Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Freedom and the subject were guiding themes for Michel Foucault
throughout his philosophical career. In this clear and comprehensive
analysis of his thought, Johanna Oksala identifies the different interpre-
tations of freedom in his philosophy and examines three major divisions
of it: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical. She shows
convincingly that in order to appreciate Foucaults project fully we must
understand his complex relationship to phenomenology, and she dis-
cusses Foucaults treatment of the body in relation to recent feminist
work on this topic. Her sophisticated but lucid book illuminates the pos-
sibilities which Foucaults philosophy opens up for us in thinking about
freedom.
JOHANNA OKSALA
University of Helsinki
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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C Johanna Oksala 2005
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
pa rt i l a n g ua g e
1 Philosophical laughter 17
An archaeology of order 19
The three epistemes 23
The birth and death of man 30
The being of language 34
2 The Foucaultian failure of phenomenology 40
The history of science 41
The analytic of finitude 53
3 The anonymity of language 70
A view from nowhere 71
The subject of change 78
The freedom of language 81
pa rt i i b o dy
4 A genealogy of the subject 93
The constitution of the subject 95
The problem of circularity 104
5 Anarchic bodies 110
The body of power 111
The discursive body 117
v
vi contents
pa rt i i i e t h i c s
7 The silence of ethics 157
History of ethics 157
Ethics as practice 160
The ethical subject 161
Ethics as aesthetics 165
Philosophy lived 169
8 The freedom of philosophy 175
The freedom of critical reflection 176
Freedom as ethos 182
The different meanings of freedom 188
9 The other 193
Ethical subject and the other 195
Subjectivity as passivity 199
The other as precondition of ethics 204
Conclusion: freedom as an operational concept 208
References 211
Index 220
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
vii
A B B R E V I AT I O N S F O R W O R K S
B Y F O U C A U LT
Books in English
AK The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
DL Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Trans.
Charles Ruas. New York: Doubleday, 1986.
DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheri-
dan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977/1991.
HS The History of Sexuality, vol. i, An Introduction. Trans. Robert
Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
OT The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
London: Routledge, 1970/1994.
UP The History of Sexuality, vol. ii, The Use of Pleasure. Trans.
Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
viii
l i s t o f a b b r e v i at i o n s ix
Books in French
AS Larcheologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969/2001.
MC Les mots et les choses. Une archeologie des sciences humaines. Paris:
Gallimard, 1966/1996.
RR Raymond Roussel. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
xii l i s t o f a b b r e v i at i o n s
1
2 fo u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
I belong to the generation who as students had before their eyes, and
were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and
existentialism . . . at the time I was working on my book about the history of
madness [Folie et deraison]. I was divided between existential psychology
and phenomenology, and my research was an attempt to discover the
extent that these could be defined in historical terms . . . Thats when I
discovered that the subject would have to be defined in other terms than
Marxism or phenomenology.
(PS, 174)8
9 Foucault distinguishes two different modalities according to which French thinkers appro-
priated Husserls thought after his Paris lectures in 1929. One was the existentialist read-
ing of Sartre, which took Husserl in the direction of a philosophy of the subject, and the
other was Cavailles reading, which, according to Foucault, brought it back to its founding
principles in formalism and the theory of science (INP, 89). Foucault situates his own
thought in the tradition of Cavailles, which developed as the history of thought and the
philosophy of science.
introduction 9
And if phenomenology, after quite a long period when it was kept at the
border, finally penetrated in its turn, it was undoubtedly the day when
Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis, posed the question of
the relations between the western project of a universal development
of reason, the positivity of the sciences and the radicality of philosophy.
(INP, 11)10
10 Et si la phenomenologie, apres une bien longue periode ou elle fut tenue en lisiere,
a fini par penetrer a son tour, cest sans doute du jour ou Husserl, dans les Meditations
cartesiennes et dans la Krisis, a pose la question des rapports entre le projet occidental
dun deploiement universel de la raison, la positivite des sciences et la radicalite de la
philosophie. (IMF, 432)
10 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
This book is divided into three parts: Language (chapters 1, 2, and 3),
Body (chapters 4, 5, and 6) and Ethics (chapters, 7, 8, and 9). These three
parts explicate the three constitutive modes of subjectivity in Foucaults
thought, and they also correspond loosely with the three chronological
periods in it: archaeology, genealogy and his late writings on ethics.
The structure of the book is primarily thematic, however. I do not offer
a chronological reading of the development of Foucaults thought, or
a philosophical reconstruction of Foucaults theory of the subject.
Instead, I ask what freedom means at different points in his work and
study its preconditions as well as its problems. My argument is that
language, the body and ethics are the domains in which the different senses
of freedom can be found. My focus on certain Foucault texts, and the
omission of others, are based on this thematic priority.
The first part of the book, Language, inquires into the idea of free-
dom present in Foucaults archaeology. The focus of my reading is
on The Order of Things, which studies the question of language most
explicitly. I explicate Foucaults philosophical position by contrasting it
to Husserls phenomenology, particularly to his late work, The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. This is illuminative
in terms of understanding the philosophical implications of Foucaults
treatment of the history of science in OT. I also make a stronger claim
about the importance of reading OT in relation to phenomenology. I
will show how many of the central philosophical issues, as well as the
methodological directions, that are present in OT are motivated by the
problems arising out of the phenomenological enterprise.
In OT Foucault advocates the idea of language as something that
always outruns the subject, who can never completely master it. Lan-
guage is not simply an instrument of expression, it also generates an
excess of meanings. Foucault gives language a regulative role in the
mode of scientific discourse, but it also demarcates a domain of free-
dom in the mode of literature, particularly as avant-garde writing. There
is an ontological order of things implicit in the theories of scientific dis-
course. Language as avant-garde writing is, however, capable of form-
ing alternative, unscientific and irrational ontological realms: different
experiences of order on the basis of which different perceptual and
practical grids become possible, and hence lead to new ways of seeing
and experiencing. While Foucaults archaeology is generally viewed as
emphasizing the necessary structures of thought and opposing human-
ist aspirations of looking for the freedom of man, there is an anti-
humanist understanding of freedom as an opening of new possibilities
introduction 11
LANGUAGE
1
PHILOSOPHICAL LAUGHTER
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his eyes. Whither is God? he cried; I will tell you. We have
killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how
did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave
us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we
doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it
moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are
we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward,
in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not
straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the
breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night
continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns
in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the
gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as
yet of the divine decomposition? Gods too decompose. God
is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
(Nietzsche 1887/1974,181)
The instant bestseller that made Foucault famous, The Order of Things
(OT), arose out of laughter. Foucault opens the book by writing that the
book arouse out of a passage in Borges, from a laughter that shattered
all the familiar landmarks of his thought and continued long afterwards
to disturb and threaten with collapse the age-old distinction between
the Same and the Other. This passage quoted a certain Chinese
encyclopedia which presented a wholly other system of thought and
therefore broke up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing
things (OT, xv). The shattering impossibility to think in certain ways
17
18 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
shows the continuity of the two projects as well as their roots in a com-
mon Kantian origin. According to Han, for Foucault, phenomenology
is both an interlocutor and a favoured target, because it also attempts
to overcome the obstacle of pure transcendentalism. Despite appear-
ances, archaeology is profoundly connected to phenomenology in that
it attempts to find a solution to the same problem and adopts a method
that is similar in aspects such as its descriptive rather than explicative
outlook (Han 1998/2002, 5).
This first chapter presents a concise explication of the main philo-
sophical arguments in OT. The explication prepares the way for the
reading put forward in the second chapter, which contrasts OT to
Husserls thought, particularly to his late work, The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Following the presentation
of the negative or critical side of archaeology as an effort to overcome
the problems inherent in phenomenology, the third chapter evaluates
the positive contribution of Foucaults archaeology to philosophical
questioning. It focuses on the topic that is the overriding theme of
the present book: the question of freedom in Foucaults thought. I will
argue that OT contains an idea of otherness a realm outside the dis-
cursive order of things which represents freedom for Foucault. This
possibility of an otherness outside of what can be scientifically ordered
and brought within the realm of knowledge does not lie in some pure
and prelinguistic sphere of originary experience, however, but in lan-
guage itself.
An archaeology of order
Foucault argues in OT that there is a level of order, a positive uncon-
scious of knowledge, that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and
yet is formative of scientific discourse. This level gives us the organiz-
ing principles of knowledge, the unconscious structures that order sci-
entific discourses. Even though individual scientists never formulated
these principles, nor were they even aware of them at the time, this
level nevertheless defines the objects proper to their study. It consti-
tutes the condition of possibility for forming concepts and building
theories (OT, xi). Hence, beyond the level of scientific discoveries, dis-
cussions, theories and philosophical views exists an archaeological level
formative of them. This level consists of the ontological order of things
assumed to exist, and also of the principles that organize the relation-
ships between things and words in terms of what exists and how it
20 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Quite obviously such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas
or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what
basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order
knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori and in
the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established,
experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only,
perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards.
(OT, xxii)4
3 Cet a priori, cest ce qui, a une epoque donnee, decoupe dans lexperience un champ
de savoir possible, definit le mode detre des objets qui y apparaissent, arme le regard
quotidien de pouvoirs theoriques, et definit les conditions dans lesquelles on peut tenir
sur les choses un discours reconnu pour vrai. (MC, 171)
4 Une telle analyse, on le voit, ne releve pas de lhistoire des idees ou des sciences: cest
plutot une etude qui sefforce de retrouver a partir de quoi connaissances et theories
ont ete possibles; selon quel espace dordre sest constitue le savoir; sur fond de quel a
priori historique et dans lelement de quelle positivite des idees ont pu apparatre, des
sciences se constituer, des experiences se reflechir dans des philosophies, des rationalites
se former, pour, peut-etre, se denouer et sevanouir bientot. (MC, 13)
p h i l o s o p h i c a l l au g h t e r 21
5 Beatrice Han (1998/2002) shows that Foucaults inquiry into the historical a priori of
knowledge is a search for a principle of determination, which is non-subjective. It has
the function of introducing into the field of knowledge a principle of nonsubjective
determination, which defines for a given period and geographical area the historical
form taken by the constitution of various forms of knowledge (45).
6 The notion of episteme presented in OT was widely criticized for being a totality as well
as a static notion that excludes change. In the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of
Knowledge (AK), Foucault answers this criticism and modifies his stance. He denies that
there is one episteme for the science of a particular period: the relations that he describes
are valid only in order to define a particular configuration (AK, 159). He also writes that
episteme is not an immobile figure but rather an infinitely mobile group of scansions,
shifts, and coincidences which establish and dismantle themselves (AK, 250).
7 OFarrell (1989, 545) argues that when the notion of episteme is introduced for the
first time in OT, Foucault uses it in two different ways: firstly to denote the entirety of
western knowledge, and secondly to describe different configurations of knowledge at
different periods.
8 See e.g. Machado 1989/1992, 14.
22 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
9 ce quon voudrait mettre au jour, cest le champ epistemologique, lepisteme ou les con-
naissances, envisagees hors de tout critere se referant a leur valeur rationnelle ou a leur
formes objectives, enfoncent leur positivite et manifestent ainsi une histoire qui nest pas
celle de leur perfection croissante, mais plutot celle de leurs conditions de possibilite
(MC, 13).
p h i l o s o p h i c a l l au g h t e r 23
The classical episteme. With the advent of the classical age there occurred
a change. At the beginning of the seventeenth century similitude ceased
to be the organizing principle of words and things. It was, rather, under-
stood as the occasion for error, something that tempted man to draw
conclusions from the deceiving senses (OT, 51). The hierarchy of analo-
gies was substituted by the analysis of identity and difference. Rational-
ism was to replace old superstitious beliefs. It was firmly believed in the
classical age that being had a universal order that could be analyzed
by a universal method and that could be represented by signs that mir-
rored perfectly this order of being. Knowledge was organized in a table,
it could be displayed as a perfect system. The method was to find the
simple nature of beings and proceed from them to more complex ones
p h i l o s o p h i c a l l au g h t e r 25
10 le langage nest plus une des figures du monde, ni la signature imposee aux choses
depuis le fond des temps. La verite trouve sa manifestation et son signe dans la percep-
tion evidente et distincte. Il appartient aux mots de la traduire sils le peuvent; ils nont
plus droit a en etre la marque. Le langage se retire du milieu des etres pour entrer dans
son age de transparence et de neutralite. (MC, 70)
26 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
The modern episteme. There occurred another a major change at the end
of the eighteenth century. Foucault claims that the visible order of
things was torn apart: a space opened up behind it that required expla-
nation. Knowledge no longer meant perceiving and representing the
visible order in language. It now meant disclosing the invisible basis of
living beings in life, of different discourses in the being of language,
of the systems of wealth in labour. Language, life and labour become
p h i l o s o p h i c a l l au g h t e r 27
11 Ainsi, la culture europeenne sinvente une profondeur ou il sera question non plus des
identites, des caracteres distinctifs, des tables permanentes avec tous leurs chemins et
parcours possibles, mais des grandes forces cachees developpees a partir de leur noyau
primitif et inaccessible, mais de lorigine, de la causalite et de lhistoire. (MC, 263)
28 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Man was simply another being in Gods well-ordered table. His place
as the organizer of the representations was never problematised in the
classical episteme. According to Foucault, man as an ordering subject
thus did not appear in western thought until Kant. In Kants thought,
man has taken the place of God as the organizer of the world, but he
has done this by virtue of being tied to finitude, by being limited. It is
the limits of his knowledge that make knowledge of the world possible.
Foucault describes the philosophy following Kant up to the present
as different efforts to deal with the dissolution of the homogenous field
of orderable representations. He distinguishes between two correlative
new forms of thought. On the one hand, there is the reformulation
of transcendental philosophy in the form of phenomenology: the ques-
tioning of the conditions of possibility of representation from the point
of view of the experiencing subject. On the other hand, there are the
forms of thought in which knowledge is grounded in the mode of being
of the object. Foucault writes that in the latter modes of thought, the
conditions of possibility of experience are being sought in the condi-
tions of possibility of the object and its existence whereas in transcen-
dental reflection the conditions of possibility of the objects of experi-
ence are identified with the conditions of possibility of experience itself
(OT, 244). Foucault refers here, on the one hand, to positivism: There
are philosophies that set themselves no other task than the observa-
tion of precisely that which is given to positive knowledge (OT, 244).
The other possible counterpart to transcendental philosophy of the
subject are the various metaphysics of the object. For these forms of
thought there are transcendentals Will for Schopenhauer, Life for
Nietzsche which form the conditions of possibility of the always partial
knowledge of the subject. These metaphysics of the object, according
to Foucault, posit an objective foundation behind experience, with its
own rationality that the subject is never able to bring to light completely.
The modern episteme thus has become severely fractured. There is no
one unified archaeological basis of knowledge.12
12 Foucault argues that there are, in fact, two forms of fracture. Firstly, there is the split
between forms of knowledge finding their basis in transcendental subjectivity and those
finding a basis in the mode of being of the object. Secondly, because of the emergence of
empirical fields of which mere internal analysis of representation can no longer provide
an account, there is also a split between the field of a priori sciences, pure, formal
sciences, and the domain of a posteri sciences, empirical sciences. These two forms of
fracture give rise to the modern problem concerning the relations between the formal
field and the transcendental field, the domain of empiricity and the transcendental
foundation of knowledge (OT, 248).
30 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
knowledge of the world, and at the same a being in the world that can be
known. Foucault calls man an empirico-transcendental doublet. Man,
finite, yet a basis of all knowledge, is an invention of modern thought.
In his double aspect, man is at the same time a fact among other facts
to be studied empirically, and he is the transcendental ground of all
knowledge. He is formed by a complex network of background prac-
tices that he can never fully understand, and yet he is the possibility
of their elucidation. He is a product of a history whose beginning he
cannot reach and at the same time he is the writer of that history.
Foucault claims that the new conceptual space in which the human
sciences were formed in the modern age took shape in the figure of
man:
In classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists,
and who represents himself within it, recognizes himself therein as an
image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of
the representation in the form of the table he is never to be found
in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did
not exist anymore than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or
the historical density of language. He is quite a recent creature, which
the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with his own hands less than two
hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only
too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in
the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he could finally
be known.
(OT, 308)13
13 Dans la pensee classique, celui pour qui la representation existe, et qui se represente
lui-meme en elle, sy reconnaissant pour image ou reflet, celui qui noue tous les fils
entrecroises de la representation en tableau, celui-la ne sy trouve jamais present
lui-meme. Avant la fin du XVIIIe siecle, lhomme nexistait pas. Non plus que la puissance
de la vie, la fecondite du travail, ou lepaisseur historique du langage. Cest une toute
recente creature que la demiurgie du savoir a fabriquee de ses mains, il y a moins de
deux cents ans: mais il a si vite vieilli, quon a imagine facilement quil avait attendu dans
lombre pendant des millenaires le moment dillumination ou il serait enfin connu.
(MC, 319)
32 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
initiator of the discursive space in which Modernity deploys itself by critically questioning
the conditions of possibility of representation, and consequently of all possible knowl-
edge. On the other hand, for Foucault, Kant was the insurmountable limit of Modern
thought because his thought initiated the monopolization of the field of possible knowl-
edge by man and his doubles. The critical question of the conditions of possibility of
true knowledge was, for Kant, intrinsically connected to the introduction of the distinc-
tion between the empirical and the transcendental. Han reads Foucaults unpublished
complementary doctoral thesis, which was a commentary to his translation of Kants
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and argues that in this text Foucaults aim
was to show how the strict separation between the transcendental and the empirical put
forward by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason undergoes an inflection in the Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View symbolized by the recentring of Kants triple interrogation
on to the question What is man? This displacement is problematic for Foucault, as it
makes the contents of empirical experience work as their own condition of possibility;
moreover it seeks within human finitude the elements of a transcendental determina-
tion henceforth made impossible in principle by the anthropological confusion between
the empirical and the a priori (Han 1998/2002, 3). Han writes: Commentary permits us
to establish that it is not the Kantian critique in its totality that marks the threshold of
our Modernity, but that the line of division passes within Kants work itself, separating
the original formulations of the transcendental theme from its later versions (35). This
means that Foucaults work is not only a critical reaction to phenomenology, but also
and more profoundly to Kant. According to Han, it is the identification of the Kantian
aporia that provided Foucault with a guide from which he was able to build a contrario an
original method and conceptual apparatus, and that allowed him to reopen the critical
question of the conditions of possibility of knowledge while attempting to throw off the
last anthropological constraints (Han 1998/2002, 45).
34 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
16 While language was posited and reflected upon only in the form of an analysis of rep-
resentation in the classical age, in the modern age it appeared as a question in its own
right. Language itself had become an object of science, instead of having the sole right
to represent the natural order of things. According to Foucault, this demotion of lan-
guage was compensated for in three ways. Firstly, because language was not only an
object of science but also the necessary medium for any scientific knowledge, there
arose the aim of neutralizing scientific language so that it could mirror the world as
exactly as possible. Foucault calls this the positivist dream of a purified, logical language
(OT, 2967). Secondly, because language had lost its transparency and resumed instead
the enigmatic density it possessed at the time of the Renaissance, this resulted in the
revival of the techniques of exegesis (OT, 298). And thirdly, there was the birth of lit-
erature in the modern sense. According to Foucault, modernist writing is not about
creating beauty or pleasing our senses. What it lays before us is the enigmatic being of
language, the bare existence of words with their indefinite meanings (OT, 300).
p h i l o s o p h i c a l l au g h t e r 35
Hence, one can say that Foucault considers the whole network of knowl-
edge, in its positivity, also to constitute its own unconscious, the his-
torical a priori that makes certain problems and ways of questioning
possible. Thus, he does not claim that there exists two separate onto-
logical levels, the network of scientific discourses, on the one hand, and
the conditions that form it, on the other. There is only the network of
discourses, which can, however, be retrospectively analyzed on differ-
ent levels. Archaeological analysis reveals the structures of this network
that have remained unconscious to its practitioners while conditioning
their thought and experience.
The nominalist idea that discourse systematically forms the objects
of which it speaks, as well as the ontological order on the basis of which
they become possible, is made more explicit in the book that followed
17 For more on Foucaults nominalism, see e.g. Flynn 1994, Rouse 1994.
18 Si on veut entreprendre une analyse archeologique du savoir lui-meme . . . Il faut
reconstituer le systeme general de pensee dont le reseau, en sa positivite, rend possible
un jeu dopinions simultanees et apparemment contradictoires. Cest ce reseau qui
definit les conditions de possibilite dun debat ou dun probleme, cest lui qui est porteur
de lhistoricite du savoir. (MC, 89)
36 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
19 Beatrice Han (1998, 8793) argues that Foucaults nominalist position is not consistent
in OT, and that there is a major shift between OT and AK. The historical a priori is
defined in OT as an implicit relationship between words and things, or between being
and language: the conditions of possibility of forms of knowledge consist of different
relationships between the being of signs and being in general. Foucault considered it his
task to chart the different forms of this relationship between words and things through
history, from the Renaissance to modernity. According to Han, his form of analysis
already makes it clear that he must still have presupposed an ontology of words and
things in OT an ontology of two separate and autonomous modes of existence
to be able to analyze the changing forms of their relationship. Hence, although he ret-
rospectively claimed that his book dealt with neither words nor things, but rather with
objects, which are discursively constituted, his position becomes consistently nominal-
ist only after OT.
20 Foucault acknowledged in AK that he used the notion of discourse in at least three
different ways: (1) as a general domain of all statements, (2) as an individualizable
group of statements, (3) as a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of
statements (AK, 80). I will restrict myself to the last meaning, which, I argue, is central
to understanding Foucaults philosophical position. For more on Foucaults concept of
discourse see e.g. Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, Frank 1989/1992.
21 Tache qui consiste a ne pas a ne plus traiter les discours comme des ensembles de
signes (delements signifiants renvoyant a des contenus ou a des representations) mais
comme des practiques qui forment systematiquement les objets dont ils parlent. Certes,
les discours sont faits de signes; mais ce quils font, cest plus que dutiliser ces signes
pour designer des choses. Cest ce plus, qui les rend irreductibles a la langue et a la
parole. Cest ce plus quil faut faire apparatre et quil faut decrire. (AS, 667)
p h i l o s o p h i c a l l au g h t e r 37
transcendental philosophy in the sense that his aim was to isolate the
conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge for an epoch, in AK he
restricts his analysis more strictly to particular discursive fields and their
conditions of existence.
I will show in the following chapter how the central role Foucault
gives to language, as well as the methodological paths that he explores
in studying it, can be read as reactions to the problems arising out of phe-
nomenology. I take the main motivation in Foucaults criticism of phe-
nomenology in OT to be to reveal the problems involved in grounding
knowledge on the being of man and to press upon us the need to find
a new direction for philosophical inquiry in the study of language. By
comparing Foucaults archaeology to Husserls phenomenology, espe-
cially to the formulations Husserl gives his project in his late work The
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, I hope to
bring to light both the common forms of questioning as well as the
profound methodological differences.
The philosophical laughter that inaugurates OT reappears later on
in the book as laughter directed at phenomenology as a prime example
of a thought centred on man. Philosophical laughter is what Foucault
thinks is needed in order to shatter the familiar landmarks, the dom-
ineering forms of thought, and to inaugurate a new mode of thinking.
However, he must have been aware of the vulnerability of his own philo-
sophical position, since his philosophical laughter could only ever be
silent laughter. He ends his criticism of phenomenology in chapter 9
by writing:
man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection
we can answer only with a philosophical laugh which means, to a certain
extent, a silent one.
(OT, 3423)22
T H E F O U C A U LT I A N FA I L U R E
OF PHENOMENOLOGY
1 Husserl explicates the notion of historical a priori in his essay The Origin of Geometry.
Although Foucaults historical a priori originates from there, it gets a very different mean-
ing in Foucaults thought. I will return to the difference between Husserls and Foucaults
notions at the end of this chapter.
40
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 41
Husserl argues that the life-world forms the basis of all human praxis,
including all scientific praxis. All theories of science not just empirical
sciences but also the a priori sciences, such as mathematics and logic
derive their meaning and grounds for validity from the life-world. They
presuppose the existence of a directly experienceable world, and set
themselves the task of making this prescientific and subjective knowl-
edge into perfect and objective knowledge. In the process, however,
they lose sight of this ground on which their theoretical formulations
rest and can only rest. The objective-true world that results from the
theoretical activity of the sciences and of the scientists is a construction
of something that, in principle, is not perceivable or experienceable in
its own being. Husserl writes:
The contrast between the subjectivity of the life-world and the objective,
the true world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical substruc-
tion, the substruction of something that is in principle not perceivable,
in principle not experienceable in its own proper being, whereas the
subjective, in the life-world, is distinguished in all respects precisely by its
being actually experienceable.
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 127)3
The life-world is, by its being, experienceable and is therefore the realm
of original self-evidences. It consists of what is intuitable in principle
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 127). It is thus both the reference point of mean-
ing for the theories of objective science as well the concrete unity that
2 Die Lebenswelt ist . . . fur uns, die in ihr wach Lebenden, immer schon da, im voraus fur
uns seiend, Boden fur alle, ob theoretische oder auertheoretische Praxis. Die Welt ist
uns, den wachen, den immerzu irgendwie praktisch interessierten Subjekten, nicht gele-
gentlich einmal, sondern immer und notwendig als Universalfeld aller wirklichen und
moglichen Praxis, als Horizont vorgegeben. Leben ist standig In-Weltgewiheit-leben.
(Husserl 1954/1962, 145)
3 Der Kontrast zwischen dem Subjektiven der Lebenswelt und der objektiven, der
wahren Welt liegt nun darin, da die letztere eine theoretisch-logische Substruktion
ist, die eines prinzipiell nicht Wahrnehmbaren, prinzipiell in seinem eigenen Selbstsein
nicht Erfarhrbaren, wahrend das lebensweltlich Subjektive in allem und jedem eben
durch seine wirkliche Erfahrbarkeit ausgezeichnet ist (Husserl 1954/1976, 130).
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 43
We notice thereby that the first step which seemed to help at the begin-
ning, that epoche through which we freed ourselves from all the objective
sciences as grounds of validity, by no means suffices. In carrying out this
epoche, we obviously continue to stand on the ground of the world; it
44 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
4 Wir bemerken dabei, da jener nachste Schritt, der anfangs zu helfen schien, jene
Epoche, in der wir uns aller objektiven Wissenschaften als Geltungsbodens entheben
muten, keineswegs schon genugt. Im Vollzug dieser Epoche stehen wir offenbar noch
weiter auf dem Boden der Welt; sie ist nun reduziert auf die vorwissenschaftlich uns gel-
tende Lebenswelt, nur da wir keinerlei Wissen, das aus den Wissenschaften herstammt,
als Pramisse verwenden und die Wissenschaften nur in der Weise historischer Tatsachen,
ohne eigene Stellungnahme zu ihrer Wahrheit, in Rechnung ziehen durfen. (Husserl
1954/1962, 150)
5 Recent studies in phenomenology argue that reduction is not strictly speaking something
that is accomplished. It is not a planned procedure or an expected result, but rather,
unanticipated experience. Juha Himanka (1999) emphasizes that reduction allows us to
move from the habitual to the unforeseen and the unexpected: after reduction we are
able to look as if for the first time. On this kind of interpretation of reduction, see e.g.
Waldenfels 1993, Himanka 1999 and 2001, Heinamaa 2002. See also already Fink 1933,
Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994.
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 45
I will show here that the method and overall understanding of the his-
tory of science present in OT also makes it impossible to accomplish
the first epoche.
Husserls aim in The Crisis, in concise terms, is to show how the life-
world is the starting point for all scientific abstractions and theories. All
scientific truths, even the detailed calculations of observed phenom-
ena given by complicated measuring devices, must derive their ground
of validity from the life-world, which alone is directly experienceable.
Foucault, on the other hand, understands scientific development as
irreversibly removed from direct intuition and experience.
In order to explicate the difference between Foucaults and Husserls
understanding of the philosophy of science, I will argue here that many
of the central ideas that Foucault inherits from Gaston Bachelards
and George Canguilhems thought are illuminative.6 A third impor-
tant influence would be Jean Cavailles, whose posthumously published
essays contain an explicit critique of Husserlian phenomenology and a
call to abandon the subject and to develop in its place a philosophy of
the concept.7
6 Gary Gutting (1989) explicates the relationship between Foucaults archaeology and Can-
guilhems and Bachelards philosophies of science in his book Michel Foucaults Archaeology
of Scientific Reason. Gutting argues that Foucaults method in OT is primarily an applica-
tion and an extension of Canguilhems history of concepts, as well as a refinement of
Bachelards understanding of the historicity of scientific conceptions. Gutting (1989, 54,
21820) also points out, however, that Foucaults archaeology is not only a continuation
of Bachelards and Canguilhems work. His archaeology is an original method for the
study of history of science, with its own distinctive topics and concerns. Even in areas
where Bachelards and Canguilhems influence is particularly strong, Foucault extends,
adapts and transforms their ideas and methods. As a historian of biology, Canguilhem
focused on concepts that were in fact deployed by the biologists whose work he was ana-
lyzing. Foucault, however, deals not only with first-order biological concepts, but also
with concepts that define the conditions of possibility for formulating such concepts.
According to Gutting, Foucaults extension of the history of concepts thus undermines
the privileged role of disciplines in the history of thought and introduces a level of con-
ceptual history that is more fundamental than that of the first-order concepts of scientific
disciplines. While Foucaults work follows Bachelard in emphasizing the epistemologi-
cal factors working below the level of first-order concepts as well as the consciousness
of the scientists, unlike Bachelard, Foucault does not see this level as entirely negative.
For Bachelard, such factors are residues of outdated modes of thought that obstruct the
path of scientific development. For Foucault, this deep epistemological level has positive
significance: it embodies the conditions that make possible the formation of new con-
cepts. Since my principal topic is Foucaults relationship to phenomenology and not to
French philosophy of science, my presentation of Foucaults relationship to Bachelards
and Canguilhems thought relies considerably on Guttings work.
7 See Cavailles 1947/1994, 473560.
46 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
8 Gary Gutting (1989, 23) argues that it is important to note that Bachelards subordination
of philosophy to science is not an instance of positivistic scientism. Bachelard did not
consider philosophy itself to be a part of science. Philosophy is a reflection of the sciences,
and its methods and results do not share the empirical character of scientific disciplines.
See also Canguilhem 1994a, 33, 43.
9 In his book La philosophie de non (1940/1949) Bachelard also argued against the idea
of a unitary epistemological base underlying modern science. Reason, rather, must obey
science: it must not privilege immediate experience, but rather balance it with scientific
experience, which is more richly structured (144). Paul Rabinow (1994, 13) elaborates
on this by writing that Bachelards aim was not to attack science, but rather to show it in
action in its specificity and plurality.
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 47
10 See, in particular, the readings of Husserl that emphasize the importance of intersub-
jectivity and his phenomenology of the social world, most notably Steinbock 1995 and
Zahavi 1996/2001.
11 See also Machado 1989/1992, 4.
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 49
So long as texts and other works yoked together by the heuristic com-
pression of time have not been subject to critical analysis for the purpose
of explicitly demonstrating that two researchers sought to answer iden-
tical questions for identical reasons, using identical guiding concepts,
defined by identical systems, then insofar as an authentic history of sci-
ence is concerned, it is completely artificial, arbitrary and unsatisfactory
to say that one man finished what the other started or anticipated what
the other achieved. By substituting the logical time of truth relations for
the historical time of these relations inventions, one treats the history of
science as though it were a copy of science and its object a copy of the
object of science. The result is the creation of an artifact, a counterfeit
historical object the precursor.
(Canguilhem 1994a, 51)12
15 See Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 3341, Gutting 1989, 204. Didier Eribon (1991, 157)
claims that OT was a challenge to Sartrean hegemony in France at the time. He points
out that the book contained numerous attacks on Sartre that Foucault omitted from
the final version.
54 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
The empirical and the transcendental. The first paradox, the empirical
and the transcendental, refers to the paradoxical role a human being
has as an empirically limited being and a transcendentally determin-
ing subject: such a being that knowledge will be attained in him of
what renders all knowledge possible (OT, 318). Man is both part
of the world and, as such, an object of empirical sciences, and at
the same time the transcendental ground of all knowledge, includ-
ing these very same empirical sciences. Foucault argues that this ana-
lytic of finitude transforms questions about the empirical limits of
the knowing subject into questions about the conditions of possibil-
ity of knowledge. The anthropological becomes the transcendental
For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply
objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of
an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man. Two kinds
of analysis then came into being: There are those that operate within
the space of the body . . . ; these led to the discovery that knowledge
has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within
56 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it,
but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning;
in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its
forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own
empirical contents. There were also analyses that . . . functioned as a sort
of transcendental dialectic; by this means it was shown that knowledge
had historical, social or economic conditions, that it was formed within
the relations that are woven between men, and that it was not indepen-
dent of the particular form they might take here or there; in short that
there was a history of human knowledge which could both be given to
empirical knowledge and which prescribe its forms . . . they claim to be
able to rest entirely on themselves, since it is the contents themselves that
function as transcendental reflection. But in fact the search for a nature
or a history of knowledge, in the movement by which the dimension
proper to the critique is fitted over the contents of empirical knowledge,
already presupposes the use of a certain critique a critique that is not
the exercise of pure reflection, but the result of a series of more or less
obscure divisions.
(OT, 319)17
Both Foucault and Husserl thus claim that naturalism and historicism
stand on the same epistemological ground. Naturalism, which pre-
supposes that empirical sciences can answer philosophical questions
about the possibility of knowledge, and historicism, according to which
17 Car le seuil de notre modernite nest pas situe au moment ou on a voulu appliquer
a letude de lhomme des methodes objectives, mais bien le jour ou sest constitue un
doublet empirico-transcendantal quon a appele lhomme. On a vu natre alors deux
sortes danalyses: celles qui se sont logees dans lespace du corps . . . on y decouvrait que
la connaissance avait des conditions anatomo-physiologiques, quelle se formait peu a
peu dans la nervure du corps, quelle y avait peut-etre un siege privilegie, que ses formes
en tout cas ne pouvaient pas etre dissociees des singularites de son fonctionnement; bref,
quil y avait une nature de la connaissance humaine qui en determinait les formes et
qui pouvait en meme temps lui etre manifestee dans ses propres contenus empiriques.
Il y a eu aussi les analyses qui . . . ont fonctionne comme une sorte de dialectique
transcendantale; on montrait ainsi que la connaissance avait des conditions historiques,
sociales, ou economiques, quelle se formait a linterieur des rapports qui se tissent entre
les hommes et quelle netait pas independante de la figure particuliere quils pouvaient
prendre ici ou la, bref quil y avait une histoire de la connaissance humaine, qui pouvait
a la fois etre donnee au savoir empirique et lui prescrire ses formes . . . elles pretendent
pouvoir ne reposer que sur elles-memes, puisque ce sont les contenus eux-memes qui
fonctionnent comme reflexion transcendantale. Mais, en fait, la recherche dune nature
ou dune histoire de la connaissance, dans le mouvement ou elle rabat la dimension
propre de la critique sur les contenus dune connaissance empirique, suppose lusage
dune certaine critique. Critique qui nest pas lexercise dune reflexion pure, mais le
resultat dune serie de partages plus ou moins obscurs. (MC, 32930)
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 57
For can I, in fact, say that I am this language I speak, into which my
thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its
own possibilities, yet which exists only in the weight of sedimentations
58 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute
the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one
which has always already become what it is and continues to develop,
formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing
subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation,
are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?
The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole
world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which
18 puis-je dire, en effet, que je suis ce langage que je parle et ou ma pensee se glisse au point
de trouver en lui le systeme de toutes ses possibilites propres, mais qui nexiste pourtant
que dans la lourdeur de sedimentations quelle ne sera jamais capable dactualiser
entierement? Puis-je dire que je suis ce travail que je fais de mes mains, mais qui
mechappe non seulement lorsque je lai fini, mais avant meme que je laie entame?
Puis-je dire que je suis cette vie que je sens au fond de moi, mais qui menveloppe a la
fois par le temps formidable quelle pousse avec soi et qui me juche un instant sur sa
crete, mais aussi par le temps imminent qui me prescrit ma mort? (MC, 335)
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 59
Husserl continues to argue that the paradox vanishes once the epoche
has been radically and universally carried out. At this point, we do
not have human beings either as subjects constituting the world or as
objects dependent on it, because we have achieved the attitude above
the subjectobject correlation which belongs to the world and thus the
attitude of focus upon the transcendental subjectobject correlation
(Husserl 1954/1970a, 181). We are led to recognize the constitutive
function, not of human beings, but of transcendental subjectivity con-
stitutive even of the phenomena of human beings (1803). After the
reduction, the reflecting subject is annulled as man, and transcenden-
tal subjectivity, previously concealed, reflectively turns to inquire about
itself. Thus, for Husserl, Foucaults paradox of man is only a paradox if
the reduction has not been accomplished. Man as both a subject and
an object of knowledge is a figure of the natural attitude and its reality
is suspended in the reduction. Underlying both sides of the double is
transcendental subjectivity, above or beyond the subject/object distinc-
tion and constitutive of all worldly objectivities.
What still remains a problem in Husserls account is how mundane
subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity are related to each other, if
they cannot be conflated. Transcendental subjectivity is not a human
being in either one of its two aspects or sides. Yet, in order to reveal
transcendental subjectivity, the starting point of the investigation must
be mundane subjectivity, subjectivity as it is in everyday life. The phe-
nomenologist is thus both part of the universal field of the life-world,
as well as curiously being able to stand outside of it. Husserls assistant
19 Wie soll ein Teilbestand der Welt, ihre menschliche Subjektivitat, die ganze Welt kon-
stituieren, namlich konstituieren als ihr intentionales Gebilde? Welt, ein immer schon
gewordenes und fortwerdendes Gebilde des universalen Konnexes der intentional leis-
tenden Subjektivitat wobei sie, die im Miteinander leistenden Subjekte, selbst nur
Teilgebilde der totalen Leistung sein sollen? Der Subjektbestand der Welt verschlingt
sozusagen die gesamte Welt und damit sich selbst. Welch ein Widersinn. Oder ist es
doch eine sinnvoll auflosbare, sogar eine notwendige Paradoxie, notwendig entsprin-
gend aus der bestandigen Spannung zwischen der Macht der Selbstverstandlichkeit der
naturlichen objektiven Einstellung . . . und der sich ihr gegenubersetzenden Einstellung
der uninteressierten Betrachters? (Husserl 1954/1962, 183)
60 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Eugen Fink formulates this problem clearly in The Sixth Cartesian Medi-
tation.20 He takes issue precisely with the relationship between the tran-
scendental ego and the human ego, with their necessary difference on
the one hand, and their necessary identity on the other.21 He raises
two questions in particular: (1) how pre/non-existent transcendental
subjectivity relates to mundane/human subjectivity, forming a unity in
difference; and (2) how that same transcendental agency as an absolute
constitutive source relates to the world that is its constitutive end prod-
uct, forming with it a unity in bipolar differentation (Bruzina 1995,
lvi). Fink indicates and anticipates solutions by arguing that the full-
sided subject of phenomenology is neither the transcendental subject
taken purely in its transcendentality, nor the human subject taken as
uninvolved with the transcendental, but it is rather transcendental sub-
jectivity appearing in the world. He writes:
The cogito and the unthought. I will now move on to the second of Fou-
caults pradoxes cogito and unthought which surfaces as a conse-
quence of the phenomenological method: self-reflection as a way of
investigating subjectivity. The substance of this paradox is that the phe-
nomenologizing subject is fundamentally constituted by what eludes
his reflection the unthought yet reflection is the method for illumi-
nating it.
Foucault claims that, while modern thought has been forced to focus
on the thinking subject as the precondition of knowledge, the modern
cogito for example Husserls transcendental ego is not transparent
to itself. It cannot reduce the whole being of things to thought in the
way Descartes cogito could without ramifying the being of thought
right down to the inert network of what does not think (OT, 324).
Self-reflection can no longer lead to the affirmation of being, or, as
Foucault writes, I think does not anymore lead to the evident truth
of I am. The cogito cannot provide epistemic immediacy and self-
certainty because there are prereflective conditions of knowledge that
obfuscate the evident truths of reflection. Instead, modern subjectivity is
permeated by an unthought that eludes reflection, but that nevertheless
must determine the ways of questioning it.
Menschen selbst auf, der Mensch entmenscht sich im Vollzug der Epoche, d.h. er legt
den transzendentalen Zuschauer in sich frei, er vergeht in ihn. Dieser ist aber nicht
erst durch die Epoche geworden, sondern ist nur frei geworden von der verhullenden
Verkleidung des Menschseins. (Fink 1932/1988, 434)
23 Of the contemporary phenomenologists, J. N. Mohanty and David Carr have extensively
studied the problem of the relation between the transcendental subject and the empir-
ical subject. See e.g. Mohanty 1989, 1997, and Carr 1999. On the relationship between
Foucaults critique of the paradox of subjectivity and contemporary phenomenological
understandings of it, see Oksala 2003.
62 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
24 Elle fait aussitot bouger ce quelle touche: elle ne peut decouvrir limpense, ou du
moins aller dans sa direction, sans lapprocher aussitot de soi, ou peut-etre encore
sans leloigner, sans que letre de lhomme, en tout cas, puisquil se deploie dans cette
distance, ne se trouve du fait meme altere. (MC, 338)
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 63
25 Derrida presents one of the most influential forms of this criticism in his introduction
to Husserls essay The Origin of Geometry. In this essay, too, Husserl inquires into
the production of the ideal objects of science, and shows how they originate in the
life-world, from its pre-scientific, sensibly evident truths. Derrida shows (1962/1989,
63) that in order to study how the subjective egological evidence of the senses derived
from the life-world can give rise to the ideal objects of science, Husserl must ask how
this sense-evidence becomes objective and intersubjective. Derrida credits Husserl with
acknowledging that the only possibility is through language. According to Derrida,
however, Husserl ultimately fails to question how his own project must also depend on
language. He argues that Husserl distinguishes ideal objectivities from the concepts
of language. Ideal objects must be free from all factual subjectivity, from any de facto
language and also from the fact of language in general. Nevertheless, Husserl claims that
ideality comes to objectivity by means of language. According to Derrida, the paradox
that emerges is, thus, that although objective ideality must be independent of language,
nevertheless without the apparent fall back into language and thereby into history, a
fall which would alienate the ideal purity of sense, sense would remain an empirical
formation imprisoned as fact in a psychological subjectivity in the inventors head.
Historical incarnation sets free the transcendental, instead of binding it (77). Hence,
while being aware that only language can make possible ideal objectivity, Husserl does
not follow up the consequences that this idea has for the phenomenological enterprise.
26 Earlier, Husserl dealt with language extensively in Logical Investigations. The First and
Forth Investigations put forward a theory of expression and signification. This was before
Husserl had introduced the idea of reduction in Ideas I, however, and the question of
language in connection with the phenomenological reduction could thus not be ini-
tially asked. The second edition of Logical Investigations, which came out in 1913, was
extensively rewritten by Husserl in the light of his new understanding of phenomenol-
ogy. In the introduction to the second volume he takes up the problem of language,
but solves it rather quickly by referring to a necessary transformation of sense. (Husserl
1913/2001, 1712.) For more on language in Husserl, see e.g. Mohanty 1976, Edie
1976, Hutcheson 1981.
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 65
28 Es gibt hier demnach kein phanomenologisches Verstehen durch das blosse Lesen
phanomenologischer Forschungsberichte, sondern solche konnen uberhaupt erst gele-
sen werden im Nachvollzug der Forschungen selbst. Wer das unterlasst, liest gar
nicht phanomenologische Satze, sondern liest absonderliche Satze der naturlichen
Sprache, nimmt die blosse Erscheinung fur die Sache selbst und betrugt sich . . . Die
Verwandlung, die die naturliche Sprache, als Aussprechen von Seiendem, durch die
Inanspruchnahme durch das phanomenologisierende Ich erfahrt, muss immer als
Verwandlung der ontisch-naiven Bedeutungen in die sich analogisch anzeigenden
transzendental-ontischen Bedeutungen bewusst bleiben. Es bedeutet ein Verfallen in
den Dogmatismus (der naturlichen Einstellung), wenn das ausdruckliche Wissen um
die notwendige Verwandlung erlischt und damit der Phanomenologe den Gegenstand
seiner theoretischen Erfahrungen auslegend verfalscht. (Fink 1932/1988, 1012)
t h e f o u c au lt i a n fa i l u r e o f p h e n o m e n o l o g y 67
The retreat and the return of the origin. The third paradox the return
and the retreat of the origin refers to man as both dependent on a
history whose beginning will always elude him, and as the condition of
possibility of writing that history. Man is essentially a historical being,
he is burdened by a history that is not of his own making and it is always
against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect
on what may serve for him as origin (OT, 330). Yet the world becomes
a historical reality through man: It is in him that things (those same
things that hang over him) find their beginning (OT, 332). According
to the phenomenologists, the structures of human consciousness are
understood as the condition of possibility of all factual history.
Husserl introduces the notion of historical a priori in his essay The
Origin of Geometry. He emphasizes the historicity of ideal entities and
theories by arguing that they always have a historical origin, and that
this fact is essential to them and to their constitutive power. Sciences
can only stand within the historical horizon in which everything is his-
torical (Husserl 1939/1989, 172). Husserl goes on to argue that this
historicity cannot be revealed by factual history, in which the conclu-
sions are always drawn naively and straightforwardly from the facts. It
never makes thematic the general ground of meaning upon which all
such conclusions rest, has never investigated the immense structural
a priori which is proper to it (174).
Husserl thus again argues against the naivety of historicism in regard
to the grounding of the sciences as well as the resulting relativism. He
proposes a methodological inquiry that can reveal the essential struc-
ture of the necessary historical horizon of all sciences, the apriori struc-
ture contained in this historicity (Husserl 1939/1989, 172). This is
the historical a priori for Husserl. The proposed method for revealing
it is free variation: In running through the conceivable possibilities
for the life-world, there arises, with apodictic self-evidence, an essen-
tially general set of elements going through all the variants, and of
this we can convince ourselves with truly apodictic certainty (177).
Even if we know almost nothing of the historical surrounding world
of the first geometers, we do know that it had an invariant, essential
structure, which could be revealed to us through the method of free
68 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
The Order of Things has been severely criticized by both historians and
philosophers.1 Since its publication, the philosophical criticism has cen-
tred around two themes. Firstly, a common charge is that Foucault does
not problematize his own position, but assumes it to be situated outside
of the epistemic orders he studies. This means that he ends up reit-
erating the problem of empirical/transcendental circularity of which
phenomenology stands accused. Secondly, it has been claimed that
Foucaults alternative to the subject-centred approach of phenomenol-
ogy leads to serious difficulties in conceiving change and consequently
also freedom. Archaeology is therefore a step backwards rather than a
step forwards from phenomenology: it does not manage to solve the
problems with which phenomenology is riddled, but rather adds to
them by creating a host of new ones.
Both strands of the criticism are connected to the question of the
subject. On the one hand it raises questions about the subject as the
1 Gary Gutting (1989, 1759, 221) notes that, of all Foucaults books, OT has been the
most severely criticized by historians. In order to assess the impact of these criticisms,
he distinguishes several different historical levels on which OT operates. The first is that
of specific history: the interpretation of particular texts in their own terms. Second, the
level of constructive history, which builds general interpretative frameworks connecting
a range of texts. Third is the level of critical history: the use of the outcomes of spe-
cific and constructive history to question the self-understanding of various contemporary
disciplines. Following this schema, Gutting argues that Foucaults interpretations of par-
ticular authors have drawn some criticism, but the primary objection has been to the lack
of detailed evidence for the sweeping claims of his constructive history. Nevertheless, he
defends Foucault by pointing out that the value of his work is most of all as a source
of fruitful suggestions rather than as accurate generalizations. Foucaults account of the
modern episteme is important primarily as the basis of his critical history of the human
sciences. My focus here is on the philosophical criticism of Foucaults archaeology. For
more on Foucault as a historian, see e.g. Veyne 1971/1997, Flynn 1994 and Goldstein
1994.
70
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 71
writer of its own history. Who is the writer of archaeology? To what extent
was Foucault himself determined by the discursive structures under
study? The other strand concerns the subject as the agent of change.
How can we understand change if we do not study the intentions and
motives of the subject? Does freedom not become an impossible idea?
My aim in this chapter is to explicate the question of the subject in
connection with the criticism of OT. I will not attempt to clear up all the
ambiguities in Foucaults archaeology, however. It contains several con-
tradictions, problems and errors that have been thoroughly discussed
by other commentators.2 My principle goal is to show how the central,
philosophical role Foucault assigns to language has important conse-
quences in terms of how we conceive of our subjectivity as well as of our
freedom. I will show that, despite its firm refusal to accept the subject
as the basis of explanation, Foucaults archaeology does not eradicate
it as a question. Neither does it eradicate freedom, but charts instead
new dimensions of it, which are not tied to the subjects expressions
and initiatives, but rather make them possible.
2 See, in particular, Han 1998/2002. Roberto Machado (1989/1992, 17), on the other
hand, argues that one of the essential characteristics of archaeology is exactly the multiple
ways in which it can be defined, and another is its fluidity as a mode of research. The suc-
cessive shifts are not marks of inadequacy or a lack of rigour: they illustrate the deliberate
and well-considered provisional nature of the analysis. The tensions in archaeology are
more prominent after the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, in which
Foucault claims to present one method, archaeology, that characterizes all of his work.
In reality, however, the methods, theoretical frameworks and aims in OT and in AK are
not identical. Cf. Machado 1989/1992, 12, 17; Han 1998/2002, 524, 678.
72 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
3 Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, 8590) argue that Foucaults archaeology is a radicalization
of Husserls reductions. Their argument is that the phenomenologist only brackets the
truth of the statement he is studying, that is, its validity, but an archaeologist even brackets
its meaning. Foucaults approach is thus more radical in the sense that the bracketing
includes more entities: not just the truth, but also the meaning. This is a problematic
characterization of both Foucaults and Husserls methods, however. Heinamaa points
out that Dreyfus and Rabinows comparison is based on a controversial interpretation
of Husserls concept of noema as being similar to Freges sense. They presuppose that
truth and meaning are two separate entities that can be bracketed one after the other.
This is possible only if the noema is understood to be like the Fregean sense, between
the act and the reference and distinct from both. Such an understanding is by no means
self-evident or undisputed (see Heinamaa and Oksala 2000). For alternative readings of
the noema, see e.g. Drummond 1990 and Haaparanta 1994.
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 73
4 Foucault himself explicitly refused this label in the preface to the English translation of
OT, for example, and the significance of this refusal has been further discussed by com-
mentators. Gary Gutting (1989, 228) argues that, although there is a close link between
Foucaults work and structuralism, we must understand why Foucault insists on several
occasions that he is not a structuralist. According to Gutting, the link derives from the
fact that, like structuralist work on language, culture and the unconscious, archaeology
displaces man from his privileged position. At the same time, it is a historical method of
inquiry, concerned not with structural possibilities but with actual occurrences and their
effects. Beatrice Han (1998/2002, 45) also points out that Foucauldian understanding
is distinguished from the structuralist model in that the historical a priori is understood
neither as universal nor as invariant; rather, it undergoes the historical transformations
that archaeology is to identify. On Foucaults relationship with structuralism, see also
e.g. Caws 1988, Dosse 1991, 1992, Frank 1989/1992.
5 See e.g. SP, UP.
74 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
6 on devrait pouvoir definir le modele theorique auquel appartient non seulement mon
livre mais aussi ceux qui appartiennent a la meme configuration de savoir. Sans doute est-
ce celle qui nous permet aujourdhui de traiter de lhistoire comme ensemble denonces
effectivement articules, de la langue comme objet de description et ensemble de relations
par rapport au discours, aux enonces qui font lobjet de linterpretation. Cest notre
epoque et elle seule qui rend possible lapparition de cet ensemble de textes qui traitent de
la grammaire, de lhistoire naturelle ou de leconomie politique comme autant dobjets.
Si bien que lauteur, en cela, et en cela seulement, est constitutif de ce dont il parle . . . Si
bien que le sujet est en effet present dans la totalite du livre, mais il est le on anonyme
qui parle aujourdhui dans tout ce qui se dit. (SFH, 591)
7 See e.g. Han 1998/2002, Elden 2001. Foucault hardly ever referred directly to Heidegger.
In his last interview he made a surprisingly strong statement about him, however. For me
Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher . . . I have never written anything
on Heidegger and I wrote only a small article on Nietzsche; these are nevertheless the
two authors I have read the most. (RM, 250).
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 75
8 Je peux, en effet, definir lage classique dans sa configuration propre par la double
difference qui loppose au XVIe siecle, dune part, au XIXe , de lautre. En revanche,
je ne peux definir lage moderne dans sa singularite quen lopposant au XVIIe siecle,
dune part, et a nous, dautre part; il faut donc, pour pouvoir operer sans cesse le partage,
faire surgir sous chacune de nos phrases la difference qui nous en separe. De cet age
moderne qui commence vers 17901810 et va jusque vers 1950, il sagit de se deprendre
alors quil ne sagit, pour l age classique, que de le decrire. (SFH, 5989)
76 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
the modern episteme only when we manage to pull ourselves free from
it and analyze it as a past that is in some important ways different from
our present. The ability to recognize the differences signals the break
that separates us from it.9
In the book that followed OT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault
avoids the notion of episteme and introduces that of archive, which he
defines as the general system of the formation and transformation of
statements (AK, 130). In this connection, he states explicitly that it is
not possible for us to describe our own archive (AK, 130). We cannot
free ourselves from the rules ordering our own discursive practices and
submit them for archaeological analysis. Foucault thus argues against
the possibility of studying the conditions of possibility of our own knowl-
edge at all, whether or not these conditions are understood as historical
or not. All that he presents is a historical description, a study of the con-
ditions of existence, which is conducted from the vantage point of the
present in regard to the past.
Unlike the Husserlian phenomenologist, Foucault thus does not
claim to be able to study the constitutive conditions of our own thought
and experience. It is my contention that this impossibility is exactly why
he had to engage in historical study in his quest to understand the
semantic relationships between words and things. It is only from the
vantage point of the present ontological order that the semantic rela-
tionships of another epoch can be described. This description cannot
reveal any ultimate foundations. Not only are the ontological orders
historical, they can only appear as such from our own interpretative per-
spective. This perspectivism is the positive condition that allows such
orders to appear at all. Foucaults question of the historical limits of
language, for example, is a question that can only self-consciously be
asked after the linguistic turn in philosophy. Reading history through
our questions, concepts and ways of thinking makes it possible to reveal
what is different.
Hence, Foucault does not hold that the other epistemic orders are
completely cut off from us. But neither is his archaeology anachro-
nistic in the sense that past forms of thinking were treated as directly
accessible and understandable. Because they are based on a different
9 Thomas Flynn (1997, 2515) argues that Foucaults aim was to distance himself from the
modern episteme by questioning its basic presuppositions and by viewing it from without.
He refers to the end of OT, where Foucault charts the privileged positions of ethnology
and psychoanalysis in our present-day knowledge, and argues that he was undertaking an
ethnology of his own culture.
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 77
10 Gary Gutting (1989, 2278, 244, 269) argues that archaeology must be read primarily
as a distinctive approach to the history of thought. It is a historical counterpart of the
structuralist counter-sciences and a move away from the modes of thought centred on
the concept of man. It is only open to the devastating philosophical criticism that Dreyfus
and Rabinow develop in their study of Foucault when it is understood as a general philo-
sophical theory. Gutting argues that it should not be construed along these theoretical
lines. Foucaults aim was not to develop a general theory of discursive regularities at all.
What might appear to be foundational philosophical theories of language, for example,
are better construed as no more than attempts to show that the archaeological approach
can be coherently formulated without relying on the modern philosophical category of
the subject.
11 Claire OFarrell writes (1989, 33) that history reveals the limits of the formation of ideas
and objects which are both part of historical order and beyond that order. History is
thus in a unique position to attach philosophy to empirical realities while studying their
conditions of possibility at the same time. Shortly before his death Foucault himself
described his books as historical studies but noted that they were not the work of a
historian, as they were embarked on as a philosophical exercise (UP, 15).
78 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
preface to OT, his aim is to bring to light the history of the conditions
of possibility of knowledge (OT, xxii).
12 Arnold Davidson (1997b, 1013) argues that the influence of structuralism on Foucaults
thought shows here: only a synchronic analysis allows one to define the field within which
a causal explanation can then operate. An analysis of the logical structures of knowledge
has to precede any effort to provide causal explanations.
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 79
13 Il sagit moins des bornes posees a linitiative des sujets que du champ ou elle
sarticule . . . Je nai pas nie, loin de la, la possibilite de changer le discours: jen ai
retire le droit exclusif et instantane a la souverainete du sujet. (AS, 272)
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 81
claims that every statement has a subject, but that this subject is not a
speaking consciousness but rather a position that may be filled in cer-
tain conditions by various individuals (AK, 115). The subject position
is established by the rules of the discursive formation.
By focusing on the systems of the actual statements that define the
space in which speaking subjects operate, archaeology seeks to ques-
tion the fundamental role of the human subject in the constitution of
knowledge. Statements are studied historically in their own right, not
as means of understanding the thoughts of the dead. The source of
scientific discourse is an anonymous field of discursive practices, not
the meaning-giving subject. Foucault writes ironically in AK that it is
unpleasant to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice where
one is used to seeing, in all its pure transparency, the expression of
genius and freedom (AK, 210).
Even though archaeology describes the discursive conditions that
limit and make different subject positions possible, it is not until Fou-
caults genealogy introduces the notion of productive power that his
idea of a constituted subject gets its full force. Archaeology describes
the possibility and availability of various subject positions. It also con-
cerns the ways in which scientific discourses produce subjects as their
object of study, for example, the speaking subject in general grammar,
philology and linguistics, and the labouring subject in the analysis of
wealth or economics. Nevertheless, these studies only bring out partial
analyses of subjectivity. As Foucault himself admitted later, his archae-
ology presented only one of the axes of the constitution of the subject
(SP, 208).
14 Rajchman (1985, 111) identifies Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and
Jacques Derrida as central figures in this movement.
15 Foucault said (PS, 185) in an interview that he was happy that no one had paid much
attention to this book, because it had remained his secret affair. He also claimed that
it did not have a place in the sequence of his books.
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 83
16 En apparence le hasard triomphe a la surface du recit, dans ces figures qui surgis-
sent naturellement du fond de leur impossibilite dans les cirons chanteurs, dans
lhomme-tronc qui est un homme-orchestre, dans le coq qui ecrit son nom en crachant
du sang, dans les meduses de Fogar, ombrelles gloutonnes. Mais ces monstruosites sans
especes ni familles sont des rencontres obligees, elles obeissent, mathematiquement, a
la loi des synonymes et au principe de la plus juste economie; elles sont inevitables . . .
Au depart, il y a ces lots, dont aucun instrument, aucune ruse ne prevoit la sortie; puis le
merveilleux mecanisme sen empare, les transforme, double leur improbabilite par le jeu
des synonymes, trace entre eux un chemin naturel, et les livre enfin dans une necessite
meticuleuse. Le lecteur pense reconnatre les errements sans chemins de limagination
la ou il ny a que les hasards de langage traites methodiquement. (RR, 523)
84 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
17 I will argue in chapter 7 that Foucaults understanding of art as being capable of revealing
and transgressing the limits of subjectivity was explicitly brought out in his late work on
ethics. He saw the arts of existence as a possibility for challenging normalizing power.
Language and writing become tools for recreating the self ways of opening new forms of
experience, modes of thinking and living. According to Foucault, one writes to become
someone other than who one is: language is a possibility for modifying ones way of being
through the act of writing. See e.g. UP, 8.
86 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
18 Je sais bien quen entreprenant lanalyse interne et architectonique dune uvre (quil
sagisse dun texte litteraire, dun systeme philosophique, ou dune uvre scientique),
en mettant entre parentheses les references biographiques ou psychologiques, on a deja
remis en question le caractere absolu, et le role fondateur du sujet. Mais il faudrait peut-
etre revenir sur ce suspens, non point pour restaurer le theme dun sujet originaire,
mais pour saisir les points dinsertion, les modes de fonctionnement et les dependances
du sujet. (QA, 810.)
t h e a n o n y m i t y o f l a n g ua g e 87
Foucault does not claim that there are no subjects writing books
with their pens or on their computers. What he claims is that we cannot
understand what an author is by only studying the individual writing a
book. We need a new method. Apart from presenting a new method,
however, he also seems to suggest that his approach has an additional
advantage. He ends his essay with a curious, Utopian twist that brings us
back to the question of freedom. The author as a functional principle
not only organizes the work in a certain way, but also limits, excludes and
chooses. It is the means by which the free circulation, manipulation,
composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction is impended
(WA, 119). The author for Foucault is thus both a contingent and a con-
straining figure.19 Although there will never be a completely free circu-
lation of texts, the modes of constraint are historically changing, and
it is therefore possible that one day we might live in a culture in which
we are not limited by the figure of the author, but rather surrounded
by an anonymous murmur, an endless proliferation of meanings (WA,
11920).
Hence, by a curious twist, the methodological disappearance of the
subject in Foucaults thought does not signal the disappearance of free-
dom. It is, rather, the case that freedom is understood as the endless
proliferation of meanings, which undermines the stability of the his-
torical a priori determining possible ways of seeing, understanding and
acting. Rather than thinking of the subject in terms of individuals, and
of freedom as something they have or do not have, he suggests that we
attempt to think of the subject as a discursive effect and freedom as
a non-subjective opening up of possibilities for multiple creative prac-
tices. This does not mean that he denies the possibility of understanding
subjects as individuals or agents, and freedom as a capacity that is tied
to their initiatives. His analysis simply does not operate on this level. It
charts new dimensions of freedom. He is trying to find freedom on a
level that orders and regulates subjective expressions and initiatives.
In the realm of scientific discourse, Foucault emphasized the rules
and formal conditions of thinking, and questioned the possibility of
saying something completely new. In the realm of literature this possi-
bility is emphasized, however, because the ontological order of things,
the historical a priori, can be suspended, even thrown out. Language
solidifies the identity of things by repetition, it creates an ontological
order taken as unquestioned reality, but it can also act as a thin blade
that slits the identity of things, showing them as hopelessly double and
self-divided even as they are repeated (RR, 23). There is a dimension of
language capable of undermining reality instead of only materializing
and solidifying it according to pre-existing rules.
Hence, as it is often argued that Foucault wanted to construct a
history and politics without human nature,20 it could equally well be
argued that he wanted to rethink freedom without human nature. In
the same way as archaeology questions the privileged role of the subject
in the constitution of knowledge without eradicating it as a question, it
also seeks to understand freedom in non-subjective terms without erad-
icating the notion. Freedom characterizes language rather than the
subject. The limits of freedom are the limits of the discursive order, and
they must not be conflated with the limits of the social order or of accep-
tance. Although Foucault showed interest in marginal subjectivities
throughout his work, he did not romanticize marginal lifestyles, nor did
he see them as exemplifying freedom. The limits that he attempted to
identify demarcated discursively constructed ontological realms. What
lies outside of them is not socially unacceptable, it is unintelligible in
existing modes of order.
The history of madness would be the history of the Other of that
which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be
excluded . . . whereas the history of the order imposed on things would
be the history of the Same of that which, for a given culture, is both
dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be
collected together into identities.
(OT, xxiv)21
Clare OFarrell (1989, vii) points to this passage, and argues that Fou-
caults whole work can be read as a history of limits, of that edge between
the systems societies impose upon order (the Same), and that which
is outside or beyond that order (the Other). His work of the 1960s
presents, in this sense, a consistent ontological view of a changing
boundary between the Same and the Other, apparent in the events
of history (OFarrell 1989, 40, 90). In Madness and Civilization, the
confrontation between the Same and the Other was between reason
and madness, while in The Birth of the Clinic the Other was represented
by death, and in The Order of Things by the being of language. OFarrell
nevertheless claims that, during the 1970s, Foucault gradually con-
structed a vision of society and history in which the Same and the
Other were totally coextensive and indeed interchangeable, inextrica-
bly bound together in their movement. Notions of power and politics
came to occupy an important place in his thought at the expense of
the Other. According to OFarrell, the problem of the limit did not
reappear until the 1980s, when the notion of the subject took centre
stage and the Same and the Other become distinct and free terms again
(41, 91, 115).
I will argue, against OFarrell, that the limit, and freedom as its
transgression, never disappears from Foucaults thought. I now turn
my attention to Foucaults thought in the 1970s, and my focus is on
the question of the body. Although the realm of freedom opened up by
literary writing or in OFarrells conceptual terminology, the Other
is harder to locate in the tightly knit networks of power and knowledge,
it is nevertheless present. The body will come to represent resistance
to power, and it will open up new ways of understanding freedom. In
the works following The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge,
Foucault further developed the idea that subjects are formed in discur-
sive practices, but he also turned to study other axes of the constitution
of the subject in non-discursive practices as well as in the technologies of
the self. This means that the realms of freedom are also expanded. Free-
dom emerges not only through the practice of writing as constitutive of
an ontological otherness to the discursive order, but also in other kinds
of practice. At the same time, writing becomes entangled with subjec-
tivity in even more integral ways: it becomes inseparable from sexuality
and life: The private life of an individual, his sexual preferences, and
his work are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual life,
but because the work includes the whole life as well as the text. The
work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the
work (PS, 184).
II
BODY
4
So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a history.
Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of
conscience, of pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty? Even
a comparative history of law or at least of punishment is so
far lacking completely. Has anyone made a study of different
ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular
schedule of work, festivals and rest?
(Nietzsche 1887/1974, 812)
1 Donc, je dirais que tout ce qui sest passe autour des annees soixante venait bien de cette
insatisfaction devant la theorie phenomenologique du sujet, avec differentes echappees,
differentes echappatoires, differentes percees, selon quon prend un terme negatif ou
positif, vers la linguistique, vers la psychoanalyse, vers Nietzsche (SEPS, 437).
93
94 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
did not, however, elaborate on how the close tie between the discursive
and the non-discursive should be understood, except that he clearly
denied both that they symbolically reflect each other, and that non-
discursive changes should be studied in terms of a causality communi-
cated through the consciousness of the speaking subject (e.g., AK, 163).
By suspending causal analysis of discursive changes, he denied that he
was trying to give discourse the status of pure ideality and total historical
independence, but was rather doing it in order to discover the domain
of existence and functioning of a discursive practice (AK, 1645).
Foucaults focus on discourse was thus a methodological choice, not the
ontological choice of discursive idealism. He did not hold that discursive
formations were completely autonomous, nor did he later give up this
position despite its problems in favour of a completely new position
emphasizing non-discursive practices. Instead, he further developed
his central philosophical claim that scientific objects are constituted in
history through discursive practices. Foucaults genealogy in the 1970s
also looked more comprehensively at the tie between discursive and
non-discursive practices through the notion of power/knowledge.
Beatrice Han (1998/2002) also argues that a shift of attention from
discursive to non-discursive practices is not sufficient to mark the dif-
ference between archaeology and genealogy.5 According to her, what
is important in the introduction of genealogy is the claim that it is
impossible to understand the conditions of possibility of scientific dis-
course without taking into account the development of new forms of
power. With genealogy Foucault is able to analyze the way non-epistemic
demands not only control the effective predication of scientific truths,
but also shape the overall conditions of possibility of scientific discourse
(Han 1998/2002, 104, 10910). The conditions of possibility under
investigation are thus no longer a set of purely epistemic rules, but
a power/knowledge network consisting of all kinds of practices: insti-
tutional, architectonic, juridical and medical. The episteme, or what
Foucault now refers to as the regime of discourses, only constitutes
the specifically discursive element of a more general regime, the dis-
positif or apparatus (Han 1998/2002, 1378). Foucault clarifies their
relationship by writing that the episteme is a specifically discursive
apparatus, whereas the apparatus in its general form is both discursive
5 Gary Gutting (1989, 271) also argues that genealogy does not replace or even seriously
revise Foucaults archaeological method, but rather combines it with the complementary
technique of causal analysis, which establishes an essential symbiotic relation between
power and knowledge.
a ge n e a l o g y o f t h e s u b j e c t 97
What I am trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a wholly hetero-
geneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural
forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific state-
ments, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions in short,
the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the appara-
tus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established
between these elements.
(CF, 194)6
In his Two Lectures, which dates from around the same period as
Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the relationship between body,
power and the subject. These lectures represent one of his early efforts
to conceptualize power in new terms.8 He wanted to find an alterna-
tive to theorizing power in terms of sovereignty as well as in terms of
rights, repression or economy. He turned to the Nietzschean alter-
native, according to which the basis of the relationships of power lie
in the hostile engagement of forces (TL, 91). Foucault also wanted
to construct a model that would better account for the new form of
power, disciplinary power. This type of power functions through mate-
rial operators; it presupposes a tightly knit grid of material coercions
rather than the physical existence of a sovereign (TL, 104). Foucault
suggests that we should not look for the centre of power, but rather
study it at its extremities, the points at which it becomes capillary
7 Lhomme dont on nous parle et quon invite a liberer est deja en lui-meme leffet dun
assujettissement bien plus profond que lui. Une ame lhabite et le porte a lexistence,
qui est elle-meme une piece dans la matrise que le pouvoir exerce sur le corps. Lame,
effet et instrument dune anatomie politique; lame, prison du corps. (SEP, 38)
8 Foucault presents his account of power as a series of propositions in HS and elucidates
it further in numerous interviews and essays. Foucaults account of power should not be
understood as a universally applicable theory of power. His goal in HS is rather to find a
method that will help us to understand a certain form of knowledge regarding sex (HS,
92). See also e.g. Cousins and Hussain 1984, 2 and Gutting 1994, 1920.
100 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
(TL, 96). Neither should we look for the individuals who dominate, or
question their motives, but rather study the myriad of bodies which are
constituted as peripheral subjects as results of the effects of power (TL,
98). Rather than studying how subjects exercise power, Foucault turns
the question around and asks how the subject emerges as an effect of
power. Now he clearly formulates his project in terms of constitutional
analysis.9
[R]ather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to us in his lofty
isolation, we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually,
progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of
organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should
try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.
(TL, 97)10
produce subjects per se, but is only one part of a complex network of
power/knowledge, or apparatus, which forms the constitutive condi-
tions of subjectivity. Bodily subjection partakes in the formation of a
discursive order, through the birth of human sciences, for example.
This discursive order then feeds back to the non-discursive practices
by creating material effects. Human sciences and their truths create
objects not only of science, but also of reality: desires, forms of expe-
rience, certain kinds of bodies. Scientific discourse and practice con-
stitute not only conceptual objects and identities, but also the subjects
who make them materialize. Hence, the manipulation of bodies forms
only one dimension of a complex power/knowledge network, which
further constitutes subjects through the material effects generated by
scientific truths.
Ian Hacking (1984, 115, 122) argues that Foucault restricts his anal-
ysis to the human sciences exactly for the reason that it is only in the
human sciences that scientific truths have constitutive effects on the
subjects under study. In the natural sciences our invention of new iden-
tities and categories does not really change the way the world works.
Even though we may create new phenomena that did not exist before
our scientific endeavours, what happens in our experiments is con-
strained by the world: if we do certain things, certain phenomena will
always appear. But in the social sciences we may generate kinds of peo-
ple and kinds of action as we devise new classifications and categories.
Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of
people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way
interaction between these processes.13
Beatrice Han (1998/2002, 125) also explains this process in her
discussion of a course given by Foucault in 1974 at the College de
France, in which the effects of truth specific to medical discourse
on hysteric patients were analyzed. Medical discourse elaborated a
13 One of Hackings examples is the notion of psychic trauma. He discusses it along with the
three axes that Foucault distinguishes in his analyses of the constitution of the subject:
knowledge, power and ethics. First, there is the person as known about, as having a kind
of behaviour and sense of self that is produced by psychic trauma. There is a vast body
of knowledge in the growing field of tramatology. Second, in addition to the power of
courts and legislatures, there is the anonymous power that this concept has in peoples
lives. It organizes their ideas and emotions by creating a new sense of self. At the third,
moral level, the new sense of self as a victim of childhood trauma, for example, also
creates a new moral being. An understanding of who one is and why one is as one is has
implications for our understanding of a persons responsibilities and duties (Hacking
2002, 1820).
a ge n e a l o g y o f t h e s u b j e c t 103
the choice or decision of an individual subject (HS, 95). This claim has often been
interpreted as bestowing power with some occult qualities, or as simply nonsensical.
(See e.g. Waltzer 1986, 63; Taylor 1986, 856.) The claim is that power should be studied
as a non-subjective form of intentionality: it cannot be theorized as an object-like entity,
structure or state of affairs. It is an intentional, productive practice: a set of actions upon
other actions (SP, 220).
a ge n e a l o g y o f t h e s u b j e c t 107
17 Nick Crossley (1994, 191), for example, has argued that what Foucault needs is an
account of a prepersonal being, a being which is less than a fully fledged subject but
more than an object. This being would then be turned into a subject through disci-
plinary technologies. This kind of account would, however, be impossible in Foucaults
genealogical framework, since Foucault very strongly rejects all a priori theories of a
subject.
108 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
ANARCHIC BODIES
1 Susan Bordo (1989, 1993) has appropriated Foucaults ideas about power and the body in
order to study the different ways that women shape their bodies from cosmetic surgery
to dieting and eating disorders and has analyzed these micro-practices of everyday
life as disciplinary technologies in the service of normalizing power. According to Bordo,
these normative feminine practices train the female body in docility and obedience to
cultural demands, while at the same time they are paradoxically experienced in terms
of power and control by the women themselves. For other feminist appropriations
of Foucault, see e.g. Diamond and Quinby 1988, Butler 1990, Hekman 1990, Braidotti
1991, Sawicki 1991 and McNay 1992.
2 See e.g. Bigwood 1991, McNay 1991, Soper 1993.
110
anarchic bodies 111
3 Foucault himself also explicitly characterized genealogies as histories that have political
meaning, utility and effectiveness. See e.g. QG, 64; TL, 83.
anarchic bodies 113
system through the bodies of criminals, and thus brings under scrutiny
the connection between power and the body by analyzing the ways in
which the body is consciously manipulated by disciplinary power. As I
pointed out in the previous chapter, discipline is a form of power that
operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim
at making the body docile and useful. It has both a practical dimen-
sion institutions such as prison, school, hospital and an abstract
dimension, represented by the human and social sciences, which devel-
oped in tandem with them, such as criminology, psychology and ped-
agogy. Disciplinary power thus demonstrates Foucaults central idea of
the intertwining of power and knowledge: disciplinary techniques are
important instances of the power/knowledge network.
Foucaults thought continued to focus on the body throughout the
1970s. His next major work, The History of Sexuality, vol. i, thematizes the
body through the question of sexuality and studies the development of
sexuality as a discursive construct during the last two centuries. Foucault
argues against the repressive hypothesis which claims that sexuality in
the Victorian era was repressed and discourse on it silenced. It was
rather that sexuality became the object of a new kind of discourse
medical, juridical and psychological and that discourse on it actu-
ally multiplied. It also became importantly linked to truth: these new
discourses were able to tell us the truth about ourselves through our
sexuality. Sexuality became essential in determining not only a persons
moral worth, but his or her health, desire and identity.
The society that emerged in the nineteenth century bourgeois, capitalist
or industrial society, call it what you will did not confront sex with a
fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation
an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not
only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to
formulate the uniform truth of sex.
(HS, 69)4
4 La societe qui se developpe au XVIIIe siecle quon appelera comme on voudra bour-
geoise, capitaliste ou industrielle na pas oppose au sexe un refus fondamental de le
reconnatre. Elle a au contraire mis en uvre tout un appareil pour produire sur lui
des discours vrais. Non seulement, elle a beaucoup parle de lui et contraint chacun a en
parler; mais elle a entrepris den formuler la verite reglee (VS, 92).
114 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
that completely evades the materiality of the body and the biologically
established existence of sexual functions (HS, 1501). His response is
that the purpose of the study is, in fact, to show
how deployments of power are directly connected to the body to bodies,
functions, physiological processes, sensations and pleasures . . . what is
needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the biological and
the historical are not consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of
the first sociologists, but are bound together in an increasingly complex
fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies
of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envisage a
history of mentalities that would take account of bodies only through
the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and
value; but a history of the bodies and the manner in which what is most
material and most vital in them has been invested.
(HS, 1512)5
5 comment des dispositifs de pouvoir sarticulent directement sur le corps sur des corps,
des fonctions, des processus physiologiques, des sensations, des plaisirs; loin que le corps
ait a etre gomme, il sagit de le faire apparatre dans une analyse ou le biologique et
lhistorique ne se feraient pas suite, comme dans levolutionnisme des anciens socio-
logues, mais se lieraient selon une complexite croissant a mesure que se developpent les
technologies modernes de pouvoir qui prennent la vie pour cible. Non pas donc histoire
des mentalites qui ne tiendrait compte des corps que par la maniere dont on les a percus
ou dont on leur a donne sens et valeur; mais histoire des corps et de la maniere dont
on a investi ce quil y a de plus materiel, de plus vivant en eux. (VS, 200)
6 HS, 1509.
anarchic bodies 115
and argued that sex, like gender, was a social product or a cultural
construct.10
Foucaults discussion of sex at the end of HS is not, however, a com-
ment on feminist discussions of sex or gender, and therefore to read it
through this distinction can be misleading. The original French word
sexe can refer to the categories of male and female in the sense of sex
organs anatomy and biology that differentiates males from females
but Foucaults stress is clearly on the sense of the natural function, an
embodied foundation or principle that belongs in common to both
men and women. Sex is understood as a hidden cause behind observ-
able characteristics and behaviour. Foucault argues that sex is a com-
plex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality. It is an
idea of an inner truth, an idea that there exists something other than
bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatomo-physiological
systems, sensations, and pleasures; something else and something more,
with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: sex (HS, 1523). He elab-
orates the idea further by writing that sex is a form of secret causality,
an interplay of the visible and hidden (HS, 152).
Foucault thus did not problematize sex in the sense that feminist
theory has done. He did not question how the categories of male
and female are constructed or what consequences they have for the
behaviour or empowerment of women. By claiming that sex is imag-
inary (HS, 156) and the most ideal element in strategies of power
(HS, 155), he was not arguing that femaleness is imaginary, ideal or arbi-
trary. Rather, he was trying to problematize a certain kind of explanatory
framework of sexuality: the idea of a foundation or an invisible cause
that supports the visible effects.
Foucault takes up the question of sex as a principle of explanation
for the classification of bodies into females and males in his introduc-
tion to the book Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of
a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Foucault now poses the ques-
tion whether we really need the idea of a true sex. Using the example of
a hermaphrodite, he attempts to make visible how deep in our think-
ing lies the idea that everybody has a definite and naturally given sex
that is the truth and cause of our behaviour as well as of the observable
sexual characteristics. This true sex determines the individuals gender
identity, behaviour and desire for the opposite sex. What the body of
a hermaphrodite can show is that there is no true sex to be found in
our body, but that this idea is rather a product of the development of
scientific discourse and juridical procedures (IHB, xxi).
Foucault refers to the Middle Ages, when it was common practice to
think that a hermaphrodite was a person that combined both masculine
and feminine characteristics. When the individual had legally reached
adulthood, he or she could choose which sex to keep. This concep-
tion was superceded by scientific theories about sex, which developed
around the same time as juridical concepts and practices relating to
the idea of a true sex. Everybody had only one true sex, which could
be settled conclusively by experts. All the characteristics of the opposite
sex in ones body and soul were deemed arbitrary, imaginary or super-
ficial. The true sex further determined the individuals gender role,
and his or her moral responsibility was to behave according to this true
sex. The doctor, as the expert in recognizing this true sex, had to strip
the body of its anatomical deceptions and discover the one true sex
behind organs that might have put on the forms of the opposite sex
(IHB, viiiix).
Here, Foucault is using the notion of sex in more or less the way it
is understood in the sex/gender discourse. He discusses the idea of a
true sex from which gender, understood as social roles and culturally
acquired characteristics, follows. This idea also underlies the feminist
distinction between sex and gender, which feminists have used to argue
that natural sex does not determine social gender. Foucault does, how-
ever, also critically appraise the idea of natural, scientifically true sex by
revealing its historical construction. His aim, again, is to question the
whole explanatory framework of natural foundations and secondary
effects. He does not claim here, either, that sex as the categories of
maleness and femaleness was invented in a particular historical period
and that we could give them up when we wanted to. He rather ana-
lyzes the ways in which these categories were scientifically founded and
explained in discourses of truth, and how this pure explanation in fact
constituted these categories so that they were understood as natural.
11 The possibilities of understanding the discursive body are further increased if discursive
is understood in the psychoanalytic sense of symbolic. Although Foucaults relationship
with psychoanalysis is explicitly critical in HS, one could argue that behind this explicit
relationship lies an unacknowledged debt. Charles Shepherdson (2000, 182), for exam-
ple, argues that the canonical reception that opposes Foucault and Lacan does not do
justice to the complexity of their relation. On Foucaults relationship to psychoanalysis,
see also e.g. Miller 1989/1992.
12 Non pas donc histoire des mentalites qui ne tiendrait compte des corps que par la
maniere dont on les a percus ou dont on leur a donne sens et valeur; mais histoire des
corps et de la maniere dont on a investi ce quil y a de plus materiel, de plus vivant en
eux (VS, 200).
anarchic bodies 119
13 Sara Heinamaa (1996, 299) argues that Butler herself occasionally uses the terminology
of raw material and production in Gender Trouble. The metaphor of production brings
anarchic bodies 121
with it the idea of raw material, that is, a natural substance that is prior to and indepen-
dent of the process of production. In the traditional sex/gender thinking that Butler
sets out to criticize, females and males are treated as the raw material of gender produc-
tion. Butlers new claim is that even females and males are products, and thus there must
be something that precedes these constructions and which passes as their raw material:
a body that is free from the sexed categories of culture. Even though the line between
naturally given and culturally produced is drawn in a new way, it is still there. Heinamaa
argues that this is why, in order to get rid of the natureculture distinction, Butler has
to elaborate on her claim by adding that the production of sex is a process which even
generates its own raw material, and that, in effect, becoming sexed must be conceived
of as a process of repetitive and citational action.
14 Butlers books that followed Gender Trouble, particularly Bodies that Matter and The Psychic
Life of Power, partly answer these questions. She argues in Bodies that Matter that to defend
a culturally constructed body does not mean that one understands cultural construction
as a single, deterministic act or as a causal process initiated by the subject and culminating
in a set of fixed effects. In place of these conceptions of construction, she suggests a
return to the notion of matter as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to
produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter (Butler 1993, 9). Butler
emphasizes the gaps and fissures that are opened up in this process of materialization:
the constitutive instabilities become the deconstitutive possibilities. She also turns to
psychoanalysis in order to understand these disruptions as imaginary contestations that
effect a failure in the workings of the law, but also importantly as occasions for a radical
rearticulation of the symbolic domain. The political dimension of her work is thus again
safeguarded: even if the female body cannot be liberated, the meaning of what counts
as a valued and valuable body can be altered.
15 Despite Butlers criticism of Foucaults understanding of the body in Gender Trouble, her
conception is often conflated with Foucaults in feminist literature and referred to as
the post-structuralist body. See e.g. Bigwood 1991.
122 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
16 In interviews about sexuality or the politics of sexuality, Foucault stressed the dangers
of legal control imposed on sexual practices. In connection with homosexuality, he
showed concern about the strategic role played by sexual preference within a legal and
social framework and said very little about the meaning of homosexual behaviour as
such. He strongly refused to offer any comment as regards to the distinction between
innate predisposition to homosexual behaviour and social conditioning (SC, 288). All
he would grant is that there is a certain style of existence . . . or art of living, which
might be called gay(SC, 292).
anarchic bodies 123
how is it possible that there are several different variations of it? Even
if we identify with the subject positions to which we are summoned
in the case of gender, even if my gender identity appears almost self-
evident both to myself and to others I still have the singular style
of living my female embodiment. Despite providing an explanation
of the normative construction of the female body, feminist theory has
not yet accounted for or explained in any way the variations of female
embodiment.
The third, and from my perspective the most interesting, set of ques-
tions concerns the possibility of resistance to normative power. The
only possibilities for resistance against subjection that a strong inter-
pretation of the discursive body seems to allow open up through the
gaps in the struggle with competing regimes. The subjection of bodies
is never complete because the deployments of power are always par-
tial and contradictory. Foucault insists that where there is power there
is resistance (HS, 95). The points of resistance are distributed in an
irregular fashion throughout the power network. They are the odd
term in relations of power (HS, 96), its blind spot or evading limit.
Power is thus not deterministic machinery, but a dynamic and com-
plex strategical situation. In her book The Psychic Life of Power, Butler
analyzes and concisely explicates this idea of resistance in Foucaults
thought. In Foucault, resistance appears (a) in the course of a subjec-
tivation that exceeds the normalizing aims by which it is mobilized, or
(b) through convergence with other discursive regimes, whereby inad-
vertently produced discursive complexity undermines the teleological
aims of normalization. Butler concludes: Thus resistance appears as the
effect of power, as part of power, its self-subversion (Butler 1997, 93).
Hence, she puts forward the view that resistance constitutes a hazard in
normalizing power as the only viable account of resistance in Foucault.
The idea that bodies themselves could generate any resistance, she thus
sees as either a naive mistake by Foucault or as simply impossible within
his framework.
From a feminist point of view, this means that, while a focus on bod-
ies seems to open up important connections with Foucaults thought,
the apparent denial of the bodys capacity for resistance seems to refute
all feminist political goals. Lois McNay (1992), for example, argues in
her book Foucault and Feminism that Foucaults historical studies give
the impression that the body presents no resistance to the operations
of power. Although Foucault insists that power is always accompanied
by resistance, he does not elaborate on how this resistance mani-
fests itself through the body. McNay (1992, 12) argues that this is
124 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Here Foucault suggests that it is in the body that the seeds for subverting
the normalizing aims of power are sown. The body becomes a locus of
resistance. Foucault elaborates further on this in an interview:
Mastery and awareness of ones own body can be acquired only through
the effect of an investment of power in the body . . . But once power
17 Ne pas croire quen disant oui au sexe, on dit non au pouvoir; on suit au contraire le
fil du dispositif general de sexualite. Cest de linstance du sexe quil faut saffranchir si,
par un retournement tactique des divers mecanismes de la sexualite, on veut faire valoir
contre les prises du pouvoir, les corps, les plaisirs, les savoirs, dans leur multiplicite et
leur possibilite de resistance. Contre le dispositif de sexualite, le point dappui de la
contre-attaque ne doit pas etre le sexe desir, mais les corps et les plaisirs. (VS, 2078)
anarchic bodies 125
produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and
affirmations, those of ones own body against power, of health against
the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality,
marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used
to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed
to a counterattack in the same body.
(B/P, 56)18
18 La matrise, la conscience de son corps nont pu etre acquises que par leffet de
linvestissement du corps par le pouvoir . . . Mais, des lors que le pouvoir a produit
cet effet, dans la ligne meme de ses conquetes, emerge inevitablement la revendication
de son corps contre le pouvoir, la sante contre leconomie, le plaisir contre les normes
morales de la sexualite, du mariage, de la pudeur. Et, du coup, ce par quoi le pouvoir
etait fort devient ce par quoi il est attaque (PC, 7545).
19 Elizabeth Grosz reiterates this criticism in her book Volatile Bodies. See Grosz 1994, 155.
In her next book, Space, Time and Perversion, however, she presents what she calls the
most generous reading of what Foucault means by bodies and pleasures. She argues
that Foucault is suggesting that the body may lend itself to economies and modes of
production that are other than the ones that produce sexuality. A different economy
of bodies and pleasures may find the organization of sexuality, the implantation of our
sex as the secret of our being, curious and intriguing instead of self-evident (Grosz 1995,
218).
126 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
20 La derniere fois que nous nous sommes vus, Michel me dit, avec beaucoup de gentillesse
et affection, a peu pres: je ne peux pas supporter le mot desir; meme si vous lemployez
autrement, je ne peux pas mempecher de penser ou de vivre que desir = manque,
ou que desir se dit reprime. Michel ajoute: alors moi, ce que jappelle plaisir, cest
peut-etre ce que vous appelez desir; mais de toute facon jai besoin dun autre mot
que desir. (Deleuze 1994, 63)
21 In his book Foucault (1986/1988), Deleuze attributes to Foucault the idea of life as
resistance: that power does not take life as its objective without revealing or giving rise
to a life that resists power (94). See also HS, 1445.
anarchic bodies 127
24 David Halperin (1995, 934) takes up Foucaults distinction between desire and plea-
sure as his way of distancing himself from the idea of desire associated with Deleuzes
philosophy. According to Halperin, Foucaults famous and rather cryptic remarks at the
end of volume i of The History of Sexuality, about the political importance of attacking
sexuality and promoting pleasures at the expense of sex, make more sense when they
are set in the context of his insistent distinction between pleasure and desire. Halperin
emphasizes the idea that pleasure is an event at the limit of the subject: intense pleasure
is desubjectivating, impersonal.
25 The interview, conducted on 10 July 1978, was published in Dutch in 1982 (Vijftien
vragen van homosexuele zijde san Michel Foucault, Interviews met Michel Foucault, ed.
M. Duyves and T. Massen, Utrecht: De Woelrat) and in French in 1988 (Le Gai savoir,
Mec Magazine). There is a transcription of the original interview in the Centre Michel
Foucault in Paris, but the text has been omitted from the four-volume collection of
Foucaults texts, Dits et ecrits 19541988. The translation here is by David Halperin,
who also provides the original French text in a footnote (181, p. 217). Cette notion
a ete utilisee comme un outil, une mise en intelligibilite, un etanlonnage en terme de
130 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
normalite . . . Le desir nest pas un evenement, mais une permanence du sujet, sur
laquelle se greffe toute cette armature psychologico-medicale. Le terme de plaisir de
son cote est vierge dutilisation, quasiment vide de sens. Il ny a pas de pathologie du
plaisir, de plaisir anormal. Cest un evenement hors sujet, ou a la limite du sujet,
dans ce quelque chose qui nest ni du corps ni de lame, qui nest ni a linterieur, ni a
lexterieur, bref une notion non assignee et non assignable.
26 See e.g. CF, 197.
27 Cf. Shepherdson 2000, 5. According to Shepherdson, Lacan understands transgression
and law very similarly. The rule of law does not repress or prohibit, but produces its own
exception. The symbolic order functions only on the basis of this exception or excess.
The excess is not a natural phenomenon that disrupts the machinery of culture; it is
rather a peculiar feature of culture itself, an effect of language, which includes its own
malfunction, a remainder that marks its limits (Shepherdson 2000, 17580).
anarchic bodies 131
28 This interview was conducted in Toronto in 1982, and appeared originally in English.
132 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
29 Merleau-Pontys and Foucaults conceptions of the body are more often contrasted
rather than seen as similar. David Levin (1991), for example, argues that, while Foucault
describes a passive body, moulded, even totally rebuilt by regimes of power, Merleau-
Pontys account emphasizes the activity of the body in shaping our cultural environment.
According to Levin, the lived body thus shapes society while the Foucaultian body is
shaped by it. As I have shown, however, Foucaults conception of the body as an object
of disciplinary manipulation put forward in DP is complemented by an understanding
of the body as experiencing sexual pleasure in HS. The contrast between the passive
Foucaultian body and the active, lived body can therefore not be upheld if Foucaults
thought as a whole is taken into account.
anarchic bodies 133
body would function as a stable reference point for truth, and hence
provide a position from which to criticize the deployments of power
(167). Dreyfus and Rabinow write:
If the lived body is more than the result of the disciplinary technolo-
gies that have been brought to bear upon it, it would perhaps provide a
position from which to criticize these practices, and maybe even a way
to account for the tendency towards rationalization and the tendency of
this tendency to hide itself.
(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 167)
30 David Couzens Hoy (1999, 611) also argues against Dreyfus and Rabinows effort to
base resistance on the bodys universal and invariant structures. Hoy points out that
firstly, even if there are bodily invariants, they may be too thin to serve as the basis of
criticism and resistance. Secondly, Foucaults genealogy is an effort to show that the way
of thinking that there is a normal, natural or universal way to exist would itself be a variant
of normalization. Instead of adopting the assumption of invariance, genealogy seeks to
show how the body has been lived differently historically, and how it can therefore
become more than it is now. According to Hoy, critical resistance thus flows from the
realization that the presents self-interpretation is only one among several others that
have been viable, and that it should keep itself open to alternative interpretations.
134 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
FEMALE FREEDOM
Iris Marion Youngs book Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist
Philosophy and Social Theory represented one of the most notable efforts
to apply Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body to explicitly fem-
inist issues.1 The essay Throwing like a Girl traces some of the basic
modalities of feminine comportment, manner of moving and relation
in space. With the help of these modalities Young seeks to make under-
standable the ways in which women in our society typically comport
themselves and move differently from the ways in which men do. She
argues, with the help of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the body,
that the modalities of feminine comportment, motility and spatiality are
restricted modes of embodiment. According to Young, Merleau-Ponty
describes the lived body as a transcendence that moves out from the
body in its immanence in an open and unbroken directness upon the
world in action. The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action,
the continuous calling forth of capacities that are applied to the world.
In the case of feminine movement the most primordial intentional act
the motion of the body orienting itself with respect to and moving within
its surroundings is inhibited (Young 1990,148). A woman lives her
body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and
retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from
engagement in the worlds possibilities (150).
Jean Grimshaw criticizes Youngs analysis of female embodiment of
the problematic opposition of the repressed female body and the free
or unrepressed male body. In her view, Young idealizes masculine move-
ment by assuming it unproblematically as a norm. Merleau-Ponty could
1 It can be argued that Simone de Beauvoir had already put forward a phenomenological
description of female embodiment in The Second Sex. See e.g. Kruks 1990, Vintges 1992,
Heinamaa 2003.
135
136 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
4 See e.g. Gatens 1996, 12, 6970. Merleau-Pontys notion of body schema was strongly
influenced by psychoanalytical accounts of the body image, however, as well as by Paul
Schilders research in neurophysiology.
5 la vie de la conscience . . . est sous-tendue par un arc intentionnel qui projette autour
de nous notre passe, notre avenir, notre milieu humain, notre situation physique, notre
situation ideologique, notre situation morale, ou plutot qui fait que nous soyons situes
sous tous ces rapports. Cest cet arc intentionnel qui fait lunite des sens, celle des sens et
de intelligence, celle de la sensibilite et de la motricite. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1972, 158)
6 See Heinamaa 2002.
140 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
7 Quand je bouge les yeux, je tiens compte de leur mouvement, sans en prendre con-
science expresse, et je comprends par lui que le bouleversement du champ visuel nest
quapparent. De meme la sexualite, sans etre lobjet dun acte de conscience expres,
peut motiver les formes privilegiees de mon experience. Prise ainsi, cest-a-dire comme
atmosphere ambique, la sexualite est coextensive a la vie. (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1972,
197)
female freedom 141
8 je metends dans mon lit, sur le cote gauche, les genoux replies, je ferme les yeux, je
respire lentement, jeloigne de moi mes projets. Mais le pouvoir de ma volonte ou de
ma conscience sarrete la . . . Il y a un moment ou le sommeil vient, il se pose sur cette
imitation de lui-meme que je lui proposais, je reussis a devenir ce que je feignais detre
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/1972, 191).
142 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Hence, Merleau-Ponty clearly claims that the tacit cogito, or the anony-
mous body-subject, is foundational in relation to individual, personal
subjectivity. It forms the latters condition of possibility. What is not so
clear in his account of subjectivity, however, is the relationship between
10 Dan Zahavi also argues that, for an experience to be anonymous means that it lacks
explicit self-awareness; it does not mean that it lacks self-awareness, differentiation and
individuation altogether. According to Zahavi, Merleau-Ponty occasionally flirts with this
radical interpretation, but on closer scrutiny, this must be rejected. See Zahavi 2001.
144 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
the other two. It forms the condition of possibility, not only for indi-
vidual consciousness but also for intersubjectivity understood as com-
prising the linguistic community, culture and history. In this reading,
Merleau-Ponty presents a foundational account of subjectivity. There
is a rudimentary level, the perceptual flow of the singular subject, on
which all forms of subjectivity are founded.
Even though, according to this reading, the anonymous existence
of the body forms a universal foundation, the subject is still not an
ahistorical constant. This is because the body-subject is, for Merleau-
Ponty, always and by necessity historically situated and circumscribed.
The phenomenological account of the lived body shows that it is always
situated within or intertwined with its environment. It actively takes
up its situation in the world and transforms it through its bodily acts,
attitudes or styles. This activity of the body is, moreover, normatively
generative: the body has optimal ways of acting in the world. Normality
for the lived body can, thus, according to this reading, be understood
as what is optimal for it. Optima are instituted within experience by the
very fact that the body takes a perspective on things and is embedded in
the surrounding world. As bodies we can be more open to the givenness
of objects or more closed to them.11 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
refers to normal as optimal when he writes that for each object, as for
each painting in a gallery, there is an optimal distance from which it
demands to be viewed, an orientation through which it gives the most
of itself . . . the distance from me to the object is not a size which
decreases or increases, but a tension that oscillates around a norm
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 302).
In this reading, phenomenology of the lived body can be criticized
for approaching the notions of normal and abnormal with respect to the
lived body and its immediate surroundings, not with respect to an inter-
personal community. What characterizes the living body is its ability to
instigate norms, and norms are founded on the experience of the lived
body. This understanding of the foundational role of the structures of
the body in establishing the normal seems to be in stark contrast to
the feminist theorists who claim that normal and abnormal are always
defined in a social context and attached to the polarity of positive
negative. Norms offer possibilities for reference and judgement; insti-
tuting and identifying norms are always acts of power.
11 See Steinbock 1995, 13843. Steinbock argues that, when Husserl refers to normal as
optimal, the optimal as a norm is instituted and generated from within experience.
female freedom 145
as well as for objective reality. Instead of the tacit cogito being a foun-
dational layer of subjectivity on which the personal and intersubjective
depend, I will argue that it is a dimension of intersubjective sense con-
stitution. It is not a foundation, but a constitutive condition.
Merleau-Ponty clearly emphasizes the reciprocity of all constitutive
processes. For instance, subjectivity and the world can never be under-
stood in isolation from each other. He also explicitly states that transcen-
dental subjectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity (Merleau-Ponty
1945/1994, 3612). How transcendental intersubjectivity is under-
stood is, however, decisive for the way we understand its relationship to
the body-subject.
Dan Zahavi, among others, effectively argues for an intersubjective
transformation of Husserls phenomenology in his late, posthumously
published writings.13 These texts by Husserl had the greatest influence
on Merleau-Ponty, who saw the main thrust of Husserls work to be
contained in the manuscripts.14 Zahavi shows that, from the winter
of 1910/11 up until his death in 1938, Husserls aim was to develop
a transcendental theory of intersubjectivity. According to Zahavi, what
has made Husserls account difficult to explicate and understand is that
he operated with several different kinds of intersubjectivity. He did not
only understand it to refer to the subjects cultural context, to the fact
that we are constantly confronted with intersubjective meanings such as
social institutions and cultural products. Neither does intersubjectivity
refer exclusively to other peoples actual presence in the subjects field
of experience. The core in Husserls reflections on intersubjectivity lies
in its fundamental reality-constitutive function.
In terms of understanding Merleau-Pontys body-subject as intersub-
jectivity, Husserls major claim is that the experience of objective valid-
ity is made possible by the experience of the transcendence of foreign
subjectivity. Objects cannot be reduced to being merely my intentional
correlates if they can be experienced by others. Our primal experience
of others permanently transforms our categories of experience. The
objective validity of my experiences does not, after the initial encounter,
require the others actual presence. The precondition for objective real-
ity is, however, that it can only be constituted by a subject that has
relevant to us. It is the world that our body intends and spins around us.
The subjects embeddedness in this living tradition and its anonymous
normality forms a third type of intersubjectivity. Normality is under-
stood as conventionality, which in its being transcends the individual.
Our horizon of anticipations is structured in accordance with the inter-
subjectively handed-down forms of apperception (Zahavi 1996, 239
42). Social normativity cannot therefore be regarded only as secondary
or derivative of individual, lived normativity.16
When intersubjectivity is understood as social normativity, the body-
subject cannot be understood as historically situated, but rather as his-
torically constituted. According to this view, there can be no universal
or inherent normativity of the living body. The anonymous body is
not foundational for social normativity, but the relationship between
the living body and the surrounding culture is complex and chiasmic.
The structures of the body are structures of the world, but not only of the
natural world. The shared normativity of the living tradition also con-
stitutes and structures the intentionality of perceptions, sexuality and
embodiment.
Merleau-Ponty does not defend the view that posits the body as
immune to the influence of history. According to him, Man is a his-
torical idea, not a natural species (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1994, 170).
This claim is often interpreted to mean that the fundamental struc-
tures of the anonymous body for example temporality, spatiality and
sexuality form a foundation that simply assumes different guises in
different historical situations. Merleau-Pontys emphasis on history can,
however, be interpreted through Husserls theory of transcendental
intersubjectivity as defending a stronger version of historical consti-
tution. The structures of the anonymous body come into being only
as intersubjectively generated. Merleau-Pontys conditions of possibil-
ity for perception must not be understood as ahistorical or universal
forms, but rather as dynamic and developing structures derived from
our cultural environment, constantly in a state of change. The anony-
mous body is not a natural foundation on which intersubjectivity, under-
stood as tradition and community, forms a secondary layer. Nor is it the
16 Anthony Steinbock (1995, 267) argues that, when Husserl turned to generative phe-
nomena, he no longer addressed the problem of normality and abnormality in terms of
normal as optimal for the living being and abnormal as one-sidedly dependent on the
normal, but rather treated them intersubjectively in terms of homeworld and alien-
world. By doing this, Husserl implicitly reinterpreted the concepts of normality and
abnormality.
female freedom 149
Female freedom?
When Merleau-Pontys body-subject is not understood as universal or
foundational, but as essentially dynamic and historically constituted,
the implication for feminist theory is that there are no normal or foun-
dational modes of female embodiment, motility or sexuality. There is no
inhibited female corporeality and free and normal male corporeality
in societies of sexist oppression, but rather two differently gendered
and historically constituted experiences and modalities of embodi-
ment. What is called normal depends on the values of the society in
question.
This view comes close to Foucaults idea that power/knowledge net-
works constitute normalcy. According to Foucault, modernity is char-
acterized by life becoming an object of scientific discourse intrinsically
tied to political aims and technologies. Biopower targets individual bod-
ies and the populations health as a whole. An important consequence
of its development is the growing importance assumed by the action
of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Unlike
laws which function according to the binary logic of the forbidden
and the permitted, norms are individualizing: they make it possible
to demarcate distributions, measure differences, construct scales and
classify in various categories. Biopower is dependent on this individual-
izing knowledge about particular bodies, and about the population as a
whole. It is power for normalizing judgement, power to identify scientific
criteria for what is normal.
According to Foucault, norms are thus an important part of the
power/knowledge network, and as such constitutive of the subject. Sci-
entific discourse creates norms that are utilized by political discourse
and institutional practices and vice versa: political problems are taken
up by scientific discourse and its experts, on whose authority the nor-
mal is identified. Structures of power/knowledge create not only new
objects of science, but also new kinds of subjects.
Foucaults studies of dividing practices show how the normal sub-
ject is constituted by a distinction and physical separation between nor-
mal and abnormal subjects. Scientific normativity and its third-person
accounts contribute to the constitution of our lived bodily sense of the
normal. They also shape the liminal encounters of the home-world and
female freedom 151
ETHICS
7
Foucault never developed a theory of ethics, yet his two last books, The
History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, could be characterized as being
concerned primarily with ethics. They deal with the sexual morality
of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The question that guides
Foucaults inquiry is: How, why and in what form was sexuality consti-
tuted as a moral domain? (UP, 10). The focus of the inquiry is thus
on the manner in which sexual activity was problematized, mainly by
philosophers and doctors in texts written as guides for others. In the
second volume of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasures, the period
under study is the classical Greek culture of the fourth century bc. The
third volume, The Care of the Self, deals with the same problematization
in the Roman Empire of the first two centuries ad.
History of ethics
What emerges out of Foucaults historical studies of sexual morality is a
particular conception of ethics that he traces to antiquity. He begins by
157
158 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
of analysis that can be profitably investigated both when moral codes are relatively static
and when they undergo great upheaval. His ethics provides us with a way of writing a
history of ethics that will not collapse into a history of moral codes.
160 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Ethics as practice
The History of Sexuality, volumes ii and iii, thus presents us with a histor-
ical study of the forms of an ethical problematization of a remote past.
Ethics refers to a specific component of morality and provides a useful
analytical tool for studying its history. Foucaults work on ethics should
not be read solely as a new methodological approach to historical stud-
ies of sexual morality, however. His notion of ethics refers not only to
a component of morality that deals with the ways individuals constitute
themselves as moral subjects, but also to a certain way of understanding
morality. I argue that when his last books are combined with his late
interviews and other texts, an idea of ethics in the prescriptive sense of
the word emerges too; a conception of ethics as an individual ethos, an
attitude or a way of life. Foucaults late work on ethics represents a con-
tinuation of his on-going concern with forms of subjection, and makes a
contribution to the task of rethinking ethics in the postmodern world.
Foucault explicitly admitted that he wrote the last two volumes of
The History of Sexuality in terms of a contemporary situation (CT, 263).
He denied, however, that he was suggesting that we adopt the ethics
of ancient Greece. He condemns outright the ancient Greek ethics of
pleasure in many ways as something quite disgusting, and refers to how
it was linked to the ideas of a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of
the other and an obsession with penetration, for example (GE, 346).
Yet, he suggests there is something we can learn from it.
2 The interview is the result of a series of working sessions with Michel Foucault conducted
by Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus at Berkley in 1983, and was originally published in
English.
the silence of ethics 161
I wonder if our problem is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us
no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal
system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation
movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on
which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but
they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called
scientific knowledge.
(GE, 343)
Gregory exhorts one to light the lamp and turn the house over and
search, until gleaming in the shadow one sees the drachma within. In
order to recover the efficacy which God has printed on ones soul and
which the body has tarnished, one must take care of oneself and search
every corner of the soul.
(TES, 227)
Foucault thus argues that there has been an inversion between the
hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, Take care of yourself and
Know thyself. Knowledge of the self was understood in Greco-Roman
culture as a consequence of taking care of the self and therefore was
subordinated to it. In the modern world, it constitutes the fundamental
principle. Foucault was not only referring to our religious tradition. He
also claims that the principle of knowing the self underlies all those
philosophies of the subject in which knowledge of the thinking subject
constitutes the first step in the theory of knowledge (TES, 228).
Foucaults studies of the history of ethics can thus be seen as a contin-
uation of his attempt to rethink the subject, this time the forms of the
self: the forms of understanding which the subject creates about him-
self or herself and the practices by which he or she transforms his or
her mode of being. Rather than understanding the ethical relationship
one has to oneself as a relationship of knowledge, Foucault advocates
an understanding of it as a care or concern for oneself. With his
explication of ancient Greek ethics, he clearly wanted to further argue
the point that there is no true self that can be deciphered and eman-
cipated, but that the self is something that has been and must be
created. There is a whole new axis of analysis present in his late studies
of the subject, however.
The last two volumes of The History of Sexuality appeared in a very
different form from the one that Foucault had originally planned and
proposed.4 He indicates in the introduction to volume ii that there was
an analytical axis missing from his previous work. To be able to study
the history of the experience of sexuality, he also needed, besides
the methodological tools with which his archaeologies and genealogies
4 The back cover of the first volume of The History of Sexuality announced the five forthcom-
ing volumes: The second volume was to be called The Flesh and the Body and it was going
to deal with the problematization of sex in early Christianity; volume iii, The Childrens
Crusade, with the sexuality of children; volume iv, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, with the ways in
which sexuality had been invested in the female body; volume v, Perverts; with the person
of the pervert; and volume vi, Population and Races, with bio-politics. See Davidson 1994,
117.
164 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
5 See also e.g. Davidson 1986, 230. 6 See also e.g. UP, 11.
the silence of ethics 165
(ST, 181). These contact points are what Foucault calls governmentality
(TES, 225).
Hence, technologies of the self do not introduce a totally auto-
nomous subject to Foucaults late thinking. As he commented, even
if he was interested in the way in which the subject constituted him-
self or herself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these
practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by
himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are
proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society
and his social group (EPF, 11). Neither are technologies of the self
simple extensions of techniques of domination disguised as voluntary,
however. Foucault must presuppose a subject with some relative inde-
pendence with regard to the constitutive power/knowledge network in
order to describe a subject capable of critical self-reflection and ethical
work on the self. As Gilles Deleuze (1986/1988, 101) argues, Foucaults
fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from the
power/knowledge network without being dependent on it. The subject
constituted by the power/knowledge network is now capable of turning
back upon itself: of critically studying the processes of its own constitu-
tion, but also of subverting them and effecting changes in them.
This understanding of the subject as being, on the one hand, con-
stituted by the power/knowledge network, while on the other hand
retaining a relative independence from it, is, in my view, one of the
most problematic aspects of Foucaults late thinking on ethics. I will
explicate my criticism in detail in chapter 9, but I will first defend Fou-
cault against a number of other criticisms that have been levelled against
his ethics. I will argue that it is important to understand correctly his
idea of an aesthetics of existence, as well as his aim in inquiring into
the possibility of contemporary ethics. Foucaults ethics must be read
as a continuation of his genealogy of the subject and of his on-going
concern with oppressive forms of subjection.
Ethics as aesthetics
The new focus on the government of the self by ones self is crucial
in Foucaults elaboration of resistance. Ethics is the domain in which
he situates it. Ethics becomes an important mediator in the triangle
of relationships between the subject, knowledge and power. In his late
thinking Foucault returns to the idea, found in his early work, of the
subversive role of art. The ethical practices of the self are closely linked,
166 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
or even fused with aesthetics. When asked what kind of ethics it was
possible to build in our society, he replied:
[I]n our society, art has become something that is related only to objects
and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized
or done by experts who are artists. But couldnt everyones life become a
work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not
our life?
(GE, 350)
What I mean by the phrase [arts of existence] are those intentional and
voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct
but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their sin-
gular being, and to make life into an uvre that carries certain aesthetic
values and meets certain stylistic criteria.
(UP, 1011)7
This idea of creating oneself as a work of art has fuelled a lot of heated
criticism against Foucault.8 He has been accused of retreating into
amoral aesthetics, privileging an elitist notion of self-centred styliza-
tion, and undermining all possibilities of emancipatory politics. The
7 Par la il faut entendre des pratiques reflechies et volontaires par lesquelles les hommes,
non seulement se fixent des regles de conduite, mais cherchent a se transformer eux-
memes, a se modifier dans leur etre singulier, et a faire de leur vie une uvre qui porte
certaines valeurs esthetiques et reponde a certains criteres de style. (UPL, 1617).
8 See e.g. Wolin 1986, Fraser 1989. Foucaults practices of the self incorporate certain
intellectual attitudes an attitude of permanent criticism yet they are principally bodily
techniques that focus on everyday life and on the choices one makes in ones way of life,
diet and habits. They also incorporate ones sexuality and aspects of ones gender. To
turn ones life into a form of art involves ones body, its experiences and pleasures, not
the renunciation of them. This connection between ethics, sexuality and embodiment
seems to open up interesting connections between Foucault and feminist ethics. Yet per-
haps surprisingly, feminist theorists have commented very little on Foucaults late work,
and generally their critical stance is derivative of an established ethical and theoretical
framework. In Foucault and Feminism, Lois McNay (1992), for example, follows Habermas
and argues that there is a problematic lack of normative grounding to Foucaults implicit
criticism of modern society, and that his thinking therefore slips into a politically and eth-
ically disabling relativism. Some feminist writers, such as Jean Grimshaw (1993), simply
dismiss Foucaults studies of Greek morality as elitist and male-dominated, that therefore
sidestep questions that are crucial for feminist theory.
the silence of ethics 167
Philosophy lived
When Foucaults ethics is understood as personal practice, it means that
ethical acts are primary in the sense that they will not find their justi-
fication in any general theory or principle. Foucault therefore invites
readers who are more accustomed to normative ethics to ask the obvi-
ous question: are all creative and transgressive acts ethical, and if not,
which ones are? Rape and murder could be seen as creative and trans-
gressive, since for a lot of us it would certainly constitute a new field of
experience. Since there are no normative guidelines or rational justifi-
cations, there seems to be no way to make distinctions between different
acts and no way to determine which ones are ethical. As Foucaults crit-
ics argue, what is wrong with his aesthetics of existence is that it can
never provide the critical framework necessary for being able to con-
demn certain actions, such as rape or murder, as being simply wrong.13
Therefore it fails to create the normative space of judgement which
these critics assume ethics should provide.
For Foucault, however, it was an impossibility to provide people with
normative grounding, guidelines, rules or criteria for passing moral
judgements. The task of an intellectual is not to tell others what to
do, people have to build their own ethics (MS, 16). What Foucault is
12 Paul Veyne (1986/1997, 231) also argues that style in Foucaults thought does not mean
a distinction; the word should be understood in the sense in which the Greeks used it,
for whom an artist was first of all an artisan, and a work of art first of all a work.
13 Jurgen Habermas is perhaps the best-known critic of Foucault, and has accused him of
a lack of normative grounding in his analyses. See e.g. Habermas 1985/1987. See also
e.g. Walzer 1986, Taylor 1986, Fraser 1989. The planned discussion between Foucault
and Habermas never took place. For a reconstruction of the Foucaultian portion of this
exchange, see Flynn 1989.
170 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
14 Probably the single most often cited statement from the philosophical literature of
the twentieth century is the concluding line from Wittgensteins Tractatus: Whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (6.54). Read in combination with other
statements such as the line that there can be no ethical propositions (6.522), a radical
understanding of ethics, or rather the impossibility of it, in the usual sense of the word,
emerges. Ethics is not a term for a subject matter alongside other subjects. It comes
from our having a human world and a capacity to decipher ethical meanings in it. It
frames or gives form to our propositions about facts, but cannot be any one of them.
172 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
15 The famous distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown
obtains a decisive philosophical significance in Tractatus. According to Wittgenstein,
what can be shown is, in the end, what matters, as the privileged object of philo-
sophical insight. If all epistemic worries were suddenly, one beautiful morning,
resolved by scientific inquiry, the problems of life have still not been touched at all
(6.52).
the silence of ethics 173
Apart from the focus on the self, Foucaults ethics has another
dimension: critical responding to ones time. Critical work encompasses
the subjects personal work on him/herself, and also a critique of soci-
ety, power relations and structures. While I have argued that to crit-
icize Foucaults late work for a lack of normative guidelines misses
the point of his effort to rethink ethics, the need for a normative
grounding becomes more pressing in connection with politics. The
subjects ethical work on him/herself may be based on unthematized
values and experiences of liberation, but a shared conception of free-
dom seems necessary in emancipatory politics. Concepts empower, they
incite discussions, arguments, dialogues. Normative ideals such as free-
dom, equality and justice articulate Utopian possibilities and give imag-
inations a concrete form that can be communicated and shared as a
common political ideal and goal.
The connection between philosophy and politics in Foucaults
thought is, to say the least, ambiguous. David Couzens Hoy (1998,
1820), for example, argues that, although Foucaults writings seem
to be politically engaged, exactly how they generate this effect is not
clear. Hoy finds evidence in Foucaults writings that he asserted both
175
176 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
that philosophy and politics are profoundly linked, and that they are
not linked.1 Wendy Brown (1998, 33) argues similarly that Foucaults
responses to expressly political questions in interviews are frequently
vague, oblique, deflective or simply bland. While Hoy seeks to redeem
Foucaults thought for progressive politics by pointing to his involve-
ment in various political struggles, Brown argues for the opposite. She
claims that Foucaults thinking opposes all traditional understandings
of politics, and instead reformulates the political as opposition to politi-
cization on the one hand, and to policy on the other (Brown 1998, 42).
She challenges the idea that Foucaults particular political positions and
enthusiasms were an outcome of his genealogical studies: a genealogi-
cal politics has no necessary political entailments.
I will argue in this chapter that Foucaults understanding of the con-
nection between philosophy and emancipatory politics turns on his
stance on the Enlightenment. In order to understand his late think-
ing on ethics we have to read it in connection with his other writ-
ings, his genealogies of subject and power, but particularly with his
writings on the Enlightenment. In what follows, I will briefly present
the common form of criticism against the political implications of
Foucaults thought, and then present two possible readings of his posi-
tion in regard to emancipatory politics, arguing for the latter. I will
conclude by distinguishing four different meanings of freedom that I
find in his work.
1 Hoy (1998, 201) ends up arguing for the former stance: the idea of a profound link
between philosophy and politics represents Foucaults more mature view. Hoy claims that,
for Foucault, philosophy is imbedded in an ethos critically involved in minimizing domi-
nation. In the ethos the political is personal and the personal is political. Thomas Flynn
(1989, 188) also argues that if politics is the art/science of governance, if governance is
the directing of power relationships, and if power, for Foucault, is all-pervasive, then so
too is the political: every facet of human life carries a political dimension and stands
subject to political analysis.
the freedom of philosophy 177
2 je crois quil ne peut pas y avoir de societe sans relations de pouvoir, si on les entend
comme strategies par lesquelles les individus essaient de conduire, de determiner la
conduite des autres. Le probleme nest donc pas dessayer de les dissoudre dans lutopie
dune communication parfaitement transparente, mais de se donner les regles de droit,
les techniques de gestion et aussi la morale, lethos, la pratique de soi, qui permettront,
dans ces jeux de pouvoir, de jouer avec le minimum possible de domination. (EPL, 727)
178 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
political outlook and do not tend towards the realization of some political
project. This is doubtless what people mean when they reproach me for
not presenting an overall theory. But I believe precisely that the forms
of totalization offered by politics are always, in fact, very limited. I am
attempting, to the contrary, apart from any totalization which would be
at once abstract and limiting to open up problems that are as concrete as
possible, problems that approach politics from behind and cut societies
on the diagonal, problems that are at once constituents of our history
and constituted by that history.
(PE, 3756)8
8 En fait jai surtout voulu poser des question a la politique et faire apparatre dans
le champ de la politique comme de linterrogation historique et philosophique, des
problemes qui ny avaient pas droit de cite. Les questions que jessaie de poser ne sont
pas determinees par une conception politique prealable et ne tendent pas a la realisation
dun projet politique defini. Cest sans doute cela que les gens veulent dire lorsquils
me reprochent de ne pas presenter de theorie densemble. Mais je crois justement que
les formes de totalisation offertes par la politique sont toujours, en fait, tres limitees.
Jessaie, au contraire, en dehors de toute totalisation, a la fois abstraite et limitative, douvrir
des problemes aussi concrets et generaux que possible des problemes qui prennent la
politique a revers, traversent les societes en diagonal, et sont tout a la fois constituants
de notre histoire et constitues par elle. (PEI, 5867)
9 See e.g. McWhorter 1999.
10 Thomas Flynn (1991, 115), for example, notes that the genealogical charting of the
advent of the modern subject is itself a form of liberation.
182 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
Freedom as ethos
According to my first reading, Foucaults work is critical in the sense
that, although purely descriptive, it nevertheless represents the crit-
ical practice of freedom in posing questions about the constitutive
conditions of subjectivity. I will, however, argue for a second read-
ing, according to which it is not purely descriptive, but incorporates
a normative dimension. This normative dimension is, I claim, what
gives his thought its political character.11 Foucaults analyses are under-
taken with the explicit aim of changing social reality in the direction of
freedom.
The ideal of freedom as emancipation from the effects of power is
an important part of the Enlightenment thinking and the subsequent
understanding of emancipatory politics. Foucault, however, is notori-
ous for his clear objection to the universalistic discourse of Enlight-
enment emancipation: there is no inherent human nature justifying
the demands for human freedom or guaranteeing the possibility of
progress. Foucault warned us that the Enlightenment ideal of indi-
vidual autonomy was one effect of normalizing power, power that is
totalizing and individualizing at the same time (SP, 213). According to
Foucault, Enlightenment humanisms have furthermore either masked
forms of disciplinary power that operate to produce forms of modern
individuality, or have participated in extending domination (Sawicki
1996, 169).
Consequently, when, shortly before his death, Foucault wrote a read-
ing of an article by Kant entitled What is Enlightenment (WE), in
which he located himself squarely within the Enlightenment tradition
of philosophy, many of his readers were surprised and confused.12 I
Through his reading of Kant, Foucault explicitly presents his own work
from his early archaeological writings to his genealogies of the modern
subject as well as the diagnosis of modern forms of power essentially as
an Enlightenment project: a series of historico-critical analyses studying
the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize our-
selves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking and saying (WE, 46).
This critical ontology of ourselves is a philosophical, ethical and politi-
cal task all at the same time: it is an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical
life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the
historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an exper-
iment with the possibility of going beyond them (WE, 50). Foucault
calls the philosophical ethos characterizing his work a limit-attitude. He
wants to turn the Kantian question around: rather than asking what
limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, he is asking, In what
is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory . . . what place is occu-
pied by what ever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary
constraints? (WE, 45). He was thus not interested in showing what are
the necessary conditions determining the limits of reason, but in reveal-
ing the extent to which the limits presenting themselves as necessary
are actually contingent.
Hence, Foucault does not simply embrace traditional Enlightenment
ideals, but submits them to critical reappropriation. Through reserva-
tion, he denied that his work was simply for or against the Enlighten-
ment. He refused the blackmail of the Enlightenment, the idea that
one has to be for or against the Enlightenment (WE, 43). For
him, reappropriating the critical ethos of the Enlightenment means
precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in
the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative (WE, 43). Fou-
cault also clearly distances himself from humanism, warning us that We
must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the
theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment (WE, 45).
He thus saw humanism not as a critical questioning of the present, but as
a diverse and inconsistent set of themes designed to justify and promote
particular values. It necessarily leans on conceptions of what it means
to be human borrowed from religion, science or politics, and thus func-
tions as a form of justification, not as a form of critique. Enlightenment
and humanism are therefore in a state of tension rather than identity
(WE, 44).
The limit-attitude characterizing the philosophical ethos of the
Enlightenment has to be translated into specific inquiries. It is in this
context that Foucault presents his analyses of the three axes of the
constitution of the subject knowledge, power, ethics as the con-
crete forms into which the limit-attitude translates. The ontology of
ourselves poses the questions: How are we constituted as subjects of our
knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit
to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our
own actions? (WE, 49). Archaeology and genealogy are methods in
this inquiry into the constitution of the subject conducted as a study of
practices or practical systems (WE, 48). Nevertheless, these historico-
critical reflections must also be put to the test of contemporary reality,
both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and
to determine the precise form this change should take (WE, 46).
186 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
At the same time, they are necessary outsiders because they constitute
the limits of the normal and the intelligible. In Foucaults genealogy,
like in his archaeology, there is a dimension of freedom in the sense of
a constitutive outside to the discursive order, even if there is no outside
to the apparatus or network of practices as a whole.
Practices of freedom. Foucaults late thinking identifies ethics as the
deliberate dimension of freedom. Ethics is a practice of freedom.
Hence, while freedom in the previous sense is an ontological condition
of ethics, ethics as a practice is the deliberate form it assumes. Foucaults
thinking on ethics thus develops a fuller understanding of freedom,
elaborates it by introducing a deliberate dimension to it. Freedom is
not only a non-subjective opening of possibilities, it can be deliberately
cultivated and practised by subjects. The subject exercises freedom in
critically reflecting on itself and its behaviour, on beliefs and the social
field of which it is part. It materializes the possibilities that are opened
around it. The practices of freedom may challenge, contest and even
change the constitutive conditions of our subjectivity as well as its actual
forms. Ethics as practices of freedom means exploring possibilities for
new forms of the subject, new fields of experiences, pleasures, relation-
ships, modes of living and thinking. It consists of creative activity as well
as the critical interrogation of our present, and of the contemporary
field of possible experience. The quest for freedom in Foucaults ethics
is a question of developing forms of the subject that are capable of
functioning as resistance to the normalizing power.
Freedom as the ethos of the Enlightenment. Foucaults essays on the
Enlightenment put forward the idea of freedom as a historical ideal
originating from it. He does not simply embrace traditional Enlighten-
ment ideals, but submits them for critical reappropriation. What, for
him, characterizes the philosophical ethos originating in the Enlight-
enment is that it is a permanent critique of our own era. By linking
his thought to the Enlightenment, he makes the normative move of
adopting the ideals associated with it critical reason and personal
autonomy as the implicit ground on which his critiques of domi-
nation, abusive forms of power and reason rest. The Enlightenment
provides him with the historical not transcendental values on which
to base his critiques. The ideal of freedom is a commitment to a specific
historical tradition within which we think about human life and politics.
Freedom is the contingent historical ethos and precondition of critical
reflection on our present.
the freedom of philosophy 191
THE OTHER
Unlike the claim of some of his critics, Foucaults ethics is not a solitary
pursuit, nor does he prioritize isolated individuality. Ethical subjectivity
is given a form in the practices of the self, but these practices always
take place and derive their meaning from an interpersonal situation.
Care for the self, according to Foucault, implies complex relationships
with others: relationships and duties towards ones family members,
society at large, ones spiritual master or guide. The ethos of freedom
and self-mastery can only take concrete shape and become a style of life
in a particular interpersonal situation in which the ethical acts become
ways of dealing with the surrounding community. The self that is cared
for is never isolated, but always linked to larger societal structures.1
Moreover, the ethical relationship always exists between free indi-
viduals. When Foucault was asked whether care for the self released
193
194 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
from the care of others ran the risk of absolutizing itself and therefore
becoming an exercise of power on others, he replied:
[T]he risk of dominating others and exercising over them a tyrannical
power only comes from the fact that one did not care for ones self and
that one has become a slave for his desires. But if you care for yourself
correctly, that is to say if you know ontologically what you are . . . you can
not abuse your power over others.
(EPF, 8)2
2 le risque de dominer les autres et dexercer sur eux un pouvoir tyrannique ne vient
precisement que du fait quon ne sest pas soucie de soi et quon est devenu lesclave
de ses desirs. Mais si vous vous souciez de vous comme il faut, cest-a-dire si vous savez
ontologiquement ce que vous etes . . . vous ne pouvez pas a ce moment-la abuser de votre
pouvoir sur les autres. (EPL, 716)
the other 195
Subjectivity as passivity
In his late work Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Levinas sets out
to do the impossible: to articulate, using the language of philosophy,
the inevitable silence of philosophy. He seeks to describe in language
what by definition is unthematizable, a sphere that cannot be an object
of knowledge, understanding or any other intentional act. To write
about ethics means to describe what is beyond being and non-being,
the otherwise than being. Ontology traditionally refers to an area of
philosophy that studies being in all its forms and modes. It seeks to
comprehend being and thus to bring it into the realm of knowledge.
For Levinas, however, ethics is beyond being and therefore beyond
ontological inquiry. It is not a relation of knowledge, but it is in direct
opposition to ontology.7 However, before philosophy can describe what
lies beyond being what is otherwise than being it must give up the
language of ontology without sinking into incomprehensibility.
An important distinction in Levinas thought is therefore the one
he makes in Otherwise than Being between saying (le dire) and the said
(le dit).8 The language of philosophy has traditionally consisted only of
the said: of sentences and arguments that have a truth-value. Everything
that can be named, discussed and debated can only be expressed in the
said. Philosophy has therefore neglected the other aspect of language,
the saying. By saying, Levinas refers to speech as aimed at the other.
Speaking to the other addressing and responding is the condition
of possibility of all language and philosophy. There can be no language
without the other, because words are always for the other. Saying is thus
similar to Levinas idea of responsibility: it is a relationship of openness
and vulnerability to the other which cannot be thematized or brought
to the said.
The only way to approach the saying in philosophy is through the
said. However, the effort to thematize saying in the said is always, by
necessity, an act of its destruction: to succeed in thematizing what
cannot be thematized, paradoxically, means to fail. Philosophy is thus
doomed to this recurring failure, and therefore has to start anew time
and time again. Hence, it is necessary to do the impossible in order
to write about ethics. The ethical relation to the other will always be
beyond the language of philosophy, rationality, totality, order and
being. Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise than being, the
very possibility of the beyond (Levinas 1989, 179).
This fundamental paradox in philosophical language underlies the
description of subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. Ethical subjectivity
is described in the language of philosophy, which is, nevertheless, con-
stantly undoing itself: subjectivity is equated with passivity, vulnerability,
sensibility, maternity, materiality, responsibility and substitution. These
terms may each express something about it, but it cannot be reduced
to any one of them. Levinas writes, for example, that ethical subjectiv-
ity is essentially passivity, but this is not passivity in the sense in which
we normally understand it, as the opposite of activity. Subjectivity as
ultimate passivity does not belong to the order in which the alternative
of active/passive retains its meaning: Our western passivity refers to
8 Otherwise than Being is often read as Levinas attempt to address the questions Derrida
posed in Violence et metaphysique (1967/1987). On Derridas relationship to Levinas
thought, see e.g. Bernasconi 1991, Critchley 1991, 1992.
the other 201
a subject who is passive when he does not give himself the contents
of perceptual and cognitive acts. This passivity is not passive enough
because the subject is still receptive. Sensations are produced in a sub-
ject who grasps himself through these sensations and conceives them.
Levinas seeks a new degree of passivity, more passive than passivity, that
does not take charge of itself, but that breaks the unity of subjectivity.
The passivity of subjectivity ultimately means its fission (Levinas 1986/
1998, 89).
The radical understanding of subjectivity as responsibility prior to
commitment is also developed further. Levinas said in an interview:
In this book [Otherwise than Being] I speak of responsibility as the
essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity (Levinas
1982/1985, 95). Responsibility is the absolute principle of becom-
ing a human subject, and as such is the primordial structure of sub-
jectivity. Through substitution, literally putting myself in the place of
the other, I become responsible even for the others responsibility, I
become a hostage for the other. The possibility of putting oneself in
the place of the other is a condition of possibility for solidarity and
ethical behaviour. It is through the condition of being a hostage that
there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity
even the little there is, even the simple After you, sir (Levinas 1974/
1981, 117).
Responsibility for the other is not, however, only a demand, a weight
on the shoulders. It is also the freedom that constitutes the subjects
uniqueness. Levinas had already repudiated the modern humanist idea
of the essential similarity and equality of subjects in his book Time and
the Other (1947/1987). My responsibility constitutes my singularity and
uniqueness because no one can carry my responsibility for me. No one
can substitute himself for me, who substitutes myself for all (Levinas
1989, 115). My selfhood comes into being through my responsibility
for the other. The inescapable responsibility makes me an individual I:
to be myself can only mean being for the other.
The identity of the subject is thus determined by the uniqueness of
his or her responsibility for everybody and everything. Responsibility is
fundamental and yet impossible. I cannot shed its demand/command
because it is a fundamental structure of my being, but neither can I
ever fulfil it: the more just I am, the greater is my responsibility. I am
responsible for that which has preceded me and that which will outlive
me. No one else can take my place and carry my responsibility, which
is always more than anyone elses. Responsibility for the neighbour is
202 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
precisely what goes beyond the legal and obliges beyond contracts; it
comes to me from what is prior to my freedom, from a non-present, an
immemorial (Levinas 1989, 180).
Like the phenomenological subject, the subject for Levinas is always
the singular I. Husserls subject is singular for methodological rea-
sons, but for Levinas the singularity is integral for his understanding
of ethics.9 The ethical demand can only be placed upon me. Ethical
subjectivity cannot be objectified or studied as generic. Responsibility,
as the assignment of the other, always arises in a singular and particular
situation and concerns only me.
Unlike the phenomenological subject, the subject that Levinas
aims at describing does not constitute the world in perceptions or
any meaning-giving acts. An ethical relation is not like a relation of
knowledge; it cannot be reduced to knowledge about the other. The
other cannot be posited by any constituting, intentional act of the sub-
ject, because he or she cannot be an intentional object, but always over-
flows the limits of perception and comprehension. This constitutes the
paradox of the presence of alterity in a finite act of a self-possessed
subject. To encounter something truly other is, by definition, impos-
sible, because it would be incomprehensible and unexperienceable.
For something to be able to preserve its alterity means that it must
exceed my categories of experience and understanding, and therefore
be a non-experience, unexperienceable. This core problem in Levinas
thought is also already articulated in the early work Time and the Other:
How can an event that cannot be grasped still happen to me? What
can the others relationship with a being, an existent, be? . . . How can a
being enter into a relationship with the other without allowing its very
self to be crushed by the other? (Levinas 1947/1987, 77). It is this
paradox that founds subjectivity, which is not reducible to conscious-
ness or to any kind of intentionality. Subjectivity as passivity does not
constitute the other through meaning-giving acts, but the other breaks
up the unity of transcendental constitution.
The paradoxical understanding of subjectivity becomes even more
pronounced in Otherwise than Being. The reason the subject cannot con-
stitute the other is not only because the other as radical alterity always
overflows the limits of experience, but also because the subject itself
divine spark that dwells within it, as it was for the ancient philosophers,
but rather the subjects determination by history. It is no longer divinity
but history that guarantees us an experience of the Other at the core
of our own subjectivity and brings it about that any direct encounter
with the self must also be a confrontation with the not-self (Halperin
1995, 104). The study of history becomes a spiritual exercise when it is
conducted as an inquiry into our own alterity (Halperin 1995, 105).
If we accept the Levinasian idea that ethical subjectivity is constituted
by the other, understood as the other person, I suggest that we do not
necessarily need to study history to encounter our own alterity. We
can also think that an encounter with other people will bring about a
confrontation with the not-self, but also an experience of the other as
passivity, responsibility and vulnerability at the core our subjectivity.
The other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted sub-
ject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know. The arts of
existence aiming to transgress normalized individuality would succeed
in opening up an ethical sphere exceeding totality and determination
because the other is capable of introducing alterity to the constituted
subject. The other makes ethical subjectivity possible, but also breaks
the totality of constituted experience by introducing a plurality in being
that resists all efforts of totalization and normalization. Only the other
ultimately reveals the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempts to
transgress them an ethical meaning.
CONCLUSION: FREEDOM AS AN
O P E R AT I O N A L C O N C E P T
I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis con-
cerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple charac-
terization of what we are but, instead by following lines of fragility in
the present in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no
longer be that-which-is.
(CT/IH, 36)1
Even though freedom for Foucault is thus not an attribute of the sub-
ject, this does not commit us to political apathy and cynicism. Freedom
is anarchic in the sense that it disturbs and even breaks every total-
ity, but it must nevertheless not be understood as some absolute and
mystical outside. The virtual fractures for thinking and being other-
wise will not just appear in the invisible walls of our world, they can
only emerge from our practices. We must try to open up possibilities
1 Ce que je voudrais aussi dire a propos de cette fonction du diagnostic sur ce quest
aujourdhui, cest quelle ne consiste pas a caracteriser simplement ce que nous sommes,
mais, en suivant les lignes de fragilite daujourdhui, a parvenir a saisir par ou ce qui est et
comment ce qui est pourrait ne plus etre ce qui est. Et cest en ce sens que la description
doit etre toujours faite selon cette espece de fracture virtuelle, qui ouvre un espace de lib-
erte, entendu comme espace de liberte concrete, cest-a-dire de transformation possible.
(SEPS, 4489)
208
c o n c l u s i o n : f r e e d o m a s a n o p e r at i o n a l c o n c e p t 209
for seeing to what extent that which is might no longer be what it is.
Foucault continues: In this sense, any description must always be made
in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the
space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of
possible transformation (CT/IH, 36).
I will conclude by putting forward one more definition of freedom
that does not directly emerge from Foucaults thinking, but which nev-
ertheless, in my view, captures something essential about it: freedom
as an operational concept. According to dictionaries of philosophy, an
operational definition is the characterization of a concept through the
operations performed to check it, such as the characterization of weight
as that which scales measure and intelligence as that which IQ tests mea-
sure. Freedom as an operational concept would thus mean that freedom
is defined and gains a meaning only through the concrete operations
through which its existence is tested. It emerges through the particular,
political and/or personal struggles that try and test its limits, possibili-
ties or extent. Foucault writes about philosophy that it is important in
that it should be put to the test of contemporary reality:
But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of
freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be
an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves
must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the
other, put itself to the test of reality, both to grasp the points where change
is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change
should take.
(WE, 46)2
Freedom can only gain meaning through our practices of resistance and
the fleeting experiences of liberation resulting from them, both collec-
tive and personal. It is always dangerous and precarious. Sometimes its
testing turns into riots and violence, and what emerges is not freedom
but anger and resentment. Sometimes it results in nothing but dry pages
filled with exercises of common sense. Freedom is a fragile moment, a
2 Mais pour quil ne sagisse pas simplement de laffirmation ou du reve vide de la liberte, il
me semble que cette attitude historico-critique doit etre aussi une attitude experimentale.
Je veux dire que ce travail fait aux limites de nous-memes doit dun cote ouvrir un domaine
denquetes historiques et de lautre se mettre a lepreuve de la realite et de lactualite, a la
fois pour saisir ler points ou le changement est possible et souhaitable et pour determiner
la forme precise a donner a ce changement. (QL1, 574)
210 f o u c au lt o n f r e e d o m
211
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216 references
aesthetics of existence, 159, 160, 165, lived, 12, 119, 1323, 134, 135,
1667, 1689, 171, 174, 207 13840, 144, 148, 151, 152
analytic of finitude, 54 phenomenology of the body,
apparatus (dispositif), 967, 102, 106, see phenomenology
130, 132 Boothroyd, David, 167
a priori, historical, 203, 35, 36n19, 37, Bordo, Susan, 110n1
40, 47, 48, 679, 72, 87 Braidotti, Rosi, 5
archaeology, 3, 1011, 18, 19, 202, 35, Brown, Wendy, 176, 180
36, 378, 68, 69, 701, 74, 768, Bruzina, Ronald, 60n20
802, 88, 94, 95, 96, 97, 132, 163, Butler, Judith, 1089, 115, 1202, 123,
170, 171, 184, 185, 186, 189, 190 1256, 131, 134, 1367
Archaeology of Knowledge, The, 21n6, 368,
76, 80, 81, 89, 95 Canguilhem, Georges, 8, 45, 45n6,
archive, 76 4951, 77
Ashbery, John, 82 Carr, David, 61n23
Cavailles, Jean, 8n9, 45, 79
Bachelard, Gaston, 45, 45n6, 46n9, 47, contingency, historical, 13, 107, 170,
48 172, 187, 188
Barthes, Roland, 82n14 Critchley, Simon, 203
Bataille, Georges, 128, 129 critique, 89, 1213, 173, 175, 178,
Beauvoir, Simone de, 135n1 17980, 182, 1867, 188, 190
Benhabib, Seyla, 179, 180 Crossley, Nick, 107n17
Bernauer, James, 167
Binswanger, Ludwig, 7 Davidson, Arnold, 78n12, 158n1,
Birth of the Clinique, The, 89 173n17
bodies Death and the Labyrinth: The World of
and pleasures, 11, 124, 126, 1278, Raymond Roussel, 82
129, 134 Deleuze, Gilles, 1267, 165
and power, 1112, 97102, 113, 120, Derrida, Jacques, 64n25, 82n14,
1312 16972, 174, 200n8
and resistance, 11, 89, 109, 110, 111, Descartes, Rene, 13, 28, 49, 512,
122, 1236, 127, 131, 134, 153, 61
189 Dews, Peter, 164
experiential, 1112, 127, 1289, Dillon, Martin, 142
1301, 132, 134 Discipline and Punish, 3, 97, 98, 112,
female, 110, 110n1, 120, 1223, 124, 1278
1358, 150, 152, 153 discourse, 11, 32, 35, 36, 36n20, 38, 55,
Foucaults understanding of, 1112, 67, 72, 74, 77, 78, 801, 845, 86,
11014, 1171, 124, 128, 131, 956, 1023, 113, 117, 130, 131,
1324, 145, 150 1829
220
index 221
Lacan, Jacques, 82n14, 118n11, and the subject, 41, 44, 47, 58, 5961,
130n27 934, 109, 1378, 14150, 151,
language, 1011, 256, 27, 34, 34n6, 36, 202
74, 76, 878, 89, 118, 129, 130, 132, of the body, (see also bodies, lived),
170, 171, 1723, 191 135, 136, 13741, 1426, 147,
and freedom, 1011, 19, 812, 845, 14850, 1513
88, 89, 189 Foucault and, 69, 30, 323, 35, 38,
and phenomenology, see phenomenology 401, 445, 47, 489, 52, 538,
Levinas on, 199201 679, 70, 76, 945, 1034, 132, 134,
Lebrun, Gerard, 40, 52 145n12
Levin, David, 132n29 Plato, 162
Levinas, Emmanuel, 9, 13, 192, pleasure, 1267, 129, 132, 158, 159
196205 and body, see bodies
life-world, 415, 478, 49, 57, 58, 59, 62, and resistance, see bodies and resistance
64, 67 positivism, 18, 29, 30, 32, 55, 57
Lingis, Alphonso, 203 post-structuralism, 1, 2, 5, 93
literature, 10, 34n16, 81, 847 power, 12, 945, 97, 98102, 106, 1089,
avant-garde, 10, 34n16, 825, 189 113, 118, 123, 126, 129, 167, 1769,
184, 186, 190, 191, 194
Machado, Robert, 71n2 and body, see bodies
Madness and Civilization, 7, 88, 169, 171 and games, 105, 108
Mahon, Michel, 167 and knowledge, 4, 96, 97, 102,
Maladie mental et personalite, 7 1045, 107, 108, 110, 113, 122, 126,
man 130, 132, 150, 165, 196, 204,
as empirico-transcendental doublet, 206
313, 57, 73 and sexuality, 115, 116
doubles of, 323, 539 bio-, 100, 103, 127, 132, 150
paradox of, 53, 543, 679 normalizing, 12, 111, 127, 131, 132,
McNay, Lois, 1234, 166n8, 167 167, 168, 177, 182
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9, 12, 32, 53, practices, 11, 12, 36, 77, 104, 1058,
119, 1323, 134, 13547, 14850, 119, 129, 132, 170, 171, 185, 191,
1513 192
Mohanty, J. N., 61n23, 103n14 discursive, 20, 723, 78, 89, 967
dividing, 3, 150, 1513
naturalism, 55, 57 of the self, 159, 161, 165, 166n8,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 9, 29, 33, 16870, 172, 193, 196, 204
34, 94, 95n4, 99, 111, 119, 183, scientific, 35, 71, 72, 102
188 present
nominalism, 35 critique of the, 9, 1213, 175, 1845,
186, 187, 190
OFarrell, Claire, 21, 77n11, 889 ontology of the, 13, 756, 184
OLeary, Timothy, 168n11, 169, 195 psychoanalysis, 18, 93, 118n11, 139n4,
order, 1920, 81, 89 141
Order of Things, The, 3, 7, 10, 1718, Pulkkinen, Tuija, 191
1923, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 401,
445, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 69, 70, 71, Rabinow, Paul, 46n9, 713, 77, 119,
745, 76, 78, 7980, 84, 85, 89, 1323, 164, 191
183 Rajchman, John, 2, 82, 82n14, 85, 178,
1829
Patton, Paul, 188 relativism, 5n4, 67, 170, 172
Pheng Cheah, 94, 95 resistance, 11, 108, 109, 123, 165,
phenomenology, 4, 69, 29, 415, 1678, 194, 209
204 and the body, see body
and archaeology, 723, 77, 94 responsibility, 1978, 2012, 203,
and language, 646, 142, 145 204
and science, 423, 45, 479, 52, 55 Roussel, Raymond, 825
index 223