margaret C. Jacob, "The Anglican Origins of Modem Science: The
Metaphysical Foimdations ofthe Whig Constitution,"/sis 71 (1980): 251-67; Otto
Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986); and two early works by Stephen Shapin,
"Social Uses of Science," in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the
Historiography of Eighteenth Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 95-139, and "Of God's and Kings: Natural
Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes," Isis 72 (1981): 187-215.

g2

Foucault's Analogies

ship of Thucidydes to Pericles or Rsuike to Luther, sympathy

guides the choice of historical object and initiates interpretation. But as Gadamer is quick to point out, sjnnpathy is also
much more than simply a condition of knowledge. Through
it, "iuiother person is transformed at the same time."'^
The sympathy (or antipathy) a historian feels toward his
or her object is not pristine and detached, nor does the object
leave the historian unaffected. As Foucault reveals in his
discussion of the Renaissance episteme, sympathy is an
intense and mutually transformative attraction. What is
more, it need not be just an emotional condition relating two
people; it can relate and transform ways of being as well, or
even inanimate things. Historical analysis that relates
modern ethics to an ancient aesthetics of existence is
"useful" to Foucault precisely for this reason. By isolating,
for instance, the austere art of living in fourth-century
Greece from the familiar nsirrative that renders it proportionally analogous to a modern science of sex, Foucault frees
it to resonate with and transform our modern way of living.
Thus researching what we are not, or how things differ, is
not the historian's only task. On the contrary, it is when
things enter into analogical resonance that "it becomes
worthwhile to think."
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

31. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 232-33.